Wow a month??!?

Posted on April 1, 2012 by firestream

So here it is, nearly a month since my last blog post.  Not sure why I haven’t posted anything in so long, but it’s been a busy month for me.  I’ve been sick for like half of it, but I’ve still been busy working on various things.

HaloCharts is back!
First, and most shockingly probably is that HaloCharts.com is back online, but with no stats!  It’s pretty much a forum for the time being, with a steady flow of posts and a good community.  It will ramp up over time and start doing monthly events, group nights, contest, etc, but we’re taking it slow.  There aren’t any stats because I don’t have the time to manage everything the site used to have, and at the same time the Halo Reach API was taken down as of yesterday, so even if I wanted to do stats it would be super hard and require me to screen scrape Waypoint’s site.

I brought the site back because I missed a lot of the community we had.  The news for Halo 4 got me excited for Halo again, but the details have been sparse.  Hopefully we’ll start getting good info on the game soon.  When Halo 4 details emerge I think things on HC will pick up greatly as we start getting ready for it’s launch.

Lot’s of HaloSphere Updates!
I’ve managed to have a lot of time to work on HaloSphere2 and it’s been great!  The community there is really excited about all the updates.  More games are being played and I think things are fun again.  I took about a 4 month break from it all due to a lot of personal events, but I’m back to it and on track to release a lot of cool updates for a long time.  Big thanks go out to Psyfireman and Fett2005 for their help managing the game and working out ideas with me.

In the last 2 weeks I’ve fixed a ton of bugs, cleaned up some systems that needed improvement greatly, like the Items section and Item Shop. I’ve added some new items, features and yesterday I just launched the Class System, which will be a big part of the game as time goes on.  We have some tuning to do in it, but it’s only a day old too.

Other Stuff


I released a free Mass Effect 3 clock Widget for Android.  Here’s a link to it. It’s already got a couple hundred downloads in just a few days!  The Halo Reach clock widget I made like a year ago has over 60,000 downloads!

I got another 3DS so that I wouldn’t have to fight over the one my son has haha.  They have really come down in price so I picked one up and Mario 3D land as well as Kid Icarus.  Great games.  I’ve still got Ocarina of Time to play through again too.  The 3DS is a really solid system thanks to the strong library of games out now.  I hope the Vita can get to that point.  I still play the Vita a few times a week, but it’s in need of some big games and a price drop before it will really become popular.

I’m closing FPSCharts down soon.  The forum part at least.  It’s running vBulletin which is plagued with spammers and has been difficult to maintain.  We don’t need forums over there anyways.

Posted in Gaming, Halo, HaloCharts, Tech | 2 Comments

Viva la Vita!

Posted on February 28, 2012 by firestream

So I wanted to share some more thoughts I’ve had on the Vita and a few other related things.  First off, I still like it very much.  In fact, I’ve picked it up pretty much daily since I got it last week to at least play for 15-20 minute increments.  The poor iPhone isn’t getting near the playtime it was getting… and the 3DS, well it’s a good thing I have a kid in my house that likes Mario Kart.

I now own three Vita games: “Super Stardust HD”, “Rayman Origins” and “Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack”.  Each of them is very good in their own right and pretty highly rated on the various game sites around the web.  I’m hopeful that the Vita will get some real FPS games in the coming months.  I also transferred 4 of my PSP games over to it.  Site note: PSP games look great on the Vita.

I played with the “Near” app for bit.  It’s a mess.  In fact, I think it’s the most confusing location based app I’ve ever seen.  It’s terrible.  The only cool thing I can get from it is that there are between 5-10 Vita owners in a 2 mile range of my house.

Friends and Trophies are both easy to use and handy while playing.  I’ve managed to get a few more PSN friends by having a Vita.  I actually think I like the Trophy system on PSN better than Xbox Live Achievements because Trophies are broken down by difficulty.  You really get a sense of achievement when you get one of the Gold Trophies as opposed to just a Bronze one.  That never happened on Xbox because you’d get the same Achievement Unlocked notice for all of them, even if it took you weeks to do.

So does a dedicated portable gaming system make sense these days?  That seems to be the question asked ever since the Vita was announced.  Nintendo still makes a killing from DS and 3DS sales, so that alone tells me that portables are relevant.  You can argue that you wouldn’t need a dedicated device when you have things like the iPhone for gaming.  That would be true if you could play games other than old school ports and cheap knock-offs of popular games on the iPhone.  That, and controls.  There are some games that really shine on the iPhone, like RPG’s that do not require precise movements, etc, to play.  In fact I feel so strongly about the iPhone being an incredible platform for RPG’s that I went off and made a little site for them over at iOSRPG.com

But where touch-screen gaming falls right over is when you have a game like a platformer that requires precise movements and combinations.  The novelty of playing games on a touchscreen has worn off for me.  I do not want to play on a device where my thumbs cover up half the screen.  Give me buttons.  In fact, give me dual analog sticks for even more precision.  For casual games, the iPhone is fine and I suppose the average person is just a casual gamer so the Vita probably doesn’t make sense for them.  I know I won’t ever see my parents or my Grandma playing on a Vita and that’s ok.  They aren’t the intended market for the Vita, but there are millions of people out there like me that like to play games that require a certain level of commitment and can become engrossing, enjoyable experiences.  The iPhone/Android gaming scene will do just fine with little quick mini games that you can get out and play when you’re waiting at the dentist for 10 minutes.  I don’t think I could force myself to deal with horrible controls and a touchscreen for a game like ‘Final Fantasy Tactics’ though.  I’ll play that again on the Vita.

I’m not trying to just rant here.  I’m just dumping my thoughts on it all.  I like the Vita and I think it has a place in the market next to mobile phone gaming.  I think they serve different purposes and markets entirely and I hope the Vita goes on to be very successful.  The better it does, the more likely I’ll be able to play ‘Battlefield’ or ‘Call of Duty’ in the the bathroom.

Come visit my new Vita discussion board over at VitaBoards.com!

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Sony PS Vita – Initial impressions

Posted on February 23, 2012 by firestream

After taking back the Transformer Prime last week, I decided I’d spend half as much and go grab a PS Vita.   I purchased it Monday and was finally able to pick it up yesterday at lunch.  I spent the evening with it, setting things up, playing with the apps and getting a few of my PSP games back on it.  Here are my initial thoughts:

Hardware
The PS Vita’s screen is fantastic and the best part of the entire device.  It’s a massive 5″ OLED screen running at 960×544.  It’s bright and crisp with great colors and good viewing angles.  Video looks fantastic on it and so do all the games I’ve tried.  The rest of the device is built very solidly.  The buttons and D-pad are good and the dual thumb-sticks are excellent even if they are a tad bit smaller than you’d expect.  Cameras seemed average but they do the job they are meant to.  The device is lighter than you’d think and much more comfortable to hold than the PSP.

Software
Sony has developed a very nice UI for the PS Vita.  It’s very smooth with no stutters or lags anywhere.  I think it’s very intuitive to use also and while some of the game sites bash it for being so similar to iOS or Android, it seems to make sense that Sony would want a UI for it’s Vita that is easy to use and touchscreen friendly and I think they’ve accomplished that.  I think it would make a great OS for a phone honestly. I’ve played with only a few apps so far, like Twitter and Facebook.  Both of those apps worked like you’d expect and work very well.  I’ll be sure to write a followup to this post that goes more in-depth on the software on the Vita.

Gaming
So let me put it this way.  Buttons rock.  I think too many of us where mislead by the illusion of gaming on a touch screen actually being fun and engaging when in reality it’s tedious and way too inaccurate for real games.  Have you ever tried to play any real platformer on a device that requires touch input (think iPhone, iPad, etc)?  I’m sure there’s some experts out there somewhere, but for me, playing games like that on a touchscreen pretty much sucks.  This is where a truly dedicated gaming device, like the Vita, really shines just by the fact that you have actual buttons, including dual analog sticks, to play games that require such precise movements.  The best part is you also have a touchscreen allowing a truly unique gaming experience.  I’ve only spent time with Rayman Origins and the Unit 13 demo so far and both are very good.

Everything Else
I have a few gripes that might be deal-breakers to many people, but could change down the road.  First off, Sony’s memory card prices are insane and an extreme hidden cost when getting a PS Vita.   You think you’re only spending $250 on the unit only to discover you have to buy memory that really should have been included to start with.  I’m dealing with it because I think the power and potential of the system is excellent, but I can see many people just saying ‘No Way’ to the Vita for the memory card fiasco alone.

Secondly, and this has only happened to me once, but I’ve had my PS Vita freeze up (I think) and do nothing but show me a flash blue light on the PS button.  Another site out there refers to this as the Blinking Blue Light Of Death (BBLOD).  I couldn’t get the system to turn back on or respond.  The solution to this is to hold down the power button for about 30 seconds and reboot.  However, I’m also confused by this happening because in one of the firmware updates there was a mention that a blinking blue light meant that the system was entering sleep.  Maybe I didn’t give it enough time?  If any of you out there reading this has had this happen and can provide some insight, please do so!  This might not be a problem at all.  Time will tell.

More on the PS Vita soon!

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Two days with the Transformer Prime

Posted on February 19, 2012 by firestream

I went out the other day and spent way way too much money on a Transformer Prime and keyboard dock.  It’s going back today actually, but I did play with it for 2 days a good bit and here are some thoughts I had on the device.

Build and Ultra-book setup
First off, the concept of a tablet docking to form an ultrabook is as cool as it sounds.  That’s by far one of the most powerful features of the TP.  The keyboard is pretty small though and my large hands had a lot of trouble typing on it.  The keyboard dock has a USB port and an SD mem card reader in it.  The whole setup is really slick and the build quality of the tablet and keyboard dock are top notch.

Screen
The TP’s screen is amazing and is by far the brightest and most crisp screen I’ve seen on a tablet so far.  It worked well in sunlight too thanks to the IPS+ mode.  Unfortunately it suffered from a lot of light leak when the screen was showing dark images or video.  That’s my only gripe on the screen.

Software Experience
Android 4 at 1280×800 is pretty much the same as what you get on the Galaxy Nexus.  However, I hate the way apps scale to it.  None of them seem to scale exactly the same and a few apps like Tweetdeck constantly force you to portrait and back to landscape like it didn’t know how to handle the tablet resolution.  Honestly, the wide-screen layout of the tablet feels really odd when you hold it portrait style.  I would probably get used to it, but I prefer the iPad’s 4:3 aspect ratio.  The 16:9 ratio rocks for watching video though.

Performance
The performance of the tablet is really hit or miss.  In a lot of places it’s as fast as you’d expect and it games really well.  I tried out a lot of games, some really heavy in graphics and they all played great.  The fact you can plug in a gamepad via the keyboard USB port made it even better at gaming.  Combine that with all the emulation you can do easily on Android and it set’s up a really nice gaming system.

At the same time, using apps like the browser and chrome beta pretty much suck compared to the performance you get from even the very first iPad.  That’s not acceptable to me on a brand-new tablet in 2012.  Scrolling web pages should not lag on a quad-core tablet!  Pretty much any app that gives you a list of things means you can expect the scrolling of that list to lag some or a lot.  Even with forced GPU acceleration turned on things still lagged all over the place. I’m pretty sure I’m a stuck up Apple user, but I cannot stand when an interface lags or stutters consistently and Android 4 on the Transformer Prime did it a lot.

Battery Life
The battery life wasn’t really all that great unfortunately.  The TP sucks a lot of battery up even when you turn it to eco mode and don’t use it.  The iPad 1 was so good about sipping battery life that I could literally charge it biweekly, but the TP was going to need a good charge every few days.  I never got close to the 18 hours ASUS says the TP will get with the keyboard dock.  I got about 10 hours combined with the keyboard dock, which IMO sucks.

Conclusion
So ultimately I felt like the investment was nowhere near worth it based on the performance I have seen in 2 days of using the Transformer Prime.  I’m disappointed by that, but at least I can still return it.  I will say that I’m a pretty hardcore Apple user and I’m used to the polish and attention to detail that Apple gives it’s products.  Had the TP been half the price I would have been ok with some of it’s shortcomings, but I cannot be happy with a product that doesn’t perform as well as it’s equally priced competition.

Posted in Tech | 3 Comments

Mobile Chat for BF3

Posted on February 18, 2012 by firestream

Wanted to share a new app I just submitted to the iTunes App Store!  It’s called ‘Mobile Chat for BF3′ and it’s really a pretty simple, but hopefully useful chat app.  It’s tailored for Battlefield 3 players and will continue to expand to meet the needs of people that find it useful.  The idea is a chat that allows you to find other players and quickly see their skill in Battlefield 3.  Version 1.0 is barebones, but I’ll have updates quickly as people download it and use it.  It’s FREE!

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Firestream Vault is back!

Posted on February 14, 2012 by firestream

Many years ago, when Firestream.net was a site dedicated to Christian Rock & Metal, I started a music database system called the Firestream Music Vault.  It was managed and maintained by an awesome group of metalheads that submitted thousands of albums and bands and it grew into a fantastic resource for Christian Rock and Metal.  Unfortunately it’s had a rocky existence in the last few years.

I’m happy to say that it’s back and under new management!  Dale (fishingd) is leading it up as well as a lot of the original vault managers and it’s alive and well.  I’m glad that I could assist them with getting it going again and that too much data wasn’t lost.  I hope to be able to help them get a few more things added back in and some new updates to the system.

Check it out at FirestreamVault.com

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iOSRPG.com has a much better look now!

Posted on January 24, 2012 by firestream

My last post about iOSRPG.com is only a few days old, but I wasn’t happy with how the site looked.  I purchased a template and customized it and things look MUCH better now.

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iOSRPG.com – find the best & worst RPG’s for iOS!

Posted on January 19, 2012 by firestream

About a year ago I registered the domain iosrpg.com with the idea to build a ratings site for every RPG I could find for iOS.  I never really had time to build out my idea, but I’ve managed to get around to building it now, so I’d like to tell you about iOSRPG.com now.

The idea is that the site is a database for Role Playing Games (RPG) of various types for the Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch (any device that can run iOS).  The site has a number of features that make finding the best games or specific types of RPG’s easy.  You can filter down the database by RPG genre, price, device, and more.  If you register you can rate or comment on any of the games in the system.  You can also add games that you own to your “Owned Games” list or games that you want to your “Wanted Games” list.

I’ve got a Price List that shows every game, the type and price of the game.  Prices that change from the day before will show up in either Red or Green to indicate a rise or fall in price.  I’m planning to have the site email you when any of the games you want falls in price.

I’m hoping that if traffic picks up that I can start getting good reviews and write-ups for games the site shows as well as doing featured games or “Game of the Day” type things.  At the very least, I hope for the site to be a way for people to find RPG’s easily as the iTunes RPG category isn’t that great.

Posted in Gaming, iOS | Leave a comment

I tried to love you, Galaxy Nexus.

Posted on January 13, 2012 by firestream

Right around Christmas time I went and got the latest and greatest Google Phone, the Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.  I stood in line for a bit to get it and was thoroughly excited for the Android 4 goodness, the super large screen and the 4G LTE.  Here I am, almost a month later, left with a bad taste in my mouth from the phone, from Google and from Verizon.

Let me start by saying I’m not an Apple fanboy and I’m not a Google fanboy.  I like products on both sides and know that the competition is good for everybody.  I do use a Macbook Pro now though because OSX is seriously nice and the laptop itself is fantastically engineered with great battery life, etc.  Anyways, I’m supposed to be writing about why I loved the Galaxy Nexus and why I decided to ditch it.

The Galaxy Nexus has a lot going for it.  It has a really large, high resolution screen that has more pixels than Apple’s iPad. Honestly going back to any phone smaller than the GN feels funny and I do prefer the larger screen.  However, having such a large screen made the phone a little clunky to carry and getting it out of my pocket was always a chore.  That’s a minor gripe.  The display is nice, especially at high brightness levels, but that sucks up battery quickly.  Lowering the brightness helps but I quickly noticed a lot of banding in the screen.  Hard to explain, but it almost looked like little waves in the pixels.  Here’s a screenshot by somebody else that really shows off what I’m talking about.

Next thing that was nice was the 4G/LTE.  The kind of speeds I was getting were really fast and very impressive.  I could sync and download apps super quickly.  Google Music worked really well with 4G also.  I don’t really have any complaints at all about the 4G network.  Coverage was good, speeds were great.  I’ll miss that.

Battery life was OK.  I picked up the extended battery so that I could get through a complete day with casual use.  Without the extended battery I could barely get to the afternoon before needing to charge again.  I do like that the GN gives me the option of getting extended batteries.  I could have lived with the battery life I was getting daily with the extended battery.

The camera was garbage.  It was really fast, with no shutter lag…. and took really bad, blurry, grainy pictures.  I used it quite a bit and thanks to it being so fast, I would have to take 10-20 pictures just to get 1 or 2 good ones.  It was really really bad in low light.  The video was pretty good, no real complaints there.  The built in panoramic mode was pretty cool as well as some of the image effects and editing tools.  I never played with the Movie studio app though.

Also, in terms of the smoothness in scrolling and the response of the OS, Android 4 is the best version of Android yet.  It still doesn’t match the smoothness and responsiveness of iOS though.  I’m not just talking about the home screens with your icons here, because ICS has a really smooth home screen with widgets and live wallpapers.  It’s when I’d start running apps that shouldn’t be laggy where I noticed it all.  Run the CNN app on the Galaxy Nexus and watch it stutter trying to scroll the headlines.  The Amazon App Store was even worse.  Netflix scrolled horribly slow and laggy.  I can be content with that though, because the HTC Incredible I had before was way worse than the GN.  I’ll kinda miss widgets and live wallpapers, but they aren’t required for the phone to be acceptable.  I could only stand to use slow moving live wallpapers anyways and widgets really only showed me the weather, some pics and my email.  Like I said, they are nice, but I can live without those things.

Even with the things I mentioned above, I would have been willing to keep the phone and use it for quite a while.  I had 3 extremely annoying problems, that were probably hardware related, but who knows.  I’ll get to why I didn’t just trade in for another GN in just a minute.  The 3 problems were:

  1. Quite often I’d go to use the camera and get this message: “Cannot connect to Camera”.  Only solution I found was to reboot.  This happened probably 30% of the time I would go to take a picture.  Missed a few shots of my kids playing that would have been good.
  2. The proximity sensor had issues, especially after playing a game or using the touch screen with an app.  When phone calls would come in, sometimes the screen wouldn’t turn off at all during the call.  I muted a few people and hung up on a few others.  It also happened the other way around where I’d get a call and the screen would go off and stay off.  No matter what I tried, the screen would not come back on until the other person hung up.
  3. The phone froze up and rebooted way more times than a new phone should.  It happened mostly when I’d get calls.  That’s not acceptable to me.  A smartphone in 2012 should work 99.9% of the time when it comes to sending and receiving calls.

I tried to take the phone to Verizon to just get another Nexus.  Just like when you take your car to the mechanic, when I got to the score I couldn’t reproduce any of the problems I was having.  They wouldn’t even just take my word for it and said they couldn’t help me.  I was down to either just getting a ‘refurb/like new’ from Samsung or to trade in for something else since I was in my grace period still.  I contemplated some other Android phones, all of which had their flaws.  I honestly just felt like I didn’t want to go through the hassle with Samsung when it should have been so much more easier than this.  I’m unhappy with this phone, it has problems, believe me and give me another one.  Apple does that right.

I went home and just sat on it all for another day or so.  I thought about some other things, mostly with Android itself, that helped steer me towards just getting an iPhone.  Quite a few times recently some friends at work would show me an app on their iPhone that was very cool/useful/fun, etc.  I’d go look in the Android market for the same app.  No dice.  It’s not that Android doesn’t have plenty of apps, because it does, but it’s still missing so many apps that are available on iOS.  I think software availability is very important to me.  I like features as much as the next guy, but what good are a bunch of bells and whistles if you can’t get software that really lets you “use” your phone.  Apple does that right, and things could change for Google this year or next.

I’ve given Google a few chances now, but I’m tired of dealing with a poor product and poor service.  I went back over to the walled garden for a bit with an iPhone 4S.  Will I stay with it?  No idea, but I am hopeful that it will just work as it’s supposed to and maybe later this year I’ll look and see where Google’s at with things.  I think they’ll do well as more phones come out with ICS and I will be looking forward to going back to 4G.  However, I believe that Apple is probably cooking up some big updates with the iPhone 5 and I look forward to seeing what they show off too.

So in short:
Galaxy Nexus -> big, nice screen, crappy camera, fast 4G, weak market, only sometimes smooth, buggy
iPhone 4S -> smaller, really nice screen, great camera, slow 3G, fantastic market, always smooth, less-buggy

One final thought:  I’m not really trying to start another iOS vs Android debate.  Really and truly if Verizon had just taken my word for it and given me another Galaxy Nexus, I would have kept it and been fine.  I know how good Apple’s customer service is and I know the 4S is a good phone, even if it’s not 4G, so I’m choosing the side that will mean the fewest headaches and right now that’s Apple.

Posted in Tech, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

SharePoint 2010 and the dreaded 500 Internal Server Error

Posted on January 7, 2012 by firestream

This week at work I came back from Christmas break to discover that both of the SharePoint front-end servers had been ‘patched’ with dozens of updates and fixes.  The list of things installed on the servers was a mile long and just as I feared, when I pulled up the SharePoint web app, it was dead.  ”500 Internal Server Error” was all that I could get.  That’s got to be the most worthless error you could possibly get, only topped by a blank white page.

So it was my job to fix it, or else face having to reinstall and reconfigure SharePoint which could easy take a few weeks.  I honestly do not know the exact culprit from the long list of patches that actually broke SharePoint and IIS, but at the very least I want to share the steps I took to fix it.  First and foremost is getting past only seeing the 500 Internal Server Error.  I did the usual thing and checked out the SharePoint ULS logs followed by the Windows Server Event log and then finally the IIS logs.  Nothing unusual jumped out from any of those places which left me scratching my head even more.

The trick to figuring out the errors was a feature in IIS7 called ‘Failed Request Tracing’.  Basically you go to the SharePoint web app via IIS Manager and under the Actions pane on the right side click on ‘Failed Request Tracing’.

You’re not done though, as by only doing this step won’t actually give you any logs to dig through.   You’ve still got to setup the Tracing Rules for this app.  Do that by clicking on ‘Failed Request Tracing Rules’ and then click Add over on the right.  Go through the wizard and on the Error Code box put in 500 (notice this could be helpful in tracing other error codes as well).  Now when you go back to your SharePoint site and refresh it, a file will be generated in the directory you specified the Failed Request Log files to go to.

It’s pretty amazing the amount of information logged from a single failed request.  One refresh would generated a 200k file, so be sure you turn this off after you’re done.  The log file is in XML and somewhat of a pain to look through manually, so check out this Log Viewer made especially for these kinds of log files: http://www.iis.net/community/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1653

After spending some time looking through the trace log files I finally found some information that pointed me in the direction of the problem.  In my case, a set of web.config config types had been blocked at the parent level in IIS.  I had to do a number of requests to the site to get the logs to show them all, but in the end by doing this command I was able to unlock those configs and SharePoint functioned again.

appcmd.exe unlock config -section:CONFIG_SECTION_HERE

For more information on this, check out this page.  I’d like to go back through the list of things installed to see which of them could have made these changes to IIS, because this was a real pain to figure out.  Thankfully SharePoint appears to work as normal now which means I don’t have to spend a few weeks rebuilding.  I hope this information can be useful to somebody else, and at the very least can be a refresher for me if I ever run into problems like this again.

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