On how the WinACE people should be waterboarded then shot
News ·Friday November 3, 2006 @ 01:36 EST (link)
I'd like to take this rare opportunity to say a few deservedly mean things about WinACE. Oh boy do they annoy me. They dangle an admittedly decent compression format in front of unsuspecting users, but it's a closed format, useless to anybody. They do pretend that there's a working Linux version, downloadable from their site, but it fails CRC checks and eventually crashes randomly, lending credence to my theory that it was produced by a roomful of blind gophers on crack.
The WinACE twits also bounced my (polite—really) email; they use some sort of ignorant DNS blackhole list which thinks I'm using residential cable (the same one Honey's work uses, but since she's quitting I figured I didn't need to bother with them*). Yep, Honey gave her notice two weeks ago so technically Friday's her last day but they want her to come back for a few days; given how much she likes her boss, I was hoping she'd give them a sheet of insanely-high contracting rates and tell them to get back to her when they'd picked their jaws off the floor.
* I had to email and call my ISP, Millennium Digital Media (MDM) several times to get them to contact a similar list that Microsoft uses so that we could send mail to my work address... argh.
CLOSED FORMATS ARE HORRIBLE. WE HATES THEM, GOLLUM, WE HATESES THEM! DIE DIE DIE.
(This is why I'm ecstatic about the Microsoft Word .docx format; for those not up to speed, it's the default Word 12 open XML format, soon to be an ECMA ISO standard. It's so completely open that in theory Microsoft could lose control of it.)
Anyway, back to the ACE issue. So I have a few collections of NES/SNES/Atari game ROMs for MythGame on the MythTV system, generously burned to DVD by BB from work. Fine, I say, I'll mount the DVD on the MythTV box and copy the files to the disk and uncompress them. Haha! say the blind gophers on crack at ACE, oh no you won't. First uncompression program I tried (emerge unace) said unknown compression method; fine, it's a (very) old version, at least it can see the filenames in the archives. When I downloaded the latest unace from WinACE's site, it ran (in 32-bit compatibility mode, of course), but was having trouble creating directories (it also liked to freeze a lot). Eventually I straced it to find out what was going on, and created one of the directories it needed, but that's when I got the CRC errors and eventually Segmentation fault. If I had source, or even a spec, I wouldn't have had that problem.
So here's the plan. I'm going to uncompress the files on my only Windows system, my laptop. Sadly, its DVD drive has just about had it, so there's come circumlocution involved here. I'd already bought a DVD writer (ASUS DRW-1608P35 DVD±RW 16x16) from HDNW when I traded my Hauppauge capture card; I installed it on my primary server machine, minas-tirith, tonight (I'd got it for backups). When I was at Costco tonight picking up some DVD blanks, I wasn't sure whether I needed DVR-R or DVD+R, so I guessed and picked DVD+R, which turned out to be best but either would have worked; if I'd've guessed wrong, I could have exchanged them next time.
Naturally, when I tried to restart the server, it didn't.
I unplug the EIDE and power cables from the DVD drive and the existing CD drive, still nothing; the monitor I dragged over and connected has no signal. I vacuum out the more obvious dust, and somehow this makes it come up. Reconnect the optical drives, still boots, so while it's still powered I screw them onto the rails and close up the box, not willing to risk it not coming up again. And, um, note to self, do those proposed backups soon since it's been a while.
To the plan! Copy the DVD onto minas-tirith's HD, transfer the files to the Windows laptop that can actually run WinACE, uncompress the files, and then probably recompress them with something saner, or just copy them over the network to the MythTV box. What a hassle! Now, it's not that impressive that my (Acer) laptop's DVD drive is dying, but these contortions could have been avoided if the idiots at WinACE had just put down the crack pipe for a few hours.
I've been working on getting two months of receipts into the system... the tax man cometh.
