This Internet thing could be big.

So the post preceding this one was an attempt by me to help the Internet work. I had a problem with my iPod, and spent many hours trying to resolve it before finally finding the (simple) solution.
Why did it take so long? Basically, because the way I was describing the symptoms was different from the way that Jeff Bryan over at the 5G iPod forums at Apple described the underlying problem. I was looking for something having to do with ipodservice.exe taking up 100% of CPU, while he was describing a problem with drive letters. Fortunately for me, I found his post and guessed the issue he was talking about might be related to the one I was experiencing.

Then I figured that I'd try to make the internet better by putting the information I had gathered in someplace where it could be found, so that others might benefit. Thus far, 3 people have left comments indicating that this was a good idea. I'm pretty happy with that.

This kind of highlights the problem with the web, though. Almost all of the information you want is somewhere out there in the long tail, but finding it, weeding out the useful thing from all the other crap, is a nigh-insurmountable task. Without a deliberate attempt by humans to wrest order from chaos, the internet isn't going to live up to its potential as a transformative mechanism for humanity.

Most attempts to create order from internet chaos have been top-down. Yahoo was my first exposure to someone attempting to categorize all the stuff on the 'net, and even early on, it was pretty obvious that the amount and variety of stuff was growing faster than the ability of people to come up with categories. I think the future of order-from-chaos lies in tagging and folksonomies. Yes, they introduce a lot of crap data, and have the potential for abuse, but I believe the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Especially because we can build mechanisms for determining who to trust based on behavior, as Google has done with their ranking mechanisms for sites.

iPod 100% CPU utilization - problem solved

I finally gave in an got an iPod. I was a relatively early adopter of digital music playback, as I've had an Iriver IHP-120 (also known as the H120) for a couple of years. It died on a flight back from Boston a couple of weeks ago, and I had a whole day before my next flight, so I bit the bullet and picked up an iPod.

Things went okay for the first week or so, but then I started to have a problem where I could not eject it -- iTunes would lock up hard when I tried to eject the iPod. Then I developed a new problem, where connecting the iPod would cause ipodservice.exe to activate, and my machine would go to 100% CPU and stay there.

I tried a lot of things to fix the problem, none of which worked (until the last one, of course). Over the space of two days...

- I uninstalled iTunes and reinstalled it, which did nothing
- I uninstalled iTunes and Quicktime, and then could not reinstall Quicktime until I (finally) found the quicktime files in /WINDOWS/System32/
- I deleted dozens of quicktime and itunes references from my registry
- I uninstalled and reinstalled again

And of course, I rebooted dozens of times.

The problem, as it turned out, is all about drive letters. It seems that iPods do not like to share their drive letter with other devices, even if said devices are not connected.

If you're having this problem, try what worked for me:

With the iPod connected (and CPU at 100%, of course)

Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management

Select the iPod and choose a different letter. I picked "I" since it's high enough I should not get another drive up there. You'll get a warning that changing drive letters may make software not work. This is only true if you are running applications from your iPod, so I felt safe ignoring it.

This fixed the problem immediately.

Scoreboard updates

Things are looking up. The Twins are 4 games up in the wild card, a game and a half behind the Tigers for the Central, and leading the BoSox 6-nothing as I type this. Odds of making the postseason are up to 95%, saith Baseball Prospectus.

And the race for the Senate is looking up. Latest polls have a 50-50 split, and with the way the wind is blowing, I am hoping for a change.

Scoreboard-watching, in two ways.

It's the time of year when I watch the scoreboards, in two ways. Why do I think in twos? Dunno.

The first kind of scoreboard-watching is baseball. My Twins are currently embroiled in a fight for the postseason. As I write this, they're a half-game ahead in the wild card race and four back in the division race. The statheads (my peeps) at Baseball Prospectus have them at a 65% chance of making the postseason. So I'm watching the scoreboard, not just to see how well they do, but also the other teams they're competing against.

The second kind is electoral. The Votemaster has returned, and www.electoral-vote.com is back in action. As an unabashed Democrat, I'd really like it if we could get control of the Senate away from the Reptiles. Sadly, his projections for control of the Senate are not as rosy as the Twins' chances of making the postseason.

City Clowncil. Yay.

Apparently, my City Council is composed almost entirely of 12-year-olds. Entertaining (from a schadenfreude kind of perspective) can be found here.

A tale of two demos

I play a lot of games. I buy even more games, although not as many as I used to. See my earlier post on the economics of MMOs -- I am still playing City of Heroes after two years, which reduces my interest in other games. But that's not why I'm motivated to post. No, I wanted to talk to my future self about why demos are important.

The first demo I want to talk about is a failure, in my opinion. I've been interested in Titan Quest for a while. I loved Diablo II, and TQ looks like a good D2 clone, with high-quality graphics. So when the demo became available, I promptly downloaded it, only to find out that the damn thing won't install on my machine. The demo installed was created and tested on machines that have Windows installed to the C: drive, and relies on that. In my case, my primary HD is G: (it's SATA, and I have no IDE hard drives), so the installer bombs. There is a fix, of course. All I need to do is go out and buy an IDE hard drive and reinstall Windows, and then I can install the demo. Or I could install it on another computer, copy the install over and edit my registry. Neither of those is a realistic scenario.

In my mind, this makes the Titan Quest demo a failure. The point of a demo is to get me enough of the game experience to make me want more, so I buy the full game.

One demo that worked really well is Armadillo Run. I got an email from an online acquaintance with the link to the site and a recommendation. It's somewhere between The Incredible Machine and Lemmings, but simpler and somehow more engaging. At heart, it's a puzzle game, but one with many possible solutions for each puzzle. You're presented with a simple scenario -- get the armadillo (which strongly resembles a basketball) safely to a target area. To accomplish this, you use simple construction materials to build a route it will roll along. The materials have physical properties and obey basic physical principles -- things fall if unsupported, heavy things will break under their own weight, and so on.

The demo installed fine, so the first barrier was passed. I played through the simple tutorial and the six demo puzzles in about half an hour. While I was doing this, my wife saw the game up and asked me to forward her the link. About 15 minutes later I bought the full game.

What's the lesson? It's simple -- If I can't see your demo, I can't tell how good it is.

Which, of course, leads right back to switches and dials.

Okay, I suck at this

It would seem that I suck at blogging. I'm not finding the time to devote to my own projects. I need to regain some balance.

So, is this a commitment to trying again, or an admission of failure? Good question. I don't like giving up.

I do want to write up my thoughts on switches and dials, and the importance of applying interaction design principles to game UI design (which ought to be obvious, and yet is not). So the chance I will do so is pretty good.

It would seem I must link. Increasing the connectivity of the Internet is a good thing.

I found this recently, and it caught my interest. I'm familiar with Tog as an influential member of the UI design community, and have read his stuff before.

First Principles on UI Design

A brief intermission

But before I get back to talking about games, a brief blogroll for my brother. He's blogging his trip to Europe with his pipe band, and it's great fun to read about.

Annoyingly enough, even with all the typos, it's fairly obvious which of us is the better writer. :)

The Road Less Traveled

The sleeper wakes

Long dormant, I rise from my slumber...

Not really. I've just been busy doing various things other than blogging. Although I must say I've been better at this than at any diary I've ever kept. I think I work better with a keyboard than with paper. Plus, being able to get to it from anywhere helps.

The main problem is that I have either nothing to write about, or far too much. I'm not interesting in creating an E/N livejournal sort of thing, so blogging about the various events in my life holds no interest for me.

So I need a topic... and it's games. The theory and design of them, and what makes for goodness in gaming. I'm going to try to get out some of my own thoughts, and then work on reacting to some of the things I am reading on game design.

Next up: switches and dials.

A flurry of activity, although not here

I've been more active than usual of late on the SDMB. I'm not entirely sure why. I've actually been choosing to read and post there over playing City of Heroes, which is surprising. I think my CoH addiction may have peaked. I'm still addicted and still playing, mind you, but I think I may be past the most obsessive, must-play-all-the-time point.

Only time will tell, of course. I seem to recall going through the same kind of cycle with Diablo II, where I got away from playing it at times, only to be drawn back in by the endless cycle of leveling and acquiring new cool stuff. CoH lacks stuff, though, which makes it a bit less compelling. But it offers more skill/power choices than D2, and it's superheroes, which are the stuff of my boyhood fantasies. So it's got that going for it.

I've been doing some more actual working at work, as well. That is, more time spent doing the things I really should be doing, like longer-term strategy, instead of short-term reactive stuff. It's a nice feeling, but hard to sustain. I need uninterrupted time to focus on what I am doing, and that doesn't come easily. Now that I have my team handling most of the issues, it's starting to happen, though.

In fact, what am I doing posting here when I should be either working or going home?