RPG Articles

This can’t be good.

If I could get to the Ubuntu Forums right now I’d link to the post that had these instructions. Maybe later.

Anyway, it had me set these to true in about:config

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining

Then this was set to 30:
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Note that this value is controversial since it can eat more bandwidth at once from a server. The default is 4, feel free to use that or any other low number you want.

Then it had me create this key:
nglayout.initialpaint.delay
Which was an integer value, set to 0.

Previously I already disabled ipv6 with this key:
network.dns.disableIPv6 set to true.

Lastly I used a modification of this great tip from tombuntu:
Added tmpfs /fftmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,size=100m,mode=1777 0 0 to /etc/fstab
Make sure you adjust the size to fit your needs. By default you only really need 50MB, or 50m, but I figured some padding is good. You can leave the size option off and it’ll default to half your RAM, but that’s a maximum number, not what it’ll always use.
Next I mounted that with sudo mount -a, after making /fftmp, then added this key to Firefox:
browser.cache.disk.parent_directory which was a string equal to /fftmp.

The result? So far a really snappy Firefox.

How specific is that huh? In all honesty it could have done it with any non-embedded documents for all I know, I didn’t check. The full story is the client, using Vista, got this problem yesterday along with not being able to open Word documents. You would try to open one and it would say the document was unavailable.

The fix? Clean out the temp files. I use CCleaner for this, since it’s very thorough. Why this fixed it, I really don’t know. There wasn’t anything else obviously wrong, like malware or viruses, so I can only assume something got corrupted somehow.

Watched this last night. It was about 10 minutes of awesome dispersed into 90+ minutes of crap.

The basic plot is that a super virus ran rampant through Scotland some 10 years ago, so Britain walled it in, killing anyone that came near the wall. We also learn that the surrounding waters are mined and patrolled, but you never see any of that.

The breakdown begins almost immediately. We see the initial closing of Scotland, and a bunch of people being killed. Somehow a little girl has an eye shot out. I have no idea what the deal is because it either just happened too fast or just wasn’t very well thought out. That part is ok. But then we’re expected to believe that this soldier, who is part of a group evacuating in a helicopter, will give up his life for this little girl with a bloody hole instead of an eye, without even questioning if she’s infected. I’m afraid that most people would have told her to sod off and find a different plot device. Instead we get a largely boring scene, and the little girl is given a note from her mommy and trundles off to presumably be a ward of the state.

Now we skip 10 years to the story’s present. The girl, Sinclair I guess (oddly “Vagrant Girl” has top billing in IMDb), is now some sort of cop, it’s never really clear what her actual office is. We see her using her newfangled cybernetic eye to spy on criminals and look around corners. The eye isn’t well thought out, and looks sort of silly. Not terrible, but there’s a little “what the hell?” vibe to it. After rolling around on the ground she just slips it back into her seemingly still organic socket, which is just eww. So one of the bad guys has ambushed her partner and puts a shotgun to his head.  She’s advancing towards him, he’s backing away, and, for no apparent reason she just keeps advancing until the dude slips and accidentally destroys the partner’s head. She kills the bad guy and looks queasy. The whole scene was pointless, and served only to make her alone without imparting any empathy at all. Oh, and she recorded everything with her eyeball.

Something that would have been nice with the eyeball thing would have been a few shots that made use of its perspective. It would have also been nice to make it an obvious prosthetic. I mean, sure, it’s like 30 years in the future, so I guess it’s possible, but it doesn’t seem like an economically devastated country would spend that kind of scratch on an orphan, even if she is also a cop/soldier/whatever. I digress, however, but seriously they could have made much better use of the eye as a cinematic device. It doesn’t even really serve as much of a plot device, so overall a straight up eye-patch would have served them better and saved a little budget.

Ok, so partner dies, Bob Hoskins, playing her CO, has some meandering talk with her. Blah blah blah. There’s absolutely no sense of energy or cohesion so far, and that never changes. All of the actors really do a great job too, but the script and direction is so absolutely wooden that they don’t have a prayer. This movie would have been at least an order of magnitude better if nearly all of the dialogue was stripped out and they just let the interactions between these actors convey the tone. This is especially true because almost all of the dialogue is either raw exposition or emotional tone, and the exposition is largely unneeded.

Moving on, another scene. Yes, like so many failed movies this one jumps from scene to scene without ever feeling like there’s a connection. You may as well be jumping through really repetitive alternate Earths. So now we find out that the mystery disease is on the loose again, via some vector that will never be questioned let alone revealed, but, quite conveniently, they’ve also discovered survivors in Scotland, so they think there’s a cure or something to be extracted from there.

Let’s examine what’s wrong and how it could be better. This is far too convenient. This is like some really bottom of the barrel type writing. Also, wouldn’t you have been studying this disease for 10 years anyway? There was bound to be plenty of samples. Before I mention how to make it better, you have to know that the jerkwad in the government, I don’t know his title, makes it clear that they should let the disease kill off the bulk of the lower class before deploying any kind of treatment. With that known the obvious, and quite used but still better than what they went with, path would be to have it so that they already have a cure, that they are the ones that released the disease, and that this whole mission to find one is a smokescreen to make the timetables play out. Instead we get some garbage.

Scotland is a no-fly zone for some reason. I understand monitoring traffic and restricting what can fly around there, but seriously, there’s no reason that I can think of to not allow your own intelligence gathering flights. It’s not like this is an anti-jet virus. Then Sinclair is spun some story about how they can’t just fly her team in because of the no-fly zone, which is just retarded. It could make some sense if you take the story into the timetable scenario, as just a line of unquestionable bullshit, but in the actual context it’s just straight bullshit.

Skip ahead. Our heroes are looking for a lab that was ran by a dude named Kane, someplace in Glasgow. Inevitably they’re attacked by Mad Max extras. Oh, and apparently in the future we lose night vision technology completely, despite it being available at Wal-Mart currently. The team is killed or captured depending on pay grade. There’s a pretty awesome feral girl that really gets into her role, but her character wad is blown way early. Also they cook a poor bastard, oddly in his clothes despite wanting to eat him. The vague indication of hunger being an issue is truly retarded since a few minutes before we see a countryside overrun with cattle.

Getting bored. Nutshell- We switch from city punks to the countryside, where it’s ye ren-fair all the time. There’s an _ok_ gladiator style showdown with Sinclair and The Black Knight, Ted or whatever his name was. They escape, the burgeoning love interest for Sinclair dies by multiple arrows, then it’s off to the races as we revisit what should be an interesting military station but is instead hideously dull, from which they get a fancy car and belt off to play Road Warrior. At this point the native girl asks what the car does, despite having seen cars and buses already in the film, in a place where she was, and yet more cars in the Mad Max road chase scene.

Skip further ahead. I’m bored just writing this, so let’s wrap up with just some consistent faults in the film, along with some good stuff.

The writing is terrible. It’s not even cliche, it’s just dull.
The cinematography is pure crap. It skips around stroboscopically and is generally more headache generating than the now omni-present shaky-cam.
Areas that could have been of interest contain nothing or are never gotten back to, while hideously boring crap is revisted over and over.
The car Sinclair ends up going randomly Mad Max in is hardly blemished, despite crashing through an exploding bus. Yeah, you read that right.

Good stuff.
Sets and costumes were generally well done and entertaining.
The actors were wonderful.

There is only one truly good scene in the movie. It’s at the very end. Sinclair takes the head of the Mad Maxian’s leader back to them and it’s pretty obvious that she’s just taken over. The look on her face is this pitch perfect expression of someone about to go nuts with total freedom and power, after having lived in a repressed soceity for so long. I really like that this is where you leave her as well, opening her actual ending up to your imagination, which even if you’re dull will be a dozen times better than what these people would write.

This movie could have been great, but you would have had to fire a whole mess of people and get a really strong editor onboard. It needed gutting and de-bullshitting.

Christ this was a long and dull post.

Of people yammering about crap.

Do any of you “writers” even bother trying to understand your topics? Sure, I guess it could help people find exploits, but so what? They were going to be found anyway, and this way developers that care can find and manage code just a little better.

Stop your fear monger dumbasses.

Recently I had a silly email forwarded to me. It contains some tripe from some dude. Here is an excerpt-

In the days, weeks and months following 9/11, our country was bathed in
American flags as citizens mourned the incredible losses and stood
shoulder-to-shoulder against terrorism. Sadly, those flags have all but
disappeared. Our patriotism pulled us through some tough times and it
shouldn't take another attack to galvanize us in solidarity. Our American
flag is the fabric of our country and together we can prevail over terrorism
of all kinds

Now, I actually watched the planes crash into the towers, on television, as it happened. Did it make me feel patriotic? No, it was just sad and terrible. Patriotism is pointless. This is just another country, not some heavenly body anointed by whatever deity you choose to believe in. We are not special just because we were born in the US. If you need to present a silly flag, a blind icon, to rouse some feeling of pride in your government, then maybe you need to stop putting those things up and really examine the system, your role in it, and what’s really going on in the world.

For that matter, at this juncture, all these repetitions of flags as symbols of something greater have only reduced their psychological impact. You lot have literally boiled the care out of people. Only the absolute hardliners, who don’t need a flag to get riled up anyway, and the easily swayed still think they matter or initiate some special connection to the land where our parents happened to birth us in.

If you’ve lost faith in gummi style candies, these will provide redemption. They are unholy in their awesomeosity. I have no idea what flavor they’re supposed to be. They’re purple, so I guess grape, but they smell sort of like plums and taste of pear and apple. They’re chewy without being stiff and oh my lord you need to get some of these.

A statement like this sneaks into an email reply to a programming mailing list-

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from website development it’s that users will absolutely destroy your expectations of how much damage they can do. The system you’re doing right now is essentially SQL transaction replay, which I’m sure is fine, but I wouldn’t ever suggest not keeping them separated. You really need someway to constrain and verify those changes. Perhaps it’ll be a little slower, but less likely to hop up and rape you like a methamphetamine frenzied greater primate when you least expect it. You don’t play odds on monkey rapists or what users will do to databases, it’s why we have cages and men in white coats scienceing these things out.