Everyone in their right mind is playing Portal 2, As was I. But when my co-op partner (my little brother) had to go to bed, I decided to check out what else there was. And, much to my surprise, the extras section of Portal 2 had something I wasn’t expecting – In addition to the trailers and videos that had previously been released was “Super 8 Interactive Trailer”.
You start off in a train (Big surprise, if you’re familiar with Valve games). The tooltip pops up, encouraging you to use the middle button to zoom. There’s boxes of military looking supplies, and a radio in the center of the car that’s on, and indistinguishable speech playing. You can walk towards the front of the car, and that’s when things start to happen. A clear shout comes over the radio; “There’s something on the track!”. The view warps, as the boxcar collapses around you.

Seconds later from the player’s perspective, you wake up surrounded by the debris of the train. Fires light your way as you wander towards the front. A barrel catches fire and explodes as you approach, teetering telephone lines suddenly give. You continue walking forward, through the wreckage, til you come to a relatively intact boxcar, and it’s clear why it’s survived better: It’s armored. Suddenly, the area around you explodes, and you’re thrown back, to get a better view of the armored hatch. The hatch starts to thud, then dents appear, and finally, it flies up –

Fade to black, and launch webbrowser. A flash movie plays, and the credits at the bottom says “JJ Abrams” and “Steven Spielberg”. A curious marketing trick (I’d not heard of Super 8 before), but it seems in the vein of both Cloverfield and ET; A young boy with his Super 8 camera is helping his brother film a movie, and they seem the only ones in the town who believe in the alien entity, despite the fact that the military has shown up en-masse.

What does this actually mean, though? Is this just a quick marketing stunt? Is Valve making a Super-8 game? Will there be more interactive components to this story? What did I miss in the train car that I should’ve zoomed in on? If anything is clear from Abrams past works, there will be much secrecy, and many more small snippets of information to build hype. After the almost-letdown that was the Portal 2 ARG, is this what Valve should be doing?

One of my ZFS drives went bad a little while ago, and I thought by replacing it I might get additional speed; Perhaps it had been the problem all along? Doing such has certainly improved my ZFS experience, but there’s still something wrong. I have discovered something that has improved it further, though.

while true; do sync; done;

That got rid of frequent pauses, and made my ZFS partition grab data fairly fast… Faster than I can shove it down a wireless G pipe, anyway. It’s not perfect, but then again, my ZFS setup is far from ideal.

My dad is trying to make a website for my little brother’s high school PTSA; Among the functions he needed to use was mail(). It’s pretty drop-dead simple, but I needed to figure out what I was doing for sendmail, first, since I’d never set it up before. A little bit of searching showed that sendmail on my system was provided by ssmtp, and I was able to edit it’s config file to set up the proper external host.

Install GMP, sysstat
Stop and disable sendmail
Make certain etc hosts maps $HOSTNAME to it’s public IP address and not 127..; I.E.

::1             localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6
172.17.20.43    grgzimbra2.gilmore-research.com grgzimbra2

I’ve learned a lot about how windows profiles and the registry work today. In the interests of unlearning it quicker, I am going to write it down so I no longer need to know it.

First: The windows registry is a terrible thing. It is a full ACL’d filesystem, except with retarded files. Further, it supports mounting loopback files, but only at one level below the predefined roots. And, yet, despite that, it is one of the most unix-like and useful parts of windows. *Facepalm*

So, you’ve got a user profile, and you’re, say, migrating your entire corporation from a primitive LDAP solution to a primitive AD solution. You want those user profiles to transfer over to the new domain. All the user profiles are stored as local profiles.

There’s three things of import: Change the permissions of the directory, change the permissions of the registry, and deal with all the little nitpicks that come up.

The directory is simple: Just log in as admin, remove the permissions from the old domain user, and add full access as the new. Should be set to propagate by default, and things will just work out.

The registry permissions are a little more complex. First, they can’t be edited while either the new or old user is logged in. Second, we’ll need to detach the registry hive: I recommend just rebooting, first, because windows has a tendency to not allow you to detach that hive.

The first thing you need to do is find the new user’s profile in the windows Profiles List, and point that at the old location, while deleting the old profile list entry for that profile. You can find the profile list in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList. Under there should be a list of SID’s; You can lookup the SID and do it that way, or just find the ones that are pointing to the old and new profiles. First, copy the profile location of the old user SID, and then (for safety) export that key and it’s subkeys, then delete it. Now, paste the profile location of the old profile into the new SID’s

Then, you need to mount the old user’s hive, and alter the permissions. Open up regedit, and then select HKEY_USERS. You’ll then want to go to File -> Load Hive. Browse to the user directory, then select the user’s NTUSER.DAT file. This is their personal registry hive. Open that, and name it what you will; it’s irrelavent for now (though naming it with the users SID can avert problems if you forget to unmount it).

Change the permissions on the root of the user hive, as well as in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies (The only exception I’ve found); They’ll have previous ACL’s for the old SID for full access and read-only, respectively.

I have a friend, a good friend of several years. We laugh, we joke,  we gossip, and we’re part of a larger community, so we often share tidbits of conversations with each other. All of this was well and good; The community is not super-open, but well enough open that all of this was acceptable.

As happens from time to time, new people join the community. Recently, my friend has made friends with a new member. This newbie seems nice enough, however, they are very concerned about privacy. They seem like a nice enough person, and I’ve had enjoyable conversations with them in the past. However, they also have a secret. And thus, privacy.

Now, I’m a staunch anti-privatist. The world is far too prudish for me to be as open as I’d like, but I do try and be as open as I can, and while I’ve been burned, I’ve also profited from it. I know my game theory, and it turns out that games of perfect information are a lot more fair than games with hidden information. Many people I know have told me “Google is destroying privacy”, and I have replied with “I know, isn’t it wonderful?” Privacy benefits larger entities; Corporations, Governments, and special interests. Public information benefits the common good.

I’ve recently gotten into trouble with my friend; and I can only liken it to a playground metaphor. Friend A has a cool new friend, B, and now A won’t hang out with me. Nor will B. Friend A gets in trouble for laughing, joking, or, most of all. gossiping with me. I’ve put up sincere effort to be friendly with B; They are concerned for their privacy whenever I try to share a joke or try to share in a joke. It’s not cool, it’s hurting my friendship with A, and it’s a dick move from square 1.

So, basically, Fuck You, Tango_. You and your Wife can do whatever you’d like; I really don’t care. But be a human being; There’s only drama when you make it.

I’ve been playing a lot of Babo:Invasion recently. It’s a fun little game, and for the $3 or so it cost me on steam the price couldn’t be beat. It’s been great fun on windows, but I’m trying to get my desktop (now codenamed “hera”) up to be my perfect box: Tri boot Windows, Ubuntu, and FreeBSD. One of the neat tricks I have up my sleeve is a simple symlink: ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/steamapps is a symlink to /mnt/windows/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps. This is pretty nifty; Worst case scenario, my Linux steaminstall keeps all my steamapps up to date in periods of inactivity. In the best case, for a couple games (like Civ IV), this means I’ve got just one install, but I can play either on ubuntu via Wine or on my windows box with basically zero hassle.

However, Babo is not one of the nice games. Here’s what I’ve done so far to get it to work, and where I am right now: First off, it wanted an initial install, which consisted of a directx update. Obviously, this didn’t install under wine, so I had to fake it out by adding the following key to the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\MIBI\DXMar2009\ “DirectX”=dword:00000001

Once that was done, the application wouldn’t launch. It wanted two dlls: d3dx9_41.dll and xinput1_3.dll; Get those from the windows\system32 directory of a windows box that has it installed, or if you can extract the CAB files they’re in baboinvasion\directx\dxdllreg_x86.cab and APR2007_xinput_x86.cab . Put those in the application directory.

Once that’s done, launch steam and launch babo. This is as far as I’ve gotten; It appears to be working, but it’s got a constant ‘down’ input and a screen flicker; sound is tempermental, meaning it’s worked at least once but I don’t know why it worked that time, and most importantly there’s /huge/ screen flicker; It looks to me to be vsync related. Upgrading to the more recent Wine, it’s no longer got the ‘down’ input, but the other two problems persist.

And one step back. Or rather, today it seems like a whole tango backwards. I managed to blow up my computer yesterday. A loose fan wire sparked against my case. It seems to have destroyed my primary hard drive. Not my secondary, though, nor my backup… I didn’t have proper backups going, though, so I’m out quite a bit. I’ll have to see if I can recover it, find a second copy of that board; I think, though, it might just have been a fuse or diode that blew, so I’ll see if I can repair it.

AIDS is an epidemic. There’s a lot of money and research going to find a cure. Ebola; Not so Epidemic. Why is this?

AIDS transmits fairly easily, but slowly. Ebola is faster at transmission. Why is AIDS more common? It kills slowly. Ebola kills, fast and often. The solution?

Make AIDS more deadly. Right now, if you’re HIV Infected, you’ve got years to live. We need to make it far more deadly, far more of a threat, far more liable to destroy it’s population before it has a chance to spread.