Ye Officium Area

Another Shakespearean rendition, this time by shortline99:

PETER: When I was but a lad of lesser years a wise man posed a question to my ears: if ever a great windfall I had found what wouldst I do with but one million pounds? And if I were to say the chore I'd try would be to build the carriages, then I, I'd be a carriage-maker, biding time by mending wood and making naught a dime.

SAMIR: Lo, and your answer?

PETER: I had no reply, and thus I am imprisoned here to die.

MIKE: This old man's useless riddles hold no sway, for if there were a purpose to your say then none would claim that he would shovel shiat and streets of London would remain unfit.

SAMIR: Would I give truth to this I would declare That I would leave this fortune in the care Of my old friend Saheib, or at the least would leave some to the bankers of the East.

MIKE: This question's purpose yet eludes thee too, as all you say does not reveal... the... you... What? PC Load Letter? O by the stars, I'll tear this base machine into its parts!

A Slurry Tale

A scene from pulp fiction in Shakespearean style by ceruleanst. Fucking A.

ACT I SCENE 2. A road, morning. Enter JULES and VINCENT, murderers.

V: And know'st thou what the French name cottage pie?
J: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?
V: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike
Are strange to ours, with their own history:
Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.
J: What say they then, pray?
V: Hachis Parmentier.
J: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream?
V: Cream is but cream, only they say la crème.
J: What do they name black pudding?
V: I know not;
I visited no inn it could be bought.

--

J: Your pardon; did I break thy concentration?
Continue! Ah, but now thy tongue is still.
Allow me then to offer a response.
Describe Marsellus Wallace to me, pray.
B: What?
J: What country dost thou hail from?
B: What?
J: Thou sayest thou dost hail from distant What?
I know but naught of thy fair country What.
What language speak they in the land of What?
B: What?
J: English, base knave, dost thou speak it?
B: Aye!
J: Then hearken to my words and answer them!
Describe to me Marsellus Wallace!
B: What?
JULES presses his knife to BRETT's throat
J: Speak 'What' again! Thou cur, cry 'What' again!
I dare thee utter 'What' again but once!
I dare thee twice and spit upon thy name!
Now, paint for me a portraiture in words,
If thou hast any in thy head but 'What',
Of Marsellus Wallace!
B: He is dark.
J: Aye, and what more?
B: His head is shaven bald.
J: Hath he the semblance of a harlot?
B: What?
JULES strikes and BRETT cries out
J: Hath he the semblance of a harlot?
B: Nay!
J: Then why didst thou attempt to bed him thus?
B: I did not!
J: Aye, thou didst! O, aye, thou didst!
Thou sought to rape him like a chattel whore!
And sooth, Lord Wallace is displeased to bed
With aught but Lady Wallace, whom he wed.

Divorce on YouTube

This woman is going through a nasty divorce process, so she ups the ante and posts on youtube the hairy details and some intimate dirt.

Welcome to a new era, a frightening, broadcasted era.

Link: Crazy golddigger or crazy victim?

Hell hath no fury...

Emulation for iphone (last)

Advanced wars is really addictive, you have different units, attack ranges, damage meters, power ups, fog of war, etc. Fun turn based strategy that will keep you glued to your handheld.

The only bone I could pick with it is the dialogue. I've done 10 missions so far and the story is too predictable, full of cheesy one liners and one-dimensional characters. Still the game play is excellent; give it a try if you can.

What's up with this metal slug advance? seems like an original version (not a lame port from a previous game). Nice.

Emulation for iPhone (cont.)

I got the psx4iphone running and tested with the following ISOs (thanks for the correction d00d).

Tenchu Stealth Assassins: 20FPS tops, not really playable even if it looks nice.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night: 25-30FPS, slow and working. Still the speed makes it unplayable.
Diablo: 20FPS. The only psx RPG I was really interested in playing and it's almost playable. Too bad it goes glitchy and crashes when rendering many monsters at the same time.

So right now it's more of a fun exercise than actual functional emulation. Either way the work of Zottd is impressive.

Interesting note: FFVII works really good outside of battles, almost full speed (or so I read), that's a big plus for many.

Emulation for iphone

I have used the NES emulator for iphone for the past few months, it is actually really good, the only complain I have is the controls are somewhat small; yesterday I got the complete collection of games released in America, a dream come true.

Also yesterday, I got the snes4iphone and the genesis4iphone, great work by the author, bigger controls with options for panoramic play. So on one side we have super mario world, mario kart, and donkey kong country, and on the other side sonic, altered beast and golden axe. Everything in your pocket with very decent framerates. Amazing.

I have to try the psx4phone... maybe the framerate is not as good, and the roms are bound to be heavy, but still sounds quite interesting.

Windows 2003 Server 64 bits edition

I haven't post in a while, I was flooded with work because of this precious little OS called windows server 2003 64 bits edition.

We have an architecture that selects updates and drops data from MDB files (MS Access). I had to migrate this architecture from a 32 bits environment to a 64 bits environment, alas; the whole thing was throwing errors.

After some pain I found out that the drivers used to connect to the MDB files do not work on 64 bits. The loathsome ‘Microsoft.Jet.OleDB.4.0’ driver. I tried different patches addressing this problem released by Microsoft, but most of them were geared for the Ithanium platform (which is not our case), therefore useless to us.

The research revealed that this driver and any other 32 bits drivers can and will work on a 64 bits environment if you explicitly force your code to run on x86 instead of x64 as a target machine. Unfortunately our web project does not have this option available (only appears on standard non-web projects) and our primitive IIS does not accept this type of configuration.

I tried configurating the IIS from command line to run on a 32 bits ASP.NET by force but every web site hosted in this server died after the change so I had to rollback and try again.

Time was running out, for us, we just moved the hands upon the clooock (8), so I had to call in the cavalry, our very own MS arquitecture expert provided a solution. We could code all the methods that called this driver in a separate WCF service. This service will be set to run x86 as the target machine, our web service will call this new service and everyone would be happy.

The WCF code was provided by one of our star developers. He had little time, but a lot of wits and a company party upstairs to attend at the time. Beer was calling him, sweet sweet sour beer, beckoning. And he got it right and working. I was seeing the light.

Boom new error. We have user defined data types and they couldn’t be serialized. After a while I decided to change every non-serializable data types to inefficient but tried and true strings. By the way: the service gave an error if you initialize a string with the alias “String”, it only accepted “string”. Weird.

Finally, alongside my project leader, we made it work. Wondrous Saturday at eleven p.m. victory.