MAME, MESS, and Other Fun

When you stole my iPod last night, thank you for using the unlocked car doors, and not needlessly smashing out any windows.  It was a rental, and that would have been really unfortunate to have to both spend money replacing my iPod and replacing the window.

I also appreciate the fact that you left the 7 Nintendo 64 games that I had yet to take in from my most recent Play-N-Trade trip, as they are considerably much harder to come by than an iPod.  Likewise, thank you for leaving the male-to-male stereo audio cable with which I had connected the iPod, as I wouldn’t want to have to shell out another $20 for a small length of wire.

On the subject of finance, however, you missed an opportunity to make a quick dollar or so by not taking the multitude of soda cans with you as well.

Overall, I hope you enjoy your newfound portable music player, and hopefully you’ll enjoy the rather eclectic collection of music on it.  You may be disappointed, though, as there wasn’t quite as much gangsta rap on there this time of year as you might like.  Enjoy!

I just had a really weird thing happen to me.

My primary central media PC in my apartment, as of March of last year, had four 1TB drives in it.  Three of the drives were arranged in a RAID5 configuration, the fourth drive was standalone due to the on-board RAID controller not supporting a large enough single volume to encompass all four drives.

There was a brief power outage in August of last year.  When I powered the computer back up, I was greeted with an unfriendly POST message from my RAID controller informing me that three 1TB hard drives were connected and one unknown hard drive.  Oops.  It was at this point that I was grateful that I had selected a RAID5 configuration, and all the more grateful that I had never gotten around to putting any data on the loose drive.  I was able to put the computer to work rebuilding the parity data over the next couple of days, and everything was fine save for that one drive.

After reading about the various issues with 1.5TB and 1TB Seagate drives, just for kicks I decided to look up the model numbers of the drives, so I fired up the “Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager”.  It then informed me that it had detected a new non-RAID drive, and asked me if I would like to reinitialize the drive so that its parameters could be read.  Sure enough, the drive seemed to have leapt back to life.  After rebooting the media server, the drive is still there.  I really have no idea what would have caused it to leap back to life like that, but I know I am sure as hell not going to be putting any important data onto it anytime soon.

Incidentally, all four drives appear to be ST31000340AS, firmware revision SD15, which is the firmware and model number affected by the bricking problems that have been raging across the Internet lately.  Hmm.

“Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

I’m writing this blog post shortly before I completely reformat my laptop specifically to offer a warning to those of you who think that you’re somehow “protected” against passively-installed viruses, trojans, spyware and/or malware being installed on your computer just by visiting a website because you’re using Mozilla Firefox: You’re not.  I’m using Firefox 3.0.4, the latest version, and now I have to reformat my laptop to get rid of the absolute infestation that I’m dealing with.

I was searching for a fairly amusing series of images last night via Google.  I clicked on one of the top links that Google came up with and was immediately greeted with three popups and my hard drive being hit constantly, bogging down my laptop to the point where it took five minutes to bring up the Task Manager so that I could forcibly terminate Firefox.  Within minutes I saw several command-line windows pop open to run some sort of batch file, I saw five or six processes in the Task Manager with names such as “2jdj23rk.exe”, and since last night I’ve had fairly continual popups springing open with IE.

My best efforts with HijackThis, Super Anti Spyware, Spybot Search & Destroy, and AVG Anti-Virus have not restored the status quo, so right now I am backing up all of my important files so that I can reformat and reinstall.

KITTENZ KITTENZ KITNZ KITENS KITTENS KITTENS

OMFFFFFFG KITTENS KITTENS

• http://moogle-tech.com/kitnz1.jpg
• http://moogle-tech.com/kitnz2.jpg
• http://moogle-tech.com/kitnz3.jpg
• http://moogle-tech.com/kitnz4.jpg
• http://moogle-tech.com/kitnz5.jpg
• http://moogle-tech.com/kitnz6.jpg
• http://moogle-tech.com/kitnz7.jpg
• http://moogle-tech.com/kitnz8.jpg
• http://moogle-tech.com/kitnz9.jpg
• http://moogle-tech.com/kitnz10.jpg

SERIOUSLY LOOK AT ALL OF THOSE DANG CUTE KITTENS LOOK AT THEM LOOK AT THEM YOU HAD BETTER BE LOOKING AT THEM

In all seriousness, here’s the backstory:

Back in September when I was visiting my mom after finishing Guitar Hero: World Tour, there was this stray cat that would come by her house every once in a while.  This cat was nicknamed “Bobbie”, as she was a female bobtail - that is, a tailless cat.  I wasn’t able to tell, as I haven’t been around cats for decades - just a male cat or two while growing up - but this stray was imminently pregnant, and she was attempting to gain the cat’s trust so that she’d have her kittens in a safe place rather than under a neighbor’s house like last year, which resulted in the litter dying.

Sure enough, a week or so after I got back home, I received a phone call from my mom saying that she’d manage to coax Bobbie inside, and had set up a box and such for her to give birth, and a week or so after that she gave birth, resulting in the litter of kittens depicted above.  My mom, expert domestic animal handler that she is, has gone so far as to bottle-feed the runt of the litter.  As of this date they’re all healthy and hardy!

A Play-N-Trade recently opened up in a local mall, and I have to admit that it’s been an absolute godsend as far as N64 games are concerned; they have more unpopular games than I could have hoped for.

My ultimate goal is to amass a complete collection of every Nintendo 64 cartridge released in North America, and I realize it’s going to be tough going, but I think Play-N-Trade is definitely going to help me out in this regard.

Today I collected up all of the unused game consoles and games that I had laying around my apartment that I knew I’d never get around to playing or would never play again, and took them over to the Play-N-Trade.  $303 in in-store credit later, I picked up the following N64 games for only $135 out of that credit pool:

A Bug’s Life
Chopper Attack
Destruction Derby 64
Gauntlet Legends
Gex 64: Enter the Gecko
Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko
Glover
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
Mario Golf
Mario Kart 64
Monster Truck Madness 64
Pokemon Snap
Re-Volt
Ridge Racer 64
Roadsters
Rugrats Scavenger Hunt
Starfox 64
Super Bowling
Tom & Jerry in: Fists of Furry
Tonic Trouble
WCW vs. NWO: World Tour
WWF: No Mercy

Ultimately, a pretty good haul!

Nearly three and a half years ago I attended East Tennessee State university and obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, C.S. concentration.  After completing the project I was on at work, I was granted some time off, so I decided to spend a couple of weeks back in Tennessee.  While there, I received rather disheartening news about the ETSU “College of Business and Technology” program - encompassing the Computer Science degree track - which is that it is at risk for becoming professionally irrelevant.

You see, the people in charge of the Computer Science department have decided to move the focus of their courses away from C++.  This is not necessarily a bad thing; .NET is the flashy new language framework, and Microsoft have all but announced that they’re going to be shifting towards only allowing applications written with the .NET framework to run on Windows.

The problem?

They’re not moving over to .NET.

No, they’re moving to Java.  Java.  Of all of the languages on this Earth.

Folks, on The Mog’s Scale of Programming Relevance, Java ranks slightly higher than FORTRAN and slightly lower than Malbolge.

From what I’ve heard, this choice was made primarily because a couple semi-local companies, Northrop Grumman and CGI, have about a half-and-half mix of Java and C++.  Hey, I know!  A company uses two languages in an even mix, one of which we’re currently teaching, so let’s force all of our professors save for the couple with some sense and clout to switch entirely over to the other language!  Teach both languages in an even mix?  Continue to concentrate on C++ because it has much, much wider usage in much, much more “fun” professions?  Why, that’s crazy talk!

Speaking as an ETSU alum, I have to say that I am personally ashamed of what they are doing.   When I first went to work for EA Tiburon, the C.S. department at ETSU asked me to give a testimonial, which I happily provided.  When I moved on to Vicarious Visions, I had them update my testimonial to remove references to EA Tiburon.  Now?  Now I’ve all but made the decision that I want my testimonial removed.  Part of my testimonial states that I wouldn’t have secured my job in the video game industry had I not had the benefit of ETSU’s Computer Science program.  These words strike me as somewhat hollow now that the same program offers almost nothing relevant to the video game industry at all.

In short, I must protest this erroneous decision made by a university for which I once had great respect.  Java is largely on a decline, and suddenly deciding to specialize in a dying language in order to prepare students for a mere handful of local corporations is flagrantly irresponsible, unethical, and it does a disservice to the students that are now paying for an irrelevant degree.

Today I came home to find that the power had gone out to my apartment.  After turning everything back on, I discovered that my media PC was reporting one of its three RAIDed drives as being in an “Error Condition”, which is a kind way of saying that the drive was toast.  I guess drives don’t like it when you cut power to them in the middle of a write.

Luckily, back in March I had the foresight to buy four 1TB drives and only use three of them in a RAID5 configuration, with a fourth just used as anciliary storage.  I never got around to storing anything on that fourth drive, so I now have the “Intel(R) Matrix Storage Console” sitting in the background on my media PC, rebuilding the array onto the fourth drive.

Guess I’m going to have to earmark $200 out of this month’s upcoming bonus (assuming I get one) for a new drive.

Tonight I present the first in what will hopefully be a regular series: Dramatic Message Board Readings.

Tonight’s installment can be found here.

I’ve been rather busy at work lately, and will be for a while yet, so don’t expect too terribly many N64 updates in the coming months.

That said, I’ve converted the Controller Pak handling into actual pluggable devices using MESS’s device framework. The upshot is that games no longer need to attempt to format a brand new Controller Pak each time a game is started.

It seems that there are some lingering bugs, however - games report that there are 123 pages free on the Controller Pak, as they should, but attempting to create a new save file causes the game to claim that the Controller Pak is full. Ah well.


#if 0
Human* you = HumanInterfaceMgr::GetInstance()->GetTargetByID( PID_SONG_DEDICATION );
HumanInterfaceMgr::GetInstance()->GiveUp( you );
you->SetPosition( you->GetPosition() - { 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f } );
RunAround(); HumanInterfaceMgr::GetInstance()->RemoveNonMatching( you );
you->SetEmotionalState( EID_SAD );
you->PostMessage( MSG_ID_GOODBYE );
you->PostMessage( MSG_ID_LIES );
you->Kill();
#endif