Some time back, I picked up the news that the NVidia GTX 1080 was released. That got me thinking---was it time to update the GTX 680 currently in Elysie-II? I scoured the info-sheets to get more information on the performance characteristics of the GTX 1080, and compared it to that of the GTX 680.
There was definitely a significant improvement by the numbers. Almost 3× in fact.
So I ended up getting the ASUS GTX 1080-8G Founder's Edition. That it was a ``founder's edition'' was more fluke than planning. So far I am liking the kind of throughput I am seeing from the card. Of course, I probably should replace my aging monitor (it's one of the oldest components that have been around since I first built Elysie) especially since the LCDs along its edges are starting to fade away into white. But it's not like I'm using Elysie-II to do anything important whilst sitting in front of it---I do most of the coding and what-not through SSH-ing into the Xubuntu partition of the machine.
Speaking of Xubuntu partition, I need to install the custom drivers from NVidia on it soon. The existing drivers, possibly from the ``noveau'' package are not working at all with such a new card.
Performance-wise, the GTX 1080 seems to run much cooler than the GTX 680, even at a more punishing setting. That was one the big reasons why I chose to get it now instead of waiting for later. Running cooler in the hot and humid weather is a definite advantage.
Another big push towards getting the GTX 1080 has been because of the games on the list that I'd like to play. I had completed The Witcher and The Witcher 2, and am about to start on The Witcher 3. That last Witcher game is a demanding beast. From what I had read, my GTX 680 was going to have a hard time playing it even at low settings. I am also waiting for the price for the new DOOM game to drop so that I can get it too.
So that's at least two AAA games that require the kind of horsepower that the GTX 1080 can deliver.
I know that the GTX 1080 is supposed to be VR-ready as well, but I don't really care about it since I'm not into the whole VR nonsense. 4k gaming is also touted to be a strong point of the GTX 1080, but again, with a 1080p screen, I'd rather much prefer 1080p@60Hz smoothness than 4k whatever.
All in all, a good use of money for my own entertainment.
------
The other day, my 10-hole dizi finally made its way through the world and on to my door-step. I had asked sifu about his opinions of that instrument before, and he said that it was in general, not really worth it due to too awkward fingering and a general lack of actual pieces that demand its exclusive use. Nevertheless, I got one mostly to mess around with, and to test the particular e-commerce chain that I had not tried before.
He wasn't kidding about the awkward fingering. I found that the fingers on the left-hand suffered quite a bit of strain from trying to keep them bunched up the way one might do while holding a concert flute with a shelf, while trying to simultaneously cover all the wholes that each of them had. It also took me quite a while to figure out how to set up the correct balancing point positions so that the dizi can be held up while the fingers are racing up and down to play the various notes.
But other than that, that dizi actually has a decent tone. It is probably wise to treat it like another instrument in the dizi family as opposed to unifying it under the same ``style'' as the 6-hole dizi.
And that's all I have for now. Till the next update.
Showing posts with label elysie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label elysie. Show all posts
Monday, June 13, 2016
Monday, September 23, 2013
Feed Not the Troll, but Ban it Instead
It has been a while since I last wrote here. The lack of updates isn't really because of a lack of want to update, but really because there is just so little to update. But, to keep things interesting, allow me to spew some vitriol on something controversal first, before expounding on more... mundane things. I mean at the end of the day, what's the point of a blog if not to rant?
``Victim blaming'' is a phrase I keep hearing time and time again, and often times, this is associated with the loaded word ``rape''. ``Rape'' is a loaded word because in many cases it ends up becoming a case of circumstantial evidence, a case of ``he said, she said'', and only because the conditions in which it is set up is based around the notion of consent, yet without the formality that is provided by usual contractual law. But that's not what I'm going to rant about -- I am ranting about the notion of ``victim blaming''. One common defense that rapists make is that the victim ``had it coming by dressing in a way that is sexually provocative''. Is that a valid defense? No, definitely not; in a liberal society, everyone is allowed to wear whatever the hell they want and walk wherever the hell they want. However, and this is a really big however, we should all be aware of how certain seemingly innocent factors can cumulate towards increasing the risk in which someone can become a victim.
Here's a slightly less controversial example. Suppose that there is a step ladder leaned against the wall, with someone on top of it painting. You are walking and you see this ladder. Will you walk below the ladder or around the ladder? Here, I am creating a scenario where there are two obvious courses of actions, one that is obviously less risky and one that is obviously more risky. A rational agent assumption would suppose that a rational agent would be slightly more risk averse, and therefore choose the course of action that is least risky, and in this case, walking around the ladder. Will anyone stop you from walking below the ladder? No, not really -- you can always do that, though if the ladder falls on top of you, you have no one to blame except for your own judgement.
Accusing someone of ``victim blaming'' is jarring to me only because it pre-supposes that the consequences of all possible actions taken are solely dependent on the environment, and that the victim is an innocent party. I disagree. While the victim ought to be empathised for his/her plight, he/she should also be taken to task for having poor judgement on his/her choice of actions given that the world is not an ideal non-hostile environment. I have to emphasize that last point because it is crucial -- just because you can dress skimpily (for example) doesn't mean that you have to. Should you be raped if you dress skimpily? Definitely not! But by doing so, you've already shifted the odds against you -- so while you shouldn't be sexually assaulted at all no matter what you wear, by dressing skimpily, you are already sending the wrong signals out. And I find that yelling at people who point out this at-risk behaviour as ``victim blaming'' is not only unfair, but highly irrational.
But try to get this past the general population. Good luck.
------
In other news, the eye infection that I was fighting for the past three weeks has finally been fully healed over. It was stupid -- I thought it was yet another one of those corneal abrasions that I seemed to be prone to getting, but it turned out to be a viral infection. The opthalmologist suspected that it was a Herpes Simplex (HSV-1) infection; the infection managed to clear up from a sustained dose of topical Acyclovir. Having one blurry eye and one good eye made it really hard to see things and get stuff done, and more often than not I was just feeling rather irritated.
After nearly 4 years of service, Elysie finally kicked the bucket. I ended up making Elysie Mk II with a Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H mother board with Intel Core i7 4770 Haswell processor and 32GiB RAM, housed in a Coolmaster HAF 912 chassis. I cannibalised the relatively new ASUS Nvidia GTX 680 and PSU from Elysie Mk I for Elysie Mk II, and moved the 1TB hard drive over to join with the 2TB hard drive. I had originally planned to rebuild Elysie next year, probably when Broadwell is released, but due to the sudden death of the old motherboard, I had to bring forward the upgrade plans. I ditched the Windows XP 64-bit Professional edition ``gaming'' operating system and installed a Windows 7 64-bit Professional edtiion one instead. I tried to get Xubuntu 12.04 LTS to work, but the Intel GbE ethernet interface was completely unrecognised -- had to use Xubuntu 13.04 instead.
I find the Elysie Mk II (or Elysie-II from now on) is not very stable for some reason. On Xubuntu 13.04, I started to get random kernel panics from kswapd, so I disabled the swap partition -- that seemed to do the trick. But then after nearly 24 hours of running the prime95 (version 27) program, she suddenly had a black screen and seemed to be turned off, and I have no bloody clue what was going on. On Windows 7, I had slightly different problems -- some of the graphics when playing Poker Night 2 were jittery, and there were a few random crashes for almost no reason. Thinking that the virtual/physical memory map was the issue, I have disabled the page file, and so far, that seemed to do the trick also.
I'm starting to suspect that perhaps 32GiB of RAM is starting to encroach upon other reserved memory locations that I was previously unaware of from running everything with memory of at most 8GiB. I have run memtest86+ on the RAM chips, and they seemed to be good. Guess I'll have to keep an eye out on things from now on.
Finally, my Bose QC20 In-ear Active Noise-Cancelling Headphones finally arrived last Friday. I test run the device on over the weekend and damn was I impressed. The comfort was like the usual IE2 that I use regularly (audiophiles can take a hike -- I value comfort over ``audiophilic quality playback'' from the headphones since I wear the damn thing for at least 8 hours a day), but it was damn good at blocking out the mundane noise that one would expect from living in a non-air-conditioned HDB flat on a low floor. Earlier today, I used the QC20 on the bus, and in the office before finally using it on the train, and I have the same comment as before -- the damn thing does a really good job at blocking out the unwanted noise, whether it was a consistent hum or human speech. I might have over-paid for this (it is Bose after all), but I'm not regretting it at all. I have tried many types of in-ear headphones, but of the lot, I still like the comfort that the basic Bose IE2 design has, where the speakers sit in the bowl of the pinna instead of digging deeper into the ear canal to find a hold there. The sound reproduction of the QC20 is not fantastic, but for what it is supposed to do (cut back on ambient noise), it does it really well in a form factor that lends itself to a much longer use time.
------
Man, this is fast turning into one of those über-long and ranty posts. And I'm still not quite done yet. The last thing I want to rant about is the incident that occurred in my previous post. Let me put things into a little perspective. I write entries on this blog mostly as a way of airing my views on issues big or small, as well as to highlight some observations that I have made about the world around me. I love comments, because it is one of the ways to have some light interaction here. But I maintain an iron-grip on what comment gets published and what doesn't -- this is just prudence at work, and not really about censorship.
Recently, there have been two instances of trolls who have decided to make use of the anonymous commenting capability of my blog to slam me with rather negative and useless comments. One basically accused me of ``wasting my advisor's money'' (false: I was funded directly by the Organisation) and the other was goading me into thinking that I was a loser. I could have easily refused to publish those comments, but I chose to do so, as well as to rebut their allegations. Immediately after the appearance of the second troll, I promptly disabled anonymous commenting on my blog.
In all the years that this blog has existed, I have rarely had a troll situation like this. Yet in the short span of less than six months, I see two instances of such abuse of the anonymous comment system. I can shrug it off and get on with life, but I suspect this is likely to escalate over time -- I doubt that these comments happened ``by chance''. I don't have to deal with this crap -- and so, the anonymous commenting capability is removed.
Those who care will still know how to get hold of me, so nothing of value was truly lost. =)
And with that, I'm done with this post. Till the next entry then.
``Victim blaming'' is a phrase I keep hearing time and time again, and often times, this is associated with the loaded word ``rape''. ``Rape'' is a loaded word because in many cases it ends up becoming a case of circumstantial evidence, a case of ``he said, she said'', and only because the conditions in which it is set up is based around the notion of consent, yet without the formality that is provided by usual contractual law. But that's not what I'm going to rant about -- I am ranting about the notion of ``victim blaming''. One common defense that rapists make is that the victim ``had it coming by dressing in a way that is sexually provocative''. Is that a valid defense? No, definitely not; in a liberal society, everyone is allowed to wear whatever the hell they want and walk wherever the hell they want. However, and this is a really big however, we should all be aware of how certain seemingly innocent factors can cumulate towards increasing the risk in which someone can become a victim.
Here's a slightly less controversial example. Suppose that there is a step ladder leaned against the wall, with someone on top of it painting. You are walking and you see this ladder. Will you walk below the ladder or around the ladder? Here, I am creating a scenario where there are two obvious courses of actions, one that is obviously less risky and one that is obviously more risky. A rational agent assumption would suppose that a rational agent would be slightly more risk averse, and therefore choose the course of action that is least risky, and in this case, walking around the ladder. Will anyone stop you from walking below the ladder? No, not really -- you can always do that, though if the ladder falls on top of you, you have no one to blame except for your own judgement.
Accusing someone of ``victim blaming'' is jarring to me only because it pre-supposes that the consequences of all possible actions taken are solely dependent on the environment, and that the victim is an innocent party. I disagree. While the victim ought to be empathised for his/her plight, he/she should also be taken to task for having poor judgement on his/her choice of actions given that the world is not an ideal non-hostile environment. I have to emphasize that last point because it is crucial -- just because you can dress skimpily (for example) doesn't mean that you have to. Should you be raped if you dress skimpily? Definitely not! But by doing so, you've already shifted the odds against you -- so while you shouldn't be sexually assaulted at all no matter what you wear, by dressing skimpily, you are already sending the wrong signals out. And I find that yelling at people who point out this at-risk behaviour as ``victim blaming'' is not only unfair, but highly irrational.
But try to get this past the general population. Good luck.
------
In other news, the eye infection that I was fighting for the past three weeks has finally been fully healed over. It was stupid -- I thought it was yet another one of those corneal abrasions that I seemed to be prone to getting, but it turned out to be a viral infection. The opthalmologist suspected that it was a Herpes Simplex (HSV-1) infection; the infection managed to clear up from a sustained dose of topical Acyclovir. Having one blurry eye and one good eye made it really hard to see things and get stuff done, and more often than not I was just feeling rather irritated.
After nearly 4 years of service, Elysie finally kicked the bucket. I ended up making Elysie Mk II with a Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H mother board with Intel Core i7 4770 Haswell processor and 32GiB RAM, housed in a Coolmaster HAF 912 chassis. I cannibalised the relatively new ASUS Nvidia GTX 680 and PSU from Elysie Mk I for Elysie Mk II, and moved the 1TB hard drive over to join with the 2TB hard drive. I had originally planned to rebuild Elysie next year, probably when Broadwell is released, but due to the sudden death of the old motherboard, I had to bring forward the upgrade plans. I ditched the Windows XP 64-bit Professional edition ``gaming'' operating system and installed a Windows 7 64-bit Professional edtiion one instead. I tried to get Xubuntu 12.04 LTS to work, but the Intel GbE ethernet interface was completely unrecognised -- had to use Xubuntu 13.04 instead.
I find the Elysie Mk II (or Elysie-II from now on) is not very stable for some reason. On Xubuntu 13.04, I started to get random kernel panics from kswapd, so I disabled the swap partition -- that seemed to do the trick. But then after nearly 24 hours of running the prime95 (version 27) program, she suddenly had a black screen and seemed to be turned off, and I have no bloody clue what was going on. On Windows 7, I had slightly different problems -- some of the graphics when playing Poker Night 2 were jittery, and there were a few random crashes for almost no reason. Thinking that the virtual/physical memory map was the issue, I have disabled the page file, and so far, that seemed to do the trick also.
I'm starting to suspect that perhaps 32GiB of RAM is starting to encroach upon other reserved memory locations that I was previously unaware of from running everything with memory of at most 8GiB. I have run memtest86+ on the RAM chips, and they seemed to be good. Guess I'll have to keep an eye out on things from now on.
Finally, my Bose QC20 In-ear Active Noise-Cancelling Headphones finally arrived last Friday. I test run the device on over the weekend and damn was I impressed. The comfort was like the usual IE2 that I use regularly (audiophiles can take a hike -- I value comfort over ``audiophilic quality playback'' from the headphones since I wear the damn thing for at least 8 hours a day), but it was damn good at blocking out the mundane noise that one would expect from living in a non-air-conditioned HDB flat on a low floor. Earlier today, I used the QC20 on the bus, and in the office before finally using it on the train, and I have the same comment as before -- the damn thing does a really good job at blocking out the unwanted noise, whether it was a consistent hum or human speech. I might have over-paid for this (it is Bose after all), but I'm not regretting it at all. I have tried many types of in-ear headphones, but of the lot, I still like the comfort that the basic Bose IE2 design has, where the speakers sit in the bowl of the pinna instead of digging deeper into the ear canal to find a hold there. The sound reproduction of the QC20 is not fantastic, but for what it is supposed to do (cut back on ambient noise), it does it really well in a form factor that lends itself to a much longer use time.
------
Man, this is fast turning into one of those über-long and ranty posts. And I'm still not quite done yet. The last thing I want to rant about is the incident that occurred in my previous post. Let me put things into a little perspective. I write entries on this blog mostly as a way of airing my views on issues big or small, as well as to highlight some observations that I have made about the world around me. I love comments, because it is one of the ways to have some light interaction here. But I maintain an iron-grip on what comment gets published and what doesn't -- this is just prudence at work, and not really about censorship.
Recently, there have been two instances of trolls who have decided to make use of the anonymous commenting capability of my blog to slam me with rather negative and useless comments. One basically accused me of ``wasting my advisor's money'' (false: I was funded directly by the Organisation) and the other was goading me into thinking that I was a loser. I could have easily refused to publish those comments, but I chose to do so, as well as to rebut their allegations. Immediately after the appearance of the second troll, I promptly disabled anonymous commenting on my blog.
In all the years that this blog has existed, I have rarely had a troll situation like this. Yet in the short span of less than six months, I see two instances of such abuse of the anonymous comment system. I can shrug it off and get on with life, but I suspect this is likely to escalate over time -- I doubt that these comments happened ``by chance''. I don't have to deal with this crap -- and so, the anonymous commenting capability is removed.
Those who care will still know how to get hold of me, so nothing of value was truly lost. =)
And with that, I'm done with this post. Till the next entry then.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Home Again
Well well, once again we are here, with me wondering what I should be writing for yet another entry in my blog. The answer is pretty obvious really, and it is more of an exercise of pseudo-intellectual rhetoric than anything actually remotely useful.
I've been back in Singapore for at least a fortnight by now, and like all things that occur in my life, things got a little interesting along the way. I think that to give enough perspective, it is important to start writing things in a chronological order.
So I took a rather long flight from Champaign-Urbana back to Singapore. In the bid to avoid having to take any of the long haul buses up to Chicago, the originating flight for it all was from CMI (Champaign-Urbana). The trip from CMI to ORD was relatively uneventful. However, it was at ORD where things started to get... interesting.
First off, my two pieces of checked in luggage required re-tagging to be kept checked in all the way from ORD through AUH to SIN. That took a while, but it was eventually done. Second, I had to have my boarding pass reprinted at ORD because there was no direct transfer from the domestic terminal to the international one---I had to leave the secure area and re-enter, which explained the need for the reprinting of the boarding pass.
The flight from ORD to AUH was relatively uneventful too. AUH (Abu Dhabi) was an interesting airport to spend the night at; it was located in the UAE, and thus the dominant landscape was that of sand. The food places at the airport were as expected; mostly ``international'' fare in the sense of the fast food. I had a lot of coffee there, but still managed to sleep on the eventual plane ride back. The transit to the aircraft was something of an eye-opener as well, since we had to take a bus out from the departing gate towards the plane that was parked a little ways off from where the gate was. It felt like the old days of air-travel for some reason, where one would get to climb up the stairs to board the plane, kind of like the depictions in the many Tintin comics.
The nightmare began the moment I arrived back in Singapore. The airline lost my luggage, both of them. To make matters worse, the re-tagging step at ORD was done incorrectly---only one of the two pieces was re-tagged, and even then, it didn't seem that it made its way back to Singapore either. It would take the airline and the Lost & Found department of Changi Airport roughly a week to find everything back, and even then, the hard shell luggage was damaged beyond economic repair and I had to claim damage fees. During that time, I just made do with whatever clothes that I had left lying around at home, as well as the stuff that I had shipped back via FedEx. Since I was missing my key going-out clothes, I was also mostly confined indoors, which was a blessing in disguise because I could acclimatise with relative ease.
------
In general, I think that the way in which I had been relying to beat jet lag was to use my ginormous brain to solve some problems that crop up, and this time was probably no different. I took apart Elysie and cleaned her out as best as I can, going as far as to take apart the heat sink and fan of the CPU to clean out the dust and to re-apply thermal grease, seeing an immediate improvement in the overall core temperatures. While Elysie was still incapable of handling a four-core full load while maintaining a relatively low temperature in this non-air-conditioned environment, it took much longer for the warning sensors to report reaching 90 degrees Celsius than before the thermal grease update. That's of course a good thing.
I also switched out the PSU to something of a higher wattage (from 480W to 600W), and switched out her Nvidia 9600 GT for an Nvidia GTX 680 made by ASUS. Man, that new graphics card is a real beast. It was just long enough that I had to shift the hard drive to a higher position in the mounting rack, nearly missing the ventilation that the fan could provide. It was also thick enough that I had to remove the external eSata card connected to one of the PCI slots just to give it enough room for the heat sinks and fans. It consumed enough power that it required effectively three PCI-e power sockets; two multiplexed with a given cable plus another one. Thankfully, the new PSU was a modular one, and it was possible to stitch together something that worked. The other problems that the new card posed were the position of the cables---Windows XP, being the weird system it was, didn't like it when the hard drive was not in the SATA #0 or #1 slot, and it promptly kept crashing ever so often. But I was afraid of connecting the hard drive to the SATA #1 slot because it was directly under the massive card; I was afraid there wasn't enough clearance, something that I soon discovered to be false.
So after rejigging things for quite a bit and suffering one too many BSODs from Windows XP (no kernel panics from Xubuntu, even after the rather harrowing re-partitioning process and re-install), the card was successfully installed and tested. Benchmarks from DMC4 and Torchlight II showed a ridiculous improvement to the point that I am extremely satisfied at the small fortune I spent in the upgrade.
------
I think I will stop here for now and write more some other time.
I've been back in Singapore for at least a fortnight by now, and like all things that occur in my life, things got a little interesting along the way. I think that to give enough perspective, it is important to start writing things in a chronological order.
So I took a rather long flight from Champaign-Urbana back to Singapore. In the bid to avoid having to take any of the long haul buses up to Chicago, the originating flight for it all was from CMI (Champaign-Urbana). The trip from CMI to ORD was relatively uneventful. However, it was at ORD where things started to get... interesting.
First off, my two pieces of checked in luggage required re-tagging to be kept checked in all the way from ORD through AUH to SIN. That took a while, but it was eventually done. Second, I had to have my boarding pass reprinted at ORD because there was no direct transfer from the domestic terminal to the international one---I had to leave the secure area and re-enter, which explained the need for the reprinting of the boarding pass.
The flight from ORD to AUH was relatively uneventful too. AUH (Abu Dhabi) was an interesting airport to spend the night at; it was located in the UAE, and thus the dominant landscape was that of sand. The food places at the airport were as expected; mostly ``international'' fare in the sense of the fast food. I had a lot of coffee there, but still managed to sleep on the eventual plane ride back. The transit to the aircraft was something of an eye-opener as well, since we had to take a bus out from the departing gate towards the plane that was parked a little ways off from where the gate was. It felt like the old days of air-travel for some reason, where one would get to climb up the stairs to board the plane, kind of like the depictions in the many Tintin comics.
The nightmare began the moment I arrived back in Singapore. The airline lost my luggage, both of them. To make matters worse, the re-tagging step at ORD was done incorrectly---only one of the two pieces was re-tagged, and even then, it didn't seem that it made its way back to Singapore either. It would take the airline and the Lost & Found department of Changi Airport roughly a week to find everything back, and even then, the hard shell luggage was damaged beyond economic repair and I had to claim damage fees. During that time, I just made do with whatever clothes that I had left lying around at home, as well as the stuff that I had shipped back via FedEx. Since I was missing my key going-out clothes, I was also mostly confined indoors, which was a blessing in disguise because I could acclimatise with relative ease.
------
In general, I think that the way in which I had been relying to beat jet lag was to use my ginormous brain to solve some problems that crop up, and this time was probably no different. I took apart Elysie and cleaned her out as best as I can, going as far as to take apart the heat sink and fan of the CPU to clean out the dust and to re-apply thermal grease, seeing an immediate improvement in the overall core temperatures. While Elysie was still incapable of handling a four-core full load while maintaining a relatively low temperature in this non-air-conditioned environment, it took much longer for the warning sensors to report reaching 90 degrees Celsius than before the thermal grease update. That's of course a good thing.
I also switched out the PSU to something of a higher wattage (from 480W to 600W), and switched out her Nvidia 9600 GT for an Nvidia GTX 680 made by ASUS. Man, that new graphics card is a real beast. It was just long enough that I had to shift the hard drive to a higher position in the mounting rack, nearly missing the ventilation that the fan could provide. It was also thick enough that I had to remove the external eSata card connected to one of the PCI slots just to give it enough room for the heat sinks and fans. It consumed enough power that it required effectively three PCI-e power sockets; two multiplexed with a given cable plus another one. Thankfully, the new PSU was a modular one, and it was possible to stitch together something that worked. The other problems that the new card posed were the position of the cables---Windows XP, being the weird system it was, didn't like it when the hard drive was not in the SATA #0 or #1 slot, and it promptly kept crashing ever so often. But I was afraid of connecting the hard drive to the SATA #1 slot because it was directly under the massive card; I was afraid there wasn't enough clearance, something that I soon discovered to be false.
So after rejigging things for quite a bit and suffering one too many BSODs from Windows XP (no kernel panics from Xubuntu, even after the rather harrowing re-partitioning process and re-install), the card was successfully installed and tested. Benchmarks from DMC4 and Torchlight II showed a ridiculous improvement to the point that I am extremely satisfied at the small fortune I spent in the upgrade.
------
I think I will stop here for now and write more some other time.
Monday, February 08, 2010
[PROTOTYPE]
So not too long ago (less than three or four days back, actually) I finally convinced myself to put up the cash to purchase [PROTOTYPE] off Steam after hearing from Mo that it was an interesting game that was kinda like DMC4 but with differing mechanics. Apart from a small snafu involving DirectX 9.0c on Elysie's Windows XP 64-bit edition, the installation wasn't too bad, and soon enough I had the game up and running.
What I wasn't prepared for was the epic levels of win the game entailed. Imagine GTA III, but with epic attack powers (kicking a flying helicopter to destruction), epic moves (wall-sprinting up the skyscraper to glide across Central Park), and epic battles (slamming the ground with a hard enough force that makes everything surrounding the protagonist fly up and take damage). In short, it is GTA III on steroids, and I'm not even sure if steroids are strong enough to produce the effect that I am seeing through the game. The sand-box feature of the game suits the purposes well, as it allows one to sometimes forget about the story missions and just roam around the city finding things to do, like infiltrating enemy bases, perform crazy stunts, or just go round killing things. Unlike GTA III, the only penalty for being overly violent is to have the military and/or mutants hunt you down, which is only a mild trifle if you have sufficient skill and powers to fight back or even dodge away. And the vehicles you can ride are insane---no civilian vehicles are ridable, but all manner of military hardware is available for your consumption.
Heh. Consumption---it is a key thing to do in the game itself, as many will say. In short, [PROTOTYPE] is an action fanatic's dream come true, with superhuman powers set in a pseudo-dystopian storyline with great cinematics to back the story up. This is probably among the best purchases I have ever made when it comes to games.
What I wasn't prepared for was the epic levels of win the game entailed. Imagine GTA III, but with epic attack powers (kicking a flying helicopter to destruction), epic moves (wall-sprinting up the skyscraper to glide across Central Park), and epic battles (slamming the ground with a hard enough force that makes everything surrounding the protagonist fly up and take damage). In short, it is GTA III on steroids, and I'm not even sure if steroids are strong enough to produce the effect that I am seeing through the game. The sand-box feature of the game suits the purposes well, as it allows one to sometimes forget about the story missions and just roam around the city finding things to do, like infiltrating enemy bases, perform crazy stunts, or just go round killing things. Unlike GTA III, the only penalty for being overly violent is to have the military and/or mutants hunt you down, which is only a mild trifle if you have sufficient skill and powers to fight back or even dodge away. And the vehicles you can ride are insane---no civilian vehicles are ridable, but all manner of military hardware is available for your consumption.
Heh. Consumption---it is a key thing to do in the game itself, as many will say. In short, [PROTOTYPE] is an action fanatic's dream come true, with superhuman powers set in a pseudo-dystopian storyline with great cinematics to back the story up. This is probably among the best purchases I have ever made when it comes to games.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
February Musings
Hmm. February, a traditional month for pain and anguish. Heh. Maybe not this February---things have changed. Probably. Who knows? So many things have happened over the last week that at times, I'm still a little giddy from the excitement.
I've finally got around to doing yet another round of upgrading of the software components that are running on Elyse. I got rid of the propriety SSH/SFTP tool that was licensed to CMU and installed WinSCP instead. Much cleaner interface, and less monstrosities to deal with, I suppose. I've updated my FL Studio to the latest version while updating Audacity to the beta which is much more recent than the last stable (works fine as far as I can tell). The good thing about this is that now FL Studio can double up as a VSTi plug-in from within Audacity, which further allows the use of Nyquist (the LISP-like programming language in Audacity) to be further combined with the plethora of tools that FL Studio has to offer.
I originally thought of upgrading the Xubuntu install on Elysie to Karmic Koala, but after reading the many problems that occur with machines that sport the nVidia graphics cards after that upgrade, I've decided to give the Koala a miss. Besides, things are working relatively well now and I don't see a need to rock the boat, as compared to my high portable and mostly experimental rig on Edythe-EEE. I might consider upgrading the home computer to Koala since it is using an integrated graphics card, which reduces the issues that can occur with the propriety binary blobs that are needed for the higher end cards. Speaking of which, I probably need to run an update on the Windows XP 64-bit edition partition of Elysie---the last time I ran anything on that was... a very long time ago.
Life. That's right, I was mumbling something about that before I got hopelessly side tracked. February is a month of confusion many times, and this year, it's probably not going to be that bad. Most of the things that are causing me severe anguish are at least undergoing some form of amelioration, either through efforts of mine or not. There are things that I have already done, and there are also things where I have little control over, so I suppose there is little need to worry about them. After all, life is short, for how long can we be worrying about things anyway?
I remember that I used to think that I would be a detective when I grew up. That's right, a hard-boiled detective, one who went around looking for clues, sleuthing for ideas on how to solve a crime, learning the art of cryptography to foil the bad spies and other detectives who are trying to muscle in on my jobs. Or a spy, one of those two; it didn't really matter which. There was a certain romantic feel to that line of work, always living on the edge, always doing things that people have little idea is going on, walking about in the shadows, seeing things that people don't see, and best of all, achieving successes that the normal folks would never have thought originated from one. Of course, as time went on, it made less and less sense to be working as a detective nor spy (something about level of danger and the need to be realistic on what my body can and cannot do), but many of the job traits that I loved seemed to manifest themselves as part of my personality. For instance, while I used to like the limelight a lot when I was younger, I tend to shun it in favour of working deep within the shadows and making magic happen. Even today, I still have a tendency to walk in the shadows, avoiding light (both literally and metaphorically), and preferring muchly to work hard in a secluded location than to draw attention to myself for no rhyme nor reason.
Alright, I have no idea what my direction of thought is... it is getting rather late, and I ought to go get some sleep. Till next time, I suppose.
I've finally got around to doing yet another round of upgrading of the software components that are running on Elyse. I got rid of the propriety SSH/SFTP tool that was licensed to CMU and installed WinSCP instead. Much cleaner interface, and less monstrosities to deal with, I suppose. I've updated my FL Studio to the latest version while updating Audacity to the beta which is much more recent than the last stable (works fine as far as I can tell). The good thing about this is that now FL Studio can double up as a VSTi plug-in from within Audacity, which further allows the use of Nyquist (the LISP-like programming language in Audacity) to be further combined with the plethora of tools that FL Studio has to offer.
I originally thought of upgrading the Xubuntu install on Elysie to Karmic Koala, but after reading the many problems that occur with machines that sport the nVidia graphics cards after that upgrade, I've decided to give the Koala a miss. Besides, things are working relatively well now and I don't see a need to rock the boat, as compared to my high portable and mostly experimental rig on Edythe-EEE. I might consider upgrading the home computer to Koala since it is using an integrated graphics card, which reduces the issues that can occur with the propriety binary blobs that are needed for the higher end cards. Speaking of which, I probably need to run an update on the Windows XP 64-bit edition partition of Elysie---the last time I ran anything on that was... a very long time ago.
Life. That's right, I was mumbling something about that before I got hopelessly side tracked. February is a month of confusion many times, and this year, it's probably not going to be that bad. Most of the things that are causing me severe anguish are at least undergoing some form of amelioration, either through efforts of mine or not. There are things that I have already done, and there are also things where I have little control over, so I suppose there is little need to worry about them. After all, life is short, for how long can we be worrying about things anyway?
I remember that I used to think that I would be a detective when I grew up. That's right, a hard-boiled detective, one who went around looking for clues, sleuthing for ideas on how to solve a crime, learning the art of cryptography to foil the bad spies and other detectives who are trying to muscle in on my jobs. Or a spy, one of those two; it didn't really matter which. There was a certain romantic feel to that line of work, always living on the edge, always doing things that people have little idea is going on, walking about in the shadows, seeing things that people don't see, and best of all, achieving successes that the normal folks would never have thought originated from one. Of course, as time went on, it made less and less sense to be working as a detective nor spy (something about level of danger and the need to be realistic on what my body can and cannot do), but many of the job traits that I loved seemed to manifest themselves as part of my personality. For instance, while I used to like the limelight a lot when I was younger, I tend to shun it in favour of working deep within the shadows and making magic happen. Even today, I still have a tendency to walk in the shadows, avoiding light (both literally and metaphorically), and preferring muchly to work hard in a secluded location than to draw attention to myself for no rhyme nor reason.
Alright, I have no idea what my direction of thought is... it is getting rather late, and I ought to go get some sleep. Till next time, I suppose.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Misaligned Ramble...
It feels a little different, writing on Elysie instead of Elyse (no, there's no typo there). First of all, I am sitting much further from my text on Elysie than on Elyse---something about having a fairly large screen I suppose. Secondly, things just feel a little different when one is just sitting down and chilling out a little, with the help of a little bit of alcohol to help soothe the nerves.
The night time air always feels different for me. It is as though being nocturnal was something that I secretly loved to do, that somehow I commune better when there is less light outside. Unfortunately, it would appear that ever since that I have done the LASIK surgery, my night vision hasn't really been the same as it was, and that the glare of lights are still playing havoc on my overall perception of objects around me. For that reason, I actually wear sunglasses even when it is dark out, relying heavily on my rods to provide the necessary resolving power to see better in the dark.
Well, I'm rambling again. I started off trying to write something, and then got severely side tracked as I get FL Studio 9.0 to install on Elyse. Ugh... I can't multitask at all.
This sucks.
The night time air always feels different for me. It is as though being nocturnal was something that I secretly loved to do, that somehow I commune better when there is less light outside. Unfortunately, it would appear that ever since that I have done the LASIK surgery, my night vision hasn't really been the same as it was, and that the glare of lights are still playing havoc on my overall perception of objects around me. For that reason, I actually wear sunglasses even when it is dark out, relying heavily on my rods to provide the necessary resolving power to see better in the dark.
Well, I'm rambling again. I started off trying to write something, and then got severely side tracked as I get FL Studio 9.0 to install on Elyse. Ugh... I can't multitask at all.
This sucks.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Ramble Bramble
So I've been back in Singapore for the better part of two weeks, and the one thing that I can truly attest to the city is that it is bloody hot. Thankfully though, I have more or less acclimatised to the ridiculous weather conditions, and is slowly getting more and more comfortable with the formerly excruciating heat.
I must say though, that I am starting to like the idea that I have decently good skin now. It is really nice to be able to live through the day and do things without having to feel uncomfortably itchy and dealing with cracked skin from the lack of sebum/thickness of the skin plaque itself. Sure, it is not as dry as in the US (there is this perpetual stickiness from the humidity), but at least I don't feel as uncomfortable as before. The stickiness from the perspiration and humidity is something that one can sort of get used to (taking some showers when the feeling borders upon that of pure discomfort).
That aside, the temperature here is truly abhorrent. The last time I checked my thermometer, it was registering highs of about 35 degrees Celsius, something that was never the case about 6 to 7 years ago. Many people would take this as an indicator that the world is indeed warming up due to the effects of global-warming, but to be really honest about it, the entire mechanism of global warming is not something that just came about recently---it is an action that has been in place for more than fifty years now. To say that the world has only been recently affected by global warming is like saying to an 18-year-old that he/she has just recently grown up.
But as usual, I digress.
Sitting around, waiting for work to begin, can be at times both interesting and infuriating. Interesting because I get to do things that I wanted to do but never quite seem to have the time to do so, like working on one of my multitude of personal projects. Infuriating because what I am doing doesn't pay the bills---one needs a job in order to make enough money to pay off stuff. I'm not saying that I have a ton of bills to pay now, but it is nice to be making some cash to squirrel away so that when I need to use it next time, I will have some at hand.
I've built myself a new machine. She's an Intel Core 2 Quad Core Q9550 with 8GiB of RAM, 1TB hard disk, NVidia Geforce N9600GT graphics card on a Gigabyte motherboard with a 21.5" Samsung LCD display. Her name is Elysie---kind of related to Elyse (differs by one letter!) but sufficiently different. Everything about Elysie is excellent---she runs on Windows XP x64 edition for gaming and the standard Xubuntu 9.04 distro for the main operating system. The only thing that I need to figure out now is how to ssh to Elysie from outside the LAN; this is an issue that is compounded by the rather strange and draconian way in which the ISP implements the IP address mapping; hopefully I can figure this out soon enough.
Well, that's all for now, I suppose.
I must say though, that I am starting to like the idea that I have decently good skin now. It is really nice to be able to live through the day and do things without having to feel uncomfortably itchy and dealing with cracked skin from the lack of sebum/thickness of the skin plaque itself. Sure, it is not as dry as in the US (there is this perpetual stickiness from the humidity), but at least I don't feel as uncomfortable as before. The stickiness from the perspiration and humidity is something that one can sort of get used to (taking some showers when the feeling borders upon that of pure discomfort).
That aside, the temperature here is truly abhorrent. The last time I checked my thermometer, it was registering highs of about 35 degrees Celsius, something that was never the case about 6 to 7 years ago. Many people would take this as an indicator that the world is indeed warming up due to the effects of global-warming, but to be really honest about it, the entire mechanism of global warming is not something that just came about recently---it is an action that has been in place for more than fifty years now. To say that the world has only been recently affected by global warming is like saying to an 18-year-old that he/she has just recently grown up.
But as usual, I digress.
Sitting around, waiting for work to begin, can be at times both interesting and infuriating. Interesting because I get to do things that I wanted to do but never quite seem to have the time to do so, like working on one of my multitude of personal projects. Infuriating because what I am doing doesn't pay the bills---one needs a job in order to make enough money to pay off stuff. I'm not saying that I have a ton of bills to pay now, but it is nice to be making some cash to squirrel away so that when I need to use it next time, I will have some at hand.
I've built myself a new machine. She's an Intel Core 2 Quad Core Q9550 with 8GiB of RAM, 1TB hard disk, NVidia Geforce N9600GT graphics card on a Gigabyte motherboard with a 21.5" Samsung LCD display. Her name is Elysie---kind of related to Elyse (differs by one letter!) but sufficiently different. Everything about Elysie is excellent---she runs on Windows XP x64 edition for gaming and the standard Xubuntu 9.04 distro for the main operating system. The only thing that I need to figure out now is how to ssh to Elysie from outside the LAN; this is an issue that is compounded by the rather strange and draconian way in which the ISP implements the IP address mapping; hopefully I can figure this out soon enough.
Well, that's all for now, I suppose.
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