We’ve run into an issue often with the AdminStudio Repackager where after we install the generated MSI all programs become corrupted. The cause ended up being a single registry entry.

AdminStudio does not support REG_QWORD registry entries, but it also both incorrectly adds them to packaged MSI’s and gives them the wrong value. One of those QWORD entries corrupts Windows EXE’s if the entry isn’t formatted correctly, but it’s also a useless entry.

So simple solution, delete the following entry before using AdminStudio: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\SideBySide PublisherPolicyChangeTime

I mostly play puzzlers, indie games, platformers, and any Nintendo series. The less intense first-person shooters also get a large amount of play. There are so many incredible video games though, so compiling my favourites may take a while.

Portal

Physics based puzzle platformer filled with dark humour. Everything awesome in a small well thought out game.

TimeSplitters: Future Perfect

Spiritual successor to Goldeneye/Perfect Dark, except with a terrible storyline, pile of monkeys, a level editor, and a hundred increasingly rediculous playable characters.

Shoot anything with teeth bigger than its face!

Digimon World

Remember Tamagotchi’s? This is the next level up. Raising a virtual monster from birth to evolution (digivolving). Battling monsters around the world and recruiting them to your city where they open shops and help you’re monster become more powerful.

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

Yes the entire Zelda series is incredible. Link’s Awakening however was an odd blend of Zelda and Mario enemies (due to the game just being a dream), allowed you to steal from the item shop (and get labelled as a thief), it had top of the line graphics for the GB, the story plays out better than so many other Zelda games story of “Go to the next temple now”, the difficulty level was at the perfect level for me, and the world was huge and memorable.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

Professor Layton is basically just a collection of the best classic pen & paper and thought puzzles wrapped around a simple adventure video game. The game works well though and I love the puzzles. Later games in the series aren’t worse, just exactly the same aka. the Pokemon series.

Bad News Baseball

I cannot overstate how awesome this game is. It’s the only sports game I’ve ever remotely liked and I still always want to play more. Bad News Baseball is an extremely simple baseball game, with rabbits for umpires, awesome FMV sequences when you hit a homerun (with Mr. T), entertaining broken base stealing controls, and a tendancy for the catcher to miss the ball when you try to get someone out at home base leading to a frantic waddle. It’s simple and non-stop amusing.

I’m slightly obsessed with quotes, but I’ll try and limit myself.

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
William Blake – Auguries of Innocence

William Blake was an amazing poet. I just love the first few lines of his Auguries of Innocence poem. I treat it as a reminder that we stop noticing the simple miracles around us as we grow and get wiser. The occasional falling into a state of childlike wonder where the sheer complexity of nature hits me is one of my all time favourite feelings.

Some things don’t need meanings.
They just are how they are.
They have no reason.
And that’s how it is.
So stop with your questions, your how’s? and your why’s? Look at the world through simpler eyes.
The stars are bright, the leaves are green, the oceans vast, the sand is soft, the rain is gentle, your heart beats slow and then fast.
So take a glimpse, breath life in, feel the tide, race the wind, catch the moon, and don’t question why, because in some moments, there is no explanation.
Unknown

When I look back at all of my decisions – especially the ones that turned out badly – I’m always glad that I made them. I just don’t like seeing it as ‘everything happens for a reason’, it’s much more a ‘everything works out in the end’ type of feeling. Understanding is an admiral goal but there’s no need to overanalyze the world, sometimes life just is.

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.”
John Green, Looking for Alaska

One that’s been stuck in my head ever since reading Looking for Alaska, it’s just beautiful.

“People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn’t bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn’t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn’t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.”
John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I never do anything I don’t want to do. Nor does anyone, but in my case I am always aware of it.”
Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“In the twentieth century, nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed as in America — and nowhere else was there such a deep interest in it.”
Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.”
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

“Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next – and disappear. That’s why it’s so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.”
Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein

“We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That’s the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we’re in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it’s time to make a run for the fence.”
Daniel Gilbert

“Research suggests that people are typically unaware of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing, but when asked for a reason, they readily supply one.”
Daneil Gilbert

“Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”
Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

Tremors

I don’t know why.. It’s a B movie about giant snakes that attack anywhere anyone is making noise. It’s wonderful and terrible.

Bridge to Terabithia

A coming of age movie where the kids ‘travel’ to a make believe world.

My favourite TV show are pretty standard popular at some point series.

Community

Community is episodic but is not funny in the slightest without knowing a large amount about how each of the characters think. I’m actually surprised the series is lasting so long given how difficult it must be for new viewers to enjoy it. The series plays on it’s own cleverness often and each episode is a complete surprise and often takes on a completely different genre or way of filming for a single episode. It’s one of those series that you actually have to pay attention to if you want to get any of the humour, and even then sometimes the humour only comes out on a second watching.

Abed the socially awkward, unable to understand social constructs, confusing real life with what’s in his mind guy and his interactions with the group being my favourite aspect.

How I Met Your Mother

“The Friends replacement”. A group of friends sitting in a bar drinking and having odd stories that all tie together well. Its writers are incredible and I don’t know what else to say. It’s Friends for a new decade.

Stargate SG1

Stargate SG1 was a 10 season long run sci-fi series involving wormhole teleportation to other planets populated with humans by the ancient Egyptian gods (who were actually aliens). Episodes focused on various cultures and religions, science, setting up traps and running rescue missions, dealing with farflung physics concepts (time travel, black holes, solar drift). The writers and actors were incredible and almost every episode was well thought out.

Charmed

A trio of witch sisters living through life while dealing with demon attacks. It’s a guilty pleasure and badly written, with a few too many episodes issues being fixed by a new random character showing up who can rewind time. It’s wonderful.

Books are a wonderful escape and I hope future generations never give up on reading. My personal interests lie in epic fantasy or sci-fi, books involving religions and psychology books about how the mind and the world in general works.

All of my favourite books will come off as slow-paced and wordy to an extreme (so you’ve been warned), but having a detailed rich world described to me is incredibly important. I need to feel and be able to see all the intricacies of the world for me to truly enjoy a book. And they’ll generally be about a bastardized view of sex or religion, and be boring or frustratingly written. I don’t know why! I like what I like!

My full collection and reviews are listed over at my GoodReads Account, but my current all-time favourites are:

The Wheel of Time Series

An epic fantasy 22 years in the making and continuing after the original authors death. The Wheel of Time and Robert Jordan the original author is just incredible with the number of simultaneous plotlines and hundreds of characters he has interact with his world. Yes some of the middle books drag on, but the sheer depth of the world makes this my favourite series of all time.

Stumbling on Happiness

I need to re-read this book before I can review it. I read so many self-development books that they all start to blend together after a while so I can’t even say what I read from Stumbling on Happiness and what I picked up from other books. I simply remember that I couldn’t put this one down and that for a year I was referring back to it all the time and saving off all the wonderful quotes.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Alien books are normally my cup of tea but Stranger in a Strange Land is much more an analysis of humanity and culture from an alien point of view (or more specifically from the point of view of a human who was raised by aliens). I absolutely love the outside looking in style, and it fits in nicely with my psychology obsession and really just how I view the world in general.

As far as the content of the book, I can’t help but love the [bad attempt at a] celebration of free love and a guilty pleasure of loving the mocking of religion. On the other hand the number of outright insults to women is just painful, especially as I’ve hit on a bit of a feminist streak with the US continually doing away with women’s rights. I don’t think I’d enjoy the book on a second read through, it clashes pretty badly with my Libertarian views.

Looking for Alaska

A young adult coming of age story about a boy and a girl. Blah, blah, blah. It is phenomenal! It covers all the random thoughts going through a teenagers mind and it was just so terribly quirky and unpredictable. The second half of the book was really depressing and actually fairly boring to read…but looking back at it I’m glad it was done the way it was. It fit so with real life and how life events just don’t always wrap up nicely.

Kushiel’s Dart

Oh Kushiel’s Dart. I’m not sure what to say about this book. First and foremost it’s another book about sex and second the book fades to a different scene during any sort of sex, so while it’s blatantly about sex and BDSM it also skips over anything that might actually turn the reader on. It’s bizarre, it’s written in the most offhand difficult to read prose I’ve ever attempted to read through, and the politics only barely makes sense and is just a wrapper for the main character needing to have sex with others characters.

It’s interesting non-the-less. It’s an alternate medieval Europe where Christianity has not caught on, and where the French have raised prostitution and pleasure to an art form and turned sex into a religious act. I like it for what it is, an alternate BDSM/sex-positive version of our timeline, with a writing style that is unique in being incredibly annoying through the first hundred pages but now I’m wishing I could read more books in a similar prose. So many amazing quotes.

I would never recommend it to anyone.

I first got introduced to the non-standard board games around 2010 thanks to a board game group at IBM – my previous employer – and since then I’ve been attending monthly get togethers with dozens to hundreds of people and have amassed a fairly large collection. It’s great fun!

My full collection and reviews are listed over at my BoardGameGeek Account, but my current all-time favourites are:

Paranoia Mandatory Bonus Fun! Card Game

You can tell from the name alone that this game does not take itself seriously. You’re all on a team and you’re all traitors, so the game is basically a co-op game where the goal is to consistently screw over everyone else.

If you play nice and co-operatively it’s one of the most painful games I’ve ever played but if it’s played with a bunch of assholes who one step away from completing the mission will instead choose to plasma-cannon you in the face instead of the enemy, well…then it’s one of the best games ever. As a result games do unfortunately end with everyone hating each other for a few hours.

Dominion

A desk building game where everyone starts with the same small deck and through the course of the game builds up their deck by buying new cards in a race for the expensive victory point cards. It’s reminiscent of a TCG (ala Magic: The Gathering) except the collecting of new cards IS the entire game.

Ticket to Ride: Europe

Ticket to Ride is a train placement game involving amassing certain colours of trains and then laying them on predefined tracks to complete your unique routes you were given at the beginning of the game. Your opponents meanwhile are building their own tracks which quite often will get in the way of yours and force you to detour around them if you’re not quick enough at building those contested routes.

For us it has the perfect balance of strategy & randomness, doing your own thing & annoying other players, and just is a wonderful game to pull out for new gamers. Without fail we end up with 3+ copies of Ticket to Ride at our monthly meetups and in most cases that results in 3 out of the 6 or 7 tables playing Ticket to Ride.

Flash Duel

Flash Duel is a 2 player sparring game involving trying to position yourself the correct distance away from your opponent to strike them without them hitting you. It’s intention is to simulate a classic 1 vs. 1 arcade fighting game and it pulls it off nicely. It’s an extremely short 5 minute game contained within a single deck of simple numbered cards meaning it can be pulled out anywhere when bored. Plus it has a single player and a 4 vs. 1 variant which both play just as well as the main game.

Last Night on Earth

Ameritrash at its finest. This is another one with the same issue as Paranoia, players need to act how the game designers intended or the game is terrible. If you act as you’d expect a human or zombie to act in a B Zombie action flick then the game plays cinematically. 4 humans trying to escape a hoard of zombies spawned by the other 2 players and it always feels like you’re being overrun even though both sides are very well balanced.

Speakout Wireless from 7/11 is single handedly the best value phone plan in Canada for light users and now they also support data plans!

I’m currently paying $13.25/month

• Unlimited Data: $10/month
• 911 fees: $1.25/month
• Caller ID: free!
• Voicemail: free!
• Incoming texts: free!
• Outgoing texts: 10cents/txt
• Local calling: 25cents/min
• Long distance: 45cents/min

The setup is a little trickier then the major carriers so here’s a quick step by step guide for anyone wanting to switch to Speakout.

Requirements

A rooted Android phone running at least Android 2.2.

The Android image needs to have been compiled with iptables support (most custom roms).

Speakout Configuration

1. Speakout Wireless SIM cards can be bought from any 7/11 for $10, pick one up as well as a prepaid card ($25 is the lowest amount you can buy).

2. Pop in the SIM card, start your phone and dial *#06#. As soon as you type the last # a screen will pop up listing your IMEI number for your phone. Write it down.

3. Head over to the SIM card activation page and enter the required information: the activation code on your SIM card packaging and the IMEI number of your phone.

4. Your phone should be automatically assigned its new phone number and be ready to go, although you may need to wait a few minutes and then restart your phone for your phone to pick up on the change.

5. Create a new Speakout account and then add your new phone number to your account.

6. Now you can go back to the account page and at the bottom of the page you’ll see a list of available addons. Select the $10 – Unlimited Browsing addon to activate your a data plan.

Phone Configuration

1. On your Android phone head over Settings > Wireless and Networks > Mobile Networks > Access Point Names.

2. Delete any existing APN’s.

3. Add a new APN with the following settings:

• Name: Speakout
• APN: goam.com
• Proxy: 10.128.1.69
• Port: 80
• Username: wapuser1
• Password: wap
• Server:
• MMSC: http://mms.gprs.rogers.com
• MMS Proxy: 10.128.1.169
• MMS Port: 80
• MCC: 302
• MNC: 720
• Authentication Type:
• APN type: default,supl,mms
• APN Protocol: IPv4

4. Now you should see your phone get a data connection and be able to browse the web on your 3G connection. Apps aren’t working yet unfortunately, we’re getting to it.

5. Download the latest copy of AutoProxy and install it on your phone.

Scanning this barcode using your phone should automatically download and install the latest version at the time of writing (V0.25).

6. Turn off wireless if you have it on (AutoProxy configures whatever connection is currently active). Then start AutoProxy and add a new proxy with the following settings:

• Proxy Host: 10.128.1.69
• Proxy Port: 80
• Proxy Type: http

7. Save the configuration and then long press on your new configuration > Connect to this Proxy.

8. You’re all set. $10 unlimited browsing on your Android phone!

Questions

What was all that proxy stuff?

Speakout uses a proxy to access the internet which only allows connections through port 80 (the default HTTP port). This allows the web browser to work but any secure HTTPS pages or apps aren’t able to get a connection since they go through different ports.

AutoProxy modifies files in the underlying Linux system Android runs on to trick all your apps into sending data over port 80 instead of the port they’re configured to use allowing all your apps to work even with the proxy restrictions.

Really? Unlimited?

No probably not, but unlimited within what would fall under fair usage. Don’t do things like tethering and downloading 50GB’s of movies and you should be ok. I’ll update later if they ever contact me about my data usage.

Any issues?

Well other then needing to configure a proxy to get full usage of your apps Rogers also blocks Speakout from using the port that Google does its push notifications through.

Basically while on 3G you won’t get instant notification when you get an email and instead will get them when the phone does its usual syncing phase or when you manually sync. This could also affect Google Talk (unsure, I don’t use it) but other chat and email apps will still work correctly.

Well if you’re migrating a Concrete5 website and are like me, you’ve managed to change your database password to Concrete5 and ended up with your website broken and simply coming up with a ‘could not connect to database error’.

The config file to fix it is easy enough to find in <concrete5 root>/config/site.php but updating your username and password in that file isn’t enough due to the password being salted.

So as a final step go into phpMyAdmin and into your Concrete5 database and run:

UPDATE Users SET uPassword = md5('password:salt') WHERE uName = 'admin'
Where password is your new password and salt is the salt value defined in the site.php file.

Many hosts disable file_get_contents for security purposes leaving you with an error like:

Warning: file_get_contents(): URL file-access is disabled in the server

If your host refuses to turn on the file_get_contents access it’s possible to get around it by using curl instead.

Replace the offending line:
$data = file_get_contents(<filename>);

With:

$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5;
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, <filename>);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);


Cheers!