Josh Wieder

I'm a fan of video games. While being a grown up means I don't have a chance to play them as frequently as I used to, I still enjoy decompressing on the weekend with the old XBox and try to do it as much as I can. That said, I would rather jump out of an airplane without a parachute than pay $60 for a newly released console game. No matter how much I take home, its difficult for me to justify that  sort of expense. Every once in a while there are some titles that pique my interest and that at least tent me to break that rule. However, a disturbing trend among game developers has just about ensured that will never happened. I am referring to the trend in which a video game is released to the public without being finished. I could go on for quite some time listing examples, but two particularly egregious examples have been well publicized recently. The first, Aliens: Colonial Marines. Take a look at the brief YouTube video below for an example of standard game play that custo

The one-time designer of Ultima is currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign. He has raised over a million dollars to add to his own personal fortune to finance a new gaming project. Richard lives in a castle and has gone to outer space . The public entertains his tasteless compulsion to refer to himself as "Lord British" and to name his house/castle "Britannia Manor". Most people in his position would have some nice things to say about the industry that has made him rich and that has coddled his adolescent fantasies for decades. But not Richard. During a recent interview with PC Gamer , Richard Garriott was quoted as saying "most game designers really just suck". Specifically, he said: "You know, I go back to the day when I was the programmer, I was the artist, I was the text writer, etcetera. Every artist we've ever hired ever is infinitely better at art than I ever was. I was never a good artist, or audio engineer, or composer. I

Barcamp is a DIY series of regional tech conferences. The Barcamp organization as such provides a template for organizing, and tech-interested people all over the world use it to organize events, speakers and guests to get together and talk about computers over the weekend with a few beers. You can read more about Barcamp on their website and their wiki entry . The events are a lot of fun and a way to talk to some really interesting industry people that you wouldn't otherwise have an opportunity to chat with, and I've been involved with speaking at them and helping companies fund them all over the east coast. Recently a good friend and former colleague let me know that he is going to be getting a new Barcamp started in Huntsville, Alabama. If you are in that area, plan on being in that area soon, you are interested in getting to know more people in the Huntsville area, or you represent a company looking to raise your profile with tech people in Alabama, reach out to me so

Upon restarting Apache, you may receive errors like this: # service httpd restart Stopping httpd: [FAILED] Starting httpd: httpd: apr_sockaddr_info_get() failed for webserver-sb-1 httpd: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName In order to resolve this issue and successfully start Apache, you will need to ensure that there is a resolvable hostname assigned to your server. This hostname does not need to be a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), it just needs to resolve. Here is how to get around it.  #echo yourhostname.extension > /etc/hostname #/bin/hostname -F /etc/hostname Finally, confirm that the assigned domain name is resolvable using the host command #host yourhostname.extension localhost If not, check the following settings: -does /etc/resolv.conf have the correct DNS servers listed to allow for resolution? -If your hostname is not an FQDN, lis

The distinguished judge from the 9th Circuit discusses escaping from communist Romania, the law, and libertarianism  (my favorite quote - "I thought it had to do with libertines!)

So you've just run a barebones installation of CentOS 6, and you run a host command to check DNS resolution and you get the following: whois: command not found By default the barebones CentOS installation lacks even the most basic network diagnostic tools. Use yum to install the following packages to get a few basic tools back on your server: yum install bind-utils  (installs nslookup and host) yum install jwhois (installs whois)

Jonathan Zdziarski, the gentleman behind the fantastic mod_evasive Apache module, has a paper available on his website regarding Bayesian noise reduction that is well worth a read.