Breaking Windows

It's almost over. It's almost over.

The system was shipped yesterday afternoon after 15 days at the service center. That's absurd Microsoft. You suck. You're lucky your system doesn't.

Now the only question that remains is how long before it dies again.

Yes, third graders. That's what, eight years old?

And not just one of them. Nine of the kids in the class plotted to kill their teacher. It wasn't just a basic let's stab her and run thing either. No, these little bastards had a plan. One was going to tie her up, another planned on blocking out the windows, another was a lookout, etc. They planned this better than some adult criminals plan their own crimes.

I'm not sure whether these kids are evil hell spawns or should be members of Mensa. These are some smart third graders. I felt bad when I heard of kids putting tacks on the chair in third grade. Now these little suckers are skipping the tack phase and going straight for assault with a deadly weapon. Times change.

So this week Mr. Driller made its way to XBLA. The single player is great. As Ryan said, it feels like the Dreamcast version. But the online multiplayer is broken. You simply cannot play a game. The person who is not the host continually resets to the begining of the level, in a loop.

For Namco's sake, they better be hard at work on a patch. It really makes me wonder how a show stopper bug like this makes it past QA and Microsoft's "stringent" certification. 

Stupid, stupid flash game. Filler is addictive. Fill the screen with growing balls (heh) and avoid the smaller ones in the process.

Today is the last day. As my Xbox 360 sits literally 15 minutes away in Maumee Ohio at the UPS station, lonely, lacking attention, and likely crying out for me, I await its arrival tomorrow morning.

My 360 officially went through an Emo stage earlier in the week, and how now turned into pure, unadulterated hatred. Since no one told me I could set a vacation time to prevent the poor thing from going through this depressed period, I lost a 209 day playing streak. The sudden stoppage must have made my 360 feel abandoned.

Soon you'll be home. Soon.

Yes, you read that correctly. I have been co-hosting a show for five months now. And as of last night, I  started to host it. I had a small issue, call it first time jitters - I forgot to tell the live listeners that we were going into the after show! Other than that, last night's show went really well, if I do say so myself. In other news I finally got our show listed in iTunes, though I am sad to say through no help of BlogTalkRadio.

I have also setup a Facebook and MySpace Group page for the show. So please join and listen live every Tuesday!

You may have noticed that I have not been posting much to Breaking Windows lately. I have not been online much lately, in all actuality. Well, other than work of course. I have been so busy with projects, I have decided that I will not be online until I get them under control.

This includes online gaming. My Xbox 360 is pretty pissed at me too (If you do not have a 360voice.com account, you may not understand). I am still here, just knee deep in web projects. That is not entirely a bad thing.

And if I could talk to my 360, I would piss it off even more because all I have been playing recently are Hot Shots Golf Out of Bounds and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue.

So Six Apart released this new Facebook app today, it is called Blog It. I know, how original. Well, it lets me post to my MT, WP, Tumblr, Twitter, Pownce, and of course Facebook mini-feed all at once.

It seems to do a good job, as I just sent my first post. The problem seems to be that is it taking line breaks and doubling them in the HTML coding. To be more clear, it looks like this:

P (text) BR BR /P for every graph I write. That is no good. So, I am using this as another test. My main blog is using MT 3.36, so I will have to test it out with MT 4 as well. I should also note that in the Blog It app in Facebook that I am using the 'Plain Text' Format. They have added Markdown already today which is nice. I hope they add TinyMCE or similar WYSIWYG soon.

UPDATE: Bryan Tighe, the app developer is helping me out. I think we have got it working. 

It seems that there is an issue with MT 3.35 where it puts in extra spaces on the published page, even though if you login to MT and republish, things look fine again. The problem I was having (consistently) was that I had not changed my Web Services password from the default one. Once I did that, everything was peachy again.

So, I need to upgrade Breaking Windows to MT 4, and Blog It needs to support Categories. Then this will be a Facebook application that I would use on a daily basis.

Read full, original, review, after the break.

You can bet I will be posting this on Web Hosting Talk later. I already do not like iPower as a host. They suck, simply put. One of our last sites on iPower, one that was not on our iPower reseller, had been the target of a rather malicious and nasty .htaccess hack.

Not only is it irritating that the site got hacked and iPower did not notice or inform us, when we called to tell them they did not sound one bit alerted to the seriousness of the issue. Really bad host.

When asked if they could look into the log files, as I knew the exact date and time it happened, they said that would not lead to much. He would not even transfer me to a Tier 2 tech. I did not push the matter, as I was about to ring his neck. I had already fixed the problem and I could tell the tech was not concerned at all in the matter.

As a matter of fact, he said a "hack" usually happens when a new or old web guy is involved. Well, I work for the old web guy and I am the new web guy, so I don't think so buddy.

This was an genius little hack, some script kiddie must be so proud. They used RewriteCond statements in the .htaccess file to redirect all search traffic from about 20 different search engines to a porn site script that sent you to a random site, oh and 301 redirects to boot. There were also ErrorDocument scripts as well.

Once I looked into the matter the first thing I noticed was the Index and the .htaccess files were modified on April 11. That means the site has been like this for six bleeping days.

The most shocking thing to note here is that "this is not the first time this has happened to one of my client sites," as I am told by coworker. HUH?

Needless to say I changed the password on the account and am moving them to our new reseller on Liquid Web. Hit the jump if you are interested in the code from the little hack.

The Metal Gear Online beta starts on the 21st. And I am ready. But man the process to get here was a bitch! Konami sure could have made the process a little easier. First you must obtain a beta key. Then you need to go into Account Management to enter and download the 700+ MB beta.

Launch the beta and you find out that a 1.01 update is required, this is about 600 MB more. This is an update before we have started the beta, mind you. It begs the question: why not make the 1.3 GB beta downloadable from the PS Store? The download of 1.01 was slow slow I left it go overnight to finish.

Now a KONAMI ID is required. You get this at the id.konami.net site. Good luck using it. It took me no less than six hrs. to successfully create my KONAMI ID. It would either time out the web browser, or it would fail with an error stating that the page had expired due to inactivity (even though I had just clicked NEXT to get to the next registration screen). I understand sites like this get busy but this is unreal.

Now for your KONAMI ID, you need to create two names, and two passwords. Think of it like a login name and pin. This is a little much for a bleeping beta.

Back in the beta you enter your Game ID (that would be the second name attached to your KONAMI ID) and your Game ID password. Now we wait for April 21.

For those casually looking to check out the beta, like my friend Juganawt, these rediculous hoops will not be jumped through. Bad move Konami. Bad move. 

Friday our new intern started at the office, which meant Thursday I had to get Haley's old PC cleaned up and ready for the new guy to use. Its not that we wanted to give him a hard time, it's just that we don't have another Mac in the office.

There is a major difference between using a five year old Dell and a five year old Apple computer. I have a 1 Ghz PowerBook G4 that is seven years old and it does not behave as badly as this Dell. To make a really long story short, I spent half the day friday trying to get everything working for him to use Illustrator -- which I thought I had done Thursday before I left the office.

We then spent about a half hour and purchased a referbished iMac from Apple for $999. We looked on Crag's List and eBay, and finally decided on a Certified Referb from Apple. 

The Dell was going to need more RAM, a complete re-install of XP, and a lot of my time. In the end it was fonts that was the bottleneck that made us decide to get a Mac. We do not exclusivly work with OpenType fonts, so going between Mac and Windows would truely be a pain.

The intern is not a Mac person, but we will change that.

Since the "new" iMac is an Intel, I can get the Dell out of the office for good, installing Parallels and XP on it, as there are a couple programs we need Windows for. It arrives by Thursday, and I can't wait.

So to recap we got a new intern and a new Mac on Friday. 

Lets be honest, LinkedIn is not the pissing contest that MySpace or even Facebook is. LinkedIn is about professional networking over social networking. I really like LinkedIn. I recently wrote a letter to customer service, and since I spent such a lot of time writing it, I figured I should post it here. You can read it in its entirety after the break.

See, Kotaku is not the only blog that can make useless posts about Nintendo and/or other publishers sending games and other swag in cool packages. This is by far the most anticipated Wii game this year for me, even more than SSBB.

It is the same box you have seen, with the skid mark on the top. It also has a car freshener hanger that says "I ♥ Kart" which is pretty neat - so I am not going to waste time snapping photos. GolinHarris always come up with fun stuff.

Of course I am driving home this weekend for my birthday, maybe I will take my Wii with me.

Well, I guess you can say that I am still young enough to find birthdays exciting. I turned 30 on the 24th. So now I am older and wiser. HA. I am heading home for the weekend, to try and relax a bit. So see you all on Monday.

Bryan Tighe, the app developer is helping me out. I think we have got it working.

It seems that there is an issue with MT 3.35 where it puts in extra spaces on the published page, even though if you login to MT and republish, things look fine again. The problem I was having (consistently) was that I had not changed my Web Services password from the default one. Once I did that, everything was peachy again.

So, I need to upgrade Breaking Windows to MT 4, and Blog It needs to support Categories. Then this will be a Facebook application that I would use on a daily basis. Read my original review.

Thanks a lot Paramount. A week to the day you release Cloverfield on DVD, you announce it's coming on Blu-ray June 3rd. That's bullshit. Kind of convenient that you had no Blu-ray plans prior to today, and then suddenly, multiple recent DVD-only releases are getting the HD treatment. I want my $15 back for buying Cloverfield on DVD. We had damn well better be getting a coupon, rebate, or some solid exclusive extras.

On the other hand, if you haven't seen Cloverfield, you need to. Don't expect the tired monster movie cliches. Expect one hell of a fun ride.

When a 7-year old kid, obviously being well monitored, goes on a driving spree and smacks four cars (and more) that's actually pretty impressive. I mean, he couldn't even see over the dash and manages to keep going after four accidents? Kids got some skillz.

That said, the interview in the video is unbelievable. "It's fun to do bad things" and he wanted to let his friend smoke are his reasons. His punishment according to him? Take away the video games for a weekend. One weekend. The car is almost totaled. I'm thinking he's a little more screwed than that. I'm sure someone will hear video game and driving spree in the same sentence and run with it.