Blog - Everything

Epic: an overused word. Also: describes the Video Games Live concert experience that I had at the Greek Theatre tonight.

The highlights for me were:

• Songs from Chrono Trigger!
• Oboe solo in Legend of Zelda medley.
• Music from Halo 1 and 3, with live guitar and full orchestra and choir. Just excellent sound. It made me want to play through Halo 1 again. And get the soundtrack.
• Music from World of Warcraft! It was amazing to hear the background music that I usually take for granted done with such precision and volume. Syncing it with visuals from the in-game trailers was also a nice touch.
• Excellent performance of One Winged Angel from Final Fantasy VII, with cosplay pics being shown on the display, as an encore.
• The Video Game Pianist renditions of Final Fantasy and Mario tunes.
• Music from various Castlevania and Mega Man games, some of which I recognized from my The Advantage CDs.
• A live performance of Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion on expert mode in Guitar Hero by a talented audience member, with guitar and orchestra accompaniment. And some sort of odd-looking tube for the first 20 seconds or so of the song.
• Seeing Out Run footage while the orchestra played some of its music, as I was walking in. Man that takes me back.

There were a few things that could have made the show even more amazing than it already was.

• I couldn't place one of the songs in the Chrono Trigger medley that most time was spent on. Perhaps it was a Chrono Cross piece? I would have liked to have heard even more themes from Chrono Trigger, and more time spent on that segment overall.
• For Castlevania: Stage 3 (I think that's what it was), instead of them saying "go, go, go", I was expecting to hear some really sweet high notes being hit on the guitar. Most likely, this is due to me being familiar with the live performance version of the song by The Advantage from archive.org.

Stacked parking was an interesting experience. Lots of people waiting in their dark cars, and then simultaneously leaving. It was more painless than it looked. One car nearby was rocking out some video game tunes with some sort of synchronous blinking lights on their car while everyone was waiting to get started.

I had a guest over who ssh'd into a machine named similarly to one of my top-level directories. This caused M-x find-file to show his machine every time I tried to tab-complete on that directory. Very annoying. It turns out that tramp is to blame: it reads ~/.ssh/known-hosts every time find-file is run. To make that bad completion go away, just remove all mentions of the machine name from ~/.ssh/known_hosts.

I don't think it has been announced elsewhere yet, so I thought I'd mention this: I've stepped down from my responsibilities as an HCoop Sysadmin. The primary reason is lack of motivation to work on remote system administration, particularly without machines to stage changes on before they hit prime time. Programming as a day job has been very good to me, to the extent that sysadmin work feels like drudgery.

It's been instructive. I had to adapt a lot of essential utilities like Mailman, Exim, and Courier to work with the AFS filesystem. Hacking Exim was easily the most invasive AFS-related change, and involved me grepping through the large Exim spec document numerous times. I also had to work on a cron script hack to deal with the mess procmail makes when it can't write to AFS for whatever reason.

It has also been fun. I've worked on a method for using git to work on custom changes to Debian packages. I've been impressed with the idea of directory-level ACL's, as implemented by AFS. I've been less than impressed with the idea of tokens that expire, causing standard tools to display weird error messages. I've written and organized a major collaborative documentation effort: the HCoop Member Manual. I've automated much of the work of signing and managing SSL certificates as a site-specific certificate authority.

I tried some Trader Joe Tofu Spring Rolls, just for the heck of it. The tofu and peanut sauce tasted decent, but they completely screwed things up by including raw mint leaves in the roll. What a terrible idea. Mint belongs only in ice cream and gum, and even then, not in raw form. I had to wash the taste out of my mouth with a hot dog.

I had an idea for a new Emacs mode yesterday while talking with a coworker: a clipboard manager for Emacs. Think M-x browse-kill-ring, but able to pick up on yanks and kills made by other X programs, and set the current X (and Emacs) selection. An initial search didn't yield anything similar to this, so it might be interesting to implement — don't think I'll do it myself, though, since XFCE's Clipman is good enough for me.

Q: What do you get when you cross a mobster with an international standard?

A: You get someone who makes you an offer that you can't understand!

— /usr/games/fortune

Obligatory joke about OfficeOpen XML:

Q: What do you get when you cross Microsoft with an international standards organization?

A: You get an Office format that you can't understand.

Gmane is a handy way to follow mailing lists, especially those with a large volume of messages. There are cases when it is not a good idea to use it, however.

Maintainers of a project should definitely not use it to follow mailing lists for their projects. The same goes for active contributors. The reasons are as follows.

1. If your main computer breaks down and you have to rely on just websites, you would have to visit the Gmane web interface for each mailing list that you're a part of. This would mean you can't easily keep track of which messages have been seen, and becomes a hassle if you're involved in several projects.
2. More things can go wrong. Most people use something like leafnode to download messages from Gmane. I recently ran into a bug where leafnode was not fetching messages for any newsgroups (after about three weeks of being without internet access) until each newsgroup was visited and had all of its messages read. I just don't have time to investigate such things.
3. If your mailing list has a policy of sending replies both to individual senders and the list itself, this is nontrivial to do.