Woohoo, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban came out today! Can’t wait to see that one. The dementors look like they’re going to scare the living crap out of me - they were bad enough in print - and it’ll be interesting to see a new director’s take on Hogwarts too. While on the trailer site I noticed this, which I though Ben particularly may be interested in.

Speaking of films, my dvd rental company (originally the catchy ‘dvdsontap’ until it was inexplicably renamed ‘LOVEFiLM’) have upgraded my £15/month package to three dvds at a time! Nice. I haven’t yet seen any catch, other than that the £10/month tariff still only allows one at a time, so I can’t downgrade to save money for certain other pastimes. I’ve been with LOVEFiLM for a few months now and have been fairly happy with them. The turnaround is normally within 3 days of me posting a DVD back, which isn’t as good as it could be but is nothing to complain about, really. I’ve had a few problems with DVDs (stuttering, skipping, etc.) but that’s to be expected when you’re dealing with discs. The DVDs are cleaned before being sent out, so it’s only ever actual scratches that are a problem. I’ve emailed them whenever I’ve had an issue and generally received a response the same day. They have a tendency to be over-apologetic, but that’s hardly a bad thing and I do get free days added to my account, which I assume means that once I get enough they won’t charge me for a month. Most importantly, I’m enjoying the films! I’m seeing many that I’d probably skip were they in Blockbuster, as well as various genres and obscure movies that are hard to find on the high street. So, all in all, it’s been worth the money so far.

Oh, and this is really my kind of office…

Not the best photo I’ve ever taken, but hopefully you can make out what it is…THE MONKEY LIVES!!!! He hasn’t been working for years, but today there he was, recently acquired baby monkey in tow, going up up up…oooover…and down!

Up up up…oooover…and down!
Up up up…oooover…and down!
Up up up…oooover…and down!
Up up up…oooover…and down!
Up up up…oooover…and down!
Up up up…oooover…and down!
Up up up…oooover…and down!
Up up up…oooover…and down!
Up up up…oooover…and down!

Like that.

So he wanted to…no…he talked…what? (not terribly pleasant)

The final episode of Friends is on shortly. I’ve never watched the show relig…no…crap word…I’ve never been a dedicated fan of the show, but I’ve seen a fair few of the episodes and have always enjoyed it. I know enough about the characters to care what happens to them all (although I’m still holding out hope that they gang together and throw Joey off the balcony). Somehow I’ve managed to avoid news of their ultimate fates, despite the final episode being shown a month back in the US. Personally, I’m hoping Gunther and Rachel get married and live happily ever after.

I think that this, along with Sex and the City ending, are all the world’s way of building me up for the final episode of Frasier in a few week’s time…sniff.

I was invited to team up in City of Heroes earlier. This hadn’t happened before, so I wasn’t entirely sure of the procedure. I accepted the invitation and immediatedly embarrassed myself by getting stuck in auto-run mode and disappearing off down the street in the wrong direction (the chat window had focus due to a half-completed sentence, and my mad-clicking just opened up more windows to confused things further). Then, when we started an ‘instanced’ mission - one in which a special area is opened just for your team - I got a phone call! Not wanting to look even more stupid, I continued playing while talking, and I think I pulled it off without saying / doing anything wrong…Still, I wouldn’t like to do that again! After completing the mission we headed off to ‘Perez Park’ - a dangerous area I hadn’t visited before. It quickly became apparent that we weren’t going to be able to cope with just the two of us, so my teammate, as leader of the team, started inviting others. He had no luck, so asked if I’d like to be leader. Given that I’d never even been in a team before, you’d think I would pass on this. But nooooo.

I managed to talk a few others into joining and we soon headed off into the park, promptly encountering a group of marauding ’skulls’. The ensuing fight nearly killed my graphics card, but went ok with minimal loss of health. We then merged with a team who had come along to help and they asked me to continue as leader. Feeling full of myself, I led them into another group, who were again quickly despatched (dispatched?). I then quickly moved onto a group of monsters, but my team weren’t quite ready and said monsters pummelled me into supermush. So I had to lie there on the ground, unconscious, while the other heroes exterminated the baddies, until I could use my ‘awaken’ one-shot power that leaves you disoriented and unable to move for 20 seconds. Sheepishly, I apologised and we moved on into a park clearing. Here we found a veritable army of monsters at least two levels higher than our most powerful team member, and within minutes I and three others were dead while the remaining heroes tried in vain to fight off a group that had almost double their number. I had no ‘awaken’ this time, so had to activate the hospital teleporter. I made my way back but didn’t even make it to the battlezone. At this point I apologised and quit the team.

So, I was crap at leadership…However, they were all more powerful than me, and I’d never done it before today. And besides, it was bloody good fun! Nobody had a go at me or anything, they were actually all very friendly. I shall just have to practice more This game rocks!

Astonishingly, my friend Nod is now on his way back to Dorridge, having finished his time at university. To him I say this: DON’T BE SO BLOODY STUPID, YOU HAVE AT LEAST ANOTHER YEAR LEFT. Lynsey came back last week, and I was in denial then too. There’s just no way this is actually happening. Three years cannot possibly have passed that quickly; don’t be ridiculous. The strange thing is, if you say ‘it’s three years since we finished college’, I can believe it. My sense of time is all messed up…

In other news, Darfeyn Quinn keeps getting his ass kicked by the undead, so he’s going to have to team up with some other heroes soon if he wants to progess any further. Oooh…teamwork. I…er…he’s never been very good at teamwork. Still, it has to be done. Now that some of the enemies have slightly fancier defences I’m starting to notice that the graphics are stuttering. I haven’t even got the settings maxed out! This is the first time my GF3 has struggled with anything (without being silly about it), so I think the time may have come to replace it. I’m thinking a Sapphire 9600XT with Half-Life 2 coupon may be the way to go, although the 9800 Pros are pretty cheap these days…

I have a friend who’s been looking for the Gameboy Advance version of Scrabble for weeks and can’t find it anywhere; it seems to have been discontinued as nowhere has it in stock. I’m not having any luck either, so I was wondering whether anyone had any cunning tips? This is the one we’re after. I’ve tried eBay, Amazon, Play, random google searches…

I’m getting myself all confused regarding firewalls, NAT and port forwarding. This is annoying, as I thought I understood it all. I’m going to write it all out as hopefully that’ll help clarify things for me. As I currently understand it:

NAT enables computers with non-public IP addresses to share a limited range of public IP addresses. Here’s the process:

• A LAN-side computer wants to communicate with the WAN, so sends a packet to the router
• The NAT in the router looks at this packet, determines that it is to the WAN, so changes the sender’s (private) IP address to the router’s (public) IP address
• The NAT also changes the ‘Generic ID’ TCP/IP header to a unique 16-but number and assigns this to a private IP address on the local network.
• The router than sends the packet off into the wild blue yonder (literally, in my case)
• When the router receives a reply, it checks the ‘Generic ID’ header (which the other computer keeps intact), finds the 16-bit number, matches this with the private IP address and sends the packet to the appropriate port on the local computer.

All well and good. Port forwarding comes into play when a LAN-side computer wants to act as a server i.e. it receives unsolicited packets. Now normally the router would receive these packets, find no matching ‘Generic ID’ and ditch them. But if you set up port forwarding you can say ‘all packets to port 33445 should be forwarded to computer with IP address x.x.x.x’.

To deal with the above problem there’s something called ‘UPnP NAT’, which understands servers. While various routers and windows xp support this, I don’t really know what layer of the OSI network model it’s on. Do applications have to support it directly? Anyway, that’s not too important…hopefully.

A firewall is basically anything that filters packets in some way. A NAT is a firewall.

Currently in our office we have a server which serves out the internet connection via ICS. This works very well, but the firewall configuration on the server is getting increasingly complicated, especially with Norton’s total paranoia, and I’d like to move the internet connection sharing to a hardware router. I’m looking at the Linksys WRT54GS which includes a ‘powerful SPI firewall’ (unlike the WRT54G - but they’re the same price anyway). This will filter packets based on various options you can control, including packet content, ports etc.

Let’s say I want to run a web server on my computer. Do you think that I have to ‘open’ port 80 through the firewall, then configure port forwarding to send all the packets to my computer? I’d guess not…I would imagine that the firewall is all linked into port forwarding and the NAT system, so setting up the port forwarding would sort it all out automatically. What about if l33t haX0r 3d tries to communicate with the router on port 21…will the port appear ‘closed’ or not to be there at all? Not that it matters all that much - afaik unless problems are found in the TCP/IP stack closed ports are pretty much a solid wall. So I don’t care all that much about that.

Ok, next issue. City of Heroes needs, amongst others, ports 6994 and 2104 ‘open’. Is there a way to simply open these without having them forwarded anywhere? Just so that they don’t get rejected automatically? Thinking about it, this shouldn’t be an issue. Unlike the current Norton firewall, ‘unused’ ports aren’t just blocked no matter what, and any packets received on these ports should have been requested by me, so the NAT should handle them. Probably.

What worried me was that the WRT54G ‘only’ has space for 10 port forwarding entries (though you can set a range etc. in each). 10 doesn’t seem like very many. However, I’m not running any servers here all the time, and any game servers would only be temporary, so I think that should be enough. For a while I was confused and thought I’d have to set port forwarding for all games, but there’s no reason to do like just like there’s no need to set up port forwarding for email / web access.

Ok, I think I’ve got it all figured out now. Sorry for the rambling post! I find that in networking you can’t afford to forget anything, as all the technologies are so interlinked you need a wide range of knowledge to understand how it all works

The Grand Prix yesterday was the first I’d watched the whole way through for a long time. Not that I have anything against Michael Schumacher - he’s obviously the best driver in the world, perhaps ever - but his superiority doesn’t make for interesting races. However Monaco’s kinda pretty and the race quickly became exciting enough to warrant watching it all. It would have been even more interesting had I known that in order to publicise Ocean’s 12, a £200,000 diamond was implanted into the front of the Jaguar nosecone. Unfortunately said Jaguar crashed out on the first corner…and lost the nosecone. There’s still no sign of the diamond. Now, obviously people have lost out badly here, but it’s still pretty damn funny

A quote from Michael J. Fox regarding stem cell research:

I believe it was a 19th-century scientist who said there are three stages of every breakthrough: First, everyone thinks you’re crazy. Then the church comes out against you. Then it changes the world. We’re in stage two. But I don’t see any backsliding in momentum.

I like it

For perhaps the first time in a month, I did some exercise yesterday. I saw a bunch of people doing aerobics and decided to join them.

A physicist by profession, Darfeyn Quinn was experimenting with artificial Dark Matter when a swarm of neutrinos from a nearby supernova caused it to multiply and swarm towards any nearby metallic objects. A steel plate from a childhood accident attracted the particles into his brain, and he soon realised that his fate did not lie with science. Darfeyn found he had the ability to manipulate water molecules by thought alone! Combining this with his technological abilities he became a SUPERHERO, fighting injustice and evildoers on the streets of Paragon City, as well as affording him the opportunity to wear cool hats.

In case you haven’t guessed, I treated myself to City of Heroes on Wednesday, and so far it’s fantastic! Darfeyn is my first attempt at a hero - you can have 8 per server, and there are 10 servers - and he’s already saved a fair few citizens from muggings and other terrible fates. There are rumours that he stupidly took on more bad guys than he could handle and subsequently had to be revived in hospital, but that’s a smear campaign put about by jealous anti-heroes.

Creating your hero is so much fun it’s scary. You first choose an origin (science, mutation, magic, natural or…er…something else) and an archetype that defines the kind of powers you have (basically just offensive, defensive or a mixture). After choosing a body type - male, female or ‘huge’ (a very large male figure) - you get to design the costume. The sheer range of possiblities is staggering. You can customise pretty much every part of your hero’s body and costume, with a very wide range of possiblities that are actually all quite good. Few are silly, and you frequently find yourself having to adapt other body parts to accommodate a pleasant discovery elsewhere. The colours are also completely customisable. You can’t have a cape, which is a shame (the developers operate a ‘if we can’t do it right we don’t do it at all’ policy and want capes to flow properly and look good rather than just being static - there are rumours they’ll be introduced in a future upgrade) but apart from that you are really only limited by your imagination. Once you’re happy with your costume you move onto the hardest part of the entire game: thinking up a name. Darfeyn’s scientific background lead helped me to come up with his, but I can see how one could struggle for hours! You can also enter a ‘battle cry’ and origin if you like. Once this is done, you’re ready to enter Paragon City.

I’m not going to say anything more as to be honest I haven’t got much further in the limited time I’ve had to play. I will undoubtedly be boring you with more details in the future! If anyone else gets the game (please ) Darfeyn is on the ‘Infinity’ server - you’d need to register on this if you want to meet up as heroes can’t move server (yet). CoH is $49.99 to download, which is about £28 atm, plus $14.99 a month. The developers have said that major upgrades will be released every two months, so providing you enjoy the game you should get your money’s worth. It is still possible to buy online, despite the main link being removed from the PlayNC website. You need to register an account then select the ‘Purchase Code’ option. The CoH client is a 900mb download, plus a few updates once installed.

I can’t fly yet, dammit. Must work on that.

The ghost of Windows 95 reared its ugly head just now, when I discovered that my sister’s hard drive was only operating in PIO mode in Windows XP, despite being in ‘DMA if available’ mode. I checked the bios and updated Windows with the latest hyperion drivers to no avail. So, on advice from a newsgroup posting, I ‘uninstalled’ the ‘Primary IDE Device’ and rebooted, which fixed it. It now boots up 20 seconds faster. I haven’t had to use that kind of fix in 2K/XP before

Well, I made it! It didn’t hurt all that much, either. I’ve been pretty rushed all day and am too exhausted for any more than a few lines now, but I received some great presents and an unexpected number of cards. I spent most of the day with Kate, which was of course very nice, and this evening had a birthday cake shaped like a caterpillar! The house is still littered with various packaging materials, and I don’t care a bit

A conversation from the weekend:

Me: I think Grissom from CSI is cool. I want to be him when I grow up.
Kate: I thought you were going to be Sam from West Wing?
Me: Oh yeah, he’s cool too. I’ll be both. I’ll be a freelance writer who solves crimes.
Kate: What, like Jessica Fletcher?

Wow, but wow did I walk into that one.

So today’s the last day before I become an old person. Will my perspective on the world change, I wonder? Will there be a Kevin like shift in my attitudes at the stroke of midnight? What’s it like for you people on the other side? Does it hurt?