Michael Cook’s Place

It’s been a while since I posted. I’ve been busy with work, mostly, and a few other things.

I noticed this week that I’m down to one little shrimp in my biosphere. This means I must rename him, as I have done each time such a loss has occurred.

I am now down to one: Vash The Stampede (the $$60,000,000,000 shrimp)

I emailed Microsoft Support with a bug entry about the clock. They made it very hard to find anywhere to email them, but I did it.

A short while later I got back a nice email saying, essentially, “Sorry, and here is how to set the clock.” You can guess how happy I am about that.

But there was a mention in the email about XBox Live. It turns out when you connect to XBox Live it does set the time on your XBox. Furthermore, you can’t change the time while you’re connected to XBox Live. This is exactly what I’d like this would solve my problem. But it doesn’t work.

You see, I don’t use XBox live. The only time I connect is if I decide to buy some little game (which I haven’t done since buying Geometry Wars shortly after buying my system). I can’t play multiplayer (like in GTA4) since I don’t pay for Gold, and only have the free Silver membership.

This means that, despite the fact that my XBox is always connecting to Live to deal with friends, gamer scores, achievements, and other such things… it’s not connecting to XBox live since I must not be doing enough on Live to trigger the time update.

Weak. Really weak.

Due to recent experiences, I’m reminded of the fact that the XBox 360 doesn’t include a clock that works when the power is off. With just a few seconds of research, I was able to confirm that the PC-AT (released in 1984) had a real time clock that could keep time when the unit wasn’t plugged in. My Mac keeps the clock without it’s power cord. So did all my PCs, various other consoles, clock radios, etc.

Yet my 360 doesn’t do this. When I moved, it lost it’s time sitting in a box for a month or two. When I unplugged it for a few hours to plug something else in, it lost it’s time.

When I unplugged it so that I could plug it into a bigger power strip 5 minutes later, it lost track of the time.

So every time something like that happens, I get to reset it. It doesn’t take a reasonable guess, it resets it’s self to launch day or so: November 25^th, 2005.

Now in a stupid device, this would be unacceptable. All it takes is a little real time clock circuit to maintain the correct time for months without power. It’s trivially simple.

Yet the 360 can’t do it. Worse than that is that it is connected to the internet. This means that it could easily ping a timeserver and ask what time it is. That would be fine with me. Maybe it wouldn’t get the exact time right (due to timezones), but it could at least get the year right. Every time I boot the thing up and go to play GTA4, it signs in to XBox live. It finds out my gamer score, what I’ve been playing recently, if I have friends online, what new games are available, and many other things. But it doesn’t know what time it is.

I’m submitting this as a bug to Microsoft.

I’ve been playing GTA4 on and off for about a week now. It’s pretty well done. There are some curious framerate issues, and the game is definitely in the uncanny valley. The shooting controls are much improved; which is to say almost playable. But I’ve come across a fair bit of things that caught my interest while playing.

• While playing yesterday I was on a date with Michelle. I took her to a small bar. There was a fade out and suddenly I was drunk. REALLY drunk. Michelle was fine. The game does a great job of this. Walking was near impossible, let alone driving. The camera moves around on it’s own. Niko stumbles around comically. As time goes on, these things get easier and easier as your buzz wears off. There are visual filters applied making things tougher to see too.

  Yet Michelle didn’t care at all. She didn’t see to make anything of it. To get home, I called a cab. The driver picked us up and then started a very vulgar conversation discussing how many girls he finds in the city. Michelle didn’t react or blink an eye during this time. At the end of this date (where I got so drunk I couldn’t walk)… she was happy with me.

• Other dates have been similar. What’s Michelle’s reaction if you hit a pedestrian with your car? Not much. Doesn’t seem to effect her mood the few times I accidentally did it.
• The police are interesting. Carjacking someone in front of them will get you in trouble. Doing it 20 feet away doesn’t. Crashing into their cars will get you in trouble, bumping them with some minor damage won’t. I went to a nightclub that had a bouncer to make sure you didn’t walk in carrying a weapon. He didn’t mind when I stole someone’s car right in front of him.

• The people often react really well. After taking one guy’s car, another car stopped and the guy got out and started coming after me. While playing one mission a fellow pedestrian (I was on foot) saw me chasing someone with a gun so he pulled his and tried to stop me.

  The one that really surprised me was when I took a car from a guy and ended up chasing him. This wasn’t intentional, I took the car and started driving towards my destination. This happened to be the direction the former driver was running in. As I drove down the street, he was running on the sidewalk, pushing between people, jumping through a construction site. He got more and more panicked because I was “after” him.

• While driving one character around for a mission, he was smoking weed in my car. The windows were cracked (because of him) so as I drove around thin white clouds of smoke would seep out of the windows and float in the air… all looking quite realistic in the way they acted.

They put a ton of attention to detail in this game. I wish they had improved the shooting controls more. The uncanny valley and (relatively) low polygon counts of the people could be improved. But they made a great little city.

Intro

Thanks to the large storm cell that went through the midwest on Thursday, basically every TV show that my TiVo recorded off the major networks during primetime was useless. I would guess I got about 10% TV shows, 90% weather coverage.

But I’ve got two nice internet connections (6Mbps at home, dual T1s at work) so I decided to try out the streaming services that the major networks are now offering on their websites. The last time I had this problem almost no TV shows had an official way of viewing them. You’d have to just use a torrent. But that’s changed.

CBS

I just finished watching Thursday’s episode of CSI using their episode viewer. There were noticeable framerate problems during the show. It basically looked like portions of the show were missing frames, purposely. My guess is that it’s an encoding issue as my computer had plenty of extra CPU head room so I doubt that to be the problem. Other than that (which is kind of minor, but if common could effect more action oriented shows like Survivor quite a bit), the video was very nice looking.

The site it’s self is easy enough to navigate. The video plays simply in the web page, using a flash player that looks quite a bit like the YouTube player. Commercials are short (just one commercial per commercial break), and embedded straight into the video. This is quite nice. When paused, the video simply pauses and nothing odd happens (keep reading for why I mentioned this). You can watch either in the native size, or fullscreen. The problem here (which is minor) is that when put into full screen, it stretches up the 4:3 size of the player. Yet the content is widescreen, thus putting black bars that are unnecessary on my widescreen monitor all around the video.

ABC

Using ABC’s service I watch both Ugly Betty and Grey’s Anatomy. ABC’s service is the one I liked the least. The biggest problem for me was the commercials and pausing the video. When you pause the video, it becomes a much smaller version of it’s self and moves off to the side so the whole window can be used for an ad. When unpaused, things go back to the way they were.

The commercials are either videos or little flash files. The problem is that the video stops, and this ad shows up instead. When the ad is over (you are forced to wait 30 seconds), the ad doesn’t go away. The program doesn’t continue. You have to click the continue button. This means you can’t just watch the show, you must interact. Where I watched CSI on my TV using the VGA port, I wouldn’t be able to do this with the ABC shows because I would have to get up and click the little button every 10-15 minutes. On the plus side they offer four sizes for the video (small, normal, large, and fullscreen).

The player is a big flash window, which sucks up extra CPU that it doesn’t need. It’s all animated and nice looking, wasting cycles on pointless transition effects (that could be trivially accelerated with 3D processing, which flash has access to). The video looks great though, I have no complaints in that department. I just wish they’d fix the player. I’m not sure if it is flash though, as it required a little plugin to be installed (some custom thing).

NBC

The system NBC uses is pretty nice. It’s not hard to use, and once the video starts playing the screen more or less clears of clutter making things a bit easier to watch. I used it to watch The Office, Scrubs, and My Name Is Earl. The video quality was great, I didn’t notice any problems. Yet not every NBC show is available: notably ER. Since the episode isn’t being rerun on my local station (as far as I can tell) and isn’t available online (legally), I just won’t get to see it until it reruns later in the year or in syndication.

My favorite thing about the NBC system is one that will probably be fixed. When your show first starts or during commercials, you are shown an ad video. At least I think that is what is supposed to happen. You see on my Mac those videos didn’t play… at all. Yet after that was over (30s) the video would start back up. This meant that it was commercial free for me. Now whether this was a Mac thing or a Safari thing, I don’t know. But it was nice.

It Works With A Mac!

The best part of all this is that it works with a Mac. No Windows Media Player nuttiness. No “you must install Silverlight”. They all worked on my Mac. It’s nice to see that. So many people just ignore Apple users or cop out and say “get Parallels.”

None of the services were bad, they were all quite usable. That’s a good thing, since we’re entering severe weather season and I’ll probably get to use them again.

Maybe I’ll get to checkout Fox or The CW next time.