All posts by Bob Igo

I am human.
Technology

Two Ways to Force Firefox to Remember Passwords

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Some well-meaning web UI designers will specify that login and password fields are not to be remembered, by setting the autocomplete attribute to ‘off’.  When autocomplete is ‘on’ a good browser like Firefox can remember your login and password for you and keep them in an encrypted list of passwords that you unencrypt with a master password.  The trouble, I suppose, is that it’s not mandatory to encrypt the password list, so uninformed users may leave themsleves open to an attack which the “autocomplete off” sites try to prevent.  But I’m not an uninformed user and want Firefox to remember all my passwords for me, whether the site designers like it or not.

Enter greasemonkey.  With the greasemonkey extension to Firefox, you can “fix” broken web pages by applying changes to the DOM (Document Object Model) via little Javascript commands.  Greasemonkey can support many sub-scripts, and the one I chose to get around M&T Bank’s broken login page is simply called Allow Password Remembering.  It’s straightforward – find anything under a form that has an ‘autocomplete’ element, and change its value to ‘on’.  However, this wasn’t enough for Highmark Blueshield’s site, possibly because greasemonkey isn’t the last thing that runs to alter the page’s contents.

Enter DOM Inspector.  Thanks to Jason May for introducing me to DOM Inspector, which allows you to view and edit a webpage live.  No it isn’t magical and can’t push changes back to the server, but you do affect the way the page behaves for you, at least temporarily.  So I went to Highmark’s login page and opened up DOM Inspector (Tools -> DOM Inspector).  Searching for the ‘form’ tag narrowed the search down to the login form, and after some manual looking around, I found the ‘autocomplete’ attributes for the userid field and the password field, and I changed them both to ‘on’.  When I logged in, Firefox dutifully asked me if I wanted to remember the password.  The best part is that revisiting the page in its natural state still allows Firefox to use the saved password.  (Apparently, Firefox will offer a saved password no matter what the ‘autocomplete’ field says; it just won’t offer to remember it if it’s ‘off’.)

Politics

Sabotaging Political Polls

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If a pollster asks who you’re backing in the Presidential election, lie to them and help inflate the poll numbers for your candidate’s opponent.  This will make your candidate work harder to win over undecided voters and cause the other candidate to coast to the finish line, only to find they aren’t the one who gets to break the paper ribbon.

Politics

Why Don’t We Get to Pick Vice-Presidential Candidates?

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We spend millions of dollars and hours during the Presidential primary campaigns, trying to weed out the candidates that nobody wants.  When this is all over, the chosen candidates usually pick someone who either was not part of the primary election, or who did poorly in it.  I once proposed that there be no such thing as a candidate for Vice President, with the role being filled by the runner-up of the Presidential election, and I was told that things used to be done that way.  Up to and including the 1800 election, the Vice President was the runner-up of the Presidential election, and there were several candidates in the contest, not at all like today.  It only changed because of poor hazard analysis on the part of the country’s founders; they had not foreseen a tied vote.  Strangely, instead of simply implementing a tie-breaker by enforcing an odd number of electoral votes or by employing a thunderdome, the 12th amendment forced people to explicitly vote for a President and a Vice President.  Given that party politics has always been divisive, this ended up reflecting the kinds of pairings we see now.

Mind you, there are problems.  If we lived in a world where the runner-up got to be VP, there would be lots of names on the ballot.  Based on the voter response during the 2008 primaries, the main candidates would have been McCain / Obama / Clinton, likely resulting in a McCain win with Obama as VP due to vote-splitting between the two Democrats.  If this seems undesirable to you, consider that the 2000 elections would have resulted in Gore as VP, thus sparing people’s faces from shotgun fire.  2004 may have kept the two in place or shaken things up by demoting Bush to VP.  A side-effect of all this is that, in most cases, there would be a President from one major party and a Vice President from the other, with either party likely to offer new candidates for the general election.  That could potentially lead to stagnation.

There are also advantages.  If the country is divided, maybe the Executive branch should be, too.  Lincoln was famous for appointing his opposition to his cabinet, typically justified as keeping an eye on them and/or preventing them from working against his goals.  But maybe he had other reasons.  Maybe Lincoln, who did not win the majority vote, knew that in order to serve the entire country, he needed access to viewpoints that conflicted with his own.  If a President and VP from opposing parties could find a way to work together to get things done, maybe they could show the rest of the country how it’s done.  Then maybe we can eliminate this whole “party” shorthand that seems to make instant idiots of so many people.

The major problem I see with this idea is that, as far as I know, the VP has virtually no role that the President doesn’t assign to them, so a split administration may mean a VP who gets less done than they would as a member of congress, for example.

What do the rest of you think?  Should we do away with appointed candidates and go back to the days before the 12th amendment?

Games

Nostalgia Gaming: X-COM and its Clones

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I just posted about my technical experiences with the Steam re-release of the X-COM series, so let me tell you about X-COM.  It’s a game where you are in control of a planetary anti-UFO force during an era when a bunch of different alien races seem intent on attacking the planet.  The gameplay has several combined elements that made it unique in its time, as far as I know.

The strategic element is sim-like and lets you manage your bases.  You can hire researchers, soldiers, and scientists, build new equipment and base components, and decide what to do when aliens are spotted.  You will have to decide how to spend limited resources to go fight the aliens, since they will often land in more places than you have vehicles.  A country will angrily pull its funding if you don’t fight the aliens that attack it.

When I first played this game, the most fascinating aspect was what we now call a tech tree.  Unlike usual tech trees, the tech tree in X-COM only reveals itself as you retrieve more alien beings and technology.  Your scientists study what you retrieve, and while they can learn some things about alien corpses, they can learn even more from live specimens, which are tougher to collect.  With the right research, your soldiers could eventually acquire beam weapons and flying power armor.  The best part about this is that what you discover varies from game to game, adding to replay value.

The RPG element is small but significant.  Each of your soldiers has a name, attributes, and skills.  Initially, you’ll want to assign weapons to them based on their skills with different weapon types, maximum movement rate, etc.  After each alien encounter, they gain experience which is auto-allocated toward their attributes.  Deaths in the field can impact morale, which can lead your soldiers to panic and run or leave them susceptible to alien mind control, turning them into enemy soldiers.  A soldier who stays alive through several missions will be promoted in rank, and the presence of high-ranking people in the field improves morale.  Likewise, the death of a high-ranking soldier hurts morale more than the death of a low-ranking soldier.

The tactical element is what you do when you go find the aliens.  Sometimes the aliens land a fully intact ship and go rampaging.  Sometimes they crash after you shoot them down.  Regardless, you find them in a state where they’d prefer not to talk and would rather exterminate you, so you need to be careful.  The earlier games are turn-based, and you have to carefully decide whether to save movement for automatic actions (such as defensive weapons fire) or use it up.  If you just move as far as you can, on the aliens’ turn, an alien could stumble upon you and shoot you.  If you had saved enough time to fire your weapon, when you see the alien, you’ll fire reflexively before they have a chance.  The aliens can make the same decisions, so be careful.

The game concept was innovative, and unfortunately never developed by Microprose into a successful franchise.  I think that they failed to capture what was great about the original in their two in-genre followups.  It was clear that they had given up when they released a space flight shooter and a first-person shooter under the X-COM name.

People often misunderstand the expression, “You can never go home again.”  While you can go back to the house where you grew up, it does not reproduce the experience and the feeling of being a kid again, living under your parents’ roof and guidance.  Even if the house hasn’t changed, you have.  The same can be said about beloved old video games.  In the course of playing the original DOS version of X-COM, I soon realized how quirky the controls were and how randomly malicious the game could be, such as invading your base on your first game day and wiping you out.

I also realized that these games are firmly from the era where you needed a manual to learn how to play them.  After trying the only in-genre X-COM title that I hadn’t played before, X-COM Apocalypse, I saw all these unfamiliar controls and had little idea what to do.  A modern game would never be so cruel, but this is how pirates used to be punished, kids; they didn’t care if you copied the game because they knew you’d never figure it out without the hard-to-copy black-on-gray manual.  GUIs and game design have come a long way since X-COM debuted, and I soon itched for a game that played just like X-COM that would take advantage of modern game design.

After some searching, I found that a European company called Altar Games had developed some recent titles that could be considered X-COM clones: UFO Aftermath, UFO Aftershock, and UFO Afterlight.  All of them have demos, and two of them run in wine, although they have invisible mouse cursors, making gameplay hard.  Despite that, I like what I see so far, but I need to play more extensively to see if they retained all the core elements of the original X-COM, or if they just expanded on the tactics and set aside the rest.  After some more testing, I’ll report what I find.

Linux

Like an Onion Skin

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I saw that Valve was offering a cheap bundle of all the old X-COM games on Steam, and I decided to buy them, hoping they’d run in wine.  The Steam version was too new to show up on wine’s compatibility list, but it was less than $14, so I gambled.  Out of 5 games, 4 run in wine well enough to play, and 1 does nothing.  Here’s the insanity: The older DOS games were not actually ported to Windows, so the Steam version includes a Windows-based DOS emulator.  In my case, I’m running Linux and launching wine, which runs the Windows program, which launches the Windows-based DOS emulator, which runs the old DOS game.  And it works.  You’d sound like a zealot or a crazy person if you suggested that I try to run it that way on purpose, but this only serves to highlight how good wine is now.

Programming, Quality Assurance

Circumventing QA Processes

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Now and then, a manager will make a decision to meet a software delivery deadline by bypassing a QA process, because in their mind, meeting the deadline is more important than assuring quality.  They may send something broken, but at least they send something broken on time.  To be fair, this is not always their fault; their own managers may be the ones enforcing this world view, and adhering to it, however nonsensical, may make a major difference in their annual raise.

Those of us who actually produce work product for a living tend to think of things in terms of whether or not they work, not when they are delivered.  The when is largely a measure of how inaccurate the manager’s arbitrary schedule was, nothing more.  It took as long as it took to make it work, and that’s that.

I propose that any manager who elects to circumvent a QA process in order to rush software toward a deadline must read and sign a document stating the following:

I’m a manager, and as such, I know way more than the QA department’s trained professionals about the chaotic nature of software changes.  I acknowledge that one simple change can cause side-effects that are not obvious, but I’m certain that this isn’t the case here because my mind is more powerful than any mere QA process, and I know better than the entire QA group.  If for some reason I’m wrong (which I am not), I will buy everyone a pony of their choosing.

This may seem a little harsh, but when I was starting my career, I became the delivery manager and the QA department, making me the gatekeeper between a deliverable and our customer.  I had a total quality failure involving someone who was new to a software module and building it for the first time.  Twice in the same week, he assured me it was good to go, and twice in the same week, I trusted that and delivered something that was fundamentally broken.  We worked together to resolve the problem, but the lesson I learned was that trust and judgment are not as powerful as a robust QA process.  When I elected to bypass the QA process, I was essentially making an implicit declaration like the one above.  Of course, I was, in effect, saying that I knew more than me, since I was both the delivery manager and the QA department 🙂

Technology

Whole-house Air Conditioner Tip

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This is mundane but practical.  In the course of having a minor but critical repair done on a failed air conditioner, I learned that it had never had enough freon.  I had just accepted that the vent temperatures in the low 70s were what we could expect, but after our friendly neighborhood repairman added some freon, our vent temperature is 59°F now.  It’s strikingly analogous to what happens to humans when they’re missing blood volume – they don’t tend to work as well.  And just like with humans, optimal efficiency is achieved by the precise amount of fluid in the system.  If you put in too much, then it doesn’t move because there’s no room for the pressure differentials that allow pumping in a closed system.

The environmental and economic benefit is much like proper tire pressure’s effect on fuel economy.  We’ve been here for three years, and on every hot day, our second-floor air conditioner was running for longer than it should have, simply due to the fact that it was inefficient. All that time, we used more electricity than we needed to.  This simple cheap step would have paid for itself long ago.  As someone who loves efficiency, this really hurts, but I’m glad it’s fixed now.

I encourage all of you to measure your vent temperatures.  You should get somewhere around 60°F – anything more is inefficient and costly and needs to be addressed, possibly with more freon.

Science

How Did I Not Know This?

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While reading a list of strange scientific phenomena, I saw a throwaway comment about a natural nuclear reactor underneath the surface of the Earth at “what is now Oklo in Gabon.”  It had to be a joke.  Surely I had stumbled across some obscure viral marketing for the next horrible scifi movie, and when I researched Oklo, I’d find some website talking about it that looked old but had no archival record prior to 2007, with speculation from prominent UFOlogists suggesting it was from a crashed spaceship.

Except my search quickly brought me to a sub-site of the US Department of Energy talking about how it happened, how they know it happened, and what it means for disposal of radioactive materials.  Huh.  Now, I don’t expect to have learned everything there is just yet, but damn it if this isn’t the most awesome thing nobody seems to talk about. Our planet spontaneously made its own nuclear reactor millions of years before any mind ever considered the possibility.

It ranks up there with the moment I learned that in 1975, the USSR landed probes on the surface of Venus, withstanding the crushing pressures and lead-melting temperatures long enough to take pictures and gather some environmental data and transmit it back to Earth.  6 years later, they repeated their success and returned color pictures.  Badass.  If you check out their timeline, you’ll see that they failed for 14 years until they got it right, which is possibly very inspirational, but I can’t escape the mental imagery of a special Siberian gulag just for disgraced Venus mission leaders.

Uncategorized

Apparently, People Read This Stuff

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Slides from my recent talk were downloaded an unexpected number of times, leading me to conclude that either I’m being abused by aggressive PDF-indexing search bots, or that more people than I suspected may actually read my blog.

If you haven’t posted a comment so far, feel free to just say hi.  I’m still content to write what comes into my mind, but if anyone has a particular topic of interest, it may prod me into action to turn a half-baked concept into an actual readable post.  (You’d pass out if you saw all the drafts I have queued up…)