February 2, 2009: Happy 15th Anniversary to the Ralstons

Wow, fifteen years.  I can’t believe that the Ralston’s wedding was fifteen years ago!  That is just crazy.

Here is some serious xenophobia in northern Italy  – some cities are beginning to ban “foreign” foods claiming that only regional cuisine be allowed.  This is a slipperly slope since it is primarily a form of racism and secondly it is completely undefinable.  Already, in an act of extreme racism against a large percentage of national Italians, it has been put form that French cuisine is “Italian” but that Sicilians are foreigners and their cuisine is not legal.  Even though Arabs are a primary influence in modern Italy there is so much racism in Italy today, apparently, that any food widely perceived as being derived from Arab cuisine may be outlawed no matter how fundamental it is to the Italian diet or how discriminatory it is to the population at large.

Actions like these make us wonder if a new Mussolini might rise again in Italy.  Remember than when Italy expressed solidarity with Nazi Germany before and during World War II that Italy was allowed to change sides mid-war and was “forgiven” for its transgressions while Germany both lost the war and was forced to endure half a century of direct oppression.  Italy learned no such lesson and, in fact, that they might be able to get away with things like, oh I don’t know, institutionalized racism.

Perhaps it is time for some of the more recent European nations to rethink their structures.  We saw the forced conglomerate of Yugoslavia break apart over the last decade and we have seen the two Germanies reunite after a very long time apart.  A few countries have had the opportunity to rethink decades of externally instituted national boundaries.

Italy, like many European nations like Germany and Yugoslavia, is actually a relatively recent invention.  The war of Italian unification happened around the same time that the American Civil War took place – which was not all that long ago.  Not so long for the country to have time to adjust to being a single culture which they, like the US, is clearly not.  Unlike the US which is a highly mobile population that was already highly integrated between the north and the south and split widely based on ethics and not culture, the nation of Italy is split based on geography, history, culture, climate, cuisine and race.  The demarcation is rather significant unlike in America.  In the US, as well, the war took place after a hundred years of unification as the United States and after a long tradition of being cooperative colonies under British rule before that.  Italy has no such tradition since Roman times.

There really is very little reason for the nation of Italy, as we know it today, to remain a single country.  The unification was done by force of arms (and shortly after the unification the large Sicilian emmigration began supplying the United States with one of our largest population groups over the course of just a decade or two joining the Engish, Dutch and Germans) and Siciliy (both Sicilies including the island as well as the “boot” up to Naples which used to be the capital of the Two Kingdoms of Sicily before unification) was kept as a part of the empire by force and not by will.  Keep in mind that Americans often think of the US invasion of Sicily in 1943 as us arriving to liberate Sicily from the facists and Nazis of northern Italy and Germany.  Perhaps this was not the case but the mindset happened for a reason.  Hard-core, insane nationalism was primarily a central-Eurpean phenominon originating from the Holy Roman homeland and not a result of Mediterranean culture.

Germany has had the long-term benefit of having lost the war so decisively.  Yes, several generations, who had nothing to do with the war, had to suffer horribly, especially at the hands of the Soviets, but now Germany has been allowed to re-unify under their own terms, has come to grasp with its own culturale and social shortcomings and views itself with a suspicious eye, always weary that the worst could happen again – and just be worry so it seems that it likely never will.  Germany has arisen from its own ashes and has redefined itself as a war-adverse, economically driven, friendly neighbour nation that takes its global responsibilities seriously.

I woke up rather early this morning, on my own, and was able to start work on the early side today. Dominica got a chance, with Liesl sleeping, to do two more lessons in her first UNIX Administration class from UofI OST and then got some time to continue playing Paper Mario.

Work slowed down a bit this afternoon which was nice.  In the mail today my brand new copies of Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy IX, both for the original Sony Playstation, arrived.  I bought them via eBay getting quite a good deal.  Getting numbers eight and nine in the series officially completes my FF collection.  I now own at least one copy of every title in the main series (1-10, 10 Part 2 and 12.)  I am really looking forward to getting to play these later two PSX titles.  I have no idea why I never got them back when I owned a Playstation.  They must have released after I was no longer playing it or at least not very often.

I only even played the original Playstation while living in Greece, New York with Josh and later Josh and Andy.  I got the Playstation while living in Greece.  Mark and I had bought it together but then he never paid for his half and I got saddled with it even though he was the one that had really wanted to get it and had talked me into going halves on it (but putting it on my credit card, of course.)  So it was my unplanned game system of the period when I already owned a Nintendo 64 which I didn’t have enough time to play.

So I probably got the Playstation in 1998 or maybe even early 1999.  I know that I never hooked it up again after moving out of Greece which I did on February 20th, 2000 to move to Ithaca (then Pittsburgh and then Washington) so I could not possibly have used it for very long.

After work we ate dinner, vegetarian pot pie, and watched a little of Major Dad.  Since having moved to Peekskill we almost never eat fish anymore.  I used to have fish in almost every meal but now almost nothing.  Our dairy consumption is down significantly as well.  We have switched from real cheese to soy-based vege-cheese which is much healthier and we almost never eat out getting things like pizza.  We are much healthier now than we were six months ago.

Tonight Dominica decided that she really wanted me to hook up the Playstation 2 in the living room so that she can play our stacks and stacks of Playstation 2 games that we have not been able to touch for months.  So I set about on an hour long search looking for the adapters to plug in the PS2.  I eventually found them but it was so late then that she was not all that interested.

She also sent me out tearing the house apart attempting to find the missing wireless dongle and memory card for the GameCube.  That required me to empty out all of the under-the-stairs storage in the basement, dump bins of cabling out onto the floor and sort through everything very carefully.  We took the last of the unpacked boxes upstairs and Dominica sorted through them unpacking everything that we had left to unpack.  Then, just because she didn’t trust my searching them, I carried all of our plastic drawers from under my office desk upstairs and she went through all of them in the living room.

We never did find the GameCube stuff that we needed but tonight did give us a chance to clean out a ton of things that have accumulated, mostly during last minute packing, into strange nooks and crannies.  A lot of mail was just thrown into drawers the last few weeks in Newark since all of the correct places to put the mail had already left.

I got to play Fable for a while tonight which was really nice.  I was really upset, though, when after playing through a very long, hard and important part of the game without any way to save that the XBOX 360 crashed and I had to physically power it down.  So quite a bit of work on the game was lost, again.  Game designers need to be accutely aware that when they spread out save points they are putting the game at the mercy of every little glitch, power outage, hardware problem, surprise phone call, etc.  And not to mention making a game potentially uncompletable my a lot of children whose parents will not allow them to play more than, say, two hours per night.  Having a quest that must be done in a single shot that takes three hours, then, is no different to them then having the game have a bug that cannot be addressed.  Making saving difficult is a cheap way out of making gameplay good.  With a little thought there are better ways to make a video game interesting.

February 1, 2009: Productive Day

We have nothing much planned for today.  So after getting up this morning and everyone moving down to the living room I took over the morning Liesl schedule, helper with her exercises and tummy time and other activites, while Dominica got started on her first class at the O’Reilly School at the University of Illinois.  That actually worked out really well.  Liesl and I really enjoyed getting a morning together – normally she spends her mornings happy and alert with Dominica and I only see her during the tired evening hours – and Dominica was able to focus, quite productively, on her schoolwork for several hours.  By the time that she decided to call it a day she had completed six lessons out of the nineteen needed to complete her first course.  There are four courses altogether in her certificate program.  So today gave her a really good jump on the whole thing.

When Liesl fell asleep after her morning exercises I got a little bit of a chance, maybe an hour, to play some Fable while Dominica was still working on her classword.  I tried going through the Arena but didn’t understand the directions and ended up accidentally dying just because I did the wrong thing and went through the wrong door.  Oops.  So I had to start over and ended up getting almost nowhere for my work today.

In the early afternoon, after finishing up her schoolwork for today, Dominica settled in to play some Paper Mario on the Wii Virtual Console.  She has been working hard the last few days to attempt to complete this classic adventure title.  This afternoon she managed to get in a few hours and was able to complete the next to last chapter in the game.

We downloaded Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars for the Wii Virtual Console today.  I have never actually played this classic SNES title before and Dominica has never even seen it.  I played it for maybe fifteen minutes, if that long, so that we could at least see what it looked like today.  Paper Mario is sometimes considered to be the spiritual successor to Super Mario RPG.  SMRPG was made by Squaresoft, however, and is far more similar to classic JRGP titles than the Paper Mario series is as they are adventure/JRPG crossovers made by Nintendo themselves.

I put in an hour or two working for the office today after getting paged out in the middle of the afternoon and subsequently needing to deal with several issues that all came up around about the same time.  I also put in an hour or two working on some other projects in the basement before returning to the upstairs to hang out with the family.

My big challenge for today continued to be attempting to install Windows 2003 (fully virtualized, of course) onto an HP Proliant DL385 G5 remotely onto a Xen Virtualization environment running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.  The challenge was that there was no local graphical environment at all.  I finally found a solution to the issue tonight by using SSH Port Forwarding to bring the remote graphical connection securing back to my laptop from which I am working and then connecting throught the tunnel using TightVNC because UltraVNC, for some reason, is not happy with the connection.  That little problem set me back a good day or two.  NTFS formatting is running as I write this.  Pheww.

Oreo was in a very playful mood tonight.  We played and played for quite a long time.  You can tell when he is really ready to play hard when he decides to dig out his tennis ball instead of just playing with one of his stuffed animals which he knows collectively as his binkies.  Playing with his tennis ball gives him much more of a workout.

Oreo was chasing his tennis ball at one point today and slid under the runner in the vestibule and fell twisting his front left leg.  He limped really badly for half an hour or so but appeared to make a complete recovery by this evening so I guess that it was not all that bad.  We will see how he is tomorrow after he sleeps on it and has a chance to become stiff.

Dominica spent the entire evening attempting to complete Paper Mario.  She picked it back up around eight in the evening and was still playing when I was wrapping up the SGL daily as it was coming up on midnight.  When I was attempting to get off to bed she had long ago completed all of the chapters of the game itself and was just down to the very final section in which she had to track down Bowser himself and defeat him.  I had wished that I could stay up and watch the very final ending of the game but the game really does not have any plot or storyline of which to speak so there really isn’t anything to miss out on.

Paper Mario, like all Mario games, is roughly the video game equivalent of playing a Popeye Cartoon.  Every single episode has the exact same plot and not just the same plot but the same plot with the same characters going through the same motions over and over again in a neverending cycle of dork like girl, girl likes dork, bully kidnaps girl, dork finds bizarre way of beating up bully and takes girl back.  Rinse.  Repeat.

It is almost midnight here.  I am taking Oreo and heading off to bed.  Liesl has been sleeping for many hours now and needs to wake up and get a bottle of formula before she and Dominica can really come to bed.  I have the Windows updates running on the Windows Server 2003 machine that I managed to get installed this evening.  I am very much relieved to have gotten that done and out of the way.  Today qualifies as a rather significant success with a lot of time being spent a) with my daughter during her happy time b) getting real work done for the office c) getting work done at home d) overcoming a major technical obstacle e) catching up on SGL completely f) getting to play Fable for at least an hour and finally g) heading off to bed early enough to be able to play at least twenty minutes of Dragon Quest IV.

Last night I completed chapter one in Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen.  The game is neat in that it is broken up into four chapters, each of which tells the story of a single hero.  In the fifth chapter, I am told, the four heros of the previous chapters come together.  It is a very interesting approach and so far I am enjoying the storytelling.  The graphical style of DQ4 on the Nintendo DS is extremely well done.  I am looking forward to more remakes using this game engine from Square Enix.

Paper Mario (Virtual Console)

Paper Mario (known in Japan as Mario Story and originally conceptualized as Super Mario RPG 2) was originally released for the Nintendo 64 in 2000 in Japan and in 2001 in North America as one of the very last big budget games for the then aging N64 console – Paper Mario released in North America and Europe just months ahead of the release of the GameCube system making many people completely unaware of the existance of the game at all.  Paper Mario is a beginner’s adventure/JRPG title designed to introduce casual gamers to role playing game concepts while using the familiar Mario character from so many action-platformer titles which made Nintendo famous in the past.

Paper Mario was originally planned as Super Mario RPG 2, a direct sequel to Squaresoft’s Super Nintendo release Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars.  The style of the games differ quite significantly, however, and because of this, I believe, Nintendo decided to introduce Paper Mario with its own name and identity to keep gamers from comparing the two titles too closely as they are definitely very different games.

The big innovation that we see in Paper Mario is the use of very attractive, rendered three dimensional environments (some of the best seen on the Nintendo 64) with all of the characters and artifacts in the game being flat, two dimensional objects rendered on top of the environment.  The effect is somewhat gimmicky but it is cute and unique and works well considering the limited rendering power of the N64 console.  The effect is so key to the look and feel of the game that the title of the series, Paper Mario, came from the graphical approach used.

Paper Mario contains many basic JRPG (Japanese RPG) elements but does so in a very basic manner making it a nice introductory JRPG for younger gamers or casual gamers looking for a game to ease them into the genre.  As a true JRPG, Paper Mario contains no character decision making (you do not determine the story-affecting actions of your character nor do you determine the outcome of the story) and the game is completely linear.

Unlike more traditional JRPG games (Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Kingdom Hearts, Suikoden, Fire Emblem, Breath of Fire, etc.) Paper Mario contains very little storyline or character development and what little storyline there is is completely non-engaging or interesting at all.  This has been the curse of the Mario franchise from the beginning.  In the more traditional Mario games (e.g. Super Mario Bros., Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, etc.) this was not really a problem as action-platformers really don’t need a storyline to be interesting.  This does become a problem in a JRPG – a gaming genre whose sole purpose for existing is to act as a delivery mechanism for deeply engaging interactive literature.

The idea behind Paper Mario seems to be a combination of showing off what the N64 could do now that several years of experience with the console had prepared developers to really take advantage of its power and to introduce young and casual gamers to a genre for which Nintendo platforms were generally pretty well known.  Since the introduction of Paper Mario the Nintendo platforms (GameCube and Wii) have leaned heavily away from adventure, JRPG and RPG genres but Paper Mario has remained one of the very few series to survive through the development of the new consoles.

Personally, I find the “Mario world” (Mushroom Kingdom) characters to be empty and shallow.  The idea behind the original Mario games was never to have characters with deep, inter-personal relationships, detailed backgrounds, personal motivations, etc. or even to have a universe that made particular sense.  Let’s face it, the concept of Mario, the Italian plumber, who adventures through bizarre vertical pipes that take him to magic realms where he fights turtles in order to rescue Princess Toadstool sounds like an “F” on a second grader’s creative writing assignment.  Taking this game world, made quickly without any particular thought as nothing more than a series of simple plot devices to make action game development simple in the early 1980s, and attempting to shoehorn a JRPG around it feels uncomfortable and strange.  The settings do not blend well together and everything feels like a plot device rather than like a carefully constructed story full of plot twists and surprise relationships.

One interesting and well done piece of the game mechanics involves the need to “acquire” a large number of allies who travel with you throughout the game hiding in a form of “friend inventory” ready to be pulled out when you need them but only one at a time.  Each of your allies has a different skill or power and by selecting the right friend to have “active” at a given moment will allow you to solve a puzzle or advance past a certain point.   The puzzle solving aspect makes Paper Mario feel, in many ways, like a more traditional graphical adventure game but its JRPG roots are pretty solid.  Battles in PM are turn-based but with minor action elements thrown in to keep the player involved.  It is a nice blend.

Technically the game shines for its generation.  The graphical approach is fresh and interesting, the graphics in general are quite impressive for the N64, the audio is well done too and the controls are quite acceptable.  The game clearly looks old when played on the Wii VIrtual Console today, but it does not look nearly as dated as its console breatheren like Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask look.  It holds up much better with age although should never be listed as a classic alongside those other two.

Overall, Paper Mario appears to meet its goals.  The game is not overly ambitious and it is very accessible to a wide audience.  Its simplicity, lack of deep story and use of the tired Mario game world will turn off most gamers but those who are truly in love with Mario, Pricess Toadstool and Bowser or are looking for an easy way to ease into the JRPG genre may find it a cute and enjoyable game.  (For reference, Paper Mario is a far more “casual” and beginner JRPG than are the Disney-themed Kingdom Hearts titles.)

Paper Mario is, to the best of my knowledge, the very first title that can be considered a JRPG or RPG ever produced by Nintendo themselves (the Zelda games are adventures and do not qualify at all as JRPGs, Super Mario RPG was made by Squaresoft and not Nintendo) and remains the only JRPG series that they have produced.

Paper Mario produced a sequel, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, on the Nintendo GameCube which, in turn, spawned the recent fourth installment Super Paper Mario for the Nintendo Wii (fourth after Super Mario RPG, Paper Mario and PM: 1000 Year Door.)  At this time, Super Mario RPG (SNES) and Paper Mario (N64) have both been rereleased for the Wii’s Virtual Console making the Wii the one system where all four titles are available together.

If you are a die-hard Mario fan then there is no way that you can skip Paper Mario.  If you are looking for a low cost and easy to digest introduction to the Japanese RPG genre then this is a decent place to start for Wii owners.  If you are really interested in JRPG and console arcana then there is a neat bit of history tied up in Paper Mario.  But if you are already into more serious JRPG and RPG titles then think carefully before investing your gaming time into Paper Mario, it is probably too simple and too shallow to make you really happy.

Installing Windows Server 2003 on Xen on Red Hat Linux 5

After being challenged several times during the process of installing Windows Server 2003 into a fully virtualized Xen environment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5 or CentOS 5) I decided that a quick tutorial for those of you who wish to install in exactly the same way would be helpful.  There are several potential road blocks that must be addressed including issues with accessing the graphical console (necessary for a normal Windows installation process)  if you are not working from a local Linux workstation with a graphical environment installed.

I like to start a Xen installation using the very handy virt-install command.  Virt-install, available by default, makes creating a new virtual machine very simple.  I will assume that you are familiar with this part of the process and already have Xen installed and working.  If you are not sure if your environment is set up properly, I suggest that you start by paravirtualizing a very simple, bare-bones Red Hat Linux server using the virt-install process to test out your setup before challenging yourself with a much more lengthy Windows install that has many potential pitfalls.

The first potential problem that many users face is a lack of support for full virtualization.  This is becoming less common of a problem as time goes on.  Full virtualization must be supported at the hardware level in both the processor and in the BIOS/firmware.  (I personally recommend the AMD Opteron platform for virtualization but be sure to get a processor revision, like Barcelona or later, that supports this.)

Using virt-install to kick off our install process is great but, most likely, you will do this and, if all goes well, you will begin to format your hard drive and then you will find that your Xen machine (xm) simply dies leaving you with nothing.  Do not be concerned.  This is a known issue that can be fixed with a simple tweak to the Xen configuration file.

CD Drive Configuration Issues

In some cases, you may have problems with your CD / DVD drive not being recognized correctly.  This can be fixed by adding a phy designation in the Xen configuration file to point to the CD-Rom drive.  This is only appropriate for people who are installing directly from CD or DVD.  Most people prefer to install from an ISO image.  Using an ISO does not have this problem.

In Red Hat, your Xen configuration files should be stored, by default, in /etc/xen.  Look in this directory and open the configuration file for the Windows Server 2003 virtual machine which you just created using virt-install.  There should be a “disk =” configuration line.  This line should contain, at a minimum, configuration details about your virtual hard drive and about the CD ROM device from which you will be installing.

The configuration for the CD ROM device should look something like:

disk = [ “file:/dev/to-w2k3-ww1,hda,w”, “,hdc:cdrom,r” ]

You should change this file to add in a phy section for the cdrom device to point the system to the correct hardware device.  On my machine the cdrom device is mapped to /dev/cdrom which makes this very simple.

disk = [ “tap:aio:/xen/to-w2k3-ww1,hda,w”, “phy:/dev/cdrom,hdc:cdrom,r” ]

Accessing the Xen Graphical Console Remotely via VNC

If you are like me you do not install anything unnecessary on your virtualization servers.  I find it very inappropriate for there to be any additional libraries, tools, utilities, packages, etc. located on the virtualization platform.  These are unnecessary and each one risks bloat and, worse yet, potential security holes.  Since all of the guest machines running on the host machine all all vulnerable to any security concerns on the host it is very important that the host be kept as secure and lean as possible.  To this end I have no graphical utilities of any kind available on the host (Dom0) environment.  Windows installations, however, generally require a graphical console in order to proceed.  This can cause any number of issues.

The simplest means of working around this problem is to use SSH forwarding to bring the remote frame buffer protocol (a.k.a. VNC or RFB) to your local workstation which, I will assume, has a graphical environment.  This solution is practical for almost any situation, is very secure, rather simple and is a good way to access emergency graphical consoles for any maintenance emergency.  Importantly, this solution works on Linux, Mac OSX, Windows or pretty much any operating system from which you may be working.

Before we begin attempting to open a connection we need to know on which port the VNC server is listening for connections on the Xen host (Dom0).  You can discover this, if you don’t know already from your settings, by running:

netstat -a | grep LISTEN | grep tcp

On Linux, Mac OSX or any UNIX or UNIX-like environment utilizing a command-line SSH client (OpenSSH on Windows, CygWin, etc. will also work on Windows in this way) we can easily establish a connection with a tunnel bring the VNC connection to our local machine.  Here is a sample command:

ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 [email protected]

If you are a normal Windows desktop user you do not have a command-line integrated SSH option already installed.  I suggest PuTTY.  It is the best SSH client for Windows.  In PuTTY you simply enter the name or IP address of the server which is your Dom0 as usual.  Then, before opening the connection, you can go into the PuTTY configuration menu and under Connection -> SSH -> Tunnels you can specify the Source Port (5900, by default for VNC but check your particular machine) and the Destination (localhost:5900.)  Then, just open your SSH connection, log in as root and we are ready to connect with TightVNC Viewer to our remote, graphical console session.

If you are connecting on a UNIX platform, such as Linux, and have vncviewer installed then you can easily connect to your session using:

vncviewer localhost::5900

Notice that there are two colons between localhost and the port number.  If you only use one colon then vncviewer thinks that you are entering a display number rather than a port number.

If you are on Windows you can download the viewer from the TightVNC project, for free, without any need to install.  Just unzip the download and run TightVNC Viewer.  You will enter localhost::5900 and voila, you have remote, secure access to the graphical console of your Windows server running on Xen on Linux.

January 31, 2009: Linnea Comes to Visit

Liesl has very visibly matured today.  It is a wondrous thing to watch a child at this age because every day brings something new and exciting.  This morning Liesl began “talking” far more than she has been doing up until now.  She has been “talking” a little for some time now but it has been just an occassional part of her interactions with us.  Today she began really acknowledging us when we talk and responding with her own sounds.  He looks right at you and acts just like she is talking like a normal person, but without knowing her words at all.  It is so adorable.  I didn’t think that she would be doing this type of reaction to us so soon.

This evening, while I was playing with Liesl, she did a whole new range of facial expressions!  Tonight was the first time that I have noticed her using her eyebrows intentionally.  It so cute when she sits in your lap and looks you in the face and makes faces at you.

It’s Saturday and, as usual, I was up at seven thirty so that I could head on down into the dungeon and get to work.  The sun is out today and it is shining brightly.  It is nice to have some serious sunlight.  Now that we have the palm tree and the spiky tree thing in the nursery where there is more light than anywhere else in the house I get to go in there every morning and open up the blinds.  Just doing that easily more than doubles the total amount of natural light coming into the upstairs of the house and makes the house feel so much more open.

I worked for just a few hours this morning down in the basement.  Then I came up and while Dominica and Liesl were still asleep I fired up the XBOX 360 and popped in Fable: The Lost Chapters and played as much as I could while I was alone with Oreo.  I managed to go back and complete the “Rescue the Traders” mission that I had been in the midst of several days ago when the 360 got left on all day and went to sleep effectively causing me to die mid-mission.  I went back to the beginning of the game and completed the Beardy Baldy quest that I had skipped there as well, although after having done it I kind of wish that I had just skipped it altogether.  It was boring and silly.  I even managed to move forward and complete the “Kill the White Balverine” quest which is not a side-quest like the others but is one of the main plot points of the game.  It has been a while since I was able to actually advance the main storyline.  It was not a lot of time that I got to play today but I really appreciated it.

My big project for today is getting Windows Server 2003 installed onto a fully virtualized Xen host.  Doing this is harder than it sounds because my host environment is a completely graphics-free Red Hat Linux host so I am not able to simply fire up the virtual machine and connect locally using a VNC client.  I have to access the VNC data remotely which is a bit of a pain for several reasons.  The first big pain is that our Internet access went down for a little while yesterday (most likely due to weather conditions) and our IPSec VPN went down that connects me to the server on which I have been working and the connections has been unable to reestablish itself in the mean time so I am stuck creating all kinds of troublesome workarounds to attempt to connect to this server so that I may continue to work.

We did some quick cleaning around the house today including dishes, kitchen cleaning and vacuuming.  Linnea drove up from White Plains this afternoon and arrived around two in the afternoon.  This is Linnea’s first trip to Peekskill to visit us and see the new house and to meet little Liesl.

We all hung out at the house for a few hours and then decided to go out to Pastel’s in the Beach Shopping Center for dinner.  They are starting to know Liesl down there.  It is hard not to be famous when you are so cute.

Linnea left Peekskill around eight or so.  I was not watching the clock very closely.  After she left I did some searching around the house to attempt to find the gear necessary for Dominica to be able to play GameCube games on the Nintendo Wii, but all that I was able to find was the controller itself and not the wireless dongle or the memory card.  They are probably packed away somewhere with the missing XBOX 360 controller that we have not yet been able to find either.

So Dominica was not able to play GameCube games like she had wanted to be able to do tonight (she was thinking about starting The Legend of Zelda: The Four Swords Adventures) and instead spent the evening playing Paper Mario on the Wii’s Virtual Console.  She is a long way through Paper Mario and it would be really nice if she was able to complete it sometime soon.  If she got another night like tonight in which she was able to play with several hours I would not be surprised if she was able to beat the game.

Paper Mario is actually the second game in a series.  The first game is Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars from the SNES.  That game is by far the most famous and most classic.  It was an isometric 3D game from the late SNES era that was extremely popular as an adventure/JRPG crossover.  Then Paper Mario, which Dominica is playing, came out for the Nintendo 64 introducing true 3D environments and changing the game from a classic isometric view with traditionally designed, sprite-based characters and going with the now-standard 2D “paper” characters in the 3D world.  Following the first Paper Mario was Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door for the GameCube (which we also own for Dominica to play once she completes this one.)  And finally, Super Paper Mario is currently available for the Nintendo Wii.  Like most Nintendo-published games claiming to be an RPG, the Paper Mario series is actually a series of adventure games and do not qualify as either true RPGs or JRPGs.

I spent my evening attempting to figure out the remote VNC viewer issues that I am facing with installing Windows Server 2003 onto a Red Hat Linux (RHEL) Xen installation without any local graphical environment.  I finally decided to give up at half past midnight and to focus on getting Sheep Guarding Llama caught up instead.  I have been behind so much recently that I really wanted to get completely caught up so that tomorrow morning I can begin working on tomorrow’s post instead of doing today’s.

Tomorrow, Sunday, Dominica and I get to just stay home for the day.  We have nothing planned other than a short software demo that I need to watch around noon and some light grocery shopping that Dominica is considering doing at some point when Liesl goes to sleep.  Not that it matters much if Liesl falls asleep because she will be wide awake and screaming the instant that Dominica steps out of the door leaving me to deal with a very unhappy baby whom I am completely unable to console until minutes before Dominica arrives back home making it look like she has been asleep the entire time.

I did get a very short chance to play a little bit of Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen today.  I am just over one hour into the game at this point.  So far I am very impressed with it as a title from the 16-bit Super Nintendo era.  The graphics on this new Nintendo DS port are really nice.  Square Enix has done a very good job with making the game feel both modern and up-to-date without sacrificing the feel and style of the original games.  What they have done is a really innovative blend of rendered three-dimensional backgrounds with traditional two-dimensional sprites for the characters in the game.  The result works far better than it sounds to explain.  Since this is an “update” of a classic title, this effect really works well.  I don’t know if I would recommend the approach for a new game being made from the ground up, but it works so well in DQ4 that I might consider it if I was designing a new game like this for a portable platform like the DS.

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride releases in mid-February this year so I don’t have very much time to complete DQ4 if I am to have it finished before DQ5 releases.  Also releasing this month, on the 20th, is The Sims 3 which looks to be pretty interesting.  It makes me wish that we had a nice gaming PC on which to play it since it is a style of game that the console systems cannot handle at all.

Releasing soon on the Nintendo DS is Dragon Quest IX which is being made by Level 5 who made Dragon Quest VIII for the Sony PS2 which currently ranks as my favourite game ever.  Just a few weeks ago it was officially announced that Square Enix had decided to make Dragon Quest X for the Nintendo Wii.  It will likely be quite some time before we even have a release schedule on that title.  I am very hopeful that Level 5 will be involved and that the gorgeous cell-shading used in DQ8 and Dragon Quest Swords will be carried through onto this latest title.  If we are really lucky the game will not be simplified like DQS was and the full gameplay of the traditional series will be maintained for this latest title.  Having it targetted for the Wii worries me that Square Enix will decide to eschew their traditional, high-quality game play in exchange for the gimmicks so popular for games being made for the Wii.