January 2006 Archives

Well, I've officially finished with my GMing for another year at Warpcon. The Paranoia was on last night, and I feel that my players performed their tasks at disaster management very well. One of them survived, bravely fighting off the remainder of the players for the personal shield. He, of course was the one on his last clone from the start, and was successfully getting everyone else at the table recloned a few times. Bouncy rubber balls, flesh eating viruses, where bodies were being put together using 2,000 km of sticky tape. Several nuclear explosions, vast amounts of MDK everywhere. Oh, it was all good.
This afternoon it was the Cthulhu scenario. Hey! it's great to have the band back.

I saw a recent complaint from someone that Apple should open up their system update interface to other developers. I agree, this should be done. It would be a boon for consumers.
However, it should also be done for Windows as well. Currently only Microsoft products (and a few drivers) are integrated into Windows Update, which is a real shame.
What hurts on your typical PC is the sheer number of update mechanisms that are installed on a machine in order to ensure that software is kept 'up to date'. Typically each of them installs their own scheduler that performs all the update checking tasks. Liveupdate, jusched, realsched. There's probably a scheduler for you anti-virus software as well. The complaint is that on Windows 2000 and newer there is a perfectly good task scheduler on the machine (there was one earlier as well, but that's not the issue, really). It can do everything that you need for scheduling - one offs, once a week, once a day, once an hour, every third Thursday of the month. Why can't developers use it?

Well I was in Dublin over the weekend and met the Bob and his girlfriend Karen. We went for food and a few drinks. He is doing well. I'll put up the pictures when I get to broadbandland.

It turns out that there is a mobile phone version of Wonder Boy. My little sister wants it for her phone dammit! Anyone know how you can get it in Ireland? Legally?

It's 11pm and you still tell us that the show has graphic scenes (CSI:Miami), come on, this is well beyond the watershed.

This one: Secure Java apps on Linux using MD5 crypt
Firstly, the encrypted string is: $<mechanism>$..., where a mechanism of 1 is MD5. My desktop has 2a, which indicates I'm using the Blowfish algorithm - I see no reason to compromise.
Well, guess what - this document won't work for me because I use blowfish locally, and secondly, the only accounts in /etc/shadow (and passwd) are local accounts - if you're using nis, nisplus, or ldap (solaris more so) for your name services, then you're SOL with this mechanism.
This is another reason for not using the crypt mechanism is that this is trying to solve the problem from the wrong level. You should not be trying to compare the encryption strings, you should be using an alternative to the OS provided security mechanism. So in this case you should be using jaas, and a PAM plugin. The use of yet another 'well it works on my box' mechanism is so cripplingly annoying that it angries up my blood.

It's the COM apartment models. They're related to the threads that make use of COM objects. What happens is that when you initialize COM for a specific thread you declare that it's either Apartment Threaded (AKA Single Threaded Apartment) or Multi Threaded.
When you use the Apartment threading model, it means that the COM object is isolated within the thread that created it. The most important piece of information about this model is that you should never use that object in another thread - it causes brokenness.
When you use the multi-threading model, what you're pretty much saying is that I'm probably going to use this COM object in several threads. The way it works is that a multi threaded model, then the context is shared within the process.
The model you support also puts extra complications on you, the creator of the object. COM objects with a declared MT support must use some synchronization to protect shared information within the object, otherwise you'll suffer from data corruption due to threads walking over the data. You don't have any of these considerations in a Single threaded model - you're guaranteed safe and sane interactions.
Additionally, when you're in COM land, remember never just WaitFor*, but instead MsgWaitFor* things. This also applies to using DDE. This is because the Apartment model uses windows messages under the hood.

My filter keeps missing them - bloody bayseian filtering; maybe I should go back to keywords.
Annoying, and generally incorrect. If you're trying to sell me worthless, internet pseudo-intercourse then you could at least target it better.

The laptop does suspend and resume to disk, but I have issues with the video card - I use the 855resolution program to allow the video card to set the native 1400x1050 resolution of the screen. When I resume once X kicks in and can't set the video mode correctly I am booted back to a login screen.
I put in an entry in the powersaved post resume from suspend2disk script, and it correctly repatches the video mode before the X server tries to reinitialize the video. The problem is that I need to use the powersave command to shut it down correctly.
I took the alternate route and installed the software suspend2 patch. It provides a cleaner interface to hibernation (the hibernate command); it compresses the file; it supports using a file on disk instead of the swap partition; you can encrypt the hibernation file. It will unmount the windows paritions when I suspend, remounting them when I resume (corruption issues avoided) and runs the 855resolution command before X kicks in. All in all a nicer way to deal with hibernation.
I still haven't got suspend to ram working. Standby works, though.
Now all I need is to get 855resolution working on Solaris and most of my complaints will just vanish into the distance.

Wow, just wow. The visuals are just amazing.

It's roleplaying. It's Penny Arcade. I laugh (you may not be able to view this directly.

Well it seems to be a problem for me - I'd love to get more work done on Pocketcity, but these bloody episodes of CSI on UK Living (I used to work there) are distracting me horribly until really late at night.

Anyone, anyone?

The world's best quotes in 1-10 words.
Ok, looks like there's only one today.

My sister got her divorce in the courts this morning. She's planning a party for tonight.

I have a problem with emotional situations - they tend to drain my energy completely. On Tuesday morning, my sister-in-law's father passed away. I was directing traffic around the house last night, and got home sometime after 11pm. I was, to say the least, shattered, even though I was doing nothing more than waving a torch and walking people from their parking place to the house (to protect them from oncoming traffic).
Every funeral occasion in the last year has left me drained; even if they were only slightly connected to me.

I've been re-watching the new series of Battlestar Galactica, and damn, but it's great. I've played several tactical games on the computer, but I've never encountered anything that has had the player in such an impotent position. You are dealing with an enemy that can increase it's number by simply pressing the 'more' button on a console. I don't think that anyone could play a game that ultimately, regardless of what you did, was unwinnable.
There are a few missions in games (such as the 10 minute survival ones in starcaft) that gave you a sense of just how hopeless it was, but they really don't contribute to how awful it is.
There are few games that get close to this fact. Freespace 2 was one of them. It concludes with the baddies causing a supernova. It leaves us with a sense of hope. The only problem is that it, at some level, it allows us to feel that we can win.
I want an armageddon situation.