Nongraphical.com

Sorting rated items

fyhuang — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:31:55 +0000

While shopping on Amazon and Newegg, I’ve come across a most frustrating problem. Both websites offer a sorting feature where you can view items in a particular category usually by price or name or release date or things like that. Both also allow buyers to rate items after they’ve used them, and allow potential buyers to sort the items based on other customers’ reviews. There is a fairly frustrating problem with this system, however.

Both Amazon and Newegg (and presumably thousands of other online stores) sort by *average customer rating* when told to sort by rating. If I were shopping for, say, computer monitors on Newegg, and I was looking for one that was reliable and rated highly by a lot of people, the average rating system might be misleading. Say there is an HP monitor for sale, which 500 people bought and liked. One person, however, bought it and found a few dead pixels (manufacturing defect - it happens), and so rated it low. The monitor’s average rating would be **4.98** out of **5.00** or something like that.

Now consider a no-name monitor that one person bought and liked. He or she is the only person to have ever rated this monitor, and rated it a 5, making the monitor’s average rating **5.00**. 5.00 for this no-name monitor is higher than 4.98 for the HP monitor - this would put the no-name monitor *higher up* on the list if I asked Newegg to sort by “Best rating”.

For a selection of two products this seems like a minor problem, but if I were looking for, perhaps, a new DVD burner, the hundreds of products which received two or three 5.00 reviews would fill up many pages of my search with irrelevant products - I would not consider one or two people rating a product a 5.00 to be an accurate indication that the product is, on the whole, reliably constructed. I would have to wade through all those pages before I found the first product rated by more than about five people.

There must be a better way to sort products by customer rating than simply by average rating, which produces misleading results. Newegg’s sort by number of ratings is better but still not exactly it. What if five hundred people bought a product and rated it badly? I think a better solution might be some sort of weighted average - 4.98s can be pulled higher than 5.00s if they have more ratings. Something along the lines of (score * number-of-reviews), so that the 500 5.00s that the better product received counts more than the two 5.00s that the inferior product received.

Grace, an original composition

fyhuang — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:45:30 +0000

Here is an original composition I wrote, called Grace, for flute, clarinet (in Bb) and piano, based somewhat on the hymn “Amazing Grace”. I’m providing it for free, under copyright, but if you decide to perform it, I would appreciate it if you would let me know!

Grace (PDF)

Problems with the Linux desktop

fyhuang — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:04:13 +0000

*(Update: in retrospect, I have realized that this article is perhaps not so well written. Expect something more useful and coherent soon!)*

Linux seems like the perfect solution for the new brand of portable PCs, netbooks. It’s efficient, requires few resources, and can run most if not all of the programs one usually runs on such small computers - word processing, email, web browsing, and so on. Large, complex software packages that require Windows to run perform abysmally on low-power computers like netbooks, so effectively the need to run Windows is nullified.

Why, then, do consumers (and reviewers!) choose Windows over Linux for netbooks?

*(In the remainder of this article, I will refer to “Linux” when I sometimes mean “the Linux community” and occasionally “the open-source community at large”.)*

### User Interface ###

I think the problem is two-fold. First, Linux’s user-interface is still not up to par with that of Windows, even Windows XP. GNOME’s user-interface has not been truly updated for years, and the basic components of a Linux UI - the file manager (Nautilus), the web browser (Firefox) simply don’t run as well as their Windows counterparts. By some trick or sleight of hand, Windows Explorer and Firefox on Windows simply run faster than on Linux. No, it’s not measured in raw performance - if anything, web page render rates on Linux should be faster. When the user clicks a button in Windows, or double-clicks a file folder, or anything of the sort, the computer simply responds faster. Especially if the computer is new, computer response time in Windows is almost instant.

This is not true with Linux. Even though Windows tends to slow down far past the level of Linux with time, and Linux more consistently maintains response time, that first impression of the Windows instant response is powerful. I can’t put my finger on what causes it right now, but certain options in the Linux kernel config seem to help. On the whole though, the Linux system is tuned more for consistent performance than instantly overridable user response.

This is evident when running multiple, intensive tasks at once. Linux slows down, but everything in the GUI is still clickable. Windows, however, is much less capable at handling complex multitasking. Unfortunately, the ordinary user doesn’t care.

Overall, Windows is just more pleasant to use. This is a combination of the above-detailed response time effect, and also because Linux’s increased flexibility, also pertaining to the UI, hinders usability. Simply put, the Linux UI needs to be better designed, for *ordinary users* and not for developers or hackers or power users.

### Economics ###

The second problem is one of economics. There are two types of goods in a simple economic analysis - normal goods and inferior goods. Normal goods are those that you buy more of as your income increases. Inferior goods, on the other hand, are goods that you buy only when your income is very low. A common example in economics is single-ply toilet paper - normally, people only buy cheap toilet paper when they have a great need to save money. Wealthier individuals avoid the product altogether.

My proposition is that Linux is currently being seen as an inferior good. [This ZDnet blog post][zdnet] explains the situation pertaining to Linux in Africa. Radio stations, an important tool for communication in Africa, prefer to use pirated versions of Windows instead of legally obtained copies of Linux. The Linux distributions proposed are specifically designed for their broadcasting purposes, and in basically all respects have *better-designed* UIs (for broadcasting) than Windows. In this case, Linux is objectively more suited for their purposes, so why do the radio operators prefer Windows?

[zdnet]: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=11141&tag=nl.e539

According to that post, Windows is seen as a “first world standard”, and to the radio stations, encouraging them to use Linux seems like trying to “cheat local people out of getting the same quality of software that is used in the developed world”. In this case, Linux is seen as the inferior good. It is seen as the product that one chooses to use *only when one does not have the economic resources to use a “better” product*, like Windows.

Partly, I blame previous (and in some cases still ongoing) advertising and publicity for Linux as a “low-cost alternative” to Windows. The use of both those terms have created huge problems for Linux’s image today. It is seen as being the cheaper “version” of Windows - that which one would buy only if they lacked the ability to pay for Windows. It is also painted as an “alternative”, and combined with the efforts (well-placed!) of such projects as wine and OpenOffice.org to ensure Windows compatibility, creates again an impression that Linux is trying to live up to Windows, and should only be used when one has no other choice. Instead of creating choice, Linux seems to have in a way limited it.

### Solutions? ###

I honestly don’t think very many people, if anyone, has a solution to Linux’s persistent image and market penetration problems. I think Ubuntu, my preferred and favorite Linux distro, is the only distribution so far to even come close to a usable, well-respected Linux distribution. (In my opinion, it’s more well-respected than usable.) I don’t claim to have the answers either. However, I do think that Linux needs to **stop copying Windows**. I don’t think that Microsoft’s UI is necessarily the best either. OpenOffice.org doesn’t have to look *exactly* like Microsoft Office 2003. More UI innovation from within the open-source community, and also more open-source UI designers, are needed. Linux should be aiming for increased usability, not simply look-alike Windows functionality. UIs for programs need to be designed, reviewed, and tested, with third-party test subjects, if possible.

I do not condone, however, decreased Windows compatibility. Linux needs to work flawlessly with Windows file formats and networks (and, to some extent, Windows applications) in order to be competitive. Development also needs to be easier on Linux. Face it friends, autoconf and automake are outdated and clumsy. Makefiles are outdated. IDEs, such as KDevelop (in all other respects an excellent IDE!), that require the use of autoconf and automake are, by extension, outdated. Software development is too slow and clumsy right now on Linux. This is not to say that Linux-based software development technologies are bad! Subversion, for example, is an excellent version control system. Unfortunately, it’s most easily used in conjunction with a Windows-based IDE. Software development needs to be removed from the domain of the text-based editors and command-line hackers, and into the domain of easy, rapid, commercial (and volunteer) development. User-interface development, for example, is extremely easy on Windows due to Microsoft’s well-designed tools for UI development. Sure, Qt Designer fills the same shoes, but Microsoft’s tools are better-made, and more flexible without sacrificing usability. If Linux could adopt a consistent policy on which UI toolkit to use, and then make that UI toolkit very easy to program with, I’m certain that application development on Linux would blossom.

Obviously the open-source development model has been relatively successful up to this point. Its free flow of information and code encourages iterative development and widens the net for programming talent. Unfortunately, it still has a long way to go. Linux’s reputation cannot be fixed by more effective coding alone. The user-interface problems that many Linux programs face cannot be fixed without a more commercial-like development model, or more full-time (maybe paid!) workers. Until that happens, Linux is likely to remain an inferior product in the eyes of the public.

Tuniq Sanctum HDD cooler/silencer

fyhuang — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 23:24:58 +0000

It doesn’t work.

Okay, that’s a little bit unfair; it’s probably more accurate to say that it doesn’t work *as expected*. The Tuniq Sanctum hard drive enclosure is a 5.25” bay device that holds a 3.5” (or smaller, I suppose) hard drive, and purportedly not only reduces the noise output of the drive but also helps to keep it cool. This device, unfortunately, excels at one aspect of its claimed purpose and fails at the other. While it does indeed keep noise levels down very acceptably, the Tuniq Sanctum enclosure, due to the lack of airflow inside the device, fails to cool the hard drive adequately. In fact, leaving the hard drive inside the enclosure will probably decrease the hard drive’s lifetime due to the 60+ degrees Celsius temperatures sometimes experienced inside the device.

There are other problems with the Sanctum. Cables passing into the device to connect to the hard drive, as seen here, are obstructed by a piece of foam at the back of the device. The foam puts pressure on the cables, which could be devastating for weaker connectors like SATA cables. The indents you can see above are caused by the wires pushing down on the foam.

When installing the hard drive into the Sanctum, one is supposed to attach two “thermal pads” to the hard drive. (These pads can be seen in the first photo.) The pads supposedly conduct heat away from the drive to the aluminum fins on the outside. I didn’t attach them during my installation, because they would have forced me to continue using the Sanctum with that drive for all eternity - the pads would make the drive thicker than an ordinary 3.5” bay. I don’t think the pads can do much to affect the thermals anyway, as foam (no matter how “thermal”) can never be a really good heat conductor.

To conclude, the Tuniq Sanctum is probably not worth the money. While it keeps the noise of the hard drive down, its inability to cool the drive adequately makes it basically useless to anyone wanting high performance or longevity from their drive. For new builders, the money spent on this enclosure would be better put toward a quieter or cooler-running hard drive.

Causes of video game piracy

fyhuang — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 19:03:06 +0000

There’s been a lot of talk recently about why PC gaming is “doomed”, mainly because of the ever-growing amount of PC game piracy. I don’t necessarily think that PC gaming is doomed at all, although I do think there will be a significant shift in the way the PC game market works - towards a more controlled distribution model, perhaps, like Steam.

This is what I think about piracy, however. It’s a self-sustaining cycle, in a way: high video game prices encourage gamers to pirate games instead of buying them, “forcing” video game manufacturers to raise prices or keep prices high in order to not lose revenue. Those high prices in turn continue to encourage piracy. This loop is not necessarily unbreakable, though there are several factors that, in my opinion, contribute to its sustenance:

1. **Too much push for realism.** High quality graphics is not necessarily photorealism, but the obsession with photorealism basically ensures that developers and publishers spend enormous amounts of money on game development, and are subsequently extremely afraid of “lost” revenue. This keeps game prices high. I think perhaps a better “marketing catchphrase” would be **believability**. Most games are not realistic at all in any way except for graphics - after all, why play a game if you could do the same thing in real life? Games are, almost by definition, unrealistic. That’s what makes them fun. Games do, however, need to be believable. They need to produce suspension of disbelief in the gamer, just like a good movie.

2. **Anti-consumer policies.** This includes schemes such as DRM and copy protection. It is helpful here to categorize piracy into two groups - “distribution” piracy and “consumption” piracy. Piracy consumers are often somewhat ignorant of their actions - they are simply looking for a cheaper way to play a game. Consumers are not necessarily skilled at manipulating computers or games. Pirate distributors are completely aware of their actions, and are usually the ones who break the encryption schemes on most games. They are usually very computer-saavy.

Which group is targeted by game copy protection schemes? Publishers would like to think the consumers. Copy protection prevents “casual piracy”, they say. However, in my opinion the reality is, “casual piracy” occurs when a piracy consumer unknowingly downloads a pirated product from the Internet, that *already has the copy protection removed*. I’m pretty sure that publishers lose much more money from widespread Internet distribution of pirated games than they do from, say, JoeBob giving his buddies a copy of the game so they can all play together. Copy protection really targets pirate distributors - it supposedly makes it harder for them to distribute games illegally. Does it? Definitely not. Current industry copy protection schemes (Securom, Safedisc, etc.) are easily broken by pirates. “No-CD cracks” for games are released by piraters sometimes even before the game is released. Worst of all, **copy protection schemes convince pirate distributors that the game publishers are evil and greedy and don’t deserve the profits from video game sales. This leads them to continue pirating video games.

What’s the lesson here? Copy protection doesn’t work, it’s easily broken, and all it does is make things worse.

Some solutions have been proposed to these problems. Centralized content distribution systems, like Steam, propose a seemingly almost-perfect way to control these factors. The built-in “activation” system prevents gamers from installing games that they do not own (as long as those games are Steam-exclusive), giving publishers peace of mind in knowing that their products will have to bring in revenue to be played. However, Steam is installable on as many computers as the user wants, along with its games, so it does not preclude small groups of friends from playing a game together. (Its activation system prevents multiple copies of a game to be played online simultaneously.) The nature of having an account with a username and password makes many people hesitant to freely give away their credentials, making rampant piracy much less appealing.

Its only flaws are this. One is purely technical - Steam does not work through proxy servers, making life extremely difficult for some gamers behind proxies. This can surely be resolved, easily, through some future Steam update. The other is something of a market flaw - Steam only allows games to be purchased new, then kept or gifted. There is no “used games” market on Steam. Some gamers (including myself) buy most games used, which is cheaper and very appealing for those willing to wait for a period after a game’s release. eBay prices for many old games are exceedingly affordable. However, because of Steam’s lack of a used game market, all game purchases on Steam are at somewhat inflated prices. A game that one could buy on eBay for less than $10 might still sell for $40 on Steam. Gamers who no longer wish to play some game do not have the option to recover some of their expenses in purchasing it - their only option is to give the game away to another Steam user. This means that second-hand transfers of games on Steam is very limited.

I think, with the resolution of these minor issues, platforms like Steam will become the ubiquitous method of distributing games on the PC. Lest developers feel that console distribution is the only way to go, let me put forth my opinion that console gaming is even more anti-consumer: it forces the consumer to buy entirely new, unflexible hardware if some game is exclusive to one particular console. There are currently no such things as cross-console standards. And do not think that console games cannot be pirated. Simple encryption schemes and specialized media do not prevent console games and emulators from being distributed widely on the Internet, as they are even now.

Firefox bookmark shortcuts

fyhuang — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:49:49 +0000

This is a neat trick I found in Firefox. This works at least in Firefox 3 and may also work in Firefox 2; I do, however, encourage you to upgrade if you’re still using Firefox 2, as the third release brings about many needed enhancements in performance and memory usage. Using a bookmark, one can turn the location bar into a sort-of command parser, thereby creating a sort of “keyboard shortcut” for that bookmark. This in effect allows you to create your own custom “keyboard shortcuts” or “location bar commands”. Here’s an example of how it works. Say I want to create a shortcut for Google Image Search. I can go to the Image Search page, and right click the box, and select “Add a keyword for this search”:

Enter some name for your search; the name doesn’t matter. *(Alternatively, you could simply create a new bookmark; its target (“location”) should be something like `http://www.google.com/search?q=%s`, where `%s` represents what will be searched on. Right-click the bookmark you just created and click “properties”.)* This dialog box will pop up:

In “keyword”, type the “command” that you wish to use to access this shortcut. In this case, I would use something like “imgs” or “is”. One-letter keywords do not seem to work very well. Once you have entered the keyword and closed the dialog, you can type in the location bar (press CTRL+L to get there quickly):

imgs cute puppies

Press enter, and behold your search unfolding before your eyes.

Updated Squid 3 configuration

fyhuang — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:54:51 +0000

Here is the updated version of my [previous authenticating/forwarding Squid 3 config](http://nongraphical.com/2008/09/squid-3-proxy-chaining/). It adds some things and fixes some things. In particular, the peer exclusion rules from the previous config were not working - this one should correctly *not use* the parent proxies when querying “local addresses”. As before, the configuration file contains two proxy servers for load balancing; it can be extended easily to include more. Here it is for your enjoyment:

cache_effective_user proxy
cache_effective_group proxy

http_port 3128
http_access allow all

acl local_ips dst 127.0.0.0/8 192.168.0.0/24 10.10.0.0/16
acl local_servers dstdomain localhost my.local.domain
never_direct allow all
always_direct allow local_ips
always_direct allow local_servers

acl http-only port 80
cache_peer firstProxy.site.com parent 3128 3190 no-query proxy-only login=Username:Password name=prx1
cache_peer secondProxy.site.com parent 3128 3190 no-query proxy-only login=Username:Password default name=prx2

# This makes only HTTP load balanced
cache_peer_access prx1 deny all
cache_peer_access prx1 allow http-only
cache_peer_access prx2 allow all

# Reinforcement of direct rules
cache_peer_access prx1 deny local_ips
cache_peer_access prx1 deny local_servers
cache_peer_access prx2 deny local_ips
cache_peer_access prx2 deny local_servers

# Some timeouts
connect_timeout 8 seconds
peer_connect_timeout 3 seconds

hierarchy_stoplist cgi-bin ?

cache_mem 64 MB
maximum_object_size_in_memory 64 KB

cache_replacement_policy heap GDSF
cache_dir aufs /var/spool/squid3 6000 16 256 # Make sure to check this path
maximum_object_size 16384 KB

access_log /var/log/squid3/access.log squid # Make sure to check this path

shutdown_lifetime 3 seconds

debug_options ALL,1

Social gaming? Try HoMM 3!

fyhuang — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:13:56 +0000

[Last time][cpc] I wrote about trying to find casual games for medium/large-group social events. We can split multiplayer video gaming into a couple of vaguely-defined categories; I’m going to use the term “casual” or “social gaming” to refer to medium-scale social gatherings that involve video gaming; hardcore gaming, of course, is all about the game; and we might perhaps call the last group “LAN party gaming” to indicate a middle ground between casual gaming and super-intense gaming.

[cpc]: http://nongraphical.com/2008/09/casual-games-for-the-pc/
[homm3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_of_Might_and_Magic_III

It is for the first category, social gaming, that I suggest a game today: [Heroes of Might and Magic III][homm3]. It’s kind of an old game - it was released in 1999, but the graphics certainly don’t show it. If you look closely (and use the map editor a lot), you’ll notice that an incredible amount of time was put into making the artwork for the game. Even at the measly 800x600 or whatever resolution the game uses, the forests and mountains and everything are incredibly detailed.

What is most interesting about the game, however, is its potential for social gaming today. It has two inherent advantages. Old games tend to use disk space much more efficiently (as a necessity), and this one is no exception. The entire installed footprint of HoMM 3 Complete (the original and two expansion packs) is only about 300 MB. I can compress this into an archive and put it on other computers, and get this - HoMM 3 allows you to join multiplayer games without having a CD inserted! You can copy this game to all your friends’ computers and have them join your game with exceptional ease. It’s second advantage is its turn-based nature: since you cannot do anything when it’s not your turn (besides looking around and inspecting your allies’ heroes), there is a lot of room in-between turns for conversation and socializing. It’s not necessary to be in a frenzied, intense state the entire time one is playing this game.

[SinglePic not found]

HoMM 3 games do take a long time to complete (on the order of many, many real-life hours), but multiplayer games can be saved and restarted at any time. Saving is almost instantaneous and basically effortless. I have been trying it out with my friends, and HoMM 3 does indeed make an excellent social game!

Unfortunately, HoMM 3 is no longer published, but you can still buy HoMM 3 Complete (which works, very well, on Vista!) very cheaply at [some sites][buyhomm3]. It might be worthwhile to pick one up soon, especially if you’re interesting in social gaming, as I’m not sure you will even still be able to buy this game in a couple of years.

[SinglePic not found]

[buyhomm3]: http://www.mastertronic.com/productPcGamer.asp?pid=331&productLabelID=1

Mouse repairs

fyhuang — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 01:29:29 +0000

This is a mouse that was once broken but is now healed. (A mechanical switch on the circuit board was broken; upon fixing that, the mouse works almost like-new.) I was actually quite surprised at the extreme simplicity of the actual mouse hardware - a couple of resistors, capacitors, an LED for the sensor, and the sensor chip itself. It seems to me that the costs for building such a mouse must be rather cheap indeed. In fact, I wonder now about the optical trackballs out on the market today - mine (the [Kensington Expert Mouse][kem]) is to all appearances just an upside-down optical mouse with a ball and a couple of extra buttons; would it be perhaps possible to construct my own perfectly-functioning trackball with only cheap optical mouse parts?

[kem]: http://blog.nongraphical.com/2008/08/kensington-expert-mouse-70/

Fascinating as that may seem, there are indeed [more exciting projects][mt] to attend to first.

[mt]: http://ssandler.wordpress.com/MTmini/

Disable virus scanning in Firefox after download

fyhuang — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 03:26:59 +0000

Here’s how to stop Firefox from automatically virus scanning all downloads after they’ve finished - something that’s been annoying me since I’ve upgraded to Firefox 3 because of the extraneous disk accesses it creates. Open up the `about:config` (open a new tab, type `about:config` in the location bar), and find the **`browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone`** value. Type in `browser` in the filter bar for quick searching. Set that value to false by double-clicking. And that’s it! What, were you expecting something more?

(originally read [here][ghacks])

[ghacks]: http://www.ghacks.net/2008/06/04/disable-automatic-virus-scanning-in-firefox-3/