I am sure that any game playing geek out there has heard of, if not played America’s Army. This was the FPS put out by the Army about five years ago. It has been so popular that it seems the Army is looking to use video games even more for training and other purposes. It’s about time someone decided to tap this gold mine!
Author Archives: Laz
This can’t be good
Anyone that reads much on this site will see a theme in many of my posts and articles, where I stress security quite a bit. Here is a prime example of security being the job of everyone, users and system administrators alike. Here is a snippet of an article from ars technica:
“Hackers successfully infiltrated Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL),
one of the nation’s leading military research facilities. The attackers
gained access by sending e-mails infected with trojan horses to ORNL
employees. The lab claims that no classified information was retrieved,
but admits that the perpetrators managed to acquire a database
containing personal information about ORNL visitors and employees,
including Social Security numbers.”
Yikes! Read more about it …
You want to trademark what?
OK, I like Fark and probably go there almost every day to catch up on interesting news. However, it seems Drew wants to trademark the phrase “Not Safe For Work”! How can you trademark something so vague and intermixed amongst the ‘net as that? I think they are reaching a bit far on this one and personally I hope it gets thrown out.
Latest EVE-Online Patch Bricks Windows XP
This is an interesting article from Slashdot, so I thought I would post it here. Check it out!
“CCP’s latest major patch to the EVE-Online client, Trinity,
comes with an optional DX9-enhanced graphics patch that dramatically
improves the visual quality of the in-game graphics through remade
models, textures, and HDR. It also has an unfortunate bug: the
incredibly stupid choice of boot.ini as a game configuration file,
coupled with an errant extra backslash in the installer configuration.
The result is that anyone who installs the enhanced graphics patch
overwrites the windows XP c:\boot.ini file with the EVE client
configuration file, bricking the machine on the next boot. Discussion
in a couple of forums threads is becoming understandably heated.”
Need a good cross platform IM client?
I do! Or should I say, did. I am not a huge IM (Instant Message) junkie, but I do have friends and family that I communicate with that way. This means that I have several different IM accounts, because no one can seem to agree on just one. Many people reading this are nodding in agreement sharing my frustration right now. Until recently, I have used Trillian on Windows because it spoke all the different IM languages (AIM, YIM, MSN, ICQ, IRC, etc) so I was able to consolidate all of my separate clients into one. Lately though, I have been having some troubles with Trillian crashing a lot, so I went on the hunt for a new client to try out.
One thought that I had was about Linux, and the fact that on Linux I used GAIM, and IM client that was much like Trillian in that it talked to everyone. One thing I liked about GAIM (among many things), was that it was fast, lightweight, and powerful. It just ran really well. On a whim, I searched for GAIM for Windows and low and behold, I found that not only did the name change (it’s now called Pidgin), but it’s setup for many different operating systems with Linux and Windows being two of them.
I decided to give it a try and I haven’t looked back. It’s very much like the GAIM I am used to on Linux, and it’s very slick. It looks good, it runs good, and hasn’t crashed once! 🙂 So far, I think I have found my IM client of choice and I highly recommend it to anyone that is looking for a robust cross platform and multi protocol client. Check it out here on Wikipedia, and download a copy from the Pidgin homepage to see for yourself!
Creating MySQL database tables
A while back I posted an article on creating MySQL databases from the command line (see here). I am a command line junkie, and usually prefer it to a GUI. I thought I would add to that last database post by sharing how I work with MySQL, designing databases and their structure in the initial phases of application development. Keep in mind, what I am going to go over in this post is strictly for quick and easy database structure design, possibly with test data, from the command line. This is not for mangling your database after you have real data in it, or else you will mangle your data! Continue reading