Just a quick one before I head off to my next meeting. My latest addiction for the iPhone is called ‘iDracula’. It’s sort of a mix of Diablo vs Quake vs Robotron. The 19th century ‘van helsing’-esque setting is beautifully rendered, and the soundtrack adds the appropriate head-banging necessary for any good vampire slaughtering.
There’s a great video of it in action on YouTube.
One thing I have to comment on – this is the first interactive action game on the iPhone that I feel gets the controls right. They use a pair of ‘wheels’ on the screen – one for motion, one for firing. Given the iphone’s lack of any other gaming controls, this seems to be an excellent compromise, allowing very easy motion and action.
There are a few known bugs. Settings aren’t being saved between games, it’s occasionally tricky to switch weapons in mid-melee, and there are occasional pauses. I picked it up off the appstore during a sale for $1, but it’s easily worth a lot more than that.
I hope the developers do continue to update it – a larger play area, or a decent levelling mechanism (finish this level, waste the bosses, move on to the next level) would be a definite win.
Blog
The problem with cloud computing – or “BITE ME, GOOGLE”
While browsing around this afternoon using the (usually) awesome Google Reader, I saw a sudden change in my entire look and feel. Apparently Google decided to punch out an update to Reader while i was using it. No notification, no information about it, just “oh, by the way, here’s a redesign of your page layout.”
Fortunately, the reader blog has a handy link to their “news” blog – that should have some information on what just happened…
Guess not. (for those perusing this later, the first article on that page is currently ‘READ WRITE DRINK”, or this article here. Nothing about an update, no news about changes to the site. Guess we’re on our own.
A mark against cloud computing, and a mark for locally installed apps.
A Panoply of Pidgin Plugins
I have this ongoing personal philosophy. “Don’t get too wedded to a single environment, because the designs will channel your way of thinking, and those ‘new fangled’ ideas about UI’s and systems? They they may have something there, give it a try.”
To that end, not long ago I switched from KDE to Gnome. That has had it’s ups and downs, but regardless of whether it’s been a good move or not, I now understand Gnome a lot better.
One of the tools I’ve used the longest has been X-Chat – a fairly decent IRC client that does pretty much everything I want in a client. I have screenshots of me using Xchat going back many years – a sure sign it might be time to try something else.
You, yes you on your phone in Starbucks.
We’re very impressed you have a nice blackberry, Jawbone bluetooth headset, and brown loafers. The leather case you’re carrying is pretty snappy. I think it’s particularly fascinating how you’ve managed to park yourself in a sparsely populated Starbucks, cranked up that wonderful gear of yours, and decided to CALL EVERYONE IN YOUR PHONE BOOK. I suspect there may be a small problem with your headphone, because the tree-leveling volume you’re speaking at must be needed for those obviously important customers to hear you.
Oh, and the constant revolving of your head to look at everyone around you, to make sure people notice you’re doing real live interesting cool stuff? Wonderful. Makes me want to throw down my obviously worthless career and beg for your guidance to success.
It’s particularly riveting that you’ve decided not to lower yourself to actually patronizing the restaurant you’ve decided to claim as your own personal conference room. What a star!
Speaking of webcomics. What are your favorites?
While on the topic of webcomics, I’m curious what strips folks read regularly? I have all of mine loaded up in Google Reader (currently one of my favorite toys), and while I’m not necessarily looking for other good strips to add to my lineup, I’m always interested in finding new interesting comics. Some I add to my daily read, some I let slip…
Anyway, here’s my current reading list.
- Order of the Stick
- Sinfest
- Inktank
- Three Panel Soul
- Girl Genius
- Dilbert Daily
- Penny Arcade
- PvPonline
- xkcd
So, got any suggestions of strips I absolutely should read, no matter what?
Why yes, I have been at this convention.
Thanks to Ben Levy for forwarding this to me – UserFriendly takes on registration at an IT conference…
Upgraded to MT4
We’ve upgraded all our blog software to MovableType 4, as well as changed hosts. We don’t have the crossposting to Livejournal working yet, so folks over there are going to have to go hungry for a bit.
Please let me know if there’s any instability or oddities
Barry Smith is back!
(Who?)
Barry Smith once drew the incredibly awesome Angst Technologies webcomic. He went on hiatus for a while, but has restarted his artwork.
I highly recommend reading through the archives – the current strip is on InkTank.com. He’s thoughtfully linked the older strips into archives.
Ya’ll can finally see the origin of the IT Ninjas.
Check out my nephew’s band : “The Malone”
Check it out. My nephew’s band, “The Malone” has set up their myspace page (Warning for us old farts – it will start playing music as soon as you click on that link.)
Josh is playing bass, and I can well say he sounds a lot better than I do.
RadioParadise iPhone app!
Last night I wanted to sit down and listen to some RadioParadise during gaming. Unfortunately, my efforts to get a streaming ‘terminal’ available in the living room (other than plugging in one of the laptops) hasn’t gone particularly well.
I remember listening to RP via my iPhone, and since we had Cat’s Bose Sounddock on the shelf, I figured I just had to whip up a connection and dock the phone.
I ran up Safari on the phone, navigated to Radio Paradise, and lo, there was a link to a Radio Paradise iPhone app! For free!
In a blink I had it downloaded and running on my iPhone. The app gives basic functionality, showing the current track and allowing easy music control.
Score another one for the awesome Radio Paradise.
A little distracted.
Perhaps my mind wasn’t completely on the game at hand.
The Macs. They tempt me.
I’ve been having… unpure thoughts lately.
While I’m fairly happy with clipper running Ubuntu 8.10 as my working desktop machine, I realize that clipper is getting a little long in the tooth (I have not worn the keycaps off, but there’s a distinct ‘looseness’ in the keyboard). It’s now 4+ years old, and while it’s ‘working’, it might be time to consider an upgrade.
The macs tempt me. After setting up mom with her macbook, I had a better feel for the mac mobile experience. The latest line of macbooks has enough power in a non-bulky configuration that I can do all my development and serious work on them without making compromises.
I stopped by the Apple store to try out the new macbook touchpad (as I’m not a fan of touchpads in general), and I have to say I was impressed. The ‘glass’ touchpad implements multitouch in a good way (one finger for ‘single click’, two fingers for ‘right click’). I’d still miss the ‘nipple’ pointing device in the middle of the keyboard, but I think I’d be okay.
The last thing motivating me is the need to run some business software. I’ll be taking over more of Stonekeep’s finances, so I need to run Quicken / Quickbooks. While Intuit has done the right thing and put Quicken / Quickbooks online (though with our account with DCU, much of our banking can be done remotely anyway), having native commercial apps available, plus all the wonderful opensource / free apps – is a huge draw.
A properly kitted out laptop from Apple (250gig HD, 4gig RAM, Macbook 2.4Ghz) runs $1800-ish. This would be my machine for another 3-4 years at least – the price is reasonable, though a little daunting.
But then I look at other things that would bring me – like Time Capsule. Brilliant.
It would mean abandoning Linux as a desktop. A moral dilemma to be sure.
Classics app for the iPhone
A few years ago, I posted about reading books on my Treo – an exercise I thought I’d never enjoy, but in the end, enjoyed quite a lot.
Ever since I got my iPhone, I’ve been considering setting up an ebook reader, but never got around to it. Recently I found the Classics app, a reader for the iPhone that is set up to provide a series of ‘classic’ books for the iPhone.
The reader app is quite good, and very easy to navigate (and pretty to look at). What I’ve been enjoying the most though is that the books that are available are, as the name implies, all ‘classics’ – books I should have read, but never got around to.
I finished reading ‘Flatland’, and now I’m about halfway through ‘Robinson Crusoe’. As always, it’s convenient having books with me at all times. I suspect when i’m done with these books, I’ll look at another reader app for other books, but for now, Classics makes it so I have at least 15 books with me at all times.
Not 64 bit.
Gall dang it.
‘ketch’ will be the new application server at our colo facility. I’vebeen slowly piecing it together and installing pieces on it.
Tonight I sat down to load Debian etch. Lo, it kept coming up with:
Your cpu does not support long mode
Turns out these are older Xeons, and are in fact not 64 bit. They’re also configured for hyperthreading, which I”m also hearing I should turn off.
Still, a pair of 2gig CPU’s will be a vast improvement over what we had, just not quite as shiny as I had hoped.
RAID1 configuration is continuing now. Debian’s RAID setup can be a little convoluted to set up on install, but I managed to wiggle my way through it.
Oh, a hint if you ever do this? Remember to leave a little space on your raid volumes for swap space. 2 40 gig drives mirrored to make one 40gig volume == no space for swap. Oops.
It’s alive! ketch is powered up
About six months ago, it became pretty apparent that boomer‘s newest brother, guardian, wasn’t going to be enough to bring the load off the main server, and that applications needed to be shifted off boomer soon. The paired 80gig SATA drives were getting full – it was time to expand the cluster.
Because homeport is a community cluster, I couldn’t just go to the CTO and requisition up another couple servers. One of our community members coughed up a little cash, thereby setting a budget, and I was off. After much ebaying and craigslisting, I came home with a pair of Penguin Computing Relion 130 1U servers. These were pulled out of a computation cluster, and were missing some small parts (one had no fans in it, and between the two of them they only had 2 40gig drives), but the price was right, the CPU oomph was good (dual Xeon 2gig CPUs), and the budget allowed for further upgrades.
Last week I got the final parts and did the assembly last weekend. ‘ketch’ here is the first machine assembled and loaded, and so far things are going fine. I moved the 2 40gig drives into this machine, and set up RAID-1 mirroring. ‘ketch’ will be an application server, taking the load off ‘boomer’ (which is only an AMD Sempron 2400+). The real kicker load wise was that I’m now deploying Tomcat based applications, and boomer just can’t handle big Java footprints and still manage 20-30 users comfortably.
‘ketch’ will stay here until configuration is done. I still have to build ‘dock’, which is an identical machine, except for a pair of 500gig drives that, once mirrored, will act as homeport’s NFS and MySQL server, further unloading boomer. We have dozens of Drupal sites running now, and the MySQL traffic is pretty hefty.
I haven’t made the final decision on directory services. There’s more and more pressure to just knuckle under and use NIS, certainly the easiest and best-known mechanism for replicating user information around a cluster, though I still hold out hope of a central LDAP based authentication / authorization system.
I hope to have ‘dock’ configured in the next week or two, and once they’re both ready, they’ll be shipped off to our colo facility for installation, bringing our homeport-specific server count to 4 (6 if you count 2 other machines that we share services with).
Pretty durned cool.