From an email that a friend of mine sent me:
Anyone who has small children or has been around them will appreciate this…….You all will like this one, especially if you’ve had kids!
This is my kindergartener’s artistic rendering of a pair of scissors. I wonder what his teacher thought. And I am so darned proud of myself - I allowed myself just a small smirk when I saw it. I waited until he was out of the room, before I started to cry from laughing so hard.
Something else I did this weekend was pickup Supreme Commander. For those of you who don’t keep up with computer games, Sup Com is the huge, much anticipated game from the same guys who did Total Annihilation. It got amazing reviews, but it’s a performance hog. Fortunately I’ve got a decent rig to run it. Core2Duo 6400 + 2GB ram + Geforce 9800 + Dell 24″.
Fire the badboy up… Welcome to get owned 101. No tutorial besides, build a power plant. Build a resource gathering thing. Okay.. now I’m going to attack you with a shitton of stuff… Yep… They basically throw you into combat without telling you anything. And those of you who say RTFM, the M has nothing in it. The graphics are beautiful, the interface takes some getting used to, but has a lot of niceities, like smart queuing, but for the most part… very complex.
The game is designed for the guy who knows all the commands. If you don’t… boy, does it suck.
I’ve been playing it between system rebuilds of my linux box (I would be wow’ing, but the (package) downloads suck down a lot of my bandwidth so… yeah. Besides… getting ganked and kernel panicing is too sucky even for me.
The thing you first notice is that you need balanced armies. For example… I had 87 light tanks. I tried to attack a base with 5 tier 1 point defense guns. Me -87 light tanks, them -1 point defense gun. 2 subs vs no sonar detection, - 15 frigates, and 2 shipyards before I could defeat them. When they say rock paper scissor, they aint kidding.
You start to pick up little tricks you can do to manage the crazy things, like queueing up a build order to generate an army. For instance, build 2 tanks, then 2 artillery, then 2 more tanks, then 1 anti aircraft, repeat build. Also, transports were a huge enigma before I finally figured out how to use them. If you try to load them up starcraft style, failure. The carrier and the troops just sit there. If you get a bunch of carriers, and set up a ferry point with just 1 of them, then tell the other 15 carriers to assist the ferry point, then tell your whole army to enter the ferry point, all the carriers work like the US Army with military precision to transport everything. Once you get things going, its awesome. Too bad they don’t mention how to do these things.
I’ll post more stuff later.
Sorry I haven’t been making many posts. The new system we are using at work basically takes like 5 x the work to do the same stuff we were doing before, so I haven’t been able to free up much time. Work keeps piling up.
Last week was the week all the people get their acceptance letters emails to check their account so we basically get flooded. I ended up working a 12 hour shift, and got comped back a day, so I used the comp day to take Monday off.
Friday Dragon was a bust, basically nothing going on. Saturday I did some much needed work on my Pally, and Sunday I decided to actually do some work and get my secondary computer on Linux. You see, I decided to try to get “legal” and try to purchase or go free as much as possible. Hence the Linux.
This is where the adventures in frustration come in. I have a Ath64 3500+ with a 120gb boot drive and a 300×2GB raid 1 ntfs stripe on a RocketRaid 454 controller. I decided that the easiest way to do this was to resize my windows partition on my boot drive down a bit, install ubuntu on a partiton, and then find a way to mount the NTFS stripe and then migrate some of it off onto the boot drive, then wipe out the stripe and make it a Raid 1 mirror stripe. Of course I backup as much as I could on my 300GB external.
Frustration #1: Boot drive has 2 bad sectors.
Gparted says oh noes and quits. Try doing all sorts of remedial things, including installing Partition Magic. No help. Spend 6 hours troubleshooting. Throw up my hands and quit. Use gParted and wipe out the windows partition and just format everything ext3. Smartly decide that 20gb will be my root, and 80 gb will be my home.
Frustration #2: Kernel Panic!
I stupidly decided to try out Feisty Fawn, which is the alpha build of Ubuntu’s OS. Crash and burn. Install, and then kernel panic after I roll up to the most recent everything. After a couple of hours of troubleshooting, I find out that the “splash” boot time option in grub causes a kernel panic. No idea why. Edit menu.lst to boot without the “splash” option.
Frustration #3: 1024×768, Mesa rendering. No ATI
I’m running an ATI X800 on my system. I would like to not have it be a glorified vga adapter. Can’t get the ATI driver to work. After much mucking around with fglrx, I decide to roll back to edgy. Format root partition, install edgy. Doesn’t work there either. Yay. After rolling back up to Feisty, then coming back to Edgy again, I find the envy script, which basically does exactly the things I did, but it actually works.
Frustration #4: Can’t mount my Highpoint RocketRaid 454 controlled ntfs partition.
Do some research on using dmraid to mount a stripeset… basically all I find is a ton of people who want to do this for whatever reason, but fail miserably. I fail miserbly. Decide to just wipe the stripe set and set it to Raid 1, in the hopes that linux will do better mounting a EXT3 partition. Nope.
Find a guide on how to modprobe the whole raid stuff into the kernel rather than rely on dmraid to do the mapping. That ends up working, I suddenly have /dev/sda1 as a 300 gb drive, that I can mount, but fstab hates me and will not mount from fstab. Yay. That’s where I am now.
I’m sure once I get it up it will be fine, but man… when linux works, its awesome. The configuring part is the sucky part.
