WauloK : The life and interests of an Aussie

I use multi-million dollar satellites to find tupperware in the bush!

Archive for June, 2005

Torrential rain & the net

Wednesday, June 29th, 2005

YO! Where’s all this rain come from? Have we had the Pacific Ocean evaporate over our home?
The whole back yard is flooded. The drain can’t cope. He’s lost his bottle, man!
The car port is flooded and a river is flowing down our driveway!
Haven’t seen this much rain since the day I flew up here to check out potential places to live.
I heard on the news on the way home that they expected severe weather conditions so I put both cars in the carport tonight. It’s a wonder they don’t float away anyhow.

I hope Blake is going to fly home tomorrow okay. They said on the news also that if you expect anyone flying in tonight to ring the airport as they might not be coming after all. It appears some flights were cancelled.

We’ve decided to go back to ii for our internet. I went to check our plan for internet and our phone bundle. I found out we were on the highest line rental plan there is. Over $40.00 per month! Also, we had thought it was costing us $44.95 per month, but that’s the 256k/128k (iirc) plan. We are really on $59.95 per month. We were getting 12Gb per month for our limit then being shaped to 64kbps if we went over that.
Now, ii has $49.95 per month for a 1.5mb/256k plan with 10Gb peak/10Gb offpeak plan with $29.95 line rental! WOAH big difference. Since Second Life is extremely bandwidth-hungry, we need all the speed we can.
So, we can get three times the download speed for less cash per month. Hmm. What would Jesus do? ;)
I rang them today and signed up straight away! We should get it by next week and have 2 – 5 hours downtime, which is quite good.
The thing with Second Life is the textures are all on the server and uploaded by players, so if you enter an area you have to stream download the textures via UDP to your PC before they can be rendered. Also, any sound bites or streamed music/video has to be downloaded to your PC as you play. This is different from other MMO’s where the world is mostly static with minor updates downloaded in a big patch once. Second Life is totally dynamic and any part of it can change from day to day or even hour to hour. In fact, I was reading where one place people frequented they had decided to completely re-do it, so they wiped all buildings and other 3d objects and totally rebuilt the place from scratch.
I exceeded our download limit for this month at the start of the week, so we’ve been shaped to 64kbps until Friday when it gets reset so only one of us is able to play online at a time. My game isn’t affected by Bec’s but if I play her game will lag so much that it’s totally unplayable since mine will be sucking all the bandwidth to download textures, etc.
The game can cache up to 1Gb of data (the main reason I resized my C: drive the other day) which really isn’t that much in a ‘game’ this size.
Now we can’t wait until next week. 8Gb pm more download space, triple the speed and cheaper charges. Sounds great :)
The funny thing is, when we were on ii before (when it was still called iiNet) if you joined their iiPhone as your preferred long distance provider, they HALVED your download limit per month. That’s fuct up! NOW they do the right thing and DOUBLE your download limit per month for using iiPhone.
We don’t care whom provides us with our phone line. If we didn’t have ADSL we wouldn’t need a local line anyway, but it’s a pre-requisite unfortunately. We make most calls mobile to mobile since we get free 10 min mobile calls all day.

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Rain, Second Life

Wednesday, June 29th, 2005

Woah! It’s sure been raining lots lately.
The last few days it’s just been POURING down. Minor flash flooding, trees falling over, Bec getting woken by huge thunderclaps. At least it gives me another break from having to mow the lawn. I was gonna have to do it this weekend, but if the rain keeps up I won’t be able to ;) But then again. Once it stops the lawn will be head-high! argh!

Last night, I decided to try my hand at creating prims (primitive 3d objects) in Second Life and writing a script to go with it. I created a 3d box and whacked a texture on it. I have plans for making a very basic looking, but fun to interact with, statue.

At this stage I’m working on ideas aka they have on IRC bots where the statue will react to certain commands (talk to Tuatara on Efnet #hello if she’s still around.. hmm maybe she’s not). Some scripts can be quite quite complex. My friend Majere coded a script and then Limnos (iirc) from #hello made it very complex and cool such that Tuatara responded to certain commands, told jokes and even could shorten your name when talking to you, based on a somewhat complex algorithm which counts the number of vowels and consonants in your name. She managed to correctly shorten my name from WauloK to just ‘Waul’. I’d also like my statue to rarely randomly move, maybe give out a little money or other reward, but all very rarely so you just have to be there at the right time for something cool to happen :)

I also have an idea for a gambling game to create. Second Life has it’s own scripting language based on C++/Java called LSL (Linden Scripting Language – original, I know ;) ). That’s what I’ve been working with and learning. Apparently there’s plans for connecting it to .Net and other languages in the future. Cool.

I’ve not had so much interest in a 3d ‘game’ before. I’ve just converted my ZigZag.Soft website to advertise and discuss my Second Life scripting and creation experience. Will have to update the forums soon to align with this, although I might not need a forum since there won’t be people joining the site, no doubt.

Tomorrow I have the day off as Bec is going to an interview and we are picking up Blake from the airport. I hope he had a really good time in Sydney and has a safe and not too scarey flight back up home again.

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Stupid computers

Sunday, June 26th, 2005

What a waste of about five hours.
I decided to take the 120Gb HDD out of my desktop PC and whack it into the FreeBSD server. I was using it to try out Linux again, but it annoys me since it still doesn’t work 100% and my interest in Linux has waned yet again.

Since Blake’s computer hasn’t been working for some time (I thought the Hard Drive in that was broken) I decided to ‘upgrade’ the server with bits out of Blake’s computer and get him another one when we have time and money.
Retrieving the server from behind my desk is a chore in itself. There’s no way to take it out sideways or underneath the table. You can only remove it by reaching right over the high desk and grabbing the top of the case and lifting it over the desk. Unfortunately, it’s in an old old full tower case which by itself is extremely heavy. Add the bits inside and try to lift it with nothing to pivot on by putting your arms over the top and trying to pull it up and you have yourself a perfect case for Occupational Health and Safety.

I got it out and pulled two hard drives out of it and put those with my 120Gb HDD into Blake’s smaller mini tower case. So that’s a 120Gb HDD, a 200Gb HDD and a 40Gb HDD which I was hoping to boot off. I was going to discard the 20Gb HDD I used to boot off.
To make sure it was all going to work, I plugged the PC into enough cables to boot it and show it starting FreeBSD on my monitor. Cheerin’. It wouldn’t even boot Blake’s OS nor let me install an OS on his HDD so his old 17Gb HDD must be broken, right?
I put it all together and leaned over the table and lifted the mini tower over it. My arms aren’t that long, so of course the PC drops the last foot to the floor (oops).
I power it up and it won’t start.
Apparently, it had been configured to have the main boot sector set up on the 20Gb HDD then load the kernel off the 40Gb HDD!! wtf!
After much stuffing around (and nearly calling Sarge in on the fone, but he wasn’t available) I managed to get it to boot the 20Gb HDD with an old kernel it still had on it. It booted most of the way but at the end it couldn’t get a signal any more from the HDD (controller?) and tried to reset the drive and locked up.
I put the old full tower together with the old motherboard already in it, in order to get a working PC for Blake with a nice 40Gb HDD in it.
I put in my Windows XP cd and it loaded all the drivers into memory and displayed “Booting Windows…”. After 30 seconds it shut down the HDD and after another 30 seconds it shut the PC off. I tried another XP cd but it did the same thing, so I chucked in my Knoppix Live CD and it started up, detected some hardware, sent TERM signals to all processes and turned the PC off again.
*SIIIIIIIIIIIGH*
I found another old motherboard in the cupboard which had stopped working ages ago and had been replaced, but I thought “what they hey” and put it into the mini tower case instaed. That wouldn’t boot up either, so it MUST be dead.
By this time I was very frustrated and angry. A lot of time invested and both motherboards are broken.
I had some lunch and a shower and went back to business.

I reached over and picked up that mini tower case, nearly giving myself another hernia, and pulled all it’s guts out again and put them all back into the full tower.
Next, I leaned over the table again and heaved the damn full tower up and over again. It only has to drop about half a foot to the ground.
I had decided to put both the 40Gb and 20Gb HDD’s back into the full tower since they seem so reliant on each other and detatched the CD Burner drive in there. So now it’s got: 200Gb HDD, 120Gb HDD, 40Gb HDD and 20Gb HDD in there. 380Gb should be enough for anyone ;)

So, now I have a server which works, but it’s a 433 MHz Celeron with 256Mb RAM. It was going to be an Athlon XP 1600+ with 512Mb RAM and cables and controller supporting 100 UDMA drives instead of the 33 it now supports. At least it supports S.M.A.R.T mode (Never knew what that was but I suspect it’s not as good as having 100 UDMA mode HDDs in there. For some reason, the motherboard which supports UDMA 100 automatically disabled S.M.A.R.T on the HDD’s anyway. Weird.

Oh well. I will have to get a new motherboard for the server at some stage. I’m sure I can get a relatively cheap one. So long as it supports Athlon 1600+ (do they have them any more? I might have to go to the computer markets and get a second hand mobo).

So, maybe Blake’s 17Gb HDD does work after all and it was the motherboard controller that was broken? Dunno. Maybe both.
We’ve seen advertisements on TV about ex-Government laptops for a couple of hundred dollars, so we might get Blake one of those instead.

I also chucked in an old Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 sound card I found in a drawer in the bedroom. If/when I cbf I might install sound drivers on my FreeBSD servers, but now I’m off to play Second Life again. I need the relaxation.

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Second Life and my PC

Saturday, June 25th, 2005

I’m currently downloading new drivers for my PC. My Second Life has crashed a few times and I was reading that you should check your drivers. I hadn’t updated mine in a year or something so have downloaded the latest ones and am about to install them: nVidia nForce2, Intel Pro 100B network & nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200. Wish me luck.

I also consolidated my partitions. I had: C:, D:, E:, F:, G: now I have C:, D:, E:
Unfortunately, the partitioning program got an error twice and I had to try to recover the partitions. It didn’t work, so I lost a partition. It was my games partition and so only had a couple things on it, so no great loss. I had to reformat the lost partition. In the end, I got it all working tho. C: drive is now 20Gb instead of 10Gb.
I found a great program called PerfectDisk for defragging hard drives. I had tried running the builtin Windows XP defragger but after it ran it still looked fragged, so I clicked ANALYZE again and it told me it recommended I defrag the drive!! SHEESH!
You get a 30 day trial of PerfectDisk and that’s enough to defrag all your partitions and drives.
Now, my PC seems like it’s almost FLYING! It was laggy in it’s responsiveness, but now it’s a lot better.

I also was brutal deleting and uninstalling applications and data. I cleared off so much crap which had just been rotting on my hard drive.

I’m still having fun with Second Life. Bec tried it for a short test, but it doesn’t interest her. She’d rather go around whacking monsters in World of Warcraft or fragging people in Quake than playing a game like SL. The programming and creating interests me, tho.
I played some more SL-ingo today and my friend whom introduced SL to me (Hi EGGY!) popped on, so I invited him over to the Casino I was in. He’s not at all interested in playing games tho, preferring programming instead. I sometimes like to program and sometimes like to explore. Since I don’t know how to create/build/program in SL yet (doesn’t seem to be many detailed tutorials or documents on it) I haven’t done anything worthwhile yet. I created a cube and resized it’s sides. That’s about all I can figure out for now.
The game has what it calls ‘primitive 3d shapes’ or ‘PRIMS’ for creating whatever you wish. It doesn’t seem too intuitive tho. I can’t even figure out how to make my own clothing or skins. Guess I will have to ask around.

Eggy donated some money to our SL-ingo pot (L$500 WOO!) but early in the game, my client crashed so I missed out on being in the running for it since I missed a few rounds while restarting the client, logging on, caching the graphics and getting back to my SL-ingo card. :(
Hence why I am trying to work out how to cut down on crashes.
I’ve turned off all graphics enhancements in the game since it seems to play rather laggy. Unfortunately, with a game like this, you need quite a good lot of bandwidth speed. Players can upload their own textures (for a fee of in-game money) so whenever you enter an area or even walk around in the area you are currently in, it has to constantly stream content, graphics and audio to your PC (not audio so much depending on what’s happening around). It can cache up to about 1Gig of data (selectable) but it doesn’t seem to alleviate the problem so much. I think it’s better if you live in USA or have a phat pipe to your PC. Maybe one day we will look at getting iiNet ADSL2 ;)

I took Sienna out before lunch this morning to pick up our mail from the PO Box and do a bit of shopping. We popped into BiLo to pick up some supplies. We made Tacos tonight with some of them. I bought the new ‘flat bottom’ tacos which allow you to sit the taco up on it’s end while you fill it up. A great idea if I ever heard one :)

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Second Life

Friday, June 24th, 2005

I think I’ll keep my Second Life account. It will give me something to do when bored and it’s getting more interestingthe more I play.
The first time I played someone gave me some free dance animations and Irish clothing (which I later found out is free in the game) and helped me with learning some useful things in the game. He also showed me his friend’s place, the ‘Unwelcome area’ (as opposed to the Welcome area you begin the game in).
He even gaveme an attachable penis to stick on my character if I want lol!!
A girl was in the sanfbox test area and created a Chocabo which went running around. Heh.
I lost all my money $L – Linden dollars) the fisrt night so spent last night looking around. I checked out some casinos. Seems everyone has one!
I rnded ip in a popular one and chatted with the people there. They introduced me to a game called ‘SL-ingo” which is Second Life Bingo. It was great fun!
You can randomly win money just by being in the casino. I won L$9.

I think I’ll play it some more this weekend.

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Brisbane, Sienna, Bec

Friday, June 24th, 2005

Here I am at the train station waiting to go north for the day to a stupid company course.

Last night Sienna decided to fo her own hair. She opened my jar of hair gel and Bec’s moisturiser and put handfuls of both in her hair lol. I had to take her for a “showerie” after that!

Bec is very sick today with the flu. We just can’t get rid of it :(

Might blog again later if I get time.

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Second Life

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005

Those of you whom know me know how much of a fickle person I can be. Especially when it comes to playing computer games.
Usually, I can be quite enthusiastic at first.. even over the top, but my interest quickly wanes as I discover the game to be quite repetitive and non-challenging. Hence my lack of desire to play something like World of Warcraft or Everquest on a regular basis. Or even a non-regular basis. My problem is this:
If I do like a game, I still don’t want to play it every night/day. I value my time more than that (and instead spend it on endless new projects I seemingly quickly abandon). Online games (particularly MMO’s) require ongoing monthly payments. Now if I only play a game 7 times in a whole month, I’ve wasted a ton of money for nothing. Months may go by when I don’t play anything at all, either too busy with the kids or other Real Life situations or just not interested in playing games. I prefer to be learning how to MAKE games.
Which brings me up to the current line of thought.
While I was in Sydney, Scott was showing me this MMO he and Robin have started playing called “Guild Wars. It’s an online MMORPG where you only pay once and get all updates free. This may be of more interest & use to me as I can play it as often as I want (or not play it as often as I want) and it will be no more of a financial burden to me. It’s still a relatively static MMO with a top level of 20.

Another friend has told me previously about a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game called Second Life. I had read about this quite some time ago and decided it wasn’t something I could get interested in. However.. he mentioned it again when I was talking to him today and I had quite a long look over the website and other information sites related to it. It seems like it might be of interest after all. You see, if you only want a basic account, there’s a once-off fee to get an account and no ongoing fees. If you decide after that you wish to become more involved in the game more permanently, you can pay an ongoing fee and have your own land, etc in the game. Also, in this game you can make vehicles, clothing, animals, swimming pools, homes.. anything you want and sell it to other people. You can even write your own in-game games for people to play, using the game’s scripting language LSL (Linden Scripting Language) which is a bit like C++/Java. This could be where an MMO would grab my attention. You can even add effects to objects you make such as gravity or program it to react in different ways to people and other objects in the game (also the weather).
It remains to be seen.
The game has a 7 day trial account which you can test it out with, so I might give it a go tonight and see what I think. If it looks good enough, I might get a basic account. The Australian dollar has hit an all-time high, apparently so this would be the ideal time to make such a purchase.
You can even sell your objects, land, etc in an online auction site akin to eBay for real money. Some people apparently make good money to help their “real-life” existence this way. I was just reading how a guy makes enough money in the game selling property, etc to fund his own mortgage. My friend has received two requests for jobs at around US$1000 per job to do some in-game programming for some people. That’s not bad at all! Let’s see where it takes us.

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