Ramblings of no great importance

The 2012 Cape Town VTES League - game 1

2012-01-26T22:15:00.002+02:00

In an attempt to try and boost attendance at socials, and just generally play more VTES, I suggested we run a league this year and see what happens. Other people also seemed to think this sounded interesting, and so, probably rather foolishly, I'm helping run the inaugural Cape Town VTES league.

We started with a 7 player game, which was not ideal, but worked out reasonably well.
The "Cap X at 5" rule we stole from the Bochum League works quite well in this situation, and helps keeps things somewhat sane.

I decided to run the weenie vote deck (which suffers from looking scary without actually being effective), which turned out to be a poor choice given the number of other decks with titles on the table.

The game setup saw Simon, playing a Black Hand bleed with light stealth deck starring Al-Muntathir bleeding me (really weenie vote) bleeding Dave (new Brujah bruise & vote) bleeding James (all Jyhad Brujah) bleeding Philip (Lasombra rush & bleed) bleeding Richard (Akunase rush with Dragonbound) bleeding Brent (Gargoyle rush with Fame).

I made my first, and arguably most serious, misplay right on the first turn. With two titles in my hand, and knowing that the deck needs to get titles early to get running, I chose to bring out a two-cap rather than two one-caps. I was able to get a title (Prince of Dublin, IIRC) down before anyone else had minions out and then bring out a three more minions, but, by the time my next turn came round, the number of votes on the table meant I wasn't going to pass anything without some serious sweet talking.

By my second turn, the table was starting to get setup - everyone had a minion out, so I followed this up with my second serious misplay - having drawn a third title, I proceeded to cycle both titles out of my hand knowing that I wouldn't pass them while looking for a bribes. This was foolish, since I should have kept 1 in hand to cryptic rider into play later. I also had my second-turn Creepshow Casino Suddened, which was annoying, but ultimately not that relevant, since almost none of my votes actually got blocked.

Dave, worried by my developing swarm of weenies, stuck on bringing out only 2 mid-caps, which meant he wasn't putting pressure on James, who happily took the opportunity to tool up, acquiring a laptop and a sport's bike. Phillip attempted a couple of rushes without being able to seriously inconvenience Richard's fortitude and Brent got out a !Tremere and Chaundice. After a couple of setup actions, Simon attracted the table's attention by bleeding me for 7 with Al-Muntathir. This actually worked in my favour a bit, as it meant the table allowed me to pass a Autakis Persecution to gain pool (the bribes helped) and that allowed me to cryptic rider a conservative agitation, which, combined with a few nibble bleeds, actually allowed me to make a significant impact on Dave's pool.

I was given a bit more breathing space by Brent Faming Al-Muntathir, and rushing. He wasn't quite able to make the rush stick, but Simon was forced to be a bit more defensive as he sought to protect his star vampire. I continued to nibble at Dave, losing a minion to one of the combats, but getting down a few Saturday Night Specials, but fully expecting to be ousted quickly. The game dynamics changed again when Richard rushed Brent's !Tremere, and was also unable to make the deal stick. Brent responded by rushing backwards and burning one of Richard's minions, leaving Simon alone for a turn. Simon bled forward, leaving me on 3 pool.

I bled Dave for the edge, losing a minion in the process, but putting down Dave's primogen thanks to a Scattershot (after surviving a Grapple by the skin of my teeth). With the votes a bit more delicately balanced, I was able to convince Richard to help me oust Dave, since that was the only way I'd stay in the game, which duly happened, giving me a VP.

The enxt couple of turns weren't that significant. as the people recovered from the previous couple of turns. I attempted to call another Autkis Persectution, but that was narrowly voted down, which left me unable to cryptic rider off it, and damage James. I ended that turn on 5 pool. James transferred himself down to three pool to bring out Don Cruez, and, had I had another turn, I may have been able to swarm bleed him out, although that was unclear. Philip had ran himself down to 1 or 2 pool as well. Simon duly ousted me with a couple of stealthed bleeds, and then James ousted Philip. Richard fell soon afterwards, thanks to a deflected bleed by Simon, and Brent, having spent too many resources tangling with the Akunase, also fell to the Brujah quickly.

Despite having gained 18 pool from 3 ousts quickly, the end game wasn't clear cut, as Simon could bleed faster than James, and was able to successfully farm with Reunion Kamut. Simon however, eventually came up a little bit short (James was on 3 or 4 pool at the start of the last turn) and fell to the Brujah swarm.

So first blood to James, and revenge plotting for the rest of us.

Misc Travel Notes

2011-12-14T19:13:00.003+02:00

One of the better perks of academic life is the occasional opportunity to travel to various conferences, which gave me an excuse to go to Bali to attend CACS 2011 in November. The downside of pulling this trick is of course that your opportunity to sight-see is rather limited by this annoying "conference" thing.

Still, I managed to see a bit of the country, and generally had an enjoyable trip.

Various notes:

Sex tourism is clearly big in Bali, as evidenced by being offered Viagra by a very insistent street merchant and a "very nice girl" by the hotel's security guard on my first day there.
Walking around with a couple of million rupiah (about R2000) was rather fun
Having to scrounge up internet access at internet cafes felt very archaic
I seriously underestimated the carrying capacity of the average scooter
The rules of the road for scooters in Bali are from a very different book to anything else
The Balinese clearly have lots of practice at fleecing tourists
Dealing with the above while slightly jetlagged is not recommended
Not unrelated to this, the infamous Civet coffee is actually really good, but far too expensive
The runway right on the beach is very impressive
As is Mt Agung
As are the sunsets

The conference itself was pretty good, although it dropped down to minimal attendance fairly quickly, which was probably due to the competition with the local attractions.

More photos can be see at my gallery.

Pyweek 13: Mutable Mamba

2011-09-18T10:04:00.005+02:00

First, play our latest pyweek entry: http://www.pyweek.org/e/mamba/

The game went a lot smoother than pyweek 12's Nine Tales. I think we hit on a much better scale for this effort, given the time available, and, as a puzzle game, we were able to get the basic mechanics reasonably set early enough that we were never under pressure to have a game to submit, and so could do a fair amount of polishing. This also meant we actually spent a lot of time actually playing the game, so we could work off a few rough edges, which was good for the game.

We also spread things out a bit better than in pyweek 12. We avoided the major stumbling block of lots of central state people had to touch which we had in Nine Tales (the infamous game.json), which meant we had fewer merge issues than previously, and, by not using yet another version control system, benefited from the lessons learnt about mercurial last pyweek.

Unlike pyweek 11, where I ended up accidentally writing a level building tool, I more deliberately decided to write a level editor this time. While it's not perfect, and only learnt a few important tricks on the Saturday, the effort was, I think, well spent, as it allowed us to rope in spare people for extra level design effort, and made the addition of uploadable network levels a lot more feasible.

There are several issues. Most notable, our within a week widget stack, although inspired and influenced by past experience, is kludgy and lacks proper support for several important features. We should probably have a good look at the our last couple of pyweek entries and cut out a basic widget library from them, which can save us time in the future.

While not the best of our pyweek entries, I think we ended up with a fairly solid game, and it can fairly easily be extended by adding new levels, and, if we polish up the multiple tileset support, it would be quite easy to reskin levels.

June 2011 Tournament (Final)

2011-06-28T00:25:00.003+02:00

The shape of the final was changed fairly dramatically when Yancke pulled out, and Simon stepped in, which bumped me up to seating 4th.

The final seating was me (OBF/pre swarm) starting, bleeding Simon (5/6 Baali with the Horder) bleeding Richard (Gargoyle wall with Smiling Jack) bleeding Marc (Lasombra Anarchs) bleeding Brendan (Ahrimane wall'ish bleed and top seed).

I didn't have an ideal crypt draw, but my opening hand had two Effective Managements, so that wasn't actually an issue, and I was soon up and running with both Renenet and Herbert Westin in play, and was able to steadily bleed Simon. Simon was able to put a fair amount of pressure on Richard, while Marc, without the stealth to get through Brendan, gradually brought out more minions without much pressure. Brendan was bleeding me for the odd one or two, but wasn't setup enough to bother me in the early game.

The table ended up sitting up quite nicely for me, and my deck flowed really nicely in the early part of the game - with the aid of the Baali's infernal cost, I was able to oust Simon quite quickly, and then, thanks to some fortuitous stealth top-decking, and the increased hand size from The Bitter & Sweet Story, I was able to stealth over Richard often enough to oust him (Most memorably requiring 5 stealth cards to land one bleed, thanks to two cards being canceled). Marc didn't have the intercept to trouble me, although he did bounce a few bleeds, and I duly ousted him for my 3rd VP. At this point, though, I had burnt through a lot of my deck, and didn't have enough stealth left to get through Brendan, eventually decking myself, and, as he was soon setup with extra bleed options, I duly fell to the Ahrimanes. Still, I'll happily take a 3 VP final GW.

The events module for the deck doesn't flow as I hoped - I eventually did get The Rising down, but only after I had gone through most of my deck, and thus it didn't impact on the game at all. The PRE/OBF bleed module worked wonderfully well, though, and the lack of rush on the table made my life a lot easier.

After the final, we played a quick social game - I tried the Baali vote deck again. Although I did land one Reckless Agitation, I didn't get the combat cards I needed to survive against the rush from James' Assamites, who were my prey, and was not able to keep enough minions up to get votes passed with the other titles on the table, and so was ousted fairly quickly. The deck probably needs a bit more of a defensive bloat module so it can build up it's position a bit, and then lunge rather than it's current build, which tends to start a bit fast and attract table hate it can't really deal with.

June 2011 VTES tournament (prelim rounds)

2011-06-26T18:02:00.001+02:00

We ended up at 8 players for the tournament (which was a significant improvement on the 4 for the last Tokai tournament), so we opted to go with a multi-deck format. As 3 of us (myself, Simon and Marc) had built variations on the new Baali vote deck, the multi-deck format allowed us to all try the deck at various points without contesting.

The first round of the tournament saw Marc (Baali vote) bleeding Antony (!Malk) bleeding Matthew (Giovanni bruise and bleed with Fortitude) bleeding me (Weenie OBF/pre with the Rising). Marc got out Arishat and a Horde early, Matthew brought out Ignazio and started to govern out a couple of support minions, I brought out Renenet and a obf weenie and Anthony brought out Harold Zettler. I landed a couple of early bleeds, but Marc got the fastest start, with 2 early Reckless Agitations, a Kine and a couple of bleeds seeing him oust Anthony on the 4th or 5th turn (Anthony helped by spending 3 pool on Masters fairly soon after the 1st reckless and bringing out a second minion without finding the farm he needed). I ate a couple of heavy bleeds from the Giovanni, but a couple of Social Charms and the low cost of my minions helped me build up to 4 minions out, and, with Marc looking the table threat, some fast talk saw Matthew wasting a few actions rushing Arishat, which both slowed Marc down and took pressure off me. I was down to 1 pool before I ousted Marc, who had worked Matthew down to only 3 or 4 pool, although he was whittled down to only a single Hord able to act. Thanks to the increased hand size from the Bitter and Sweet story, I was able to survive a rush from Matthew and oust him the next turn. The OF/pre deck didn't quite come up as planned and I need to work on the events package so I can get the Rising into play, but did OK for it's first outing.

Since we were done and dusted in about 45 minutes, and the other table was still going strong, we ran a small social game.

Marc (Assamite BH) bleeding Anthony (!Malk) bleeding Matthew (Small Liabon POT) bleeding me (weenie vote). I had a somewhat weird draw, and didn't see a single Praxis Siezure in the game. However, I was able to hit Marc with 3 or 4 Kines before another title hit the table, and, with some careful negotiation, was able to pass enough votes after the to oust Marc. Matthew spent most of his time rushing backwards, but wasn't able to fend off the Malks (the lack of pressure from Marc helping Anthony here). I did lose a couple of minions to Marc's Hand Contracts, but the swarm ran over him. Anthony did land a couple of heavy bleeds on me, but to deny me the votes, he brough out a second titled vampire, and I was able to simply swarm bleed him out for the win. This was another short game - we finished this game before the second table had seen it's first oust. The weenie deck isn't perfect yet, and needs a couple more tricks for dealing with other votes on the table, but is currently not bad.

In the second tournament round, Simon (Baali vote) was bleeding me (!Brujah bruise & vote) was bleeding Anthony (!Malks) who was bleeding Yancke (DOM/THA power bleed). Given Hektor's downside against the Baali, I opted to play with the B team. Simon got a fairly fast start, and was able to land a couple of annoying bleeds. I also bled myself with a couple of expensive masters. The titles on the table made passing votes for both Simon and myself difficult, which created some interesting dynamics. Yancke was sitting pretty, being able to bounce Anthony's bleeds and not having boucne to worry about from Simon. There was an interesting turn where Simon Reckless Agitation'ed Yancke backwards to try and weaken him, and then I Consag Boon'ed the Baali to try help hold off the DOM swarm for a turn, but it didn't help, as a bounced bleed ousted Simon, and then, although I blocked and torporised one of Yancke's bleeds, a Seduction saw him oust me in the same turn. Anthony didn't have enough pool or bleed to survive the head's up against Yancke, and fell soon afterwards.

While we decided to have the final only on Monday, we had another social - this time 5 players with Matthew added to the game. The table saw Yancke (Osebo) starting, bleeding Simon (CEL/THA trophy deck) bleeding we (new Baali vote) bleeding Anthony (!Malk) bleeding Matthew (Giovanni).

I had the prefect opening crypt, with all 3 of Arishat, Annazir and Xepher and a Horde, and an early Dreams to help accelerate my crypt. I brough out Xepher first, while Simon brought out Lucas, and Anthony brought out a small Malk and Rudolfo, and Matthew brought out a couple of giovanni (without Ignazio), and Yancke brought out Massasi and a random Catiff. There were a couple of odd turns - I landed a Reckless Agitation on Anthony, who then bled backward with Kindred Spirits with Rudolfo for 4, before having being rushed by Matthew. Simon then rushed, torporised and Amaranth'ed Xepher, but didn't quite have the vote lock, so some frantic table talk saw Lucas burnt in the blood hunt. This slowed Simon down enough that I was able to bring out both Annazir and Arishat, although it did leave me very low on pool. Yancke wasn't really able to capitalise on Simon's weakened position, so Simon was able to influence out Lernean and a 4 cap. There was an amusing exchange when Yancke blocked a bleed from Matthew with Massasi and Immortal Grappled, only to be hit by a inferior Burning Wrath. However, a couple more blocks and CEL/POT fun saw all Matthew's minions in torpor, which allowed Anthony to oust him. I was running a bit low on pool, but a second Dreams allowed me to get some card flow going, and I was able to get a couple of votes and Voter Capitivations played to take me out of immediate danger and weaken Anthony. I was able to pull off the Kine, My Kin to untap, bleed, bleed combo to oust Anthony, and, with a hand full of stealth, was able to dispense with Yancke in short order, at which point we called the game. The Baali deck showed promise, although the master card flow was a bit weird, and, had Simon's deck drawn the Red list actions rather than the votes, I would have had a much tougher run.

Pyweek 12: Nine Times

2011-04-10T03:48:00.000+02:00

So a bunch of us took part in pyweek 12. While we had a lot of fun, and the ended up with something that looked very good, we didn't quite manage to get the game completely playable inside the 1 week time limit.

Failures are generally more educational than successes, so some thoughts on what went wrong.

a) We were arguably over ambitious, although I'm not sure where we needed to scale down. This is probably the most important factor as it meant we took too long to get enough of the game playable that we could start getting stuff hooked up, and it also meant that we didn't have as much overlap on knowledge of the code base as we had on Suspended Sentence, which slowed us down at critical points, and made fixing various bugs quite hard.

b) We took too long to converge on what game we were writing. Various bits grew in different directions and got fixed in the wrong place, and there were a couple of dead ends we pursued. We also didn't have the time to refactor code to fix things as we've had previously, so the game is more than just somewhat buggy.

c) We didn't know mercurial nearly as well as we thought we did. Most of us had used it for the Genshi sprint, which was quite intense, as well as using it on other projects, so we thought we going for a safe option At the pace of pyweek development, however, we tripped over mercurial not behaving as we expected quite often, and the slow downs fixing the issues this caused all added up to quite a lot of lost time.

Still, the game has a number of promising bits, and, with some concerted work on the engine, and some work on the other bugs and the game balance, it can turn into something really quite cool. This should be a good candidate for pyggy, if we can summon the energy to tackle again.

Veiled Sight (April 2011 VTES Tournament)

2011-04-04T19:52:00.000+02:00

So we recently held the first VTES tournament of 2011, with the first rounds on the 2nd of April and the delayed final (due to pyweek) only on the 13th.

We had a good turnout, with 12 players for the Saturday. A very important number, given the rules of the TWDA.

I decided (via die roll) to try the "Not a Lutz deck" again, which ended up being a good choice and did quite nicely for itself.

The first round saw me (starting) bleeding Hendrik (Assamite trophy deck) bleeding Dave (Kiasyd sleaze) bleeding Yancke (!Tremere DOM Mirror Walk stealth bleed). I had a fast start, with two early Zillah's Valley's which saw Lutz out on turn two, and Alicia on turn three, and an early secure haven on Lutz essentially shut down Hendrik's deck. I took a couple of turns to reach a Minion Tap, though, and, had Yancke drawn an early conditioning, I would have been the first ousted. I was able to oust Hendrik, but, due to a Covincraft from Dave, needed one more vote card to do so than I had hoped. At this point, I suffered a critical deck failure, and didn't draw the votes I needed to oust David, and, with not enough bounce, was rapidly whittled down by Yancke's DOM. Yancke critically ran out of bounce, and was ousted by David who then ousted me.

On the other tables, Brendan (Tzimisce wall with DOM) took 3 VPS, with Simon (Spiridonas bleed and vote) taking 1, and Marc (Torrance Circle BB) and Richard (Weenie Liabon Vote) getting none. James (Imbued) took 3 on his table with Kevin (Settites) getting 1VP, with Anthony (Kiasyd) and Evan (!Salubri with Q) getting 0 each.

The second round was one of the more stressful, and frankly odder, games I've ever been involved in.

The table was James (Imbued) bleeding Anthony (Kiasyd) bleeding Richard (Liabon vote) bleeding me. I didn't get as fast a start as the first game, but I did start by contesting James' first turn Dreams of the Sphinx immediately, as contesting with your prey is usually worth it. I got Lutz out on turn 3, only for James to Pentex him immediately. Richard was gradually building up, and not blocking any of Anthony's actions, and succeeded on jamming on stealth. I was extremely vulnerable for a turn while I got out Alicia, and got going again, and, had Richard had a extra bleed card, I may have been ousted before I got to act.

Once I had Alicia, I drew a Minion Tap, which gave me a buffer, and started to dent James' pool a bit. There was also a cross table rush on Richard by James that helped me, by slowing Richard up a bit. I made a misjudgement when I wasted a couple of actions trying to burn the Pentex before realising that I didn't need to. Due to another Minion Tap, I was able to bring out Aristotle, which was important, as, without his extra stealth, I was struggling to get past the intercept of the Imbued.

There was one critical vote by Richard, which would have led to my being ousted, but frantic negotiation with Anthony saw him cycle a Covincraft to save me. This however left Anthony without a wake, and he fell to the James' lunge immediately after this, and, at this point, the table looked to be falling for James. Richard, however, was worried about the threat of the Imbued and cut a deal to pass a couple of votes with me, which hurt James, and, combined by a bounced bleed (by the still Pentex'd Lutz) which forced James to tap his blockers, I was able to land a couple of votes and get him within range again. James then played Gambit accepted, and, thanks to a Minion Tap on Aristotle, I was able to buy myself enough breathing space to oust James, although, had he chosen to block rather than determine my Kine, I wouldn't have been able to make the lunge stick. In the end game against Richard, I was able to block a Founders, and, although Richard had managed to secure the vote lock, he couldn't call aggressive votes due to Lutz's special. Once I remembered that, with James ousted, Lutz was free to act again, I could bleed faster at stealth than he could, and so I was able to oust him for the sweep. I made several poor decisions, but was able to hang on enough to recover.

I didn't see what happened on the other two tables, but Yancke & Marc both swept, but my extra VP from the first round saw me enter the final as top seed. Brendan, James and Dave were all tied, and Brendan lost the roll off for a place in the final. Yacnke and Marc also rolled off to see who would choose seating first, with Marc rolling lowest (and so choosing first).

For the final, Marc (unsurprisingly) chose to sit upstream of the Kiasyd. Yancke then chose to sit between The BB and the Kiasyd, which surprised me, as I expected him to sit upstream of Marc. As I didn't want to sit downstream of the DOM decks, I chose to sit between James and Marc, hoping that the upstream pressure would keep James off my case and that I could oust Marc before he got the wall part of his deck setup. I rolled highest, so I started.

The final was one of those games where my deck, despite not quite coming as I wanted, generally ran nicely. I got a first turn Dreams, which allows me to get Lutz out on turn 3, despite starting, and despite taking an early bleed for 3 from James, an early Minion Tap saw me up to a decent pool again. I didn't draw any voter caps for much of the game, but, as I had enough stealth to go over Marc's Gestalts, and James was too occupied with the pressure from upstream, I didn't see any combat, and thus never has any real blood management issues.

YDave got up to 3 minions fairly quickly via some govern trickery, and Yancke got up to t2o, with Carna appearing in the mid-game. With Yancke bleeding heavily, and David drawing a truly astonishing number of bounce cards, James was left trying to block 5-6 bleeds a turn, which took all the pressure off me. A key early play saw James try to Pentex Dave's the Arcadian, only for Dave to Sudden it, which ensured that James never got to go forward at all. I had votes come up nicely, and was able to whittle down Marc in good order. Thanks to a Forgotten labyrinth, I was able to stealth over Marc and oust him despite his intercept, and, with the aid of a Zillah's Valley, able to get Aristotle out and into play as well. James eventually ran out of blockers (although there was one 4 bleed that was bounced to Yancke who then bounced it to me, which itched a bit), and was ousted. I had been able to Minion Tap Alicia, but at that point wasn't out of lunge range. I was able to call a couple of votes to whittle Yancke down, also including the first Voter Cap I'd drawn .

At this point, Yancke was looking quite vulnerable, and, as I had a Rumors of Gehenna in play I could vote away at will, I was fairly certain I had him next, but I was worried about the heads up against Dave, who had shown considerable bleed potential, no shortage of bounce and was looking pretty on 14 pool. Yancke bled forward, though, and it turned out that Dave was out of wake and bounce, and he was whittled down to only 4 pool. He was also short on bleed, so I started my next turn sitting quite pretty, espeically as I was then able to Minion Tap Arisotle to ensure I was safe. A Kine and a Conservative Agitation saw me oust Yancke, and the incidental damage reducde Dave to 1 pool, and then voting away the Rumors saw me oust Dave, so I ousted Dave and Yancke in a single turn for the game win.

The table did sit up very nicely for me. The shortage of other votes on the table meant that, although I only drew a couple of vote push cards and 1 Voter Cap, I never had a problem passing the votes. Choosing to be Marc's predator was the correct choice, as, once he was ousted, no-one else ever threatened to block me. The Masters came up very nicely - I had an early dreams, which got Lutz out one turn earlier, and drew Minion Taps when I needed them. The low combat environment meant I actually jammed a bit on S:CE cards, which is most unusual for Cape Town, but I always had a vote in hand when I needed one, so I never lost momentum.

So, a successful tournament win, and what should be an entry in the TWDA, which is a nice little milestone to tick off.

An Observation

2011-04-04T19:46:00.000+02:00

It's regrettably common for car drivers to try and muscle out motorcycles, and, given that the motorcyclist is the squishier of the parties involved, it's usually better for the motorcyclist to choose discretion over arguing too hard about right of way.

As an enthusiastic motorcyclist, I've this happen to me numerous times. It is, however, hard not to feel particularly ticked off when the car in question sports a prominent "Think Bike" sticker.

Failing to learn from history again

2011-04-01T00:00:00.000+02:00

Learning from history is often hard - without the perfect vision of hindsight, it's easy to overlook the similarities of your current situation with past experience. This isn't at all comforting when one recognised the similarities and dismissed them with "This time, it will be different".

I often write "throw away" code - usually to isolate some specific code path or test some specific case that's currently interesting from the larger system. As the code's initial life expentancy is quite short, I often don't bother with niceties like proper argument parsing or decent error handling. In theory, the technical debt from this never be a problem, just write a little wrapper program, learn what you need, and throw it away.

The scare quotes and "initial life expectancy" phrasing should immediately identify my problem, though. If I didn't but the code in the VCS, the theory might work, but, once the code is there, it's never going to be thrown away, and, since it exists, in a day or a week or a month or something, I'll need something similar, and it's easy enough to just quickly add an option and make the throw script do a little more, and, since it's still just a throw away script, there's still no need to do proper error handling or argument parsing. And, of course, the moment a couple of the command line options become enshrined in a test script or two, the effort required to actually fix things never seems worthwhile, despite the increasingly convoluted "simple quick code" handling things.

Given that I've trodden this path several times before, this week's effort of going from 100 lines of C requiring a single filename to two 250-line interlocked programs, each with complex combinations of options and error handling from the oblivious school (the actual important code of each program is still less than 100 lines each), via a steady stream of "I'll quickly add this", is one of my more impressive examples of failing to heed lessons from the past. Next week, I'll probably spend some time fixing things, although there's still that ever so seductive "it's just one last option and then you can throw it away" voice to deal with.

Treaty Tree (Weekend of Nightmares: Sunday)

2010-12-12T23:48:00.000+02:00

Sunday saw 8 players for the Treaty Tree tournament. We were unable to use the Tokai Library as planned, due to an annoying scheduling issue resulting in no one being around to hand over the keys during the week, which hurt the turnout, so we opted to do several rounds of multi-deck play without a final.

In the first round, I played my "Not a Lutz deck" deck, bleeding Simon (!Salubri) bleeding Mike Streathfield (Ravnos Sense Dep and Bleed) bleeding Phillip (Settite S & B). I had a mixed start, with an good opening hand (1st turn Dreams and a Zillah's Valley), but no Lutz in my uncontrolled region. Fortunately, the Dreams and the Zillah's meant I was able to fish for Lutz successfully without losing too much time. Mike Sense Dep'ed Phillip's largest vampire, which slowed him down and gave me a bit of time as well. Once I had both Lutz and Alicia out, I managed to survive a couple of rushes from Simon, which allowed me to get a Secure haven on Lutz, and I was then able to get a sleep unseen on Alicia, which protected her from the threat of a cross table Sense Dep long enough to oust Simon. Mike then bled out Pillip, and did Sense Dep Alicia, which slowed me down, but the combination of A minion tap on Alicia, and Lutz's steady 3 bleeds meant I was able to oust Mike, although it was tight, as I wouldn't have survived another turn.

I feel the Lutz deck is somewhat vindicated, after a troubled debut at Dragonfire. It won despite having a not quite ideal library flow, and having a minion locked down with a Sense Dep, which did hurt. Like many decks relying on only a few minions, it is sensitive to card flow issues, and can lose momentum by not having the cards available, but the option of bleeding for 3 with Lutz is always a useful backup plan. The Sleep Unseen's were a good addition, as the extra defense is really worth it in this deck.

In the second round, I played my HoS wall deck, bleeding James (Assamites), bleeding Simon (!Salubri), bleeding Brendan (Tzimisce with Lambach). The table dynamics, with several nasty combat combo's running around, where a bit strange. I got two Slaughterhouses early, and was thus able to failry consistently bleed James with Trochomancy, although I did lost a minion to a early contract. Brendan was having some serious problems with the !Salubri, so I was never bled that heavily, and generally had the bounce in hand I needed. James did manage to whittle Simon's pool down quite effectively, and I had to Eagle Sight's what would have been an ousting bleed to keep James in lunge range. While this did allow to eventually oust James, it also gave time for Simon to bin all of Brendan's minions and oust him, although he did have one of his minions burnt in the process. The two player game was quite tight, and I came close to ousting Simon, but I couldn't quite deal with enough the !Salubri combat, so Simon ousted me. Unusually, both Simon and I had run out of library by the end of the game, which also contributed to how the end game played out.

The HoS deck is generally working OK, but I need to do something about blood management. It would also be nice to return to the original Black Hand angle, since unpreventable Psychic Assault is just so much better, but that requires further crypt tweaking.

In the third game, I played my Osebo wall, bleeding Brendan (weenie Auspex wall), bleeding Kevin (FoS corruption shennigans with Nakhthorheb) bleeding Richard (weenie Liabon vote). Kevin failed to draw Nakhthorheb, and generally seemed to struggle for stealth throughout the game, so didn't get that much forward momentum. Richard was largely shutdown by my deck, and I was able to prevent several key actions on Brendan's part which kept him under control, although he did return the favour several times. In general, it was a game where nobody's deck really quite took off. My combat package came up a bit oddly, Kevin didn't draw stealth, Richard was struggling to find votes and Brendan didn't see sniper rifles early enough to get one down. The combat package of the Osebo was able to keep putting down Brendan's minions, but, as he was able to bring more out, and recover blood with Lillith's blessing, I never had him down for the ousting bleed. Richard kept bringing out more minions, hoping to eventually be able to swarm past me, but I was generally able to block enough that it wasn't an issue until late in the game. There were a couple of turns of epic table talk, with resulted in Kevin blocking a couple of Richard's votes to help keep me alive, and Brendan Eagle Sighting Kevin when he looked likely to oust Richard, before I managed to eventually bleed Brendan out. At that point, being some way over the time limit, we called the game. I may have been able to take the table, as I probably had enough combat left to keep control of the table, but it wasn't completely clear cut, given the resources I'd expended by that point.

The Osebo deck is now pretty well tuned, and I'm not sure if there are any significant changes I need to make. A few more Eyes of Argus for the extra untap option may be useful, but that's a minor tweak. At some point, I do want to revisit the original ranged thrown junk version, especially given the new Laibon set range tech in EK.

I saw comparatively little of the other games played. One very notable moment was Simon using Santelous to cancel a Gangrel Conspiracy Mike had played, which resulted in Enkidu being burnt in a blood hunt.

Saturday Socials (Weekend of Nightmares: Saturday)

2010-12-12T22:47:00.000+02:00

The Saturday socials had a regrettably low turnout, with only myself, Simon and Richard eventually showing up. Thus there were a number of 3 players games, which was not quite ideal.

In the first game, I was playing a deck built out of two Kiasyd / Lasombra starters bleeding Simon (tweaked Anarch Lasombra) bleeding Richard (2 Guhuri starter). I got off to a nice start with the Kiasyd, and, with the benefit of an early Dominate Master, was able to Govern down twice, which allowed me to get to 3 minions quickly and cheaply. The deck generally had decent forward momentum, but struggled a bit in combat, and really does need a couple of conditionings added to it. I was able to oust Simon, but fell to Richard's deck, as I wasn't able to block enough of the votes.

The Kiasyd deck operated much as I expected, and probably can become a decent DOM & B deck. I need to retool the combat package, which is a bit light. Earth Swords would be a good addition, although I may need some more manevours. I need to also examine the other crypt options I have, as I was rather lucky with the Master draw, which did help.

In the second game, I played a deck I'd put together out of two Ishtarri starters, bleeding Richard (2 Akunase deck), bleeding Simon (Anarch Lasombra). I had a nice crypt draw, and generally the deck flowed quite nicely. I generally struggled for blood management, there are a number of expensive cards, but the combination of a Marajavi Ghoul, Heildeburg and Ganhuru's special mean I was often bleeding at stealth, and gained a fair bit of pool from the bleeds, which helped me considerably. Simon had minion torporised and burnt early on in the game, which left him struggling to put pressure on me, which also helped a great deal, and so I was able to sweep.

I'm somewhat surprised at how well the Ishtarri deck did. I've always been a bit meh on Uncontrolled Impulse, due to it's conditional nature, but, if the deck's flowing a bit, it works really well. The crypt needs tweaking, as there are some good vampires who aren't in the starter.

In the third game, I played my Off Kilter + Enticement deck, bleeding Simon (Thaum Cel Trophies) bleeding Richard (Guhuri bleed). Simon maanged to red list and burn one of Richard's minions early, which allowed him to get permanent untap and intercept. I got off to a reasonable start, and had got up to 3 minions and SER on one by the mid game, but hadn't quite seen enough pool damage or any of the Freak Drives, so hadn't really pressurised Simon. Simon then burnt my third minion, and I wasn't able to bloat or bleed fast enough to survive the Guhuri deck. Simon wasn't able to keep enough blood on his minions to survive the potence from the Guhuri, and eventually fell to them as well.

The Off-Kilter deck continues to feel as if it will almost work, but doesn't. The deck just doesn't generate the actions it needs to continually keep it's prey under pressure, and, although I did have Simon down quite low at one point, I didn't have the push needed to oust him. More Freak Drives would help, but I think I need to retool the Master package to include some Effectives or Coroner's Contracts, so I can gain more use out of the Little Mountain Cementaries. Sprinkling in a handful of Corpses is probably not a bad idea either, as a few extra 2 bleeds can't hurt.

At this point, we decided to play a couple of rounds using decks built by other people.

In the first game, I played Richard's Akunase deck, bleeding Simon, playing a weenie'ish Liabon vote deck of Richard's, bleeding Richard, playing my Ravnos weapons deck. Simon had a failry bad game, as the combination of my getting out a magagi before he passed a vote, the small minions all being vulnerable to the Abombwe block fails tech and the wall'ish nature of the Ravnos tech resulted in him not being able to go forward, and he was unable to defend against the Akunase. The Ravnos deck did fairly well, getting decently setup and blocking several actions, but the fortitude of the Akunase was enough to stay alive. I managed to oust Simon without two much difficulty, but there were a couple of tight rounds against the Ravnos were I drew into a couple of combat cards at just the right time, and was able to trade minions going down with Richard, but, as that left it as 2 minions against 1, I was then able to win the endgame, although not completely comfortably.

The Akunase deck was fiddly to play, largely due to my unfamiliarity with the cards, but, with small'ish minions, and some strong action modifiers, it works quite well. Reliquary: Akunanse Remains is also really strong. The combat package needs a bit of work - on several occasions, I had a rush card in hand, but no good combat options available to me. ANI support, for crows, and some of the new Abombwe tech from EK will help that at lot.

In the next game, I was playing Simon's Nergal deck, bleeding Simon, playing Richard's two Guhuri starter deck, bleeding Richard, playing Simon's Samedi wall. Despite an almost prefect start for the Nergal deck (1st turn concordance, merging Nergal immediately), I found myself constantly struggling to get actions through, and, when I did land a bleed, the bloat of the Guhuri deck eradicated the effects almost immediately. Consistent bleeds from the Samedi deck eventually ousted me. The Guhuri deck, while bloating quite effectively, wasn't able to generate much forward pressure, so it couldn't prevent the Samedi deck getting setup, and, after I was ousted, the Samedi deck was able to whittle the Guhuri deck down with consistent blocks, and thus swept.

The Nergal deck is again just not fast enough. Once setup, it has some nice combos, but probably needs either a little bit of permament stealth, or some more block fails tech, and, if the untappy thing is working, it needs some additional damaging actions for Nergal to take. I'd be tempted to sneak in a Heart of the City and a couple of D'habi Revenant's, so Nergal's bleed continues to tick up, relying on Nergal's special and the Spying Missions to deal with bounce.

Simon's Samedi wall continues to be surprisingly effective. Having played against it a few times now, I've come to the conclusion that the stealth, which allows it to get almost all the setup actions, is a key component. This allows it to run mainly off permanents, which is always better.

Fee Stake Cape Town (Weekend of Nightmares: Friday)

2010-12-12T21:08:00.000+02:00

Friday evening was the Fee Stakes tournament. We got going a little late, due to various people, and were annoyingly one short of the 10 required for a TWDA entry, so we opted to go with a multi-deck tournament.

In the first round, I opted to play my Anarch vote deck [1]. The game was Hendrik (Assamite blood control), bleeding Phillip (group 1 Gangrel) bleeding me bleeding Marc (Stanislava and friends) bleeding Simon (Lasombra Anarchs Hell-for-Leather). I got a slightly weird crypt draw, with 3 Anarch Converts, which meant I didn't get going that quickly. Initially, Marc looked like the table threat, pulling out Stansiliva and another minion, and, while not going for huge bleeds, consistent 3 bleeds from Stansilava were whittling through Simon's pool quite quickly. Phillip was bleeding consistently, but was slowed down by Hendrick's blood denial actions. I made an early miscalculation with a Voter Cap, and left Raphael Catarari stuck tapped on odd blood total without a Crimethinc in play, and thus spent a couple of turns effectively down a minion. I did manage to get a Fee Stake down, and scrape through a Reckless Agitation, which, with a combination of Marc voting away the Fee Stake, and then having what would have been the ousting bleed blocked by Simon, who was able to Immortal Grapple to prevent the Form of Mist, left Marc in lunge range for the next turn. The next turn, I was able to play a Dreams, and the increased hand size allowed me to get what I needed to oust Marc, and was able to oust Simon almost immediately as well. The game then folded fairly quickly in my favour, as I had the stealth and Crimethinc's needed to oust both Hendrik and Phillip. It was a bit tight for a couple of turns, and, had Marc ousted Simon, I may not have been able to keep him from running away with the table, but the table was quite favourable for my deck, and I had a couple of lucky moments.

I didn't see much of the second table, but it had James (Imbued) bleeding Yancke (Tzimisce wall) bleeding Brendan (Lasombra vote, I think), bleeding Richard (Akunase wall). At the point I saw the game, other than the imbued, the only minion up was one of Yancke's vampires, who had been Pentexed. Richard was ousted by his own Smiling Jack, giving Brendan a VP, but then James swept up the rest of the table.

In the second game, I decided to play the Harbringer's of Skull deck. The table was James (!Salubri) bleeding Brendan (Big cap vote with Rafael de Corazon) bleeding me bleeding Hendrik, bleeding Yancke (!Ventrue grinder). An early Antediluvian Awakening by Yancke, and an early bleeding for 6 from Brendan left me somewhat low on blood, and, as I'd drawn the fat end of my crypt, I ended up being far too defensive, and I only brought out 1 minion. In general, I just played this game badly, and really should have gone fishing for a small second minion. James, however, was able to block enough of Brendan's actions that Brendan could never really get the farm going, and a couple of Eagle Sight's from James helped keep me in the game for quite some time. I did manage to whittle done Hendrik to almost in lunge range several times, but was always an action short of being able to oust him. Yancke eventually ousted James (after a couple of turns when he should have ousted James, but misplayed things, such as not saving a bonding for the minion with DOM), and swept through Brendan and myself quickly, but then timed out against Hendrik. I didn't see anything at all of the other game, but Marc collected the most VP's and made it to the final.

On a die roll, I opted to play the Anarch Vote deck for the final, but I made a very poor seating choice. James had decided to play the Imbued, and as I was worried by their ability to interfere with my setup, I didn't want to sit next to them. I also thought that Marc would be playing the Stansilava deck again, so I didn't want to be downstream of it, so I opted to sit as Marc's predator and Brendan's prey, not realising that Brendan would be playing the Lasombra deck, and not realising that Yancke, Brendan's predator, was going to play his PRO DOM deck. Marc turned out to be playing his Assamite Black Hand deck, and, although I got Raphael Catarari early, and was able to start getting the Anarch cycle going, I didn't see the Fee Stakes our Crimethinc's I needed to really get going, and a few heavy bleeds early left me unable to get the number of minions I needed out. An early Yawp Court from Marc meant that I was also going to struggle to get a vote to hit the table, since I saw little of my combat package. My involvement in the final was thus fairly short-lived, and, although I did land a couple of 3 bleeds on Marc, he farmed most of it back so I had made little impression on his pool. James was being largely left alone, so was able to tool up fairly nicely. Marc was up to through minions, and around 10 pool when I was ousted, but fell quickly afterwards, thanks to a couple of heavy bleeds that were deflected onto him and a single bleed for 4 from Brendan, and, given that James was fairly low on pool at that point, I thought Brendan had the game. Brendan though, didn't have the cards that he needed to force the actions through past the Imbued, and suffered a critical bounce failure on a turn when Yancke bled for 14. This wasn't enough to oust Brendan, so Yancke fell to the Imbued, and, as Brendan was unable to draw into enough stealth, James won the two-player shootout.

In retrospect, given the decks involved, I should have sat as James' predator, as I may have been able to negotiate vote support of the basis that the Imbued are always a threat, which could have given me a VP, but I didn't have anyway of dealing with permanent votes of the Lasombra, so it's doubtful if I could have really done better than that.

The Anarch deck is probably about as good as this version is going to get. The addition of the Reckless Agitations has helped a lot, as it's a significant amount of pool damage that is less resource intensive than the Revolutionary Councils, and the Revolutionary Council, Crimethinc, Reckless double is a scary combo, but it is ultimately a fragile deck build, and vulnerable to heavy bleed or serious vote.

[1] Given that it was "Fee Stake: Cape Town", someone had to play a Fee Stake deck, after all.

Slachter's Nek tournament

2010-11-07T16:50:00.000+02:00

So 5 of us made it to the November tournament (which unfortunately clashed with a number of other things). Due to the small size, we opted for a multi-deck tournament, and ended up cutting it down to only two rounds due to time constraints.

So the first round saw Richard (Akunanse wall) bleeding Bredan (weenie group 2 & 3 AUS wall with sniper rifles) bleeding Marc (Guhuri bruise vote and bleed) bleeding me (!Brujah bruise vote and bleed) bleeding Kevin (FoS corruption antics with Nakhthorheb).

Brendan got off to a fast start, with an early Lilith's Blessing and getting a minion setup with a sniper rifle and sports bike early. I got Smash and Hektor out, but didn't draw much of the farm of my deck. I was able to land a couple of early Kines and then bleed with a Iron Glare to weaken Kevin considerably, but he was working through Richard at a fair rate, so I ended up burning his smallest vampire with a rush from Hektor to slow him down. Marc & Richard each had more votes than I did, and with Marc and I both looking to call votes, and Brendan able to block Marc most of the time, the was a lot of negotiating about during the game. Kevin also played a fair bit of vote defense, which all combined to slow me down once I had Kevin low on pool. Kevin did get Richard down to a couple of pool, but Richard managed to get a No Secrets down, and Kevin wasn't able to stealth over it after that (which, given that he was playing FoS, rather surprised the rest of the table). I blocked one of Marc's bleeds with Hektor, and a Death of My Conscience & a Burning Wrath from Marc later, both minions were burnt, which slowed me down further. Brendan then played an Antediluvian Awakening, and I was able to last long enough for it to kill Kevin. The game timed out shortly after that. It's not clear quite how the table would have folded from where the game timed out - Marc would have probably had me, but Brendan was able to block several of his actions, which would have made it a slow process. While Richard wasn't really able to go forward strongly, he was pretty well setup defensively and no-one had the stealth to go over his no secrets at that point. Marc had managed to generate a lot of pool via Voter Caps, so that probably would have given him the game eventually.

The second game saw Kevin (!Brujah rush) bleeding Marc (Kiasyd power bleed) bleeding Richard (Guhuri Brutual Influence bleed with OBF) bleeding me (Groteques) bleeding Brendan (old school Lasombra politics). This is the first time the Groteque deck has really struggled in a game - while I got Gerald Windham out (whose vote special was really influential), I didn't draw a location early and so struggled to bring out the Grotesques. An early "Blood Weakens" from Richard also made life awkward for everyone on the table. Brendan got off to a very fast start, with a first turn Info Highway and a second turn Zillah's valley. Kevin's deck struggled, without the vote push available to get votes through and not enough ways for Hektor to get into combat. Marc's didn't draw into the power part of the power bleed combo, and so Richard was able to build up fairly easily. While I was able to block him several times, I mainly drew prevent from the combat package, so I was never able to serious inconvenience any of his minions. Gerald's votes from other titles scattered around the table, and the presence of 3 prisci, meant that Brendan didn't have the vote lock, and thus wasn't able to push through Kevin that quickly. Kevin also played a Protected Resources, which delayed Brendan bleeding him out a few turns.

I eventually fell to the Guhuri. Brendan probably should have ousted Kevin, but didn't draw out stealth on a couple of bleeds before bouncing them on, which meant Kevin was able to block, and allowed Richard to Majesty and them farm or hunt to setup for the next turn. This allowed Richard to oust Brendan and then Kevin in quick succession, and the pool and minion advantage meant he was able to win the two player contest with Marc, despite having exhausted his library, although it was a close run thing.

Hinkey letter is Hinkey

2010-09-25T14:29:00.000+02:00

Scams intrigue me [1]. While e-mail scams are a dime-a-dozen these days, paper based scams are less common, and thus stick out more.

Which brings me to the "SARS" letter I received last week. The letter itself was quite interesting stylistically, being a "Your deductions from 2006 are being re-examined, please send supporting documentation or call to query this", and mis-stating the income tax act in various threatening ways. The letter was a pretty good effort, with the correct letterhead, correct tax number, a valid return address and it arrived in what looked like an official SARS envelope. The tone and number to call were enough to make the letter hinkey, but it was convincing enough that I ended up calling SARS to check that it was actually fake. It was also accompanied by a "please call to confirm you've received the letter" SMS the day before. The amount of correct information is both non-unexpected proof that this information is not at all secret and represents a reasonable amount of effort on the part of the scammers.

I assume (based on very little evidence, but inferring from the tone of the letter and the emphasis on phoning them) that this is a "pay us to make this all go away" scam. If that is true, the people running reckon that there are enough people who are somewhat guilty about the deductions they've claimed and/or sufficiently convinced about the corruption in the system that this strikes them as an acceptable approach to getting rid of the problem for the scam to be profitable, which is an unflattering assessment of modern South African society.

Also, given the times-scales involved - probably a week to allow for letters to arrive, a few days for the people who are going to call to call, and them some time to talk them into something that will pay money, it look likely to tie them to an potentially identifiable number for at least a few weeks. Since they cannot be assuming that no-one will realise this is fake and report it, either this needs to move to the paying money part quickly (and I'm not seeing how they'd do that) or there's something in the risk mitigation part I'm not seeing.

[1] Based on the success of the various con caper films, I'm probably far from alone in this.

Pyweek 11: Caught

2010-08-29T20:40:00.000+02:00

After the success of last year's entry, we decided to do another one this year (we skipped pyweek 10, as none of us had time available then), with a slightly tweaked team.

This years entry ran rather differently. We met on Sunday to discuss things, and,. although we settled on a point and click adventure game fairly early, we spent a lot of time converging to a basic premise and initial plot, although we did manage to get this largely settled by Sunday evening.

Another serious issue was the colds several members of the team (including me) were battling with. This added a layer of fuzzy thinking in several places, and was just generally not helpful.

The development ran rather differently to the last pyweek. I think because of the previous experience, the pace of development, while equally fast, wasn't nearly as startling. We also used a different toolkit, albow, which, while not perfect, was easier to get on top of than pgu had been. The game, being point and click, is also less busy than fox assault was, so from that point of view the code base was easier to manage. As a result, the basic engine part of the game actually shaped up fairly quickly, and we were generally able to extend it as needed with little trouble.

On the other hand, as an adventure game, we needed to generate a lot of content before we could hook up parts of the game. This was the largest stumbling block for the game. By Thursday, it looked like we would have something workable, but we only got rid of the last of the text placeholders quite late on Saturday. This meant we didn't have a reasonably playable version of the game until quite late, and thus never got much feedback as a result of other people playing the game. This helped contribute to the annoying bugs in the final submission, as, by that stage, we weren't testing unexpected interactions enough.

Notes on things that happened along the way:

My quick 20 minute hack to help layout rectangles grew rather more features than I expected.
Finding sounds with decent licenses is a painful and tedious exercise.
The same is true for fonts
But writing a little sine wave tone generator using just sys, math and struct was amusing
Hooking up humorous descriptions and interactions is why to kill compiling time

While not as fun for me as the first pyweek, largely due to the cold, this was still enjoyable, and the game, while quite a simple little adventure game, is amusing, and has promise as a more general adventure game engine.

Dragonfire 2010

2010-08-10T21:24:00.000+02:00

I spent the long weekend mainly at Dragonfire, which, for me, consisted of several VTES social games of mixed success, a less enjoyable run in the tournament, an rather lengthy game of Arkham Horror and some enjoyable role-playing modules.

Running chronologically'ish. Friday was the newbie demo games - I went to kibbutz and also play in a few social games. A somewhat mixed evening deck success wise.

The slightly retooled Jann Berger deck actually swept the three-player table it was one, although it did bottom out at around 4 pool, and struggled more than I expected in combat, although it did manage to dunk a few minions. Table dynamics helped, but being able to drop an Iron Glare on a presence bleed card can whittle through pool at quite an impressive speed.

The tweaked Samedi Corpse deck didn't really get going, and I think I was first ousted in the game, but the deck showed some signs of promise.

I then played two games with the very reworked Spell of Life deck. In the first game, it crashed and burnt horribly. I didn't get Nakahoteb until I'd drawn 3 crypt cards, and had to bring out a different minion, which didn't help the deck flow. Nobody tried to block the Spell of Lifes, so I jammed on stealth, and, with only 1 minion out, I didn't have other actions I could use the stealth on. I was ousted after only getting 3 Spells down, even though I only had 1 turn were I didn't have one to play.

The second game with the Spell of Life deck was rather more successful - I didn't draw Nakhoteb in my opening crypt, but was able to pull him immediately with an Effective. I brought out the 5 cap, so I could start Spell of Life'ing earlier, and, even though I ended up contesting Nakahoteb with Kevin cross table, my single minion was able to get the Spells down in time. I did have to frantically pull cards from my crypt - by the time I had 4 Spell of Lifes down, I could only have brought out 2 mummies that wouldn't contest. When the Spells did go off (for 4 mummies), they performed impressively. My prey (Yancke, playing Simon's Aching Beauty deck), had just ousted Kevin, and was sitting on 12 pool. However, 4 Mummies, a Dream World, a Psychic Veil (cunningly stored in a Storage Annex early in the game) and a couple of bleed mods I could use with the mummies saw me oust him in a single turn. I was then able clean up, largely by using the mummies to rush everyone else and smooth out the path for the Settites to bleed. While not yet a particularly good deck, the 12 pool in a single turn showed considerable potential.

Saturday was the SA VTES Nationals. We had a decent turnout, with 15 players, even though the Fishhoek crowd couldn't make it, and no-one from Joburg traveled down. I've had a Alicia Burrows/Aristole vote deck idea knocking about in my head for some time, which I finally decided to build and play. It ended up becoming a Lutz deck, as he had the overlap on PRE and pot I was looking for. In theory, the deck should work OK. In practice, I badly misread the meta-game, and didn't have the combat defense I needed.

In the first game, Dave (Toreador wall with guns) was bleeding Hendrik (!Tor toolbox), bleeding Richard (Guhuri ANI & POT rush), bleeding me, bleeding Matthew (old school Brujah rush). I was a vote deck between two POT immortal grapple rush decks, so things did not go well for me at all. I had only a single action (with Lutz, which admittedly did do 5 pool damage) in the game, and had both minions I brought out burnt, one by Matthew, and one by my predator. Richard. The game stayed static for a long time after I was ousted, although that's largely because Richard did not go forward as hard as he could have done. Dave was eventually able to oust Hendrik, who never got setup enough to really make an impression on Richard's farm, and Richard cleaned up the rest of the table.

In the second game. Dan (weenie DOM & THA) was bleeding me, bleeding James (Imbued), bleeding Simon (!Salubri rush) bleeding Phillip (!Ventrue toolbox). The deck did a lot better, and I had James' imbued down to three pool before Simon rushed me cross table and put Aristotle in torpor and burnt Lutz. I should have had the Imbued though, as I made a couple of serious errors. The first was not bringing out Aristotle as my second minion (I brought out Alicia instead) - the extra stealth would have saved me a couple of blocks by the imbued, and allowed me to oust James, and the combat defense saved might have been enough to survive against Simon for long enough to oust him. Then, after playing a Zillah's Valley at a point when it wasn't ideal for me to do so to cycle cards, I brought out Aristotle as a third minion, when I should have just stayed on two minions and looked less threatening (although that might not have been enough) [1]. Simon was able to oust Phillip, who never drew enough combat defense to survive against the !Salubri. I didn't watch the rest of the table unfold, as I went to play a social game, but eventually James cleaned up the rest of the table.

Dan proceeded to win the final with his weenie deck.

In between, I did also play a couple of social games - in one, the Venture deck got up and running, and pretty much steam rollered the table. In the other, the reworked Samedi managed one oust, but them got smashed by Phillip's red list combat deck.

After the tournament and some supper, we ended up playing a 6 player game of Arkham Horror, with the great old one being Zhar. An early 2 extra counters on the doom track, and an environment preventing us from sealing gates for most of the game left us always chasing the game, and, indeed, in 10 turns Zhar awoke, and duly devoured us (although we did defeat him once). We erred by not getting more people blessed near the end of the game, but there were numerous amusing incidents, though, and the game was quite fun.

Sunday saw me play in both modules. They were both enjoyable, although I was a bit disappointed that the first module's big surprise was as predictable as it was. As I wasn't playing in the LARP that evening, I went home, but failed to catch up on sleep, being distracted by a link to tvtropes.

Monday was the long two-session Innocents module, which was great fun, despite the length. As a result, I didn't do have much to do with the newbie tournament, although it attracted 9 players, and generally seems to have been a success.

I did fit in one final social game, with the Grotesque deck. It ended up with the table win, although this was largely due to weaknesses of the other decks and the inexperience of a couple of the new players we had involved. The deck does gather some impressive momentum when rolling, but it takes time to get going, and still needs a bit more combat oomph to be really scary.

[1] The Lutz deck was seen as the table threat on a table with an imbued deck and a weenie dominate deck. I'm not quite sure what to make of that.

ICON 2010, Sunday

2010-07-31T01:48:00.000+02:00

The coffee shop was open again on Sunday, so that was a good start.

I opted to play in another module, rather than watch the VTES final, so I saw very little of the final.

The module got going rather late, and ran a bit long, despite our GM valiantly cutting various bits from the module. It was not a bad module, but suffered a bit from a table of slightly drunk and crazy. The table didn't quite gel, and I often felt I was having to force myself into the game, rather than having space to work with. Also, as my first experience of the infamous ICON tent, I now understand years of complaints about that venue from friends.

The module itself wasn't bad, although, as a Call of Cthulhu module in a medieval setting, it did feel a bit D & D'ish. It was a vast improvement on Friday's modules, though. It felt as if it didn't need all the characters, although that might have just been because of how our table worked.

After the module, I managed to get in another social game, trying out my Alan Sovereign investment idea, which didn't work well - I was left with the feeling that the idea could work, but I'm not sure how to balance things to make it happen yet. With the module running long, this took us well into the afternoon, so the rest of the afternoon was spent in a few conversations before leaving to drop me off at the airport.

Edit: Mish-mash of photos now up here.

ICON 2010, Saturday

2010-07-31T00:48:00.000+02:00

Saturday got off to a poor start, as the coffee shop was closed, so we ended up decamping to a nearby Wimpy (having been led astray by my GPS, which promised more options at the location).

I signed up for the VTES tournament, and, while waiting for the tournament to start, got in my second partial VTES social. I was playing the !Brujah deck. which seemed to be doing OK, although we called the game before the table really shook itself into shape.

As I thought the deck was quite solid, I opted to play my HoS deck. This turned out to be a pure choice, and I probably would have done better with a more combat focused deck, as there wasn't that much combat defense around.

The first round was one of the odder games I've ever been involved in. I was bleeding Victor (Assamite BH toolbox), bleeding Jan (!Ventrue farm), bleeding Alex (HoS wall), with Victor starting, IIRC. My predator, Alex, brought out Agaitas, and was thus able to draw and use cards from my deck most successfully. Since Alex's deck was much more wallish than mine, he used this a lot to cycle into block fails and bleed to run me down. He also played a Anarch Troublemaker from my deck, which he should have been able to use to oust me, but forgot about it when he should have lunged. I almost had an awesome play, as I played a second Anatch Troublemaker to contest, but Victor Suddened it. It didn't matter, as Alex fell to a bounced bleed, and I fell to Jan shortly thereafter. Jan was able to whittle down Viktor gradually to take the sweep.

In the second game, I was bleeding Neville (!Ventrue anti-vote wall), bleeding Simon (Malk CEL/DEM combat), bleeding Jan, bleeding Josh (!Malk fast sneak bleed with Malkavian Games) (can't remember who started). I didn't draw enough bounce or intercept to deal with the very forward focused deck (I don't think it had a single reaction card), so was duly ousted first. I hadn't had a chance to bleed Neville before being ousted, so he was somewhat setup, and with a combination of Villeins, a well-timed Giant's Blood, some votes, Neville farmed up considerably, but eventually fell before the !Malks. Jan, who had minions Coma'ed by both Josh and Simon, eventually fell to Simon, but Simon couldn't quite hold on to stop Josh, although it was very close, as Josh almost decked himself on the last bleed.

The third game saw me bleeding Josh, bleeding Willem (Ventrue vote) bleeding Marnik (Tremere slave Gargoyles) bleeding Victor (I started, I think). Willem fell to the sneak bleed quite quickly, but I was able to put in a couple of solid hits on Josh's pool, and almost had him in range before he ousted Willem. At this point, with Josh on 6 pool, he lost a Malkavian Game, and, as he misannounced the effect, he thought he'd lost 6 instead of 4 pool. This, annoyingly, probably cost me a VP, as, had the effect been properly applied, I would have almost certainly had Josh the next turn, and would have hit the Gargoyle deck after an extra turn of being bled by the Malks, rather than with 12 pool, and would have probably been able to win that battle. Victor, who had been largely left alone to tool up, as everyone focused on the !Malks, was able to mop up the table.

Between the tournament and the start of the second LARP, I got in one more social game. I played my Nocturn deck, bleeding Neville (HoS), bleeding Gareth (Nergal power bleed), bleeding Vleis (Gangrel aggro-poke), bleeding Simon (!Salubri). The game had several amusing events - Neville played a Tension in the ranks early, so I wasn't in a position to recruit Nocturns, as the cost for them burning would have itched mightly. Gareth bled forward heavily, and Vleis had something of a bad game as a result. Simon was able to bring out a couple of smallish minions, and burnt one of the Gangrel early. At about this point, Gareth discarded a Majesty, announcing that he had too many in his hand. Simon, seeing that Gareth was about to oust the Gangrel, rushed cross table. It turned out that Garther considered two Majesty's in hand too many, and, having played the one combat card in the first rush, promptly had Nergal burnt by the !Salubri (which, given the old WoD mythos, seemed very appropriate). I got good use out of the DOM/OBT plan B gear of the Nocturn deck, and. with combat flying around cross table, was able to keep my head down and stealth bleed past Neville's defenses. Gareth, although he managed to oust the Gangrel, was running short on minions, and soon fell. Fortunately, I had enough S:CE in hand to survive a turn of rushes from the !Salubri, and, with bleed in hand, had little trouble finishing off Simon's deck.

The LARP kept the vampire theme going, as it was a Dracula LARP. I was cast as Renfield, who was fun to play. His goals were never particularly achievable, but I feel I managed a creditable level of creepy, and generally had a good time. I also managed to get killed twice - both times by Simon's character - which gave me a better than 100% record for dying in the weekend's LARPs.

Comic punting

2010-07-26T21:20:00.000+02:00

I am a big fan of Christopher Baldwin's various works. His current strip, Spacetrawler, is being tremendously entertaining - the madcap nature is very well summed up by this strip. Well worth the read.

Icon 2010, Friday

2010-07-26T18:55:00.000+02:00

So, in the company of Simon, Adrianna, Mike & Beth, I went up to ICON. I flew up with Simon and Adrianna on Thursday evening, and, with some "not quite following the GPS" navigation (which included a loop around the block in a series of confusing one-way streets, where we may have ended up going the wrong way down one), we made it to the F1 hotel and met up with Mike and Beth.

Friday got off to a bright and early start. Early successes were finding a decent coffee shop for breakfast near ICON, and a source of wasabi coated peas.

I duly signed up for two role-playing modules. We were informed that two modules, one of which I had been considering playing in, had been canceled due to "severe technical weaknesses".

Before role playing started, I got in most of a quick social game with two Pretoria players and Simon. I was playing my Unnamed bleed deck. The game was interesting, as, with the unnamed bleeding, I ended up with a surprisingly large amount of pool without actually doing that much damage. I also had my Enkil Cog DI'd and my Metro Underground Suddened, which left me feeling a bit picked on.

The first role-playing module was more than a bit dire. The group I was in took some time to find the actual character descriptions, which were cunningly hidden as a couple of lines amongst walls of stats and system descriptions. The module itself wasn't much better, as it was equally sparse and lacked essential elements such as a basic plot. Our GM, Naas, took us seriously off script to add some structure - it ended up playing more as a Call of Cthulu module, but ended up being reasonably enjoyable.

The afternoon module was probably less dire, although it was a close call. The character sheets were more fleshed out, but the module was again lacking in basic plot and the characters lacked any motivation for acting in the way the module writer clearly intended. This weak setup also made it almost impossible to do any sort of real horror, and my group played it a bit for laughs, so it was quite entertaining, but not, I suspect, the module the author had intended.

Given the poor quality of the modules on show on Friday (the second afternoon module was apparently also a bit dire), the quality of the scotched modules was a source of some speculation.

Between the modules and the evening LARP, we went to the Edenvale Spur. They were having a very busy night, so this resulted in a quick dinner dash becoming a leisurely, frustrating dinner dash, and us getting back a bit late for the LARP.

The LARP was quite fun. The plot involved nearly every applicable daytime soap cliche, and several that weren't strictly applicable, but were thrown in anyway. My character came quite close to achieving his objectives, largely by presenting a completely false face of reasonable sensibleness, before dying from an unfortunate series of events - it started with poisoning and went a little odd from there, to end in a case of spontaneous human combustion.

July tournament

2010-07-13T19:57:00.000+02:00

After playing a number of socials leading up to the storyline tournament, I think I only attended one social between the storyline final and July's tournament. Consequently, I didn't have any new decks I felt confident in [1], and, although I seriously considered trying one of my political decks, I opted to go with a completely untried and ever so elegant in its simplicity the unnamed Enkil Cog bleed and bloat deck.

The first game saw me (starting) bleeding Anthony (a new player, playing Malk S & B & insanity) bleeding Hendrik (!tor vote & bleed) bleeding Simon (Samedi wall [2]) bleeding Kevin (Settite S & B & enticement). I got off to a decent start, and actually drew the Cog before I had the unnamed out, which saved me one fishing attempt. I was able to start bleeding my prey, but a early Malkavian game which saw my prey gain 6 pool before I got going, and steady bloat from Kindred Spirits meant I wasn't really getting through my prey very quickly. Simon, facing both Hendrik's forward pressure and flicked bleeds, wasn't able to bleed Kevin often, so I was steadily whittled down. The bloat module did work well enough to keep me in the game, but I made a couple of bad plays immediately after having a bleed reduced to 0 (so I couldn't bloat off it). I misjudged Kevin's likely lunge potential, and a) brought out an extra minion I couldn't afford at the time, b) tapped the black hand minion who could play the black reduce in my hand and c) failed to use the cog for additional bloat before Kevin's turn. In all likelihood, it wouldn't have saved me from being ousted, but I should have been able to hang on for at least one more turn. The rest of the game timed out, as a couple of Malkavian Pranks added a considerable amount of pool to the game.

In the second game, Simon (starting) was bleeding Marc (Assamite black hand) bleeding Richard (Eze bloat) bleeding James (!Sal breed) bleeding me. I had an unfortunate crypt draw, and had to fish for the unnamed, who fortunately was the first card I pulled, so it only slowed me down a turn. This did allow James to get in a number of small bleeds, but by the time he had a camera phone down, I did have a blocker/bouncer out. I was able to Tongue the Enkil Cog, and get it onto the unnamed in good order, but I then had a long delay while trying to draw into either the Metro Underground or a second Tongue.
James kept bleeding me (and very occasionally Simon) in small packets, but also couldn't go forward too hard due to the threat of Richard's deck. Marc and James tried to run Richard out of S:CE, but, although they did put Eze down a couple of times, weren't able to make the deal stick, and, although Marc did land several big bleeds, Richard's bloat was too effective. Simon gradually whittle away at Marc, who was also slowed down by a Banishment, and, after Marc had tapped himself out, was duly ousted. I was, at this time, whittling Simon's pool down fairly well, but under quite some pressure from James, who was up to 7 minions at this point. I was able to get the Ashur Tablets off for some much needed additional bloat. There's was a tense sequence where I had to bleed with the unnamed during Richard's turn to ensure I stayed far enough ahead of James, with Simon in lunge range, and then had the unnamed Pantexed by James shortly afterwards. Some top-decking of stealth, though, allowed me to burn the Pentex, and, as Simon had given James intercept from the WMRH radio, the extra pool loss meant Simon wasn't able to reduce my bleed enough and was ousted. James fell to Richard, and the table timed out shortly afterwards, leaving me with 1.5 VPs, which was unfortunately not enough to make the final table (although it was close, as there where a lot of timeouts in the tournament).

The deck idea is honestly very simple - the unnamed, with an Enkil Cog, bleeds with social charm a lot. The support tech to set this up is less so - !Malks with Sybil's Tongue to fetch the Cog and the Metro underground, Ashur Tablets for additional bloat and to tune the deck later in the game, and a smattering of bounce and vote defense, and the lack of discipline overlap in the crypt meant I was short one more minion who could bleed effectively. I managed to prune the deck down to 75 cards (the best compromise between my "let's add more stuff" inclinations and the need to have reasonable odds of the Tongues coming up I could manage), which is still a little on the large side for the deck to really run smoothly, but, for an untried concept deck, it put in a decent showing. I had more fun playing it than I actually expected - it was nice to finally get some use out of my Enkil Cog, and after several attempts in a couple of different decks, I finally got a Ashur Tablets sequence off.

I didn't see much of the final, being involved in a couple of social games with the reworked HoS deck based on my storyline deck. The modified version shows some promise, and a few of the changes (such as the addition of a few Anarch troublemakers) worked really well. I also discovered that Trochmancy'ing Imbued convictions is far more satisfying than it probably should be.

[1] A good case can be made that the Nocturn Dom/Obt deck would have been a decent choice for this tournament.

[2] Which worked a lot better than you would expect given the description.

The Battle Lines Storyline tournament: Final

2010-06-08T20:23:00.000+02:00

The finalists were (in order of seeding) Phillip (Ahrimane bleed and vote, replacing Ruan, who couldn't make the final), Richard (Tupdogs), Hendrik (True Brujah), myself (Hardbringer AUS black hand) & Brendan (Nagaraja power bleed).

Hendrik placed himself downstream of Phillip - I chose to go between Phillip and Hendrik, leaving Phillip at the mercy of the Tupdogs. Brendan somewhat surprisingly chose to be my predator - I had expected him to go downstream, as Hendrik didn't have bounce, but Brendan was perhaps disadvantaged here by not having really seen either my deck or Hendrik's during the initial rounds. The roll to see who started ended up with Hendrik starting, so the table was Hendrik -> Richard -> Phillip -> Brendan -> me.

Richard made most of the early running, binning and graverobbing the first minion Phillip brought out, and working through Phillip's pool quite quickly. Brendan got off to a very slow start, which hurt me, since I drew a lot of bounce, and didn't have anything to bounce. I also didn't draw anything to help me got forward, and mainly drew target vitals, rather than any of the other combat cards, so my deck didn't really get running. This left Hendrik free to tool up his Trujah without problems.

I spent a couple of blocks stopping some tool-up actions from Brendan, mainly to cycle cards (without much effect), and working on getting out more minions. I maybe should have tried to block Hendrik more, but early on I didn't have a decent enough combat package to feel I could risk that.

With Phillip looking very vulnerable at around 3 or 4 pool, and Hendrik's Antediluvian Awakening in play, Richard decided to start putting pressure on Brendan (with a Fame and a couple of rushes), rather than finishing off Phillip. This gave Phillip a window to call a couple of votes and gain blood and pool via voter caps, and also led to Brendan burning his Fame'd minion to get rid of the Antediluvian, which also helped Phillip. Richard then blocked a number of Hendrik's actions, and saw several minions (including the stolen minion) put into torpor, which left him unable to oust Phillip that turn. A Neonate breach from Phillip, and an Ancilla Empowerment from Hendrik then ousted Richard. I could potentially have blocked the Ancilla Empowerment, but opted out, due to a poor combat hand, which was my major misplay of the game, as it gave Hendrik momentum. To pass the Ancilla empowerment, Hendrik had agreed to leave Phillip alone for two turns, which Hendrik spent further tooling up, and this allowed Phillip to land some solid hits on Brendan's pool, but not quite quick enough to beat being ousted himself.

I finally drew into some bleed, so I was able to damage Hendrik's pool, but not enough to offset the gains from the ousts. Brendan also finally bled me, but I was out of bounce, so it left me rather low. I was able to survive until after Brendan had been ousted, but wasn't able to stop Hendrik sweeping.

Because my deck came up a bit strangely, I was overly defensive for much of the final. The current build of the deck is also too focused towards bleed defense. This was a design choice based on what I expected to see, but that didn't end up working that well for me in any of the games. I think there are some good ideas in the deck, though, and I can hopefully make a non-storyline rules version work.

The Battle Lines Storyline tournament: first rounds

2010-05-30T00:25:00.000+02:00

I put together two deck ideas for the tournament, and Ahrimane Anarch Pre bleed deck, and a Harbringer of Skulls Black Hand deck, and managed to playtest both decks twice. The Ahrimane deck never really gelled for me, as the combat and defense never flowed nicely. The Harbringer deck did reasonably well in the first playtest, and got horribly crushed in the second (Simon's Blood Brothers made for a horrible prey), it did at least seem to be able to pull of the combos I wanted more often, and had access to bounce, which is always good, so, after further tweaking, I decided to run with it for the tournament.

In the first round, Dave (Kiasyd S & B, Bahari faction) was bleeding me (HoS, Loyalist) bleeding Ruan (smallish Daughters bleed, Bahari) bleeding John (Petanique something, Bahari) bleeding Hendrik (True Brujah bruise & bleed, Loyalist).

Ruan got off to a really fast start, and John never got into the game, only managing a couple of actions before being ousted. I failed to draw Sennadurek, but did get the +1 intercept Mordechai into play, and get a blooding early to get the black hand goodness going. Dave didn't seem to be drawing into any bleed, and, with Hendrik in a position to apply a fair bit of pressure early (due to John's troubles), was looking wall up a fair bit. Hendrik put one of Ruan minions down, and I was able to knock another down, to slow him down, and, when Hendrik suddenly brought out two small minions, it looked like he was in a good position to push through. Ruan, however, was able to contest one of the minions with Hendrik, and some Faerie Wards from Dave bought him some time. I had a couple of tight turns when I didn't quite have the bounce or intercept I needed in hand, and was only on 6 pool, but Dave, who had built up to 3 minions didn't draw the bleed push he needed, and I survived. I was able to land a few solid Trochmancy bleeds on Ruan, and whittled him down into lunge range, but I screwed up the lunge royally, needlessly boosting a bleed and having a minion Archon'ed. I was able to oust Ruan that turn, but, having lost a minion, I was left in pretty bad shape and couldn't pressurise Hendrik, who quickly ousted both Dave and myself. Still, 1 VP was a decent start to the tournament.

The second round saw Phillip (Ahrimane Vote & Bleed, Loyalist) bleeding Hendrik bleeding me bleeding James (Salubri Antitribu combat, Bahari) bleeding Richard (Tupdog & weenie dom madness, Bahari). The Tupdog deck got off to a fast start, graverobbing a small minion with a sniper rifle from James, and Fame'ing Phillip's vampire. I was able to Cadet my crypt early, which meant all my vampires came into play Black Hand, which was useful, but I spent a lot of the game trying to draw into my Trochomancies, and wasn't able to really pressurise James. I got a pulse down, but misjudged the amount untap James had and had the vampire burnt by an Eye of unforgiving Heaven. Hendrik played an Antediluvian Awakening and this led to probably the most amusing passage of play from the game. With Phillip on the ropes, Richard burnt the stolen minion to burn Hendrik's Antediluvian Awakening, so he could play his own Awakening, only to have it immediately contested by Hendrik. Richard duly ousted Phillip, but then run out of momentum a bit, and I was whittled down fairly quickly by Hendrik. Luckily for me, James eagle sight'ed an ousting bleed, and I was able to start farming back to hold on. I was able to block a couple of Hendrik's bleeds and drew enough prevent to survive the combats, but, with a Form of Corruption in play, and Sennadurak stuck on 1 blood in a Vessel & hunt cycle to pay for the Antediluvian Awakening, I couldn't afford to bleed James unless I could secure the oust, as gaining the Edge would have been fatal to me. Eventually, I blocked Hendrik who played domain of evernight and my prevent allowed me to torprise one of Hendrik's minions, and, with Richard burning another minion to burn the Antediluvian Awakening, I was in a position to lunge for James, and got that through. Hendrik then fell to the Tupdog deck, but as I was able to bring out another minion, and I had the combat to deal with the Tupdogs for a couple of turns, I was able to finally oust Richard. An admittedly rather lucky game win, but they all count.

The HoS deck is still fragile, and it is more passive than most other decks I play, but it does have some good ideas and is quite fun to play [1], although it does rely on the Storyline's no group restriction rules. I will need to think about how to make the deck work without the storyline rules a fair bit still.

[1] Unless it has Simon's BB deck as its prey.

Ahem

2010-04-02T11:10:00.000+02:00

MINE!

:D

Spontaneous Photoblog

2010-03-26T20:44:00.000+02:00

A selection of some recent photos [1][2].

[1] because writing a RSS feed generator for my gallery keeps slipping down the priority list
[2] More over here

First VTES torunament of 2010

2010-03-06T16:19:00.000+02:00

Last weekend was the 1st tournament of the year, the Battle of Paardeberg. Unfortunately, only 7 players showed up, which is one of the more awkward numbers.

Saturday saw the preliminary rounds (tables of 5, 4, and 5).

The first round saw Dan (Osebo wall with thrown junk) bleeding Kevin (!Toreador sneak bleed & vote) bleeding Hendrik (weenie Pre & For swarm) bleeding Phillip (Brujah Trophy deck) bleeding Richard (Guhuri Ani Pot Pre bruise and bleed).

Hendrik got off to a fast start, but was slowed down by a cross table eagle sight from Dan. This allowed Phillip to bin and burn a couple of Hendrik's minions. It was at this point that Phillip discovered that his trophy deck completed lacked any Master cards, which was rather amusing. Kevin got a few bleeds and votes through, and gradually whittled Hendrik down. Richard was able to trump Dan's combat package, as Dan never got the Ayes he needed, or the maneuvers to avoid close range combat. Hendrik was eventually able to bleed through Phillip, but had taken quite a heavy toll doing so. Richard duly ousted Dan. Kevin should have ousted Hendrik, but backed off at a point when he should have just bled Hendrik out, and then opted to allow one of his minions to be Golconda'ed by Richard, which never looked the right play. This allowed Richard to clean up the rest of the table.

The second game saw Phillip bleeding me (!Nosferatu rush with Fame) bleeding Hendrik bleeding Simon (!salubri combat). Hendrik got off to a fast start, which only allowed Simon to bring out a single minion. Simon and I ended up co-operating to rush Hendrik minions into the ground to keep him from sweeping though Simon, but this meant that Simon was unable to pressurise Phillip, so I was also having to try and balance that threat. I was able to successfully burn one of Phillip's vampires, and did torporise a few others, and between Simon and I, Hendrik and 6 or 7 minions either toporised or burnt. However, I didn't draw into a single Fame or Tension, so was never able to really damage Hendrik's pool, and, with Phillip burning my hunting ground, eventually ran out of blood on my minions and was duly ousted. Phillip was able to sweep the table from there, although Hendrik might have been able to oust Simon if he'd played things a little differently.

The third round saw me bleeding Richard bleeding Kevin bleeding Simon bleeding Dan. I got off to a good start, being able to bin one of Richard's vampires early, but then went through a long period of not drawing into my combat, which slowed me down to a crawl. This meant I was also unable to stop Richard gearing up - the leather jackets were a real problem for me. Dan built up fairly slowly, while Sim on back-rushed Kevin a fair bit. This allowed Richard to oust Kevin, after which the table stabilised for a bit. The most amusing incident was the complex deal Simon struck, agreeing to torporise one of Dan's minions for my support, and then later agreeing not to rush Dan for his support, which he was not quite able to fulfill, due to Dan choosing not to block Simon when he had a Kiss of Ra in hand. Richard was able to oust Simon, but at this point he had several minions in torpor (as did I), and was severely hurt by having a few minions diablerised. I didn't have the minions to survive against Dan, and he duly ousted both me and Richard.

I ended up being the 5th player in the final in the roll off.

The final saw me (starting) bleeding Richard bleeding Phillip bleeding Dan bleeding Hendrik.

I had a poor crypt draw, no beast, all three copies of Calebos and one Mateusz, which immediately meant that I wasn't going to get any use out of the Street Creds in my deck. Hendrik, however, opted to go slowly, and thus I was able to bring out both Mateusz and Calebos. I generally tried to keep Hendrik down to two minions by rushing backwards, and tried to put pressure forward on Richard. Richard, however, opted to largely sit tight, leaving Phillip alone, except for a couple of cross-table rushes against Dan. Phillip seemed to have a poor crypt draw, and so didn't put much pressure on Dan for much of the game. Dan played a Powerbase Montreal, which was promptly stolen, and for much of the game, it was traded back and forth between Phillip and Hendrik. I perhaps should have gotten into the stealing act earlier, but didn't really have that many actions to spare, as I was trying to pressurise Richard (without much success). Hendrik eventually lunged, but I had enough untap to survive, and Hendrik left himself to exposed and was ousted by Dan.

This game saw quite a bit of contesting as well. I spent much of the game contesting a fame with Richard (my Fame on Hendrik), and, after Hendrik was ousted, I ended up contesting both a Fame and a Tension with Richard for some turns.

I managed to bring out Beast, and started whittling Richard down, but a Golconda but Richard out of range. Dan stopped on ousting lunge from Richard on Phillip, and I binned one of Richard's two minions the next turn, but was unable to stop the rescue, and Phillip was unable to stop the final bleed. At this point, Richard was out of library, I had both the Powerbase and the Nosferatu Kingdom, so was able to farm up. Dan was down to only 1 minion. I ran out of time to oust Richard (The game ended with him on 1 pool, and a famed minion in torpor), and may have been able to take Dan due to minion superiority, but my minions were looking quite low, so it wasn't that clear cut.

Still, the final was extremely epic at times, and, considering that I was downstream of the fast weenie horde, I was really surprised to not be ousted.

After the final, I was involved in a quick social game, playing my modified Anarch Vote deck. I was bleeding Yancke (Ravanos bleed) bleeding Richard (Kiasyd) bleeding Simon (DoC vote). I managed to oust both Yancke and Richard, but fell to the daughters. Overall, I think the tweaks help the deck, although it still struggles to get going a bit, and is very vulnerable to other vote decks.

How not to setup your firewall

2010-01-23T19:11:00.000+02:00

(This is of course an entirely hypothetical set of notes, since it's inconceivable [1] that I would make any of these errors).

For the purposes of this exercise, we assume a gateway machine, running a simple firewall, which we want to use to drop various packets on the floor - such as those from machines particiapting in a distributed brute for ssh attack, for instance. We assume there are several scripts managing the blocked list. For best effect, your gateway box should be mounting a few directories via nfs from another machine.

Ensure that packets between the gateway box and the file server need to traverse the blocked list first.
Don't lock properly when adding new IPs to the firewall. This ensures that, under load, you can add large numbers of duplicate entries to the list.
Have every packet traverse the blocked list twice.

Under smallish numbers of blocked IPs, the results aren't impressive, so, for best effect, you need to wait until a there's a reasonably large attack before the effects are really noticeable. If done properly, however, at a few thousand unique entries, the network performance should slow to an absolute crawl.

[1] Which means exactly what I think it means.

The Novemebr 2009 Vampire Tournament

2009-11-15T23:11:00.000+02:00

The November tournament was this weekend.

After it worked quite well at the previous social, I opted to try my Ventrue vote deck. Unfortunately, the deck decided to mock me, very badly, in both rounds.

The first round was one of the stranger games I've been involved in. Simon (Tremere Thaum combat & bleed) (starting) bleeding me, bleeding Richard (Guhuri Brutal influence bleed), bleeding Hendrick (Thau combat & some wall). Simon's deck was in several ways the rock to my scissors - he got out both Carna (+1 intercept) and Oliver Thrace (no S:CE), and, when he placed a Pulse on Oliver, was able to keep me under a fair bit of pressure. I suffered badly in that I drew very few votes early on, and, with the number of other votes on the table (mid-game, the 13 votes I could generate from my vampires and locations was only enough to tie the rest of the table) I was unable to exert enough pressure on Richard. I was fortunate to draw most of my Minion Taps, so I was able to farm back fast enough to prevent Simon being able to overrun me. Richard was also farming quite successfully, but wasn't cycling into the bleed cards he needed to pressurise Hendrick. Hendrick took some time to get setup. He never had enough ways around S:CE to bother Richard, and, while he was able to trouble Simon in combat, didn't have enough ways of getting into combat with Simon, and didn't have the bleed push to pressurise him much either. The game was much more attritional than most, and never looked that likely to fold before we timed out. I gradually whittled Richard down to lunge range, but, due to a Smiling Jack, and a turn when I was short an untap card to bounce a bleed from Simon, was left with 1 less blood on my minions than I needed, and was thus unable to play both a Govern and a Conditioning to oust Richard. Richard, right before time, lunged at Hendrick with a Strange Day bleed, but it was bounced to Simon, ousting him with the last act of the game.

The next game saw Matthew (weenie pot Swarm with Brutal Influence) (starting) bleeding Hendrick, bleeding me, bleeding Dave (Brujah Cel/Pot). While I was never under much pressure from Hendrick, Dave went backwards a great deal, and, drawing into his Immortal Grapples quite often, gave me a very hard time, especially after he got a KRCG down. I didn't draw a single Voter Cap until the very end of the game, and thus wasn't able to refill my minions, which hurt me quite badly. Hendrick was unable to hold off Matthew's swarm although it did leave several of Matthew's minions in torpor. I managed to get Dave down to a couple of pool, but he was able to torporise all my minions . With no prospect of getting another minion out, I transferred myself out, giving Matthew a second VP. Matthew was unable to survive against the Brujah, and Dave duly collected the remaining 2 VPs.

I didn't see much of the final, as I went off to find some lunch, but Dave eventually won that with 4 VPs and Richard collecting the remaining VP.

Pyweek 9: Feather

2009-09-06T12:24:00.000+02:00

Pyweek has, since I first heard about it, been one of things I've always wanted to have a stab at, but never got around to. For pweek 9, with the benefit of enthusiasm from fellow members of CTPUG, we managed to get an entry together. We ended up with a rather fun little strategy game (in my completely neutral and unbiased opinion, of course), called "Fox Assault".

The whole development experience was quite interesting - I'm still somewhat amazed on how quickly we seemed to hit a concept in the initial discussion and were able to just run with it. Based on this experience, and the momentum the initial concept discussions gave us, for any future team entries, having an initial in person discussion & planning session is will be most useful.

The pace of development was more than a bit breathless, and, on a couple of occasions, I watched a throw-away comment in the code suddenly arrive in the codebase turned into something awesome, which was quite gratifying.

The way the game took over my week was a little unexpected, and contributed to rather less sleep than was probably healthy (the VTES social and a C. J. Cherryh novel didn't help this either). Some of other events of the week really quite surprised me, such as #ctpug suddenly becoming our personal source of additional testers.

Our one major error was not looking taking more time to familiarise ourselves with pygame and the available support libraries more beforehand. We chose to use Phil's pyGame Utilities almost on a whim, and, while it helped a great deal in providing several useful framework tools, and did save us quite a lot of time initially, it also forced several compromises and hacks onto us, partly due to design decisions taken by pgu, and partly due the time pressure favouring "It works, that's good enough" over pretty much anything else.

Overall, the whole experience was simply gosh-darn FUN, and while I would like to see our game score well, I'm overall really not bothered about that, since I know it's quite cool. I'd certainly like to do this again, although I'll probably try and plan to have a day's leave towards the end of the week for the next one.

An annoying discovery

2009-08-24T23:54:00.000+02:00

One of the great annoyances of manufactured items is they tend to be very symmetrical. This makes various approaches to automated registration more complicated, since there are often ambiguous possible solutions, so one often has to shove in more domain specific knowledge to get the correct answer. Domain specific information makes thins less portable, and generally requires annoying maintenance effort later.

This is all; relevant, since I've been trying to avoid shoving such domain specific knowledge into the registration step for the calibration cube for the x-ray system, which, being quite a precisely manufactured cube, is rather symmetric. I had thought I had enough information available from the views to get around this, and solve the problem fairly elegantly, but I spent the later half of last week and most of this morning failing to make the idea work. The answer obtained looked almost reasonable, but had a 5 cm offset, and a rather high error.

I thus resorted to a heavy-handed optimisation approach, using the domain specific information to ensure the minimum was near the correct place.

This did not work. Given the fairly specific constraints I had placed on the problem, not working was a very surprising result.

Much digging later, I discovered a sign error in the input data I had created to describe the cube last week, which meant I was trying to register the cube a collection of fairly widely spaced separated planes, and getting odd results out.

While I now have a correct solution, I will now need to revisit my earlier idea, and see if it works better with the correct data. Since I spend considerable time checking the data last week, and had convinced myself that it was actually correct, I'm currently rather annoyed with the universe [1].

[1] Because it's clearly not my fault, after all.

Dragonfire 2009 III (Mon)

2009-08-12T00:32:00.000+02:00

(being the last in the series of posts based on slightly inaccurate memories)

Most of the day got taken up by the actual draft tournament.

The draft got going a little later than planned, due to Richard oversleeping, and much juggling to arrange that we got 8 players, rather than dealing with 7. Phillip and I got in a very quick 2-player game shortly before the tournament. In an environment without bounce, the Settite bleed deck is really scary.

The problem with the draft was the complete lack of stealth, and, with EK providing both a master out of turn for intercept and an intercept reaction card, the games were very block heavy.

My deck was based around being able to use Batsehava with an Abombwe master and Founders to accelerate out my crypt, but the intercept meant that didn't work out quite as planned. I had a couple of bleed mods, but no stealth, and my combat was more defensive than it probably should have been. I also suffered from having a large number of permanents - my second and third passes through the deck were very quick, which meant I was out of library by the end of all the games.

In the first game, I got a bit lucky, and was able to contest a small vampire with my prey (Simon, and thus revenge for the Imperator final), but, with both of us down a minion, I wasn't able to really push forward, and spent most of my time holding off Dan's deck. This allowed Richard to setup nicely, and, while I was eventually able to oust Simon, Richard took the table comfortably.

In the second game, I was bleeding Richard, bleeding Matthew, bleeding Verolin (Richard starting). I got screwed over as Matthew brought out the same Abiku a turn or so after I had, and, not being in a great position to force the contest, and not wanting Richard to be able to plow forward too quickly, I had to yield. While I was able to push the odd bleed through, I was generally down a minion and thus never able to really pressurise Richard.

However, the 1.5 VP's was enough to get me to the final table.

The final table saw Dan (starting) bleeding me, bleeding Matthew, bleeding Richard, bleeding Phillip. Since I knew that Mathhew, Dan & I all shared a common vampire in Abiku, I brought out Titi first. Phillip found himself in the awkward position of having made transfers onto Titi and Mamadou, the vampire Matthew brought out first, so was struggling to get into the game. Richard took the opportunity to bring out the Remnant and the Tunnel Runner - Phillip then contested Mamadou with Matthew, who chose to yield, which allowed Phillip to steal the Remnant with Legend of the Leopard, and use it to burn the Tunnel Runner. Unfortunately, being down a minion, Matthew wasn't in a position to really pressurise Richard, and consequently walled up against me, which slowed my game down a lot. This allowed Richard to setup a lunge which ousted Phillip. The game see-sawed for some time afterwards, with Dan trying to balance the table. I gradually whittled Matthew down, and was able to land 2 successive bleeds for 2 to leave him on 2 pool, but my minions were running low on blood. Dan delayed me ousting Matthew by putting a minion in torpor, but left himself in range of Richard, who promptly ousted him. I was ale to oust Matthew, but was in no position to withstand Richard, who completed the game win shortly there-after.

After the tournament, there was some complex juggling to fit baby Cthulhu into my car, before heading off to the final after party.

Dragonfire 2009 II (Sun)

2009-08-12T00:24:00.000+02:00

(being part 2 of the series)

Due to the previous night, I decided not to try and make the first module, (which seems to have been a good one to miss), and only arrived around 11:30'ish or so. The trip across was complicated by road works on the N2 hat reduced it to one lane at the point the airport road feeds in, which wasn't a good idea.

While waiting for the afternoon module, I succumbed to temptation and spent rather more than I probably should have to secure the Doom board game and the Munchkin board game (I'm blaming the combination of tiredness and the 10% discount, but that's merely because I've always been good at finding excuses for myself). I also played a game of "Settlers of Catan", which is interesting, but not quite enough that I need to rush out and buy it.

The afternoon module was a great deal of fun - children playing monster whacker. The very downscaled capabilities of the child characters, and the local scale of the interactions made for a very enjoyable game. We teetered on the edge of disaster at the end, but came through OK to get the happy ending, so that was good. The module did run very late, though, and e only finished around 20:00.

The evening involved a bit more vampire. Notably, there was a game involving Marc, playing Tzimisce, bleeding one of the new players, playing his Brujah deck, bleeding Dave, playing my !Nos combat deck bleeding me, playing Tremere. Giving Dave my !Nos deck turned out to be a bad idea, as the Tremere combat didn't come up, and I got pretty much cremated by my own deck, and Dave went on to oust Marc (after Marc had ousted his prey), which is one of those situations which leads to rather conflicting emotions.

Since it had now become very late, I opted to sleep over in Rondebosch rather than trying to drive back home and then mke it in for the tournament.

Dragonfire 2009 I (Fri evening & Sat)

2009-08-12T00:00:00.000+02:00

(being the first of a somewhat fuzzy and rather short series of posts about this year's Dragonfire)

Friday evening

Friday evening was the start of the con, and involved at least one newbie VTES game (with the usual advice), and a couple of social games.

I got to try my Gangrel aggro-poke deck, which worked surprisingly well - holding off Garrick's Assamite swarm and (admittedly slowly) pushing through both Kevin and Marc. I should add a couple of Amaranths to exploit Ariadne's text, and the deck could use a bit more ousting oomph (although it was hampered by Marc playing a Fame early).

I gave the Ventrue vote deck another run - it did reasonably well, ousting two decks (including Garrick, playing Marc's Ventrue bleed deck), before running out of S:CE at a bad time and folding to Marc's combat deck.

Saturday

Saturday, I played in both modules, and some vampire in the evening.

The first module was quite a lot of fun - Werewolves in Iran with orcs, with an enjoyable group to play with. My character got to set the big bad on fire, which is always fun.

The second module was also quite fun, although the group I was playing with was a bit less focused, and didn't quite gel. The ending was also a bit of a downer, despite effectively "winning" the module, but, still, overall good fun.

After the second module, I attempted to go down to Kauai on Main Road, only to hit the "returning from the rugby" traffic, which meant crossing Main Road became exceedingly difficult, so I opted for Steers.

I returned to watch and actual help and hinder Kevin's running of a newbie tournament, also spending some time watching an attempt to explain and play the "A game of Thrones" board game, which was complicated by various of the players being distracted by helping prepare people for the evening's LARP.

At around 23:30'ish or so, Kevin, Marc and I finally started a 3 player game. Kevin was playing A modified Toreador starter, me playing my Ventrue deck and Marc playing a Brujah combat deck. I had a fast start (Hardesadt out on turn 2), but, due to Kevin having the vampire who can burn a blood to cancel votes from a not acting minion, and Marc getting out his Inner Circle member, and two minions with intercept when I was attempting political actions, I never got the vote momentum I needed. Marc went backwards to eventually run me out of S:CE, and then whittled Kevin out before finishing me off. However, the game stayed quite balanced for quite some time, and eventually only folded near 2 am.

Vignettes from the road trip

2009-07-21T23:08:00.000+02:00

So, with Hodgestar and Confluence, I did the overly complex road trip to the Festival and ICON.

Various notes:

Agreeing to the trip isn't helping my "I'm not that crazy" case.
Remembering to wait for all the passengers to get into the car before driving off is a good thing - I should do it more often.
5 shows a day is about my limit
Considering I saw 21 shows, there were very few duds.
Getting laundry done in Grahamstown sounded a lot simpler before we tried it.
We were unduly picked on by the various bicycle races and related traffic
There are far too many heavy vehicles on our roads
The roadworks don't help the "driving in Gauteng" experience in any way whatsoever
The lack of correspondence between the warning signs and the actual state of the road may have contributed to this.
LARP combat sucks when trying to do a sneak attack
Explaining VTES is hard enough without loud background noise
Email piles up surprisingly fast when I'm not checking it regularly

photos from the trip here.

Notes from the VTES tournament (Hallowed Tomes)

2009-05-19T19:49:00.000+02:00

On Saturday, we held another vampire tournament at Tokai Library. A good turnout of 10 playes, with a few new faces, but none of the Fishhoek crowd, which, given that the Tokai tournaments were originally arranged as being easier for them to attend, is something I find somewhat annoying. I decided to give my Anarch Vote deck another tournament run.

In the first round I started, bleeding (new player who's name I forget) (Tremere antitribu) bleeding Dan (Osebo wall) bleeding Phillip (Tszicme) bleeding Andrew (Old school Toreador guns with bleed). The game took a long time to reach the endgame - Dan spent most of his time blocking bleeds, and kept having his minions dumped into torpor from aggravated Thaumaturgy. Phillip gradually whittled down Andrew a bit via an Army of Rats and a few bleeds, while I took a couple of heavy bleeds from Andrew while fishing for my Fee Stakes and votes, I was able to survive thanks to the bleed reduction of 'Detect Authority'. Eventually, I was in a position to call a Revolutionary Council and force it through, which allowed me to untap a minion and oust my prey with an Undue Influence bleed, but I then hit a run of Fee Stakes without stealth, and was forced to waste a couple of turns trying to cycle through to more useful cards - in the process, I had a minion Fame'd and knocked into torpor, which hurt badly. I did eventually draw a Revolutionary Council and was able to run Dan down to one pool (after he paid for the Fame), but was unable to push the final lunge through and was ousted by Andrew a few minutes before the game timed out.

In the second game, Simon (Nergal agg damage & bleed) was bleeding me bleeding James (old school Brujah with guns) bleeding Rudy (Guiallame hand-size madness Giovanni) bledding the !Tremere. I had a unfortunate crypt draw, without a single Anarch Convert, and erred badly by not paying one to see one early. I did get a Fee Stake down, by my single Baron promptly got a Haven Uncovered slapped on him by James, and was repeatedly rushed, which left me never able to call the vote. I was thus left fairly easy prey to Simon, who ousted me with an unblockable Force of Will bleed in due course. Rudy was able to whittle through the !Tremere, who were unable to deal with the potence combat from the Giovanni. James was at this point rather well setup, and was able to hold off the Nergal deck fairly efficiently, which allowed Rudy to push through Simon, but Rudy then ran into problems with the Celerity combat of the Brujah, and with the Brujah having minion superiority, was unable to stop James.

I didn't make the final (that annoying 1 pool of Dan's that I couldn't get through), but I did pop across to play a couple of social rounds on Monday, when the final was held. The Final saw James bleeding Andrew bleeding Richard (weenie Obf & Dom, and the highest seeded player) bleeding Dan bleeding Rudy. Richard was able to sweep the final table, which was a surprise, as I had expected more ganging up of the table against the weenie hordes.

I managed three games over the course of the evening - 2 3 player games and 1 4 player game. In the first game, I tried the anarch vote deck again, bleeding Simon's tweaked Nergal deck, bleeding Phillip (Gangrel animalism). I struggled initially, as it was a while before I pulled a Thaumaturgy master, but once I had a Crimethinc down, and 4 Anarchs out, I was ale to close out the table fairly quickly, given that I had the vote lock.

In the second game, I played my modified !Nos combat deck (since I finally have enough Immortal Grapples to not need the fragile Celerity sideline). I was bleeding James (Assamite Quietus) bleeding Simon's Nergal deck. Given that I seemed to draw rather more Master cards than I expected, and the amount of Aggravated damage on the table, it worked surprisingly well - I was able to get a Tension in the ranks and a Fame on a small minion of James' early, and as able to successfully push the minion into torpor, and was able to burn another of James'' minions, I did find my minions bouncing in and out of torpor a bit, but fortunately Simon didn't pull the base Nergal, and wasn't able to generate the really big bleeds, so I could survive long enough to oust James. I then drew into another Fame and was able to oust Simon quickly as well as a result.

The last game saw me (playing my Anarch bruise and bleed deck) bleeding James (Brujah deck) bleeding Simon (Kiasyd anarchs) bleeding Richard (playing Simon's Nergal deck). The Anarch bruise and bleed deck is still not right - I spent far to much of the game with bleed modifiers in my hand that I couldn't afford to use and no combat cards. I was also a bit overly cautious as a result, and thus didn't get the forward momentum I needed. Some of the changes worked - adding the Baseball bats made the combat more effective when I had it, and The Anarch Free Press was useful intercept. Richard had a good start, and was able to get Nergal merged early, and, with a couple of vessels to pay for Nergal's infernal cost, was able to work through me. Simon was able to put a fair amount of pressure on Richard though (partly aided by the Club Illusions I put down), so he never got away. This allowed James to get setup, and, after Richard had ousted me, Simon was unable to pull off a lunge on Richard (which he may have been able to make had he done things in a slightly different order), and left himself open to James, who proceeded to clean up the table.

The Anarch vote deck is in pretty good shape now - I think the crypt changes help. Having 4 Anarchs and a couple of Crimethinc's down is a solid position, and being able to do 8 pool damage in a single turn is a solid ousting strategy. I need to fit in a couple of copies of the Barrens or something to help address the card flow problems, but the deck is capable of gaining VP's on a fairly regular basis. The setup requirements do mean the deck is always going to be fragile, but it's fun when it comes off.

The modified !Nos deck shows promise. I need to look at the card balance a bit, and I'm not sure if the Street Cred angle is effective enough to be worth keeping, but it's first showing was quite reasonable. The Anarch bruise and bleed deck needs more thought. I still nowhere close to the balance I need for the deck to work, and the blood management isn't working either, which makes several cards too expensive to play. I'll fiddle further and see what happens.

Code Mainentance

2009-05-06T00:26:00.000+02:00

One of the problems with an under-resourced development environment, such as the one I'm involved in at iTL, is the lack of decent code review. Consequently, the code base ends up with dirty little secrets, like the routines to automatically identify the calibration cube, a awkwardly tangled implementation of what still is actually quite a good idea. It's a chunk of code I'm both perversely proud of, and terrified someone else will look at and thus call me out as a total fraud.

Despite this, it actually works pretty well almost all the time, which is unfortunately an "almost" too many, so today was spent debugging this dirty little secret, which is never that much fun. It's easier than it may sound, though. Most programmers will have had the experience of looking at old code and thinking "How could this possibly ever work?", and most programmers will also have experienced looking at bits of old code and realizing "Oh, that actually quite a nifty trick". For me, reading this code tends to be a sequence of a's followed by b's followed by a's and so on. When the sequence doesn't end at b, it's probably a bug. The retroactive ego-boosting and deflating does make it a slightly bizarre experience, though, and not one I'm keen to repeat anytime soon.

The April 2009 VTES Tournament

2009-04-29T20:12:00.004+02:00

The tournament was held at the new Outer Limits shop. It's a considerable improvement on the old 5th floor store, feeling a lot more spacious and less pokey. The access control system to get into the building is a little fiddly at times, but no less annoying than the sign-in requirement at the Strand Towers.

Due to only 6 players showing up, we decided to go for the 3 rounds of 4 player games, with two players sitting out each round. Since we also wanted to fit the final in, I opted to play the Settite Stealth Bleed deck, as being the most forward focused of those I'd brought.

Round 1 saw Richard (weenie Obf), bleeding Kevin (!Tor Bleed & Vote), bleeding Brendan (Ventrue Bleed & Vote) bleeding me (Richard starting). I had a less than ideal start, with Richard Archon'ing my first bleed, a loss that did slow me down rather more than I would have liked. Brendan was able to easily secure the vote lock, and Kevin wasn't able to generate enough bounce or intercept to reliably trouble Richard, who rapidly built up a scary swarm, and duly ousted Kevin. I was able to put some pressure on Richard, but was losing pool too fast to Brendan's votes, so my situation looked dire. A combination of a misjudgment on Brendan's part, which allowed me to survive bringing out an extra minion (although it did leave me on 1 pool) and place a spying mission on Richard, a fortunate Pentex from Richard on Hardestaadt, combined with a well-timed Ecstasy on my part to reduce a ousting bleed from Brendan that he was unable to boost suddenly left me with an opportunity to oust Richard, which I duly took. With Brendan then drawing a couple of votes, though, my doom was sealed in the next turn.

I sat out the second round, which saw Marc (Akunanse bleed & vote) bleeding Richard bleeding Simon (!Salubri combat) bleeding Kevin (Marc starting). Since I did a lunch run and was seduced by the shinies on display, I didn't pay close attention to the game. Simon suffered horribly from being the only pure combat deck in play, and never really got forward momentum. Richard ended up bearing the brunt of Simon's combat, which allowed Marc to oust both Richard and Simon, but Marc was ousted by Kevin.

In the 3rd game, Simon was bleeding me, bleeding Marc, bleeding Brendan. I had a funny crypt draw, never seeing a minion with OBF, and starting with 2 duplicates in my opening draw, which made things a bit more awkward than I would have liked. I also didn't run into many eternal masks in the first half of my deck, which also made things a bit tricky. I did get lucky in drawing the two Presence masters really early, which allowed me to protect the two minions without pre, which made it much harder for Simon to attack me. I was forced to juggle things a fair bit, with a Fame'd minion hanging around on 1 blood for much of the game, but gradually got setup with the hunting ground and Opium Den, and eventually got up to 4 minions out, although I did have a Waters of Duat burnt by Marc in combat. The game see-sawed until Simon caught Brendan without S:CE and was able to put a vampire in torpor, who was subsequently diablirised by Marc, providing Marc with the minion superiority he needed to oust Brendan. I was now setup, and drawing into my stealth cards, I was able to run through Marc in fairly short order, and then my minion superiority and available stealth allowed me to overwhelm Simon fairly quickly.

This meant I was the top seed in the final. I chose to sit as Kevin's predator, which, in retrospect, given that he was the most capable of generating intercept, was probably an error. The final table was me bleeding Kevin bleeding Brendan bleeding Richard bleeding Marc (I started). Being immediately upstream of the two decks with bounce was probably foolish as well, but I was worried about my defense against bleeds being bounced onto me, and didn't want to be Richard's prey. My crypt draw was on the expensive side for the deck, and I should have paid to see 1 more, as I only got three minions out. Consequently, the deck ran a little slow, and, although I did eventually oust Kevin, Brendan had ousted Richard by that stage (helped by bouncing some bleeds, including one of mine that Kevin had already bounced), and Brendan was well setup and had farmed back enough pool to be out of range. I had been whittled done most effectively by Marc, but Marc had been whittled down by Richard, and then by Brendan, so it was a race to see who would be ousted first. Brendan decided to resolve the matters by voting us both out in a single turn, and thus leaving both Marc and I with a single VP to his 3.

We manage 3 rounds and a final in under 6 hours, which is quite good going. The predominance of bleed decks on the table contributed to this though.

Overall, I had fun, and the Settite deck secured 5 VP's on the day, and generally functioned quite well, even when faced with odd crypt draws. There are a couple of crypt choices I'd like to adjust, and I should probably replace the Dream Worlds with Social Charms, for the occasional farm option, but the deck's pretty solid.

The benefits of expressivity

2009-03-27T21:59:00.005+02:00

This is the result of a chain of thought kicked off by reading "The fallacy of high level languages".

While I agree with many points made, it did start me thinking about how the debate about high and low level language is framed almost entirely in terms of the main developers. This is probably since most people in the debate are heavily involved in commercial software development. One of the great strengths of FLOSS development is the existence of the casual contributor, the person who submits a fix to an bug they find personally annoying or such. They often are more interested in using the program than developing it, but they have the skills to make the occasional contribution.

Consequently, ease of contribution is a factor that is worth considering, and, based on my personal experience, the easier it is to get up to speed on the code around the problem, the more likely I am to write and submit a patch. Expressive, compact code is easier for me to get my head around, and thus easier for me to contribute to.

Of course, expressive code is only partly function of language choice, often being more a matter of developer discipline (nothing can save one from writing crap code, after all).

Compactness is just as important though. When dealing with a new codebase, the less I have to keep in my head in trying to follow the logic flow of the path of interest, the better. Here, language and library choices are important, and this is where high level languages can really shine.

Indeed, pretty much all of the arguments for the maintainability of code written in a high level language are much more relevant for casual contributers, who can't fall back on the sort of overview somebody who's worked extensively with the code base will have, than it is for the major developers.

Today's social (16 Mar 2009)

2009-03-17T00:28:00.003+02:00

Today's social featured arguablely the longest 4 player game I've ever been involved in. Phillip (playing old-school Ventrue Vote & Bleed, and starting) was bleeding Val (Guhuri Restricted Vitae & some vote) bleeding me (new school Ventrue vote and vote) bleeding Kevin (!Toreador sneak bleed).

The game started fairly slowly, since we were all bringing out fairly large minions. With all the Zillah's Valleys and one of the Information Highways in the bottom 10 cards, and not drawing many masters, I was slower to get going than I hoped. I was always going to be in trouble as I only drew 2 masters in the first 3rd of my deck, so later one I was jamming rather horribly on masters. I also erred in the balance of vote cards, and didn't have enough aggrssive votes to really pressurise Kevin when I needed to, and, with the number of big vampires around, calling Honour the Elders ended up helping the table fairly equally. Kevin, relying on the power bleed from the Palle Grande was able to oust Phillip, although Phillip did come close to ousting Val a couple of times, but Val's farming was just good enough to hold him off. I did eventually oust Kevin, after much to-ing and fro-ing, but eventually minion superiority meant Val was able to end oust me (Val had 8 vampires to my 6). Considering that my cheapest two minions were 6 and 7 caps, and Val vampires ranging from 4 up to 11 (Eze) says a lot of how the farming went through the course of the game.

The game had several unusual events - I had to yield two titles due to contests, and had to burn my protected resources to eventually bleed Kevin out, which was extremely annoying. Both Kevin and I decked ourselves, and, when Val ousted me, he was down to only a couple of cards left in his library.

The Ventrue deck does show promise (with the Ventrue headquarters and Gustav, I could towards the end generate 17 votes without modifers, despite the yielded titles), but I do need to add a few more aggressive votes, and work on the master balance a bit. Fitting in a couple of vessels will a) provide an additional pool gain option, and the trifle will also be useful to help cycle through the masters a bit faster.

After the marathon, Kevin left, and we played a three player with the intention of playing fast. I (Serpentis bleed deck, mildly tweaked) was bleeding Phillip (Brujah concept deck) bleeding Val (Lasombra combat & bleed), with Phillip starting. I got off to a fast start, with an early hunting ground and a path not to long thereafter, and, since the bleed deck is fast, was able to sweep the table in less than 30 minutes. The combination of the path & the eternal mask is truly scary. This deck will suffer against bounce, and can be run out of S:CE, it's probably the best of my attempts at a stealth bleed deck.

An interesting, and rather educational evening.

Notes from the VTES tournament

2009-03-11T22:15:00.003+02:00

So, Sunday was the most recent VTES tournament, being held at the Tokai Library. Although I arrived somewhat late (due to a misjudgement with the traffic caused by the Argus), I was still in time to play, which was good from a "note wasting the trip" perspective. Regrettably (presumably because of the Argus clash), we didn't attract a larger representation from the Fishhoek crowd, but we still had 10 players, and Phillip judging.

In the tournament, I played the Anarch Vote deck. It successfully got to the final table, which is a much better showing than the previous tournament I played it, though it remains fragile due to it's many moving parts.

The tournament was for me somewhat frustrating, as the deck didn't flow as nicely as it had at Monday's social. The crypt probably needs tweaking. The original idea of bringing out a huge swarm of minions out and RC'ing for double digits is proving to hard to pull off - 4 minions out looks much more reasonable, and I frequently suffered from not having both PRE and OBF available.

So in the first round, we managed to screw up and get the seating wrong from the announced order, and ended up with Marc (Ventrue antribu dominate bleed) bleeding Brendan (Ahrimane precense bleed & wall) bleeding Nick (Lasombra dominate bleed and vote) bleeding me (anarch Revolutionary Council) bleeding Kevin (Toreador antitribu stealth presence bleed). I didn't really get going, but was able to whittle away at Kevin's pool with a few bleeds, and did get one Revolutionary Council off. I made a tactical error in using a Detect Authority in a failed attempt to intercept a vote, rather than holding it for the bleed reduction, which may have saved me long enough to oust Kevin. Scariest event on the table was Marc bleeding Brendan for 13 in one turn, but he ultimately wasn't able to push through fast enough.

In the second round, Simon (Malkavain combat) was bleeding Kevin, bleeding me, bleeding James (Ventrue dominate bleed) bleeding Nick. For most of the game, I had too few votes available to go forward. Between Nick, James and Kevin, there where 7 votes from titles on the table, and James had the Ventrue headquarters, and I only got two Fee Stakes into play, one of which got burnt by a vote.

However, after a turn when James called a Parity Shift, and had thus tapped his Ventrue Headquarters, I was able to combine a inferior bewitching and a rant to force a revolutionary council through and oust him. Being forced to use Seren Sukardi's pre did mean I could never Voter Cap, so my farming strategy, such as it is, failed completely, and I was quickly ousted by Kevin.

Simon's deck was never able to really get around Kevin's combat defense, although, with 3 hunting grounds in play, and a Pulse, Santaleous's standing 6 bleed did generate a lot of blocks. There was an amusing turn, after both James and I were ousted, when Sanelous's bleed was bounced back and forth between Kevin and Nick. Eventually, Kevin was able to go through both Nick and Simon.

The final saw Nick bleeding me bleeding Richard (Akunase wall'ish deck) bleeding Andrew (Ishtarri bleed) bleeding Kevin. This round went rather badly for me. Where I'd previously suffered from not drawing Fee Stakes, in this round, I almost only drew Fee Stakes and wasn't even close to drawing a single vote modifier. Given that Nick got a regent down on the table, as well as another title, I was never in a position to even attempt a vote. Richard also went backwards early in the game, which significantly slowed me down as well. Nick was able to oust me fairly quickly, and Andrew ousted Kevin fairly soon thereafter. When I left, Andrew had also ousted Nick, and with minion superiority, was looking likely to oust Richard, which eventually happened.

In between the first two tournament rounds, I was also able to get 2 social games in.

The first, when I tried the Anarch deck, didn't go well, and Phillip's experimental trophy deck was able to red-list and then burn my single baron, which didn't help me. James's Assamite bleed-farm deck worked efficiently and swept fairly quickly.

In the next game, I played my Serpentis bleed deck, bleeding Phillip's trophy deck, bleeding James's Assamites, bleeding Marc's Liabon presence bleed deck. I was able to work through Phillip quite quickly, although I did end up burning through most of my strike combat ends card after he made one of my minions redlist. James was able to get fairly setup, and bled Marc for 8 in one turn after I'd ousted Phillip. I got lucky, and drew a Path of the Typhon just in time for it to allow me to afford two "Truth of a Thousand Lies"s, allowing me to oust James. Thereafter, I was able to push through Marc, although it was tight as I had very little blood left on my minions, and Marc was bleeding me fairly quickly as well.

After being ousted in the final, I played one more social, trying the latest version of the Mass Reality deck. I bled Simon's Malk combat, bleeding Phillips Aabbt deck, bleeding James's Ventrue deck. The deck performed incredibly poorly. Poor card draws contributed. I didn't draw a Mass Reality at all, and given that there are only a handful of guns in the deck, having 3 .44 Magnums in my hand after two turns was rather annoying. It's hard to say what parts of the deck actually work as a result, and I'll have to try it again to see what happens.

Still, the day was good fun, and I got quite a lot of vampire in, and the Anarch deck got to a final, despite the difficulties it had on the day, so I'm fairly happy with the day. The library is a very pleasant venue (and has a complimentary cat), and, when the event doesn't clash with the Argus, not that hard to get to, so I'm certainly in favour of holding more events there. I'm less of a fan of playing on the Sunday, though.

Today's social

2009-03-02T23:57:00.003+02:00

With the benefit of sharing the table with James in all the games, despite the cut-off being moved to 11, I managed to get in 4 and bit games in between arriving at just past 7 and the deadline, which is pretty good going. In addition, I managed to sweep all 4 games that completed, although, in a least a couple of the games, a more aggressive predator would have probably ousted me.

I played two and a bit games with the modified anarch vote deck. It still feels like it has too many moving parts, but the dropping the Veiled Sight's for Forgotten Labyrinth's and some Lost in Crowds makes a big difference to the deck. The Groundfighting are also a useful option, since it an additional option in combat, and remembering that one can Crimethinc in the middle of a vote is very useful for the Revolutionary Council. A serious vote deck will still lock this deck down, and a fast stealth bleed deck will almost surely toast it, and a bad library draw will screw me over, but that's true of many decks. Still, it is quite fun when I manage to pull off the RC.

I also played two games with the Settite Serpentis bleed deck. The addition of the Path's certainly helps that deck. Being able to bleed for 4 at +1 stealth for 1 blood with inferior Serpentis is pretty scary, and the small minions means the deck can move forward fairly quickly. The lack of PRE is a bit of a problem for the S:CE, but the deck is fairly effecient. A good POT combat deck will toast it (I was lucky in one game that Mark didn't draw any of his Immortal Grapples), and bleed bounce will also hurt the deck, but it's been surprisingly effective so far.

Tuesday's Social

2009-02-18T23:28:00.008+02:00

(YAVP)

I managed to get two games in (1 4 player, 1 3 player) (Kevin not arriving meant it took a while before we could get a second table going).

In the first game, Gerhard (Blooded Sand) (playing a Tariq superstar deck), was bleeding me (Ahrimane), bleeding Phillip (Harbringers of Skulls) bleeding Val (Mid-cap Gangrel Protean), with Val starting.

I suffered from having a rather weird combat draw throughout (only 1 Carrion Crows, for example), and a somewhat unfortunate crypt draw (all 3 the non-Ahrimane vampires came up) and twice had minions toporised and then diablerised, which was rather sucky. I was able to pressure Phillip fairly well early on, but never got close to ousting him. Val's deck was too strong for both Gehard's and my decks. I didn't stick around to watch the end game. With a few different draws, I might have been able to survive better, but so the game goes sometimes.

In the second game, I tried the mid-cap Serpentis bleed deck. Val (weenie guns) was bleeding Gehard (Tariq) bleeding me, with me starting. I had a great start, being bring out the two-cap, and play the hunting ground early. This allowed me to pay for the Eternal Masks, and, although Val was able to bring out several minions quickly, the time taken to find his intercept locations meant I could bleed unhindered at the start. Gehard's deck was unable to resist the weenie swarm, and he conceded fairly early. Val helped my cause by paying for several guns, and I was never short of S:CE, so the combat was never an issue. There was a turn where things looked like they might be a little tight, as I went down to 6 pool, and was facing six minions, and some farm, but, with a Catatonic Fear at superior to knock a minion into torpor, and a vessel to destroy one of Val's blood dolls meant I was able to push through.

The Settite deck shows some promise, but the card balance needs work. I ideally also need to find room for the Path's as well, as being able to bleed for 2 at +1 stealth with one card at no cost will be useful, and it will make the Truth of a Thousand Lies a much more attractive option to play.

DVCS musings

2009-02-18T23:28:00.004+02:00

Every so often, there are a spate of blog posts ragging on git. Probably because of who wrote it, and it's importance to the kernel, negative criticism of git tends to get rather widely broadcast, and attracts the same sort of stupid fanboy'ish flamewars that plague many bits of the free software ecosystem, and there always seems to be a "my DVCS is better than yours" flamewar just waiting in the wings to really get the discussion going.

To me, much of the discussion feels very much like the old emacs vs vi flamewars, before they became parodies of themselves. Given the trend towards easy interoperability, with tools such as git-svn, the bzr svn plugin, the various git fastimport helpers, and so forth, increasingly, the choice of (D)VCS is as independent of the other people in the project as the choice of editor. In a few years, hopefully people will actually realise this, and the whole debate will calm down. At which point, we can all return to arguing about the important things, like editors.

Yet more Vampire

2009-01-27T00:43:00.003+02:00

(a further post in the "blog as a dump of deck notes" series)

So, at the social today, A had yet another stab at the Revolutionary Council Anarchs deck I'm trying to get to work. It's morphed a fair bit since the last attempts - I totally reworked the crypt, relying on Anarch Converts rather than trying to make Jack Drake work, which makes the crypt cheaper, although I still think the balance is a bit off. The existance of Herbert Westin, another 5-cap with OBF & PRE helps, but I'm still not completely happy with the crypt. I dropped the No Confidences, as just being to corner case, and replaced Anarch Manifesto's with Crypt Son's, since equiping them doesn't actually require an anarch, so can't be used to play Crimethinc. I'm relying on a smattering of tha in the crypt, and a bunch of discipline masters to boost my vampires.

In the first game, I was bleeding Andrew (playing old-school Toreador with some guns), bleeding Simon (Tremere) bleeding Richard (Guruhi PRE bleed) bleeding Marc (!Ventrue Wall/Bleed), with me starting. While I had a reasonable crypt draw (both Rennet and Herbert in the opening crypt), I had a sufficiently strange library draw that's it hard to say anything about the deck from it. I didn't draw a single Revolutionary Council, Effective Maangement or stealth card, and only drew 1 Crimethinc, immediately before I was ousted. Since I went through about 1/3 of my deck, that's fairly improbable (odds of around 1 in 1000, according to Sutekh (since I wrote that bit of the code, I'm reasonbly certain the maths is correct here)). Needless to say, the experience ended up being pretty annoying, and being hit by the occasionaly dominate bleed meant I was osuted without being able to put much pressure on Andrew. At this point, I went in search of some food, so I'm a bit hazy on the details of the rest of game, but, as I recall, Andrew having gradually built up, and, with Masika out to act as a repeat blocker, was able to defend himself well while bring out lots of small minions to whittle down Simon, with the occasional big presence bleed. Richard got several large bleeds through on Marc, but was unable to really get his pool farm going, due to having two Vessels Sudden'ed, which also stopped him burning Marc's blood dolls. Consequently, he was unable to survive a lunge by Simon, who soon fell to Andrew. Marc held on for a bit, but ultimately Andrew's minion superiority simply overwhelmed him.

In the second game, Andrew, playing a Ravnos deck (and starting) was bleeding Richard (Guhuri) bleeding me (Anarch Revolutionary Council) bleeding Marc (Nosferatu Rush combat) bleeding Simon (!Salburi). I had a much better library draw, and actually got some use out of the Poachers Hunting ground (until Andrew burnt Richard's hunting ground). I also managed to get three Revolutionary Councils off, although I had to direct 1 backwards to avoid being blocked. I was able to pressurise Marc quite successfully, but ultimately struggled to generate enough stealth. There were a couple of occasions where I was possibly 1 stealth card away from having the oust, but never quite drew the cards I needed. Having to juggle minions in and out of torpor because of Dragonbound being on the table also complicated things for me. I ultimately was ousted by Richard. Simon was able to oust Andrew via Fame, while Richard managed to strange day a bleed past Marc's 3-Raven spy Cock robin to oust him. Simon though, was eventually able to knock Richards minions down, diablerising Iniko and, had we not called the game at the point, would have probably been able to bleed through (although arguably the game was long past the timeout stage).

The major problem was the lack of stealth - I amybe need to rework the crypt a bit more so there is more OBF available, and run more different stealth cards - having the option of dropping the occasional Lost would make getting the votes to the table more likely. The problem is finding the space, though, as I need to have a number of slots for the Fee Stakes, I can;t reduce the vote push, since the anarch titlesjust aren't enough, and the defence package is already probably too weak. It needs more work, but it's much closer to a working deck idea than in the past, I feel.

Gtk+ lessons

2009-01-14T22:23:00.003+02:00

I learnt of a couple of interesting gtk+ quirks over the last couple of days while hacking on Sutekh. Both rather surprised me, so are thus worth noting for future reference.

The first quirk is something I still don't fully understand. For various reasons[1] Sutekh uses strings to display the numbers with markup in the interface. I recently added a tweak so that these would sort numerically, rather than lexically. Since this involves stripping off the markup and converting to an integer, the sort is not lightning fast, but still acceptable. Unfortunately, adding the tweak the obvious way doubled the length of time to run the tests on the model, despite the model being unsorted by default. I've been unable to track down why this affects the tests so badly, since we shouldn't be using that code path at all. Fortunately, a simple lazy work-around exists, which is to tweak the sorting in a slightly less obvious way, and avoid it impacting the test suit.

The second quirk is something I do now understand, although the behaviour did surprise me. Sutekh is capable of generating very large gtk+ models (using "show all cards, show expansions + card sets" and editable options, it's easy to end up with a gtk.TreeStore containing more than 100000 entries). Loading these was unacceptably slow, with most of the time spent adding rows to the model, despite using the usual recommended tricks of disabling notifications and such while adding the rows.

It turns out that the underlying data structure for the gtk.TreeStore is glib's n-ary tree, g_node.
g_node, however, represents each list of children as a singly linked list from the parent. Consequently, appends into long lists are slow, since you have to walk to the end of the list. There's the obvious work-around, which is to insert thing in reverse using prepend, and it is indeed significantly faster, but you'd think this would be mentioned prominently in the docs, rather than requiring one to grub around in the glib code.

[1] i.e. We haven't got around to fixing this the right way yet.

What I've done on my Xmas Holiday

2008-12-22T18:04:00.003+02:00

As has been mentioned several times, I tend to spend a lot of time hacking on Sutekh, the VtES card manager.

I am, however, also somewhat addicted to the (now defunct) Dune CCG, so some time ago, I vaguely started working on a fork of Sutekh to deal with Dune's cards.

And, with minimal cheating [1], I now present the first evidence of Thufir's evolution to non-vapourware status [2]:

[1] It doesn't parse unmodified html files yet - I'm leaning towards just distributing the tweaked files as a better choice fixing the parser to handle the rather horrible html.

[2] git repo

PRASA 2008

2008-12-02T23:38:00.005+02:00

So, this year PRASA was in Cape Town, and, riding on the work of my loyal minion (i.e. my M. student), I was once represented. Notes from this year:

I should never, ever, ever get a job which involves commuting in on the N2 - taking around 90 minutes to get from my flat to the conference venue each morning was not a good way to start the day.
I should be more forceful when chairing sessions - I left the long talk to go on embarrassingly long.
Ideally, I should duck out of chairing sessions more often. It's easier to catnap in the back during the boring bits that way.
Two bottles of wine per table (1 white, 1 red) just doesn't cut it for the conference dinner
I'm very glad I wasn't driving after the conference dinner (see previous point).
Ordering off the menu a week in advance didn't work well, and hopefully that won't be repeated for some time.
I came away with fewer things that struck me as really interesting this time - I think the first point played a role in that, though.
The meeting footage database does sound like a fun dataset to have on hand. I'll hopefully remember to follow up on that.

Sutekh 0.6.0 released

2008-12-02T22:40:00.005+02:00

After far too long, we finally got the current trunk to a state where we were happy to release. Unlike the previous stable releases, we decided that this one was worth a bigger splash, and announced it on the VTES newsgroup.

As such releases go, that seems to have been a success, and I've spent the last couple of days obsessively watching the sourceforge downloads counter tick up.

The increasing number of downloads, however, has not been accompanying by any comparable flood of queries or requests. As a measure of validation that people are using out work, this leaves a fair bit to be desired. Typical, really. Users are never around when you want them, and often there to complain when you don't.

Development style

2008-11-16T22:54:00.004+02:00

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to make a concerted effort to fill in some of Sutekh's documentation, since we are planning to release fairly soon.

As a result, Sutekh now displays icons in the main tree view, and has a plugin for importing card sets from zip files.

I'm prone to this development pattern, and, given the amount of feature creep you see in modern software, I suspect that it's actually quite common.

(There has also been progress on the documentation, though, and the icons feature is really nifty)

comics

2008-11-07T22:13:00.003+02:00

Because they both throughly amused me today, and I have not punted either here previously:

Freefall.

Irregular webcomic. (warning, combine irregular webcomic and tvtropes at your own risk)

Both are well worth following.

Identity

2008-11-02T19:58:00.013+02:00

Emotional stress is, amongst many other things, quite educational. For me, it's quite good at stripping away some of the layers of deception (self and otherwise) I engage in to make my life more comfortable. The last few weeks have been rather good at forcing me to re-examine who I am, and, in particular, I've been forced to confront the extent to which I am extremely coy about my Christianity [1].

There are various reasons for this. In part, I am an extremely private individual. I'm REALLY not comfortable with personal information leaking across my boundaries (and something as fundamental as my beliefs counts as pretty darn personal). In addition, I don't want to get drawn into the inevitably pointless debates about belief and religion - no-one ever got converted in either direction by rational debate.

There's an aspect of not wanting to be identified with the extremes of Christianity [2], and, let's face it, the crackpot extremes are really screwy, really loud, and, based on the available evidence, annoyingly common.

Disappointingly, however, a very large portion is due to simple cowardice [3]. My reluctance to trust that other people will tolerate my beliefs is both uncomfortably revealing and more than somewhat sad. While I've generally avoided explicitly denying my faith, far too often, I've simply found it comfortably convenient to avoid committing to any particular position. I'm not sure when or why I became so defensive about my beliefs, but it's hardly one of my better character traits, and represents a rather significant failure to live up to my personal ideals.

Overall, a failing grade, but hopefully with potential to do better in future.

[1] I'm not going to go into the particulars of what exactly I believe here, but it's sufficiently based on the traditions of the Protestant Christian church that the label will do. Some more details are available here

[2] Let's not even start on the history of Western Christianity, which, with some extremely vigorous white-washing of the really bloody bits, may just make it to the point where it can be described as an utterly horrific failure for a religion with "love thy neighbour" as one of the central doctrines.

[3] For example, I've spent far too much time polishing this post instead of publishing it, for very little gain.

Reasons for loving FLOSS, #

2008-10-16T21:36:00.005+02:00

As I've mentioned before, I've been poking at a gmail backup application based off libgmail. It's been making slow progress, partly because I've been distracted by other things (such as Project Euler), but it hasn't completely stalled.

Recently, while fiddling with it, though, I hit a snag - libgmail would throw an exception when trying to access certain threads. After much head scratching, and testing, I eventually twigged that the problematic threads all included messages sent via google chat. A little focussed debugging showed that gmail creates pseudo mail messages for these when accessed via the API libgmail uses that don't quite match the messages libgmail expects. A little crude patch later, and the problem was fixed for me.

Thus armed, I submitted a bug to the Debian bug tracker, at around 19:00 local time. At 21:00, I received a acknowledgement from the maintainer, who had forwarded upstream, and at 21:10, I received a note that a patch had been applied upstream. Just over 2 hours from bug report to upstream fix strikes me as pretty good going.

Adding periodicity

2008-10-11T12:22:00.010+02:00

Still generating complete sequences, so linear growth is expected.

Found period 32, difference 126
time to generate 200000 numbers (U (2, 5)) is 0.37129
time to generate 2000000 numbers (U (2, 5)) is 3.66487
time to generate 20000000 numbers (U (2, 5)) is 38.38641
Found period 26, difference 126
time to generate 200000 numbers (U (2, 7)) is 0.36446
time to generate 2000000 numbers (U (2, 7)) is 4.06793
time to generate 20000000 numbers (U (2, 7)) is 44.24620
Found period 444, difference 1778
time to generate 200000 numbers (U (2, 9)) is 0.40023
time to generate 2000000 numbers (U (2, 9)) is 5.73586
time to generate 20000000 numbers (U (2, 9)) is 38.33744
Found period 1628, difference 6510
time to generate 200000 numbers (U (2, 11)) is 0.41977
time to generate 2000000 numbers (U (2, 11)) is 3.65161
time to generate 20000000 numbers (U (2, 11)) is 37.85133
Found period 5906, difference 23622
time to generate 200000 numbers (U (2, 13)) is 0.65191
time to generate 2000000 numbers (U (2, 13)) is 3.69802
time to generate 20000000 numbers (U (2, 13)) is 36.82868
Found period 80, difference 510
time to generate 200000 numbers (U (2, 15)) is 0.36584
time to generate 2000000 numbers (U (2, 15)) is 3.61351
time to generate 20000000 numbers (U (2, 15)) is 37.08529
time to generate 200000 numbers (U (2, 17)) is 4.52874
Found period 126960, difference 507842
time to generate 2000000 numbers (U (2, 17)) is 7.54118
time to generate 20000000 numbers (U (2, 17)) is 39.30235
time to generate 200000 numbers (U (2, 19)) is 4.54097
Found period 380882, difference 1523526
time to generate 2000000 numbers (U (2, 19)) is 35.07058
time to generate 20000000 numbers (U (2, 19)) is 36.92766
time to generate 200000 numbers (U (2, 21)) is 4.10050
time to generate 2000000 numbers (U (2, 21)) is 43.80197
Found period 2097152, difference 8388606
time to generate 20000000 numbers (U (2, 21)) is 456.09959

There's a bunch of improvements that can be made to the code - especially the periodicity check is not that efficient, and tends to repeat work which could be avoided. This bites for the U(2, 21) sequence, for which the direct approach presented earlier can calculate 20000000 elements in around 290 seconds, but the overall problem is now something that can be solved in "reasonable" time periods

Presented without further comment.

# time python ./solve_167.py
Answer = <answer redacted, but confirmed correct>

real 7m15.052s
user 6m41.213s
sys 0m15.365s

This may actually be feasible now

2008-10-10T23:31:00.007+02:00

With CTPUG 14 in the near future, and two failed attempts to tackle the Ulam seuqence problem from the previous meetings, I decided to give the problem some thought today.

So, from today's bright idea,:

$ python ./Ulam.py
time to generate 100 numbers (U (2, 5)) is 0.00426
time to generate 1000 numbers (U (2, 5)) is 0.03167
time to generate 10000 numbers (U (2, 5)) is 0.22796
time to generate 100000 numbers (U (2, 5)) is 1.44548
time to generate 1000000 numbers (U (2, 5)) is 14.71493
time to generate 100 numbers (U (2, 7)) is 0.00214
time to generate 1000 numbers (U (2, 7)) is 0.01558
time to generate 10000 numbers (U (2, 7)) is 0.15068
time to generate 100000 numbers (U (2, 7)) is 1.43910
time to generate 1000000 numbers (U (2, 7)) is 14.62419
time to generate 100 numbers (U (2, 9)) is 0.00245
time to generate 1000 numbers (U (2, 9)) is 0.01770
time to generate 10000 numbers (U (2, 9)) is 0.15190
time to generate 100000 numbers (U (2, 9)) is 1.45868
time to generate 1000000 numbers (U (2, 9)) is 14.93112
time to generate 100 numbers (U (2, 11)) is 0.00211
time to generate 1000 numbers (U (2, 11)) is 0.01602
time to generate 10000 numbers (U (2, 11)) is 0.15409
time to generate 100000 numbers (U (2, 11)) is 1.49055
time to generate 1000000 numbers (U (2, 11)) is 15.08445
...
time to generate 100 numbers (U (2, 21)) is 0.00486
time to generate 1000 numbers (U (2, 21)) is 0.03741
time to generate 10000 numbers (U (2, 21)) is 0.25073
time to generate 100000 numbers (U (2, 21)) is 1.78683
time to generate 1000000 numbers (U (2, 21)) is 17.9669

(Sequences U(2,5) and U(2,7) verified against the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (to 1000 elements))

The period detection and related footwork is still missing, but with a linear time growth, the problem looks much more doable.

So, the bright idea:

Looking at various articles, it's mentioned several times that Scherml and Speigel proved that "The sequence (2, v) for odd v >= 5 had precisely 2 even terms".
It can also be shown that the second even number occurs fairly early in the sequence.

Since we're dealing with sequences of that form, after the initial terms to reach the second even term, the candidate numbers we're dealing with must be odd. Generating the new candidates is thus trivial, and, with a little housekeeping, the list of candidates to consider can be kept short on every loop.

I'm not sure whether to feel chuffed about spotting this, or annoyed that I didn't spot this earlier.

Paging Captain "Ya know, that's really pretty obvious"

2008-10-08T19:34:00.004+02:00

Occasionally, it's useful to be able to write a one-line script (it's especially handy for pasting into IRC channels). Python's one-line capabilities are somewhat limited though. Statement lists (see the offical grammer) are always terminated by a newline. Thus, it's impossible to directly express the following snippet as a single line:

z=0
for x in range(5):
z += x
print z

Of course, there are a vast number of ways to achieve the same effect using the constructs that can be placed on a single line, and, other than showing off, there's usually very little need to coerce something to be a single line.

Today, however, it occurred to me that it's also possible to abuse eval for this (I don't know why this only struck me today), leading to:

python -c 'eval(compile("z=0\nfor x in range(5):\n z+=x\nprint z", "test", "exec"))'

While not exactly readable, I think combination of eval, compile + a one-liner is just too amusing to ignore. I'm sure that eventually, somewhere, I'll be able to convince myself that this trick will be just what I need.

The Side project, or a tale of paranoia and python

2008-09-13T10:50:00.001+02:00

This starts with a post to clug-tech (http://lists.clug.org.za/pipermail/clug-tech/2008-September/041635.html), titled "Make automatic backups of gmail account". This extracted several obvious solutions using getmail or fetchmail & gmail's IMAP service. There are obvious weaknesses with using IMAP to backup mail, though - exposing all the labels as folders is not desirable when you regularly use multiple labels per message, and any re-arrangement of mail into per month mailboxes or the like needs to be handled client side, which seems a waste given that gmail has a rather nice search engine as a major selling point.

Combine this with the following ingredients:

I'm prone to sporadic bursts of data paranoia
I've wanted to play with libgmail (a python interface to gmail) for ages
I don't have a backup of my gmail account's mail
work has involved lots of meetings & academic proposal writing, and not much of actual interest of late.

The result is Gparanoia, a simple little python program for pulling down mail. It's currently far from robust, and far from complete, but kinda-sorta-maybe does some of what I want some of the time, which seems the perfect point at which to turn it loose into the wild. It may very well eat your data, start a land war in Asia, or generally behave in an ill-mannered way at the dinner table, but it's available if people want to play with it.

Whale watching

2008-09-12T12:51:00.002+02:00

After the Monkey town visit, and related activities, Simon, Adrianna, Andrea & myself went through to Hermanus, with the aim of Whale watching on Sunday. Saturday evening involved a game of scrabble where I had a statistically rather unlikely run of low point letters (although I did have one nice score from adding FIG to Simon's OX), which I am blaming for my defeat (regardless of the evidence).

Sunday morning was spent more successfully whale watching (photos). Photographing whales is always a bit awkward - unless they actually do something, you tend have photographs that look like large logs floating in the water. Fortunately, the whales were quite active, and we even saw one jumping very close to the shore.

This was followed by lunch at "Coffee on the Rocks", a very pleasant little restaurant in De Kelders, with some really nice views of the bay.

Monkey Town

2008-09-12T12:18:00.005+02:00

Last Saturday, I joined the party visiting Monkey Town to celebrate belately celebrate Simon's birthday. Having often seen the sign on the way out on the N2, and considering how close it is too me, visiting Monkey Town has been long overdue.

The visit more than lived up to expectations, it's a very nicely laid out facility (photos). The central part is essentially one large cage, with covered passageways for the vistors, and then a large number of cages off to the side. Favourites include the mongoose lemurs, the ruffed lemurs and the cottontop tamarins. Photographing the monkeys is made complicated by the fences, and the bright sunny day meant that most pictures are against a bright background, so I have a number of "almost good" pictures. I should have used the flash more to compensate for the back lighting, which is something to remember next time (And there will be a next time).

Lunch was at the Harbour Island, which I hadn't previously been to. Pretty little venue, and worth baring in mind when the occasion arises. This was followed by losing time in the Gordon's Bay bookshop - I picked up a copy of some of Gilbert and Sullivan's operas, and a few other odds and ends,

Very true

2008-09-03T23:53:00.001+02:00

From a post by Valdis Kletnieks on the Full Disclosure list:

"Ever notice that most of the 'die in a fire' comments come from top-posters?"

Who knew?

2008-09-03T09:09:00.001+02:00

Turns out that spending an entire afternoon in a meeting that spun around in circles doesn't leave me in a good state of mind for reading a thesis draft.

Webcomic discovery

2008-08-26T19:39:00.003+02:00

Websnark has recently started writing about webcomics again, which introduced me to the most promising Skin Horse, Shaenon "Narbonic" Garrity's new strip, which I somehow managed to completely miss beforehand.

Dragonfire 2008 summary

2008-08-12T21:05:00.003+02:00

I wasn't involved in either of the LARPs, although I did help play-test one of then the week before, which was quite fun, if a little rough around the edges at the first running.

The Saturday was taken up by the Vampire tournament. I tried my Malkavian deck again, but in neitehr game was I able to secure a VP. The first game tone got set by the early appearance of Smiling Jack for my predator, which meant I wasted time going backwards, which the deck is not good at, and was unable to put pressure on my Imbued prey, and that allowed him to build up, and successfully sweep the table.

The second game, I had an Ahrimane wall deck as my prey - I almost successfully ousted him, but a cross-table direct intervention against one of my stealth cards meant that my lunge was blocked, which pretty much left me dead in the water.

In between, we did mange most of a social game, where I played my !Nossie deck, which did a lot better, successfully ousting my prey with a well timed Fame, and beating up my predator a great deal (who twice bled we for 5, so I had to, although it did leave him dead in the water for the weenie gun deck beyond to bleed through).

Sunday I played the two modules.

The first, a Call of Cthulu module, was quite fun, but, with the way the DM's dice where working, we had little chance of surviving the module (only 1 of the 3 groups plaing the module had players alive at the end, so we didn't feel too bad about that).

The second was a DnD 4th ed module. Our group ended up being the slowest by quite some distance - the unfamilarity with the rules did play a role in that, but largely it was they way the group approached the game and the roles. Still, good fun was had by all, and we did eventually beat the big bad glowly vampire boss at the end (although, our DM (Simon), to speed things along, did have the big bad come meet us halfway).

Overall, the con was most enjoyable. Unfortunately, I came done with some sort of bug towards the end, so had to skip the after party.

This yar did suffer a bit from late announcements - the module descriptions weren't up until quite close to the start of the con and the unexpected venue change (although not something in the control of the organisers) wasn't ideal. On the other hand, the mugs were available during the con, so that was good.

Thoughts on test driven development

2008-07-31T19:59:00.007+02:00

At the start of May. Simon and I redid the database layout for Sutekh, and, since then, have been working on fixing all the fallout of that. I recently spent a bunch of time working on finishing off some parts of the transition. Since we had a good idea of what the code should accomplish, I ended up doing most of this in a very test-driven fashion. Since most of my work is much more experimental in flavour, and doesn't thus doesn't lend itself to strongly test-driven development, it was an interesting exercise.

Some observations

Having the test available is nice, especially given the number of interactions involved
It tended to get sucked into "let just get this test working", and, as a result, the first version that successfully passed all the tests is a poster case for the difference between "working code" and "decent code". I'm still busy refactoring the code to amalgamate common bits, and there's still considerable work before the code is maintainable.
I frequently erred towards being overly concerned with not breaking the tests. I ended up duplicating code unnecessarily in places as a result.
Refactoring is made easier by the test, though.
Largely as a result of 2, I don't actually have that good a mental map of the code, which feels rather weird. Spotting repetitions between the different code paths is thus quite time consuming.
I do have quite a lot of confidence in the tests.

A fair bit of this list boils down differences in the manner in which code is produced. In my usual development model, by the time I'm satisfied that the code is doing what it should, I've spent a lot of time worrying about specific details and all sorts of implementation issues, and consequently, the code is vastly more polished. Here, because I was usually focused on short term gains, I have something which does what I want, but still needs considerable work before I'll regard it as complete. Also, as the list illustrates, I made the error of treating this as a bug-fixing exercise, rather than as development, so that's something I'll have to bear in mind in future. Point 5, though, is the real problem, though, and I'm not quite sure how to fix that, although things should hopefully be a lot better by the time I finish refactoring.

Still, despite my complaints about the resulting code, it did make the development a lot easier, and, for a part-time project, being able to deal with it in the smallish chunks of "let's get this test case working" did make it much easier to maintain momentum via visible results.

Stuff from the Day-job

2008-07-30T20:49:00.004+02:00

So, after a couple of weeks of much intermittent panicking, we commissioned the latest version of the patient positioning system today. I feel rather chuffed about the whole thing at the moment, since it's always nice to see one's work used, but I could have done with a less stressful last two weeks.

Since the last version was commissioned (November 2006), several chances have been made. Most significantly, the control and drive systems for the chair were replaced. The improved electronics allows great accuracy, and the updated control system fixes the numerous problems with the old version. The vision system received polishing - various inefficiences were ironed out, and the code is generally much less fragile, and numerous bugs on the front-end were fixed. All in all, the new system represents a significant improvement, and is the result of lots of hard work by the MedRad development team.

As the panicking comment above suggests, the comissioning process did not run that smoothly, though. Things that went wrong varied include the serious - I had to rework and significantly simplify parts the lens distortion code due to issues with the repeatability of the results (trading theorical accuracy for practical reliability, which was the correct choice, but I will need to revisit and fix that code), the daft - a stupid error in the mathematical formulation, that all of us who looked at it missed completely, meant the final collimator rotation was only correct in the range 0 - π (Of course, the standard QA tests we used during the development phase only cover that range, so we didn't pick this up until quite late) and the standard - the spare box, which also needed to be updated booted fine, but completely failed to see it's frame-grabbers, so that had to be hastily rebuilt (leaving us short of additional spares for now), combined with all the usual last minute bug-fixes, but it is complete, and the accuracy figures do show a statistically significant improvement in the accuracy. Considering that the previous system was already accurate to within 0.5 mm, I'm pretty pleased with that.

The Final

2008-07-24T00:09:00.004+02:00

So, final table went better than I expected - I wasn't ousted, and got 1 VP.

Table setup was Mike bleeding Verolin bleeding Val bleeding me bleeding Dan, with Mike starting.

It was definitely a table of people's decks not working as designed - Val got off to a fast start, with enough stealth to avoid his fee stakes being blocked, and dropping an early Reckless to hit me for 5. I brought out Rodolfo, who fairly quickly lost his title due to 2 No Confidences being played, and Korah, while Dan brought out Joe 'Boot" Hill and Basir. Mike got an early Information Highway again, and was off and running quite fast. Both Dan & I were reluctant to bring out a 3rd minion, because we knew Mike would be playing recalled to the founder, but early on, I was able to generate enough stealth to successfully bleed Dan a few times. Verolin's deck never got going, as he ever drew a bleed modifier, and Val was quite happy to take bleeds for one.

So, by about an hour in, I had two minions out, and the powerbase Madrid, but only 8 pool, Dan had two minions, and a lot of pool, Mike had 4 minions, but was struggling a bit for pool, while Verolin was also starting to feel the pressure from Mike, with Val sitting quite pretty, largely tooled up, and quite a bit of pool. at this point, though, Val stated trying to balance the table, being worried that Mike would oust Verolin too quickly - this resulted in two Reckless's (called over a couple of turns), which, combined with a couple of bleeds by Rodolfo, left Dan within lunge range for me. I was struggling for stealth cards though, which delayed me somewhat - Verolin was duly ousted, and then I drew the stealth I needed to oust Dan - I played a Kine to which Val allowed to pass which reduced him to 1 pool, but I would have had enough bleed modifiers to oust him with the next bleed even without the Kine, but I did need the extra stealth card I drew to replace the Kine to be sure of getting past his Abbot.

At this point, I ran into a run of cards without any stealth, which meant I was unable to pressurise Mike, and Val run out of S:CE, so was unable to survive Mike's rushes, which left Val in trouble. I eventually drew stealth, and attempted to lunge, but was deflected onto Val, which ousted him (even without the determine, Mike could probably have untapped his Champion, but I was hoping to get lucky) - at that stage, the game timed out, but, since I would have been unable to survive Mike's rush actions, he would have been able to bleed me out fairly quickly had play continued.

Still, the deck worked pretty well - In this tournament, I could have used some Confusion of the Eye's or Poison Pills for additional vote defence, but it's probably not general enough in the Cape Town play environment to be worth adding. I usually had enough stealth in my hand (except for a funny run in the final), but the deck almost certainly doesn't generate enough stealth to beat a full-on wall deck. The combat defence is the major weakness, and, against imbued, the ineffectiveness of Coma is a major issue. More Mental Mazes is probably the way to go, but that does require successful blocks, can be hard to pull off, but, considering how badly the deck crashed and burnt last time I tried it in a tournament environment, 1.5 VP from the final table is a fair result.

Saturday's Vampire tournament

2008-07-20T10:03:00.003+02:00

I decided to give the Malkavian antitribu deck another run in a tournament - I tweaked the balance somewhat (I reluctantly removed Aristotle, since he tends to generate excessive table hate, and I replaced the confusions with more generic stealth cards). I managed a single VP with the deck, but, thanks to the scary efficiency of Val's anarch reckless agitation deck (1 table sweep, 1 near sweep), that was enough to qualify for Wednesday's final.

There were only 9 players, so the split was into two tables, one of 4, one of 5.

So, the rounds:
Round 1: I was bleeding Robert's guhuri farm deck bleeding Val's reckless agitation deck, bleeding Phillip's Aabbt deck, bleeding Garrick's Brujah equipment deck.

Robert started. I had a decent crypt draw, and was able to put decent pressure on Robert, but didn't draw enough bleed cards (I drew 1 kindred spirits in the game, and only 2 eye's of chaos's), so I was never quite able to finish him off. I erred badly in not stopping Val's Firebrand when I could have, which made it easier for Val to get the vote lock, and sweep the table. Phillip's deck got going, but wasn't fast, which left Val easily able to finish Phillip and Garrick in quick succession, before going on to sweep the table. Garrick's deck didn't really get going - he ended up spending a lot of time setting up with equipment, and a couple of bleeds by Phillip put him very much on the defensive, but he struggled to generate enough intercept. Robert didn't really get the full arm going, but a couple of well timed minion taps, and some other pool jiggling meant he survived my attacks - that he never blocked any of my actions also meant I was jamming on stealth cards a bit. Annoyingly, when I was ousted, the two of the next three cards in my deck were a Kindred Spirits and a Eye's of Chaos - given that I had stealth in my hand, and Robert was on only 4 pool at the time, had these cards come up a little earlier, I might well have been able to oust him.

The second table was Mike, playing an Imbued event deck , bleeding Verolin, playing and Akunanse deck, bleeding Dan, playing his Seraph multi-act Assamite deck, bleeding Marc, playing a Tzimisce bleed deck (no idea who started). The table timed out. Mike was on quite low pool, but Marc was never able to generate enough bleed to defeat the Imbued's farming. I'm not sure why Mike was unable to oust Verolin, since he was down to a single minion by the end of the game, and didn't seem to have much farm going, but the table indeed timed out.

Round 2:
Table 1: I was bleeding Phillip's deck, bleeding Mike, bleeding Robert. I started.

I didn't have an ideal crypt draw (two Dolphin Blacks, the General and Hannibal), and I drew a lot of Master's early on, so it took me a bit of time to get myself setup. Fortunately for me, both Phillip and Robert were bringing out 11 blood vampires (Sutekh and Eze respectively), so my slow start didn't really hurt me. Mike, on the other hand, drew an information highway in his opening hand, and, combined with the other acceleration tricks he had, had 4 minions out by the time Phillip brought out Sutekh. With Eze and Sutekh on the table, and Vox Senis down early, I didn't have the voter lock, but I was able to successfully whittle Phillip out - it was a close run thing though, as he had played the Kahabr towers the turn before I ousted him, and would almost certainly had burnt Sutekh for the 11 pool on his next turn. Thereafter, with the Unmasking down, I run into a drought of stealth cards, so wasn't able to put pressure on Mike, and with both Mike + Robert attacking me, I ended up losing minions fairly rapidly. Mike eventually ousted Robert, since timeout was looming, and then easily ousted me for the game win.

Since this game went close to timeout, I didn't see what happened on the second table - I know Verolin got 1 VP, which was apparently engineered by Val, and Val cleaned up the table thereafter.

So, reflections:

I probably need to add a couple of Barren's to the deck - when people aren't blocking, it's prone to jamming on stealth
The changed balance is better - despite the occasionally weird draws, I had fewer completely useless cards at any stage, and was generally able to go forward fairly well.
I need more Mental Maze's, since the Malk's remain crunchy in combat.
I still can't believe I only drew 1 Kindred Spirits in the first game - Sutekh's card draw probability calculator tells me that the odds of that are < class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_33">probability plugin, I'm naturally completely confident in the accuracy of the figure).
Outer Limits had shiny Twilight Rebellion boosters. I had little self control, and now have a number of shiny Twilight Rebellion boosters (next on the agenda: somehow secure some Fee Stakes, so I can actually use the nice shiny tech)

We'll see how the final goes on Wednesday

Python Sprint Day Take 2

2008-06-21T21:21:00.002+02:00

In terms of overall productivity, this was less successful than the first. Partly the break for the talks ate up a lot of time, so getting momentum was a lot harder, and also, with the recent beta release, the number of clear issues was much reduced. The checkin that broke floatobject for some of us didn't help either, as people got side tracked into getting working python 2.6 builds.

Still, we prodded a couple of issues from the last bug day, and a couple of new bugs were filed about odd bits in the code (mainly by Simon), so there was some positive progress.

The CTPUG meeting part of the day was a definite success. The localisation talk took some time to get going, and it would have been nice if Dwayne had been able to stay longer so that we could have explored some of the discussion avenues a bit further. Simon's PyObject talk was interesting, especially touching on some of the differences between py3k and the python 2.X series.

Curiosity is a funny thing

2008-06-03T22:58:00.004+02:00

For various reasons, many to do with my instinctive distrust of university IT departments (what can I say, I've been around academia for too long), I find myself responsible for our departments web-server.
The web-server hosts various things, such as the course pages, a wiki for the South African OR society and a few other things.

Unsurprisingly, pursuing the logs reveals a great deal of refer spam, and, unsurprisingly, I have a set rewrite rules to deny access to obviously bad refers, and various automated steps in place to keep the blacklist updated, and some manual processes, since not everything can be automated. This does have the side effect that I have a automatically updated record of referrer spam in our logs. Which is where curiosity kicks in and asks "I wonder if there are any interesting stats to be gather from this?"

Perhaps fortunately, the data isn't well organised for analysis - I can't readily extract temporal information or frequencies of repeated patterns without correlating stuff against the logs, which is more effort than it's worth, but some simple keyword grepping is enough t at least roughly break things down into categories, which is already interesting.

So, based pretty much on the junk seem so far this year, dip's stats are:

Leading the way, at a little under 35%, are gambling related terms, with poker the big winner, followed by various spellings of blackjack.

Insurance surprisingly comes next - accounting for just over 20%. Medical and health insurance are the major keywords, with the vehicle insurance terms running a fairly distant third.

Next, at just under 10%, are various loan and debt management terms. Bills and debt are the most popular keywords here, with loans close behind.

Viagra and such account for around 7.5%

Porn does surprisingly badly, only accounting for around 5% of the cases - with a huge variety of terms used.

The rest is a mish-mash of music sites, link sites and various other junk., with nothing really worth singling out into a single category, although 1% is taken up by cigar and cigarette related links, which I find somewhat bizarre.

Well, at least I'm no longer that curious - in due course, no doubt, the bug will bite again, and I'll do the correlation against the logs, in which case, dear innocent reader, you shall be confronted by graphs (and even possibly pie-charts).

This Week

2008-05-30T22:42:00.003+02:00

So, what happened in the past week?

On Monday, there was VTES at Phillip's house. I tried out 3 decks, and, while I didn't do particularly well, I managed to oust my prey in two games, which was a fair effort for the evening

Tuesday, I was off sick

On Wednesday, I attended Geekdinner (pictures here), which was pretty enjoyable, despite riding my motorcycle in the rain (and, please note, the sound of the rain isn't soothing when you're on a bike). The trip back was enlivened by a cylinder cutting out, but I made it home alive [1].

My UPS's finally arrived, so I spent quite some time on Thursday prodding at them. Annoyingly, there's a bug in nut 2.2.1, which is the currently latest packaged version, which breaks support for several megatec usb UPS's, such as my new ones, so I had to roll my own nut 2.2.2 backport, which was not quite as simple as I would have liked.

Today (Friday) was mainly spent on the final stages of setting up our rather idle UltraSparc as a buildbot for numpy. After some annoying surprises (a variant of issue 198 amongst other things), and some fussing around to get multiple chroots installed (so we can test both g77 and gcc4's gfortran), things finally seem to be working properly (see this and this for example).

Workwise, we're testing the latest version of the SPG system, so much bug fixing. I loathed at qt a fair bit, but managed to get most issues resolved. We've also been poking at the robot-SPG communication, which has uncovered some interesting issues with the path planner, so , even there, I can claim to have had a reasonably productive week.

[1] I've always liked that song, the actual riding in the rain less so, though.

Today

2008-05-16T20:14:00.004+02:00

Proposition A:

Waking up on a cold morning, and realising that you don't need to get up for a while is one of life's pleasures.

Proposition B: (from Proposition A)

Waking up on a cold morning and realising you must get up now is a poor way to start the day.

Proposition C:

Days that start poorly have a higher likelihood of sucking than other days

Today amply demonstrated Proposition B, and provided no evidence against proposition C.

Redoing my photo gallery

2008-05-11T01:05:00.005+02:00

I have, for some years now, maintained an online gallery of my photographs on dip.

It has, for most of it's existence, been maintained by a rather complex and fragile set of shell scripts, so , with the recent spate of long weekends, I finally got around to replacing them with some more maintainable python code. This, after poking at the problem off and on for the last two weeks, reached a point that I started moving my gallery over to this on Friday. While the code is not bug-free yet [1], it works pretty well.

Why write yet another gallery generator, though?

Why not? With python's tools, most of the heavy lifting can be passed off to PIL and elementtree, and it's just the file parsing that needs attention.
Most existing packages are trying to solve a different problem, namely managing the gallery entirely through a web browser. I don't need to do that, and so focus on creating static pages offline.
I'd have to write a tool to import the existing image annotations into whatever gallery I use.
I've wanted to experiment with git for a while, so this project also gave me an opportunity to poke around at that.

Version 0.1 is available from dip.sun.ac.za at the moment, but I'll probably be rolling a version 0.2 with several recent bug fixes (see [1]) soon. Then it's time to look at adding an RSS feed generator.

[1] For instance, I had to fix a memory issue this evening. Keeping references to 100 odd 2592x1944 images after PIL's loaded them completely is not the brightest thing I've ever done.

CTPUG's python sprint day

2008-05-11T00:59:00.003+02:00

Overall, I think the day went well. At one point we had 8 people in the room working on various issues, and, during the course of the day, we touched 11 issues by my count (http://groups.google.com/group/ctpug/browse_thread/thread/edff4863226806ea), and submitted patches (in some cases multiple patches) to 10 of them.

Due to the time-zone issues, there wasn't much opportunity to push for review of the patches, but they are now there.

Vampire on the mind

2008-04-01T20:50:00.003+02:00

I failed to distinguish between Nergal and Mysql at a glance today - I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something (whether it's about vampire or MySQL is open for debate, though).

Motorcycling

2008-03-30T20:39:00.003+02:00

The bits that aren't either terrifying, frustrating or miserably uncomfortable are frickin awesome (and sometimes things are awesome anyway).

Wednesday's Social game

2008-03-27T06:46:00.004+02:00

I arrived somewhat late, due to SANUM stuff, and, with various people leaving early, and such, was only able to play 2 games, one 4 player and one (surprisingly slow) 3 player game. In both, I tried the !Malk deck, which I'm trying to fix (I had a fairly successful 90 card version, which I trimmed to 80 cards, and ended up making it overly finicky and fragile).

In the first game, Dan (Assamite melee weapon bruise and bleed) (starting) was bleeding me, bleeding Olivier (Tzimisce bleed), bleeding Roberta (!Brujah bruise and bleed). The combat setup, a large number of titles on the table, and not drawing stealth until quite late in the game meant I never really got much momentum going. Olivier ousted Roberta, who's deck struggled to make much of an impression on Dan's Assamites, which farmed quite efficiently. Dan's deck used Seraph Seconds and Tattoo Signals to do a ridiculous number of actions a turn, most of which was spent on setup. I was eventually able to oust Olivier when he transferred out an extra minion, and brought himself into lunge range on one of the few turns I found myself with stealth in hand, but, by that stage, I was struggling to keep my minions out of torpor, and was quickly overwhelmed by Dan's deck. Dan and Olivier bouncing minions into torpor, with Olivier's Tension in the Ranks on the table, helped my single lunge as well, but, ultimately, I took too long to oust him.

In the second game, I (starting) was bleeding Robert?'s Akunanse bloat deck, bleeding Dan playing a Saulot deck. I started off much better this game, and was able to combo a coma and diablerie to burn Saulot, which was great. Robert's deck was able to farm very successfully (Parthenon plus Secret horde plus blood dolls meant he was regularly pulling back 3 or 4 pool a turn). I made a couple of tatical errors as well - I should have force him to burn the Major Boon much earlier, and I should not have blocked a particular rescue attempt - I was hoping he would put more pressure on Dan, who was allowed to recover from having Saulot burnt with very little effort, and was ultimately ousted. Dan did eventually oust Robert, although, with the bloat of both decks, it did take a long time. A somewhat annoying game from my perspective, mainly because I should have managed to do better from the position I found myself in.

In both games, I drew too little stealth, and too many untap cards, which highlights a major problem with the card distribution. I also need to tweak the balance between vote and bleed a bit, since the deck ends up struggling with both not quite enough vote push or bleed push to finish off the prey. Probably pushing it to be a bit more stealth bleedy, and keeping the votes as a bloat and occasional aggressive sideline is the way to go. The crypt may also need tweaking - while Aristotle is very nice, he does tend to attract table hate, and the lack of a title is an issue. Perhaps replacing him with an extra Korah and a couple of other titled vamps is the way to go.

Misc Geekery

2008-03-25T21:20:00.003+02:00

(or wasting time with elementtree)

Like many people, I have attempted and pretty much utterly failed to maintain the classic list of links style web-page. This is most notable example is my list of web-comics I read, which is both out of date, and horribly incomplete.

Part of this, is, of course, the effort to manually create the webpages needed, and fill in the content. However, since galeon's bookmark are stored in nicely structured xml, and I group the comics I follow in a not completely broken manner, I hit on the bright idea of pulling the bookmarks out using elementtree, and, furthermore, I can use galeon's bookmark notes to do the documenting about the comics.

So, after a couple of hours of prodding (much of it spent trying to get an overly complex design working before an important light-bulb went on), I now have a little python script that pulls all the data out, and writes a nice, standards conforming html file with all details - Now I just need to actually go through and sort out my comics bookmarks a bit, and I'll actually have a much more maintainable way of generating the list.

Of course, when I eventually move away from galeon (I've been using epiphany exclusively on my laptop for a while now, so it's likely to be not too far off), I'll have to tweak the script, and probably fiddle with the bookmark's conversion a bit to get all the comments across properly, but such is progress.

ah, the idle amusements of a life around computers.
(and to think I'd planned to spent the evening working on Sutekh)

Curse you, James Barrie

2008-02-27T22:19:00.002+02:00

For never finishing "Shall we Join the Ladies".

Yes, I knew it was an incomplete play (it even says so in the stage directions). That is of absolutely no comfort whatsoever.

And I can't even swear revenge, what with the march of history and all that.

Darn and botheration.

VtES social game report

2008-02-21T20:26:00.002+02:00

(A "relying on blogger not to lose my notes" post)

So, Monday's social game was quite fun. I managed to fit 4 games in, the last (admittedly a 3 player), in just over 35 minutes, and tried different decks each time. I didn't try my !Malk deck, which I had wanted to play, since I somehow left out 2 vampires when reconstructing it, which was somewhat daft.

In the first game, I was playing an experimental Samedi deck. The table was Phillip, playing a !Salubri deck, bleeding Brendan's !Tor combat deck bleeding my Samedi, bleeding Marc's potence combat deck. A very combat heavy table. The Samedi deck didn't do particularly well, which, given the thrown together nature of it, is not that surprising. Damage prevention was a major issue, so I should prehaps add some Fortitude to the deck idea. I think there's a potentially fun vampire bloat module using Genina + Compress + Amaranth + Ritual of the Bitter Rose, and then rescue Genina if the blood hunt sends her to topor, but I need more Amaranths and Rituals to make that work. The concept of using Reanimated corpses and Shambling Hordes didn't come out at all, which partly reflects how the deck struggled. Marc's potence deck eventually swept the table, thanks to dealing vast amounts of damage, and gradually building up a stock of useful devices to boost bleed.

The second game saw me playing my Blood Brothers deck, bleeding Brendan with a Settite deck, bleeding Val's Eze bloat deck, bleeding Phillip's experimental deck, bleeding James' !Brujah bleed deck (I think I started, although that may be incorrect). Val's bloat strategy worked exteremely well, while Phillip's deck never really got going. I was able to oust Brendan, using Walk of Caine for a 5 bleed, but ran into the problem of not being able to fill up blood quickly enough to put pressure on Val. Having Angelo Banished twice in the game certainly didn't help me, either. I should look at adding the Sermon of Caine's, to get blood redistribution, and I need some additional pool gain (maybe a Powerbase Chicago?). I'd dearly love to have some Hungry Coyotes for the Hermana's hunting, but that will probably require searching eBay, and a secure ahven or two for Angelo is probably also a good idea, since the deck is heavily reliant on him. Anyway, 1 VP for that deck is not bad, and I can blame Brendan for not putting enough pressure on Val for my later troubles :).

The third game saw Val, playing a weenie gun deck, bleeding James (the deck never got going, but looked bruise-bleed'ish), bleeding Phillip, playing a Nossie bruise bleed deck, bleeding me, playing my Toreador Alexandra star vampire deck, with Val starting. Val got off to a very fast start, as the weenie's are prone to do, and, by adding camera phones, was setting up to be very dangerous. James never got into the game, not being able to defend against Val succesfully. I had a good opening few draws, pulling Alexandra early, being able to minion tap her, enchant down, and pull Elliot quickly as well, followed by another Minion Tap, leaving me with two minions,. Alexandra's untap ability and surprisingly good pool levels. While I never had the vote lock, since Phillip pulled out several titles, the early pressure from Val, and a well timed Scorn of Adonis enabled me to get a Kine through. A couple of bleeds, and I was able to oust Val before he ousted James. I did have a uncovered haven slapped on Alexandra, but was able to draw enough strike combat ends to survive that. James was quite weak, and I was able to get a couple of Aching Beauties down, so I ousted him quickly. Phillip had got a Army of Rats into play, but I was generating pool fast enough that I could cope. In general, the cards were very kind to me, in addition to the two minion taps, I drew three Aching Beauties, and both the Hunting Ground and the Art Museum quite early. which helped me keep my vampires sufficiently healthy. Due to the number of minions, the endgame between Phillip and me got quite tight, but, with two minions with Aching Beauties, I was able to oust him successfully. Despite not having the vote dominance the deck usually has, I'm quite pleased with how it went. Had Val been my predator, though, things would likely have gone rather poorly for me. Like any star vampire deck, the Toreador deck is rather fragile, but it can be very effective.

The final game was a three player game between me, playing my Ahrimane deck, bleeding Simon, playing his !Salubri deck, bleeding James, playing Micheal's Osebo deck. This game was rather madcap, since we were pushing to be over by midnight, and only started at just after 11:30 pm (in the end, me finished at 0:06, which was't a bad effort). I was able to sweep the table, thanks largely to how the table interaction fell out - James, while doing quite a bit of damage, never got enough blood back onto his minions, so was scrambling to keep them out of torpor by the end. Simon suffered from having a minion burnt in combat early, and I was able to get a Army of rats in paly, and defended it for long enough for it to significantly reduce his pool. I also was able to get good use out of the Carrion Crows + Aid from Bats combo, sprinkled with a few Strength of bear's + Scorpion Stings, so I was able to do enough damage in combat to be OK. I did have several vampires got to topor, and one vampire burnt. I also drew Ohoyo for the first time since I started using the deck. He provided some useful additional combat options, and the ability to swap him in to a combat was most useful. While he was burnt after only a few turns, he did enough damage to be worth the cost, and it allowed to to play a Vulture's Buffet with good effect. I eventually was able to play Tier of Souls, which, with the added bleed, gave me sufficient momentum to oust Simon and then James. A game, which, despite ultimately sweeping the table, was quite tight, and generally good fun. I think the Ahrimane deck is actually shaping up reasonably well now. While not A-class, it's got enough going for the bruise and bleed option to be quite dangerous when things go it's way.

Humanity

2008-02-15T23:38:00.002+02:00

I'm usually fairly upbeat about humanity. I generally believe that most people are pretty decent, and so forth, despite the, at times, overwhelming evidence to the contrary. On days when I have to be early, though, this tends to be much less true.

While part of this is due to my just not being an early morning person, and the consequent bad mood that puts me in, much of the blame is due to having to deal with early morning traffic. The selfishness, lack of forethought, general stubbornness and sheer stupidity to be seen in a few minutes of driving is enough to severely strain my tolerance.

Of course, this raises all sorts of questions: Is driving merely well suited to bringing out the worst in people? Are people always like this, and I just don't notice most of the time? Is it just because I'm really irritable at that time of the morning (and usually running late)? All of them?

Probably the only firm conclusion that can be drawn is I really do need to work harder at avoiding early mornings.

Common experiences

2008-02-12T09:42:00.000+02:00

Communication is much easier when people can call on common experiences. While many concepts and experiences are fairly universal, there are others that are far less common, and, while it may be quite possible to cover the broad outlines, it is very difficult for someone who has not shared a similar experience to truly grasp the details.

Dealing with a mosquito buzzing around inside your helmet on the N2 probably falls into the "not universal" category.

The Eskom Rant

2008-01-30T09:41:00.001+02:00

In which nothing particularly new is said about the situation, no great answers are provided, and the tone of the debate is not raised to any great height.

That we have a power crisis is a major problem, and shows poor planning. That we have a crisis, and no particularly coherent response from the warning signs in 2006, is an example of poor planning.

Several things that have struck me during the current situation:

A scheduled power cut that doesn't happen is almost as bad for productivity as a power cut.
Eskom ain't at all good about providing information about why things go bad - their press releases are appalling. "We need to load shed, tough cookies" basically.
This leads to lots of rumours (X% of the generating capacity off-line, so much power exported to other countries, etc, etc.), and the lack of information from Eskom makes the denials implausible.
Unfortunately, the people jumping up and down about the rumours most ardently (the DA and Solidarity stand out here) aren't plausible either, so it's really hard to good any feeling on what the heck is going on
WTF is up with poweralert's trend pages. The displayed historical trend changes radically over quite short periods of time.
While the working laptop is nice, until everything that connects me to the Internet at iTL is also on various long-lived battery backups, I can only work at about half capacity during a power failure. When did I become so reliant on Google and other online services?
Why is iTL listed as both iThemba Labs and Cyclotron in the load shedding schedule? It makes no sense.
Although I finally found a real personal use case for searching pdf's. Pretty much every other document I deal with, I need to read the entire thing, and, since most are academic papers with figures, I usually use the figures to navigate if I need to find something again.
Considering the number of power outages, I'm surprised more of the hardware I maintain hasn't died.
Discovering I mis-set my alarm clock after yet another power failure was an unpleasant surprise.
I need new UPS's for some of the Stellenbosch machines.
I badly need new UPS's for home.
Why is it going to take so long to build another power station? There is surely lots of scope for just throwing extra resources at the project (it's not software after all)
Aren't we due to have the pebble bed reactor come online around 2013 anyway?

New Toy

2008-01-22T08:33:00.000+02:00

I have a rather old laptop. Considering that I acquired it at the end of 2001, it's served me exceedingly well, and proved rather robust. All good things must come to and end, and, although I've kept the laptop alive despite a gradually failing hard-drive for some time, the screen, which never quite recovered from water damage due to being caught in some rather heavy rain on the bike, eventually gave up the ghost.

Thus I have a new, shiny, fast toy. I acquired a Fujitsu-Siemens Li1718 laptop (dual-core 1.78Ghz Pentium, 160GB harddisk, ATI graphics, etc) (pictures here). Overall, a very nice shiny toy.

My home desktop machine is still marginally more powerful, but, considering I only spent 7000 rand on the laptop, and I spent slightly more than that on the desktop machine 18 months ago, it's quite a testament to how technology prices have continued to fall.

Installing Debian was quite painless - The latest etch installer had minimal trouble, and upgrading to lenny was completely painless, thanks to doing it at campus, with a nice fast local mirror available (I've not been tracking testing for a while, so I thought this was a good time to start doing so again). The only thing not working out of the box is the wireless network card, but there are patches for madwifi floating around, so hopefully that will fix itself in due course, and I'm not such a heavy wireless user that it really matters. The graphics card is currently not accelerating OpenGL stuff, but the current work on the DRI drivers should solve that fairly soon. There was a time when I would have booted into the windows partition just to check things, but these days my confidence in Linux's hardware support is such that I no longer bother, so I honestly don't know what was pre-installed on the machine.

And, with Eskom's current failure to provide the country with reliable power, it is nice to once again have a machine with a battery life that can be measured in more than seconds (Of course, this means I lose an excuse not to do work, but the toy's worth it.)

Hermanus Hike

2008-01-14T07:27:00.000+02:00

Over the weekend, I went hiking with Simon, Adrianna and Simon's Mom Pat in the Vogelgat Nature reverse near Hermanus. Overall, a most enjoyable weekend (hopfully I'll have the photos up by the weekend (edit: now up at my dip site). Observations from the experience

I'm no longer hiking fit. Since was never an issue when I worked at UCT, I blame the lack of hills in iThemba LABS buildings.
Guy's Pool was worth the hike, though.
It's a very pretty nature reverse
I'm probably overly addicted to trying to construct Panoramas at the moment.
Consequently, I could use a larger memory card for my camera
Being far from it makes me realise just how much a fan of indoor plumbing I am.
I need to find a tame botanist to drag along on such trips. Identifying things as "pretty flower" lacks accuracy but I don't want to invest the effort into learning how to identify plants personally.
The people who made the paths did a truly impressive amount of work.
They weren't kidding about the slippery rocks, either.
Hopefully, my next water bottle won't have the cap disintegrate mid-hike.
Weather changes fast on mountains (I knew this, but it was a reminder)
Next time, I'll take a Bookcrossings book to leave at the hut.
There will be a next time, if for no other reason than I couldn't get good photos of the Main falls because of rain on the Sunday.
The wind on the way back from Hermanus was impressive - the rainbow was pretty.

Achievements

2008-01-13T11:05:00.000+02:00

On Friday, I defrosted the fridge in the lab.

It's a sad comment on the state of the fridge (regrettably, I didn't think to take my camera) that actually achieving what I did on Friday, which was to get almost all the ice out of the fridge, represents a significant achievement, and occupied a considerable chunk of my time. Anyway, the fridge is now again usable.

Probably the frustration of spending most of my day wrestling with a fridge is why I got involved in debugging a postscript issue on #clug - for whatever reason, evince doesn't properly render postscript without the %%Page: comment deliminators - once we figured that out, everything worked a lot better.

Christmas

2007-12-21T10:40:00.000+02:00

I like Christmas - it's a good oppurtunity to catch up with family, take a break and laze around doing very little, and generaly annoy the garden's birds by trying to photograph them (which is proving difficult this year since the trees have leaves).

Unfortunately, Christmas is paired with Christmas shopping. In addition to the usual perils of shopping at this time of year (although fortunately fleeing the coast does mean I'm facing less crowded malls than those in the Cape), it also involves selecting some sort of appropriate gift.

Given that everyone I'm shopping for has a reasonable level of disposable income, this means finding something that they want (and isn't ludicrously expensive), but won't buy for themselves, since otherwise they'd have it already. This turns out to be really hard. I suspect it's time to seriously consider falling back on the default gift of a box of biscuits.

Fortuantely, the Christmas season does feature extended shopping hours, so, despite still needing o acquire several gifts, I should be OK.

Starcamp

2007-12-09T10:06:00.000+02:00

So, I spent a lot of the last two days caught up in Starcamp. All in all, it was pretty cool. As a result, I'm currently short of sleep, and work tomorrow is really going to suck, but so be it.

Some overall, not yet well thought out comments:

Not setting up the computers on day 1 was a collective 'WTF were we thinking' moment
Watching people play on the wii is really quite entertaining in its own right
The 1st day was much more traditional conference than I expected, and probably required some pushing to get away from that mould. Having the lab up would probably have helped here, as there wasn't anything happening away from the main venue. The talks were quite interesting though, so there was no dead time.
Free food + T-shirt was a major, major plus
trying to get gtkboard to compile at around midnight with not nearly enough sleep was perhaps not the best way to prepare for the Sunday
Getting the pentago hacking session going to took time, but we did get fairly far (for a generous definition of far)
gtkboard is quirky, and it took some time getting my head somewhat around it. We are probably doing horrible things to it, but we may be able to find some nice generalisations that we can try feeding back to whatever's left of the upstream project.
I really didn't get enough sleep.
(did I mention the free food?)
I need a new laptop badly
That there was an active IRC channel during a couple of the talks mainly occupied by members of the audience says something about the community. I don't know what, but it definitely says it.
My internal physics model is both vague and inaccurate. At some point, I should rectify this.
I've forgotten pretty much everything I learnt in my 3rd year AI course, which is somewhat sad, since the course was fun.
There are a lot of web companies in CT.
There are a number of cool people in CT.
(did I mention the free food?)
9am on a Saturday is early - not that we ever got going anywhere close to the scheduled time
Being able to stay at the venue later would have been good
I still maintain nobody warned us that they were about to unplug the power point my laptop was using. Since I don't have battery that works, I feel rather aggrieved about this.
Talking and listening over loud music (the pub, the brass bell), sucks quite badly as a method of interaction
I took surprisingly few photographs. Dying batteries played a part, but still. Fortunately, other people didn't hold back, so there will be a good photographic record.
It's surprisingly easy to buy a toothbrush at around 10pm.
The R310 remains an if'ish road at night.

On criticism

2007-12-05T08:21:00.000+02:00

I write short notes on every movie a see on the big screen. This is mainly to keep track of what I've seen, and to remind myself about the movies later.

Looking at the collection of comments, however, reveals a trend that I find rather interesting. The movies I like tend to get quite short entries (see the 2005's entry for the Incredibles for example), while the longest entries tend to be for movies I did not enjoy (see 2003's comments on the Reign of Fire, for example). While there are numerous short entries for movies I didn't enjoy, there are very few long entries about movies I did enjoy.

I'm not quite sure what this reveals about me, but it does suggest that I find it easier to analyze where something didn't work than what aspects did work.

While my behaviour is unlikely to change, it is an interesting observation.

LotN Starters

2007-12-03T07:35:00.000+02:00

So, with the order of LotN Starters having arrived, we had a session to try them out. Overall, the afternoon was quite fun.

In the first game, I played the Assamites, and starting, bleeding Simon, playing the Followers of Set, bleeding Adrianna, playing the Giovanni, bleeding Kevin with the Ravnos. Simon swept the table there, although I was able to burn two minions of his.

This game was rather frustrating for me - Simon got out both Tutu the mummy, and Nakhtorheb, giving him two minions who could untap a turn. I was eventually able to burn both Tutu and another small minion, but in each case, it took a couple of actions to setup. Also, given the Settites S:CE options, the Assamites struggled to be effective. I weirdly only drew 1 Master card, and no untap at all. Adrianna had a couple of good combat combos, but suffered from drawing too much equipment, and wasn't really able to get the Giovanni deck going forward too well. Facing multiple acting minions also didn't help at all. Kevin wasn't able to get the Ravnos deck going, and generally struggled for useful actions throughout.

In the second game, I played the Ravnos (starting again), bleeding Simon with the Giovanni, bleeding Adrianna with the Assamites, bleeding Kevin with the Settites. Kevin and I each gained 2 VPs, with Kevin ousting me after I ousted Simon and Adrianne.

Kevin managed to pull both Tutu and Nakhtorheb for the Settites again. Fortunately, I was able to pull Durga Syn, whose "do not tap for blocking allies and younger vampires, and also had some good luck with drawing untap, but spent much of the game struggling to generate forward momentum due to needing to defend against Kevin. Adrianna struggled with her crypt draw, and ended up bring out 2 ten-caps, while struggling to really impact on Kevin's vampires. Simon was able to pressurise Adrianna quite successfully (striking for 7 in one combat), and, had he ousted her, was probably quite well placed to sweep the table. However, I was able to prevent Simon's lunge succeeding with a Ignis Fatuus, and, thanks to a round of several blocks of Kevin's minions, was able to draw week of Nightmares. The additional bleed allowed me to oust Simon and Adrianna in quick succession, but, despite the 12 pool gained, I then ran out of untap. Kevin, despite being down to only 4 pool (IIRC) was able to bleed through me at an alarming rate (I lost more than 10 in a single turn), and I was unable to generate the stealth needed to get the critical bleeds through.

Overall, the results were not that surprising. All the starters are hurt by having only 6 distinct vampires in the crypt. The Settite starter is the best balanced of the lot, and can generate some quite scary amounts of bleed. The untapping 10-cap is horrible, and is probably the best vampire in the expansion. The Giovanni deck has promise, although is a little light in Dominate (both in the crypt and cards in the deck), and is probably equipment heavy. It also seems an odd choice of deck to have the most votes (3), given the single titled vampire in the crypt. The Ravnos crypt is weird, having only 1 vampire with superior Animalism, although Durga Syn's non-tappiness is very useful (although having a 9 blood reserved as a blocker does suck). The deck struggles with the rather diverse scattering of Chimestry options, and I found the deck really struggled until I got "Week of Nightmares" out. Also, not seeing the Path hurt me, since I spent a lot of blood on Chimestry cards without ever recovering it. The Assasamites needs the most work, undoubtedly. The crypt is a little unbalanced cost wise (2 of the 6 vampires are 10 caps), and the deck needs a clearer focus than it currently has.

Still, I'm happy to have copies of the decks, and the investment looks to be well worth it. The extra potence cards from the Giovanni decks will be very useful, even if I don't put together a good Giovanni deck.

Comics

2007-11-30T11:14:00.000+02:00

I don't punt PhD comics nearly enough. The characters and situations are instantly recognisable to anyone who's been in grad school.

And, frankly, anyone who doesn't find this funny, is going to understand half my conversations.

Then there's xkcd, which I also need to punt more often. The latest example of why is here.

PRASA 2007

2007-11-30T10:32:00.000+02:00

So, I went to PRASA in Pietermartizburg, and successfully returned. Overall, good conference.

An unsorted list of thingies.

The N3 to Pietermartizburg sucks. It would suck less, but probably still suck if they weren't doing construction
Where do all the lorries on the N3 come from?
Durban drivers are impolite and insane. I'm not quite sure how I managed to avoid getting the rent-a-car dinged.
Natal thunderstorms are impressive.
This is true even when the second storm of the conference is delaying takeoff
Photographing birds in lush vegetation is really hard
I'm no longer anonymous enough to avoid being roped into chairing sessions. This is both kinda cool, and really annoying
I failed my 'avoid involvement' roll, so I'm not going to be able to avoid being involved in the organisation of PRASA 2008
Both my students spoke well. I'm more relieved about this than I expected.
Students have a bad influence on my drinking habits
I'm not really complaining about the above
'Did an engine fall off' as become a over-used standard joke
Durban airport is pleasant, but doesn't have enough through the security checkpoint

Sutekh ramblings

2007-11-23T06:29:00.000+02:00

(Sutekh is, of course, the python Vampire card management app Simon Cross and I have been working on)

Conceptually, the app is fairly simple, and I've been largely using it as a learning bed for pygtk. Consequently, it does things by hand, rather than the often recommended "use glade" approach. Personally, for something that now as a number of dynamic aspects to the gui (ability to rearrange panes, and so on), I think glade would have become quite painful, and straight pygtk coding is fairly easy once you wrap your head around the whole container paradigm. As an vehicle for learning pygtk, it has been pretty good.

But what has surprised me is it's ability to uncover database oddities. We have to date, discovered two issues with sqlobject (both fixed), had to work around sqlite's query optimiser by throwing in extra joins, triggered a segfault in sqlite (fixed in more recent sqlite's fortunately) and hit a bug in mysql query optimiser that makes certain queries run extremely slowly. WE ahven't triggered any postgresql bugs yet (although there have been a few weirdness's with certain versions of sqlobject talking to postgresql), but have had to fix several bugs in Sutekh's code because of postgres's much more stringent SQL implementation. For not a teribly complex database app, it's quite a impressive list.

So, do other people not trigger these bugs? Are we stretching corners of the databases that many other apps just don't hit (Sutekh has a number of tables, and can involve some quite complex joins)? Do other people just stick to one db, and work around it's quirks?

I dunno, but on the other hand, it's quite pleasing to see how some of this bugs have disappeared during Sutekh's lifetime, which is always one of the strengths of FOSS.

Enough already

2007-11-09T07:01:00.000+02:00

An open letter to the management.

To whom it may concern,

While I appreciate that, given the near-crisis strain on the region's water supply, rain should always be considered a good thing, surely you must agree that several rainy days in succession in November is pushing it. Getting wet on a motorcycle is to be endured during the Cape winters, but getting wet during prime riding season is an affront to the natural order of things.

While I will concede that today's rainbow was pretty, it's short duration, and that it occurred while I was riding, and thus unable to photograph also shows a distinct lack of proper planning.

Hoping service will improve.
Disgruntled.

The Children of Dune miniseries

2007-11-04T09:25:00.000+02:00

(or "Yes, Virginia, we are completely insane")

So, Saturday evening, the special seminar series resumed. As is often the case, it resumed with a rather ludicrously long session, but it was enjoyable. Kevin, alas, could not make it.

We started with a couple more episodes of Blood+, which continues to wobble between cool bit and excessive teenage angst, without quite falling off the fence on what it intends to be, followed by Bubba-HoTep, which, although I've seen several times before, I had not watched on a projector, and the film is certainly not hurt by the experience (although, given my fondness for the film, that's not that surprising a reaction).

We followed this with the entire Children of Dune miniseries, which took us to 5:15 am. The copy we had suffered from weird glitches, chopping and changing between grey scale and colour on several occasions, and having a few other glitches, but not so many as to be unwatchable.

The actual adaption isn't bad. There are some surprising liberties taken with the books, though, for reasons I don't quite fathom. The conflating of the Guild plots into the House Corrino plots seems pointless, and the depiction of Leto's second skin as a small smattering of sand trout on his right arm seems a completely bizarre choice. Also lost, although this probably hard to avoid with a TV adaption, is the doubt about the Preacher's identity. While in the book, it is only confirmed quite late, in the adaptation it is clear from the Preacher's first appearance.

The bit I found most objectionable is the chance in the structure of Leto and Ghani's plan. In the book, they both agree to Leto's departure, and Chani's belief in Leto's death is a deception she practices on herself. Here, it's a deception Leto practices on Ghani, which seems contrary to the spirit of the relationship.

Otherwise, as expected, lots of the detail of the mental battles is stripped out of the adaption, but, overall, it is not a bad effort at all.

Overall, I'm glad I saw it, but won't be buying the DVD anytime soon.

White Russian (or "wasn't I meant to do something here?")

2007-10-22T09:54:00.000+02:00

I finally got around to flashing my WRT54GL with the rather spiffy openwrt firmware (White Russian 0.9 release). Considering I had been intending to do so ever since I got the thing early in the year, this represents a rather impressive feat of procrastination on my part (although not yet an awe-inspiring feat, such as my intention to finish working through the Communication Theory text book I bought while doing my M.)

The process was competely painless. In fact, it was so painless I'm almost feeling cheated. Isn't getting Linux running on exotic hardware the way you proven your geekiness? In addition to the extremely simple install (point router at firmware, press upgrade, wait), the upgrade process retained the wireless network settings, so I didn't even have to configure anything to get my wireless network going again.
Very convenient.

Now, having finally flashed the the thing, I can move doing a proper compartmentalised wireless setup up my todo list. Check back in six months or so.

Zombies!!!

2007-10-22T07:37:00.000+02:00

So, on Friday I was up way too late (4 am in the morning), because of a game Zombies!!!, which I nearly, but not quite, won (I rolled a 4, when I needed a 5). Although, given the way my rolling had gone, it was required some late good fortune to get me that close to winning.

Some observations to come out of the session.

Rolling three successive rolls below 4 when on the the Town Square, and a "no bullets may be used effect" is in play really sucks.
The extra cards from the guts counters added by the university expansion really changes the balance for events. It's much more likely you'll have a useful event in hand, and thus more events are changed
The mall expansion, being much more compact, and with the ease of moving between shops provided by the airducts, is significantly unbalanced when compared to the the town and university. We should never have allowed Kevin to camp in the mall as we did.
When trailing badly on Zombies, the fact that the trailing player can place the Helipad makes wandering away from everyone else a viable approach, as you can place the Helipad near yourself. As other players aren't around though, you do have to deal with all the Zombies nearby alone, which can suck badly.
Having different expansions running, with different possible Helipad locations, makes this less viable, though.
Zombies!!! remains a seriously cool concept, and, if shipping weren't so bloody expensive, I'd be buying it
I should have brought Jonathon Coulton's Re: Your Brains to be played at some point during the game

In other zombie related news, Fluxx now has a Zombie version (want (really, really want)).

CTPUG 6

2007-10-07T10:44:00.000+02:00

So, this Saturday was the 6th CTPUG meeting. We had a reasonable turnout, and the talks seemed to go down well. The python on the S60 has me thinking that, when my current cellphone contract is up for renewal, I need to get me something that can run python (not because I really have any great use for python on a phone, being someone who still mainly uses a cellphone for talking to people, but it'll generally be a cool think to have).

The pylons talk was interesting for me from a underlying technology point of view. I'm not nearly involved enough in web stuff to be that concerned about the differences between the frameworks, but the WSGI stuff is something that looks worth getting acquainted with.

After the talk, a bunch of us eventually ended up a Pancho's for supper. Pancho's serve impressively sized potions, which is just as well, as I needed the food to balance out the margarita's I had. Pleasant enough way to spent the time, be carefully picking my way back along the N2.

CTPUG 7 is scheduled for the 17th of November, which will almost certainly be the last one for 2007.

Geekdinner 4 - Dangerous drumstick

2007-09-29T00:10:00.000+02:00

So, I dragged my brother Mark along to this GeekDinner. Since he's down here on holiday, it's seemed a good option. he seemed to enjoy the experience, and I had a pretty god time to, and got very mellow on the rather pleasant wine Getwine provided and I have now ordered some more from them, so I'm sorted on the wine stakes for a while.

(Geekdinner 24 is going to be difficult to name, I suspect)

The Venue

Overall, quite pleasant. Terrible acoustics, but that's true of so may restaurants it's hard to fault them on that. The major complaints I had were parking (it's in Camp's Bay, so that would always e an issue), and actually finding the venue (the name on the awning canopy set back from the road is not visible at night). But the food was good (and excellent value for money), the portions were large and the service was fine.

The Talks

The first talk, on social media, was a bit 'rah rah, the internet is here' for my tastes.

The WikiMania bid sounds interesting. It has the optimistic feel of people organising their first conference about it, which is probably necessary to pull something like that off.

Stefano Rivera's talk on CaCert was brief, but did remind me about it, and I really do need to get myself properly linked into the whole web of trust and replace the self-signed certificates with something at least a little less hassle to keep in sync.

Joe's talk about wireless openings and his visions where it's going to go in this country was interesting, and, if even half of what he discussed comes of, they'll be some cool results out there.

nbm's talk on his planned *Camp was a bit light on the details, but things do seem to be moving in some sort of vaguely forward direction on that, and, overall, the event has the possibility of being quite cool.

So, a pretty good evening, and it rescued the day from being a total disaster due to Futurex,

Futurex

2007-09-29T00:00:00.000+02:00

I'm sorely tempted to write a really lengthy rant about just how bad Futurex was this year, but, considering that such a rant would take me longer to develop to the desired finely honed level of virulence than I actually spent at Futures, I'll restrain myself to a brief, less well thought out rant.

If you had' got the message from the above, Futurex was bad. It was dire. As Mark rather aptly summed it up "It was a good squib short of a damp squib". It would be much easier to list the things they got right rather than the things they got wrong, expect there isn't anything to list as being noticeably right. It felt half-baked, unprepared and poorly thought out. No map, no logic to the positioning of the stalls, only a couple of interesting things on display, amid a lot of just meh. Even the securex side of it didn't have anything interesting.

Basically, unless I am assured by several trustworthy people that the next one is a massive improvement, I'll probably not be attending Futurex again, which is a pity, because, at one time, it used to actually be a useful event.

Upgrading debian

2007-09-23T09:49:00.000+02:00

I don't think I've mentioned recently just how much I adore debian's easy upgrades.

Considering that I upgraded our file server yesterday, with the only major hiccup being due to carelessness on my part (a stupid error on the kernel command line), and everything seems to be working fine now, with almost no additional tweaking required, I think it's time a corrected that lack.

I am truly a fan of the work and effort that goes into knocking the rough edges off the entire process.

Playing with panoramas

2007-09-17T07:58:00.000+02:00

As anyone looking at my photos might notice, I'm rather keen on playing with my digital camera.

It's probably inevitable that, at some point, I'd be tempted by the idea of creating panorama shots. And, as people who attended my CTPUG talk on PIL can testify, I've sued very simple techniques (simple correlation matching, and PIL's blend stitching, without camera corrections) to demonstarate ideas in on a few occasions before, but never got around to actually doing all the heavy lifting needed to create proper panoramas. Fortunately, the beauty of open source software means I don't need to.

I've been aware of panorama tools for a few years, without ever getting around to playing with them. This changed when I recently discovered hugin, a nice GUI frontend for all the various panorama tools stages. The frontend is pretty intuitive, although it took me a while to grasp adding horizontal and vertical guidelines to help prevent unnecessary curvature of the horizon, and the result, when combined with enblend's stitching, is pretty impressive, I think. See this for example.

So, in short, expect more panorama's from me.