Been tidying up my hard drive lately.
Putting all my scripts and code snippets that I use slowly into github (https://github.com/old486whizz) so that I am versioning my changes to my scripts.
I will slowly put more up there as I get myself more organized.
But the latest I've been tidying is my music, and using Amazon to buy MP3s - that was strange!
I had to use clamz to download the files since their Linux client is 3 Fedora versions out of date (soon to be 4... So that's ~2 years!!).
Salsa is going well, I'm getting some new shoes: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B003D46WNY/ref=ox_ya_os_product
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Friday, October 7, 2011
ok, so it has been a while...
ok, so I thought I would try and post stuff up semi regular like, get into a routine.
more also to type up about what software and hardware I've been fooling about with, and what my plans are.... With minor life stuff thrown in sometimes.
So, brief summary of my last 2 or so years since my last post: shit happens.
I've moved a couple of times, and bought various things. Read various books, sung various hymns (yes, a sort-of ryhme on purpose!).
But overall, where I thought I was making progress in the past, I haven't. Where I hoped things would change, they haven't. And instead of things getting better I lowered my expectations.
Now, onto the tech stuff.
I'm typing this on my Motorola XOOM tablet, I have a raid-mirrored PC, which has Fedora Linux on it. I have 2 laptops, again both with Fedora on them.
The hardware stuff I plan to do soon (in no particular order) is:
1) Root the xoom and put a different ROM on there (Motorola have pissed me off!)
2) Symultaniously upgrade/migrate my pc to have raid 2tb drives (currently has raid 1tb drives), and also upgrade Fedora to the latest version.
... I will update any further actions but I am not much into hardware...
I'm more into software!!!
1) Correct my linux auto-installer method to re-install to previous partitions instead of recreating the volume group (good if I wanna keep a snapshot of a filesystem)
2) Investigate GIT some more (currently understanding it bit by bit)
3) read through and help contribute to the bumblebee project on github.com (project to help get my graphics card working better on linux).
4) sync up my data in a better fashion (I need a pop up box to tell me I have to sort out any errors).
5) investigate integration of git into work, how it may help there
6) progress my c++ and opengl knowledge, get some stuff done here!!
7) fix my backup system to be a bit more smoother and backup only the valuable things.
This last week I've been looking at git, and how it works.. I've also been reading through systemd, the new linux boot initialization system (very interesting stuff)..
I shall try to give an update soon and it should be much better...
See you then!
Friday, December 4, 2009
Dear Nokia:
This is not a question, it is a statement.
If you wish to reward your customers for buying sub-par, BETA hardware & software and testing it for you, give a little more than £10 in VOUCHERS every 3 months.
This is the biggest *HOAX* I have ever seen.
I work in the IT department of a large UK company, and all employee's are moving away from Nokia due to their poor practices.
I am particularly insulted by Nokia using all N97 owners as beta testers without paying us a penny.
Keeping up these practices (non-functional software/hardware, keeping updates behind in the UK) will lead Nokia to ruin.
If you wish to report on anything, report on THAT.
--
Paul Sanders
Unix Administrator
x44957
+44 (0)2392 494 957
--Quote--
I don't just like it - I LIKLE it!
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Sunday, November 22, 2009
Test blog update #3
This is a test blog entry from my phone.
Just using email because mms doesn't work (obviously).
Just using email because mms doesn't work (obviously).
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Monday, August 10, 2009
Who woke me up - and why'd they do it!?
Erm, been a very long time since I wrote in here!
Might start using this more, pointing things from Facebook here - or re-posting Facebook things here.
Just for the odd occasions when it's funny / useful to say the problems I've gone through and the way I've fixed them...
PEACE!
Might start using this more, pointing things from Facebook here - or re-posting Facebook things here.
Just for the odd occasions when it's funny / useful to say the problems I've gone through and the way I've fixed them...
PEACE!
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Decentralized Gaming Network
So, I have this rather big idea:
Having a gaming network which is essentially hosted BY the people playing the game!!
Of course, it'd only be the top 10% (by default) of the gaming network who would end up actually hosting the game, but that would be an improvement in either way we currently do it.
Right now, you can either have a centralized gaming experience, where the game is hosted on a main central server (Wow etc, or public games servers) and these take commands from your PC, take where you are and only gives you the information that you need (so locally within a certain in-game distance). This is good because there's low bandwidth used from the client PC's and provided the server can handle the bandwidth, it only deals out what's needed to each server.
BUT this comes at a price - you need the moola to get the bandwidth.. You need the moola for the server to be able to handle that many people concurrently.. You need to moola to store these somewhere, for the electric, for the IP address, etc.
Then there's games like Unreal Tournament etc. They can REALLY test the network to see where contention is, and stress the network to it's best.
This is because each PC, broadcasts what it's doing to all the others on the network. This means you get a flood of packets coming from each PC, and then each one needs to get that, look at it and see if it's relevant at all.
The cost here is that the more PC's you've got, the more packets have to be sent to tell everyone of the updates, and so you need a very wide bandwidth.
My idea: have 10% of the people playing the game, actually host it. This is given by the speed of the network (latency etc - I don't quite know how I'd do that), and then organise it so that the map is split into two whenever it gets busy.
So the main map on one server gets too busy - it get's split in half so one deals with one map-grid area, and the other map-grid area gets assigned to the next-fastest PC in a list (list is updated every 30 minutes speed-wise.. Logging-off removes them from the list). Then if that one's too busy then that one splits in two also, and this organises itself so that the busiest area's are immediately sorted out, rather then relying on some central numbering system.
The grid-areas are duplicated and load balanced - so for every area there is in fact 2 servers which need to keep each other updated on what's actually happening (so that almost doubles the bandwidth required by these servers) - this is so that you can't loose a server and have people loose where they were etc.
If that does happen, then it becomes stale and another server replaces it. Once it comes back, it'll be told that it's been replaced and it'll redirect any attempts to the replacement (shouldn't really be necessary because each of these 'servers' will be updated with a new list once a server is 'created').
Now comes the only down-part I can see: the fact the players can alter, or potentially create bogus users, alter their users details, alter OTHERS' details, and get to the top of the 'network speed' list by faking details.
So you can cheat and there's nothing I can really do about it.
On my mind right now is time-based encryption involving MD5 sums, continually rolling files, and shadow-node verification when a user moves from grid-area to grid-area.
To me this seems a very good idea from a software point of view, it lessens the money the game creator needs to generate to keep the game going - but maybe not from a corporation's point of view (making money).
And the main reason I'm putting it up here? .. Is because I have no-one who I can actually bounce these idea's off of, so if some poor soul comes across this and has an opinion, give us a shout!
Having a gaming network which is essentially hosted BY the people playing the game!!
Of course, it'd only be the top 10% (by default) of the gaming network who would end up actually hosting the game, but that would be an improvement in either way we currently do it.
Right now, you can either have a centralized gaming experience, where the game is hosted on a main central server (Wow etc, or public games servers) and these take commands from your PC, take where you are and only gives you the information that you need (so locally within a certain in-game distance). This is good because there's low bandwidth used from the client PC's and provided the server can handle the bandwidth, it only deals out what's needed to each server.
BUT this comes at a price - you need the moola to get the bandwidth.. You need the moola for the server to be able to handle that many people concurrently.. You need to moola to store these somewhere, for the electric, for the IP address, etc.
Then there's games like Unreal Tournament etc. They can REALLY test the network to see where contention is, and stress the network to it's best.
This is because each PC, broadcasts what it's doing to all the others on the network. This means you get a flood of packets coming from each PC, and then each one needs to get that, look at it and see if it's relevant at all.
The cost here is that the more PC's you've got, the more packets have to be sent to tell everyone of the updates, and so you need a very wide bandwidth.
My idea: have 10% of the people playing the game, actually host it. This is given by the speed of the network (latency etc - I don't quite know how I'd do that), and then organise it so that the map is split into two whenever it gets busy.
So the main map on one server gets too busy - it get's split in half so one deals with one map-grid area, and the other map-grid area gets assigned to the next-fastest PC in a list (list is updated every 30 minutes speed-wise.. Logging-off removes them from the list). Then if that one's too busy then that one splits in two also, and this organises itself so that the busiest area's are immediately sorted out, rather then relying on some central numbering system.
The grid-areas are duplicated and load balanced - so for every area there is in fact 2 servers which need to keep each other updated on what's actually happening (so that almost doubles the bandwidth required by these servers) - this is so that you can't loose a server and have people loose where they were etc.
If that does happen, then it becomes stale and another server replaces it. Once it comes back, it'll be told that it's been replaced and it'll redirect any attempts to the replacement (shouldn't really be necessary because each of these 'servers' will be updated with a new list once a server is 'created').
Now comes the only down-part I can see: the fact the players can alter, or potentially create bogus users, alter their users details, alter OTHERS' details, and get to the top of the 'network speed' list by faking details.
So you can cheat and there's nothing I can really do about it.
On my mind right now is time-based encryption involving MD5 sums, continually rolling files, and shadow-node verification when a user moves from grid-area to grid-area.
To me this seems a very good idea from a software point of view, it lessens the money the game creator needs to generate to keep the game going - but maybe not from a corporation's point of view (making money).
And the main reason I'm putting it up here? .. Is because I have no-one who I can actually bounce these idea's off of, so if some poor soul comes across this and has an opinion, give us a shout!
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