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Starcraft 2 Beta – Yes I got an official Invite!

July 17, 2010 1 Comment

The good!

As the title suggests I received a Official Beta Invitation for Starcraft 2 this morning, this blog post will touch on my thoughts of the game so far.

I am not sure if I am able to post screenshots due to the game not being released yet but I will do my best to sum up my experience with the game so far.

The not so good!

Well it is not apparent that my skills in Starcraft are rusty (were never that good to begin with), I can not seem to get the upper hand on opponents that I fight in the Beta. Since the Official game does not release till July 27th 2010 the single player functionality of the game is non-existent (or at least locked out), this means that your forced to ether battle the computer in a traditional Battle.net way (similar to the online play of SC1) or go head to head (or 2v2, 3v3 and so on) with other beta players. The issue here is I SUCK AT PVP REGARDLESS OF THE GAME! You might think me exaggerating but I assure you I am not, playing vs a real person requires honing in on your strategy skills which sadly I apparently lack.

Point When playing I won only once (and that was vs the PC) this was out of maybe 20 matches i played through out the day.

General Game play VS SC 1

The core way you play the game has not changed much, the graphics are nicer and smoother, but aside from that actual game dynamics have not changed (based on the Multiplayer side anyway).

Aside from the actual functionality of the game being similar they seem to have greatly reduced resource harvesting times, the new time is similar to the speed achieved in the first game when entering the cheat “operation cwal” almost instantly your units gather resources (there is a small delay to make it more challenging), however I expect this might be tweaked and possibly lengthened by the time the game launches.

There are some units that have changed a great deal in use however I never lasted long enough to test any of these lol.

Overall impression from the few hours i played it so far!

I think the game is a huge leap forward in terms of technology and what it can do, however as far as feel, it very  much feels like an updated version of the first game. In fairness however one can not really get a feel for the new features of this game until you are allowed to play the single player game. I feel for Multiplayer at least the game will be very similar and feel almost like a new SC1 remake.

I am convinced that the story aspect of the game will be far better then the first and the dynamic aspects involved in campaign mode will make this game stand out.

In its favor it does incorporate itself into the new overhauled Battle.net system which supports RealID friends. These are essentially friends that once added to your list can be chatted with from any of the new Blizzard games, World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2 are the first two to use it Diablo 3 from what I hear will utilize it as well. Blizzard is boasting the big benefit of this is that if two friends have linked their RealIDs on a friends list then Friend A could be playing World of Warcraft while Friend B could be playing Starcraft 2 and both could see when the other is online and chat with them across games.

A WoW user could use this feature to chat with friends regardless of the realm they are on or the faction they chose.

As I continue to use the Beta I will report back should I find anything cool about the new game. Keep in mind just 9 days from today you can buy the full game so it is rather odd that i was given a Beta invite this late in the program and this close to the final launch.

Feel free to post your comments below and if you also have a SC2 Beta (official no hacked beta versions please) key as well and wish to play together some time look me up and send your RealID* to andy [at] andyjamison [dot] com if you want to be friends on the game of course.

*RealID refers to the email address you used when you signed up for battle.net. There is also a method in Sc2 using your Character ID but this is rather buggy i hear

Games, Starcraft & Starcraft 2, World of Warcraft

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Introducing: Open Source Food – Fried Mushroom Edition

July 14, 2010 1 Comment

Open Source Food

What is Open Source Food? – To answer this I need to first summarize what Open Source means to me.

Open source is the essence of sharing in the software world, you take the source code someone else has worked to make and adapt it for your own needs and possibly make a new peace of software out of it. I have taken this philosophy and adapted it to the Food world, you take an recipe that someone puts up and allows you to use, alter it and adapt it to serve a new purpose and create a new item from someone else initial work. This to me is very similar to Open Source, so I coined it Open Source Food!

In the spirit of Open Source I took a recipe i found on a friends site and changed it slightly making it work for my needs.

Open in the sense your free to change it and Source referring to the raw ingredients

Fried Mushrooms

Recently I got a huge craving for Fried Mushrooms so I began to look for recipes online, not finding any that really interested me, Robbie Ferguson suggested trying the batter for his Parmesan Chicken and using it for the mushrooms, I agreed and tonight I did just that.

Mushrooms before being Fried

Mushrooms before being Fried

I started with some cheap White Top mushrooms shown above which I mistakenly bought way to many of. I then took the following recipie

  • 1 Cup Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
  • 1/2 Cup Grated Parmesan Cheese (I just use the freeze-dried stuff here)
  • Sea Salt (about 1 tsp)
  • Fresh Crack Pepper (about 2 1/2 tsp)
  • 2 Large Eggs (Whites Only)
  • 1/2 Cup Room-Temperature Water

This generated a nice batter which proved to not be enough for the large amount of Mushrooms I bought, so I had to make a second batch while dubbling the above incrediants.

Mushroom Batter

Mushroom Batter

When I placed the mushrooms in the batter they were easily coated as you can see which helped to create a great tasting mushroom. When i got them evenly coated I began to heat up some cooking oil in a Deep Fryer, setting the Fryer to 375 and giving it about 5 minutes to heat up. I then dropped them in one at a time and let them cook until they resembled the color below

What the Mushrooms look like fresh out of the Fryer

Freshly fried mushrooms

After that you want to make sure you have a plate with a few paper towels on it to absorb the excess oil, then place the Fried Mushrooms down on it and repeat till all the Mushrooms are done. You can tell if you did it correctly when they look similar to the image below

First Batch of Mushrooms

First Batch of Mushrooms

That is all that is left of the first batch as they were so good my Wife and Daughter seemed to woof them down as evidant by the small amount that is in the picture above. Keep in mind this was merely the first batch, finaly I repeated the steps over and over until the last batch was done, You can tell by the picture below just how many Mushrooms were made.

Final fried mushrooms

The pile of Shrooms

As you can see I made a huge amount here and that was not even all the Mushrooms I still have about 12-15 left that never got fried due to running out of Batter once again. You can see in the image below just how many mushrooms were left which is not alot

Left over raw Mushrooms

Left over Mushroom stems

Bottom Line – These things are delicious and very easy to make but be careful how many mushrooms you buy because they seem to multiply once you clean and cut them up. I had some rather large mushrooms so alot of them had to be Quartered and all of them needed to be de-stemed.

That leaves the left over stems and other Mushroom scraps seen below. You could easily include these in some kind of soup or other Mushroom dish.

Mushroom Stems

Mushroom Stems

Let me know what you think post your comments below.

Food, Recipies

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World of Warcraft – Cataclysm Information

July 14, 2010 0 Comments

G4 has 3 videos up on their site that explain more in depth the benefits of the upcoming expansion for World of Warcraft.

Some of the features they explained were more on the Archeology profession – turns out this is a secondary profession so it can be learned in addition to the main two Professions, however the way the video put it, it is mostly a way to get additional Lore information and learn more about each race in Azerroth. Still this is a cool thing to do when you have nothing better to do.

Of course there is going to be other huge changes with the expansion some of which sound very interesting, the Lead Content designer (last video on that page) mentions so much audio being included that they almost can not fit it on 2 DVDs. It makes me wonder if they might release a Blu-ray version of the game for those with the proper drives, at any rate sounds like Cataclysm will be 2 or more DVDs otherwise.

With regards to flight in Azeroth they seemed tight lipped as to just what would be required to be able to fly in the Classic Zones but the way it sounded is there will be no additional requirement you can just do it, provided you are the right level and have bough flight in the past expansions.

At any rate this is a short post but wanted to get the word out, if you are even slightly interested in the expansion I suggest checking out the videos they are all about 6-8 minutes long and there are 3 of them.

http://www.av-j.com/wowcata

The link above will take you to the G4 site that hosts the interviews.

Games, World of Warcraft

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Cool little Command Line Trick

July 9, 2010 4 Comments

Ok so most of you might be a little beyond small little tricks like the one I am going to talk about here but, I found this incredibly useful and felt the need to share it.

Ok so first off  I need to site the source here this command is not my work it is the brain child of the folks at Lifehacker.com specifically written by one lowell[AT]lifehacker[DOT]com

That being said on to the meat of this blog post.

OK so when browsing the net looking for guides on how to navigate around the Linux CLI and over all tips and tricks in this area, I was listening to a podcast and this site was mentioned, so I checked it out.

The scenario: Have you ever wondered what you can do to make creating a directory and then entering the directory easier and less time consuming?

For most beginner to intermediate users of Linux CLI tricks and macros are not something that comes easy, however with this little bit of code you can easily make a directory and instantly enter that directory. This alone is cool but this command does one more thing I love coming from a Windows background, it allows you to use folder names with spaces without the need to encapsulate them inside (‘’)!

Now this may sound like a trivial bit of code but to someone like myself this was a huge time saver, this may not make a difference to the hardcore Linux CLI power user.

So lets look at some sample code

mkdir ~/test

cd ~/test

That is a example of doing a simple folder creation in your home folder and then entering the folder the old way.

mkdir ~/’foldername with some space’

cd ~/‘foldername with some space’

The above would be an example of how to make a directory with spaces in the name and then enter that directory. As you can see this requires a little bit of time even if you use the ~ to represent your home folder as I have done above.

The article Create and Change to a New Directory in One Command says that if you edit your ~/.bashrc file and add the following code

# mkdir, cd into it
mkcd () {
mkdir -p "$*"
cd "$*"
}

You can then simple combine the mkdir and cd commands using the following command

mkcd New Folder/New Subfolder

or

mkcd New Folder

The first line above will make one folder and a subsequent sub-folder under it and then cd into the furthest most folder.

The second option would be the equivalent to making a folder called “New Folder” and then entering it.

While the above commands are not entirely necessary it helps to stream line the process of creating a large number of folders and then entering the last folder made. Some useful things i could see this being used for is say creating a set of folders for a backup archive where instead of having to manually create a folder for each hierarchal level you can simple do it all in one swoop and be in the last directory.

This as mentioned is more a time saver for new users and is extremely easy to setup. It could prove useful to some advanced members as well and is useable on any Linux distro that honors the .bashrc file within a users home folder. I suppose if you knew what your doing you could place this code into a global configuration file to allow every user of the system to utilize this shortcut but seeing as that is beyond my skills I will leave that to the comments should someone want to add how to do it.

As always comments are welcome, any other quick commands similar to this you wish to share feel free to drop them in a comment, I am always willing to save time and it helps users like myself get more comfortable with how to manipulate the .bashrc file to help customized our Linux.

Fedora, Linux, Non-Specific, Ubuntu

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Backups – Off-site is important

July 7, 2010 1 Comment

Well I had a review on this book that I wrote when it was fresh in my mind (the review not the book) but due to some weird Database error it seems that all my posts with the exception of the Linux centric posts were deleted from the time I wrote the original review.

That being said I felt it important to try and recreate this book review. So like any good nerd I went back into my repository of Site backups to see if I could find the backup only to remember that server died! It occurred to me then and there that Off-site backups is the way to go and well that left me with this post which I would have done my best to re-create from my horribly bad memory, however i would rather wait till i can give a more substantial review

Now I have multiple backup systems in place including a manual backup from phpMyAdmin to my Dropbox account. I now have a copy of the DB stored on Dropbox.coms server my own file server, and Amazon S3 as well. Needless to say I shall not loose a DB again (unless all three servers crash simultaneously god forbid).

Since my DB tend to be rather small once compressed I will also copy them to a USB flash drive. Also I will have my new Android phone (with luck the Droid X) and can copy the files over to the Mini-SD card on it as well.

So lets see that is 2 copies on physical removable medium and 3 servers one of which is on site. I hope that fits the bill for Off-site backup!

On another note with reference to the error that seemed to eliminate most of my blog posts (must have happened some time ago) it convienantly left my categories and tags alone how quaint. My post reviewing Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04 i  believe it was at the time, Gone! my review of WIndows 7, Gone!

All this and several others, seems more like an attack then an error but oh well it has been done now time for damage control.

Android, Books, General Stuff, Linux, Non-Specific, Terry Brooks, Uncategorized

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Trouble with getting a clean Face image

July 6, 2010 11 Comments

Ok so I am trying to join the Social Media trend and make a decent Face image to use as my avatar and what not. I am however running into some issues.

me.jpg This image is the source image the one i am trying to use to get the face image. I looked around for tools to help me do this and the only way I found to do it was to open the image in Gimp and then use the Multi-point selection tool to try and outline my face then cut the image from the background and past it onto a new layer on top of a layer with a transparent background.

This resulted in this image face-master.png

The image as you can see if technicaly a face image but it is no where near as cleanly done as I want. If you look on http://www.av-j.com/fedoraplanet you will see examples of people with clean faces ones that do not have jagged edges and do not look like an amateur edited them such as myself.

So what I ask you guys is, Do  you know of a plug-in for the Gimp or some site that can aid me in doing this more cleanly? I need the file it generates to be able to be safely re-sized with minimal degradation to the image quality (not a super good quality to begin with )

Digital photography is not one of my strong points here so anything suggested should be clear and to the point and hopefully something i can follow easy enough.

Fedora, General Stuff, Linux, Ubuntu

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Droid X and Possible New Job Prospect

July 4, 2010 4 Comments

Job Prospect

Those of you that know me personally or even on a chatting basis, know that I have had one heck of a year with all that has been going on. One among many other things in my life that are less then fortunate, is that I am currently unemployed.

Enter Monster.com, I updated my resume on Monster and did the normal daily grind of late which is find 4-8 jobs and apply for them. Out of the blue one day I get a call from a company looking for someone to represent Sharp Electronics for their Marketing company basically helping educate customers on Sharp HD technology, I passed the initial pre-screen and anxiously awaited the interview.

The following Monday I got a call from who would become my manager should I get the job, The interview seemed to go really well and I am confident that the Interviewer got a similar feel for my experience. Now I should mention I have had experience in this type of job before, I sold Cell Phones for the 3 major carriers (not going to list them here you know who they are) wit a company called Mosaic Sales Solutions, This job i interviewed for was very similar to the cell phone one minus cell phones add HD tvs.

At any rate the interview was last Monday and I followed up on Thursday with a phone call re-emphasising how interested I was in the job and what it entailed. Now comes the waiting game, I should know by the end of this week (hopefully) if i got the job or not.

This job should I land it will require me to get rid of my pre-paid phone and get a regular posting plan phone which will be needed to keep in touch with my boss since I am completely solo on this job should i get it.

This brings me to the Droid X part of the post.

Droid X

Given that I would need a regular Phone and not a pre-paid phone, I began to look into which phone I would get and the more I looked the more it occured to me that if I had a smartphone I could be far more productive in several areas with relation to this job. For one customer questions I could not answer could be easily answered using the phone to do a quick internet search and pull up the information. Second I could use this phone to track my sales and log required information for the daily report at the end of the night.

So knowing I would need a Smartphone I began to narrow down which phone I wanted, would work for what I wanted. I tending to prefer anything other then Windows mobile was left with Palm WebOS phones or Android Powered phones. Having done a little research i found Palm was recently acquired by HP and while i have no beefs with Hewlett Packard, I felt with the buyout things might be a little late to be updated/fixed. Android was my choice of OS, then I began narrowing down Verizon Android powered phones as a means to get the phone I really wanted. Talking to several people and researching bit I found that the upcoming Droid X to be my phone of choice. It was not till after I chose this that I realized just how cool this would be, I could download apps from the Android Market to allow me to use this phone for non-work stuff as well.

True with the above things I researched which apps I would install off the bat as soon as I had network access, Some that came to mind were Seesmic, Bank of America for Android, WordPress, shopsavvy and Blizzards Authenticator app. I am sure I will install many more but for starters these are apps i would consider must haves.

Also Android is obviously powered by Linux which to me is one the best things out there. I use Windows for some things i can not get to work under WINE but for the most part Linux is my OS of choice so a phone powered by Linux just seems to be a logical choice.

All that being said, I will most likely not get a phone should I not get this job (at least not at first) since another monthly bill with no job is not the smartest of moves.

If you know a good (useful, or fun) app for android post it in a comment.

Android, Fedora, Linux, Non-Specific, Ubuntu

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Fedora 13 Way more then hype Part 2 – General Usability

June 26, 2010 3 Comments

Fedora has changed alot over the years and during the time in which I have been using Linux, Fedora 13 is no exception to this. There are some very cool new things in Fedora and some even under the hood which you might not think about. Those however that affect the way in which you use Fedora are what I call Usability features. It is no secret that I am rather partial to Fedora and continue to use and occupationally review it.

In case you have not read my last post or do not wish to read it here are the specs for the system and VM i used to review this.

My hardware:

Virtual Machine Specs

  • 22gb Hard drive image
  • 1024mb of ram
  • only allowed 1 Core to be used for this VM (4 available from my CPU)
  • Host OS Windows 7 Pro 64bit
  • VM Software Virtual Box 3.1.8
  • 12mb of video memory
  • mouted ISO image as CD drive
  • Virtual machine CPU extensions turned on

Plymouth

As many of you undoubtedly know this is the new graphical loader that replaced Red Hat”s RHGB back in Fedora 9 I believe ( maybe 8 was the last one to use RHGB), this allows for animated graphical splash screens to be displayed while the system boots as well as offering a plug-in interface for developers to tie in other features to Plymouth.

Fedora 13 added support for more graphics cards allowing more people to take advantage of this new technology. Not a whole lot different then previous Fedora versions here but worth mentioning.

New Documentation Menu
Fedora 13 Introduces a new Documentation sub-menu to the Gnome panel, this allows users to more easily gain access to important information such as the Release notes or security guide. Below you can see the main menu and then a screen-shot of the underlying documentation menu.

Documentation Main Menu

Documentation Sub-menu

Backup Utilities
As any user knows backing up your system is an essential part of ensuring your data remains safe, Fedora 13 has taken steps to include a peace of software that will make this task painless.

When i first load a new version of Fedora one of the first things i do is find a good backup program to aid in automated backups of my home folder. Fedora 13 includes by default a program called Deja Dup. This program upon loading looks very simple and quite stripped of features, however as I found out looks are deceiving.

What this App lacks in visual appeal it makes up for in pure awesomeness. For the first time since its release Deja is one of the only (decent) apps to support backing up to an Amazon S3 cloud FREE. Let me repeat that “FREE” access to backup to a Amazon S3 cloud.

Why is it so important you might ask?

Amazon S3 is a way to have cloud storage that extends as you need it instead of charging you for a set limit on space. The down side here is that they do not have an Amazon program to download and use to manage your files. This is where a lot of third party developers come in and charge for solutions that will allow you to use your S3 cloud for backup storage. Deja might be light weight but it is a fully robust S3 backup client as well as a general backup tool. This program being free is a huge plus to me as I have yet to find a comparable program on Linux or Windows that comes close to this one.

That being Said it can backup through tradittional means such as a network location or even to a compressed file you can then copy to a CD or DVD. While its ability to connect to S3 is one of the features I use frequently I am by no means implying you need an S3 account to get use of this program.

Judging from the projects website it looks as though this was originally an Ubuntu project and must have been ported to Fedora. I am so glad that who ever ported it did, I strongly recommend you give it some attention and see how it works.

Deja Dup Project Site

Deja Dup Opening Screen

Deja Dup Preferences

Deja Dup Backup Summary

Automatic Printer Installation
Fedora 13 contains an improved Printer wizard that for most printers will detect and automatically configure the printer for you. My printer apparently was not one of these printers that was automatically detectable, however it still did not take much for me to get it setup as I am used to the older wizard.

The wizard detected my network printer and even let me expand the network tree to see the printer, however it did not allow me to click on the printer to set it up so I was forced to do a manual printer setup. I should note my printer works fine after manually setting it up.

Other Thoughts
Aside from the things i have mentioned in this post there is not a whole lot different that the average user will notice. There is of course a great deal that was done under the hood to make things more secure and what not but for the most part this will feel like a much more Ascetically pleasing OS (due to the new theme) and feel a bit faster as many optimizations have been made.

If I missed any bug Noticeable features (something the average user would notice not a dev) then please feel free to bring that up in a comment below.

As always it is important to note that the views here are not endorsed by Red Hat, Fedora or any other party involved with the development of programs and or components in Fedora 13. if you do not agree with my views that is of course fine just keep the above disclaimer in mind before approaching Fedora or Red Hat

Posted from GScribble.

Fedora, Linux, Reviews

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