Worms Open Warfare

I have now identified the next Nintendo DS game that I will purchase, Worms Open Warfare. I am a huge fan of the Worms turn based strategy game series. It even ran great on my old 233 mhz system.



Now back in the traditional 2d style that I loved so much, it's coming to the Nintendo DS. I cant wait to see what they do with the touchscreen, especially regarding weapon selection. It's going to be great. Now I just wish we could have Starcraft and Lemmings for the DS as well.

No caffine today

Man, I really have been drinking too many coffee drinks and energy drinks lately. I stayed home today and didnt eat out. This combined with the fact that there was no soda or bottled frappucino drinks in the house, meant no caffine for someone with a two frappucino, two soda a day habit, is going to have a long day, (in the words of Terry Tate), a lonnnnnng day.


I felt like a zombie for most of the day, but it did improve my skills playing Need for Speed Most Wanted on the XBox. Rode my bike around a bit as well, up at the UCF campus.

Tomorrow I might attend a chili cookoff that one of my good friends is competing in. Should be fun.

The benifits of in person LUG meetings

I have been to only one linux users group meeting in person. That will probably be enough to last a lifetime.

Why bother actually meeting physically when the net offers so many possibilities for interaction. More specifically it allows you to do research while discussing a topic with others, and to contribute and insert outside information links during the session.

The in person meeting seemed so low-bandwidth that it drove me nuts. Maybe this is just a side effect of my ever shrinking attention span.

The main benifit I see from going to these things is going out to dinner afterward, which is really a drawback since it's hard enough as it is to try and keep the weight off as a computer guy.

Fly-d.net back up

After a moderately long downtime, fly-d.net is back up and running. Go check out the home of the Flying Daggers Descent Squadron.

This is a video game clan that I joined in high school, to play the obsessively fun game Descent.

Pandora - great music.

I was reading about Pandora over at TechCrunch a while back, and only gave it a cursory glance before.

It is a service that will take a list of songs and artists that you like, and utilize a database of songs to create a streaming playlist of both the songs you entered, and songs that follow the same style. It gets better and better at making suggestions for new songs as you continue listening. Each time a song comes up, you can give it a thumbs up or down, to help Pandora further refine your listening style.

For some reason or another I gave Pandora another chance. Aside from the flash interface being a moderate pain in linux, I have grown really fond of the interface.

I have never used last.fm before, but i'll probably stick with pandora for a while.

I just cant take it anymore

I'm not even a mac user, and I find this article by Dvorak offensive.

Why in god's name, would you want to put the mac "look and feel" on top of windows.

And as for the running every single device known to mankind idea. The reason many mac users like their stuff is because they know apple is working hard to make sure it's compatible. They definately pay a price premium for the certified working hardware, but for a lot of people with Mac's, the lack of hastle is worth the extra price.

Should we usher the mac users into a world where your OS crashes because of a buggy display driver? Really, is this what we want?

From the feel of the article I just cant see how this isnt page view whoring. The article has almost nothing but speculation, but you know it will get tons of readers.

welcome to a world...

A world in which Business has gone mad.

You may have heard your history professors in high school say that those who do not heed the past are doomed to repeat it's mistakes. Along those same lines there are those who would actively seek to change the past to suit their current position.

Morning rants about music and live shows.

Woke up on my own this morning at approx 7:45. That's an unusual change from my usual battle with the alarm's sleep button. Apparently I forgot to set the alarm. Oh well.


I did find some interesting stuff this morning via TechCrunch, specifically a service called Podbop that provides RSS feeds per city that contain event info and music samples for bands soon to be playing in your area. Check out the Podbop page for Orlando Florida.

I really really like it. The web interface for listening to samples is really cool, with little flash preview buttons/sliders to run each sample. The only odd thing about the whole experience was that starting one sample did not shut off a previously playing sample. This could get a bit odd when you have Flogging Molly running alongside Electric Six.

I really cant forgive myself for not checking out The Crystal Method when they were here in Orlando. In fact I think the only live concert i've attended since I have been here is one put on at the Hard Rock Live in Orlando, featuring Hoobastank. That was an incredible concert. They put on an excellent live show, and I was fortunate enough to hear a lot of their older songs that I had never heard via radio before. I miss attending Edgefest in Albuquerque NM back in the high school days. It was hot as hell, but with a local stage and a headliner stage running almost the entire day, there was no shortage of stuff to do. This was back when they held it at the state fair grounds. I dont know where they do it now, or even if they still do it.

I remember one year Limp Bizkit was playing, and the mayor had the city power shut off to that part of the fairgrounds at 10 or 11pm, something stupid. I think the festival was on a sunday or something and they had made an agreement to run the festival from morning until 10. No idea. Would be interesting to find out what happened. This is of course back when the "Did it all for the Nookie" song was a popular thing. Did everclear play at that edgefest? I cant remember. Oh well. Fun times. Almost as good as my first Rob Zombie concert.

Descent 3 for Windows Finally

I just picked up a copy of Descent 3 from Amazon, through their marketplace vendor NothingButSoftware. It was I believe 9 dollars including shipping for a sealed dual jewel pack of Descent 3 and Descent 3 Mercenaries Expansion.

Pick it up folks, this is cheap for a great game. I cant believe the guys on ebay try to sell it for so much.

Thanks to the folks on the Gentoo Forums for suggesting this to me. Amazon seems like a great place to find some used games for cheaper than you might find on ebay.

Now I just need a copy of the Linux version of D3 and I will be all set. My previous copy of the windows version was destroyed in a laptop accident, and the linux version i had melted in my Jeep. I must be more careful with such important software.

Cafe Tu Tu Tango

Not to much to write about in the daily blog today. Just got plenty of rest, then met up with some friends for dinner at Cafe Tu Tu Tango, the Orlando location.

At Tu Tu Tango's they are more of an appitizer restaurant. Each item on the menu is around 8 dollars, and comes with about 3 to four pieces. Things like chipolte grilled chicken egg rolls, and Sloppy Joe Quesedillas. If you bring several people with you, each ordering two dishes each, there is a lot of great swapping around of items on the table. In this way you can try tons of stuff.

Their website isnt so hot in my opinion, but their food more than makes up for it. Be sure to show up early though, since they dont take reservations.

Carnivale

I have never heard of HBO's Carnivale until recently. It is the first thing since Stephen King's Dark Tower series to capture my attention so fully. I just started watching it and cant stop thinking about it during the day. It is very detailed and rich in the way the plot unfolds, making it worth watching several times over to see what you missed.

You can catch up on all your old episodes using HBO on demand. Or if you are not already a Netflix Member then go ahead and rent seasons one and two so you can watch them even without digital cable. I'm a Netflix subscriber myself, and am generally very happy with it.

Wikipedia Carnivale Entry
Netflix search results for Carnivale -- such search links arent gauranteed to work forever. So YMMV

Using gmail for your company domain

Looks like my previous post on the subject was unneccessary. Go google.

GMail hosting service for domains

If you arent in an industry that has ultra strict restrictions on e-mail archival locations, then you definately want to be using google to manage your e-mail.

More mercenaries action incoming

Looks like Ben is going to get back to work on his "Mercenaries" story. I have really enjoyed reading the sample of the story that he has made available.

Ben is of course, also a former member of The Flying Daggers a gaming clan that was active in the late nineties.

Practice for life

It's important to have a hobby. Neccessary for sanity in fact.

I've been fairly involved with the Orlando Jeep Club this past year. I took on the duties of club webmaster very early. This means that I had to attend board meetings.

The club is run as a non profit business, with a board of directors, and a panel of appointed positions. Only the directors can vote on decisions regarding the club, but the appointed positions are required to be at board meetings to take forth to the directors the sentiments of the membership, and to speak on behalf of committees that they may be involved in.

We've been having quite a lively argument lately over the structure of our club website. Some growing pains over the introduction of a forum. Forum moderation is something that the club is still getting used to. Initially this caused conflict between members who liked the old static web page, and the members who wanted modern public forums. It was almost like a culture clash. Th elong term members who have been in the club for many years have grown accustomed to the club being a social club. Dinners, barbeques, show-n-shines, etc. Many of the newer members are into going on trail rides or just hitting up the message forums.

Of course, being younger people, there was a fair amount of trash talking going on in the forums. Now i'm not saying that older more mature folks dont trash talk, but they tend to do it via more traditional means, such as telephones or face to face meetings. It made people uncomfortable, so we came very close to having the forums shut down only four months or so after it was created. Yet something wonderful was about to happen, made more special because it could have gone a lot worse.

A very active forum thread got started, where those who wanted to keep the forums argued back and forth with those who did not. There was a fair amount of negative comments here, and some incorrect arguments, but from this spawned some incredibly well written responses. Detailed, careful responses. It became letter writing in the classic sense. People carefully organized their thoughts and wrote them down for others to comment.

By the time we reached the board of directors meeting in which the fate of the forums was to be decided, everyone was fairly conversant in the issues at hand. Every single person that commented in that forum thread showed up, even a guy that lived hours away. There was so little bickering throughout the entire process, and we worked towards a compromise that we could all live with. The vice president made a comment to this effect, that he was very pleased at how we had all conducted ourselves. Point one for reasonable debate, even if on such a small scale.

Something i thought i'd never... gmail for whole company

Disclaimer: I havent done this, but it is compelling for those involved in a small business, or for people who dont have in house IT talent.

Lets start with a few requirements for a small business.

• You need a web page, that the uninitiated can learn to edit quickly.


• You need some e-mail boxes: sales@yourcompany, support@yourcompany, info@yourcompany, and boxes for employees. Antivirus and spam filtering required.


• You might also need an incoming fax line

Traditionally, this would require a bit of setup. But if you are willing to take a few well placed risks, you can do all this for a song. You will be trusting parts of your fate to Google, but for a very big payoff.

Ask any systems administrator what they spent most of their time setting up when they started working at their current job. Many of them will tell you it was e-mail, and web page setup, but mostly e-mail. You need to set up e-mail with anti spam and anti virus controls, and you need to do it quickly. You can invest in several completely decent solutions tied together with a custom installed mailserver, like Roaring Penguin Software's CanIT and The Venerable Sendmail, or even ClamAV Antivirus Scanner with the Postfix mail server on a Debian Linux installation, but that's a lot of effort the first time out, let me tell you that from experience. Here's how to be a hero, and how to do it fast.

Set up everyone in your company with a GMail account from Google. You will immediately think, but no one will respect a gmail.com mailing address as legit, they will think that we are small time. But dont fret, Google has decided to make your life easier in a way that the self posessed AOL took years to approach. They have added the capability to set your Reply To: address on the fly, and to retrieve your mail using POP. Here's how it works.

First you will register a domain name, lets call it yourcompany.com using 100megsdomains.com. Why do we use them? A Marco Carag kindly pointed out, they have built in DNS and simple MX forwarding built into their service. This means you can, just using their service, set up mail forwards for your domain. You will set up forwards from employeename@yourcompany.com to the_employee_address@gmail.com. That way customers can send e-mails to an official looking address, and you can still recieve it at your GMail account. You will automatically get the benifit of GMail's virus filtering and anti spam, along with unmatched e-mail conversation viewing (where all previous messages in a conversation are displayed with the most recent).

Traditionally, this works great for recieving, but not for sending, as most webmails will only send out e-mails with the webmail address as the sender. Gmail however lets you specify "accounts" which are basically the full e-mail addresses you would like to send your mail as. You can use their "Settings" panel to add accounts, so that you can send messages as employee@yourcompany.com, or what have you.

The Website
Now you need a snazzy website to go along with your new e-mail addresses. Enter DreamHost with their really reasonable hosting plans, along with free domain registration if you pay yearly. The most important thing here though is that DreamHost offers 1 click MediaWiki installation. The Mediawiki software lets you create your own website in a dynamic and organized fashion that your customers will appreciate. Some people that have run with this idea are The Mono Project (a software project) and JeepersDen ( an offroad parts store). You can even get someone to develop a custom Mediawiki theme that will give your site a very coherant and easy to read appearance.

Sidenotes
I made no mention of file sharing, but there are some totally decent online file storage and collaboration services out there that you need to check out. Box.net is one of the top players in the arena, and you get the benifit of being able to access your files from home and work without issue.


References:

• http://www.gmail.com - best webmail service ever


• https://dreamhost.com - really decent webhosting


• http://www.100megsdomains.com/services.asp - domain hosting with DNS capabilities and e-mail forwarder

AOL Radio and targeted software

I enjoy the AOL Pop Radio remix channel, as i've commented on before. I however hate having to open the bloated crappy slow and generally poorly designed client that is AOL 9.0 security edition. Not only do I have to manually disable random popup advertising on a PAID service, I have to deal with it asking me to install the AOL anti spyware every time it loads. This crap is madness, and appears designed for a person who doesnt know crap about computers.

Why not make it easy to customize the AOL client to load less of this useless crap that I dont need? Why not help your paying customer out by giving them what they want in exactly the form they want. I'm not asking you to add new functionality to your client, just make a little system tray applet that can run AOL radio without loading the entire client.

This gets me back on the idea that companies with paying customers in the software world should target their software like GMail targets its advertising. Give me what I want, in the way that I want, especially if i'm paying you cash for it.

All these software firms are getting too damn greedy trying to lock people into their content worlds, wanting all of the pie, trying to make it harder for consumers to integrate products from multiple vendors into their computing experience. Even worse is the idiots who develop software copy protection that makes life more difficult for people who actually bought the software. Why piss of the people giving you money, it's so damn stupid.

The people who pirate your stuff arent going to pay for it anyway. You idiots, you glaring, greedy, idiots. The most irritating thing I ever have to do is activate copies of Microsoft Windows XP. I just payed you $130 for an OEM copy, please dont freaking hastle me with this product activation bullshit. I know $130 isnt a lot in the total budget of M$, but please, let your unwilling paying customer off with a break, and stop making me call people in india to enter in a billion digit product activation override code. Shame on you.

Complaining about markets

As i sit here chuggingaway on a windows XP installation, i think about how wrong things have gone in the software world, and maybe the general marketplace.

In the physical product marketplace there are very real limits on amount of value producers of goods can give to consumers. Things cost money to make, materials have to be paid for, etc.

The software world was supposed to change this. Create something once and instantly without cost it can be replicated to everyone without incremental cost. This isnt the way it worked out.

Not forgetting that some companies have made computing soo popular that you can get near supercomputer performance for a few grand, I think that we've gone too far in the direction that Mr. G. would have software go. It's unfair to relegate the user to use products that they cannot themselves improve.

That's what's most frustrating about windows and these other proprietary products. There are very smart users out there that could help to make them better, but they are shackled, without access to the code, and thus cannot cooperate with the software development houses to build better software.

This post is raw, and contains random thoughts, so think of it what you will. It's the kind of tired ranting you'll get from me after a long day at work.

Why is my internet slow?

A Tech Dirt Article worth reading about how the telecom companies failed to deliver on their promise of faster internet access speeds and fiber to the home.

AOL Pop Remix Radio Station

I was not the one who decided to get AOL service for the house, but I'm not feeling to bad about the decision now. I was working at my desk when my other started up the AOL Pop Remix station on her AOL client. It is incredible for my use as work acceleration music.

I keep a windows laptop on my desk at work now to run the station. It's really great. It's nonstop remixes of popular songs. I love it.

Their workout songs station is also quite good, but I prefer POP Remixes most of the time.