x86 Fun

Who said all generic RAM lacks character?

Rambo tested and approved.

Half-Life 2: Episode One

Time: Fri Jul 14 21:44:56 AUSEST 2006

Status: Done.

Pros: The gameplay felt like the original Half-Life once again. Steam looking good at great gfx speeds even on my good old(ish) GeForce 6600 GT. (Thanks to HDRR)

Cons: Way too short & Not enough Gman.

-----

Let's hope we don't see too many of these short episodes. Valve needs to make a proper length release. Finally they have turned their focus away from improving Source gfx engine back to making good gaming levels. Initial Half-Life 2's gameplay was not up to their previous gaming standard, it lacked replay quality.

HL2:E1 comes with the original Half-Life Deathmatch ported to Source. I must say it's quite fun to hop on for a quick bash.

Extra, extra!: "Steam still sucks!"

Sengors

Thanks to the ever expanding internet my popularity seems to be increasing:

• Finally we have a town named after me [1, 2]
• I am also a senior PhD class geologist and an engineer
• A proud owner of an international company specialising in quality carpet sales
• Short documentary about me has also been released
• Co-author of few books [1, 2]
• Appeared on BBC TV & essential mix and a in a short story
• And many more

Not too bad considering none of the search engines would return any results for my name back in late 90s.

Blackadder - S4 - Goodbyeee

Baldrick: I have a plan, sir...

Blackadder: Really Baldrick? A cunning and subtle one?

Baldrick: Yes sir.

Blackadder: As cunning as a fox who's just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford university?

Baldrick: Yes sir.

Blackadder: ... well I'm afraid it'll have to wait. Whatever it was, I'm sure it was better than my plan to get out of this by pretending to be mad... I mean, who would have noticed another madman around here?

You got rooted

Say: Thank you Sony. --- Via: Blubrick

Oblivion

Good news everyone! I have just completed the main quest in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. As many know I am definately not an RPG fan, however I could not stop playing this one. A great mix of music, graphics, storyline, dynamically varied environment and the action make this a worthwhile adventure.

The overall game is very well integrated, with smooth gameplay and very logical environment interactions. Quite surprisingly after completion of the main quest, majority of the map still remains non-revealed. This can mean only one thing: a lot more remains to be explored, with a great potential of prolonged gameplay. It could also indicate my excessive usage of the new Fast Travel features (Morrowind was missing this excellent time saver). ;) Graphics tweaking was a necessary step for my GeForce 6600GT - grass was turned off, and compromises on environmental shadows were made. Other settings were at the maximum.

All-in-all Oblivion manages to be a great game without compromising on either the game play duration or the graphics.

Free Traffic - Victoria

Crossing over your peak quota and getting shaped is no fun. This is where free traffic from participating state peering networks comes in very handy. Basically all the traffic that does not leave the state will remain at your maximum un-shaped xDSL download speed and will not be counted towards your download quota limits (even if you are not already shaped). Gaming has an extra advantage where pings (or the packet latency) will be lowest for peered traffic (due to the number of hops/routers which are in the path to the server).

For Victoria two major peering providers are present: PIPE and VIX. They basically provide a way for participating state ISPs (Lists: 1, 2) to exchange internet traffic for a marginal cost (that is they don't go through their main backbone provider's network at all, which is Telstra Wholesale). This allows them to cut down on the relatively expensive traffic from their backbone provider and allow their customers to exchange traffic for free within the state they are located in.

Here is a compiled list of sites which will allow free traffic downloads, mainly open source software, radio/video streams and gaming servers. If you have any more good links (which I'm sure I'm missing a few) send them over for inclusion to the list.

Check out my compiled list of URLs here.

Notice to Cable users: sorry no free traffic for you :) peering is applicable to xDSL clients only.

Ceasing qualities

It has been ages since Sonique and it's forums went down, currently accessible only in Gcache. As a regular forum poster and religious Sonique user it was disappointing to see this unique player never get out of it's 2.0 Alpha stages. This version was the last development of the player, way ahead in terms of it's interface eye-candy compared to it's direct competitor Winamp. Even today some of Soniques's visual plugins are still unique compared to Winamp's offerings. Admittedly Winamp has always been more extensible and efficient. After the original Sonique team got kicked out including Tony Million (straight after the Lycos merger) and replaced by an internal team, Sonique went down the drain. This is when i fell back to Winamp, my previously hated (and now loved) media player. Even the official website has been shut down without any official announcements. Now switch to 2006:

• Sonique gone...
• Winamp's original core team (including Justin Frankel) are now gone, some time after the AOL/Nullsoft merger
• Winamp3 was developed without the original team's involvement (what a great release that was, Not). Sometimes i think the only reason they bothered with it was to have MP3 in the name (Winamp3)
• Have no fear, Justin rightfully comes back in and finishes off Winamp 5, his efforts can be clearly seen across the versions he developed and worked on
• As of right now Winamp5 is not being developed by the original team who are no longer on the project and Justin is out of the game once again
• Newer revisions of Winamp5 seem to be already deviating from the usual Nullsoft way (now there's more crashes, glitches and options/addons that nobody wants included)

Still Winamp5 remains the media player of choice for me and many many others out there.

Sanders lives!

Ever had that situation where you are just driving along in a car and something interesting comes along? Certainly not an frequent situation. This is where those phone cameras come in very handy . . .

Sanders!

Opera 9 Tech Preview #2

What can I say, Opera just keeps improving itself. It's the best browser around that makes heavy, frequent and intermittent web surfing much easier to deal with... My picks from the latest release (still not officially out of testing) would have to be:

• Updated about:config - great way to customise those browser internals
• Highlighted page search - This has been long time coming, just like in FireFox every search within the current page will be highlighted at once, for better search overview.
• Integrated BitTorrent client - sticking with uTorrent for now
• Tab hover page previews - might come in handy, although it takes a while to load, it's often just faster clicking on the tab and seeing the actual page. Probably useful as the number of tabs increases.
• Per site customisations - turn off that popup blocker for a site where you want popups ;)
• AJAX based Widgets - kindof don't see much of a point in these as being a part of a web browser so far since I use Y'z Dock. It certainly seems to be a step closer to Opera's missing Extension like interface that FireFox already has.
• RSS Aggregator and archiver - yes I know it's not new in this version but I use it rather extensively. Best thing about it is it's house keeping of previous articles, basically if you delete one article from an RSS feed it won't show up there again when the RSS feed updates. And also all of the RSS items ever received are kept there until deletion (the archiving system).
• Session saving - Continue your browsing from where you left off. Crash proof feature that's been around for a long time.
• Font rendering - still not good enough when pages are zoomed in/out. It's probably due to it's page rendering system, which seems to cause 2D acceleration troubles on my Nvidia 6600GT Graphics Card. Basically I have to reload the display settings by for example changing to another resolution and switching back, while Opera is still open

What is surprising to me is the fact that Opera installer (for Windows at least) is still under 4MB in size. Even It's HTML rendering engine performs far better than Firefox and IE on the Acid2 test. Still this does not stop Blogger post editor to become "less functional" when opened within Opera, even with browser identification spoofing set to Mozilla or IE (browser what you say? Press F12 within Opera, it's the last 3 options).

No I didn't like IE 7...

Solaris 9+ and Nohup

How to deattach a long and already running process from it's shell (or parent process in general) so that it can be left running on the system intact, even if the user who triggered the process logs out? Nohup does it (assuming it's the right version):

 $ nohup -a -F -p [PID] 

These nohup(1) extensions seem to be only available on Sun Solaris 9 and up.

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla 10 July 1856 - 7 January 1943. The importance of this man is often overlooked by many of us. Scientific and Engineering ideas pioneered by Tesla have changed the course of technological development and have indeed shaped the world as we see it today. It is unfortunate to see that Tesla's work progress has been put back by numerous manifestations of reality. His ideas have all emerged from his endless search to change the world for the better. A pioneering mind of his nature comes along once in a long time.

Futurama - Godfellas

~19:00 Min into the episode:

God: Earth? Which way is that...? --silence--

--bender looks around--

Bender B. R.: I don't know...

Sengor's General Tool Set

Looking at how much time I spend looking for useful software utilities, here is an essential list, all of them are freely available on the internet:

(In no particular order or category)

• AVG Free
• Great free antivirus software, thanks Jones
• Sonique
• Formerly my favourite audio player, development of it these days is next to none
• GX::Transcoder
• Convert those audio files to and from multiple formats
• EAC - Exact Audio Copy
• Accurate and quality focused free CD -> MP3 ripper
• PowerToys for Win XP
• Tweak UI & Enhanced Alt+Tab & ClearType Tuner & Image Resizer & Virtual Desktop Manager are the most useful ones
• SciTE
• Syntax aware Code/Text editor with ability to expand/collapse code sections, very useful for large code viewing
• Dev C++
• C/C++ IDE for Windows platform
• WinAMP
• Still with classic skin, still the best media player out there ;)
• PeerGuardian
• Block/Filter out internet traffic from preselected IP address ranges, thanks Jones
• The GIMP
• Free photo editor/creator like Photoshop. Wind32 and Linux
• WinRAR
• best file archiver out there, light and fast, opens many formats
• 3D Mark
• Test out that Gfx Card, yes I know it's now called Futuremark - Hey I'm old fashioned!
• BurnAtOnce
• Burn those ISO images
• OneWorld Time
• What time is it in --insert place-- ?
• PowerOff
• Turn that PC off when you want and how you want, thanks Jones for the tip
• GameArena COGS
• Keep track of all of those local gaming servers for all of your games, GA account required
• WordWeb
• Uhh Ohh what does this and that fancy word mean? Free disctionary, I wish they had more internet jargon in there
• Windows Uptime
• How long did your Windows PC manage to stay up for so far?
• RefreshForce
• Fix all of those games/[resolutions] that run in low refresh rates
• SuperScan & Nmap
• See what TCP/IP ports are open on a remote computer
• Y'z Dock
• Mac OS Like docking bar for Windows, attractive eye candy, no official page since development ceased
• TCPview
• kindof like netstat but in GUI and real time
• Process Explorer
• See ALL processes that Windows is running, Task Manager hides some
• Riva Tuner
• Tweaker for nVidia based video cards
• Resource Hacker
• See what those Win32 binaries contain, Pictures, cursors, resources, classes...
• WinSCP
• The best SCP/SFTP client out there
• TightVNC
• Cross platform remote graphcal computer access, great for slow links, session resuming and situations where you don't have admin access to the remote box
• FreeNX
• I blogged about this a while ago. Similar to VNC but faster
• PuTTY
• SSH/Tenet/RAW client, for all of the remote access needs
• Cygwin
• unix shell for windows along with all of the usefull GNU tools, best way to get X11 working under Windows
• gVim
• advanced text editor, only for the brave!
• Real Alternative
• aka Media Player Classic with Plugins
• VLC Media Player
• ... and also preview/stream those corrupt/incomplete videos
• Net Transport
• download manager, even downloads streams into a file, thanks Jones
• uTorrent
• Light and small BitTorrent client with all the features you might need
• WinRipper
• Extract various multimedia segments from any file. Useful for extracting content from game files
• GkrellM
• System statistics monitoring panel, one of my long time favourites. Comes both in Unix and Win32 ports
• CPU-z
• Detailed info on CPU, M/B and RAM for PCs, can produce great summaries of a PC config.
• BartPE
• Make a bootable Windows XP based CD. There's lots of plugins for it available out there. Great for troubleshooting Windows issues (viruses, disks, spyware...)
• Knoppix
• Best live Linux CD/DVD out there. Useful feature is booting Memtest86 for troubleshooting memory related problems.
• Slackware
• Not a single tool, but a great selection of useful tools atop of a great build of Linux ketrnels (Yes that does constitute an OS).

That's enough for now, I'll probably update this list at a later stage...

Version: 1.4

Flash and Web Design

This is what it is all about, effective ideas with simplicity in mind: ertdfgcvb.ch idea.hr

Web Browsers Update

Opera 8.51 and FireFox 1.5 were released almost on the same day. Coincidence? Who knows . . . Anyway seems like FireFox has finally sped up their GUI which got annoyingly slow in previous versions (especially as the number of tags opened increased while browsing). My recommendation: Opera for everyday browsing and FireFox for all the tech/web development tasks.

Bye, Bye Optus Game Servers . . .

. . . it's been a long time and finally on December 1st 2005 Optus has officially closed down all of their gaming servers. :( Local RtCW: ET Alternatives:

• Internode (aka Intern00b)
• GameArena

Update: rtcw-4.games.internode.on.net:27960 seems to be gaining popularity, about time. :)