Brent’s Thoughts

So I recently got a few Xbox games and I thought I would take some time to give you guys a quick review of them.

WWE2: Wow terrible. Not much else to say. Might be fun in a multi-player enviroment, but playing it by myself was like eating glass shards cold.

Freaky Flyers: Mario Kart in Planes!! Except it is hard to keep track of what is going on. The maps are expansive and there aren’t any tracks. Plus you can go up or down. What it really makes it is hard. Hard to keep track of where you are supposed to be going and hard to meet the various goals that it sets for you.

Freedom Force: This is a pretty bad ass game really. It suffers from one thing. It is hard to aim. The control for where you are looking is sorta jacked up. The concept of the game is awesome though and I would say it is a definite must play. In the game America has been invaded by the USSR. At the end of WWII it was Russia that dropped the bombs not us. As a result of that and other events they became the dominate Superpower. Now it is your job as a freedom fighter to attempt to battle them out of New York. The interesting thing is that a close line could be drawn between this scenerio and perhaps the one in Iraq now. It is set off nice by news reports from the now Russian run media about how they are helping people and “Have always been worried about the dictatorship government of America”. Good stuff, if only the controls were a little better. Of course I never played a lot of Tomb Raider so perhaps I am just not practiced at it.

Dungeons and Dragons, Heroes: Great game and I have only played it single player. Multi-player can only be fun since it is just the game with a bunch of your friends there to play with you. It is a lot like Hunter:Reckoning, but is more enjoyable to me since it adds on all the stuff that Hunter seemed to be missing. Plus the attack button isn’t the trigger (Man that wears you finger out). Typical D&D style leveling and magic with some real twists to give it that brawler feel.

I also got a copy of Futurama. It is pretty decent and would probably be worth playing through if I didn’t have these other ones to play. The controls are fairly decent, but it suffers from something that I have found to be a problem in all 3d platform games: Poor landing detection. It is too difficult to find the edge of a platform and make the jump to another one that is really far away. You either walk off the edge of the one that you are on, or don’t get close enough to the edge and miss the one you are trying to land on.

I picked up a 250G hard drive for Diablo to store some of my “backups” and stuff on. Unfortunately, apparently there is a real issue with 137+G IDE Hard drives in Linux. It is something that is being worked out though. For right now I am running a 2.6.0test4 kernel so that I will have access to the whole drive. I wonder if Windows has this issue?

The LKML has been a big help with it though and I have generated a little bit of traffic about some of the different stuff that needs to be done to get it right. Hopefully that will result in some cool stuff.

Thought I would add in that I now have added another 250G to Diablo. Pretty amazing that I can have half a terabyte of data in one machine. Actually since I am running a seperate IDE controller for them I could put a terabyte in it.

No not MRTG, I got that, but I want something better.

All my switches are SNMP aware and all of them are setup to use it. I have MRTG monitoring them and it draws me a pretty little graph and stuff. That is great for when I want to see what traffic any particular link is taking up, but it sucks for when you want to track that traffic down.

What I want is something that looks similar to Etherape, but that uses the SNMP data off of my switches and routers to graph out the traffic flow as it happens. Almost like a combo of cheops and etherape.

Does anyone know of such a beast? Linux or Windows is fine.

Original thread from my old forums

Well my parents new house is pretty much completed. All that is left is for some appliances to be put into place and for some touch up paint work to be done. As a result it was time for me to start finishing up the Television system and Computer network. The phone system piggy backs onto the data wires so it gets done as well. The television system is actually a fairly complex system. There are really two completely separate systems in the house. Dad and I ran over 500 feet of coax in the attic, which was kinda cool since I was running it when there was no ceiling underneath me. Since it is too far out of town to get cable television they have DirectTV dish and have two of the receivers. In order to hopefully allow more people to watch what they want one receiver is setup in the master bedroom and the other is (currently) setup for the great room. All rooms will be connected to both of these though. This allows all the rooms to watch either of the receivers. It is pretty cool and I did a decent job of designing it out and everything I think. When we plugged a VCR into the uplinks and then tested it out at the jacks that I got done, it seemed to have a really clear picture. Means I did a good job of making sure all my connections were grounded and all that. I think I will go back up into the attic and ground all the splitters so that the whole system will be directly grounded, instead of being grounded through the receivers. I think that if there is anyway to make the pictures look better then this is it.
The final end result of what I think would be the coolest thing ever is to take both receivers and place in the in a central location connected to 1 or 2 Linux machines running MythTV. Then out at all the televisions place a modified Xbox running MythTV frontend. With these everyone can schedule programs that they want to watch and the Linux computers will record it. Then anyone can watch it anywhere, anytime, and pause it as well. This would allow people to watch as many programs as they had recorded. Having only two receivers wouldn’t really be an issue anymore, since the chances that three people would want to watch something at the same time that was on live tv would be slimmer. Instead you just schedule your shows and then come back later and watch them wherever you want with the commercials automatically edited out not causing anyone else any grief. It would also allow Movies and Mp3s to be delivered to whatever room that was needed, independently of what was going on in the rest of the house. It is pretty much the end-all-be-all of content delivery systems in my book. Two good computers at about $900 total and then say four or 5 Xboxes at $149 might seem high, but I think it would be worth it and if you did it a little bit at a time might not be too hard. You might be able to find the Xboxes somewhere cheaper than that too I guess.