12/05/2005 @21:04:25 ^22:04:49

TAKE AN INTEREST

Stop being so self-absorbed and thinking about how you come off to other people and be interested in what they have to say!

Kama Sutra is easier than it looks

I have to admit I misjudged the difficulty level of Kama Sutra in the review I did last week. On a whim I ran one of the earlier maps from a pistol start and to my surprise I killed all the monsters with relative ease... Intrigued, I went on and as of now I've managed to do a total of 14 of the maps from a pistol start without using savegames. Furthermore, most of those went easily on the first attempt.

I think the misjudgement occurred because I was carrying ammunition forward; this meant I was aware of the high monster densities but less aware of the easy availability of weapons, ammunition and health on all the maps. Also, all the ones I've done are early maps. Towards the end it gets ridiculous and it probably biased my memory.

DBD::SQLite is a bit of a disappointment

SQLite 3 supports binary data in tables properly, calling them "BLOBS", to distinguish them from text strings which are zero-terminated. Great, I thought, I can put JPEG thumbnails and crap like that into them. But wait! In order to use this for the site, I need to use it from perl which means using perl's SQLite interface, DBD::SQLite.

I would say that this isn't really up to standard. It switched to SQLite 3 some time ago (without renaming itself, which caused a lot of problems as v2 and v3 databases are binary incompatible and if you upgraded all of a sudden your scripts would stop working) In spite of this, it appears to treat blobs exactly the same way as text, and so if you try to insert data that contains zeroes it happily chops it off at the first one. I can't find a way round this. Perl strings are binary-safe, you can put as many zeroes in as you like. It's annoying.

Oh yeah, it's not threadsafe either and there's no option to dynamically link with whatever version of libsqlite3 you have on your system instead of using the (old, obsolete, susceptible to database corruption bugs) version 3.1.3 that it ships with.

That was boring, wasn't it! I get complaints about the updates I write these days, they're all boring technical nonsense instead of the drama filled faggot shit I used to write about.

Oh my god, what the hell is that thing?!

I went for a walk yesterday. I guess I was feeling odd because of sleep deprivation. Anyway, as luck would have it there was this 100-foot balloon version of the nodding dog off those bloody insurance adverts on the common. It was hilarious and pretty scary close up, especially when the wind blew it so that its bloated chops plummetted towards you!

I enjoyed leaving the house for the first time in months, indeed I kicked a football a couple of times as I was passing some kids who let theirs stray. However there were too many people around and I couldn't relax so unless I can find an easy way to get out of the house when it's like 5am and the sun is just about to rise I won't be repeating this.