Paul Kuliniewicz

The PPA for Panflute now has builds for Maverick in addition to Jaunty, Karmic, and Lucid.

Work on Panflute 0.7.0 has been sporadic lately, but it is happening. The big thing I’m working on right now is a way to test Panflute’s capabilities with the wide range of players it’s trying to support — with 15 different players, and multiple versions of each one, it’s completely impractical to manually test Panflute against each. Some of this has already landed in the source repo, but it’s in an extremely early stage at the moment. It’s also dangerous — there’s a reason the test tool refuses to do anything unless you explicitly ask it to --destroy-my-data. (I’ll write about how to use it correctly after it becomes at least half-baked.)

Most of the other plans for 0.7.0 involve clearing out the backlog of bugs. I’m hoping to release 0.7.0 by the end of September.

In case anyone was worried, yes, I did survive the strongest recorded earthquake in Maryland history.

As much as I like xkcd, I can’t let Monday’s comic stand without comment:

That’s not how homeopathy works.

Wait, let me rephrase that. That’s not how homeopathy claims to work.

According to the principles of homeopathy, the cure for any condition can be created by finding a substance that induces the same symptoms of the condition, and then diluting it to an extreme degree. Hahnemann “discovered” this by observing that if a healthy person ingested cinchona bark (which had been used to treat malaria), they suffered symptoms similar to malaria. He therefore took this one data point and concluded that “like cures like” is a universal principle. Furthermore, since diluting something harmful reduces its harmful effects, it therefore eliminated the harmful effects of the compound without reducing the supposed curative properties.

Why do homeopaths know this, especially given that homeopathic treatments consistently fail scientific tests? Ask them, and they’ll accuse you of just being a shill for big pharma.

Now you see the problem in the aforehotlinked xkcd comic. If homeopathy were true, heavily diluted semen wouldn’t get you pregnant; it would be birth control. Or maybe induce an abortion.

Also: you might think that the 30X dilution means “diluting by a factor of 30″. That’s not how homeopathic notation works. The “X” doesn’t mean “times”, it means “factors of 10″. A 30X homeopathic dilution of something is made by diluting it by a factor of 10-to-1, thirty times in a row. Or, in other words, diluting it by a factor of 10³⁰ = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000-to-1.

A 30X dilution of semen certainly won’t get you pregnant. According to Wikipedia, an undiluted dose of human semen contains roughly 4×10⁷ spermatozoa. After a 30X dilution, the sperm count drops to 4×10^-23, or 0.00000000000000000000004 spermatozoa. Since you can’t have fractional spermatozoa, your 30X dilution leaves you with nothing but water. It definitely won’t get you pregnant. Or keep you from getting pregnant. It’s freaking water.

Another way of looking at it is this. Also according to Wikipedia, the original volume of that semen is 2 mL. A 30X dilution would add enough water to increase the volume to 2×10³⁰ mL = 2×10²⁷ L. That’s a lot. That’s roughly 4.8×10¹⁴ cubic miles. The Pacific Ocean “only” has 1.5×10⁸ cubic miles of water in it.

And 30X is fairly modest as far as homeopathic dilutions go. You can find homeopathic “treatments” on the market that are diluted at 200C. Since the C stands for 100, this is the same as 400X. That’s one-followed-by-400-zeros-to-one!

In summary: homeopathy is completely ridiculous, but not in the way that xkcd claims it is.

A little while ago I complained about the abominable remake of The Prisoner. As further evidence of how that review was not just a case of “they changed it, now it sucks“, I present you with this:

It’s time to play inappropriate music and chew bubblegum. And Unit-03 is all out of bubblegum.

Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance improves on the original.

You may recall that my assessment of the first Evangelion remake movie is that it stuck far too close to the first several episodes of the original series, to the point of often being nearly shot-by-shot identical save for the increased budget. A nice visual upgrade, sure, but compressing six episodes’ worth of material into a movie left the plot feeling rushed and the overall effort seeming rather unnecessary.

Evangelion 2.0 instead retells the other twenty episodes of the original series. It manages this by streamlining plot and character development and excising filler wherever possible. The core of the original’s storyline is still there, but it’s been extensively reworked, and mostly for the better.

For Unit-00, anything can be a melee weapon.

The clearest example of that is the fight scene with the Tenth Angel. Instead of just being an upgraded version of the corresponding scene in episode 19, it also incorporates quite a bit of the fight scene against the Sixteenth Angel in episode 23 of the series, particularly the so-called director’s cut version of that episode. (And the movie does it much better than the episode did; I always thought the shorter, non-director’s-cut version of that fight more effectively conveyed the emotional impact of <spoiler>Unit-00’s destruction and Rei’s death</spoiler>. But I digress.)

And while I’m whipping out the spoiler tags, I might as well add that the fight also has a big surprise for those familiar with the original series, who surely aren’t expecting the fight to include <spoiler>the beginning of Third Impact</spoiler>

The characters, particularly the three main pilots, have been toned down from the series. Shinji isn’t as mopey and angsty and manages to actually take decisive action a bit more. Rei is still mysterious but less aloof; we even see her try to get Shinji and his father together, which isn’t completely out of left field given that she’s <spoiler>a clone of Shinji’s dead mother</spoiler>. Given how Shinji and Rei have a closer relationship in the movie, it’ll be interesting to see what happens this time around when he eventually learns Rei’s backstory.

This is several kinds of wrong.

Judging from the Internet, toning down Asuka’s whole set of issues is a much more contentious topic, but if you ask me, the “resolution” we see of them in the movie is superficial and won’t last. (Or perhaps she doesn’t know certain details of her own past yet?) I mean, she carries around a doll or puppet of herself. Now if you haven’t seen the series before, that might merely seem a little odd, but believe me, once you learn where it came from, that’s seriously messed up.

No, my biggest complaint about how Asuka is treated in the movie is not her character development or (<sarcasm>horrors!</sarcasm>) her changed last name, but the repeated gratuitous fanservice shots of her. I’m willing to accept giving her her own version of Shinji’s toothpicks scene, but pretty much everything besides that is way too blatant and unnecessary. Sure, some of it was in the original series too, but not to the same degree, and even there it also served to torment Shinji. Here, it’s clearly just to titillate the viewer. (And no, hanging a lampshade on her test plug suit doesn’t make up for it.)

I just destroyed Unit-05; better make myself scarce for the next 45 minutes of screen time.

I can only assume that if new character Mari had gotten more screen time, she would’ve been subjected to similar treatment. (She certainly seemed to enjoy her redesigned plug suit….) It’s hinted that there’s more going on with her than we see, but then most of what we do see of her is her effectively filling in for Asuka after Asuka gets written out a little after the halfway mark.

And while I’m complaining about things, I might as well point out that the soundtrack dissonance used during Unit 03’s fight scene just doesn’t work for me. Using Komm, Süßer Tod during End of Evangelion worked, as does the scene with the Tenth Angel around the end of Evangelion 2.0, but this definitely does not. Maybe it’s just me, though.

But really, that’s about the extent of my complaints about this movie. This is what a remake should be: true to the spirit of the original, but not afraid to take liberties with the source material. Approachable to newcomers (assuming they’ve seen Evangelion 1.0, naturally), yet enough that’s new to keep those familiar with the original engaged. In all honestly, I have no idea what’s going to happen in the first few minutes of Evangelion 3.0, let alone the remainder of the remake. And most importantly, I’m looking forward to see what they come up with.

This is what happens when your handwriting recognition engine insists on interpreting anything the user scribbles with the stylus as an integer. (Warning: do not use this video as a study guide for arithmetic.)

This is what happens when you’re too lenient when your function for fuzzy matching on strings is a little too fuzzy. (Warning: some NSFW language.)

It turns out that moving into a newly-purchased home can be just as time-consuming as purchasing it in the first place. Who knew?

Anyway, that’s the excuse I’m going to go with for not having posted here in about a month.

When the title screen tells you to give up, you know you’re in trouble.

The short version: don’t waste your time watching last year’s remake of The Prisoner. Stick with the original.

Considered on its own merits, the remake isn’t terrible, but it never rises above mediocre either. There’s an over-reliance on camera trickery to create confusion on the part of the viewer, with lots of disjointed cuts between scenes that, at it worst, makes some episodes (particular the fifth one) simply difficult to follow. It can be hard to tell whether something is happening concurrently with another scene, or is a flashback, or a dream, or or an hallucination, or something else. Given that each of those happen with quite a bit of regularity, trying to disentangle the editing while making sense of the plot is a nontrivial task.

Hey, no one noticed when John McClane’s shirt changed color, right?

It would have been nice if the editors had remembered to check for continuity between successive shots, though. Let’s get the basics before we start getting all fancy with the cuts, OK?

The remake does do a couple interesting things with the premise, and it certainly takes things in a very different direction than the original, but it does neither well enough to really stand on its own. And as a fan of the original, it’s impossible for me to evaluate the remake without constantly comparing it against the 1960s version. And there, it comes up far, far short of the mark.

Obviously, a remake is going to change some things. I understand that. Heck, the last time I wrote about a remake of something here, my major complaint was that it changed so little for most of the running time, except for the effects budget. But the The Prisoner remake makes the mistake of changing absolutely fundamental aspects of the original without providing a satisfying payoff for those changes.

The most grating is the issue of 6’s identity. In the original, Number 6 refuses to ever refer to himself as Number 6, the identity imposed upon him in The Village. He never calls himself by any number. He never wears the numbered identity badge that everyone else wears. There’s even an episode where Number 2 struggles to get him to even say the number six in any context.

Contrast the remake, where at the end of the second episode we see 6 screaming at 2 “I am 6, you bastard!” In the following episodes 6 shows no resistance to being identified as 6. The real Number 6 would die sooner than accepting that.

The remake’s Village is no Portmeirion.

The remake’s version of The Village and the people living there defies suspension of disbelief. The Village is surrounded by desert, and allegedly there is nowhere else. That’s right, the majority of people there accept The Village as being the entirety of human civilization, despite it obviously not having the industrial base needed to manufacture the cars and buses and everything else within it. This is taken to the extreme in the last episode, where we see people arriving by bus to The Village; not only can the new arrivals not explain where they arrived from, but no one besides 6 considers people arriving from allegedly nowhere as something worth questioning.

OK, maybe this isn’t entirely inexplicable, since it’s pretty obvious that the people in The Village live in abject fear of 2, and it would make sense that they would be terrified of voicing any opposition to what he tells them. Even though 2’s weapon of choice is sadistic psychological manipulation, he isn’t above orchestrating acts of terrorism to keep people in line, such as having a diner full of people blown up in the first episode in order to silence 554, where “silence” in this context means “put into a coma.” Although, given 2’s fondness of hand grenades, he may have simply done it himself.

2’s the kind of guy who will throw a grenade at you and ask if you’ve had sex with your mother. I am not making this up.

In the original, most of the Number 2s didn’t sink to that level of obvious evil, and there was some ambiguity as to whether at least some of them were prisoners themselves who capitulated to The Village’s unseen masters. No, the remake’s 2 is pretty clearly evil. Nor is there any question in the remake as to 2 being in charge. This time around, when 6 asks “Who is number one?” — a recurring question in the original — the answer simply comes back that 2 is called 2 instead of 1 as a show of humility. Period.

I’m reluctant to call the remake The Prisoner In Name Only, but then there’s the issue of the episode titles. Each title is a one-word version of an episode of the original, but in only two of the six episodes is the plot even remotely related to the plot in the original. What’s the point, other than trying to slip in a shout-out?

It’s fitting how in the opening of the first episode we see 6 bury 93 in a shallow grave in the desert. 93 is wearing the same distinctive outfit that the original’s Number 6 wore. According to the commentary, the creators of the remake had even tried to get Patrick McGoohan to play the role of 93. I think that pretty much sums up symbolically what the remake does to the original.

Spoiler warning: If you don’t want me to spoil the endings of both the original and the remake, you better stop reading here.

Read the rest of this entry »

I now have a mortgage. And a home to go along with it. But by dollar amounts, mostly a mortgage.

When Renee and I had the idea to do a double date with Ryan and Jenny, Renee thought we should do something extremely weird or extremely clichéd. I managed to come up with an idea that was both: going on a clichéd dinner date with them within a role playing game.

Renee recruited Peace to run things for us, without whose help that night wouldn’t have been possible. He prepared a one-shot Minimus campaign. The player’s handbook for Minimus is a mere two pages long, and character generation can be done in five minutes, allowing us to surprise Ryan and Jenny with our plan when we showed up at their door.

Well, character generation can theoretically be done in five minutes. We spent a good hour and a half on it.

The first step of character generation is picking a name, a role that fits the setting, and five major life events. Since the game was in a modern, non-fantasy setting, magic and the like were right out. Peace revealed that time travel would be involved, so I wanted a character whose skills would be useful in that world.

Thus was born Stan “The Voltman” Voltronski, rogue electrician. The initial inspiration came from Harry Tuttle in Brazil, although as his character was fleshed out he became more of a mad scientist than a hero, using his unlicensed electrical work in pursuit of his goals of developing an over-unity circuit.

The Voltman’s major life events, taken from his character sheet:

1. Childhood train set shorted out city’s power supply. Through him.
2. After getting no date to prom, electrified the dance floor and got thrown out of high school.
3. Put on UL’s lifetime blacklist after successfully using a soda can to replace a little league stadium’s fuse box.
4. After The Man shut off Chalice’s [Chamberman, Renee's character, a Harvard-educated slumlordess] power supply, was hired to tap into the grid on the down low.
5. After Chalice tried to chain him down, told her no one can keep The Voltman grounded.

The Voltman didn’t want to get tied down in a relationship, on account of being on the run from his nemesis, Reg Phillips, the chief enforcer of the American Society of Electrical Engineers [because I apparently forgot about the IEEE and thus came up with a fictitious organization]. After all, The Voltman’s big secret was his home address (and the fact that his previous residences all burned down in mysterious electrical fires).

Minimus’s character generation involves passing character sheets around to have other players assign things to your character. Renee came up with The Voltman’s set of skills, again quoted from the character sheet:

1. Electrician
2. Sneaking
3. Knowledge (lovemaking)
4. Climbing
5. Shopping (specifically for clothes, but overall good too)
6. That Hebrew fighting style that is badass
7. Steampunk

I’m not sure how steampunk abilities fit in with being a rogue electrician, since it’s all about steam-powered technology rather than electricity-powered technology, but I gave The Voltman ranks in it anyway, because it’s still awesome.

For their part, Ryan’s character was Steve Montana, a pro football player whose solution to everything appeared to involve donning his uniform. Jenny’s character was Joanna I-didn’t-write-it-down-in-my-notes, Chalice’s sister and a cheerleader-turned-sideline-reporter trying to keep her nascent relationship with Steve secret to avoid scandal and eventually get promoted into the press box.

Once we finally got into the game itself, things began with our four characters on a double date, when Steve got his drink drugged by a former football player he knew and Chalice got her car stolen. While leaving the back way, they got attacked by a group of taser-armed thugs who easily wiped the floor with them. Joanna and The Voltman both got knocked out in the first round before they could attack — I’m still not entirely sure how The Voltman fell to a mere taser. Chalice lasted a bit longer before being overpowered.

They woke up strapped to tables and got sent back in time to the year 2000, in what would turn out to be the villain’s plan to dissociate them from the timeline and turn them into his team of chrononauts.

Villain

You’re going to be my chrononauts.

Chalice

I’m sorry? What? What was that?

The Voltman

It means “time-nauts.”

They had two hours to do whatever they wanted in the past before returning to the present and, from there, into the future.

I found it interesting that Renee and Jenny used the opportunity to have their characters seek revenge, whereas Ryan and I tried to make a profit. Steve tried to put together some convoluted scheme involving sports betting and memorabilia that I’m pretty sure Peace accepted because he didn’t want to try to figure out just what was going on with that. “OK, fine, you have a poster with the wrong person’s autograph.”

The Voltman helped Chalice get revenge on her abusive father by booby-trapping a remote control with one of The Voltman’s experimental super batteries, powerful and dangerous enough to electrify plastic. (One battery to injure, two to kill.) With that done, it was The Voltman’s time to shine.

In 2000, Stan Voltonski hadn’t yet been booted from the electricians’ community, so he was still operating legitimately as an apprentice under his real name. The Voltman looked up his number in a phone book and hot-wired a pay phone to make the call. This despite that:

• Pay phones only cost 25 cents
• Chalice had lockpicking skills and could’ve opened the pay phone’s coin box
• Chalice had grabbed a fistful of change when leaving her father’s house anyway

Anyway, The Voltman called past Stan Voltronski and gave him the instructions for building the experimental super battery. The idea was for The Voltman to give Stan the outcome of his previous ten years’ work, letting Stan Voltrinski get a jump on things and making advances more quickly. Once The Voltman would suddenly remember the new advancements built upon the super battery thanks to how he hoped the rules for time travel worked, he would then give that information to Stan too, and so on until running out of time in the past. Had the loop worked, The Voltman could have abused time travel to accomplish decades worth of research and experiments in mere minutes.

Of course, The Voltman kind of came off a little crazy, what with not wanting to try to explain the whole time travel thing to past Stan. The Voltman’s warning to Stan to keep his experiments secret to avoid losing his legitimate job didn’t help much either:

The Voltman

You have to separate Stan Voltronski from The Voltman!

Stan

Who is this?

The Voltman

I know what you’re doing! If they find out, they’ll be after you!

*click*

dial tone

Yeah, it didn’t work. In the end, Stan’s was the only past that hardly changed, since The Voltman wasn’t able to hurt Stan in any way that Stan wasn’t already going to do to himself. Besides, all that traveling back from the past accomplished was to bring them back to an alternate present where they didn’t belong. Not that that mattered too much to The Voltman; he was more interested in the chips that had been implanted into each of their brains that let the villain immobilize them and send them through time. The Voltman wanted to figure out how it worked so he could hack it; had we not called it a night before getting that far, the first thing he would’ve done in the future was get a brain scan done so he could start reverse engineering the chip.

Also, given that time travel was accompanied by an immobilizing sense of euphoria, one not entirely dissimilar to the train set incident from The Voltman’s childhood, apparently the chips operated based on Buddhist time travel, sending people through Nirvana into the past or future.

Apparently the broader plan for the campaign was for our characters to be send through time to find and hide historic artifacts like the Q document so they could be “discovered” in the future and used to fund development of time travel, which itself happened in the future. (Obviously you couldn’t just bring the artifacts with you into the future, since then they wouldn’t carbon-date correctly and would be considered frauds.) On account of us spending an hour and a half on the five-minute character generation, though, we never got past the prelude of the campaign.

One might question the wisdom in role playing a dysfunctional relationship with the person you’re in an actual relationship with. Or in coming up with a double date idea that involves the introduction of a fifth person. Or in coming up with such a ridiculously nerdy idea for a double date to begin with.

Well, it seemed to work out pretty well anyway.

I can’t help but note the similarity between today’s xkcd and a ghost story told in Chapter 20 of Homunculus….

Does the fact that Linux users are contributing almost twice as much for the Humble Indie Bundle as Windows users prove that we’re twice as generous as they are?

Yes. Yes it does.

Remember how I was briefly pretty OK at Mega Man 10’s Special Stage 1?

Well, my time on clearing Special Stage 2 is holding up quite a bit better. Monday evening I managed to get the #6 spot on the leaderboard with a time of 2:27:83. The score was still there, albeit having dropped to around #27ish, Thursday evening. I then managed to slightly improve my time to 2:24:91, which is as of this evening at #22. That’s five days on the Special Stage 2 leaderboard.

I guess either the other players are having even more trouble with Special Stage 2 than I, or there simply aren’t as many people trying to get on the leaderboard this time around.

I don’t think I’m going to improve my time much more than 2:24:91, certainly not without figuring out a way to effectively use the Mirror Buster against Punk. It’s his weakness, but I have a really tough time trying to hit him with it. The only way to use it offensively is to reflect the enemy’s shots, and I haven’t figured out Punk’s pattern well enough to do it reliably. It takes me significantly longer to beat him with it than it does just using the Mega Buster on him, since at least with that I can hit him rapidly.

Also, it takes me about 1:40:00 to get to Punk’s room, which is about the same as the #1 score on the leaderboard to clear the stage entirely, so there’s clearly room for improvement elsewhere too. I have an idea what parts I need to speed up in (since they’re the ones where I’m not constantly moving forward), but it’s really hard to keep moving without getting hit and losing even more time from getting pushed back.

If you have an upstairs neighbor, do not store anything important in your laundry room. Sooner or later, their washing machine will break, and your building’s construction is not 100% waterproof.

Luckily, I avoided learning this the hard way — I mostly had old junk in mine, and the few important bits were near the top and not directly under ground zero. Er, ceiling zero. You know what I mean.

For a brief time in the late afternoon (Eastern time) on Monday, April 5, 2010, I had the world’s seventeenth fastest time on Mega Man 10’s Special Stage 1.

What’s that, you say? “Pics or it didn’t happen“?

By around 9 pm that evening, my score had dropped to #30, the very last place on the leaderboard. Since then it’s fallen off completely, and now the bottom spots are dominated by the sorts of times that were at the very top when I was #17. As of this writing, the current #1 spot is over a minute faster than my time. This blog post shall stand as the only persistent record of my accomplishment.

What was the secret to my fleeting success? Playing Special Stage 1 many times the day it came out, before the people who have way too much free time on their hands had a chance to fully learn the stage and claim the top spots. It’s easier to rank if everyone you’re competing against is just as new to the stage as you are.

If you want to follow my lead, Special Stages 2 and 3 get released on April 26.

The Panflute PPA now contains packages built for Lucid in addition to Karmic.