Portable Applications

So, for some strange reason I carry a flash drive in my pocket. Pretty much all the time. Most guys jeans have a double pocket on the right side - one about 3 inches wide and 5 deep, and one that's no more than an inch or two wide and the same deep. It's too small for most cell phones, but it does fit a USB flash drive perfectly.

My old one recently broke; it had no cap, so the metal part got pushed back and forth and eventually some connection snapped. My new one is a 4 gigabyte drive (that I got for 8 bucks), and it retracts into the base.

First thing I put on it was a small text file; it is titled "Bring me home!" and gives contact info for me. Then I realized - I have a 4 gigabyte flash drive, which I use solely for transferring documents from school to home, and to the printer. It's never going to have more than a few hundred megabytes of data on it.

So, I've started putting portable applications on it; Portable Apps has all the programs you want.

I started with Tor, which is a special anonymity software, which runs via a worldwide onion routing network. It's perfect for bypassing censorship; it's used by anonymous whistleblowers, bloggers, and those behind firewalls (like in China) worldwide. I'll use it to bypass the ridiculous filtering software at my school, which blocks perfectly acceptable websites like Youtube (which doesn't work with Tor because Flash video can compromise anonymity, unfortunately), The Onion (a parody news source), and most anything related to fighting censorship.

Then I got a portable version of Google Chrome. Tor runs on Firefox, but I'm not a huge fan of Firefox. I'll use Chrome instead of the crappy old versions of Internet Explorer on school computers.

Then, I got Nethack 3.4.3, so I can waste time.

Now, I'm looking to get some more applications. Maybe GIMP and Inkscape for graphics work, maybe chess or some other games. Maybe OpenOffice.

All of this is on my flash drive. How cool is that?

NetHack Wiki

I received a very nice email today from Tjr, one of the admins of Nethack Wiki, asking me to change my links from the old site on Wikia to the new one, which is on the same servers as nethack.alt.org. Apparently Wikia was being nasty with a new default skin and putting too many intrusive ads on.

So, the links are changed and as a bonus, I might start playing Nethack again.

TelNetHack

So, I got bored in Marine Science today. We were supposed to be writing research papers, but that doesn't work too well when all our work is online.... and most of the computers don't work. We theoretically have a dozen laptops, but many don't login properly... or connect to the internet. Some that do connect still can't actually load websites.

I was dealing with one such laptop today. Having at that point absolutely nothing productive to do, I went under Accessories, and sure enough, I managed to access the Command Line interface. It's not supposed to be accessible on school computers (along with Facebook, Youtube, and anything deemed R rated), but somehow it was. I used ping and ipconfig to check the network status - the network was fine, Internet Exploder was the problem - then I typed the the command 'telnet nethack.alt.org'. A login later, et voila. Nethack.

It was the text-based graphical interface - I normally play with tiles - and the half-second lag was not fun. But I haven't died yet, and hey, Nethack. In class. It's the old-school technology version of the comic book behind the textbook.

Things I Am Bad At

Getting homework done

Maintaining a proper sleep schedule

Resisting the urge to listen to metal for hours on end

Not dying in Nethack

Finishing books

Blogging semi-regularly


....yeah.

Gnome With the Wand of Death

Yesterday, as I was playing Nethack, I suffered a horrible death. A promising young Valkyrie, already with speed boots and the artifact weapon Mjollnir, was killed by the (mostly) mythical Gnome With the Wand of Death.

It's a ridiculously long-odds occurrence. In Nethack, intelligent monsters can use wands (4% of randomly generated items). One of every 200 wands is a wand of death. But somehow, the random item that this gnome stumbled across was the 1-in-5000 wand of death.

Not to mention, gnomes are puny monsters. With an artifact weapon like Mjollnir, they die in one hit. But my character got felled by a pathetic monster with a powerful wand. Not fair.

The biggest irony: My character was called RNGbane. RNG is the Random Number God, the anthropomorphization of the random number generator that determines everything in Nethack - what monsters and items are generated, whether attacks hit, even the shape of the dungeon. The Banes are a type of artifact weapon that do double damage against their specific monster. Trollsbane, for example, does double damage to trolls. Thus, RNGbane should have been able to beat the RNG. Instead, the RNG pulled off a nearly impossible trick.

I captured the moment for all eternity:

Click on the image to embiggen it.

Very little to post about

Didn't see the aurora last night. Too cloudy.

There was a tornado spotted yesterday morning about 5 miles south of here. Not a very common sight in Connecticut.

Got the booster of the A.R.V. Condor primered.

Playing Nethack.

J. Random Hacker

A subset of the Jargon File is the Portrait of "J. Random Hacker". (Hacker here refers to a skilled programmer, rather than a "cracker" who attempts to damage systems). Even though I am just a padawan - I can program only in BASIC, the lowest of the low, on my calculator, I aspire to be an excellent programmer, and I completely recognize myself in the personality traits listed:

• Appearance: Intelligent, intense, abstracted, thin. That's pretty much me.
• Dress: T-shirts, jeans, sneakers. Casual and vaguely post-hippie. Likes black, not for the goth look but because it goes with everything, hides dirt, and makes dressing up (when needed) easier.
• Reading habits: a range that astonishes liberal arts majors, with lots of well-thumbed books on a variety of subjects. Fond of technical maunuals and good sci-fi.
• Interests: chess, intellectual games, wargames, music, Nethack, linguistics, theater.
• Sports: likes competitive but not-team and non-contact sports. I like tennis and skiing. Also, other things like climbing, hiking, aviation, and diving.
• Food: exotic food, often Oriental stuff like Chinese and Japanese. Also stuff like pizzas and microwaved burritos when working. Stir-fried random is good.
• Personality traits: high intellience, ability to digest and retain large amoutns of information, intellectually broad but focused, control freaks about their work but chaotic and messy elsewhere, attracted by challenges and cool toys. I also possess the rare but hacker-common INTJ (introvert-intuitive-thinker-judger) Myers-Briggs personality type. Possible ADD / Asbergers. Strange sleep patterns.
• Writing: tends to be better at writing than speaking. Bad handwriting and fond of block-printing. Tends to verb nouns (turning any noun into a verb rather than using a more general verb, which is allowed in pure-positional languages like Chinese, but not English). Tends to put punctuation after parentheses and quotes, which makes more sense than the prevailing method of putting them inside.

Random Stuff

1) Been playing Nethack a lot lately. Great gobs of fun.

2) I'm starting to coat the main body of the Orbital Transport with wood glue in preparation for painting. It'll take 5 or 6 times, each covering about 20% of the balsa, to get it nice and smooth.

3) Ever wondered how many hamburger patties could fit into a tractor trailer? About 100 million, or enough for every third person in the United States.

Can I make it?

I'm only at 336 posts, including this one, and I've got just 17 days to make my goal of 365 posts in the first year. That's 29 posts in 17 days, or about 1.7 posts per day. That's a rate of 54 per month, which so far I've only achieved in January do to a flurry of building and launching rockets. (The only rocket I've been working on in May is the Machnum force, and I haven't launched since April).

Fortunately, I've got a couple of factors working in my favor. I've got my computer back and working smoothly - Norton and Office are happy, IE8 isn't too bad (not very different from IE7, acts a bit more like Chrome, windows linked from each other are colored the same), and I have Nethack entirely self-contained on my backed-up documents (hurray for flash drives). This means I have access to the internet 24 hours a day, without having to use my parent's desktop or risk them looking over my shoulder, so posts will come at all hours now, not just late at night.

I've also got more material coming: the Machnum force being built, plans to launch more soon, my simulation program, music reviews, and more. With tennis over and summer coming, I've got a lot more time for building stuff, launching rockets, and blogging. I think I can make 365 by June 10th, and more interesting stuff is yet to come.

A few notes: I've averaging about 8-10 visitors per day, and for the amateur geek and amateur geek, both in and out of quotes, I'm #1 on google results. I show up on a few other reulsts, including my name, oddrocs, micromaxx staging, oop Estes rockets, Astron Invader, and a handful of others.

On the 10th, the Amateur Geek's first anniversary, I plan to do a bit of a retrospective.

Computer Fixed

By brute force. The geek squad took a look, saw many problems, and with my permission wiped it. Fortunately, I had my data backed up to a flash drive. Then, they test it out... and it crashes again. Turns out the problem was a faulty 2GB strip of RAM. Now I'm down to 3GB (still plenty) and my computer is wiped, but I've got IE8 (looks the same as IE7), and a clean slate with no programs to cause problems.
I'll put Picasa, Itunes, Norton Antivirus, and a graphing program for physics on soon, and maybe Chrome, GEarth, or NetHack on later. (NH is a self-contained app in my documents, so all my scores and bones files are safe.)

Sleep

Various bits and pieces on one of the trifecta of essential activities (eat, sleep, breathe).

I am currently in the throes of what Jeph Jacques terms 'sleep madness'. Basically, My combination of weird sleep schedule and little sleep has screwed with my brain and caused even weirder sleep habits.
I tend to sleep roughly midnight to 630 (or 650) am on school nights, and 2am to 10am on weekends. However, over the last few nights I have't been getting enough sleep, and last night i got just 5 hours. Plus, I had tennis today. That introduces the additional factors of sitting out in the sun for 3 hours (dehydration, messes up my eating schedule), playing for an hour (excercise and dehydration), and the team tradition of engorging at the local fast food joint afterwards (2 cheesburgers, fries, and a medium soda), all of which do crazy things to my sleep schedule.

By the time I got home after the hour bus ride, I was a bit tired. I actually slept from 930 to 1015, and missed part of Numb3rs, dammit. After watching that and getting excited when Youkilis hit a walk-off to beat the Yankees (haha, suckas), I've been wide awake since 11 (it's now 2am). Now I've been eating turkey and drinking milk so I can get to sleep.

Sleeping that 45 minutes this evening was only the third time in recent memory that I've napped. The first was a year ago coming home from a ski trip - two long days of skiing and the relaxing sound of rain outside made it the first time I've ever slept in a car (planes i can sleep in just fine). The second was back in October when I had a nasty coldish thing. I slept for 3 to 5 one afternoon and had an immense fever dream, in which i played a very realistic game of Nethack for 2 hours, until I met an Archon where they don't normally appear and I realized I was in a dream.

Speaking of dreams, I normally have many memorable dreams, but in the last few months I've barely dreamed at all, and I can remember few if any at all. I suspect it's due to a potent combination of stress from school, not enough sleep, eating late at night, and getting more excercise from tennis.

It's now 2:42 and I'm still wide awake, and I'm eating biscuits made in the microwave. Why? Because utter deliciousness waits for no man!

And now I'm actually going to sleep. Good night.

Bones!

Is not on tonight. Sigh.
But there's another type of bones. Bones files. If you die in NetHack then, depending on where you die, you might leave a bones file. It includes a ghost named after you and your stuff, mostly cursed. The ghost is annoying and hard to kill, but sometimes you can find usable stuff. A few days ago, I accidentally angered Izchak, a shopkeeper. Bad Luck. Shopkeepers are powerful and hard to kill, as a lawful character murdering a human is bad, and killing Izchak is looked down on by others because Izchak Miller was a major part of creating NetHack you tragically died from cancer in 1994. Needles to say, my unlikely Valkyrie died. Unfortunately, she also left a bones file with an angry Izchak. That bones file killed 3 other promising Valkyries.
I took the unusual step of deleting all the bones files on my computer - all 4 of them. I consider this fair because I deleted all, including those that might have benefited me. This is the same situation as if I loaded the game onto a new computer, for example. The game didn't declare death by trickery, so I think it's fair. If you have any complaint, please comment.

Farvell RNGbane the Valkyrie

(My player-character, not the rocket)
My best-ever game of NetHack died today. I will now say it in narrative form. (Note to the rude: I play a Valkyrie, a female p-c, because they are the easiest type to play, fight better than other types, and can easily get Excalibur. )
RNGbane the stripling started out good. She went through 3 levels of maze and 3 of the Gnomish Mines before reaching Minetown. She accidentally angered the guards and was forced to kill them in self-defense. That, however, gave her a good set of armor. She ascended to the mazes, went down some more, and entered the puzzle-levels of Sokoban. She solved all four levels and defeated hordes of monsters. She then collected her trophy - a bag of holding - which doubled the weight she could carry - and then promptly destroyed it by putting a wand on cancellation in it. Her wands, rings, and most of her food were lost, but she recovered. She returned to the Mines and soon found another BoH. She acquired much money, gems, and 21 daggers to throw. She went to the end of the mines and acquired a luckstone. She stepped onto a polymorph trap, became a Master Mind Flayer, and sucked a few brains out before returning to human form. Returning to the Mazes of Menace, she descended deeper. After a hitting another polymorph trap and becoming a unicorn, she lost her T-shirt, cloak, and body armor, but all were soon replaced. She found the portal to her Quest but was not yet ready for it. 2 levels later, she hit another polymorph trap and became a stronger Valkyrie. Now she was ready. She easily made it to the Quest's final level. Finally, though, she was done in by a Fire Giant with a wand of sleep. She died with 162 Hit Points at XL (Experience Level) 14 on depth level 17. She had gathered 159,000 points - her personal best. Farvell, RNGbane.
She will rise to fight again.