Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – Infinity Ward Fail
If you’ve been reading any gaming news lately, you know the big deal for the PC version is that there are no dedicated servers. IW shot themselves in the foot here. You cannot choose a favorite server (there are none), cheaters are a lot harder to deal with, no mods, no admins, and from what I’ve been reading, it’s overall a pretty laggy experience. The last PC Call of Duty I played was CoD2. I have CoD Modern Warfare for the PS3, but haven’t logged much time at all on it. Buyer beware for CoD MW2, though. The single player is short, and the multiplayer experience is iffy.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala
I’m running Ubuntu 9.10 both at home and at work, and so far it’s been a pretty decent experience. I’ve had some trouble with networking on the work machine, but found the fixes over at the Ubuntu Forums. I have to admit I hardly go there any more as it just seems overwhelmed with a lot of newcomers’ questions. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s just not something I want to wade through, so generally I wander over, search, and then leave. I may get back into being more active, but I’m just not sure yet.

endperform.org future
I’m still trying to figure out where to go with the site. Part of me wants to move the blog elsewhere and do something else with the frontpage, part of me wants to whip up a podcast, and a third part of me wants to just leave things as they are. I’m torn, but I’ll figure out where it’s going to go soon.

I’ve been toying with the Wordpress Lifestream Plugin, but I kept ramming into the same problem with my template approach to doing it: I couldnt get it to work correctly with my theme.
Then I though of something: You have to place the “<?php lifestream(); ?>” line inside of div tags with the ID of “content” for the lifestream to be shown as content.

I’ve posted my template below for anyone who wishes to use it in the future:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Lifestream
*/
?>
 
<?php get_header(); ?>
 
<div id="content">
<?php lifestream(); ?>
</div>
 
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
 
<?php get_footer(); ?>

The Ubuntu Georgia LoCo and ALE will be holding an Ubuntu 9.10 install fest at ITT-Tech Atlanta.

When:
Saturday, November 21st, 2009, 9am-5pm

Where:
ITT Tech
1745 Phoenix Blvd # 100
Atlanta, GA
(Map)
Enter the ITT Tech building at the north end, front doors on the east side are kept locked on the weekends.

Click image for full size

So the server is running again, or so it is having me think.

Let’s see if we make it past another 24 hours without something strange going on…

I would just like to take this time to notify the readers of this blog about the usefulness of using the Bittorent download option for downloading releases. Not only is it more reliable, it also takes a tremendous load off the main archive servers. When release day hits, the torrent files for Karmic can be found in the directory listing at releases.ubuntu.com/9.10/

Remember to seed back!

So, this weekend was… interesting.

Through something of a comedy of errors, the server suffered some strange software issues that prevented it from working this weekend.  There was a bug in a recent update to the server software (running testing software) and that caused longer downtime than it should have due to various interactions between things on the server.  The good news is that this is mostly fixed.

Additionally, this downtime has taught me that there is yet still more to do in terms of getting the server able to stand back up on its own.  I’ve simplified the server’s setup a bit, and I have to write some scripts and other little glue here and there to tie down some of the things I’m doing so that the server can do things like go down and come back up without issues, all by itself.  Getting that done would be generally a good thing.  First things first, I have to figure out a decently reliable way to shutdown the system without having to do something like kill the containers and not give them the chance to cleanly shut down.  Ideally, there would be some sort of command that could be run on the system that would enable the containers to be shutdown.  This is slightly challenging, because you cannot just chroot into the directory tree that the VMs are running in and kill processes, because things like /proc inside the container aren’t visible to tools running on the host.  Oops.

So, I have some work left yet in terms of getting the server going the way it needs to be again.  After that, I’ll be working on it over the next couple of weekends to try to increase its robustness, and so planned weekend downtime for *.trausch.us and www.mischiefinoverdrive.us can be expected. 

With great sadness, one of the original hosting services of the web is shutting down tomorrow due to internal Yahoo! budget cuts.

Until the cutoff, you are free to download your site onto your computer. All data will be deleted after the cutoff, though.

The Archive Team is attempting to save as many pages as they can from Geocities before the lights go out on the service.

Mashable has a great article on this event: mashable.com/2009/10/25/geocities-closes-2/

XKCD has also altered their site to emulate a… badly well designed Geocities website (It nearly froze Firefox): xkcd.com/

XKCD murdering Firefox