A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

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.

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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.

Tetris DS: I have confirmed that, in versus play, the players don't all get the same pieces; they are independently random for each player.

This is really disappoint, and seems like a bizarre thing for Nintendo to get wrong, since this has been a standard attribute of most every multiplayer Tetris game since the start. I suppose there's a chance that they made this choice on purpose, but if so I have to say that it's an objectively wrong decision.

Giving all players the the same array of pieces equates to starting them out on the same ground, with identical resources; the winner is the one who made better (and swifter) use of them. If everyone's random, though, then any losing player can reasonably make the argument that they simply got an unlucky piece distribution or ordering. And that really sucks.

My Tetris friend code is 519310566343. Also I just totally beat someone with an ELO over 6000 and now mine is above 5000 again. Like that'll last.

For all my personally generated hype in anticipation it I actually haven't played Tetris much in the 10 days or so that I've had it. I don't think I've even played online enough to warrant an exit from the probationary ranks, assuming that Nintendo uses the decreasing-K style of ELO (and I believe that they do).

I started putting together a DS fan-page type thing on jmac.org.

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I don't feel like doing any work today.

This has felt like a nice, long month, with lots of content. I'll take a couple more, please.