I’ve run through Origins once as a mage and most of the way a second time as a rogue before I got tired of it and switched to Awakening. I ended up finding a glitch letting me get a party member (Velanna) after I was supposed to, and getting into an area that was supposed to be locked down (the Silverite Mine), so I switched characters and ran through as a blood mage. Bioware has announced they’re not fixing the Silverite Mine bug, which I don’t understand because there are plenty of other unpickable door locks, so why can’t they fix that one? When I first got in there, none of the dialogue made sense because I hadn’t gotten Velanna in my party and she hadn’t told me her story yet. I missed out on some cut scenes that I later saw when I ran through as a blood mage, too.

On the subject of glitches, I wish more sites would use OpenID for authentication. I rather consider it a glitch that every time I want to log into, for example, my cell phone provider’s site, I have to use their Reset Password form because their password restrictions keep out my passwords of choice. It’s ridiculous, too, because I like having, say, exclamation points in my passwords, but they disallow them, so my passwords are less secure. I don’t want to use the same password everywhere, though I guess OpenID would pretty much be the same thing. At least then I could focus on having one awesome password through a site like Google, that doesn’t have pointless password restrictions, and have that everywhere.

You see that? All 4GB of my RAM are finally recognized by Windows 7! No more “4GB (3GB usable)”! I just now installed the 64-bit version because I’ve been having a slew of troubles with The Sims 3 in Windows 7 32-bit, plus I wanted to go to 64-bit anyway, so I figured I’d take the leap. Even with 64-bit, I had 3GB of usable RAM because some was marked as “hardware reserved.” After a bit of Googling, I found I should check my BIOS settings for something like the following: frame buffer size, video buffer size, or memory remapping. I found the latter but there were two options: h/w remapping and s/w remapping. More Googling and forum-checking led me to enable s/w remapping and leave h/w remapping disabled. Boot into Windows, and I see the above information–huzzah!

I still have EA Download Manager installing The Sims 3, so it’ll be a while yet before I know if this has fixed my oh-so-annoying crashes. I would be playing along, doing fine, when suddenly my screen would go black and audio would be caught in a loop. My monitor light would go orange and there would no longer be a signal to the monitor. The only way to fix it was to hold in the reset button. This seemed to most often happen when I was scrolling across the map. It happened less frequently when I ran in windowed mode and killed all processes I thought I didn’t need. It was getting to the point where I saved every 5 minutes because it was so frequent, and so annoying to lose all that unsaved progress.

I planned on donating my 25″ RCA TruFlat SDTV (a giant CRT thing) to Goodwill, but then Mark’s mom on Facebook inquired about it. I checked the Salvation Army’s valuation guide and estimated my TV might be worth a $100 write-off, so I offered to sell it to her for that. She’s not interested, and I don’t blame her since HDTV’s are getting so cheap. Seriously, the new LCD HDTV I just bought was $258.99 and, about two years ago when I bought my current SDTV, I paid $258 for it! Anyway, she informed me that Goodwill no longer accepts TV donations but apparently the Salvation Army does, which is good to know before I went tracking down a nearby Goodwill.

In other news, I’ve been playing Fat Princess on the PS3 like a fiend; I’m currently at the rank of Ensign. Some of my best moments include:

Reign of terror

I was an upgraded Worker and had a Priest teammate following me around. We got in a highly contested Outpost and he kept me healed while I chucked bombs down at all the enemies below. We had a reign of terror that lasted for some time and garnered some serious points. We eventually got killed but I went back later with another Priest, perhaps the same one, and did it again. Anytime the Priest needed healing, he’d switch to the Dark Priest to suck life out of enemies, and I’d just jump out and run back into the Outpost to heal myself.

I just want to be a lumberjack

The game had just started and I was a Worker, chopping trees all by myself in Black Forest. Suddenly, some enemy goes running past me carrying his princess. I was like “oh shit!” and started chasing him down. Of course the Worker wasn’t upgraded because we were so poor resource-wise, so I just hacked and slashed at him with my axe. I had to chase him down into the water but eventually killed him. I grabbed the princess and started running/swimming back to our castle. My enemies were chasing me down, a few Warriors taking slashes at me, and I got down to the tiniest little heart but managed to make it to one of our Outposts. I popped in the Outpost, still carrying the prisoner princess, and then came one of our Priests, healing me up fully. I hopped out, carried the princess to our dungeon, and got 50 points. I think it was an entirely different game, but the same thing happened again. The lowly axe-carrying Worker saves the day!

Staving off defeat

I can’t remember the map but it was set up such that a little cliff was above each castle. I ran to the cliff over my enemy’s castle while I was an upgraded Worker. I just hung out up there, chucking bombs down into the castle below, right where their princess was sitting on the thrown. When archers would shoot at me, I’d back up until they couldn’t reach me and still chuck bombs. I know, I know, I’m a camper. Anyway, my teammates would run up beside me and hop down to steal the princess, but the timer was going because they also had our princess in their dungeon. Whenever the timer was almost up and my teammates weren’t around, I would hop down and grab their princess, running off with her as far as I could get. Of course they always killed me before I made it out of the castle, but it was enough to decrease the timer until a flood of my teammates could make it and steal her more soundly. We eventually lost the match but I staved off the end for a while!

Hallelujah, it’s raining royalty

I was doing my thing as either a Worker or a Mage, I can’t remember, when suddenly our princess came flying down in front of me from a fight that had happened on the cliff above me. I was all “holy shit!” then grabbed the princess and started running for our castle. I had to cross the whole map since I had been right next to the enemy castle. I made it back to our castle and dumped her on our throne, getting I think 150 points for my trouble.

Just now, I was going to boot into Windows to get the drivers for my Samsung Magnet so that I could transfer some files to it via its USB cable. I couldn’t even boot because my BIOS gave me its “keyboard error or no keyboard present” message and wouldn’t get past the loading screen. I tried plugging my new Microsoft keyboard into various USB ports to no avail. I even got out my old but still-working Targus keyboard but didn’t have any luck. I opened the computer case and jiggled all the connections I could think to jiggle, but I think perhaps the thing has just lived past its time. Ugh, this means I need to go searching on Newegg for another motherboard, probably a new case, and make sure everything will work with my video card and memory.

My problem though is that I need to get rid of my existing stuff before I go buying new stuff. I’m trying to reduce the amount of crap I have in my apartment, and I’ve started by putting my loveseat up for sale on Craigslist. I also cleared off one of my two bookshelves in my apartment and brought it home for my brother to use. In the process, I picked out a bunch of books that I don’t figure I’ll want to read anytime soon, but that I otherwise don’t want to sell/donate, and I brought those home to store in my old bedroom. I look forward to the day when I have a house from which I don’t plan to move for a long time, so that I can bring back all of my crap from my parents’ house and either keep it, sell it, or donate it. I would also like to sell my couch because it is a freaking heavy sleeper sofa that my old roommate picked out because she thought having a sleeper sofa would be a good thing. I insist that it is not. I for some reason bought the damn thing from her when we parted ways, though, and now I want it gone. That would leave me with fancy camper chairs for seating, were I to sell the couch and the loveseat, but that would be oh so convenient when I move later this year. I would end up buying a couch that is not a sleeper sofa for my new place.

Anywho, I’m still getting my ass kicked in Bayonetta at this harder difficulty setting, but I’m muddling through. I’m discovering all kinds of new stuff that I missed the first time through, probably because I’m used to the game and recognize when something is out of ordinary. I’m looking around a lot more, initially ignoring the obvious spot where they want me to go and poking around instead to find secrets. I found the last piece of a record, allowing me to get a new weapon I didn’t have before: the Kulshedra. I’ve also discovered what those Broken Witch Hearts are good for (collect 4 to get a larger life bar) and have been actively seeking them out. It’s funny that on Easy I didn’t have need of these things because it was easy enough I just blew through every fight. I didn’t miss not finding the extra goodies because the game was easy enough without them. Now I find myself in dire need of some of the green concoction components because I’m always using health lollipops and can’t make more. I’m even running low on the yellow and red components used for the other lollies.

I was just reading about God of War III and it sounds pretty fun. I like the idea of battles played on top of huge creatures. I enjoy that part of Bayonetta, and wish there were more battles with a crazy-large scale.

I find it interesting that before I bought a PS3 or became interested in owning one, I didn’t think there were many games for it that I would enjoy. It’s probably because I didn’t even look at games that came out for the PS3 because I didn’t own one and didn’t plan on buying one. Now that I do own one, though, and am looking at games for it, I find there are quite a few that I’m interested in playing. It’s nice, because I kept replaying the same old games on my Wii: Animal Crossing, Paper Mario, and Twilight Princess.

Ha! My dad just said something to me about glittery vampires and I was all “what?? what do you know about glittery vampires?”. He told me that they do get Showtime, and apparently he’s caught Twilight on there. I told him how I was going to rent New Moon later this month and force Jon to watch it with me. His response: “You mean there’s more than one of these things?? I haven’t been able to sit through more than about thirty seconds of the first one! It’s just stupid. It’s unbelievably stupid!”

One thing I wanted to point out (can’t remember if I’ve said as much before on here) is that I haven’t had any problem with the game’s load times. I know I read in different reviews online of the game that everyone thought Bayonetta’s load times on the PS3 were ridiculous. Now I haven’t tried the 360 version, but I did do one thing that I didn’t see other PS3 reviewers mention: I chose the Install option before I ever started playing Bayonetta. I saw it in the main menu, didn’t know what it would entail, but it sounded like a fine idea. I’m guessing that doing that speeds up loading considerably by copying necessary stuff to the PS3 instead of always reading from disc.

I have Eternal Sonata ordered and it should arrive in a couple days. Just in time, too, since I beat Bayonetta only yesterday. I’ve been playing Pixeljunk Eden also, though I’ve only gotten 4/5 Spectra in Garden 1 and nothing in any other garden.

I found the 120GB version on Toys R Us’s web site for $299 and it said it was in stock. Not trusting that to be accurate, since every other store I checked online was out of stock, and stores I called in person were sold out, I decided to call Toys R Us. I fortunately got stuck with a phone menu that you talk into instead of the kind where you hit different buttons. I say fortunately because the speak-aloud ones are easy to circumvent: just wail and squeak and squeal different inhuman noises. It frustrates the machine and causes it to say things like “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that” and eventually “Please hold while I connect you with a representative.” Score! I got a guy who checked for me and said it did indeed appear to be in their warehouse and that there shouldn’t be a delay in shipping. We’ll see. I went ahead and ordered it from their web site; $299 PS3, $13 shipping, and $18 in taxes later, my PS3 order was placed.

Games I’m looking forward to playing:

• Eternal Sonata
• Heavy Rain
• Katamari Damacy
• Dragon Age
• Heavenly Sword
• Little Big Planet

If you have any PS3 game suggestions, let me know. :) Also, has anyone else had trouble finding these things?

Here's sample output on my Mac:

Searching *.rb for "puts"...
./finder.rb:4:puts
./finder.rb:5:puts
./finder.rb:11:puts
./finder.rb:22:puts

And here's some sample output from a Linux machine:

Searching *.c for "struct task_struct"...
./fs/fcntl.c:414:struct task_struct
./fs/fcntl.c:423:struct task_struct
./fs/fcntl.c:462:struct task_struct
./fs/fcntl.c:481:struct task_struct
./fs/fcntl.c:490:struct task_struct

Note for students: my professor requested I state that, should you be taking his programming languages class CS 655 at the University of Kentucky and you try to use this code, (1) you'll get in trouble for using someone else's work and (2) you have to include the GPL and my copyright notice, which would be a big hint that it's not entirely your work. ;)

I started out using the Facebooker API but got frustrated when I kept getting an error about not being able to convert nil to String. I don’t even know now what was causing that. I tried various ways of accessing Facebooker, via gem or plugin (though one of the developers says in this forum that he hadn’t rebuilt the gem in a while, so use the plugin), with no luck. So I switched to the older RFacebook and had troubles accessing the magical “fbsession” that every tutorial in the history of RFacebook tutorials glosses over like of course it’s available in your controller and if it’s not then you’re obviously retarded and should just write Visual Basic for the rest of your pitiful programming career. Again, screw that. Feeling hopeless at the lack of other Ruby APIs out there for Facebook, I went back to Facebooker and proceeded to get 422 Unprocessable Entity errors (?!) whenever I would submit a POST request. In my logs, I was seeing the following:

ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken (ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken):
  facebooker (1.0.61) [v] lib/facebooker.rb:90:in `with_application'

Lots of googling led to the aforelinked forum post wherein someone said to turn off forgery protection by commenting out the following line in app/controllers/application_controller.rb

That doesn’t sound good, turning off forgery protection, but the forum poster said Facebook already provides it. No idea if that’s true, but by damn, I just want to POST two string values to update the database! Sheesh! Anyway, so my posts work now and things are proceeding along as I would have expected them to three days ago.

My first little problem came when I was going to have it create an account for me so I could easily buy TurboTax again in the future. The labels for “Password”, “Password Again”, “Security Question”, etc. were offset from the form elements they went with. Not a big deal since I could mostly figure out what went where, but it made me leery of trusting the company with my personal details. If they can’t put some polish in their program to, uh, make their forms legible, which is kinda basic, I don’t exactly trust them to get security and privacy down pat. So I skipped that step and was just going to do a one-time purchase for my 2009 tax return. I fully filled out the form with my name, address, and phone number but when I hit the Continue button, it popped up an error: make sure there are at least two characters in the Customer Billing Address2 field. Uh, there was no Customer Billing Address2 field. I had checked the “Billing address same as shipping address” checkbox, and there was only one set of address fields available. Even in that set of address fields, there was only one field for “Address”, not a second one labeled “Address2″. I couldn’t get it to go through, so I’m thinking I’ll go with H&R Block’s tax program again this year, since it worked well for me last year.

On a side note, ever since I updated this blog to Wordpress 2.9, I’ve been having trouble Publishing posts. I usually write up an entry in one shot and it auto-saves as I type, which is nice. However, when I hit the Publish button, it redirects me to a page saying my attempt to edit the entry failed, would I like to try again. I have to go to Posts > Edit, open the saved draft, add in whatever tags I had tried to publish it with along with the title sometimes, and then Publish. I hope this is fixed in an update.

Note for students: my professor requested I state that, should you be taking his programming languages class CS 655 at the University of Kentucky and you try to use this code, (1) you'll get in trouble for using someone else's work and (2) you have to include the GPL and my copyright notice, which would be a real big hint that it's not entirely your work. ;)

shared.ml

heap_sort.ml

Another question I had was if I had to pay the $199 all at once or if they offered some kind of installment plan. I just figured a big company like Adobe would offer such conveniences, considering that Apple and other companies do. Hell, I can buy an iMac for $28/month, and its total cost is way more than the student Photoshop at $199. *rolls eyes* Way to be inflexible and lose a sale, Adobe. Guess I’ll continue with GIMP and ArtRage.