"Trader's World"

"Trader's World" (Charles Sheffield) - I am really liking Sheffield.  This book reads like the Golden Age of SF, but is from 1988.  Reminds me of the Stainless Steel Rat.  Earth is recovering from WWIII, and the traders hold together the big nations through diplomacy and trade.

Starfarers

"Starfarers" (Poul Anderson) - I'm not sure what to say about this book.  The main idea is the development of a zero energy reactionless drive (so, no FTL, but lots of STL).  The story is told in two parts, the first follows the first star ship (traveling thousands of light years towards signs of other reactionless ships); the second follows the second generation explorers, settlers, and traders.

The two stories help to break up some of the monotony (not much happens in 495 pages - at one point, I broke out the old "I'm sorry, my friend, but you must die to make the movie more interesting!").  However, it seems like the whole thing could have been made shorter.

NedOS on real hardware!

It took some doing (and it's still not where it is on simulators), but it's something.

Voxel Worlds

I think I need to work on some sort of voxel world building game (aka Minecraft - or should I say, NedCraft, MiNed?)

Some numbers:
Figure 1 GB allocated for the world (which should fit nicely into memory on modern machines - you could go to 2 or 4, but not 10 or 20 yet).  One byte per block gives 255 active textures (plus empty).  That should be plenty (Minecraft has a ton of items and creatures, but those can be handled separately).

1e9 blocks sounds like a lot, until you start trying to fill a globe with them...

That's 1000 blocks cube, if each block is one meter, that's only a 1km cube (which is a pretty small planet).

You might use a lazy system for allocating, but that opens the possibility of the total storage growing enormous over time.

It seems better to limit the depth, and spread the blocks over a greater area...

Of course, you need some volume above the surface as well...

500 m high, 500 m deep... 1 GB goes fast!

Soylent People Are Green!

(you know, green, like they care about the environment)

I seem to remember something about some guy trying to develop a food replacement blend.  I didn't think much of it until I saw it on Ars, and checked out the blog.

"Suppose we had a default meal that was the nutritional equivalent of water: cheap, healthy, convenient and ubiquitous."

There is something in geek culture called "life hacking".  Just like you might hack software or hardware to scratch an itch, you can hack your body to make it a little better.

That's the approach here - the creator started with a personal project (simplify meals), and is now open sourcing it for everyone.  I think it will be interesting.

Gentoo Defeated Me

You know it's bad when you start thinking about finishing your own operating system, rather than wrestling with getting an existing one to work...

My old laptop has Ubuntu 10.4 (which expired June 1).  Lots of stuff has started breaking, I've known I needed to update the OS for a long time.

I hate 12.4 (which was the natural upgrade), so I figured I would try Gentoo.  I'd be able to build any software I need.

I've been trying to build Gentoo on two machines since December.  Neither works.  They have different processors and graphics, but, ironically, they both fail in the same place (X server fails to load KMS module).

I just pulled the Gentoo live DVD, and it looks good.  X starts up (although my wireless isn't recognized...).  I looked for a "Install this!" button, but alas, no such thing.

I searched for "Install Gentoo from live dvd".  I found a forum post which pointed to a wiki page.  The wiki page wouldn't load, so I had to go through the Google cache, only to discover the page was deleted - due to incompatible license.  Wonderful.