2009 Birthday Wishlist

Silver Eagle Group Hosting 2-Gun Match!

I was at Silver Eagle this weekend for some trigger time, and noticed a flyer for a 2-gun match on 22-July!  They’ll run it with IDPA rules, only the stages will involve both rifle and pistol shots, and will include reloads for both.  I can’t wait!

Why do all mortgage calculators suck?

I”m currently in the process of buying my first home, so I am being exposed to the mortgage experience for the first time.  While I expected a certain degree of suckage, I was quite surprised to see how shitty the available rent vs buy and mortgage payment calculators are.

In an age where most of the AJAX and server-side hardness is done for the web app developer by any of a number of different web frameworks, leaving development talent to focus on building value-added functionality, all the calculators I saw were nothing more than linkbait, a convenient excuse to display a huge block of AdSense ads.

This was even worse for rent/buy calculators, since the number of possible parameters is not nearly so standardized.  For example, in order to decide if it’s cheaper to rent or buy, it’s necessary to know things like how much return you could get on your down payment if you invested it somewhere instead of buying a house with it.  What number do I put down?  0%, assuming a savings account that pays no interest?  10%, the supposed rate of return for the stock market over long time periods (giggle)?  What difference does it make?

The calculators should let you specify a range of values, and experiment with the results interactively to see how different assumptions impact the outcome.  The calculators should pre-emptively try obvious alternatives, like using some of the down payment to pay points instead, or putting more or less money down.  But they don’t do that.  It’s as though the technology is stuck in the 80s.

I did run across a link on Reddit to a mortgage company offering $10,000 for the best mortgate calculator, but it turns out it’s a gimmick.  They are effectively outsourcing the development of a new calculator for themselves, under very favorable terms.  Everyone who enters must develop a solution with PHP and AJAX, it must run on RedHat linux, and in order to receive the $10k they must sign over all rights to the code.  Pretty sweet deal.

I guess the reason there’s not been much innovation here is:

1. Not much competition; everyone seems to suck the same.
2. Not a directly profitable service, apart from ad placement.  Since they all suck the same (see #1), it’s not something a lender has to distinguish itself, just a box to check.

I have a few ideas for a better way to solve the problem.  Maybe I’ll even implement them someday.

How to Install Subversion on FH CentOS 5 (it should be easy, but isn’t)

I’ve been running apocryph.org and my other sites off of a pair of VPS instances hosted at FutureHosting.  It’s been a mixed bag of good and bad experiences, about which more later.  Long story short, I was standing up a new back-end server instance to host the MySQL databases and my personal Subversion repository.  In order to do this I obviously needed SVN installed.  No problem, of course, it’s as easy as ‘sudo yum install subversion‘.  Except it isn’t.

When I run the above command, I get:


Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile
* base: centos.secsup.org
* updates: mirror.raystedman.net
* addons: mirrors.tummy.com
* extras: mirrors.adams.net
base | 1.1 kB 00:00
updates | 951 B 00:00
addons | 951 B 00:00
extras | 1.1 kB 00:00
Excluding Packages in global exclude list
Finished
Setting up Install Process
Parsing package install arguments
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package subversion.x86_64 0:1.4.2-4.el5 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: perl(URI) >= 1.17 for package: subversion
--> Processing Dependency: neon >= 0.25.5-6.el5 for package: subversion
--> Processing Dependency: libneon.so.25()(64bit) for package: subversion
---> Package subversion.i386 0:1.4.2-4.el5 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: perl(URI) >= 1.17 for package: subversion
--> Processing Dependency: libneon.so.25 for package: subversion
--> Running transaction check
---> Package subversion.x86_64 0:1.4.2-4.el5 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: perl(URI) >= 1.17 for package: subversion
---> Package subversion.i386 0:1.4.2-4.el5 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: perl(URI) >= 1.17 for package: subversion
---> Package neon.x86_64 0:0.25.5-10.el5 set to be updated
---> Package neon.i386 0:0.25.5-10.el5 set to be updated
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
subversion-1.4.2-4.el5.i386 from base has depsolving problems
--> Missing Dependency: perl(URI) >= 1.17 is needed by package subversion-1.4.2-4.el5.i386 (base)
subversion-1.4.2-4.el5.x86_64 from base has depsolving problems
--> Missing Dependency: perl(URI) >= 1.17 is needed by package subversion-1.4.2-4.el5.x86_64 (base)
Error: Missing Dependency: perl(URI) >= 1.17 is needed by package subversion-1.4.2-4.el5.i386 (base)
Error: Missing Dependency: perl(URI) >= 1.17 is needed by package subversion-1.4.2-4.el5.x86_64 (base)

Not cool.  Why can’t yum resolve that dependency?  That’s what it’s for?  Oh well, I’ll install it manually with ‘sudo yum install perl-URI‘.  Um, no:


...
Parsing package install arguments
No package perl-URI available.
Nothing to do


No package available? WTF?

Googling about yields posts like this one, which suggest manually downloading and installing the perl-URI RPM.  I tried that and got this:


warning: perl-URI-1.37-2.fc11.noarch.rpm.1: Header V3 RSA/SHA256 signature: NOKEY, key ID d22e77f2
error: Failed dependencies:
perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.10.0) is needed by perl-URI-1.37-2.fc11.noarch
rpmlib(FileDigests) <= 4.6.0-1 is needed by perl-URI-1.37-2.fc11.noarch


Not helpful. But then I goggled about a bit more and ran into this. The OP in this forum thread had the exact same problem, and it turned out there were exclusions in his /etc/yum.conf file that excluded, among other things, all perl packages. I looked at my yum.conf and found this:

exclude=apache* bind-chroot courier* dovecot* exim* httpd* mod_ssl* mysql* nsd* perl* php* proftpd* pure-ftpd* ruby* spamassassin* squirrelmail*


WTF? Why are all those packages excluded?

I opened a ticket with FutureHosting on this, and first they just manually installed the perl-URI RPM and closed the ticket. I pushed further on why these excludes were there, and got this reply:

They are automatically put in there when cPanel installs. It’s because of cPanel.
Thank you,

Because of cPanel.  Well, that clears it right up.  This is the sort of answer I expect from FutureHosting, where their support people are clearly paid to close tickets, not explain things to users.  Why does cPanel require these exclusions?  What would happen if I removed them?  What did the support guy do to get the perl-URI package installed?   I don’t know.  I may never know.  But if you run in to this problem, particularly if you’re hosted on a VPS or cPanel instance, check your exclude in yum.conf.

English Punctuation Reform Now!

Just days ago I noted how I hate and willfully ignore the English punctuation rules pertaining to parentheses and quotation marks.  Today I find I’m not alone.

ESR nails it again, this time on guns

Here I go linking to ESR twice in as many days.  I’m not an ESR fanboy, really.

His essay We Are Not Sheep nails the issue of visceral hoplophobia and ways by which the shooting community can counter what is usually not a rationally held view regarding firearms.

It’s still weird for me to be reminded how fiercly pro-gun rights ESR is.  Given his open-source credentials and militant opposition to closed source software, it seems like he should be a gun-hating liberal, but he’s not.  Awesome.

Mercenaries 2 on Xbox 360 is fun (and frustrating)

Ever since I finished the greatest game in the history of human civilization (and possibly the universe), Fallout 3, I’ve been playing Mercenaries 2 on my XBOX 360.  I like the premise of the game (which is that you blow things up with a wide variety of small arms, explosives, vehicles, and munitions), but the execution is a bit flawed.

Those who know me well know I am easily entertained by wonton destruction.  One of the things that I love to do in Crackdown is to camp out on an overpass, shooting out the tires of the cars below, creating an ever-larger pile up, then peppering the road with explosive barrels and lobbing a grenade into the mix.  I was hoping for a similarly visceral rampage experience in Mercs 2, and from time to time it delivers.

I love calling in artillery strikes to level a building, or sending in a tank-killer to wipe enemy heavy armor from the map, and I especially love flying about Venezuela in an attack helicopter unleashing rockets and barrages of minigun rounds on unsuspecting tangos below.  However the game strays from this proven formula too often in the form of road or boat races along the main story line which one must complete to move forward.  I hate racing games, which is why I’m playing Mercenaries 2 and not Forza.  I’m fine with little side quests and mini-games that cross genres to keep things interesting, but forcing me to race around on a fucking jet ski just so I can get back to blowing shit up is maddening.

I also find the game lacks some polish.  For example, the game save GUI is clunky, and you can’t load a saved game without quitting the current game and navigating to the save game mangement view.  Further more, while the game lets you save at any time, if you’re in the middle of a contract the game will load only as far as the last checkpoint, and does not reflect where you were at the time of the save.

I also find the lack of persistence in the game annoying.  Perhaps I was spoiled by Fallout 3′s mind-blowing success in this regard, where I could drop a pistol in a room somewhere in the world, come back days or weeks or months later, and find the pistol exactly where I left it.  Still, it irritates me when I spend cash and fuel to get a Rogue Assassin helo, park it on the helipad, go get a contract fron a contact, and discover my helo is now gone.  Lame.

Though there’s not much need to farm resources to move forward in the game, what little there is is still too much.  For a game about blowing shit up, there’s an awful lot of drugery involved.  For example, why must I constantly seek out fuel?  Why can’t I buy it with my many millions of dollars?  It’s not like this adds any challenge to the game; I just fly in my UP helo to the nearest UP camp, grab their fuel tank with my grapple while they still think I’m a UP unit, and fly off to a nearby safe LZ to get the oil extracted.  What’s next, stopping three times a day to get food for my character?  If I wanted to dwell on banal minutiae, I’d live my actual life.

I’ll keep playing Mercs 2 because overall it’s a fun game, and the co-op multiplayer is even moreso, but it could have been so much better.

ESR on punctuation

ESR discusses different punctuation styles.  What he calls the ‘eloqutionist’ style is the punctuation style I used intuitively as a child and young adult.  It was somewhat beaten out of me by the prescriptivist grammarian regime which ascribes strict syntactic rules to the placement of punctuation marks.  This has always seems arbitrary and in some cases leads to absurd results (two examples are the placement of a period after quotes or parenthesis; the programmer in my wants it to fall outside of the parens/quotes, but the syntact fetishists don’t seem to mind the ugly asymmetry of it all).  <– See what I did there?  That’s where the period should go.  If it falls within the parenthesis, it’s like it’s a period on the bit in parens, not the whole sentence.  Ugly!

Before reading ESR’s article I didn’t realize there was a legitimate literary tradition of eloqutionist punctuation, and I’m a bit dismayed that I have for the most part kicked the habit due to the aforementioned sylistic oppression of the ruling prescriptivist regime.  Maybe I can train myself back now that it no longer matters what English PhDs think of my writing.