Category: Deus ex Machina

… where is your god now?

D'Arque Bishop

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6159158.html

Last month, McDonald’s introduced a line of Happy Meal toys featuring Nintendo mascots like Mario and Donkey Kong. As part of the company’s image-reworking emphasis on fitness, each of the toys had a physical activity focus.

Today, McDonald’s rival Burger King officially announced a campaign that takes a different tack to a gaming tie-in. Instead of offering toys that evoke games and promote activity, the fast-food chain is going to offer three Xbox and Xbox 360 games of its own this holiday season, each of them slathered with Burger King branding like so much mayonnaise on a Double Whopper with cheese.

Burger King’s plans to get into gaming were originally leaked in April by a company doing market research for the fast-food chain.

Pocketbike Racer will feature a number of Burger King mascots, including the King, the Subservient Chicken, the Whopper Jr., and former host of E!’s Wild On series, Brooke Burke. Five levels will be included, as will multiplayer races for four people on the same Xbox or Xbox 360, or eight people online over Xbox Live.

Big Bumpin’ also takes a lineup of BK mascots and pits them against one another in vehicular competition, but this game isn’t a race so much as a bumper-car ride. The game features a number of theme-park settings and on-track hazards like saws and bottomless pits, as well as bump-pumping power-ups. Big Bumpin’ will also have four-player action and online multiplayer support.

Finally, Sneak King takes the stealth action genre and puts it to a friendlier use than usual. Instead of tiptoeing behind enemy guards to silently snap their necks, players will sneak up on hungry people to surprise them with offerings of Burger King food. Gamers will have to sneak up on people in a logging yard, a construction site, downtown, and the suburbs, and they will be graded on their performance “based on how elaborate the delivery is executed.”

…

The three games will be playable on either the Xbox or Xbox 360. They will be available from November 19 through December 24 at participating Burger King locations for $3.99 with the purchase of a value meal. All of the games are rated E for Everybody.

[UPDATE] It appears that the fast-food promotional tie-in isn’t the only first that can be attributed to these games. “These are not backward-compatible original Xbox games, but truly designed and developed for each platform separately,” the Burger King representative said. “There are two versions on each disc, specifically made for each platform. This has never been done before for a title.”

…. er, right. I’ll have to pick up a copy of one of these next time I’m going through the drive-thru at the BK by my office, just out of sheer morbid curiosity…

Fun with Windows Vista…

D'Arque Bishop

Well, I’ve been running Windows Vista for a couple of weeks now. All in all, I think I’m getting used to it. It certainly looks nicer than Windows XP did (I was using WindowBlinds to make my desktop look nicer), and some of the design decisions are rather nice.

Still, it’s definitely not without its drawbacks. So far I’ve encountered five different issues that royally annoy the hell out of me. Granted, only three of them are Microsoft’s fault, but it still irks me to no end. I definitely hope they’re fixed sooner rather than later.

  • ATI’s beta video drivers for Vista have really poor OpenGL support. I wouldn’t be quite annoyed by this yet if it wasn’t for the fact that Defcon apparently uses OpenGL for rendering, and the game runs slowly as a result. (By contrast, Counter-Strike: Source runs about the same as it did under XP.)
  • User Account Control is a pain in the ass. Not only is it very intrusive (stopping EVERYTHING while it waits for your prompt), it has a bug where if (My) Documents is on a network share, it can’t read the network drive and as a result a number of programs fail to install.
  • The built-in support for Windows Mobile devices (takes the place of ActiveSync) is buggy. Installing programs for the device doesn’t work as the program doesn’t recognize ActiveSync as being installed, and transferring files to/from the device never works (it copies maybe 40k and then crashes, severing the link between the PC and the device).
  • Logitech has yet to release SetPoint software (for the keyboard and mouse) that will work properly with Vista.
  • Winamp is my preferred media player. However, no matter what I do, Vista INSISTS that Windows Media Player be the default player for most media files. Granted, I might need to check WMP itself, but it’s annoying that I can’t just tell Winamp to be default and it’s automatically recognized. (Even if I go into the “default programs” place to change that on the Start menu, it won’t let me change media settings.)

Otherwise, Vista’s been working fine for me, and I’d rather keep it. Still, it makes my life difficult dealing with some of these issues. (I got around one, UAC, by completely disabling it.) Hopefully MS, ATI, and Logitech will fix the issues sooner rather than later. Ah, well.

EDIT – 7:57 PM – Well, this thread on the Winamp Forums explains what the problem with Winamp and Windows Media Player is: apparently there’s an extra step or two Winamp needs to add to the registry so that normal programs can alter the file associations without requiring administrative access. Ah, well, I suppose we’ll see that before the official Vista release.

The Movie Phone Project!

D'Arque Bishop3 Comments

Yes, this is the project I had been working on… heh.

Anyway, one thing I enjoy doing when out of town is taking movies to watch, especially when on a long and boring flight. In particular, whenever I go on flights for trips involving Mortal Kombat Online, it’s a tradition for me to watch Mortal Kombat on the flight there. Up until recently, I would watch the movies on my laptop. While the screen is great for that, there are two problems: 1) you’re never sure if the battery will last the whole movie, and 2) you’re not given enough room. More than once I feared damaging my laptop on a flight because someone in the seat in front of me leaned back and cut my room down. Obviously, a different tactic was needed.

So, my first idea was to buy a portable DVD player. However, the problem with that is that I would be spending $200+ on a piece of equipment I would only use maybe once every couple of months, if that. That wouldn’t be a very good investment for me. My next thought was to buy a video-capable iPod. I use my iPod every day, so it wouldn’t be like it wouldn’t be used. However… I was loathe to spend $350 to replace a piece of equipment that still worked perfectly well. Then, it suddenly occurred to me that I DID have one item already that was capable of displaying video: my cell phone.

My cell phone is a Cingular 8125, which is really a rebranded HTC Windows Mobile 5.0 device capable of holding extra storage. I did some research, and found the tools I needed: a program called TCPMP (a media player for Windows Mobile), and Auto Gordian Knot, which can convert a DVD to XviD. After reading a tutorial, I tested using the movie Mortal Kombat: I ripped my DVD into a 475 XviD file, which I then copied onto my phone’s 2 GB MiniSD storage card. I then installed TCPMP onto the phone. Did it work? Well, see for yourself… :-)

Mortal Kombat on my Cingular 8125...

The movie itself runs great without any glitches, and there’s enough battery power in the device where watching the movie won’t kill it. I even stopped by Radio Shack on the way home and picked up an adapter that would let me use my headphones on the phone. The sound came through great. :-)

So, all in all, I think I’ve come up with a long-term solution for watching movies in planes. Fortunately I won’t get any hassles out of using this; I’ve already confirmed that these devices are fine on flights so long as you can show they’re in flight mode (all radio transceivers off). It’s the low cost solution to my problem, and it seems to work fine. :-) Now, to decide what OTHER movie I want in here…

A change on the main PC…

D'Arque Bishop

I’ve gone ahead and made a massive change to my main PC.

Main PC desktop - 17 Sept 2006

As you can see, I’ve gone ahead and loaded Windows Vista RC1 on this machine. It’s actually been a source of frustration, mostly, as I spent most of the day trying to get Vista’s installer to recognize my hard drives. I finally got it to recognize by using doing a semi-clean install from Windows XP. Ah, well… this is definitely taking a lot of getting used to.

The main things I’m coming across that annoy me most are that the (My) Documents, (My) Pictures, and other folders are handled differently in Vista than they were in previous versions of Windows, plus some program installers gripe if those folders are located on a network drive. I’ve worked around it for now, but I know it’ll end up biting me in the ass if this behaviour continues when it’s officially released and I have to work with it at the office.

Ah, well. I suppose I’ll get used to it over time. For now, I’ll muddle through as best I can.

All is fixed… one Office Depot run later.

D'Arque Bishop

Well, the home network is back up and running. I had planned on doing a bit of checking to see if I could get the WAP/router (a Linksys WRT54G) back up and running, but when I really thought about it I decided that after a complete and total failure like that, the safest thing to do is just to get a new device. So, I ran down to Office Depot at about 9 AM, and bought a brand new WRT54G. I brought it home, got it configured, and proceeded to replace the old router with the new one…

… and Dad decided he wanted to take that opportunity to rearrange the servers and printers.

Of course, that meant shutting everything down, so belated apologies to anyone who happened to be trying to access the site or their emails this morning. After a lot of moving around and a lot of frustration, we finally managed to get everything in their new places and get everything back up and running. And now, if you’d like, I took a picture of the end result.

The D'Arque Cathedral servers and printers...

I will admit I was not happy about being asked to do the movearound this morning. In hindsight, though, it ended up looking rather nice, and the stuff like the DSL modem, router, and even the KVM switch are a LOT easier to get to. So, the time was well-spent.

Ah, well. I’ve got other stuff that needs doing at this point. Fun fun…

What a way to start the day…

D'Arque Bishop

Well, this sucks.

I woke up at 6 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue; I’d just get onto my PC and browse around until I COULD get back to sleep. That’s when I found my PC was no longer connected to the net. It turns out my wireless access point/router had failed overnight.

Crap.

I’m either going to have to find a fix for the damn thing, or I’m going to have to make a run to Office Depot to replace it. The latter is much more likely, as if it failed once it’ll overwhelmingly likely fail again. Fortunately my servers aren’t on the router itself so my site and email are still up. It just irks me that I’m going to have to spend this morning replacing and reconfiguring one of the core devices on this network.

Ah, well. Here’s hoping nothing else goes wrong today…

Is the email world a slightly safer place to be?

D'Arque Bishop

As some readers might know, I installed a virus scanning solution for the D’Arque Cathedral email setup. The virus scanning consists of all email being filtered through a combination of Clam AntiVirus and amavisd-new; any infected message gets quarantined before it hits a mailbox and an email warning is sent to me. Anyway, on a whim, I checked my mail folder that contains the virus alerts, and checked to see when the last time an infected email message hit the server.

The last actual worm-infected message to hit my server was received on August 3rd. All alerts since then have been for phishing emails (which ClamAV/amavisd-new also detect).

I must say, I’m rather surprised that I’ve gone an entire month without getting an actual virus/worm email to ANY address on my mail server. Maybe all of the fuss that was made in the news about these viruses have wised people up to the fact that if they’re running Windows, they NEED virus scanners. I can’t imagine the worm writers had just given up. Maybe, just maybe, the public at large will listen to security concerns about their PCs if they’re shouted loud enough.

Here’s hoping that’s the case, anyway.

Waiting and waiting…

D'Arque Bishop

Well, right now I’m sitting in the waiting area of the Saturn dealership over on I-45 by 1960. It was time for my car’s 84k mile service, so I scheduled some time to come out here and get it taken care of. In addition I’m going to have to stop at Fry’s on the way in to work to see if I can get a new tone probe and generator. For those not in the know, tone probes and generators are used for tracing out phone/data lines. You plug the generator into the plug and switch it on, and then you go to the other end (say, a phone room) and use the probe to detect the tone the generator’s putting out, which leads you to find the correct line. I’ve got a few lines at the office that I need to track down, and I lost my original probe. Fun fun.

The main thing that annoys me about this Saturn dealership is that they used to have an open wifi connection here. Now, though, they’ve locked down the wifi with WEP, which I suppose is their way of saying, “Oops, we didn’t mean for this to be open in the first place.” So, right now, I’m using my cell phone as a Bluetooth modem. Even then it’s not as functional as I like; I can’t get my VPN client working on it and can’t connect to my servers at home. About the only thing that’s working right now is web access. Still, a working open wifi connection would be great here; some people like me come in during working hours and it makes it easy for me to actually do work. Right now I can’t make any calls while the phone’s in use.

Like I said earlier, I met Sean and Jinny for coffee Wednesday evening. It was kinda unexpected; Sean called in the middle of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, and I had actually ignored the call because I didn’t recognize the number. However, Sean left a voicemail so I went ahead and checked it (I figured that whoever it was, if they left a voicemail it was important), got back with Sean, and went off to meet him at Denny’s. It’s always good to meet up with those two and discuss current and former times.

Speaking of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, I actually did end up enjoying the film. The key to it is to not take a single bit of it seriously. I might end up adding it to my permanent DVD collection out of shits and grins. We’ll see, though.

In any event, that’s about it for me here… time for more waiting on my car. Fun fun…

The weekend’s over… where the hell did it go to?

D'Arque Bishop2 Comments

Well, another weekend is over and done with. Granted, I’m not sure where the hell it went to, but it’s pretty much over.

Yesterday at about lunchtime, Dave came around to the house. Unfortunately, Chase went into serious protection mode and we had to restrain him; for some reason he did NOT like Dave being there. In retrospect, it was my fault, as I let Dave go in first and Chase probably thought he was an intruder. He wasn’t any better the rest of the day, either. *sigh* I just hope he eases up over time and realizes that Dave is a friend. Interestingly enough, later in the day, Gus overcame his skittish nature and came into my room to meet Dave. Dave had never seen him before, and made sure to make friends with him. It’s weird when the cats are friendlier than the dogs…

Anyway, after Dave arrived, he and I went to Pei-Wei for lunch. After having our lunch we headed back to the house and he proceeded to introduce me to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Unfortunately, I would have to say that Louie lasted longer than I did; at the 17 minute mark, when I saw them walk into a room about to have guy on guy action, I said, “STOP! Enough.” Not that I have any problem with it, mind you, but at that point the movie was getting too surrealistic for my tastes. So, I ended up putting the 2003 miniseries of Battlestar Galactica on. However, right before we reached the halfway mark, the power flickered and the movie cut out. We took that opportunity to head on to dinner at the Black-Eyed Pea. After dinner, we headed back to the house, where I introduced Dave to the 80’s sci-fi/fantasy goodness that is Krull. After the movie was done, he headed back home.

The main thing that bugged me about yesterday was that issues with MK Online and with work meant I ended up neglecting Dave a couple of times. I hated doing so; he said he didn’t mind, but I felt really rude doing so. *sigh* In the end, I told Dave that it was days like yesterday where I hated my MK Online job.

I wanted to watch Corpse Bride tonight, but unfortunately something was wrong with the disc. Mom tried watching it and it crashed her DVD player part way into the movie. Then I took it and put it on my own DVD player, and it didn’t work at all. I tried it on my main PC using PowerDVD as well, to the same result: both times the player hardware/software just locked. I’ve already arranged for a replacement from Netflix and am sending the bad one back tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll get it soon.

Otherwise, the only other thing I’ve done today was set up Mozilla Thunderbird on my mom’s laptop and get her brand new domain and email address set up. It didn’t take too long; it was just a matter of getting Dad to buy the domain name, and I did all the technical work after he had done so. She’s getting this new domain so she can get rid of her AOL account; all she uses her AOL account for now is email and she’s kinda miffed AOL’s giving away free email now. At this point, I’m reasonably sure I can give her better spam/virus filtering anyway, so she wins in the end. However, it’ll be fun for me as my AIM account is tied to her AOL account and I don’t know if it’ll end up surviving…

I also ended up setting up GNU Privacy Guard on my main PC as well as Enigmail for Mozilla Thunderbird. Now all of my emails are being cryptographically signed, and if people want they can encrypt email to me. I admit I’m not doing this for any more reason than it looks neat and acts as a kind of verification later on if people want to confirm if a message came from me. If you want my PGP key for my darquecathedral.org email address, you can get it here, and for my MK Online email address, you can get it here.

And now, it’s time for me to start winding down, as I have work in the morning. Fun fun…

I suppose it’s time for a normal post.

D'Arque Bishop

Damn, I haven’t posted a regular post in a while. I suppose I should rectify that now… heh.

*sigh* It’s not that I’ve had much time to do such posts recently, actually. I spent most of last week on a business trip to Casper, WY. As beautiful as Casper is, it annoyed me to no end that data service didn’t work too well. Data service on my cell phone was very sporadic. In addition, I was staying in a Holiday Inn that had free wifi service, yet the service kept cutting out on me. It was worst on Wednesday night, when I ended up taking my laptop down to the lobby in order to get a decent signal. Ah, well… at least I can say that I got most of the work I was sent to do done. On the other hand, one set of equipment didn’t arrive until fifteen minutes after my flight home took off Friday, so that part didn’t get done. We’re not worried there; we can get someone local to do the preliminary configuration and then finish the configuration remotely. At this point I’m just glad this is the last trip I need to take for the foreseeable future. I have enough work waiting for me at the office that I need to catch up on.

I picked up a new game to try yesterday: Halo for PC. All right, all right, it’s an old game, but I wanted to give it a try and see how it is. I might also pick up a Playstation 2 to USB adapter from Fry’s so I can play Halo on it and get practice playing first-person shooters using a gamepad. As much as I like the keyboard and mouse combination, I’ll need to get used to a gamepad if I’m going to start playing console FPS games. In the meantime, I’ll be keeping to the keyboard/mouse and progressing that way. The game’s been interesting so far… should be fun to see how it goes. Of course, I’ll likely have to pick up an Xbox 360 if I want to play Halo 2…

Of course, I’m not looking forward to Tuesday, either. Apparently I developed an ingrown toenail that needs to be cut out… and it got badly infected, or else I would have had it done last Monday. Under doctor’s orders I’ve been soaking my feet twice a day and taking antibiotics. Trust me, finding epsom salt, white vinegar, measuring cups, and a container to put my feet in my first day in Casper was fun as all hell. Fortunately the soakings and antibiotics have helped and the infection’s been knocked down. Also, hopefully the soakings and antibiotics will finish once the procedure is done. I’m just not looking forward to the procedure itself. I hate surgeries…. heh.

Ah, well. I think that’s about all I had to say this time around. I’ll probably update with more stuff in a day or two once I figure out what I want to say… heh.