One more seem­ing­ly-use­less Log­itech fea­ture: the G15 key­board’s LCD. Gamers that would buy the G15 key­board - most like­ly MMO play­ers and, to a lesser ex­tent, FPS play­ers. The G15’s most out­stand­ing fea­ture is its pletho­ra of assignable macro keys, which makes it won­der­ful for, say, WoW. Why, though, would you look down from the game on your mon­i­tor to check some dim­ly-lit stats on your key­board LCD? Seems point­less to me.

Don’t get me wrong: Log­itech is a won­der­ful pe­riph­er­al com­pa­ny. They make what I con­sid­er to be the world’s best gen­er­al-pur­pose mice (Dell’s ba­sic USB mouse in­clud­ed with their desk­tops, my per­son­al fa­vorite, was¹ made by Log­itech). They make rel­a­tive­ly good, us­able key­boards, some­times with a touch of my pre­ferred min­i­mal­is­tic style (Di­Novo Edge). And, de­spite ar­gu­ments be­tween Log­itech, Raz­er, and now Mi­crosoft users about which gam­ing mouse is the best, there’s no doubt that Log­itech’s, espe­cial­ly the G5, are among the top gam­ing mice avail­able. It’s just that no­body re­al­ly wants to spend ex­tra money buy­ing fea­tures that are com­plete­ly un­nec­es­sary.

Cur­rent­ly, I play a fair amount of Call of Du­ty, which is an ex­cel­lent PC FPS. I prefer it over other mul­ti­play­er PC shoot­ers sim­ply be­cause I think CoD’s gun fir­ing sounds and an­i­ma­tions are much more grat­i­fy­ing. Okay, that’s a lit­tle ex­ag­ger­at­ed: Call of Du­ty is an in­cred­i­ble, pol­ished game with many very good ele­ments. Its mul­ti­play­er is ex­cel­lent when you’re play­ing on com­put­ers that al­ready have the game in­stalled, and with peo­ple that have played shoot­ers be­fore. With both the­se com­po­nents lack­ing, how­ev­er, Call of Du­ty is not a par­tic­u­lar­ly ef­fec­tive mul­ti­play­er ex­pe­ri­ence.

I’m cur­rent­ly look­ing for games that are easy to pick up, can be played in a very short amount of time, and have fair­ly small in­stal­la­tion foot­prints (or bet­ter yet, can be played from a CD or the net­work). Those qual­i­ties, in my opin­ion, will make a game that is much more ac­ces­si­ble than to­day’s games, and will turn video gam­ing in­to a much more in­clu­sive and ul­ti­mate­ly more so­cial­ly suc­cess­ful ac­tiv­i­ty.

Babo Vi­o­lent 2 comes close. It’s small and very, very sim­ple for a shooter. Ob­vi­ous­ly it doesn’t work with peo­ple who don’t en­joy shoot­ing other peo­ple, but it’s about as close to a “par­ty game” as I can think of for the PC. Game con­soles have it bet­ter in this re­spect: Mar­io Par­ty, for ex­am­ple, or DDR, or Gui­tar Hero (although those games have ac­quired some­thing of a hard­core cult sta­tus as well) are good ex­am­ples. I sup­pose I’ll just have to wait pa­tient­ly here for ca­su­al PC gam­ing to catch up and provide us with more ac­ces­si­ble par­ty games.

My disk ac­cess prob­lems prob­a­bly stem from the fact that my VMware disk and my sys­tem boot disk are both the same par­ti­tion and the same disk. This prob­a­bly caus­es all sorts of ac­cess is­sues, espe­cial­ly while my com­put­er is boot­ing (I have no­ticed that my com­put­er takes forever to stop thrash­ing the disk after log­ging in). The net­work prob­lems are more eva­sive, how­ev­er. I’m us­ing the NAT net­work­ing in­ter­face so that I can as­sign my Ubun­tu a stat­ic IP ad­dress that will nev­er change, even if my phys­i­cal com­put­er changes lo­ca­tion (and it will, often). How­ev­er, pret­ty fre­quent­ly the DNS “server” that VMware pro­vides breaks down, and while Ubun­tu is able to send pack­ets to the net­work, it can­not per­form DNS queries through the lo­cal DNS ser­vice. Oc­ca­sion­al­ly, the net­work will fail to op­er­ate al­to­geth­er, and Ubun­tu will be un­able to send any pack­ets any­where (in­clud­ing to the host com­put­er!). This is a prob­lem which I’ve looked for so­lu­tions for on­line, but have so far come up with noth­ing.

Fi­nal­ly, I would like to be able to serve files from the host com­put­er through a web server on Ubun­tu, and my cur­rent method of mount­ing the host shares with CIFS and then shar­ing them with Apache is not op­ti­mal (the least of the prob­lems with this method is re­dun­dant net­work usage). I would like to get the VMware shared fold­ers fea­ture work­ing, ex­cept that I can­not seem to com­pile the VMware tools’ ker­nel mod­ules on Ubun­tu 8.04 (even fol­low­ing other ref­er­ences on­line). VMware’s ker­nel mod­ule builder is not quite as pol­ished, ev­i­dent­ly, as others’ (like nVidia).

Hope­ful­ly I will find so­lu­tions to the­se prob­lems soon, as I re­al­ly like the idea of run­ning a vir­tu­al­ized Lin­ux server on a Win­dows host, and hope that this sort of ar­range­ment will prove fruit­ful.