Category: Sci-Fi

Science fiction!

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Star Citizen Launcher Issue

I decided it was time to check out Star Citizen for Alpha 3.0. I created an account, paid my money, and downloaded the launcher. I was greeted with this:

Electron! Cool! OK, so what now? I googled around a bit and searched the forum to see if anyone else was experiencing this. Nope, just me.

I tried uninstalling/reinstalling and rebooting in various combinations. I tried it on another computer in my network and it worked normally.

What should have been obvious somehow wasn’t. I went to bed.

With a fresh mind I reviewed the evidence. The error was screaming the answer to me the whole time.

Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION REFUSED http://localhost:9000/app/cig-launcher.js

  1. The launcher was trying to load a JavaScript file from localhost:9000.
  2. Chrome dev tools were open

All of a sudden it clicked – I’m in development mode! Doing node development on that machine I had set the environment variable NODE_ENV to Development. Removing that environment variable was the solution.

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The Book of G’Kar

What is Truth? What is God?

When a question like this is asked on TV, the best answers come from science fiction. Babylon 5 presented this answer through the character G’Kar:

If I take a lamp and shine toward the wall, a bright spot will appear on the wall. The lamp is our search for truth, for understanding. Too often we assume the light on the wall is God, but the light is not the goal of the search, it is the result of the search. The more intense the search, the brighter the light on the wall. The brighter the light on the wall, the greater the revelation upon seeing it. Similarly, someone who does not search, who does not bring a lantern with him, sees nothing. What we perceive as God is the by-product of our search for God. It may simply be an appreciation of the light, pure and unblemished, not understanding that it comes from us. Sometimes, we stand in front of the light and assume we are the center of the universe – God looks astonishingly like we do! – or we turn to look at our shadow and assume that all is darkness. If we allow ourselves to get in the way, we defeat the purpose – which is to use the light of our search to illuminate the wall in all its beauty and all its flaws, and in so doing, better understand the world around us.

The writing for G’Kar rarely disappoints. For that, I will continue to suffer through season 5.