Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

This has been a fairly bad week for me. One thing seemed to pile on to another in typical avalanche fashion. One of the worst bits was Monday, when Blade died. I'm fairly certain a nasty static shock through the USB port is what did it.

Blade is the system that started as a pure gaming rig, back in January 2005, and quickly became my full-time Linux do-everything box. It was my first 'new' build, all the others had been with scavenged parts. It seems cheesy, but tonight I'm dismantling her and I feel pretty sad, actually. This computer went through 3 power supplies, but otherwise had no mechanical issues. I ended up adding 2 hard drives to have almost a Terabyte of storage on there, an extra 2GB of RAM, a 'new' (at the time) GeForce 6800XT, and logged untold thousands of hours of gaming on her. LAN parties too numerous to count, dozens (hundreds including stuff for school) of software projects, and just about all my Walraven programming was done from her keyboard. Her uptime (aside from a summer in storage while I was out of the country) was probably up around 95%, not 5 9's but everything I ever asked for. Honestly, it was to the point where when I finally graduated and got a place with an office separate from my bedroom I'd wake up and wonder why she was off (as I couldn't see the running-lights). Now she's sitting in pieces on my floor as I part out what's good, and what's bad.

Living for another build:

• All the small bits: Screws, Jumpers, CMOS battery, etc.
• Case... she's served me well.
• Hard Drives, no data corruption that I know of.
• CD-ROM, still good but ordered a new one anyhow to get SATA.
• Peripherals, I may have damaged my USB mouse, but I think the others still work.
• RAM, its still good, and decent stuff too!
• Video card will definitely find a new home, she's still great!
• Heat sink, SPU had a nice heatsink, might as well keep that.

Bound for the scrap heap:

• PSU. When I plug a power cord in I get big blue sparks off the back power switch.
• Motherboard, although she won't hit the trash yet. I'm thinking of making a display for it.
• CPU. I don't have a spare board to test and see if its still good. If I can nab one off a friend I'll test, but otherwise this is gone.

What I ordered:

• Motherboard: obviously need a new one of these.
• RAM, my old stuff is DDR, need to get at least DDR2 for a new motherboard.
• CPU, again an old form factor just can't be found on modern boards.
• CD-ROM, I need a SATA CD-ROM as the new mobo only has one IDE slot and I have two IDE drives (yes, still).
• PSU, nice new 630W with a good long warranty!

The above should get me back up and running nicely, though in the future I'll be picking up a PCI-E video card (my old ones are all AGP) so I can run monitors dual-head. Have a nice 9800GT (my old card's big brother, XFS) picked out for early May, I think. This is money I did not want to have to spend now, so the optional pieces are waiting. I think that once I get the system up and running I'm going to do a nice reformat to clean up all the drives (begs the question of where I'll keep the data) and start from scratch. I'll consider it a new build, and let the name 'Blade' go to rest.

With all that said, I'll go back to dealing with the remains. If anyone knows of fun ways to display a motherboard, let me know. I want to honor this build somehow.

Good night, friend.

Another game review coming at you, took about a week off for the holidays and worked in some PS3 time.

Game: Metal Gear Solid 4
Developer: Kojima Productions
System: PS3
Difficulty: Solid Normal (3rd highest of 5)

Background
Metal Gear Solid 4 is set in a bleak future where war is a driving force for the world economy. Instead of standing armies, countries turn to Private Military Companies (only referred to as PMCs) to fight their wars, and the game portrays these wars as being purely for business sake. The soldiers are all kept in control by nanomachines running throughout their body, and every piece of equipment is 'tagged' to respond only if an authorized user is using it.

Full review below the cut.

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Everyone knows that if you play certain Beatle's records backwards you can uncover the conspiracy that Paul McCartney died and was replaced. There are other albums, especially metal albums, that make use of this technique, called Backmasking. In it a sound is placed into the music that means nothing played forwards, but played backwards its intelligible.

In order to find Backmasking, one must either already know to look for it, randomly play everything backwards, or hear something that sounds interesting and essentially just stumble upon it.

In regards to stumbling across almost subliminal messages, I just found a funny one. I use the Famfamfam Silk icon pack a lot. I mean a LOT. Just about any website I set up will use at least a few of them because they're so clean and, well, free! (And since I'm plugging him, I'll point out that these are licensed under the CC Attribution 2.5 license, so if you end up using them, make sure to attribute!)

Browsing through the big ol' image of all icons I came across this:

(Don't) Drink and drive!

I've browsed through here may times before, but this time I read that as "drink and drive", and then I just couldn't help but notice the hidden commands.

1) Get a drink.
2) Empty drink.
3) Drive! (and you'll notice later on there's drive_error, and drive_burn... as such I highly do NOT recommend actual drinking and driving).

Hope you get a chuckle out of it as well.

(DISCLAIMER: Neither I, nor Mark James/Famfamfam, would ever encourage any form of dangerous or illegal behavior. Do not drink and drive... period)

Yesterday I posted a long write up of my thoughts on Fallout 3. In my haste to get that written and get off to bed, I forgot one of the main points I wanted to talk about, although in retrospect I think that it deserves its own post anyhow.

The Hacking Minigame
Scattered across the Wastes, whether in museums, house, or random places that just happen to have turrets nearby, you'll stumble across old computer terminals. These may be useless systems that just contain a random citizen's poetry about the current situation, or control the turret system you're about to walk into, or do anything in between. Some of the terminals are just open, these are almost always of the useless 'poetry' variety. Most, however, are password protected which gives you two ways to get inside of them. Ok, possibly three if there's a "D - none of the above" choice, Such as just blowing up the turret you want stopped.

The easiest way to get in is searching the surrounding area for a password. Yes, just like in real life, the denizens of the Wastes write down their password, and stick it in their desk (or in their pocket, or corpse...). I chuckled a little bit the first time I found one of these in a desk.

The normal way to break in to the terminal is the hacking minigame. I've seen a few of these over time, ranging from simple "Guess the password" Flash games, to HBH and Hack This Site, and this was probably the simplest one that captures the feel of real hacking.

When you open up a locked terminal, you'll see a screen like the following:

At the top you see 'Attempts Left', this starts at 4 most of the time, and counts down. If you ever use all your attempts, the computer is locked down, and unless you have a special skill you're out for good.

Below that is a bunch of plaintext and garbage. This is supposedly a recovered password file, and its up to you to figure out what's the correct password. You do this like Mastermind, you pick a plaintext string, and it'll tell you how many letters are correct, and in the correct spot. If the password was Grapes, and I clicked on Kitten I'd get back 1/6. Statistically this becomes very hard once you get up to hard terminals that have 8 characters and a bunch of choices. The way to make it easier is to look through the garbage for hints. Anytime you find matching braces, parenthesis, or brackets, you select the first one and it'll either remove a dud string, or replenish your allowance. Unlike the plaintext words, you must mouse over the first character in one of these garbage strings to see the whole thing highlighted. On my old TV this was a lesson in squinting and frustration, trying to pick out the parens from braces.

Once you correctly input the password, the computer is forever open to you (and you get 44 experience, regardless of level!).

The Reality
The reason I liked this minigame, is its darn close to reality. Not in the actual skills used, but through the sifting through of a bunch of garbage, trying to figure out what's valuable and what's just another corrupted file. You have to sit there, be patient, and keep trying. In some cases you have to cancel your attempt because you're about to lock the system, and start all over again. Sure, when script kiddies can just release a botnet these factors are mitigated, but at the heart of it all, it comes down to noticing the little things (oh, look, an old Apache install), having to piece things together (Hmm, they plugged all the holes in Apache, but I noticed there's .php pages, maybe mod_php is old), and hoping you're going after a user that's careless enough to leave their password laying on the desk.

And of course, there's always the ability to bypass getting into the system, and simply pick the lock on the safe, or destroy a turret or two and forget about the system.

I picked Fallout 3 up the night before I had surgery with the thought that I'll have tons of time to myself to plug through an RPG. We (a friend that was helping me out at the time and I) logged a good amount of play time, if I can find a way to find out exactly how much I'll edit the post to reflect that, during the next week while I was off from work. Having just hit two possible endings tonight, I felt it was time for a review.

Note: I will keep this as spoiler free as possible, however if you really don't want to learn anything, walk away now. I will give basic geographical/plot background information, and some limited meta information about endings, nothing about the endings themselves.

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I've been laid up for two weeks now due to my own stupidity. Ok, my own stupidity coupled with a 400 pound motorcycle and a extra 3 inches I wanted her in the corner. Ok, my own stupidity, Kari, a corner, and my father and I cracking jokes about hernias (he'd had two by then, I'd had one). So of course, Karma being the fickle mistress she is, she graced me with another hernia (I'm ahead of my father who didn't get his FIRST until my age!). The hernia itself didn't hurt much, it just felt uncomfortable enough while sitting up straight that I took that week off of work.

My surgery was scheduled for this past Tuesday, but I had a friend coming in last weekend for a concert and gaming. What's a boy to do? I took the noble way out, and holed up all weekend with the PS3, new Magic (the Gathering) decks, and a new (to me) game called Gloom in order to feel as good as possible for the concert. I have to say, this game is a winner.

Gloom is made by Atlas Games, a company that makes some fun and compact games, such as Lunch Money that are easily portable, and yet very engrossing. What intrigued me as I was reading the back of the box in a good local game store were the card design and feel of the game.

The cards are clear. That's right, clear. The image on the back of the box shows this:

(feel free to ignore the creepy clown, he's but one of 20 characters)

Every character has a portrait in the center, and some flavor text in various places (name, title, flavor). Each Modifier (What's that?! More later) card has flavor text (name, flavor text), modifiers in one or more of three locations (all on the left), optional rules, and an optional story icon. In the sample picture above, the top top card is an untimely death, but the Modifier card under it has a -10 modifier in the middle spot, see it? It also has a bat as the story icon (this is just a generic 'beast').

Basically the game revolves around stacking Modifiers on top of Characters (you control a whole family, the winner is whichever family has the lowest self-worth). Because the cards are clear you'll see Modifiers or story icons from all the cards below unless you play a card that has something in the same spot. The goal is to eventually kill off your Characters using Untimely Death cards when the have the lowest self-worth possible, hence the name, Gloom.

The fun part is the feel of the game. Knowing just the above the game seems, well, depressing, but it is simply hysterical. Yes, you can play just by tossing cards around like you might in Magic, but the whole point of the game is to tell the sad story of a certain family. Think of it like a good Poe story, if Poe was Dave Berry. In the rules it encourages you to tell more of the story as you play Modifiers and Untimely Deaths, kind of like the old campfire game of everyone adding a sentence to a story, since you can play cards on anyone's Characters. The fun bit here is the usual 'punish' on another player of hurting their character is flipped on its head. So you'll hear "Angel was unhappy since she got beat up by bums, but then she met the man of her dreams and got blessed by the church." "Nooooooo! Why?! I didn't do ANYTHING to you!".

The stories get fun. A friend who's holed up with me since his car is in the shop and has been for weeks was playing purely based on building good story lines. It doesn't get wins but I was dieing laughing at bits of it. For example (card names in italics):

Player 1 (owner of Grogar): "Grogar, the half alive Teddy Bear, went on a trip last week. He went to see his family in Africa, but forgot to bring his water purification tablets. Ever since he's been distressed by dysentery." (-25 total Modifier, -15 on top, and -10 in the middle).

Player 2: "Grogar was horribly distress by this disease, especially when he heard it affected his whole family back home as well. However, when his much-removed uncle, Jimmy, finally succombed to the disease, he left Grogar the family land, all of Egypt! Grogar really landed a legacy." (+15 total modifier, +15 in the center... which wipes out the -10 from above).

Player 3: "After Grogar landed his legacy. he became the talk of the town! A cute young teddy bear named Jenny introduced herself, and not three months later they were wondrously well wed!" (+20 total modifier, 0 on top which wipes out the -15 from Player 1's card, +20 on bottom).

Now in one turn Grogar has gone from being worth -25 (a decent score, all 5 members being worth that is -100 total. My wins usually come around -110 to -130) to +35, a rotten score. Thankfully there's very very few ways to kill off a Character while they have positive self worth, but it'll still take a few turns for Grogar to go back to getting points for his player. More importantly, we now know Grogar has land in Africa, and a newly wed wife, which lets us play an abundance of negative cards and stay within the story!

Overall, my two friends and I have really enjoyed this game. We played 4-5 games last weekend, and I've done 2-3 since then, way more than we played with the Magic decks we all bought. The games can take a while, the three player games lasted about an hour apiece using all five Characters in the families. I'd have to rate it a 4/5 for myself.

Why does it warrant a 4/5?

• It is unique, its not a rip-off of another idea (aka another CCG, or based off a computer game or movie).
• I still get a kick out of the clear cards, they look and feel darn cool. The humor is to die for (pun intended).
• The box is small, easily tossed into a bag, mayhaps even a purse (I don't own one, so I wouldn't know) to have if you're planning on waiting somewhere, or for a picnic.
• Its a smaller game company, I really like supporting companies like SJ Games, Atlas, etc over mass-producing places like Hasbro. The games feel more unique, and usually have a bit more 'flair'.

So why not a 5/5?

• After a few games we could tell what card the opponent would play just by listening to the story, a few more cards would be very welcome. There are add-on packs, and I may pick them up just to get a little more randomness.
• With even a 3 player game we got through the deck one and a half times before the end of the first game, so its something you can expect to happen.
• It comes in a box, not a tin. This is very common, and I dislike it. See box rant below.
• I feel a 5/5 is for games that make me sit back and think "Wow, am I lucky I experienced that. nothing better could be done." You know, like the movie Torque.

Box Rant:
Recently I've become very irked at games that are packaged in cardboard boxes, not tins. For a big game, this makes a bit of sense, such as Munchkin. Big box, can be made of study cardboard, in two parts like a normal box + top. However, for small games that are Chez Geek sized (and Gloom is the same size) or smaller, where the box is one cardboard box with flaps that need to close over the cards, this is not a good solution. It works fine when the cards are in their shrink wrap, but after one game they're a tad bigger, and the flaps never close correctly. They'll get bent, or let cards slide out, or not fit the rules, its just not a good solution, its a hack. Hacks, while clever, aren't right for long term solutions.

The real solution here is tins. Make a tin the same size as that cardboard box and it'll hold its shape. It'll hold the cards. It'll snap closed so you're absolutely sure no cards are falling out in your backpack. Tins work. I'm sure they're not used because of a price issue, but I'm always more inclined to buy a tined game than a boxed one. My hack to fix their hack is ziplock bags. All of my game cards, for all of my games, live in plastic ziplock bags. I know they're not coming out.

Due to the recent elections, and fears of a renewed Assault Weapons ban (Which actually bans a lot more than should be considered an 'assault weapon', and only semi-automatic weapons) gun parts have been getting extremely rare, leading to me still waiting on the 20" barrel I ordered over a month ago. I've heard I may be waiting another 4 weeks for it, though I'll probably just cancel the back order. Saturday I rush delivered Midway's last 24" AR barrel (at least, within my price range, and with a gas block) thanks to a Veteran's Day sale. Between this and the hand guards I just ordered, I've got enough of a gun for "Hero pictures". Kidding aside, the gun's about 95% complete, all I have left to do is tighten the hand guard (its serving as the barrel nut), and put the gas tube in.

So, after I take the hand guard/gas block off again tonight and put everything in there, I'll have the following:

• DPMS Stripped Lower
• DPMS Lower Parts Kit
• CCA 6 position stock
• Hogue tactical pistol grip
• DPMS stripped upper
• DPMS bolt assembly (I don't recommend this... it was really shoddily put together and not lubed. While I intended to strip it down anyhow, I was very sad to find that I *had* to. Anyone buying the bolt I got as a drop in replacement would have been sorely mistaken)
• 24" DPMS stainless steel 1x9" barrel.
• Aluminum gas block
• DPMS gas system
• Hogue Molded foregrip

Total cost: $632.12! That's under what I was aiming to spend ($700)! Try finding a 24" AR-15 from DPMS, Olympic Arms, or Stag for under $1000... I feel like I'm forgetting something here, but I've gone through and touched every bit, and they're in my list.

Now, the one big thing I'm missing is optics. I'll be buying a scope next pay period, and ordering iron sights as a backup. The minor bit I'm missing is a bipod. It turns out this thing is *heavy*. Because I have a more 'tactical' stock on it (light and collapsible) its also very front-heavy. To fix this I could either get a traditional solid stock, and toss a 2-3 pound lead weight in the back, or get a bipod and just be happy with bench shooting. I'm going the latter route, though it will mean ordering a new gas block with rails on the bottom as well. I have one, but its for a smaller barrel, oh well.

But, overall I have a piece of equipment that should put a tiny piece of metal down range very, very quickly. The 24" barrel means I expect this to be shooting around 2500 ft/s. The other advantage to a nice heavy gun is low recoil, this will be very interesting to shoot since I've only ever fired the 16" tactical set ups.

Now I just need a name for her.

Ok, the title lies. but I'm cleaning up my desktop, and came across a screenshot from a few days ago. It is a CAPTCHA that I, for the life of me, could only make sense of as: Six E Pi Pi. So, in this case it worked, right? The human figured out what the letters should be, except as clearly as those are Pi's, Pi is not a letter on my keyboard. I figured I should get a screenshot to show where CAPTCHAs are going:

Sadly, CAPTCHAs are a technology we need to combat spam, which accounts for at least 80% of email today, not to mention message boards, instant messages, or text-messages. However, we're merely engaged in a technology arms race with spammers, this is *not* a technology that is winning any fights, we just try to stay one step ahead. This is increasingly hard with CAPTCHA entry being a job in countries with lower incomes, spammers cheating by offering porn in return for solving a CAPTCHA, and (in a case that doesn't just apply humans) CAPTCHA breaking drives AI research. Basically, no 'new' CAPTCHA technology is going to keep spammers out for long. A bleak future indeed. On the other hand, we already have 80%, how much worse can it get? I think the real answer lies in spam filters, although for the most part those are also in a mere arms race, but at least then you can control your own computer, not just leave the image out there for another human to crack.

Its been a few months since I announced I was going to try to write a PHP based Mafia game and in that time I've learned a decent amount.

First off, if you want a project done, you can't be getting distracted. Since I've started Thieves Tavern I've also fallen in love with motorcycles and started gun smithing. Both of those have stolen major programming time away from this project. Its only through the weather being downright cold lately, and parts for the gun being on back order that I've had the time to get gung ho on this project again.

Secondly, when dealing with databases, its really easy to tailor the database so that the game works. In fact, that's the whole point of editing the database: To test this bit, or that bit... but not the overall product. Earlier this week I'd reached a point where I thought I could push my code live, and invite some friends to beta test it. I figured, at the time that clearing out my database would make stuff work better, get rid of all the random edge cases I'd built up along the way. Well, after clearing out the database, nothing worked. I couldn't start games, I couldn't chat, nada. This is when I learned that it doesn't get easier after removing test data, only harder. It took another two days of testing, clearing, testing some more, as well as cleaning up my code, before I got it back to the 'working' beta state. Thankfully, now I know its working as intended (minus the obvious beta bugs, of course).

So now its off to beta test Thieves Tavern. I'm kind of excited to be playing this, I had loads of fun while playing myself in local tests, and I can imagine it being even better taking out friends online. If you'd like to help test, get ahold of me (in real life, I'll ask for signups for a public beta later on) and I'll send you an invite.

(And in the 10 minutes it took to write this I already have a laundry list of fixes/stuff I just plumb forgot)

I got my motorcycle a little over 4 months ago and had a blast learning how to ride, enjoying taking the slower roads, and having a new way to clear my mind of any issues. She was a good little bike, not too underpowered, and on a warm afternoon she'd pull all the way from first to 6th beautifully!

Unfortunately I've learned that that warm spirit takes a mean turn into cold distance as the temperature goes down... the hard way. So for those of you who met Kari, bid your farewells, she's on her way out. What i thought would be an amicable break up is really going to be me dumping her for as much as I can get. Before I post the picture of the day, I'll point out that I'm 100% ok, and she didn't go down or anything, just had issues with staying on... while I was doing a fair clip... 70 miles from home... up in the mountains... way after dark... when I didn't have cold weather gear.

So, without further ado, I present Dead Bike Walking!

Now to go find another way to plug the hole in my heart, already have a few plans in motion, but I'll wait to see what pans out before posting about Kari's replacement. Unfortunately it'll take a bit longer than I'd hoped due to the cost of a tow home, even with roadside assistance on my insurance.