August 2005 - Posts
This audio file is about 10 minutes long. I'm glad I had a chance to be a part of this. I love Nintendogs!!
http://nintendo.pwop.com/dogdaysevent.mp3
This post explains everything.
I can't guarantee anything, but it looks like this is the first of a whole series of podcasts that Pwop is going to do for Nintendo.
<bark mode>Tell a Friend</bark mode>
I'll be recording a podcast for Nintendo tomorrow (Sunday, August 28, 2005) at the Nintendo World Store at Rockefeller Plaza. The event is called Nintendo's Dog Days of Summer: Girls' Gaming Event and naturally, my 9-year old daughter is coming with me. The focus is on non-competitive games, which have a huge potential market.
In particular, all eyes are on a new game for the Nintendo DS called Nintendogs. The idea is that you buy a puppy, train it, feed it, walk it, play with it, and in general spend as much time with it as you would with a real dog. The graphics are good, and the appeal is obvious just spending a few minutes with it.
The coolest feature is by far "bark mode". In this mode the wi-fi turns on and when you come close to another unit in bark mode, it barks at you. When you flip it up, you can interact with the other players' dogs in this virtual dog park. Interestingly, each player gets a unique experience in this mode. Players will each experience the group of dogs in a different way. In this way, everyone gets to control the group.
This idea is vastly different from first-person shooter games where everyone experiences the grid from their point of view. The emphasis is on the quality of individual experience with the dogs, not on any kind of competitive activity.
Not surprisingly, this kind of game goes over big in Japan. Nintendogs has sold over 700,000 copies in Japan, and stores in the US were sold out on August 22nd when it first hit the shelves.
You may not realize it but girl gamers account for about 44% of habitual video game players. The conclusion is that there's a huge largely untapped market for games where the focus is on the experience, not on scores and competitions.
Anyway, this is the second project I've done for Nintendo, and I'm really excited about it. In the podcast I'll be conducting interviews with gamers, Nintendo Trendspotters, and executives, and it will feature some new music that I composed just for the project as well.
So if you're a New Yawkah and are looking for something to do Sunday afternoon from 2 to 4, come hang out with me at the Nintendo World Store, 10 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan.
So yesterday I was feeling a little to confident over the health of my system, and wouldn't you know - I got some spyware from some website. Did I have Microsoft Anti-Spyware installed? No. Why? I'm an idiot, that's why.
All of a sudden I get a message on the desktop as an HTML document that I had been infected with spyware and that I should run PSGuard, which has already been conveniently installed for me. Turns out that PSGuard IS the spyware, and acting as a spyware removal tool, totally screws up your system.
Not only was shit popping up left and right but I couldn't remove the helpful message from my desktop. The desktop tab in the Display Property window was frickin GONE. That's right. Gone!
Recognizing the smell of the wool being pulled over my eyes I found this website which directed me to install XsoftSpy to remove it. After a bit of online research I came to the conclusion that this was a safe tool to install, so I did. Turns out it will tell you EXACTLY what's wrong with your system, but if you want to REMOVE the malware you have to register. So I paid them their money and it worked.. Sort of.
I will say that SpyBot did not find this bad boy. AntiSpyware didn't find it either. XsoftSpy actually worked.
Everything returned to normal except that outgoing SMTP and POP3 connections didn't work. So, outlook was broken. I tried connecting with Telnet to my mail server on ports 110 and 25 with no luck. Outlook reported that it could not connect.
No TCP Filtering on the network connection, and turning the firewall off didn't do squat. I was stumped.
So I called in my resident genius who I have on staff for just these kinds of issues. He's painfully shy so I won't tell you who he is, but suffice it to say, he figured it out.
Rich Pendleton who runs Interbridge, my ISP across the hall said he thought it might be that the TCP stack itself had been stubbed. So I told the Genius this and he suggested I run WinsockFix, a free utility that restores your Winsock stack to its original state.
So after this, something strange happened. Telnet to the mail server at port 110 connected but I got a blank screen and pressing any key killed the connection. Outlook was reporting that the connection was Interrupted. Interesting.
So, I immediately thought that this was a double-whammy. Not only did the spyware write over the TCP stack but it also had some accomplice blocking the port. That's the way it looked anyway.
So boy genius says to boot up in Safe Mode with networking support. Sure enough, I could connect. Genius says to download and run HijackThis, which generates a log file of all startup activity. I ran it in safe mode and emailed the log file to him.
We went through all of the exes and dlls that load up at bootup and nothing seemed out of place. All of a sudden he says.. go ahead and disable all the Symantec Antivirus services and reboot. I got what he was thinking, that antivirus software is an easy target of spyware, and I didn't think of that. That's why I hired him.
Of course, that's what it was. I don't know what it was doing, but for some reason, it was blocking my outgoing SMTP and POP3 connection.
Thanks, Einstein.
So, being the main story on the front page of the Daybreak section this morning is a strange feeling. You can read the story here:
http://www.theday.com/eng/web/news/re.aspx?re=241BAB66-4E03-483B-AB05-A626035B85D5
The city has been in the news recently because a small group of people have pursued the eminent domain issue all the way to the supreme court of the United States. The results: the federal government now has the power to force you out of your home if they feel like it. That's right. Google it. It's incredible.
I just want to reassure my fans that this is the action of a handful of people who have power in the city. The people of New London are cool, hip, artsy, and generally very smart. If you are ever in town, stop in and I'll introduce you to some of them. You'll find that they are all as outraged as you are about this incredible issue.
Anyway, it's an honor to be in the local paper (finally) after being in the NY Times, Wired, and The Hartford Courant.
We're in the process of moving the control room, and the live stream is the first casualty. :-)
Mondays
Tonight (Thursday) at 10PM Eastern
.NET Rocks! with guest Joel Pobar from the CLR team
Tomorrow (Friday) at 1PM Eastern
.NET Rocks!
In this episode, Rocky talks about CSLA.NET and the changes for VS2005. He drills down into the details of some aspects of CSLA, and talks about his opinions on Service Oriented Architechture and Objects, and plenty more.
http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=127
Mondays
The Faking-It Show
Karen is NOT drunk this week, and shares her advice for people who try to hard to "keep it real." Carl reviews the Week in Geek and discovers that Shmeckle dabbles in software development as well as saving the world from incompetence. Mark achieves dumber than me nirvana. The Anti-Monkey Brigade gets a taste of "Gorilla warfare". Geoff introduces a new bit, and Richard digs up mostly great toys, and a few bad ones.
http://mondays.pwop.com/default.aspx?showID=31
Mondays Clip of the Week
Shmeckle Writes Code for NASA: http://perseus.franklins.net/Mondays_Schmeckle_Writes_Code.wma (9:08)
Rocky Lhotka is back this week to talk about business objects vs mobile objects vs services, and to update us on his CSLA 2.0 project.
Live show starts at 6PM Eastern. Details at http://www.franklins.net/calldotnetrocks
The refactoring support for VB 2005 is being supplied by Developer Express
Mark Miller, Chief Architect of the IDE Tools Division at Developer Express (he's the guy who designed CodeRush and Refactor!), shows off the new features of refactoring support available to VB 2005 developers in this two part video, totalling 22 minutes.
Part A (1 of 2) http://perseus.franklins.net/refactor3a.html
Part B (2 of 2) http://perseus.franklins.net/refactor3b.html
These are flash movies created with TechSmith Camtasia. They total about 18MB
Enjoy!
It's official!
http://www.dotnetrocks.com/roadtrip/
More details to follow...
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