Hydrocodone sucks ;-P

I don’t do drugs. Ok, that’s never true – everyone does something. But from the outset I knew that all the “fun” drugs folks rave about weren’t for me. I do drink occasionally, and after 38 years I had finally fallen into smoking up until the gallbladder surgery. So that’s alcohol and nicotine. But I got off the nicotine, and as I said, I don’t drink that often.

I take pride in the level of creativity I’m able to achieve just using my own gray matter. But the real reason I don’t (have never) touched other stuff is because I always knew it would mess me up.

Who’s working marketing for EQ2?

I’d imagine with the EQ2x stuff going seemingly well they’d have a fire lit under their ass. Then I read the upcoming expansion flier and had to stop and double take on my underwhelmedness.

“300 new quests?” “30 new creatures” “Crawl your way through 10 dangerous dungeons” “Group up with 12-24 man raids for desirable loot”

“desirable loot” is where the penny dropped.

“24 man raid ‘desirable’ loot”.

Destiny of Velious Features:

• Flying Mounts – Soar high above Norrath and explore EQII like never before
• Hundreds of new weapons and items – Customize your character and in-game home in thousands of ways
• Over 300 new quests – Follow the EQII storyline through the fabled lands of Velious
• Ten instanced dungeons – Crawl your way through 10 dangerous dungeons
• Four new Heritage Quests – Live the legacy of the EverQuest franchise and gain memorable rewards
• One massive contested dungeon – Good or evil, be the first to conquer the all-new contested dungeon
• Two overland zones – Journey into incredible unknown lands
• Six Raid Instances –  Group up with 12-24 man raids for desirable loot
• Velious-themed Battlegrounds – Get your PvP on in the snow
• A new Signature Quest line – Immerse yourself in EQII lore and get the goods
• Over 30 new creatures – Battle dangerous and fantastical enemies
• Dozens of new armor sets – Gear up in powerful armor sets

Why Android makes Jobs sad…

http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/10/19/187242/Steve-Jobs-Lashes-Out-At-Android

Remember that Apple used to be a computer/software company, believing itself capable of being David to Microsoft’s Goliath. Anyone who didn’t have their head stuck up their backside could clearly tell this was throne-lust and not magnanimity. Steve Jobs’ love for the small man was a deep, passionate love, that took place with the exchange of as little as $1400!

With a lucky pole-vault off the back of Sony’s Walkman into the world of the iPod and then the lightning swing into the iPhone era, Apple suddenly found itself king of a real mountain – not just a foot hill or a dune.

Is Android the right thing for consumers? Frankly, no. That’s not what bothers Steve Jobs. Android is excellent for developers (a subset of the human species that Mr Jobs has utmost disdain for, just talk to any Apple developer) and wanna-be phone manufacturers.

It provides them with a fantastic baseline for bringing their concept to market. It just seems that, so far, most of the manufacturers concept has been that you pay them money for something someone else wrote and they stuck a badge on.

Jobs’ arguments:

Value.

I would hope that most people understand that nothing on the Internet is really free. While there are some services out there that are supported by donors, so that end-users don’t have to pay to use, most of them bring in money through either advertising or selling your data.

Chances are that you’ve read a privacy policy once or twice and it seemed pretty tame. Maybe thought “pfft, suckers, what are they gonna do with that?”

But there’s a downside to this sort of mass all-you-can-eat-for-a-little-chunk-of-your-privacy buffet…

Value: Or lack of any association to.

Now with 100% less gallbladder

Ungh. Not looking forward to the removal of the staples…

Multiple cores, why not CPUs?

Historically, multi-CPU motherboards were generally graded “server” (i.e. expensive). Now that multi-core is pretty much defacto, you’d expect to be seeing multi-cpu motherboards in the desktop/workstation grade.

But most dual-cpu motherboards seem to be labelled “server” still. The pricing is coming down, although still significantly higher than single CPU motherboards.

My hunch is that when desktop performance consumers spent $500 on a motherboard, $2000 on a pair of i7 extremes and $500-$1500 for sufficient cooling, they’d be kinda upset when they found performance to be about the same as a single CPU, possibly even slower in many cases.

Uncovering why would damage Intel/AMDs calm. Perhaps blow the lid on the shameful state of current-gen multicore CPUs. No lengthy explanation this time, lets just say that I view the “Core i” gen CPUs as an alpha/beta market test.

I <3 Canada

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2010/10/05/15594091.html

Facebook spammer fined $1 billion

Been busy

Working on 1.32 stuff, working on 1.32+ stuff, working on long-term stuff (keeping your lobby connection after spawning so we can do some of the stuff we’ve been dying to do for ages), checking out various F2P MMOs for ideas and understanding of how freeplay works…

And there is a continual background task running of working out ways I can take advantage of ZeroMQ to improve gameplay and development.

My first real Python script went into service today, part of the host executable staging… I have a shell-script wrapper called “buildpatch” which marshals the relevant stuff, builds the host binaries, runs all the unit tests, and if that all clears, stages the resulting package to one or more server clusters.

When it came time to publish a staged package, it was all pretty much handled manually, barring a script called “updatecluster” which was intended to be used as the final step in the process. It started by brute-force shutting down the cluster.

I leveraged the same code I built for terrain publishes, which takes advantage of Strat’s internal Lua support to check for a population on the server. If one is found, it performs a graceful shutdown. Otherwise it goes back to the brute-force mechanism.

My Python script checks the SVN repository for the revision being shipped, gets a host-affecting change log of all the revisions since the last publish, and then stamps the published revision as “published” and sends a change-summary email to the production list. It just kinda of nicely brings all of that to a close for now.

I coulda – a few years ago, woulda – done it in Perl or shell, but Python was so much less wordy.