X3: The return

Posted on February 26, 2008 by Arthur

Last week, I X3: The Reunion screenshotnoticed that I had missed an update for ‘X3: Reunion’ (earlier on xsamplex), which should patch your X3 game up to 2.5 (if you’ve got X3 via Steam, it should come as an automatic update).

Since the last time I played the game was probably almost a year ago, I decided to try out the new patch. Three or four days later, I can (safely) report that I’m hooked to it again: It’s an excellent game, that is if you’re into space-sims a la Privateer and Elite. So yeah, here’s the next batch of tips and remarks about X3 (previous tips). If you’re not familiar with the X3 world, you may want to hold up right here.

1. I used to hate flying slow Nova’s and Falcons (M3 classes), however, in the fight against pirates and others, they are superior, particularly when you have an escort of 3 or 4 M4 fighters handy. If you need fast M4 fighters, you can buy Buster Vanguards at the ‘Heart of Light’ system: though, make sure to upgrade their shields and weaponry first (run ‘southward’ via sectors Montalaar and Lucky Planets). Additionally, keep at least 2 captured pirate Falcons. During fights, let your M4 fighters handle the fast flyers, while using your squad of Falcons to finish off the larger ships.

2. The only good transporter is the Demeter Miner: it’s faster than regular transporters and at least it can carry XL commodities like ore and silicone wafers.

3. In the beginning, trade ore, silicone wafers and energy cells in areas like ‘Kingdom’s End’ (via Power Circle and Queen’s Space), ‘Argon Prime/Home of Light’ (via Power Circle and/Or The Wall), ‘Paranid Prime’ (via Emperor Mines, Priest Rings and Empire’s Edge), ‘CEO’s Buckzoid’ (via Profit Share and Seizewell) and ‘Trinity Sanctum’ (via Lucky Planets). Notice that the AI is smart enough to detect when you start dumping raw materials in all sectors, so if you see the prices for ore and silicone wafers fall, it’s time to start trading energy cells or Teladinanium.

4. Use Pegasus M5 scouts to travel through sectors that sell special devices like “Trade Extensions #3” (see sector ‘Industry of Finance’).

5. A high ore yield for asteroids doesn’t automatically mean profits. You find several asteroids with a yield of 61 in ‘Antigone Memorial’: these asteroids eat resources. No, really: you’ll be burning money to keep those mining stations on those asteroids running.

6. You can actually capture Kha’ak interceptors and Xenon M and Ls. They make lousy fighters though.

7. Patch 2.5 added a couple of new sectors, which aren’t that interesting, unless I miss something.

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A Carrier

Posted on February 26, 2008 by Arthur

Way earlier Karel Doorman (a couple of weeks perhaps) I was reminded of the fact that the Dutch navy at one time had a carrier (actually two but that’s a different story) which served a small amount of time in and around New Guinea to convince the Indonesians not to claim that last bastion of Dutch colonialism.

I mention this because my dad, who in his travels and search for a new life after surviving the Second World War and the violent Indonesian independence fight eventuallly ended up in New Guinea (or, rather ‘Netherlands New Guinea’), in the city of Hollandia, (now Jayapura), regularly recalled this particular stunt the Dutch navy pulled in Australia:

When the Doorman arrived at Fremantle, Australia, the local seamen’s union struck to show sympathy with Indonesia, refused to man tugs or docking lines. The Doorman cranked up her aircraft and maneuvered to her berth by using the propeller blasts to nudge alongside the dock. At Hollandia, New Guinea, the Doorman unloaded twelve obsolescent Hawker Hunter turbojets to bolster the small Dutch defense forces. Crying “Horrid imperialists,” Indonesia’s President Sukarno broke off diplomatic relations with The Netherlands.

I don’t think Dad was still in Hollandia at that time of that incident: although New Guinea was like heaven on earth for him, after witnessing a botched Indonesian landing in or around 1961 (“I saw the paratroopers hanging in the trees”), he decided that enough was enough and finally made it to the land of his forefathers, The Netherlands.

Hollandia was eventually let go by the Dutch authorities and after a controversial election or plebiscite, New Guinea was eventually annexed by Indonesia in 1963.

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Roll up the Rim 2008

Posted on February 26, 2008 by Arthur

If you read Roll up the Rim 2008this blog, you’d know that I’ve been tracking the Hortons’ ‘Roll up the Rim’ contest for quite a while (“Since 2002”). Just like last year, 2008 also misses the ‘breakdown of winning cups per size’ which makes the numbers look stale, if you’re a number cruncher.

On first view, there are more cases shipped to the regions 2 (Alberta), 4 (Quebec) and 6 (the US), while the Atlantic provinces and Ontario lose out on the amount of them (there’s also a bit more ‘winning cases’, 12,000 or some [Hortons metrics: ‘1 case = 1000 cups’].

As for the prizes: they’re quite dull. There is the Toyota (for the 3rd year in a row now) of course but the rest of the prizes (a boat, a Garmin device and a Hortons cash card worth 50 dollars) will probably not appeal to everyone. I’m a bit surprised to see the (popular) TV prize missing. On the other hand this appears logical and follows the basic rule of linear interpolation: after all, the size of the winning TV shrunk from 50 inch (in 2006) to 40 inch (in 2007) to nothing, nada, zilch this year. For some kind of reason, I keep thinking of the Wizard of Oz, right now.

If that doesn’t make you want to throw up and laugh, what does? Have at it coffee-drinkers of Canada (and the US).

Previous entries: 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 and 2002.

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Moby Octopad

Posted on February 23, 2008 by Arthur

I brought Yo La Tengoup Yo La Tengo a couple of times, skirmishly, I admit (previously on xsamplex). I discovered the band via the ‘regular musical path’: As a fan of Sonic Youth I ended up listening to Yo La Tengo. I’m not sure why that is: Yo La Tengo’s music style comes closer to ‘easy listening music’: edgy, experimental, yet, predictable and accessible. But fun, yes: the bandmembers are well-known for making fun (“You Can Have It All, Live”) of themselves (“Tom Courtenay”) and their ‘nerdy image’ (“Sugar Cube”). Maybe it’s because they are from New Jersey.

So: Initially, I was thinking of throwing in their song ‘You Can Have It All’ (see link above for live performance) but I decided to go for a sample from YLT’s 1997 album ‘I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One’: Moby Octopad (sample 30+second) is the second track on that album. For me, personally, it stands out because of the heavily pronounced bass and drum theme and the (band’s) typical multi-vocal melodic song style. Not brilliant, but definitely different and unique.

Update (03/02/08): Yo La Tengo is murdering the classics 2008.

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The, Surprise

Posted on February 18, 2008 by Arthur

Microsoft’s move to open up the (file) specifications for its Office applications quite surprised me. I don’t think it has hit Slashdot yet, but it made it to the ‘frontpage’ of ZDNews. Brian Jones (Program Manager for Office) made the announcement late last week. All files are available in PDF format and, they’re actually quite readable.

The news that Toshiba is going to announce the end of the HD-DVD format is another surprise: Well, not nearly as much as the one above. Rumour has it that many movie distributors decided to go for Blu-Ray. The final nail on the HD-DVD coffin appears to have been Walmart’s decision to exclusively sell Blu-Ray discs.

Update:

Toshiba (officially) announces discontinuation of HD-DVD business. (via Reddit)

Update (02/24/07)

Microsoft pulls the plug on HD-DVD players (Slashdot thread).

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WTH

Posted on February 17, 2008 by Arthur

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PropertyGrids in C#

Posted on February 17, 2008 by Arthur

Yesterday, An example property gridI decided to tackle .Net’s PropertyGrid component: for Helios, I was working on code to allow users to view Datasource-specific data at run-time. For this, I already had several support objects programmed and ready to go, and what better to test them right in that PropertyGrid component?

This worked out easier than I thought: Basically, the only thing you need to do as a programmer is to actually create those objects and assign it to ‘SelectedObject’ property of the component. This works in most cases, however, I had a TServerPropertyObject contained inside a TDataSourceObject (half-pseudocode follows): 

public class TServerPropertyObject
{
     public string GroupByBehaviour {get; set;}
     public string IdentifierCase{get; set;}
     // etc...
}

public class TDataSourceObject
{
     private TServerPropertyObject fserverproperties = 
             new TServerPropertyObject();

     public string ServerName {get; set; }

     public string DSN { get; set; }

     public TServerPropertyObject Properties { 
          get { return fserverproperties; }
     }
}

Obviously, the idea is to have the properties object of TDataSourceObject to show as a ‘collapsible’ item in the PropertyGrid component. To achieve this, you need to add (those devilish) so called ‘property attributes’ (I believe these are the only things that makes .Net look evil). In our case of the collapsible item, we’re going to use the ‘TypeConverter’ class and pass it the ExpandableObjectConvertor type. 

public class TDataSourceObject
{
     private TServerPropertyObject fserverproperties = 
             new TServerPropertyObject();

     public string ServerName {get; set; }

     public string DSN { get; set; }

     // Make this property expandable and let .Net
     // figure out what to do with the object.
     [ TypeConverter(
           typeof(ExpandableObjectConverter)),
        Category("Connection"),
        Description("Server properties")]
     public TServerPropertyObject Properties { 
          get { return fserverproperties; }
     }
}

This will let .Net handle (and figure out) what to do with the object itself: In my case the contained object only exposed simple types (like strings and integers). Naturally, you’ll have to do a lot more work (read coding) when your objects (and components) need specialized ‘property-editors’: for that, I have to refer you to the .Net documentation.

Update: See also here for more context and a larger screenshot (outdated though but still relevant).

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CVS meet Enscript

Posted on February 17, 2008 by Arthur

Last night, This sucks. TerriblyI was installing CVS on my Debian box. Actually, it was already installed: the CVSROOT was ready to go and the service itself had been listening since the early days. However, I never finished assigning rights to myself, so, with that done and by adding myself to the cvs group, I was finally able to check in my latest Helios sources using WinCVS (I despise TortoiseCVS1).

For work, I had once added viewcvs to the CVS repository engine: Viewcvs allows developers to view the repository via a webserver. Easy as is: During its install (apt-get install viewcvs), I ran into the normal installation checks and changes for this specific script: Most of them can be resolved by Debian’s viewcvs installer but (as usual) you should prepare yourself for some old-handy typework. The first action on your list is to add a couple of Aliases to Apache’s httpd.conf file (in my case I was only interested in one, the viewcvs ‘docroot’ parameter: I don’t like graphics2). 

 Alias /viewcvs/ /usr/share/viewcvs/

The next step is to set the ‘docroot’ and ‘icons’ folder parameters in the viewcvs.conf file (/etc/viewcvs/): these folders refer to the folderstructure on the webserver and not to the physical folder structure on your Linux system (hint: check Alias). After this, you can set the use_cvsgraph and use_enscript variables in that same file to 1.

Enscript is a ‘source code highlighter’, but (obviously) it doesn’t come with a state file for C#: I found a good one at Adam Milazzo’s (Thanks Adam). This file should be copied to the enscript states directory (on Debian that is at /usr/share/enscript/hl). Also, you will have to make a couple of changes to the enscript.st file (which is in the same directory): add the csharp highlighter to the namerules section. The final step that needs to be undertaken is a change to the viewcvs.py file (you generally should be able to find this at or around /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/viewcvs/). Look for the enscript_extensions section. Notice the comment that one of the programmer left behind, just right above that extensions section:

### this sucks… we have to duplicate the extensions defined by enscript

You wouldn’t say.

1 Yeah, I was going to write something here, but I forget. Oh right, something about TortoiseCVS and how I hate it.
2 Uh. Right. What was that again?

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When the Earth

Posted on February 16, 2008 by Arthur

A couple of links to keep you busy for now:

I’m not sure where I got this one from, but to me ‘Social Wallpaper’ is the only compelling social network. If you can call it a social network: basically, it allows everyone to upload their wallpaper, with mixed results, of course. Some of the pictures are truly amazing, some of them plainly suck. Some pictures come from the NASA archives and some, well, don’t. I have to admit that I haven’t been convinced to change my desktop wallpaper yet (that wallpaper comes from Alfons).

Earlier this week, I stumbled upon this 2004 discussion on the Physics Forum where someone asked for ‘Prove that the Earth revolves around the Sun’Geocentric vs heliocentric:

I find it obvious, as did many previous people, that the sun goes aroudn the earth. I of course know htis to be untrue as it has been drummed into me again and again for the past 16 years.
Can someone please prove to me (so that i can prove to others as well) that the earth goes around the sun. Do not be afraid to explain using mathematics, as i see that as the only way of undeniable proof.

The discussion is eye-opening: the most compelling (easy to verify) proof seems to be planetary retrograde motion, which is too complex to explain if our solar system was a geocentric system. Additionally, with the knowledge we have of gravity, it would have been scientifically impossible to explain why the sun would move around an object with less mass (more on heliocentric vs. geocentric, right here).

And last but not least: I was surprised to find out that OpenOffice comes with CLI/.Net assemblies (if you have OpenOffice installed, it’s right in your “Program Files\OpenOffice.org 2.0\program\assembly” folder). Sample code can be found at OpenDocument4All: the projects seem to be geared towards .Net 1.1 (Sourceforge project page).

Update: Slightly unrelated: Fulll moon eclipse for next Thursday.

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And then for…

Posted on February 12, 2008 by Arthur

And then for something slightly different: More of the same! You guessed it: Yesterday morning, I was surprised to find we were a bit snowed in. When I say snowed in, I mean that I have to use force to open up the front door. I think, Debert weather station reported 26 cms and it really looks like that much. This makes for slightly nice pictures, if it wasn’t so cold outside. The bad news is that it is supposed to be snowing overnight (and in the morning) again. The good news is that the snow will change to freezing rain and eventually to rain tomorrow night.

With that out of the way: Via Kottke, I found this map of New York, er, an imaginative map of whatever was New York if it was still in the hands of the Dutch powers. I don’t think I have to remind the reader that New York used to be in the hands of the Dutch and that (after many wars and battles with the British empire) they traded it for portions of South America. What you say? You really like the fictional flag for this ‘Dutch republic’ (taken from the original creator’s blogpost)? Is that the Japanese ‘Rising Sun’ in the flag? Oh dear.

And last but not least: Newsweek reports that Amsterdam is to close down its Red Light district. The most surprising part is that the main driving force behind the campaign (to close down the district) is a member of the Labour Party. Socialists closing down the Public Sector in Amsterdam? What will the British think of this?

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VirtuAmp

Posted on February 9, 2008 by Arthur

A coupleVirtuAmp of months ago, I found VirtuAmp, a (real-time) virtual guitar amplifier that comes with a range of virtual pedals, including a tremolo, flanger and compressor. It works actually pretty good too and it’s easy to setup: your (desktop) microphone can work as an input, but preferably you should use your (semi/electric) guitar cable and plug it right into the line-in/mic of your computer (for this you may need an adapter of course).

So, if you want to be a rockstar, you can even use your acoustic guitar (or semi-acoustic in my case) and crank up the flanger. You go, Jimmy Hendrix! (Sample sound of me playing, 30+ second, mp31).

Since VirtuAmp processes everything in real-time, you may need a fast processor. You definitely need a good soundcard (my onboard cheapy ass freaking soundcard makes a mess out of it). Additionally, if you feel so obliged, virtuAmp comes with complete sources.

(I’m also not sure how this compares to the real stuff, but hey, it’s fun anyways).

1 I did this in one take using Audacity and my USB Creative SoundBlaster Live! soundcard. Background noise and static was filtered out, and the overall sound was amplified with a (min.) preset level of (at least) 0.8 dB. Hence why it may sound a bit ‘tin-canned’.

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Aliens uh?

Posted on February 9, 2008 by Arthur

If you’re bored and feel for a challenge this weekend: I watched a couple of videos online that were interesting enought to share.

‘Alien Planet’ (1h:30m) is a documentary about an imaginative human mission to an inhabited planet (“Darwin IV”) 40 or some lightyears away. I added this video in my ‘recent links’ section last night but I thought it was worth mentioning here as well. The documentary is cheesy but interesting, particularly because of the great animation (done by a Montreal-based animation shop). I thought that the scientific explanations of other lifeforms (or the attempts thereof) were awkward. Also, what the hell makes George Lucas an expert. See also IMDB’s entry on this documentary.

There was a buzz around the January 30th ‘God Debate’ between Chris Hitchens and rabbi Shmuley Boteach. The host of that debate has put the full video online which can be watched at the 92Y site. It’s a long video too: one and a half hour, I believe.

And once again, I would like to remind you of that other video I posted in another entry, which is the one about gravity: ‘What on Earth is wrong with gravity’. While I’m not a fan of the way how Horizon presents these kind of heavy topics, in this case they do an excellent job in trying to explain what gravity is about, in exactly 1h:30m too.

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You failed

Posted on February 8, 2008 by Arthur

Via FailistanCrooks and Liars, I saw The Daily Show’s coverage of Romney’s CPAC speech: the speech contained so many platitudes, cliches and stereotypes that it had me laughing.

Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life and eroded morality.

So, there you have it, Europe: take that and eat some more of that ‘pain de francais and freedom fries with that’.

Update 1: Slightly related, “‘Euros accepted’ signs pop up in NYC” (via Reuters).
Update 2: RawStory has a longer clip of that Daily Show segment.
Update 3 (02/13/07): This also reminds me of Romney’s other gaffe when he was asked about on his sons support for the military and nation (video). The question was asked by Nancy Griffith and the clip circulated for a while in the media.
Update 4 (02/21/07): Jon Stewart (at Larry King’s) discusses Romney’s comment (YouTube video: approximately at 4:00).

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