(no subject)

I finally made and uploaded a ding-dong-dang MSI file. Even with this tool it's hard to figure out what the hell's going on, but I'm willing to chalk this up to my lack of experience with Windows culture; I don't know where things are supposed to go. I expect, through experience and feedback, to learn what I need to know, and no more.

The MSI-constructing application is pretty good -- it certainly lifted quite a weight off of me after I bit the bullet and surrendered our credit card number -- and has a command-line interface as well as the usual GUI. After Andy gets Cygwin and sshd running on the machine, I should be able to drive it around by lobbing commands at it from the Perl build script running on my Mac. This is like using a WALDO unit to handle the computer through 10cm of radiation shielding, and rikchik notes, this is really the only way some of us can comfortably make software for Windows.

If you'd like to test the MSI-ized Gamut, it's here: wingamutmsi-0.3.2.zip [~6MB Windows32 MSI]. That done, I will now finish the website. Eh, tomorrow.

---

I just had a fellow Tetris DS player contact me offline for the first time. My handle in the game is "jmac.org", and I got an email from a guy with a much higher rating than me who I beat 2 games out of three. He just said "I just totally lost to you at Tetris, heh." I wrote back to admit he actually handed me the one loss I suffered tonight (I was on fire through seven games), and thanked him for the nice games. I considered sharing my friend code, but eh, that seemed weird somehow. Then again, what else is the thing for? I don't know.

Interesting: When playing two-player games online, I often play with the understanding that we're having a best-of-three contest, even though there's nothing in-game that enforces or even suggests this, and the players can't talk to each other (outside of spelling furtive low-reslution love notes with tetrominos or what have you). And I think that other folks often assume the same thing. I rarely see the other person drop before someone's won twice, and often see them leave as soon as this happens... if I don't leave first.

Exception last night when a person with a much lower rating kept beating me, and I stayed for three or four beatings until I finally bested them. Pride thing. I'm glad they were happy to accommodate, I guess.

Finally, a real blog post

I haven't cut my hair since we got entrenched in December, I don't think. Well, maybe once, shortly after we started. Yeah, I would have done it because of the Dec. 10 Gameshelf shoot, because that's one side-effect the show was having: I was getting my hair cut regularly, before the first shoot of each month.

I'm going to do it before I start talking to any Money face-to-face. It will be very drastic and violent and all of that.

Today's source of murderous rage: AJAX help needed

Why would Firefox + prototype.js recognize an X-JSON of "monkey" just fine, as well as "['gibbon', 'ape', 'baboon']", but not "{'monkey_count': 42}" or even, for that matter, "{}"?

Safari is handling all of these just fine. Firefox ain't; it evaluates the latter two into "undefined". This is the latest Firefox for Mac.

Sarcastic/self-deprecatory answers from people who don't know what I am talking about not welcome. I am very grumpy right now. I am seriously about to go looking for a clock tower. For me to climb to the top of and then for me to point at people while saying pshew pshew.

Also if you comment to tell me that an ape isn't a monkey I will punch you in the head with my fists.

Update I discovered a workaround: if I wrap the curly-braced object spec in square brackets, and then pull a json = json[0]; on the receiving end, it works. I'll take it. This does not answer my question, though.