The Brad Hole

One of the key features of the last Jedi Academy patch was the ability to load code DLLs from within pk3 files, which allowed it to work on pure servers running PC mods. This feature worked in my limited testing, but once people started building Mac DLLs for the 1.01c patch in earnest, they exposed a bug in my implementation.

Turns out that the 1.01c Mac patch would not do the right thing for some zip files created on a PC - notably, the last release of the JA+ mod. As it happens, I had to address this same bug in another Q3 app I'm working on, so I was able to roll the proper fix back into Jedi Academy. I have newfound respect for Carmack's decision to avoid DLLs in the original Quake 3 release in favor of having mod makers use the Quake virtual machine. :-)

I've uploaded a new version here - 1.01d, if you will. It hasn't had any official testing or QA from Aspyr (and likely never will) and it only addresses this one issue. This patch only affects the multi-player app, and as such doesn't include the 1.01c version of the single-player app from the previous patch.

I don't expect it'll make things worse, but you should set your expectations as you would when using any pre-release or untested software. Post any bugs as comments to this thread - don't e-mail Aspyr for support.

Posted by bradman at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

It's time for another overly verbose round-up of our home buying process. :-)

The last I wrote, we were waiting for the home inspection. That came and went this past Friday, and we had until the end of business today to complete the next step - sending in a list of requested repairs that we'd like to see from the seller. This house was built in 1982, and clearly hasn't had much done to it in the way of maintenance (or sprucing up) in at least 10 years, if not longer.

As such, our home inspection didn't uncover any one major thing, but we did run into many minor things: broken garbage disposal, broken sprayer on the kitchen sink, missing closet doors on 3 closets, a cracked mirror closet door in the master bedroom, a non-functional handle on a faucet in the master bedroom, a bedroom with a door frame that was damaged ("violently" in the words of the inspector), dry rot on some fascia, a bedroom door missing the entire handle assembly, a missing smoke detector, wall damage behind one toilet, a non-functional solar water heater, a non-functional evap cooler, massive mildew/mold in the master bathroom shower, 2 leaks on the patio roof, a minor roof leak, etc. etc.

Because we're not in a strong negotiating position, there's not a whole lot we can do but ask for fixes or money back in consideration for fixes. The general idea is that if they don't want to do anything (which is certainly their right), we can either walk away or live with it. Given that most of these things are each minor when taken one by one, it probably doesn't make sense to walk away.

But between you and me, internet, if they totally balk and do nothing, I think we could potentially bluff like we're pulling out to get them to negotiate. They're pretty desperate to move out for financial reasons, and our proposed closing date is under a month away now. We're under no such fixed deadline or financial pressure - our lease is up April 1, but that can be extended month-by-month. We've also seen one or two houses come up each week that are interesting. The prospect of going through the same-day-offer bidding war crap again isn't appealing, but neither is buying a house that will turn into a money pit right off the bat.

Still, hope springs eternal that the sellers will take some responsibility, since their neglect is the main factor behind all this.

Posted by bradman at 02:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Today is one of those days where I wish I could be a reporter if only to be able to write a headline like the one on this article.

Posted by bradman at 07:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I ran into an interesting problem with 10.3.8 yesterday. Upon installing the update, I restarted and shortly thereafter got several nasty warnings that I had run out of disk space on my startup volume. At first, this didn't worry me too much - I'd been down to about 3 gigs of space left the last time I checked a few months back, and it didn't seem inconceivable to me that I'd accidentally blown by that recently. I deleted 8 gigs of old crap and went on my way.

This morning, I woke up to a Mac in deep trouble. Overnight, it had spawned a number of warning dialogs about running out of disk space again. This was pretty surprising to me, so I quickly ditched a few more gigs of junk, restarted and started digging for the root cause. I could watch my disk usage drop by a few hundred megs each minute, so I didn't have unlimited time.

It turns out that the MacAlly iShock driver was having some big issues with 10.3.8. It pegged the CPU usage at close to 100%, which was clearly not right. I killed that and the disk usage stabilized a bit. Upon further investigation, the iShock driver was totally filling up the system log with error messages. My system.log file was 8 gigs in size, and the console.log file from yesterday was another 4.5 gigs. Yowza!

Luckily, the iShock driver is pretty much worthless (it adds the questionable ability to drive the mouse cursor with the joystick) so I haven't lost anything. As an added bonus, I've got way more disk space on my startup disk now. :-) This problem is also noted today on macfixit.com, so hopefully affected people will see it.

If you've got the iShock driver and are having this problem, you can find the driver in /Library/Application Support - just delete the "iShock*" files and you're good to go. Also, system.log lives in /var/log and your console.log file lives in /Library/Logs/Console/<your user name>. If your log file is massive like mine was, don't try to view it in the Console app - it'll take forever - or at least longer than the minute or two I waited. ;-)

Posted by bradman at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I think I mentioned this in an earlier post, but this home-buying adventure is all-new for Beth and myself. In that light, I've developed a roadmap of the process, based on my limited understanding so far. There are a few grey areas which I've left out, namely lucky step #13.

1. Decide to buy home
2. Get finances in order
3. Hire a realtor
4. Start looking
5. Recover from sticker shock. (This usually involves alcohol.)
6. Find home
7. Place bid in form of signed contract to seller
8. Wait anxiously. (Alcohol comes in handy here too.)
9. Upon acceptance, fork over an escrow check for a few thousand.
10. Start paying for a battery of inspections, as well as a house appraisal.
11. If house is pre-owned, develop an unhealthy obsession with home improvement. (We are here.)
12. Pray for relatively good news on the inspections, and also hope the appraisal doesn't come in below the sale price.
13. ???
14. If everything goes well, sign a ton of papers on the closing date in the contract and wait for the sale to be recorded by the county.
15. Take possession of the new home.

Posted by bradman at 04:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Our home search seems to have come to an unusual resolution. One of the houses we were interested in last week (and lost the same day) fell out of escrow and essentially into our laps. This past Thursday, the listing agent called our realtor (remembering our interest) and offered to not relist the home for a few hours while we came and looked at it again. Beth took a long lunch and we hauled ourselves up there again - another 40-minute-each-way drive. At least it's mostly freeway miles. :-)

We ended up making an offer and signing a contract with the stipulation that they had to either accept or reject the contract by 7pm Thursday night. Well, it turns out that the husband signed it by 7pm but his wife wasn't home by then, so their realtor was going to get the signed contract back to our realtor Friday morning sometime. Apparently the wife forgot (or did she?) to sign it Thursday night so it wasn't ready Friday morning. The last I heard was that our realtor was supposed to get a faxed copy last night once the wife got home again. We were out so I'll call him later this morning to see if it's official or if it's turned into crap.

We're kinda prepared for some jack-assery with this house. To remind you, this was the "first mad dash" from last Wednesday night - the one where we were scheduled to stop by between 6 and 6:30pm only to be told at 6:15 and half a mile away that it was gone. Knowing this, and knowing that there was some disagreement that caused the previous offer to fall apart, it would not surprise me to discover that these sellers are a large part of the problem. Because this is such a sellers' market, I'd like to limit the number of times we get bent over and screwed to once or twice a month. ;-)

Edit: Good news for us - the wife of the seller signed the contract last night and everything is now official. My understanding is that now we've got 10 days to complete a number of inspections, so that process will start in earnest on Monday. w00t!

Posted by bradman at 08:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

A while back, I railed on the new Star Trek series Enterprise for new heights of mediocrity. It's true though - the first two seasons of Enterprise were equal parts interesting (Vulcans! Andorians! Old-school! The characterizations of the doctor, Trip and T'Pol) and painful (temporal cold wars? faith of the heart? a love of water polo?). Starting with season 3, however, I believe they took the show to new heights with the Xindi season-spanning plotline.

By the end of last season, I felt Enterprise had risen right to the top, even surpassing TNG in my mind. Perhaps the only flat note in all of season 3 was the clunky time-travel cliffhanger at the end, but I realize now that this was an attempt to end the temporal cold war plotline that had been left hanging as quickly as possible. A lot of hardcore geeks (at least those on Slashdot) have enjoyed ragging on Enterprise, but I suspect most of that criticism comes with an ignorance of seasons 3 and 4.

As such, I've enjoyed this season very much. They've continued to play up to the old-school strengths of Trek - Vulcans, Andorians and strong character development. With the 2 Stargates and Battlestar Galactica on Friday right after Enterprise, it's a 4-hour sci-fi orgasmic block that can't be beat.

But all that is apparently coming to an end - today it was announced that Enterprise has been axed. This seems like a crime - crap like Voyager can go for 7 seasons, but something a little darker and grittier like Enterprise gets the heave-ho. Oh well - it was good while it lasted.

Posted by bradman at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)