Category: Uncategorized

I hate to be the first one to say this but X Rebirth sucks. I’ve been a fan of the X series from the beginning and have for the last month waited for X Rebirth almost painfully. I even preordered the game, something I almost never do since I prefer to wait for reviews.

30 seconds: Try to setup joystick from the settings menu – obviously something is wrong. For example, I cannot bind the fire button and it starts unbound.
5 minutes: Start new campaign, cutscene – horrible writing and voice acting!
6 minutes: Some chick who talks to you like a jerk boards your ship without player permission. She walks to the cockpit and sits down. Who is this person? Why would I let someone I don’t know, who talks like a jerk, just board my ship like that? How does she know the layout of my ship, or automatically gain entry to the cockpit through a handprint access panel that was not set to her?
6 minutes 30 seconds: Booted out of dialog with chick while I was messing with the settings. Stuck in the back of my ship. No way to reenter – Handprint access panel does not work. Restart campaign. This is literally the fastest I’ve ever encountered a no-progress situation in a game.
10 minutes: Tried to fly with a joystick, realized it will never work because you cannot bind the controls for pitch / yaw at the same time as strafe. Even though the menu says joystick / gamepad it’s obviously gamepad only and was never tested with a joystick.
11 minutes: Using the mouse, how do I get rid of this annoying “Press space…” message at the bottom of my screen?
15 minutes: Despite Egosoft’s claim to dumb down the game to make it controllable with a gamepad, you still have layers of menus. The layout is actually worse than the original game as well. It’s not worth going into why, but it’s quite obvious if you actually try it.
20 minutes: After 10 minutes of flying around, I kill 2 drones. I’m supposed to control my freighter somehow, but no idea what to press. The help says to press 2-2 or something like that, but after doing so you still have another menu with no idea what to hit beyond there.
25 minutes: Alt-F4 in frustration, write this post.

I’ll let them patch for a year or so and see what it’s like then.

Apache and Apache Tomcat are technologies that both serve webpages, have features in common, and have a name in common. But they are DIFFERENT FUCKING things and NOWHERE is this fucking clear until I ran across a post where someone else discovered this too. So I would do a general search on how to do something, and the webpage would be talking about Apache and not Apache Tomcat, and I would be confused out of my fucking mind. Especially since some sites talking about Tomcat would shorten it to “Apache” and some sites talking about “Apache” I thought were talking about Tomcat. So the website would say to add settings to a text file that doesn’t exist, or to create a file and the changes would not work. I wasted a LOT of damn hours because of this.

It would be like if I made a hamburger restaurant named “McDonalds BurgerKing” that had a similar layout and menu, but be a different restaurant and use different names of items with different ingredients, and never explain this to anyone.

[3:04:22 PM] kevinjenkins1974: I have to restart Eclipse because the UI degrades every time I debug. At first I can no longer use the search function. Then copy/paste no longer works. Then the function keys no longer work. Then it randomly crashes and switches the UI to debug mode with no code every 10 seconds. This all happens in about 5 minutes after I debug
[3:04:42 PM] kevinjenkins1974: I can’t believe large companies use it
[3:05:04 PM] Dustin McCartney: *shrug*. Me either. It is huge at IBM, Google, SAP, etc.
[3:05:49 PM] kevinjenkins1974: another thing is suppose I have an html file and make an edit. I reload in my browser. Would you expect A: My changes are visible B: my changes are not visible ?
[3:05:51 PM] Dustin McCartney: …part of that might be Eclipse on Windows though… maybe. Many of these tools and such don’t quite work right on Windows.
[3:06:23 PM] kevinjenkins1974: There’s a ‘clean and publish’ button for the server. So I press that. Would you expect the changes are now visible?
[3:06:37 PM] kevinjenkins1974: There’s a ‘clean’ for the solutoin, I press that. Changes are now visible?
[3:06:48 PM] kevinjenkins1974: Shutdown and restart eclipse. Changes are now visible?
[3:06:54 PM] kevinjenkins1974: If you said no to every question, youd’ be right
[3:07:22 PM] kevinjenkins1974: I can either A: Delete all files from my harddrive, restart eclipse, now it is visible. Or B: Press F5 in project explorer to reload files into eclipse’s cache
[3:07:34 PM] kevinjenkins1974: Now why it does not do this automatically is a real question
[3:08:28 PM] kevinjenkins1974: Half the reason for my headache with ehcache.xml is I’d make a change and eclipse would not refresh or I’d forget to refresh. Then it would use my old settings at random, and drive me crazy wondering what I am doing wrong
[3:09:58 PM] kevinjenkins1974: I think you are probably right about Windows. I think they use it on Linux only, and have some build tool to automatically port to Windows. But nobody checks it and nobody cares, so it’s half-assed and doesn’t work right
[3:11:54 PM] Dustin McCartney: LOL.

I needed a JSON library for C++. Despite the large number of them on the internet, only one was suitable. My requirement was that it can both read and write (many can only read) and that it does not have external dependencies, including STL.

Jzon v2-0.zip
I really liked this because it is the easiest to use and only has one cpp file. But it relies on STL

jansson
Kind of large, but includes a VS2010 project so you can verify it compiles on Windows. Does not rely on STL. That is what I ended up using.

jsoncpp
Documented, but uses STL

json-glib
Documented, but through kind of usesless auto documentation http://developer.gnome.org/json-glib/
Even though they include a Visual Studio solution, it didn’t build.

yajl
Only reads, cannot write

SimpleJSON-master
Relies on STL

talkson
Not sophisticated enough

New computer:
Processor: INTEL, Core™ i7-3770K Quad-Core 3.5 – 3.9GHz TB, HD Graphics 4000, LGA1155, 8MB L3 Cache, 22nm
Memory: CRUCIAL, 8GB (2 x 4GB) Ballistix Tactical Tracer w/ LEDs PC3-14900 DDR3 1866MHz CL9 (9-9-9-27) 1.5V SDRAM DIMM, Non-ECC
Video card: ASUS, GTX680-DC2T-2GD5, GeForce® GTX 680 1201MHz, 2GB GDDR5 6008MHz, PCIe x16 SLI, 2x DVI + HDMI + DP, Retail
Motherboard: ASUS, P8Z77-V LX, LGA1155, Intel® Z77, DDR3-2400 (O.C) 32GB /4, PCIe x16, SATA 3Gb/s RAID 5 /4, 6Gb/s /2, HDMI + DVI + VGA, USB 3.0 /4, HDA, GbLAN, ATX, Retail

Passmark rating is 4518.6

Old computer:
Processor: AMD PHENOM X4 9950 BLACK EDITION 120W
Memory: CR DMNT 2X2 GB TWIN 8500 MEMORY (later I upgrade to 8 GB)
Video card: AMD Radeon 6970, upgrade from original dual EVGA NVIDIA GTX 280
Motherboard: AM2 ASUS CROSSHAIR II FORMULAR 780A

Passmark rating is 1864.9

I’ve been playing Dark Souls and brought up a character to about level 60, specializing in strength, vitality, and endurance. My character is gimped and now I have to reroll.

The reason is that every weapon in the game is effective. The tradeoff is between size and speed basically. Furthermore, you can use every weapon without specializing in a primary attribute anyway just by upgrading it to lightning or fire, which removes stat scaling.

If your primary attribute is strength or dexterity, slightly increased damage for those weapon types is all it is good for. If you specialize in faith or intelligence instead, you get the slightly increased damage too, and CAN USE MAGIC WHICH PUTS THE GAME IN EASY MODE.

1. Most enemies are vulnerable at range.
2. You are at risk in close
3. Weapon primary attributes are evenly distributed among the types of weapons available.
4. Strength and dexterity provide no other benefit

Conclusion: You’d be foolish to specialize in strength or dexterity because you can no longer effectively use magic but still have access to the same weapons

Resistance is just a useless stat, when compared to the same attribute point in vitality, endurance, intelligence, or faith

The only equipment I have is adjustable dumbells, a tree with a low branch for pullups, and a fitness ball. This is what I do on a typical workout:

Start with lateral and front deltoid raises, sometimes combined
Pullups
Bench press or Chest fly
Biceps Curl
Kneeling one arm row
Upright row, sometimes continue into a shoulder press
Sometimes triceps extensions
Wrist twist
Arnold press, usually replacing one set of shoulder press
Shoulder shrugs

On off-days I may do
Side / front plank, passball
Pushups
Ab rollouts on the ball
Back extensions
Burpees

For legs I do interval training sprints and ride a mountain bike. If I use weights it is with deadlifts and lunges. However, the weights are too light so I usually have to go to the gym to really work my legs.

I’ve stopped working with trainers after 3 years of not seeing results (*). I originally bought the Powerblock dumbells for home use as they were only $250. However, due to the shape you can’t grip them to do high-weight pullovers. I returned them and bought Bowflex 552s for about $300. The dial makes them easy to adjust. I also bought a Powerblock branch bench just because it was the floor model, about $150, and they are all basically the same.

7/19/12 these were a few of my numbers:
Dumbell bench press: 40
Dumbell biceps Curl: 25
Dumbell shoulder press: 25
Pullover: 40
Side plank: 40 seconds

8/16/12 these are my numbers:
Dumbell bench press: 50
Dumbell biceps Curl: 30
Dumbell shoulder press: 30
Pullover: 45
Side plank: 60 seconds

Similar results for other exercises. Except for the pullover I got a 20% strength increase in one month by taking over my own training.

(*) With my first trainer, at one point I could do a 60 pound biceps curl 5 times. However, I was injured every month. After the last serious injury that took me out for 6 weeks I stopped using him. With the second trainer we’d do 3 warmup sets, conservative weights, and spend the whole hour on a few muscle groups, hitting each group about once a week. However, after 2 years I was no stronger than when I started. I need to workout my entire upper body every workout and to keep going up in weight. to see results.

I started Barefoot running about two years ago. I did not want to actually run barefoot due to concerns about stepping on rocks. So I bought one of the older generation Nike Free shoes. It still looks similar to what is pictured on the Nike website right now. About 4 months ago I bought Vibram FiveFingers. Lastly, 3 days ago I bought New Balance Minimus shoes.

First, my results from each shoe:

Nike Free:

Due to the thick sole, especially on the heel, your stride is not significantly different than in regular running shoes. The primary design difference I can see is that the heel cushioning is minimized. As you can see from the picture, there is still a large arch. The shoes are very tight, and are meant to be laced tightly. You do not feel the road any more than you do with regular running shoes. I could run in the shoes, but preferred not to because the lack of cushioning hurt my feet and resulted in a sprain in the instep. I stopped using them after about 3 weeks.

Vibrams:

The bottom of the shoe is nearly flat. Because the heel is so flat, you are able to land on the balls of your feet rather than the heel and in fact prefer to due so since it is not comfortable otherwise. It’s hard to put the shoes on and you need foot powder since you cannot wear socks. I ran in the shoes about two weeks. After each running session my calves were very sore. I over trained though, and hurt my Achilles tendon which took two months to heal. The thin sole of the style I bought also means you can run only on pavement or grass. Small stones on other surfaces are extremely painful!

New Balance Minimus:

The Minimus has a fairly solid and hard sole. The heel is not as high as traditional running shoes, but is still too high for you to consistently land on the balls of your feet when running or walking. I only wore them two days and had to take them off for a period of time both days, due to the soreness of my heels. The heel was too high to land on the balls of my feet, as if I were barefoot, but too thin to cushion my steps.

—

When you walk barefoot or in socks, you tend to land on the balls of your feet unless you are purposely walking slowly. It is harder to notice where you land when walking but try it out and you’ll see this is the case. This uses your body’s foot arch, achilles tendon, and calves to cushion each step. When you walk with traditional running shoes, you land on the heels. Traditional running shoes force you to do so because the heel is so thick that is naturally what touches the ground first.

Unless you are used to landing on the balls of your feet, running while doing so, such as in the Vibrams, results in very sore calves. It is important to heed the warning and ramp up your run gradually so your body becomes used to doing so.

Otherwise, I do not recommend buying any minimalist shoe that has a thicker heel than the rest of the foot. The designers of any such shoe mistakenly believe barefoot running is the same as regular shoes, minus the cushioning from the sole. This is completely wrong and results in a sore heel. Barefoot running is a different style of running.

Regular running shoes are good for long distance running when you are not used to a barefoot style of running, and for bumpy surfaces. Vibrams are good for barefoot running where you want a little more protection than actually being barefoot. Minimalist shoes that have a thicker heel are useless for all purposes.