Archive for October, 2007

This past Sunday afternoon, I made the decision to purchase The Orange Box on Steam, forgoing the traditional media route. You might recall that I did the same thing with Half-Life 2: Episode 1, swearing to never do it again. I have since changed my mind on the matter. It occurred to me that Valve is a company I truly want to support. Unlike any other game developer, I actually look forward to their game releases. Much like supporting local farmers through a local farmer’s market, I decided I would buy this package right from the source, cutting out the middle man.

The only downside to electronic distribution is the fact that you have to actually download the content. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is approximately 6 GB in size (according to Steam), so it took a while to get, even on our cable connection. Having the physical media to install with would have been much quicker, but I feel that my direct support of Valve outweighs that minor quibble.

I have since downloaded both Episode 2 and Portal, and have played through both once (I was up very late last night). There is so much I want to write about each, that I will separate my thoughts for both into two posts. Stay tuned.

On Monday, Slashdot carried a story about two key developers leaving the Thunderbird project. Is this a sign of troubled times ahead? Mozilla is attempting to spin off the product into its own company, which seems rife with failure to me. As a user of Thunderbird, I certainly hope that this isn’t the end of such a great product.

The third service pack for the Windows XP operating system has now officially entered the beta testing phase. According to an article at neosmart.net (link points to a network mirror, since the site is down), there are 1,073 patches in this service pack, a testament to how long it’s been since SP2 was released. What I find most interesting, however, is that Microsoft is back-porting features from Vista into this service pack. A few specific features have been mentioned:

• New Windows Product Activation model
• Network Access Protection modules and policies
• New Microsoft Kernel Mode Cryptographic Module
• New “Black Hole Router” detection

Could these back-ported features be a sign that Microsoft is getting ready to drop Vista? Take up on the new operating system has reportedly been very slow, with the large vendors (HP, Dell, etc.) requesting XP preloads instead of Vista, due to customer demand. Microsoft has always been its own biggest competitor, and this could be a sign of a power struggle within the corporation (XP teams vs. Vista teams). If they do indeed pull the plug, I predict a collective sigh of relief from around the globe. Only time will tell what happens.

I recently ran into a problem on my system where all the HTML document icons had been reset to the generic default icon:

Apparently, the Minefield build of Firefox had at some point corrupted this icon. I found that I was unable to change or reset the icon through the Folder Options » File Types dialog in Windows Explorer. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t restore the icon, and it drove me nuts. Then I figured out what to do, thanks to this forum post at MozillaZine:

1. Open RegEdit.
2. Browse to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\FirefoxHTML registry branch.
3. Delete the ShellEx\IconHandler registry key entry.
4. Close RegEdit.
5. In Windows Explorer, browse to the Documents and Settings\{username}\Local Settings\Application Data folder.
6. Delete the iconcache.db file. It’s hidden, so you may need to tweak your Windows Explorer settings to see it.
7. Reboot.

Problem solved!

I bought a Linksys WRT54GL today, to replace our aging DLink DI-624 (it had been acting pretty flaky as of late). The Linksys router supports open-source firmware, and our first course of action was to flash the highly recommended DD-WRT distribution. I have to say that I am very impressed with this firmware. There are lots of options available and it reports lots of interesting information.

Setting up the router wasn’t difficult, but my dad and I ran into problems getting our IBM laptops connected wirelessly. All of our other machines were able to connect without any problems, so it was clearly a problem with either the ThinkVantage Access Connections application or the IBM wireless adapter. We spent quite a while trying to get things working, and finally found the issue. We had originally set the Wireless Network Mode option in the router basic setup to “G-Only” mode since we intended to use 802.11g only around our house. But for whatever reason, the IBM laptops didn’t like that. Switching the option back to “Mixed Mode” cleared up the problem immediately, much to our delight. Hopefully this little tidbit will help out someone else facing the same problem.

My birthday was earlier this week, and I got The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for our Nintendo Wii. So far it’s been a great game, and I’ve only just started the story line (even though I’m only over 4 hours in). There are lots of great games coming in the fourth quarter of this year, and I’m so excited! Here’s what I’m looking forward to:

• Metroid Prime: Corruption (Nintendo Wii, Available Now!)
• The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo DS, Available Now!)
• Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (PC, October 9)
• Portal (PC, October 9)
• Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (Nintendo Wii, October 28)
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (PC, November 5)
• Gears of War (PC, November 6)
• Unreal Tournament 3 (PC, November 9)
• Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo Wii, November 12)
• Geometry Wars: Galaxies (Nintendo DS & Wii, November 13)
• Crysis (PC, November 16)

So many games, so little time! What games are you looking forward to?

P.S. - This is post #400 at Year of the Code Monkey. Pretty cool!