Torchlight is a pretty fine game to play, while waiting for Diablo 3.

It integrates some of the best elements from Diablo 2, and World Of Warcraft. Lots of monsters to hack and slash. Lots of loot. And plenty of ways to bash in your foes.

Forget challenge. Forget the story. Forget FMV. It’s just mindless clicking fun. And it works fine in a windowed screen, so I can have Star Trek:TNG playing on one monitor while I disintegrate goblins with a laser beam. All the while, I can still tab out and carry out some semblance of a conversation on MSN.

It’s a nice game that just works and gives you no grief even if you don’t have the latest graphics card that comes in a box-so-big-you-can-use-it-as-a-casket.

But there is a bug. A nice one.

Talk to the vendor that sells you Identify Scrolls.

Left click on the Identify Scroll, bring it over to your inventory box, and left-click on your item. And behold, the item is duplicated!

Use this to duplicate your gems till you’ve got all you need.

So. Much. Fun.

Wordpress uses the absolute path of URL links instead of relative paths. This means that when you move your blog to a different domain name, there are things in the database that needs fixing.

Learnt everything about this here.

Tried it, and it fixes most of the problems. But there’s still one big glaring issue: the Next Page link doesn’t work. It must be something else…

Tsubame means swift, as in, the bird.

Speed is essential in the technique, the block & counter needs to be done in one swooping motion.

Hiraki gamae. Offence: gyaku jodan zuki.

Stance is open and faces opponent. Uchi uke the incoming punch, revolving the upper body around the attack and forward, not just striking out with the blocking arm.

After the uke, weight should be leaning far forwards, as the blocking arm swings around into a shuto, and pushes/cuts FORWARDS at the opponent’s neck. Pushing him backwards, opening his belly to a gyaku zuki.

The renhanko then gets messy with some odd footwork. >.<

Been trying to migrate a webapp onto a machine running CentOS 5 Linux.

Couldn’t QUITE get it to work right, and I thought it was some shitty coding. Nearly despaired for reading through poorly documented PHP codes.

Till I figured I might try to install WordPress on the same machine and see if there’s some OTHER possibility…

And I immediately got a very useful error message.

PHP isn’t connecting to MySQL.

Indeed phpinfo() revealed that the PHP was configured –without-mysql

WTF?! This is really n00b. CentOS will install Apache, PHP and MySQL all together, but forget to enable this vital connectivity.

So I downloaded PHP 5.3

And while configuring, I’m getting a problem with libxml2.

Checked with yum, and I already have the libxml2 installed, and it’s the latest version.

Then tried

wget ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/LATEST_LIBXML2

and if it wasn’t a newer version than yum already installed… This one compiled and installed properly. (ie ./configure, make, make install).

Now tried configuring PHP 5.3 again, this time using  –with-mysql

Got an error. That mysql isn’t bundled in 5.3 anymore.

Found on MySQL instead, that PHP 5.3 now comes with native drivers.

Thus, ./configure –with-mysql=mysqlnd –with-mysqli=mysqlnd –with-pdo-mysql=mysqlnd

Now… what happens when there’s 2 versions of PHP on my machine >.>

And then, it seems that I need to configure PHP with the –with-apxs option as well.

But that doesn’t work cos the Apache installed with CentOS doesn’t have this enabled either.

So, have to yum install httpd-devel

Then reconfigure PHP with ./configure –with-mysql=mysqlnd –with-mysqli=mysqlnd –with-pdo-mysql=mysqlnd –with-apxs

That worked. Finally.

Note: Stop the Apache service before make install.

Then, Apache won’t start up, cos of some Undefined Symbol thingie.

Aaahh…. this is the Linux I know. And for a moment, I thought those days have passed me by.

…

So, managed to sort out that problem above… Did a:

ldd -d libphp5.so

So it’s apparent that there’s a lot of Undefined Symbols. Oddly enough this was easy enough to fix:

make clean

THEN, do the configure, make, make install again.

And this time, it works. I’ve got PHP5.3 working. Finally.

But during the make test, I saw some errors connecting with MySQL. So, it’s still not connecting to MySQL.

The quest continues…..

Was raining heavily, so I had no reason to rush home.

Took the opportunity to read a couple of books I saw at Borders a while ago. And also to redeem some Tesco coupons.

There’s a new Nick Hornby book, but I couldn’t find it. Hard to believe that the entire stack I saw last time sold out. But then, they say naked sells. So maybe that’s why there wasn’t a single copy of Juliet, Naked left.

While hunting for it, I came across :

The final book of The Wheel Of Time…. Maybe… Probably not…

So it’s finally out. A chance for closure. Yet, a chance I dare not take.

This is the book Robert Jordan wrote while losing the fight with sarcoidosis. He never saw it finished.

Seeing this title at Borders now, was like suddenly finding your cat’s chew-toy under the sofa, a cat that you buried three years ago, and which you had loved for twelve.

I believe I started the series at the end of 1995. And I can almost remember when/where I acquired the books I have in my collection. Several of them were gifts.

Rand al’Thor, Perrin Aybara & Mat Cauthon are more familiar to me than the Tooks and Brandybucks.

This relationship has been too long, and too bitter sweet.

And I don’t think I’m quite ready to deal with the conclusion yet.

Another turn around the shelves, and I also found this:

Some idiot saw himself fit to write a 6th book to the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

I gave it a quick flip, and it was like watching a pimply-faced arse playing Kurt Cobain on Guitar Hero.

So apparently everyone didn’t die in Mostly Harmless, and they’re all back for a big adventure. Including Random Dent, Arthur’s daughter, who is President of the Universe and married a gerbil.

F.U.C.K.

This is a word that I use VERY sparingly. But in this case, there’s nothing more eloquent.

This Rowling-wannabe, tripping on meth, thinks he can get away with screwing Douglas Adams’ gift to mankind!!

F.U.C.K.

He even brings back Fenchurch.

F….

Even while I was mourning those that have been taken too soon, I am assaulted by this injustice.

It’s more painful than watching Spielberg rape Indiana Jones. More foul than Lucas shitting on his own franchise.

This depresses me.

I’m going to bed!

Every Pratchett has a theme, or a parody.

Unseen Academicals is Romeo and Juliet with soccer.

Honestly, not too interesting. The main protagonists are a candle dribbler turned soccer coach and a pie-baker. Even though Rincewind makes a cameo, he doesn’t do much except for pinballing a football with the back of his head.

There is a story of personal growth, of rising above the expectations and prejudices of people. The other story is of living up to the expectations of those same people.

One of the most interesting Pratchett metaphors in this book, is the Crab Bucket.

For every crab that finds the strength to attempt to crawl its way out of the bucket, other crabs who’ll pull it back down. That’s why you can keep crabs in a bucket without a lid.

An eloquent metaphor for the lower denizens of Ankh-Morpork. Or everywhere else.

Good set of starter instructions on this page.

Perfect tutorial. Complete with setting up Virtual Hosts and SSL.

But an error occurs when the Apache service is restarted.

Getting:

Starting httpd: Warning: DocumentRoot [/www/iqtest/html] does not exist
[FAILED]

The error is the result of SELinux.
Disable it at

/etc/sysconfig/selinux

and reboot.
Or run the following command as root:

echo 0 >/selinux/enforce

Click here to view the embedded video.

First glance: Oh, another WW2 movie.

First whispers from a random review: Tarantino. Doing a war movie. With very little pew-pew. Sounds odd, but intriguing.

Another look: So it’s a fictional story about a team of Jewish black-ops killing Nazis in Germany. I can accept that.

At the end of the first viewing: HOLY CRAP!! This isn’t a war movie! It’s an alternate time-line fantasy!

The movie is all about the Tough Guys. Everyone’s a tough guy talking tough. Oozing menace / charm / power / vanity / authority through dialogue. And this made it extremely interesting and very, very fun to watch!

The strong-as-oak man-of-the-land facing off a German detective hunting Jews. The stereotypical drill sergeant shout-talk. Intimidation of Nazi captives. An SS officer sniffing out British spies. A war hero sweet-talking a French belle. Or just eating and talking about strudels.

Lots of very interesting face-offs with high stakes verbal dueling. Every scene well acted.

There must be an odd dozen and more fantastic quotable quotes in the movie. If the dialogue didn’t keep shifting between English, German, French and Italian. High points for realism. But a little annoying perhaps.

The ending blew me away…

With Hollywood being so Jewish, I’m surprised that a movie like this never materialized much earlier. It’s like everybody in Hollywood just flipped Germany the Bird.

One word to describe this movie? I’ld go with SCHADENFREUDE.

“Schadenfreude is German for: taking delight in the misery of others.”
“Schadenfreude. Taking delight in the misery of others. That IS German.”
~~~ Lyrics from Avenue Q ~~~

Using Pidgin, after setting the basic account information for your GoogleTalk account, you also need to do the following in the Advanced settings:

Force old (port 5223) SSL: Checked
Allow plaintext auth over unencrypted streams: Un-Checked
Connect Port: 443
Connect Server: talk.google.com
Proxy type: Use Global Proxy Settings