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.

The dealer follows the standard dealer rules:

• Stand on 17
• Draw on 16

And I set up the player to:

• Stand on 17
• Stand on 13 if dealer card shows 6 or lower

The bank pays 2 : 3 on blackjack (ace + 10 / J / Q / K) from the first card.

And as an extra, I’ve added some cash: 1,000 credits, chips, dollars, euro’s, … whatever you like, to play with. The robot also doesn’t know how to split so that’s kind of an issue, but I doubt it effects the odds that much. Here are some results:

Player will hold on 17
dealer will draw on 16
dealer will hold on 17

Amount of games: 10000
Starting money: 1000 dollar
Bet size: 1 dollar
Final capital: 619.5

Absolute totals:
Draw: 908
Player: 3712
Dealer: 4399
Player blackjack: 515
Dealer blackjack: 466

Relative totals:
Draw: 9.08%
Player: 37.12%
dealer: 43.99%
Player blackjack: 5.15%
Dealer blackjack: 4.66%

I’m pretty sure I’ve made a mistake here somewhere as I actually win much more often in Blackjack but that could just as well be luck.

For the hardcore fans, I’ve uploaded the log of all thousand games here: clicky (2.32mb), there’s also the Perl script I wrote (it’s MESSY and INEFFICIENT, sorry sorry sorry) to simulate all this: clicky.

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.

Now this might sound like a very ‘cool’ idea, but let’s look at what could possibly go wrong shall we?
First of all if all your files are stored on the internet, you will obviously need an internet connection, if you internet connection fails you’ve got a PC without any files on it.

Also how safe will it really be? With all those hackers out there you might get screwed up quite badly, if for example someone finds your login he can access ALL your files! This would mean he can delete your games, your work, your whole operating system basically.

What about money? If your files are stored on a server from a hosting company, you can expect to pay for your storage, and that’s not the only cost. You will get to pay your internet price of course, but if you’re lucky enough to live in Belgium, or any other country with the gorgeous data limits, you can expect your internet bill to rise quickly. Just imagine having to get GB’s of information of the internet just to work on your computer?

Hosting companies?
Now here is a bigger issue, the hosting companies could possibly login to your account and bitch the hell out of you if they’d want to, now that’s probably not going to happen (unless they know you’re a fit girl having pics of you stored on the internet…?) but what if they go broke and have to shut down their company? You could lose GB’s if not TB’s of information you needed, and what if they get a virus on their server? Or even a minor bug causing their servers to be down for days causing you to lose your PowerPoint you forgot to backup and needed for school?

With all this things, the positive side seems like a little thing being shadowed by huge problems.
But what are the positive sides?

Well the most important thing I guess is that you can access your information all around the world, New York, Brussels, Amsterdam; it wouldn’t matter where you are!
Of course it has some ‘positive  points’ that don’t affect us a lot, like your storage would be easy to upgrade, even though buying a new external is about 100€ for 1TB, so that’s not an issue.

Anyway if you’d like to try out cloud computing for yourself there are a 2 big options i’d recommend. the first one is getting the Google OS when it’s properly released, it will be all internet based (read cloud-computing) and the second one is: get Ubuntu 9.10. Ubuntu 9.10 has a cloud-computing program included from the start called Ubuntu-one.

So tell me, what do you think about cloud computing?

The big studios (both music and movie industries) have been crying wolf ever since radios came with a tape deck, shouting harder every time technology advanced. Their actions feel like trying to stop a flood with paper towels; it’s just not working. The beauty of all this is forcing them to be creative (3D anyone?) and more competitive which is great for the custom, the downside are the most annoying inventions such as DRM which provide only hassle for the more advanced users. I should mention the games industry here too, but I think they’ve got it figured out by now: restrict the most fun parts of your game to the paying users (World of Warcraft, and every other multiplayer game of the last five years) and bring a convenient tool that secretly acts as a DRM to the end-user that has some of the best advantages such as being able to download your game endlessly at great speeds (Steam, obviously).

But, this Wild West of events isn’t exactly the vision the “great minds” of our generation have in mind. You know them: the rich and greedy guys who force their opinion on the free world and want to log every time you sneeze or click on a link on the internet. By lobbying their ass into our governments they have a chance to speak against the will of the mass, they can extort entire countries until they have what their agenda prescribes.

The internet and more specifically “net neutrality” are in serious danger, as the big companies are taking an increasingly big interest in these matters. Illegal downloading for example, you take it for granted today, it’s only a matter of time before a motion is passed where the downloaders are cut off from the internet using something such as three-strike system.

I have no idea what the future might bring, but I’m sure as hell things won’t stay the way they are right now. If you want to read more on this, check out savetheinternet.com.

Sony is developing a new 3D camera, Playstation 3 will support 3D films and games, Panasonic has got a 3D camera being made and Fujifilm already released one. Now along with loads of others I wonder: will this be just another hype or not?

The great down side of 3D is that you need to wear these weird glasses that look no good on anyone. People don’t like to wear these glasses and especially not at home in the living room when your neighbours see you wearing them when passing by. I hope though, that 3D will not be another hype because I like it a lot, I find optical illusions interesting but this is just awesome Especially 3D games sound pretty cool to me, I just can’t imagine what a shooter like Battlefield would be like in 3D…

So: the real deal 3D? or 2D with perspective?

So, on the CeBIT side: it was partially interesting, boring, nice, mostly Asian companies no one ever heard of and a lot of business suits.

On the Bad Company side: DICE screwed up another launch, but I was so used to it I remained calm and fixed every fixable issue for myself until I had a playable game. It’s much like the Battlefield Heroes launch: it was near-impossible to get into a game, but once you were it was absolutely awesome and impressive. I’m currently a rank 8 (nickname: Brotha) specialized in medic stuff. The game is really the game of the year for me already (Starcraft II might rock its socks though), the map design is nothing short of perfect and the action just feels great. I just hope DICE doesn’t pull a second BFH on this and ruin the experience by giving people unfair advantages with payable content.

In other news, I have a lot of unfinished projects (around four) and that’s not enough! I’m going to start a new one, this time together with Tom, we’re still working on the details and hope to start programming soon. I’m not giving any more information as the whole thing is (as usual) subject to becoming something entirely different over the course of time

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.

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!