Author Archives: Calreth

Memorizing in the age of Google

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U-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan might have been a running joke for Herman Cain,
but sometimes I think that of all the GOP running candidates, or well,
ex-candidates, Herman Cain is one of those few who are actually rooted
in reality.

On Monday’s The Daily Show, Herman Cain was asked once again, this
time by John Oliver, who the president of Ubekistan was. Herman Cain,
much to the surprise of John Oliver, professed that he still didn’t
know. He then added that it would be a waste of time for him memorize
the names of all the heads of states, and he’s got a point. Why should
he when he can just look it up?

You know how in some exams, your score basically boils down to how
much you can memorize and dump word for word on the script? I just had
one such paper today. In the midst of studying for it, Herman Cain’s
interview came to mind.

There’s no reason we should be mocking him for that. Much like
memorizing all the names of states, exams that rely on one’s ability
to memorize information are becoming irrelevant in the age of Google,
unless your goal is to win trivia games. In fact, we might just as
well laugh at someone who spends their time memorizing such
information because of their lack of ability to make use of existing
resources.

It’s no longer about what you know, but whether you know where to find
the answers to what you don’t know.

Hackintosh

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I’ve been meaning to give OS X for sometime now. I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the OS a couple years back, but lately my interest in it has been piqued.

Why OS X?

Why am I interested in OS X? The answer is probably not something you hear from most people —it’s the terminal.

Wha?! Yes, you heard me, the OS X terminal is what a modern shell should be, and Windows ought to be ashamed its command prompt that’s lacking basics such as tab completion for commands. I do a fair bit of sysadmin work and programming, so the console is a rather huge part of my workflow. Being UNIX-like, OS X has rsync, which is something pretty much unavoidable if you’re doing any sysadmin kind of work. I can’t understand why Windows still lacks a built-in delta-based diff backup/sync tool. Robocopy is great, but it’s just not the same. But I digress. This post isn’t about why, but how.

Pre-installation

First of all, Lifehacker has a useful, albet simplified guide to installing OS X Lion here. It’s a good start, but you’re going to have to branch off to the OSx86 wiki and tonymac’s forums now and then.

Most guides, the Lifehacker one included, assume you already own a Mac and starts off guiding you on how to create a bootable OS X Lion USB stick using Unibeast. Unibeast is an OS X only software, so that’s not going to be very helpful if you don’t already have Macs sitting around. And if you already have a Mac, I honestly don’t know why you’ll want to venture into the world of hurt that is installing OS X on non-Apple hardware. It seems if you want to install OS X, you need a Mac, but if you have a Mac, why would you need to install OS X? Sounds a little like a bit of a catch-22? Here’s where virtualization comes in.

Running OS X Lion as a VM

Windows 7 Hacker has a very well written and detailed post about getting OS X 10.7 Lion to run in VMWare. I managed to get it running on my first try. If you just want to fool around, and have no intentions of using OS X for anything serious, you’re probably fine with just using the VM. However, since the VM does not have graphics acceleration of any form, window animations are choppy, and any apps that rely on OpenGL will fail. Not a pleasant experience.

Now that you have OS X running in an VM, you’ll want to follow step 2 of Lifehacker’s guide. You can access USB devices connected to your computer through the VM by using the ‘USB pass through’ feature of VMWare. With that done, you’re ready to install on real hardware, also known as entering the world of hurt.

Hell and High Water

Depending on what hardware you have, things may or may not work. I went through countless reinstalls and various hardware configurations before finally settling on one that worked. I initially used a Asus P5K motherboard, but I couldn’t for the hell of me get the Attansic L1 Ethernet driver to work, even going after through various kext. The nVidia 7800 GT card also refused to play nice. Eventually I switched over to a Asus P5G31D-M board, and I managed to get things working after using the MultiBeast installer (from tonymac’s site) to install EasyBeast, Lnx2′s Realtek network kext and VoodooHDA audio kext. The onboard Intel GMA3100 graphics that came with the board wasn’t recognized, and I swapped it out for a nVidia 8800 GT card and that worked out of the box. I was able to output my monitor’s native resolution of 1920×1080.

You might what the hell are all this ‘kext’ things I am talking about. Kext stands for Kernel Extensions, which you can think of as being drivers on Windows. If you’re keen on reading more about the underpinnings of OS X, I highly suggest checking out http://www.puredarwin.org/. I happen to be taking an Operating Systems class this semester so it was a highly interesting read for me,

Post-Installation

I took two whole evenings (the second of which extended to 4am) to get the whole set up working. I’m very pleased with how it turned out. The first thing I tested I was if YouTube worked. Flash and GPU acceleration has always been something that was iffy with unsupported setups, but I’m pleased to report that it worked just fine streaming 720p and 1080p videos. Despite so, one caveat was that GPU decoding for x264 videos didn’t seem to be working, but the E7400 CPU was able to hold up, albet at about 50% load for a 1080p video.

Xcode works and I was able to run the default project in the iOS simulator, so this is a viable platform for iOS development. Chess and Rail Maze, both OpenGL based games were working. It’d seem at this point that all the basic functionality are there. I connected my iPhone and iPad and iTunes was able to pick them up. Also, the App Store works.

Feeling pretty good about myself, I went out and bought a Belkin Bluetooth dongle, F8T016 to be exact, along with an Apple Wireless keyboard, and the setup worked out of the box. The Apple Wireless keyboard is surprisingly comfortable to use, which surprised me. After using a Filco cherry mx blue, I was worried that other keyboards would feel inferior. It didn’t. The response of the keyboard was good with a decent amount of tactile feedback. The keys were also spaced apart just right that I didn’t have an issue touch typing on it. However, I did feel lost without the insert/home/end/page up/page down keys associated with a usual keyboard. I select lines by doing shift-home and shift-end a lot when writing or coding, and losing them feels like it hampers my productivity. One other complain I have is that for the price tag of S$98, it could have at least come with backlight, but I suppose Apple wouldn’t have been able to maintain the form factor with backlighting.

Windows and OS X side by side

So that’s how my setup looks like currently. I’m going try to do most of my work on OS X for the next couple of days and see how it’s like. Like I said before, I’m loving the terminal already. I’ll do more comprehensive testing in the upcoming days and report back.

Certainty in a sea of uncertainty

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When I awoke this morning, I was stricken with uncertainty. I wasn’t certain how my day was going to turn out. I had a medical appointment in the morning, and I wasn’t certain what the doctor and I were going to be talking about. I had class after that, and since the second half of the semester is upon us, we had new lecturers. I wasn’t certain that the new lecturers were going to be good. I wasn’t uncertain if I was going to be able to understand them. Then, it turns out that I needed to amend one of my lab assignments, and I wasn’t certain if I could make the changes on time. You see, I have a quiz on my accountancy module later, and I wasn’t certain I was going to make it there on time. Neither was I certain about how I was going to fare. In fact, I couldn’t, with certitude, say or know anything at all.

I was a bundle of nerves, but I held on calmly. In this sea of uncertainty, there is only one thing I know with unwavering certainty, and it shall be my anchor. I don’t know how it’s going to end today, but tomorrow will come with this certain fact. Putin is going to win the 2012 elections, and win he did.

Seriously though, was there any doubt?

Akylios down

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Some promises are hard to keep

Remember my last post saying that I wasn’t going to be able to see Akylios dead? I lied.

My guild was previously close to getting Akylios down, and our previous attempt was 30-something percent. Earlier this week, a patched was rolled by nerfing Akylios significantly, and we managed to down him after one serious attempt (previous attempts were stymied by lots of people disconnecting).

End of an era

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I'm not going to be able to see him go down


I’ve been playing MMORPGs since Secondary 3, and if my feeble memory still serves me, that was in 2003. It is 2012 now. So I’ve been playing MMORPGs for somewhere in the area of close to 10 years.

I’m no casual player. When I embark on a new game, I sink my hours into it, and strive to be the best at what I do. Perhaps I’ve not always achieved that, but I’ve tried at the very least, and I daresay I’ve been better than the average player.

At some point during my haze of virtual world activities, I must have grown up. I’m now a second year university student (also known as college, for you yanks and rebels). I realized that I haven’t done quite as well as I ought to have. I’ve internship coming up soon, which means I’ve to buck the hell up and get myself together. Neither have I achieved what I wanted to do in life.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m going to take a hiatus from MMORPGs, and to refocus on the more immediate stuff in life that I have to tend to. I’m not quitting gaming, and in fact, I’m going to play Alan Wake this weekend when it gets released for the PC. Gaming is a huge part of me, and that’s never going away. I’m just going to spend less time of it, and make it less of a priority. Unfortunately, that means strict raiding schedules are out.

In a sentence, I’m relegating myself to the seats of casuals.

Stuff like this keep me up at night

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When I have trouble sleeping at night, I often put on an old show, preferably one that’s dialog heavy, and leave it running in the background. I find that it helps me sleep, and more importantly, it satisfies my OCD need to know exactly how long it took me to fall asleep. I’d usually wake up the next day and roughly remember what were the last few lines I heard, and that’d give me a good estimate.

In S01E10 of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon retrieves his lunch back from the trash after Leonard binned it in an attempt to make his deception to Penny more believable. When I first watched it years ago, no red flags were raised.

However, after watching five seasons of the show and getting to know Sheldon’s character intimately well, Sheldon’s obsession with cleanliness, especially when it comes to food, the scene seems wrong. The Sheldon we know wouldn’t have even reached into the bin without screaming for disinfectants, much less retrieve his lunch from it. Sheldon freaked out in S02E07, when Penny touched one of his onion rings, and threw away the rest as a result.

In S03E04, Sheldon came into contact a little ink from a whiteboard marker and ran for the nearest baby wipes. Then, in S05E02, Sheldon reacted strongly on hygiene grounds when he discovered Penny had retrieved a chair that was originally discarded. This all reinforces that point that Sheldon’s actions in S01E10 seems completely contrary to his character.

Of course, none of this any fault of the authors. In any long running series, be it a book, game, or television, there are bound to inconsistencies that only arise when you look at the whole thing in retrospect. The authors, while writing for season 1, probably didn’t have all the episodes for season 5 planned out, and it would be silly to considering how TV shows might get axed any time.

Much like history, we often look back and blame individuals or groups of people for failing to see what to us now, in retrospect, feels incredibly obvious. The truth is, in prospect, none of them could have possibly have conceived the every possible chain of results from their action, or inaction.

I need a vacation

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Karagga, with a hat that was probably stolen from Otto von Bismarck.

It’s been a hectic week for me since the last weekend, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been able to get any gaming done. I did manage to log into SWTOR once and completed the Karagga’s Palace raid instance. I’ve mentioned before that BioWare loves puzzles, and KP is no exception. In one of the fights, you have to constantly solve a puzzle which fires an incinerator positioned above the boss, removing it’s damage reduction buff. Fellow computer science students would be pleased to know that the puzzle is a classic problem taught in class — it’s a three piece Tower of Hanoi problem.

Other than that one SWTOR raid, and my raid obligations in Rift, which I’ve ended up being late for on a number of occasions, I hadn’t had a chance to play anything on my own free will. Now is the time where I’m gravitating towards the middle of my semester and my workload is piling up. I find myself wanting to put Rift raiding on a hiatus, and just using the free time to relax, or play a game that isn’t an MMORPG. I’ve having no fun rushing from one thing to another, and raiding has become a chore in itself.

I need a vacation.

That's how I look right now, emotionally and mentally.

Rant: The above screenshot took way too much effort and too long to capture. Curse you Hollywood, and your draconian DRM on blu-ray discs.