Posts Tagged ‘frustrated’

PC Gaming – end of an era

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

I must admit, I don’t really buy software, because I find it terribly overpriced here, in Eastern Europe – but if I can afford it (probably through discount sales in major supermarkets) and do find it an invaluable one, I am willing to pay. If it is a game and it does entertain me (which is terribly hard) then it’s fine - I only ask for two things. Try to keep the software bug free (and at least try not to annoy me with patches and automated downloaders) and don’t install crap (spyware or other assorted “security” software “protection”) on my machine, because if you do so, I might as well used cracked executables (risk of getting malware, risk of having unwanted bugs etc).

Also note that having a broken Internet connection around here is not so uncommon; last time I felt a bit bored because of this I wanted to play Half Life 2 single player: Steam laughed in my face.

Now, on with the rant: I liked Neverwinter Nights a lot, but that’s a bit dated, so I’m willing to pay for the somewhat better (still butt ugly) graphics NWN2 would offer and I may consider buying Kotor2, though I’m not a big fan of the Star Wars universe. Also lately I tried out Mass Effect which really really could entertain me: I love the storyline, the carefully written dialogs, the graphics, the gameplay – and since it’s not an FPS, I still can play a couple of hours without having a migraine (free look camera controls even with vsync can give me quite a headache).

So this means we got a buyer, am I right? Hell no. All three software has showstopper bugs (NWN2 for example is well known for its’ lockups and freezes – more than 20 major patches/updates has been released since initial launch) and both NWN and ME has Securom protection, which is very very close to spyware. If I let the softwae phone home all the time and install a low level rootkit (buying it in a shop) I may play; if I choose to pirate the game, I commit a crime, loose risking data and probably will loose updates (a small hope for bugfixes).

So is this a justification for pirating games? Will I use pirated copies instead of legit ones? The answer is no: I will not use either one, this is not a justification, this is not an excuse; I just ditch gaming – the glory days are over for good, thank you EA, BioWare, Valve and rest of you.

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Partition magic broke

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

I wanted to check if all my partitions are primary (I tend to do this foolishness) so dug up an old Partition Magic, checked if things can be resized and moved around. I usually press the undo then, I don’t want to commit because I’m a bit afraid of playing with partitions – unfortunately something went awfully wrong for PQMagic and it frooze. No commit, no revoke, it died. No ctrl-alt-del, no taskmanager, no nothing. Good bye primary partition :) Some notes on this not-so-funny incident:

  • After booting into repair mode, doing the magical chkdsk-fixmbr-fixboot the system still is unbootable
  • Debian linux not just sees the partition, but can mount it and I can access everything (default ntfs driver, not the ntfs3g fuse module)
  • Why on earth can Linux mount and work with an NTFS drive, while windows (saying it’s okay and fixed) can’t even boot up?
  • What would happen if I wanted to reinstall Windows, which I would not be allowed if using an oem copy (I had Vista Home for a while, though now we’re talking about a plain old XP) – bad luck?

BTW I’m happy that Symantec bought PQMagic and ceased development.

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Java+Tomcat+Eclipse, not a newbie friendly setup

Sunday, November 25th, 2007

This trio equals terrible headaches. I wanted tutorials on how to setup a Java based webdev environment (no, I’m no Java expert at all), so that I can start looking into this whole Java business thingy, but all Google spits out are pages either outdated, badly written, irrelevant or filled with nonexistent references. Add the “compact” (behemoth) solutions involving the different appservers fromGlassfish bundled Netbeans to J2EE flavoured Eclipse and I’m lost forever.

Edit: no wonder Zend started to promote its appserver towards “enterprise folks”.

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Installing Apache on Vista Home Basic

Thursday, August 9th, 2007

Vista is getting flaky, driving me nuts… might be back to Linux sooner than I thought? Anyway… Vista Home does not like developers, but with some work, one can install Apache.

  1. download Apache msi installer :)
  2. run cmd.exe as administrator (right click), then run msconfig
  3. go to tools, run the “Disable UAC” script (without that you would get “(OS )Access Denied” error). reboot.
  4. install Apache from a fake administrator account (the real one is buried deeply in VHB; don’t bother to enable it, it will just hurt you badly); fill in the forms, make all stuff go to C:\APACHE, give it port 80 and let the service run for all users.
  5. the Apache service should have been created (if not, do “http.exe -k install” from admin cmd)
  6. delete Apache control tool from Startup (inside start menu) – to get rid of the “Error” nag box.
  7. do the msconfig trick, but enable uac this time. Reboot.

In case I haven’t mentioned Vista started to show popups for everything admin related, no matter which user I use (yes, I do have admin rights enabled). MS will have to try harder to make people believe this is what they need…

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Front-end development woes

Friday, May 25th, 2007

After watching some episodes of Lost and waiting eagerly for saturday when my fiance’e is getting home from a faraway place I still can’t get rid of the frustration I take home every weekday from my workplace, which is – simply put -utterly sad.

I have more than three dozens of CVs and out of one or two none of those people ever read Ajaxian, know nothing about sitebuilding trends and hell, most of them doesn’t even know about things like RIA, the semantic web, or basic stuff like tableless design and browser engine differences… pretty daunting I guess, but the only thing that sucks even more is that my company lets (I’m very euphemistic here) some of its best people leave and just tries to squeeze more and more out of the rest.

Basically I’m amused by the shere blindness found around here; when you remove one tiny piece from a thousand piece picture puzzle, noone really cares; when you remove a dozen the picture is still easy to get, but when there are more holes than details people should start looking for the pieces or do a clean start again.

But I guess this is what happening to this whole country; it is falling apart piece by piece, forgetting the glorious days of the change of regimes in ’89; now, when there’s nothing more to steal, and there’s no pieces left, the only thing that remains is the cold rule of capitalism, where the poor only gets poorer, the rich gets richer and the rest is struggling not to drown.

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