A bonus friday fun link for everyone – check out warrock, a free battlefield 2 clone from South Korea. It’s a free download and well worth checking out if you like team and class-based first person shooters with vehicles. The graphics aren’t up to the level of Battlefield 2, but it’s an otherwise competent riff on the same theme and runs on lower end hardware. You can’t beat the price either. Mind, if you’re going to check it out make sure to use Internet Explorer, their website is awful and firefox has some difficulty with it. Also note that you’ll have to register to play, and as you might expect this is Windows only.
Friday gaming fun – web-based risk-like game, Conquerer
Imagine a juiced up riff on the classic boardgame Risk that adds diplomacy, fortifications, and cultural production but maintains the simplicity of Risk’s basic gameplay. Sound interesting? Check out conquerer, a free, web-based boardgame. Then go ahead and throw down the gauntlet if you dare, as usual I’ll take any challengers.
The dumbest system administrator ever
I shall name no names, nor will I say at which job I encountered this, to protect the not so innocent and the more than slightly dumb. At one of my places of employment we ran Apple Xserves. I’m not a big fan of them, but whatever, they’ve done their job more or less. Anyway at one point we had installed a new machine in the racks and I was busily installing its software layer. I noticed performance was pretty sluggish but didn’t give it a lot of thought, I figured I would get to the bottom of it as I went through the install process. As I walked out to lunch I noticed the screen of the laptop of a coworker of mine and one of the main system admins, a brand new laptop, running an opengl screensaver at an atrocious framerate. I made an offhand comment about poor performance and he got a gleam in his eye. ‘You know what that is? come here!’ He proceeded to show me how he had configured our brand new xserve to run an opengl screensaver, then connected apple’s remote management tool to the machine across the network, and he was streaming the video from the xserve to his laptop.
!!!
Nevermind the overhead of running an opengl screensaver on a server, which is bad enough, he compounded it by some incalculable order of magnitude by streaming it across the network. This fellow was the main web systems administrator and this was not an issue of him thinking he would just experiment with a new box – he was surprised when I started berating him for wasting system and network resources. It hadn’t occurred to him that these might be issues.
He lost access to the server that day, right after lunch.
Manage bookmarks across multiple machines
The scenario – like me, you have multiple computers running multiple operating systems, and your bookmark collection is scattered across them. You’re looking for a better way to manage this. Check out foxcloud for one approach to this problem. It’s a firefox extension that can be configured to either store your bookmarks on the foxcloud servers, then synch to any browser that has the extension installed, or if you’re running your own server you can configure it to use ftp or DAV to store your bookmarks on your own server. This is a pretty slick solution and since you can run it on your own machine you can presumably get better performance than you’ll see with a shared server solution like del.icio.us (though now that they’re owned by yahoo this will probably improve) or storing them on the foxcloud server. It’s free and runs across all platforms firefox runs on. The only downside to it is it doesn’t support sftp.
Fate gets a bonus pack
I blogged about fate, the excellent little $20 diablo clone, several months ago. Seems like I’m not alone in liking it – it’s turned into wild tangent’s best selling game ever and as a reward they’ve offered up a free bonus pack. If you already have fate, the download is a click away. If you haven’t yet tried it and you enjoyed diablo/diablo II, I guarantee you’ll enjoy Fate. Check it out.
Interesting approach to backup
What if you could get those tape drives off your network? Anyone who’s had to work with them knows how much of a pain in the rear end they are, and how tedious the process of managing the tape library is. An Indian company has come out with a really novel solution to backups called StoreGrid, which stores backup files on the unused disk capacity on your network. They’ve correctly observed that most computer users use only a fraction of their available drive space in the business environment and take advantage of that. It can be configured as a p2p application or in the traditional client-server backup model, and it’s cross platform -Linux, Mac and Windows are all supported. There’s even a free windows version you can check out that’s feature limited but still very useful.
They’re targeting this at the home and small business market and pricing it accordingly – $20 a seat. I think it’s brilliant. Not only is that pricing model lower than what you would pay for equivalent products, it removes a piece of the skilled labor required to manage your backup system and relieves a headache for support staff and small business owners. If I can get this running on my Linux box it’s going to become my new backup system, and this is well worth a look for folks who are running small networks in their homes. I’m willing to bet a large sum of money that none of you have an effective backup strategy on your home network, if you have one at all.
Neverwinter Nights done right – Minions of Mirth
Ever wanted to run your own 3d mmorpg? There are a variety of emulators out there for everquest, dark ages of camelot, Ultima Online and so on, but at best they’re quasi-legal and most of them are flat out illegal. There are also projects like Crossfire, which is a fun game but 2d only and with a relatively unsophisticated engine – it plays more like gauntlet than a modern computer rpg. I discovered Minions of Mirth this week and am flat out amazed. It’s best described as an everquest clone – the graphics are slightly better than the original everquest and the play mechanics are somewhat similar – but it’s also much much more. First, in terms of mechanics, it has something unique (to my knowledge) in mmorpg’s – a multiparty system that allows you to adventure with a group of your own characters. It’s a bit clunky in practice but it’s novel and allows you to effectively ‘solo’ your way through the game with your adventuring group.
The game also charges no monthly subscription fees and comes with a server bundled with the product, allowing you to run servers for your friends. Right now that’s for mac and pc only, though a linux server version is promised and they hope to produce a linux client version as well.
What’s most interesting though is how entirely mod-able the game is. Want to add in the smurf village from the original diku muds? You can. Think every 1st level mage should start with tiltowait? Know a little python? Add it in. You can modify the games graphics using free and open source software to build 3d models and texture and animate them, you can add in new landmasses (zones, in mmorpg parlance) again using free open source tools, and you can completely change the underlying game logic and add in new features.
This is the game I wish Neverwinter Nights had been. While I had tons of fun with NWN, and even ran a server for a year or so, I quickly tired of its repetitious tile-based game graphics. With Minions of Mirth they’ve got the fundamentals right – fully 3d, fully modable by anyone who’s figured out how to use the toolsets used to modify first person shooters. I have really high hopes for this game – there are tons of free Ultima Online shards out there and my expectation is that over the next year or two we’ll see an equivalent explosion of Minions of Mirth servers.
The full game is scheduled to release on December 15th, but if you buy it now you can get in on the beta for only $25. You don’t even need a net connection to play – if you jones for that MMORPG experience but don’t have a net connection, you can run your own local server and play on that.
I should note that while I’m really enthusiastic, this is early days for this product – it’s somewhat thin on content and the graphics are a mixed bag even by the standards of the previous generation of graphics engines. Both of these will improve over time as folks add in their own custom content, just as it has with NeverWinter Nights, but if you’re considering a purchase bear this in mind.
As soon as they release the linux server I’ll have this running here on metamusing – I’ll let folks know when it’s up and running.
Prepare yourself for George RR Martin’s latest opus
So perhaps your read my recent post about the publication of George RR Martin’s A Feast for Crows and are considering picking up a copy. Given how complex the series has been, with its huge cast of characters and ever shifting alliances between them, you will probably find it useful to take a look at Vincent Briscuso’s excellent compendium of information on the series, including an incredibly comprehensive set of chapter summaries for all the released books (with the exception of the most recent). This is holiday reading material for me as I prepare to dive into the new novel.
Excellent mac note taking app
So you’ve been reading me wax enthusiastic about wikis for the past couple of years, maybe you’ve played around with one, and you just don’t buy it as an organizational tool. Perhaps you’ll find TopXNotes more to your liking – it’s a traditional shareware ($20) macosx app. While it doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, it’s very well thought out, has a tiny footprint, a great gui, and a great templating system. Worth a look if you’re on a Mac and looking for something more sophisticated than stickies.
Another step towards the hydrogen economy
Danish researchers have found a way to store hydrogen as ammonia bound up in a tablet of sea salt – apply the catalyst and the hydrogen is released, apply more ammonia and the tablet is recharged. This is pretty slick stuff. You can read up about it on dtu.dk, a Danish technical university’s website.
[via digg]
Dave's Place/Metamusing 