Bloggy

So Mario Kart Wii came out the other day. Given that every Mario Kart ever has been at least a great game, we picked it up immediately.

I’ve only played it in versus mode, both competitively and cooperatively with my wife, in racing and both battle modes, and I can definitely say that this is the least pleased I’ve been with a Mario Kart title ever. I’ve actually thrown the Wiimote (luckily a mattress was in the way) :(

My major gripes? Well, let’s list:

• I’m actually not upset at the Wiimote-as-steering-wheel controls. They take getting used to and I don’t think they’re as precise as normal analog stick controls (I haven’t tried yet however) but as long as you recognize that about 350 degrees full left to full right is the complete range of motion you’ll adapt. Try to push more and you’ll simply confuse the game into steering the wrong way. This is something that could be improved by a stand or something that has a mechanical stop, at least you’d know when you hit the full range of motion. But again, you’ll at least get used to this.
• The first major concern for me (and this is huge) is that they seem to have drastically changed power sliding. In Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart Double Dash when you power slide you can kind of adjust the direction you slide. They seem to have significantly reduced this in Mario Kart Wii. This significantly ramps up the difficulty. Turn too early and you are pretty much guaranteed to go over an edge or run into the wall. Turn too late and you are pretty much guaranteed to go over an edge or run into a wall. Even if you don’t spill out you’re likely not going to be pointed in the right direction once the turn is done. Probably the safest bet is to never power slide (or leave it in Auto) but then you will slow down a lot through every turn.
• Oh, and when you do run into a wall (and it will be frequent), you are practically guaranteed to lose 2-3 places each time. This would have been OK as a difficulty-enhancer had they not combined it with the penalty on power sliding.
• One thing that I hoped they would fix at some point is the rubber-band logic that allows the CPU to basically completely annihilate you just for doing well in a race. Do too well and all of a sudden you will have disasters rained down upon you as if from on high (and then you will no longer be in the first half of the leaderboard). In previous Mario Karts it would go from happening randomly to conveniently happening on the second or third lap. Now it just seems to happen all the time instead.
• Also cool is when you get hit by an item, and then get hit by a passing kart, and then get hit by another item (or two, you’re already hosed at this point). This happens in every Mario Kart game. But I think I’m already up to about half the number of times that it happened to me in Mario Kart 64 and Double Dash combined.

It’s not all bad news. I watched my wife play one-player and even though she made a lot of mistakes playing through her first time, she rather easily took first in all 4 races she played. Apparently my strategy will have to be trying to stay in 12th the whole time and hoping for good items. In addition the stages are inspired, both for racing and battle modes. I’m going to stay away from online play because that merely leads to me getting my face stepped on by someone I can’t so much as throw my soda at, but it’s nice that it has the option.

I’m going to go try playing it one-player and seeing if I can at least get some entertainment out of it in solo mode. It’s not like I can return it and get my money back. :-/

Posted by mpyne under Personal | 5 Comments »

So before I went underway our car had developed a trouble causing the Check Engine light to come in continuously. No abnormal sounds but being nuclear-trained has taught me not to live with “locked-in” alarms or warnings. I wasn’t able to troubleshoot it in the limited time I had before deploying so I asked my wife to make sure it got investigated when she had free time.

She took the car to the dealership. She actually had to make two trips; apparently there were two separate faults that would have caused the light to come in by this time. Nothing mechanical luckily, but apparently at some point while the dealership was troubleshooting the issue they had to unhook the battery. Doing this activated the anti-theft feature of my radio; it would not play music unless I typed in the anti-theft code. This code was included on a card which I was supposed to remove from the car and keep in a safe place. Needless to say, I had removed it from the car, and it is still in some safe place, nowhere to be found.

So my car radio has been silent for about a month and a half now. I finally got the time to really dig into this issue since the dealership apparently is completely unable to figure out what the unlock code should be. A little browsing on the Internet and apparently many people have had the same issue, and the unlock codes are few enough to list in one paragraph.

So I went and wrote them down and typed them in one by one. After about a dozen tries the radio started working again. Yay! I will record the code in my KWallet this time; it is the only thing which I reliably can count on being there. In case anyone else develops this issue with a Chevy Aveo, I found these posts helpful: automotive forums and Yahoo! Answers.

Posted by mpyne under Personal & Useful Tricks | 2 Comments »

I think I blogged earlier about the Dell Inspiron laptop I bought with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. I managed to use it sparingly underway (had I known beforehand how little free time I would have I wouldn’t have bothered but that’s a different story). It was cool showing some of the other officers the programs where I’m listed in the credits though.

Anyways, one of the first things I did when I got back of course was to make sure it was fully updated. And wouldn’t you know it, they had just released Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), and would I like to upgrade it asked me. Well I’m a sucker for upgrades so I went ahead and clicked OK.

It actually went 99% smoothly. The 1% this time was that my sound no longer worked afterwards, which was unfortunate. Luckily a little searching around revealed a post on Ubuntu Forums from someone with a different laptop but an identical problem. It appears that the pre-loaded Dell driver for the modem replaces the audio driver so that when the kernel was upgraded but the driver wasn’t, sound broke. Uninstalling the Conexant HSF Modem driver (hsfmodem in Adept Package Manager) reinstalled the correct driver and things were fine. I didn’t even have to reboot.

If the Dell-added weirdness hadn’t been added this probably would have been a seamless upgrade. The differences appear strictly cosmetic at this point however. I know PulseAudio is now floating around in here somewhere but ALSA still works so that’s fine.

Posted by mpyne under Computing Troubles & Personal | 1 Comment »

So now I’m back in town again, after a fairly harrowing (for me) patrol. Apparently being chem-radcon officer is a lot of work for inspection. The final grade is apparently classified so I won’t remain on the topic for too long, but I didn’t do too bad at least, which is all I can do really.

Tons more fun was had; I think I actually slept more and saw more movies when I was qualifying than I did this run. (You are supposed to neither watch movies nor be sleeping for no reason until you are qualified ;) Once, I actually got 12 consecutive hours of sleep… and promptly got the nickname “12 down” for the rest of the run. *sigh*

Either way though if you’ve sent me email or left me a comment and I haven’t replied back, well, that’s the reason. I’m living in a different house now so I’ll probably still be busy unpacking but feel free to drop me an email if you need something now that I’m back.

I have noticed much improvement to KDE 4, which is exciting to see. Unfortunately my sound still does not work, but I haven’t troubleshooted (troubleshot?) it at all yet. I’ve also applied the usual 15 or so security upgrades I seem to usually have waiting for me when I pull back in. Now it’s time to think about what computer upgrade I will treat myself to after this last patrol.

Also, two thumbs up to Super Smash Bros. Brawl. If I can figure out how to stop running into the walls I may eventually give two thumbs up to Mario Kart Wii. TODO: Make a TODO list for the new house and stick to it.

Posted by mpyne under Personal | 3 Comments »

At some point soon I’ll be away again. So, I’ve made a new release of kdesvn-build so that people not tracking the trunk version of it can still use the nifty asynchronous download/build feature. (Sorry if the output still seems buggier, you can disable using –no-async if you don’t like it).

If I haven’t been very communicative recently I apologize, but I’ve been really busy. So stay safe and I’ll be back soon.

Posted by mpyne under Personal & kdesvn-build | 1 Comment »

So I bought the game Galactic Civilizations II a long time ago. I was able to play it on my wife’s laptop and I figured it had to be pretty easy to get at least the major parts of the game running in Wine since it doesn’t have the copy protection code which normally breaks games nowadays, and it didn’t look like it was using any fancy DirectX features.

Needless to say my first attempts to make it work in Wine didn’t go so well. I tried off and on over that month and eventually just gave up, playing it on the laptop when I had time. I basically never play it now, as moving over to the laptop is just too much of a hassle.

Last night I decided to try again. It took some 6 hours and probably the most debugging I’ve had to employ over this entire year on a problem, but Victory is Mine! :)

The first problem I had is that after patching the game to the latest version, 1.4x, it required activation (what Stardock uses for copy protection instead of CD copying controls) in order to start. This is normally pretty easy, and you can activate by email even if necessary. But the process always crashed. I first tried copying over the authentication certificate from the laptop but it’s tied to the machine you’re on.

So I then tried bringing down the network interface, running the activation again and trying to get the activation request so I could email it to Stardock. That didn’t work either, as it crashed just before I got to that part.

Getting fed up I decided to use one of the Wine debugging megaweapons, relay tracing. This option causes Wine to mark the entry and exit from practically every single procedure call in Wine, including function name, module, and parameters and return codes. You can filter this all down to just the module you need but I didn’t know where the problem was. 70 megabytes of a relay log later, I had something which I could look at.

It took a bit of deductiveness (i.e. searching for the last place where the serial number is used, which is probably close to the crash location) but it turned out the error was in advapi32, in the cryptographic code. Looking at the Wine source code, it looked like the code was trying and failing to read a required Registry key. But how did Wine install itself without setting up required Registry contents?

I tried running wineprefixcreate (which among other things, sets up default Registry contents) but that didn’t help. Eventually a bit of Google searching for the registry key name (Cryptography\Defaults or something like that) resulted in a hit on the rsaenh.dll in the Wine source, in the DllRegisterServer() function. That looked like it created the required keys. Hmm.

From my past life developing Win32 applications I knew that OLE registration for a DLL was typically handled by running rundll32 and passing the DLL name and entry point (DllRegisterServer in this case). wine has that tool as well so I tried running it and… success at last!

Now GalCiv2 wouldn’t run because it said I didn’t have DirectX 9.0c. I tried following some instructions I found to install DirectX 9.0c DLLs into Wine. It turned out I had to use the rundll32 program again on the wintrust DLL to get the installer to do anything. It would still error out though.

At this time I figured there were probably many DLLs that needed to be registered. So I took the rash action of going to my /usr/lib32/wine directory and registering every single DLL in there.

GalCiv2 still didn’t start up, but that’s because I forgot to undo some of the steps I took in the previously mentioned DirectX 9.0c install guide (namely, using native instead of builtin versions of some DLLs). Once I undid that GalCiv2 started up just fine. I haven’t actually played it yet. It was so late by that point that I immediately went to bed. Now I need to see if the game can actually be played in Wine.

I also wonder what part of Wine is supposed to register DLLs (i.e. installer, on first run, or what?) and figure out why it never happened here.

Posted by mpyne under Computing Troubles & Personal & Screenshots | 7 Comments »

So yesterday I completed my submarine officer qualification board. Today I had my dolphins pinned on me by my wife. It’s different having them on, I’m still not really sure what to make of it. For better or for worse you’re looked at differently by submariners if you are qualified in submarines. Unlike many other badges and awards you may encounter this one is still generally awarded only to those who deserve it and have completed all the applicable requirements.

In my case due to circumstances I had a patrol pin with 2 gold stars (indicating 3 alert deterrent patrols) without dolphins. Normally this is the sign of a junior officer who does not have the trust of his captain as you typically get dolphins after your second patrol. In my case the pin and first star were for half patrols, but it’s nice going from dirtbag to experienced junior officer in 15 short minutes this afternoon.

While researching this entry I came across a letter from an SSBN commanding officer briefly describing what it’s like to serve on an SSBN, which I thought was pretty good. You can read it at http://www.news.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_5/confessions.html if you’re interested.

Posted by mpyne under Navy & Personal | 9 Comments »

So I went to a football game today with officers from my ship. Throwing the football before the game, I somehow managed to injure the ring finger on my left hand on a catch. I kept it iced during the game and was able to flex it and everything but it never quite stopped swelling and it eventually bruised really badly.

I have it splinted pretty heavily right now in order to be ready to go to Medical in the morning tomorrow. The sad thing about this is that this is the second time I have injured my hand catching a football (same hand even). When I was in high school I was playing catch and had the ball hit my left pinky instead of my hand and force the outer two finger bones over the innermost one, which I then had to pop out. That hurt a lot, and never fully healed.

I think I’m going to have to stop playing catch with real footballs from now on or something, this is crazy. I’m pretty sure I didn’t dislocate the finger this time, but judging from the continuous swelling I may have fractured the bone. We’ll see tomorrow I guess.

It’s a good thing I finished with Guitar Hero III on Medium yesterday because it’s going to be quite some time before I can play again I would imagine. :(

On an unrelated note, the Indianapolis Colts are beating up on the Ravens pretty bad at this point. Peyton Manning has already been pulled from the game, with 13 completions for 17 attempts, for 249 yards and 4 touchdowns. According to my QB rating calculator he only needed one more completion (even for no yardage!) to get a perfect QB rating of 158.3. His final rating was 157.5.

Posted by mpyne under Personal | 6 Comments »

I’m sure many have seen the news about the nuclear fast attack submarine, USS Hampton, which has had its operations suspended due to failing to perform required inspections, and then trying to fake the required paperwork later.

We had heard inklings of what happened before it hit the news, so I knew that the media coverage of the story was predicably inaccurate but nothing too bad. But then I saw what may have been the stupidest blog post ever about it. Their description? “USS Hampton Submarine Crew Fails To Read Meter, Fakes Logbook, As Fluid That Keeps Reactor From Going Critical Runs Low”.

They then go on to talk about some magical ingredient that submarine nuclear reactors have that keeps the reactor from going critical which must be constantly maintained and which this crew was not doing. Then they accuse the Navy PAO who said that there was never a threat to the public or crew of a “Flat-out fucking lie”.

Unfortunately reality has a funny way of interposing. First off, though this may surprise people, the reactor is pretty much always critical while underway. This may be deduced from the definition of criticality: “2. Physics The point at which a nuclear reaction is self-sustaining.”

Even going by what I assume they mean by critical (i.e. chain reaction going out of control) the chemistry levels couldn’t cause that. Pretty much everything dealing with the actual operation of a naval nuclear power plant is classified CONFIDENTIAL but the fact that we use Pressurized Water Reactors is public knowledge, and Wikipedia has a good article on their operation. I’d like to point out the section dealing with control of reactor power: “Generally, reactor power can be viewed as following steam (turbine) demand”, and “Boron and control rods are used to maintain primary system temperature at the desired point.”. In other words, reactor power depends on the system demand (it automatically rises and falls as necessary), while control rods control temperature. What about boron, you ask? The article answers it in the last sentence of that section: “Due to design and fuel enrichment differences, naval nuclear reactors do not use boric acid.”

Notice nothing of that (besides boron, which I’ve covered) deals with chemicals. We do add chemicals to the water, obviously. But not for control of power. The author of the story I linked to then goes on to say that failure to maintain levels of this magical substance will cause alarms going off, and then “everyone becoming radioactive and the ship sinking.” Which is just so funny that I actually laughed at first until I realized he was serious.

He then says that it’s easy to measure the level, i.e. you just read a meter. That’s unfortunately not the case. It may be on civilian plants but monitoring chemistry levels on the submarine involves (at the very least) drawing a sample of water to perform the analyses on in the first place, which is rather involved due to the fact that the water is radioactive to at least some degree and therefore radiological controls are required during the entire sampling and analysis process.

He then compares adding more chemicals to maintaining the oil levels in your car. I don’t know how his car operates, but with mine I can just unscrew the lid, pour in a quart, and screw the lid back on. You can’t just “unscrew” a cap off of a very highly pressurized primary coolant system and pour some chemicals in. It’s not super hard but it is an involved process.

Next up: “This is in the course, mind you, of a 12 hour daily shift, most of which you spend, in the normal course of activities, bored. Having something to do is good.” To which all I can say is that the author has obviously never been underway. Between training, drills, monitored evolution periods, actual mission operations, cleaning, and qualifying it’s hard enough to find time to sleep. And it’s not a 12-hour shift, it’s (in theory) 6 hours of watch, 6 hours of maintenance/training/other work and 6 hours of off time in an 18-hour day.

Finally the author says that this is the very last bit of maintenance you would want to mess up and then calls the workers in “the reactor room” a bunch of “complete fuckups”. I can think of at least 3 maintenance items right off the top of my head that would be much more horrifying to “gaff off” and I’m sure there’s dozens more that more directly impact reactor safety. And there is no reactor room, and not every nuclear-trained worker was complicit, and the fact of the matter is that we don’t know what happened to cause this (the Commanding Officer has just been relieved of command however).

This is not to try and fluff off what happened (missing chemistry analyses is a *big* deal to Naval Reactors). I would like to think that the whole division did not ignore daily samples for a month (as this would involve not only the RL division in question but also all of the EOOWs and EWSs who had stood watch over that time) but instead had forgotten some sort of non-daily sample. But until more information is released about what exactly the Hampton did wrong it’s way too early to start calling the hardest-working department on a submarine a “complete fuckup”.

Planet KDE readers: I tried to include something relevant to KDE but I have no nifty unfinished work laying around at this time. :-(.

I realize that there is often confusion about how nuclear power works so if anyone has any questions feel free to ask in the comments section but if I’m vague at all (or just refer you to relevant Wikipedia entries) just realize that I have confidentiality standards I have to maintain.

Posted by mpyne under Navy | 11 Comments »

Spent a lot of time over the past two days scanning in some old photos that my Grandma has left me and trying to touch some of them up. I’m not good at photo editing but ye olde “Auto Adjust” feature has made a lot of these pictures look better. For a few of them they looked 100% better just from being scanned (xsane also has an auto-adjust feature).

Sadly I look nowhere near this good nowadays. :)

Posted by mpyne under Personal & Pictures | No Comments »