Christmas Party only 2 weeks away.. [vagga]

Christmas Party is only 2 weeks away..
I need to make a booking today, or at worst as soon as possible. So we need a deffinate show of hands. So right now we have 9 people. We have..
ME! Teeth, Shinji, Lurks, Brit, Spiro, Pod, Dave, Am
Anyone else coming? Jay? Beej? Skeeve? Mugs?
Remember we were talking about Chinatown on the evening of Friday the 12th of December.
Come on you slack fuckers, sort it out!

More shiny stuff [spiny]

'Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, the missus bought me a router & I like it like that'. Erm, or something.
With the iminent arrival of ADSL to Spiny Estates, I spent this evening setting up my LAN with a Netgear DG834G 54G ADSL Router, a Netgear WGE10154G bridge, my PC and XBox.
What's the verdict then? Well, pretty good actually, data rates vary from 687KBps when the bridge & router are sat next to each other down to 234KBps when the bridge is taken downstairs to my lounge. Seems plenty to stream video, even if it takes around a second per track for XBMP to get an ID3 tag.
The setups for the router & bridge are quite nice webby interfaces with all the usual options for authorising access by SSID, MAC addresses & WEP. I really only have a basic grasp of networking & didn't bump into any showstopper problems.
The router includes a DHCP server (which, IMHO, is pretty useless on a small home LAN where not every device can get to a WINS server). The firewall seems pretty comprehensive too with options to set up port ranges as 'services' to be port forwarded, then add these into the block/allow list on the firewall. This sort of thing is a necessary feature for running game servers & apps like bittorrent.
Oh yeah, and it's shiny and silver :)

Huntley is having a laugh! [lurks]

In case you've not been following the trial of Ian Huntley for the murder of the two 10 year old girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, I thought I'd summarise the situation. Well, I'm not going to be objective about this. First, I want to tell you so far what Huntley's defence will admit.

• The girls went to Huntley's house at 6:30pm on the day they died.
• Jessica's mobile was switched off at 6:46pm.
• Holly and Jessica died in Huntley's home.
• The only other person in the house was Huntley.
• Huntley dumped the bodies of the girls where they were found.
• Huntley cut the clothes from the girls and took them back home to set fire to them.

If you will indulge me, please read the above carefully again.
This man, incredibly, maintains his innocence. How does he do so? By taking the stand today and telling his version of events. I wondered what this man could possibly have to say for himself.
Apparently Holly had a nose bleed. She went to Huntley's bathroom and fell into the bath, which was full of water, and drowned. Jessica discovered this and started screaming. Huntley came in, tried to stop her from screaming by covering her mouth. When removing hands, she fell to the ground. Dead.
That's his story. Why on earth are we wasting tax payer's money on this?

Lurks sheepishly returns to Blueyonder [lurks]

Christ, I've now had 4 DSL providers and one cable provider. I like my broadband. So when Telewest fucked me around back in blog 419, I didn't see going back to DSL as much of a hardship. Especially since I signed up with the excellent Nildram being as the costs had dropped to the point that I could get myself a nice 1MB business line for the sort of money that broadband is personally worth to me (around £60 a month, so I saved some cash too).
Unfortunately over time, I just came to realise that actually, DSL is quite noticably slower than cable. Slower particularly the way I tend to use broadband, which is having a fair bit of upstream shit going on. There's a simple reason for that. ADSL is basically a modem whereby the actual datarate of the modem itself and hence how much frequency spectrum it uses, is dependant on the base rate of modulation. When you've got 1MB ADSL downstream and 256K up, that's how much bandy is there and that's that. Self explanitory perhaps?
Cable, on the other hand, is basically a very very fast modem indeed. Around 10-20Mb. It uses ridiculous spectrum because it's sat on a dedicated bit of coax rather than a bit of twisted pair wiring. The key difference is that cable modems are throttled on throughput and not throttled on the base bandwidth. The throttling mechanism is also a little lazy, it's not too worried if you burst a bit faster for a fraction of a second, it'll let things by. This makes them absolutely superb for browsing web pages, for a start. But beyond that, there's ramifications for ADSL and cable when you start to suck a bit of bandy...
See TCP/IP itself relies on being able to send little acknowledge packets back to keep the flow of data happening. The issue with DSL is that when your upstream starts getting busy, it delays your packets to fit into the alloted bandy because there just is no more bandy going. Where as cable modems will quite happily let shit through right away and then just choke stuff back if you're getting out of control. The difference might sound subtle but in my tests, the latency of a simple ping through DSL vs cable when running the pipe to half saturation is very telling. DSL latency triples. Cable latency hardly shifts. When you're running your pipe at 90% saturation - then ADSL seriously starts to suffer, as anyone trying Bittorrent will find out quick enough.
So, anyway, what I'm not trying to say here is that DSL is pants because it's not. It bloody rocks. It's the first broadband I had, I've had 4 providers of it. It's how 90% of us will get broadband and it sure beats the crap out of dial-up. We're splitting hairs. I'm just feebly justifying why I went back and in no way am I deriding the the DSL service the rest of you guys have or anything. That would be lame.
No, it's just that ultimately I realised that I was paying a fair whack more for broadband via Nildram DSL than cable via Telewest and that for my pattern of usage, even with lines the same speed, cable is faster. To say nothing that for around the same money I can just press a button on my 'Self Care' page and upgrade my line to 2Mb...
Of course they may still magically fuck me around like last time but now I have the contact details for the PA of the executive in charge of onsumer operations... I'm confident I know how to get some action should come to that again. :)
No problem with Nildram, awesome provider. Not a spot of bother. Love the static IP, reverse DNS and the way they personally tested my mail server before unblocking port 25. Quality operation. I'll certainly miss them but the fact of the matter is, I don't notice what Nildy are good at where as I notice what's good about Blueyonder broadband. Speed and price. Speed and price which has ultimately had me going back to the service and hoping I get another few trouble-free years out of them before they decide I'm running an open relay or something retarded like that.

Running BF1942 and Teamspeak as an NT / Win2k service [brit]

A guide to running normal non service executables as NT/2000/2003 services.
There are various ways of taking a normal .exe and turning it into a service; the Windows NT Resource Pack gives you one way using 'srvany' but I have found this to be dubious at best - some .exe's refuse to work with it, and it can require editing of the system registry which could prove dodgy.
Then there are the GUI based applications like 'Firedaemon' which whilst excellent, cost money - or, have unhelpful restrictions on certain uses (such as only running 1 service in their Lite product) which preclude them from serious consideration.
So after an enormous amount of digging around, I found an application called the 'NT Launcher Service' which is freeware, and can be found here: www.duodata.de
It works, exceptionally well. The following tutorial will take you through setting up a pretty standard affair of 1 Battlefield 1942 Desert Combat server, and 1 Teamspeak (voice comms) server. Note however, that you shouldn't do this unless you have a nice meaty server!
Download the following:
1. Battlefield 1942 stand alone server 2. Desert Combat stand alone server 3. Battlefield 1942 remote server admin executable 4. The NT Launcher application
Installation:
1. Install BF1942 and then the DC server. 2. Place the remote server admin executable in the same directory as BF1942.exe 3. Run the server admin executable, and use it to configure the server - save the resulting settings.
It's useful to actually kick the server off at this point, with the server admin to ensure that everything is working; a couple of times I found that the server wouldn't see the DC maps, or had other issues.
4. Go to the directory that you put the NT Launcher app into, and edit the file NTLauncher.ini
Basically, this is where you put the gubbins that NT Launcher uses to monitor it's 'services'. It's an easy text file to edit, so no skills related issues should be forthcoming. For each application you want to run as a service, enter an application container. For our two applications (BF1942(DC) and Teamspeak) the config looks like this:
-----------
[Program] PollForClosedApps=5 LaunchDelay=15
[App1] Path=C:\Program Files\Teamspeak2_RC2\server_windows.exe Param= CloseTimeout=15
[App2] Path=C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\Battlefield 1942 Server\BF1942.exe Param=+game DesertCombat +restart 1 CloseTimeout=15
------------
Save out the file, and that's your editing done.
5. Get up a command prompt, and go to the directory where the NT Launcher application sits, and type:
net start launchersvc
You'll see it start the services. Normally, it kicks off the NT Launcher service, and then fires up the applications as defined in the .ini after 15 seconds; a timetable set by the LaunchDelay=15 setting.
Once this is done, your TS and DC servers will be up and running, and it's time to get online and start blowing the hell out of stuff!

What went wrong? [muz]

Those of you who consider yourselves to be in any way serious gamers will have no doubt played the gem that is Deus Ex. Developed by Ion Storm (no, not *that* one, the good Ion Storm), under the leadership of Warren Spector (of System Shock 2 and Thief fame), it was a worthy successor to those two titles. A story driven FPS/RPG hybrid set in a grim cyberpunk-esque future, with mega-corporations and conspiracies galore.
Story aside, the game simply 'felt' nice to play. The inventory and skills interfaces were functional and simple, and didn't get in the way. And as it was based around the Unreal engine, the shooty-shooty bits were pretty nice too.
Beyond this superficial layer , the players choices actually had an impact on gameplay and story. Dialogue changed depending on the order in which objectives were completed. There were plenty of 'side-quests' to keep one diverted, if one so chose. The skills and augmentations selected for one's character made a marked difference in the style of play required.
Deus Ex is one of the few games that deserves to be played through again and again. Indeed, it is still installed on this gamer's machine, for when he feels nostalgic for a bit of story-driven FPS action.
Understandably, when word of a sequel percolated up out of the ether that makes up the interweb, there were excited whispers. Anticipation. And other suspense-laden words that I can't think of right now.
So, as soon as word reached me that the demo had been released on fileplanet, I wandered off to download it, salivating at the prospect of what had happened to the world after the end of Area 51...
I needn't have bothered, really. The demo is... mediocre, at best. The inventory interface has been redesigned in order to accomodate those without a mouse and keyboard, as the XBox version has been developed concurrently with the PC version. I have no objection to this in principle, but surely it would have made sense to make use of the mouse and keyboard more fully in the PC version? Moving on... the graphics, while not shoddy, are nothing spectacular. The goals/inventory interface is too obtrusive, taking up far to much of the player's field of view. Text (from conversations, radio transmissions, even item descriptions) is huge! And rather than scrolling conveniently in a log window at the top of the screen, all conversation now fills the middle of the HUD, obscuring your view of the world. The player is now limited to having a maximum of 12 items, and ammunition is unified. There is no reload mechanic as such, one just keeps on firing until one is dead, or the enemy i! s.
Add to this a demo that has .ini files set to read only so configuration changes are not saved, and a default mouse sensitivity that means a slight twitch has the player's character doing a 720 on the spot*, and you can see why this gamer was less than impressed.
It's not just me, is it? I'm not elevating the first game above it's station in the gaming pantheon, and I'm not judging the demo too harshly, I hope? These being the case, I can only ask.... what, exactly, went wrong?

Monkey fun [lurks]

I have to share this. On the basis that I've spent the last 5 minutes poking bits of tissue between the keys on my keyboard, mopping up bits of Diet Coke with Lemon. A cliche perhaps, but nevertheless true.
One of the lasses in my office said, and I quote;

'Did you know that monkeys lick each other out?'

Followed by the keyboard coke incident. What caused this merriment? This is what.