Lost Planet Colonies

This has to be the first time I've bought a video game... twice. Lost Planet: Extreme Condition was an awesome game for Xbox 360, with the best online play (can you say head shot?).

So what happened? Capcom re-released it as Lost Planet: Colonies Edition with more online maps, characters, and game play - it's pretty well a whole new game.



So far my game stats don't show in the new edition, and because it's a new game my online level was back to Level 1.

The game was released on the 27th, and they didn't have it at Best Buy yet and they said it gets shipped to them on the release date (wtf?). Anyway, it was supposed to be in on Wednesday, and it wasn't on the shelf when I went in during the evening. After about 20 minutes of staff searching the warehouse, they found me a copy. Cameron was playing as soon as he was home from Cubs!

Weezer

Spotted this cool new video from Weezer, Pork and Beans.



Let's play spot-the-homage. So far I've found Star Wars (light sabers), Will It Blend (Blendtec blender), web cams (start and throughout), Threadless (155 t-shirts!), and of course the Mentos and Diet Coke fountains.

Star Wars and a Half

There are some cool half Star Wars releases coming out - half because they fit between episodes.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars is coming to theatres in August, just in time for Cameron's birthday! It looks very cool, a high quality animated Star Wars II 1/2.



After that in September the new game Star Wars The Force Unleashed comes out, which is essentially Star Wars III 1/2. Coming soon to... Cameron's XBox 360.

Vista TCP tweak

Here's a tweak to get rid of the awful network performance of Vista file copies, especially if you are moving around large AVI or ISO files. Note that if you are intending to use Windows Server 2008 this should not be done as these are performance tweaks optimized for Vista-to-2008 communications. If you use a mix of operating systems, this may be a tweak for you.

This issue was documented in MSKB 932170 and is stated as fixed in SP1 but I haven't seen the performance gain yet.

Open a command prompt with administrator access.

netsh interface tcp show global

Querying active state...

TCP Global Parameters
----------------------------------------------
Receive-Side Scaling State : enabled
Chimney Offload State : disabled
Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level : normal
Add-On Congestion Control Provider : none
ECN Capability : disabled
RFC 1323 Timestamps : disabled


The one to look at is the Auto-Tuning Level. Change this to highlyrestricted and if that doesn't give the performance needed, change to disabled. I've been running with the highlyrestricted for some time on the laptop and it's been normal network performance.

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=highlyrestricted
or
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

To revert it back to the defaults, change it back with:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal