No Business Naming Things

I broke down and bought the Orange Box over the weekend. The curiosity I felt for Portal had reached levels I could no longer ignore and I snatched it up on a whim as we passed through EB Games. I haven’t touched any of the other Orange Box content yet, so I can only really comment on Portal. Also remember that I have the much maligned PS3 version.

First, the negatives. The load times are shockingly bad. Going between levels might pass for reasonable these days but restoring from a save has to take a good 30 seconds. I can’t fathom the amount of state its trying to restore - the game isn’t exactly full of branching pathes. Secondly, there is noticible slowdown at some very unfortunate times. Those times usually involve a rocket coming towards you. It hasn’t cost me yet but it’s really disorienting. Saying something other than the Aperture gun is disorienting in Portal is doing a disservice to the Aperture gun but it’s still true. Luckily there are only a few places where the rocket comes into play.

Now, the positives. Every. Damn. Thing. Else. This game is quite fantastic. The portal mechanic never gets old, the puzzles keep getting more challenging without getting stupid, the change of theme and pace near the end feels fresh, and most of all the writing and voice acting for GLaDOS is probably the best I’ve ever experienced in a game. I love black humor and she had it in spades - I actually killed myself on several occasions so I could hear her lines again. Related to GLaDOS are the voices of the sentry guns which are truely twisted. Having cute sentries with the voices of children trying to mow you down was great. Lastly, the final fight with GLaDOS and the subsequent credit sequence was just about as good as they get.

I can’t wait for Portal 2!

Paramount is the last studio to adopt Blu-ray… so all I need to ask is, where the hell is my Transformers Blu-ray?

Awhile ago I posted about how annoying I found links from PHPbb sites due to the fact that the referrers didn’t help you one bit in isolating the page that was responsible for the link. For the past few weeks, on a daily basis, I get 5-6 mails from Wordpress that look like the following:

A user tried to go to http://pookzilla.net/wp/wp/2007/11/phpbb/+%5BPLM=0%5D+GET+http://pookzilla.net/wp/2007/11/phpbb/+%5B0,21691,27374%5D+-%3E+%5BN%5D+POST+http://pookzilla.net/wp/wp-comments-post.php+%5B0,0,273%5D and received a 404 (page not found) error. It wasn’t their fault, so try fixing it you shithead.

They came from http://pookzilla.net/wp/2007/11/phpbb/+%5BPLM=0%5D+GET+http://pookzilla.net/wp/2007/11/phpbb/+%5B0,21691,27374%5D+-%3E+%5BN%5D+POST+http://pookzilla.net/wp/wp-comments-post.php+%5B0,0,273%5D

I have no idea why this is happening. Is that page really on occasion generating such bogus links and referrers? I can’t see that happening but if not then what’s the real explanation? Is there some kind of intrusion bot attempting to gain access to that page as if it were a PHPbb system based on the title of the post? How very odd.

We brought Abby to the vet today fearing that she may not make the trip home. She had an infection a few weeks back and since then she’s deteriorated. She’s stumbling more than she used to, she’s not as gregarious, and most telling of all: she’s started peeing well outside of her box. The vet gave her a thorough lookover and figures she’s basically healthy with the exception of her arthritis. It’s getting progressively worse, which is why she’s been peeing on the floor - it’s simply too difficult for her to get into the boxes. Armed with this information she’s going on a new pain medication regimen involving morphine, increased MediCam dosage, and a new anti-inflamatory. We also have a new catbox for her upstairs (so she doesn’t have to take the trek down the steps). In addition to this she’ll be be getting a cartilage builder supplement. She now takes more medication than I do. But at least she’s coming home and should be okay for awhile longer. I am starting to feel guilty for prolonging her pain but the vet insists that she’s still okay otherwise. If we can manage the pain we’ll have managed all of her problems. I want to believe he’s right and I will entrust that he is but I can’t help but feel like a selfish asshole for keeping her around. Her and I have bonded to an absurd degree and the idea of losing her keeps me crying like a baby. I know it’ll be sooner rather than later… but it wont be today.

The cast of Spongebob Squarepants doing hilarious voiceover of famous movies.

Hopefully this will be the last post with the words “startup changes” in its title for a very long time to come.

As mentioned previously, in 3.3 we prevent unknown Runnables from executing during the startup procedure via

and

. I last mentioned a strategy for avoiding use of such runnables during the initialization of editors. I believe that advice is still valid. However, there are scenarios where you may legitimately need access to these methods. Without them, for instance, Splash Screen implementors are forced to spin the event loop themselves if they want to do any clever UI work while the workbench is coming up. In an answer to this problem, we’ve added the new

class as API to the 3.4 stream. This class has one static method,

. Calling this method on any thread not created by the UI (ie: any user Thread) will allow that thread to access the Display.async() and Display.sync() methods as if they were one of our privileged startup threads.

For example:

package mail.example;

import org.eclipse.swt.SWT;
import org.eclipse.swt.events.PaintEvent;
import org.eclipse.swt.events.PaintListener;
import org.eclipse.swt.graphics.Color;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Canvas;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Shell;
import org.eclipse.ui.application.DisplayAccess;
import org.eclipse.ui.splash.AbstractSplashHandler;

public class SplashHandlerWIthDisplayAccess extends AbstractSplashHandler {
        public void init(Shell splash) {
                super.init(splash);

                final Color[] color = new Color[] { splash.getDisplay().getSystemColor(
                                SWT.COLOR_YELLOW) };
                final Canvas canvas = new Canvas(splash, SWT.NONE);
                canvas.setBounds(0, 0, splash.getSize().x, splash.getSize().y);
                canvas.addPaintListener(new PaintListener() {

                        public void paintControl(PaintEvent e) {
                                e.gc.setForeground(e.display.getSystemColor(SWT.COLOR_BLACK));
                                e.gc.setBackground(color[0]);
                                e.gc.fillOval(0, 0, canvas.getSize().x, canvas.getSize().y);
                        }
                });

                Thread worker = new Thread() {
                        public void run() {
                                DisplayAccess.accessDisplayDuringStartup();
                                try {
                                        Thread.sleep(500); // sleep a little so we can see the
                                                                                // color change
                                } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                                }
                                canvas.getDisplay().syncExec(new Runnable() {

                                        public void run() {
                                                color[0] = canvas.getDisplay().getSystemColor(
                                                                SWT.COLOR_GREEN);
                                                if (!canvas.isDisposed())
                                                        canvas.redraw();
                                        }
                                });
                        }
                };
                worker.start();
        }
}

This simple splash handler creates a canvas on the splash shell that will initially have a yellow oval taking up the entirety of the drawing area. We then create a thread which declares that it will be used to access the display during startup. After a short nap this thread will set the color of the oval to green and cause a repaint. You can verify that without the call to

the oval will remain yellow until the splash comes down.

Last night we went to see Juno with some friends.  I wasn’t expecting too much despite the hype but I was completely surprised - I LOVED the film.  In fact,  I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a film that much.  I’m not sure how to talk about why I enjoyed the film so much without spoiling it but let me just say that a film regarding adoption has the potential to leave me a train wreck emotionally.  As the film progressed I feared the ending would have this result but by the time the credits rolled I was smiling.  Ellen Page was fresh and charming as Juno and I hope this film is only the first of many for her.  Surprisingly enough I also found Jennifer Garner, an actress I don’t have any love for, extremely convincing as a woman desperate for a child.  There were points where I found looking at her eyes on screen incredibly uncomfortable - I could actually feel the desperation coming off of her.

I don’t want to make a habit of talking about music here but I feel the need to pass on this list of cover songs (with mp3s!) performed by Of Montreal (via MetaFilter).  Of Montreal doing Talking Heads?  Oh sweet lord…