If it wasn't for carbon-14, I wouldn't date at all
Fintan pointed out that there are T-shirts for the County of Kerry. Considering the number of People’s Republic of Cork T-Shirts there are I’m happy to see that there are Langer Free Kingdom of Kerry T-Shirts.
Ok, I released the latest Pocketcity. It was just languishing.
Now on to the complaints, and how can I fix them.
1) I originally downloaded what was the “stable” version .17, and I had color. After running into some of the snags that I will mention below, I decided first to dowload the update which warned that it would have bugs. Well, I lost the color. I have a Tungsten T3 running on Palm OS 5.2.1. Actually, the color shows when I view the map, but the city is now in black and white. I tried deleting the game and re-loading the first “stable” .17, and I still have B&W. Patch available?
I don’t think this exists in the 0.17 release version, it sounds like the user uploaded one of the -bw tilesets.
2) The tax rate doesn’t seem to have any impact on the rate of development. I tested raising it and lowering it to see if population, factory growth, and commercial growth would (as they should) be stimulated when lower… no connection it seems. Here’s one way to have a big bank account… raise the tax rate sky high! They won’t move out! 🙂
True, the tax isn’t influencing people. I still have to get the feedback loops working properly.
3) It doesn’t seem to matter how many Military, Police, or Fire Stations I build… I can only have one unit deployed to fight monsters.
3a) I kept trying to get more units deployed because fighting them doesn’t seem to kill them any faster than just letting them run their damage unchecked. I thought if I could deploy more than one tank, I could stop them. I also tried deploying one tank, and one police car… still no apparent effect except that they seem to sometimes divert course.
Unfortunately you need to surround the monster/fire to nullify it. I need to change them to area effect items.
4) Deploying a firefighting unit seems the surest way for the fire to spread. Instead, I learned to pause the game and bulldoze all around the fire and just let it burn out. Early attempts to use the fire fighting unit ended in exponential spread of fire.
Same problem as 3, it’s not an area effect item.
5) Rate of development slows down a lot if I try to build a seperate “colony” further down the river. When the game starts, it’s really cool to see it grow. I expected that adding the same config. a little further down or even accross from the river would yeild a similar rate of development. It seems as they are all tied in to a reduced growth rate once population hits a certain level.
This is the distribution algorithm acting up again. I’ll have to re-work it to make it deal with this situation a little better.
6) Looking for ways to stimulate population growth. As indicated in item #2, Tax rate doesn’t seem to stimulate. I tried trees and water, and no apparent stimulus there. Roads are a must, but after that, I haven’t seen increased paces of development from the addition of PD’s either. Thought more would move in with better police presence, etc…
Problems with feedback circuit.
Aargh! I just have to get my head out of my ass with this program. People are complaining.
This is a bit of a music/video otherwise problem that seems to not have been sorted out. The problem is that when I’ve got a long piece of either music or video there is no facility for bookmarking where I am within the file. iTunes has support within files that are either Podcasts or Audiobooks, but outside of that you’re S.O.L.
Well I was at Mick and T’s combined 10th wedding anniversary and Mick’s ‘answer’ birthday party. If you have to ask what the answer birthday is then I sugggest a swift belt of a towel. The images are still being uploaded – sadly the internet is slow for uploading pictures.
Well I was looking at another batch of laptops – this time by a group called WindowPC, and I found an option to buy a DVD burner with ‘LightScribe’. Now I didn’t know what lightscribe was before that, but now that I know, I think it’s a really good idea. You get to label the physical disc itself, and you can use both text and images. What a really neat idea, producing highly personalized discs without the need to mess with sticky labels.
The website has a label gallery, which has some examples. I’ll say it again, what a really nice idea.
This one was a bit painful as I didn’t want to mess with the pre-existing configuration of the key files. Installation required a small modification to the standard installation options.
cygrunsrv --install sshd --path '/usr/sbin/sshd' --env 'PATH=/bin;/sbin' --env 'CYGWIN=ntsec tty' -a -D
You need to use the cygwin –path item, otherwise the service won’t start correctly (sshd needs to be executed with an absolute path). The env flags are there to allow the service to start, otherwise you end up with an annoying: cygcrypt-0.dll cannot be found error. The CYGWIN environment was there because otherwise it doesn’t work correctly. the -D is for daemon mode.
While installing the latest release of Solaris Express on my laptop (which took waaay too long) I was watching Dawn of the Dead on the telly. I tell you those zombies were just way too fast for my liking. It makes for a much scarier experience for us fans of the genre. The experience left me just a little shaken it was done so well. I mean, hell I laughed during Scream, but this had me turning my head on more than one occasion.
Obligatory Link of the Day: V.G. Cats. Humourous computer-game based comics by Scott Ramsoomair. Check out the T-shirts. I’m tempted myself.
Aargh! sucky iTunes just crapped out on me while burning mix cd #8 for the party this weekend. At least I can just deselect the tracks that have been already written and get on with the burning. I suppose it’s part of the iTunes does not like writing large compilations (this one’s 14.2 hours long). Scratch that – It’s decide to keep burning the same tracks. I suppose there’s a bug there somewhere. Piece of chit Apple software.
It looks like iTunes tries to make them unusable on computers as well. I have a single badly labelled CD track on the disk.
The music is?
It’s old, it’s boring, but it’s functional. The old Software Engineering Proverbs Page.
Well it finally happened – my hard drive decided that it could no longer take all the beatings that I was putting it through. Clicks, whirs and spinning up and down were the order of the day so I set about to recover as much data from it as possible. Bearing in mind of course that it was split into more than one operating system. Damn these rubbishy small drives. At least I have backups of most everything.
Being that it would take at least a week for my favourite on-line retailer to get me a hard drive, and next day delivery was not really an option I went to the local Aldi, and bought a Western Digital hard drive (250gb, 8Mb Cache, 7200 RPM) for the princely sum of €125, which is a little over 50¢ a gigabyte, which is damned good value.
Thankfully there is no corruption of the partition table, so as I performed for the laptop upgrade, I used the trusty dd command.
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=512 conv=noerror,sync
The difference here is of course that I’ve added the essential conv=noerror,sync to the command line. This means that it ignores input/output errors, and the sync makes sure that when I/O errors happen that the destination drive gets padded with zeros. It’s progressing nicely, and I’ve only seen 72 i/o errors, and they look to be sequential on the drive. whatever was on the drive at that location has just taken one for the team 🙂
I’ll fire up partition magic once I’ve all the content transferred. 72 sectors of 512 bytes is not a huge amount of data to lose, and I have a feeling it’s in the pagefile.
Update 2005-08-24 12:51 – it seems to be working well so far.
