Checksum Arcanius

Worth The Wait

Worth Its Weight

W O W

HL2

After the TRC meeting today (which included talking about the upcoming 2005 competition and stuffing 450 envelopes), I met up with Dan and took a look at Half-Life 2 on one of the few computers owned by a friend that outclasses mine in every respect (well, almost – except for my RAID 0 4x stripe and debatably my Audigy 2 Platinum).

After eating at Applebees, I even tried my hand at HL2, but with different controls and not being used to the feel, I had trouble staying on small beams that are normally easy for me to traverse. Lets just say, tis not good to fall down into a horde of zombies.

After my grisly death, we watched many more grisly deaths in Tombstone, which neither of us had ever before seen. For its formulaity, I enjoyed it a good amount, even though I saw through it, I still had a good time.

Upon returning home, I ended up buying the Gold HL2 package – I figure if I wasted $60 on Doom3, I should reward a good game with a little more. After all, Half Life 2 is why I bought/put together Kaleidoscope (my desktop) in the first place.

Although we tried to avoid it, I still ended up having to download the entire game, but on a cable modem it seems to be going too bad – ETA was an hour.

Well, the comment spammers finally got to me. They found a way to sneak past WordPress’s built in spam filters, so a nifty little SQL was required to dispatch of the spam comments quickly. However, over the past three days, hundreds of spam comments waiting in moderation queues got to me, and so I decided to take action.

The result of phase I of overt anti-spam actions here at Arcanius is now complete. The goal here is to keep it highly streamlined for commenters yet baffle spammers, for a little while at least.

Wish me luck.

A few days ago, I got a request for another subdomain here at SilverFir.net. Its become pretty routine for me to add them, so I went thourgh the steps and presented the results to the requestor. But something wasn’t working. Apache claimed it didn’t have write access to the directory. But I had put apache into the group, just like I have done for all the other subdomains on SilverFir. The reasoning behind this is that then multiple people can admin a site without having any global privileges; Apache can access files with semi-sensitive usernames and passwords without making them world-readable, and everyone is happy-hunky-dory.

Until arbitrary limits in the Linux Kernel rear their ugly head.

A user can not be a member of more than 32 groups. I learned this fact after a suspicion of such a limit led me to google for “Is there a limit to how many groups a user can be a member of?” which eventually led me to this page where the truth was hidden. That page also happens to contain a patch for the Linux Kernel, and given that I’m not using NFS, which seemed to be the main reason for the arbitrary limit, it would probably work. I’ve never patched a linux kernel… but might as well start with oasis and gentoo, just to make sure I get it down before I try it on this computer, which is becoming mission-critical for the TRC and well, this site too, as well as some others, I suppose.

A question about this picture led me to these Haikus in Perl. I was laughing out loud. Yes, I’m a nerd.

From looking at Apache server logs, it seems that every search engine bot, feed aggregator, and miscellaneous script decided to check out silverfir.net over the weekend. The result has been less than stellar online gameplay on my newly reborn desktop PC. But I guess thats the price of fame.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 doesn’t boot on my machine. Thanks to a slipstreamed SP2 installation disc from nifty sources, I was able to confirm this. So, I am staying away from SP2 and have an SP1 install chugging away just fine right now.

Since I was installing my Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum drivers today anyway, I noticed the DVD Audio stuff that I had never really played around with, since my last machine wasn’t up to the task of playing it. Well, my current machine is up to the task, and I was quite impressed. Computers are so cool.

It will be a while before I have everything back to exactly how I like it, but I never planned on having a real permanent installation on this computer anyway, so thats acceptable.

Oh, when I reinstalled Steam (one of my first tasks – amazing considering how much I used to detest the thing) I noticed that Half Life 2 Bronze, Silver, and Gold packs are being presold. So now I have to figure out if playing CS: Source is worth it, or if I should hold out for the Platinum Pack that will be available from retailers with a T-shirt. After all, I do have the original platinum pack…