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There seem to be a lot of public interest recently in the use of Taser’s, this comes after the media reported a few cases of possible taser abuse by the police force, and an even more recent lawuite by Taser International to have the cause of death in some Taser related incidences changed to their favour.

Well I certainly agree that it is wrong to lie and change the cause of death from Taser to ‘Excited Delerium’ (which isn’t a medically sound cause of death), I certainly do not agree with banning Tasers from the police force.

There is an apparent issue with some authority figures abusing people, be it some form of prejudice or their desire for power this is not limited to Tasers. For instance a case brought forward in Nova Scotia over the past couple of years where two officers assaulted a man in a convenience store who was being beligerent, but clearly not assualting or otherwise resisting the officers.

Notice that when this happened we did not question weather the police force should be allowed to have hands, nor any time you hear a police officer has shot someone when they should not have we never question the use of arms, so why would throw away our moral standard to integrity in our police officers and try to solve our problems by banning one of the most usefull, and least deadly tools on the force?

Some people have attempted to state that the only purpose of a Taser is to cause pain, once again this is not a fact. The way the human nervous system works, is that once a nerve ‘fires’ there is a preset period of time until it is capable of sending another signal to the brain. This is why people will rub a sore area of their body, the sensation caused by rubbing blocks more painful signal from getting to the brain, and the Taser works by forcing the nervous system to constantly keep firing so that the target is incapable of movement. Yes a Taser can be painful, but not nearly as painful as mace, or a bullet.

Taser provide authorities with a means of disabling people who are potentially going to cause harm to others, and they do so with a very minor chance of permanent injury or death; You cannot say that about a gun. And very simply put, if you do not want to be hit with one, don’t break the law; I promise this works almost all the time.

Oh squiggly line in my eye fluid.
I see you lurking there on the periphery of my vision.
But when I try to look at you, you scurry away.
Are you shy, squiggly line?
Why only when I ignore you, do you return to the center of my eye?
Oh, squiggly line,
it’s alright, you are forgiven.

Recently I managed to get our latest project compiling for the PS2, using Sony’s cross platform compiler sold by SN Systems, ProDG.

Now having only worked with ProDG for one week this is what I found:

The licensing for the compiler is very expensive, and honestly I am very surprised by this, since the compiler is a direct rip off of the GCC compiler; are people just not aware that they can request the source code for it or copy it as they see fit. The GCC compiler is protected (last I checked) by GPL, meaning any changes to the compiler must be released with the binaries in the same format as the paid for binaries upon request of anyone, and without charge.

Now once you spend several hours installing ProDG, fighting with the installer which likes to hang or pretend that it is actually uninstalling but really isn’t (and refuses to reinstall until it is fully uninstalled) you will finally be able to compile and connect to the PS2 dev kit, allowing you to serve binaries for testing.

This wouldn’t be so bad if the ProDG tools would allow some form of code debugging that rivaled an ASM output, with register view and, if you are lucky, a call stack.

Fortunately it seems that PS2 titles are on the way out, and I am advised of many great improvements to the PS3 development toolchain, including an actual proprietary compiler which I will only assume doesn’t violate the GPL agreement.

As many of you know by know I recently received a job offer with one of EA Sports’ contracted development studios, prompting Jenn and I to up and leave Alberta with only 4 days notice.

I am almost done my second week and had the pleasure of meeting a few of the higher ups from the company, and working well through EA’s PC and Console engine code. It is easy to tell that EA has been doing this for a while which has unfortunatly left me wadding through at least 4 years of reused code.

Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know that Jenn, Saffron and I have almost settled back into our new home and I should have some more updates and pictures of the baby to follow soon.