Archive for November, 2007

Gordon Freeman’s Legendary Air Duct Crawling Skills

Friday, November 30th, 2007

Hopefully this might be one of my last Half Life themed posts. If you are bored or annoyed by these, I apologize, but in the last few weeks I played Portal, Episode One and Episode Two straight through, back to back and now I’m impatiently waiting for Episode Three. So bear with me for a bit while I get this stuff out of my system.

Anyways, every single Half Life game involves a fair amount crawling through air ducts, or some other tight places. In fact, Valve even decided to make fun of their love for air-duct sequences, by having Alyx make references to Gordon’s formidable crawling skills in Episode One. At one point, when I was doing all the crawling it hit me. How the hell do you fit in these tight ducts with the HEV suit and all your weapons? I mean, let’s think about it – on your average day, Gordon can be seen carrying:

  1. standard crowbar
  2. USP Match Pistol, with around 8 spare magazines
  3. .357 Magnum revolver with 12 spare rounds
  4. MP7 Submachine gun with 5 spare ammo clips, and 3 grenades for the built in launcher
  5. SPAS-12 pump action shotgun with around 30 spare cartridges
  6. Overwatch Standard Issue Pulse Rifle with 60 spare rounds
  7. mechanical crossbow with 10 bolts
  8. AT4 Rocket Propelled Grenade Launcher (RPG) with 3 rockets
  9. three fragmentation grenades
  10. Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator (aka the Gravity Gun)

That’s two machine guns, a crossbow, a rocket launcher tube, a unwieldy crowbar and a very bulky and heavy gravity gun. Seriously, check out the scenes when it used by Alyx or Dr. Breen. It’s so heavy that they can hardly lift it into the upright firing position without the HEV suit. Actually, Alyx seems to be barely able to lift the damn thing at all.

Note that I’m not even mentioning the HEV suit itself here. Ok, so I just mentioned it. Look at it though. From the way it looks on concept art sketches, and that brief moment you see it in the game, it looks big and bulky. I think that it actually has rigid plate components that protect you from “blunt trauma”, a hardened collar and chest plate and etc. It’s not really a good outfit for ventilation duct crawling to begin with.

So next time you are crawling through an air duct in Half Life think about this: you are actually have a dozen bulky weapons strapped to your suit. How is it possible? Gordon Freeman is just that awesome. This is why Vortigaunts are always so nice to him! Cause, dude – if you can fit into a tiny duct in a big suit, with weapons strapped all over your body, you must be fucking unconsciously using vortesence to bend reality or something. ;)

Comment subscriptions may be b0rked for some

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

Quick note for those of you who use Gmail and rely on the comment subscription thingymajig to follow the discussions around here. There seems to be some weird bottleneck when relaying emails to gmail accounts, which seems to be affecting the comment subscription system. If you haven’t received any comment notifications today blame Dreamhogs. I was wondering why my email is being so quiet today. There was not a single notification message in my inbox today.

I sent Dreamhost an email, but they are pretty much like:

I DUNNO...

I don’t have a clue how long will this persist. I’m hoping it will get cleared by tomorrow, but who knows. I’ll keep you updated. If you are not using Gmail, you will probably be unaffected by this. If you are not on Gmail and you are not getting any notifications, let me know, and I’ll go and yell at Dremroast some more.

Netgear WG111 Disables Fast User Switching (aka the RtlGina2.dll issue)

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

One of my users dropped off a WinXP desktop on my desk today, telling me that all his user accounts are gone and, the welcome screen is missing. Bit perplexed I hooked it up to a nearby monitor half expecting to face some odd registry corruption issue. Luckily I do have a Knoppix SDT with that nifty windows password blanking script in my bag. What I found however was even weirder. I was greeted with the “classic” windows logon (ie. the one where you actually have to type in the username and password).

I was able to successfully log in using the correct username and password which ruled out some registry hiccup. So I went straight to Control Panel, determined to switch on the fast user switching and the welcome screen via the Users applet. Unfortunately as soon as I clicked on the right option I got the following message:

A recently installed program has disabled the welcome screen and fast user switching. To restore these features you must uninstall the program. The following filename might help you identify the program that made the change: RtlGina2.dll.

Trojan? No, not really. Apparently RtlGina2.dll belongs to the Netgear WG111 network card driver installation package. For some unknown reason it replaces the default windows graphical logon MSGINA.dll with it’s own implementation, effectively disabling the nice logon features of windows XP.

Excuse me Netgear, but what the fuck are you doing? How the hell do you justify modifying the way user’s system logs in when all you are doing is installing networking drivers? Actually, fuck that. I don’t want to know. It’s unacceptable. There is no way in hell you could justify this sort of invasive bullshit to me. I’m going to advise all my users against your shitty products from now on.

How to fix this mess? It’s relatively simple. You just need to dive into registry and remove the references to RtlGina2.dll – most importantly from:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/SOFTWARE/MICROSOFT/WINDOWSNT/WINLOGON

Or, if you are lazy you can grab a tool designed especially for this problem. It was written by Doug Knox who is an MVP, and a Microsoft Expert Zone Associate Expert (oh, hey, redundant redundancy!). Apparently he is to busy writing registry hacks to actually update his circa 1991 website layout and design, which initially made me suspicious of his legitimacy. But his credentials do check out and the tool works (I tested it), so feel free to use it. All you need to do is download it, and run it and it does the rest.