I really love the frenzy people work themselves up to over the Securom DRM system found in many games these days. To my knowledge Securom is a PC only thing and some of the games using it are Bioshock, Mass Effect, Spore and most recently Grand Theft Auto IV.

The main complaint for the inclusion of Securom is that it can be used to limit the number of times you may install a game without having to make a telephone call somewhere to be authorised. The first time I heard about this developers were limiting the number of 'free' installs to 3 and I agreed completely that limiting the number of times I reinstall a game is ridiculous when I had paid for it. This is especially the case when you consider that the very reason this is implemented is to combat piracy and such a limit would not exist in a pirated version.

Grand Theft Auto IV has done the right thing and done away with the limit altogether but that hasn't stopped the securom haters from declaring a boycott again. I believe the problem is now the simple existence of Securom which once installed is incredibly difficult to remove without a complete hard disk wipe.

Now that there is no limit on the number of installs I think they're wasting their breath. The last complaint I had is gone and I don't see the problem with a software developer wanting to protect their property if doing so is unobtrusive and doesn't hinder me as a paying customer.

Not that I'm going to buy GTA IV, hell no. I'll probably download it from a torrent site and try it out, but it isn't really my style of game. See? Piracy doesn't always mean a lost sale because I never would have bought it anyway.

For todays lesson: everything I described above is actually software theft, not piracy. Software piracy entails selling stolen software, theft is only the use of it. I prefer pirate though, because it sounds more exotic than thievery.

Since the release of Wrath of the Lich King I've noticed that performance in Northrend on my pc is quite slow and, for the first time in quite a while, I was forced to knock the detail down. The beautiful shadows were the first to go, giving back some performance, but even then the significantly pushed out draw distance in Northrend was making my video card (Geforce 8800GT) choke.

I'm not a person who likes to play at anything but maximum detail, thus the whining and begging on my part began.

I already planned to get a new video card at the end of the year, so I figured why not just use the credit card and get it now? Good plan, huh? Oui didn't agree. It took some work, but he reluctantly came around to my way of thinking (I gave him the silent treatment). Off to Jedi Shop we went.

I've been a nVidia user for a long time so that was what I asked for, but the answer was not exactly what I'd hoped. They didn't have any because they were expecting a new model to be released in about a month. The staff kept asking me why didn't I want to wait and get the new one, but I explained that I'm not a person who likes to wait.

I was desperate and not walking out of the store without something after going to the effort of convincing Oui, so asked about ATI's offerings and while they didn't have the top model (I had to 'wait' until Monday for that one) they did have the next best thing so I got that.

I ended up with the ATI 4870 HD and after installing it and testing it out in my pc I quickly discovered something important: my power supply wasn't cutting the cheese. It was pretty clear this was occuring as whenever I ran anything taxing the entire pc would shutdown. After checking the manual I saw it requires a 500W power supply and as mine was only 390W it was off to Jedi Shop again the next morning.

The new power supply (Gigabyte Odin Pro 550W) is very nice and now that there is enough power my pc isn't shutting itself down all the time. The video card is also working as intended and when taxed the fan in the dual slot design powers up with quite a lot of noise.

At least it runs good.

I've been good a good boy lately so to reward me Oui allowed me to buy some new speakers for my pc. The volume control on the old ones was a bit flaky and would randomly go from loud to soft, though the speakers themselves were fine. A bad volume control was enough though.

Let me rewind a bit by explaining that this all originated from my desire to buy a new sound card, namely the PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro Series (pictured left)).

The longer the name the more awesome, right? Unfortunately Oui said I am not allowed to get that, yet, so I had to think of something else - thus the speakers.

The old speakers were a 2.1 set from Creative, who make mid-range in quality speakers (actually, they bought Cambridge Soundworks rather than making their own), and unbeknownst to Oui my plan was always to upgrade to a 5.1 set of speakers.

Off to Pantip we went last Friday evening and it didn't take long to find a set I liked, the Inspire T6100 also from Creative (pictured right).

It was at this point that my irritation was established - they don't come with rear speaker stands (pictured left), made specifically for these speakers. In fact, none of the speakers on offer do. These are computer speakers, not home theatre speakers, so where do they think I'm going to put the rear speakers? On the floor? The staff at the stores I visited didn't really seem to care and were completely uninterested in even ordering the stands for the rear speakers on my behalf.

I bought the speakers anyway, because I am hoping I can bug Creative Singapore to send me the stands, but I don't understand why it is so hard to just think or provide some customer service. I mean, I was and am willing to pay for the stands.

The speakers are quite nice and give a good sound thankfully, but I'm really itching for those stands.

I might get laughed at by certain people for admitting this, but I've just today setup Windows Home Server as a new addition to our network. I was after a hassle-free backup solution that once setup would manage itself and I'm happy to report that it does exactly that as well as a couple of other things that are probably edge-case-uses for me.

I particularly like the remote access feature as it allows me to retrieve files on the server from anywhere. I haven't actually tried it yet though so I don't know if it works or how good it is however I must give props to the developers for coming up with what is the smoothest remote access setup I have ever seen. It consisted of me clicking a button and everything, including my router and very own domain, being automatically configured for me!

What a far cry from the port forwarding, dynamic DNS and DMZ hell I had to go through for my pc at work in anticipation of my upcoming holiday. I never did manage to get that working properly with a dynamic dns and have ended up using the dyndns.org service just to tell me the public IP address of the office.

While it was easy for me, I can imagine the hell people with routers that refused to play with windows home server would go through with this feature. In my experience software that can automatically configure itself tends to be a right pain in the arse when it has to be done manually. Now if only the rest of the installation had been so wonderful.

The installation not only took forever, it also rebooted an incredible number of time (I lost count), and called itself different things throughout the process - it's clearly the first version and a thrown together one at that. The startup screen still shows Windows Server 2003, not that I have a monitor attached to the server anymore.

or

or

It's a bit of everything

I got a bit of a scare after installation because it hadn't picked up my network adapter so I had to go hunting for one. The motherboard disk of course didn't recognise Windows Home Server and gace me another panicked moment, but luckily there were still drivers on there that I could install manually.

Thankfully it's all setup now so I can just leave it to do its 'thing'.

You know those moments in your life when you do something and instantly realise you've just made a collosal fuck up? I nearly had one of them earlier and in my life have experienced that feeling far too many times due to my inherent impatience and lock of planning or forward thinking. Today's oh fuck moment occured at work. I'm trying to make my life easier by importing the records for our updated price list into the respective table using a 3rd party tool (which was recommended by the application vendor). It wouldn't be so hard if the application involved wasn't using the file-based visual fox pro database, but I finally managed to get the table I wanted out, modified it, and put it into a file format the 3rd party tool would understand. Fortunately I'd earlier had a moment where I realised that perhaps it wasn't a good idea that I be playing around with live data and, in one of my rare moments of prescience, created a test database to use while I make sure it works. When I imported and found that for some reason all of the prices in the main database were missing I freaked out. My heart was racing and the only thing I could think was OH FUCK! I'M IN DEEP SHIT. The three other people in the office were completely oblivious to this occuring and luckily after a reindex everything was fine. Phew! I wiped the sweat from my brow and tried to get my heart beating at its previous normal rate. I hate this stupid application so bloody much. If they'd just used SQL or something like that this problem wouldn't have happened. I don't understand why anyone uses these ancient databases anyway.

I just found out, courtesy of the guys on GFW Radio (a podcast at 1up.com), that you can register your cd keys for older Blizzard games using the account management screen on the Blizzard Store and they will then be available for download. This was music to my ears since I've had the problem of not being able to find my cd key a number of times and with the keys the game itself can't even be installed. Now I can get rid of those old cds and even better news is that they've of course dropped the cd-based copy protection with the latest patches. I've registered both Warcraft 3 and Diablo 2 and their expansions just now and it works! In other news, I became aware that anyone trying to submit a comment would get an error. This is caused by the Akismet module, which is still a work in progress for Drupal 6, and I've disabled it for now since it just plain doesn't work at all currently.

I love the PNG format and since both firefox and Internet Explorer 7 support it I figure it's safe to use it everywhere. The problem was that the files are naturally quite big compared to their JPG and GIF brothers/sisters. Enter PNGOUT. This handy, tiny utility will do something or other to your PNG files that in most cases will dramatically decrease their size without any decrease in image quality at all! Amazing huh? I had one image compress to 13% of it's original size! Unfortunately the easy-to-use windows version of PNGOUT that has batch processing costs money, but at least the command-line version is free.