et alii*Step V.2
"You're not the time Kent, you're not the time!"
If you're following the game with the titles the last entry was a reference to an episode of The Simpsons. Some neighborhood boys it seems destroyed Principle Skinner's bird bath then hurled rotten egg onto the front of his house then when he looked out the window they were mooning him. To make him angrier. Thus the humor and clever writing revealed in that brilliant show. Yelling at them to let them know brandishing their buttocks at him was only making him angrier. Now who wouldn't find that humorous?
The last entry I had actually meant to go into this game I've been playing or did play called Neocron. But it's more than simply the game. It's the experience now associated with my playing of this game.
Neocron was in a beta stage in early to mid 2002. That means it was being tested before release to work as many of the problems and program out as possible for the public release, for those of you from Swansborrow (if you don't get that don't be surprised, no one will). I was in college at the time and generally avoid playing games during the semester but since this was my first experience getting to play game in beta so I was jumping at the chance. I should also mention Neocron is a MMORGP (that means it's a "Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game" or a game that can only be played while on the Internet, for those of you in Swansborrow). For the record I did as good or better than I was usually doing in my grades for the semester.
For the first several weeks of playing the game I didn't really understand what going on or really get to know or talk to anyone on a regular basis. But about I would guess a month in I finally had the idea of doing a general broadcast on the public chat channel to all players to request aid in taking on a really tough location in the game known as the sewer. My character was still rather low in the rankings and I couldn't handle the higher level of sewers. I wanted to take on the infamous level 5 sewers so I requested aid from all comers and managed to gather a good-sized group. I'm not even going to try and remember the name of the players.
At the point in the game there really wasn't much to do or places to go. Just killing the same monsters in the same sewers over and over was pretty much it. I wanted to do Sewer level five because it was so hard and had an even harder monster at the very end known as the queen spider, ranked a very dangerous *** (three stars). And maybe if I was lucky 5 others and me could beat it after much effort. In subsequent updates to the game this queen spider and whole sewer was significantly as the vernacular goes "nurfed".
Eventually a semi-regular group formed. Thing is it was a little difficult keeping track. The game had a sort of "buddy list" feature but it was constantly getting wiped along with the server constantly going down without warning for unspecified amounts of time making it difficult to track the same people from one gaming session to the next. Eventually some how I found a group a players and some we all managed to keep track of each other from one server crash to the next. At the time the much coveted clan feature was still a distant future feature coming soon. So we all started wearing the same color pants and shirt (one of the few things we could actually change about our appearance). This was the easiest way to make it obvious we were all part of the same group.
I'm beginning to think a short blog entry is too much to accomplish. So this will have to be a two parter. So stay tuned for part two...
"Brandishing Your Buttocks At Me Is Only Making Me Angrier!"
In case you're following the little game with my titles the title of the last entry was a paraphrase of a liberated Iraqi's banner held up on April 9th 2003 (the day Baghdad was liberated).
This time I am going to follow-up on the last entry with a little more detail of what's going on but still not really get technical. Then I will go into some detail on the experiences I have had in various online-only computer games I have played/am playing/will play.
I'm trying to figure out how much detail I should be giving. I'm pretending anyone is reading this for some reason. Well first off there's the Internet. The Internet is just a gian mesh/spider web of computers connected to each other. And these computers are not necessarily personal type computers with a keyboard and mouse running Windows or whatever. So more accurately there's millions of simply "devices" on the Internet. And each device must have a unique identifying number that only it has. If you end up with the same number as another device on the Internet, well that's not supposed to be possible actually. For the record this unique identifying number is called an Internet Protocol (IP) address. So every computing device has at least one IP address. In fact the device you're reading this on right now has at least two. Besides the one everyone else on the Internet can see you as you also have one called the "localhost" address, which is 127.0.0.1.
I hope that wasn't too technical. This brings me to the concepts introduced last time. Usually when you sign up for the Internet with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) you only get one address. Usually you get a new IP address every time you connect to your ISP or your ISP swaps your address with another one every fixed period of time at their own discretion. This leads to a problem if you have more than one computer you would like to have on the Internet at one time. So without paying the ISP even more money how exactly do you do this?
First of all there's usually two networks involved in my scenario: the "internal" network and the "external network". The external of course being the Internet or everyone outside of what you would consider "your" one or more computers. The internal network is what is your network of one or more computers, the ones you are trying to connect to the Internet.
Well besides the "lovely" connection sharing feature in some versions of MS Windows you can buy a device that features DHCP (Dynamic Host Protocol) and NAT (Network Address Translation).
DHCP, or rather the server part anyway, is simply a program that sits and runs on a computer or computing device and says (as it would seem to us humans) "here have an IP address...here have an IP address...here have an IP address..." over and over. On the other end are the DHCP clients conversely saying "gimme an IP address...gimme an IP address...gimme an IP address...". This makes setting up a network very, very easy.
NAT works along side DHCP in this case. DHCP give everybody looking for one an IP address, NAT keeps track of this and re-routes as necessary.
So your DHCP/NAT device contains your one valid IP address from your ISP and hands out local-only addresses to the devices on your local network. This way your local network is divided off from the Internet. So when you connect to a website you send a signal to your NAT device which then re-writes the signal and re-sends to the website of your choice. When the website comes back in the form of a web page or whatever the NAT device remembers what your local address was when you originally requested it and forwards the information to your computer. This is all transparent and happens in fractions of a second of course.
All this is also supposed to help protect you from the outside world. After all if you're on the outside and don't know where you going on the inside it will be that much more difficult. Unfortunately if you want to do some fun things like set up a server for a computer game or a web server (for some strange reason) it may take a while. Or at least it did with me any way. You must set up something referred to only as "port forwarding". Basically all this means is "open a hole to the outside network assigned a number. When a signal from the outside comes in referring to that number send it to this specific computer on the internal network".
I hope this somewhat easy to understand. I did the best I possibly could to make it sound simple. Actually this is difficult because the concepts are not simple, they're quite complex.
This turned out longer than I expected so I am going to wait until next time to talk about my mutli-player game experience. Not sure when I will do that. Maybe later today maybe next week. Who knows...
Originally Posted:
[3/16/2003 11:35:59 PM | Col. Dubois]
"It Ain't Gonna Be A Rabbit"
Welcome to my blog, et alii*Step -- version 2. If you didn't read the first version (no one read the first version) this one is going to be much, much better.
First things first:
What is the deal with that weird title, et alii*Step? Well I'll tell you.
I'm not one of these fancy people who got to learn Latin in school. I did learn a minute bit in a business law class I had to take and to my utter surprise it seemed a little interesting. So I took the common abbreviation et. al. and expanded it to it's fully spelling. et alii roughly translates to "and others" which is intended to be my overly-cerebral way of saying "I'm going to write about anything and everything I feel like, nothing specific".
The second part, *Step, should be somewhat familiar to any über-computer-geeks reading this. This is a reference to an old operating system, or more specifically an old interface for an operating system called NextSTEP. The operating system was made by one of the original creators of the Apple Macintosh (Steve Jobs) after he left Apple computer in the late 1980s. Since then there have been many graphical user interfaces (GUI) trying to mimic the look and feel. One of these GUIs was made for Microsoft Windows and is called LiteStep. The asterisk in computer terms is the "wild card" or "any and all examples of" if you want to think of that way. So to refer to any of these Next-inspired GUIs one would simply write *Step in place of listing a bunch of names.
Assuming any of that made sense, et alii*Step means "any and everything I want to write about; also I will refer to my favorite program, LiteStep."
Next? How about the title to today's blog entry: "It ain't going to be a rabbit". This is a reference to one of my favorite TV shows. I like coming up with creative and sometimes bizarre titles to things. But I got an idea this time: each of my blog entries will have a creative and/or bizarre title which may or may not have anything to do with the actual entry. This will be a reference to something some where in pop-culture which you will be free to try and figure out. The following entry will reveal the answer to the reference. These references will be very specialized and difficult, so ya know.
Originally Posted:
[4/14/2003 12:59:20 AM Col. Dubois]
"Human Shields Go Home"
So here I am, finally making entry two for the et alii*Step.
A lot of stuff has happened that I want to write about and I don't know where to start. I really wanted to keep making entries but stuff just keeps coming up. Ya know? I mean I have everything all lined up and perfectly lined up when I'm jogging or bored in class. But now? How do I say what I want to say?
Here's an idea. Just pick a topic and start typing.
Although first of all I should mention I managed to screw up the whole blog thing. I can't get the archive to, well, archive the way I want. Mostly because I played around with the ftp server, apparently an unwise move. So the archive at left may or may not work and may or may not have working links, also.
Lets see. I would like to draw out how I set up my home network, overly complicated as usual for me. I didn't feel like taking the "easy way out" and buying one of those "broadband router" devices that do everything for you. Pffff. Too damn easy. So I took a spare Pentium 166 Mhz computer and put two network cards in it. Then I bought a switch. Next all I needed were a couple Cat 5 networking cables and a distribution of this free router/firewall package called LEAF, which stands for Linux Embedded Application Firewall . Which means, as you may have guessed, this is a firewall based on Linux. It's just a single-purpose program that runs from a floppy disk eliminating the need for a hard drive. All I did was uncomment out the appropriate driver in the relevant configuration file. LEAF includes a DHCP server, features NAT, and is supposed to be an impeccably secure firewall too.
So what is a DHCP server? I don't feel like going into details so lets just say it auto-magically gives all computers connected to a network address (an IP address, which stands for “Internet Protocol”, but lets not get technical). Pretty much all operating systems in existence have a DHCP client, or an "I'm looking for a network address" feature built in. So to summarize, my network has the ISP's connection going to the LEAF, the LEAF going to the switch and all computers connected to this switch. Basically when you try to connect to a site on the Internet you send a request to that computer which then sends back a response. Behind the LEAF featuring a "NAT" what is actually happening is your request is sent to the LEAF, which sends the request then the response is sent back to the LEAF, which then relays to the local computer.
The whole point of all this is to "hide" one or more computers behind one network address. This way if you only have one network address you can have lots of computers using it. It also helps protect you from the evil outside world.
Of course, if I just bought a device it would have a built-in firewall/DHCP/NAT and switch and would setup in mere seconds. But at least I've had the fun of hours of frustration trying to get the stupid Linux port rules to work. And it works. So there's that. In theory all it cost me was the extra network card (well two really) and the switch (which I need anyway for a home network), which is less than $100 or $80 or whatever. If that was $15 each for the network cards and $30 for the cheapest switch it comes to roughly $60.
Next time I would like to go into a little more detail and possibly get a little more technical. Hopefully next time will be soon.
Well I guess that's all for this sucky blog entry. By the way as promised the title pop-culture reference from the first entry is from one of the funniest shows on TV called Whose Line Is It Anyway?
