James Chamberlin

I don’t follow browser development that closely. I know there are some who download nightly builds and all that, but I guess I have things to do.

Anyway, Mozilla put on quite a little song and dance to promote their Firefox browser recently. A lot of sites had news about how they were trying to set a world record for downloads in a day. The whole thing seemed silly to me. I’m a huge fan of the browser, but even I scoffed at that PR stunt.

The hype was there and so were the downloaders. I got my copy right at launch, downloaded at ~40kBps, dreadfully slow. It seems Mozilla couldn’t handle the bandwidth. Haha. I couldn’t help put laugh. Be careful what you wish for, Mozilla.

As for the browser, I like it. There aren’t that many obvious changes, but enough to warrant a new version number (3, in this case). The bookmark organization/tagging/searching is interesting. But really, the thing that bugged me so far is the fact that all of my auto-complete information was deleted (or it just isn’t compatible). That stuff came in handy when filling out forms all the time.

When I mentioned putting in a garden a few weeks ago, Ogre said he wanted pics. You wish is my command, old friend. I got my mom a digital camera for Mother’s Day and she’s been snapping pics of the garden.

There are two galleries full of photos of the garden. They show the amount of growth that has taken place over the last ten days, which is pretty incredible. We have to credit the weather for that. We’ve gotten so much rain recently that riverbanks are being breached. The rain just hasn’t let up. Of course, we probably won’t get much rain for most of the summer; we’re getting it all now.

Anyway, most of the pics have been cropped and resized to fill a 1024×768 screen, which should be plenty big.

Just click on the photo of the broccoli plant to be taken to the gallery.

I’ve been trying to get this done for a while now, but I finally managed to export all of the TV-related content from this blog and have built another site for it.

TV-Reviewed was recently launched and contains most of my TV content. Some of it was deleted because I didn’t think it should ALL go there… some of it didn’t really fit with the site in my opinion.

Anyway, the new site will be more of a full-fledged TV review and news site, though it’ll be primarily be a place for television episode reviews. I’ve recruited two people to help contribute reviews, but I’m looking for more authors to help with content. If you are interested in reviewing television episodes, email me.

Yesterday was rather interesting around here. Charter is the only cable company in the area and all of their services went out. Internet, TV, and Telephone. All three went down for four hours or more. Of course it wasn’t in the middle of the night when no one would notice… it was in late morning-early afternoon.

It wasn’t just in my town either. I heard it affected people more than an hours drive from here. A neighbor went up to the local office to pay her bill and she reported that their computers were down. It’s hard to say exactly what happened, but it must have been pretty bad.

The last big outage in the area took place several months ago when a major router in or near Chicago died, and that took quite a long time to replace.

For roughly the last fifteen years, my family has put in a garden. For a while, it slowly got smaller, but in the past few years, we have expanded it to its largest size. Putting in a garden is a lot of hard work, let me tell you. But having a tiller is a big help. It chews up the dirt, making is nice and fluffy. It makes planting things a lot easier and good aeration benefits the plants.

In the last several years, we’ve never been able to get the garden complete in one day. Well, we managed to accomplish that this year. We also got our fence up (to keep out rabbits and other critters). To give you an idea of how big the garden is, we used three 50′ rolls of fencing to go around the perimeter. It’ll produce a lot of tasty veggies… peppers, corn, tomatoes, carrots, onions, pumpkins, squash, radishes, and broccoli.

Now if it would only rain! The soil here is bone dry right now.

I’m not a long-time user of RSS feeds. I’ve only bothered to use them recently (less than 6 months). One of the RSS feeds I use in Google Reader is from History Channel. For a few of their shows, they have episode guides in RSS form. It’s a good idea in theory, but they haven’t made it very practical yet. I don’t have a problem with them listing repeats, but what does bug me is the fact that whenever the RSS feed gets updated, the entire feed is republished (or whatever you wish to call it) and the Google lists them all as new, so I have to look through all of the RSS entries each time History Channel decides to update their feed. It’s a real nuisance.

EA has come under fire recently for its decision to use SecuROM’s new copy protection for video games. What is so controversial about the new scheme is that for you to play the game, you need to have your PC connected to the Internet and the game has to “phone home” and authenticate itself every ten days. Yeah, not just once, but every ten days. WTF?!

Piracy has been a huge problem in the PC game market. Some companies have scaled back publishing for the PC because of it. I’ve seen some figures that were downright scary from a game developer/publisher standpoint. As much as half of the installations of some games are illegitimate.

CD keys aren’t working. I don’t mind this copy protection scheme so much. But when I put the CD back in the wrong case, then it becomes a problem.

So online authentication sounds like a good idea… in theory. Not everyone has their gaming PC connected to the Internet. Not everyone gets into the multiplayer aspect of games.

Anyway, what happens when the game’s developer goes out of business? EA isn’t likely going to go under anytime soon, but we’ve all seen developers and publishers come and go over the years. If the company shuts down, how would I authenticate the game? Some of the best games I have are almost ten years old now. Not all companies are in business for that long.

If online authentication becomes the wave of the future, I hope the companies look into creating some sort of system that can be hosted/shared by all of the companies so that if one company goes down, people can still authenticate their game(s). They need to share some sort of centralized system for this to win me over.

Although I follow the news and politics, it’s never something I feel compelled to discuss here. I guess it’s because I just get tired of it after a while and don’t want to bring it up again. Well, the fact that Hillary Clinton is still trying to become the nominee has, for me, at least, reached a point where it’s just embarrassing to watch.

The other night, NBC Nightly News had Tim Russert on and he brought out his little white-board and showed how there is no mathematical way for her to get enough delegates and superdelegates to beat Obama. She’s just hoping to prove that Barack isn’t as strong as people think he is by winning a state here and there.

At some point, I had hoped reason would sink in, but I just heard this week that she loaned her campaign another $5 million or so. All I could do is shake my head when I heard that. There’s nothing for her to win at this point.

It’s time to admit defeat, pack it up, and move out of the state of denial.

Two of my network cables arrived the other day. They’re of the three-foot variety, which is a little too short. I think I should have grabbed six-footers instead, but they will work nonetheless. The run isn’t all that long anyway. It’s just less cabling hanging down behind the desk I suppose.

Anyway, I’ve been transferring files from one to the other all night. I was doing that for three or four hours last night and am finishing up what’s left. It wasn’t too difficult. Outlook Express was surprisingly easy to transfer over. Microsoft had terrific instructions on their support site. In the past, I used instructions made by an Outlook Express guru, but his site doesn’t seem to be that easy to find or navigate through anymore.

The biggest hurdle I’ve faced had to deal with IP addresses. When I plugged the new machine into the network, I got an error message. Two PCs were fighting over the same IP. I forgot that I don’t have them using DHCP because I needed to give the machines static IPs for port forwarding on my router. So I had to check out what IPs the others were using and give the new PC an IP of its own. It wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t a problem I was expecting.

After getting all of that sorted out, I updated Windows. 38 Critical Updates were found on Microsoft’s Windows Update site. Wow. I think Dell needs to get these updates into their installation discs because that’s a lot of updates. And I passed on getting Service Pack 3 (SP3). I’ve heard a lot of complaints, so I’m staying away from it. Every time there’s a service pack released, Windows users complain of problems.

One other problem I didn’t think I was going to run into was Windows Messenger. It pops up when you open Outlook Express. I couldn’t get Messenger to stop popping up when I open OE. I unchecked every logical option within OE and Messenger and still couldn’t get it to stop popping up. So I did the natural thing: I edited the registry. This isn’t something I enjoy doing because I know bad things can happen if you screw up. But I followed instructions found on PC Hell and Microsoft’s support site to create a DWORD value that would stop Messenger. It worked like a charm. I no longer have to worry about that annoying little program anymore.

Right now, I’m just installing a few programs that I need… 7Zip, FileZilla, Winamp, Notepad++, etc. I should be done with that pretty soon and will be able to put the old Dell away in a box. It’ll be nice to get this old CRT monitor off my desk. That bowing in my desk is annoying as hell.

I’ve been really anxious to get my new Dell PC up and running. I don’t have my network cables yet, so I can’t connect them to the router and do anything with it on the Internet or my LAN, but I did manage to get it setup on a card table in the other room and played AoE III.

And holy cow, does that game look great?! Considering the fact that the new machine is running an nvidia 8800GT, it’s no surprise. Even with anti-aliasing off [default option], it looked good. But turned on and to High, everything looks sweet. The rifle-fire is fun to watch. It was what caught my eye when the game was in development and some videos and screenshots of beta versions of the game were released.

I went through the tutorial, which was a bit shorter than I was hoping. Sure I’ve played all of the other games in the series, but I think the tutorial should offer the player information on each of the buildings available.

Anyway, it was a lot fun to play with for a few hours.