Grind has a new and kinda REAL address! (c;
Now I can resume bitching! (c:
Today I got fired.
I’ve been quiet here because all my posting would be to do with bitching about the very company that currently hosts this page.
Lucky I (finally) realised I have another, off site, avenue of venting at my fingertips.
I keep on visiting here and thinking I should post something.
Unfortunately I don’t really have anything to say. My life isn’t incredibly exciting or anything, I mean yesterday consisted of neighbours alarms going off, going to work, going to the gym, eating too much chocolate and then sitting at my computer and chatting.
But the dilemma I have is I feel I really should add something to the site. Maybe it’s because I feel I need to be entertaining for the reluctant few that read this out of some kind of twisted obligation, maybe it’s because I desperately want to be entertaining… but when I don’t have anything of substance to say, is it all right to just waffle on and waste your time with inane drivel?
I didn’t really leave you with much of a choice there, did I?
@_; – Bored!
If I said I had a great weekend would that make me a complete and utter shallow bastard? It sure as hell would make me feel like one.
Curse life and it’s lack of foresight and planning.
This afternoon I was getting ready to go out whistling “It’s my Life” (the good No Doubt version) to myself and I was in a jolly good mood, I then realised what I was doing and what mood I was in.
I don’t feel as much of a c*nt because 10 seconds later I was dabbing my eyes.
I guess you have take the highs and the lows as they come. Granddad certainly wouldn’t begrudge me a happy weekend and all my great friends certainly helped me achieve some semblance of that. I still miss him though.
Yesterday at approximately 23:15 my time one of the best men I knew passed away peacefully in his sleep. His generosity, warm heart and wicked sense of humour will be sorely missed, but some solace can be taken in the fact that he now joins his wife of 60’ish-odd years who passed away on Anzac day last year.
He will be remembered fondly by all who knew him, and is survived by three children and six grandchildren, one of which is me.
R.I.P. Granddad.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . and happy birthday to me.
RPoL’s been extremely hard on the server it shares, utilising quite a bit of the CPU (and I’d guess other resources).
I’ve been thinking that I should probably move off Berkeley DB, so I decided to port the user database to a mySQL one. I then ran some benchmark tests to see how much better one was from the other;
Benchmark: timing 1 iterations of 1 mySQL, 2 Berkeley... 1 mySQL: 5 wallclock secs ( 2.10 usr + 0.30 sys = 2.40 CPU) @ 0.42/s 2 Berkeley: 1 wallclock secs ( 0.67 usr + 0.23 sys = 0.90 CPU) @ 1.11/s
Both benchmarks read in 10,000 random user DB entries one by one, with Berkeley DB showing it’s some 5 times faster…
So now my current thought is along the lines of the fact that each game has it’s own lil Berkeley DB for the public threads in it, and another for the private threads… and then one per user in the game for their private threads. Each of these lil DB’s is its own file, so maybe it’s all the file opening and closing… perhaps mySQL would come into it’s own when it’s just one open DB with the above mentioned thread stuff in a table each.
Why can’t some DB expert see my plight and decide I’m in need of rescuing?!
I shall now commence the beating of my head against a wall.
We’ve always known you should keep small children away from me, but here’s an e-mail I just received…
I’m writing on behalf of Sir Apple Strudle, GM of Strawberry Flan, who has been somehow blocked from accessing RPOL.NET from China. Apple is on the last few months of teaching English in Shanghai. Access was blocked approximately two weeks ago. What we’re trying to determine is whether there was some change on your end that might have resulted in this blocked access. China’s firewall restrictions are what originally recommended moving our game to your site from 2d10, which was also blocked. Any thoughts or suggestions on how we might proceed would be greatly appreciated.
Names have been changed to protect the oppressed.
And here I was thinking China would dig my totalatarian dictatorship gig!
elSpike watches The Bold and the Beautiful when MsPackman has it on in the afternoon.
@_; – Even I wouldn’t stoop that low!
6:30pm I was napping on the study floor, I kid you not. Bed probably would have been a more comfortable choice, however if I’d done that I would not have made my 7:30 squash game. Setting an alarm is just way too complicated.
So now it’s 1:30am, and of course I’m awake. I knew this would happen, ready to fall asleep on my feet in the afternoon, wide awake at night. It’s part of being a techie I believe, but really, I don’t enjoy it overly much.
It was Australia Day on Monday. A day of national pride, where we can all get together and celebrate our Australian-ness and what makes us and our Island/Continent so damn excellent. In Western Australia this all comes to a head at 8pm when we have the fireworks over the river, and event watched by pretty much everyone in one for or another.
However over one thousand individuals thought rather than feel proud and stand tall it’d be a better idea to have a mass brawl while another group thought it’d be jolly great sporting fun (wot wot) to throw beer bottles at each other (as IronSite asked me, how does a fight involving throwing bottles start?). So rather than national pride, I’m now filled with a deep sense of shame and embarrassment on the behalf of those involved, because I’m sure they don’t have the decency to have any such notions.
Lastly, the more I work on RPoL the more I get the feeling it needs a proper database administrator, a proper web developer, a proper coder and a proper graphic designer. I don’t fit into any of those categories.
I’ve been working on a few things on the site of late, but this one has annoyed me the most.
While looking at changing to XHTML I discovered/realised that my document type at the start of the HTML was actually incomplete, currently saying;
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
When what I really need is
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
Though what I had before was valid, the lack of ‘dtd’ file puts most browsers into ‘quirks’ mode. So I added it in, surely the full thing would be better, hopefully more uniform rendering across all browsers.
So I added it in. Now every single table cell defaults to centre aligned, rather than left. I blamed this on XHTML at first, but then I realised it did it with HTML when I specified the dtd.
So I can either go through and tell every table cell with no alignment that it’s now left, but there’s a lot of them, and apparently that’s not what you do any more, you use style sheets.
So I can set the default in the style sheet so the cells are left aligned, easy. Except for the small fact that the style sheet takes precedence over the “align=’center'” and “align=’right'” I had to align the cells, so they’re all left aligned regardless.
I can, of course, make two special style sheet cases to align the text to the centre and right, and (having called these ‘centre’ and ‘right’) go through and change all instances of “align=’center'” and “align=’right'” to “class=’center'” and “class=’right'”, respectively. However I cannot do a global search and replace because “align=’center'” and “align=’right'” occur in more than just table cells.
Anyone want a job of manual search and replace?
And did I mention that the nice nifty CSS command to hide the side scrollbar (unless it’s needed) no longer works when I specify the dtd? I’m really beginning to question if it’s worth it.
