There would be no point for reviewing the individual books, since, like with Corwin, it is one big story spanning five books. Eight years after the first five disappointing books in the series were published, Roger Zelazny comes back with a little more writing skill, a more interesting plot and a different character. That's the good news. The bad news is that it is pretty much like the Corwin cycle, only with a guy that uses magic instead of a stupid sword. His name is Merlin and he is Corwin's and Dara's son, inheriting both Amber and Chaotic blood. Somehow he still gets his ass kicked by his father, though.

The characters are again, like something from a high school teen movie set in the middle ages. People are mortal enemies and then make conversation, make up and help each other against another mortal enemy, who will probably help them both sometimes later. Arrogant nobility behavior mixes with a general ineptitude to use any knowledge from the "shadow lands" even if a lot of the characters gain their education on Earth. The only interesting thing seems to be an AI that Merlin created... which then calls him dad and acts just like every other generic character in the books. And everybody is just so amazingly and mind stunningly stupid! I couldn't take another book in this crappy series.

Bottom line: The Amber Chronicles was a total waste of my time, the only advantage it has being that its writer ended both cycles and then died, making any sequels improbable. I kid you not, Eragon was way better and it was written by a 19 year old!

In my opinion, when a software you have been using for a long time changes the way it works and intrudes on your already existing installations, not only it is disappointing and mean, but it should also be illegal. Today I noticed that the links from my blog went to intermediate sites (I apologize for not noticing it sooner) like vindicosuite. A quick Google search led me to this link: Goodbye Sitemeter. Apparently, SiteMeter, a software that I have been using to show a views counter on my blog, has been acquired by a crappy company called News Company. I mean, this is the actual name, I am not making fun of you; it's like displaying "Dr Doom's Evil Lair" on your house fence (and not kidding about it). Without the company saying anything, the SiteMeter script added these click and contextmenu handlers on my links, redirecting to other sites, maybe with ads on them (I have AdBlock Plus installed and so should you!, so I don't know). Anyway, the moment I realized this I removed the script from my blog. I have to apologize again for failing to notice this for so long.

Because of idiotic firewall rules at my workplace I am forced to use Hangouts rather than Yahoo Messenger as an instant messenger. I am not going to rant here about which one is best, enough to say that most of my friends are on YM and being on Hangouts doesn't help. Hangouts has many annoyances for me, like its propensity to freeze when you lose Internet connection often or the lack of features that YM had. In fact I was so annoyed that I planned to do my own professional messenger to rule them all. But that's another story.

I am writing this post because of a behaviour of the Google Hangouts instant messenger (which, to be fair, is only a Chrome extension), mainly that after a while, the green traybar icon of the messenger goes in the "hidden icons" group. I have to customize it every day, sometimes twice, as it seems to reset this behavior after a period of use, not just on restarts. There is a Google product forum that discusses this here: System tray icon resets every time Chrome is started where you also see a few comments from your truly.

I immediately wanted to create a script or a C# program to fix this, but at first I just searched for a solution on the web and I found TrayManager, a C# app that does what the "Customize..." tray link does and more. One of the best features is a command line! So here is what you do after downloading the software and installing it somewhere: TrayManager.exe -t "Hangouts" 2. Now, probably that doesn't solve the problem long term. It is just as you would go into the Customize... link, but it's faster. Also, it has no side effects if run multiple times, so you can use Task Scheduler to run it periodically. Yatta!

So I have to leave Italy and go to Belgium for some business. I would make the trip with my colleagues so, imagining they know better how to fly from Italy, since they live here, I ask them to search for the flight. They do that and they send me this link to a site called VolaGratis ("fly for free" would be the translation). This is actually an Italian web site for BravoFly, an Italian flight search aggregator. I find my flight, it says 89EUR a two way flight, which was OK. The site is in Italian, though, so I choose English, it takes me to the BravoFly site, I select the same flight: 105EUR. I'll be damned! So I use the Italian site. I also check the special needs box and write down "Long Legs", expecting them to book me one of those extra legroom places. Now it gets interesting.

The payment section held a big message telling me how great it is that I use Mastercard, so they can give me a big discount. I don't use Mastercard, though, so I select VISA. Suddenly the price jumps from 89 to 125EUR. Well, that probably explained why there was a difference between the Italian and international site. So I proceed. In about half an hour I receive a call from a weirdly formatted Italian number: +39 followed by only 6 digits. I answer in English. There is a long pause, then (in English) I hear the question "Do you speak French?", I reply that I don't, the voice asks a quivering "Do you speak Italian?" (also in English) I also reply no, but I ask her to wait and I pass my phone to an Italian colleague. The operator has closed the connection by then, probably couldn't wait for more than 2 seconds without asking an inane question. A minute later I receive an SMS - in Italian, of course - that I couldn't be contacted and that I should call them back. All nice and all, only their phone numbers are all paid numbers, I have to pay 6EUR per call, give them my credit card details, etc. Or I can call the Italian paid number (six digits) and pay 1.8EUR per minute. Funny enough, I could not call the Italian number from the land line, since it was a paid one, nor from my friend's phone, also because it was locked for paid lines, nor could I call the international number from any Italian phone, as there was an automated voice telling me to call the other number. I wrote them a scalding email, awaiting a reply. I got a phone call at 8 PM which clicked two times and closed after two seconds, but no other reply.

So I was forced to call them using my Romanian number, in roaming in Italy, calling the paid "international" Italian number. And that is because their site could only show my bookings, but would not allow me to cancel one, so in fact they were holding my credit card details hostage. In order to cancel any booking with BravoFly I had to - yeah, you guessed it - call them. Meanwhile I was stuck not knowing if they will book the flight or not. After speaking with an operator speaking English with a thick Italian accent, one who barely mumbled anything she said and then acted annoyed that I ask her to speak louder, I realize that the whole thing was caused by my ticking the special request box and asking for the legroom. I needed to pay extra for that, of course. I said OK, waited for five minutes, nothing happened. I hung up the phone. Got called back in 5 minutes that my booking could not be confirmed. They might just as well have said "Thank you for the money and time you spent trying to make us do what we advertised we do, but we can't, so fuck you!". And I wouldn't have minded as much, since that could have been a nice email message and I wouldn't have had to get this angry.

The ending of the story is me getting to the EasyJet site directly, getting the ticket (with the extra legroom) for about 40EUR less than the one from VolaGratis, all in one nice and clear web interface. Perhaps Vola Gratis in the name of the site is all about them getting to fly for free with the money they extort from you. Don't ever use the BravoFly site or any of their differently named clones. From the way I was treated, I can only assume it is basically a scam, their purpose being only to steal from you.

I met a few friends for a drink and they recommended to me (or rather seemed amazed that I had not heard of it) Dragonlance. I looked it up and, to my chagrin, found that it is a huge series with over 20 books and a lot of short stories - actually, in 2008 there where over 190 novels in the same universe. Resigned myself to read them all, I googled for the right order in which to read the saga and came up with Chronicles, which is a trilogy of books, as the correct starting point.

As in the story, there is balance between the good and the bad in my assessment of the books. For one, I will not read the rest of the books and waste a lot of my time, but for the other, I already start regretting reading the first three. You see, the entire plot seems to have the only purpose of supporting a canon of the classic fantasy genre that the writers have thought up.

Probably emerging from games of Dungeons and Dragons, like many fantasy universes, the world of Krynn has nothing remotely original. There are elves, humans, dwarves, goblins, dragons, pegasi, unicorns, centaurs, and other races like that. From the very first pages, you meet the heroes that form the quest party and they seem to have gathered all the possible cliches in the genre in their travels: the dwarf is old and grumpy and complains a lot, the half-elf is tortured by his double ancestry, the knight is rigid and honorable, the mage is tiny and frail and frustrated about it, his big (twin) brother is huge and completely non-magical, etc. In fact, the mage character is the only one which seems remotely interesting, all the other being busy posturing most of the time, like real size commercials for their D&D class and specialization.

But what I thought was the most offensive of all was the premise of the trilogy. Beware, here be dragons... and spoilers. Do not read further if you think you might want to read the books.

You see, the world has been reeling after a huge Cataclysm, a fiery mountain hitting the planet and causing havoc. At the end of the book we learn that the gods, in their infinite wisdom, did that because the world was too unbalanced towards good! And we learn this from the good god, who for the entire duration of the story just nudged our heroes in one direction or the other while the evil god was amassing armies and killing everybody. How is that for balance?

Even so, you can hardly complain about a book being cliché if you don't read more of the genre and, to be honest, except for a few books, I didn't really read much fantasy. So I had an opportunity to enjoy this, even if the writing was simplistic, the characterization almost non existent and the story bland. But there was something in the books that kept me at arms length from enjoying it. It finally dawned on me in the middle of the second book, when, after reading about the emotional turmoil of everybody, having the men pair with the women - unless they were there for comic relief, like the dwarf and the kender (which one could consider a pair, if I think about it) - and making chaste promises to one another (like not having sex until they can focus on the relationship and stuff like that)... after all that, I realized that Dragonlance was written by two women. (Even later I realized that one of the women was actually a man. Shame on me! The rest of the review stands)

I don't want to sound misogynistic here, I really wanted to read something cool written by women, but for a series entitled after a weapon - albeit something long and thin, with a thick bulbous appendage at the tip - the story was surprisingly devoid of any detailed battles, tactics, strategy or even decent brawls. The heroes are always running around, talking about their feelings or thinking about them and, in case there is a huge battle between the forces of good and evil, quickly skips forward to the conflict between the two women that love the same man.

Also, as if it all wasn't formulaic enough, no one really dies from the group, unless it is something that fulfills their purpose in life, while the support cast keeps perishing without anyone actually giving a damn. Check out the bit where an entire ship crew - including the woman captain and the minotaur second that I had read a lot about in previous pages - just die without the characters even remembering it. Or the battle of the knights with the dragon armies, where one phrase describes how the knights held, but half of them died. Just like that. I may have written more about that bit than there was written in the book.

To end this terrible rant, if you thought Wheel of Time was childish, as I did, this is worse. T'is true, the fair maiden that hath captured my heart and recommended the books hath read said scrolls of wisdom when she was 16, so that might explain her fond memories and my tortured journey towards the end of the story. I also really really wanted to believe that by writing more, the authors would become more skilled at it. It didn't seem to be the case. I refuse to read another dozen books just to keep the faith.

In conclusion, I cannot in good conscience recommend this to anyone, including children or young adults - to which I think the story would be tantamount to poison, teaching all the wrong lessons in the worst possible way. These books sucked lance!

This is one of those WTF moments. After more than a decade of working in software development I learn something this basic about T-SQL (or rather, any flavour based on SQL-92). What would you think happens when running this script?

IF ''='                 ' SELECT 'WTF?!' -- empty string compared to a bunch of spaces
IF '      '='           ' SELECT 'WTF?!' -- bunch or spaces compared to another bunch of spaces of different length
IF 'x'='x               ' SELECT 'WTF?!' -- 'x' compared to 'x' followed by a bunch of spaces
IF 'x'='               x' SELECT 'WTF?!' -- 'x' compared to 'x' preceded by a bunch of spaces

There will be three WTF rows returned, for the first three queries. You don't believe me? Try it yourself. The motive is explained here: INF: How SQL Server Compares Strings with Trailing Spaces. Short story shorter: in order for SQL to compare two strings of different lengths, it first right-pads the shorter one with spaces.

So what can you do to fix it? Easy enough, use LEN ,right? Nope. Read the definition carefully: Returns the number of characters of the specified string expression, excluding trailing blanks. A possible but weird solution is to use DATALENGTH. A string is empty only is it has a datalength of 0. In the case of NVARCHAR you could even divide the resulting number to 2 in order to get the true length of the string. WTF, right?

A lot of the political discourse these days relates to the difference between democratic and non-democratic systems. More close to home, the amount of choice a government allows and - do not forget that part - demands from the individual. The usual path of such discourse is either "We let you do what you want!" or "We won't allow people do what you don't want!". I am telling you here that there is only a difference of nuance here, both systems are essentially doing the same thing, with top-to-bottom approaches or bottom-to-top. Like with the Borg in Star Trek, there is a point where both meet and make definition impossible.

My first argument is that the ideal democracy encourages personal freedom as long as it doesn't bother anyone else. That makes a lot of sense, like not allowing someone to kill you because they feel you're an asshole. Many people today live solely because of this side of democratic society. But it also means something else, something you are less prone to notice: you are demanded to know what everybody affected by your actions would feel about them. Forget the legal system, which in its annoying cumbersome way is only a shortcut to the principle described before. This is what it means, people: know your friends, know your enemies, join up! Otherwise you will just offend hard enough somebody who is important enough to make it illegal.

The non-democratic societies function like the all mighty parent of all. Under such governorship, all individual are children, incapable of making their own choices, unless supported by the whole of society or at least a large part of it. That's terribly oppressive, as it lets you do only what is communally permissible. But it also allows you the freedom of ignoring the personal choices of others. You don't need to know anything about anybody, just adhere to a set of rules that defines what you are allowed to do. It's that easy! That's why the system is so popular with uneducated people. Or maybe I should say lazy, to involve also those super educated people who end up supporting one radical view or another because it is inconvenient to find a middle ground compromise.

I am a techie, as you may know, so I will reduce all this human complexity to computer systems. Yes, I can! The first computer systems, created by scientists and highly technical people, were almost impossible to use. Not because they didn't let you do stuff, but because they let you do anything you wanted, assuming you were smart enough to understand what you were playing with. Obviously, few of us are really that smart. Even fewer want to make the effort. This is an important point: it's not that you are stupid, that you didn't read the manual, or anything like that. It's a rather aristocratic reason: you don't want to, don't need to, you expect comfort from the people who give you a complicated piece of machinery to operate. I mean, if they are smart to build one, why can't they make it so easy to use that a child could do it? (child sold separately, of course)

The answer to these complex UNIX systems was DOS, then Windows, then IOS. Operating systems increasingly dumbed down for the average user. Now everybody has a computer, whether a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, a smartphone or a combination of these. Children have at their fingertips computers thousands of times more powerful that what I was using as a desktop in my childhood, and it is all because they have operating systems that allow them to quickly "get it" and do what they feel like. They are empowered by them to do... well.. incredibly idiotic things, but that is what children do. That's how they learn.

You get where I am getting at, I guess. We are all children now, with tools that empower us to get all the information and disinformation we could possibly want. And here is where it gets fuzzy. The totalitarian systems of yesterday are failing to constrain people to conform to the rules because of the freedom technology brought. But at the same time the democratic systems are also failing, because the complicated legal systems that were created as a shortcut for human stupidity and lack of understanding of the needs of others completely break down in front of the onslaught of technology, empowering people to evolve, change, find solutions faster than antiquated laws can possibly advance. The "parents" are in shock, whether biological ones or just people who think they know better for some reason.

Forget parents, older brothers can hardly understand what the youth of today is talking about. Laws that applied to your grandparents are hardly applicable to you, but they are incomprehensible to your children. The world is slowly reaching an equilibrium, not that of democracy and not that of totalitarianism, but the one in between, where people are not doing what they are allowed to, but what they can get away with! And that includes (if not first and foremost) our governors.

This brings me to the burden of choice, the thing that really none of us wants. We want to be able to choose when we want to be able to choose. And before you attack my tautology, think about it. It's true. We want to have the choice in specific contexts, while most of the time we want that choice removed from us, or better said: we want to be protected from choice, when that choice is either obvious, difficult to make or requiring skills we don't have. That is why you pay an accountant to hold the financial reins of your company, even if it is your lifeblood, and you trust that that person will make the right choices for you. If he doesn't, your life is pretty much forfeit, but you want it like that. The alternative is you would understand and perform accounting. Death is preferable.

You know that there are still operating systems that allow a high level of choice, like Linux. They are preferable to the "childish" operating systems because they give you all the options you want (except user friendliness, but that bit has changed too in the last decade). The most used mobile operating system nowadays is probably Android and if it not, it will be soon. It swept the market that Apple's IPhone was thought to master because it gave everybody (users and developers) The Choice. But the off the shelf Android phone doesn't allow that choice to the average user. You have to be technically adept first and emotionally certain second that you want to enable that option on your own phone! It's like a coming of age ritual, if you will, the first "jailbreak" or "root" of your smartphone.

How does that translate to real life? Right now, not much, but it's coming. It should be, I mean. Maybe I am overly optimistic. You get the accountants that find loopholes to pay less taxes, the lawyers that find the path to getting away with what normally would be illegal, the businessmen that eskew the rules that apply to any others. They are the hackers of the system, one that is so mindbogglingly complex that computer science seems a child's game in comparison. If you mess with them, they quickly give you the RTFM answer, like the Linuxers of old, though.

The answer: make the system user friendly. Technology can certainly help now. There will be hackers of the system no matter what you do, but if the system is easy to use, everyone will have the choice, when they want it, and will not be burdened by it, when they don't want it. People talking to find a solution to a problem? When did that ever work? We need government, law, business, social services, everyday life to work "on Android". We need the hurdles that stop us from enabling the "Pro" options, but they must not be impossible to get through. Bring back the guilds - without the monopoly - when people were helping each other to get through a problem together. Liberalize the banking and governmental systems. Forget about borders: just "subscribe" to a government, "like" a bank, "share" a life.

You think this is hard, but it is not. You can survive in an old fashioned system just as much and as well as you can survive in real life without using a computer. You can't! You can dream of a perfect house in the middle of nowhere with the white picket fence, where you will be happy with your spouse, children, dog, but really, that doesn't exist anymore. Maybe in a virtual world. Where the spouse will not nag, the children will actually love you instead of doing things you don't even begin to understand and the dog will never wake you up when you need to sleep. Use the tools you have to make your life simpler, better, depth first!

I assume some people would give me the attitude that is prevalent in some movies that try to explore this situation: "you want to escape reality!" - Yes! Who doesn't? Have you seen reality lately? "you want to play God!" - Yes! I like playing and I would like being God: win-win! And if I cannot, I will get real serious and not play, just be! Is that OK? "this is fantasy, this cannot be!" - Join the billions of dead people who thought the same about what you are doing daily without thinking about it. "You are an anarchist! The government as it is today knows what to do!" or "Allah/Jesus/Dawkings know best!" - no, they don't! And if they knew, they wouldn't tell you, so there.

It all comes to dynamical systems versus static ones. You don't go to the web to search for things and find what you were actually looking for because there is a law against sites hijacking your searches. It is because people want it enough so that a service like Google appeared. You can still find your porn and your torrents, though.

Consider every option you may possible have as a service. You need the service to be discoverable, but not mandatory or oppressive in its design, it has to be easy to use. You want to be able to find and use it, but not for it to be imposed on you. A good example for this is copyright. A small community of producers and a significantly larger one of intermediaries trying to leach on them are attempting to force a huge community of consumers abide to the (otherwise moral and reasonable) laws of paying for what you want and others worked for. The procedure is so annoying that people spontaneously organize to create the framework that democratizes theft. Someone is risking jail to film the movie in the cinema so you can download it free. Why is that? Because technology increases the dynamicity of the system with orders of magnitude. Another service is sex. Porn be damned, prostitutes don't stay on street corners anymore, they wait on the web for you to need them. Supply and demand. So the important point is what are you really demanding?

You know what you won't find on the web? Easy to use government sites. Services that would make it simple to interact with laws, lawmakers, local authorities, country officials. All similar attempts are notoriously bad, if at all present. Why is that? Because the system itself is obsolete, incapable of adapting. Built from centuries of posturing and politicking, it has as little connection to reality as a session of Angry Birds. And you may be enjoying the latter. They survived as long as they have because they were the best at one thing: limiting your choices. Even if you hated it, you enjoyed other people being as limited as you. But the dam is breaking, the water is sipping through, it will all vanish in a deluge of water and debris. It's already started, with peer to peer banks and online cryptographic currencies and what not. Why wait for it? Join the nation of your choice; if there isn't one you like, create one. Be God, be Adam, Eve, the serpent or any combination thereof - whatever you do, just don't be yourself, no one likes that.


I leave you with the beautiful words and music of Perfect Circle: Pet. Something so awesome an entire corporation was created to offer the ability for people to share the song with you, for free, even if theoretically it's illegal.

I am writing this post because I sometimes get fed up with all these self-righteous people who explain to me, condescendingly of course, what "real" means and how important it is compared to what I may be doing, which has a lower value of reality, often approaching zero. I am hearing that texting or using an instant messenger is not carrying a conversation. That love is attention and that I should always focus that attention on one thing or another (mainly on their person, though). I watch too many movies instead of going out to parties, I read books instead of talking walks, I throw myself into an online game or some news item instead of noticing to my wife's needs, I stay indoors instead of going out. You see, for these people, going outside the home, physically interacting with other humans with no hope of escape and watching events unfold with your eyes (smell them with your nose, touch them with your own skin) rather than seeing them on a screen is what is "real". Well, I am here to tell you all: bullshit! There is no such thing as real since the time a brain was invented.

Now, I could be as condescending as these people are and explain to you how neurologically a brain is trying to project the world, as perceived by the senses, so that it can fit in the head and can simulate events before they happen, thus leading to informed decisions. Or I could bore you to death by demonstrating that two people can never ever have access to the same reality. I won't do that, though :) What I will do is just give you some counter-examples that will prove, I hope, that there was never a common reality to begin with and that technology only enables a process that is too old and too human to ever stop.

When I was a child my parents were thinking that going out would be good for me. I, however, wanted to stay indoors and read books. Not on a PDA or on a computer, but on actual paper, the only things that were then available to me in Romania. They would talk to me, you see, ask me to come to lunch, or ask me a question or try to interact with me for some reason or another. I, however, was lost 20000 leagues under the sea or on some alien planet or in some cave, running from a crazed killer. I couldn't hear them. More, I didn't really want to. They could, of course, smack me in the head and that would certainly feel more real than what was in the book, but does that mean it was not real to begin with? And I will have to say that, even if some written scenario was complete fantasy, I was interacting with it, remembering it, training my mind on it, maybe even believing it could be real or that it was real already. The contents of the book were changing my personality and my knowledge and, on any further "real" interactions with other people, changed them a bit, too. It's the same thing as believing the things said in an electoral campaign and then changing your life's course to account for that. At least sci-fi has a small chance to happen!

My point is that the process of losing myself into a parallel world, whether of my own creation or somebody else's, is something that people have been doing for a long time. Technology is not creating this phenomenon, it only enables it.

And then there is the hypocrisy. Some fantasy book is something not real and I should do something that counts, you say, but you don't have the balls to say the same thing to a religious nut who advocates prayer every Sunday (or perhaps a small war). That would be insensitive to their beliefs, you say then. They have the right to lose themselves in a complete fabrication because they are not the only ones. There is a whole pack ready to tear you to bits if you try to stop it. I have news to you! The readers of books may not be a tight knit pack, but their set includes the set of people who read religious books and believe in them, too. The book readers group is a lot bigger, if a less ferocious, tribe. We are not to be feared, but that doesn't mean you are not insensitive to us.

So now it is easier to watch a movie or a series to become lost in some fantastic universe. It is easier to split communication into small text bits that are sent only when and where you want them. It is a lot easier to imagine you are in a circle of friends, even if you've never actually met most of them. Is that bad? It's like accusing the inventor of writing of making people listen less to other people speak. Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating replacing the old and tried methods of human interaction with technological means; I am instead revolting against attempts to limit the methods I find best for me.

And literary fantasy is not necessarily the stuff that shapes your thoughts for a while. It can be something acutely technical, like a recipe for cake, or a legal contract, or a video explaining how to do something. Neither are "real", they are just information. Then comes your decision to bake the cake, memorize the recipe or just forget the whole thing. And when has anything you've read in a legal contract have anything to do with reality?

I believe that all this propaganda for the concept of reality - itself just a fantasy of the accuser - is used to hide a more brutal thing, one that is harder to accept. I submit to you that when someone prefers to read a book or watch a movie rather than talk to you, it is because you are less interesting. When children prefer to text on their smartphones while ignoring their parents, it's because their parents are boring. When someone prefers indoor activities to outdoor activities, it's because the things you did outside when you were young, the things that made you feel healthy and proud, are becoming less and less relevant. A conversation is two-sided only and continuous only if both participants are incredibly interesting, otherwise there are other options now. Eye contact doesn't communicate the amount and quality of information that makes it worthwhile anymore. And love, the ultimate feeling, the thing that makes the world go round, the stuff of dreams and fairy tales, love just has to be of a certain quality nowadays before it becomes attractive. Reality is boring, it's the low bandwidth information flow of yesterday, the only people living almost exclusively in it are termed savages and peasants and other derogatory terms that you don't want attached to you. Be Zen! Be aware of and absorb everything that is happening to you, instead of choosing the things you want to see and hear and not smell. What pretentious crap!

Learning is now multithreaded, a web of fantasy and fact that just comes at you from all directions and that needs you to determine at every step how reliable, interesting or "real" it is. Other people are just data points and tools to help you achieve goals. Friendship is distributed. Identity is multiple and depends on context. People choose to live in fantasies now, because they can do it easier and better than before, when they still would have chosen it, but they didn't quite knew how. There is an app for everything because we thought of it first, someone created the app and people find the need to use it.

Technology does not ultimately change humanity in unwanted directions because technology has no desires. If humanity changes - or gives technology desires :), it is because it chooses so. It might be a bad choice, but it's a choice nonetheless. And people that find themselves overwhelmed by that choice should refrain from trying to rebrand past as reality.

I work in this silly place where everything must be done according to some plan or procedure. They aren't even very good at it, but they are very proud of this bureaucracy. For example I don't have Outlook installed on my work machine, but on a virtual one which is in a different network and can be accessed only by remote desktop protocol. Some admin with a God complex thought it was a good idea to make the computer lock itself after a few minutes of idleness and even close the entire virtual machine when no one accesses it for a while. This might have some sick sense in the admin's head, but I need to know when an email arrives and so I would like to have this virtual machine open on the second monitor without having to enter the password every 5 minutes. To add hurt to offence, I cannot install any software on the virtual machine or using Powershell to prevent the computer going idle or anything useful like that. Good, a challenge! I need to find a way to keep the remote desktop session alive.

Enter Windows Script Hosting. I've created a small Javascript file that gets executed by the machine and occasionally moves the mouse and simulates pressing Shift. No more idleness and no need to access Group Policy or install anything. Just create a text file and paste the following code and then save it with a .js extension, then run it. It will keep the computer from going idle.

var WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");
for (var i=0; i<60; i++) // 60 minutes
{
WshShell.SendKeys('+');
WScript.Sleep (60000);
}

Step by step instructions for non technical people:

1. Press the Windows key and E to start the Windows Explorer
2. In the Explorer, navigate to Desktop
3. Remove the setting for "Hide extensions for known file types" - this is done differently from Windows version to Windows version, so google it
4. Create a new text file on the desktop by right clicking in it and choosing "New Text Document"
5. Paste the code above in it
6. Save the file (if you successfully removed the setting at point 3, you should not only see the name, but also the .txt extension for the file)
7. Rename the file to busybee.js (or any name, as long as it ends with .js
8. Double click it

The script will run 60 times at every minute (so for an hour) and keep the machine on which it runs on from going idle. Enjoy!

There is nothing more fantastic than the advertising world. Whether it is a brilliant spot, winning prize after prize at ad competitions, or a formulaic and horribly boring video of a housewife getting aroused by the newest household products, marketing and advertising items have one thing in common: they can't possibly be true. Maniacal teens getting their faces stretched by hideously wide grins cannot possibly love a soft drink or a gum so much. The housewife I previously mentioned probably has a job and children to take care of on the side, chances are there is little that actually makes her happy and absolutely nothing that can make her ecstatic about cleaning products. The newest app is never as good as the banner annoyingly appearing over your web site indicates, nor is the latest enterprise software doing the job it's supposed to do beyond a superficial number of typical scenarios. No teen finds happiness by buying the latest smartphone or opting in the latest two year cell subscription.

The governments everywhere are not doing their job, not keeping the promises they made during electoral campaigns, companies try to hide their problems under the rug while bragging to anyone that listens of the quality of their staff and products, human resources hire people under false pretenses while employees advertise skills that they never had. Boys proffer their love to girls and they in turn promise to have actual sex after the relationship steadies. Security companies, national or commercial, are only interested in their own security rather than yours. People that sarcastically make fun of other people's commercials are never as cool as they attempt to look.

I don't know about you, but in the rare cases when software doesn't manage to remove ads completely from my browser or smart phone, the fact that the ads appear in front of me has no effect other than mild (or strong) annoyance. My mind filters out the flashing images, the over the top colors and embellished fonts, anyway. Even the user content and comments that have been touted as the soul of Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 now?) which would allow me to feel connected and get the information I need, they either reek of aggressive stupidity or bring little useful information to the table. I don't care what the top N items are in any list, nor am I interested in what other people Liked or not on Facebook. I never give money to beggars and don't buy stuff from loud people.

As far I can see, there is nothing that can be called advertising that is actually true or at least beneficial. So I have to wonder, in view of this impression of mine, could it be possible that the promise of advertising as a whole is just a lie as well, that the advertising of the marketing science and art is just as much bullshit as anything else the comes out of their world? Could it be that advertising's greatest feat is to make us think it actually works?

This would be my first post from Ispra, Italy. There is no broadband Internet. Anywhere! I guess I will have some at work, but soiled by IT guys with God complexes who will filter every port that is remotely significant. When asking about it everybody recommends cellular cards that have "a flat rate" of 12 euros, which would be pretty cheap if it weren't limited to 2 GB transfer and wouldn't have ridiculous speeds. So probably I have a lot to say, but I will write blog posts when available. This one, for example, I am writing as a text file on my lonely laptop, hoping to get a chance to post it soon.

Well, after ranting about the lack of Internet access, which was probably the least of your curiosities, I can continue. I got here using the plane from Bucharest to Malpensa, which is one of the airports close to Milan. I've bought the ticket online, checked in online, they gave me a PDF to download, I printed it at a local printer service and so I had my ticket. Being a tall guy, I requested extra leg room and being a lazy guy, I requested priority boarding. In order to get from Malpensa to Ispra I would have had to take a train to Gallarate, then switch to one that would take me to Sesto Calende, then switch again for Ispra. This would have taken me 2 hours and a half, carrying the mother of all baggage. You see, my wife prepared everything that I would ever need in a single bag (except the Internet!!!). Well, screw that. I also ordered online a taxi cab to wait for me at the airport and take me to Ispra, which did cost as much as a third of the plane ticket. Estimated arrival time: 40 minutes.

So I woke up at 6:30, got clothed, took the dog out, read some of the news, got in the car with the wife, she drove me to the airport, I brought my printed ticket to the lady in charge, she took my baggage and that was that. I was ready for boarding at 9:30, when the plane was leaving at 11:20. You see, in Romania the public services have been so poor for the last decades that people still expect something as simple as a plane boarding to take hours. I spent some time with the wife, connected to the airport Wi-Fi, downloaded two podcasts and then went to the boarding gate. There I found a lot of people standing in a huge line. I went to the girl in charge and asked her what should I do, considering I had a priority boarding ticket. She said "well, take a seat and we'll call you". And so it happened. The entire line moved back to allow me and a few other people, mostly foreigners, to pass through. Then people with children, then the regular folks. I guess this is one of the few advantages of having a child. The disadvantage being that it could cry the entire flight to Malpensa, which one of them did! Luckily I had my new smartphone with me, which allowed me to listen to two podcasts and watch most of a Japanese anime film with my headphones on.

I have to digress a little here, as I have mentioned my new smartphone. The reason I've abandoned my trusted Nokia E60 is that the head of the new project implied we could be writing code that would work for cell phones, as well. Another reason was that I wanted something I could watch films on and also read books. Previously I would have used my other trusted device, my PalmVX, a PDA built in 1998 that still works perfectly. Unfortunately, the way to connect the PDA to a computer is either via Infrared or via a 9-pin serial port, which have long disappeared from computers and laptops. And since I could not bring my trusted Athlon 2500+ desktop PC with me, I had to buy a smartphone that is faster than the desktop PC, has more features than the PalmVX and also functions as a phone. Pretty awesome, in a way, but also pretty shitty if you think devices that are decades old could easily carry the load of most of the usage of this incredible device. They couldn't do fart sounds, though.

Anyway, I passed via customs instantly, had to wait for the luggage to arrive (which is always a lengthy process, probably because it doesn't interfere with the plane schedule and we've already paid). Then I went outside. A lot of people there, some were carrying signs with pen written names. There was a cute little chick there, with a printed A4 paper with my name on it. It was like in the movies when they do that. I felt pretty good. Apparently, the designated driver had some delays with his previous customer and so they've sent this girl with a big van thing, even if I had only paid for a small car. I am not one to complain, though, am I? Don't answer that! The girl was very polite, knew English well and we conversed until I got to my destination.

The residence, which is a sort of long term hotel, was right across the street to my new job. I checked in, conversing with the owner's wife, who is also Romanian, and at 15:30 I was "home". By all accounts I will be living here for at least two months and probably for many years.

Next I phoned my new employer, who graciously invited me to a beer (he is Belgian, you see) and we got to talking. Well, things look pretty good, but also are really not well defined. I will not talk about details here, but let's just say that there is a deadline in two months and not many ideas on what exactly we are building. This is a Research Center, though, my new boss assured me, that's what we do: research.

My hotel is right across the street from my job, which is awesome, but one kilometer away from the nearest supermarket. Ispra is a small village, 5000 people or so living in it, and as far as I saw, there are a lot of small villages here, but very few services. You need a car to go to anywhere that matters, including daily shopping. Well, in a way that's the way in Bucharest, as well, but there are a lot more shops on the way instead of lizards running for their lives and squirrels running up trees. Supposedly there is a lake close to here that is warm enough to swim in, there are trees and green things (also known as plants) everywhere and it is rather chilly, which I love. One of the reasons I came here was to escape the horrible wet heat of my apartment, where my wife could not suffer air conditioning. Here I don't have air conditioning, but people assure me I don't need it, I will only need heaters for the winter. Well, let's hope so.

So after I've met with my new employer and most of the team (we will be five people in all working on this) I went shopping. I was very confident that 1 Km would be close enough to get to on foot. And I was right up to the point where I had to return with my hands filled with bags of stuff. But it was OK, I got myself some vegetables and eating utensils, even if later on I discovered I already had some. I went to sleep listening to music on my smartphone. The next day I made myself a salad, went for more groceries, and wrote this post.

In conclusion, I still have to get my "codice fiscale" without which I cannot buy things of importance (like cellular dongles to give me Internet), but other than that I am a brand new inhabitant of Ispra, of the Varese province in Italy. Although that is debatable, as well, since my job is certainly in Ispra, but my hotel seems to be in Cadrezzate. Next to do is explore the area, find some way to wash and iron my clothes, buy decent glasses, cups and water boilers, not these silly Italian espresso things, maybe get to lake Monate and swim a little and, of course, get myself some Internet.

One of my responsibilities is to create an email newsletter for some friends of mine. In order to do that I scour the Internet using Google Alert, RSS feeds and other nefarious means like that. The job consists of opening each page, copy pasting the URL, the title and then finding the most effective way to express the content of the page, which is often one of the first paragraphs. And what do I get when doing that? A sort of weird marketing spam that is as annoying as it is (in my view) pointless.

Here is what happens: first you go to a page using a normal URL, let's say you googled it. Once it loads you look at the address bar and see what is called a hash added to the URL, probably used to identify your visits for marketing purposes. Example NewScientist: mouse over the link to see the actual URL, then click on it to see what actually happens. I have tracked this to the AddThis scripts, when configured with the parameter data_track_addressbar:true. So in case you wondered if the site you are visiting chose to add that ugly hash there, yes it has!

Another thing that happens: You select a paragraph of a page, you copy it, you paste it in your email only to see added stuff to the text, like "See more - some URL". Check it out at Astro Bob's. Try copying something from the blog and pasting it into Notepad. The crappy string at the end is added by ShareThis, usually by its WordPress plugin. This time it was their fault, as they added some crap in the plugin. All Astro Bob has to do [hint! hint!] is to disable the feature.

Now all that remains is to understand why. According to marketing reports, the sharing of information on the Net via copy&paste is more than 80%. So they want people to be able to control what happens with the information they publish, and it is a reasonable goal, but this is not the solution. Instead, what users will do is either get annoyed with the spam they have to clear from URLs and pasted text or, and that should concern the site owners, not copy from them at all. And if you thought having your information disseminated on the Internet without your knowledge and/or consent was bad, wait until nobody cares about it at all.

I was watching this spy movie where a general was talking about "turning" all kinds of nationalities to their cause. And it got me thinking: what is the real difference between them? Nationalities, I mean. When guys like Snowden or Manning spill out secrets to the press, what are they betraying, and to whom? When a spy sells the secrets of his country to other spies, from another country, what is really at stake?

The problem, as I see it, are borders. I've seen borders in my life. I may leave my city block and move towards the poorer ones. There is a border there, not physical, but social. Same applies to when I leave town and go into the country. You never know exactly when the city ends and the country begins, but the border exists. I've also passed between country borders. Spent a lot more time and money, of course, in order to do that - one has to have the proper papers and documents and IDs - but I've never seen a smaller difference between the people from one side and the other as I have seen with national borders. Of course, one country may be a lot richer overall than the other. See Mexico and the US, for example, as a brutal example, but everywhere I went I saw people from one side infiltrated, working or visiting, the other side. When you take those people into account, the border blurs.

Is Snowden more of an American than he is a conscientious member of the human race? He says no. Is a British spy selling secrets to the Russians more of a British than he is a spy? I would bet no. At least he doesn't feel that way, for sure. Who is the owner of secrets spilled? The country, one says... What does that mean? The land? The buildings? The people? Are the people really so different as to need those secrets? Are the borders between nations really necessary?

I really didn't mean to make this a long post. My point, as always rather unclear, is that I am more alike to software developers in Russia and the US than I am with a lot of my countrymen. The nationality of a person doesn't really matter except to the people that manage that nationality. They are the one that put those borders there in the first place and they are the ones that consider they have ownership of a country's secrets. Normal people usually don't give a damn. Am I very different from a Muslim terrorist? Yes I am, but that difference has been nurtured and created by these border managers. I do have to wonder, if those borders weren't there, would the terrorist still exist?

What is the modern purpose of borders anymore? I have no idea, frankly. Why can't I just move around wherever I want, speak the language I like, settle where I have space and work and, maybe, protect the secret of the people that employ me, rather than of those that are employed by me - like a government. What would happen if borders would suddenly be abolished, everywhere? I just don't know. It seems to me a lot of noise, about nothing.

Update 1 June 2014: Somewhere in the blog post I recommended Truecrypt. Strange events happened today when suddenly, in the wake of a crowdfunded security audit, the Truecrypt page changed to recommend switching to something else, mainly Microsoft's BitLocker, published a version that only decrypts and does not allow creating encrypted disks and basically went "poof!". It is noteworthy that the developers of the encryption tool were and have always been anonymous. Strange indeed. Read more here.

Update 24 Aug 2013: Just forget what I said about having a secure and anonymous Windows 8 computer. Read this link here: LEAKED: German Government Warns Key Entities Not To Use Windows 8 – Links The NSA.

I wanted to see how Windows 8 looked and felt, as I didn't really see or try it beyond looking from afar at those obnoxious icon things they called tiles. Also, as a prerequisite that I added myself, I wanted to be as anonymous as possible, using new emails that have no connection with my previous names or nicknames and hiding as much as possible about my identity. So far, I can only describe the experience as creepy.

But let's start with the beginning, as they say. I plugged a Windows 8.1 Preview bootable USB stick in a laptop and started the machine, after previously making sure it could only boot from USB devices. On a black screen a little fish appeared, a strange little creature that blew air bubbles, then a funny looking 'waiting' logo that looked like beads trying to catch other in a circle. It entered a pretty standard interface that allowed me to upgrade or install a new version of Windows. I took the latter, as I wanted a clean, anonymous install. I've reconfigured the partitions, formatted them, but, to my surprise, a warning appeared informing me I could not install Windows on the newly created partitions, as the computer could not boot from them. This was all related to the settings in BIOS that allowed only USB devices to boot. It was an unexpected surprise, both pleasant (they thought about the drive not being bootable) and unpleasant (I had to restart the laptop, add the hard drive to the boot list and start over.

Starting over I had to immediately connect my computer to the Internet. It was not mandatory, but I didn't really have an easy alternative. As a warning, connecting the machine to the Internet gives away your location (especially if it's your broandband IP which is contractually linked to your name and address) and probably pins it to that location. In truth what I should have done is use some sort of anonymous Internet source, like via GPRS from a disposable card. The best option that I can think of is to create a TOR router and use it exclusively with this machine. Now, using a cellular Internet source is not a grand idea, either, as to use it they need to triangulate your position anyway, but we're already getting into more details than needed. After all, this is all a test for now and the blog entry is mostly about Windows 8.

Choosing a colour theme was a bit annoying. That colour theme defined at least the background colour of my desktop. I had a lot of colours to choose from, but they were all overly bright. The best one (which was my favourite anyway) was chosen by default, which forced me to choose another. The only other option that was remotely acceptable was grey, but a bright version of grey. I wanted black, but there was no option for that.

Choosing a username was the real creeper. The username was actually an email. I chose to create a new Windows account, but this would not actually create a new email, just use the email provided by you to associate it with Microsoft. I had to give them my email, my password, my phone number, a security question, my alternate email. I refused to enter my phone number, but they forced it anyway, as they needed two ways of recovering my password and I didn't want to enter an alternate email, so I entered a bogus phone number. The password was the funniest part. I entered a password, one that would be safe from cracking, only to be met with an alert "Your password cannot have more than 16 characters". Are they trying to make passwords easy to crack? Apparently (with emphasis on that word) they don't, as they suggest or require all the other "standard" solutions for a safe password: upper and lowercase letters, digits, special characters. As a famous Xkcd comic shows, that's just stupid.

Just another detour towards personal security and anonymity: giving them an email as the account name normally means you already had that email. I entered a bogus one, but eventually I would have to create it. Any access to that email will be logged somewhere. The email that you use (and by extension the Microsoft account) should be accessed only from this machine and only when the network is secured (via TOR or other mechanisms), otherwise connecting you with the laptop and finding you will be trivial. Obviously the phone number should not be real, nor the alternate email. Also, there were the options that you could Customize. Even if I left all the options as suggested, there were a lot of them set to true by default that did things like: send files to Microsoft in case of crash, remember searches and location in order to optimize Bing searches, send to Microsoft browsing history in order to preload pages in Internet Explorer, etc. Spooky, indeed.

After all this, the screen turned grey (obviously) and a large text appeared slowly: "Hi". Then a long pause, then the text was replaced just as slowly by "We are setting things up for you" or something to that effect. During the "set up" stage, the background cycles the hue from colour to colour. This was by far the creepiest part of the setup. Perhaps I've seen to many horror movies, or perhaps the Windows startup designer has, but I half expected a screeching sound and something jumping from the screen, or maybe a quiet voice coming from a big red eye calling me Dave or something.

To summarize the security bit (of which I am not an expert, mind you): the setup was creepy enough, but after being prepared a plan should be more clear. The most fragile part of the anonymising process is the Internet, actually. No matter how you do it, it identifies you and your location rather directly. There is something called TOR to save you, but to be certain your software always uses it for Internet access, a true external hardware router should be set (there are several solutions, the one that I like best - without actually trying it - is the Raspberry PI version). Even so, anything you do from Windows 8 will likely be associated with the Microsoft account, so the first thing you do after setup is use some sort of encryption on your drive (TrueCrypt sounds like it has both the required features and spirit), then make sure you only use this laptop for things that have nothing to do with your real life. You don't send yourself emails, you don't visit your own blog, you don't lookup restaurants near your location, talk to friends who know who you are on the messenger, or anything that has to do with your real life.

All that pretty much sounds like having a dedicated laptop for a completely different part of your life; a bit schizoid. But consider what that means: there is almost no one on this planet that cannot be traced or located on the Internet. The technology is more and more connected and there are numerous ways to circumvent the meagre security measures that are put in place for most software. Even TOR is not perfectly safe and besides, it only proxies TCP packets, so it's not a full replacement. So: Human nature, the connected nature of operating systems and software these days, numerous vulnerabilities that can be exploited by both evil hackers and governments, they all conspire to make you visible on the Internet. You are not "safe" on the Internet because it provides you with anonymity, but because no one cares enough to get to you.

I have very fond memories of the games Star Control and Star Control 2, played on my PC when I was but a wee boy. They were DOS games released in 1990 and 1992, respectively, and were absolutely marvellous: large universes, with many star systems, each of them with planets and moons; many alien species which were strange and funny and obnoxious; storylines that were both absurd and very captivating. I had a great time.

I want to open a parenthesis here and talk about the quality of games back then. Click here to hide the following rant, if you are not in the mood for it. I really have no idea how the PC game market was working in the US, but here in Romania, there were very few PCs, no Internet and the distribution of games (all pirated) was done via friends who would recommend and share what they thought was great. There were no walkthroughs, rarely any printed maps or special instructions (since they were not original games) and the only way to finish up a game was to actually play it. Sometimes it got frustrating enough that after hours of trying to find something, you would call friends and ask them what they did. I can only imagine that even in a country were they were a lot more computers and games were bought, rather than copied, the game play situation was similar. In other words, the relationship to the game played was personal: someone that you know and respect came to you and recommended the game. This was the only thing that made you play it other than seeing the cover in some window and feeling like you have to try it. Also, not having any Internet (or very little on it), you would not have access to many reviews and neither to game updates, if something was wrong in the game. And you also have to think of the state of affairs in software programming: every software firm was basically a gang of enthusiasts inventing and trying their own way in which to build software.

Yet, a lot of the games back then were great. Not all, maybe not most, but certainly the ones reaching me through "the grapevine", probably because the bad ones would be filtered away. One has to ask oneself how games back then required a number of hours of play orders of magnitude larger than present ones. How their stories had the complexity of movie scripts (often a lot better) and so much intricacies like alternate game modes, humour and so on. And the answer is, of course, the Internet. Once the gameplay is too complex, players swarm to online walkthroughs, often in video format, to tell them what to do. Atmospheric gameplay where one has to walk for hours to find something are considered antique and wasteful of time. And of course, if they are not social enough, they aren't even worth playing. The advertising is done via the web, with "stars" or other such whimsical method of rating a game, often resulting in simplistic orgies of graphical design with repetitive action as the only thing to do, humour provided by caricaturesque icons of birds or zombies.

That being said, as a software developer myself, I played The Ur-Quan Masters for only two days, using said walkthroughs and being nagged by the wife and dog for not spending time with them. I also had moments where I cursed the necessity to move towards a planet or a star by actually waiting until the ship got there, and often by manually controlling the craft to reach there. Also very annoying was to manually look for star names, until I downloaded the map from ... the Internet. So I am not just a geezer that hates the new, all melancholic about the past; the present has its boons... few as they are. Anyway, to the game!

In 2002, ten years after its release, the makers of Star Control 2 made released the source of the game as open source. Maybe this should be heeded by other game and software makers: create a copyright licence that voids itself ten years after the release of the software. The world would be a better place! Anyway, some people decided to port that to different platforms, including Windows. Now I know that DOS and Windows are made by the same company and that the port sounds easy, but you should look at the bugs for this port like 'Not thread safe' or 'Not safe for 64 bits' and so on.

Accidentally I found out about this port for Star Control 2, called The Ur-Quan Masters. Why was the name changed? Because even as the source code was free to use, the name was copyrighted. Weird, right? I installed the latest version (0.7.0.1 - you gotta love these open source versions that tend to reach 1.0, but never do - a bunch of perfectionists, all of them :-) ) and I couldn't start it. It threw an error no matter what I did. In their defence, I was trying to play it on an Athlon 2500+ processor running Windows XP (I know, geezer!). But I did manage to install and run version 0.6.2, which seems to be working on my machine. This is part of the motivation for writing this post, since I found no one on the Internet complaining about the same problem as me. I did try all the compatibility modes for it, BTW, and it didn't work. Maybe I should have tried running in Windows 98 (yes, I still have that installed as a secondary OS).

You see, the plot is that you are the descendant of an exploration mission that was never picked up from the planet they were supposed to investigate. They did find an ancient alien starship factory and managed to build just the skeleton of a ship to send you back to Earth to see what had happened. Getting there you find the Earth encased in an impenetrable shield with an orbiting station around it. The crew of the station tell you the story: alien race called the Ur-Quan came for enslaving all sentient races, won the war and gave earthlings two choices (well, actually three, if you consider total annihilation, but let's not get technical): join them as their slaves or relocate all resources to Earth and be trapped under the slave shield. Humans chose the latter. Now, your mission is to find alien races, make them join you in defeating the Ur-Quan and ... well, defeat the Ur-Quan. You have to do that by exploring amongst hundreds of stars, each with their own solar system of planets and moons. You get fuel and extra modules for your ship at the human station, but you need to bring materials (minerals) in order to get them. Minerals are gathered via manual missions to the surface of each planet and moon, while fires, lightning, earthquakes and alien lifeforms are attacking your landers. Aliens are diverse and most very funny: a cowardly race that speak like Italians, an evil spider race, a sexy race called the Syreen, warrior type race (that is weak and stupid), automatic probes that declare their peaceful intentions then attack you, mean spirited aliens that consider all harm done to you as a practical joke and so on. There is even an Emo race, although the term became popular a long time after the release of the game.

Oh, the memories! The vibrating music originally thought for PC speaker or maybe AdLib cards brought back feelings of old. The witty dialogues and the immersive nature of the game made me relive a lot of past pleasures. Unfortunately, as I was saying in the rant above, there was a lot of immersion that I really didn't want, like waiting for minutes to get from a star to another, then manually navigate to reach a planet or moon. I couldn't help thinking as a software developer and consider how I would have done the game - of course, online, in HTML5 and Javascript, and actually it wouldn't be so hard. Playing the game I realised how different the perception of time was then compared to now. It was obscene how much time I had back then, and completely devoid of responsibilities, too.

Well, because of the time constraints I quickly hacked the game, added infinite money and proceeded to finish the game using a map and a walkthrough. I also was unable to finish the game due to two bugs: one where the Spathi should have given me an Umgah Caster and did not, and another where the Mycon were supposed to go to Organon and did not. Even so, it took me two full days, about 16 hours of gameplay. Anyway, I was close to the finish and I did watch the ending on YouTube (how nouveau of me! :-( ) For the people that loved playing this game in the past, maybe you should try it again. Old memories often bring complexity to present perspective. And for those who did not know of this game until this post, maybe you should try it, see what people of old considered a good game, even if they played it on 33Mhz 386 PCs with 4MB of RAM and 120MB hard drives.

Also, there is another attempt for a port to Windows from the same source called Project 6014, for some reason. I think it stalled, but maybe it brings some surprises to the table.

I leave you with a YouTube video gameplay by some guy (frankly the first I did find) if you are unwilling to take the trek yourself.

[youtube:KOndm_1w1ws]