| (no subject) |
[Posted on Saturday, the 21st of November 2009 at 12:24 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | meta, nablopomo | ] |
| [ | What |
| |  sleepy | ] |
| [ | Who |
| | Orchestral Suite No. 4 in D major - Ouverture ~ JS Bach/Violin Concertos | ] |
Having seen ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) talismancer's entry I wondered how much I'd written.
Well, copying and pasting this month's entries from ljArchive into Word gives a shade under four thousand words. Hmm. Then again, there's a lot of variation in this: the shortest entry was a single word, while the longest is 816 words. I think talismancer has been more consistent than me with entry length.
While I've got ljArchive open (and to try and make this post slightly more substantial), let's have a play with a couple of the plugins. First up is a graph of posts per month:
( Posts per month )
The only other plugin worth running is the most common words one:
( Most common words )
And as to why "bounce" and "splat" are so common, see this madness... |
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| Writer's Block: First Things First |
[Posted on Thursday, the 19th of November 2009 at 10:38 pm] |
That's a slightly inaccurate question: my computers are usually permanently logged in, but I generally hibernate them when I'm away. They're set to prompt for a password when restoring from hibernation, so I suppose technically I'm logging back in then.
Anyway, at work I have Outlook set to auto-run on startup. So first I'll go through that checking for any emails, check a couple other information pages for updates, then pick up the pieces of whatever bugfix or development I was in the middle of.
When I get home I usually hit LiveJournal, sign into IRC, check half-a-dozen webcomics, check the RSS feeds, check emails, and check a couple of forums I frequent. About half of that happens automatically, or should at least (the RSS reader appears to get mildly confused by hibernation, and fails to update half the feeds). After that it slows down a bit, and quite often after doing that I'll abandon the computer and fire up a games console (currently the Nintendo 64). |
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| Travelling through time |
[Posted on Wednesday, the 18th of November 2009 at 11:03 pm] |
The Master Sword is a ship with which you can sail upstream and downstream through time's river... The port for that ship is in the Temple of Time...
While playing Ocarina of Time I started wondering about the time travel involved in it. For those of you who don't know, you start out as ten-year-old Link but after the first quarter of the game you travel seven years into the future. Later on, you get the ability to travel between both points in time.
The thing is, when you arrive in the future you've also physically aged seven years. So you've not so much travelled through time as slept through it. This makes some sense: when you pulled out the Master Sword, your spirit is sealed away for seven years until you're old enough to be able to weild it (young Link can barely reach to pull it out from the plinth in the first place!).
Anyway, you trundle along to Kakariko village, pick up the Hookshot, and then learn the Song of Storms. This one has always intrigued me. You learn the song from the windmill guy, who picked it up seven years ago when an Ocarina kid turned up and played a song which messed up the windmill. Ocarina kid? Well, it can't have been you, as you've never played this song before... or can it?
Potential paradoxes aside, at some point you'll head back to the Temple of Time. Here Sheik will appear and tell you that you can put the sword back in the pedastal, and by doing so you will travel back in time. This is where it gets weird. You never actually travelled forwards in time in the first place, but were just sealed away. And yet, returning the sword will not only take you back seven years, but when the blue light fades you're back in your ten-year-old body! This makes no sense by classical time travel theory, and no sense by the "sealed away" theory either.
The other puzzle, and what originally caused me to start writing this post, is *when* do you arrive? You don't return to the same point in time every time you use the sword, as things that you do as young Link don't get reverted. So the possibilities are that you return immediately (so that if someone was standing there in Past Hyrule, watching you, they'd see you grab the sword, a flash of blue light, and then you letting go of the sword), or that you travel back exactly seven years (so the watcher would see you disappear and reappear several days later)? I've never checked the in-game clock to work this one out.
You can also travel forwards in time again, though this is much more explainable: you get sealed away for seven years again. It's implied that you have no sense of what happens during these seven years - you blink, and you're a few feet taller.
Anyway, back to your younger self. After some more dungeon-crawling you end up back at the windmill again. Still no sign of that pesky Ocarina kid... but the only person in all of Past Hyrule that knows the Song of Storms is you, and so you play that song, teaching it to the windmill guy. The same windmill guy who seven years later teaches it back to you. It's a wonderful paradox, and just where did that song come from?
Just when you thought there was enough messing around with the time stream, you get the ending to the game (which I assume you all know, but stop reading now if you've somehow not finished it yet). The sages banish Ganon to the Sacred Realm, and seal him away for a long time. Future Hyrule is still a right mess: Hyrule Castle is a lava-filled crater, the town is a ruined shell, and monsters are roaming the land. So Zelda uses the Ocarina of Time to return you for the last time to Past Hyrule, though again I'm not sure when you arrive. You return to the Temple of Time, and the door is still open so Ganondorf can still waltz in and try to control the Triforce... except he's sealed away in the Sacred Realm. Even though that happened in the future. How does that work?
For added speculation, what happens to Future Hyrule? Remember, we've got a seven year period where for a large chunk of it Ganondorf ruled over all. This can't just disappear... can it? I remember an old TV cartoon where they sent someone to the past to defeat some evil. When their hero returned to the future and asked if he managed to stop the enemy, no-one knew who he was talking about. Does the same happen here: the Future Hyrule that we know morph into the new Future-without-Ganon Hyrule without anyone realising?
Did it really happen? |
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| (no subject) |
[Posted on Wednesday, the 18th of November 2009 at 7:59 pm] |
Question for all you techie types: what would you expect to pay for unlimited, unrestricted 8Mb/s broadband?
That's without any transfer caps and without any artificial throttling.
Edit: I'm looking at ADSL, so that's 8Mb/s down and around 1Mb/s up. A symmetric line is much too expensive for what I want. |
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| Icon meme |
[Posted on Tuesday, the 17th of November 2009 at 9:55 pm] |
So, over halfway through NaBloPoMo and I've managed to keep up, more or less. I shall celebrate this achievment by posting a meme! (to be fair, I've been sitting on this for half a year)
Found via sarshin: Icon meme!
- Reply to this post, and I will pick six of your icons.
- Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
- Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
- This will create a never-ending cycle of icon glee.
This is my original Tall Ships icon, based on a photomanipulation by cez-metal (many thanks for letting me use it), in turn inspired by the Show of Hands song Tall Ships. The original image was portrait format and didn't really have anything that could be cropped, so I left-aligned it and stuck a solid fill on the right-hand side.
Emptiness. I swiped this from olego many years ago, and use it for the occassional post. Sometimes there isn't anything you want to say with the userpic, though you could also think of it as being a LiveJournal version of 4'33".
The grand secret of how I do all my programming. That's me in there, along with me and me. I made this one back in university - if I remember rightly, a friend had done a clone photo and I decided to one-up him. It's made up of three photos of me layered on a clean background, taken using the self-timer on my camera. The layering isn't perfect: the camera shifted a few pixels between shots needing some careful positioning to line myself up with everything, and I didn't get the shadows right.
Lest we forget.
It's a scan of a British Legion poppy from a few years ago (probably around the same time as the previous photo), with the white background of the scanner replaced with a neutral sky-blue.
On the skyline the tall ships sail by
Bound for London their decks piled high
Fruits of warmer lands
Passing through our hands
So we look for a storm in the sky
This is the much-improved version of the original Tall Ships userpic. To make this I took the full image, and rotated and cropped it to have the ship appear roughly upright and central. Even with that there's still some gaps from the original image (notably the top-right corner), so I added a vignetting effect with a bit of masking. I then used a bit of unsharp to sharpen the detail, though looking back on it it could do with some more sharpening (it's a very fine line between "sharp" and "edgey", and surprisingly hard to achieve). This is my current userpic across all sites that have icon or avatar support.
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| Iji |
[Posted on Monday, the 16th of November 2009 at 11:38 pm] |
In lieu of a post (and I do have a couple of proper posts brewing, one on Doctor Who and one on The Wheel of Time), I shall instead draw your attention towards Iji. It's a free platform shooter game with actual plot, actual world(s) and actual backstory.
I've called it a shooter, but you can play the game as a pacifist, and like Ikaruga complete it almost without firing a single shot. The gameplay and enemy logs change depending on how you tackle it - for example, it's possible to form a truce in one level, and enemies will speculate on your motives (genocidal killer or potential assassin? Neither, if you wish). It's things like this which make you feel that you're actually in control of the characters, and not just following a rigid script. As much as I like the Zelda and Metroid games, you are rather limited in how you can achieve the main plot. |
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| (no subject) |
[Posted on Sunday, the 15th of November 2009 at 11:17 pm] |
Having managed pretty much 100% completion in Twilight Princess (not finished Rollgoal yet) and Minish Cap (need to finish that dratted Cucco game), I'm now going through Ocarina of Time with the same intention.
I've lost count of the number of times I've played through it over the years, but I'm still finding hidden places and new tricks in it. Some really useful ones too - it turns out the Deku Nuts are ridiculously overpowered against the right sort of enemy (you can use one to clear a roomful of those bouncing bubbles inside Jabu-Jabu), and the spin attack works against enemies that normally zap you if you touch them, like the jellyfish.
I also managed to beat Dark Link using just the Master Sword, which is a first for me. Only used up 9½ hearts too. Previously I've abused Din's Fire against him, by backing him into a corner so he can't dodge. This time I got to the door and realised I hadn't gotten the magic upgrade, hadn't got any green potions, and didn't even have full magic power because I'd used Farore's Wind. So I just went ahead and had a go anyway, and managed an epic sword duel. I still want to know how he does that annoying jump-on-your-sword-and-stab-you trick though... |
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| Mini-rants |
[Posted on Saturday, the 14th of November 2009 at 9:20 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | nablopomo, rant | ] |
| [ | Who |
| | Now We Are Free ~ Hans Zimmer & Lisa Gerrard/Gladiator: Special Annivesary Edition | ] |
Today's post is a collection of mini-rants about how modern software is made of fail.
First up is GSAK, which when I imported a set of waypoints from Geocaching.com decided to overwrite any existing ones in its database. I'd actually gone through all the child waypoints for multi-caches and renamed them to a) fit the 6 character limit on my GPS receiver, and b) have names that I can find easily. Fine, so I imported with the defaults which updates existing records, so this is semi-expected. Would have been nice if it had prompted me. Anyway, restore from backup (GSAK takes automatic backups on exit, which is a very good thing to have), change the option to "Add", and reimport. Apparently in GSAK "Add" also means "feel free to replace existing records", and it went and blatted some of the waypoints anyway.
Second up is the Microsoft Security Resource Centre blog, which is syndicated on LiveJournal as and which until a couple of minutes ago was on my friends page. November's bulletin includes an embedded video for the webcast. Fair enough, saves people having to follow a link to view it. What's not nice is automatically downloading the entire video in the background as soon as the page has loaded, without waiting for the user to click play. How did I find that one out? By Internet Explorer taking several tens of seconds to load my friends page and doing some hefty disk activity at the same time. Turns out that it copies the wmv to the Temp directory when the page loads, and the wmv is 200MB. That'll be a rude surprise for anyone using a low-bandwidth or capped connection. There's no obvious way to disable that behaviour either.
Honary mini-rant at Youtube, which doesn't appear to let you stop downloading a video once you've started playing it but will at least wait for you to click play (or have the video auto-play when you go directly to a page on youtube). |
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| No storyteller |
[Posted on Saturday, the 14th of November 2009 at 12:10 am] |
Well, that's rather annoying. I had a wonderful plan for today's (ok, technically yesterday's but I've not gone to bed yet) post, involving an inline version of last year's Storyteller. Unfortuantly this was scuppered by several things: 1) LiveJournal does not allow IFRAMES, 2) using the OBJECT tag with HTML doesn't reliably work in IE6 (it loads the page but doesn't display it), and 3) when you use the OBJECT or EMBED tags in a LJ entry, what actually happens is their backend wraps it in an IFRAME using the lj-toys.com domain. This eats the referer, and so I can't find out which user is viewing that entry.
I could probably make it work by dynamically generating an image and including that - images still get directly included, and so the referer header should still be present. Doing it that way feels like a horrible hack, but that's the Internet for you. |
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| (no subject) |
[Posted on Thursday, the 12th of November 2009 at 11:56 pm] |
Today's discovery at work included a genuine 10Base2 to AUI adapter that may well be as old as I am. |
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| For the Fallen |
[Posted on Wednesday, the 11th of November 2009 at 11:59 pm] |
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
For the Fallen, Laurence Binyon |
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| Icon overload |
[Posted on Tuesday, the 10th of November 2009 at 10:43 pm] |
You know you've got far too many windows open when you're entering the third column of icons on a vertically-aligned taskbar...
I can begin to see the attraction of tab-based systems (I think at least a quarter of those were PuTTY sessions), though all to often I find they add another layer of indirection that gets in the way. I also find tabs very inflexible when using a multi-monitor system: quite often I'll want to pull a tab out into its own window (to then drag it over to the other screen, so I can see both things at once), or do the opposite and add a separate window into an existing tab system. The great beauty of a multi-monitor system is being able to see more stuff at the same time, something which tab-based interfaces seem to actively discourage. Traditional MDI views also suffer, as once you start spanning the window across more than one screen accessing elements in the parent window becomes awkward, more so when the screens are not aligned vertically. The ones that I find work best are SDI views as your window layout is not constrained by whatever some developer thinks is the One True Layout (though then you end up with the aforementioned icon overload...).
My setup has the secondary screen on the right, about 100px lower than the primary, with the start bar auto-hiding to the right side of the primary. It means the start bar is always near the mouse pointer, and makes it easy to capture it by aiming for the top-right corner of the primary screen. It's a bit of an odd layout (it started because my original secondary screen was a different size to the primary), but I find it works for me.
Anyway, was there a point to this post? Probably not, but have a cookie for putting up with my NaBloPoMo contribution. |
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| Are you wearing a poppy? |
[Posted on Monday, the 9th of November 2009 at 7:24 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | nablopomo, poll | ] |
| [ | What |
| |  curious | ] |
| [ | Who |
| | Another Round ~ Foo Fighters/In Your Honor Disc 2 | ] |
Normally around this time of year you would see lots of people wearing poppies. So why is it that hardly anyone seems to be wearing them this year?
This calls for a poll!
Poll #1483029 Are you wearing a poppy?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 10Are you wearing a poppy? If you answered yes or not yet, when did you/will you start wearing it? If you answered yes or not yet, why? If you answered no, why not? |
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| Minish cap figurines, take two |
[Posted on Saturday, the 7th of November 2009 at 9:10 pm] |
I decided to finally get the last half-dozen figurines in Minish Cap (well, the last half-dozen before facing Vaati). Of course, to do this you need Mysterious Shells, and to get those you either need lots of patience or lots of rupees. I'd been playing the game occassionally since the last post, getting a couple more every time, but there had to be a faster way of getting shells than just using Picolyte.
It turns out there's actually a red rupee available by digging just to the left of the door into Link's house. This respawns every time you re-enter the area, which is easily achieved by going in and out of the house. So the plan is to collect 900 rupees here, then head into the town and swap them for 90 mysterious shells. At first I was going to stop there and try to get the figurines with just that (spend 15 shells per attempt, resetting until I get a new figurine), but then I realised that it didn't actually take me that long to get the shells. And with only six left, getting enough for guaranteed success on every one won't take much longer.
I guesstimate it at being less than 4 seconds per red rupee, and did the mental arithmetic while picking up the rupees. It takes 45 red rupees to get 900 rupees. That's 180s or 3 minutes each. So, do this six times to get 90 shells to use for each figurine, taking a bit more than 18 minutes... actually, that's only 540 shells so let's go round again and make it >600 shells so I can use the maximum number per figurine. Call it under 25 minutes total, and I can *finally* get into the music box house.
Now to deal with those dratted Cuccos...
Have I told you how much I appreciate your continued patronage?
Because I do.
Stockwell, Minish Cap |
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| Centidrabble |
[Posted on Saturday, the 7th of November 2009 at 12:01 am] |
Centidrabble! |
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| Bonus NaBloPoMo post |
[Posted on Thursday, the 5th of November 2009 at 10:58 pm] |
I managed to crash my TV earlier today.
I switched on the N64 to play some Wipeout, held down power on the remote to turn on the TV, sat back, and then wondered why the TV hadn't powered up. So I look at it, and just see the power led flashing once every couple of seconds. "That's odd", I think, and I hold down the power button again for a couple of seconds (this model needs the button on the remote held down for a bit to turn on). The LED on the TV flickers like it should, but when I let go of the button it goes out completely. Strange.
This TV runs Linux internally (judging by a GPL hidden somewhere in the menus, and some source code on a related website), so I can only guess that the Linux kernel has actually crashed.
I suppose it is a sign of how advanced modern technology has become. |
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| Remember, remember the fifth of November |
[Posted on Thursday, the 5th of November 2009 at 5:58 pm] |
Remember, remember the fifth of November,
gunpowder, treason and plot,
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes,
'twas his intent
to blow up the King and the Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below,
Poor old England to overthrow:
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Hip hip hoorah!
Taken from http://www.yorkshirefireworks.co.uk/gunpowderplot.html |
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| Polarium |
[Posted on Wednesday, the 4th of November 2009 at 11:40 pm] |
I'm mildly disappointed that none of you recognised the puzzle I posted yesterday.
It's a level from Polarium, a puzzle game for the DS. In this game, tiles flip between white and black when selected. The aim is to in a single stroke without passing through the same tile twice, change the white and black tiles such that each row contains tiles of a single colour. The grey border doesn't count for this, and allows you to exit and re-enter the main block of tiles.
For example, solving the puzzle posted yesterday could be done by selecting the tiles in the following order:
The levels start off very simple, but get much more complicated as you go on. There's also a time attack mode, where new rows fall from the top of the screen and solved rows disappear (like in Tetris). I'd been meaning to get hold of it for a while since playing ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) glasshalf_empty's copy, and spotted a pre-owned one in Game for £8 the other day. At that price it's excellent value. |
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thoughtful
annoyed
7 (70.0%)
contemplative
accomplished
amused
silly