Cricalix.Net

I have found one distinct issue with EVE so far.  The collision detection code is either very poorly written, or non-existent.

Today, while running Technological Secrets part 3, I decided to fly straight at the nice big cruiser (same size ship as me) on afterburner and get in range so that my light missiles and heavies would hit.  This might have actually worked, had it not been for the large chunk of asteroid between me and it.  Does my ship fly around the asteroid (considering the asteroid is a few thousand metres wide and long)?  No, it decides to be friends with it.

So while my ship was greeting the asteroid like a dog in heat, all of the wonderful computer-controlled ships were dumping missiles on me.  I try to tell the ship to navigate away from the asteroid – it doesn’t seem to listen.  When it finally listens, I’m on 30% structure, and trying to click the darn warp button just wouldn’t work.

Needless to say, I’m now kitting out a new ship.

$dayjob, as written previously, is a managed anti-spam, anti-virus service.  One of our first customers was our ISP, so we’ve always been protected by our software – good way to tell if it’s working!

Things have changed, we’re moving away from that ISP, and they’re changing to an in-house solution tailored for their needs.  Our MX records now point straight to the mail store server, so all the wonderful spammers in the world can now e-mail us, and our accounts have no protection.

I didn’t realise how much spam I get at my work account – I’ve never run a report on my own mail before, and I’m thinking I should, because it’s absolutely nuts how much I’m getting.  I’ll be changing to a fetchmail + SA pickup for now, until we get our SDSL line and pull our mail in-house.

EVE has a really neat visual effect when your structure gets damaged.  You start trailing smoke, and a rather large fireball appears on your hull…  I was at 5% structure – barely managed to warp out in time.

One of the problems with modern games is the size of their texture libraries etc, especially games like EVE.  This problem also extends to any large datasets that you might be working with, like graphics.

Enter the Gigabyte GC-Ramdisk (or i-RAM) – a PCI card with 4 DIMM slots, capable of holding up to 4 GB of RAM, but accessible as a SATA 150 drive via a SATA connector.  Battery backup too.  It’s not a true RAM speed ramdisk, but it sure looks nifty :)  $120 USD via Newegg.  I wonder if there’s a version in the UK?

Spring appears to have finally arrived in the Midlands. Cherries are blossoming, trees are getting leaves, and the temperature is above 15 ° C during the day. This means for a large number of us that the gardening season has started, and this year it includes me.

I’ve decided to rip out most plants in the lower bed (towards the house), and extend it by about a foot into the lawn. I’ll be converting this space into a vegetable garden with a bit of green thumb luck – carrots, peas, broccoli if all goes well. To that end, I’ve spent the weekend pulling plants out, and digging up the entire bed to add 150 litres of farmyard manure, and 50 odd litres of topsoil. I’ve found muscles I never knew I had as a result. continue reading…

While I wait for digiKam 0.9 SVN to move towards beta, and get better RAW support, I’ve had to investigate the Windows world of graphics manipulation to find software that I can accept as useable for my purposes. The 190ish photos I feel were worth posting for my Netherlands trip (over 1000 shot, so ~19% is pretty good!) required a few bits of software to get them to a posting state.

1. RawShooter essentials 2006 – I’ve touched on this software earlier. It takes my 9 MB MRWs, and spits out 25 – 35 MB TIFFs.
2. IrfanView 3.98 – Batch convert the TIFFs into 90% quality JPEGs.
3. ExifTool – A perl utility that can read EXIF, IPTC and Makernote data from the MRWs, and apply them to the JPEGs.

Why such a convoluted path? RSE can’t generate anything other than JPG and TIFF in the free version. I potentially wanted to edit the mid-way output, so I chose 16-bit TIFF as the intermediary step. IrfanView can read the 16-bit TIFFs, and claims to write out the EXIF data. In reality, it didn’t (I checked the TIFFs, the data was there), so ExifTool was brought into the picture. ExifTool will read and write just about every image format (so I really hope the Exiv2 guys can collaborate with the author of ExifTool), and can copy tags from one file format to another.

Toss in Gallery Remote to mass-upload my images into the gallery, and I’ve got a full gallery of photos. What’s left now is the tagging and mirroring to Bonito – my offsite hosting (as my entire site runs from my ADSL line). Feel free to check out the Netherlands gallery, but until the upload is done, it’s going to be a bit slow :(

My journey to the Netherlands on Saturday the 8th did not begin fortuitously – for a start, I mixed up my tickets for the train journey from Stoke-on-Trent, and thought I had to catch a noon train, not a 2 PM train. This however, had a bright side, for as I was standing on the platform, pondering the trains, I realised that I had left the Archos jukebox back in my house on the bed. Quick time, across the station, hail a taxi and make a very quick round-trip to pick it up from home. I then found out that my ticket allowed me to catch any train that was going in the approximate direction that I was going. This makes me wonder if I can travel to Manchester via London on a standard saver :) If I can, it’ll be a very cheap way to get around on the rail network.

The check-in for Jet2 was painless, if a bit tedious. They’ll only start checking-in for a flight 2 hours before the flight, and no earlier, even if the desk is open. So I had a pleasant stay in the line, waiting for them to close the Alicante flight and open the Amsterdam flight. Painless check-in though – present the booking ID and my passport, tag my carry-on and wander off to find lunch – which is how checking in should be.

If you ever travel out of Manchester Airport, and don’t mind spending a few quid over and above for lunch, find a seat at the Lancaster Brasserie in Terminal 1. The food is fantastic (especially for airport fare), the garlic bread was divine and the view is pretty darn good (right out onto the tarmac). The food quality was something I’d expect landside at a good restaurant in town, so 4 stars to the Brasserie.