TF2 Dedicated Server Rant

Attention: This content is 15 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

Where to start with this one…

I just spent the better part of 2 hours trying to configure a dedicated TF2 server with the Beetle’s Mod admin plugin… what appears to be the only functioning admin plugin out there worth a fuck for TF2.

And you know where I’m at now?  FUCKING NO WHERE.  I have given up, deleted all the server files, and told Steam to get fucking BENT for having absolutely shit support and documentation on how to configure a fucking server.  And on top of that, an even bigger fuck you to whatever assclown pieced together that piece of shit known as Beetle’s Mod.

First off, installing the TF2 dedicated server on a plain machine with out Steam on it is a royal fuck in the ass.  Go ahead and try and figure it out with out googling and reading through other forum posts.  I dare you to.

You won’t get far.

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PHP – 4th Most Popular Programming Language

Attention: This content is 15 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

Just a quick post here.  I came across the Tiobe Software Index today which… well, I’ll let them explain it:

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and YouTube are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

And PHP is on their list at number 4!

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Only following Java, C, and C++!

I thought it was pretty cool since I’m a big fan of php and php projects 🙂  So those of you out there who haven’t given PHP a shot yet, now would be a good time to check it out!

Vista Bashing – I’m SICK of it!

Attention: This content is 15 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

It seems that every single day I stumble on another article, newscast, or person, who is brainlessly bashing Vista.  I’m fucking sick of hearing it.

Every single one of these articles I have seen appears to be written by some talentless hack who has either not used Vista, or someone who has no fucking business touching a computer in the first place.

I have been running Vista for nearly 2 years now and am currently running it on both my desktop and my laptop and I have NEVER had a problem with it.  ALL of my hardware worked painlessly and I have not seen a SINGLE software compatibility issue.

It just boggles my mind when I read articles that say “It took me 16 months to get it working”.  I mean… my mind just can’t comprehend what is so god damned hard about it.  Seriously?  What is it?

Yes, it has it’s little quarks and annoyances, but there is no reason to avoid it.  It is a great, fantastic, VERY stable OS.  Anyone who claims otherwise probably doesn’t understand computers and is scared of change.

Rant over.

So Long iGoogle!

Attention: This content is 15 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

It’s been almost a week now and iGoogle still has no option of reverting.  It is still loading slow and the new way their “widgets” load is fucking terrible.

As of today I am changing my home page on all of my machines at work and home.  I refuse to use a home page that looks and functions like crap.

My new home page, which it seems a lot of iGoogler’s are fleeing to, is Netvibes.  A very clean, organized, and functional ajax home page.  I have it set up exactly like my iGoogle page was, matching feeds in the same place and it even has a Gmail widget so I can still keep an easy eye on Gmail!

If you used iGoogle and are upset with their changes, leave them.  Leave them now and be happy with your new home page.  I know I am!

FAIL:

WIN:

Move that nasty EA Games folder out of Documents!

Attention: This content is 15 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

My girlfriend loves The Sims 2.  Unfortunately she has to play it on my main computer because it’s also a gaming rig so it handles The Sims 2 with ease, where as her computer would stroke out.

Because of this The Sims 2 is installed on my computer.

I have my system setup with multiple hard drives, but for the sake of this article, we’ll say I have my C: which is where Windows and all it’s crap is installed, and I have a D: where I install all my games and keep the [legal] images for them and stuff.

Well The Sims 2, thanks to EA’s shitty programming, when installed to another location besides the C:, like the D:, even though it installs to d:\program files\ea games\the sims 2 it still feels the dire need to install files on you C: in your Documents folder!  Even more so, if you have every expansion pack and add on like we do that EA Games folder on your C: can balloon up to over 5gb!!!  This is incredibly frustrating because this is the EXACT reason why I install games to the D: I want to keep ridiculous amount of files OFF my much smaller C:

As far as I know, I am the first person that has come up with a way to move this folder-of-shit off of your C: and to any other location you please.

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Follow up to “Open File – Security Warning”

Attention: This content is 16 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

A month ago I posted on how to disable the annoying Open File- Security Warning dialog when opening files downloaded from the Internet.

At the end of the article I mentioned that there was a side effect in doing this…

The only side effect is that IE will have a warning bar at the top when you fire it up trying to scare you in to enabling it again.

And I come to you today with a way to disable this across both Business(Professional) and Home editions of XP and Vista

Fire up your trusty registry editor and go to:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Security

Note that you may not have the Internet Explorer and Security keys under the Microsoft key.  You can create these your self, just be sure you remember the registry is all case sensitive.

Under the Security key create a new DWORD Value and name it DisableSecuritySettingsCheck and then set its value to 1

Now the next time your have to fire up that turd IE, you won’t be harassed by a silly warning message!

Sometimes Microsoft makes me want to stab them in the face with a hot poker

Attention: This content is 16 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

Over all I like Microsoft, but some things they do just really really annoy the hell out of me.

The most recent happened today when I was out at a client site. Long long story short, I needed to create a scheduled task for this particular computer. Well I kept getting an error message when setting the user account password for the account it needed to run under. Come to find out Microsoft knows about this issue and there is a Hotfix for it, but no patch has been released.

Ugh.

Getting a Hotfix from Microsoft in the past has been like prying a nickel out of a jew’s hands. (Damn near impossible).

Why on Earth can they not simple make the damn Hotfixes available for download! Seriously! There is NO reason why they can’t do this, other then the fact the love to make things difficult.

I filled out their form to email me the Hotfix. It said it would be there some time in the next 5 minutes.

20 minutes later I was sick of waiting around on it as I had things that needed to be done. I started searching around on the web for this Hotfix and finally found a site that had it for download… once you registered. FUCK I hate sites that FORCE you to register just so you can download 1 file and never every visit their site again. Stupid.

So I jump through the hoops, register, confirm my email address so they can spam the shit out of me and FINALLY download the file. Downloaded it, ran it, rebooted, and I was finally able to create a scheduled task.

Well the story doesn’t quite end there. I get back to the office and about an hour after my original request I sent in, I got an email from MS with a link to download the Hotfix. I thought well finally, I might as well download and archive this damn thing in case I need it again in the future. I clicky their link and it downloads a Zip executable, not a standard winzip packager, but some shitty looking MS in-house zip packager.

I run the exe to extract the actual Hotfix exe and guess what…

That’s right, I can’t even use the fucking file they sent me a link for.

I refused to do any research on THIS error code now as I am fed up with it. The problem has been fixed and I am done with the issue.

WHY DO YOU FAIL SO HARD MICROSOFT???

What is so fucking hard about having a list of Hotfixes where you just staight-up download the Hotfix. Why so many shitty hoops, then you end up with an unuseable file???

WHY???

Vista/XP Annoyance – “Open File – Security Warning” (Caused by IE7)

Attention: This content is 16 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading as its contents may now be outdated or inaccurate.

Apparently with a recent “security” update pushed out by Microsoft, it now causes ANY file you download from the internet and try and open to pop up with a security warning like this one:

Good LORD this has got to be the most OBNOXIOUS WINDOWS UPDATE EVER.  What on god’s green Earth was Microsoft thinking when they pushed this one out?!  Shut the hell up, I know what I downloaded.  I have updated virus protection (I <3 NOD32), so leave me the hell alone about it and let me run what the fuck I want to!  I don’t need you baby sitting my downloaded files as I’m not a moron, thanks for assuming I am though MS.

It finally pushed me over the edge today when I saw this warning pop-up for the 9000th time in one day.  I had to find a way to make it go away and never come back, as unchecking that box simply applies to that 1 file, not ALL files as you might think it would.

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