December 2007 archive

Doomed!

Anyone still playing Doom out there? I came across a custom level I made way back in 1995 (give or take a year) and realized that the world shouldn’t be deprived of this great treasure.

I think it’s a decent, playable level, with good “texturization.” There are two difficulty levels: 1-2 is fairly easy, and 3-5 should be challenging.

Although the Doom source code is free software under the GNU GPL now, I don’t think that includes the main Doom “wad” with all the textures.

I haven’t tried running one of the GPL versions. To get the map and screenshots included here, I ran Doom95 under Wine. That worked ok except that I didn’t get any sound.

Check it …

Ruthless Massively Parallel Trial-and-Error with a Feedback Cycle

Glyn Moody points to Simon Willison pointing to an old 2001 post by Linus Torvalds. An oldie but a goodie, I’m including it here for greater memory permanence.

In response to a comment that “Linux really isn’t going anywhere in particular and seems to be making progress through sheer luck,” Linus writes:

Hey, that’s not a bug, that’s a FEATURE!

You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is?

Guess what - it’s not Linux, it’s not Solaris, and it’s not your car.

It’s you. And me.

And think about how you and me actually came about - not through any complex design.

Right. “Sheer luck.”

Well, sheer luck, AND:

Free availability and crosspollination through sharing of “source code,” although biologists call it DNA.

A rather unforgiving user

…

Playing the Leeann Chin Gift Card Investment Game

(Part of being on break means I can write totally inane, off-topic posts…)

We get takeout from Leeann Chin once per week, usually on Fridays. This is about the third Christmas season now (that I can remember) where they offer a gift card deal: buy a $40 gift card and receive an additional $10 “free” in gift cards.

So let’s do the math:

Our usual bill: $13.81. (Includes Bourbon and Mongolian Chicken, umm…)

$13.81 x 52 = $718.12 per year

If I was willing to pay for a year’s worth of meals in advance:

$718 / $50 = 14.3624 gift card deals. (Let’s round down to 14.)

14 cards x $40 = $560 actual outlay

$560 gets us $700 worth of meals. That’s a $140 return on a $560 investment, for a very crude and approximate 25% annual …

Updating the Linksys BEFSR41 Router Firmware from GNU/Linux

One of the challenges you run in to when moving to GNU/Linux is that simple little things may not be supported. For example, updating the firmware on your router. Linksys provides some rinky-dink program to install the firmware from Windows, but doesn’t tell you how or if you can do it from GNU/Linux. (At least there wasn’t anything I could find on their site about this.)

I’ve had a Linksys BEFSR41 4-port wired router since 2000, and in the early days I upgraded the firmware from Windows a few times, but now haven’t touched it in many years, getting by just fine with the 1.37 firmware from Jan ‘01. Recently I’ve been trying out OpenDNS, and from their site gathered that a newer firmware might allow me …

Long Canyon Trail

Long Canyon Trail in Sedona, Arizona.

I enjoyed this trail, but we didn’t go as far down it as we might have liked. It’s one of those “out-and-back” kinds of trails, so with every step you take, you’re thinking about how you’ll have to retrace it later. Having already done Doe Mountain earlier in the morning, we decided to turn back after a couple of miles (I hazily recall), for a four mile hike. I much prefer a loop when hiking. It seems easier to manage a longer hike that way, in order to complete the loop.

1600 x 1200

Self service wallpaper: 1280×1024 1280×960 1152×864 1024×768 800×600 640×480

Shared with: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

Shot with: 2 mega-pixel Olympus D-520 camera

Hey!

Hi. All. …