Author: Steve Dougherty

Coding

I recently started trying to set up zoneclient to update my DNS listings if my IP changed. I wanted to have it checked extremely often, yet not waste zoneedit’s bandwidth by checking up with them every 3 to 5 hours via cron. This problem was brought into new light when Irfan tried to pull up my site during Biology class and failed. Tandoc was nice enough to let me check what was wrong after class, (we finished a bit early) and my IP had changed, although I could do nothing to fix it from school.

I was having a problem with zoneedit. Although it claimed to support getting my external IP from my router, for some reason it was checking the wrong page. I have no formal or even really informal experience in Python, and my attempts at poking the code produced nothing helpful. I contacted Kal, the sole maintainer of the code. He replied in close to an hour, which was a pleasant suprise. I explained my problem and gave him my logs, and within 5 hours of email back and forth the problem was completely solved! I now have the script running every 5 minutes. Excessive? Yes.

I’m also writing a C++ fish tank simulation program as qualification for Camp CAEN‘s advanced C++  Game Development class. We’re supposed to draw a fish tank in text on the screen, then when space is pressed, randomize all the positions of the fish and draw again. Multiple fish in one position are shown as a * instead of their type letter. This program is also supposed to be able to read in the number of fish and tank dimensions from a file at runtime. When I started it had been quite a while since I had done any C++. The initial part went relatively quickly, (drawing the fish tank, having the fish randomize) but I was stumped with the memory errors I was getting when I started easing the thing into being dynamic and read its settings in at runtime. After spending quite a while troubleshooting with the help of those in ##C++ on freenode, I found that my problems were because I was accidentally declaring a local instance of the member variables I was attempting to initialize in my constructor. Whoops. Let’s see if I make that mistake again in a hurry.

EDIT: Alter Ego!

Electric Cars!

Here’s a very good idea. There’s an article on Forbes. We need to skip the whole painful hydrogen and ethanol and biofuel psudoadvancement and go right to electric cars. Solar peaks in the day, wind peaks in the night. Balance out the load by allowing utilities to borrow power back from the cars, provided the driver has not disabled this ability. (Like they’re leaving soon or something?) Really, why are we even trying to set up another flawed model of distrubution of liquids for powering vechicles? Electricity really is the renewable way to go. Besides, I remember reading somewhere that two thirds of oil in the US is used for millitary use and transporation trucks and the like. Although changes in consumer technology could definitely help, the millitary and transporation and freighting industry will need to get involved too. The article is here.

Server Reinstall

I’ve reinstalled Debian, I felt there was a buildup of bloat on my previous system. While I did this, I moved the site over temporarily to one of my BOINC zombies. I resized my initial partition into the smallest size possible near the end of my drive. I resized the swap partition from an extravagant 3.8GB to a more logical 2GB. I made the rest of the drive another ext3 partition. During all the pre-reinstall tweaking I did, I adjusted the BIOS. I turned off all the onboard stuff except ethernet. I noticed the SiS onboard video card was sharing 32MB of my RAM, so I disabled that. Oops, no video. I had to go get a spare video card and use that. Nothing fancy, just an ATI Radeon LT. All it needed to do was text anway.

I then installed the system, checking Basic System and Web Server as the packages to install, because it seemed to have frozen when I tried SQL server as well. I installed a few basic packages such as lynx and bzip2, copied over the server log and configuration files, and set up the static LAN IP. After making sure the password protection for some server resources were intact, (they were) I pointed the router at the server again. It seems faster, which is everything I was looking for.

Audiosurf!

Many of you may have heard about Audiosurf. I would like to now officially lend my voice to the chorus proclaiming its awesomeness. Audiosurf is a game where you play as a character moving down a highway. This highway is remarkable in that it is dynamically and automatically created by the game depending on what song you feed it. It seems to support all formats that matter, including OGG and FLAC, which is a pleasant surprise. The object of the game is to collect colored blocks, forming groups of three or more so that they disappear. There are different characters, each a different game mode. High scores are integrated. There are worldwide and statewide score charts. Your score is automatically added to any charts you managed to get on to, provided you are logged in. You can also add your friends’ usernames and compare your scores to theirs.

Pics:

Title screen. Yes, Steam overlay supported.

Select a character and difficulty level.

Then select a song.

I'm choosing Still Alive, sung by Jonathan Coulton.

And there's the highway!

Whee!

In calm moments the road slants upwards, in tense parts the road shoots downward, making a very intense experience. The game isn’t so much like Frets on Fire, Guitar Hero, or DDR in that it’s not really about hitting everything. It’s more about having a more interesting experience with your music. The song analysis works amazingly well. A song with a strong beat is recommended. The only thing I’ve seen that didn’t really work was a very soft one from my sister’s MSUCC practice CD.

Everything else has worked marvelously. Rock, techno, Orange Box tracks, even Bach! I strongly recommend this game. There’s a demo on Steam if you’re interested.

EDIT: Yes, there is a typo in the Portal Orange Box songs. It reads “10 – Your Not A Good Person,” and it should be “You’re Not A Good Person.”

Published
Categorized as Games

Bush’s Decline

This is an interesting video. It compares Bush’s speaking skills 10 years ago to a more recent Bush. Link.

Fun With Linux

I have two things:

  1. Guild Wars runs perfectly under Wine, no tweaking.
  2. VirtualBox is interesting, and much less nerve-wracking then trying a new OS on a real system. I intend to use it to try out new distributions more easily.

Also, logical volume management sounds interesting. I think I’ll check that out later…