There are certain things like the iDuck that strike that perfect balance between being appalling and being highly desirable...
(link via Neil Gaiman's Journal)
This past weekend I finally broke down and bought a Xerox 15 sheet cross cut shredder. I can not tell you how satisfying it is to take yet another annoying credit card offer and just run the whole thing through the shredder without even bothering to take it out of the envelope.
The only thing that I've disliked so far is that the spec sheet at Staples said that it does CDs and the box doesn't say that it shreds CDs. As an experiment I ran a CD through the shredder. However, I'm not entirely convinced that I could repeat the procedure several dozen times without having a sharp piece of plastic come flying out of the machine and into my eye.
I ascended a Valkyrie (using nethack 3.4.3) .
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Farvel matt the Demigoddess...
You went to your reward with 5375280 points,
Sting (worth 800 zorkmids and 2000 points)
Mjollnir (worth 4000 zorkmids and 10000 points)
The Bell of Opening (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
Vorpal Blade (worth 4000 zorkmids and 10000 points)
The Orb of Fate (worth 3500 zorkmids and 8750 points)
20 aquamarine stones (worth 30000 zorkmids),
16 jade stones (worth 4800 zorkmids),
14 emeralds (worth 35000 zorkmids),
14 citrine stones (worth 21000 zorkmids),
11 jacinth stones (worth 35750 zorkmids),
11 amber stones (worth 11000 zorkmids),
10 sapphires (worth 30000 zorkmids),
10 black opals (worth 25000 zorkmids),
10 turquoise stones (worth 20000 zorkmids),
9 amethyst stones (worth 5400 zorkmids),
9 fluorite stones (worth 3600 zorkmids),
7 rubies (worth 24500 zorkmids),
7 jet stones (worth 5950 zorkmids),
7 obsidian stones (worth 1400 zorkmids),
7 worthless pieces of colored glass,
5 dilithium crystals (worth 22500 zorkmids),
5 diamonds (worth 20000 zorkmids),
5 chrysoberyl stones (worth 3500 zorkmids),
3 garnet stones (worth 2100 zorkmids),
3 jasper stones (worth 1500 zorkmids),
3 agate stones (worth 600 zorkmids),
2 topaz stones (worth 1800 zorkmids),
2 opals (worth 1600 zorkmids),
1 amulet of change (worth 150 zorkmids),
1 amulet of unchanging (worth 150 zorkmids),
1 amulet of reflection (worth 150 zorkmids),
1 amulet of magical breathing (worth 150 zorkmids),
and 24905 pieces of gold, after 80446 moves.
You were level 27 with a maximum of 269 hit points when you ascended.
I guess I should get back to work now...
Today I made my first contribution to the Wikipedia.
I also learned how to dump a mapfile out of ps2ld (SnSystems' ultra nifty linker) and by using a friend's utility to analyze the output I tracked down and eliminated 233k of static allocations that didn't need to be there.
So, now I'm exploring the mysteries of tequila and anime.
Well, I'm totally swamped moving toward alpha (which is apparently going to be our emergency back up for E3 build), but once I'm past alpha I've found my next project.
(link via sQurl)
In order to reduce streaming load off disk we're experimenting with an compression algorithm where we reduce each asset to a 32 bit integer length value and either a 32 bit CRC or a 128 bit MD5 value. The values are then used to allocate an appropriately sized buffer and a search is conducted to produce a final dataset that matches the checksum. With an average asset size of 200KB the average compression ratio for disk assets is approximately 100,000:1 for the CRC based algorithm and 40,000:1 for the MD5 based algorithm.
By performing PS2 DVD reads aligned to 16 sector boundaries we can achieve a minimum raw data throroughput in excess of 2Mb/s on the inner edge of the disk and a maximum thoroughput of 4Mb/s toward the outer edge with the average being around 3Mb/s in the middle. This provides an effective average read rate of 300Gb/s using the CRC based algorithm.