If you ever find yourself trying to run Disney’s Mickey Mouse Kindergarten or Winnie the Pooh Kindergarten on a Windows Vista Home Premium x64 system, you may find yourself running into the following gem of an error:

Script runtime error
VERIFY: [3s.dcr] OpenForWriting Error:
I/O Error

It then refuses to continue, dumping you back to your desktop. Now, this is a pretty self-explanatory error message, but I fired off a web search anyway. The only page I saw that looks reasonably-likely to provide a solution to this problem wanted me to sign up for an account and provide credit card information. Oh hell no.

As a public service:

After you install, find your shortcut to the launcher and right-click on it. This will give you a pull-down context menu. Select “Preferences” and click on the “Compatibility” tab. Mark the checkbox labeled “Run this program as an Administrator.” Click the button labeled “OK.” Done.

Now every time you use that shortcut you will be prompted to allow it to run as administrator, but it will work and your little kid can stop bugging you about his Mickey game. You’re welcome, Internet.

Got myself a new computer at home with a Core i7 CPU under the hood, matched tri-channel RAM, a 64-bit operating system, and what am I doing with it? Playing a game I bought at a yard-sale back when I still lived with my parents. X-Com: UFO Defense is the first and best of a line of tactical games that pit a secretive international conspiracy against brutal alien invaders.

Like many games hailing from the early 1990’s, X-Com is a hodgepodge of minigames. By juggling the pace of your research and manufacturing resources as well as shooting down and investigating alien ships, the game does an excellent job of keeping you on your toes. There’s always something just around the corner for you to take care of, or so it seems. You can dialate or compress time in the main interface, giving you a great deal of control over the passage of dead time.

An important exception to this is when you’ve got your soldiers on the scene repelling an alien terror attack, or checking out a grounded alien ship. This interface is entirely turn-based, and has a strick fog of war. You are presented with a “hidden movement” screen whenever the bad-guys (or unseen civilians) are doing something you can’t see. Noting how long this screen stays up can be a pretty good indicator of how many bad-guys you’re dealing with.

These ground deployments make up a majority of play-time, with each of your soldiers capable of a small set of options that can lead to a rather broad variety of tactics when applied over a strike team of up to 14. I find myself using basically the same setup when I first hit the landing zone:

• It all starts by equipping your craft, so I get 10 soldiers and one heavy weapons platform. I keep a captain and a sergeant on each personel carrier, and rotate in rookies to season them up a bit.
• I designate one person to carry a heavy cannon with high explosive and incendiary rounds. Once I have them, I equip one person with a small launcher and stun bombs. Everybody else gets a rifle (of whatever flavor I have researched). Two people get high explosives (for clearing out sand mounds that sometimes block a craft’s doors), and everybody else gets a single grenade. Everybody gets an electroflare and a med-kit. This keeps matters very flexible, as everybody can lay down an area-of-effect blast and nearly everyone has a weapon suitable for close combat.
• Check the map. Always check the map before moving anything. You’ll often be able to tell right off the bat that you’re at one extreme or another of the play area, which is important; you don’t have to worry about enemy fire coming from off the map.
• Once landed, the HWP goes out first. These things are expensive but basically disposable; they don’t benefit from on-the-job experience, and are quite speedy. The HWP flushes out enemy reaction fire, which has saved many a rookie’s life when a barrage of plasma rifle fire greets the first thing out the hatch.
• The game plan generally shifts a bit by the time the HWP has finished its turn, but the first two soldiers out the hatch tend to do the same things anyway: one breaks left, one breaks right. This gets a pair of eyeballs looking each of the cardinal directions — somebody’s looking out the windshield when the map loads — so I’ve got a pretty good lay of the land by the time my third trooper activates.
• The next four troopers split up to provide back-up to the HWP and the two troopers that went out first, favoring whichever has an enemy in its sites, the direction of a downed UFO that you’ve already spotted, or simply away from a known edge of the map.
• The last four troopers generally won’t have enough time units to get out of your transport and squeeze a shot out, so don’t hang them out in the wind. I move them up to the exit but not quite to the ramp. This puts them in a good position to by my second wave.
• By the third turn, the fur is probably already flying. I’ll have two or three 3-man fire teams actively shooting up the xenos, attempting flanking maneuvers, and behing useful, with the HWP mostly just running around trying to draw fire and flush out more bad-guys. The remaining two or three soldiers keep their back to the action, looking around for a chance to lay down some reactive fire if anything tries to sneak up.
• Once it’s time to actually kick the doors open and raid a grounded UFO, the cannon-toting soldier and the HWP stay outside. I burn a turn or two setting up my entry, lining the boys up outside the door so they don’t have to spend too many time units getting inside. Two preferred tactics:
  • Have a rookie prime a grenade on turn a. One turn b, run him in, rifle a’blazing. If he sees a bad-guy, have him take his shot. Worst-case scenario is that the alien counterattacks and you’re short a rookie. When he dies, he lets go of the grenade, and you’re probably short an alien now, too. The downsides outweight the brutal elegance of this method. Obviously there’s the callous expenditure of human life, but this also risks destroying valuable alien artifacts. Waste not, want not.
  • Far less grisly is to send your first person in with no intention to actually shoot. You get the door open, see where any aliens are, turn the heck around, and get out of the line of fire. Happily, turning doesn’t seem to provoke reaction shots, though moving sometimes does. With the door open, a barrage of fire from outside can generally take care of business.

TL;DR – If you haven’t playing this before, you are missing out. Don’t let the graphics fool you, X-Com: UFO Defense is one of the best video games available today, a steal at $5.99. That’s not a typo; this is an old game.

Since AT&T is distributing the D-Link DSL-2640B modem/router combo in pretty big numbers, it is necessary from time to time to convince one to stop using PPPoE. Configuration changes beyond bypassing PPPoE are beyond the scope of this article.

1. Connect your computer directly to the D-Link. Use a cable, as Wi-Fi masochism is beyond the scope of this document. Browse to http://192.168.1.1/ in the browser of your choice. If your system has assigned itself a 169.mumble address, you will first need to manually assign your computer an IP address like 192.168.1.5, a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, and a default gateway of 192.168.1.1 to do so.
2. You should be challenged for a username and password to proceed. By default these are both set to “admin” and you really ought to change this at some point.
3. You should be presented with a Home / Wizard screen. Un-check the box labeled “DSL Auto-connect.” This will allow you to specify the VPI and VCI for your connection. For most ISPs in the AT&T ILEC footprint, this will be 0 and 35 respectively. Click Next.
4. You should be prompted to set the connection type. Select the radio button labeled “Bridging” and the pull-down menu option labeled “LLC/SNAP-BRIDGING.” Click Next.
5. You will be presented with the Device Setup screen. The default settings will suffice for most home use. Click Next.
6. You will be presented with the wireless configuration screen. If you wish to disable wireless for some reason (and should have bought at 2320B instead), un-check the box labeled “Enable Wireless.” Click Next.
7. You will be presented with a summary of your configuration. Read it carefully to ensure that it understood you correctly, then click the button labeled “Save / Reboot.” The DSL-2640B will restart, after which you should have Internet connectivity.

If you don’t know the password for your D-Link, you can perform a hard reset (reverting it to factory settings).

1. Locate the Reset button on the rear panel.
2. With the device powered on (but without network cables plugged in), use a paperclip to hold the button down for 10 seconds.
3. Release the button. The modem should reboot.
4. Wait about 30 seconds to access the modem as above.

Finally started playing Fallout 3. I’ve been a fan of the series since stopping by by buddy Scott’s place years ago and playing Wastelands with him. A couple thoughts on the subject:

• It’s crawling with supermutants. What the hell?
• Animating the human face is something the Havok engine just doesn’t handle very well. I’m under the distinct impression that these people’s skin doesn’t fit over their heads properly.
• People sure are talkative in the post-apocalypse. They just love to drone on and on about every little subject. Must be lonely or something.
• I don’t remember radscorpions being so tough. I seem to recall beating the snot out of one with my bare hands early in Fallout and schooling several with a spear in Fallout 2. In Fallout 3 a chinese assault rifle barely puts a dent in one.
• God damn landmines. God damn them.

One of the plagues of the Internets, one of those sterling examples of a technology victimized by its own success, is unsolicited bulk email. It is obnoxious. It is a hassle for recipients and system administrators. It is a pain to identify in an automated manner, spawning an entire sub-industry of professionals dedicated to thwarting it. Frankly it’s a theft of service. It’s also fairly easy to get involved in accidentally.

For people that have been using the Internets since before they were re-pluralized, the notion of just adding a big batch of total strangers to your mailing list wouldn’t even come up. Who’d do that? It’s terrible etiquette. Sadly Miss Manners hasn’t quite spread the word. Happily, the folks at MailChimp have an excellent listing of representative scenarios to help illuminate the unwashed masses that are looking to do some legitimate mailing:

“I bought a list of 30 million emails from this guy on the Internet, and…”

Stop right there. Don’t use MailChimp. Don’t use anything. Throw away the list. Turn off the computer. Snip the power cord, so this doesn’t happen again. Now go punch yourself in the gut.

It’s an entertaining read, especially if you already know better.

This seems to come up a lot, though Sonic.net does not officially support the iPhone interface and therefore has no public documentation on the subject. To get an Apple iPhone to use email properly, using IMAP, for a Sonic.net email account, follow these steps:

1. If this is your first mail setup, start by tapping Mail
2. Otherwise tap Settings
3. Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars
4. Under Accounts, tap Add Account…
5. Tap Other
6. In the New Account window tap Name and type in your Full Name
7. Tap the Address field and type in your Sonic.net (or domain) email address
8. Tap the Password field and type in your Sonic.net password
9. Tap the Description field to change the description name if you wish. (Optional)
10. Tap the Save button
11. Tap IMAP
12. Under Incoming Mail Server, tap the Host Name field and type in imap.sonic.net
13. Tap the User Name field and type in your Sonic.net username
14. The password should be filled in for you from the previous screen
15. Touch and scroll to the Outgoing Mail Server section
16. Tap the Host Name field and type in mail.sonic.net
17. Tap the User Name field and type in your Sonic.net username
18. Tap the Password field and type in your Sonic.net password
19. Tap the Save button at the top of the screen
20. Mail will verify your settings by connecting to the server

To confirm your settings are correct:

1. Tap Settings on your home screen.
2. Tap the name of the account you want to check the settings for. A settings summary should appear.
   • The Host Name is your incoming mail server, imap.sonic.net
   • The User Name is the Sonic.net account name of the mailbox you’re using
   • The Password field should contain a series of dots
3. For your outgoing mail server, the SMTP should be mail.sonic.net. Tap this to view more information about your outgoing mail server.
   • Tap mail.sonic.net to see its settings
   • Server should be ON
   • Host Name is mail.sonic.net
   • User name is the Sonic.net account name of the mailbox you’re using
   • The Password field should contain a series of dots
   • As you are likely to communicate on your iPhone on a variety of networks, Use SSL should be ON
   • Tap Authentication for authentication settings
   • Password should be checked in the Authentication screen
   • Server Port is typically 25. Many networks block port 25 access to anything but their own mail servers, so it may be a good idea to specify an alternate port. This can be accomplished by replacing mail.sonic.net with mail.sonic.net:587 in the Host Name field.
4. Tap Advanced for additional settings

This is in no way an endorsement of Apple, the iPhone, nor IMAP.

I ran into an excellent, thorough explanation of how ADSL line filters work today at epanorama. Contents include an increasingly in-depth description of the theoretical and practical purpose of such devices, photographs of disassembled filters, and what really caught my attention: a circuit diagram.

A few years back, my gracious employer bought an Ultracade machine with a couple dozen games on it ranging from Frogger to Street Fighter, with several classics and many games that I simply had never heard of before. At the generous rate of four credits per quarter, I’ve dug through and found several outdated games that are really quite good. My habit has been to play a game several times, generally until I’ve filled up the high-score board. On some games (e.g. Donkey Kong), I’ve had a competitor or two exchanging places on the top-score list back and forth until we lost interest. On others (e.g. Robotron or Joust), others in the building surpass my skill so greatly that a high-score run is simply unthinkable. On several, there simply hasn’t been any competition. Nobody else plays these games. Truxton II is one of these. Penguin-kun Wars is another.

After months of having no back-and-forth competition for the high score on any of the games, a challenger as finally appeared. One of my coworkers started playing Truxton II recently. Apparently he used to play it when it was new (1992, I gather). He quickly knocked the rust off his game and got all the way to the second boss fight. I’ve never seen anything past the second boss, having never defeated the thing. In doing so he beat my high score by six thousand points, somewhere in the neighborhood of 355,000 total to my 349,000. That’s a pretty close margin, so it’s time to roll up my sleeves and have another go at it.

Anybody with tips on how to make the best use of the blue, red, and green power-ups at various stages of the game, please let me know. I’ve found that the blue auto-aim guns work great on the 1st level, and the red rolling-thunder guns work very well in the mid-to-late 2nd level, but have never found a compelling use for the green scatter-gun.