Found at ph33r and loathing.

FK Zebra’s last match has been played. If you weren’t there yesterday, you’ll have to watch it on TV. I’m happy with the way I played, especially in relation to how the previous night went (Chrystelle, that was an excellent party, but a badly chosen day).

I have a few of Chrystelle’s pictures on flickr, and there’s more info on our Facebook page.

The filming for FK Zebra is coming to an end. It’s been a blast, I’ve gotten more excercise in these two months than in the entire previous year, met some cool people, did some fun stuff and played a lot of tough matches. The last match is on September 28th and he first episode will air on October 1st.

Sadly, our final match will not be at Ullevaal as planned. The grass is too worn out, they say, and I understand that the worldcup qualifications take priority over a bunch of nerds. So we’ll be playing on our home turf, at Haraløkka Idrettsanlegg. The event starts at 11 o’clock, the actual game at 14:00 sharp - I hope there will be a big group of supporters!

I’m going to be sad when this is all over, and I hope we can get together and play a bit more after we’ve all com down from the permanent high that these two months have been.

If you missed this game, you’re not alone. As someone who has played it, let me recommend this game warmly: It’s among my favorites on the Gamecube, and one of the few games I played all the way through. Soon now it’s coming to Steam, so go and get it!

It looks like all the good adventures are being put on Steam these days: The longest Journey, Jack Keane, Sherlock Holmes, Beyond Good & Evil and not to forget, the excellent Telltale games. As an adventure gamer, I should rejoice - just one wish: Somebody convince Lucasarts to do the same. I’d absolutely buy Monkey Island over again.

For those of you who come here through a google search for “enno rehling zebra”: Yes, I’m the guy that’s on TV2’s new football show FK Zebra. For those who don’t know what that is, we’re 16 nerds who are learning to play football, and we’re being coached by Norway’s former national coach, Egil “Drillo” Olsen. This is a lot of fun for us, and because most of us have never played much football before, and we’re playing with some football legends, it will hopefully also make good television. If you’re in Norway, tune in to TV2 Zebra in October.

If you’re hoping for inside information about the show or match results then I have to disappoint: we’re not allowed to give away spoilers (games industry folks will be familiar with the concept of an NDA), so I probably won’t talk about anything that hasn’t already been shown on TV. If you want to see what’s been written about us other places, the Facebook group for our team.

I made a shocking discovery today: Gamers don’t care about graphical quality. I was sitting together with a dozen other nerds looking at four of them play FIFA 08, and commented on how bad the lighting in that game is (a “where is the light source that is throwing those shadows?” sort of comment). When I explained why it couldn’t be the way it was, one of the guys said “only you would see something like that”.

To me, and everyone working in games, what looked like a cheap mix of shadow maps and stencil shadows was glaringly obvious, and we know the PS3 can probably do better. But to these guys, all with different backgrounds, it not only didn’t matter - they didn’t see it! Why are we spending bazillions of dollars on ever more refined tricks like AO (”look how the shadow in the corner of the room are very realistic - oooh!” when even simple shadows are something players don’t pay attention to?

Last year I bought a new PC, and because I didn’t know which graphics card to get at the time, I decided to do a little self-experimentation and see what life is like with integrated graphics. After all, more and more people buy cheap laptops these days, and integrated graphics are getting better all the time. I bought an Intel G33 board which has a GMA 3100 (no X) chipset. The specs say it can do DirectX 9.0b, and Shader Model 2.0. Enough for quite a lot of games, but not for the latest and greatest. (more…)

The Eressea server (and with it, this blog) has been down for about a week due to a burnt motherboard. The hard drives could be saved, but the new machine doesn’t have SCSI, so some work had to be done. Thanks go to Andreas and Nils for fixing this.

The new machine is no longer Debian but Ubuntu. This gives me a chance to set things up The Right Way - after 8 years, the old machines had a lot of quirky stuff installed, and was running with a number of unexplained anachronisms. So excuse the mess, we’re under construction.

Here’s my preliminary TODO-List:
(more…)

There are a lot of good things I can say about Eclipse, but I have two griefs: One is the fact that I have way too much stuff in the menus that I never use. The other is that I’ve spent way too much time fiddling with the installation of plugins. Yesterday was no different: Upgrading to Ganymede left me without a working Flex Builder plugin. The MXML editor simply breaks with a traceback:
org.eclipse.jface.util.Assert$AssertionFailedException: Assertion failed:
at org.eclipse.jface.util.Assert.isTrue(Assert.java:185)
at org.eclipse.jface.util.Assert.isTrue(Assert.java:170)
at com.adobe.flexbuilder.editors.derived.editor.FlexMultiPageEditorPart.setActivePage(FlexMultiPageEditorPart.java:569)


I did find a solution here (make sure to restart eclipse with -clean afterwards), but this kind of fiddling with the installation is not something I should have to do. Especially not with a plugin that’s as important as Flex Builder. Adobe, I’m looking at you!

Let’s all remember that Personal data is as hot as nuclear waste.

• Travelers’ Laptops May Be Detained At Border
• Feds accuse bank insider of massive data heist (The Register)
• Wenn Zöllner Copyright-Cops werden (via lawblog)
• Unencrypted traveler data laptop disappears from airport (The Register)
• British tax authority lost 25 million households records because privacy isn’t a priority there (via BoingBoing)