Archive for General
09.06.05
Posted in General at 6:52 pm by jw
Finished Dungeon Seige 2 on the weekend. The story has an interesting twist at the end – haven’t made my mind up yet if I actually like it or not. Started on the Veteran level but only made it part way through the first mission before I realized that I have a bunch of games piled up waiting to play and spending a few more weeks to finish on the tougher levels can wait, for now.
So, I dug out my Flight Sims again, which continue to draw me back into them for some strange reason. My wife swears she’s never letting me anywhere near a real life airplane though while she watches me go through some voluntary and involuntary acrobatics.
My biggest problem with civilian flight sims is the real lack of drive to actually do anything. Sure you can fly pretty much anywhere in the world you want to in FS2004 but without a good reason to actually fly a certain route you’re pretty much lost for goals. Well, I got my hands on Airliner Pilot and a demo of FSPassengers and had some fun messing around with them. Here’s my take on them:
FSPassengers
I think I actually killed more passengers than I got safely to their destination in FSPassengers (which is all the fault of a stupid Beechcraft that didn’t clear the runway fast enough at LAX). Overall I managed to have a lot more success with this product than I did with Airliner Pilot, but it seems a lot more simplistic. It’s fun bringing on passengers, hearing the hostess go through the flight safety routine and loving the apparent Kiwi accents on everyone but at least in the demo it still seemed pretty open ended on where you actually are supposed to fly your passengers. I’ll have to check around some and see if the full version actually assigns you routes to go with or not because jumping in a 737 full of passengers at San Francisco and choosing where to fly really just doesn’t seem like a realistic scenario.
Airliner Pilot
This seems a lot more involved, but I didn’t have much success actually completing a flight. Every time I tried, the electronics on my Dash-8 cut out at some point and that’s pretty much game over for trying to do anything useful (nothing works very well after that). I’m not sure if it’s a bug or if it’s what happens when I get too far off course but it’s annoying because the whole simulation seems rather interesting until the point I lose power.
I also jumped onto FlightSim.com and grabbed a whole bunch of interesting landings which have been entertaining for me, and confirming my wife’s fears about my piloting skillz as I park aircraft all over the landscape. I will say I have no idea how any sane pilot could land at the old Hong Kong airport from the northern approach though. Just seems completely impossible to me unless you’re taking a huge dive or jumping sideways a half mile just prior to touchdown.
Lastly I played a little with Wings Over Vietnam which was kinda fun but runs a little like an arcade game when put up against something like Falcon 4.0, which is another game I’m yet to master. It was vaguely satisfying though to jump into a plane, shoot down a half dozen MIGs and leave with a successful mission though, even while figuring out the keyboard/joystick controls as I was dogfighting (well, the obvious joystick controls I had pretty much down first of course).
In my reading, I finished 3001: Final Odyssey and wasn’t terribly impressed. Clarke seems much better at short stories than full blown novels and especially a series. When whole chapters are copied verbatim from previous books it really disappoints and the plot was really pretty simplistic. Now I’m working on Deus Irae and then I’m going to have to go ebook shopping again!
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09.02.05
Posted in General at 2:26 pm by jw
Some people may think I’m nuts, but Firefox wasn’t the entire solution to my web browsing desires. I played some with Deer Park as well and definitely think it’s a nice upgrade to Firefox, but some areas I still prefer Internet Explorer. Love it or hate it, the ability to host ActiveX controls is a beautiful thing in IE for the end user’s experience. Sure they can cause security holes, but the fact I have to restart Firefox (or Deer Park) every time I install a new extension is very, very annoying – especially if I have a whole bunch of tabs open.
Now, I’m beta testing IE7 at the moment and have been vaguely impressed with it (it’s better than IE6) but I can’t comment too much on it thanks to NDAs and EULAs and other fancy stuff. Although it does have tabbed browsing, I wanted to look for IE6 based solutions as well because tabbed browsing really is a good thing! So far I’ve tried Maxthon and Avant and both are fairly impressive but also very similar in their features and failures. My biggest annoyance of both browsers is the fact their tabs implementation leaves quite a bit to be desired – it’s more like an MDI environment where you can tile, maximize and do other stuff which isn’t necessarily what I want, especially when I accidentally tile my dozen or two tabs and have to fix it somehow.
The biggest gripe though of these two browsers is also the reason I was looking to a tabbed based IE – to support Onfolio, which I continue to use and love. Neither Maxthon or Avant will display the Onfolio bar for me, which makes them rather useless for a good replacement to IE or Firefox. IE7 has it’s own set of problems (which are mostly from the fact it’s beta and some sites don’t recognize the user agent yet). Still, I’m looking for more tabbed IE implementations to mess with so I’m sure I’ll report on more in the future.
Totally off topic, I’m still playing and enjoying Dungeon Siege 2, have tinkered more with my myriad of Flight Sims (love Falcon 4.0 even though the AI still pwns me) and am tinkering with some sports games to get my knowledge up to scratch so I can seriously compete in the Fantasy Football league! Life’s just too busy…
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08.30.05
Posted in General at 10:00 pm by jw
I moved back to Outlook 2003 after all the fuss of moving to Thunderbird. I think I gave it a fair trial (about 6 months) but in the end it just wasn’t up to the job in the same way Outlook was. What I really wanted from a mail package was the following:
- Email via IMAP – Outlook and Thunderbird both do a great job with this natively. I’ve yet to find a popular mailer that doesn’t to be honest. With the IMAP server set up on my local linux server, I enjoy being able to access the same inbox from multiple machines wherever and whenever I want it.
- Shared Address Book – I want to share the Address book between all the computers that access the email server. Neither Thunderbird or Outlook do this natively over IMAP, but I’ll go into how I tried to fix it on both machines later.
- Shared Calendar – I don’t want to manage different calendars all over the place. I want the same set of appointments and reminders all the way from my Pocket PC to my gaming machine to my work desktop. Again, there’s no native support for either of these scenarios in Thunderbird or Outlook over IMAP but I had some inroads into getting around them.
- Pocket PC Integration – Outlook does this easily. Thunderbird doesn’t. It’s really that simple.
Getting around the address book and calendar limitations was interesting. I first tried the SyncKolab plugin with the mozilla calendar add-on and it seemed to transfer my address book from one machine to another without too many problems. When it came to merging in changes from various places though, it just failed to work at all. It may have been something I did, but if I can’t work it out then it’s no good to me. Again, I tried for a few weeks to work with this but in the end it just wasn’t happening.
So, I moved back to Outlook (with the transfer of contacts via Outlook Express because Outlook and Thunderbird don’t support import/export from each other) and fired up the Bynari Insight IMAP connector which makes my IMAP server appear like an Exchange Server. Suddenly I now have the full Outlook/Exchange functionality and am independant of the machine I’m working on for my Calendar and Contact lists http://www.tadalafilotc.com/.
Yeah – I like open source and all, but it still sucks in places and I’m not about to sacrifice my own ease of use just for someone’s political statement on how source code “should be free”. Get a better program and I’ll use it. Until then, I’m going with the commercial stuff.
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08.27.05
Posted in General at 3:15 am by jw
It’s been a while but I spent some time working on my parser for Everquest 2. Fixed up a few bugs that were annoying me and added the ability to view log files, which Keldoth has been asking about for a while now. Rather than keep the entire log in memory, I store the byte offsets within the file where each event takes place and can quickly move through a file taking the lines of interest and dumping them into a text box for the user to see.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with the niche this parser seems to be sitting in. Although I have no illusions that many people are actually using it, I am happy that my guildies find it useful for analyzing stuff after raids. Naturally I think it blows the other parsers (combatstats and statalyzer) out of the water with the plots, detailed analysis and presentation of actual useful data for improving raids rather than flashy in-game stuff that disappears all too quickly. I’m probably just biased though.
.NET 2.0 really is fun to work with. It’s a mile ahead of .NET 1.1 and the ease with which I can mess around with an XML schema (in a .xsd file) and then actually use that within code directly is amazing. Seeing classes created in realtime as I edit the schema and having every thing just link up without any effort is really, really nice.
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08.24.05
Posted in General at 10:55 pm by jw
I feel all obsessive/compulsive writing this but I’ve put even more graphs onto my Linux box to monitor it behavior. This time I’ve found some scripts (that were originally not written in English so bear with some of the labels being in strange languages) which measure all sorts of esoteric stuff like CPU temp, Motherboard temp, voltages, memory usage, CPU usage, paging to swap and plenty of other junk. At least it tells me that my PC is still on!
In other news, I got my new PC at work today and had some fun playing with it. Was disappointed to discover that it doesn’t have a DVI output on the video card for the flat panel display and that nVidia doesn’t have 64 bit drivers for Vista out yet. Oh well, can’t have everything but coming from the pretty glass look on an ATI card to the non-glass nVidia is a fair let down.
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