Steam Stats

This is what excessive and intermittent work hours & consequential stress end up causing:

*nix

My long held comparison views on the commercial non-Intel Midrange UNIX OSes out there based on my own experiences & expectations, being as generalistic as possible:

AIX >> ( Linux/*BSD > Solaris > HP-UX )

Now the amount of each I've seen out there which has been or is being deployed:

Solaris >> ( Linux/*BSD > AIX > HP-UX )

(Where > is greater than and >> is much greater than).

Naturally combine Veritas software with any one of the above greatly puts the OS it self out of the bigger picture within Midrange. HP-UX seems to be going out of the door for a while now.

On the other hand SANs and Virtualisation seem to be in the spotlight these days more so that any OS out there. OS has largey become something that simply makes all the hardware work together to run the App/DB. 

Now if I could only run AIX on something that's not a pSeries... Can run Solaris within VMware quite well, but AIX, no such luck even with AIX 6 Open Beta & PearPC...

2008 - great success!

Vista on SPARC

Microsoft's Vista has finally been ported to SPARC architecture!

Now I can finally run a modern OS on SparcStation 10 since Sun dropped Solaris 10's support for it.

The Orange Box

Time: Thu Oct 11 19:48:13 AUSEST 2007

Status: Completed

Just finished Episode 2 with a positive feel. This episode has improved upon the original Half-Life2 game-play considerably. Semi-linear action packed story's the biggest plus in this episode installment, and more Gman was always desirable. There's plenty of original Half-Life references within the cut scenes, while Gman manages to keep the player puzzled about the "behind the scenes" happenings (actually he managed to make me look into WordWeb on more than one occasion to figure out what he was saying). ;)

Variety of gameplay terrains ranges from caves, forests, mountains, bridges, to underground bases. Ambientish music & sound within the game were worth putting up loud on HD555. And finally this episode seemed to be quite longer than HL2:EP1. Personally I'll be glad to see Episode 3 be the last 'episode' installment. Valve's initial reasoning behind the episodes concept has been largely due to faster ability to pump out new releases. Turns out at the end of the day each episode release took much longer than expected with Valve's almost usual promise-and-delay saga.

Team-Fortress 2's looking quite promising. Gameplay's quite different compared to Counter Strike Source in terms of nearly everything looking "bulky" and cartoonish giving it a feel of non-precision oriented gaming. I'm yet to properly play it though. Glad to see Internode's got plenty of TF2 servers around. I wonder how long before half of them are shut down...

And lastly Portal's quite an interesting game concept, contrary to my initial expectations. For those who like in-game physics, don't miss out!

CS:S Setup

Very Niiice...

So long ago

So clear

Thx Vj

Touch Screen

Self timed touch screen rebooting Windows box.

Ubuntu on main PC

I've finally rolled up my sleeves and put Linux on main desktop PC, which has been for long a Windows XP box. Looked around a few Linux & BSD distributions and finalised the choice to Ubuntu. Finally a Linux distribution which is 'usable'. This OS is quite a joy to use with XGL and Beryl in action. Ubuntu is not only well integrated and automated, it's also based upon Debian's proven and mature packaging system. All the packages are specifically made for and 'supported' under Ubuntu, making software installations & dependency handling a breeze. Simply install and use.

By saying 'supported' I'm referring to the software begin specifically packaged for Ubuntu, this implies any software you install will work and be 'integrated' with it's surrounding environment. This practically eliminates post installation configurations & maintenance. (An example for the sceptics: install Enlightenment, and you'll have no need to go back handle dependencies and reconfigure your login manager to include it as a login session window manager option). In addition you will be notified about any software updates as new supported versions roll out.

Main struggle with Linux on main desktop PC has been non-integration, non-automation and things simply "breaking"/not working for whatever valid or invalid reason. This is quite history with Ubuntu (even Dell realises it).

Ubuntu Desk by ~eking on deviantART

Random notes:

• NTFS write support works well via NTFS-3G (although still chews up CPU).
• USB storage's detected, mounted and recognised automatically (iPod is different to USB Key).
• Plenty of Gkrellm plugins pre-packages (# apt-cache search gkrellm)
• RTCW:ET @ 1680x1050 32Bpp works just fine (if not better than in XP, # xmodmap -e "clear control", ~-Alt-Enter to "minimise" ingame)
• Internode usage meter for GNOME's neat, so is wmium
• Radio an TV Tuner card working by default

Slackware still remains steady on the server end for me.

Back to ET

Just like the good old times, never too late to overdo it:

Eastwoods's Duo

Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima & Flags of Our Fathers are a truly unequaled movies when combined together. Two differing perspectives on the same historical event show the differences and similarities between both sides of the conflict in a very neutral manner. It's relieving to see that Clint at his 76 years of age still manages to retain his character, whether he'd be on stage or behind the scenes. His son, Kyle Eastwood, is now in a "family business", co-creating the movies' soundtracks. To my unexpected surprise, soundtrack are actually quite decent. The stories and side comparisons are the best characteristics of the two movies. Definitely worthy of a watch...

Renaissance 2054

A movie like Renaissance 2054 manages to come along once in a long while. The combination of computer graphics (on IBM equipmet), motion capture and fine attention to detail make this a real eye candy. Most of the scenes come to life when motion captured physics are revealed. Somehow the French lyrics audio track adds a nice essence to the movie. I'm suspecting this is the fact either because of the usual stylishness associated with the French or more technically all the motion capture was tuned to French lyrics...

Check out some of the hi-res in movie screens here. You could almost call this a French anime comic film. Attitude Studio has really entered the market well, with a great 1st full length movie production.

All-in-all: Big thumbs up, a definitive keeper.

WH40K DoW: Dark Crusade

Been playing Dark Crusade lately. Continental battles, multiple teams and no allies = yet another fine release of the Warhammer 40000 computer game series.

Battles and teams are fairly similar to Winter Assault. Unlike previously, there is no preset linearity about the overall game play. Continental province battles can be decided upon manually which results in a more strategic game play. Similarly to previous releases of the game series, Inon Zur still manages to compose a great soundtrack that complements game's mood very nicely (currently playing in Winamp thanks to this). I must note that this is one of the easiest to navigate RTS games. All you really need is a mouse and the occasional Ctrl key for multi unit selections. Still waiting for truly large scale continental battles of Supreme Commander.

/ MegA /'s back

Haven't played ET in ages now...

Got hooked up on classical HL:DM and the qUiCkSiLvEr server. Server's map is a port of dm_spookface, filled with many game play enhancing secrets:

Excuse the ping, the server's not exactly local ...

Agent Elrond

Made this one quite a while ago during the LOTR and Matrix sagas. Recently re-discovered on my computer during a routine cleanup.

Red Dwarf - Season 7 Episode 3

~21Min into the episode:

Arnold Rimmer: This is reality? But, how can we be sure?

The Cat: Why do you care? Nothing makes any sense no matter where we are...!

Bye Westnet, Hello Internode

In a recent light of ADSL price increases for Westnet plans it was time to hunt around for a better deal. Being a long time Westnet ADSL subscriber narrowed down the ISP/Plan expectations quite dramatically, thanks to their great support and overall reliable service. Being on an exchange without ADSL2+ support, practically the only other ISP that had similar reliability, quota and low pings was Internode.

Internode pros over Westnet:

• Lower latencies on their gaming servers
• Great unmetered content, most importantly 3Dgamers mirror ;)
• Access to premium usenet server
• No peak and offpeak quota divisions (use quota any time)
• Better webhosting service, PHP/Perl/CGI/Apache
• Interesting shaping methodology which aims to have no effect on routine browsing
• Dedicated network links

Internode cons over Westnet:

• Peered state traffic is counted towards quota (including downloads from internode users)
• Once shaped unmetered content does not run at full speed
• Lower shaped speed (64Kbps compared to Westnet's 72Kbps)
• Payments only through Credit Card (for those who don't know me: I hate CCs)

Update: Internode intros Direct Debit. ;)