Steam Summer Sale 2105

Once again the Steam summer sale has killed my budget. Not the $ budget, the time budget. I spent about $125, got something like 25 games, and they will take me a couple of years to complete, during which time OTHER things will come out, or go on sale cheap, etc, an endless cycle.

I hope I don't run out of disk space too soon...There are games I already had that I haven't reloaded following the crash disaster last fall...

What all I got: Hitman series (5 titles), Rez Evil 4/5/6, Far Cry 2/3, Baldur's Gate 1/2, Icewind Dale, Just Cause 1/2, Shadowrun 1/2, Starpoint Gemini 1/2, Wolfenstein Old Blood, and some others...nearly two dozen...



So I'm playing through Far Cry 2 first. That's the Africa one. You can kinda stealth through a lot of it, and the sniper rifles are pretty good, super accurate. You get to drive vehicles and boats. The in-game currency is conflict diamonds, appropriately questionable morality.

There's even a little of fast travel! OK, it's just the bus lines, but still...

The one thing that really bugged me about this game at first was the fact that as soon as you clear out one area and leave, when you come back by it's been repopulated with opponents. The game does dynamically load/unload around the edges as you travel (Skyrim/et al do this too), and you don't have to go very far, maybe just out of sight, to cause map territory to unload and reload with more opponents. That was really aggravating, but it does give you plenty of tries at optimizing how you tackle any given spot.

One thing it needs: a compass, small, upper right corner, or at the top a la Skyrim, with a direction indicator in it.

Later: well, I broke it. Reached a point where I had to talk to an "associate", and it hung badly. No solution. Well, not to that interaction--I reloaded slightly back, and finished that specific mission a different way, all was ok, but that one path had no forward motion. It's the one where you have to take a bomb fuse to a guy waiting on the bridge at the far east edge of the map, so he can blow the bridge. I went there, he says "give me the fuse", and then the game hangs--not broken, there is still the standard Brownian motion in the graphics, it's just stuck somehow in the interaction. You have to either go to Task Manager, or log out. I had to log out. Sheesh.

You will do a lot of driving in this game, or boating. I did find a couple of hang-gliders, which is amusing except that those are terribly hard to fly, and they don't go anywhere useful.

Disk drive troubles

or other "storage devices", since they ain't always rotating platters any more.

Fall 2014 I had an OMG bad system crash at home, when the power supply on my PC decided to die in the middle of when Windows was doing system updates (you know, the one point where they tell you "Don't turn off your computer now" -- yeah, that's bad, there is no recovery).

So this time I put in an SSD, re-intalled Windows 7. So far, that's been just fine. Windows definitely boots faster, and software installed there starts faster. Great. Hmm. I wonder: did I clone that thing afterwards? I probably should have put in a smaller drive, or partitioned it smaller, and then cloned the boot partition. Well, Acronis doesn't work the way I'd like (which is to say: just like CCC on Mac). [Later: well, it didn't at that time, or I didn't figure it out; subsequently, at work, we've cloned a smaller onto a larger without the prob I had]

Anyway...early this year, I got a "promotion" of sorts: I am now leading a tiny team (4 ppl) doing a new version of a project at the customer location. New (used) hardware, new concepts and variations on things I was doing last year.

So we bought some used servers, partially filled rack. Twelve HP DL 360 G6 1U dual quad-core intel 5560, four drive slots, in which we are putting 3 SSDs and one platter drive for backup, 96 GB RAM each (going to be trying a software system re-architecting using RAMDISK instead of actual disks). Three clusters for federated databases for dev/int/rel usage.

The SSDs are small, 128 GB SATA. Crucial MX100.

Well, ina few weeks already I have broken one drive totally dead, a second is going bad, and I might have pushed a third one onto the death-track.

How? Well, I've replaced the indexing engine in the commercial database we've been using with Berkley DB, a very seriously fast (but not, itself, SOTA) hashing engine. Whatever BDB does and how it does it apparently kills an SSD pretty fast; exceedingly the write-limit on it.

Remember that an SSD has a finite lifetime, quite short in comparison with a regular old platter-style disk. I have indexed hundreds of millions of objects with BDB on platter drives at work over the last year--with zero failures. I can't even get through a few million objects on the SSD before it is reporting "unable to find sector" errors, which means I have damaged it. I don't even know if CHKDSK can repair that--it may be completely hosed (the first one is totally dead; won't mount).

OK, this means for now that we are going to RAMDISK a bit sooner than I anticipated, which presents its own interesting challenges. Not because making/using a RAMDISK is hard, it's nearly trivial, but the logistics of how to not lose any data permanently presents challenges around the rest of the system requirements. 96 GB allows for an interesting-size RAMDISK.

Talking with a friend who's a disk/storage-system expert, RAMDISK is probably the final answer anyway, but at the least an Enterprise SSD would be a good idea. So we might be trying that too.

First, however, I've bought an Enterprise 146GB 10K SAS drive for the moment ($25, omg), to replace the now-dying SSD (which was itself a replacement for the first REALLY dead one), we'll see what that does. And then maybe we'll try an Enterprise SSD to see what that buys us.

There are a bunch of performance needs on this new system (current prod system has speed issues all over, but it has ZERO optimizations, so new system delivers with ALL those optimizations, as we figure them out).

But really...I've killed two SSDs in the last 4 weeks. and I could easily kill the others in a matter of hours...

Painful lesson. Those "consumer" SSDs have an entirely different target audience than me and my HPC work.

Later: the SAS drive works great, no errors, $24 delivered. So we bought more of them, to be the boot drives in each server. They aren't as fast as I'd like, but RAMDISK is still the target, because we're going to deliver on machines with 256 GB of RAM--what the heck else should we do with that much RAM?

Later later: it turned out that RAMDISK didn't make a difference in our usage of commercial database--that wasn't the slow part. I was bummed.

RAMDISK would have been great on a previous effort, if I'd had machines I could have put enough RAM in to make that worthwhile, because I was pounding some enterprise 2T drives enough to have to replace four (out of 60, in a SAN). The region thing I was pounding that hard could have been replaced by RAMDISK where I booted the system, copied some executables into RAMDISK, and then run from there, avoiding the pounding on the drive where those things sat (the pounding was reading them + libs hundreds to thousands of times per minute, totaling hundreds of millions by the time that activity ended.

Later(3): we punted that commercial database. There were other issues about being unable to deal with the volume of data we were putting into it. Other customers were apparently able to put a lot more data in, but their data was different from ours--we were banging up against some implementation decisions that were poor ones for data like ours (supernodes in an object database). We've replaced it with Neo4J, because of some other speed reasons; don't yet know if that is going to play out long term.

Games for Girls

or Women, if you prefer.

several years ago I came across someone else's blog, in which she did one of the classic rants about games being created by males for males, and where were the games for females?

and of course I gave the classic response of "if you want one, make one" -- that really is the surest way to bring about something you want. Complaining about it accomplishes nothing.

In the general case, this is the most classic complaint you see about most any creative/consumptive endeavor. You see it here, you see it with music, movies, magazine articles...

Magazine articles? well, for smallish, single-topic magazines...there are a few writers, they are all free-lance, which means they are not being assigned stories by the editor, they write what they want...and then there are the readers, some of whom will complain something along the lines of "why don't you publish an article about X?" because they want to read an article about X. But they don't want to WRITE an article about X, they want to read it. And of course the editor always responds "how about if you write the article about X? and then we'll publish an article about X" but the complainer doesn't want to do the writing, just the reading, and generally seems to think that the magazine has this room full of writers just waiting to be assigned a story...well, maybe big mags and newspapers work like that...but I imagine they get the same kind of complaints too :)

back to games

it turns out there is a category on Steam called "Female Protagonist" (ok, you can play Skyrim as a "female", but I've done that, and I couldn't detect any differences; I seem to recall Voyager Elite Force 1 allowed you to play as female, and you'd have a different romantic interaction with an NPC (if you chose to) than if you played as male.

So are the "Female Protagonist" games any good? There are 400 games tagged with that label (not clear how/why "Zombie Army" got tagged with "FP"). "Neon Struct" and "Toren" look good, but too many of them look sprite- or anime/manga-based ("Hyperdimension Neptunia"). "Republique Remastered" looks excellent, but it's developed by pros.

How many were created by women programmers? Does that really make a difference? (I'm expecting it would, but in what ways?)

What would you say constitutes a Game for Girls/Women? What are the criteria?

I've put a couple on my wishlist, we'll see if they go on sale during the summer "Steam sale".

Politics

"What would be the prospects for any Republican seeking their party's nomination today at any level if he or she stated that they believed in evolution, that the earth is over 3 billion years old, that the Bible is not the literal word of God, and that separation of church and state is an essential part of the American way of life as envisioned by the founding fathers? Thirty years ago, none of these ideas would have been controversial for Republicans as a whole. Today, espousing any one of them would be death in the eyes of the GOP base voters."

Forget where I read that, it was a comment on a story on Daily Kos.

Why are those topics so toxic?

What is it about their "base voters" these days that makes them this way?

I couldn't possibly vote for someone who did NOT believe the above things...

Wildlife @ The Ranch

Geez. Found what was I think a copperhead last weekend, at the bottom of a drain spout. Not very big, seemed like 18 inches or so, but still...where there's one that size, there are others that are bigger.

Hard to be sure...the pattern wasn't that well defined. Maybe a cottonmouth...it didn't open its mouth, which would have been a dead giveaway.

Definitely not a rattler...It did wiggle its tail some like a rattler, but The Ranch is too far north, anyway.

I gave it some flying lessons while transferring it to a location at the edge of the property. Hope I don't see it again.

We have a couple of other snakes, but they're harmless ones.

Pretty sure I saw a bigger cottonmouth a year ago while mowing...it didn't occur to me about it being one at the time, or I'd have driven over it to be sure it was dead. I'd have driven over this one, too, except I figure it was going to run away while I went to get the mower...Thus the flying lessons.

And now I have to have my boots on all the time outside. Not that I don't like my boots, I do, but now I have to watch out all the time.

------------

a month later: took the dog along to get gas when i drained the mower to the bottom...coming back, partway along the driveway, we saw a big black dog we hadn't seen before just standing there..."Look, Gabby" I said. "There's a dog we don't know. What kind of dog is that? It's tall, like Russian wolfhound maybe?" Then it turned to go back in the woods and I realized it was not a dog at all--it was a BEAR! A black bear. A young bear. Which means that larger Momma Bear and Papa Bear are around somewhere.

And I had forgotten to take my phone with me to get gas, so I don't have a photo of it. AAARRRRGGG!!!

Fallout 4

FNV was better than FO3. No argument there.

FO4 is in Boston. Local outdoor stuff, like statues n such.

You will have a dog. And a jetpack. Dude. About time.

And more color. Seriously, folks, photosynthesis is not suddenly go from green to brown because of radiation. "life will find a way" (Jurassic Park)

There will be plenty of plants around, along with dead spots.

11-10-2015.

Yeah. That's what I'm talkin about. There goes another 1000 hours of my life :)

Probably on the XBone this time. Think I'll try that.

-----

Later (nov 7): it's almost here. I have to be sure I can do this offline, at The Ranch. First opp for that is nov 14, then xmas.

-----

2 years later:

OK, no jetpack, far as I can tell. And other subtle things. I just got informed that it's possible to see the extra-perk-points options, so that apparently there IS one where you can fast-travel while over-encumbered. But it's six levels away, so at Level 72 that's going to take a while to get there. I couldn't leave the institute because I was carrying too much, and lacked that perk. Geez.

Did discover something interesting, although I didn't test it long enough to see if it's permanent: The time comes when you are going to help a synth courser, but if you go collect him, you can then go do other stuff for a while and have a SECOND follower (I have the reporter (fewer paper cuts) already, AND then the courser). Only flaw with this is that your followers all bop around a bit, get in between you and targets, etc, meaning that you have to let them fight for you lest you shoot them in the back.