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[Mar. 19th, 2008|04:56 pm] |
Four days ago, I moved to InsaneJournal. To clarify that a bit: I'll continue to read my friends page here and comment on entries, but I don't plan to post to this journal in future. Some possible options for reading my journal are:
- Read it on LiveJournal: just add
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) chris_boyle (same as shortcipher_ij) and my entries will appear on your friends page almost exactly as before. Public posts only, but that's nearly everything.
- Read it on InsaneJournal: add
![[info]](http://chris.boyle.name/images/userinfo.gif) shortcipher. You can do this either by using OpenID (enter yourusername.livejournal.com) or by creating an InsaneJournal account.
- Read in an RSS reader: use this feed (again, public posts only).
If you haven't done one of these (looking at the new readership vs. the old, that's most of you), I'd appreciate it if you'd ( tell me why ) |
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| LieJournal: [sic] and tired of all of this |
[Mar. 15th, 2008|09:46 am] |
I'm moving to InsaneJournal. Add me as shortcipher there, or shortcipher_ij here (public posts only and there are some old entries atm, sorry). Geekier post about migration coming soon.
To the management and owners of LiveJournal, ← (can anyone suggest the best place to send this?) Summary: paid user leaving LiveJournal because of issues of culture and communication ( An open letter )
Last one out, lock the door. |
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| Half-Life withdrawal symptoms |
[Feb. 26th, 2008|05:23 pm] |
In my typical fashion of being late to the party for this sort of thing, I first encountered Half-Life in about 2001/2002, by finding the Half-Life: Platinum Pack (or something very similar; it came with the t-shirt in this userpic) in a game shop bargain bin. This looks worth a try , I thought. Impressed would be one word for my reaction on playing it. Addicted would be another; after finishing everything in the box I was somewhat left hanging. More recently, I've had much the same experience with The Orange Box: having grudgingly ignored Half-Life 2 when it came out (for want of sufficiently powerful hardware) and subsequently mostly ignored Windows games more generally by eschewing a native Windows install when building apollo (my current machine), I didn't notice when Wine became able to run Source/Steam. Hearing people raving ecstatically about Portal and the rest of the orange bargain, I discovered that by then it was able and gleefully set out to acquire a copy. (Another pleasant surprise was that just entering the CD key for my previous purchase into Steam gave me the Steam equivalents plus Blue Shift and Day of Defeat, saving me trying to get the original CD to play nicely with Wine.)
So here I am again, having charged headlong through HL2 and the rest of its runty children so far and, effectively, run smack into an Under Construction sign. Half-Life 2, Episode 3, Millwall 1 isn't expected to be released for some time . Woe. However, help is at hand: my aforementioned lateness means there's been time for a good few third-party mods to appear as well. HL1 mods abound; I can particularly recommend Poke646 and its sequel, Vendetta (amusingly, the protagonist of these has, modulo spelling, the same name as my employer's former CTO). I can also recommend Someplace Else, but, most of all, its HL2 sequel, MINERVA: Metastasis. Just… wow. The author, being a one-man band, seemingly hasn't the time/resources to put in voice acting or friendly NPCs like Alyx, but the level design is every bit as good as Valve's (better, in places) and if they haven't offered him a job yet, they're missing out.
Another current source of HL-related fun for me is level editing. As of my last (fairly recent) check, I can't get recent versions of Valve Hammer Editor to run in Wine (Hammer draws its views of the map using strange DirectX hackery that shows up in Wine as a mostly-black window). Happily, there is QuArK, which, as well as being more Wine-friendly, has some improvements over Hammer (e.g. negative polys, duplicators (think staircases), other pseudo-preprocessor-macros, groups). Unfortunately it lacks model/lighting previews, but it's under active development. What am I doing with all this? Well, as an initial learning project, Normality (home) and the surrounding area. I tried this using Hammer (which may still have been called WorldCraft) some years ago with my parents' house, but ran out of patience and, in places, hit limits of the HL1 engine (e.g. number of switchable lights). Unfortunately I don't have the file to compare progress, but with the better editor and more powerful game engine / machine, it's much more fun this time around. As a template for the surrounding area, I've placed the whole thing on some Google Maps aerial photos. For that reason and others, I don't intend to release this map, but it'll be an entertaining way to try out what-ifs of furniture/redecoration/extension. HL2 players out there, who among you hasn't ever wanted to rearrange your house with a Gravity Gun, or race the HL2 vehicles on the nearby roads? :-) |
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| Bwahahahaha |
[Feb. 12th, 2008|12:43 pm] |
UserFriendly.org is very much +1 Insightful this morning. I already wanted to post about media distribution, so here goes:
Why do people blindly believe the unsubstantiated claims that piracy copyright infringement is solely responsible for the decline in music/film sales? Especially the claim that it costs them millions , and similar waffle, repeated as a mantra by an industry with its head in the sand? One cannot simply take an estimate of illegal downloads, multiply it by the price or profit on a CD, wring ones hands in despair and claim to be losing a lot of money on the basis that clearly all those people would have bought CDs. They've been doing just that for years, though. Journalists and, worse, some powerful politicians seem to believe them.
They don't even have the excuse that they're doing it for the benefit of the artists:
The RIAA is asking the Copyright Royalty Board to lower songwriter royalties on song file downloads, from the present rate of 9 cents per song — about 13% of the wholesale price — down to 8% of wholesale. Meanwhile, the big digital music companies, such as Apple, want the royalty rate lowered even more, to something like 4% of wholesale. So any representations by any of these companies that they are concerned for the 'creators' of the music must henceforth be taken with a boxcar-load of salt. (via)
Oh, woe is me, won't somebody please think of the starving record executives. Going back to UF: they are obsolete. Artists can sell and advertise to the world without their assistance now; some have been brave enough to do so. This gives them more income and a lower selling price: everybody wins. I think, economically, there is no reason for these organisations to exist anymore; I just wish people (especially artists) would notice this a bit faster, so we can get rid of them before they do any more damage. |
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| LastGraph / why I listen to so much gothy bleep |
[Feb. 8th, 2008|03:51 pm] |
For those who use last.fm, a random cool thing: LastGraph. Give it your last.fm username and a date range, and you'll get a "wave graph" showing which artists you've listened to in that time and how much, in PDF and SVG. Here's my graph (PDF), starting in January last year, just before I started listening to streams from last.fm. It's a much better view of things than the charts available on my last.fm profile: you can see how I've listened to numerous artists, some of which I've liked and kept listening to, and how my tastes have changed over the past year.
Currently my listening habits seem to be approximately centred on the tuneful end of what's played at The Calling. A good example is Mind.In.A.Box, whose album, Crossroads, I've recently bought (I've never heard that particular group played at The Calling; if any of the DJs are reading this, could we change that?) That's because these days I mostly listen at work and I find that style about right as a background for that. At a concert or when sitting around not doing anything important, I love listening to the Wise Guys, who are engaging, funny and often moving too. When I'm coding, I really don't want that; I just want something tuneful, not too distracting, active/bouncy (so as not to send me to sleep) without being cheesy. It's the last of those that's largely the explanation for the tendency towards darker, gothy stuff; I think very few more mainstream bands get that right. My favourite example of one that does is The Feeling, despite the quote on that page: Don't fear the cheese, embrace it. Contrast that light-heartedness with groups who try to write terribly serious stuff and fail (except perhaps from the point of view of the average teenager, hence their success).
What about you lot? Those who write code (or do vaguely similar work) in particular, what do you listen to? |
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| A naive question about lorries |
[Jan. 24th, 2008|12:54 am] |
Prompted by my driving to Coventry and back today (I haven't done that for a while). I've never quite understood this one; someone explain it to me please? (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) gerald_duck, I'm looking mainly at you here.)
How, on $DEITY's green earth, have we ended up in the situation where all HGVs appear to be limited to very slightly different speeds around 60mph and it is legal (AFAIK) for them to attempt to overtake each other on two-lane roads such as the A14, painfully slowly, over the course of about a mile, jamming up dozens of following vehicles? The total time lost to occupants of following vehicles due to this phenomenon seems large. More importantly, so does the increase in accident risks, considering typical impatiently short following distances.
Have there ever been any attempts to get a law passed banning overtaking with a speed difference of less than ~4mph (at least, when there are only two lanes)? If so, what was the outcome? |
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| Of journals, other sites for them, feeds, OpenID, lions, tigers, bugs etc. |
[Jan. 10th, 2008|03:20 pm] |
Since Lupie unfortunately had to move her journal again and I keep seeing people asking how to keep track of such journals on other sites from LiveJournal, or at least all in one place, I thought I'd write up an explanation here so I don't keep saying the same things in comments.
( You're off the edge of the map, mate. Here, there be monsters. :-p ) |
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| Snippets |
[Jan. 3rd, 2008|12:58 pm] |
- Snow! I predict that by the time I want to get home tonight, there'll be a crash somewhere and the A14 will come to a complete stop, followed as usual by all of Cambridge.
- Stomach bugs! I predict that some kind soul will give me (or worse, Susan) this
gift that keeps on giving at some point.
- On a more positive note, for anyone else who's been looking for the blunt instrument required to persuade all ALSA applications to use, say, card 1, which in my case, at work, is my USB headphones (Last.fm is particularly problematic and baulked at the few .asoundrc tricks I tried), a fairly easy way is to set the environment variable ALSA_CARD to 1 (e.g. by putting ALSA_CARD=1 in /etc/environment).
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| Mindless link propagation |
[Dec. 18th, 2007|09:45 am] |
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| Google Reader notifier |
[Dec. 5th, 2007|10:57 pm] |
 The bad news is I have a mysterious ear-blocking toothachey lurgy. The good news is I finally got around to hacking together a Google Reader notifier in 66 lines of Python to sit in my GNOME system tray and light up when I have new items. At the moment, that's all it does and configuration is a matter of editing the script. Improvements (browser launching, config UI, Free images) to follow in my copious free time. It does at least mean I don't now have to keep Firefox open to keep an eye on Reader (my previous monitor for it was a Firefox extension). :-) If you use GNOME, please do take a look, poke holes, send patches (I should be so lucky) etc. |
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| Strange blank screen bugs, or, I want my /dev/tty1 back! |
[Nov. 16th, 2007|03:20 pm] |
Dear Lazyweb (or at least the geekier portions thereof),
My Ubuntu desktop at home has a strange problem (or rather, two possibly related problems) for which I'm hoping someone on this flist can give me a clue.
( Here There Be Monsters / Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here / etc. )
Edit: solved. I bought a new graphics card (still AGP 8x nVidia, but more features and more memory) and the problems went away. |
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| Ruddigore, Pirates, The Orange Box |
[Nov. 14th, 2007|12:20 pm] |
 Ruddigore, Wednesday to Saturday next week, 8pm at the Robinson College Auditorium, £7/£5. Also, if you play an instrument and are free on any of those nights, get in touch with Debbie Murray (email dfm30) as we'd like a slightly bigger orchestra. I'll be in the chorus as usual.
Also, next term's show is The Pirates of Penzance, which was my first encounter with G&S back at Warwick and is, I think, my favourite of those I've seen. This one will be at the Arts Theatre and will be a lot of work, but very much worth doing. :-) Auditions, if anyone else wants to take part, are 7:45-10 tonight at Catz Chapel, and tomorrow (7:45-10) and Friday (7:15-10) in the Lloyd Room at Christ's. Not sure when I'm going yet.
In other news, I can thoroughly recommend The Orange Box. I recently finished Portal, and loved every minute of it, especially the ending song, Still Alive. Even better, that and Half Life 2 (so presumably the other games too) work fine in Wine; I've been playing them on Ubuntu. :-) |
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| We have net access |
[Sep. 18th, 2007|11:40 am] |
At 07:06 today, our doorbell rang. I think I might well have just slammed the door shut again had it not been ParcelFarce with something plausibly router-shaped. As of 07:22, we have 4544 kbps downstream and 416 kbps upstream. I've even persuaded my Linux desktop to speak WPA. I'm happy now. :-) |
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| Dear LazyWeb, |
[Sep. 6th, 2007|11:29 pm] |
DoeS aNyBody know a good LaTeX reference book? Ta. |
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| We have Normality |
[Aug. 20th, 2007|01:35 pm] |
I hate wasps. There was a nest (possibly under construction) in the wall near an air vent in the bedroom; wasps were going in and out of the outside surface of it fairly constantly. I was stung thrice; the first sting was on my left wrist and woke me up at 6am on Saturday. I had nothing in the house and had to drive to Tesco to get something to treat it (which obviously took a while), so my hand has since blown up like a balloon. It's now very slowly deflating, but I'm still having to type this one-handed. In related news, I can recommend Cambridge Environmental Services for all your wasp-poisoning needs; they were effective, prompt and professional. :-)
Also, we lack many things at Normality, including internet access. We're considering Sky broadband (ADSL available to Sky TV customers for £5 - 10 /month), since we might want Sky anyway, but I hear scary things about 100:1 contention ratios and incompetence. Is there anyone reading who has used them and can (dis)recommend them? Also Virgin broadband (cable, formerly NTL), same question, especially anyone with recent experience of them. I always used to hear very variable reports of NTL and its outage frequency, but outages, when they happened, seemed fairly universally to last days rather than hours, which, if it's still true, is probably a deal-breaker for me. This would therefore mean ADSL, since I don't know anyone else doing cable in Cambridge (please correct me if I'm wrong). The question then would be whether to get it from Sky or not: obviously the price is attractive, but I'm worried that you get what you pay for.
Edit: thanks for all the information; we're going with Sky broadband (just as soon as our phone line has been activated for long enough to be ADSL-capable, grrr) |
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| Now you see me, now you don't |
[Jul. 28th, 2007|04:46 pm] |
I'm about to disappear to the general area of Oxfnord for a week, canal boating with friends. I expect to be reachable by phone for most of the time and to return on Saturday. Feel free to comment here (or email) with any LJ/other stuff you want to make sure I see when I get back, because I might miss things in the middle of a week's catch-up.
Also, the author of Friend Wheel seems to have implemented my idea (tick the obvious box when generating your wheel). :-) |
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| Software idea for the day |
[Jul. 11th, 2007|11:36 am] |
Friend Wheel (a facebook extension) + Planarity = ?
Somebody needs to write this. :-) This, or any better way to explore that data, really. I'm curious (for no particular reason) about who knows whom, but can't pick much out of Friend Wheel's output. |
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