As a degenerate gambler, I love to play all sorts of card games, either online or offline. I lost and won a lot of money over the years, so I guess it evens each other out but we’ll never know for sure.

I had a lot of fun writing a Perl script that simulates Blackjack, it’s mainly useful for calculating the odds depending on the parameters and felt like publishing the results. Please note this only includes a few from the basic strategies so the odds can fluctuate a few percents if you take them into account.

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This wall of (most interesting) text was written by  Insanity, an IT student and good friend of me.

Over the last few months there has been one subject that has raised a lot of questions all around in our geeky IT “crowd” and that’s cloud computing.

For those of you that haven’t heard about cloud computing yet, I’ll explain the very basics.
Cloud computing means that all your files are hosted on another pc, for example you login to your account on any pc and you will receive the files that are associated with your account.
What this would basically mean is that your whole systems receives all it’s files and information from an external server, having your files everywhere and yet only you can access them.

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Somehow this is a hot topic, I’ve talked this over with a lot of people and given it a lot of thought. Let’s take the internet in its current form (with the exception of a few mass-firewalled countries): a giant network of computers connected to share all possible information, be it science papers or the gruesome fetishes only a person with an insane amount of issues would be interested in. There are no rules, even though there is some kind of public opinion what is acceptable.

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This is something I’ve looked for a little on Google but couldn’t really find a good answer to this, so I’ll share the solution here.

The problem is simple: Windows 7 shuts down your extra hard drives after 20 minutes of idling for power saving, this is useful for most people but somehow it annoys the shit out of me – especially when I’m listening to music, which is scattered among a couple of my disks. Say every five or six songs my media player freezes for a couple of seconds while Windows fires up a hard drive it shut down earlier.

So, the solution is really simple, there is a setting for this under power management, kind of hidden though. Open up a explorer screen and go to this location:

Control Panel >> All Control Panel Items >> Power Options >>Edit Plan Settings for the plan you are using

Now click on “Change advanced power settings” and go to the hard disk menu, change the value of “Turn off hard disk after” to 0 minutes, the value will automatically become “never”.

For those two readers who might be looking for this: you’re welcome.

I’ll also take the opportunity to explain why I am using Windows 7 and not a Linux distro like I’m used to: because the latest generation of Ubuntu/Fedora/Gentoo/etc is a disappointment in every perspective. The whole “larger public” approach is probably great for their numbers, but it also brought a lot of goddamn bugs and retarded new-age features that lower the performance Linux had to offer in a previous life. I won’t go into specifics now, will bring you an enormous article on that later.

(this is a follow-up on this previous entry)

I’ve been mailing back and forth with both PayPal and Steam and if you wonder which one is the most reliable and customer-friendly, then read the rest of the story.

Both parties were very clear from the beginning:

Steam: “If the account holder is unable or unwilling to drop the dispute and let the PayPal know that the purchase is valid; and in turn have the funds returned to Steam then we will not be able to reactivate the account”

PayPal was too… oh wait no; they weren’t:

Sometimes, PayPal intercepts payment for investigation. This has happened
with your payment as well. Because PayPal saw this payment as too much risk
to send to the seller, PayPal decided not to let the payment through.
Unfortunately, due to safety reasons and database protection, we cannot
provide you with a clear reason about why the transaction has been
reversed. Our apologies for this inconvenience. You can however try to pay
the seller again.

You can read that as: “Yes, we fucked you over but will never be able to tell you why”. Say whatever you like but that sounds pretty goddamn random to me. So, PayPal clearly stated later they weren’t unable (or willing, I’ll never know) to reopen the dispute or reverse the chargeback so the only direction I was headed was the goodwill of Steam, and boy did I get lucky. I told them how ridiculous the whole case was: how a verified PayPal account that I’ve been using for years, had seen many thousands of dollars/euros pass by, and never even the slightest dispute, was suddenly selected for review and had a payment reversed. The person from support (wish I had a name for him but it just said “Support”, sorry) was very helpful:

Hello Giel, I have contacted PayPal directly on your behalf regarding your case. I need to confirm with them that they have verified your account and that the PayPal account was not being used fraudulently. If that is the case I will talk to my supervisor and see if we can make an exception in your case.

There’s a word I love: exception. The reply I got today was the best:

Hello Giel, I have heard back from PayPal and confirmed your account status with them. Our standard policy is to have PayPal reverse the chargeback before we reactivate your account. Since this is not an option in your case, I have had a discussion with my supervisor and gotten approval to reactivate your account with the expectation that you repurchase the chargedback title within the next 5 days.

Needless to say I picked up my credit card and not my goddamn PayPal account and played a long overdue game of Bad Company 2 Beta… and it still rocks. Can’t wait for the full release!

Moral of the story is: PayPal is okay, until you get in trouble, they’re not there to fix it and you’ll be subject to the goodwill of the other party, in this case the company with the best support: Steam!

You read on it, you hear about it, you try to ignore it but when you’ve been a PayPal user for a long time you’re bound to encounter one of their famous horrors.This particular horror didn’t really affect my PayPal account as much as it did my Steam.

Two weeks ago, I bought Battlefield Bad Company 2 (pre-purchase), for some reason PayPal went mental a few minutes after the purchase and locked me out of my account until I changed my password, security question and verified my e-mail half a dozen times again. The payment was marked as “suspicious” and went into the resolution center.

I wondered what it was all about, for about a week or so it said “Waiting for response from vendor”, and I figured once they said something the whole thing would go away. Well, it didn’t; yesterday they reversed the payment and I saw in the resolution log they apparently contacted me three times. I checked all possible e-mail accounts, their spam folders, their inboxes, their deleted files, everything. I wasn’t contacted once.

Obviously Steam isn’t happy about payments getting reversed, and my account is now fucking disabled; yes, I am extremely unhappy about this. Over the years I bought a lot of Steam games and now they’re all lost because of one administrative failure. Obviously I opened a ticket at both sides, I’ll let you guys know the outcome.

Chrome is what it is: damn great. It currently has around 5% of the market (source, source 2) which doesn’t look like much, well until you see the time it has taken Google to reach this market share: less than two years, and it’s bound to rise even faster with the recent addition of plug-ins and the overall performance upgrades.

Firefox, once the lightweight version of Mozilla, has become a dinosaur; it puts a great load on your system and has serious issues running on low-end systems while Google Chrome runs like a cheetah on speed, even on the popular net-books. An example; at the moment I am running Firefox with four tabs, memory usage is 187mb. If I open the exact same tabs in Chrome, memory usage is 44mb. That does make a difference on systems with 512mb RAM available.

The overall performance of Chrome basically beats up all the other browsers, big time, remember the CNET benchmark that probably shocked the developers of all other browsers? Chrome keeps running fine under all circumstances, the only crash I’ve ever had was in the very beginning, while Firefox does crash sometimes under the load of Javascript.

But obviously Firefox will remain important for quite sometime, but unless they clean up the performance issues and get on the same level as Chrome, they should prepare to be kicked out of the market. My personal opinion on this is quite utopian: Chrome should completely kill all versions of Internet Explorer and share the market with Firefox, so all webdevelopers and designers can sleep at night again, the IE nightmare has taken long enough.

Which browser do you use and why?