James Chamberlin

I’m not a long-time user of RSS feeds. I’ve only bothered to use them recently (less than 6 months). One of the RSS feeds I use in Google Reader is from History Channel. For a few of their shows, they have episode guides in RSS form. It’s a good idea in theory, but they haven’t made it very practical yet. I don’t have a problem with them listing repeats, but what does bug me is the fact that whenever the RSS feed gets updated, the entire feed is republished (or whatever you wish to call it) and the Google lists them all as new, so I have to look through all of the RSS entries each time History Channel decides to update their feed. It’s a real nuisance.

EA has come under fire recently for its decision to use SecuROM’s new copy protection for video games. What is so controversial about the new scheme is that for you to play the game, you need to have your PC connected to the Internet and the game has to “phone home” and authenticate itself every ten days. Yeah, not just once, but every ten days. WTF?!

Piracy has been a huge problem in the PC game market. Some companies have scaled back publishing for the PC because of it. I’ve seen some figures that were downright scary from a game developer/publisher standpoint. As much as half of the installations of some games are illegitimate.

CD keys aren’t working. I don’t mind this copy protection scheme so much. But when I put the CD back in the wrong case, then it becomes a problem.

So online authentication sounds like a good idea… in theory. Not everyone has their gaming PC connected to the Internet. Not everyone gets into the multiplayer aspect of games.

Anyway, what happens when the game’s developer goes out of business? EA isn’t likely going to go under anytime soon, but we’ve all seen developers and publishers come and go over the years. If the company shuts down, how would I authenticate the game? Some of the best games I have are almost ten years old now. Not all companies are in business for that long.

If online authentication becomes the wave of the future, I hope the companies look into creating some sort of system that can be hosted/shared by all of the companies so that if one company goes down, people can still authenticate their game(s). They need to share some sort of centralized system for this to win me over.

Although I follow the news and politics, it’s never something I feel compelled to discuss here. I guess it’s because I just get tired of it after a while and don’t want to bring it up again. Well, the fact that Hillary Clinton is still trying to become the nominee has, for me, at least, reached a point where it’s just embarrassing to watch.

The other night, NBC Nightly News had Tim Russert on and he brought out his little white-board and showed how there is no mathematical way for her to get enough delegates and superdelegates to beat Obama. She’s just hoping to prove that Barack isn’t as strong as people think he is by winning a state here and there.

At some point, I had hoped reason would sink in, but I just heard this week that she loaned her campaign another $5 million or so. All I could do is shake my head when I heard that. There’s nothing for her to win at this point.

It’s time to admit defeat, pack it up, and move out of the state of denial.

Two of my network cables arrived the other day. They’re of the three-foot variety, which is a little too short. I think I should have grabbed six-footers instead, but they will work nonetheless. The run isn’t all that long anyway. It’s just less cabling hanging down behind the desk I suppose.

Anyway, I’ve been transferring files from one to the other all night. I was doing that for three or four hours last night and am finishing up what’s left. It wasn’t too difficult. Outlook Express was surprisingly easy to transfer over. Microsoft had terrific instructions on their support site. In the past, I used instructions made by an Outlook Express guru, but his site doesn’t seem to be that easy to find or navigate through anymore.

The biggest hurdle I’ve faced had to deal with IP addresses. When I plugged the new machine into the network, I got an error message. Two PCs were fighting over the same IP. I forgot that I don’t have them using DHCP because I needed to give the machines static IPs for port forwarding on my router. So I had to check out what IPs the others were using and give the new PC an IP of its own. It wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t a problem I was expecting.

After getting all of that sorted out, I updated Windows. 38 Critical Updates were found on Microsoft’s Windows Update site. Wow. I think Dell needs to get these updates into their installation discs because that’s a lot of updates. And I passed on getting Service Pack 3 (SP3). I’ve heard a lot of complaints, so I’m staying away from it. Every time there’s a service pack released, Windows users complain of problems.

One other problem I didn’t think I was going to run into was Windows Messenger. It pops up when you open Outlook Express. I couldn’t get Messenger to stop popping up when I open OE. I unchecked every logical option within OE and Messenger and still couldn’t get it to stop popping up. So I did the natural thing: I edited the registry. This isn’t something I enjoy doing because I know bad things can happen if you screw up. But I followed instructions found on PC Hell and Microsoft’s support site to create a DWORD value that would stop Messenger. It worked like a charm. I no longer have to worry about that annoying little program anymore.

Right now, I’m just installing a few programs that I need… 7Zip, FileZilla, Winamp, Notepad++, etc. I should be done with that pretty soon and will be able to put the old Dell away in a box. It’ll be nice to get this old CRT monitor off my desk. That bowing in my desk is annoying as hell.

I’ve been really anxious to get my new Dell PC up and running. I don’t have my network cables yet, so I can’t connect them to the router and do anything with it on the Internet or my LAN, but I did manage to get it setup on a card table in the other room and played AoE III.

And holy cow, does that game look great?! Considering the fact that the new machine is running an nvidia 8800GT, it’s no surprise. Even with anti-aliasing off [default option], it looked good. But turned on and to High, everything looks sweet. The rifle-fire is fun to watch. It was what caught my eye when the game was in development and some videos and screenshots of beta versions of the game were released.

I went through the tutorial, which was a bit shorter than I was hoping. Sure I’ve played all of the other games in the series, but I think the tutorial should offer the player information on each of the buildings available.

Anyway, it was a lot fun to play with for a few hours.

It doesn’t seem like all that long ago that the Microsoft guys were dead-set against any talks with Sony about bringing the BluRay drive to their console system. They seemed to have an “over my dead body” stance on the issue, but Steve Balmer admitted that the console will be going blue this year.

The drives will begin manufacturing very soon and will be shipped in the third quarter of this year. I suspected that Microsoft would realize that there’s money to be made and regardless of their rivalry with Sony, they’re a company and they want to make money.

This all comes out at a rather ironic time though. A piece of news surfaced about the fact that BluRay players and disks aren’t selling as fast as people had hoped for and many consumers claimed they couldn’t tell the difference between DVDs and BluRay.

Haha. I had to laugh at that because on my tiny 20″ LCD monitor, I can tell the difference. I can’t imagine what BluRay on a 40+ inch HDTV would look like. DVD is a great format. It’s leaps and bounds ahead of VHS, but consumers will eventually come around. Because of BluRay, I have stopped purchasing movies on DVD. I’m frankly holding my cash for TV shows on DVD which I know won’t see BluRay releases for years [if ever] and will buy the others when BluRay players and movies become affordable. Players currently cost over $300!

One of the tools Google has developed for webmasters to obtain information on their visitors [where they're coming from, browser type, etc] is their Analytics program. I was impressed by its demo a long time ago and signed up for it immediately. It seemed to work well for a while, but I’ve been having problems with it recently.

I don’t recall exactly when it began happening, but my account seems to lose website profiles all the time. For those not familiar with the service, Google gives each site you work on its own section [profile] and tracking code. Well, I seem to lose two or three of them all the time. The system seems very unstable and I’ve found similar complaints from other users. I don’t know what the problem is, but Google should fix it.

I intend to stick with the stat scripts that my host provides for free. They’ve never given me a reason to swear out loud. This is the first time Google has really let me down.

I’ve been a frequent shopper at Amazon.com for quite a while. The prices are usually reasonable, though I usually wait for sales. But one thing [there are several, but I'll just mention one for today] that bugs me about their site is on the home page, they often have an announcement. It’s not all the time, but when they do have one, it’s up there for a long time and there’s no way to get rid of it to my knowledge.

Right now it has a letter from Jeff Bezos blathering on about their electronic book reader, which from what I’ve heard is a piece of ****, but I can’t find a way to get rid of the damn letter and replace it with the more sales pitches.

If only Amazon would put a little link at the bottom of the letter which would enable normal front-page activity…

I received my new Dell yesterday. It’s my third one, and none of them have shipped with a piece of network cable. All I ask for is a cheap three-foot Cat 5 cable with connectors. Is that really too much to ask for? Not everyone uses wireless network technology.

A few days ago, I was working with another WordPress installation which is for another project. When I downloaded the config file to update it, I noticed the formatting was screwed up. So I fixed it up so that it looked like it should, uploaded it to the server, and WordPress had a fit. Whatever little changes I did screwed everything up.

I didn’t have a backup of the config file, so I couldn’t just undo the changes. I’m usually pretty good about making backups of some things, but it looks like I’m going to have to backup the WordPress files a little more often.

In the case of that install, I just re-installed everything. I didn’t make any posts, so I didn’t really lose any data. It’s just a pain in the ass to deal with things like this sometimes.