The Ugly Side

Every society has an ugly side to it, whatever that may be. The sad truth of it though is that when forced to face it, most realize that the ugly part of their society isn't just some small minority, but usually tends to be the large majority. Today's modern communication systems allow for online gaming on a scale never before realized. When joining this online gaming community, it's like jumping head first into the deep end of the ugly side of society's pool.

The fact that there is absolutely no identification available to others beyond what information you choose to put up with your own gamer information, opens people up to the realized freedom to say whatever they want. This freedom (and sad reality that people choose to exercise it) is a clear window to the ugly side of our society, a side that will likely turn out to be more of a majority than we would like to admit. While most people who meet someone on the street, face to face, will act with some amount of mutual respect towards each other, the same cannot be said of online gamers. Often times the first words out of a gamers mouth in a new encounter are laced with profane, sexist, racist and homophobic remarks.

As G4's Adam Sessler comments in this video, there is no reason for this type of behavior. Just because someone on the other team chose to camp an area because that was their best strategy against you isn't reason enough to hate them for it. Since when did Run & Gun become the only strategy to use in shooters? There are no rules as to how to play FPS games..you just play them. Whoever has the most kills in the end is the winner, no matter how they got them (except by the obvious system manipulations which ruin the game for everyone). There's no need to whine and complain when you get beat. Just grow a pair and be man enough to say Good Game to the other guy and go your separate ways. Even after the Boston Celtics dismantled the LA Lakers in the NBA Finals last night, Kobe Bryant was man enough to go over and congratulate the other team. Kind of sad that most gamers today aren't man enough to even do that.

Firefox 3 Released

Today is the release date for Firefox 3. Starting at 10 AM PDT today, Mozilla is going to try and set a world record for the most software downloads in a single 24 hour period. For those who don't know what Firefox is, it's basically your run of the mill web browser with a lot of enhancements to make it by far the best one on the market. If you're still using Microsoft's Internet Explorer...I'm sorry.

Firefox doesn't present the security flaws that are built into Microsoft IE. Maybe it's just me, but I don't like my web browser so tightly intertwined with my operating system. Firefox also renders web pages (converts the HTML code to the stuff you see on your screen) a lot better and more accurate than almost any web browser out there.

For those wanting to see the new cool features of Firefox 3, here's a great screencast that demonstrates them.

An all new high....

Well, it looks like my internet connection got slightly better. Above is an image from my all time high for bandwidth that I just hit today. Perfect gaming speeds, don't you think?

Xbox Live Video Marketplace....FAIL

During the last week I've started getting an error message whenever I try and download a video through the Xbox Live Marketplace. When I click to agree to the purchase of a video, the error message

"This item is not available at your current location".

From what I've been able to ascertain, this error message is intended to restrict video content to certain geographic locations. This is understandable as some videos are only licensed to be distributed in the United States. The problem I have with it is that I am located in the United States and have been for the last eight years, which wholly encompasses my time as an Xbox Live subscriber.

So, in an effort to resolve the situation I called Xbox Support (1-800-4MY-XBOX) which resulted in 30 minutes explaining the situation to someone with a thick Indian accent, only to be transfered to someone who (supposedly) knew what they were doing. The next person (still, an Indian accent, but just not as thick) had no clue as well, but thought that crediting me 160 MS points would fix the problem. By that time I pretty much determined that phone support was useless.

My next attempt was via the Xbox.com forums. Sure, it was exposing the problem to millions of idiots, but there was the slight chance someone competent would read it. I made my post, but only received responses from one person who really didn't seem to know how to do anything but throw out random suggestions.

My latest attempt at trying to resolve the issue was in using Xbox's email support. The email support form isn't exactly shown up front on Xbox.com. They really want to push people to use the phone support first. Anyways, I sent my email off, detailing the whole problem, copying much of what I posted in the forums. Here is the response I received today:

I understand, you can’t download some contents from Video Marketplace and you get an error message “This item is not available from your current location.” I deeply apologize for the inconvenience that this might have caused you.

Beginning in May 2007, the Xbox LIVE service will restrict the download or purchase of content based on geographic location of their console.

Xbox LIVE will determine the user’s geographic location based on their console’s IP address upon login. If the content the user is trying to obtain is restricted in their geographic location, Xbox LIVE will block the purchase or download from occurring.

Upon blocking content, the user recieves the following error message:
This item is not available from your current location.

Licensing Compliance will primarily affect Video Marketplace content, as it is licensed only for U.S. distribution. Additionally, gaming content will be restricted based on government regulation. There are certain countries, such as Germany, where that content cannot be viewed per government regulation. Thank you for understanding.

It looks like they didn't really read my email other than to glean the subject of the matter and send out a generic response. The big clue they should look at is why this just started happening a week ago and why it's still happening when it's pretty obvious if they did a simple trace of my IP address that I'm located in Utah, USA. It would seem whatever algorithm they're using for determining geographic location is flawed. I responded to the email and am waiting to hear back from them now. Hopefully it gets forwarded on to someone who is actually able to read and understand the issue and then go and fix the problem. If Microsoft wants to become an online distributor of high definition content (movies & television shows) they had better get this fixed, otherwise I see people sticking with cable & satellite on-demand, DVD, & Blu-Ray.

Firefox 2.0.0.13 Memory Usage

Mozilla's Firefox browser had me update to the newest version earlier this week, version 2.0.0.13. Usually this isn't such a big deal. Mozilla puts out a good web browser that so far has beaten hands down anything Microsoft has out (Internet Explorer). Yesterday though I noticed a problem with Firefox. It seemed that it was using a lot of memory, a lot more than usual. I thought maybe it was just my work machine, considering I was playing streaming music on it through pandora.com as well as running a few development environments.

Last night I thought I'd test it out. Before I went to sleep I opened up Firefox to an ordinary web page, one without any video, audio or flash running. I left the browser open all night while I slept. This morning I awoke and checked the memory usage for firefox.exe. It was using over a gigabyte of memory, on a machine with only two gigabytes available! I don't know what the problem is, but it seems Mozilla has a serious flaw in this version of Firefox. If you use Firefox and haven't already updated to version 2.0.0.13, don't. Wait until they come out with the next version. I assume I won't be the only one experiencing this problem and Mozilla should kick out a new version pretty quickly. Hopefully sooner than later...

Xbox Live Game Bandwidth Usage Study

I've had an idea brewing for a bit but I need some help in order to complete it. My idea is to use my laptop computer to measure the bandwidth used by Xbox 360 games, on a per game basis. I figure that since my internet connection bandwidth is more than enough to be sure that it won't be a bottleneck that I might actually be able to pull this off and be fairly accurate about it.

My idea is to use my laptop with internet connection sharing to connect my Xbox 360 to Xbox Live. I have a USB to Ethernet port and the built in ethernet port on my laptop. I would just need some software that will allow me to track the individual bandwidth usage of a single ethernet port. The best I've found is AnalogX Netstat Live, but it lacks the ability to track over a specific time period and the ability to export more specific stats. I would be welcome to any ideas on a software tool to use to do this.

Update Post Link

Google - Use it

I'm not all for big internet companies in general, but Google has changed my mind, at least with respect to them. I used to have a Yahoo email account, one that I signed up for back in the early 90's. After a while of using that I figured out how to use PoP3 to check your email using a windows application. Then Yahoo discontinued that service (unless you paid for it). So, I dropped Yahoo.

Then I got myself a hotmail account. I thought it was pretty good. I could use it for email as well as instant messaging. The only real downside to it was the fact that your email could only be accessed via HTTP. That got old pretty quick. After we dropped our dial-up internet service (which required an MSN username), I told myself no more online email systems.

I then registered my own domain name and paid for web hosting. This enabled me to setup my own email addresses at my own domain name. I still use them to this day. The downside is that I have to have an email client to access it or go through a painful login process to get to their hosted email clients.

Then I was introduced to Gmail, Google's email service. I signed up for a gmail account way back when it was in beta and the only way to get one was if someone who had one sent you an invite. At the time the only people who had that were the über geeks aka computer science and engineering students at the university I was at. This email service has grown to exceed any of my expectations. After a while of using it they added IMAP access. Now they have PoP3 access, enabling me to download all my email to an offline backup. The filtering system is amazing. I now have all my email addresses (as of right now--8 distinct email addresses) forwarded to my gmail account, allowing me convenient access to everything. They even have a decent mobile application that lets me check my email on my cell phone.

After a while of using Gmail I started to branch off and try other Google services. Now I have my homepage on my web browser set to iGoogle, a Google search page with other nifty little tools you can place on their, such as RSS feeds, games and interfaces to other Google services (calendar, notebook, etc). iGoogle also gives convenient links at the top to other Google services I use a lot like Google Documents (online word processor and spreadsheets), Google Maps (also available in a mobile application), Google Video (aka YouTube now), Google News (aggregated news feeds from tons of sources), and Google Calendar (good scheduling calendar, highly useful in remembering birthdays, anniversaries, etc).

Just recently I discovered Google's Blogs aka Blogger. Apparently, as a computer science student, I totally missed the ball on this one. It turns out tons of my friends already have blogs (and have had them for years). In fact, this blog is run by Blogger. It's very convenient to be able to post to the blog without the annoying admin interface such as in WordPress. Blogger also makes it very easy to have multiple contributors to a blog. After blogging for a bit I wondered how would be the easiest way to keep track of all my friends blogs and how to find out when someone posted something new. At first I was putting all the feeds on my iGoogle page, but that started getting crowded real quick. Then I found out about Google Reader, an RSS feed aggregator that shows multiple feeds together in one nice little widget on my iGoogle page. This tool makes keeping track of news, blogs, online comics, or anything else with an RSS feed very simple and easy to do. I think it's safe to say that I'm a Google convert...

MORE SPEED!

Not to gloat (ok, yeah, I'm gloating), but I recently was able to upgrade my internet connection to the higher tier of service. All I can say is....wow.

I really don't understand why more people out there aren't demanding internet speeds like this. After this, I'll never be able to go back to cable or dsl.