[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.

Haha, thanks Noles :-)

Writer's Block: Year of the Ox

Happy Chinese New Year! The Year of the Ox starts today. What is your Chinese zodiac animal? Do you think you fit the description of the sign?

Live Journals Writer's Block

http://www.chinesezodiac.com/dragon.php


Hmm, an earth dragon. I don't believe in Astrology, but I must admit it is generally intriguing to parse.

Stress Buster

Well, with nothing to do, no inclination left to me for sleep... and quite far from in the mood to get any more work done (Dang it!) for the night, I figured I'd play a little bit of DooM. After sorting a little issue of loading the right IWAD, I noticed something interesting in ports: the Hell Revealed MegaWad for Doom II :-)


So I installed the doom-freedoom Free Software IWAD for DooM II, and the doom-hr ports on my laptop. I haven't tried UV, but from the soun do it, I wonder if after all these years, if I'd even get past the first room on UV, lol. I've played the shareware version of DooM from Id some time ago, and wished that I had a copy of the full version handy afterwards (very fun game). The thing that surprised me about revisiting classic DooM, was not only were the levels much like I remembered them, there was still a good "Oh !@#$, it's a trap!" factor keeping you on ya toes for hosing down some baddies -- applying [SAS] movement and room clearing techniques actually helped clear it, haha! Playing through HR, might be agood time paser for awhile :\. It's a very well known megawad, but it's still my first encounter ;-).


DooM is like _t_h_e_ classic FPS shooter. I was never into it very much as a child, and usually just watched my brother play the various console ports. But in later years, I've come to regard it as a great way to relieve stress -- switch brain off, and let the shells fly.

cvs / git cooperation

http://issaris.blogspot.com/2005/11/cvs-to-git-and-back.html

hmm, might be useful.

Somethings I'd like to work on, are using git, cvs, or svn. My own system here runs CVS, since that's what OpenBSD comes with, but I'm more used to workign with Subversion. Git and Bazaar-ng are two programs I really should evaluate, since git is likely a program I would love using, and bzr is one I may find more useful in the wider world.


It also pays to know svn/cvs, hehe.

Grrr....

It seems, whenever I try to get some sleep during my 'down' hours, there is always something or someone to jar me awake... By the time I'm able to get back to sleep again, my brain is usually to "online" with being awake and thinking again, rather then being obediant to the rest of good sense that demands going back to sleep. If I actually do get back to sleep, I always end up with even less work done, and little time left to myself :\


How many freaking years, do I have to go with a minimal of sleep....

Strange set of dreams tonight. In one realm, it involved work, gee what fun... day off in the morning, and dreaming about working my as off & being threated like dirt :\. Like the last thing I want to think about, is going back to that, eh? In another phase there was a rather sudden, but interesting entanglement with an attractive woman to say the least, in retrospect I wonder who was trying to seduce who lol. But for better or worse, not enough privacy for much to come of it >_<. Hmm, almost thought I had forgoten how to kiss a girl like that... guess there are a few things, that ya never forget. And in the third cycle of dreams, having to out-think a few drunks to extricate myself from a sticky situation, an incident involving a big ass truck and its occupents had an intent for some viloence (Hmm, maybe she was married? lol). Had no luck in avoiding a fight, but not being one for like a six vs one fight (and maybe 2:0 or 3:0 guns), I managed to exploit their drunkeiness in order to take them suitably 'prisioner' until backup could arrive; join joined the arresting officers in a good hard laugh at how I tricked them into surrendering ^_^.


I have some crazy dreams, eh? In real life, I almost never end up in trouble... but in dreamland, it finds me lol.

GET SOME SLEEP SPIDEY01 !!!!!!

I'm wondering for an hour, why the frig I'm getting missmatched checksums.... then it hit me, and I feel like punching myself in the head lol.


I tried this:

sub checksum {
    my $file = shift || return;

    my $md5 = Digest->new("MD5");
    my $sha = Digest->new("SHA-256");
    open my $fh, $file or die "Can't checksum file: $!";
    binmode($fh);

    return ( MD5     => $md5->addfile($fh)->hexdigest();
             SHA256  => $sha->addfile($fh)->hexdigest();
           );
}

and then compared the output agaisnt checksums generated by FreeBSDs md5/sha256 utilities (they are actually the same program). The MD5 matched perfectly, but the SHA256 were different.

After much thinking, I figured it out....

sub checksum {
    my $file = shift || return;

    my $md5 = Digest->new("MD5");
    my $sha = Digest->new("SHA-256");
    open my $fh, $file or die "Can't checksum file: $!";
    binmode($fh);
    my $mh = $md5->addfile($fh)->hexdigest();
    seek($fh, 0, 0); # <----- you've got to rewind it to the start of the file before the next I/O
    my $sh = $sha->addfile($fh)->hexdigest();
    return ( MD5     => $mh,
             SHA256  => $sh,
           );
}

The thing that really irks me, I was wondering if the Digest:: classes would be so nice, as to rewind the file handle when they were done, but I think that idea occured to me about 4 hours ago, lool. Actually, if I've got to rewind the fscking handle between objects, I may as well just walk the file and append the data to each as we go... then get the digests.



I really need more sleep....



EDIT: Take III

=pod internal

checksum FILENAME

Open filename, and return a hash containing ALGORITHM => check sum
key/value pairs, for each algorithm supported. Both MD5 and SHA256 will
always be supported.

=cut

sub checksum($) {
    my $file = shift || return;

    my $md5 = Digest->new("MD5");
    my $sha = Digest->new("SHA-256");
    open my $fh, $file         or die "Can't checksum file: $!";
    binmode($fh);

    # suck the file,  and Digest::add it. We would have to parse 
    # the entire file per object, and seek to 0,0 between calls other wise.
    while (my $ln = <$fh>) {
        $md5->add($ln);
        $sha->add($ln);
    }
    close $fh;

    return ( MD5     => $md5->hexdigest(),
             SHA256  => $sha->hexdigest(),
           );
}

Hmm you know you're crazy when

instead of writing the file path, and using tab completion to view a file listed in a programs output: you pipe the programs output into a command to get the desired line, pipe then pipe that into AWK, so you can pipe that into xargs ....

or maybe it's just being lazy....

Terry@dixie$ perl script-name project --debug | head -n 1 | awk '{ print $2 }' | xargs cat

Quote of the Day

This is a consequence rather than a goal. I abhor a system designed for the “user”, if that word is a coded pejorative meaning “stupid and unsophisticated”.

-- Ken Thompson

Hmm, some how this makes me laugh when I think of ed and notepad (ed is like the most basic editor I've ever met, but it's still 1000 times better then notepad)

What everyone should know....

LO: Scorpian

Joined TG#1 today, PG#1 was mostly full and I didn't want to take a slot from
the SAS friends there. Managed to get a bit of a warm up, then Carter joined
and I had to shift my brain from skills-focused training mode to team-focused
mode :\. We finally hit the end of our launch envelope, just before 2230Z came
around. I think, I forgot just how much stress it is on the server admins and
live op conductor.... hehe. But it was a great Live Operation.

We had some problems with the first map, so Medic pulls out his plan B. When I
saw the map name, I started shouting "where the hell did you find that map!",
for a moment I thought he found my secret storage place... *sigh*, now I need a
new map one for LO: Vengeance #1 -- Vipers Edge. It was good though,m to
finally set foot on that map again, and see it in Live Op action! We finally
got everyone in the server, organized swiftly into to combat teams by JB, and
ready to rock. I was a bit disappointed by the insertion, but I expected it
because I know the maps spawn point lol. It is the kind of map, you have to
cover 360' degrees at all times or you get screwed up bad. And even then, you
risk getting rolled hard from several angels at once -- most of the map is like
a staircse, a 3-Dimenisional death trap! The problem we had at spawn, it's
mostly a psychological thing IMHO. People tend to bog down and become confused
in those kind of insertions, the old "Where are they", "What am I doing", "What
is expected of me", "What am I doing here", et cetera. Once everyone
got past their initial confusion, and made a coheisive response -- we lit up
the enemies world like hellfire.

We managed to put down the enemy threat and freak'em out. Once we got the team
moving out of the area, we secured safer ground and sprang out along the
paraemter streets -- cutting down snipers (Headshot!) and X-Rays along the way.
Then we made it into the subway without further incident, and ended up forking
into 2 scout-assault groups.

The EL took our main body right, I was on point-cover to our left with a backup
man (MB & his SAW). I usually try and makes use of our radio commu to ease the
confusion, so we don't get lulls where people are waiting for instructions:
when I can I try and reduce the Element Leaders workload, so he doesn't have to
be reading over my shoulder in order to keep me in line with his plan of attack
lol. Once my scouting order came through, me and MB headed up and got the
clearence to take the high ground above. I figured, getting up here will
probably do nothing more then get my ass shot.... but it was a great spot.
Well protected, about the only place on the map that you can put a
sharpshooter, without making him a sitting duck lol. We didn't expect to see
any threats from there, but I was hopeful that I'd be able to provide JB enough
intel and overwatch, that the elements main body could clear out their AoR
without getting overwelemd by a QRF.

Later on, I'm like, "I think I can see Ghost from over here", so I lower my
gun, and you could say gave the proverbial wave in my minds eye lol. JB
summery turned around, and shot me twice in the head on reflex, seeing nothing
but a head (in our teams camo) looking at him from the roof top. Never mind the
fact, that we were feeding them the positional information to avoid that kind
of incident.... Intentions completed (support the teams efforts), but got shot
by a confused teammate in the process lol. The team then went on to secure the
last threats; we took about 30% casualties at the insertion, one down during
the street to street fighting, and JB took off my avatars head by mistake >_<. Maybe next time, I should use Smoke. I didn't want to puff one on the roof, because it would've just gotten any remaining snipers looking at us; and I expected to get shot on the way up anyway lol. If I had puffed a smoke grenade on our roof, when the other team was closer, and called it over TS to mark it.... Rather then telling them WHERE we were (the maps big, but not really that big lol), mayhbe it would've eased the confusion... And drawn more enemy fire our way.

Once people got it sorted at the insert, everything went pretty well. It's a
mission that is some what, close to our problem domain but also far enough from
most peoples general training, that the unexpected can hit them hard. What was
really needed, I feel, is for Element Leaders to anticpate such a situation and
be snap to it [faster]; directing people where they need to be, in order to cut
down the confusion and get people responding to the situation again. Enlist
their 2nd in commands to assist would help to, especially when (like in this
Live Op) there are/were multiple teams involved.

You've got to get things organized so no one gets cut off in the corners alone,
or bunched up waiting for spec fire to grind their ass. People need to have the
initiative to react FAST, and deal with things without direction. The problem
is, when people hit a situation like the one we spawned into on that map; most
people expect direction from EL, and naturally become mentally "slow" until
they get past the initial shock of the engagement, or you pop'em over the head
with an idea (any idea) and get them back into the action. Like wise, most seasoned ELs tend to know better then try to micromanage people that know how to cover their sectors; but dealing with team confusion :\.

That's been my experience after 3 years of Element Leader, dealing with
everything from noobs screwing up our plans, to live ops with deep recon of the
enemy. I actually had it drilled into me during ops training to respond this
way to bad situations: take control of the situation QUICKLY or people
die.

Hmm, I still remember one Live Op I did when I was a young trooper. The Lance
Corporal took Element Lead, since he was the highest head on the totem poll and
we were still just a few months out of the Selection Course. We went through
each phase of the mission smoothly, our CQB training combined with the ELs much
greater green field experience got us through it like clock work. But when we
got the VIP to the car, surprise! A third map loads, the escape car as been
sabotaged, and every tom, dick, and harry with an AK47 was out for blood. The
element was quickly overwhelmed and destroyed, leaving the VIP to the opposing
force; mission failed, after such a successful run lol. Like our Sergeant
drilled into us all after that -- don't bog down, take control. If LCpl Rand
had come out of the surprise faster, and shouted at us young Troopers into a
proper response, we
might've survived that Live Op; we had a perfect position to use our Tactical
Aids and man power to slow down, evade, and flank the enemy from our own
ground. Most members present that day (~3 years ago) chalked it up as a
critical lesson learned. That's also when contact drills entered our young
minds, hehe.

I'm the kind of person, shit happens, deal with it now, panic later. Only way I
know to be lol. Every member of Elite Virtual
Regiment is extremly skilled within the scope of our games. But most
people, haven't been exposed to enough hard action in game or in real life, to
deal with a nasty fire fight like that outright: the team spawned into the
game in such a way, we almost had a man shot before anyone could phyiscally
pull a trigger: such was the map deesign of todays live op. Whenever I can, if
I see people loosing the initiative to DO, rather then have the EL hold their
hand; I try to get the people around me working and reduce the Element Leaders
thought-load, so he can focus on getting us the heck out of the there lool.

A keen battlespace awareness is crictical! But it's something that has to be both educated into people, and drilled sensely into them. Hey wait, that's what we do.... hehe :-). It's jsut it takes longer to work on it in game, then it does in live combat.

SLEEP !!! Precious sleep !!!

Oh that felt so damn good, it should be a crime. I got to the point, you take a rest or else. So I powered down, laid down to watch some of the Simpsons before dinner; but no luck on a nap. After dinner, I think I managed to get nearly an hours sleep; but as usual no one will let me fscking sleep!!! So after drifting/waddling through the misc crap that had to get done, I put on the Simpsons where I left off, and crashed. I think I managed to get through the rest of the episode (~20min) before dropping off to a sound sleep.


A freaking bomb could've gone off, and I wouldn't have noticed lol. Dreamt of maybe, woken up not a flubbin' chance man.


That was maybe 2 hours ago, short... but very greatly appreicated lol. Now I'll probably be up to six o'clock in the morning, working on some projects until I pass the frick out again :\

sleep deprivation

Braintrace:
 mcp->proc:           function call returned EXCEPTNOTCAUGHT
 vigrep{data}:        focus allocation error; unable to focus!
 0xDEEDBEEF:          unaligned neural access; errno = EIAMNOTAMACHINE
 unhandled exception: ExhaustionError!!!
 
Emergency power down:   dispatching the interrupt to address 0xFEE1BAD
 0xFEE1BAD:           eval{ crash->to_bed->sleep or exec{0xFEE1DEAD} }

This figures

When [John] Carmack was on vacation with his wife, he ended up playing some games on her cellphone, and he realized that the games weren't any good. He then decided he was going to make a good mobile game. When he got back from his vacation he revealed that he had started working on Doom RPG.

Ok, maybe it is possible to make a decent video game on a cell phone, haha! If anyone could.... :-)

*sigh*

I /almost/ got to get some sleep.... but my brother called and spoiled my chances for a nap :-(. If he still has problems with setting up his router Friday, call #3 8=).


sigh

my family so often reminds me, that I'm virtually the only one of my kind out here...

Hmm, I never knew Albert Einstein had a sense of humour before.

Even a spider has to get some time off... hehe

Managed to catch the Last Action Hero, haven't seen it in awhile so I could enjoy it; the poking fun at action movies <_<. Also got to see the end of Bringing Up Baby. Kathine Hepburns charactor is the epitome of a zany girl, and the movie is like screw ball comedy of the first class :-). The Philadelphia Story also starts at 2, so there is something to watch hehe.

Ok... I need to sit down

because I'm sorry to say, I've actually seen horse shit like this: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Mentors,_the_Freshmaker.aspx


lol. I still remember one day finding some even worse shit... Found some code (looked like a lazy patch someone did to tweak it) that did nothing but a series of database lookups, set iterations, and I/O calls (without error checking) just to figure out how to print a non breaking space haha. That's when I threw up my hands and said, FUCK IT I'm done reading this thing looooooooool.


Maybe I really should get a life again >_<

Do you need theropy?

(00:54:33) xspidey01x: Hmm, should I dare even play a round at any of their tests for the sake of curiosity? lol

What do your responses tell us?

Although your scores were generally quite good, you scored well outside the normal range in at least one category. This suggests that you should probably consult with a mental health professional for further testing or treatment. There is most certainly a professional out there who can help improve the symptoms you are experiencing.

The following are the areas of concern detected by the screening:

* Your responses indicated that your relationships are at least in some way dysfunctional, and may be causing problems in your life.

The test also detected symptoms of one or more disorders that did not meet all the criteria, but that may still merit treatment.

The following are the areas of concern detected by the screening:

* You have experienced symptoms of a major depressive episode, but not enough to qualify as a full-blown episode, or as major depressive disorder.
* Although you meet the criteria for the frequency of symptoms, your symptoms do not appear to be severe enough to meet the criteria for Major Depressive Disorder.
* You have experienced symptoms of a manic episode.
* You experience some symptoms of Simple Phobia.
* You appear to have some obsessive thoughts.
* You display some symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but you do not appear to meet the full criteria for the disorder.
* You appear to suffer from some symptoms of Borderline Personality disorder.

Nothing I didn't already know <_<

A decent day....

Not a bad day, spent most of my time in Training Grounds #1. I turned off the aiming reticle again, so my accuracy is getting back up to snuff in RvS. Used to have it off all the time, but after getting back into SWAT 4, I turned it back on in RvS, for the consistency - since SWAT 4 won't let me turn off the aiming reticle there in Multiplayer mode :-(. Really, I like playing without the reticle on screen; much more realistic. It also frees me up to just aim and fire insticively, rather then using the red micro-dot in the centre, as my point of refence. Instead, I see target, I hit target ;-). That's basically the way I was trained, keep moving, go full auto, fire off short controlled bursts of 2~3 rounds and keep'em firing until the S.O.B. goes down for good. With the way things are going these days, I think the next generation of Recruits is gonna have it much easier then us lot did :\. But oh well, I'm just an old fart at heart lol.


Got to enjoy some range work also, taking shorts at near my maximum effective range on DF_Compound, limbering up the ol'CQB and virtual CS-imunity on Box_Storage, limping through the Playground on razor-eyes detail <_<, and commanding a stealth element on Private Airport and MP Training; finishing out witha little more 'mixed' ops hehe.


No idea who set up the line up for this afternoon, but I really enjoyed listening to the Radio today lol. This one song in particular is really starting to grow on me, and a friend introduced me to an interesting band today... hehe.


Sigh, it's back to work on Tuesday :-(

Annoyance with half assed work

I will never understand why so many people seem to do so much insecure $h|+ with temporary files.... for the love of petes sister, if the system provides secure alterntiives -- use them for cryoing out !)%(!%)!(%Y)!ing loud. Is it really that hard? It's not like you have to implement the damn wheel everwhere.... And if osme one is going to reimplement the damn wheel -- make it a better one, not even worse one shaped like a triangle!!!




Some times... people really, really, really annoy me with what they do....

An utterly boring day...

Almost no sleep, and more then a bit of annoyance to start off the day... Gotta love family, eh? SO nice to only be considered, when it is /as good as/ a ploy for getting cooperation with their own endeavours (shove off!). Managed to have a good lunch, better then most meals of late; I haven't been eating that much. Really, about all I've been eating much of is a Special K cereal with berries; I gave up most junk foods last year, lol.


Managed to get several rounds on SWAT 4 today, good to see that I am still limber ;). From recent ops, I think it is about time I release my personal skin; the no armour version is technically a bug, but I actually like how it came out hehe. Also found out about a few tanks I never heard of before: the Panzer VIII "Maus", Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte, and Landkreuzer P. 1500 Monster. Looking over the docs, ffs - like a navy destroyer with tank threads kind of big! I wonder if even modern day technology, could get a beast the size of the Ratte moving across a battle field for more then 10 minutes and a few metre lol. I've also heard that a newer MS Gundam series is running on Sci-Fi, note to self - check further.


Really, it's been a very boring and uneventful day. I've also gotten absolutly nothing done........ *sigh*

I really, really, really need some R&R

Hmm, it has most certainly been a long day. My mind has been focused on issues, both of a very pleasent and unpleasent nature most of the night, not even coding has provided much distraction from the rest of my life. Hmm, at this point, I think I am sick of my own thoughts. It's only 0830Z (0330R (local)), but I may as well hit the hay. There is nothing that I can get done, that I actually feel like doing, or am capable of doing at this point. I wonder, what was the last time I actually had some peace in my life? Has it really been that long? Probably has, my friends would know it better then I would.. (f*** it) it really has been a long time. I'm not sure if I honestly remember what the word means anymore, I so rarely get any with the way things are these days lol. It's 16 degrees out, but I think I would rather march in the cool air, then sit idle tonight. I never seem to sleep that well anymore, for at least a ~decade I guess. but I know, sleep soon, or there will be sunlight through the blinds before I doze off. Already been there once, not really in any mood to repeat that incident.


Oh, how I wish I could get out of here.... even if for just a little while.

At long last... Friday cometh, thank ye GOD.

Finally, I'm off work until Tuesday - and will probably be mad as a hatter before night fall :\. This morning, I was some what disappointed, it was only around 15 F (around -9.5 C) by the time I woke up; people were told to expect much, much colder xD. Never the less, I still equipped for with an extra layer just in case. Usually, I'm out with nothing on but a T-Shirt or a moderate-level of jacket until I can see my breath, then I consider a 3rd layer (I consider my T-Shirt *as* one layer, lol). Took an old light-duty jacket out of the closet, that was getting a little to short in the draft for regular use; but it had a great lining for such a thin jacket lol. Also conveniently one that tends to keep the air tucked in close to the body, in this case warm air from the house. Put my usual light/medium jacket over that for a hood, it has a mesh like lining on the inside, for whatever it's value; usually I wear it as a rain coat, not for cold weather purposes haha. Then donned the fleece for a final layer; the heaviest form of dress that I will actually wear, lol. I figured with the wind, I should wrap my face in the scarf, then put up the hood and secure it all with my boonie style hat (usually, I only bring it out on rainy days lol), but couldn't find the dang scarf; which is what I really wanted :-(. All in all, I could've done with just my regular jacket and that scarf though, when I set foot outside I couldn't feel a damn thing - except for my bare face and knee caps.


Before I left work, I put on one jacket for the trip home; and put the rest in the pack, since I always shred my layers upon arrival lol. By the time I got to the car, I was already hot and took it off. It was only 27 F (around -2.45 C), so it wasn't cold out in the least! I grew up in South Florida, where anything under 90 F (around +32 C) is considered a cool day by local standards... After moving to Georgia, if it is above freezing, I don't even notice the temperature without a wind chill >_>.


I prefer colder weather, and usually enjoy being out in the rain; maybe I am just a strange person. Although I miss Florida a lot, I really, really, really!!!! do not miss the heat that much. I'm just naturally warm to start with :\





I was some what hoping to get to the Library today, but unfortunately not in the cards. I'm rather interested to see what they might have, if anything interesting; on various mathematics topics. Generally, I laugh my ass off whenever I pass their computer section (Foo for dummies and learn XYZ app/OS is about as good as they get), but I do remember they *used* to have some good books on Aeronautics once upon a time, so maybe I'll get lucky. I still remember my surprise when they upgraded all their computers, I was surprised their budget ever heard of something faster then an Intel 80486 or Pentium Pro o.00.o. They only completed the switch from card catalogue to a computerized system in the mid 2000s, so I guess that is a good sign... Haha, I never thought I'd say it, but I actually miss the old card catalogue. The computer based catalogue, utterly sucks for trying to find anything; it makes Microsoft's search engine look sexy. One nice thing about the card catalogue, it went quite nice with how the library organizes the books on the shelves; so usually I have to settle for using the computer to find what shelf I should check, then visually grep (vigrep anyone? hehe) the asiles for subject matter. I tried checking their website, but it's been down for weeks; can't find anything from Googles cache, so it doesn't look like the computerized card catalogue is available online. The place that is hosting the new central library that opened recently however, seems to have a database of all libraries in the county, so maybe I can scope things out.


An interesting thought also occurred to me, but nah... fate is so rarely on my side lol.



On another note, I really should look up the organization system used by libraries here, and see if I can leverage that further to my advantage (hey, it's been years since I used the old-style card catalogue ^_^). A quick Google turns up a few ideas for what I should search for next; combined with my memory, should be fairly easy for me to look up the system in use; if it is one of those anyway... EDIT: looking at the online offerings for the county, I am oddly reminded of an issue of xkcd, and their website is *so* old-style IE it hurts almost as bad as their catalogue hehe.

How it is possible to spend hours filtering across the web, trying to learn parts of mathematics bit by bit until the clocks gone by.... And not be bored :\

Headache or eye strain, yes occasionally, but not boredom lol.

I can't wait for the weekend....

Perl promotes laziness

#
# We need to open a set of files for writing, and reference the paths later;
# the hash gives us a nice way to work with them later.
#
my %lgfiles = ( pidfile     => "${datadir}/${0}.pid",
                errlog      => "${datadir}/${0}.err"
                ...         => ... );

# but how do we open the set of files?


# this is a lot of typing, but common style in some places
open PIDFILE,   ">", $lgfiles{pidfile}     or die "some message: $!";
open ERRLOG,    ">", $lgfiles{errlog}      or die "some message: $!";
open ...,       ">", $lgfiles{...}         or die "some message: $!";


# this is better, but still too much typing
{
    my $msg = 'some message:';
    open PIDFILE,   ">", $lgfiles{pidfile}     or die "$msg $!";
    open ERRLOG,    ">", $lgfiles{errlog}      or die "$msg $!";
    open ...,       ">", $lgfiles{...}         or die "$msg $!";
}


# this is handy
#
# open each key in %lgfiles for writing to as KEY
#
while (my ($k, $v) = each %lgfiles) {
    open uc($k), '>', $v or die "can't open $v: $!";
} 

# same thing, but faster to read (IMHO)
#
# open each key in %lgfiles for writing to as KEY
#
map { 
       my $fn = $lgfiles{$_};
       open uc($_), '>', $fn or die "can't open $fn: $!";
    } keys %lgfiles;

For some reason, the intregration of regular expressions, qw/quote words/, map {} @list, grep {} @list, the $_ default variable, and the do_something or die $! thing are my favorite features of Perl. While in most other languages, the only great feature I get to enjoy is the trinary/ternary ?: operator, when there's a place that it improves readiblity and reduces visual clutter ;-).


Ok, so my biggest beefs about Python 2.5 is no ? : and having to import re, hehe

Day dreams

Recently, I've been drueling a bit at the T-Mobile G1, if I had the money to spare, it would really be worth it, in it's own way lol. Especially the fun of bending it to the functionality I require from such a gizmo, although honestly; I don't care much for such mobile devices. In America, we're stuck in a country where it pays more to rehash last years crap then be innovative; just look at Microsofts last 30 years of products.


I doubt, if I'll ever meet a gizomo smaller then a laptop but bigger then a pen, that I won't consider unneccessarily "downgraded", short of importing an old Zaurus PDA or building something myself. Heh, if I had the kind of cash Mark Shuttleworth has, I would really have some fun :-). Enough cash to cover the educational-in-betweens, and the cash to see just what is possible with modern technology...

And then sale it and go broke in the process of competing with same ol'craps that tries to set the users expectations, not go for the gold.

Days thoughts, thus far

Managed to get to bed early last night, was only up to around 0330R haha. Dreams were a mixture, of pleasant and unpleasant; the former parts still being on my mind. I also woke up to some good news: an unexpected day off work! Which is good, because tomorrow will likely be a living hell.... as usual.


I'm tired, and it's only 1736R. Really, I think the dog is the smart one lol, Willows been sleeping all day >_<. Last night, I posted on Daemon Forums asking for suggestions on a lightweight web browser to replace Firefox3. I've used Firefox for a really, really, really long time; but 1.5.x was the best hehe. I found Fx2 disappointing in terms of usability, and Fx3 has been totally useless for me on Windows, and a major pain in the ass under FreeBSD. I also went through Links 2.2, and tested it thoroughly; I could live without CSS support, if only it supported tabbed browsing in the GUI. Links is really a very nice browser on the user side, it also boats great speed and highly legible display. Today, I did some heavy testing on the FreeBSD and Linux builds of Opera 9.63. For a long time, I used Opera, first in the 8.5x and later into the early 9.x before switching defaults. Dillo2, Arora, and Midori are next on my hit list; but it would be awesome to adapt Opera as my standard browser again. I'm a person that very much likes to use his own personal environment, rather then someone else's can of spam.


I also enjoy software that are both portable, easy to manage, and don't make you unlearn things just for changing Operating Systems. One of my big beefs with Firefox for example, Unix edit->preferences Vs Windows tools->preferences. It adapts to what the user would expect, which is honourable for such a program I guess, but pisses me off ^_^.


Opera is one of the better proprietary products I've encountered, and one of my favorite web browsers. Unlike Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, there is no need to extend it in order to get the most bang for ya buck either ;-)

Writer's Block: Tricky Questions

What is your first reaction when someone says "I need to talk to you"?

Live Journals Writer's Block

"About what?"


What else could I possibly think of on first contact? >_>.


Ok, so my mind just works like that, lol -- I can't help it :-)

Hard Target

Caught an interesting action movie on, Hard Target. I'm not a fan of Jean Claude van Damme, but I was well impressed. Throughout the entire action flick, I couldn't help but wonder who made this movie... the planning and use of the camera was awesome; in a way, that I have not seen for years lol.


I also had the train of thought, some where along the lines that if John Woo didn't have some influence on this, I'd eat my hat! Sure enough, Directed by John Woo, and executive produced by Sam Raimi, which really explains a lot. The shots in the movie alone make it worth watching, the ingenuity during fight, fusion of gun play and close quarters, go well beyond what you see in many of the more recent action movies. Not quite the invincible hero syndrome of the 80's, or the regular 90's flair but without a doubt, superb! Hard Targets a must see for any action movie goer lol.


Also good to see a techniques using a pistol in each hand, combined with Van Damme's foot work; which can only be outshone by the bayou lovin', moon shine drinkin' uncle lol.

I can really relate to this:

Dark Helmet: Careful you idiot! I said across her nose, not up it!
Laser Gunner: Sorry sir! I'm doing my best!
Dark Helmet: Who made that man a gunner?
Major Asshole: I did sir. He's my cousin.
Dark Helmet: Who is he?
Colonel Sandurz: He's an asshole sir.
Dark Helmet: I know that! What's his name?
Colonel Sandurz: That is his name sir. Asshole, Major Asshole!
Dark Helmet: And his cousin?
Colonel Sandurz: He's an asshole too sir. Gunner's mate First Class Philip Asshole!
Dark Helmet: How many asholes do we have on this ship, anyway?
[Entire bridge crew stands up and raises a hand]
Entire Bridge Crew: Yo!
Dark Helmet: I knew it. I'm surrounded by assholes!
[Dark Helmet pulls his face shield down]
Dark Helmet: Keep firing, assholes!

For some reason, they've been playing Spaceballs a lot lately, refreshing really - they usually don't put it on cable that much.

scary...

Ok, picking apart X86 assembly by studying code written for Linux under GAS, using NASM for documentation on FreeBSD, was fun.

When it's after 0800 zulu, I'm starving, and picking apart notations is beginning to compile into making sense..... and you can't remember the last time you slept at ease, somerhing is just nuts... :\ I guess, the real question, is how much will still be remembered in the morning, or with the time frame I'm likely to get to bed at, probably the _afternoon_

Grrr..... spanning around 20 pages of wikipedia and other places on the net, I think I can kiss sleep good bye tonight...

One sad fact, with the limitations of my education: I always find myself backtracking through the "Eh, what does that mean" 'ing of things, until eventually I figure it out, or my brains stack overflows; especially a problem, since once I start I often end up exploring further. (I still remember looking up something from the 1800s for school, and ending my quest around the 1960s in Vietnam War...)


In one of my many side steps from topic matter, to trying to make heads or tails of things I see, I finally saw something that made sense:



rewritten as:



I saw something like the above earlier today, and scratched my head. Seeing the decompiled form of it, the really strange thing? I see an iterative loop much like a line of code, haha! I remember seeing a symbol like the one in the center somewhere, in reference to summation; so considering that possibility (and noting to look try and look it up later); the ⁿ above and the i=1 below the symbol, it became clear. The c_i x_i made sense the instant I saw it, I'm not that numb lol; it was the stuff in the center that didn't fit my comprehension.


So, if the ⁿ was the length of vectors c and x, with _i so obviously being an index value >0 and < n; _i=1 would have to be the first index value to use for iteration over c and x; intended to make it clear what element the slice begins at (helpful to me, since I often count from 0 to n, thank you C lol); and having already written off the funky-E as an operator meaning the find the total value of each element added together. The middle of the image became in my minds eye like some what like this:

for (i=1, n=length(c); i <= n; i++) { do a sum += c[i]; ... }

only, written sideways with lovable horizontal terseness ;-) I am reminded of a something I once read:

Mathematicians are [like] a sort of Frenchmen; if you talk to them, they translate it into their own language, and then it is immediately something quite different.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

but in this case, you could say a programmer is trying to translate math notation, into concepts he already knows as second nature lol. You know, it really would've be nice if school had thought me this stuff.

I think, I could really use a drink...

I had a shocking thought, stick a nice cigar in my mouth and give me a week in the brush, and I'm starting to look a little to much like Big Boss for my tastes :\. I really need to get cleaned up this weekend, and get a close shave.... Really, I'd like to get out of this rats nest for awhile, and have some fun, but I am supposed to be using this time for a little Rest and Relaxation; guess taking a Buddy Love inspired holiday wouldn't be very restful any way >_<

If it wasn't for trying to learn something about differential equations (curse smart people for piquing my interest!) and reading a little bit of lisp, this might be a boring, lol.



Now if I could just do something about getting some sleep at night.......

Should reading lisp be considerd hazardous?

my eyes are starting to see ) and jump back to matching (, then reparse what I just read, jump back to ); like a bloody type writer, lol

(define (factorial n k)
  (= n 0 (lambda (b)
          (if b
              (k 1)
              (- n 1 (lambda (nm1)
                      (factorial nm1 (lambda (f)
                                      (* n f k)))))))))

if I wasn't hungry, I would think that I was getting dizzy after 30min of this kinda stuff :\. I generally don't mind the parens, but I find assembly easier on the brain sometimes...

Just one o' them songs

Heard it enough times on the radio to get sick of it, until it actually starts to sound pretty good....

Just a girl born in Dixie, washed in the blood
And raised on the banks of the Mississippi mud
She always had a thing about fallin’ in love with a bad boy
Yeah they could see it all comin’
But her daddy never dreamed
She’d grow up that fast, you know what I mean
The way a girls gets when she turns seventeen, kinda crazy

She’s a rebel child and a preacher’s daughter
She was baptized in dirty water
Her mama cried the first time they caught her with me
They knew they couldn’t stop her
She holds tight to me and the Bible
On the back seat of my motorcycle
Left her daddy standing there preaching to the choir, you see
God love her
Oh, me and God love her

She kissed her mama good-bye
Said, "I’ll be sure to phone ‘ya"
She called her from a truck stop in Tucson, Arizona
With amazing grace we made California alive
And then my gypsy life started takin’ it's toll
And the fast lane got empty and out of control
And just like an angel she saved my soul from the devil

She’s a rebel child and a preacher’s daughter
She was baptized in dirty water
Her mama cried the first time they caught her with me
They knew they couldn’t stop her
She holds tight to me and the Bible
On the back seat of my motorcycle
Left her daddy standing there preaching to the choir, you see
God love her
Oh, me and God love her

Now she holds tight to me and the Bible
On the back seat of my motorcycle
Left her daddy standing there preaching to the choir, you see
God love her
Oh me and God love her
God love her
Me and God love her

-- GOD Love Her, by Toby Keith

I really hate to tell people how to do their job

I really hate to tell people how to do their job, especially when they are the ones who should be getting paid to do it; but sometimes I can't help but wonder, if some people have ever heard of the words race condition or predictability, being used in the same sentence as exploit or security vulnerability?

How to fix complex technology

Russian Cosmonaut: It's stuck, yes?
American Astronaut: Back off! You don't know the components!
[Russian guy pushes American gal out of the way; who looks ready to belt him one]
Russian Cosmonaut: Components. American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!
[He beats the crap out of the machinery with a wrench until it works]

Ain't it just the truth? Does it really matter which country uses it, it's all more or less from the same place, and none of it works properly ^_^

Camels rock

Been reading a bit more of Programming perl, I left off at the start of Chap. 7 "Formats" for the night, so I could get to taking care of things before work tomorrow (I haven't been on the computer all day lol). I enjoyed the later parts of the chapter on regular expressions; although I've known regular expressions (hence forth regex) for a long time now, I *loved* getting to read more about how the parser & engine works; it has changed the way I think about the /PATTERN/ (and just how much hard work perl does to deal with greedy people).


I also learned a few new things, namely just how advanced Perls regexes are: I've always felt that Perl must be the king & queen of regex implementations.... after seeing all the (?...) stuff that is referenced in the book (the ones I didn't know yet), I think Perl must be the king, queen, jack, and ace; or as my hanging jaw expressed, "Fucking brilliant!" ;-). The other things, is how in the universe can 'pos($str) = 1;' could possibly be legal, rather then just an interesting form of magic; and how functions that skip the dang comma after a block, like the built in 'map { block } @list' does, can be defined. Which interestingly, also explains how modules like Error and Exception from CPAN likely do there stuff.


This is getting interesting hehe.

Hmm, in reading the large message I've been writing out, I can't help but think..... If I don't edit a few parts out, they are gonna think I'm psychic or knew that the past months worth of ops were coming. I didn't though, I just figured out they were coming, months ago looool; it's not like it was that hard to anticipates.


It's the virtue of old age, you get to spend more time thinking :-)



But if I don't keep the sections in place, the recipients might not understand the direction I'm coming from :\. What can I say, life is like a chess board.

DTrace entry in /usr/src/UPDATING

20080826:
DTrace support was merged to STABLE today. In the best
tradition of "the dog ate my homework", subversion decided
that the commit message was too large and opted not to send
it. It was a stealth commit!

A 'make buildkernel' will now default to build the kernel
and modules with both DTrace kernel hooks and CTF data ready
for DTrace.

After you have installed both world and the kernel, and
rebooted, you can 'kldload dtraceall' to load all the DTrace
kernel modules and then you're set to run the 'dtrace'
client (as root).

For DTrace documentation, refer to:


We are limited to kernel tracing at the moment, so the pid
provider is not available.

For the syscall provider, note that the arguments to the
return probes are the same as for the entry probes.

hehe, gotta love Subversion :-)

Oy, not ot far into the book and the lack of sleep finally cought up to me... passed out for a few hours. I set a new shameful record for lack of sleep this week, but the nap was well deserved lol. Felt fairly well without the lack of sleep, but eventually.... as one friend put it:

your body will give you a resounding "NO MORE" and you w ill collapse whn you need sleep

Last night, I meant to read some more of the camel, but dropped stone cold to the pillow; then woke up bright and fresh around 0700 local haha. Decided to read some of the book, but couldn't focus very well with the brightness of the book light; ut the TV on to help my eyes adjust to the light. Read a few chapters and had some scrambled eggs & toast (I almost never have any breakfast, but then again, I almost never get out of bed at 0730 without leaving for work either!). So far, I've only read around 80 pages, so I'm about 50~60pg behind schedule; (but hey, sleep deprivation catches up eventually) hopefully I'll work my way through the thousand or so remaining pages quite quickly. I know Perl about as well as I know any language well; but ya never know, might actually learn something new lol.

Just finished the preface maybe 15min ago, and even by then, I could tell I was gonna like this book xD

stressful, yet economical day

I logged off around 0530~0545R, I couldn't sleep.... was around 0730'ish when Ma got up, and aroun d800 by the time the woke me up to start shuffling crap around; operating under the assumption that the maintenance guy would have to replace the entire water heater in order to deal with the now kaput elements. Managed to clear the forums a bit & get throuhg it. Then she decided to go shopping; I managed to get to BestBuy and Barnes & Noble.


Spent my gift card towards a (DDR-333) PC-2700 SO-DIMM, got my laptop sold 512MB one sitting on a dresser now. So far, it seems the system has become more processor limited, but hey, GNU emacs starts quickly now >_> (but I'm a vim user :-P). I also bought a little Jumbo LapDesk to replace the chestboard I've been using as a tray table for my laptop. I don't like the slippage, but it's sound enough when in 'use', but I wouldn't want to use it for storage though - for fear the laptop will slide off the lapdesk, off the table, and onto the hard deck lol. As a replacement for the chessboard, I miss how the laptop used to stick in place on the surface, I kinda wish that I got the wooden lapdesk for about $10 more, but hey... I'm a cheap bastard. The only reason why I'm replacing the chessboard, is because last week I was wondering why my left leg was hurting around the inner-side (Tibia?), when about 3 days later I found the edges of the chess board were starting to cut into my leg :\.


Found a much wider scope of books at the store then I expected, basically every kind of Linux (especially Fedora / Ubuntu) and Windows server book out there; VisualBasic, heck of a lot of ASP.net (barf), sweet stockpile of Java & JavaScript books, even C#, Python, and Ruby books; even PHP & MySQL. I didn't find anything I had *wanted* to find though, stuff like the works of W. Richard Stevens (especially those on network programming), or some of the books on LaTeX I have interest in (as opposed to flipping through webpages of documentation). not to much of a surprise though. I was rather disappointed with the amount of computer related and science books there, but alas, that's the world we live in -- I didn't really expect to find anything better then "Learn Visual Basic in 20 minutes" or something useless like that 8=). I did however find something worth buying, the llama, Camel, and the Cookbook. I hated to pay the price ($50), but I bought Programming Perl; hopefully it will come in handy someday.


I know both programming and Perl well enough, that the cook book doesn't interest me that much, not for $50 lol. Learning Perl, is good for refreshing my memory if I never touch the language for over a year or so... But I've never read Programming Perl, no idea where to put it on my book shelve yet either lol. The thing I'm mostly interested in, is not having to look for the manual pages / plain old documentation for various things and switch between windows back / forth while coding. Although, I do have both perldoc.perl.org and search.cpan.org on keyword access in Fx, it's a bit of a poor substitute for a few book marks hehe. I was also a good boy, I kept myself firmly away from the science fiction and fantasy sections.... I'd be to tempted to pick up good reading material, lol.


I almost never buy computer books really, most of the ones I have were $1 at a library book sale; since I'm the only mook around who would care, bought'em lol. That's actually how Java entered my skill-set, even though I often avoid writing Java code when I can. Most of the books I get, usually are Sci-Fi or technical material related to such topics >_>. On computers, I'm used to using documentation and reading comprehension to understand stuff.



All in all, I guess a fair day.... NOW IF ONLY I COULD GET SOME SLEEP !!!

New personal best RvS Crazy

Parade Line Up Mission; teammates dropping like flies, I'm running a blitzkrieg of a fight through the map.... clear the roof alone with just a naked MP5/10A2 with no attachments.


All the way pro.... just like I was trained, then I round the corner with gun ready as I slice it -> POW right in the kisser.



All that, without so much as a scratch, and he had to go do that lol.

Todo

Reply to this thread properly: http://forums.pcbsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12998


& this one: http://forums.pcbsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=9763&start=15

Chuckle of the day, 2009-01-02

Getting playful

I've been experimenting with extracting PC-BSD PBI on FreeBSD; mainly because I would like to do a little postmortem analysis on a couple of PBI's, to see if the "Officially sanctioned" PBI Developers are still following the rules.


The process is actually a lot simpler then I thought it would be, the only problem is doing it in a chroot lol. Already more then 200MB in files in /tmp/chroot, and I've found that PBI must "assume" the presence of a lot of shit, because it will segfault if even simple things like awk or whoami are missing, let along bigger things 8=), what ever happened to error checking? But anyway, it's a fairly easy thing to sort out, even with having to take a fair number of libraries and programs into the chroot, in order to fool the thing into -extract'ing. So far, I've only hit one snag:

/home/0/.PBItmp/.pbistart: ./PBI: not found

which I have not figured out yet.


I think I've also found the origin of one of the more stupid elements of the PBC Sh API, and it seems to reflect the PBI sub systems source, judging by what I see in PC-BSDs Subversion >_>. It also reminds me, that some people seem to have never heard of a symbolic constant in their entire lives.... which also explains a few other things about the PBI Creation process and PC-BSD in general. Since PC-BSD, unlike a *real* BSD system, does not believe in documenting anything. I've had to go straight to the (also undocumented) source for answers, it also temps me to write a detailed review and commentary - but I'll keep my mouth shut for now. The number of people they will probably buttfuck in the long run is their own concern, I've already left. I'm not really interested in shifting through several thousand lines of intermixed Bourne, Bourne Again, and C++ code just to audit a few PBI; let some other poor schlep, eh Good Samaritan deal with this schlockware.



If my post doesn't make it obvious by now, the reasons why I was conducting the tests within a chroot environment, rather then sparing myself the trouble -> I wouldn't let the PC-BSD developers, or most peoples PBI touch one of my systems with a ten-thousand foot cattle prod, and I don't have time for setting up a jail. That is the kind of feelings I've got for the project, after using PC-BSD for years; now OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD on the other hand, them I trust... and have seen the resulting work to warrant it lol.


- A strict son of a bitch.

Oh wonderful day....

Spend my afternoon trying to out lag suspects on SWAT 4, with a ratio of 5:1 rounds per kill them:me. Managed to sit down with the laptop, start compiling a list of libraries to standardize on, and at long last - there's actually good stuff on TV. Fast foreward a few hours, now Ma is using my DVD player to watch her new movie; being hard of hearing like everyone else in my fscking family, I'm gonna be deaf from how high she has the volume lol. Even worse, between her and the dogs, I'm getting crowded off my bed... laptop and all.


And I've still got a few dozen libraries to sort through before dinner.... why do I even bother? Doing anything in this place, is like trying to put a hole in ones head -> not good for ones survival, unless ones name is Egon Spengler!


to do: finish research on text, cgi, html, http, gtk, tk, and x11 relateds.

*sigh*

Why I love Perl.....

For a little project, I basically need a quick but simple way of translating things from one format to one of another; the catch? How to do it! I figured, a hash would be a great way to do it, since each of the translations can be quickly processed as translate_from => translate_to. The problem? There's a fair # of keys and values, most hashes I encounter in Perl are written like this:

# modern
my %hash = ( foo => 1, bar => 'string', );
# classic
my %hash = ( 'foo', 1, 'bar', 'string', );

the main value of the arrow operator => is that we get to skip quoting the hashes key... but wtf good is it, if we have to quote each value, because they are all strings in our hash? So I sat and thunk for about 45 seconds and wondered.... wouldn't it be so wonderful, if I could say something like qw/key1 value1 key2 value2 .../ and format it much like the classic style for legibility, but not have to write *any* quotes for the strings?


Attempting it 2 minutes later:

my %hash = qw/foo  1
                bar  string
                ...  ...
             /;

It never actually occurred to me before, b/c almost every time I care about hash keys, is w hen I can use a hash as a form of quick dynamically created storage for data, that I will probably want to walk across both the keys and values on later. But since qw/foo bar/ is equivalent to ('foo', 'bar'), it works just perfectly here!


Perl is not the most beautiful language, it's a language for *getting the job done*, and in that spirit, has 1000s of little things that help make things less painful -> like not having to quote every dang gum key value in a hash lol. One thing I also like abut Perl, I can always read my scripts 6++ months later ;-)



I love this tool, lol.