I’ve been reading dozens and dozens of stories about people having issues with Battlefield 3: getting triple billed, unable to activate or unable to join games. These are all serious problems and I hope that EA fixes them and prevents them in the future Knowing EA the prevention wont happen), however you only ever hear the bad stories.

In my case I bought Battlefield 3 on Friday, went home, downloaded and installed it. Launched Battlelog, joined a server and started playing. Servers are a bit glitchy left and right, and sometimes lag a bit but other than that it’s smooth sailing.

I really hope everyone that is having problems gets them resolved ASAP. I figured I’d also show that it isn’t fucked up for everyone.

~Xeross

CCP fucked up and went into the wrong direction, Hilmar finally apologized publicly and said that they’ll starting fixing their shit. After this a stream of devblogs and other positive news came out of CCP’s direction and I started to regain faith in their doings.

However now they are firing 20% of their staff because of their continued fuck-ups. And during a stroke of brilliance someone decided that they should fire part of the community team (Which includes Fallout, Wrangler, Zymurgist and Pann).

Regardless of who is getting fired, this is a difficult time for both the people fired and the people that have to tell them the news. However it is just stupid that they are firing people that are doing a good job, and that were responsible for communicating with the playerbase. Not to forget that this is a PR failure as, logically, the community team is well known by, well, the community.

I regained hope, and felt like CCP finally got their shit together, but now I just realized they’ll never, and that they’ll continue to make shitty decisions.

To Fallout, Wrangler, Zymurgist, Pann, Maidensteel and everyone else that got laid off. I wish you the best of luck, may you find a new (And hopefully similarly/moor awesome) job.

~Xeross

I finally have Battlefield 3 Beta working, it turned out to be a bug with folder names containing an è, apparently characters with accents aren’t well liked.

Regardless, the fix:

1. Go to the folder where Origin installed BF3 Beta, this is usually:
   32bit: C:\Program Files\Origin Games
   64bit: C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games
2. Rename the Bèta Battlefield 3 folder to Beta Battlefield 3
3. Start regedit , browse to the following key:
   32bit: HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SOFTWARE\EA Games
64bit: HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WoW6432Node\EA Games
4. Change the InstallDir path to:
   C:\Program Files\Origin Games\Beta Battlefield 3
5. Change the GDFBinary path to the following, while keeping the stuff after the last \ intact (the last bit starts with GDFBinary and ends with .dll):
   C:\Program Files\Origin Games\Beta Battlefield 3
So in my case that would be
   C:\Program Files\Origin Games\Beta Battlefield 3\GDFBinary_en_US.dll


Source: http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-3/1432752-win7-x64-bf3-exe-crash-fix.html

NOTE: I have not been able to verify the 32bit values so they might be incorrect, a solution if you can’t find the registry key is to search for “Battlefield 3” and check if the location is similar to the above ones.

Lemme know if it works

Recently (Update: Amended press release by JP Morgan states beginning of  2010) the NYPD received “the largest donation in the history of the foundation” from JP Morgan as stated in a press release (mirror), a sum of $4.6 million.

Today during the “Solidarity March” protesters were kettled by the NYPD, and they’ve been (and still are) arresting people one by one, seemingly at random (Including children/teenagers), looking at the live feed I can see no reason for the arrests, people are just standing there getting picked off one by one. Now the real reasons are unknown so I can not comment on whether these are lawful or not.

I also can’t help but think that this is a strange coincidence; the arrests of (mostly) harmless protesters (protesting against the banks) and the biggest donation to the NYPD in their history (by one of those banks).

The livestream (well it was live, their battery went dead as I’m writing this, currently previously recorded footage is played) currently has 20,000+ viewers and is still increasing rapidly, the people are watching.

If the NYPD ignored the whole thing and acted rationally rather than randomly arresting and macing people this would’ve gotten nowhere near the attention it is now getting, so I guess we have to thank them for that.

TL;DR/Just Facts Version

NYPD received $4.6 million donation from JP Morgan (Update: At the beginning of 2010), press release (mirror) states “the largest donation in the history of the foundation”

Protesters were kettled (contained/corralled) during the “Solidarity March” and are one by one arrested for an as of yet unknown reason.

Livestream has over 20,000, growing rapidly, the world is watching.

Follow #OccupyWallstreet On

• Twitter
• Livestream
• Unofficial official website
  

Update: It seems that JP Morgan has changed the statement on their website, the image mirror I put up is the original message

As I have recently once again become frustrated by how my IRC bot evolved into a horrible mess of code and I have decided on yet another rewrite after seeing how hook.io (Written in NodeJS) handles IRC bots I decided to take a look at implementing something similar.

I recalled that I experimented with message queues before with various pieces of other software and that a message queue might just provide the functionality that’s similar to hook.io that I wanted.

So after some researching I decided to settle on RabbitMQ, it’s fast, simple to set-up and has a nice status/admin plugin that is helpful both during development and a live environment.

I also decided to use Gevent for this rewrite rather than Twisted which I’ve always used for my previous bots. Sure asynchronous code can be written clearly, but the clarity and ease-of-use of blocking/synchronous code is just way better in my opinion. And with Gevent I can write synchronous code (And use blocking libraries) and it’ll make them async in the background (Thanks to how Python generators work).

The basic functionality version of the new bot is finished, I currently have a few node types (Processes with a certain task) implemented:

• A proxy: this just connects to an IRC server, registers and pushes any packets onto the message queue (And listens for packets to send too), so now rebooting the bot won’t make it close all connections.
• A client: does the actual IRC interaction and hands the proxy packets to send to the server.
• A logger: simply outputs all messages sent between the nodes
• A command line interface: a simple command line application that implements some basic IRC commands (PRIVMSG, JOIN, PART) to send to the client manually

It’s all very basic, the proxy and client need to be changed so that they manage multiple IRC servers, a management node will be implemented that will orchestrate everything and plugins, etc. will also be their own nodes.

Some might say this is over-engineering, I’d call it flexibility and reliability. It does what I want and it does it in a clean effective fashion. Not to forget I learn more about using message queues which seem to be gaining popularity lately.

This is still long from being a working functional IRC bot but I already feel like I am making a cleaner and more organized start, and hopefully this will be the first one that actually runs in production fairly smoothly.

~Xeross

As I’ve lately got a preference for Battlefield over Call of Duty I was quite excited when I heard that there was an open beta for Battlefield 3.

So after downloading Origin and letting it install Battlefield 3 I fired it up, and it opened a website, okay not what I prefer for finding a match but it’ll do.

So I go find a random server with room and hit the join button, okay my mouse shows the loading graphic. Ok good origin says it’s starting Battlefield 3. Okay bf3.exe in task manager… poof, gone.

It seems in my case Battlefield decided that it will just crash during start-up, doesn’t even go beyond 30MB of RAM usage so it’s crashing really early in its start-up phase.

I updated my drivers, reinstalled it and rebooted my computer, nothing, and considering this is really a minimal windows install (Only games + game related software) it seems highly unlikely my OS install is the problem.

This is a shame as I was quite excited for it after watching some gameplay footage and commentaries.

Well guess I’ll try again sometime soon when it’s fixed, hopefully this is before the beta ends.

~Xeross

Update: fixed it!