Sunday, 30 December 2007

Updates to Crow's Nest and Tsavo Highway

Playing through the two though fights in Crow's Nest I made some progress in making them easier. The first one is when you returned to the op center and then head out to the barracks to save some fellow marines. I suggest that you take with you a fully loaded battle rifle, a fully loaded needler from the fight at the hangar and the turret from the cave where you fought with the drones. When you enter the room you keep the turret and start shooting at the first line of brutes focusing on the golden brute because he has a brute shot. If some brutes close in then you can use the turret to kill them fast. Every time your shield is down you hide until completely recovered. If brutes are closing in while you recover throw a grenade their way and they might retreat. Now drop the turret and use the battle rifle to kill any brutes you can find. If you have time try to shoot at the Brute Chieftain with the Gravity Hammer even though he is far away. If you are lucky you might even kill him there.

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Posted by schaefera at 11:33 AM in XBox and Games

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Wednesday, 26 December 2007

Don't Buy at Best Buy

I don't like to drive in LA and so I was wondering if I should start shopping certain electronic stuff at BestBuy rather than driving to Fry's which is roughly an hour away. Well, they made that choice quite easy and I will not go there and buy anything even if it is the only thing in the whole wide world. It is not enough that there Geek Squad became famous lately as Porn Collectors but their return policy is quite ludicrous.

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Posted by schaefera at 12:23 PM in Annoying

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TomTom GO 720: Don't Buy

I just wasted $60 bucks on a TomTom GO 720 because of the BestBuy return policy but I have to say that even without that I would not recommend it. Especially if you don't have Windows at hand please don't waste a minute thinking about it. Strangely enough because TomTom uses a Linux kernel on its device.

One reasons why I don't like it is that I doesn't list Starbucks. I shows the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Company but not Starbucks, how come? Then you must have Windows in order to use their feature like Map Share and finally you need to register within a month of the purchase and then you get one year of free updates. After than you buy their update service.

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Posted by schaefera at 12:22 PM in Annoying

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Tuesday, 25 December 2007

State of Emergeny Averted

Well, last Friday the Coffee Machine was delivered and I had to unpack and to try it out right there. Now a few days later we are quite happy with it and think that overall it makes the better coffee than the 2 1/2 times more expensive Italian machine. Here is a picture of the entire machine: KitchenAid Pro Line Espresso Machine:

KitchenAid Pro Line Espresso Machine

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Posted by schaefera at 4:22 PM in Personal

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Saturday, 22 December 2007

To ServiceMix or Not To ServiceMix

Now as my project dealing with JBI / ESB / ServiceMix has been terminated will I stick around and still keeping an eye on ServiceMix. To be honest probably not just because it is not my field of expertise even though I worked on a similar field (EAI) when I was working for SeeBeyond. The basic idea of JBI / ESB is quite interesting but in my honest opinion JBI is not the right tool and ESB is too much of a marketing term than to be taken seriously. Again I like the basic idea but the entire thing is way to complicated, to hard to debug and even harder to test because of the inherent asynchronous nature.

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Posted by schaefera at 10:54 PM in Madplanet.com Inc.

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Friday, 21 December 2007

Schoene Weihnachten

Which means Merry Christmas in German. Back when I was a kid living on my parents' farm Christmas was quite different than it is here in the US. First we celebrated Christmas with the presents and lighting up the tree on Christmas eve and probably this year we will do this with our kids as well because I don't like the concept of my kids running down on Christmas morning ripping of all the presents and an hour later complaining about not having got enough presents. We will sit down for a nice dinner and afterwards I will put the presents under the tree and we sit around it enjoying the tree and giving the kids the presents.

Actually back then as well as up to now where my sister is keeping up with the tradition the tree was lit with real candles and because the tree was fresh and just brought into the house a few hours before there was never an accident as far as I can remember. But of course you can only light them up when you keep an eye on them until they are burned down and when I am back home I enjoy to watch the candles go out one by one and the room gets slowly darker.

As our family grows with the fourth on the way Christmas becomes more and more a family event where we try to celebrate our family and the love we share for each other. Even though I hate the commerce surrounding Christmas in the US even more than at home I like the aspect of the family event because the excitement, anticipation and the glowing in the kids eyes seem to be gone and is a thing of the past. I don't know if that is just because I am a parent now and my parents thought the same thing or if it is because Christmas is used and misused for commerce and to make more and more money.

That said we are keeping the amount spent for presents in tight limits and are not going to max out any credit cards or anything else like that. We want to enjoy Christmas and not worrying about the upcoming credit card payments. We also like to buy toys made out of wood rather than plastic and this year showed that this might was a wise decision with all the poisoned toys and their recalls.

Happy Holiday, a Merry Christmas and Thank You for Reading my Blog

Andy Schaefer

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Posted by schaefera at 1:13 PM in Personal

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Wednesday, 19 December 2007

It is Time to Say Goodbye

As a contractor I always hope that I can leave a project when I have another one lined up but mostly the client terminates a contract and then I have to find another one pretty quickly. This time is no exception and to make things worse it is right before Xmas where many people are on vacation and are not back until the beginning of next year. In addition the client did not let the contract just expire but terminate it actually a week earlier.

Well, nothing is going to help and so I am back looking for a new contract. For now I am happy to just find a short term contract and in case   keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 1:21 PM in Madplanet.com Inc.

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Monday, 17 December 2007

State of Emergency

We are in a state of emergency because our coffee machine shows signs of an eminent breakdown. Everyone who knows me knows that I prefer good food in general but when it comes to coffee then I do not compromise. This is due because of traveling through Italy many times because my wife's mother grew up in Italy. That means that I want to have a good shot of espresso and cannot stand drip coffee or, even worse, peppermint while mocha, yikes. Having owned many espresso machines in my life my wife and I decided that only an espresso machine with a boiler is going to work for us. The ones with a  keep on reading here

Posted by schaefera at 8:32 PM in Personal

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Continous Intergration

In my current job I am looking into some strategies on how to develop software efficiently and one of the best working model I know of is how software is develop in open-source. It is mind boggling to watch how companies are unable to do basic things like automated builds, automated tests, notifications about failures, release management even though they have the resources, the manpower and they work in close proximity. But I think actually all these points are the reasons why it doesn't work because they make it easy to cheat on them which over time becomes a way of how software is developed. Open-source projects on the other hand do not have a choice and because of their setup they cannot cheat and so it becomes a way of how they develop software without expensive and resource intensive tools like Clearcase, Project Management tools, (UML) Design tools and many more. Therefore the streaming lining of a project because of its open-source nature is their biggest advantage for developing great software. Another point would be that many users see the code a give more feedback than in a for-profit company but there is not much a company could do about it.

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Posted by schaefera at 10:25 AM in Java

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Saturday, 15 December 2007

I am the Crazy King on the Hill

One reason why I don't blog that much lately is that I spend quite some time playing Halo 3 on XBox Live which is quite a thrill. When I began I played mostly Team Slayer but after a while I became frustrated with my personal performance especially when I was one of the reasons why my team lost. So I started to play Lone Wolves which was fun but also taught me quite some tricks and pitfalls. I seem to make progress because my rating finally started to climb again especially because I started to win some of the games mostly of type Oddball and Crazy King.

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Posted by schaefera at 10:51 PM in Personal

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Thursday, 13 December 2007

Late Night Scrambles are Dangerous

Last Saturday night I was going over my emails and suddenly it hit me. I did not receive any emails today and the last email I received was from yesterday. Shoot, did DNS MX record problems hit me again? Did my server crash? What was going on?

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Posted by schaefera at 12:05 PM in Madplanet.com Inc.

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Thursday, 6 December 2007

One more Service brought Home

Currently I am trying to have all the services around my server and websites back at the office so that I can modify them quickly and have full control over them. One of these services is the DNS server providing the host name and the reverse lookup resolution. Normally one needs two servers to provide them which also means I need two IP addresses. But now I finally have a few IP addresses and so I was able to set it up again.

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Posted by schaefera at 4:01 PM in Madplanet.com Inc.

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