Yesterday a friend of mine was mine was telling a story, to which I replied “well the definition of genius is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result!”

Everyone had a good laugh. We discussed the meaning of the joke for half a minute, before I concluded by adding in the exact same inflection “like I always say, the definition of genius is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result!”

At this point someone else in the room, who'd been within ear shot the entire time but hadn't been listening, suddenly piped in with “what? You know that's the definition of insanity, right?”

I had tried to do the exact same thing twice, implicitly proving the real saying as a joke. Ironically however the result was different the second time.

Scientifically, doing the same thing twice should yield the same result, so assuming something different will happen is crazy. In the real world, though, almost nothing is isolated, so nothing is idempotent, and something different usually happens. Getting the same thing to happen twice is actually really difficult, and in fact the only way in which experiments become respected in the scientific community is if they are repeated, preferably by different people.

However, too often people take it for granted that the same thing will happen twice because they mistakenly think they completely understand the causes of what happened the first time. If you acknowledge the fact that most of us never really know what we're doing anyway and those that do rarely have 100% control of the outcome of our actions, there are many things people could attempt repeatedly while getting widely different results. This phenomenon forms the basis of the game “Horse.”

If being insane means expecting a different outcome from the same actions, yet most people are incapable of performing the intended action once, let alone twice, then maybe the real measure of sanity (and competence in general) is the ability to identify why an outcome is different from a goal and adjust accordingly.

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.