Minecraft – TNT Explosion
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Minecraft – The U.S. Capitol Building by Alizée Fan
This is a 1:1 scale model of the United States Capitol building built by hand on my Survival MP server by Alizée Fan.
Destruction Day 2.0
Once again it’s time to go our separate ways and generate new land a world apart…
Why We Believe in God(s)
I read a book called Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith by J. Anderson Thomson Jr. MD and Clare Aukofer (I believe it was Penn Jillette who recommended it). It attempts to explain why humans have a natural susceptibility to believe in the supernatural by describing various behavioral adaptations in our species. It even goes into some of the physiology and brain chemistry involved.
Some of parts I found most interesting were about the evolution of our species and reasons some of the social adaptations were successful. It also includes an explanation for our natural cravings for food high in sugar and fat, which I found interesting. The overly positive reactions in our brain to sugar and fat are leftover adaptations from when these were very difficult to obtain (there were no grocery stores for cavemen apparently).
It also had interesting insights into psychology and several studies of the brain and behavior of young children. There were many less obvious things that were revealed which really got me thinking.
Overall, I found the book pretty interesting. It’s short and definitely worth reading if you have any interest in evolution, psychology, or religion. I’ll close with an interesting quote:
“Children have been described as ‘intuitive theists.’ Children show what is called promiscuous teleology, a basic preference to understand the world in terms of purpose. This contributes to what we now know about children’s belief. Children will spontaneously adopt the concept of God and a created world with no adult intervention. At heart we are all born creationists. Disbelief requires effort.” [1]
[1] Thomson, J. Anderson; Aukofer, Clare; Richard Dawkins (2011-06-01). Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith (Kindle Locations 766-769). Pitchstone Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Super 8
Super 8 is a film about these kids who are making a movie for a film festival or something. They are faced with many challenges during production including casting, budget, equipment failure, and an alien monster thing. Will they finish the movie? See the movie (Super 8) to find out.
This movie had a style that reminded me of many classic films such as E.T. and Stand By Me. It had a good mix of mystery, action, drama, and comedy and good pacing throughout. I never grew bored of any scene or felt that any part was dragging on. I also liked that it took place in the 70’s which seemed like a fun time.
The focus was on the main characters, so the alien monster thing actually wasn’t that interesting. There was also at least one scene where multiple lens flares took over the screen (how you know it’s a J.J. Abrams production). Other than that, Super 8 is an excellent film and I will probably see it again some time. I give it an arbitrary rating of 92/100.
Minecraft Races
Here is a super scientific comparison of the land speed of various Minecraft wildlife:
Also, here is a giant hole:
Noty
I’ve been inundated with requests to explain what “Noty” means. Well, I have finally been authorized to release the following information, which will hopefully satisfy the public by explaining who or what is Noty.
Noty is the culmination of decades of scientific research and billions of dollars in funding. The greatest minds in the world have been working in secret since 1973 to come up with the breakthrough technologies behind the Noty device.
Noty stands for Notation Orifice Transitional Yacht. However, despite common misconception, Noty is not actually a boat. While it is incapable if floatation on water, it does have the ability to store information much like a sheet of paper which can be placed on a boat, hence the “yacht” in the name.
Noty takes advantage of the patented process of “making notes.” Many of the details of this process are highly classified, but the process involves quoting parts of text and/or supplementing text with original commentary relating to said text. The Noty device can facilitate this and more.
You can get your own piece of this space-age technology or see a live demo of it in action. That site says it costs $6 or something like that, but I have lots of functional prototypes I’ll give away. Just ask…
Disclaimer: The above statements are not guaranteed to be factual in nature.
TF2 Replays
The latest update to Team Fortress 2 added Replays. This allows you to save a recording, much like a SourceTV demo, of your current life on servers that have the feature enabled. What separates this from SourceTV demos, however, is that replays are automatically delivered to the client over HTTP.
Once you save a replay, you can view and edit scenes using the built-in editor. The editor is very simple and easy to use, and allows you to capture the action from any angle and save different takes of the same replay. Once you have a take, you can save it as a video or image sequence with several options for quality. This really simplifies the process for making simple TF2 videos without external programs.
The server-side implementation of replays is very unstable currently, with blocking and crashes, but hopefully that gets fixed soon. Setup requires a web server, which can be local or accessible via FTP, and there are example configs provided that make setup very easy.
Below is my incredible entry to the Saxxy Awards. Obviously there is not a chance this will not win…
Server Broken and Then Unbroken
The following chronology of events is brought to you with limited commercial interruption by Death Bat 4, in theaters some time in the late 70’s.
Sunday 4/24
It all started Sunday when Dog noticed the Left4DoD server hosted on my server was lagging horribly. I checked the graphs on server stats and saw nothing unusual. There were no increases in load or network usage anywhere. Very curious…
Monday 4/25
I noticed the same game server lagging horribly again. Curiously, no other services were affected, including other game servers. It’s also doubtful the Left4DoD plugin is to blame since other servers with the same plugin were fine.
Tuesday 4/26
The entire server locked up for about an hour. All processes were being blocked. The graphs showed a huge spike in load, memory, processes, and everything else immediately before the freeze. It kind of looked like a DoS attack. I put in a ticket with the datacenter asking them to investigate, but they didn’t find anything.
Wednesday 4/27
While poking around the server, I realized it was running Fedora 11, which is very old. So I decided it was time to upgrade to Fedora 15! The process of remotely upgrading Fedora remotely via yum is messy to say the least. So after hours of updating, resolving dependencies, and removing old junk the upgrade was complete!
Later that night, Dog and I noticed the Left4DoD server lagging again. Restarting and disabling the plugin had no effect, so we started suspecting a DoS attack. After changing the port, the lag immediately stopped. That all but confirmed our suspicion and we went to work hardening the server against the various DoS vulnerabilities in srcds. Dog technologied an anti-DoS plugin and I scienced together some iptables rules, and the problem hasn’t occurred since.
Thursday 4/28
I noticed no emails were getting through the server since the upgrade to Fedora 15. The email services were all managed by ISPConfig, so I thought I’d update that. Well that didn’t go well and I’ve been dissatisfied with it before, so I decided to replace it with Webmin. Installing it was easy.
I set up my main websites and copied the files to the new directories. Most systems were fully operational. However, the email situation was only made worse by these changes.
Friday 4/29
I spent most of the day fixing the email situation. Everything relating to emails seemed to be failing. First I fixed postfix somehow (I forget; something about the hostname) to allow the server to send and receive mail. Meanwhile, I got the rest of the website stuff set up again.
The next step was to get Dovecot working again so I can get my mail out of the server. It was not accepting my credentials. After figuring out how to fix the logging, I was able to see that Dovecot couldn’t find where the mail is kept. A small change in the configuration solved that and everything was happy again in email land.
However, there seemed to be some DNS issues. I think everything is right in that area after lots of BIND tweaking, but I’m not sure. To be continued…
Conclusion
Comment if you notice any problems accessing this site.
In closing: