Grid (racing)

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Apr 132013
 

With Grid2 around the corner (May, 28th) I decided to buy Grid (the first one). It’s cheap on GreenmanGaming.com at the moment, so I bought it and installed it by entering the key on Steam.

The controller defaults on Grid are of course the (cursor-)keys, so to use the Fanatec wheel, I had to make a custom setup. Not very difficult, but strange to see a game that is all about realism does not have a default “wheel” setup.

The game is difficult. I did my fair share of Forza3, Forza4, Shift, Shift2 and Forza Horizon, but this game is unforgiving. Like it is in real life of course. Bump into a wall, and basically your race is over, since your front wheels are damaged or maybe worse: you totalled your car. I cranked down the difficulty a bit, but even then the game is very hard.

Probably because it’s an older game, it does not support FullHD resolution. The closest is 1280×800 or 1280×900. Still the game looks great when you modify the graphics details to HIGH.

For the price on Greenman, don’t think twice and buy this game if you’re into racing games. But don’t say I didn’t warn you…

Facebook adds paid messages

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Apr 082013
 

Facebook is getting weirder every day. Apart from advertising, their biggest source of income is probably gaming. Gaming requires friends, or neighbors, or whatever the game calls is.
Now Facebook introduced paid messages to non-friends, and celebrities.
How can you expand your neighbors without harassing someone with a friend request first? And secondly, I think it’s ripping off celebrities, since they don’t see a penny of the revenues.

Maybe it’s time to turn our backs to Facebook. I just did by ranting here 😉

Bye bye MSN

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Apr 082013
 

Starting today, Microsoft will terminate the services for its messenger MSN or Messenger Live. We will all have to use Skype from now on. Almost the same you would say, although Skype doesn’t have personalized statuses, it doesn’t understand the typed smileys, and it’s a big program to start with. You loose the groups you created. And in a lot of countries Skype just doesn’t work. The MSN king is dead, long live the new king Skype.

BARF!

SQL joins

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Mar 122013
 

I’m an oldskool Oracle user, so I learned and used joins in the oldfashioned way. Just name all the tables in the WHERE-clause, and specify the join conditions, and use (+) for outer joins. Times change, and the new syntax has been around for years. Never really used it, but today I did, and I found this image on the internet, I thought I’d share it, since I think it’s quite helpful.

sql-joins

It clearly shows how to use LEFT and RIGHT joins.

Loading 3D points into Oracle with SQL Loader

 2 Responses »
Feb 152013
 

I received some files with only coordinates, which had to be loaded into Oracle. It’s not super difficult, but I thought I’d share it anyway. The files contain some comment lines first, easily recognized the the hash (#) as the first character. The rest of the lines are x, y and z separated by spaces, like this:

#[MetadataBegin]
#[OrderNumber]2013001
#[Measured by]Piet
#[MeasureDate]30-1-2013
#[MetadataEnd]
 58392.50 439762.50 -0.01
 58397.50 439762.50 -0.03
 58402.50 439762.50 -0.03
 58407.50 439762.50 -0.03

The control file should be like this (change the filename etc):

OPTIONS (DIRECT=TRUE,MULTITHREADING=TRUE)
LOAD DATA
INTO TABLE DEPTHDATA
WHEN 1-1<>'#'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ' '
(ID SEQUENCE(1,1),
 GEOMETRY COLUMN OBJECT
 (
  SDO_GTYPE CONSTANT "3001",
  SDO_POINT COLUMN OBJECT
   (X FLOAT EXTERNAL TERMINATED BY ' ' ,
    Y FLOAT EXTERNAL TERMINATED BY ' ' ,
    Z FLOAT EXTERNAL TERMINATED BY ' ' )
   )
)

Prefork vs Worker

 1 Response »
Feb 022013
 

Just changed the server’s Apache model from Prefork to Worker. Should be easier on the memory and the CPU, but after downloading/installing it (via aptitude) nothing worked anymore. PHP works different under the Worker model, so directories need an extra handler and options. No biggie, read this thread.

Restored images

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Jan 162013
 

I saw that images in old posts weren’t showing, so for what it’s worth I restored the images as far as I could find them. That’s the problem with harddisk crashes, not everything can be restored. If you’re missing anything, tell me.

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