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crusadingknight

Members
  • Content count

    2014
  • Joined

  • Last visited

About crusadingknight

  • Rank
    Feran
  • Birthday 10/29/1989

Contact Methods

  • AIM
    bremacdon
  • MSN
    crusadingknight@gawab.com
  • Website URL
    http://rootshell.be/~bremac/index.html
  • ICQ
    226111090

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    /usr/local/bin/rc, Belnan
  • Interests
    Eternal Lands, AI Programming, D/C/Ruby Programming, Game and Integrated Interpreter Programming.

Recent Profile Visitors

1009 profile views
  1. Spikebigpapa banned for foul language in presence of mod

    This would be easier to take seriously if it didn't look like the complainant had swallowed and yet failed to comprehend a thesaurus. Most of Spikebigpapa's postings have been impressive in their conflation of content with verbosity, the majority of which consists of absolute nonsense or misplaced adjectives. I suppose I could scribe an equally loquacious assay into deciphering for him the necessity of concisely phrasing communications, but I'm afraid his egomania and persecution complex totally eclipses any attempt to pierce the delusions of grandeur he has erected to shield himself from both humanity and informed exchanges. (Please shoot me if I ever write something else this indecipherable on these forums.) Oh, and spike: before you accuse me of being a supplicant, please look up the meaning of the word. You're actually looking for the word 'sycophant'. Supplication does not imply sycophancy, nor vice versa.
  2. Best Linux Distro?

    You could try wubi and just install it on Windows. It won't be as fast as it would if it was running on bare metal, but if you're just looking for the easiest way to try it out without any installation, that should do the trick. Not worth fumbling with the bootloader to install it on an external HD, or trying to get something installed to a USB drive from Windows if you don't know that you will like it. Uhhh.... no. Just no. You shouldn't need to recompile your kernel on a regular basis (the only time I have in the last two years was from a pre-configured PKGBUILD on Arch so that I had full support for my AA1), nor should you need to compile software as an end-user (again, I only fall back to PKGBUILDs for uncommon software, and write my own for rare software) as sorting out and updating packages installed outside of the package manager will prove an immense nuisance.
  3. Bluenosers

    Since nobody else seems to want to admit to it, I'll go second. I'm rural Nova Scotian born and bred, and at the time of writing I remain a current resident. Unfortunately it's up in the air how long I have left here before I migrate westward, since software development isn't exactly a common job in the area.
  4. malloc is evil

    alloca won't really help there, since it takes little work to free a chunk of memory at the end of the scope it was allocated it in - less work, in fact, than to change all scope-local memory allocations over to alloca and remove the corresponding calls to free. In my experience, most memory leaks come from manipulating and tearing down with more complex (global) structures rather than from within a single scope. Besides, I don't think EL should be able to leak 400MB of scope-local memory within a few days, unless you're frequently allocating obscenely large transient buffers. Out of curiosity, have you tried compiling with -DMEMORY_DEBUG to see if you can pin down the memory leaks, or at least determine whether they are in sections of code using the C allocators?
  5. malloc is evil

    There are a few caveats to ponder first when considering using alloca: Obviously, there can't be many places in EL where memory is allocated for use and freed within a single scope. In fact, the only examples I can think of are creating strings for filenames, which could quite simply use variable-length arrays - however, last time I checked (a *long* time ago), EL was only using C89-compliant features. It's not standard ANSI C of any variety, though GCC, MSVC (via _alloca_s) and tcc (x86 only?) support it. "Portable" alloca implementations tend to make non-standard assumptions about the underlying architecture, and thus don't offer a guaranteed userspace alternative when the compiler fails to implement it. IIRC the GCC implementation doesn't cleanly return NULL when you allocate too much memory, but segfaults instead. alloca uses the size-limited execution stack, which makes it terrible for use for parsing large temporary sets or in recursive functions. If EL continues slowly transitioning towards C++, scope-local containers will be able to handle most, if not all, of the use cases of alloca cleanly anyway. Most people don't know about alloca, and thus may either a) assume that it's a general-purpose allocator in the EL code or need to look it up, raising the barrier-to-entry to the codebase. PS: What's the deal with the first link, anyway? I know it covers general tenets about optimization, but unless you're calling a function to generate path names in an inner loop somewhere, alloca will not supply a quantifiable performance boost. EDIT: Oh, I see. You perhaps meant to point to http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/diet.pdf ?
  6. Are you an EL oldbie?

    Wow Nardo you are prolly the oldest player who isnt a dev... Don't go entirely by member numbers. Everyone had to re-register after the old forum was replaced on the 20th, and some took longer than others to do so . Probably the first ~150 members registered on the forum had accounts before the change was made.
  7. Are you an EL oldbie?

    That means you started playing in March of '06, in case you were curious.
  8. Script to install el and desktop icon on ubuntu

    Why not use the native package manager? Distros such as archlinux and gentoo already have Eternal Lands, and I think a .deb or .rpm package (if not already available) would be much more useful than a script to install it without package management, possibly causing uninstall problems, version conflicts, or shared library dependency problems down the road.
  9. EL Demographics

    I've learned that people tend to lie about how long they've been ingame. I can usually tell, since I actually HAVE been ingame to see these people Yeah, didn't the last topic of this type actually have someone (in mid-2007) claim to have been playing for five years? I seem to recall something like that, but I might be misremembering. I've been around here 4+ years myself (five by October 8th), and I often wonder how I missed so many people from a time when players online was often around seven.
  10. Earth Hour 2008 - Show You Care

    It's actually affected most by free radicals and reactive substances (NO, CL, Br, and other halogens), of which CO2 is definitely not one. In fact, CFCs have been regulated since the Vienna convention of 1985, and data since 1995 seems to be showing a general upward trend in the amount of atmospheric ozone . According to most current extrapolations, it should return to normal by the end of the century.
  11. Earth Hour 2008 - Show You Care

    Just like they did with AIDS? Right. The power that be are not almighty, and certainly not infallible - plus elected officials are more beholden to current corporate profits than possible scientific predictions as a rule of thumb. Of course, when you consider them as a statistic, the current powers that be will likely have lived to a ripe old age before any of the predicted consequences occur anyway. Does only looking for a conspiracy count as homework? If the IPCC _is_ a political organization, why don't they behave like one? Printing retractions when your models were off enough to colour your extrapolations, though not your conclusions, thus lending to rampant cries of 'conspiracy!' is hardly the accepted behavior of political organizations, but rather that of a scientific one. I suppose that you may respond that they're leading me, but if we want to go that rather I may very well be living in the Matrix. This is not an easy topic to determine who is right or who is wrong, and I prefer to err on the side of caution. CO2 is continually released from inside the Earth, through volcanism and associated processes - the Earth apparently didn't form with a complete atmosphere. Of course, if we discard our knowledge of the past and of geology as flawed, your theory has merit, though I can find no support for humans being alive during the Cambrian period, during which our current knowledge indicates atmospheric CO2 concentrations were highest. Anyway, I don't worry about global warming myself - the extrapolations made by scientists forget that we're running out of economically viable sources of fossil fuels anyway - we may or may not have hit peak oil recently, though it will be impossible to tell for years down the road. Even with the rosiest predictions, we'll stop burning fossil fuels long before we've re-released all of the carbon into the atmosphere. Conserving limited fossil fuels until we switch to alternatives is more my concern, given the huge economic impacts that the loss of a few oil wells can have at present.
  12. Earth Hour 2008 - Show You Care

    We said the same thing about the cod, but then again, only hindsight is 20/20. In defense of real power savings, they should help keep the brownouts down in the future. Uh, no... if it happens many of our Nova Scotian cities will be under water. I live dead in the center of the province, on top of a hill, and I'm still barely above sea level. That's what I like to hear. Lighting may be a major factor if, like many businesses, you have a lot of 100W incandescents, and have them on all the time, but on a personal level it's a tiny factor (at 8PM, the only light I usually have on is a 7W LED array.) We'll be far better off if people choose energy efficient appliances when the time for replacement comes, and consider alternative approaches (ie. my house is passive solar, and even during the winter only ~500 square feet of it is heated.) Earth Hour is fine and dandy, but I have the suspicion too many others will turn out their lights for an hour, and fail to make any changes to follow up. The clean energy sources _aren't_ extremely expensive, but rather it is expensive to phase out and replace any generating infrastructure (even one coal plant for another). Additionally, many require specific sites to produce to full capacity, and others such as solar power generation require more R&D before they reach their full potential, all of which make them difficult choices until one is creating new infrastructure.
  13. Most computer issues?

    And simply counting the results of a search proves what exactly? Exactly as much as posting a link to a search, which was the whole point. Instead of linking to google searches, use links to articles instead.
  14. How chinese treat animals

    Senator McCarthy, I presume? I actually don't see any communist states in the world, unless you count those one-party states which are as 'communist' as the recent Kenyan Presidential Election is believed to be 'democratic'. In any case, putting a social ideology in context with human slaughter and suffering is simply outlandish. I couldn't quite understand that (first) video though - not only is what they were doing to the animals awful, some of it would also have been extensively damaging to their furs. Neither a humane nor an efficient way to run an industry.
  15. Most computer issues?

    Thats a mistake TigerDirect has a very bad reputation. Go NewEgg If we're to go by the judgment of google, you would appear to be wrong. The best solution is usually to buy from a local retailer, because shipping mistakes are common no matter who you order from.
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