The conventional adage has held that “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” I’ve recently observed some alternative vocations for those who can’t. For example, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, carry out sociological studies on those who can in some effort to gain insight into what motivates them to do what they do.” Not especially catchy, but there it is.

If you participate in any open source software development, or even just hang out on development mailing lists, you have probably seen emails from university grad students performing some survey of open source developers. I’ve been doing this free software programming stuff since 1999. I don’t remember exactly when I first saw one of these email solicitations to fill out a survey but I do remember that I thought it novel at the time and cheerfully contributed. Same with the next half dozen or so. Eventually, I started getting that “haven’t I seen this before?” feeling when encountering such survey solicitations. This notion is exacerbated by the fact that each survey seems to think that it’s breaking new ground.

The only reason I bring this up is that I got another survey solicitation today in private email. This email was particularly irksome in that it was actually a followup to an earlier solicitation that demanded to know why I had not responded to the earlier inquiry.

As I compose this post, it suddenly occurs to me to wonder why anyone would care about collating this type of data (aside from a researcher attempting to justify his academic existence and delaying the real world activities as long as possible). This latest survey comes from people in some business and management schools. I can’t shake the feeling that there might be some businesses out there who would be interested to know what motivates open source software development in an effort to better leverage the model for their own business objectives.

While browsing at a Salvation Army store this past weekend I found a bin of old CD-ROMs. Naturally, I just had to get a few. Actually, I probably would have taken most of the bin if the merchandise was less than a static $2 per disc. But there was at least one disc I just couldn’t pass up– a Taco Bell-themed computer game. Tek Kids something or other, and disc 2 of 4 to boot. It likely came with a children’s meal for little or no cost above and beyond the cost of the meal. This means I probably paid more for it than the original customer did. Still, I look forward to seeing what the thing is all about.

I also recently learned that Burger King is running a promotional Xbox game tie-in where customers can purchase one of 3 BK-themed Xbox/Xbox 360 games for a nominal price in addition to their meal. Collect them all!

This all reminds me that I have a pile of licensed schlock game titles to review for multimedia purposes, many procured from a variety of garage sales (and many which still need permanent homes is the MobyGames database). You-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it titles include:

• Tek Kids Flash Ops– Mission: Polar Challenge (the aforementioned Taco Bell game)
• Snowday: The Gap Kids Quest
• Little Caesar’s Fractions Pizza
• Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts Presents: Rescue The Rusties
• 13 Days of Halloween: Rhythm And Boos (breakfast cereal tie-in)
• Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchling Adventure

click for a closer look

And this further reminds me what kind of a backlog I’m still looking at for my Multimedia Exploration Journal. Some people observe that I’m the only person they know that thinks it’s a chore to work through this many games; the only person who sighs and talks about how many games are yet to “be processed”.

It’s the path I’ve chosen.

I generally don’t like to talk about the top search terms that are driving traffic to this blog since doing so tends to have the effect of driving more traffic based on particular terms to the posts that discuss that particular term. But last month, I noticed that “doubletwist ventures” drove a huge amount of traffic to this old post.

Is it just me, or are DRM-cracking stories just not interesting anymore? Maybe I just think of cracked DRM to be a fait accompli— I accept it as a forgone conclusion that DRM can’t work and it’s just a matter of time before the specific DRM algorithms are recovered (that is, if it’s not just stock AES).

At long last, I am getting around to posting some omelette pictures in an effort to re-hijack the search term. Not only is the site named for the breakfast food, it will have a post about the same illustrated with pictures. Omelettes– they’re not just about multimedia technology and reverse engineering anymore! Without further ado…

This was an all-around well-done omelette.

This is an omelette in the early stages of cooking. I must have used most of the spices on my shelf for this one.

This one looks like it has jalapenos baked in.

Sometimes, things go bad. I probably just wasn’t watching this one and it burned. Looks like it is leaking chopped onions, too.