Rant 122 / Poutine = Cheese Fries + Gravy = Sounds Delicious

Emailed most of my fake motivational posters to the BC a couple of days ago. No reply as of today. Either they're lacking in e-manners or they didn't receive it. Whatever.






No idea why I have to wake up at 12am. Been sleeping for 6 hours since 2 days ago, which is 3 hours less than my optimum. Yet I'm still waking at 12am tonight. Heck, I slept at 6.30pm just now and woke at 11.30pm. So I kept myself calm and forced myself to sleep again, but I woke up again at 1am feeling refreshed.

Strange. I'm becoming nocturnal, in an unorthodox sense. Usually nocturnal people sleep in the morning, but I sleep in the evening. Wonder what's going to happen if I ever need to go out in the evening. Probably skip a night of sleep.

But I'll be buying Half-Life 2 Ep1 after exams, which means I'll most likely be playing in the U.S. servers. So my current sleeping hours are perfectly fine for that.Woot! Zombie Panic 2 coming in 20+ days' time!




Another great news for me just now. Code Geass R2 is out and subbed!! RAWR!!





Yay! Another 1M donated in the past 3 hours. Can't remember how many I made before restarting the bot at 1am.





Find that putting my laptop on this large plastic board (that once served as a box cover) only cools it as efficiently as if I placed it on my desk. Its upper left corner where the most active ventilator is always gets very hot. Maybe someday I should get a fan or something and a modified board. Or maybe one of those cooling boards or whatever they're called.

Testing a GIF file again.





Found this article describing the best audio/video system I've ever seen. I was speechless when I saw the pics. See it for yourself. This is probably what rich people do when they finally think they've made enough.




Found this song by Bobby McFerrin called Don't Worry Be Happy. His a cappella songs are pretty good. I guess from the sound of it he makes those drum-beat-like sounds by hitting his chest. Usually these beats coincide with his consonants (sounds of t, d etc), but when those beats are not accompanied by consonants, it sounds like short interrupts in his songs.

Overall I thought he was damn good at a capella. I've always found it hard to keep a the rhythm without some sort of cue/help while singing a song.


Finally got a copy of the film Soylent Green. WOOT! Probably going to watch it after the exams. Can't wait.



Just checked my yahoo mail after a month of neglect and found this email from acmabooks about some minor damage to one of the corners of my copy of Feast for the Crows. They gave me a choice of either a discount of $1.83 or a new copy which would require another 2-14 days. They stated that they were waiting for my reply and the email was 8 days old lol! Anyway of coz it was too little, so I asked for a new copy. A longer wait is fine, since I'm having exams anyway.

Rant 121 / Teh Intarweb - The Only Place In Existence That Is Worse Than Africa

Success! Another 3 millions grains of rice generated and still counting. As of this moment it's at 3.46million grains.

But then, I have been running it at 80 threads since 6pm and it's 6am now. It began spamming at a rate of 11X grains/s at first but right now it's at 81 grains/s. The threads are starting to crash I guess.

And it appears that the bot doesn't need the online dictionaries anymore. It has been relying on its internal dictionary throughout the night! Woot! Godlike internal dictionary FTW!




Found this picture from 7chan yesterday that made me laugh out loud. Apparently there was this thread in somethingaweful.com that asked for people to turn porn pictures into non-porn pictures. What a novel idea! Here's a pic from that thread. Fucking hilarious.


Of course I went to browse through www.somethingaweful.com then, but everything there sux. There was nothing funny to be found, so I didn't bookmark it. In fact this is another website that I'm going to forget about.






A few months back, there was this documentary on Discovery about how the FBI lures pedophiles from the Internet and catches them. The online chat is easy, but then they have a woman with a really squeaky (read girly) voice to handle the phone chat which follows. Throughout these conversations, the FBI woman pretends to be an underage girl, while the pedophile pretends to be a teenager. Through the phone chat, she gets the guy to go to her house, where the door is unlocked, and tells him to strip and wait for him from upstairs. Once he's done, the FBI officers run down the stairs and arrest him. Justice!

But apparently the FBI isn't the only group of people who do such things. Many guys on the net hates pedophiles too, me included. But this is how some of them handle it:




This isn't the only screenshot of such conversations that I've found, but this is the best among all. It has also helped reinforce the idea in me that there are no girls on the internet, only guys with voice-changer programs. "Girls on the net" is a myth, just like masturbation among Asians and that girls surf internet pr0n.




Hmm... I'm testing an animated GIF here...




My books aren't here yet!!! But then I haven't been reading novels much these days. Need to keep myself at minimum energy so that I can maintain my sleeping hours till my body clock is tuned properly. Better to be damn shag at the proper time than to be "kinda tired", at least for now.

One of my books that I ordered is out of stock!! Rise of Endymion! Gah! How can I miss that book when the sequel is arriving with the rest of them?? This means I can't read 2 books out of the 8 (I think) that I ordered. BS!!! Bloody Acmabooks! Update your website properly pls!

Guess I will just have to wait....





Was reading the featured article on Wikipedia on Suleiman the Magnificient, one of the greatest Sultans of the Ottoman Empire. What really caught my attention was not how great he was, but how sad things turned out after him. One of his eight sons, Mustafa, was known as the best choice to be his successor, so talented that the Austrian Ambassador hoped that his country would not have to deal with him in the future. Luckily for him, due to court intrigues, Mustafa was killed by his father.

The Sultan who succeeded Suleiman in the end was a useless guy who spent all his time getting drunk and left all his duties to his Vizier, which should mean his Prime Minister or something like that. It was very fortunate for him that this Vizier was a very good general/ruler too, so the empire was not greatly affected. But then, he did not help his empire expand or grow - all he had accomplished was to maintain the status quo. Compared to his father, he was shit. It was claimed that he died when he slipped and fell in the bath while drunk.

Then most of the Sultans in the subsequent generations were pretty useless too. Basically the decline of the empire began with the death of Suleiman. Even though some of the later guys had some successes somewhere somehow, they were not enough.

For example one of them is described by historians to have been the closest, among all the Sultans in Ottoman history, to toppling their northern rival, Russia. But he did not quite manage to accomplish that because of riots within his empire. He had to return and pacify his people, and by doing so, he missed that golden opportunity.

Another example was one of the Sultans around the World War One era, who started to implement reforms to save his country. By then, the Ottoman Empire was really militarily impotent. But because of the size of the Ottoman Empire, there was a great inertia against his changes and everything he tried was either too little or strongly disapproved by everyone.

After all that, the Empire disintegrated during the period between the two World Wars (specifically in 1922) and the final remnant of this once-superpower is now known as Turkey. Yes there is still a Sultan(Ertuğrul Osman Osmanoğlu, Prince of the Ottoman Empire (full title : Devletli Necabetli Ertuğrul Osman Efendi Hazretleri) )but he doesn't rule at all nor given a place anywhere. Heck, he was only given Turkish citizenship in the recent decades and he is still living in the U.S. It's pretty sad how royalty lives when the kingdom dies, especially if they are compared with their ancestors.

On a lighter note, I want to try their Turkish coffee!!!!! If I ever visit Turkey someday, there are two things that must be done: visit Hagia Sophia and drink Turkish coffee. Man, they make their coffee sound damn good!






Feminism. How do I put it? It's fine with me, but only up to a certain degree. Women want to be treated equally. They want to have the same jobs, same opportunities, same sort of lives as men. Basically, they do not want to be seen as the weaker sex. Fine.

On one hand, they want to be courted more than they want to do any courting. They want guys to ask them out. They like guys who treat them like princesses during dates. Lesbians are acceptable, gay men aren't. For safe sex, men are the ones who have to cover up their sensitive parts while the ladies get the full pleasure. To look gorgeous, all that a woman needs are breast implants. Nightclubs only have Ladies' Nights, never Gentlemen's Nights. When a female accuses a male of molest/rape, she always get the sympathies. When a male accuses a female of molest/rape, he always get the ridicules. When a female stumbles into a male washroom, she only gets strange looks and curious glances. When a male stumbles into a female washroom, all hell breaks loose. When a woman cries in front of a camera, she is a victim. When a man cries in front of a camera, he is a dramafag.

But on the other hand, to argue for the feminists, we do have several valid reasons. Women give birth. Women have periods. Rape/molest victims are usually female. No one seriously believes that Virgin Mary was really a virgin. Britney Spears. Women have often been oppressed in the past. Balding women are much more unacceptable than balding men.

But let's look at things from another point of view. If men are the ones who give birth to babies, imagine how many babies would have been born alcoholics. Imagine how big the penis would need to be. Imagine the pain for the ladies then.

Men don't have periods. But men have the insatiable lust that drives them crazy, force them to make stupid choices and be easily manipulated.

No one really cares if Virgin Mary was a virgin.

Britney Spears.

Women have frequently been the actual rulers behind the kings and emperors of many kingdoms and empires. There have also been many women who are as powerful, if not more powerful, than other men of their times.

Men bald more easily.

Finally, some women are just not that attractive, yet they seem to believe that they are. Evidence: girls who wear revealing clothes when they are not well-endowed (either have too little or too much). Confidence is fine, but if you end up being single forever after demanding too much from the guys, don't blame it on them. Same for the men - don't blame the women.

And if anyone is still wondering why more people are remaining single as the years go by, blame it on feminism. Here's a clear example.

Rant 120 / "Pwn" Is Not "Pawn", But A Stronger Version Of "Own", Which Means "Trash"

Found 2 problems with the Ricemaker bot.

First, I was wrong when I guessed that the bot crashes due to Connection Time Out's. In fact, I find that threads can disappear without crashing the bot. I discovered that when I used 5 threads while doing something else. When I checked the bot after a while, only 3 threads were appearing. Therefore, I concluded that crashing threads =/= crashing bot.

Second, apparently something is very wrong with its usage of dict.org. Started last night, when I found its accuracy at 5% and generating rice 10+ grains/s with 30 threads. So I expanded the command prompt it was in and saw that every single entry that uses dict.org to check for definition gives a wrong answer. Absolutely no idea why. When I tested dict.org myself, the definitions I get were correct.

I guess I have to make it skip dict.org now. Another command to add to its starting commands.... it's already pretty long and inconvenient as it is now:

ricemaker.py -t50 -l2 -m7

and now I have to add "-bdict.org" too.





Tried baking salmon just now. The notion of baking fish started last night when I woke up. I remembered this piece of salmon left in the freezer for more than a month and was wondering if it was still edible. Since it was probably way past its expiry date, I took it out and opened it to see if there was any odour.

It was frozen, so that was no smell. Being too lazy to wait for it to thaw before testing again, I sprinkled black pepper on it liberally, wrap it with its original wrapper and put it in my fridge for a slow thaw cum marination.

At 7.30am, I started to prepare my breakfast. Took out the salmon, thought it smelled slightly wrong. But I decided that the baking process will solve the problem. With a piece of butter-covered aluminium foil, I wrapped the salmon up neatly and placed it in the oven. Using the maximum heat at 230 degrees C, I baked it for 14mins.

The recipes I checked on the Net either stated about 17mins at 175 degrees C or "depends on the size of the salmon". So I decided on 230 degrees at 14mins, which is about the same, to me.

When I took it out finally, it didn't smell as wrong anymore, but it was not cooked thoroughly, so I put it back in and baked for another 15mins at 230 degrees.

At last, it was done, after 30mins of waiting. I eagerly poured it out, with the melted butter and all, onto my plate. I cut out a small piece and put it into my mouth. It didn't take long for it to happen. What struck me at that point was the truth. It was not my 1337 skills that affected my cooking. Not was it the lack of spices and stuff.

The fish was really way past its expiry date.







--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WARNING! SKIP THE FOLLOWING PART IF YOU ARE STILL AN INNOCENT LITTLE KID WHO CANNOT STAND EXTREMELY OBSCENE IDEAS!!! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!




Was looking through a list of videos in some forums yesterday when I saw this video's description: why u shouldn't stick something into your urethra.

Being a sane young man, I thought it was a funny video about dildos stuck in pussys, so I clicked on it. While I waited for it to load, I checked its comments. And thank whatever powers that are out there that I did. The comments ranged from short ones like "..." to something about "forks and pens" to extremely tortured screams like "OMFG YOU SICK BASTARD!"

That kinda made me close the browser tab right away. Close shave, but the idea still gives me the shivers now. Seriously.

Brrr...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------









Noticed that one of the worst time to use the Net is about 8-10am. My bot crashed a lot during these few hours whenever I have 10 threads or more running. People shouldn't surf for pr0n so early in the morning. Kidding. I know everyone checks his/her email and etc at this time when they arrive in their offices, or even at home. Sucks.





After the last few days' torture, my sleeping hours have finally stabilized at a more acceptable time. I am beginning to start sleeping at 6pm and waking at 12am. Happened the day before and yesterday. This is much better than sleeping 6am, at least for now. Sleeping at 6am is the best because I get to do everything in the silence of the night, but only when school is not an important factor.






Seriously, why "Free Tibet"? Those protesters are morons. Tibet doesn't need to be free. Tibet should not be free! Shit, if Tibet wasn't part of China all these years it would still be the mountain shithole today that it once was. If not for China's help, they wouldn't have developed shit! Even the Dalai Lama understands that.

What the Dalai Lama is a measure of autonomy. He doesn't want Tibet to be separate from the wealth of China. He just want a separate system for Tibet. But all those idiots with their ignorance and hot blood just want to "Free Tibet". How can an independent Tibet survive in the world today? What do they have but rocks? They don't even have enough flat land to build on!
Entrepot? LOL!!!

The "Free Tibet" supporters should read a little more on what they're really protesting for, or do the world a favour and shoot themselves in the head together with the skeptics of global warming.

And many of those reports we see are phrased to make it sound different from what really happened. Like the casualties. Not all reports on the Net mentioned who were killed, and without stating that it was mainly the Han Chinese who were the victims, many people would assume that it was the Tibetans who were killed fighting Chinese troops.

True that the Tibetan genes are probably going to be replaced by the Chinese genes in the future, but without China to depend on, they're going to live really shitty lives. According to the Wikipedia's article on Tibet's economy, "the Central Chinese government exempts Tibet from all taxation and provides 90% of Tibet's government expenditure."

Free Tibet. Genius with a capital "G".

So, should they lose their Tibetan identity or live in poverty and under constant threat of a Chinese invasion? And who's going to support their independence? Are they going to be like Taiwan, sucking up to the U.S. 24/7 just to prevent China from completely pwning them with a sneeze?

Both ways are shit, but if they would just think about their descendants, perhaps turning into Chinese is a preferable choice compared to making their kids' future look dark as Hell. I mean, all Chinese people have ancestors who suffered that fate. When the First Emperor conquered all the kingdoms, they lost their identities. It became worse when he unified the Chinese language and burnt all those books. It happened again at the end of the famous war between the 3 kingdoms. So, Tibet, you aren't anything special in the eyes of the Chinese.

So far in every leg of the Olympics torch relay, there have been pro-Tibetan protesters making trouble for the torch-bearers. This is sad and stupid. The world is full of fools.

Pro-Tibetan separatists,






I have spoken.

Rant 119 / It's Not That Bad. It's Worse.

I found this website www.7chan.org yesterday. Full of Internet trash. Of course, even in the rubbish dump, there are sometimes hidden gems to be found. So it is the same with this website. I'd say that 90% of its contents is junk that people need not see, but once in a while I find something funny that is worth the search.

There is porn, but I don't need to go any further into that. Generally, I don't touch such sections since there are usually things that I don't want to see in there. Like Goatse (/shiver). But they have a rather large section of it, so it's worth a mention.

The best section should be their /wp/, or wallpapers section, where users request and post nice wallpapers that are often clean, i.e. no names and websites on them. Took a few of their sky-themed wallpapers.

Their /b/, a.k.a. random section, is the essence of the Internet. That is where all random shit goes, and when I say "shit", I mean shit. To summarize what this section contains in the style of the American netizens, I need only 3 words: "fail" and "EPIC FAIL".

This should describe most of the anonymous users.

But then this is...

So, really, 90% of everything you find is trash. However, there is still that pulling force that makes me want to search for forums like this. It's...



According to Wikipedia, this website is also a "stronghold" of Anonymous. I'm really only interested in their Project Chanology. Though Scientology hasn't affected Singapore yet, thanks to its strict censorship, I'm still somewhat unhappy that it is successful in attaining tax-exempt status in countries like Australia, using the reason that it is a religion.

Fuck that bullshit. Non-violent protests FTW! In some of the protests, they actually rickrolled the Church of Scientology (CoS). Utterly pointless, but funny, thus catches attention.

To understand rickrolling, one must first see the Wiki definition of "rickrolling".

There, if you've clicked on the link, you've just been rickrolled.

If you still don't understand this, imagine you are reading an article on the net, then you spot a link that says something that attracts your eyes, like "New C&C3 Expansion Announced! Click here to see trailer!". You click on it, just like the way you click on this link. All you see is this campy music video of Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up".

It is basically a trick, a joke. Instead of saying,"You've been tricked!", with this you say," You've been rickrolled!" Thus "rickroll" means "to trick someone into watching the music video of Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley". And in the case of Project Chanology, they played the song during the protest, and apparently this is also a form of "rickrolling".






The following picture has a good point...


So that's it for now. Can't put too many pics or it'll take too long to load.

Rant 118 / Divided We Stand, Together We Fall

Slept quite early yesterday - somewhere between 1830 - 1900hr. Was quite happy, expecting to wake up at about 4am like my bro, since I slept quite little that night before.

But alas, life doesn't always turn out the way you expect it would! I woke up in the dark, refreshed, and stretched out my right arm to get my handphone. I flicked it up, and looked at the time. WTF!?!?! 11.47pm?!?!? I couldn't believe my eyes, so I went out to look around. Sure enough, my mum was still hard at work in front of my bro's 20+ inch wide screen LCD monitor (She sleeps at around 1-2am).

Holy Shit! I thought my lack of sleep will help me get through the times when my body is becoming accustomed to staying awake, namely 12-4am. But no, it didn't help. So I decided not to sleep in the morning, not to sleep during the new sleeping hours of my body clock (10am), not to sleep in the afternoon, and held on till evening. With help from 3 packets of instant tea (yep I'm sensitive to caffeine, thanks to my abstinence from coffee and tea, and my rare contact with Coca Cola)

So I'm still quite awake, even if it's been 17 hours since I came awake. I totally couldn't mug after I woke up last night, so I played till 7am. Neverwinter Nights: Mask of the Betrayer. Then since my mum wasn't up yet, I decided to cook some breakfast for myself to make myself stay awake with the energy input and the work (not because of hunger). Surprisingly, sleep deprivation doesn't make me feel hungry. Yes my stomach does growl at the appropriate hours but I don't have the motivation to eat. My mouth stays as dry as normal times even when I see food.

So I cooked a heavy breakfast again. Didn't care about my bro. He microwaved last night's leftover fried rice when I went to the kitchen. Anyway he wouldn't want to eat such evil stuff that I was planning to cook anyway. Asked him once, yesterday morning.



Felt like eating bite-sized buttered toast, so I need to cut them properly. With crust, because the crust makes it more crunchy and gives it more "substance". Or else it'll feel like chewing on air.


Yes, that's my "chopping board". I had to balance the paper plate on the round cap and still cut the bread as softly as I can. Turned out pretty good, eh? The usual area where the chopping board is placed is occupied by a pile of vegetables that my mum bought. She didn't expect me to use that space.


And the beef patties. The main course. The almighty processed meat. Of course I didn't cook 10. Managed to tear out 2 frozen patties, whole, and put the rest back.


Eggs. Natural, chicken eggs full of wholesome goodness. Fresh enough to eat raw, but not too fresh that I can still smell the chicken vagina. Not that I'd be able to recognize the odour even if I actually did catch a whiff of it, of course, but you know what I mean.


The toasts, buttered before toasting, and toasted to a state of post-perfection. Man, it was only 4mins at 230 degrees Celsius!


Closer look at the better ones. What did you expect? It was 7am and I was damn bored!


The final product. Note the broken yolk of the upper egg and that the two patties are stacked. Also note the black patches on the top patty. The taste of the patty wasn't affected by the black patches. It may look more seriously burnt in the pic because of the colour contrast, but it wasn't that bad. But the broken yolk was unforgivable! Those eggs were fresh! Theoretically.

That was what I ate this morning and I washed them all down with a huge mug of iced milk tea.

Moral of the story:
a) if that didn't look appetizing to you, never, ever ask a sleep-deprived gamer to cook for you.
b) if that looked delicious, try cooking it! It's easy. Substitute patties with bacon strips to make it even easier.





Finally read the article of "ethics of file sharing" on Wikipedia. I like this reason especially:

A further argument in favour of file sharing is that not all of its users would buy all of the material that they download. In other words, one illegal download will not immediately translate to one lost sale, as many anti-piracy groups maintain. No study has yet been done to ascertain the proportion of users that would buy any of the material they download, if downloading were not available, and there is no currently available method to determine the number of sales that are represented by a given number of downloads.

This is so true. If there were no PS2 games available online or being pirated in the streets back then, no one would have even bought the console itself! They were so damned expensive! Who would have bought Xenosaga Episode 1 for a price that exceeds S$50? Well, other than the die-hard fans.






Then for the opponents, they have:

Opponents of file sharing argue that not only does sharing files decrease the income of the actors and bands; it especially affects the staff that works for them. For the film industry, the set builders and makeup artists take the fall. If someone downloads a movie from the internet, that person may not go to see the movie in theaters or buy the DVD. If that happens then the production studios make less profit or may not be able to recuperate the high costs of production. This leads to salary decreases for employees. It also leads to less financial backing for both mainstream and independent filmmakers because investing thousands or millions of dollars in a movie becomes even riskier.


This is, in my opinion, not exactly true. Think again.

First, do movie stars really deserve the millions they make just for one movie? Do certain singers really deserve the millions they make just by singing about 13 songs that are really digitally enhanced to make it sound better than the crap it really was?

In my opinion, no. They are not contributing to society as much as people like, say, doctors in your neighbourhood clinic. Heck, even mushroom farmers are contributing more to the world than actors. Imagine a world where mushrooms are incredibly expensive, then imagine a world where movies are not affordable by the middle-class people. Which is worse?


Second, if a singer can't sing and requires digital enhancements to sound good, if a movie has no plot whatsoever and relies purely on special effects to attract its audience, should the singer be paid more than the guy on the controls and should the actors be paid more than the special effects specialists?

In the first case, the singer is merely selling her looks. The songs could have been sung by someone else, and with enough digital enhancements they will sound like her voice, only with better singing technique. So, if people refuse to admit that they buy her albums for her looks, then they cannot deny that the guy who improved her songs should be paid more because he's the one who made what they say they're buying it for - the songs! The singer should be paid less, not the employees.

In the second case, what makes the movie sell? The actor or the explosions? Take the latest Die Hard sequel as an example. Without Bruce Willis, the movie wouldn't have sold well. Without the stuntmen, computer effects experts, explosives specialists and etc, the movie would have sold in the first week and gain notoriety for being shit by the second week. Just like Snakes on a Plane. So if anyone should take a pay cut, it definitely isn't any of them!

Third, when it comes to investments being riskier, that's bull! In the first place, they shouldn't even invest in shit movies like Meet the Spartans! They degrade the intelligence of American civilization. Yes, it sold pretty well, but what does it say about the viewers who support this kind of film? And it sold well only because it wasn't released in the holiday seasons, when the good movies are out.

If investors become less willing to take risks, perhaps they will have stricter criteria on what to invest in. Perhaps Hollywood will stop flooding the world with shit. Perhaps they will even hire scriptwriters who actually have this apparently close-to-extinction-among-scriptwriters talent called creativity. Maybe, just maybe, Hollywood will even produce its own original horror movie, instead of the run-of-the-mill gory thrillers! What a dream!

And speaking of that, I think Hollywood is doing to the U.S. exactly what the Coliseum had done to Rome. Back in the past, the Roman Empire had many problems, like rebellions in its newly conquered states. These generated other problems like the huge amount of money needed to be spent on its military, and etc. But with widespread and very accessible entertainment for the masses, the public remained happy or satisfied with their world. Kind of like a drug for the people.

And that is what Hollywood is doing now, it seems to me. By flooding the American minds with harmless, mindless entertainment, the people forget their troubles more often while filmmakers make massive amounts of money helping them do that.

If it very risky to make movies, then why are there so many box office flops these days? I mean, why do so many people want to try bad scripts and gamble that they will sell? It's risky! Isn't it logical that they should think more about it before spending millions of dollars on it?

So if it gets riskier, will they not read through the scripts a few more times, do more research on the directors and etc before making the actual movie? Then won't we get better films more often? Then won't people stop downloading so many movies because more movies are actually worth the ticket prices??

Anyone can tell you that watching a film at home can never beat watching it in the cinema. The main thing that stops people from paying for the movies that they don't believe they are worth the price of the tickets. Is it not true that the price is determined by the customers? If the price is not worth the product, potential buyers will not pay for it.

So if more and more people download movies, doesn't it just mean that the movies aren't worth the current ticket prices? Ditto for song albums.

So my argument is that if more people are turning to illegal downloads, it's only because they are willing to sacrifice the quality of the experience so that they won't have to pay a price that they don't believe to be worth it.

You know, I believe I've said something very similar long ago...

Rant 117 / Reading Olympos... Again!

Made a new record of over 2 million grains in 7 hours. Actually, it was about 2.8M in 7 hours. Which is roughly 10kg/hr, taking the weight of a grain of rice to be 0.025g. That is when I use 50 threads. And it didn't crash! That is the most important thing! At this moment it has generated over 2.9M grains, and is still going at 106.6 grains/s. Woot! All the theoretical counts I made in the past were nothing compared to what is displayed now.

Now I can't sleep. Managed to fall asleep at 8pm last night. Was quite happy, but woke up feeling energetic... at 11.30pm. So I slept a total of 3.5 hrs last night. Worse is the fact that I've been sleeping at about 10am the last 3 days and waking at various times between 1-5pm. Today I'm not going sleep in the morning and I'm going to do what I can to sleep at a healthy time at night, say, 7pm earliest. I drank 3 cups of instant tea just now, plus I made myself a breakfast that consisted of an omelette, 3 Chinese buns (the sort that looks like a purse), some beans and 2 beef patties. Lots of carbohydrates and fats.

If I don't sleep within 2 hrs due to the heavy breakfast, I should be able to stay awake until dusk. If I make it to 11.30pm, that would mean I went 24hrs without sleep. Of course I wouldn't do that, if I can help it. I read that it's very unhealthy to go without sleep for so long.





Forgot again that oil is different from water in that I don't need to see bubbles to know that it is hot enough. Well, almost forgot. And I forgot that the deep frozen patties need to be dried, or at least with the ice/snow scraped off before frying. LOL! It was damn loud just now when I put in the first patty into the oil. Lucky for me I put it in using the spatula. The oil splattered all over the stove.

Then I almost forgot that the oil is too hot to follow the instructions on the packet, which is to fry each side for 5 mins. I fried the first for 2 mins before remembering this and turned it just in time to see the ring of black forming on the underside. So I flipped the other one too, and saw a lesser ring on that patty.

Fried both for another min and put them on my plate. Didn't care about the black parts. They were too little to affect the taste. The center was barely cooked for the second piece, but at least it wasn't raw.

Not too bad for someone who had been up since 11.30pm. =P






Alright. The sleepiness is coming. The test begins. Will 3 cups of tea work? Or will it just help me get a stomachache? I always get a stomachache when I drink tea/coffee, probably because I rare drink them. I see these 2 drinks as delicious medicine, something that cures fatigue in the short term. I don't drink them unless I see a use for it. Like now, when I need to change my sleeping hours.

If this fails, I'm switching to coffee tomorrow. Two cups of it.






10 minutes after my last check on the bot, it has finally crashed. I estimate it to be at just over 2.9M grains. The instructions from the author is that I should press Ctrl + C to end it, but it doesn't work now. I take this as proof that it has crashed.

Restarted it with 30 threads, minimum rest time at 2 seconds, maximum rest time at 7 seconds. The error I saw was Operation Time Out for one of the threads when it was supposed to display something. It should be that the server's response to that thread was suddenly stopped. I believe it was due to the bandwidth being used by more people at this time, thus getting more unstable. So 30 threads for now.

Just in case this needs an explanation again, each thread is an invisible internet browser that the bot has opened. In this case, the browser is for www.freerice.com. And rest time refers to the time it pauses between each answer to simulate human response time so that it won't be obvious that it's a bot.

And it has now 8898 words in its internal dictionary! Talk about fast learners! Those guys at freerice.com must have been really busy finding all those words.

Hmm... 25 grains/s.. this is merely a quarter of what I was getting just now with 50 threads and rest time between 4-9 seconds...

And it crashed again!!

I guess the connection must be pretty bad now. Not that I'm surprise. It's 9.14am after all, when people are reaching their office or just waking up and checking their emails and stuff. I often get bad pings on NS around this time.

Restarting bot with 10 threads and rest time between 2-5 seconds.

So far so good. 99.19% accuracy, at 22.2 grains/s. 5k grains and no crash yet.






My medic in Urban Dead is a zombie again. Treweeke Mall fell and is now in ruins. The main zombie horde has left for greener pastures (pun intended), while I have no idea where to run to. This is hopeless, there is no green zone left that lasts for more than 2 days. The Big Bash has finally revealed the true weakness of the game: the search rate of Revivification Syringes at 12.5% max is really too low, and requiring 10AP to revive a zombie is too expensive. It is too easy to die and become a zombie, but too difficult to rise as a human again.

I'm just going stop playing this guy and concentrate on the other medic I have in the other map they created to celebrate the release of Diary of the Dead. Yeah, they created a map of Monroeville and tested some new game mechanics with it. Entry is now totally restricted though, so no new characters can be made. They also tested the idea of having no Revivification Syringes in this map, and zombies can be killed permanently with Headshot, a skill that only level ten guys can have. These two ideas conform to the modern lore on zombies, that they have to be shot in the head to really die, and zombies cannot become human again.

Rant 116 / Generating 100 Grains Of Rice Per Second

After reading the discussion between the few authors of freerice bots in the blog of the guy who wrote a 50-thread bot with Ruby, I found out that the first bot I used, the one written in Python, was actually able to multi-thread too. So I abandoned the newer bots and reinstalled Python.

Now, I have set the number of threads of the bot to 50, so it is now running 50 browers of www.freerice.com at the same time. And it seems that he has improved the bot, making it display the rate of donation per second and the total number of grains can now exceed 100k (it used to reset at 100k).

Also it displays the amount of time the browsers are resting between each question, so that it won't look exactly like a bot. Right now it is resting at the default option of random number of seconds between 3-6. So the result looks as if 50 very smart people are playing it.

As of this moment it is donating at a rate of 105 grains/s, though I've seen it hit 114 just half an hour ago. Probably because all 50 threads are at level 50 now and makes a few mistakes here and there. Those guys at freerice.com actually does input new words now and again. Accuracy of the bot, according to its calculator, is at 87.95%.

Another aspect I like about this bot is that it has a very large vocabulary of over 2.5k words even before I first started it. After starting it, the bot actually learns from its mistakes, but that's just like every other freerice bot I've come across. In addition, it checks with dict.org if its internal dictionary does not provide the right answer. So, at 87.95% accuracy, it means that 12.05% of all the words it has seen so far are not available at dict.org.

Anyway, I can set the number of threads to any number I want. I tried 20 at first and there as no problem. So I tested 50 and went to do something else. I returned after 15mins and checked with my brother to see if I'm using too much bandwidth. I didn't, so I'm going to try to find out my limits gradually. I'll increase the number by 10 every time I turn it on, until it affects my games. If 50 threads can go up to a rate of 114grains/s, imagine how much 100 can do!

Even at 105grains/s, it will generate 378000 grains/hr, and taking a grain of rice to weigh 0.025g each, that is a whopping 9.45kg/hr. If I leave it on for as long as I'm awake, which is at least 14 hours a day, and assuming that it doesn't crash, that is a minimum of 132.3 kg/day!!! I can freaking feed a village or even a town at this rate all by myself!

Of course, nothing is perfect. It turns out that this bot does crash. After generating 110k grains of rice, it finally stopped for reasons I don't understand. By reading where it ended, I guess that it was probably because the website did not reply to one of the answers submitted quick enough, and the bot didn't know what to do, thus it crashed.

To solve this, I'm now trying to increase the minimum amount of time it can rest, from 3-6s to 4-6s. Hope that works. Or else, I can run 100 threads that rest 5-10s. Logically, this would put the same amount of workload, but I'm not exactly a pro in this matter.






Yesterday my bro found a game that combines Heroes of Might and Magic V with MMORPG elements. He tried it for 2 hours, and what he found was that quests take the form of small HOMMV maps with only 1 way to move. Hero has a city that can almost identical to those in HOMMV, but with different graphics. You have one hero, who buys armies in your city that other people cannot access (kinda lame here, coz what's the point of having a fantastic city in a multiplayer game if not to show it off?), and goes for quests. He did not try anymore after finding out this much.

I believe there has to be PVP elements in there, probably a duel between armies or etc. But it really is interesting if there are co-op quests in the game, and how they can be implemented.

The graphics of the armies are almost identical to the originals for some (eg zombies look just the same, except with a really long knife), but quite different for others (skeletons wield only huge swords here). There are also new units, like the lizard archers. Lastly the numbers are quite different in this game, like the fact that skeletons have 20 HP and ballistas have 2500 HP.

Unfortunately, this game is produced by a Chinese company and in beta phase, which means there are no English versions yet. So if I play this game, I will be a really slow player because I take some time to read Chinese words.

The game looks interesting, especially since I have played HOMMV before. Mixing it with a MMO is something I didn't expect. No matter, since my bro has deleted the game and forgot the link to the website. Perhaps someday if it gets popular, I may try it.