Perpetually Bored

It is much easier to please an audience crafting a game in an entirely fictional setting that having elements that have real life equivalents. The trouble with games that import certain elements from real life is that the player may have a certain opinion about that aspect of the game from past experience and thus have a certain expectation of it.

What the heck am I talking about? Call of Duty 4 and it’s successor, Call of Duty: MW2 is a first person shooter in a modern setting, and both have received raving reviews. However, I can’t bring myself to enjoy the game. The trouble is that the guns sound weak and nothing in comparison to their real life counterparts they’re modeled after. All the guns in Call of Duty sound dull, monotonous and similar to one another. In comparison, the weapons in Counter-Strike sounds much better.

I’m not here to bash Call of Duty, but rather point out that the same issue wouldn’t have presented itself if the game had a fantasy or sci-fi background. I have no idea how an alien blaster is going to sound like, nor the kind of damage a +3 poison imbued sword would do, but I do know something about the sound of a M-4 firing, the ballistic properties of a 5.56mm bullet traveling over 150m, and hence have a conception of how they should be. I went into the game with that conception, and the game didn’t live up to it.

It was an evening of watching Future Weapons and reading Wikipedia. It wasn’t an entirely unproductive evening though and I walked away with a theory, or an opinion, that the standard anti-tank weapon used by infantry here is nothing but a glorified wall smasher.

The MATADOR was developed jointly by DSTA (Singapore) and Rafael (Israel). However, different variants of the weapon are employed by the Singapore and Israeli army, with more options for export purposes. It seems however, we chose poorly.

Singapore operates the MATADOR MP in which the warhead can be fired either in HEAT or HESH mode. The selection between the two is done by extending the probe in the front of the weapon for HEAT mode, and leaving it in it’s original configuration for HESH.

HEAT is a high explosive shaped charged, which simply means that its explosive is shaped – guided and concentrated in a certain direction, in order to allow it to breach armor. HESH operates by splattering a layer of plastic explosives (think throwing an egg and its contents sticking to the wall) and then detonating the explosive. HEAT destroys by penetrating armor itself and blowing up, HESH destroys by sending a shock wave through the armor.

Israel operates the MATADOR AS, which is a HEAT only warhead but has two charges, and delay between the first charge and second charge can be set by turning the knob in the front on the weapon. This is called a tandem charge. Simply put, the two charges in the warhead explode at a different timing.

Most modern tank defend themselves against rocket attacks by employing reactive armor. Reactive armor contains a layer of explosives in the form of shaped charges that, upon contact with an incoming rocket, explodes in a certain fashion and destroys the warhead before it can sufficiently penetrate the hull of the tank. Reactor armor are usually placed on tanks in ’slabs’, as pictured below. Those ugly rectangular slabs all over the tank are pieces of reactive armor. Although not the original intention, the spacing between the slabs of reactive armor also serves to reduce the effect of a HESH round as the plastic explosives cannot be applied uniformly and are scattered due to the spacing, resulting in a less effective explosion. In addition, most modern tanks line their interior with shock absorbers making HESH rounds even less effective.

So, I’ve made a tank sound indestructible. Here is where the tandem-charge on the MATADOR AS comes into play. When the rocket hits the target initially, the first charge on it’s warhead goes off, and so does the reactive armor in response. The reactive armor plate is now gone, and a split second later, the second charge on the warhead explodes, piercing through the unprotected hull.

The MATADOR MP which Singapore operates does not have such a capability. Not to discredit the weapon fully, plastic explosives are effective against concrete and thus HESH is therein lies the only usefulness of the weapon in HESH mode – breaching and entering. As an infantryman, I’ll be real upset about lugging a 11.3kg piece of equipment around just to watch it do nothing against a modern tank, and the T72 isn’t even modern.

Before anyone thinks of charging me for anything ridiculous, all of the information obtained in reaching my conclusion were from freely published and unclassified sources.

I can’t help thinking that the real reason we have all these arms limitation treaties governing what weapons could or could not be used during war is because politicians don’t want their war to end fast.

We have the equivalent of that in RTS games, such as the C&C series, where players would set mutual rules such as no superweapons or no attacking for 20 minutes for the same reason. We don’t want to spend time setting up a game to have it end in 5 minutes. Neither do politicians want to spend time mobilizing and preparing for a war, just to have it all end in the 20 minutes it takes for their intercontinental nuclear weapons to find their targets. It’s simply no fun, and it doesn’t give enough time for the military industries which politicians are often tied to, or have a background in to profit from it.

The next time you hear about the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the various forms of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), thinking about familiar terms such as “no rush 20″ and “no superweapons”.

Race change potions have been added to the Station Marketplace in EQ2, and I was more than willingly to indulge myself in one. For quite sometime, I’ve been wanting to be an Erudite instead of a High Elf. I love the mysterious and alien look of the Erudite. It is as if in they’ve neglected their corporal form in the search of magic and the amount of power in them have twisted them into what looks like a twisted shriveled body, but one that contains pure power. In a way, it is like a cross between the Emperor from Star Wars and Voldemort from the Harry Potter series.

The potion can be bought for 2500 station cash, the same as what it takes for a character transfer. Some people however, are visibly upset with the race change potions. As Stargrace kindly pointed out to me, this would let someone be a Dark Elf Paladin easily instead of having to make a Shadowknight and betray it over, making some combinations of race and class easily obtainable without any effort.

Despite not enjoying my own time in military service, I’m a huge military history fan. My initial interest as a kid was first in weaponry, which then grew to tactics and strategy. For the past year or two, my field of interest has shifted to the personal lives and experiences of leaders/commanders, the common soldier and their significant others and that of the civilian during times of war.

While reading autobiography which largely consists of the account of an individual named Erwin Rosen, who enlisted into the French Foreign Legion during the early 1990s [Book title: 'In The Foreign Legion' by Erwin Rosen], I was sidetracked and chanced upon an archive of letters sent during war times, namely the first and second World War, http://www.war-letters.com/. The site is absolutely fantastic, with scanned originals and text transcribed versions of a large number of letters sent to/from the common soldiers who participated in these wars. It was a huge insight to be privileged to the thoughts of these people, who mostly were in a war they’d rather not be in, and want nothing more than to be reunited with their loved ones, and also their thoughts on the day to day routines.

Seems strange that someone who is anti-war like myself would love military history, but is only from understanding the experiences of people who were caught in them can we understand how they have felt, and how truly terrible a thing war is.

The Headless Horseman is an epic x2 mob that spawns during the Nights of the Dead festival from a dead looking tree in Neklutos Forest near the Darklight Woods entrance. He drops a couple of awesome pieces and is an easy kill if done right.

I managed to put together slightly over one and half groups for him. To get him to spawn, at least one member of the raid force needs the necklace obtained from doing the Halloween maze. He’s on an one to three hour spawn timer, and upon spawning, goes for the person with the necklace in their inventory in an attempt to snatch it off. If the person dies, the necklace is consumed. Otherwise, it can be used again for subsequent spawns.

In only place where The Headless Horseman can be killed effectively is on the grounds with the field of bones near the tree. My first attempt lasted almost 45 minutes before wiping because we were clueless on the strategy and tanked him elsewhere, where he had a 99% damage resist debuff. Stupid of us, but we were all once young and naive.

Tanked in the right spot, he was easier than cake and took little effort.

I seldom partake in sports, and the one time I did, which was yesterday, I injured my right wrist while bowling. It’s the worst place that I can possibly suffer an injury. It hurts when I type, and it hurts when I use the mouse. Looks like I’m out of action for first-person shooter gaming.

It was an activity I reluctantly took part in only after much persuasion, and I walked away regretful. As Calvin would say, “Every time I’ve built character, I’ve regretted it.”

Yet another adventure in Linux land. This time, it was largely due to issues with iptables.

First of all, installing vsftpd was rather easy. Issuing aptitude install vsftpd with superuser privileges was all. Configuration didn’t take all that much work either, but it dragged on due to this being my first time and having to look up the manual.

The configuration for vsftpd is located at /etc/vsftpd.conf. Out of the box, vsftp allows anonymous read access. The first order of the day was to disable that by changing the variable.

anonymous_enable=NO

Users in vsftpd can either be local accounts, or vsftpd specific ones. I used local accounts to save myself the hassle since all my local accounts have their permissions set correctly already and what not.

local_enable=YES

By default, all user accounts (including local) are only granted read access. Adding the following line enables write and modify permissions.

write_enable=YES

At this stage. vsftpd is configured and ready to run. However, if you’re behind a firewall, some additional configuration needs to be done to allow vsftp listen and pass through it. To the novice who is inexperienced with iptables like myself, this turned out to be quite an adventure. Before we get to that however, it is imperative to understand how FTP works.

FTP works in two modes, active and passive. A detailed and extremely useful explanation of the difference between the two can be found on http://slacksite.com/other/ftp.html. Briefly, in active FTP, the client initiates a connection to the listening server’s control port, and when data transfer is required, the client opens up a port and lets the server know via the control channel which port on the client side to send the data to. Thus, it requires the client open a port in the listening state. This doesn’t quite work if the client is behind a firewall or NAT. In passive FTP, the client initiates the connection to the server’s control port. The server then dynamically opens up another port and lets the client know this port number via the control channel. The client would then initiate a connection to this port for data transfer. In summary, active FTP requires an open port on both the client and server side, and passive ftp requires two open ports on the server side while none on the client’s.

While the server listens on port 21 constantly for incoming connections, and we can specify that as such in the firewall, the dynamically created port creates an issue since it’s open only when required, and is usually a random port in a port range. Having all these ports constantly open is not feasible as it’d be a security issue. To get around this, the firewall has to be stateful react accordingly.

Two things need to be done. First, add the stateful rule in iptables.

-A INPUT -p tcp -m state --state NEW --dport 21 -j ACCEPT

Next, we’re going have to enable the module that allows connection tracking for FTP so that our stateful rule would work. This can be done simply by running modprobe ip_conntrack_ftp as superuser. In order to make command permanent however, we need to add it to the /etc/modules file so that it runs on startup.

Took a bit of work, but we now have a fully functional FTP server. My adventures in Linux land continues.

From today henceforth, this site will be rebranded as ‘Perpetually Bored’ and the domain name will change accordingly from http://blog.mythokia.net to http://perpetuallybored.com. Old links will still work for as long as possible (looking at at least a year), and will redirect accordingly  thanks to the power of mod_rewrite and HTTP 301 Redirects. The crossover actually happened last week, but I saved the announcement until today to give time for DNS records to propagate and update.

Why? The site never really had a proper name to begin with. It used to be Thermonuclear Exchange, but that was too long. So it became just boring and plain blog.mythokia.net, after a handle I adopted for use. I choose the name ‘Perpetually Bored’ for a number of reasons, one of which is to express the state of life I’m constantly in, and another, was to convey the message that, in relation to the content, being in a state of boredom does give you creative ideas and encouragement to experiment and explore, the results of which can be very positive.

Apologies to those who have to update their bookmarks and such. I’ll try as much as I can to promise that this blog doesn’t go through another name change again.

Carrying on from where I left off yesterday, I assembled a group this morning in a vain attempt to kill Varsoon and finish up yesterday’s instance. After which, I spent the next couple hours spamming the channels looking a Palace of Ferzhul group while grinding out some writs. I even had time to spare, drawing a flowchart of how terrible my weekends are should anyone ask on the following work day.

In the mist of spamming LFGs, I learnt how to use Visio too. No more PowerPoint flowcharts for me.

The day didn’t just end there. I was saved by Latharek late the in afternoon who put together a PoF group for me. That’s the guy who also helped me get my T4 armor too. I owe him lots. Since our group’s Troubadour also had a saved Varsoon only instance of PoF, there was some confusion in determining whose instance, whether mine or his, to use so that one of us wouldn’t get the ‘you may not enter an instance created prior to when your previous instances minimum lockout timer expired’ message. I’ve never had an issue understanding the message, but it can be confusing for some. For heroic zones with a typical 18 hours lockout, what it simply means is that, if you zone into and instance and have a lockout starting at 0100h, you won’t be able to enter another person’s instance unless it his lockout started after 1900h on that day. How did I get the latter number? Time my instance was created + lockout time (18h). It’s only fair because otherwise could constantly do another instance someone else created and never having a lockout yourself. Perhaps I worded it badly, and still do, thus I ended up drawing a small diagram to explain.

Hope I made sense.

Back to the group, we ended up killing Varsoon twice. First time using the saved instance which was cleared up to Varsoon and incurring no lockout penalty, and then resetting it and clearing the whole zone again. Finally, I have my Dagger of the Ethernaut Magus, and wrapped up the TSO signature line. I plan to finish up the signatures and weapon quests from other expansions too eventually, but that’s for another day.