WombatNation

Word Mapping [Not suitable for those with an aversion to prof*nity.]

This site provides advice to current and prospective referees in the Football Association in England. As an aside, the term “soccer” that is more commonly used in the US, Canada, Australia, and a few other countries comes from an abbreviation of “association football”. Perhaps the abbreviation was created after an extended drinking bout that resulted in a significant slurring of speech.

And while I’m already off course, I take issue with those who say we in the States should call the sport football, since it is called football in the English speaking parts of the UK, futbol in Spanish, futebol in Portuguese, fussball in German, and voetball in Dutch. But, what about Italy? They call the sport calcio (or perhaps more completely, gioco del calcio), which an Italian friend told me literally means “to kick”, as in a ball or a person. How come I never hear people criticizing the Italians for not calling the game piedesfera? Okay, enough of that.

One of the highlights of the aforementioned referees’ advice site is a Venn diagram that tries to illustrate what punishment a ref should dole out for specific examples of bad language. This is useful info for the non-Brit, as I had never received the memo indicating that bollocks and piss off were semantically so closely related. And who knew that shag needed to be carefully concealed as sh&g?

[via Boing Boing]

Over the last few years, I’ve generally found that my interest in a specific video game rarely lasts longer than the amount of gameplay that is made available through the free demo. The upside of this is that now I don’t pay for games that I end up playing only a couple times. I have not yet extended this discipline to books, so I still buy many books that I don’t read or only read a chapter or two from.

Although I was tempted to immediately buy UT2004 (I loved the UT2003 demo, but lost interest before deciding I needed the whole game), I decided to once again give the demo a try. I got the UT2003 demo to work on XP, but not on Red Hat 8.

After downloading the Linux version of the UT2004 demo through one of the mirror sites and installing it [uncompress the bz2 file, su to root, and run sh ./ ut2004-lnx-demo-3120.run], I got the following error when it tried to start:

Couldn't set video mode: Couldn't find matching GLX visual

Based on the info I found from googling for that phrase, it was pretty obvious the problem was with the NVIDIA drivers. I had not yet updated the drivers that came with Fedora Core 1. I used yum and the rpm.livna.org repository to install a kernel built with the newest version of the NVIDIA drivers. After a quick reboot, I was hard at work fragging aliens. And as an extra bonus, Tux Racer was finally playable.

Update 11/27/2004 – I posted new instructions if you are using FC2.

Update 4/25/04 – In case you are a Fedora Linux user and need more help getting this to work, here are a little more detailed instructions:

• Add the following section to /etc/yum.conf (I normally leave gpgcheck set to 1, but I have sometimes had to turn off digital signature checking specifically to download Livna’s kernel module for the Nvidia drivers)

###############
## Livna.org ##
###############

[livna-stable]
name=Livna.org - Fedora Compatible Packages (stable)
baseurl=http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/yum/stable
gpgcheck=0

• su to root
• #yum install kernel-module-nvidia-$(uname -r)
• Reboot your machine (actually, exiting and restarting the windowing system may be sufficient, but I haven’t verified that)

FYI, $uname -r returns the release identifier for the kernel you are using. Also, you can use $yum info kernel-module-nvidia* to see all the modules (e.g., kernel-module-nvidia-2.4.22-1.2188.nptl) that are available. If you have a single processor machine, you need one that ends in nptl. If you have a multi-processor box, you want nptlsmp. NPTL = native POSIX thread library and SMP = symmetric multi-processing