Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Olli Tietäväinen's LiveJournal:

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Friday, July 3rd, 2009
9:07 am	Zeno Clash I got Zeno Clash last Sunday (due to it being 50% off on Steam at the time) and played it through in a couple of days. The game is basically an indie first person brawler, sort of like Dark Messiah of Might and Magic without the standard RPG stuff like magic, experience levels or an inventory. Or jumping. There are two main things of interest about the game: the first person combat mechanics and the kooky setting. Both have their merits and problems. The scenario is a postmodern* fantasy-punk with a lot of animal-human hybrids, barbarian/tribal chic and all kinds of metaphysical bullshit. It's very obviously not from an anglo-saxon country or Japan (I had guessed some Eastern European country, but apparently it's from Chile). The game starts with the main character, Ghat, on the lam after killing his own father-mother creature for initially undisclosed reasons. The story follows his travels from the murder onwards and discloses past events via flashbacks. The writing is pretty poor, but not having elves, dwarves or final fantasy cliches forgives a lot in my book. As for the combat, Ghat's main weapons are his fists. Melee implementation is not perfect, but it works well enough for a first person game and is often surprisingly fun. There are some tactical elements with dodging, blocking and counterattacks, but simple hit-and-run tactics are enough to beat most enemies. Weapons like bows, flint-lock guns and primitive grenade launchers can be found lying around, but they are mostly slow, underpowered and uninspired - usually the only reason to use them over fisticuffs is the chance to knock off a few hit points off the enemies before they get too close. Enemies get more benefit from using ranged weapons, as they usually team up on the lone Ghat, and you need to be aware of your surroundings to knock the guns off the sniping bastards. One of the worse parts of the game is the level design. The levels are really small and mostly flat, partly thanks to not having a jump command. I appreciate not trying to make a 3D platformer, but at some points the old "can't go over a foot-high obstacle" is pretty damned annoying (if a little nostalgic). Most of the levels are there for the duration of a combat situation only, and there are very few puzzles or plot events that require interaction from the player. All in all, Zeno Clash is a mostly fun little indie game that is just about short enough for me not to get too annoyed over its shortcomings. I don't regret playing it, but I'm not excited about the foreshadowed sequel. I am glad I didn't have to pay full price, but at 50% off it wasn't a bad deal. *** out of ***** * weird for the sake of weird (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
2:07 pm	Fallout 3 So far (maybe 5-6 hours in?) I am liking: * Super mutants * Large open world * Interesting quests * Not too much or too little ammunition available * VATS * Nostalgy Not liking: * Weapons break too fast * Uncanny valley faces on characters * Skill points required / available * Too easy to kill monsters with no long range attacks with cheap hit & run tactics * Kind of easy overall (Comment on this)
Monday, April 6th, 2009
1:04 pm	Sending messages through time How can you prove that you have made a message at a certain point in time? The classic situation is "I have kidnapped your daughter and she is still alive" where you take a picture of the kidnappee holding today's newspaper. This newspaper only exists in (or near) the present, not in the past. Even the editor of the newspaper probably only knows what the front page is going to look like a few hours before the paper goes to print. If you want to fake a picture like that, you're going to need to photoshop today's paper in the image with the girl. If you want extra certainty of the genuineness of the message, ask for ten pictures from different angles - pulling off that many fakes without leaving behind evidence of tampering is not going to be easy. A more interesting case is how to prove that this message is actually from the past. Holding a newspaper is no use, as it's trivially easy to keep an old copy of a newspaper around. Traditionally authors send sealed copies of their manuscripts to themselves in certified mail to prove legally that they wrote it first (and not, for example, the copy editor). This only works as long as you trust the post office and only while the seal is not broken. If you want to use a photograph, you're going to need to show something that provably exists in the past and not in the present. You could stand in front of a building that's going to be demolished in the future or one that's still being built. This might not be easy, as finding such buildings might not be easy or the building might not be recognizable. You could take a picture in front of a famous painting and then punch a hole in it. You could take a picture with a person that's about to die, or a young person who's not going to, but the person who looks at the picture needs to know who is in it. You could get a tattoo or a scar after taking the picture, but better make sure that it's in a visible place. (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
2:18 pm	Lucha libre Some thing just sound too awesome to be true: (from Wikipedia) Lucha films also starred other masked luchadores including Tinieblas (The Darkness), el Rayo de Jalisco, Sr. (Lightning from Jalisco), El Medico Asesino (The Killer Doctor), El Fantasma Blanco (The White Ghost) and Superzan. The most successful luchador film in Mexico was Las Momias de Guanajuato ("The Mummies of Guanajuato"). In that 1970 film, El Santo, Blue Demon, and Mil Mascaras team-up to battle a group of re-animated mummies. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
12:46 pm	Tech work is being outsourced to Africa now? I have a very unscientific hunch that tech work is now being outsourced to Africa. Why? Because the software development forums I browse seem to have a lot of new users with African nicknames. It's so crazy it just might be true! (Comment on this)
Monday, January 19th, 2009
8:46 pm	Dogs are smart Everyone who has played fetch with a dog knows you can pretend to throw a stick and the dog goes to fetch it. I guess a typical reaction is "ha ha, stupid dog, I didn't throw the stick but you thought I did". When you think about it, though, that's totally wrong. The dog is smart enough to read your movements to figure out that you're going to throw the stick, and they even know to which direction it's supposed to be going. That's pretty damn smart! Try programming a robot that does that. Additionally, the dogs I've interacted with have always figured out the fake throwing game after a few tries. tl;dr: dogs are smart enough to read your body language and they learn from their mistakes. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
12:54 pm	What I did today Boring stuff alert. So, I was preparing a training scenario for my colleagues at work today. This consists of creating a sample program that communicates with another sample program in a secure manner. I was aiming for the simplest possible example: The caller sends a string ("%name") and the callee returns another ("Hello %name!"). Unfortunately, I was a bit lazy so I let the program components in both modules have the default name ("Component1"). This caused a problem during the installation on my server, as apparently there can be only one program component of a given name, so the installation crashed. The programs couldn't be uninstalled via the normal interface, so I had to go manually remove them from the server administrative console. No big deal, this happens. After having learned my lesson I renamed both components. They install fine, but then I make a change. This needs to be reinstalled on the server, which fails because there's a running instance of "Component1" and this prevents stopping the program I need to update. I thought I removed those things? I can force-uninstall the program, but it's a tedious process. I search for any signs of that name in my own files, and find nothing: it must be a problem on the server settings. I spent roughly an hour looking in the administrative console, but I couldn't find anything that was of help. I decided to spend a while looking for information on the internet and I finally found a server administrator's guide for the correct version. After browsing a while, I found the steps to remove these kinds of corrupted programs ("This situation usually has no impact" it says, except that I can't reinstall my application without taking at least 5 minutes to work my way through the administrative console). It includes running an administrative jacl script. After spending some time working out how to run jacl scripts and the correct format of the parameters (incorrectly stated in the guide) I finally managed to run the script. The script didn't work. The problem still persisted. The corrupted program was still giving me all kinds of trouble. I tried running the script again and I noticed a message in the output stating that this script has been deprecated and that there is a replacement jython script. I spent some time looking for it; for some reason, the first script is under \util while the second is under \admin. After figuring out how to run jython scripts on the administrative tool (thanks, helpful error message in the source code that doesn't get printed when there's an error!), I found out that this doesn't work either. Reading the source code of the jython script gave me an idea that I might be able to write a program in Java code that accesses the same interface as the administrative script. Unfortunately, after looking into this, it seems that the Java interface is not as powerful as the jacl / jython one, so I'm out of luck. Then I remembered that the server's settings are mostly stored in an internal database. I dug through the hard drive to find the database and I eventually found a program that could read it. I interpreted the table structure and located the rows that were giving me trouble. I cautiously marked these rows as belonging to another module. However, after I try to restart the server, it failed on a data integrity check. Defeated, I reverted the changes to the database, and I could at least start the server again. After everything I could think of had failed, I could only do one thing: rewrite both of the programs from scratch. This took a couple of minutes, whereas trying to fix things took several hours and amounted to nothing (except bitterness and a little knowledge of scripting). I don't know if I there's a lesson to this story. (Comment on this)
Thursday, December 18th, 2008
8:43 am	Post post So I ordered some stuff (a camera and a dvr) from the internet. After a couple of days I got a confirmation e-mail that my order had been shipped and I got a tracking code and a link to the logistics company's website. I went to the site and tried my shipping code and I got a page that said that the code was wrong or the item had not been entered in their system yet (I tried a few times just to be sure). Now how does that work out? I got a tracking code so obviously somebody had done something to interact with their system. Later on I tried the code again and I got a progress report. So... "programs", huh. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 29th, 2008
1:39 am	Travelling In the last 24 hours, I've travelled using an airplane, a train, a bus, a car and my feet. I should go ride my bike but it's really late and I'm really tired. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, November 24th, 2008
9:30 am	Penitentiary steel More than 1 percentage of U.S. residents are incarcerated. That's including both men and women, while women are much less likely to be jail. In 2006, the number was one in 30 for men between the ages of 20 and 34. For black males, it was one in nine. Also note that these numbers aren't for people who have been in jail, it's people currently in jail. (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 9th, 2008
7:56 pm	Hellblazer So I've been collecting John Constantine: Hellblazer trades for a while now. I copied the following list from Wikipedia. I own the ones I've marked with an asterisk, and I've read the ones that have a plus sign. Original Sins * The Devil You Know * The Fear Machine * The Family Man Rare Cuts Dangerous Habits * Bloodlines * Fear and Loathing + Tainted Love * Damnation's Flame Rake at the Gates of Hell * Son of Man * Haunted + Setting Sun Hard Time * Good Intentions Freezes Over * Highwater * Red Sepulchre Black Flowers Staring at the Wall Stations of the Cross Reasons to be Cheerful The Gift * Empathy is the Enemy The Red Right Hand Joyride * The Laughing Magician * Roots of Coincidence Still a long way to go, and a lot of money needs to be spent (trades are generally 15 to 20 euros a piece). (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
11:07 pm	Helsinki is for chumps There, I said it. Okay, maybe the weather is kind of bad right now, but it seems like it's always really windy when I'm here. (Comment on this)
Monday, October 13th, 2008
1:59 pm	Arrrgh. Damn it. I'm coming down with a fever on one of the like four weeks of the year I can't afford to be away from work. Help! (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 9th, 2008
4:35 pm	That's Gangsta Both George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush lived in Compton for roughly a year. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bush41/timeline/ (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
9:26 am	New house So I moved to a new house and it's pretty awesome. It's a studio apartment with a sauna. I still have a week or so without the internets, though. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
1:02 pm	Hooray for acronyms SPNEGO = Simple and Protected GSSAPI Negotiation Mechanism For serious. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
11:54 pm	Freezepop Oh man, I guess I'm late to this particular party, but Freezepop is awesome! It's the kind of pop electro I've been looking for years. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
12:48 am	Musings Being on my summer vacation, I seem to have adopted a strange sleeping pattern: stay up late, wake up in the mid-morning, take a two-hour nap around six pm. I kind of like it. I saw a couple of movies, Dark Knight was really good and Wanted was pretty average. (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
8:53 pm	The Incredible Hulk Oh man, why didn't I go see Dark Knight? The I. Hulk wasn't bad, it just wasn't good enough. CGI was better than in Ang Lee's Hulk, but otherwise there was not much else to be excited about in the film. The cameos and appearances (Lou Ferrigno, Stan Lee, Robert Downey Junior) and in-jokes were the only things that I really liked. **+/***** (Comment on this)
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
10:07 pm	The best length of things Albums: 45 minutes TV serials: 4 seasons Computer games (where applicable): 10 hours Movies: 90 minutes Novels: 60 000 words (Comment on this)