flipabode

Haven’t kept up with my own promise to myself to post regularly on my own blog. I’ll do  WordPress updates tomorrow and type a little something up afterwords I have tons in my head that needs to be typed up.

Finally finished COD4’s campaign mode on the Xbox last night. I thought I was up to the challenge of going through it on Veteran difficulty, and it turned out I was. It wasn’t difficult, it was severe punishment. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the game. From the intro boat scene to putting the final bullet in the terrorist leader, it was an amazing, cinematic experience. It’s extremely linear, to be more precise it’s an FPS on a rail. A very, very beautiful rail.

I think the hardest difficulty exposes the (few) weak points in the game’s design. The most obvious one is the few places where there is infinite respawns of enemies in combination with the pretty obvious “tripwire” triggering of new waves of enemies. I thought this was pretty obvious fault in COD3 (nothing more awesome than watching a NPC pop into existence), which was considered a low point in the franchise. It’s not too noticeable on default difficulty, which I’m guessing Joe Gamer will be playing on, since you would move through levels fairly consistently, minimizing the number of respawned waves of enemies.

The tripwire triggering of infinite waves in a few places in combination with the increased difficulty (you only take 2-3 shots before dieing in Veteran, plus everyone has superhuman sharpshooting skills) makes it some of these sections incredibly tough. In a couple cases I think it came down to luck more than anything that allowed me to survive. Add the sometimes microscopic Checkpoint triggering, you can make your way pretty far into a firefight and completely miss  checkpoints.

On the flip side, I can also easily argue against the above. With percise enough timing between waves, you could make it through the infinite respawn area with quick enough shooting and sprinting to the next checkpoint. The only problem with that is you aren’t really taking a moment to really admire the world that Infinity Ward built.

All things considered, it is a well crafted experience, and I’m saying that after hours of swearing at the TV after dieing for the 50th time in the same place. Now, tonight, I subject myself to the hell that is known as the Epilogue mission on Veteran.

Hopefully this is positive news. This morning in my usual digg skimming before I start my day of work, I came across a post linking to MacScoop about the latest 10.5.2 developer seed issues fixed list. There was a couple things that stood out that where identified. First was network sharing of optical drives. That’s a given considering the MacBook Air’s quickly approaching release. The other discovered feature is the ability to use network volumes as a Time Machine backup device. By no means is this confirmed in the final build, Apple has pulled undocumented features last minute before on OS updates, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

If that feature makes it into final release, but you can’t use the afp share on the AirDisk, you can mount it as a regular Samba share and go about backups that way.

full list at MacScoop.com

“The” Steve Jobs had his keynote at Macworld yesterday, along with bringing a few new Apple branded goodies to the table. The biggest of which is the new MacBook Air. All I can say is this, Hotness. I couldn’t bring myself to buying one to replace my still going strong MacBook Pro (albeit it’s on it’s third battery in less than two years.), I still ordered one on behalf of my sister, as she was holding out for something thin and lightweight. I know she’s pumped to get it, and I’m pumped to get a chance to play with it before she gets it.
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Well, I haven’t really posted anything on here in a while, super busy with work and all. Now that work has settled down somewhat in terms of workload, I can finally make regular updates to the blog again.First thing is first, what was I working on since the last post? Well, I was put on the tea that was tasked to do the Rolex Mentor and Protege redesign. We launched the English version a couple weeks ago, and just today launched the Spanish and French versions of the website!  Mad props to everyone involved, I really dig the design, it’s so sharp to look at. Check it out if you get a chance! With that launch done, I can finally concentrate on starting to build my own website. Bizarre I know. What kind of web developer doesn’t have his own real website. As with most things, I’m really big nitpick, unless it’s done completely and properly, there is very little reason to put it online. I have a couple 99% complete templates built, just have to finish the one I want off and go with that.This is perfect timing, since I’ll be able to monkey around with Prototype JS 1.6 that was just recently released. All the new features and speed optimizations have got me interested, I want to try my hand at building some cool things. For the Mentor and Protege site I got to do a bit of work with Prototype 1.5, since that was the latest stable at the beginning of the technical implementation. It has definitely gotten my attention though, it has alot of pretty cool convenience features that help speed up the development process of building new functionality.Moar posts, I promise!. 

I stayed up until 2 AM jumping through a ton of hoops to get my phone running Windows Mobile 6.

I purchased the HTC 621 from Rogers when it was first released a few months ago, and was extremely happy with it. My previous phone was an Audiovox SMT5600, just another rebranded HTC phone (I really dig HTC phones). It served it’s purpose for the couple years I have it, but I must say, the 621 is leaps and bounds better than the 5600.

As with most things in the wireless communications industry in Canada, the phone is lagging behind in terms of Windows Mobile 6 support. I hear it may or may not be coming as an update to what is on it now, which is Windows Mobile 5. I decided to take the leap and update the phone with HTC’s official firmware that was just released in the last couple days.

I must say, I’m pretty impressed by it overall. HTML e-mail support works great, especially in combination with my RSS feeds inside Outlook 2007. Yahoo Go is another app that came installed on it. It’s beta but it feels like a polished app, I really dig the flickr functions in it (I just wish data plans didn’t suck in Canada, I’d be using my phone for far more in regards to internet usage. Who knows, I would even start building applications specifically for the platform.)

As I explore functionality, I will be posting my opinion about it in the following days.