links for 2009-01-30
Friday, January 30th, 2009Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Archive for January, 2009
Networking with xVM(Xen) and Opensolaris
Thursday, January 29th, 2009So I’ve been playing around with the new virtualization features that have been put back into Opensolaris and to say the documentation is a little sketchy is being kind. Most writing found on the web refers to installations that are using linux as the Dom0 and Solaris is doing it just different enough to make them useless.
As a helpful hint, when you are setting up Dom0 and you have multiple adapters don’t believe the documentation when it says that the default is the first device in dladm show-link. Because for me it wasn’t, and I wasted a bit of time trying to figure out why my networking wasn’t working.
Posted in OpenSolaris | 2 Comments »
2008 Video Game Summary
Friday, January 9th, 2009So 2008 was a great year for games. (Well at least it finished strong) It also marked my complete change over from a PC gamer to a Console gamer. Other than Valve/Half Life I’ll never play another single player PC video game due to the horrible state of copy protection, I’m sorry but I shouldn’t have to pirate your game in order to actually play it in an enjoyable way.
So here’s my writeup of what I played in 2008, with some summary over the notable titles broken down by platform.
Nintendo DS – Loved the wii integration this got this year, would like to see more of this.
- The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
- Professor Layton and the Curious Village
- The World Ends With You – Interesting game, my first experience with a Square Enix title, this sort of grind RPG really isn’t my thing but it was different enough to be enjoyable for the first run through.
PSP 3000 – Really think Sony needs to expand on how this connects to the PS3, so far it is just a curiosity but could be really really good.
- God of War Chains of Olympus – Really enjoyable game, sold me on the platform and looking forward to the PS3 game.
- Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters
- Wii Fit with Blance Board – Fun, and interactive but needs more depth or DLC. Excellent way to discover how much you really cheat in using your dominant side.
- Mario Kart Wii with Wii Wheel – Great fun, the online matchmaking system is horrible and if it wasn’t such a good time no one would bother going through the trouble of adding their friends.
- Super Mario Galaxy – Probably the most fun I’ve had with a mario game in a long time.
- Super Smash Bros. Brawl – I don’t get the hype over this game.
PlayStation 3 Consoles and Accessories- Picked this up because my XBox had RRoD and I wanted to play Resistance while I was waiting for it to be repaired. Pleasantly suprised, this has become my primary multimedia machine. Thing I’d like to see fixed in 2009, optical out sound working at the same time as HDMI, I know the hardware can do it, it’s just stupid DRM reasons that they aren’t. Trophy system needs to be made much better to make it worthwhile, spend more time seeing why people care about gamer score on the Xbox.
- Resistance 2 – I really really enjoyed this game overall, Resistance 1 is why I bought a PS3 in the first place. The change from the narritive style of Resistance 1 I’m not sure about, and a lot of the boss battles ended up being a little too Cinematic and lacking in actual meat.
- Dead Space- For a first try this was an excellent game, the mind bender of forcing you to shoot outside the center of mass was actually quite enjoyable. I’m looking forward to the second effort from this team if EA doesn’t screw them up.
- Ratchet and Clank ‘The Quest For Booty’ – My first DLC that I paid for from the Sony Store, other than the annoyance of the actual system I’d like to see more of this sort of thing, just enough game to pass a few hours without having to invest serious time and $$$.
- LittleBigPlanet – Unique and fun, will definitely be spending more time with this one in 2009
- Metal Gear Solid 4 – Can’t even get into the game in the first real mission, another game that may be carried forward by previous versions hype.
- SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Confrontation bundled with Bluetooth Headset – The initial launch left something to be desired. Note to developers that if your game is online only it should gracefully handle the fact that you might have more load at launch than it can handle, spend the minor amount of time required to have an offline tutorial/bot version so that people don’t have so much time to spout angry messages about you on your message board. Game itself is fun but has a learning curve with respect to the big maps.
Xbox 360 Console Collection – The new dashboard is nice but still requires some tweaking, would like to see a better method for playing games directly from the hard disk without having to track down the disk. More reasonable costs for 120 gig hard disks would also be nice, I’ll probably hand make my own this year.
- Fallout 3 – This game was well worth the wait, finally someone who actually ‘gets’ the achievements system, all the acheivements in this game are things you’d actually want to try to do during a full playthrough. Attention game developers, yes Havok is fun but please assign proper weights to items so I don’t see giant barrels shooting away when I bump into them, I know it causes gameplay issues but it’s very distracting.
- Lego Anything ‘Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures, Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga, LEGO Batman‘ – These games are probably the most fun you can have on a console with a non-gamer. My wife loves these and actively will solicit me to play on the console with her.
- NHL 09 – Great game with some interesting ideas, but needs to focus more on QAing out the fluke/random factor.
- Gears of War 2 – Wow..what can I say, gears 1 sold me on the 360 originally and Gears 2 was exceptionally well done. That being said, they needed to work harder on blending the things you hid behind into the terrain more, it became very jaring/obvious by the end of where you were going to get in a major firefight by the number of mechanical walls in the area.
- Grand Theft Auto IV – Enjoyable game, really needs a fast travel option for the primary quest as traveling from A->B gets a little old when the city is as large as it is.
- Xbox 360 Rock Band 2 Special Edition – A really well done update to a game that has probably brought more adults into the console world than anything else, really need to work on their DLC choices so they don’t just get out-spent by Activision and ‘Guitar Hero – World Tour’.
Posted in Video Games | No Comments »
Will Oscigen be OCaml’s killer app in 2009?
Friday, January 9th, 2009Ocsigen could be OCaml’s Rails to push the language forward fully into the spotlight this year. If you look at the Eigenclass writeup of basic hello world functionality you can certainly see the potential.
Rails dragged a bunch of PHP coders into the world of meta programming and code generation, can OCaml’s simple deployment succeed where Seaside failed? ( I realize that most rails users just ‘cargo cult’ a lot of the meta programming but at this point in my career I’m happy to see baby steps)
Posted in Software Development | No Comments »
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