idlethreat

After recovering from a particularly nasty crash and migrating my sites and data over to a new server, I became curious at the number of networking connections that it received, and what was going where. Sure, there’s a lot of tools out there to give me that sort of information, but sometimes you would really just like a pretty (if informative) picture of information instead of dry old text scrolling across the screen.
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Had a system go down over the week, so have been scrambling around behind the scenes to get things back where they were.

More here later.

Cheers,

tom

Up until this weekend, I was completely convinced that the 0xDEADBEEF was more a programming joke than an actual system error message. This weekend, I learned a lot.

Was reloading the wife's grandmother's computer after a particularly nasty crash. When I attempted a Windows repair install, the mythical 0XDEADBEEF reared its ugly head not once, but three separate times.

So, yeah. I ended up formatting and wiping out the whole thing.

they lost some stuff, but the whole experience was somewhat surreal.

tom

While I adore the zombie horror game Left 4 Dead, the online co-op play seems to be hit-and-miss at the moment. Depending on which server you auto-connect to, you end up with something laggy, or completely inappropriate to your level of play.

So, since I happen to have my own dedicated system I decided to give a try at running my own dedicated server instead. Since I couldn't locate one place that had all of this information, I decided to write up my own document to show you how to install and setup your very own Left 4 Dead Dedicated Server.

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While I had all the best intentions of posting more neat and interesting stuff (well, to me, that is), I managed to run smack into Left 4 Dead and things haven't been quite the same since.

Sure, I'm still the standard-issue Midwest programming geek, but I just happen to flinch a hell of a lot more in dark rooms.

If you guys haven't had an opportunity to try L4D out, I would highly recommend it. If you already happen to have it and are looking for someone to join you in the festivities, just hop over to my Steam page and contact me.

Finally, this reminds me that I have extra Steam copies of HL 2 and HL2, Episode One that I picked up whenever I got Orange Box.

If you would like a free legal copy of them for your very own, just log in (or create yourself a new account) and reply back with your Steam contact information.

Cheers,

tom