It’s roleplaying. It’s Penny Arcade. I laugh (you may not be able to view this directly.
It would be really easy to get work done
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.
Dancing the Weinerschnitzel waltz
Anyone, anyone?
A few links
The world’s best quotes in 1-10 words.
Ok, looks like there’s only one today.
Mah D-i-v-o-r-c-e (not mine! honest!)
My sister got her divorce in the courts this morning. She’s planning a party for tonight.
Energy Drain
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.
War comparisons
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.
Image file execution options (or how to replace taskmgr.exe)
Well, tricked out with the new procexp.exe, I wondered how it did it’s magic ‘replace the task manager’ option. It turns out that this magic is from the Image File Execution Options registry key entries. There’s a blog entry which describes this feature. process explorer sets itself up as the debugger application for taskmgr.exe, when you try to launch taskmgr, it launches procexp first as it’s debugger, which then doesn’t launch taskmgr.
Valid windows file names
I keep forgetting this when I decide to accidentally create files with names that turn out to be undeletable under windows. What makes a valid Windows file name? is a blog entry on Brian Dewey’s blog and it reminds me that using the \\?\ feature bypasses the MAX_PATH check for a file name’s length when trying to manipulate it (or delete it). I’ve accidentally created files with long names a few times, and been unable to delete them. Thankfully I’ve created a little application that allows me to do this now.
Lots of cups
Today was of course christmas dinner, but over the last few days (yesterday included) I’ve been struggling with an upgrade to SuSE linux 10. I stupidly installed the commercial version, instead of the open one. X doesn’t work correctly (swapping VTs crashed the X server – this is apparently a bug with Xorg when compiled with gcc 4.0.2 [laptop dell inspiron 500m, 855 intel graphics). fixing the missing packages took a while. The only reason I noticed was that xgettext was missing. Turns out that there’s a bunch of packages missing (ncft, gettext-devel). For someone who cares about having a decent ftp client and be able to use xgettext (I mean what the fuck are you people thinking – do you even care about the rest of the world. You pretty much can’t compile a single open source project without xgettext).
Anyway, rant over for the time being, on to the fixes. I made use of a page on the jem report, which got me a convenient set of Yast sources to add the missing packages.
A partial fix for X was to download the fairlite x drivers, the problem is that I lose 3d acceleration. Lose one thing, gain another! Frustrating to say the least.