I decided to learn Clojure recently, which unfortunately means installing Java on Windows.

In case you don't know, when people blame Microsoft for creating insecure operating systems, they're half-right. Really, Windows and its ilk are incredibly secure. The issue is all the common junk people download for it; things like Winamp, various chat clients, and Java. I have personally lost a Windows Vista install which was otherwise up to date due to an exploit in Java which infected my computer via an ad pop-up in YTMND. Here's an article where security experts berate Java for being increasingly unsafe.

So, what's my secret now? First off, I do all my web browsing inside a Virtual Box VM running Ubuntu. LOL! Imagine what a funny joke that would be if it weren't true!

Second off, when I install the JDK I make sure to disable installing Java applets. It seems like Oracle is increasingly aggressive about installing the ability to run Java applets on a machine whenever you download the JDK. Except for online poker sites and virus writers, no one has seriously used a Java applet since the late nineties so make sure you treat it like cancer and don't let it into your system!

These days the installer installs the applet viewer with the “public JRE.” When installing the JDK, make sure you deny this option:

Don't worry, there's a private JRE too that gets installed too which is all you need as a developer.

Java's crappy track record with security, along with Oracle's ever-increasing dickishness, has dampened my desire to do anything with Java over the past year even though its such a nice framework. One of the reasons I'm learning Clojure is because there is a seemingly finished port to .NET and Javascript compiler, meaning I could eventually use it on a more stable, less-litigated platform, although for now I plan on going with the most used platform for Clojure since that's what any book will teach.

I recently resumed playing through Metal Gear Solid HD Collection and had just started Metal Gear Solid 3 when I noticed something was missing. MGS3 is an incredibly deep game, but after you've beaten it there isn't much to do… unless you thoroughly explore each area Snake walks through, at which point you realize the game is teaming with details. Much of it is the animals you can capture or eat along with the special items you may not have found the first time through the game.

Metal Gear Solid 2 allowed you to capture the dog tags off enemy soldiers in order to earn special items, such as the stealth camouflage or infinite ammo, and had a viewer built into the game so you could track your progress. It was a nice way to see how much extra stuff you could find and pick up as you replayed the game.

MGS3 has nothing like that, so its a surprise to discover there is far more secret stuff to find. In MGS3 eating every animal you find, as well as shooting every single hidden frog coin bank in the game, will unlock special items. There's also additional secrets such as weapons or camouflage sprinkled throughout the game.

Now unfortunately, because MGS3 is linear this means you can't simply play to the last boss and then backtrack through the entire game to pick up stuff you missed; you really have to remember it as you play through. Unless you're sitting down with an FAQ or other guide in front of you as you play, this isn't really possible. As much as I love MGS3 it takes about 18 hours to play through, and most people won't feel like replaying the entire game because they missed some item ten hours in.

Years ago as I sought to alleviate this issue and to learn Adobe In Design I created a fairly short PDF which had a check list for all special items and things in the game, as well as a listing of every location in the order you visit it in the game with a summary of the unique stuff to do in that area. This included unique animals to kill and eat and the location of the frog. To get that information I copied the works of two guides on GameFAQs that told you the locations of all frogs and animals. The frog guide (whose sentences I copied verbatim) was MangaMan505's Find the Stupid Frog Guide and the animal one was Vesperas' Markhor Rank Help FAQ. I contacted the authors to get their permission to release the guide but only one ever responded before the trial to In Design expired (making me unable to ever update the PDF), so I never released it (I also pilfered dozens of official Konami images but that's par for course on the internet).

However the guide is so useful that in retrospect it seems like a mistake to not share it, so I'm doing that now. If either one of the GameFAQ authors contacts me with a complaint I'll take it down, but for now I'm going to offer it up in hopes others might also rekindle their love for MGS3.

Download the normal version of the PDF here, and the even more condensed version which contains some embarrassing spelling errors and other nonsense here.

… so why is it every time I start up the system I have to wait for the menu selections to load? Having to load some menu text and icons, isn't that the kind of thing a next-generation, super fast multiprocessor could have helped with?

What I really don't get is the time to load each column of items takes the same regardless of how much time I've spent waiting before that. So for example, I see the super-tiny, no-way anyone without a huge TV can read it text that warning me of the world of hurt I'm about to get myself into, and leave it sitting there for a minute. When I finally hit start, all the menus will still have to load. Isn't that a classical problem that can be solved by running parallel threads of execution? Shouldn't it have already been loading all the menus for everyone (or at least the most frequently accessed account) while I was staring at the warning screen?

I recently got a new, fairly top of the line desktop machine, and was surprised at how pleasant it is to play games on it compared to the newer game systems. I'm a console gamer myself, and one of the biggest reasons to play games on that format historically has been the limited boot up time made it easier to play games on impulse. No logging into accounts, no waiting for Windows, you just put the game in the box, hit the power button and go. However, the new systems - even the Wii - are just so frickin' slow, to the point where a fast computer seems much nicer.

I also got an iPhone recently. My favorite part of it is how buttery smooth the experience is, and also that I can play an intense game like Don Don Pachi, hit the home button, and be looking at emails in roughly a second. That kind of ease of use, and speed to switch between tasks, should be something the newer game consoles strive for, but if I switch between Batman and Pacman Championship Edition DX on the PS3 the process takes several minutes (nearly a minute to start up Pacman and longer to wait for it to load). This has been my biggest pet peeve about the PS3 for awhile, so imagine my surprise to find the PS Vita takes nearly as long to load games as the PS3! Just trying the Vita in a retail store is something you have to commit to since you'll spend a good thirty seconds opening up a game. The fact my iPhone can open up a game faster than either of the two current Sony game systems is shameful. I might get the new bigger 3DS soon; hopefully this problem will not exist on that system.

I wrote my first webpage during the reign of Windows 98, back when the time period and my own inexperience made such a sin excusable. Sure, Front Page would generate a bunch of surplus HTML (newer, hipper tools such as GWT do the same thing) and junk that didn't work on all browsers, but in retrospect it wasn't that bad and the ability to instantly see what the page would look like as I wrote it imbued a level of creativity in my first site which all later iterations have lacked.

One feature I really missed as time went on was being able to quickly preview different fonts to find the one that fit. “Google Font Previewer for Chrome” is a plugin for the Chrome web browser that brings back this ability; it allows you to quickly preview how certain fonts would look on a web page so you can find one you like. It also provides CSS snippets so you can copy and paste the result into your own stylesheet.

This tool is so nice its making me reevaluate every font I've been using on this website. I'd say something like “I don't know how I ever got by without it!” but one look at this page would reveal that for the lie it is since I clearly didn't get by without it. With this tool however there is now hope.

Download the plugin here.