Games

task.done() ? rest : work;

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Not an overly busy day compared to the last few but the tiredness is catching up. Current plan of action is 5-10min to lay down and then start getting to work on things.

I need to finish evaluating things, start preparing my report, and get things done as necessary lol. I’ve also got a related appointment for this weekend so I’ve noted that my report should be considered due by Monday.

Managed to get in server for some SWAT4, *finally* game time this week. Only had time for two or three rounds though, got to move through on Point and First Cover positions. Been awhile since I’ve done any serious point work, much of my time as SSM/RSM had me in EL’s boots lol. Glad to see I’m still effective though, was able to keep a dynamic pace as Point with an MP5 and as First Cover with the M4A1 and still keep accuracy up.

Firing the M4A1 in SWAT4 when on the move is not very hard but takes practice to do it, gotta learn to control and manage the weapon. The recoil in the game is unrealistically appalling but it makes taking threats out as you move to your Point of Domination a little more challenging then in Rvs or using one of the SMGs.

It’s also nice to see how far one of our new Troopers have come, Big12… He’s come a long way since the first day he set foot in our server hehe.

It’s just the way I am I guess, work a bit, game a bit, work more. When I’ve got a big task list it tends to weigh on my mind to much to spend an entire day off totally lol.

Today also is my Fathers birthday, he was born in 1946 iirc so it would have been his 62nd.

Happy birthday Dad 😉

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Having dived down the rabbit hole an RSM and landed a Warrant Officer Class 1 in Wonderland, I know the red pill was the best choice.

I’m not really sorry to see the RSMs post go, it is really a lot less to worry about. I still have responsibilities but of a different nature, the one thing I really do like about the WO1 task set is the potentional jack of all trades nature it holds.

Some people don’t do things by halves, including me. I know many things but am master of few, yet I often study well beyond my skill sets own domain.

I’ve been transferring as many files as I think relivent over to our new RSM but I havn’t had time to formally report for my own orders yet. Now being the most healthy one here I’m stuck on the on call every 2 minutes at the drop of a pin instead of ht emore normal 5 minutes :-(. First time I’ve seen my mother throwing up in almost 20 years, whether she has a cold or not I know I’m only with allergies. Ended up with blood in the output of one of my allergy attacks today, not sure if that is a good sign or a bad sign but I know one thing — my sinuses feel a hell of a lot better !

With luck the down time won’t be to much… I’m usually like a butler around this house any way :. I’m not exactly the best person for the job imho but there is no other course of action. What would my family do if I didn’t act the way I do…. lol.

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I’ve had a lot of rolling about on [SAS] related business today, generally productive as far as the NCO and RSM matters go. I also posted a file with my ‘musings’ on a few tactical matters in an appropriate place. Not sure if it was a good idea to share my thoughts in this case but I’ve never really cared much about what others think of me, no point starting now 8=).

I’ve had some time to play with my little music management toy hehe. Basically the idea is to track filename changes in my music collection and then update my playlist files. It’s not meant to be pretty or optimal, just effective. If I ever get it finished I’ll probably leave it running on the file server so it can look after my music files. Every now and then I do like to rearrange files in ~/Music and it always breaks my playlists, and even when using Amarok for the excellent playlist editing… It kind of sucks to have to redo them manually through Amaroks collection browser, it’s a great system but my playlists can some times get quite large.

I’ve also managed to get my server and laptop set up to use NFS instead of SSHFS. Since it seems I can’t count on SSHFS, it has already incured a ‘price tag’. Samba’s mount_smbfs is to much bother on FreeBSD atm, the program that comes with the fusefs-smbnetfs port seems to be as good as KiA if you want to know any thing more about it beyond the sample config file and source code… That leaves NFS and AFS, not familiar very greatly with AFS but NFS a bit more so. The BSDs seem to do things a bit differently with the exports file then what I’ve encountered before, the fbsd handbook / obsd faq also leaves a little to be desired compared to some nice BNF notation ^_^. I might be able to do some thing with a SSH tunnel later, right now some thing that works is all that is important…

My allergies have been tremendous lately but it’s that time of year again. One thing I really did like about living in Fl. It was to damn hot for most of the stuff that makes me sneeze! It was kind of one of those places you are soaked to the bone just crossing the parking lot to get to the car lol.

Time to get some rest, tomorrows another day… Primary objectives for the near future are getting more work done on the SOP Rewrites and trying to fix my laptops problem with Linux GTK+ apps..grrr.

Tactical Wonderland

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An old friend appeared before me with a question before my new orders come, in each hand he held a pill. One Red, one Blue, each representing a course of action. Towards service or my own ends, my reply?

Loyal to the end

Musings of an RSM.

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Well, I expect I’ll probably get flamed over it but I’ve posted a WARNO in the SNCO forum.

I need to know exactly what is going on so I know just how much needs to be done. Perhaps my tone and style of writing is not the best for the situation, never has been one of my strong points for that matter. I think it serves the purpose well though, warno := helps me to order my thoughts and instructions in a manor for others to read and understand without a headache trying to figure them out.

The selection of a “warning order” I think was also appropriate, it’s advance warning of coming instructions and providing as much information and instruction as I can now. It’s also a point of fact that we need to get going hehe.

Once every thing is done, I want to grab the SSMs, sit down, discuss it and work on an OPORD (Operations Order), get with any Sgts who have more to say. Once that is done, type set the operations order and issue it. I figure it is probably the best way for me to handle the situation. I’ve mentally alotted about a week for start and a week for finish, after that.. If nothing comes in I guess it is RSM from hell time.

Because, whether I like it or not (and I don’t) I need to make sure things are running smoothly and push things in the proper direction as necessary… I want to make sure of where we are on the map before I push, to hard or softly… One thing I do want to do and Noer seems to be a step a head of me is a consistency to what we teach. I want as part of the OPORD or an attachment to it, a listing of every thing ‘big’ on that issue and boiled down to it’s simple form for routing through the SNCO and NCOs.

I could write that part in 5 minutes, have it type set in another 5, but I want to make sure nothing is missing from our current environment.

I am not going to sit and watch another generation of [SAS] Members face the same things mine had to during training… As the motto I would put on my sigblock if I could (bloody forum rules and all). Lead me, follow me, or get the fuck out of my way.

In this case I think we probably have a better group for getting the tasks we need done done, then we have since Randoms time as Cpl loool.

Breaking the new Training Grounds

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Got to play ab it solo on the new TG#1, didn’t want to have a slot opened for m e on PG#1 just for a couple games.

Latency and Ubisoft proved to be both friend and foe as usual, finding a tango standing on top of a table didn’t throw my aim off any. Put a burst square in his mid section (~4rnd), saw him jerk from the hits but died with no rounds hitting him 8=), even got shot (even with my cam jerking) in another round without getting injured from it lol.

RvS is a pile of horse crap, how on earth could any one dare ship a game like that. The amount of buggy doors and corners, even in the professionally created maps is tremendous. If I worked on Raven Shields development team, I think I would’ve resigned from the project rather then let my name go on the credits…

And much to the games credit I appeared to shoot a tango through a wall 🙂

RvS is the only game you can have a threat at 2 metres, put 5 rounds into a group smaller then a stomach, and have all 5 rounds hit the wall directly behind the tango ^_^

One thing I really like about RvS though is the admin functions, way better then SWAT4. Even with the Gez Mod RvS has a better admin system, but the code is even worse on stability.

It’s also nice that I can turn off my reticle and just use the weapon in the player characters arms as a reference instead. Engagement distances in RvS are usually short or long, often within 10 or 15 metres unless they are far away: far enough that an assault rifle is preferable that is.

At that range, aiming without iron sights or cross hairs is pretty easy.. With a little pratice even targets at ~20-25 metres are doable. The more you know your weapon the easiser it is, like me. I could use the MP5A4 blind folded in RvS, I don’t even need to look at the bean counter any more.. I can feel how many bullets have been fired.

I wish I could play SWAT4 online with the reticle off, the cross hairs are a nicer blue then RvS’s red and actually do reflect your aim and accuracy. In Raven Shield, I’ve always disregarded the rets as having any thing to do with point of impact, they mean almost nothing… So why bother using them? I train with both rets on and rets off, been a few months since I turned them on.. Now I’m starting to be able to chuck grenades with the same accuracy as with the rets off.

In SWAT, you rets show a lot about how your point of impact will be. I’d still like to go without them though because really you shouldn’t need them unless the enemy is far or you need a more precise shot. And in that case you should be using the weapons sights any way, not the shitty zoom-focus on the aiming reticle that RvS and SWAT4 use any way.

One thing I like about firing on Full Auto, is complete control of the trigger. Want one round? Easy, need 20? Ok no problem. Typically I fire 2 to 3 rounds per burst and will increase to 4-6 rounds as necessary to bring down the tango. It’s very easy to fire off a few sets of 2-3 rounds, much better then firing off like 5 rounds in a single burst.

SWAT4s MP5 lacks full auto and the UMP and AKM have their rates of fire set to pathetically unrealistic values. All weapons in SWAT4 were balenced on the grounds that a modifier of 1.0 Burst Rate Factor == ~600 Rounds Per Minute (RPM).

Following that line of reasoning, the M4A1 is given a burst rate factor (BRF) of 1.5, roughly equal to 900 RPM. The real M4A1 Carbine has a cyclic rate of fire between 700 and 950 RPM as far as I know, a good balance for a game. The AK47 will kill you in one round if fired from a suspect (1-2 if you are shooting them), while you need 2-4 rounds with the quick firing M4.

The UMP on the other hand has a BRF of 0.55 yielding approx 330 rounds per minute. The UMP is supposed to have a rate of fire on par with 600 RPM, making it horrible unbalanced, except by it’s powerful cartridge in SWAT4.

However the burst rate factor is handled I doubt it reflects well on real life. I remember for a Mod, I once recalibrated all weapons in SWAT4 to use real world bullet mass instead of the overweight rounds in SWAT4… Which was a left shift of two or three digits kind of off track, heck it would be like shooting grapefruit instead of bullets lol. luckily the weapons were already calibrated for the real world muzzle velocities.

Recalibrating the game settings to model real world factors, based on Unreal Engine units was totally destructive. Resulting in a long stream of dirty tricks to get the bullets ‘lethal’ again. I always knew the systems they used were horrid for modeling real world ballistics but when JHP rounds are going so fast the pass through a target without doing any damage and kept going until they hit some thing impossible to penitrate in the game engine, YOU KNOW YOU HAVE A PROBLEM !!!! The JHP ammo was more FMJ like then the FMJ ammo was after that test haha.

I’m no expert in physics but it doesn’t take much understanding to tell the Unreal Engine as configured in SWAT4 is worthless, retarded at best for any dream of realistic shooting.

I’d love to study physics some day, that kidn of stuff interests me. But I know as long as I’m living here, with my family around trying to learn any thing ‘interesting’ in that regard would be a headache and learning as good as in one ear out the other.

Just like in games, give me a sniper rifle, a mark to shoot at, and a secure firing position, and I’ll hit the mark. Give me some thing I’m interested in, a proper working environment, and I’ll inhale the fucking thing!

Give me a sniping position with every SOB and his dog trying to blow it sky high and I probably will be to busy to hit the mark, same case living here….

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Been learning a lot about TeX and LaTeX lately, my brain is like a sponge…

Some how I don’t think I’ll ever use a word processor again, TeX/LaTeX beats XHTML/CSS for working on content without getting in the way, and imho it automates more of the menial tasks better. I couldn’t stand getting proper printout with all the cross-word processor + cross-pc issues involved… So I eventually took to using XHTML instead, I’m fluent after all. I have a large répertoire of computer languages to choose from, I just hate PHP…

I need to take some time to generate a PBI of TeX Live 2007, not much left to do before then and most of that can probably be sped up by scripting. For deployment though I’d rather like to split it into two packages, if the compression ratio is similar, should result including a ~250MB and ~300MB tar.lzma file (1 in each pbi) rather then a huge ~500mb one. As far as the documentation goes, there is not to much net savings to strip out languages, unless it really strips down to just English and made an English and ‘multinational’ docs module. For me, it would make sense to keep the ‘big ones’, English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese, in a standard install and doing that would be no real saving so far as I can tell.

Got a start for trying to get organized with the SSMs, they are basically a week behind me as far as being able to get things in sync but that’s unavoidable.. In the mean time I guess I should concentrate on the Sgts. I’m glad we have Blade and Noer a foot again they’re both dedicated workers, Blade well better late then never hehe.

The recent unpleasantness with ]SD[ on our SWAT servers is annoying me. I honestly don’t care if we ban every last one of them or shake their hand, there’s more important business I need to look after. I just follow orders, no more, no less. From where I sit, it is a Majors department to deal with it not an RSMs so I’d rather like to stay out of the hub bub. I’d also not have to cram any more forum posts into RAM between working hours.

The SOP Rewrites, I don’t think are going to progress any this week with both SSMs largely out of the loop until next week. Another large section is ready for SNCO Review, in the mean time I can try and look over the other stuff… Just a matter of free time.

I’ve now transitioned almost 3GB in all from my home directory over to the OpenBSD system working as a file server here: effectively fulfilling it’s purpose of integrating my home directory across my desktop and laptop. With some time to test out the permission settings, I may soon move my code directory there as well. With luck maybe I’ll have some time to *finally* get the bloody printer setup rather then sitting there gathering dust, good thing I rarely print.

I still need to organise my music files and rebuild all of my playlists but hey, at least my music folder is neat again. Life really would be a bit easier if I didn’t have to have most of my files available on both systems, to avoid having to boot my laptop to get to stuff. I’m tired of having to choose between booting my laptop, taring the files, scp’ing them over, and having to switch from desktop to laptop. I get 90% of my work done from my PC-BSD laptop yeah, but I like to work on the system I’m in the mood to use, not play chair-jockey.

And to top it all off my brain has been wandering off drastically lately, I suppose it beats being miserable though. I don’t really want to think that much about it right now, I’d never get any sleep other wise…

Found a music video of one of the songs that was on the last CD I bought. Which shows where my minds been drifting off to lool. Is it a wonder some friends wonder if I ever loop up from a compiler?

Works got to get done… How that effects the rest of my life, well..

Snakes and Tree Frogs

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Metal Gear Solid 3: Trailer



It’s a shame that The Boss had to die at the end in order to complete her mission for the USA. It’s no wonder that “Big Boss” would betray his country in later years, after all MGS3 basically amounts to the lot of them being screwed over for ~20 Billion. I’m axious to some day see Metal Gear Solid 4, and I wonder if the aging Solid Snake will himself be,

“Loyal to the end”

Hmm, found a copy of the intro music from Metal Gear Solid 3 posted on YouTube:



It’s a bit of a funky track but it kind of grows on you after enough hours of working Snake through the jungle hehe.

SOPs and the screaming running dashing SNCO team

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A relatively full day…

I’ve spent most of the day working on the SOP rewrites with my peers, I wish we could have them done in days… but I don’t know if we could pull that off.. or if I’d still be standing afterwards.

We got a major section done, I’ll read about what the other SNCOs have to say tomorrow. I need to get the Preface, Intro, and RoE fixed tonight and we got maybe 5 sections done today. Tomorrow, I guess a review of the next two parts with there assoicated (~6) sections.

Rasa and I spent most of the day in my office, when he dropped for the night he said it had been 5 hours… I barely could tell :

I only know two ways of doing things, sit on my duff or work till I drop… No in between. I guess maybe I do tend to take things to extremes but how else to get’em done?

And Ma hasn’t been feeling good so I’ve been hoping, skipping, and jumping a lot whenever she needed something. Next time I say I’m going to do some thing all day even if I get a sore ass — I’ll keep my mouth shut lool. Despite the hyper business, headaches, and multitasking (~5 chat windows, 3 browser tabs, music, etc) it’s been quite productive.

My family generally knows my own SOP, if I love you I’ll do *almost* any thing short of breaking most of the Ten Commandments. So nothing I can do on that matter lol.

At least I’ve been sleeping… Instead of going to bed like 0700 in the morning it’s been more like 0430 which is a lot better. Honestly I’m not sure what is worse, knowing it’s an all-nighter when a British radio station is in the middle of the morning Zoo or your own regular radio station starts doing the morning on the way to work stuff !!!

And I did eventually make it into TG#1 for a little Rvs, The Baroness got me in and being the [SAS] Magnet she seems to be. We soon had a nice couple of rounds, JB, Random, Spawn, the pubs and I think even Valroe joined the fray after I left.

Snake Eater

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Been playing through Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater of late, could probably have it beaten by breakfast time but I’m not interested in losing sleep over it (more then any thing else).

I left off just after Snake loses his eye and gets chucked in the cell.

I know perfectly well the hardest part of the game is the end lol. Snake gets the living crap beaten out of him when he’s captured and loses his eye trying to protect Eva. But that still leaves escaping the cell, destroying the Shagohod and Volgin. Including the run for ya life of them all.

Eva steering the motorbike while Snake deals with the army on their tails. While the character of Eva is arguably a great combination of beauty and ability, being almost skewered to death and bleeding out wouldn’t leave any one fit for combat.

Getting through the jungle with her in tow and the “Goon squad” is probably the single hardest part of MGS3, I remember the first time I played through it. I some what regretted that I never had time to pick up the M60, I found the light machine gun one night playing but was never able to get it later (forgot to save!). At least for Round #2 through the game there is The Bosses Patriot 🙂

Basically a weapon that makes the Colt Commando look a bit bigger while still clearly being an XM177 (prototype m4) family member. The C-Beta mag also has unlimited ammunitions so it’s as good as an M60 loool. Which will be good because the running firefight is one time when it will come in handy.

I’ve played the Metal Gear Solid games a long time, in fact MGS4 is one of very few reasons I’d ever care to get a PS3. I didn’t get into MGS to much until the VR Training missions game was released. I think my completion was like 295-297 missions or some thing like that. I got to be lethally proficient, training harder to fight easier :-). Metal Gear Solid 2 was great fun and I loved the additions. Although I think the plot could have used a little more work (seeing the twists coming).

The only problem with MGS3 is your stuck in the middle of a jungle and I’m used to sneaking in an urban environment. Spent most of the ‘classic sneaking through enemies, most of MGS2 mugging guards for dog tags and throwing them overboard xD. But MGS3, ambushing and knifing as necessary. The loss of the high tech sneaking suit and nano technology from MGS/MGS2 is not really a problem, it only made life easier sneaking through guards. And in MGS3 you get the next best thing, all the other high tech gizmos. Motion sensor, AP Sensor set to vibrate, not as good but handy from time to time. Considering MGS3 takes place in the 1960s it would probably have been as space age as the gear from the first Metal Gear Solid, but it still is just dead weight. From binoculars and a MK23 SOCOM to Thermal Goggles and a Knife 😉

The Jungles just not my bag for sneak past without dropping any but it’s a good game. It’s also great to see the legendary “Big Boss” in his youth. It’s quite a sad story though, I remember after finally completing it the first trip through.

It was nice to know that Snake and Eva got some time alone, without hundreds of soviet infantry on patrol. Especially considering how much the characters were put through, including Big Bosses eye… Kind of sad really but I think it makes it easier to snipe lol. And it ends with the cold hard facts, Evas betrayal, The Bosses real mission, and that the real aim of the ordeal was nothing more then to secure the Philosophers Legacy.

The story of “The Boss” is a sobering one, yet she was loyal to her country to the end. Is it really any wonder that after being granted the title of “Big Boss” for his success during Operation Snake eater that he eventually turns?

It’s been a long time but if I recall correctly, when Big Boss betrayed the Solid Snake we’ve all enjoyed destroying Metal Gears as. He was trying to create a warrior state with sufficient fire power to insure there independence or the destruction of any threats.

I look forward to MGS4 and the rest to come, and I wonder if Solid Snake will share Big Bosses final fate.