Legends of the Five Rings, 4th ed.

Friday, my friend Marius published a concise review the new 4th edition of L5R.

Yes, the graphical design is indeed lovely, presentation is good and clearly Rokugan-themed. A great deal of care has gone into this new edition.

The changes to the system seem to be mostly reasonable and sensible.

In addition to what Marius has mentioned about this revision, I would like to point out a few things that I noticed within the first couple of hours of use. This is of course quite opinionated, but that is what you get for reading a blog. ;)

• The index is improved in this edition, good going!


• Chapter organization still seems slightly haphazard: you have to know your way around the book to know your way around the book.
  
  Yes, the chapter ("book") titles "Book of Fire", "Book of Water", etc. are cute, but they seem to have little to do with the rings as I understand them in context of the system.
  
  Additionally, there appears to be little enough thought behind what went in which chapter.


• They have not fixed the monetary system.


• For a player converting from 3rd to 4th, there are several WTF moments.
  
  I kept thinking: "they should have made a character conversion guide, or at least a chapter briefly outlining the changes from 3rd".

I wonder about two more things:

1. We have had role-playing books like these for ages now, yet there appears to be little actual development in presentation.
   
   For those who want to understand the technicalities of a RPG, first-generation games were supreme in providing a technical reference to the actual system, usually very little prose, while leaving a lot to be desired in terms of descriptions of background, setting, and not least: graphical design.
   
   Today's generation of games are pretty darn good at providing background, setting, and graphical design, and also good in describing how the system works with examples and prose, but usually suck at being a technical reference.
   
   In other words: before, you could more or less easily look up the game mechanics, but in these days, you need to read several small essays and short stories to get there.
   
   What prevents RPG publishers from combining the best features?



2. And, as a person who is rather fond of carrying less things around, where is the searchable PDF? Please, pretty please! :)

These bullet points can more or less easily be solved by eager fans with too much time on their hands.

In these days, I wouldn't be surprised if one of these fans came up with an iPhone/iPad/Android app for handling the technicalities.

Oh, and, yes, the system and setting is still highly recommendable.

Even easier copy and paste for X11 in Snow Leopard

A week ago, I blogged as a result of rather long-standing frustration.

I didn't think my solution through properly. This can be solved in a far superior manner with a FIFO (pipe).

Here's how to do it with just one xterm and one Terminal.app window/tab dedicated for the purpose.

1. mkfifo ~/tmp/paste


2. In Terminal.app: cat ~/tmp/paste - leave this running


3. In the xterm: cat > ~/tmp/paste - leave this running


4. Paste whatever you want into the xterm that's redirecting its output to ~/tmp/paste.


5. This text automagically appears in the Terminal.app window/tab. Copy it from there and into the application you wanted to provide it to in the first place.

Copy and paste from X11 in MacOS X Snow Leopard

Apple has done it again: broken something beyond repair.

In Snow Leopard, copy and paste between X11 and other applications seems at first to work just as in previous versions of MacOS X.

But after a while, it just stops working.

To "fix" it, you need to quit the X11 application and start over.

But that also means exiting all the X11 client applications that you had running, it's not quite as simple as restarting a window manager used to be.

Apple is notorious for not fixing bugs with their X11 implementation other than at the time of a new MacOS X version, so don't hold your breath.

So here's a butt-ugly work-around. Prerequisite: a spare xterm with e.g. bash running.

1. Select the text you want to copy.


2. Copy it into your spare xterm. Example: copying the URL http://www.google.com/ (in real life, the URL is bound to be harder to type by hand)

   jani@computer ~ >echo 'http://www.google.com/' > /tmp/paste



3. Switch to a first-class Mac application citizen, like Terminal.app.


4. In Terminal.app, get the contents of the paste file:

   jani@computer ~ >cat /tmp/paste
   http://www.google.com/



5. Select the text and copy it with command+c


6. Switch to your favourite browser, e.g. Opera


7. Paste the URL into the address bar

See, that was eaaaasy.

*grumble*

Happy new year^Wopportunities

I still enjoy photography, but I suck at making the results available to others.

There's this thing called time. I've heard that it's nice when you have it, and don't spend it all at once. And it's more fun to take the pictures than to ready them for others, especially when my day job is to spend 8 to 10 hours in front of a computer.

Ironically – some might say – I plan to spend more time taking pictures this year than last year. Why?

I want to catch the bird before it's flown. Literally.

Happy new year, and happy new opportunities to you all! (Myself included ...)

Asus NCCH-DR

That NCCH-DR is a "¤%)/"¤)/%#" piece of ...

But it's our piece of crappy hardware, and we've bought three.

The first looks are okay, it seems to have almost all the bells and whistles that are necessary for a dual Xeon server board, except that pesky 4 GiB limit for RAM.

So, having installed the motherboard with CPU, RAM and whatnot into a 2U rack-mountable, it was time to boot and configure the BIOS, then install an OS.

1st annoyance
This motherboard takes forever to reach POST. And I mean to reach it, not actually pass it. I have to wait for nearly one minute every time I boot or reboot before the motherboard starts listing BIOS information about CPUs etc. Hrrrgh.

2nd annoyance
The motherboard comes with both PATA (IDE) and SATA connectors. Following fairly standard procedure, we like to install our servers from a CD-ROM onto a SATA disk. One should think that this is hardly unusual. One should also think that since there are precious few SATA CD-ROM (or DVD-ROM or rewritable) drives, it would work to install a bog standard server OS (i.e. Debian or Slackware) from said CD-ROM onto said harddisk. Wrong. The default setting for the motherboard is to not support both PATA and SATA devices simultaneously connected, you have to change something in the BIOS. Of course, the failure mode is less than obvious; you get to boot from a CD-ROM, but the OS cannot really use that CD-ROM afterwards. If you boot with a live-CD like Knoppix, you'll be able to load the OS. Not only that, you'll be able to install Debian using debootstrap, but you won't be able to boot to it, not with a rescue CD, either.

Solution: change the BIOS configuration as follows:

1. Enter the Advanced section.
2. Select Onboard Device
3. Select SATA Configuration
4. Change the On-Chip Serial ATA mode from Auto to Enhanced Mode
5. Save the friggin' changes.

3rd annoyance
It's a motherboard with advertised support for "Maximum up to 4GB". Yep, that's probably the theoretical maximum, because you're not likely to see it. Although they sell it as a server motherboard, you can't rely on getting the full usage of your RAM, because -- as the manual puts it:

Due to chipset resource allocation, the system may detect less than 4 GB system memory when you installed four 1 GB DDR memory modules.

Our first installed motherboard reports 3.4 GB. This is what is usable by the kernel, too, even in PAE mode, the remaining 700 MB (not a typo, 4 GiB is about 4.1 GB) are simply unusable. Crap.

I can sit normally

Yes, it's been yet another week at work, exciting enough to try to sit normally, let alone sleep on my back.

On January 1st, I was in Korketrekker'n, a nice place to go and risk your health. Lots of fun, but it caused me some damage to the remainder of the tail we humans no longer have.

Highly recommended, but go slowly over the bumps.

Nearly half full

It's the third day of Christmas, and as per tradition, I'm nearly half full.

The gluttony of Christmas is a welcome change from the healthy foodstuff we eat and clean water we imbibe the rest of the year. I'm joking only a little bit.

So, three down (24th to the 26th) and four to go (28th to the 31st) before I'm done; tonight is free from gluttony.

Maybe.

Peace!

I went here, and I was damned

Thanks to several years of indirect peer pressure and what can only be brainwashing, I've now succumbed to blogging, too.

For those who don't get the blog title ("No matter where you go, there you are"): you've got a hole in your memory. Whether that hole comes from not actually seeing the source, or if it comes from simply not remembering, well ...