March2005Walks, Scanners and Long Weekends30 March 2005 Hooray! We have a scanner! It's an old Umax SCSI scanner Confluence's parents gave to us along with a giant 56 device PCI SCSI card. Only 55 devices to go! Confluence's computer now has a somewhat industrial look to it since the giant SCSI cable has to come out through one of the drive panels on the front (the cable is too big to go out the back). Now to find stuff to scan... :) It's been a while since the last post and the while has included two long weekends so there is lots to report. Confluence won the most recent (19th March) V:tES tournament, although she squeaked into final by rolling higher than Ryan who was tied with her for victory points. It was the biggest tournament yet with 12 players and I made the final too - so a good day all round. My new Malkavian Antitribu deck is now quite a bit stronger than it was at the tournament, so maybe better luck for me next time. :) We almost missed the tournament (and did miss my ex-housemate Sarah's birthday) because the night before I attempted to repair my car which was giving trouble after driving for "long" (> 30 minute) periods. The nett result was that we were without a car for the weekend. On the bright side I got to chat with Philip at Outer Limits and have lunch with Confluence while waiting for Squeak to be fixed. The evening after the tournament was the first episode in the Flowerwar campaign LARP. It tried quite a lot of new ideas, not all of which worked. Hopefully the later installments will be better now that I have a firmer understanding of what's important in the LARP. Jason and Colleen came over for dinner the following evening and I got to learn Mahjong. Colleen's tiles are pretty cool. The mechanics of the game itself are bit too similar to rummy which I played to death as a child so it's definitely something which I'd like to only play occasionally. The week between the long weekends was damn short. :) The only major thing I got done at work was to write a prototype graph pattern matcher which we'll be needing for an upcoming project. The latest long weekend began with a night in Obs. I saw Gareth and JD at Stones. Gareth appears to be currently living in sin with Steve's family. :) Then found Lucas, Claire and Nadine at A Touch of Madness. I spent some of Friday working on the sleeves of our maille shirt. They have defeated me for now, but I have some ideas to try. Also worked on a box bracelet for Claire's birthday present and did some exploratory work on the Sigil magic system. Saturday we went walking in Cecilia Forest with Lucas and Claire. Confluence took a bag for collecting mushrooms and although be saw one enormous fungus it was, alas, not a mushroom. Walking around the forest it struck me how inaccurate most fantasy roleplaying games are. The next time I DM I'll be sure to include a slippery pine-needle-covered slope, steep sudden drops next to the path and the really bumpy terrain. That evening we played the Great Brain Robbery with Kevin and Neil. In general it seems to be a good idea to run ahead (so you don't fall of the train) and keep a secret good brain in reserve until the end. We ended off with a game of the Ninja Burger card game which seemed to go better now that we know you can trade items even after dice rolls and that letting anyone gain too much of a lead is suicidal. There is still the problem that people with few levels end up not being able to gain any without ending the game (and thus losing). Sunday was family day. We visited my mom and grandfather in the afternoon and had dinner with Confluence's parents (see scanner comments above, whee!). We played V:tES and Pimp: The Backhanding with Philip and Jo afterwards to recover. I am not at all bitter that I had to start every Pimp turn because we got the rules wrong. :P The weekend ended with a walk beneath The Sentinel with Neil, KD, the other Simon. It's an awesome walk (with seals to see at the end of it) but we came back to find Neil's car window broken and his box of tissues stolen so it ended on a bit of a low note. We bought dinner from Chef Pon's Asian Kitchen to console ourselves. Monday night we went to Jason and Colleen's and played bridge. It's been such a long time since any of us have played (and Confluence had never played before) that we really only got to refresh our minds with the rules. Maybe we'll have some proper games in the near future. So far this week we've upgrade Confluence's machine to Fedora Core 3 and set up the scanner. I've also installed shfs so I can access the music collection on Confluence's machine from mine. :) The only casualty from the Fedora upgrade was the phone bill - the cron job which disconnects didn't get restored. :| I'm currently fighting off the beginnings of a cold. Blerg. P.S. Confluence has just written a Wikipedia article for Forty Thieves. Home Computer, Ebuilds, Traffic Shaping10 March 2005 I eventually decided against getting a machine from BTServices and picked up an Athlon XP from the Cape Ads. Fedora Core 3 is now installed (which was done in 35 minutes) and updated (which took forever over dial-up). Nvidia drivers are also installed. Yum's habit of wanting to download package header information every time you run a command makes it very irritating to use over dial-up so I've switched back to apt4rpm. The home network now also has basic traffic shaping set up so the machine with 40 http connections doesn't steal all the bandwidth from the machine with the single ftp download which is updating packages. :) Traffic shaping turned out to be quite a bit more complicated than I thought it would be - I guess because I hadn't thought the issues through properly before diving into things. For those interested in learn I found this tutorial helpful. Submitted two more Gentoo ebuild updates (for redland and redland-bindings) which have now made it into portage. Still waiting for the mongoose ebuild to go in. I suppose completely new ebuilds take longer than updates. The alert reader will probably also have noticed that I've modified the site's colour scheme a bit. In defensive of my earlier choice of colour scheme I did the design on an old laptop where the colours looked completely different. :) After all the installing and setup I played an arcade game on my own machine for the first time in at least 5 years. :) And I have a Chromium score of 348980 to show for it. P.S. Note to self, the nice way to do C like for loops in Bash is:
CIID8 March 2005 I was there the day the strength of men failed. PyProtocols and Dual PIIIs3 March 2005 As a short addendum to last night's post: I've been playing around with PyProtocols mostly because it looked like something which is important to know but also because I what to use it in a small fun project I'm working on. After reading large wodges of the PyProtocols documentation and experimenting a bit I think I've gotten the whole 'adaption' thing. Now if only someone could have said: "The point of PyProtocols is to replace type checking with the adapt function. The adapt function attempts to find a wrapper which provides access to a given object using a given protocol. A protocol is exactly that - a set of rules for communicating with an object. In its simplest form, a protocol is just a class or type. I've also been looking at BTServices since I want to replace my laptop with a second hand desktop. Somehow R1600 for a dual PIII 550MHz just doesn't seem worth it - even with 512MB of RAM and newish graphics card. Ebuilds, Game Theorising, Hiking - and Gout2 March 2005 Friday we hosted an epic (i.e. six hour) seven-player V:tES game. The start was fairly predictable with Confluence's sneak-and-bleed deck taking the first too kills. I managed to halt the charge by putting most of Confluence's minions in torpor and after that the game settled down into an edgy three-way stand-off which Philip eventually won. Thinking about the game now, I've come to realise an important piece of strategy which I'd previously missed: never weaken your predator's defense. The problem is that a weakened predator is easily ousted and once ousted they'll be replaced by a strong predator who has just gained a substantial amount of pool and a victory point - while you've possibly spent pool and gained nothing. A corollorary to this is that there is nothing worse than a predator with a strong offense and a weak defense (e.g. a sneak-and-bleed or weenie-vampire deck). Taking this a step further the more strong-offence, weak-defense decks there are in a game the more difficult it will be for any other kind of deck to succeed. All of this is bad news for me because my current deck has no means to blunt my predators offense with simultaneous crippling his defense. Off to the drawing board I suppose... I somehow managed to haul myself out of bed at 7:00 on Saturday to go walking up Table Mountain with people from work - mostly for Chris' (a visiting student's) benefit. We had planned to go up Skeleton Gorge but discovered that Kirstenbosch have effectively blocked off all routes leading to it except those going through the gardens themselves - forcing hikers to pay if they want to get to the gorge - so we left from Celia Forest instead. The path we took went about three quarters of the way up Rooikat Valley and the broke left to join the concrete road which leads up to the ranger's hut and the dams from Constania Nek. After looping around the dams we met up with Estienne at the top of Skeleton Gorge (he had taken Farahnaz back to Kirstenbosch and then missioned up the gorge to meet us). The dams are very dry and the last dam we passed was empty. Quite sobering. We made our way down via Nursery Ravine and finished off with a picnic in Kirstenbosch (those bastards :). Saturday evening was Al's party where the primary feature was a keg of beer. Three people managed to complete the gallon-of-beer challenge. One of the three is now suffering from gout. Monday we continued our house hunting and went to look at a flat which was "very nice inside". The outside was terrible (flaky tourquoise paint on rusty steel railings), the area was worse (we were accosted by a strange grimy man who appeared to live in his bakkie and who asked us to jump start said bakkie) and the current tenants are fundamentalist muslims. Not very encouraging. Yesterday we did character creation for FlowerWar - a campaign LARP being run by d@vid and Tim. Went quite well despite Tim's flat being situated within a maze of rugby-related road blocks. Tonight we went to the Maynardville Carnaval and had good food and acquired cheap books. We will go again later when the bookstall has refreshed its supply. Food eaten: Polish potato pancakes, Austrian sausages. Food acquired for later: Austrian cheese. Books acquired: Gormenghast, Analog Anthology. Work news is that we have funding - hooray! - and that I'm currently trying to debug the Redland MySQL storage routines. I'm sure it's not meant to open a thousand connections to the database for a single RDQL query. :) I've also contributed a Gentoo ebuild for Mongoose. Hopefully it'll make it into portage soon. Whee! :) Contributing stuff has made me realise that a big attraction (for both individuals and businesses) to the OSS development model is that it's better to be a small part of something cool than a large part of something crap. And for those of you who are involved with software creation but live with your head in the sand I'll end with a link to Jack Reeves' Code as Design.
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