Prepare For Takeof*crash*

Digging through my pile of older CDs, I found my Flight Simulator 2000 discs. I popped it in and gave it another whirl and…now I remember why they should never, ever let me anywhere near the cockpit of a plane. Not even seated nearby, lest I infect the crew with Bad Piloting vibes.

I do miss the ‘old-school’ slightly-less-realistic combat flight sims like F-19 and ATF though. You didn’t have to be a perfect pilot, and it was still fun to fly around and just Blow Stuff Up. Unfortunately they don’t run or look so well on today’s machines, and modern flight sims seem to be a dying genre, and overly focused on realism. I’ve been out of touch with the genre though, so maybe there’s a recent gem hidden away somewhere…

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I like The Onion, but they recently underwent a slight site redesign and now things are a bit…spread out. For example, the main stories are split into two pages now, which I didn’t realize at first until I scrolled down a bit after thinking that one of them seemed a bit short. The motive here is fairly obvious: get more separate page views in order to get more advertisements in, or entice people into premium subscriptions. Fair enough, we’re reading it for free after all so we don’t really have much room to complain.

When they go so far as to put each individual single-paragraph News In Brief blurb on a separate slow-loading page though… Well, I still don’t have much room to complain. But it’s still annoying.

Gourmet It Ain’t

If you’re really lazy and want to avoid showering, getting dressed, going out, and restocking on milk and margarine or butter, vegetable oil and water make an acceptable substitute in your Kraft Dinner. Only use a *tiny* little amount though, just enough to make it unstick and mix nicely…

Sucked Back In

Well, I was sitting around thinking to myself “Gee, what are you going to do with your copious free time now that the current project at work is wrapping up?” when I suddenly learned that the new Diablo II Ladder season has started. So much for all that free time…

I had put D2 on the back burner for a while partly due to a lack of time and partly because, despite the efforts of the 1.10 patch, the ladder realm had become tainted by hacks and dupes, and after a while there was also the lingering threat of the end-of-season ladder reset. No point in starting a ladder character if the ladder season’s going to end in a month…

Hopefully the hacking won’t be as bad this time around since there’s no new patch to introduce more holes (though it did still occur in 1.10, it was at least greatly reduced), and maybe I’ll actually get around to finishing off the Hell difficulty and completing the world event this season. There are also 23 new runewords, increasing the odds I’ll actually be able to complete one. There’s also some contest going on, though it’ll almost certainly be won by some bot-assisted 24-hour-playing kiddie…

Oh, and this time around I can connect with both my PC and iBook at the same time. No, I’m not dextrous enough to play both at the same time, but it will allow me to transfer items to ‘mule’ characters safely instead of the risky drop-on-the-ground-and-quickly-switch-characters-and-rejoin-the-game method, and having a second player in the game increases the amount of xp you get and the quantity of loot dropped, even if the second isn’t doing anything.

New Node Name Niceties

Tip for the day: Restarting ‘udev’ on a running system is a really, really bad idea if you ever want to see any of your pseudo-ttys again. I couldn’t log in via SSH or even start another xterm until I rebooted.

Otherwise though, it seems like it works fairly well so far under Slackware 10. The entries in /dev are minimized to those actually relevant to the system, and I can assign node names based on things like vendor strings, so my camera always appears as /dev/camera instead of varying between /dev/sda1 or /dev/sdb1 depending on what order I plugged things in.

As always, there are quirks. My USB multi-card reader only shows up as the basic whole-device node (e.g., /dev/sda) if no cards are actually in it at boot time, as is usually the case. In order to actually get at the files though, you need the partition nodes (e.g., /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, etc.), and they don’t show up. Unfortunately, with these kinds of devices, inserting a card doesn’t actually cause a USB event, so the kernel and udev don’t know that there’s now a card there on which it should go scan the partitions.

Fortunately there’s a workaround; you can force udev to always create the partition nodes with something like the following in udev.rules:

BUS="usb", SYSFS{product}="Multi-Card Reader", NAME{all_partitions}="usbcard"

Then I can access my SD card in the reader with /dev/usbcard1.

And, of course, the above pseudo-tty problem…

A Patriot Is You

Once again it is time to celebrate our country’s, uh, liberation from polar bears. Or something. Which I did by playing video games all day. Whoo.

(Seems like holidays are the only chance I even get anymore to do what used to be a daily ritual…)

And #173, Get A Life

Ugh, I really need to make a to-do list. Not that any of you would care, but I have to keep reminding myself…

  1. Get a haircut.

    Sorry J, but long hair is more of a nuisance than anything else. I really should get it done more often (last time was around Christmas), but I hate getting my hair cut. I hate my awkward attempts to make small talk. I hate trying to answer ‘how do you want it?’ when I have no real clue or preference. I hate being touched that way.

  2. Get an eye exam and new frames.

    It’s been a long time since my last exam and although my vision hasn’t deteriorated much, if any, it wouldn’t hurt to get the prescription up-to-date. And it’s way past time to ditch the aviator frames. I may be an uber-geek, but there’s no need to broadcast it so blatantly. :-P They’re getting fairly warped and beat-up anyway.

  3. Get new shoes

    It’s probably a bad thing when there’s a hole worn almost all the way through the sole… I really should put more effort into finding a *good* pair of shoes though, that won’t completely fall apart within a year. I’ve traditionally gone with Reebok walking shoes, but the construction didn’t seem all that great on this last pair, and I’ve heard good things about the Rockport ‘World Tour’ shoes.

  4. Take the Class 7 permit exam

    A Class 5 may be a ways off yet, but I should at least get the Class 7 redone just to start the timer on the probationary period, if nothing else. Now I just need to find the time to study and take it…

  5. Clean up and organize around the apartment a bit more

    Miraculously enough I’ve managed to keep the place reasonably decent, but there are still a few things to take care of. In particular are bunches of things like CDs, manuals, DVDs, etc. that get shuffled around from spot to spot a lot, often winding up just sitting on the floor by the desk. I need to clear out some more closet space for the manuals and get some racks for the discs, at least.

  6. Buy some new jeans.

    It’s almost comical just how poorly my current pairs of jeans fit me. I could probably shelter homeless people in them. It’s hard enough just holding them in place long enough to get the belt looped.

  7. Restart the diet

    Hovering around a point is perfectly fine, but finishing off that last 15-20 lbs first would be even better.

  8. Shoot myself in the head.

    For not already taking care of this stuff regularly at my age…

Does It Get HBO?

Though I’m not much of a Mac zealot, there were still a few things out of the WWDC announcements yesterday that caught my interest:

Cinema Displays: Oooo, widescreen. And, uh, HUGE — that 30″ screen is bigger than my living room TV! That one is overkill (meant for professional editing and such) and beyond my tech specs anyway, and the 23″ is still rather expensive, but the 20″ one is intriguing. I wouldn’t be able to use it with the iBook, but their switch to DVI makes it a viable choice on a KVM for the rest of the systems, and the hubs certainly don’t hurt. The new stand is also a lot better than the old ‘easel’ style that I thought was rather silly-looking and hard to adjust.

It is, though, just one more possibility out of a field of contenders for LCD screens, and I doubt I’ll be picking one up soon anyway. My ViewSonic 17PS may be getting old, but it still serves very well with a high-quality picture, so there’s not much of an incentive to switch to an LCD at the moment.

Spotlight: Hah, looks like Apple’s going to beat MS to getting metadata search capabilities (it won’t be in Windows until Longhorn in 2006ish). The devil is in the details though, and its usefulness will depend on how good it is at extracting useful metadata from files (will it be able to search based on GIF/JPG comments? EXIF headers? Comments in text-based files?).

Automator: Now this could be very useful. There have been times where I’ve wanted to repeat a task a bunch of times, and I knew I could probably do it in something like AppleScript, but I didn’t want to have to stop, refresh my memory on the scripting syntax, write the script, experiment, debug it, etc… This sounds like it would nicely cover that gap where something’s annoying to repeat by hand, but manually scripting it feels like too much work.

Too Close, So Far

I know a lot of people on the Net. Or, rather, I know *of* a lot of people. Would I call these people friends? Not many of them; I don’t really know them at a sufficiently personal level to think of them as friends. Acquaintances, then? Some of them, certainly. Many though, are people I know of by having been led to them through some other means (search engine, posting, referral, etc.) and they in turn aren’t necessarily even aware of my existence. A ‘fan’ then, perhaps.

On the Net though, everyone is equal. When someone’s name comes up via a comment or a link or such, it’s not immediately clear just what the relationship is; there’s often no distinction between a lifelong pal, a beer buddy, an acquaintance, or plain old hangers-on. As a result, someone’s circle of friends can appear to be larger than it really is.

This can lead to some odd behaviour, at least so far as I’ve seen. If a particular topic of interest comes up, someone may be inclined to comment on it. But, given the circles of friends that are already established, that person may also be afraid of overrepresenting their relationship with this group, and feel uncomfortable posting. Why would they care what some random bozo barges in and says, after all? Who are you to just show up and start spouting off? But, on the other hand, how else do connections get established in the first place? These circles had to start somewhere and develop somehow. Plus, those circles may not actually be as strong as they might seem to an outsider, due to the effect above.

I would imagine that there’s at least some portion of the Internet population who *want* to reach out to other people, but are afraid to, but for reasons that are often illusiory, but difficult to clarify. The question is, how do you break the cycle…

Smooth

Whoo, fully upgraded from Slackware 9.1 to 10.0 in just under two and a half hours. And without rebooting, even — uptime is still 77 days and counting…

The only major pain was updating config files in /etc, but even then the differences were pretty minor (Slackware’s major draw is that it keeps things pretty simplified and straightforward for power users, so there aren’t umpteen zillion layers of wrappers that get completely rewritten from release to release). The only annoying one was Apache, due to some loadable modules being moved around.

Now to see what all the hubbub over GNOME 2.6 and the new Nautilus is… Tomorrow. Zzzzz….

Update:
So far only two things seem broken: SpamAssassin had to be reinstalled because it likes to hardcode paths to the Perl library directories when you ‘make’ it, and the session startup path to ‘gkrellm’ had to be adjusted since it’s an official package now and thus moved from /usr/local/bin to /usr/bin.

I don’t really like the new ‘spatial’ method of traversing folders in Nautilus in GNOME 2.6; I like my directories deep and don’t want six gazillion windows open just from browsing through them. Fortunately though, it’s configurable. Somewhere…

Thanks For The Quick Turnaround…

A bit over a month ago I placed an order for the iRiver iGP-100 from a dealer in the States, and only just now did I get a notice that they’ve cancelled the order due to the item being discontinued.

Gee, thanks. Yes, it may be an older item, but when you claim you have some in stock and allow me to order it, I’d expect to, you know, actually receive one…

So, the search is on yet again. It’s a shame too, since the iGP-100 hit pretty much the perfect price/feature point for me, and they don’t appear to be interested in continuing that line of players.