I don't play seriously at all, but I think keeping up on the sets for whatever format tournament you're playing in plays a big role, too. When you're making decisions you need to always balance what cards they might have in their hand. You can make much more informed guesses when you know what's possible in the set and what the theme of their deck is.

Also, if you end up playing draft formats (which help negate the buy-in substantially) that advice goes double. Same for... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 8:14 AM on August 8, 2008

This is a tough thing to debug remotely. In general, spinning balls on OS X are on a per-application basis and represent the OS thinking it's lost touch with the application because it's busy doing something or other. I can't really think of a time that I've gotten a system-wide beachball. Some things to try to identify which application or service is causing problems:


Keep the Activity Monitor application up at all times. Setup the CPU monitor displays so... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 3:25 PM on August 2, 2008

I'm not sure that restoring to factory settings includes a drive reformat. You might try using Windows' disk utility formatter app (don't know the name, I'm a mac person) to wipe the drive and reformat it. iTunes should recognize the empty drive and install all the bits it needs to come back to life and be an iPod again. We did this to a friend's iPod Shuffle last weekend to convert it from PC to Mac and it worked fine.
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 4:20 PM on July 22, 2008

I have this problem whenever I bring my computer out of sleep. Any page that had an embedded video won't be able to access that video until I refresh the page.

This may have to do with the time-out issue described earlier, but I think even if I sleep for a little bit I'll lose any videos that were embedded.
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 8:11 AM on July 11, 2008

Thumbs up: Helmand (consistently wonderful), Underbones (Red Bone's bar), Green Street (bl1nk totally pegged the differences between Green Street and B-Side - I like them both for different reasons), and Emma's.

Cambridge Brewing Company is okay - they do have their own beers that are pretty good, but it's not a huge selection since they only serve their own stuff. The food is good but not great.

I also really enjoy the East Coast Grill, but it's... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 3:51 PM on June 19, 2008

See also something like Fake Steve (which these days seems primarily concerned with lampooning Jerry Yang. Who know?) and his imitators, plus the accompanying book. I don't know much about law, but it seems like there are enough examples of this kind of thing happening that there must be some kind of legal protection if you do it properly, although it may depend a lot on the celebrity in question. I imagine using a certain mission impossible star might be more inclined to generate unwanted... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 12:41 PM on June 17, 2008

The only reason this is easy is because the developers were lazy about how they send the data. If they salted the high score reports (ala this old askmefi thread on web security) this would be much harder to do.

Tools that actually manipulate local game state will still work, though. I always assumed these kinds of attacks were always on the high score submission engine on the server, but the memory/time manipulation tools sound very sneaky.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 6:39 AM on May 27, 2008

The option that RATP wants you to use is the ParisVisite pass. It's a relatively cheap, infinite ride pass (including busses and RER, etc) that also has some discounts at various Paris destinations (see the Advantages page for a full list.)

If you're not leaving the city, 1-3 is fine except for to and from the airport. I would recommend (depending on your timing) buying those tickets as single rides to and from CDG (or Orly) and then activating the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 11:34 AM on May 20, 2008

I can't speak to the wages, but the public transport in Brussels is generally quite good. You can get a complete network map here. That area is particularly well served, since it's right near Arts-Loi (or Kunst-Wet, depending on your linguistic preferences) which is perhaps interchange between the three subway lines. It's also a short walk to one of many, many tram lines that have very excellent coverage city wide. Living downtown might be pricy, but there are lots of nice parts of town that... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 12:19 PM on March 31, 2008

I spent 2 weeks (maybe 3? I forget) at Centre Linguistique pour Etrangers in Tours. It was definitely useful for me, even in that small a dose. I came out way more confident in French than I was going in, although I did have a bunch of years of HS french, plus some other experience with non-immersive French classes.

They do arrange home-stays for you, which was also a great experience.

There were opportunities to lapse into English, though.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 8:17 AM on March 27, 2008

I tend to have a hard time learning from books, so I picked up most of what I know about DNS from setting up my own DNS server from scratch. It took a while, but really helped me get a grasp on what was going on. I used DJBDNS, which separates out some tasks that bind conflates. Unfortunately, it's sparsely documented and generally hard to deal with. But then, I heard bind isn't much better. Either way, you're in for some pretty tricky work.
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 7:17 AM on March 27, 2008

Zippy's point about being an investor is definitely on target. More than just being an investor in terms of stock options, you're investing your time and energy into this particular company. You don't want to invest that in a company that's going to tank in a year because then you have the hassle of finding a job again. Don't take them at their word, either. Dig into the other companies in this market area and see what they're doing. Startups are more than a job, and it really helps if you... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 12:19 PM on March 16, 2008

I think the save files could be equivalent. With all the multiplatform development that's going on these days, I would be surprised if EA didn't standardize on save file formats.

I don't know anything about console development, though, and it might be that Sony/MS offer some sort of save-file API to make save files easier to work with (ala Apple + plists) which would make this not work. There are also a zillion other reasons why it wouldn't work out of the box, but a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 4:41 PM on March 15, 2008

They're definitely wrong. PC-formatted stuff can be read from a mac (but not written, unless you've done something fancy to it), so you should be able to plug your PC ipod into your mac and follow Good Brain's advice. If the command line stuff is too technical, something like this app or the Senuti app mentioned above should work fine.
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 3:29 PM on March 15, 2008

I've been really happy with Slicehost. I haven't run into any problems that required support calls, but signup was good and billing is painless. No outages that I've seen.

It's a really low-level service, though. They give you a fresh linux box basically and it's up to you to set it up how you want. No cpanel, etc. The upside is that memory and cpu are guaranteed resources and so you're not fighting with the hordes of people on dreamhost. You run your own DB servers,... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 3:44 PM on March 10, 2008

This exact same thing happened to my mother's car. It was like a 1993 Sable Wagon, and it just lit itself on fire in the parking lot one day while she was shopping. After she answered a page at the store, the woman at the customer service desk asked "Would you like us to call the fire department?" By the time I saw it, the engine block had melted itself into a solid undifferentiated wad of metal. It was pretty spectacular. The fire department did a sort of investigation, but never came... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 1:54 PM on March 3, 2008

I'd like to third the mention of Combat Mission. It's got a great order system (both players submit moves and they're resolved simultaneously in real time). It's super fun to set up your orders and see how they roll out. Some of my favorite moments are attaching my view to the back of a tank that's hightailing it across an open field under fire. The graphics aren't great, but they're evocative. Its modeling of command delays, morale, armor penetration, movement, etc are both fun and convincing.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 9:18 AM on February 28, 2008

In many other object oriented languages, '.' is synonymous with '->'.
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 7:00 AM on February 26, 2008

You might have to pay a little bit, but Wufoo is way better than Survey Monkey. You'll have an easier time building the forms, better access to the results, and the survey will look decent.
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 6:58 AM on February 18, 2008

I am very skeptical of Media Grid. I saw one of their early presentations in Cambridge and was extremely underwhelmed. It may have just been a bad presentation, but it was not clear to me that had a basic grasp on what the point of virtual environments is, or even the technical issues involved with what they're proposing. It feels quite a bit like vaporware, and I wouldn't bet on it too heavily.

There's a group called Studio Wikitecture that is doing pretty much exactly... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 7:47 AM on February 15, 2008 marked best answer

Well, let me be that nay-sayer.

Yes, it will work, but mac line in ports (at least on the Pro line, and I think on the non-Pro line, too) are expecting an amplified audio signal. They do this because they figure if you're using that port, you're probably trying to do "serious" audio, and you'll have your own amplifier and don't want to rely on some crappy laptop amp. The upshot of this for you is that your signal is going to be very quiet.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 6:22 AM on February 12, 2008

For music, there's tourb.us. It's originally a Boston thing, I think, so the NYC listings might be a bit sparse.
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 12:07 PM on February 7, 2008

Yeah, spammers are constantly looking for installations of bbs, blogs, etc, that don't have good spam protection. If you run a publicly visible web server and watch your logs, you'll see these requests literally all day. For instance, my installation of phpMyAdmin gets pinged all the time:

71.34.71.250 - - [20/Jan/2008:13:19:18 -0500] "GET /admin/phpmyadmin/main.php HTTP/1.0" 404 339 "-" "-"
72.34.71.250 - - [20/Jan/2008:13:19:18... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 10:26 AM on January 30, 2008

Papers is pretty good for managing paper PDFs. It doesn't integrate with word for citation, though, so while it maintains a great local database, I don't think it replaces EndNote yet. I've also had major trouble getting a good workflow going between Papers and EndNote — export to EndNote always kind of screws up the entries, like getting them all to show up as "Bill" instead of "Conference Paper" or whatever. Papers is also not great at managing anything other than papers.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 10:37 AM on January 29, 2008

I know this is probably not the case for you, but I've had this problem with a single disk before. It can be disk specific, even though this particular instance of the problem seems general. Have you tried swapping disks with a friend to see if their disks play in your 360 and yours in theirs? This will probably show that the issue is with your box, but might also provide New Data on the issue.
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 7:26 AM on January 29, 2008

I think developing a metaphorical understanding of something requires pretty deep knowledge of an area. Metaphors are partially about abstraction, and it's hard to abstract from something when you have only a passing familiarity with it. You also risk exposing what you don't know in your selection of metaphors; the people who will get the most out of programming metaphors are themselves knowledgeable about programming, and are the most likely to catch you in bad metaphors.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 6:44 AM on January 24, 2008

I don't mean to spread FUD, but my roommate has a 64 bit Vista machine at his office and there are a bunch of engineering-related apps that just don't have 64 bit drivers yet. Engineering software can be pretty obscure, though, so I don't know if you'll run into this problem. My advice would be to make a list of software you're sure you're going to need often and check the internets to make sure that it all runs on 64 bit Vista. It may also be the case that you can keep your old laptop around... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 1:20 PM on January 22, 2008

If you can get them, fancy letterhead and nice envelopes don't hurt either. It's a way of demonstrating that other people trust you enough to hire you without having to be super explicit about your own achievements. It also shows that you care enough about the person you're recommending that you'll take the extra time to make the physical letter look nice instead of just cranking something out in word and emailing it to them.
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 9:12 AM on January 16, 2008

A lot of laptops whose default behavior is mirroring adjust their own LCD display resolution to match that of the projector. I think this is the effect that the executives are complaining about and what's driving this question (but I could be missing the point). Most projectors you run into are 1024x768, and a 1440x900 display looks like ass when scaled that way.

I don't know that I've ever projected from a project that's not 1024x768, so I don't know what the default... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 2:49 PM on January 11, 2008

I think the three major sections to the SOP are (1) What is your main research interest? (2) Why do you want to pursue that interest at this institution? (3) Why are you the right person to pursue this research? The "how did you become interested" and "future plans" parts of the prompt are, to me, largely filler text. If you can't fill 2000 good words about sections 1-3 above (which doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad candidate — lots of people coming out of undergrad don't... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 6:39 PM on December 13, 2007

I would strongly recommend against Wolfenstein:ET. You most definitely do not want a class based shooter if you're just coming back to multiplayer shooters. They're meant to be played with big teams of players with each team having a few of each class. Plus, there's the objectives for each map which are kind of complicated and non-obvious. Plus, as an online experience with other people, I find it to be punishingly imbalanced most of the time. W:ET can be great, but for new... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 3:22 PM on December 13, 2007

I like Ornette Coleman's Shape of Jazz To Come for some of the same reasons as I like Time Out.
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 4:00 PM on December 10, 2007

If you're in Leopard, make sure to try out the email message -> ical event bridge. If you mouse over a time in one of your emails (eg "lets meet tomorrow at 2:00") it'll fade in a little arrow, which lets you automatically create an event in iCal. It tries to infer whatever date/time/location information it can. It's not always that accurate, but it's a super killer feature for me in an environment where no one uses outlook style meeting requests. It also links the ical events back... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 12:19 PM on December 6, 2007

I'm particularly fond of this story out of the jargon file (which you may have already read).
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 5:33 PM on December 5, 2007

This is such a trivial amount of money you should just pay it to ignore the issue. Your time is worth more than dealing with this, and the principle you're defending here (though I'm not totally sure I see what it is) is hardly that compelling.
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 5:36 PM on November 30, 2007

Nthing they-probably-don't-think-you're-boring.

I think pretty much everyone has been in this situation at some point, and it's hard to handle it gracefully. For me, at least, when I'm in the majority, I don't (and I don't meant this in a mean way at all) have high expectations for the person who doesn't know anyone. If they chime in at all I'm really impressed. I feel like in those situations, the burden is on the people who know everyone to engage with the person who... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 4:29 PM on November 28, 2007

There's a level in Oni that takes place in your own dreams. It's called, somewhat unsurprisingly "Dream Diver." The game got pretty bad reviews, but I actually really enjoyed it. The combat system is great, even though you're basically fighting people in exactly the same way for the whole game. You could probably find a copy of the game for like 10 bucks at this point.
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 6:27 AM on November 22, 2007

I've only rented apartments in the Boston area, so I'm not really sure what's so bizarre about the market here. I guess I've just been brainwashed into thinking it's normal.

The primary cycle around here is based around the school year. Most people I know move around the end of August, and that's when the majority of apartments open up around town. If you're moving out of phase with that you'll have fewer options, but there also won't be the crush of... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 6:49 AM on November 14, 2007 marked best answer

One warning - Word for OS X is pretty bad. It's slow, cranky, unreliable, and is missing a handful of features from the windows version that drive me nuts. I use it for academic-ish writing, though, so I'm doing a fair amount of fussing with styles and figures. You may find that the things you need it to do avoid its biggest issues.

iWork is also probably not what you want. It's oriented much more towards layout than word processing. So while you can definitely write... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 8:06 AM on October 6, 2007

11a sounds about right to me.

Second the RER. It's kind of hard to find (really, finding anything in CDG is trying) but it's relatively cheap and drops you more or less in the middle of things at Les Halles, from which you can get everywhere.

Also, on the return - make sure to check train times. They're still pretty frequent, but I think low enough frequency that you might want to aim for a particular train in the way back.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 9:33 PM on October 2, 2007 marked best answer

I know you said you're not a gamer, but are you good at card games or anything? Some of my most intense and stressful moments have been in online tournaments. You can find plenty of regular tournaments on Yahoo Games or a million other similar sites (pogo, etc). If you get really into those, they can cause a fair amount of stress.

Also, poker might work? Having actual money riding on stuff tends to make it more stressful.

Also, I... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 7:23 PM on August 28, 2007

I'm no communications expert, but from what I remember from my college communications course, it depends a lot on the technology the phone is using. The two primary encoding techniques for 2G cell phone networks are Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). GSM systems that are still 2G usually use TDMA, while everyone else uses CDMA.

Briefly, here's more or less how they work. TDMA is a pretty simple concept. If you've got 10 cell... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 7:41 AM on August 24, 2007

There's no reason for the professor to let you do that. Grading papers and providing feedback takes work, and it's not clear why the prof would do that for your friend.

If your friend wasn't looking to get their work graded, then it's a better but still negative proposition. From the professor's perspective, having someone in the room who has nothing at stake can be risky (money or grade).

Now, the bit about wanting to go to grad school there is... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 9:12 PM on August 8, 2007

I think the OP means when they show those displays of balls/strikes/total when they say "pitch count." So yeah, they get counted as strikes for those purposes.
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 7:58 PM on August 6, 2007 marked best answer

What gumblebee said is as good a high level explanation as you're going to get on this topic!

I will quibble slightly about Javascript, though. Grumblebee said: "NOTE: Javascript alone isn't good at downloading additional content ... " This is not really true at all.

Javascript can do basically anything you need in terms of manipulating HTML pages, so there's really no need to worry about that when you're mapping out what parts of the... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 2:29 PM on August 5, 2007

I think narratology v ludology is basically dead as far as Reasonable People are concerned. Yes, it's a nice debate to trot out for undergrad classes, but no one I know in the field actively writes about it.

I'll second the Game Design Reader edited by Salen and Zimmerman. That is far and away the best single volume I know of. What's great about is that it's not just academic style writing - often the academic writing about games is obsessed with explaining games to... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 8:15 PM on July 29, 2007

Oh, also, the Communications of the ACM this month has a big section on games. The one article I've read from it (science & engineering education) was pretty boring, but the others might be good. The table of contents is here. The link might not work - it's hard to tell how much of the ACM portal is open to people outside academic networks. If you want a PDF of the page for hunting down the articles on google scholar, let me know. Email's in profile.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 11:43 AM on July 30, 2007

I'd disagree about the Power Grid reference. Power Grid's power plants change in numerical function, but they don't actually represent shifts in rules like, say, flight or gunpowder do in Civilization.

The person who really gets this stuff and is applying it directly to education is Katie Salen. She's starting the Institute of Play, about which I am rather obsessed. I really hope she does well because I - like you - see tremendous potential in techniques like this. I... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 8:38 PM on July 29, 2007 marked best answer

I money weren't an issue, I've used SigmaPlot to generate that sort of graph in the past. It's extraordinarily powerful and met my pretty exacting standards for graphing tools in terms of output quality.

For free stuff, maybe try GNUPlot? I haven't used it myself, but it's supposed to be pretty decent. It's got a polar plotting mode that looks like it might be useful for you. I think it's also somehow connected/connectable to Octave. It might be easier to prototype with... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 6:31 PM on July 27, 2007

It sounds like I'm pretty much the only person this has happened to, but I've had a random ID check on a French train. It was, technically, an international train, but the ID check happened a ways from the France/Belgium border. Two gendarmes got on at each end of the train and checked everyone. I had a Belgian carte d'etranger that seemed to satisfy them, but I don't know what they would have accepted in terms of international ID.

But yeah, it sounds like this was a... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by heresiarch at 7:26 AM on July 24, 2007