Harsh J

Windows 7 and Games – They just don’t work for me.

Having got myself a copy of Blizzard’s latest shiny release, an iteration of the ever legendary StarCraft, the StarCraft II, I didn’t waste much time getting down to installing it onto my not-yet-aging rig. I run Windows 7 64-bit on it and its pretty nice as long as am not doing anything but running a browser on it.

So the installation begins and there’s a cool story being narrated along as it does. As with all progress bars on Windows, it crashes at one point telling me that its not gonna obey my command due to some crappy message like this:

Couldn’t decompress Ogg data. If this problem persists, please contact Blizzard Technical Support. (InstallerDecompressOgg)

(Hey, they’re using Ogg – sweet!).

Now I try to do the thing I always do when my installation from an external media fails. I copy all the files off the disc and run it from my local hard disk drive, expecting it to go smooth. But it doesn’t. I scream out in frustration as its not a visible corruption since the points of failure are between 8% and 13% (randomly).

I decide to tear my hair out on not being able to play the next best game to Barman: Arkham Asylum; but before I tried to do that I hit upon a solution quite accidentally (as is all I ever do on a Windows OS).

I minimized the installer; and it installed.

Yes you read that right; even me. I blinked at the growing numbers on the progress bar when I checked it at random points. It installed successfully and even updated the game copy automatically to the latest and the greatest Blizzard had up for offering.

I played it for a while and then got back to the desktop, removed the game, reinstalled it with the installer not minimized – hit the same error again. Retry with a minimize – it works like a charm.

I’m guessing the issue is with the installer-time narration of a wonderful story by a wonderful voice. Upon minimizing the installer window the audio playing the narration and the BGM stops and the error does not come up. Very very odd.

You always gotta try Windows to get scared back into using Linux.

About the immutability of variables once bounded in Erlang:

Single assignment is like algebra.

When I went to school, my math teacher said, “If there’s an X in several different parts in the same equation, then all the Xs mean the same thing.” That’s how we can solve equations: if we know that X+Y=10 and X-Y=2, then X will be 6 and Y will be 4 in both equations.

But when I learned my first programming language, we were shown stuff like this:
X = X + 1

Everyone protested, saying “you can’t do that!”. But the teacher said we were wrong, and we had to unlearn what we learned in math class. X isn’t a math variable: it’s like a pigeon hole/little box…

In Erlang, variables are just like they are in math. When you associate a value with a variable, you’re making an assertion – a statement of fact. This variable has that value. And that’s that.

– Joe Armstrong, in his book Programming Erlang.