/Word stream

With the recent Katrina Katrina Hurricane aftermath going on up north, a lot of donation services have been set up.

Some sites also created fundraisers to help the people affected by the hurricane. Such was the case with everybody’s prefered interweb stupidity mill, SomeThingAwful.com.

However, half a day after they started their donation campaign – having gathered $20,000 so far – PayPal decided there was something suspicious on their account and locked it. The awkward thing about it is that, no matter how legitimate the account usage was, there is no way to prove it to PayPal anyways – they need proof something was successfully shipped from the account, but since the account is used for donations only, nothing was shipped. So there’s simply no way to get it fixed, and now PayPal has in their pockets money that would be used for disaster relief.

That’s, in fact, a common source of problems with PayPal. If they decide your account looks weird for whatever reason, it’s locked for good – the only way to get it unlocked is to provide some information that might not even exist in the first place. A similar thing happened to me a couple of years ago – long story short, my account was locked because a credit card I used with it was cancelled (by myself – it had been lost) six months after I created my account, and to unlock it I would have to send them a copy of the credit card. I didn’t have it, of course (and I received the warning another six months after I cancelled it), but PayPal wasn’t taking any of this – there was no way to contact them to solve the matter as the contact form blocked any message I tried to send them, saying I had to solve the credit card issue first. In the end, there was anything I could do so the account remained locked.

Luckily for me, I didn’t had any money on the account – I had only used the account once, to pay for some stuff I ordered a few months prior to the incident – but the way the thing was handled by PayPal was enough for me to get really scared of what could have happened. Like facing ED 209 telling you to drop your weapons when they’re already on the ground.

SomethingAwful.com seems to have the same problem – faced with some suspicious activity, PayPal simply decided to lock them until they prove something that is impossible to prove. That’s the PayPal way, and you can find a lot of similar stories on sites like PayPalWarning.com and PayPalSucks.com.

In the end, PayPal works just like a bank, but a bank that can lock your money when/if they want to, then giving you some impossible ways to get it unlocked and not talking to you until you unlock it. A Kafkaesque process at its best – that’s how I felt when I had my credit card problem with them, and how I felt when I’ve read SomethingAwful.com’s story. Makes a man feel so powerless.

Edit: Luckily for SomethingAwful.com, Lowtax (SA’s main shareholder, CEO and JeffK in disguise) got ahold of PayPal’s telephone “customer” support and things are starting to be sorted out.

I still think it’s strange that they use such a system to make arbitrary decisions which can’t be solved (in SA’s case, showing a page listing 0 shippings that had to be proved) and putting their “customers” on a deadend, but again… it’s the PayPal way.

So one of the biggest interweb rumors so far came out to be true: Google has released their own IM client, Google Talk. Thankfully, it uses the Jabber/XMPP protocol, so the best non-proprietary IMs around are already able to support this new service.

I’m a firm Miranda user, but Miranda isn’t listed on Google’s compatible clients list. It’s still easy to setup the Google/Jabber protocol on it though; instructions can be found here.

And for all it’s worth, my account is zisforzeh [AT] gmail.

Update: Google has now added Miranda instructions to their list.

When I first heard the news that someone – probably related to the recent bombings – had been shot to death on London after being held down I was a bit surprised. After all, after he was already down, it’d be way better to take him into custody and interrogate him.

Now the shocker: the man recently killed wasn’t connected to any bombing incident and wasn’t even under investigation. Plain clothes policemen followed him after he left a building that was under investigation; when policemen confronted him, he ran away. CNN is on the subject:

De Menezes on Friday left a south London apartment building that had been under surveillance as part of the investigation into the attempted bombings Thursday.

Officers followed him to the Stockwell Underground station. The man’s “clothing and suspicious behavior at the station added to their suspicions,” a police statement said.

He challenged police and refused to obey orders before he was shot and killed Friday morning, Blair said Friday.

A witness to the shooting, Mark Whitby, said he was sitting on the train when “I heard a lot of shouting.”

“I saw a chap run on to the train,” Whitby said. “He was running so fast he half sort of tripped. He was being pursued by three guys. One had a black handgun in his hand.”

“As he sort of went down, two of them sort of dropped on to him to hold him down, and the other one fired. I heard five shots.”

According to an eye witness report on Washing Post, he was already pinned down when shot.

“He looked like a cornered rabbit, a cornered fox, absolutely petrified,” said Mark Whitby, one of the witnesses. “They pushed him onto the floor, bundled on top of him and unloaded five shots into him. I saw it. He’s dead.”

Ken Livingstone, Mayor or London, said:

The police acted to do what they believed necessary to protect the lives of the public.

This tragedy has added another victim to the toll of deaths for which the terrorists bear responsibility.

Dude. He was shot by policemen. Five shots to his head. When he was already pinned to the floor. I’m not in a very good position to judge other countries’ police actions – you can find reports of police brutality virtually everyday on brazilian newspapers, and I don’t know the exact conditions of the incident anyways – but when police start shooting to kill people that are suspects because of their clothing when they are already held down and blaming it on terrorists, there’s something very, very wrong going on.

A brazilian newspaper (in brazilian portuguese) has a bit more info on him. Jean Charles de Menezes, the man killed, was 27 and worked as an electrician. He spoke good english and had been living in London for three years. On thursday – a day before the incident – he said to a coworker that he would probably buy a motorcycle soon, to avoid using public transport – he was afraid of more attacks. On friday, just before he was shot to death, he phoned this coworker two times to say he would be late because of delays on the bus and subway systems. He didn’t call again; calls to his phone weren’t answered. Then, on saturday, at 1 in the morning, the police called his coworker back, investigating the calls made to and from Jean’s phone.

It kind of shocks me to know he was Brazilian and for all purposes working legally on the country (and had the same age as me), but what really makes me sad (apart from the usual tragedy of someone’s death) is that incidents like this just increases the fear the population is feeling… and you know where that leads to, and who profits from that.

In related news, the new trailer for V for Vendetta is out.

Edit: Investigation shows that not only Scotlant Yard was resisting investigating the case, but new facts point to a new version of the whole case: Jean wasn’t running from police, he didn’t jump the gates (the policemen did though), he even picked up a free newspaper inside the station, and he only ran to get the train. He didn’t acknowledge being followed by police until he was sitting inside the train. He was then shot 8 times – 7 in the head, 1 in the shoulder – and 3 other shots missed their target. There are many discrepancies in reports done about the event, speciallyin face of new CCTV footage, but on all accounts, police actions seem too extreme from one point one view and too late from the other. And if you consider the new evidence, it just gets worse.

This is the first post I’m doing using WordPress as a blogging software – the old one used Movable Type and is no more. I was sick of having to clean comment spamming from the site – even using MT-BlackList to catch up most of the spamming, I still had to log in just to clean up and add new words to it. The process of moving the content and the templates has been anything but easy – I already had to create a new plugin just to display my category icons like it used to do on MovableType – and there’s still a lot that need to be fixed, not mentioning making sure the old links still work, but I’m liking it so far. From what I’ve seen, WordPress is a lot less crazy than MovableType, and it’s done on PHP, so it’ll be easier to do a few changes (or install some plugins) to prevent bulk comment adding.

This is quite old, but since I’m on the subject of user interface design on FPS games, I was researching a little more on the thing and found a designer diary about the user interface design decisions involved in EA Games’ Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. It’s wrote by Ed Moore, Multiplayer Design Lead on the game. Here’s a quote:

It took me a while to find a “rhythm” but once I overcame the inertia, the Interface Spec really started to evolve. Through multiple iterations of layout, review, discussion, and revision between me and my senior producer, Matt Powers, we started to hash out what this was going to be. Neither of us really had any sort of background in interface design or really knew what we were doing. Although we had consulted with interface designers, as well as people in academia studying for doctorates in human/computer interfaces, we were driving relatively blind and it was slow going at times. One paradox we faced was making the interface convenient and accessible for casual gamers, while still offering the depth and complexity advanced or “power” users demand from their multiplayer games. Another big challenge was to constantly encourage users to “authenticate” or register to create online accounts or personas (necessary in order to provide buddy list and stat-tracking services).

Interesting stuff.

The best browser ever changed name again: from Phoenix to Firebird and now to FireFox. At least there’s a new version out, check what’s new. Here’s a strip,

Better Handling of File Types

Binary files (e.g. .wma and .rar files) served by servers incorrectly sending text/plain should no longer be displayed as garbage in the browser, rather they should be appropriately handled.

Finally.

Sometimes the world makes me sad. Once in a while I do check this newsfeed’s comments, and it’s pretty sad to find lots of random spam when I hope to find information or questions on the stuff I’ve posted. After deleting dozens of unwanted messages, I had almost decided to close the comment system when I notice this entry on Michael E. Gunn’s HollowCube.com, talking about MT-Blacklist. It’s a new, efficient MovableType plugin to block comments based on a blacklist, and it seems to work as a charm.

Time will tell if it’s enough, but now it looks like it’s perfect: my blacklist is already beefed up with a general all-purpose blacklist, basically because I’m too lazy to block comment by comment as new ones are posted.

And spammers, please die ktnxgg.

Oldschool gamers will like to know that Electronic Arts has put online a free, online version of SimCity Classic. Free registration is required.

While it’s pretty cool to see the first SimCity available as a free online game, and while the game works as it should despite a few UI cursor issues, it’s kind of sad to see they opted for a proprietary, ActiveX-based application, instead of going for some cross-platform, independent solution, as would be the case with Flash or Java or even Shockwave. The game only ran on MSIE on a PC, and not on Firebird (although it issues a warning that it does work on Netscape).

It’s still fun nonetheless. The original Simcity is for me the second best on the series, only surpassed in the fun aspect by SimCity 2000 (3000 sucks, 4 is nice, but they’re just beefed up, slower versions of 2000).

Good news for Flash 6- developers: FontLab released FontFlasher, a conversion tool that creates new truetype fonts suited for a fixed size based on an original font’s hinting instructions. This software has been discussed here recently. Although there are similar software packages already released by other companies, this will probably make this kind of conversion more popular.

Ok, here it is: a software to painlessly create so-called pixel or bitmap fonts, SimpleFont. It’s a commercial software and I haven’t tested it already, but some people might be interested. Via Quasimondo.

While we’re on the subject and I’m feeling like Santa Claus on crack, I remembered I had to make public my special ‘pixel’ font template. Well, download it here. You can use it to create TrueType (TTF) based ‘pixel’ fonts, and it’s free for anything as long as it doesn’t include kitten killing. Here’s some needed instructions:

1. Use either FontLab or TypeTool to open the .VFB file. Both share a very similar interface and will produce the same results. Both are commercial software and both have a trial version, too, although FontLab costs $549 and TypeTool costs $99 (and comes with less advanced features). So, yeah, this is only free if you already have one of these tools. Sorry.

2. Set your grid steps (Tools > Options > Glyph) to 256×256. That will ensure that each grid box on your screen is the same than a pixel.

3. Create and edit your letters. Each box on a grid will make one pixel, when the font is used at size 8, so just draw squares like there’s no tomorrow! It’s pretty easy, though, both FL and TT has some nice boolean drawing tools which makes ‘bitmap’ font creation amazingly easy.

4. Flash has a rendering problem which makes small fonts be filled when their interiors are too small. To avoid this, you have to make sure the “hollow” parts of the font aren’t real holes (they will look like they are). On the font sample you download, check the ‘B’ glyph. Zoom it to the maximum, and check the part in with the medium horizontal line touches the outer archs. You’ll notice a small diagonal gap of exactly two points. You need a space at least this big to make sure the font’s won’t get filled and render like ink blots (I learnt this trick from the guy from AtomicMedia.net some 4 years ago, although I don’t think he has this on his site anymore).

5. Remember to change the font name and information before release.

Cool, huh? I think so. And I’m not even a communist.

PS: It’s important to note this template file was created solely by me and not copied and/or modified from any other source. I actually went through hell to get this font’s metrics to work correctly – even though in the end they’re pretty simple dumb numbers – and I think the result is satisfactory enough to let it be released like this. Comments and critics are appreciated, though.

Update: Brew just pointed out on the comments that the AtomicMedia.net article I mentioned is mirrored at UltraShock in all its glory. More than being an article on font fixing, it’s an article that teachs how to create pixel fonts on a Fontographer. Pretty cool.

I’d like to point that I disagree with the way the no-fill solution is done, however; I like to make “open” fonts myself (see step 4, above), and keep the vertical and horizontal lines straight on the grid, leaving only a single diagonal opening on one single. Both solutions have the same result on its minimal (ideal) font size, but since there’s a bigger modification on the color weight, bigger path modifications such as moving one entire vertical line will produce errors earlier on greater sizes. That’s a really good article and a breakthrough when it was published, but use caution when doing the no-fill fix.