Been a while since I updated the blog, so I thought I would. First, an admission of guilt. If you haven’t been following the front page, I’m twittering (or whatever) now. Since I’m lazy, I’ve been updating that more than the blog.

Otherwise, the whole buying a house thing has consumed a lot of my time. The rest, really, has been Etrian Odyssey (yes, still) and Rock Band 2. But, those are going as you would expect: awesomely. The house thing is more interesting, and on the subject, I’d like to thank Tobi Silgman with the Stark Company and Christopher Ohly with UW Credit Union for helping me through the process. Both were very professional, skilled, helpful, etc., and did a great job for me under a unique situation or two.

On the house thing, I moved the first set of stuff there today, and took a bunch of pictures. It’s really awesome. And then, leaving, I smashed the car into a pole while backing out of the driveway. Now I’m down one tail light. More moving next week, I’m hoping to be fully in there by the end of October. Crazy. A month and a half ago I was only scarcely looking at buying a house, and now, here I am.

I think my favorite thing about Gen Con is that I can haul back a bunch of books and ride the high for weeks, maybe months. Today I finally cracked open Cults of Freeport, a supplement by Green Ronin for their Freeport setting, which is well-written and interesting stuff, especially if you like the idea of a Cthulhu/pirates mashup.

(Total aside: what is it with me and Cthulhu hybrid games/settings? CthulhuTech is bliss, and I really dig the obvious Mythos references in the Freeport setting. If there were benchmarks for modern day Cthulhu cultists…)

Not sure if I’ll use anything directly from the book for my True20/Freeport setting, but it definitely gets the gears turning. Also worth checking out is a tip or two for running 4th edition D&D in Freeport, hinting that they may make a 4e guidebook one day. That has the potential for fun stuff.

Otherwise, more house prep work, and more gaming. Slowly getting the ball rolling again on the play-by-IRC/wiki game in my custom/Freeport setting hybrid, need to do some plotting (and maybe even real writing!) for CthulhuTech. Awesome times.

I think the whole house-buying thing finally set in today, meeting with my buyer’s agent whom I am surprisingly well-connected to (well, if two independent acquaintances count). Not one of those “oh crap, what am I doing?” moments, but certainly “oh man, this is the real deal.” I hope I didn’t look too much like a deer in headlights.

Things are coming along nicely, though, in that they’ve started and I haven’t gone screaming for the door yet. Paperwork to read and more people to talk to, though. Buyer’s agent has been awesome so far, truth be told; I’m really quite excited.

Also about houses, House starts up again in two weeks. I really need to fix the media PC by then.

So I did that thing I mentioned in my last post, with the aggregation. The front page now combines RSS feeds from my blog, gallery, and wiki, and my page on Delicious in addition. More to come, likely.

Also, hooray for others making an edit or two to the wiki. Friend codes (thanks, Nintendo, for the most annoying online experience, by the way), but more interestingly, Dan has touched the CthulhuTech section a little bit, which I’ve been negligent in updating. But thanks for that, and stuff. There are CthulhuTech things I’ve been meaning to put up that I have yet to.

Also, the front page has reminded me of how much MoinMoin’s RSS feed sucks. I wonder if I can replace that…

Taking a lazy Sunday to play around with the website. Finally installing Planet, which I plan on making my front page once it’s ready — the idea is it can assemble all of my RSS feeds, so the front page has a rolling view of everything I’ve deemed important enough to promote, like the blog, but for all of my updates.

After that I don’t know what I’ll do, but on the list is fixing some minor CSS quibbles here and there.

Oh, and on a totally unrelated tangent, I haven’t beaten Final Fantasy IV (DS) yet, but I’ve gone and picked Etrian Odyssey back up, trying to get everything completed.

Why the hell doesn’t CAcert scream up and down that your SSL certs are going to expire soon, so renew them now before you forget, you lazy admin? I’m a lazy admin and forgot that my SSL certs were going to expire.

I was feeling kind of nostalgic today, after the house poking around, and I always enjoyed driving Wisconsin Highway 33 (which has terminus points in La Crosse and Port Washington!). In fact, I think taking that 4 – 5 hour drive from one end to the other was my favorite part of living in La Crosse, to the point that I had often gone out of my way to start my drive at one end, so I could say that I drove the entirety of 33.

Anyway, nostalgia. I “drove” 33 again today by turning on satellite view on Google Maps, zooming in as close as I could for each location, and scrolling from La Crosse to Port Washington. Fun times.

Now that I’m looking for a house, I’m kind of regretting that large payment I made towards my student loan a month ago because “the money was just sitting there.” Doh!

Picked up, among others, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. Have only paged through it, but it’s pretty interesting so far. Unapologetically changed the physical landscape, dropped a lot of deities, killed off Mystra, dropped the Weave, so on and so on. Am I going to run it? Dunno. But it’s tempting me, in that “ooh, it’s the Realms” way, changes or not.

Need to read more (also reading GURPS stuff). Maybe I’ll dust off the Undermountain campaign…

Gen Con ‘08 was awesome. Got Vade Mecum, hooray for in color from a new publisher. Played lots of D&D, didn’t suck in the Championship, picked up some Saga Edition books in case I have time to get that started again, and even bought a couple or five anime/Jpop CDs. And of course dice.

Best year ever? Maybe. Only took a couple pictures though. :( There are a bunch of others, people should upload.

Hell yeah, this can only mean it’s time for Gen Con. I actually feel like I’m packing a bit light this year. I’m of course including clothes and hygiene items (I’m not one of those gamers), but those are boring, and not befitting a celebratory picture/monthly update.

Con on!

GamePro:

“Ultimately, Final Fantasy IV remains the same epic experience it was 17 years ago, and improvements on the DS are a welcome treat for fans of the series and newcomers to the franchise.”

I’m excited about playing a new version of a game that I first played almost two-thirds of my life ago. And I still need to complete Etrian Odyssey…

WALL•E was amazingly good. Funny and endearing, with a lot of character in the robot designs. The obligatory cultural/political message was handled discretely enough that it didn’t feel like it was being jammed down my throat. And, the animation was, naturally, very impressive. Nothing against the rest of the movie, but the first fourty five or so minutes, when the narrative was driven entirely by robots’ physical mannerisms and occasional utterances of nouns, was perfect. Also, I enjoyed that the short before the movie was basically Portal gags put to film.

More movies need to be as accessible yet original as this one was.

Been playing Nexuiz semi-regularly (for me, anyway) lately. Good way to blow off steam, even if I’m not conscious of it. Anyway, I was thinking about how bots are named for first-person shooters. Names like Death, and Paranoia, and Roadkill (okay, not so sure about the last one). Dark names, that invoke emotions of rage and fear. That’s good and everything, but I was thinking that maybe they should be named a bit more accurately.

I can almost imagine it now. “Walks Backwards Way Too Much has joined the game.” “cUrIoUsLy InEpT aT rOcKeTs has exploded.” “bss was fragged by Gerald Ford.” “You fragged The Bot Who Can’t Seem to Comprehend Gravity and Really, It Just Walked Off the Platform, but You Shot It Last, So Here’s A Point.”

It’s possible I don’t really buy into the atmosphere of these games as much as others, though.

rsnapshot, the remote filesystem snapshot utility, is a nice little tool. It uses rsync to copy a filesystem from one point to another, using a diff-based system to keep multiple snapshots and only copy/download the changed files into the new snapshot, leaving past versions of the backup(s) hanging around for as long as you want.

For example, you could have a set of backups made every four hours, another every day, another every week, and so on, for as long as you want to retain past filesystem states. And if a file never changed, there is only one file in the backup for all of the times it appears in your snapshots. Pretty slick.

My project today was installing it on leto, the NAS box here at home. It has over 2 terabytes of disk space, so it’s a perfect candidate for keeping all sorts of backups. Here’s a small little config, which copies what I think are going to be all of the important parts of Empty Matter:

/etc/rsnapshot.conf

snapshot_root   /share/snapshots/

# ...

interval        hourly  12
interval        daily   14
interval        weekly  8
interval        monthly 24

# ...

backup  root@emptymatter.org:/etc/              emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/home/             emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/root/             emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/var/www/          emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/var/log/          emptymatter/

That keeps an large (perhaps even excessive) number of backups in /share/snapshots/ (owned and only readable by root). We’ll see if it’s overkill or not, but I’m expecting a lot of my big files to not change, and thus be hard-linked multiple times without re-copying the files. But I’m always wishing I could go back to old config files, so this is an attempt to thwart future regret with that problem.

Other hosts will be added soon. Finally, I have a use for that NAS. :)

Edit: another useful link: Using Rsnapshot and SSH.

Celebrated the migration of emptymatter.org with a long-overdue session of Nexuiz with the #lh fellows, served by the new version of my favorite (well, only) VPS. Pings were low, as intended by the move, and Xen handled the dedicated server’s load (mostly network traffic) like a champ. Very awesome. emptymatter.org has of course hosted Nexuiz in the past, so this is nothing surprising, but an actual appreciable improvement is worth being excited about.

Also fun: decided to upgrade my DS experience, bought a CycloDS Evolution and EZ Flash 3-in-1, so that I can have more storage (currently 8 GB), and play around with GBA homebrew as well. The CycloDS Evolution is much more polished than the R4DS, and I’ve been very pleased with my purchases thus far.

The real excitement for the past two days has been the Linode, however. The conversion was a bit bumpy, at first, but everything seems good now. I almost wish I had an excuse to buy a second, or at the very least throw more at my current one. Maybe I’ll concoct some scheme and bring up yet another service…

And we’re back. Now in Newark, now on Xen, it’s happy times all around. May reboot once or twice more to make sure everything is sane, and I still am waiting for RDNS to repropagate, but otherwise, everything is looking good so far.

Took a couple hours to shuffle my disk images from Fremont to Newark, and Xen booted pretty much without a hitch. Grew my disk and added a backend IP while I was at it. Linode, you rock.

In case you were wondering why I moved to Newark, it was mainly to reduce server pings in Nexuiz. California is just too far to go for us northern midwest/east coast fellows.

Some time within the next week or so, everything on emptymatter.org will be going into downtime, as I’m planning to move from Fremont to Newark, and converting to Xen while I’m at it. I’m told the conversion is not a long process, but it will mean my server’s IP will be changing, which means I have DNS updates to do, which means there’s a delay in that propagating throughout the Internet, and so on.

No idea when I’ll decide to do it; odds are emptymatter.org will just suddenly go dark for a while. You’ve been warned.

Linode turns 5, gives away 20% more disk to every account.

Once I win this round of voice survivor, I’m going to reboot. =)

Finally got Sender Policy Framework support added to my Postfix install like I said I would. HowtoForge was a big help, but I had to use g-cpan to generate Mail::SPF ebuilds. Just one of those things I was surprised wasn’t already in Gentoo.

Next up: testing that SpamAssassin supports SPF and penalizes failures. I think I have had everything in place to do that properly for a while, now, but I never actually checked…

Two or so weeks ago, I finally finished the climax of Etrian Odyssey (commonly known as the “end boss"), in the sense that I saw the ending for the game, not conquered the game — there is still another stratum and a couple quests left to topple. All in all, it was a very enjoyable (and enjoyably frustrating, at times) experience, and the game has left me with a small sense of real accomplishment. I did not beat it, so much as I did pass its trials, and Etrian Odyssey II sounds like it will be just as enjoyable as the first.

In the end, EO is probably one of my favorite RPGs, which is saying a lot. There are of course the common favorites: Baldur’s Gate II, Final Fantasy VI, etc., but Etrian shines for what it isn’t. It is not a glossly conglomoration of drama, overpowered combat with spiky-haired, pencil-thin kids, and card games. It isn’t action intermingled between cutscenes. It doesn’t hold your hand through half of the game. It uses the DS’s stylus in a goddamn reasonable manner.

EO knows what it is and embraces it. There is a dungeon, and apparently you’ve assembled a gang of people who consider themselves adventurers and dungeon delvers, so what you have to do is obvious. Round peg, round hole.

That reminds me of a sentiment sprinkled here and there in the press for the game — the game keeps plot sparce and PC character development nil so that the player can imagine their own stories and motivations, however reasonable or not. In my game, the guild was named after the gaming group, and the characters were all friends from the group. In my mind, their motivation was simple, and as just described — much like how we get together to play D&D, the quest for the group was running head-first into danger together, sharing in accomplishment and defeat, the joy of a close battle and the fear of an even closer one. And I pictured myself as the guildmaster; not a participant, but the orchestrator, the one getting the party into the messes they so gleefully got themselves out of.

It sounds hokey, but it worked for me. I catch myself every now and then, seeing friends’ D&D characters in a slightly EO light: Mark’s cleric a stalwart center for the party, Aaron’s exemplar brute force in combat. Granted, the class selection for the characters were inspired to varying degrees by their then-current D&D characters, but nevertheless, EO had no small part in making the characters of both games feel a bit more real.

Off that, however, and back onto the actual game. The supplied plot is decent, but low on surprises; surprising, however, is the writing supplied for the town’s NPCs, a couple being presented well enough that you can become momentarily attached to their unanimated, never-leaving-the-shop lives. But, in the end, it’s all about exploration and combat, which it delivers superbly. The game is one that dials into its desired formula (backs-to-the-wall difficult dungeon diving), assembles it into an old-school feel what with the first-person view, the mapping, and the PC-88 original soundtrack, and supplies it throughout, without distraction or deviation.

Not incidentally, I think this may be the first RPG I’ve beaten since Neverwinter Nights, another favorite. Currently competing for the next slot is any of The World Ends With You, Rondo of Swords, and Final Fantasy III. Hopefully, those won’t take me five+ years…

Software deploy Tuesday went horribly. That’s not why I’m writing, though.

American video game commercials suck.

…and I think they’re trying to sell me Sex and/or Cola.

We actually played D&D on Monday! Holy crap, and things. D&D 4e is looming, and I’m more excited than I thought I’d be. I think part of it is just the motivation to buy new books. But, maybe the new edition will be awesome. At the very least, I’m hoping that the flushing away of 3.5e material will, for at least a short period of time, make the system feel more pure and pristine.

I don’t expect WotC to show restraint, however, and expect to be inundated with broken prestige classes and feats within a year’s time. Don’t know how I feel about the messing around with Forgotten Realms, either. Maybe it’ll work out, but part of me feels that they could and should have just left it the way it was. Meh.

A Slashdot article reminded me of one of my favorite technical articles on the Internet entitled “A Tour of the Worm", an in-depth historical and technical look at the Morris worm. The Morris worm, mistakenly unleashed in 1988, was one of the first significant worms to strike the Internet, and it caused enough damage that it arguably has done the most relative damage of any worm since then.

Check it out if you haven’t read it, or even if you have; it’s a fascinating look at the early days of the Internet. http://world.std.com/~franl/worm.html

Someone in #lh today told me about Sender Policy Framework, which sounds like a badly-needed enhancement to the Internet’s email protocols. Basically, the idea is to provide a DNS record that informs MTAs “don’t trust emails claiming to be from this domain unless they’re coming from one of my actual servers".

In DNS, this looks like (in my case):

emptymatter.org. IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx ~all"

Some MTAs support SPF but need to be configured, I believe Gentoo’s postfix is one of them. If I’m going to expect other mail servers to support it, I probably should myself. I’ll have to tackle that another day…

Nothing exciting here. Got my tax refunds. Might build a home-made NAS with a couple terabytes of disk and put it in the basement.

On the DS, I’ve been playing Rondo of Swords and The World Ends With You. Rondo is a pleasant find, a difficult but still reasonable strategy RPG that makes one think and plan ahead, unlike games such as Revenant Wings which are much more “bring a healer and just mob everyone at the thing they’re strong against!” Also, I have a crush on Atlus by this point. There’s no denying it now. I draw their name with little hearts all around when I’m in meetings.

The World Ends With You is refreshingly original, one of those games that, even with it being Square Enix, is a bit surprising that it made it to the States. Very Japanese, and the game makes few concessions to the English audience. Sure, long gone are the times of gratitutous name changes, but even the j-pop/j-rock soundtrack remains intact, and that is, to my slightly jaded mind, a bit commendable. Now, if only the main character didn’t suffer from two vile Square Enix staples: unimaginable thinness and nearly sickening teenage angst. Neku is supposed to get better with the latter; I hope it is soon.

My games to beat are now Etrian Odyssey and Rondo of Swords, one I must beat before Etrian Odyssey II (guess which one) is released here, and the other before the Final Fantasy IV remake reaches the States. I’m excited. If I have time before those, Final Fantasy III and The World Ends With You are my RPGs to beat. FF3 is a cakewalk thus far, but its ease and its crude mechanics compared to Final Fantasy V make it hard to stay with for long.

I didn’t really intend this to become all about video games. I’ve been working on a Gentoo Wiki page for the HP 2133 which has kind of slowed down as most of the parts I’m interested in are supported as best they can be without new versions of drivers, I think. There’s some other hardware that I need to try out (the webcam, for example), but I don’t really care that much, so it’s low priority. Notebooky stuff works.

I have a Waterfield Designs bag coming soon, which I’m excited about. Don’t think it will be suitable for gaming books, but I still have that backpack which is going on 5+ years. The little trooper.

I’ve been meaning to survey the gaming group and associated friends to see what they’re using for IM these days. I think the answer for some is “nothing", with a couple saying “AIM on occasion” or “I idle on Google Talk", so I’ve not really been motivated to test those waters. I want to get a private Jabber conference room running for the group, since the IRC thing kind of sputtered off and died (I still idle there!), but I know it means getting people to switch to Jabber (or at least Google Talk) and then getting them to use a non-Google Talk client (Pidgin, I bet, but maybe Trillian would work). Sigh. If anyone has interest in switching to one network (I highly suggest a Jabber-like ["XMPP” for the techies]), or trying out conferences, or whatever, email/IM me and we’ll play around.

This really is getting rambly, and people might expect me to write long posts all the time. So I’m wrapping this up by saying that spring is finally here, and that’s why it snowed yesterday.

• Went bowling with the Rutzes and, for expediency, let’s call them the Schucks. I wish I wasn’t so rusty. I did have one decent game though.
• On the subject of Rock Band, Appetite For Destruction would be an awesome full album for them to sell in their music store.
• On the subject of games, Rondo of Swords is pretty interesting. Hard, too, but I like the “Route Maneuver System". Adds a nice amount of tactics to the game. Atlus is easily my favorite DS publisher. And it has Izuna, apparently!
• Work destroyed me this week, but I had fun.

I always seem to update my blog in bursts. So, while I suggest that no one get hasty and expect large posts the next couple days, I thought I would mention a little something to keep me from feeling totally neglectful.

I bought a HP 2133 ("Mini-note") to play with, the middle configuration with SuSE, to be exact. So that should be exciting. Won’t be here for another couple weeks, though. :( The plan is to use it as essentially a quick companion for work and such, with enough of a desktop environment to get work done and/or SSH into my various sites of interest. The MacBook is still around, too, for any hypothetical bigger or more involved tasks. Not that the HP 2133 is a toy, but a lot of it is about playing around and being a bit less tied to my desktop.

Looking forward to when it gets here, since it would seem that it will also become a minor task to get everything supported in Gentoo… looks like I get to contribute to another page on the Gentoo wiki.

I was going to go off on another aural association story, but I decided at the last minute to instead point you, the reader, to one of my all-time favorite essays, by none other than Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning…was the Command Line.

All of those who think I’m a bit — ahem — snobbish in my choice of technology would do good to give it a read. A bit dated, yes, but it does a good job of explaining where I, personally, am coming from when I look down my nose at certain operating systems/software/social networking whooey websites/etc.

And for those already fully familiar with my biases, or those having similar biases of their own, if you haven’t read In the Beginning…, it’s really worth it.

I decided to play Still Alive in Rock Band to blow off some steam today, and after beating it on hard guitar, beating it on expert guitar, beating it on medium vocals, and beating it on hard vocals, I knew I was on a roll.

What followed was one and a half hours of slogging my way through the expert guitar solo tour. Didn’t do the greatest (but never did fail), and this is probably nothing special to some readers, but I’m excited. Suffragette City was my old obstacle, and it has been hurdled, for now, until it comes up again in band play. I finished out two cities and parts of a third before I had to stop. Where did I end off?

Enter God-Damned Sandman.

I’m going to need a dark pact to get through it, I am certain. I am already preparing the necessary sacrifices to some foul demon necessary to grace my left hand with enough metal to make it through. But, oh, what a night of unholy glory it will be when that song is a notch on my belt.

Anyway, Still Alive is loads of fun. Everyone (all three) here knows the song and just mentioning it invokes humming and singing and dry, informative recitals. Will be great when four are over for full band play.

The great thing about the song, I decided on my way to lunch today, is how beautifully Portal it is. Sure, the song is funny on its surface, but after playing the game, the song becomes a deep underground complex of dark humor. The entire game is brilliantly executed in the humor department, and after going through GLaDOS’ insincere banter and bloodthirsty pleading, the context of Still Alive becomes a deep black — the empty motivation in the people who are still alive especially. A perfect ominous closing.

And then it’s still a funny song.

… then tore right through it.

Soon after Friday’s post, GNOME was installed. Excited, I restarted X, but was quickly demoralized by stumbling again across the X/hal/evdev Gentoo configuration issue-bug-thing. I had “fixed” KDE once before, but not, to my recollection, X in general. Long story short, after an hour of screwing around, I got basic X (that is, xev while inside twm or fluxbox) to properly handle my evdev-managed USB keyboard with the dvorak layout, but I cannot get GNOME to cooperate. I don’t know if it is trying to be overly clever, or there is some mystery config setting I can’t find, or it just hates me, but for the moment GNOME is seemingly unusable.

So instead I’m trying again Fluxbox, and rediscovering what I enjoyed so much about it in the first place. Simple and mostly out of the way, and nice-looking, to boot (I enjoy the Fluxbox look so much that my KDE looked somewhat like it for a long while). I don’t know if I’ll try GNOME again, or go back to KDE. For the moment, I’m pretty content.

Other random news: I did indeed buy that 8800GT (should be here in a couple days), I’m looking forward to playing Oblivion once again, and I also picked up Dead Rising for my 360, which slowly but surely is gaining more games and more play time.

Remember when I had all but sworn off video games?

Those were funny times.

KDE4 needs to improve. Sooner, please. My KDE3 install is feeling a bit behind, but 4 still has random bugs/issues (I can’t find the option to have the mouse wheel scroll through the desktop, automatic file preview in the open dialogs seems to be gone, Konsole performance blows, KWin exhibits random “that window doesn’t exist despite appearing in the taskbar” or “this window will always be on top, deal with it” bugs, so on and so forth.

I know it’s still in its infancy, but man, I need something new.

I’m installing GNOME. (What have I become?)

Also, I think I may buy an XFX PVT88PYDE4 GeForce 8800GT. The improvement over the 7900GT is supposed to be obvious. Maybe I can finally go back to a non-choppy Oblivion.

It’s time for changes, or something.

Random thoughts today:

• Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard comes to us North Americans in June. Check out Atlus’ promotional site.
• I think I let my Rock Band guitar skills lapse for too long. I did far worse on the Metallica songs than I have in the past, I still can’t get through Joker & the Thief on Hard guitar, and Suffragette City is equally unscalable on Expert guitar.
• It seems more likely that my video card is dying. I’ve been pretending to be interested in an 8800GT, but I’m not really sure how much I care until it no longer pushes air.
• Seriously, Etrian Odyssey II. I don’t know if I’ve looked forward to a game more in recent history. The gunner class looks like it could be interesting, and I’m even a bit excited about some minor details: more map icons (hopefully the hard limit on the number of icons you can place per map is gone, too), and, thankfully, you can now browse your characters’ equipment while deep in the store menus.

Now not with conflicting Apache options that broke the wiki!

If you were looking for that over the past, oh, 14 or so hours, it’s back now.

Thees murneeng ves system meeentenunce-a teeme-a, und I fuoond a neece-a leettle-a Vebeleezer cunffeeg sumeune-a poot tugezeer. Zee leest is a beet oold noo, boot it’s steell oone-a ooff zee mure-a cumprehenseefe-a SeerchEngeene-a leests I’fe-a seee. Huurey!

In oorder tu nut breek zee Internet, I’m gueeng tu leenk tu it unencheffereezed.

webalizer.conf with, among others, a nice SearchEngine list.

Börk! Börk! Börk!

(Tudey iff my persunel “telk leeke-a zee Svedeesh Cheff” dey, iff yuoo deed nut see-a yesterdey’s pust.)