Joped.com

The time has finally come, its time to move on from Evony. I have really enjoyed playing this game with many of my real life friends and met a lot of new friends along the way. Our alliance FUBAR has really made a name for it self using a well defined mixture of co-ordination, hard work, spies and cleaver guerrilla tactics. The most fun challenge was to destroy the biggest back stabbing alliance on the server, LEGENDS. Very early on they were welcomed to our family of allies with open arms. The immature leadership found it amusing to declare war on us only to apologize for the attacks a few hours later. We presented them with forgiveness twice, but you know how the saying goes. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” We weren’t going to let this happen again, so we embarked on a successful campaign to see their demise. In their death throws they managed to convince another one of our allies WDC to turn on us forming the alliance Nemesis.

All of FUBAR again answered the call of war and turned the Nemesis cities into firewood. While sending their cavalry off to the glue factory. Following this war came another war against a number of alliances that were so easily rolled over that its not even worth the time to mention them.

Why have I decided to move on ? The list is actually pretty long, but the most basic summary is. I am bored with the game and might as well call it quits before I end up hating the game. Who knows, in a few months I might come back. Which is why I have positioned my remaining city in such a way that a return would be very easy. I have grossly neglected a number of personal projects in the past few months, the time has come to jump in and finish them off.

What are my ending thoughts about Evony ? I honestly have to say that their customer service is hands down worse then Sony (Everquest). At least Sony answered requests and did bug fixes. There are countless bugs and problems with Evony that will never be fixed. The company is busy working on “Age 2″ of the game, which is a whole new version of the game. However, it is very hard to trust a company with another game when they poorly support their existing products.

Lets face it, Evony has some very questionable advertising techniques. The banner ads entice you with large breasted woman that need to be saved in the game. Players very quickly realize that this content doesn’t exist in the game what so ever. You also very quickly realize that the company spams you constantly trying to encourage you to spend money on the game to quickly advance your empire. Yes, I did spend some money on the game. The amount of money I spent is equal to 2 of your average console games yet provided me with 3 times the amount of hours of entertainment. Do I regret it ? Absolutely not! Honestly, the spam is very annoying and turns a lot of players away. But, I am awesome at ignoring advertising in general.

I personally did not start playing the game from these ads. I started to play because some real life friends were playing. Let me tell you, the LAN parties have been a lot of fun!

Cheating is a tremendous problem with this game. The game mechanics force players with very large armies to either invest incredible amounts time farming or cheat to feed their armies. Some players take this cheating to the next level to automated their attacks and defenses. As it stands, taking a city from a player who is online is difficult. Trying to take a city from a bot is impossible. Sure, people cheat at all sorts of games and that is nothing new. Sadly, there is nothing that Evony can do to battle this outside of banning players. There is just no way to protect a flash game from automated actions. Yet surprisingly they don’t even take basic steps to encrypt their network stream, which leads to interesting programs used to SMS you of an incoming attack. Most top players use this types of applications and that prevents a legitimate player from climbing the ranks.

We are presently looking for a new game, something with far less of an upkeep time investment. Just something to hold us off for a few months until Starcraft 2 comes out. I have discussed it with all of my friends who play Evony and we all agreed that it will be our next major game.

Joped Vice host of FUBAR, out!

This cartoon take Terminator and mixes it with another time travel movie. Don’t want to spoil it, but its perfect.

This is a very long rap that covers the entire Terminator 2 movie from start to end. Very very well done, I am impressed. This must have taken a shit load of work to complete.

Here is a new category on my blog where I am going to repost all things Terminator.  Lets start it off with a bang.

This is a very well done remix where the creator took all the sound effects from Terminator 2 and remixed them into a song.  I totally love everything after 3:07 of it.

We took a walk down to Embarcadero to stretch our legs a bit and take a few nightshots.  Conditions weren’t perfect as there was a tiny bit of fog that made some of these shots not very clear.  We also screwed around with Stephanie playing with a glow stick, these didn’t come out as good as I hoped.  But still kinda cool.

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Tonight I was playing around with my Canon S2 IS using long exposure mode.  The scenery wasn’t all that amazing, I was primarily playing around with the F stop and ISO setting.  I honestly really don’t know much about photography, this is totally uncharted territory for me.  However, now that I have a better idea of what I am doing I am going to go for a bike ride this week and see what I can shots of.  The netbook will come in handy here so I can preview things in full screen to see how I am doing.

You can click the picture to get a full size version.  Clicking it again will return you back to the site.

Shot of San Francisco from inside our apartment

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We have been talking about getting kittens for a while now and finally took the plunge. It was always the goal to get 2 kittens. I personally think that cats with playmates will be much happier kitties in the long term.

We have not named them yet, its going to take a few days before we can really see their personalities. The grey one is a male who so far is extremely affectionate, soon as I sit on the ground he rushes over to sit on my lap. The tortoise shell one is very playful and is a big stalker, loves to pounce.

Here is a short video

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For the longest time I have been trying to figure out how to force GCC to use multiple cores when doing compiles. Today, I finally came across the -j flag for make. This basically tells make to run x number of jobs at a time. Warning, don’t specify -j without a parameter or it will spawn an infinite number of jobs which is very bad.

Release notes for Linkped 2.16

• Introducing new shorter URL  and new algorithm for generated links. All links generated will now use lkp.cc instead of linkped.com.  Old links will direct to the new location, so don’t worry they won’t break.
• SSL for login, registering and change password has been restored.
• Fixed issues with the view count on links not always updating properly.

Alpha testing of the new send link feature has been going well, but its still not quite ready for beta.  Although the interface is pretty much the same, all of the backend code was completely rewritten.  Presently, there is no ETA on when this will be available.