RPG Articles

I read a lot. Most of it is, to be kind, unimportant. A while back I was reading/listening to the Deathlands series. It’s set roughly 100 years after a nuclear war, primarily between the US and the USSR. It’s pulpy, but really fun. Towards the end of book two it starts to play the rough patriotism card, but reigns it in before starting to make me discard it. I had just finished the Graphic Audio version of number 18. While waiting for 19, I decided to try Doomsday Warrior, which is from the same publisher.

After only a few minutes I sensed this may have been a mistake. Let’s review what you need in an atomic apocalypse story.

1)Very few survivors, at least per place. Small population centers.

2)Poor communications. Telcos gone, radios very few and far between. Add a lack of trust and you’re off to the races.

3)Mutants of some kind, preferably somewhat believable. Rather, believable enough for what, really, is cheap entertainment.

4)General breakdown in knowledge.

That’s kind of it, I think. Aside from that you just need good writing, like any story. Let’s examine this one.

The main hero is Tom Rockson. I shit you not, his name is Rockson. He is described as being “The ultimate American”. So, that’s a red flag. Next is that while it’s indicated that 2/3rds of the world’s population, and that most of that was the flattening of the US. 100 million during the attack, 75 million within the year. Looking at census data, it seems that the population in 84, when this was written, was about 235 million. So, fine, so far so few. Could probably be less initial survivors, you know, but whatever. Now we get to hear how the Soviets “won” because they had advanced missile killers. I know, I know, the Cold War had everyone worried, but seriously. Ok, we’ll let that slide. Oh, the other thing is that the intro here describes all the main players and lays out their motivations, which is a bad sign of explainitis. Anyway. The Russians build 40 fortresses, for some reason, and take over. One minute we’re told that 90% of plants and animals are extinct, but then we’re told about mutant animals, and forests. Turns out that there’s “free cities” left, built on the edge of radioactive hot zones, which house the last AMERICANSFUCKYEAH people. 75 of the fuckers, with 1000 to 40000 people each. Living next to hell pits. Riiiiight. Described as “fiercely democratic”, and natural selection has made them 10 times more resistant to radiation, plus they use Spartan style child selection. More on that in a minute. So already we’ve broken some guidelines, in that we have a lot, like a lot a lot, of people working together with a fair amount of communication somehow.

About this rad resistance business. Ok, fine, it’s not too ludicrous to be in a story, though if you were to amplify my radiation resistance ten fold there’s still no way I could live in fallout, but we’ll let that slide for now. Having that and roughly a million people is pushing it pretty far though. Now, apparently these super democrats also put their children out into the night, where they have to survive 20 below temperatures. Yeah. This would totally allow you a population of roughly a million.

Then you get some other crap explained to you. Like the white markings on the radiation resistant generation. If I recall accurately, I’m picking this post up from an old draft, Tom there had…. STARS!! That’s right, he’s so patriotic he’s covered in stars. Jesus wept.

Finally we get to his hometown, which was built into a mountain by the survivors of some people stuck in a roadway tunnel that had the entrances collapsed during the nuclear strike. That’s right, people stuck in gridlock then trapped in a radioactive tomb survived long enough to build a city in a mountain. He wanders into this place, naturally the most advanced of the free cities, and eventually wanders into the gym, where his “She’s totally not my girlfriend, but hot sex friend” is sparring with a martial arts instructor. Not only did they survive to build a city, but they apparently had a strong kung-fu tradition to hand down. The lady eventually gets her ass handed to her, then Tom and the teacher throw down, ending in a draw, because the woman can’t be better than him, and neither can some random Chinese guy.

Sometime around then they talk about the weapons of these free cities. Instead of knocking off a million AKs or M16s, they created their own gun design, which is better than the Russian’s arms, and manage to churn out by the thousands.

So, effectively, within like 20 pages, the story as set means the Russians have lost. There is no feasible way for them to hold the region, and in fact it won’t even be a struggle, relatively speaking.

Then there’s the icing. The evil Soviets have a machine that erase your personality and imprint you with good commie thoughts. They bring one of the test subjects in to parade in front of some higher up and he starts asking if she would do this or that or the other thing. All in the affirmative. Then he asks if she would kill Tom Rockson, I believe even calling him The Ultimate American, and she starts screaming. Then she dies. Not just says “I dunno, he’s hunky” or passes out, but flat out dies.

I stopped reading about three pages beyond that, when the horror caught up to my brain.

These all have something insane in common, they can only open pst files that are 2GB or less, but they’ll write those files until well over that limit. So the next time Outlook opens it just sort of spazzes out.

Fun yes?

There’s a tool to truncate the file, from MicroSoft, but it doesn’t seem to follow any sane pattern or allow you any kind of selectivity.

Definitely fun. The only options from here are to change mail clients (I suggest Thunderbird) or upgrade to a later version of Outlook. I don’t suggest that because then you’ll still be using Outlook.

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.

This seems to be a great malware scanner. Use it, if you’re a sucker and use Windows.

Edit: Scratch all of my dumb convoluted theories kids. Turns out, and I told him to check on this a month ago, they shut his account down due to copyright infringement, specifically downloading old episodes of Heroes. The best part is that only one technician, out of something like 6, actually bothered looking at his account and finding the issue.

Sometimes a device will fail in a way that is, to put it gently, retarded. Radiator thermostats stick closed, a dhcp device will issue an immediate expiration of leases just as it dies, a sensor will report that everything is just fine, and all that sort of thing.

This is about a cable modem.

The person who has tolerated me the longest, my friend Art, has been having internet issues. Specifically he can’t connect to it. He would get issued an address in a 172 range, which is a private subnet, which is a problem since he connects directly to a cable modem and should be receiving a publicly routed real boy ip address. In Windows it would also be assigned a gateway in the 172 range.

Did I mention he lives several states away, so I had to handle this all by phone? Yeah, good times.

So we plunk away at it, do a repair install, try a different NIC, and so on. I remember he has a router so I walk him through setting it up, but I’m pretty sure he goofed and plugged the cable modem into one of the 4 internal ports, a fact that would set my diagnosis back a ways.

Cox said everything looks fine (a foul lie), and said he should power off his modem for 10 minutes and try again. Try not to fall for this people, make them wait it out with you if they insist on such a time. There’s no real difference between 10 seconds and 10 minutes, aside from some heat maybe.

He doesn’t have another computer and knows only technophobes apparently, so trying another computer is out of the question. So I convince him to download Ubuntu and burn a livecd of that. We boot up and…. a 172 address greets us. We look in resolv.conf, however, and guess what? There’s Cox information in there. A 24. gateway and a Cox search domain.

So we hook the router up again, double checking the connections this time, and lo, he has a real (local) ip and can hit the router’s configuration page. Meanwhile it’s acquired the same bogus info he was getting, so here’s my theory.

The modem broke, and can no longer obtain an ip, but is set to do some weird fallback behavior and is assigning an ip based on that, plus a default gateway that it’s set to search for initially, or something very much like that.

He’s currently out getting another modem, so we shall see.

That took some real doing. If you have the option, just use PECL extensions. If you don’t, prepare to sit around and try a bunch of things out.

I found several scripts that claimed to be the solution to this issue, but none of them wanted to work. Finally I pieced together something like this-

$commandline = “gpg –homedir /var/www/vhosts/host/httpdocs/gpgtests/gnupg –keyring  /var/www/vhosts/host/httpdocs/gpgtests/gnupg/keyring1 -a –always-trust –batch –no-secmem-warning -e -r ‘Fargo Holiday’  -o $outfile $infile”;

system($commandline, $result);

Which still didn’t seem to work, because the line, cribbed from one of the scripts, to check the result before emailing wasn’t firing. It was looking for a $result of 0, and I was getting 2. Turns out, for this case anyway, 2 works just fine.

Also, PGP is awesome, and I feel bad for having mostly ignored it until now.

If you weren’t so handy you’d be worthless. I swear though, if I ever find a good alternative, it’s over.

Anyway, on to the meat of this post. I had trouble getting Hamachi to run on my linux box. Wouldn’t go, wouldn’t error, wouldn’t anything.

Finally I found this post, and lo, it solved the whole shootin’ match of issues. I can’t even conceive of why.  For those that just want the answer, I installed the upx-ucl-beta from Synaptic, went into /usr/bin and ran upx -d hamachi .

This “unpacks” the binary. If you can tell me what that means, feel free.

This is something I just setup for a client of mine, whose company processes payroll and taxes. I honestly don’t know the full extent of what ATX does, but here’s what I do know- It’s written in Java, yet is platform dependent. That’s quite common with this sort of thing, and I don’t know why, but it’s a good sign that the software blows.

Anyway. Looked fairly reasonable, overall, but would stall out sometimes because of Java’s magic. Overall, didn’t really look at it enough to tell you anything beyond it’s as poorly laid out as any super industry specific software.

ATX Scan & Fill was something I had to install. It let’s you scan documents in, such as invoices and W2s, and save those under client profiles.

First, I looked for an option to import clients from ATX. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? But no, nothing there. Thankfully he only has like 5 clients in the system currently, but still.

Next I tried to add a client. This took some time, because it just had a “Create new folder” option, which turned out to be it. I imagine it’s rather a pain in the ass to work with, based on my small sample. Supposedly you can scan W2s, and similar structured forms, and it’ll use OCR to fill in the electronic info from that. Aside from that there is literally no reason to use it.

Why? Because in ATX, when you click the option to import from Scand & Fill, it’ll let you browse to any image you want. Sure, it supports some search parameters, and the fill option, but it’s something to bear in mind if you don’t want to buy them both right off the bat.