Undrblog

According to this link on Warcry’s forums, Cryptic Studio’s (the makers of City of heros/villians) has is the recipient of the STO content.  With any luck they’ll actually pick up where P2 left off, and not severely muck up what thus far promises to be an excellent game.   -War (Crossing fingers)

A friend of mine passed along this article yesterday.

Apparently Perpetual entertainment has changed their name (To P2 Entertainment), and ceased work on STO, and transfered all but the game code to another developer.  I’m really hoping that this does not really mean that STO’s going to turn into Vaporware, but it just doesn’t look good.

At the very least, this means we’re going to have to wait a whole lot longer for STO…  Sigh.

-War

…

I read an article on SlashDot today about young IT staff expecting too much in compensation for their skills.  The article claimed that members of the "Millennials" generation are jaded due to the high quality of life they were subjected to as children in the US.  So i guess being a prosperous country, and not living in fear of militants, starvation, and plague is actually bad for you? 

It’s an interesting read honestly.  As a member of said generation, I can say that i’ve seen exactly what theyre talking about.  I’m pretty modest when it comes to my skills, and i’m pretty greatful for the salary i get currently.  I cant imagine demanding more just because i’m full of myself. I have however seen a number of my friends and co-workers move on to "better" jobs for higher pay or status. At my current job i’ve been witness to a stream of developers and admins that come and go. always looking for that "perfect" job.  Since I started here, 2 network admins have passed through, one of which was only here for a month and a half, 4 web designers, and 3 developers.  That’s JUST the IT staff!  Forget about Sales staff.  And i’ve only been here for just over 2 years!  My last job.. I spent 8 years working for the same company.  Started there just out of High School.  Guess why i left?  Money.  Ha!  Sounds like i’m a hypocrite eh?  Not really, the place i used to work for horribly underpay’s their IT staff, unless you have the right last name, or you’re in the right position or you’ve been there since the place opened their doors (15 years ago or so) then you make CRAP wages, but that’s a whole other blog post.

It’s like people dont appreciate their job’s anymore.  I feel privileged to work in this country.  I dont feel that I’m owed a job.  It’s more like i owe my employer for my job. Isn;t that how it works?  I work for him, i do my job, he pays me… Not he pays me, and i gripe about my job and do as little as possible.

I guess i was just raised differently than all of the rest of my generation.

-War

…

As you read in another posting, I’m an EQ Vetran.  I stopped playing due to lack of time, money, and to be honest, a loss of interest.  Sony has an excellent game in EQ, but some of the implementation is poor.  Experience for example.  It would take me DAYS (of a few hours a day) to get a level, ONE level!  I’m admittedly a casual gamer at best.  I play when i have time and nothing else important to do.  When i was in my EQ hayday, i played about 2-4 hours after work before i went to bed (worked second’s, home at 10:30pm, grabbed a snack, logged in about 11 logged out between 1 and 2AM).  So you wouldn’t exactly call me a powergamer.  I enjoyed the game though.  LOTS of geography to explore, and that’s what i love in a game. There were nights i’d just explore, see what i could find. 

As I hinted at earlier, I dont exactly agree with how Sony runs the game.  I think Experience is too slow, and the whole game is geared toward grouping.  Which is great for players with a lot of friends, but i like to play my Rogue like a rogue, Rogues dont really surround themselves with paladin’s, cleric’s, and well,, pretty much anyone else.  Theyre a reclusive lot, they do their thing in the shadows, when no one notices them.  Taveling around with a group of 5 other players is just not rogue like!  I had a few friends, but at most i’d play in groups of 2 or 3.  So i was stuck fighing creatures of lower levels than Me, so i the already slow experience, was EVEN SLOWER because i couldnt fight creatures of my level or higher. 

So i quit, like i said, lost interest, didnt want to pay for a game that i wasnt playing.  Lost my level 20ish rogue (main character) and a years worth of work (i told you i wasnt a power gamer).  A little while later i read about this project by HackerQuest, they were developing an EQ emulator.  Kinda neat.  Spent a day tinkering with it.  At the time it was terrible, so i gave it up, but it got me looking for other emulators.

Enter EQEmu.

This looked like a much better project than hackerquest’s from the get-go.  It’s built as a stand in for Sony’s server.  It is meant to mimic sony’s server, but the whole thing is configurable.  You can modify the EXP rate (nudge nudge) party exp rate, all the creatures, spawn points, loot tables, everything!

I first found EQEmu in 2004 or so.  I’m more of a do it yourself kinda guy, so i downloaded the source. 0.6.0 IIRC, and built a server.  Took me days.  It fought me every step of the way!  Heh.  But i got it working.  It was dog slow on the hardware that i had at the time.  And so full of bugs that it was unplayable.  So i gave up on the whole thing.

A few years later (Now) i decide to check back on the project and see what’s changed.  Theyre up to 0.7.0 now, A lot of servers are up and running (probably 30, vs the 8 or so that were live when i first tried it).  Most are custom.  There’s a whole project dedicated to just item/monster/spawn/quest data collection.  Once again, i ran through and setup my own server.  Things went much more smoothly this time. I’d learned a lot since my first attempt.  I know what i’m doing with C++ compliation, source tree’s, makefile modifications, and MySQL now.  I set it up, played around with it, then promptly started playing on someone elses server.  My server’s still up and running, but it’s got 1 player… Me. So that gets kinda boring.  I’m playing on Project EQ‘s "grand creation" server.  Which is where they have their database of quests, monsters, items, whatever live for players.  It’s about 95% legit (as compared to live).  The experience is turned up a little. (about 1.5 times) which is nice, its not so much that you get that cheater feeling, but it’s faster than on live, which is teriffic! 

My wife and I are both playing.  She;s new to the game, but she’s enjoying it.  There’s something about EQ.  It’s just easier to play than a lot of other MMO’s out there.  We played DAOC together for a bit, and she got bored with it quick, then we played WoW on WoWSexy for a while, again, bored, but this is working out nicely.  I’m playing my Rogue, Gangrif, and she;s playing a Ranger, Arora, both Half Elves.  We’ve been playing up in BlackBurrow and kicking some Gnoll behind for about a week now.  We just hit Level 12 last night. I’m collecting BB Gnoll Skins for the Burning Rapier quest, which i intend to run through once i;m a high enough level.  The problem is, i know nothing about rangers, so it’s all new to me, as to what we need to get her.

-War

…

I came across two very exciting pieces of information today!

First, i found out that there’s a StarGate SG1 MMO in the works.  It’s called "Stargate Worlds" and it’s based on the Stargate SG1 universe. It was apparently announced back at the beginning of 2006 and i missed it.  It;s being developed by MGM Interactive, and Cheyenne mountain. Pretty cool stuff.  While i was reading about it, i stumbled across a hint of an upcoming Star Trek MMO.  Well… that stopped the Stargate search in its tracks.  I’ve always been a HUGE fan of Star Trek TNG and to some extent DS9.  The slightest hint of an MMO got my attention.

Well i found it!  Star Trek Online

Now i’m back in anticipation mode.  I remember this feeling… Back in 2000 i picked up Everquest.  Got hooked.  EQ gave way to Dark Age Of Camelot, i remember sitting there in Tech Support (the job i worked at the time) staring at every site i could find with the littlest tidbits of information about the upcoming game.  Then Anarchy Online! Except with AO my love of Sci-Fi drug me in even further.  Then WoW.. You get the idea.  Except this is different.  I have NO IDEA when STO’s going to be released. I cant even find a date when it was announced! It looks like it was also early 2006, The oldest article i can find on their site is dated February fo 2006.

I cannot wait!  It’s being developed by Perpetual Entertainment, and from some of the tidbit’s i’ve been able to gather online, it’s going to be a pretty good game.  Theyre claiming that it’s goig to be groundbreaking.  We’ll see if it’s really all that, but even if it’s not half bad, i’ll be happy.  I’ve always wanted a first hand role in the Star Trek universe.  Well now is my chance.  You ca bet i’ll be posting more when i get more information!

-Ensign War

…

Time came for me to replace my old Cel Phone with something a little more flashy. 🙂

My carrier is Verizon, and anyone who has verizon knows that every 2 years they give you credit tward a new phone.  Well in October my new every two came about, so I started looking for a phone.  I decided on the Samsung SCH-u740.  It;s got some cool features, a full qwerty keyboard, and with my new-every-2 credit, i got it for FREE!  Pretty cool!

I like belt clips, so i ordered a $20 belt clip along with it. In a few days, my new phone arrived via FedEx.  Theres something about new electronics… I couldn’t wait to fire it up.  I charged it up, and activated it.  To my dismay i found that the belt clip had arrived broken.  It’s made of plastic, so i figured, what the heck, it was just packaged wrong or whatever.  My first phone call on my new phone was to verizon, to ask them how to go about getting it replaced.  They were very helpful and told me to jus take it to a verizon store, and they’d replace it. So i did, and all was well.

The phone is great.  I’ve had it for almost 2 months now, and i definately DO NOT regret my purchase.  The qwerty keyboard was easy to get used to, and the dual flip screen (vertical, or horizontal) seems well thought out. When text messaging, you can flip from one position to the other without even losing your message.  This doesn’t work on all screens though, which is sort of a bummer, but it’s not that often that i;m switching from one mode to the other, unless texting.

The phone also plays music, though i havent tried it out.  I have an MP3 player already, so it’s not really a selling point for me.  I did download a ring tone of a Static-X song, and it sounds pretty good.  I’d imagine that an actual MP3 would sound better. The phone has touch-screen controls on the front of the phone for playing music.  Theyre a little too sensitive.  If i just pick the phone up i usually activate one of the buttons.  Not a big deal, the phone has a lock function for the front panel, so that solves that.

The outside of the phone is easy to scratch though, so get a protective cover for it.  Using my belt clip, i managed to scratch the front of the phone.  I dont even remember hitting it off of anything…  I’m a little rough on phones due to my hobbies, so i expected to scratch it, I just hoped it would last longer than 2 weeks.  Heh.

On the topic of that belt clip… Dont buy one.  It;s a terrible design. I dont know what it is about samsung, but they do not make good belt clips.  I have another samsung for work, i forget the model.  But it’s got a belt clip as well, and i;m not impressed with it.  It’s doing a much better job than the u740’s clip does though.  Because of the dual flip, they had to use a somewhat non-standard clip for the phone, in order to allow it to operate while in the clip.  It’s got one finger that clips over half of the hinge, and sort of wraps around the hinge.  One night i was called into work, late, and i was working on fixing a problem.  I was in a bit of a rush.  My wife called me to find out when i;d be home, and in a hurry, when i put the phone back in the clip, it broke the finger off. Later i took it back to verizon, and reluctantly got it replaced with another of the same clip. The lady that helped me told me that this happens when you clip the phone back into the holster without minding the clip finger. I thought that was a little rediculus.  I’m all about well made stuff, and that sounded the opposite of well made to me. They said they’d replace it this once, as a courtesy. Which again, sort of miffed me. The thing failed through normal use, after a friggin week.

So i took the replacement, and off i went. With my old phone, i used my belt clip 99% of the time.  Now with this fragile pice of underengineerd crap, i decided that i;d put the phone in my pocket, when i had one available, and only use the belt clip when necessary. This was working well, i usually wear cargo style pants to work, so they have a nice large pocket on each leg, perfect for the phone, and a lot of my jeans have carpenter style pockets on one leg, also perfect for a phone.  So i was using my belt clip, maybe 20% of the time. So this worked well, i figured the less i used the belt clip, the less chance there was that it would break again.

Well it was inevitable.  This past saturday we were cleaning up the yard from the fall leaves, setting up christmas decorations, all that mid fall stuff.  Well i was pulling a garden hose out to let it drain so i could coil it up and store it for the winter, and as i’m pulling, i brushed against my side, where the phone was clipped to my belt.  When i say brushed, i mean that literally,  Well i must have snagged the phone with that brush, and it just snapped that damned finger off like it was made of.. well. CHEAP MOTHERF*#$ING PLASTIC.  I felt my phone fall to the pavement… I was already pissed by the time it hit the ground.  The battery cover popped off, the battery flew out.  I quickly picked it up and inspected it for damage.  After putting the battery back in and making sure the phone still worked, I pulled the clip from my belt, sure enough, that damned clip was broken.  I didnt hesitate, I threw the damn thing with all of my might, straight to the pavement.  It flew apart into half a dozen pieces.  Yea, it was a waste of $20.  I might have been able to go make a scene in their lobby and gotten it replaced, or a credit for the price of the piece of crap, but it just felt too good to destroy it.

So anyway, good phone, but DONT buy the plastic belt clip, get a case with a clip if you like belt clips like I do.

-War

…

I work in an IT firm. Well, i guess thats what you’d call us.  We do web hosting, development, a little internet access. We do more than just hosting, so i dont really think calling us a host is broad enough. I do Admin work, i administer a mix of Windows, and *nix servers. Theres two of us, and between the both of us, we do a pretty good job of keeping things stable.  The servers stay up, we keep them up to date, we’re constantly working to improve on the things that were put in place by earlier admins (who more often than not, did things wrong!).

All along though, it seems that our biggest hassle is the mechanism’s put in place to help "protect" everyone from viruses. Not believe me, i know how important it is to prevent the spread of viruses.  Try managing 100+ Windows servers sometime, you’ll know what i mean.. I really think it’s gotten out of hand though. In the position we’re in, it’s common that we need clients to send us things. Content for their wesite, half finished site designs or web applications, databases, programs to inspect, install, or whatever.  What’s the easiest way to send files to one another across the internet?  You got it… E-mail! We use an exchange serer, so of course, we use Outlook, in order to take advantage of all of the "Features" that microsoft has so graciously packed into its overbloated answer to an e-mail server. Outlook strips attachments on its owrn.  Yesterday i was working on a task from our shared task list. I wrote a perl script that needed to be deployed on a number of servers, and along with its deployment, a command line compression utility had to be installed.  So i attached them both to the task for "safe" keeping.Well when i saved the task, Outlook tells me that i’ve attached "Possibly unsafe files" and that they might not be available to me if i re-open the task. I assume it’s talking about the installer for the command line utility, and figure, what the heck, and just tell it ok. It’s not _that_ important that the file is attached to the task anyway.

Well i come back to my task later, open it up, and as i expected, the .exe is no longer attached.  No big deal. The perl script is still there. Ok, back to work.  Once I’ve made some updates, and want to save my task, it tells me that the same damn file is "unsafe"… It’s not there! I can only assume that instead of removing it, outlook has hidden it. Which is just great.  Now my task takes up an additional 3MB of storage on the exchange server, because of a file, that i cant even access. BRILLIANT! On top of that, i tried to replace my perl script with a newer version of it, and guess what…. It crashed Outlook.

Anyway, the point of the story is this.  At what point does security become more of a burden than a tool?  We have to keep things so locked down anymore in the IT field, that we need to find a way around our own security whenever we want to get some work done…

-War

…

I;ve got a PC connected to my living room tv at home.  (Does that surprise you?) We use the PC as a media center.  It;s currently running XP Pro.  Not a bad setup, but recently i’ve been having problems with XP.. It’ll jump while playing DVD’s, and it’s just not performing like it did when i first installed it.  As happes to most XP installs, it’s probably time to wipe it, and reinstall.  Man.. I hate windows.

Anyway, I took this opportunity to start looking into alternatives.  I know i can get a DVD player for Linux, and for me it’d be great, but i need something that;s user friendly enough that my wife can sit down and watch a movie while i’m at work, or whatever.  I’ve been unable to find a dvd player for linux that lives up to my expectations.  Sure, i can watch a DVD, but the UI is usually a little less than friendly.  While that’s no problem for me, it makes it difficult for anyone else to just use it as a player.  In XP i just have an icon on the desktop for WinDVD and the program’s UI is easy enough for just about anyone to figure out. I’ve tried Ogle on Fedora Core 7, and while it worked, the UI wasnt nice, and it didnt expand to full screen nicely. Xine does a better job of playing, but the UI isnt friendly. 

Enter MythTV.  I’ve read about it before, in fact i read a very long write-up on setting up MythTV as an all in one PVR with network storage.  Excellent!  I dont have the resources at the moment to setup a whole network just for my entertainment, but i DO have one PC, connected to a TV, that needs a nice friendly DVD player.  MythTV does it all!  There’s plugins for all sorts of things, news feeds, game system front ends, and, of course, DVD playback.  Myth was originally designed as a PVR.  With a TV Turner card, you can use Myth to build your own cable box, with a channel guide, timed recordings, the works!  So i’ve set out on the quest of getting Myth configured for DVD playback, and once i have the spare cash, i’m going to get a tuner card for it.  I’ll post more once i’ve actually done this. 🙂

I tried to install Myth on my FC7 install, but it just wasnt cooperating.  It runs, but i’m getting some backend erros, and for some reason displayed fonts dont work?  So i found this modified FC6 distribution called MythDora It takes Fc6, and pre-builds Myth into the install. I just went through an install of it on my Laptop, just to test it out, and it looks damn nice.  We’ll see how it pans out when i get home and install it on my entertainment pc.

-War

…

Yea, i’m always working on this thing….

I’ve added a cool editor to my post page… which none of you will ever see, because i’m the only one that’s allowed to post new entries.  So HA! I’m cooler than you are!! 

So now i can do cool things like add color With the just the click of a button and insert images and such.  All pretty cool.  Not that i need all of that, i could just use html to do it, but man… i get tired of coding sometimes, and just want a good wysiwyg. 

Well, here we go, about to click the submit button, we’ll see how this thing works!

…

Why in the hell did congress decide that it was essential to the survival of the country to change DST?!?!?!

From an IT standpoint.. what a bloody nightmare. I manage a number of servers, ranging to Windows 2k, 2003, FreeBSD, and Linux. All of which require a different update for the DST changes. What a pain. I should have dealt with these back in March, but such things happen when you’ve only got 2 admins to manage over 100 servers….

So, for those interested here’s what ive come across:

Windows 2000: Microsoft has a utility called “tzedit” which will allow you to manually update the DST info. I dont know for certain, but i think they later released a Windows update to automate this.

Windows 2003: Same as 2000, except that the Update was released earlier than the update for 2000 was, so the need for “tzedit” is removed, unless you tried to update it before the update was released.

FreeBSD: Apparently the guys at FreeBSD shipped 6.2 with the new DST info pre-packaged. Lucky for me, the newest FreeBSD server i manage is 6.1! With the majority being older. So if you’re in the same boat, use Ports to update the zone info. First Update the ports tree, then install /usr/ports/misc/zoneinfo. Afterward I ran tzsetup to make the changes take effect, I dont know that this is necessary.

Linux: We run Fedora, and CentOS, so the yum package repository of choice. yum update tzdata gets the update, then system-config-time re-set’s the clock.

Hope this helps someone avoid my headache…

-War…