November 2007 Archives

So for the first time in ages I finished a proper, real game. I guess technically the last was Portal, but that wasn't a full First Person Shooter, more of a puzzle game. I have a bad habit of collecting single player first person shooter games, starting them, getting a bit in and then just falling to boredom, laziness, or the call of leveling up and getting that new shiny gun or achievement in an online FPS like Battlefield 2 or 2142 or Team Fortress 2. So I was pretty surprised when I completed CoD4.

I got Call of Duty 4 a while ago (not long after the beta was released) and was sucked in right away. The beta I wasn't impressed that much with, so imagine my surprise at how good I found the game. I'm sure there are a few spoilers about some of the niceties in there, and a couple of major spoilers I'll hide as best I can. So if you dare, here's a quick run down...

Note the dust in the air and the "feel" of the environment as me and my sniper buddy head to a high hide.

I'm not sure if something in Facebook has changed recently, but I just got my first bit of spam.

I'm sure she's a lovely girl and all, but isn't part of the whole idea of social networks that they prevent spam by restricting messaging or email to your group of approved friends? Yes, you can still send and receive to "strangers" (how else to see if the Bob Jones you saw in a search is the same Bob Jones who used to beat you up in high school or not, but this is the first bit of what I consider "pure" spam email I've gotten on the site.

If the trend continues, or Facebook removes privacy and restrictions to allow "monetization" (read: selling of it's users private information for boatloads of cold hard cash) I can see it becoming useless very fast for a large number of people who use it. Of course, to survive as a company and to be able to pump the gazillion's of dollars into the site for bandwidth, development, etc, I'm sure they are walking a thin line between selling out and providing a level of privacy and fairness to it's thousands of users.

Had to share this quote from a co-worker in instant message today (we had just gotten an internet filtering proxy server running again):

(3:18:32 PM) Alan: porn free internet
(3:18:40 PM) Alan: what's the point...
(3:24:49 PM) Coworker: It's true. Without porn, we'd all be without our jobs. Think about it.
(3:30:11 PM) Alan: that'd deep man

So so true...

Came into work and... well, lets just say it's not a good hardware day. I'll use a "screenshot" of system uptime to illustrate:

04:20:30 up 8:41, 1 user, load average: 433.59, 175.21, 112.95

That really high number? Normally that's in the 0-2 range. Yea. Eeek.

Update
Another one....

16:53:35 up 2 min, 2 users, load average: 494.42, 130.53, 44.11

Can I get a 500..... 500, anyone... ? :)

I had an inspiration to create a less-personal (but still personal) tech-oriented blog, kinda a Scoble-like thing, but with more of an Alan-esque twist. Basically this, but without the random long posts about things that no one but me cares about :)

Though about something like techno blog, techno geek blog, geek blog, something like that and started hunting for domain names. It's funny, pretty much everything I tried (admittedly only about 5-10 in the vein) was either taken, a redirect to something totally different (thegeek.com ends up at some place selling cams for freezers, or chili, one of the two) or are (ugh) domain squatters.

This made me think of college around 1993 or 1994, just when the net was coming into it's own, with Josh and a couple of the guys in one of my classes (the excruciatingly boring database one I think) going through and putting random sexual domain names (bigboobs.com, sexyladies.com, hamsterlovin.com, that sort of thing) in to see a) if they were taken and b) how crazy we could get before a domain wouldn't show up. Even 15 years ago we could get pretty crazy before we'd get domains not found. That was before the age of domain squatters too.... if only we'd know we could buy and hold monstersexyassescoveredwithchocolate.com before selling it for top dollar.

Some days I really miss the innocence of the web at the start. I remember when all my favorite ftp sites were bookmarked in my brain... Of course, part of the great thing about innocence is you don't know it's an age of innocence. Ah, so where's my time machine?

Seeing Paul's post on Microsoft's live.com webapp offerings prompted me to pen some quick thoughts on something related to this that I came across a bit ago.

I read about the new live.com webapps and figured I'd give them a try (hear something about it on a blog or podcast or something). Going to get.live.com presents me with a nice overview and a big 'get' button. This in turn sends me over to a page where I can select one or all of the apps and options. Very cool, but with one, teeny glaring oversight.

I have no idea what they do.

Some are obvious, messanger, toolbar, and the "take over my computer with microsoft options" selections for the default search, homepage and so on.

However, the options for mail, photo gallery, writer and the onecare family center don't give me any indication of what they are. Will they install something on my system? Convert all my document options to open in Writer (which I thought was a web based app)? Will mail install a new mail client on my system or will it just set up my system to point all mailto: links open in the live.com webmail page?

I was wanting to compare Microsoft's offerings to those from Google. I was under the impression that Writer was like Google documents, Mail was like GMail (and if you go to mail.live.com it is....), and photo gallery was something like Google's Picasa.

With just the option to download a single .exe file though.... scary. Not to say I don't trust Microsoft of course, but lets be honest.... I don't trust Microsoft :) Hey, if I was in their position I'd use this to fill up the users computer with all my own software and options, and eclipse whatever google offerings are there.

That said, it's true that Google also provides a download pack, but last time I looked at it, it seemed fairly obvious what it did, and the programs were all fairly separate. Antivirus, toolbar, etc. Yes, some of them are a bit ambiguous as to what they do, but less so (to me) than Microsoft's offering. It might be familiarity though.

Deciding to take a leap for journalistic integrity (hehehe), I actually downloaded and clicked the Windows Live installer thingy. It took a long time to get itself going, but when it finally did appeared to not give me any options, and just had a progress bar (checking for installed applications) and text that made it look like it was just going to install whatever it was going to install regardless of if I'd changed my mind.

There is a cancel button, but that didn't work. It asked if I really wanted to cancel, then continued downloading and installing, and even after I hit the 'close' button again, it still left a WLSomethingSvc.exe in the process list.

Not nice :( Why the change from a standard installer with a bit of an explanation of what it'll do, where it'll install things, and give you the chance to cancel if you decide you don't like what it's doing.

Dear Shaw..... provider of both home internet and internet to the main feed at work. Why did you choose my week on call to decide to do things?