Distributed File System, part 3

I've thought through a lot of this already, but I have not implemented much. But I have gotten started...

Wish I could put a block diagram thing in here somehow...image seems the only way, but I don't really have any.

So you want to have all the shared files available everywhere, but you sure can't keep copies everywhere, and I discussed the idea of cross-mounts, or buying truly massive storage devices, etc... none of those things are workable, really.

So what I think you do is gather the knowledge of what all the shared files are, catalog them, publish the catalog via a web-service, and then transparently copy things locally when you need to use them, and age them off later (either by a size heuristic, or a time heuristic, or LRU heuristic), making them available locally.

Depending on what's happening across your network, you could wind up with a popular file having copies actually reside a lot of places...for a while. Most files would only have two locations: primary shared, and whatever there is for standard backup,

At the moment I'm thinking of it rather like a library system.You have your own collection of files (books you acquired somewhere). You are willing to share some of them. Others are likewise willing to share some. There's a "library/librarian" service. You can ask the service what all is available (from all those willing to share--the "library" doesn't have its own repository), and you can have a copy of anything listed, until you bump into your local age-off restrictions. Remember how your local physical library works? You can look at the catalog, find something you want, check out a book for 30 days, take it home to be in your personal library, and then return it: i.e., locate a file, copy it locally for temporary use, and then delete it.

If you find yourself having age-off space problems, maybe you buy some bigger bookshelves (i.e., a new and larger disk drive).

This is not a perfect analogy, but works ok for the moment.

So there are some other storage units that could/should participate in this, and they need a proxy of sorts to do so: SAN, NAS--that sort of thing. A NAS device can be just a mountable filesystem, which suggests that perhaps the Librarian needs to take on the management of that, although that doesn't quite fit the analogy the right way: I am thinking of the file-copying as being a lot more like a P2P file-transfer system.

So there's the Librarian service(s), the local shared-publishing service, the P2P file-transferring, and the local storage management. I've written a small part of the Librarian, more of the local shared, I've been looking at file-transfer codes, and merely thought about the storage mgmt. It's all just casual so far, although it's been in the back of my mind for months. Been writing down the use cases, too.  I should have a working system in a couple of months, I think.

[Later: ok, I've put less time into it recently, so not til this fall at the earliest]

The annual V-day M/F relationships writings...

you see online...  

[this blog post was started in 2011 and then forgotten for a while]

There were several interesting ones this year [2011]. The first was from a Mormon woman, let's say late 20s, in a big city (possibly NYC, but I don't recall). She was lamenting the usual "can't find a man" situation. So of course she had some requirements that weren't being met: same religion, no pre-marital sex. IIRC, she was unhappy that guys would not stick around long; not like she wasn't a good catch: good education, good job. Eventually one of them made it clear to her: "You left nothing for us to be/do in your life" (Mormons being still a bit more traditional per historical attitudes.) In other words: you are sufficiently independent that we have no self-perceived value in the relationship--how can we be a "provider" when you don't need that?

A male comment on an entirely different story I read some weeks later put it better: "We need to be needed." When we aren't, well, it's time to leave.

So around V-day there was a story by a woman in NYC who basically said to other women: "Can't find a man? It's you, not them." It went right to the heart of things: what you say you want and what you do aren't the same. Of course there was a firestorm of comments in response. Many were a little off-target ("Why the assumption that every woman needs a man?" -- you have to wonder why those folks even read the story to begin with, and then complained, they aren't the target audience). The author was herself having this trouble, thinks NYC demographics are part of the problem (apparently there are noticeably more single women than men there), but blames herself for essentially pursuing the excitement factor and variety rather than something else.

HU sez: "don't bitch about there being no good men--if you haven't found one then that isn't what you want."

Game Philosophy

What causes a game to be successful? Do you need an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure it out?

To what extent is a game's success based on:

1. Visuals/graphics
2. Story
3. Action
4. Explorability
5. Good AI
6. Other

What do I mean here?

Visuals/graphics: the very best-looking games these days are things like Skyrim, CoD, etc. Fabulous 3D world to wander through. I love Skyrim (altho I think I like Oblivion better, for reasons of greater variety); visually stunning. But other games, less good, have decent graphics, too, and some interesting games have fairly limited graphics. I've replayed Total Annihilation recently (from GOG, despite my having the original install disk), and heck, that's only just barely 3D at all, it's 8-bit color, etc, and yet that doesn't matter in the end--it can still be quite difficult.

Story: Skyrim etc have pretty good stories in them. There's a main plot, and some relevant/valuable major sub-plots, and lots of little tiny things. This all works great. In fact, those little side projects work so well, I haven't even started the main plot yet, and that's after several hundred hours of game time.

Action: Quake 1-3, Unreal Tournament, etc, are all about the action. The 3D-ness of the maps is interesting, but not critical. There's no story whatsoever. For me, this makes for limited interest. Replayability is all about improving your twitch skill. I enjoy the speed and action, but the only real interesting thing about replayability is that you can do it in relatively tiny increments, like 5-10 mins.

Explorability: Half-Life 2 is a great game, but it gets a zero on this scale. It's very linear. Too linear. Dungeon Siege 1 is equally linear (well, nearly so), but you have a lot of leeway in how you play your character/team. Skyrim etc are anything BUT linear--you don't EVER have the play the main story. I like this aspect--I really don't like being locked into playing a game only one possible way, being locked into a developer's limitations--they might as well do machinima of it for you. I'm not suggesting that linearity = ease of play, it means no opportunity to meander around and look at things.

Good AI: This doesn't even apply to a wide range of games. Team Fortress 2, UT04, Quake3, etc. The AI is other humans. Alpha Centauri, otoh, is mostly AI, and can be really hard to take on.

Other: not sure what I think this is, but maybe it's something like you can find in MMO games, where you can participate without exactly being a quest player, like by being a "crafter". This doesn't interest me. I actually felt more distracted by this whole routine. DLC is a new aspect.

Think back a bit on all your games...Pong, 40 years ago, was the absolute minimalist graphics game, but was not at all easy--it was action-only, no AI, playable in tiny increments; Tank was much the same, only very slightly more complex. This was the era when graphics were super-limited. Think of other games where this is some better, but still the game has to be dominated by something else--while better-looking, Diablo is a little less about action, it seems more about the process of managing loot and such like. There's some story of sorts, but I wasn't really keeping track of that too well--despite the maps being mostly unique each play-through, it's still fairly linear.

So where is the trade-off sweet-spot? I'm sure there's a range. Could we describe it, put some bounds on it? Maybe more by example than by measurement. Reason I ask: I have developed a game or two in the distant past (known as the 70s), and have contemplated making one again, but I find myself debating what flavor I would create. Certainly it would avoid things I dislike, like the repair/crafting stuff. I'd want auto-generated maps to maximize replayability. I'd want to have some reasonable amount of action, but not where it devolves into a twitch game. I'd want some reasonable amount of story; I think I'm more story-driven than most folks. My son is more action-oriented, it seems, he can play TF2 for hours/days; he has, however, played Oblivion et al about as much as I have, HL2 more, Mass Effect, Fallout3/FNV more...he does have more time right now, but that won't last.

How much work goes into making a good story? Is it really all that much? If it's not, you should be able to take one of the free "game engines" and make a game. How difficult is it? How do you make it a story you can actually participate in, as opposed to just following a script? Think of making a game from a movie: seems over-constrained.

It seems to me that good story is what really makes a game--for the kind where there even IS a story. Think about it--I think we tolerate less-than-photorealistic visuals for a better story.

So how hard is it to make a really good story? Do you need more than one? Is it even possible to have more than one? They'd mostly have to be disjoint. Perhaps retirement is the time for me to tackle creating a better story for a game. The problem with that is that it is probably going to still feel too linear. If you allow much variability it's going to become very hard to manage reaching a pre-defined endgame conclusion. My goal would probably be to aim for a much less predictable outcome: create a starting point, play rules, and run it more like a simulation, and watch to see what happens.

I need to re-experiment with some AI activities. Can I make something that is largely emergent-behavior and interesting?

Distributed File System, part 2

In April, I had a training class called "Intro to Big Data", from Learning Tree. It's really aimed at your getting into Hadoop, but prelim topics were covered first with separate tools. Nice course, really. LT is clearly good at this kind of thing (was my first/only LT course), unlike some other "training" I've had in the last year.

So what sparked my thinking again on DFS/VFS was the segment about Distributed Hash Table. That might work as the lookup mechanism I need to have server as the complete distributed file table.

Making a distributed database is not easy, even the big guys have trouble with this, and overall performance is not all that great. My fave SQL database, H2, is not distrib.

I do not, as yet, know anything about what sort of performance I need. *I* probably don't need all that much, but running my Grid Engine would need more.

Suppose I take a DHT tool (Apache Cassandra is one possibility) have it store this:

filename, directory path, host

where filename is the access key, and maybe host/path is stored as a URL.

filename, URL

If the URL is good, I could pass it to the Grid Engine as is, and let relevant/interested process(es) use it directly to open a file stream. That could work; it could mean having a lot of file streams/handles open at any one time. (The GE typically wouldn't have more than 100 at a time per machine, probably. Well, maybe 200.) So depending on file size, maybe that's too much network traffic; if nothing else, it's not going to scale well.

Maybe I should be using the file-content MD5 as the key? that is at least fixed size (32 chars). That ends up being much more the DHT approach, because you could distribute keys based on the first character of the MD5 (or maybe the first two, if you had a lot of machines).

MD5, URL

So what am I doing with these things? Suppose I have what I think a DHT is: a local service which can tell me where a file actually is for a given MD5; that MD5 has come from the Grid Engine. OK, that feels clunky, because I only know MD5s from the GE.



Other tools: HDFS (Hadoop) has several issues: the "ingest problem" (i.e., how do you get all your data into it), internal replication (it wants 3X, although you can set that to just 1X: you lose any redundancy security, but ingest is faster), and block size, since it uses 64MB ??!! That's maybe not so painful if your files are all 2GB video...

Another reason to NOT try to use a huge SAN cluster (you can daisy-chain these things) is that you end up having to have a minimum block size around 4k or 8k. Well, that's fine if your files are mostly big, but what happens when you tend to have a lot of 1K files? That issue argues for VFS which lets you use (for example) a ZIP file as a file system, which probably gets around the minimum block-size problem; I expect that has other performance issues, but wasted space isn't one of them.

Distributed file system, part 1

There's a lot of data around on a lot of computers everywhere...far too much to fit on any one machine, or even on some kind of larger storage in any cost-effective manner for us little guys.

At work I have a SAN, 100TB available storage. THAT is a lot of storage; but given what I do there, actually not all that hard to fill up. But that kind of device STILL does not solve the larger problem, nor was it very cost effective--I could replace the drives, from 2TB to 3TB, but that would only be a 50% increase...suppose I need a 10X increase? 100X? More?

2TB drives aren't very expensive any more (you know, it seems almost absurd to even be able to say that, given that my first computer had a 20 MB drive in it), and it's not hard to find dirt-cheap machines around, used or even free. Regrettably they are seldom small, and therefore tend to be a little power hungry...not a prob for a data center kinda place, but uncomfortable for me at home.

Suppose I decided I had a problem to work where 30TB looked like the right capacity...and let's say that means 10 machines @ 3TB each...

I've written a heterogeneous distributed OS-agnostic Grid Engine. Perfect for doing data processing on a 10-node cluster. But this really works best when all the nodes are using a shared/common file system. THAT works best with a SAN and a Blade Server, like at work. Well, the blade server part isn't really very expensive ($3k will buy a decent used one that is full, and pleasantly fast--look on EBay for IBM HS21 systems). But getting a SAN on there--not going to happen. OK, I could perhaps put some high-cap 2.5" drives in the blades, etc, but that doesn't solve the resulting problem, which is still how do they share data with each other?

Well, on a limited basis you can make file shares and cross-mount all the shares across all the machines--but that doesn't scale all that far, and those shares all become a nightmare--and they STILL aren't a shared common file system.

So really the problem I have is how to make a shared common file system across a bunch of machines? I need it to be heterogeneous, since I run Mac/Win/Linux machines, and am considering other things like Gumstix.

There are homogeneous file systems around...several, it turns out, although they are mostly Linux-only (FUSE, Lustre/Gluster, etc), which doesn't help me. OK, I could just buy the cheap hardware, and install Linux everywhere, but what happens when I have a windows-only software tool to run?

I've been hunting for an OS-agnostic tool, it's not really clear whether there is such a thing. OpenAFS (i.e, Andrew File System) might do it, which would be perhaps the ideal solution. I haven't tried this yet. Pretty much everything I've read about doesn't meet my requirements, heterogeneous being the first fail point. At work I'm using StorNext with the SAN, but I can't afford that on my own.

So I think I have to solve this myself. What I kinda think I want is a BYOD approach where you'd have to run some agents to join, but you'd have access to everything shared on the network without having to cross mount a zillion things that you can't even find out about casually.

What you would NOT have is something that shows up in Finder/Windows-Explorer. I can probably figure out how to finagle that too, altho I don't consider that a critical requirement. I expect that OpenAFS has that figured out.

Is it going to take an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure this out? It's not an easy problem.

Young female guitar players

been You-tubin some the last few days...cause a friend pointed me at Joe Bonamassa on YouTube. OK, so I don't know who he is...he's good, but obscure. His better work seems to be when he's playing with someone else more famous and with better tunes. (Later: just found out that YT app is available on iphone from Google--yay! After Apple punted theirs)

and then I happened on Orianthi. and then Desiree Bassett.

Wow.

Neither of them is really old enough to play the blues, in terms of the negative life experiences that hammer your soul the right way. So their original "songs" aren't that great...so you're really there to listen to the guitar work. And that part is phenomenal, most of the time (example where it's not: Desiree plays Jeff Beck's "Because We've Ended as Lovers", pretty much note perfect, as though she had learned it from sheet music--problem is, that's supposed to be a really mournful, melancholy tune, and she plays it with way to sharp an edge, too upbeat)

I wanted to be that kinda good on guitar, but I'm not.

There are a few others...Ariel...Juliette Valduriez.

----------

Been therefore digging on a few other YouTube things...Clapton's Crossroads festivals, which I hadn't heard of before (with DVDs now on order)...Concert For George (which seems not to be available in full on DVD, but the whole thing is on YouTube? [although blocked])

Later: concert DVDs arrived, that is some nice stuff. Now to rip the audio and import into ITunes.

Advanced Software, leading to PDVFS

I generally work on somewhat exotic software projects. Cutting, if not bleeding, edge.

Was early in the Semantic Web stuff 2000-06, the AI stuff in the 80s, other oddments like Digital Mapping (starting in the 80s), text processing (starting mid-90s), I wrote one of the very first GUI builders (late 80s). A health-care R&D effort in the early 90s would still be cutting edge today.

My latest bit of exotic is a Grid Engine. Granted, not anything new, other than mine is OS-agnostic. You can readily find the other grid engines, but they are not really agnostic. Mine runs Windows (XP/7), Linux (probably any flavor) and OSX (at least 10.6+). The whole thing is of course written in Java, which is why it's agnostic. It should run anywhere a Java 1.6 JVM runs properly (possibly including JME, I haven't a way to test there--it would depend on the lightweight thread support).

I'm now processing a lot bigger datasets than I used to, thus the Grid Engine, in order to distribute processing adequately. I have, so far, run it on two systems: 3 machines with 64 total cores, and 12 machines with 48 total cores. It's designed to run on A LOT of machines, but I'm pretty sure that there are undiscovered scale-up problems along the way. There's no imposed maximum.

Because the datasets are now bigger, I have to think about additional problems. In particular, where does that data go? Everything is fine as long as the dataset is under 2 TB, because that fits a single disk just fine, but then you have the issue of how many clients have to be served by that disk, and therefore how much punishment the disk is taking over time; this is the arrangement I have on the 3/64 machines, with no apparent disk degradation yet. If you use a SAN, you can certainly make a much larger apparent single partition; this is what I have with the 12/48 machines, that's a blade chassis with an attached FC-SAN, with 60/15/15/5/5 TB partitions. You set up the SAN for the partition sizes, and use separate software to manage how the blade units see the SAN; works fine, that's really a lot of space, you CAN daisy-chain another SAN onto it, but that isn't really solving the problem--because I've already burned out two disks in it.

I want/need to distribute data differently, so that I am achieving a more random spread of data over storage devices. I want to work this with the grid engine. I need it to be heterogeneous across random hardware.

So of course Hadoop HDFS sounds like a possible, but there are some reason why not. Hadoop is not oriented around this kind of data, where file sizes range from 100 bytes to 3 Gig. Hadoop wants a 64 MB file-chunk size--I don't have that. I need to use native file systems and disk behavior.

Looking at various experimental file systems, nothing seems to do the right job, or be adequately OS-agnostic. There are several Linus-only possibilities, which are probably closer to what I want other than being Linux-only.

Initially I thought I wanted real mounted file-systems. AFS seemed the likeliest solution, but I think that has some problems likely. I don't know what, specifically, except that I wonder what it means to be writing files out--where are they? It looks like a unified file-system, DOES appear OS-agnostic, but...I don't know.

So I'm now thinking about something that isn't actually a file-system, but a P2P-FS-like thing. I need some not-quite-normal capabilities. And I ultimately want it to run on anything that has file storage (or fronts for it, like a NAS). Going to be interesting working this...

The cars again

Right after xmas I (for some reason I forget) discovered that there were meeces in the garage. I should have put the poison out immediately, but I didn't. They ended up getting inside my lovely XKE and doing some chewing on things. For meeces, and a car that age, that means seat cushion insides, and cloth-covered wiring. So now I have some flaky wiring behavior: sometimes the dashboard instruments cut out. Grr.

I hate meeces to pieces.

Buying a house...

Well, we're now trying to buy the retirement house. Which does not mean that we are retiring, but we have this opportunity to by something that has some specific interest.

I'd forgotten how complex and time-consuming that process is...it's been > 20 years since we last bought.

Timeline:
Dallas, Fall 1982: my first house. Not big, but fine for me solo. Interest: 11% ? [ouch!]. ARM.
Fairfax, Summer 1991: first house with family. Wife is pregnant with second child. Interest: 9%
       Refi: 1996. Interest: 7%.
       Refi: 2002. Interest: 5%
Central VA: Spring 2013. Retirement house. Interest 3.875%. Fairfax house refi: 3.75%--yay!

It's been great how the interest rate has come down each time. And as of this writing, Fairfax house will be paid off in about 5 yrs. [later: we did a third refi, it's at 3.75, minimized monthly, but now back out to 30 years]

So why this house? Incomplete information, but it's the middle of really old family ancestry area. Many people in the area will turn out to be distant cousins. The house is pretty cool, in our price range, the view out back is great (instead of car traffic, it's a mountain ridge, although not at the same distance), it's very quiet (cow noise is all you hear during the day). I couldn't afford anything more than what I have now if we stayed here in Fairfax, which would be kinda boring.

Plus, it feels like time for a new adventure. It's a fairly rural area, so we'll be doing a variety of things differently. Our current plan is that we will continue to primary-house in Fairfax for a while, be at new house weekends/holidays/vacation/etc., and gradually move into it permanently over several years. This is an ideal approach, as it lets us slowly figure out what goes where, rather than do it all in a rush, which is what I have *always* done in the past. What will be awkward is furnishing two houses for a while, with things we won't all keep.

Well, it's been an adventure so far. More complex than I remembered, more paper to worry about. As it's rural, different things to worry about: we will have a well, and a septic system. That means no water and sewer bill, or at least not in the same way: a little bit of electricity for the well pump, and an occasional septic pumping out. Undoubtedly less than the monthly amount here in Fairfax. Satellite for cable/internet, maybe phone too. And if I manage to inherit enough money, we may even see about a solar installation, so as to eliminate that as well--the property will have more than enough space.

Do you/I believe in God?

What do people mean when they say that?

I think it's an implied different question: "Do you believe in God the same way I do?"

The answer to that implied question can't possibly be "yes" because you don't really ever know what the asker's beliefs are. Asker may not really even know him/herself. How many of us really think about it in any real detail?

Do you have to have an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure it out?

My impression is that we are all selective about what exact details of the religious dogma we believe. Including, and perhaps especially, those who are most religious. Given the amount of overall inconsistencies and contradictions in any Bible/equivalent, why do you have to believe anything one way or the other? If we were all really strict about it, how would anyone ever commit a murder?

It probably all boils down to the essentially unanswerable questions of "why are we here?" and "what comes after this?" and the worry about there not even *being* an answer.

One bit of description about the afterlife I've read is that it is as different from this life as being an adult is from being five years old. You can't even *describe* being an adult to a five-year-old, they have neither the vocabulary or the concepts or the experiences to begin to understand completely. So we can't even understand the afterlife, if there even is one. (And really, if there is, and it's overmuch like this life here on earth, with *all the same people* -- do  you really want to go through eternity with the same bunch of idiots you have to deal with now? I don't think so)

So why ARE we here? Perhaps it's simpler to think about how we got here first. Suppose you were God...if you can create this amazing and complex universe, why would you do it? If we can't understand the afterlife, we probably can't understand this either, but it is at least more amenable to speculation.

The universe as we know it seems tuned to increase the likelihood that [intelligent] life will come to pass somewhere. It would not take much change to some basic physical/chemical properties of matter for things to still be a workable universe, but completely incapable of producing life, perhaps not even lasting long enough before collapsing for the basics of life to start. That suggests this universe was designed to eventually produce life, with the eventual outcome that that life becomes intelligent (why would you bother about life that does NOT eventually become intelligent?). Thus, a Creator of some sort.

But if you were God, and you could design and create this universe, why would you do it? To have worshippers? Ick--that's a creepy concept. I can't even imagine a being so smart and powerful wanting such a thing--I would not want to meet/know such a being. To have complete and total advance knowledge of how every single instant of time would go, how every single action of every single atom would combine or change? Seriously? What would be interesting about that? (it'd be worse than being Dr Bloody Bernofski.) It is the process of discovery and the unexpected surprises that are interesting.

I think that what would be interesting would be (if you were able to do so) to create a universe like the one we have, where randomness was an essential characteristic, where there were rules about how physical matter behaves, but designed-in unpredictability (stemming from the randomness). Your goal would really be more about observing emergent behavior. The Evolution of life. A universe with no emergent behavior would not be very interesting. What will happen? You don't know until it does so. How and where will life first develop? How many variations of it CAN develop? There are opposing forces at work--the self-organizing aspects of chemical reactions, and the de-organizing behavior of entropy. Can intelligent life develop at all? Just how far can it evolve? How long can it last? What sort of interesting things can it do for itself? Can intelligent lifeforms evolve in different places and discover each other? How different are they? What can they do together?

Would you ever really meddle in the ongoing development of life? Why? At what level? Because one of the individuals asked you to? I wouldn't. In fact, I wouldn't even be listening like that. What would be the point? Where would it stop? What would make one request better than another?

So are we just the results of God's PhD thesis research? Unknowable, I think. Does it matter? I personally don't care one way or the other.

So I probably don't believe in God the way you'd mean it if you asked me.

[Later: this past week was "talk with young atheists" on NPR (well, it wasn't called that, but it WAS that). The question posed was really "Did they believe in God? how did they lose the belief?" Nobody said anything like the above.]

Shuffle music playback on the iphone 4S

On the beach vacation last week, had an interesting experience with the rental car. We were looking for the cigarette lighter socket in order to plug in the GPS gizmo; it was pretty well hidden under the centerline cup-holder. Also in there was a USB socket...hoping it would be connected to the radio, I plugged in my phone--yea verily yea! It did *exactly* the thing I wanted it to do, without my even knowing what that was at first, which was go straight to music and start playback.

Playback of the current playlist, which was *not* what I wanted, because it was not a playlist at all but rather a single special selection. So I had to figure out what to do to get it onto a different playlist. Unfortunately, this necessitates unplugging the phone from the car each time you want to actually use the music app's own controls. And I wanted it to do "shuffle". Which meant finding out how to get it to shuffle in the first place.

The deal is this: "shuffle" is not a global setting like on my ipod. Shuffle works on a per-playlist basis. An album = one playlist. The songs for an artist = one playlist. All the songs you have =- one playlist. Etc. So to get global shuffle, go to "music->songs->shuffle" where the "shuffle" button is at the very top of the list of songs, above "A"--you'll see these two intertwined arrows, press that and make it turn blue (as opposed to gray, which means off). Plug the phone back in, and that playlist (all songs) now plays in random mode.

The other thing about shuffle is that when you turn it on, it computes a complete ordered list of the playlist (all songs) in advance. So if you cycle through it once, things play again in the same order. If you want a new order, press the shuffle arrows again to turn it off, and again to turn it back on, which produces a completely new ordering.

You can't do shuffle for albums (or artists), like the ipod does, which kinda bites--I really want to shuffle albums. I'm really not interested in listening to a song in the middle of an album like Tommy, or JC Superstar. But it does not seem possible to cause that.

The other thing that happened was when I flipped over to make a call, the radio went silent so I could talk, and when I was done with the call the music came back (no I wasn't driving).

I want this behavior in my own car, now. That was great. And it means replacing the radio--which I was going to do anyway, it's an Alpine unit, which is nice, but has been having misbehaviors recently.

Best Buy has a nice Sony on sale right now. Going to check this all out tomorrow after work.

[later--ok, this doesn't work as well as I thought. why?]

More on cars

Have gotten a third Jaguar, a 1991 XJS. Pretty color, "oyster", which is a metallic pale gold. Bought it locally, for $3k. Needs about $10k of work, a little of which I can do (easy stuff), and some that LA will do, a little that Rosenthal will do, and some that likely won't even get done.

It's a convertible, which wasn't my actual plan...need something fun to drive to work as I don't like driving the elephant all that much--partly because seeing out the windows is hard, unlike the truck, which had plenty of visibility. This is better visibility than the XK8, as the bar at the top of the windshield is higher, so it doesn't interfere. Otherwise, it's not as good a car.

More on the car...

Car has been driving well this year, this spring, but I have had a couple of problems. Had been driving every weekend, and occasional days to work. Took a trip to a british car show in Williamsburg, VA in April. Had seen some smoke from underneath the middle, before I left home, but all seemed fine the whole way down.

I still don't know what the smoke is about, but I suspect that a tiny leak of oil had been getting on the tailpipe. The tailpipe has since rusted through at a spot that looks discolored and is in just the right location to have had oil dripping on it. I'm sure that wouldn't be good...Having replaced the cam covers, the oil leak is gone, but I think the damage is done.

June 8. Had a flat today. Ugh. Same tire as last time, so I suspect this wheel has more pointy stickouts inside and needs attention. Easy enough to fix the flat, the spare was good. Took maybe ten minutes, but it was hot out. Well, at least not expensive to get *that* fixed.

The tailpipe is annoying, though. Thought I had found a nifty fix, this apparently heat-activated bandage/wrap thing that you'd use like an arm bandage, it's wet in a pouch, and it dries/hardens in place. That seems to have half-worked, because I was out in the car shortly after applying it, had the flat, and seem to have ripped off part of the bandage. Well, back to the beer-can patch; using soda cans, plenty around, they flex adequately, and I got U-bolts for it. Did this patch before, about 1979 or so, on the Comet. Worked fine. [later: although this time, not so much]

I'd like to replace the entire tailpipe, headers on back, with stainless steel equivalents. That appears that it will cost $2000+ installed. Headers are nicely rusted, so that part is not easy. I need to take it over to London Auto and let them look. I've seen the stainless parts on ebay, just not right now; I forget the pricing. I need to start recording some of that stuff for later reuse.

Later: stainless headers are $325. Seller offers $75 rebate if I get a good set of installation photos for him. LA agrees to do this, so we'll see. the mounting flange is not as straight as I think it should be, hope that doesn't become an issue. I'll want LA to test-install that solo, before anything else, so I can return them if need be.

Went to the Movie Theater

for the first time in a long time...to see

One for the Money

Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum, first novel, as a movie. I was excited to see that this was being filmed, I love those books (funniest things in the english language after Wodehouse), but I wasn't too sure about the casting.

Katherine Heigl looks just right as Plum. Debbie Reynolds was good as the kooky grandmother (although I think Ruth Gordon of the 70s was more the right thing). The actors playing Ranger and Morelli I'm not so sure about. Ranger needed to look/be a little more mysterious, and Morelli needed to look less scruffy. (It could be that I misremember how they started out in the first book, been a few years since I read that) Vinnie Plum seemed less weasel-y than I think he should have...we didn't meet or hear about some standard things (grandma's interest in going to the funeral parlor for viewings and cookies), but Stephanie's car did properly explode at one point (this especially is a theme in the books), she had to go to Stark Street several times (a recurring location for trouble of one sort or another). They did do voice-over for what Stephanie is thinking, which is great for filling-in things that need a little explanation but not necessarily screen time.

Apparently this story had been made for TV ten years ago--I wasn't aware at the time, hadn't read the books yet; no idea whether that was any good or not.

I hope this did well enough that more are made...the characters take time to develop properly.

YAGB 2

So I was wondering if I could ever play Alpha Centauri again...highest rated game ever by PC Gamer, and it didn't even make the top 100 in this year's list.

My installer doesn't get it done on Win7, but apparently GOG.COM has adapted it somehow, and the result works just fine. I was going to try to make myself a Win2k VM and run it there, or maybe even a Win98 VM, but it was $5 on GOG, and my time is worth more than that to try to figure out how to get a VM created and running properly. Won't be able to do this at all on my Mac, because SMAC was an OS9 game, and there's no longer any software path from there onto the Intel processor; I'd have to keep an older Mac around, not interested in doing that. (OK, and older Mini would maybe do it, and at least be small, but still...that'd be the only purpose)

So now I can play SMAC again--which is good, because that is a game with a lot of replayability, very challenging, especially at the higher skill levels, or smaller maps (wherein conflict stars a lot sooner).

Apparently you can also get Total Annihilation, so I did. Haven't tried that yet, and I didn't finish it way back when, but now I can try again. Also for $5. Hard to beat, esp given that for $5 NWN2 still sucked big time.

GOG is great.

Follow-up on the Jaguar

It turns out that when the oil-pressure gauge shows low, it means low oil. Seems obvious enough, in retrospect, but given that newer cars don't vary even slightly about what the gauge shows, I didn't know that...and with an older car, you could wonder if it means low oil, oil sender has probs, gauge has probs...no way to be sure.

So I eventually looked at the oil dipstick, and it looked way down. Added 3 qts (car takes 8, which is more than US cars). Things looked good after that, pressure varied from 20-40, and it sounded smoother. A few weeks later I added another qt--I don't know what my consumption rate is, although I certainly know I have several leaks. Two are the valve-covers, you can *see* the crack in one where it was over-torqued bolting it down; I have a replacement for that one.

Still...car is running just fine, have been enjoying the driving, even though it is winter and the heater doesn't work.

Another round on the Jaguar

So it turns out that the oil pressure gauge tells you exactly what it should be telling you: when the pressure is low it means you need to add oil. I finally checked it, needed to add quite a bit, and it was just fine after that. Problem is that unlike a modern car, which keeps/shows a constant reading until you are dry, this one varies based on speed, and given that it's an old car, I wasn't sure that it wasn't something else wrong...now I know.

It still leaks oil, but that's normal for this car...it's not very fast, but it does happen. And there's more than one leak, two of them are the valve covers; both are tiny, but not necessarily hard to solve. I have one replacement cover now, got for $25. As they are aluminum, that may be not too hard to weld back closed. The current cracks are from having been torqued down too tight.

Got the voltage regulator replaced, which was critical. Old one was misbehaving badly. No surprise, it's a crappy two-transistor design that doesn't really regulate voltage so much as reduce fluctuations. Still, better than a mechanical one, which is just turning one flavor of AC into a pulse train which is just a different flavor of AC.

Car drives pretty well, although more work is needed. As it's drivable, I do that unless it's bitter cold out, because I haven't gotten the heater repaired. That is a job for the spring--I think I can do some/most/all of it myself. I'm sure it's rusted sealed, and the motor doesn't turn. Can't work on it in the winter, tho. Too cold out.

But it's now at the point I wanted it to be at--I can drive it. That is good fun.

YAGB

"Yet Another Game Blog" entry. been several months...

During which time Skyrim has come out. I have played it a lot, and I haven't even started the main sequence about the dragons. Just about everything else, tho.

Thoughts: this is not as good as Oblivion, in a variety of aspects.

#1) it's buggy. I don't mean crash buggy, but rather that various tasks break irrecoverably. Example: "buy a house in Markarth" -- if you don't do this the very first time it is offered, it will never be available again, but the quest won't go away.
#2) the color pallette is bland. territory is bland.
#3) it lacks the overall variety of opponents, and map areas.
#4) too much emphasis on "crafting". no offense intended, but BFD. *pointless*
#5) magic is harder. in fact, it's really different. How is it that Morrowind has different magic from Cyrodiil from Skyrim? We're not talking about entire other planets or something.
#6) the "skills tree". BFD. also pointless.
#7) "shouts". pointless. you don't need them for anything. as I have yet to kill a dragon, I can't use them anyway, and that's not any hardship.
#8) no auto-attempt on lockpicking. sorry, just not interested in this little micro-game over and over. this is an FNV-derived thing, and I was tired of it there, too.

things that are good:

#1) total map is huge. this is always good.
#2) plenty to do. except for the bugginess, which means some things can't be done, or can't be completed.
#3) your helper doesn't actually get killed (unless you do it, which I did a few times)
#4) chameleon is gone. just a flying disappeared after morrowind, chameleon is gone now. which means you have to be more careful, even at sneak 100.
#5) it's still possible, for some skills, to find a way to level them really really fast. sneak is one. armor is another (just the same way as in oblivion, too, which was good), summoning a Dremora runs that one up damn fast, even at the top end, although it only seems to count when it attacks something.

but overall, well worth the $50.

unlike NeverWinter Nights 2, which I just got (again). This time it was $5, on my Mac. Still has the same extremely annoying set of UI misfeatures and other failures. This game really is all about whether you like the D&D R3 details. Screw that, I have no interest. Bring me the story and the action. It's buggy, too. I've had it crash to desktop more than once. It doesn't autosave often enough--Skyrim autosaves every time you enter a new map area, or fast-travel; this is the
right approach. NWN2 doesn't really do first person properly, which means that other aspects of camera-handling suck big time. Sales is too hard (i.e., too many mouse-clicks), and the merchants NEVER have new stuff--always the same stuff. That is totally stupid--it means you are the one and only customer in the game. stupid.

even for $5, it's only worth your time for the purpose of figuring out how seriously flawed it is, and then taking those lessons to heart in making a better game. gah.

Back to the Jaguar

My car has been at the shop the past month, slowly getting some things fixed:

1) The alternator/charging system. Got a rebuilt alternator, and some wiring fixes. This is now working properly (exc see below). Have a new regulator coming, from ebay.

2) Cooling system. Got the hoses, thermostat replace, radiator core rebuild. This is working nicely. Engine block freeze plugs replaced.

on Oct 21, I got to have the car back for the weekend. The following notes are from the return email I send sunday night.

I was able to drive home ok (Chantilly), albeit slowly because of traffic...Then I drove north up Rt 28 to Sterling, south back to I-66, then to the Fair Oaks Whole Foods grocery, by which point I had a flat tire on the left rear. Because it was dark, we left it there overnight, and I put the spare on Saturday morning after bringing the proper tools. That all went fine, but it was a regrettable surprise. Therefore, I need the wheel that is in the boot repaired--not sure what is wrong with it, but that is the better rim (at least in terms of minimal rust and better appearance). I also put my last inner tube in the back, if it is needed. While going north on Rt 28, there was a thump underneath my feet while driving, like something hit the underside; my guess is that whatever that was caused the flat--it was dark, and I didn't see anything. I hope it was not something falling off the car and bouncing up off the road. I do not have an additional spare. When I got these tires put on the rims, it was at Radial Tire in Silver Spring MD, that could handle the wire rims. I'm ok with you all doing this if you can, else I need to see about it myself, don't really want to drive without a spare (although that is how I got it home in the first place). If it's just needing a new tire, I will get a matching tire (came from a Firestone place in Sterling).


They were very right about the throttle linkage being sticky--it cold-starts very high rpms. Saturday it was near 2500 rpm when I started it after changing the tire. Sunday it was nearly 4000 rpm at lunch time start-up. I had seen Dave poke on the linkage to fix that, so I did the same thing, and it was better, but this is something that needs attention before something goes worse wrong.

The voltage meter often shows something near 16 volts from the alternator, which is definitely too high. Saturday afternoon it was down at 13 for a while, which was fine. the 16 is alarming, not good for the battery. I will have the new voltage regulator in my hands in a few more days, probably time to replace that.

The speedometer is only partially functional--it doesn't rise above 40 mph, and doesn't always drop below 20 when stopped. I have bought a sender off ebay, perhaps we can try that out as a replacement. Or perhaps something is sticking there...

Oil pressure was somewhat variable, but was never down to zero--it ranged from 20-50 (what that really means) over the weekend. This seems ok for now, unless it's supposed to be a very steady pressure.

Headlights worked ok in the dark. I didn't look at the brake/turn-signal lights. They were ok 2 yrs ago.

Coolant/water temperature gauge looked great the whole time, on the low side of normal range, so great job on that. Keeps my feets toasty warm while driving.

There seems to be a low speed at which there is a motion resonance bounce...not sure if this means a tire is out of balance, or what. Noticeable on a really smooth road, elsewhere not so much.

-------

Comments on the above: the oil system had been a little off, in particular the oil pressure gauge usually read zero or nearly so. I got a new sensor off ebay, it got installed. The speedometer used to work ok, I thought. I think the replacement sensor I am getting is used, so it may not matter. The throttle linkage fix is probably part of a larger system fix that includes better carb tuning.

I could not tell whether the front suspension was showing any effect from the ball joints needing work...related: probably ALL the rubber anywhere needs replacing.

Anyway...it was great fun getting to drive the car...once more things are fixed, it will be even better.

Best part at this point is that we have not yet even hit the halfway point on my budget, although we are close. Still...remaining budget should cover good territory.

I had replaced the stereo soon after getting the car. New unit takes a USB drive to play from, which works pretty well. I made an 8GB drive, which results in a really good lot of stuff. Only flaw: it plays in alphabetic order, A-Z. Would prefer random.

Another new compy...

Gad. My Shuttle died today. Sort of--it's not completely dead, but it ain't working worth a damn.

First thing I tried to do was wake it up, the wake-up screen was a BSOD, and reboot said there was no disk. I thought I had another disk that had Win7 on it, but apparently that disk, although labeled Win 7, just has files.

Now I'm already feeling panicky. I *think* I have a full backup, on my backup server, but I've never had to go look, or try to recover from it.

Tried re-installing Win 7 on another disk (1.5TB; this *was* in my Win Home Server box, but may have been flaking out, I replaced it already, so I had this just sitting around). This isn't working...got a fair amount through, it did some CHKDSK repairs, etc, was beginning to do updates, and that failed to reboot the first time it needed to, and worse still, trying again I can't even see the disk any more. Went by MicroCenter after visiting a friend, got a new 1TB disk, and that too fails to go through the install process, ALSO not showing the disk the 2nd try.

I tried formatting the 1.5TB on my Mac Pro. That went fine, it seemed to be ok; not sure what the deal is, but I didn't try it back in the PC.

This is all very alarming, and after what is now at least 4 tries to install O/S on more than one disk, and trying to view disks on my Mac (mostly failing), I'm feeling a bit alarmed. Looks like tomorrow is another visit to Micro Center for a whole new set of parts...

At least this time I think I won't get the Shuttle-size box, that, although cutely small, hasn't really worked as well as I wanted. I tried to get a new video card for the Shuttle as week ago, saw a good price, only to discover after I got home that the box said it needed two slots, which the Shuttle cannot provide for a video card.

But I will be able to get something faster: 6 core, more/faster RAM (8GB, DDR3-1333). And a better video card before Skyrim shows up.

I don't mind the upgrade aspect, it's the panic over maybe losing my files. That is really worrying me--I'm thinking about how to be even more certain I have backups.

new compy

Well, it looked like time to replace the old G5 Mac...because it was shortly going to no longer be possible to get an Intel Mac Pro with Snow Leopard on it out of the box.

And Snow Lep is important for me, as I need Rosetta in order to be able to continue to run old stuff I can't afford to replace. Lion is not going to come with Rosetta; it doesn't come with Samba either, and I still need access to the Win systems here.

So I got a quad-core Mac Pro with Snow Lep. Upgraded RAM to 16gb, for $160, great price. Upgraded disks to total of 5TB (2TB is Time Machine).

The G5 had Leopard on it, and that was as far as it could go. Q now is whether or not it can be sold for anything reasonable...or should I see about a school donation?

The Rosetta stuff works reasonably well so far...I have not tried a serious 3D game yet. Turns out that EV Nova runs ok, but that's low-res graphics behavior. Most other things have been fine. Only untested thing I think remains is the M-Audio PCI card in the G5. I'd like that to continue to work, too, but I'll have to go hunt for a driver, or give up.

Having a new compy is kinda fun, like a new girlfriend, all the discovery phase.

----

And just yesterday the new iPhone was announced. Sprint will finally have one, so we'll be switching phones finally, to a phone I actually will like (have not been impressed with the Android phone).

Steve Jobs died today. Man, that is sad. Quite possibly no one other single person had as broad a positive impact on the world in the past several decades (bin Laden clearly had a huge negative impact, but no one will miss him except psychos).

Fallout New Vegas

Been playing this for a couple weeks...it does of course have the same flaw I didn't like about F3, the bland color scheme. Given the length of time that has past since the "war", you'd think people would again have paint to color things with, and that there would have been some foliage recovery, at the least along the CO river valley.

One very good feature in this is that you can have a companion, who can't be killed. So you can let the companion do the dirty work a bunch of the time, or at least be a distraction...which is good, because the companion is probably going to stand between you and the target, so that you can't shoot it.

You have to spend overmuch time on repairing your weapons and armor. Granted, in Oblivion, you did need to do that a good bit, but it wasn't so hard--this is of course the same as F3, which means that while you can repair everything yourself, you have to do it by collecting additional items to do it with--either the same item (repair a 44-cal pistol with another 44-cal pistol), or pay someone else rather a lot to do it for you.

I made a tactical error early on, in a little town called Tipton, in which I was grossed out by the Legion jerks slaughtering everyone, and then acting proud of it and daring me to attack. So I did--and killed them all. Of course, that meant that Legion assassin squads were after me regularly after that, which made for some awkward episodes later, and needing to watch out for them quite a bit, and make sure I didn't let them get into a town or NCR area--because those squads seem to be quite a bit stronger than most NPCs. Mostly the squads came after me, but they appear randomly, sometimes right when you land someplace via fast travel or entering a door, in which case there's going to be some serious carnage you maybe didn't want...if I could do that over, I'd follow the original group and lay waste to their entire location. I want to go to the Hoover Dam and wipe them out now, instead of waiting for whatever it is I'm waiting for.

The map is plenty big, so you get your $ worth, esp if you only spend $15 for it on Steam.

The Congressional Budget Battle

and the debt ceiling...man what a psycho episode.

Made worse by the spineless president. That was not what I voted for. I would agree with a post I saw online today, where someone wrote that Obama should have acted more like LBJ would have, by saying something more like: "You want cost of gov reduced? I'll halt all the projects in your district tomorrow--that'll reduce the cost of government." Which can be done...USG can issue a stop-work order at any time, on any contract, and you as contractor cannot bill any further. The executive branch makes those kind of decisions regularly.

Which means that of course the executive branch can always turn off expenditures anywhere, at any time--so even if the President can't make the budget law, he can simply not spend all of what's allocated.

What continues to amaze me is that so many folks are complaining about how we can't raise the retirement age on Social Security--it has been clear for years that the eligible retirement age needed to go up. It really ought to be 70 *now*, rather than sometime next decade. *I* expect to have to work until I'm 70 (or die at my desk, whichever comes first). The economic downturn over the past several years I think pushed back my retirement opportunity a few years.

Recall when SS started? 1935? The retirement age was set at 65 because that was the actuarial expected lifetime for someone in America at the time. So you could retire at that point, and start getting $, until you died, which probably wasn't all that far off (not to suggest that folks couldn't live longer, IIRC both John Adams and Ben Franklin lived to be 90, more than 100 years earlier). Now, thanks to all the medical improvements, we can now expect to live well past that, the actuarial average death age is about 80 (from USG website). Which means that you are likely to be able to collect 15 years worth of payments. Or more. That really isn't sustainable.

While it sounds good to say "well, let's index the retirement age to follow the actuarial numbers", it's a near certainty that your work years past 70 aren't going to be as productive as those just before. We all are starting to slow down at that point, so 80 isn't really a feasible date. I think 70 is good, now, however, because we can all do better at living healthy lives to that point. That said, I know folks age 80 who are pretty active, but not like they were at 60.

If retirement age rises, that should let SS be stable for any foreseeable future.

Means testing is critical on this, too. If you believe what you hear, most folks will face retirement with only around $50K in savings--which means that SS is critical for them, the only thing separating them from poverty.

Of course the Republicans, for all their scare talk of Death Panels, would prefer that anyone who can't take care of themselves just die, that no "social safety net" even exist in such a way that they are taxed for any of it.

Two Worlds 2

Yeah, another game entry. Steam had a two-fer deal recently, where you could get Two Worlds 2, and Fallout New Vegas both under $20. Hard to skip that one.

I've played Two Worlds 1 already, and while the 3D there wasn't as good, I think it worked better overall. TW2 I got tired of it about halfway through; I found the UI awkward, parts were essentially pointless (crafting: unless you specifically like that, it isn't really going to do much for you--you'll be able to find/buy better loot plenty soon enough.

TW1 was originally billed as an "Oblivion-killer" but of course it was no such thing.

TW2 was ok as filler until Skyrim comes out later this year, but not really interesting enough to finish. Nowhere near enough caves/ruins/dungeons to investigate. It's a real button-masher, and my hands aren't really up to that any more...

The one thing I did like was the personal teleport stones. They were much like the teleport rings in Morrowind, something I wish had been in Oblivion (at least for loot-selling, especially if you included the patch that put new merchants/buyers within touch distance at the various teleport targets).

Dungeon Siege 3

So Dungeon Siege 3 came out a couple of months ago. I was excited about this in advance, and when Steam offered the early-bird deal that would get you Both DS 1 and DS 2 AND DS 3 when released, that was too good to pass up.

So during the spring I re-played DS 1 and DS 2. Still worth the original cost, for sure. It took me nearly 100 hours to replay DS 1. Probably my 2nd fave game (after Oblivion, of course). DS 2 took a comparable amount of time.

Dungeon Siege 3, however, commits the cardinal sin of being short. WAY short for the price. It was pretty, no doubt, but short. Opponents respawn pretty quick, so you can run over various areas a bunch of times for XP/leveling/loot/cash, but that's artificial. The game itself is just short.

I recall DS1 being originally billed as a 40-hour game. I don't think I've ever played it less than 80. DS3 seemed more like a 20-hour game, even for me. So it really needed to have cost 20 dollars.

If you look at the Wikipedia story on DS3, I'd say that's right on the money. In comparison with DS1/2, DS 3 hasn't much territory.

Another game discussion...

so PC Gamer's latest DVD had "Alganon" on it...Alganon is an MMO kinda game, rather like the others...My experience with these things is limited, played Guild Wars for a while a couple of years ago.

Guild Wars you buy the game (which I did for next to zip), and it's free to play after that. You can cover a decent amount of territory solo (well, by hiring NPCs for your team), but ultimately it's not very interesting. There were a fair number of folks playing at any time, each "town" had some dozens of players standing around looking for a group, or various Guild players. Random self-selected groups don't work too well. A couple of folks seemed a bit too Leroy Jenkins to me.

Alganon is of course similar...but without all the players. I think I maybe saw 3 or 4 total. It seems heavily oriented around the "crafting" crap, which does not interest me. Opponents only occasionally drop anything interesting. I happened by a beach in one area where the opponents, which looked a lot like green gorgons without the snake hair, were the same level as me--level 8. A little further south, they were blue, and level 30. ???!!! How can you have a level 8 area next to a level 30 area?

I got killed a bunch of times...actually that aspect is kinda cool: you turn into a spirit, respawn back in town, the world is now black&white/gray-scale, and you can run back to your body--or go exploring around a bit, because as a spirit, you can't be re-killed, in fact for the most part you can't even see the opponents. Once you are back to your body, you can reclaim it exactly as it was.

It is entirely too easy to sign up for quests that are WAY above your level, which does argue for a team. So let's have some NPCs to hire to form that team--I realize the MM part of MMORPG means other players on your team, but I prefer solo gaming, so I don't embarrass myself or anyone else. (GWs hire-able NPCs weren't all that great, they didn't level up as fast as you, so after a while they tend to be more cannon fodder to distract an opponent.

Alganon's crafting stuff seems really complex, time-consuming...forum posts do indicate that's where the best loot comes from, but seriously...the game is about crafting???

So at Level 10 I ran into a disastrous bug...I had just bought a chunk of training from the Ranger Trainer in Adrok, and decided I would re-arrange my skills bar (bottom center), and I managed to simultaneously delete every single one of them with some tray mouse-click...that is a serious bug. Basically killed the game for me. I have reported it, but I don't expect to get much resolution. In fact, if there isn't one that simply restores me either to right before the training "purchases" or simply puts my lost skill items back on the bar, uninstall occurs later this week. At least I didn't pay for it or anything.

In any case, it appears to be a game that very few people are playing. The map stuff shows a pretty darn large territory to wander through, which would be great if there was a good way to avoid quests that are way to far above your skill level, and if others were playing such that you could get onto a team, and if there were better loot drops.

The game also seems very oriented around getting you to pay for things on the outside, things which would make you considerably stronger. Lots of things in the in-game economy are obscure at best, and you have to buy a lot of training.

Oblivion is so much better than this...

Can the iPad do a blog now?

Yes, it can, but you have to go to the "edit" tab to do it, and then you're editing the raw HTML. But still, it's better than nothing, which is what you have otherwise.

And I'm finding that I type better with just a couple of fingers rather than the whole hand, on this virtual kbd.

Using preview works fine, result look ok. You can always go edit later on a real compy.

Changing employers

So I've changed employers this month. I had not done that since 1993...which was essentially before the World Wide Web even existed (except on a very limited basis).

I had essentially run out of billable work for the foreseeable future where I was the last 17 years. Sad, but true. I'd been doing solo stuff most of the last several years, was disconnected from other things.

Now was a good time to do the change. I recall when my dad retired from the USAF he said to me at the time: Want to be able to say I can do at least ten years with a commercial employer, and staying in the USAF for the remaining possible 5 years would violate that idea.

So for me, retirement is approaching at about that same pace. Dad was a year older, was planning to officially retire at 65 no matter what. I expect to have to go closer to 70; while that's still a ways off, it's a lot closer than the beginning of my professional career (1978).

Key thing with new employer is whether the work will be enjoyable. At the moment, it looks so for the next several years.

Java and EXIF data

I have recently needed to try to read EXIF data from Java. Easier said than done, unfortunately, and finding out how was not easy.

A few months ago I dug up what looked like a good approach, but it's old code (~2002), and calls classes/methods that are no longer accessible. I think they're still present in the runtime, but you can't use them yourself.

So I went hunting again, today. Found something called Imagero, which claimed to read the EXIF, but it didn't really look like it did, and the license statement was too burdensome.

Something called JExifViewer also looks good. It's a little bit too much GUI as opposed to callable functions, but it does seem to work ok.

I also found this:

Java Forum Link

which explains how to do it relatively easily.

The key thing is that you have to install a separate tool (the TIFF tool), and that turns out to have a quirk in that there are multiple variations, and you really need to install the JDK variation *and* the JRE version, because you probably aren't running your code in Eclipse from the runtime in the JDK.

Anyway, the code in the forum works great, does exactly what you are hoping for, and this code is way smaller once you install the other library (which comes from Sun anyway, so it's a good thing to go ahead and do).

The only flaw with all this is that EXIF data is most non-standardized, there are implementation inconsistencies...you know the drill, and it only applies to a few file formats, primarily JPG.

-----------

Later: well, this bit of java code is less than perfect. I was able to break it pretty quickly.

Looks like "exiftool" is the better approach, as a callable program.

Ain't Windows wonderful?

So in general it's a good idea to do the O/S updates from Microstink when they are issued.

but not always...

and I got burned by that two days ago. I have two PCs, both are the neat little micro-boxes...I like the size, the lack of noise, etc. Anyway, one runs XP and one runs 7. I don't have space for multiple kbds and monitors, so I normally have XP open via Remote Desktop.

So these latest updates from M$ broke Remote Desktop. I cannot connect to XP from 7. This is awful!

Surely it doesn't take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure out these kinds of things before releasing software !?!?!?

I realize you can't test against all possible combinations of softwares someone else might have...but surely you can test against all your own stuff ?!?!

So Win 7 is now showing what are probably the same updates...maybe I'll get really really lucky and that will fix the problem...nah. not gonna happen.

Favorite restaurants

My favorite chinese restaurant in this area has closed: Hunan Lion. The facility has been stripped to the walls, even the lions are gone. That almost suggests they are moving...went by last night hoping for dinner, but no.

This is a sad day...there really isn't one as good that we know of around here.

-------

[Later: Sept 15] In a weird turn of events, I've changed employers, and I'm now going to be working in the building where Hunan Lion used to be. Same bldg used to have a TGI Friday's, but that's been gone for years. It is just now getting replaced by an Indian restaurant. If it's a good one, that will be like heaven.

Starcraft 2

Yeah, so I did the crazy thing and went to Best Buy at midnight to get a copy on opening day. Actually I went at 12.45, and there was no one there except the employees...so no waiting.

Fired it up at home...and did the tutorial. The gameplay mechanics appear to have not changed at all. It IS visually prettier--but it still needs the zoom way way out that Supreme Commander has. All the keystrokes are the same.

The EULA is a bit annoying...if I were to use the editor kit to make something, Blizzard owns it. Guess I won't be doing any.

It's good that this is finally out...been a long time coming. We'll see how it goes.

[later...]

It's a lot prettier than the first game. the cinematics are excellent...the way this works is that you do a mission, you end up back on Raynor's starship. If you did the side missions, you maybe have some money and research points to spend on things, which you do while on the ship.

The in-game animations are really good, too.

But what of the "story" ? So far it seems like the SC 1, the story takes place as narrative and cinematics while you blast aliens. One thing I don't like is that it doesn't let me finish blasting the aliens everywhere...Redstone was the first map where I did.

[days later]

I'll post a walk-through of sorts before too long, for the campaign.

There are four difficulty modes: Casual=you're new to RTS games, Normal=you've played RTS games, Hard=you've played through StarCraft 1 not too long ago, Brutal=you're a master at SC 1.

Even with that, the maps vary in difficulty: some on Normal are more difficult than others on Hard.

One story sequence has Zeratul appear, and then you actually play as Zeratul for a few missions--the last one of which is harder than anything else I've done in SC2 so far--this is primarily because I don't really know how to play as a Protoss, and doing the other missions isn't really going to teach you.

As you proceed through missions, new mission possibilities pop up, featuring different characters: Zeratul, Tosh, Tychus, Mengsk Jr. You are working towards a point where you are maybe going to be able to rescue Kerrigan !?

I'm not finished yet...

Latest on compy games

Played the Supreme Commander 2 demo earlier this year (figuring I'd get SupCom 2 when Steam has it cheap enough), and so I finally got motivated to buy the original...

With which I have issues...

1) It won't even install on Win 7 Pro. Grrr...It's not like this is from some little micro developer. Back to XP.
2) My XP box just barely has enough horsepower, despite being an AMD 2800+ dual-core, with ATI X1600 graphics.
3) It aborted really badly on me yesterday, and I cannot recover. I was in the middle of the final episode (#6) for the UEF faction, did something that caused it to crash hard, and I cannot get it going again...not for lack of trying, but none of the saved games will get going, not even the tutorial behaves properly.

SupCom1 is an update to Total Annihilation, from years ago. One extra feature is that your army can be A LOT larger, I think 400 buildings and fighting units, which is great (considering that Starcraft limits you to 200, which gets to pinch a little sometimes), but this does mean that extra compute power is needed. So with this crash, something is now wrong in that it seems unable to handle more than six or eight units/bldgs. So game saves just barely even load, and won't run.

This crash was so bad that I went and looked at services to turn off, startup apps to remove, and ultimately had to uninstall the game.

Fortunately, I only paid $3 for the game, on Ebay...but still. That is absolutely the worst software crash I've experienced. Ouch.

Steam games on mac

Hallelujah! Steam has come to the intel mac!

I now have Torchlight, Portal, and --TADA! Half-life 2 on my powerbook laptop!

Booyah! Vacation is going to be even better, whether the beach has oil residue on it or not!

Cars n such

Recall from earlier entries that I got a Jaguar XKE 18 months ago...joined the local Jag owner's club about that same time...last summer's picnic was good, and there was a couple there with an '03 XK8, sea-foam green (my mom's fave color). This car is a nice looker...probably the best-looking Jag after the E. And if you don't need a new one, a used one is a good bit cheaper than an E.

[here's where a secret is revealed] So my wife decides she really likes this one, and wants one of her own, except she wants a convertible. This took a while to manage, basically not until I had a chunk of $ come in as bonus money this year...so here's what we got:

I apologize that the size is wrong. Just click right on it and click "view image" in the popup menu.



it's midnight blue, with a nice light tan interior (ideal for when it's hot out, unlike my E, which has a *black* interior :(:( which I gotta fix one of these days)

So now we are a two-Jag operation...plus two other cars...altho the pickup is going to evolve into being my son's car, since he's 18 now.

It's the iPad

So I got an ipad ten days ago...this is a REALLY nifty device...going to change personal computing as we know.

What makes it different: you DO NOT interact with the operating system. Ever. This means you can't actually look at files qua files. Only as things you manipulate via applications...so when you "save an image" from Safari, it is actually copied directly into the "iphoto" application's storage and knowledge...no "find a folder, supply a name, click save, go to iphoto, open/import, find the folder, click the file". Anytime you need to enter text, you tap the field to do that in, the virtual kbd pops up, you type away...

What it does NOT do: well, it does not let me make these blog entries--the blog body text is entered in a javascript widget, not a regular text field, so ipad cannot see the thing, thus no kbd, no typing, no nothing...well, you can enter the title, and the label tags below...but that's it.

This is really bad--this device is ideal for a blog-on-the-go, and it can't be done.

What is really cool: last friday I saw a Tesla car just outside my office bldg, at lunchtime. Decided I needed to send my wife a text msg about it, I don't have my phone (just the ipad), how am I going to do it? when I got to the cafe with wifi, got logged in, looked online for help on this, it says "grab this free ipad app" by clicking on a link which takes me right to the app store, I click again to install it, that takes a few seconds, then tiny bit of setup and I can send a msg. Fabulous!

I actually bought the ipad app for Bento, as well as the G5 version, so I could see about converting my filemaker databases over to something I could sync with the ipad (had been thinking about having them on my android phone, but this is going to be better...once I can get the pictures incorporated (non-trivial: I have about 2000 images in those databases I want on the ipad).

Still...I love this gadget.

Computer games on Steam

Steam is a really nifty delivery mechanism, and a lot of older games are moving over there...just this past week, the entire Quake collection was available for $15. Hard to beat that...

Except that all too often, you can buy a game that literally WILL NOT PLAY. Is Valve actually testing any of this stuff?

I'm running Win7 x64, and I have some serious trouble with things. I have had several demos fail to run, and a couple of things I've bought also would not run. I think a couple of demos have even failed to install.

Surely it doesn't take an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure this out? At the least, the Steam client should be able to detect your machine properties and tell you that it won't run certain things.

computer parts

got some some bonus money from work a couple of months ago, so I bought myself this:

HP 21" Touch-screen monitor

which is just as cool as the name implies. works right out of the box on Win 7.

so imagine my surprise when i attach the other monitor and make this one the 2nd mon...yeah, the touch point x/y is assumed to be the primary monitor, so it does things on that monitor!

that's right, either the monitor or (more likely) Win7 does NOT know that the touch-screen might not be the primary monitor.

Looks like I'll have to switch them. Gad.

more gadgets

I'll probably get an IPAD next month...I've already ordered a fairly nifty looking touch-screen, it should be here in a few days.

Something else I've been thinking about recently is wearable computer. There's a reason why, but I had not thought about it for several years...I was expecting to be able to have one this year, and they don't look any more available than ever, maybe less.

The key reason I'd want one is that I want it to have what's called a Remembrance Agent, although I want it to be a lot more powerful than the discussion here. At another place, read the "Future" section, and that is more what I want (although this paper is ancient). I want it to be a regular computer, too, and do other stuff like watch RSS feeds for me and notify me when there's something I might be interested in. I've done some of the software work on that already.

Looking here, you can see this guy's interests are related, but he doesn't do any maintenance on his website.

and here's an enabling device I have to get

news you can use

or not...I did not know this: (see panel two)

Comic pic

new phone coming...

into my life...probably in a week or two at the most...

the Android phone. specifically, the HTC Hero, from Sprint.

why? because you can program it in Java, and it's not restricted the way the iphone is. and that means I can write my own apps and use them without getting Apple's approval for it...yay! that means I can figure out how to move my databases onto the phone, and finally ditch the PDA.

this is looking pretty nifty at this point.

Vancouver Olympics

I'm watching the gold-medal ice hockey game between Canada and the US men's teams...I watched the women's final as well...I had forgotten that USA had a good women's ice hockey team, but we weren't quite good enough this time. It's interesting watching hockey where checking isn't allowed. The hockey games have not been as challenging as one might hae wished, given that the US and Canadian teams are really dominant.

The Olympics have certainly been good this year. I watch nearly every minute that is actually broadcast that I'm home for, which is about 10 times as much tv as I can really stand. It is pretty high-res stuff, tho...watching the instant-replay for hockey the puck is really sharp on the screen, which is impressive considering that thing can be moving 100 mph.

I have something else going on this year, in that I wanted to track news stories about various events, because I need some additional input content for training a piece of software I wrote a year ago: it filters text content (stories, like news) based on training which is pre-categorized...i.e., I take various stories, assign topics, create a training model from them, and then use that training model to categorize new stories. The technique uses what's called "support vector machine", it's mostly about positive examples (where other trained systems used both pos and neg training). Anyway, I generally grab content from various RSS feeds, because they are slightly pre-categorized (like the Washington Post sports feed); this is not great because it tends to be limited content: NFL, NBA, MLB, and college equivalents. I need some other sources, but haven't looked very hard yet. Olympics is a fairly concentrated bunch of stories about skiing, skating, hockey, and curling. And it turned out that Vancouver has its own RSS feed, which is ideal for me: I have a separate tool written several years ago whose sole purpose is to grab stories from RSS feeds. This means I can continuously grab stories, not worry about them getting superseded or expiring, and then zip through a folder of them marking them for their training topics.

I should fire up a few more feeds for this, but I especially wanted to get the olympics because of the fairly unique set of stories I could get.

The only flaw in this is that I don't have a really good set of story topics that covers a lot of territory in a lot of detail. If I made more topics, I could probably get into more detail, but I don't know how much is really appropriate.

This whole idea, for me, dates back to some work in about the 1996 time-frame. You'd have a text-processing system where content would be brought in (like a large number of RSS feeds), you'd run them through a topic recognizer, and run that output through several differently-trained name-finders. From there you'd feed the names into a database, use some other correlation techniques.

I was trying to go this direction again in '08 with the pirates demo: could you find out what those guys are up to by any online content (in retrospect, I think not, that seems to be entirely target of opportunity, rather than any organized piracy with malice aforethought). Like drug-related stuff in Mexico, and Columbia, it's mostly about kidnapping, rather than loot.

----

The Canadian hockey team is outplaying us, same as the women's game. Sigh. We are not doing the passing we need to, and shooting too early.

interesting artwork

actually, amazing is more like it. You have probably never seen anything this before in your life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOhf3OvRXKg

(and note that there are other vids of her work--I gotta get these onto my ipod)

here's the background (as I rec'd it from a friend):


Dont dare to miss this amazing Video Clip . . first read it properly..

This video shows the winner of "Ukraine’s Got Talent", Kseniya Simonova, 24, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. Her talent, which admittedly is a strange one, is mesmeric to watch.

The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears and she won the top prize of about £75,000.

She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.

It is replaced by a woman’s face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman’s face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.


Kseniya Simonova says:
"I find it difficult enough to create art using paper and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is beyond me. The art, especially when the war is used as the subject matter, even brings some audience members to tears. And there’s surely no bigger compliment."


Please take time out to see this amazing piece of art.

click on the link below

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vOhf3OvRXKg

on being a geek

This little top-ten list describes me a little too well...

http://www.gk2gk.com/topten/waystotell.asp

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words copied here in case that link goes bad. apologies for the cut-n-paste, but I'm not claiming I created this:

Top 10 Reasons Why Geeks Make the Best Catch

It’s not generally realized that geeks (male and female) are the best catches. Americans focus on the glamour of the good-looking, the male jock and the statuesque female, and tend to make fun of second banana characters like Urkel. Yet, geeks (a.k.a. nerds, etc.) provide the opportunity to have much longer, more stable, and happy relationships. Here are the top ten reasons:

1. Geeks don't cheat. Geeks know that the grass only seems greener on the other side. They instinctively stay devotedly loyal to their lovers through thick and thin. Their social skills are also not well developed enough to support an affair.

2. Geeks appreciate their mates. Since you are likely to be one of the first persons a geek has ever had a significant relationship with, you will be treated well. A geek knows that there aren’t a whole lot of other possibilities. Frankly, geeks aren't quite sure how they ended up with the person they have attracted. When you date a geek, you know that geek will be yours for as long as you wish.

3. Geeks haven't formed bad relationship habits. After years of dating other people, the socially successful have become too confident to be intimate, think of partners as being only for their self-gratification, and focus on making themselves happy. None of this is true of a geek. The lack of past romantic partners allows the geek to approach lovers with the zest of a neophyte. Geeks are not full of romantic confidence. However, once encouraged, they are eager to please and enjoy their relationship.

4. Geeks are good at the things they try. Every geek has skills passionately developed over a long period of time. It could be role playing, chess, hacking, playing video games, or the ability to properly assemble a computer. So you know that geeks won't quit until they have learned how to make their relationship the best.

5. Geeks are not interested in status. Geeks became geeks because they chose to spend their time doing things that would not necessarily make them popular with everyone else in school, like sports and fashion. The ability to resist peer pressure is important to geeks. This means that a geek is more interested in your happiness than in looking good to others.

6. Geeks have imagination. Boredom is important to avoid to the game playing geek. A geek will seek new and creative ways to play, and this translates to relationships as well.

7. Geeks are happy and successful in their chosen field. No matter what their education level, geeks are able to make good incomes doing work that they enjoy. That eliminates one of the most frequent causes of relationship problems, since people who don’t like their jobs may take it out on their significant other.

8. Geeks are analytical. If they don’t get it right the first time, they look at what they did and figure out what to change. And when they DO get it right, they still keep finding ways to improve on it.

9. Geeks can concentrate. Geeks can focus their energy on one task with total intensity. Granted, the task they are focusing on may have more to do with writing new software for their Blackberry, but the fact remains that a geek, once set upon a task, tirelessly sets about to achieving a goal.

All of which means that…

10. Geeks want to be the best at what they do. So they try harder. And they never stop trying.

© 2004-2007 by Geek 2 Geek. www.gk2gk.com Not to be used without permission and attribution

building a new compy again

So about the time I got Torchlight, there was also the announcement about the new 3D zero-gravity space shooter game (Shattered Horizon [shadoobie]) that is Win7/Vista/DX10-only. Arrgg!

The PC I built in early 2006 is not going to get the job done, without a lot of upgrade, in which case I might as well build a new one. Is that even going to be possible? I have some requirements: AMD Phenom II quad-core cpu, 3+GHz, min 4GB DDR2 RAM possible, PCI Ex 2.0, DX10 possible, micro ATX-size case.

Turns out that is just now doable, with caveats. Shuttle is now making a case/mobo combo that will take a Phenom II, but only certain ones: those needing < 100 watts of power. There's a sticker on the cpu socket that warns you about this...so the highest-end cpus can't go in there (940, 955, 965) because they are either 125 or 140 watts. I only found this out by reading some of the user comments at Newegg. I'd have found out when I opened the case, of course, but if I'd already bought the 965 I'd have been unhappy. Newegg offers those two as a bundle, but that's kinda stupid given that that cpu can't go on the mobo. I went with the 945, 3 GHz quad-core, 95 watts.

In addition, Windows 7 is available as a free beta for the next 5 months. I don't know what happens after that, probably they want money or it shuts down. Well, it's Win7 Ultimate, which is actually more than I really want; Pro is what I want...but for test-drive purposes, this is ok.

Bought some of the new pieces in person at MicroCenter, and mail-ordered the case/cpu pair from Newegg.

Things went together like a breeze, which was great. Win7 installed with ZERO hassles, and nearly zero personal involvement. Other drivers went in super-quick/simple, also good, and it ran the first game I tried out...which was, interestingly, Bioshock, which does not run properly on my XP box. Works great, so I need to try some other things out, too, like UT04 which has quit working on my XP box. Need to try out Oblivion (and when the hell is Elder Scrolls 5 coming out?).

Case/mobo comes with two monitor sockets on-board, and the video card (ATI 4670) has two more, so i could put four monitors on this. Think I'll see about getting another 24" one...four monitors. That's what I'm talkin' about!

Gotta put a carrying handle on top of this one, too.

Win 7 boots pretty damn fast, and the wake from sleep is damn fast, too. Hooray!

The trick will be to not install so much stuff that if I have to do a complete wipe/reinstall it won't be too hard...

A month or so ago I got a dual 1TB raid unit set to mirroring. I have pushed all the mp3 stuff from the old pc onto the raid unit. It's not real fast, but does ok to play music. And all the machines can see it. (actually this "not too fast" issue is alarming/weird--should be at least 100T ethernet going in the back, but it seems like no more than 10T at best)

See you again in 3 years or so on this same topic.

----

Bioshock has behaved weirdly for me...Oblivion has been great, except when i was trying to run bioshock, which was having/causing some really weird audio problems. So long as I steer clear of BioS, everything else seems ok...which won't be hard to do, because I've reached a point in BioS where I literally cannot continue, there's some bug I'm hitting.

Oblivion plays quite fine on this system, even with a bunch of the graphics aspects near maximum (which, btw, are pretty but unhelpful: if you turn on nearby grass, there will be plenty of cases where an outdoor opponent drops a weapon and you can't find it).

I've been playing with some different techniques this time: You can run sneak to 100 on the very first guy in the tutorial, there's a sweet spot where, as reported before, you can set a weight on an arrow key and just walk away. You can do something similar with most of the magic schools, too, which is also interesting. I'm level 35 now, have done very little fighting overall, and I am absurdly easy to kill. I went with being a Khajiit, which is a weak character to begin with, so I'm mostly having to play by letting summoned things do the work. The reason I went ahead an leveled up is that I being so weak I needed to get to the point where I could kill/soul-trap grand-level souls (aiming at chameleon 100), and you can't even encounter them at level 2 (well, excepting that you kill some necromancers and get black soul gems). But I'm level 35, and I haven't even started the main story line, or gone very far with Mages Guild, or even the first task for fighters guild.

In addition to being a weak character, my armor and blade skill levels are low, which contributes to my being easily killed. Turns out that "fortify blade on self 100 pts for 30 sec" spell is far better than "fortify strength 100 pts".

Oh...the other reason I'm easily killed is that I set the difficulty to max, which makes for a really different game experience. At least until I got to chameleon 100, I got killed entirely too often. At normal difficulty, with sneak 100, you can sneak in the day without being seen...not even remotely possible at max difficulty.

So it's been interesting again...

TorchLight game

I have a Steam account, but I mostly have Steam not running...for other reasons, I had it on last week, and up popped one of their infomercial windows (a key reason why I don't run it), and the top thing was "TorchLight", and there was a free demo.

Steam is actually pretty slick overall, although it didn't start out that way. Now it's excellent.

Anyway.

I played the TorchLight demo...this is basically Diablo 2.5, or Diablo 2 with Warcraft graphics. So I bought the full game.

Pretty Nice. Many identical names for things, there's a good merchant system, each one has a brand-new load of stuff for sale when you return to town (a la Dungeon Siege). There are Town Portal Scrolls, Identify Scrolls, a nearly infinite qty of merch items with lots of recombination and predefined things (although their definition of "unique" is slightly different from mine...at one point I actually *did* have 2 of the same "unique" item). There are some health-recovery gems, you can fuse them for higher value, and pop them off to reuse.

There's a near infinite amount of play possible, because one of the things you can do is buy a scroll that will open a portal to another map--one not connect with anything else in the story--and it will be instanced to about your current performance level. Or you can buy them and hold them for a while, until they become easy walk-throughs.

The monster at the tail end is REALLY difficult. I think I got killed like 6 times while working him over. A key thing to have learned before going in there is how to summon a lot of helpers (Skel 6 seems best), and the Level 30 spell for seismic shock, which has this interesting advantage of being usable multiple times with no wait in-between (although you will run out of mana). It can take down a lot of opponents at once. [my son also played TL, and did the mage character and boosted his various summon skills to the point where he had a squad of 15 or so summoned things, meaning he didn't have to actually get close to directly fighting anything]

I think the idea of needing "Identify Scrolls" is stupid/pointless..

You have a sidekick/pet, which can help fight, but won't be as good as the skels, and is best used as pack mule...with one added bonus: when the pet is full up, you can send it to town to sell everything it is carrying, and it will come back with the cash. That's what I'm talkin' about!

The various map levels will reload with opposition creatures, if they don't have some special relationship to the main story line. This allows you to redo a level for more points or goodies.

I did have a couple of problems, one task just isn't completing for me...I think I did it, but it still registers as not done, which means I can't move on with the supplier of it (who probably has other tasks).

Apparently levels dynamically generate, so they should be different for a game restart...didn't look like that was true, though. Diablo 2 did do this--if you started over, levels were fairly different, other than some set locations that were quest-specific, but you could redo the entirety of all of them.

I thought the game was too short. I played the entire thing in just over a weekend. You can play as one of 3 character types, so I probably should go do one of the others...and it turns out that you can give a bunch af items to your other selves via the "shared items chest" which is a huge deal in your favor, if you actually know this. Too bad you can't give $. Still, it does argue in favor of keeping a variety of items on hand to pass on, covering a range of levels.