afog 93
Well, *someone* made something of a comeback in Attack!: The Expansion yesterday. Well done. Your secret sacred instructions to Rob must've worked. Final scores are on Rob's blog.
Posted on 01 August 2004 at 05:58 AM by Alicia Smith
afog 94
Thurs AM 05/08:
Well that was a busyish week. Looking back I don't think I accomplished much but it certainly flled the time. I am actually busy at work as well which helps a lot.
Never again will I try and play an 8 player game of Attack! This game just does not scale. Two turns in 5+ hours. And I had to proxy the second turn so that I could get home in time to get to JAFWA. Still Rob did really well especially as my major tactic card couldnt be played in the order I wanted because it would have ended the game. Well done Rob.
Due to my sleeping in several times I have not gone in by bike for nearly a week now. However, that has meant an oportunity to catch up with the nesting Galahs. The pair are still there but no sign of any young peeking from the nest. I can't find any details in the bird books about the development period for Galah chicks but I think they should be fairly active by now.
"Lake Trinity" ebbs and refills as the rain comes and goes. No resident Mountain ducks at the moment but a pair of Wood ducks were keeping watch.
Saw Triplets of Bellville on Monday evening. Very coool, very wacky, it reminds me a lot of the pen and wash cartoons that you used to get in upmarket journals come to life.
I've been working my way through re-reading Sherri S. Tepper's True Game books. I have two collected editions; The True Game, and The Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped as well as the last book of the third trilogy Jinian Footseer. I must go looking to see if Ms. Tepper has a website. My favoutite book of hers is Raising the Stones which is part of the loose story cycle that starts with Grass and ends with Sideshow.
Got a fair bit of mangling done to the QuickTopic archive script done recently. The results can be found on the archive page.
Posted on 04 August 2004 at 07:00 PM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 95
Found this fun little quiz on Laura's Blog. My result was:
You have a small, highly edited social group, and you like it that way.
What Type of Social Entity are You? brought to you by Quizilla
Posted on 05 August 2004 at 02:20 AM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 96
Sun PM 08/08:
Friday night gaming saw our old opponent John Samuel visiting from the wilds of the East. We played Citadels, Chrononauts, and Pirate's Cove. I won Chrononauts so I went home happy. Mind you I did pretty dismally at everything else.
I took the first steps to creating a Gentoo Linux distribution today. A couple of partitions were backed up and re-sized and the starter CD image downloaded (4 hours worth). Gentoo is set up as a source based distribution. It needs a lot more setup and compilation than many of the other installations but you get a vastly more streamlined result. Next step is to burn a starter CD and set up a minimal system that will dual boot with my existing SuSE system. I'm going to try and move to a 2.6 kernel at the same time.
I went to the local Harvey Norman's (Australian retail superstore) on Saturday to get printer ink refills. The price was about what I would pay elsewhere but there was an extra 15% discount if I purchased 3 or more cartridges. This just made it worthwhile dealing with a chain that I normally avoid like the plague.
With no JAFWA Saturday I cooked a Roast leg of lamb with garlic. Mmmmm. Roast carrot, pumpkin, and onions. Also corn on the cob and a couple of baby grilled eggplant. Ahhhh. I used to like doing legs of mutton because, it is cheap, the meat has more flavour, there is more of it, and where possible I prefer to let the animal have a life before it gets turned into my dinner. However, of late, the price of mutton has gone out of sight. Part of this has been the reduced flocks of wool producing sheep. But there has been an overall reduction in sheep numbers all over.
Saturday night we watched Wonderful Days a Korean animated film. We were reminded of an amalgam of Ghost in the Shell, Wings of Honneamise, Green Legend Ran, and a bit of Ben Elton's Stark. After an ecological catastrophe a refuge city is created for a social elite. The city is built around a power source derived from the pollution itself. Wonderful Days is set in the closing days of the city when the pollution is almost exhausted and the protagonists face personal and ethical conflicts while attending to the birth of a new age. All I can say is I don't think everyone dies.
Posted on 08 August 2004 at 09:49 AM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 97
Tues AM 10/08:
Waiting patiently for the 18th to come around. That is the release date for Madman's August titles. This month we are after Twelve Kingdoms and Witch Hunter Robin. Both of them are top series. Interesting characters, good storylines, beautiful animation, and interesting settings. This is the payoff for enduring the dross.
Stupid Evolution has crashed again while I was writing this. Possibly next weekend I'll start the compilation tasks for the Gentoo distribution. I'm looking foward to a having a low-latency 2.6 kernel.
There is a Black Faced Cuckoo-Shrike come by to perch on the power lines in the first rays of the morning sun. Perch ... semaphore with wings ... warble ... peer about ... shift ... repeat.
Posted on 09 August 2004 at 07:07 PM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 98
Mon AM 23/08
We are about two weeks away from implementing the HP OpenView Configuration Management Data-Base pilot at work. So work is a continual round of review and adjust.
After two weeks of intermittant downloading and compiling I've almost conquered the Gentoo installation process. My system dual boots into either SuSE or Gentoo and the Gentoo version runs with a 2.6.7 kernel and Gnome. I used the gnome-light package which works without a lot of the extras. I've been doing a lot of dependency comparisons an it looks like I'll run Mozilla-Firefox as the browser and Spruce or Sylpheed as the mail agent. Gentoo uses the X code from Xorg-X11 rather than XFree. X setup is normally a pain but it went quite smoothly. Xorg -config didn't quite cut it but the semi-manual configurator worked well.
I think the Galahs in the Plane tree have an offspring. The front looks a little too grey for an adult and it isn't attempting to fly. However, it is nearly ready to leave and it looks the size and almost the colour of an adult so I can't be sure.
Saw Hellboy on Sunday morning. Not quite what I expected but good enough. They have conflated a few characters and story lines but if Mike Mignola is happy then I'm not about to complain. Ron Pearlman made a fine Hellboy and the actor who played Abe Sapiens was wonderful.
Posted on 22 August 2004 at 09:08 PM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 99
Tues AM 24/08:
Gentoo continues to not quite work ... Sylpheed (and Spruce) keep throwing illegal instructions. So I am recompiling the complete tool tree with my current set of compilation flags. Fingers crossed. I guess it keeps me off the streets 8-/.
Welcome bcak to Lukasz who has recently re-built his blog page, Dwarf's Corner and is including his new wife, Alexsandra, as a corespondant. It seems like every time I look he as a new design up.
Over at Gary's Boring Blog I have been following the progress of their baby daughter. Sadly Rosie has just lost her battle against a malformed heart. It is strange, I have never met these people, they don't know me, and yet I know them better than I do the people two houses in any direction from home. I feel sad for Gary and Megumi and yet there are many worse happenings in the world every day that don't cause any noticable emotion. Maybe it is the same as reality TV, with people who want to be voyeurs, to experience life without taking any risks. *sigh* This is getting all too deep for me, I'm going to go and send them a sympathy message anyway.
Posted on 23 August 2004 at 09:12 PM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 100
Wed AM 25/08
Finished the re-compilation of everything that Sylpheed depends on sometime during the night. As I had to switch OS's to check my mail I decided to kick off the OpenOffice source download. To check the prerequsites and download size we run emerge --pretend --verbose openoffice. About 20 Mb ... no problems. However when the actual download happens it reports 220 Mb with a download duration of a fraction under 12 hours. *sigh* OpenOffice is going to account for nearly half the total source code volume on the system. What on earth do they put in there?
Posted on 24 August 2004 at 09:17 PM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 101
"What on earth do they put in there?"
Some clean underwear; a raincoat, just in case; some sandwiches in case the download gets hungry. 12 hours is a long time!
Posted on 25 August 2004 at 07:47 PM by Poss
afog 102
What on earth do they put in there?
Poss: I wouldn't be suprised. But I think your scale is off. Try: an entire walk in wardrobe possibly with an attached en-suite and a dining room with a 6 course banquet waiting to be served. Add assorted servants and possibly the kitchen sink to clean up afterwards.
To add insult the compile of Open Office failed miserably. The start-up warns that OO is very fragile with respect to compiler optimisation flags. To me this just seems like bad programming. It smacks of developers that are relying on side effects or particular code generation effects for "high performance" results.
The Sylpheed recompile worked nicely. I have a browser, I have a mail reader. Now if I can just work out why wvdial is rejecting any attempts to connect to the modem I would be laughing.
Posted on 25 August 2004 at 08:55 PM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 103
Mon 30/08:
Friday night went well. We played Britannia which is a boardgame about the history of Britain from the Roman invasion to the conquest by William the Conquerer. Each player controls a sequence of tribes and nations defending, raiding, and invading as their particular fortunes rise and fall. This time I was the red player who starts the game with the Brigantes who are sandwiched between the Belgae in the south and the Picts in the north. The ususal Brigante pattern is fight a delaying action against the Roman legions and submit to Roman rule as soon as it is permitted. This time I decided to go North and carve a new territory in Pictish lands. This worked and upset the game. The Blue player (Gary) lost points that the Picts would have gained, the Purple player's (Leece) Romans had an insecure Northern border and lost allied points, and the Green player (Rob) made some initial gains but suffered later from having a strong (red) Irish and Saxon presence.
Kudos to Rob for remembering that users must have write access to /var/lock to use the serial port. I was a member of the right group but the group did not have write rights. Now I have to work out why Westnet keeps hanging up the modem. I suspect pap-secrets and/or chap-secrets are not set up.
Posted on 29 August 2004 at 09:06 PM by Stephen Gunnell
afog 104
Tues AM 31/08:
Setting up pap-secrets fixed the disconnection problem. Now, I think, all I have to do is fix resolv.conf to get the applications talking across the link. I'll probably do that be setting up Bind as I do on the SuSE installation and put some entries in ip-up and ip-down to switch things on and off. Setting up Gentoo certainly has been a re-learning experience. I had forgotten exactly how many mysterious incantations get hidden behind the candy coated administration tools.
The quicktopic archive script has had some debugging and the archives are starting to format properly (before this debug session some line breaks were getting lost).
The gear-hub on my bike really needs a strip and clean. The gear change mechanism is all gummed up and won't properly go into top gear. I'll have to dose it with CRC 5.56 again as a temporary measure.
Posted on 30 August 2004 at 06:58 PM by Stephen Gunnell