Cubegeek

There Is No Cat

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
-- Albert Einstein

In the movie Revolver, one of the rules is that you only improve your game by playing a smarter opponent. So I am applying that to myself as I figure out ways to get a small peg up in security.

Having the advantage of being an old geezer, I remember when the Cult of the Dead Cow was just beginning, more or less. And so it's nice to know a little bit of where to go when thinking about security. So I headed there and though about ways I could catch up to what has been going on in the hacking world since I decided to get political and de-cloak. I'm wanting to re-cloak and thinking about the best way to anonymize some of my activities. Which is to say, attempt to craft a hacking legend. This would be difficult - depending on what I want to do with this legend. What I'm thinking about is getting a bunch of hacked software.

And so I have discovered several interesting new tools. The first is the XeroBank which has a set of tools including the xB browser. This was based on Torpark which was a Firefox browser enhanced to use the Tor network. There's probably a free way to use onion routing but I haven't discovered it yet. That's next, plus I'd want a good review of Google's incognito browser. But that depends on getting somewhere people who would know would comment. And *that* depends on my reducing my reading list to fewer of my usual non-hacker suspect.

All this is interesting because I really got started just looking for a copy of VMWare Workstation 5 which I paid for three years ago and has disappeared off the face of the map. Until I went to the Pirate Bay where it was easy to find. But the Pirate Bay has its own set of temptations. So I started thinking about how I could stash purloined goods and contraband and it ran me into this larger problem which is how do you get what you want from the web without leaving a trail, and once you have it inhouse, how do you use it without showing you have it. So I have to think about concentric firewalling of behavior and hardware.

Speaking of browsers, I'm now running NoScript on my Firefox. I'm rather bored of Chrome and it's not that much faster. Plus, a guy that Johnny Long is following on Twitter recommends it.

Here's another weird thing. TrueCrypt is now running seven or eight diagnoses of insecurity - like what's unencrypted in memory when you drop programs or what goes to the Windows swap space. But these are vulnerabilities that I think are specific to one dimension of security - which is to say that they are defenses against a certain type of intrusion. Most likely those kits that are aimed at botting your machine. I just need to keep in mind all of the sorts of intrusions I'm a tasty target for. But then again, I do like the idea of having my own botnet. Which takes me back to thinking about very light hypervisor stuff at the bottom of some stack of OSes running wholly anonymized. Such a thing is possible and I'll be trying it next week.

Also I found a couple stupid music sites, just eyeballing Slashdot comments. They are free music sites with the kind of new music that appeals to folks who are actually pissed off that they have to buy music. I'm never quite sure of such peoples' taste in music considering what I've heard free. Oh. The sites are Magnatunes and Jamendo.

Meanwhile I'll be checking out this thing called VLC and seeing whether or not I can rip my own DVDs. I've wanted to do that for a long time.

Microsoft PPS: Dead.

Nigel Pendse reports the death of Microsoft Performance Point Server:

Despite all the positive auguries, it seems that PerformancePoint Planning has flopped.
Microsoft announced on January 23 that it was to be discontinued. There will be a final SP3 Planning release in mid 2009 to deal with immediate customer issues, but no further enhancements. It is possible that some planning functionality will be added into other Microsoft products, such as Analysis Services and Excel, but this will not be based on the abandoned PerformancePoint Planning product.
The Biz# project will have run for almost six years from commencement to abandonment, with little to show for it apart from some disappointed customers and partners.

Disappointment indeed. It's now official. I can say with finality that I wasted a year in my career. In fact, a lot of good people that I know personally wasted a year and even longer chasing the rainbow that was Microsoft Performance Point Server. It's a damned shame because some very smart people worked very hard and some hard earned money turned out to be a bad investment. I personally know people who went halfway around the world trying to make Microsoft PPS do what it was supposed to do. It's not just the clients of Madoff who are pissed these days. 

I was fortunate to get hit over the head with a brick almost exactly a year ago when my boss made the judicious decision to trim his sails and begin cutting his losses in an ambitious project to corner the consulting market on PPS. We were the consulting vendor of choice. We proved that we could do things with that product that almost nobody else could and we survived on hope, skill and the kind of gallows humor dedication of the dogfaced GI. 

There were several occasions when I had to stop and scratch my head wondering if it was just me or were we pushing ropes. But I'm no quitter. If there was a way to make that stuff work, we were going to do it. Now what I remember of the story can be told. 

First of all, PPS was a decent product. It had particular strengths and weaknesses that you might expect from a version one launch, but in my revised opinion - the kind of opinion I could afford to develop after I left the team, there were certain things that simply doomed it. Only one of them had to do with the technology.

The first and foremost thing that doomed PPS was that it was a Microsoft product and what I learned was that Microsoft, certainly as far as PPS was concerned and probably in general is a technology company, not a product company. That is to say that Microsoft is the kind of company that is well suited to marshal its resources on a global scale with a large existing installed base of interlocking technologies but that ability doesn't scale down. Microsoft is incapable of profiting from small products with small markets, and from a Microsoft perspective PPS was tiny. 

Secondly PPS itself belonged to nobody. Not that there were 'nobodies' in charge of it. In fact there were multiple big somebodies in charge of various parts of it. There lies the problem; there simply was not one integrated product organization that could make decisions in support of the product and then stand behind those decisions internally to Microsoft or externally to consultants and customers. PPS primarily belonged to 'OBA', the guys responsible for Microsoft Office. Now I know BPM people are saying what!?. I did too, but that's the way it went. PPS also depended on Excel, which was another group. PPS also depended on SharePoint which was another group. And of course it depended on SQL Server & Analysis Services, yet another group. So who coordinated all of those development efforts? Effectively nobody. 

Thirdly PPS had no product roadmap. The product roadmap for PPS was basically a function of sales. We throw it out there to 50,000 customers, we expect an adaptation rate of 3% at a price of X per pop, there's your revenue stream. Completely absent from that was a feedback loop. Microsoft didn't care a hoot about what customers and developers might have to say about the product's features or shortcomings. It was as if a mighty focus group or marketing exec had spoken and that was the end of it. So when things went wrong, and believe me a lot of things went wrong, there was no recourse. So nobody inside or outside of Microsoft, situated to support the product knew if, for example, there would be a published API for the product. Nobody knew if there was actually going to be a next release or what the priofities might be in that release. For all the things we knew that worked or didn't work internally to the product, we would be stuck telling our customers - well we don't really know when Microsoft is going to address that. In fact, we didn't even know IF Microsoft was going to address that.

Fourth. PPS just didn't perform. I had guys working the guts of this product and one of the things that was entirely too clever about it was that it had a kind of code generator that would determine whether or not it would use MDX or T-SQL to execute its functions. I don't recall what people have said about how well optimized Microsoft compilers are, but obviously none of those geniuses worked on optimizing PPS. PPS would generate a meta-language that was basically full of crap. Our guys were hand-coding all of the internals and forcing the product to use SQL instead of MDX, period. It was the only way to get it performing worth beans.

I recall a famous meeting I had up in Redmond with some really sharp guys that Microsoft had redeployed from FRX to get on the PPS bandwagon. I didn't like it because it meant that Microsoft was hedging on us as a consulting vendor, but we all figured that the market would eventually take care of us all so we played nice. One of the top three PPS architects in the world was there explaining and demonstrating one of the few successful internal implementations. As we went through the demo the architect did a drilldown in Excel. You know me, I counted seconds for response time. ..6..7..8..9..10. After about 12 seconds we got about 50 rows of data. Let me make that clear, 50 rows with 12 columns, 600 freaking cells. This, I know because I asked, was coming off of a 64bit server. Anybody with any experience in OLAP knows that kind of performance was unacceptable back in 1992. At the time of this meeting, there was only one person who actually had any experience doing any back-end tuning behind PPS. All I could say was, well, FRX has done well in the mid-market, so maybe this isn't so bad. But I knew from that moment on that it would be a cold day in hell before we could beat Oracle, Cognos or even Outlooksoft for Enterprise customers. 

And yet Microsoft people had the nerve to believe that their entry into the market - their purchase of ProClarity was this fearsome move that *prompted* Oracle to buy Hyperion and IBM to buy Cognos. Unbelievable. 

I have to say in retrospect, that PPS was the crappiest product I've ever had to work with for its market. ProClarity was 3 times better by itself. ProClarity as a company may have been destroyed here, but there's an object lesson that the brains behind ProClarity and the organization was much better suited to manage that product than Microsoft. I've come to terms with my frustration with Microsoft. I don't hate them, but I understand why people hate them. I have never, in my entire career, had customers so furious at me for a failure to deliver on promises implicit in a product. I have never seen smart consultants so frustrated by a product's complexity and poor performance. I have never seen businessmen have to tapdance so fiercely to keep everybody on the same page.

I've learned a great deal about Microsoft, people and myself through my experience with PPS. I can say this. When it comes to delivering products and services to the enterprise, Microsoft is better to have as an enemy than as a partner.

To all my friends and associates in Redmond and Century City, to all of my customers and partners in Washginton, Arizona, Oregon and Hong Kong, you know I have great respect and admiration for your courage under fire. I'm sorry to have failed you. I did all that I could, but now you know that Microsoft just didn't back us up. 

Now there's somebody who I have to buy a cow. 

Vault 107

A bit of progress on my home-based data center is happening bit by bit. Last week I figured I should give it a name, and so following on my latest RPG adventure in Fallout 3, I have decided to call it Vault 107. 

The first trick up my sleeve is to figure out if it is possible, while Washington is being stupider than usual, to get a grant for my business to purchase some hardware. I've fallen in love with the affordability of dual processor 2U rack moutable HP servers (4G) and so I figure that if I come up with a nice 50 page document I can get my future bailed out. So I'm finding out a bunch of things.

One of the things I found out is that there are fifty government agencies that are currently certified as qualified to get federal money to electronically publish statistics on murder and other sordid crimes to the public. Now if you've looked at any of the government run statistical websites and compared their query tools to what we do on the regular, you just know that they are ridiculously inferior. Also, you should know that Mayor Bloomberg has revolutionized his little bailywick in NYC with Oracle Indicators, which are good but not as great as something like Tableau. 

So as part of my off-hours project vis a vis the new call for government transparency, I'm going to FOIA my way into a small fortune - or at least that's the wild eyed plan I have at the moment. 

Vault 107 will be the test bed and development studio, I will Ghost and Virtualize some commodity-type server images complete with data and then I will migrate them up to EC2 or some such and then voila, instant slashdotting. It just really depends on how quickly I can turn around data of popular interest. I've got a unique headstart because ever since Hyperion laid me off eight years ago, I've been growing some small niche popularity as a blogger up to the point at which I have the attention of some producers at NPR and heads at Pajamas Media. 

My current inspiration is this guy. Patience is a virtue. 

Geothermal Physics Problem

So I'm thinking why we don't do geothermal. And it occurs to me that the opportunity to go that deep into the earth is limited. I may have just answered my own question but let's keep going.

Imagine you've got a river and a very deep hole. A hole so deep that in fact that when you get down a mile or two it's hot enough to make steam. The original question was a kind of open query as to if the energy of steam off the hot rock is enough to be exothermic. How hot does the rock have to be as a ratio to depth of the hole so that there is recoverable energy if you dump a river down it and drive steam turbines?

But it occurs to me that the earth just doesn't get hot close enough to the surface to make any of that work on a general basis. You'd have to be somewhere the magma and other hots were close otherwise simple kinetic energy would be more efficient. Obviously hydroelectric only needs water to fall a few hundred feet to make serious amounts of electricity, why drill a hole a mile deep? Besides, oilwells go miles deep and they don't hit the heat. So geothermal is limited to very specific geographical locations.

And so I defer to Wikipedia:

The United States of America is the country with the greatest geothermal energy production.^[31]

The largest dry steam field in the world is The Geysers, 72 miles (116 km) north of San Francisco. The Geysers began in 1960, has 1360 MW of installed capacity and produces over 750 MW net. Calpine Corporation now owns 19 of the 21 plants in The Geysers and is currently the United States' largest producer of geothermal energy. The other two plants are owned jointly by the Northern California Power Agency and the City of Santa Clara's municipal Electric Utility (now called Silicon Valley Power). Since the activities of one geothermal plant affects those nearby, the consolidation plant ownership at The Geysers has been beneficial because the plants operate cooperatively instead of in their own short-term interest. The Geysers is now recharged by injecting treated sewage effluent from the City of Santa Rosa and the Lake County sewage treatment plant. This sewage effluent used to be dumped into rivers and streams and is now piped to the geothermal field where it replenishes the steam produced for power generation.

Another major geothermal area is located in south central California, on the southeast side of the Salton Sea, near the cities of Niland and Calipatria, California. As of 2001, there were 15 geothermal plants producing electricity in the area. CalEnergy owns about half of them and the rest are owned by various companies. Combined the plants have a capacity of about 570 MW.

The Basin and Range geologic province in Nevada, southeastern Oregon, southwestern Idaho, Arizona and western Utah is now an area of rapid geothermal development. Several small power plants were built during the late 1980s during times of high power prices. Rising energy costs have spurred new development. Plants in Nevada at Steamboat near Reno, Brady/Desert Peak, Dixie Valley, Soda Lake, Stillwater and Beowawe now produce about 235 MW.

The Geek Week In Review

Dropping an orbit of electrical energy and closing to my nucleus of geekery, I emit a quantum of light and will perchance illuminate some spectrum of knowledge. Thus is born the Geek Week in Review.

My new little XP server, Deneb, has been upgraded a bit. I stuck in a uTorrent client/server and will likely be serving up some data goodies for my pals in due time. They will include a library of dimensions fit to beat the band. I've decided that's the best way - I can keep it private if I like. uTorrent itself was a breeze to install and behaved exactly like I hoped it would. All I've snagged so far is a copy of Fedora 10 which is likely to be my Linux of immediate choice. I checked out the Wiki entry for a Linux comparison and am going to stick with my Red Hat oriented distro. Previously I had played with Caldera, Yellow Dog and Knoppix, but other than that, it's always been Red Had (and Solaris). I may have at one point got my hands on Interactive Unix but that's when they were still writing it. God, I'm old. Anyway, I'm also going to keep an eye out for Scientific Linux, the distro out of CERN. I want to get on the path of the massive.

I failed to activate my copy of VMWare 6.5 workstation because I can't remember where I left my trial code. I have a full commercial license for version 5 which I bought three years ago and it doesn't work, so I still need to see what's up with an upgrade. In the meantime I'm still searching all of Vault 107 for my original copy. There's also nothing on Oldversion.com. VMWare finally makes sense to me, it's nice to see that everything has matured. I realized that there were actually tools out there to help manage VMs and that's what let me know now is the time. Thanks to the IT people in Cincinatti, who have it going on. My new cultural note is to pay close attention to IT guys with bald heads. I'm thinking now that a bald head is the new gray beard. Maybe I should even use the Anathem term 'Ita'.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to our company getting its VM act together because although I don't mind spending a grand for a hot server, I don't want to fork over for ESX, which something tells me I'm going to need. In the meantime, as soon as I can find a way to guarantee a restoration of my OEM versions of XP then I'll get ESXi between that and the hardware, but that experiment has to wait until next week.

For Deneb, I'm putting together some database stuff, and I've been trying to decide which. Thus far, in the war of the databases, the winner is MSSQL 2K8. That's because for the life of me, even after three installs, I can't figure out how to get the right authentication working for Oracle 10g. I enter a password during the installation and then when I'm ready to start and login as SYSDBA the system doesn't recognize the password. I'm telling you that authentication is starting to get on my nerves, really. I understand that we need security modularized but nobody is making this straightforward. 

Still, I'm enjoying what they've done with the import wizard which has always been the best in the business, and I'm just pulling data from everywhere to build up my library.

I got a little bit of a scare playing with Picasa. One of the things I'm doing these days is my annual security / backup and reorg. So I'm changing a lot of passwords, making sure that things are where I thought they would be and general tidying. I noticed that whenever I open Picasa, it updates some of the same thumbnails over and over. So I've had the nagging suspicion that I'm infected and that somebody is marking some pictures to show that they've been here. Maybe changing one pixel and getting a new hashcode out of the file, restamping it with the same datestamp and using it as a marker. Sure, I'm actually that paranoid. So I grabbed SysInternals Diskmon and Filemon to see what was touching what on my drives. It turns out that svchost.exe is touching my private keys, I don't like being touched there. But you can never tell who or what owns svchost, right? Since they were touched after Picasa was opened, I assumed it was Picasa. But it could still be anything. So I looked for a has verification of the Picasa download and realized that Google doesn't provide it. I'll complain about that later. But you can see my dilemma. How can I validate that Picasa isn't doing weirdness through an unhinged svchost.exe (or any damned dll, for that matter)?  I got some answers about the updated thumbnails but I'm still a bit unsettled. So next I'll just come up with another way to segregate out securish files that I want untouched.  That means putting my PGP keys on an encrypted drive that I keep on my person.

Speaking of security, I realize that I haven't used my OpenId much. I'll keep that in mind.

What else is new. Oh on that VM thing. I discovered Xen, but I'm now pretty sure that it only runs native on Linux. A new acquaintance from DataDomain hipped me to Tunebite which will help me convert all of my DRM'd iTunes mp4s into MP3s and otherwise allow me to run virtual servers with the content I own. If I was a stock market betting man, I'd bet on those guys at DataDomain by the way.

I'm sure that a lot of other things have crossed my path this week, which only goes to show that I should do more of my everyday geekery posts. Especially since I'm insomniac until 2am computing and what not.

Star May Have Done It Again

In my aging and occasionally useless universe of computing, there are several important galaxies. The most important is the BI galaxy, which is alternately called the DW and the BPM galaxy. That's the one that pays my bills, and with any luck will get my brats through college. In that galaxy are several stars that I pay attention to although there may be others that are brighter and more massive. I try to get into their orbits when I can.

Among those stars are Applied Olap, Tableau and Star Analytics  - some of the brightest people in the Essbase Quadrant. Folks who still build products have my admiration.  

Here at the NorCal OAUG I've seen some familiar faces from Star Analytics.I just happened by Suzanne Hoffman, who keeps track of all of my favorite people and Quinlan Eddy, one of the guys who taught me Essbase.  They are If my guess is correct, he's done it again. Within a few hours I'll know for sure, but he may have just short-circuited my little big idea for the year, which has to do with the automation of back-end processes that feed Hyperion apps. I'll get a demo later and post what I can post. 

Palm Pre - Uh Oh.

Just when I was about to throw my hands in the air. Palm has done it again. 

Several weeks ago my Treo lunched. It lost all of my contacts and really pissed me off. So I started looking for a new phone, but mostly new excuses to buy an iPhone. Except iPhones don't tether and I'd be stuck with AT&T. I'd much rather get on Verizon, but merely for one reason which is that I'd get better coverage. But that mostly means better coverage at my house which is a Sprint dead zone. I love Sprint's plan - unlimited digital for a simple flat rate, but their coverage leaves me wanting.

The reason my Treo lunched has to do with my PDANet application which stresses it out. Before using PDANet my Treo never ever gave me any problems. It rebooted maybe 6 times a year. But 6 times a day is not unusual when I've got it tethered to my laptop. 

The last phone I looked at, having decided that all of the Verizon phones bite, is the E71 by Nokia. I gotta have a keypad for my texting, period. So I get over to Best Buy just last weekend to put the Nokia in my hands. Yuk. It feels like an eye makeup kit. I mean it looks great but you pick it up and it's too light and too square and too thin. Don't these Nokia guys know anything about ergonomics?  HP figured this out 30 years ago with the 12C. What's wrong with you people? Same thing with the HTC Google Phone. Man those HTC phones look awesome in the glossy print ads and the big billboards at OHare, but when you touch them, the feel like they were made by Hasbro. Hasbro Vietnam that is.

So I have waited several months and have been giving my Treo a second chance and now I'm in luck because this Pre looks pretty awesome, so do the hands-on demos that I've seen. I get the feeling that this might be the phone for me. Now I can just be patient.  

Fallout 3 - Game of the Year

Fallout 3 is the game of the year. I know this already. Although I only got it four days ago, I have put in 31 hours of work.

Fallout Three is superb and has set the new standard for turn based RPG combat. In a brilliant move they have created a system called VATS (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) that allows you to stop time, target your enemy (with a single weapon) and engage. The system then puts moves forward in time, animating all of the effects of your turn in slo-mo then moves back to real-time. The results are really well done. I have had situations in which a bear-like creature is caught in mid pounce two feet in the air above my character. I got off two shotgun blasts using VATS and splattered the beastie. 

Being from Bethesda, F3 is very Oblivion-like with several improvements. First of all, it gives the appearance of being about a 60 hour game whereas Oblivion is at least three times that. But I could be quite wrong about that - I'm about 30 hours into it and only two of my 20-odd skills are >50%.  There is a bit less human interaction and fewer ways you can seem to grow your character but plenty of diversity possible. 

The artwork is much more striking in F3. The entire effect feels more immediate whereas in Oblivion you seem to have a bit more distance between yourself and the avatar, it being sword and sorcery. With Fallout 3 you have a constant sense of being Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. 

There are little touches that I like - for example you don't get woken up in the middle of your sleep by some creature wandering by. You are also incompetent for a much shorter period of time than in Oblivion. The action is more immediate, you don't spelunk for 15 minutes into a cave and then get ambushed by 10 creatures all the way in the back so that you need to run back another 15 minutes for life & weapons. Encumberance is handled better; you can repair items wherever you are which consumes spares in the field, lightening you. 

Whereas Oblivion was a kind of awe-inspiringly, overwhelmingly massive work, Fallout Three is merely jaw-dropping and stays closer to the plot and adventure. You don't spend inordinate amounts of time, as you did in Oblivion, shopping the diaspora for goods and visiting your prize vendors every day. 

The environment is huge, but not quite as large as Oblivion's. It's more compact and there are fewer side missions. The missions in F3 are very well crafted and have subtleties of negotiations between characters and factions that are very appreciable. As in real life, nobody is quite so evil as they may appear. The 'Blood Ties' mission surprised me in this way. 

There is a Karma system which is very nice, and some great computer hacking puzzles that make you put down the controller, get a pencil and paper and do some different kind of thinking. The quality of these games within the game shows through. 

Control of the character in the environment is good, I've gotten stuck in a few places. You get unlimited saves so you don't have to work up to checkpoints. There is fast travel between major discovery points on the map which comes in handy, but you can't jump out of combat like a genie and teleport yourself to safety. 

Like Oblivion, there is a limited 'alchemy' skill. You can combine found objects within the game and craft them into weapons and technologies. Bodies in the road are persistent, so if you kill it it doesn't vanish over time. There are thousands of nooks and crannies filled with worthless junk that you pick up and drop as well as roaming caravans of merchants who will sell you stuff. 

Your health is three dimensional. You have basic life points, you have a radiation count and you have 'effects'. Everything you eat is radioactive so you trade off health for radioactivity. At 200 rads you start to get ill and need special meds or the services of a doctor. There are all sorts of drugs to take which add 'effects' including increased or decreased perception, strength, intelligence, etc. You can get addicted and suffer withdrawl which also alters your performance. 

What is startling about the F3 world is how Mad Maxian it is and isn't. In the ruins of Washington DC, it's heartbreaking. There are two competing radio stations, both echoing melancholy songs as far as their signals go. Of course everything has a 1947-58 look and feel. Analogs of the voices of the Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald croon out songs of love and loss, of hope and sadness. A DJ named 'Three Dog' whose voice and attitude is a cross between Wolfman Jack, George Carlin and Samuel L. Jackson spins these tunes and offers helpful hints to his 'children' in the wasteland. The other, the evidently pre-recorded voice of 'John Henry Eden', the president of the US, makes nostalgia come alive and promises a brighter future - a restoration of a simpler past among patriotic songs.  After about 20 minutes or either station, you see how empty and sad the whole place is - all the books are burned. There is no legend and little history, there is only survival in the now and your character plays a part in every dream anyone in the Wasteland manages to keep.

Fallout 3 is the game of the year. I know this already. Although I only got it four days ago, I have put in 31 hours of work.

Fallout Three is superb and has set the new standard for turn based RPG combat. In a brilliant move they have created a system called VATS (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) that allows you to stop time, target your enemy (with a single weapon) and engage. The system then puts moves forward in time, animating all of the effects of your turn in slo-mo then moves back to real-time. The results are really well done. I have had situations in which a bear-like creature is caught in mid pounce two feet in the air above my character. I got off two shotgun blasts using VATS and splattered the beastie. 

Being from Bethesda, F3 is very Oblivion-like with several improvements. First of all, it gives the appearance of being about a 60 hour game whereas Oblivion is at least three times that. But I could be quite wrong about that - I'm about 30 hours into it and only two of my 20-odd skills are >50%.  There is a bit less human interaction and fewer ways you can seem to grow your character but plenty of diversity possible. 

The artwork is much more striking in F3. The entire effect feels more immediate whereas in Oblivion you seem to have a bit more distance between yourself and the avatar, it being sword and sorcery. With Fallout 3 you have a constant sense of being Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. 

There are little touches that I like - for example you don't get woken up in the middle of your sleep by some creature wandering by. You are also incompetent for a much shorter period of time than in Oblivion. The action is more immediate, you don't spelunk for 15 minutes into a cave and then get ambushed by 10 creatures all the way in the back so that you need to run back another 15 minutes for life & weapons. Encumberance is handled better; you can repair items wherever you are which consumes spares in the field, lightening you. 

Whereas Oblivion was a kind of awe-inspiringly, overwhelmingly massive work, Fallout Three is merely jaw-dropping and stays closer to the plot and adventure. You don't spend inordinate amounts of time, as you did in Oblivion, shopping the diaspora for goods and visiting your prize vendors every day. 

The environment is huge, but not quite as large as Oblivion's. It's more compact and there are fewer side missions. The missions in F3 are very well crafted and have subtleties of negotiations between characters and factions that are very appreciable. As in real life, nobody is quite so evil as they may appear. The 'Blood Ties' mission surprised me in this way. 

There is a Karma system which is very nice, and some great computer hacking puzzles that make you put down the controller, get a pencil and paper and do some different kind of thinking. The quality of these games within the game shows through. 

Control of the character in the environment is good, I've gotten stuck in a few places. You get unlimited saves so you don't have to work up to checkpoints. There is fast travel between major discovery points on the map which comes in handy, but you can't jump out of combat like a genie and teleport yourself to safety. 

Like Oblivion, there is a limited 'alchemy' skill. You can combine found objects within the game and craft them into weapons and technologies. Bodies in the road are persistent, so if you kill it it doesn't vanish over time. There are thousands of nooks and crannies filled with worthless junk that you pick up and drop as well as roaming caravans of merchants who will sell you stuff. 

Your health is three dimensional. You have basic life points, you have a radiation count and you have 'effects'. Everything you eat is radioactive so you trade off health for radioactivity. At 200 rads you start to get ill and need special meds or the services of a doctor. There are all sorts of drugs to take which add 'effects' including increased or decreased perception, strength, intelligence, etc. You can get addicted and suffer withdrawl which also alters your performance. 

What is startling about the F3 world is how Mad Maxian it is and isn't. In the ruins of Washington DC, it's heartbreaking. There are two competing radio stations, both echoing melancholy songs as far as their signals go. Of course everything has a 1947-58 look and feel. Analogs of the voices of the Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald croon out songs of love and loss, of hope and sadness. A DJ named 'Three Dog' whose voice and attitude is a cross between Wolfman Jack, George Carlin and Samuel L. Jackson spins these tunes and offers helpful hints to his 'children' in the wasteland. The other, the evidently pre-recorded voice of 'John Henry Eden', the president of the US, makes nostalgia come alive and promises a brighter future - a restoration of a simpler past among patriotic songs.  After about 20 minutes or either station, you see how empty and sad the whole place is - all the books are burned. There is no legend and little history, there is only survival in the now and your character plays a part in every dream anyone in the Wasteland manages to keep.

2008 Games of the Year

As you know, I play three types of games. Shooters, Drivers and RPGs. My favorites are shooting RPGs which is why I tend to enjoy Tom Clancy's stuff. This year wasn't much different, except that the number of high quality games this year was very impressive.

10. Too Human
Almost didn't make the cut. I was surprised that I liked this game at all because it's so corny and rather button mashy. However it was very engaging and had a good mix of squad play that got me emotionally involved.

9. Frontlines: Fuel of War
This was a very good game and I spent a good deal of time in it. It had a lot of great promise for massive online squad based conflict that simply never lived up to its potential. It wasn't the game designers' fault, it just that gamers didn't run with it. If gamers who like R6V2 would have taken more to it.. well. They didn't, but even the single player was worth it.

8. Tom Clancy's End War
Same problem here. I'm going to give this game another chance however. It just got launched in during an awesome season. Lots of competition. This game is completely unique, nicely complex and yet very playable. It also lacks some enthusiastic support online, and is probably the underrated game of the year.

7. Call of Duty: World At War
Back to WW2 again? OK they did a good job. It's everything you expect COD to be but no more. Although I did have a lot of fun online with the zombies, the whole graduating to a 40s era tommy gun was a turn off - very ponderous and hard work for online shooting fun. However, as usual, the single player is extraordinarily chaotic, and COD gets the award for best flamethrower.

6. GRID
GRID is really a great driver. I have to say that I like it more than Forza. The great thing about GRID, aside from the huge variety of driving styles, is that it works the physicality of online driving better than any other game. PGR basically encourages ridiculous stunts with Cat and Mouse but is very annoying when you want pure driving. Forza is too damned touchy to be fun, and you have to be a genius mechanic to tune those cars. GRID is right in the middle, and does demolition derby right.

5. Midnight Club LA
I am so glad that I got this game. I had no idea it was going to be as much fun as it is. For a gearhead like me there is no other driving game that exploits the pure beauty of the automobile as this one. Online gaming is crappy but the single player more than makes up for it. A lot less realistic than GRID or PGR, but it does have precise control. A bit better than Burnout Paradise, MCLA benefitted from snappy dialog and memorable characters. Plus driving in recognizable LA was a huge plus. The open street mode of racing in MCLA is exactly what PGR was missing. This is an excellent driver.

4. Gears of War 2
I didn't expect Gears of War 2 to be so much better than the original. It was in every respect except one in which it was exactly the same. Basically when you hit the wall on single player, there is no way you can get past it without coop. For me it was the big courtyard before going down into the hole of Jacinto. I swear I played that level 100 times. Still, shooting from moving platforms did transform the feel of the game. Losing the detail of directing your partner and leaving it up to the AI was so good that I didn't even miss it. Everything seemed to click together better. New weapons, moving cover, new baddies, online lobbies, online game modes. They improved every single thing. This is an instant classic, and like its predecessor, burns you out in six weeks.

3. GTA 4
Everything great has been said about this game and it has lived up to its reputation in every way, except one. For some reason, I just never felt compelled to complete it in single player mode. I don't know exactly why that is, because unlike San Andreas, I didn't get weary of being a bad guy in this episode. For a sandbox adventure, this has some of the most tight and compelling storytelling of any game ever. And yet as soon as I put it down for a couple weeks, it lost all momentum.

2. Mercenaries 2
I don't know where this game came from, but I have never had so much fun being a destructive badass in any game. It found the perfect balance between realistic narrative, personal indestructability, variety of adventures and quests and stright up destructive fun. M2 has the largest destructable environment I've ever played in, and the widest variety of guns and vehicles as well as one of the largest maps. Super fun game. Just super.

1. Fallout 3.
This game owns me. I never thought I would play another game with as much intensity and devotion as I played Oblivion, but the folks at Bethesda have me pegged. I had no idea the game was coming, nor did I know they had been working on it for four years, but it shows. This is a massive, massive game. It is as intriguing and complex a world as ever has been written for any platform and it continues to fascinate and amaze me. I can only hope that as with Oblivion, I can continue to play and acquire skills after the completing the main quest.

Honorable Mentions
Fable 2 - I really didn't expect that I would play it once and then drop it. The problem was that my son got into it and instead of playing myself, I just watched him play. Realizing how huge the game was, I stayed away from it.

Left 4 Dead - I hate zombie games. As great as L4D is Even Valve can't make me like exterminating vermin. I played for an hour or two and gave up. Beautiful, fast game. But I haven't been twitchy lately. Maybe I'll come back to it.

Spore - The most fun in Spore was all up to the tribal level. After that it sucked. Plus the security on that game was totally retarded. I cannot believe the nerve of EA to make it a single player license. Just one more reason I hate PC games. This had great potential, but turned out to be a dud.

Tiger Woods 09 - I only bought this to play online with my buds. I think I can say now once and for all that I don't like golf. Or rather that I can't stand the way in which golf is an extraordinary waste of time. TW09 makes that perfectly obvious. That's how realistic it is.

10. Too Human
Almost didn't make the cut. I was surprised that I liked this game at all because it's so corny and rather button mashy. However it was very engaging and had a good mix of squad play that got me emotionally involved.

9. Frontlines: Fuel of War
This was a very good game and I spent a good deal of time in it. It had a lot of great promise for massive online squad based conflict that simply never lived up to its potential. It wasn't the game designers' fault, it just that gamers didn't run with it. If gamers who like R6V2 would have taken more to it.. well. They didn't, but even the single player was worth it.

8. Tom Clancy's End War
Same problem here. I'm going to give this game another chance however. It just got launched in during an awesome season. Lots of competition. This game is completely unique, nicely complex and yet very playable. It also lacks some enthusiastic support online, and is probably the underrated game of the year.

7. Call of Duty: World At War
Back to WW2 again? OK they did a good job. It's everything you expect COD to be but no more. Although I did have a lot of fun online with the zombies, the whole graduating to a 40s era tommy gun was a turn off - very ponderous and hard work for online shooting fun. However, as usual, the single player is extraordinarily chaotic, and COD gets the award for best flamethrower.

6. GRID
GRID is really a great driver. I have to say that I like it more than Forza. The great thing about GRID, aside from the huge variety of driving styles, is that it works the physicality of online driving better than any other game. PGR basically encourages ridiculous stunts with Cat and Mouse but is very annoying when you want pure driving. Forza is too damned touchy to be fun, and you have to be a genius mechanic to tune those cars. GRID is right in the middle, and does demolition derby right.

5. Midnight Club LA
I am so glad that I got this game. I had no idea it was going to be as much fun as it is. For a gearhead like me there is no other driving game that exploits the pure beauty of the automobile as this one. Online gaming is crappy but the single player more than makes up for it. A lot less realistic than GRID or PGR, but it does have precise control. A bit better than Burnout Paradise, MCLA benefitted from snappy dialog and memorable characters. Plus driving in recognizable LA was a huge plus. The open street mode of racing in MCLA is exactly what PGR was missing. This is an excellent driver.

4. Gears of War 2
I didn't expect Gears of War 2 to be so much better than the original. It was in every respect except one in which it was exactly the same. Basically when you hit the wall on single player, there is no way you can get past it without coop. For me it was the big courtyard before going down into the hole of Jacinto. I swear I played that level 100 times. Still, shooting from moving platforms did transform the feel of the game. Losing the detail of directing your partner and leaving it up to the AI was so good that I didn't even miss it. Everything seemed to click together better. New weapons, moving cover, new baddies, online lobbies, online game modes. They improved every single thing. This is an instant classic, and like its predecessor, burns you out in six weeks.

3. GTA 4
Everything great has been said about this game and it has lived up to its reputation in every way, except one. For some reason, I just never felt compelled to complete it in single player mode. I don't know exactly why that is, because unlike San Andreas, I didn't get weary of being a bad guy in this episode. For a sandbox adventure, this has some of the most tight and compelling storytelling of any game ever. And yet as soon as I put it down for a couple weeks, it lost all momentum.

2. Mercenaries 2
I don't know where this game came from, but I have never had so much fun being a destructive badass in any game. It found the perfect balance between realistic narrative, personal indestructability, variety of adventures and quests and stright up destructive fun. M2 has the largest destructable environment I've ever played in, and the widest variety of guns and vehicles as well as one of the largest maps. Super fun game. Just super.

1. Fallout 3.
This game owns me. I never thought I would play another game with as much intensity and devotion as I played Oblivion, but the folks at Bethesda have me pegged. I had no idea the game was coming, nor did I know they had been working on it for four years, but it shows. This is a massive, massive game. It is as intriguing and complex a world as ever has been written for any platform and it continues to fascinate and amaze me. I can only hope that as with Oblivion, I can continue to play and acquire skills after the completing the main quest.

Honorable Mentions
Fable 2 - I really didn't expect that I would play it once and then drop it. The problem was that my son got into it and instead of playing myself, I just watched him play. Realizing how huge the game was, I stayed away from it.

Left 4 Dead - I hate zombie games. As great as L4D is Even Valve can't make me like exterminating vermin. I played for an hour or two and gave up. Beautiful, fast game. But I haven't been twitchy lately. Maybe I'll come back to it.

Spore - The most fun in Spore was all up to the tribal level. After that it sucked. Plus the security on that game was totally retarded. I cannot believe the nerve of EA to make it a single player license. Just one more reason I hate PC games. This had great potential, but turned out to be a dud.

Tiger Woods 09 - I only bought this to play online with my buds. I think I can say now once and for all that I don't like golf. Or rather that I can't stand the way in which golf is an extraordinary waste of time. TW09 makes that perfectly obvious. That's how realistic it is.

Spelunking Through The Stack

Today I start building my massive server in earnest. As we speak I'm dowloading a big hunk of software from Oracle. They were very smart to do some of what Hyperion did which was to put all of their supported versions in one place so the customer base could get at it. But they went one further which was to rely on their legal teams and not their DRM to control distributions. So I've got access to the entire stack of software which I can use as a developer and not worry about calling 15 different people to negotiate a developer's license. I'm glad that era is over.

That doesn't change the fact that it takes time to assemble all of the right pieces and installation and certification of the installation is a bear. So that's where I am now. I'm getting OBIEE, Essbase, Informatica, Analyzer and Warehouse Builder. That should allow me to recreate, as is my intent, a big library of my greatest hits. Which is to say, I'm going to, as time permits, put together the biggest collection of demo apps the space has ever seen (if I say so myself). See I've got over 100 different customer histories in Vault 107, and I intend to strip them down, very carefully so as not to violate that sacred trust between developer and customer, and remake the salient pieces of their applications into a thing of complex beauty. Half of my task is to pick 20 from the 150 odd and prioritize. But that's just half the fun.

I remember doing this the first time when I moved from Pilot Software over to Arbor back in 1996. I was amazed at how easy it had become to build what had taken months in just a matter of days. So if these products are all that, I should be able to build in a matter of weeks, the best of what I've been doing the past 11 years. What's going to help is that I'm going to use my new Java skills (fingers crossed) to flesh out a multidimensional data generation tool whose core code I've already written in Perl. With any luck, I'll be able to figure out the API pieces and get it to read an Essbase outline. So this is my private project for 2009, which is to build a rather sophisticated data generator that will read your outline, and generate fake data so you can do performance testing. So far as I know, no such tool exists.

What I really want is a database scale visualizer - something that parses the Essbase index and then gives a navigable kind of heat map or something which allows developers to quickly asses what data is doing in cubes. For example, wouldn't it be cool to have a visualizer that allows you to see a calc as it's processing? Something like that. I know that it's stupid ambitious, but hey. I'm getting bored with politics and freeing up my time to do technical things.

In the meantime, the installation continues.