Copperwire » Rants/Ramblings

EA screwed the pooch

ericr — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 03:02:42 +0000

I just got Red Alert 3 for the Mac. It worked fine after installing it, but after a reboot, it crashes on start up.

I must say, the EA support pages are pretty horrible. It’s difficult to find support articles (worth anything) or to get patches.

I’d really appreciate it if someone could help me. I run the game on the top 24-inch iMac that just got released (Stock, except for a bluetooth mouse. Stats are in the Systems page). Here is the messages I get on the “Game crash” screen:
: < << DID YOU REMEMBER TO BUILD DATA??? >>>


You might have build the wrong LOD level!
Can't open stream data\mapmetadata.manifest

256 addresses:

(0): (unknown mod) (unknown)

(0): (unknown mod) (unknown)

... continues for a while ...

(0): (unknown mod) (unknown)

(0): (unknown mod) (unknown)

Because of the severity of this error the game will now exit.

Stupid Apple AV cable @#$%^

ericr — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 23:15:17 +0000

The other week I decided to buy the AV cables for my iPod/iPhone, thinking it would be handy to play a few show that I have on my iPod. After I got home from buying the (expensive) cables, I learned that they didn’t quite fit my television inputs. With a little bit lot of force, they might fit, but at the risk of breaking the inputs. A little bit of googling shown that other people have gotten the same results.

Looking at the images above, you can see Apple decided to be cool and continue the aluminum body all the way to the end of sleeve. Most people seem to just toss the cables is frustration, but with a trip to the local store, you can get RCA adapters and use a short set of RCA cables (that you probably have laying around) to go in between.

This seems pretty simple solution, but I haven’t heard of anyone actually doing it. With the adapters, you can put use a little bit of force to get the on the cable and just leave them on after you are done. I’m pretty sure there is some loss in the adapters, but it’s better than nothing.

Web 3.0cvs20060905

ericr — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 12:30:25 +0000

Oh god, facebook.com just upgraded and pulled Web 3.0 out of cvs. It’s just got more annoying as they just started to get cool with thier developer shit.

Verizon, about f’ing time!

ericr — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 07:54:19 +0000

I have Verizon DSL at home since the local cable company (Patriot Media) are a bunch of dirt bags. In June, Verizon got a hold of the IP block 72.0.0.0/8 and started assigning them to it’s DSL users. This is all find and dandy, but they didn’t update the reverse dns look up stuff (the in-addr.arpa, the PTR record, you know what I’m talking about). As a result, I couldn’t use a lot of services that does reverse dns lookup (like ssh on eden), which sucks majorly. So today, around 03:00, I loose my dsl connection, which almost gave me a heart attack. After about ten minutes of trying to get back the PPPoE connection back up, I finally persuade it to come back and use the loading of google.com/ig as the smoke test. Lo and behold, Verizon got it’s act together:

I guess all the customers that complained finally got them to fix it.

Lost for words

ericr — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 19:20:40 +0000

I hate Software Engineering

Why, Apple, Why?

ericr — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 04:57:04 +0000

Dear Steve Jobs,

What is up with the iPod HiFi and the new Mac Mini? The iPod HiFi is just uncalled for; so many other companies have created speakers for the iPod, why must you create one, a much more crappy one? And the Mac Mini, why the integrated graphics? Is Intel pushing you around to use their chips more now that you two are in bed together? So the Core Duo I get, the graphics card I can forgive, but now the higher price? Oh come on! I first got a Mac since it was different and elegent with it’s PowerPC processor and new Mac OS X. Now I see kludged together Intel processors and craptasic products, which was what I was trying to get away from. If you continue this trend, I don’t see myself nor anyone else purchasing any more of your shitty products. Think now, do you really want to bring yourself and your company down to the level of the sterotypical PC and consumer electronic manufacturers?

Rutgers’ Libraries

ericr — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 02:52:20 +0000

Why is it that the libraries are so backwards? I don’t mind that they need a special bar code on the ID cards. I don’t mind that they need their own special number in order to check out books (previous mentioned bar code is encoded with this number). My question is, why do they ask you to log on to their site then ask you to enter your bar code number? Logging on to their site seems so useless since in order to do anything, you need the bar code number and some 4-digit PIN that no one ever remembers.

Also, why can’t they set up their stuff to accept just libraries.rutgers.edu? You have to enter www.libraries.rutgers.edu.

Update: I’ve discovered that they require logins with NetIDs in order to access copyrighted reserve material. Now, the question is, why can’t they integrate their circulation and reserve systems to accpet the same login?

iTunes 5, atrocity to the eyes

ericr — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 19:26:32 +0000

Now that iTunes 5 is out, is anyone else pissed that Apple keeps changing the look of the UI? From the last count, there were 6 differnent themes (aqua (e.g. disk utility), brushed metal (e.g. Safari), wood (e.g. garage band), pro tools (e.g. Final Cut Pro), Tiger (e.g. Mail.app 2.0) and now the new iTunes).

Apple, this is not Windows, stop changing the friggin’ theme. Pick one theme and stick to it.

I hate one sentence posts, but…

ericr — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 21:59:44 +0000

I hate when people just post a single sentence that makes no sense, but this is how I’m feeling right now: I want to give up.

I’ll probably explain in a week.

~~P.S. If you have any idea how to do Fourier series and it’s still the day of this post, contact me, please, I beg of you.~~

P.P.S Would the person or persons taking all the mouse balls in Alexander cut it out.

UTF

ericr — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 07:37:53 +0000

I was looking at Jason’s blog and out of all the systems I use, only my Solaris 10 box running Firefox displays the Bengali font correctly. I find this fairly amusing.