Fallout 3 initial impressions

I have been waiting for the next Fallout game since Fallout 2 came out. I loved Fallout, and I enjoyed Fallout 2 even though it was a bit too buggy to really care for. For years and years I read every piece of news about the Fallout series. I skipped Tactics and BoS for obvious reasons. Finally, Fallout 3 has been released. I've been playing in all my free time which means I am almost level 6. With three kids, a full time job, and grad school, I don't have much free time!
The Good:

• VATS is neat and interesting. I don't really understand the Action Point system. For some reason I can use VATS until I run out of Action Points, then I just shoot and shoot FPS style. So why limit the APs at all? Anyway, I still like using VATS and wish I could for all combat (read: I miss turn based)
  
• Fallout 3 is dark. I like that a lot. I was worried that it would be silly and lighthearted, but it turns out the world is very unpleasant in many ways - good job!
• Interesting quests and people. The quests have my attention for the most part. There's a bit more of the fetch/deliver variety than I recall being in the first fallout, but you also get the rescue/eliminate stuff too.
• I can resolve things with speech. Very nice. When I play Fallout, I'm a talker, not a fighter. The developers have done a nice job making this path available so far.

The Bad:

• Repairing weapons. Why do I need to do this? I played Oblivion, and every time I manage my weapon's condition, I'm playing Oblivion again. I liked Oblivion, but I didn't spend nearly this much effort managing my gear. Maybe it gets easier at higher levels, but right now I spend a ton of time trying to decide what the weakest weapon I can use in a fight will be. I don't have the repair skills to just blast away with my best gun. I can manage ammo, or I can manage condition, but managing both is annoying.
• Weight management. I have to carry at least a half dozen weapons just to be assured that I will have something to beat on my opponents with. Maybe next time I will allocate more points to unarmed combat, but for now I have to carry so many guns and knives and beating sticks that I have little capacity for anything else.
• It would be nice if there were more than two shades of brown in the wasteland.

On the whole, I am having a good time with Fallout 3. Hopefully the resource management will get easier as my character becomes more experienced. If not, maybe I can find some cheats that will let me ignore my weapon condition.

When to update your BIOS

For about a week I've been trying to correct a problem with my desktop PC. I had updated it to Ubuntu's Hardy Heron, and suddenly I couldn't reach the network anymore. Hmmm. That was surprising. So I spent a week chasing down all the possible reasons. I decided it was the driver for my nforce chipset. The version changed in the new kernel, and when I booted to the old kernel everything worked fine. So I'm researching how to downgrade driver versions and trying to get the kernel source, etc, etc. Finally, on a whim, I check to see if there's a new BIOS for my motherboard. And there is! And it fixes the problem! I feel pretty stupid.
I overclock to get a few more frames for my games, and any BIOS change can mess up a good overclock. So I never update unless there's a problem. I just wish I would remember to try that sooner.
Moral of the story - any time you have a weird driver or hardware problem, check your BIOS revision right away.

Hypermiling?

I drive a 2002 Subaru Impreza Outback Sport. I drive mostly to work during the summer, and I drive a ways further during the school year (working on my masters). Up until a few weeks ago I averaged about 21 mpg. I wasn't careful at all about how I drove or what route I took. I had heard of hypermiling, but I didn't really know anything about it, or if it would make much difference. A friend of mine pointed me at CleanMPG.com, and I started doing some reading about stuff to do. Most of it is fairly obvious, but it takes a lot of focus - not necessarily a bad thing while driving! :) So here's what I did:
- Go the speed limit.
- Keep my RPMs below 2250 when not on the highway. That happens to be 55mph for my car. Even on the highway, I keep my RPMs below 2250 until I get to 55mph, then I accelerate to 65.
- Coast whenever safely possible - I've found that if I take the highway, I can coast for over a mile going downhill to both exit ramps I use, and I don't impact traffic at all.
- Never accelerate toward stop-signs, red lights, or stale green lights

My commute is ten miles, so I drive twenty miles a day. Now that I can coast for two miles, there's ten percent of my drive where I use almost no gas. Altogether, with these few changes, I have improved my mileage to 26mpg, which is better than 20% improvement. Nice.

Using Lisp in Windows

The past two years or so I've been learning and using Lisp. I have to use it in Windows sometimes, and I've found that getting Lisp running in MS Windows is hard. I mean a free version of lisp hooked into Emacs/SLIME with asdf support. I know about Lisp in a box , but I found that the default setup put things in places that were hard to find when I used lisp outside Lisp in a Box. So I've scoured the web and put together a step-by-step to getting Lisp going in Windows. I use CLISP and SBCL

I have benefited a lot from Bill Clementson's blog, and have 'borrowed' some instructions and the elisp code to start SLIME in Emacs from him (thanks!). Really, that may be enough information to get most people going, but there are a few other steps here that may be helpful.

I've used these instructions for both Windows XP and Vista. You'll need something to unpack .tar.gz file (I use 7-Zip)

1. Setting up Windows
   
   
   
   • Make sure your HOME environment variable points to your home directory. For me, this is:
     

     
             c:\Documents and Settings\ben (in XP)
             c:\Users\ben (in Vista)
     



2. Installing Emacs
   
   
   
   • Install Emacs 22. Don't use XEmacs. Nothing personal, but as of two weeks ago it couldn't make system calls in Vista.
   
   


3. Installing SLIME
   
   
   
   • Create a cl-library\site directory in your HOME directory. (C:\Users\ben\cl-library\site in Vista)
   
   
   • Download and install SLIME to HOME\cl-library\site\slime


4. Installing Lisps
   
   
   NOTE: I think I've had trouble with emacs making system calls
   with spaces in the pathnames, so modify the default
   install locations to have no spaces.
   
   • Install SBCL to c:\sbcl
   
   
   • If you have previously installed sbcl to another location, uninstall it, and make sure that the environment variables are cleared out.
   
   
   • Install CLISP. At the time I'm writing this, the default location is OK.


5. Installing ASDF
   
   
   SBCL comes with asdf, so skip to step 4 if you only plan to use SBCL.
   
   
   1. Install CVS if you don't have it. (You'll need the latest version if you're behind a firewall)
   
   
   2. Open a command prompt and change to the HOME\cl-library directory. CVS will check out the asdf library to this location.
   
   
   3. Install asdf from CVS. The cliki page has a link to directions. Here is what I did:
      

      
      cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cclan.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/cclan login
      cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cclan.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/cclan co -P asdf
      

   
   
   4. To use this from the REPL type:
      

      
      (load "C:/Users/bholm1/cl-library/asdftools.lisp")
      



6. Initialization Files
   
   
   
   • Read through and follow Bill Clementson's directions for CLISP (I'll see if I can't get permission to post my version here)
   
   
   • Add an SBCL function right before or after the clisp function:
     

     
     ;; SBCL
     ;; Note that the CLISP version is part of the path
     (defun sbcl ()
       (interactive)
       (setq inferior-lisp-program (concat bin-dir "sbcl/1.0.6/sbcl.exe"
                                           " --core " bin-dir "sbcl/1.0.6/sbcl.core"))
       (load "slime"))
     

   
   
   • Create a file HOME\.clisprc.lisp with the contents (don't forget to adjust the path):
     

     
     (nconc CUSTOM:*LOAD-PATHS* (list #P"c:\\Users\\ben\\cl-library\\**\\"))
     

   
   
   • You SHOULD be able to load SLIME at this point. Run emacs and:
     

     
             M-X sbcl
             M-x slime
     

     
     .... OR ....
     

     
             M-x clisp
             M-x slime
     

Ok. You're up and running. Let me know if you have any trouble with these directions. As I get corrections / suggestions I update this. Good luck!!