Starcraft Lectures
Berkeley university is having Starcraft lectures.
I could only find lecture 1, 3, 4 and 6 on YouTube (there is also lecture 10 but sound quality is bellow anything listenable).
I do hope that they will record everything next year.
Because some posts just refuse to be placed into a bucket
What to Do When Airline Breaks Your Stuff?
You could try something like this:
No LAN for Starcraft 2
Blizzard decided that Starcraft 2 will not have LAN support.
This decision is quite strange to me. Starcraft as a sport was raised on local network and low latency (just try to do Mutalisk micro on battle.net). I do not know what they did so great to their service too speed it up, but I am quite sure that it cannot be as fast as two computers next to each other. And that is even without thinking how speedy Internet play will be when Starcraft II comes out and all trillions of people try to play it at same time.
I do remember quite a few Starcraft games in hotels where ad-hoc wireless was all it was needed. Those days are gone now…
Presenting
I occasionally do small presentations. Most of them are inside jobs, but sometimes I do find myself in front of unknown people. Here are some tips that I found useful.
Rehearse
Nothing is more important than rehearsing your speech before giving it. You don’t need to do it dozen of times, one or two times is enough. Just make sure that you rehearse it as you will give it. Go through all samples and use a clock. Timing is of essence here.
Check a room
Be sure to get overview of room at least few hours (minutes in worst case) before giving a speech. Check everything that you need: power, network, telephone… If you need it for presentations, make sure it is there or that you are aware of problem. Do not allow yourself to do network troubleshooting in front of audience.
Tea
Drink tea, not coffee. I personally tend to be quite speedy presenter and if you combine that with coffee you get really quick talk that nobody can follow. Give people enough time to absorb information as they get it. However, remember that some enthusiasm is quite a good thing.
I know few presenters that have beer before presentation (or even during) but I must confess that it does not work for me. If I want to give presentation it has to be alcohol-free.
Don’t be late
Don’t be an asshole. Be in room as people pour in. Wait if you think that some more people will come in, but be there.
Going Down
I am currently experiencing major technical difficulties for both my e-mail and web site.
My mail domain had non-default MX record settings (Google Apps) and that was not updated with move to new server. Without noticing, my e-mail account was gone since 2009-06-19. MX records are now corrected, but it will probably be few more hours until DNS gets new data. And then again, I will be e-mailable.
My web site is also down since transfer to new server broke some settings and I broke rest of it.
Long night awaits…
[2009-06-22 02:00: Web site is finally up but not with full functionality. I still need to restore 404 functionality (in case of non-existent file, I used to redirect it to newest version).]
[2009-06-22 03:00: DotNetPanel was a problem. If you don’t put * into sub-code text field it will not warn you, but it will just start displaying “The data is invalid.” page for all http requests. It seems that error checking is unknown discipline in this product. In any case, web page is back up.]
[2009-06-22 03:00: My e-mail is up, but in very weird and uncomfortable setup. Hopefully normal access will be restored soon.]
[2009-06-22 12:00: I also need to thank to my web provider. While this was caused by them while moving me to another server, I must commend their availability in middle of night and during non-working days. I will most definitely stay with them.]
[2009-06-23 08:30: I got first e-mail to my server! It is sent from my web provider so it should take some more time for it to propagate through all DNS caches.]
[2009-06-23 23:30: I finally got my error reporting system back on-line. Some servers send me e-mail to correct address, but big part of them still hasn’t updated their DNS records.]
[2009-06-25: Finally everything works. :)]
Virtual Disk Management From PowerShell
Since my presentation on KulenDayz 2009 is over, I will share here PowerShell scripts for creating and mounting virtual disks under Windows Server 2008 R2. For those who really need it on Windows 7, there is solution with C# dll called from PowerShell (or just use small sample application).
Here are also links to some older post that cover most of what I was speaking about:
If you are C# soul, you may also want to check my WinDays post.
Windows 7 - VHD
I am giving lecture at KulenDayz 2009 developer conference. I am quite curious how it will go since I am primary a developer and this is my first lecture in system administration track.
If you are in neighborhood, please do come.
P.S. Guess which one I am on this picture (hint: look what pumpkin’s eyes are saying)…
Project Natal
Today I was on coffee with dear friend and I learned that Microsoft has something called Project Natal. There I said that almost nothing can persuade me to get Xbox.
I saw this video and I changed my mind. There are things that could make buying Xbox a viable option.
Bing
There is new Microsoft’s search engine called Bing. Name itself reminds me of Alan Ford’s quote: “Hello, Bing, how’s the brother?”. While meaning of that greeting is not so nice (trafficking stolen goods), it means that I will remember it without problems.
Search interface is clean (with nice picture background) and search speed is good. However, after spending one day with it, I cannot say that I am too excited. When I look at all those things it can do, I feel cheated. All that seems really useful, but in reality almost everything is limited to North America. All I got from it is just generic search engine results.
P.S. It even fails at recognizing that I come from Croatia. Getting results of Slovenian pages does not help me much.
Juni Vs By.hero
I stumbled upon this video of Zerg vs. Zerg Starcraft match.
Until now, I though that this match-up cannot last more than ten minutes. Boy, I was wrong.