Monday 9th August 2010
07:00am – 08:00am: I open the front door to throw some rubbish into the bin, took one step outside and… what is that smell. I look down and see the likings of feline excrement all over my front porch. And I know exactly which cat it is that has done it, a repeat offender. It may be expending all of its 9 lives very shortly. An hour of scrubbing helped, but the smell is still there and my poor poor shoes took most of the punishment.

12:30pm – 03:00pm: Server cluster was clusterfscked. So much so that none of the resources were accessible, and there was a user acceptance test the next day. I was too busy to deal with it myself so handed it over to my colleague, he now hates clustering. Welcome to my world.

9:00pm – 11.00pm: Hard day at the office, but time to flex my aggression and my sword on my weekly night of fencing. Everything was going well, but during one fight I tried to parry an attack with my coquille (sword guard), which coincidentally pushed my opponent’s sword downward. I was too slow and I essentially helped him stab my own leg. “Are you OK?”…”Oh YES I’m perfectly fine, let’s continue!”. After I got back home, the adrenaline wore off and I felt crippled.

11:00pm – 02:00am: I get home late so I eat dinner late. I thought I would make some BBQ chicken wings for dinner, in the oven it goes. I loaded up StarCraft 2 and proceeded to play, I had my headphones on and the door closed. 30 minutes later my other half charges in and says he can smell burning. Sure enough my entire kitchen is engulfed in smoke, then the smoke alarm went off waking up the entire neighbourhood. I didn’t have dinner that night and I also died in the StarCraft 2 mission since it wasn’t paused. Addtionally, I burnt my arm against the oven from trying to remove the charred wings too quickly.

Tuesday 10th August 2010
08:00am – 09:00am: I ran out of Mountain Dew, again. This, to me, is a very big deal. After fighting through hoards of traffic with people not knowing the existance of indicator lights, I wanted caffeine. I wanted it now. And why do people insist on driving huge cars without knowing how to drive a normal one. Their thought process: Yes I am a mother and I must have the largest car humanly possible, even though I know I have zero spacial awareness of other objects around me, and I have as much navigational sense as a crane fly. But I will still buy one, because I am that awesome. Got to love those “Children on Board” stickers when the driver of the vehicle with said sticker is the hazard. Some people should not be allowed to procreate and it’s a shame Mars can’t be colonised just yet.

10:00am – 11:00am: I choked on a croissant.

11:00am – 04:00pm: It’s amazing how many things can break within 5 hours. We had about 10 hardware defects and for some unknown reason, network cables were being removed at the back of servers. Why?! Who?! Cable elves?! Virtual entities were going missing as well, about 50% of my virtual infrastructure went poof overnight. But I open sesame’ed it back, thank Crunchy. But it wasn’t Friday, sadness.

05:00pm – 05:30pm: After viewing a house, I start to drive away and I hear a grinding noise but it went away after a few minutes. Very ominous; like the sound of the sword falling on the head of Anne Boleyn, it signalled the doom that was to befall me.

Wednesday 11th August 2010
07:00 – 08:00am: I woke up, the worst thing I could have possibly done. This is marked down as an hour because I snooze my alarm clock about 7 times.

08:00 – 08:30am: I try to start the car, and nothing. Foot on brake pedal – check, gears in neutral – check, seatbelt on – check. Turn the key and… still nothing. You definitely need your foot on the brake when starting my car and I was doing that so hmm. Flick through my purse, find the RAC roadside assistance membership card, dial number. “Yes madam, a recovery vehicle will be with you in 2 hours because of traffic in your area”. Fantastic. But at least my car was on my driveway and not stranded in some ditch.

08:30 – 09:30am: Waiting, I hate waiting. I emailed the guys at work and left voicemail messages to tell them of my car problem. After awhile, I decided to watch the third episode of Sherlock. My viewing was disrupted by phone calls and updates about when the RAC will arrive at my house. But lo and behold he turns up. Hooray! Or maybe not hooray.

09:30am – 10:30am: Mr. RAC conclude after extensive taking apart of my car and trying to push-start a semi-automatic with an SMG gearbox (which I did say probably won’t work), that my car is officially fubared. The starter motor is shot to pieces and the grinding from the night before was an indication of its demise. He flicks through his book and says my car cannot be towed. He calls in a truck so my car can be loaded and taken to the nearest garage for repairs. ETA whenever they can arrive, which is most likely another 2 hours. 2 hours of my life I can never reclaim back. Why me Lord, WHY. OK so maybe I took a pad of Post-It notes one time at work and I forgot my mother’s birthday a couple of times. But Jesus Christ give me a break? Please?

10:30am – 01:00pm: More waiting. The truck arrives, quite a nice chap but he had a very bad toothache; his filling had pierced through his tooth and touched sensitive nerves in his mouth. He wasn’t having a good day either. The car is loaded and then taken to the garage for repairs, and he was also kind enough to give me a lift into work. I never did finish that episode of Sherlock, I had placed the BBC iPlayer on pause. I walk into the office, where I am now faced with mocking comments about cars and towing for the next 4 hours. I love work so much.

05:30pm – 06:00pm: The other half picks me up from work so I can get my car and oh look, the height of traffic. Again. That’s why I leave work at 4pm but the repairs on the car took longer than expected, which was also reflected on the bill afterwards. I may be living on instant ramen and Pocky for the next few months.

08:00pm – 08:30pm: After a quick nap I head out to meet with my badminton partner for our usual Wednesday match. I drove around the car park 3 times to find a space and finally I found one, of course after having to wait 15/20 minutes for someone to reverse their car out of the space. Hello eternity. My badminton partner booked the court online the week before but according to the sports centre, no court reservation was found. Double checking then triple checking, still nothing. I really shouldn’t have woken up today.

08:30pm – 09:30pm: We decide to not take a later timeslot and go to Tesco for our food shopping. As I walked to the checkout, I just knew that something bad was going to happen. I mean there was a whole 4 hours or so left of the day. Plenty of time to destroy my life some more. Not only did the barcode scanner broke on the till, but also I disputed the final bill since the discounts did not appear. The scanner was not my fault by the way, the Tesco lady tried to put the discounts through for me manually and try as she might, the computer says no. Meanwhile, a Polish guy with limited English vocabulary tried to buy a bottle of Smirnoff vodka. The till next to me was locked; he then proceeded to place a £10 note on the table and started walking out with the bottle which was security tagged. My lady helper ran after him trying to explain, he finally stopped just short of the alarm sensors. There I am, stood at the broken till, with a bag full of shopping I can’t touch because I can’t pay for it. Half an hour later, I walk away with the goods. I didn’t even scan in my Tesco Clubcard, I wanted to leave while I still had the chance.

I eventually finished watching Sherlock, great episode. I hope that by the time you read this, I am having a better 24 hours.

“Apparently, the game’s menu screens aren’t framerate-limited. This means that when there’s nothing else going on, your graphics hardware renders the bejeezus out of those screens…”

As the post says, you need to add the following lines to your variables.txt file in Documents\StarCraft II\variables.txt:

• frameratecapglue=30
• frameratecap=60

It will cap your framerate to around 60fps. To show you just how bad this issue is, I used FRAPS to show the framerate before and after the file edit:

Starcraft II - Mission Archives menu at 340 frames per second (Before)

Starcraft II - Mission Archives menu at 63 frames per second (After)

I don’t know whether this is operating system specific, but I do know that other menus such as Lab Upgrades causes the same issues. I had a friend FRAPS his game and he was experiencing the same crazy numbers as I was.

I run the game using the Ultra graphics setting across the board at 1920 x 1200 resolution; you may get different framerates for your system but no doubt the problem will occur regardless. Whether it affects Macs or not remains to be seen. My gaming system is as follows for your reference:

• Intel Core2 Extreme 9650 quad core CPU
• 2 x NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards, SLi capable
• 4GB DDR2 RAM
• 1TB hard disk space
• Windows 7 OS

Blizzard has just released a new StarCraft II patch, version 1.0.1. Unfortunately it does not mention any fixes for graphical issues. Hopefully they will pick up on this soon.

Enjoy and have a good weekend!

There are several solutions I have found, but this one is best as you don’t need to SSH into your web server… and you may not have access anyway if your blog is hosted by a third party. WordPress sometimes has excessive delays for carrying out schedules; by default you only have 0.01 seconds to initiate the cron job for scheduling. Cron is a time scheduler for Unix/Linux based systems, and it is handy for automating tasks. In this case, our automated task is to post blog entries at a specific date and time without manual intervention.

So to fix this issue, use FTP to access your WordPress install and edit cron.php in the wp-includes folder.

• Find this line entry in cron.php: wp_remote_post ($cron_url, Array (‘ timeout’ => 0.01, ‘ blocking’ => false));

• Change the timeout to 20 seconds: wp_remote_post ($cron_url, Array (‘ timeout’ => 20, ‘ blocking’ => false));

Save the file and upload it back onto your webspace.

But after four days of not sleeping I cracked it. I’m not one for giving up, especially when it comes to technical quandaries of this nature. In fact, I love challenges like these and I’m about to share with you so you can avoid the pain. Lets go back in time for a bit…

The Problem

After installing Windows 7, I bought a LG Blu-ray SATA drive from PC World; not the best place to buy hardware but they had a fairly decent deal on them. So you just buy one, install it in the Shuttle, pop in a Blu-ray disc and away you go right? Wrong. So very wrong. The Shuttle comes with an Intel GMA3100 chipset for the onboard graphics card. The picture quality produced via HDMI is quite good for an onboard, but when it comes to playing Blu-ray, it is one of the most hated chipsets known to man. I have tried both Cyberlink PowerDVD and Corel WinDVD 2010 but they failed to play a Blu-ray disc. You will be greeted with something like this:

Infinite patching for both programs produced the same result. Is it a hardware problem? Well lets go through the motions:

• HDCP compliant graphics card – Check.
• HDCP compliant monitor – Check.
• HDMI connection working correctly – Check.
• Up to date graphics card drivers – Check.

So what on earth is going on?

The Solution

It’s a software problem, as in the main producers of DVD/Blu-ray playback software have limited support for the Intel GMA graphics chipset. Maybe there is a way to get the above programs to work on my system, but I gave up. After trawling through the internet, I stumbled upon one random post on a forum. It mentioned using Total Media Theatre with the Japanese version of the files required for the video renderer. What?! Yes, without the renderers for Total Media Theatre pulled from the Japanese version of the software… it will not work. Don’t ask me how or why or what kind of crazy software development cycle is going on here, but that’s how it is.

So you need:

• Total Media Theatre version 3 installed
• VMR renderer files from the Japanese trial version (linked here for your convenience)
• Save the renderer files to: C:\Program Files\ArcSoft\TotalMedia Theatre 3\Codec

And that’s it! As if by magic, you can fully enjoy your Shuttle as it was meant to be.

My Shuttle and Inglourious Basterds. White Totoro approves.

I haven’t played Magic for that long but I wanted to try out the new core set to see how it fairs. The best way to get started is to buy the Fat Pack; you get the following to start your collection:

• 40-card basic land pack
• Eight 15-card booster packs from the M11 core set
• Player’s guide with visual encyclopedia
• Special edition Spindown life counter
• Excerpt from Planeswalker Novel
• Nice box to keep it all in

Now the one thing I am disappointed about in this Fat Pack, is the lack of plastic dividers for your cards. Older Fat Packs used to have them, but it seems they are skimping on what you get these days. However, you do get 8 booster packs which is pretty good. All I need now is several hours to plan and create my deck of destruction!

So what’s been going on in the world of game and tech etc. during this time? What I should have done was do a post for each of these but here is a very condensed version! In no particular order…

Starcraft 2 – Beta
I did a post about this on the Girlygeekdom blog, but to summarise… it is smokingly hot and I’m not talking about the summer heartwave we are getting in the UK. It is due to be released on 23rd July. I’ll try not to disappear when this arrives, and also promise to step outside once in awhile.

Apple iPad
Great for some, mediocre for others. Your lifestyle dictates whether this is a good match for you or not. Personally speaking, there isn’t much room for this slab in my life. I need a full OS, I need power, I need an open platform and I need to run existing applications I currently have. Also regardless of what Steve Jobs said in his keynote speech, this for me is not going to replace a netbook. And it’s too damn heavy.

E3
I personally prefer the Tokyo Game Show than E3, but this year I think the event has been very interesting. Microsoft announces Kinetic, Sony with their 3Dness, and Nintendo with their new 3DS portable console. Out of the three industry heavyweights, Nintendo outshines the rest. I’m buying the 3DS without a doubt; Kingdom Hearts, Zelda, Kirby, Final Fantasy, Kid Icarus the list goes on. And NO 3D GLASSES REQUIRED!

Sci-Fi London
A great event every year, I couldn’t go to the entire event because of fencing commitments. However, I did go to the Anime All-Nighter; 10 hours of anime movies back to back starting at midnight (with the odd RedBull/toilet break inbetween). I absolutely loved it, it’s like a pub lock-in but in a cinema. The best anime was Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Bladeworks. I cannot tell you the sheer awesomeness of seeing this on the big screen; if you love Rin, Lancer et al then you must watch this. Unfortunately for some, it was the last anime shown that morning and the majority of the audience were fast asleep. I made sure I was completely awake for it.

iPhone 4
To grip or not to grip, that is the question. Either way, I am getting the HTC Desire running Android in a few weeks. At least people who are experiencing death grip woes get a free bumper case, offer valid until 30th September.

World Cup 2010
The tech angle for this is that I will never, ever, forgive ITV for their “transmission error”: showing a Hyundai ad JUST AS GERRARD SCORES THE FIRST GOAL FOR ENGLAND. Insert rage sentence here.

IT Crowd – Series 4
Our beloved geek series is back on Channel 4. Join Moss, Roy and Jen as they embark on more ridiculous IT shenanigans with utmost hilarity. Street Countdown!

My birthday
I got insanely drunk and played LAN games; apparently I can headshot quite well while inebriated. Everything else is a blur; I think we spent an hour trying to blow up the airbed at 4am. I highly recommend Danzka vodka with Mountain Dew.

Final Fantasy XIII
I completed it! You either love it or hate it, I personally liked it a lot. The battle system is to die for, yes the game is mostly on rails but the game does get going after awhile. There are some insanely difficuly bosses to beat, namely Proud Clad and Gigantuar if you find him on Gran Pulse. I’m just happy that I saw the ending after clocking in around 70 hours of gameplay. Also, I hate Barthandelus.

And finally…

Inception
I saw this movie when it was released on Friday. I have sat here for awhile thinking of how to review it and in summary, I just can’t. It’s such an amazing experience, that any words uttered on this page would not do it enough justice. Not to mention it’s rather difficult to describe, my mind was blown. If you think Memento was a mind masher, try this on for size… only Nolan can produce something like this on the big screen and succeed. A plot peppered full of twists and turns, stunts galore, and a great protagonist supported by a wonderful cast; these are the makings of a movie that will pull you in. I also love the music score by Hans Zimmer, it fits in with the film sequences perfectly.

I and many others looked on in horror as events unfolded during the live broadcast in the House of Commons. To paraphrase, creativity is more important than freedom, was one of the alarming arguments proposed to promote the bill.

Here is the response in full:

Thank you for your recent correspondence concerning the Digital
Economy Bill. I share your concern about the way this piece of
legislation has been handled by the Government. Since the Dissolution
of Parliament, there are no longer any MPs, but I can continue with
casework/correspondence.

The Bill contained important provisions regarding the regulatory
environment for the digital and creative industries. It is completely
unacceptable that the Government failed to allocate the sufficient
time in the House of Commons for proper legislative scrutiny. It is
wrong to push through these issues and because of this I did not
support the Bill and I abstained from the vote.

The reason that I did not vote against the Bill is that a number of
the measures within it have great merit – particularly tackling online
copyright infringement. This is an extremely serious issue that costs
the creative industries hundreds of millions of pounds each year. I
want to make sure that Britain has the most favourable intellectual
property framework in the world for innovators, digital content
creators and high tech businesses.

Also, the measures in the Bill designed to tackle illegal peer to peer
file sharing set up a proportionate regime that would, only following
public consultation, repeated warnings and due process, lead to people
having their internet connection temporarily suspended. It will not,
as many have suggested, lead to people being disconnected without an
appeal. Even if people are disconnected they will be able to sign up
to another ISP immediately without penalty.

However, the Government should not push through such significant
issues without proper debate – the handling of this Bill means that
the debate on copyright is not over and my Party will seek to revisit
options for a balanced solution as part of a broader update of
copyright following the General Election.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to contact me.

With best wishes,
Maria Miller, Parliamentary Candidate

I don’t like how you can’t change your characters. In fact the freedom of team customisation that is akin to say FF 7 or 8 is almost completely removed. Why Squeenix why? I tell you why, because they replaced this with something called the Paradigm Shift. You will soon realise just how important this function is, and how you cannot progress through the game without it. One time, during a 2 minute battle I must have switched Paradigms about 8 times; each Paradigm in the deck comprises of different tactical stances and roles for each team member. Your team works cohesively and dynamically depending on the situation. I like it, in fact after awhile I started to like it a lot. But walking into the next battle with full health is a bit weird, and I think takes away some of the real mechanics from the game. The left shoulder becomes a bit overused though. My index finger is testament to that.

The graphics are gorgeous, it’s so lush and lovely I just want to jump right in there. But everything seems to be on rails, rather like the old fashioned gun-toting Time Crisis. It does take the fun out of exploring, I am hoping that later on it will open up a bit more. I presume it will be, as you can catch a Chocobo to help you travel around. I encountered my first summon on Monday, or Eidolans. Shiva is a sister pair, which transforms into a rather awesome bike. It’s cooler than Fenrir for God sake. The game really picks up at this point, as the earlier chapters are too easy and slightly boring. Mainly they are used for tutorial purposes, which in a way is good. It would be too overwhelming to introduce so many new features in one go, so that was probably a good idea.

This game is gargantuan no doubt about it, I will write something more substantial once I complete it. Whenever that may be!

Anyway, this year is the year of the Tiger, for people born on the following:

• 1902
• 1914
• 1926
• 1938
• 1950
• 1962
• 1974
• 1986
• 1998

According to the story, the Tiger came 3rd in the race. A small factoid… The number 3 is considered a lucky number in Chinese beliefs; 3 in Chinese also sounds like the word “life or alive”. However, the number 4 is considered unlucky as the same pronounciation for this also means “death”. Maybe 2010 is your lucky year! Don’t forget to give someone you love a Red Envelope of money.

May 2010 bring you good fortune and prosperity!

*RAWR*