Relatives
My grandfather and aunt, who usually resides in Indonesia, and recently just toured Europe, decided to drop by and pay us a visit before heading back home to Indonesia. They’re planning to stay here until the end of the week, or early next week. Either way, I don’t like that very much.
Their presence is a huge disruption to my daily life. I live in a house with my parents which is just sufficient for the three of us, and having extra people over means that we need to surrender a room over to them. Due to a lack of foresight when my parents first purchased this house, there’s only two bedrooms instead of the supposed three. Therefore, after surrendering one room to them, that results with me sharing a room with my parents, an arrangement which I do not fancy.
An issue I find rude about my relatives is that they often request my presence when everyone else in the family is involved in a conversation, but they refuse to speak in a language that I can comprehend. Instead of conversing in English or Mandarin, which most of them are capable of one or both, they elect to speak in Indonesian. So there I am, not being able to participate in a conversation that I’m not allowed to leave either. Indonesian might be their must fluent language, but in any form of communication, the polite, and only logical protocol is to fallback to a language than everyone can understand, or just tear down and not have the exchange at all. Cross platform software or different versions of software are designed to do that in order to preserve compatibility. I would think as humans, we’re capable of that also, but that logic escapes my relatives.
I look forward to spending as much of my time out of my house as possible during this period of time.
I would’ve done the same
A man in the US who dashed into his burning home to save his computer was arrested for disorderly conduct. However, had a similar situation present itself to me, I would have done exactly the same. If my house caught fire while I was present inside, the first action I would do would not be to run, but to remove my array of hard drives first, and then run. I’ve some files stored on offsite backups but those are not anywhere as complete as I would like them to be.
A friend of mine has always joked to me that offsite backups were unnecessary to him because he spends so much time at home and if a catastrophic disaster did indeed occur, it is highly likely that he would perish too, along with all the data, therefore rendering offsite backups useless since no one would be around to claim them. The same might be true for me too.
Windows and removable or remote media
We’ve come a long way in the history of Windows since Windows 95 and despite the hostility of a huge number towards Vista, there has been remarkable improvements and innovations made. However, beneath the fresh coat of paint, some of the old cracks in the wall are still occasionally visible. I was reminded, just not too many minutes ago, that Windows Vista is not all that different from Windows 95. What on earth am I talking about?
Thirteen years into the evolution of Windows, attempting to access a damaged/dirty CD still has the chance to bring down the entire explorer.exe process. The same can happen when trying to access a network resource over Explorer that has an unstable link or loses connectivity halfway. It has been thirteen years, THIRTEEN YEARS for crying out loud! Why can’t we handle I/O errors gracefully?
To give Microsoft some credit, at least we are no longer thrown a blue screen when the floppy drive is inaccessible.
RDP-ing to the console session
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.
I’ve got a noob question
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.
Nektropos Castle: The Return
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 - damn she's massive! (and notice the typo)
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.
Indiana Jones
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.
File transfer rate: What’s going on here?
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
Test file created with fsutil
Transfer rate with a test file of the exact same size created by fsutil
Naming
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.
I hate arcades and musings on my gaming history
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.
