November 2004 - Posts
I was reading a post by Michael Stuart about Halo 2 on Xbox Live and completely agree about the problem of a few gamers really ruining the experience for others. Talking trash on Xbox Live has become pretty standard these days and seems to be getting out of hand. I've found the racial and religous slurs to be way out of hand, and I don't understand what happens when you give feedback on players. In NHL Rivals I used be able to mute people (usually because they would drop during games) and it would show up as soon as they entered the lobby, which made it easy to either drop before it started or have them kicked, depending on my clout with the room. I haven't figured out a comparable way to mark players in H2 just yet.
I do like the way the ranking system works to keep players matched up with others of similar skill. However, the other thing I was wondering about is how the ranking system works when people quit. For example, I've seen comments where people say that your ranking gets dropped when you quit, but that doesn't make any sense to me. As a player, I care more about winning than I do about having a high rank. As such, I would play a bunch of games until my rank rose to the point where people got better than me, then quit a bunch of games so my rank would drop and I could 0wn some n00bz (EDITOR'S NOTE: 0wning of n00bz is not necessarily endorsed by SharpLogic Software, http://www.sharplogic.com). On the other hand, if your rank goes up when quitting, you'd get to play better and better people as "punishment" to drop your rank naturally, which makes the game sucky for your unfortunate teammates. It would be very interesting to know how the system works, although publicly describing the system would reduce its effectiveness drastically (unless it's really, really good).
Any thoughts?
I've got a few long flights coming up, so I'm planning my inflight entertainment strategy. Does it require more battery power to play a song from a CD or from a WMA on disk? My thinking is that spinning the CD drive costs more energy than decompressing the WMA file, thereby wearing out the battery faster. Does anybody know for sure? Also, what about the same question for DVDs vs. WMV?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6549074/
Maybe it's because I'm a hockey fan, but I'm a little surprised that a player could get suspended for 30 games for throwing punches. Granted, athletes are not supposed to hit fans, but fans aren't supposed to hit athletes either.
After the infamous shoe-beating that Mike Milbury unleashed on a fan in the stands in 1979 (http://www.eagletribune.com/news/stories/20001215/SP_002.htm) he was suspended--for two games--and the fans were ticketed for disorderly conduct.
If a fan throws an object at a player, they should be obligated to receive a thrown object--such as a fist--from anyone on that player's team.
The sad thing is that some of the fans--who should qualify for Darwin awards--will probably end up with millions after the inevitable lawsuits. It sets a precident for future fans to continue to attack players who are essentially defenseless due to inadequate arena security.
Well, at least for a few days--I've been invited to speak at Microsoft's Mobile Developer Conference in Bangalore. I hear that Doug Boling will be there, which is great because I've always wanted to get the chance to meet him. I don't know exactly which sessions I'll be giving yet (as far as I know they're all .NET CF so far), but I've already picked out the wu-tang lyrics I plan to slip into the demos in one form or another. If you happen to be in the neighborhood, let me know and we can find some good pizza.
I keep a Hotmail account for Passport and for whenever I have to sign up for something that might produce volumes of spam. However, since the Web interface...leaves something to be desired, I use Outlook. Now--and I guess there's some comlex "win the battle by losing customers" bid that I don't understand--MSN has decided to charge people if they want to access their accounts outside of the browser interface. I guess it's time to dust off the ol' gmail account.
Oh well, at least their music is still free.
I had a need to list the IIS directories available on my local machine, along with their local paths. There is a lot of cool WMI stuff to support things like this for IIS 6, but since I'm using XP I can't use it. I found it to be quite challenging to find code for this on the Web, so here's the code in case anyone else runs across the same challenge in the future:
using DirectoryEntry root = new DirectoryEntry("IIS://localhost/W3SVC/1/Root")
foreach (DirectoryEntry child in root.Children)
{
if (child.SchemaClassName == "IIsWebVirtualDir")
{
Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0}: {1}", child.Name, child.Properties["Path"][0]));
}
}
Let me know if there are better ways to do this.
There's a petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/MLF/ to try and get EA Sports to make "mutant league" games again. Any game that requires you to eliminate the authority figure to re-level the playing field is fine by me. I also need a new hockey game to live by now that the NHL Rivals franchise has been ended :-(
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