Let 10,000 Wolfenstein projects bloom!

Just reading a post by John Carmack where he talks about porting his old Castle Wolfenstein code to the iPhone. Since he open-sourced the code several years ago there's been a fair bit of development, with several open source projects adopting, adapting, and going off merrily on their own sweet ways.

He reveals that he finally settled on Wolf3D Redux, and then drops the fabulous line, "I sent an email to the Wolf 3D Redux project maintainer to see if he might be interested in working on an iPhone project with us, but it had been over a year since the last update, and he must have moved on to other things". Sheesh! If that developer ever reads his email, he'll be kicking himself to the moon and back while weeping tears of blood! I'd sacrifice whatever parts of my anatomy are not strictly necessary for coding to get that kind of offer, and I think 99% of programmers out there would do the same.

So I foresee an immediate uptick of sourceforge projects dedicated to porting, cleaning, remodularising, abstracting, translating and just plain messing around with that old Wolfenstein code. Just on the offchance you understand...

Cherie Blair hired to sue RBS and Sir Fred Goodwin

This looks, on the face of it, highly suspicious. North Yorkshire Council and Merseyside Council, hmm... They wouldn't be Labour councils by any chance? And Cherie Blair???? There's more than a whiff of a stitch up here, this is presumably Harriet Harman's doing. I'm only surprised that Cherie Blair is lending her name and her skills to such an enterprise.

Britain poised to tumble

I am deeply dubious that the answer to our economic problems lies in encouraging banks to lend. Rather, since the reason they won't lend is that households are overburdened with debt, to such an extent that a large proportion of existing loans may never be paid back, the answer to me seems to be to play things quietly: to let people reduce their debts — over years if necessary — until financial health is restored. Only then can growth resume.

To put it in more familiar terms: if you've binged so much that you're lying puking in the gutter, with a cirrhotic liver and clogged kidneys, then a hair of the dog is probably not the right answer.

I also doubt recent claims in the media that the government will stand ready to claw back any excess liquidity should inflation reassert itself. I think they've calculated that a decade of inflation at 10% or so will nicely reduce all those personal loans to manageable proportions, and at far less political cost than a decade of real financial prudence.

That's not a popular analysis. Indeed I expect most commentators would scoff at its naivety. Certainly, insofar as the original personal debt problem has led to other problems such as a dearth of commercial lending, I suppose it may be reasonable to try to resolve those separately. But I don't think that trying to give the old wheel one more turn is going to get us anywhere, other than the poor house.

So it's nice to see that at least some financial professionals agree with me: house prices 'could fall by further 55 per cent' say Numis Securities, a leading City investment bank whom I've regrettably never heard of till now. They put it rather better than I've been able to:

"The Prime Minister and Chancellor have publicly stated that they want banks this year to lend at 2007 levels... We think this is a crazy policy, given that too much debt was one of the prime reasons why the economy has its current problems."

"The bankruptcy of the UK is a very real probability as the UK Government is trying to stimulate a greater debt burden in a grossly indebted economy."

Intel prepping for mass roll-out of Android netbooks

This post, from January 2008, is looking a little bit prescient now. I do so love being right. [OK, I said set top boxes and it's actually netbooks, I'm still claiming half a point.]

Of course, this is just the tip of … well, something a lot more pointy than an iceberg … a giant harpoon perhaps, aimed fair and square at Microsoft's heart. Manufacturers are already putting versions of Linux on full-size desktop PCs whose primary operating system is Windows, so that you can use them — for email, browsing, and playing tunes — without having to "boot" them [i.e., not into Windows]. Look for Android to be made more suitable for this purpose.

In true Google style, nothing will be said. Officially, it won't be happening. In practice, some manufacturer's light-boot linux will turn out to be Android when disassembled by an intrepid hacker. If it catches on, good; if it doesn't, "we were never really interested in doing that anyway".…

"Cannot access the Hardware Clock via any known method."

Downloaded the latest VirtualBox, version 2.1.2, for my now-ancient Windows XP main PC, and wondered if I could finally get Ubuntu server to boot on it. Having tried previously with the old 1.6 version and failed. Got the same problem, couldn't boot, but fixing it was as simple as enabling PAE (processor architecture extensions) in the settings for the VM. I don't know whether that option wasn't there in 1.6 or whether I was just being exceptionally dense that day, but anyway it's solved now.

During the Ubuntu boot process there was another odd message though, even when it was successfully booting: "Cannot access the Hardware Clock via any known method." Sounded like the hardware was being hidden a little too successfully. Sounded like something that a lot of people would come across, but the only solution I found was on a German website.

In brief, there are two files in /etc/init.d :

hwclockfirst.sh

and

hwlock.sh

You need to edit both of them. There's a line that defines an (empty) environment variable, HWCLOCKPARS; it looks like this:

HWCLOCKPARS=

Edited that line to look like this:

HWCLOCKPARS="--directisa"

And Ubuntu server now boots in the VM without any problem.

Markets in used lightbulbs

Hat tip to the ever-readable Marginal Revolution blog ("interesting throughout"):

For most of us, it is hard to fathom the rationale for a market in burnt-out light bulbs. But in the scarcity-driven Soviet economy, the market was entirely reasonable. Light bulbs were rarely available to individual consumers, but were obtainable for state-sponsored activities. Thus, it would be difficult to purchase a light bulb for a new lamp in one's home, while burnt-out bulbs in state-run offices or factories were routinely replaced. So if someone purchased a new lamp and needed a bulb, he would buy a used light bulb for a small fee and replace a functioning bulb at work with the dud. He would then take the functioning bulb home for the new lamp, while the burnt-out bulb at the office/factory would be replaced with a new functioning bulb. Meanwhile, the maintenance person at the office/factory would take the used bulb and sell it on the used light bulb market.

What's particularly interesting here is the use of something (the broken bulb) — other than money itself — acting as a catalyst in an economic transaction.

I think I finally understand

I think I finally understand why the pound is falling so badly and, even when the whole world is in recession, people are particularly "shorting" Britain. As I read more and more American articles on the current financial collapse they all seem to be saying the same thing: the old financial system was a house of cards, and it's not going to come back. What will rise in its place is something very much smaller and less ambitious - and far less profitable.

Britain, of course, allowed its manufacturing sector to run down while it concentrated on growing its financial sector. Britain is fucked.