Truth, Computing and Fail

Just finished playing The Two Thrones. It had remarkably shorter playing time, I finished it off in only 2 days. It was no where close to the complete experience Warrior Within gave me. The plot in WW was full of unexpected twists and turns and the alternate ending was something you had to really work hard to achieve. Collecting 9 life upgrades scattered throughout the island was never an easy task! I wonder why they needed to make T2T so melodramatic. Maybe they got the idea from the Venom episode in Spiderman. The evil, selfish, vengeance seeking side of the protagonists getting the better of them. Now follow it up with lots of emotions, heartbreaks and reunions…..and then finally a moment of clarity, when the hero finally comes to terms with his self and becomes this uber cool warrior cum sage. I mean they need not have done this in T2T. It seems the developers had already decided what had to happen at the end of the trilogy without thinking where the character development of the prince was headed. Suddenly within the T2T, you hear that monotonous female voice(Kaileena) narrating how hard boiled an egg the Prince had become, with no feelings for anyone but himself. What the hell? When did we ever get a hint of that in the previous 2 games? On the contrary, we saw the Prince giving not a damn about his life, risking everything, never giving up even when all the odds were up against him. In the alternate ending, he even defeats Dahaka, achieving the impossible, vanquishing the once dreaded beast that chased him around. Now suddenly we are being told all those qualities have made Prince a badass. It can’t get any sillier. The only thing good about T2T was the witty jokes and one-liners that the inner voice i.e. the evil prince kept on cracking.

I would be expecting PoP 4 to have a better storyline and a longer gameplay time.

Coming to metal, the soundtrack of WW by Godsmack was simply awesome. I missed it in T2T. While listening to Hallowed Be thy Name it suddenly occured to me that the lyrics make the song a strong contender for the theme soundtrack of PoP 4.

This is how the song starts:

I am waiting in my cold cell
When the bell begins to chime
Reflecting on my past life
And it doesn’t have much time
Because at 5′o clock
They take me to the gallows
The Sands of Time for me are running low………

See what I mean?

With much hype and publicity, the wifi service of our university was launched 10 days ago. The service was christened I-ON (no idea what that has got to do with wireless networking) and large, beautiful posters greeted you on every step inside the campus: inside the hostels, the college, the lecture halls and all other places imaginable and within the reach of the human physique. It promised to Mobify ur world and according to the fkin fully techno illiterate helpdesk personnel, you would be getting speeds around 500 kbps. So, the first few days went fine, we were downloading and surfing merrily at speeds touching 50 KB/s. Anyways we were very well aware that a speed of 500 kbps is not feasible and possible for the size of the network and the backbone our university possesses. But still the speeds were simply great.
And then comes the shocker. Some 3 days back, suddenly everything drops and starts to suck, big time. Downloads drop to 6 KB/s. So what is it? As obvious it can get, its a nasty traffic shaper. The University gets back to its dirty tricks. You decide for yourself. 6 KB/s. Fucking hell. I would be getting the same speed on a dial up connection. For God’s sake, it is an internet service for the whole University. What can be more shameful that a University with 50+ years of history behind can’t offer a basic, decent internet connection to its students. Everything is simply wrong about the whole thing. To download even a small tool like Brutus, I’ve to wait 5 minutes and yes, that is if I stop whatever surfing I might be doing at that time. What purpose would this connection serve?

Agreed that traffic shapers are very much needed for maintaining the QoS of the network, but the University authorities have simply pulled off a cheap trick by misusing the powers of these tools.

In my next post, I’ll be posting some iperf results as evidence to my claims.

Sonicwall blocks a certain purely technical blog as Forbidden Category “Intimate Apparel/Swimsuit”. Yet the router is open to remote telnet connections, without any authentication required. So even if you aren’t an uber level 99 user, still you can watch over and monitor all the processes running on the router and maybe if a certain person decides to take the next step, there is nothing to stop him.

Coming back to my college, studies and life……there are still some persons who think pointers and references are the same thing.