obscurereality

I just finished BC2. I have to say, it’s single player was a lot longer and is a lot prettier than Modern Warfare… maybe not as exciting though. What took me 4′ish hours on MW2 took me around 12 with BC2. I did take a short break to be disappointed with it’s multiplayer, and of course to shower.

BC2 is beautiful. More so than MW2 even. The level of detail and colors are amazing.

The plot is pretty good, and stays interesting enough. It was nice to play out a whole story that didn’t leave you with all sorts of crazy subplots and loose ends as MW2 did. I wasn’t real impressed with the AI, but I think this only bothered me because I saw a guy firing in the wrong direction. It’s worth mentioning that stabbing in BC2 isn’t as enjoyable.

BC2 doesn’t really have a finished feel to it. It tries to give you tips during the load screen, but they black out, and you don’t have enough time to read them. I’m not sure how a bug like that gets out the door. There were a few other annoyances, but most of them are unnoticeable.

There’s a decent variety of weapons.

So, here’s the deal… If you’re looking for a good single player FPS, buy BC2. It’s long enough, and overall pretty well done. If you’re looking to frag kids online, MW2 is a must. You can completely ignore MW2’s single player shortcomings by playing online.

Let me know what you think (And give me a caption for that GIMP’ed together image I made ;)

UPDATE

I had planned on trading BC2 in yesterday, but decided I would give it another try [online]. I fired it up when I got home, and wasn’t able to connect to a single game. There was a notice to check twitter for updates, but the last thing mentioned was 10 hours prior saying everything should be back to normal within 90 minutes.

We’ll see. I’ll give it another shot tonight. Of course, Brendan hasn’t experienced any of these problems… maybe it’s just me.

I spent some late time at work the other night getting HyperDB working with wordpress. I needed to have a WP install that would read from one sql server, and write to another.

Assuming you have a MySQL Master/Slave setup, and replication, this is pretty easy to accomplish.

The documentation is a bit lacking, so it took me longer than it probably should have. Once I did get it working, I realized I was pointing the reads to the write server, and vise versa. That created a bit of a mess.

To get this done, grab the two files from here

Drop db.php into your wp-content directory (Not in the plugins folder), and db-settings.php into your WP root (where wp-config.php lives).

Add ‘require(‘db-settings.php’);’ to wp-config.php near the top. At this point, WP will stop working until you’ve configured db-settings.php

Around line 32 of db-settings.php, there’s this bit “Next line populates ‘global’ dataset from wp-config.php for instant compatibility. Remove it when you put your settings here.” This didn’t seem to work. I commented it out right away.

Below is what makes the magic happen, leave it commented out, I had best luck rewriting

/*
add_db_server( 'misc', 0, 'lax', 1, 1, 'misc.db.example.com:3722', 'misc.db.example.lan:3722', 'wp-misc', 'miscuser', 'miscpassword');
add_db_server('global', 0, 'nyc', 1, 1,'global.mysql.example.com:3509','global.mysql.example.lan:3509','global-db','globaluser','globalpassword');
*/


Below is what worked for me. I found leaving things blank wasn’t a good idea.


//dataset, partition, datacenter, R, W, internet host:port, internal network host:port, database, user, password

//write db server
add_db_server('global', 0, 'lan', 0, 1,'192.168.1.12:3306','192.168.1.12:3306','dbname','dbuser','passwd');


That’s all there is to it. Once the file is saved, you’ll be spreading the load. I haven’t found a decent way to benchmark performance of this setup yet.

Brewing my own beer is something I’ve wanted to do for a while now, more so since my friend Brendan started doing it. I had the chance to brew with him last Sunday, which made me want to do it even more.

We went to Keystone Homebrew to get the ingredients for a Stout recipe he found on the tubes. The store was pretty overwhelming… I learned that brewing can be as complex as you can make it. I was really glad to see that most of the equipment you can buy, can easily be made for a fraction of the cost. DIY just adds to fun I’m sure. I’d like to build an Immersion Chiller, just because. These things sell for $50-$125 easily. All they are is some copper and a couple of fittings. I bet I could build one for $20 or less.

Brendan’s methods are pretty straight forward, and not complex at all. There was a lot of ‘ok, now we wait X minutes, then do Y’. It was fun though. Something I’m ready to do again for sure.

I might be more excited to make beer with zombie labels on them than the brewing process.

More on this topic in the future, I’m sure.

Brendan’s toolbox sporting Free Spirit.

More stickers are on the way, I’ll post details when they arrive.

There’s no doubt, the RepRap Aggregation Pipe is an amazing resource for all things RepRap. However, I don’t feel that my (this) blog belongs on it. I do write a great deal about 3D printing, but because that isn’t the sole purpose of my blog, It just doesn’t seem like a good fit.

I tried to figure out how to remove it, but It’s not obvious… If who ever added me to it, I kindly ask that it be removed.

Unless, of course, you all enjoy reading about video games and other random crap I post about now and then.

That said, I took a break from making my Mendel print. It was just something I needed to do. All that’s left really to finish is the extruder. I plan on working on it more this week, so naturally, I’ll keep you all posted.