I have spent a good several hours over the past several months fighting with my ubuntu machine. It would come up and attempt to mount my raid (A simple RAID1 over two drives), and, upon boot, try and mount the MD device with /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb, not /dev/sdb1. It turned out that, while a mdadm -E didn’t show it, /dev/sdb had enough of a superblock on it that mdadm tried to use it as part of an array… And that prevented it from reading the partition table, preventing me from even manually mounting it. I used –zero-superblock to clear it, and suddenly my machine is booting fine.
Category Archives: Personal
On Ass.
I have recently acquired a PS3 and a PSP, so I am going back and playing all the games for them that I meant to, but missed. Unfortunately, I have not actually paid attention to what were good games for these systems. This has led me to pick up two very ill-advised games.
First is “Work Time Fun”, which is anything but. As minigame collections go, it is ass. There’s nothing redeeming. The only reason I bought it was because I thought it was from Lone Sausage, the creators of Dr. Tran, but it turns out that there’s simply a similar looking vietnamese kid on the cover. Bleh.
Next up is Noby Noby Boy. Noby Noby Boy is amazing. Never before has there been a game where the chief, and in fact only, game mechanic is filling up the creators ego. In Noby Noby boy, you play an earthworm-like thing called BOY, and you eat stuff and get bigger. If this sounds like Katamari, you’ve figured out it’s pedigree. About the only thing that Noby Noby Boy has going for it is that, as you grow, your gameplay statistics are uploaded to make the space-earthworm known as GIRL grow. There’s nothing else to do. There’s some cute psychadelic flavor, but if you’ve played the later Katamaris you’ve already gotten your fill of such. That’s all there really is to it. It’s a wank-fest for Keita Takahashi.
At least I’m not working with a caste system. Or one with staticly typed classes.
I am anxiously awaiting my 21st birthday; Like most people my age, I’m not actually a stranger to alcohol, but being able to acquire such myself will be a nice change. I’ve never been a fan of age-based restricions; I believe we should lower the voting age, lower the drinking age, lower the driving age, be more flexible in our age-of-consent laws…
I was looking forward to finally hitting the last age-based milestone, but then I realized that there’s one more to go. And, unlike the age of drinking, which is state decided though uniform aross the nation, It’s written into the very constituion. I cannot yet attain the office of President.
This really annoys me, actually. Not that I intended to vote for someone under 35, or would even really consider it. But it is another arbitrary age-drawn line. There are people I know who’re old enough to be my father, yet nowhere near mature enough. There are those whom are barely older than me whom I’d vote for any day of the week, if they decided they were going into politics. It’s unfortunate that we’ve got this restriction.
Ports and the lack thereof.
From: Ted Hahn
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 18:23
To: ‘tycho@penny-arcade.com’
Subject: Last Remnant, Controller integration
Tycho,
You mention in yesterdays post that my wish had been granted of playing The Last Remnant on the console. I see your point; Consoles offer several advantages over PC controls; Theres no question that for, say, Super Mario, a good joypad feels better than the keyboard does. However When I get a PC port, I expect a /port/, which as youve described, is no longer necessarily the case.
I just finished Mirrors Edge for the PC, and while I was more forgiving than most of its combat (I generally found it fun, even in the bits where you were very forced into it), I was really disturbed by how little porting they had done. I expect that my PC game will have PC controls. I /expect/ it. Mirrors Edge popped up for every informational with Xbox controller mappings; I bought the PC version because, while I liked the 360 demo, I thought it would play better with proper FPS controls. Im going to grab a wired 360 controller from a friend and play it through again; Maybe it really is a platformer, but I expect that it will at least be less disconcerting if it tells me which buttons are which. I tried and quickly gave up with my Logitech gamepad because it was so off putting.
XNA is a wonderful thing. It makes it really easy to port games from 360 to Windows. However, it also makes it really easy for developers to take the lazy way out and not even bother porting; I cant honestly call Mirrors edge for PC anything more than the 360 version recompiled.
Aquarela do Brazil
WARNING: HAZARDOUS CONTENT WITHIN
This is an attempt to journal the activities of a dangerous conspiracy. This conspiracy ranges far and wide, using a network of media outlets, artists and musicians in an attempt to spread their goals. The only know part of their agenda is this: Distribution of an insidious song, one that permeates our popular culture yet remains dangerously under-the-radar, out of sight and out of concious mind for most of the population. Here are but a few of the places where it has been subtly hidden:
- A Donald Duck Cartoon
- Advertisements for Pixar’s “Wall-E“
- A Visa Advertisement
- A Music Video
- A fake Movie Trailer
- Frank Sinatra sung it
- So did The Arcade Fire
- iTunes has 118 results for ‘Aquarela do Brasil’, including an Entire ALBUM named for it.
- An entire Terry Gilliam Film
There are merely the entries that I have yet discovered. More certainly lurk at the edges of our vision, silently poisoning our minds.
Edit: THERE’S A WHOLE SWARM OF THEM!
Feeping
I have been reading through the Jargon File (again), slowly. Today, I reached the entry on Creeping Featureism. The source to hello, is, as it says, hilarious. So, I go over to my ubuntu machine, and get this:
ted@thahnubuntu:/$ hello
The program ‘hello’ can be found in the following packages:
* hello-dbs
* hello-debhelper
* hello
Try: sudo apt-get install <selected package>
bash: hello: command not found
I think there’s a lesson here.
You’re so dreamy.
I don’t dream often. At least, I don’t think I do. So, from now on, whenever I /do/ dream, I will try and record it here.
Now, to not post for another month.
I’d like to take a minute and tell you all about my new Porn site, entellium.
This is why I’ve never show my parents this blog.
Anyway: Story behind this is that I have a friend working at “Entellium”, the real company. He suggested that he hates the web developer they’ve got their currently, and another friend suggested that she’d love to kill him and take his place. They then get into a brief discussion about SEO, to which I cut in with an obvious “Yeah, but at some point your gonna have porn masquerading as you”. He said “Well, I doubt there’s any ‘Entellium’ porn.” And that, my friends, was a challenge.
Anyway, the idea is that I am to, over the next few weeks, get my site up on the first page of google results for “Entellium”. Easy, right?
A failure of society
Monday I was trapped on a bus for a good 15 minutes. I think the story was fairly simple: Some little old lady didn’t pay her fare. The bus stopped at the Bellevue Highway station, a little bus stop on the highway, about a city block’s walk from a park+ride. A bunch of people got on, and slipping between people was this little old chinese lady. Now, I’m fairly certain she didn’t pay the fare: I was somewhat looking up, and I did see her slip past. I don’t think she even noticed the fare collector, though.
She wanders to the back of the bus, everyone sits down or finds a handhold, and prepares to move. The bus driver shuts the doors. And doesn’t move. Just sits there. After a little bit, people started to notice that we weren’t moving, but nobody did anything (Including I). Finally, the driver got out of the bus, and a police officer got on. He walked back, talked briefly to the woman, and then escorted her off the bus.
Now, all in all, this was not a horrible result. No violence, no angry yelling. But, at the same time, there was no human interaction. There was only a sort of cold machine-logic to it. The busdriver didn’t even attempt to explain the issue to either the cause or any of the rest of the passengers. And, probably, he couldn’t, by law or union rules.
Now think of it this way: This bus was filled with business commuters. I was the least dressed person on the bus, and was wearing a nice leather jacket and a collared shirt. Most everyone else was in a business suit. Further, it was a double-long bus. Every seat was filled, and there were multiple people standing. Every one of these people was 15 minutes later to work that morning. Over a $2.25 bus fare, and probably a misunderstanding of one at that! Society has built safety buffers so that there are not “incidents”, but at the cost of far more than the incidents could ever be. If this were downtown LA, maybe the caution would be warranted. But this was Bellevue, Washington, and the “criminal” was a little old asian lady to boot.
A very wise webcomic author once described a risk/reward chart for crime: The amount you gain from the crime, the chance of succeeding, the fines/jail time if you get caught. It’s important to balance it so that the risk*failure chance is slightly greater than the gain*chance of not getting caught. The chance for not getting caught sneaking onto the bus is relatively high, but the gain is so low it’s barely worth bothering with.
There are two courses of action that are fairly obvious, and produce better results: Either A) The driver went on with the trip, calling a metrocop to meet us at the next station or b) The driver said something, casing her to either Pay the Fare, get off, or worst case, I woulda just paid it for her! It’s $2.25. It’s simply not worth the bother.
Stupid Mail.app
Mail.app decided it wanted to download all my messages again today. Fscking Sucks. But, I am a Coder! So, I spent a half hour playing with it, and figured out a solution to convince Mail.app it had already downloaded all the messages in my inbox.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to fixing your list of downloaded messages. It requires using the terminal. If you’re not comfortable with that, you’re probably out of luck.
First, you’ll need to grab you UID list from your mailserver. If you’re OK with connecting unsecured, simply fire up telnet, and connect to your mailserver on port 110. If you want SSL, it’s a little harder, but there’s actually a relatively painless way. Use “openssl sclient -connect <mailserver>:995 -crlf”
Once connected, type “user <username>”, then “pass <password>”. If you’ve connected successfuly, it’ll respond “+OK”. They type UIDL, and it’ll return a list of message UIDs. Copy-Paste that to a textfile.
Next up, grab a copy of my script: It writes the proper plist file for your messages. http://thomashahn.is-a-geek.com/fixUidls.txt
Rename that file to fixUidls.php, and chmod u+x it. Then, run it with the parameters “<inputUidFile> <outputUidFile>”. Don’t save this directly over your current UID file, just in case.
Once you’ve got the new UID file, copy it to “~/Library/Mail/<Account>/MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded2” First, though, you should rename the file already there (if there is one) to .old.
When you next open up Mail.app, it shouldn’t download anything! Hurrah!