Jason's Site

I remember during my teen years, if you wanted a BBQ, you rang people a day before and they would most likely turn up. No one really had anything better to do. If you wanted to goto the pub in the middle of the day, there was normally someone to go with. However, recently I’ve noticed this is no-longer the case.

I wanted to arrange a BBQ with some people, but everyone seems to be doing things all the time now, so the earliest can happen is next month, and even then some can’t make it. Still, the nice weather is now upon us, and I was admiring the temperature this morning as early as 5:30AM thinking the sun was quite warm enough at that time, for a day stuck in the office. It’s BBQ season, and I’m sure I’ll have at least 4 between now and when the arranged BBQ is. As for the pub in the middle of the day, does anyone know anyone that’s available for such a thing anymore?

While the warm weather is here, I fully intend on spending most of it outside in the sun, with BBQ’s going and Cider drinking under-way. Is this Summer? I hope so. as I don’t like the cold.

So, for all you readers; if you’re having a BBQ, I’m available for attending. :-)

J

I have played Online RolePlay games for many years, from well known games like World of Warcraft and Guildwars to games that are not so well known like PlaneShift and Auteria. All of these games have good points and bad points, however, these points also change often.

This is mostly about the 3 I have played most of all in the last few years. Firstly, I didn’t play World of Warcraft for very long, because I completely disagree with going to the shops to buy a game, and then having to pay to play that game every month aswell, (note, I wouldn’t mind getting the game for nothing, and paying a small fee to play online, I understand there are maintenance costs). Guild Wars you pay once for, and then play online when and if you feel like it, Auteria and PlaneShift are both free (but not the same type of free). Here’s a short run down of things that I did and didn’t like about the games (I’m not including World of Warcraft on here, as I didn’t play it for long enough to have a real opinion)

PlaneShift: http://www.planeshift.it/

Planeshift is Open Source (though you may not use the Art-Work from Planeshift) this is a good point, because it’s already “community” based. some very nice graphics, though the animations could do with some more work. There is always something to do in Yliakum, and many skills to learn. Planeshift is very heavily orientated around the Role Play, including spending hours in the Tavern, though they have recently added a second server that is for the people that don’t really want to do the Role-Playing. You can very easily just run around and kill creatures in Planeshift, but I think most would get bored of that relatively quickly. Training skills, selling items, and Role-Playing brings this game to life. I, Myself am a blacksmith in Planeshift, Mostly because Tailoring wasn’t an option when I started (I’m not sure it’s implemented yet, I would have to check)

If you want to learn to do some very good Role Playing, I would recommend Planeshift, with lots of role-playing going on here, and Jobs for people to do as well as killing the creatures. There are also many quests here, and some of them are quite tough with riddles and longer answers than just a “yes” or “no” which require communicating with other players, finding your way around the maps and learning where different NPC’s are. (Though you must be in-character when asking for help if asking in the Main channel out-of-character conversations don’t go down very well here).

Pros:

Free
Excellent story line with individual (Role-Played) stories from other players / characters
Great Role-playing
Challenging quests (yes, this is a good thing)
Many skills and levels to learn
Ability to purchase guild/safe houses
Grouped Role-Play world events

Cons:

Server can be a little unstable under load
Some area’s of the maps are sluggish due to trying to load too many items (even on fast systems)
Some listed skills are not yet implemented
Sometimes a little overly concerned about the Role-Playing
Some skills take a long time to learn and can get a little boring.
Character movement can feel sluggish

Score 8/10

Auteria: http://www.auteria.com/

So far, this is my favourite to play at the moment, Despite the lack of “Role-Playing” when in the game, the community is very good, and the developers have worked hard on making the game work. The Chat section of this game is a separate server, as is each map area. this mean when one of them goes down for some reason (very rarely happens, but I have seen it once) the rest of the game still works. However, if your character is in the area that has crashed, or you try to travel there, you end up in a timeout loop, and have to wait for the server to come back.

Like Planeshift there are many skills to learn here, and maybe more here than there is in Planeshift. Almost everything you get that is not a form of raw material you are able to make with the appropriate skills, some Items require multiple skills, for instance some armour will require you to do some Blacksmith work, as well as some tailoring. Though the skills are not tailored around the community making and selling to other players, this does happen a lot still. There is also many things to do here, it’s very hard to get bored, a lot of skills to learn, a huge amount of quests, and when all else fails, there’s probably some pig-racing going on somewhere.

At the moment, the game is still very quiet, it doesn’t have many players yet, but it’s also still quite new and not very well advertised. I’m sure this will change over time, and new players are always well greeted with other players offering help and items to get them started.

Pros:

Free
Excellent Community
Great fun to play
Lots of quests (some easy and some hard)
Events happening pretty much weekly (sometimes more)
Lots of skills to learn
Endless levels

Cons:

Not many players yet
not a lot of Role-Playing

score 9/10

Guild Wars: http://www.guildwars.com/

Guild Wars is a good game if what you want to do is run around and kill things, that’s about all there is to do – really, you have missions which can be challenging but the point is really to progress by attack. however, the “community” in Guild Wars was not so great in with my experience of the game, people rarely talked to each other, and there was never more said than “do people want to join my team” (to go out and attack). This said, it is fun to play when you want to ignore the world, and just run around killing things for a bit. It has a very large map, and takes a lot of time to get through the game.

In Guild Wars you only see other players in Towns, when you are running around the maps outside of the towns you don’t see any other players unless you are grouped with them. I think this has a big effect on the lack of communication in the game, and does push people into silently playing the game.

Pros:

Good value for money
fun to play
outstanding graphics

Cons:

Poor story line
very poor community
no interaction with other players outside of towns
only has attack / defense skills

Score: 6/10

Conclusion:

For anyone wanting to try out any of these games I would recommend trying at least PlaneShift and Auteria. and of the 2 it would very much depend on your personal preference of games. If you prefer role-playing, Planeshift would come very highly recommended, if you’re looking for a good community and a good game, I would recommend Auteria. However both are very good games to play. I would only recommend Guild Wars if what your looking for is to ignore the world and just go and kill things.

Bare in mind, the 2 games that I highly recommend are both still under development, so there is quite often updates to the games, and things can change qutie dramatically without much warning. However, they are the most fun games I’ve played and both have kept me occupied for more than a year each. Guild Wars only had me glued to the screen for a couple of months.

If you try these out, I wish you the best of luck, and if you want to speak to me in game (mostly Auteria at the moment) then I am Mohero

— Comments disabled on this post due to too many spam messages in my inbox every morning.

Hi to all that read,

The company I work for along with a few other companies are now running a world-wide programming contest, with a nice prize to win at the end of $2000 plus a trip to our conference in Princeton, New Jersey in September. For those that don’t know, I work for a company called Dyalog LTD, they are a programming company creating an APL Interpriter.

This competition will be very good for anyone with a good mathematical mind, and for all people that would like to know more about the fantastic APL Language, be warned, it’s hard to get into, but very cool once you’ve cracked the code! For more information on the competition, you can look here, and for your copy of Dyalog APL to get started with the competition, you can apply for a student license here, or if you’re not a student and would like a non-commercial license, look here.

The competition requires completing some problems found on the Project Euler website These are very mathmatical problems, and must be completed in APL. Unfortunately I can’t enter it, (or at least not win) which is a shame, as it would be a good learning curve for my APL. I also can’t help any of you with the problems. but if you would like to enter, I can assure you the Conference in Princeton will be very good for anyone getting into APL. (and APL is a good thing to get into ;-) )

Enjoy, and I hope some of you that read this do have a look into the competition, and give it a go.

J

It doesn’t take much to please me, infact, it takes very little. So, I guess I’m a simple person.

There’s various things you can do whilst bored on the Internet, one thing that crops up on occasion is searching for yourself on Google, and then picking one of the first 3 hits as your “double”

looking at the logs on my website, I noticed there was a google search for me, “Jason Rivers” and I thought, wow, how far did they have to search for that! so I had a look and searched me on Google. Turns out I’m 9th on Google so, hopefully not long before I am myself.

Well, nice short one for now, more later… when I can be bothered to sit at the screen for a little longer :)

J

Ok, so over the past week I’ve been moving house, as some of you may know, However, what this means is there has been no or little Internet at home. I have been able to get online with a mobile “Broadband” dongle, but it’s speed has been varying between completely unusable and completely unbearable. And yes, there is a difference, one allows you to send a message once an hour…

Anyway, if you know me, you’ll also know that I spend my life online. So a week without Internet is like torture for me. One would think that it would give me time to sort some other things out, and to some extent this maybe true, as I now have DVB-S2 card in my media system, but other than setting that up, I really have just been going completely nuts without the internet. But the internet came online on Wedesday, and this is great, after updating all my systems with latest patches, and upgrading the media system, this has had some nice changes, that I’ll go into in another blog.

Not having the Internet for a few days has taught me 1 thing. That is, how much we have come to rely on it. The connection I now have probably costs more than most of yours, as I’ve opted for a business grade line that is with probably the most expensive provider, however, I chose them, because I know them, they’re fantastic, and I’m yet to hear a bad word about them. You get what you pay for.

well, enough for now, I think I have some work to be doing, oh and I need tea bags!

With the move of house, comes a lot of other movements of technology. At the old place, I was on Virgin Media’s Broadband, Although I did not have any problems with them, I do know people that had more than their fair share. I think in the course of 2 years my line went down for a total of 2 minutes, and I think that’s fairly acceptable. However, it lacks on some features. Dynamic IPv4 address (and only 1) means I had to write some rather complex scripts, due to my server blocking SSH access from anywhere unless it’s a “Known Location”. These locations normally consist of my place of work, my place of home, and my parents houses for when I visit them.

Although IPv4 is being exhausted, many people are still using it, in fact, pretty much everyone on the Internet is using IPv4 in one way or another. For me, my new connection has a /28 mask of address’s, call me selfish, but this does give all my machines external IP’s, and then I’m NAT-ing Wifi connections, because they don’t need external address’s. It also has Native IPv6 on the new line. there is still very much a case of “No one’s using IPv6 so we don’t support it” and also “many things still don’t support it, so I don’t have IPv6″. In my 2 years working at Dyalog, I have moved our internal systems to IPv6, and so far 50% of our servers are on IPv6. The interpreter received it’s required changes to support IPv6 in version 12, and some of these will be improved in 12.1, and this improvement will most likely be on-going.

So, to IPv6, and who supports it? well, Google have had IPv6 work going on for a long time now, and you have been able to access http://ipv6.google.com to run your web searches. however they only resolve www.google.com as an IPv6 address if your ISP has registered with them. I can understand this to some extent, but on the other hand, it might hold things back, as there’s alot of people beating their ISP’s to IPv6 with Tunneling over IPv4. Google here have proved that a move to IPv6 can be done without too much effort, providing you can release resources into the change, and you have a good firewall, Remember NAT is not a firewall.

What about ISP’s, what are they doing about IPv6? well Andrews and Arnold seem to be among the few ISP’s offering native IPv6 in the UK, I believe there is currently no more than 3 ISP’s offering such service. Why? maybe they don’t see the point because not many sites are using it yet. Well, here’s some news, every site I run, has IPv6, that is my personal sites and company sites, Google also have IPv6. so what are we waiting for?

Consumer devices is where my attention is grabbed, Can you name a single off-the-shelf Consumer grade router / modem that supports IPv6? I can not. and I can’t see someone at home spending thousands on Cisco gear to have IPv6. My solution to this was to buy a consumer-grade Asus WL-500gp router, and flash it’s firmware with Linux. This now gives me IPv6, along with IP4 and IP6 firewalls that I am personally comfortable with configuring.

Maybe the big problem here with ISP’s supporting IPv6 is that the consumer devices do not yet support such a thing, this means it is completely pointless having the ISP’s support it. IPv6 is moving forwards, and in the last year or 2 there has been some very big movements. unfortunately, these movements are no going fast enough, and until consumer devices support IPv6 this movement will be on a slow trickle. we only need one or two big ISP’s to start supporting IPv6 in the UK for it to take off like a rocket over here, so maybe this is a cry to the manufacturers of the consumer devices to support IPv6 so the ISP’s can also support it.

Get on the IPv6 bandwagon, this is a vote for IPv6 move forward.

Most people on a Monday morning don’t particularly want to do much, that’s understandable, 2 days of being lazy, or doing something fun, why would you want to go back to work, you already know that you’re inbox is going to be full of emails that you don’t want to read. By the time you’ve got through your emails it’s lunch, and lets face it, even if you got through your emails in an hour, it would still take a couple of hours more to get back into the work zone, by which time, it would be lunch… so Monday’s are really only a half-day, at least of real work.

However, my Monday morning is a little different, First into the office, having not even had a cuppa tea, first things first – Kettle on, then open up the server room and change the backup disk ready for tonights backup, open my inbox and start reading. Fortunately there wasn’t a great deal of emails that I had to pay attention to today, so I start my routine of checking the systems, which is an every day thing, but more important on a Monday, and why generally on a Monday I’m in so early.

When others started arriving, there were brief conversations about the weekend, top subject for me was the Formula 1, with Button winning and the whole pack order completely different from the last 3 seasons. There does however seem to be some interesting conversations today, Someone in the office wanted to see my Eee, and used the phrase “come-on then, whip it out” which, of course started a whole hour of stupid entertaining comments, including looking outside and saying “It’s nice out, I think I’ll leave it out for a bit.” It’s possibly worth noting that there isn’t a single female that works in this office, so some of these conversations, though amusing can be a little worrying at times.

Things I’m not looking forward to this week consist of the Dentist tomorrow, and Car service on Thursday, both of which manage to drain you out of any funds you should be saving, though I should still be able to save some of my income this month.

Things I am looking forward to consist of Wednesday evening (you’ll have to ask to find out why), and maybe the weekend is something else I’m looking forward to. Don’t get me wrong, I get up every morning and not only want to goto the office, I look forward to it. I enjoy the work, and enjoy the people, but sometimes weekends are very much needed, and I didn’t get much sleep the one just gone, due to the time difference to be able to watch the Formula 1, and no, I don’t want to watch the repeat, that means avoiding all forms of news, my brother and anyone else that might let anything slip, how a lot of people are with Football, is how I am with the Formula 1.

Anyway, enough from me for now. Time to get back to work…

Well, there’s some good news coming through, that is, I am moving house, hopefully the move date will be April 13th. People say you shouldn’t get the first place you see, well we are. any why not.

The House is perfect for our needs, spanning 3 floors with a large kitchen/diner, study lounge and 4 bedrooms (2 of which with ensuites). Even the smallest bedroom can have a double bed in it without any problems atall, of course, I’ll possibly have the biggest room, as I’m the only one that’s going to be there full time. I now have to decide what I have in what room…. My Media system (which I will write about later) is setup in a Single seat mode, this means it runs for itself and nothing else. so I can put that in the Living room on the nice big telly, but….. what about music in the Study, bedroom or kitchen…. (note the flat I have at the moment is small enough that this isn’t a problem) So I’m now thinking about a uPNP system for the Media system, along with some EeePC Desktops, or ITX Pico systems to run a very minimal Operating system and connect to the Master system for all the Music and Video’s.

This will most likely be a Linux system with Myth front-end, The question is if I can mix MythTV with MediaPortal, each have their benefits, and each will be used, at least until Myth TV does everything I want it to do (and I am willing to live with some flaws…)

I’ll be looking into the features of both MediaPortal and MyhTV (running on MythBuntu) later in the week, providing there is time to do so. so keep an eye here, and you’ll see how my current system is configured.

Last year at the 2008 Dyalog APL Conference in Lo-Skolen, Helsingør, Denmark. Along with most of the normal presentations on what’s new and what’s been going on with the company, there was a Presentation done by John Scholes. John is one of the oldest developers of Dyalog APL, having been with the company since day 1 almost 26 years ago, as far as his computers go, he likes them to work, he’s not too fussed what it runs, as long as it does the job in hand. Johns presentation; a Plea for simplicity is here:

This was an absolutely brilliant presentation, and a big relief for a lot of people after a very long day of conferences, to have something amusing like this was great.

However, John Scholes has created a new youtube post, for those that don’t know what a Palindromatic expression is, it is an expression that looks the same, irrelivant of which way you read it. So from the person that brought you the plea for simplicity comes a Palindromatic APL Expression for Phi.

For those that don’t know about APL, have a look here APL is one of the oldest programming languages, it’s an interpreted array language mainly for mathematicians, with it’s own character set, mayking it very fast to use for people that know what they’re doing with it, but very difficault to learn if you don’t know APL, as almost every function has it’s own character as apposed to most languages you might have seen that use words for their functions.