Erik Novales

I recently ran into some issues with installing PHP on an IIS server, and, in the process of tracking down the problems, came to the conclusion that the PHP Group doesn’t do enough (any?) release testing, and still treats the Windows platform (regardless of whether or not Apache is used) as a second-class citizen. Why? [...]

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Last night, I finally plowed through to the end of Culdcept Saga. I discovered, via GameFaqs, the concept of the “symbol deck” — one that has absolutely no items or creatures in it, and instead focuses on spending as much money as possible through the symbol system, and controlling the board and pace of the [...]

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That’s the byline of an interesting 60 Minutes piece on ‘corporate raider’ Carl Icahn (who was mentioned here before in relation to an attempted takeover of Marvel Comics). Regardless of whatever else you may think of his practices, his commentary on CEO pay in this country is spot on. It’s particularly disturbing when they try [...]

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The other day I received an interesting letter in the mail. It was an offer from Sprint (my former cell phone provider), offering me $10 for my 4+ year old Samsung A620. I’m not sure if there is some kind of government subsidy involved here (a brief search didn’t turn up anything that seemed relevant), [...]

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Amongst the pirates, that is, with 1,893 people leeching it at the time of the survey. Not sure how to take that…

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By way of this Coding Horror article discussing recent CAPTCHA breaks in Yahoo, Hotmail, and Google, I stumbled across the Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) project at Microsoft Research. It’s a CAPTCHA system that uses pictures of cats and dogs, taken from Petfinder, to filter out bots from real people. I decided [...]

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It’s a really great game, in my opinion, held back a little bit by some technical and usability issues. To get those out of the way first: There’s some slowdown on certain maps when a lot of creatures are deployed, which doesn’t seem justified given the perceived GPU load. There’s also some visible tearing at [...]

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A resident in my apartment complex just had all of the tires off of his BMW M3 stolen overnight. The car was left up on cinderblocks — we saw him talking to the police earlier this afternoon. Not a good way to start your Saturday, although I was impressed — he seemed much calmer talking [...]

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