Binary Formations Blog

I just finished reading this press release on TransGaming’s website. It is announcing that Sony’s SecuROM digital rights management (DRM) technology is being added to Cider. Cider is TransGaming’s technology that helps game developers port (or cross-develop, depending on whatever word choice you prefer) Windows games to OS X. Electronic Arts is using Cider for some of its upcoming titles, such as Spore.

Such DRM is pretty nasty stuff and has been known to cause all sorts of problems with people’s systems. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you no doubt know I’ve had my own bad experiences with DRM failures in the past and flat out refuse to buy any software using it in the future. There are other ways to cut down on piracy without putting your customers’ systems at risk. Anyway, if you feel remotely the same as I do, I suggest heading over to TransGaming’s contact page and dropping them an e-mail with your (respectfully worded) thoughts.

I’ve already sent my own complaint (text of the e-mail below). It will be interesting to see if/how they respond. If they do, I’ll post it here.

To Whom It May Concern:

I just finished reading your press release on adding SecuROM DRM to Cider. I am one of those, ‘if it has activation/DRM, I’m not buying it’, people. I also make my living developing software and know just how damaging piracy can be. Conversely, though, I know how damaging activation and other forms of DRM can and have been to legitimate, honest (dare I mention paying?) users.

Such techniques never, ever go as smoothly as promised by developers. SecuROM in particular has a already garnered a rather nasty consumer unfriendly reputation on the Windows side of the PC world. To date SecuROM has been associated with conflicts with other software, preventing peripherals from functioning properly under certain circumstances, system slowdowns, and in some cases, complete system failure. Such technologies, far from flawless, interfere with the normal operation of systems in many cases. Worse, novice users may not even be aware the problems they are experiencing are the result of errant DRM code, costing them hours in wasted time and hundreds of dollars to have the problem ‘fixed’ by people whose technical expertise is questionable at best, like Best Buy’s Geek Squad.

Implementing this sort of solution to prevent piracy is just plain unethical. You have no right to put your customers’ machines at risk just to protect yourselves. But that is exactly what DRM does. Meanwhile, the pirates keep on doing what they have always been doing. The only difference now is that with DRM the pirates can offer something more than just a free copy of the software. Now they can offer a better product, unencumbered by the DRM that puts the user’s system at risk. For the educated user, where is the incentive to pay? As for me, I will just add games developed using Cider to the growing list of software I avoid because the developer has no respect for their customers.

Regards,

Kevin Hamilton
Binary Formations, LLC

…what happens when you give catnip to a lion? Do they go all nuts like house cats? Can you get them all toked up on catnip and then breakout the laser pointer and watch them chase the little red dot all around? Just wondering. Surely somewhere a zoo keeper has throw a few pounds of catnip in the lion exhibit just to see what would happen.

I have received several e-mails over the past few weeks asking if it is going to cost anything to upgrade to Home Inventory v2.0 when it comes out. The short answer is yes. At this time, I don’t know how much, but it will be $10.00 or under (most likely under). If you purchased the current release of Home Inventory between August 1, 2008 and the time when version 2.0 releases, you will receive a free upgrade to version 2.0. At this point the release date for version 2.0 looks to be sometime early next year.

I hate to have to charge for the upgrade, but software development is a long and expensive process and it just isn’t financially feasible to make major upgrades available for free for the life of the product.

So I had been working on this iPhone companion app for Home Inventory off and on for a couple of months now. I say off and on, but it’s been mostly off since the bulk of my focus has been on Home Inventory 2.0. The other day I pulled up the code for the iPhone app with every intention of making some serious progress and within half an hour ran into a road block.

When I designed the data model for Home Inventory, I had never intended for there to be another source for adding, editing, and removing data in an open Home Inventory database outside of the Home Inventory application itself. I knew this when I started the iPhone app, but didn’t think it would be much of a problem. I was wrong. When I got to the part where I was writing the code to update the data I realized I had no way for the app to tell Home Inventory just exactly what data it should be updating. Oops! Big rookie mistake! Two mistakes, actually. The first being that even though I had not come up with the idea of this companion app at the time I did the original design work for Home Inventory, I should have known better than to go with such a short-sighted data model. The second mistake was not doing a better job of planning with the iPhone app. If I had, I would have discovered this problem long before I began coding (not to mention long before I put up a post about the iPhone app being available this summer — Doh!).

The good news is that a lot of thought and planning has gone into version 2.0 of Home Inventory and its data model. I think it will be much easier to extend than the current version of Home Inventory (not to mention more feature-filled). And yes, it will support the iPhone companion app as well.

Unfortunately, the iPhone companion app won’t be available for the current release of Home Inventory. Instead it will have to wait until sometime after version 2.0 is out. Dang!

So I’m writing this post on my iPhone using the new WordPress app. It will be nice to have in a pinch, but typing more than a few words on a touchscreen is tedious.

BTW, how about those quarterly results from Apple yesterday? 2.5 million Macs shipped - awesome!

My wife and I have taken to calling our child ‘The Wa-Wa’ because whenever he is awake, it seems like he is crying. Maybe I should be called ‘The Wa-Wa Senior’ for all the whining I do in this blog about how bad Windows Vista is. But that’s just it, it is really, really bad, and while in many ways it is a general, though modest, improvement over Windows XP, it seems that in many more ways it is a honkin’-huge-Jolly-Green-Giant step backwards. Yesterday, I was confronted with another of Vista’s backslides that makes me want to kick Microsoft in the backside (har!).

For those of you who may be (blessedly) unfamiliar, Windows Vista installs the components for every available feature (like Movie Maker, Media Center, etc), whether you want them or not. This is all fine and good, but instead of the add/remove programs control panel that has a tab for adding and removing Windows components in Windows XP, Vista has a Windows Features control panel that lets you turn individual features on or off. Think about that not-so-subtle shift in nomenclature while you read on.

I happen to need Vista for another development project I’m working on at the moment. I run it on my Mac under VMWare Fusion with 30GB of storage allocated to it. Since the only additional software I need on the system is Visual Studio and the source code for the project, 30GB should be more than enough space, right? Well… Let’s just say that when moving some test data around, space was getting tight. The obvious thing to do would be to get rid of those pre-installed programs that I don’t use (who in there right mind would use Movie Maker over iMovie anyway?).

If you were paying attention to the second paragraph, you have probably figured out by now that turning a Windows Vista feature ‘off’ does not actually remove it from the system. Nope, it just takes away access to that feature but leaves the files on your computer’s hard drive. What’s funny, in a hammering a six-inch steel spike through my skull sort of way, is that turning off simple features that should not need any complicated reconfiguration, such as games, can take up to a minute. Seriously! Vista can actually spend the better part of sixty seconds removing a freakin’ link from the Programs menu. Boy the wow sure starts now on that one — as in ‘Wow, this operating system sucks!’

Back to the problem at hand. What do you do if you want to get rid of these ‘features’ that you don’t use so you can free up space on the hard drive? You can’t do it through Vista’s control panel, so maybe deleting the files directly is the way to go? Slow down, Mac user. That thought is a little too close to making sense for Microsoft and therefore dangerous and must be beaten out of you.

You see, Windows has a concept called the registry, which can conceptually be thought of as eight pounds of over-cooked vermicelli all tangled up and left to dry out in the sun for forty straight days. Each strand represents an application and the points where it is fused together with other bits of hardened pasta represent all of the ‘keys’ in the registry that somehow refer to that app. The trick is to get the strand that represents the application you want to remove out of the hardened ball without leaving any pieces of it behind or disturbing anything else. If you are not successful in this endeavor, Windows will get its hate on and seek to punish you (repeatedly) for dipping your fork in its lunch.

Even if I was willing to waste my time blowing away all traces of each and every one of these applications from the registry and then manually deleting them from the disk, there’s a fair chance that the next OS update would put some of them back or worse, flat out break the operating system (I’ve experienced both of these scenarios under Windows XP). Yes, there are third party tools and scripts available that can automate the removal of these components, but they often come from dubious sources and do the job with questionable results. Even if they did work flawlessly, I shouldn’t have to resort to this type of computer jujitsu just to remove unwanted applications that come bundled as a part of the OS.

Thanks, Microsoft. Thanks again for making each day I spend with Vista suck just a little bit more than the day before.

Work on version 2.0 of Home Inventory has been moving along quite well. The new data model is in place. It will bring customizable fields, collections, and some other goodies to Home Inventory. So far it has survived the initial feature implementation phases with only one minor change — hooray for up-front design!

This new model is more extensible than the one in the current release, which isn’t extensible at all. Some of the more requested feature additions from users had to be put off until version 2.0 because I did not want to deal with converting to a newer data model for minor 1.x releases. Although the conversion process is relatively simple, there is room for error and I don’t want to have to deal with the risk of data conversion screw-ups on a regular basis. Of course there will be a conversion from 1.x Home Inventory data files to the new format for version 2.0, but hopefully it will be a long while before it is necessary to do it again.

From the user interface side, Home Inventory’s newer, more streamlined look is coming together nicely. The application doesn’t look as heavy to me as the current release. That could just be the newness of it all, though. I also finished up the navigation changes for the item lists. This is another area of Home Inventory that has undergone a complete design re-think and code rewrite from version 2.0. I’ve passed it on to my wife for her opinion. Hopefully she won’t be too brutal. If it passes the wife test, you can rest assured it will be good.

That’s about all for now. There is still a lot of work ahead, especially if I want to get a beta out this Fall.

My wife is a fascinating woman to talk to. She’s whip smart, has traveled the world, and is well read. She’s also funny as hell. All of these qualities coalesced the other day as we were walking to grab some ice cream (there’s a strip mall with six restaurants, including an awesome local pizzeria, and a Bruster’s about a mile from our house). She was telling me about a paper she had written for an online course she is taking when she let it slip that she wrote the entire paper without doing any of the assigned reading. Curious, I asked her why, while doing my best to keep any hint of admonition from my voice. Without missing a beat she told me that it was because there was no risk of plagiarism if she didn’t do any of the reading.

To me this was a revelation that had come twenty years too late. All throughout high school and college I avoided the reading that was assigned to me, particularly where classic literature was involved (Seriously, did it really take that many words to describe a field in Wuthering Heights? — It’s a freakin’ FIELD!) Anyway, I wish I had known about this brilliant excuse when I was in school. I could have saved myself from more than a few failing grades: But Miss Johnson, of course my book report on The Catcher In The Rye takes place on Mars. You told us plagiarism was a guaranteed trip to the principal’s office and I didn’t want any chance of Salinger’s work cross-pollinating my own so I didn’t read it.