Month: May 2006

The problem with illegal aliens is that
1. We don’t have the resources to hire enough agents to catch most of them
2. Most of those we do catch are immediately released because we don’t have the resources to hold most of them.
3. Those we do send back just get a free ticket home.
4. As soon as they are sent back, they just come to the US again.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned this before: just bill (via tarrifs or other means) the country of origin for the costs of the deportation. After all, these are their citizens we are talking about.

1. The increased funding would go towards hiring more agents
2. The increased funding would allow us to better hold caught illegals
3. They still get a free ticket home, just we (meaning you and I, the tax payers) aren’t the ones paying for it.
4. Their own goverments will have an incentive to stop them, rather than encourage them, to cross the border.

Right now the Mexican goverment is actually encouraging people to cross, going so far as to give them desert crossing travel guides! If they worked with us, rather than against us, we’d be 10X better, not twice as better, as protecting the border.

We should also fine businesses that hire illegals. This is already the law – just not enforced.

A few years back I wanted a DVD player for my TV. When I went to the store, I didn’t go to the video game aisle. I went to the DVD player aisle. Something like 6 months later I wanted a PS2. I didn’t go to the DVD aisle. I went to the video game aisle. Belatedly, I found out the PS2 could play DVDs, so I sorted of wasted my money on that $100 DVD player. While I now know better, is Grandma buying Christmas presents going to know? Of course not. And this is the flaw behind the $500/$600 PS3 sales strategy. Grandma’s going to buy a Wii for her grandkids, because it’s 1/3rd the price and it also plays games. And she’s going to buy a DVD player for her son, or some more affordable alternative such as the HD-DVD, because they all play movies. Even if you’re technically knowledgable you’re still going to balk at the price because, again, there are cheaper alternatives that do the same thing. For 1/2 the price I could get an XBOX 360 rather than a PS3. Most developers develop for both platforms and they usually use the lowest common denominator for both machines. So even if you have a Blu-Ray drive that holds Gigs of extra data, it just means you have a big empty disk.

In this article this article Ray Maguire defends the price because it’s allegedly cheaper than buying both together:

“I don’t think it’s an expensive machine; I think actually, it’s probably a cheap machine,” he commented. “If you think a Blu-Ray player by itself might be GBP 600-700, and we’re coming in at just GBP 425 – it’s a bargain.”

This is the begging the question fallacy. If you are Ray Maguire then you work for Sony and as such you won’t even consider buying a HD-DVD or an XBOX 360. So yeah, “it’s a bargain”. However, if you’re not Ray Maguire and you don’t work for Sony (or aren’t that loyal) you’re going to look at alternatives, in which case it’s not so cheap anymore.

In my opinion, Sony should sell the PS3 and they should sell a Blu-Ray drive. Each can sink or swim on its own merits. I think sticking to their guns will just cause both to fail.

If you’re interested in taking credit cards online, I think the best option on the internet right now is Paypal. But it depends on your volume:

Authorize.net
$150 setup fee
$30 a month monthly fee
You have to actually program a shopping cart using their API
Supports recurring billing
3% + some small amount per-transaction fee
Money goes to your bank account

PayPal
No setup fee
No monthly fee
You don’t have to program anything, although you might want to use javascript to make filling the form easier.
Supports recurring billing
3% + some large amount per-transaction fee
Money goes to PayPal’s bank account, which in theory you can transfer to your bank account.

That “in theory” is why I’ve waited so long to switch to PayPal. I’ve read numerous stories about how PayPal has frozen accounts, for no fault of the owner, because of scammers or other reasons. Just search for “Pay Pal sucks” in Google and you’ll see lots of horror stories about this.

The problem I had with Authorize.net is that they refused an overseas transaction (because it was overseas) for $1000 and didn’t ask me first or tell me about it until the pissed off customer contacts me and wants to know where his money is. Apparently his credit card company put a hold on the money anyway and there is some kind of asinine process where he can’t get his money although Authorize.net refused the transaction and there’s no way for me to help him out. Obviously, I cancelled Authorize.net and am out about $1200 counting the setup and monthly fee. If I had gotten PayPal originally this wouldn’t have happened (Paypal does accept overseas).

When I finally finish my MMO and have thousands of customers though, I will have to switch back. I can’t afford the risk of PayPal freezing an account clearing tens of thousands a month and the per-transaction charge will kill me.

Evolution, like Perforce, is good at the check-out / modify / check-in model of working. I don’t work that way though – I do modify / scan for changes / check in. While Evolution supports scanning for changes (which Perforce doesn’t really do) if it finds Renegade files you only have the option to merge by hand and immediately change what is on the server. You cannot check out these files, nor is your change set atomic, nor can you submit comments with your check-in.

The merge tool that comes with Evolution is especially lame. All they did was take the freeware GPL merge tool and rename it. It doesn’t link in with the rest of Evolution because they’d have to make it open source. As a result, it is missing features such as the ability to see what version you are looking at if you do a diff in the history.

I’m dropping Evolution until a later date when they have time to polish it up. I’m going to give Vault another shot, since the more I use these other tools the more I still like Vault.

I’ve been trying out various source control applications recently. At work we use Perforce. I have to admit that it’s powerful. That aside, I hate Perforce with a passion. I’ve lost work on at least 4 occassions and everytime I have a problem it’s “Perforce fucked up again” which is probably about once a week. It’s because Perforce doesn’t work well with people who do what I do, which is to work partly at home (not on Perforce) and partly at work (sometimes on Perforce).

Over the last 5 days I tried SourceGear Vault, because I’ve had really nice experiences with it when I used to work for nFusion. For usability it’s the best I’ve seen. However, the server installation is a nightmare due to external dependencies, to the point to where I decided it wasn’t worth the headache and tried installing IonForge Evolution.

I don’t have much to say about the installation of Evolution (which is a good thing). It took about half an hour to install. 5 minutes to figure out. I uploaded RakNet’s directories, setup users and groups with permissions per-directory, and that was it. I had a friend download the client and connect to me and it worked the first time. The only bad thing is it seems like uploading is pretty slow compared to Perforce or Vault. However, connections are reasonably fast unlike Vault, which takes a good 10 seconds to connect.

Evolution supports my style of working, which is to work locally without checking out and only uploading when I want to. I’m not totally sure but I think that it also supports searching for renegade files, which Vault doesn’t do short of checking out everything first.

The price is decent. Perforce is $800 per user. Vault is $289 per user. Evolution is $550 per user, but 50% off for IGDA members, so $275. Howevfer, it might be the most expensive for me. I only need 2 users. Perforce gives that for free. Vault comes with one free users. I don’t think Evolution comes with any free users. I’ll email them now to find out.

Yesterday I was at E3 trying to talk to a developer who was obviously passionate and hopeful about their new MMO. I forget the name, but it was to be a free download and free play, with subscriptions for premium content. But I couldn’t hear half of what he was saying, even though he was speaking loudly, and I had my ear turned towards him. This is because they had the unfortunate position of being next to a booth with an announcer, screaming into a microphone idiotic play-by-play commentary on a game of Quake.

“FRAG!!!! OH HE’S GOING FOR THE MACHINE GUN! CAN HE GET IT! NO HE’S GOING FOR THE PLATFORM! DOOFUS JUST GOT A FRAG! LOOK AT THOSE GIBS! NOW DWEEBUS GOT THE ROCKET LAUNCHER! HE’S GOING FOR IT!!”

I was then drawn in by a huge projection of this 5 minute cutscene of a gorgeous battle between Japanese styled heros and a horde of crawling monsters led by a Japanese styled villian. There were hundreds of characters on the screen at once. So I turn to look at the game (yet another MMO) and, at least at first view, it’s a copy of WoW with one (not hundreds) of characters on the screen at once and that character with a sword (Rather than guns as was in the movie). Which was confusing because I didn’t expect to see a copy of WoW, but the game that was on the projector, which was hundreds of characters in a war with a zerg-like horde of charging beasts. So different are the two that I looked back at the projector just to make sure I was looking at the right game (I was). I try to watch some gameplay but am distracted when 6 scantily clad models prance onto the stage in front of the projection and start dancing around, with another model screeching excitedly into the microphone. I just left at that point because it was annoying and the crowd was too large to look at the game any longer.

A while later, in another booth, they have having a Warcraft 3 tournament, but it’s hard to tell more than that because there are 8 monitors up on a platform with only 3 of them showing the game the announcer is screaming about. Between the crowds, the announcer, and the layout I never was able to tell who won.

Mid-day they had a girl twirling a flaming baton, with other models on raised platforms dancing or shooting with pretend guns. I have no idea what game or company they were with. I think it was Ubisoft though, because later on in the same general area another model got a hold of another microphone. It went something like

“OK BOYS! ON THREE SHOUT UBISOFT! READY?! ONE! TWO! THREE”
“…”
“COME ONE GUYS. UBSOFT!!! ONE! TWO! THREE”
“…”

I laughed.

The most interesting thing I saw was that Microsoft games had a copy of Windows Vista there. The demo guy had chess up on the screen, but apparently lost the network connection because he had to load up ipconfig /renew (I was watching what he was typing). I don’t think he got it working though.

To their credit, there were companies there just trying to show off their games at let people play it. But a very significant number of companies were there just to do the equivalent of standing up on a box and screaming their names over and over, to the point where you couldn’t understand anyone else. I was ready to go home literally about 30 minutes after walking in. I’m not going to go to any future E3 events.

Sourcegear Vault is a source control server that is designed to be a replacement for Visual Source Safe.

Rather than write a long review, I’ll list the major pros and cons:

Pros:
1. Client is very easy to use. Even with no training in any source control system I think most users can accomplish what they want with little direction. Perforce, by comparison (which is the next closest comparison) is very difficult to use and it is both possible and likely you will lose data because of this.
2. You can work by changing files locally and merging and checking them in. Or you can do the usual checkout / change / checkin method.
3. It doesn’t create files on your local harddrive (Perforce also has this benefit). CVS and Subversion both create files on your harddrive, which is really annoying when trying to make builds.
4. It has a command line Linux client.
5. It’s half the price of Perforce.
6. It uses a real database, rather than try to reinvent the wheel as does Perforce.
7. All but one of my support posts on the forum were answered quickly.

Cons:
1. It’s slow to connect to – takes about 10 seconds even on localhost with a fast computer.
2. The command line Linux client requires Mono, and my users indicate that is an unacceptable dependency. Perforce has better support for Linux.
3. While it comes with a web interface, the web interface is useless for anything other than looking at the directory structure.
4. Depends on Microsoft’s expensive SQL database, rather than MySQL, a free alternative. Microsoft has a free version of their database but it comes with restrictions. I heard you can purchase the SQL database from SourceGear cheaper, but this is unconfirmed.
5. Depends on Microsoft’s IIS, which is very difficult to configure and is inferior to Apache. In fact after 5 days I still don’t have it working right. “The Vault server could not be contacted to perform the operation. Your network connection to the server may have been interrupted. Please verify your network settings using the Options dialog under the Tools menu in the Vault GUI Client.The request failed with HTTP status 403: Access Forbidden.” This may be an IIS error, but I really consider it to be a Vault error, because Vault has a needless dependency on IIS and the only reason I installed IIS is because Vault depends on it.
6. My friend Jason told me it’s very slow with very large databases.