Filler

I have always used Quicken for the most minimalistic of checkbook balancing. For some reason, even though the newer versions have continued to get bigger and more bloated, I’ve continued to stick with them, and even paid for the pile of rat dung they call Quicken Deluxe 2005.

Hating Intuit was a dangerous choice, as it turns out. Starting in 2005 editions, Intuit apparently added in the ability to disable select features after a three year period. For those of us who rely on, say, importing transactions from our bank, we’re just screwed through and through. Raped, more like. Violently. With broomsticks, chains, whips, and random jolts of high-voltage electricity.

How can a company as big as Intuit actually get away with something like this? It’s pretty much blackmail - won’t their users get as disgusted as I did and look for other options?

…

Maybe it doesn’t even matter. Because I did that. I looked at the other options. I looked at Moneydance. I looked at Gnucash. I looked at a few others whose names I forgot about as fast as it took me to run their uninstall programs. I avoided MS Money because I’ve heard it’s just as bad as Quicken in terms of the BS they’ve added in over the years.

In the end, I wasted a couple hours just to buy Quicken 2008.

I’m amazed at how utterly shitty the competition is. I’m a software designer for a living, and I’ve even worked on accounting software at my last job, so I know how challenging it can be to design something as big as a knock-off of a really successful accounting package. And for the freeware options, I can hardly fault them for sucking - they’re free. Gnucash looks promising if you’re an accountant. Plus, it couldn’t deal with downloaded transactions even a tenth as nicely as Quicken. Moneydance, a commercial app, was written wholly in Java, making its UI anything but consistent with other Windows apps. Plus, it couldn’t deal with downloaded transactions even as well as Gnucash. Another app, another set of problems, plus they couldn’t fucking deal with downloaded transactions nicely.

I can’t figure it out. For all of Intuit’s crap, for all Quicken’s painful UI decisions, it’s still the best app for somebody who just wants to download transactions and keep a single checking account balanced. Weird.

I’m sure I’ve bitched about open source plenty of times, but I have to rant once again. Dotproject is my project management application of choice. It does everything I want, and in particular allows for very awesome time estimation which was extremely useful for Bloodsport Colosseum. I was able to break down every task into subtasks and really get a feel for how much effort was left by looking at the accuracy of past estimates.

But it’s programmed by idiots. I mean, these guys are actually pretty stupid compared to the average rock. I’m sorry, it’s a great tool designed by somebody who had a head for project management, but programmed by idiots.

After not using dotproject for a while (after the death of bloodsport colosseum, I had little to track), I got a contract job that really needs careful design. So I jumped back into a semi-recent version of this awesome/disgusting app, and found that it uses overlib for popup help! (No, that isn’t the problem. Overlib is actually really nice for web-based hover-help) But the dotproject devs by default chose to make the popups STICKY. That is, when you hover over a link you think is just a link, a popup shows up that will not go away until you explicitly mouse over the “close” button.

This is revolting.

So I know overlib. I’m not phased a bit. I used it for Bloodsport Colosseum and it’s really a pretty straightforward JS library (a rarity these days). It’s open source, so it probably sucks monkey balls, but as a user of the tool, I liked it.

Overlib has a central area to put all your app’s default preferences for things like font, colors, opacity, and, of course, sticky. To override the defaults, you can actually specify “commands” in your call to the overlib methods, which is handy for special cases.

The dotproject dimwits actually ignored the defaults altogether, and put the exact same preferences into their HTML in seven different places. I’m not sure what can happen to a programmer where they learn the number one failing of software. The first thing you learn in your first CS class is about code reuse. Functions, code centralization, that sort of shit. HOW can somebody be so stupid as to ignore these amazingly simple principles when the library already provides a really easy and central place for this stuff?

Then I remembered my first dotproject disaster - an old version had some broken SQL for calculating the % left on a task, and to fix it I had to change this SQL in 3 or 4 places, and rewrite a couple rather large sections of code.

No, that memory didn’t comfort me, but at least I was able to say, “Oh yeah, they’re just dotproject developers. They didn’t know better.”

I’m a huge fan of Stardock. They kick ass hands down. Galactic Civilizations II, especially with the expansions Dark Avatar and the still-in-beta Twilight of the Arnor, blows away other 4x games that exist today. Civ 4 is so far behind in terms of AI and economic complexity (while still having way too much micromanagement anyway), it’s just amazing.

Then Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, has to post this incredible claim that piracy isn’t the root cause for everything bad that happens to us today. Here’s an excerpt of this poor, deluded fool’s insanity:

Now many of you out there may fall for this kind of pro-terrorist propaganda, but not me. I’ve seen the DVD commercials that tell me how piracy is just like stealing a car and how it supports terrorism and kills babies and causes hurricanes and the apocalypse is coming early because of torrents. I’m no fool. You morons can go on believing that Hollywood is going to hell because of poor quality movies that nobody wants to pay to see. You can keep convincing yourselves that the record industry is going to be okay and Amazon.com’s DRM-free MP3 sales are proof. And you can say that a game can sell well even if it has no copy protection.

I’ll pray for your souls. I can only hope the very intelligent entertainment companies find a way to not only jail all the pirates (victimless crime my ass!), but also those who spread these filthy, disgusting, dirty dirty lies.

Brad Wardell, you’re now on my “list”. Watch your back, buddy. Watch your fucking back.

I’m a huge fan of Master of Magic. Have been since I bought the game over 12 years ago when it was released in a 4-pack with some other Microprose games. Since I bought it, it’s been possibly the single longest lasting game I’ve ever played. Other games have come and gone, and a few have had pretty good long- term appeal, but nothing matches the depth of Master of Magic. Even with its horrific AI and ugly graphics, the game was, for me, an instant classic, and one I have never truly put down.

The next series of articles are going to be my own personal tribute to this amazing game. From my own perspective I’m going to try and explain what makes this game so amazing. For today, I’ll just do my best to give a simple overview of the game. It’s complex enough that if I just jump right into the details, I’ll probably confuse even myself….

Master of Magic, the 4X with a twist

If you don’t know what a 4X game is, you should probably stop right here. The genre is pretty complex by itself, and trying to explain the basics of a 4X is way out of the scope of this series.

Master of Magic is a pretty early 4X game. It was released in 1993, just two years after the well-known Civilization came out. It took a lot of Civilization’s general look and feel, but built a significantly different game out of what appears at first glance to be just a Civ clone.

MoM’s big twist is that despite certain game balance issues, the developers decided to avoid the typical pitfall of 4X games: repetition. Civilization embodied the 4X genre with its random maps, large technology tree, varied military units, etc. But even so, each game was still played more or less the same. No matter how you started out, no matter your approach to winning, a game of Civilization tended to have a pretty set “roadmap” to victory. The same can be said of many turn-based strategy games, 4X or otherwise: Master of Orion, Heroes of Might and Magic, Age of Wonders, etc. I love every one of those games, but the fact is their appeal doesn’t come from being able to play a different style each game.

With MoM, you can play like it’s a normal strategy game - choose the same general startup options, and your games will indeed all feel similar, and you will likely have as much fun as you might when playing other 4X games. But the big trick that Simtex pulled out of their hats when developing it is that if you choose different startup options, your games can be so different that you feel like you’re not playing the same game!

Overview

You are a powerful wizard in control of a civilization. Your wizard’s spell choices, special abilities, and intial race are selected by you at the beginning of the game. The choices made when building a wizard determine exactly what style of play will suit you best. Choosing strong attributes instead of spellbooks generally means you need to expand and conquer quickly, before your enemies are able to research their overpowering spells. Choosing a strong focus in a single color of magic gives you excellent early-game spells, and the ability to eventually research the best spells the game has to offer, something not possible for those who choose abilities over spellbook focus.

When you start, you control a single city and two relatively weak military units. The general course of the game involves building new cities, conquering enemy (or neutral) cities, improving your cities so that they are able to support your goals better. City improvements are many and varied, depending on the race of the city’s inhabitants. Generally speaking, improvements will directly help your cause by unlocking better military units, or do more indirect things like increasing tax or magic income.

Your city is placed randomly on the randomly-generated overland map. Your units can stay and defend the city or wander around the map, looking for items of interest. They can enter various monster lairs to do battle with the many fantastic (summonable) creatures in the game, and usually can expect a worthwhile reward if they survive these encounters. They can take over neutral or enemy cities, potentially giving you new races and their associated military units. And of course, your units can die, giving you a gaping hole in your defenses that is almost certain to be filled by an enemy wizard’s forces or rampaging monsters.

Combat

Combat is one of the best parts to Master of Magic, and one that has never really been recreated in other games I’ve played. Maybe I’ve missed out on a really great game somewhere, but nothing has had the same game mechanics. Don’t get me wrong, the combat interface in Age of Wonders was much nicer, and the stack-based combat in the Heroes series was always interesting to me, but MoM’s combat was great for its approach to the “die rolls”. Or, more specifically, the lack thereof. The combat system gave weight to numbers as well as individual strength, so that a weak unit could have 8 “figures” in it (a unit is a single entity in the game, but can consist of 1-8 individual figures) and stand a chance against a stronger unit that had only two figures. I’ll go into much more detail in a later article, but sufficed to say, this approach to combat made for some really interesting strategies.

*** Go into detail about the usefulness of heavy enchantments on weak units - lionheart, for instance, cast on spearmen gave a 7-figure unit an incredible boost that’s nearly lost on a 1-figure unit, no matter its strength.

All units have four basic stats: attack, defense, resistance, and hits. Attack and defense are strictly for “normal” combat: higher attack means more chances to deal damage; higher defense means more chances to block otherwise successful attacks. Resistance is used for magical defense - a spell of strength 10 would be just like a strength 10 normal attack, but the defender would rely on its resistance for blocking damage instead of its defense. Hits told you how much damage could be taken before a single figure in the unit died. For 8-figure units, multiply the hits by 8 to determine damage that must be dealt to bring on the unit’s complete demise.

Another nice facet that MoM introduced me to was simultaneous combat. This is quite likely not the first game to do such a system, but to me it was pretty nice, and I’ve seen very few modern games that do it, which is really a shame – it really breaks the immersion to see the defender wait until it’s been attacked to fight back. In MoM, the counterattack is simultaneous in most cases, so if I send 9 weak units to attack your uber-strong paladins, I won’t get a free 9-unit bomb. Your paladins will retaliate every time (okay, so this part is unrealistic), causing my weak units to almost certainly take heavy losses. This really makes you rethink your strategies, as ganging up on a strong unit with weaker units isn’t nearly as effective. It’s a good approach, but you have to expect losses, unlike so many other games with tactical combat.

The other really cool thing about combat is the amazing variety of abilities a creature can have. If a creature has the shield ability, it takes less damage from ranged weapons. A creature with stoning can kill figures within the enemy unit before the counterattack happens, giving a tremendous advantage. A creature with illusion can make its attack as if the enemy had a defense of zero, which can be incredibly deadly.

And finally, magic within combat is really just great. Temporary creatures can be summoned, heroes can be recalled, friendly creatures can be buffed (a bonus to stats or abilities), enemies can be cursed (a penalty to stats or abilities), etc. The magic system is incredible, and is the major factor to MoM’s success, so it really needs its own section, even in this “brief” overview.

Magic

Combat, as I said, is one of the best parts of the game. But if one has to choose the best aspect, it’s gotta be the magic. Magic in Master of Magic (as the name implies) is a huge part of the game. Not just in winning battles, but in every aspect of the game. Some examples of the spell diversity: one spell allows you to view unseen terrain, one slows production in enemy cities, many call forth fantastic creatures to fight at your side, and one allows your cities to produce more gold.

Magic is broken up into 6 colors: Black (death), White (life), Green (nature), Blue (sorcery), Red (chaos), and Gray (arcane). Each school has its own trademarks, and while types of spells overlap sometimes, for the most part, a given school will have a focus of some kind that other schools have no way to reproduce.

When you start the game, you choose your spellbooks and abilities, as I stated above. Those choices determine how many spells of a given color you are able to research, as well as what spells you will start the game with. More focus in a single color means more spells of that color at the start of the game, and more (and more powerful) spells of that color will be available through research.

Spells are cast in combat or on the overland map (where you are when you look at the cities on the map). They can be instant, in that they do something (such as damage an enemy or heal a friend) and are done. They can be enchantments requiring per-turn mana upkeep, and can affect a unit, city, or just the game world as a whole. They can summon creatures for you temporarily during combat, or permanently so long as you can pay their upkeep.

Spells are the most complex aspect of the game, and will need a whole lot of time in a later article to fully discuss.

Winning the game

Though nothing groundbreaking, there are two paths to victory in Master of Magic. The obvious path is to simply destroy all your opponents by capturing their fortress (located in their starting city) so the enemy wizard is banished. In some cases the wizard will start the spell of return, but while he’s banished, he’s unable to use any magic, making the conquest of his remaining cities far easier. And in the cases the enemy sees defeat, he simply gives up once his fortress is captured and is out of the game permanently.

The other path to victory is the spell of mastery. It’s extremely expensive to research and isn’t even available to start researching until you’ve exhausted most of your other research possibilities. Then once researched you have to cast the thing, during which time all enemy wizards declare war upon you.

The nice thing about this second path is that it theoretically allows you to play a much more diplomatic game - be nice to your neighbors and just get that spell of mastery started when it’s too late for them to stop you. Unfortunately, though, the AI tends to play a game that’s largely conquest- oriented, making it rather difficult to go for the spell of mastery without doing a lot of the same stuff you’d do when pursuing a conquest victory.

Conclusion

The next series of articles will hopefully show those new to Master of Magic what an amazing game it is, even today, and maybe breathe some new life into the game for old veterans.

In the meantime, here’s where you can find Master of Magic: LINK

It seems that the once-monopolistic domain registrar, Network Solutions, has decided they need more power again. Domain Name Wire’s article reads like a bizarre April Fool’s joke at first glance, but it’s true. I tried it out with sweettemplatesforphp.com just for kicks, and those bastards really did park the domain.

Their motives almost seem genuine: “This is a customer protection measure to protect customers from frontrunners. After four days, we release the domain.” says Network Solution’s spin doctor PR spokeswoman, Susan Wade.

But if this is truly their goal, why is there no mention of it when you do a search? Why is there no option to skip it? Why the hell isn’t there a giant blinking warning? “IF YOU SEARCH FOR A DOMAIN WE’LL F*CKING SNAG IT FOR FOUR DAYS SO YOU CAN’T SHOP AROUND!”

I get it that they aren’t forcing you to pay a premium to register the domain from them. They’re just “safeguarding” it from the real front runners. But the thing is, they’re guaranteeing that if I do a search for a domain, I can not shop around for prices without going through this BS waiting period. A much more elegant solution (if they really want one, which I suspect they do not) would be a little checkbox:

If it takes me two minutes to come up with a solution that isn’t controversial, it can’t be that hard….

My son is three, so I grant him a lot of leeway when it comes to his choices of video. However, I was shocked, appalled, and disturbed when my wife mentioned he was totally in love with the “Care Bears: Big Wish Movie”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0472221/. Naturally I beat the crap out of him. Many times. But he still likes that god-forsaken video.

So one day he asked me to watch it with him. When a three-year-old asks you to do something, man, let me tell you, you’d better think real hard before refusing. Unless you really need to teach the kid that what he’s asking for is not allowed or bad for him, you obey. So anyway, I sat down and watched a fair amount of the movie.

I was once again totally shocked about midway through the movie when they made a reference to “Dr. Sbaitso”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso:

Funshine Bear: [dons Groucho Marx glasses and imitates Sigmund Freud] Hmm, interesting. Tell me about “caring.”
Wish Bear: I can’t. I feel all empty inside.
Funshine Bear: Interesting. Tell me about “empty inside.”

Okay, to be fair it could have been any “Eliza”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA like algorithm, but the point is clear - the designers of the Care Bears CGI movie (or script writer I suppose) have a geeky background, and actually put in a reference that probably one in a thousand people watching the movie would ever get.

I don’t claim to like the Care Bears all of a sudden, but I can’t help but laugh every time I see or hear that scene. Whoever decided to put that into the movie KICKS ASS.

I was thinking of all the various Norrisisms on the web (”Chuck Noriss’s tears cure cancer. If only he would ever cry…” and such), and realized that Chuck Norris would prefer ruby to perl. Two of my own very clever*** quotes are below, and after reading them I think even the most die-hard perl programmer will have no choice but to convert.

The ruby versions:

Chuck Norris doesn’t strip strings - when they see him, they get so excited they just strip themselves.

If Chuck Norris raises an exception, it takes two programmers, four paramedics, and at least one Chinese Healer to rescue it.

The perl versions:

Chuck Norris doesn’t trim strings - when they see him, they trim themselves out of fear.

When Chuck Norris found out perl couldn’t deal with exceptions nicely, he roundhouse kicked it. Twice. That’s why perl is so ugly.

Note how much less scared and ugly I made ruby sound.

Attention, nerds! If you are horribly wronged, do not simply accept your mistreatment. Sure, in high school we learned that survival depended upon rolling up into a ball and feigning death to protect ourselves from the jocks, but those days are behind (some of) us!

I finally got to the point that I threatened legal action against ebay for banning my account (see my “Boycott Ebay”:http://blog.nerdbucket.com/articles/2007/02/09/boycott-ebay article for more information). I told them essentially they had wrongfully banned me, and if I didn’t get a real response soon I’d simply take legal action for unfair business practices. I also hinted that banning people for legitimate items might allow for a class action lawsuit - they’re quite familiar with class action lawsuits, so maybe this was enough to put the fear of God into them.

In any case, they sent an email that they reinstated my account and relisted my previously-removed items. There was no “Oh #$@%! Sorry, looks like we made a mistake!” I would have liked that. But the admission that my account should be reinstated was good enough.

Hooray for me!

If any of you nerds are treated poorly, follow my example and threaten legal action. It’s good and good for you. Just keep in mind that you have to actually be in the right for this to work. You won’t get anywhere trying to sue your boss for telling you that Captain Kirk was cooler than Captain Pickard. Not only would no judge take that case, but your boss would be right.

(Note: some people will claim that ebay simply changed their mind on the policy in question, but we all know it was my threat of legal action that made them do it)

I use Magic the Gathering Online as a source of supplemental income. I am not “poor”, but with a wife, two kids, and a lot of medical bills for one child, my income is stretched extremely thin. Every month we might be able to save $20-40 for future emergencies. So when I found that I could make $20-40 extra in any given month via MtGO, I jumped at the chance - that’s doubling our current disposable income!

As many people are aware, ebay has decided to stop allowing sales of “digital items” in which the seller does not own the rights to the items in question, or is not authorized to trade those items. As an avid player of Magic the Gathering Online, I made sure Wizards of the Coast does indeed allow such transactions. WotC’s website even has a forum for conducting trades with other players, for cash or other in-game items. Their “code of conduct” states that the player is allowed to trade digital goods. I did my homework.

I was warned to no longer list digital items from this game, and my auctions were deleted. I sent several emails back and forth explaining that WotC allows MtGO properties to be traded (they even offer a forum on their site for this specific purpose). The responses were always the same - don’t list digital goods you aren’t authorized to list. Eventually they flat out told me they were no longer listening to my emails, at which point I told them that I would continue listing auctions until a written policy stated I could not do this.

Interestingly, it was only after this final email from me, in which I was excessively blunt and probably a bit rude, that they banned me. The ban appears to have happened within an hour or two of my final email, which seems pretty suspicious to me. They say they’ll lift the ban within seven days (assuming I fill out a form and jump through a bunch of hoops), but I don’t see the point - they’ll just continue to bully me in order to prove a point or something.

I’m keeping a record of the email that’s been happening, and I hope that even though my blog is very small that I can get some support. Check out the emails if you’re interested: “http://blog.nerdbucket.com/pages/ebaybs”:http://blog.nerdbucket.com/pages/ebaybs

And check these guys out: “http://www.ebaypigs.com/default.asp”:http://www.ebaypigs.com/default.asp

I seem to suffer from some rarely-heard-of form of insomnia in which I generally sleep well, but sometimes can’t fall asleep for hours. And when I fall asleep, I usually sleep well, but only if I don’t go to sleep too early.

Tonight I fell asleep putting Alex (my son) to bed, and that was around 8pm. I woke up just before 1am, and haven’t been able to sleep since then.

The worst part of this almost nonexistent disorder is that sleeping medication doesn’t work either… I tried some of that hardcore stuff you need a prescription for (Ambien or Lunesta, can’t recall which). That stuff seems like it would be great if one feels that he isn’t bumping into walls or falling on his ass often enough - it’s definitely got the “impair motor functions” bit down pat. But it just didn’t make me sleep any better than normal.

Why is that the worst part, you ask? Well, simple. For a sleep disorder that strikes randomly, there would be little fear of growing dependent on (or even gaining a tolerance to) the sleep meds. So in my situation, they ought to be a fracking lifesaver!

On the plus side, this means I have a bit of extra time to work on Bloodsport Coliseum before I stop being able to function for the day!

h6. Yes, I said “fracking”. I have heard rumor that kids as young as 10 hit my blog (in fact I think they’re my main demographic), and as much as I like to corrupt minors, I prefer to do it in more interesting ways. So expect more Battlestar Galactica swearing over Real World swearing from now on.