Norwinter Studios

Recently Spotify has been running an advertisement about a new feature allowing you to search for music by record label. That seems about as useful as searching for music by street name or color. Who cares what label produced a certain record? Labels don’t make music. In fact labels don’t make anything at all, they just put money on the table – they are an increasingly irrelevant fragment of the past when a recording studio was something fancy and printing a record cost involved a huge factory instead of an on demand print with shipping at $4.95.

And since we are using Spotify, printing CDs is even less relevant. Why would I care about a record label? A better related music feature or a better genre based radio feature would be a much better expenditure of time.

siker Site labels, music, Spotify

Today I saw a strange SWT bug which I couldn’t find much on when I searched for it online. In Mac OS X with a Table widget, sometimes pressing the Home or End keys on the keyboard would make the scrollbar move without the content actually moving. So for instance maybe you were scrolled towards the bottom and hit the Home key to get to the top: the bug would make you still see the same table rows even that the blue scrollbar marker would hop to the top. Even weirder, if you scrolled with the mouse wheel after that the scrollbar would snap right back to where you started and scroll like if you had never hit Home to begin with.

The solution was to add an SWT.KeyDown listener on the table and intercept any Home or End keyboard events. Set e.doit = false, then use table.setTopIndex() to change the viewing position in the table by hand. E.g. just reimplement the Home and End keys in your own code.

This worked fine for me.

siker Mac OS X, Programming bug, keyboard, OS X, Programming, SWT, table

Valve’s badly programmed Steam software has problems accepting credit cards in certain situation. The following message may appear when trying to pay:

Your billing address doesn’t look like it matches up with your current country. Please contact support for assistance or use a payment method registered to your current address.

It seems to be caused by more bad programming on Valve’s part:

1. The software incorrectly believes it can detect what country you are in based on your IP address.
2. The software incorrectly believes the country you are in affects the validity of your credit card.

Unfortunately there is no easy work around. The first time this happened to me the solution was to change my IP address. I suppose you could also use PayPal instead to pay but PayPal sucks in its own right (their terms of services basically give them carte blanche to rip you off seven ways to Sunday.) A third solution, one which I haven’t tried, could be to sign up for a disposable CC number and set your billing address to something the software approves off. I don’t know if this works.

The second time it happened, some months later, I just put my credit card back in my wallet. I’m not going to fight to spend my money.

I really want an idea like Steam to work but after my experiences so far I think I have to move on. Steam is not a new product – they have had plenty of chances to fix these shortcomings. Maybe Direct 2 Drive is better?

siker Games bug, credit card, error, problem, Steam, Valve

Valve’s Steam software is one of the few programs that allows you to download games online and play right on your computer. Downloading to play with unlimited redownloads makes perfect sense. Why kill trees and make plastic discs you’re just going to lose next time you move anyhow? Downloading is the only acceptable distribution model for bytes in the 21st century. Unfortunately, Valve’s Steam software sucks.

I’m not even talking about the customer hostile DRM or the constant calling home annoyance. No, it’s the program’s basic functionality I have got a problem with. Today I booted up Windows for the first time in months to try to get an hour of Fallout 3 before going to bed, something well deserved after a long work day. Alas, it was not to be. Without asking me Steam began downloading an enormous update for Fallout the moment I started the computer.

I checked online and found out that there were no updates to Fallout 3 I needed. The most recent update did fix a few bugs, but nothing critical enough that it couldn’t wait until next time I played.

So naturally I right clicked the update in Steam and selected “Pause update”. That didn’t seem to work too well – Steam showed me a permanent “Download stopping…” indicator while in the background continuing to download the update anyhow.

I clicked “Launch Game”. Got a popup saying the game will be ready to play in “approximately 40 minutes”. Apparently Steam didn’t get the message when I paused the update. Okay, so I thought I would be a little more clear. I right clicked the game and selected “Properties” and then turned off automatic updates for the game. That froze the software. I killed it and restarted it. The setting had saved when I checked in properties again but the download continued anyhow.

So in my infinite patience I went into “Offline” mode. Surely it would give up on the idea of downloading updates if it wasn’t even online. I restarted. Tried to launch the game and it told me the game couldn’t be run.

I opened up the Steam folder and deleted a random “AppUpdateStats” file. No dice. Steam still refused to start the game.

At the end of the day all I got to do was to write an angry blog posting instead of getting to play even a minute – the update still isn’t done – because of an update I don’t even want and ultimately because Valve has managed to create the first downloader program in history without a working cancel button.

As a user I have to say it’s enormously frustrating when a computer program does not do what I tell it to. As a software developer I have to say I’m disappointed that a program that could have been such a natural success and fit right into the 21st century is being developed with so little common sense. How hard is it to write a downloader?

siker Games bug, problem, Steam, update, Valve

Trade organizations RIAA and MPAA are used to getting what they want politically. In Sweden they have had good success too, most recently getting the right judge for the job at the Pirate Bay trial. But is their political maneuvering backfiring in Sweden? The raid on the Pirate Bay lead to public demonstrations by upset Swedes. And now it appears the Pirate Bay trial has fed the opposition: the Swedish Pirate Party has doubled in size in less than a week.

Using this member count history tool at the Pirate Party’s homepage I sampled the member count at 18:00 for each day for the last month.

Pirate Party Growth between 2009-03-23 and 2009-04-24.

The day before the guilty verdict for The Pirate Bay the party grew by only 68 members. Then on the day, the 17th of April, 2824 new members joined up. At the time of this writing the party has grown by 150%, now eclipsing several smaller Swedish parties in member count, as seen in the following chart from the Pirate Party’s website:

Pirate Party Member Count Compared to other Swedish Parties

We’ll see soon if these members are bringing real votes with them. First up is the election for EU parliament on the 7th of June. RIAA and MPAA may find they won a pyrrhus victory if awareness of their heavy handed behavior has started to spread.

Raw CSV data

siker News MPAA, Pirate Party, RIAA

I’ve been busily reposting the old content. Today’s news include Gnaw and Bouncy Hunters.

I also snuck in a link to Konkret Dice Roller in the sidebar. That guy is getting close to half a million uses! 492382 rolls at the time of this writing.

siker Games, Site, Video

Oops. Some weird people with even stranger political views hacked the e107 installation we had been running for ages. No surprise there – e107 was never that good to begin with and besides I hadn’t updated it for years.

Oh well, thanks to Pingdom I got an alert when it happened. It was easier to just get rid of e107 and put up a straight forward WordPress install so that’s what I did. I’ll try to repost all the old material here in the near future.

siker Site

We now have a faster server. Hopefully page loads will feel quicker.

Also, Path to Prestige has finally been taken down. Rest in peace.

siker Site Games

Just a couple of quick notes.

• Use ‘entropy-php’ to install the php module to run with Apache on your mac.
• Rename /usr/bin/php to /usr/bin/php4 (This is important.)
• Rename /usr/bin/pear to /usr/bin/pear13 (Even more important.)
• Create a symbolic link so that the php5 pear can be used: ln /usr/local/php5/bin/pear /usr/bin/pear (Most important.)

If you don’t follow the last two steps you will get all kinds of funny errors with pear. Pear upgrade will refuse to upgrade you to pear 1.4 because it claims it’s missing pear 1.3 (which is funny because if pear isn’t installed, how can pear say anything? And why do you need an old version of pear to get a new version of pear?).

The most likely message you’ll see if you don’t do the last two steps is:

“Command ‘pear.symfony-project.com’ is not valid, try ‘pear help’”

when you try to add the Symfony channel.

From there on you can just proceed with the normal symfony installation stuff.

pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
pear install symfony/symfony

All done.

siker Mac OS X Guide

I experienced this problem today. I bought a first generation MacBook (13″ 2.0 GHz Core Duo) for my brother. It came with 1GB of memory, but after playing around with a couple of programs I realized that was a little bit short. I was running a Windows XP in Parallels, and at the same time I had a Word document open, and a couple of browser windows. The machine almost came to a stop. Not that strange since Windows XP alone was using a couple of hundred MB of memory – maybe 400 MB. And Word running in Rosetta is a beast.

Anyhow, so I had 2GB of memory in my MacBook Pro and decided to swap a memory stick from the MacBook Pro with a stick from the MacBook. Then both machines would have 1.5 GB.

When you take out the battery pack from the MacBook you’ll find a little rail which you need to remove to get to the memory banks. Three tiny screws hold it in place, and it’s shaped like an L sort of. Here’s the thing: once I was done and I had put the memory in (marveling over the engineering making it possible to get to the memory hidden inside of the computer with the help of two cute little levers), I was unable to get the battery pack back in.

It just wouldn’t seem to fit anymore. When I tried to push the battery in it insisted on going towards the center of the computer instead of fitting snuggly. Anyhow to make a long story short it turns out I hadn’t put the L shaped rail back in place correctly. On the short leg of the L there is a little piece which needs to go into a little hole in the side of the battery compartment. Apparently I had missed that hole but since the L rail is made out of flexible metal it just bent a little and I didn’t realize it was put in wrong.

Solution was to use a little screwdriver to guide the little piece on the short leg into the little hole in the compartment wall. Then the battery fit great again and everything was A-ok.

Just writing this down to save people some time should you happen to come by this by place by Google or something.

siker Mac OS X Guide