I’m just posting this up here because I always forget how to fix it and because it usually takes me 15 minutes to track down again. When you enable the CentOS web stack, perl is excluded - which is generally correct - except that dependencies require (currently) 5.8.8 whereas that is not provided by the base repos. If you hit that, you’ll get a message along these lines:
Error: Missing Dependency: perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.8.8) is needed by package perl-DBD-MySQL
So, the way to fix that is to change the priority of CentOS Plus to 1 temporarily, yum clean all, install perl - which will get current, which is 5.8.8, put CentOS Plus back where you had it (presumably 2), and go back to what you were doing.
So I’m working on a quick run at 99 Lisp Problems in Erlang, because I’m a little bored of Project Euler, and I write myself a tiny little testing rig.
And it occurs to me: if I had the ability to slap a name on that fun - say, strip_tuple - then its purpose would be far more obvious, and the whole block of code would suddenly be much easier to read. I realize that the purpose of lambdas is to just write out as functions what couldn’t easily be expressed otherwise and yet stay inline, which has enormous space-savings, readability and debugging benefits. But, there’s nothing in there that actually requires my inability to paste a label on it, is there?
From Jack Thompson’s new temper tantrum at Take Two:
I want to bring to your attention the fact that at www.rockstargames.com anyone of any age can order Manhunt 2 and receive it, with no age verification whatsoever. Asking a 14-year-old if he’s 17 is not age verification, now is it?
How the hell is this guy a lawyer? Not only is that legal age verification in the United States (and, in fact, has been by precedent since the 1960s, when the issue was first tested by adult telephone services,) but also the Take 2 site only takes credit cards - which are themselves acceptable forms of age verification in the US since the early 1970s. Either the Florida Bar is obscenely easy, or Jacky Boy has been taking some anti-memory pills. That he should send that phrase on to the FTC and activist groups is so deeply ignorant of the law that it’s almost embarrassing to know who Jack is.
Jack, I write family-friendly game titles for a living, including family licenses from children’s cartoons. I want you out of my industry. You do far more damage than you prevent. Get it through your head: you’re a poor lawyer, a poor activist and a poor excuse for an adult living in a representative democracy. Stop flogging the bear: you may be a media whore, but the bear’s gonna turn around and bite you, soon enough.
And by bear, I mean “barratry.” Since you don’t seem to understand the law, Jack, please look it up (the various news blogs covering this are unfortunately referring to the COPPA decision; the COPA decision I just linked is far more germane.)
I greatly hope that the Take 2 lawyers will take barratry into consideration. This is the clearest case of abuse of the legal system I’ve seen in years, and that’d put a hell of a lot of weight behind the disbarment we all so desperately want to see.
Yay, windows media player pulled the only two things I use in the new version. Not only is the toolbar context menu that shows your library from collapsed WMP gone, but there’s also - get this - no way to look at your entire media library at once. Want to find a song that isn’t well categorized? You’re screwed.
There was a time when I respected the WMP interface team. That time has passed.
Don’t ever ask AdBrite for clarifications of their terms of service. They’ll ignore repeated emails and phone calls for a month, tell you it’s ok on the phone but that they won’t say it in writing, then tell you you’re being abusive by continuing to ask, and that you’re risking getting your account shut down. (There’s nothing against what I want to do in the TOS; I was just trying to be a good neighbor.)
I just shut my account down. I will not deal with a company that is offended by a customer wanting to check if their idea is okay before doing it. Scumbags.
Anyone know of a text ad auction system other than AdBrite?
Our good friends at DevKitPro want help exposing their project to a wider audience through the SourceForge Community Choice awards. DevKitPro is a deployment of GCC meant to facilitate development for console video game systems, including the Nintendo DS, the GameBoy Advance, Playstation Portable, Sega Saturn, GP2X, GP32, Nintendo GameCube and hopefully soon the Wii.
Some of you may know that I write Nintendo games commercially. DevKitPro and its antecedents were how I got my foot in the door. I’d like other people to know these tools are available, in case they have the passion too.
If you’d like to see other people able to make homebrew gaming happen for their consoles, cast your vote here.
So, I tried to set up ModernBill for a new business I’m starting on the side. I hit a fairly serious showstopper bug, that prevents me from so much as adding a product. Eight days have gone by, and the staff hasn’t said a single word. Luckily, the product is only available encoded, so I can’t fix whatever their random bug is myself. I’m a quarter of the way through the product evaluation period, and I can’t use the product. I’ve contacted the company through email, through trouble tickets, through the forum and by thinking really, really hard at them. Other users of theirs have expressed similar problems.
Despite loudly claiming that they are a support-active company, in eight days, they have ignored every single attempt I’ve made at contact. They silently closed two seperate trouble tickets without a response. I recommend against any of my readers ever doing business with ModernGigabyte in any fashion.
… which screws you nicely for a while, while you’re trying to figure out what’s broken in your erlang port. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a portable solution. That said, here’s what you do in unix:
Normally I’d do the rant myself, but io_error did a better job than I’m likely to do. This article contains the single funniest thing I’ve ever seen him say (the line about the governor; you’ll know it when you see it.)
I’m becoming ever more convinced that the answer is yes. I’ve been playing, a bit, a game called Project Euler, a game for programmers wherein the object is to find solutions to deceptively simple problems. It’s surprisingly entertaining, and your score is a result of the function of programmers which have not succeeded in a task.
There are people who take long roundabout approaches to get to results like these, when instead they could be doing things like
p1() -> lists:sum(
[ X || X <- lists:seq(1,10),
((X rem 3) == 0) orelse ((X rem 5) == 0) ]
).
As a result, I’m starting to think that I need to start explaining things. Anyone agree or disagree?
So, I’m writing a web-based game, and I would like to know how people feel about timing out people who have disconnected. The game is a turn-based strategy game with moderately fast play, on the order of every 30 seconds to 1 minute, comparable to Reversi/Othello (Havannah, to be specific.) In particular, I’m not sure where to set the threshholds for a given person timing out.
My plan is to have three threshholds. If you’re playing a game, and someone disconnects, it’s generally for one of two reasons: their connection failed, or they’re quitting to avoid losing. On the one hand, I have spotty wifi at home, and I frequently lose connection for several minutes at a time, and I wouldn’t want to be counted a loser and a poor sport while I waited on my DSL modem to stop sucking. On the other hand, sitting around waiting for someone you don’t know is frequently the suck, and many people do quit to get out of a loss.
So, I’m setting the upper threshhold at 20 minutes. No matter what, if they log off and stay gone for 20 minutes, the game is discarded, and called in favor of the person still online. However, obviously I don’t want people to have to wait around for 20 minutes, so I need to set a lower threshhold. That threshhold will be the point at which someone gets to choose what to do. If I’m gone a little over the lower threshhold, the system will say to the other player “do you want to call it a tie, save it for later, or claim a disconnect win?” If it’s someone who doesn’t know me, they shouldn’t be forced to wait, and should have the option of calling it a tie if the game isn’t very far in, or if I’ve obviously been having connection trouble. However, they should also be able to claim a disconnect win if they smell a jerk.
It would be nice if they could call a tie or a save very early, much earlier than would be appropriate for calling a quitter loss, so the other two threshholds are those two issues seperately. The lowest threshhold is the “save or tie” threshhold, and it should be fairly fast. Someone can choose to ignore it if they want. The next threshhold is the “you quit to cheat” threshhold, and it should be at least somewhat patient. At the 20 minute line, the system will call it, no matter what.
So, the question is, how long should those two lower timeouts be? Twenty minutes is obviously far too long for either. On the balance, ten seconds obviously isn’t long enough; most people can’t reconnect that fast, and we need to be accomodating of people’s computers rebooting, of modem reconnect cycles, of DSL reconnect cycles, and so on.
I’m going to set a range of options. If you don’t see the time you want, feel free to add it; I’ll be using the distribution of answers, not just the most popular, so it’ll still count.
How long should the game wait before allowing a tie or save?
That’s right, it’s not a dub, it’s a cover. As in, they actually remade the entire episode themselves. Brace yourself for the lowest budget “The Man Trap” you’ve ever seen. Cardboard cutout people, transporters that look like macaroni beams, girls who aren’t even close to hot - it’s got it all.
So, I handed over some webspace to a guy on IRC who was converting books from Project Gutenberg for use with the bookreader in MoonShell for the Nintendo DS. He was trying to share a few books I recognized and they’re all legal, and his webspace was fail, so I figured I’d be goodbear and share.
Lo and behold, I take a look at the space I gave him - http://moonbooks.stonecypher.net/ - a few weeks later. He’s already got 150+ books up. Very rarely am I as happy with someone to whom I give resources as I am this time. This is a great example of shared resources being put to very good use. In particular, Brandon asked me what authors I liked, and when I name-dropped Ambrose Bierce, he went and converted what appears to be everything Bierce ever wrote, including a personal favorite called “Write it Right.”
Bravo. Makes me wonder who else I should be helping out, and I gave out another account today. We’ll see if it’s also put to good use.
Yeah, I know I’ve been quiet for a long time. There’s a good reason, and it’ll all make sense soon. However, I just stumbled across an article that is so amazing that I just can’t wait, and I need to share it. Andrei Alexandrescu is a brain, but this one’s special, even for him.
Yet another mathematician who uses a silly premise to get Halloween headlines. This one’s kind of a flop, though. Costas Efthimiou claims that the population growth rate of vampires makes them fundamentally impossible. His reasoning is that, starting in 1600 from a population of 538 million, if each vampire converts one person into a vampire once a month, it will be only 2.6 years until all humans have been converted.
Now, this is a bit like saying that if a grasshopper eats a pound of grass a minute, given 1 billion grasshoppers and 500 million pounds of grass, then the Earth will be barren in about 30 seconds. Sure, the math works just fine, but the data is obviously wrong. Dracula was hundreds of years old (potentially thousands; the book doesn’t actually say,) and had created half a dozen childer. Lestat is 300 years old, and has only created two. Unfortunately I don’t wear enough white makeup and black hair dye to name any other vampires, but their birth rate is on the order of either decades or centuries, not single months.
So, fear not, Vlad: no matter what biology, history, zoology, archaeology or common sense may say about you, math hasn’t disproven a thing.
And no, these dots aren’t being agitated. This is a simple visual/auditory demo with delusions of grandeur, but on the other hand, it is surprisingly pretty; very reminiscent of 80s demoscene stuff, back when (insert obviously false nostalgia here.) Granted, this is something of an old news moment, but hey, it’s the first time I saw it, and almost everyone I’ve showed it to thinks it’s new to, so good enough.