Time-stamp: <2014-01-04 12:32:30 (bm3719)>
* Project List (2013)
** Books: Computer Science/Programming
*** DONE Let Over Lambda
- State "DONE" [2013-01-01 Tue 22:06]
- State "STARTED" [2012-07-18 Wed 08:15]
An advanced topics Lisp book, mostly about macros and closures. I was going to
put this off until the end of my Lisp self-education, but it was the best
portable hard copy book I had lying around, so I was reading it on the Metro
since I had a commute for awhile.
Gets into a lot more advanced detail than is useful for me at the moment, like
low level optimizations. If I come back to writing CL regularly, I'll reread
this. This did give me a few new macro usage ideas and I'll probably use the
custom hygienic macro definition macro.
*** DONE Idiomatic Expressions in C (paper)
- State "DONE" [2013-01-11 Fri 02:06]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-11 Fri 01:24]
Knowing common C idioms is useful for reading others' code and improving my
own.
Useful info. Turns out I didn't know most of these. Will need to keep these
in mind, particularly the malloc/sizeof assignment and struct initialization
idioms.
*** DONE Pregel: A System for Large-Scale Graph Processing (paper)
- State "DONE" [2013-01-12 Sat 11:26]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-12 Sat 01:19]
I may have some ideas about graph algorithms applied to distributed computing,
which is a large part of my job. Pregel established the base concepts used in
Apache Hama and the now defunct GoldenOrb (replaced by Giraph).
This isn't that complicated. Figure 2 pretty much illustrates how an algorithm
would execute. Also to keep in mind are aggregators and topology mutation.
*** DONE How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning With Python
- State "DONE" [2013-01-12 Sat 12:55]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-12 Sat 10:50]
Was hoping this could be a refresher of some basics and a good chance to make
sure I've internalized everything. However, I read some of this and it's
pretty lame. The CS here is minimal and it's mainly a Python tutorial.
http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english2e/
Plowed through this pretty quick and ignored the GASP library stuff. Not
bothering to do the exercises since they're all pretty trivial. I'm also not
crazy about the random mashing of CS and SE concepts.
I did learn a couple things:
- ` * 4' initializes a list of zeros of length 4.
- `[1, 2] * 2' evaluates to [1, 2, 1, 2].
*** DONE Fast unfolding of communities in large networks (paper)
- State "DONE" [2013-01-24 Thu 10:58]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-24 Thu 10:03]
Work-related reading as a prerequisite to implementing the Louvain algorithm on
Giraph. Hopefully will provide some context on community detection in general
too. http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0476
Not too complicated on its surface. Doing this in Giraph might be a challenge
though, since it's not immediately obvious to me how this algorithm would
decompose/map into Giraph tasks (or whatever they're called). I'm also not
sure what's meant here by the "modularity" of nodes in communities.
*** DONE Yet Another Haskell Tutorial
- State "DONE" [2013-04-05 Fri 10:02]
- State "STARTED" [2012-01-04 Wed 12:26]
Already did the exercises for a lot of this, but it was years ago, so starting
over. This is really a good tutorial (with a few minor exceptions).
Since a lot of content is still missing from this (looks like it's not done
yet), I'll have to supplement this with some other Haskell text afterwards, but
that was my plan anyway. There's some things I'm not sure about though, like
the CPS style is wrong, I think. Code in practice/haskell/yaht.
I'm skipping the final chapter, but I may come back and do it later.
*** DONE Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets (paper)
- State "DONE" [2013-04-08 Mon 10:47]
- State "STARTED" [2013-04-05 Fri 14:47]
Probably the next step (or maybe fad) post-MR.
http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html
Notes:
- Dremel uses a columnar data model. Records are either atomic values or
records that contain some number of required or optional fields. Some fields
can be repeated, meaning they can many entries.
- A dotted notation is used for references records/fields.
- Repetition levels are necessary to disambiguate columns. They are indexed by
"at what repeated field in the field's path the value has repeated." NULLs
are inserted when a repeated field doesn't include another field that
contains the same required field. The definition levels inform how many
potentially undefined fields in that path are actually defined. A bit
confusing, but can be worked out with some effort, though in practice it
requires extra info.
- The efficiency is gained in the fact that record assembly only occurs upon
needed fields. These are reconstructed using FSMs.
Columnar data models seem to have a serious downside in visually inspecting
what you actually have in your data. Algorithms like those provided in the
appendices are needed to do anything in such a system. This complexity can be
outweighed in performance, particularly in sparse datasets with lots of fields.
*** CANCELED Programming in Scala
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:06]
Chose this as my primary Scala text, mostly because it's written by the
language designers.
Was going to read this for work, but since I resigned, I'll be skipping Scala.
From what I've learned about it so far, it's an okay language, but lacks the
elegance of Clojure. Of course, I'd still rather write in Scala than Java.
*** CANCELED Cascalog for the Impatient
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:08]
Not done yet. Check back in a couple weeks.
https://github.com/Quantisan/Impatient/
Resigning my job means I no longer need this.
*** CANCELED Computer Science from the Bottom Up
- State "CANCELED" [2013-07-27 Sat 18:17]
- State "STARTED" [2013-07-15 Mon 12:03]
An online textbook.
*** DONE What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic (paper)
- State "DONE" [2013-11-22 Fri 23:55]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-21 Thu 23:29]
From a summary: "Explains overflow, underflow, what denormalized numbers are,
what NaNs are, what inf is, and all the things these imply. After reading this
paper, you'll know why a == a + 1.0 can be true, why a==a can be false, why
running your code on two different machines can give you two different answers,
why summing numbers in a different order can give you an order of magnitude
difference and all the wacky stuff that happens in the world of mapping an
uncountably infinite set of numbers onto a countably finite set."
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html
Notes:
- The IEEE floating-point standards provides algorithms for basic math
operations with answers that implementations are required to match. If
designing systems, it'd be a good idea to check against them.
- 0.1 base 10 cannot be exactly stored in base 2 (1.10011001... * 2^-4).
- Various methods for rewriting algorithms exist to accommodate rounding
errors. An example is given here.
- The IEEE floating-point standards are IEEE 754 for binary and IEEE 854 for
base 2 and 10.
- Base 2 implementations benefit from tighter error analyses, as base is a
factor in relative error.
- NaN is represented by floating-point numbers with exponent max(e) + 1 and
nonzero significands, zero by exponent min(e) - 1 and zero significand.
Practically, the issues here are indeed things a programmer or computer
scientist should always be keeping in mind, as floating-point computation can
introduce small "relative errors" that cascade to "catastrophic" value errors.
For language design, obviously try to meet the IEEE standards (probably not a
problem if there's a standard host language).
** Books: Math
*** CANCELED The R Book
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:10]
Read enough of this to at least get competent in the R language. Will skip
this if I don't get to it by retirement.
This was a work-related reading task. I don't intend to actually use R on my
own, as there's really very little about it that appeals to me.
*** CANCELED Introductory Statistics with R
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:10]
Was going to read separate books on statistics and R, but this combines the two
conveniently.
*** CANCELED Detection of Abrupt Changes: Theory and Application
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:10]
It's possible I might want to revisit this concept later for one of my startup
ideas. Until then, canceling.
*** CANCELED Hierarchical Edge Bundles (paper)
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:11]
http://www.win.tue.nl/~dholten/papers/bundles_infovis.pdf
** Books: General Non-fiction
*** DONE A Brief History of Tape (paper)
- State "DONE" [2013-01-13 Sun 02:51]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-13 Sun 02:40]
A white paper by Exabyte on tape storage.
Mostly just an advertisement and therefore useless.
*** DONE BMP4
- State "DONE" [2013-01-28 Mon 02:20]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-28 Mon 01:47]
Full title: BMP4: Best Management Practices for Protection against Somalia
Based Piracy. Might get some ideas from this for games or maybe at least be
mildly entertained.
Not really much here. However, pirate operations similar to this would be
better in space games than the way they currently are, though I think the idea
is a bit overused.
*** DONE Lyman Reloading Handbook (44th Ed.)
- State "DONE" [2013-02-18 Mon 16:07]
- State "STARTED" [2013-02-18 Mon 13:00]
I'm considering getting into handloading as a hobby once I move out of DC. The
main reason is to be able to use some esoteric cartridges, as there are few
good off the shelf rifle-like cartridges optimized for short barrels. It also
looks like it might be fun. However, I'm a bit put off by how much stuff I'd
have to own to do this. So, I haven't decided yet, but reading the informative
(non-chart data) chapters of this should give me an insight into the effort
involved and is just good info to know. If I do decide to get into this, get
an updated version of this book.
An okay read, but actually didn't learn much since I'm somewhat familiar with
the basics. This copy is very old, so it doesn't even include most of the
newer cartridges I'd be interested in.
*** DONE North Korea's Military Threat
- State "DONE" [2013-03-11 Mon 02:06]
- State "STARTED" [2013-03-08 Fri 23:20]
A lengthy report by the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute. Written around
the time I was tracking this stuff at work, but since it's mostly about
conventional forces, not much is likely to have changed since then.
About as informative as possible on this topic and somewhat educational.
*** DONE Technological Slavery: The Road to Revolution
- State "DONE" [2013-03-14 Thu 00:56]
- State "STARTED" [2013-03-06 Wed 18:11]
A collection of writings by Ted Kaczynksi, including an update to Industrial
Society and its Future.
There's only a few other interesting post-manifesto points in here. Kaczynksi
also seems to repeat himself often and engage in a lot of rather uninteresting
rambling. A lot of this reads like an internal dialog within the
anarcho-primitivism movement, which of course isn't something I care about.
Overall, I'm unimpressed and more convinced than ever that my counter-arguments
to anarcho-primitivism are correct.
*** DONE How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day
- State "DONE" [2013-03-21 Thu 23:06]
- State "STARTED" [2013-03-18 Mon 10:23]
An essay from 1910 on how to best use your time.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2274/2274-h/2274-h.htm
Also read some of the cited works, like Hazlitt's "On Poetry in General".
There's some good content here and I seem to have independently discovered most
of these ideas. Some notes:
- I've lately started to feel more in agreement with something pointed out here
about fiction: "[...] the reason is that bad novels ought not to be read, and
that good novels never demand any appreciable mental application on the part
of the reader."
- I'm not sure I agree with his later assertion about there being a mental
benefit to reading classic literature that is difficult to parse or is
written in verse. If I'm going to really struggle reading, I'd rather it be
to learn something useful. However, I've queued his main suggestion of
reading Aurora Leigh in an attempt to find out for sure. I suspect this
would be more true for one developing reading skills.
- I like his idea about training your brain to focus better by forcing it to
stay on topic for set periods of time. My approach here has been to remove
distractions, but this could be a useful method when that's not possible.
- Includes a reminder that quantity of books read is unimportant. He suggests
45 min of reflection for every 90 min of reading, which I think is a bit
too much on average.
*** CANCELED The Road to Reality
- State "CANCELED" [2013-04-05 Fri 14:23]
- State "STARTED" [2013-03-27 Wed 12:38]
A Roger Penrose book that presents the fundamental laws of the universe, with
much mathematical information intact. I'm mainly interested in this for the
first section, which is intended to get the reader at least acquainted enough
with the relevant math to understand the physics, but I'll read the rest of it
too (minus the stuff on twistor theory, which I already read about in The
Emporer's New Mind and am at least tentatively dismissing).
This book doesn't meet its stated goal of being for intelligent
non-professionals. Even being a layman of somewhat above average mathematical
skill, I found much of this impenetrable. While this has helped identify some
shortcomings, a better approach could have managed the state of the reader's
learning as well. I would've gladly exchanged scope for a more carefully built
foundation. I'm stopping a few chapters in and will revisit this later once
I've done more remedial work on my own, as plowing ahead with it in confusion
isn't an optimal use of energy.
*** DONE FreeBSD 9.1 Handbook
- State "DONE" [2013-04-05 Fri 14:26]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-28 Mon 11:02]
I've read older versions of this, but want to read the current version since
I'm upgrading to 9.1 and want to use the current best sysadmin practices.
Notes:
- chflags can do things like set a flag on a file such that it cannot be
deleted. This might have its uses, but I'm a bit wary of having to manage
extra metadata on files.
- Consider different settings for various filesystems. For example, I might
want /home to be nosuid. noexec could also be useful (like for /tmp or
/var). Full options are in mount(8).
Most of this is the same, but a lot of sysadmin stuff has been improved.
Created separate tasks for the replacement utilities and documented stuff in my
9.1 setup document. Read most of this, but skipped much of the stuff I don't
use, since the main point of this task is now achieved.
*** DONE Winchester, VA City Code
- State "DONE" [2013-07-31 Wed 03:30]
- State "STARTED" [2013-07-29 Mon 13:31]
Read the city code document available on the city government site. Will skip
some of the parts that don't apply to me, since it's pretty long.
Property tax in the surrounding Frederick county is 0.51%, versus the
Winchester rate of 0.95%.
This is less offensive of a city code than other places I've lived, but it's
still beyond my tolerance level. I definitely won't be buying any property
within city limits, at least to actually live in, mainly due to the standard
assortment of required responsibilities (lawn care, snow removal, taxes).
However, there are some very minor benefits offered by the city for registered
technology businesses that may be worth exploring if the occasion arises.
*** DONE Arrest-Proof Yourself
- State "DONE" [2013-08-25 Sun 15:13]
- State "STARTED" [2013-08-24 Sat 13:39]
A popular guide on how to avoid police-related legal problems. Doesn't look
like great literature, but could have useful information.
Has some off-topic politicking, but also some pragmatic info too. Worth
reading, I'd say.
*** DONE Arthur Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms
- State "DONE" [2013-09-03 Tue 14:00]
- State "STARTED" [2013-08-18 Sun 16:29]
Doesn't look promising, but I promised I'd give it a chance.
There's a few okay essays in here, but I've read better ones on every topic
covered. Those closer to erudite philosophy are often nonsensical
navel-gazing.
*** CANCELED Essays of Michel de Montaigne
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-20 Wed 21:50]
Essays about the nature of man. Supposedly one of the more significant
humanist works. Considered reading this for awhile, hesitating mainly due to
Montaigne's Catholicism. I'm only tentatively forgiving it due to him being
from the 16th century.
Read enough to know that reading even a subset of these would be a waste of
time. Instead, I read a summary of highlights, confirming my findings that
these are just a collection of opinion pieces with not particularly interesting
conclusions.
** Books: Fiction
*** DONE Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- State "DONE" [2013-01-01 Tue 23:00]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-01 Tue 11:30]
I'd long been aware of this popular philosophy book, but decided to pass on it
until recommended enthusiastically by a coworker.
Quitting this about a third in. There's some serious problems here:
- The existence of infinite hypotheses doesn't imply the scientific method is
flawed. It just means we need external criteria for prioritizing them. This
already happens.
- This book is part autobiography, and a very boring one at that. Maybe this
is okay to help a general audience relate, but I'd rather just read the main
point, which I later did on Wikipedia.
- Like a typical philosophic tract, this is full of unreasoned assertions.
- Lots of Eastern mysticism nonsense.
 Reading it
without its verbal fluff on Wikipedia illustrates this clearly.
This isn't all bad, but the okay parts are mostly just self-help and
observations on human behavior.
*** DONE The Wreck of the Rivers of Stars
- State "DONE" [2013-02-28 Thu 21:41]
- State "STARTED" [2013-02-01 Fri 11:49]
Another Michael Flynn hard scifi novel.
This is more of a character study -- something I've never seen a good example
of. The scifi elements here are okay, but are too sparse to maintain my
interest. Quit about 12% in and just read the ending, which wasn't that great
either.
*** DONE In the Country of the Blind
- State "DONE" [2013-03-21 Thu 00:42]
- State "STARTED" [2013-02-28 Thu 21:45]
Another Michael Flynn novel.
There's some decent writing here, but it's interspersed between two types of
really crappy writing. One is predictable, trope-fest action scenes. The
other is just mindless filler about mundane things that have no relation to the
story (likely backfilled in to pad the length). Also, despite being well
researched in some areas, really dumb errors are made in others (e.g.,
revolvers don't have safeties). I'd have preferred a little more believable
fictitious math too, as what's here isn't convincing.
*** DONE The Boat of a Million Years
- State "DONE" [2013-03-24 Sun 17:00]
- State "STARTED" [2013-03-21 Thu 23:08]
The only other Poul Anderson book which looks interesting.
I'd divide this book into two parts. One is the past, which is very well
researched and believable. After an awkward segue into the future, it turns
into a just standard hard scifi read. This was still okay, but nothing
special and could have benefited from more work.
*** DONE Yellow Blue Tibia
- State "DONE" [2013-03-26 Tue 01:38]
- State "STARTED" [2013-03-25 Mon 01:45]
A unique concept for an invasion novel.
Great setup in the first half, but somewhat loses it after that. A worthy
read, but short of great.
*** DONE Wil McCarthy short stories
- State "DONE" [2013-04-01 Mon 10:43]
- State "STARTED" [2013-03-31 Sun 23:25]
A hard scifi novelist recommended by /r/printSF. I had already tried reading
Bloom long ago though, and didn't like it.
- Boundary Condition: Okay.
- How the Bald Apes Saved Mass Crossing: Entertaining.
- Garbage Day: Not bad, but it seems the Queendom of Sol setting this takes
place in may only be interesting for character development and such. I'll
probably pass on it as a result.
- Heisenberg Elementary: Meh.
- The Technetium Rush: Crap.
I'll probably try one or two of his longer novels. He's capable of good
writing but occasionally chooses topics poorly, it seems.
*** DONE Wake
- State "DONE" [2013-04-05 Fri 02:18]
- State "STARTED" [2013-04-04 Thu 13:35]
A Robert Sawyer novel about an internet sentience.
Apparently the author is confused about what the difference is between the web
and the internet. Not a bad concept but ineptly executed. Will skip the rest
of this trilogy and all other works by this author (who apparently can't keep
his novels from turning into leftist political screeds).
*** DONE Blood Music
- State "DONE" [2013-04-09 Tue 14:15]
- State "STARTED" [2013-04-08 Mon 23:05]
Another nanotechnology scifi novel by the hit-or-miss Greg Bear. Hopefully
another good exploration of the potential for technology to change just about
everything (though in this case, it's supposedly apocalyptic). Bear's few
excellent works have been good enough for me to at least try anything that
sounds promising of his.
An excellent novel in almost every way. A thoroughly original concept (or at
least unique to me) and well-researched enough to be educational too. I'd say
its only minor weakness is including the concept of observation creating
reality at the macro scale.
*** DONE Ken Liu short stories
- State "DONE" [2013-04-11 Thu 15:41]
- State "STARTED" [2013-04-09 Tue 14:52]
A former programmer that occasionally includes programming topics in his
works. http://kenliu.name/stories/
Read all the free ones. Most were either just okay or crap, but these were
quite good:
- The mMod
- The Perfect Match
- The Paper Menagerie
Looking forward to what else is forthcoming here, so I'll check back again in a
few years and catch up on anything new.
*** DONE The Waste Land
- State "DONE" [2013-04-17 Wed 15:00]
- State "STARTED" [2013-04-15 Mon 14:33]
The T.S. Eliot poem often assigned for analysis by English majors. Cited by
Wikipedia as being called "one of the most important poems of the 20th
century."
Very Ezra Pound-like. Needlessly and intentionally obscurantist, which
explains its popularity for keeping students busy. There is some okay imagery
in a few parts here, I guess, but if the goal is to transfer information of
some kind to the reader, it fails miserably. Also noticed this is where the
title for the novel "Consider Phlebas" came from. Didn't get anything out of
reading this.
*** DONE Darwin series
- State "DONE" [2013-04-27 Sat 20:53]
- State "STARTED" [2013-04-13 Sat 23:22]
A biology hard scifi novel series by Greg Bear.
- Darwin's Radio: Contains some well researched and even somewhat educational
science. Apart from that, this is mostly not that great. None of the
characters are interesting enough for a character-centric story like this.
Making matters worse, dull minutia of their everyday lives is described in
great detail (probably just as page count fodder). Actual plot progression
is incredibly slow partly as a result, but also because just not that much
interesting stuff happens.
- Darwin's Children: Has all the problems of the former text, but worse. Has
some annoying political commentary. I regret reading this series.
*** DONE Aurora Leigh
- State "DONE" [2013-05-01 Wed 14:37]
- State "STARTED" [2013-04-30 Tue 05:32]
Recommended in How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day as an example of a work
which, when read, develops ones mental faculties -- unlike normal good fiction:
"There is an infinitely finer English novel, written by a woman, than anything
by George Eliot or the Brontes, or even Jane Austen, which perhaps you have not
read. Its title is "Aurora Leigh," and its author E.B. Browning. It happens to
be written in verse, and to contain a considerable amount of genuinely fine
poetry. Decide to read that book through, even if you die for it. Forget that
it is fine poetry. Read it simply for the story and the social ideas. And when
you have done, ask yourself honestly whether you still dislike poetry."
I've been meaning to give an epic novel/poem like this a new try, so this is as
good as any. If I like this writing style, I may try Paradise Lost, which the
author of the essay suggests next. If I find this a waste of time, I can
safely get rid of several printed books in the same genre.
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barrett/aurora/aurora.html
Excellent writing which would be far more digestible in prose form. Had to
quit early due to the actual content being conveyed being an uninteresting
emotional narrative of the "journey of life" variety. This is great at what
it's trying to do, but I've already experienced such chronicles too many times
for one so fundamentally unremarkable to appeal to me. On the contrary to the
cited essay, this is a perfect example of why to avoid female-authored classic
literature, particularly that from England.
As for the original goal of reading this, I guess you could use intentionally
abstruse text to hone your information extraction skill, but why not apply that
effort reading something both challenging to understand and useful (or
entertaining)? The only secondary benefit in this example is expanding one's
vocabulary or perhaps appreciation of well-crafted text. So, I certainly don't
think there's anything inherently beneficial about poetry, particularly given
it's many downsides as a form of communication. I also still think the
pinnacle of writing to be the judicious application of finely honed authoring
skills -- that is, its application in a manner that substantively adds to the
content. Here, the talent is wasted, bloating an otherwise insubstantial
narrative with a profusion of sentimental blather.
*** DONE Wool (1-6)
- State "DONE" [2013-06-22 Sat 01:42]
- State "STARTED" [2013-06-15 Sat 03:04]
A modern scifi novel by Hugh Howey.
Great setting and reasonably good stories for the most part. Up to Book 9 will
be available eventually, so I'll check back later when the last is released.
*** DONE The Last Theorem
- State "DONE" [2013-07-13 Sat 01:37]
- State "STARTED" [2013-07-11 Thu 03:58]
The supposedly not so great final Arthur C. Clarke novel.
Borderline bailing quality, but finished it anyway. Main problems: Lots of
pointless filler, forgettable characters, and not that creative scifi.
*** DONE Heart of the Comet
- State "DONE" [2013-07-28 Sun 00:43]
- State "STARTED" [2013-07-13 Sat 02:16]
A hard-scifi novel about an expedition to a comet.
Overall a good read. A fair amount of well-researched science, a plausible
back story, decent (but not great) writing, and a mostly believable plot.
Probably the weakest link was the main characters, who were a bit dull to read
so much character development about. I would have also been happy to pass on
the love triangle and other romance.
*** CANCELED The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- State "CANCELED" [2013-07-28 Sun 19:07]
- State "STARTED" [2013-07-28 Sun 16:53]
Don't have high hopes for this, but I'll give it a try before tossing my
hardcopy of it.
 Quitting after a few chapters.
*** DONE Wolfbane
- State "DONE" [2013-08-02 Fri 10:39]
- State "STARTED" [2013-07-31 Wed 16:47]
A rogue planet-related semi-hard scifi novel.
Okay for a novel from the 1950s. Modernizing this and removing the space
adventure elements would make it more readable.
*** DONE Alongside Night
- State "DONE" [2013-08-05 Mon 00:56]
- State "STARTED" [2013-08-02 Fri 14:59]
An introduction to agorism in novel form, which preceded the full manifesto on
it.
Okay in some respects, but a bit too much of an adventure story for me. Plus,
though I generally appreciate agorism, I'm certainly not foolish enough to find
plausible a massive underground of like-minded agorists.
*** DONE Art & Lies
- State "DONE" [2013-08-18 Sun 06:26]
- State "STARTED" [2013-08-18 Sun 01:24]
A book that was popular amongst gender theory types and feminists when I was in
college.
Wieners and lady-bits everywhere. There is some good writing in here, and if
the author was only not obsessed with gender, art, and fag0rts, she'd probably
be capable of productive output.
*** DONE Mass Effect series
- State "DONE" [2013-10-10 Thu 01:38]
- State "STARTED" [2013-08-16 Fri 01:51]
Only planning on the first 3, as the last one supposedly is terrible. I like
the Mass Effect mythos, and decided to try this series for that reason. I
don't have high expectations though.
- Revelation: A straight action novel. Short and shallow.
- Ascension: Slightly better than the first.
- Retribution: About the same as the second.
Typical dime novel scifi.
*** CANCELED Lord of Light
- State "CANCELED" [2013-10-10 Thu 07:10]
Supposedly the best of Zelazny, who some consider the best of fantasy authors.
I've also been a long time ZAngband player, though that probably shouldn't have
anything to do with whether or not to read this. This is tasked mainly to see
if fantasy fiction can appeal to me. If I'm bored here, I can probably safely
forget it.
 Like with Hesse's Siddhartha, Hinduism
ruins any novel it becomes a major factor in.
*** DONE Commonwealth Saga
- State "DONE" [2013-10-30 Wed 02:04]
- State "STARTED" [2013-10-11 Fri 14:59]
This series has potential since it's a space exploration saga that doesn't
primarily use space ships. I've suspected that interstellar travel (if
possible) may not necessarily require ships (though I also have other notions
that travel at all may not be something prioritized by such a civilization or
even that "civilization" should be assumed). This series is followed by the
"Void Trilogy", which I'll consider after finishing.
- Misspent Youth: Not officially part of this saga, but provides some of the
back-story on its universe. Skipping due to it being a completely
character-centric novel. Just read the Wikipedia entry plot summary.
- Pandora's Star: Very long, but filled with good content. There's some less
interesting stuff in here too (mostly about personal relationships), but the
good outweighs the bad. This does also include a fair amount of ship-based
space travel, but it's handled fairly well.
- Judas Unchained: Less well written than the first part. Too many fast-paced
action sequences and too much predictable trope-usage.
*** CANCELED Void Trilogy
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-04 Mon 14:39]
A followup series to the Commonwealth Saga (which was mostly decent), though
this appears not as good.
- The Dreaming Void:
- The Temporal Void:
- The Evolutionary Void:
Read enough of the first novel to know this is a classic example of "too far in
the future" syndrome. Gave up and read the plot summary and found I'm
apparently not missing anything interesting.
*** DONE VALIS
- State "DONE" [2013-11-05 Tue 14:32]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-04 Mon 15:13]
Read about a third long ago. While nothing interesting happened by the point
where I left off, the potential was there for that. Plus, I've been meaning to
finish at least one Philip K. Dick novel. This is the first of a trilogy, the
following books of which I may read if I like where this goes.
Starts off great, kind of turns to semi-crap by the end.
*** DONE Candide
- State "DONE" [2013-11-07 Thu 16:36]
- State "STARTED" [2013-09-06 Fri 03:19]
Voltaire's magnum opus. This is short, so it's a low cost dose of classic
literature. It being a refutation of Leibnizian optimism mildly appeals to me
too (though that's obviously not defensible these days anyway).
This disappointment just repeats the same thing over and over in various random
incarnations.
*** DONE Wool (7-9)
- State "DONE" [2013-11-08 Fri 01:08]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-05 Tue 17:45]
The final 3 books of this series.
Not perfect, but one of the few truly creative scifi series of recent history.
Will have to keep an eye out for more stuff from this author.
*** CANCELED Compleat Enchanter
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-08 Fri 07:44]
May cancel this as I cannot recall why I wanted to read it.

*** DONE Swann's Way
- State "DONE" [2013-11-09 Sat 13:31]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-08 Fri 09:16]
The first volume of "À la recherche du temps perdu" by Marcel Proust. Might
continue with the series if this seems worthwhile. This is referenced
constantly by the supposedly cultured. I'll give this a fair attempt and find
if the emperor is wearing anything.
Aimless ramblings. I really need to stop queuing up garbage like this.
*** DONE Rudy Rucker short stories
- State "DONE" [2013-11-11 Mon 05:20]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-08 Fri 09:37]
A hard scifi novelist recommended by /r/printSF. I'll try some of his novels
if these seem promising.
- The Third Bomb: Bleh.
- Tangiers Routines: Huh?
- The Man Who Ate Himself: Pretty good.
- Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch: Pretty good.
- Chu and the Nants: Okay, I guess.
- Colliding Branes: Not bad.
- Inside Out: Bleh.
- The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club: Okay, I guess.

While occasionally talented, this author's failings appear to be introducing
fantasy elements (transrealism), comedy that only sometimes works, and an
obsession with gays and drugs.
*** CANCELED Ubik
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-11 Mon 05:38]
A Phillip K. Dick novel. I may read this if VALIS turns out to be good. This
seemed the most promising of his bibliography.
Read a little and wasn't impressed. Skipping.
*** CANCELED Uplift series
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-14 Thu 03:26]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-13 Wed 03:43]
A hard scifi series by David Brin. Worth a try, though I'm a bit wary of the
galactic feudalism concept (which seems a bit uncreative).  Brin did co-author Heart of
the Comet, so maybe it'll be okay.
- Aficionado (short story): Dolphins...
- Sundiver: Quitting, since I'm not into SeaQuest fan fiction.
- Startide Rising:
- The Uplift War:
- Temptation (short story):
- Brightness Reef:
- Infinity's Shore:
- Heaven's Reach:
I just can't take dolphins seriously.
*** CANCELED Dhalgren
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-14 Thu 03:57]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-14 Thu 03:37]
Supposedly a quite dense and difficult hard scifi novel.
Not hard scifi (or even scifi at all) and only difficult due to intentional
obscurantism. I'll also cancel Ulysses as a result of disliking this writing
style, as it's a waste of time.
*** CANCELED Ulysses
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-14 Thu 03:58]
The most highly regarded James Joyce novel, this one supposedly perfecting his
"stream of consciousness" style of writing... or whatever. I'll know if it's
stupid pretty quickly, so it's a low cost attempt.
I'm now a non-believer in this style of writing mainly because:
- Deciphering it is considerable extra effort with no payoff over clear
writing.
- Its actual content is mundane garbage.
*** CANCELED The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-14 Thu 12:56]
Another /r/printSF recommendation. I'm a little wary of its religious theme,
as Dick apparently was a bit of a kook and I'm less interested in anything he's
authored now.
No more Dick for me.
*** DONE Anathem
- State "DONE" [2013-12-25 Wed 00:55]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-20 Wed 22:22]
Having read a few Stephenson books now, I'm not sure his writing style is for
me. I think I'll make this one my last real attempt at his stuff. This is
supposedly the best of his works, so if I can't stomach it, then I'll be
writing him off for good.
A thoroughly excellent book and well researched. A lot of thought went into
structuring this novel and it shows. I may give Cryptonomicon a try as a
result.
*** DONE Daemon series
- State "DONE" [2013-12-29 Sun 01:37]
- State "STARTED" [2013-12-25 Wed 02:01]
A promising looking two part hard scifi series about distributed AI. Highly
recommended by a former coworker.
- Daemon: Great concept, only okay execution. Problems include too much
action, unrealistically competent government employees (balanced somewhat by
their failure, but only when at odds with a much more competent force),
uninteresting characters, and a few (minor) technical errors. Still a decent
read overall.
- Freedom: More of the same, such that it might as well have been all the same
book.
*** DONE Dead Space: Martyr
- State "DONE" [2013-12-31 Tue 22:22]
- State "STARTED" [2013-12-29 Sun 03:22]
A prequel novel to the Dead Space game series. Not into the games, but the
lore still seems interesting enough to try this.
Not terrible, but also not good. There's currently one other non-graphic novel
in this mythos, called Catalyst, but I'll skip it. While this IP has some
creative aspects, most parts of it aren't very original.
** Technology and software
*** DONE Emacs scripts update
- State "DONE" [2013-01-13 Sun 01:45]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-13 Sun 00:24]
Time to go through all scripts and check for updates.
- pabbrev.el: 2.0 -> 3.0.
- clojure-mode: git pull.
- haskell-mode: Switched to the GitHub version.
- helm: git pull.
- ruby-mode: svn up.
- Rhino: Manually updated to 1.7R4 on Windows.
- ESS: Manually updated to 12.09-2.
- egg: git pull.
- redo+.el: Manually updated (no real change).
- htmlize.el: Manually updated.
Notes:
- Disabled autoloading custom nXhtml install. nXhtml is included in Emacs now,
but it looks like MuMaMo isn't. However, I'm okay with that for the time
being since startup is way faster without it, but if I ever need to do any
web development, I should probably go back to the way it was.
Re-byte-compiled everything at top-level ~/.emacs.d. Putting off updating
SLIME until the nrepl.el task is done.
*** DONE rebuild gaming/VM rig
- State "DONE" [2013-01-26 Sat 16:20]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-23 Wed 01:31]
This is just a general upgrade of MB, CPU, RAM, vidcard, disk, and OS.
Switching OS to Win7 Home Premium (the downside is a 16GB RAM max, but has way
less overhead overall). This is part of my ultimate computing setup task and
provided nothing breaks, I'll be keeping this setup for at least 6 years and
hopefully longer if I keep it off when not using it. I'll keep the fanless
vidcard in case the new one (which has a fan) dies.
This came together nicely and the performance improvements were worth it. The
only minor downsides were that none of the 2.5"->3.5" adapters I had fit the
case's HDD slots and apparently MBs don't come with IDE adapters anymore so I
had to also buy a SATA DVD drive for $17.
*** DONE pkgng
- State "DONE" [2013-01-28 Mon 21:14]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-28 Mon 20:35]
This is an alternative to the pkg_tools on FreeBSD. Like those, it only deals
with binary packages and overall package management. Using this has a few
benefits as I see it:
- Consolidates all the pkg_tools commands under one command.
- Includes built in security auditing, negating the need for portaudit.
- It's probably what will become standard as 10.x defaults to this (I think).
Usage notes:
- Bootstrap the pkg system by running `/usr/sbin/pkg' as root.
- Convert the pkg_tools database to pkgng by running `pkg2ng'.
- Delete /var/db/pkg.bak, if it exists.
- Edit /etc/make.conf and add (with a tab before yes): WITH_PKGNG= yes
Like pkg_tools, I won't install anything through this.
*** DONE portsnap
- State "DONE" [2013-01-28 Mon 21:55]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-28 Mon 21:15]
This replaces cvsup, which is now deprecated. Redo all cvsup scripts.
portsnap is included in the base install.
Usage notes:
- For initial setup, run `portsnap fetch' then `portsnap extract'.
- To update ports, run `portsnap update'.
Now I can safely forget about cvsup.
*** DONE freebsd-update
- State "DONE" [2013-01-28 Mon 22:15]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-28 Mon 21:57]
This replaces the need to manually apply patches when updating the system. I
still want to build a custom kernel, so I'll just use it to update the source
tree and userland.
During my normal install procedure, I would manually rebuild userland and the
kernel twice to get the latest patches in before installing any ports. This
procedure can now change to leaving the default settings in
/etc/freebsd-update.conf which includes the line `Components src world kernel'
and running the update. After that, I'll remove the kernel part.
*** DONE portmaster
- State "DONE" [2013-01-28 Mon 22:44]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-28 Mon 22:18]
portmanager is non-functional with pkgng. Apparently no one was maintaining
it. portmaster seems like it might be an acceptable alternative.
Usage notes:
- Install ports-mgmt/portmaster. Flag for PKGNGPATCH and ZSH.
- Check for newer ports: portmaster -L
- Upgrade everything: portmaster -a
- Upgrade everything with prompts: portmaster -ai
- Install a port, upgrading dependencies: portmaster shells/bash
`portmaster -L' also categorizes all ports into various groups. Looking at
the leaf and root ports serves the same purpose as `portmanager -sl' did.
This is probably a better port management utility than portmanager, as it's way
faster and the command flags are more intuitive.
*** DONE replace Scheme implementation
- State "DONE" [2013-01-31 Thu 22:11]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-31 Thu 13:55]
Gauche is broken in ports now. The interpreter is actively maintained, so it's
probably the maintainer's fault. However, since I do need a working Scheme
interpreter, I'll find something else to use in the meantime and maybe stick
with this alternative.
Switched to scm. Installing lang/scm and lang/slib seems to work fine. Emacs
integration works. Unless I encounter some issues with it while writing code,
I may just stick with this from now on.
Update: Gauche is working again as of 9.2.
*** CANCELED Eev mode
- State "CANCELED" [2013-03-22 Fri 21:55]
Maybe I can use this to replace various shell scripts I wrote for automating
tasks. Perhaps I can never need to write a script in Bourne shell ever again.
http://angg.twu.net/eev-article.html
Not sure I'm sold on this idea, but it's potential benefits make it worth
thinking about for a bit.
Looked into this some. The main features, and the reasons I don't need eev for
those purposes, are:
- Recording shell sessions: I use shell scripts for this.
- Referring to other documents: I can use Emacs bookmarks for this.
- Demos: Don't do demos.
This is simpler than I thought. I can see it being useful in some situations,
but it's not worth the cost for me.
*** DONE Litecoin
- State "DONE" [2013-04-01 Mon 11:30]
- State "STARTED" [2013-03-29 Fri 15:48]
A possible Bitcoin replacement. I might just mine a bunch of these and hang
onto them for awhile. I don't see these as very likely to be used, since the
algorithm doesn't address Bitcoin's faults, but a small holding can't hurt.
http://litecoin.org/
Tried mining overnight, but didn't get anything. Since I'm not willing to blow
all that power for something unlikely to be worth anything, I'm not bothering
with this.
*** CANCELED LMMS
- State "CANCELED" [2013-08-14 Wed 16:57]
A freeware synthesizer.
Tried this and it's pretty awful. Might come back to it and give it more time
if I can't find anything better though.
*** DONE nrepl.el
- State "DONE" [2013-08-15 Thu 03:59]
- State "STARTED" [2013-08-15 Thu 01:58]
A possible replacement for SLIME and swank-clojure. This can also act as a
front end for multiple Lisps (the swank-clojure maintainer confirmed my
suspicions that it was simply not possible to have both functional with SLIME).
This is still not quite at feature parity with SLIME, so I may restore my SBCL
SLIME setup for now and just use nrepl for Clojure. Look into lein-nrepl while
I'm at it and convert all projects over to this. Probably will require
Marmalade to pull in dependencies, unless I want to do that manually.
https://github.com/kingtim/nrepl.el
This is actually slower than SLIME on my n270; to the point of being unusable.
However, I tested it in Windows and it works. I'll probably have to do any
Clojure development on a VM there.
*** DONE fix meta key in Conkeror
- State "DONE" [2013-11-01 Fri 21:54]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-01 Fri 21:49]
I've got a fully updated Conkeror setup in a Debian 7 VM.
Turns out the meta key isn't recognized by xulrunner 17. Applied this fix:
// Fix the missing modifier key in later versions of xulrunner.
modifiers.M = new modifier(
function (event) { return event.metaKey; },
function (event) { event.metaKey = true; });
Will add this to my FreeBSD setup when it's time to upgrade.
*** CANCELED Incanter
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-01 Fri 21:55]
A Clojure-based R-clone. http://incanter.org
Probably not better, but worth a quick look.
No longer need to use R.
*** DONE deprecate ESS
- State "DONE" [2013-11-01 Fri 22:01]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-01 Fri 21:57]
No longer use R, so I might as well deprecate my ESS config in ~/.emacs.
It could be my imagination, but this seems to speed up startup a little.
*** CANCELED Drizzle
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-01 Fri 22:02]
Just read about this. Supposedly a rewritten MySQL with various lessons
learned implemented and optimized for web backends.
Don't care about this anymore. PostgreSQL has won the lightweight database war
(for now).
*** DONE Memcached
- State "DONE" [2013-11-14 Thu 03:33]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-14 Thu 03:27]
Just read about this a little.
Pretty simple and seems useful for the types of environments it was designed
for.
*** CANCELED bpython
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-14 Thu 13:01]
Too beta for me right now, but check back on this in 6-12 months from now
(now is 2012-05-22).
The completion here is nice, but I'm not sure the interpreter is the right
place for this functionality. Furthermore, it's unlikely this would integrate
nicely into Emacs.
http://bpython-interpreter.org/
I guess I don't need an interpreter with these features. I do want all of
these in my editor though.
*** DONE deprecate JDEE
- State "DONE" [2013-11-14 Thu 13:17]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-14 Thu 13:07]
I'm giving up on trying to turn Emacs into a Java IDE. Maybe one day someone
will come up with a more elegant solution to this. Replacing this with the
built-in java-mode.
Backed up JDEE config to unused_init.el. Deleted ~/.ant/lib/ecj-3.6.jar.
Added java-mode block. emacs-eclim is probably the most promising option for
getting modern Java development features cleanly integrated and I'll still give
that a try.
*** DONE re-enable SLIME
- State "DONE" [2013-11-14 Thu 15:46]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-14 Thu 15:04]
Now that nrepl.el is being used for Clojure, SLIME can be used for SBCL.
Current SLIME from CVS works fine at this time with the SBCL version in 9.2.
However, this didn't work with my old 8.0 setup, which I guess is okay for now,
since I'm redoing the workstation once 10.0 comes out. Only had to change a
few lines of config.
*** DONE upgrade FreeBSD to 9.2
- State "DONE" [2013-11-14 Thu 16:30]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-11 Mon 17:18]
Emacs 24.x and FreeBSD 9.2 are now released, meaning it's time to do an
upgrade. I was going to do a source upgrade, but I got a spare SSD of similar
specs so I can revert back in the event of something serious being broken.
10.0 is coming out in a month or two though, so I may wait for that.
Tasks:
- Read the new install procedure in the handbook.
- Setup 9.2 on a VM and run through the process, updating my install document.
- Backup all stuff off cellblock. rsync everything to muze if there's enough
space. Also scp the entire FS to my backup drive (just in case).
- Replace the SSD and do the install.
- Spend a lot of time on the new kernel build. Check the Hardware
Compatibility List for 9.2 (sometimes there's useful hints in here).
Changes since 8.0 are the most drastic I've seen in a long time. The new
system administration utilities are all improvements with far less cognitive
overhead and allow me to delete a ton of scripts. The main downside is that a
lot more disk is used (though this is mainly a result of more bloat in ports).
Overall, I'd trade the gig or two in space for the improvements, but the
trade-off should be unnecessary.
Only did the VM, since 10.0 is coming out very soon.
 It also has a
toolbar. However, if I was on some really minimal hardware, this would be an
option (though I'd probably just stick with a text-only browser in that case).
*** CANCELED Classic Shell
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-20 Wed 04:09]
Replace the n00bified win7 start menu with this on my gaming machine.
http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/
Not sure I'll bother though, since I don't really use Windows for anything
besides games.
Investigated this. There's two things that this cleans up: the Start menu and
Windows Explorer. I don't really use the Start menu much, and I've already
found a replacement file manager in Explorer^2 (which I mainly also launch
applications from). So, there's really no use in installing this.
However, if I ever end up stuck with a Windows 8 box, this will be a must,
provided it works as advertised.
*** CANCELED Pythonect
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-20 Wed 04:13]
A dataflow EDSL inside of Python. Looks only marginally interesting, but it
could be fun to obfuscate code in it at work.
https://github.com/ikotler/pythonect
My original goal here is no longer valid. However, this could be useful for
its integrated asynchronous operators, should the need ever arise.
*** CANCELED patch xf86-video-intel
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-20 Wed 04:14]
This is suitably awesome that it might be worth the trouble to manually patch:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/commit/?id=bcef98af561939aa48d9236b2dfa2c5626adf4cb
If I don't get around to it anytime soon, just check later on FreshPorts to see
if it was added. As of this writing, a lot of code is still being committed,
so maybe I'll just want to grab the latest instead of patch.
Don't need this, since I'm just going to upgrade to 10.0 once it comes out.
*** CANCELED Marmalade
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-20 Wed 21:31]
Check out this Emacs package repo and see if it's worth including for the
supported packages. Will wait for Emacs 24 to make use of this so I don't have
to bother manually installing package.el.
http://marmalade-repo.org/packages
Been using 24.x for awhile now and can get by fine without it.
*** CANCELED Rosegarden
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-21 Thu 22:59]
A MIDI sequencer for Unix-variants. It runs on FreeBSD, but the dependency
list is huge, so I'll keep it on a Linux VM.
I guess I don't need a MIDI sequencer. If this changes, will reopen.
*** DONE autocutsel
- State "DONE" [2013-11-22 Fri 01:01]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-22 Fri 00:44]
This doesn't come in handy too often, but this will merge cuts in GTK+ apps
with the X clipboard.
I forgot that I already had this ready to go in ~/.xinitrc. Installed and
uncommented the initialization for it. Updated setup document.
*** DONE VCS macroexpand.com main site
- State "DONE" [2013-11-28 Thu 00:26]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-27 Wed 23:07]
Just doing the main site for now. If this works out, I'll consider doing my
personal site too. VCS-ing a site has multiple benefits:
- No need to backup or sync website content manually or by script.
- Ability to check out the site and edit it as normal user.
- Reduced need to edit anything as root.
However, I do have to keep in mind that everything behind the scenes will now
be world-viewable. Make sure there's no personal info or passwords anywhere.
Notes:
- Excluding cgi-bin for now.
- To switch a repo to ssh, edit .git/config and change the "origin" URL to
something like<EMAIL_ADDRESS>When creating a new
repo, you can also run `git remote add origin
git@github.com:user/project.git'.
- Run my standard GitHub config steps as root before cloning.
- I also ran chmod o-rx on the .git/ directory.
I should have done this long ago. I'll also do the same for my personal site,
but before doing so, I'll need to clean it up some. Adding task for that.
*** DONE convert timestamps to ISO 8601
- State "DONE" [2013-12-24 Tue 11:11]
- State "STARTED" [2013-12-24 Tue 10:30]
My preferred timestamp is close enough that I might consider using a standard.
To do this, I'll need to go through all existing docs and regex them and change
at least three functions in ~/.emacs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
Notes:
- The bcm-date function is fine, since it's already in the correct format (as
it doesn't include time).
- Added a bcm-datetime function, returning UTC.
- Unfortunately, org-mode requires its current default format for date
scanning. It's changeable, but you lose various date features, so it's not
worth the trade-off. So, I'm leaving file header timestamps and org-mode
ones alone. See: http://orgmode.org/manual/Custom-time-format.html
As a result of the above, nothing has really changed, except that bcm-datetime
could be useful in macros populating datasets.
** Work-related topics
*** CANCELED learn R
- State "CANCELED" [2013-01-25 Fri 10:33]
- State "STARTED" [2010-06-16 Wed 23:21]
Trying to use R for the developing statistical learning models used at work. R
may also be handy later for backend integration with various parts of
applications. R is a flawed language though, so I'm targeting only a practical
level of usefulness. I'm quite alright with sucking at R, and if I don't get
through all of this by retirement, that's fine with me.
Setup notes:
- Available on FreeBSD in math/R. Change build options to include LETTER_PAPER
and PDF_MANUALS.
- Unfortunately, this pulls in a full stack of packages for an updated gcc
version. :\
- Build lang/gcc45 dependency without Java frontend.
- Setup ESS (already added to .emacs and ~/.emacs.d/ess).
- In some Linuxes, the R package is often called r-base.
Tasks:
- Learn some basic R. (DONE)
- Setup ESS. (DONE)
- Read the online R manual: http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.html
- Choose a book to read on R. Someone at work suggested the O'Reilly book, "R
In a Nutshell", but I don't have a copy, so unless I buy one, reading
"Introductory Statistics with R".
- Check out bnlearn and other Bayesian network R packages.
- Make an R script to collect all my add-on packages.
- Maybe read the rest of the R docs at: http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html
- Check out igraph.
- Consider ggplot2 for graphs.
Installing this on my work VMs so as not to muck up my home machine.
Update: I'm going to try to get away without learning this. From what I know
of R so far, it's a pretty ugly language, statistics bore me, packages too
often don't work and require much manual labor, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't
have a future with me post-work due to the bloated dependencies.
*** CANCELED Apache Giraph
- State "CANCELED" [2013-02-27 Wed 21:00]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-25 Fri 10:30]
Distributed graph processing. Looked at some code for this, and it's ugly. I
suspect that it's a bloated, sub-optimal solution to solving graph problems,
but I'm not aware of any alternatives at the moment (apart from other libraries
very similar to this). I've already read the Pregel paper for some context, so
just read whatever docs are available on the Giraph site. Maybe make a sample
program.
This works, but is extremely awkward and time-consuming. It also is very rough
around the edges.
Gave up on this. Modern Java development frustrates me too much.
*** DONE bulk synchronous parallel
- State "DONE" [2013-02-27 Wed 21:00]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-25 Fri 10:30]
This is a concept around which things like Pregel, Apache Hama, and Apache
Giraph are centered. This is apparently the pre-eminent distributed graph
processing algorithm. I've been skeptical of it some due to the overhead
involved, but apparently it does scale well in the real world if you structure
your problems correctly.
I guess I pretty much get how this works now.
*** DONE betweenness centrality
- State "DONE" [2013-03-26 Tue 10:28]
- State "STARTED" [2013-03-26 Tue 10:09]
A graph theory concept used in the various graph analytics.
Centrality is the relative importance of a vertex within a graph. There are
several other types of centrality besides betweeness. Degree centrality is the
"default". Betweeness centrality is the measure of the number of shortest
paths from all vertices to all others that pass between that vertex.
*** DONE statistical learning models
- State "DONE" [2013-05-02 Thu 13:58]
- State "STARTED" [2010-11-12 Fri 15:30]
Survey these and read at least a few books on the subject.
Tasks:
- Read chapter 20 of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.
- Read up on Bayesian networks.
- Read the PDF of slides titled Clustering with Gaussian Mixtures. Finished
this.
Resigning the job means I don't need this.
*** DONE learn Clojure
- State "DONE" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:04]
- State "STARTED" [2012-05-17 Thu 15:42]
Apparently being already Lisp-literate makes this pretty easy.
The plan:
- Read A Brief Beginner's Guide To Clojure (online).
- Read Clojure - Functional Programming for the JVM (online).
- Do UPenn Clojure exercises (online).
- Read Clojure Programming. This unfortunately lacks exercises (like all
Clojure books I considered).
- Due to no exercises, do all of: https://www.4clojure.com/problems
- Write some kind of actual mini-project in the language.
- Read everything on the Clojure main site.
- Look at the Clojure Contrib projects:
http://dev.clojure.org/display/doc/Clojure+Contrib
- Keep this cheatsheet handy: http://clojure.org/cheatsheet
- Reference this site for examples/docs: http://clojuredocs.org/
Notes:
- ring is probably the most popular webapps library:
https://github.com/mmcgrana/ring
- For a Clojure-specific pastebin, use: https://refheap.com/paste
- Some things seem more complex in Clojure vs. Lisp. For example, this in CL:
(let ((count 0)) (defun counter () (incf count)))
is equivalent to this in Clojure:
(let [count (ref 0)] (defn counter [] (dosync (alter count inc))))
Resigning the job means I don't necessarily need Clojure anymore. However, I
may still complete this task on my own terms. I like most things about
Clojure, but there are exceptions:
- Clojure stacktraces are the same mess that Java's are.
- Much stuff in Clojure is just a wrapper around Java code. In most Lisps, you
can just navigate into the underlying Lisp code all the way to primitives.

- It's often painfully slow.
- Some of the Clojure ecology of libraries resemble Java ones in that they have
way too many dependencies.
*** DONE learn Scala
- State "DONE" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:04]
- State "STARTED" [2012-11-10 Sat 13:07]
This will probably be a little harder than learning Clojure, but I'm countering
that by not going as deep on it (due to lack of interest and it not being as
nice of a language). Though this is work-driven, there is some residual
benefit here, as ML-variant literacy is on my list of things to have.
The plan:
- Redo Scala Emacs setup.
- Read Programming Scala (2nd ed.).
- Read the sbt manual.
- Read the ENSIME manual.
- Write some projects in Scala. I'd like to at least do one test project using
Scalding, preferably one of the ones I've already done in Cascalog to compare
performance and ease of use.
- Decide how much, if at all, I want to stick with the language/ecology.
Resigned job.
*** CANCELED SymPy
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:05]
I'll use other languages for these purposes going forward.
*** CANCELED NumPy
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:05]
Read up on this some. Maybe SciPy too.
Might still look into this more on my own.
*** CANCELED latent class analysis
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:05]
And principle components analysis (or, some more general topic including
these).
*** CANCELED RapidMiner (revisited)
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:05]
*** CANCELED Scalding
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:05]
A Cascalog-like library in Scala.
*** CANCELED Cascading
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:05]
Might be able to skip this if Cascalog works out. I may still want to just
read about it a little even in that case though. If Cascalog isn't usable,
I'll have to research this properly.
*** CANCELED Mahout (revisited)
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:05]
Canceled this too soon. However, I might as well start over since I only did a
brief intro to it before.
The plan:
- Redo an updated setup for this.
- Read up on each algorithm implemented.
- Read the book Mahout in Action.
*** CANCELED ARIMA model
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:05]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoregressive_integrated_moving_average
*** CANCELED Kronecker graphs
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:05]
Considered for use in a model at work. http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4905
Kronecker graphs are the result of a specific operation on matrices (or matrix
representations of graphs). They're useful for several things, but one
potential relevant use may be for synthetic data generation.
*** DONE CS183: Startup Stanford, Spring 2012
- State "DONE" [2013-06-27 Thu 18:53]
- State "STARTED" [2013-06-07 Fri 02:34]
Some guy's class notes from Peter Thiel's startup course.
http://blakemasters.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup
There's actually a lot of good info in here. This has caused me to rethink
some aspects of my potential involvement in startups and grounded some
expectations in reality.
** Games to play
*** DONE Xenocide
- State "DONE" [2013-01-01 Tue 01:31]
- State "STARTED" [2012-12-31 Mon 20:48]
Install Windows version with full sounds (46MB). http://xeno.chaosforge.org/
This looks promising, but isn't finished and seems abandoned. It's definitely
not complex enough for actually playing much yet.
*** DONE MAME romset
- State "DONE" [2013-01-04 Fri 23:15]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-03 Thu 21:38]
Audit the entire collection of MAME roms. This is mostly just to clear up some
disk space, for which this collection is the worst offender. First, I'll
delete all non-working, sports, card game, foreign language, porn,
cassette-based, light gun, and obviously crappy roms. Then, I'll manually go
through the remaining and start each one up and delete anything I don't want to
look at later. The goal is to get it under 1GB at most.
Most arcade games are button-mashing spaz-fests, so I was able to get rid of
the vast majority of them, leaving 92 roms of total size 900MB.
I may do the same later with other romsets, all of which I've already created
first pass subsets of. If I could get my complete rom collection down to a few
GB, that would go a long way towards my data size goals.
*** DONE console romsets
- State "DONE" [2013-01-05 Sat 00:58]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-04 Fri 23:17]
Audit the entire roms collection. I already did a preliminary first pass and
deleted the majority of the romsets altogether.
Got the entire collection down to 2.34GB and I feel a lot better not curating a
rom museum.
*** DONE Avadon: The Black Fortress
- State "DONE" [2013-01-07 Mon 03:25]
- State "STARTED" [2012-11-24 Sat 22:29]
Supposedly the most refined Spiderweb Software game to date. Was on sale for a
few dollars on Steam so it seemed like a good opportunity to finally experience
one and see if their fanbase's loyalty is justified.
This game is just okay. It has some good points and acceptable graphics, but a
lot of downsides:
- Classes and character development are too simplified.
- Skill trees are very small and restrictive.
- Not enough item choices. In fact, you really don't have any gear choices to
make since the best one is always obvious and each class really only has
predefined play-styles.
- Practically non-existent RP value outside of the occasional minor dialog
choice.
- Boring, uninspired story and game world that borrows so heavily from various
tropes that it's completely generic.
- Combat is repetitive and too simple. Most encounters are just trash mobs
that charge at you until dying.
- Environment is too non-interactive.
The annotated maps are rather useful when playing so as not to lose track of
quest givers: http://avadonannotatedmaps.zxq.net/index.html
I guess it's not a bad deal for $3, but there are more interesting games that
are completely free. Playing this just feels like a waste of entertainment
time. Ended up quitting this after getting to the second main area. I may one
day come back and finish it but will definitely skip future installments.
*** DONE Castle of the Winds
- State "DONE" [2013-01-09 Wed 17:53]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-08 Tue 20:58]
I like games that are built within the native OS toolkit. Will need to run
this in an XP VM.
Full version available here: http://lkbm.ecritters.biz/cotw/download.html
Completely unbalanced and poorly designed. Only has some of the absolute
basics of a roguelike and most of those aren't done well.
*** DONE TERA
- State "DONE" [2013-01-14 Mon 19:40]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-14 Mon 13:39]
The stolen and reworked codebase for what was to be Lineage 3. Will just fr00b
it up for a few evenings, then call it done. I definitely don't actually want
to grind in a modern MMO, but if you pretend the extent of the game is just the
early levels, they're okay provided you possess the discipline to quit when the
time comes.
Played an antlerface mystic for awhile, but only managed to stomach it for a
few hours. This game has a lot of problems, but the main issue (for me) is the
manual aiming and dodging, which requires way more cognitive overhead than it
should. Compared to more passively-played MMOs, you do a lot more work for
very little extra game experience. Apart from that, it's mostly just yet
another boring modern WoW/EQ-clone with standard Asian MMORPG tropes.
*** DONE Space Rangers 2
- State "DONE" [2013-01-18 Fri 21:13]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-13 Sun 20:50]
Played this a little back in 2005, but will start over and make a proper
attempt at beating it. Space Rangers: Reboot only costs a few dollars and
includes the expansion pack, but I'll just play the normal game for now.
After installing, edit cfg.txt and change the RobotResolution to 1920,1200.
This only affects the RTS mini-games and also causes crashing if changing
options in game.
This is an okay game, but has some problems:
- The graphics aren't terrible but the color palette makes my eyeballs bleed.
The user interface would probably look less appalling if it were higher
resolution and didn't have randomly arranged buttons.
- Installs Starforce. I installed the game normally, overwrote the binary with
a no-CD one, then ran the Starforce removal utility. However, it says the
driver isn't installed. So, it's either hiding somewhere, Starforce doesn't
support 2k8r2, or the utility doesn't support removal on 2k8r2.
- The arcade-like wormhole mini-game isn't any fun (for me). If I wanted to
play an action game, I'd not be playing a mostly TBS game. I usually just
save scum them, letting the autopilot do the work.
- Has mostly uninspired writing and game lore. Poor translation is everywhere.
- I'd prefer space flight was a bit more realistic. Planets are too close
together, asteroids zoom around like in an arcade game, and planets orbit
their suns in a few weeks. Obviously this isn't a sim, but some relation to
reality would've made it more fun for me.
- NPCs can target and begin firing mid-turn, but the player can't.
- You have to keep up with an item/ship treadmill. This actually isn't too
hard, but I'd prefer at least a slightly more static universe given how much
of a pain it is to collect/mod proper gear.
- The economy is completely imbalanced. Trading becomes pointless once you get
some okay gear.
- Repair costs are insane. You can carefully mod certain n00b gear you pick up
early to help this, but you have to get lucky on micromodules.
- There's no grand strategy against the antagonists. You just take back and
defend systems and others randomly fall. Eventually, the balance shifts in
your favor. It takes forever, which would be fine, except that the space
combat here gets very repetitive. A more interesting setup would be having
tough enemy core systems surrounded by less defended ones, and these empires
expand/contract based upon player and NPC ranger/military actions.
- I'd rather have a better core game experience (trading and space
flight/combat) than all these mini-games which are just crappier versions of
genres done better elsewhere.
After getting familiar with the game's quirks, I played for several nights and
got to the #2 ranking, but then lost the desire to keep going. The most
frustrating part of this game is that it could be quite awesome if it just
didn't have a few fundamental flaws. I'm sure I can win with my current run,
but there's less depressing gaming experiences to be had. I'll back up my
saves, but it's highly unlikely I'll ever revisit this.
*** DONE Endless Space
- State "DONE" [2013-01-20 Sun 16:52]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-20 Sun 00:18]
Yet another 4x game that looks really polished and seems devoid of at least
some of the problems that many more half-assed attempts have. Was on sale for
$15 on Steam.
Complaints:
- Has some graphical glitches and BSODs my computer occasionally.
- No space stations or a lot of the other features that are common in 4x
games. Definitely needs more stuff to do.
- The balance seems a bit off on system improvements vs. income in early game.
The expansion disapproval is a bit rough as well then becomes a non-issue
later on.
- Battles are just a non-interactive card game, but one with completely random
results. There's no reason to load these up once you've seen a few.
- Tech trees need more thought. They're supposed to be divided by play style,
but in reality they're somewhat mixed up. Even worse, there's no way to tell
(at least in game) what the tech unlocks do.
- Has the same useless diplomacy most 4x games have.
- The computer opponents cheat.
- At harder difficulties, you can easily get gimped from the start and have no
real chance of winning.
- The UI is really nice except there are almost no keyboard shortcuts.
- Battles are too small and non-epic. Fleets have a maximum command point
size, which ensures battles will never have dozens of ships.
This is just an average 4x game, though it does have some really nice graphics
and universe creation options. This is fine for a few days of fun, but won't
be replacing Stars! as my main 4x game. I'll keep it installed for a few
months for an occasional game though.
*** DONE Defense Grid: Community Levels
- State "DONE" [2013-01-27 Sun 00:49]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-26 Sat 21:40]
These are free, so no reason not to try them.
Okay levels, but a bit too easy.
*** DONE Scarlet Blade (alpha)
- State "DONE" [2013-01-27 Sun 19:00]
- State "STARTED" [2013-01-25 Fri 01:33]
Pure prolefeed, but so preposterous, I can't not at least play it for a couple
of hours. I think it's going to be a F2P MMORPG. Its gimmick is that it's
total, unadulterated fanservice. Apart from that, it's completely generic.
Amusing for a couple hours, then just turns into a standard grind. Like most
Asian MMORPGs, this lacks a lot of polish and has a sloppy feel to it. After
this, I think I'm filled up on crappy games for this year.
*** DONE Defense Grid: Containment
- State "DONE" [2013-02-03 Sun 18:15]
- State "STARTED" [2013-02-02 Sat 22:26]
Yet another expansion.
These are mostly well-designed maps, obviously designed with challenge games in
mind. The new storyline is okay, but nothing special.
*** DONE AI War: Fleet Command
- State "DONE" [2013-02-19 Tue 00:33]
- State "STARTED" [2013-02-06 Wed 22:31]
A huge space strategy game that includes a lot of unique features. Grabbed the
AI War: Alien Bundle on Steam, which includes the game and the first 3
expansions. AI War: Ancient Shadows is still $4.99 (which is more than I paid
for the bundle), so I'll wait until I see how much I like the game first.
Some minor complaints:
- This being 2D kills the immersion some, since it's in space. Being in 3D
wouldn't work here, but gameplay could have been on planet surfaces.
- Animation gets choppy at higher time deceleration.
- At high resolution, it's hard to distinguish icons.
- Claims to have a lot of tower defense features, but doesn't really.
- The ship caps are workable, but I'd prefer if the bottleneck was more on the
resource side than artificial unit count limits.
This is closer to a stock RTS experience than the game descriptions would lead
you to believe. However, it's the best RTS I've played, and the only one I'd
consider playing long term. It's a real timesink though, so I'll probably play
more when I have more free time.
*** CANCELED Naval War: Arctic Circle
- State "CANCELED" [2013-03-05 Tue 10:52]
Was going to wait until this was $5 or so on Steam, but there seems to be a
developer/publisher scandal here with the typical results of unfixed,
game-killing bugs. Will pass on it and look for a copy of Fleet Command
instead.
*** CANCELED Space Empires V
- State "CANCELED" [2013-03-22 Fri 10:46]
A possible candidate for a decent super-complex 4x game.
This game has some serious technical/performance issues. To get playable FPS
on it, do this:
- Patch to 1.79.
- Edit data/HUDSettings.txt and define the windowed resolution to 1366x1024.
- Edit data/Settings.txt and set "Support Multithreading" to "TRUE".
- Set Video Mode to "1280x900x16". Try windowed mode too and see if it gives
30FPS (it probably won't).
- Set 3D Device to "Direct3D HAL".
- Set Video Memory Usage to "Safe".
- Turn off ClearType text in Windows. There's a utility for this that can be
found by typing in "clear" into the Windows search box.
I finished the tutorial and played this a little. However, I'm going to cancel
this due to the many technical issues with getting this to run properly. I can
get this to be barely playable, but everyone online says that even if you
manage this, the game will slow to a crawl once you have a lot of active units.
Given this, I can't justify wasting a week to learn everything to play this. A
real shame, since this looks fairly close to what I'd want in a modern 4x game.
I think I pretty much know what I want my ultimate 4x experience to have. It
needs:
- Solar systems with multiple planets. Planet types should be realistically
distributed according to distance from the star (e.g., no ice planets in
close orbit).
- Space stations, preferably with the ability to place them anywhere in a
system, not just in orbit of planets.
- Space and ground combat, with orbiting forces supporting ground forces.
- Moons with the ability to colonize them.
- Some simulation of the vastness of space. Traveling vast distances should be
an appropriately lengthy endeavor. Planets shouldn't be so close together.
- Some appropriate system for upgrading obsolete components.
- Research that can't realistically be maxed out in any one game, even if it
goes on for 1000s of turns.
- Weird races. Since they don't have to be rendered, there's no excuse for
making them all sentient versions of Earth animals.
- Nearly everything in the game should be able to be turned over to the AI.
- Non-interactive combat is fine, but battles should be potentially massive in
scale.
- Faction personalities shouldn't be so 2 dimensional. Diplomacy in all 4x
games I've played so far sucks and I'd almost rather it not be there.
*** DONE Starcross
- State "DONE" [2013-03-28 Thu 09:34]
- State "STARTED" [2013-03-27 Wed 15:27]
A BDO IF game from 1982. Supposedly good and rather difficult.
Has a very primitive parser and not a lot of ancillary text. Most mentioned
objects aren't recognized. The puzzles here aren't that good either. Didn't
bother finishing it.
*** CANCELED UnAngband
- State "CANCELED" [2013-03-28 Thu 10:09]
Seems like a promising kitchen sink Angband-variant.
A bit tired of Angband, so skipping this one.
*** DONE Shrapnel
- State "DONE" [2013-03-29 Fri 14:08]
- State "STARTED" [2013-03-29 Fri 13:48]
Another concept IF game.
Concept fail.
*** DONE Sid Meier's Civilization IV
- State "DONE" [2013-03-30 Sat 10:50]
- State "STARTED" [2013-03-28 Thu 22:04]
Got a free copy with both expansion packs from work, so might as well try it.
This is probably better than Civilization II, but has almost all the same
problems it does. Almost every aspect of the game has design decisions that
annoy me. It can still be entertaining if you were in the market for some
casual gameplay, I guess, but it's not for me. I have a vision of what an
awesome engine for this type of game would look like, but I don't think
something like that exists. I'll still give Alpha Centauri a try, but after
that I'm sticking with space 4x games.
*** DONE Blue Chairs
- State "DONE" [2013-04-03 Wed 10:33]
- State "STARTED" [2013-03-29 Fri 14:23]
A surrealist IF game.
This is just okay and doesn't really quite work. Has several noun oversights,
an annoying maze, and some hunt the verb.
*** CANCELED Magic Candle
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-06 Mon 01:09]
Has some unique RPG concepts. Check out Magic Candle II and III if I like this
enough.
Setup:
- Grab a copy of Magic Candle (it's free now) and extract it somewhere.
- Make a .conf file for DOSBox that mounts the folder and launches the game.
- Create a launcher for it. Left this in the game directory.
Watched a bit of an LP of this and I don't think I want to play it.
*** CANCELED Drox Operative
- State "CANCELED" [2013-05-09 Thu 01:06]
Looks like a better Space Rangers 2. Watch an LP on it first.
Looks semi-promising, but I've concluded that I'm not into this close-in 2D
style of space game with arcade-like combat.
While I think space games are one place that 3D makes sense, I do have a vision
for what I think would be an awesome 2D space sim though (mostly sensor-based).
*** DONE Icewind Dale
- State "DONE" [2013-05-14 Tue 01:37]
- State "STARTED" [2013-05-06 Mon 10:48]
Restarting my 4 character run from 2010. Considered powergaming a 4 character
party of multi-classed half-elves and getting them to HoF mode, but that
requires multiple full game runs to get them leveled and geared.
Had semi-fun, but probably won't play this ever again as I have the whole game
memorized now. I would gladly pay money for a new campaign using the same
engine, but this style of game is gone forever.
*** DONE Icewind Dale II
- State "DONE" [2013-05-21 Tue 03:27]
- State "STARTED" [2013-05-14 Tue 21:27]
Trying this with a full semi-RP party. Hopefully this isn't too much
micromanagement. If this is too easy, replace the fighter with something
gimped, like a dual-wielding deep gnome ranger.
These steps get a completely working version on Win7:
- Install the 2.01 patch and put the bonus merchants pack in the Override
folder.
- Be sure to set "3D Acceleration=1" in icewind.ini.
- There's a bug in the Fell Wood area that requires reverting to 800x600
resolution while there.
- To fix the DirectDraw issues, install the Microsoft Application Compatibility
Toolkit. Run this and select "New Database" then click the "Fix" button.
Point this at the IWD2.exe file. Skip Compatibility Modes screen. On
Compatibility Fixes screen, check ForceDirectDrawEmulation. Save this as
something, then right click the DB and select Install.
Created this party:
- Erica Barone: Aasimar, Cleric (Sheild of Lathander), Lawful Good
- STR: 14 DEX: 10 CON: 12 INT: 8 WIS: 18 CHA: 18
- Weapons: blunt weapons + shield, sling
- Notes: Will tank less later game (switching positions with Mayo when
adventuring) and spend more time combat casting.
- Fairbairn Sykes: Human, Paladin of Helm(2)/Fighter, Lawful Good
- STR: 18 DEX: 13 CON: 18 INT: 6 WIS: 10 CHA: 5
- Weapons: long sword (Holy Avenger) + shield
- Notes: Front-line tank. Provides Aura of Courage.
- Mayo Dialtone: Drow, Monk, Lawful Evil
- Stats: STR: 16 DEX: 20 CON: 16 INT: 5 WIS: 18 CHA: 5
- Weapons: Fists
- Notes: Melee damage dealer and high AC/medium HP tank.
- Angelica Garcia: Moon Elf, Rogue, True Neutral
- STR: 12 DEX: 20 CON: 16 INT: 16 WIS: 8 CHA: 4
- Weapons: long bow, short sword
- Notes: Ranged support, backstabs/hamstrings in tough fights.
- Rabsjavert Lalapine: Human, Wizard, True Neutral
- STR: 12 DEX: 16 CON: 14 INT: 18 WIS: 10 CHA: 6
- Weapons: quarterstaff
- Notes: Casting only, no melee.
- Spam Gadgee: Lightfoot Halfling, Bard, Chaotic Good
- STR: 8 DEX: 20 CON: 10 INT: 14 WIS: 6 CHA: 18
- Weapons: short/long sword + shield, light crossbow
- Notes: Mainly uses bard song, but also secondary buffer, backup combat
spellcaster (with Armoured Arcana), and ranged support.
A good game, but I do have a couple complaints:
- A shame this is 3.0E instead of 2.0 or 2.5. I'd even prefer 3.5 over this.
- I prefer the IWD1 UI over this one.
- Monk unarmed attacks need a better animation.
- Needs more skills ported over. I should never have a character where I just
don't care about skill points.
- Too many ambushes involving enemies appearing out of nowhere.
- Like IWD1, this game pegs a core while running.
*** DONE X3:Reunion
- State "DONE" [2013-06-14 Fri 04:44]
- State "STARTED" [2013-05-22 Wed 00:45]
The best of the Elite-clones.
Notes:
- Install 2.5 patch, X3 bonus package, and the official cockpit mod. Then add
the Cockpit Callback 1.4 mod directory additions. Rename the numbered files
to the highest present in the main install directory + 1.
- Super useful complex calculator here: http://www.altanetworks.com/x3occ.html
- To fix the weird audio feedback issue, convert all mp3 files in soundtrack/
from mp3 to wma. In TC+AP, this will require playing in offline mode.
Made a massive empire. Then I decided to do the main plot, which trashed many
of my assets in Paranid space. Instead of rebuilding all of that, I'll just
move on to the next one. However, I'll keep my saves around in case I get
nostalgic for X3:R.
*** DONE Everquest 1
- State "DONE" [2013-06-17 Mon 23:33]
- State "STARTED" [2013-06-16 Sun 00:52]
Now that this is F2P, I'll finally get to experience this (very briefly) for
myself.
While this is better than most modern MMOs, if I wanted to play an old,
mainstream 3D MMO, I'd probably go with AO. This was still not a fun
experience.
*** CANCELED Battlecruiser Millenium Gold
- State "CANCELED" [2013-06-23 Sun 15:43]
Available for free, so worth a look. I've always been fond of the concept
behind this game series (until they turned into action games, that is), but was
put off by the lacking design. Now I'm considerably more forgiving about that
kind of stuff and much more into original concepts and complexity. However,
I'm still not sure it's worth learning everything to play this, since it's very
prone to crashing.
Tried this and experienced constant crashes. Will switch to Universal Combat
and try that instead.
*** DONE Morrowind (restart)
- State "DONE" [2013-07-09 Tue 04:00]
- State "STARTED" [2013-06-25 Tue 00:13]
I never actually finished Morrowind, or even played much into the main quest.
I've been meaning to get back into the game at some point. Only using the
Tribunal expansion (since werewolves don't really belong in this game, or
really any game). Skipping some of the mods I used last time.
Setup notes:
- Install Tribunal patch.
- Use the instructions and launcher linked here for widescreen support and to
increase draw distance: http://www.wsgf.org/dr/elder-scrolls-iii-morrowind
- Use the `ra' command to reset NPCs when they start blocking doorways.
Playing a custom class that's almost exclusively magic-focused. Unfortunately,
the game really isn't setup for hardcore perma-death play.
Collected a massive house full of stuff and finally beat the main quest and
expansion. I'll save my saved game, but it's unlikely I'll ever come back to
it since the only things left to do are a few very minor quests with rewards
that are inconsequential to my uber character.
Morrowind is on my list of best RPGs of all time, but I'll have to admit I
didn't quite enjoy the experience as much as before. That's mainly due to:
- The leveling system is a bit broken.
- A magic-based build is severely gimped due to limited means of regenerating
MP. Even with a Breton and Mage starsign, the maximum MP you can have is
still quite low. There are some ways around this, but by that time, you'll
start encountering high resist/reflect enemies.
- Builds in general don't have as much variety as the large number of skills
would suggest. Everyone needs some kind of physical attack and the same
basic support magic.
- The game is riddled with bugs.
- Replayability is very low. Most of what I did here was almost exactly the
same as my last run. In retrospect, I probably should have just restored my
old save.
*** DONE Endgame: Singularity
- State "DONE" [2013-07-09 Tue 04:02]
- State "STARTED" [2013-07-01 Mon 18:30]
A freeware game about the AI apotheosis, written with PyGame. The source may
be worth looking at too. http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/
Okay concept for a story, but crappy concept for gameplay.
*** CANCELED Iter Vehemens ad Necem
- State "CANCELED" [2013-07-11 Thu 01:21]
This looks like it might be a little rough, but supposedly has a bunch of
original concepts, so maybe it's worth a quick look.
http://www.attnam.com/wiki/Main_Page
Not a bad idea, but not complex enough for a roguelike.
*** CANCELED Global Conflict Blue 1.25.001
- State "CANCELED" [2013-07-15 Mon 03:02]
A beta is available.
Tried this but it's not ready yet. Looks promising though, so will have to
check back later.
*** CANCELED Ad Astra
- State "CANCELED" [2013-07-24 Wed 20:59]
A space exploration game with procedurally generated content. Though it has
trading and mining, it's primarily combat focused, so it's unlikely I'll play
this much. http://www.a-astra.com/index.htm
Tried this out a bit, but it's missing some of the core features I'd want in an
Elite-clone. A shame too, since the massive universe is really great. It just
needs to be populated with more interesting things to do besides blasting
stuff.
*** CANCELED Scalatron
- State "CANCELED" [2013-07-24 Wed 21:01]
A game where you program bots in Scala. While I like the concept, I'll
probably skip this due to it being in Scala and the bots not really capable of
doing much interesting besides shooting and moving.
http://scalatron.github.com/
Skipping mainly due to not wanting to learn Scala. If only it was in Clojure.
*** DONE Jane's Fleet Command
- State "DONE" [2013-08-02 Fri 11:27]
- State "STARTED" [2013-07-15 Mon 16:59]
Available in a $5 bundle with two other games on Steam. Consider using the NWP
(Naval Warfare Project) mod for it. Runs on Win7 64-bit, but has some
graphical glitches.
Notes:
- To get higher graphics settings working with usable framerates, disable the
radar display with C-v.
- The game has a bad habit of crashing occasionally, so save often.
Naval wargame fans always cite this as the ultimate operational sim. I agree
that it probably is, since there really aren't many competitors (only Naval
Warfare: Arctic Circle, Global Conflict Blue, and the Harpoon games come to
mind). While there are a lot of really nice touches here, the actual game
experience leaves a bit to be desired for me. I'm not sure what's missing, but
I don't feel like a grand strategist playing this. Maybe it's just at the
wrong level of abstraction for that kind of thing though. One could possibly
enjoy this purely from a sim perspective, but for me it lacks the complexity
necessary for that and the interaction is too far removed from reality. I'm
now thinking the optimal strategic naval sim would be platform-specific, but
with your platform participating in fleet actions, carrying out orders, or
engaging solo in limited actions. Dangerous Waters is close to this, but is
missing the first part.
*** DONE FO:NV Honest Hearts
- State "DONE" [2013-08-13 Tue 03:33]
- State "STARTED" [2012-08-12 Sun 20:49]
The second of the FO:NV DLCs. The price was halved for these on Steam, so
I'll pick this one up.
In most ways, this is better than Dead Money, but I think I'd still rather be
playing ARMA 2. I'm not sure if I'm just bored of Bethesda Fallout or if ARMA
has ruined my ability to enjoy more n00b-like FPS experiences. With this
realization, I'll now be skipping the rest of the FO:NV expansions, which is
partly a shame, since supposedly the best DLC is Old World Blues.
As for the actual content, like the first expansion, it's not as polished as
stock FO:NV stuff. The plot itself is pretty boring and has limited choices.
The new area is okay, but uninspired. Overall, mostly a semi-yawn.
*** DONE Supreme Commander 1
- State "DONE" [2013-09-03 Tue 14:00]
- State "STARTED" [2012-03-24 Sat 20:28]
SC1 supposedly has various unique features that other RTSes don't provide. I'm
not particularly crazy about RTSes in general, but since I got this for free, I
might as well try it out. Also have the Forged Alliance expansion.
Beat the UEF campaign, but I'm skipping the expansion and other campaigns.
This is better than most other AAA RTS games for sure, but it's still not quite
for me.
*** DONE Neverwinter Nights 2 + MotB
- State "DONE" [2013-10-12 Sat 04:19]
- State "STARTED" [2013-09-10 Tue 14:21]
I've beaten the original game, but I'll redo it and then try the expansion.
Will probably do a challenge game of some kind.
Note: In 64-bit Windows, NWN2 has serious graphical issues. These can be fixed
by using this: http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=nwn2other.Detail&id=231
Install the files to the game directory and only launch the game from
NWLauncher.exe.
NWN2 is probably the best of the 3.5 games, despite it's many frustrating bugs.
The OC is only okay, content-wise, but MotB is significantly better (minus the
ending). I'd like to play Storm of Zehir (since it allows you to create your
entire party from scratch), but it doesn't appear to be available by itself
anywhere.
*** DONE Neverwinter Nights Diamond
- State "DONE" [2013-10-24 Thu 21:49]
- State "STARTED" [2012-04-08 Sun 09:47]
Played through the original long ago, but since the full game + expansions can
be had for cheap on GOG.com, I'll play all of them again.
I may also check out the Player Resource Consortium mod (so I can play as an
oozemaster): http://www.nwnprc.com/
- NWN: The single player main campaign mission is as boring as I semi-remember.
Power-gamed a solo human monk (instead of my typical mage or bard). This run
was solo in the sense that it was without henchmen or other pets/summons.
Monks are definitely less interesting to play, especially alone. I can see
them being pretty awesome by this ruleset in a party, but I'll go back to
being a mage with a party in the expansions.
- NWN:SoU: Too focused on annoying puzzles to be any good.
- NWN:HotU: Not perfect, but the best of the expansions.
 Was never finished.
- NWN:WW: Seems like it might be okay, but I can't tell since it was never
finished.
- NWN:KM: Not bad.
*** CANCELED SpaceChem
- State "CANCELED" [2013-10-28 Mon 20:39]
A design-based puzzle game. Looks like it's probably one that involves some
thinking.
On closer examination, this doesn't look complex enough to be worth it. I'll
just stick to real programming.
*** CANCELED Siege of Avalon
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-01 Fri 13:48]
Try chapter 1 of this (free download). If I like playing this, order the full
6 chapters. Check here first though, since it might now be freeware:
http://soaos.sourceforge.net/
Though it looks like fun, I might skip this game due to it being rather buggy
and unfinished. Some guy was still working on unofficial patches until 2011
though: http://blackflystudios.com/SiegeDev.html
Tried this but it wouldn't run for reasons unknown.
*** CANCELED Wing Commander
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-01 Fri 13:51]
Maybe try the SNES port of this first. Tried it on a keyboard, but it's not
playable that way.
Watched an LP of some of this. Not sure why I thought playing this would be a
good idea.
*** DONE Spice Trade
- State "DONE" [2013-11-01 Fri 15:34]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-01 Fri 15:14]
A freeware trading game that runs on Linux. http://www.spicetrade.org/
This game is kind of a mess and definitely isn't interesting to play.
*** DONE Make It Good
- State "DONE" [2013-11-01 Fri 18:44]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-01 Fri 16:16]
Supposedly one of the better mystery IF games ever.
http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=jdrbw1htq4ah8q57
Not as good as normally claimed and has too many hidden actions that no normal
person would ever find. It's also a time-sensitive IF game, which is extra
annoying.
*** DONE DaiZy
- State "DONE" [2013-11-02 Sat 05:32]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-02 Sat 01:14]
Had DayZ SP working long ago, but wanted to try it out again with the new
stuff. Supposedly this is possible and just requires a bit of file management.
http://kodabar.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/dayz-offline-single-player-practice.html
Works great, but requires symlinking (mklink /j) the Addons folder from the non
OA ARMA 2 folder. The SupportCall addon used in the conjunction with this
fixes some of the missing features (namely, editing the game time). Despite
missing several important features from MP DayZ, this reasonably accurately
recreates the experience and is less annoying than playing online. It still
gets old pretty quick though.
*** CANCELED Starpoint Gemini
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-02 Sat 18:18]
Supposedly a good space sandbox game. Do a little more research before getting
it though.
Looked into this some and I'll pass on inviting all those bugs into my life.
*** DONE Cossacks II: Battle for Europe
- State "DONE" [2013-11-04 Mon 11:12]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-02 Sat 20:44]
An RTS, notable for the number of units on screen. Probably is a cross between
the Total War series and standard AoE-clones.
Eh, not as good as I thought it'd be. Far closer to the other AoE-clones than
I'd hoped. Might come back to this, but probably not. I wish I had my $5
back.
*** CANCELED Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-04 Mon 12:10]
Looks decent and well researched, but I'm not sure I like this style of command
sim anymore. Also is way too expensive.
Watched some LPs on this and will skip it for now. Doesn't offer enough over
Fleet Command to be worth $80.
*** CANCELED StarDrive
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-07 Thu 12:54]
Looks like a contender for a good modern 4x game. Currently out, but has some
bugs and costs $30. Will wait awhile for bug fixes and a price drop.
Looks like the developer abandoned this game with promised core features still
unimplemented and critical bugs unfixed. Since he doesn't care, I don't
either.
*** CANCELED Thousand Parsec (single player)
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-07 Thu 13:07]
Originally a project to create Stars! clone, this looks promising in that it
may capture some of the original's excellence. This is still in active
development, so I'm not in any hurry to get started on it.
Setup a TP server, one or more AI clients, and the normal client on some
GNU/Linux box or VM. See: http://www.thousandparsec.net/tp/downloads.php
Looked into this some and spotted some deal-breakers, notably timed turns and
the lengthy turn completion. This isn't terrible, and I'll consider this later
if I need some 4x action on Linux, but there are better games in this genre
otherwise.
*** CANCELED Steel Panthers World War 2
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-07 Thu 21:16]
A freeware tank sim. Seems unremarkable except for the free part.
Better options are available for very little.
*** CANCELED Sword of the Stars 1
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-08 Fri 08:00]
+ 3 expansions.
Previewed a little. This looks well made, but is more of a casual 4x game, so
I'll pass on it for now. I need a lot more complexity than this to be
entertained. I'm also not a big fan of this UI.
*** DONE Douchebag Beach Club
- State "DONE" [2013-11-09 Sat 01:49]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-08 Fri 17:59]
A free flash game, but looks pretty good.
Also played the other Douchebag games. These are okay, but have a few bugs and
are dragged out for no good reason.
*** DONE PlaneShift
- State "DONE" [2013-11-09 Sat 13:42]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-08 Fri 14:49]
Looks pretty terrible, but is free and runs on Linux.
There's a lot of problems with this game that nullify its chances of ever being
good, most importantly its lack of a coherent vision and awkward skill/magic
system. It is, however, marginally playable and if you were a Linux-only MMO
junkie, this would perhaps be good enough for a minor fix.
*** CANCELED Freelancer
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-16 Sat 23:53]
Maybe worth a play. Looks a bit too casual-piloting focused for me though, but
the gameplay looks pretty good for that genre. Check about running it in Win7
first.
Looked into it and I'm not in the market for arcade-style space combat, though
it seems to do that well.
*** CANCELED X Rebirth
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-17 Sun 00:31]
Now available, but is currently a complete bug-fest. Also, from what I've seen
so far, I'm considerably less excited about this compared to any previous
X-series game, as it looks pretty dumbed down. Overall, it's a mess.
Apart from bugs and price, at least some of these problems will have to be
resolved before I get it:
- The highway system is a lame mini-game. As silly as SETA was, I'd rather
have that as I could ignore it.
- Computer-controlled life in the game is a thin facade.
- The UI is extremely console-like and has awkward radial menus.
- First person exploration is nice and all, but if you're not going to do it
right, don't bother. It doesn't really add anything to the core experience.
- 1 ship only. This doesn't bother me as much as other X fans, but it's a step
backwards for this series.
- The map sucks.
- Only 1 active weapon at a time, no turrets, and only 5 total weapons removes
an important strategy element.
- There's only a fraction of the depth of the X3 games.
- Using DX9 would be okay if it wasn't AAA priced.

- Repetitive, unskippable animations and dialog.
- Many useful hotkeys I relied upon (like targeting) have been removed.
- It's not going to be possible to build up then manage a huge trading empire.
It's highly unlikely the core design decisions behind some of these
deal-breakers will be resolved, but I'd probably accept some compromise for
around $10. I'll probably have to pass on this completely and just hope the
next effort (or one of the other Elite-clones in progress) addresses these
problems.
After reading the developer posts on the game post-release, it seems the design
is what they intended and intend to continue with, particularly with targeting
consoles.
*** DONE ADOM 1.2.0 PR18 + NotEye
- State "DONE" [2013-11-17 Sun 04:12]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-17 Sun 01:17]
Latest ADOM with graphics. Worth checking out to see how this looks, though I
can't imagine it improves anything.
I prefer the text version of this. The graphics add nothing and actually
detract from the game in these ways:
- They're rather cartoonish, so the game loses some of the imaginative appeal
to me. I always visualized myself in a desperate struggle to survive.
- The perspective makes it harder to see things, including exactly which tile
you're on.
- There's a few bugs when clicking on things, and the mouse panning makes the
scrolling jerky if the pointer isn't centered.
- You can only see part of the map instead of all of it.
Otherwise the latest version supposedly has some improvements over the very old
version I was playing, so I'll upgrade to this for my installed text version.
*** DONE Napoleon: Total War
- State "DONE" [2013-11-18 Mon 22:30]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-17 Sun 19:00]
Had this on Steam for years, but never got around to playing it much. It's a
massive >23GB install, so I'll try to finish with it quickly then clear off
that space.
Pretty good, but the thing I want is the open campaign that Rome: Total War
had, where you can start as any country and take over the game world. The
flexibility to do what you want in the scripted campaigns is ruined by the time
limits. A shame, because all things being equal, I'd rather play in this time
period. this was the same result as last time, and I'm not sure why I bothered
again.
*** DONE Planetfall
- State "DONE" [2013-11-19 Tue 01:41]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-18 Mon 22:58]
A classic Infocom IF game.
Some good points, but has a lot of the same annoying puzzles (the kind with
colored buttons/levers/slots that don't integrate into the world) that plague
many Infocom games. Would require a lot of trial and error (probably many days
of it) to actually beat normally, and I'm not going to bother.
I've concluded I only really like modern story-IF, and even then, only when
it's extremely well written. Won't bother with any more of old puzzle IF.
*** CANCELED A Mind Forever Voyaging
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-19 Tue 01:43]
An Infocom IF game. One of the first heavy story-driving IF games and
supposedly quite good. The manual is needed to play this for the table of
decoder codes (the built-in copy protection).
Possibly one of the more ambitious IF games ever made. The left/right
political dichotomy (and the author's thinly veiled leanings) could be done
without though.
Skipping, due to being an old puzzle IF. If I ever do want to play one though,
I'll try this one.
*** CANCELED Gary Grigsby's Pacific War
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-19 Tue 02:34]
Available for free here:
http://www.matrixgames.com/games/pacificwar/features.asp
Ran this in a VM and it doesn't work properly due to mouse issues. Probably
would work okay in DOSBox, but I don't want to install that just for this.
*** CANCELED Pathologic
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-19 Tue 03:37]
If I like this, also try The Void. Watch a few minutes of an LP of it first.
Watched an LP of some of this and I think I'll pass. It looks okay, but it
doesn't have anything going for it that really compels me to spend $10.
*** CANCELED Spacebase DF-9
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-19 Tue 03:57]
Looks like an okay sim-style game. This looks pretty simple and needs to be
much, much cheaper (like around $5 sounds fair).
After more investigation, it doesn't look like this would keep my interest very
long. There just isn't that much content here to be worth bothering with the
game, even if the price was significantly less.
*** DONE Helherron
- State "DONE" [2013-11-20 Wed 02:50]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-19 Tue 16:05]
This looks like a suitably complex RPG and is a good example of what's possible
with Allegro.
Notes:
- Site with info: http://www.popehat.com/helherron/
- To sell stuff, enter trade and using the "," and "." keys to access character
inventories. Then highlight an item and use the "s" key.
- Search bodies, barrels, and other objects with "s".
Almost a good game. If these things were fixed, it'd be playable:
- Searching for secret doors wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have to target a
wall tile. The Nethack method would've made this not suck.
- I like a challenge, but the difficulty of some encounters is completely
impossible. I min/maxed a full party, but ended up getting blocked at every
point. Farming up the necessary XP to level would take days.
- Some character builds don't have an appropriate sprite.
- Noob mobs like rats shouldn't inflict disease (totally gimping you) at 100%.
This is very annoying when you don't have the cure disease spell yet.
- The title screen art makes me think this was written by a 12 year old.
This one goes in the "maybe play again if dreadfully bored" pile, but I
probably won't bother, since it's not compatible with modern OSes. A shame,
because this kind of strategic, turn-based RPG is pretty unique and is a style
not available in any modern game (that I'm aware of).
*** CANCELED ADOM II (in development)
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-20 Wed 03:05]
The ADOM author is apparently working on this now. I'll ignore it until a 1.x
is out, since who knows when/if this will be finished. Looks like there will
also be a payware version of it, which I'll surely pass on (no roguelike should
be payware as long as the best ones are still free).
Latest news on this is that the free version will be playable only via Java
WebStart. I'll pass on this then.
*** CANCELED LambdaRogue
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-20 Wed 03:08]
Windows version is most full-featured. Looked promising, but I can't play all
the rogue-likes I want to, so I may skip this one.
Turns out this is an Angband-clone. I'm no longer a fan of non-persistent
dungeon levels in a roguelike.
*** CANCELED Space Exploration: Serpens Sector (in development)
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-20 Wed 05:05]
A space game for GNU/Linux styled after Strange Adventures. Currently in
development, but preview builds are available. Might wait a couple years and
see if it's further along before going through the trouble of trying it. See:
http://www.metalbeetle.com/spaceexploration/
Giving up on this. Probably vaporware, and even if not, has some design I'm
not fond of.
*** CANCELED Hegemonia: Gold Edition
- State "CANCELED" [2013-11-20 Wed 21:04]
Looks like it might be an interesting modern Stars!-style 4X game. The Gold
Edition includes the original Legions of Iron and The Solon Heritage expansion.
Available for cheap on GOG, but I'm waiting for a sale. Research this a little
more before buying.
Watched an LP. Skipping this due problems noticed, including:
- Scale of star systems is all wrong. The game has time compression, so
there's no reason planets have to be right next to each other.
- Space is too bright. Apparently the Earth is in the middle of a colorful
nebula.
- Too fast-paced.
- More like Sins of Solar Empire than Stars!.
- The campaign is okay, but nothing great.
Probably would still play it if it was free, but this gaming experience isn't
worth $10 to me.
*** DONE Cyber Dungeon Quest
- State "DONE" [2013-11-23 Sat 23:15]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-23 Sat 23:00]
Canceled this years ago due to it not working. It's now distributed as a JAR,
so will give it a try.
Pretty terrible.
*** DONE Jagged Alliance 2 1.13
- State "DONE" [2013-12-22 Sun 00:57]
- State "STARTED" [2013-11-28 Thu 02:22]
The best turn-based squad tactics game I know about. Grabbed for $5 on a Steam
sale.
Notes:
- The 1.13 mod changes this from an okay game into an awesome one:
http://ja2v113.pbworks.com/w/page/4218339/FrontPage
- The Arulco Revisited mod makes the game world considerably more interesting
(requires 1.13). This requires launching from the INI Editor (there's an
inconvenient workaround for this, but this works fine for me).
- The game has many, many bugs, some of which can completely ruin a saved game
or lock up a computer. Backup in many save slots and don't run other
programs.
- Ja2_sp.ini is convenient for remembering preferred starting options.
- The 1.13 setting ENABLE_EMERGENCY_BUTTON_NUMLOCK_TO_SKIP_STRATEGIC_EVENTS
should be set to true to prevent cutscene hangups. Now, holding NumLock will
skip them if they get stuck.
- Turn off "merc lights" to fix the jerky scrolling at night.
- For the infinite loading clock bug, sometimes Alt-Tabbing out then holding
Alt or using M-Enter clears it up.
- To craft items, pick one component up in tactical view, RMB on the other,
then C-LMB the default slots.
- Use Tab to cycle targeting rooftops.
- To use under-slung GLs, click the burst icon twice.
- Use S-n to do a full team smart goggle swap based on conditions.
- M-LMB in the sector inventory can be used to auto-sell stuff to locals, but
I've set the sell cost to 10% of item value to balance out the full item
drops (which really helps immersion).
- Use of the End key in combat shows line of sight information.
- Use Insert in tactical mode for a mini-map.
- A good battle workflow is the hit S-b at the beginning of a battle to drop
backpacks (these reduce AP). Once over, use C-S-f to return them, unload
dropped weapons, and sort sector inventory. Then use C-S-m to merge items.
- Once piles of ammo are in my hoard location, use C-S-a to convert it all to
crates. Crates are also useful for transporting lots of ammo in a vehicle.
While 1.13 and AR make this one of the greatest games of all times, I still
have a few complaints:
- Bugs everywhere. I looked at the C source for JA2:UB, and while not
terrible, it's a bit of a mess and the amount of bugs isn't surprising.
- Most of the additional music provided by AR is pretty bad.
- A lot of the really excellent 1.13 features are very obscure and/or
inconvenient to use. This is probably just a result of JA2 not being
designed with them in mind. A context menu on objects would make things way
easier.
- Windowed mode works okay, but lacks the edge scrolling and leaving the
tactical map manually.
- Though extremely well researched, there's still a few factual inaccuracies
regarding weapons/items. Also, there's some non-realistic quantification of
various real world things (e.g. 10mm is more powerful than .40 S&W).
- Breaching rooms needs work. Something like having a better ability to toss
grenades through doors/windows would fix this.
I may play this again some day, perhaps once 1.13 has more features. In that
event, I'll change the following:
- Tweak the settings some to allow for slower progression, as the increased
enemy kills maxed this out a bit too early (see the "Game progress weights"
section).
- Make my item stash at Estoni. Then spares can be regularly carted to San
Mona and Hamous can be stationed there to sell them every day. I can also
store unrepaired stuff in the junkyard, and only the repaired stuff and ammo
in the airport, to spare myself a lot of manual sorting.
- I'll do a completely different collection of high WIS chars (except Flo,
which I'll keep), only have max 2 IMP chars, and probably just run two main
squads with perhaps one backup squad of free campaign characters.
*** CANCELED Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Business
- State "CANCELED" [2013-12-22 Sun 15:12]
This has significantly less sandbox features and a more linear plot with the
emphasis on combat strategy. I'm less interested in this, but may still play
it since it came free with vanilla JA2.
Tried this a bit, but it's just not the same as JA2 1.13.
*** CANCELED Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition
- State "CANCELED" [2013-12-24 Tue 17:38]
Available on Steam, but I'll wait for the price to drop below $15, since I
already paid for it before. BGII + ToB is also out now as well, and maybe
they'll bundle them together some time.
After more investigation, this is just BGTutu with a few extra characters (that
don't really integrate as well) added. I will probably give the BG series one
last run, but there's no point in paying more money for it.
*** CANCELED Shadowrun Returns
- State "CANCELED" [2013-12-28 Sat 11:38]
Judging from what I've read online, my best guess is this is a light RPG with
turn based squad tactics and pretty shallow at both of these overall. Given
that assessment, I'll wait awhile until the price drops, if I get it at all.
More content is also being released and sold separately, so maybe waiting for a
bundle is the better course of action, so as not to get DLC-milked. There's
also a highly rated campaign called "Dead Man's Switch" to download.
Despite wanting a new Shadowrun RPG, I don't think this is it. This has a few
redeeming qualities, but overall actually manages to have less depth than the
16-bit console games:
- Guns have infinite ammo.
- Matrix combat is exactly the same as normal combat, just with IC instead of
humanoids.
- Tablet-centric UI.
- No proper save system.
- Extremely linear plot.
Another Kickstarter cash-grab milks nostalgic fanbois.
** Math goals
*** DONE statistics
- State "DONE" [2013-05-02 Thu 14:11]
- State "STARTED" [2010-11-03 Wed 16:00]
Need to refresh my statistics knowledge at least to the roughly intermediate
level it was in college. In addition to this, I'll need the ability to do
statistics related mathematics in R.
Read:
- Dealing With Statistics: What you need to know. Finished this.
- Introductory Statistics with R
- Pick some heavier math book on statistics from e-book collection.
- Detection of Abrupt Changes: Theory and Application
This won't make me a statistics expert, but I'll at least not be a total cl00b.
I've learned a lot of about statistics in the last 3 years. While I still
think it'd be cool to understand it in more depth, I don't think the payoff is
there post-resigning from work.
** General life goals
*** CANCELED Do Nothing Day
- State "CANCELED" [2013-01-02 Wed 12:35]
For a whole day, do absolutely nothing. That includes no reading, walking
anywhere, writing anything, using a computer, doing chores, talking to anyone,
or anything else that could even be remotely considered an activity.
Obviously, I'll need to do a couple things to stay alive, so these activities
are exempt (if done in necessity):
- Eating.
- Going to the restroom.
- Showering in the morning.
- Having a glass of water nearby, refilling it, and drinking from it.
- Brushing teeth and other hygiene.
- Walking between rooms (only provided I need to do so for one of the above
reasons).
- Turning on/off lights.
By this standard, almost no one has had a day where they did nothing. Why not
find out what it's like? This might also help if ever in prison.
I suspect I'll find this uncomfortable. But, as primitive humans were content
to often do this all day, perhaps modern life has overstimulated me. There's
only one way to find out for sure.
After some thought, decided to cancel this idea. I'm sure I'll have the chance
to do this plenty when I get old.
*** DONE financial independence
- State "DONE" [2013-05-17 Fri 12:59]
- State "STARTED" [2008-01-01 Tue 13:20]
Though starting this was actually a series of realizations and actions over
several years, I'm marking this started in January 2008, which is the month I
achieved $0 net worth. I have a detailed org-mode plan for this elsewhere, but
it deserves an entry here too. This is, after all, top priority for me, as
accomplishing the many things I really want to do in life are predicated on
making this happen. Once I achieve FI and quit working, I'll cancel all
unfinished work-related tasks here and replace them with post-work items (of
which I already have a pending list for).
By my original plan, I am leaving work slightly early, but I consider what I've
achieved to be FI. To hopefully close this gap and increase security even
more, however, I will be occasionally attempting to make money via non-job
methods.
*** DONE resign job
- State "DONE" [2013-05-17 Fri 12:59]
- State "STARTED" [2013-04-30 Tue 14:32]
This is tied to the financial independence task, but I also want to strategize
the specifics of my exit.
The plan:
- Tweak LaTeX resignation letter and turn it in.
- Leave on good terms with coworkers. No point in taking any dumps on the
desks of any sorry plebs. The ones who've earned such treatment will get
exactly what they deserve in the form of a life of employment, after all.
- Pass on all good-bye parties and such. I've always done these when resigning
in the past, but I think I'd rather just walk. I'll also skip on sending out
a clever goodbye email. This one will just read "Bye".
- Don't bother expending any energy on the exit interview. Just find out
about:
- W-2 mailing.
- Clearances.
- 401k.
 I'll get sick of this pretty quick, probably in
a few weeks at most.
- Catch up on personal tasks.
- Find a new apartment and move.

- Switch mental mode into complete independence.
- Work on physical health.
- Read a few books.
I'll quickly tire of being idle. At that point it's time to get to the rest of
the tasks listed here, plus get started on my startup ideas.
*** DONE CHP
- State "DONE" [2013-09-17 Tue 00:11]
- State "STARTED" [2013-08-29 Thu 14:58]
I feel naked walking around outside unarmed most of the time.
Unfortunately, this is only good for 5 years and requires notification if
moving to a new county (adding yet another moving task). Plus there are
annoying fees and navigating the necessary paperwork is a real timesink. But,
the end result is worth the effort and now I'll always have my LCP or Detective
Special on me.
** Macro-goals
*** DONE year-end review for 2013
- State "DONE" [2013-12-31 Tue 22:46]
- State "STARTED" [2013-12-31 Tue 22:39]
Observations for 2013:
- Quit work late April.
- Downscaled life to approximate planned transition period.
- Minimized many possessions.
- Deworkified brain. This included mostly non-productive tasks. However, I
did managed to knock out the vast majority of tasks in the fiction and games
section. Apart from the much needed break, there was much to be gained from
doing this, but I probably overdid it some.
Goals for 2014:
- Try to earn at least $30k. If it doesn't look like I'll be able to do that
on my own by beginning Q3, I'll get a short term contract job, as I had left
work earlier than planned originally anyway.
- Now that I'm settled into non-work life, starting at the beginning of the
year, I'll "work" at least a full 8 hours a day on learning my planned
programming skills or writing code. This work is defined as stuff on this
list, not including non-fiction, fiction, and games sections. As with having
a job, I'll give myself 2 days off a week (probably Sunday and Monday) to
just play games or recover. I've learned that operating without any
structure whatsoever probably isn't going to work for me.
- Come up with a post-transition period plan and begin implementing it.
* Project List (2012)
** Books: Computer Science/Programming
*** DONE The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
- State "DONE" [2012-02-04 Sat 16:11]
- State "STARTED" [2012-02-01 Wed 15:59]
Had been meaning to read this since about 1998. I had already heard the
important points here from secondary sources, but this is still a good read,
minus all the religious references and uselessly outdated technical specifics.
I'm not sure I agree with all of the author's recommendations for project
management, however. I would modify his `surgical team' approach only
slightly, but I think a case can be made on how that conflicts fundamentally
with some of the other standard waterfall model suggestions.  I've had enough exposure to the later alternative
methodologies to know they are attacking the problem the wrong way.
*** CANCELED Mahout in Action
- State "CANCELED" [2012-02-14 Tue 15:18]
- State "STARTED" [2011-05-23 Mon 11:39]
Got an early access version of this book.
Read some of this, but it was pretty boring. Since I deployed to Afghanistan,
I'm canceling this and hope I won't ever need it when I get back, as it seems
highly unlikely now. Will reopen if that turns out not to be true.
*** CANCELED RapidMiner 5.0 manual
- State "CANCELED" [2012-02-14 Tue 15:19]
- State "STARTED" [2011-05-09 Mon 08:58]
Notes:
- Attributes can have roles, e.g. ID, target attribute, regular.
- Attribute types: nominal (enumerated), numeric, integer, real, text
(unstructured free text), binominal (only two valid nominal values,
e.g. yes/no), polynominal (more than two valid nominal values), data_time
(date and time), date, time.
Read several chapters, but there's little to learn here of permanent value, as
this is just a boring end-user application. Since I deployed to Afghanistan,
I'm canceling this and hope I won't ever need it when I get back, as it seems
highly unlikely now. Will reopen if that turns out not to be true.
*** DONE The Cloud at Your Service
- State "DONE" [2012-02-14 Tue 15:20]
- State "STARTED" [2011-04-26 Tue 05:16]
A higher-level introduction to cloud computing and a survey of the current
state of the technology. Only have this on Kindle.
Pretty boring, but if you didn't know anything about cloud computing and were a
bean-counter, it'd be a okay introduction. Despite being rather high-level,
this has strangely-selected, super-simple code snippets (probably just to pad
out the book). It's also very repetitive.
Only read a little over half of this, but I'm calling it done. This is really
crappy book and obvious short term tech book fodder. It might as well have
been called "Learn Teh Clouds in 24 Hours".
*** CANCELED Mars: A MapReduce Framework on Graphics Processors (paper)
- State "CANCELED" [2012-02-15 Wed 03:54]
Recommended by coworker.
Skipping this, since this isn't something I'll likely ever use now. It was
going to be one of my research side projects while deployed, but it turns out I
don't have as much free time as I hoped, thus I have to be more selective about
how I spend it.
*** DONE A Critique of Common Lisp
- State "DONE" [2012-03-12 Mon 15:48]
- State "STARTED" [2012-03-12 Mon 14:43]
This is a post-CL committee critique. I generally agree with all the
complaints voiced here. The large number of undefined language aspects is
particularly annoying.
*** DONE A Brief Beginner's Guide to Clojure
- State "DONE" [2012-05-22 Tue 10:27]
- State "STARTED" [2012-05-18 Fri 09:22]
Starting with this one since it's quite recent and includes the latest
Leiningen setup.
http://www.unexpected-vortices.com/clojure/brief-beginners-guide/index.html
Notes:
- Instead of variables, Clojure uses reference types. The four types of these
are: Vars, Refs, Agents, and Atoms.
- Namespaces: A function `my-func' in file src/my-proj/core.clj has a fully
qualified name of `my-proj.core/my-func'. `my-proj.core' is the namespace.
Local functions and ones in namespace clojure.core can be called with their
short name.
- Clojure uses vectors instead of arrays.
- When looking for libraries, first check the standard library at
http://clojure.github.com/clojure/index.html then contrib at
http://richhickey.github.com/clojure-contrib/ then finally at Clojars.
- To use stuff from the standard library, just add a `(:require
[clojure.string])' in the ns macro. No project.clj edit is necessary.
- For contrib, add something like `:dependencies [... [org.clojure/data.json
"0.1.2"]]' to project.clj and `(:require [clojure.data.json :as cdj])' to the
ns macro.
- Maven Central hosts all contrib and Java libraries. Find the Maven path for
these at: http://search.maven.org/
- lein-marginalia can generate docs from a library, which is handy for actually
using it without having to delve into the code for most situations. To
enable this everywhere by default, add it to ~/.lein/profiles.clj. Then run
`lein marg' and check the uberdoc.html file in docs/. See this for the latest
version: https://github.com/fogus/lein-marginalia
An okay intro. Not very comprehensive or anything, but good enough to get
your bearings in the Clojure ecology.
*** DONE Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data (paper)
- State "DONE" [2012-05-23 Wed 22:47]
- State "STARTED" [2012-05-23 Wed 22:12]
Recommended by my work's resident cloud guru as an overview of the fundamentals
behind Hadoop (which is primarily an open source copy of the design in this
paper).
I read some of this, but I disagree with the usefulness of reading this paper
for someone using Hadoop. There's too many internal Google specifics here.
These are things that Hadoop core developers should care about, but I certainly
don't need to know them.
*** DONE Effective Java
- State "DONE" [2012-05-23 Wed 23:38]
- State "STARTED" [2010-07-16 Fri 16:15]
This book is full of useful info and no fluff. Gave this a close read, but
didn't take notes or try to write programs along with it, so I might read it
again some day to make sure the tips here stick. Definitely keep a copy of
this handy whenever writing Java, which is something I try to do as little of
as possible.
Update 2012-05-23: I made it through about 3/4 of this 2 years ago. I haven't
written a line of Java since then, but kept this task open under the assumption
that I'd have to at some point. Given my successful avoidance so far and no
prospects of having to write it in remaining time I have planned to have a job,
I think I can safely forget about this book. If the worst does somehow happen,
I'll just reread it from the beginning, since I've forgotten a lot of it now.
*** DONE CS2008 Curriculum Update (paper)
- State "DONE" [2012-08-25 Sat 21:51]
- State "STARTED" [2012-08-23 Thu 08:42]
The ACM's recommended ideal computer science curriculum. Or in the ACM's
words, "CS2008 should seek to identify the fundamental skills and knowledge
that all computing students must possess".
http://www.acm.org//education/curricula/ComputerScience2008.pdf
This white paper definitely has a designed by committee feel to it. The good
parts mostly just confirmed I don't really have any major fundamental gaps in
CS knowledge (by their measure), at least for the stuff I care about. However,
a lot of the stuff included here are things I would argue don't necessarily
belong (or at least aren't essential) in a CS course. True CS knowledge isn't
as ephemeral as things like security, current social issues, and human-computer
interaction. That stuff definitely belongs in an SE program, but it isn't
science.
*** DONE Clojure - Functional Programming for the JVM
- State "DONE" [2012-08-27 Mon 12:16]
- State "STARTED" [2012-05-22 Tue 11:07]
Looks like this is probably a good overview of language features. The goal
here is to complete an intro of all the main concepts so that when I read the
book Clojure Programming, it's just detail filling. Such a comprehensive intro
is included in my Clojure learning plan due to my chosen full text's lack of
exercises.
http://java.ociweb.com/mark/clojure/article.html
Notes:
- println auto-inserts spaces between parameters. To avoid this, use the str
function first.
- Use all-ns to get a list of loaded namespaces.
This is a good quick reference for getting stuff done. Will keep it bookmarked
for that reason.
*** CANCELED Core Java, Volume 2: Advanced Features, 8th Edition
- State "CANCELED" [2012-08-27 Mon 12:19]
Don't want to write any Java anymore, so don't need this.
*** CANCELED Functional Programming for Java Developers
- State "CANCELED" [2012-08-27 Mon 21:00]
This book seems to be about applying functional techniques to OOP languages
like Java.
I'm canceling this since I don't write Java, any mashing of FP into OOP is
always a mess, and there are already plenty of real FP languages on the JVM.
*** DONE GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual 3.0
- State "DONE" [2012-08-27 Mon 23:38]
- State "STARTED" [2011-05-31 Tue 10:25]
At `C-h i d m Elisp'. Reading this since I'm often stuck in ielm at work when
on a non-SLIME box. This can definitely be frustrating once one realizes how
many CL niceties are lost. I don't want to become an elisp guru, but a bit
more competence would make life a lot better. This book is more of a reference
manual though, whereas the other built-in elisp book is more a proper
introduction. I'd read that instead first, but it's broken on the RHEL distro
work uses.
Notes:
- Replace all `(if (...) (progn ...))' (if statements without else clauses)
with `(when (...) (...) (...))'.
- For readability reasons, use () when representing nothing or an empty list
but nil when representing false.
- This is the place to go to look up documentation on various aspects of
elisp. The programming workflow includes:
- Using eldoc-mode to get the lambda list for known functions.
- C-h d <function-name> to get the function documentation.
- C-h i d m elisp s <search-term> to get the full docs on that elisp subject,
where search-term is a function name, or other unique string.
- Floating point arithmetic is non-exact, so use something like this for
floating point comparison:
(defvar fuzz-factor 1.0e-6)
(defun approx-equal (x y)
(or (and (= x 0) (= y 0))
(< (/ (abs (- x y))
(max (abs x) (abs y)))
fuzz-factor)))
- A repeat..until loop can be written like:
(while (progn
(forward-line 1)
(not (looking-at "^$"))))
- Use symbol-function to get a function definition.
Since I'm no longer stuck working in a SCIF all day, I'll end this task now. I
read most of this, and learned a lot, but Emacs Lisp isn't something I really
want to focus on getting awesome at.
*** DONE Google Correlate Whitepaper (paper)
- State "DONE" [2012-09-10 Mon 10:59]
- State "STARTED" [2012-09-10 Mon 10:41]
An example of scalable dimensional analytics, using approximation to trade off
precision for speed.
http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/whitepaper.pdf
Notes:
- Given input data, can describe relevant queries.
- Uses an ANN (approximate nearest neighbor) algorithm. This algorithm isn't
too difficult and I could probably implement it myself.
I could see this method being very useful for stock market data. Attempting to
find correlations between indicators/values would otherwise be an expensive
process and could never happen in near real time. If I ever start doing some