Aspirations, thoughts, and Operator overloading

Just a short post to say I’m top-hat deep in the Dragon Age & Mass Effect worlds/universe and loving (almost) every moment of it!

Now if I can only get my ME2 Collector’s Edition to install without issues …

This is mainly a note to myself, but Sept saw a few cool moments early morning, but now that we’re into Oct we’re finally getting a few mornings that are truly cool. Not cold, but I can tell it’s on it’s way.

I’d guess it was Wednesday when I stepped out and truly felt there was a chance of snow this year. Where I live, it’s rare enough to be seen as a good thing.

View Yahoo Q/A entry

At least two things stand out:

1. Replies supporting the original poster are modded up and posts disagreeing with the original poster are modded down and hidden from sight. It seems that this person really didn’t want a balanced view, but a justification to go ahead anyway.
2. We’re likely to see a lot of those sort of people should we leave our lights on this Halloween.

My personal opinion is that regardless of the holiday’s pagan roots, in our area it’s thought of as a holiday for the kids. The kids will get dressed up and a parent or older sibling will take the little one(s) around to family/friends and nearby neighbor’s houses. It is as much about showing off the costumes as it is getting candy.

Personally I think the OP is just greedy, but at best the OP is trying to hang onto a childhood that is quickly slipping away.

Were I to leave my lights on this year, I would politely refuse to hand out candy to anyone that is not a kid (unless it’s someone supervising a crew of them). It’s not a holiday for them.

You’d think something like this would be incredibly easy, maybe even be in an options tab or possibly prefs.js in the user’s profile.

Eh, sort of.

The setting is in localstore.rdf within the user’s profile. This value is supposed to be saved automatically when closing out of the browser, as this page mentions.

In my case I want a lab of users to all receive the same “maximize window” setting. Thankfully, the user profile being used is thin and I don’t have to worry about them having a personalized localstore.rdf file.

Here is the file I’ll use:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- 
    $Id$
    $HeadURL$
 
    Purpose: Set the Firefox window to maximized. This file would be copied
             over on every login, thereby preventing the window from coming up
             sized smaller. Users are able to size it themselves during their
             browsing session however.
-->
<RDF:RDF xmlns:NC="http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#"
         xmlns:RDF="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
  <RDF:Description RDF:about="chrome://browser/content/browser.xul#sidebar-title"
                   value="" />
  <RDF:Description RDF:about="chrome://browser/content/browser.xul#main-window"
                   sizemode="maximized" />
  <RDF:Description RDF:about="chrome://browser/content/browser.xul">
    <NC:persist RDF:resource="chrome://browser/content/browser.xul#main-window"/>
    <NC:persist RDF:resource="chrome://browser/content/browser.xul#sidebar-box"/>
    <NC:persist RDF:resource="chrome://browser/content/browser.xul#sidebar-title"/>
  </RDF:Description>
</RDF:RDF>

Here is the relevant value:

sizemode="maximized"

Hope somebody finds that useful.

For a moment I’ll pretend I’m due my moment of whining, and unload what’s weighing me down.

A lot of things really. For one, the ever present feeling of midlife crisis: the watching of life fading before my eyes and knowing I’ll never have it back again. I’m dealing with that, but it’s always there nonetheless.

For many months now (years?) I’ve gone without good rest. This is partly my fault as I should have known better to quit playing games late into the night and actually go to bed. What I had counted on was my body recuperating at the rate it did when I was younger, and that’s not happening. Especially with allergy problems.

Until recent years I had almost forgotten just how much they bothered me. These days I barely feel like I’m getting any rest at all, and my right nostril feels like I’m breathing through socks; very congested.

That alone leaves me feeling depressed (lack of sleep grants that wonderful euphoric feeling), but then combined with a poor diet (not enough veggies) a lack of proper exercise (feeling like crap isn’t granting me the encouragement to exert more energy) and …

phft … I’m feeling much too lazy to even finish that sentence. Point is, I’m just wore out. Physically and emotionally.

My memory sucks, and I feel like a blithering idiot when I forget which road I live off of. I can recall days long past when I woke up feeling refreshed and my mind was razor sharp. I knew I was going to get old and feebleminded, but I just didn’t realize it was going to come so soon.

Yesterday was definitely a Monday. The gremlins were about at work and I received news that my decade+ old cat was crunched to death by a dog that was being looked after since it’s owners left.

I feel bad for my mother. She came upon my cat as she screamed in agony trying to get away, mangled by a dog that was attempting to catch cats from day one.

I was the moron who didn’t insist the dog be given away. Had I known that the dog was actually encouraged to catch and kill cats by it’s previous caretakers, I would hope that I would have taken her with me.

It’s not so strange, but it was more than just my cat that died yesterday. I suppose it was the last of my youth as well, as she’s been with me in the tough times of self-discovery, and the moments when I needed a good head butt. There were many of those.

This isn’t much of a tribute to her, but I’m not in much of a mood to attempt creativity. Really, I’d just like some sleep. Then a good shower, and then more sleep. Repeat for a few days, and then perhaps a day at the beach. I dunno.

Depression sucks.

Well, I did it (mostly without help): I beat Prince of Persia 2008, aka PoP 4.

I first heard about the game and wasn’t too interested as I hadn’t played any of the PoP games before and didn’t think I was into the Action Adventure genre. Then I heard about the DRM – word was there wasn’t any in the retail copy.

So I bought it to support Ubisoft’s efforts at publishing DRM-free games and was amazed at the production value: The sound, the art, the experience, I didn’t realize what I had been missing from the series.

The things that really stood out for me about this game:

• The art style. I had no idea cell shading could be so gorgeous.
• The level design. The areas where you face off against the alchemist were amazing.
• The “Elika, save me!” ability. This struck me as cheap to start with, but i was impressed after a while at how much this kept the game flowing.
• How intuitive the controls were with an XBox360 controller.

There are some things I’d have to critique though:

SPOILER WARNING!

• Conversations between the price and Elika. When cleansing the Concubine’s tower, the two begin to grow close, but in another general’s area they seem to be really distant, as if the previous time spent together didn’t happen. It’s almost like you were given the freedom to go anywhere you wished, but the storyline expects you to go a particular direction. This was jarring at times.
• Timing for some areas, such as when you’re running from Ahriman and trying to make it to a plate before he drowns you with corruption. The first one and later ones are easy enough, but there is one that even if you’re a little off, you’ll be forced to start over back at the last platform. I had to do that one almost 20 times to get it right. Just one second more leeway and it would have never stood out.
• The ending. Just like the remarks Sean had, the prince did not appear to be devastated enough to make the choice that he ends up making. He really should have been depicted as losing his mind before it happened.
• The timing required for some counter attacks, and how the buttons didn’t relate to the action needed. One example would be your enemy has you pinned to the ground with a sword pushing towards your face. You have your own sword against his and are pushing back. To successfully push him back you’d think maybe using your glove, or maybe the sword button would be needed. Yeah, maybe sometimes, but sometimes it’s the jump button or the Elika button. This could be unintuitive at times.

With all that said, I really enjoyed it and don’t regret being a early buyer at all. I don’t recall having any technical issues and once it was installed, I could put my disc away without any worries it would get messed up. I highly recommend this game to anyone who is a fan of the action adventure genre, and at the current price, even to those that haven’t given it a shot. At it’s current price of $15, you really can’t go wrong.

I just finished the demo for Defense Grid; that was yet another awesome game I’ve played lately. After playing beating the demo Friday night I bought it for $9.99 + shipping from Amazon. The demo was reason enough, but finding out the non-Steam copy doesn’t have DRM was a decision maker for me.

These are some misc notes on setting up a Windows 2000 Server virtual machine using VirtualBox. I could also use VMware Server, and I may end up doing that, but I’d like to give VirtualBox a try as I haven’t used it yet.

• This seems to be a good starting point once I’ve made a backup image of the current production box
• This looks similar to MS Virtual PC 2007 or VMware Workstation
• This is a good warning about how the VM will respond too quickly when setting up a Win2K VM from sratch
• How To Migrate Your Live Windows System to VirtualBox

I’ve been playing around with VMware Player and MS Virtual PC 2007 this weekend and using a guest installation of Windows 98 as the test.

I built the VM using MS Virtual PC 2007 and copied it over to another machine to boot it using VMware Player. It started up and started detecting new drivers. After several, “Do you wish to restart your computer now?”, screens I was reminded just how spoiled recent Windows versions have made me. With Windows 7 I didn’t even have to reboot when installing video card drivers. Pretty neat!

Of course if you’ve any *NIX experience it’s old news to be able to do that, but for Windows users it’s a big deal.

Neat stuff.