recently featured posts we've got 178 articles so far

Valve is God! Steam Coming to the Mac! 0

Perhaps three or four years ago, Steam was a swear word in my world. It was some buggy piece of bloatware that I was forced to use for some of my favourite games.

But for the last 2 years or so, I can only applaude valve for what they have done. Steam to me, is now THE model of what the future of desktop gaming should be modelled on. A great and very stable client that is a one stop shop for digital distribution of games. For the last 18 months to 2 years (is that when Team Fortress 2 came out?), whenever I want to buy a game for the PC I always check to see if it is available on Steam first.

Sure they are not always the cheapest (though if you are patient they often have great sales), but I can buy the game online in a few clicks, it starts downloading straight away and usually at a very decent speed. Then with the game downloaded, updates are delivered automatically pretty much for the lifetime of the game. The community integration and friends list makes it the ‘Xbox Live for the PC world.’ The best part of all is that after a format of my computer, I can just install Steam and instantly redownload the latest version of all my games without worrying about activation or other DRM nightmares.

Now, the Valve gods have truly pulled a masterstroke in announcing a Mac client to be released in April along with Mac versions of all their big titles such as Team Fortress, Half-Life, and Left for Dead series. Not only will they be native versions of games (no emulation yay!) they are fully cross compatibile with the PC versions meaning I can play in the same servers as my PC using buddies.

This is a great day for Mac gaming, and giant step for the future development of Mac as a gaming platform. I suspect they are the only big company out there with the balls to try and become the defacto ‘appstore for games’ before Apple does it. Having this kind of distribution and tools already developed for simultaneously developing mac and PC versions of games (OpenGL and DirectX versions are built simultaneously when devs checkin code) should not only mean a bright future for fans of Valve’s games, but their engine can then be used by other developers to bring cross platform goodness to all us Mac users.

And if you are still not convinced by Valve’s good intentions then read this:

“They are also adding a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge”

I would have happily rebought some of my favourite games for a mac version, but I don’t need to! As I own the games on the PC, I automatically own them on the Mac (this only applies to Valve’s games as far as I can tell).

My Mac Pro is licking its lips with anticipation for April already! Bravo Valve… Bravo!

When Home Servers Go Tits-up! 2

I have spent quite some time on several occassions on here praising the awesomeness that is Windows Home Server. So it’s only fair that when the shit hits the fan, I spend a similar amount of time cursing the entire ancestoral history of everyone involved with Windows Home Server!
My machine is the fantastic (if terribly named) Tranquil PC T7-HSG with a 500gb hard drive of its own and an attached USB 1TB WD green power hard drive. This setup has been running around 9 months now without a single issue. I have not even needed to log onto the machine since I installed around 10 months ago as it quietly kept itself up to date and served my storage and backup needs. During that time we have had probably five or six power outages and each time its just been a case of switching it back on and it just resumed it’s duties faithfully without a murmur of discontent.
BUT, in the last week or two I have had some issues which have begun to snowball a little out of control. Occasionally I would request a file from it’s storage and it would not be available due to an “I/O error”. After a couple of days of assuming this was a new ‘feature’ of my new Snow Leopard installation, I did the unthinkable and actually went down to the workroom to physically check the machine!
What I noticed was that though the USB drive had its power light on, there seemed to be no disk activity. I cycled the power and low and behold the problem was fixed… for about 24 hours. I continued this monotonous pattern for a few days (just no time to investigate properly) until I started getting messages about file conflicts as well as the USB drive occassionally dissapearing from the storage pool. On more than one occasion I have seen messages about bad blocks and other ugly things such as extremely slow response on explorer.exe tasks such as browsing the filesystem whilst using remote desktop. Some something is seriously up with this hitherto flawless machine. Furthermore the backup service refuses to start and file transfer from the WHS machine to other machines is incredibly slow (
So I needed to make time and start to investigate the root cause. Scandisk on the larger drive seems to go extremely slowly, so slowly it hadnt got past the index scan in 8 hours (bear in mind only about 400gb of the 1tb is actually used). Getting a little panicky I thought I would start copying the REALLY important data such as photos and family videos off the machine, but this would fail on many of the files with the same “I/O error” as earlier. I unplugged the USB drive and attached it to another Windows 7 PC and tried to physically copy the files over from the drive… again more failure. Seeing as these files are so valuable I am using folder duplication for those shares (meaning a physical copy is kept on both the hard drives) which should mean if one drive is failed then I should be able to retrieve them from the other drive. So I tried to copy them directly from the 500gb internal drive…. failure!!
So at this stage I see the problem as being one of several things:
- One or both hard drives is failing
- One or both of the hard drives is corrupt
- The WHS db or ‘tombstones’ are messed up
- The actual files themselves really are corrupt and un-recoverable!
My best option right now according to the very knowledgable folks at the wegotserved forums is to try a server recovery. This is basically a reinstallation of WHS that doesn’t touch the data. In the process I will end up with a new db and all the tombstones will be rebuilt. This may be enough for me to get my important data off the machine. Then I can start using some disk utilities to try and establish the exact problems with the drives and replace them if necessary. I will embark on this project tonight and cross my fingers!
The thing that has angered me is that there is no early warning of these problems in any logs. OK I understand a total and sudden complete failure of a drive would be impossible to warn about, but this seems like a slow corruption which therefore should be detectable and thus I should have been receiving big flashy warnings on my connected machines for a few weeks so that recovering the data to other machines could be embarked on as early as possible.
I’ll keep you posted on my progress and the results in case you should hit a similar problem.

I have spent quite some time on several occassions on here praising the awesomeness that is Windows Home Server. So it’s only fair that when the shit hits the fan, I spend a similar amount of time cursing the entire ancestoral history of everyone involved with Windows Home Server! continue reading »

Dust 514 – I am VERY Excited! 0

Aug23

Video: Dust 514 – Ego-Shooter im Universum von Eve Online – Gamescom 2009 (5:18)

In summary, an MMOFPS, on Xbox360 and Playstation 3, based in the Eve Online universe, and linked to the Eve Online MMORPG universe on the PC. Those playing Dust 514 fight for control of the planets within Eve, whilst those playing Eve Online continue battling over space.

The best bit…. the two games are linked to each other so Eve Online players can hire Dust 514 players to take planets for them to profit from within the Eve Online world.

Sheer frickin genius!

Xmarks for Safari Broken in Snow Leopard – no fix in sight 3

I am in the middle of writing a Snow Leopard preview piece, but with rumours of the latest build being the gold master, I have to say Apple’s ‘just works’ slogan can be thrown out of the window if this really is release code.

Two particular apps I can’t live without Xmarks for Safari and iStats Menu Meters are just two of a slew of applications that are broken, broken broken.

Xmarks for safari in particular is a troublesome one as it seems there is no fix is in sight. This post on the official support sight seems to suggest they have not yet even got a concept of how to make this essential Safari plugin work under Snow Leopard.

Input Managers are no longer supported on Snow Leopard – so most Safari plugins need to be re-written in some other way.
So guys – you will need to wait a while for XMarks to figure out an alternative way of doing the plugin

Among other apps to be causing me trouble this far are Cyberduck which crashes on startup, Mail which is refusing to send/receive mail on demand and iMovie which has crashed 3 times in 4 attempts to encode a project. Boot up times in 64bit mode are some 250% slower (30 seconds as opposed to 12 seconds for 32 bit mode) and a lot of niggly glitches have hit my Mac Pro 2009 Nehalem since Snow Leopard was clean installed onto the box.

Let us know of any apps you find that don’t work in Snow Leopard. The verdict so far, could this be Apple’s Vista?

Update: Here is a good post where many users are listing the apps that they find work or not work, very useful if you are thinking of taking the plunge.

Comments are b0rked 4

Aug19
Thanks to a nice bloke called ‘Magnus’ I have been made aware that the commenting system is b0rked with a capital 0. I did think it was strange that there was no comments on anything since April (when we changed to the new look). The problem is that you the commenter should be able to post without being registered, but you supply an email and answer a simple maths question. The problem is that you can’t see the question :)
Soooo, I need to dig into the code and see what the problem is, but in the meantime, if you log in as a registered user you will be able to comment without issue.
Thanks for your patience and thanks again Magnus for bringing it to my attention!

Thanks to a nice bloke called ‘Magnus’ I have been made aware that the commenting system is b0rked with a capital 0. I did think it was strange that there was no comments on anything since April (when we changed to the new look). The problem is that you the commenter should be able to post without being registered, but you supply an email and answer a simple maths question. The problem is that you can’t see the maths question which makes providing the answer quite difficult :)

Soooo, I need to dig into the code and see what the problem is, but in the meantime, if you log in as a registered user you will be able to comment without issue. I have posted Magnus’s comment as myself for now (couldn’t not post it when it was so complimentary :) )

Thanks for your patience and thanks again Magnus for bringing it to my attention!

UPDATE: The problem is now fixed, but I have had to introduce some stronger spam criteria instead of the maths check. So if your comment doesn’t show up straight away, then it’s in the approval queue and I will approve the genuine comments as quickly as possible. As always the easiest way to hassle free commenting is to register and then most of the checks are removed because I have the added tool of a mighty banhammer :)

Warhammer Dawn of War 2 2

Sometimes you still get pleasant surprises when fishing around for a game to play like I did this week. I was firing up Steam to play Arma2 (heavily flawed genius just like Operation Flashpoint was I am sad to say) when a Steam promotion popped up offering Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War 2 for half-price. I ummmed and arrrred and then clicked buy.

continue reading »

Hyperic Enterprise Monitoring 0

My real job is as a Systems Specialist running one of the world’s largest retail websites. It’s a huge operation which requires a knowledge of the whole scope of today’s typical enterprise technologies. The size of the environments and breadth of scope is what keeps me interested and enthusiastic as I typically get to play with anything and everything. However, from an operations perspective, one big problem is performance monitoring and getting the metrics you need, when you need them. In the past we had a huge bunch of hacks and scripts stacked up like a house of cards, just to get a few measly bits of performance data. I was yearning for a single, supported solution that could give us wide-ranging and ‘live’ performance data on any component of our environments, whilst not creating any kind of performance overhead. continue reading »

Planet Earth, in a very different light 0

I am pretty stunned by this collection of imagery from shown in great detail at New Scientist. continue reading »

The Pirate Bay Trial, Guilty! Sack The Lawyers 0

Despite looking so cool, calm and collected throughout the trial, each of the four accused were fined 930,000 big ones and 12 months of ‘grip the soap hard’ time.

I can’t understand it myself, the defence should have been so simple. Challenge the prosecution to find any torrent on TPB that couldn’t be located by google. Case closed your honour!

Progress on the New Look 0

Apr16

So a lot of the new design is in place, but there is still a lot of more minor tweaking to do. There are a lot of things I like personally about the new look, not least the ease of reading and the clear division between content, the other items such as tags and comments. continue reading »

Trigger Finger is powered by WordPress