Puzzles in Myst games

The GameSetWatch blog has a posting on puzzles in the Myst games. It's not quite consistent - the intro promises more than the body provides, but the conclusion is right:

Fairness, novelty, and integration are all important for making good puzzles, but what makes the puzzles discussed here stand out is their payoffs. Each of them has a moment of epiphany, where the odd structure of the game world suddenly makes sense, and all the pieces fit together. Because they are especially tricky, the reward is sweeter, and the player feels a greater sense of accomplishment.

It's this puzzle with a twist that is the greatest strength of the Myst series. By starting with a solid puzzle and then adding a twist, developers can make their own puzzles stick in players' memories. This doesn't just apply to adventure games, either; any kind of game that uses puzzles will be better-served by a cleverly crafted obstacle rather than just another game of Nim.

I've long loved the Myst games, and certainly don't think they're the reason the adventure genre has suffered over the last decade. If they are, it's because other game designers struggle to match the quality, internal consistency, and production values of the Myst games. (Frankly, I think that's more connected with the adrenaline-fueled, frame-rate obsessed FPS crowd that just don't get the more cerebral pursuit of the Myst games.)

I will say though, that there is one puzzle I thought stuck out as really not belonging in the Myst canon, and that's the dreadful Dream puzzle of the Serenia Age in Myst IV. Far to subject to the vaguaries of colour vision and a long way from fitting the criteria of the article at the top of this post.

Hydrogen fueled cars

On the Register today they're talking the LA Times talking about the Honda FX Clarity, (also on wikipedia and Top Gear's site) the first commercially available (albeit only in Southern California) hydrogen fuel cell driven car.

Top Gear did a great piece on this car just before Christmas. James May loved it, he waxed lyrical about it, they even got Jay Leno to say how much he loved it too - though his comments focused more on how it was going to save his beloved petrol-drinking race cars by allowing the petrol to last longer.

Now Dan Neil (who?) writing for the LA Times writes off the hydrogen fuel cell idea as a cul-de-sac in development. Just because there's no network of hydrogen filling stations outside of Southern California. I beg to differ mate. There's a massive, coordinated, reasonably resilient network of filling stations already out there. All we need to do is persuade them to carry one more product: liquid hydrogen. I'll come back to this later.

Ok, let's step back one moment and look at why we would want to use hydrogen over batteries first of all. The only car remotely comparable to the FCX Clarity is the Tesla Roadster. Fast, good looking (based on the Lotus Elise), and run on batteries. Tesla claim a range of 220 miles on a full charge, as opposed to Honda's claim of 270 miles on a full tank of hydrogen. The Tesla is a two-seater; the Honda a family saloon (Dan Neil says, "Lincoln-Town-Car huge, and the trunk is a spacious 11 cubic feet."). The Tesla has a huge composite battery made of 6,831 lithium cells (essentially laptop batteries!). Yes six thousand, eight hundred and thirty one of them. Imagine how much that must weigh (actually, it's 450kg). No wonder there's no room for passengers!

Top Gear's analysis basically went along the lines of, the Honda is going to succeed because it is so much like what it replaces ... the normal, standard, family saloon of today. No big leap in behaviour for the motorist, no big change in the experience of car travel, just an enormous change in the type of fuel and emissions.

Finally, on the cars themselves. The Honda is made by ... Honda. One of the world's largest (if not the largest) car companies. The other by Tesla Motors... who? Even if they are backed by Elon Musk, co-founder of Paypal, that's an awfully long way from the scale of Honda.

Now, back to the choice of fuel. It is clear that producing liquid hydrogen takes about four times more energy than the Tesla needs for the same range:

• Tesla: 53kWh for 220 miles
• Honda: 240kWh for 270 miles worth of hydrogen, (or 195kWh for 220 miles to match the Tesla's maximum range)

But the big difference is in the behaviour required to support the difference. With the Honda you go to the fueling station and fill up the 4kg tank when you run low. It takes a couple of minutes, just like a conventional petrol tank. With the Tesla, you plug it in every time it runs low ... for three and a half hours (!) at 240v (great if you're on 120v in the USA). So where do I plug it in if I have no garage, or if my parking space is some distance from my home? 

See what I mean about changes of behaviour?

Finally, back to Dan Neil's biggest complaint; that there is no network of hydrogen fuel stations. This could be solved reasonably simply by the simple expedient of mandating any new fuel station must install and maintain at least one hydrogen pump, similarly any existing station wanting planning permission for changes must install and maintain a pump, and every other existing station has two years to install at least one, with increasing penalties for every quarter thereafter when they don't have one.

By that simple change, the suppliers have a distribution network, where the cost is widely distributed (maybe the local or federal/national government can give a subsidy to sweeten the deal if they install more than one at a station), and the car manufacturers have the opportunity to sell new cars all over the place. Consumers would finally have a real choice that makes the possibility of switching away from oil a real, practical and most of all normal change. Just change the pump you visit on the forecourt - just like going unleaded or diesel.

With a company the scale of Honda behind the FCX Clarity, they could easily ramp up production to meet demand were the pumps available, and that demand would just as easily justify the investment in the pumps and infrastructure. Not just a win-win, but a win-win-win-win: car manufacturers, fuel distributors, consumers and the global environment.

Update: a number of commenters on the original Register article have been talking about using replaceable batteries, rather than charging up your own battery. Given the sheer size of the Tesla battery (which seems to be what you need to get a sensible range out of an electric car) and weight of it (450kg), the idea of a filling station (or equivalent) storing hundreds (possibly thousands) or batteries fully charged, and transporting said heavy objects around the place every day (or charging them on site - imagine the electricity supply required to do that - 70 amps for 3.5 hours per battery), doesn't strike me as being in the least bit practical. And how do you propose a driver in poor health, or not built like Arnold Schwartzenegger is going to handle swapping over batteries like that? You might as well suggest that the hydrogen fuel tank of the FCX Clarity is swapped out every time, instead of filling it with liquid hydrogen.

Channelling Douglas Adams from 1999

If you've never heard of Douglas Adams, you're an unfortunate individual. He was not, as some people might claim, the greatest author of the late 20th century, but he was one of the most influential. If you doubt this, just think about how much modern story telling owes to the success of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: writers like Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and many others in the speculative fiction world would not have got their breaks without Adams. (Ok, enough unsubstantiated waffle)

Today I was reading the TechDirt blog, as I often do, and came across this article. However, it was not that article that really got my attention so much (sorry Mike) - it's their stock-in-trade kind of commentary on the madness and desperation of the old-skool media types trying to defend out dated business models. No, it was this little quote:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

This comes from an article (warning: the text has the wrong text-encoding, you might want to change that, probably in your browser's View menu) that Douglas Adams wrote in 1999! But he's absolutely right. (though I question his choice of 'thirty', being as I'm still a tech-fan at forty).

Enough talk of the recession already

Everyone knows that most of the world's major economies are in recession now, or if they're not, their economic growth has slowed significantly. Given the exposure of our banks to bad debt (brought on by a mixture of idiotically bad lending by the banks, and idiotically imprudent spending by their debtors - i.e. the rest of us!), this is hardly surprising.

However, there is one more factor that is really important in how we look at our economy, and that stock prices, and so much of the stock price of a company is based not on their balance sheet, their order book (in those rare companies in the UK that actually make something these days!), or their actual assets (fixed, personnel, or intellectual), but upon the confidence investors have in the company. Take a look at Apple over the last two years (compared to the Nasdaq and Dow Jones indexes). There's a massive dip in Apple shares in Feb 2008. Why? They'd just released the 32GB iPod, they were leading the market for legal music downloads with the iTunes store, and the video store was doing well too; the future looks seriously rosy. So why did their shares drop from $199 (Dec 28, 2007) to $119 (Feb 25 2008) - a 40% drop in 2 months!

I can't find any logical reason in the news archives, and the Nasdaq and Dow Jones (also shown on the above graph) show only a gentle slide at that time. (Dow dropped 1000 points (7%) and NDQ 321 points (12%) over the same period). This is confidence at work. It often has no discernable connection with reality outside of the trading floors of London or New York.

More recently, many many investors have lost confidence in the shares of the banks, with some reason, it appears. But something that is really, really not helping matters is the continual talk of economic doom and gloom by every news organisation I come across. Do these people (Robert Peston, I'm looking at you!) not realise the harm they're doing? Surely it's time to start either doing something to help, or at least coming up with real solutions. Fundamentally, the global economy is still producing plenty of goods. Global warming provides all sorts of opportunities for innovative thinking about ways to invest in our future. The world won't stop spinning on it's axis just because a few bankers mis-incentivised their traders and lenders so that it was in the traders' and lenders' interests to make extra-risky decisions.

Stop being part of the problem, and start finding the solutions. Look for the good news in the economy, and help me look forward to listening to BBC Radio 4's Today Programme tomorrow morning instead of dreading what new depressing statistic is being published to make me fear for my job in the finance sector.

President Barack Obama

From here:

W. E. B. DuBois started to teach so that Rosa Parks could take a seat.
Rosa Parks took a seat so that we could all take a stand. 
We all took a stand so that Martin Luther King, Jr. could march. 
Martin Luther King, Jr. marched so that Jesse Jackson could run. 
Jesse Jackson ran so that Barack Obama could win!

Cleo Fields at the State of the Black Union February. 23, 2008

This says so much to me about how the way the political geography of the US has changed in just two generations (Rosa Parks sat in the 'wrong' seat on a segregated bus in 1955). Not everyone around me appreciates just how significant this is for the United States, but it gives me great hope for the future if such seemingly impossible odds can be overturned.

Who among you, even in 2007, really could have said with any kind of confidence that 2008 would see the Democratic race for the nomination for president would be between a woman and an African-American man, let alone that the resulting candidate would win?

p.s. if you can watch BBC programs on iPlayer, I recommend this recent program on Barack Obama, it's available until 7:59pm Tuesday 27th January 2009.

Tips and Tricks

I don't often feel the need to write about anything particularly technical here, but today I feel the need to publicize this excellent tutorials site. As an example of how useful I've found it, I had a peek at their Eclipse tutorials.

I've been using Eclipse for Java web application development for about 6 years now, and it's an excellent platform. However, there is a minor issue with upgrading eclipse versions. Each time you upgrade, you really need a clean install in the eclipse directory. So far, so good. The downside of this is that you lose all your plugins - one of the greatest strengths of the eclipse platforms - so that I usually have to write off a days work to do an upgrade (consequently, I'm still on the Europa release, as opposed to the more recent Ganymede release).

Now, this inertia isn't a huge problem; in fact, I'd say it's only an annoyance that hits once or twice a year, but it would be nice to have a solution.

Introducing 'externalised eclipse plugins'. It's surprising what you can learn when your not expecting to see anything remarkable on a site.

Now, you may say that any eclipse user worth their developer chops will have already have solved this problem three years ago, but so what. I'm still learning new vi tricks after more than 20 years daily use. But I'll take new learning any way I can get it.

So, if you're a developer in the Web arena, take a look at avaJava's Web Tutorials, you never know what might strike you.

Steve Jobs' Health Issues and Apple

I know a lot of people have spent a lot of electrons talking about this one, but I have to have my go, that's just how it is.

Steve Jobs is only the CEO of Apple, he is NOT the god of product design, nor the only reason that Apple has grown so much since his return. Jobs returned from NeXT and Pixar at a point where Apple was quiet, but was lucky enough to have some very talented people hidden in the R&D departments. In contrast to Apple of the 80s, instead of spewing money all over the place in the hope of getting some ok products, Jobs made some canny decisions to cut effort in areas that were never going to make serious money - WebObjects I'm looking at you - it's just a framework for websites, not a money-maker. On the other hand, he and his collegues in management seem to have been very smart in recognising the strength of the iPod and it's simplicity. Of course, the alternative interpretation of the success of the iPod is a mixture of Apple-fanboyism plus just happening to hit the sweet spot in growth in the market for MP3 players.

Now that Apple is successful, and still growing, the fact that Steve Jobs is taking a break (that might turn out to be permanent) really shouldn't be causing everyone to suddenly pull their investment out of the shares. Afterall, Steve Jobs did not design the iPod (nor any of it's variants), nor the current crop of Apple laptops, nor the iPhone.... and someone else will be able to do the same for future Apple products, providing Apple continue to employ excellent designers and product creators.

Now let's let the guy take the time he needs to to get well. He's only human at the end of it all.

New Year's Resolutions?

I know, I know. Every year it's the same. People bemoaning their inability to keep their New Year's Resolutions, but this one (go to the end of the column) made me laugh out loud:

The two-faced god [Janus, the Roman god of the New Year] would have coughed hard at my official New Year resolutions, which were — life being shorter than a wren's blink, and all — to be both nicer and more honest. Have you tried it lately? It's like trying to sit up by lying down.

The only scenario in which it works is on country walks, where a rigid etiquette governs all encounters.

You can say 'lovely weather', 'gorgeous dog!' and 'Happy New Year'. You cannot say 'those are some comedy dentures' or 'I bet that's not your husband!'

The minute I hit the roads, it all went awry. I gave way meekly to a thundering 4 x 4 Death Star, even though I had right of way, and the beast swept past without acknowledging my gesture.

I wanted to follow them and beat them to a foaming pulp.

This was three days into January. But what is life without challenges?

Sir Jackie Stewart vs. the World

You've got to give Sir Jackie Stewart credit for sheer balls and a willingness to pull no punches. As reported via grandprix.com, he's been talking to the Times again. I agree with what he says, but the real kicker is in the last line of the grandprix.com report:

"Stewart's comments will not go down well with those on the receiving end."

Ya think?

Matt Smith?

Who the heck is Matt Smith? The BBC have named this nobody as the replacement for David Tennant as the eleventh Doctor Who. Watch the little movie at the start of that article, and it's clear he's not even been properly briefed on how to talk about the role. 'Iconic' is about the only thing he can say. And what's with those bonkers hands? Is that the 'Doctor-ness' Piers Wenger is talking about in the same article?

This kid grew up in the hiatus between the old Doctor (killed off with Sylvester McCoy's incarnation, that was cursed with the worst ever assistant Mel, played by Bonnie Langford <>), and the 1996 TV movie with Paul McGann that made the modern seasons possible. Matt Smith wanted to be a footballer... sounds like a Doctor Who geek from his childhood ... NOT!

Sounds more like the BBC wanted to hire a real cheap nobody to save a few pounds, instead of the real actors named as possible choices before last night:

• James Nesbitt, serious actor with loads of credits,
• Patterson Joseph, another serious actor with loads of credits - he's even been in a couple of episodes of Doctor Who,
• John Simm, the talented actor who played The Master in 2007. Also has a lot of credits, an unlikely choice because that would confuse people.
• David Morrissey, another good actor who'll never now play the Doctor because he played such a key role in the 2008 Christmas Special, appearing to be a future incarnation of the Doctor.

See, all far too experienced, far too expensive. Let's have a cute nobody with an asymmetric haircut that'll appeal to the teenage girl demographic because he looks like an emo rockstar.

Creative Zen X-Fi

For the last few years, I've been using my mobile phone as a multi-purpose device: phone, SMS, diary, sudoku generator and MP3 player. This Christmas, I asked for a real media player for music and video, and rather than follow the stampede towards Apple, I've gone for a Creative Zen X-Fi (the 16GB model with WiFi). It's small, light, plays lots of formats and, importantly, comes with a decent pair of in-ear headphones.

Most importantly of all (apart from the obvious 'does it play music & videos' functionality), it doesn't require me to use that dreadfully clunky and unresponsive piece of software called iTunes. I'm running Vista 64-bit, on a decent PC - plenty of RAM, and a fast dual AMD CPU, so there really is no excuse for iTunes to run slowly when nothing else does.

It's taken me a little time to find the sweet spot in video format to minimize audio glitching - but it was just the realisation that you have to run the supplied video converter software at the highest quality (& slowest conversion speed, of course) to get the best results.

I've not returned to work after the holidays yet, so I've yet to see how the device functions in that part of my life, so expect more on this another time.

One odd thing though, and it's really a criticism of Google, or the 'net as a whole. When I google for information about the X-Fi, I get the best part of 10 pages of people either selling it, or 'professional' reviews. On those pages where there are comments from real people, there's so much Apple/anti-Apple fan-boi noise that sensible, vaguely objective experiences are hard to find. Where have all the bloggers and sane people gone?

Happy New Year 2009!

I'm curious to see what 2009 brings.... could be good, might be not so good.

Money vs. Democracy

Via Chris Samuel's Blog:

I've read various news items, and other blogger's posts on the subject of electronic voting machines in the US with a mixture of shock and disbelief. I am constantly staggered at the way the US electorate is allowing their electoral system to be sold off to commercial interests that clearly have no interest in democracy or accountability.... oops, sounds a bit like the US government (regardless of species  party  people corporation(s) in 'power').

F1 and the Isle of Man

It's not often that the Isle of Man gets linked with F1, but with Lewis Hamilton's World Championship, they've decided to do a range of commemerative stamps and a first day cover.

I found about this via grandprix.com, a site I visit daily for F1 (and other 4-wheeled motorsports) news. However, they seem to have missed something the nature of the Isle - motor racing is a big deal here: there's racing of various forms throughout the year, not just the Tourist Trophy (TT) for motorbikes in June!

IOM Post did another range of racing stamps earlier this year too.

Here! Here!

Time for me to come clean about where I live... well, a bit anyway. I live on one of those offshore territories that Barack Obama seems not to like. It seems the Financial Times of London doesn't like us much either, but at least a few logical, sensible American professors of business & law do!

I work in the financial industry and am regularly required to attend Anti-Money-Laundering training, despite working in the IT bowels of the company, rarely having contact with customer data, let alone customers. Even so, I am well aware that our company has strict requirements to 'know our customers' - including identity and source of income statements. Long gone are the days when any dodgy character in a trilby and macintosh could show up at the door with a suitcase full of bundled $50s and expect us to do business with them... apparently a few have tried, and have never been given the time of day!

Anyone still accusing at least the Manx authorities of shady behaviour should check out the behaviour of the UK government when they stole froze the assets of KSF in London including legimately held Manx deposits. Or the attitude in the US to corporations registered in Delaware (section entitled "DELAWARE: AMERICA’S OWN HOME TO CORPORATE ANONYMITY" at the bottom of the article).

Hypocracy in international government? Never

Oh, and now the Pope wants to have a turn with the hypocracy hat, Mr-I-run-the-biggest-untaxed-repository-of-obscene-wealth-in-the-world!

Is Hamilton the F1 Champion?

Well, he finished 5th, and that was all he needed to have 98 points to Massa's 97 (having won the final race), but what does it say for the credibility of the FIA and their stewards that I'm just waiting for them to find a way to penalise Hamilton or McLaren such that he looses it by one point instead?

However, a final note on the grace of the runner up - Filipe Massa showed true class when he thanked the crowd for their support, and did not partake of their disgraceful treatment of Hamilton on the run into parc fermé. It's not true that nice guys finish last - he did win the race, and nearly the championship, but it is clear that we have not seen the last of Massa in the top places in the F1 championship table.

An exciting end, to an exciting season. Afterall, how long is it since we've had a season with 7, yes, SEVEN different grand prix winners?

... actually, it was 2003 - one of Michael Schumacher's 7 championship years, but not one of his most dominant. So not so long :)

The terrorists have won

For the last seven-plus years, the US government have been chipping away at the human rights of everyone entering or leaving the country. This article is the most eloquent description of the results of this process of security theatre.

Give up Al Qaeda, you've won. Not by destroying things, or spending money, but by getting the idiots on Capitol Hill to destroy the liberties of their own citizens.

P.S. Over 20 years ago I visited the Soviet Union, at the height of the Communist regime, and my experience of travel to, around and back from that famously restrictive and 'dangerous' country was easy. Yes, the boarder guards were quite meticulous in their examination of your passport, but at no time did it feel like someone was about to turn an Uzi on us, or send us off to Siberia forever. I'll bet the victims of the article above couldn't say the same for their experiences at JFK airport.

'Chicanegate'

The FIA (or at least their proxies the race stewards at the Belgian Grand Prix) have done it again: making decisions that appear to almost all commentators to favour Ferrari over McLaren. Some people fired off rants within scant hours of the decision, others have taken a little longer.

In the light of Massa's 'unsafe release' exiting the pits in Valencia (which earned him a mere fine, but a GP2 competitor at the same event a stop-go penalty!), contrasted with Hamilton's 25 second penalty for 'not slowing down enough' (what, a full car length and 6.7km/h slower isn't slower enough?) after using the escape road in wet conditions!

Come on, this may be a perception, but there's more evidence gathering almost every race weekend now. The FIA is rotten to the core - it's clearly more interested in helping Ferrari than being fair. And the Mosley affair hardly adds to the lustre of the organisation, whatever the 'democratic vote' of the strangely represented federation said.

Google Chrome

Yes, everyone is writing about it, but is everyone writing sense?

No.

Thank goodness for people like Ted Dziuba at the Register. Even if his article has little flecks of spit around the edges where he gets a little "wound up", shall we say.

Basically, a whole load of should-know-better tech journalists have been writing all kinds of rubbish and hyperbole about Google's latest beta product, some even going as far as to suggest that it is an operating system... oh my Lord, could they be further from reality? It's an application, in the same sense as Firefox, notepad or Microsoft Excel. An operating system is concerned with hardware and providing services to applications, like those I just mentioned.

Addendum: another blogger's comments on the same TechCrunch article that got Dzuiba going.

RIAA Pays $107,951 to Alleged Filesharer

I post this not because of any personal interest but because it is clear that the RIAA are very good at publicising anything that looks vaguely like a win for them, but are very quiet (as are the rest of the mainstream news media) when things go the other way.

The RIAA has settled Atlantic vs Anderson with prejudice - they accept they brought the case in error, and have accepted liability for Anderson's legal costs (and interest)... the bill: $107,951.

It is time that the RIAA (and their mates at the MPAA, and alied organisations in Europe) realised that, whatever the rights & wrongs of copyright infringment, they cannot simply assume that someone sharing files over a P2P connection is automatically infringing on the rights of those they claim to represent. As more and more musicians come out either in opposition to the restrictive & punitive behaviours of the record companies, or even in direct support of free file sharing, surely they have got to see that the music industry revenue model has to change as consumer demand simply won't support their existing profitteering methods.

The market has spoken, all hail market forces... except where there inconvenient to a big corporation like Disney, Sony, RCA, UMG...