Burrowowl

One of the plagues of the Internets, one of those sterling examples of a technology victimized by its own success, is unsolicited bulk email. It is obnoxious. It is a hassle for recipients and system administrators. It is a pain to identify in an automated manner, spawning an entire sub-industry of professionals dedicated to thwarting it. Frankly it’s a theft of service. It’s also fairly easy to get involved in accidentally.

For people that have been using the Internets since before they were re-pluralized, the notion of just adding a big batch of total strangers to your mailing list wouldn’t even come up. Who’d do that? It’s terrible etiquette. Sadly Miss Manners hasn’t quite spread the word. Happily, the folks at MailChimp have an excellent listing of representative scenarios to help illuminate the unwashed masses that are looking to do some legitimate mailing:

“I bought a list of 30 million emails from this guy on the Internet, and…”

Stop right there. Don’t use MailChimp. Don’t use anything. Throw away the list. Turn off the computer. Snip the power cord, so this doesn’t happen again. Now go punch yourself in the gut.

It’s an entertaining read, especially if you already know better.

This seems to come up a lot, though Sonic.net does not officially support the iPhone interface and therefore has no public documentation on the subject. To get an Apple iPhone to use email properly, using IMAP, for a Sonic.net email account, follow these steps:

1. If this is your first mail setup, start by tapping Mail
2. Otherwise tap Settings
3. Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars
4. Under Accounts, tap Add Account…
5. Tap Other
6. In the New Account window tap Name and type in your Full Name
7. Tap the Address field and type in your Sonic.net (or domain) email address
8. Tap the Password field and type in your Sonic.net password
9. Tap the Description field to change the description name if you wish. (Optional)
10. Tap the Save button
11. Tap IMAP
12. Under Incoming Mail Server, tap the Host Name field and type in imap.sonic.net
13. Tap the User Name field and type in your Sonic.net username
14. The password should be filled in for you from the previous screen
15. Touch and scroll to the Outgoing Mail Server section
16. Tap the Host Name field and type in mail.sonic.net
17. Tap the User Name field and type in your Sonic.net username
18. Tap the Password field and type in your Sonic.net password
19. Tap the Save button at the top of the screen
20. Mail will verify your settings by connecting to the server

To confirm your settings are correct:

1. Tap Settings on your home screen.
2. Tap the name of the account you want to check the settings for. A settings summary should appear.
   • The Host Name is your incoming mail server, imap.sonic.net
   • The User Name is the Sonic.net account name of the mailbox you’re using
   • The Password field should contain a series of dots
3. For your outgoing mail server, the SMTP should be mail.sonic.net. Tap this to view more information about your outgoing mail server.
   • Tap mail.sonic.net to see its settings
   • Server should be ON
   • Host Name is mail.sonic.net
   • User name is the Sonic.net account name of the mailbox you’re using
   • The Password field should contain a series of dots
   • As you are likely to communicate on your iPhone on a variety of networks, Use SSL should be ON
   • Tap Authentication for authentication settings
   • Password should be checked in the Authentication screen
   • Server Port is typically 25. Many networks block port 25 access to anything but their own mail servers, so it may be a good idea to specify an alternate port. This can be accomplished by replacing mail.sonic.net with mail.sonic.net:587 in the Host Name field.
4. Tap Advanced for additional settings

This is in no way an endorsement of Apple, the iPhone, nor IMAP.

Why the hell aren’t you playing Dwarf Fortress? Seriously. What the hell?

“But there’s a learning curve!” you complain. Use the wiki.

“But what’s with the ASCII art?” you whine. Well, when I was a kid we didn’t have fancy bump-mapping and realistic lighting techniques. Take your ASCII art and like it, or if you just don’t have the stones, try one of the tile sets.

“What the heck is this all about?” you bleat. It’s about mining. And booze. And craftng. And fighting. And beards. And murderous elephants. Good stout-hearted Dwarf stuff.

Dwarf Fortress. What can I say about this wonderful, horrible game? Well, it’s free. That’s an important point.

It’s an economics / strategy simulation game. People have called it a RPG, but that’s because there are Dwarves and the occasional goblin siege, not because there’s any actual role-playing going on. It’s also an adventure game, but I find the fun to lie with building and managing a settlement.

It’s also ugly. Very ugly. That horrible picture atop this post is a screenshot of the first floor of my current project. I understand that some of the weaker-stomached folk out there don’t remember Rogue and NetHack and the eyestrain-inducing splendor of staying up all night playing video games on a green monochrome monitor. Such people are weak. Beneath my consideration, unworthy of even my disdain.

It’s also tremendously deep. Not deep as in “the Dwarves delved too deep and worked the accursed adamantine veins” — though that happens too — but deep as in many-layered, characterized by nuance and complexity. Dwarf Fortress is a wondrous sandbox for you to play in, unconstrained by a set scoring system or victory condition. There’s no wrong way to play Dwarf Fortress, and no right way. You can build your settlement above ground or dig deep into a mountainside. You can erect self-aggrandizing monuments to your own genius or establish a humble community of poor dirt-farmers. You can erect stout defenses and staff them with expertly-trained axedwarves and marksdwarves, or you can take a more pacifistic route. The pacifistic route can result in genocide by goblins, but that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong approach. Just because there’s no right way to play doesn’t mean the game won’t exert some pressure on your bustling little community.

If you can bear with the learning curve for, say, an hour, and you can suspend your desire for 21st-century computer graphics for the duration, Dwarf Fortress is a tremendously rewarding game. Go get it; it’s not even six megabytes, and runs on Windows and Macintosh.

I ran into an excellent, thorough explanation of how ADSL line filters work today at epanorama. Contents include an increasingly in-depth description of the theoretical and practical purpose of such devices, photographs of disassembled filters, and what really caught my attention: a circuit diagram.

A few years back, my gracious employer bought an Ultracade machine with a couple dozen games on it ranging from Frogger to Street Fighter, with several classics and many games that I simply had never heard of before. At the generous rate of four credits per quarter, I’ve dug through and found several outdated games that are really quite good. My habit has been to play a game several times, generally until I’ve filled up the high-score board. On some games (e.g. Donkey Kong), I’ve had a competitor or two exchanging places on the top-score list back and forth until we lost interest. On others (e.g. Robotron or Joust), others in the building surpass my skill so greatly that a high-score run is simply unthinkable. On several, there simply hasn’t been any competition. Nobody else plays these games. Truxton II is one of these. Penguin-kun Wars is another.

After months of having no back-and-forth competition for the high score on any of the games, a challenger as finally appeared. One of my coworkers started playing Truxton II recently. Apparently he used to play it when it was new (1992, I gather). He quickly knocked the rust off his game and got all the way to the second boss fight. I’ve never seen anything past the second boss, having never defeated the thing. In doing so he beat my high score by six thousand points, somewhere in the neighborhood of 355,000 total to my 349,000. That’s a pretty close margin, so it’s time to roll up my sleeves and have another go at it.

Anybody with tips on how to make the best use of the blue, red, and green power-ups at various stages of the game, please let me know. I’ve found that the blue auto-aim guns work great on the 1st level, and the red rolling-thunder guns work very well in the mid-to-late 2nd level, but have never found a compelling use for the green scatter-gun.

The Motorola 2210-02 is an ADSL2+ modem recently distributed by AT&T for its residential customers. It features a handsome form factor and reasonably-useful LED status indicators. As it is most commonly introduced through a PPPoE-based provider, it is sometimes necessary to switch it over to a straight ATM<->Ethernet bridge. Here’s what you do:

1. Connect your computer directly to the Motorola. Browse to http://192.168.1.254/ in the browser of your choice. If your system has assigned itself a 169.mumble address, you will first need to manually assign your computer an IP address like 192.168.1.5, a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, and a default gateway of 192.168.1.254 to do so.
2. You should be challenged for Modem Access Code in order to change anything. This should be a ten-digit number on the bottom of the modem. It should be on a yellow sticker.
3. The Motorola will present a page prompting you for your PPPoE authentication info. You don’t need this any more, as you’re about to disable PPPoE. Click “Advanced” in the left-hand navigation bar instead.
4. Once the Advanced navigation has expanded, select “PPP Location.”
5. You should get a big red warning about the dire consequences of changing PPPoE settings. Ignore the warning and select “Bridged Mode (PPPoE is not used).”
6. Click the “Save Changes” button. Wait 15 seconds or so.
7. Switch your computer back to DHCP, hook your router back up, or whatever makes you happy. That’s none of my business; this document is just supposed to help you turn off PPPoE, not find meaning in life, achieve spiritual fulfillment, or any of the other things you should be working on.

Please note that the default Motorola 2210-02 firmware as detailed in the user’s guide available on Motorola’s site has a significantly different interface, as do the Motorola 2210-02 models distributed through BellSouth. I am located in SBC’s incumbent footprint, so the above instructions only apply to the stuff they distributed. I think the BellSouth one is 2210-02-1006 whereas the SBC version is 2210-02-1002, but don’t bet the rent on it. I mention this just in case you run into something purchased on eBay or trucked over during a interstate move.

A topic I’ve been interested in for a while now is the stampede mentality some people exhibit in regards to subjects framed as frightening. This includes handgun ownership, terrorism, hormones in food, genetically-engineered food, SARS, and a number of other supposed menaces to your personal safety that account for a very small number of actual problems. One that has come up recently at work has been the adverse effects of WiFi signals. A small but highly-motivated culture of electrosensitives and the chronically-afraid has sprung up around the radio frequencies emitted by cellphones and cellphone towers. Many have decided to associate the years-old paranoia about cellphones to wireless networking as well.

My knee-jerk reaction is that such concerns are overblown, a kind of niche-hysteria that just doesn’t make sense. WiFi access points use very little power; 100 milliwatts is typical, KSRO radio broadcasts at 5,000 watts and is just one of dozens of local radio stations. Shouldn’t we have been seeing health effects from generations of radio broadcasts irradiating us day and night without pause? So I did a little reading.

Looks like one of those great convergences where a handful of scientific studies have fallen into the hands of some highly-vocal people with a vested interest in hyping fear of this technology and a receptive media that is willing to fill (ironically enough) broadcast airtime on hyping it further.

The WiFi health scare has now found fertile soil in Sebastopol, California, where fourteen concerned residents converged on the city council to demand that a community wireless network project be shelved. This happened to be a project my employer was set to implement, more for gee-whiz factor than any real prospect of making money off it, hence my interest in the matter. Sebastopol has an interesting reputation for its residents’ collective insistence that it has an independent streak, often manifesting itself in odd ways including the overuse of political bumper stickers.

Now, I’ll concede that most of the folks that have sign onto the “new things are bad” approach to things are sincere in their intentions. Some honestly believe themselves to be affected by radio signals. Some have concerns about cancer that are amplified by family backgrounds and specific personal situations. Some are genuinely concerned about the well-being of children that are being forced to grow up in the future instead of the past. The problem here is that they’re getting played, manipulated, bamboozled, conned. There’s money to be made in RF-screening paint, curtains, gee-gaws, and even underwear. But who’d buy such things if they weren’t afraid of RF? If you’re somebody that follows links, yes, that’s over $459 for a gallon of paint.

Declaration of victory against WiFi
Observations by the guy trying to give a town free WiFi
Some British guy that’s skeptical on the matter

A proper study on the matter (PDF)

Commercial Applications Research for Extraterrestrial Technology, or CARET, is the name of the program that “Isaac” worked with during the mid-80’s. As the name indicates, they were looking into some very interesting technology that works on a significantly different set of design principles than those generally associated with Terran engineering. The kind folks at the Jimbo Propulsion Laboratories sent me a link to this interesting material which I now in turn share with you.

The photographs accompanying Isaac’s story are striking in their visual design, incorporating stark contrasts and hard angles with graceful curves at once reminiscent of a Nonokrian rune, katakana, a bat’leth, and sperm. If our military-industrial complex has been working on extraterrestrial tech, I’d like to think that it’s something as cool looking as this stuff.

More information on this matter, including a rebuttal by Isaac to a few of his critics, is available at ufo.whipnet.org.

Hey look, it’s day 500 since my last reboot:

$ uptime
08:23:46 up 500 days, 20:19,  1 user,  load average: 0.07, 0.10, 0.08

The animations I’ve seen so far for these two classic Street Fighter characters in the upcoming Street Fighter IV make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. The Dhalsim teleport and Zangief double-suplex look great. I’d seen some screenshots previously, but they don’t tell you much about the game play. The proof is in the playing, but I’m optimistic that this’ll be a good one.