User talk:Darkcanuck

Archived chat from old wiki: Jan 2008

E-mail notifications

Hey, just wanted to let you know that the e-mail notifications are working. I'd never played with the wiki e-mail stuff at all, so I checked existence of sendmail, tried to confirm my e-mail to see what error I got, and it worked. I can only deduce that the recent OS upgrade server maintenance did something different that didn't break it (like install sendmail)? Anyway, let me know if you have any problems with it. --Voidious 23:23, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Nice, I think it's working. Got the confirmation email at long last... =) --Darkcanuck 05:59, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Snow Leopard?

Hey - have you upgraded to Snow Leopard? If so, have you run a RoboRumble client? After quite a few minor annoyances already tonight with Snow Leopard, I was really bummed to run into this when I ran RoboRumble (not every match):

Exception in thread "AWT-Shutdown" java.lang.IllegalThreadStateException
	at java.lang.ThreadGroup.addUnstarted(ThreadGroup.java:832)
	at java.lang.Thread.init(Thread.java:344)
	at java.lang.Thread.<init>(Thread.java:410)
	at sun.awt.AppContext$CreateThreadAction.run(AppContext.java:522)
	at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
	at sun.awt.AppContext.stopEventDispatchThreads(AppContext.java:542)
	at sun.awt.AWTAutoShutdown.run(AWTAutoShutdown.java:290)
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:637)

It was kinda nice for those 10 days of Leopard on the MacBook Pro being able to run an Apple JVM with the RoboRumble, but I guess it's back to SoyLatte for me...

--Voidious 03:17, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

That error is not OS related, it's a Roborumble bug. I see it in my work computer too (Win XP), after a while the client freezes. It has been preventing me from contributing more to the melee rumble. --ABC 09:41, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Same here, I've seen this regularly since I started with 1.6.1.4. Doesn't seem to have influence on the results though. Seems to happen more often if the system is rather busy, like refreshing RR rankings. My client doesn't freeze, so contributing is no problem. --GrubbmGait 11:01, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

That sucks... I did upgrade on Sunday, although I haven't tried roborumble yet, my CPU has been occupied with targeting and movement experiments. Maybe the new rumble beta will be better? --Darkcanuck 03:32, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

You know what, this is embarrassing, but I think I was actually running SoyLatte those 10 days of Leopard + MBP, anyway. I remember checking the Java version at some point, but it must have been before I fixed my shell to be tcsh, which loaded my .cshrc and pointed back at SoyLatte. I was definitely seeing the X11 app load (which I knew seemed odd). The net being that I am still getting the above error in SL + MBP + RoboRumble, but it may not be new to Snow Leopard... --Voidious 04:05, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Aha! Well, I just did a local test and it seems to be fine here. In Leopard I had to download the 64-bit build of Java 1.6 separately (from Apple) but I'm not sure if it was made the default in Snow Leopard. This is my "java -version" output:

java version "1.6.0_15"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_15-b03-219)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.1-b02-90, mixed mode)

--Darkcanuck 04:20, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

What other "minor annoyances" have you found? I miss iStat Menus -- now I have to listen to fan intensity to tell if RoboResearch is still running in another space... --Darkcanuck 04:25, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Exposé and Spaces seem a bit choppy, which really bothers me - that's the biggest one. A quick search showed a lot of others with this gripe. I also dislike this "Recipient Bar" in iChat message windows that I cannot disable (only for contacts for whom I have both AIM and Jabber accounts in my buddy lists, but that includes several of my main contacts). Minor stuff, really, but given a lack of any huge features that are drawing me in, it's been a pretty underwhelming upgrade so far... Maybe I'll wait for .1 from now on. --Voidious 04:38, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, I never use iChat or Expose, but I'm very much a Spaces junkie and haven't really noticed much. I was sold on the 7GB of freed drive space and Mail seems more stable so far. Mouse transition into VMWare is the only thing bothering me, but that could be an application issue. Overall I like the philosophy of a release that's focused on performance rather than features and the price was nice to boot. --Darkcanuck 04:52, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Today I was hearing from an avid mac user who is a coworker of mine, talking about the changes in Snow Leapord. While it's true it doesn't have many user-visible features, it has some very major under-the-hood updates. What I find particularly neat, is that benchmark scores were up by well over 10% when he updated to Snow Leopard, and as a developer, some of the new under-the-hood features like 'Grand Central Dispatch' seem really amazingly awesome... Anyways, I'm also pretty sure that the fact that Snow Leopard was primarily an under-the-hood update was why it was a significantly less expensive update than normal anyway. --Rednaxela 06:05, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't at all mean to sound like a hater. I think the under-the-hood improvements will pay huge dividends over time, especially when apps leveraging the new stuff start coming out. I love that OS X gets leaner and meaner over time instead of bloating and slowing down. But as for first impressions, having one of my very favorite OS X features (Exposé) perform considerably worse on brand spankin' new hardware was pretty frustrating, and there wasn't much else in terms of visible features to offset it mentally... --Voidious 14:44, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

I encountered a strange thing last night while doing some Diamond debugging. I was using the Apple JVM to run Robocode, because with Snow Leopard + SoyLatte, Robocode crashes when I open Preferences. With the Apple JVM (but not with SoyLatte), I found my 1v1 radar was slipping - for one turn, it would just not move. It turns out that execute() was simply never being called for that one tick (and no skipped turn was reported). It was a rare thing, not nearly often enough to affect results (imo), but easily reproducible in just a few rounds. It took me a while to realize it was not my radar code at fault. I'd be curious to hear if you can duplicate this... I can send you a bot that prints when it happens if you want. I still need to test it on Leopard/Apple Java 5, too. --Voidious 17:45, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

Sure, either email it or put it up on digitari and I'll give it a try. I haven't noticed anything, but then all of my bots like skipping turns and I've never trusted how Robocode notifies bots of skipped turns anyway. My bots track two things: the number of skipped turn events received, plus the difference between the current tick (from getTime) and the last tick after every call to execute(). The second number is always smaller. --Darkcanuck 18:50, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

B26354

Hey man, been waiting for you to make a page for B26354, but since I'm not seeing one... =) What's up with this? If it's indeed an all-new melee bot from you, great work! (I only temper my congrats in case it is HawkOnFire movement or something, as your description was "a test"...) --Voidious 03:58, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Heya Darkcanuck,

I was wondering if I could get a RR API key, as well as setting my flag to the United States flag on the RR server.

Have a great day!

Just a bump. I also sent you an email on the 10th. :)