Author: Dave Shevett

A wandering geek. Toys, shiny things, pursuits and distractions.

Socialism! In online gaming?




Group Mining in Eve

Originally uploaded by eidolon.

As in most MMPORGS, Eve Online has a way of organizing into groups with other players. In World of Warcraft, this are called ClansGuilds. In Eve, they’re called Corporations. Recently I joined a corporation that has taken a completely socialist tack.

Our ‘Collective’ pools all resources. Cash, ships, equipment, eveyrthing are all owned by the corporation. Members of the corporation can take any of the ships or equipment or weapons anytime, long as you put it back or replenish when done. All money from operations, missions, and bounties go into the collective wallet.

Recently, we needed to pick up minerals for manufacturing. A half dozen players got together and went on a mining op. This screenshot shows the op in progress. Several small mining ships re mining (me in the middle). The mining ships have almost no armor, and very small cargo holds. So the ships jettison mined ore into holding containers, or ‘cans’. The cans are ‘gang’ owned – meaning anyone in the mining group can open them. Another pilot has a ‘hauler’. His job is to run around to all the cans emptying them of ore, and shipping the ore back to the corporation’s hangar. A round trip of about 10 minutes, but the hauler can hold 50x what a mining frigate can hold.

Also in the gang are escorts. Their job is to keep rats (NPC pirates) and normal pirates (player characters) off our backs while we mine. We’re in ‘low security’ space, so there’s no police (in Eve, they’re called the Concord) around to help keep law and order. We’re on our own.

This is a community of players working together toward a common goal – the strength and prosperity of the corporation, which we’re all a part of.

This is a great game.

Typing Tests!

Cat made a comment today that I’m still one of the fastest typists she knows. I sort of laughed and moved on, because, yeah, I do crank the keys pretty fast. I wonder if this is why I’m so touchy about my keyboard types.
It got me wondering though, how fast do I really type? Well, the net came to my rescue. I went to typingtest.com, started up their little Java applet, and typed away. I got:
Gross speed, 112 WPM. Errors: 6 words. Net speed: 106WPM. Accuracy 94%
Not too shabby!

The Weekend that Was




P5290091.JPG

Originally uploaded by eidolon.

My goodness, what a couple days. I’ll try and write a nice long pictorial history of the trials and tribulations that were AnimeBoston. All in all, a successful, if exhausting event. By far the largest deployment I’ve ever done, with our fastest throughput ever (over 500 badges printed per hour). Next year we’ll go even faster!

This picture is from Sunday, getting close to closing registration. The lone security person (whose name escapes me, but she was awesome all weekend) is directing the few last-minute registrants to either pre-reg or at-con registration lines. We did have a few hundred show up on Sunday, even some who had pre-registered.

Spectacular mad props to Ben and Barb for pulling 12+ hour days all weekend, and dealing with my own crotchetiness.

Spring Storm




Spring Storm

Originally uploaded by eidolon.

We get some lovely storms coming up the coast. This one was the leading edge of a storm front that just whipped through Worcester county. The radar image looked just like a boomerange. Nothing in front of it, nothing behind it, heavy rain and wind and clouds at the front and rear edge.

Zach and I went down to the edge of the lake and took this picture just as the front edge was moving over us. Within 90 seconds of this picture, we were being pelted with pretty heavy duty hail.

Barcamp Boston! June 3-4, Maynard

Looks like I’ll be doing registration work for Barcamp Boston at Monster.com’s offices in Maynard. BarCamp is an un-conference – a sort of on the fly get together for geeks to talk about geeky stuff and hang out. Sounds like fun, and sounds like an opportunity to talk about CONGO to an appreciative audience.
This is a pretty low-key event, but if you have something you like to present, or just want to come by and help with reg and yammer about various linux-y things, cmon down!

Fruit Bowl!




P5210003.JPG

Originally uploaded by eidolon.

I rarely get the chance to create something in the kitchen, but somewhere I got a reputation for making nice fruit bowl sculptures. Since we’re going down to a birthday party for Catya‘s grandmother today, I had a request to make another fruit bowl.

This was a smaller watermelon than I usually use, so instead of the ‘built in handle’ I usually do, I decided to make it sort of more ‘cradle’ like. I cut the melon down and removed the ‘lid, and hollowed out the interior (after cutting watermelon balls using a 1tbspn measuring spoon). After that I cut up pineapple, honeydew melon, grapes, kiwis (with Zach’s help!), and strawberrys, and mixed those in. The baby pineapple was _TOO CUTE_ to cut down, so I fitted it into the top part of the watermelon.

Toothpicks are used a bit to hold the things on the top of the melon, but mostly this is just a bowl full o fruit. We have about the same volume again to refill as folks eat, carried in a seperate set of bowls.

Dog added for scale.

The Geek Farm

Following along my comments earlier about following in Steve Ciarcia’s chatterings in his column in Byte magazine called Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar, I’ve decided to do something similar.
I frequently talk about the machines I run here at Chez Geek, without really having a library showing them. Each of these machines has filled a specific niche in what I do and helps me pursue my various n sundry projects. As I go on about various tinkerings, I’ll try and keep the pages up to date with new upgrades and changes, and link to them whenever mentioning them.
So, without further adieu, I give you… The Geek Farm:

  • hunter – IBM T40 Thinkpad
  • endor – AMD Shuttle
  • yawl – Dell GX-260
  • winxp – AMD Shuttle (the only windows box)
  • deathstar – Old AMD box, running MythTV

There are others, but these are the primary machines that live here in my office. Good eggs, all of them 🙂

A Wikipedia evening

Tonight I spent some time working on Wikipedia, specifically finally creating my own user page, and cleaning up a few articles I had contributed to.
The big change though was I actually found a topic for which there appeared no Wikipedia article. So I went ahead and created a page about the AT&T 3b1, a computer I spent much of my time using back when I was learning many of my early Unix admin skillz. Feel free to check it out and add / change anything you know or don’t know about this machine.

Fission : An active address bar for Firefox

I saw a reference to this while looking at the new feature list for Firefox 2.0, and decided to give it a shot. I rather like it. It’s a plugin for FF 1.5 or later that uses the addressbar as a progress bar for loading a webpage. You don’t have to keep an eye on the statusbar to see what’s going on. This is similar to how Safari under OSX works. I’m rather liking it.
The plugin is called ‘Fission’ and is available here.

Volleyball in the Boston Area?

So thanks to blk dragging me to a couple pickup games on Saturday while visiting scenic Pittsburgh, I’ve gotten the urge to look for some evening volleyball leagues in the Boston area.
I found the Boston Area Volleyball Players forums, which I’ll be posting to shortly, but does anyone have personal groups they play with? Would be good to share the court with some folks I know. I’m a knowledgeable player with very rusty skills, though they seemed to coem back okay on Saturday. Playing weekday evenings would be best. Metro Boston (Framingham / Natick) would be ideal. 🙂
Update 5/14/06 – Found this listing on Yankee.org of local groups and pickup games.

If you weren’t angry before…

… there’s no reason to hold back now.

I’ve avoided political discussion for a while, mostly because the world pretty much knows how awful Bush is, and commenting on it just makes me angrier. But this article from the Boston Globe has to be read by anyone who thinks that Bush is still acting in any way fairly, legally, or morally in the right…

WASHINGTON — President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

How can anyone possibly defend the actions of this man, who has taken on the role of sole arbiter of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’, no matter what the Constitution or the laws say? The Signing Statements have never been abused to this level before in the history of United States. No wonder Bush has never vetoed a bill. Had he followed the law and vetoed something he disagreed with, the Congress could have overruled him. These notes have no oversight. He can choose what laws he wants to obey that CONGRESS HAS PASSED, and which ones he doesn’t feel like enforcing.

This is not the way the US Government should act, folks. Congress makes the laws, the President approves them or vetoes them, he doesn’t get to pick and choose which ones he likes or dislikes. That’s called a Line Item Veto, and the Supreme court in the 90’s rules that that was unconstitutional, even WITH congressional oversight.

Why is this man still trusted with the keys to the White House?