Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in RavenBlack's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Friday, May 3rd, 2013
8:05 pm	Real-world economics in action! Goozex, a video game trading service that's now pretty much defunct, ran like this: a game has a value in 'points'. You can offer a game for its point value, or you can request a game for its point value. When there is both an offer and a request, the two are matched up, the points change hands, and the requester is also charged a "token", which costs a dollar. The seller pays for the shipping to the buyer, and ships the game. Also you can buy points. For a while this model worked pretty well, games traded regularly, people were happy with it. Gradually, the request queues got longer, and there were no dangling offers to be found. And in talking about this, and what could cause it to have collapsed like that, I think I found the answer. And it's kind of interesting. Imagine on a small scale, let's say there are 6 people. One of them buys 5000 points and 5 tokens. Each game costs 1000 points. The other 5 people all have a game they want to trade, so they sell their games to the first person. Now they each have 1000 points and the first person has no points and 5 games. Now in the system is 5000 points worth of demand, and zero supply. The guy who bought the games finishes them, decides to keep one, and sell the others. Now there's 5000 points worth of demand, and 4000 points of supply. The other users buy tokens so they can spend their points, and one of them buys a thousand points too. That one buys two of the games, two of the others buy a game, and two are left with their 1000 points and are in a queue. Now the original user has 4000 points, two users have 1000 points each, and there's no supply again. This sort of trading can go on indefinitely, the point is, the demand never ever goes down - there will always be 6000 points worth of demand, or more if someone buys some points again. Supply can go up if people buy games for money and sell them for points, down when people make their trades, or stay the same when people make trades and then want to resell the game back in again. But anyone who has points won't want to buy games for money and sell them for points - they want to use their points to get their game, obviously, because cash is good for other things but points aren't. Demand can only ever go up, short of people dying with a points balance and no request queue. So it's inevitable, with this design, that the Goozex economy would fail. The prices were fixed, at first, but now they freed them up which has resulted in massive inflation as the prices go up to try to compensate for more demand than supply, but since there is essentially infinite demand, inflation can't fix it - all it does is make people mistrustful of the system so they try to cash out, making the problem even worse. The funny thing is they could have solved this problem at the beginning, if they'd thought it through and realized this would happen - rather than charging a dollar for a trade token, they could have just charged a percentage of the points involved in a trade. That way the demand and supply would both 'soften' when a trade happens, preventing their current situation where there is literally no supply and nobody wants to provide any supply - it doesn't matter how many points you can get for your game if there's nothing you can spend points on. On the other hand, maybe with a points-only system a different problem would arise - people would try to trade in games for more points than they could buy for the same amount of cash, and would refuse to pay cash for points because they would perceive that they could get a better deal. However, this problem would resolve itself - an oversupply of cheap games would reduce their point price (before trades are made since not enough people are buying those games for points) until that game's point value corresponds to the cash value of buying that many points. So in the end there would be no advantage to trading for points rather than buying them, unless you were trading games people actually want, in which case the system is working as intended! There might be a problem persuading people that buying points is ever a good idea though, when they could just buy the game they want in the first place for the same amount of money. Tokens are a clever way of sidestepping that psychological issue. Alternatively, if the point value (including the transaction 'tax') is always slightly lower than the cash value of the game, then it would make sense to buy points if you don't have any, while still making sense to trade games in. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 17th, 2013
5:24 pm	I just noticed a really obviously stupid thing about operating system design, mostly Windows but partly true in others as well. There's the concept of the "administrator account", that enables installing software, to prevent things from secretly installing malicious software. But here's the problem - every time we intentionally install something, we give someone's arbitrary program the permission to run as an administrator. So basically every piece of software we ever use, at the very first point in its life cycle has administrator privilege. At that point, what good is that barrier even doing? I suppose it's useful for preventing buffer overflows and things from giving system-invading access, but those things are a tiny minority of infections - the usual vector is people installing something that has a malicious thing piggybacked on it. That malicious thing now has administrator privileges if it wants them, because it can grant itself them during the install! It would make much more sense to have a single operating-system-owned "installer" program, and only install packages, globs of files with coded installation instructions. There would still be an annoying "are you sure you want to install this?" popup, and there would still be the possibility of installing malicious software that you might run at the user level, but there would only be an "are you sure you want to give an arbitrary thing administrator privileges?" warning if the installation package was specifically requesting that. The installer program could also have a separate warning for "are you sure you want to install a thing that will run at startup / immediately?" which would vastly reduce the risk of malicious software infections, since there isn't a lot malicious software can do if you have to actively elect to run it every time. As an added bonus, this would warn you about Adobe and Sun's auto-updaters being jerks before you installed them, too. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 15th, 2013
2:56 pm	Followup to my Facebook fiasco - I have now got back in by giving it Jessica's phone number. Somehow that is valid confirmation that I am me, while actually valid photo ID went completely ignored for three days. Well played, Facebook. (I then immediately deleted the phone number from my account because fuck you Facebook I don't want a phone number on my account, let alone someone else's phone number!) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 13th, 2013
4:43 pm	That's pretty messed up - a few days ago Facebook decided to accuse me of not being a real person, and challenged me to identify 5 friends from randomly selected pictures. That would be easier if half the pictures weren't indistinguishable baby pictures, and if Facebook hadn't aggressively encouraged me to 'friend' everyone I've ever met in the slightest capacity many of whom I have no idea what they look like today since I last saw them 20 years ago, but I managed to barely defeat the challenge, and regained access to the account. 24 hours later it decides to accuse me of not being real again, and this time it wants a phone number to confirm that I'm a person. So I give it a phone number. "We're going to send a text now, okay?" Well, no, that phone number can't receive a text, and I don't have one that does. "In that case just scan and send us some government-issued photo ID!" What the hell? This isn't a high-security dealy like a bank account, it's Facebook, and there wasn't any valid reason for the accusation in the first place - the only reasons I can conceive of for this happening are either that I have a funny name that has matched some new no-fake-names algorithm, or someone has decided to report my account as a fake and Facebook just arbitrarily takes someone's word about such things a second time even after the accusee has jumped through hoops to show the accusation to be false less than a day earlier. But it's worse than that, because Facebook has become such a ubiquitous thing that many sites have a "log in using Facebook" button - so Facebook deciding to randomly cut you off from your account isn't just cutting you off from their service, they're cutting you off from an unknown number of other services too. And it's worse than that too, because the remedy "send us photo ID", which I'm willing and able to do because they do say "obscure any parts that aren't relevant", and I have a scanner and am okay with Photoshop (what the hell would my mother in law do with this situation?) ... this remedy isn't actually processed in a timely manner, so even if you're willing and able to jump through hoops you're still cut off from whatever accounts you use Facebook to log in to for an arbitrary amount of time. Yet another reason why I wish "log in using Facebook" buttons were replaced with "log in using singlepassword.com", a hypothetical nonexistent service for which you would create an account as anonymous as you like and use it to log in to any other accounts. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 9th, 2013
12:57 am	A product that should exist; robot simulator. With several environments and components as plugins so they can be easily added, with everything based on things that actually exist - so you could build a virtual robot, for example, made of an arduino board or a raspberry pi, say, with moisture sensors or GPS or cameras or LEDs or lasers or motors or arm-controllers or touch-screens or whatever, attached to whatever pins of the boards, plus batteries or solar panels or etc. then you can program it in a virtual arduino/pi programming environment, and see how it operates in a given context. Uses: Prototype a concept without having to buy parts or solder anything. It would be a fun game to make fake robots fight each other or solve problems. It could be better TV than "Robot Wars" because there wouldn't be any safety limitations! (You could apply price or weight limits for different robot classes.) Get your prototype actually built since the virtual one is essentially assembled from real parts. There was a game kind of like this years ago, but the programming part was a very limited pseudo-language of drag-and-drop instructions, and the available components were also very limited (there was no GPS or triangulation facility, nor any sort of 'out' signals, only passive 'receive' signals, geared entirely to fighting robots in a very limited arena, rather than solving problems). I realize it seems like an insanely complicated thing, but there's already basically all the physics simulation that's the hard part, making realistically inaccurate sensors is mostly trivial by comparison (though doing things like lasers flickering at an invisibly high frequency coupled with light sensors or large volumes of flowing water could be tough - it wouldn't be that hard to simulate adequately but it would be hard to simulate in real-time. But for non-human-controlled robots that's fine, you could simulate it slow overnight and play it back real-time the next morning to see what happens.) It seems like if such a product existed it would likely lead to vastly faster development of all sorts of useful automation. A lot of people like to solve problems or make cool things, but we can't all afford the hardware to experiment. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 8th, 2012
12:27 am	I am surprised. I was predicting that some time in the last few weeks there would have been a lot of noisy news about poor sales figures over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday time, but I haven't seen a one. I was planning to be grumbling "maybe your sales figures wouldn't be rubbish if you were having actual worthwhile deals!" Maybe they successfully sold a lot of things despite all the deals being pretty pathetic this year, in which case I suppose we can expect every future Black Friday to consist of ads saying "it's Black Friday! Buy something at its usual price or even more!" And people queuing up overnight to do so just out of a sense of tradition. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 16th, 2012
10:35 pm	Recently, there's been a fair bit of noise about Rick Santorum saying "We will never have the elite smart people on our side". It got me thinking about what could possibly be the justification for saying something like that, given that it seems pretty risky to call your target audience relatively stupid right to their faces. The only thing I could come up with is kind of silly, and is not a serious suggestion at all, but if it were the goal then it would be completely brilliant; that idea is that it's a fantastic piece of misdirection, a kind of mental sleight of hand, designed to get people who think of themselves as smart to unthinkingly buy into the idea that there are two "sides", and thus perpetuate the reign of Kang and Kodos. (Against this argument must be raised the point that nearly everyone already bought that idea, hook, line and sinker, so there would be absolutely no need to sneakily subconsciously re-endorse it. So instead we can fall back on "never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.") (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 29th, 2012
2:56 pm	The junk undermining SSL/https makes me angry. For people who don't make websites, here is a quick explanation; https means your connection with a website is both encrypted and verified to be the real site. The encryption is a good and desirable thing. The verification is achieved through third party "root certifiers", and costs an unjust amount of money every month (given that the act of weakly verifying that you are who you claim is something done once, and renewing is something done without human intervention, a cost of say $50 once and maybe $5 per year would be reasonable). There exist organizations that verify who you are better, and issue SSL certificates at no cost, but they're not in the "approved list" so browsers won't recognize those certificates. Now the thing that makes this annoying is that when the browser doesn't recognize a certificate's verifier, you get giant alert boxes swearing that the offered certificate is made of toxic slime and will eat your face off given the chance, making it seem like the website in question is less secure than a website that doesn't even try to be secure (ie. you don't get any alerts about face-eating when you go to any site without https). So while you technically can just have the encryption without the verification, using a self-signed certificate, no users would visit your site because their browser makes it sound like a terrible scary disaster waiting to happen. Now to some extent this does make sense - it's plausible that, with an unverified certificate, someone can intercept your conversation with a server by pretending to be the server, to you, and pretending to be you, to the server, and thus steal all the data. This is known as a man in the middle attack. It's prevented by root certificate verification. The prevalence of this kind of attack is approximately zero attacks in every thousand, so the mandatory verifying is very helpful for preventing those zero attacks. Without encryption at all, you can just passively 'sniff' traffic to steal passwords - this is maybe five attacks in every thousand, which could be prevented with encryption, which would be a lot more prevalent if you didn't have to do the damn verifying. So that's five attacks in every thousand that aren't prevented because of the additional security price hurdle that prevents websites from bothering with encryption. This is why I am annoyed by it. Most of the other 995 out of a thousand attacks involve installing trojans on people's computers and stealing their passwords right from their keyboard or browser. None of the security measures discussed help with that. So basically, SSL certificates ask that you pay money every month to prevent zero attacks, to make your website more secure, while still being vulnerable to the vast majority of attacks. SSL is the internet's TSA. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 29th, 2012
11:50 pm	Today I came up with the silliest idea for an income tax loophole. For it to make sense, you first have to know that gambling winnings are taxable as income, and gambling losses are only deductable as an offset against gambling winnings (except the stock market, where you can deduct all losses for years, because that's gambling for politicians and lobbyists, and those guys don't like to pay taxes, everyone else loves it.) Here's how you can exploit this as a tax loophole. Step 1: Have your employer pay you minimum wage plus a limited number of gambling opportunities at odds which average out to winning the rest of your wage. (eg. if you're paid $20 an hour and minimum wage is $10 an hour, your new wage is $10 an hour plus an option of 20 opportunities to gamble $1 against $2 with 50:50 odds.) So now half of your income is legitimately "gambling winnings" and can be declared as such. Step 2: Open shops at which you can 'gamble' for all the things you would normally buy. 10 cents for a one in twenty chance of winning a loaf of bread, a loaf which normally costs $2. Now your "gambling losses" are more than half your income, though your "gambling winnings" are also increased by the same amount when you win the bread since you also have to declare non-cash prizes, leading to... Step 3: The gambleshops also sell all prize items for ten percent of their normal-shop price, limit one item per customer (lifetime). Thus we establish that the tax-declared 'value' of your 'prize' loaf of bread is just 20 cents, since that's what you can buy it for. Bringing it all together, now you work for an hour and earn $10 regular income, gamble 20 times and now have $20 (on average, made up of your initial $10 plus $20 gambling winnings and $10 gambling expenses/losses). Now you gamble for bread 100 times, winning 5 loaves, costing you $10 ($10 gambling losses, and $1 in gambling winnings of 'prizes'). Your running totals for the taxes are now $10 regular income, $21 gambling winnings, and a deductible $20 of gambling losses, totaling $11 of taxable income, versus the normal-world $20 you'd be taxed on for that same practical result. Essentially, the idea is that through making everything "gambling" you can make everything you "win" instead of buying tax-deductible. Note that this only works if you're also paid in "gambling winnings", because the "losses" wouldn't be deductible otherwise, and also only works if you establish the "value" of what you "win" as lower than its normal cost, because otherwise your additional prize-winnings will be equal to your losses and cancel them out. I would love to see the court case that would result when the IRS cries "fraud" if someone actually set up a town that worked on this basis. Presumably the argument would be about the "value" of the prizes, but what is the true value of a loaf of bread prize? If that was the argument then, worst case, you could still end up tax-deducting the difference between what you pay for a loaf of bread and what a loaf of bread costs the store wholesale. I'd be really interested to find out what the true and proper value of intangible goods is in the eyes of a court too - if you were to win rental of a house that has never been rented for money, what was that prize's cash value according to the IRS? (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
5:25 pm	I've just made a little one-week-game-jam game available on Kongregate. The Tell-Tale Heart. The jam theme was classic literature. The other part of this post is to help other people integrating Kongregate stuff into a Unity game, because all the documentation for doing that is completely terrible and lots of it is outdated. The best one I found does a bunch of stuff nobody wants to do (dealing with Kongregate payments and inventories) and didn't deal with stats or properly deal with late-login, but it was still the most helpful one. So here's my Unity C# code, helpfully documented, for dealing with Kongregate stats (for badges) and login properly and ignoring payments and inventories! Unity Kongregate API object. Hopefully this will get google-ranked above most of the unhelpful stuff after a while! (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 24th, 2011
4:11 am	delicious horrible-looking lentil mulch It's lazy recipe time! I call this one "delicious horrible-looking lentil mulch". It was created as a soy-free available-in-America analogue to one of my old convenient meals "beanfeast mince and tatties". Ingredients: One tin of black olives A couple of cups of mushrooms An onion Some olive oil A stock cube A half cup of red lentils Two tins of new potatoes Some spices. I used a serrano pepper, a teaspoon of paprika, a teaspoon of turmeric, and a sprinkle of dried cilantro A teaspoon of cornstarch. Directions: Finely chop the olives, mushrooms and onion. I used the food-processor slicing blade because this is a lazy recipe. A regular food-processor blade doesn't do it though, I tried that last time, mushrooms just bounce around wildly. Splash a little olive oil on the bottom of a saucepan, and heat it up. Dump all the sliced stuff in and stir it around for a few minutes. Add about a cup and a half of hot water, and the stock cube. Stir it around. (I guess you could use a cup and a half of cartoned stock here instead to be even lazier) Add the lentils and spices, stir it around again. Let it simmer for a couple of minutes. Add the tinned potatoes. Simmer for a couple more minutes. Mix the cornstarch with a small splash of cold water (just enough for it to become runny, it doesn't take much), then pour it in and quickly stir it. Simmer for about another 10-12 minutes, until the lentils are soft. Serve in a bowl with optional salt and/or delicious hot sauce. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 15th, 2011
11:16 pm	Kinect Since most Kinect games are fitness/rhythm games, where the 'gameplay' involves doing what the screen tells you to do, when it tells you to do it, perhaps instead of "you are the controller", Microsoft should have gone with the slogan "you are the controlled". (Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
8:19 pm	Science! I was having an argument about whether, if someone really had a working alternative medicine for something, they would be famous and we would all know about it - my position being "of course we wouldn't necessarily - how would they transition from being considered a crackpot with a crazy out-there theory to being taken seriously enough that it would undergo a clinical study?" As evidence for my position, I dug up some stuff about "black salve" (warning, link has gross pictures), an alternative treatment for skin cancer, combined with what cancer.org has to say about it. The information I was pointing at was "there have been no controlled clinical studies of cancer salves published in the medical literature". So basically, it's been around for ages and it hasn't been tested in a way that would satisfy a skeptic. Point proven. But then I noticed this phrasing: "There have been no controlled clinical studies of cancer salves published in the medical literature, and available scientific evidence does not support claims that cancer salves can cure cancer or any other disease." Now I realize that this is true (if you don't consider people's personal experience to be scientific evidence), but that phrasing is outrageous to me. Why? Because it carries a strong implication of "science says this doesn't work". But it would be equally true to say "available scientific evidence does not support claims that cancer salves can't cure cancer" or "available scientific evidence does not support claims that cancer salves can burn your skin" (they can, it's not in question, but there is no clinical study proving it). I'm reasonably sure that it's not their intent to imply that things don't work, they're just meaning it in a "cover your ass" sort of way, but, well, here's the power of that phrasing to be applied as a positive statement, over at quackwatch on another alt cancer treatment: "The American Cancer Society reviewed the "Grape Cure" in 1965, 1971, 1974, and 2000. and found no evidence of benefit against human cancer or any other disease." Oh well obviously it doesn't work then, right? But wait, that's not what it says. It doesn't say they performed a study. They didn't try it. They read the book, and determined that it didn't contain any clinical trials. Then they did the same thing again three other times. Here's a little analogy; the Raven Society Of Official Soundingness reviewed Grey's Anatomy, and found no evidence that removing an appendix can help with any illness. Debunked, motherfroggers! (Note: not endorsing either of these things, my point here is just two things. 1. "if alternative medicine worked it would be called medicine" is retarded, because a thing can evidently work or not work for a long long time without ever being tested (the grape cure is at least 90 years old and still scientifically untested) and 2. "available scientific evidence does not support (whatever)" is a horrible misleading phrase, because it implies that there is available scientific evidence, and that it fails to support something (which would be a synonym of disproving it in clinical trials), rather than just saying "we did not find any scientific evidence on this subject".) (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 30th, 2011
9:02 pm	A quite fun free PC game: Beret. It's a puzzle-platformer, more puzzle than platform. There are occasional moments of careful jumping, but the game's single keystroke "save this position" and "restore that position" mechanism removes the bulk of the horribleness of "timing puzzles". Also a backup "restore the saved position before that" option for if you accidentally save in a deathly precarious position, and always the option to just start a room again. Pleasingly, all these things also rewind the time, so you're allowed to rewind as much as you need to for the speed challenges, should you decide to do them. Also fun is that a level's speed challenge (running from start to finish) is frequently around 45 seconds, but doing all the other subtasks (kill all monsters, collect 100 small easy fragments, collect 4 medium difficult fragments, and collect 1 large extra-difficult medallion) is more like a ten minute task per level. Since you only need a subset of medallions to move on, you can mostly play in your preferred style - good design there. This was recommended by the Caravel Games Newsletter - it's not one of their games, but it is kind of like a platform game version of their DROD series (or this link includes the free, oldest one), which I also partially recommend (I don't recommend the RPG one). (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 29th, 2011
10:39 pm	I like the Professor Layton games, but they are always really annoying with the inconsistent puzzle logic. One puzzle will say "you must take two adjacent objects each turn" and mean that if you had four objects in a row, and took the middle two, the remaining two are now adjacent, and another will say "you must take the two books to the right" and mean the two books that were originally to the right, so if one of them has been removed you can't make that move, even if afterwards there are still two other books (further) to the right. It would be slightly annoying to have the ambiguity in the puzzle wording at all, but having it ambiguous and inconsistent is really not good. One puzzle goes "ha ha, tricked you, you didn't think of it that way!" and the next puzzle it goes "no your answer is wrong because we didn't think of it that way this time!" (Comment on this)
Monday, October 10th, 2011
12:04 am	I was thinking about this study, and a similar one from 30 years ago where Monsanto pretended Roundup didn't cause health problems; I was trying to figure out why such studies would exist. Specifically, studies where the numbers show one thing and then huge error bars and fudging "lead to" the conclusion that was paid for. I'm not questioning why bad conclusions exist, obviously that's money, but why would they perform an actual study and then fudge with error bars rather than, say, fudging the numbers so the things look actually how you want, or, even cleverer, fudging the experiment (perhaps even without the scientists' knowledge) so that the results look like what you want. (eg. for the HFCS experiment, to rig it simply provide HFCS as the sugar syrup, or sugar syrup as the HFCS, tada, genuine identical results!) I really doubt that the scientists think that fudged error bars and a false conclusion are significantly more ethical than fudged numbers for the same false conclusion, and I'm pretty sure fudging numbers or fudging the experiment would be easier than fudging error bars, as well as producing a more convincing study, so why would they do it the more difficult stupider seeming way? One possibility, of course, is "idiots", always a good answer to a "why do people do something" question. But I find it hard to imagine idiocy that endorses doing something more difficult for worse results that is also obviously more difficult and worse results. (Jokes about Microsoft Access notwithstanding.) Then another possibility struck me, and if this is the case it's fucking amazingly brilliant and Machiavellian: if you had a study in which the numbers falsely showed HFCS and sugar to behave identically, and someone else performed a 'verification' study whose numbers differed, it would be scandalous, terrible publicity. But if you have a study with real numbers and bullshit conclusion, then any scientist who might believe otherwise comes along, looks at the study, and goes "hey, that doesn't show what the conclusion says." There's no point in him performing a study to see if the numbers show otherwise, because the numbers already show otherwise. You know what makes news? "Hey, we did this study and it shows that other study to be completely fraudulent, and also this stuff that's in everything is terribly poisonous." You know what doesn't make news? "Hey, the conclusion of this study from 5 years ago doesn't match with its results." Genius. Evil, evil genius. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
12:33 am	Perhaps you remember Olean/Olestra, the "diet oil" that was indigestible and reportedly had the side effect of skidmarked pants? I have an idea of marketing genius: re-release the product, but as a fantastic drunken prank rather than as a diet aid with horrible side-effects. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011
12:18 am	A post to help other people encountering the same programming annoyance I just had today. Here's some keywords I was searching for: Visual C++ resource compiler RCDATA dependencies. The problem: if you have data files in a resource file - eg. ID_BANANAPICTURE RCDATA "banana.jpg" ... then the resource compiler doesn't recognize "banana.jpg" as a dependency. If you update banana.jpg and rebuild, your program will continue to use the old banana.jpg until you manually rebuild the resources, or change the resource file. With a jpg this probably isn't too annoying, but if you have some sort of complicated binary data structure that's generated by another program that you expect to be loaded in a specific way, it can be a huge pain in the arse that takes you three hours to figure out at what stage it went wrong. Not that I'm bitter. The solution: swearing at the compiler! Add something like this: #ifdef FUCK_YOU_COMPILER_I_JUST_WANT_THESE_TO_BE_DEPENDENCIES #include "banana.jpg" #endif The part of the resource compiler that figures out dependencies will be fooled by this into thinking banana.jpg is a dependency (er, which it is, so it's not really fooled, but you could fool it into thinking other things are dependencies too), while the part that does the actual compiling will ignore it. Annoying problem that shouldn't exist solved in an annoying way that creates unnecessary work for you! Hooray! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
9:33 pm	A new Humble Indie Bundle arrives, including Hammerfight (which I already bought and enjoyed and recommended long ago), Crayon Physics Deluxe which I think has been recommended to me but I haven't got, and, er, a few other things I've heard of but don't really know about; Cogs, And Yet It Moves and VVVVVV. "Whatever you choose to pay" is a pretty good deal even for just Hammerfight. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 20th, 2011
10:51 pm	I just bothered to pay attention to the details of both a Windows Update and an Ubuntu update, and it suddenly struck me as pretty funny - if software required this many updates of this size fifteen years ago they'd each be sending out about twenty new 3.5" floppy disks every week, to every user. (1 Comment |Comment on this)