WALL•E was amazingly good. Funny and endearing, with a lot of character in the robot designs. The obligatory cultural/political message was handled discretely enough that it didn’t feel like it was being jammed down my throat. And, the animation was, naturally, very impressive. Nothing against the rest of the movie, but the first fourty five or so minutes, when the narrative was driven entirely by robots’ physical mannerisms and occasional utterances of nouns, was perfect. Also, I enjoyed that the short before the movie was basically Portal gags put to film.

More movies need to be as accessible yet original as this one was.

Been playing Nexuiz semi-regularly (for me, anyway) lately. Good way to blow off steam, even if I’m not conscious of it. Anyway, I was thinking about how bots are named for first-person shooters. Names like Death, and Paranoia, and Roadkill (okay, not so sure about the last one). Dark names, that invoke emotions of rage and fear. That’s good and everything, but I was thinking that maybe they should be named a bit more accurately.

I can almost imagine it now. “Walks Backwards Way Too Much has joined the game.” “cUrIoUsLy InEpT aT rOcKeTs has exploded.” “bss was fragged by Gerald Ford.” “You fragged The Bot Who Can’t Seem to Comprehend Gravity and Really, It Just Walked Off the Platform, but You Shot It Last, So Here’s A Point.”

It’s possible I don’t really buy into the atmosphere of these games as much as others, though.

rsnapshot, the remote filesystem snapshot utility, is a nice little tool. It uses rsync to copy a filesystem from one point to another, using a diff-based system to keep multiple snapshots and only copy/download the changed files into the new snapshot, leaving past versions of the backup(s) hanging around for as long as you want.

For example, you could have a set of backups made every four hours, another every day, another every week, and so on, for as long as you want to retain past filesystem states. And if a file never changed, there is only one file in the backup for all of the times it appears in your snapshots. Pretty slick.

My project today was installing it on leto, the NAS box here at home. It has over 2 terabytes of disk space, so it’s a perfect candidate for keeping all sorts of backups. Here’s a small little config, which copies what I think are going to be all of the important parts of Empty Matter:

/etc/rsnapshot.conf

snapshot_root   /share/snapshots/

# ...

interval        hourly  12
interval        daily   14
interval        weekly  8
interval        monthly 24

# ...

backup  root@emptymatter.org:/etc/              emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/home/             emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/root/             emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/var/www/          emptymatter/
backup  root@emptymatter.org:/var/log/          emptymatter/

That keeps an large (perhaps even excessive) number of backups in /share/snapshots/ (owned and only readable by root). We’ll see if it’s overkill or not, but I’m expecting a lot of my big files to not change, and thus be hard-linked multiple times without re-copying the files. But I’m always wishing I could go back to old config files, so this is an attempt to thwart future regret with that problem.

Other hosts will be added soon. Finally, I have a use for that NAS. :)

Edit: another useful link: Using Rsnapshot and SSH.

Celebrated the migration of emptymatter.org with a long-overdue session of Nexuiz with the #lh fellows, served by the new version of my favorite (well, only) VPS. Pings were low, as intended by the move, and Xen handled the dedicated server’s load (mostly network traffic) like a champ. Very awesome. emptymatter.org has of course hosted Nexuiz in the past, so this is nothing surprising, but an actual appreciable improvement is worth being excited about.

Also fun: decided to upgrade my DS experience, bought a CycloDS Evolution and EZ Flash 3-in-1, so that I can have more storage (currently 8 GB), and play around with GBA homebrew as well. The CycloDS Evolution is much more polished than the R4DS, and I’ve been very pleased with my purchases thus far.

The real excitement for the past two days has been the Linode, however. The conversion was a bit bumpy, at first, but everything seems good now. I almost wish I had an excuse to buy a second, or at the very least throw more at my current one. Maybe I’ll concoct some scheme and bring up yet another service…

And we’re back. Now in Newark, now on Xen, it’s happy times all around. May reboot once or twice more to make sure everything is sane, and I still am waiting for RDNS to repropagate, but otherwise, everything is looking good so far.

Took a couple hours to shuffle my disk images from Fremont to Newark, and Xen booted pretty much without a hitch. Grew my disk and added a backend IP while I was at it. Linode, you rock.

In case you were wondering why I moved to Newark, it was mainly to reduce server pings in Nexuiz. California is just too far to go for us northern midwest/east coast fellows.

Some time within the next week or so, everything on emptymatter.org will be going into downtime, as I’m planning to move from Fremont to Newark, and converting to Xen while I’m at it. I’m told the conversion is not a long process, but it will mean my server’s IP will be changing, which means I have DNS updates to do, which means there’s a delay in that propagating throughout the Internet, and so on.

No idea when I’ll decide to do it; odds are emptymatter.org will just suddenly go dark for a while. You’ve been warned.

Linode turns 5, gives away 20% more disk to every account.

Once I win this round of voice survivor, I’m going to reboot. =)

Finally got Sender Policy Framework support added to my Postfix install like I said I would. HowtoForge was a big help, but I had to use g-cpan to generate Mail::SPF ebuilds. Just one of those things I was surprised wasn’t already in Gentoo.

Next up: testing that SpamAssassin supports SPF and penalizes failures. I think I have had everything in place to do that properly for a while, now, but I never actually checked…

Two or so weeks ago, I finally finished the climax of Etrian Odyssey (commonly known as the “end boss"), in the sense that I saw the ending for the game, not conquered the game — there is still another stratum and a couple quests left to topple. All in all, it was a very enjoyable (and enjoyably frustrating, at times) experience, and the game has left me with a small sense of real accomplishment. I did not beat it, so much as I did pass its trials, and Etrian Odyssey II sounds like it will be just as enjoyable as the first.

In the end, EO is probably one of my favorite RPGs, which is saying a lot. There are of course the common favorites: Baldur’s Gate II, Final Fantasy VI, etc., but Etrian shines for what it isn’t. It is not a glossly conglomoration of drama, overpowered combat with spiky-haired, pencil-thin kids, and card games. It isn’t action intermingled between cutscenes. It doesn’t hold your hand through half of the game. It uses the DS’s stylus in a goddamn reasonable manner.

EO knows what it is and embraces it. There is a dungeon, and apparently you’ve assembled a gang of people who consider themselves adventurers and dungeon delvers, so what you have to do is obvious. Round peg, round hole.

That reminds me of a sentiment sprinkled here and there in the press for the game — the game keeps plot sparce and PC character development nil so that the player can imagine their own stories and motivations, however reasonable or not. In my game, the guild was named after the gaming group, and the characters were all friends from the group. In my mind, their motivation was simple, and as just described — much like how we get together to play D&D, the quest for the group was running head-first into danger together, sharing in accomplishment and defeat, the joy of a close battle and the fear of an even closer one. And I pictured myself as the guildmaster; not a participant, but the orchestrator, the one getting the party into the messes they so gleefully got themselves out of.

It sounds hokey, but it worked for me. I catch myself every now and then, seeing friends’ D&D characters in a slightly EO light: Mark’s cleric a stalwart center for the party, Aaron’s exemplar brute force in combat. Granted, the class selection for the characters were inspired to varying degrees by their then-current D&D characters, but nevertheless, EO had no small part in making the characters of both games feel a bit more real.

Off that, however, and back onto the actual game. The supplied plot is decent, but low on surprises; surprising, however, is the writing supplied for the town’s NPCs, a couple being presented well enough that you can become momentarily attached to their unanimated, never-leaving-the-shop lives. But, in the end, it’s all about exploration and combat, which it delivers superbly. The game is one that dials into its desired formula (backs-to-the-wall difficult dungeon diving), assembles it into an old-school feel what with the first-person view, the mapping, and the PC-88 original soundtrack, and supplies it throughout, without distraction or deviation.

Not incidentally, I think this may be the first RPG I’ve beaten since Neverwinter Nights, another favorite. Currently competing for the next slot is any of The World Ends With You, Rondo of Swords, and Final Fantasy III. Hopefully, those won’t take me five+ years…

Software deploy Tuesday went horribly. That’s not why I’m writing, though.

American video game commercials suck.