Makin Movies, Makin Songs...

... and Foightin round the World!

So at work this week, I hack into Gary's 1337 book collection. He has a book for Linux Network Administration, or some such. It looks like a good one. I've been reading it a bit at work and I am hoping I will be able to setup some more network servers on Nikita, starting with a primary nameserver and hopefully ending up with a successful NIS setup.

"Its a long hard road out of Hell!"

There's just *piles* of stuff I know too little about. Like the 'host' command for looking up the IPs of urls. Or yp-serv for sharing user information on a network. That oughtta keep me busy in the 'slow' times at work.

In consumer business, though I have not bought anything yet, I'm also thinking about my multimedia equipment. Chiefly that I should start building a home stereo and ignore wasting cash on a portable cd/mp3 player. Sounds like fun, no? I can just replace Paul's stereo by module, starting with the amp.

Mmm and Vampire. Most of the coterie ended up owing *lots* of boons left-and-right and in return I (and my coterie) have a couple big favours to call in from a couple big sources... Hmm, we'd best figure a good way to let this city know that we did revive Archon Fedrico Di Padawah and are the ones to choose to run this show.

Argh Its Quiet!

Same-old same-old. Up to work, video games, and too little projin'. Actually, I did log some energy into the messaging design *grumble* *grumble*. That is something I really need to spend regular time at. Had a few drinks this eve so not tonight, but mayhaps tomorrow.

In Nikita news... I think I'm finally getting my expectations for a server down to a reasonable level. Chiefly: None. I'm going to stick a bigger hd in Dulcea and a mess of RAM. As for Nikita, I will swap a quieter power-supply in since her's is suffering a little of the vtol'itis. Upgrade her ram soonish. As for the storage issues, I dunno. Mayhaps I will swap my new huge drive in for the hdb and use the 20GB for Dulcea which is enough (now she has a 7GB which is weak).

And that's the news. Heck, soon I get paid and will realize some of my computer upgrades.

Whoops, Lost a Week There

Seems that I lost a week in there somewhere. Guess I had better summarize briefly then since I have no hope of remember all the details...

Hmm. Work, games, food, repeat. Not very intersting week since I haven't done anything. Wait, LIES! I was taking a peek at Nikita's df -h during the week to find that the root partition was down to 35MB free. I started bitching and cursing and dove into rpm to start removing packages. Well, I kill rpm again thus I *really* need to start build my new server from LFS.

After hacking at rpm for a little while to no avail, one of my brilliant users pointed out that I should probably clear-out /var/log. I said to myself:

"hmm... good idead. lets du -sh... Oh shit! Its 200MB! I installed this system four weeks ago. That's 50MB a week..."

Nikita was going down by the end of the week so I moved everything in /var/log to my share partition and... symlinked /var/log to it, hehe. Symlinks rule.

So to summarize: Don't be an archangel and put your /var/log on a separate partition so that you don't fill up root and fuck-up your system. (Note the rhyme.)

Sunday Night

In the news today: Updates have gone missing. We suspect that journalists are either getting really sloppy, or have picked up a crack habbit. We apologize for the lack of interesting service lately and will continue with our rehabilitation program.

And now for something completely different, a midget wearing a bikini:
This last week has been plenty full of Vampire stuff. Writing background material and building the online site. Heck, even added a light-weight private messaging system to it. Seems like the players are making fairly good use of it.

In sys admin news, I finally found a good setup for wu-ftp. Anonymous login sends you to the chrooted ftp directory where you can d/l files but not upload. Navigate to the pub folder and you can upload files and conversly not download them. Seems to be working nice a slick. And no guest or real logins, of course.

Picked up a little practice with .htaccess files today as well. Got them to supress or allow directory listings in the various areas of the site. Shipped the boss .htaccess link to Tammie as well. I'm sure she'll love it.

Ah, and did a little slogging on the ArchMessaging design. Doesn't look pretty, I tells yeh. The elegant solution I had mostly sketched out is *way* too inefficient. Every user would have a minimum of at least one group and every forum would have permissions for most of the groups which would have to be sorted through every time a user viewed, posted, edited... etc. Not nice. The way phpBB seems to have it setup is by breaking the forum system in a set of cases which maybe more cumbersome to handle in code but is much lighter in execution. Pfah!

order deny,allow
deny from all

That's what I say to users!

Up and Runnin'

New Hethor round just started. Our tenth enumerated round. Must be something special. Bah, I dunno. Feeling tired but I'm just campin' to make sure the round (Infection) gets rolling properly. Should be fine since the code came up and the registration worked fine. Just a question as to how well the growth script works. Dis is goink to be a gud round, da? Gud and long. Eight weeks will make this our longest fixed round.

Mmm, still ploughing through piles of Vampire material. I've been spending my eves bickering over URO so I haven't got as much to show as I would like. Yergh. Being unemployed is a lot easier. Speaking of which, I'll get paid some time this week, mayhaps. Dat'd be swell since I'm flat freaking broke and would like to avoid cashing more of my term just to buy pizza. Dat'd be lame.

/me starts twiddling his thumbs

Eight minutes until the growth script runs. Doobie-doobie-doo...

There it goes. Not bad. The script went fine. Problem in the attacks though... Scored negative kills. Should be a quick patch.


Cheerio

Bwah! Mad sniper!

Boy, did I eat shit in DoD today. Scragged 7:26 while useing the Gerand and then 13:28 as I finished the map with a Thompson. Yeesh. My skillz suck.

Good news today, posted a fresh code-batch of Hethor. Yay for me. Tomorrow I have to implement the changes for Infection.

Still slogging up piles of BG work for Vampire. Mmm-mmm good. Fun stuff, but there's *lots* of it. I should paste it all in a doc and see how many words I've done up so far. Plenty, I'm sure.

Anyhow, dats de brief, yo. Diggit?

/me has been a slacker

Well, maybe, maybe not. Work is going fine. Up in the morning, at work until the evening.

Thursday I went over to Meep's pad. They've *really* cleaned that place up since I was last there. Heck, a fellow could even see the floor, ain't that fancy. Even the new tenant there seems like a nice person rather the psychotic and prone to the occasional assaults against the other tenants. Sadly, my visit was cut short after some choice eats and a couple brews because I made my mad dash over to the post office to grab my passport... Finally.

Took bleedin' long enough. The application was mailed on December 28th, along with the required DL and birth-cert, and only arrived on March 6th. That was not the expected two to four weeks. You know what that was? It was BULLSHIT!

Friday, again work. They haven't filed for a restraining order yet so I may have carried off a pretty good cover. Friday though, Tammie and I swapped sailor jokes for dead baby jokes, heh. Still no word of a restraining order. This place should be just fine.

Friday night we all piled west to Czak's for grub and duck porn. All was good in the land of Taco salad. Tacos!

".. all day and through the night" we were up to making Vampire characters and backgrounds. I'm still doing that right now, actually. I just realized I hadn't updated my plan. At any rate, that's about all my hours account for since my last plan update on the fifth.

Screw you guys.

A bum no more

Ah, so tomorrow morning I start my brand new job as Tier 1 tech support for ParaSun. Should be fine considering my biggest concern is what to wear. No holy jeans and shirt first day. No shirt and tie neither. Bah, slacks and a shirt will be fine.

In other news, that last of the major work on the Vampire site is done. What a pile of crap code. Definately caught the "it's due in 48 hours" syndrome. The db is okay, but I'm not using objects aside from the menu and email classes I wrote elsewhere. Archangel is a very naughty fellow. The code stinks but should work considering the site useage is exactly five. Now if only I could get more of GD done... I guess Vampire gave me some good ideas on what not to do for GD.

Other news? Ah, nothing. Screw you guys, I have to catch some 'Z's.

I like pipes

They are cool... Today's accomplishments are a simple few:
1. Got a bus pass,
2. Enhanced my news features (archives, ooo),
3. Added sexy pipes to the items in my links section,
4. Illed in tha hood, yo.

Yep, that's it. I start work on Thursday so I feel justified in slacking. Then again, by Monday I'll be wishing I hadn't wasted all my free time :P If anyone catches me bemoaning my time usage just remind me:

"Arch, four boxes of Vancouver Island in that weekend..."

A lightweight plan tonight. I'm going to go read. I'll just drop this in here: http://uro.mine.nu/~archangel/personal/

"Welcome to [the Ice Palace] where two's company and three's an audience." - Max Headroom (mod'ed by archangel)

Lookout! Games Ahead

And now, the review you've all been waiting for:

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Absolutely boss, yo. Ah dig dat flick. The CG was truly astounding. Spotting the *huge* Maya logo in the first scene was an amusing props to the 3D studio used for FF, and used well. If only animators weren't so stinking bent on particle effects... But aside from the gorgeous gfx, I even found most of the movie valuable for its setting and characters. CG aside, FF is still a good Sci Fi movie. They just got a little too melodramatic in the script in the last few scenes: "Don't leave me now!" "You saved my life, let me save yours." ... And so on. Heh, Alec Baldwin voiced Captain Gray. Overall rating: "see it in theaters and rent it a few times".

And now you'll be pleased to know that I won't be wasting your precious few literacy skills with my videe reviews for a while... Instead bullcrap about gaming!

In Kobal's werewolf, where I run a pack of evil characters, I had a boss downtime. Through a strange twist of events, my group of malevolent characters have managed to attract a group of cultist. Cool huh? Still deciding what to do with them. Maybe setup some traps and then flaunt the crew around town and try and gank some of the good-guys. Should be able to nab a few of those do-gooders.

As for Quirinus' Vampire game, I'm still thinking of what character I want to play. Definately leaning towards the meglomaniac kinda character. A Brujah likely. A Ventrue possibly. I guess I'll see what everyone else is sorta aiming for.

Must be time to unplug. C'yall on the morrow.

I'm On a Freakin' Roll Here

Dude! Today I recovered my old archive CD! I'm stoked about that. I have all my old school projects back, chiefly the 80c196KC Domination which is a micro controller simulator. I thought that was gone for good, but thar she be. More on that further down, but the other stuff on that disc was a pile of useful utilties I'd forgotten all about. Stuff like Eudora keygens, fv AudioCatalyst, and, erm, well a pile of other warez. Nevertheless, I had to surf through a lot of pr0n spam to get those apps and now I have them back thanks to IsoBuster.

Now that I have recovered my pride and joy, the chip sim, I brought this up with Dante. Needless to say, we've got a new project cookin. Since the simulator will read hex-files and our assembler (assm) in C produces hex files from assembly code, we're aiming to re-write both.

I'm pretty keen to practice my OOP and think we stand a sizeable profit from using C++ for both projects which will be a re-work from design forward. I may have to handle the bulk of the sim myself, but it all depends on what we plan.

Mmmm, Dos Equis is nice. And tomorrow is Nibble Night(tm). More brew again. Well, I'll harangue Dante into showing-up early so we can lay down some plans for coding our various projects before we head out.

Whee! It'll be fun. I'm still ecstatic to have recovered that CD :D At the bottom of my third brew now, so I'll see all y'all tomorrow.

Just another day on the farm

Interesting news? Nah, ain't got much of that. Got a pile of videe from the local store. 5 of 'em for 6 bucks. Here's the rundown so far:

Max Headroom
Wicked Sci Fi. Excellent humor in a dark-future setting. Definately a part of everyone's mandatory sci fi education. Glad I caught it. I rate it as "rent it often or buy yourself a copy".

Canadian Bacon
John Candy and company in the classic flick about the next US invasion of Canada, eh? Rated as "see it first run and buy yourself a copy". Heh. Even I'm afraid of the Canadian Menace now.

Amos Perros (subtitled)
Three short stories tied together for a Tarantino style film of wicked character. Truly well played and written characters. Rated as "catch in theaters for cheap and rent it many times".

The Long Yard
For fans of Mean Machine, you will immediately spot its origins in The Long Yard. A game about prisons and american football. Good humor if you can understand what the mush-mouths are saying. I could bloody understand the British Mean Machine way betteh then this southan mush. Blimey. Rated as "rent it".

Final Fantasy
Showing tomorrow.


In other news, been usering it up again. Apparently I never actually sent Kobal the email telling him GD was ready for his data. My bad. He's filled out the first batch of data and so I whipped up a bit more work on that site. Mmmm, faking foreign keys is fun.

Ah, and in gaming news... Those bastards didn't play Deadlands. So here endeth the tales of noble Nick. May he rest uneasily fer eternity. Bah, so next game we're going to take a spin at is Vampire. Eeks. Well it may not work out so well on the basis of my work schedule for the next while until the students are out of class. We shall see. Apparently Quirinus wants *us* to put effort into the game. Heh. That's like saying that running the show by commitee is a *good* idea. Maybe we'll slide into getting two games running in alternate weeks. Give each storyteller a chance to catch some air.


Anyhoo. Boring rant, I'm sure. But its time to read some more of American Gods. I'm near the end now. Shadow is hanging from the World Tree for Odin's vigil.