The Clan of the Cave Bague

….you think you know how the land lies and then something comes along that pulls the rug out from under you.

Is it just me, or are we being surreptitiously taxed to death?

I thought I’d post a picture of a couple of things I’ve finished painting recently, just because. First of, this here is a goblin wolf chariot – a nasty little beggar that scoots across the battlefield and causes a fair pile of impact damage whenever it hits anything. It’s best used to even the odds in combat or take on individual models as, once it’s in close combat, it’s pretty limited – having only two wolves and three gobbos in regular combat. It’s still pretty cheap, though, and you generally get two for the points of one.

This puppy was basecoated black then the wooden parts painted with a mix 50% bestial brown and 50% PVA glue, to give it a varnished look. It was then washed over with black ink with a spot of washing up liquid in it. The metallic parts were just given a heavy drybrush of chainmail with a light drybrush of mythril on the highest points. The goblins were done in the usual manner – goblin green basecoat, black ink (diluted) wash, and then bleached bone drybrush. Nails and teeth picked out in white.

Now this wicked looking thing is a snotling pump wagon. It’s basically a cobbled together framework with a crank and handle attached to the wheels and crawling with snotlings. Thing of it as the railroad uppy-downy thing Wil-E-Coyote rides about on from time to time. It moves in the compulsory movement phase and hurtles forwards 3D6, inflicting horrible horrible impact hits on anything it comes into combat with.

This model was painted pretty much identically to the wolf chariot, but with several different shades of brown for the wooden parts – representing the fact that it’s cobbled together out of whatever they could get their mitts on.

As always, with Orcs & Goblins, the units are there for the comedy value more than the strategic usefulness.

Frederic Chopin lies on his deathbed dreaming his final dream. And for some peculiar reason, he’s dreaming about cutesy Anime characters fighting monsters and trying to save the world from the taxman!

If this is an indication of where RPGs are going, then I’m a very happy bunny. The storytelling is beautiful, as is the presentation. The audio is rich, the voice acting (with the possible exception of the terminally irritating Polka) is spot on, and the combat mechanic is both innovate and solid.

Ok, so I’ve barely done the prelude – I have two seperate parties at the moment, but as both have just decided to head to Castle Forte, I suspect I’m going to have one larger party very soon.

And – hooray! At each major interlude, it unlocks one of Chopin’s piano pieces which can be listened to outwith the game. Not that I don’t already have them on other media, but – well – if it brings his music to a new audience, then that can only be a good thing. Personally, I’m hoping the second movement of Piano Concerto #1 makes an appearance, but I think it may just be unaccompanied works.

Ok, so the more observant nelefans amongst you may have noticed the Nike+ challenge widget that sat over there —–>

Well, after the EPIC FAIL which resulted in none of us actually doing anything towards the challenge, we decided to start a new one – 100km by the end of September. Sounds doable, I think.

The reason it’s part 3 and not part 2, though, is that when I created part 2 I inadvertently made it public instead of invite only, which resulted in loads of competent people joining and they’d make us look bad.

So it’s Me, Mrs Gubbins, and Mr Smartie who are competing for the ultimate prize of 27p and a packet of rolos. If you want to join, drop me a comment.

Ok, so we have a Linux box sitting at our colo doing, amongst other things, some ASP stuff. Thing is, this server is a little broken. Someone, at some point in time prior to me working here, decided in their infinite knowledge and wisdom to ‘transfer’ one machine to another by rsyncing random bits of the filesystem over.

Naturally, as /etc and /var were included in this madness, it’s a very broken machine with an even more broken package management system.

So there I was today. I decided that, as I was implementing a new backup procedure on the machine after moving it out to the datacenter, that it would be helpful to fix the horribly broken mail system so I can actually get the results of the backup job mailed to me. No problemo – ripped out the horribly broken exim system and replaced it with a simple and elegant localhost-only sendmail set up. Hooray! Mail is fixed.

Except what’s this! I’m receiving loads of mails of failed cronjobs. Quickly fire up crontab to have a look. Nope, nothing in the crontab – must be the system crontab. Had a look in there. Removed a couple of synced-over crontabs for applications which weren’t even installed, but still no sign of the one generating the verbose errors.

To cut a long story short – crontab was cheerfully showing me the cron files stored where it expected them. Crond was happily running the cronjobs stored where it expected them. Sadly, the crontab application was not only from a different version of the cron package from the actual daemon, but it was from a completely seperate distro of linux which expected the cron files to be kept in a different place.

Lovely.

Bizarrely, I read in the news today that a British woman has just been fined £16,000 for putting a video game on a filesharing network. Fair enough I suppose.

The trouble is, I also read last week that a British woman received £10,000 compensation for being subjected to a particularly brutal rape.

Is the British justice system trying to tell us that unauthorised copying[0] is a more serious crime than the rape and beating of a young woman?

And before people jump in in the comments – yes, I whole-heartedly agree with the idea that the whole concept of ‘catching people’ filesharing is ridiculous. If it were possible to do so, I’d expect the police and government would be reeling in a lot more of the child pornographers they keep telling us about. Sadly, they seem more interested in middle-aged women posting copies of Quake III.

[0] Yes, that’s right – I said ‘unauthorised copying’. I did not say ‘piracy’. That’s because making an unauthorised copy of a piece of software / movie / CD can not reasonably be compared to the boarding and pillaging of a seagoing vessel resulting in the murder of all on board. Hence, it is not ‘piracy’.

My beloved Mrs Gubbins has her very own website here. On it you’ll find wee mini images of the awesome GIANT CANVASSES she paints.

Why is it that, when I actually feel like writing a blog post, I have absolutely nothing to say? I’m a complete blank. I think it’s induced by either too much coffee or not enough $sparkling_beverage. Still, at least I managed to get three sentences out.

 While crawling about the back of a server rack connecting serial ports to a serial console server, I was asked what I was doing.

“Connecting these machines to the serial console so I can identify and label them.”

“It would be quicker to set up a running ping and then yank the cables out and see which one stops responding.”

“These servers are running Oracle, with the datafiles stored on an NFS server.”

“We could do it really really quickly.”

Some people are alive simply because it’s illegal to kill them.

OK, with the every increasing number of domains that live under the nelefa.org umbrella, I thought it was about time I organised a dedicated VM so they’re all in one please rather than scattered all over the internet. After looking around at many different hosting companies, I’ve gone (after a personal recommendation from The Daniels) with Xeriom Networks who, rumour has it, craft their VMs out of pure awesome.

Having looked at their network management graphs and played around with the VM for a day or two, I have to concur. The performance is excellent, the price is excellent, and the customer service is exemplary. I’ve been in this business for a very long time and have rarely come across this quality at the prices they’re asking. So they have the Nelefa seal of approval.

Easyspace, on the other hand, get a square thumbs down. Purely on the basis of customer service. Sure, they machine was set up – eventually – it took them 36 hours, compared to Xeriom’s 45 minutes; support tickets were closed without being resolved, and my requests to cancel are being soundly ignored. I look forward to them charging my card next month so I can take them to small claims court.