September 2008 – Steve Dougherty's Blog

Poem

Robert Langdon and I wrote a poem about my mom’s carpooling consistancy:

Sometimes she’s there at 3:20,

Sometimes she’s there at 3:10.

Sometimes she’s there at 3:40,

And sometimes not even then.

I suppose I should be grateful to the reviews for lowering my expectations of Spore. It’s an okay game. It can be really fun at times. The space stage seems unstable – it spontaneously crashed during the UFO piloting tutorial. After installing Spore at dad’s, I came to the unpleasant realization that save files are not tied to your account. I assumed my world was uploaded automatically, if not publicly, then at least to my account. I didn’t see a share button, not that I was looking for one. I guess it just annoys me that after going through all the pains of registering my account to my CD key and (I haven’t tested this, but) limiting me to one account per copy of the game, they don’t move my save files. This, to me, removes the scrap of good I was hoping for from this whole login thing. This is upsetting.

EDIT: Turns out it did automatically upload all my buildings and creatures, (they showed up under “My Creations”) but for some reason I cannot comprehend, the save file was not part of this. There’s only one save file, and if there is an upside to that limitation, save files following your account should be it.

Cat

My mom decided to go outside, pick up a cat, bring it inside, and stuff it in a box. All cats involved were upset. Wally, the alpha cat, ran away. It’s still meowing what I take to be its displeasure in being stuffed in a box against its will.

Because I uploaded that image with the built-in WordPress tool instead of cropping in Photoshop and uploading a single image, it’s fancy, meaning you can click to bestow upon it bigness. Mom says it looks like an adolecant male. This is very sudden…

EDIT: She put the cat back outside in the morning.

EDIT 2: Cropped now. Link is to full-size.

Compiling

Pat’s map that I was working on wasn’t done after I left it overnight and waited until after school. This is insane. I guess I’ll have to read up on level optimizing.

EDIT: Looks like the first step will be making all the columns func_detail, then once I learn more about area portals and hint brushes I could try those as well.

Alarm

I found out that my Fluxbuntu-Gutsy-powered box with 256MB of RAM had to use swap to play a sound file. This was upsetting. I uninstalled Xorg and Fluxbox and slim, (login manager) but couldn’t figure out how to add virtual consoles, which Fluxbuntu sadly seemed to lack. I somehow failed to install the standard C++ libraries, (I was too fed up to try to fix it at that point) and just installed Debian Etch. I installed BOINC and ALSA from repos, along with libasound2-dev (needed to compile Mplayer to use ALSA) and was pleased to find I could now run Seti@home, transfer files in over sftp, and play an audio file all within 256MB. (With around 4MB to spare.) Hooray!

Computer Move

I just moved all my Pentium 3s into the basement. I’m not too proud of the specs, but they do everything I need them to do. The things the current server doesn’t do (can’t? haven’t tried) are a Ventrilo server and a Source dedicated. I hope to get a Pentium 4 – the school is selling some. I haven’t been able to get specs or a price point on those yet though. Anyway, after Ryan came over and put the end (a female end, he found that easier as it doesn’t involve crimping) on the cable, I started getting ready to move my boxes to the basement.

I moved the cables downstairs just fine. I had to move the computers on to the floor. That isn’t all of the cables, I took this in the middle of setting everything up.

My mom wouldn’t let me carry them out of concern for my hips. (I wanted to, though.) So I had to wait for someone to carry them, and my mom wouldn’t do it because she’s having trouble with her shoulder and back. That left our neighbors – who are amazingly strong – to help. In the background there you can see the pile of faceplates I took off, and the case of the dead server. I think it still has a mobo and PSU in there. When I moved the stack, the floor had a noticeably cleaner spot on it – they were heavy.

The alarm is the only one left in my room. It is now inside the closet.

When I moved the switch, the router got its box all to itself. It has a box so its lights aren’t distracting at night. The speakers there are plugged into the alarm machine, which is running Fluxbuntu Gutsy Debian Etch [EDIT: Changed when I noticed that I was running out of my 256MB of RAM just to play a sound file. I uninstalled X, but didn’t feel like taking the time to figure out how to add a virtual console and whatnot.] and has a cron job to launch xmms [EDIT: MPlayer] to wake me up every morning. I used the nail file on that nail clipper to press the power buttons – they are recessed when without faceplates. I now use a paper clip.

Here’s a shot where I was trying to figure out where the keyboard port was by taking a picture of the back of a machine – there isn’t enough room behind the shelves. 🙁 You can see the purple label just below the green – it’s the lower PS/2 port.

Here’s the very machine that’s serving you this website RIGHT NOW! O_O Doesn’t take much to run Apache. 🙂

Here’s everything all finished up:

Another angle so you can see the monitor. I might want a KVM, but it wouldn’t be useful that often.

In the dark!

Oblivion

Oblivion still exists. Sadly Bethesda doesn’t seem to have improved the engine much for Fallout 3 – the characters still move jerkily, and the voiceacting still leaves much to be desired.

I finished the Theives’ Guild quest. It was pretty epic and the ending gives you very, very nice things. I’m also in the Dark Brotherhood now, and the quests are kinda depressing. OOO upped the amount of gold that was required to be fenced to a whopping 15,000! I had to go down lines of shops and houses stealing anything worth money that I could get to. I got it, though. There are lots of vistas – I mean that in the sense of breathtaking view, not in an operating system full of fail – to catch one’s eye.

In other news, I’m waiting for the impending school to happen, I’m working on a HL2DM map of my house, and I have confirmed that Oblivion uses nav nodes. Which is bad. Also, I called Cavalier (for C2) and a high-level tech was able to confirm that they don’t do any filtering or blocking. W00T!

EDIT: Thanks to Ryan, I am now able to begin moving my machines downstairs into the nice, cool basement! ^^ I am happy! He helped by putting an end on the ubercable that comes down from upstairs where the Intertubes come in.