Alexbobp’s Blog

FPS Armor System Idea

Posted on July 2009 in 3', undeveloped ideas

The other day I had an idea for am armor system for first person shooters. It still seems like a pretty good idea, so I’m going to go ahead and throw it out there in case any of my readers have more weight to throw around in the gaming industry, or just the skillz and motivation to actually make a first person shooter. It would probably be hard to mod into an existing game because it would require bizarre data structures and specifics of projectile hit locations to actually implement.

The fluff I came up with to justify the mechanic is: you’re a more or less normal person, but you’re wearing a suit that projects a force-field. The force-field closely hugs your body, and consists of a chemical regent that’s held around your body by an energy field. When hit by a projectile, it is able to deflect that projectile by burning off some of the energy and forcing a reaction in the regent to harden it, but then the used regent burns off, leaving the location of the hit more vulnerable until the physical component of the shield rebalances.

The gameplay goal of this mechanic is that attackers would be encouraged to try to land multiple projectiles on the same part of your body in series, instead of just spamming you with projectiles. It seems that in most first person shooters, if someone has an automatic weapon with even a decently high firing rate, their best option is to just keep it pointed in your direction and hold the trigger down, and I’d like to change that. Another thing I was thinking was that if a first person shooter were played in very slow motion, complex team tactics could emerge. For example, a dude could jump out from behind a bush and shoot you a couple times in the chest to drain your regent away, thus allowing a sniper with an immensely low rate of fire to shoot you and score a kill before giving away his position.

Hell, who am I kidding? I was thinking in slow motion, and fantasizing about epic gun battles with multiple assailants (as I often do), and I more or less made up a mechanic to enable the battles I was fantasizing about. So please, somebody make a first person shooter that’s played in very slow motion, gives characters a very good range of motion, and records demos to be played back at full speed. I will buy that game.

What is the mechanic? Come to think of it, I’m several paragraphs in and have not answered that yet. That’s probably why they don’t let me write books.

You will have realistic flesh damage (possibly with automatic amputations performed by your suit as necessary). If you get shot in an appendage, you just lose that appendage below where you got shot. If you get shot in the head or chest, you die (in slow motion games, you’d get time to squeeze off a few “last words” in the case of a chest shot). The shield is the important bit. It will have two attributes: a total amount of energy, and some manner of tracking the arrangement of regent. Regent rebalances itself around the shield over time, slowly, and ideally could be set to prefer different configurations (such as preferentially defending head, or preferentially defending arms, or just evenly distributed). Think of it as a fluid dynamics sort of thing. When you get hit by a projectile, any regent within a certain circular area of the hit location (size determined by size of the projectile) is activated to defend you, and then you lose an amount of energy and local regent proportional to the energy dissipated in blocking the shot. If there is some regent but not what would have been destroyed, then perhaps it could still block the shot but at a higher energy cost.

Area of Effect explosives could be considered to do a certain amount of damage over the entire surface of the portion of the shield facing the explosive, meaning lots of regent is available to try to block the shockwave, but also the damage would be high, thus, high energy dissipation.

With a mechanic like this, you’d have, as always, a guarantee on the maximum amount of damage a target can avoid, bounded by energy. But, you’d also have a way for more precisely applied damage in a short period of time to circumvent the shield energy and hit the target anyways. This would keep players on the move and prevent meat shielding. And combined with good physics and the ability to take cover, it would just make for hella cool gameplay videos.

Why Valve Will NEVER Get my Money

Posted on May 2009 in angry rant, freedom

 (unless they change their ways)

Now this is a story all about how… well I can’t really figure out how to Bel-Air it.  But if you can, that’s what the comments section is for.  I guess I’ll just prose it.

Hokay, so.  I just got my steam password reset after a bit of hassle (fueled largely by incompetence on my end).  And I borrowed my sister’s graphics card, so 3D acceleration works, and I test it on wine, and it works on wine.  So I run the steam, and get the Team Fortress 2 updated, and it updates without a hitch and says “ready to run”.  So my computer setup is ready to run this game, and the game is on my computer, ready to be run, so all should be good.  Right?

In fact, just to make sure we’ve covered all the bases: the game (Team Fortress 2) was given to me as a gift, and it was payed for and such, and transferred using steam’s thingy for that, so for all intents and purposes it’s my property and I am a legit customer.  And I am logged into steam and it as far as I can tell agrees with this assessment.  So I’ve got all the stuff here, ready to run, and my box should be able to run it, and even Valve says it’s my game and I can run it.  So nothing can stop me now.  Right?

Well I run the game and I see a box that says: “This game is currently unavailable.  Please try again at another time.”

What

the

fuck

…

Now lets play a little guessing game.  Assume that I have run Unreal Tournament 2004 a lot of times (I have).  I have run it a lot of times on both windows and linux and on a lot of different computers and here and there (not at the same time, although that wouldn’t e an issue), all over the place, and such.  You get the idea.  I run that game a lot (it is after all the best game ever).  And all with one licence key.  Guess, how many times has my ability to run that game been in any way, even the slightest bit impeded, by any hurdle or problem outside of my own computer?

If you guessed anything other than zero, you are wrong, and also really bad at detecting sarcasm!  That’s right.  As it turns out, if a piece of software is installed on my computer, and does not need any data from outside sources to run, then it is entirely a function of the setup of my computer whether I can run the software.  This means that I can unplug the network cable at both ends, unscrew the wireless antennae from my computer and router, and smash my DSL modem with a sledgehammer of epic proportions, and I can still run UT2004.

And lets be honest with ourselves here.  This is not some byzantine voodoo software that runs over the Internet or something:  It’s normal mundane client software, that runs first and foremost on your computer, and then later can talk to a network if you want it to.  Even World of Warcraft and Second Life, both of which are massively multiplayer online games (only one of which I’d call a roleplaying game, and it’s not WoW), with absolutely no singleplayer capabilities, will still run just fine with absolutely no connection to anything outside my own computer.

Team Fortress 2 is no different.  There’s nothing networkey about the way that game displays it’s main menu screen.  There is no reason for that game to even notice whether you have a network connection at all, until you try to go to the server lobby and poke around.  So again, here I am, with the game all on my computer and my computer ready to run it.  Even ignoring the fact that my inet connection is fine and the problem is on valve’s en, there is still no apparent reason why I can’t run the game.  And this brings us to the source of my anger.

The real reason why I can’t run this game when the conditions seem just right for me being able to run the game (besides Valve not being able to keep shit straight with their servers), is trust.  Specifically, valve (the seller of content) does not trust me (completely legitimate consumer and owner of content) to actually use the content.  It is more important to them that they give themselves power over their users than that their users actually be able to use their products in the event of network issues or such.

Would you go to the cvs to buy cough suppressant if they were going to send an agent to follow you home and make sure you’re not making meth?  I’m guessing, even if you’re not running a meth lab (and frankly, plenty of people don’t run meth labs), you’re still not going to find this arrangement very comfortable.  A minor inconvenience can and should seem like a big deal when it’s for the sake of allowing some large entity to exert control over you because they claim to mistrust you.

Say “fuck you” to big brother.  Don’t buy software that phones home, and certainly don’t buy software that asks some remote site for permission just to let you run your own software on your own computer.  And when you can, pay with cash.

Tables are Turned

Posted on April 2009 in incoherent, unicycling

Hey.

So… that’s an interesting device you’ve got there.

Like, it looks really complicated.

I could never ride something like that.

…

Don’t your pants get caught in the chain?

Well, doesn’t it jam, or break, or whatever?  I mean, that’s a lot of moving parts…

Hmm.  If you say so… but maintaining that seems like a lot of work.

…

It looks pretty bulky.  Where do you keep it?

Oh wow, it’s heavy, too.

I can’t even imagine trying to clear a fence carrying that!  It looks like even getting it up a curb is quite a chore!

…

How would you even turn on something like that?

Oh!  That thing swivels?

So do you have to keep your hands on it then?

Oh, that bites.

…

How do you even get on that?

Do you have to climb on from behind, or do you just swing your leg over like a horse?

How do you get *off* of it?  Wouldn’t that take too long?

…

Haha, that’s quite the turning radius you have there…

…

Wow.  Do you have to pull that thing to stop?

I’d be afraid do try that… I’d forget to pull the thing to stop and I’d die!

Haha, you never forget?  You make it sound like you must have had some pretty wild crashes on that thing while learning.

I bet wiping out on one of *those* actually *hurts*…

…

And this is all for what?  Just so it goes faster?

So it’s just useful for multiple mile trips then?

…

Alright.  Well, good to meet you and your vehicle.

I don’t think it’s for me.  I’m happy with what I have.

…

However, I can see that it might have it’s merits.

It would be completely arrogant and stupid of me to simply assume my tool I ride every day is inherently better than yours, if I don’t have any experience with yours.

Maybe some day I’ll try to achieve competence with one of those, and then I’ll be qualified to pass judgement.

Cheap Lighter Review: The Bic Lighter

Posted on April 2009 in 3', cheap lighter review, new features

The time has come for me to review something other than video games.  Not that I’ve looked very hard, but I haven’t really been able to find any lighter reviews that meet my exacting standards.  It seems like all the reviews for cheap lighters are short-ish blurbs along the lines of “it makes fire,” and all the lengthy in-depth reviews are for expensive (ie, more than $3) lighters, like zippos and such.  So I’m here to fix that, by giving you reviews of cheap lighters that are so in depth reading them is not worth the couple bucks it would cost you to just buy one anyways, unless you enjoy my writing (which is what I’m hoping for in general with this whole blog thing).

So to start things off, I will review what, as far as I know, is the widely used lighter, the canonical Bic Lighter, with the “Flick Your Bic” marketing campaign.  Speaking of marketing, well, lets just say bic is lucky I’m not judging lighters’ websites.

Best Price
The best price I have found for these lighters is a three-pack priced at $3.19 (at the CVS on the Drag, for you local readers), which comes out to about $1.06 per lighter.

Operation
The Bic Lighter is easy to use: you press down on the safety flap with your thumb until it contacts the wheel, and then spin it quickly, landing your thumb on the butane button.

Safety
The Bic Lighter has a metal flap which extends over the flint wheel and sticks out just farther than the thumbgrips on the side of the wheel, making it difficult to turn without applying pressure.  Presumably this is to keep children from being able to strike the device with their useless, weak fingers (I assume the expectation is that children should use lighters only for the purpose of huffing butane (don’t do that though, it’s bad for you)), or perhaps to safeguard against stoners continuing to toke after they are too high to operate the striking mechanism.  In any case, with the flap in place, it will probably give you blisters or at least hurt your thumb if you use the lighter often.

Disarming the Safety
This safety is trivial to disarm.  In fact, due to the popularity of the lighter, there already exist guides on the Internet.  However the commonly recommended method is bullshit, because it takes about ten times as long as my way and actually requires precision and effort.  Here’s the proper way to disarm the Bic Lighter’s safety:

1. Slip a thin metal rod (I use the thin flathead screwsdriver on my pocketknife, and I’d also recommend those mini-screwdrivers for computer parts) under the safety, next to the flint wheel, parallel to the axis of rotation of the wheel.
2. Yank that bitch right up, away from the lighter (the tab will pop off and go flying)
3. Fold the little tabs next to the aperture back down with your fingernail to make it all pretty again

Operation Without Safety
Without the safety, this is one of the easiest lighters around to use.  All you have to do is slam your thumb on the button letting it graze the striking wheel on the way down.  With some practice you can do it quickly, quietly, and with almost no visible sparks.

Features
Feature-wise this is a pretty lame lighter.  It doesn’t have an adjustable flame, and it’s not refillable.  The default flame is decently sized, though, so it’s not a problematic piece unless you have special requirements.

Hackability
This lighter is just not modifiable at all.  If you take off the cover you will find that the nozzle lifting lever is solid metal and not adjustable, and to add insult to injury, taking off the cover in itself is sort of a pain because of the way it snaps into place.

Conclusion
This lighter is fairly featureless, but it’s a good, solid, working fire maker. I’d say it’s fair to say this is the lighter against which other lighers are compared.  Thus, I’ll rate it 10 decibics.

zomg alexbobp on twitter wtf

Posted on April 2009 in facebook, new features

While I was googling around trying to find a way to use facebook from my beloved IRC client (something I do quite often, in fact), I found something different: a jabber to twitter gateway!  So now I can tweet as easily as I send random messages to friends, which I presume is the point of twitter, since anything actually worth hearing is more than 140 characters (the twitter length limit).  So you can expect a lot of twitter posts in the next few days, and maybe some after that, I dunno.  I get tired of things quickly, especially when they SUCK.  But since I can use it from irssi, it’s worth a test drive.

You can follow this shit at https://twitter.com/alexbobp

Time to Move On

Posted on April 2009 in masturbatory ranting about how I have a webserver, metablogging

It’s been fun having my own webserver, not to mention bragging about such, but I’ve finally decided it’s for the best to get a proper webhost for my blog.  So if you are seeing this post, you are seeing it on the new site, which is hosted by some people other than me!  I sort of didn’t want to have to do this, mainly because I’m cheap, but the bandwidth to the site has just gotten to be too much for a shitty old computer in my parents’ closet to handle.  At least the good news is that this will probably mean there will be reduced downtime, at least until I negotiate/acquire root access on the new server.

Enormous Downtime Excuse

Posted on March 2009 in crosspost, excuses, masturbatory ranting about how I have a webserver

So my parents changed ISP, and during this process, they changed modems. New modem means new firewall, and lets just say that my parents aren’t exactly firewall-configuring wizards.

So I know what you’re thinking, “You expect me to believe that it took you two weeks to talk your parents through forwarding ports 22 and 80 to your server, which was infact online the whole time?” …No, I don’t really expect you to believe that, but it’s true.

Now I know what you’re thinking, “Quit being a cheapass and buy a damn VPS or at least a webhost already.” But I assure you, having my own webserver running out of my parents’ house is better! Here’s a list of reasons why:

1. I have my own webserver.
2. I can brag about #1.
3. My blog can be brought down at the whim of my cat.

Hmm. Maybe I should get a VPS.

First Cross-Post

Posted on February 2009 in Club Ubuntu, crosspost, new features

Warning: This post is administrivia, not normal content.  Those “webtarblags != srs bsns” types out there might just want to skip it.
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Summary:
I’m going to start cross-posting all (or most?) of my posts between my wordpress blog and my new Club Ubuntu blog.
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For people finding this on the Club Ubuntu website:
I also have a blog which I host on my own webserver using wordpress, at http://alexbobp.homelinux.net/wordpress.
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For people reading at my site:
Club Ubuntu (##club-ubuntu on irc.freenode.net, drop by!) is an IRC channel community that is very near and dear to my heart.  This is because of the people in it, not because of the name (so no I’m not endorsing Ubuntu).  It’s not even an official Ubuntu channel.  I don’t even know why it’s still called “Club Ubuntu”… but I digress.  It’s a great channel.
It recently got itself a website, which is powered by Drupal which includes blogging functionality for channel members.
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Regarding posts:
I’m certainly not going to let my blog’s already sparse content suffer, but I wanted to participate in this, so I decided the best course of action was to cross-post (post the same things to both blogs).
Any post tagged as crosspost (see “Regarding tags”) can also be found on the other blog.
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Regarding comments:
Please leave comments on my own webserver.  I want the comments all in one place, not split.  I will disable comments on crossposts on the drupal blog as soon as I figure out how.  In the meantime, I will delete comments left on a post tagged “nocomment”.
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Regarding tags:
Crossposted posts will be tagged as “crosspost” on both blogs.
Posts I don’t want comments on will be tagged as “nocomment”, for the drupal blog only.
Posts regarding Club Ubuntu will be tagged “Club Ubuntu” on both blogs.
Other than this, I will try to keep tags synchronized between the two blogs.  Of course, I can’t control what other posters use any given tag on the Club Ubuntu site.
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Regarding post content:
Frankly, wordpress is far superior to drupal in terms of features available to me.  If a post contains anything complicated (images? embeds? formatting?  I don’t know what will cause issues), and the two posts look different, then you can assume that the wordpress one is the look I intended for the post, and the drupal one is my best approximation with what’s available.
If for any reason I feel the need to include different content on either side of the crosspost, then the wordpress side will include all content and the drupal side will be a subset.  This is because there should be no feeling that people who subscribe only my existing blog are missing something.  If you read my wordpress blog and don’t care about the affairs of Club Ubuntu, then simply skip posts tagged “Club Ubuntu”.

Get a Jar and Do This

Posted on January 2009 in alex shares wisdom, masturbatory ranting about how I have a webserver

If you are like most of my friends (and it’s a fair bet you’re one of my friends who I nagged into reading my blog, unless I’m more famous than I thought), then one of the primary ways you benefit from my existence is by using my recklessness to test potentially dangerous things so that you don’t have to try them until you know they are safe.  (Incidentally, having your own webserver is safe, not to mention totally badass)

So.  I just tried this, because I’m an idiot, and the result surprised me.  I assure you it’s safe (and particularly, can assure you that you won’t be subject to even mildly uncomfortable amounts of heat), but I don’t want to spoiler it, so just do it!

.

You will need:

1. A glass jar that you can comfortably seal with the palm of your hand
2. Rubbing alcohol
3. A match

You will do:

1.  Pour some rubbing alcohol into the jar (just enough to cover the bottom should be fine)
2. Swirl it around gently for several seconds
3. Drop a lit match in
4. After the fire goes out, cover the jar with your hand

.

Try this and leave me a comment.  Or if you’re unwilling to try this, feel free to comment anyways.  If your comment contains spoilers you can feel free to encrypt to http://pgp.surfnet.nl:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0×1DC89C43998E171B, and if you’re so-inclined, email it to me so that you don’t have to tantalize my other reader(s) with an encrypted comment they can’t read.

.

Finally, a bit of poetry (an inside joke):

Three words.

I have webserver.

How to Use /ignore

Posted on January 2009 in alex shares wisdom, angry rant

This seems to be a difficult concept for many people, so I am going to write a quick guide to using the wonderful IRC feature known as “ignore”. I’m going to assume you already know mechanically how to manage your ignore list. This is about the practical application of it.

So first of all, you should have a good reason to ignore foo. Basically there’s one legitimate reason, and that is that foo is annoying the shit out of you. If you can think of another reason to ignore let me know, but whatever, that’s not important. Assume for the sake of this guide you have already decided to ignore foo.

The correct way to use ignore

1. Place foo on your ignore list
2. Tell foo he is on your ignore list (optional)
3. Shut the fuck up about it

The INCORRECT way to use ignore

1. Threaten to place foo on your ignore list
2. Place foo on your ignore list
3. Tell foo he is on your ignore list
4. Continue to remind foo he is on your ignore list, by going on about how nice the silence is

Ignore is meant as a conflict killer. If you use the first method, you are preventing someone from continuing to fan your flames. If you use the second method, you are trolling to piss them off, blocking them from responding because you’re a pansy-ass bitch who can’t take what you dish out, and the con-fucking-TINUING to troll them. Do you see the difference?

Finally, some people have one more argument for this behavior, along the lines of “I’m so goddamn important/smart that if everybody knows who I ignore they will follow suit.” The problem with this argument is as follows:

1. If you think someone should be mass-ignored, then surely you think they should be banned.
2. If you were really that important, then the person who was pissing you off would be banned.
3. Therefore you are not that important.
4. If you think a person’s behavior should be banned and the ops do not, then one of you is wrong, because the viewpoints are controdictory.
5. Your residence in the channel is a sign that you respect the ops’ abilities to make decisions.
6. Ergo, it is you who are wrong, and the person should not be banned.
7. If a person is not ban-worthy, then it stands to reason that the person is not going to be ignored by most of the channel.
8. So just put them on your own ignore list and shut the fuck up about it, nobody wants to hear it.

Thank you for listening, and have a nice chat!

How to Learn to Unicycle

Posted on January 2009 in alex shares wisdom, unicycling

If I seem like I’m obsessed with unicycles lately… well, lets just say it’s amazing what a training partner can do for your enthusiasm for a sport.  Anyway, this is a guide to learning to unicycle.  It assumes you already know how to ride a bicycle, because everybody should know how to ride a bicycle, so if you can’t that should be your first priority.

Quick note on the estimated times: If you take longer to learn something than I estimate you should take, don’t worry about it.  Unless you’re physically handicapped you’ll be able to figure this out, and even if you take a bit longer, you’re still way cooler than the people who don’t bother to learn at all.

The following is an entirely unnecessary paragraph of me, as far as I can tell, trying to brag about my own writing or coaching abilities or something.  Skip right to the numbered steps.

This guide is oriented towards people who don’t like reading, formal instruction, information you can figure out yourself, or similar crap.  Apparently a lot of people think that you should teach people technique.  When you were a kid, did someone teach you how to throw rocks?  No, you fed your innate grasp of physics with trial-and-error until you could throw stuff pretty well and accurately.  This guide is supposed to be enough that someone who has never ridden a unicycle can pick one up and figure out how to ride it (as opposed to staring blankly at it with no clue how to start learning).  It’s not supposed to tell you how to balance, because that’s silly, and you can figure it out.  You’ll see what I mean…  and if you are still reading this you probably think I’m an arrogant prick, but for the record I told you to skip this paragraph.  If you think other guides (and I am certain, by the laws of probability, that other guides exist) are better, then use those.

-

1) Get comfortable sitting on it

Get a thing to lean on, or grab, like a wall, tree, or good friend (mediocre friends won’t work).  Put the unicycle next to it.  Arrange the pedals so that one is up and one is down.  Put the seat into your crotch, wide-end back (and if you’re a man, make sure you don’t sit on your balls; grab them and pull them up if necessary).  Now put a foot onto the low pedal, grab onto your support for dear life, and then step your other foot up to the high pedal (keeping weight on the low pedal).  It should take about 20 seconds for you to get a solid grasp of keeping the wheel from turning (by keeping weight on the low pedal). After that, start trying to shift your weight so that you are balanced.

Your goal is to be able to stay up applying only light pressure to whatever you are holding on to.  This step is quick; you will probably get used to sitting on the unicycle in under 20 minutes.

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2) Get comfortable rolling

You will want either a wall or a good friend for this one (because trees don’t move).  I can’t recommend one over the other, so try them both and see which works for you.  The approach is different for the two options.

If you use a wall, you will need to walk along the wall with your hands while you ride.  What you will want to do is turn your wheels slowly, and walk along the wall with your hands in order to keep yourself balanced.  Don’t worry about side to side balance at first, just front-back balance.  After you can hand-walk along the wall well, try to reduce how much you touch the wall with your hands, and actually move yourself with the wheel.  This means, pedal forwards when you are leaning forwards, and vice versa.  If you are stopped and want to go forwards, you lean forwards and then pedal forwards.  The goal is to be able to use the wall to keep yourself from falling over sideways, while using the pedals to keep yourself from falling over forwards and backwards, and leaning to control your speed.

If you use a person, just ask them to walk, and use the pedals to try to keep the wheel directly under you.

Either way, your goal is to get to where you can keep your wheel beneath you so that you stop ending up hanging from a wall, or worse, your poor friend’s shoulder.  This is the hardest step, in terms of effort you have to put in.  Past this, it’s all trial-and error and building muscle memory.  This step probably takes around two or three hours of practice.

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3) Start pushing off

Find a long flat piece of ground (because you don’t know how to turn yet).  Ideally you should have a wall parallel to your pathway that ends before it, so that you can get going before you let go of the wall.  But if you can get your balance on a perpendicular wall and push off, that works too.  Remember to keep your weight on the seat and not the pedals.  It’s easier to balance with your weight on the pedals, but you will get tired very quickly, so save that for staircases ;)

Your goal is to be able to ride short distances like 50 feet reliably without falling down.  This is the most time-consuming step, which is why I don’t recommend making a friend be your support beam.  If you practice an hour every day, you should be be able to have this down in just a few weeks.

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4) Learn to turn

There are basically two ways to turn on a unicycle.  Twisting, and leaning.  You’ll want to learn both.  Twisting is the most intuitive way, largely due to the fact that humans expect to be able to turn anything by twisting, and intuitively there is no other reasonable way to turn a unicycle.   I shouldn’t have to explain how that’s done.  Leaning is actually simple too, in theory.  You just lean to the side, and the muscle memory you’ve already developed for keeping balance will keep you upright.  Of course, both methods are hard at first, and you will fall over a bunch of times.  To practice this, just go for rides around your neighborhood or whatever.

For an inexperienced unicyclist, leaning slightly will allow you to sort of turn, only with an enormous turning radius, and and twisting is for anything one might actually call a “turn.”  For an experienced unicyclist, most turns are lean turns, and twisting is for making a 90 degree turn on a dime.  If you have the space to do a lean turn it’s generally preferred because you don’t lose all your speed.

I can’t really put a goal or a time estimate on this one.  At risk of sounding cheesy, I’ll say, “A unicyclist never stops learning to turn.”  That is, a unicyclist never stops learning to make tighter and smoother turns.  So you’re basically done with this step when you feel good enough about your abilities that sidewalk curbs start to look appealing.

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That’s it for this beginner’s guide!  Here’s a sneak-peek at what future steps you might expect if popular demand forces me to continue this line of posts:

- Going down curbs

- Jumping (Going up curbs)

- Hopping in place

- Installing a bong on your unicycle

- Riding backwards

- Riding one-legged

- Double-jumping and walljumping

- Riding sideways

- Descending vertical walls

- Riding on liquids

- Riding upside-down

- “The Helicopter”

5 features that manufacturers have no excuse not to include with laptops

Posted on November 2008 in Uncategorized

I’m sure you know the drill by now, but in case there are any new readers, lists are presented in descending order by apparent sanity of the writer, because, y’know, first impressions.

5) Dual Battery Bays

Raise your hand if you think it makes sense to shut off your computer while using it so that you can swap out the empty battery for your full spare battery!  Okay, that’s what I thought*.

4) Handcrank Charger

If you look up the power consumption of your laptop, and do some math with levers and shit, you will find that a human could easily power even the biggest lappies.  There is no reason why I should not be able to turn a crank for 10 seconds every 10 minutes to coil a spring, and keep my computer powered indefinitely.  So why the hell can’t I get an off-the-shelf handcrank-spring-assembly with a plug that fits into the back of my laptop?  Sure people are lazy, but I’d think most people would rather yank a crank than stop using the computer.

3) More Ports

Even today I see new laptops with 3 USB ports.  Seriously?  Who the fuck has only 3 USB devices?  Laptops should have 6 usb ports.  It’s not that hard to stick more ports on, is it?  And on the topic of ports, bring back the PS/2 port!  No matter which side of the clitmouse/touchpad holy war you’re on**, surely you’ll agree that they both can suck a Kirk Johnson-sized rubberdong while you play first person shooters with the one true pointer-control mechanism… but I digress.  My point is, I still have PS/2 mice lying around, as do hopefully plenty of other people, and laptops are the last things that should be rejecting assistance in the human interface department.

2) Chassis Intrusion Detection

Most Desktop PCs already have this feature; the ability to know when the computer has been opened is very important.  Why oh why should my laptop sit on it’s hands like a dope, while the snoops unscrew the lid on my RAM at their leisure?  Come on now.  It should be notifying my software, so that it can purge encryption keys in memory, zero the entire ram, and/or halt the system.  This is not hard to do.  It’s one extra button.

1) A Hovercraft

You see, my dad does this thing where when someone says “You know what would be great?” or “You know what’s cool?,” etc, he says “a hovercraft.”

…

I’m tired, go away.

* Blogging tip: Get away with an argument by basing it on the reader raising their hand!  They never raise their hands.  Even if they’re completely alone in front of the computer, with no webcam or anything, they’ll be too self-conscious to raise their hand.

** The clitmouse is, of course, superior

Laptops, Passwords, and Passwords

Posted on November 2008 in alex shares wisdom, angry rant, security

A lot of people have either one or zero password on their laptop computer.  But then again, some people use Windows.  More importantly, a lot of people have said that I’m some kind of a nutter for the fact that I have to type four passwords to get into my lappy.  Well you know what, ignorant masses?  Now it’s personal.  I’m going to explain why it is necessary to have four passwords, and you are required to leave me a blog comment.

First of all, you should know what the passwords are.  They are: The BIOS password, the hard drive password, the volume encryption password, and the login password.  They each serve a separate purpose.  The BIOS password prevents the computer from being useful to people who are not me.  The hard drive password prevents people from reading from or writing to my hard drive. The encryption password prevents people from reading my data.  Lastly, the login password prevents people from using my computer.  Now, I know what you’re thinking.  “Aren’t _ and _ redundant?”  Well I’m going to shoot that down in four fell swoops, by explaining exactly what the Enemy would be able to do if I were missing any one of these four passwords.

If I were missing the BIOS password, they would be able to steal my computer and use it.  Come on now, that one’s a no-brainer.  I dunno about you, but I have no love for people who steal my shit, and I don’t want them to profit from it.  This is the best I can do to keep my computer from being their computer short of explosive boobytraps.

If I were missing the hard drive password, someone would be able to take the hard drive out, put it in another laptop, and screw with it.  Now I know what you’re thinking.  “If your hard drive is encrypted, what’s wrong with people being able to read it?”  Why, nothing, of course!  After all, all they’d get is grub and my kernel, which are all GPL’d and shit, so they can have them.  But, with the hard drive unlocked, they could also *write* it.  Which means they can edit the unencrypted bootloader stuff, and then replace the hard drive and I’d be none the wiser.  Imagine if somebody patched a kernel so that it would keylog your ass and email them the results.  Think that’s unlikely?  You can fit a lot of stuff in the kernel.

Now, there’s the encryption password.  This should be obvious.  I don’t want people getting my data.  You might say, “with a hard drive password, why do you need to encrypt?”  Because a hard drive password just locks the hard drive, it doesn’t hide the data in any way.  If you just take apart the hard drive, you can read everything right off the platters.  Sound complicated?  Data recovery specialists will do it for, like, a hunnert bucks or something.  Groups that do this sort of thing a lot, like the NSA, can do it themselves pretty much for free (the amortized equipment cost is negligible; the aforementioned $100 is pricegouging for pricegouging’s sake).

Finally, there’s the login password.  This is so I can ssh in, or so I can lock the laptop while it’s running and walk away.  Duh.

Now, assuming you’re somehow convinced, you might still be wondering if you could make all these passwords the same or some stupid shit like that.  No.

First of all, you can’t have the same bios password as any of your other passwords, because if you need to get your laptop repaired the repairpersons will probably need the bios password. They sure as shit don’t need your hard drive password.  In fact, only a chump actually sends the hard drive with the laptop when getting repaired.

Now, you might still be wondering why you can’t have the same hard drive password as other passwords.  Simple.  The hard drive password is handled in the bios, and therefore probably has ridiculous limitations on the characterset and password length, because electrical engineers are morons when it comes to security.  Your disk encryption password has to be very strong, because it’s the one that’s vulnerble to an offline attack with whatever computational resources your adversary has available.  You think the NSA is going to have time to blink before bruteforcing through your 8-character LUKS password?  They have a lot of computers.  Similarly, you want to have a strong login password, because linux is a complicated system, and therefore there are a lot of password testing pathways, which means it’s probably open to a fast online bruteforce.  The hard drive itself has throttling mechanisms, so it’s probably safe.  Although I’d still be careful about who gets to handle it.  Consider boobytrapping your drive bays so you’ll know if they have been opened.

Finally, why can’t the login password be the same as the encryption password?  Well, actually, they could, I guess.  But it’s a bad idea, because your normal password is something you are going to be typing all day long, wheras your encryption password needs to have very high security standards.  So I just don’t recommend it.  But do what you want, I guess.  As Shamus Young once said in some context probably inferior to this one, I’m not your mum.

Greetz to my homeboy samphippen, who reminds me to do things (like write this)

Process Lists

Posted on November 2008 in nerd stuff, software development

If you ask people what the cause of humor is, they will fall squarely into two camps.  Half of people will say that humor is what happens when you build up expectations in a person and then shatter them.  The other half will argue that humor is simply what happens when you goatse somebody.  It’s easy to merely dismiss the former definition as ridiculous, but what if there is in fact some truth to both sides?  Well, as per Science, the asking of this question necessitated the testing and answering of it.  Now how do you combine the shattering of expectations with the goatseing of people?  Simple.  Find the places where they least expect to find goatse, and then put it there.

Anybody familiar with linux or similar operating systems knows that there is a program called “top” that can be used to view the list of processes that are running, sorted by CPU usage or other things.  This is a useful tool because, often, one wants to see what process is hogging all the CPU in order to kill it, or if neither the process owner nor root, to email it’s owner rude messages.  But I digress.  The important point here, is that when one runs the “top” program in order to view a list of running processes, one expects to see a set of distinct rows without any particular order-sensitive relations between them.  In other words, not goatse.

So it began.  The overall methodology is simple.  To get multiple rows in the process list, you need multiple processes.  Since processes can take arbitrary text on the command line, you just have to get them to show up in the correct order.  By default, process are sorted by CPU time, so we (some friends on IRC and I) devised a simple C program to take CPU time based on it’s first command-line argument.  This way, you can just tack on the art as more arguments.  Then I made a simple bash script to take an ascii-art file (named goatse), and launch the necessary instances of the CPU burner.

You can find the script here.  If you’re too lazy to try it, or on windows or someshit, you can see a demo here. You can also try ssh-ing to alexbobp.servebeer.com with username “root” and password “verygullibleami” and then running top, but that’s probably overkill.

Dropping More Eggs than Google

Posted on November 2008 in Uncategorized

There is a classic problem, supposedly from google interviews: You have two eggs, and a 100 story building.  There is a number n, in the range 0 to 100, such that dropping an egg from the nth story or above will shatter it.  (n=0 means eggs always shatter, and n=100 means they never do).

The Classic Puzzles blog offers a solution as a formula that generalizes to any number of floors.  However, I wanted a solution that generalizes to any number of eggs, too.  Unfortunately, I’m not so good at the maths as these nerds, so I decided to do an exhaustive search.  After I realized that Java doesn’t really like recursing hundreds of calls deep, I ended up going with a rather optimized memorized implementation.  After much blood, tears, and Internet Relay Chat, and debugging too painful to recount, I finally ended up with a working implementation.  It can give you the best worst case number of drops, and it can also give you the full decision tree, biased towards either high or low drops.

You can find my code at http://pastebin.com/, my own server, or also my server (the last link will make your browser want to save it).

How to Piss Off a Unicyclist

Posted on October 2008 in alex shares wisdom, angry rant, unicycling

As we all know, unicyclists are total weirdos.  (holy shit, I just realized like half my posts start with “As we all know…”)  We don’t see them very often, so when we do, we should treat them like the clowns they are.  So as usual, I’m coming to the rescue with some tips and tricks on pissing off unicyclists, collected from various people who pissed off a unicyclist.  Enjoy!  (Warning: angry post ahead.)

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-Toss a stick into the spokes*

One quick, easy way to encourage an unplanned dismount is to simply toss a stick into the spokes.  This will freeze the wheel.  Afterwards, you can claim that you did it to see if they could keep riding, as if that were somehow non-0bvious.

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-Say “Man, I could never do that.”

Because a unicyclist is not merely person who has practiced unicycling.  A unicyclist is a special person, or “freak,” if you will, who has superpowers (probably traded for either his/her immortal soul, or a period of indentured servitude in a circus).  Extra points if you claim the unicyclist must be on some kind of drugs or claim that unicycling violates the laws of physics**.

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-Imply that the unicyclist is an elitist or a showoff.

I can’t do this justice in sarcasm.  So instead of using the word “not” a whole lot, I’m going to cheat a bit.

not {Unicyclists will be the first people to inform you that you can learn to ride too.  It’s not special, it’s just another thing people take time to learn to do.  If we are riding all the time, it’s only because it’s so goddamn much fun (it is).  I’m not unicycling to show off my leet skillz, or to pick up girls (although if it did that it would be totally okay).  I’m unicycling to get from place to place, and walking is boring, and bicycles are not boring, but not as much fun either.  I’m not gonna lie and say I don’t like or want complements.  I love complements.  But lets just say if that were my goal, I would have used more efficient methods to extract them.}

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-Freak out and freeze in place.

One funny trait about unicyclists it that they are unable to see motion.  If they see a person walking, all they see is the person, and they will attempt to navigate right where said person is walking to!  Nothing throws off a unicyclist more than a person who is moving at constant velocity and KEEPS DOING SO.  So when you see the unicycle coming, on a collision course for right where you won’t be anymore when he arrives, you’d better stop dead or you’re gonna get hit!***

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-Dive out of the way like it’s a derailed freight train.

Nothing says respect like the implication that someone is unreliable, scary, and dangerous.  If you suddenly see a unicyclist close to you, and want to let him know what you think of that, dive.  Most of the amateurs out there are just doing a leap that says “Man, I don’t trust your balance for SHIT.”  Your body language needs to say “WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING BRINGING THAT WEAPON INTO MY TOWN!”  If you don’t roll, powerslide, or clear a fence, you’re not sending a strong enough message.

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-Say “Your bicycle lost a wheel.****

Since nobody ever told you to say this, and you thought of it independently, it is original, right?  There is no such thing as a joke so obvious that every person EVER has thought of it.  So go tell this to the next unicyclist you see, because it is absolutely not the case that he already heard it 15 times in the time it took you to wipe the drool off your cheek when you woke up in the morning.

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* Luckily this one has never happened to me.  But I have overheard people planning to do it, and taken a wide route to avoid it.  And yes, the unicyclist will fall off, obviously.

** Seriously.  Some guy insists on both of these.  But he’s an otherwise pleasant person.  Go figure.

*** Fun fact: About 95% of the people I have collided with were people I was going to ride *behind*, until they saw me and turned into statues.  The other 5% or so were me actually falling off the unicycle.

**** Short story: Once I was riding a unicycle while carrying another one (from the bike shop, where I was getting the stuff to repair it), and somebody said “your bicycle fell apart.”  He soon learned about it’s alternate use as a spinning bludgeon.

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P.S.

I feel I owe the universe some extra comment on number two, “I could never do that.”  Yes you fucking can.  If you can learn to ride a bicycle you can learn to ride a unicycle.  You are (with some exceptions) not a cripple, and therefore, all it takes is practice.  Perhaps “I could never do that” is meant as a weird compliment, or perhaps you actually have some deep misunderstanding about the human brain that makes it seem like only a small subset of the population can learn to balance on something.  But what it comes out sounding like is “I’m lazy and/or don’t actually want to unicycle, but I don’t want to admit this.”

Anyways, get a unicycle and learn to ride it.  It only takes a few dozen hours to get competent enough to ride sidwalks and stuff, and it’s fucking fun!