Skip to content

RDP-ing to the console session

Posted on 04 July 2008

Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol has a feature that gives it a huge advantage over most traditional remote desktop software such as VNC (UltraVNC, RealVNC etc.): the redirection of sound from the remote to the local machine. That is to say, I would be able to play a music file on the remote computer and have the sound playback from the local computer’s speakers, instead of it being outputted on the speakers of the remote computer.

Typically however, when a RDP connection is established, it creates a new session by default instead of showing what’s display on the remote desktop currently. So although you were logged into the remote computer, you weren’t able to carry on the work you left off previously remotely. This has been the main reason that previously made me use UltraVNC over Microsoft RDP. However, I was ignorant of the fact that Microsoft RDP is able to do the same, until I stumbled across this KB entry. The reason is that this feature is not obvious right out of the box, it’s not shown on the GUI of the client anywhere. It can only be accessed via a command line, with the following command:

mstsc -v:servername /F -console

That’s the best of both worlds in one. I don’t think I’ll ever look back to VNC again, at least not on a Windows system. Maybe when everyone is sporting 10 Gbps LAN connections, we’ll have enough bandwidth to redirect 3D graphics too.

Posted in § Tech ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: ,

I’ve got a noob question

Posted on 28 June 2008

I was calling a corporate helpdesk today and I had to hold myself back from starting my question with “hey, I’ve got a noob question here”. Typically in the online world, most people open their sentence with that if it’s going to be about something trivial, me included, and prolonged usage dragged it into real life, but I’m sure the operator at the helpdesk would’ve had a funny or confused expression on their face if they weren’t used to online communities.

Posted in § Life ‡ Comments (1) °

Nektropos Castle: The Return

Posted on 21 June 2008

I haven’t been able to get a group to do the new Runnyeye instance yet, but I did manage to get a few friends together and do another zone that I’ve always wanted to run through, Nektropos Castle: The Return, or Nek2 for short.

Nek2 is basically a level 50 remake of the good old Nektropos Castle that we’re all so familiar with. The only difference is that unlike Nek1, which has a ton of quests inside, and even more heritage quests which require you to tour the zone, Nek2 has a total sum of zero quests.


Shelia Everling, notice the typo in the NPC name. Damn, she’s massive!

The instance is a lot more linear than the first. Unlike the first, the place has caved in at a lot more places, resulting in conveniently blocked passageways and only one path leading to the end of the zone.

Two of my friends returned to the game because of the Living Legacy trial program, who conveniently happened to be a Shadowknight and a Dirge, complimenting my usual duo of a me (a Fury) and friend who plays a Swashbuckler. With the exception of the two patchwork golems right at the beginning of the zone who seemed to have a ton more HP than even some of the other names, we tore through the zone with just four of us.

It was a fun trip down a zone that I’ve always longed to do, and we came out with a decent amount of AA gained. The only thing that I would whine, and whine really badly about the zone is that the drops were pathetic. Every single named we killed dropped wood. Disappointing. Disgusting. Pathetic.

Posted in § Everquest 2 § Gaming ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , ,

Indiana Jones

Posted on 10 June 2008

Watched my first Indiana Jones movie today and I loved it. Indiana Jones reminds me the Daniel Jackson character in the Stargate series, which is one of my favorite shows/TV series. I’m not sure how I’ve missed out on watching all of the Indiana Jones movies my entire life, but I’m going to have to land my hands on them.

Posted in § Life ‡ Comments (3) ° Tagged:

File transfer rate: What’s going on here?

Posted on 09 June 2008

I’m completely puzzled by this. Transferring a file across the network (GigE), a file that contains real data moves much slower (it’s almost a 10 MB/s difference!) than a test file created by fsutil. As far as I know, and I maybe wrong here, the content of a file shouldn’t matter when transferring across the network as the protocols involved (TCP and Samba) doesn’t do any compression on its own. Explanations anyone?


Transfer rate with a real file, in this case, an image of the Windows Vista WAIK


Transfer rate with a test file of the exact same size created by fsutil

Posted in § Tech ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , ,

Naming

Posted on 08 June 2008

There is no doubt that the naming process is the bane of anything I create or own. Having to name something is a show stopper for me. When creating an MMO character, I spend hours staring at the character creation screen not knowing what to come up with. When I had to give my blog a name, I couldn’t think of one either, nor my domain. I couldn’t come up with names for the small applications that I’ve written for my own use, the computers in my network, and the list goes on, and in the future, naming my kid, if I’m ever fortunate enough to get married, that’s going to the biggest pain of them all.

Turns out that I’m not the only person that’s struggling at coming up with names. There are guides at coming up with (network) names here and two RFCs that talk about naming, RFC1178 - Choosing a Name for Your Computer and the slightly humorous RFC2100 - The Naming of Hosts that consists of a poem. There’s even an entire site that’s dedicated to helping you chose a naming scheme at http://namingschemes.com/Main_Page.

One thing I learnt from all of that is having a theme largely simplifies the naming process when you need to come up with a large number of names. It might already be obvious to you, but it wasn’t to me. I ought to name all my machines after the deities in the Forgotten Realms, which is by far my favorite D&D setting.

Posted in § Thoughts ‡ Comments (1) °

I hate arcades and musings on my gaming history

Posted on 07 June 2008

ArsTechnica recently ran an article on the dying of classic video game arcades and many gamers today talk about them with a kind of wistfulness. Unfortunately, despite being a gamer myself, I am unable to share that same nostalgic feelings.

I don’t fancy arcades. Wait, that sentiment is not strong enough to express what I feel. Let me rephrase my point.

I hate arcades.

That is not to say that I’ve always felt this way towards arcades. I did beg my parents for money to allow me to visit arcades when I was still in primary school, that is to say, when I was between the ages of six to twelve. Past that however, I cannot recall a single instance of wanting to be in an arcade voluntarily.

It would seem that as I grew older, I actually started to despise the arcade more. Right now, I see them as a horrible entropy of noise and light, blaring and flashing at me from every direction. It’s a seizure inducing place. I love being able to sit in the quiet comfort of my chair, being in an room that has just the right temperature, and completely immersing myself in a virtual world with zero distractions. The arcade just isn’t a conducive gaming environment.

One’s personality also changes over time, and so does the activities that he indulges in. The same applies within the context of gaming. Aside from all that noise and crowd, it seems that the genre of games that I play shifted. I used to be a huge FPS (first person shooter) fan. I played every sequel of Unreal Tournament, every sequel of Quake, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Battlefield 2, and most recently, Team Fortress 2. However, I am no longer able to obtain the same sense of gratification from these games that I was able to before. I am only able to manage perhaps, two or three hours a week playing Team Fortress at most. Past that, it feels like “why bother?”.

The above mentioned games all share common similarities with arcade games. There is no compelling reason to play them. They’re all in essence, an infinite loop of a grinding treadmill. It is not the same as in an MMO, whereby I might spend ten hours getting a level, but that one level is as intrinsic as it can get. I get to keep that one level, and as long as that virtual world exists (the game isn’t pulled offline), I’ll forever be one level higher than I was before. In an arcade game however, when I come back tomorrow, even to the same machine, I’ll have to work through all of that again. There is no persistency, there is no goal and hence, actions simply have no resulting effect.

Not all shooters are the same however. Single player shooters generally much more like an RPG. They have a compelling storyline to follow. Sure, I might have to kill a couple hundred Covenant grunts in Halo along the way, but there is real and visible progress being made that is relayed through the advancement in the finely crafted story.

A huge sandbox is what these shooters and arcade games are, and being placed in a sandbox with another individual so that we can spend the next couple hours trying to mindlessly blow each other up over and over again is no fun. Remember that episode of Stargate SG-1 where Jack O’Neill and Daniel Jackson got stuck in a time loop? It’s exactly what these games are. No matter what you do, you always start back at zero again. That’s the reason why I choose to play RPGs and MMORPGs, and I can never bring myself to play the same kind of shooters I once did before.

Posted in § Gaming § Thoughts ‡ Comments (0) °

It’s back to the old theme

Posted on 03 June 2008

I’m sorry for switching the theme on you readers again. I realize that it’s not pleasant to have to relearn a new layout each time you visit my blog, but it had to be done.

It’s always the small UI quirks that get me. As much as I loved the soft look of the previous theme, the few small details kept coming back and bugging me.

First and foremost, was the location of the sidebar. Traditionally, the navigation menu has been on the left side of the page (or the top), but over the recent years, most blogs have it located on the right. I find that this makes tremendous good sense as it minimizes the distance one would have to move between the scroll bar and the navigation menu. Of course this problem wouldn’t exists if you used the wheel located on the mouse, but I’ve never been a great fan of that. The wheel doesn’t offer me the precision necessary to scroll text while I read and digest them. Don’t tell me about smooth wheel plugins, those make things even much worse. The wheel is great for other things, like scrolling text in blocks, or zooming, but just not for this purpose.

Secondly, the font size was just too darn small for when I’m not pressing my nose to my monitor. I’ve to squint to read when I’m tired. I’m not sure if any of my readers noticed, but I certainly did.

Another thing was the fixed size layout. At 1280×1024, the last great dividing resolution between normal LCD monitors and gigantic widescreen ones, and the last acceptable resolution to be running a browser in fullscreen (I hope if you have a 2560×1600 monitor, you’re not wasting all that screen real estate by running one instance of a browser full screened), there is just too much white space. I understand the rationale between packing text into a fixed and not too lengthy column facilitates better reading, but this goes back to the font sizes. If the font size was larger, the column could have been wider and thus, pack the same amount of characters on the same line despite the wider space to fill.

I could alternatively write my theme that suited all my quirks and oddities, but I’m horrible at CSS. As I told my project members once while we were developing a web application, “if I had my way, this whole site would have been nothing but plain text”. I’m pretty sure that if I got down to working on it, the result would be an abomination. Once again, apologies to my readers, but the village had to be destroyed in order to save it.

Posted in § Site ‡ Comments (1) °

The Big Bang Theory

Posted on 02 June 2008

I don’t usually do shows reviews and I don’t think I even capable of writing one, but The Big Bang Theory has to be one of the best sitcoms ever. Don’t let its name fool you, it’s more than just a geek show. I’ve been repeatedly watching it ever since I came across it and the jokes never get old. It is that good. I wouldn’t say it is my favorite TV show, because first place would be a tough fight between this and The IT Crowd. I’m not quite sure why I enjoy watching shows that sometimes tend to seem like parodies of my life, but I guarantee that you won’t walk away from this one disappointed. There are episodes on the official site linked above that you could watch episodes if you’re in the US but if you’re outside, I’m sure it’s still pretty easily obtainable through your favorite distribution channel.

Posted in § Thoughts ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

The Path to x64

Posted on 31 May 2008

RAM prices are dirt cheap, and with the amount of work I’m doing on virtual machines lately, it would be silly to not get another stick of 2 GB to my existing 2 GB.

2 + 2 might make 5 if you were in the world of Big Brother, but in the 32-bit world, 2 + 2 is somewhere in the range of 3 ~ 3.5 GB. 32-bit systems are not always able to address up to the full 4 GB of available physical memory, the reason is a bit complicated and has to do with virtual addressing limits. I’ll save myself from rehashing what others have written on the topic and refer you to the excellent article here.

The transition from 32-bits to 64-bits was smoother than I expected. First of all, I’m running on an OEM version of Windows Vista Business 32-bit, and I needed a 64-bit copy of Windows. Luckily obtaining the installation media wasn’t an issue for me as I had a copy of Windows Ultimate lying around, which I won from a Microsoft talk last year. I admit I was a reluctant to open the shrink wrap at first, but I desperately needed the media.

It is worthwhile to note that serial keys for Windows Vista are tied to the edition (Home Premium, Business, Ultimate etc) but not to the bitness (32-bit or 64-bit). Therefore, using my old Business edition serial was perfectly fine and I can save my Ultimate edition license for another day.

There is no difference in the installation process between the two bitness. The only difference, and deal breaker for many is that 64-bit Vista requires 64-bit drivers, and the drivers have to be digitally signed. The only two drivers that I have trouble with were Sony Ericsson’s PC Suit, which was required to sync my phone and Adobe’s PDF printer. It seems that I’m out of luck for the former, but the latter got addressed with a patch.

The only issue I had was with poorly written applications which hardcode their installation paths. In Windows x64, program space is separated depending on if they’re 32 or 64 bit (with a few naming oddities I must say, but they’re all preserved for compatibility reasons). However, SOE’s launchpad absolutely insists on writing to C:\Program Files\Sony\Station\LaunchPad despite the fact that 32-bit applications are suppposed to be redirected to C:\Program Files (x86). The problem exists with only the launchpad itself though, it is able to patch EQ2 in its correct C:\Program Files (x86) path.

The other problem I have was with 64-bit Java; it didn’t provide a plugin for 32-bit Firefox. There exists a way to work around this on Linux, but as far as my Google skills go, I couldn’t find a solution on Windows. Therefore, I went back to 32-bit Java.

With a full 4 GB of addressable memory, there certainly has been some changes to my workflow. I’m gradually becoming a huge fan of keeping my system clean and moving my work onto virtual machines. I might be a terribly messy person in real life, but I almost have a certain OCD when it comes to organizing my system. I’d almost do all my work exclusively inside virtual machines if not for the fact that I’m a gamer, and that virtualized 3D hardware acceleration isn’t quite here yet, but it will be one day. Guaranteed its not much and it’ll take another year or two, or even longer, before the technology matures, but VMWare Fusion already has experimental Direct X 9 support, and its the road that we’re going to take.

There’s still a vacuum as far as 64-bit software is concerned. Let’s face it, there’s not that many applications that would benefit from a 32-bit to 64-bit transition. WoW64 does its job of running 32-bit applications on Windows x64 just fine without any performance degradation, despite all the rumors that fly around.

Posted in § Tech ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,