Ramblings of Narc

This is part 7 of the series The Guild 2 Guide. You can go back to part six (the scholar guide), if you feel like it.

Welcome to the seventh and hopefully last installment of this guide to The Guild II: Pirates of the European Seas! In this part of the guide, we’ll be covering all the stuff I’ve been asked about: automating production, using thugs, doing guild contracts, and anything else that catches my addled memory or divided attention. As always, feel free to put questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them (though maybe not promptly). If I get asked the same question enough, I’ll probably update the post!

But before we get into all that, a special note now that Guild II: Renaissance is out and reasonably popular: this guide is mostly, but not completely applicable to G2Ren. By this I mean, the stuff that’s been introduced in Ren tends to mostly use the same mechanics and methods of thinking, but I make no guarantees. Similarly, this guide assumes you’ve at least gone through the Pirates tutorial — this is quite impossible for Renaissance players, because Ren doesn’t include any tutorial. I strongly encourage anyone with a bit of spare time and a passion for Renaissance to work up a guide. Feel free to link, copy, or just reuse bits of this guide — in accordance with CC-BY-SA, all I ask for is attribution and continuing with the CC license.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s start with…
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This is part 6 of the ongoing series The Guild 2 Guide. You can go back to part five (the rogue guide), if you feel like it.

Welcome to the fourth and final class guide for The Guild II: Pirates of the European Seas! Today, we will finally get around to discussing the scholar, a decent money-maker who uses the power of words! And healing! But mostly words!
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This is part 5 of the ongoing series The Guild 2 Guide. You can go back to part four (the patron guide), if you feel like it.

Okay, I admit, I lied yesterday when I said the rogue guide would be up then — to make up for it, the scholar guide will be forthcoming as soon as I finish this one. So, without further ado:

Welcome to the third class guide for The Guild II: Pirates of the European Seas! In this post we will be discussing the rogue class, which (among other things) features the titular pirate occupation, as well as a couple of other similarly underhanded business opportunities.

The rogue class has always been a good money-maker in G2, presumably to offset the theoretical risk of being brought to court and having your life (and possibly your dynasty) ended prematurely. However, given that it’s perfectly possible to offset that risk and “play it safe”, the rogue class has also gained a reputation for being somewhat unbalanced.
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This is part 4 of the ongoing series The Guild 2 Guide. You can go back to part three (the craftsman guide), if you feel like it.

Welcome to the second class guide for The Guild 2: Pirates of the European Seas! In this post, we’ll be discussing the patron class — (at least half of) the backbone of the Guild 2 economy.

Patrons are “fun-loving people with a penchant for good beer and wine”, or so the game says. What they really are is an excellent support class for pretty much any other, as they come with multiple benefits, including some of the raw materials all the crafting classes use. One thing patrons are not, however: they are not huge money makers.
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This is part 3 of the ongoing series The Guild 2 Guide. Here’s a link to part two, the general overview, in case you missed it.

So, you wanna be a craftsman? Or maybe you just want to read about what they can do? Well, you’ve come to the right place.

The craftsman class of The Guild 2 is one of the easiest to make money with, primarily because it features the most lucrative raw material building in the game: the Mine. But before we get into the details, let’s start with…
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This is part 2 of the ongoing series The Guild 2 Guide. Here’s a link to part one, in case you missed it.

Well, I was going to continue with the class guides, but my attention was correctly drawn to the fact that I haven’t really explained the more general parts of the game — the parts everyone has to deal with, no matter the class. So I’m going to cover all that now: the fun of marriage, politics, and a few more things.

To start us off, let’s look at:

Interface: the hidden (and not so hidden) features

One particularly interesting part you may have noticed already is that “Pause” speed doesn’t really pause. If you’re in-game, go ahead and hit Space or Num – until you get to pause and look closely — see, the carts and people are still moving, just incredibly slowly.
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Welcome to what I’m hoping will be a useful and definitive guide to the world of The Guild 2, and its expansion, Pirates of the European Seas!

Foreword and Game History

Way back in the Internet Dark Ages of 2002, a small German developer studio called 4HEAD Studios came to JoWood Productions and pitched a game called Europa 1400: The Guild. The game was revolutionary for its time and was quite fun to play, however it sold poorly, presumably because it was also buggy and painful to learn. Nonetheless, it was good enough to spawn a sequel: The Guild 2, published in 2006.

In both games’ cases, they started out full of bugs and half-finished features, and in both games’ cases, the bugs were patched and the features improved. Unfortunately, the early bugs also led to poor sales and relative obscurity of the games in the gaming community. Until 2010.

In June 2010, JoWood exposed The Guild 2 and its first expansion, Pirates of the European Seas, to users of Valve’s Steam platform, at very reasonable prices. This quickly led to an influx of new players, most of who were discovering the game for the first time and finding it quite fun. With most of the earlier bugs fixed, and in spite of a four-year-old platform, Steam users enjoyed it at first — and then came the questions.

You see, in all of TG2′s history, nobody seems to have written a comprehensive guide to the game. The ingame tutorial, though sufficiently broad to give a good start, barely scratches the surface of the underlying game. And the manual… well, people don’t read manuals, do they?

And so we come to this: an attempt at producing and providing to the community a comprehensive guide to The Guild 2. This guide will be focusing on the Pirates of the European Seas expansion because it is assumed more people will play it than the original. Let’s get started, then, shall we?
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Earlier today, I was reading this Ars Technica article and found it difficult to relate the figure of 250 GB/$250 to what I knew. So I figured it was time to do some statistics of my own!

First of all, a direct comparison isn’t really possible — I’m on a proper unlimited data plan (well, two of them actually), and nobody has ever called me up to ask me about toning down my usage. Similarly, I live in a nice big city of 2.something million residents and that really does translate to good prices solely because it’s cheaper to run Internets to a lot of people in a small area, than to a small number of people in a large area.

But putting all that aside for now and just focusing on the numbers, let’s see how we can quantify my Internet usage:

Cost

We’ll start with the easiest part, determining the cost per month. I have two ISPs: RDS and iLink. The RDS connection costs me 64 RON/month and the iLink one costs 45 RON/month. Converting (and rounding up) to the nearest US Dollar, we get:

RDS: $21 US/mo
iLink: $15 US/mo
Total: $36 US/mo

Usage in the last month

Looking at my pfSense gateway’s statistics, I don’t actually have numbers for the entire previous month, but I’m pretty close. Here are the graphs I saw (click for full-size, if you want):

RDS:

iLink:

And here are the interesting numbers in plain text:
RDS: 210.11 GB in + 20.83 GB out = 230.94 GB
iLink: 68.96 GB in + 32.57 GB out = 101.52 GB
Total (rounded up): 230 GB in + 54 GB = 284 GB

Which gives us a ratio of 284 GB / $36 US = almost 8 GB/US$.

When we compare this to just over 1 GB/US$, we come to the conclusion that I would’ve ended up paying 8 times more for the same bandwidth usage, were I unfortunate enough to have Frontier Communications as my ISP.

Now, like I said earlier, it’s not really a fair comparison, in that they’re in a small town and I’m not, but still… a ratio of 1/8th the price?

And some fun

Anyway, while we’re looking at this data, let’s have some fun with it. Using the maximum columns from the two graphs above, we can characterize my two Internet connections (with some crappy approximation):

• RDS: Asymmetrical 20 Mbps/3.5 Mbps, for $21/mo.
• iLink: Symmetrical 10/10 Mbps, for $15/mo.

Is that good? Is that bad? I don’t know. All I know is it’s more bandwidth than I absolutely need (and the averages agree), but since I need both connections for redundancy anyway, why not use them both?

Holy crap, has it been that long, really? Actually, I probably shouldn’t draw attention to it, should I? I vaguely recall reading that people are irritated by this kind of thing. Hell, I dunno.

There haven’t been many updates from me because I haven’t had much time for generating content, nor do I have that many interesting things to talk about, anyway. Work has been… well, busy, obviously, but also unusually tedious. This is new to me, but it certainly gives me an idea of where the phrase “working stiffs” came from. Nonetheless, we press forward, since nobody wants to hear about any of that (nor do I believe anyone appreciates the excuses).

I actually want to bring to your attention some stuff I’m interested in and one thing I’m proud of. Let’s get pride out of the way first, yes? I don’t know and can’t be bothered to check how many people have seen this blog’s About page, but if you go look at it now and you remember what it used to look like, you’ll notice something new… a photo! I’ve actually been meaning to add one for almost a year now, and today I finally decided (on a whim) to get my webcam working again (not for any particular purpose, mind you), and while playing around with it I managed to snap a particularly good photo.

Come to think of it, I suppose the reason I wanted my webcam running is because I wanted to see myself in a mirror without actually getting up to find one (and without leaving my headphones behind). The reason for that was to see how I look with the new glasses. They’re non-corrective “computer” glasses, which are supposed to prevent eye fatigue from prolonged staring into computer monitors. I was skeptical that they would provide any real effect, but having worn them for a few hours now while sitting here, they do seem to help quite a bit. Normally, by this point I’d be having trouble focusing and be forced to squint to keep going — which hasn’t happened yet. I’m not entirely convinced it’s not just a placebo effect yet, though, but every little bit helps. And they look great on me, too, which is a definite bonus.

Now, for some stuff I’m interested in that I’ve picked up recently. Firstly, some webcomics:

• Irregular Webcomic!
• Darths and Droids
• MS Paint Adventures

That last one is such an awesome concept that it’s worth expanding on a little bit. According to the site, “MSPA stories exist in the format of “mock games”, specifically text-based adventure games.” This was a definite draw for me, in spite of having pretty much never played an actual text adventure — the name “adventure” itself was enough for me. Maybe that says something about my psychological profile, I dunno. One thing of note about the so-far sole completed story (Problem Sleuth) is that it eventually seemed to reach a level of complexity that made it nearly impossible to fully follow — which gives us another draw: pushing one’s limits! I’m having much better luck following the story in the current adventure, Homestuck. It’s not easy to quantify why MSPA is so amazingly fun — you just have to see it for yourself.

Beyond all of that, I’m finding myself enjoying a bunch of not-new-even-to-me things:

• TVTropes
• Ars Technica
• jQuery

I’ve actually been meaning to rave about jQuery for a while now, but the truth is it’s all been said already by more awesome people than I (to whom I can’t link because I don’t really keep watch on their blogs and have no idea who they are anymore. Seriously, if I started following every blog that I ever read anything interesting on, I’d end up just reading updates for 10 hours a day).

So, that’s it for now. Hopefully it won’t be another 6 months until the next update, yes?

I got to travel a little bit a few weeks ago — my mother and I went to Borsec (actually, to nearby Corbu) to meet a friend of hers (who happens to have six Dachshunds, but that’s a story for another place). One thing we were warned about was the cellphone network there is spotty (and there’s no power where they live, but we didn’t stay with them, so that was okay).

They weren’t kidding. My lovely 3G modem could only connect at GPRS speeds, and even then the connection tended to drop out every once in a while — which was how I found out many of my favorite lovely little apps have a terrible, terrible time handling intermittent Internet connections.

Now, I’ll be among the first to recognize that broadband adoption has been increasing steadily at a booming pace in the past decade or more, but that doesn’t mean literally everybody has one, or that it’s impossible to go anywhere where one is not available. For that matter, it also doesn’t mean a broadband connection — any broadband connection — is perfect: they do drop sometimes, even if only for short periods, and this needs to be taken into account by any software that purports to handle transfers over the Internet.

On top of that, there is no real excuse for not handling all this stuff well — it’s the year 2009, and Internet connections have been getting widespread for at least 14 years. And they haven’t tended to be fast, reliable ones, either. There is plenty of software that has evolved to take these factors into account. On the Linux side, I only need to point to wget as a download agent that understands this fact and will happily allow a download to be resumed, retried, or restarted, as needed, more or less automatically, and wget is available in pretty much even the most basic Ubuntu system, and very likely in most other “mainstream” Linux distributions. Certainly, it represents an external dependency, but one that can be safely relied on by pretty much any Linux software author.

Except, for instance, the authors of gPodder don’t seem to have ever heard of it. Or, if they have, none of them have bothered making use of this mature, well-written solution to download handling, and instead implemented something written in-house, probably just as a quick ‘n’ dirty hack to quickly get some kind of downloading support in place, so they can at least get to testing the software and get a feel for it. Which would be fine… if it weren’t still in there.

Now, I want to be very clear that I am not specifically harping on gPodder for this. It’s far from the only piece of software that handles downloads poorly. In fact, I would like to turn a particular eye towards Firefox on this front, since I’ve never felt comfortable with its internal download support. Or that of any other browser, for that matter.

But what I would like to say is that the problem of downloads over an unreliable TCP/IP network is a solved one, and solutions exist for it — well-tested solutions that are well-known and work at least 99.99% of the time.

So why is it possible nowadays to write a mostly new piece of software that downloads relatively large files (an episode of the Rathole Radio podcast is around 55 MB, on average), which are bound to take a long time on a slow connection (like a 3G modem forced to work at GPRS speeds), and not build in the capability of resuming an interrupted download?

Even putting aside the fact that a GPRS connection is not the most stable thing in the world (particularly in relatively mountainous areas), there are times I cannot justify leaving a system turned on for the several hours it would take to finish a download unless I were reasonably certain the download was going to finish or that I wouldn’t have to start over from byte zero if it was interrupted. Without that (in my opinion) reasonable expectation, I might as well not bother until or unless I could get to a stable connection to do it. And too bad if I really couldn’t get to that stable connection, isn’t it?

By request, here’s the script I worked up to make periodic database dumps into a directory and gzip them up:

#!/bin/zsh

mysql_user=root
mysql_pass=your-root-password-here
bk_path='/where/to/put/the/dumps'

right_now=`date +"%Y%m%d-h%H"`

bk_fname="${bk_path}/full-db-dump.sql"
bk_gzname="${bk_path}/full-db-dump-${right_now}.sql.gz"

mysqldump -u"$mysql_user" -p"$mysql_pass" --all-databases > "${bk_fname}"
gzip -c "${bk_fname}" > "${bk_gzname}"

Running this as a cron job every [x] hours should be pretty good for small sites, especially if the archive directory is periodically rsynced to another remote host (as in my case).

For serious stuff, you may consider adding MySQL replication for continuous backup.

Oh, and since not everybody uses zsh, you can probably change the hash-bang to point to /bin/sh safely. I haven’t tried it myself, though.

Here’s an interesting quickie: I’ve been getting a bunch (well, four so far, but far more than usual) of comments in Russian, all coming from the same IP that DomainTools says is in Ukraine — apparently, an ISP or something like that.

Now, the comment text, when run through Google Translate, reads pretty innocuous, but the activity smells spammy; and I can’t read Russian anyway, so I don’t want to approve what I don’t understand, either.

To the commenter(s) in question: I have only a slight idea of what you posted. I would prefer comments in English, or Romanian (if you speak that one). French is also an acceptable alternative. I’ll even try Spanish.

And if it’s spam, please just don’t bother — it’s useless!

a.k.a. “Inter-dimensional vortexes? In my database?”

Yah, so I screwed up. Back when I moved the Web server from one computer to another, I thought I might’ve forgotten something important, but couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Then I forgot about that, too, and everything was just fine until yesterday morning…

Being that I was pissed off by the web server’s inability to hold an erection function properly without periodically stopping and starting udev (seriously, I still have no idea why that was happening!), I decided a dist-upgrade to Jaunty might help. I’d already done a couple of them, so I wasn’t totally going into the unknown… And it seemed to work, too! It asked for a reboot, I gave it one. It lost its nvidia driver, but asked for another reboot, so I gave it that one, too… and then things got heavily reminiscent of the Windows days.

You see, after that last reboot, the system would come up, all the way through GDM and showing the nice xfce desktop… and then reboot. Out of the blue. Lather, rinse, repeat.

At this point, I realized I was more or less fuckt… so I dug up a fresh Jaunty iso, burned it to about four CD-RWs before one finally worked, and found I was supposed to plug in a monitor because the install GUI wouldn’t come up on the TV, and… sort of backed up the interesting bits. You know, the old /home, and the old /etc, and also the /opt/www dir.

Did you notice me forgetting anything at this point? If you said “THE DATABASES!!!1oneone!”, you’d be right. Yes, I forgot to back up the databases. The reason I forgot is that I remembered there being 4x daily dumps to a directory inside /opt. Which there are. On the old web server. The one that’s not running anymore.

So, long story short, the databases are back to where they were before I finally disabled apache on the old web server. I’m going to recover the old posts from Google cache (come to think of it, I probably also still have them in the Atom feed) and repost them, but the 4 comments that were posted in the mean time are gone. So sorry.

And after I do that, I’ll turn on that damned automated backup…

Just took these pictures outside my window an hour or so ago:

UPDATE: I took a bunch of photos from the set and managed to make a panoramic pic:

Every blogger has done a post like this. You know them, you love them, they are… the silly Google search queries people use to find your blog!

These are in reverse order of arrival, and the URLs are mostly pasted straight out of the referrer log. Without further ado:

• narc ftp port (Google UK) — I’m not sure I really want to know. Do I have an FTP daemon I’m not aware of? If so, it’s probably stuck inside the LAN, since I’m not forwarding anything unexpected.
• what a narc does to set up people — Did you really think it would be that easy? Us narcs have our professional pride, you know?
• acronym for narcs (Google Australia) — Do we really need an acronym here? “Narc” is a pretty short word already. What would be the acronym? “N”?
• zap+ro (Google Thailand) — I’d really prefer if you didn’t, thank you. I happen to live here in .ro, and I like it.
• pl poke data narc (Google UK) — Er… I don’t think I really want to know what that’s supposed to mean. Using Perl to poke data into my brain? No, thank you. Although, if you manage it, that’ll be a neat hack.
• short summary of the notebook — Before I did that search, I hadn’t known The Notebook (2004) was a movie (and a novel, apparently). So here’s a short summary, then: “It’s a movie (and a book).” Happy?
• why is vodafone website so shit? (Google UK) — Good question! Without knowing anything about their internal organization, I’d guess that most of it was their use of a very crappy technology (JavaServer Pages? That’s what the JSP stands for, yes?), which presumably was chosen because the rest weren’t Enterprise-y enough and/or because that’s what the consultants they hired to do the job “knew”.
• mysql “add a fucking user” — This search actually returns a very specific result from my blog, that being my “Going Insane From Work” post, which unfortunately, doesn’t actually answer the (implied) question. So, here it is: to “add a fucking user” to mysql, the command is: GRANT <privileges> ON <database>.<table> TO '<username>'@'<host>' [IDENTIFIED BY '<password>]. Alternatively, to leave the user at default privileges (that is, none), use: CREATE USER '<username>'@'<host> [IDENTIFIED BY '<password>']. This, and more, can be found in the fucking MySQL manual, which you should’ve picked up like the rest of us do.
• arguments against alcoholics anonymous — Er… why? Oh! Oh! I got one: “I’m not a drunk, I can quit whenever I like!” There’s your argument.
• Finally, i didn’t know my friend was a narc — Well, neither did I. Which poses an interesting question: if neither of us knew, are you really my friend?

That’s it for this edition of “Silly Google Phrases”. One thing I’d like to mention, though — a lot of people have been finding my website by searching google for… narc.ro. I find this very curious, but ultimately, as long as people find what they’re looking for, who am I to judge?

Thank you all, and good night!