文字馬鹿: A fool of words

The below was originally posted in my OKCupid Journal, as part of moving my "profile completion" bar from 85% to 90%. It's an insidious system that successfully lured me into using online dating. And now I can't seem to extricate myself. ^_^

OK, that profile-completion bar is going to lose. I've gotten this far, so I really have to see what happens when I fill it. I'm hoping for free chocolate from the sky, but it seems unlikely.

So while I'm dumping text on the Internet, I might as well complain about online dating sites. _Other_ online dating sites, mind you. (OKCupid will get a serve too, but a minor one. Spoiler, it wins in the end.)

If you are in a hurry and just want to see the ending, scroll down to the bolded summary header. You'll avoid a really bad pun, and some analogies between video games and online dating websites.

I've avoided online dating sites for years, because I like to think the Internet hasn't completely taken over my life (I'm holding on to that belief, BTW) but a friend of mine dragged me into OKCupid to take some test about the furry apocalypse. That's where this whole profile-completion bar thing started.

Along the way I've had one (brief, I'm sorry to say) relationship from OkCupid but was staying away from any other sites because they were either costly (RSVP, eHarmony), ugly as all hell and unusable (PlentyOfFish) or just didn't show up anything withing a few hundred kilometres of me (every "geek" dating site Google could find.)

This stance changed for no good reason I am aware of on New Year's Eve.

Plenty Of Fish remains an ugly, unusable nightmare of a web site. It's the spiritual successor to that old Flash website where you had to click the pulsating squid to go to pictures page, or the upside-down light bulb to turn the music on and off. I don't remember if it was a satire about how Flash was destroying the Web, or a serious attempt by an artist or designer to try and move the Web away from all the boring text and pictures laid out in a way that's meaningful and interrelated. I really hope it was the former...

Back on topic, my biggest problem with Plenty of Fish would have to be that it's matching system is bizarrely unuseful, and most of the people there provide one-line profiles, and maybe a pair of interest keywords. That and you can't combine their searches.

I like the idea of searching by personality. Numbers are fun. I like the idea of limiting my search to women of an appropriate age and relationship interest. I like the idea of of searching for people who live within 100km of me. So far, so good. But PoF and I disagree about the idea of using all these criteria at once. Heck, if I could have the personality search show me more than just bizarrely distended head-shots, it'd be a step up.

That's also bizarre, BTW. Is ASP.NET so very bad at image manipulation that they can't implement a system that can maintain the aspect ratio of a head-shot?

And the final straw in PoF's haystack of pain? When it's showing you photos-only, the ones without photos usefully tell you their age and what they're looking for. So you can see either if someone's attractive (in a Dali-ish way) _or_ if they're an appropriate age and are actually looking for the sort of relationship you're looking for. (BTW, what is "Other relationship" supposed to be. Some people won't take messages from it, looking like it's an synonym for fuck-buddy, and some people seem to use it as "friends now which might turn into a relationship if you turn out to match some arbitrary criteria I haven't decided yet". Maybe it's in the PoF help, but frankly, they need all the help they can get with the site already, I don't want to consume any of it with my inane queries.)

Sometimes it feels like PoF is actively trying to work against you. There's plenty of video game analogies available here, but I'm going to compare it to some early Wii titles. The ones where motion control was so shiny, developers figured that anything that worked by waggling the Wiimote would sell like hotcakes, and failed to notice that Nintendo were launching with a title or two that showed how to do motion controls _right_, making everyone else who got it wrong (Samurai Warriors Katana, I'm looking at you), look like they'd been caught asleep at the switch. Red Steel actually has this reputation, but I think unfairly. Go back and try it now that we've had Wiimotes for three years, and they're not new and bizarre addons. In fact, I might see if I can find the work copy of Red Steel, and actually finish the damn game. And in all fairness, Red Steel was a launch title, so the developers probably hadn't tried Wii Sports or Warioware: Smooth Moves to know how it was supposed to feel.

Next up in my outpouring of... I dunno what this is. If it was hate, I wouldn't keep going back.... The more it hurts, the more it shows I care, as the philosophers say.

Right? Yeah... Next, is RSVP.com.au

It's an interesting system. Free to browse but costs money to open a communication channel. You pay per person per month. Once you've bought credit, you can send pre-canned little messages for free, so once you've decided to pay at all, you don't have to spend the credit unless the person's at least returned your "time of day". Not that RSVP cares at that point, they have your money.

It's a bit like a token-based video arcade. You go in, you can look for free. Once you want to play something, you buy a pile of tokens. Now they have your cash, and you suddenly become extra choosy about what you play, because you're working from a limited pile of tokens.

They make no effort (that I can perceive) to find the _right_ people for you, and in fact the option to only show people whose "ideal partner" profile you fit isn't always there. (Again, I think it's not available when you also try to search for people who fit your "ideal partner" profile).

But once again, the real disappointment is the people. Not that it's a huge disappointment, mind you, but most of the Canberra women on RSVP seem to hold as their primary interests sports, sports, V8 car racing and other sports. And unlike OkCupid and PoF, not posting a photo publicly appears to be the norm.

The plus side to RSVP is it's popular. So once I've waded through the 143 women within distance, with appropriate relationship interest and age group, there's a reasonable chance there'll be three or four whose profiles both interest me and indicate I might interest them.

By-the-by, tall women are hot, but only seem to like taller guys, from what they tell me and post in their profiles. I think this is terrifically unfair. Short women are hot too. So're women my height. I'm not being picky about height, to be clear.

So yeah, RSVP makes up for poor selection by playing the percentages. That's actually why I went there, after a friend was stunned I was on a smaller site like OkCupid but hadn't been to RSVP.

And further, there's eHarmony. I actually like it, bizarrely. They have a personality matching system, which I'm fond of (that's why I joined OkCupid in the first place, just to see how it worked. And then didn't come back for two years) and works reasonably well. I took advantage of their "free communication" weekend, where you can send messages (which normally requires you to subscribe) but cannot see photos (which requires you to subscribe) and frankly, it was oddly liberating. They don't even post body-shape information, so you aren't tempted to reject someone because you don't like the look of them straight off. (This is not a "ugly people need love too" thing. I didn't say it's better this way, just different).

As mentioned, eHarmony has a subscription model. You can't search or browse for people, you have to wait for eHarmony's magic psychologist computer to send you people who might match. So far it's had better percentages than RSVP as far as sending me sports-fanatics who think Reading is in Berkshire. It has sent me a couple of Melbourneites, who're apparently in one of the very northern outer suburbs, about a 600km round trip if they want to go into town, but less than 50km from Canberra...

I guess for what it is, eHarmony's not doing too bad a job. Sure, for a subscription site, trickling people to you makes sense, rather than letting you find everyone one the site whom you might match in the first week, and then cancelling your subscription before it renews.

It's kinda like World of Warcraft in that respect. You can't do it all in a month, and every month after the first makes you less likely to quit as you're that much more invested. (Trust me, I do this sort of stuff for a living. WoW is like a finely-tuned poker machine, except poker machines are required by law to have a certain payout level. WoW only rewards you until you reach critical mass of social investment, and then feeds off you like some kind of video game leech. Which is completely different from Earthworm Jim...)

However, unlike WoW, I think it's way too expensive for what you get. I've paid 'em once, unsure if I'll pay 'em again. I have the rest of the month to decide...

Anyway, I guess OkCupid'd better have a turn. I like the site. The matching system is actually really good (by and large), it lets you define "near" and sticks to it, except when it emails me matches, who're all universally a few hundred kilometres away, and frequently not looking for a relationship anyway. I suspect the email matching thing is ignore criteria in order to find three new people to email me.

Which actually leads in to the problem. My match list here is something like 13 people. I think I've messaged all the ones with whom I might have something in common, and a few with whom I have almost nothing in common. I've messaged a few people who haven't been on the site in months. I keep coming back here partly because I'm actually in the middle of one conversation (interrupted by Christmas) and because I had one success here, and am hoping lightning will strike me twice. (Except without the zappy, painful static bit).

So OkCupid gets to be analogised to ArmA 2. It's a great game, wonderful community which lets me choose to associate and search for the sort of people I want to associate with, and little-to-few of the sports-obsessed, team-killing, V8-racing-watching and crashing-the-only-damned-wreck-helicopter-into-the-sea douchebags that populate such popular dating sites as OkCounterstrike. The downside is that there's a hundred billion CounterStrike players (all of whom have used the word "fag" as a pejorative in the last 20 minutes) and only a dozen of us playing ArmA 2, on a 30-player map. (And I must confess, I haven't played ArmA 2 in months, Aion's release was too close on its heels and I don't have the hard disk space for both. Curse you Steam and your over 100gB of steamapps!)

I am starting to see why if I turn off the "visited in the last month" filter on OkCupid, the list goes up to 60-ish. (RSVP went up to something like 500 for comparison. So same level of increase). I guess many of us do it. We come to the site, look around, message everyone who catches our eye, either succeed or fail, and go back to bar-hoping. (It's a pun, not a typo.)

And I suspect if I lived in a bigger city, I'd be doing better. When I turn off the distance filter, my match list goes through the roof. I sometimes am tempted to message out-of-towners in places that'd be fun to live, but I'm also sometimes tempted to eat nothing but chocolate for a day (three 100g blocks of dark chocolate is below my daily energy intake goal, so this isn't as crazy as it sounds) but I don't do that either.

Summary

So, anyway, I wish all the people using online dating sites would use OkCupid instead. It's attractive, useful, provides actual matches with a number that seems to work, doesn't make you pay and therefore doesn't produce arbitrary obstacles to ensure you pay more.

Alternatively, I wish I lived in a bigger city, where OkCupid had more people, maybe?

I'm actually really happy with this post. I might go attach it to my real blog, once the web server's fixed.

Dear EA Sports active Team,

I have recently purchased your fine product, but have a few concerns I wish to raise with you.

Firstly, despite your strong insistence, and in fact obstinate refusal to proceed without it, a nunchuck accessory is not required to navigate your user interface menu.

Secondly, given the nature of your target audience, shipping a thigh-wrapping strap with a device for making it shorter, and nothing to make it longer, seems a surprising oversight. In case it is not clear, your target audience for a video games console-based exercise assistance program is people who both need exercise assistance, own a video games console, and feel that there is a sufficient level of overlap between these two ideas to spend money on such a program. Many such people will have thighs which exceed your apparent circumference estimations, particularly the upper thigh where you suggest this device is best placed.

Thirdly, it is a breach of Section 53 of the Trade Practices Act 1974 to indicate that your product is "Fitness made Fun and Easy" or to use the phrase "fun, easy-to-learn exercises" when your product holds these two ideas as antonyms. I realise I have not yet fully explored your product, and in fact there may be exercises in your product that match both terms, but surely it would be appropriate to use "and/or" in place of "and", or possibly ensure that the exercises that are both fun and easy-to-learn are in the first day's routine.

Fourthly, for a product that purports to encourage good health, it is a concern that your female trainer appear to smile somewhat more frequently and widely than is healthy. Whether this effect is caused by botox, abuse of medicinal substances or simply because she is attempting to reinforce the "fun" aspect of the program by appearing to enjoy herself, it is rather offputting.

Speaking of offputting, my fifth point relates to the representation of myself during many of the gym-style (as opposed to track or game style) activities. The trainer in the Picture-in-Picture window is facing me, as is correct. However, the representation of myself is also facing me, and then undertakes actions with the incorrect arm. If I am told to lift my right arm, and the image of me lifts my left arm, that is confusing. If there were some indication of a mirror being involved, that would alleviate the confusion somewhat, although that indication would probably be hampered by the appearance of a large, lightly wooded grassland behind me, making the existence of a mirror somewhat jarring.

Ante-penultimately, the suggestion in the front of the manual that the player register this game online in order to access cheat codes seems rather out of place in an exercise game, where cheating should probably be discouraged more than it already should be. This issue is somewhat alleviated by the fact that the manual does not appear to contain the required registration code, so access to these cheat codes appears to be impossible.

Penultimately, and this should probably be passed on to any of your VO-script-writing colleagues who may be tempted to similar behaviour, it is inappropriate to describe the player as "owning" anything that is not either chattel or property, unless the target audience exclusively consists of 12-year old male citizens of the United States of America or her conquered territories.

Despite the above comments, I am quite pleased with your product over all, and after a period of time sufficient to ensure that this pleasure is not simply the result of exercise-induced lightheadedness, I will not hesitate to recommend it to my friends who fall within the target market. Although my list of friends is rather limited, the broad appeal of the Wii gaming platform and the broadness of many of my friends means that I feel this recommendation will be of some benefit.

Yours sincerely,
Paul "TBBle" Hampson, Exhausted.

PS. If you were intending to pronounce "pwned", that leading descender attached to the initial o similarly attaches a bilabial stop to the front of the initial rounded lower middle vowel, unless you are intending to sound like a 12-year old male citizen of the United States of America or her conquered territories.

So, yeah. I bought EA Sports active for the Wii, and foolishly decided, despite my raging cold, to start with the "high intensity" workout. About 10 minutes in I thought my head was going to explode, but it appears to have not done so, and I was able to finish the workout. Mind you, that's largely because they don't actually tell you about the "skip current exercise" button during the workout, but rely on you to wander into the help menu on the front screen.

Despite my above comments, I think it's actually a good thing, assuming I can keep it up. The resistance band however, I'm not hugely fond of. I'd rather have free weights, if they'd tell me the amount of weight I should be carrying for the relevant exercise.

Apart from that, I spent the day downloading Old Time Radio shows: Abbott and Costello [another set], Sherlock Holmes [another set, part 1] [another set, part 2] [another site], Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Candy Matson, Yukon 2-8209, You Bet Your Life and Mindwebs. I've downloaded or queued all the above, so if you want to avoid a several-gigabyte download, feel free to poke me into putting them onto a USB stick for you if you're 'round my place.

This should ensure I have sufficient mp3s to not get bored when I start taking long walks for exercise reasons. Of course, it'd prolly be healthier to walk with someone who can both ignore my whinging of physical discomfort in good humour and whom on with I can carry a conversation for a half hour to an hour, but I don't have anyone who intersects those two groups, who I feel up to tapping for such a plan.

Oh, and my friends aren't actually broad. Many of them are broads, but that's a much harder pun to work into a sentence, without offending them. Not that many of the broads I know are easily offended. ^_^

Often my weekends start out with grandiose plans of what I might try and get done.

This weekend (and the preceding evenings I guess) saw me produce a Wine patch I was only playing with out of interest but which turns out to affect Warhammer Online, although I didn't know it until after I implemented the patch, and a WIne patch I've been meaning to prototype for a while using XInput 2 to fix a long-standing Wine bug which also affects Warhammer Online.

I also got back to watching Life On Mars, although I've only managed one episode and a bit. It's pretty damned good.

I also decided to make gyoza, as I have fond, alcohol-supported memories of the last time I made them.

I managed to lazy my cooking even more than usual. I'm using a recipe I picked up last time I made them off a site called The Food Palate by Deborah Rodrigo, whom Google has since informed me is from Sydney but both that site and her personal blog appear to have fallen off the Internet, sadly. However, I distilled (with the help of Kirky at work) the ingredients down to this:

Ginger, chives, chili flakes, coriander, garlic, sesame seed oil, soy sauce for dumplings, and gyoza skins

Adding half a kilo of lean pork mince, and about a half-hour, you get:

30 gyoza, freezer-bound

So not as bad as the ugly cake I made recently, but still not spectacular. And unlike the cake, I don't yet know if these turn out to be poison or not.

I expect that they'll be delicious, and not even slightly poisonous. And unlike my cake, I'm not going to try to share them with anyone. ^_^

It could be worse, at least I seem to have not managed to poison my housemate's lizards, Prime and Grimlock, whom I've been feeding while he's away this weekend. I'm not sure how I could get "put grasshoppers into the box" wrong, but I don't think I did. I think they're pretty neat names for lizards, reflecting Mick's inner geek, and his outer geek, although Prime seems to be larger than Grimlock which is to the best of my knowledge the wrong way 'round.

I was going to try and leverage in a rant about characters in children's books with alliterative names at this point, and observe that one of my favorite authors as a young child, Richard Scarry happened to avoid that, but upon actually looking him up, I realise the characters whose names I'd forgotten quite often had alliterative names. The characters I remembered still had non-alliterative names, so it's not as bad as some authors I can't be bothered remembering, but I'll chalk that one up as being disappointed by a childhood memory.

A less disappointing childhood memory turns out to be Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series. I read the series when I was quite young, and I'm only re-reading the first one at the moment, but it reminds me how good a writer he is, and why I loved his books so much as a child. Also because he's alphabetically early on the shelves. I don't know why I seem to do that. I think when I'm picking a new series, I start at the beginning and go until I've chosen one. So that favours the alphabetically early.

I've managed to get a whole bunch of reading done recently, which is good. Sadly, Borders now wants me to pay $7 on a $14 book to order it in from overseas, and it turns out most of the series I'm following keenly enough to actually order books are on that list, so I may end up having to do an Amazon order. Which is annoying, because I'm also looking for some DS games: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations appears to be discontinued in Australia and the US, and Impossible Mission never seems to have been released here at all. Along with wanting Race on DVD, I have a fair bit of overseas shopping to do, and the local financial climate is not exactly conducive to that. -_-

Anyway, the above is my documentation supporting why I should not be left alone for days at a time. ^_^

A followup to last year's foray into Python and OpenGL.

I noticed today that wxPython includes a GLCanvas class which uses PyOpenGL. However, as of 2.8.9.2, wxPython's demo crashes due to wxWidgets bug 10203 which is fixed in 2.8 wxWidgets post 2.8.9, and in 2.10.

Until a wxPython release comes out based on either of those, there is a workaround. The script update_manifest.py, which wxPython includes to change the manifest in your python.exe and pythonw.exe to use the Windows XP comctl32.dll, also fixes this problem, so even though I've been aware of this bug for ages, I've only learned about this workaround tonight by reading the wxpython mailing list archive.

Now that I've got that patched, and PyOpenGL installed, the GLCanvas demo in wxPython runs, and the cube demo works. The cone demo however comes back with this:

OpenGL.error.NullFunctionError: Attempt to call an undefined function __glutInitWithExit, check for bool(__glutInitWithExit) before calling

This turns out to not be a surprise, as I don't have GLUT (glut32.dll) installed. Sadly, the wxPython demo code doesn't test the result of the OpenGL.GLUT.glutInit method in PyOpenGL, so this exception is simply output without causing the cone window to abort.

Since the draw code for the cone calls glPushMatrix before any of its glut calls, and the glut calls throw an exception so you never call glPopMatrix, you end up filling your matrix stack, and getting a lot of error spam in your output window, where the later errors can easily push the older errors out the top of your scrollback buffer.

I turned out to be too lazy to build my own glut (it's anecdotaly possible) but a lucky hit with Google informed me that Nvidia's Cg Toolkit includes both a win32 and x64 version of glut32.dll. You wouldn't be able to distribute it as there's no license indication for glut apart from the license for the whole Cg Toolkit. The glut.h file included however is the one from normal Glut (or so it appears) so I doubt it's anything except the win32 version of upstream glut.

On this point, it's not obvious to me if freeglut is supposed to be a drop-in replacement for glut32.dll, or a souped-up alternative. It doesn't help that the freeglut configure file includes an option to switch that mode on or off (producing libglut.so or libfreeglut.so) while the .mak file (for NMake) only produces freeglut.dll not glut32.dll. So I guess it's intended to be both. The next step would be to see if freeglut can build from configure using mingw64 and produce a drop-in glut32.dll.

However, I don't care that much. I only wanted to see the wxPython GLCanvas demo run. I won't be using GLUT (or event GLCanvas, to be honest) myself so this has had plenty of time devoted to it anway.

I guess I hope that the main benefit of this blog posting is to allow those very occasional forum posters who go looking for glut32.dll for Vista x64 or XP x64, or even Vista 32-bit, to find it in the NVidia Cg Toolkit. So far I've seen several such questions when searching Google for a copy myself, but no one ever finds one for 64-bit. (There's a 32-bit one in the bullet physics SVN repository, if you don't want NVidia's one.)

And for those same forum posters, a quick note. The x64 build of glut32.dll goes in %WINDIR%\system32 on x64 machines. The win32 build of glut32.dll goes in %WINDIR%\SysWOW64. If you get this wrong, you'll get the same error messages as not having the file present at all. It's prolly both easier and a better idea to actually drop the glut32.dll next to the program you're running, unless you have both 32-bit and x64 versions in the same directory for some reason...

My original plan was to only use the Windows XP 64 installed on my laptop for video games (and then only when necessary due to a Wine disfeature) and Linux for everything else. My World Of Warcraft days actually worked quite well for this, as it played very nicely under Wine. However, as interesting things (ala my previous blog post) sometimes crop up while I'm in Windows, and also as I'm now playing games that aren't so nice under Linux, I've ended up being in Windows more than Linux. And now I've found myself distracted from games playing by, of all things, MMO UI Addon programming, keeping me in Windows even more.

You'd think with my strong awareness of the commercial nature of grind, I'd prolly be trying to get all the playtime I can out of my monthly subscription to Warhammer Online. Instead, I seem to be burrowing my head down into some UI programming in Lua. Like WoW, WAR (or WHO as a friend of mine calls it) uses LUA to implement its user interface and provides a way of adding modules in to modify, adjust or just plain futz with the interface. The big site for WAR addons (like WoW addons, in fact) is Curse Gaming and they even provide a Sourceforge-like site for addon development called CurseForge.

Anyway, why am I doing this, given I managed to avoid WoW addon programming for my entire playing time? Apart from external reasons I'm not going to post here, WAR being brand new is missing a fair few addons. None I can't live without, but one it does lack is DrDamage, which enhances your ability tooltips with the actual effective values of the ability once gear and stats are taken into account.

Part of the issue is that WAR's combat calculations are not fully understood yet. An excellent primer is available at Disquette's Weblog and Warhammer Alliance has a Mechanic Analysis forum as well. I've posted some comments at the former, but the latter requires you to be a "WAR Soldier" before you can post, and I seem to still be a "WAR Recruit", which means I haven't contributed enough to the Warhammer Alliance forums. Ah well.

So anyway, my addon. LibCombatCalcs is my first MMO addon, basically supposed to encapsulate the various combat number mechanics of WAR so that I or someone else can write tools like DrDamage (or RatingsBuster) which magically continue working when they change the mechanics, and which don't need large hard-coded tables of information duplicated across each addon.

It also intends to tie together the seperate sources of combat information into a single coherent stream for other addons to listen to.

Anyway, we're not there yet. What it does do right now is record hits against monsters, and give you a little window with /lcc mobinfo which shows the calculated toughness of the monster (from an unambigous non critical autoattack) and the calculated values for all the subsequent abilities you used, letting you see if my calculations (and therefore my transcriptions of the community's understanding) are correct, and/or where things need tweaks. I'll be using this (and I hope others do too, I don't want to build a level 40 of each class to do this...) to identify the sources of DPS that contribute to each ability.

Anyway, there it is. I'd love to hear feedback about it, preferably at Curse/CurseForge but here is fine too if you hate those sort of sites. You can clone the git repo from CurseForge, and it currently autopackages every commit I push so you can also grab and install the zips.

By the by, this is my first time using mysgit although I did contribute some work to a different msys git effort, and it combined with Console and an updated Vim with some nice colour schemes (I'm using xterm16 at home and work now) makes me a much happier Windows programmer on my laptop.

On other fronts, I've recently been playing with Python-Ogre, hoping to knock out a 3D physics-based tech demo of some kind with it in the middle-term future. (May end up being a Christmas break project...). After my disappointments with 64-bit Python and Pyglet under Windows, I may end up doing it under Linux. Ideally it's cross-platform of course. I've also done some more serious work on my book cataloging software using Elixir, SQLAlchemy and SQLite to turn my collection of text files into a real database. However, there's not a particularly good way of dealing with schema changes that I can wrap my head around, so I've put that on hold while I think about how the data's going to have to look in the long run. And then I got distracted, so it's on the Christmas break pile too.

Holger Levsen wonders what tense people write their changelogs in. Andrew Pollock feels that his tendancy is past-tense.

Looking back over some of mine, FreeRADIUS from a long time ago, and openjpeg more recently, it appears that my preference is to actually write them as untensed fragments. I think I'm answering the question "What does this change do?" from the perspective of the change. This would make sense, mirroring somewhat the comments I put in dpatches (and the overly verbose names that have been known to occur) which are usually the patch talking about itself in the plural. Unless that's the patch _and_ I talking about ourselves in the plural?

As I documented in one of my much earlier blog posts, Where are they now?, I lost tbble.com nearly four years ago, and Google hits and archived links have been slowing dying/updating every since.

On the weekend just past I got an email from someone telling me they had recently come into possession of tbble.com, and as the owner of tbble.net, please click the included link to purchase it. (I only read the email tonight. That's how far behind I am at life.)

Barely restraining my hopes, I immediately clicked on the link fired up an ssh session to my fileserver and whoised tbble.com, discovering it to be apparently unregistered.

Continuing to restrain my now burgeoning glee, I went to do my Bubblesworth domain renewals, and idly popped tbble.com onto the shopping list, almost as if by accident. (No point tempting fate at this point. I've had tbble.com disappear from whois before but be snapped up before I could reclaim it).

$15 later (reseller price. ^_^) I'm the proud once-again owner of tbble.com, your source for all things TBBle. Although since I'd managed to migrate to tbble.net and tbble.org over the past four years, there's nothing good there. I really need to sort this stuff out.

I stopped restraining my glee at this point, and cheered near my housemate until he woke up and heard about my glee.

And now so have the rest of you. Sans cheering, unless you're using some kind of Text-To-Speech software which takes a fairly imaginative interpretation of the phrase "Text-To-Speech". If you are using such a program, let me know. I'll try and work some more amusing noises into my blog posts.

Anyway, that's TBBle 1, Evil Domain Registrars Who Jump On Expired .com Domains And Try To Sell Them Back To The Original Owners For $1500 Through A Shell Company In South Africa -$20 (or whatever a registrar pays Verisign for four years squatting).

Also on 0, but having had a bye this round, are Evil Domain Resellers Who Refuse To Process My Credit Card And Refuse To Release My Domain For Transfer Without Some Kind Of Fee They Added To The User Agreement Post Purchase Using One Of Those "We Reserve The Right To Modify This Agreement As We See Fit" Clauses. Recapping the earlier round, it was a draw. I lost one domain, and rescued five others without charge.

I'm gonna need a wider scoreboard...

Edit: That's not how you spell "amusing" or "restrain". "Gonna" on the other hand is correct.

OK, so I made it to LCA08 in Melbourne, eventually.

However, I managed to have the following happen on the way:

• Got the time of my flight to Melbourne wrong, arrived at 5:30pm for a flight that left at 5pm.
• Caught the wrong tram from Melbourne CBD to uni accomodation, had to walk from Royal Melbourne Hospital back to the university. This was precipitated by me misreading the tram t
  imetable thingy.
• Failed to wave at a traim outside the uni, meaning it sailed right on past me.
• Locked myself out of my room, the third time I left it. (They've got those dumb swipe-card locks which are always locked except when you've just swiped from the outside, but are open from the inside.)
• Asked on #linux.conf.au about the URL for Planet LCA 2008 while it was in the topic. (Unlike on #debian, not only was I not mocked for this, no one noticed before I did, a while later)

On the other hand, I caught up with Brad, Evelyn, Bek, Jason, Phil, Naoko, Geoff and Ange, all in the one day. That was fun, we had dinner, I stuck my sore feet in the ocean and felt better, and I manged to catch the right trams from the university _to_ the city. Well, lunch with Naoko, the rest with the others. (Actually, that's in reverse chronological order)

The actual conference first day was interesting. I was at the Debian Mini-conf all day, seeing a neat thing about using git for managing packges sensibly, which is something I was trying to figure out when I was packaging Second Life last year, as well as some cool stuff coming into Debian over the next year or so.

After the Debian Mini-conf all went over to the keysigning (I didn't go again this year, I wasn't organised in time) I went to see a presentation about Ingex which is something the BBC have developed to try and take Digital Betamax out of the video production process (since Digital Betamax only works in real-time, as I understand it) with some success so far, and it's pretty interesting.

Speaking of not being organised in time, I only thought today to look at the Tutorials, and both Wednesday's tutorial about hooking up hardware to Second Life and Thursday's tutorial about hacking on lguest require preperation. I was able to grab Jon Oxer at the Debian Mini-conf and get my name put on the one remaining spare development kit, and so now I'm down in the Junior Common Room of Trinity College (no wireless in the rooms yet) updating my blog instead of trying to get lguest running under qemu. I'll have to go dig up Rusty's and Robert Love's instructions from LCA05 preparing for their kernel hacking tutorial that year. Wow. Archiving the old LCA websites kicks ass!

Edit: I actually was dumb on #linux.conf.au, not #debian. As an aside, I managed to lock myself out of my room again later that week.

Good news! Having worked for most of the traditional Christmas break, I'm now going to to linux.conf.au 08 in Melbourne next week, and Game Developers Conference 2008 in San Francisco in late February.

CAPSLOCK CANNOT EXPRESS MY GIRLY DELIGHT

For those of you who don't already realise, my dream job since age six was to be a video games programmer. Having now achieved that, you'd figure I was now in for karmic mortgage payments for a while. And sure enough, having an umbilical hernia become quite painful on Friday night, 28th of December (I was working that day) would certainly seem to be within reach. I'd actually had the hernia for a couple of months, I reckon, but hadn't known what it was or what to do with it. (I thought I was just getting fatter. -_-) Anyway, a mix of mentos, Coca-cola, lifting a heavy TV that week and who knows what else ended up with me spending the night in hospital on morphine. (Well, I dunno if I was on morphine all night. They gave me some) Thankfully, the surgeon registrar was able to push the bits of bowels sticking out back in (before the morphine. -_-) without problem, and no problems appeared overnight, so I'm now waiting for the letter to let me join the waiting list for surgery, and occasionally stopping to push bits of my bowel back through my belly-button.

This means I'm no longer a hospital virgin (not that I really was. I went to hospital when I was three years old or so, to get my forehead stitched up after falling off the wall above our driveway in Oyster Bay, Sydney) but it was a scare that I wouldn't be able to go to LCA this year, having already booked and paid for it, and LCA being my main actual holiday each year.

Also, it was lucky my sister was in town, since when I told her where and how it hurt, her mind went straight to hernia, so she and my mother came over to check me out and took me to hospital, hours earlier than I would have gone myself.

Anyway, early last week I saw the surgeon consultant, and he said I'd be fine to travel, since the surgery was fairly far off in the future anyway ("several months" I believe) and as long as I don't put sustained lateral strain on my abdomen, I'll be fine.

He also said to lose weight, of course.

So yeah, I reckon that the hernia prolly balances out LCA, GDC, my job, and maybe even my paying off of the ATO this year. I hope the universe agrees, 'cause if I'm still in the red for those good things, I'll have to be sure to backup my new laptop before I travel.

I recently was linked to CCG Workshop which is a site where you can play collectable card games (CCGs) online. It's interesting because they have this gatlingEngine software, which apparently runs the game for you using a set of rules in a gatlingML file.

I thought this would be a wonderful chance to document the rules for the Love Hina CCG, which I never finished translating as you can see, but the gatlingDevKit and all the developer documentation requires that you sign an NDA and suchlike.

Discussions on the forum (the developers talk openly on the public forum, so I have an idea what's not under NDA ^_^) indicated the gatlingML files were XML, but when I got one while trying to play a game, it was quite clearly binary.

The first four bytes are !HZL which I thought looked really familiar, but it took a fair while before I clicked that that was "LZH!" backwards, LZH being the compression algorithm used in the LHA family of archivers. Of course, research indicated that none of the LHA family of archivers actually wrote a file with !HZL at the front.

Poking about some more, I noticed that the gatlingEngine is written in Delphi (and is legacy code anyway) and went looking for Delphi compression libraries. Thankfully, the vast majority do PKZIP-compatible compression, and the first one I tried that supported LZH compression was Tlzrw1. (Apologies for the quality of the link, the 1998 link in the read file is dead, and the Wayback machine record for it indicates that the author's page didn't mention the library anyway) So I note that the library in question attributes its LZH code to LZHUF.C which Google duly turns up for me. I change the code a bit to stop assuming a 16-bit word, handle the header at the front, and suddenly I have a utility which can encode and decode files compressed with the LZH mode of Tlzrw1. (Which has been ported to C# and Delphi.NET, Google tells me.)

Now of course someone needs the interest, gumption and skills needed to produce an open-source program that can process gatlingML files and run games from them. ^_^

Oh, and a cool thing: progress bar for cp, courtesy of Chris Lamb via Planet Debian.

Edit: Missing quote put a whole whack of text inside an <a>-tag.

(Side note: Due to 410549, some kind of PHP4/Apache2 bug in Debian/Stable that WordPress 2.1 has triggered, this site's not loading fully. It's apparently only happening on Debian, and upgrading PHP4 to the Dotdeb 4.4 build fixes it, apparently. >_<)

Anyway, here's an entry in my "Why everything that isn't apt sucks" category.

[root@bookcase ~]# yum info kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Available Packages
Name   : kernel
Arch   : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size   : 16 M
Repo   : updates
Summary: The Linux kernel (the core of the Linux operating system)
Description:
The kernel package contains the Linux kernel (vmlinuz), the core of any
Linux operating system.  The kernel handles the basic functions
of the operating system:  memory allocation, process allocation, device
input and output, etc.

Name   : kernel-devel
Arch   : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size   : 4.7 M
Repo   : updates
Summary: Development package for building kernel modules to match the kernel.
Description:
This package provides kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules
against the kernel package.

[root@bookcase ~]# yum install kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
Resolving Dependencies
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Package kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.19-1.2911.fc6 set to be installed
--> Running transaction check
--> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
---> Package kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 set to be erased
--> Running transaction check

Dependencies Resolved

=============================================================================
 Package                 Arch       Version          Repository        Size
=============================================================================
Installing:
 kernel-devel            i686       2.6.19-1.2911.fc6  updates           4.7 M
Removing:
 kernel-devel            i686       2.6.18-1.2798.fc6  installed          14 M

Transaction Summary
=============================================================================
Install      1 Package(s)
Update       0 Package(s)
Remove       1 Package(s)

Total download size: 4.7 M
Is this ok [y/N]: Y
Downloading Packages:
(1/1): kernel-devel-2.6.1 100% |=========================| 4.7 MB    00:21
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
  Installing: kernel-devel                 ######################### [1/2]
  Cleanup   : kernel-devel                 ######################### [2/2]

Removed: kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.18-1.2798.fc6
Installed: kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.19-1.2911.fc6
Complete!
[root@bookcase ~]# yum install kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
Nothing to do
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -q kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
package kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 is not installed
[root@bookcase ~]# wget http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/6/i386/kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm
...
11:36:50 (141 KB/s) - `kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm' saved [17169362/17169362]
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -i kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686.rpm
[root@bookcase ~]# rpm -q kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6
[root@bookcase ~]# yum info kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686 kernel-devel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Installed Packages
Name   : kernel
Arch   : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size   : 46 M
Repo   : installed
Summary: The Linux kernel (the core of the Linux operating system)

Description:
The kernel package contains the Linux kernel (vmlinuz), the core of any
Linux operating system.  The kernel handles the basic functions
of the operating system:  memory allocation, process allocation, device
input and output, etc.

Name   : kernel-devel
Arch   : i686
Version: 2.6.19
Release: 1.2911.fc6
Size   : 14 M
Repo   : installed
Summary: Development package for building kernel modules to match the kernel.

Description:
This package provides kernel headers and makefiles sufficient to build modules
against the kernel package.

This all started when I tried to build a kernel module for the default Fedora Core 6 kernel on a fileserver at MF, only to find that the version magic didn't match, as I had an i586 kernel but i686 headers. No matter the cajoling, I couldn't get it to install an i586 set of headers, or an i686 version of the running kernel. I gave in and figured that due to a security issue, the old 2.6.19 kernel had been retired and the new kernel (2911) was the only one in the repositories.

Which led me to try the above. Clearly, yum agrees there's a kernel image RPM and kernel headers RPM available, both i686, but bizarrely is completely ignoring any requests to install it. And I mean ignoring, no error, no failure, it's as if I haven't listed the pacakge.

Sure enough, grabbing the RPM directly from the mirror and installing it with rpm worked fine.

And just to keep the hate flowing, the default setup of Yum is awful. There's no Australian mirrors in the mirror rotation, so I was getting 20kB/s before thinking to take away its mirror list and force it to use mirror.aarnet and suddenly getting the full effect of our two-megabit-per-second link. And before I did that, if I changed my mind about an operation that was busy fetching things from the network, control-c would kill the fetcher, and yum would then proceed to try the next mirror in the list. The default installation contains a huge list of mirrors (fetched from the Fedora website) which now I look at it, does start with mirror.aarnet, although it also then tells me it couldn't find any mirrors to match AU, despite having just given me one, and lists mirrors all over the shop. And it certainly never seemed to be using one when told to fetch something.

In Yum's defense, I will say that it survived being backgrounded and kill -9d on several occations. ^_^

Speaking of changing mirrors, it doesn't notice when you tell it to use a different mirror, and won't invalidate its cached metadata, meaning it'll reject the downloaded primary.xml.gz. When this happens, it still doesn't clear its metadata, meaning if you try it again, it'll fail again.

I feel better, having vented that. And I can hardly wait until we can whack this server and make it a nice Debian box, like all the rest of the systems in here (bar one FC4 box which only has one task, but happens to be in the DMZ...).

OK, one more thing. The Yum instructions say you can upgrade Fedora Core using Yum, but don't. And it'll only go one version at a time, and the box was an FC4 box in need of serious love. So I loved having to grab a four-gigabyte DVD to upgrade a server which is actually less than four gigabytes of system... It would have been quicker to image everything but our data, and FTP that to someone who already had the DVD. Except that it had to come back too. And it turned out to have, for a server, an incredible amount of crap on it. (I've this afternoon removed kde, gnome, metacity, cups, evolution, firefox...) This machine is Raided, backed up and was never ever going to be someone's desktop machine. (I hope).

Although I now understand why there are people who want to upgrade Sarge to Etch, and start by downloading the 8-CD weekly Etch image. And in fact I had someone two weeks ago who was going to install Sarge, didn't have a good Internet connection, and was asking if there was a better way than grabbing two DVD images.

In case you're wondering, the kernel module I wanted to build was ppscsi, for a HP ScanJet 5100C. I wouldn't have had this problem under Debian. ^_^

Oh you lucky things, today this blog becomes a photoblog!

Anyway, walking back from LCA07 to International House...

An unusual sign was seen in a UNSW parking area

This is probably what they actually meant...

They are of course referring to the same parking lot. But at least they're not in the parking lot of a department which has a large amount of contact with cars and the like...

Oh.

In other news, I may not have mentioned, but I got a Kodak C310 camera for Christmas. Happily, it is supported by gPhoto's libgphoto2 so I can pull my photos and movies (no sound) in linux

Just a quick note, Reviewing the Kanji uses a little flash applet for testing/reviewing flashcards. I'm pleased to announce that it works fine with Gnash 0.7.2 on my Debian/unstable PowerPC laptop. ^_^

Well, now that I'm back on the 'net fairly reliably, I can post on what I've been doing for the past few days.

Firstly, I was off the Internet because I was flat-out busy on Saturday, in transit on Sunday, and wireless did not arrive at International House until about 11pm Monday night. That time I did spend on the 'net today, at the conference, was spent in a combination of processing CBIT emails since Friday, and wrestling with my wireless network card.

My local build of the d80211 version of the bcm43xx driver got signal, would even get traffic through, but when it tried to reassociate to a different AP (all the APs here are running on channel 11... Although I was sitting next to someone who saw one on channel 1, which I'm guessing was rouge... I also saw some IBSS networks on the same SSID....) it would corrupt something nasty, kick the screen brightness up to full and oops with slab errors in short order.

The 2.6.18 (2.6.18-3-powerpc Debian build) bcm43xx softmac driver didn't crash or anything, but generally performed worse, and when the Debian miniconf's theatre (Mathews A) was full, my connection suffered or would completely fail to dhcp. >_<

On the plus side, the presentations were great. AJ gave us a rundown of debian-devel (ie 12 months of flamewars) and other significant Debian going-ons. Keith Packard produced a whole bunch of neat X things slated for X.org 7.3 (input hotplugging, dynamic output selection and modesetting, which is exactly what I need to get the projectors I keep plugging into to work better than 640x480...). Russell Coker talked about the various security gaps still remaining in Linux.

In non-conference goings on, I was talking to someone on IRC who's gotten Second Life Viewer building under Linux/PowerPC (a previously unsupported platform) and I'm going to see if we can get a .deb built. I've already created an ELFIO package, and have the OpenJPEG source to try packaging tomorrow. I've also sent off an email to the person who ITP'd secondlife-client for Debian already, to see if he wants to co-operate, or if I'm just tooling about.

Speaking of tooling about, I decided it'd be a good idea to upgrade my bcm43xx-d80211 build to something more recent than mid December, but it seems the 2.6.20 workqueue changes mean I can't compile it against 2.6.19 anymore. The rt2x00 d80211 stack has backwards compatibility macros for the workqueue stuff, but I don't really feel like hacking those into bcm43xx, it's already a large and unsteady beast.

BTW, cogito's update could handle resuming better. Although it happily detected it was resuming a failed update, it had to keep refetching the packs. I eventually realised it would eventually time-out a fetch if I didn't ^c it and happily try again, presuming I had in the meantime walked outside or reloaded the driver.

Anyway, so I've decided tonight (while I was still off the wireless) that I'd finally bite the bullet and build myself a custom dscape.git kernel, to see if the pain I keep suffering from the bcm43xx-d80211 driver is just my cheap-ass backport. That was still building when the wireless came up, and then barfed because KConfig happily let me include both the PCI and SoC versions of the OHCI USB host driver, which provide the same symbols. I must remember to file a bug report about that, or at least check linus's git tree in case it's already fixed. (Both drivers recommended yes, but are patently incompatible as they require different endianness of the host interface). I've restarted the make-kpkg, hopefully that'll build overnight and I can try it in the morning.

I also put some time into my Remembering the Kanji book. I was going to do an hour, but after about a half-hour (with a break to configure and fire the kernel build off) I was yawning, and figured I'd prolly left the imaginative-memory zone. I was going to watch some Gokusen but thought I'd take a last wander over to the IH whiteboard to see if the wireless was up. Bizarrely, it was.

So I wandered onto the 'net, checked email, volunteered myself to package Thousand Parsec for Debian, added the Kanji I studied to Reviewing the Kanji (a web site for reviewing the stuff you learn in Remembering the Kanji) and updated my blog.

Which funnily enough, is where we came in

In good news, the pledge drive to raise $10 000 towards a reverse-engineered NVidia DRI-3D-accelerated driver has succeeded. Dave Nielsen, the instigator of the pledge, gave a canned history of the pledge drive on his blog, and handily demonstrated that the free software community are willing to put a little bit of extra cash towards a little bit of extra freedom.

In bad news, the Ryzom.org bid to purchase "The Saga Of Ryzom" from failed developer Nevrax has failed. They were outbid by Gameforge AG. A ray of sunshine is that the project looks like it will continue, and there has already been the suggestion that they instead consider Asheron's Call 2 which closed in 2005 but was apparently quite good.

Co-incidentally, I was in one of the beta tests for Asheron's Call (I don't remember if it was 1 or 2), and today beta-testing applications opened for Tabula Rasa. I don't remember signing up for the mailing list, but I do have a PlayNC account through having purchased Guild Wars, a model I still hold up as being an excellent way to structure a MMOG's income, at least from a payer point of view. Of course, my job here at Micro Forté is as a programmer, not game producer, so my views aren't exactly changing the world... but give it time. ^_^

Speaking of Micro Forté, the Gaming Miniconf at LCA2007 is having Paul Murphy from (MF's MMOG technology development subsidiary, based in Sydney) as a guest speaker. I'll prolly have to sneak out of the Debian Miniconf to see that.

Poop. Paul Murphy's talk clashes directly with Anthony Town's "State of The Project" address. So there you go, first session of LCA2007 (barring keynotes, which don't conflict...) and I've got a scheduling conflict. >_< Maybe this year the recording will all work...

Edit: Someone floated the open-source Asheron's Call 2 idea the day it closed...

Well, it's nearly LCA time again. This is just a quick post mainly to see if my syndication at Planet Linux.conf.au 2007 is working yet.

I've been working at MF (Milestones just seem to come at you faster than the calender would otherwise suggest) and particularly in the last couple of weeks getting a good vector-math workout.

I've also been working at picking off RC bugs to try and help Etch along a bit, since kind of hoped to be upgrading to it in the half of January that's just passed.

I've also been looking for a CMS for the ANU Anime Society to try and resolve the fact that our web admins never seem to last as long as we'd like. At the moment, Joomla! is top of my list for trialling, as I'm familiar with PHP and looks to have the relevant modules (forum, calendar, eventing system that'll need modification to work for screening scheduling). However, I'm open to other suggestions, and will see if anyone at LCA has any useful suggestions.

And of course, by adding Planet LCA 2007, I've had to read it. And I came across ThreatNet, which is a distributed compromised computer identification system. It's actually really simple, you do something to identify a certain IP as a threat (the sample code scans postfix logs for "REJECT: noqueue" which usually comes from "no such user" although I noticed it also comes from greylister at CBIT) and sends that IP address to a nominated IRC channel. I dunno what's next, actually. Presumably, sites can block that IP address as they see fit, and if the responsible parties for the machine become aware of it, they can take action. I'll be adding this to my ever-growing list of things I need to consider implementation of at CBIT.

On the plus side, I recently installed Debian on a Slug with a 512MB USB flash stick, and I'm going to see how Nagios performs on it. If it's up to scratch, I'll prolly shoehorn in a wireless card and see if I can monitor two disparate networks effectively.

Just a quick note, in the aftermath of the vote to decide where Anthony Towns, Debian Project Leader did something good for Debian, bad for Debian or indifferent to Debian with the Dunc-Tank.

I, Paul Hampson, hereby confess that I too earnt money for doing Debian work, specifically packaging FreeRADIUS and getting it sponsored into the archive in time for Sarge to ship.

Mind you, I didn't earn much money, since Bandwidth Unlimited (for it was they) went bust without paying me much, but they did pay me. And you might argue that I'd been looking for a package to help out with in Debian for nearly three years at that point, and I would have worked on it for free, and that when I was being paid serious money to administer an ISP, I didn't do much FreeRADIUS work at all.

To which I'd say that I'd never have picked FreeRADIUS were I not running an ISP, and I would not have been running an ISP had I not planned to become rich and buy the world's largest chocolate bar from the experience. And I didn't get a lot of my job functions done when I was running an ISP, so lower-priority things (like FreeRADIUS, cleaning my desk, a full night's sleep) were often pushed aside.

I have to say that until I recently became a professional, regularly paid, programmer, I was highly envious of people who get paid to work on Open Source stuff, let alone Debian stuff. Now I'm just envious, although that'll prolly upgrade back to highly envious after linux.conf.au 2007 (or as I like to think of it now, clitoris.conf.au)

This whole thing puts me in mind of my experience at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. I was one of the IT volunteers, and we basically picked up the less-interesting jobs the IBM-paid staffers gave us. At the time I felt a bit put out that I was there volunteering, and these guys were being paid to be there doing nothing that I couldn't have handled. Obviously that was decidedly unfair, and from my days of "I'm as good as or better than anyone else at computers" phase. But the unfairness of my attitude isn't actually the issue, the issue was that I really wanted to be paid to do that sort of thing, and didn't see why others should get paid but me not be.

Now of course I want two things: To get paid, and to do the things I love. I've finally reached the point where I can combine them, and I no longer begrudge those who, through luck, skill or otherwise, get paid more to do the same things, or get access to cooler toys to do them on. I'm envious, obviously. How do you not envy someone who gets to bring up Linux on a 128-way Power5 machine on the quiet? But that doesn't make me unhappy, it just makes me want to strive more, and work harder. One day I'll be the one submitting a paper to Linux.conf.au on some stupendously cool thing I've done. ^_^

Anyway, my short-medium term goal is to leverage the experience of the current MicroForté work, plus finishing my Japanese studies, to go work for a games company in Japan, combining my two favorite pipe-dreams into one, and making it reachable in a little as two years. Maybe I'll be lucky and MicroForté will open a Japanese office or something, or I'll luck out and end up working on a Japanese MMORPG with a Linux client and a measurable dose of serious cool. Or somehow end up programming at Nintendo.... Oh, sparkley eyes! *_*

And a by-the-by, it's two and a half months in, and I'm still totally thrilled to be working at a video games company. I mean, seriously, I'm like all, wow. I thought it was cool when I was working at TransACT, and my testing procedure involved firing up a video stream, and watching it on a TV. I had a TV on my desk, for work purposes, and that was the high-point of my career. Now I don't have a TV on my desk, but when I'm hacking on combat-handling code, part of my procedure involves firing up a game server, and playing.

I'm learning to take my time with things a bit more. I'm now much less worried that I won't speak six asian languages, play the piano, have my name someone in the Linux kernel that doesn't share a sentence with "blame", have invented an entirely new way of interacting with computers, master four different styles of martial art, earn my first dan in three different Japanese weapon styles, hold two masters degrees in disparate subject areas, earn infamy in the Debian community or even the admiration of my peers by 30. Or 40. I'll be pushing it to get there by 50. But the advantage of youth is that you get it when you're young, and only lose it if you let it go.

I guess on reflection, my goal has become to be a polymath ronin... For those familiar with anime, I think I want to be Kintaro Oe when I grow up...

Side-note: I'm now the secretary of the ANU Anime Society. Two days before the AGM, I wrote in an email to the then-executive committee that secretary was the one position I'd never take. Time makes fools of us all. ^_^ Congratulations to Cathy Ring on stepping up to the presidency, and to the other executives, old and new, for stepping up to what I expect (knowing Cathy) to be a hard-driven and successful year coming.

Oh, and someone asked this week about getting the GTO Live Action box set. So here's my AmazonJP links...

Two things...

Wii.com has gone live, along with a news release from Nintendo Japan announcing ship date and release pricing for the Wii.

For those who don't read Japanese and can't puzzle it out (it's up the top, above “ＷｉｉTM”) it'll ship on 2nd December 2006 for ￥25 000. It also says that schedule and pricing for foreign countries will come in the next few days.

Following some links from wii.com back through the Wii page at Nintendo.co.jp we get to see a video of the Wii software lineup, as follows:

I've highlighted launch titles, and indicated by-the-end-of-the-year titles as per the Wii software lineup page.

• Wii Sports
• Forever Blue
• Mario Strikers Charged
• Excite Truck
• Dragon Quest Swords
• Dynasty Warriors Wave (December 2006)
• Red Steel
• Fire Emblem
• Swing Golf Pangya
• Super Mario Galaxy
• Necro-Nesia
• Super Surgery (Card?) Chaos (Tenative name)
• Sonic and the Secret Ring
• Wing Island
• Pokemon Battle Revolution (December 2006)
• Bleach Wii (December 2006)
• One Piece Unlimited Adventure
• Dragon Ball Z Sparkling Neo
• SD Gundam Revolution (Tenative name)
• Crayon Shin-chan (December 2006)
• Tamagocchi
• Introduction to Wii
• Elebits
• Rayman (December 2006)
• Super Monkey Ball Oook Oook Party Great Gathering
• Fishing Master (December 2006) (Tenative name)
• Festival Master
• Furi Furi (December 2006)
• Harvest Moon Wii
• Twiilight Princess
• Colorinpa
• Metroid Prime 3
• Warioware Dance
• Super Famicon Wars W
• Bomberman Land
• The Dog Island
• Wii Music
• Wii Yawaraka Head Training
• Road Cool Domino
• No-miso connecting puzzle Takoron
• Cooking Mama (December 2006)
• Project H.A.M.M.E.R
• Biohazard Umbrella Chronicles
• Twiilight Princess (so good, they showed it twice!)

I count 43 titles there. ^_^

Also, NES games will be ￥500, SNES games ￥800 and N64 games ￥1000.

The Wii Preview slides are a goldmine, and include videos of the Virtual Console.

Did I mention that Zelda: Twiilight Princess is a launch title?

Along with 15 other launch titles, and another 11 titles by the end of the year.

Oh, dude, yay!

Oh, and the second thing...

17:01 <@usotsuki> Debian's definition of "stable" is different from what most people call "stable"

17:01 <@usotsuki> that's good and bad

17:02 < TBBle> Nope, it's pretty much what everyone except computer users mean by "stable". Think about it in the geological sense, for example. Or the chemical sense.

17:02 <@usotsuki> lol

17:02 < TBBle> ie "If you don't touch it, it won't randomly explode"

Edit: Found the Wii software lineup page, and so fixed my video listing above.

Edit: Forgot the AmazonJP link. ^_^

Wow. "Later this week" certainly took longer than I expected.

As of July 31st, I'm a (junior, for now) programmer at Micro Forté's Canberra studio. Two weeks in, and it's the best job I've had so far. ^_^ My first task involved trying out installation of the BigWorld MMOG server system as a new user so we could see what state the documentation was in, and for those who know how pedantic I am, a four-page file called whinge.txt is actually a positive sign.

It's an approximately eighteen-month contract, so I guess Japan and University will have to be put off at least that much longer. Still, I've pretty much wanted to write video games since I was six, learning Applesoft BASIC on the family //c, so no regrets. ^_^

I'm no longer working full-time at CBIT Internet, although I am still maintaining the ISP's servers there.

In celebration, I bought Guitar Hero, which neccesitated getting my Playstation 2 back from Richard, who'd in the meantime bought a PS2 EyeToy. I haven't tried the bundled game yet, but instructions exist to use the EyeToy as a windows webcam, and to use the EyeToy as a linux webcam.

This, plus the request of a nice young lady whom I only seem to face-to-face once every twelve months or so that I install Skype, got me playing with Skype again. Sadly, the 10 euros of credit I bought in 2004 and was unable to use (due to their system failing to transmit voice to the US at the time) have "expired", which annoyed me enough that I was boycotting them. The boycott ended the moment someone asked me to actually use it, mind you. ^_^

Of course, this led me into an exploration of open-source alternatives. On the Skype-protcol side, there's a paper from 2004 looking at how Skype 0.97 talked to the network as well as a recent claims from a Chinese company to have reverse-engineered the Skype protocol. Sadly, the latter is planning to commercialise their results, not publish them.

On the actual open-source side, I've been playing with SIP stuff again. I've had a SIP-based Asterisk server running here (You can try to call me via SIP although I don't always have a SIP client running) for a while now, and I recently got a chance to test it with some overseas friends, but due to poor codec choice, it quality sucked.

On codecs, I have to say that Speex is great and iLBC is awful. Both in voice quality, and for the fact that Speex is free open-source, while iLBC comes with a "no-commercial use" license.

Anyway, with a webcam, I've been toying with video-supporting SIP clients. For windows, the only free one appears to be X-Lite 3 which doesn't do Speex (although its commerical version, eyeBeam 1.5 does) but for my purposes (LAN to the Asterisk Box) I can do G.711 and let Asterisk do the Speex transcoding for me.

Under linux, Linphone has video support (although the 1.35 Debian package is compiled without, and the build-deps to build it wanted to remove texlive in favour of tetex...) which I've not tried yet, but which a brief glance at the source suggests supports H.263-1998. Ekiga, the successor to GnomeMeeting, also supports video, via opal, but only H.261. There's H.263 code there, but relies on FFMpeg 0.4.7 patched to support RFC2190 for its video support. (It's actually FFMpeg's libavcodec that's being used, but very few people make the distinction it seems)

A brief aside on the video codecs at play here. H.261 is the older ITU-T video standard for ISDN, while H.263 was a newer standard which drew from H.261 as well as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, and which was the default video standard for H.323 computer video conferencing, thanks to things like Microsoft's NetMeeting and the open-source GnomeMeeting. However, along with MPEG technology comes murky and ill-defined MPEGLA patent issues. There's also H.263-1998, aka H.263p or H.263+, which adds some annexes to H.263 to support some more encoding features. For moving H.263 over RTP RFC 2190 was written. However, the stream format defined in RFC2190 couldn't support the data stream from H.263-1998, so RFC 2429 was published. Both H.263 and H.263-1998 can be carried in the RFC 2429 stream format, so in theory everyone should be using RFC 2429 streams, and we'd all be happy. Apparently, NetMeeting only support RFC 2190 and H.263 however, so that's the version that they implemented in Ekiga too (since Opal is a refactoring of the OpenH323 library's media interface, and Gnomemeeting's built on OpenH323. And the OpenH323 H.263 code was submitted by the same person who did the FFMpeg patch mentioned above.) Meanwhile, X-Lite supports H.263, H.263plus, and (according to my SIP debug logs on Asterisk) RFC 2429 streaming.

I spent most of today weighing up forwardporting the RFC2190 patch to FFMpeg, or updating libopal to support RFC2429. I didn't achieve much, but I weighed it up a lot. The final answer was wait for the current libopal refactoring (they've moved the video codec support out into plugins, and rewrote the H.263 code such that it's much easier to _add_ RFC2429 support) to reach my via Debian in some way, and then have a poke at it, if they haven't done it already. If it's not already done, I'm sure that submitted the code to make it work would make me an Open-source Telephony Hero

So to bring us back to the story, I've got a nice little Windows-based SIP client which does video but not Speex and needs to register with someone, a Linux-based client that does speex but which I haven't compiled the video for yet (Linphone), and a both linux- and win32-based client which claims to do Speex but barfs (Ekiga...) and which can't do the current video codec with the current video stream format, and depends on a slight fork of another library to do current video with the old format.

I can see why Skype's so popular...>_<

Incidentally, if you want a non-registrar-requiring Speex-supporting free but-without-video SIP client for Windows, I found PhonerLite seemed to work well. And frankly, if you're going to call me without warning at home, you might not want the webcam to show you whatever my current state of dress or undress is. ^_^

Talking to Chris Smart (of Kororaa) at CLUG's PSIG meeting last Thursday about webcams, Ekiga and kopete inevitably led onto the GPL and the Linux Kernel (he loves to talk about it, really! ^_^) and Chris pointed me at Greg K-H's take on Linux and Binary-only modules, which manages to draw the line between legal and illegal way way back there compared to where we all through we were. (On a sidenote, OLS looks like it would have been tremendous fun. I can hardly wait until I'm a jetsetting conference-attending Linux Kernel Hero.)

I've also been poking at the DeviceScape 802.11 stack for Linux. As well as happily running my laptop's Apple Airport Extreme2 card for the past few months, its software-based Access Point support appears to have progressed to the point at which I can start poking at it for Nintendo DS Wirelss Multi-boot infrastructure, which will bypass all the card-specific hacking people're having to do, as well as let it work on things that aren't RT25xx cards. It seems in the six months or so since I've looked hard at Nifi, a dude called masscat has picked up the ball and run with it, so I've almost 10 pages of forum thread, and then whatever code he's published, to catch up on. I'm pleasantly surprised, I thought with the advent of Wifi support for Nintendo DS Homebrew code interest in WMBing over Nifi would die. So here's my chance to get the dscape port done, and become an NDS Homebrew Hero.

I'm currently reading Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials and it's reinvigorating my love of Perl. ^_^ Shame MicroForté is a C++ and Python shop... Still, it's a nice change from reading The C++ Programming Language, 3rd Edition which I was reading for the six weeks between my first job interview and pretty much the weekend before I started at MicroForté. Of course, this means I'm tempted to spend my free time ignoring all the above ideas, and tooling about with Perl 6 and Parrot Especially with sheer coolness like Z-Code support in Parrot.

And for one final note, the real-estate agent is coming around next Saturday to inspect my flat, so I had to clean up. Luckily, it was mainly a case of emptying all the bins, although I need to run a quick vacuum around the place, it's a bit dusty in parts. I expect this inspection is because my lease expires in the next couple of weeks, and they want to know if they should kick me out or not. Given that I'm not working days in Watson with occasional evenings in Belconnen, I'm looking at moving anyway. Anyone know of a cheap one-bedroomer or two-bedroomer in Watson or adjoining suburbs? I'd like to be able to walk or bicycle to work. ^_^

Edit: Correct misspelling

I'm out of juice

In other news... Finally upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.0.3 and Spam Karma 2.2r3. Also decided to celebrate with a new theme, blog.txt. It's OK so far, apart from the title sizing... Dunno if I'll stick with it yet.

The actual content of this post is twofold... I used CurlFtpFS (A FUSE-based filesystem) to update the site. I chose CurlFtpFS over Fuseftp because the latter consistently failed to handle vimdiff. ^_^

Happily, on Debian, it was easy to set up. m-a a-i fuse gave me the fuse kernel modules, and then grabbing the CurlFtpFS Debian package.

The main disadvantage is that you can't see the FUSE-mounted share from my windows box over Samba... This may just be a permissions thing, as I can follow symlinks across filesystem mounts OK, although I didn't used to be able to.

The other fold is that I finally started my exercise regime. Tonight, about a half-hour on Stepmania, for 14 three-foot songs and a four-foot song. I'm working alphabetically through the list of songs at three-feet, and then my last set of the three for the night is whatever I feel like. And tonight I was in a Bubble Bobble, そばかす and WITCH DOCTOR mood.

Most frustrating song of the night was Beyblade 2000 - Off the Chains, the BPM seemed to be tuned to the rappers, not the actual beats. On the other hand, most frustrating in a good way was Cowboy Bebop - Tank [Para Para mix], 307BPM of surprise steps. Fun. ^_^

Final good news, the author of the Top 10 posts plugins noticed my updates. I was linked from a blog that shows up in the WordPress Dashboard. ^_^

Meh, a few other things going on, I should be able to blog about them later this week. >_<

Edit: Back to Ocadia. Also, I bought juice. ^_^