This blog is about technology, programming, video games, books and other related topics. It is published by Mark Papadakis.

Its been a whole long while since I last had the {time, will, chance} to blog, for various reasons - mostly because time didn't permit so neither the mood was aligned properly for scribing words here. The past two weeks ( I keep using this 'the past two weeks' sentence, its a recurring theme.. ) were - still are - crazy. We are suffering from multiple networking failures, whereas the actual source of the problem is still untraced for all three ISPs we utilize cannot get to the bottom of this. In addition to that, we are having some other problems ( of a similar nature ) of our own to battle with. All in all, its a binary chaos where the packets get routed to oblivion and bytes get morphed out of the blue. It can't get any worse than that ( actually, it can - but lets keep it sane ).

As if it wasn't enough to drive us crazy to the Nth degree, we are having various other issues related to software failures. However, software is usually something we can handle efficiently, and this is also the case. Those problems are almost gone.

Which brings us to the reason why I felt the need to blog in the first place. I HATE dealing with 3d party software or hardware. Be it routers, switches, web servers, database servers, you name it. Its about combinations of {lousy support, crappy implementation, bugs, lack of documentation, scalability limitations}. This is why I really dislike open source ( there are a few exceptions to the rule, Linux coming to mind ) and why I prefer building everything myself rather than relying on others. It may seem like a crazy idea, but doing everything in house has worked really well for us. Hopefully, someday soon I 'll be able to throw away Apache and sendmail, and even mySQL - dare I say - for our own solutions and be happy.

I picked up the Wii and my brother got my Zelda : the Twilight princess and the classic controller. The Wii is a bit of a unique system. Its really small, somewhat cool looking, can be used and set up in a snap, and feels very friendly, in a way. The new 'revolutionary' control scheme doesn't appeal to me that much - however my brother is crazy about it, given that he loves playing tennis and golf on Wii Sports, every chance he gets - however it seems at least interesting. The channels concept is pretty neat - I can't wait for the 'Internet channel' to become available so that I can browse the web on my TV with the Wiimote, and the shop has some lovely retro games to download/purchase.

Zelda is a magical, wonderful, beautiful, complete game. I 'd prefer using a classic controller for handling Link, but other than that this game is amazing. That game alone is worth buying the wii just to play it. EXTREMELY highly recommended.

Having said that, the 360 still seems like the ultimate game console to me. The future will tell how the PS3 and the Wii will fare against it.

On unrelated note, our team kicks ass. I am so proud to work with them. Go phaistonians!

Tagged with: sony , nintendo , computer games , microsoft , phaistos networks
Published at Wednesday, 13 December 2006 0:57 am