For a while, I had been saying that I would get myself a newish portable gaming system like a Nintendo DS. While I still have my Game Boy Advance, I wanted something with newer games. The reason I wanted a portable gaming system is because while it’s not as true as it used to be, I still do some travel for work (and for vacation) so I wanted something to entertain myself with. Well, a few days ago, I realized that I DID get myself a portable gaming system. I just hadn’t realized it.

As it turns out, my portable gaming system is my iPhone.

I had been getting games for it for a while, but it was only within the past couple of months that I started getting the higher-end games. For example, when I first started, I got my hands on 21 Pro Sponsored (a blackjack game) and SolFree (a collection of Solitaire games). However, I’ve been buying more and more games recently. The one I’ve been playing most often has been Apple’s own Texas Hold Em, which I use as a sort of poker practice. The rest of my games are, with one exception, new versions of old games. The one exception is Wolfenstein 3D Classic, which is literally the original Wolfenstein 3D with an iPhone/iPod Touch friendly format. I also picked up Galaga Remix and Space Invaders Infinity Gene, which are very fun versions of the original game, with updated graphics and gameplay. (The latter even allows you to use your own music while playing.)

The most interesting of the remakes, though, is DOOM Resurrection. I had been planning to buy it for a while, but when I realized this weekend that it was only $3, I went ahead and bought it. It’s a different concept for a DOOM game: it’s an on-rails shooter, and aiming is accomplished by tilting the phone. I had expected aiming to be difficult, but it actually works extremely well. With all the work I’d had to do this weekend, I didn’t get a chance to finish the game, but I probably will later this week.

That said, I wouldn’t mind getting a few more games for the system. I understand Space Ace has been released, but I would much rather have Dragon’s Lair. The original DOOM is being ported as well, but honestly I’m not sure if I want to pay for another port, considering I have the PC version and the Xbox Live Arcade version. I also admit that it would be nice if Square-Enix would port some of their Final Fantasy games; after all, they did release the original for cell phones. As for other games… I’ll see what’s coming and what’s available, and decide from there.

This wasn’t the gaming system I had thought I would get… but it’s working out pretty well for me nonetheless. :-)

Well, as you can probably tell (unless you’re seeing the site via the LiveJournal mirror), I’ve switched the site’s theme. I had been using the same theme since I reopened the D’Arque Cathedral back in 2005, and while I had been updating the site’s WordPress software all that time, I hadn’t been updating the theme. It’s just as well, as the theme stopped being updated some years back. Unfortunately, during that time I decided I wanted widget support in the site, and the original theme was too old to support such things. So, I went ahead and looked for a new theme. I FINALLY found one today that I could use with a bit of tweaking, and with Joey “CCShadow” Schorr’s help, I got it up and running. It now looks a bit cleaner and more up to date, and to keep it from looking too static I made my Twitter feed available on it. For now, though, I think it looks nice. :-)

The website isn’t the only thing I recently updated. A few days ago, I went ahead and bit the bullet.

Yes, I put Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 on my main PC.

Actually, so far, I’m quite impressed. It certainly runs smoother and lighter than Windows Vista did, and so far the only problems I’ve had with installing stuff have been my fault, especially when trying to restore my Firefox and Thunderbird settings. The interface took a little getting used to, especially as other than when testing the release candidates of Vista for a couple of weeks, I’m mostly used to Windows XP. (I, of course, exclude Linux and Mac from that.) Still, I think I’ll definitely migrate to the final version of 7 when it comes out. The only thing I haven’t tested has been games; I’ve reinstalled Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2, but haven’t tried loading them yet. Then again, I don’t know if the latest video drivers from ATI will support my video card; my card is less than four years old yet ATI recently retired a bunch of cards including mine. Ah, well…

For now, though, I’m just going to continue tweaking the site and my system as best I can, until I get them to a point that I’m most comfortable with and think runs best. We’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, suggestions/comments on the new layout are welcome. :-)

You know, it’s kind of sad.

I’ve got this perfectly good website here, and I haven’t been updating it. Instead, I’ve been spending more time updating my Twitter. I don’t know why that is; I guess I just like the quick-and-easy format of doing status updates. I was doing status updates on my Facebook page, and then when I realized I could link my Facebook status updates to my Twitter, I switched over to that. It helps that I have two quick methods of updating my Twitter: TwitterFox for my web browser, and Twitterrific for my iPhone. What I’m going to end up doing, though, to make the site a little less static is put the Twitter feed in via a sidebar. Of course, the fact that this WordPress theme doesn’t support sidebars means I need to find a new theme. I’ve found one; the problem is that I need to create a new header image, as the new theme requires a larger image size. Oh, well. Hopefully I can get some help on that, and have the new theme up relatively quickly.

On another tech front, I have to admit to a bit of disappointment. At the house, if I have to do work on the company network, what I’ll frequently do is take my work laptop and set it on my desk next to my main PC’s monitor. However, it’s usually a bit inconvenient for me to reach over to use the laptop keyboard and touchpad, and there’s not really enough room on here for a second keyboard and mouse. I managed to find a piece of software called Synergy, which allows one to use one keyboard and mouse on multiple machines. You move the mouse off one screen, and it appears on the next. Just what I was looking for, right? Well, the problem is that the machines need to be able to communicate via TCP/IP for it to work. Normally that’s not a problem at all, except for the fact that when my laptop connects to the corporate VPN, the VPN profile automatically disables all communication to computers on the local network. So, in other words… I can only use Synergy when it’s not on the corporate VPN, and 99% of the time when the laptop is booted up here, it’s on the corporate VPN. Thus, it’s useless to me. I wish there was something I could do about it, but I’ll just have to grin and bear it.

Ah, well. We’ll see how things go on either front. For now, though, I’m just proceeding as I have been and hope things change where I can implement either improvement I’m looking into. :-)

Well, this was a fun week on the server front.

On Wednesday morning, after I had my breakfast, I logged into my main PC to check email and morning news (as I usually do before going to Cypress or Creekmont). Unfortunately, I found a major problem on my main server involving the hard drive holding the operating system. The system had registered enough errors where it put the filesystem in read-only mode. That’s usually a very good sign that the drive needs to be replaced. I sighed, and rebooted the machine to clear out the problem. I resolved to see what spare hard drives I had at the house when I got home from work, and do the replacement on Saturday.

Alas, that was not meant to be. Later that morning, while at the office, I got a notification that the main drive had again gone into read-only mode. I sighed, logged into the machine, and shut it down. At that point I was resigned to reloading the server that night. I went ahead and downloaded the most recent version of Slackware, and otherwise did work as normal.

I’m sure a couple of my Linux-using friends are probably raising their eyebrows over the choice of Slackware, considering at work (both main job and MK Online) I use CentOS, which is a free reimplementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The truth of the matter, though, is that when I started with Linux, I started on Slackware. Considering Slackware is the oldest of the active Linux distributions, you really can’t get much more old-school than that. :-) I had briefly considered using CentOS for the new server build, but decided that I really had no reason to. Slackware was what I started with. I’ll keep using Slackware for my personal servers until such time it no longer is actively developed… if that ever happens.

When I got home, my first order of business was to switch the server back on and copy off the AMANDA databases and indexes, copy off the entire configuration directory, and make a full dump of the MySQL database. From there I shut down the server, disconnected it, put it on a table, and got to work opening the case and removing the OS hard drive. I’m actually not too surprised the drive finally failed, to be honest. It was a 9 GB SCSI hard drive that I got with the original server hardware back in 2002, and even back then the drive was probably old. Fortunately I found a 13 GB Maxtor hard drive in my pile of spares, and ended up using that. I burned the Slackware 12.2 CD images to discs, reconnected the server (with the case still open in case there was a problem with the “new” drive), and tested. Once I was sure it had come up fine, I put the case back together, hooked everything up, and installed Slackware on the machine.

The rest of the night was spent getting the mail system operational. While it wasn’t that important that my email, my mom’s email, or even my friends’ email be up ASAP (sorry, guys!), my dad’s business uses my server for email hosting, so it was kind of important I get it back up for his sake. I finally had email back up and running by midnight… and it was NOT an easy process. One thing I always forget about these reinstalls is just how many services need to be brought back into operation. In this case, it was the SMTP service, POP/IMAP service, spam filter, virus filter, and greylisting service. That doesn’t even include the webmail, which requires the web server to be operational. By the time I had all that operational, I was ready for bed.

The next day, I worked on getting everything else operational (in between doing work tickets). The biggest pain in the ass ended up being the web server; I encountered more than a couple of problems getting it up and running alongside mod_security. On the other hand, fixing those problems showed me why an upgraded Apache wouldn’t work on my old install. The thing that took the longest to fix was a problem in the webmail, and that ended up being an extremely easy fix once someone in Freenode’s #slackware channel pointed me the right way. By the end of the day Thursday, things were more or less completely operational.

So, in effect, if you read this site and noticed it was down or I host your email and you lost access temporarily, then I apologize. I hadn’t expected needing to replace the drive that quickly. Fortunately things appear to be running smoothly, with the possible exception of a couple of headaches that I’ve so far been able to work around. Hopefully I won’t have to do this all over again soon, but in case I do, I hope to have early warning. We’ll see what happens.

I suppose it’s kind of stating the obvious that Windows Vista hasn’t exactly caught on with people. As far as I know, the only reason it gets the sales it does is because it’s offered by default with new machines. I’m not one of those that have been using it, though. I have a perfectly good license for Windows XP Professional, and I have no real pressing need to upgrade. (I have no programs that require Vista to run.) In addition, at work, we’re still ordering machines with XP Professional as the OS. I don’t see us moving to Vista until we absolutely have to.

In any event, Microsoft’s been aware of the very cool reception towards Vista, and have been working to get its replacement, Windows 7, out the door. This past Friday Microsoft released a public beta of Windows 7, and I decided to go ahead and give it a try. I did so for Vista when it was in release candidate form, and I figured doing so for Windows 7 wouldn’t hurt this time either.

However, seeing as I’d just as soon have a completely functional main PC and not deal with any real issues with having a main machine that doesn’t work, I’ve taken a slightly different approach this time around and installed Windows 7 in a virtual machine. It’s definitely a less than ideal situation, as my main PC only has 2 GB of RAM in it and Microsoft recommends a minimum of 1 GB, so the virtual machine (named Anezka; I name my systems after female video game characters) only has 512 MB of RAM available. I definitely took care to give it plenty of disk space, though.

So, how does it run, you might ask? The answer is, “Surprisingly well.”

Even though Anezka is definitely underpowered as far as the memory requirements go, the system itself stays snappy. Granted, though, most of what I’ve been doing has been involving web browsing and checking out the controls. One thing I’m not finding is an equivalent to the black Aero glass theme in Vista; it might be a stupid gripe, but it’s one all the same. I’ve also found that at least one program suite required me to run it in Vista compatibility mode in order for it to install properly. The install itself was relatively painless as well. As far as installed programs go, Windows 7 is actually lighter than XP or Vista. There’s no mail client, IM client, or any of that junk. About the only two of those programs I personally found have been Internet Explorer (version 8 beta) and Windows Media Player. There’s also the opportunity to add gadgets to the desktop, but I haven’t availed myself of that yet.

The thing that amused me most, though, was the version number. The official name of the operating system is “Windows 7”. However, if you open up Command Prompt or happen to look at logs from a web server accessed by a Windows 7 machine, the version number given is “6.1.7000”. Which is it, folks? :-) (For the record, Windows 2000 was 5.0, XP was 5.1, and Vista was 6.0.)

So, the question becomes… will I migrate my main PC to Windows 7? I probably will, at some point. However, I’d just like to make sure Logitech SetPoint works for it first (it currently does not), and also it would help if I could find out if my Dalek webcam will work with it. Anezka currently lacks USB support, but I suppose it might be possible to enable it so I can test something like Skype or Windows Live Messenger on it. We’ll see. The interesting thing is that when I posted on Facebook this morning that I was working on installing Windows 7 beta on a virtual, I had a couple of friends tell me they were already running it as their primary OS with absolutely no issues. (I should add that one said he helped another mutual friend put it on as his primary OS too.) In fact, they liked it better than Vista, which appears to be the common theme from reactions across the web. We’ll see.

For now, though, I’m going to keep using XP as my primary OS and testing out Windows 7 on the virtual. Once I know the core apps I need work, and I get around to putting an external hard drive on this box for archival purposes (my media folder is far larger than my tape drive’s capacity), then maybe I’ll see about switching. Still, it’s impressed me more than Vista, so a switch is a definite possibility.

I have to admit that I’m more than a little annoyed right now with some of my systems. I had mentioned before that my PowerBook’s video chipset had appeared to have fried itself. Somehow, though, it corrected itself and is working properly now. I have no idea why, but since trying to help Louie with an issue with his own Mac, I’ve not had any video problems. Unfortunately, in trying to fix a separate networking issue, I appear to have seriously FUBARed the networking to the point where nothing works anymore. I even managed to track down my OS X 10.4 install DVD and tried to do a reinstall of the operating system, with no success. At this point I may be forced to try another reinstall, except this time wiping out my home directory and networking settings. I’m loathe to do a wipe and reload, as I can’t seem to find the installer for the iMovie addons I bought which do watermarking of videos (which is needed for MK Online). If I can find that, a wipe/reload will work nicely for me. There isn’t anything on the PowerBook that needs to be saved as it is.

I do admit though sometimes I wish I could justify the purchase of a new MacBook, but the problem is that I don’t do enough personal travel where buying a MacBook Pro is worth it. About the only reason I take the PowerBook as opposed to the work laptop is if I need to do video editing, and of the new generation of Mac laptops, only MacBook Pros have Firewire ports. Ah, well… I’ll figure something out eventually.

On another front, I’m also miffed because I had a supply of 20/40 GB backup tapes that Sean gave me some time back, and I can’t seem to find them now. They’d be useful, considering I’m reaching the limit of the 12/24 GB tapes I’m using for backups on my server now. I’ll be checking at the office tomorrow to see we have any unused 20/40 GB tapes there, and if so if I can steal some. The sooner I can get that taken care of, the happier I’ll be.

On a final front, I’m finding I’m using my Facebook account far more than I ever did my MySpace account. I’m guessing it probably has to do with the fact that my MySpace friends are mostly online friends, while the Facebook ones are mostly rl friends (even if many are ones I’ve not seen in several years). In addition, I’m finding that I’m doing most of the quick posts like status comments and amusing videos on the Facebook, while keeping the long posts on this site. It doesn’t really bother me doing that, either; I have it set up now where announcements about blog posts get posted over to the Facebook. We’ll see how it goes from here, but for now, I have no complaints. :-)

Now I just need to get some rest, because I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow, and that doesn’t even include searching for those tapes. Fun fun…

I saw this mentioned over at Penny Arcade, and felt it needed to be shared with all of you. It’s a game called Auditorium, in which you need to use special icons/markers to redirect streams of light across the screen so that they hit these special targets that look like graphic equalizers. When hit, the targets start playing one part of a tune, so that when all targets are hit it comes together almost like a symphony. It sounds and looks beautiful, and is quite challenging. Fortunately, there’s no single right answer, so any way you can get it to work will be valid.

If you’d like to give it a try, you can play it here.

Well, I finally got my hands on Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe. I’ve played it for a few days, and I have to say that right now, gameplay-wise, I consider it the best game since Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance. The fighting engine feels more like Mortal Kombat II than anything else, and not dealing with only dial-a-combos makes a nice change. I’m also liking the story mode; it’s not as flexible/non-linear as the Konquest modes from Mortal Kombat: Deception and Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, but on the other hand the story is better (and does a decent job of explaining why the worlds are merging), and the voice acting is far better. (There’s also nothing as ridiculous as in Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, where Baraka impales a monk through the chest and head, and tosses him to Liu Kang and Kung Lao, where Liu asks him if he’s all right.) I haven’t played much online, though, but I’ve been consistently getting my ass kicked. Obviously I need more practice. If I had one major gripe about the game, it’s the fact that in Freefall Kombat, if you build up the damage meter enough to do a super attack, if your opponent counters they have access to that full damage bar instead of starting over. It’s annoying. Now we just need for some DLC to come out for it…

Also, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (wow, that’s a mouthful) was released this week on Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network. I’ve already downloaded it and installed it. The game looks and sounds GREAT, and the controls seem to be good. I just don’t recall ever being this bloody BAD at the game. Even on the easy difficulty in single player, I started getting my ass beat after the third opponent or so. Maybe I’m just out of practice, but I don’t recall doing so poorly at this game. Either that or I just need a more appropriate controller. Ah, well… I’ll keep plugging away and practicing. I haven’t even tried to play online, nor will I unless I play someone I know. :-)

I’ve also been playing some LEGO Batman. I have to admit, it’s a pretty cute game. I haven’t gotten to the point where I can unlock the villain chapters of the game, but I’ve been having fun so far. There’s just something innately quirky about playing as Batman and Robin in the form of LEGO characters… it’s got some definite comedy moments, but more of as a previously mentioned cute feel, and not the deadpan absurdity of the 1960’s TV series. I’m going to keep on with this, but so far I like it. :-)

Finally, I leave you with something Maxim posted. I’ve met Hernan Sanchez at E3 before. If you don’t know who he is, you’ve probably heard him. He’s been the announcer for every Mortal Kombat fighting game since Mortal Kombat 4. Well, Maxim got him to come by and do some more announcer-type phrases, but not the kind you would normally hear in a Mortal Kombat game… :-)