Ranok’s Ramblings

As some of you know, this summer (and many before that) I spent paddling in northern Ontario (and beyond). This year will be my second year on staff, and I’m one of the few who will be going up early to set this up and prepare for the influx of staff, campers and parents, who will take the islands by force. I’m leaving on my 564 mile journey on Wednesday, which I’m breaking up into a few chunks. I’m going to visit some friends in Westport, and spend the night in Potsdam, visiting Lauren and some of my other friends who are there. The next day, I continue my journey north, hopefully getting picked up in a boat (otherwise it’s a long swim) where I’ll start working.

For the first portion of the summer, I’ll be cleaning up rodent scat and prying open doors to reveal… more rodent scat. After the other staff members arrive, we’ll fix canoes, and prepare the rest of camp for the campers to arrive. Once they hit the docks, I will hopefully be assisting a trip of young men out into the wilderness for 3 weeks, portaging from lake to lake, and longs days under the sun and above the water.

I’ve been going to this camp since I was but a young lad, and although I love every minute of being there, there’s no way to communicate that with people who haven’t experienced it. When I try to share my journeys, I can sense that the deeper meaning of my travels is lost, and all is left is a week-long canoe paddle around a lake.

If possible, I will try to post pictures, or keep people updated, but part of the experience is being on a remote island, so if you don’t hear from me, I hope you’re having a wonderful summer, and I’m excited to see you in the fall.

This is my first music review, but I thought I’d give it a shot — any comments would be much appreciated.

After searching for more music like Porcupine Tree, I found another one of Steven Wilson’s project bands, Blackfield. Blackfield is a joint effort between british Steven Wilson and israeli Aviv Geffen. Blackfield II is their second album and overall is a very pleasant listen, with calming melodies and solem lyrics. From what I can tell, both Aviv and Steven take turns with the singing and the difference in accent is quite apparent. Listeners not used to a foreign English accent might find Aviv’s to be a little odd and take a little getting used to. Of the 10 songs on this album, the ones that stand out are “End of the World”, “1,000 People”, “Miss U” and “Epidemic”, each of which have sad, yet powerful lyrics, and a beautiful musical score to accompany them.

While very partial to Steven Wilson and Porcupine Tree, I think that Blackfield expresses their emotions and thoughts in a very gestalt manner and comes highly recommended.

Blackfield Home

I know it was short, but please give feedback, as I’d like to review more music and critiques would be quite helpful. Ranok

While on the train back from my girlfriend's house, I whiled away the hours making ThinkLink, a site that uses various association techniques to find others while think like you. After signing up, you just type the first thing that pops into your head when you read the idea, or look at the picture. After doing 20+ of these, you can click on your name to see other's who made the same associations as you did, I just did it to keep myself busy, but it's very interesting to see how closely some of my best friends are linked together, even though they have not met. It's still very much in its infancy, but feel free to give it a shot.

                                       Peace and chow,

                                     Ranok
 

Hello,

    After spending way too much time on I Can Has Cheezburger looking at funny cats, I decided to use their LOL builder to make my own. Please be aware that it's my first attempt, so it may not be that good.

                                    Peace and chow,

                                         Ranok
 

    Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone can enjoy a few days with family and friends. As per Todd's request, here is the package that lets you suspend and hibernate on my IBM T60 when no other method worked.

    Install 'uswsusp' and then run either s2disk to hibernate, or s2ram to suspend. Enjoy!

                             Peace and much chow,

                                       Ranok
 

After playing Tremulous for a few weeks, and administering two servers, I've gleaned some knowledge that other may find useful if they're running their own server. Here is basically a dump of what I've learned, in no order:

• If you're trying to add new maps, download the .pk3 files and put them in the same directory as the other maps. You can then add the name of the map to maprotation.cfg, but make sure that you don't forget whatever comes after the name (i.e. procyon-beta3 rather than procyon). Also you need to make sure the variable sv_pure is set to 0.
• If you want to enable cheating (/give funds x) you need to choose the map using the command /rcon <rconpassword> devmap <map-name>.
• To make a team evolve, type /rcon <rconpassword> set g_<human|alien>stage <0-2> (regardless of whether there are cheats enabled or not).
• When all the buildpoints go away, it's not a bug, it's sudden death mode kicking in, which can be disabled by setting g_suddendeathtime to 0
• The dedicated variable tells the server whether or not to ping the master server so it'll show up when people list Internet servers. If you want to keep your server private (though people will be able to connect to it if they have the IP/hostname) set it to 1, otherwise 2.
• To color your username, prefix your name with ^(0-9)
  1. 0 - Black
  2. 1– Red
  3. 2 - Green
  4. 3 - Yellow
     
  5. 4 - Blue
  6. 5 - Cyan
  7. 6 - Pink
  8. 7 - White
  9. 8 - Black
  10. 9 - Red
      

Hope this helped.

                 Peace and chow,

                           Ranok
 

After this gets posted, there will be no doubt, I'm an evil computer science student, I loathe annoyances as they remind me of seg faults and core dumps, I can't stand spam like I can't stand useless log entries to dmesg, I am heartless. But, now that everything is out in the open, I will share some of my dirty little pleasures that I derive so much fun from:

1. After a certain professor used 'clearly' to show how simple some things are (sometimes, they are about as clear as mud), I've decided to use clearly, followed by a bogus fact or proof, as no one would refute a 'clearly'.
2. This one is for those distant relatives who have your email, but nothing important to send you, so they just forward jokes that got forwarded to them. My favorite response is to start forwarding spam I get to them, so they can feel as special, and as loved I feel when I get pictures of dogs in funny hats or chain letters .

On a completely different note, I've fallen completely in love with Lisp, sorry, but now it seemes that everything in the world is just a list waiting to be LOOPed through, car'd or cdr'd. It's just like the XKCD comic, last night I was drifting through parenthesises and recursion, free of syntax and compiler restrictions.

For a COSI project, I'm thinking of playing with Ubuntu and thinclients, perhaps I could make an Ubuntu build that could be managed easily, and stay up to date.

                 Peace and chow,

                                      Ranok

Hello avid readers ,

     Today I got a very rough proof of concept regenerative distributed hash table (DHT) working. It's a peer-to-peer setup. When the client makes a request, it queries the master server (version two will make it true p2p) and gets an address of where the data corresponding to the hash key is. If that server is down, or the server doesn't respond, the client returns to the master and gets the next host that has a copy of that key slice. If that host is up, the client downloads the entire keyslice, and tells the master server that it's now replacing the down host. If there are enough clients making requests, the downed servers should be replaced fast enough to keep the data intact.

    Currently, it will only allow users to query and regenerate, I haven't added any logic to allow for updates or additions, but I'm going to keep plugging away at it. I also want to add some logic into the master server to be able to split up the entire DHT once it's redundant enough, that way each server has reduced strain.

                         Peace and chow,

                                ranok
 

In class, sometimes I just can't make myself care. Either I know it, or the professor just drones on. Luckily, I have my trusty IBM T60 running Ubuntu 7.04. Many people I've talked to about Linux vs. Windows cite games as a reason for staying with Windows. While this is true, there are many great, free games out there for Linux. There are also some commercial games that run on both. Here are some that I've enjoyed in the past:

Commercial:

Savage: The Battle for Newerth - This game is more gfx intensive than any of the others, and is now being released for free. It is a realtime strategy shooter, where players assume the roles of both a commander, and the soldiers on the field.

Free/Opensource:

Nibbles - This comes with GNOME, and is 'finger-twitching good' to quote one of the skill levels, play with up to 3 other people on some very challenging courses.

Tremulous - Based on the Quake 3 engine, it is a game that pits alien versus humans. Humans have guns and armor, whereas the aliens have more natural attacks, and some can walk on the walks and sneak across the ceilings.

Planet Penguin Racer - Control Tux as you race down the icy slopes in many of the user created tracks. Either enter a cup, collecting herring in a given time, or go for big air.

This is a very short list, but these are the ones I play the most, and are a nice way to while away the time.