June 06, 2003
Ewww!!
Is that how this blog [The old Blogger blog. — Ed.] looks in Internet Explorer? I must admit, I'd never tried it; I use Mozilla for everything these days. No wonder nobody was reading it.
Well, anyway, that was easy enough to fix. Thank goodness it's just tables and not stylesheets. And Internet Explorer really doesn't get the idea of "reload", does it? Cow of a browser. People use this thing? By choice?Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:00 AM | Comments (70) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
An Outbreak of Sanity
I've commented before on Australia's insanely expensive internet access. At the time I mentioned Comindico, and their unlimited usage plans.
I have a problem with unlimited usage plans. First, the ISP will certainly not have enough bandwidth to allow everyone to run at full speed all the time. Comindico appear to oversell their bandwidth 30 times; in other words, they provision 1.5Mbits of bandwidth to the Internet for every 30 1.5Mbit customers they sign up. That's not unusual, by the way. In fact, many ISPs use higher ratios. The problem is, by promoting themselves as an all-you-can-eat network, Comindico are likely to attract the big eaters. If everyone is constantly downloading as fast as they can, everyone will get 50 kilobits per second. That's dial-up speed. And the other problem is that if you give something away for free, people don't value it. Why curb your downloads when they don't cost you anything? It's the tragedy of the commons yet again. Which is why I was interested to note that three ISPs - Swiftel, Optraweb and CyberLink - have now announced new plans with drastically cheaper - but not free - downloads. The plans are almost identical, so I suspect there's some sort of resale deal going on. Quick summary:| Speed | Included Downloads | Monthly Charge | Excess per MB | Included Uploads | IP Address |
| 256/64 | 2GB | $45 | 0.6c | Unlimited | Static |
| 512/128 | 6GB | $65 | 0.6c | Unlimited | Static |
| 512/512 | 6GB | $125 | 0.6c | Unlimited | Static |
| 1500/256 | 10GB | $125 | 0.6c | Unlimited | Static |
| 256/64 | Unlimited | $75 | n/a | Unlimited | Static |
Yes, that's zero point six cents per megabyte. Compare that to the 14.9 cents charged by my current ISP.
Also nice to see is the 512/512 SDSL plan. At first glance, this has no real advantages for the average user. But when you think about it, ADSL forces us all into the category of consumers: with limited upload rates we're permanent second-class internet citizens. SDSL means that you can run your own web server or file sharing, and give as good as you get. In fact, these plans are perfect for hobbyists or small businesses running their own web sites, as they all include a static IP address and unlimited uploads. So, am I going to switch? Yes. Probably yes. I'd have to give up my free night-time and weekend downloads. But I think I can cope with that; after all, Buffy's over now; no more to download. And I'm probably going to switch to the 512/512 while I'm at it. Hosting providers, who needs them?Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:27 AM | Comments (72) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 05, 2003
Yes, We Have No GA-7NNXP
It's not my fault that Google keeps pointing people to Ambient Irony when they are really looking for reviews of the GA-7NNXP. And I'm not the kind of person who would stoop to using this to boost my reader count. If you are looking for a review of the GA-7NNXP, I still can't help you. But if you live in Australia, Eyo now have stock of the GA-7NNXP ($352) and the GA-7N400V Pro ($280.50). The latter board lacks Gigabit ethernet and 6-phase power, and only supports 333MHz memory and FSB, but it does include dual-channel GeForce4MX graphics.
He called his rescue racer crewThe GA-7NNXP, of course! With dual-channel DDR-400 memory, it flies through the benchmarks!
As often they'd rehearsed
And off to save the boy they flew
But who would get there first?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:16 PM | Comments (69) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Gadget File
Played with a couple of interesting gadgets recently.
On my way home from work yesterday, I noticed that my local Apple dealer had a little stall set up in the shopping mall I pass through. And, nestled between two Powerbooks, there was the new iPod, singing the siren song from the start of Pufnstuf:Come and play with me, JimmyMy name's not Jimmy, but hey, whatever. My current MP3 player is a Sony Picturebook. This has the advantage of being a full blown PC, so not only does it play music, but also Nethack, the Sims, videos, Microsoft Word... It has the major disadvantage, though, that it runs Windows XP. While XP is at least a real operating system (unlike Windows ME, which just played one on television), it is a big fat mooing cow of an operating system. A nifty gadget like the Picturebook needs a frolicking lamb-like operating system, like OS-9 or AmigaOS. But it's got Windows XP. So while it works, it's not exactly convenient if you just want to put on your headphones and listen to a tune or three. The first thing that struck me about the iPod is how small it is. Looking at the pictures on Apple's web site don't really give you any guide to the size, so let me tell you: It's small. It's maybe one-tenth the size of my Picturebook, and the Picturebook is one of the smallest and lightest notebooks around. Second, it looks better in real life than on the web. The finish is very clean; it's clearly a well-designed and well-constructed item. The flea in the ointment is the controls. Apple make a big fuss about how the new controls are touch-sensitive, with no moving parts to wear out or break down. The down side of having no moving parts, though, is that you get no tactile feedback whatsoever. Is it doing something when I push here? Oh, look, the screen scrolled! How... novel. Still tempting, though. Still very tempting. The other gadget was somewhat larger: A dual-processor Athlon MP 2400+, kitted out with a 3Ware RAID controller and 8 Western Digital 200GB drives. Only 1GB of memory, because the supplier was out of stock of the 1GB memory modules. It came with two 512MB modules for the time being. This is not a slow box. It's destined to house about a terabyte of archival data, and run various searches and reports. I was wondering just how long it would take Linux to format a 1.05 terabyte RAID-5 volume. The answer is: Rather less time than it takes Windows XP to format a new 80GB drive on my home machine. This was easily the quickest Linux install I've done; I've never seen the progress meter go flickety-flickety quite like that. If you have a terabyte of data that needs a home, and a modest budget, then this sort of system is highly recommended.
Come and play with me.
And I will take you on a trip
Far across the sea.
From her broom broom in the skyNot quite so impressive, though, is Red Hat's disk partitioning utility. For some unfathomable reason, rather than clicking to select the drive that a particular filesystem will live on, you have to click to turn off all the drives that you don't want it to live on. This gets tired quickly when you have eight drives in the system. No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sdb. No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sdc. No, I do not... Maybe they've improved things in version 9; I was installing 8.0, since I know that release works with the software I want to run. Red Hat 9 seems to work, but I'm not about to rebuild a terabyte of data due to some minor incompatibility. No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sde. No, I do not... With all my filesystems RAIDed, and my old-fogey habits of having separate partitions for separate things - so that when something inevitably runs amok, it doesn't trash everything in one go - with those two put together, I had about 30 partitions to create. No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sdg... Oh, and you know how if you have, say, 28GB of free space on a drive, you can allocate it easily to a new partition by double-clicking on it? Don't do that. Sigh. Reboot. Keyboard-Mouse-English-Custom-No, I do not want this filesystem on /dev/sdb... It took me longer to get the partitions set up than it did to format 1.6TB of disk. That's good, I suppose. But I just know that my next dream will involve check boxes that just won't stay turned off. NO DAMMIT! I DO NOT WANT THIS FILESYSTEM ON /DEV/SDC!!
She watched her plans materialize
She waved her wand
The beautiful boat was gone
The skies grew dark
The sea grew rough
And the boat sailed on and on and on and on and on and on.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:27 PM | Comments (73) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 04, 2003
Infernal Combustion
Frank J. of IMAO has the skinny on how internal combustion engines work:
Well, if you check around the engine (do this when it is off and on a non-haunted car), you'll see a magic rune imprinted on it. This spell keeps the fire inside the engine. Were it ever scratched off, the next time you start your car, KA-BOOM! Every 100,000 miles, you really should have the rune re-enchanted by a sorcerer. Check you car's owner manual for more information.What Frank doesn't explain, though, is that the rune is there to keep the elves in. The elves actually do the work of moving the pistons, y'see. They're kind of like the magic smoke that is used in so-called "electronic" equipment; you'll have noticed that if the smoke ever gets out, the thing stops working. When you send it in for repairs, all they really do is put new smoke in.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:58 PM | Comments (78) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Finding Captain Nemo
James Lileks has found a movie he actually likes:
I also watched “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” New restored widescreen Technicolor Cinemescope etc. version. Having only seen a scratchy pan-and-scan on TV as a kid, I was curious what the movie really looked like. Oy. It’s just sublime.I also want to know the story behind the Kirk Douglas interview he mentions.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:02 AM | Comments (77) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 03, 2003
Mandy Twain and the Vultures of L'hi
What do an international banking conspiracy, an ancient, floating Tibetan mountain by the name of L'hi (pronounced lee), a group of schoolgirl crimefighters with an irascible hidden leader, a train that doesn't appear on any timetable bearing the number plate MAD 06, a secretive group of assassins composed of misfits described as being "stillborn into society", a talking vulture, and an extremely badly-written play that was panned by critics fifty years before it was written have in common?
The inscription translates as L'hi hovers over everything. Actually, where I say hovers, it uses a word that also means bank and architecture and is a near-homonym in the original language for vulture. In fact, there's another hundred lines of it, but no-one remembers the rest.Answer: They interrupted my nap. Stupid dreams. I wonder if the girls will rescue their kidnapped newest member in the next episode...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:45 PM | Comments (77) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
No More Busy Busy
Bills went out today, busy busy time is done for another month, and my life returns to normal. Ish. Normalish. Regular blogging will resume after my nap.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:34 PM | Comments (75) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 02, 2003
Video Cards 'R' Us
For a couple of years it was easy to recommend a video card: just buy whatever Nvidia had in your price range. After a somewhat awkward start with the NV1, Nvidia shot to the lead of the graphics market and stayed there . Competitors like 3DFX went broke trying to catch up. Others abandoned the broader market to try to carve comfortable niches for themselves at the periphery. As the GeForce 2, 3 and 4 rolled out, Nvidia looked unstoppable.
Then something happened. ATI came from behind and started narrowing the gap very quickly indeed. Nvidia needed a new chip to show that they were still the undisputed champions of the graphics world, they needed it to be fast, and the needed it now. What they got was the GeForce FX: late, expensive, absurdly power hungry, and not all that much faster than the previous model. Meanwhile ATI rolled on, launching new models in all directions: the 9000, the 9200, the 9500, the 9500 Pro, the 9600, the 9700, the 9700 Pro, the 9800... Of course, a 9500 Pro is faster than the 9600. Is a 9700 Pro faster than a 9800? Who knows? Dan does. At Dansdata he delves deep into the question of which video card, without - and this is important - without bludgeoning you to death with statistics and misleading bar-graphs. (Hardware reviewers should be forced to read Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information before they are allowed anywhere near a keyboard.) If you're not looking for a new graphics card right now (and if you shelled out for a GeForce4 4600 Ultra last year like me, I can't blame you), then you obviously need either (a) a tiny radio controlled tank, (b) a really nifty collection of nifty magnets, or (c) a kitten. Warning: Purchasing two or more of these simultaneously may prove hazardous to your continued well-being.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:41 PM | Comments (78) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 01, 2003
Good News, Everyone!
AnimeSuki is back! If you get the "Those idiots..." page, you'll just need to hit reload. Or if you're running IE, which is a bit fuzzy on the whole "reload" concept, you may need to reboot a couple of times.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:05 AM | Comments (72) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Neverwinter Update
I've been looking over the white cliffs of... no.
I've been taking closer look at the various hakpacks developed for Neverwinter Nights. At first, I thought that not that much had changed in the last few months. Then I realised that I was looking in the wrong place. Then I found the right place. Yow. People have been busy. I like the looks of this swamp. This strange city is cool too. Here's an alternate version of the standard dungeon. These drylands tilesets are a welcome change from the standard greenery. Drow fans will find this castle and this temple rewarding. And I quite liked this nicely decorated castle. Here's a list of all of the general-purpose tilesets - there's 173 of them - and another list of the tilesets tied to specific adventures. There's 213 of those. The original game came with eight. There are also 58 combination tilesets, getting around the problem of only being able to use one tileset at a time, and 37 all-in-one tilesets. I'm not sure how you can have 37 different all-in-ones, but there you are. Update: Here's a view of the Elemental Plane of Cheese. And here are some Cheese Elementals. These are Nacho Cheese Elementals:
This is what happens when you over microwave nacho cheese, and it becomes a planar vortex to the plane of cheese. Or there may be other reasons, but oh well. They Burn people to death with their boiling cheesiness!I'm sure they do! Here's a Ninja Cow. There's also a nattily dressed Cow Wizard, but I seem to have lost it.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:09 AM | Comments (75) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
She Sells Sea Lions?
If you're truly bored and it's daytime in San Francisco, why not spend thirty seconds looking at small blurry pictures of small blurry people looking at small blurry sea lions?
Oh, yeah. Here. I think the sea lions are the things sitting on the rectangular things.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:43 AM | Comments (77) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Readers? Or Not Readers?
I just took a look at my Sitemeter referral stats. Endlessly fascinating. Apart from my friends on the JREF Forums, I have a (presumably disappointed) fellow of excellent taste looking to download the Marx Brothers on Bittorrent; a couple of irritated people who were after a review of the Gigabyte GA-7NNXP (I must say it looks good on paper, and I may be getting one when the next pay cheque comes in); more people of discernment looking for Jungle Guu, Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar and Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (AnimeSuki is where I found Jungle Guu, but it's down right now. It is available on Kazaa, partly because I'm sharing it (cough). Likewise MST3K; I have about 20 episodes downloaded and shared - that's around 14GB worth. Sugar is available on DVD, so be nice and buy it.) And someone arriving from gravett.org who I'll forgive for the blinking links because I'm listed in (his? her? its?) blogroll. And a fine blogroll it is too; look at the company I'm in: James Lileks, Glenn Reynolds, Rachel Lucas, Frank J., Emperor Misha, Tim Blair, Mr. Mustard... I mean, I'm down near the bottom of the page, but what a great page to be down near the bottom of. Except for the blue text on a blue background, that is.
For the person who wanted to limit uploads in Bittorrent under Linux: the --max_upload_rate option may do the trick. The person looking for pictures (presumably) of Guu in the bear suit: sorry, I don't have any. The Weird Al fans: sorry, I still don't have Poodle Hat. It's not out for another week in Australia. Wow, there really are a lot of people looking for reviews of the GA-7NNXP. Sorry, I could swear I found one at work on Friday, but it doesn't show up in my searches now. You could do worse than looking here at nForcersHQ or keeping an eye on AMDZone. If you live in Australia (like all right-thinking people), CW Supplies have the GA-7NNXP for $333 and the nearly-as-good GA-7N400 Pro for $239. As for the people searching on "Nullarbor Plain horned kangaroo" and "mootrix comic", well done! You've discovered Ambient Irony!Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:19 AM | Comments (73) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Trashing With Style
James Lileks was not impressed with The Matrix Reloaded:
“Um - it’s all underground? The steel mill is entirely underground?” “That’s right. Tall as a 50-story building, when completed. It will be the world’s biggest underground steel mill.” “It’ll be the world’s only underground steel mill.”Nor was Mark Steyn overly enthused with X-Men 2:
Nobody who genuinely loved superheroes would do that to them. The exception is Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, who plays the shape-shifter Mystique. I can’t say Miss Romijn-Stamos’ shape is in much need of shifting, particularly as she spends most of the movie dressed in a kind of skin-tight slime that makes it look as if she’s just emerged from the pit on Lesbian Mud-Wrestling Night at the local sports bar.Are there any good movies on the horizon, now that Return of the King has been pushed back to 2004? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:36 AM | Comments (75) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 31, 2003
Zombie Werespiders Are Go!
Dungeons and Dragons players, start your engines: Shadows of Undrentide, the first expansion pack for Neverwinter Nights, has gone gold. Development is underway on the second expansion, Hordes of the Underdark. No details can be found here.
I have to admit I was disappointed with NWN. The bundled campaign was, frankly, dumb. Compared with the brilliance of recent D&D titles (other than the execrable Pool of Radiance II), NWN was a drab little story of no great interest. Torment, by comparison, was simply amazing; both Baldur's Gate games had strong storylines; and both the Icewind Dale games, while targeted primarily at the hack-'n'-slash crowd, were full of delightful touches. NWN was just blah. But that didn't worry me too much, since what I really wanted was the NWN tools (the Aurora Toolset) for designing my own adventures, and the NWN engine for playing them. Unfortunately, they have problems too. The toolset I can live with, since it's the end result that matters. The game engine, in and of itself, isn't too bad, though I will always prefer isometric perspective for this sort of game. (Until you get fluid realtime photorealistic rendering working, anyway, and that's some years off yet.) The problem is the tiles. When you want to build an area, you are given a choice of tilesets: Forest, City, Sewers, and so on. Once you've made your choice, you're stuck with it: you can only use one tileset for a given area. This wouldn't be so bad if the tilesets had more variety in them. But when your players can open a door and say at once "Oh yes, a #4 castle room, the only searchable location is the desk drawer.", you have a problem. You can't pick an empty room and fill it with furniture manually, either. You don't have empty rooms - they generally come prefurnished - and even when you do, you just don't have the furniture. The forests look nice. The water effects are great. The falling leaves, the ambience of the sunlight through the treetops, are wonderfully rendered. So why didn't they take a little time to produce a stream that can bend at something other than a right-angle? A road that can run in a direction other than precisely North-to-South or exactly East-to-West? As for the indoor settings: why is everything so darn big? I want some nice claustrophobic effects in my tombs. I want my players bumping into each other and tripping over sarcophagi when they're in a desparate battle against the advancing horde of kill-crazed zombie werespiders. What I definitely don't want is a room the size of baseball stadium. Any fool can tell you that zombies are hockey fans, and don't care for baseball at all. I wish the designers had taken a look at The Sims. Its design tools are nothing amazing; houses in The Sims aren't likely to win any architectural awards. But in terms of flexibility it's miles ahead of what Neverwinter Nights offers. And so I put NWN to bed about six months ago, and went back to playing Nethack. Now the first expansion pack is about to hit the shelves, and my interest has resurfaced. Why is that? Well, for one thing, I like Dungeons and Dragons. I like it lots. I've been playing D&D in its many incarnations for twenty years now, and in that time it has gathered a richness of material that no other game can match. As an example, I went shopping recently and bought seven new hardcover official D&D rule books. That's entirely ignoring the softcovers, the adventures, and the huge amount of semi-official and unofficial material. For another thing, Bioware seem keen to do the right thing with NWN. Though the tileset model is flawed, they are open about the file formats involved, and the result is a suprising number of fan-created tilesets becoming available for download. Fan-created monsters too, and armour and statues and all sorts of things. They're known as Hakpacks, and here you can see a listing of what's been created just in the past week. Check out this example of an underwater setting. That seaweed looks a bit odd because it's just modified trees: this was originally the forest tileset. And here are some really amazing monsters: myconids (mushroom men), familiar to Icewind Dale fans. Bioware recognise the value of fan content, and are working to make NWN automatically download hakpacks as needed. The problem is, you see, that if you want to play an adventure that needs a particularly hakpack, and you don't already have that hakpack, the whole thing goes splat in an unpleasant way. Apart from the tileset problem, and the dire lack of furniture that you can place on your own problem, NWN is amazingly flexible. It includes a full programming language which can change anything in the game (apart from those pesky tiles, of course). Bioware are working to add a database to it. (Hint: Use Berkeley DB; it's free even for commercial use, and it works.) Maybe I need to wait for Neverwinter Nights II to see a proper fix for the tileset problem, but in the meantime I think I'll buy Shadows of Undrentide, download myself a few hakpacks, and give Neverwinter Nights I another try.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:16 PM | Comments (73) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Squirrel Trouble?
This site has the answer. They can also solve your koala, wombat and penguin infestation worries.
On top of this, they explain why everything tastes like chicken, and how to properly cook a frog.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:07 PM | Comments (77) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 30, 2003
Squirrels Went Berserk
We may think we're safe living in Australia, but as recent news shows, there is no place truly safe from the evil wiles of the squirrel conspiracy! Little known fact: Dave Barry is no more than a front for the furry menace!
Handy tips on how to deal with the squirrel threat are available here and also here. And you thought lemurs were bad... (via The Squirrel Conspiracy)Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:37 PM | Comments (71) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 29, 2003
Little, Big
Tuesday, the day that will go down in history as having been eaten by mice, I went out and bought another two DVDs. After all, I only have 41 already in my to-watch pile.
These two are special. These two came recommended. First up, Big Trouble, the film of the book Big Trouble by Dave "I am not making this up" Barry, as recommended by reader Susie. (Yes! We have readers!) Second, Big Trouble in Little China, as recommended on the Bad Astronomer's Good Movie page. Reviews will follow, as sure as droppings follow day-eating mice. Logically, they'd go on the shelf next to Ranma ½: Chûgoku Nekonron daikessen! Okite yaburi no gekitô hen, but I like to keep my anime separate from other stuff. In case of cross-pollination or something. I don't know.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:06 AM | Comments (74) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 28, 2003
Blogger is Scroggled
Blogger won't talk to me. Well, that's fine. I won't talk to Blogger either.
Meanwhile, coolness is where you find it:As perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the power of sophisticated but inexpensive game consoles, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a supercomputer from an army of Sony PlayStation 2 devices.I know that's why I bought mine.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the project, which uses the open-source Linux operating system, is that the only hardware engineering involved was placing 70 of the individual game machines in a rack and plugging them together with a high-speed Hewlett-Packard network switch. The center's scientists bought 100 machines but are holding 30 in reserve, possibly for high-resolution display application.Or possibly because they still haven't finished Final Fantasy X.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:24 AM | Comments (72) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
May 26, 2003
Bunyip Blogging
Blog of the Day is Professor Bunyip:
Anyone who works on the theory that you get what you pay for can't be too surprised by Blogger's recent problems. They've driven Tim Blair to a new home and tempted the Professor to follow suit. Unfortunately, despite donning a pair of elephantine trousers, borrowing a back-the-front baseball cap from young Master Bunyip, and addressing his computer his "dude", all that slash-dot-font-template stuff at Moveable Type was incomprensible when the Professor logged on early in the evening. It was even moreso after a bottle of red, several ports, an Irish coffee, a few more ports and, ill-advisedly, a long telephone conversation with Mrs. Bunyip's youngest brother, the clan's purported expert in matters cyber. The only wisdom gleaned from that exchange: An intoxicated academic should not expect sound counsel from a red-eyed young fellow whose explanations are punctuated by the background bubbling of a bong.Stylesheets! Bloody stylesheets! Even if you get them right they don't work!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:54 PM | Comments (78) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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