Laggy new year

EA sucks. Really... Not only they didn't pay the overtimes of their workers but their games are very costly and in many cases install DRM software which actually are rootkits for fuck's sake.

I suck too. Why? Among other things because I paid for one of their games: BF2142.


BF2142, or Battlefield 2142 is a really great game that was released three year ago (but still costs 30 euros in Greece). In fact it's one of the best first person shooters I've ever played if not the best one. And being the best FPS is the only reason I haven't thrown my copy out of the window. The Battlefield series was started by DICE which was afterwards acquired by EA. And obviously EA is now guiding DICE's efforts wherever it will create moooaaar money for those chairmen that haven't written a single line of code for they games that made them rich.

For the last three weeks at least, an extremely annoying bug (known as hesitation lag/bug) appeared in BF2142. Every three seconds or so the game pauses for half a second. The bug appears on a per server basis after playing for 10-45 minutes, makes the game unplayable and will not go away unless you restart BF2142. But that is not much of a problem compared to the position of EA on it.

Here is a taste of the bug:

There is a thread (in fact there were much more but they were joined) in their official forums where many angry players, including me, complained about the problem. For the last three fucking weeks the only answer by a forum admin was "we are aware of the problem and we are looking into it". For the love of Khali do they need three weeks to address a simple lag problem? Even if they hired a new programmer, trained him and put him to work on it, it would take less than three weeks to solve it!!!

So the situation now is that a three years old game is completely unplayable for hundreds of players (if not thousands) and EA isn't saying anything on what causes it. Instead, me and a bunch of 10 more players on that thread are speculating on what is causing it like it is our job after paying 30 euros to figure out what is wrong.

So next time you think about buying something from those money-eating lets-mess-a-game-up'ers remember that although the game manual doesn't state it, supports is not actually available after 3 years.

I am going to play some Dystopia now, a free half life mod created by amateurs that has less bugs than most EA games. And it's a complex game to make and to play.


I'm gonna write something about Dystopia soon cause it is really worth it as well as my $10 donation. Until then stay away from scams.

BOINC Portable Beta

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a system that allows users to volunteer CPU time to various projects. The idle CPU time is used to help discover new drugs, search for extraterrestrial intelligence, solve mathematical problems, predict climate changes etc.

Normally you install BOINC on your computer and then subscribe to different projects. Now you can run it from your USB flash stick or from your desktop without the need for an installation.

This is a beta version and I release it hopping to get some feedback.

You should be aware of the following problems:

1. If you download a job on an Intel CPU and then continue running it on an AMD CPU (or perhaps on a different Intel CPU too) it might corrupt the results so try not to do this.
2. Because of the limited space on flash drives some projects might reject you.

It would be a good idea to attach to a project and then edit the local preferences to make it write to the disk every ten minutes or even more and also not download data for many days ahead. Finally it would be better to use it more like an install-less version rather than a portable one.

Download BOINC Portable Beta from here and please leave comments!

PS: After I made my portable version I found another portable version made by another guy here.

PS2: You can find the source code for the launcher in the Data directory. It's an AutoIt3 script. Feel free to do whatever you like with it.

PS3: I forgot to add this to the readme:

You can find the source code for BOINC here.

PS4: I tested the other guy's portable version and it lack some features compared to my own. For example it doesn't seem to save the registry settings of BOINC Manager.

Ctrl+H

In Linux you can toggle the viewing of hidden files by pressing Ctrl+H. This doesn't happen in Windows where you have to take a small trip through the explorer menus and options to toggle this setting, accept the changes, se your hidden files and then go through the same trip to hide them again. Ctr+H comes to fill in this feature. Copy it to any folder and run it once. It will ask you if you want to register it so that it starts up with your system. After that it will popup a message over your clock telling you it's running. Its tray icon will soon dissapear but Ctrl+H is still running. Then you will be able to show or hide hidden files by pressing Ctrl+H just like on Linux. Click here to download Ctrl+H.

FrontPAQ v4

FrontPAQ is now better. Here is a list of changes:

• The progress bar moves smoothly and not only on the end of files.
• FrontPAQ doesn't show a folder selection dialog if you run it. Instead it displays how to use it which now has changed: you drag and drop things on it. That way you can have it on your Desktop or you can have a shortcut in the quick launch and use it easily by dragging directories or files on it.
• It will search the directory where it is stored for PAQ8P*.exe compressors and use the first one if available. If it finds none then it will temporarily export an embedded one in its directory. If its directory is read-only (eg CDROM) it will use the system temp instead.
• It is compatible with PAQ8PF too which is a much faster compressor with still great compression.
• It includes two embedded compressors: PAQ8PX v64 and PAQ8PF beta 1. You can select any of them when you select the level of compression.
• It now gives proper advice when the "tmpfile: access denied" error is encountered. (reboot or run as admin)

FrontPAQ versions 2 and 3 were made by moisesmcardona and included different compression engines. You can also find version 5 on his site which uses more up-to-date compression engines. I will update FrontPAQ only when I make changes in the front end so you can find the latest versions either on moisesmcardona's site or you can get them from this great forum and drop the one you want to use in FrontPAQ's directory and it will use it instead of the embedded. On the forum you can also discuss about FrontPAQ in this thread.

To download FrontPAQ v4 click here.

SFTM v2.0

Super Fuck This Mind (my Mastermind solver) has been upgraded! Parts of it have been rewritten and it includes 5 new features:

1. You can tell it to ignore combinations that contain a color more than once.
2. Color names can be easily customized.
3. You can now play your own moves instead of the suggestion that will always be given. That way you can continue old games by playing the old moves again.
4. The above settings can either be typed into SFTM whenever you run it or read from textfiles.
5. If it detects a mistake it will ask for the correct combination and spot the mistake you did.

I also included a benchmarking version too which will tell you how many moves are needed on average for different settings.

Here is a screenshot:


Don't forget to read the included README! It explains most things, I think!

You can download SFTM from here. Have fun cheating!