dpk’s weblog

I just got Civilization 4 in the mail yesterday.
Amazon sure shipped it quick. I am thoroughly enjoying this game. It plays reasonably well on my laptop, and I haven’t run in to any bugs so far. It’s very similar to the past Civilization games, but now breaks up the monolithic “government” entity into multiple groups, including state religion, which makes for far more interesting development. I’m spreading Islam throughout Germany and Egypt, and I’m loving it!

If you liked the past Civ games, I strongly believe you’ll love Civ4. As far as I can tell, it only added to the fun, without taking anything away.

It was refreshing to be able to install a game, click “update”, and have it find no patches. It’s almost as though the game company tested the software before releasing it, to reduce the launch bugs. This seemingly novel concept, if spread throughout the industry, could lead to a Golden Age of gaming!

10/10. I think I’ll be playing this one for quite a long time.

This has been covered on many sites before — massive ssh attacks. There’s not a whole lot you can do about them except employ firewalls. Anyways, here’s a stat to throw out at ya. Over the past 24 hours we’ve logged 743427 failed or illegal login attempts for sshd network-wide.

I sure enjoy this new show on Comedy Central. I am kind of bummed it appears to have already gone in to re-runs after it’s first week, however. Unless I just got a bum feed, Monday night’s show was a repeat of some show last week. If it was a new one, anyone got a torrent? :)

Gmail is pretty sweet. I moved all of my personal mail to gmail a while back, and have been enjoying its interface. I like that I can search my emails offline, with Google Desktop. There’s just one problem:

1/3 to 1/4th of the mail sent to me is misclassified as spam.

It’s mostly mailing list messages, such as freebsd-questions, debian-users, bugs@dragonfly, etc, but it also catches password change confirmations and other important messages. For some reason there’s no way to disable the spam filtering. The result of all this is that I have to check the spam box frequently, throughout the day, to ensure I’m getting all of my email.

I suspect it’s possible that there are some people on gmail flagging everything as spam, either to intentionally screw up the spam database, or because they just don’t know what they’re doing. I dunno. I’ve contacted Google to try to find a way to disable the spam filtering for my account and to ask, in the alternative, if there’s a way I can prevent so many of my legitimate emails from going to the spam box. The autoresponder they sent went… you guessed it… straight into the spam box.

Gmail is still in beta. It works very well (other than this one significant issue), in my experience. I have tons of invites if anyone wants them. I’ll be watching my inbox and my spam box just in case.

Update: Gmail has confirmed there is no way to disable the spam filtering, so I have to live with handling the false positives for now.

Moving from FreeBSD to Linux, another issue that came up is that apparently Linux’s default terminal information allows the use of the “alternate screen buffer” from vt102 or some such thing. This is what causes less and vi to clear the screen when you exit, screen to not allow you to use xterm’s scrollback buffer, and other such anti-user things that really ought to be disabled by default. (Hell if I wanted that enabled, I’d just run the programs in their own xterm, so when I exit they just disappear completely).

The solution that works for me can be found here:

Exorcising the Evil Alternate Screen

Specifically, I added the line to .Xdefaults, and ran xrdb as specified, and that took care of it. The terminfo stuff at the end of the page didn’t work, but that might just be because I’m using Debian instead of another distro (maybe some look in $HOME/terminfo by default, who knows).

If y’all want a URL shortener, without ever having interstitials, swing on over to http://dpk.net/t/post . Obviously, there’s no way I can guarantee the privacy of the URLs sent through it. But there ya go.

Edited: What I mean by that is that someone could conceivably guess the URLs given out by this tool, and go to where you’ve gone. The URLs are stored in plaintext, too.

A co-worker of mine, Russell, has got the motivation and the lack of experience to really make it as a Bush White House appointee. I urge you to write to your representative and senator today. Let’s make this happen people!

Washington state legislature passed a bill to fund hundreds of transporation projects, funded by a $.03-.09/gallon gas tax. In case you haven’t ever visited Washington state, we have some of the worst traffic ever, and of the major cities I’ve visited recently, some of the hardest to use public transit (it’s mostly centralized in Seattle itself, which isn’t all that big a place to be honest, IMO).

In comes the initiative process to try and undo the legislature’s work again. I-912 was created to undo the gas tax increase, and then effectively halt all of those projects it would have funded.

I strongly believe a gas tax is the way to fund transportation projects. It’s a pretty effective way to charge people for the use of roads, without the overhead and extra expense of a toll system, and it is pretty clear we need road repairs. Cutting existing taxes does not seem to be the way to go if we want these repairs and upgrades to ever happen. If we cut this, we’ll only hurt ourselves. It’s not as though the legislature will suddenly find billions of dollars somewhere that they can instantly allocate to road projects.

(Edited: How embarassing. I mixed up I-901 with I-912. I’m voting “no” on both but that’s no excuse.)