So, to sum up; Windows XP Service Pack 3, wont install unless you hack your into your registry.   That’s the short of it.

Microsoft’s official stance is to say that “some programs change the system access control lists (SACL) in the Registry so that administrator accounts cannot alter them. The service pack installer runs under the user (admin) account and not under the SYSTEM account. Failure to update a registry key causes the Setup program to fail.”

Wait..  You mean Administrator isn’t root?  Why does the root login for my box not have root access?!  Who’s the jackass that thought that was a good idea?! 

And Microsofts official stance is that you must edit your registry.. something that if you don’t do 100% correctly, you’re boned.  I swear they developers at Microsoft are the biggest bunch of asshats..  I’d love to hear why this is acceptable and how this got through QA.. Someone MUST know — Please chime in..

What’s jacked up is on their website it actually says that this is for advanced users only and if you’re not comfortable then here is our support link where you can pay us to help you.. (I’m paraphrasing.)

They give instructions on how to fix it, then below the instructions they say that they aren’t responsible if these instructions don’t work.  Awesome..  Gotta love good customer support on top of a huge snafu.

To save you the trouble, here are the steps to fix it;

1. Backup your registry.
2. Download Microsofts Subinacl.
3. Download this file and double click it.
4. Install Service Pack 3 from the FULL install.

It works.  Step 1 is vital just in case, 2 is a microsoft tool that enables the script that is step three.  Step three is just what passes for a shell script, feel free to read it via notepad.  Also, step three takes about 10 minutes to run so go have a coke and a smile.

 I had actually been considering installing Vista just to test out DX10 on a different partition, now screw that.  Install Vista? Accept/Deny… Denied.

Game developers please.. start releasing your games for Linux..  Let’s make Microsoft shape up or get the hell out of the market..

Not any more!  Codemaster’s, GRID is a fantastic game.. Codemasters yet again earns the faith I put in them for a high quality product.. (Operation Flashpoint 2 better rule!)

Once you get past the fact that you buy and sell cars through “eBay Motors” the game is quite enjoyable.. (I can’t blame them for product placement.. I assume by letting Ebay, Champion, Valvoline… etc… add product placement and branding they can make the game for a lot less… Sponsors baby.. sponsors! It’s not overly out of place and for the most part you don’t even notice it.. )

The cars seem to drive pretty realistically and the realistic crash damage is awesome and adds a dynamic element to the game..

The cars all move exactly as you would expect them to. They seem to have real “weight” when they move which I like. So many other car simulations just don’t get it.. Codemasters really captured the feel of how a vehicle show move..

One thing I really think is a nice touch is that you can setup the game to know your real name, and as such say it when they talk to you. They recorded probably a 100 common names, both male and female as well as a bunch of nick names.. You can choose one as your “audio name” and when the pit crew guy talks to you via the radio he says your name.. I know that’s really minor, and easy to do.. but its a nice touch and goes a long way towards immersion..

Something else I like is that it has a braking idiot light… The designers realized that they are simulating a very realistic sport, in an unrealistic medium and as such we as drivers have a hell of a lot of sensory information left completely out.. So knowing the proper time to brake for a sharp turn is often very hard to judge.. As such there is a little light in the lower left that will go green, yellow, red.. flash.. brake now you moron!!… etc.. I like that, but it needs to be right in the center of the screen.. Usually when amid 11 other cars all trying to get position and avoid crashing, its hard to notice..

The game does have an EXCELLENT multiplayer game..  Nothing more fun that doing race after race with other folks over the web.  The only real issue is that most people like running derby after derby and that gets told to me.. Also online game play being what it is, you do get quite a lot of douche bags who don’t know how to do anything other than type “fuck” or “nigger” over and over again.. *sigh* But so long as you can tune them out, its pretty fun.

At this point my only real complaint is that you MUST have a wheel.. trying to play this game with the keys (no mouse driving at all) is impossible or at least very hard with any accuracy.. (which makes sense.. I mean there is a good reason we drive with big analog wheels and not digital keys..)  So, having said that it’s a completely invalid complaint but one that I figured I would voice.  I mean its a driving game after all, a wheel isn’t out of the ordinary in the extremely rare situation of being in control of a car..

When trying to drive with the keyboard the wheels, brakes and accelerator are either FULL ON, FULL OFF, FULL LEFT, or FULL RIGHT which makes for sporadic driving at best.

I have 2 good wheels for my Playstation 2 but they don’t use USB plugs so now I have to go buy a new wheel.. A little annoyed by that, but so be it.. I like racing games that much so I went out and got the R660 GT Motorsport racing wheel which I’ll try to write a review about..  Some folks on the community grid forums can’t get it to work with the game at all, but I’m having no troubles..

Wish list wise; I wish the game would actually make you pay for the damage you do to your car.. right now you can buy a 10 million dollar vehicle, total it.. and fixing it is free.. It shouldn’t be.. but what can ya do.. this is really minor all things considered..

The reason this is important is because otherwise you can play the game as one bug crash derby and get away with it..

I also wish you had more control over things like tire selection, engine tunings..etc.. That stuff is completely left out of the game.

Update

I sat there for thirty minutes talking to him about everything under the sun. Nice guy. He’s an old computer nerd like me and my friends and we had a good chat. He showed me a lot of the controls for the plane and introduced me to the various screens as shown in the picture below. My side is an exact mirror of what you see there. (with the exception of having a fairly competent pilot on that side. )

Did you know that the 737 has pull down HUD? It was very cool. Wish I had thought to snap a couple more pics but I didn’t think to take that one until just before I got up. It’s odd but I felt so much better about the flight once I talked to him and found out he could have been one of us.

My friends are all now terrified of flying.. haha

Original Post: I used to think I hated traveling in general, but the more I ponder it the more I realize that I like to travel. … I just don’t like to fly.

A hundred and fifty people jammed six abreast in a tiny metal tube thirty thousand feet in the air — Not my idea of fun.

So of course, I find myself in exactly that situation. IBM had an emergency offsite that they needed a UI developer to attend to and I was the likely (only?) choice.

Anyone who knows me knows I don’t like people as it is. But put me in this situation where personal space and comfort are completely null and void and it begins to wear on my cherub like demeanor.

People don’t mean to be rude nor do they indend to bump and poke into me but some times I wonder if the stop trying one on the plane. It’s almost as if folks say to themselves, “fuck it, the isles are to small anyway so I’m gonna whack everyone as I walk past. ”

Speaking of that — you gotta have a narrow ass to sit in these seats. And I swear the lavetories have shrunk. The ol’joke about the mile high club is a lie!!! If a guy got a hard-on in there it’d push him into the isle!

But anyway.. Off I go to Boston to get yelled at by customers. Lucky me.

Cryptic had sold CoH to the masses as this do anything engine that would mirror “Champions” the role playing game, without actually saying the word champions. And to be honest, it turned out to be much less than champions. Still a good game, but not the freeform system that everyone envisioned. Lots of work and updates went into the game and it’s still pretty fun. I still play it.

In November of 2007 Cryptic sold their ownership of the CoH and City of Villains franchise to NCSoft so that they could work on their new super secret project!

Enter, the real Champions Online. Everyone kind of assumed that the super secret project that Cryptic was working on was Champions Online. I don’t know this for sure, but I get the impression that they were trying to get the Champions Intellectual Property license for a long time — like even back while working on CoH. They didn’t get it until recently,  once they got it they dropped CoH like a bad habit.

The Champions Online website was pretty lack luster to be fair and in all honesty the game as awhole looks like nothing but CoH 2.0.   I’m okay with that — I think that the City of Heroes game is a great game with a lot of casual game play, and a lot of hidden depth as well for the hard core gamer..    So seeing them simply move forward with what City of Heroes is, but meld it a bit to make it more Champions like with new and improved, safe for carpets hotness..

Oh man that’d be great!  Having said that, the Champions Online website had a count down clock that finally counted down just the other day.  Most of us expected a new video, graphics, eyecandy or someting.. But I doubt anyone expected, what we got..

Star trek online’s website went live..  Cryptic got the Star Trek IP!!    So.. what that means is that Cryptic is doing two major MMO franchises at once!     Ugh..

This sorta seems bad to me.  Firstly, Star Trek seems to have a bit of a curse associated with it..  And now they are saying they are going to do both Star Trek AND Champions Online at the same time? Hrmmm This is worrisome.. I fear that this means we are going to get 2 bad games..  Bad for business, bad for the customers.. just.. bad.

I love those little green bastards but I have a billion of them to paint.. (Okay, a billion might be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.) Over the years I have had Necron, Tau and Orks as my 40K armies, and Orcs & Goblins, Skaven and Tomb Kings as my Fantasy armies. I played the role playing game for years and really preferred it to D&D or any of the other traditional role playing systems..

I tell you this so that you will come away with the understanding that I have a pretty good idea about the Warhammer universe and to convey to you how absolutely excited I was about Warhammer Online, Age of Reckoning. I had long thought this universe was ripe for computer games.

I was proven right when Blizzard pretty much raped the Warhammer universe for all of it’s games — but that’s for another post..

Needless to say, after doing a lot of looking, I’m a little disappointed in the direction the Warhammer Online game is taking. Firstly, it looks terrible. The graphics look extremely “Last Generation” in my mind. My first thought was, wow.. it looks like Dark Age of Camelot. I then learned it was being put out by the original DAOC creators.. that gave me a chuckle, and worried me. If their mark was to make a game that from launch looks 4 or 5 years old, then kudos boys, ya did it. If you’re intent was to make a modern looking game then you failed.

It has a wonderful Cinematic Trailer but that doesn’t tell you anything about the game play — and that trailer is over 2 years old at this point..

It really looks like they are trying to duplicate Blizzards World of Warcraft art style, all the while blizzard is basically using clones of their intellectual property.. It’s just sad. Especially considering one of the Q and A presenters when asked how they would deal with competition like World of Warcraft responded, “Kill them!” But.. you’re imitating them.. OH.. I see.. kill them, then you can say what you’re doing is original.. Got it.

More over in the modern era of dual and quad core machines they are intentionally keeping the system spec’s dreadfully low. They haven’t released the system requirements yet, but I bet you I could play it on my phone.. It doesn’t look any more advanced than Everquest 1 was.. To be honest, World of Warcraft actually looks a little better.. (I shun myself for saying that.. ) The Beta footage of Warhammer Online looks extremely lack-luster. They are talking about not wanting to make users need “liquid cooled super computers”, but from the looks of it don’t come anywhere near close to that. They may be very high poly count models, but they use the blizzard art style and thus they all look flat with sharp corners in an almost cartoon style.

During the Q and A session one of the devs was bragging about how he plays it on his old laptop and has zero problems.. *sigh* I can’t help but feel the game industry is going the wrong way here.. This is yet another case of “Blizzard did it so, it must be right!” I’m not saying go extreme high graphics like Crysis or Vanguard, just more than WoW cartoon blockiness.

They claim to be looking to the future, but it doesn’t appear that’s the case with regards to the LOOK of the game. Now I will be the first to stand up and say that game play ALWAYS comes first.. But why start with it looking old and outdated?

I do appreciate that they are looking to the future with content though.. they have 2 years of content planned to include the first 2 major patches, as well as being in planning and pre-production of the first expansion.. that’s nice.. That usually means they have budgeted it and that the game wont be here today, gone tomorrow. But, When do we get a graphics update? (Even World of Warcraft desperately needs one at this point and is my major sticking point with Wow. I hate the look.)

They are all proud about how their game doesn’t start until you have gotten to the end of your leveling. Meaning, you play the game from 1 to 50 and at 50 the game “really starts”. They tout that as being original and exciting when that’s EXACTLY what World of Warcraft does, the WoW game doesn’t start until you get to 70.. Period. All the grind to get there has nothing to do with WoW.. Its actually true of most games..

They are excited about all their “unique” advancement systems, but none of them sound unique. WoW gives you all the armor stuff, EQ1/EQ2/WoW gives you the alternate advancements and traits.. D&D Online gives you stat advancements.. City of Heroes gives you the badges, awards and trophies.. etc.. It’s been done. Move on.

And what the hell, if you want to customize the look of your character above the standard 2 or 3 sliders you have to buy the special copy of the game?! Fuck you! That’s just asinine and is the first HUGE red flag for me. Talk about nickel and diming the hell out of people.. I can’t think of anything that will make me not want to play the game more than being forced to play the same looking toon someone else plays simply because I didn’t want to fork over the extra $40 to get the “special” edition of the game. I want to be able to customize and I should be able to using the standard edition of the game.

It really seems the ONLY thing that Warhammer online has going for it is the realm versus realm, and player versus player game play. To be honest, I could give a crap about that. I didn’t enjoy it in DAOC, and I don’t know that I’ll enjoy it here. From what I can see, it doesn’t look like they have any end game PVE?! Are you kidding me? Of all the shit to NOT copy from WoW or EQ, you miss this one?

In the end, if I wanted to play world of warcraft, I’d play world of warcraft — if I wanted to play DAOC, I’d play DAOC. I have yet to see anything that makes this game stand apart from blizzards blatant IP theft of the Warhammer Universe or DAOC.

This game seems like nothing but DAOC 2 using the Warhammer IP. And that’s sad, it could have been so much more. Games Workshop, you should hang your head.

Adding a photo of one of my cats to see how it turns out.

Updated from home:

After fiddling with the new iPhone Wordpress application for a while (AppStoreLink) it seems to do the job, although its extremely light on features.

For an application that is designed to post quickly and easily, I think it fits the bill. But if you want to do anything even as mundane as align a photo or style your post — you’re out of luck.

It really feels more like a quicky twitter application than a true blog posting tool and that’s unfortunate. I can honestly say I will likely never use it again to “publish” content unless they give us more power. However I can see it as a rather useful tool to submit stuff as a quickly draft while you’re out on the road that you’ll then add more content to once you get to a computer..

I also fully realize that this is a 1.0 product and there is a lot of room for growth. The guys at automattic have done a good job here.. It will be interesting to see where it goes.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is just plain.. LEGEN-DARY! (er.. sorry.. wrong show).. Joss Whedon put together this little internet mini-series during the writers strike and its really very good.

It stars Neil Patrick Harris (commonly known as Doogie Howser) as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion (Malcom Reynolds or the wrong private Ryan) as Captain Hammer (”Corporate Tool” hehe), and Felicia Day (Buffy, and The Guild) as Penny, Dr. Horribles love interest. It’s spread out over 3 episodes spanning a grand total of about 40 minutes..

In an attempt to test the waters, joss and crew have decided to release this pony for free over the course of the next couple of days, then to offer it for sale. One week only!! Posted initially on the 15th, they stay free until the 20th then go for sale.. I love this idea.. One week, get the word out.. then see who comes and buys it. I would.. its good!

In fact, I’m stunned at how good it is.. hehe I shouldn’t be, I mean Joss is great — just watch firefly, serenity, buffy..etc.. (Damn you fox!) But this is a good little show.. I wish it were longer.. (Sorta like Firefly.. But I digress..)

I love musicals.. I dunno why.. I know its not manly, I don’t care. I really enjoy them and when they are comical, they are even better. This was a fantastic show with just the right amount of music.. More over they were all really well done!

And while I do like Nathan Fillion, I think Neil Patrick Harris completely stole the show. He was great! He makes me want to be in the Evil League of Evil! I had no idea he could sing! It was fun seeing Simon Helberg show up as “Moist”..heh I’m enjoying him on Big Bang Theory.. (did he do your piano work?)

Nathan’s “Moral dilemma” song (end of act 2) was fantastic and probably my favorite. The end of act 1 song was good too.. Oh and Joss, Loved the chair.. heh I also really loved the whole bad horse stuff.. that was funny as hell..

This whole thing was done on a shoe string budget but you wouldn’t know to look at it. I mean the camera work looked great, the lighting and sound were fine. More over they got excellent talent and whoever wrote the songs was great! Lots of counterpoint which was fun.

Very well done though guys.. kudos! I wish it was longer than 3 episodes — BALLS!

On a side note, I’d love to see numbers as to how much this actually cost. Down to equipment, stars, etc.. maybe show us the original script etc.. Really use this as a lesson to the “fan films” and Amateur films community to show us really how its done. That sort of thing would be of interest to everyone and I think they’d pay to see the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff.. I know I would.

Or is it? The more I play it the more I find super secret hidden stuff that is in the background. I’m discovering that there is a lot of depth in the game that I never realized was there.

It made me realize that CoH/CoV took the EQ1 style of game play to heart, instead of the WoW style. Meaning that in World of Warcraft if the guy standing there doesn’t have an exclamation or question mark over his head — you don’t need to talk to him, ever..

In EQ1 that wasn’t the case at all.. In fact if you didn’t talk to just about everyone, you missed all the good quests. I think it added a lot to the sense of accomplishment, but the cost of having to run around and talk to everyone was pretty high and kinda sucked.

City of Heroes has both methods employed. You have a list of contacts which you can talk to or even call in order to do quests.. but there are also super secret ninja monkey heroes in the world that you have to go find.. This means that there are levels of depth to the game — you don’t have to do the super secret stuff.. or you can.. You choose.

That’s pretty cool. Plus with the invention system and the set powers they have going now, you can further refine your characters abilities. You don’t have to..but you can if you want to.. The neat thing about the set inventions is that they get stupidly powerful..

I recently got my toon fully outfitted with the “Blizzard” power with a complete set on it. Aim + Build up + Ice Storm + Blizzard… wow.. lots of shit dies very quickly. Suddenly that pack of 20 orange mobs isn’t a problem, and I’m just one guy.

It’s a fun game.. but eventually I’ll get tired of it and cancel my account… until I need something new and reactivate it.. haha.. I have done this like 5 times at this point..

Currently I am trying to get City of Heroes to work under Ubuntu. I’m going through another cycle where windows has pissed me off, so back to Ubuntu. I’ve already replaced my secondary computer with a mac mini (formerly an old windows box), if windows doesn’t knock it off I’ll just stay Ubuntu.

Either way it shouldn’t be too hard — I’ll keep you posted. Right now its downloading. 2.5 gigs takes a little while. I tried the “move it from the windows partition” trick but the patcher just didn’t understand. So fine.. download the thing again.. whatever..

Ps. Whatever you do — don’t install Vista. And don’t install IE8 on XP. Wine runs most windows programs better than windows. As soon as I get a couple more of them working I may not go back.

Update: Well it works. I don’t know why it surprises me but it always does.. I guess I’m still programmed to think that you have to have the OS printed on the box in order to run the application..

I had to completely reinstall it from the updater which confused me because it was replacing the exact same files with brand new files.. in the same place.. *shrug* Oh well it took an hour longer than I had anticipated.. wooptie do..

It works very smoothly and so far I can’t tell that I’m not in windows.. Wine, rocks.

The only bug is that the mouse cursor looks like its been “de-interlaced”.. After doing some looking, this is a known issue and one I care less about.  It still works just fine, it just looks like the mouse has been sliced up horizontally..

This is the second time something like this has happened and the second time I’m going to have to get it fixed. My truck is only 8 years old and I hate that these things happen. Stuff breaks, I know.. but damn it.. this is another cost I just don’t need..

The last time it was a “coil” (something to do with the sparkplugs).. It was a pretty simple fix.. I hope its something similar this time..

I had considered maybe getting another vehicle but lets be honest, nothing better than a paid off vehicle, and once you have gone without a car payment for a couple of years it’s really.. really tough to go back. I like the look of the latest Eclipse or the Solstice but those are 30k man.. hah

The real bummer is now this is another day of work that will be stunted because I have to take the truck to the shop.

Update:  Well it was another coil that blew.. Simple fix, has taken them 5 days because I am having them go ahead and replace the o2 sensors at the same time.  2 of them have been burnt out for about 5 years so might as well fix it while we can.

It’s just that some of the stuff I’m working on has the “too little, too late” feel to it that I can’t really explain. Plus I’m worried that it’s something that doesn’t bring value to the customer — which believe it or not, and despite what my manager thinks.. I actually care about.

The part of the product I’m currently work in is “reporting” and its a HUGE job. Bigger than most realize — though I was told yesterday by one of the technical writers than she had no clue how big it was.. haha

I have basically been tasked with completely rewriting the user interface for the reporting side of the product in a very short period of time. It took 2 years to get into the state its in today (A buggy and often incomplete state) and they gave me 90 days to fix it. I failed.

It just wasn’t enough time. I’m still working on it and everyone has been understanding about it, but I still hate that I wasn’t able to get it on time.

I often blame IBM for the endless meetings and other time wasters for this failure, but in all truth it was just too much work.. I bit off more than I could chew.. Though the time wasters might have been a factor;

Our last couple of work days involved a two day class on “agile programming”. And while I agree with the message of the class, the class itself wasn’t very good. Primarily because you had a bunch of non-programmer bureaucrats telling us how we should do our job. More over, I kind of got that one of the leading messages they were shilling was that metrics driven product development was a mistake.. all the while giving us a brand new set of metrics to use.. And doing so in a “touchy feely, every one get up and do this goofy activity” sort of way.

More over, I feel that most of their message would have been better delivered to the upper management instead of us. As programmers, we just need to know when, where and how.. The why of it can be kept to a 30 minute meeting.. 2 whole days seemed wasteful.. Just my opinion of course, so it’s worth pretty much nothing.

The whole class was full of trendy keywords like scrum, stand-ups, sprint backlog, stakeholders, and burn down.. when I thought they could have just used plain words to get basic concepts across.. It really smacked of red tape to be honest..

What amuses me the most is the fact that the agile programming method isn’t vastly different from what we were doing at BuildForge prior to IBM buying the company — we just didn’t have a trendy name for it.

All and all though I think agile is a good idea, and it certainly will help in the future but does nothing for us in the here and now.

Certainly doesn’t help me make up for the missed deadline..