I hate Windows!

I haven't blogged much this week and that's mainly because I've been wrestling with Windows XP until I hate looking at the screen. Something . . . happened recently. I rebooted into XP Friday night with the intent of playing a game and discovered that XP no longer boots. (It complains that it can't find HAL.DLL). Oddly enough, the Parallels Desktop version still runs but it (XP inside the virtual machine that is) is crashing on logout - WIndows does some typically brilliant thing where it wants to know if I want to put logon.exe in the debugger (oh that sounds like it should work just great!) Although . . . it turns out Windows Update no longer runs inside Parallels so clearly all is not well inside the VM box either.

After some fiddling I decided to give up and reinstall Windows XP. Turns out you can "repair" the XP installation which seems to basically reinstall the OS but keep your Registry, apps, and so forth. Fantastic. And it turns out that Windows Update isn't running on the repaired XP either. There was a lot of comedy with this because there are a lot of conflicting reports on the net on how to best fix this. I did some steps that I think were false, but here's what I think fixed it. This worked (twice) to repair the problem, and I think the other steps were just misdirection. In IE open Internet Options. On the General Tab select Tempory Internet Files->Settings and remove the MUWebControl and the WUWebControl. You may or may not need to stop the service before doing this.

Anyway, finally got XP running again, let it download the 70+ (!) critical patches, rebooting like four times, blah, blah, blah.

Reboot into OS X, try to run Parallels Desktop. Parallels just reboots the VM immediately. Fantastic. Reboot to XP. Now we're back to missing HAL.DLL. Grrr. The Parallels FAQ claims I should try to reboot XP (inside the VM) in "Safe Mode", but it still reboots just after loading MUP.SYS. This is either because of the Parallel Tools or because some USB issue (or both - one of the things Parallels does is shims my USB keyboard/mouse into virtual PS2 connections).

Run the whole drill again. Get a functioning XP install and attempt to uninstall the Parallels Tools - oh they can't be uninstalled except when running in the VM. Wanna bet? One slash & burn through the registry later and a delete inside C:\Program Files and I think they are really gone. But I'm not going to rely on that. I'm not gonna try Parallels again until I find a satisfactory way to back and restore the entire partition. (Remember my previous backup strategy relied on Parallels - which now isn't running.) At the moment I'm letting a OS X app called WinClone crunch on making an image of my running XP System - Dev Studio installed and so forth. If THAT works then I'll try Parallels again.

Grrrr.

I didn't work on it last night though, Karin and I went and saw The Police in concert. That was a fine show, well worth seeing if you can.

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The CityDesk Archives

So somebody yesterday tried to access "The old CityDesk Site" link at the bottom of the page and got a "forbidden" error for their troubles. (For those who don't know the first several months of the blog weren't done with MovableType and I just archived it away when I converted.) I suspect it was just a web spider but just in case I fixed the permissions. If you were sad at missing the old archives, they are back. (Mostly. I notice the Java Tic-Tac-Toe links don't work, but I don't think that's worth fixing. If I'm wrong let me know.)

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The 360 Guitar and Me

You might be wondering how did I ever settle in to the 360 Guitar Hero controller, especially after I started trying the "new grip"? Well, I'd say pretty good. But I don't have to say it myself because I can let the "Sandbox Hero" achievement (for getting five stars on all songs on the Easy tour) on my GamerTag speak for itself. Now I'm on to five-starring the Medium songs. "The Grip" rules, my friends!

In a somewhat funny note, I accidentally skipped a song in the second tier of easy, so I worked my through Psychobilly Freakout on Easy and went "Awhaa?" when I didn't get my achievement. So I had to go back and play this absolutely baby-simple song and I nailed every note on my first playthrough. Which is only sorta awesome, except back in my 360 Achievement categorization post my example of a "Major Goal" was the Guitar Hero II 100% achievement. At the time I wrote

You might do that through normal play, but it's more likely that you sit down and work at it for a while.

Well then. Turns out you can do it through normal play - IF you have mastered "The Grip". Later in the post I also referenced Splinter Cell: Double Agent's achievement for completing an entire level without being detected as a "Major Goal", so that will have to stand as my canonical example. I don't think it's likely to happen on anybody's first playthrough of a SC:DA level, so it's much more likely to be something you're doing deliberately. Unless there's a special SC:DA "Grip" that I know not of . . . .

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DM of the Rings

Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign.

Twenty Sided ยป DM of the Rings I:The Copious Backstory

I got this from Chris Roberson, but it's super-funny! Be sure to read the text at the bottom as well. I miss the days when I had time for D&D . . . .

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The Hidden Family

Even more books! I'll admit I started reading The Jennifer Morgue today at lunch so I figured I'd better stay on track. I'm seriously contemplating modifying my book review policy. The problem is that later volumes in a series seem difficult to me. Today I'm here to talk about The Hidden Family which is book two of The Merchant Princes and nobody is going to care about The Hidden Family unless they've read The Family Trade. But if they have read the first book then they already have an opinion of the series and it's unclear that I'm providing any value. There's a very serious argument that I should just go ahead and note "Yep, it's more of the same." and then move on reviewing Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End. On the other hand, maybe a comment thread tagged as "Spoiler", means that we could discuss the book without worrying about giving away the big secrets? There's a topic of open discussion. Is anybody actually reading these? If you are, do you find the reviews of volumes two and three worthwhile?

As usual, I won't spoil The Hidden Family, but I will assume that spoiling The Family Trade is fair game. If that bugs you then read no further.

The Hidden Family continues piling it higher and deeper on poor Miriam. One thing I will call out and praise Stross for is that it doesn't feel like an Act II. This book is a good story on it's own merits, in part because the series doesn't have a traditional trilogy structure. In some ways The Hidden Family and The Family Trade work more as a duology than I expected. While it's clear that Miriam's story has further chapters many of the story arcs are concluded at the end of this book. Miriam's relationship with the Clan is solidified and all of the not-so-subtle hints in the first book about the sixth family resolve. The seeds of new story lines are sown throughout the novel, but it closes at least as many plot lines as it opens (I'd say it closes more than it opens, but perhaps that's a debateable point.)

Overall I liked The Hidden Family more than The Family Trade, but I'm not going to claim it will change your mind wherever you fell on the first book. In the bulk this is more of the same. If you liked book one then I can easily recommend book two. I noted in my review of the first book that it seems almost rushed, like too much is crammed into the start. I think The Hidden Family benefits in comparison, and this is a large part of why I like it better. All of that frantic sketching in of the modern world can be taken as given and we know quite about about the world of the Clan and Gruinmarkt already. Miriam is still in way over her head and learning a lot but at the same time she knows a lot more than she did in book one and things unfold at a more normal pace.

I'd be curious to know how The Merchant Princes books are selling comparing to Accelerando or Glasshouse. The general wisdom is that fantasy outsells science fiction these days, but of course Accelerando got a lot of attention due to being nominated for the Hugo and winning the Locus Best SF Novel. The reason why I wonder is that while I like The Merchant Princes just fine there's nothing really compelling or unique there. It's well executed fantasy, and it is a pleasure to read but I don't really feel like it especially required Charlie Stross to write them. As opposed to Accelerando which is simply mind-blowing and I can't imagine coming from any other writer I know of. I'd be sad if the Stross' SF output is impacted by his fantasy works. I don't mean that as a strong criticism - I'll be happy to read the next book in the series, just that I don't see it as Stross' best work.

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