Since I installed Gentoo its been bugging me that if I scrolled too quickly through a web page, it'd switch from “scrolling the page” to “next page” and flip to the page I'd used the back button to get away from. For a while I thought it was a Firefox thang, but I finally discovered that my mouse was giving different “button” messages depending how quickly I scrolled it. Normal, slow, scrolling was sending buttons “4” or “5” to the system, but quick scrolling sent buttons “6” or “7”.
A quick check of the xorg.conf file showed the mouse configuration looked like:
*ring* *ring*
Me: “Hello?”
Man (with noticeably accent): “Hi. How are you today?”
Me (suspiciously): “Fine.”
Man: “I'm calling today to talk to you about your mobile phone. How much are you spending per month?”
Me: “No, it's OK. I'm happy with my phone.”
Man: “So you are spending 20 to 30 pounds per month?”
Me: “No... I... look - I don't want to change phones.”
Man: “We'd like to offer...”
<voice fades out as I put the phone down>
What's interesting is they seem to be talking at cross-porpoises. Here's Mighty Marvelite Ames Kirshen:
“World of Warcraft is a success because of accessibility to the user. It's a pick up and play MMO, same with City of Heroes. Having tried Final Fantasy XI and EverQuest, it was easier to jump in [to CoH or WoW] and customize your character and play.”
So... basically, simple = a winnar.
Meanwhile, over at Cryptic, Jack “Emmett” Emmett goes for the gameplay:
“In CoH it was a goal that the game had to be fun to play. But what CoH didn't engage in, that a game like WoW does, is an economy system. Playing the auction house in WoW is a game in and of itself, how does that interpret and how does that translate to the Marvel universe? We've got to figure that out.”
Which sounds suspiciously like, “boy did we screw the pooch by leaving out all the fun complexity WoW has”.
Maybe they're just hoping talking about how cool WoW is will cause its success to rub off on them. But I think they're missing what really made WoW the 6 million subscriber success it is: Blizzard's long history of good multiplayer games that resulted in a large fanbase that plays online games. Oh, and Elf pr0n.
“This is interesting: seems like Seth MacFarlane and company snuck the phrase "so fucking funny" into last night's episode of Family Guy, and FOX didn't catch it until it was too late.”
A rare family gathering this last weekend, three generations under one roof. At least until we went over to Stourhead House to see the Gardens:
Stourhead garden was created by Henry Hoare II in the 1740s. The River Stour was dammed to form a great lake. Around the lake Hoare laid out a landscape garden to entrance his guests with stunning views and pacify them with serene walking pleasure.
As the garden developed, he added classical features, such as the Temple of Flora, the Pantheon, the Temple of Apollo and Gothic ruins to enhance the series of splendid and unexpected vistas.
Pics are up on Flickr. In addition, there's a couple of videos I made on You Tube. They're having a extra special (as in Ralph Wiggum special) art exhibit there at the moment called Beauty and the Beast, which largely features the rape of the existing art around the lake with ill-judged modern art pieces such as a polystyrene version of one of the existing statues, a flattened Mini propped up on a tree, some rubber tubes masquerading as a fake island (liked by the local birds at least - though they had crapped all over it), a few cheaply made water bottle labels inspired by thirteen conversations the artist had with people in the gardens or a bronze bust called the Head of Christ carelessly plonked in the middle of a tribute to Greek, Roman and Egyptian gods. Only one piece seemed to garner some positive reviews (and I'm including the staff of the gardens in this - the guide in the Parthenon who had to sit with the Head of Chris for hours was positively scathing) was David Toop's musical additions to the Grotto - which is what the twovideos are of.
Sweet Enola Gay! I've got to say Date Movie is one of the worst movies I've every tried to watch. I've sat through bad movies in the past, but I couldn't even make it through this one... even for Alyson Hannigan's sake.
Let's say you have a number of servers at a hosting company. If one of the servers becomes unresponsive, said hosting company (herafter SHC) have a “control panel” that allows you to request either a hard reset or a KVMoIP connection to the doomed machine. In order that the server will recognise the KVMoIP (or, more correctly, the keyboard and mouse parts) SHC will hard reset your machine for you.
Let's say further one of your servers - they call it Server A - stops responding and you request a KVMoIP to it, but when you connect you find you're looking at Server B. So you call up SHC and tell them they've connected the KVMoIP to the wrong server.
“No”, they reply. “You must have labelled the machines wrongly or have otherwise confused which of servers A and B correspond to your names for them. If you request a KVMoIP for Server B you will find youself looking at Server A.”
So you request a KVMoIP for Server B, but when you connect you find you're still looking at Server B. So you call SHC and tell them you're still seeing Server B. Whilst you're on the phone, Server B (which, if it wasn't obvious, is running fine) is unceremoniously powered off and rebooted, a process which ends with the machine booting to the chilling message “Operating System not found”.
After a little more time - during which it becomes apparent that the KVMoIP attached to Server B is either improperly connected or faulty and has to be replaced - the RAID interface for Server B is available through the KVMoIP and shows that one disk has catastrophically failed (most likely due to being switched off whilst running) and cannot be rebuilt. A replacement will be needed.
Meanwhile, Server A is still unresponsive, and SHC again explains that the KVMoIP that showed Server B was attached to Server A and there must be some three- or four-way confusion where Server A points to Server B, Server B points to... wait... anyway, some other server, possibly will point to Server A. So you should request a reboot for Server A and see which server is in fact rebooted and that will show which one it really is.
A reboot for Server A is thus requested which promptly reboots and, in a stroke of luck, returns to normal operation. No clue as to why it crashed mind you.
And thus, back to Server B and the big question: how many cock-punches does the person who tells you it will cost £60/hour for an engineer to swap in the replacement hard disk deserve? And how many more if you knew it was a hot-swappable machine where the drives slide out the front?
Do these people not live in the real world? It's as if they expected the sales to keep rising for ever...
“Analysts warn that the iPod has passed its peak. From its launch five years ago its sales graph showed a consistent upward curve, culminating in a period around last Christmas that saw a record 14 million sold. But sales fell to 8.5 million in the following quarter, and down to 8.1 million in the most recent three-month period. Wall Street is reportedly starting to worry that the bubble will burst.”
The Afghan Whigs are back together, at least for a bit; Pitchfork has the skinny, and an old video.
“It was announced today that Greg Dulli will reunite with the beloved (and, OK, pretty strongly hated, too) 80s/90s alt-rock band that made his decadent, quasi-misogynistic leerings famous.”
“You can select columns, rows, or blocks of cells in HTML tables in Firefox (or any Gecko-powered browser) by holding down "Control" and selecting with the mouse. Handy for copy pasting data from tables in websites.”
Now part of the Google Toolbar for Firefox - pity they didn't leave it as a standalone though as there don't appear to be any other functions in the toolbar I find useful.
The Cave - It should be a no brainer; even if you're not claustrophobic the idea of being trapped a mile underground should give you the willies. Unfortunately, The Cave fumbles this with three problems:
It's too dark down there. Hiding your monsters is de rigeur in horror movies, but The Cave manages to hide everything as well. Our heroes are equipped with their own lights of course, but they're hand-held things and when thrashed around by victims obscure events more than reveal them.
No-one's scared. As one character notes, if anyone else was stuck down where they are, they'd be the ones sent to rescue them. They're the experts at being a mile underground, so no-one's worried about it.
At some point in the process, someone said “wouldn't it be great if the monsters were humans mutated by a weird parasite into bat-like monsters that need six-inch claws to eat fish” and no-one stood up and said it was a stupid idea. Then someone else must have said “what about if we make out that the parasite adapts its hosts to living underground and destroys their intelligence, but right at the end have it take over someone and not adapt them but instead take them over mentally and escape into the world” and, instead of them being beaten to a pulp, someone else said “I smell sequel!”
King Kong - Peter Jackson's version. Apparently, he's so god-damn good now he doesn't need to be edited any more. This thing's three hours long (well, less ten minutes for the credits) when it really could have been at least an hour shorter. There's innumerable long, shots of people looking at things and at least one fight scene that is in slow motion for no discernable reason. I hear he wants to make an extended version, which boggles the mind. I couldn't say how faithful it is to the original(s), since I haven't seen them, but the basic story is decent - if a little out of date now (I'd be interested in seeing what an updated version of the story might be as well as the FX) and allegedly a touch racist.
