So, my new graphics card is working nicely. I've noticed that desktop performance (window scrolling etc) isn't quite as good, but 3D performance is just swell. I haven't had a chance to really see what it can do, but preliminary results are good.

Now that i've got a machine that can handle newer games, do I go for Battlefield Vietnam or Farcry?

So, I took the plunge and got the XFX GeForce 6600gt AGP for about 225 incl. tax. There's a 25 buck rebate, but I almost always fail to get rebates, so we'll see. You can check out a comparative review of a few 6600gt cards from techreport.com for more info about my card. I'll undoubtably be putting rants or raves about it once I get the thing up and running.

If you're interested, I bought the card from ZipZoomFly.com and they've been alright so far. They had the best price and offered free 2-day fedex.

Let's say I'm willing to spend around $200 on games/electronics for the next, say 4 to 6 months. What should I do?

1. Replace my failing graphics card with a new one (~$100 - $160)
2. Buy a (pre-played) X-Box + controller + Halo and Halo2 (~$200)
3. Buy a (pre-played) Gamecube + controller + memory stick + Rogue Squadron (I and II) (~$150)
4. Buy some PS2 games

Going into this I was just planning on getting the graphics card, but then I saw the prices and began to think about what else I could do with that kind of money. Incidentally, the prices on the cards I was looking at last time I brought this up (around October maybe?) have not gone down much at all. The difference is that now my graphics card is dying, so it's a slightly more pressing issue. Anything using DirectX has horrible artifacting, making most of my 3d games kind of un-playable. Advice?

If anyone's interested, here's the perl script I wrote to check through a .pwf file and print the names of any users who are also using their username as a password. It's not documented, but I guess that'll be a feature of version 2.0.

while(<STDIN>){
        chop;
        next unless /^(.+):(.+)/;
        my $name = $1; 
        my $pwd = $2;
        my $salt = substr($pwd, 0, 2);

        if (crypt($name, $salt) eq $pwd) {
                print "$name\n";
        }
}

This iterates through whatever's coming in on stdin (so call this like perl foo.pl < bar.pwf) one line at a time. It chops the newline char off the end then skips the line unless it matches the pattern of one or more characters then a colon then one or more other characters. It then checks if the username encrypts to the encrypted password. If it does, the name gets printed to stdout. ta da!

Because penny arcade is down, here's the penny arcade remix project!

Argh, there's a browser problem out there. It affects every browser except Internet Explorer (and Lynx, as it turns out). To check it out, go over to schmoo and click the links. If the address bar says paypal.com but you're obviously not at paypal, I'd recommend not clicking on links to get you anyplace important until this is resolved. Really, you should type in by hand or use a bookmark to get anywhere important anyway. By important I mean anything someone would want to fool you about, such as money.

Of course, relatively speaking, I'd say you're still better off not using IE unless you're willing to wait around for Microsoft to tell you about flaws with their product.

Ok you geeks, I hate to admit it, but, much to my chagrin, I've discovered that Perl is fun. I just used it to parse a file (much like a .htaccess file) containing "username:encrypted_password" and test to see if the username was the same as the (unencrypted) password. (and no, i'm not breaking into anything, i'm supposed to be the admin for the system in question)

What astonishes me is how easy it was. It didn't take much work at all, and as I learn more about perl, I see how I could have done it even easier with built-in shortcuts and regexps.

The reason I'm astonished is because I used to hold a strong prejudice against perl. For those wondering why level-headed me would be so prejudicial, here's a bit of sample code I randomly grabbed from here
$drw =~ m/.*exception occurred:.*?pid=(\d+).*?\s+\1\s(.*?)\n/s;
Yeah. That's not real pretty. Perl jockeys seem to love code like that, and, quite frankly, it scares me. (and no, I still am not quite sure what that line is doing). Anyway, who knows? Maybe I'll be writing stuff like that in a few weeks. I kind of hope not.