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http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0347.html 
There comes a time in every new gamer's experience when they realise that things have gone horribly wrong*. Dealing with this is all part
of the process of maturing as a gamer. Of course, it's a bit difficult when you're actually not a mature adult to begin with.
So really, it's a tricky situation for all gamers.
* If you're playing Call of Cthulhu, ideally this should occur in the first 3 minutes of play.
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New shinkansen |
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It's been a while since I made a general post, but here are some of the links that have accumulated since then: | |
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I have a certain amount of sympathy with the views expressed in this Grauniad blog entry. When ++Rowan is issuing statements condemning the election of a second homosexual bishop in the USA, but not issuing statements condemning the proposed criminalising of homosexuality in Uganda (including the death penalty for "aggravated" cases), nor the support of that law by Uganda's bishops, then it leaves a very unfortunate image of what the Church's priorities are. Surely protecting the already discriminated-against homosexual minority in Uganda from state oppression is the urgent priority? | |
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Rather late in the day compared to many people, I've recently been taking steps toward joining the DVCS generation. For a year or two I've been an occasional light user of bzr, either to hold temporary branches off my main SVN repository (e.g. pre-commit polishing of a big patch somebody contributed to one of my public projects) or to hold projects too small, too experimental, too embarrassingly silly, or occasionally too private or legally encumbered to want to put into my public main SVN. A few weeks ago I managed to lose my long-standing fear of git, by dint of playing with test repositories and examining the output of git fast-export until I actually understood how its data structure fitted together and could work out everything else by reasoning about that. Having done so, I immediately migrated all my bzr repositories to git, because that kind of understanding is very valuable to me and bzr's documentation seems to place almost no emphasis on imparting it. At the weekend, though, I actually did find the document which explains bzr's data structure – and, despite a superficially completely different user experience, it's actually very similar to that of git. As, I discovered after a brief browse on another website, is the data structure of Mercurial. The user interfaces can vary, but all three of these DVCSes have an essentially similar underlying data model. And, curiously, a thing that struck me about this model is that it's surprisingly similar to something I already know about: Usenet. ( may not be entirely serious ) | |
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... ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) d_floorlandmine and, a little belatedly, chaospigeon, _marauder_ and rubberwench!! Hope all your birthdays are fab... ION, in school. about 20% awake. The worst lesson of the day is now done, though, so it's not too bad. I just need more coffee...(some time and energy to practise my own guitar stuff and some chance to play it in public would also be good, longer term, but hey, one thing at a time). | |
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The world needs more angry cat sushi. Edit: no sooner do I post that than their site goes down! Watch this space... | |
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They're tough in Guadalajara, allegedly everybody carries guns, people will start a shoot-out at the drop of a hat, there's still the cow-boy frame set.. And dinosaurs get nicked | |
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http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0346.html 
Let's talk about hit location tables.
If some form of physical peril strikes your character, it can be important to know where on your body it hits. In many cases the
impact is more or less random, so it's not obvious where you've been hit. Enter the hit location table.
This is a table which cross-references the results of a dice roll with various body parts. For example, if you roll a 7, you might get
hit in the torso, a 13 might indicate the right leg, and a 29 could mean the sniper's bullet hit you in the left clavicle. The more detailed
the combat system, the more possible results you can have and the more detailed and specific the body parts can be.
Also, typically a hit in various locations carries with it certain penalties. For example, if you get hit in the leg, it might reduce your
movement rate. If you get hit in the clavicle, it might cause you to drop any weapons being carried in that arm and a 5% chance of bone
fragments severing your carotid artery. You get the idea.
One of the prime hit locations is, of course, the head. It's a nice juicy target, and being hit there can cause all sorts of interesting
side effects. So a high quality hit location table should have a nice, big chance of causing hits to the head. Guaranteed fun for all!
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I looked up at the beautifully clear night sky yesterday, and noticed that the stars actually looked to me as if they were different distances away. Now I know perfectly well that human binocular vision can't possibly resolve distances of that magnitude. It therefore struck me as odd that I was perceiving something which I knew to be both an optical illusion, and true! | |
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.. How much I hate getting up at 6:00 am...?:P | |
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So, I have to get everything I've done this year written up in reports and documentation for delivery to Japan on 15 December. The reports all need to be reviewed by someone outside my project - of which there are maybe only 2 people in the company qualified to do so since it's highly technical stuff.
I asked a guy to review the reports, and he agreed. Then yesterday afternoon he said he had some more urgent things to do on Tuesday and Wednesday, and would get to my reports on Thursday, and hopefully have them returned to me by Friday. Fine, I think, That gives me Monday and most of Tuesday to go through the reviews and make any necessary changes.
This morning I get to work and find an email saying that I need to get my stuff completed by Thursday afternoon, so corporate services can have three days to do whatever they need to do to it all (i.e. burning it to a CD) before sending it to Japan on Tuesday!
So I spent time this morning running around trying to find someone else who can review my stuff more urgently - and of course everyone in the company is in a similar end-of-year mad dash to get stuff completed by imminent deadlines. And then the rest of the day documenting all the code I've written all year - which I'd planned to spend the entire rest of this week documenting, but now I can't because I have to spend tomorrow making changes based on document reviews in order to get them completed by Thursday!
Yaaaaagggghhhhh!!! | |
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Apparently the listening part of this year's JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) included an excerpt from a 'radio drama' which sounded suspiciously like Evangelion with the serial numbers filed off...
It's already made it to youtube [Japanese only, obv.]...
Who says examiners don't have a sense of humour? (Caution: may only be funny if you're the sort of Japanese nerd who might find themselves in a JLPT listening test in the first place :-)) | |
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**FINAL EDIT Thu Dec 10 02:15:47 UTC 2009** So there is the final update... Over the past day we have processed around 11 million jobs out of the 12 million that were in queue at that time. Please bear in mind that over this past day, more jobs for notifications are also created. So while the queue has been dropping, we are still not fully caught up at this point, due to backlog and new jobs. We have roughly 3 million jobs still pending that involve the notification system in some manner. We had hoped we could have fully cleared the queue in a day, but unfortunately we can't clear it too quickly, since we need the rest of the site to operate normally. From our current perspective on the amount of jobs that are left in queue, and how many it has processed thus far, we believe it will take around another 8 - 12 hours to process everything. And finally some answers to some questions: ( Read More and Get Some Answers... ) | |
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I had a spare hour to installed FreeBSD 8.0 under VMWare on my Mac recently, and I managed to get ZFS on root working. Here are a few logs. I had to re-compile /boot/loader to make it work. These two guides were invaluable: http://lulf.geeknest.org/blog/freebsd/Setting_up_a_zfs-only_system/ http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBootI created 2 x 30G virtual disks as mirrors of each other, and I got about 12MB/sec read/write to/from them. Not bad, considered it was all virtualised under MacOS whilst using HFS+ natively. It's a shame ZFS didn't come to Snow Leopard. Checksumming and pool management with self-healing are the best things about ZFS. This video explains a lot behind ZFS: http://blogs.sun.com/storage/entry/video_the_utlimate_zfs_tutorialHere are my logs:
FreeBSD happy.home.thackray.org 8.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE #0: Sat Nov 21 15:02:08 UTC 2009 root@mason.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC amd64
12:05:55 ~ on happy$ df
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
space 26G 289M 26G 1% /
devfs 1.0k 1.0k 0B 100% /dev
tmpfs 434M 4.1k 434M 0% /tmp
space/home 26G 0B 26G 0% /home
space/home/jrmt 26G 8.5M 26G 0% /home/jrmt
space/usr 31G 5.4G 26G 17% /usr
space/var 26G 205M 26G 1% /var
12:05:55 ~ on happy$ zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
space 29.8G 5.49G 24.3G 18% ONLINE -
12:06:03 ~ on happy$ zpool status
pool: space
state: ONLINE
scrub: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
space ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
da1p2 ONLINE 0 0 0
da2p2 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
12:06:08 ~ on happy$ zpool iostat -v
capacity operations bandwidth
pool used avail read write read write
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
space 5.49G 24.3G 3 3 43.2K 77.5K
mirror 5.49G 24.3G 3 3 43.2K 77.5K
da1p2 - - 1 1 31.6K 77.6K
da2p2 - - 1 1 31.7K 77.6K
---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
12:07:46 ~ on happy$ zfs list -o name,sharenfs,mountpoint,used,creation,type,mounted,snapdir,copies,quota -t all
NAME SHARENFS MOUNTPOINT USED CREATION TYPE MOUNTED SNAPDIR COPIES QUOTA
space on /space 5.21G Mon Nov 30 21:57 2009 filesystem yes visible 1 none
space/home on /home 4.10M Mon Nov 30 21:57 2009 filesystem yes visible 1 none
space/home/jrmt on /home/jrmt 4.08M Mon Nov 30 21:58 2009 filesystem yes visible 2 none
space/home/jrmt@now - - 0 Wed Dec 2 1:40 2009 snapshot - - - -
space/usr on /usr 5.02G Mon Nov 30 22:15 2009 filesystem yes visible 1 none
space/var on /var 196M Mon Nov 30 22:15 2009 filesystem yes visible 1 none
12:07:13 ~ on happy$ cat /etc/fstab
# Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass#
#/dev/da0s1b none swap sw 0 0
none /tmp tmpfs rw 2 0
/dev/acd0 /cdrom cd9660 ro,noauto 0 0
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 So, the next CD on the pile is one that seems to have taken up near permenant residence in my CD player (as is the one after it in fact, but that's for another post). cyberinsekt shared one of the tracks off And So I Watch You From Afar's self-titled debut album a few months back, which once listened to necessitated buying the album. The album is was worth getting just for the cover art, which is an amazingly surreal landscape, featuring a bull with a teapot, a fish with legs and a hammer-headed dog amongst other strange things. This carries on into the track titles, which have names like Eat The City, Eat It Whole and it's somehow quite fitting for the music within. Bands without vocals seem to have a bit more room to play with their sound and ASIWYFA (to use an acronym as the names far too long to keep typing out) certainly do this, bringing together intricate melodic maths-rock, dramatic arena rock, aggressive heavy metal, discordant punk and grunge all at once, with other influences from all over the place. The album's opener, Set Guitars To Kill, launches off with an attack of drums followed by grungy guitar before dissolving into the melody and back again. This then moves aside for A Little Bit Of Solidarity Goes A Long Way, which as I mentioned in a previous post, sounds strangely as if it should break into bongos at any second, but instead breaks into heavy metal guitars. And so it continues, each track bringing something new and entirely different from the last. The album's crammed with invention, it's anything but formulaic and there isn't a single weak track. All the tracks are available on last.fm, but the real highlights of the album, must be Don't Waste Time Doing Things You Hate and The Voiceless. | |
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What's the Belgian idiom(s) for "Not known at this address, return to sender"?
(I know there is no such language, FTAOD) | |
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After I've had a coffee or three..  I also have to confirm a couple of lessons for today and there is something at the Venezuelan consulate that I would like to attend for a bit. What's that saying about London buses? | |
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http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0345.html 
It is, of course, of paramount importance that a character being run by the GM be seen as not having an unfair advantage in any way.
The operative words here are "be seen". When you're GMing a game and also playing one of the characters in the adventuring party,
you need to be sure to hide all of the little advantages that character has.
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There are a number of things going on in the run up to Copenhagen to make the point about how serious climate change is. One of the more interesting ones is this:  Alfio Bonanno and Christophe Cornubert have created a 1 ton cube of CO2. At 27-foot it's not inconsiderable. Going on figures from the Guardian, each person in the UK, on average, produces nearly 10 of these each year. That's a lot of carbon, and yet it's nothing compared to places that the US, who produce twice as much per capita. ( via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) inhabitat) | |
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This afternoon a substantial number of people (tens of thousands from what I gathered - I didn't try counting) marched from Grosvenor Square and surrounded the Houses of Parliament in the wave. The tail was still coming through Parliament Square as the front dispersed.
A substantial number of people voicing a concern about an issue that affects all of us and far too little is being down about. It would be nice if all the things being called for including pledges to cut emissions massively were agreed to at Copenhagen. It shouldn't take tens of thousands of people to get the government to actually do something about an issue that has been on the agenda for years though.
Unfortunately, our society gives louder voices to the huge corporations. It's not in the interest of these entities to cut emissions as there's no money to be made out of it, so they will resist the necessary changes to society. The insignificance of the changes to policy since the Stern report 3 years ago, just goes to show this.
Nobody wants climate chaos, but people are slaves to the corporate entities at all levels from the shop floor workers to the most senior managers. In a society based around money we all need it to pay the rent, mortgage, bills. Without it there's no roofs over our heads and no food to eat. We are all therefore reliant on these corporate entities and go along with them to a greater or lesser extent depending on our personal circumstance. If the profits of these entities are hit then it has a direct knock-on effect on the employees of that corporation and therefore on the people.
The government therefore places the needs of the economy above those of the people. After all, as the effects of a recession are felt much more in the short term than something like climate change, it's much easier to pretend that the latter is not happening.
In a system where money confers status and power, we need to spend to show we have it to promote our place in society. Profits need to grow to allow our status to grow. Both of which naturally require growth of production, whether we actually need the resulting goods or not, and hence an increased use of resources. Efficiency only really becomes necessary when resources become scarce and therefore expensive. Otherwise it's business as normal, produce more to sell more, convincing people they need to replace perfectly functional items to upgrade to the latest features that most of them won't ever use.
A system which actively seeks to increase consumption to grow profits is pushing in exactly the wrong direction to cut carbon emissions. You can impose limits on it, but the push will still be there and they will be actively seeking to increase those limits.
Hopefully Copenhagen will result in enough measures to prevent complete disaster, but the problem will still be there and unless we cut consumerism the shadow of climate chaos will always be looming over us ready to hit as soon as we let things slip slightly out of control.
The more I think about it, the more it seems that climate change isn't solvable within a capitalist system. If we seriously want to do something about it, we need to kill consumerism and move towards equality of status for all, so we don't need trinkets to prove ourselves worthy of society, we just consume according to our needs. | |
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But not shots
• Oh, ok; apart from the couple of Jägermeisters and the various Guinness and other imbibables.
• Inferno was ace. Had to leave early as, as is often the case, I have a busy day tomorrow.
• Blacklist, too, was good. Catching up with peeps I don't very often see, but should.
• Couple of episodes of the original Battlestar Galactica this morning. I'm afraid, every bit as bad as I remembered them; the reasons why I took so long to watch the new one that just ended (that is, I remembered the original one) still there.
• Did I mention a busy day tomorrow? But that's not a bad thing. Promise. | |
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