Col.tf2 Won a Big Goose Egg

I just watched the Cevo-P Team Fortress 2 OCZ Grand Finals featuring Team Complexity and Evil Geniuses fighting against each other for $2500. I saw this broadcasted match over on Pwnage.tv and I would like to say, “Thank you Leo for an unfortunately short but great shoutcast.” Like always, your voice captures the essence of the competitive TF2 scene. Alright, enough with the ass-kissing; it is making me very uncomfortable. I was very excited to see my favourite pro TF2 team, Team Compexity (Col.tf2 previously known as Team Pandemic which was previously known as The Experiment) take on Evil Geniuses (EG.tf2 which was previously known as Sway Gaming). Both these teams are two North America’s top TF2 teams and can no doubt compete with the top pro teams from Europe (where the competitive scene is much bigger and more developed).

The line up for Complexity was:
Hell
Paladin
O’Plaid (apparently pronounced as oh-plad)
Punisher
Pyour
Reptile

The line up for EG was:
amr
casey
czr
destro
hero
yaug

I predicted that Complexity would take this match with a score of 4-1 but unfortunately to my surprise, EG came out with a big huge shalackin’ and whooped Complexity’s asses with a score for 5-0. What is even worse, this loss is Complexity’s worst loss by far. I thought their first loss against Team Loaded (previously known as the new Team Pandemic after the old team signed with Complexity) in the Season 3 Cevo-P finals was bad, but this takes the cake. They lost 5-0 with about 10 minutes before the half ended! They didn’t even get to the intermission!

Before I go on, I should explain the rules. The finals was on cp_badlands which is a map with five control points. Whichever team manages to control all five points wins a round. With Cevo, whichever team manages to take five rounds first wins the match and after thirty minutes of play time (I think), the teams switch colours and go at it again and play for another thirty minutes.

I was shocked when Complexity just got rolled so fast like that. The entire matchup took around 20 minutes in total and it was not enjoyable at all. Complexity managed to take around two control points but…that’s not enough to win a map, not even a round. Just by watching the cast, you can definitely tell the entire Complexity squad was off their game. It seemed like they haven’t played TF2 in a month and I can actually tell as I checked their steam accounts and saw that their play time hours were quite low even for a casual gamer. I do not think they practiced at all for this match and they probably just winged it hoping their skillz and comradery would do the trick. It did not pay off as their hard proven strategy against EG did not work at all. They still had their skills and strategies but it did not seem like their teamwork was doing well. A good strategy they pulled was by utilizing the Kritzkreig and pushing EG backwards into the scout flank but that was all. Once they captured the middle point, they just could not hold on to it and let EG steamroll through.

Throughout the whole entire match I kept on pleading for them to switch up their strategy and do something new and have Reptile go back to soldier, the class that made him so infamous in TF2. What makes me mad the most is that this is their third loss IN A ROW in finals matches. My faith in this team has been shattered into a million pieces and it does not help when Syckness, TheFragile, and Hubris left to join other competing teams. What I have seen is that Complexity has been using their same old strategies that have made them the top TF2 team in North America but ever since they have been dominating, the other TF2 teams have analyzed and figured out counter strategies to defeat Complexity and it has worked. It is time for Complexity to evolve and develop and be more creative with what they have because if things continue the way they are, it’s going to be a sad day when they become known as North America’s #2 team. They roll right through the competition with a near perfect record but when it counts the most, they choke! I do not think this is what they and Jason Lake want to become known for. This better not continute with the ESEA Invite Finals as this team better get their act together because they will face off against either 20ID, EG, or Team Loaded who are at the same skill level as Complexity. Complexity better change up their strategy, make new, cunning plays, and bring Dummy back as demo and sub out Rep with Reptile for soldier. If Mr. Dopko does not want to be soldier…make him. It is only one game and I’m pretty sure he still has his rocket juggling skills.

YOU BETTER WIN ESEA INVITE COMPLEXITY AS YOUR LAST THREE LOSSES COST ME $300

Haha, ok I’m just joking, it COST ME $600.

kk, I’ll stop. Just win the dam thing, alright?

TheFragile Joins Team Dynamic

I haven’t posted in quite a long time because life has been hectic REALLY hectic right now. I finally have some time now to write a new entry.

So lately I have been watching pro TF2 matches from Pwnage.tv as I am an avid fan of TF2 and I have been following the pro scene for a while now. From Cevo-p to ESEA to MLG, I know what’s going on. I started watching pro TF2 after I saw the soldier frag vid from Complexity’s Reptile (Adam Dopko). That was the most amazing thing I have ever seen from TF2 players at the time. Back then, col.TF2 used to be Team Pandemic but unfortunately due to business reasons they left Team Pandemic to join their current team. As the Chris Lemley, Team Pandemic’s owner and president said,
“Our former team achieved great success during their time under our banner,” said Pandemic President Chris Lemley in noting the departure of the former Pandemic.TF2 and defending CEVO-P champs. “At the end of the day however, we can’t forget that professional gaming is a business. Business and ethics forced my hand today, and I feel confident that I’ve done my very best in not finding their ‘replacement’ but instead finding a lineup that will become the next Team Fortress champion.”

Fortunately for Team Pandemic, they picked up iDemise’s TF2 roster to replace their loss and they have been doing well. Now there is a struggle for top the North American TF2 team between new Pandemic and old Pandemic. Team Pandemic has beaten Complexity for the Season 3 Cevo-P championship and they can arguably be the top TF2 team now, but there is always the strugle between both teams. Their current record versus Complexity is 2-4 I believe so there is still some discrepancy to be the top team.

On April 1st, GotFrag reported that Complexity’s medic TheFragile has left the team which is a blow to their current roster as he is considered to be one of the best medics in the game. He felt that playing TF2 for Complexity became to stressful and aggravating to a point that playing the game was not fun anymore. He also expressed his desire to play different classes like soldier, scout, or spy. Basically, he was tired of playing as a medic and the scheduling of pugs and practices. He wanted to take a more laid back approach. Fortunately he has found a team that has met his desire to a more laid back approach, Team Dynamic. He officially joined the roster for Team Dynamic just a few days ago as he played with them in the ESEA playoffs against his former gaming syndicate, Team Pandemic. What was weird is that he was playing as a medic instead of a scout or soldier (spies are RARELY played in pro matches) which would lead one to ask what is the REAL reason he left his old team. He left Complexity and the legacy to join a less successful team. We don’t know the true story though so you never know until it comes out. All the best to him and his TF2 skillz.

Installing Intrepid Ibex on a USB Key

I started doing some machine level coding this month and it is the most complicated programming language I have ever seen. It takes quite a bit of time outputing “hello world” on the terminal. It’s not the same as just importing your libraries, creating your class and typing out, system.out.println(“hello world”);, or printf(“hello world”);. The high level programming languages like C, C++, C#, or Java make this so much easy for you, but once you start assembly language, you’re done! It will take a lot more time to get to know how the language works.

So, I figured the best way to write assembly language is in linux. So I decided to hop on the band wagon and download the most popular unix/linux variant I can find which happens to be Ubuntu. I downloaded Ubuntu 8.10 or what many like to call it, Intrepid Ibex. I already have Hardy Heron (8.04) on my computer as dual boot with Windows XP so I decided to install it on my 8 Gb USB key. I used this article from PenDriveLinux in order to install to USB. The installation process is actually the same thing as just installing it on your computer. The article states that you should remove any existing hard drives in your computer/laptop before you plug in the USB, but you don’t have to. As long as you know the name of the hard drive(s) on your computer and the name of the USB key, you should be fine. Oh, you have to make sure to set your BiOS to boot from CD and if you want to use the Ubuntu USB, then you better make sure your computer can boot from USB as I learned the hard way. In the partition option, they give you which storage device you can partition and it will show you the USB key. Choose the USB key from the list and start the installation. Usually installing Ubuntu on a computer takes around half an hour. It depends on the reading/writing speed of your hard drive and the CD/DVD drive. If you install it on USB though, you better make some popcorn because it will take a while. It took about an hour and a half to finish installation but when it finally finished installing I leapt with glee, only to have it brought back down to observing HOW SLOW it is on USB. The operating system is so slow on USB; due to the fact it is SSD technology slowing it down, a lot. I’ll open up Firefox and it will take about thirty seconds for the program to pop up and when I create three empty tabs….it takes a LONG time for the program to respond. You actually might think that the program stopped responding but, just be patient and you’ll see. Anyways I had enough of that once I tried out the many applications that came with Intrepid Ibex. They just took too much time to boot up and I couldn’t do any work on it. The terminal was even slow and I couldn’t do my machine level coding on it.

Well, it was waste of 8 Gb. It was cool installing the OS on my USB key but the end results do not satisfy the curiosity. Next time I’ll install it on my external hard drive and see how that goes.

Print Screen on a Mac

So I recently started using Apple’s Macs this year and I have to say they are actually cool…until you see how different it is from Windows. As a Window’s user, migrating from Windows to Mac is quite time consuming until you realize after the first few seconds of using a Mac keyboard that all the keyboard short cuts for OSX are the same, you just have to replace control (ctrl) with the apple key (comman key, or the ⌘ key (Unicode 2318). I have found that every keyboard short cut I use for Windows can be replicated on the Mac side. All but one…PRINT SCREEN! Unfortunately the Mac keyboards do not have the print screen button so unfortunately when using Windows on a Mac, I am pretty much screwed when I need to take a picture of the desktop.

Fortunately I have been able to find a couple of solutions to my problem:

1. Press ctrl + F4 (unfortunately this does not work on all builds, only boot camp apparently?)
2. Press F13 or F14 (unfortunately, not ALL macs have an F13 or F14. I don’t even know if any mac keyboards have F13 or F14)
3. In Windows go to Start–>All Programs–>Accessories–>Accessibility–>On-Screen Keyboard (you need to arrange your windows in a way so that you can easily crop out the on screen keyboard as that will appear in your print screen)
4. Use screen capture programs like Gadwin, or Print Screen Deluxe (Yea, last resort, you have to download software to do it for you).
5. If you really want to go last resort, you can go into the hex editor in windows and use a certain key combination or useless button to do your print screen for you. (I have not figured this out yet though)

Lenovo w700 DS a Bust

Lenovo stopped the presses and made head line news when they revealed to the world their latest innovation, a dual screen laptop, the Lenovo w700 DS. Too bad it sucks! A considerable desktop replacement, the latest reinvention of the w700 weighs about ten pounds and the new extra screen adds about 0.4 inches to its already monstrous width. The w700 DS adds on another screen that is 10.6 inches to the 17 inches of space the user has. It is really cool how it is spring loaded. All you have to do is push it and it will pop out. Too bad though that there are no hinges on the new screen so that the user can tilt or move the screen at a certain angle.

The w700 DS pretty much has the same specifications of its parent: NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700M graphics card, 8 Gb or RAM, availability of using two hard drives at once in a RAID array, although I’m certain that the w700 allows up to three HDDs to be used together. It has the Blu-Ray option which is a good thing, it still has that digitizer pad, and the colour correction thing which is pretty useless to everyone not into digital media.

At first glance the new desktop replacement looks pretty cool but the new screen is too small to really make life more efficient. It is a neat thing to have on the road but having a 10.6 inch monitor does not really do justice, well maybe if the user watches a movie while they do work or uses the screen for side by side comparisons of pictures but for side by side comparisons, that extra 10.6 inches can only go so far. What is worse is the fact that you have to pay $500 more for an extra two pounds of weight. That extra 10.6 inches costs A LOT of money. It’s a great piece of technology, don’t get me wrong. Lenovo is the first company to present a dual screen laptop or in this case a replacement desktop and it looks really cool too. They had to ship this out and present their idea to everyone to get a head start on the competition who no doubt have plans and are working on dual screen laptops as we speak. Unfortunately, the 10.6 inches is not the icing on the cake for this laptop and even if they come out with a bigger screen in the next two years it still will not matter. Let’s just wait until companies are able to get full dual screen capabilities from a single laptop and then we’ll start talking. Imagine having the capability to pull out another 17 inch screen right beside you, that will be amazing. Then the ability to pull out a second screen to your left and a third screen on top. FOUR screens in total. That is a lot of work space and for sure that will be a big ass laptop. Well actually that won’t happen as after having two extra screens they’ll just leave the third extra one out so the desktops actually have a chance.

TWiT: Security Now 159 – Is Vista Safe?

I am a regular listener to the TWiT network which is hosted by none other than TechTV alum and ‘Call for Help’ host Leo Laporte. I finally got a chance to listen to last week’s Security Now netcast hosted by Mr. Laporte and Steve Gibson (the man who discovered and coined the term, ’spyware’) and once I heard Steve say, “I mean, for example, we’re seeing an increasing number of Mac exploits and vulnerabilities now. I mean, those are happening. We’re getting security patches from Apple at an unprecedented rate compared to the past because hackers have Macs now. It used to be that they predominantly had Windows machines. Now they’ve got Macs, and they’re poking around
in there.” I knew my prediction was true.

Since now, Apple has become basically a fashion statement where its cool to use Apple products like the iPod and the iMac – lets not forget about the iPhone, I see so many people buy and use these products. Many people buy Apple products because they want to be cool like everyone else and they look nice and stuff. I understand that because no one wants to be the outcast, the one person who does not have th product that all the cool kids at school have. I’ve been there and I’ve definitely seen it.
In this case though with Apple products, I say, “you guys are so stupid.” No matter what, just because it looks cool doesn’t mean its better and don’t give me that bullshit saying that the Leopard OS is safer than Vista or even XP because its not. It is only ’safer’ because hackers predominantly use Windows/Linux and hack into other Windows machines because Windows is the only OS people have. Now, all these hackers have macs and they’re developing and finding exploits to use against all the fan boys out there. Once you get infected with a mac virus or worm, GG to you. Its just like using Windows all over again.

Soon enough though, when enough people use macs, Leopard will become like Windows and then no one will be able to trust either Microsoft and Apple anymore and then everyone will say, “Fuck it, lets go with Linux!”

TF2 and a Microsoft Keyboard

I’ve lately been playing the game Team Fortress 2, developed by Valve in 2007.  The Heavy update finally came on August 19th and I’ve been playing non-stop for a week now trying to gain all the achievements.  I’ve managed to get twenty-three of the thirty-eight achievements available and am now using the nicely made K.G.B.  What pisses me off though is the keyboard I am using.

I know for a fact that since I am a gamer that wired keyboards and mouses are preferred to rather than their wireless counterparts. The main problem being that you never know when the batteries will run out, especially the batteries for the mouse that can crap out on you when you get ambushed from behind by a pyro wielding a backburner.
I’m using the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop 3.0 package and I can tell you, I do not like this keyboard what-so-ever. The keyboard and mouse have their advantages and disadvantages but the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages.

The Pros:
1. Ergonomically, the design is alright and the keyboard feels nice on the hands
2. It has many programmable macro keys for your programs and also has for short cut keys like a button for MSN messenger, calculator, my documents, my computer, notepad, e-mail, and the internet.
3. It contains media player buttons which are always good for watching movies, television shows, and also listening to music.
4. The mouse feels great and is ergonomically designed and fits the hand well. It feels very nice to hold it.
5. Mouse and keyboard do not take up that much battery power. For two years of owning this keyboard, I haven’t replaced the keyboard batteries and I’ve only replaced the mouse batteries twice.
6. The range can go up to five feet at least. I didn’t test at any further distances as my room is not long enough for this testing.

The Cons:
1. The program that comes with the package is easy to use and easy to install. It is very easy to navigate through and is intuitive. Unfortunately the macro keys and the shortcuts do not respond very well to the programs that are assigned to these buttons. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. I had a problem with always resetting the macro keys to their respective programs. The keys would respond for a short period but after a while or even after restarting the computer, the macro keys stop working.
2. The mouse wheel is too sensitive for me. This is a subjective view as I like the old school mouse wheels in which you can feel each click the mouse makes. The mouse wheel rotates very smoothly and you can barely feel any of the clicks. The wheel feels nice though with a translucent rubber finish. The scroll wheel can be moved from left to right which is used to help navigate through the tabs in Firefox and Opera but it seems as if the keyboard problems extend to the mouse as well.

Now the biggest problem:
3. This keyboard is not suitable for gaming what-so-ever! If you are a gamer, do not buy this keyboard because it will fail you and get you killed countless times, so many times that you will want to throw the keyboard and mouse out the window in frustration. The major problems that occur with this keyboard is that somehow the keys become unresponsive and de-sync somehow while you are trying to move your character. Just by pressing two buttons at once, your character will stop moving. This is very problematic especially if you try to crouch jump onto a ledge or even try and dodge while strafing and running forward.

While playing a scout in TF2, double-jumping is very important. What happens when you regularly double jump is you jump forward first and when you try to do the second jump you stop moving and just jump upwards – very frustrating.
Rocket jumping also is a big problem as jumping and trying to move forward is a big problem. Many times while rocket jumping I never move forward but only upward.
The biggest problem is strafing. Many times as I run forward and strafe to the left or right, the keys malfunction and de-sync or so and my character stops moving thus sending me to my untimely death.

These problems though never occur when I play DoTA, but mostly in WC3 its all done with the mouse and the keyboard hot-keys are not usually pressed at the same time.
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In the end, this keyboard is ideal for any kind type of computer use except for gaming. It is great for businesses and casual typing. It is great for typing your blog or finishing off an essay for school but it is definitely not for games. If you are a gamer, stay away from this keyboard.