Bio Schockers

I finally went through Bioshock 1 for the first time. Got this on steam a while ago...actually played through successfully this go-round...I had the DVD-installed game 10 years ago, but it had a problem with crashing, and then I got to an airlock/map-level-change that wouldn't work, so I had to give up.

Didn't really get the supposed Ayn Rand feel of it, tho. I've read Atlas Shrugged, 40 years ago. Maybe it's been too long since I read that. This seemed more about generic power struggle between Ryan, Fontaine, Tennenbaum, etc. I played about half of it in silence, as my computer's internal audio was broken (still is, but I got a usb-audio stick).

Well, this new version from Steam got all the way through to the end, but not without some of the same flavor of seg-fault crashes. Gad. Isn't anyone able to do anything about this? *My* software doesn't seg-fault (well, actually some of it does, and those seg-faults are caused by third-party tools, and they crash in strange ways; usually I have to alert the 3rd-party-manuf about them: you know, "the JVM has detected a failure in native code" and then you get the damn core-dump, which doesn't actually terminate properly, so I can't have an auto-restart; I have a different thing where a sub-process called in a shell crashes on me so hard that it doesn't just kill itself, it takes out my code too (on Linux! no less); man I hate other people's software).

Bioshock 2 crashes on me too...entirely too often. WAY too often. Piece of crap.

At least Windows doesn't get killed along with it. But still...I wish there was some way to complain to Steam about this--entirely too many games that I have bought from Steam have had serious crashing problems (or completely failing to start at all).

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Anyway...B1 was ok, although I found the controls a little hard to work with again. The worst of which was discovering repeatedly that I had bought a plasmid upgrade only to find that the slot for the plasmid had been moved, so where I thought I had dropped it was different, and then I'd have a time cycling through them to select again. I think that happened every time--making them not that useful.

And I think that the only really useful plasmids were electro-shock and TK. Incinerate was ok once in a while, but it drank Eve like a sand-dune.

With TK, you can grab an opponent's missile/grenade out of the air and throw it back at them. *That* is nifty--except that when it came time to take on Fontaine at the end I completely forgot about doing that and just did the usual run-n-gun with occasional grenades.

And what's with the deal that when you're using a gun, and you run out of one flavor of bullet, it doesn't auto-switch you to another one? You end up using the wrong ones most of the time anyway...

A rule of thumb--you should either hack or destroy every single health station you come across; hack the easier ones, and destroy the hard ones--otherwise splicers you didn't quite kill are using them against you by re-healthing.

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B2 was properly harder than B1. The controls are essentially identical, so no re-learning what to do. Big Sisters were appallingly hard to kill.

Which brings up another point: there's limited value to trying to dodge death, since you just get re-vitalized nearby.

Another rule of thumb: Bee Swarm is your friend. Upgrade that to max *early*, because the swarm is independent from you, can detect targets around corners, and will attack things out of sight. And out-of-sight opponents won't come running at you. You can take down anything with bee swarm if you're patient and they don't see you. Also: upgrade Hypnotize as fast as you can--that's your other best friend--get the opponents to fight each other, esp the big ones. Then get killed, stay in the Re-Vi chamber until they are done, then prep bee swarm for remaining singletons, or another hypnotize for small crowds.

One tonic you can take will do something unusual: prevent you from using nearly all your weapons, but also cuts the Eve cost down 90% or so, which means you're the magic man, but weapon limited--the drill just doesn't do that much for you. If you want to play this mode (which I did for a while, it was distinctly harder), you probably also need the shock/fire-protection add-ons, since you'll do a lot more melee. I did not try Decoy @ max here, which would be interesting too.

I mostly didn't listen to the audio diaries. Once in a while they contain a passcode for a locked door, but other than that they're pointless.

This crashed-out-to-desktop on me 2-3 times a day while I was playing it. Really. Talk about crappy software...

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[March 6, 2016] So this past 10 days I played Bioshock Infinite. Wonder of Wonders, it did not crash even once. Hooray!

Didn't understand it, tho. As with the others, you have to die at the end. And apparently, if you do like I did, and quit during the credits, you don't see the end thing that explains how it turned out (ok, well, it doesn't, really). So the ending is pretty meaningless. I'm still not sure I understand the explanation. You begin the game as Booker DeWitt. But maybe you are also Comstock? How is that possible? There's a baby. Comstock's baby. Maybe; that seems to have been a lie. Or maybe she was a created thing? Or something? Anyway, at age 19, she's been able to open "tears" between, well, "places", that might be parallel universes. One of which was Rapture. You have to rescue the girl and trade her for something, not clear what that is, maybe it's death. Or someone else' death? Huh? Why does your dying fix anything?

I'm told the "infinite" part of the name is about the multiple worlds...I've have believed that more if it was made more clear that you were traveling between them. And that each one had more that was different. It really only felt like two of them.

The setting feels like The Music Man. Or maybe a little older than that.

In the end: (spoilers!) it's your daughter, not explained how/why, you are/were/could-be Comstock, you have to time-travel to undo something that prevents him from being born, but that means you aren't born, something something something. I didn't understand it, such as that was. And I'm well familiar with the parallel universes routine.

I didn't find the "vigors/plasmids" to be that interesting. Except levitate. That was fun. Except when it didn't work on George or Abe.

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and of course this is just killing time before Fallout 4 arrives on Nov 10. I did the XBONE pre-order last night, that took hours to d/l, but I'm ready. And F3 comes with it, apparently. That was interesting. That's a 360 game, sounds like it's had an update for X1? Or something like that...I hope so, F4 cost was $90, which is pricey.

Only a few days left.

[Later: Fallout 3 bundle with F4 is because Microsoft did something they said they couldn't, which was to create an X360-emulator that runs on the XBOne, so that 360 games don't just go dead. But not all 360 games make the grade, but as I have zero of them, so what?]

Far Cry 2 and 3

There are a few things in computer games that REALLY REALLY torque me off.

1) Not letting me save where *I* want to. I.e., checkpointed saves, only when THEY want to let it happen.

2) Forcing me to play some scenes THEIR way instead of MY way.

3) Stupid and un-changeable keyboard settings.

4) Timed scenarios or sections.

5) No auto-saves at all. So that way, when the game crashes, you are going back to whatever was the last save, and redoing a bunch of stuff, as opposed to the autosave that SHOULD have taken place a few minutes ago when you made a huge transition in the game (Spore just screwed me over on this, I have to replay the entire third section ("Tribe") of the game; maybe I'll just punt--seriously, people? How hard is it to automate this? Does it take an Advanced Degree to understand this?)



Checkpointed saves mean you have to repeat actions that become annoying. This is generally compounded by being forced to play certain areas a particular way, AND being unable to modify control settings in such a way that I can do better. This is what killed Far Cry 1 for me.

Forcing me to play it their way--seriously folks? If that is what you want, just make a cut-scene of it, and let's move on. I hate that routine, and it will cause me to stop playing and then delete a game.

Un-changeable settings means typically that someone doesn't understand what other people need to do. *I* have to play with left-sided-left-handed mouse, because of RSI issues 15 years ago. I want to pretty much completely remap the keyboard/action settings, as well as flip mouse buttons.


Far Cry 2 was ok. I was able to finish it, and pretty much play it my way. That was good. Didn't like the ending, tho. You get two choices, but you die either way.

Far Cry 3 eventually pissed me off about action/controls, so I've quit playing. I was about 1/2 way through when I decided I couldn't tolerate it any more.

Steam Summer Sale 2105

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Disk drive troubles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Games for Girls

or Women, if you prefer.

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

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

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

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

back to games

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

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

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

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

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

Politics

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

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

Why are those topics so toxic?

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

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

Wildlife @ The Ranch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fallout 4

FNV was better than FO3. No argument there.

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

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

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

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

11-10-2015.

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

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

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

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2 years later:

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

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

What is "Genesis" really about?

This is a bit of a recap of a fascinating book, "Eve's Seed", by Robert McElvaine. 2001.

I read this about a year after it was out...because there was an excerpt written for the WaPo editorial section the sunday after 9/11. That little bit was weird enough an idea that I got the whole book.


What's Genesis about? Not what you thought...

It is of course a mythology about the origin of humanity. An allegory for some things. Interesting things. But *not* about Adam, Eve, a serpent and an apple.

That story is putatively about "the fall of man", but really it's about "the fall of men", which is a subtle distinction. A fall from grace, yes. Beginning when...

Eve ate a fruit from the tree of knowledge.

What knowledge?

Now for the anthropology history aspects: early humankind are of course wanderers. Hunter/gatherers. As are most "higher" animals. Cows are not, they just eat grass. Chimps are gatherers. Humans are omnivorous, so some hunting and some gathering. Can't be otherwise, because we know too little to do anything else, and besides, food is reasonably plentiful--lots of trees produce fruits and nuts, you can watch what other animals eat and do the same, and occasionally you eat of them.

Gathering of things that fall from trees. Hunting the occasional large beast.

That hunting might actually take a couple of days, days of wandering, finding, shooting, following, and then dragging the thing back to camp. That requires upper body strength, so it's the men doing it. Women are doing the gathering. When you "exhaust" an area, you move on.

When you wander into the area that has A LOT of stuff, you end up staying for a while, because you can't exhaust the area. Men go out to hunt. Women stay behind, with babies, kids. And trash.

When the time comes that they stay in one area for a number of years, what happens? The women are in the same place every day, and have the opportunity to observe something: things they eat have seeds. Seeds which they have thrown away. Seeds sprout in the ground. Sprouts become new plants. New plants eventually make more food.

Hoorah! We can grow it ourselves! Let's dig in the dirt and plant seeds and have more food and stop having to wander all over tarnation.

Eve has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. Knowledge of agriculture. Men (upper body strength again) now have to do the backbreaking work of tilling and harvesting--they have fallen from grace.

Women must be punished for this. And have been ever since. Because I was once a hunter, but now I'm a slave. A slave to the fields. And my johnson.

All the chatter you read here/there about "it was the tree of knowledge about good and evil" is baloney. The origin of the story is pre-history, when humans went from hard wandering, to find the "garden of eden, where food was plentiful". Good. And then to farming. Evil.

So the story was invented where the snake tempted Eve with knowledge of seeds, of planting, of growth and harvesting.

The book is fascinating, and well worth your time to read. Unless of course you are a bible literalist, in which case it might make your head explode.

- - - -

So why did I encounter this in WaPo? Well, there was the excerpt variant by the author, written as an Editorial essay. About Muslims, for the most part; appropriate a few days post-9/11.

Why do the men grow beards? Why did it become a religious requirement? Because women can't. And therefore having a beard proves that one is "not-a-woman". 

Read the book. Fascinating. I can't hardly do it justice here.

It IS about the nail

My sister sent me this link a few days ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg

which is amusing, and cringe-inducing, at the same time.

The worst of it, I think, from a male view, is when she says "It's not about the nail, I need you to listen to me"...because what we hear is "I am not interested in your opinion or participation", and then we just check out of the conversation. You get head-nods, "mmm-hmm"s, and maybe "how do you feel about that?", but we aren't actually listening any longer. If we internalize that enough, we aren't listening to anything you say after that, ever.

Few of us are clever enough to figure out how to lead her to come to the realization that it IS about the nail, and that we are wired to be suppliers of help if you come with a complaint of some sort.

It's not that we are being dismissive of your feelings (altho I'm sure some are), but that you want to talk about something which is causing you trouble, for which there is a clear and unmistakable cause and effect, and for which there is a clear solution.

and we are unable to imagine that removing the nail is NOT the first order of business.

It's worse for me. I'm an engineer--EVERYTHING looks like it needs problem-solving.

Crytek games

Steam had a sale of their usual style a few months ago, and I got a Crytek bundle:

Crisis 1, 2 + plus some expansions.

I also had a DVD of Far Cry from a while ago that I had not installed or played.

They'd had good reviews, as I recalled.

Far Cry 1: well, it's interesting until you get to that derelict ship (actually, this is fairly early). That was a nightmare for me.

Why? Checkpoint saves. Only. I hate that. That is nearly a complete deal-breaker, because those saves are generally not where I'd want...one of them is right before you climb out onto the top deck of that derelict, which is good, because that is a really really hard segment to run...and when you've cleared it, you have to get into this little dinghy that is hanging, I fell out of it twice all the way to the bottom where there is no way back up, meaning you have to reload the last checkpoint save and try to evade that damn helicopter AGAIN. Quit, and deleted the game--the annoyance is too great.

Crisis 1 is better. Actually, it's REALLY good, for a lot of reasons. 1) the enemies are North Koreans. That's almost as good as Nazis, except that I really wish they'd been wearing those ridiculous bouffant hats you always see them wear in photos. 2) Quicksaves and named saves. 3) The tank battle. 4) You drive the cars, the tanks, the boats, eventually a VTOL (which was weird). 4) It's much more about stealthing your way through some areas. 5) It's not terribly linear. It does get harder as you progress. 6) Lots of open territory. You don't have to go through it the same way every time. 7) There's some semblance of real story there (rescue a science team, discover the NKs, then the aliens, then the BIG aliens).

Crisis 2 is ok. I thought the end was a little disappointing. The aliens were individually interesting, but we're back to checkpoint-saves only. The settings/levels were all WAY too linear--but the setting kinda forces it that way, since it is basically outdoors in NYC. I'd have rather been able to just walk around in NYC, but there's a lot of jumping large distances between levels. Felt a little too episodic. Not much vehicles action--what little there is is unimportant (well, in C1 you can probably do the tank battle on foot, but that wouldn't be as interesting). Too much cut-scenes (arrrrg, if you want me to watch a movie, just make a movie).


I'll play Crisis 1 again (altho probably NOT that final battle on top of the carrier). Crisis 2, maybe. Far Cry, not a chance.

new Games via Steam pt 2

So I also got/played Batman Arkham Asylum over christmas vac. Only paid like $5 for this, so there was no way to be disappointed.

Annoyed, yes, but for $5 you can't say you didn't get your money's worth.

And what was annoying was the UI. It really feels like it's a console game, and that you should play it like that. (Something else that annoys me is that Batman doesn't use any hand-weapons; pretty sure that wasn't true 70 years ago.)

The thing I have the most trouble with in this sort of game is how the UI behaves (or fails). Example: about mid-way in the game you have to go find "Killer Croc" and collect some stuff. Then you have to get out. This is mostly about stealth, and knowing that you have to throw batarangs at him when he charges...except that when it comes time to leave, as you begin the final stretch suddenly the camera changes position--instead of being 3rd-person look forwards over the right shoulder, now it's in front of Batman, looking back at him--and you still have to run and dodge. So what, you say? Well, the camera has changed position to be in front looking back instead of in back looking front--which means that your key and mouse movements are now backwards, and for just this stretch the direction you run is not 100% under your control. I had a terrible time with this.

When you have to tackle Scarecrow, that game turns into a side-scroller. I hate those. When you take on Poison Ivy, that too is a side-scroller. And there's NO caps-lock=always-run.

Most of the combat is many-to-one kung-fu-punch-n-kick stuff, all about the "move" combinations, where opponents are mostly auto-targeted

I.e., it's a button-masher. That is quickly tiresome for me, partly because I can't do it all that well.

So I gave up in the middle of trying to beat Poison Ivy--that one has a little too much going on for me when I don't have control over the camera.

Still...only $5.

One thing that was useful was the character info, and dates. There's a lot of modern Batman that is things I don't know (Arkham Island/Asylum didn't exist in the old Batman I remember from 50 years ago).

new Games via Steam

Got reminded last month that it was time again for the annual Christmas game sale at Steam. I went to see if Civilization: Beyond Earth was on sale, got lucky and it was, and I picked up the other two Batman games (Arkham Asylum, Origins).

Civ BE is clearly the successor to Alpha Centauri (Firaxis, 1998?/99?), which PCGamer mag rated the highest score ever before or since. That score convinced me to get it. I have played Alpha C a lot since then, and I don't disagree with the score. Yes, it outscored HL2, all the Elder Scrolls games (which I like)...and while I will probably play Oblivion and Skyrim again, once each, Alpha C I return to FAR more often.

Without a doubt, Civ BE is a lot prettier than AC. I played for a while, was far less successful at building new cities (others were comparably slow), got sneak attacked more than once by both neighbors, and generally had a hard time figuring out what the hell the "tech-tree" was about. Success in this game (as with AC) requires you to understand the tech tree, or at least to let the AI direct your research.

Parts of the GUI were very nice, and parts sucked big time. I thought the terrain view, and the per-hex content variations were WAY too busy. AC had a less pretty, but I think far smoother terrain variance. (I didn't fully appreciate this until I was digging into the graphics files, to see what they hold. The terrain/map generator uses some form of fractal-based algorithm for computing similarity of one square to its neighbors. That's not what I'm doing, at least not yet--more work than I want to go through at this moment.) Another suck: I want to know what units are in a city. You cannot find this out. Another suck--any "fight" between two units takes multiple turns. Everything in the game just seemed too slow to me.

One thing that AC does well is give you the ability to micro-manage your cities OR NOT. Civ BE doesn't seem to give you that option, and in fact seems to do the worst possible thing--be unable to create a construction queue of multiple items, so that every time something is built, you have to completely replan what you are doing. (OK, if your ability to create more cities is really low, that may not be so hard, but when you have more, that last thing you want to have to do every turn is rescan the entire list of options and rethink what you should do--takes way too long when you have a bunch of cities.

I've played about 180 turns I think, I have four cities (two others were wiped out along the way, as a result of sneak attacks). I do not know what facilities those cities have built already, you don't seem to get to know that, only what yet remains to be built. There doesn't seem to be a way to create your own forces/units; AC had an entire window dedicated to this.

The tech tree is very strange. AC has a good tree--it makes sense to me based on the names and the item descriptions (granted that some of them are far-fetched, but it's a sci-fi game, some of it *should* be far-fetched). This is not to suggest that AC is perfect, but the only thing I think it misses the mark on is that there are some inconsistencies in the tech/special-projects options.

So Civ BE seems weird to me. I think what I really wanted was a better version of AC--better graphics, for sure, more tech, probably more things going on. This is like opposite what I wanted.

I may continue to play, but I'm disappointed.

And that's why I waited for it to be on sale.

Writing a computer game

Alpha Centauri (SMAC) is one of my favorites. Been playing it since it came out, in 1999. Brilliant game. Complex in a lot of ways. Not perfect, there are some small flaws, but they're small. PC Gamer gave it their highest-ever score ranking (98, not matched by Skyrim, HL2, etc).

Been out of print for years. GOG carries it for Win/Mac, which is great. But eventually even that won't be good enough.

So I'm writing a clone of sorts.

A better-looking clone. Probably a simpler clone--there are a lot of things in SMAC that I have never had to use or understand. Granted, I have never played online against others, and maybe those things are more important in that case.

The level of detail that went into the tech/research-tree, and all the other little details about what can/can't be done when/where by what, just marvelous.

Customizable in so many ways. Largely irrelevant was my experience. I don't know how many times I've played through. This is a really long game (like playing Monopoly all the way through to the solo end), it can take 100-200 hours each time, so my play-through count isn't huge, probably a dozen or so.

I'm going to snarf most of the details, leave out some things that seem like unnecessary complexity.

Already I have a better-looking opening screen/menu sequence, and I've begun creating the classes in Java for it. As Java, it has to be OO, which I suspect the original was not...I have a terrain generator of sorts, but I'm not happy with it yet. Still thinking about how-to details for various aspects.

As Java, it will run on just about any platform that runs a complete Java JSE+Swing, incl Linux, but probably NOT any JME.

I'll try to do some 3D GUI stuff. That's a retirement project, to create such a thing.

I hate Java

I've been programming in Java for over 15 years.

I'm very good at it.

And I still hate it. (Writing below refers to Java 6; newer Java may have solved part of this issue)

Cases in point:

1) Iteration. The inconsistencies about how you do this are endlessly aggravating. There should be ONE SINGLE WAY to iterate. And that means ONE SINGLE WAY to create something to iterate over, when it's not something that already has an obvious iteration sequence.

Sometimes you have a List-behaving group. Sometimes you don't. Either way, I should NOT have to be remembering "ah, for *this* particular thing I have to loop over a Vector, for this one it's an array, this time I get an enumeration, this one is an iterator, etc"

Code examples:

File[] files = new File("some-folder/").listFiles();

Enumeration keys = new Hashtable().keys();

Collection values = new Hashtable().values();
Iterator iter = values.iterator();

Vector xx = new Vector();
for (String yy:xx) { whatever(yy); } //this works fine

for (String fname:new File("some-folder").listFiles()) { something(fname); } // nope, can't do this

2) Lengths of various things.

new File("some-folder/").length

new Vector().size();

Enumeration keys = new Hashtable().keys(); //what? there IS NO WAY to get the length? GGGGAAAAHHHH!!!!


3) Apply a function/method to the elements of a sequence. No such animal.

I'd like to be able to do something like this:

 for (String fname:Apply(FindMethodNamed("xyz"), new File("some-folder").listFiles(), Vector) { something(fname); }

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

I used to program in Lisp, starting 30 years ago. Lisp is beautiful. So clean in comparison. I was twice as good.

need the length of something that could be a list/sequence? (size X) 

need to do that "Apply" thing above?

(map #'(lambda(obj) (filename-name obj)) (list-files "some-folder/"))

Well, really, you would probably not even do that anyway. There wouldn't be a reason, if you were just going to iterate over the list of files.

(dolist (file (list-files "some-folder/")) (do-something (filename-name file)))

Hmm. Was that that function called list-directory? Been long enough that I misremember.

Rumor is that Java 8 finally has something like this. 8. Rumor was that Java 7 was going to have it. But most of it is a foreign concept for Java. Functions? Functions not tied to a class? Anonymous functions? "Lambda" functions? I haven't been to look, as I have a restriction at work to using Java 6 still (not that I wouldn't like to move forward, but I don't control the circumstances; it was supposed to have changed by now, but personnel turnover in IT have not helped).


Java is a language hacked together by a committee that never met to discuss things like consistency. Damn amateurs.


Granted, when I started with Lisp, it was almost 30 years old, and these issues were long gone, and the formal standard of Common Lisp had just hit the streets. And that was designed by a committee. A committee that "met" many times over some years, and had themselves many years, or decades, of background in various dialects of Lisp. And even then version one isn't quite perfect...for one thing, the Object System isn't included (not because the reference implementation didn't exist, it did, I knew of it, but I hadn't touched it yet). Version two had that, and it was/is better than Java's. Did the Java creators learn from it? Not hardly. Java is C++ minus the really stupid things about C++ from the 80s (another amateur hack that didn't learn from others).

And here I am, I am now full-time a Java programmer. And after this many years, parts of it are still just as stupid as 20 years ago, and will not ever be getting better. And I won't be getting any better at it either.

Fortunately retirement is not that far off...and I still have a huge amount of personal programming to do after that.

The "Friend Zone" :)

This is an amusing read:

Top 10 reasons why...

My reaction (by the reason numbers):

1) Of course it's real. It's been around a long time, and now it formally has a name. (I think it used to be called "LJBF", but "FZ is better".)

OK, what IS the friend zone? It's when a woman you have some romantic interest in tells you "I've always thought of you as [just] a friend" -- which means that she DOES NOT and CANNOT see you as a romantic interest. When they say that to you, it is time to walk away. Take the ego hit and go. Permanently.Getting pushed into the "FZ" is a one-way trip.

2) You have only just so much time to spend on "the pursuit". You cannot afford to spend any on a woman who has "FZ'd" you. Not any. Move on. Be courteous if you bump into her, but you will never be seen as a romantic partner. (Alright, maybe it's not a statistical impossibility, but the probability is vanishingly small, don't waste time on it.)

3) Actually, it's a very subtle attack: what it really means is "please go away and don't be a stalker". She did not give you "the truth", because part of the truth involves words she doesn't want to say.

4) True enough, but since they can't say the words it really means, it's another self-deception on their part. You acted like one of her female friends, so that's how you got classified. Don't allow it.

5) What is a "nice guy" ? One who isn't going to hit her? Remember that they want some measure of excitement. Don't hit her, ever, but don't let her think you're a doormat. Either act like she's a romantic target or do not interact with her at all.

6) Have never done this. Well, not that I am aware of...I remember, well, let's go ahead and say "dumping" two girlfriends, but they were actual girlfriends I'd had sex with, not women who'd been interested but I ignored. That sort of thing could not happen to me. Why? I am not a guy who attracts women. At all. So there is no possible occurrence where I would FZ one, because there wouldn't be a circumstance where there would be one who had a romantic interest in me and she made the initial approach. So of course you can describe the hypothetical of "well what if one did?" but since that can't happen to me, I would be 100% incapable of recognizing it, and would be certain that there was some other meaning to the initial contact and would react accordingly. (My superpower was and still is being invisible to women :) )

7) Women don't complain about it because they are running a master class in self-deception, and that includes careful code-phrases like "It just didn't work out", which is much gentler on one's self than "he thought I was boring/unattractive".

8) As I am not any woman's "type" this doesn't even mean anything to me. It is true as written. (fwiw, I'd go with Zooey, (unless she was blond at the time, that just does not work for Zooey) but since nothing of the kind could happen, it still doesn't mean anything)

9) Correct as written. Move on. Immediately. Do not give her a second glance. It ain't happening.

10) Mostly right. You got rejected, in a way that allows her to pretend to herself that she didn't "reject" you. She still doesn't want to see you ever again, since what it means is that she doesn't think you are exciting or attractive.

------

The Friend Zone is a female thing. Women put you in it so as not to think about you as a romantic partner, and to avoid saying "I don't think you're attractive".

(Repeating from a recent prior blog wherein Ben Affleck was mentioned:)

Scenario: you're female, single, 27. You live by yourself (or with female roommates), in an apartment. There's a knock at the door. You answer, a guy is there, you've not met before. He says "come have dinner with me". What are the first words out of your mouth?

1) Get out of here you creep! (followed by slamming the door and locking it)
2) I've always thought of you as a friend.
3) Give me five minutes to change clothes. How dressed up should I look?

The answer to this is 100% based on how good-looking he is. If it's one of those dorks from Dumb and Dumber, you say #1. If it's Harold from the Accounting dept, you say #2. If it's (your pick) Ben Affleck or Benedict Cumberbatch, you say #3, after you pick your jaw up off the floor.


Variation: flip the sexes. You're male, single, 27. You live alone, of course. At the apartment, a knock comes on the door. You answer, it's a female, she says "come have dinner with me". What do you say?

1) Buzz off slut!
2) I'm unfortunately busy this evening.
3) Let me get my jacket.
4) Am I on Candid Camera?

The answer to this is 100% based on how good-looking she is. If she looks like Mama June, you either say #1 or just close the door and think wtf (followed by holding that beer bottle up to the light and wondering if there are some hallucinogenics in it and why you didn't hallucinate Lynda Carter)? If she looks like Amy from BBT you likely say #2 (unless it looks like she has good-sized tits, or it's Mayim and she looks like this). If she looks like Deepika, you say #3, regardless of whatever the hell else other circumstances exist (even if you're getting married tomorrow), you don't even need to change clothes, because no one is even going to see you other than to wonder who's that guy with Deepika?

No guy is going to say "I've always thought of you as just a friend".

(If you're me, there are only two phrases: "I'm sorry" and you close the door, or "I'm sorry, you've confused me with someone else" (and that is even if it's Deepika) because of course there's absolutely no way a female is going to come knock on my door).


So, another anecdote. (Anecdotes are not data.) Long ago, there was an exchange with an ex-gf:

(I forget the precise timing, it was after the break-up, but perhaps not long after)

Her: can we still be friends? Oh, wait, I forgot, you don't have female "friends".

Me: Your sarcasm is wasted. [I'll be polite, but I won't go any farther than that, if our paths cross again]

I don't know what she meant by "friends", as there weren't any circumstances that would cause us to be within a mile of each other again after that, and we wouldn't be talking on the phone (and this was long before email).

The amount of time I have to spend interacting with women must be focused on the romantic angle, I do not have time to be "friends". What does that even mean?



Another anecdote  (we'll see if I can even remember this completely, I think it was 1988):

Female cousin (age ~26) says to me: I'm in this singles group at church, it's a big group, and I never get asked out. (which I is guess basically the raison d'etre for a church singles group)

Me:Why don't YOU ask one of THEM? Can't hurt...

Weeks or months later...

Cousin: well, I tried that. I got told he didn't want to damage his friendship with {her ex-boyfriend} [so I hadn't known about that at all] [as though an ex-boyfriend would care even slightly].

Me: [probably something like:] Huh. wow. Well...

What was I going to tell her? The reality of that was: He didn't find you attractive enough. [True enough; at the time she was a bit overweight] Simple as that. I guarantee you that if she had looked like (let's pick a well-known actress at that specific time) Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (~same age as cousin in that movie) or Romancing the Stone, the guy she asked would have been more than willing to ignore anything else for her. (Of course this ignores the fact that if she looked like KT in Body Heat she'd have had to fight guys off with a stick just to get out to her car)

So that was a lie he told her to dodge giving the real answer: I don't find you attractive. (And of course I didn't say it either, wimping out to an extent, I couldn't see a good reason to do so.) Also note that he didn't say "I've always thought of you as a friend".

The other important lesson in that episode is that she learns just how hard it is for most of us to ask them out, the insecurity, the second-guessing in advance, the agonizing over whether today is the right day. I sure don't want to have to think about that again.

How hard is it to find a date when you're female?

I'd have said "not at all"  but maybe I'm wrong...it always seemed like *I* was the one with difficulty...does it take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure this out?

[sorry about the links having been wrong, I didn't realize Blogger was prepending the http part]

British glamour model Lucy Harrold apparently has trouble. Enough so that despite being on a UK "dating show" called "Take Me Out", and having adequate finances anyway, she created her own singles website to help solve this.

Seriously?

OK, I don't actually like the shape of her face, but certainly from the neck down is more than ok (although her tits are fake, eyebrows too)...I wouldn't have been interested...and of course she wouldn't be interested in me. But if she'd asked me (ok, the odds there are actually negative), I'd have sure had ONE date with her.

Is it that difficult for them?

So what is she looking for?


what are ANY of them looking for?

Brad Pitt, apparently. or Ben Affleck, it seems.

Excitement.

I did another blog on this a ways back...


Apparently Jennifer Lawrence has trouble finding a date, too. 

Seriously? OK, she's ridiculous famous, very attractive without it being ridiculous. She has a lot of money, fancy house...but no dates? Granted, under those circumstances you can't just casually meet people who aren't either sycophants or wanting something themselves, but it shouldn't be impossible. Of course who you DO meet is going to be other people who are in the same line of work and are likely to be more than a bit self-centered. So we're back to the question of "what does she want?"


Which was Freud's old question, too.


---


OK, anecdotes are not data, but we all have some anecdotes. Here's one:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/xojane-/online-dating_b_5909274.html

She leads with the photo. I'm sure her friends say she's marvelous...but she leads with the photo, and you can tell what's going on. She's overweight. Precisely the thing your friends won't tell you. Of course she kinda knows, you really do always know when you're overweight, altho maybe you can't admit it to yourself. I know; I'm overweight right now, although down 10 from a year ago (I have a dog now; a dog for whom a "short walk" is minimum half a mile, 4X/day). "many ramen noodle dinners" she says, but obviously that hasn't helped, she's been putting too much bacon in them.  "What was turning them away? Was it my looks -- which was based on the best photos of me?" No, hon, it's the weight. And if it was those same photos, eew; I'd include a pic of me with my sailboat (Hobie 16) years 
ago (and mention that it was an old pic), at least that's something a bit more active.

Well. She has gotten to experience what most of us guys go through over and over: "the rejection thing". She certainly seems surprised. "after two months I had been rejected by countless numbers of men" -- aaawwww. Two whole months. I stopped after 10 years.

OK, so we're shallow. Sorry. Lose some weight. Several comments say this, followed by "her weight is fine" except that it's not. I guarantee that a 25-lb weight-loss would turn things around pretty quick for her. OK, maybe 40. (also: go read this, and look at the pics--WAY better than the two she showed for her article/"profiles"; which had that "desperate" sound to me, altho apparently she has clinical depression--that guarantees trouble here)

And as some of the comments suggest, she needs a better self-marketing pitch. It's not like going to Comicon, to a presentation on your fave comic, and know that everyone in the room has a common interest, so you can pick a guy whose looks you like, know he's nerdy and shy and talk...

another great comment: "not all girls want a ben affleck type."

Of course they do. What would they do if Ben Affleck showed up at their door and said "come have dinner with me" ? They sure wouldn't slam it in his face...it'd be more like "Give me 5 mins I need to change clothes first...how fancy?"

Actually, she needs a different approach. My best experience at her age was with a church singles group a cousin suggested I attend. That group had ~200 people attending, all roughly 22-32, and as I recall there was some couple there saying they were engaged at least once a month, maybe even once a week.

---

I'm sure you've heard the words about them having a hard time, because the easy way tended to attract the "wrong kind of guys". I argue that that really means they aren't attacking the problem pro-actively. 

Anecdote: One of my best friends met his wife at a bar. Yes, really. 1989. Been married since '90. That *can* be done, but you shouldn't expect it.

Being a nerd doesn't preclude success here, but it does argue for an alternate approach. You need to get involved in a group (or more than one) that has MOTOS and a specific focus you are interested in, and then actively participate.

The better looking you are the less difficult this is overall, so you have to be really honest with yourself about this, and deal with the fact that there's a correlation. 

for comparison: I'm about 15-20 pounds overweight. I'm tall, but no more than average looks. I'm "difficult", so few-to-none people like me. I'm now approaching 60, and retirement (see blogs on that topic). None of that is fatal, but it's not helpful. I forget who said this in a movie/tv-show, it was a early-teen male: "my superpower is being invisible to women" -- applies to me -- they can only see me for collision-avoidance purposes--and that's always been the case.

A few more little anecdotes (which still aren't data): 

Guy I knew at college ("K"). Civil Engineering. "K" was overweight when I knew him (280, I asked once).  That basically killed his having a date, despite his being one of the most likable people I've ever known. I think he had one date the entire 4 years, and that was because I suggested her to him. Something like 12 years out of college he meets a woman at the golf-pro shop where he plays golf. She does too. He's still the same shape, but with a lot less hair. She's about the same shape, too. They were married ~15 years; he died young, from cancer; one child.

Woman I knew very slightly at work 30 years ago: I only had a conversation with her a couple of times (let's say her name was "G"). Not attractive. A bit overweight. Pleasant enough, intelligent enough, knew how to dress...but the looks were a severe handicap. No dates. Eventually she gave up; I recall a little bit of conversation with another woman ("M", foreign born, distinctly more attractive, I sat next to her for 6 months) at work about it, because "M" told me that "G" had said she was done trying/hoping. (I hope "G" did ok with her life; "M" got married in 1989--almost coulda been to me.)

Woman I've known a while: bought herself a Jaguar convertible car in 2010. All of a sudden she was getting new attention from random men, because of the car.

Woman at work two years ago: stunningly attractive. Attractive enough to have to fight guys off with a club just to get to her car. I only talked to her 2-3 times ever; I know nothing of her social life, but she could have a dinner date with a new guy every single day for years if she wished.

Man. It's a wonder most of us ever get together.

Retirement

Late in 2013 my job situation was getting kinda weird. There was contracting funny-biz at work, on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again...yeesh.

By TG it looked ok again, contract re-awarded...but my tasking wasn't in it, apparently, and that started to go weird in Jan, on/off/on/off--bam! Not going to have a job on Feb 1. What to do?

And then for the first time ever, "Retirement" was now on the list of options. Not *quite* ready to do that (well, I  AM, but it ain't quite time, need to wait about 3 years).

Changed employers very abruptly, stayed in exactly the same job slot, that's good for about 2 years it looks like, so that's now the retirement planning horizon. There are a couple of circumstances whereby it might happen sooner, but I think they're unlikely.

Personally, I can hardly wait...man I'm tired of the rat race around here. Job is more interesting than it was six months ago, but I am getting hammered by this ridiculous database we are using (I've found two seg-fault-fatal crashes in in the last two months, and the indexing isn't anything like SotA speed [a few weeks later: now we have damaged data because deletes are problematic]), and that is getting tiresome (although my next task there will be to try to do a complete replacement for the indexes, Berkeley DB Java is ~4X faster, and I think that will do the job; the C version is probably twice that speed, but I don't know about a Java interface, and I dislike horsing around with JNI).

Got plenty to do when I do retire--enough to keep me busy until I die. Rereading my books is a minimum 10-year project. Working the model railroad runs forever. Computer games never end, programming never ends. Multitude of projects on The Ranch to do, several of which are engineering experiments.

That's all probably good for 30 years, at which point I'm probably getting a bit feeble, and probably ought to just go ahead and die anyway.

It can't start too soon!

One last time playing Dungeon Siege

One of my favoritest games. I've been through it end to end probably six times, as all four specialties. Figured I'd do one last time, try something I've wondered about since the beginning.

At about the final merchant, there's a spell called "Bomb". You have to have Combat Level 60 to use it, and You can't reach level 60 until about that point, or maybe later (ok, that makes sense), but that's really only if you have one character do ALL the work, using ONLY Combat magic.

Otherwise, you pretty much can't reach level 60 at ANYTHING.

"Bomb" is "Explosive Powder" on steroids, about 3-4X the power. I'm very fond of Explosive Powder, but since it maxes out at 70 pts, it's mostly only useful for getting the attention of an opponent from a distance to separate it from a crowd, or do some special sniping. You'd want Bomb to do the same (which it appears to), but available sooner, like maybe level 45 or so--60 is close to useless, because it's almost the end of the game before you can use it.

Mostly what you want to do is have really good summons to help you. That's the most effective way to go, because their health is be 2-3X you team.

If you do melee players, you most want to have freeze weapons. That, combined with summons is great--your team is maybe 16 players, half have freeze weapons, which means opponents basically can't hit back while you just pound them.

Also interesting: why I didn't notice this before I do not know: when you have to fight Gresh, there are those bunch of stone columns that appear out of the ground. I thought you were locked into that little space with him, but apparently that's not true, you can run back between them where you came from, or off to the right where there are lots more opponents (not a good idea). First time through I could not complete this, had to run the cheat code for invincibility. But when you can retreat safely, it become reasonably easy...I had no idea, I thought it was a locked arena.

Local weather. I hate snow.

When I was a kid I lived in cold places several times...one of them was Colorado. Right after that I lived in Hawai'i.

I like Hawai'i. I like that kind of weather.

Now I live in Virginia. Mostly this is ok.

So this year we got four feet of snow in my area.

FOUR FEET OF SNOW.

That is why I went to Texas out of college, as opposed to Syracuse.

I hate snow.

Divinity 2 game

I replayed most of Divine Divinity first, but gave up when I kinda got lost about what things needed doing next...

Well, D2 has somewhat the same issue...game is visually good, but it's got a large-ish flaw about managing your quests and the locations you have to go to to complete them. I repeatedly had to refer to online sources as to where things were. I liked the "flying fortresses" best of all, they reminded me of Oblivion gates.

Too often the combat devolves into a click-fest, however, and that is not something my hands are capable of on a large basis.

Getting to be the dragon was interesting, esp once I realized I had power-ups I could take, and that "fireball" was actually a homing missile.

I haven't finished, and probably won't. It's clear my attack finger is not up to the next battle I have to fight...

ash, well, I have plenty to do with DLC in Skyrim, and none of that is a major click-fest.

Dec/Jan gametime

A while ago, GOG (www.gog.com) offered Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri as a download. This was a favorite a while ago, so for $5 (or was it less?) that was an easy decision.

I'd forgotten how challenging SMAC could be...intellectually the hardest game I've played, because of the sheer range of variability it can have. It's a mostly 2D game.

There's a randomly generated world map; there's a pre-created standard one (actually, probably several). Maps can have several sizes, S/M/L/XL. They can have a variable amount of ocean surface. Land surface is random. There are seven skill/difficulty levels. There's an R&D tech tree, advances are mostly random. Your starting location on the map is random. Ground resources are random. Mobile units that you can create have near-infinite variability of designs that you choose if you wish.

There are seven playable factions; you play one of them, and they're fairly different, different strengths and weaknesses.

If you go with a large map and lots of ocean, the factions are (probably) on islands separated by a fair amount of water. This allows unfettered development with little or no conflict. Then success is based on how fast you expand how far.

Wow. Not easy at all. I had to relearn all the detail. I've only ever played as two factions, green (default) and white. And I've only played two skill levels (default and +1).

I need to try some of the other factions and harder skill levels, now that I've been through it again.

-----

A month ago I received a URL for something on Youtube...it was the opening sequence from Skyrim. You know the one, you're about to get your head chopped off, when all of a sudden, THE DRAGON appears overhead, and you escape in the confusion.

That's the normal situation.

This link was to a machinima of how someone made a game mod to change it. This designer happens to like trains, steam engines in particular, so he's made several mods involving them. There's a spell that rains trains from the sky--do that in town and pretty soon you're Public Enemy #1.

But this startup movie. He's replaced the dragons throughout the entire game with trains. So when you should be hearing the dragon roar, you actually get a train whistle.

But they are not just *any* trains. Oh no. These are special ones. Special KID trains.

Thomas the Tank Engine.

Yes, that first dragon is Thomas.

OMG that was just about the funniest thing I'd ever seen. Angry Thomas swoops down, breathes fire, perches on buildings and glares. Brilliant!

Deus Ex gametime

geez...this was actually going ok for me, except that when i read the walkthrough I discovered I had missed all sorts of stuff. I was enjoying the largely stealth-based gameplay.

And then I got to "the jumping game".

I don't do jumping games. Doesn't work for me--I use wireless mouse and keyboard, they are not properly responsive, and my fingers aren't either.

So we're done with that one.

Dragon Age Origins

So this is a Bioware game, and it sucks like all the other Bioware games I've played, and this will be the last one...

The visual is good, the 3D well done, the building/terrain models good, but as always, it's the game-play that bites almost totally. The game has to be played the way the developers want it played--which is pretty much NOT the way I want to play things.

Sometimes you're solo, sometimes you have a squad. Inevitably, your squadmates will all get killed by opponents because you can't actually manage them quite right, and then you likely will get killed too.

The game is WAY to heavy on their chatty cathies and their cut-scenes (look! we made another mini-movie).

Camera control isn't what I want it to be. Can't much look "up". Can't quite "stealth" enough. Way too heavy on left-hand-keyboard/right-hand-mouse -- which I can't do: I was having RSI trouble on the right hand years ago, so I switched to lefty-mouse, and now my keyboard is different too. Not going back.

Excruciatingly linear, on micro maps.

I did not get very far into it.

Where's the delete button?

Steam and their various games

Steam is a fabulous service, the market leader.

But the products are really iffy. I have a number of games that simply do not play on my PC.

Max Payne 1
Max Payne 2
Serious Sam 1 HD

Others are wonky in one way or another, like they sort of work, but have some serious problems and halt for some reason.

Alice 2 (I reach a point where I have to use a custom item, and it simply doesn't do anything)
Batman Arkham City required a mouse that has a different kind of "middle button" than mine.
Supreme Commander 2 has some problem (I forget what was wrong here, but it wouldn't do something).

Do they not do any kind of testing? Or have some minimum testing requirement to impose on game creators to make an attempt at compatibility?

Some work just fabulous

Skyrim
HL 2
Torchlight 1/2

Given the qty of either total or partial failures I've encountered, I only buy games there when they are low-priced, under $20.

And why do so many games insist on installing yet another version of Visual C++ Runtime? or some variant of DirectX? I'm always a little nervous about this.

Wish there was a way to get the broken ones fixed. Or send them an email saying "BROKEN!"

Batman Arkham City

played some of the PC version of this...it's obviously a console port...visually quite good, possibly the best *looking* game I've played. It's obviously a console port. The controls feel too much exactly like PCGamer Mag always complained about with console ports--not really built for the mouse and keyboard, checkpoint saves

Very much of it is about the keystroke combination sequences that get the Bat Man to do the choreographed motion-animations they probably rotoscoped and re-animated from there. If you can't quite do the special things, it's just a button-masher, which is ultimately kinda boring.

Seems like every notable opponent Batman had is in this, all kinda flat, really depending on you already being very familiar with them. I'm not, of course.

And I have hit a wall. I have to fight the very first opponent who has body armor. It doesn't matter how many times I apply normal hits, it requires me to do a special move THAT MY MOUSE CANNOT DO.

So I'm done playing this one. Which is too bad, because I don't think I really got all that far along.

Moving on to Dragon Age Origins.

Some more notes on Parallel FS

OrangeFS looks kinda like what I want, but it has the usual Linux-only aspect.

http://www.orangefs.org/

The lack of real portability bothers me. I do most of my Java Dev work on OSX, 2nd-most on Windows, with Linux a distant third, mostly for concerns about portability. (I do note that that is really the reverse-order list of "able to patch the OS" behavior).

So of course in terms of what I can do for myself, it has to completely be portable across OSes, and not require any sort of "kernel patch" because there's no way I'm going to do that--just not interested.

Orange FS does have similar aspects, but at least in the doc reading I've done, they don't quite have a conceptual theme/analogy.

------

Related, but a little weird: I'm actually thinking about writing some/all of this in Lisp (ok, that'd have some portability issues, but there's no reason a Librarian couldn't be written in Lisp). I haven't done any work in Lisp in years, so that'd be kinda cool...and there are some free Lisp versions that are pretty good these days (I recently re-discovered CLisp for Windows, it's a Cygwin package). Already I can see an issue: I need a build that includes multi-threading, and the basic CLisp does not.

------

Desiderata for my Grid FS:

OS-agnostic
Can make use of any/all machines on the local net (scales)
Doesn't require mount-points for every machine (doesn't scale)
All shared space is available to any machine (scales)
Fault-tolerant about machines coming/going; system contains much self-discovery (scales)
Local apps don't really have to know much about the actual system, they're just going to interact with local files (scales)
Has some amount of redundancy
Doesn't require a bunch of special services

Amateur software is the bane of my life

an example: I have to parse some CSVs from another tool I didn't write. The folks who wrote it didn't use a standard CSV output generator, and thus failed to generate correct output a disturbing fraction of the time: Specifically: un-escaped embedded quoting characters. And this is in VERSION 2.0 of their software--seems like they never really examined their own output, and that no one else did either, meaning we have already parsed/ingested an unknown amount of data of now questionable validity.

I basically told them "you have to use a standard tool for this--one that YOU didn't write" so as to avoid this kind of thing, one that follows the conventions that pass for a standard for CSVs (which does not have a formal std, but does have well-known syntax).

I recommended three possible choices: Apache Commons CSV (not my fave, it's a little cumbersome), JavaCSV (my fave), and OpenCSV (fewer control options). I think they're going with Apache; I am using JavaCSV.

That is now resolved, but this is a beginner kind of error. Yeesh!

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.