JibberJabber | PlayControl Software

Apple TV Overheating Problems: Shame on Apple (Part 1 of 2)

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 23:59:41 -0700

On this rumor filled eve of things to come concerning Apple TV, I am going to publicly say, "Shame on Apple" for the heating problems plaguing my existing Apple TV.

The earliest production Apple TVs have a serious overheating problem. They ran hot under the 1.x software, but not enough to push it over the edge. But with certainly, the latest software (Take 3) overheats my Apple TV causing big blocky artifacts to appear in movie playback in the good case, and complete video card freezing requiring a reboot in the bad case.

This blog has photos of the problem which are similar to mine and tries to measure the temperature.
http://blog.olitee.com/2010/04/overheating-apple-tv/

These problems are very easy to reproduce for me and occurs during…

Adventures with DD-WRT Addendum: Switching from DD-WRT to Tomato

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 03:38:59 -0700

I thought the last part would actually be my last part. But shortly after I wrote up the initial draft of my complete Adventures with DD-WRT, I encountered an application that was having trouble with the UPnP/NAT-PMP that I had set up. Strangely, this particular application worked with the built-in UPnP of DD-WRT, but failed with my MiniUPnP bypass. I didn't really believe that MiniUPnP was the problem because both NAT-PMP and UPnP would have to fail separately. More likely that this app was doing something different than my other apps and there was a flaw in my iptables rules.

So this became the straw that broke the camel's back. I actually did come up with a workaround that used MiniUPnP for NAT-PMP and then used the built-in UPnP as the…

Adventures with DD-WRT Part 9: Conclusion

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 20:00:29 -0700

So this concludes my adventures with DD-WRT (for now).

There are plenty of other things to install. I may eventually get around to installing those. But of the remaining components that interest me, there is at least documentation. So I don't feel compelled to write up those pieces as I did for Avahi and MiniUPnP.

All that remains is giving my overall opinion. So far, my opinion is mixed.

Stability & Features

First, their firmware seems to be much better than the stuff I get from the off-the-shelf home routers with respect to feature set, bugs, and stability. So I will always opt for flashing my router from now on. However, I am less certain about my choice in DD-WRT vs. Tomato (and a lesser extent OpenWRT). I also see a lot of noise…

Adventures with DD-WRT Part 8: How I built a cheap Apple Airport Base Station substitute for $30

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 18:59:04 -0700

Ha ha. Okay, it was closer to $35 for me, but I'm told if you wait for the right time, you can buy an Asus WL-520gU for $30 or less.

But the question has been asked of me, "Is this just a way of getting an Apple Airport without paying for one?", or "Why didn't you just buy an Apple Airport?"

Is this an Apple Airport Base Station replacement? Well, there are differences so it might not be a totally fair comparison. But the title was too catchy to pass up. I'm curious what those search engines are going to do. :)

Hardware Features and Cost

But first, just from a hardware point, we would need to compare models of Apple Airport with my device. Since the Asus WL-520gU lacks 802.11n, we would either have to compare with an older Apple model, or…

Adventures with DD-WRT Part 7: Installing MiniUPnP

Sat, 03 Jul 2010 18:57:20 -0700

So it seems enough people are having problems with DD-WRT's built-in UPnP support, that there is an automated script that has been written that will fetch a prebuilt MiniUPnP package from a server, unpack it into the RAM disk, run the daemon, and reconfigure the firewall rules.

Unfortunately, the script didn't work out of the box for me. And I also prefer to not have to re-download the package every time I reboot the router. I would prefer to have a local copy, especially since I do have disk space available.

So first, in my opinion, the easiest thing to is just follow their instructions to get everything on your system. Then we'll apply the necessary changes. So run the following commands on the router.

wget http://hackthecode.googlecode.…

Adventures with DD-WRT Part 6: UPnP and NAT-PMP

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:35:34 -0700

DD-WRT ships with a UPnP implementation built-in. However, according to multiple posts I've found, the implementation seems to be kind of broken. There are a sufficient number of applications that fail to operate with DD-WRT's chosen UPnP daemon that many users in the community have worked around it.

To see it for myself, I tried an unscientific assortment of applications that use UPnP, and some did indeed have problems.

After reading further about the problem, I read that both Tomato and OpenWRT already replaced their old UPnP implementation with a different one called MiniUPnP. This one actually seems to work for everybody and also appears to be used by some commercial routers too. And for the DD-WRT users working around the built-in…

Adventures with DD-WRT Part 5: Installing Optware & Avahi (Zeroconf)

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 21:47:13 -0700

Last time, I laid out my motivations of why I want Zeroconf on the router. Now let's actually do it. I will use Avahi because there are prebuilt packages available for it.

I actually tried two different ways, but the first way didn't work.

With the first way, I noticed there was a direct Avahi package available from the OpenWRT and I was under the impression from the documentation that DD-WRT had support for OpenWRT packages. Unfortunately when I actually tried starting the Avahi-daemon, the process failed to daemonize and would abort. I could not figure out why this happened. So I went to Optware.

So in DD-WRT, there is a significant amount of documentation devoted to another packaging system called Optware. It looks like it belongs to…

Adventures with DD-WRT Part 4: Zeroconf should be available on all network devices, including routers

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:36:44 -0700

Last time, we got JFFS and a USB drive working on the DD-WRT router. Now I want to put it to use.

The first thing I want is Zeroconf. While all my OS X readers are very familiar with the technology and understand its powerful implications, there are still many circles outside that don't.

So for those who aren't familiar with it, Zeroconf (Zero-Configuration Networking) is an open standard to make IP-based network devices trivially easy to plug in and configure. A typical comparison is a USB device. With your USB device, you plug it in, and don't have to worry about typing in IP addresses, subnet masks, etc. There is no good reason IP based devices can't do this, and Zeroconf finally fills in that hole.

Zeroconf is actually built on 3…

Adventures with DD-WRT Part 3: Enabling JFFS & Adding USB Storage

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:30:11 -0700

In the previous part, we successfully flashed DD-WRT on an Asus WL-520gU router. But my goal is to go beyond the standard firmware and install additional software on this router. To do that, I need to enable JFFS2, which basically transforms the remaining free area of the ROM into disk space, and enable USB support so I can plug in additional storage if needed.

To enable JFFS2, go to the Administration->Management tab and look for the JFFS2 Support section. Enable it and also enable Clean JFFS2. I think the "Clean" option is like a format. When you apply and/or reboot, the option will reset to disable which is where you will want to leave it. (It will look kind of like the screenshot above when you are done.)

Next we need to enable USB.…

Adventures with DD-WRT Part 2: Picking a Firmware & Initial Flashing

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:37:34 -0700

Disclaimer: I am documenting what I did myself. There may be errors or omissions. The process is long, complicated, and convoluted. I am not responsible for any loss of data or damage that may occur if you try this yourself. You have been warned.

As I mentioned in the previous part, the three biggest distros seem to be OpenWRT, DD-WRT, and Tomato.

OpenWRT seems to be the most modular and customizable. But I would also say it is the least user friendly from my attempts to figure it out. It is so modular that a web-gui doesn't even come with it by default and many of the OpenWRT people seem comfortable hacking away at the terminal. I really didn't want to go this route (though you will see that I end up doing a considerable amount of…

Flashing Linux on a Home Router: Adventures with DD-WRT and an Asus WL-520gU Part 1: Introduction

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 17:55:33 -0700

Recently, my router died. It was made by D-Link and it was cheap. It also barely worked. The built-in software had bugs and certain combinations of settings were impossible to set even though the options were perfectly reasonable. There were also periods where the device needed rebooting constantly. There have been many times I've considered replacing the router, but the question is always, 'with what alternative'?

I've also dealt with many other brands over the years. For me, Netgear and Linksys were just as bad (though I didn't have one of the blessed WRT54G routers). And I have had a high degree of hardware failures with those too. Linksys also made me very angry some years ago with a rebate claim and also being given the run-around…

GIST Cancer

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:08:41 -0700

My mother recently lost her fight to GIST Cancer. To help raise awareness, I added a little blurb to my site for my new book, Beginning iPhone Games Development which can be found here.

Beginning iPhone Games Development now shipping

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:50:44 -0700

My new book, Beginning iPhone Games Development (published by Apress) is now shipping! I am one of the co-authors of the book and wrote the audio sections of the book. I teach how to use the various APIs provided by Core Audio plus a whole lot on OpenAL, possibly more than has ever been written before.

So if you are interested in learning how to write games for iPhone OS, buy this book! Or if you want to learn OpenAL, buy this book too!

I have set up a sibling website dedicated to the book, found here. (I also added a navbar link at the top of this page.) Check it out to learn more.

Big Behind-the-Scenes changes for SDL 1.2.14 on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard)

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 21:38:09 -0700

At least from my perspective, there has been a surprising amount of work and effort put into the (upcoming) maintenance release of SDL 1.2.14 for the Mac. Many of the changes have been focused on modifying the Mac code base to support Snow Leopard, particularly 64-bit. As I understand it, Ryan Gordon has spent the time cleaning up the codebase with help from user patch submissions in the SDL Bugzilla to modernize the codebase. (Thank you to all of you that have submitted patches.)

Meanwhile, I have been focusing on modernizing the Xcode projects, Xcode application templates, doing testing, updating documentation, and working on the official binary distribution.

So there are some fairly substantial behind the scenes changes Mac…

Norman Borlaug: The Man Who Saved More People Than Anyone Else in History, Has Died

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 09:00:01 -0700

I don't plan to talk much about current events on this blog, but Norman Borlaug more than anybody deserves an exception. No person in history has done more good for the world than Dr. Borlaug.

Dr. Norman Borlaug was an agricultural scientist who developed high-yield crop techniques and other agricultural innovations, credited with averting global famine in the latter half of the 20th century. He is "The Man Who Fed the World".

By some estimates, he saved over a billion people (that's with a 'B') from starvation.

"He has probably done more and is known by fewer people than anybody that has done that much."

Dr. Borlaug died last night from complications from cancer. He was 95.

Links:

Another C vs. C++ incompatibility rant: Void parameter lists

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 22:19:16 -0700

Ugh. C++ always finds another way to irk me.

I finally upgraded one of my systems to Snow Leopard and am trying out all the new compilers (gcc 4.2, llvm/gcc, clang). In addition, Apple sent me back a bug report telling me they fixed a problem with OpenAL buffer unqueuing returning the wrong buffer id, and wanted me to test it in Snow Leopard.

Being OpenAL, I could have submitted a plain C example, but I wanted to use some standard data structures so Apple couldn't accuse my code of being buggy. I wanted a GUI too to help trigger the problem, so I obviously used Cocoa/Obj-C to build the UI. But from past experience, I knew the Core Audio team likes C++ and I really wanted them to fix my bug, so I decided to use STL data structures instead…

Found the Braid Stars

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 02:37:45 -0700

*************************************************************

SPOILER ALERT! (WARNING!)

*************************************************************

I'm going to talk about some hidden things in the video game Braid.

Stop reading if you don't want to spoil the secrets.

See further down below to continue.

*************************************************************

…

Murky: A Cocoa GUI front-end for Mercurial

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:13:15 -0700

One of the things I miss from the days just before the great Linux/Bitkeeper schizm is the Bitkeeper GUI front-end tools. Obviously, since the great fallout, I have moved away from Bitkeeper and have been alternating between Git and Mercurial as I get the chance. But to this day, I still miss the GUI tools Bitkeeper provided. They were written in Tk and damn ugly, but the overall design was pretty good and integrated well with my workflows at the time.

I remember struggling to get better Mac support for the Bitkeeper tools way back then as they required X11. Once upon a time, there was a way you could redirect Bitkeeper to use an Aqua/Tk so you at least didn't have to go through X11 (which had even less integration on those older Mac OS X…

Sandvox updates comment support; Picking a new comment system

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 04:39:54 -0700

A long time ago, I posted about trying to pick a comment system. At the time, Haloscan was the built-in option for Sandvox, and JS-Kit was the only other alternative I could find.

I was worried about Haloscan because there were complaints that comments were deleted after one year. But I couldn't get JS-Kit to work nicely with Sandvox. (The comment boxes would collide into other parts of the webpage.)

I tried contacting Haloscan about their policy but never heard a word from them.

Well, since then, Haloscan was bought by JS-Kit. Comments have not been removed so far after 1 year as far as I can tell. But interestingly, JS-Kit no longer allows new registrations for Haloscan. I am apparently grandfathered in. But I wonder how long JS-Kit is…

Mercurial Subrepos: A past example revisited with a new technique

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 01:40:44 -0700

A while ago, I did a back-to-back comparison of Git and Mercurial on how to create aggregate projects containing unrelated repositories. For Git, I used the submodule option. For Mercurial, I used the Forest Extension. Since then, Mercurial (1.3) has rolled out a new experimental feature called subrepositories (subrepos). This new experimental feature seems slated to replace the Forest extension as an official core feature.

I was curious how the procedure for the new subrepos differed from forests, so I have revisited the earlier example I did using LuaDoc, and repeated it using subrepos.

The original Mercurial repositories for the underlying subrepos are in the same place from the Forest example, so all that is unchanged. So we just need…

New Screencasts Uploaded on Getting Started With CMake (An End-User's Perspective)

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:23:18 -0700

I just uploaded a set of new screencasts. I've been sitting on this since for 5 months now, just to show you how far behind I am in things. But I worked really hard to improve the production and post-production quality over my last set of videos.

Now that YouTube has an HD option, using them as the primary server is no longer a problem for me.

Head over to my Screencasts section for more details.

Direct link to my entry here.

Create a Triple-boot Mac/Windows/Linux system and share/reuse with VMWare... In just 19 easy steps! (In the basement of your home, to amuse yourself and your friends)

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:54:41 -0700

I setup a triple-boot Mac/Windows/Linux system about 6 months ago with which partitions I shared with virtualization. Unfortunately, I sat on this document too long without finishing it and have forgotten what I did to make it work. At this point, I'm just going to push out my notes as I have them now and hope it still may be helpful to somebody out there. My particular setup is a bit more uncommon which is why I feel I should push this document out there.

Unlike a traditional triple-boot system, I pushed the envelope a bit further. In addition to having native bootable partitions for each OS, I also made each runnable through virtualization. In my case, I used VMWare Fusion. I also tried Parallels Desktop, but didn't have any success.

…

Book Review: Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone by Bill Dudney

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:10:48 -0700

What is Core Animation?

Core Animation is a powerful new Apple technology that debuted with Mac OS X Leopard. As it was later revealed, it was a technology that originated for the iPhone.

Core Animation is actually comprised of two different technologies:

1) An animation technology

2) A layering (compositing) technology

Core Animation makes it easy to animate a "view" object from point A to point B without having to write your own animation loop or timer callbacks. It can be as simple as just saying "move there" and Core Animation takes care of the rest.

The layering aspect is the part that caught my attention as an OpenGL developer. Basically, you can think of Core Animation as a textured rectangle engine, i.e. apply a 2D image on a…

SDL_Clipboard API Prototype/Proposal

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 12:13:54 -0700

Cross-platform copy & paste support comes up once in a blue moon on the SDL mailing list.

Sam Lantinga (the main author of SDL) implemented a demo piece called SDL_scrap some years ago. Several years ago, I tried the code and decided to modify it because it didn't meet my needs.

First, it completely lacked a native Mac OS X implementation, so I implemented that.

Second, Sam's demo relied on inventing custom types for clipboards so it was useless for sharing data between other applications that didn't use SDL_scrap. For example, if I wanted to copy/paste text with Notepad.exe or an image with MS Paint , this was impossible because SDL_Scrap didn't leverage native known types in the underlying clipboard implementations.

So I implemented…

Mixing audio sources for multiple computers

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:59:11 -0700

With all my recent talk of triple-booting, I might be giving the wrong impression. Generally speaking, I am not a fan of multi-booting, and without hardware accelerated OpenGL, virtualization is of limited use to me.

So my solution has been to run multiple computers. This has many well-known downsides. I'm not really going to defend my solution, but merely state it as fact that this is what I tend to do.

One aspect of dealing with multiple computers that is often ignored is audio. For other things, there are gadgets like KVMs, and so forth, but there is very little discussion and even fewer gadgets for audio.

I dislike using a set of speakers per computer because the wiring and power brick situation gets messy. I also have (only) one…

Initial Impressions (and Criticisms) of Debian Lenny

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:37:02 -0700

To my shock, the next iteration of Debian was released and it hasn't been an eternity. For those who don't use Debian, releases in the past have taken very long amounts of time. It is usually the butt of jokes along with Windows (Vista) release cycle times.

I actually put off upgrading to Etch until only a little over a year ago expecting I would still have at least several more years before Lenny.

My experience I am about to convey is actually two separate experiences, a brand new computer and fresh install, and an upgrade on an old computer.

The Story of the New Computer (New install on Mac Pro)

I was entrusted with a new Mac Pro to do some development work on. The work was for a cross-platform project, so I needed Mac OS X, Windows,…

Native Mac OS X and iPhone back-ends for SDL_image

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:02:11 -0800

This holiday break was much like revisiting my roots. I did OpenGL, OpenAL, and now SDL.

I finally got around to finishing one of the zillion things in my queue. With SDL getting closer to its 1.3 release, I felt compelled to get this one done. I have implemented and submitted a new native Mac OS X and also iPhone backend for SDL_image.

SDL_image currently depends on libgif, libjpeg, libpng, and libtiff to load these formats. For the official Mac OS X framework distribution, we have been statically linking these libraries into the framework. This has been a pain to build and maintain, particularly since none of these libraries have Universal Binary friendly build systems.

This submission utilizes native OS X frameworks to load the images…

Defective Core Audio (Mac OS X) ALC_ENUMERATION_EXT implementation / My fixed implementation and letter to the community

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:01:09 -0800

(The following is an open letter I posted to the OpenAL community asking for support to convince Apple this problem is indeed a bug in their implementation and to accept my patch.)

The Bug:

There is a bug in the current Mac OS X implementation concerning the ALC_ENUMERATION_EXT.

The current implementation fails to do two things:

1) It fails to return a list of devices as intended by the ALC_ENUMERATION_EXT, even though the implementation claims to support the extension.

2) It fails to support opening of specific devices that would be named in this list.

As my Xmas gift to the community, I have implemented these deficiencies and made my changes publicly available. My wish is that these will be included into the main Mac OS X distribution as I…

OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects (VBOs): A Simple Tutorial

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 05:59:01 -0800

Recently, I have been getting a lot of similar questions about how to draw geometry in OpenGL without the use of glBegin()/glEnd(). This is mostly due to the interest in iPhone development which uses OpenGL ES 1.1, though I have received a few desktop performance questions as well. Since I've gotten multiple questions, I thought I would post a very simple tutorial for VBOs.

When most people first learn OpenGL, they are taught using glBegin() and glEnd(). But to shock of many people, these functions have been excluded from OpenGL ES, and there is pressure to remove these functions from future versions of OpenGL proper. The two main reasons for removing these functions are performance and simplicity.

In performance, the glBegin()/glEnd()…

Balanced Fund Update & Market Thoughts

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:46:56 -0700

This is a follow up to the article I wrote on Aggressive Savings Techniques using Balanced Funds (for intermediate term). I am not going to do a quantitative analysis right now. I want to wait for the year to end to see where things end up.

But yikes! When I wrote the article, I didn't believe we would enter into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. (Don't interpret that line as this crisis is just as bad as the Great Depression. Some people I've talked to make that allusion when they hear this and that is plain wrong. While the current crisis is very bad, it is nowhere as bad as the Great Depression. Perhaps the phrase, 'Only the Great Depression has been worse in the past 80 years' would be more clear.)

So here are…

QuickTime 7.5 Core Animation Improvements

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 01:43:47 -0700

Every time a new Apple software update comes out, people always wonder what's really changed. Apple's release notes are usually not very detailed. QuickTime 7.5 which was released the week of WWDC 2008 happened to be a fairly significant update in terms of bug fixes and enhancements.

I was trying to implement a "reflection" of a movie layer using QTKit and Core Animation. I wanted a single movie source and either two movie layers to share the the source, or a way to capture the current displayed image of one layer and transfer it to another. It turns out neither was possible prior to QuickTime 7.5. (You might be able to use to Core Video and OpenGL, but the QuickTime/Core Video API interface still hasn't been updated to support 64-bit…

Mercurial Forests: A Real World Example (LuaDoc with CMake)

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:28:21 -0700

(Update 2009/09/04: I added a new entry on Mercurial Subrepos which is slated to replace Forests.Link here)

In my last entry, we created a Git Superproject for LuaDoc and its dependencies. For comparison, let's repeat the example using the Mercurial Forest Extension.

Because the Forest is still an unofficial extension, you may need to configure/install things for your Mercurial installation. My example below assumes you have a working Forest extension installed. The following link contains instructions and a tutorial I based this example on.

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/ForestExtension

The first step is to create the regular individual Mercurial repositories for each subproject. They can be found here:


Mercurial…

Git Superproject and Submodules: A Real World Example (LuaDoc with CMake)

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:26:43 -0700

In my previous entry on Git Superprojects and Mercurial Forests, I didn't have any examples. I meant to do that, but didn't finish that. Having a horrible memory for these things, I regret that very much because it meant I didn't have a good reference to go back to.

Not wanting to repeat that mistake again, I have implemented a Git Superproject and Submodules for a real world project that I needed to get fixed. Furthermore, the project is relatively lightweight and potentially cross-platform, so I have designed the example so you can participate too by accessing a public repository.

The project is LuaDoc. It is a documentation generator that is similar to Doxygen, except that it is designed explicitly for Lua. (Doxygen currently lacks Lua…

LuaObjCBridge & LuaCore Updates

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 21:31:57 -0700

I've been working with the LuaObjCBridge (by Tom McClean) and LuaCore (by Gus Mueller). I've encountered some bugs, limitations, and things that needed improvement. As I'm already forgetting what changes I've made, I decided I better document them and push them back out for the public to test and improve. Because my changes may potentially break compatibility (not necessarily a bad thing though because some things just didn't work correctly in the original code base), I've pushed my changes into a separate repository.

Meanwhile, I've been using a lot of these changes to test ideas for the next generation LuaObjCBridge which will use BridgeSupport and likely libffi. If you are interested in contributing, please don't hesitate to contact me.

…

Somebody Found My Blog! (Update: Zeroconf Printer Advertising)

Fri, 09 May 2008 12:20:02 -0700

If anybody has been tracking my blog prior to this point, I apologize. I did not expect anybody to find it. (Google is too efficient at crawling.) Prior to this point, this blog was an experimental test for me and I wasn't yet announcing it publicly.

You might notice that there were a bunch of articles with dates starting from January pushed just today. That's because I started writing those articles back then, but had not finished writing/editing/revising them until today. I figured it was no big deal since nobody has seen my blog. Oops.

Today, I discovered that somebody has indeed been reading my blog (outside my private circle) because somebody left a comment, and a great one too! (More on that in a moment.)

I checked Google Analytics,…

Contacting Southwest Airlines

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:56:06 -0700

Southwest Airlines has a little application called Ding! which offers special limited time (hours) fares. I have relatives that love this program. But, maybe predictably, this blog entry has nothing to do with the concept of the application itself.

It turns out that the application has an annoying bug where the programmers left in code that prints debugging statements (via NSLog?) to the system log on Mac OS X (Leopard).

The big problem is that the application prints a huge number of messages. Coupled with the fact that users run this application non-stop to get the most benefit from it, this floods the system log and forces quicker log rotation, removing the chances to find important events in the system log.

While dealing with Apple on…

An Aggressive Intermediate Term Savings Strategy (Analysis on Balanced Funds)

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:48:39 -0800

In honor of the upcoming Tax Day, I'm going to gripe. The tax code is unfair and broken. (There, I did it. I don't feel any better.) While there are volumes of reasons to complain (literally), I'm going to focus in on a specific aspect: savings.

A case in point of the unfairness is savings (plain old, non-retirement accounts). The tax code is structured so there is a huge disincentive to save money, particularly for the short term or intermediate term.

You might be trying to save money for an emergency fund, save for a big purchase item such as a car or house, save for a big event such as a wedding, or just trying to plan for the future. But if you try saving for these types of things and your time span is less than the long term (say…