Eric Cosky

I have found the ancient printouts of Trissaighty! Well, they were never really lost. Just never scanned. Sort of like old photos, these bits of code had been sitting in an ancient peechee folder since the early 80's undisturbed once I stopped using the TRS-80. I have been lugging them around with my Star Wars cards and train set as part of the small collection of mementos I have actually managed to hang onto despite all the moves over the years. The printouts were made using a 4-color pen printer that printed on a spool of paper 4 inches wide. When it printed, it would have this little rotating chamber of pens that it would spin to get the correct color in contact with the paper. Pretty high tech, everyone was impressed when they saw it because most printers at the time were about the size of a piano. Cassette drives were the only way I had to store my programs and so a printer was highly valuable in making sure I'd be able to recover my lost work. Good thing too because it's been a while since I've loaded up data from a cassette!

Preventing cell phones from being used in crimes is an increasingly important goal for law enforcement. However, the tactic of brute-force jamming of radio frequencies used by cell phones to accomplish this is a misguided, incomplete and error prone solution. While jamming equipment can, in theory, block the signals, there is no guarantee that any specific act of jamming will be effective. There is a chance that the signal will get through so long as the cellular network is operational. There are any number of problems with jamming equipment that can occur which would allow the signal to continue to be available, such as incorrect configuration, positioning, or power failure. Additionally, it is possible that the criminals can detect when jamming is occurring, possibly removing the element of surprise or triggering whatever terrible devices are in use. Obviously, this is something we would all like to avoid.

I'm not usually one to get terribly excited about Microsoft Office (and that's an understatement), however the next update to this suite of applications is perhaps the most significant one ever. I think it may have the potential to affect developers who may not have expected Office to provide any functional benefits to the application development process. While there are many new features, far too many to list and I am sure there are more than I realize, there is one change that has the potential to have a significant impact to developers. Specifically, the Office applications are no longer just client applications. As I understand it, the Office applications are now capable of providing services, much like a web server or other back end application where there is no visible user interface and instead provides support services for other applications that build upon the functionality. Of course, the applications continue to provide all the features you expect from a client standpoint when used in that manner - you can still edit documents, spreadsheets and so forth just like you always have. However, with the new services features, it now becomes possible for developers to programmatically take advantage of all the abilities of the Office applications in the context of a UI-free server application. This is a fundamental change in the way office applications can be used; by separating the user interface of the client from the logic of the underlying application services, the office applications can now provide their functionality as an API to any managed code application.

Social security numbers are terribly, terribly unsafe. They are now used for far more than they were ever intended for which was to simply track contributions to the Social Security system. The creators of this system recognized the potential for and the problems that could come with a tracking number being widely used and this is why they made efforts to limit it's use to Social Security and Social Security alone. Unfortunately, the functional convenience of an individual tracking number proved too tempting for many industries and has in a decades-long process of feature creep is now the basis of identification for all sorts of financial, medical and legal matters and with that has come all the problems the creators of this system had intended to avoid. The root of the problem is that there is now a single point of failure making it easy for almost anyone to become victimized by identity theft. Fortunately, there is a solution.

There is another parallel to be made between the games industry and the film & television industries. Much like how film & television coexist peacefully and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, so will MMO and single player games. In each case, they both serve different needs. To say they serve different audiences is only partially true; it’s more correct to say they serve different content which provide different expectations (and limitations) which suit people in various degrees depending on their mood.

The expectations that MMO players have for the content and evolution of the games they play are similar in ways to what I think people have for television series they enjoy. A certain amount of comfortable entertainment is to be had when a person can expect a familiar yet slightly new twist on a familiar story or game. There are limitations to how far from the original story, character development and so forth that a series viewer will tolerate before they lose that comfortable feeling. For instance, if a character on the series "Friends" suddenly switched from being such a nice person into a mean person, nobody would believe it and many people would simply be annoyed that one of their comfortably defined personalities suddenly became something other than what they had grown accustomed. Along the same lines, if you take a well defined, long standing game mechanic or game storyline and arbitrarily change it from what players have grown comfortable with, you will risk the same kind of effect. Players are not amused when the rules suddenly change for the same reason they do not like sudden character changes, it breaks the connection with the content and they are then forced to decide if they still like the content before they will commit any more time to the experience. The risk of alienation is increased.

I just returned from a trip to Alaska where I broke 10,000 photos on my Nikon D70. It's been a great camera during the past 20 months; it has been the source of a much frustration and eventually, great satisfaction. Hitting 10,000 photos inspired me to write a bit about my experience because prior to owning this camera I had next to zero knowledge about photography. My previous video experience gave me a leg up on composing and the bare mechanics of how to take a decent picture when I could use the automatic modes, but after a while I started seeing the shortcomings of the automatic modes and thus began the real learning process as I began experimenting with all the other settings this camera provides.

Here's a cropped portion of photo 9999. While it isn't the best photo of a breaching whale, I'm pretty happy with it because I've gone from being a full-auto user to almost complete manual control of all settings which is the case in this photo. I was pleasantly surprised to discover this was the lucky image, I still consider myself lucky to get anything resembling focus and decent lighting much less both with such excellent subject matter. I wouldn't have picked this as my best photo (obviously it's a bit dark and the whale isn't perfectly focused) it just happens to be the one that rolled the odometer over so to speak.



The full size version of this photo and many more can be seen on my gallery site.

Max Headroom, that computer generated character of a previous century - remember him?

This computer generated guy spoke to people in real time. Or so it seemed, anyways - I wasn't really sure if the first iteration of that was in fact real time.

Skip forward a few years, we now have webcams that can overlay cartoons on top of digitized video in true real time. Pretty funny stuff actually.


What I can't help but wonder is where will this eventually lead? It seems likely that given enough progress in technology, we will be able to generate real time images of people that quite simply look like real people but are completely computer generated. Today, it's easy to imagine Half Life 2 quality faces and expressions extending the tech that already exists today. 10, 15 years from now - who knows how realistic it will look by then. You may not even be able to tell the difference. If & when we get to that point it will be because we have reached the limit of the Max Headroom function of simulating humans in realtime.

I know I’m not the first person to notice this but I’ve been saying for a few years now that the video game industry is in the same sort of situation that the movie industry must have been in at some point. From what (little) I know, sometime around the 1920’s the tools of making movies finally started to stabilize. I see a similar thing happening to the games industry. The process of making games is starting to be fairly well understood, including the tools, processes and even the social dynamics of the people involved. At some point the filmmakers stopped building their own cameras, developing their own film, and found a system that generally worked for making and selling movies in a reliable manner. Something much like that is bound to happen to videogames.

Hopefully this will be the one I keep for a while. The website is now running on Drupal. I had it running using Wordpress for a while, and it was quite nice, but as I started to explore adding new features to it I became a little frustrated and starting looking for alternatives. Drupal is a pretty good alternative. We'll see how it goes.