August 2006 Archives

Getting Deported

By
Epu
on August 29, 2006 11:04 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Always make sure your visa is good for as long a stay as you think it is. Don't listen to your boss or friends if they assure you it's good. Trust your instincts. If you are unsure, ask your embassy.
Continue reading Getting Deported.

The Apostate

By
Epu
on August 29, 2006 9:48 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Dude, you gotta play a game with the Apostate. He's funny, his characters and timelines are way interesting, and you pretty much get to riff and be whatever you want to be, and let him be whatever he wants to be. From space-opera to fantasy to heros to horror, you are going to have a fun time. The gross, the grand, the epic, they all go pretty well. Bad, sad, mad, glad events occur. I've especially enjoyed playing:
and many others. Either running or playing.

The Apostate also likes to eat, which means we get along pretty well.

The Beijing Scene

By
Epu
on August 29, 2006 9:39 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
When Cpu decided she was going to live and work in China, I determined to go along with her. Unluckily, I also got a job with the Beijing Scene. We had a great time working illegally in China, eating street food, learning how to choose a good restaurant, biking with a passenger, and getting deported. We made loads of good friends along the way. My favorite way to get around in China was the train. You meet interesting people when you travel by rail.

Amber Diceless Role Playing Game

By
Epu
on August 29, 2006 8:13 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
I used to roleplay avidly, and as an Amber fan I sought out the game at GenCon, the largest roleplaying convention in the US. Roger was supposed to show up. Though he did not, I had a great time roleplaying. My friends and I nicked the rules, and played substantial amounts of what was to become the Amber Diceless Role Playing Game.
Continue reading Amber Diceless Role Playing Game.

My New Home

By
Epu
on August 27, 2006 11:43 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've moved just about everything from eta.org to here. Some people still read the slide-taking guide, apparently. The resume, it seems, is still a big hit with people looking for testers

If you were redirected here, please use the search feature in the upper right.

I spent about 60 minutes trying to figure out how to use Apache .htaccess rules to redirect you to anchored URLs like http://skull.piratehaven.org/~epu/#TheChroniclesOfAmber, but this is very difficult.

Incidentally, 'my new home' is also what Bpu calls our first Chicago rental apartment. This is the opposite of my old home.

Confusingly, in June of 2007, we all moved to sweet home Chicago, which is our new-new home.

ShadowNet

By
Epu
on August 24, 2006 9:47 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Visit ShadowNet. It was a really great idea at the time; a collaborative website for ADRPG fans. These days, it would have lived forever as a wiki. You know, it sounds wierd, there was a time before the wiki. Those were bad times for collaboration.
Continue reading ShadowNet.

Licensed Therapist

By
Epu
on August 23, 2006 9:28 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Cpu and I once tried getting some help with our relationship. It was useful. It did bring us closer together. We had a ride on the Judah, followed by therapy, followed by breakfast. I mean, really. A nice date. Our therapist explained that we were pretty normal. It gave us more tools to deal with each other, like:
  • taking a time out for one's self when needed
  • listening exercises
  • vocab to talk about our feelings instead of each other

Carousel Cookies & Free TVs

By
Epu
on August 22, 2006 10:37 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Hmm, carousel cookies.

Yerba Buena carousel horsies scared Bpu, so she sat down in a sleigh instead with her Grampy and Grammy. Then it was time for splashing in a play pool for like 30 minutes and eating on the lawn behind the Metreon. She's having a fab time.

Game developers, it is no surprise, like bubble tea drinks. They like burritos. They like getting free 23" MicroSoft HDTVs. Seriously, J. Allard's keynote speech at GDC gave away 1 of these for every 3 attendees. And I skipped it knowing the speech would be stupid (aka PR poo poo). I wanted a TV bad.

Cpu tells me even if I got one, because MS is on her beat, I'd have to return it. We also agreed that keeping it and regifting it counts as keeping it. I brought it up with my co-workers who worked with me at my last job, since after all, MS is a supplier and publisher we deal with. Can we, as game developers, be bought for the simple price of a free TV?

Oh yes, yes we can.

All my co-workers were talking about the TVs. Only one of them checked with his manager, as instructed by our ethics training, to see if it was ok to keep it. Sigh.

Thank God For Fair Use

By
Epu
on August 22, 2006 10:26 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Ok, what happens when Bpu meets CDs and DVDs designed to work only in a DVD player or the computer? Scratch city.

Making backups is more hard than it needs to be. Enter doom9.org - they can and will tell you how it is done. Now, you just need the time and the inclination to read all about it.

Thank God that fair use lets you legally:
  • make a scratch-free copy of CDs and DVDs in case the worst should happen
  • add missing features to your DVD like fan subtitles
  • remove stupid trailers or make your DVD jump right to the film
  • add CD-TEXT features to CDs that should, but don't, have it

Arch You Glad You Use Perforce?

By
Epu
on August 22, 2006 8:18 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Last year I really wanted to use MadMan II. I don't remember why. I thought I would build it for win32, or at least port it brokenly. Boy, was that a dumb idea.

But mid dumb idea, the MadMan author switched to using the gnu Arch revision control system instead of CVS. Tim Mensch had mentioned that Arch might be worth checking out for work, so I asked it out, just as friends. You know. Low expectations.

I gave up on compiling it early, and got the binaries from the wiki. I have a whole list of gnu arch issues.

Counter-Strike towel

By
Epu
on August 21, 2006 11:47 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Towel. Toel. Touel.

To Bpu, in March of 2005, a chair pad is a towel, but so is a dish-cloth. Hiding something under a towel amuses Bpu; she and Cpu played the 'which towel is the thing under' game, and Bpu never got it wrong. She's a big girl. It's still a fun game for her. (Note: as of August 2006, Bpu is way beyond this game.)

She also went went went to mommy today when she came home, chanting the Counter-Strike litany 'Go Go Go!' as she crawled. And then she sank her head onto mommy's lap instead of the customary stop 2 feet away. Good times.

Free Software

By
Epu
on August 21, 2006 9:37 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
By which I mean free as in freedom software, not so much free-as-in-beer.

The free software movement resonates with me like a tuning fork resonates with being hit on something hard. Free software is rad, because it aligns itself nicely with my own beliefs:
  • I can copy it and distribute it freely
  • I can edit and hack on it freely
I strongly believe in all the rights the GPL provides me. I love to copy and redistribute software. Shit, when I was a kid, I learned to copy Apple ][e discs with Copy][+. There were big disc copying parties. Nobody said there was anything wrong with it. We just took everything we wanted. I probably never had the formal right to do any of this, but I never checked.

At that young age, I understood that all software was free-as-in-beer. I was raised thinking software, mostly games, are to be copied at parties with friends. Software cost as much as the blank media you had to buy to put it on, plus the cost of the disk puncher so you could use both sides of the 5-1/4" floppy. All the way through my post-college years, software was considered free-as-in-beer. Tons of CDROM and ZIP disks full of self-mounting disk images with serial numbers, installers, cracks, no-cds, and serial databases. A currency for swapping for new files and programs. A resource for re-installing (again). A resource for fixing relative's computers. A resting-home for games that were too large to co-exist on the hardware simultaneously. I probably never had the right to do this either, but I never checked.

Must-have game titles were bought as I became a wage- and then salary-earning member of society. Game developers garnered respect, while publishers were despised for slowing down or crashing already-ancient hardware with copy protection. As I became a true dork, I learned to hate my Macintosh and my hand-me-down PC. My rage was chiefly directed against the operating systems; Windows for its stupidity and complexity, MacOS for its lack of transparency, FreeBSD and Debian Gnu/Linux for that very Do It Yourself-ness that brought them to my desktop. They all ate my time out of curiousity and maintenance. But thank god for Debian.

These days, I chiefly love the right to modify broken software. I log bugs with free software, I fix my own copy of broken software. And I rest pretty easy. With the unfortunate exception of win32 (which I buy and use for its percieved simplicity of use, and to play games on), I'm done with non-free software.

Um, where is this going again? Ah, the First Dork Manifesto. Right.

Backup My Computer

By
Epu
on August 20, 2006 11:13 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
I don't. I mean, not really. Not like I could recover from disaster and have all my data intact. Shit, some of the data I 'backed up' onto CD and DVD is already worthless. Discs do get bad with age.

Seriously, who backs up 120gb and 160gb drives?
Continue reading Backup My Computer.

Shuttle XPC

By
Epu
on August 20, 2006 10:03 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
It's a double-bagel-toaster-sized beauty, best described as sexy. It is a Shuttle 3100 XPC for Intel PentiumD processors, composed of:
Before my cursed OEM copy of win32 arrived, it ran Ubuntu from Breezy Badger dist-upgraded to June 2006 latest.

Aged Athalon Now Online

By
Epu
on August 20, 2006 8:06 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
I Ubuntu'd the aged athalon. This took awhile because the disk image for the installer wasn't completely downloaded. Wasted a bunch of discs figuring that out. I only had a few setbacks.
Continue reading Aged Athalon Now Online.

The Chronicles of Amber

By
Epu
on August 20, 2006 7:32 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
By Roger Zelazney, some awesome reading. Hook yourself up with all 10 stories. Or if you haven't already, read its parody, The Dying of Ember.

It sounds cheesy to say now, but these books really changed my life. They were ordered as part of my initial Science Fiction Book Club subscription's free hardcover books when I was a teenager.

I became a fan. In high school, I got hooked on the Amber Diceless Role Playing Game (ADRPG). By the time I had graduated from college, I had read all his short fiction that I could get my hands on (with the UW Madison Memorial graduate studies library available, it was quite a lot of stories and magazines). Years later, I broke down the The Hand of Oberon into story beats and did a short set of storyboards.

While reading his shorts, I developed an aversion to long-winded and poorly crafted sci-fi and fantasy novels. I no longer read fantasy novels, although I once did just to settle a bet. When I read, it's still mostly short fiction.

Upstairs Neighbor From Hell

By
Epu
on August 19, 2006 10:11 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Back in San Francisco, we had this guy who:
To my great relief, now that we've sold our San Francisco TIC, our landords:
  • Live downstairs.
  • Have a nanny who we can communicate with, without attacking her.
  • Do not ever think of rocking out till all hours. There is sometimes some inappropriate construction noise.
We never did forclose on his 1/6th undivided interest in the building; just taking the initial steps convinced him to sell. Since we sold out too, I haven't had to deal with any bad neighbors yet. Yay!

The UNFH has been kickbanned.

YouTube Needs Lube

By
Epu
on August 19, 2006 10:07 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Slashdot had a thing about YouTube (now a household name). It didn't work with my VLC-captured webcam videos of Bpu. It's frustrated me since then: the upload success dialog keeps telling me that the upload was A-OK.

I reported the failures, and was contacted by a software engineer about the issue, and he seemed really excited about the converter getting fixed. I followed up on it after he reported a new release of the back end, and still no-go. A good idea, I suppose, with not enough engineering in it yet.

Uncarpeted Subfloor

By
Epu
on August 19, 2006 9:59 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Our HOA agreement included noise-consideration clauses. Owners were to carpet or cover 85% of their floor to prevent noise from traveling downstairs.

The upstairs neighbor from hell had his carpeting and the underlying European fire-and-noise-proof padding torn out in the front 1/2 of his unit, and never replaced either. Instead, his subfloor was refinished to provide an ever-creaking, ever-noise-transmitting series of pine planks. It remained uncovered by the required carpeting, although we never addressed it with him through the HOA.

Cpu and I believe in the alternatives to an uncarpeted subfloor: the hardwood floor and the do-it-yourself tile floor.
Continue reading Uncarpeted Subfloor.

Ubuntu

By
Epu
on August 19, 2006 9:57 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Ubuntu is a Linux distro that focuses on ease of use. It's based on Debian GNU/Linux. There is an Ubuntu live CD and an Ubuntu install DVD. And, in a word, it's sweet. If you ever get the chance to install it, I highly recommend it. I think of it as the distro that intends to move tasks on Linux from very difficult to relatively easy.
Continue reading Ubuntu.

USB Print Server Redux

By
Epu
on August 19, 2006 9:53 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Back when I bought my USB print server, I was really really really happy with it:
  • Cpu and I could each print without having to turn on any extra computers
  • Came with explicit Unix instructions for using it as lpr/lpd printer
  • Instantly set up when I installed Ubuntu on the aged Athalon.
These days, I'm not feeling the love:
  • non-free software that comes with it doesn't install on win32 after SP2, AFAIKT. This was never a problem before SP2, but I ain't downgrading.
    • Setup runs, but doesn't display
  • The non-free software driver package from the manufacturer was very difficult to find, since the unit doesn't have a name or model number.
That's what you get for 30 smackers!

Aged Athalon

By
Epu
on August 19, 2006 8:04 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
I bought Travis' fiance's old computer from them for 35 smackers. It's an old Athalon of some kind, with a Voodoo 5500 video card and two really slow 10 mb NICs. It serves as a file share, name server, and does other crap whenever I need it to. I hasn't been turned on since I moved to my new home, and sits in the basement of sweet home Chicago.

Universal Wireless Console Controller

By
Epu
on August 18, 2006 10:47 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
You know you need one too: I'm not the only gamer I know who has 2 or more consoles stuffed away in his entertainment cabinet.

Has anyone ever made a universal remote controller? How hard could it be? I envision taking it out of its charging cradle, turning it on, powering up the system, and playing. When you're ready to switch to another console, turn that console on and play. No wires. There are no new dreamcast products, so I think I'm still on the right trail. Users with snes and friends will want similar products, I think.
Continue reading Universal Wireless Console Controller.

BackBurner Render Farm For Exports?

By
Epu
on August 18, 2006 9:18 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Installed 3dsmax 8 trial version to poke around the new features.
  1. It doesn't fully support choosing your own install directory (help ends up in default location: who needs help files anyways?)
  2. Backburner can run custom commands and scripts. Can you say, art build farm?
That's the best part, really; the idea that I can have the equivalent of a render farm running my custom commands on shared files on a fileserver. Dude. Sweet. Now, all that needs to be done is to have them also hooked into the make system so programmers can also generate their files.

No Perl For You

By
Epu
on August 17, 2006 11:01 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
At work, I had to defend my use of Perl and swear not to check any into the build tree, no matter how useful. This is a decided shame since I am effective with it.

I understand my peer's take on this; we've all been bitten by having to maintain something that is a pain-in-the-ass to read. Perl syntax is a little weird to those not steeped in it. And it did take a few years to get the hang of non-module, shell script-style development with it. Finding a Perl GUI debugger really flipped the switch for me.

Anyways, it reminded me of a few good things we used to do at my last job;
  1. Always check in and use the checked in headers, libs, and tools in the build (including the Perl interpreter)
    • This kept us from having everyone have to install the right versions of things, and guaranteed that a user sync'd to head could build
    • This is in opposition to relying on the user's local environment and installed SDKs to be up-to-date.
  2. Check your calendar and show up to meetings you were called to.
    • Setting development policy minus attendees never works. Good reason to have a wiki or versioned word doc.
  3. Have and stick to core hours for the developers so they can be relied on to be there when you need them.
The good news? I had to learn some C# and windows .NET widgets. I got my own seat of vc7 so I don't have to nag engineers for things I can figure out myself. I got to break my old habits, really. And I got to break some of theirs by checking in a Perl script that proves useful. Yay.

My Home Town

By
Epu
on August 17, 2006 10:57 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
I grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It's nice there. My parents still live in my  home town. I moved close enough to drive to see them, which is nice now that Cpu and I have Bpu to share with them. So we get away on weekends and holidays. Sometimes, we can drop Bpu off with my parents or my in-laws. Life is good.

Bpu

By
Epu
on August 17, 2006 10:51 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
bpu.mug.png


Oh! Oh! Bpu is my first forked child process, and she is so dreamy. When she's not a pain in the ass.

Continue reading Bpu.

Hardware MP3 Players

By
Epu
on August 17, 2006 9:45 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
My biggest disappointment in the whole .MP3 player arms race is that I, the consumer, lost.
  1. I can't auto update my players - maybe the iPod.
  2. I can't easily pull audio off of my players (yes, even if I own it, the vendor risks a huge lawsuit letting me do this).
  3. I can't move files easily between my players
  4. I have an ass load of proprietary chargers and a bucket of rechargable batteries
  5. I can't play books-on-tape that I bought from Audible on all of them
  6. In a year, I probably won't be able to even run them on Vista since proprietary device driver whores tend to drop support for older devices between win32 revisions.
I have 5 hardware .MP3 players. In order of purchase, they are:
  1. Samsung Yepp NDU 64mb walkman (no FM radio)
  2. Audible Otis 64mb walkman .Required to play DRM'd audio books. Stupid DRM. I have 5 players for christ sakes!
  3. Apple iPod Mini. It can also play audible DRM'd books, stupid .aac and other DRM'd files. God. This was like my 3rd player. I hate you Apple.
  4. Car CD player. It has CD text and album skip and everything! Goodbye, CD changer.
  5. Some junky Korean .MP3 walkman with an FM radio I got as a raffle prize.
Of these, only the car stereo component approaches transparent use; they all use different .DRM, they all use different software to update files on them, and none of them use an integrated feature of win32 (like, say, Explorer) to update their contents. None of them have open-source drivers from the manufacturer, AFAIK. I can't just plug them in and have them get recognized. Getting any one of these working in Linux is a pure dork triumph. If you have succeeded, way to go. I pat you on the back. It's not easy hacking USB drivers either.

Planescape: Torment

By
Epu
on August 17, 2006 9:35 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
2 thumbs up the butt. Dude, you have got to play this game. If you love The Chronicles of Amber, Dungeons & Dragons, and good character-driven games, you already played the crap out of this.

I got it as a gift maybe one year after its release, and managed to play it almost to the bitter end (I think it was the fallen angel encounter magic missiles that I couldn't get past without crashing) on an overclocked Compaq Presario 133mhz -- an earlier gift from the same individual -- like 3 years past its prime. Pass-through Voodoo card and everything.

I loved that computer. But I loved Planescape more than the Compaq.

How to Keep Your Win32 PATH Super Short

By
Epu
on August 17, 2006 9:04 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
In two words, .cmd wrappers.

I keep my win32 PATH environment variable short. Really short. Like, there are some default windows folders that have to be there, I keep it to that plus one more directory. Theoretically, you could just put the wrappers in one of the system directories and have  the shortest path ever. The output of the PATH command should never be longer than:
PATH=F:\;C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem
Continue reading How to Keep Your Win32 PATH Super Short.

Tiddle Dialog Tree

By
Epu
on August 17, 2006 7:31 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
It seems like so far, all my Tiddles read like a video game dialog tree. Doesn't it feel like we've had this conversation already in a game somewhere?
1. No, it feels like all my other one-way conversations with you.
2. Yeah, it feels pretty stale, like Planescape: Torment or something.
3. What's a game dialog tree?
4. I feel like talking about something else.

Hello World

By
Epu
on August 16, 2006 10:28 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Hi there, world.

Thanks for hooking me up with Cpu, safely delivering the babies Bpu and iPu, and giving me a living with the compu.

It's nice that we have this one way dialog, you and I.

Stay dreamy,
xxoo
-Epu

Epu

By
Epu
on August 16, 2006 9:34 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Me? I run this joint. And I spend at least as many hours inside my own skull as I do on the  computer. This entry is dedicated to coffee and all you late-nighters out there. Late-nighters, keep it caffinated :]

You can get ahold of me via e-mail. epu AT piratehaven DOT org

Where does the nickname come from? Ages ago, a Cogswell alumni had a video game testing job with me, late nights from like 10:30 PM until 2:00 PM at my last job. During one poorly remembered, ill-fated, Mountain Dew inspired, slap happy evening, he fused our no-longer-deemed-strange obsession with Pokemon and some dog-poo-on-my-shoe into a nick. He had been calling me 'E'. Then, E-poo. Shortened to Epu, my pokemon monster alter-ego.
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