I’ve been playing the game for about a week now and was trying to write something about it for the same amount of time. The problem was, I couldn’t get myself to write the blog in the time when I could stay awake and play! Its such a good game I had to wait till I finish it to write about it.

Bad company 2 is a COD style cold war era game. I’m not pretty sure about the timeline though.

There are many good things about this game, first being it’s lightweight. I’ve been playing 1024 all the way and the FPS only drops at about 19 where there’s an awesome amount of particles and foliage and a lot of enemies and buildings around. Whoever made this game was really conscious about the memory and processing power it needs.

There are so many cool stuff here. Take a look at this sniper shot. You have to wait till it thunders and cover the sound of the gun.

There are a lot of activities in-game. You not only have to point and shoot. You have to operate vehicles ranging from Remote controlled Arial vehicles to Tanks. I personally love the jeeps and dune buggies.

There are some intense cases as well. Take this trap for example. During this mission, we have to keep our eyes open for man-traps laid out in the open. They are so small and are hard to spot. [click to zoom]. Check out the trap wire near the crosshair.

The game’s physics engine rocks to the limit. Trees break apart and walls break down in the shootouts. And the best part is; buildings collapse when their structure is damaged beyond a certain point.! Take a look at this bombing. The ground troops mark the target and keep your eyes on the building in the incline where it falls out completely. Totally realistic!

The foliage and the surrounding is also exquisite. I guess I dont have to explain when you see the movie below!

There are some crazy-ass characters like this pilot. He dodges RPG while talking to the crew!

I’d say this is one great game I’d remember and talk about for a long time and when times come where other games make mistakes. This is one good benchmark. Good games like COD, Crysis and Bad Company are really rare!

So you see, there are some software developers out there that are somewhat dumber than you’d imagine.

The reason for this post was one such software I came across today.

It was on a Western Digital external USB HDD. Madhavi and Hasitha came over today for a chat and Mad was ‘sane’ enough to bring up her new toy from Aussie, an External HDD! All she wanted was some music but I didn’t have much. So I agreed to give some movies instead. So after they went home giving me the disk, I plugged it in (with the moral fear of her bringing me an array of viruses in her USB’s) and waited for it.

It turned out bad! The damn thing had some software that made the HDD look like a CD-ROM to the PC.! I assumed this was some mechanism to keep the viruses from the disk. So I used the software to install a driver it had inside and then tried to get the internal storage to unlock. The stupid thing won’t barge!

Me being allergic to these add-ons, I called Mad and asked her what she did normally when she used the drive and got the most unexpected reply. (Getting an unexpected reply wasn’t that unexpected anyway) She never plugged the thing onto the PC before. Making me the idiot who used it for the first time!

I asked her whether I should remove this piece of rotten meat out of the drive. And as always, her reply was “if you don’t burn it down, OK with me.”

So armed with clearance, I tried to use the software to get the disk to open again. But no detection from the software

Then I checked the Storage devices whether the partitions were really available. They were visible and it was clear that none of them were mounted.

So I came to the conclusion that the driver would not mount the partitions at all and I mounted one manually. And voila! The software starts to show up the drive’s storage.! How stupid was that? It looks like any idiot could use the software as long as that idiot knows how to mount drives up!

So I installed another software on the drive that was some kind of tray icon launcher. It told me to power cycle the drive, which I did and after that, the CD-ROM thing was gone!

I realized this was a no-good piece of crap which WD software guys wrote when they were using laptops in the bathroom. So I manually deleted all the partitions and then re-created two new ones one with 300GB and the other 404GB (ironic! 404 – stands for “Not Found” )

The drive was not fully usable. Named the partitions “Vidi” and “Vici”. I never went anywhere. It came to me! But I saw and I conquered.!

The copying speed was good as well. But not that good compared to my USB Flash!

Hope Mad can still use it when she plugs the drive onto her laptop.

Its a bit more like Stalker. But this is better. In my viewpoint, STALKER sucked. No in-game sense of direction or any hints for help. But Metro has some sense of play. One could assume this is the way to go or this is what I need to do now.

But the game is overly dark. You have to use the flashlight a lot. They also know it. There is a flashlight charger to charge the flashlight as well.

I need to mention this as well; my 9600GT is an old granpa for this game. It runs at around 23~25 FPS and sometimes drops to 18. The video settings are at one level lower than the most detailed with 4XAA (lowest setting) at 1024×768 res.

Here are some screenies;

The menu.

This is a guy talking about Russia before the Nuclear weapons destroyed the world.

This game has nVidia physics support. This shattered glass will make sounds and alert the bandits if we step on it. There are traps made out of strings as well. But I’m still to see FEAR grade physics in this.

Here is another place.

The game title itself is displayed at many places. There are DVD boxes on desks of people as well. Its a bit too much sometimes.

Here’s an alien of some sort. Maybe a mutated human or something. Need to find that out by playing

Will post if there’s any other interesting stuff is there. I think most of you guys have played this and aren’t a Grandpa to Games like I am now.

After looking all over for pet dogs Nadeera and I got our eyes on a female German Shephard who happened to be in a pet shop. It cost us a small fortune but both of us are happy that we got it.

We took around half a day thinking of names and Nadeera came up with this because it was called with no name for a long time and we were sick of that.

Richie is an active dog. But a bit stupid. It whines at the back door while the front is wide open and it just peed in the house not waiting 15 seconds till I open the door for it. I think with time, she will learn to do things. But for the time being, this dog hates the backyard and the front.

Whenever we put it out, she cries like hell in front of the door.

What to say other than…I love my dog!!!

But I found out that my version of leopard was not compatible with the software. So I decided to install the long awaited snow leopard x86 hackintosh. So i made up my mind and shut the mac down. That’s when all the problems started to arise. Everything got stuck. Nothing was Force closable and nothing was responsive except the mouse pointer which gave the busy icon.

So I had no choice other than to reset the system. Then I swapped the boot priority from BIOS and booted into Win7. But it took a very long time to boot. Then I noticed that my 40G Maxtor and the DVD RW was not there in ‘My Computer’. That’s when the fun began. After playing a bit with BIOS and cable I got to know that the Maxtor was faulty.

Then I checked BIOS. It detected the disk as Maxtor ‘ARES 64K’, with something I’ve never seen before. The “ARES 64” actually Blinked in the screen. This was enough to trigger the internal debug mode of myself. I knew the disk was burnt the instance I saw that.

I downloaded a zerofill tool. But the tool was not able to detect my disk or even initialize it.

Look at the disk space reported by the software. LoL. I could’ve downloaded the whole internet if I had such a disk!

Windows was not able to initialize the disk either.

That was yesterday. I tried some zerofill utilities today but nothing worked. There is one solution from Maxtor and the damn thing does not run on x64! CRAP!

Then I got my hands on a Maxtor software called Powermax. It had only a floppy version and after some googling I got an ISO. Burnt it to a CDRW and booted. It detected and told me that the disk was failing and I should send the error codes and the disk to maxtor for repair. Hell.! Maxtor don’t even exist now! Its been bought by Seagate. After that, all the utility software in the downloads have been moved. Stupid Seagate.!

So I tried Zero-Filling with PowerMax. Then I struck on to the brick wall of coders’ lameness.! The software was designed to run on a floppy. When it starts to zerofill, it writes a log file to the floppy itself. The CD is ROM! Unable to write the damn log, the software gives and error and exits.!!! How bad is that!????

Now I’m going to try a more cunning approach. I’m going to get the .img of the same software to a pen, and boot. Luckily, it might work.. Will keep you posted.!

Since this is the season, my Father found one fruit and brought it home. Nadeera wanted to have a bite but milliseconds after moving a piece near her, she went into the un-believers’ side.! Now all that is left of the Duriyan fans in my family are my Father and me! Since we moved to a new home, its just me.

This sign is from Singapore where they’ve banned Duriyan in a certain area. Looks like there are a lot of haters than lovers!

Duriyan is rich in Carbohydrates, Vitamin C and Potassium! Potassium is good for me since I’m a haven for muscle cramps!

My friend Sankha has a few trees at his place and despite the notorious price it’d give him if he sold them, he brings us a few each season. (Thanks man!) This time I booked not one, but two fruits.

But my Father is away in an office trip so I have to run this show alone!

One of the two was ripe. So as soon as I got home, I started the frenzy!

This is the parted fruit. [click to enlarge images]

The second one doesn’t look ripe. But the tell tail cracks are there to indicate that it is! Wonder whether it was caused when I took it home by car!

No matter what, I’m having the second one tomorrow. Who knows? it might get rotten

For those who dont use Firefox, this is another pull towards the world’s greatest browser. (This is for you opera users and Chrome junkies and you safari fans. Not for IE guys coz i’ve given up on them :S )

Ad block plus is an extension that is developed by a person named Henrik Aasted Sorensen and was improved by Wladimir Palant.

The add-on does the exact thing as it says. It blocks those ads. Even mighty Google fails to pass this app! What it does is; it examines the URL of the HTTP object and it tells firefox whether to go ahead with the GET action or not. What we can do now, is to gather up all those URLs of Ads and then filter them on the browser. Not an easy task. The internet is HUGE!

Happily, the developers have come up with a solution. Subscriptions. They have a set of rules (filters) for specific areas that we can use. As an example, I use the subscription called “Easylist USA”

So whats the big deal not seeing the ads?

One main advantage is bandwidth. Ads take a considerable amount of your bandwidth. It is you who have to download the ad. With that ad, comes a lot of kilobytes. reduce the number of ads and you reduce the amount of data you download. If you are on a pay per downloaded data plan, you gain bigtime!

Another advantage you get is the neatness of the pages. Ads aren’t always designed by the person who designs the webpage. They may take away the aesthetic value and even some functionality in a page. So if you refrain from seeing/loading the ad, you see a much more organized page.

The third is a wonder point for notebook / netbook users. Adblock actually has proven to reduce the load off the browser and preserve battery.! The less computing power used by the browser means you save on battery life.

It will reduce the load time for a website as well. See the pics below for facebook with and without ad-block in Firefox 3.6.3 with Firebug. Notice there is a time difference.  [click to enlarge images]

With Adblock Enabled (No Ads)	Without Adblock Enabled.

If there were a lot of ads, this time might start to feel even though its small for this load. Imagine when you load the FB pages 50,60 times. Adblock will save you a minute.!

The following screenies are from famous sites with and without AdBlock enabled. See the difference yourself. [Click to enlarge the images]

With Adblock	Without Adblock

The site ‘thepiratebay.com’ (our all time favorite torrent tracker) had banners on it’s side. It took me around a year to realize they were there. I never knew it. I got to see it only when I used to browse the site through another PC! Thats how seamless Adblock is!

There are the cons as well. For an example, you might miss on some important information in the ad. And Adblock has proven to be a killer in the internet business. Since all adsense and other ad content are blocked, users won’t click links. Which leads to site owners with less income.

So the final decision is yours.! Do you want those ads or not?

The long line to the Dansala

Then we decided to walk to the Sumanarama Temple where a Pandol was being shown. But we decided that going by car would be easier. So we hopped in and drove to the place.

This is the Pandol. It shows the sixteen dreams of King Kosol; who dreamt of the forthcomings of his land and acted accordingly after consulting the Buddha!

There was another Dansala there, which we had coffee

Here’s a small video

පුරුදු විදියට පන්සල් ගිහින් දන්සැල් වන්දනාව පටන් ගත්තා.

ඇත්තම කිව්වොත් ඉතිං වැඳලා, බෝධි පූජාවෙ බාගයක් ඉවර වෙනකොට මගේ එකතැන ඉන්න බැරි අමාරුව උපරිමේට ආවා! එළියේ මම ඉන්නං කියල මං එනකොට හසිතයයි මාධවීයි එතන! උන් දෙන්නා නදීරා ටත් කථා කර ගත්තෙ නැද්ද! ඉතිං කට්ටියම ඇවිදලා ඇවිදලා ආවා වතුර ටැංකිය ගාව බත් දන්සැලට. ඊට කලින් පන්සල ගාව තිබ්බ මඤ්ඤොක්කා දන්සැලෙන් හොඳට සප්පායං වෙලා කට්ටියම හිටියෙ!

පෝලිමේ ඉඳල කන්න ගත්ත! පේනවනෙ ගිලින හැටි!

මේ හසිතය විසප්පු ගෙඩි කිය කියා හොඳට අඹරනවා!

පේනවනෙ උගේ නොනත් ඌට දෙවනි නෑ. කිව්වට මොකෝ නදීරයි මායිත් කෑවා . හැබැයි අවුලකට තිබ්බෙ දන්සැලේ කස්ටිය බත් කන්න එළවලු දුන්නෙ අම්බානෙක අඩුවෙන්. බත් ටිකෙන් කොටසක් අහක ගියා ඒ වැඩේ නිසා.

ඊට පස්සෙ ගෙදර ආවා හෙට අයිස් ක්‍රීම් කන්න දන්සැලට එනවා කියලා!! මෙහෙමත් කෑමක් නේද?

මේ අපේ ගෙදර කූඩු! කීර්ති බාප්පාගේ සැකිලි ටික අපි දෙන්නගෙ ඇලවිල්ල හා තාත්තගෙ ආලෝකකරණය!

I think there are others out there thats doing the exact same thing as I am. Whenever it rains these days, it pours like hell! Which floods most of the roads and my tiny car can't handle that kind of water.

So after a certain threshold of rain, its the bus for me!