All posts from category Internet

The Intricate Web

 Martin · 2 years

I've been developing my own websites for over 20 years, and doing the odd website work for a few clients lately, and so I keep up with that scene as best as I can.

The amount of stuff you need to know to be a solo web developer in 2021 is kind of mind boggling though, and I concentrate mostly on the design side, along with rudimentary things like HTML, PHP, CSS, and some Javascript.

I aspire to be able to be better at Javascript, and I'd like to learn Ajax properly someday. And get good at making things with three.js.

I like that we can have websites that do all this stuff - it's crazy compared to the rinky-dink sites I learned how to make back in the Geocities days. But I also sort of lament how complicated everything is, too.

I don't want to compile a website before deploying it. I don't want to have to worry about SEO, and compromise (or worse, homogenize) my designs because Google wants things to be a certain way. I don't want to add special code to my websites so Facebook understands the content flow better.

I hate that this stuff is common. It makes the web feel less like a tool for free expression. But if you don't learn it, and don't do it, others will - and then you won't get work.

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The Shifting Game Maker Scene

 Martin · 13 years

A lot of other Game Maker-related events have happened since I last blogged, as well.

New Admins

Another big development over the last few months is that I am now an admin at the Game Maker Community forum.

Following the sudden retirement of longtime community leader KC LC, the GMC needed admins. Chronic, who was pretty much the sole active admin after KC LC's retirement, needed help. Xot and I talked with YoYo Games' Kirsty Scott about this, and within a few days we were given promotions. We've both previously served as global moderators, and earlier, simply moderators. And I'd also like to think that we both bring something fresh to the community's leadership.

I guess it all sounds a bit silly when you write it out. But I am happy to be a part of the community, and glad that YoYo Games trusts many of us enough to help guide the forum into the future.

Game Maker on PSP & iOS

Speaking of the future, a lot more information has come to light recently (and over the period of time where I didn't update the blog) on the continued development of Game Maker's runner.

At the beginning of the summer, we were shown a copy of Skydiver running on PSP, and much more recently, we've seen Madness Madness Madness running on an iPod and Skydiver on iPad. It's an impressive feat, and I look forward to seeing where it leads for Game Maker users.

The PSP runner wasn't as impressive to me, simply because I knew that even if they did work out all the kinks, it would never truly be easy to release GM-made games on the platform. There are simply too many hoops to jump through. For that reason alone, the iOS runner seems much more promising to me. I hope that I might get a chance to help push out some games for it early on, depending on how YoYo Games plans on publishing user-created content.

I still hate saying "iOS" out loud though. Eye-oh-ess. Does not roll off the tongue.

Oh, and I've also been really happy with all the information Mike Dailly (YYG) has been posting on his blog about the development of upcoming Game Maker releases. It's been a good read, and I like that someone so experienced is heading up that project.

Discovery Competition Entry is Go. Er... No.

A much smaller blip on the radar was the Discovery Competition entry me and some buddies (Matt "Lethalanvas" Griffin and David Perritte) were working on. It took off at tremendous pace, and then we all got a little too busy and we stopped working on it.

Originally, we wanted to keep it a secret, so there wouldn't be much hype about it if we didn't finish (good thing, right?), but now I figure we might as well show off what we've done.

Basically, it's a game about a ninja assassin type guy who's lost his memory and who wants to stop the world from collapsing around him. It features a robust platform engine, coupled a ton of slick animations by yours truly, which lets you run, slide, grapple ledges, swing from ceilings, and eventually a lot more. The gist of it was to create a story-driven platforming experience that gave players a lot of difference challenges at once, so they could work on levels in whatever order they liked, to an extent, depending on their skill level.

If we can all find the time, I wouldn't mind working on it again sometime next year, actually. We all put a lot of work into it, and although there isn't much to do in the game right now, there is a lot of stuff that we have done, including a written story, an awesome platforming engine, some killer graphics and animation, and some cool tunes. I don't want to see it go to waste.

I'll try to get a demo or something up eventually. Like I said, we don't have much of the actual gameplay hammered out yet, but it's fun to play around with.

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Technnoyances

 Martin · 14 years

A list of four things in the world of tech that I find annoying, submitted for your approval in no particular order.

Unboxing videos

I've ranted about this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating; unboxing videos are awful. If there's anything more pathetic to me than sitting around wishing you had some piece of technology, it's doing so while also seeking out and watching other people open up boxes with the desired tech inside.I understand doing research on products you're thinking about buying, but I don't see where the unboxing video fits in with all that. If you want to find out what's actually inside the box, you can find that info on websites or in stores. If you want to see little bits of molded Styrofoam, you've probably got some in boxes you already own sitting around in your house or apartment somewhere.

If you want some new thing that badly, watching someone open up its box isn't going to get you any closer to that goal. Spoiler alert: it's going to be boxed up the same as everything else you've bought. Lots of tape, lots of Styrofoam, lots of plastic. Whoopdy doo.

Purposefully misspelled website/service names

I know that this is probably something that can't really be helped, considering the ever-decreasing amount of URL's available, but there's something that really annoys me about every new website being named in some "edgy" or "cute" misspelling of a simple word.

Flickr. Digg. Pownce. Blippr. Tumblr. Mixx. The lyst goes on.

Have we completely exhausted our reserve of real words for domain names? Has the well of creativity run dry? Seriously annoying.

And you can add to this all the various websites with the words "pop", "crunch", and "mash" in their domain names. Not necessarily misspelled words, but still awful. I don't think I've ever found any site with any of those words in their URL useful in any way whatsoever.

Network searches with Finder

I work in a creative field, and have for years. Unfortunately, this means that most of the time, my employers equip me with a Mac and by extension OS X, which you probably know, is not my preferred operating system.

I don't hate OS X, and actually wish one or two of its features would creep into Windows someday, but there are many quirks and problems with it that nobody ever talks about when they're in the middle of trying to convince you it's worth buying over-priced Apple hardware for. One of those things is the fact that, if you're planning on using it over any type of network, you could be in for some frustration, especially where search is concerned.

The other day I tried searching for a file on our network at work, both of which use OS X. No results were returned, and the spinning "beach ball" appeared, signaling network wait time. So I let it run its course and got back to my work. 10 minutes later, the pinwheel was still showing, and Finder wasn't responding. I forced Finder to quit and then tried to re-open it, but no dice; OS X informed me that Finder can't re-open. And since Finder handles the file saving functions for all the programs I was running, I couldn't save any of my work for a restart. Gah.

And this isn't an isolated incident. In all my years of using OS X, the most problems I've had with it have involved network problems. The only advice I can give, if you absolutely have to work on a Mac, is that if you're planning on doing any major network activity, save your work first.

Organizing media files with Win 7

I've been happy with Windows 7 since I picked it up last year on launch day. It does just about everything better than XP did, and it's nice and snappy to boot. But one thing that absolutely annoys me to no end is the problems I've had trying to organize my music files.

Like many people out there, I've been collecting digital music files for years. A good portion of my music consists of files I ripped myself from CD's I've bought, and most of the rest is digital music I've purchased from Amazon. Over time, as I've bounced between two iPods and about four computers, all with varying amounts of storage, my music has become a bit disorganized. With big hard drives being pretty cheap these days, I've managed to consolidate most of the recent additions to my collection onto one drive, and now I've begun trying to organize it.

Problem is, about 75% of the time I try to move around my music folders, Windows 7 is telling me that there is a file in use and prevents the operation from happening.

After an hour of pure frustration, disabling all music sharing, disabling the folder from being read by Windows 7's music library, disabling Windows Media Player from scanning the folder, and disabling all folder thumbnailing the OS does, it's gotten better. But I still get this error now and then, and it still hurts every time it happens. The file is in use by the OS that is trying to move it.

Isn't it reasonable to suspend the OS from reading the file if a move is being requested? It kills me that with all the great things Windows 7 can do, it still stumbles over something so basic, and so stupid.

So now I have to choose between letting the OS thumbnail my folders, so I can see what's in them without opening them, or making the whole thing look like some kind of file system ghost town, but with the ability to easily move my music around. Awesome.

The one good thing about this is that I've discovered the Local Group Policy Editor, which offers a lot of interesting customization options for Windows 7, under the hood.

Anyway, it feels good to get all that off my chest. Some of it may be unreasonable, and you might disagree with me, but there it is. Sound off in the comments if you have any extreme likes or dislikes in my list or let me know about some of your own tech world annoyances! I'm sure I'll be back with more in the future.

Image unironically courtesy of unpluggd.com.

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One of These Things Is Not Like The Others

 Martin · 14 years

We all have little fits of nostalgia now and then. And what better way to fulfill these odd urges than by jumping online and finding old videos on YouTube, toys on eBay, and DVD collections on Amazon?

So it was that I found myself browsing Amazon the other day, looking at old cartoons. Something I'd read that morning reminded me of an old cartoon I'd enjoyed as a kid, Doug, and I wanted to see if anyone ever got around to putting the series on DVD. This was one of those times when a mere search would satisfy my curiosity; no purchases were to be made.

I pulled up Amazon, typed in the word "Doug", and a few moments later was looking down a long list of cartoons and shows, many of which I remember watching in my youth.

The list read like a lineup of classic Nickelodeon shows: Doug, Ren & Stimpy, Rocko's Modern Life, Hey Arnold!, The Adventures of Pete and Pete, Rugrats, Losing Control, The Secret World of... er, wait. Losing Control?

A softcore porno. In the middle of my Doug search results!

I find this completely hilarious. Right smack-dab in the middle of a bunch of cartoon DVD collections is some random adult DVD, which I can only surmise is there because one of the actors is named Doug Jeffery. A page or two down, the same search also yielded a Girls Gone Wild video, which apparently included "commentary" by comedian Doug Stanhope.

Maybe all those Bing commercials are right - perhaps we are indeed suffering from Search Overload Syndrome.

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Bing Goes The Internet

 Martin · 14 years

Though I am not a diehard Google fan, I usually use Google whenever I need to search for something, and I take advantage of a few of the services they offer like Gmail and their online calendar. Lately though, I've been a bit intrigued with Microsoft's revamped Live Search, Bing. I've been frequently jumping back and forth between Google and Bing to compare search results, especially when I have trouble finding something.

So far, I've been pretty impressed with Bing - it almost always returns just about everything I would find on Google, and the image and video search function on Bing is actually a cut above those found on Google.  And though I do enjoy the simplicity of the Google landing page, which is one of the reasons why I think it became so popular in the first place, I do find myself drawn to the Bing landing as well; they almost always have a beautiful image on display, and the fact boxes you can mouse over are usually interesting.

Bing has been running a contest over the last few weeks, in order to help them find a jingle for the site. The contest simply asked people to record their idea for a jingle, and then submit it to the Bing YouTube page, where the winner would be chosen based on number of views and quality of rating.

The winner was crowned yesterday, and while the video is odd and slightly disturbing, I have to admit - the song is kind of catchy. Catchy in the way that the simple tune gets stuck in your head for about an hour after viewing. Behold the winning video:

The winner, Jonathan Mann, has been creating (and posting on YouTube) a song a day, and the video he submitted to the Bing jingle contest was his 202nd creation. Sure, it's decidedly awful, but isn't that pretty much what's expected from contests like this? Isn't being awful a prerequisite for running a viral internet campaign?

Anyway, I got a kick out of it. And almost as big of a kick out of the sourpuss people posting about how terrible it is directly on the Bing blog. It's pretty easy to pick out the people who are seemingly just mad that Bing isn't the pile of garbage they hoped it would be. But their comments are funny, nonetheless.

Also, I'm happy to report that Twitter has been down for hours now. Apparently, it was taken out by hackers early this morning. Let's hope it stays down.

Update: It looks like it's tentatively back up now. The world has its largest collection of useless information back again.

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Team Fortress 2 Update – Sniper… and Spy?

 Martin · 14 years

Man, I go away for a small vacation and I miss the next big TF2 announcement from Valve! Not a big deal, really - I did have quite a good time on my trip, so a TF2 update kinda takes a back seat in terms of awesomeness... but more on that later. Valve's got a new update page set up for the next TF2 update, and it looks like it's going to be another sweet addition to the game.

So far, they've announced The Huntsman, a bow and arrow for the Sniper that can stick enemies to walls, Payload Race, a new game mode that's kind of like a two-way Gold Rush, and another item for the Sniper, The Razorback, a back-mounted shield that keeps the Spy from stabbing him.

Oh, and speaking of the Spy, he's also snuck in for some update goodness; he'll be getting the "Dead Ringer" watch and the "Cloak and Dagger" watch, which will let him fake death and stay cloaked forever respectively.

Like the other updates Valve has brought to TF2, these will change play considerably, but also seem very well thought-out, so hope fully balance will not be hurt too much. I haven't played TF2 in a month or two and I'm pretty excited about all this... hopefully this will be the push I need to come back to the game, as it is one of the more fun experiences I've had in online gaming.

Anyway, maybe I'll see you there - and hopefully I'll see you back here soon as well, as I write a bit about my recent vacation. Thanks for reading!

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Swashbuckling Under Pressure

 Martin · 15 years

I'll admit it - I am a former pirate.

Back in high school and college, I traded MP3's with friends. We burned each other copies of games. I was not a stranger to the occasional DVD copy. And I ran an illegal OS with illegal software for years.

Much has changed since those days, however. When I fire up my computer today, I'm pleased to see a completely legal copy of Windows XP appear on the screen. Every piece of software and every game I run on my machine has been paid for. And even though a few remnants of my freebooter past resurface now and then in my MP3 collection, the vast majority of the music I listen to was purchased from iTunes, Amazon, or ripped from a CD I bought.

It makes me feel good. But now, I seem to find myself on the opposite side of the fence from many of my fellow internet users.

Recently, the crew behind The Pirate Bay website was put on trial and subsequently convicted of "assisting in making copyright content available," with a total of $3,620,000 in fines, and each member of the team facing a one-year prison sentence. It's hard to say whether or not the verdict was just. On the one hand, The Pirate Bay is brazenly obvious about the purpose of its site. The pirate theme has been taken on in name and symbol, it organizes torrent files by media type (music, movies, programs, etc.), and a cursory search of the site will reveal that the vast majority of the content being traded among users is not legal. But on the other hand, The Pirate Bay doesn't explicitly host any of the files in question; they merely house the torrent files users download to find peers in their BitTorrent client. So, it could be argued that it is the site's users who are in performing the illegal activity, and not the site itself (dubbed the "King Kong defense").

I happened to read this news on Digg, and many people there disagreed with the verdict. What disturbed me though, was that the majority of these people didn't care about the legal intricacies or implications of the matter. They seemed only to think that piracy should be legal, and that it was in the best interest of everyone to continue pirating movies and music in protest.

Here's a few excerpts from the comments section of the submission I read:

Let's all stop going to the cinema for one year!

Truly a sad day...I'm gonna watch a torrented movie now :'(

95% of teenagers generation uses file sharing; they will be the ones in a few years who can vote and be in power.

The majority of people in power at the moment have more than likely never truely used the Internet; for them it's just about profits.

Stopping bullshit.

If you release an album of music, have all the songs good. There is no point in having an album with one good song and the other 50 tracks full of useless songs for padding.

Same with copy-paste Hollywood blockbusters and Video Games.

A real torrent user with pay for anything that is worth of value. Half-Life 2, Super Mario Galaxy, The Dark Knight, these were barely affected by piracy because they were...you know...actually GOOD so people bought them.

So basically, the MPAA and the RIAA are pissed because they will have to get the Entertainment Industry to work harder and actually make a majority good content, which is the exact opposite of their business plan of "take a dump in a bag and net one billion dollars."

And that is exactly the problem with the RIAA MPAA and this witch hunt. All they are trying to do is protect their ability to get money for producing steaming piles of bullshit! Period.

Surely I couldn't be the only person who reads comments like this and just shakes his head in disgust.

First of all, just because something isn't good by your count, doesn't mean that you are entitled to take it for free. In fact, I personally don't understand why you would go to the trouble of taking it for free if it's not good to begin with. But one of the best things about MP3 stores like Amazon is that you can almost always buy individual songs and leave the rest of the album behind, if you so choose. Under most circumstances, that'll only set you back a buck, too.

And if that's not good enough for you, then look at piracy figures for games like World of Goo or Demigod. Both games have gotten good reviews, and both were released without anti-piracy measures in place. At last count, World of Goo had an estimated piracy rate of 90%, while Demigod, after only being out for a week, had hit about 85%. I'm no fan of heavy-handed copy protection measures, but if you think that good content doesn't get pirated, you might just be an idiot.

Secondly, I find it absurd that some people think that music, movies, and art in general should be a free service provided to everyone else. Yes, many artists (myself included) produce work purely for others to see and share with each other. But we also ought to be able to make money from our work, and if the legal system doesn't help protect us, then what incentive do we have to do work? If your passion is carpentry, should I expect you to build me a house pro bono just because you like doing it?

But let's take this idea to the extreme for a moment - imagine that the judicial system has decided that music, movies, and other artistic works should be free for the public to copy and share. Essentially intellectual property, patents, copyrights, etc. would be no more.

Creative work would be pointless, because anyone would be able to take anything you made and reproduce it without consequence. By an ironic twist of fate, large companies, being in the best position to market and sell media, would benefit the most from this arrangement; they would be able to take any idea they spotted among independents and replicate, package, and sell it without giving a cent to the original creator. Where is the logic in that?

Don't get me wrong here; I'm not siding with big business on this issue. I'm no proponent of the DRM schemes they've tried to use to protect their content, typically to the detriment of paying customers. But when I see the ridiculous sense of entitlement people have towards media, coupled with the outrageous piracy rates of games like World of Goo, I can't help but think that there must be some kind of "happy medium" between producers and consumers. And there is, by means of systems like Steam, which seem to be getting things mostly right so far. But we've got a long way to go. It's important to me that we arrive at that destination though, because I am an artist and a creative person, and I want my work to be protected, like everyone else.

For now, I'm just happy to report that despite my years aboard the massive vessel of media piracy, I'm no longer part of the problem.

And it feels good to be a landlubber.

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A Response to a Fignorant GamesRadar Article

 Martin · 15 years

If you were asked to attribute a specific name to the shallow, and often ill-conceived articles that appear on game-oriented websites when real news is in a lull, what label would you give them? Would you merely call them 'filler'? Or would you go further and use more descriptive words like 'garbage,' or 'stupid,'?

In the case of GamesRadar's article, The Fugliest Games Ever Made, you'd likely use those words and a lot more, peppered with profanity, and probably with some vague threats of violence. This list of games is so inconclusive and arbitrary, it almost seems as if they were drawn from a hat. Here's the list of the "fugliest" games of all time, according to Justin Towell, the author:

  • Toejam & Earl: Panic on Funkotron
  • Nucleus
  • Streets of Rage 3
  • Earache: Extreme Metal Racing
  • Sabre Wulf
  • Sonic & Knuckles
  • Mirror's Edge
  • Sega Rally Championship
  • Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing

I've only played four of the nine games on the list, but of those four, none of them deserve to be dubbed the ugliest game ever. And looking at the screenshots and commentary for the others, I get the feeling that the other five games are just as undeserving of that title as well.

First of all, I'd like to point out that style isn't a bad thing, and style certainly shouldn't be confused for poor design. Games like Toejam & Earl or Nucleus employed a unique style to make their game worlds memorable, and the designers should be congratulated for that, even if they weren't always a complete success. According to Towell however, we should look down upon these games; in his opinion, we should hold the style of all past games to modern standards:

"We didn't realise how garish this game is until we downloaded it off Virtual Console recently. Squiggly wiggles in scrolling backgrounds no longer say 'cool'."

We're rapidly moving towards a time where most games are starting to look way too similar to each other, and the best GamesRadar can do is go back in time to trash past games that tried something a little off the beaten path? Forgive me, but that seems counter-intuitive.

Another thing I find particular offensive about this article is that it makes the mistake of equating the technical limitations of game platforms with bad graphics.

Streets of Rage 3 used a dot pattern to simulate transparency. The Sega Genesis didn't have the capability to do hardware transparency, so developers had to find ways around it. This was a common technique at the time.

Sega Rally Championship was a 3D racing game on the GameBoy Advance. The fact that Sega even got a 3D engine working on the GBA is so incredible that I think the low resolution of the rendering should be overlooked, at least in terms of "fugliness".

Sabre Wulf was created in 1984 for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the UK equivalent of the Commodore 64, by a two man team. The ZX was an 8-bit system running on a Z80 processor (a slower version of the one inside the original GameBoy), so naturally, the graphics it pushed weren't particularly amazing. They literally couldn't be.

Towell, speaking of Sabre Wulf:

"At the time of the game's release, the screen was so busy we couldn't work out what was going on.

Now, of course, that lushness has wilted somewhat, especially in the face of games like Tomb Raider Underworld, to the point where its colour palette now looks like someone ate a load of cheap confectionery and barfed it all back up in 259x192 resolution."

Apparently, Mr. Towell didn't go any farther than Wikipedia for his "research." Kinda makes you wonder if he's ever played Sabre Wulf, doesn't it?

Of course, there's nothing wrong with finding appreciation for the current graphical limitations of games by playing older games now and then, so long as you remember that most of those games could not have looked better than they did because the technology (and oftentimes the expertise) just wasn't there yet. Context matters!

But now, even as I've gotten past GamesRadar's complete ignorance of context, technology, and style, I find myself asking: why are Sonic & Knuckles and Mirror's Edge on this list? S&K's graphics were good for the time, and are in my opinion, still some of the best you can find in 2D platformers. Mirror's Edge isn't ugly at all. Does Justin Towell truly believe that one psychedelic background effect can ruin a game? If a handful of people get motion sickness from a game, does that make its graphics bad in any way?

"The screen's just a mess of colours and glowing white orbs. But wait… this is the bonus level after all! And it's horrible. Everything's pulsating like the lightshow you get from a migraine."

How am I supposed to take commentary like this seriously from a guy who, only a few paragraphs prior, lavished Geometry Wars with praise ("bonfire night explosions of colour and joy")?

Maybe I shouldn't expect so much from GamesRadar, but I can't help it; articles like this give me the feeling that they simply don't care what passes for content these days. Or perhaps this is merely the result of a lazy viewership who never questions the veracity of the articles it consumes. But how is it possible to publish an article like this, without harboring at least mild contempt for your site's viewers?

It's truly a shame when articles like this, which contain nothing but dopey opinions and half-baked zingers, make the rounds and generate ad revenue for sites like GamesRadar. I just hope this model of online content-sans-content doesn't become the norm, especially with many major news publications taking their magazines onto the internet and leaving print behind. There's enough garbage online as it is.

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I Got God Damned Malware

 Martin · 15 years

And I'm almost ashamed to admit it. My various Win XP installs have been virus free for about 7 years now, but now the streak has finally been broken. The strange thing is, I'm still not entirely sure how, or where, my computer got infected.

I've looked back on the events that have led up to this unfortunate incident, and I have pieced together what I think has happened, which I present to you below.

Two nights ago, I was browsing the net with Google's Chrome. I had a few tabs open, and I was bouncing back and forth between them. In one of them I was working on downloading a file from a file-sharing site, kind of like RapidShare, but not quite as official (if you can call RapidShare "official" by any stretch). I had jumped through all the rings, skipping two ads and waiting 60 seconds for the download link to appear. Once the link was ready, I began downloading (it was a RAR file).

About 5 minutes later, while the RAR file was still downloading, I noticed that I had left the tab open with the file share site on it. With no reason to keep it open, I switched to it to close it, but as soon as I selected it, Chrome became unresponsive. Not wanting to cancel my downloading file, I let the program sit, hoping that whatever was slowing down that page would resolve itself. After a minute or two, the tab finally showed up, but the whole browser was acting slow and slightly unresponsive, so I closed out that tab and a few others that I wasn't using anymore.

I turned away from the computer for a second to look at something, but out of the corner of my eye I saw the screen change. I looked back at the display, and it took me a moment to realize that Chrome wasn't on the screen anymore - not in a window or on the taskbar. So I opened it back up, and began trying to restore the tabs I had open. About 30 seconds into this, all of my tabs (even those that had already loaded and stopped), switched to show the Chrome error page. A minute later Chrome disappeared from my screen again with no warning or error message. Opening the program again resulted in a similar outcome.

By this time, it had gotten pretty late, so I attributed this to Chrome's beta status, turned off the computer, and went to sleep.The next day I got home from work and fired up the computer again. I browsed around the web a little, got up to go eat dinner with my girlfriend, and later came back to the computer to play some games. I noticed that FireFox (my default browser) had opened a window in the background - an ad for some idiotic anti-virus program. I assumed I had overlooked it from using FireFox earlier in the evening, and closed it. A minute later it was back, and this time I was sure that I hadn't initiated it's arrival.

My troubles with Chrome the night before came back to me, and instantly, I suspected something might be wrong.A quick look through the computer's running processes yielded nothing. Everything that was supposed to be running was. I checked the startup folder in the Start Menu; still nothing.

Finally, I opened up msconfig to check and see if anything had been added to my list of boot items. Sure enough, there were four oddly named dll's there that I did not recognize. I unchecked their boxes so they wouldn't be run when my computer started, and immediately went hunting for information on the problem.

I found out that my computer was infected with a few pieces of malware, all of the same origin, and all of which had a nasty habit of renaming themselves and latching onto legitimate processes to run. I wasn't entirely sure if their only function was to show me anti-virus ads however, so I figured the best course of action would be to remove the infection and then re-install Windows, just to be safe.

I tried to start up AdAware, but after waiting a few seconds, a cryptic error message appeared on the screen about a server error, and the program refused to load. So, I looked up NOD32, an anti-virus program which I've heard about on "The Tech Guy" radio show, installed it, and ran it. 10 minutes later, after I'd watched the program cycle through all the known areas of the infection, the program reported that it had found nothing. Lame.

A quick Google search returned a few more promising pieces of software; upon further investigation, I decided to try out a program called Anti-Malware by Malware Bytes. This program zipped through my drive and found about 14 infected files and registry entries. I quarantined and deleted all of these, restarted, and ran the program again. The second search turned up nothing. I checked msconfig and my processes list for similar results. I made a mental note that I should purchase the full version of Anti-Malware when this was all over with, as a token of my thanks.

With that, the pre-re-install process began: check, backup, delete, and restore. I checked the software on my computer to make sure I had all the install files I needed and read up on how to properly save my email and saved games. I copied everything from my main hard drive to the (much larger) second hard drive. I uninstalled everything that pointed to files on the second drive, and then rebooted with my trusty Windows XP disc in the tray.

About 30 minutes later I found myself staring blankly at the rolling green hills of the default Windows XP wallpaper. I turned off the machine and went to sleep.

Now it's time for me to get all my programs, games, and files back in their rightful places – just what I wanted to do this weekend.

Thanks malware. Thanks a lot.

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Quick Reflect Competition & WordPress 2.7

 Martin · 15 years

I just wanted to post a quick note to tell everyone about two things, the currently on-going Reflect Games Competition and WordPress 2.7.

First, the Reflect Games Competition - it began last night, and is ending at midnight PST on December 21. The challenge is to make a cut scene in Game Maker, pretty much however you want. The rules are lax and the time is short, so read more about that at the Reflect Games forum, and consider throwing something together - you could win a little holiday fun in the form of Steam games, Amazon goods, or iTunes music!

Second, I installed WordPress 2.7 RC1 a few days ago, and all went smoothly... I'm not even sure that I had more than about 30 seconds of downtime. Today, the official release of WordPress 2.7 was released, and I got my first chance to try out the automatic upgrade function. So far, I love it! Instead of having to download, unzip, and upload a bunch of files, I can now upgrade the entire blog at the push of a button. The WordPress team deserves a resounding "good job" from everyone who uses and supports their software for this - they really did an excellent job.

Anyway, I'd better get back to work for now, but thanks for stopping in to see what's going on, and good luck with the contest if you decide to enter it! The raffle for Marty Blog is still being planned, so don't miss these two opportunities to win some stuff!

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