dark cave

Crappy programmers, untrustworthy Customer Care and laggy hardware

January 16th, 2007 at 12:28am dark

Yeah, sure, right now that I have the time to sit in front of my PC, I can conclude that today has been a (relatively) bad one. Damn it.

Oh, sorry, I didn’t notice you… you’re back. Howdy?

If you are wondering about what the terms in the title exactly refer to, keep reading. If, today, you are frustrated too, like a kid vainly defending his sand castle from the irreverent waves of a peaceless sea, who tries to wash away the fully-armored knights, the court ladies, the almighty king and even the infraposed, worried and almost crying obstacle, go on. Otherwise, I wish you a very good day.

• First of all, my connection. My ISP, FastWeb, sells 10 Mbit cable connections and is well known for the quickness and ability of its call center. I’m joking. Well, maybe its customer care is a lot better than those of many other Italian ISPs, that’s true, but nevertheless I waited 3 days more than expected to see my router’s LEDs turn on again. Thanks God.
• The authors of the theme of this blog are, simply, stupid. When I first downloaded it, I chose it because of its name (guess it :P) and its color combination (and I would still choose it). First, I played a bit with the CSS file and such… there were some corrections to be done, IMO, but none of them was substantial. Nevermind, no one is perfect. Sure, they aren’t, I realized in the afternoon. After inspecting the full code, I can only define them as crappy programmers: I’ve wasted hours adjusting sizes and dimensions, before realizing that the error was in a poorly designed PHP page. Shame on you. I could change the theme, that’s true, but now the matter is personal, this is between me and them.
• When arrived home, I decided to install Neverwinter Nights (the first episode, not the sequel) on my Gentoo box, having in mind the wonderful hours spent playing it on Windows, on the same machine. Couldn’t be easier:
  

  nano -w /etc/portage/package.use

  ### add/edit the lines:

  # games-rpg/nwn hou sou
  # games-rpg/nwn-data hou nowin sou

  emerge ––sync

  emerge nwn

  ### mount CDs when requested
  ### (better, mount && export the path, before)

  nwn

  I’ve played many not-so-new games on this laptop, both on windows and on Gentoo, almost always with satisfactory frame rate. No more true with NWN. Running on Gentoo, Neverwinter Nights was laggy as hell, while some benchmark programs (like glxgears) or some other games with relatively heavy load on the graphic card (like ppracer) run quite smoothly. Damn lag. Yes, I know that my video card is just a…

  Display controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device

  (as lspci promptly reports) but, until now, I felt satisfied.

Well, if you need me, I’m reading Sigmund Freud’s work The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (or Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, if you prefer). Just gimme a call.

See you around.

Entry Filed under: English, Free (as in freedom) thoughts, Politically (in)correct