BenV's notes

This morning my mailbox opened up with an email inviting me to the Diablo 3 Beta. After checking the headers
to make sure it wasn’t another battlenet phishing scam I noticed that the Received headers really came from blizzard.com, and they even signed the mail with a domainkey. Also they didn’t include some link but simply told me to go to battle net and get the goods there.

Surprisingly they state:

We also invite you to share your Diablo III beta experience with the world! All participants can take screen shots, capture video, and/or publicly disclose information about their beta test experience.

(instead of the usual non-disclosure agreement). So thanks Blizzard and a friend who works there who is no doubt responsible for getting me this invite in the first place (continue reading…)

Obviously dealing with windows isn’t my favorite, but it comes along as part of the job.

Today my boss wanted to view some car site in internet exploder, because “Some sites don’t show properly in Firefox, Internet Explorer does a better job sometimes”. So I was like “You mean garbage sites that still write IE specific html… oh never mind, show it ”

First he showed his problem in Firefox. As far as I’m concerned it looked like a failing search engine on the site and nothing html related, but whatever. (continue reading…)

A short summary of my Fable 3 experience so far.

First we install it, and immediately we notice the Windows Game Live Garbage Cancer. So far so bad.
However, apart from the login bugging me every time I start the game it works fine.

The game itself looks fine, better than the previous Fable I played at least. The story is pretty standard, you’re a prince and your evil brother – the king – is ruining everything.
You’re the hero who has to murder him. Or something.
So the first thing you do is shake everyone’s hand for 5 minutes, apparently people love you when you shake their hands long enough.
Then you go through the usual “Get kicked out of the castle and start your quest” ritual. Speaking of rituals, did I mention I hate unskippable cutscenes?
Especially when starting the game, who the fuck cares that Microsoft made the game…
Anyhow, after running around a bit and getting your first skills you find yourself in the familiar guild room, a safe place to save your game and switch clothes etc.
Reminded me of Baldur’s Gate’s pocket plane.

Next you go to villages to gather allies. Which means helping them out first. Which means shaking hands, and smashing monsters.
Oh yeah, “prove you’re a hero” so they can teach you how to use your sword and gun in addition to the magic you started off with.
Great great. In the second village your run into you can do minigames like Guitar Hero, only more retarded because there are only two buttons involved.
If that wasn’t easy enough already, they also have Pie Making Hero. Same game with only 3 notes per song. So before you know it you have enough money
to buy several houses. So much for that.

Other villagers give you quests after whistling to them for an hour (did I mention it gets really old, really fast?), and strangely they all need you to get the same hidden
package in the other village, or talk to the same retard in that other village to pass a message.
I’d like to get a list of my active quests, but that isn’t unlocked at this part of the game yet.
So I decided to go on with the story to unlock that part, but just after traveling back to the village my windows decided to BSOD. Probably related to that new NVIDIA driver update from yesterday.
Anyhow, I reboot windows, restart Fable 3, get through the sickening unskippable intro garbage, log into LIVE.
[Windows LIVE] Saaay, your savegame …. isn’t.
[BenV] What?
[LIVE] Your save is corrupt, so we’ll just start the game from scratch again. Would you like a Prince or a Princess?
[BenV] !(@3(@^$*&%^*(@$#(@*$%3*REBOOT*

So much for Fable 3 and windows.

UPDATE:
Just tried to get the game working in wine. With some hassle I got through the installation.
However, the game won’t start becaseu FS3Secu.exe crashes. Garbage DRM as always.
Couldn’t find a crack that would bypass this exe though, so no luck for Wine at the moment.

Last week I upgraded our fileserver at work from Debian Lenny to Debian Squeeze.
Obviously a ton of stuff got ‘new’ (read: less ancient) versions, including Apache.
Apart from a reboot or two for new kernels and some config fixes everything went pretty smooth.

This week lotjuh ran into the problem that she couldn’t push to the mercurial repository from windows.
Strange, because everything worked fine from linux. Tested from both the windows 2008 server we have here and another windows 7 machine at home, the both broke with the same cryptic message:

Huh. That’s weird.
Obviously google doesn’t help with this, you get some garbage results on how mercurial didn’t do jack with https certificates before version 1.7 and their struggle to implement it.

After some digging I found this in the apache logs:

Feh. Somewhere old SSL libraries are being used! Windows… .always the same.

Solution:
In your apache ssl configuration (mods-enabeld/ssl.conf on Debian), add this:

Note that this obviously isn’t a great solution, but it’s the only way to get it to work on windows at the moment.

Windows and Ninite

So after the Adobe Cancer experience yesterday I still had to install a bunch of other things for the helpless windows user.
After I was done with most of that (of course, the good stuff always comes too late) I ran into this tool: Ninite.
They call it “The easiest way to get apps”. Well, from the screenshots it certainly looks that way. No cruft like toolbars and updaters and junk installed, just the application. (continue reading…)