This is the Message Centre for Pete, never to have a time-specific nick again (Keeper of Disambiguating Semicolons) - Born in the Year of the Lab Rat

Hello Pete

Post 1

OwlofDoom

I'm a bit worried, looking through your Personal Space ...

Have I found my doppelgänger?

You hate grammatical errors too - and don't you just hate people that hate people who hate grammatical errors? (I think your right and its a good thing to be ... smiley - sorry, couldn't resist that!)

OK, you're also a Linux user - good, good. I've managed to stay away from MS Windoze (at least on my own computer) for about eight-nine months now, but yes I still have to deal with it from time to time (I pity you not having Linux at university, though - we have a very out of date RedHat distro running in our department, which is better than nowt I suppose)... I had a geek-code lying around somewhere but I think it got lost when I wiped the evil RedHat from my drive to put nice Debian on there. Have you come across the term "spod" to refer to procrastinating geeks? That's the word I like to attribute to myself most of the time. Take a look at my pages to see what I get up to.

I'm also a Nethack (and Slash'EM) player, but I must admit I'm pretty crap at all that... I only worked out that spells are a pretty good thing the other day, and I think my top score is little more than 2500 ... Oh well, perhaps I'll improve one day ... (*dreams of the Amulet of Yendor*)

Nice to have met you, thanks for your comments on my article, and you're welcome to visit me at my personal space, my website and on GateWay (the talker - see my website for details).

See you around!

~ Owl smiley - towel


Hello Pete

Post 2

Pete, never to have a time-specific nick again (Keeper of Disambiguating Semicolons) - Born in the Year of the Lab Rat

Cripes. You see the dangers of having an out-of-date Personal Space? smiley - winkeye Watch this space: I'm trying to rewrite it completely. Or perhaps almost remove it in favour of a proper hosted website (since my personal space is currently my de facto homepage, my freedom of speech is stifled a little by the Beeb's policies).

A theory on spods (and related species) and grammatical errors... ESR says: "People who are lazy or careless in their writing are usually too lazy and careless in their thinking to make good hackers." (from the Hacker-HOWTO)

The no-Windows institution was my college, not uni. (In America the two terms are synonymous - they would probably look at you a bit funny if you said they weren't here smiley - winkeye) I wouldn't even consider a university that has no Unix of any kind, though I don't really mind what sort (other than XENIX, but there's not much chance of that). Linux is preferable though. Anyway, the complaint was more to do with the lack of alternatives to the blecherous MSIE than anything else. They have Win2000 now, which is at least more stable than Win95/NetWare. But still they insist on giving EVERY machine a CD-RW even though nobody is able to use them - what a waste of money! Haven't they heard of network installation?

ATM I'm still using Win98 SE since I've repeatedly been having trouble with hardware support under Linux. Specifically, it's damn hard to get my graphics card (GF4 440, 64MB) to run X, under Debian at least. You have to compile a new kernel for it to work. (OK, so it's more to do with the fact that I'm a terminal procrastinator smiley - winkeye)

As for the mouse... I got Mandrake 9.0 download edition with Linux Format. When it came to configure the mouse, I immediately went for the obvious option - Genius NetScroll Optical, which is what it says under my mouse. It popped up a test screen. I randomly moved the mouse, the wheel, and the buttons... and the pointer behaved even more randomly! It seemed not to work at all, even though it should have been a perfect match.

OTOH the generic wheel mouse driver worked ok, though without thumb button support - which I really need to persuade me to move off Linux. You see, the only things sticking me to Windoze ATM are the games, especially Half-Life mods. These are a LOT less RSI-inducing if you can configure a thumb buton as crouch (the default being left ctrl with movement keys W,A,S,D - just imagine holding down that button for long periods of time with your pinkie while trying to move).

As for NetHack... yes, it's hard, but knowing about rec.games.roguelike.nethack helps a lot. Try http://www.melankolia.net/nethack/nethack.guide.html for some pointers. I've been playing, on and off, for about as long as I've been on h2g2, and the furthest I've got is (IIRC) the level past Medusa's, as a Valkyrie (which is pretty poor at magic). I lost my high-score table when my dad last changed his hard disc, but I think my all-time top score is somewhere around 50,000. I think. It's a long time since I saw the scores so I can't be certain.

I've never tried Slash'EM... any good?

Anyway... see you around. I just added you to my MSN contact list - my nick is Hairy Dude.

P.S. Currently listening to an Ogg Vorbis rip of "Life On Other Planets" by Supergrass.


Hello Pete

Post 3

OwlofDoom

Hello again!

Nah I think you misunderstood my definition of "spod" (mind you ESR gets it completely wrong - the fool). A spod is (as added to the latest JF) "an otherwise competent hacker who spends way too much time on talker systems" (come onto a talker, you'll soon understand smiley - weird). I'm very careful with my writing, as are a lot of other spods I know.

About the college and uni thing - I know exactly how you feel. Nitina (my fiancée) went to school in America and to an American school in Cyprus, so she didn't understand when I said I got my A-levels at college!

Yuck yuck yuck yuck at you still using windoze (the temptation of games is the only thing that ever convinces me I need a windoze box, but as long as I have ZSnes and Unreal Tournament - and NetHack/Slash'EM!) in Linux, I don't really need it too much.

Yeah, hardware support under a proper (sorry) distro like Debian can be a pain because you're given an "essentials" kernel (in fact, bootfloppies - Deb's installer - gives you a 2.2-flavoured kernel if you're not paying attention, which is very old and hadly supports anything) which you're then expected to recompile. Kernel building isn't hard (especially under a distro like debian where they expect you to_ - I'm still pretty-much a newbie to Linux, but when I used RedHat I was under the impression that my CD-writer, my joypad, my digicam and my printer were not supported. However, after building my own kernel I'm happy to say they all work!

The mouse issue is an issue of getting to grips with how to tweak /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 by hand. It's a bit tricky until you get the hang of it, but can be very advantageous - took me lots of messing around to get mousewheel and gfx-acceleration working. smiley - biggrin

Thanks for that NetHack link, I've already learned more than I knew before.

Slash'EM is great fun, it's got loads of extra commands and character-classes and stuff, and things that appeared to be missing in NetHack like toilets. smiley - winkeye If you get the win32 version, you get a choice of graphics-modes, right from original text (with nice colours) up to full-blown isometric fancy-graphics mode. Take a look!

Anyhoo I have to booger off to uni for a Compilers lecture.. Bye!

PS you're on my MSN list too now, and Supergrass are great!


Hello Pete

Post 4

Pete, never to have a time-specific nick again (Keeper of Disambiguating Semicolons) - Born in the Year of the Lab Rat

Nah, you misunderstood the way I used it... or rather I used it in a confusing way. I meant spods' attitude to such things... sorry, I was being lazy.

For games, I ought to install Wine and see if any of my favourite games (other than NetHack, which I slightly prefer under Linux smiley - smiley) run under it. Especially Homeworld, which is pretty graphics-intensive.


Hello Pete

Post 5

OwlofDoom

smiley - doh I think I'd been drinking too much Irn Bru at the time. Yes, you make perfect sense, and I'm an eejit.

As for wine, it doesn't appear to be a particularly good way of emulating nice graphicky things (I have trouble with anything DirectX or Quicktime for starters) and it's pretty slow too (not a problem if you have a nice fast computer I guess).

However, many popular games (the Quake series and Unreal Tournament spring to mind) have hacks that allow you to play them natively in Linux using the mesa3d (OpenGL) library, and some games (it appears to be a rarity, but SimCity 3000 is an example) actually released genuine Linux versions (usually thanks to a bunch of hackers called Loki Games, who've since gone out of business).

Take a surf around on google, and you'll be surprised at how much has been hacked around (we OSSers often can't live without our games!) smiley - biggrin

~ smiley - towel


Hello Pete

Post 6

OwlofDoom

I've just created an entry called "h2g2 Nethack Rogues' Guild" (A972650) and I'm looking for members (it's just a nethack hangout, really). I thought you'd be interested, and perhaps be able to offer some advice for stuff to add to the page (it's pretty boring at the moment)...

Take a look smiley - winkeye

~ smiley - towel


Hello Pete

Post 7

Pete, never to have a time-specific nick again (Keeper of Disambiguating Semicolons) - Born in the Year of the Lab Rat

The level needs to be surrounded by tags. You could also use tags so you can get rid of all the   things everywhere, which would make the code easier to read. See A975927 for an example... unfortunately there's a bug which stops working if you use any subheaders (which bug I will submit). But there aren't any on that page so it should work.

BTW, I've also posted to the other thread.

}:=8 <-- minotaur smiley


Hello Pete

Post 8

OwlofDoom

The level _is_ surrounded by tags, but they only seem to work about half the time, smiley - grr which is better than how often they worked with rather than which is what I have now.

As for I only realised one could use it in GuideML _after_ I'd spent all that time adding &nbsp; entities to my thing by hand (I will change it now though - vim at the ready).

~ smiley - towel


Hello Pete

Post 9

OwlofDoom

Hmm weird, putting the in appears to have stopped that little bug. However, I did remove and that might've been what was causing it. I think it's a bug beyond h2g2's control, unfortunately - those tags (pre,blockquote and code) are all just translated 1-for-1 into their html siblings, so it's a browser rendering error (and I suspect you use a gecko browser too, not Internet Exploder).

~ smiley - towel


Hello Pete

Post 10

OwlofDoom

Even weirder, the bug now seems to be replicated 100% of the time in GOO and 0% of the time in the other three skins, even though the html is rendered in exactly the same way in all four ... smiley - grr

I've also added some colours to it (using CSS alone so people with older browsers can still see it in black-on-white) to make it feel more like home.

~ smiley - towel


Key: Complain about this post

More Conversations for Pete, never to have a time-specific nick again (Keeper of Disambiguating Semicolons) - Born in the Year of the Lab Rat

Write an Entry

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."

Write an entry
Read more