Yeraze's Domain 3.0

Seems it’s all the rage to go “episodic” nowadays, and Half Life 2 is no exception.  In fact, they may just prove the point, as Half Life 2: Episode 1 was released on June 1st.  I just got it earlier this week and played through it, and I must admit I was impressed.

I played through Half-Life 2 shortly after it came out, and I still think it’s probably the best story-driven FPS in existence.  From the Graphics, to the Story, to the enemy AI, to the friendly AI, there’s nothing to complain about (Except the annoying Steam issues).  Episode 1 is more of the same.

You start off having, somehow, survived the explosion atop the citadel and are rescued by Alyx and Dog.  They return the fabulous Zero Gravity gun to you, and the adventures resume.  First off you have to stop, or at least delay, the core explosion inside the Citadel.  From there, it’s a simple matter of leaving the city.  The first third of the game is a large collection of puzzles, as you don’t have any weaponry.  The flashlight becomes your best friend as Alyx has a seemingly infinite supply of ammunition, but can’t see in the dark.  So it’s a collection of “Illuminate the Bad Guys” and watch the carnage ensue.  Of course, there’s plenty of debris for you to pick up and hurl at them too, but Alyx’s weapons are far more effective.  You do eventually get some weaponry, and towards the end you get to relive the excitement of taking down hordes of soldiers, blowing helicopters out of the sky, and running from Striders.  As soon as it was over, tho, I did have to revisit the Half Life Saga Guide to figure out what’s going on.

It’s action packed, and every bit as good as Half Life 2.  It is, however, episodic.  So expect about 4 to 5 hours of gameplay, with a nice cliffhanger of an ending.  With my new 6800GS video card, I was able to turn on all the bells and whistles at 1280×1024, including HDR which was a big surprise to me.  The game itself is beautiful, and the HDR effect is simply amazing.  It’s done so well that you may not even notice it, but it adds a huge amount of realism to the game when you’re clambering through the undergroud (and dark) remains of the city streets.  The enemy AI is impressive, for the soldiers anyway. Of course, the zombies are dumb as bricks and rightfully so.  The soldiers have learned a few new tricks, tho, and work together in a truly frightening fashion.  Even Alyx has gotten a few “upgrades” and does a great job of pitching in.  Unlike Half-life 2, you actually spend pretty much the entire game side-by-side, none of the “passing in the night” stuff that gets so frustrating.  Much to my surprise, while traveling underground in pitch blackness, when my flashlight went out she actually proceeded to sneak up behind me making Zombie noises.  When I turned it back on she proceeded to laugh and go “Gotcha!”.  If I shined it in her face she would wince and cover her eyes.  They’re all novelties, but add alot to making her a believable character.

I truly enjoyed it, and I’m considering digging out my HL2 install and trying it again.  I’m also anxiously awaiting Episode 2, and if this trailer and this “Portal Weapon Preview” are true, then I won’t be disappointed. 
[tag:halflife][tag:game][tag:episode1]

My 1998 Toyota Camry is completely paid-for. I made the last payment almost a year ago and I’ve been loving it. Unfortunately, cars don’t last forever so I’m sure I’ll be shopping for a replacement before too long. With the continuous rise in gas prices (Yes, I know it’s still well below the global average but it’s frustrating nonetheless) an electric car or hybrid is starting to look very appealing. A hybrid seems to be the approach that’s gaining the most traction, but why? From what I’ve seen, you can get a Camry that does 30MPG, or a Hybrid Camry that does 35 or 40. woo. Where’s the 50,60,70 MPG cars? Where’s the fully-electric cars?

As an Electrical Engineer, the electric cars are intriguing. I can’t deny the allure of driving a completely gas-free car: No oil changes, no exhaust, no vibration (other than the bumpy Mississippi Roads). I also can’t ignore the problems: Battery Memory effects, extreme climates, low accelleration & torque. But honestly, are these really problems? They’re problems with other devices I own (Batteries decay over time, explode in heat, etc) but surely they aren’t insurmountable. With just a little bit of effort, I found a few answers.

In short, these problems are definately solvable. In fact, they were solved quite some time ago.
[tag:teslaroadster][tag:car][tag:electriccar][tag:hybrid]

Tonight Tom Brokaw aired an hour-long special called “Separate and Unequal”. In it, he followed 3 Lanier High School students through a year of classes and talked about the challenges they faced. Lanier is pretty much all-black, so it was really a special on how far (or not so far) blacks have advanced since segregation was finally outlawed.

In short, one student graduated and is on her way to college. One student had a child, at 17, and wound up dropping out of school her senior year and narrowly failing her GED exam. The third student was kicked off the basketball team for poor grades & missed practices, and finally flunked at the end of the year (With averages in the 50’s).. MSNBC has archived alot of the text and some of the video here, and it’s worth checking out. They did talk about the recent increase in crime in Jackson, and they even followed Frank Melton around Jackson as he visited people. Unfortunatey, they did not get into any of the more unusual things he’s done lately like the State of Emergency and the Homeless Curfews.

While he did a pretty good job discussing the problems teens, of any race really, face in today’s schools, he seemed to flounder around a bit without really offering any information or ideas on how to remedy it. He showed several success stories, and several failures, but never really spoke about what specifically made them different. Was it the schools? Was it the family? Was it rap music? (That, actually, did come up in the show but was quickly dismissed). One thing I think he really left out was the poor state of Mississippi’s industrial sector. He wanted a story that would apply to any city across the US, but I think cities in Mississippi are unique compared to most others because of the simple lack of opportunities. In Meridian, it seemed the choice was always a) College, b) Peavey, or c) Auto mechanic. Sadly, things haven’t changed much since I graduated. In Jackson, simply switch Peavey for Nissan.

The new Nissan plant has done alot for North Jackson, specifically Madison and Canton. Unfortunately, it only impacts a small portion of the state and with reports like 4 of the 5 vehicles produced there top Consumer Reports Least Reliable list, it’s questionable how much longer they’ll stick around. Alot of people’s hopes were riding on the Kia plant, but those dreams seems to have been just that. I hear more and more of people taking tele-commute jobs out -of-state. In fact, my own dad has a job in Texas but continues to live in Meridian. There are a few technical jobs in Mississippi, such as the 2 MSRC’s and the thriving Medial Sector, but those are small and very selective. With so many technical jobs and people leaving Mississippi for greener pastures, is it any surprise that all that remains is the few people incapable (or unwilling) to leave? If all the graduates see people is the people “left behind”, is it any surprise that they “don’t know how to succeed” (as Brokaw put it repeatedly in his broadcast).
[tag:nbc][tag:tombrokaw][tag:mississippi]

I’ve been hearing about Senator Steven’s “Series of Tubes” fubar for a while now but haven’t really bothered to follow up on it.  Well, Jon Stewart and John Hodgman do an excellent job of ripping his speech and the Net Neutrality legislation to pieces.  Definately worth a look.
[tag:netneutrality][tag:dailyshow][tag:tedstephens]

So I spent some more time last night playing with MythTV. I gave up on KnoppMyth, never being able to get it working and not really having enough understanding of Debian to figure out why. Instead, I tried MythDora this time, v2.1 to be exact.

The install went smooth, they have a nice “AutoInstall” that will, completely non-interactively, wipe the disks and install everything. On the first boot it ran me through MythSetup to configure everything, and all seemed well. Unfortunately, I was still unable to get any video from my Hauppauge PVR250. I opened a terminal and saw the Brooktree BTTV drivers loaded, specifically BT878. In the ‘dmesg’ there was basically nothing about the ivtv drivers except that they tried to load. They were loaded, but not in use.

I fought with it for a few hours before I thought “Well, if it insists on being a Bt878 let’s see what it does”. I reran Mythtvsetup and instead of using IVTV, I used V4L with /dev/video0. Viola, it worked. Granted, I have no hardware acceleration so the poor little machine was sputtering and skipping, but I had full-screen video that I could pause/play/rewind/etc.

I still can’t figure out why this PVR-250 says it’s a Brooktree. Even the lspci (I’ll post it here tonight) shows it as a Brooktree Video Capture card, made by Hauppauge. Tonight I’m going to try the new Mythdora 2.32 and see if that helps, and I’m also going to verify that my card is in fact a PVR-250. An email I sent to the IVTV Mailing List yielded a few responses that perhaps I don’t really have a PVR-250, but a Brooktree card. I’ll update this post tonight with the details of the lspci command, just for completeness.

So, I made progress but not entirely in the way I wanted.

Update: 6:45pm
Find the ‘lspci’ and ‘dmesg’ output after the link…

[tag:mythtv][tag:bttv][tag:hauppauge][tag:linux][tag:mythdora]

I saw this on Google Video today and couldn’t help but repost it. With things like this floating around, groping german politicians doesn’t see too far off.

[tag:video][tag:funny][tag:georgebush][tag:bloodysunday]

As a followup to a previous story, I just found a press release on Biomet’s Website entitled “Biomet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year-End Results, and Cash Dividend“. It has the following sad information:

So that’s it, Acumen is finished (At least with Biomet/EBI). Sorry hear it guys, I hope all you that got shafted in the “relocation” 2 years ago do ok.
[tag:biomet][tag:ebi][tag:acumen][tag:zkat]

I noticed the other day that I hadn’t updated my “Games” category in quite some time. So I’m here to fill you in on what’s been occupying my time as of late: Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I’m sure alot of you see that and go “Don’t you mean Oblivion?” No, I mean Morrowind. First off, I’m not sure my rig could handle Oblivion without some (more) upgrades. Second, from the folks I know who have played both, it seems Morrowind is the favored choice between the two. Finally, a quick trip to your local Target and $20 can hook you up with the “Game of the Year” Edition that comes with both the Tribunal and Bloodmoon expansions.

So a few weeks ago I rolled up a Redguard Crusader and took about cleansing the surface of Vvardenfell. I played the game briefly in college, but never really got around to figuring out much, so the game has been pretty much brand new to me. I’ve already made it up to level 29, have just over a half-mil in the bank, and have made Guildmaster of the Fighter’s Guild. The game is engrossing with a great storyline, and the world is simply massive. Even with the weeks I’ve spent playing it I’ve only uncovered probably somewhere around 20% of the map, and only about 50% of that is really explored.

My one complaint has been the graphics. For a game that came out in 2002 the graphics were good, but by today’s standards they’re lacking. Even at full-resolution (1152×864) with antialiasing turned on and every other bell and whistle I can find, they’re just not very impressive. Not that they really need to be, but it was one small lacking detail. But, the mod community is still very-much active with Morrowind and they’ve come up with a few solutions:

1. Shadows & Light Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 – complete texture replacements for most of the textures used in the major cities. Adds an insane amount of detail to the buildings.
2. NPC Replace – replaces the face & hair textures for pretty much all the NPC’s, making them look much more lifelike.
3. Better Bodies – what NPC replace does for heads, this does for everything else. Full replacement meshes with improved poly-counts for every race in the game!

Screenshots don’t do the differences justice, but I thought I had to try. Sadly, I installed the mods before I had any screenshots and now I can’t find any good way to roll-back to before (not that I really want to). Thanks to GameSpy I was able to grab a few screenshots and try my best to replicate them with my mod-ed version.

Before	After

The difference is amazing. These three mods really go a long ways toward making Morrowind look like it was released in 2006. So if you still have it laying around, I highly recommend you load it up and then mod it up. It’s still a great game and I’m looking forward to several more weeks of enjoyment from it.
[tag:elderscrolls][tag:game][tag:morrowind][tag:mod]

Last night was the return of SciFi friday, with the premiere of Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis.

I would love to say I saw them and they were awesome, but alas I can’t.  Due to “unforseen equipment failure”, Entergy had the power down until almost 11:00 last night, so I missed the first half of SG1.  But even when the power was restored and I got to see them, I’m sorry to say they just weren’t all that good.  On SG1 they setup the Ori in our galaxy, leaving us soundly trounced and licking our wounds.  On Atlantis they managed to save our galaxy from an additional invasion (2 for 1 special at the galactic ass-whoopin buffet apparently) at the cost of 1 intergalactic battlecruiser.  Basically, it was the same-old same-old, “Oh no we’re gonna get invaded”, “Oh no we’re gonna die but we’re gonna take them with us first!”, “Oh wow, how did we survive that?”.  The show really seems to have lost something since Richard Dean Anderson left, and it’s hard to see Atlantis as anything other than SG1 with a Search-and-replace on all the characters.  Hopefully they just had a weak season premiere and they’ll get better as the season goes on.

Although Friday nights are back, what I’m really looking forward to seeing is the new SciFi tuesday.  They’ve aquired showtime’s Dead Like Me, which even though I’ve only seen one episode I’m really looking forward to.  They’re also backing it up with the new Eureka, which looks like it could be alot of fun.  So I suspect I’m going to start slowly shifting away from Friday Scifi towards Tuesday Scifi, at least until Battlestar Galactica comes back. (Speaking of which, there’s supposed to be a preview of the new season’s BSG during the premiere of Eureka this Tuesday, set your calendars/TIVO’s).
[tag:tv][tag:scifi][tag:stargate]

Yesterday I had my first.. well, disappointment in Python. Let me explain.

I have some data from a researcher that is written in a very simple ASCII format. On each line I have X,Y,Z particle location, U,V,W particle velocity, and a few other paramters. They are all space separated, and I just needed to load them into a VTK file so I could look at them with other code. The datasets, however, are pretty large (20 million lines in the file = 20 million particles). The easiest thing to do seemed to be to use my new VTK Python code and see how it went.

Without too much trouble I threw together some quick Python code to do the following

1. Initialize & Open the file
2. Read the line & split it into the parts
3. Add a “vtkVertex” to the “vtkPolyData” at the desired location.
4. Convert the UVW Velocity to its cylindrical coordinate Theta & R
5. Save the Theta & R
6. Repeat 2-5 for every line in the file
7. Combine them all into a single vtkPolyData
8. Write the results to Disk in a Legacy VTK file.

I had the code written and debugged in about 10 minutes. Then I started to notice something.
Note: This story is broken into multiple pages because of it’s length.
[tag:python][tag:vtk][tag:performance][tag:comparison][tag:programming]