"SmoothwApple"

So here I am, once again only a day later writing in my blog. This time it's post second interview at Apple Computer and while waiting for them to call to tell me I've been hired. I never even thought I was even remotely qualified to work for such an organization to begin with. The staffing service contact guy said he thought I did pretty well, I don't really know though. How in the world they called me based on my resume that didn't include "the company" I don't know. What local cable companies with famously bad customer service have higher hiring standards that Apple?! Bah.

So today the staffing service will call me if Apple is at all interested. The staffing said I did ok, maybe he says that to everyone to make them feel better; I really don't know. It would be nice to be told I did really badly and don't bother waiting for the call because it won't come so I could get on with my life and not missing my class at the JC that just happen to be having a mid term today. Starting about 10 minutes from the time I'm writing this as a matter of fact. Bah, what does it matter? I sent the teacher a note via email letting him know I had an interview with Apple and I didn't know if I could make it to class but I might but I might not blah/blah/blah. So he'll let me take it later or he won't. Of course if this staying him pays off and they hire me I won't be attending class again anyway so it matters not that much to me.

And again maybe it's just my inferiority complex working over time but I really didn't think I had much chance to be considered. Not much chance through the phone interview, not much chance through the "study session" and not much chance via the panel interview I just finished. I just realized I can't ever share this blog with any Apple employee in the unlikelihood they hire me. I'm certainly glad they decided to consider me, that's the best thing that could have happened to me. If I had to guess probably they won't hire me, as I don't usually match up to someone else when it comes to this.

During this interview I just got back from I did try to smile and show some of my personality however subtle and/or subdued it may be. As I was explaining about "the call center experience at a small local ISP I didn't mention on my resume" I did manage to get a little bit of a reaction out of some of the panel. The old story about the old lady who REALLY wanted IE 5.5 for Mac even though MS only makes up to IE 5.0 or 5.1 whatever and how no matter what I simply could not convince her that such a thing does not exist and there was nothing I or anybody else at the ISP could do about it. Also the time one of the accounting people said she was very impressed how I showed up and left at a consistent time every day, implying I had some sort of option in the matter that I was unaware of. I think that got some sort of reaction out of them, maybe a smirk and a "wow". So this could be an indicator maybe I left an impression and they'll remember me come call to new employee time. Or maybe not.

I'm still in shock I was considered, I mean really. Now I will discuss another variable I have here. I got this hair cut about 5 weeks ago and I didn't really like it. So yesterday before the study session I went to this real live barbershop and got it re-trimmed to look good. Actually it turned into a flat top which isn't necessarily what I was looking for but the general shape of a flat top was there so that's what I got. It's amazing how much a good hair cut can have on the way person is perceived or looked upon. As I have noticed from having what I would call not a very good haircut. So I'm sure the recently trimmed flat top had a hand in getting as far as I have in the process.

So what have I written, three or four pages just on this interview about absolutely nothing? Writing is certainly a good way to vent feelings, frustrations etc., isn't it?

Update...

Well it's now the next day, and no one has called me. I'm assuming this means they're not going to hire me or the staffing company lost my name yet again. How hard is it to keep track of a candidate's name? I'm sure they didn't lose it. Just wouldn't surprise me if they did. So now I guess I'll try cheering myself up.

For instance I was watching this old re-run of Night Court the other day, it was perhaps the first episode with the short lived comic from the Soviet Union Yakoff Smirnoff (I don't know how to spell that); you might know him from in soviet Russia car drives you and similar sort of lines. Well in this episode of Night Court Yakoff is describing what it's like in the USSR to Bull, the bailiff. He tells Bull to close his eyes and says "imagine you're in downtown Milwaukee, no matter where you go you're in downtown Milwaukee...you can get in your or fly for thousands of miles and no matter what you're still in downtown Milwaukee..." finally Bull grabs the sides of his head and yells "STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT!!" and runs screaming from the room. That was possibly the best Night Court ever. The best one I've seen anyway.

That was one of the best-written shows ever. In fact I can name a lot of well written shows: NewsRadio, The Simpsons (up to season 9), Futurama, Family Guy, The Practice, 24, well that's all I can think of off the top of my head. Several of these shows, at the very least NewsRadio, Futurama and the Family guy, are actually what I would call "writer's shows" or "shows for writers". Lot of jokes included only a person who's dealt with the frustrations of creative writing could possibly appreciate.

The Family Guy for example had a lot of apparently wrestling with dumbing-down episodes to appeal to a broader audience or staying more the way it already was and thus "staying true" to the idea that made the show original and creative to begin with. Futurama also had a lot of references to "low level awards, like writing".

NewsRadio had something similar, expressing frustration with the competition of the show being a lowest-common-denominator shock effect sort of thing while NewsRadio was much more sophisticated, do such things as using terms like "strata various" and "ambidextrous" without stopping to explain what they're talking about. They also did a reference to the old UN images of the USSR representative banging his show on a desk and yelling, "we will destroy you". I think that was from the UN, I don't remember. Anyway not many would get the reference and there was no attempt to stop and explain. That's what I call "not dumbing it down to the lowest-common-denominator".

Ok lets change the subject. I decided I was going to do one of two things: create a series of different floppies set up differently for my Dachstein LEAF router. You see this is a Linux-based floppy that acts as a router/firewall for my network connection to the Internet. There is convenient web browser interface to control everything, I have to go into that particular computer and edit a "network.conf" file if want to play certain games or start an FTP server. This is really, really annoying as I have to try to set it up, test it out, if it doesn't work go back in and edit it again, see if it works, repeat. So I thought I would make a bunch of different floppies, each one with a different configuration and depending on what I wanted to do I would insert in that floppy, reboot and use it; setting the router back to a normal no ports floppy was I was done.

That I heard about a similar project called Smoothwall. This one requires a hard drive and a lot more RAM but it has a lot more features such as a web browser interface to opening/forwarding ports, easy setup of a "DMZ", not to mention some kind of intrusion detection software built in. Only problem is I can't get it work. I can bring up the convenient web interface, so I know that parts working, just can't do anything else like connect to the Internet for instance. I mean this thing even has a built-in Java-based SSH client and I can reboot the system for the web browser. I mean it's nice! But why won't it work?! I know it should work because I can't put the floppy back in and reboot and the Internet abstemiously works again on my computer. Try it from Smoothwall on the HDD and it doesn't work.

Well I just spent several minutes talking to a Smoothwall expert in an IRC channel and slowly realized since Smoothwall swaps the IDs of the two NICs (the that communicates internally and the one that communicates with the Internet) my ISP was preventing me from connection to the Internet because the other NIC obviously has a different MAC address. So now I'll try simply putting each NIC in the other PCI slot to see if that works. I'm so excited! And Apple wouldn't hire me :).

Well this has been a long enough entry so I think I'll go now.

  ¶ 2:22 PM

 

"LANappley"

In case Justin Blanton is reading the feed, I have more news: I went to the study session at Apple computer, again. A representative from the staffing service apple uses called me up and started describing this same position as if she'd never heard of me so I mentioned I had already been to a study session; news to her. So I ask if I can attend again, she says she'll get back to me. Three days later she calls again and again starts describing the position to me as if she'd never heard of me. So I tell her again I've already attended a session and that she'd already called me. Oh sure, now I'm suddenly familiar. I'm kind of losing confidence in this staffing service by this point.

So finally I go into the study session, having little to no faith the staffing service would even be able to keep track of my freakin' name anyway. But as it turns out there was only 5 of us that showed up (out of 6 anyway I think) so it wasn't too hard to go through it all. I did my little activity packet for OS 9 and OS X, took their stupid little quiz on Mac OS and finally at the end one of the people in charge walks me out and tells me they'd like to hear from me again. Isn't that great?

So I guess now I have to like...learn about Macintosh? Doh! Ah it won't be too bad. It'll be like hiding my non-liberalism at college. Or something. So I'm just really excited about this. If I make it past the next interview, which is tomorrow, I'll immediately go over and file the W4 form with the staffing service and I could start the orientation this Friday and start working Monday. Isn't that insane? Or is it just I? If I actually make it that far I'll have like a real job or whatever. And ironically the pay check from Apple will make any of number of PC-related company's stocks go up based on how much I'll be finally spending. At least I assume I'll spend more with my money given the amount I've been spending with no money. Or maybe I won't have time for all that. I'll be too tired maybe?

So that's the biggest thing I have right now. I also have a short 8-hour a week gig "advocating" a brand of soil at a local home improvement warehouse. On Sunday it was in the upper 80s and I was standing there, in the heat, for four hours straight. And there were little to no customers all aboot the gardening department. So I was bored as all hell, and hot, and dehydrated. I drank three liters of water in three hours. That was a lot even for a hot environment now.

Other stuff? Well I finished FarCry, and it's a really, really good game. Just a weak story, near-non-existent story is all. I just have way too much patience to be able to pass complete this game. Because the latter levels, on the second-to-easiest difficulty, are so damned ridiculously hard you may as well put it on the hardest level because it's just so hard. Get ready to play the same areas over...and over...and over...again. But the AI provides much entertainment. You can trick the AI enemies into the fighting each other instead of you the player, for instance. That's the one thing that kept me playing for all those repeating saves.

Then, in a brief irrational need to buy stuff I have no money to buy, I purchased the relatively old game Max Payne on account of I heard it was good and had a cool Matrix mod and it was only $10. Wow, what a short game! And very linear also. But still I think a really good story and well laid out, in a "graphic novel" sort of format. The only part I didn't like was the dream/drug trip sequences. I could have done without that, thanks. I just found that annoying as all hell.

I did finish it in a very short number of hours. Not sure how many exactly, but it's a very short game. There's both a "Kung Fu edition" mod and a Matrix mod. The thing about this game that makes it special is the ability to slow down the action in both "bullet dodge" and "bullet time", which is that famous effect made popular in the Matrix movies. So it's only natural someone eventually made the necessary modifications to make both special Kung Fu moves as well as the special air displacement bullet effect during the slow motion portion. Also in the Matrix mod are additional weapons and the ability to hold two of the special machine guns at once, which isn't available in the original game. And the bullet clips hold a lot more and you can carry more clips. It even has some of the same sound track during the slow motion sequence.

I also went to a LAN party up in my old hometown. Turns out they were all playing Unreal Tournament 2004 so I had to go buy it so I actually had something to play at this LAN party. Doesn't anyone play counter strike any more? I can't believe I bought that stupid game. But at least I had that one. So I bought Unreal 2k4 for $40, which isn't bad, played a few rounds of including one that just had the whole place in a stalemate for what must have been 90 minutes, which is really long for an Unreal match. Mostly it was pretty fun though, if not really repetitious.

  ¶ 11:51 PM 0 Comments

 

"That's an opine"

So it's again been quite a while since I've contributed to my blog. Whether it's studying for the A+ exam or playing my latest game, I just haven't gotten around to it lately.

As always not a lot has happened. I am still working on my bootable 98 CD, though my goal is now less clear. The only thing really left to do is figure out how to trim down the required disk space for the install so I can fit both it and a game into 64 megs of RAM. Now that will be extremely difficult. Because not only do I have to get the OS itself way below 64, I have to get it so small I can include the OS plus extra programs.

My new plan is to make it so I have a basic bootable disc with what is called the ENUM key of the registry gone. With that key missing Windows will re-detect all the hardware and provide an opportunity to install the drivers. This is necessary when boot 98 on a new system with a different motherboard etc. Once that is all done I could create new zips of the existing windows and program files directories and burn a new CD. Then leave that CD in and reboot once more, resulting in a forever there after customized bootable CD for that particular computer. So at the every least I need enough space left over for a new copy of the zip files and for the CD burner software. Now I was going to use the free CDR tools that will both create ISO images/bootable ISO images and burn CDs while taking up very little disk space, but the burning portion isn't even compatible with my burner. So perhaps I can reverse engineer the necessary files to make EZ CD Creator work. Or better yet I could put a trial Nero on there. After all this a read-only medium, it's not like the thing is going to ever expire. Right? Might have to change the system time however.

I also found out that even during the first reboot from setup.exe two very unnecessary files are loaded: one for "video phone helper" and one for the MS JVM discussed in the last entry. Now why would a system need to lead to file necessary for functions no one could possible use during setup? Doesn't make much sense really. How can you use either Java or a video phone during the setup of Windows?! Good thing I figured out how to remove such things from my registry and system. Now I just need to figure out how to automate the process...

And another thing. My mouse started acting extremely strangely one day for no reason what so ever. I didn't install any mouse software or anything; the device said just a normal, standard mouse. But when I would try to use the scroll button to go up or down a page in IE for instance the page would go back/forward real quick and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why. So hoping the official driver what help in some I downloaded the software from the manufacturer's web site and looked at it. At first I couldn't find anything that could help and I still had the problem. Then on one of the tabs I found an "Advanced" button and looked at it. In the diagram of the mouse the mouse had five buttons, while mine has mere the two standard and the scroll button. I then noticed the short cut of pushing buttons 4 and 5 at the same time was assigned to scrolling the scroll button. But I don't have buttons 4 and 5 ya see. So how can the scroll button be assigned to them? So I unassociated the scroller with buttons 4 and 5 and assigned those buttons to "none?, which fixed the problem. I love when software spawns extra non-existent buttons.

I've been continuing to attend my "Ethical Hacking" class at the local JC. It's about mid-term time now and I'm just starting to actually get some information that was useful. I was expecting more of a "this is what hackers will do to break in, here's how to counter-act it" sort of a class. Instead it's kind of a "how can you tell if you've been hacked" followed by "is your 'my documents' of the start menu any different". Yeah, thanks, could have guessed that. Then we learned about encryption, two key encryption, and different things like that. Again, not incredibly useful for my money but I have learned maybe three things I didn't know before.

As for the latest game, Far Cry, I'm guessing I'm somewhere towards the end now. The non-existent plot is starting to bug me, but the game itself is pretty fun. Seems like all I have to do is trigger the AI and it starts fighting itself independent of me, the player. For instance I was driving a jeep on this dirt road high above the ocean below. I went over a hill too fast, couldn't see where I was going and went off the cliff into the ocean. I expected I would die rather quickly at that point but I didn't so I ejected out of the jeep and there I was in the ocean. The jeep at the bottom of the bottomless abyss apparently. Hoping there would be a secret way to climb up to where I was going before I kept swimming that direction until I heard the sounds of a fire fight on a bridge above me. The genetically manipulated psycho apes were fighting it out with the mercenaries on this island. As I swam under the bridge a helicopter came in to help with the fight, and as I past the bridge this helicopter was destroyed and fell down into the ocean as a giant hunk of smoking metal, narrowly missing me. Up above the mutants and mercs had pretty much killed each other off so by the time I finally found a way up there were only a few mutants left on that side and the rest were mercs on the other side of the bridge I had just been under.

Now maybe a lot games are like this, operating (or seemingly so) independent of the player. But I for one was quite impressed.

The game has a lot of the normal problems of course; the AI not noticing a rock just flew over their shoulder but going to investigate the sound of the rock in front of them. Or my footsteps being a very suspicious sound but the sound of a grenade? Didn't notice. But as compared to most other games, this AI is extremely good.

Now there's only one more thing I can think of to write about: environmentalists and gas prices. And by environmentalists I of course mean left wing partisans doing their cheer leader routine for Kerry. Why are these people criticizing Bush for the high gas prices? If they knew anything about anything they'd be cheering and dancing in the street; setting off the environmentally friendly fireworks etc. The best possible thing that can happen for the environment is for gas prices to be as high as possible, thus providing a financial incentive to buy hybrid and highly gas efficient vehicles. So why would any self-confessed "pro-environment" left wing partisan be anti-high gas prices?

Lemme guess: the focus groups say the average citizen/voter would prefer low gas prices to high gas prices and since Bush is president and the gas prices are high Bush is therefore against the little people and the price is totally and completely his fault, right? So what I just described there is that these supposedly pro-environment types are in fact unprincipled patricians who care and know nothing of the environment, just using it as a buzz word to go through on their way to a very, very left wing agenda. Or they're incredibly stupid and ignorant. So which is it? I've always maintained these people that purport to be environmentalist aren't really pro-environment but rather quite simply 100% left wing partisans pushing their left-wing agenda. They just can't come out and say so because "vote for us: we're extreme left wing and hope to turn the USA into a system similar to that of Germany or the U.K. economically" simply isn't palpable to the average voter. So "we have a strong environmental policy and therefore a vote against us is a vote against the environment" works for reason. What, I'm wrong?

I've also been wondering about Kerry and his apparent unwillingness to move to the center, like normal candidates do. That's the way it works normally: you go all the way to your respective end of the spectrum to get the nomination then move to the center to appeal to everybody else. Kerry has the nomination since no one is even running against him any more, yet he does not move to the center. I think I know why: he thinks he's competing with Nader. According to the polling Kerry loses to Bush only because Nader is pulling about 5 or 6% and therefore Kerry has to do more competing with Nader right now then he does with Bush for the center. If Kerry would just look at the history of the whole he'd know come convention and election time not nearly that many people will vote Nader and he really has nothing to worry about. But it's not really like I care. In fact I care little about who becomes president. There's no candidate out there to represent me right now, we get the same thing pretty much irregardless. Except for Kerry treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue instead of a war-like issue. That's about the best and/or only argument for Bush going right now. But again, I don't care that much.

This is all I can think of for now; I'll try to add more later.

  ¶ 1:01 PM 0 Comments

 

"A return..."

I figured something out, all by myself. I figured out how to remove Microsoft's "Java Virtual Machine" (MS JVM) under Windows 98. Actually I did find how to remove the MS JVM on Windows XP, and just simply modified the command to suit my needs. So the original command, for Windows XP, is:

RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection java.inf,UnInstall

And modified to run work under Windows 98, I just simply changed the name of the INF file that does the removal part:

RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection MSjava16.inf,UnInstall

As noted with the underline, under Windows 98 the name of the INF is different but otherwise works the same. I didn't find this on a web site, I really found the relevant INF in my Windows 98 installation and modified this command. Ok maybe it's not that special, but I was so proud I some how figured this out.

In news I did FINALLY finish making my stupid live bootable Windows 98 CD. Doesn't work as well as the article I used to make it though. For instance I have to go into the BIOS and complete disable the floppy drive for to work. Also I was having so much trouble with a file called scanregw.exe I just deleted it, solving the "system file not found, restoring backup...press any key to restart" error. And since I used UPX to compact down my binaries the command console doesn't work. And I get an error if I try to access the CD-ROM via My Computer, but I figured out a work-around for that.

The other minor detail would be that the CD may boot on all computers but the OS has to detect all those devices all over again so you have to hit escape and/or Next a couple dozen times and good luck getting anything to work after all that.

So what I did run the Windows 98 setup up to the point where it copies all the files and reboots at which point I ran ghost and made an image of that point to a CD so I can at least get the proper setup parts of it ready when preparing a CD for a particular system. Now I just need to figure out how to set it up so it finds all the hardware on the fly quickly and makes all the registry modifications and deletes all the unneeded files auto magically.

In unrelated news I purchased the full version of the demo I've been playing, a game called FarCry. I was playing this game instead of writing in the blog now that I think about it. It really is a wonderful game, and only $40 new. Also it's not for Mac ;-). I haven't finished it yet, I doubt I'm even half way through. It's so new only one patch has been released. One 28-megabyte patch. Damn! The AI is REALLY good though. And can even be adjusted quite a bit.

Lastly, I think, I have an idea for an original invention-like device for my computer. I have this intake chassis fan on the side, you see. It's sucking in dust at a mad rate. This fan also has a grill over the top of it, which serves mostly to remind just how much dust is being sucked into the system. So I made a rough device that stretches some panty hose over the fan to try and collect the dust. Not as easy as I would have thought really, but I some how did it. On a related note the other day I dusted out my system. It was running at 60 degrees Celsius while idle before I dusted it out and down to around 52 or 53 degrees post dust-out. Lets just say there was some dust involved! Now I'm thinking I want to make a real semi-professional device to go over my filter. The kind that allows you to easily slide new panty hose filters in and out without taking apart and shutting down the system ;-).

Well it's now 2am so I'm going to go to bed. I hope this was all informative. Good night...

  ¶ 2:14 AM 0 Comments

 

"pkzip -P -d"

Here I keep meaning to write in the as often as I was for a little while there. But it's only been five days and I don't think that's too bad. Not too much has happened since the last entry. On the Win98 CD front I was starting to delete what were obviously useless files in the \win and \win\system directories when I apparently deleted some files I needed. My logic, you see, was that any file I needed would currently be in use by the system thus preventing me from deleting said file. Right? But as it turns out there are several vital files that are only accessed at system boot-up and not when you're actually in Windows. So I had to restore a few missing files. That was working until I found out I was missing VMM32.VXD. I don't even remember deleting this one and as I soon learned it is a very, very important file.

As I learned from Internet research this file is generated auto-magically by setup when Win98 is installed. It contains all the "virtual device drivers" necessary for the currently installed devices. So if you delete it you can't simply copy over someone else's or find a copy on the Internet, that won't work. There is supposed to be a way to re-generate one without re-installing but it requires information from the registry and extracting a few files from a few of the setup CAB files. Unfortunately I don't have access to the registry unless I'm in Windows, now do I? And the files the article told me to extract from a few specific CABs weren't in those cabs, so that didn't work.

Fortunately I had been zipping up my Windows directory and transferring them to the other computer so I had a handy original copy of my Win directory. I just made up a CD that extracted the win.zip file to X: with X: substed to \cdrom instead of the RAM disk. So I'm back to where I started before the great files delete experiment. I could try it again, I was actually making quite a bit of progress before rebooting to find the system hosed.

On the downside whatever version of the win.zip file I now have I'm back to not being able to even boot into safe mode any more. But now that I think about I made both an ISO and zipped up the pair of zips that were working so that isn't too much of a problem. The other problem I'm having with this is the command prompt no longer working, either in regular mode booted from the HDD or CD. Either I deleted a file I needed or it has something to do with that UPX executable packer I use on the files.

On other fronts I got a low paying weekend-only job, selling soil. Maybe I already mentioned this, I don?t remember or feel like looking. I don't know why I don't just find some part time job at wherever while I'm looking for a real one. I mean I could get any old job, I'm sure. Truth is I put too much emphasis on pleasing my Dad. He's paying the bills after all; I thought he was in charge. I think he's coming down with Parkinson's disease or something. He has this problem with bottling up frustration and letting everything explode every so often. That combined with the drinking and lack of memory makes living with him very, very unpleasant.

The stupidity on my part is that essentially getting an A+ and Network+ certification is the only thing in-between me and a real job that'd allow me to move out. So essentially the only thing standing between me and being away from this is this little red book currently on my shelf. And here I am writing in a blog instead of studying the book and taking A+ quizzes. I don't think I'm feeling very rational these days. A rational person would be studying that A+ book like there was no tomorrow, or rather would have studied and finished it 3 months ago along with several other books and most likely have a job by now.

But I don't want to make myself depressed any more than I have to right now. I just want to study that damned book, take the quizzes online and on the CD I have and move the hell out.

On other fronts I downloaded a demo of this game called Far Cry. Took me a while but I finally finished the demo all the way through. Then, since I had such a good time, I did it again on another difficulty setting. Then I put it on hard and toggled on "adaptive AI". Beat it on that difficulty also, though it took quite a while. As you may have guessed I liked that game quite a bit. It's a first-person shooter that's extremely flexible about how you get to your objective. The demo has you starting in a rubber raft off the coast of some Caribbean island. You can start by either going straightforward to small out-cropping with a hill and some foliage hiding you from some non-descript henchmen or you can take off either to your left or right to find an alternative route.

You start with merely a hand gun and the ability to throw rocks to distract the AI characters. I didn't realize the rock thing until quite late in my first run through. Eventually you can find or obtain from enemies other weapons including two separate assault rifles, a sniper rifle and a rocket launcher. Your mission is to make it to this giant satellite dish and destroy it. You can see the dish from the rubber raft when you first start, so you know where you're going. And essentially if you can see a location at any given point you can get there by trudging through the jungle.

There are several routes to the dish, each requiring differing amounts of gunfire with the enemy. I'm sure you could make it with no fire fights what so ever but I never tried that. Once you make it to immediately outside the old for ruins near the dish it really gets interesting. You have to set traps by making distractions with the rocks. Throwing a rock into a doorway to attract several guards and then throw a grenade into the same area, for instance. This can be done several times over until all or almost all the guards in the fort are dead. Even on "hard" with "adaptive AI" the enemies still go for the rock-thrown-over-the-shoulder-noise trick. I also found a place in the fort that I can climb up on and attract all the AI to come in below me then shoot them all like fish-in-a-barrel as they apparrently can't shoot upwards, only stick their head in a wall and run in place.

Once I finally made it to outside the door leading to the command center for the dish I get a radio message the door is locked and to hang tight. Fortunately there's a rocket launcher in handy view and a bulletproof vest in close reach. Unfortunately you're soon spotted and some AI with incredibly good aim starts shelling your exact location. Unless of course they never see you, then your golden because all you have to do is move away from the immediate area where they are shelling and they keep hitting the same place over and over no where near where you are. At some point a transport helicopter and two machine gun-mounted copters come in at the same time for a final assault while you're waiting for your slow partner to break the lock on the door. So it's just a matter of staying a live.

You only get 3 rockets in your rocket launcher. The transport copter can be taken down with one rocket, the other ones take quite a bit more. But one well-placed rocket does tip the copter over and dump out a few people, which helps in the surviving portion of the game. Now one time I did some how manage to make the game timed so a mortar aiming at me actually hit the transport copter. That was frigging awesome. It was quite an accident and it only happened once. I was playing that last portion over and over again doing different experiments. I think I would really love this game if I were to purchase it.

  ¶ 1:44 PM 0 Comments

 

"xcopy /t /e"

Well, for the most part I think I've successfully made a live bootable Windows 98 CD. Most of the time of course I have to go in to safe mode because one of the drivers is bad. Of course I have to use step-by-step boot since selecting the actual "safe mode" would bypass the autoexec.bat and config.sys, which would leave out the RAM disk driver. Also I can't really use it on a separate computer since it has to find all that new hardware. And lastly I never did get it to use a different version of system.dat such as system.tat so I'm nervous about booting it on a system with an existing Windows installation for fear of a conflict and unpredictable results.

But why did I do all this anyway? Well actually before I get into that I should say I still have the problem of a conflict with one particular file, IOS.VXD. Not sure what that file does or why I need it, but I am fairly certain the system will not boot without it. I think I may or may not have an idea about what is going on. It has something to do with the bootable CD emulating a bootable 3 1/2 inch floppy disk and being a CD-ROM at the same time. The system can't deal with trying to access both devices at once. This new article I found actually has a solution to this, or what is supposed to be a solution to this, involving renaming one particular file. But I seem to still have a problem.

The way I did this is to create a bootable system with everything relevant pointing to the X: drive. My solution to this is to subst a folder to X: and install windows to X:\win, which is what I did before. The other step is to zip up the program files and win directories and unzip them on the fly via the autoexec.bat into a RAM disk specified as x:. Now did you get all that? Good.

I also learned something I didn't know before: apparently trying to boot Windows 98 from a CD isn't that uncommon of a thing because I found a "patched" IO.SYS file that is supposed to solve that problem I mentioned above about the conflicting CD and floppy driver. It's supposed to make the system wait for the CD to finish before loading the next item. But, for me at least, it doesn't seem to actually work. I have no idea why. Maybe it's that file I renamed before?

So if I could just figure out how to make the system find the proper INF and driver files on the fly w/out having to hit Next a bunch of times, or just suppress all that stuff and enable the proper hardware as necessary manually. Of course I have the Windows XP bootable CD thanks to Bart's PE I downloaded and got working.

The real reason I even did all this was to have a platform on which old legacy Win9x and DOS games could be played without the pain of a dual boot or swapping hard drives or whatever. Many of those legacy games can in fact be made to play in Windows XP, but it seems like a lottah trouble and besides I can save disk space that way. Maybe it'd even be a safe way to do a LAN party: disable and/or remove HDDs from system, boot from CD at LAN party and not worry about anyone infecting me with viruses or taking files.

In fact there's a chance I could even write a series of batch files to set such a thing up. As in write a batch file to eliminate all uncessary, non-vital files for the system to operate, leave in necessary video/audio/network/etc drivers and the game or games that need to be played. I don't think that can be done with the Bart's PE program as it severely limits the number of programs that can be run at the same time.

That wouldn't work for all games unfortunately. Even if I burned the bootable distribution with the Win98 system itself only taking up 10 megs to a DVD-R, I would take up so much memory but the end I don't think much of any game would actually work. That and the annoying types saying "just use Knoppix with Wine" or something. Though Wine isn't free. That wouldn't work too well anyway.

So this is for those few games that either don't run at all or don't run well under Windows XP. Any time I wanted to play a particular game I would just take out that particular CD and fire it up, play the game I want and when I'm done simple take out the CD and restart the computer. That's assuming I didn't want to save my game at any given moment. For that I could use a USB thumb drive or something that.

There's still one possibility I never quite understood why it couldn't be attempted: use the handy "HDD emulation" option right a long side "floppy disk emulation". If I could do that I could...well the system would think it was extracting zip files from another HDD to a RAM disk instead of a CD to a RAM disk. Would that really be significantly better than having the system think it booted from a floppy and extracted from a CD?

What I really need to do is figure out how to copy just the files that would need write access to the RAM drive, leaving the rest of the files conveniently stored on the CD, thus maximizing the amount of RAM I would have for system processes. Right now I copy the entire necessary file structure into the RAM drive that is now upwards of 100 Megs. And that's just the OS and no games installed. I wouldn't even be able to run that on a system with 64 Megs of RAM, obviously.

Now if I could some how trick it into thinking there are two partitions...one for program files one for system files? Problem is in both those cases files would need write access, thus prompting all files to be copied to the RAM disk, which is exactly where I am now.

So to make the CD emulate a HDD I would, in the simplest version, format an actual HDD as a bootable disk and copy all the files I currently got going over to that disk as I do now with the RAM disk. Then I would need to find some utility that makes raw images of HDDs including the boot sector then burn it to a CD some how. So in theory it would act as copying files from a HDD to a RAM disk currently does, only from a CD instead of from an actual HDD, thus avoiding the conflict in drivers, right?

The whole point of the HDD drive emulation idea originally was to make the whole system boot from the CD as the HDD, but the CD will of course be read-only so it would cause the page file and presumably registry to freak out with no write access.

I can't believe I wrote an entire two straight pages on my semi-successful bootable Windows 98 CD and I don't even feel like I made that much progress. Actually I forgot some stuff after all that: for I used the free UPX "executable packer" program to further save space in the RAM disk and I used a free utility entitled DOSLFN to enable full long file names in native MS-DOS. This way I could use the command line version of PKZIP to make my win.zip and programs.zip files with full paths in the zip file. If I do it from Windows I get errors about share violations. Without those two minor details I don't think this would have been possible.

Finally I feel the need to explain the title for this entry. You see xcopy /t /e will copy an entire directory structure from one location to another, without the files. That's kind of the way I feel right now. A whole structure created and ready to be filled, but currently without any really contents. In other words my unrealized potential both professionally and personally. It's a like a metaphor or something. A metaphor for my entire life tied up in a special command for a long deprecaited and old operating system. I'm sure that's telling of something, what exactly I have no idea. Sorry that's as deep as either DOS or I go metaphorically speaking.

  ¶ 1:58 AM 0 Comments