The Blog of Lucien Stals

Onliner gamer stabbed over 'stolen' cybersword

Just have to love that story.

I guess it's just another area of the law that's going to have to do a lot of catching up.

I recall a few years ago a situation where somebody auctioned their charecter on some MMORPG (Everquest? Ultima?) on EBay. Got quite a bit for it, I think. I should see if I can find that story.

And then there is the case of online comunities forming their own virtual legal systems because the real world legal system didn't have laws to cover virtual crime. Who do you charge, and with what, when somebody avatar beats up your avatar?

I enjoyed the show, but…

I seriously hope they don’t just plagiarise SG1, assuming the formula worked once, so all they need to do is change the cast, change the location then they can use all the old scripts again. They even made a parallel between Jack O’Neil and the new military commander dude (at least he was “the ranking military officer” by the end of the show, after killing his superior). I like the Jack O’Neil character, but how many derivatives do we need?

My main gripe about what was an otherwise enjoyable show, is consistency with the shows own timelines. This whole thing about Atlantis flying off millions of ye!
ars ago. I guess that bit works in well enough with the story about how all the ancients disappeared a long time ago, but in the show they speculated that the ancients went and got their asses kicked by the Wraith, then abandoned Atlantis and came back to earth, and that the legend of Atlantis came from surviving ancients talking to the ancient Greeks. But wouldn't this all have happened millions of years ago?

So some survivors come back to earth, wait around for a couple of million years until the Greeks show up, tell them some story about a sunken city, then disappear!? And what were they doing in all that time while they were waiting for the Greeks? And doesn't the normal story’s timeline say that the Goa'uld (Ra?) would have been inhabiting earth well before the Greeks came along. So should I think a couple of old aged ancients were just bumming around earth for millions of years, avoiding the Goa'uld, so they could pass on som!
e vague message about sunken cities to the Greeks?

(And w
hat about the Asgard? Aren't the Norse gods attributed to them. What were they doing while aged ancients were hobbling the grassy plains of earth?)

I don't think they thought that one through.

Also, how come everyone in the entire universe speaks perfect English? After 400 years of evolution, we have a hard enough time understanding what Americans are talking about. Why do aliens in far flung galaxies speak English? And what about the Wraith? For a race that “doesn't need to explain themselves”, they sure speak English well. Did they just happen to have an old phrase book lying around?

AND if the wraith are so damn hard to kill (they did kick the ancients asses), why did a rag tag bunch of humans manage to kill so many of them in the first episode? And mainly using human technology. Has the entire universe forgotten the usefulness of kinetic kill weapons? The galactic arms race has evolved to the point of!
wonderful energy weapons and shielding technology, but a good old fashioned projectile can bring down a wraith ship. Gota luv it.

And after all that, I'll still be watching it next week ]]>

It was ZoneAlarm that was preventing the computers from talking to each other, but I told it, in no uncertain terms, that the laptop was okay to talk to. The only trick here is that ZoneAlarm can grant access to certain IP addresses (not IP ranges). So I also had to make sure that the wrieless switch, which is running DHCP, gave the same IP address to the laptop each time.

So I found in the config menu, the ability to do static DHCP.

Eh? static dynamic host configuration!?

Isn't DHCP suposed to be the solution to hard coding address lookup tables? And now, in the switch itself, is an option to make the DHCP lookups static?

Okay, it works, and the computers can talk to each other again, but isn't there something fundamentaly going wrong when there is a work around to DHCP so that you can staticly assign addresses, whi!
ch is the way things used to be done anyway, and DHCP was suposed to do away with?

BTW, I don't seem able to share the printer yet. The config all went without a hitch. Windows machine agreed to share the printer. Mac coudl se it and added it to it's list of printers. But when I sent a print job from the Mac, it just disapeared! Didn't even show up in the printers que, but no error messages anywhere.

I'll worry about it later…]]>

Not only am I loving the new Mac, and the ability to easily work between the Mac and the Win box with MS Office docs, and Java code, but I'm loving being able to connect to a wirless network.

The Swin network is pretty much accessible to me from everywhere I've tried so far I'm writing this from my office, wirlessly!). But I thought it was so nice, that I went to the swap meet yesterday and picked up an 802.11g wirless switch. Now I have wirless broadband at home.

It took a bit of fiddling to get it working properly, and I still have to work out what some of the security settings mean, but it works. I was able to sit in the living room last night and show off the new puter to a friend who was able to surf the net straight away. No cables at all. No mouse (the touchpad actualy works better than I thought it would, but I still like having the mouse. Scroll button and righ!
t click. How can people live without these), no power, and most of all, no ethernet cables!

Even when my (soon to be?) brother in law came round with his Win laptop from work, I was able to get him onto the network in seconds.

Next test is to see how far into the park next door I can go before I start to lose the signal. The packaging claims to have about a 400m range outdoors. That means that for a little while yesterday, before I enabled the security, I might just have been offering an access point to people as far away as the near by train station.

Makes you wonder how many people install these things straight out of the box and don't change the settings. The default login to the admin panel has no password, and it doesn't prompt you to change to. Just type “admin” and your in! Then there's the fact that the default settings are to have an unencrypted, open to all commers network. You must actu!
aly go into the advanced config options to change some of this stuff,
and the printed manual that comes with it only covers the basic “installation wizard”.

I should go for a drive with the laptop and do some war chalking in the neighbourhood and see just how many domestic networks are advertising connections

I tried running the PDA on the way into work on the train one morning. It's not much good at exploring the networks, but the wirless connection in it did find half a dozen networks on the ride in. And I don't come very far. Most were around Camberwell station.

Add to this mix the article I saw the other day saying that home computers were never designed to be secure platforms and that bank are now seeing online banking from home as one of their biggest security risks. Duh!]]>

Calls for blogger freedom, from The Australian, makes interesting reading.]]>

Part II of Reinventing the Wheel

After the brilliance of rediscovering the Strategy Pattern the other day, I got to thinking about it, and I'm more than a little embaressed now.

The Strategy Pattern is fundamental to the way layout managers work in Java. There is even a lecture that points this out. Now I have studied SD2 while a student at Swinburne. Then I tutored SD2, while still studying. Then I lectured SD2 in two seperate semesters.

And the implications of the Strategy Pattern only occured to me the other day when I was trying to solve a specific problem.

This to me reinforces something that Andrew Cain has been saying for some time.

Students (like myself) need proper and valid problems to work on before thay will be able to appreciate the solution.

Simply being told that layout managers use the Strategy Pattern never meant anything to me. An!
d when I was lecturing that subject I did in fact read up on the stratey pattern to help me explain it to the students (because it hadn't made sense to me before then). But I still didn't realy get it untill I had a specific problem that I was trying to solve, and the strategy pattern turned out to be the solution. Now, 4 years after I first sat in a lecture theatre and was told about it, I think I finaly get the Stratergy Pattern.

I just never had a proper problem for it to make sense before then.

I'm into my second year as an academic teaching OOP (not counting the time I spent tutoring OOP), and I'm still unraveling the sublties of this stuff.

Can I write an OO program that works and does something? Sure. I've been doing that since first year of my Grad Dip. But do I think I can write a propper OO program? Well, I'm getting there. TO realy use, and perhaps appreciate, OOP, requires the ri!
ght set of problems.

We have been arguing back and forth
about how best to teach OOP to first year students and the argument (around FICT, at least) seems to be going toward the answer that we shouldn't be teaching OOP first. The more I learn about this stuff, the more I realise that I'm only just starting to get it. I know that's a pretty cliched thing to say, but it's true.

So why should I believe that all these first or second year students, no matter how well they cut code (and some truly are brilliant), come out of SD1 and SD2 really understanding OOP?

When I look at the path my own learning took, and despite the fact that I studied SD1 and SD2, I think now that it took me consolidating basic procedural principles first, before I could start to come to a real understanding of OOP. I was using objects all along, but I wasn't using objects.

When I look at my solution to the summer semester SD2 assignment from 18 months ago, I'm ashamed to say it!
's very much not an OO solution. And I was the one who set the assignment, and marked it. While I'm quite proud of the solution, it doesn't represent a well designed OO program.]]>

I'm sitting here writing this blog entry on it.

iBook 12″ with a 60gig HD and ~700meg ram.

Having always been a PC/Windows person, I was keen to try something different.

So far it has not been disapointing.

I only have two gripes so far, and neither is to do with the machine itself.

First, Apples supply chain. 3 bloody weeks I had to wait for this thing. Three weeks I've been putting up with having my login for the ITS computers disabled, re-enabled, spy ware on lecture theatre computers, programs not installed properly, helpdesk not open untill 8:30 when I have to be in a lecture teaching at 8:30 so I can't get a laptop.

But I have my new baby now. I have a VGA adapter and I'm very much looking forward to cutting some Java code on it and showing it in the lectures!

The other grip is that Java 1.5 is NOT availa!
ble for OS X yet!?

From what I can gather, there was a lot of hoo hah about apple being the platform to run Java on. That was about a year ago in the days of 1.4. But 1.5 has been in beta for almost that long, and the final version was released late last year. There has already been a major update for it (1.5.0_01) from Sun in the mean time. And still no 1.5 for Apple? I can't even find any mention of it on apples developers site.

I imagine it must be comming soon, but I would like a) to know exectly when to expect it, and b) why it isn't out already.

But apart from that, my new toy is very nice.

Now I just have to work out how to get it to talk to my Windows box…]]>

Extreme Refactoring” stuff and eliminate an if stament by using polymorphism and overloaded methods. After much frustration, I came upon a solution. I sat back to marvel at what I had done and slowly realised that I had just reinvented the Strategy Pattern

Doh!

Ya think your being smart, clever and original…

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posts lately, I think I should just post a link to it (as I just did) because he just puts things so well.]]>

blog

The above link is to an article about blogging. Having writen stuff on Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) while I was un undergrad (I must dust those essays off one day and write actual papers out of them), I still find the whole concept of bloggin itself immensley interesting.

Since the www first exploded in the min 90's, I've been writing online journals, well before I'd ever heard the term “blog”. Now the technology itself has evolved, and continues to evole, in leaps and bounds.]]>