Bay 12 Games Forum

Looking in the subforum for some other information (which I think I'm not now going to post about, you lucky lucky potential recipient) I realised that the very first post in it is from almost 10 years ago, exactly. Erm, "almost exactly 10 years ago"?

Whatever, in just over a week it will be exactly so. July 30th, by my reckoning, give or take your own timezone.

And I recall, hopefully correctly, the suggested formation of the Wiki (or was it the subforum?) and was probably just as uselessly waffling on in my initial support of it, but without diving into its home-page's edit history (assuming that info survived any intermediate migration) I'm not sure I can tie down exactly at which point it came about, relative to the forum.

But, if I'm not totally wrong, it's been 10 years (ish) exactly, some time around now, for sure!  At least of the subforum.


And I'm sorry to admit that I've read far too little of either's contents, and contributed far too little useful information of my own. But happy birthday anyway to it/this, and possibly some of you reading this too.( I, too, have a birthday this year. As I do most years.)

Forgive this little missive (and if it's TL;DR; then you are oerfectly free to not R). It isn't what I would call a bug, but it is my attempt to document a little personal battle against the particular configuration of ones and zeros I find myself using. If it's of interest to others, I would be gratified, but it seems no great burden uponmthe world if it is of no interest and yet I have committed its own bits and bytes to the forum in one interminably forgettable post that quickly moves off of any first-page display you care to think of.

The point being... I discovered a problem with my worldgen, on my old 32-bit system that I still use for DF. I'm fairly sure it's hitting the 32-bit hard limit for memory (including virtual RAM), but I'm not entirely convinced. But that's a first-order working theory.


It took a few days to narrow down (several overnight worldgens, and a couple of while-I-was-out overday ones) but I took the offending version (slightly customised, but only in geological matters) of the LARGE ISLAND worldgen template and put into it the precise seeds noted in the gamelog from when I first tried to worldgen a new land - within which I spotted some geogrqphy that I'm still rather keen to try to explore/build upon (in parallel copies of the save). The point being that I've had identical setups except for the enforced END_YEAR.

I used to have no trouble at all with the 1050 default upon the largest world footprints (and increased inter-cavern geologies), but added complexity of the world has clearly added to the demands called upon to enumerate the end product (and in this instance I'm specifically talking of a 44.12, but it was true with 44.02 and even in prior generations to the 44 release). I have tended to get a semi-round Year of 750 going ok without problems (maybe a message that virtual memory is being expanded for me, especially if I have other intensive things running like GIMP) except for having to leave that machine alone for some time and get on with other things. But this time I got an application crash at some point after using the "p" to export the world details. Within the DF directory the regionN-00750-01-01-world_map.bmp would appear, zero bytes in size and then after a wait I'm prompted to send details of the crash off (which I decline; and it wouldn't help, anyway, as the machine is standalone). The world_gen_param and._history and _sites_and_pops text files never get created. At no point do I actually get prompted about virtual memory resizing.

By a bit of trial and error (rerunning for years above and below the point of failure, taking roughly half the difference and seeing if that's a "too high" or "not high enough to error", then repeating within this new established range) I discovered year 402 gave me a reportable save (which I seem to be able to, embark on, from the briefest of tests) and a year 403 report request crashes.

Sigmificantly, year 403 can be generated to and accepted without crash (I have yet to try to embark/adventure upon it) but I haven't yet tested the upper bound of a) No virtual memory resize notification¹ and b) No similarly irrecoverable crash². My current theory is that it (whatever 'it' really is) will not happen much prior to an ending-year of 806. At its simplest, the crash-on-report could happen when the genned world data objects are copied whole (to instantly double the memory needed) in order to operate upon the copy to pare it down to the report info (for which the nul bitmap has been opened for writing as.a standard precaution to rule out read-only file system or other such failures, but never gets to the point of being written to).

However, that would be simplistic. Most likely a report-sized (including map-sized) chunk of memory is to be reserved, ratjer than an identical copy. Also more years generate more hiatorical events. Leastways, this aspect of the mystery remains untested by me. Ditto much testing of otherly-seeded versions of the same custom LARGE ISLAND, non-customised (similarly/otherly-seeded) LARGE ISLANDs and (apart from my Region1 save, a "CREATE WORLD NOW = 433333" creation that did not cause any such ripples and is currently be Adventured around, betwixt other demands) anything not a LARGE ISLAND in world size.

I did rerun to Year 403 with a particularly inefficient Perl script (width-first and greedy searching of a dataset phase space, a quick'n'dirty hack towards looking for a solution (unrelated to DF) that demands more memory than it deserves and will spin up the CPU fan on its own) to see if a concurrently resource-greedy process would push DF backmover the edge again, but it did not. A tribute to whatever form of virtualised resource compartmentalising is practiced by this system well into its second decade of utility, I'm sure. And why I still stick with it for these little things


Anyway, apart from not considering a buf, a brief foray onto Mantis hasn't revealed (relevent!) bug reports such that have succumbed to my inept and uncomprehensive attempts at discovery. As I don't consider it 'fixable' nor relevent to pretty much everyone else out there (who do not reserve a particlarly old workhorse/mule of a machine for DF pleasures, as other devices take up other (more) necessary tasks of the day) I'm not inclined to further chase/create this particular line of enquiry.


Yes I could post the WORLDGEN template for others to try under their own circumstances, but with the logical separation of machine I'd have to revist it, copy the necessary onto USB and then post it up..? And I haven't yet really looked (in either play-mode) at the features on the worldgen-following map that caused me to spend so much of my DF-playing machine's time on repeated worldgennings. It's entirely possible that there isn't even that much of interest to the player (over and above any starting world sourced from any other combination of seeds and other worldgen params). That is something I hope to find out, in various extended idle moments over the next week or two.

And so, apart from the below feetnete, that's all I have to say. If you're still reading then go get yourself a cookie (or a strangely green and definitely unsweetened smoothie, according to your current dietry pursuits) as reward. And then, probably, forget all about these mad/maddening ramblings and resume living the rest of your life.


¹ I might need the whole machine restarting each time, but not entitely sure if that's sufficient and/or necessary to make each iteration an equally fair test, depends upon memory handling/reverting practices with the OS - and I haven't previously had very much reason to establish what behaviours it follows.

² Initial thoughts were that tye OS-level memory resize process, during which I am warned that some things asked by the program may not have happened, was the (later) cause of the crash as the twrget of an unfortunately nul-pointer is given an attempted peek or poke. Though, as it appears that I avoided the resizing message (so far as I can tell), I've now put that idea low on the list of possibilities.

A search for this reveals nothing at all, unless I've messed up. (Even tried a DF Wiki and general Google search, but anything useful was nowhere near the top of the far-from-finding-nothing results.)

In my 44.02 game (persevering with a Worldgen on that, rather than chucking it in every time the later updates came round) first a petition-accepted visitor (now Listening to Music) and now my low-workload woodcutter have had the Activity of "Simulate Got". Which doesn't mean a thing to me. Not those two words in that particular combination, anyway.

Somebody tell me that I'm a fool (also that I can't work the Search box correctly, if necessary) and clue me in on what they're doing. The local Tavern room seems to be the location of this activity, maybe music is involved (but a "Got" is not a musical instrument.

And just as I've gone back in to try to examine the Job, the woodcutter and the others in the gathering have dropped back to Socialising, so the potential clues within that part of the interface eludes me.

Background to my query.

In other news
Londonistan autonomy soon

I'm opening this up. Is it useful to use terms like "lolberal" (whatever you think about "liberal") and "m8" (whatever you think about "mate"), and now "Londonistan".

LW believes that using light-hearted terminology helps diffuse the conversation and keep it friendly, but I've tried to privately explain that it antagonises me, one reason why I'm now holding back from directly responding to LW's messages in a certain thread (the only one I've seen his vocabulary go in that direction, but I claim no omniscience).

"M8", to me, implies a sarcastic tone of a word that I wouldn't even expect to hear directed at me by my actual, RL, peer group.  "Lolberal" and "Londonistan" indicate a deep-set bias and/or preconception.  Am I so out of kilter that such liberal (NPI) use of these terms is, after all, unthreatening and non-mocking.

I've been communicating by text-only media for more than two decades.  I used 1337-5p34k before txtspk was even invented. There wasn't BBCode or HTML formatting when I began and so we indicated stressed points through alternate ways of indicating *bold* and /italic/ text and we also (almost!) all knew how to use apostrophes, at least before the Eternal September, webtv and Google Groups came along and spoilt things democratised the fledgling Web and adolescent Internet.   So maybe it's just me.

I will tolerate these... neologisms... if I'm obviously alone, or a minority.  I'm not averse to using the odd TLA, ETLA or even VETLA (Three Letter Acronym,  Extended (4) Three Letter Acronym,  Very Extended (5) Three Letter Acronym), which I appreciate is somewhat cliquey (and possibly impenetrably archaic to some, possibly even patronising), but I'd like to make sure I'm not in the silent majority, first.

It's not been a hasty decision, to open this up to public discussion; I'm prepared to be shown to be wrong, or simply outdated. So over to you. (And of course I hope this is a civil, if diverse, conversation.  If conversation there is.)

(Poll, perhaps?)

It has been confirmed that at approximately 07:45 local time, in the Robinson family home, Mr Robinson's LEGO Detector recorded a confirmed 'event' upon the stairs.

The LEGO Detector, one of a pair operated by Mr Robinson, consists of two complex 'lengths' of calcium-based microstructures, carefully engineered to support Mr Robinson's perambulatory activities, at a basic right-angle to each other.  There is a mostly vertical length primarily calibrated to resist the force of Earth gravity and a mostly horizontal one that is used to maintain the overall verticality of the former, whilst in operation.  For operational reasons, including the need to dampen unwanted external forces, they do not consist of single elements, but are actually a collection of loose-linked structures, surrounded by a supporting sheathe of padding, sensory networks and maintenance tubes through which a basic combined heat-exchange, oxygenation and fuel-bearing liquid flows.

The above device is often deliberately desensitised by successive layers of fabric and harder materials, especially when used in conjunction with experiments in propulsion towards both monetary gain, via employment, and monetary loss, in the form of retail, these traditionally taking place outside the Robinson family home where environmental conditions are often detrimental to the apparatus being undampened and unprotected.  (Those familiar with the Robinson Family Home may be aware of some other attempts at both forms of monetary flow using the family computer, but neither has yet been deemed completely satisfactory without supplemental external efforts.)  This event, however, occurred during a short period of time in which the relevant steering group had not yet anticipated the need for changing the mode of operation from the basic unclad format.

The actual detection was heralded by a spike in the background detection data by the lower beam of the detector, and was indicated by a loud audio signal once the detection had been sufficiently processed by the Master Control Room for the device.  Full confirmation of the event was delayed by a short period of necessary down-time by the LEGO Detector concerned, the paired Detector doing double duty for the duration whilst the full extent of the original detection was fully investigated and the original Detector inspected for damage.  (In the immediate aftermath, a pattern of two by eight 'dots' were observed to have been impressed upon the Detector's lower surface, but later observations by Mrs Robinson affirmed that these were only temporary and could now hardly be observed at all.)

Further calculations and investigations are needed, but it is highly expected that once the scientific community has collated the evidence and examined the physical evidence, including that which can be observed in situ upon the stairs, that the source of the detection may well have been one or other of Holly Robinson (5) or Ben Robinson (7), normally located at that time in one of the smaller upstairs bedrooms.  Both bedrooms are known to contain large LEGO clusters (themselves rarely triggering a similar LEGO Detection event, due to their larger mass, visibility and stability), from which single LEGO particles have been known to escape during high-energy events, especially in the early night-time hours when local activity is supposed to be reduced.  It is supposed that the LEGO particle itself had managed to remain undetected overnight whilst the LEGO Detectors and their connected infrastructure were themselves taken down for their regular overnight maintenance and cool-down.

Mrs Robinson later opined that, whilst there was much excitement at the time, whichever of either Holly Robinson or Ben Robinson that it was who actually precipitated the episode were lucky that nothing as substantial as a full system crash had occurred, with Mr Robinson, and that next time such particles might irrevocably end up lost in the the space of vacuum.  Mr Robinson has not yet revealed much more about the detection, beyond the burst of four-letter data automatically given out during the initial announcement.

Well, I had a quick search with various keywords (including Norwich), but couldn't see any mention of this.  I'm not sure if it's a funny thing, something to be concerned about or even something that'd lead to an interesting discussion of some kind, but as I couldn't really pass up this gem, I present to you... Doctor Who and Star Wars clash.

Rather than make any rash statements or judgements (although I'm not lacking in any, truth be told), I think I'll leave that up to anyone else who wishes to make them.  Feel free to either ignore me or surprise me.  (Just don't get Toady freezing us up in Carbonite and then placing that in the Pandorica, and for good measure keeping that going round and round in a transporter buffer, locked into a diagnostic cycle, in a ship crashed onto the surface of a remote Dyson Sphere.)

I'm not a Twitterer, so I'm currently at a bit of a loss when it comes to advising someone about Twitter clients, like I've just been asked to do.  And it's surprising how little information the Tweetdeck/etc homepages actually tell me (never really a Web2.0 person, I'm barely Web1.0, to be honest), so I thought I'd ask here, because there's probably someone here who's 'in' with this 'groovy new technology' who can quickly give me the hippest and baddest information available out there...  Daddio.

The brief sounds simple...  A Twitter interface with an offline mode.  Something PC (i.e. Windows)-based that can be run from a memory stick and used 'live', in whatever way one actually uses twitter normally, but can be then be unplugged and taken away to an non-connected machine[1] with a fully pre-synchronised list of Tweet-type stuff[2] able to be reviewed at leisure.  The ability to cue up replies and send them off when re-connected and re-synchronised is an optional bonus (as would be multi-account management, I suspect, but they didn't explicitly ask for that...), but that's probably against the philosophy of Twitter, so I haven't promised anything on that front.


So far, the best option I've seen (and understood, to be honest) is Hotot, at least because it could be easily tweaked to do something like this.  But it looks to be quite a bit early in development, too.


(You know, I probably need to 'get with the program'[3] and get myself Twitterered.  Tune in, turn out, drop out, as it were.  But, unless I ragequite almost straight away, I might find myself wondering what to do with the half hour a day I have left after Twittering back and forth...  Thus, for now I'm trying to resist.  But not all my acquaintances are so conscientious.)

Help me Obi Wan Bay12, you're my only hope!  (Or I might just have to admit that I don't know, and let them work it out all by themselves...)



[1] Yes, they still exist, I've got several at home that I keep deliberately off-line

[2] Followed people's stuff?  Followed tags' stuff?  I don't know, like I said, I'm not a Twitter-user.  I've helped sign other people into the thing (normal web interface, only), but didn't like that one needed to specify a whole list of people to follow right from the get-go, rather than build it up from scratch...  Would I start with Stephen Fry?  There must be someone else I'd be interested in.  But ignore that question, it's not me that needs sorting out.

[3] No pun intended...

Was tempted to entitle the thread "The Evolution of Faith", but it'd have put the wrong spin on the whole thing...  Let's just say that I've seen enough discussions about faith (its nature, its efficacy, the justifications, whether it applies to 'scientific beliefs' as well) gone awry (or phase in and out of good-naturedness, alarmingly), and I think this is something I'd want to avoid.  I'd appreciate it if we stay away from that lot.  Not that I can stop you.  (Although I suppose I could, if I have the right to lock the thread, or Toady/Threetoe does, but that's really not something I'd want to happen.)

No, instead I was wondering if there was a more anthropological discussion to be wrung out of the following.  Can we follow that train of thought?  Pompous of me, perhaps.  Totalitarian, maybe.  Me, who probably (temporarily, at least) derails as many threads as any equivalently prolific poster, so probably shouldn't be deigning to mention it anything even when that isn't malice aforethought.... 

However...

It may or may not have come to your attention that the Anglican Church has been having a bit of a difference of opinion with itself about the possibility of Women Bishops™.  There's already been a concession put forward (simplifying greatly) that parishes whose parishioners are against female clergy shall not be forced to accept female clergy, in other words that there should always be a male alternative to any appointment.  (Again, I repeat that this is simplified, and it may also suffer from the fact that I have no involvement in Anglican affairs and thus am taking on board what is reported in the news.)

Today, I heard, there may be a further concession.  Given that such parish groups as mentioned above do not accept the authority of any form of female-headed bishopric, they are also entitled to not take male clergy whose ordination was performed by such females as have have attained sufficient seniority.  Presumably because they do not recognise the 'handing down' of powers.  Thus, I further surmise, they would not accept male clergy ordained by male clergy ordained by a female member of the church.  And so on.


This brings to bear an interesting situation.  The measures announced are there in order to prevent the splitting of the Anglican faith (in some cases whole nations' sub-specie of Anglican church object, or else object to to the objections, in other cases there may be a split of opinion from one parish to the next, in a patchwork nature across an otherwise pretty much similar terrain of faith.

But if this is the case, we end up with an interesting proposition, as now the subsets of the Church that decry female involvement (and, please, the merits or not of this opinion is also not my intended aim) will seek for each candidate, for posts in their particular conglomeration of ecclesiastical establishments, someone essentially with a 'pedigree' untainted by the feminine touch.  While the remainder of the possible appointees are going to gain a position only within the 'asexual' portions of the church.

Anthropologically, this would be an interesting development to monitor, for there are a number of possible outcomes.  In one, the success of female integration could achieve such a degree of success that the pool of 'untainted' clergy becomes vanishingly small, forcing those exercising their rights to the exception to recant their position, as soon as they realise that (however competent the suitable cohort of candidates might be) at some point they're going to be faced with the option of a 'dreg', or low-competence 'pure blood' priest, rather than get a pretty nifty pick out of the legion of 'mud-blood'-descended alternatives.  (And, who knows, may even have by now moved to a philosophical position whereby they reverse their original reticence against actual female clergy!)

In another option, the massed-ranks of the candidates themselves recognise something of the above, and consider that remaining 'pure' may give them a shoe-in to just about any strictly gender-conforming parish of their choice.  Thus they eschew being elevated (directly, or indirectly) by the female lineage of church officials, essentially 'breeding out' the "faith-gene" for women clergy.

Of course, there's also the possibility that neither of the above effects will dominate and either an uneasy truce will arise out of an unstable (or meta-stable) equilibrium, but far more likely than that would be the actual splitting of the church into gynophilic and gynophobic variants, producing the schism that these original measures were intended to alleviate.  Like a fault in the Earth's crust that's been allowed to slip a little, but still builds up pressure so that it does eventually rupture and produce a quake...

Or, to continue that last analogy, by relieving the pressure in this spot, it creates new pressures in another area.  Once members of the worldwide Anglican community realise that such 'arrangements' are possible for this matter of disagreement, what other niggling little alternate interpretations might then arise, with accompanying demands for either rulings over them to exhibiting total conservatism/liberalism of POV, or intended to generate further "you shalt not do what you don't want (even though many want to, and will)" allowances to various local sensibilities.


I could open a poll on which way this might swing, but I'm actually quite interested in what freeform thought might exist over this point, rather than tie you down to  finite, discreet and (presumably) mutually-exclusive options.  Like I said, I'm not really interested in the legitimacy or otherwise of the positions, but am really looking at how you might think the situation would pan out...  There are a few options and directions that I've not mentioned, e.g. something that takes into account the Catholic Church's apparent offer to absorb (with special, Hong Kong-style freedom from the incompatible parts of the ruling organisation's main doctrine) such dissatisfied elements of the Anglican Church.  (I believe that some flocks have... well.. flocked to the side of their 'papist saviour'.)  Maybe you'd like to riff upon connotations derived from these other alternatives?

If anyone's bothered.

(Oh, and need I add that if you are Anglican, then of course you can contribute, but it's not supposed to be about "whether it's right or wrong", so that might best be omitted or downplayed.  Oh dear, I really am sounding like a thread-Nazi, but it's just that I don't want this to become an actual faith battleground.  And, 'believe' me, I have opinions of my own which I should hopefully not have made a relevant issue in my writings here, so far.)

((And anyone caught copying this whole thing, verbatim, onto an actual bit of coursework for their current educational establishment frankly needs their head looking at!  Especially if it's supposed to be math(s) homework!!))