Spooky Ray

System administrator cheat sheet and Starcraft 2

Lauri Listak — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:30:52 +0000

Got a link last night to a pretty nice cheat for anyone needing to remember some system administration related stuff.
http://www.mj12net.org/index.php/system-administrator-interview-cheat-sheet.html

Starcraft 2 closed beta has started. I opted in for beta from battle.net account page, but no luck so far. Even some Blizzcon’08 attendees haven’t gotten their keys yet, so it’s no big deal for me, I can wait. Starcraft was the first game that I truly played, I used to hang around in a net café with like-minded friends and spend hours watching others play and playing ourselves. To this day the atmosphere of single player campaigns is something of true science fiction spirit.

As expected, the cracking groups are already hard at work breaking the protection and trying to get at least single player working without a beta key and of course further in the future private battle.net servers. The progress so far is unlocking the main menu without having to log on and watching replays. From what I understand, they now need to unlock maps and then single player would be possible.

It is kind of amusing, though. Considering the hype and how many people were waiting for Starcraft 2, I bet lots of cracker groups will be putting all of their resources into being the first ones to break any kind of protection mechanism Blizzard could have thought up. And it’s always easier to break stuff than to build stuff.

Regarding the previous, I’m willing to guess that beta’s single player should be cracked in 2 weeks and we’ll see first battle.net implementations in 6 weeks (counting from beta launch). Now it’s time to wait and see the results of one of the most interesting battles now between developers and crackers.

Oracle and Sun merger: troubles with MySQL?

Lauri Listak — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:57:21 +0000

Michael Widenius, the founder of MySQL is asking for help with saving MySQL from the clutches of Oracle. I kind of don’t have any feelings for the guy himself as he was the one that sold it to Sun in the first place, but I’m much more interested in the other products of Sun. Some will most likely be killed such as Glassfish and Netbeans, some are kind of in the gray area and could go either way (Solaris), but some will most likely be developed further such as Java and OpenOffice.

Oracle can’t kill them outright, but just removing the backing of a corporation will definitely halt the development of some interesting projects, such as Darkstar Project. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what the European Commission will decide about the merger.

Favorite music while programming

Lauri Listak — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 16:10:41 +0000

There’s a discussion on Slashdot about listening to music while programming. Usually when I’m studying about something new or figuring out a concept that I haven’t heard of before – hard thinking work, so to say, then I like to do it in complete silence. But going through some steps that I have already figured out, then it’s something instrumental with no vocals or a little, that don’t take attention away. Anything matching those criteria from industrial, ambient, dubstep or drum and bass will do for that.

Scalability issues

Lauri Listak — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:13:58 +0000

World of Warcraft’s patch 3.3 came out and as expected people had problems with instance servers on patch day because of the huge overload.

Now to talk about a suggestion made in the comments at Tobold’s MMORPG blog that advised moving server hosting to a cloud, so that different games could make use of the resources for a patch day and wouldn’t need to pay for the resources other times so that they’d be available for other companies.

To be honest I don’t see that happening any time soon with the way games are built and designed right now. It would be way too expensive to start redesigning the way servers interact with each other, when the system they have right now is working – not excellently, but pretty well nonetheless. However it might happen in a few years at least for a company that hosts multiple MMOs (NCSoft comes to mind) and perhaps 6-8 years for such a service to pop up allowing different companies to share those server and network resources? It is definitely something to look forward to in terms of improving the gameplay experience.

Private MMORPG servers

Lauri Listak — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:30:15 +0000

BBC News has published an article about private MMORPG servers and it was also picked up by Slashdot’s games section.

I’m sure that most MMORPG players have some kind of experience with private servers – either they played in them before moving on to retail or moved to them after they got fed up with retail for some reason (the hordes of bots plaguing MMORPGs are one of the main reasons).

Main advantages of private servers:

Free to play – with a caveat of course, because server hosting costs money.
Almost unlimited or unlimited possibilities – you can play the game any way you want. Imagine it as being able to define your own difficulty levels for a game.
Tighter administration – rules enforcement is much stricter on private servers. Using the example of WoW, bots are banned in waves so that most botters can bot for months until banned. Also bots are still paying customers, so huge bot trains mean extra revenue and staff might be hesitant to ban them.

However private servers are plagued with their own problems:

Technical problems – the server software is developed in-house, so there are lots of bugs, incomplete quests, faulty geodata, etc. Not to mention that even the best private servers with development teams (they don’t have to produce art, just server-side) are still a few months to years behind the original game’s latest functional content.
Unlawfulness – depending on where you live and the server is located, playing in a private server is either in the grey area or infringing the EULA of the client that you downloaded to play the game. Servers have been shut down and their owners dragged to court. However, some of them even seemed to earn a profit…
Imbalanced – self-cooked or datamined information is not very reliable and can cause more than just a few glitches. What is more, it is a common practice to use donations to fund the server. Donators might receive much better weapons and armor for their money which in turn will make any PvP combat between donators and free players meaningless – getting oneshot is not fun for anyone.
Unreliability and unaccountability – the server might go down any time for a time range from few minutes to forever and the reasons might be from the server owner’s mom pulling the plug to a FBI raid on the datacenter (the usual reason being not enough money to pay for the server). In official servers the maintenance times are usually well-known and the players notified before and I haven’t heard of any law enforcement raids on official game servers.

So, what’s the future? I doubt that publishers can get rid of private servers, there are way too many of them and it would be the kind of whack-a-mole that the music industry is playing against its’ customers right now. They just have to hope that private server scene brings in new customers, but also designers and developers! Besides, the revenue loss from private servers can’t be that bad, because all-in-all private servers still are pretty bad and their gameplay experience can’t be compared to playing on an official server.

Make good use of the situation, game publishers and don’t alienate your consumer base and future employees.

Ubuntu’s B-side applications

Lauri Listak — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:36:26 +0000

While reading about the new application stack in Ubuntu 10.04 I came across a comment about a relatively new feature in Ubuntu – the B-side applications.

Apparently B-side applications are ones that weren’t in the default install (that size is after all physically harshly limited), but are still too good too miss out on. Launchpad hosts the current list of B-sides and to install them just do a few simple commands:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:b-sides $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install b-sides

The more noteworthy applications are gtg – Getting Things Gnome! for managing your to-do list, then miro – an Internet TV application and pyroom – a clone of WriteRoom. I’m guessing that the people who need OpenOffice.org have already probably installed it anyways.