Mostly Polynomial

Regarding the blogging

2011-12-26T18:35:00.002Z

Not really blogging a whole lot because I just post about the updates in polynomial forum on steam, and then forget to post here. I've made a bunch of updates, and added some new enemy which is available in the "experimental" level. Feel free to upload a video of this enemy, and then I might link the video from here (but use the polynomial's own music, or some music that you know you can use freely on youtube).

In other news, with publication of Brink and Rage (both those games use OpenGL, as does Polynomial), the driver quality has remarkably improved, and there's far fewer issues.

Not everything is smooth though. The current big offender on the 'not giving a damn about OpenGL' list is, surprisingly, HP and their laptops with 'switchable' graphics which aims to use Intel HD graphics for non-demanding applications and Radeon graphics card for games. Except that for OpenGL it won't use the Radeon unless you go into bios and disable this whole 'switchable' nonsense off, which may require a bios update. There's (as usual) no way for an application to request faster card.

On 9/11 and it's significance

2011-09-09T23:19:00.000+01:00

The way I see it... if we were able to see it in perspective, relatively to other terrible things that happen - if we seen this as a highly unfortunate something like 20% bump in the murders that year - there would be a reaction for sure - such a jump in murder rate is a very bad thing! But it wouldn't have started two wars, damaged the economics, terrified the people, and resulted in some loss of freedom - which is what terrorists wanted. We don't want the lives lost to be lost in vain, but we surely should want the terrorism to be in vain.

When we mourn lives lost in 9/11, but don't equally mourn greater number of lives lost to random drunk idiots with guns, that elevates Bin Laden too far above the plurality of drunk idiots. That makes him so much more than n times the drunk idiot. Bin Laden surely does not deserve that.

Camels, last straws, mutations, strict EPA standards, and common sense.

2011-04-07T14:58:00.009+01:00

Suppose you have a large number of camels under slightly varying, very heavy loads of various things; about 40% of camels break their backs from overload.
You add extra straws to each camel's load, by accident. You observe a slight increase in the camel's probability of suffering the broken back - perhaps when you add 1000 grams of extra weight, the increase is from 40% to 41% . The common sense tells you to expect increase of 0.1% when you add 100 grams, and 0.001% when you add 1 gram - if you can plot a smooth curve of camel deaths versus weight, you would expect that you can approximate the curve with a line at small ranges - and you can expect that even if you add a single extra straw, there is a possibility that it would be the last for some unlucky camel.

Humans suffer from cancer, at a lifetime rate of approximately 40%; cancer is understood to be caused by a long, improbable sequence of mutations within a single cell's lineage. There is a very large number of mutations constantly occurring in the human body - vast majority of them not caused by external carcinogens.

Carcinogens, however, add a small number of extra mutations. Carcinogens are not expected to have safe doses - as the mutations are past the safe mutation rate - and the standards on the known carcinogens (including radiation) are thus extremely strict. No extra straws should be added to camels already at the risk.

The EPA standards for carcinogens - including radioactive contamination - are thus set to be as low as technically feasible. Strictness of the standard is not related to the danger, but to the ease of prevention. When those are exceeded, it is unacceptable, but is not a very big deal for you personally.

The EPA's standard for radioactive iodine in drinking water, in particular, is about 0.111 Bq/L . When this is exceeded by a big factor of 100, that is entirely unacceptable in the sense that the nuclear reactors have not performed as well as was deemed technically feasible - and that is entirely unacceptable because it can cause a few extra deaths in large population. But it is, in itself, not a reason to be afraid.

There is a second set of standards, set by relative threat to human life. Those are substantially more permissive. When food products exceed those standards, however, products have to be disposed of. Those standards are typically in the range of hundreds Bq/L. When those standards are exceeded, there is a sufficiently high risk to human life as to implement active measures to prevent consumption of contaminated food or drink.

Note: the camels are only an allegory. Of course the mechanics of back breaking and cancer are very different. However, both represent the situation where the normal is already unsafe and the extra risk is small.

Nuclear accident management in Japan - I just don't understand it.

2011-04-06T11:52:00.013+01:00

There's the things I simply do not understand about Fukushima nuclear disaster.

1: Lack of high range radiation meters - the ">1000 milliSievert/hour" figures that keep cropping up.
2: Complaints by the Japanese government on the inaccurate measurements performed by TEPCO. Why the government did not have it's own experts on site doing the measurements? Surely they should have some sort of nuclear war or terrorism response team that is trained for measurements of very high levels of contamination. If they don't - US does. The contamination levels are millions times higher than what TEPCO routinely deals with.
3: Why the situation is being controlled entirely by TEPCO?
4: How the spent fuel pool in reactor 4 ran dry and caught fire (the major source of radioactive release into atmosphere) ?
5: Where are the US and French (Areva) experts and what are they doing?

Lithuania - the country where I live - operated 2 nuclear reactors.

The reason I felt reasonably safe about that is - I knew that if something happened, it would have been handled by the entire European Union, using the immense resources of a region that is a largest producer of nuclear power worldwide.
There is no question that my local electrical utility would not be able to handle reactor accident. But I believe that in Europe vastly larger resources would be available. If I thought that in a case of a nuclear reactor accident in some small country in EU they would not have robots and high range radiation measurement devices on site the next day - if I had any doubts that EU's handling of such accident, combined with a natural disaster, would be vastly better than Japan's - I would be an anti nuclear advocate.

If I thought that in the event of one in a thousand years disaster, the reactors could fail here like they did in Japan - and the spent fuel pools would simply run dry if reactor basements get flooded - I would be an anti-nuclear advocate. Because it is in the disaster when nuclear power may be the most beneficial - the nuclear plant can run for a year without refuelling, providing the power to rebuild the infrastructure after the disaster. The renewable energy sources are unfortunately very fragile and vulnerable in the event of disaster. The fossil fuel sources require constant supply of the fuel. Nuclear reactors should be the energy source to rely on in the face of unprecedented disaster - not the amplifiers of severity.

This is an example of nuclear power plant that did provide shelter to the people who lost their homes, instead of contributing to their suffering. Had the Fukushima plant been built to proper standards, the nuclear power would have been the saviour in the face of disaster - but sadly, that was not the case and the nuclear power did show it's less than beneficial side.

Plant worker radiation doses.

2011-03-24T21:48:00.004Z

Two workers hospitalized for radiation exposure.
"As a result, their feet were exposed to 170 to 180 milliSieverts of radiation."
You cannot possibly know dose from something like that to such accuracy. Also, I've heard over the radio feed that water got into their boots.

Read what Sievert is. By it's very nature it is only an estimate and cannot have this kind of accuracy.
Elsewhere I even heard a figure of 173 milliSieverts. Right, 1% accuracy.

Fukushima: Disclosure vs secrecy.

2011-03-20T19:57:00.030Z

In the discussions of the disaster that arose in the web, it became apparent that many people think that the data indeed has to be withheld from the public to avoid panic in the disaster such as the one at Fukushima nuclear power plant. Data such as high resolution pictures taken by US drone, disclosure or non-disclosure of which is up to Japanese government. Data which, it can be argued, is meaningless to the public.

I'm sure however that for anyone who ever thought about making a donation, it is obvious that full and accurate disclosure would help the cause. How much you donate to a particular cause is dependent on how bad it is.

Let's not engage too much in the thinking of how people who live there - people who are going to work as usual despite their anxiety over things they don't know - their anxiety over nondisclosure of the data - are less brave or less educated than you and would panic in case of public disclosure. That is deeply disrespectful of those people.

Let's instead be positive and think of the people more generous or more rich than us who can make the difference if they are moved by the data. Let's think of the companies right now developing new technologies, which would benefit from the data and which can donate something that no money can buy - the technologies that exist only in prototypes. Let's not forget of all the people smarter than us, who would be thinking how to make reactors safer - and can tell their ideas to a friend who happens to be a nuclear energy professional, over a cup of tea.

Let's be more humble and less narcissistic, let's not think that public is all dumber, less educated, and less brave than you. The public is not. Even if you happen to be a 'genius' with meaninglessly high score on IQ tests, there's members of the public who are smarter than you, those who are more educated, and have relevant experience. The public is varied. Some people actually care and can help a lot more than you or me could, if they have the information.

I came to know a few people who live in Tokyo, and come to work as usual. They don't deserve extra suffering from the anxiety over whenever the government is giving accurate figures. And they definitely don't deserve mockery with references to 'tin foil hat' from those of us who are fortunate to be living far away from any radiation incidents. If you happen to fancy yourself educated on the topic of radioactive contamination, you should be able to explain things instead of giving self important 'look i'm better than you' speeches. Reserve those speeches for unaffected, if you want to make speeches.

If you like this blog post and think that it is well written, please share it. If you disgree - you can comment negatively, as long as it is not disrespectful of the survivors, any comments are welcome.

Articles about radiation: Complex reality of the radioactive pollution.

2011-03-18T21:22:00.007Z

As a departure from the primary topic of this blog, I am going to publish a few articles about radiation, to display support for the people affected by the terrible disaster that is unfolding in Fukushima.

Complex reality of the radioactive pollution:

There is a map that everyone must see before thinking about pollution from Fukushima.

The most common misconception is imagining contamination as having a neat falloff or smooth distribution. The distribution is smoothed over time but remained this unsmooth even after a decade. There could be a spot where you measure high levels of radiation, few meters away the levels can be normal, and few more meters away the level may be high again.

You shouldn't think of it as of contamination with 'radiation' that 'radiates' around. No, it is a contamination with dirt that goes around the way dirt does; the dirt itself is radioactive and can expose you either from outside over distance, or from inside through ingestion, inhalation, food chain, etc. The reactor pollutes environment with radioactive dirt. The radioactive dirts radiates the radiation. The radiation from the dirt does not itself make anything radioactive.

The 'radiation levels', unduly exact numbers in microsieverts/hour, are not a measurement of environment pollution with radioactive isotopes from the accident. They are merely an *indication* of a fact of pollution.
A counter would measure drastically different values whenever clean counter is held up in the air, the counter is directly held to a surface that has been collecting dirt from the air (and here it would drastically depend to the position of this surface), or the counter is allowed to collect dirt from the air [however that would pollute the counter]. The alpha and beta activity as measured by a counter held to a surface will drastically depend to the amount of *non* radioactive dirt that is mixed with radioactive dirt.

The meaningful pollution values are that of estimated curies (or becquerels) of particular isotope per square kilometre, per cubic metre of air, per cubic metre of water, etc. To measure air pollution by radioactive dust you have to run specific volume of air through the filter, then measure radioactivity of the filter.

Different isotopes have different presence in the human body even at same environmental concentration.

Furthermore, the radiation levels on the surfaces fall off quickly in first few rains even for long living isotopes due to the radioactive dirt being washed off and mixed up with a deeper volume of soil (picture radioactive dirt sitting on surfaces affecting the geiger counter a lot, then same radioactive dirt mixed up with soil and groundwater, largely not reaching the geiger counter; with a significant fraction of that dirt being washed off into rivers and then dispersed in the sea).

When you live 500km away from Chernobyl and you know of everyday things such as radioactive boars in Germany thousands kilometers away from Chernobyl, which are radioactive beyond permissible limits for meat because the boars eat truffles which concentrate radioactive isotopes, while humans and other animals whom do no routinely eat radioactive truffles (or radioactive boars) are not even remotely as much contaminated as those boars, you tend to appreciate the complexity of radioactive environment pollution which can't be represented by a mkSv/h number. Elsewhere, you do not know such things.

That is to say, the issue of pollution is very complicated and it is far more difficult to measure pollution than to hold a Geiger counter to something. So far I haven't seen any pollution figures from area around Fukushima. Only readings from Geiger counters indicating the fact of pollution.

Understandably, after earthquake and tsunami, they have other issues to be concerned with.

Google accuses Microsoft of stealing results.

2011-02-02T21:00:00.007Z

It's final, I am moving this blog out of here. And this is the reason.

Don't take me wrong, I am no fan of Microsoft. I use Linux for most of my needs. But I can't stand this sort of BS.

Search engines work by processing web pages and links between the pages. It is altogether possible for one search engine to process the page of another search engine just like it would process a regular webpage.

There's what most likely happened, or what you have to presume to have happened unless proven otherwise (innocent until proven guilty): To get Bing to "steal" results, Google guys had to search for those made up words on IE with Bing toolbar installed, for days and days, getting 9 words out of 100 into Bing. Bing toolbar is used to improve relevancy. All it takes to "steal" results is for the toolbar to occasionally process Google's page the same as any other. Which can happen if e.g. this file which specifies not to process the Google's page fails to download. Which could as well happen due to technical issue on Google's side, or simply due to unreliable connection.
And Google guys know this better than anyone else. The Google's blog post is most certainly a sign of Google slowly becoming just another corporation that expertly crafts lies and propaganda, using public lack of understanding of how technology works, and which competes not by creating a better product, but by talking bad about the competition. To 99.9% of people, all the technology could just as well have been magic, and witchcraft accusations are the hot topic now.

reCAPTCHA explained in one sentence

2011-01-31T14:29:00.007Z

Defeating severe distortion that was applied to scanned old newspaper text (largely pre-internet spam) to stop bots from recognizing it and spamming, while feeling warm and fuzzy that it helps digitize the books that couldn't be digitized automatically.
Uhh yeach.

Piracy, DRM, Steam, and pirates.

2011-01-26T07:45:00.023Z

I don't care very much about piracy.
There's a few things i hate, though:

1: Pirates contacting me for tech support. Every time there is a marketing push, the numbers are big, and even a tiny fraction of failures is a lot of reports. (most of issues are resolved by reboot by the way). I don't need you reporting me bugs that I fixed months ago! Buy it, and get the latest version with updates. And no I'm not going to be pitching my game to each pirate individually.

2: Certain individuals, who I cannot prove to be pirates, making up sheer lies for the purpose of getting others to pirate instead of buying.

I've seen big threads about my game, where early in the thread some wise-*** would tell authoritatively utter and complete made up lie that "Valve is taking >90% of the revenue" and he don't want to support a greedy evil corporation. Talk about word of mouth 'advantages' of piracy. Some paying customer starts a thread about my game, or writes a review, because he wants others to buy it too, and then someone drops by and post some made up falsehoods that would justify piracy and hurt the sales. (Don't know about you, but I would suspect this someone is a pirate). We are all trained since childhood to prepare defence speech in advance, to make up reasons. We are all trained to think that when others do it too, it is ok.

My game comes with no DRM what so ever (not even Steam's). There is a fairly generous demo. It is digitally distributed, meaning I get lion's share of what you pay. If you want to play without paying - at least keep it private, don't lie to yourself and everyone else, don't just make up and post reasons to pirate rather than buy.

Then the pirates making up bullshit about Steam problems (after never even checking my site for alternative methods of purchase). Steam may not be totally perfect, but it is VERY good and non intrusive. Yet people make up lies how you can't run game without Steam (you can) and how Steam is evil DRM adware and so on and so forth. Posting their speculations in a style as if they bought a game there then encountered problems, and had to resort to piracy (which does not seem to be the case).
They're just speaking of what they think is possible, and they don't even see this as lying, they see it as they are warning others of a possibility which they foresee using their unique skills of deduction. They don't see it as lying because they simply don't care what the truth is AT ALL. Well in my book it is worse than outright lying. To lie requires you to bother to learn the truth. There's some tiny degree of honesty in plain lying that is absent in bullshitting when you don't even care to know if you're lying or not.

Behaviours like this lead me to question whenever negative word of mouth impact from game's DRM is as strong as it would seem. It's hard to know what percentage of people who are claiming they won't buy it "because of DRM" would make up something else in absence of DRM.

Update released.

2011-01-20T00:54:00.003Z

Changes:

Windows: support for any audio format via DirectShow codecs; simply install system wide codecs in the usual way to play any format. Some types of internet streaming audio might also work now depending to the system configuration. (OS X version already supports pretty much any format through system codecs)
Key bindings for next and previous song and song restart work correctly now.
File chooser directories are remembered independently for different file chooser dialogs.
Removed "Merry Christmas" from tutorial level (the Christmas tree remains in the Christmas level)
Moved Christmas themed music down in the default playlist.
New arena.
Wormholes are bigger now and easier to fly through.

For FLAC support - I tested it, after installing these codecs:
http://xiph.org/dshow/
FLAC worked.

WMA and WAV formats should now work out of the box. I did not have time to try any codecs for Wavpack yet. Internet streaming works now if you put an URL into playlist file. (You need to have relevant codecs installed for the stream type)

Arizona shooting.

2011-01-11T14:21:00.032Z

This is just horrible.
How easily an insane individual, perhaps barely capable of finding his way on the streets, can just buy a gun and go on and kill a lot of people by just pulling the trigger. How he can just buy a high capacity magazine that holds 3 more bullets than AK47 magazine. A magazine that no reasonable person will want to have for self defence, given how it almost doubles weight of pistol, makes pistol cumbersome to carry, and is more likely to jam.
I'm not normally posting anything about US politics. But when something like this happens, when you recognize one of the faces of those shot as a face you seen before, when one can imagine the personal tragedy of a family who lost their child, well one can't just stay silent as of what one believes to have contributed to this horrible incident.

What would it take to end a politician's career for inciting those insane to violence, if a hit list complete with gun related rhetoric is not enough? Realistic cross hair over photos? Direct suggestion that one must be hunted down? Should politicians have this sort of immunity? I think not. Disagreement is fine, but gun related rhetoric targeting individual opponents is not. It is ridiculous that a (quitted or not) governor, a part of establishment, would play revolutionary tunes.
Could Palin's constant gun references and violent rhetoric ever incite a sane person to vote for her, anyway? No I do not think so! Not for my definition of sane. Of course it can also be said that you must be crazy to interpret that as incitement to violence... ohh, right.
Who's to blame for violent rhetoric? Politicians? Or the mildly insane portion of public whom this rhetoric apparently incites to vote? Or perhaps both?

It is well understood that some percentage of people are insane and can be incited by this kind of political message. It is also understood that message to sane people can be conveyed without use of this kind of symbolism, without making violent allegories, unless one specifically wants to deliver a message to insane, even at the cost of turning sane people away.

On topic of freedom of speech, is shouting "fire" in the theatre OK now too? What's if someone wants to start panic but yells it like "Fire! Fire [less loud]those actors" ? How far can plausible deniability stretch?
I sincerely hope that politicians will cut down on mixing guns into the politics now. This is outright insane. Even if this particular shooting cannot be linked to any particular rhetoric, that does not make it fine to mix guns into politics, to incite crazy to do politics by using guns.

edit: Palin describes response to her list of targets as Blood Libel. I see. That's what it would take.

But Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, has a surprising (well it was to me) spin on Palin's comment. If she thinks she's turning the guns, so to speak, back on her critics for attempting to endanger her (her what? her political future?) by claiming she contributed to a climate of violence, she's gone about it totally backwards. He told me today:

It's not just inappropriate, it's profoundly ironic. By making this comparison and playing Jew in the picture, the person endangered by a blood libel, she admits that the words people use can have deadly impact.

By claiming that others' words are a blood libel that endangers her, she's at least admitting the prospect that claims her words endangered others could be true.

I'm not giving her a free pass. It was a poor and hurtful analogy. But clearly, she's affirming exactly what her critics charge.

I'm with Rabbi Brad on this one. Astute observation. Same goes for claiming that gunsight crosshairs were meant as something else. Ohh yes, so the gunsight crosshairs could have incited violence, but Palin is totally innocent, so innocent she couldn't have imagined those crosshair like icons can be seen as gun crosshairs.

edit: Long before the shootings, Palin's list was described as "an al Qaeda Christmas card" and criticized even by conservatives previously supportive of Palin. There.
edit:
Palin's (and supported by her) 'view' how Obama is a terrorist? How Obama is like Hitler? How Obama's healthcare will introduce "death panels" that will kill her child? Combined with "don't retreat, reload" and the like. Holy shit. Is she trying to assassinate Obama or what?

Paranormal.

2010-12-28T12:56:00.004Z

I telepathically sense that this Cornell study was fraudulent and, as I concentrate hard on the future, yes, I'm beginning to feel, I'm beginning to feel that he ain't gonna collect the Randi prize. I had that feeling before and I had always been correct - I must be psychic. Take that, believers in paranormal.

Updated The Polynomial's page

2010-12-25T18:23:00.001Z

See new screenshots.
You can now buy with pay-what-you-want model. I may raise the minimum price later if it works badly.

All operating systems for everyone; pay what you want sale.

2010-12-25T17:09:00.009Z

Hello everyone,

I have changed the (private) product download page for paying customers to let you download The Polynomial for any operating system regardless of which operating system you bought it for originally. You may have bought it for Windows, and now you can play it native on Linux or OS X without buying it the second time.

Also, I'm currently working on experimental pay-what-you-want sale! The minimum price is $3 (any lower and I would feel you are supporting payment processing companies too much, which are not the cause that you'd want to donate your money to, I suppose)

The scripts are ready but I am still working on the design.

You can just buy it through this blog post for now:

The price is in USD , without VAT, and minimum is $2.99.

(to be honest i'm really curious if anyone will buy it through blog post before i work on all that fancy design for sales page)

The Polynomial is at 50% off on Steam till January 2

2010-12-22T18:51:00.003Z

If you missed the 75% off sale, you can still get it for relatively cheap at 50% off.

Christmas Sale.

2010-12-21T23:02:00.002Z

The Polynomial is at 75% off on Steam! Only 2.5$

Also includes new Christmas-themed level and extra sound track:

I'm too bloody tired to make Christmas sale on my own website today.

If you have some problems running The Polynomial

2010-12-18T18:02:00.005Z

Go here

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1619883

[Also, make sure that your card meets system requirements]

Long overdue server move.

2010-12-08T13:03:00.002Z

Moved my site to more powerful server, and a new domain name ( dmytry.com ). I'm going to move the blog as well. I hope google pagerank is transferred correctly. Would be awful to lose my pagerank for game related searches.

The Polynomial: How to use any music file format,any external player, radio, vinyl, even your throat

2010-11-29T01:15:00.002Z

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=993
(tell me if you have any problems)

Softonic: if you bought The Polynomial there, CONTACT ME IMMEDIATELY.

2010-11-02T15:06:00.007Z

Hello guys,

If any of you bought The Polynomial from this site:

http://polynomial.en.softonic.com/

please contact me immediately by email or skype ! (Don't buy it from Softonic! Only use publishers linked from my official game page! (Steam and Plimus))

Linux release of (full) The Polynomial : Space of the music.

2010-10-27T11:16:00.002+01:00

You can buy it here . Let me know if you have any problems. And sorry for the delay.

Review copies of The Polynomial.

2010-10-20T22:06:00.003+01:00

If you want a review copy of The Polynomial, please mail me from the official mail address of the website or magazine that you are publishing on, or provide one, to send the key to. Understandably, I cannot send key to someone@gmail.com who says he represents Big Important Gaming Magazine. More than one person requesting for same 'zine in this way is funny too.

Thanks.

ATI's triple buffering

2010-10-18T11:39:00.022+01:00

I investigated the triple buffering issue. The conclusions are:

ATI itself recommends to turn off triple buffering if you experience any issues. I'm quoting directly: "However using Triple Buffering may cause problems for graphics cards with lower Video RAM, so disable this option if you’re experiencing problems such as mouse or input lag".
When a big-name game gets those issues, ATI adds a "profile" to the driver to silently disable Triple Buffering for that game. Games use a wide variety of rendering techniques, and ATI's Triple Buffering implementation is known to be incompatible with many games; for those that are popular, it is silently disabled by the driver.
It is not possible for the game itself to disable Triple Buffering (the driver does not provide a way to).
While searching for any technical documentation it became apparent that ATI is far more interested in publishing marketing articles about benefits of TB than technical documentation. (fairly inaccurate articles, I must add, but this is normal for marketing)
As a technical feature, TB is very unimportant, it's effect on the final images is minimal (when compared to plain vsync on). But as marketing buzzword, it is well utilized.
TB's real purpose is to make framerates higher than display framerate appear to be useful somehow, as to provide perceived incentive to buy hardware which is over-specced for the games that their customer plays (i.e. to make gamers want their games at hundreds fps despite the fact that most games update internally at 30 fps constant, a few at 60fps constant, and that most displays update at 60 fps or so)
TB introduce time jitter, which is far worse for gameplay than tiny lag which it SOMETIMES eliminates - but even that jitter is not quite noticeable.
TB is bad for your laptop's battery, and ultimately for planet Earth (wastes electricity for no benefit whatsoever). I'm calling Greenpeace. TB will also result in higher temperatures and shorter lifespan of your hardware.

Just turn off TB, ok? If you got other non standard "optimizations" of the same kind, turn them off too. That will improve many other indie games, not just The Polynomial. For the big name titles, ATI itself turns off those features through game profile in the event of any problems. The Polynomial, however, is a indie game, and as such, has no 'profile' for it in the driver yet; you have to turn off incompatible features manually.

ATI crash solution: "triple buffering" issue.

2010-10-17T23:43:00.002+01:00

If you have recent ATI card and have trouble launching The Polynomial, check your driver options. Disable the "triple buffering" setting. It is not compatible with standard. I'll try to see if I can workaround in game, but of course the correct solution is for graphics card manufacturers to stick to the OpenGL standard.

Mac install issue: a workaround.

2010-10-17T21:05:00.002+01:00

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=17781780#post17781780

Originally Posted by Pob235
I have exactly the same issue. Fortunately I have a workaround that should work for now until the problem is solved, running the game manually, externally from Steam.

Using Finder, browse to your home directory. Next find the 'Library' folder and open it, then follow this route to find the game, opening each folder in succession.

'Application Support', 'Steam', 'SteamApps', 'common' and 'thepolynomial'.

Here you will find the application package 'Polynomial_osx'. Double click it to run the game!

Of course, time spent playing this way will probably not be logged by Steam so please do see it as a very temporary solution!

Thanks for finding and posting the workaround! Much appreciated.

Ahh, and by the way, I believe it would log time correctly if Steam itself is running. When developing, I usually launch my game from outside Steam, and the time is logged nonetheless, just as long as Steam client is running - i'm not entiely sure if that applies to Mac though as I were not paying attention, but either windows or mac does log time. Same goes for the Leaderboards.

Best Regards,

Dmytry.

GeForce 7 series - proper fix for testing.

2010-10-17T15:29:00.003+01:00

Ok fellas I have a proper fix I need tested with GeForce 7 series cards.
Download this file:
http://dmytry.pandromeda.com/games/003_Waves.lua
and replace original 003_Waves.lua with it (in the data folder, typically c:/Program Files/Steam/steamapps/common/thepolynomial/data).

When you choose Waves visualizer (press next when on the Laser Show 2), it should lag badly for few seconds, then switch back to Laser Show 2 . (It appears to be impossible to run Waves on Geforce 7 at any speed. Waves moves all the points around to the music)

Geforce 7 series freeze on start workaround.

2010-10-17T00:14:00.002+01:00

Hello everyone who's using GeForce 7 series graphics card,

I think the fix for your freeze on start problem will be available on monday.

Meanwhile you can work-around this problem. In the place whereever you have The Polynomial data files installed (c:/Program Files/Steam/steamapps/common/thepolynomial in a typical install), go to data/music_visualizer sub folder, and change file extension or delete 003_Waves.lua to disable this visualizer. The waves visualizer, for some reason, works extremely slowly on geforce 7 series hardware.

Alternatively you can go to home folder / Application Data/Polynomial , and create config.100.txt containing
game{
music_visualizer=2;
}
Do not select the Waves visualizer, and do not fly through rainbow coloured mesh wormhole.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for buying The Polynomial,

Dmytry.

The Polynomial released on Steam. Out of beta at last.

2010-10-16T02:10:00.004+01:00

Wheeeeee! At last, I am done with version 1 . Released on Steam. (I'm making a note here:
HUGE SUCCESS. :-) )
Thanks to all the people whom helped to test it!
Some days later, I'll send off Steam keys to all of you whom bought the beta version - and I will give some extras on future updates as well. It's been a frantic few months leading to this release.

Fix for upside down laptop camera in Skype under Linux

2010-10-03T12:14:00.021+01:00

If you're unlucky to have a laptop with built in upside-down camera, and you're tired of looking like a bat:

You need to install 32-bit libv4l1compat (or something similar) and launch Skype like this:

LIBV4LCONTROL_FLAGS=1 LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

If it does not work, you can try using 2 and 3 instead. Note: if when you run it complains about being unable to preload v4l1compat.so , make sure you have it. You may have it in a different place, e.g. under lib32.

In the gnome main menu, or application launcher, or the like, you should use

bash -c "LIBV4LCONTROL_FLAGS=1 LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype"

as the command.

Earlier fix: My girlfriend was flipping her display upside down with the video driver settings, to see me upside up. She's this awesome.
It took me a while to fish out this single command line from the sea of fixes that do not work for me, or shitty fixes such as hacking the driver to do image manipulation in the kernel LOL*.

My hardware: ASUS K61IC laptop.
The webcam USB device is listed as
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 064e:a116 Suyin Corp.
and it is reported elsewhere as
USB2.0 UVC 1.3M WebCam

The fix may work for other cams as well.

Other VERY useful webcam tool: v4l2ucp . It allows you to adjust the actual camera parameters such as gain. Those control the camera chip - they may actually be controlling the sensor settings itself - something that you cannot replicate in software afterwards.

I just cannot end a post without a little rant how something suck.
*Doing such stuff in a driver is a big no-no for monolithic kernel where drivers are run as part of kernel and any screw-up in the driver code brings entire system down. I'm with Tanenbaum. With a well designed microkernel, you do not care what the driver does, you can safely use complicated algorithms within the driver (such as decoding compressed images sent by camera) - and the kernel developers don't have to reject your code on the grounds of potential stability compromise. It's kind of bad that Linux has all the spotlight, and all the development - it is by far not the best open source kernel design around.

Don’t cross the LHC stream

2010-09-23T17:21:00.009+01:00

Don't cross the LHC stream
What would happen if you put a hand in LHC beam?
I think most of the question has already been answered. After experiment, LHC beam is dumped into beam dump which is made from graphite. It heats graphite to quite high temperatures, while making some secondary radiation, but it does not stop within first few centimetres of graphite. Your hand is not graphite, but it is close enough. Also, note that while the energy is equivalent to the kinetic energy of the cargo airplane, momentum is fairly small (it does not have a lot of punch).

So what I believe would happen is that it would *burn* a hole through your hand, turning a line into steam, while giving you a fatal dose of all sorts of secondary radiation from collision of protons with atoms in your hand, and sending some hydraulic compression shock wave (from steam expansion) through your body, which may or may not kill you when it reaches vital organs (i would guess it won't be strong enough to kill you, but i dont know if it will rip your hand apart). To summarize, you're gonna die if you stick your hand in LHC beam, i would say probably from radiation poisoning.

edit: correction. The beam energy is 350 megajoules, and the length of beam dump is 700 centimetres. I would say that the beam surely deposits >0.5 megajoule per centimetre at the entry, that is, your hand is going to get >1 megajoule deposited, significant fraction of this as heat. That is >250 grams of TNT . I would guess >1kg of TNT even, as the beam dump is so long as to stop the beam entirely, the beam deposits most of energy near start of dump. So I would guess that resulting explosion would kill you in a quite messy way, but at least it would be a quite quick death.

New The Polynomial video.

2010-09-18T01:30:00.002+01:00

See the homepage for more info.

Another 50-megapixel screenshot.

2010-09-15T12:29:00.004+01:00

A gigantic 'screenshot' from my game The Polynomial

Click to see the full image in its 50 megapixels glory.
See if you can even locate this fragment in full image.

That goes to demonstrate power of procedural generation. The Polynomial loads up in about one or two seconds, far faster than your web browser. And it supports this resolution - I am not doing anything special, I am simply drawing to the memory instead of display device, using my regular draw routine!

50 megapixel screenshot

2010-09-15T12:17:00.002+01:00

Enjoy the 50-megapixel screenshot

Programmer's Day

2010-09-13T12:08:00.002+01:00

Wow, it is programmer's day today. Apparently.

The Polynomial :: Beta 010

2010-08-31T09:36:00.003+01:00

A new release! A lot of things added which need testing. Most notably, MP3 support and music playlist. (If you are using Linux, you may need to install libmpg123 for MP3 support if your distribution comes without libmpg123. I cannot ship libmpg123 with my game due to mp3 patent constraints).

Try it on non-latin file names. Check out reordering in playlist by dragging items around.

Drug safety proposal (invention)

2010-08-18T13:09:00.041+01:00

A little fluorescein in water.

Manufacturers should add something like fluorescein to all pills that are usable as date rape drugs or poisons, so that those become very visible in drinks and can't be used for crime any more. Fluorescein [using it as example] is extremely visible in either water or alcohol even at the very low concentrations even in the regular daylight (more visible in fluorescent lighting, and more visible yet in ultraviolet), and biologically safe to the point that it can be injected into your veins as staining agent for various sorts of diagnosis, at quite significant concentration and in a very visible amount (your blood goes green like alien's, under ultraviolet light at least. Cool). It is also very cheap. Only very small amount of fluorescein is required to stain a lot of water or alcohol bright green.

I used fluorescein as an example only because I have old jar of bath salt that's containing it (I also used fluorescein in lab at school). Quick check for safety of fluorescein turns up this. Apparently, for some eye diagnosis, fluorescein is commonly injected in concentrations that make you turn visibly yellowgreen and which make you piss bright yellow for a while. A milligram turns entire cup of water the very bright, highly unappetizing kind of yellowgreen which you can see in this photo. I figure if people are routinely injected with 500 milligrams of fluorescein for diagnosis, it would be quite safe to add 1 milligram of fluorescein to typical pill.

Spread this idea if you support this.

"What Would You Do: you see a guy drugged girl's drink"

2010-08-18T10:44:00.038+01:00

From abcnews
"
A Man 'Drugs' His Date's Drink: What Do You Do?
Would You Speak Up If You Saw Someone's Drink Get Drugged?
"

I'm really disgusted at the people for generally being idiots.

The thing you *should* do: call the police on your cell while walking towards restroom (enough distance so that guy doesn't hear you), tell the girl authoritatively that guy drugged her drink and police is already on the way and that she needs to remain here until police arrives, but shouldn't go to the guy for a bit (so that she won't alert him somehow by her behaviour). If police takes a while to arrive one might ask her to keep guy busy (if she really wants to help the police - or one could tell bartender and bouncer and put guy under civil arrest, or a zillion actions really that can keep him from leaving before police arrives). You might think its harsh on the guy. Well it is not up to a single person to decide how harsh is enough for a person you know nothing about; it's a job for a well informed jury. For all you can know, the guy may be a serial killer.

Why you should do the right thing in such situation:

1: if you are among those whom care (people whom stop in Milgram's experiment): you should do this simply because this is decent thing to do. Imagine if next day in newspaper you see that the girl was found dead or disappeared, and her parents are devastated and police says it may be work of serial killer. You'll feel like total shit for a long long while, won't you? Or for a short while if you are prone to suicide. I'm pretty sure I don't want to find out whenever I can take this kind of shit on my conscience or not.

2: if you are among those whom don't care (deliver lethal shock in Milgram's experiment): you should do this, albeit the motivation would be quite elaborate:
The guy is ain't no mafia, the mafia doesn't do this shit! The girl's almost definitely higher social status than guy. Plus if you are a guy, even if you are happily married, someday you may need a girlfriend. Now the police. The guy has drug residue on hands, in the pocket, and original capsule in the pocket, plus in girl's drink. The case is as straightforward as it can ever be; you don't even need to be a witness. Police will be happy to improve their statistics! You're making friends with police! I been in Russia for some time, and Russian police is (supposedly) very bad, corrupt, and so on. But even there, in this drugging drink situation, for sure they'd arrive promptly, not to save girl but to have some fun busting some idiot with drugs and improving their statistics (an opportunity to catch an idiot to hang unresolved murder cases onto - they're gonna do that anyway - it better be this guy than some random guy).

But that is theory.

The things people actually did fell between:
1: Acting as if nothing happened.
2: Confronting the guy, but not preventing girl from sipping the drink, not informing the girl.

It is so disgusting. The first course of action, well it is cowardice. But what the hell is second? Risking trouble on yourself but NOT protecting the innocent? (what if he overdosed it or it is a (slow acting) lethal poison). And NOT getting yourself any reward for the risk, either. In a situation whereby you can protect the innocent with a minimal risk and all sorts of reward, for those selfish-inclined. This makes no sense at all - this is just idiotic.

What really, really, really disgusts me about this sort of stuff is stupidity. The stupidity that makes ordinary people be more evil, in a practical sense, than a cold minded psychopath who got no conscience at all (a cold minded psychopath, if he is smart enough, would not miss opportunity to be a hero with almost no risk! It's a jackpot situation for a cold minded psychopath - afterwards he most likely gets someone whom he always can ask for money, sex, and shelter; and something that would reduce his sentence if he ever commits a crime himself and gets caught).

We need to teach this in school, what to do, when you see a crime going on like this (call the police, stay out of trouble and protect the victim, this is not mutually exclusive). Drop the bullshit, recognize the fact that some people are selfish and some are selfless, some have conscience and some do not, and most are in between, and provide a rational explanation why this is a right thing to do, that's good for entire spectrum. Explain that it is at once moral, rather safe, and the society rewards for it - win win win. So that even the mildly evil people with no goodness and no conscience would do the right, good thing when they see situations such as that going on, even if for a selfish reason. Stupidity is the root of all evil. There is an old Russian saying: stupid friend is worse than smart enemy. You can combat stupidity by education.

Fractal spacecraft reentry breakdown effect.

2010-08-06T00:59:00.003+01:00

Inside The Polynomial.

Save environment: repair compact fluorescent bulbs.

2010-08-05T17:58:00.016+01:00

Instead of throwing compact fluorescent lamps into e-waste recycling right away, I kept them until I had 10, and then I made 3 working fluorescents out of 10 broken ones (then the stuff that cant be fixed goes into e-waste)... there's how:
1: Open all CFLs using wide screwdriver or butter knife or similar object to pry the ballast case open.
2: use ohm-meter to check resistance over nearby wire pairs from the lamp (no need to disconnect from ballast yet). If the resistance is around 10 ohm on both sides, then that means the lamp is alright but ballast is dead (check for bad solder joints or burnt out parts, you can fix bad solder joints, and it might work). If one or both sides measures infinite resistance, that means the lamp is dead but ballast may be alright (check it for bad solder joints and burnt out parts anyway). Try working ballasts with working bulbs. Nonworking bulbs and nonworking ballast should go to e-waste and be disposed of properly. It seems that any failure ends with both power transistors getting burnt out; I didn't encounter a possibility to fix a ballast using parts from another.

The economic inequality is very bad for environment. Think of all the resources wasted shipping those bulbs around. Think of all the resources wasted because consumers in the west can easily afford to buy fluorescents built together with ballast - a marginally more convenient choice - so that perfectly good ballast and perfectly good fluorescents end up in the e-waste. Think of all the resources wasted because it is commercially viable to assemble those lamp ballasts from low quality parts (due to low cost of assembly itself. This also goes for viability of just building lamp together with ballast). Think of all the pollution that is only possible because pollution, too, was outsourced to china.
Repairing CFLs like this doesn't even save me money because I am living in a "developed" country and jobs here pay far more per hour than in china where they make those lamps (By the way, all of the lamps that I looked inside were assembled by hand in first place. Kind of sad to see). I do it because it is good for environment and coz it is kind of fun to tinker with some electronics once in a while.

UNIPAK thread joint sealant as thermal paste.

2010-08-04T10:55:00.006+01:00

I've had some CPU overheating problems after moving to new room... I reseated the heatsink by removing old thermal goo and replacing it with unipak thread sealant (the kind that you use together with flax to seal pipe joints) . So far it works no worse than any other thermal goo. I don't think it would dry out - it never did when I used it as thread sealant on hot water pipes.
Amusing study of thermal compounds:
thermal goo comparison

I also replaced northbridge heatsink goo with unipak. Northbridge heatsink was seated on thick layer of stiff thermal goo, the kind that is almost like glue. There was nothing wrong with it's temperature but I did accidentally slide northbridge heatsink a bit, cracking the old thermal goo. It seems that unipak performs a lot better than the old goo did - probably simply because it is runny enough and I only have a very thin layer of it between heatsink and chip (in general, with thermal goo, the thinner the better).

Whoops.

2010-08-03T23:49:00.001+01:00

Whoops, messed up the free demos. Re-uploading now - should be done in 15 minutes.

The Polynomial : huge update.

2010-08-03T23:18:00.010+01:00

Download

A lot of changes, and a lot more to come out shortly soon. The gameplay is a little screwed up at the moment, but I needed testing for the new technical stuff so I released it as is.
The real bigass highlight: music visualizers, you can choose visualizer in the Game panel (press esc, the second scrollbutton under Arena), and you can adjust it's parameters in Sound&Music (or S&M how I called it during development because blinking from the earlier versions of visualizer was getting on my nerves after working on it for days). The best one at the moment is "Waves", shown below:

Uses new soundtrack made by my brother. If you want to play it with your music, you need to convert your music to OGG format and put it in data/music folder (or Resources/music , inside bundle, on Mac). MP3 support will follow shortly.

You also get two weird looking vortex things in every level, one is made of stars and is used to change arena and other is made of line grid and it changes music visualizer.

Ahh, and the menu style has been changed.

A new video.

2010-06-23T17:38:00.021+01:00

See it here.
A lot of changes which I need to make better use of.

A little rant about recaptcha (prompted by having to solve recaptcha). In theory, they could do a noble thing: instead of wasting human attention, use it to read words in the books, words which computer software cant read. That's what they claim they are doing. That would of been absolutely terrific. That would of been totally awesome.
Unfortunately, there's one little thing everyone sort of misses, even though it is absolutely right-in-your-face even on their homepage:

You see, recaptcha is, for most part, using quite computer-recognizable scanned words, resorting to addition of extra distortion, blur, strikes or blobs, as to make those words readable only by human and to stop the bots. It's mostly the distortion that's making it computer-unreadable, not the book's age. As the technology evolves, they are adding more and more distortion. And also harming human's accuracy. Case closed. Sorry, guys, you've been duped, perhaps too easily because it feels better to believe that your captcha is doing something good and noble rather than just wasting people's time.
(Other little detail that is always glossed over is that its not 'books', its new york times newspaper archives and the like. "Stop the spam. Read newspapers." doesn't sound so noble)

Sony took the toys from air force. Cry me a river.

2010-05-12T20:37:00.006+01:00

via Consumerist

Apparently the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, New York took a look at available cheap computing power and decided that the PS3 with Linux was the way to go -- until Sony removed the ability to install the OS with their latest firmware update. Now the Air Force is stuck with a lot of PS3s that can't be repaired if they break -- because Sony will update the firmware to remove the option to install Linux.
...
(One can only imagine what happened to those 2,000 PS3 controllers and other unneeded accessories.)

Wait a minute, how comes PS3 is cheaper than dedicated node without pretty boxes, casing, controllers, GPU (PS3 blocks Linux from accessing GPU), and such? Economics of scale? No. Sony is simply selling PS3s at loss, recovering the costs of hardware from game sales! Most notably, NOT recovering costs of hardware sold to Air Force.
I say, it's great news. Maybe next time Air Force won't try to be too clever, and will order nodes from a honest manufacturer, rather than, so to say, taking free pens from the conferences in unusual numbers. Smaller carbon footprint too, without all the unused hardware and casing.
And good riddance to Linux on PS3, as well. When you get PS3 to run Linux, it means that a lot of resources were wasted making the GPU, which you cannot use on PS3 under Linux.

It would've been best if Sony simply sold PS3 at it's manufacturing price, but I doubt anyone would want to buy PS3 then.

Electrolyzer pics.

2010-04-30T23:11:00.004+01:00

Taken with laptop's webcam, so the quality sucks. And I wouldn't dare melting any stuff above my laptop.

For some odd reason, my aluminium cathode became badly corroded - I suspect that alkaline solution doesn't do any good to the aluminium. So I'm going to have to replace it with something else, maybe copper. I used sodium carbonate (not bicarbonate) for electrolyte coz I didn't have any KOH or NaOH handy.

HHO torch.

2010-04-29T22:55:00.007+01:00

I've built me a really tiny HHO electrolyzer torch for welding wires and stuff. Unfortunately my photo camera is dead, so no pics yet. I've made smaller scale HHO torch when I were 14... those were the days.

Browsing for similar projects, I noticed that a lot of designs posted online are more risky than it needs to be.
A couple safety facts:
1 litre of HHO mix at atmospheric pressure and room temperature stores about 8kJ of energy. 8kJ is no toy.
8kJ is a bit less than 2 grams in TNT equivalent. It's the energy of 100kg weight raised to the height of 8 meters, or 10kg weight raised to the height of 80 meters. That's about the energy of your fall onto ground if you fall off a roof of three-story house. That's about the energy of coin shrinker.
The combustion pressure is somewhere between 5 and 10 bar. For electrolyzer chamber with lid area of 'only' 216 square centimetres, the force would be 1..2 metric tons.
Electrodes and all the connections must be entirely covered with electrolyte at all times. Why: won't take a lot of spark to set off HHO mix. Cover your soldering joints with glue on anode.
I used soft-ish plastic food container (HDPE) for my electrolyzer, which seems like excellent choice - I'm pretty sure explosion would simply blow off the lid and spray the electrolyte around, but not any shards.

Calculations for energy:
2 H2 + O2 -> 2 H2O + 572 kJ (all amounts molar, i.e. 2 mol of H2 and 1 mol of O2 become 2 mols of H2O)
1 mol of gas is 24 liters at room temperature and pressure, so we have this

Solar dynamics observatory gone live!

2010-04-21T20:41:00.001+01:00

NASA SDO first light videos! Hurray. I've been waiting for this all day.

Mouse fibroblasts

2010-04-18T21:25:00.002+01:00

wow

Looks totally awesome. I'll see if I can make something similar in my game.

Bicycle helmets.

2010-04-17T18:22:00.020+01:00

If you look at actual testing which is specified in standard for bike helmets... 1.2m fall onto a hemisphere. 2m fall onto a flat anvil. No tests whatsoever for sliding impacts, rotational brain injury (which is extremely dangerous), neck injury, or anything of this sort. Not to mention unrealistically rigid models of head. For all the standard cares, you can produce bike helmet which simply shatters into pieces at >2m fall speeds, which cracks into pieces when deformed even half as much as head could be deformed without serious damage (you'd be surprised, but bones are quite elastic), with high friction outer lining, so that in a sliding impact it gets you the worst rotational brain injury possible. And you could still legally sell this shit as "bicycle helmet"!

Those helmets are barely rated for pedestrian accidents, for god's sake, like walking into a streetlamp pole, or falling on ice (but not falling on stairs). This is frigging ridiculous. Why won't they get pedestrians to wear those helmets? After all, pedestrian brain injuries are more numerous.

If you believe that these barely-pedestrian-grade helmets are any better for cyclists than no helmet at all, well that's your own dangerous original research, the regulations and standards clearly do not provision for any testing to ensure that bicycle helmets are useful for cyclists.
You can do it all you like, then you'd better also wear the helmet when you're not on bicycle. Anyway, why "bicycle helmet" laws? Why not construction grade hardhats? Those also got some standards, similarly irrelevant to reality of bike accidents. I'd bet an industry grade hardhat has better sliding performance.

Bicycle helmet laws were lobbied by the Industry of Useless Things, simple as that, and so were the standards. IMO any useful bicycle helmet standard that would test for realistic accidents, with considerations for the total injury (impact, rotational, and neck), would only be passable by motorcycle style helmets, and nobody wants to wear those on bicycle.

And even all the uselessness aside, adults should be free to endanger themselves as much as they want when it does not endanger anyone else; motorcycle helmets should not be mandatory either. Not wearing a helmet on motorcycle may put you in more danger, but puts everyone else in (very slightly) less danger (you have larger field of vision without helmet, plus in the unlikely case of collision of your head with someone else, that someone else gets less damage if you don't have helmet) - it is your choice to make - I would recommend wearing motorcycle helmet, though I would not wear it on bicycle because it'd look too ridiculous.

A very interesting research paper

2010-03-29T06:24:00.002+01:00

experimental detection of gravitomagnetic London moment. There's been a lot of crank stories about strong artificial gravity on top of rotating exotic stuff (superconductors, superfluids, and so on) but this one seems genuine and it is from ESA. If this is confirmed, this is *awesome*.
Of course, though, even with their experimental controls (a different type of superconductor), this can still be an experimental error. And of course if you have spent months designing a nice measurement device, good for nothing else, your subconscious strongly wants it to find something. Especially when such a finding would result in a Nobel prize. And unfortunately other teams did not yet confirm or deny this - it is unlikely there would be much research interest in this stuff because all the crank gravity research made everyone sensible extremely skeptical.
By the way, if I were to suspect a conspiracy, the evil conspiring parties would have been *funding* crank research in gravity and cold fusion to drown any signals in the noise and to make everyone overly skeptical.

Frame dragging, Mach's principle, and such.

2010-03-21T19:47:00.019Z

From 'physics central'

If the Earth stood still and the rest of the universe rotated around it instead, would its equator still bulge? According to general relativity and Gravity Probe B, the answer is YES. It doesn’t matter if you are spinning or if the universe is revolving around you. Both situations are equivalent.

Hmmmmmmmm. That's reference to Mach's principle.
I'm no general relativity specialist and whatever I learn about general relativity is in form of textbooks with examples and stuff to solve, so I haven't ever came across the statement that rotation was 'relative' to something in GR before. Sure, people tend to think rotation is relative (not noticing that Earth is spinning), but rotation is demonstrably not relative in same sense in which motion is relative; you can sit in locked room without windows yet still deduce rotation of Earth 'relatively to far away stars' - even though you can't deduce motion of Earth relatively to far away stars, or tell apart uniform downward gravity from acceleration (which you could measure relatively to stars, if you wish). You can go beyond acceleration & rotation and consider Jerk (third derivative), then Jounce, those you can also feel in the locked room without looking at far away stars. Is there some dragging effect as well for higher derivatives, so that analogous statement like 'it does not matter if entire universe's being shaked or subway train you're riding hits a bump' would be true? [I really don't think so]. Does anyone know more about that?

Also, in special relativity (which I do know rather well, unlike general relativity), infinite or just very big universe *cannot* simply rotate at any rate of revolution, chiefly because far away parts would have to move at faster than speed of light to appear to be rotating around you. So, under special relativity it is no wonder what so ever that lack of rotation relatively to far away stars coincides with lack of rotation as determined by gyroscope. Special relativity is quite fine with Mach's principle.

Q: What is less than 3 in <3 smiley?

2010-03-20T12:59:00.013Z

A: I, where I=x²+(y-|x|)² .

(finding the U as to obtain 3D heart is left as exercise for the reader)

Epicly badass sea animal

2010-03-12T18:19:00.002Z

PulseAudio and why I do not use it.

2010-03-07T19:28:00.018Z

[pulseaudio is a new Linux 'sound server']

Firstly, to make it clear, I think that there is nothing really wrong with PulseAudio itself. Some versions even work fine with OpenAL, which means that my game's sound works.

What's not good, however, is distributions enabling it by default, and worst yet, distributions [ubuntu in particular] include much outdated versions of PulseAudio which have more bugs. This, especially the old versions, creates extremely difficult landscape for application developers, open source and commercial alike. Furthermore, introduction of PA on by default violates the "suck less" principle - the principle that after each new update software or the system must such *less* than it sucked before - and if it does not, you'll be losing users. What's even worse is distributions entirely ignoring frequent user complaints about PA.

The most important thing to understand about PulseAudio is that it is NOT a sound driver and is NOT an ALSA replacement. PulseAudio takes in sound from applications, does some stuff on it, and outputs the sound through ALSA. It is a sound server. It adds new features, and inevitably, new bugs.
It so happens that vast majority of software can work with ALSA directly; and it so happens that ALSA includes a lot of features which people expect and need - mixing sound from different applications (even when you do not have hardware mixer), volume control, and so on. The role of PulseAudio is to add new features.

What features? Straight from the PulseAudio developer.

There's so much more a good audio system needs to provide than just the most basic mixing functionality. Per-application volumes, moving streams between devices during playback, positional event sounds (i.e. click on the left side of the screen, have the sound event come out through the left speakers), secure session-switching support, monitoring of sound playback levels, rescuing playback streams to other audio devices on hot unplug, automatic hotplug configuration, automatic up/downmixing stereo/surround, high-quality resampling, network transparency, sound effects, simultaneous output to multiple sound devices are all features PA provides right now, and what you don't get without it. It also provides the infrastructure for upcoming features like volume-follows-focus, automatic attenuation of music on signal on VoIP stream, UPnP media renderer support, Apple RAOP support, mixing/volume adjustments with dynamic range compression, adaptive volume of event sounds based on the volume of music streams, jack sensing, switching between stereo/surround/spdif during runtime, ...
And even for the most basic mixing functionality plain ALSA/dmix is not really everlasting happiness. Due to the way it works all clients are forced to use the same buffering metrics all the time, that means all clients are limited in their wakeup/latency settings. You will burn more CPU than necessary this way, keep the risk of drop-outs unnecessarily high and still not be able to make clients with low-latency requirements happy. 'Glitch-Free' PulseAudio fixes all this. Quite frankly I believe that 'glitch-free' PulseAudio is the single most important killer feature that should be enough to convince everyone why PulseAudio is the right thing to do. Maybe people actually don't know that they want this. But they absolutely do, especially the embedded people -- if used properly it is a must for power-saving during audio playback. It's a pity that how awesome this feature is you cannot directly see from the user interface.^[1]
PulseAudio provides compatibility with a lot of sound systems/APIs that bare ALSA or bare OSS don't provide.
And last but not least, I love breaking Jeffrey's audio. It's just soo much fun, you really have to try it! ;-)

That's the things which PA aspires to make work. It's all amazing - AFAIK many of those features are not supported by the Windows or OS X. Well, that is all great, but you can imagine what sort of complexity PA needs with such a feature list.

I'm a simple man. All I want is to play music while I'm working, I want sound in flash, I do not like if some applications do not work, and I want sound in games (which use OpenAL). I need reliability. Complexity is the enemy of reliability, and the perfect is the enemy of the good.

I do not care about per application volume sliders (guess what, my application has two volume sliders, for SFX and music), I do not care about moving sound streams between devices during playback, I DEFINITELY do not give a damn about positional event sounds (more than that, I would not mind if event sounds even quitted working, except for: time alarm sound, and new mail sound), I do not care about multiple sessions playing sound through different devices, and so on and so forth. I'm pretty sure that a typical user has even simpler interests. The primary thing he needs is lack of regressions - everything that worked back when he decided to switch to Linux must still work - else he will switch back (!).

As developer, what I want is a stable API. A mature software which does not change much any more in each release, and which is not so buggy. Unfortunately, software maintenance is boring, and open source software is maintained by bright people whom do not like boring tasks. Open source developers want challenges. They want to do epic stuff that no other system does. They prefer rewrites over maintenance, they prefer large sets of very challenging features (often, features that almost nobody asks for) over basic set implemented to high reliability, and so on. They underestimate importance of reliability for people, and overestimate importance of new cool things (and keep doing that no matter how much are they flamed). Linux environment has a long history of frequent, major, breaking rewrites of important subsystems - far more frequent than on either Windows or OS X - frequent to the point that subsystems get rewritten before previous incarnation is polished and mature enough.

SSL certificates - a case of daylight racketeering.

2010-03-04T19:01:00.041Z

The dirty little 'secret' of the Internet is that in most networks all the computers on same LAN with you receive same data as you do, ignoring 'your' data by gentleman's agreement. [Unless computer is running 'packet sniffing' software that does not abide by this agreement] It is very easy for third party to listen to your Internet communications; far easier than to hack a computer between you and (for instance) your email server to launch a 'man in the middle' attack, standing between you and web service. Every login form and every webmail interface can cheaply and easily be encrypted using SSL, closing at least this gaping security hole.

Unfortunately what happened in practice is that some large businesses - certificate authorities - managed to subvert just about every browser (including Firefox) as to display extremely scary warnings on sites which want to just use the encryption without paying hefty yearly sums of money for supposed verification and authentication - while displaying no scary warnings on far less safe sites which use no encryption what so ever.
This bizarre browser behaviour of warning more scarily about safer sites has been done under guise of pushing better security practices. While in theory better security would be a laudable goal, in practice, what is being done is more of a negative campaign against acceptable security, preventing use of any encryption on many sites you and me visit every day.

There is a zillion uses where we do not need certificate authority but do need encryption. Router, internet camera, internet printer, and other internet appilance's web interfaces, on the devices which you freaking bought yourself, you need ain't no certificate authority here, the key can be printed on the box.
All those small web services like free webmail, blogs, etc. which are presently unencrypted would still benefit from encryption. All sorts of small sites. A lot of login forms. Literally any site if you don't feel good about government taps into the network (especially those done by foreign government, see echelon).

Even something as critical as my bank would also do better without certificate authority, and indeed, with a different, simpler protocol. Many banks (my bank, for instance) give users password generator devices or cards, as well as initial constant password (in the envelope). In person.
In a more sane universe, that device's passwords would have been used for crypto, at login ensuring both that you are yourself and that bank's page is genuine. The password IS a shared secret after all. There's SRP protocol which is good for just that kind of thing. With SRP both ends of connection must know the password; and when you login using SRP you are not revealing the password in any way (login could only work if both sides know password).

In reality, however... SSL and your browser does not require server to know your password, but instead requires servers owner to do various paperwork and to pay money to "Certificate Authority" whose key is "trusted" by browser (i.e. included in the browser install). Asymmetrical cryptography indeed. Bank pays to Certificate Authority who pays to browser developers whom don't and won't implement SRP protocol.

The way how SSL does logins goes contrary to basic expectations of users. Users expect that the password they enter would be used somehow to encrypt the communication, making communications secure against any third party who does not know the password. After all that's how ciphers work. It is very difficult to explain to users how SSL works, and not so much because users are stupid but because SSL is stupid. It makes no sense to use some devilishly clever math of assymetric-crypto and PKI stuff for password protected login, where even ciphering using secret password as key would've provided better authentication both ways [but would require long passwords because attacker can try a lot of passwords offline on the intercepted data. SRP protocol solves that problem, preventing offline guessing].

The 'protection' certificate authorities can offer to the end user is clearly inadequate - man in the middle can simply use plain http without SSL for connection to the user; according to various studies (like this) about 90% of users do not pay attention to minor aberrations such as http instead of https and absence of the tiny yellow padlock icon, even if told in advance that some samples will be fake. The real percentage for unsuspecting users would be even higher. (On top of that, the indicator totally sucks and its immediately obvious that whoever came up with the indicator has no clue what so ever. Up to 9% males are colorblind with inability to tell apart green, yellow, and red, and this alone is enough for phishing to be commercially viable. Imagine you're colorblind, you learn that white is non-secure and redyellowgreen is good, then you run into suspected bad site. And it's looking more similar to good than to non-secure). Worse yet, phisher can easily obtain digital certificate under false credentials; the most dramatic examples include random dude obtaining VeriSign code signing certificate in Microsoft's name - not a same thing but funny nonetheless. While absence of yellow padlock implies absence of security, presence of padlock means nothing; training users to think "padlock = secure" would only make phishing more effective. Hackers do obtain digital certificates just fine.

For better arguments from a real security expert, read this excellent paper by Bruce Schneier.

To summarize: More secure login technology, SRP protocol*, does exist, and is already implemented as library. Instead of supporting it, browser developers* play a silly game of making biggish corporations pay hefty sums yearly to display their address bar in green, making everyone else pay smaller sum yearly for blue, and making those whom are really cheap do a funny dance every 30 days to re-validate their 'free' certificate. Heck even CA's marketing slogans ("No More Abandoned Carts" for example) focus on the notion that if you don't pay money to get yourself green address bar, you're losing customers.
[* browser developers are ultimately in control of certificate business, deciding which certificate authorities are kosher]

(* for grammar nazis: P in SRP stands for password, so it's alright to say 'SRP protocol' but not 'SRP password')

[edit: correction. Evidently, there is one or two SSL authorities which are now trusted by most browsers, which gives away free (as in free beer) certificates, requiring you to do a funny dance every 30 days to re-validate it or something. Its kind of uncertain where this whole thing is heading - will those certificates eventually show scary warnings as well? Will they start charging money for freebeer certificates?]

This is absolutely amazing.

2010-02-22T20:04:00.001Z

Lightning in slow motion.

Fooling around with the con men.

2010-02-19T22:38:00.011Z

I receive quite a bit of business mail about my game, most of it good and useful. But not all.

Excerpt from some recent mail that takes the cake on verbosity and stupidity, as well as on attempts to sound patronizing and the sheer arrogance:

The next bit is the scary part and I understand why but it has to happen. You join [name removed], become an actual team member but also being on another company is fine too, as long as it doesn't go against your contract. You have to sign over the rights to the game to [name removed] Games or we can't legally claim it as our own or.. do anything with it. That is the scary part and I understand that, as it would scare me too. It's just the legal side of business.

Not your regular business correspondence, eh? Scary part, lol.
That's just the small excerpt from some mail (that did go on and on just like this for 3 pages). Conversation started off tiny and unspecific and with way better grammar, of course; it got like this only at the end.

What pisses me off the most is that some indie game developers, evidently, do/did fall for this scam (I imagine some fraction of indie game programmers are kids and/or borderline autistic and thus are easily taken advantage of) - assuming that this kind of con man earns something from his scam, and is not just a total loser who'd like to scam someone but cant.
I figure that's in part because the issue is kind of unpublicized. We're all nice people, and if you're writing about such topics, that makes you seem less nice yourself, right.
There's the nice suggestion for everyone. In business, be friendly, make a compliment or two, good for normal business. If you're talking with con man he'll think he built up the confidence, and his mail will lose any resemblance to legitimate business correspondence. The sooner con men go like this, the less time is spent in useless chitchat. After seeing what he wants you can either ignore him entirely or write something vaguely negative to watch the indignation (literally "i'm not a scammer" when you didn't even accuse anyone of anything).

The Polynomial :: Overdose.

2010-02-16T15:53:00.003Z

Setting some parameters in the Visuals tab outside range, serendipitously, makes for some insane effects...

Unfortunately, video capture program freaks out on this abuse, and adds this ugly green area (not present in game).

Big update: version 00m

2010-02-15T14:28:00.006Z

Link

Better gameplay and new game objects. Now you should shot those pacman-ish shapes (red in HUD) which are trying to eat pretty wiggly things, and protect the pretty wiggly things (bright blue in HUD). You lose points if you shoot friendly stuff.
Fly through blue things for repair (also repairs the blue thing if it is damaged, with score increase if it was not damaged by you in the first place).
New features:
New music from Alex.
Better sound effects.
Side-to-side stereo.
New collision detection framework.
Highly trippy option (in Devel tab) to draw debug info.
OS X users, rejoice! Option to disable OS X's built in nonlinear mouse acceleration. Massively improves playability. Highly recommended to turn this option on (it's in Input tab). It is off by default because I'm not sure what it would do to a trackpad.
Fixes:
Fixed crash when switching to fullscreen under Windows.
Fixed some rendering issues on OS X.
Shows icon in windowmanager on Linux.
Fixed a couple audio bugs.
Minor improvements: Less screen clutter.

Installing Polynomial in local mac shop

2010-02-08T14:27:00.005Z

I visited local mac shop and installed my game's demo there :-)
The testing results: Works perfect on iMac with NVidia 9400 GT 256MB and 1920x1080 display resolution, the framerate when maximized is around 30 fps, but controls are still very smooth and responsive. Though, I had trouble actually playing it because of mac's mouse acceleration curve, which is less than optimal for mouse-joystick controls. I do not know if it's just result of my dislike for accelerated mouse or affects everyone; I'll try to add option to disable mouse acceleration ingame.
Also, the new Apple's mouse is sexy, but does not permit pressing both left and right mouse buttons at same time. No biggie, can zoom with shift.

Also, I don't know why, but my game does seem to look prettier on that iMac than on my cheap display. Gosh. Now I'll be wanting to buy expensive display.

Bugs so far.

2010-02-07T23:43:00.016Z

0: A lot of issues get resolved by updating graphics drivers.

1: Switch to fullscreen fails on Windows if folder name contain spaces.
Why: microsoft's broken implementation of execv function. execv function takes name of program and list of arguments, then executes the program with arguments. Under any operating system but Windows, that means the list of argument comes into the program as is, no matter what the arguments contain. After all, that's the whole point of passing the list of arguments around instead of a single command string.
Under Windows, the list of arguments is converted into a string like this: arg1+' '+arg2+' '+arg3... , and then, in other place in the runtime, the string is split by ' ' . Meaning that if any argument contains a space, it comes out as 2 arguments. Needless to say, this highly peculiar behaviour is not documented. I need execv for restarting the application on mode change.
I workarounded the bug already but you'll have to wait a few days for the fix because I am in middle of a big change to the gameplay.

2: Old OS X issue. Some people with entry level cheap graphics card (NVidia 7300 gt 256mb for example) combined with dual xeon experience some sort of system hang (spinning beachball of death), requiring them to reboot using power switch.
Never had any reports of such happening on any other operating system, either because it does not happen, or because on other operating systems users tend to understand that if system hangs up like this, that's the system to blame.
One user managed to login remotely into the system and kill game's process, but the OS X GUI remained locked up, clocks not updating (meaning that it's not a keyboard glitch). Which seems to imply that the core of system did not hang, but Quartz (OS X graphics layer) hangs rock solid. Geez. (No credit to Apple for core staying alive, coz the core was ripped off BSD)
The causes unknown, I cannot reproduce it (I don't have that hardware), and WTF are entry level graphics cards doing inside expensive, professional dual-cpu systems anyway? That's just asking for trouble. The driver for cheap-ass card may well poorly support professional dual cpu systems (with 2 cpu chips on board, not just dualcore). In my opinion that's some driver bug which gone unnoticed for ages on OS X due to absence of games with advanced graphics.

3: Linux. For some people something is wrong with audio again, and I'd bet it again has something to do with PuPuPulssssseAAudio[LOUD CLICK] not always working correctly with OpenAL-soft.
Workarounds if you dont want to exorcise the pulseaudio demon:
If you run The Polynomial from console you see "initializing audio" as last words before crash, try edit the start script and add --nosound .
Alternatively, edit
~/.alsoftrc
and add
drivers = port
or
drivers = pulse
or
drivers = alsa
[ALSA]
mmap=off
depending to what you're using.

Actually, I would recommend to remove PulseAudio. Most likely you don't even need it. PulseAudio being installed by default = the WORST thing that ever happened to Linux audio and Linux usability in general. PA may be a greatest thing since sliced bread if you want to play sound from computer A through computer B, but it is far worse than useless on a typical desktop system. It doubles the bloat, and far more than doubles the number of bugs. It is a pre-alpha quality software wrapping around release-quality sound system (ALSA).
I'm far from being the only developer encountering a lot of problems caused by pulseaudio. SpringRTS, the open source game engine which I occasionally contribute to, suffers from same issues. See the FAQ

Some things in progress

2010-02-06T11:45:00.005Z

Here you can see new bot type, along with debug-mode view of leafs of space partitioning structure which I've implemented for collision detection.
Pretty wiggling things will be neutral, and these will be eating wiggly things, and growing proportionally to # eaten. Or something like that. And there will be a lot more interaction between things. Also, this bot has some facial expressions.

Version 00l

2010-01-25T15:13:00.000Z

Multiple crashbug fixes, and a new level in full version.

Why NVidia(and AMD) won't opensource linux drivers

2010-01-24T19:40:00.009Z

So much ranting about the topic on the internet, yet nobody has any clue. The crux of the matter is probably in NVidia Quadro (and AMD/ATI FireGL) cards which for most part only differ from the significantly less expensive "gamer" cads in the driver behavior - proper stereo support, antialiased lines, and such.

Those highly overpriced cards do serve a business purpose; them allow to cover development costs and generate extra profits while releasing cheaper cards for the masses. I wish they would come up with some hardware difference, such as 10% faster for 3x the price as common for the CPUs - but with every clueless gamer wanting 'overclockable' cards, it probably wont happen.

Open source drivers, whenever made through reverse engineering or with documentation available, are of no concern to either due to lack of manforce to make those drivers usable. People whom don't work in computer graphics don't quite appreciate the fact that 3D graphics card 'driver' is far more complicated than network card driver or sound driver; I'd say 3D card driver is an entire operating system in itself - with memory management, shader and OpenCL compilers, multitasking (for multiple OpenGL contexts), and such. The graphics card is a computing system of it's own.

Version 00k.

2010-01-22T22:53:00.001Z

Has those flowers and wiggling things.
Main page.

Fractal flowers

2010-01-21T15:33:00.002Z

Some fractal flowers:

Gotta release it sometime soon. If I have time I want to make 'bots pollinate the flowers or something like that.

Better animated things

2010-01-19T18:43:00.002Z

Another video:

I need to refine some more things before release tho.

Animated objects!

2010-01-16T23:41:00.010Z

I'm working on character animations now...

(guns turned off for test). Still needs some work - I need to manually or automatically select the shapes that look good when animated like this, and add more variation to the parameters.
The only problem it feels wrong to shot this stuff... I need to come up with some gameplay that doesn't involve shooting 'em down. Maybe shooting down evil geometric shapes that are trying to eat pretty wiggly fractal shapes...
Any ideas?

A while ago I also made some weird rings

(these will go with scripted levels and sort of physics puzzles, except the laws of physics are of my own making)

Ahh, and I might also make 'em evolve somehow or be editable.

Interplanetary drug trade.

2010-01-16T00:04:00.006Z

A bag of cocaine found in space shuttle hangar
I wonder how you'd snort the coke in zero gravity... do you shake it up in the bag and then snort out? What's about stickiness of particles?

WTFest bug of mine.

2010-01-12T19:28:00.009Z

Due to a bug in my site backend, google ads were displayed on top of my 'about' page. LOL. I didn't notice for several days because of adblock, which is a part of WTF. I use custom macro-expansion language to generate my web pages, similar to M4 - I implemented it ages ago when I began learning C++ .
edit: why ad code was here in first place: I'm trying to figure out if its worthwhile to buy ads myself for The Polynomial, so I did some experiments to find real (no bots) clickthrough rate. In fact I still have google ads on this blog for experiment's sake.

Minimal number of species for ecosystem...

2010-01-09T12:46:00.008Z

Charles Stross posted interesting question on his blog a while back - what is the minimal ecosystem with humans in it?
He's kind of biased though to show that other science fiction writers get it wrong disregarding the issue, and he considers 'genetically engineered algae that makes everything you need' to be a magic wand (It is very easy to argue that something never done cannot be done or is very hard to do). He probably intends to write some fiction where he 'gets it right' in portraying the immense difficulties of building such ecosystem.

In reality though, while we're still very long way off from building a starship, we can genetically engineer rice, corn, some bacteria, etc to produce a variety of vitamins.
In my opinion, the spaceship ecosystem, if it will ever be done, would consist of:
1: Waste incinerator and chemical plant (for processing ash).
2: Many tanks of genetically engineered algae and possibly yeasts (feeding on algae), the tanks capable of being fully sterilized.
3: Food processing plant.
4: Humans and internal symbiotic bacteria etc.
5: Frozen, radiation shielded specimens of all algae, yeasts, and human symbiotic bacteria, for reseeding through the mission.
6: Genetics lab just in case.
The problem with more complex ecosystems is that them tie up a lot of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, etc etc. as non-human mass - wastes being processed, worms feeding on wastes, etc etc. Very small payload to weight ratio.

On topic of keeping humans on generation ship (a ship which is going on for hundreds years) civilized enough to maintain their plumbing, consider a normal small town, if you wish, on isolated island. In that town people are watching hollywood movies(they cant make movies themselves), kids are studying in school with books written elsewhere, they're believing in religion which came from elsewhere, they have social structure which 'feels right' because it matches what they see in movies, they do plumbing based on instructions from elsewhere, and so on and so forth. Right here on earth, not only such towns do not develop some widely divergent civilizations but the cultural diversity of such towns is diminishing, and been diminishing even before the Internet. Science fiction writers came up with a lot of strange social organization types for a generation ship (my personal scifi favourite is Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky), but it seems nobody explored the boring possibility that the people on generation ship mostly sit on the couch watching TV. (I don't think anyone would ever make a generation starship, but anyway)

2010-01-07T12:16:00.005Z

Cellphone microwaves are good for brains?
Really weird. Though, it goes to show that argument that 'cellphones are certainly harmless because them have no effect because radiation is not ionizing' was probably BS. TBH this study does also reek of BS, given that they did not measure health effects of different levels of microwave radiation. I.e. they weren't actually doing much science, more like, cellphone advocacy.
By the way, the fact that mobile phone radiation is not ionizing (and is, in fact, VERY far from ionizing) goes only to explain why you don't quickly keel over and die after a single phone call (which you would had cellphones been using ionizing radiation, like x-rays or gamma rays, at same power levels).
That being said, I'll keep using mobile phone; epidemiological studies have not shown any health effects whatsoever, even though in the Europe virtually everyone is using mobile phone, and most people use it a lot more than landline phone.

Security and mathematics.

2010-01-06T20:12:00.013Z

In light of recent attempted plane bombing...
I think there is a huge number of unaccounted deaths from September 11 2001 attacks, in range of thousands, and I'm not talking of Iraqis or US soldiers. I'm speaking of US civilians in the US.

Let's look at US traffic fatalities (about 42,000 per year)
Note the rise in fatalities after September 11 2001. The traffic fatalities before 2001 were going up and down, and since 2001, only gone down in 2007 due to rising oil prices, and gone down sharply in 2008 due to the recession.

I'm pretty sure that plane security did increase the air travel time, as well as fear of flying. Consequently, some people had opted to get around interstate by car, especially for shorter distance flights where most of time is spent boarding the plane. Cars, as you can see, are significantly less safe than airlines even in the worst year (2001) counting the on-ground causalities.

I cannot know what percentage of people opt to drive rather than fly. That would require a poll. What I know is that even very conservative, small increase in car usage (1%), when multiplied by 42,000 and by 6 years, gives fairly substantial number (2,500), approaching the direct causalities (2,974 according to Wikipedia). Looking at the traffic accidents statistics, it could be even worse; thousand extra deaths per year.
That is seriously depressing. Aftermath of subway attacks in Britain may be even more depressing.
If you agree with the argument, and care about it, try make the difference.

Before giving up liberties and conveniences to avert some risks, it is absolutely essential to do a proper cost benefit analysis; failure to do so is quite equivalent to cooperation with terrorists, to direct participation in mass murder, for the suboptimal action easily results in huge number of additional deaths. Sometimes it may even be the case that very minor response is best (e.g. reinforced cockpit doors as response to 9/11/2001 could well be sufficient to prevent it from ever happening again, not because its absolutely impossible to cut through reinforced door somehow but because its secure enough to point that terrorists would rather do something else instead).
The problem is, how can democratic society do the cost-benefit analysis? A company does the cost benefit analysis for itself; for media companies, for military contractors, for pretty much all businesses involved in security, for members of the government, for many security experts, there are huge benefits from overreaction to the risks. Media is working to amplify our fears out of proportion; you will never see a major media channel comparing risks - unless it is e.g. promoting 'war on drugs' and wants to convince you that war on drugs deserves as much attention as war on terror.
On other hand, entire society bears the costs and extra risks resulting from the overreaction, not just the individuals getting the benefits. Consequently, response to terrorism is always overreaction, always biased for those benefiting from overreaction, against those harmed by overreaction.

Consider a bee sting. Normally, it takes hundreds, or thousands killer bees to kill healthy adult through the sheer amount of venom. But some people have highly overzealous immune system, sensitized to the bee sting, going out of control and destroying their own cells. Such people often die from a single sting - condition known as anaphylactic shock - people often get killed, in effect, by their own immune systems. Immune system is not intelligent - but we are. We should not let this happen to our culture.

We should not turn this failed plane bombing attempt into a successful act of terrorism, which it could easily become if boarding checks for internal travel are to take more time, for short distance flights, where driving, a much more dangerous alternative option, would become quicker and preferable leading to extra deaths in car accidents which would have been mostly prevented if people would travel by plane instead (airlines are a lot safer per km traveled than cars, even for short distance flights).

What is especially illuminating is those full body x-ray scans. I'm fairly sure that there had been no evaluation whatsoever of the number of extra cancer deaths that may be caused by x-ray scans versus deaths from terrorism that could be, arguably, prevented with those scans, which are unable to detect explosives within the body or detect plastic explosives reliably. All you can see in news about those machines is talk that dose is "very small", without actually naming the dose, and its hard to find dose estimate from reputable source (indeed, from any source other than equipment manufacturer). I bet if you ask a technician, he would be quite unable to name the dose as well (total incompetence is amazingly common).
It's as if prices did increase, and the increase was not described in percent but simply as "small". You can't straightforwardly measure x-ray dose with Geiger counter, not for low energy x-rays, due to low rate of detection for xray photons. (Though, I don't think extra x-ray dose is important problem in comparison with more car driving rather than flying because of people not wanting to be seen nude, deaths from money being spent on this rather than on healthcare, and so on and so forth). Other take on the issue.

The Polynomial: now in (stereographic) 3D

2010-01-01T16:43:00.014Z

New update
Main highlights: 3D stereographic support: anaglyph and interlaced&checkerboard (some 3D hdtv's , Zalman TRIMON, etc).

The anaglyph mode requires cheap red/cyan glasses. You may want to use 'desaturate' slider in Visuals panel to make it work better for strongly coloured arenas.

The 'H stripes' mode put left and right images into even/odd rows of pixels. This works with some 3D displays such as Zalman TRIMON and various 3D HDTVs. It could also work with some shutter glasses system which use interlaced video signal (when each frame is sent as odd rows then even rows, and glasses flip so that those go to different eyes).
'V stripes' is analogous but uses vertical stripes. It could work with such thing and various commercial 3d displays that use lenticular lenses, as well as polarizing displays like zalman's but using vertical stripes.
'Checkerboard' uses checkerboard pattern, for this kind of thing (some 3D HDTVs do actually use checkerboard format).

You will need to tune the Span and Shift sliders for best effect, and maybe toggle the "swap sides" button if your glasses are other way around.

Todo: support for opengl stereo left and right framebuffer mode (probably works only with nvidia quadro cards though. I can't initialize opengl context in stereo mode on my pc at all, with geforce 9800 GT :/ ), and support for left image on one display and right image on other display.

Other good stuff: Changeable key bindings and various bugfixes.

Stuff that does not quite work yet but is coming: Multiplayer. For now, just ignore the 'devel' options tab.

microsoft got patent-trolled.

2009-12-27T13:58:00.014Z

This is just insane. A Linux zealot I may be, but I feel for Microsoft in this case.
Patent law was intended to prevent a company from duplicating a better mousetrap without anyhow paying for the invention of that mousetrap. Patent law intends to prevent companies from ripping off the inventor. It is fairly certain in this case that Microsoft has paid engineers to develop a solution, which they did, without using anything whatsoever from i4i. Most likely before i4i showed up demanding the money, neither Microsoft nor their engineers have ever heard of i4i and their 'patent'. The patent covers storing text separately from its layout data. This is so trivial that any qualified software engineer would come up with it quicker than it'd take for him to read patent itself.
Programmers and software engineers are specifically selected&trained to be able to immediately 'invent' simple things on demand. Someone who can't immediately 'invent' this on spot wouldn't be working at Microsoft as software engineer.

Patent law is here to compensate inventors for their ingenuity - for creation of nontrivial things that wouldn't have existed for a while if not for the inventor. Patent law was never intended to let the 'first' expert who got a specific problem and straightforwardly solved it forbid others from independently solving this problem in the most natural and straightforward way imaginable.

The issue is that even the simplest solution could be presented as to appear very profound and mysterious to the totally clueless - just throw in a couple meaningless diagrams and other idiocies, and you get very nontrivial looking nonsense (see that patent, hiding triviality behind verbosity).
It is not understood by a court just how straightforward and retarded the patent is. The increased specialization results in perfect ignorance. It's perfectly equivalent to having 3 years old children for judge and jury - 3 years olds aren't stupid, but they do not know anything, they are not qualified to make any decisions on such case - and neither are adults whom do not understand the topic any better. Back in the day when patent law was introduced, the specialization was not so extreme as to prevent sensible trials; judge and jury could see if a patent is covering something totally straightforward.

On topic of Linux immunity

2009-12-24T13:17:00.003Z

It's actually quite easy to write malware for Linux, no harder than for Windows anyway (and 'not running as root' wont save you). Fortunately, whatever the reason, very few linux viruses get written in first place; maybe the would be virus writers productively contribute to open source software instead.

More on antiviruses.

2009-12-23T16:13:00.018Z

Just look at this. They claim there's 15,000 new virus definitions each day. For windows. How comes there's less than 1 new virus per day on other systems, which have only maybe 10x smaller marketshare? How come open source antivirus software has orders of magnitude fewer new definitions per day yet is fairly effective? The world is not so huge for such a number of new viruses a day anyway. How the hell are they counting, what are they counting as distinct viruses? Server side polymorphics? If a clever virus makes new variation every time, specific definitions aren't useful, you need a clever solution that lets the virus run but catches it when it tries to replicate.
My best guess is that this number is not even a count, it's simply a number that they figure is the optimal number to display in the software and write in their releases for the purpose of maximization of their profits and for advertising of their brand new "whitelisting" approach which ain't gonna protect anyone but would probably generate a lot of profit for antivirus companies (say, I launch a new software product, how it's going to get whitelisted if people aren't running it because its not whitelisted? The typical solution to a chicken and egg problem is that you have to buy a chicken. Or an egg, plus incubator. Meaning if there's whitelisting, developers have to pay for certifications).

In my opinion, antivirus is a broken solution to a wrong problem. If you run non-trustworthy code - such as pirated software, keygens for pirated software, various "toolbars", etc. or if you run email attachment, no antivirus can protect your (windows) pc - it'll eventually be infected. If you have insecure network services, antivirus won't protect you - but a security update to a service could. If you keep everything up to date and you don't run non-trustworthy code, then you're as safe without antivirus. A general security tool which watches for changes in files could be quite useful. A specific blacklist is of little use - it cannot protect even from variations of old viruses. A whitelist is just a nuisance. Antivirus software is written in such a way as to maximize profits of antivirus companies, not as to minimize threats; virus signature lists are far superior for profit generation than general solutions; it is far better to autorun files from usb sticks and then sell antivirus software than to forbid autorun for writable or all media. Microsoft's response of tightening OS security is the only hope for Windows world.

RIP Amarok 1.4

2009-12-22T17:29:00.005Z

Amarok 1.4.10 no longer works for me under mandriva (installed from old repository, into /opt/kde3 folder)... it simply doesn't scan collection.

Meanwhile, Amarok 2 is still completely unusable, even though you can get rid of the "context". It's just insane. Can't resize playlist to take up all the remaining space, cant drag-resize columns in lists, and so on (resizing columns with a slider, who the hell came up with this?! That's outright insane. Anyone with a sense would fix the list control to get drag-resizing of columns to work again rather than make slider dialog for that).
I'm switching to Exaile for final, i think. I promised to fix some bugs in it, then left 'cause i had no time... gonna get on it

Are antivirus companies the main driving force behind virus writing?

2009-12-19T15:03:00.036Z

I've always wondered why there is so many Windows viruses. Especially when I clean up friend's PC from malware. The number is on the order of hundreds thousands. An immense number of code lines. Awful lot of human effort. And when you think about it, the world is not so huge place. Naturally, some people suspect that some antivirus companies are somehow funding virus development, given that antivirus companies are the primary benefactors of virus development. This proposition, naturally, is commonly put down as an urban myth (no matter what).

I've figured some indirect but convincing evidence in favor of this 'conspiracy theory'. There's just far too many windows viruses and worms nowadays which replicate but do absolutely nothing besides slowing down the computer and saturating internet etc (so that antivirus speeds up the computer). Somehow, those viruses are the majority - viruses which actually do something like DDOSing a website, stealing credit card numbers, doing some evil as botnet, inserting obscenities into documents, and so on, are the minority - those worms are unusual, you read about them in the news. Even the botnets nowadays just sit doing nothing (Like conficker. A huge scare. It just penetrated into a lot of government facilities which it should not be able to penetrate into, which was quite seriously scary, and then did pretty much nothing except bringing billions into antivirus businesses).

This is very strange. That doesn't even look like vandalism or crime. Graffiti artists want their drawing to be seen; political vandals want to make damage to public property; criminals steal public property for scrap metal; all the IRL vandalism appears motivated, even if motivation is bizarre. There's always some driving force.
If you look at old dos (pre-windows) malware, nearly every virus did some original mischief - falling letters, animations and logos, inserted obscenities into the documents, wiped out hard drives, tried to say obscenities from PC speaker, messed with mouse cursor, and so on. Almost every 'harmless' virus did at least show a message about itself. There was some self expression, not unlike graffiti. You would expect most modern viruses to set something like goatse or 2girls1cup as desktop background, to scream from the speakers, to display political messages, to secretly record videos with webcam and upload those to youtube (particularly effective if combined with display of something nasty), and so on, a zillion possibilities. Indeed, that's what hackers do when they deface a popular website. But if you look at modern viruses, only a small fraction tries to do mischief or actually commit a crime. Majority seem to do nothing except supporting the antivirus manufacturers. There's almost no mischief and no graffiti. The viruses look like someone's boring daily job. Not like bored teens trolling. Okay, some nasty password stealers and such, those MAY be some criminal's daily boring job, but why harmless replicators don't even rickroll the user? (edit: actually there's a virus which rickrolls the users. It's on iphone!)

It seems to me that there is only one explanation: Development of windows viruses is nowadays heavily funded by antivirus companies - this at once explains why majority of viruses do nothing except replicating and generating scare, why amusing (when it's not your pc) virus pranks became rather uncommon, why there's very few Linux worms (mostly backdoors), and how it comes that antivirus companies 'detect' so many obscure viruses (which you would think user wouldn't notice) every day while being unable to respond promptly to real threats (which are extremely noticeable).

Antivirus company speakpeople would say that this is analogous to suspecting tire manufacturer of paying kids to knife the holes in tires. Well, firstly, that's an intentionally deceptive analogy. As matter of fact nobody's knifing tires in such a number as to sustain tire manufacturers; furthermore paying kids to knife the tires would've been far more dangerous and expensive, you can't outsource this to china or safely delegate it. That is why nobody suspects tire manufacturers, not blind trust that a big company would never commit a crime. They're making their profits by natural tire wear. Had they been making most of their profits from the tire slashing incidents, from unmotivated malice, then they would, in fact, be suspect (as the primary benefactors from the crime). The antivirus industry is more similar to heir inheriting billions from the rich uncle, who was killed by a car in hit-and-run near his house. Make that killed by a sniper shot - supposedly unmotivated sniper shot.

Secondly, as matter of fact, a lot of antivirus software is recognized to be fake - and the big brand antiviruses use pretty much same unethical tactics (popups telling you to upgrade, scaring you with numbers like '27 threats detected', reporting stuff like browser cookie files as threats, and so on) to generate revenue.

On the topic of trustworthiness of 'good guys'...
Putting aside small brand scareware, even the major 'antivirus' companies such as McAfee and Norton Antivirus engage in nearly fraudulent overcharging of credit cards of their customers (not outright illegal, but extremely close). If you did un-subscribe from Mc A Fee, they reportedly keep charging you the fee for 3 more months.
I certainly wouldn't trust such companies so much as to hold them above suspicion of virus development. There's certainly a plenty of ways to do this quite safely; e.g. a company could outsource virus identification to a separate company in a third world country, and this company in turn could hire a sweatshop of people and give 'em instructions vague enough that they could write the viruses in first place. Should this get discovered, the proxy gets blamed and liquidated, the sweatshop stays in place and keeps working (under different name). People whom were getting suckered into paying for antivirus still are getting suckered into paying for antivirus. People with a clue are 'outraged' but they would never have bought antivirus in first place.

I myself (I'm a Linux user) would not care about windows viruses and associated scareware at all if not for impact on the honest software developers. False positive rates of antivirus software are very high - the primary reason, i suppose, is that high false positives rate leads to increase in profits for antivirus companies - typical user tend to think that antivirus which found a virus is superior to antivirus which didn't find a virus. It appears as if some random short strings - which have nothing to do with any virus functionality itself and which appear in random software as much as in viruses - are consistently recognized as 'viruses' by design, resulting in credible virus scare for the customer. This is quite annoying for developers.

Ted Chiang's What's Expected Of Us

2009-12-06T20:51:00.008Z

I strongly recommend to read this brilliant story (if you haven't read it before).

Some minor commentary. Consider the Free Will Device, put next to the predictor. Free Will Device is actually entirely deterministic, and doesn't have any free will of its own. It consist of photocell which watches the LED on predictor, timer, which gets reset to 0 every time light hits photocell, and actuator which pushes the button when timer reaches 2 seconds. If predictor blinks within those 2 seconds, there won't be a button press, and if predictor doesn't blink, there will be a button press. That's fairly deterministic and if you had been given a box and told that it works as Predictor in this story, you're bound to try doing exactly this - setting your mind to press the button if LED was dark for several seconds, to check if it really works.
The laws of universe in this story would forbid you to press Predictor button 2 seconds after the start of experiment or flash of LED (rather than 1 second) but not forbid you to take egg out after 3 or 5 minutes of cooking depending on your decision whenever you want it hard boiled. That's not mere determinism; that would require some special malice on part of the universe, forbidding you to set your mind to make even a deterministic, predictable decision.

My view on 'crowdsourcing'.

2009-12-01T22:54:00.015Z

Crowdsourcing is IMO much similar to common scam. Fraudsters are crowdsourcing they money. They make a business proposition which almost nobody would accept - to a large group of people. Very small percentage of whom make a decision mistake - i.e. get conned.
Same goes for most crowdsourcing. A crowdsourcer is making a business proposition - typically to write some software or make some design with non-guaranteed AND small pay - which almost nobody would accept (not even mythical people from 'third world'. Don't forget that both computer and internet connection are more expensive in developing countries). But with 'crowd' of hundreds thousands passing by, it is guaranteed that a few make decision mistake and accept. Bottom line is, both scammers and 'crowdsourcers' are profiting from rare psychological conditions and decision mistakes in a huge group of people.

Some crowdsourcing-like businesses could be different however. Innocentive, for example, where its mostly industrial chemistry, not programming, and rewards are quite big, good for few weeks work at $100+ per hour. Some of those problems might be nice for industrial chemist with relevant obscure expertise who can solve it quickly and win with no competition. I would call that expert sourcing; the industrial chemistry problems are of different league than programming and software design entirely and the spec work approach makes lot of sense when you really don't know if the problem is even solvable - and makes no sense what so ever if its mere matter of spending time. (I'm no chemist though sometimes I wish I were doing chemistry or physics for living)

Chicken feather hydrogen storage.

2009-11-30T12:11:00.003Z

If this actually works, it is totally freaking awesome. Many fancy carbon structures can be formed by charring various organic wastes... even those that we don't know how to manufacture, e.g. fractal carbon structures.
Someone should try various bio materials for supercapacitors, in particular different kinds of charcoal.

Horrible Hashes

2009-11-28T08:45:00.025Z

I've noticed something exceptionally stupid:
djb2 hash function.
http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~oz/hash.html
unsigned long
hash(unsigned char *str)
{
unsigned long hash = 5381;
int c;

while (c = *str++)
hash = ((hash << 5) + hash) + c; /* hash * 33 + c */

return hash;
}
and more popular version which has
hash = ((hash << 5) + hash) ^ c;
(The latter one is more prevalent. There was a topcoder match about finding collisions in latter one.)

The function itself is not all that stupid.

What's stupid is that if you search for djb2 on google, you see all sorts of people 'personally recommending' it as best and fastest simple hash, people trying to explain why it is good (when the answer is: it is NOT good), people wondering why 5381 is better (it's not), people tracking the history of this "excellent" function, naive people whom trust this sort of advice using it in various software (ruby's hash tables?), etc. All in all people presuming that 5381 and 33 got some special significance and are much better than e.g. 0 and 31.

What is so stupid about it? For starters, even though the output of this function is 32 bits, not even for the 2 char ASCII strings do you have a guarantee for lack of collisions. In fact "SV" collides with "Pt", and "g5" collides with "as" [in the second version that uses xor], just to name two examples out of hundreds. Each character except first provides only about 5 bits because that's how much you get out with *33. That's not good. That's complete crap. From a 32-bit hash, you can expect to get no collisions at all between 2 character strings, especially restricted to lowercase or uppercase alphanumeric. Most primes work no worse; you can use 257 and then your function at least will not collide on 2-character strings (it will still be crap though, especially if you use parts of hash; this doesn't need to be a prime, only needs to be odd and you ought to run code to select best for hashing some real data like list of all file names if you want a good number, not look on the internet and judge by people's reputation). Furthermore, there are a lot of collisions between strings that differ by 2 characters, because 2 consecutive characters can be altered to keep same 'hash'. Got to give some credit though. In some very limited original usage (hash table of specific size, with specific key statistics, e.g. English words), which I do not know, and which you are highly unlikely to replicate, it may have been good. Or actually, not good. Merely not too bad.

What is the significance of 5381 ? Apart from low 8 bits of 5381*33 (in the variation which has xor instead of add), it is pretty much totally irrelevant to collision resistance, it is just multiplied by 33ⁿ and added in. This function is pretty much as crap with start value of 5381 as with start value of 42 or 100 or 12345 - the only difference is that unexplained 5381 hints at some deep wisdom whereas 12345 does not.
Now the structure. The new version of that hash function has multiply and xor. This function sucks as much with xor as it does with addition, but with xor it looks better and harder to analyze than with addition.

Moral of the story:
Do not trust magical looking code. 99.9% of magical looking code out there is utter shit, only obfuscated enough that you can't immediately recognize that it is shit, and most of the time 'smart' looking constants are also really shitty choices or are at best random choices (at the VERY best, magical constants could have been selected for some very particular case which you know nothing about, by a method which you know nothing about, and are still most likely than not bad for whatever you want to do).
Do not trust internet advice or consensus either. Keep in mind that majority of acclaimed programming experts are expert only on one thing: persistent bullshitting to obtain 'expert' status and sell some books - they're totally mediocre programmers and software engineers (doesn't apply in this case 'cause qmail seems kind of good, but nonetheless).
Especially the old usenet celebrities. Not even if they have a wiki page about themselves, not even those whom somehow got PhD. Also, keep in mind that majority of people in 'consensus' are simply repeating each other, like parrots, and haven't devoted much brain time to thinking about the question.

This is why science does not and cannot function by reference to authority, but only by reference to argument, to actual reasons, and why if no reasons are given you shouldn't assume that any exist.

edit: also, don't even get me started on "fast". If you want fast, you'd better do 4 chars at once, on 32-bit machine.

edit: clarified on the version with + and version with ^, even though those have very similar properties.

What's with all those design concepts?!

2009-11-26T00:14:00.011Z

What's with all the infestation of internet with "green" design concepts that cannot work but win awards?
I mean designs such as
The amazing plaane of the future . (With a freaking wind turbine on the tail! You use wind turbine to power the engines with the energy of motion of airplane through air!)
Gravity lamp (debunked)
mp3 player powered by spinning finger in a hole.

The mp3 player one has not been debunked properly yet, but it is very similar to this lamp in that it utilizes common lack of intuitive relation of mechanical to electrical to sonic or light power.
Assuming hundred percent efficiency, headphones consume 20 milliwatts at max power, or 1.2 Joules per minute. 1 Joule is about the energy of 1kg lifted to height 10 centimeters. Spinning a finger in a hole is about the least ergonomic way to generate power; the smallest possible leverage in the least convenient way (and you can't spin player around the finger 'cause of headphone cable). Lifting 1kg to weight 10cm every minute by spinning finger in the hole is obviously out of question, unless you're doing it constantly. (Furthermore, the efficiency of mp3 player is far below 100% due to the power consumed by mp3 decoder).

All in all, a hand powered mp3 player, lamp, or other 'low power' appliance will need occasional but fairly vigorous spinning of a crank, squeezing, or vigorous shaking (e.g. during exercise). It would of course be very cool to power mp3 player by occasional turn of a finger, absolutely amazing in fact because such player would have to include a perpetual motion device, that's why this sort of stuff seems cool and amazing.

And while you're at it, forget about powering laptop by opening a lid or with power of keypresses - it is possible but such laptop a: won't have backlight, b: won't run any modern applications (think of having 1..10 mhz cpu , with the computational power of pc from 20 years ago), and c: but it would work for months on regular battery and could recharge by solar, rendering the whole keystroke power issue nill because solar panel is going to take less space.

On topic of energy saving measures, I limit ThePolynomial's fps to your display's refresh rate by default; this OpenGL feature doesn't seem to be supported on ATI under Windows (according to user reports, didn't test myself), which if true is really downright despicable behavior on AMD's part (they probably do it because of the few gamers whom would think ATI having 1000 fps and NVidia having 70 fps in games that syncs to refresh by default would make ATI look better, or some other silly marketing related reason for not implementing refresh syncing).

Multiplayer progress.

2009-11-25T00:49:00.004Z

I've been working on multiplayer for my game for past few weeks, hence the gap in updates. Turns out good multiplayer is kind of difficult, and I'm somewhat behind my schedule, but expect updates soon.

TopCoder: lying again.

2009-11-15T11:43:00.034Z

background: TopCoder is a programing spec work business (spec work is called "crowdsourcing" nowadays). They also run some regular programming competitions (which are not work for hire), sometimes with okay problems, sometimes with so-so problems, sometimes with problems that 1/3 of participants can solve exactly. I competed there a little once in a while purely for self evaluation purposes - they do somehow have a big community, and there are a few good programmers on top to compete with.

Anyways, where was I... yes, TopCoder lying in their press releases.
It's interesting how a company can't learn a lesson that lying in public releases is not always a great idea. A while ago, they had hired some girl in china - she may have been a good choice for the job - I've no information about this - and then lied a shitton about her qualifications and achievements [see original TC's press release which was then echoed by girl's university] resulting in massive PR success followed by even more massive PR fail in the china, totally ruining girl's reputation. The lying, for a public release, was not very outstanding - just massive exaggerations, pretty standard for small company's public release, a small company has to look big, but it did ruin the girl's reputation 'cause of cultural misunderstanding, its not everywhere customary for a company to exaggerate how great their new hire is. On darker side, I bet they got her to sign their "affidavit" beforehand which explicitly forbids you from suing TopCoder for damages arising from this sort of misrepresentation of you. [you need to sign this at notary if you participate in competition and get a prize; that's quite serious. I won a prize at TopCoder once and asked for legal advice on their affidavit, a friend told me of that girl's story, which I remembered 'cause its really scary how individual could get chewed up by gears of commerce and spit out]

Recently, there had been a "NASA-TopCoder" contest with '25 000 $ in prizes'. It seemed a little strange.

The NASA-TopCoder Challenge will be the first time the TopCoder community of more than 220,000 software enthusiasts is utilized by the world's leading aerospace organization. Long-term human space missions such as those being planned for Mars, will require higher levels of pre-planning and more analysis of available data than ever before. Biometric modeling and simulation programs are algorithmically-intensive as flight surgeons explore and evaluate every possible medical scenario that might occur on long-term missions. In this experiment, competitors will develop algorithms to help NASA's flight surgeons make decisions involved with optimizing the contents of the medical supplies kit that may one day be carried onboard long-term space missions. The submissions will be compared with the results of an existing computer model that has simulated the expected medical occurrences and outcomes for various mission scenarios.

Under closer examination (I registered for the contest because I was rather curious and because invitation email didn't quite made it clear who funded the experiment), it turned out that it indeed was a business research experiment (25000$ from research grant from some business university were used to run 24 tiny contests in parallel for some sort of business research). Needless to say, there were no NASA representatives on contest forum answering the questions about problem or asking questions about solutions [correct me if any did show up since I lost the interest]. Nothing of this sort. Typical programming competition, with a typical competition problem that has only superficial resemblance to real requirements for real software. Very simple model - much simpler than your 'model' when you visit pharmacy and decide what to buy. In real life if you get a splinter under your skin, you will need tweezers to remove it. Then you can use hydrogen peroxide or you can use iodine, or other antiseptic, and if you don't treat the cut with antiseptic you might need to use topical antibiotic later to treat inflammation. That is not simulated in contest - the supplies are not ever interchangeable and medical conditions are not dependent on prior conditions and treatment (worse than that, them are totally statistically independent from prior conditions). It's absurd to think that contents of medical kit for a Mars mission would be based on such simplistic assumptions, so much more simplistic than the ones you'd make when you visit pharmacy. Yet participants would believe it because it's happier to believe you contribute something to space exploration.

Furthermore, interestingly enough, in the "community of more than 220,000 software enthusiasts", only about 1700 registered and only 400 participated in the contest.

As NASA source indicates, the truth boils down to this:

The competition originated when professor Karim R. Lakhani of Harvard Business School and professor Kevin Boudreau of London Business School invited NASA to provide a compelling technical challenge to monitor and analyze the results from an open innovation management perspective. Their research project is funded by grants from the London Business School M-Lab and the Harvard Business School.

, and naturally "topcoder asks for and gets a simple contest-style problem from NASA for use in their business experiment" is a whole bit less impressive than "NASA employs topcoder to solve something for human spaceflight".

Version 00h

2009-11-10T18:15:00.001Z

Minor changes for more compatibility with various Linux distros, should work on ubuntu karmic now.

Cutting a disk from aluminium...

2009-11-08T17:01:00.003Z

So, I need to cut a disk from aluminium plate...

Various parts: pieces from a wooden box, motor and gears from canon i250 printer which I picked up for parts other day, outdoors plastic chair, transformer from very old tv for 7v power (printer's powersupply was missing), a paperclip, piece of file, drill bit.

It features a very advanced and hi tech design, with automatic pressure adjustment (when this thing jams, pressure on cutter decreases 'cause of pull on that rope). It's going to take a long while to cut through tho, motor isn't very powerful, but as long as I'm not spinning this by hand, I don't mind.

Side idea: with 3 old printers, you can make a neat CNC machine or even reprap machine. You'll only need to cut a thread onto the paper feeding rod, and use it to move the table. There's even a very precise position encoder here. If I find 2 more broken printers, I might make this.

Another update.

2009-10-22T23:37:00.003+01:00

Version 00g . I forgot to package some latest Linux libraries with 00f, which I had installed but which didn't make it into stable versions of most distros yet (also compiler update related). Thanks for the reporting!
In progress: I did raise requirements to GLSL 1.2 a while back - mostly to detect cards which really *cannot* run the game - and turns out some cards which can run polynomial do not have GLSL 1.2 . I'll try to make some fallback.

Now I only need some reports from Mac users ;-) .

Bugfix update.

2009-10-21T19:43:00.003+01:00

Fixed 00f version bug, should work fine now.

technical: I found that GCC 4.3.3 has same problem except it crashes much less often, so I workarounded the issue by not using exceptions. From what I can see, thread local storage (which doesn't work in mingw) is used to store jump address for setjmp and longjmp.

mingw gcc 4.4.0 fails hard

2009-10-21T17:45:00.003+01:00

As i just found out, gcc 4.4.0 for windows (mingw) really doesn't like threads. A well tested piece of code in The Polynomial which worked with gcc 4.3.3 no longer works with gcc 4.4.0 , presumably due to this bug . I use threading for interactive editing and for in-progress display of level fractal as it is being generated. Apparently, exception handling is not threadsafe in mingw/gcc 4.4.0 even with -mthreads. End result is, The Polynomial crashes when switching levels.
Thanks for reporting the crashes, I'm reverting to gcc 4.3.3 for now, the fix will be released soon.

Polynomial Update (00f).

2009-10-21T13:45:00.003+01:00

Update. A lot of extra functionality:

Music
Lua scripting for levels (not used for anything really impressive yet, but stay tuned)
Mostly different sounds (tell me if you like them or not)
Improved sound sliders (exponential rather than linear)
User interface improvements. Automatically toggles to editor mode when you select editor panel. Instant view when you toggle levels.
Lot of bugfixes.
Maybe some new bugs (report them!)

The music is here mostly for test. It's being worked on.

Neuroscience and the law.

2009-10-16T17:13:00.015+01:00

Just came across some rather interesting legal discussion about neuroscience and laws and responsibility and free will and brain disorders:
http://www.bioethics.gov/transcripts/sep04/session1.html

I think the 'problem' discussed - the collision between law and science, neuroscience in particular - is entirely specific to punitive justice and to religion disguising itself as atheism and reason.
Just look at the article. Typical punitive approach: pondering religious and philosophical questions like what punishment Herbert Weinstein deserves for killing his wife in the heat of argument while having a freaking cyst in the brain that he wasn't aware of - and even whenever him without the cyst should be kept responsible for actions of him with cyst. I'll say it right now I've no freaking clue what punishment he "deserves" and see no reason why such questions should even be considered. Idea of "deserving" itself is a root cause of most homicide - whereby murderer suddenly decides that victim "deserves" to die. There's nothing rational or logical about it.

On other hand, if you consider the laws as means to protection of people, all the questions which come up are factual rather than metaphysical, and the law perfectly integrates with modern science and technology. You need to consider what action would be best for everyone. The questions are whenever he's dangerous after treatment of cyst (which he also would be if cyst was irrelevant to the murder), that's neuroscience question. Whenever he has to be locked up anyway for sake of deterrence (probably not because its inconceivable that cyst in brain would be abused as common excuse), that's also a rational question, effectiveness of deterrence could be studied with statistical methods.

Sidenote:
I were actually searching for articles about brain parasites (This article isn't really relevant to parasites). I find brain parasites which alter behaviour of the host - and especially the evolution - very fascinating (in the 'eww' way). I even blogged about 'em before.

Taking claims at face value, killing someone because of cyst in your brain, that sounds as horrible as becoming a zombie (and very plausible if cyst is substantially big and located in critical regions responsible for self control). Surely that's a lot of punishment in itself. Imagine your dog got infected with rabies, acute phase, too late for vaccination. You'll have to kill the dog due to lack of treatment, but you'd still be sorry and you'd rather treat the dog if possible.
Human nervous system differs a lot from dog's, so humans don't go on biting others when infected with rabies, because rabies is not evolved enough with humans. Yet, its not impossible in principle for a virus or other parasite to have that kind of result on humans.

More on hormesis.

2009-09-29T12:54:00.001+01:00

A great article on the topic. Basically, the same argument.

The lowest dose of ionizing radiation is one nuclear track through one cell. You can't have a fraction of a dose of that sort. Either a track goes through the nucleus and affects it, or it doesn't.

Radiation hormesis: contradicts all we know about evolution, can be shown false with elementary physics and math.

2009-09-21T19:22:00.037+01:00

See Radiation hormesis. This thing is on the rise (just like intelligent design), with potentially grave direct consequences if some nuclear regulatory body accepts this 'theory' and relaxes nuclear pollution standards - and similarly grave consequences if nuclear power opponents pick up the idea and use it their way, hints at which you can see in this wiki article ("In all likelihood, recognizing that low dose effects can't be predicted from high dose experiments would force a strengthening of public health standards, not their weakening, as hormesis proponents would argue.").

Putting aside that hormesis is just a new name for old bullshit (see quack medicines of early 20th century. Radium toothpaste, uranium ore teapots, you name it), there's outline of what is fundamentally wrong with "hormesis theory":

Firstly, according to the understanding of evolution, a wholly beneficial "defense response" does not need to be switched off in absence of ionizing radiation. Even more, the 'switch', even if present, very quickly goes away if it is not needed. For real biological examples of this see permanent tan in blacks (tan doesn't switch off in absence of light, because in tropics you always need tan), lactose tolerance in whites (lactose production doesn't switch off in adulthood). Those are just 2 most obvious examples, which are also examples of very quick evolution that happened recently in the history of homo sapiens. I'm sure there's a lot of more obscure examples in animals; I am not really a biologist.
(It's interesting that hormesis proponents love to refer to tan as example of defense response triggered by radiation. Well, used to. Hopefully, with election of Obama, whites will stop defining 'human' as something which produces melanin mostly in response to sunlight)

Secondly, humans today are exposed to about same level of radiation as in the past - or higher because of sealed homes and radon (in case you want to talk about cavemen, don't bother. Caves were never the primarily habitat of humans, nor are habitable caves well sealed. Bones are found in caves so much because bones preserve in caves a lot better than outside caves).

Thirdly, it wouldn't be a problem for living organisms to evolve to concentrate naturally radioactive elements, had those been so beneficial. Seriously, there's enough naturally radioactive elements around. Better yet, cells are producing some free radicals all by themselves without any ionizing radiation.

But okay, let's just follow less sophisticated of radiation hormesis proponents and speculate that radiation in small doses produces some chemicals that are required for some cell metabolism.
After all, cellular machinery being complex it seems very reasonable that cell's response to radiation would be nonlinear... or does it? A single cell wouldn't make good particle counter... it is, after all, very tiny, and rarely gets hit by ionizing particle or gamma ray photon. How bad of a Geiger counter a cell would be, you might ask? Turns out cell sized Geiger counter would be far worse than I would have thought.

Did you know that you have on order of hundreds times more cells in your body than you absorb ionizing particles in a year, at background radiation level? I didn't know, but fortunately it is quite easy and straightforward to calculate number of particles (of specific type) that your body absorbs when you get specific dose.
From the definition of Sievert, the general formula for number of particles for given dose is:
Number of particles = (Dose in Sievert / Q factor) * body mass / kinetic energy per particle
Background dose is 2.4E-3 Sievert per year. (http://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/gareport.pdf)
Let's take body mass as 80kg.
For 1MeV soft gamma ray photons (Q=1), the max number is:
N = 2.4E-3 J/kg * 80 kg /(1E6 electron volt) = 1.2E12
About hundredth of number of cells in your body, which is estimated as 1E14
Let's redo the calculation for Radon's alpha particles, of which you need much smaller number for same 'dose':
N = (2.4E-3/20 J/kg) *80kg / 6E6 electron volt = 1E10
That's some ten thousands times fewer alpha particles than there are cells in your body.
The cells which suffer impacts to the cell nucleus are even smaller percentage.
Alpha particles usually stop within a few cells. Gamma photons ionize when they get scattered, meaning that gamma photon doesn't just rip through your body ionizing stuff on its path, but delivers focal damage at few spots. The bottom line is, individual cell is very rarely affected by background radiation at all.

I hope it should be fairly obvious that there couldn't be any 'nonlinear' response of individual cell to such rather low probability of it getting struck by gamma or alpha particle during its lifetime. It either gets struck and has response, or it does not, and has no response. Probability is by definition linear. Only at the doses approaching 1 Sievert, a significant portion of your cells would be struck by ionizing particles [that's well in the 'glow in the dark' territory. Human's lethal dose is 3..5 Sievert], and cells could start actually responding to count of events per time. (It is indeed well documented that cells do exhibit defene response at doses approaching 1 Sievert. The response (cell division arrest) is in no way generally beneficial (if your cells stop dividing, you'll die when your existing cells wear out), but you might survive otherwise lethal dose if cells are not dividing)

Conclusions: The linear no threshold model is based upon understanding that cells respond to ionizing radiation in probabilistic way; the linearity does not come from any simplified assumption about organism or cellular machinery, but rather from how statistics and probabilities work. When you increase dose ten times over background, you do not increase dose to any cells by ten times. You're increasing the very small population of cells which suffer an ionization event in the nucleus, ten times, thus increasing ten times the population of cells that can turn cancerous. (actually, worse than that. You're increasing hundred times the population of cells which suffer two ionization events, and thousand times population which suffers triple ionization event. Quadratic or cubic dose response effect has not been observed, though. There's a lot of other sources of DNA damage besides radiation)

But what's about multiple cells, you might ask? Immune system and whatnot? Well, this is pretty much covered by evolutionary objection above. Try imagine evolved organism that would somehow measure level of radiation by monitoring a lot of cells, just to handicap itself when the level of radiation is at or below natural background - and 'unhandicap' itself on the level of say 10x natural background (which is still very low and not life threatening, but is also very unusual in nature).
Makes no sense whatsoever. That's no strawman; that's what it takes for organism to exhibit effect of radiation hormesis. Barring any possibility of direct beneficial effect, the 'beneficial response' to a stimulus is equivalent to detrimental handicap in absence of stimulus.

Furthermore, hormesis is just bad science. Studies are fraudulent - consisting of comparisons between populations without control for the age group and smoking. As typical in scientific fraud, research conclusions focus entirely on the non-scientific aspects such as safety policies, entirely ignoring the scientific implications (if the response is not linear, then you have to throw entire concept of dose out of the window. It is only the linear no threshold response model under which all kinds of ionizing radiation are equivalent (up to the scaling factor)). To put it very bluntly, there's all reasons to think that hormesis proponents are not merely mistaken, but are actively lying. A genuinely mistaken scientist explores the scientific consequences of his erroneous research. A fraudster, on other hand, focuses solely on promoting the policy changes which he wants to enact through his fraud, and shies away from the scientific implications of his research; for the science is interlinked, and scientific implications of fraudulent research would contradict a lot of other, seemingly unrelated experiments and knowledge.

Tiny Linux update.

2009-08-26T16:31:00.005+01:00

The 00e version is same 00d from 15th august, except the Linux package now includes latest libstdc++.so.6 so that it can work on older distros which do not have compatible version of this library. Thanks to users for reporting the issue.

Polynomial update.

2009-08-15T14:00:00.003+01:00

Minor middle of the month update.

Gameplay: now the screen "glitches" in the old-tv way when you're being hit while having low health (not just when dead). Now you'll know when to run for your life. The backstory is that electromagnetic shield is down, and enemy shots are actually hitting your ship, causing your onboard sensors and computer to glitch.
The "insane" gameplay is more insane now (it is actually really hard to get score above 1000 on insane).

Bugfixes: fixed some crashes on old graphics cards.

System, all platforms: Migrated from ALUT to ALURE, added ogg loader libraries (but not music yet).

OS X platform: Now includes latest OpenAL version in the bundle, all because Apple's software OpenAL is crashing randomly in mixer thread.

Bug in download page fixed.

2009-08-09T22:19:00.003+01:00

Downloading of old version (for paid customers) sometimes served previously downloaded version (=latest) instead of requested version because of broken caching. Fixed and tested.

Drake's equation

2009-08-03T09:09:00.022+01:00

I think that one's given far too much credit.
reference
Parameters in it just do not correspond to any real, measurable quantities, and there's far too many assumptions.

Reality is very complicated. There is a wide variety of stars, some of them more variable than others (and thus more of hazard to life), with a range of lifetimes. There's wide variety of planetary systems possible. Some systems may be slow to develop intelligent life and may require long-lived, old stars - and some systems may develop intelligent life relatively quickly.
It could be that unusually large moon is a requirement - Earth got one, and we do not even know if irregularity of combination of moon&sun tides is absolutely essential or unimportant. Nor do we know how common are planets with large moons. Most curiously, looking from Earth, moon has almost same disk size as Sun - we don't know if that doesn't matter or is very important to development of culture.
It could be that Jupiter is very important for diverting comets and protecting earth from constant asteroid bombardment - if there was a dinosaur killing sized meteorite every 20 millions years, intelligent life might never have evolved on Earth (that's what Stephen Hawking thinks about it, and it seems quite reasonable). Some stars are poor in heavy elements, and life as we know it requires heavy elements. Position of star within the galaxy may matter a lot.

But, of course, Drake's equation has nothing of that. No, it just has abstract "planets within continuously habitable zone". Err. Our own orbit is not 'continuously habitable' for most animals larger than rat - because of asteroids and comets that intersect it once in a while - look at what happened to dinosaurs, and exact same thing would happen to us, should dino-killing meteorite strike tomorrow. Not to mention that solar variability results in ice ages. Such somewhat hostile but not too hostile environment may be yet another requirement for intelligent life.
It's not hard to imagine a habitable world where survival is too hard for anything big, and nothing intelligent ever evolves. It is not hard to imagine Eden without the apple, a world that is too perfect for life, where apes are never forced off the trees then forced to survive ice age. Would the competition between species compensate, leading to intelligence even on such very hospitable planets? Or would it not? We do not know. Worse yet we don't even know what factors we do not know. All what we know is that a planet with history identical to that of Earth's would result in human society - with no knowledge whatsoever as of how closely similar a planet needs to be to develop something else that also sends radio signals.

There is far more variables in reality than in Drake's equation, and those variables are not merely multiplied together, but are all inter-linked in very nonlinear ways (and its not probabilities that vary, but probability distributions). There could be probability of intelligent life on planets with huge moon, and another, lower probability for planets without huge moon - or it may just take longer for intelligent life to emerge without moon, requiring much older, lighter, earlier star - which may be poorer in heavy elements. There can be varying size moons. And then probability of having a planet with huge moon within habitable zone may depend to mass of star (which is linked to lifetime). You cannot meaningfully dissect that mess into half dozen abstract parameters that are just multiplied together. It's like dissecting a hologram - each piece will still be as complex as whole, unless you get to *really* tiny pieces.