Yeah… whateva!
Noticed my avatar?
Aug 27th
For those of you reading this through facebook, my post title will make no sense – head on over to http://www.groundtactics.com/2010/08/27/noticed-my-avatar/ to see what I mean.
Yes, I’m a worms fan. If you don’t know what worms is, then don’t bother with this article. Worms Reloaded is out. Team17 has taken the franchise from 3D back to it’s 2D roots and wow… Proof that 3D is NOT always better. The 3D worms games were great and all, but nothing compares to the original 2D chaos. Having a modern version of that is just awesome.
So here’s my mini review:
What I like:
- JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING from all the years of worming through the original 2D games through the 3D games is here.
- Simplest network multiplayer support ever. Past worms games were always tough to get working right over the internet. Not so with the latest masterpiece.
- All of the classic speech banks are back along with new spinoffs of the same
- New weapons (lots)
- 3D accented graphics (nifty backgrounds and special effects)
- HD resolution support
What I don’t like:
- Lan play missing? I don’t like this new trand game devs are taking.
- Only 4 worms per team (Worms Armageddon supported up to 8 )
- I can’t seem to mix CPU players into hosted games.
- VOIP support turned on by default (annoying when not using headphones).
- I can’t have two teams on one PC connected to two teams on a remote PC. (Worms world party allowed this).
Would I recommend it? Hell yes!
Final thoughts: For a game like this, lan play isn’t all that important since if you’re going to play it at a lan party you might as well just use hotseat mode. As for 4 worms per team, it just makes for faster matches. Voip issues are resolved for me by unplugging all recording devices from my PC during a game. I seem to be at a loss for words on adding a hotseater/cpu player to internet games though – maybe they’ll patch that in later.
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Starcraft 2!
Jul 28th
It’s finally out – Starcraft 2..
I was a huge fan of the first one and think fondly back to epic 8 hour lan party battles. Yes, I know the sequel does not have lan play but I also enjoyed the single player campaign. I’m sure I’ll get my ass handed to me in online play but I’ve just got to get this game on principle. So as I’m writing this, the game is downloading to my PC via purchase online through Blizzard.
I’ll probably update this after I’ve played a bit.
The image of sheer joy (for the moment):
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Small status update.
Jul 22nd
ok.. been busy as hell lately - haven’t updated my main site or kept in touch with anybody on facebook, but here’s a list of crap that’s kept me busy for the past few months in no particular order.
- moved back into house (not on the market anymore so no more need to stage it).
- remembered the pain of $800 monthly con-ed bills (Damn central air..)
- redid my home office
- my dog died
- my great aunt died
- my grandmother turned 98
- my daughter turned 2
- my birthday came a week before hers, but somehow hers still came first. 
- helped my younger bro move to his apt
- helped my younger bro get his car
- tons of work at the office
- got a new pc (6 core intel i7, 12gb ram, 2tb hd, geforce 480, 27inch monitor)
- got new furniture
- got a new laptop
- cleaned out my garage
- updated my servers
- started teaching myself sharepoint
- helped my younger bro get a cushy office job
- my wife got a bad ear infection
- various holiday events I wanted nothing to do with but somehow got involved in.
So I send a “WHASSUP!?!” to everybody and apologize for holidays/birthdays/occasions/events/marriages/whatever I may have missed. I’ll probably still be very busy with real life for a while to come, but I haven’t forgotten you all. Take care!
VMWare to Hyper-V R2 and back.
May 25th
Well, I’ve finally gotten to testing out Hyper-V. To be completely honest, I’ve had one hell of a bad experience with it at first, but now it’s ok and I like the product (Server 2008R2 with Hyper-V Role – Not Hyper-V core). VMWare still has more of what I want, but I don’t think it will be long before it’s caught up. Keep reading for the good, the bad, and some overall useful nuggets of information.
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OpsView tip (Windows service names with spaces).
Apr 6th
For those that don’t know what it is. OpsView is a free front-end for the popular network monitoring system known as Nagios. Thanks to OpsView (http://www.opsview.org), people like me can setup no hassle network monitoring of several critical systems and services managed on a day to day basis. I plan to be releasing an opsview virtual appliance on my website soon, but in the meantime, I’m writing my findings here.
In all my searching, I haven’t found instructions or an example of how to monitor a windows service with spaces in the name through OpsView anywhere. I’ve come close, but the example I found reports a green status whether the service is up or not. I can’t remember where I found that, but if you’ve searched like me, you’ve probably found it too. Anyway, below is a standard format in opsview for a standard windows service (I’ll use a Citrix PS service as an example here):
check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c nsc_checkservicestate -a ‘ShowAll IMAAdvanceSrv=started’
However, what if I wanted to monitor the Citrix SMA service? The service name has spaces in it. No problem! Here you go:
check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c nsc_checkservicestate -a ‘ShowAll “Citrix SMA Service’=started\\”
Yes it’s odd.. note the single and double quotes are intentionally inconsistent. The combination of double escape sequences and odd single/double quoting is what does it though. If you want OpsView to monitor a service with spaces in it, you need to replace “Citrix SMA Service” in the line above with whatever service you intend to monitor. This has been tested with OpsView 3.5.2. and I use it regularly to monitor dozens of services across dozens of servers.
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Facebook facebook facebook.
Mar 27th
I just set it up so when I post on my website, it posts on facebook as well. One less thing to keep track of.. phew.
For those of you seeing this on facebook, my website is at http://www.groundtactics.com
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Giving Hyper-V another look.
Mar 25th
Well, I’ve been reading and it looks like my 2nd virtualization device may get Hyper-V loaded instead of VMware.
According to various posts, an upcoming update to Windows Server 2008 R2 will introduce a feature called “Dynamic Memory”. While technically different in implementation and behavior, this feature can be used to obtain the same results as VMWare’s “Memory Overcommit” feature with few differences if properly configured. It is a key point that is often overlooked by those debating on which is better. Granted – it seems this dynamic memory feature appears to support far less operating systems, but it’s still a step in the right direction if you only intend to load the latest and greatest Microsoft operating systems.
I built a small 1u quad core xeon monster with 12 gb of ram. I’ve been feeling that ESXi was my only way to push the number VMs that I need for my testing. While not as complete as VMWares solution, if MS were to add a contender to VMWare’s “transparent page sharing”, It’d be enough for me to switch. Lets see what the future brings.
A side note: Maybe I’ll just go experiment with Hyper-V anyway. I want to check out RemoteFX when it’s out. With my technet plus subscription I’m already entitled to play with all that stuff.. I don’t have that luxury with VMWare so I’d have to pay for VMWare view if I wanted to see PCoIP in action.
Time will tell.
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RT 3.8.7 VMWare appliance with RTFM
Mar 24th
Ok, it’s back…
My VMWare Request Tracker 3.8.7 Virtual appliance is back. This one has it all and is designed to be usable even for people with no linux knowledge. Here are some features:
- RTFM installed
- Easy to modify script for checking pop3/imap accounts (Works with Exchange 2003/2007 too!)
- No bug with network interface disappearing when copying it to another VMWare instance.
- Webmin interface installed (No linux knowledge needed)
- All features working (Graphing/Shredder to name a couple)
- And some other stuff but I can’t remember at the moment.
Here’s the product:
And here’s the documentation (first draft – could have some errors):
Groundtactics RT3 appliance documentation
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Welcome to the site.
Mar 23rd
Welcome everybody! This is my site.. I don’t care if you like it or not, but if you do like it – sign up and say something in the forums. It’s gone through many changes over the years and has been wiped and redone many many times. This time around I plan on sticking with Wordpress so even if the look changes, I’ll never have to wipe out the users again.
Poke around and enjoy!
Can’t decide on a damn banner…
Mar 23rd
I can’t seem to decide on a banner for this site. The current one is kind of crappy.. Yes, it’s supposed to look crappy to a degree, but I think it looks crappy beyond it’s attempts.
It’s such a pain in the ass because I have a dozen other things to do but I’m stuck on this.
Maybe I’ll take a break from it and get back to re-posting my virtual appliances.
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