Back in the day, when all of my friends were playing their Nintendo systems, my brother and I still had the old Atari 800XL. Having that did, however, expose me to one of the greatest games of all time, M.U.L.E..
I have since been trying to get my friends to play it but it is difficult--the old Atari still works but is huge, slow, and I'm trying not to touch it given the fact that those old 5 1/4 disks will wear out eventually, and the emulators are not perfect.
The folks over at World Of MULE originally pointed to a specific software package making it "easy" to play the game online with friends using Atari800win, but it had issues. The networking didn't handle lag very well, or saving game state, so it was a huge hassle.
Then, today, here comes mjsager with a link out of the blue: Planet M.U.L.E. Problem solved. Can't wait to play. I hope it captures the essence of the original.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Puff!
root@puff:~# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 49553428 kB
MemFree: 11544984 kB
Buffers: 147352 kB
Cached: 31231420 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 11837992 kB
Inactive: 21929416 kB
Active(anon): 2236672 kB
Inactive(anon): 161592 kB
Active(file): 9601320 kB
Inactive(file): 21767824 kB
Unevictable: 0 kB
Mlocked: 0 kB
SwapTotal: 0 kB
SwapFree: 0 kB
Dirty: 4528256 kB
Writeback: 184 kB
AnonPages: 2389112 kB
Mapped: 68748 kB
Slab: 1213664 kB
SReclaimable: 1132408 kB
SUnreclaim: 81256 kB
PageTables: 35712 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 24776712 kB
Committed_AS: 3599580 kB
VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed: 505864 kB
VmallocChunk: 34359231919 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
HugePages_Surp: 0
Hugepagesize: 2048 kB
DirectMap4k: 6756 kB
DirectMap2M: 50315264 kB
Monday, December 7, 2009
2010 Fusion, Initial impressions
Becca and I recently purchased a 2010 Fusion because Miles (her old 2001 Nissan Sentra) got rear-ended and the insurance decided to total it. So far, and I know it is early, we are ridiculously impressed with this thing.
We opted for the 3.0 V6 SEL with the moon roof and premium sound upgrades. We weren't going to get the upgrades but they ended up being about a $700 price difference and that seemed like good value for what it is. It sounds great and the moon roof is huge.
Externally I think it looks much better than the previous revision, they tweaked a few things, most noticeably the hood. I was surprised on how large the thing is, we had to reorganize the garage to get it to fit inside. I would guess that it is over a foot longer than my Focus.
Inside it is filled with features including ambient lighting which in practice is way cooler than I thought it would be. This car is my first experience with SYNC and it is currently exceeding expectations although there does seem to be a few workflow issues with tasks off the beaten path.
The V6 is nice, we went ahead with it (over the I4) because, well, why the hell not. I have the economical Focus that I commute to work with every day. The V6 Fusion comes with the silly shifter (select shift?) where you can suggest it up- or down-shift manually. Fun, but the only real practical use I can think for it (outside of towing) is preemptively shifting before opening the throttle to accelerate at cruise. Doing this avoids both the lag while the car executes the shift and the resultant often hard shift when under power.
Even for a six-banger it has pretty respectable economy. We were averaging about 22 miles per gallon for the first few days we had it (as measured by the on-board computer), and I reset the calculator on the way to hockey last night and was able to push it much higher during that trip. It's all about how you drive the thing. Having the power there when you need it (and the enjoyment of the power when you want it) is worth the extra gas in my opinion.
Yeah, we thought about the hybrid, but man, the extra cost and risk associated with purchasing a hybrid did not seem like a good bet. How much is that thing going to cost to service once the warranty runs out? Laptop batteries are expensive, how are the hybrid batteries going to compare? Yeah, the Fusion Hybrid got some ridiculously high ratings from some sites such as Consumer Reports but all of the reliability figures are pure speculation at this point. I'm hoping it is at least as reliable as my 2003 Focus (which has had its fair share of problems) over the next few years.
We opted for the 3.0 V6 SEL with the moon roof and premium sound upgrades. We weren't going to get the upgrades but they ended up being about a $700 price difference and that seemed like good value for what it is. It sounds great and the moon roof is huge.
Externally I think it looks much better than the previous revision, they tweaked a few things, most noticeably the hood. I was surprised on how large the thing is, we had to reorganize the garage to get it to fit inside. I would guess that it is over a foot longer than my Focus.
Inside it is filled with features including ambient lighting which in practice is way cooler than I thought it would be. This car is my first experience with SYNC and it is currently exceeding expectations although there does seem to be a few workflow issues with tasks off the beaten path.
The V6 is nice, we went ahead with it (over the I4) because, well, why the hell not. I have the economical Focus that I commute to work with every day. The V6 Fusion comes with the silly shifter (select shift?) where you can suggest it up- or down-shift manually. Fun, but the only real practical use I can think for it (outside of towing) is preemptively shifting before opening the throttle to accelerate at cruise. Doing this avoids both the lag while the car executes the shift and the resultant often hard shift when under power.
Even for a six-banger it has pretty respectable economy. We were averaging about 22 miles per gallon for the first few days we had it (as measured by the on-board computer), and I reset the calculator on the way to hockey last night and was able to push it much higher during that trip. It's all about how you drive the thing. Having the power there when you need it (and the enjoyment of the power when you want it) is worth the extra gas in my opinion.
Yeah, we thought about the hybrid, but man, the extra cost and risk associated with purchasing a hybrid did not seem like a good bet. How much is that thing going to cost to service once the warranty runs out? Laptop batteries are expensive, how are the hybrid batteries going to compare? Yeah, the Fusion Hybrid got some ridiculously high ratings from some sites such as Consumer Reports but all of the reliability figures are pure speculation at this point. I'm hoping it is at least as reliable as my 2003 Focus (which has had its fair share of problems) over the next few years.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Getting April components running on Windows
April software is at home on Linux systems so building and using it there is simple. Unfortunately, we have use cases involving Windows machines so I needed to get things ported. Everything we need is in Java, so simply copying Jars over compiled on Linux systems works quite well, with a couple of hiccups. I'm writing everything down here so I have it when this all needs to be officially documented later.
LCM has a few binaries that do things like generate language-specific LCM code from language-independent source files. I'm sure this wouldn't be too hard to get to compile in an environment such as Cygwin but simply copying over the generated Java output works fine (lcm.jar, lcmtypes.jar).
Things break down when trying to get Vis, a 3D visualization tool, running on different platforms because it needs platform-specific Java OpenGL bindings via the JOGL project.
To get JOGL to work, I grabbed gluegen-rt.jar and the platform-specific gluegen jar from here, along with jogl.jar from here.
I couldn't find a Windows version of jzlib.jar (another april dependency) so I just copied that over from a Linux system, where it was installed by the package manager in /usr/share/java.
In order to get (most of) the April projects to build, since they rely on each other, the CLASSPATH environment variable needed to point to all of the jars, some of which don't exist yet (they are created during the build). These include (full paths to): jogl.jar, gluegen-rt.jar, jzlib.jar, lcm.jar, lcmtypes.jar, core\java\jmat\jmat.jar, core\java\jserial\jserial.jar, core\java\vis\vis.jar.
Then, looking at the Makefile in core\java, I manually triggered the Java builds in that file in order, skipping the explicitly platform-specific JCam project.
Once everything is built, things run and seem fine even though JoglLoader complains about not being able to find some DLLs.
LCM has a few binaries that do things like generate language-specific LCM code from language-independent source files. I'm sure this wouldn't be too hard to get to compile in an environment such as Cygwin but simply copying over the generated Java output works fine (lcm.jar, lcmtypes.jar).
Things break down when trying to get Vis, a 3D visualization tool, running on different platforms because it needs platform-specific Java OpenGL bindings via the JOGL project.
To get JOGL to work, I grabbed gluegen-rt.jar and the platform-specific gluegen jar from here, along with jogl.jar from here.
I couldn't find a Windows version of jzlib.jar (another april dependency) so I just copied that over from a Linux system, where it was installed by the package manager in /usr/share/java.
In order to get (most of) the April projects to build, since they rely on each other, the CLASSPATH environment variable needed to point to all of the jars, some of which don't exist yet (they are created during the build). These include (full paths to): jogl.jar, gluegen-rt.jar, jzlib.jar, lcm.jar, lcmtypes.jar, core\java\jmat\jmat.jar, core\java\jserial\jserial.jar, core\java\vis\vis.jar.
Then, looking at the Makefile in core\java, I manually triggered the Java builds in that file in order, skipping the explicitly platform-specific JCam project.
Once everything is built, things run and seem fine even though JoglLoader complains about not being able to find some DLLs.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Jim's Coca-Cola Rant
This is epic. Jim Object on his one true love:
In the End of Days the White Words will slap in the wind on the Crimson Banners of Victory. The streets will run red with the blood of pepsi drinkers, and the revolution will be won and complete. We, the defenders and consumers of the Exalted Beverage Most High will reign and rule the earth alone, as dieties amongst those selected to live in service to our ever faithful fuel... Coca-Cola. Yes. Yes. YES.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Blog Archive
