Adny can has a blog?

Well, THAT was unpleasant.

2011-09-28T16:23:00.000+01:00

About a weekend or two ago, I picked up a good ol' cold virus and took it home to live with me for a while. Didn't mean to, but you know what public transport is like for these things. Anyway, that went about as can be expected and I was starting to feel a little more perky again by the end of the week, albeit with a bit of the Green Snot Of Death looking likely to hang around longer. And then I seemed to come down with another cold.

Colds aren't really a big problem for me, not pleasant of course, but it's just a cold. What is a problem, though, is that Green Snot Of Death. See, it has a nasty habit of lingering and making life unpleasant for months at a time, or until I actually get dragged to a doctor to be prescribed antibiotics.

So there I was, thoroughly miserable, nose dripping and yet somehow also blocked up solid with viscous gunk... feeling very much like I'd been smacked in the face repeatedly with a cricket bat. For extra pain, every time I coughed it felt like I was punching myself in the face from the inside. Painkillers were helping a little, but not enough that I could, say, sleep or anything. Appetite was another issue... it was gone. Completely. That's generally a sign that I'm actually ill, as opposed to just a bit sick, or whatever.

So... time to make an appointment with the doctor, which I did. As luck would have it, I could see $RANDOM_DOCTOR early today and for once I was fine with that (my problems with doctors are fodder for another time...). Better still, I was actually pretty exhausted and thought I might even manage to crash out and sleep.

The previous time I'd fallen asleep, I'd awoken a mere two hours later with that "Sleep? Oh, not for you, sunshine." pain so this time I made sure to have painkillers and a drink handy. I was also starting to feel a little on the over-sweaty side, so I threw on my trusty towelling bathrobe (when I get the sickly sweating, I sweat a LOT and nobody needs to have to hang a mattress out on the line to dry) and settled into bed. I did, indeed, crash out at about half-past ten, and fell asleep... And that's when it all went pear-shaped.

First of all, I'd forgotten to cancel the alarm on my phone that usually reminds me to take my melatonin on a night (my relationship with normal daylight hours is, again, fodder for another time) and that's set for half-eleven. So off it went, waking me up in a state of great confusion, not helped by the pain and a bit of good old fashioned feverishness.

Once I'd worked out what exactly was making the peculiar noises, located and silenced it, well, I was feeling a good deal worse than when I went to bed, but still pretty exhausted, so I flopped back down with the not unreasonable expectation that sleep was still an option. In a quite uncharacteristic turn of events, sleep actually was an option, as I discovered when I found myself experiencing one of those messed up, semi-lucid dreams I seem prone to when a bit under the weather. But never mind, sleep is sleep, so let's call it a win ---

--- and suddenly it's 1am and I'm awake again, in considerably more pain and a sopping wet bathrobe. "Ah, I see." I said to myself, "This is how we're playing this one then. OK." I mean, it's just a cold or two with a bit of bacterial unpleasantness, and I'll be at the doctor's in under nine hours'; all is as OK as it can reasonably be. So a little bed-drenching sweating is an inconvenience, but realistically it's not likely to go on for too long, especially once I get those sweet, sweet antibiotics pitching in with the bacterial thing so the ol' immune system can get back to any remaining viruses. Divide and conquer, and all that.

Best of all, I'd thought ahead! Beside the bed, next to the now thoroughly disgraced and silent phone, was a glass of Pepsi Max and some own-brand Lemsip cold+flu caps. Paracetamol and decongestant, just when I need them and a drink to wet the old whistle, then wash them down with. I was feeling relatively smug at this, which is not all that smug, to be honest. I mean, smug is quite hard to pull off when you're feeling like the victim of repeated cricket bat assaults to the face who has, for some reason, been wrapped in a brine-soaked towel. But, anyway, perhaps that's why it all went pearer-shaped.

I'd taken literally a sip of the delicious Max, then washed the two cold+flu capsules down with a small mouthful of drink when my stomach decided that it was feeling overlooked in the distress department. For a moment I entertained the hope that I might simply need to shamble as quickly as possible to the khazi to, ahem, catch up with some expedited digestion. But no. Oh, no. Apparently that tiny amount of liquid and the painkillers were going to bounce. Furthermore, leisurely shambling was no longer an option. This was going to have to be a frantic lunge.

"Really?" I asked of my gut, as I tried with only moderate success to compensate for the extra weight of my sweat-soaked bathrobe, "We're doing this now?!". "Yes." came the emphatic reply, and the little bastard wasn't kidding either, so off to the bathroom via the intervening door-frames like a squelching, demented pinball it was, where I proceeded to hurl a disgustingly unimpressive amount of pepsi/cold+flu capsules. Over the next fifteen or twenty minutes' worth of blasphemy enriched effort, sweat literally poured off me as my gut expressed its immense displeasure with my 'couple of sips of Max and some pills' antics.

How the hell a stomach can make such a long ordeal out of throwing up basically nothing, I have no idea. It even managed to require two 'goes' at it... I actually kinda passed out against the bathroom wall a little bit between them, but ol' passive aggressive gusty wasn't having that... so up I came for round 2. And up came damn near nothing to show for it.

By the time that was all done with, I was a wreck. Made worryingly pathetic small talk with Olga -- while appetite going may be a warning sign that all is not well with the Adny, when my natural snark has vanished, well... that's bad. It takes a lot to knock the snark out of an Adny. And of course there's precious little anybody can do for somebody else in that condition, so she just propped me up in a corner of the sofa where I drifted into merciful unconsciousness again.

Today is looking much better. Temperature is down to just over a hundred, Green Snot Of Death has been served its first Amoxycillin eviction notice, and I even managed to be interested enough in the concept of a slice of toast to cook, but forget to eat, one. The appetite might be AWOL, but at least the snark is back, much to Olga's relief.

I'm still not quite on speaking terms with ol' gutsy. I mean, when painkillers are what you absolutely need, right there and then, that sort of reaction is just not going to make you popular, now, is it. Perhaps I'll make it a peace offering of a garlic risotto tonight. That'll show it.

Missing icons in Firefox's menus...

2011-03-06T08:25:00.001Z

At some point recently, the various icons in Firefox's various menus disappeared for me. Oh, bookmarks, etc. still had their favicons, to be sure, but just about every other menu was sadly devoid of the icons I find so useful in quickly finding what I'm looking for. Disaster.

A bit of googling turned up a possible cause: there's a gconf key that specifies whether menu entries should have icons or not, and these days it defaults to off it seems. Hoorah! A easy fix... that didn't make any difference.

Maybe it's because I use KDE and not GNOME (my other boxes with GNOME haven't exhibited this issue at all...), but I've never really known Firefox to do anything other than assume that you must be using GNOME so I'm skeptical that KDE is to blame. Then again, KDE 4 is so delightfully GNOME like these days (Options? Nope. Retarded UI? Hell yes!) so who knows, maybe it did persuade Firefox to take my icons away with no redress because to allow me to choose whether they were would imply that the UI isn't perfect. (Seriously: GNOME folks think like that, and KDE is starting to feel that way. NOT what I got into Linux for at all.) Ah, but I digress...

Anyway, persuading Firefox that it should be showing those menu icons turns out to be as simple as adding a gentle, but firm, hint to userChrome.css:

.menu-iconic-left {
visibility: visible !important;
}

Tada! My icons are back and I'm happy again.

netbooting Ubuntu, a cautionary tale of NFS3 and tcp_wrappers...

2010-11-25T19:17:00.002Z

One of the things I like to have available on my LAN is a decent live Linux system that I can network boot into. It's incredibly handy for those occasions when you need to do something to, or with, an installed system that requires it not to be running.

This little tale starts a few days ago when I wanted to upgrade my Fedora 13 box to Fedora 14. No big deal, but I keep a copy of the old root filesystem on a separate partition in case of problems, said copy typically being made (e.g. with dd, and filesystem UUIDs, etc. adjusted as necessary) from a live Ubuntu. Why Ubuntu? Because it's really easy to network boot it, competent/complete enough for every issue I've needed it to fix so far... and sometimes it's just nice to see how 'the other side' does things.

So, anyway: my backup in preparation for my Fedora 14 upgrade. I told my box to boot from the network, selected Ubuntu 10.04.1 from the menu and watched the kernel/initrd load as normal, but then something I'd not seen before happened. Immediately after mounting the root filesystem, and instead of the normal live Ubuntu startup messages, there was just a string of short read: 24 < 28 messages dumped to the console, one per second. After a while it just gave up and complained that it could find no usable root filesystem. Same story for all the other live Ubuntus I had handy.

Uh-oh. Thing is, this used to work just fine. And, of course, I hadn't changed anything. Now, nobody has ever changed anything, right? Of course I had changed something, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

A quick google turned up something interesting about the order of the kernel arguments mattering (it shouldn't) and leading to that peculiar short read: 24 < 28 message. "Funny," I thought, "It never mattered before... And I don't remember changing them in the PXE menu config. wotnot either." Nonetheless, I fiddled with them and got precisely nowhere. Something was causing that NFS mount to bork, and I had no idea what.

So it was time for a different approach, and perhaps to get some more idea of what's going wrong... in the pursuit of which I tried mounting the NFS export on my box, which failed. Specifically it failed with an error message that left me even more puzzled: mount.nfs: Argument list too long. "WTF?!" I said, nonplussed. Naturally, I tried googling that and got pretty much nowhere. It's not exactly a 'normal' error to get from a simple mount command and, come to think of it, it's not an error I've seen in a long time -- typically it's caused by insanely successful wildcard matches in shell commands, etc., not by mount 192.168.3.154:/export/netboot/ubuntu-10.04.1-i386 /mnt/tmp.

By that point I was scratching my head and thinking "This used to work. Clearly something has changed. Something unexpected, perhaps. Now... What have I changed since I last definitely had this working?"

And then it hit me: My network had changed since I last knew for sure that it was working. Specifically, I added an extra router to provide wifi for guests, etc. There's more to the why than that, but that's a long, miserable, story in its own right, starring a Netgear D843G router as the villain eventually exposed by an plucky young Android phone and a single remote wget command. Anyway, the relevant part is that I now have an extra router/AP that thinks my LAN is the internet. It has a LAN of its own, of course, and that's actually a good thing since it means I can very effectively keep 'guest' wifi use under control. There's a difference between "Sure, use my wifi." and "Sure, use my wifi... and maybe rummage around on my fileserver as well." after all.

With that in mind, I'd added some rules to my hosts.allow and hosts.deny to explicitly allow NFS 3 access from my regular LAN but not from the 'guest' LAN. Shouldn't be relevant, right? Oh, but it was... and not just because I'd botched it.

Here's the thing: there's a few ways you can specify a range of IP addresses. 192.168.3.0/24 means the same as 192.168.3.0/255.255.255.0 means the same as 192.168.3. and I'd gone with the /24 version in my config. Error number one, right there: tcp_wrappers is old. Old and unloved. It does understand that form of netmask, but only for IPv6 addresses... and only just.

"Hooray!" I cried, having found the problem. But would you care to guess what happened when I corrected my netmasks by changing them to the 255.255.255.0 format? That's right: nothing changed. Still that short read: 24 < 28.

That's just not fair, really, is it. I mean, sure that config cockup shouldn't have caused those problems, but it was what had changed since the thing last worked properly... and, well, "Bother," said Pooh.

For the sake of testing, I threw an ALL : ALL rule into my hosts.allow and... suddenly... everything was working as it should. Live Ubuntu, mounting from a normal box: no problems at all. Aaaaargh. So it was tcp_wrappers that was causing the problem! But... WTF? That's when I decided to try the 'trailing dot' method of specifying the network... and... that worked.

So, to recap:

192.168.3.0/24 -- bad. That style of netmask is only for IPv6. Oops, my mistake there.

192.168.3.0/255.255.255.0 -- bad. No idea what tcp_wrapper's problem is with that. Smells of bug to me.

192.168.3. -- good.

Oh, for completeness' sake, tcp_wrappers also allows the use of asterisks as wildcards in some circumstances and I could potentially have tried 192.168.3.* but since it was now working and I had things to do, I didn't get around to trying that.

So, long-story-short version: for some reason a perfectly normal and valid netmask in hosts.allow was causing NFS to throw wobblies leading to that peculiar short read: 24 < 28 message and the equally confusing mount.nfs: Argument list too long. Who'dathunkit.

But do you want to know what the real kicker was in all of this? Sure you do, if you've read this far. And it's a real facepalm worthy one too...

The kicker is that the whole thing was an exercise in Forgetting Something Important: That extra router/AP is doing NAT, so everything 'behind' it appears to come from it... and it's part of my regular LAN. In other words: there's no bloody point in trying to restrict access to the 'guest' IP addresses, what I actually need is to restrict access from the 'guest' router's IP address.

Wait, it gets worse.

All this tcp_wrappers malarky is only relevant to NFS3... and the only things I export via NFS3 are my local package repositories and the necessary stuff to network boot things - all read only, and none of it even vaguely in need of protecting from accidental guest access. All the 'real' stuff is exported via Samba and NFS4. For what it's worth, Samba is easy enough to lock down sufficiently, and I've already done so. NFS4 is slightly more fun, and doesn't use tcp_wrappers at all, but a couple of simple firewall rules suffice.

Anyway, given the dearth of relevant google hits when searching for the two specific error messages I was seeing, I figured it might be worth sharing the story.

For the love of eye-candy

2008-05-20T19:31:00.003+01:00

Compiz-fusion is lovely, it really is... spinny cube, sproingy windows, neat effects - and even some stuff that's genuinely useful when it comes to organising today's clutter of windows. In short, I like it and find it just useful enough that I'd really hate to have to do without it.

Of course, since this is a Really Cool Thing that I really like, there are some problems. And, of course, these are problems that nobody else in the whole wide world seems to have suffered from, at least as far as google can see (and I've searched and searched and searched...).

I'm actually fairly used to not finding stuff with google - generally when I have a funky problem all I can find is forum posts by other people with the same problem, and maybe something in a language I don't understand that looks like it might be relevant, but isn't.

What makes my compiz woes so much more interesting is that for once I can't even find other people with the same problems. Sure, I can find a few people with problems that look a bit similar at first glance but turn out to be quite different, and I've read plenty of those pages just in case their problems actually turned out not to be that different after all. No joy.

It's not even one thing, either. There are three major problems I had with compiz, of which one is solved, one is mostly worked around, and one continues to baffle and frustrate me. Since I had such a bad time of searching for help on these problems, I figured it was probably worth writing them up a bit. Maybe I'm not so alone after all and somebody will descend from heaven to tell me how to fix them properly. Or maybe what I've discovered will help somebody else in the same position that I was.

Just to add to the fun, I'm unable to reproduce these problems on other boxen locally, even with cloned configuration. And, speaking of configuration, the problems exist for a completely 'clean' user also, so it's not some hairy old piece of config lying around in my setup. But, of course, only on my box.

Anyway... First of all, some background info: I'm using x86 Fedora 8, which has compiz-fusion 0.6. My boxen are all AMD/Nvidia based. The specific box that has the trouble is an Athlon64 X2 5200 with 2GB of RAM and an 8600GTS card (I'm using the x86 architecture to keep things homogeneous here). My desktop environment of choice is KDE (3.5.8), but again that seems to be irrelevant - the 'clean' user has the Fedora default of GNOME.

"Problem 1, if you were an ice-cream, what flavour would you be?"
"Choc-chip, so I could get smeared all over you and leave big splotchy marks."

Problem number 1 is the solved one - a simple change to my xorg.conf file sorted this one out, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Shortly before I started using compiz in earnest, I discovered VirtualBox and was happily using it to host various OSes for testing/compatibility/whatever. With compiz on the scene, it all started going a bit wrong... whenever the VB window resized there was heavy screen corruption around it. Occasionally the whole X server would crash. Not good, in other words. Smacks of driver/X bug, or similar. It's also worth noting that this problem isn't actually a compiz problem - the exact same thing happens with KDE's compositing manager - it's just that compiz is probably the most common compositing manager out there, and the one I had the problem with.

As it happens, as part of troubleshooting problem 2, I'd made some changes to my xorg.conf file as recommended in one of those 'not quite the same problem' forum topics. The specific change that lead to the problem seems to have been enabling backing store, thus:

Option "BackingStore" "True"

(Incidentally, that didn't make any difference to the problem). Removing that line from the xorg.conf file sorted out the corruption, and now VirtualBox is running just fine again. Yay.

"Problem 2, what would you be doing while you waited for me to get ready to go out?"
"I'd be looking at pictures of old flames."

Problem 2 is my "mostly worked around" one, for those keeping score at home.

I use the 'Animations' plugin in order to have the beam effect for minimised/restored windows, and the burn effect for closed ones. Oh, and some zooming for newly opened windows. All in all, it makes for a visually cool desktop that somehow feels a little more 'tactile' than one where windows just appear/disappear 'whole'. It gives the windows some sort of 'life', elevating them above being mere rectangular regions of a rectangular screen. And, naturally, I'm not willing to do without it. If my windows don't burn when I close them, they might as well not do anything.

So, what's the problem? Well, if I leave my box idle for any significant length of time, for instance overnight (or overday, I suppose - I tend to being nocturnal) then the next animation to be displayed gets jammed for several seconds. The length of the 'jam' seems to be proportional to the period of inactivity, and until it sorts itself out the entire X session is wedged. The effect is noticeable after even an hour or two of inactivity, but really comes into its own after a night/day or so.

What happens is that the effect begins to play, then freezes. So, if I close a window then the fire effect will render its first frame and then everything comes to a complete standstill. The same happens with the other effects provided by the Animations plugin, but not for ones provided by other plugins. My wobby windows are fine, my cube rotates, etc., etc. But that first 'animation' effect gets stuck, with 100% CPU load.

The box is still running fine while this is happening - I can ssh in to it just fine, for instance. I can't switch to a VC though - X handles that, and X is frozen until the effect finally deigns to finish playing several seconds later.

So, what's my workaround? Well, since the Animations plugin is the only one affected, and since I'm hardly likely to miss it when the machine is sitting there with the monitor off, I knocked up a little script that watches for the monitor being turned off by DPMS and disables the Animations plugin. When the monitor is turned back on, the script (re-)enables the plugin. Overall effect: problem solved as long as DPMS corresponds to idle time, which it pretty much does.

The script (and a little more info) can be found here.

"Problem 3, sometimes I feel like my clique is out of control. What alternative could you provide?"
"None. And I'd be sure to get you out of those shift dresses, too."

Ah yes, problem 3. My current Nemesis. The Unsolved One. The great Dunno. Etc.

I make heavy use of VNC: my 'media player' box runs Amarok in a VNC session, my IRC client is also running on that box and accessed via VNC. VNC is great - it's screen for X servers, and what's not awesome about that? Nothing, that's what. Sadly, VNC becomes a good deal less useful if you can't actually use it properly, say if certain mouse-clicks or key presses didn't work. And that's what's happening to me.

Specifically, I can't use the Control, Shift or Alt keys in combination with the mouse buttons. They just get ignored completely and the click happens as though I wasn't pressing any keys at all. Naturally, this makes it rather hard to do various things that require shift/ctrl/alt-clicking/dragging something - and there's actually quite a lot of things like that, as becomes abundantly clear when your ability to do them goes away.

My VNC client of choice is the standard RealVNC vncviewer as installed from the Fedora repos. Before compiz all was well, but now no modifiers. Naturally, I've tried some other VNC clients with mixed results. TightVNC has the same problem, but a really old tightVNC client I have lying around for some reason doesn't. Vinagre doesn't have the problem, either, but it's not really useful for how I use VNC.

So currently I'm stuck using an old tightVNC whenever I think I'm going to want to shift/ctrl/alt-click /drag anything, which sucks.

Try as I might, I can't get the other F8 box here to behave like this - it just works there.

Gah.

Best. Straw Man. Evar.

2008-05-09T12:21:00.002+01:00

Last night I watched a fascinating video on YouTube: 10 answers that every intelligent Christian must have. This video is a response to some other guy's video (10 questions that every intelligent Christian must answer) and far surpasses it in sheer pseudo-logical douchebaggery. But still I watched, and watched with a smile on my face, because I deeply enjoy well crafted irony.

This guy is awesome... he starts out by claiming that the 10Qs video is nothing but a set of straw man arguments, something which I suspect either makes perfect sense or not depending on whether you actually believe in God or not. But that's not what amused me. What amused me was the example of a straw man argument that he crafts in order to explain what one is. Brace yourself, it's a killer: If I can grab a box of crackers, you have no parents. Really. That, by the way, is a specific 'straw man' attack on the proposition that you have parents.

Best. Staw man. Evar.

How better to start an argument than by creating a straw man of a straw man, then tearing it down to show just how egregious straw men are! That loud clang was a huge lump of irony hitting the floor :-)

The rest of his arguments are every bit as bad, by the way. To be fair, he does at least attempt to answer the 10 questions, albeit with such impeccably douchelike logic that "attempt" is probably the best way to describe it.

On the bright side, I do now have a new phrase: crackerbox-grabbing insane.

Today I learnt...

2008-04-22T07:58:00.003+01:00

Been caught out in a deception? Or maybe you've had your woeful ignorance of some topic brought to light... Well, never fear, with just four simple words you can in all honesty contradict your accuser even if they're actually right!

Repeat after me: "I would say that..."

That magic little caveat can be used to prefix whatever you like, and best of all it makes the whole statement not only true but self evidently true.

Here's a fine example: A Conversation with Expelled's Associate Producer Mark Mathis

It seems to me that the words "I would say that" have an unspoken implication - a parenthetical "because otherwise I'd have to admit to being wrong, a pillock, or both"

But then, I would say that, wouldn't I?

Marketing... "Not really... the power of suggestion!"

2008-04-19T07:18:00.004+01:00

Excuse me while I blither a little... Having failed to get a good night's sleep yet again, I find myself sat in front of my keyboard and bored waiting for the missus to wake up. Hmm... let's see, Brain not quite engaged? Check. Bored, but with nothing much to say? Check. Internet? Check. OK, must be blog time.

I had a rather nice bagel for breakfast. It was a healthy bagel too, with "less calories than 2 slices of bread*". I have a couple of gripes with that claim, actually.

Let's start with the word "less". Why do people use "less" and "fewer" as though they are the same? It really, really grates on me when the wrong one crops up in a sentence (or, more likely, an advert). Is it really that hard to grok that "less" is appropriate for continuous values whereas "fewer" is appropriate for discrete values? Nobody would say "There was fewer water in the bathtub due to the leak.", so why do they not feel the same dissonance over something like "I had less ten pound notes than I expected." ? Is it because people are thinking of the money instead of the notes? But then again, "calories" is a continuous value... is the problem here actually that common usage typically refers to whole numbers of kcals, thus rendering calories discrete? Is it that we're referring to "calories" the unit (which is basically the same thing).

Bah.

I don't really care - "fewer calories", "less bagel". Hmm... Actually, there's a much better example: "less bagel for the money" vs. "fewer bagels for the money".

Where was I? Oh yes, bagels. With "fewer calories than 2 slices of bread*". Hmm, let's check that * out, shall we... Ah, here we go: two 60g slices of thick white bread. So that's 120g of bottom-end-of-the-scale bread. OK, I can believe that - especially since the bagel itself only weighs 95g. I guess that marketing didn't think that "Less food than two slices of bread*", or "More calories by weight than 2 slices of bread*" would get the package off the shelf and into your basket. And why stop there? "Fewer calories than a bucket of lard*!"

Actually, the claim has more to do with the subjective nature of the whole food/calorie thing. The point, apparently, is that a single bagel is as satisfying, if not more so, than two slices of bread* due to the more chewy texture... and all with fewer calories.

That's one of the things I hate about advertising, actually - it's manipulative. It doesn't matter how much we require advertising to be truthful, as long as it can be technically honest in a suggestive way, we're just as lied to as we were before. At least when adverts could get away with lying we knew not to trust them... nowadays people seem to think that "they couldn't say it if it wasn't true!" which sort of misses the whole gap between what the advertisers are saying and what their audience is hearing.

Of course, if one is aware of the difference then the ads can sometimes make for interesting viewing. Take a recent-ish ad I saw for (hair) conditioner, for example. This is a product that is very relevant to me, what with the long flowing locks and all. Now then, do you sometimes worry that your conditioner is actually stopping your anti-dandruff shampoo from working? No, of course you don't, and neither do I. But that's the question the ad poses as it opens, and by asking the question it tells me all I need to know...

First of all, if there was any evidence that conditioner could impair the performance of anti-dandruff shampoo, wouldn't they be leading with that? Or at least mentioning it? I rather think that they would. I mean, let's not forget that the "hair care" industry loves to present evidence of its claims, for example that shampoo/conditioner that can reduce breakage by up to -100% (they actually said that at one point - "up to -100% less breakage"... so that's, what, twice as much?! These days they seem to have caught on to the double negative). Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, that incredible anti-breakage shampoo/conditioner (which I do actually use and like, FWIW). That claim? Based on something like seven hair samples washed, etc. in a laboratory environment. Junk science, in other words, but necessary for the claim to be "meaningful".

OK, but what about my anti-dandruff shampoo? I mean, how am I going to get women to stroke my hair if my damn conditioner is conspiring against it? Argh! If only there was a conditioner that didn't do that... like, say, oooooh, most (all?) of them. And thanks to Head & Shoulders' advertising I now know that I don't need to bother with their conditioner, which I might otherwise have given a whirl.

Hmm, come to think of it, the first shampoo/conditioner I really liked (now long since defunct), back when my hair was first getting long, was "Finesse". A brand that claimed that their shampoo was "activated by dirt", like, oh I dunno, let's say: any detergent. Also, the conditioner worked more the longer you left it on. No, really. That's what the ads were pushing.

Anyway, in other news, wifey is now awake and enjoying fewer calories than two slices of bread*, so I guess it's time to make the internet-to-real-life transition...

sniff

2008-03-26T19:37:00.002Z

Today I failed, badly... because today it took me over eight hours to make a cup of tea.

OK, that's nothing startlingly new (although it is pretty bad, even by my standards). The whole turn kettle on, get distracted, repeat until actually getting as far as drowning a bag, get distracted, repeat... process is, thanks to the ADD, perfectly normal for me. So a few hours to make a cuppa is perfectly normal, even if that number is uncomfortably large.

What's bothering me is that today it took me eight hours to notice that the kettle wasn't plugged in.

I don't know how many times I thought I was reboiling the kettle only to get distracted before noticing that it wasn't working.

On the bright side, I nailed that cuppa on the first attempt once the kettle was actually plugged in. Yeah!

But still... Gah.

Night of the living Beebs

2008-03-13T01:40:00.010Z

I've just had a funny few days (well, nights really - but they're logical days to me, even if they're physical nights to the rest of this timezone). It all started with a box of Beeb Micros that were gathering dust (and worse...) in a friend's place, so were offered to me since it's well known that I just can't get enough of 'em.

So, Job no.1 was to find out what exactly what I'd just been given. Looked like a 128K B+ (yay! I didn't have one of these before) that was in very good condition, a couple of filthy Bs (issues 3 and 7, one with 8271 DFS) and a couple of Master 128s that were positively vile. When I said that these machines were gathering dust, and worse, the worse consisted mainly of dead insects, cocoons, insect droppings and so on. Keyboards full of gunk, with some keys barely readable through the grime. Filthy to vile, in other words. The good news was that all the machines with the exception of one of the Masters actually powered up OK, or with a bare minimum of the laying on of hands (i.e. reseating ICs) in the case of one Model-B. That's pretty amazing, really. There was also a couple of (mostly working) disc drives and a (dead) monitor.

On to Job no.2 then: cleaning. I'm fairly sure that it's not abnormal to be in the shower at 5am clutching a sponge and a 23-year old, muttering words of filth and tenderness. OK, so maybe it is abnormal when the 23-year old is a lump of beige plastic in two halves. Still, TLC gradually overcame the filth and that left me with some nice clean cases. Cleaning the PCBs was fairly easy - just dust them down, for the most part. No sexual innuendo required. That just left... the keyboards. A few hours' work ripping them apart, dunking things in soapy water, rinsing and drying them, and then reassembly and I was good to go.

Sadly, although I was good to go, two of the machines weren't really interested in getting with the program.

The previously working Master was now being intermittent. Maybe it wasn't working well before either - I did nothing more than power it on and type a *command or two - or maybe some piece of vital dirt was now missing. Either way, given the lack of socketed components in the machine, it was beyond the critical "worth the effort" point. As luck would have it, the problem with the other Master was in the PSU, so I had an entire spare Master transplant... and \o/ all was well. Having a dead Master wasn't the end of the world, either - I already had a sickly machine that it could donate some parts to.

Since I was putting so much effort into these beasties, I replaced the CMOS battery pack in the good Master, and used the dead one's pack to make a new one for my existing machine. Great fun there - leaking Duracell AAs aren't overly nice.

Final score on the Masters: I started the day with one damaged Master and ended it with two working ones in excellent condition (and some spare parts). Win.

I didn't do so well with the Beebs, when it came time to give them a more thorough test. One died fairly soon - and resisted all my efforts to bring it back. Again, it was past the effort/worthwhile horizon, so I let it go to be spare parts and/or wallpaper.

The second B seemed OK, and I went to the effort of fitting a disc interface to it before I noticed that it had some interesting problems - the screen display would (after a while) start to corrupt itself in interesting ways. Some letters (MODE 7 FTW) would change, others wouldn't. Given the characters that were affected, it was obvious that bit 3 of something was being lost. Not all instances of the characters were affected - it was dependent on screen position too. Worst of all, using the cursor/copy keys reproduced the bit3-deficient characters so that meant that the problem was in the CPU/RAM side of things, not the SAA5050 side. "Ah well," I thought, "this might make for a fun one to fix."... and then I noticed that after a time the corruption got much worse, and that moved it into the effort side of the effort/worthwhile balance.

Final score on the Beebs: gained a 128K B+ and a fair few spare parts, including an 8271 upgrade I didn't have before.

So, disc drives... One was fine, but only a SS 40T drive. Not the best news, but functional. A second SS 80T drive didn't seem at all happy, so I ditched it. That left a dual drive with one DS 80T and one SS 80T drive. The SS 80T drive wasn't happy, so out it went to be replaced by one of my spare DS 80T drives... once I'd dealt with the remaining drive. It worked, but only if I held the disc in the drive and pressed down on the clamp. Looking at it, it was pretty obvious why: the clamp mechanism was bent. A bit of fun and games stripping the drive down to fix that and I was good to go, so in went my existing drive alongside the new one... and failed to work. Seems that my existing drive's head-load solenoid was sticking. On the bright side, it was the same model as the new one, so I'd just had a crash course in stripping that type of drive down.

Final score: gained a SS 40T drive I'll probably never use, and a dual DS 80T drive that I will.

With my Beeb nostalgia freshly stirred, I figured it was about time to play with some of my existing machines a bit. "It's been a while since I played Exile!" I thought, and then on a whim read a little online about it. And now I have to play Exile - this year marks its 20th anniversary! And what better machine to play it on than the Master Compact... can't be beaten in terms of Beeb keyboard quality and comes-with-a-monitor-stand-ness.

New problem: transferring Exile from a 5.25" DFS disc to 3.5" one (maybe ADFS, maybe DFS - I can be flexible with these things having fitted a 1770DFS ROM to the Compact), or hooking up a 5.25" drive to the Compact... although the way I saw it, if I was going to go to the effort of hooking up a 5.25" drive, I might as well do it properly and transfer stuff to 3.5".

You might wonder why adding a drive to a BBC machine would be anything other than a doddle, but you see the Compact has a non-standard connector - it's a 25D that I (eventually) found corresponds to pins 8-32 of the normal 34 pin connector. Luckily, I just happen to have things like IDC 25D plugs and sockets lying around the house, and even a spare 'normal' beeb drive cable to cannibalise. So now my Compact has an external 5.25" drive as well... and I could copy Exile across to the 3.5" drive. Excellent. (I went with DFS in the end - ADFS would have offered me more space for savegames, but I would have had to disable the 1770DFS (and supply some 'placeholder' *DRIVE, etc. commands - hardly a big problem) to make it work and that seemed like more faff than it was worth).

That then lead to a bit of a head-scratch... did I want to stick with my legally purchased Exile (I bought a second copy direct from Superior about 12 years ago, shortly after buying a Master 128 to play it on), or skip all that "type this annoyingly located word in from the novella" malarky and use a version downloaded from the interwebs. In the end, I gave my genuine Exile disc a loving stroke (in its envelope, of course) and put my working copy back alongside it. Haxx it was, even if it did involve using a RiscPC to transfer the downloaded data to the Compact via an L-format ADFS disc.

Actually, I used two RiscPCs since my main one decided that then was a good time to die. It's most likely a problem I've seen before with the PSU, but I put all of that to one side because, quite frankly, I was fed up with b0rked machines and just wanted my Exile fix.

Then I had some fun with Exile's save game facility - it was often ignoring the filenames I gave and using the drive number instead. Freaky (and not something I remember seeing happen before). Worst of all, it was often doing it, not always. I.e. it was going to be a bitch to figure out/fix. I dunno, maybe it has something to do with using the normal version on a Compact (the Compact had its own version, necessary since the Compact has no DFS by default and the 'normal' Exile uses DFS commands). That doesn't explain the problems I had reproducing the glitch, but hey: I don't need to use the game's own load/save routines at all.

I really wish that I'd known just how optional the game's own load/save feature is back when I was first playing (and hooked on) Exile.

You see, Exile is such a big game that it uses damn near every scrap of memory that a Beeb has available... and that means that there's no room left for the filing system, so no built in load/save. The way that Exile solves this little conundrum (and believe me, Exile with no load/save option would be exceedingly cruel) is by having the load/save functionality in the loading program. The game itself, upon a particular keypress, squirrels all the necessary data away in safe spot in memory, corrupts the rest, and then hangs. You then hit ctrl-break to restart the machine, and run the loading program which allows you to save your game, etc.

Sounds a bit convoluted, but not necessarily all that bad, huh? Well, when I was first playing Exile, it was the tape version. So "quickly" saving my game actually took about twenty minutes. Really. No hyperbole used, because none is required. Ah, but I digress. So let's get back to my filename mangling problem and the hint as to not needing to use the game's own load/save features.

Since the savegame data is squirrelled away safely in memory, all I actually have to do is to save that block of memory to disc, and a simple *SAVE command will do just fine. (In case you're wondering, or have stumbled across this entry whilst actually looking for such info and made it past the showering with a filthy 23-year old scene, the command is: *SAVE filename 2C00 +400). Better yet, I knocked up a couple of quick programs in assembly to function as *QSAVE (to quickly save the game as Q.SAVE) and *QLOAD to load Q.SAVE into memory at &2C00 and then run the game. I still gots me some beeb-smarts after all :)

Naturally, something that was by this point going so well had so have a problem. And sure enough, this evening my Compact started doing something strange. Every now and again when I was playing Exile, the screen would corrupt - and then recover. I was a bit surprised that the game didn't crash, but screen corruption isn't necessarily that fatal for beebs. Master series machines have even more scope for "screen goes screwed but nothing crashes" since there's the possibility of shadow RAM involved.

And then things got annoyingly familiar. Every now and again, when I reset the machine in order to load/save, the normal "Acorn MOS / Acorn 1770 DFS / BASIC" messages would flicker into lowercase. A little (literal) prodding revealed that the issue was brought on by holding the ctrl key down which pushing the machine down onto the table. Pressing the underside of the case also caused the lowercase thing, and it would last as long as I pressed in a certain area. It was annoyingly familiar because, just like my dead beeb, it's a 1-bit difference (bit 5, if you care). On the bright side, there wasn't the extra "and if I wait a few more minutes, it craps itself all over the memory anyway" problem that the beeb had. On the other hand, the Compact would hang hard if I tried to do anything with it whilst the text was in lowercase.

So there I was, at "bedtime", with a machine that had a problem. A machine, furthermore, that I was very much looking forward to enjoying the fruits of my Exile-related labours with. So that most definitely lands on the worthwhile side of the effort/worthwhile balance. Just to force my hand in the issue, I'd actually downloaded the Master Compact service manual a few days beforehand.

Who needs sleep when you have a malfunctioning computer and a circuit diagram?

Long story short (cries of "too late" from the Airplane! fans), there are some plastic "support" thingies moulded into the bottom tray of the Compact's case. One of these had pressed a leg from IC14's socket (which is where the Acorn specific serial chip would be fitted if I had it) into the track that ran next to it and over time the nice green coating had worn away leaving a little patch of exposed metal. Once that had happened, all it took was a little pressure to make a connection and presto: the system VIA's PB5 was pulled to logic 1 in step with the SERPROC's ¬CS signal. Ouch.

I guess that when they said "THIS PRODUCT MUST STAND ON A HARD FLAT SURFACE" they really meant it. That alone would have prevented this issue, or at least massively reduced the chance of it happening.

And the moral of this rather long and mixed up story? Frankly, I have no idea. I was going to make some off-colour joke about fiddling with 20-year olds, but now I've forgotten it. Maybe I'd have done better if I'd gotten any sleep... Oh, wait, I have Exile and a Master Compact to play it on instead...

You gon' git yours, Triax...

Oh, and I guess I should fix my RiscPC, too :(

Hosting UT3 games... a truly daft solution!

2007-12-14T16:18:00.002Z

Update: it now seems that one can simply remove the STUN server address in the ini file in order to get rid of the message and host games successfully. I.e. change "StunServerAddress=stunserver.org" to "StunServerAddress=" in UTEngine.ini

So... read on if you like - there's info there on what the error message actually means, and why it's totally stupid - but the solution below is now even dafter than before ;)

(end of update)

Well, last night I finally got sick of that stupid UT3 error message telling me that my NAT was incompatible with hosting games, and that I should check my router's manual about setting up 'port forwarding' and 'DMZ'. Oddly enough, you see, I actually know all about that. You'll also note that at no point does it bother to mention which ports need forwarding, making this particular error doubly crap: it's misleading as well as eroneous.

Anyway, all this malarky started when Patch 1 beta 1 was installed, and one of the things that patch did was to add STUN support for hosting games behind NAT. None of the later betas or the final patch have improved matters in this respect, BTW.

Now, you may well be wondering what STUN is and why it's useful in this context. I know that I was. And, quite frankly, I still am. STUN (more info here) basically just lets an application find out the machine's public IP address (i.e. the address that the NAT results in) and what sort of port-forwarding is in operation. OK - so far, so good.

Where it all goes a bit wrong is that if, like me, you're behind a 'restricted' NAT (and you probably are, if you have any useful sort of NAT at all - especially the type that acts as a very primitive 'firewall') then UT3 throws its chubby little hands up in despair and gives that error message. Even that isn't the real problem, annoying as it is. No, the real problem is that UT3 then will not let you untick the 'LAN' option when creating a game.

STUN might be useful for some things... but in this context, it really doesn't help.

So, like I said way back at the beginning of this entry, I'd had enough. If UT3 wanted to use STUN to annoy me, then I figured that I'd also use STUN to shoot that stupid error down.

I'm on a LAN here, which is why I have NAT in the first place. And on that LAN I have a linux box, ee-i-ee-i-oh. Well, actually I have quite a few linux boxes, but just one will suffice. You can certainly do what I'm about to describe using windows, and even on the same PC as you're running UT3 but, since I haven't tried that yet, I'll stick to describing what I have done.

I've set up a STUN server on the LAN, is what I've done. It's not visible to the outside world, which makes it utterly pointless as a STUN server since the only applications that can query it are also running on machines on the LAN, and thus the result will always be "open internet" (unless some firewall rules on the box(es) interfere, of course). Just for added value, the STUN server isn't even configured quite properly either.

I'm sure you can see where this is going ;)

So now my UT3 is configured to query the local STUN server, which leads it to believe that it has a direct connection to the internet with no NAT. UT3 then quite happily hosts games because, coming back to the original point, I have read my router's manual and set up 'port forwarding' properly (screw using a DMZ - that's way beyond what's actually required).

BTW, hosting games matters to me because the only way to really enjoy the single player campaign is to play it multiplayer. Yeah, I know. But then using a STUN server on the LAN makes no sense either. I'm getting almost used to that with UT3 now.

OK, so here's the juicy details, step by step, of what I did:

Download the STUN server/client from here
Obviously, I downloaded the source and compiled it. If you're using windows, you'll probably want the precompiled windows binaries.

The STUN server wants to use two IP addresses on the box it's running on. Luckily, by stretching the point a little, you already have two with no need to muck about: your ethernet interface & the loopback interface. In my case, those IP addresses are 192.168.3.86 and 127.0.0.1, so I run the server like this:
./server -h 192.168.3.86 -a 127.0.0.1 -v
(that -v is just for verbose output so that I can see what's going on).
NB you do NOT need to be root to do this.

Check that the server is 'working':
./client localhost
That should return "Open".

Next up is editing UT3's configuration to tell it to use the local server instead of stunserver.org (the default). This is set in UTEngine.ini, which you'll find in My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame\Config (phew). Searching that file for "stunserver.org" is probably the easiest way to find it. Replace stunserver.org with the hostname (or IP address, I guess - I haven't checked that) of the machine your STUN server is now running on.

Now you need to actually forward the relevant ports from the outside world to the machine that you're playing UT3 on. All the ports are UDP and their numbers are:
7777, 7778, 7787, 6500, 13000, 27900
Disclaimer: I'm not 100% certain that all of those ports are required. Some of them probably aren't. I arrived at that list thanks to enough trial and not enough error, i.e. it works with those ports forwarded, but I haven't tried closing them to see what makes it break ;)

Enjoy public, non-LAN games! I know that I do :)

In conclusion: my 'solution' is hacky, dumb and should never have seen the light of day. Much like UT3 in its current state. -- zing! --

zomg UT3 is teh sux0rz :( Epic FAIL.

2007-12-05T17:57:00.000Z

Sad, but true: UT3 is 90% suck.

The eye-candy is spot on, for the most part: it does look very pretty indeed. Certain elements of the game's looks have come on in leaps and bounds - vehicles, for instance, look pretty frickin' sweeeet now. The maps are detailed and gorgeous to look at. The characters are pretty good looking too, although their animation still looks clunky and cartoonish.

Over all, visual quality is top notch. Indeed, reviewers everywhere seem to have noted this and heaped praise upon it, and for good reason.

Sadly, there's very little else positive to say about it. Vehicles (for the most part) handle a lot more like vehicles and less like bricks. That's good. Some have fared better than others in the "upgrade" though.

Scorpions have received possibly the most mixed blessings of the "upgrade"... Their blades are now at the front, making them look like Scorpions in an "Oh, yes! Now I see it!" kinda way. On the other hand, they no longer fire those tricky to use (but powerful) energy string jobbies. Now they fire frickin' Oreo cookies. I mean, really.

Not that those Oreo cookies aren't deadly. In fact, on higher difficulty settings in the Campaign mode you'll be hard pressed to find an instance of a bot missing its target with them. Ah, let me rephrase that: you'll be hard pressed to find an instance of an enemy bot missing. "Your" bots, your team, your AI chums... ah, not so much. Turns out that they're semi-catatonic retards.

That bot "AI" is a real bastard. UT3 has four difficulty levels: "Easy" (i.e. walkover), "Normal" (i.e. tricky at times, but not that hard), "Hard" (i.e. massively frustrating) and "Insane" (which I have yet to try, but based on previous experience I'm not expecting it to be even remotely possible).

Here's one of the things that's wrong, and really badly wrong: no matter how good you are, you'll struggle on "Hard" difficulty because your bot team mates are so mind-numbingly retarded that you'll wish you could teamkill them. If you're anything like me, once a match is beyond the point of no return, you'll spend those last few minutes (in overtime, natch) contriving ways to punish them. For some reason, the enemy AI seems to be spot on, however.

Time after time after time I've seen my "team" doing such retarded things as:
Dropping the flag (knocked off a hoverboard) and not bothering to pick it back up but just running back to base without it.
Deploying the Leviathan in a location where it simply cannot see anything it might want to fire at, such as nodes, cores, or even enemies. Hell, I'm sure that they only deployed it there (FOUR times in one particular match) because they couldn't figure out how to wedge it somewhere so stupid so that it was unrecoverable.
Picking up the orb right next to a critical node, and then running away with it. Go bots! That'll stop the enemy in their tracks.
Sitting in powerful vehicles firing shot after shot into the walls/floor. Keep it up bot, I'm sure that the seven-hundredth shot into that wall will actually hit whatever the fsck it is that you think you're targetting.
Jumping in the path of my just fired rockets/flak causing my messy death and a cry of "same team!" from them.
Taking the enemy flag and yelling "I'm under heavy attack here!" for as long as they live. You know why they're under heavy attack? Because the retards haven't even tried to leave the enemy base.
Sometimes they do try to leave the enemy base. But then tragedy strikes! Maybe they left their wallets in there, or something, because right back in they go! One time the retardobot made it all the way back to the flag stand, no mean feat I might add - and only thanks to my covering fire.

I'll not get into the whole "trying to cast a tournament game as a single-player 'story' like game" thing. The story kinda works in the sense that it more or less justifies the series of tournament games you actually play. I could have done without the cries of "fo' shizzle" and "you da man, daaawg", etc. mind you. What really spoils the "story", such as it is, is that it's short. Oh, and it has a blatant "sequel" ending on a par with Merchandising, oops, Pirates Of The Caribbean 2. After fighting both annoyingly good enemies and amazingly bad friends to get that far, you deserve more.

OK, so single-player kinda sucks. The single redeeming feature of UT3 over 2k4 in this regard is that you "can" now play the campaign through with your friends (or even complete strangers on the internet) replacing any/all of the bots on your team. That alone fixes the single-player campaign, by making it not single-player. Oh. Um. Errrr.... And, you see how I said "can" with the quotes and everything? Well, that's because it's supposed to be possible, but might not work out so well. My UT3, for instance, fortified as it is with the 1.1 beta 1 patch simply refuses to let me host anything because it's got some insane notion that my router doesn't have port-forwarding enabled properly for UT3 (which it does).

Anyway, enough "single-player" bitching.

Sadly, multi-player is annoying as hell too.

UT2k4 requires finesse... you have to flow around the maps... UT3, well... the vehicles might not move like bricks now, but the players certainly do. It feels like UT99 with lead boots on. There's no fluidity at all.
I read one review where the reviewer liked this because it meant that movement was no longer a vital skill in the game. Really.

Then there's the changes to the weapons... they feel nowhere near as meaty as they did in 2k4 (or even 99). It's a bit subjective and hard to pin down, but they just feel more tacky.

We've lost Assault, Onslaught, Double Domination, and Bombing Run and gained... Warfare. Okay, so WAR is supposed to be a mishmash of AS, ONS, and, to a certain extent, 'classic' DOM - and for the most part it is. But BR is just gone. *poof* It's a crying shame since BR is one of, if not the, most skilled gametypes in the 2k4 collection.

Movement, strategy, teamplay, thoughtfulness under pressure - all are vital to success in BR. And all seem to be playing a dim second-fiddle to the eye-candy and "mayhem" of UT3. This is most obvious in the WAR gametype... AS and ONS both required finesse and skill. In WAR the orbs turn the whole game into a much more frantic, deathmatch-like experience. The same's true of the translocator in CTF - it sucks now. Yeah, you can get around with it, but it no longer requires skill and finesse to use effectively, because you simply can't use it anywhere near as effectively as in 2k4.

I would say that UT3 is the UT2003 of 2007, but that would be being unkind to UT2003. Sure, UT2k3 was a massive leap forward in graphics quality, just as UT3 is, and yes it also sucked, just as UT3 does... but
oh boy does UT3 suck.

You might have noticed that I haven't mentioned the menus and UI at all so far. There's not anything in particular wrong with them, honestly. There's everything wrong with them. They're an abomination that should never have seen the light of beta-testing, never mind release. The only thing that's any good at all about them is that they whoosh around in a quite unnecessary manner. For that matter, that gets old pretty damn quickly and goes from being 'good' to being a bloody pain.

The whole GameSpy ID thing is a damn nuisance too, and adds nothing to the experience. Sometimes it completely replaces the experience with a login failure, for instance. Other times you might think that it's logged in OK only to find that your "Friends" list is now empty. Turns out that it isn't logged in anymore. No idea why. The only positive aspect that I can think of is that player's names will now be unique. Having been impersonated in the past (and by a foul mouthed, racist bot at that) I'm all for there only being one {R$A}Adny, however it's really not worth this much hassle and frustration.

Even the sound is a pain in the ass. There is no comfortable setting for volume. Everything is either too loud or too quiet. The announcer overwhelms everything.

Speaking of the announcer, one of the improvements in UT3 is that announcements now get 'queued' so that they don't get lost. On the face of it, this is a good thing - it always bugged me in UT2k4 that getting a killing spree, etc. with a headshot (very common for us snipers) would basically seem to pick which of the two announcements to play at random. Where this goes horribly wrong is when there's a lot of announcements quickly, and/or when some of the announcements are important and 'time-limited' in their usefulness. OK, a "killing spree" is nice to be informed of - but the enemy flag is probably more important. Throw in that bots' messages (and therefore presumably other players') get queued as well and you have near zero chance of a message concerning the flags, etc. actually being meaningful when you hear it. You can, of course, by means of fragging real hard manage to get so many announcements queued up that the pain never seems to stop. Yay. Bear in mind that the bloody announcer is so damn loud that it's overwhelming. Wonderful, it isn't.

Auto-taunts are a pain. Seems like every 13 year old prat just wants to sit and hammer those "taunt" keys at the end (or even during the normal gameplay) of a game. This is, to say the least, annoying. At least in ut2k4 you had some control over which taunts got played... fresh out of luck in UT3 - yet another feature lost. Maybe there's a cryptic ini setting you can twiddle - it's hard to tell, frankly. But I'm extremely annoyed that I even have to think about ini files in this context.

Something I've noticed, switching between UT3 and UT2k4 is that in UT3 everything is "bigger" and more cramped. It's all huge, pretty and in-your-face. Even the menus are 'designer' and intrusive (which is no mean feat when you consider that what they're intruding on is, in effect, themselves). Playing a game of 2k4 after UT3, all the characters look small and the corridors look massive. You know, with room to move.

My overall feeling about UT3 is that it is an epic failure. Epic/Midway have basically turned the magic that is Unreal Tournament into Yet Another Crappy Console Shooter Game. But, oh my, it is pretty. Sadly, pretty though it is, it stinks.

One word review: FAIL.

Plush WCC?!

2007-11-22T02:27:00.000Z

Oh dear. It looks like the Weighted Companion Cube toy is going to be a "plushie". There will even be a "furry dice" version for car owners with no taste.

I am, to say the least, disappointed. The WCC toy could have been cool. It could have been a stylish desk accessory. Now it's going to be a frickin' cat toy :(

I think I'll just make do with some papercraft.

Sound issues (or doesn't, as it happens)

2007-11-22T01:46:00.000Z

Well, it looks like I hadn't sorted my sound problems out, after all. Today when I started KDE I got that old corker: "CPU overload" and artsd quit. It did this several times, pummelling the CPU as it did so, of course.

"Enough's enough," I thought (well, in between the obscenities there was probably a couple of "enough"s, anyway).

I have a sound card that handles mixing in hardware. ALSA supports it quite nicely, so why am I having problems? Why does sound lag in KDE unless I set arts to use ESD (which leads to a slightly shorter lag rather than a full cure)? Why do I keep seeing things like "connection refused" when things try to use sound? Why is artsd suddenly burning up my CPU? Was there a second gunman?

All this trouble started with the new machine and new OS combo. As far as I'm concerned, I should be golden: I have a properly supported sound card (Audigy 2 ZS, SB0350 if you care) and I know from past experience (with SuSE / Fedora Core 6 + SB Live!) that this setup should "just work". For that matter, I have an SB Live! in another box that should also "just work".

So I'm looking squarely at Fedora 8 "Werewolf" as the culprit here... and Fedora 8 installs/uses Pulse Audio by default. Think you're using ALSA? Well, think again: the "default" device is... "pulse".

Maybe Pulse Audio will eventually be the answer to our prayers and bring Linux sound support bang up to date and even beyond the competition... but right now I just want rid of it so I can go back to my cosy ALSA world.

One quick "yum remove pulseaudio" later, which for some reason also took "kino" with it, but nothing else that wasn't an obvious part of the pulseaudio system, I was feeling a little happier. OK, so my sound was more broken now than before (OSS was fine, but ALSA was in trouble), but at least I'd taken some affirmative action and kicked some package butt.

Looking into the ALSA thing (strange that ALSA's OSS emulation would be fine, but ALSA itself wasn't, eh?) I was seeing "connection refused" errors. "Connection"? Ah... let me guess, it's still trying to use pulseaudio, isn't it? Yep. "Kino" might be so heavily dependent on pulseaudio that it had to be removed at the same time, but alsa-plugins-pulseaudio wasn't. Once more unto the yum: "yum remove alsa-plugins-pulseaudio"

And now I'm happy.

Let's see how long it lasts ;)

Sleeps?

2007-11-19T11:26:00.000Z

Well, that was a busy weekend... Lugging furniture around in the whole "moving house" stylee, and whatnot.

Utterly knackered on Saturday night, I actually fell asleep at just gone midnight. That alone is quite unusual, and welcome. Sleeps are good. Sadly, I then woke up at 3am and couldn't get back to sleep again. Less unusual, but much more annoying.

So Sunday was spent in a haze of being neither awake nor asleep... which is a shame since both sociability and mad-UT2004-skillz were required for proper functioning.

On the bright side, I did manage to get some sleeps last night... not that I feel particularly awake today, or anything, y'understand.

Sleep soon?

I hate "upgrades"

2007-11-13T02:11:00.000Z

The new box is built and working... so that means that it's time to install Linux and settle in. Naturally, the distro I'm currently using is being end-of-life'd very soon, so it's time to upgrade. Should be good, right? Shiny new hardware to run a shiny new Fedora?

Well, it isn't.

There's always some gotchas when moving from one distro to another, even when moving from one version to another. It's not that I expect things to just magically "pick up where I left off", or anything. I'm quite happy to do a little tweaking to bring things back to how I like them... but this "upgrade" has frustrated and annoyed me quite enough already - and I've barely started the process.

Sound support has always been a problem for me in the past, so naturally that was one of the things I was most concerned about with the new machine. One "quick" Fedora 8 install later (after one slow, painful failure to install - you'd think I'd have learnt by now not to add repos until after the initial installation, no matter how much the installer tempts you to) I was ready to go.

I'll skip the sorry tale of "The i586 Driver Packaged As An i686 One" because it's not terribly exciting. And besides, if livna didn't screw up at least one nvidia driver package for each fedora release people would start to think they'd got the wrong repo, or something.

I created a user (I'll move my own stuff in later, so just a test user for now) and logged in.... to be greeted by GNOME. Hmm. I don't like GNOME, and I keep forgetting that Fedora just adores it for some reason, so of course it's the default session type. Oh well, never mind - it's not exactly rocket science to select a KDE session instead, which I did. Safely back in my KDE desktop I opened up the Control Centre's soundsystem module and, with baited breath, clicked the "Test Sound" button... and heard nothing. My poor little heart sank.

And then suddenly the test sound started up. "Oh!" I thought, ever the optimist - heart in boots or not, maybe the sound system just took a while to start. So I tried it again. Same result. A little more testing confirmed that sounds did indeed play just fine - but about 2 seconds after they should have done. So I tweaked arts options a bit, but to no avail. It just wouldn't start playing sounds until it was good and ready to. Grrrr. Mr Google didn't have anything useful to say (at least not in english - I have no idea what all the non-english results said, but the fact that almost all the results fit into this category should provide some insight into just how little google had to offer. So, thoroughly miffed, I went to bed. It was, after all, 6am by this point.

Next day... Since I wasn't convinced that arts wasn't indeed the culprit, I tried sound in GNOME... and it worked perfectly. So arts was the problem. Bah. Some very careful googling turned up a page that mentioned in passing that you can make arts use the new PulseAudio wosname for sound by setting it to use the ESD, which I tried... and it worked. Sounds are still lagged a little (thanks to arts' buffering) but that's as good as it gets in KDE, so "W00t!"

By now I was getting annoyed at the fonts looking less than perfect, so went to turn on subpixel antialiasing with full hinting... only to find that I simply couldn't. The subpixel antialiasing tickbox was greyed out. Oh joy. So, having learnt from my sound tribulations, I gave it a go in GNOME... and whadayaknow, it worked just fine there. Shame I really don't like GNOME, huh? But I prefer KDE, seemingly in spite of Fedora's efforts to make it painful for me.

I'm well aware that subpixel AA and hinting are things that might be covered by patents, or some other such crap, but that never stopped me being able to use them in FC6... or in GNOME in F8. But in KDE, "The computer says 'no'." I checked the livna repo and there's a freetype package there, so I installed that... and now I can select subpixel AA in KDE, making me 'teh winnar!', or something.

Since I was clearly on a roll, I copied my homedir from the current box to the new one. OK, I expect some problems when keeping an old set of config files, etc. but generally it's not that big an issue and things get sorted out in short order.

And yet... and yet... My fonts still didn't look right. It wasn't the DPI - I'd already taken care of that. It wasn't the hinting/subpixel settings or any such, either. No, it was that they don't bloody exist according to anything I ask to find them. They're displayed on the screen, messily, but they're simply not in the list of fonts I can choose from. A little prodding later, I discovered that apparently "DejaVu LGC Sans Condensed" simply shows up as "DejaVu LGC Sans", exactly the same as "DejaVu LGC Sans" does. So, no "... Condensed" font, just the plain one. Which means that for all my config is specifying the font I actually want, and the system is using it, *I* can't select it. Worse still, the hinting on the font as displayed is messy. Looks like I lost my 'winnar' status.

Mr Google didn't manage to help me out here, either, BTW.

So here I am, using fonts I don't really like because that's better than the mess I get using the one I do like (and I use "DejaVu LGC Sans Condensed" *everywhere* - or, at least, I used to... sniff). My sound is working, as best I can tell, so that's a bonus... But still, it's taken me two long days & nights to get this far.

Hooray for "upgrades".

Now I've vented, I suppose I should get back to finding all the other problems and, hopefully, fixing them.

Bah.

The Great Betweendoors

2007-11-07T16:58:00.000Z

It's November now, and in Newcastle that means "cold". And where does the cat want to be at this chilly time of year? Inside where it's warm and cosy, perhaps curled up next to her favourite radiator? Outside, chasing hedgehogs as they search for somewhere to kip?

No.

The Great Betweendoors is where the cat wants to be. Why be inside or outside when you can be both! All the benefits of access to the garden, but with the added bonus of freezing your humans to death and/or raising their heating bills. Make them prove that they love you: let's see some financial outlay and/or suffering!

Cats, eh. Maybe not as smart as some folks would have you think... but they do seem to have a natural talent for knowing exactly where they can cause the most disruption and irritation.

I want a Turret!

2007-10-30T17:52:00.000Z

Well, I finally got my Orange Box in the post yesterday. Never mind that despite pre-ordering it it was a week and a half until I had that box (and dear lord, it's orange and then some) in my sweaty mitts... And never mind that before I could even install it I had to shuffle games between three drives to make space for it (and it certainly wants a lot of space for a game of its size)... No, never mind that at all: Portal rocks. The closing-credits' music alone was worth the wait.

The puzzles are fun, challenging (on the advanced/challenge levels, at least), and satisfying, with a fairly graceful learning curve. But what really made the game for me was the humour... the dark, dark, oh-so-cute humour. The first time I met a turret, I just sat and played with it. They're so cute that I actually didn't want to disable them.

What has me puzzled is that the Weighted Companion Cube is the thing that's getting all the attention. There's even fairly reliable talk of a WCC toy. OK, so the WCC is well handled within the game and it is kinda cute... but only kinda. It doesn't talk to you (no, it doesn't. Really, it doesn't. Weren't you listening?) like the turrets do. It isn't an adversary whose company you find yourself enjoying because everything it does is so sweet. OK, so not everything the turrets do is sweet... that whole spewing forth a hailstorm of bullets thing isn't that sweet, I guess... but that's the only thing they do that isn't. On the other hand, nothing the WCC does is cute because it, well, does nothing.

I can see that a WCC desk toy is something that would sell... it's definitely a 'badge' of portal-playerhood, for instance, and people like to advertise the things that they enjoy. But I want a turret toy! I want a sweet little white turret that doesn't blame me, in that sweet artificial voice, when I knock it over on my desk. I want it to ask if I'm still there. I want it to find me and say so.

Unfortunately, a good turret toy is probably a bit much to ask for. Ideally it should move the way that the 'real' turrets do, and that wouldn't be easy to do cheaply, or in a small-ish toy. Making it able to spot people in front of it is probably not too much of a stretch, but it is another factor that pushes the whole thing towards the 'expensive' end of things. I'm sure that it could be done but, alas, I'm also sure that it could only be done well for more money than I'm likely to be able to justify spending on it.

But still... I want a turret!