Run-Time Errors
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "breakpoint" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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09:50 pm
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JP4
Well. Today has been... interesting. We're well on our way out to The Desert, and have had a few mishaps, all of which, thus far, have been alarmingly easy to correct (so, obviously, I expect a fatality at this point.) At the moment, I am on guard duty for C.O.O.T.E.R., the Main Battle Truck. Cooter hauls lots of gear, but normally overheats every fifteen feet if you have to go uphill. We've countered this this year by installing, I shit you not, a heavy-duty manual spray mister with a two gallon tank and a quick-disconnect that goes to a spray head in front of the radiator.. That's right, we are using a swamp cooler on a cargo truck. It actually works, but it uses water like mad. Ever pour a five gallon water jug into a spray mister on a downhill slope at 70? Try it some time. Bring a snorkel. Have I mentioned the guy who thought of this thing works at a Prestigious Government Laboratory? Oh, yes-- guard duty. We have dispatched half of LASA to drive well out of our way in a more efficient vehicle to run an errand. Since Cooter goes through even more gas than water, here we sit. Apparently I have caution stripes (or the ones I stuck to Cooter's bumper are doing the trick), because people are leaving us alone. So, just sitting here caching map data to use in The Desert, drinking Root Beer, and waiting. Which is okay. Posted via LiveJournal.app.
Current Location: US, Nevada, Lyon, Fernley
Tags: via ljapp
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03:04 am
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I'm Baaaaack
Oh yes. I'm back. Right now I'm dancing my ass off at a party full of pretty, smart, creative women with a free-drinks pass. This is a lot more like it. And this wasn't even planned-- I parked my car (currently full of all my stuff) in a secure location, and wound up here, courtesy of a good friend. Plus, I'm sporting my tan from Redding and zm in pretty damn good shape. I've been approached by more women in the last fifteen minutes than in the last six months in Redding. Smart people, good music, late nights, and attractive, assertive women. It's about goddamn time. Posted via LiveJournal.app.
Current Location: US, California, Alameda, Oakland, Adeline St
Tags: via ljapp
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06:39 am
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8-Bit Tribute to a 2-Bit Nose Job
Because I love you all very, very much, here is a link to a browser-based emulator for the classic Genesis game, "Michael Jackon's Moonwalker".
http://www.thesmartass.info/play/genesis/18961/Michael+Jacksons+Moonwalker
Be aware that the site is totally slammed and it will take some time for the emulator to fetch data.
Share and enjoy!
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04:12 am
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Mac Mobile
Cute:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icC1X5qWmkY&feature=popular
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09:00 pm
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GNUstep on Fedora Linux [tech]
Okay, since nobody I know will be interested in reading this, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you got here from a search engine! Way to leverage technology.
As of 24JUN2009, and Fedora 11, if there is a "yum" repository serving packages to install GNUstep and its related materials onto Fedora cleanly, I haven't found it. So, I am considering setting up such a repository, and building packages, if necessary. If things go well, I might eventually merge this into the main Fedora repositories, something I would like to have done for something, at some point, for various reasons that mostly have to do with padding my resume.
Hey, I'm nothing if not brutally frank.
At the moment, I'm still evaluating the latest materials I've found on the GNUstep website to see if this is a good idea or not. I'm aware, however, that there are other people working towards a similar goal. I haven't been in touch with any of them. If you have, or if you are looking for similar stuff, please drop a note in my comments area below, and we'll all see what happens.
Cheers,
Breakpoint
Tags: cocoa, fedora, gnu, gnustep, linux, next, obj-c, objc, objective c, objective-c, openstep
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10:01 am
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View from the Top...ish
Here we are on the top of Mt. Lassen... +/- 20 feet =] Posted via LiveJournal.app.
Current Location: United States, California, Shasta County
Tags: via ljapp
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05:17 am
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Going Up
Off to hike Mt. Lassen. This should be interesting... Posted via LiveJournal.app.
Current Location: US, California, Shasta, Redding, Sageway Dr, 2113
Tags: via ljapp
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11:52 pm
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The 2009 Bad Onamotapoeia Challenge
"Onamotapoeia" is the term for words that represent sounds-- and, through them, actions. For example, "kaboom" represents an explosion. (Interestingly, modern explosions rarely sound like this anymore-- it's just "POW!"-- but older explosives with large, slow primers probably did.)
The best onamotapoeia is, of course, found in comic books and old Batman episodes. [SMACK!] [KA-POW!] and, of course, [BIFF!]
This challenge, however, is to create bad onamotapoeia. Horrible imagery. Grossly inappropriate sounds. Whatever strikes your fancy (since it's hard to say what your fancy being struck would actually sound like). Feel free to use colors, font changes, embedded GIFs, the dreaded blink tag, whatever. Go crazy. Bonus points if you actually draw a comic frame (that may or may not make sense with your word).
And just to lower the bar adequately, I'm going to start with one:
[ K A - ]
Have at. And feel free to cross-post.
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09:42 pm
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Frustration and Satistfaction in 8-Bit Video Gaming
An excellent developer recently mentioned this:
"Nintendo has a new Mario game that will play itself & solve difficult parts if you're stuck. Laugh all you like; my 12-year-old self would have appreciated help with Wiley's crash bomb room in Mega Man 2. The goal is not to test the child's blind adherence to the game; the goal is to have a fun adventure."
Brilliant point. He went on to ask if any of us had ever committed physical violence against something due to frustration with a video game. Other than crunching a joystick pretty hard, I don't think I've ever actually damaged something because of a video game.
However, the most frustrated I ever got with a game was back with some of the games that had infrequent save points, limited continues, and a "final boss" or "final room" where whether or not you could survive and kill everything was, for all practical purposes, random, regardless of your level of skill. I seem to remember a lot of overhead-scrolling games were like this-- the game that comes to mind is Ikari Warriors, before I knew the infamous "dancing queen" cheat.
My other pet peeve that's coming to mind is this: side-scrollers with an enforced rate of automatic scrolling. As in, it was possible to get stuck behind something you should have jumped over and shoved off the screen. "I'm sorry, you're too slow to have fun. We're going to kill you, and you don't even get to see how." Grrrr. If you want a player to run, then make something chase him.
But the big one is countdown timers.
The legitimate use for countdown timers was in arcade games, where you want the game to eventually time out and go back to the "INSERT COIN" screen if the player walks away. On console games, they serve only to frustrate the player, and rarely add anything. The only game where I felt the countdown timer actually added something was the final stage in Metroid, and only because:
1) The rest of the game, which was quite large, did not include countdown timers, so there was a definite sense of oh shit, THIS IS IT which-- combined with artwork, music, and level design not only unique to that stage, but distinctly different from the rest of the game-- definitely worked.
2) There was a valid plot point for the timer-- a bomb, if I recall-- giving an obvious explanation for why the player would not want the timer to run out. There has to be a plot point. It doesn't have to be an Asimov story, but it has to at least have enough substance that a player, asked by someone walking into the room, "Why is there a countdown timer?" can provide a better explanation than, "I don't know, just to make it harder."
3) The timer didn't keep the player from exploring. This section of the game is linear, and because it is unique, different, and interesting, you can enjoy it as you're sprinting through it, without feeling like every side door is a strategy choice-- there are no side doors.
4) In general, the timeout is not too short-- it's enough to get your attention, cause you to pick your pace up, and make you not worry about demolishing every last enemy on your way down-- but it's not frustratingly short. However, it isn't irrelevant, either, which brings us to...
5) The timer encourages you to get up close to the final boss and make the fight personal. Importantly, it is possible to hang back and pound her from a distance, and greatly limits the player's exposure to damage, but this is the one scenario where the timer is likely to run out. This, I think, is really interesting, because you're forced to do something that is obviously very dangerous, but you wind up doing it because it seems entirely necessary-- and then, satisfyingly, it works.
6) And yes, finally, the timer provides the obligatory "get out before it blows" sequence that makes it clear you're leaving the whole works.
The jump-maze on the way out is perhaps a little frustrating-- and arguably the weak pint of the ending-- but it's also a challenge that doesn't occur in quite that form elsewhere in the game, and watching that final elevator ascend to the surface with less than ten seconds provokes a victorious, "Yeah!"
The last stage, end, famous credits, and subsequent restart of Metroid are some of the crowning achievements in 8-bit video gaming. The word that comes to mind is satisfying. It really does feel like the "fifth act".
Players invest a lot of their time (and, more often than not, a lot of their money) into the games they play. They deserve gameplay that is challenging without being infuriating, and an ending that really delivers a satisfying experience. Metroid packed all of that into, I was just reminded, an amazingly-small 128 KB.
Hope you found this enjoyable-- just my 2 KB.
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09:04 pm
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Simulating a Cisco Router
My current project gives me a need to simulate an admittedly simple configuration of a Cisco router. Because the configuration is simple enough, I'm just using a quick-and-dirty Fedora server VM with multiple Ethernet cards... but is there a better, more accurate option?
It turns out that perhaps there is: an IOS emulator, connected to some network simulation software. Here are the relevant details:
White Paper: Creating a Virtual Cisco Switch, Snake Oil Research, 19FEB2009
Dynamips, the Cisco 7200 Simulator/Emulator (simulates the hardware, emulates execution of actual IOS images)
Dynagen, a front-end for use with Dynamips
GNS3, a graphical network simulator using both of the above
I don't have time to play with this right now-- nor do I have any IOS images to run-- but this may be interesting for later. Obviously, the big missing piece is an open-source IOS clone. That would have to be a clean-room job, for sure-- apparently some of the IOS source code was stolen a few years back (prompting some strong, and strongly-worded, arguments that routers should run open-source software anyway-- see Kerckhoffs' principle) but technically it certainly seems doable.
Open-source IOS, of course, would probably also have the side-effect of giving a lot of old Cisco hardware a new lease on life, as it would probably wind up being run on both the emulator and real hardware, which is a nice little circle of love, when you think about it. It would also probably aggravate the problem of Cisco constantly having to compete with its own used equipment-- but that's a high-class problem, in my book.
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04:19 pm
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Exocranial RF Shielding Analysis (MIT)
Well, this is just going the drive the conspiracy nuts batshit:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/
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10:21 am
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dnsmasq
Shortly I'll be setting up DNS, DHCP, routing, and related services for a client with multiple LANs flung around the country. Normally, this is a job for the venerable BIND ("named", pronounced name-dee) and dhcpd. However, in recent years "dnsmasq" is getting a lot of attention as a solution to both problems for small networks. It's a hell of a lot simpler to set up-- if it's powerful enough for the job. The situation in question, in my case, includes a network that has modem-based failover between LAN segments, should the MPLS connection fail.
Has anybody used dnsmasq for a network with failover, or some other "interesting" situation beyond a home network? How was it? Where did you bump into the walls and the ceiling?
For the BIND fans, any thoughts or warnings with respect to handling failover?
Thanks!
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08:43 pm
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VirtualBox, Fedora 11, LXDE, and a Rambling Tech
Just wanted to toss a knowledge chip on the big pile, in case somebody doing a Google search finds it helpful:
As of 13JUN2009, I'm successfully running a pile of Fedora 11 VMs under VirtualBox on a Fedora 9 host. (I'd upgrade the host to F11, too, but there seems to a problem with PCI bridge support for that machine in newer kernels. Still chasing that.)
The host is an AMD Athlon XP dual-core at 3 GHz, with 4 GB of RAM, with an nVidia 8800 GT graphics card, and two Samsung HD753LJ SATA drives in a 750 MB RAID-1 mirror, hung off the onboard controller of a 7050M-M motherboard. Further, that RAID hosts an encrypted LVM, whose volumes are encrypted yet again. Dynamic CPU clocking is turned out, and set for "OnDemand", so the cores generally sit at 1 GHz unless things get really busy, when they hop up to higher values as needed, up to 3 GHz.
The VMs are Fedora 11 installs (from the DVD image, using the graphical installer). I installed with 512 MB of VM RAM, then backed it off to 384 MB when running. Video memory is 16 MB. I made one install, updated it, then used "VBoxManage clonehd" to prep three more. Incidentally, there appears to be a large potential to automate VM creation. VirtualBox has an API, and most operating systems these days support scripted installs. I found a reference at CERN for something called "OSFarm", but the project is either dead, or not receiving documentation updates...
The VMs are running LXDE, a lightweight desktop environment that still looks modern, and will feel fairly familiar to Fedora GNOME users. OpenBox runs alongside it. LXDE apparently was written with conservative power usage in mind, interestingly enough, so that-- along with the "idle=halt" kernel option-- is something I'll definitely have to play with on one of the netbooks some time. It's worth noting that LXDE didn't seem to start properly "out of the box", but that may have been a quirk of running under VirtualBox. I installed the VirtualBox extensions, turned on XDM, and set LXDE as the default environment. Oh yes, and set an explicit resolution in Xorg.conf. That seems to have straightened things out, and it integrates well. It's far less resource-intensive than GNOME.
There's a also few ReactOS boxes to stand in for the Windows clients, too... but, it seems networking is broken in ReactOS at the moment. Oops. So those will temporarily be simulated by... something else. That's not today's problem.
So, with all this crap-- which is hardly optimized for any of this-- how are things running?
Well, so far, performance is quite good! Things are very responsive, yet don't constantly keep the CPU pegged. Right now, for example, all four VMs are running, they're all in X, they're all logged in, and I've got a bunch of browser tabs open on the host, along with an OpenOffice spreadsheet. The result? The CPU load indicator on the host is barely even showing any activity-- 5% processor usage-- and the on-demand CPU scaling is keeping things at 1 GHz. The air coming out of the power supply fan is cold.
I'm sold. Well, actually, I've been sold on virtualization for a long time-- the truth is that I don't actually enjoy having piles of loud machines everywhere anymore, and haven't for some years. But yeah, for 2010, I think a heavily-parallel, RAM-crammed uberserver running Fedora and VirtualBox is definitely in my company's future. It's the cheapest option, anyway! I need to be able to simulate multiple LANs in different cities connected over telco backbones, with complicated routing and firewalling, and this lets me do it easily. I can assign virtual LANs, WANs, and backbones to the various simulated devices.
What's just so impressive about all this is that, while I was very picky about how I put this physical machine together, and configured it, it's nearly two years old and it was not expensive at the time. I'm salivating thinking about what I could put together to do this kind of stuff if I actually had four five grand to throw at it. Amusingly, I'll probably look at some of the Apple hardware, because some of their desktops are starting to get up to pretty high processor counts. I have tried running VirtualBox on a Mac Mini, and it does run, but I need to try it under OSX running on heavier hardware to have a valid opinion of it. VMWare is probably a better bet for the Mini.
It's nice to be enjoying network architecture again, instead of spending all my time bashing cases open and closed and wondering which Ethernet cable came loose. I can concentrate on actually designing and testing things first.
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08:38 am
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Writer's Block: Last Meal
Brief.
Tags: writer's block
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11:16 pm
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Linux PCI-PCI Bridge troubleshooting, and related geekery
Notes to myself (and other techs who may find this useful) about how recent (2009) Linux kernels handle bridges between multiple PCI buses, and troubleshooting a problem presumed to be related to this. Mere mortals will not be interested. =]
( Read more... )
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10:16 pm
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Lightning
Wow. I'm up in Redding right now, and I am watching the most intense lightning storm I've ever seen in my life. I really wish I had a video camera or a good DSLR right now...
It's all cloud-to-cloud, near as I can tell; there's very little thunder, but these just amazingly intense, full-sky, purple-white lightning streaks, slam slam slam, three to six at a time, every twenty seconds or so. You can't even tell where the lightning is, exactly, it lights the entire cloud deck.
It looks gorgeous and absolutely lethal. Totally amazing. I'll have to see if I can get some kind of a photo. With the iPhone, that basically means taking photos over and over and over and hoping I get lucky, but why not-- I'll give it a shot.
I think my future time in California is definitely going to include visiting up here once in a while.
Other than that... let's see... I stuck Fedora 10 on an Asus Eee PC netbook for a client (worked nicely, though the second time through I left X/Gnome off), and I'm trying to get a machine to boot that doesn't seem to want to play nicely with recent kernels. You know, tech stuff.
Hmm. Lightning storm... tech stuff. Lightning storm... tech stuff. Hmm...
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05:34 pm
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Primer / Shane Carruth Interview
Primer, in case you haven't seen it, is one of the most interesting and cost-effective independent films ever made. Created by Shane Carruth for a budget of $7,000 (not including post-production), the movie is exceptionally well-done for an independent film, easily exceeding the quality and watchability of, say, a good made-for-TV movie. The writing and plot, of course, blow away typical Hollywood tripe easily. But it's the fact that Carruth made something that is totally compelling with such a minimal cast, crew, and budget that makes Primer fascinating to anyone interested in independent film-- or seriously considering doing their own.
While there have been various interviews with Carruth since, here's one I hadn't seen before that I find short but interesting. Among other things, he addresses the issue that would be near the top on a lot of would-be directors' minds: why film? The reason might surprise you. Here's the interview:
http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/artandindustry/primer.htm
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04:18 am
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A Quick Look Back at Linear Predictive Coding
A demonstration of linear predictive coding: 21st-century hardware emulation paired with 1990s software for 1980s versions of 1970s hardware speech synthesizers.
A bit long, but worth the high points: the total size of the compressed audio (which is literally shocking by today's standards, and food for thought), and of course the before and after audio clips.
The speech synthesizer chip being emulated was used in the "Gauntlet" arcade games, and is close to the author's intended target: the chip used in the external speech synthesis module available for the TI-99/4A home computers (which I cut my teeth on).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=wVDE-6TtmFQ
Geeky, but neat. Makes me want to play around with LPC some. In particular, makes me wonder if parallel GPU cores can do this in real-time. You'd be able to carry a HUGE number of conversations at once. That has an interesting application for a project I've been eying...
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12:25 am
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The Hangover
So one of my housemates invited me to see "The Hangover" tonight.
Oh dear god. That was the funniest damn thing I've seen in a long, long time, and I totally needed it. The theater was completely packed, and it's definitely a lot of fun to see with a huge crowd.
I don't think I've laughed that hard in years. It was a really nice change.
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02:31 am
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Ghost Circus, Toy Matinee, etc.
I happened to mention one of my favorite artists/albums, Toy Matinee, to a friend. I realized that my ex has wound up with the album. Oh well. Hopefully she at least likes it.
Unfortunately, I also realized I had never bothered to rip it into iTunes. My gigantic marathon iTunes ripfest was in January; one of the ways I took my mind off our breakup.
But I realized I'm really in the mood to listen to it.
Sooooooo...
I tried last.fm, which of course interprets a band as a suggestion. It actually came up with some really good stuff, one of which was "Ghost Circus".
http://www.ghostcircus.com/
Their song "cycles" is really quite good. But what's really interesting is that these two guys are on opposite sides of the Atlantic, with one in Tennessee and one in The Netherlands. And the production is definitely good stuff.
So, if you're up for listening to stuff that's similar to what's on my mind, try this:
http://www.last.fm/listen/artist/Toy%2BMatinee/similarartists#pane=webRadioPlayer&station=%252Flisten%252Fartist%252FToy%252BMatinee%252Fsimilarartists
Obviously this will be multiple artists so I'm not entirely sure exactly what you'll hear, but it'll be Toy Matinee, Ghost Circus, some of Kevin Gilbert's solo projects, and some other good stuff. Mostly it's a set of troubled minds, all sharp enough to cut their own climbing ropes. I can assure you the lyrics will be well above average, the production is interesting, and it'll occupy your mind. Some of it will be a little... strange.
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