Challenge Everything, especially your patience

Having not been able to play Burnout 3 online for weeks (“Unable to open communications to other players”), and never having managed a full game of FIFA 2004 (disconnected after the first few minutes, on the rare occasions I got a connection to another player in the first place), I spent the last couple of evenings looking into why my connection to EA’s flaky-at-best-anyway servers was so poor. I disabled firewalls, opened every port going, put the PS2 in the DMZ, all to no avail. The only thing that ever worked for EA games (while other games were working just fine) was running a wire from the PS2 straight into my modem, bypassing the router altogether– and having splashed out for a wireless bridge, I didn’t want to do that.

I think I’ve hit on the solution eventually, though. I chanced upon a couple of posts like this one yesterday that said some people were having to turn off UPnP support in their router to have Xbox Live games work. Since it was about the only thing I hadn’t tried, I investigated… and it turns out my router had UPnP turned on, but my DSL modem had it turned off. So I turned them both off.

Result 1: A happy evening of online car crashing. (Most of the time; there are still some players I just can’t ping, resulting in a disconnect.)

Result 2: France 2 Brazil 0. Arse. Maybe I should stick with PES after all.

Ubuntu to you too

Have spent a few hours over the past couple of days installing and playing with Ubuntu Linux on my Powerbook G4. I thought I was quite happy with Mandrake^H^H^Hiva 10.2 (one of the few other mainstream distros that runs on a Powerbook), but I think I was wrong… with Ubuntu, the GNOME battery monitor works, my plug-in wireless card works, and my Wacom tablet works (mostly– no pressure sensitivity). And most of all, everything feels a lot snappier, especially the indispensable MOL (which is one of the few things that’s been more of a hassle to set up with Ubuntu than it was with MDK, thanks to the lack of a pre-compiled kernel module).

As with any flavour of Linux of course, there’s still no hardware acceleration for the G4’s ATI Radeon 9700 graphics chip (I do miss being able to play TuxRacer in its native environment, although the OSX port isn’t bad), and no driver for its built-in Airport Extreme wireless card. And there probably never will be, given both manufacturers’ reluctance to release any information about them whatsoever to Linux hackers. But what the heck.

You’ve got mail… but only for 400 days

So, Sun are going to start making us archive any emails over 400 days old that we want to keep, and everything else will be automatically deleted. According to an Evolution vfolder I just set up for the job, I currently have 23,206 emails older than that, each of which I’ll need to decide whether to archive or not. Think I’m going to have a fun few weekends :)

Galway coast

A few mini-photos from our Easter weekend in Galway (most of which are actually of places in Co. Clare):

We stayed at the Ardilaun House Hotel, which was very pleasant indeed… not the cheapest, but their Easter weekend deal included dinner on one of the two nights and full use of the leisure facilities, so I took the opportunity to have my first-ever jacuzzi :)

‘Well beaten

About the only positive to take from Motherwell’s inexplicably poor performance in the CIS Cup Final
on Sunday is that at least Rangers didn’t make us look bad, which would
have made it much harder to stomach– we did it all by ourselves. 
It was such an inept performance that I can’t even bring myself to be
annoyed about it… we had no bad luck, no near misses, no dodgy
refereeing decisions (well okay, there were quite a few of those actually!).  We just
played
like a pub team, and Rangers took full advantage.

Will be interesting to see how serious David Murray really is
about banning supporters from Ibrox who sing sectarian songs, though–
if he is, then after their performance on Sunday, expect the crowd at their next home game to consist entirely of away fans…