News from Great Castle Wilson

Author: adminmcq

  • Avatar

    Ok, so the story isn’t deep — seriously, the guy beside me in the theatre brought a four year old and a six year old and despite the disturbing parenting choice they both “got it” just fine.

    And even though the er… avatars didn’t quite make it out the other side of the uncanny valley, they were close, oh so very close. I can honestly say that there were many scenes where it never even occurred to me to think about how long it would have taken to render.

    You owe it to yourself to go see this in 3D. Even if it doesn’t seem like your kind of movie, the sheer artfulness of it is enough. Afterwards, leave a comment. There are things worth discussing.

    Update: There are likely to be spoilers in the comment stream, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, don’t click through.

  • Afghanada

    I continue to be thankful that we are lucky enough, as Canadians, to have access to the best-of-breed, thought provoking, genuinely compelling content from CBC Radio One. I have talked about their shows both positively (e.g. Ideas) and negatively (e.g. Wiretap) before, and now I’d like to draw another excellent program to your attention: Afghanada.

    Afghanada is a radio drama series about the day-to-day life of a small group of Canadian soldiers stationed in Kandahar Province. The writing is strong, with a cast of characters that truly feel like living, breathing individuals put in frequently hellish situations. Having never been a soldier, I cannot say whether the portrayal of these people’s lives is accurate, but I can say that the power of this show has made me feel more compassion for the individuals in our armed forces than all of the traditional news reporting put together.

    I am particularly pleased that you can now get all three seasons worth of Episodes of Afghanada via iTunes. Season one is an awesome deal, at $12 for 22(!) half hour episodes.

    I highly recommend this series to anyone who enjoys well acted, radio programming.

    (and say “Hi” to Coach for me)

  • Spammer creativity

    It’s fascinating.

    I was reviewing the comment spam for this blog, or rather I was reviewing the ones that didn’t get automatically caught — there’s always a couple. This time, there was one reply that genuinely looked like it could have been legitimate. The content was apropos of the original post, if not directly focused on it; it was clearly not machine generated (i.e. no “dissociated press” style errors); and the tone was heartfelt.

    The only things that seemed out of whack were:

    1. The text was written in a way that it could apply to a fairly wide range of original posts.
    2. There was a website link attached to it that seemed a bit dubious.

    I really couldn’t definitively cast it as spam. But, for those that don’t know, I loath spammers. To give you some idea of how much, on one of my other sites you can find this:

    I formally curse all spammers as follows:

    Your children will die of a disease that would have been curable, except that you put such a drain on the internet that the communication needed to discover the cure did not happen.

    You get the idea.

    In any case, this time the particular comment in question didn’t make it. So, if you’re out there thinking that you legitimately replied to this site, and you don’t see your response, and you’d like to have a discussion about it, feel free to send me a note.

  • Capsule review: Torchlight

    A reasonably good timewaster, for a reasonable price ($20 US), but not much more than that.

    Torchlight adds a couple of minor additions to the Diablo formula but they don’t enhance the gameplay significantly. Graphics are definitely better than Diablo II, but are still stuck with the same isomorphic perspective. Finished in about 18 hours and, with no chance for multi-player, unlikely to have much replay value.

    Summary: Don’t buy this, unless you need a Diablo fix.
    Rating: 7/10, but it gets an extra point for being a budget title.

  • Vista makes me tired.

    Capsule summary: Vista sucks dead warthogs. The remainder of this post is just me writing for catharsis. Feel free to ignore.

    It all started at around 19h00 last night. While playing with the new MacMini, I decided to boot up my PC in preparation for a night of mayhem with the guild, playing Warhammer Online.

    For some reason, Vista asked me for a keyboard driver, which was odd because…

    1. It was a bog standard, MS, wired keyboard
    2. I had changed no hardware on the system (including the keyboard) in weeks

    Even stranger was that, after allowing it to go look for a driver on MS Update, it couldn’t find one. I mean, you’d think they would have the drivers for their own keyboards, if they were going to have anything.

    “Oh well”, I think, “I’ll just go get the driver from the Microsoft download site”. But ten minutes, a few megabytes, and a reboot later, I’m staring at the same message. WTF? And now things were worse: Previously, I had been able to use the keyboard (even though it claimed to have no driver) in a generic way (i.e. standard keys worked, special keys didn’t), but now I couldn’t type on it at all. Once again, I tried all the standard hardware debugging steps, but no luck.

    Now you’ll remember that this was all supposed to be in preparation for a night of Warhammer gaming, so the fact that it was now close to 20h00 and I still had no keyboard meant that I was starting to get stressed. Which probably explains why my next leap of er… intellect was that maybe it was actually the keyboard hardware itself that was failing. (Although I suppose that wasn’t a totally unreasonable assumption, since it was several years old, had had pepsi poured on it at least twice, and was missing a key or two).

    Those of you who know me will be surprised to find out that I had no spare keyboards lying around. Which meant that I had to rush off to the local Staples to pick up a new one. The Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop 7000 was on sale, and that’s what I ended up with.

    Brought it home, installed the drivers — made only somewhat painful by not being able to use the keyboard — , plugged in all the bits, and… (you guessed it) no keyboard. This time, it was complaining that it couldn’t find a driver for the wireless dongle (neither from the just installed CD nor Windows Update). Very weird.

    Going back to the MS download site (on my Mac, because the lack of a keyboard was starting to get to me) I found out that there were newer Intellitype drivers. I downloaded them, but then wasn’t able to connect to the Mac’s file share from the PC. That is, in Vista I could still type in the password using the Character Map applet and lots of clicking, but it wouldn’t connect anyway. Hm…

    [It’s now 21h00, and I’m officially missing guild night. Time to get creative!]

    Copy the Intellitype drivers onto a USB key, stick the key in the Vista machine and… it can’t find a driver for the USB key. WTF++?

    So finally I start to clue in: It’s not the keyboard at fault, it’s that Vista can no longer find drivers for anything. Going back to the worlds greatest help desk (i.e. the web), I find that the query “Vista stops being able to find drivers” has many hits. Sifting through the chaff leads to several patterns for common ways to attempt to fix it, which I tried without success. In the end, a depressing number of people said “The only way I could fix it was to reinstall.”, so I joined the club and at 22h15 started the looooong task of reinstalling Vista.

    Somewhere around 1h00 I had gotten far enough that most stuff (including the keyboard) was working again, which explains why Vista makes me tired. In any case, I’m now down to a single yellow “?” in the device list, for an “unknown device” with no driver. If I can figure out what it is, I should be done. I guess that’s tonight’s job.

  • GCW moves to a new box

    If you’re reading this, then NfGCW has successfully returned to the web after being moved (along with all the other sites) from my trusty ol’ G5 PowerMac to a brand new MacMini. Overall, the Mini is awesome; with the exception of 3D gaming (which I never do on my server box) it’s faster than the G5 at everything I’ve thrown at it. I suspect that’s being helped by the increased RAM in the Mini — 4Gig, up from 1.5 in the G5.

    I’m also running Snow Leopard now, which meant that once again I had to go through the dance of getting the AMP (Apache/MySQL/PHP) configured properly. Highlights for 10.6 include:

    • I installed the latest x86_64 version of MySQL. For my traffic level, I doubt that will make a significant performance difference, but you never know.
    • The PHP that comes with SL is actually current and includes the PDO drivers for MySQL. That’s great because it’s one less thing to install/configure versus previous upgrades, but there is still some work to do:
      • edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to uncomment the LoadModule for php5_module
      • copy the /etc/php.ini.default file to /etc/php.ini, then edit php.ini and modify (at least) the lines that contain “default_socket” to point at /tmp/mysql.sock, and lines that contain “default_port” to 3306.
    • At this point, php and mysql both worked (as evinced by the fact that phpmyadmin would run, and tell me useful stuff), but the blogs were still failing. It turns out that everyone (i.e. php and mysql), were now finally agreeing that I needed to use the “new” password format, so with a touch of…

      SET PASSWORD FOR 'wpuser'@'%' =

      PASSWORD('not really my password');


      …we were good to go.

    Of course, I still have all the other sites to work through. Sheep’s Ahoy is fine. Both the wiki(s) and the gallery seem to be working, but the genealogy site is completely busted. Unfortunately, that’s going to take more effort to get going again, since it has several dependencies on php4. I may have to rethink that one; one possibility is just to suck the content out of it, and then switch to a Mac based genealogy program that can publish to the web. The good news is that the G5 box is still around, so that can wait until I have some free time.

    Anyway, let me know if you see anything weird happening.

  • Champions Online… or not.

    Like a whole bunch of other people, I tried to get into the Champions Online open beta tonight. After carefully pre-loading the files from FilePlanet at one point last week, I waited patiently for them to unlock today. Then started the launcher, and…

    …was immediately told I needed to download a 3Gig patch. Apparently, the pre-load had put some of the files in the wrong place, and the launcher assumed it needed to download them all again.

    Not an auspicious start.

    It seems like they’ve got a new version of the launcher up that moves the files locally, but now that one seems to be constantly hanging while getting the content for the things that do need to be patched.

    Anyway, it’s a beta, so you get what you pay for, but let’s hope they do better on launch day, or we’re going to have another Anarchy Online on our hands. Ugh.

  • And that, would be that.

    Grisli makes it to the level cap in Warhammer Online…

  • Fly Fusion Pentop

    So there I was, wandering through the local Zeller’s at Bayshore, when I saw a rack of those Fly Fusion Pentop computers that came out a while back. Given that I hadn’t actually heard anything about them for quite a while, I had assumed they had simply gone bankrupt, and the fact that the pens had stickers that said $20 on them, did nothing to convince me otherwise.

    But I figured that for $20, it might be an interesting toy, so I grabbed one, along with a couple of pads of paper and a new memory card, for a total (according to the sticker prices) of about $40. Of course, I had to by the extra stuff too, because it wasn’t clear that I’d be able to get it later (if the company was gone).

    Anyway, I took it all to the cash, and low and behold, it was being offered at a further 50% discount, so I ended up walking away with the whole load for $20. Cool.

    Now, unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse.

    I brought it all home, took out the install CD and stuck it in my Mac… Nope, no mac version of the software… Ugh.

    “Ok”, I think, “I’ve got my Vista gaming PC, I’ll try it in there.”… Stick the CD in, try to install, CD decides it needs to get a newer version off the net… Download fails. But I’m a stubborn cuss, so I try it again… Nope, download fails again. Ok, one more time… Yes! Everything downloads and installs correctly.

    Starting the software showed it to be one of those crappy, fixed size UIs built with Flash or VisualBasic or whatever, with no apparent way to proceed. Wait! It says it will only recognize the pen if it’s plugged in and turned on. Alrighty! Plug the pen into a USB port, turn it on and…

    Get the driver search dialog. Nope, no Vista drivers available from Windows Download. Offers to look on the CD… Nope, no drivers on CD. (Which clown thought it meant it made sense to ship a Windows device without drivers. Ugh.)

    Check their support site, which is singularly unhelpful…

    Ok, now I’m getting frustrated. Then it comes to me: I’ve got a netbook that runs XP, maybe it will work with XP. Hook up an external USB CD drive to the netbook, stick the CD in, download the new version of the software (again), start it up and… Nope, the bloody fixed size UI is too big for the netbook screen!

    God, talk about ways to suck the enthusiasm right out of ya.

    One. more. try… Hook the external monitor out from the netbook to another display, and sure enough, I can finally run the software. Now, just 15 more minutes of randomly filling in stuff and connecting to a website, and creating both an admin and a user account(!), and leaving personal data that I really should not have to, and…

    I get a page that shows I haven’t done anything with the pen yet.

    Now, all I have to do is charge it up, and I can actually try it.

    *sigh*.

    (I don’t remember this thing at all. I wonder where it went. :-P)

  • New post on my *other* blog.

    In my guise of “Eclipse SDK lead”, I just posted a new entry on my (too seldom updated) Eclipse blog. For those that are interested, check out:

    Eclipse has a future.

    *sigh*. It seems the link to the blog from eclipse.org stopped working at some point. I *think* it just passed through to my blog on wordpress.com, so updated the link to point there.