Wow, I’m feeling old.

Last week, Atari celebrated its fortieth anniversary. For those not aware, Atari not only was the biggest name in arcade and home gaming in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, it could be considered the founder of arcade gaming. Their very first video game, Pong, was the first widely successful arcade game. After that, they had a string of hits including Asteroids, Breakout, Battlezone, Centipede, and others. They were also responsible for the extremely popular Atari 2600, which became the first big home video game console.

I’m feeling old because my very first console was an Atari 2600, or rather, a Sears Video Arcade.

When I was four or five years old, I was a big fan of Space Invaders. When I turned seven (way back in 1980), my parents got me a Sears Video Arcade, which was an authorized rebrand of the Atari 2600, with a copy of Space Invaders (which, like some other Atari 2600 games, was also a Sears rebrand). They had an ulterior motive to getting me the console; I had fairly poor hand-eye coordination, so they hoped that playing the games would be a fun way for me to improve my coordination. Part of me thinks they kind of regret having done so, though, as I became obsessed with video games afterwards. My hand-eye coordination did improve, though.

Of course, history shows that Atari’s dominance ended with the video game crash of 1983. The entire industry crashed and burned; one of the biggest reasons was that everyone could make games for the Atari 2600, so everyone did. That led to a glut of shovelware games on the market causing the good games to be lost among the chaff. Atari’s own decisions were pretty poor, too, with an unfaithful port of Pac-Man and reviled adaptation of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial damaging their brand pretty badly. The video game industry didn’t recover until the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, whose arcade-quality graphics and lockout chip (only allowing licensed games to play) restored confidence in the industry. The company now known as Atari is Atari in name and licenses only.

To celebrate their fortieth anniversary, Atari made it where people who installed and/or used their iOS game Atari’s Greatest Hits on June 27th would have access to the entire downloadable game library (a $10 value) until such time as the app is removed or reinstalled. (I don’t believe the offer is still valid.) I went ahead and installed it that day, and gave it a try.

The app, while interesting, is something of a mixed bag. The game selection covers both arcade games and Atari 2600 games; the arcade game selection only goes up until 1984 or so, when Warner Communications sold off the arcade division of Atari, which subsequently became Atari Games. Therefore, classics such as Gauntlet and A.P.B. are not included. (The licenses for those games are held by WB Games and are included in Midway Arcade.) Also, for several of the arcade games, both the arcade and Atari 2600 versions are included. Of particular note is Tempest, whose Atari 2600 port was never released but was included anyway. Also, four of the Atari 2600 games use the Sears Tele-Games box art. While three are understandable as they were Sears exclusives, the fourth, Pong Sports, was a renamed version of Video Olympics. For obvious reasons, licensed games from other arcade manufacturers and third-party cartridges are not included.

The downside of this app is the controls. As might be expected, the games are controlled by a virtual controller on the touch screen. On a screen the size of an iPhone’s (I don’t own an iPad), it can be awkward. While a controller such as an iCADE or a JOYSTICK-IT would work nicely for the joystick-based games, several games emulate the use of a trackball, which I imagine would not work well with these controllers. It does take some getting used to, especially with the Atari 2600 games. Still, even with some practice, I still have difficulty with many of the games I used to be halfway decent on, simply due to the controls.

Still, the app is an interesting look back at the old Atari games, both arcade and console. It brought out quite a bit of nostalgia for me, and I’ve found myself trying out the odd game every so often. While Atari’s heyday is definitely long in the past, it’s good to see people recognizing their importance. More importantly, it’s fun to play the games again and seeing how many of them still hold up, even after a few decades.

Right about the same time I was writing my last blog post, Microsoft officially announced Windows Phone 8, the new version of their phone-only operating system. I kept half an eye on Engadget’s coverage of the announcement via their Twitter feed, and there was one announcement that caught my eye: Windows Phone 8 will not be available for current Windows Phone 7 devices. Instead, people with those devices will get Windows Phone 7.8. Windows Phone 7.8 will support a number of the new features from Windows Phone 8 like the new Start screen, but it will not run apps written for Windows Phone 8.

Again, this makes me wonder about whether they’re really learning the right lessons from Apple. Recently there has been a glut of commercials for the Nokia Lumia 900, Nokia’s flagship Windows Phone, stating that “the smartphone beta test is over”. The premise is that the Lumia 900 is the ultimate in smartphones. However, those who bought a Nokia Lumia 900 now get to learn that they won’t even be allowed to run the most recent version of Windows Phone. By comparison, the iPhone 3GS was released in 2009, and can still comfortably run the most recent version of iOS (5.1.1). More, the 3GS is a supported platform for iOS 6. If a nearly three year old iPhone can run the latest and greatest iOS version, why can’t a Windows Phone-based handset that was released two months ago get the latest and greatest version of Windows Phone?

Sorry, Nokia and Microsoft. It seems to me that you’ve still got quite a bit of beta testing to go.

As I’ve stated in previous posts, I host servers at my house. I suppose I could just have email and web services for my domain hosted by services like what Google offers, but to be honest I like having full control over my mail and web services. After the incident a few months back that caused me to upgrade my main server, I started looking into upgrading my two remaining servers. I reasoned that if a total hardware failure on old equipment can happen to my main server, it could happen to my two other servers. After all, they were much older, as the DNS server was fifteen years old, and the test server was ten years old.

However, the main problem I saw was one of costs and resources. While the hardware for both servers was ancient in computer terms, it also still did the trick as far as requirements were concerned. Neither server ran anything that was resource-intensive, so buying two brand new servers seemed like serious overkill. It finally occurred to me that I could migrate both servers to one brand new box using virtualization. I originally planned on using VMware vSphere Hypervisor, which is free and I was very familiar with from my last job. However, I soon realized that in order to use it, I’d have to purchase hardware that was quite a bit more expensive than I was willing to pay for. In the end, I opted for KVM running on top of CentOS.

I ended up ordering an HP Proliant server from Newegg that was similar to the previous server I had purchased, albeit a newer model. In addition, I purchased 4 GB of additional RAM to install. Once it arrived, I ended up shutting down the test server and putting the new server in its place. Installing the operating system went fine, as did making sure virtualization was enabled. When it came time to set up the virtual DNS server, though, I hit a couple of snags. The first was that Slackware Linux (the distro of Linux I use for the DNS server) didn’t like booting after installation from KVM. I ended up finding this tutorial that helped me get around that problem. The second was that once the old DNS server was shut down and the new one started, the new one couldn’t pass any traffic to the internet. It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized that simply power-cycling the cable modem (to clear the ARP cache) would fix the issue. As soon as the virtual DNS server was brought online, I quickly put together the virtual test server and shortly had it online, too. I’ve since done a secure wipe of the hard drives of the old servers, and have them in a corner of my office waiting to be taken in for recycling. The only part that isn’t going to be recycled is the test server’s 320 GB hard drive, and that’s simply because my father wants it for his home PC.

I have to say, I’m pretty happy with how this has turned out. For one thing, shutting down the two older servers and replacing them with the one virtual host server has actually caused the temperature in my office to go down considerably, where it’s actually comfortable to sit in there for extended periods now. In addition, whereas the test server couldn’t sit on the battery backup due to load concerns, I now can have all of my servers covered by the battery backup. All in all, I’m spending less (in electricity due to power and A/C), have more stable and up-to-date hardware, the cart with my servers is less cluttered, and it’s working as stable as it did before. I can pretty much consider this migration a success. :-)

It’s Saturday night, and I’m sitting in the living room watching Mythbusters while Jennifer dozes on the couch. All in all, it’s a good evening.

Up until recently, though, I would be found in my office at least part of the evening, as I’d have an urge to browse the net. I would use my phone, but I like to keep it in the kitchen where it charges. I also have a work laptop, but it’s a little unweildy sitting in my lap while I’m in the living room. That was taken care of recently by my mother-in-law, who managed to get us an HP TouchPad. For $150, it was extremely inexpensive yet very functional. Both Jennifer and I use the tablet, and it now comes with us on trips instead of the work laptop.

Also, as Jennifer puts it, “I now see a lot more of Scott in the evening.”

However, while we’ve been very happy with the TouchPad, we have come to realize that there’s one major problem with it. The TouchPad runs webOS, which is HP’s own mobile operating system (which they got when they acquired Palm). While webOS is a nice operating system, with the discontinuation of the TouchPad it is becoming seen as a dead OS. The app support has been slight, and there have been no real additions to the lineup. What I needed most was a remote access app for work purposes, and ended up jury-rigging a proprietary solution.

Obviously we needed something better. Fortunately, a solution presented itself Thursday.

My friend Rigo Cortes posted on Twitter that a new release of CyanogenMod had been released for the TouchPad. Intrigued, I looked into it. CyanogenMod is a community-written third party distribution of Android. The installation process for CyanogenMod looked simple, and kept the original webOS install in place. I asked Rigo, and he assured me that while it was labeled as alpha software, it was still very stable.

So, last night I downloaded the needed software, and I installed it this morning.

How did it go? It turned out to be as easy as I had read. It’s also as stable as Rigo had said. I’ve gotten all sorts of software downloaded that I couldn’t get for webOS, like Fruit Ninja, Netflix, Trillian, and others. I even have remote access software installed. I’ve only used it today, but it’s working great.

So, now I’ve got a much more useful tablet. It’s too bad webOS had to be replaced, as we liked using it. However, app support is much better on Android, and app support is what’s most important. Jennifer gets her Fruit Ninja, and I get my other apps.

We’re both happy campers. :-)

By now, it’s pretty obvious to people who know me that I like to have digital copies of my movies. I guess one could argue I got started relatively early (compared to the current consumer desire, that is), seeing as that as far back as 2006, I was making digital copies of Mortal Kombat to watch on my smartphone. Nowadays, though, when a movie comes out on DVD/Blu-Ray, I buy the version of the disc that comes with the digital copy. I like being able to have the movie in iTunes, where I can watch it later using my iPhone or HP TouchPad.

However, the studios have started offering this “new service” for the digital copies that is really annoying me.

I’ve noticed that several movies that featuring a digital copy have a label on the packaging advertising that it is an “Ultraviolet digital copy”. It’s a reference to Ultraviolet, a service by Flixster that sells access to streamed versions of movies, plus allows you to redeem codes for movies you’ve bought. You can watch the movies via the Flixster app on iOS and Android, and there’s also an app (based on Adobe AIR) for PCs as well. Sounds great, right?

In my case, it’s anything but.

The primary reason I have digital copies of movies is because I want to watch them while traveling. As I brought up earlier, I like watching Mortal Kombat when on trips for Mortal Kombat Online. Another example was when I was traveling from Dubai to Houston; I watched the entire The Lord of the Rings film trilogy on the flight. Also, on a drive from New Orleans to Houston, Jennifer and I once watched The Dark Knight. In other words, I mostly watch my digital copies on portable devices. PC playback support, while kind of nice, is less important to me.

There are really three problems here. The first problem is that I like to use iTunes to manage the media on my iPhone. It tells me how much space I have available on the device, so when I’m picking and choosing what movies I want on the phone, I can make accommodations for what I’m willing to remove to make space, like shrinking the music playlists and the like. Furthermore, with the movies on the hard drive, I can simply copy the movies over USB to the phone. With Ultraviolet, while I can copy the media to my devices, I can’t actually copy it to iTunes. I can copy it to my PC, but iTunes will not recognize it as a viewable movie. I can download it straight to my iPhone, but then I have to figure out ahead of time how much space I need to clear. Worse, according to Flixster’s website, I can’t delete the movie afterwards without deleting the entire app first.

The second problem is the one that REALLY irks me. There’s no support at all for the iPod Classic or the HP TouchPad. There isn’t a Flixster app for webOS (and I’m not holding out hope that one will come out), and the iPod Classic doesn’t have net access at all. The iPod Classic is what I bring with me on trips where I don’t know what I’ll want to watch beforehand, as my entire media library will fit on it (as it has a 160 GB hard drive). One might think it’s annoying watching a movie on a screen the size of the iPod Classic’s, but if I’m not sharing with another person, it’s not that bad.

The third problem is that all of this depends on the Flixster and Ultraviolet services being completely in sync. That doesn’t seem to be the case. During the setup process for my account (done while trying to redeem a digital copy of Green Lantern), it set up a Flixster account and asked me for an email address and password for the Ultraviolet account. However, I was never told what the sign in name was for Ultraviolet, and there isn’t a process by which to find out what it is on Ultraviolet’s website. I’ve got a support ticket in, and I hope they can tell me what it is. In addition, the Flixster app for iOS isn’t giving me access to the movies in Ultraviolet. The FAQ on Flixster’s site said that if the Flixster and Ultraviolet accounts are linked, I should have access to the movies. I guess the accounts weren’t linked after all (despite what the setup process said).

All in all, I’m pretty fed up. At least when the movies had iTunes support, all I needed to do was put the code in to iTunes and the movie would simply download to my PC, and work right off. All of these extra hoops I’m having to jump through with extra accounts, new players, and the like do nothing to make things easier for the consumer. It’s crap like this that helps increase piracy, as those people who “do the right thing” get the shaft, and the pirates can get their copies of the movie far more easily and without any of the hassle.

I guess I should just look at the bright side. The worst case scenario for me is that I can take the DVD and use HandBrake to create my own digital copies. Still, it’s frustrating, and I’m going to definitely think twice before buying any film that features an “Ultraviolet” digital copy.

Some (but not many) people are probably wondering why it took me so long to put the blog post up announcing our marriage. The answer is that, well… it wasn’t exactly by choice.

A couple of days after we arrived in the Bahamas, I noticed that I wasn’t receiving email from my main server. A quick check showed that the web services weren’t responding and that the server itself wasn’t responding to pings. I wasn’t too worried; I just figured the system suffered a kernel panic (the Linux equivalent of a BSOD) and needed to be rebooted. I sent an email to the pet sitter asking him to hit the reset button on the server, and left it at that.

A day or so later, he emailed back saying he had done so. I checked, and it was still down. I still wasn’t too concerned, as I figured he probably hit the wrong button. I ended up asking Jennifer’s mom to power cycle the box. After the now-in-laws returned home, I got an email saying she had done so. I checked the server, and I still got nothing. Now I began to worry, thinking a hard drive might have failed.

When we got home, one of the first things I did was check on the server. It was worse than I thought: the system wouldn’t even bring up video. I sighed, and decided to check to see if I had a replacement motherboard. I did, but it was in an old case and wouldn’t come out.

I think it was about at that point that I decided “frak this” and started checking Newegg to see how much a new server would cost. To my surprise, there was an HP Proliant server that fit my needs that only cost $450. I talked to my dad, and he bought it for me with next day delivery (as I host his business email as well, and have done so for years).

We ended up learning a life lesson. When Newegg says “next day delivery”, they mean “delivery the day after the order is processed”. Until now, all of my orders had been processed within two hours. This time, it took two DAYS to process. The end result was that the box arrived on Wednesday instead of Monday. Dad was unhappy, even after Newegg graciously refunded the shipping costs.

As soon as the server arrived, I added a second hard drive (to hold backups), added the users and groups, installed the backup software, and copied the backup archives to the server. Thankfully, the backups restored with no problems. After that I got mail up and running (and was promptly buried under an avalanche of two weeks of undelivered email). Once email was up, I could get everything else up and running.

The new server is pretty nice, too. It’s a lot faster than the old box was (as the old one was using 10 year old hardware), has a smaller case, and it’s far more quiet. The only disadvantage is that I don’t have it set up for RAID, but I don’t need it just yet. Besides, the RAID on the old server caused me issues when I was trying to read the drives from my Windows PC for recovery purposes. :-)

Ah, well. The server, barring some last minor problems, is completely up and running. I’m just thankful the restore (once started) went as quickly as it did, and that the friends who do secondary MX for me were so willing to accommodate having two weeks worth of queued mail on their servers. :-)

It’s pretty common knowledge that I tend to be something of a nut about security.

For the past several years, I’ve been using GnuPG to cryptographically sign all of my outgoing email. The digital signature was attached to every outgoing message, as a way of verifying that I was the one who originally wrote the message. Adding GnuPG support to my emails wasn’t hard; mutt had GnuPG support built-in, while Mozilla Thunderbird could get support via the Enigmail extension. However, after using it for several years, I decided this weekend to stop automatically signing all outgoing email.

The first reason for doing so is the fact that for a couple of years now, I’ve been accessing my email via my iPhone. It doesn’t support GnuPG or any sort of PGP natively, so of course I wouldn’t be able to send out signed emails. The second – and more important – reason is the fact that really… outside of me, no one cares. Most people I know use either a webmail of some sorts or Outlook to access their email, so to them my digital signature looks like a weird text attachment. They pretty much figure the message must have come from me anyway, and aren’t concerned about it. Also, most (if not all) emails aren’t even important enough to worry about signing; I’d been signing my emails pretty much out of sheer habit. For the most part, there isn’t anything that would require me to later on prove that I actually sent it.

So, I’ve decided to stop digitally signing my emails, so those friends of mine I do send emails to won’t have to wonder about those weird text attachments on them. For the most part, I’m sure they won’t care, and I really am not going to lose any sleep over it.

Though, I will admit, it’ll be nice not having to type in the encryption passphrase with every email sent anymore. :-)