the day has finally arrived. i had hoped we might have been able to avoid it altogether, but bill-c61 is here. the initial analysis by the internet’s favourite canadian copyright lawyer michael geist indicate that the bill even worse than than our neighbours-to-the-south’s infamous dmca.

but it is not yet too late! this bill can still die on the table if canadians can convince their members of parliament that amendments such as these would throw us 10 years backwards and lock us there tighter than prentice’s beloved drm. i if you havn’t yet, i urge you to do so. if you have… feel free to do it again!

i’m all for rewarding canadian innovation and talent in every domain… but that is not the goal of locking up digital media. these tactics are for the sole purpose of keeping the power in the hands of industry majors still running on dinosaur business models that i can’t wait to see go extinct.

i demand public consultation before we do something we cannot take back. i demand a balanced system - or one in favour of our citizens (creators of art and art’s consumers are all canadian citizens, corporations - be they american or canadian - are not). if my demands are not met… well… maybe i’ll just move to new zealand. they probably have faster internet there anyway. next up: net neutrality.

(my first letter to prentice, verner, dewar and harper)

an observation of commuting on the ttc and leaving the subway via the escalator at king station during rushhour:

the hordes of shuffling people funneling into the escalator reminds me of a zipper. a very strange zipper that takes a jumbled mess and forces it into a two columned interlocking pattern (as opposed to the usual input of two descrete columns).

another thing i noticed is that since its so crowded and noone can make a full stride, people walk by shifting their weight from one foot to another and pivoting. it creates this neat reverse-pendulum effect with their upper bodies that mimics exactly how the mondoshawans walk.

it’s also fun to pretend all these shuffling people are zombies: you have to zombie-walk along with them in order to avoid detection followed by an inevitable de-braining.

i’ve come across one of the best sentences ever while reading gödel escher bach: and eternal golden braid (aka geb):

“yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation” yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

this operation of preceding a phrase with it’s quotation was invented by willard van orman quine and is hence called “to quine a phrase” to quine a phrase

quine also refers to a category of computer programs which output their own source code. here is an example in c by thad smith

#include<stdio.h>
main(){char*c="\\\"#include<stdio.h>%cmain(){char*c=%c%c%c%.102s%cn%c
;printf(c+2,c[102],c[1],*c,*c,c,*c,c[1]);exit(0);}\n";printf(c+2,c[10
2],c[1],*c,*c,c,*c,c[1]);exit(0);}

and another in lisp by john mccarthy(creator of the language) and carolyn talcott

((lambda (x)
   (list x (list (quote quote) x)))
  (quote
     (lambda (x)
       (list x (list (quote quote) x)))))

parentheses are elegant weapons for a more… civilized age

seriously tho, geb is amazing. after a brief intermission, i’ve delved into part two which has kicked it up a notch and begun theorising about the mind and the essence of consciousness. now this is what i signed up for!

makes me swoon with recursive joy

amos and i started playing mechwarrior 3050 a while back, and after hearing the news of a crysis total conversion mechwarrior mod we figured the time was right to complete this 95 snes title. the co-op mode for this game is kind of strange… one player (amos) controls the legs of your mech while the other (myself) controls the guns, each rotating independently. an interesting game dynamic, but i digress. we loaded it up tonight to finally play through the last (fifth) level, and unfortunately find ourselves caught between a thunderbolt mech and a dead-end canyon. needless to say, the level leading up to this last guy is really long and our savestate has little health and no 1ups. what are a couple of battlemech pilots to do?

we came to the consensus that cheating in order to beat this final “enemy mech” falls within our ethical boundaries as gamers, but alas! the built-in password-based code system is only available at the start screen, and we can’t find a game genie code that works!

here is where i pays off to be a total nerd. the thing about emulators is that you can read/write anything in the game’s memory (this is how game genies work, only they do it using hardware - a different kind of cool). since i’ve previously taught myself a bit of rom hacking back when i was playing dragon warrior monsters (pokèmon + breeding. good times), i decided to make us an invincibility code.

the process is actually almost simple. you search through the game’s ram (using the tools build into the emulator) for the values of the variables you’re looking to edit, resume the game so that the values are updated (or not), and search again to reduce the number of matches. lather, rinse, repeat. once you know the memory address of your desired variable, append the 2-digit hex value you want to set it to to get a pro action replay code (similar to game genie). booya.

(note: you can hack in-game constants too, but they’re harder to find. search the game’s rom for sets of related values that would appear sequentially. eg: rpg player initial stats etc)

so, for anyone who thinks mechwarrior 3050 is too hard, here’s the invincibility code:

7E2ABE00

and if you don’t like the look of that dissipating yellow overheat meter, kill it with this:

7E2ACC00

while we’re at it, set your ammo so you never run dry with these bad boys:

7E2AE402
7E2AE602
7E2AE802

for the record tho, the ending to this game is very disappointing. boo activision, boooooo.

this post is brought to you by: pocari sweat - ion supply drink. pocari sweat is to gatorade as sake is to wine. mm-mmmm sweat

i have to say that two firefox plugins that i couldn’t imagine working without are my del.icio.us buttons and the session manager. for the uninitiated, del.icio.us is a web2.0 bookmarking tool. your bookmarks are available from anywhere on the internet; you can share them with anyone, and see what other people are saving. the buttons are what make this webapp usable to me, as without browser integration… its a bust. session manager lets you save all your open windows and tabs for resuming your browsing sesh later on.

so… what about a web2.0 (or perhaps available-online but not publicly shared) browser session manager? so i can transition from using the internet at work to at home effortlessly. if such a tool exists, please let me know. if not, feel free to make one.

someone needs to port scummvm (script creation utility for maniac mansion) to the ipod touch. think about it… your on the subway/bus/car/plane/sidewalk having a wicked awesome time playing classics like sam & max hit the road, day of the tentacle, full throttle, the dig (and yes, the list of great scumm games goes on and on). lucas arts games were absolutely *amazing* back then and the touch-screen interface is absolutely *perfect* for point-and-click adventures.

speaking of which… myst. need i say more?

i was excited when i thought about making a controller to play nes games on my ipod… but this seems to have a much better effort-vs-reward equation to it. especially when someone else puts in all the effort and i reap the rewards…

update: wow, sometimes i’m just silly. thanks google…

and for the boss: sam & max on the ds

also, myst ds is going to be an actual commercial release. my 2 minutes of googling did not come up with any myst on the ipod touch tho. there is still time!now i need to go buy one of these hardware platforms… but what about my eeepc?! there is just too much cool stuff.

as you may already know, canadian copyright reform is an issue that is very important to me. so much so that i wrote a letter that i sent to multiple members of parliament to voice my concerns. this was back in early december before i had created this blog, but a digital copy of my letter can be found over on matt’s. if you havn’t already, you can join the forty-thousand-strong fair copyright for canada facbook group to show your support. for an intro to this topic, and an explanation why a canadian version of the dmca would be very very bad, michael geist is the guy to ask.

last night i was at the fcfc toronto chapter’s meet & greet and had a really good time. i truly had no idea what to expect… i ended up meeting and talking with amazingly interesting people who all have different perspectives on the issue of canadian copyright and how the yet-to-be-tabled legislature will would affect them (*if* it is adopted). participants ranged from eff activists, console mod-chip developers, archivists, engineers, to lawyers and law students. i talked a lot with rob hyndman, a technology lawyer and active blogger. during our discussions (ranging from skydiggers to how my apartment doesnt have cable) i voiced the following (tho less developed at-the-time) idea:

one of the few things i recall from grade 10 civics is some of the founding ideas of democracy from ancient greece: they would hold a public vote on any decision to be made by the government. everyone who wanted to vote would assemble on a hillside where votes were counted and the decision made. the problem with this was… you can only fit so many people on any given hill, so with larger populations not everyone is represented. fast-forward to our current system: everyone whoever cares enough to vote, only get to choose the people who’s responsibility it is to make the decisions for us. i think the greek version is a lot more in-line with how i picture an ideal democracy. true representation. no hidden agendas or surprise courses of action by elected decision-makers. the *citizens* would be able to take part in the decisions that matter and affect *them*. i think we could easily make a big enough hill on the internet…

when i mentioned this to rob, he told me about will pate who is trying to create a tool for opening up government to the public by using the internet. unfortunately his project (an app called civicster) suffers from the same ailment as a lot of these kind (for-the-good-of-civilization kind) of endeavours… our civilization’s greatest downfall is the fact that it is founded on greed: nothing is worth doing - and nothing will get done - unless someone stands to make a profit money off it. (even not-for-profits need to get paid) and yes, there are exceptions, but a guy’s gotta eat and there is only so much time in a day…

shout-outs and thank-yous to those fine folks who made last night’s meeting possible.

more ideas spawned from the event coming soon…

ana, you’re awesome. anyone who found the previous post on this topic remotely interesting needs to go and read the comment that she left. here is a quick excerpt that i would like to build on:

if you’ve got posts that are closer together you can gather more data faster, you can get and idea of how fast you’re moving sooner.

thats exactly what i was missing when i started to think about how technology ties in: “gathering data”.

we are in the information age, speeding towards the singularity. the amount of data in our lives as a technology & information driven culture is increasing at an exponential rate. and there you have it: the more data you have to process the faster time seems to go by as you sift though it all.

now if only i could make my brain go faster so i can actually get through it all…

back from vacation in bc! w000! pics coming soon… and i know i’ve said that before so here they are to show you i’m good for my word:

this nes themed xbox (aka: nesbox) was a gift for my girlfriend jess (who’s a big nes fan), its specs are pretty much the same as mine (minus the paint job)

its a 1.2 box softmodded using uxe (slightly oldschool for you ndure kids) and running an xbmc dash. no hardware mods except a 160gb hdd preloaded with the top 50 movies from imdb as well as nes, snes, n64, and genesis emus and roms.

i’m thinking about installing an internal wireless access point as she doesnt have ethernet running down her stairwell… but i’ll save that for later. i didnt put it in my own box as it somewhat clashes with my personal dislike for wireless home networking.

pictures of the nesbox:

pics courtesy of vveerrgg and his cell phone. thanks again.

everyone knows that time goes faster as you get older. previously i believed that this was due to the fact that a given unit of time would comprise a smaller percentage of your total memories. but what of the fact that i barely remember *anything* (temporal experiences, that is. i’m full of knowledge of varying usefulnesses). my brain is not some kind of storage device that records my whole history linearly, and therefore the idea of percentage of memories is total bull.

i just had a thought while talking to my mom on the telephone: what if the perceived increase in the passage of time is the same at any point for all our consciousnesses? now, i’m not suggesting an accelerating constant across all conscious beings or anything like that. it would seem to me to be something tied closely with individual cultures - groups of consciousnesses.

that was the bulk of what i wanted to get down. that its not that all 22-year-olds will feel time accelerating at the same rate. but that everyone with generally the same experiences do.

thinking more about it, it would be very easy to tie this observation to a culture’s use of technology… but the fact that both technology and our perception of time are both accelerating would be a very weak correlation.

i more notes related this subject from a few years ago in my paperlog, i wonder if i should re-visit them? (i just passed matt the book, we’ll see what he thinks)