I just can’t get enough of it. After making StarCraft work in Linux via Wine, I asked my friend who has a copy of Crossover Office to check if it will run StarCraft on it too. Guess what? It installed and played fine but there were a couple of problems - first, it wasn’t playing in fullscreen. Second, it was a bit sluggish. Geez, what’s wrong with Crossover office? Shouldn’t it be better than Wine since it’s proprietary?
Anyway, for those who doesn’t have any idea about Crossover office and Wine, please check them out at their websites but basically Crossover is based on Wine code and is said to be more stable than just plain Wine.
Ok, now that I have StarCraft running on Linux, the next thing that came to my mind was network gaming. But no one in our house would want to play it with me so I thought of the possibility of setting up a virtual LAN via the internet. A quick search on good ol’ Google came up with Hamachi (www.hamachi.cc). Hamachi is a software that allows me to do exactly what I wanted - to setup a Local Area Network over my Internet connection. So I downloaded my copy and asked my friend Kiel delos Angeles who lives just a few houses away to do the same. We installed our copies and followed instructions and we got connected to each other as if we were only on one LAN but this time, it’s LAN Over Internet.
Then, we put it to the test. It was great! We were able to play StarCraft together as if we were on the same LAN. There were a few slow network experiences but those were tolerable. Hamachi provides a GUI setup for Windows users and a command line version for Linux and OSX. Gui version for Linux and OSX is said to be under development. It’s a great tool and it was pretty trivial to setup LAN Over Internet with Hamachi.
I’ve been a website developer for almost 7 years now and ever since I started, I always heard the saying, “Do not make flash websites. They’re slow to load, not Search Engine Friendly, and not all people have flash.” But then, times and things change and ever since I heard that, lots and lots of websites have been made using flash such as this Interactive Agency website called MindComet. Here are my comments about this site:
Positive
- The overall design is good
- The flash effects are nice
- It was pretty fast to load
- The site itself is Search engine friendly since it has Search engine readable text on it.
Negative
- I love to listen to music while in front of my computer and the sudden “talking” background of the site kind of irritated me because I could no longer hear my music well
- The loading of the audio was kind of choppy on my 384kbps connection. I wonder how it would sound on dial-up.
- I couldn’t find a volume slidebar on the website which means I couldn’t turn of its sound or at least lessen its volume. Turning off the volume of my speaker won’t work for me since that would also turn off my music.
So, what do I think? I think this website is pretty good and needs just a few tweaks and it would be great.
Yes, I know StarCraft is already a bit old and that newer and more beautiful games have come out but hey, you can’t blame me because I love playing it. :D Anyways, I didn’t know that installing and playing it on Linux was easy. My Linux distro is Debian and here’s what I did.
- Install wine: as root, I typed “apt-get install wine” without the quotes
- Inserted the StarCraft CD and browsed to it using my favorite file manager - thunar
- Double clicked setup.exe and followed the instructions
Then after the installation, all I did was look for the StarCraft link in my menu list and poof! It worked like a charm. No hassles whatsoever.
People usually think of ‘invasion of privacy’ when they know that their actions are being monitored. However, there is more to monitoring than that. Actually, there are mo benefits if every action is monitored. One way or the other, the person being monitored and the the person who monitors benefit from the situation. Take the case of a keystroke logger for example. If you’re doing bad things on your PC then you will definitely not like a keystroke logger installed but if there’s nothing to hide then you surely will not be bothered.
Companies may benefit from such a device in certain ways such as monitoring keystrokes on workstations for compliance reasons, employee investigations, inappropriate web surfing and so on. Parents, to a certain extent can also monitor their children’s internet activities and perhaps even protect them from online ‘criminals’ who prey on the young. As you can see, there are more benefits to monitoring than we used to know.
Now, what I did was search the internet for a keystroke logger and I came across SpectorSoft and I was surprised to see that they don’t only provide keystroke loggers but also a bunch of other monitoring tools as well. Worth taking a look at.
