Left 4 Dead 2 On PC
I've not played any games for about 6 months, but decided to download "Left 4 Dead 2" from Steam on Friday night. Since then, and it is only Sunday now, I've played for about 16 hours.
The co-operative team play makes for a very fun and engaging experience. You can't just run around and do your own thing in this game, you have to keep an eye on your team mates and work together in order to beat the levels.
Below are two game play videos that I recorded of the game-play. The 5mbit/sec versions will load fairly quickly for most users, but they don't depict the game's graphics very well. The 15mbit/sec versions depict the graphics quality much more accurately but require a fast (20mbit+) internet connection, or a lot of buffering time.
Be sure to click the full-screen button on the video player.
Google Fiber, Hoping It Comes To Austin
I'm really hoping that Google Fiber will come to Austin, TX. It looks like we certainly had a lot of people contact Google to express their interest.
Bandwidth in Austin is disproportionately more expensive than Dallas and Houston which have some of the cheapest bandwidth in the country because they are very well connected cities.
I'd love to setup a new build office block here in Austin which offered bandwidth to small businesses at affordable prices. Lots of small companies like mine need to upload and download the occasional 5 gig file and it takes hours on the overpriced cable connection.
Switched Back To Vista From Ubuntu
Ubuntu is great for a free operating system, back in December 2009 I switched my home computer OS from Vista to Ubuntu 9.10 to see if I could get used to it enough to be able to switch to it on our work machines.
Unfortunately there is just too much that Windows makes much easier to do than Ubuntu, and needing to edit Adobe Flash files, etc means that I can't make the switch to Ubuntu until there is more supported software.
Hopefully in the next few years switching to a free OS will be a more realistic option.
Stats On UploadScreenShot.com
All uploads to UploadScreenShot.com now include statistics, simply click the stats link above your image. Stats show the number of loads, referring domains, and bandwidth usage over a 30 day period.
Here is what the stats page looks like:
Here is a link to a stats page for one of my screenshots: http://www.uploadscreenshot.com/stats/45689/5906957
How Not To Get In
This woman woke most of my neighbors up this morning, so it seems only fair that I post the video on the internet.
She was outside banging on the glass door for about 15 minutes shouting to the woman who showed up on the other side of the glass to let her in. She was saying something about having spent the night in jail, and that the woman was her best friend. It sounded like some cheating with someone's boyfriend was going on, but that is only my best guess based on parts of the shouting.
The action happens 25 seconds in to the video. I captured this video, please do not copy it to other sites, just link back here ( http://www.infohole.com/blog/videos/ouch ). Thanks.
Multi WAN Balancing Made Simple With ClearOS
I've been looking for a way to balance multiple WAN links easily for a while now and believe I've found the solution; ClearOS.
The recently released OS based on the works by ClarkConnect, appears to make WAN balancing a snap: http://www.clearfoundation.com/docs/user_guide/clearos_enterprise_5.1/multi-wan.
Obviously WAN balancing two connections will not double the download speed for a single file transfer through a single connection, but by using a download manager which makes multiple connections, or by using P2P, you can effectively download a single file at 2*XYZmbit/sec by balancing two XYZmbit WAN connections.
I'll test it out and report back.
PlayFLV
PlayFLV.org, another one of my websites, is a simple tool allowing you to play flv and mp4 encoded video files from the web.
I find this useful when testing the output of remote video conversions, etc. This allows me to playback the video as it downloads from the server, rather than having to download the whole file and test the playback locally.
Here is an example of it in action: http://playflv.org/?file=http%3A%2F%2Finfohole.com%2Fblog%2Fvideocdn%2Fcleaning-the-tank-sept-2008.flv
It also helps when I want to show a video file to a client or friend, but don't want to make it public on YouTube. I can simply drop an flv into my DropBox and then paste the link into PlayFLV.
Ubuntu 64bit Flash Player
Since installing Ubuntu 9.10 64bit I've been having some problems with the flash player disappearing in Firefox.
I've just replaced the .so that was loaded, with the latest 64bit release from Adobe. Just follow the instructions here, but for me the folder was /usr/lib/firefox/plugins, not /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins.
The flash player is showing again, hopefully this plugin resolves the problem I was having.
Switched To Ubuntu 9.10 From Vista
I upgraded my machine at work from Vista to Windows 7 a few weeks ago and whilst it is a nice OS, it simply isn't worth the $180 or so when I spend most of my time in a web browser.
With that in mind; I just switched my home machine from Vista to Ubuntu 9.10, now I can easily use tools like rsync, ffmpeg, etc. I'll give this a few months and if things go well then I'll switch the work machine over too. Right now I use Dreamweaver a lot for work, so I can't really jump right into Ubuntu yet.
I've experienced a couple of problems with the GUI freezing when I had the visual effects set to full (even with the Nvidia driver installed), but turning the visual effects off seems to have resolved the problem.
Below is a screenshot of me experimenting with ffmpeg/x.264 on my Core2 Quad:
Dell PowerConnect 5424 Photos, PDF Manual
Our Dell PowerConnect 5424 switch arrived at the office today, we're going to be testing the throughput capabilities for possible data center use. Below are some photos of the switch.
You can download the PowerConnect 5424 user manual here: 54xx_ug-dell-switch.pdf
