Safety Fork, the

I got to hook up Ye Olde Serial Cable tonight. The disk seeking-noises from my server were too regularly-timed to be normal. Sure enough, I find someone is attempting to login over ssh every two seconds. I don’t know aaron, or adom, or adlai, or adrian, or agatha, or any of the hundreds of other names. These people certainly don’t have shell accounts on my server.

Of course, it’s some moron in Rio with a dictionary attack script. I’m just an IP address listening on port 22 to him, but I wish he were reading this site. I could say to him, “You, sir, are many vile, despicable, unflattering things I won’t write here because this is the Internet and children might find this page if they’re not scared off by the picture of the bearded man at the top. But think of an insult that would make your mother cry, and imagine me never calling you that, because it’s too good for you.”

I’ve been neglecting Same OSX quite a bit lately, but I had enough motivation last night and this morning to finish a couple of features that I had been working on:

• Score tips appear when hovering over a possible selection. This was the trickier to implement, as OpenGL doesn’t have any built-in support for rendering text. OSX has nice text and drop-shadow support, so it was worth the effort to get it in.
• For fun, I made the light source in the scene follow the mouse cursor. I think it adds some nice detail, especially since the tokens themselves are rather plain.

Grab it from the Sourceforge.net page.

And you thought I was going to post about Spaceballs. Well, I’m not. But my server is running again, now with more Gentoo Linux and less Solaris 10. Backing up and restoring WordPress was disarmingly easy.

Maybe now I’ll have the ambition to get a mail server running on here, too. There’s no better way to get all that tasty email than with a safety fork.

I’m going to migrate Iago (the server to which you’re connected) to Linux tonight. If everything goes smoothly, the site will be back tonight; if not, then I’ll finish the job tomorrow.

I played my first game of Civilization IV over the last two days. Here are my observations, in order of gameplay:

1. The music is awesome.
2. I don’t understand the criteria they used to pick which world leaders made it into the game. Particularly, you can choose Chairman Mao for the Chinese, but not Lenin or Stalin for the Russians or Hitler for the Germans. These guys were just too historically unimportant?
3. Leonard Nimoy did all of the voiceovers for the research and the setup bits. Even without salsa, he is definitely a force of excellence. They should have used his bit that plays when a new game is started instead of the lame CGI intro-movie; it’s better. Actually, the designers probably wanted to, but were overruled by marketing drones for not being “flashy enough.”
4. One of the world wonders a civilization can build is the Internet. I laughed out loud when, having researched it, I discovered that its icon is a picture of Al Gore.
5. I was a little put off at first because the interface isn’t done in the same colors and style as previous Civ games. After I got over the shock, though, it works very well.
6. I played on the default difficulty, but I should have turned it up a notch. I had a hundred turns at the end when I could have finished any time. Of course, I spent them building nuclear missiles. The optimal win, when this far ahead, is to nuke everything on the second-to-last turn of the game, and launch the spaceship on the last turn. On the second-to-last turn, I had 182 ICBMs. I spent pretty much a whole hour just nuking stuff. Now it’s just me and the glow.

Hypothesis: most people who think they are computer users are not.

So that I can purchase cars and other shiny things, I am paid to write software. Since I want to continue to be paid to write software, I spend some of my time making sure that people who are not me can actually use it for something. The important distintion (in this context, anyway) between me and people who are not me is that I am a computer user and they are not.

“Um,” you ask, “how do they use your software without a computer?”

They don’t, obviously. The distinction is that they are users of my software, mostly, rather than of the computer on which it runs. Some of them may be Windows users; even fewer actual computer users. I root this distinction in scope of knowledge. A user of a particular program knows how to start Photoshop and get things done. A user of a particular operating system knows more generally how to care for and feed Mac OS X; certainly she knows how to install Photoshop, maybe even the OS itself. A computer user is definitely at least a programmer, knows how to put the machine together and could, if necessary, figure out where to start to do work with the machine, even lacking an OS.

Most who think they are computer users, then, are actually Microsoft Internet Explorer users. They are probably also Microsoft Word users, and maybe Google Mail users. I don’t mean this as an insult. They (you, even, o hapless reader?) are not computer users in the same way that I am not a user of the Prairie Island nuclear power station; I know vaguely what it does, but I couldn’t build one. I’m a user of light bulbs and garage door openers.

I make this distinction because I think it would be beneficial for individuals to realize where they sit on the scale. Internet Explorer and Word users should know that they are not Windows users; they should not expect to be able to install new programs (or they should at least expect to fail sometimes when they try). Mac OS X users should not be exasperated that ninety percent of the people to whom they talk don’t know that duh, you just drag the application to your hard disk to install it. And those few of us who are computer users should probably recognize, I guess, that while Linux is teh r0x0rz, some people would rather knit socks or go bowling than learn about the /proc filesystem.

At least I’m getting paid. I do like my shiny things.

Someone asked in the OSX Development community on LiveJournal about how to replicate the sort of translucent bezel window used by the volume/brightness adjustments. After a little bit of thought, I was intrigued enough to try to replicate it on my own:

It turns out not to be difficult at all. There’s a lot to be said about programming for a graphics environment that wasn’t originally designed for the computers of the ’80s. I was going to write up something of a tutorial, but I’ve fallen into my usual pattern: now that I’ve solved the interesting bits, I’m not much motivated to do anything else. So if you want to see how it’s done, I’ve posted my XCode project. If you’re familiar with Cocoa, it should be pretty obvious what’s going on. Feel free to base your own code on it; I only ask that you send me a copy of your software if you use it verbatim in a commercial product.

This is probably the smartest bit of computer security thinking I’ve read. In a nutshell, it proposes that instead of trying to monitor for events that are known to be bad, one specifically ignore things that are known to be harmless. It doesn’t guarantee that one will never be bothered by something uninteresting, but it does ensure that nothing that is interesting will be thrown away.

Same OSX 0.6.

As promised, Same OSX just gained four-tenths of a version.