Month: July 2009

Writer’s Block: Dream Vacations

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What vacations would you most like to take in the next five years?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

0. A tropical island, toes in the sand, and not a care in the world….

1. Visit Tennessee, see them beautiful mountains again and go campin’ out in nature for a bit, then meet up with a few friends out on the lake 🙂

2. Hit the U.K. and go exploring, get lost and get a lit’ bit wild and crazy ;). Then meet up with a few e-friends made in [SAS], I’ve always had this strange picture of us in my head, of us staggering home from a pub, and singing loudly ^_^.

3. Visit Germany, maybe see if their are any English friendly tours of Berlin that show off the cities varied architecture; then visit some of the museums in/around Berlin and München. I think I would need to be 500% more fluent in the language to pull that one off though :-/.

4. Canada, women, whiskey, and fishing…. could you ask for more? Plus an old friend is from Newfoundland, and would warrant a visit!

notes 4 later today

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http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,11502,00.asp

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,9722,00.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb174597(VS.85).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb173249(VS.85).aspx

Todays personal training (SWAT 4)

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Where; [SAS] Training Ground US

General criteria: no tactical aids permitted, other then breaching kit.

Phase I: Old Granet Hotel, stealth to first contact then high intensity clearing; round 1: success, mp5; round 2: failure, m4. Average shots per kill: 5-6/3-4, killed by a survivor of 4 5.56x45mm to the chest.

Phase II: Children of Tarrone Tenement; stealth until compromised; round 1: failure, mp5sd; round 2: failure, carsd; Average shots per kill 9 / 3; killed by the survivors of 9 9x19mm shots to the skull and 2 5.56x45mm to the skull, respectively.

Phase III: Victory Imports Auto, stealth until first contact then high intensity clearing; round 1: failure, mp5sd; round 2: failure, mp5 (was supposed to be uzisd); Average shots per kill: 4-6; Killed by the survivors of 3 shots to the chest, and a survivor of >12 shots to the body/arms/head.

I nearly threw the freakin’ MP5 at the enemy when during an ambush against would-be bush whackers took about 20 rounds to the head and 3 more to the chest!

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So far I am getting pretty used to wearing these glasses, all in all it isn’t so bad. Whether it is a positive or negative impact on my appearance, well is beyond my immediate concern lol.

They have a tendency to slide down my noise under certain conditions, which I find irksome; makes looking UP more challenging since it causes my eyes to hit or pass the upper frames :-/. That however, I think is just a fact of living with glasses and summer time!

This new headset cost about $45 but so far seems to be worth it. The MP5 in SWAT 4 sounds like a proper machinegun rather then a ‘pop gun’, and the weapons in RvS sound much better. The depth of hearing music is much greater, kind of like listening to a Stereo system. I also like that the padding effectively creates ‘cups’ around my ears xD.

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It hasn’t been a very comfortable day… to say the least of it. I woke up a bit after 0600Q with a toothache and no luck gettin’ back to sleep. I remembered something a friend once said about using a moistened tablet of paracetamol (acetaminophen) to rub along the site (and iirc, push in the “hole” if such was the case). Finding a bottle of tylenol here being slightly harder >_>.

Since yesterday the phone rang, and I stupidly left my headset on the chair instead of the desk – I sat down with a crunch! So today I had to get a new headset. I can care less about the Live! related features, as long as it is decent quality and durable (even if not 160lb of ass worth, lol). In installing it, I had quiet a bit of a monkey fight to get everything working; seems that the driver disk really likes Live Call / Messenger—and lacks a required USB Audio driver for Windows XP SP3. Ok, I was saved by that annoying hardware detection dialog but at least XP no longer thinks the headset is a mass storage device! Sound quality is totally different, gunfire in RvS and SWAT 4 reminds me of listening to Call of Duty on my brothers (costly) speaker system once upon a time.

Spent a bit of time playing OpenArena, set up a skirmish on my favorite map with 3 bots for help against 4 bots. I scored nearly 70 frags, at least a dozen of which involved the “Buzzsaw”. I couldn’t get ahold of any decent weapons but the starting kit, so I decided to start chasing the pricks with a Buzzsaw, racked up a screen full of kill-icon things with it before finally getting a proper kit. I’ve also started to get better with rocket-placement – even scoring several direct hits as well as the usual splash-damage SOP.

Tried to take some time to write code but no one in this rat-fucking place would let me get work done. Combine with a nasty headache, and I said fuck it all—and just took a nap.

I feel much better now but absolutely nothing has gotten done. I have all of about 2 useful lines of documentation for the library I wanted to get done, LAST WEEK.

My first pair of glasses

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Yesterday my glasses were ready for pick up, but eh, who wants to go right back out after they get home for work? So we picked them up today on the way home; it’s only a few miles in a perpendicular direction .(^_^)/./

When they had me try them on, it was like, in the words of Clark Griswald: hallelujah and holy shit! I found it initially very unstabling to turn my head and gaze about like normal, but I reckon that is normal at first. The difference however in vision, is tremendous. I’ve spent most of the day wearing them, and now they are fairly comfortable, more so then naked eyes lol. I only worry how wearing glasses regularly will impact my un-aided eye sight in the long run. I can see very crisp and clear, it is like someone jacked up the resolution a few orders of magnitude! On the way home, I could see license plates and street signs clear; hell I could see the specks of dirt on the road instead of just the dirt!!! Coming home it felt almost like the ground was under a microscope, so much finer detail. It’s like I could count the hairs on the dogs back, leaves on a tree at 30ft, and can see the crap between the individual blades of grass! Just walking into the apartment it was unsettling, I can now see the carpet so finely, that it’s better then when I used to sit on the carpet as a kid with action figures littered all over :-/. It’s a huge detail hack, man I think I could even read the little-bitty display on the VCR across the room, if the clock was set, ha!

Up real close things are a bit blurry with the glasses on, perhaps I need bifocals for that lol; I’m just happy with the current improvement. And really, the choice of lifting my glasses up or moving my head back a little is not a bother. So far the only irksome issue, often whenever I yawn I tend to get a bit teary eyed (always have), but now obviously I have to remove my glasses to wipe it away, so I can see clearly again lol. Even on the computer, it’s very different. I run my 19″ monitor at 1600×1200 and a custom DPI setting of 144dpi (150% winsucks normal). Most things are set to fairly large fonts because I find that Google Chrome renders fonts a hell of a lot smaller then Mozilla does; the difference being defaults in Fx have always been fine, but in Chrome I have things set to like 22pt rather then a more normal size. With my glasses I can see to read the mouse type things render on daemonforums, with chrome+my monitor. Without, I had to increase the size to be able to read it without zooming my head into the screen -> which I *hate* doing. Right now it’s become very easy to read even my LJ without jacking the font size! sasclan.org and facebook only need 1 increment of the size rather then 3 or 4; and then only in order to be read ‘at length’ rather then momentarily. Just now, I’ve tested changes to Chromes settings. I can set the fonts as low as 9 or 8 pt and be able to see them excellently in most fonts; and very comfortably around 11-12 pt period. The problem is, that results in microscopic text compared to the rest of my windows desktop – like looking at 5pt text instead of 12pt text. So I have Chrome set to 24pt now, and am reading the text in LJ’s text area – at what appears to be “9pt” text when judged against how fonts render in Chromes selection dialog.

I was playing SWAT 4 today, and found it easier to read the texts, usually I have to be careful of my cam placement in order to read team messages; grey on grey/white/black mixtures suck. The big shocker though, was it felt like I could see the threads on the enemies hoods :-/. With RvS, I’ve had a problem reading chats since I started with this 19 inch monitor; the texts far away. Now, maybe I can start reading it again like I used to on the old 15″, instead of having to stop and open the console xD.

My word, if this is what normal vision is like—what have I been seeing all these years!? Oh, in case I forgot to mention it, they are really thick-ass lenses lol.

This is rich

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As a side note, you may be wondering if it is a security risk that applications can add and remove applications from the exceptions list any user intervention, or perhaps you think that the bigger risk is that applications can disable the firewall altogether. To perform these feats, the application must have administrator privledges. If you have malicious code running in administrator mode on your system, the game is already over and the hacker has already won. The hacker’s ability to disable the firewall would merit little more than a footnote.

What it fails to mention is many millions of Windows XP installations are run with administrator privileges on the users regular account, I practically ROFL’d lol.

Having a single Wintel around pisses me off for the X”th time

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No matter what I do, it seems to be impossible to *live* with Windows as a system for getting things done.

This in particular pisses me off at the moment

>cl hi.c            --- simple hello world test
Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 15.00.30729.01 for 80x86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

hi.c
Microsoft (R) Incremental Linker Version 9.00.30729.01
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

P:TexLiveperltllib,P:TexLiveperltlsitelib,P:/Devel/Languages/Perl/site/lib,P:/Devel/Languages/Perl/lib,.
LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 'P:TexLiveperltllib,P:TexLiveperltlsitelib,P:/Devel/Languages/Perl/site/lib,P:/Devel/Languages/Perl/lib,.'

No matter what abuse I subject the environment settings to, it is impossible to compile anything from the fucking command line. The directories specified appear to be a fusion of TexLive added PERL5LIB values and the “usual” for the installed Perl. Building things using the IDE and a conventional project, does not have such errors; likely because it ‘replaces’ nmake so to speak. Needless to say, this machine must have both Perl and TexLive installed, or I will raise more mayhem then playing DooM II:Hell Revealed on Nightmare!

This kind of error causes a bit of a problem when trying to build software that only supplies Makefiles for MSVC+nmake, rather then project files for the IDE.

I’ve used Microsofts operating systems since early MS-DOS and have cursed it every fucking year. I’ve used FreeBSD since 2006 and smile joyfully every year!

For the love of FORTRAN, why is it I can never find commercial software that I do not want to hex edit into the 8th level of DooM?

footnote: the number in the subject was meant to be python26s best estimate of 1024 ** 56725691612; so cool watching this been-nothing-but-trouble-since-year-one PC burn up resources calculating this randomly chosen number!!! Even more joy, was seeing the thing pop a MemoryError before it could conclude the operation, somehow I think this fits well; the amount of times this computer has pissed me off may as well approach ∞ for all intents and purposes.

Blackout crept in from a distance?

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Power just came on, after ~35 minutes of total black out. I put my shorts and sandles on, and walked arcoss the complex to see how localized it was – everything was out. The thunder has been pretty light and far off, but then again we tend to lose power during thunder storms lol.

The sad thing is, I walked into my room, bent over, and my hand nearly landed in the shoe box haha! Before that, I walked into the room and got the light I keep near my bed, I can move around easy in the dark…. I know where everything is that counts, and my night vision is excellent. I feel like a freaking cat lol. When ma put on a pair of dim candles, I could see in the living room as if the lights were on, and those candles emite about as much light as a pen light :-/.

Before the mass power outage, I was debating to code a bit first or join JB for a couple rounds; now I think I will join the server for a few games and code afterwards lol.

Is it just me or…

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/* from Tutorial 2, Direct3D 9; DirectX SDK */
if( FAILED( g_pd3dDevice->CreateVertexBuffer( 3*sizeof(CUSTOMVERTEX),
         0 /*Usage*/, D3DFVF_CUSTOMVERTEX, D3DPOOL_DEFAULT, &g_pVB, NULL ) ) )
    return E_FAIL;

The tutorial describes the arguments, stating that ‘The final parameter is the address of the vertex buffer to create.’ Ok, I think it is obvious that it means the address of the vertex buffer being passed; further more the API documentation says the final argument is “Reserved. Set this parameter to NULL. This parameter can be used in Direct3D 9 for Windows Vista to share resources”.

I can’t help but chuckle a little bit at the tutorial, maybe it is just me and my brains crazy English parser lol.