uppercase numbers

Managed to make it to the local GameStop to pick up a copy of Warcraft Online.  Except they didn’t carry PC games.  They didn’t annoy me about pre-ordering or trade-ins or any other hyphenated aggrevation so I picked up a couple DS games and a PS3 DVD remote.  Circuit City had it in stock though.

I got a good handful of levels in to it and so far I’m really liking the game.  I feel compelled to at least keep playing it which is always a good thing.  Usually when I don’t like a game it’s subconscious.  It feels like a cross between WoW and EQ2.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  They stole the best ideas and they added their own unique ideas.

Game play aside I just wish it didn’t have all the same characters as WoW.  Perhaps WoW originally ripped off Warhammer.  Maybe they all just ripped off Tolkien.  Anyway, to pump several hundred hours in to something I’d really like to see a different environment than what I’ve already done.  If I’m disappointed by anything it’s the lack of atmosphere.  I found the WoW music enthralling when I first started playing it.  I’m just not connecting with WAR the same way.

Technically the game is sound.  It’s not plagued with bugs like Conan.  The graphics are good though a bit less than I was expecting.  At least I get super framerates at the highest settings.  Gameplay seems fun and the public quests are really interesting.  It’s nice to get the feeling of ‘epic battle’ right from the start.  PvP is great too.   I think a little more strategy heavy than in WoW which is good.  The level balancing is nice as well but at low levels it doesn’t account for the serious lack of spells.  Still a lowbie can hold his own and contribute.

I’d like to see more options in the GUI.  I really want an option to increase brightness. If there’s a concept of cities in this game I haven’t seen it yet.  I’m really excited to see what’s next.  But I’m only level 6 after today.  The first 6 levels went a lot slower than WoW but they were a lot less grindy as well.

More WiFI drama.  I kept getting drops, though I had moved the Router out of the ‘ideal’ spot since I had to reset it and reprogram it.  I had been setting MAC addresses but didn’t realize that by blocking MACs it blocked INTERNAL MACs.  Thought just the wireless ones.  So there was no administrating it after that.  Anyway, it’s back in the ideal spot now after a week of drops.  I also picked up the DLink Dual Band USB adapter at Circuit City.  The price was decent.  No drops so far, knock on plastic.

Still playing with my Vista install although I haven’t put as much time yet in to it as I would have liked.  There are some definite issues with this install.  First off, I’m having major sound issues.  Any 3d spatial sound seems REAL flakey.  My moving the camera I can hear or stop hearing certain sounds.  It sounds very obviously wrong and is a huge drawback to games.  This affects Crysis.  It also affected Bioshock until I enabled it’s EAX compliance.  Alchemy does nothing.  You can see here that I’ve been trying DX10 games.  The other issue is that the machine is a memory hog.  Vista sucks down memory like there’s no tomorrow and it makes 4G look very reasonable.

The list of supported DX10 games is very small.  Smaller than I thought really.  I have been able to notice some DX10 features.  Yeah, it looks a little better.  But the reduced framerates sorta mean I have to run with a bit less resolution.  Especially in STALKER Clear Sky.  I have 7 DX10 capable games as it stands.

The biggest frustration I’m feeling right now though is not being able to download Warhammer Online which means I need to run to the store tomorrow to get it.  Sure, you can download it from Direct2Drive but I hate IGN as a company after the billing nightmare I had with them a couple years ago.  They will not get my business.  The other issue with D2D is the inability to install the game as often as you want.  Steam is great.  It provides patches and updates.  It also allows you to install the game as often as you need on machines if you blow away the OS as I just did.  D2D makes you call their customer service department to reactivate a game after 1-2 installs.  This is retarded.  It can take over 24h for the reset to even happen.

Or, I’ll buy it at the store tomorrow for the same price and I can install it as many times as I want.  I suspect I won’t even need the DVD to play the game.

Also FYI, today I installed brake pads for the first time.  Big step for me :D

I installed Vista 64 Ultimate today on my gaming rig.  I had caught a virus on it and also I had reinstalled XP 32 on that partition several times over.  I wanted to do things from scratch and I wanted to partition the OS and Apps separately.  I’ve never really used Vista or a 64 bit OS before so I figured why not give it a shot.

I really wanted to be unbiased about this.  I went in with no expectations either way.  My own little Mohave experiment.  I acquired a copy of Vista Ultimate SP1 and installed it and that was a breeze.  The install was very quick as was getting all the drivers set up.  I found good 64 bit drivers for everything I have on the machine.

Haven’t had one stability issue yet though I haven’t installed any games.  It is more memory intensive than XP, at least out of the box.  Performance feels a bit more clunky however I have all the bells and whistles enabled.  Firefox and IE7 are noticeably slower.  However, I have a quad core CPU and a powerful GPU so I suspect I am getting more benefit from those.

One downside is certainly the lack of direct hardware support for the Sound Blaster X-Fi card I have.  ALchemy should work okay I guess but Creative really ought to do something about this situation.  Software EAX uses more CPU but again I have a quad core otherwise going to waste.

I really wanted Vista to check out some DirectX 10 features.  Hopefully I will be able to see some on the 8800 Ultra.  There are many new games out with good DirectX 10 visuals that make Vista maybe worth having.  I’ll have to see what I have in my library.  Getting a new GPU to really experience all the new eye candy is tempting but really out of the cards at the moment.

It’s relatively painless to get Vista to stop nagging you about everything.  As usual with any Microsoft product these days, I seem to spend significant time unchecking every option checked and checking every option unchecked.  I seem to be the polar opposite of Microsoft’s ‘generic user’.  However, this really wasn’t any worse than what I go through with XP every time.

In fact, Vista is quite well organized.  I feel it’s a lot easier to navigate than XP.  There are a lot more options but it they’re in the right places usually.  I do feel it’s like a refined XP.

That said, I feel like it’s a refined XP.  I see absolutely no reason why this software should cost so much more money.  I have Vista Ultimate and I’m staring at it and wondering… well what… where… where is everything neat?  What is anything that makes this better than XP?  Granted I’m still looking around.  I fully intend to see what all of these new apps can do.

However, I can’t help but think that $100 is a better price point for Vista.  Hell, I can go buy Leopard for $129 right now.  It’d probably run on my gaming rig tho… it’d defeat the purpose of having a gaming rig.  Still, tit for tat, it blows Vista away for features out of the box.

I have to wonder if Microsoft hands are a bit tied since this anti-trust thing.  I suppose they can’t go throwing neat apps in to Vista left and right the same as Apple can.  I don’t know how that affects free MS downloads.

But Vista is the in thing for PC gaming, no hardware EAX aside.  And as for 64 bit well… does anyone care?  I guess if you want 4G of memory which… in hindsight might actually be a boon to a Vista install.

My jury is still out until I have several months on this thing.  If it games better and I don’t need a GPU, I don’t think I’ll be too unhappy with it.

One of my biggest HATE right now goes to the PC gaming industry.  The whole EA thing about a limited number of installs on Spore made me not even consider buying Spore.  That, and well, the game just isn’t all that much fun to play apparently.

That’s not why I’m here.  I’m here because I actually purchase PC games.  I have valid keys.  I have original media.  And it is absolutely mind bogglingly STUPID that I have to insert my CD every time I want to play a game.

My desk is littered with game discs and although I have a massive set of binders to hold them all together, discs still get wear and scratches and I have several games that no longer work.

There is Alcohol 120% which is good but overpriced (that is, it costs money).  But Daemon Tools, this thing rocks.  I can make ISOs of my legit game CDs, store them on my HD, and then mount them with Daemon Tools so I can play the game without needing a CD.

Yes yes, this has been around for a long time.  So has GameCopyWorld.  Which is good in a pinch but hacked excecutables always make me a bit nervous.

This works moderately well and should save my brutalized Oblivion disc from making the Bethesda game even less stable.

So I did this ISO copy rigamaroll for TimeShift.  I’ve owned the game for a while now but finally had some time this weekend to play it.  Daemon Tools worked fine and I had an ISO that worked.  Then I patched TimeShift.

AND THE FUCKING ISO DOESN’T WORK ANYMORE ARRRGGHHH!!!!

Are you kidding me??  Sierra actually had the BALLS to PATCH the COPY PROTECTION???

Sure enough, it comes with an updated version of SecuRom which blacklists Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% and I just can’t make it work.

See.  The reason this pisses me off so bad is that 5 seconds later I went to GameCopyWorld and downloaded a small patch that makes the game work.  In less than 30 minutes I could have downloaded the game from some BitTorrent site.  In no time at all I could have gotten this game illegitimately and would ultimately have a better experience with it. But since I’m a moron and I gave these cockholes my money, well, they get to make my life a little more miserable.

I could see the point of making your customers suffer if it really did a darn thing to deter people from stealing the game.  But it doesn’t work.  It just doesn’t.

So fuck you PC game distrubutors.  I’m sick of paying a lot of money for game media that is easily scratched and ruined and cd-keys that manage to get lost here and there.  I have a router that doesn’t crash on heavy BitTorrent traffic and I’m not afraid to use it.

Online authentication is the way to go.  The small percentage of people without internet connections are used to suffering and can probably do authentication once over the phone.  It’s not perfect, but you’re really only trying to stop the casual theifs.  Yanno, the highschool kids trading media.  Stoping piracy by crippling the media is a bad idea.  And don’t forget that optical media is DESIGNED to have a limited shelf life.  The music industry wants you to rebuy the same thing over and over again so they can make more money.  That’s why CDs are thinner and use softer polymers now than they used to.

End rant.

So I’ve spent many hours now reading FAQs, confiruring settings, aligning antennas, and reading SNR data.  I’ve been able to improve the network situation dramatically.  I repositioned the DGL-4500 for better signal downstairs (since it resides on the floor directly above my laptop and game systems).  I used NetStumbler to help tune everything.  I was able to gain about 10dB in signal strength which may alleviate my dropping issues with the Netgear WN511T card I use in the laptop.  I’m getting about 270Mbps now according to the connection meter and 85-90% signal strength.  Up from 75%.

The major speed droppage I had was a setting on the DGL-4500 I didn’t understand.  It was channel width and I had it set to 20MHz.  But on the Auto 20/40MHz mode it enabled true N speeds since I’m on a mixed network.

It doesn’t translate much in to real life though.  Again stability is more important to me than speed.  But running the Aida32 network benchmark I’m averaging about 5.1MBps.  That’s about 3.4 minutes to transfer a 1GB file.  That’s also a real world value of 41Mbps, far far shy of 300Mbps.  However, this is on an older laptop which requires 60-70% of the CPU just to maintain that transfer speed.  It is definitely the limiting factor here.

No drops so far anyway, and that’s the important thing.

Now on to security.  I really want to use WPA2.  And of course the Xbox360 doesn’t support it.  I have had MORE wireless problems with the Xbox360 than I can count.  It’s really unreliable.  A wired connection is out of the question since I rent.  Since I have to pay for Live! anyway and I don’t want any more of their automatic billing but you can’t easily cancel shit, I’m not going to cry about it.  The PS3 and Wii connect to WPA2 fine and I’ll actually use their network services since I don’t have to pay for it.

Yes, I’m still angry about having to call Microsoft to cancel an automatic billing account I didn’t want.  And having them give me the run around trying to convince me that yes, I really do want the service I used for 3 weeks while playing Gears of War.

The DGL-4500 *does* seem to support a weird hybrid mode of WPA using AES (not TKIP as usual).  The Xbox360 can do WPA/AES and I’m not entirely sure what makes this NOT WPA2.  Most routers don’t support this mode but I love the fact that the DGL-4500 does.  I’m not going to use it though just in case it makes me less secure than I want to be.

I have used the Netgear WN802T for a few years now.  I bought it along with a bunch of other Netgear equipment at a CompUSA going out of business sale at 70% off.  I sold most of it on Ebay but I kept the WN802T along with a couple 802.11N PCMCIA and PCI cards.  I also kept the Netgear FVS318v3 firewall/router and VPN endpoint which serves as the first line of defense for my network.  A device which seems to be completely bulletproof in terms of handling game hosting, bittorrent, and whatever else I throw at it without crashing, a rare gem indeed.

The WN802T is not so lucky.  I’m on my third since the previous two self destructed under the heavy load of handling my laptop internet surfing.  The WN802T is just an Access Point with no router capabilities of any sort.  My warranty is now expired and it’s only a matter of time before this one just gives up the ghost so I decided it was time for a new AP.

I did a lot of research on this one and landed on the D-Link DGL-4500 router.  Now I know half of you are saying “D-Link?  Eww!”.  But let’s let time tell on this one.  First off I have no brand loyalty when it comes consumer grade networking problems.  Most every device out there is shit with a few specific models which are the diamonds in the rough.  I have owned enough different brands of fail routers to focus on models.  Which left me reading about 40,000 reviews.  These are also difficult to trudge through since most of these reviews are written by idiots who never truly understand why they have networking issues.  There are plenty of people who will give a router 1-star because it doesn’t work for 500 feet or because they can’t figure it out or they see their neighbors access point or they have a 2.4Ghz cordless phone.  So you got to weed through the idiots and focus on reviews where these people know what they’re doing.

And the DGL-4500 gets good marks for wireless stability which is the only metric I care about.

But let’s focus on the negatives.  First off, D-Link isn’t a company known for quality.  Most of their crap is shit.  But a few of their recent routers get actually decent reviews.  A streak of good designs is always a good thing for me.  Secondly, they’re marketing this thing for gamers.  This is so they can charge much much more than this thing is worth for it.  It has a high resolution LCD display which is ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS.  I can’t imagine a need to ever have it on something that has a web interface.

It has three external and removable antennas which is nice.  It has a 4-port gigabit switch which is also nice.  The router functionality which is supposed to give some sort of QoS priority to gaming (UDP?) sounds nice though I’m not using the router portion of this thing.  Setup wasn’t bad.  It’s pretty easy to configure.

Oh, and it seems to work with all of my devices.  This is the one reason I didn’t go for the Apple Airport Extreme.  The Airport has similar features and supposed rock solid performance.  It’s also notorious for not working with the Xbox360, Wii, PS3 and a myriad of other wireless devices not made by Apple.  Boo.

This brings me to 5Ghz.  The 5GHz band which is supposedly cleaner than the overused 2.4GHz band sounds great in theory for wireless devices.  The DGL-4500 is infact a dual band router except it either operates in 2.4GHz mode or 5GHz mode.  This is unfortunate because all my 802.11 gear I own is 2.4GHz and many of these devices (PS3, Xbox360, Wii) are not able to run in 5GHz mode.  There are some routers capable of operating in both modes at once with limited success.

Cordless phones are powerful wireless devices.  I’ve had 2.4GHz phones that could work from the car half a mile away from my house.  Many of them are spread spectrum devices which ads security but REALLY starts dirtying up the bandwidth.  These phones are common and dirt cheap and the bane of anyone with WiFi.  WiFi APs themselves are quite prevalent even though most people DON’T need them.  Companies like Verizon install APs willy nilly even for customers who don’t have more than one hard wired PC.  It’s a feature that’s flooding the AP channels with bad signal.

5GHz works because there are less devices on those channels.  I suspect there is also a little more room so more channels as well.  5GHz is also a bit more personal.  It’s range is much more limited compared to 2.4GHz and it’s also more affected by things like walls.  Since a strong wireless signal is really important for decent speed, 5GHz isn’t necessarily a win for performance.  Also there are plenty of 5GHz wireless phones now.  I own one.  I bought one because my 2.4GHz phone would start dropping the wireless.

I don’t think it’s necessarily worthwhile to upgrade to a 5GHz network right now.  However I fully intend to get a dual band USB adapter and give the 5GHz band a shot.

Back to the real world, I’ve been using the DGL-4500 for a few days now with questionable success.  Using my old Netgear PCMCIA card in my laptop, the device I was having the most network drops with, well I was still getting dropouts.  I switched from the 802.11N card to the built in 802.11b and the dropouts don’t seem to occur anymore.  Internal WiFi usually has much better antennas than external adapters.  But I suspect the Netgear software itself was a cause for the drops.

On that note, the laptop with the Netgear card used to get a steady 270-300Mbps link that dropped to about 90-110Mbps when I wwent to the D-Link.  Signal strength looked the same though I have yet to run any SNR comparison tests.  Maybe this weekend.  Anyway, that’s a serious performance drop which is either more honest than it used to be or some sort of N incompatibility.  Since N doesn’t seem to be a ’solidifed’ technology yet, these sort of cross vendor problems are not surprising.

I needed to store some MD5 keys in a database today and for the first time I think I noticed that a CHAR(32) isn’t necessarily the best storage type in MySQL for this.  Afterall, MD5 keys are only hexadecimal.  I did some digging online and I noticed that in PHP you can pass in a boolean as a second parameter to enable RAW mode which provides a 16 byte binary string.  I went to store this in a BINARY(16) using MySQL 4.1 and it all worked well. Except…

Well, using the MySQL command line client to view rows, a common occurrence where I work, would suddenly respond with corrupt looking results.  The binary data contains many exotic line breaks, backspace, bell, and other control characters which end up rendering to the screen.  Is this a 4.1 thing that has been fixed in later clients or is there a better way to deal with this?  Also, MySQL said the column was VARBINARY(16) even though I specified BINARY.  Don’t know what’s up with that.

Anyway, I converted back to plain old CHAR(32).  It’s what I get for trying to be clevar.