disobey.com

From Paint Shop Pro 9's box art:

No, I've made absolutely no dent in my list of things to read.

• The Expert Mind: "He thus put in a nutshell what a century of psychological research has subsequently established: much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once. And just as the chess master often finds the best move in a flash, an expert physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within moments of laying eyes on a patient. But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire their extraordinary skills?"
• The Hive: "Can thousands of Wikipedians be wrong? How an attempt to build an online encyclopedia touched off history’s biggest experiment in collaborative knowledge ... The power of the community to decide, of course, asks us to reexamine what we mean when we say that something is "true." ... The community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by consensus. Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five."
• Jeopardy! Archive Glossary: Includes a number of strategems, wagering and otherwise, named after the players that originated them, such as "Forrest Bounce: 1. n. a clue-selection strategy, employed during the Jeopardy! Round or the Double Jeopardy! Round, in which the next clue is selected from a randomly-chosen category different from the category of the last clue, potentially giving an advantage to the player with control of the board by confusing his or her opponents."
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: "I think of what we do as 'massively multiplayer participatory storytelling,'" She tells me how the Mind Candy [Perplex City] team tries to infiltrate their players' lives and blur the lines between reality and fantasy. ... On a lighter note, Perplex City is the reason 127 people formed a spontaneous conga line in Trafalgar Square, all in the name of puzzle-solving glory ... We moved on, then, discussing other ways they'd really like to completely immerse their players. Her favorite idea? Kidnapping. She really wants to kidnap one of you. "I really do! And I don't think I'm the only one! In a perfect world, we'd be able to infiltrate your whole world."
• The Biology of B-Movie Monsters: "Much of the movie is taken up with the Lilliputian team struggling to climb up onto pieces of furniture and then back down again. For the latter, they need not have invested so much time and effort in securing pieces of string to use as ropes: they could simply have jumped ... Indeed, sufficiently small animals cannot be hurt in a fall from any height: A monkey is too big, a squirrel is on the edge, but a mouse is completely safe ... These facts were known to our ancestors, who used this aspect of scaling to gruesome effect--a common strategy during medieval sieges was to take a carcass of a horse, let it ripen for a few days in the sun, and then catapult it over the walls of the besieged town. On impact, the carcass would indeed splash, spreading contagion throughout the city."

[This has also been posted at MacDevCenter.com].

In response to Wireless Video Streaming from OS X to your TV?, fearless reader Scott noted the Mvix MX-760HD as offered by ThinkGeek. Out of all the possibilities posted, this seemed the most relevant: wireless, internal hard drive (which is entirely optional), USB connectivity, DivX and XviD playback, and composite video connectoids (along with others). After talking with Rich Knitter, MvixUSA's Director of Marketing, he agreed to send me a review unit with the hope that I also get step-by-step sharing instructions for (the as-yet-tested) OS X.

Welp, I gotta tell ya, I'm pretty happy with this little thing.

Hardware setup was easy - the unit comes with a stand (which seemed a little loose until I found the center sweet spot), USB and composite video cables, a driver CD (which you won't ever need), remote control (a block of plastic with a central keypad similar to, but not as good as, a TiVo), the requisite power cables, and a 5dBi antenna. While the unit does support HD and progressive scan and all those other high-falutin' feel-goods, you'll need to supply your own cables. For this review, I've only used composite video because that's all I (care to, at the moment) have.

I first tested without installing a hard drive (the not-included but provided Maxtor 300GB is one of a few sizes available if you order directly from MvixUSA.com) because my focus was wireless streaming - I wanted my bevy of disks upstairs to combine into one voltronic horde of video bliss. Thus, after a quick load screen (in which DivX was misspelt as "Dvix"), I hopped into the Setup menu and started tweaking the network options. The UI isn't ugly (see the online PDF manual for some examples), though it does seem a bit syrupy at times, but not enough to be annoying.

What was annoying is its sole support for WEP as a wireless encryption standard. I don't look forward to reconfiguring all my game consoles, laptops, and handhelds away from the WPA I had been using before. After tweaking my network (as provided by a D-Link DGL-4300), the MX-760HD connected to it just fine, without having to manually specify IPs, routers, DNS, etc.

That left me with just nailing down the actual file sharing. First (tested under 10.4.8), enable OS X's Samba server by clicking "Windows Sharing" under Apple Menu > System Preferences... > Sharing. OS X will force you to choose which user account can use Windows Sharing but this won't actually matter to the MX-760HD - it doesn't send authentication so we'll need to specifically customize our server to allow guests. We'll also want to tweak exactly what directories we're sharing, as opposed to the enabled user's entire Home directory (note: even if that is what you want, you'll still need to configure it as "guests ok", something you'll probably want to reconsider for security reasons).

There are two different ways to configure the Samba server: by editing the /etc/smb.conf manually or by using a helper application like the donationware SharePoints. SharePoints has an advantage because it will display the read/write permissions of the directories you're sharing: "everyone" must have "read" access for the files to be shared properly. Before we continue, you may want to disable the default "share the entire home directory" option under SharePoint's SMB Properties > Home Directories. This is entirely optional.

To share a directory of movies, make sure you're on the "Normal Shares" tab, create a "Share Name" and "Browse..." to the right Directory. You'll also want to set the "Windows (SMB) Sharing" dropdown to "Shared (+)". Finally, click the magical circle to the right of "Show File System Properties". This drawer will offers an "Allow Windows Guests", which we'll need to enable for anything we want the MX-760HD to access. Under "Permissions", make sure "Everyone" can "r" (read) the directory, otherwise it'll will appear empty when browsed (note: this WILL change the literal permissions on disk - it's not just a Samba thing). If you haven't protected your wireless network with encryption (even if it's simply WEP, as required here), I'd heartily suggest you do so now. You'll be asked for your OS X Administrator password to effect any changes you make here. Your final screen should look something like:

Head back over to the MX-760HD and have it "Refresh" its Movie file listing. Should everything go as smoothly as it did for me, they'll be a bit of a pause as it scans (and caches) the share, but your movie files should be displayed; anything not a recognized movie file is not shown. One of the things I continue to appreciate is the long file name listings: you can actually see more than six or eight characters, and pausing on any one title will scroll the rest of the title in place. I don't understand why they didn't use this same interface for the "Recent Items" screen, which is utterly useless in its current icon-based incarnation. Choose what you'd like to watch, and depending on the size of the video, it'll start streaming to you wirelessly in 10 to 30 seconds. Awesome.

Installation of the optional hard drive is also easy: no tools are required though I did have some troubles getting the single case screw back into place, and it took a few tries of concerted jiggling to align it just right. Once the hard drive is in and connected via USB 2.0 to your Mac, format it with Disk Utility as an "MS-DOS File System" and you'll be good to go. Mounting the MX-760HD's hard drive does require its power adapter which can cause a bit of frustration when it's entangled into the mass of cables behind your entertainment center. Having a laptop in the living room is one solution; a separate internal drive enclosure for drive swapping is another. MvixUSA recently reported that a firmware update will allow mounting over the network as a NAS/NDAS device, but no ETA on this support has been provided.

Of the 20 or so ancient but much-cherished Britney Spears music videos I threw at it, all showed signs of bad cropping - some had a healthy 20 to 30 pixel column missing from the left hand side. Modern day movie rips encoded at 16:9 receive this same chopping on the right side too. This is disheartening but my previous standby, a Philips DVP-642, also suffered the same problem. Digital video software really needs take these files, figure out what dimensions they are at runtime, then display them shrunk to fit into the TV screen with a surrounding border. Either that, or a Zoom Out (nearly everything has Zoom In, why not Out? Cheap solution!) Some folks have suggested this may be due to my use of composite cables, and I cheerful admit my ignorance and luddism.

Codec and playback support was strong: after testing the first few minutes of nearly 150 movies stored on the hard drive, only two or three gave the unit problems. QPEL support is missing, nor can the unit handle the MS-MPEG4v2 codec which all the DAP's MST3K videos are ripped as, though they admit this is a problem:

However, MS-MPEG4v2 is not without it's faults, the most obvious of which being that it is a proprietary codec that is no longer in development and is not likely to make its way into settop boxes or consumer electronics anytime soon. While technically a derivative of the MPEG-4 standard, MS-MPEG4v2 does not produce an ISO compliant video stream. What that means from a practical cross-platform standpoint is that when MPEG-4 capable DVD players do start becoming available (or the rumored MPEG-4 based HD-DVD spec), getting MS-MPEG4v2 files to play on them will be a non-trivial task necessitating at the very least transcoding to an ISO compliant codec and the quality loss associated.

There are no current plans to support these codecs in a future firmware upgrade.

I did not test the Photo or Music playing capabilities to any persnickety degree, but the smallest increment of time for image slideshows is three seconds, which turns into roughly six or seven if you're wirelessly streaming 2 MB digital camera files. It'd be nice if the unit could start caching and requesting early so that a more smoother and faster slideshow transition is possible. There does seem to be some issues with the "Recent Items" function in relation to photos or missing media or perhaps amount of media: after looking at roughly 50 images of a 500 image directory, I deleted that share leaving me with just movies to be watched. However, browsing through the media list to get to the "Setup" menu caused a freeze on the "Photo" item, which showed "Recent Items" that no longer exist. I don't know the cause, but it was about 90 seconds before I regained control. There doesn't appear to be any way to delete the "Recent Items" so, at the moment, I'm just avoiding that menu item entirely and used the "Setup" button on the remote. A day later, I am unable to reproduce this particular freeze.

Apparent "freezes" like this happened a little more often than I would like, and it always seemed related to the unit's rebuilding of a file list that I know has changed. After adding 100 GBs of movies to one directory, a new access to the hard drive (which I've coquettishly named "Innards") caused the unit to appear unresponsive for nearly six minutes, nearly two minutes after I gave up clicking the "Down" arrow to check to see if it was working. Another down arrow finally teased a response, but my original request, to browse the contents of Innards, never happened. Accessing it again gave the lickety-split response I was hoping for and, save for these initial first requests after file modifications, access to large directories continues without incident. With that said, I dare not throw my 22,000 track MP3 library at it anytime soon (nor would I ever, as my sole desire is video watching).

I was unable to test subtitle support heavily, but there do seem to be problems with .sub and .idx files. Though it claims support for them, a Mvix help document suggests converting them to .srt instead; I was unable to get the files I had working (nor did I try to convert them). Another .srt file loaded with no problems, but the subtitles were in Italian so I am unable to confirm if they matched up with the video properly. There is support for timeshifting the subtitles backwards or forwards, and you can also change their position on screen. Finally, the color of the lettering can be changed from the default white to some others, but the font has black borders which should prevent any one color from being washed out by the current scene.

While there are problems here and there with the UI, I'm quite happy to have the MX-760HD as a central part of my video entertainment: I no longer intend to burn DVD-Rs anymore, and the wireless support removes the need for any other moving parts. Hopefully, future firmware updates will hammer out the remaining bugs, but until then, I'm quite happy to route around them: the advantages and other qualities make this combination of hard drive, streaming, and video too powerful to ignore.

A large collection of atheist quotes. Some of my favorites:

• "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." --Stephen Roberts
• "When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me." --Emo Philips
• "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" --Epicurus
• "We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." --Gene Roddenberry
• "We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." --H. L. Mencken
• "Jesus' last words on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" hardly seem like the words of a man who planned it that way. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure there is something wrong here." --Donald Morgan
• "Everything is more or less organized matter. To think so is against religion, but I think so just the same. When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself." --Peter O'Toole
• "Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own?" --Robert G. Ingersoll
• "The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on." --Frank Zappa
• Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?" --Annie Dillard, 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'

No! I did not collect this a few days ago and hope to trick you with "regular" updates!

• Outlandish theories: Kings of the (hollow) world: "Symmes's story is told well in "Banvard's Folly" by writer Paul Collins, who has reconstructed the stories of a series of madmen. Some were geniuses in their way, scientists who staked their entire careers on false hypotheses. He discusses the lives of men such as respected French physicist René Blondlot, who discovered N-rays in the early 20th century. N- rays didn't exist, but they threw the scientific community of the day into turmoil."
• Experiencing déjà vu?: "Experiments suggest that déjà vu can be triggered independently, without a real memory to prompt it ... Recognising a familiar object or scene is believed to unleash two processes in the brain ... Exploring this two-step theory, a team at the University of Leeds in northern England showed volunteers 24 common words, then hypnotised them ... Ten of the volunteers said they felt an odd sensation when they saw new words in red, and five others said this sensation definitely felt like déjà vu."
• Man hangs dead from the ceiling, yet remains online: "A play about a man who hangs dead from the ceiling of his apartment while his computer program maintains the facade that he is still alive was among the top entries in a new competition for plays about science and technology. That play, titled "On-line" and submitted by Minneapolis playwright Mark Steven Jensen, earned finalist status in the first Scientists, Technologists, and Artists Generating Exploration (STAGE) competition."
• Interactive Narratives Revisited: "My lecture contained a critique of the whole concept of interactive movies, and in fact I ended up saying that I didn’t believe there was any such thing as an interactive movie at all, a remark which produced prolonged cheering in my largely techie bad-attitude game developer audience. The challenge of the interactive movie, I concluded, was to make decent computer games in spite of the fact that the marketing department will insist on sticking this idiotic label on your box. So I abandoned interactive movies as a design concept, because I couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to be, and looked at interactive narratives from an abstract, theoretical point of view. In that lecture, I identified three key problems that I felt made it difficult to create interactive narratives. So the idea behind this lecture is to look back and see how things have changed since I named those problems... to see if, perhaps, any of them have been solved."
• The Latest on Long-Running Experiments: "We are happy to report that three of the world’s longest-running scientific experiments are indeed still running. It has been a number of years since anyone checked on all three ... In 1984, the European Journal of Physics published three remarkable reports, each describing a different experiment that had been continuing for decades. The youngest -- the pitch drop viscosity experiment at the University of Queensland in Brisbane -- had been started in 1927. The oldest -- the now-and-then-famous Oxford electric bell at Oxford University, was begun in 1840. The third experiment, the Beverly clock at the University of Otago in Dunedin, was commenced in 1864."

[This has also been posted at MacDevCenter.com].

The short story is that I bought a house and, with it, a new wireless router (the D-Link DGL-4300, quite nice) to penetrate the walls my previous apartment never had. With a strong wireless network on the second floor connecting to my entertainment on the first, I've my game consoles and laptop satisfied, but would like to focus on video streaming. In short: I want to wirelessly stream movies (of MPEG, DivX, and XviD persuasion) to my TV.

My current workflow is to burn digital movie files onto DVD-Rs and then play them through my Philips DVP-62, which is a cheapie throw-away player that supports all the formats I care about. This has slowly become costly and inefficient: with over 100 DVD-Rs now burnt, it's a pain to find the right movie on the right disc (and heaven-forbid I'd like to watch a marathon spanning multiple discs), much less pay the cost for media (which is roughly the same amount as the player itself).

Recently, an update to the Xbox 360 promised the ability to stream video from sources other than Windows Media Center machines and, while possible on OS X (with the help of shareware Connect 360), you need to convert your files to WMV/WMA, a feat that only Flip4Mac can currently accomplish. VLC can apparently do it on Windows, but doesn't support WMA encoding on OS X in my tests.

With over 100 DVD-Rs containing six or seven movies a piece, and Flip4Mac encoding times taking roughly the duration of the file itself, this isn't entirely ideal either. I've yet to find a live transcoding solution (i.e., convert at time of play request) for OS X, though a few exist on Windows (TVersity's latest version has specific support for this, but doesn't run on OS X).

Yes, I do have Parallels on my MacBook Pro. Yes, I have BootCamp too. Do I want to run my laptop for 15+ hours to support a movie marathon? Do I REALLY want to pipe video through my Xbox 360, or use a non-Mac solution? No. Could I save myself a lot of effort if I just settle for second best? Absolutely, but it'll take me a few more weeks to resolve myself to that.

So, of late, I've been looking around for "digital media receivers", which are boxes that specifically support what I'm looking for (again: wireless streaming video of MPEG, DivX, or XviD from my Mac upstairs to my television downstairs). Unfortunately, I haven't found a lot of satisfying results that'd fill me with such confidence that I'm ready to plunk down "definitely" as opposed to "experimental" money.

• The KiSS DP-600 plays all the formats I'm looking for, has a clean interface, and specifically supports OS X with its (ugh, brushed-metal) MacLink application. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be available in the US, and I'm not entirely willing to make this my first (non-PayPal, more than $100) overseas transaction. It is also a DVD player which seems to (though I've yet to get perfect confirmation on this) do the same thing as my current Philips box - play files stored on a DVD-R. Unfortunately, the site isn't entirely "robust" and hasn't reported any news since late 2005 (though new firmware has recently been released). Has anyone used this? If it's a DVD player, what region is it encoded for? Are there any American distributors that I've missed?
• TwonkyMedia is a general purpose UPnP server for videos, photos, and music. The software is available for Mac, Linux, and Windows and they list a number of supported systems, such as the D-Link DSM-520 and the Zensonic Z500, which both have their pros and cons. The Z500 is an unsexy DVD player (which I don't really need) and has a horrific interface, while the DSM-520 (the better of the two, IMO) has had various reviews saying its interface was slow (though some have suggested this is due to their shipped Windows-only media server, which I wouldn't be using) or that the newest firmware has broken some types of XviD and DivX playback. Both come in around the "experimental" $200 mark.
• Apple's planned iTV is a non-starter - without S-Video or composite video, I can do nothing with it (unless I buy a new TV, which isn't going to happen anytime soon), and iTunes cheerfully ignored any of the DivX and XviD files I dropped over it (and yes, these same files playback fine in QuickTime). Whilst I'm sure enterprising hackers will either add extra formats to iTunes or otherwise route around those particular requirements, I still don't plan to replace my TV when other potentially cheaper alternatives may exist.

Any readers have any of their own experience or thoughts to report?

I'm queuing these up now in a supa-sekrit text file. SshhHh.

• What Game Developers Hate About Videogame Reviewers: "They smile at junkets, exchange pleasantries at E3 and treat the enthusiast press exceptionally well, but behind closed doors, many game developers take a dim view of videogame reviewers ... Developers hate game reviewers that only play their games for a few hours ... Developers hate game reviewers because they don't understand games that are targeted for a specific audience ... Developers hate game reviewers who review games in proxy for an entire genre ... Developers hate game reviewers who have no idea what it takes to make a game."
• Are Games Getting Easier?: "When the gaming phenomenon really got going in the 1980's, it existed virtually exclusively in arcades. Back then, games were built around a couple of key concepts: they were fun, addictive - and nearly impossible to master. Games like Pac-Man have a seemingly infinite number of levels, and even the best of the best can lose while just barely scratching the surface of the game. But as games have become more complex, game designers have started wanting everyone who plays their games to get to see everything they put into it. This in turn has resulted in a generation of games that are easier to conquer. In spite of the rapid growth in technology and the ability to make games more intricate, game have become fundamentally less challenging than they were 20 years ago."
• Richard Lamm on Multiculturalism: "Last week there was an immigration-overpopulation conference in Washington, DC, filled to capacity by many of American's finest minds and leaders. A brilliant college professor named Victor Hansen Davis talked about his latest book, "Mexifornia," explaining how immigration — both legal and illegal — was destroying the entire state of California. He said it would march across the country until it destroyed all vestiges of The American Dream. Moments later, former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm stood up and gave a stunning speech on how to destroy America. The audience sat spellbound as he described eight methods for the destruction of the United States."
• Playground game design as a sustainable competitive advantage: "Some of the top franchises such as GTA or Sims do not experience the same competitive pressures as do other titles in popular genres. Also unexpected is that the companies that originally innovated with the creation of a new genre end up dominating. Something beyond your typical branding and IP ownership acts as a barrier to entry for new companies looking to cash in on popular new genres."
• MGC: Leading a Passively Multiplayer Life: "Hall ruminated on his concept of what he referred to as an entirely new genre - "inescapable games," or Passively Multiplayer games. The game, Hall explained, would be one that everyone is playing at all hours of the day. This is made possible thanks to the incredible amount of user data that individuals voluntarily give up about their hobbies, interests, school or work schedules, and all other aspects of their lives."

I'm, what, six months behind on my reading list now? Holy crap.

• Managing User Creativity, Part One and Part Two: "... user creativity is a great force which can allow the creation of new content at a level that staff couldn't possibly manage. However, user creativity also leads to issue of management, because it can be somewhat chaotic, somewhat unfocused, and somewhat uneven."
• To Hell with WCAG 2: "The proposed new WCAG 2.0 is the result of five long years' work by a Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) committee that never quite got its act together. In an effort to be all things to all web content, the fundamentals of WCAG 2 are nearly impossible for a working standards-compliant developer to understand. WCAG 2 backtracks on basics of responsible web development that are well accepted by standardistas."
• Interactive Fiction: First-Timer Foibles: Point Profusion, Synonym Sickness, Textual Truncations, Exciting Exclamations!!!, Aberrant Articles, Oral Offences, Encumbering Exposition, Shocking Spelling and Grisly Grammar, Player Perusal, Laconic Locations, Action Advancement, Insipid Initials, Mangled Mimesis, Action Abortion, and Closemouthed Characters.
• Firefox Microsummaries: "Microsummaries are regularly-updated short summaries of web pages. They are compact enough to fit in the space available to a bookmark label, they provide more useful information about pages than static page titles, and they get regularly updated as new information becomes available. ... If you are a web site developer, you can provide microsummaries for the pages on your web site by ... linking to them from within the pages being summarized via <link> tags."
• The Designer's Notebook: 'Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!' VII: "We all know the game industry suffers from a lot of personnel turnover. Enthusiastic young people join the business; the hours and working conditions burn them out; they leave to find a more sane occupation, and a new crop shows up all ready for the flames. Apart from the waste of life and talent this represents, it means that game companies have no institutional memory, and that's partly why we keep making design errors."

In order to test the stability of an IRC bot written as a Drupal module, I needed to get something useful running relatively soon so that I could watch it over a week of normal usage. As such, the first complete bot.module plugin has landed in Drupal CVS, which simply reports the titles of drupal.org nodes. In a development channel like #drupal, we're constantly mentioning issue URLs for followups, patch testing, sanity replicators, etc.. This module spits the issue title to prevent wasted clicks to a topic you know nothing about. Running live on #drupal as I type.

Been on my todo list for a while. Busted out a framework today:

Druplicon is an IRC bot that has been servicing #drupal, #drupal-support, and many other IRC channels since 2005, proving itself an invaluable resource. Originally a Perl Bot::BasicBot::Pluggable application coded by Morbus Iff, he always wanted to make the official #drupal bot an actual Drupal module.

This is the fruit of these labors. Whilst the needs of Druplicon are driving the future and design of the module, this is intended as a generic framework for IRC bots within Drupal, and usage outside of Druplicon is encouraged.

You can browse the source code online. It is very basic at the moment - mostly a proof of concept, but uses the Net_SmartIRC PEAR library, is a Drupal 5 module, and supports IRC plugins (ie., additional Drupal modules) via Drupal's hook system. I doubt I'll be converting the existing Druplicon bot over anytime soon, but I will be slowly finessing the plugin system (right after I add a "reload" function, right after I add all the IRC message types, right after I...).