What the hell is wrong with Fedora™?

It really bothers me to
see stupid things happen on Linux. We're using a Fedora Core 2 box to
do an information system security course project. We've heard rumors
about how sucky Linux based on Red Hat® are, compared to the other
distributions, but the two things below are just weird (or stupid).

nice and renice: not so nice

If you are a power user of Microsoft® Windows®,
you probably have fiddled around with the Task Manager, where you can
manually set the priority of different processes. The same kind of
utilities exists in Linux,  and they are the following 3 commands:
nice, renice, and top.

Linux has a much more fine-grained
priority scale, with 40 priority levels (highest priority to lowest
priority: -20 to 19) instead of the 6 levels in Windows (Realtime,
High, Above Normal, Normal, Below Normal, and Idle). Linux's 40 levels
of priority are, however, pretty useless. I was running Crack5 (a
password guessing program) through SSH on the Linux machine. Obviously,
it is calculation-intensive and constantly takes up over 99% of the CPU
time. At first, it was running at the normal priority level (level 0).
When I tried to log in at the machine, it took half an hour for the
desktop to show itself. Mind you, this is a Pentium® 4 2.4 GHz we are
talking about here. So I got pissed and SSH'ed in from another terminal
to renice Crack5 to 19. It still took me 30 minutes to log in and another 30 minutes to log out
of the GNOME™ desktop. This kind of thing would never happen on
Windows XP.

Where is my Chinese input?

Fedora comes with
multilanguage support, right? It's got all kinds of keyboard layouts, and the default settings
include Korean and Japanese. But where the hell is my Chinese layout?
I mean, it's a language used by 1/4 to 1/3 of the world population.
What the hell would you smoke in order to omit a keyboard layout for
Chinese?

- SwordAngel

Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvald.
Fedora™ is a trademark of Red Hat, Inc.
Microsoft® and Windows® are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.
Pentium® 4 is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation.
GNOME™ is a trademark of GNOME Foundation.
God I hate trademark notices...

Nevermind...

Ignore the first item in the previous post:

Almot forgot...
Big thanks to the following players (in no
particular order): KnightRyDuZ, SAcRiFiCe, Fantasy4U, FieldsOfLove,
ForeverAhmda, BombSquad, Dlirk (although banned), Bannefin, Banishing,
Records, Taerom, and Countess; for valuable advice, encouragement (or
taunting and bets - right, SAcRiFiCe? ),
or just wonderful party hunting. You guys saved me tons of trouble and
consistently pulled me up from the pit of despair that I often fell
into time and again. If not for your help, I may have long gave up on
playing SwordAngel.

Also thanks to some of my real life friends (again, in no particular
order): Ahmed (or Timmy), Chris, Ken, and Eric; for putting up with my
Lineage ranting and still encouraging me in my mad endeavor, even
though group assignment and grades were at stake.

- SwordAngel

I give up.

I've decided to do again what I specialize in:
giving up. I'm giving up on a few things. Below are a few of the latest
items on my give-up list:

   
1. I give up
   getting SwordAngel to level 50. I know I'm at 93.xx % and all, but it's
   just getting too tiresome. I'm slowly quitting the game too.

   

2. I
   give up thinking about this Chinese girl whom I bumped into again last
   week, who got my feelings confused 2 years ago and a few days lately.
   I've successfully suppressed my feelings for girls for almost 10 years
   now; so why not this time?

   

3. I give up trying
   to make my mother understand functional grammatical analysis of
   English. She has never got it and she never will. Period.

Have fun indulging yourself in the earthly pleasures of this lame world.

- SwordAngel

Very unhappy

Stupid parents. Today mom finally realizes that
I'm *perhaps* not happy *lately*. How long did it take her to make this
colossal discovery (i.e. How long is "lately")? Come on, take a guess.
Write your answers in the Flame Box on the right.

- SwordAngel

Halloween event (Oops, NC did it again)

As most US Lineage
players know, the first day of the Halloween event did not go very
well. First there were the annoying random drunkenness effects (area
shouting instead of talking normally, walking in random directions,
random slowed effect, and stupid wavy screen like you would see in
Heine cave 4f). Then came a series of long and short server resets. At
the time of this writing, all servers are still down and NC says they
are working on some connectivity problem. NO SHIT! I had some crazy
30-second lags and the hens looked like they were on brave.

The
fun part of the event is for dark elves and mages to go on wafer and
brave by eating some of the 14 kinds of pumpkin candies. The annoying
part is that the 14 kinds of candies all look the same and have the
same description; so often times you have to click on a few of the
different stacks to get the right candy. Roughly, I remember the
following kinds of candies:

   
• Brave (5 minutes)

   

• Wafer (10 minutes)

   

• Lesser healing (works like red pot)

   

• Healing (works like orange pot)

   

• Greater healing (works like clear pot)

   

• Wisdom (works like wis pot)

   

• Mana (works like blue pot)

   

• Instant lesser mana refill (like mp counterpart of red pot)

   

• Instant mana refill (like mp counterpart of orange pot)

   

• Instant greater mana refill (like mp counterpart of clear pot)

   

• Haste (5 minutes)

   

• Greater haste (30 minutes)

This
being said, knights are at a disadvantage for the first part of the
event since the candies don't give them any boost that they either need
or that they don't already have. The most advantaged class, I would
say, is dark elves; particularly if they decide to do some PvP right
away; A hasted dark elf with armor break and uncanny dodge spells on is
already fearsome. A braved one is worse. Plus, now they don't have to
worry about mp even if they repeatedly get cancelled by mages, since
some of the candies do instant mp refill.

Pet confusion

During
the first hour of the event, I saw some people talking about pets on
global chat and I'm now confused again. I always thought that wolves
only walk fast and do 2-cell attack. But from what some players say on
global, it seems that wolves are supposed to bite harder than dobermans
now. Given dobs and wolves have about the same constitution, this would
mean that the wolf has ascending in the pet rankings. Furthermore,
since the introduction of huskies, players have been speculating about
the seeming invincibility of a high level husky. After all, a husky at
level 45 should have something like 450 to 500 hp, which should be the
same or better than constitution elves or dark elves. And one can
notice how fast huskies hp bar fills up after injury too. So a possible
result is that the long-praised doberman is no longer the best pet in
game. It may very well be the wolf for it's speed, damage, and 2-cell
attack; or the husky for its simply awesome hp. I'm confused now. I
already have a lvl 29 wolf. It really does bite hard, definitely harder
than I can hit using a +9 SoM. Now I need to level a husky and a
doberman to see.

- SwordAngel

Lineage - Episode III: Return of the Prince

A pleasant
surprise occured to me and many other Dep players two days ago:
FieldsOfLove, the first Death Knight prince of Depardieu, is back!!!
Babos like Dlirk, Ahmda, BombSquad, many others, and I have been
waiting for this day since days forgotten. We all thought FieldsOfLove
quitted for good. I eagerly look forward to new legends of the
strongest prince of Depardieu.

- SwordAngel

The Birth of a New Babo

Congratulations to Magnetik, prince
of Electron, for getting to level 51. Leveling a royalty to and beyond
level 50 is certainly the most difficult task in Lineage, given royalty
has no combat skill bonus comparable to the other classes. It is an
achievement that few players have truly attempted due to the seeming
impossibility. Getting the right equipment and extreme hunting
optimization (more optimization than the other classes) are paramount
to the success of such attempt. Way to go, Magnetik!!

- SwordAngel

Road to 50... >.<

SwordAngel has been sitting at level 49 for really too long now, like old Fantasy4U says. I'm gonna try to break my limit and get this dumb mage of mine to level 50 in 4 weeks. It's gonna be a lot of hard work and I may have to sacrifice a bit of course grades to do it; but I'll be proud of myself at the end. Some of you say that I should relax and take it easy with the leveling; and that I should focus more on real life. Well, school is no challenge to me compared to Lineage. I can get good grades easily as long as I put a bit of effort and I know it from past experience. Lineage, however, remains a mystery to me. I've played since the .77 server and my skills are still like those of a complete newbie. And it's not like I'll totally not care about school. I'm gonna try to keep up with the pace in the midst of the chaos of midterms and assignments. Now that's the real challenge. I really want to see if I can actually play games and improve in them; not just study, study, and study.

- SwordAngel

Blog reopened... =_=;

By general consensus, the blog is reopened.

I may not be able to blog as often though because I don't have the time, plus ideas are slipping away from my mind.

- SwordAngel

Blog closed

That's it. This blog is indefinitely closed. I
can't even say it was fun ranting here. I really don't see why I should
tell people my feelings. These feelings are mine, not yours, ok? It's
not like letting you guys know what I feel will help me in anyway. In
any case, I seem to be talking to myself all this time and I don't feel
like doing it anymore. This was the last channel of communication I
had; I didn't even like to talk with friends, so I talked to myself.
From now on, I won't even be talking to myself anymore. I'll just shut
the fuck up and fade away as though I never existed in the first place.

Fuck you all, you all suck (yes, including you, the infamous "myself").

-SwordAngel