Haven’t had much tie to update my journal lately, kinda had more important things on my mind when I’m off work. At work, well, most of my time of late has been spent working on a project that’s shared between the two principal developent groups. Work related stuff, usually filters through to private notes or the companies internal stuff. That’s my policy at least.

If we could move the table out and bring in a cot and my PC, I’d probably never leave work, except to use the shower lol.

Last night was some awesome rounds on Killing Floor, which eventually became an effective 2 versus like upwards of several dozen zombies at a time: including the dreaded Fleshpound, which is basically the run for your damn life if you don’t want to lose it, kind of Big Mother of all Big Ass Zombies! A single fleshpound can easily neutralize an entire section if it catches them in an unwary crowd, and usually you find them in pairs with plenty of support!

We had some very close games but also some impressive successes against the Fleshpounds and their accompanying chainsaw wielding cousins. My teammate was running level 4 berserker with a katana, while I was running as a level 4 field medic, armed with a MP7 and DE.50. Perhaps between surviving the hordes of lesser zombies, we got into the grove by the time the big nasties entered the fray.

It was like a well choreographed dance that just came together on the fly: berserker tanking in with her katanta and my MP7s healing darts and medical syringe for help; then Ran’ would fade out to heal and I’d step in as a human shield and in between whomever not dealing with the fleshpounder, picking off the lesser zombies. Between the two of us, we basically kicked major zombie ass, lol. It was kind of impressive  to see such teamwork, because normally, two players are gonna be dead meat in a game like Killing Floor, not mopping the floor. Although of course, more than a few onslaughts we only escaped by like 3-5 points of health left… hehe. At least for me, it’s a pretty natural flow: heal my friend to starve off death, then slip in front as the fleshpound charges, then cycling back before I’m dead, lol.

Somehow, it’s part of how I am wired up, that I’d rather be support instead of the highest score. In real life, well, all I can say, the zombies would have to eat my friends over my dead and gnawed body. That point of view wouldn’t surprise most of the people that know me either.

Aside from being grumpy that the company I work for, takes Good Friday as a company holiday :'(, I’ve been somewhat busy today. My mother wanted to visit a Catholic church some miles down the highway, so I took her up there, she didn’t like it of course, but trying to please my mother isn’t quite trivial for anything, let along the Roman Catholics.

After that, it was essentially off to the nearest Publix supermarket to appease her shopping list a bit. Even though I’m not at work, I couldn’t help but notice a type error when walking down the isles. Ma wanted to grab a box of matzah, bottle of soy sauce, etc. So they’ve got the “Mexican” food, they’ve “Asian”, which is vaguely ethnic but convenient, “West Indies” which is more geographic then ethnical, but what really made my brain reach up and say “Compiler error: type association invalid”, is when I saw at the end of the isle, the sign marked “Kosher”. To top it off, the directory labels the isle as ethnic foods and the sign marks it as Hispanic foods. Yeah, I’m a pain in the ass.

The word Kosher, essentially refers to a discipline: if we go by one of my favourite resources from Princeton University, semantically it means food that obeys the jewish food law. It’s not an ethnic group. I.e. you may have a Mexican that eats kosher food in the west indies but you are unlikely to meat a someone of the Mexican-Kosher ethnicity from the west indies ^_^. O.K. so sue me, I’m stuck driving my mother around instead of being at work, the marbles ain’t going to shift out of programmer mode that easily. Besides, that kind of branch of math is very relevant to my work.

What I really would like to know however, is in what kind of type model that also makes sense, does fish != a meat. But eh, I’ve been wondering about that one for most of my life.

Well, it looks like alice is now fully operational: and my fingers are adjusting to her keyboard rapidly. Fortunately, I am finding myself more often hitting fn+key in place of ctrl+key on dixie, then I am on alice. Whew.

I’ve installed Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and set it up to behave as dixie has been used all these years: a workstation rather than a terminal. I don’t have time to fiddle further with making OpenBSD play nice with Windows 7 on this rig. This does pretty much net me all that I desire: a bourne shell, decent terminal multiplexer, XMonad, Chrome, Pidgin, Dropbox, and a system tray area. I can live with the (ugh) GNU and Ubuntu parts.

The only real difference between the Desktop and Netbook editions of Ubuntu, the former comes with a customised GNOME where as the latter comes with a custom GNOME shell called “Unity“. I have really got to say that Unity SUCKS!!!!!! I seriously cannot fathom anyone getting real work done with Unity because you’ll have to set it up to do anything more useful than launch Mozilla, it feels so useless, that I think I would trade GNU/Linux for MS-DOS 2/3, and old DOS really, really did suck. Once I found the GNOME shortcut for the run dialog didn’t work, I decided instantly it would have to Go.

But to be fair, Unity does do some Very Good Things, and I commend the engineers behind it for breaking away from the Windows norm, that every GUI app tends to follow. The focus on full-screening the apps also is a feature that I like. The whole dock/sidebar thing is also quite nice, if kind of restrictive. Not even KDE4 offered as much nice “Wow, this looks integrated” kind of warm and fuzzies.

But I don’t want to take hours to try and restructure the thing, nor do I want to constantly grep programs by their menu pretty names, or have to push a button for just about every darn thing. OK, I still live in a command prompt 75% or more of the time, so sue me.

How Alice got her name

(12:58:07 AM) Noles: Project Alice?
(12:58:09 AM) Me: sh.alice // I was typing in a terminal when this window popped up
(12:58:19 AM) Noles: hmm
(12:58:26 AM) Me: alice is the hostname of this netbook
(12:58:51 AM) Noles: it is like Project Alice in Residents Evil 😛
(12:59:24 AM) Me: Part a nod to ASUS (starts with A), Alice in Wonderland (I’m nuts), and to Project Alice because this [netbook] is cool like Alice 🙂
(12:59:35 AM) Noles: heh

Yesterday, Alice proved her utility. When I went to work Friday, I decided to go “Live fire”, leaving dixie home and bringing alice. Where as the day before  I had brought both. Except for a few cases, I rarely use my laptop at work, except to version control my notes and stream 94.9 The Bull.

A fellow programmer is implementing the backend that makes the code I’ve written on one of our projects, work. So we were sitting in front of his work station trying to get a couple things sorted. Very conveniently I just brought alice and set her up to remote access the development server the way my workstation does. What proved so useful, the battery life was being reported as over 12-hours: allowing me to focus on the work at hand, and not keeping track of when I would need to go get my charger.

Of course, alice still needs a workable OS but hey, no girl^H^H^H^Hcomputer is perfect. I could arguably live with Windows 7 Starter on it, but I rather like XMonad. Considering how slow Cygwin has been on more powerful systems, I really don’t want to try it on alice. So far,  I’ve yet to solve my booting issue with OpenBSD, and tests using X11 forwarding between dixie and alice, by way of xming/putty; does not make me think it’s gonna work. So I think alice will end up with Ubuntu Netbook or some other Linux distro, for the sake of ease of access to Google Chrome—Mozilla firefox can go suck rotten eggs.

The sad thing, since alice seems to be >= dixie on resources, it will probably work perfectly in a ‘normal’ laptop capacity :-/.

It may sound rather odd, but after a work week, I feel like I’ll go batty if I don’t touch code before Monday :-/.

Hmm, what of use to me, could be whipped up in a weekend…

This morning, my mother rather piqued my technical-goat, when she said she was “Tired of my excessive computer buying”. Which of course, is an instant sequence of hash look ups in my brain:

  1. SAL1600 (desktop) was bought with a long lost inheritance and strings attached (*groan*).
  2. Dixie (laptop) was bought by my sister-in-law, so I could get work done around my mother driving me nuts.
  3. Vectra (improvised server) is currently residing in a hodge-podge of parts:
    1. Some from a gutted-Dell my brother was throwing out.
    2. Some from an old Vectra Vli8 handed down from someone we used to work for, when he heard my mother was being a bitch about letting me dual boot her (then “family”) computer.
Alice here, is the first computer that I’ve ever bought myself, not to mention it’s the cheapest computer I’ve ever had, lol. So, what the fudge is so “Excessive” about buying one computer, which probably cost me 25% or less than what hers cost? *Shrugs*
People are stupid.

Welcome dear little Alice

Today at work, an idea caught my fancy: since I don’t need an uber-expensive laptop if I go with separate laptop/desktop setup. I thought, well gee, maybe a netbook would work in place of a laptop. So far, seems to be awesomeness.

I found an ASUS Eee PC 1015PE model at a really good price. Originally I was thinking that all it would be useful for is a glorified terminal: SSH into vectra at home and the server at work (when needed), to run Screen, then use X11 forwarding for the rest. Sadly this little netbook seems to be more snappy than my laptop, although it’s likely just as useless for compiling stuff. Which is REALLY sad IMHO because my laptop is only about 5 years old, and this netbook beats it on every performane spec save the CPU: an Atom N450 instead of a Sempron 3300+. I think I like the Atom more…

Windows 7 is quite nice and I do like it, much as I expected, but I would prefer a BSD or Linux based system. My only real complaint so far, is the keyboard places the FN key where my fingers naturally expect to land on Control. My fingers are deffo having a hard time adjusting though, since the auxiliary keys (like home/end) are even more cramped than what my laptop uses, and I am extremely used to my laptops keyboard, hey, it’s been 5 years with Dixie.

The main problem is resizing the partition to make room for a suitable OS, as there are no optical or floppy drives built in, and I’mt o cheap to buy one. So I’ve made a thread over on DF seeking some advice.

Killing Floor

Yesterday I stumbled over an interesting game, perhaps the first to offer a positive ROI since I started with the Left 4 Dead series: that is to say, I’m really enjoying this game lol.

Killing Floor is similar to the zombie mode in Call of Duty but without the run & gun feel; which is rather surprisign considering it’s built off a modified Unreal Engine 2.5. It actually makes RvS/SWAT4 look more like a R&G game IMHO. The jist of the game, your rag-tag squad is dropped into wave after wave of “Specimens”, the most basic of which resembles a vampire out of I Am Legend and behaves like a Night of the Living Dead zombie; the majority however, are closer to mid-level Strogg from Quake II/IV.

For all the specimens you kill, you earn Pounds Sterling that can be spent on weapons, ammunition, and body armour between waves. Although it is only a co-op/horror type game, it’s not as team work oriented as Left 4 Dead, which was designed to *force* you to work together. It is however extremely fun when played with a good team. Also unlike Call of Duty’s concept for co-op, it’s not oriented towards competitive co-op but more realistically, completing the objective and living to tell the tail.

Me like 🙂