Sim City V – The News Gets Worse

Imagine a big-budget game–the crowning jewel of one of the most successful game franchises ever. Then imagine that in order to play it in single player mode, you need to be able to connect to the company’s overloaded servers, so that you routinely get 20-minute-long “waiting to connect’ messages whenever you launch the game on your own machine.

How could the situation possibly get worse? Release a “patch” which de-features the game in order to make it run. Then offer affected customers to file for a refund…but refuse to actually process any of those refund requests.

Unbelievably bad customer service. Read the whole thing.

 

The Big Office Internet Upgrade is Coming!

We moved Human Computing’s offices from a non-descript office park to a cool historic building in downtown San Jose a few years back. We love our current offices–especially once we spent a very long weekend pulling down a square mile of floral wallpaper and replacing it with the brightly colored walls which to this day I’m amazed our landlord let us get away with. We also have very cool neighbors including about a hundred lawyers (who throw very nice cocktail parties!) and the offices of Drum magazine.

The only real sore spot is that the internet situation at the office has been less than ideal. We tried both T1 and Wireless T1 at first, before settling into the current DSL offered by AT&T, who luckily has a switching station relatively close to the office so the speeds aren’t as terrible as they might have been. Unfortunately, although our “downstream” speeds are reasonable, the “upstream” speeds that we can put out are just shy of horrific. To give you an idea, whenever we push an update out to our production servers located in another part of town, it becomes impossible to use the phones in the office for ten minutes as there’s so little bandwidth left. Pushing pictures and other bulky data to our production servers also takes hours when it should take minutes.

So it was with great relief that I read this week that Comcast will be wiring up the building at last, and offering state-of-the-art speeds (up to 120 MB/s down/30 MB/s up!) to residents of the building. It all starts mid-week this week, and there may be a little disruption during that time, but I can’t wait to give the new speeds a try. Since we upgraded our production servers last month, they’re already lightning fast, but this new upgrade holds the promise of making a lot of the day-to-day life of our own staffers much more pleasant.

Mind you, there’s some heavy lifting on our part to get there: we’ll have to reconfigure a few thousand firewall rules for the new networking, propagate new DNS settings to the internet, and few other measly upgrade tasks. After that, we should be able to sit back and enjoy our non-crackly phones and faster network!

Solving a Blue Screen Crash in Virtual PC on Windows 7

Whenever we get close to releasing another version of ComicBase, a big part of the testing is to make sure it runs under all our supported platforms. For ComicBase, this means 32 and 64 bit versions of a dozen or so variants of Windows XP, Windows Vista (yeah, “boo, hiss”), and of course, Windows 7.

A decade ago, we used to abuse the computer rentals at Kinko’s, trying each attempt at an installer out on a machine before moving on to the next one (and, I confess, leaving the poor Kinko’s staff to deal with any crud we may have left behind when the installers went awry).When an installer was really problematic, we’d have to move to another location. In this way, I learned the locations of most of the Kinko’s locations in the San Jose area.

In these more enlightened times, we use “virtual machines” — basically, Windows running on simulated hardware using pre-set disk images which we keep up to date with all the various flavors we need to test against. It’s basically a computer within a computer, complete with its own boot-up and shut-down–all within a little window on your regular PC. As a bonus, we can try the install, then just “wipe” the virtual PC back to its virgin state for future testing.  As you can imagine, these virtual PCs have become crucial to our testing process.

Unfortunately, something weird has begun happening using the new version of Virtual PC built into Windows 7 Ultimate Edition: after running installers that we know to be good, the virtual box began crashing with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). (If you think running a computer within a computer is weird, having your simulated computer blue-screen on you is downright bizarre).

After trying seemingly everything (different virtual machines, using it with or without Windows XP mode, etc.) it seems the problem is triggered by the new Hardware Virtualization support in Virtual PC and the particular hardware of our development machines. (Typically i7-based, Gigabyte P55 boards with a variety of NVidia graphic cards and overly complicated graphic setups). By going into the BIOS on the Gigabyte boards, selecting M.I.T., and disabling the Hardware Virtualization support, our virtual PC once again ran normally (if somewhat slowly).

Naturally, as luck would have it, there’s still a wrinkle in that the very first thing ComicBase does when launching is try to locate its Picture disks and (you guessed it!) turning off the hardware virtualization support seems to interfere with the virtual box’s ability to scan drives, making the initial drive check take several minutes instead of a second or two.

Unless we can find a better solution, it looks like we’ll either have to test on different basic hardware, or find a different virtualization software like Virtual Box to test against. The latter, of course, would force us to spend a week or more re-creating our test environment on the new (incompatible) disk images used by Virtual Box.

Any virtualization gurus out there got suggestions for a better way to go?

Fun Facts About Generators

We got a notice a while back that PG&E was going to be downing the power on our street in order to fix a transformer. Power was to be down all day, which unfortunately posed a bit of a problem since, well… We have all those computers and stuff we use to run our business.

Having survived the infamous “Gray Outs” where “rotating outages” would leave us sending everyone home when the place went dark’ I was in no mood for a repeat.

Then a brainwave hit: “I know!” thought I, “we can get a generator”

Thus began an educational adventure, as a result of which I discovered a number of interesting things:

1. They’re not as loud as you fear. It’s just like someone’s mowing the lawn…all the time.

2. If you actually want to plug something in to your generator which lives more than 20 feet away, prepare to spend as much on heavy gauge power cords as you would for yearly passes to the waterslide park for a family of four.

3. They are every bit as heavy as you feared. Luckily, they have wheels. This is when you’ll discover that the place you want to put your generator does not have pavement.

4. You apparently need about a million watts of generator capacity if you plan on actually using a major appliance–like, say, your electric razor. That’s because–at least according to the “sizing charts” that accompany generators–even the most innocuous appliances are given to wild streaks when–like the Hulk when you make him angry–they surge to 20 times their original power. That fridge you’ve been monitoring at 22 watts all year? According to lore, it can surge up to 1750 watts when something (the defroster?) sets it off. Consider yourself warned.

5. GFCI outlets and computers don’t mix. This is the big one, and really the whole excuse for writing this post. You see, a GFCI outlet (Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter) is standard on most portable generators, and is used to make sure you don’t kill yourself by taking the genny with you as you take a quick dip in the pool. The idea is, if it ever sees even a tiny disparity in the generated power vs. What it senses on the neutral wire, it’ll throw the breaker so that your loved ones will be safe as they fish your body out of the shallow end.

Unfortunately (as my electrician friend explained it to me after a miserable day when the genny decided to throw the switch whenever we dared ask it to, umm… actually generate some power for us) the GFCI design also implies that any time you hook up a medium-to sorta biggish capacitor to the line (like the sort in UPSs, computers, and all that gadgety stuff), it’ll also think someone is drowning and blow the whistle.

So yes, that in short is why we were down all day, why me and the staff are a bit frazzled, but why the beer in the fridge (no big capacitor there–just an allegedly Hulk-sized defroster which didn’t cause a lick of trouble) is still icy cold.

And boy do I need one after today….

The Government owns How Much of California?

This came up in a conversation yesterday, and I tried to use Wolfram Alpha to find the answer (unsuccessfully, sadly). Google provided the following, however:

http://www.calinst.org/bulletins/b1115h.htm

Short answer: 46.9% (!). And check out how much of Nevada is owned by the government for a real shocker.

The Stock Market Game Update

After the first day of play, mattress-stuffing Kelly is in the lead with $10,000.23 cents, courtesy of 1 day’s worth of interest on her Wamu money market fund at 0.0083% interest.

I similarly chickened out (but didn’t give myself the benefit of any interest, as my “cash” is presumably stuck in a brokerage holding account). I just didn’t see any stocks which looked like winners to me right now.

Neil went with BQI, a petroleum sands exploration company out of Canada. Had he been able to get in yesterday, he’d have made a nice profit, but for today, the stock treaded water and he’s still out the commission fee of $49.99

Lastly, Carolyn went with her “economic apocalypse” smattering of stocks which included gun makers Smith & Wesson and Ruger, defense company Textron, as well as the Gold spider fund. Textron was up significantly on a rumored buyout by Lockheed, but the others were slightly down, leading to a net loss of $26.15 for the day.

Thanks (an early Thanksgiving Post)

It’s been a crazy week, fully of 3:00 am programming sessions, server restarts, tech calls, web sites in need of updates, and a dozen other things that go into preparing for the final holiday sales push at this little software company that’s been my home for the past 15 years. As if that weren’t enough, today was update day, which means I not only needed to push out the update for this week’s new comic indexing, but also handle as many as possible of of the content corrections and updates that have been flowing in all week.

My own desk is piled with work and half-finished projects, but with everyone else in the office busily  working on their own deadlines, I started tackling the queue that had grown by some seven hundred new submissions in just three days. “Man!” I thought. “Why do I do this job? I could have gone into writing medical software, but nooooooo…“. I was ready to bang my head against the desk out of sheer exasperation.

But then, in between editing the appearance notes, cover colorists, and countless other entries sent in by dozens of people from around the world in the past few days, I had one of those quintessential ComicBase moments where I was simultaneously stressed out by the workload, ferociously proud of what our little company has built over the past decade and a half, and utterly humbled by the amount of effort, care, and goodwill that causes relative strangers from half a world away to deluge us covers for a hundred issues of Martin Mystere, or hold raging forum battles over the proper way to denote character names in anthology storylines.

Like I said, sometimes I don’t know why I do this job. And I don’t know why so many other people are willing work so hard to help us. But man, am I glad you do!

I’m a big believer in work, and I respect the heck out of anyone, in any job, that gives it their all. On a personal level, I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve managed to with ComicBase and Atomic Avenue—projects that started with me wanting to find a way to catalog and sell my own comics, then got well and truly out of hand.

But as proud as I am of all that our little company has managed to do over the years, I still have to stand back occasionally and simply marvel at the sheer volume of effort that’s been donated by people I may never even meet, much less have the chance to buy a round of drinks for at San Diego. From helping moderate the discussion boards to correcting the spelling of “Sienkiewicz”, to driving the editors here collectively mad with your insistence that we start crediting cover inkers and colorists, you folks are the one who made ComicBase and Atomic Avenue what they are today. This isn’t some kind of false modesty on my part, it’s simply the truth.

Thank you. For everything.

-Pete

Quote of the Day

“There are three things I’ve learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.”

— Linus

Road Trip Report: Pete vs. the Computers of Gettysburg

After weeks on the road, averaging more than four hundred miles a day, it was a relief to pull in my folks’ driveway in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for a record-breaking 4-day stay. The highlight of all this (and indeed the excuse for the whole trip) was being able to spend Neil’s birthday with his grandparents.

For the past four days, my Mom and Dad have showed us a grand time in Gettysburg: amazing battlefield tours, gorgeous Pennsylvania scenery, and enough fabulous, home-cooked meals to leave us all several pounds heavier as we prepare to hit the road.

But all of this hospitality came with a price—one familiar to anyone who’s the geekiest member of their family. Suddenly, I was Pete the Tech Guy, troubleshooter of everything from wonky printers to the labrynthine connections of their living room entertainment system.

And, as it turned out, I had become a serial killer, preying on my parents’ old computers.

My first victim was an old eMachines tower which had once been “The New Computer” back when my folks first moved to Las Vegas the better part of decade ago. Now, it was hopelessly glitchy and outdated, wheezing when asked to do even basic email and web browsing. For the past year or so, it had been gathering dust in my parents’ study next to the computer which had replaced it, but with nobody daring to send it on to the great beyond, for fear that perhaps some crucial file had not been copied from its ancient hard drive. Having had some recent experience in dispatching machines that had fallen on hard times, I gutted the old beast, stripped its hard drive for safety’s sake, then dragged the rest of My Computer to the Trash—the real trash—and emptied it.

Victim #2 was an old PowerBook 140: a computer that had been cool during the first Bush administration. Now it was cooling its heels in the back of my Mom’s closet. The 16 MHz processor emitted an unearthly scream when we attempted to boot it up, but Its black and white screen never showed us that famous smiling Mac startup icon. After a few more bizarre electronic shrieks, it joined the eMachine in the garbage bin.

By now, I’d managed to kill fully half the computers in my parent’s home, but my worst was yet to come. At last night’s dinner, my Dad has been desirous of a newer machine to replace the old Compaq laptop I’d loaned him as a replacement to his now-dead eMachine. Without even USB 2.0 support, the Compaq was decidedly long in the tooth, but my frugal father had decided to wait a while longer before replacing it. The wait ended just a few hours later when, after attaching a portable drive to it in an attempt to get it backed up—the machine stalled out during startup and wouldn’t allow for even a forced power shutdown. I eventually had to turn the machine on its side, press in a hidden reset button, then restart it. it came up again, but failed on the next reboot when the backup drive was attached. Another press of the reset button followed… and then it refused to do anything except blink for a moment when the power came on, then immediately shut off again. And nothing would set it to right. Ever.

A rattling sound from within the long-suffering laptop told the tale: the laptop literally had a screw loose — one which shifted from its previous, innocuous location to a new one which direct shorted out part of the motherboard when I had turned the machine over to press the reset button. Yes, I’d actually managed to kill a machine simply by flipping it over.

Three computers down; only my Mom’s “cheese grater” G5 PowerMac remains. And my Mom had been complaining that that one was getting a bit old…

…perhaps it’s best that we’re moving on tomorrow…

Those Wacky folks at JibJab

http://www.peteyandpetunia.com/VoteHere/VoteHere.htm