[SAS] — All the way live baby, all the way live!!!

Yippee-Kay-Aye! I’ve just finished the majority of remaining server setup that needs doing. So far, it feels like [SAS] is gonna have some kick ass servers going hehe. I spent most of my day helping Wiz with the odds and end; looks like we will have a fairly seamless transition to the new server machines tomorrow. The only downside is we’ll have to update our “favorites” in RvS’s server browser, and Servers/SWAT4 on XFire also. Beyond that though, looks like we are locked, cocked, and ready to rock’t and roll.

Thanks to Wiz’s curiosity and my backups, we don’t even have to screw around with our communications service! Although, I think we learned a bit more about the software then we originally bargained for, but hey, job done, task done, mission complete, was a piece of cake. Hmm, technically we might even be able to have double our usual server capacity tomorrow for a lit’ bit before change over takes place…. Hmm, *evil grin*.

At around 8:00 AM PST on Friday, January 30, Ma.gnolia experienced catastrophic failure to it’s primary and backup systems, and is offline while we attempt to repair and recover service.

DANG. It’s a good thing, I remember most of my bookmarks via URL and Google, b/c I’ll be waiting until they go back online to be able to access my bookmarks lool.

Another day in a slow hell done, another empty night nearly gone by, and a busy Friday is looming on the horizon.

So far, I’ve been spending most of my time reading the days away. Almost finished reading Programming Perl which is a nice book, been a long time since I’ve been able to read anything that length (I prefer Fiction). Higher-Order Perl has also been on the hit list recently, but haven’t had to much time to spend on it the past half-weekish; so far, I think HOP should be required reading for every programmer, perl or not lol. (If the concepts in it are new to you, please don’t sit next to me!) I’ve also been inhaling one of my favorite classics, The Art of Unix Programming; don’t think I’ve ever finished it, but hey… about it’s time, and I’ve got plenty of time to pass…

I’ve also interspersed the days routines with working on one of my larger (Perl) projects whenever I’ve got the mental resources free, and otherwise dealing with [SAS] Business whenever possible; tomorrow + the weekend is gonna be a long stretch. One way or the other… I’m going to get some drill time on SWAT 4 back in my schedule, if I’ve got to start playing at 0500R lol. Ops have been going quite well, on both sides of that coin. Mostly, it has just been a problem of getting stuff done around my family, and ever mounting levels of exhaustion… Earlier today, I remembered something I used to say in response to everyones frequent “break times”. Namely, that I’m not allowed to get tired, because if I did, I would be poked and prodded into continuing on; for all intents and purposes, that is just what my family is doing to me now >_<. I really need a _long_ vacation, one very far away from this place and virtually everything in it. Really, my life would be a lot less painful, if I just learned to stop caring; but then I wouldn't be myself, would I? Despite periodically being pushed to drop my principles (particularly whenever they interfere with my mothers demands), I've generally refused to compromise -- or as my mind repeats on occasion, they may kill me or crack the walls of my defenses, but they will never break me… Only GOD can do that. Sometimes, I feel like the only person around here that actually gives a damn… Oy. I remember many yars ago, I tried my part in establishing peace; only to be treated like a fool, guess my family liked it the way things were spiralling. Eventually, I gave up and left everyone to their own mutally-destructive ways of dealing with one another, and dived into the cover of working myself into a stupor. The past few years, have actually been the most peaceful in a very long time… Maybe since ’94 or so. Heh, I remember how as a child, I used to count my families larger squabbles in terms of “Family World Wars”, since within the scope of our family, it was on the same scale of fighting; I lost count around 7 or 9. The difference being though, while most of the in-fighting has settled down (Thank GOD) in recent years, it seems the side effect is I’m more or less a primary target rather then a chip on the table… Fuckers never would respect my neutrality policy, so why would I be surprised? If the character of Ernest P. Worrell should have “He never knew when to quit” written on his tomb stone, they should write on mine… “He never knew when to just keel over and die”.

The worse these days get, the more I think about what a /good/ day could have been like. The more it hurts, looking at what I’m chained to (in some ways, chained, bolted, and gamma-welded into this hellhole) to this rats nest; it is all the more that I long for change, and for freedom. What can I say? I hate my life…. I have enough trouble getting a decent nights sleep here around here, like I really need all this other crap tacked on at home? FFS, I don’t think I’ve really slept decently since the early 90s., not a good thing, when one considers that I was only born in ’88 lol.

Somehow, I don’t think the word surrender was ever programmed into my volcabulary.

Microsoft, innovative? Nah, really!

A new version of Windows Mobile, is supposed to have a Honeycomb like start menu.

But hey wait a minute, I remember a X window manger that has something like that. After a bit of a hunt, I found it: Unix Desktop Environment (UDE) born back in 2004 [Wiki] [home] [screen].

It’s been on my todo list for a couple years now, to try out UDE; but then again, writing my own window manager for fun, and splelunking blackbox have also been on my todo list for a few years lol. I’m sure no one working on Windows Mobile 6.5 has ever heard of UDE, but it is nice to see someone at Microsoft is willing to try something DIFFERENT, if not totally new….

So far, the most innovative thing I’ve seen come out of Microsoft is some of the new window operations/shortcuts I’ve heard about in Windows 7; my response to it being: Have you jackasses really taken over a decade to figure out how to do that, or did you finally realize that window mangement has evolved since 1987 ???

What a small world!

Made it to level 10 in HR, then stopped to deal with my IM’s. After that, I took to reading the Doom Wiki to re-learn about the power ups (manily the spheres). Then I found out… the plasma gun and shotgun were based on toys.

And guess what? I owned both as a kid :

http://content.kapowwe.com/images5/1-1-465_13.jpg

http://web.archive.org/web/20041031174054/http://www.strombecker.ca/products/viewproduct.asp?ID=317

Caught Grumpy Old Men on TV, and laughed my ass off solidly ^_^. Most Rest and Relaxiation I’ve had in ages…. Also saw a film I’ve never seen before, The Prisoner of Second Aveune with Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft. Now that was a good movie!!! He gets fired and has a wonderful nervous breakdown, they get robbed, everything goes to heck, and he eventually learns the hardway that you can’t stand out on the terrace cussing a blue streak at the neighbores ^_^. She’s forced to take a job, and put up with his breakdown; until she finally edges on a nervous breakdown lol. The ending though is wonderful, when he realizes that the mugger he chased down and recovered his wallet from, wasn’t a mugger at all… the quarrals with the couple one floor up, and the ending — it is just priceless xD (and I’m not gonna spoil it :-P).

And The China Syndrome is starting 🙂

My laugh of the day….

Early Unix hackers struggled with this in many ways. In the languages of 1970 function calls were expensive, either because call semantics were complicated (PL/1. Algol) or because the compiler was optimizing for other things like fast inner loops at the expense of call time. Thus, code tended to be written in big lumps. Ken and several of the other early Unix developers knew modularity was a good idea, but they remembered PL/1 and were reluctant to write small functions lest performance go to hell.

Dennis Ritchie encouraged modularity by telling all and sundry that function calls were really, really cheap in C. Everybody started writing small functions and modularizing. Years later we found out that function calls were still expensive on the PDP-11, and VAX code was often spending 50% of its time in the CALLS instruction. Dennis had lied to us! But it was too late; we were all hooked…
— Steve Johnson

Hmm, I’ve always wondered why some really old programms written in C look so odd, as if the person had never heard of a function call (or macro) before. I’ve never been able to figure out if it was because many function calls were more expensive on the hardware back then, because the programmer was used to assembly, or loyality to some “style of the day”.

I guess that clears that up a bit more; if so, thank GOD he lied!

Doom2-hr is a heck of a run, just pasted the map shaped like a spider; I can just imagine that thing on UV mode !!! I really wish I could dig up a copy of DooM II, the graphics in FreeDooM are quite a bit different then the ones I remember as a kid, but it gets the job done.

Some of the critters might look a bit off (especially the demon & imp), but hey… this is DooM, don’t gotta care what the heck it is, just shove a few rockets up it’s wazoo lol. The occasional revenant, and incresingly common Mancubuses are easily enough to deal with via my faovorite weapon: the super shotgun. But when an Arch Vile popped up….. Ok, a BFG9000 would have been prety handy! Rockets hwoever, have been very plentiful and there is no lack whatso ever of shotgun shells.

Somehow, I think the shotgun must be every gamers best friend, since the release of DooM. Ahh the good old days, but I at least some modern games plots have improved since the classic, hehe.

Day dreams

hmmm, [a job posting]
is that real !?
I wonder, lol
it coulb be… interesting for the least
some of the job postings are interesting on thedailywtf, but I’ll never get that lucky lol
why ? 🙂
you never know what awaits you
let me put it this way, if only 1 in every 1000 people got shit on by a pidgin, I’d probably be shit on 2ce lol

Sometimes I just crack myself up xD

I don’t know if the job listed I was looking at would fit me, or vice versa. But man, it would actually be nice to get hired on merit. Very few places that I’ve seen, will even give you the time of day without a stack of prerequisite (and expensive) papers :.

Sigh.