Month: December 2005

Sick as a dog

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Santa brought me a wicked cold for christmas. I haven’t been sick in over 3 years, so I guess I was due. Still, it’s no fun. Sadists can enjoy webcam shots of me suffering on my living room floor watching endless hours of tv. Always one to look for the positive side, I’ll note that I’ve watched quite a few excellent movies, including The Chumbscrubber, Enron: the smartest guys in the room, Serenity, The Constant Gardener, Oldboy, plus a couple of others I’ve already forgotten. I also think I’m on the road to recovery since my head is feeling slightly less foggy today. We’ll see what tomorrow brings, as they say. Now back to my living room floor – today I’m going to try and do a little reading, with one of my christmas gifts:

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell : A Novel

On tap.

Christmas 2005 wishlist

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It’s that time of year again – the family are looking for a christmas list. Here it is.

I could use upscale casual clothes, the kind of stuff I wear to work – wrinkle free slacks (34 waist 32 length), wrinkle free shirts (I wear a large), basically anything you think I could wear to work. I’m good on jeans though.

Joe Boxers. ONLY joe boxers, no brand subsitutions.

I need a mid-season coat, something to wear in the fall and the spring. Heavier than a fleece, lighter than my winter parka. I had a nice coat kirsten got me several years ago for this, but I’ve worn it out.

I keep a wishlist in my wiki, see: http://www.metamusing.net/wiki/index.php/DavesWishList. Of the things there, I would especially like DragonQuest VIII:

PS2 Dragon Quest VIII

or Shining Force Neo as a fallback:

PS2 Shining Force Neo

or a pc game:

Battlefield 2: Special Forces

(that’s the expansion pak to Battlefield 2 above, called Battlefield 2: Special Forces. Hopefully Amazon will add a pic soon enough)

I ask for a version of something like this every year. I have the world’s most complicated home stereo setup, and it’s only going to get worse this year with all the new consoles coming out. Everyone chip in and buy me one of these:

Harmony 880 Remote Control

I really want a Gamepark GP2X. You have to import them, they’re manufactured in South Korea. They go for under $200. Everyone chip in! Lik-sang is a reputable vendor I’ve dealt with a number of times. It’s everything cool about the PSP except the wifi. Order one quick if you are going to go this route, it has to get shipped from Hong Kong.

Ok, so you’re not brave enough to order something from overseas for me? Get me the Nintendo DS mario kart bundle. I want the GP2X more but if you waited till the last minute, this is an acceptable substitute:

Nintendo DS Mario Kart Bundle at Amazon

I need a coffee table. Surprise me. Smallish, preferably with some storage – by way of example check out the KOLSVIK at ikea.

I have a minor fetish for pens. Surprise me.

My amazon wishlist is chock full of books I want. I got on a zombie kick around halloween and added a ton of stuff, best to ignore all the zombie books. It will take me the rest of my life to work through those. Some suggestions from my list:

Red Mars (Mars Trilogy)

The Winter King: A Novel of Arthur (The Warlord Chronicles: I)

Astute observers will note a lot of the items on my amazon wishlist are out of print or otherwise unavailable. Surprise me with a couple of those.

I have a thing for keyboards. My current object of obsession:

Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard

Though you may be tempted to do so as the ultimate in surprises, do not buy me an xbox 360. They’ll be at least $100 cheaper when they PS3 ships and whatever reliability issues they’re having right now will be sorted out.

I crave a 19″ 4:3 <8ms monitor with dual dvi inputs. Since only Jesse will understand that, buy me a newegg gift certificate instead and I will put it towards the monitor.

I crave an ipod nano. Buy me an apple gift certificate and I will put it towards one.

I need a pair of insulated snow pants.

I need a pair of snowshoes. Modern light weight ones.

Find me the world’s coolest light-weight walking stick.

Ok. That should be enough variety for everyone, I’ll stop here…. err wait, no – one more wish: Bush in chains. Now I’m done.

;-)

Webcam finally live

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Believe it or not I’ve been trying to get a webcam working with this site for its entire existence, more than 6 years now. I actually had one running briefly back when I was running this site using windows and IIS, but that experiment didn’t last long (the OS I mean), and neither did the webcam. The problem has been getting appropriate drivers for the webcam working – back in the days of serial cams, no one, and I mean no one, outside of uber uber geeks was working on that stuff, and of course the camera manufacturers paid no attention to producing drivers for Linux. These days lots more folks are producing drivers but it’s still an issue of needing pretty good linux chops and the right camera to get things going. Needless to say, as you can see from the link in the column to the right, I’ve finally managed it. Kudos go out to the following folks:

Christian Magnusson, for his almost working set of drivers for the USB Quickcam Messenger I have.

hugelmopf and the other contributors to the ubuntuforums.org thread that helped me tweak Christian’s script such that it would work on my ubuntu-based box.

Erik Bosrup, and Kathleen More for their javascript, which I used to get the cam pics onto my site.

The webcam pic will update every 3 minutes, though depending on how you’ve set your browser’s cache you may need to force-reload the page to get a new picture to show. If you catch me doing something embarrassing or amusing, send the picture along and I’ll put it in my image gallery.

World of Warcraft 3d map and model viewer

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If you’ve got a pc and are playing World of Warcraft, check out the WoWmodelview and WoWmapview, which let you fly through the World of Warcraft world and examine the 3d models in the game. This is kind of spoilerish in that you can take away some of the fun to be had exploring the world and discovering new monsters, but it can also be helpful if you’re struggling to work your way through one of the game’s instance dungeons and want to explore it offline without the penalty of dying repeatedly. Both are free, open source and relatively small downloads.

Promising new open source RPG

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I love tactical rpgs. They’re one of my favorite gaming genres, and I buy and play almost every one that’s released, often even the stinkers. One of the kings of the genre is Square’s Final Fantasy Tactics, a game I’ve spent more time playing than perhaps anything aside from the Civilization series of games. I was psyched to discover that there’s now an open source project to develop a cross-platform tactical rpg engine inspired by classics like FFT. It’s called Galaxy Mage, and while it’s in very early alpha it’s already in a state where you can play it – there are a couple of maps, a couple of unit types, a rudimentary AI, and a working 3d graphics engine. If the genre interests you this is one to watch, here’s hoping it becomes as succesful as projects like Battle for Wesnoth.

Retail mame cabinet a bust…

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…so now I want to build my own. Check out this excellent and well-reviewed set of instructions for building a mame cabinet. Not to expensive – leaving out the cpu and monitor my guess is this cost well under $300. This is going to be my spring project, though I will probably go with an lcd monitor and a small form factor pc to power it.

Free battlefield 2 clone

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A bonus friday fun link for everyone – check out warrock, a free battlefield 2 clone from South Korea. It’s a free download and well worth checking out if you like team and class-based first person shooters with vehicles. The graphics aren’t up to the level of Battlefield 2, but it’s an otherwise competent riff on the same theme and runs on lower end hardware. You can’t beat the price either. Mind, if you’re going to check it out make sure to use Internet Explorer, their website is awful and firefox has some difficulty with it. Also note that you’ll have to register to play, and as you might expect this is Windows only.

The dumbest system administrator ever

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I shall name no names, nor will I say at which job I encountered this, to protect the not so innocent and the more than slightly dumb. At one of my places of employment we ran Apple Xserves. I’m not a big fan of them, but whatever, they’ve done their job more or less. Anyway at one point we had installed a new machine in the racks and I was busily installing its software layer. I noticed performance was pretty sluggish but didn’t give it a lot of thought, I figured I would get to the bottom of it as I went through the install process. As I walked out to lunch I noticed the screen of the laptop of a coworker of mine and one of the main system admins, a brand new laptop, running an opengl screensaver at an atrocious framerate. I made an offhand comment about poor performance and he got a gleam in his eye. ‘You know what that is? come here!’ He proceeded to show me how he had configured our brand new xserve to run an opengl screensaver, then connected apple’s remote management tool to the machine across the network, and he was streaming the video from the xserve to his laptop.

!!!

Nevermind the overhead of running an opengl screensaver on a server, which is bad enough, he compounded it by some incalculable order of magnitude by streaming it across the network. This fellow was the main web systems administrator and this was not an issue of him thinking he would just experiment with a new box – he was surprised when I started berating him for wasting system and network resources. It hadn’t occurred to him that these might be issues.

He lost access to the server that day, right after lunch.