News from Great Castle Wilson

  • 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.

  • PC, Vista, Music

    I was trying to do some music, using Reason on my dual G5 Mac, and for reasons (sic) that aren’t clear to me, started with two tracks of arpeggiated Combinator patches. Believe it or not, just those two tracks was enough to give me the dreaded “Your computer is too slow” message. Ugh.

    Normally, when this happens, I go through the rigamarole of rendering one of the tracks to audio (then slice and reload), or simplifying the sounds I’m using or some other hack to reduce the CPU load, but just for grins this time, I decided I try installing Reason on my PC instead. Time to figure out just exactly how much faster the C2Q is than the G5s!

    So, I installed Reason, the driver and automapper for my Novation keyboard, and the absolutely required to do anything useful musically on a PC ASIO4ALL — link removed, since it now goes to a spam site — universal ASIO driver. [Ah yes, I remember the “joys” of doing music on a PC.] And finally, I was ready to go.

    I recreated the original two tracks I built on the Mac, and then started layering more; not, you understand, to build something musically pleasing, but rather just to see exactly how many layers I could end up with. The result was this:

    What you are looking at is 13 Combinators, for a total of somewhere around 135 (!) individual modules. The result is, of course, an absolute mess, but if you want proof click here:

    A mess

    Remember now, I started with the original two tracks that brought the G5 to it’s knees, and it has another 11 layers added on after that. Unfortunately, that really was the limit, I tried for one more layer, but hit the “your computer is too slow” boundary. But still…

    Wow!

    Hm… Now if that’s what you can do with a Core2Quad, I wonder what you can do with one of these. 🙂

  • Dennis rocks!

    Most people in Ottawa will know that last weekend was the Ottawa Race Weekend. This year, Dennis had an opportunity to get credit for participation as part of the school’s phys. ed. program, and he went for it:

    Dennis ran the “MDS Nordion 10K” race, with a very creditable time of 1:07:01.

    Of course, he did no training of any kind before the race, so Deb and I spent the whole hour, standing at the finish line, worrying about whether he was going to have a heart attack before he got there. In the end, we didn’t see him go past us — he was lost in the press — but we got a one word text message (“Done!”).

    He complained of being a little tired, and had one blister, but nothing that stopped him from wanting to go “hang out” with his friends soon afterwards. What a guy! 😉

    You rock, Dennis!

    For what it’s worth, here’s a picture I took of the press at the starting line. I don’t think Dennis is actually in this picture, but with the limitations of the iPhone’s camera, it’s hard to tell. Oh well, next time I’ll remember to bring the video camera. 🙂

    Btw, if you’re interested, here’s a link to Dennis’ official results:
    Ottawa Race Weekend: Results

    (That last link no longer works, of course.)

  • Update on Lucky’s health

    For those who hadn’t heard, Lucky developed some kind of severe G-I issue more than a week ago, which we were unable to get under control despite several visits to the vet and everything we tried at home. This eventually culminated in us admitting him at the Ottawa Veterinary Hospital on Friday night.

    The great news is that he seems to have stabilized, under the excellent monitoring and care of the OVH staff, and we brought him home again today. He’s still on several different meds, and is getting many small meals of a custom “Gastro” diet, but hopefully a few more days of TLC will have him all fixed up. We still don’t know whether there is some underlying issue that needs to be resolved, but for now we are not going to go for further tests, unless he gets worse.

    Update: We’re not out of the woods yet; he was off his food again this morning (Tues). 🙁

    Update 2: We’re now on a third antibiotic. As long as we can prevent his appetite from failing again, this one should do it. (Thurs.)