ubercharged.net

A quick non TF2 post - if everything looks normal to you, just ignore this.

I upgraded the Wordpress install to the latest version (2.5.1). Seems ok so far, but knowing me I probably screwed something up.

Drop me a line if you see anything funky going on with the site.

What was intended as a quick note last week about why I hadn’t posted some video about some loud mouth kid, turned into a stream of messages of condolences and general e-niceness that I really wasn’t expecting.

It was great to receive that level of support from you guys at the time. I don’t have anything specific to add, except to say thank you to every one who commented, or emailed, or left a message at the other sites I frequent. It means a lot.

Anyway, I’m back home in the world of abundant internet pipes. So ubercharging will now continue as regularly scheduled. I hear something about some update just went live today. I’m sure I’ve got some words to say about that later on…

My email inbox is overflowing from being away for a bit - apologies (again) to everyone who has sent in links and things that I haven’t responded to yet!

madlep == dick | Pyro Rock Star

mhdlhp thucgth. Grd dhmn crdh mrnghy. I drn’t gnrw why thh f*** wh (drn’t) phy thiz guy tr crdh s*** rn thiz thuhth. Hhrh’th thh lhththt druhbblh hh thphwhd rut rvhr thh uhnthrtubhth:

Tr hll pr-ro fhnth: brycrtt ubhrchhrghd!!

Those amateurs over at Pyro Rock Star (Pyro and Elizabeth Bourke) have started getting all angsty on me cause I’m not doing development work for FREE for them that would normally cost quite a bit of money. And this is after doing a bunch of work setting up their site and getting things humming along (FOR FREE).

They’ve even called for a boycott of ubercharged by Pyro Rock Star readers. Oooh! I’m scared! So their 13 subscribers will stop coming here? GOOD!

Whatever. I’ll just wait for Pyro to lay off the propane fumes, and for Elizabeth to sober up, then we’ll see how it goes.

Daxter241 has assembled together a sweet selection of Posed Team Fortress 2 scenes made with Garrys Mod.

Even including all the ubercharged pics that I’ve posted at various times

Nice.

Another year of blatant rick rolling and half-assed joke posts out of the way.

I think everyone saw through the lame ass ubercharged attempt at an April Fools joke in about 2 seconds.

The really impressive one though, was the one pulled by Control Point, uh I mean “Oober Control”. Which has been several weeks in the making, and I am proud to say I had a helping hand in. Congrats to Doubtful. The only one who picked it was an Ubercharged.net/Control Point combined hoax.

And who was that dashing and handsome sounding New Zealander doing the voiceover in one of the ads in the podcast?

BTW - If any big company DOES actually want to shower me with cash to put their name on this blog… BRING IT ON! I have no morals.

Here’s how it went down:

Never tell your password to anyone.
madlep: Yep, I’m good now
Nailhead [CP]: oh ok
madlep: oh man, now the tele entrance went down… anyway
madlep: and a spy got me :/
madlep: Anyway, I’m out of game and good to talk now
Nailhead [CP]: first off, I wanted to let you know that ooberservers.com is buying the podcast and will make lots of changes to it (unfortunately for the worse). It is a REALLY good offer though. :/
madlep: congrats. All that name spamming paid off
Nailhead [CP]: I guess so.
Nailhead [CP]: Secondly, I wanted to see how believable that claim was. The truth is, I lied.
madlep: Yeah, its plausable
Nailhead [CP]: We’re planning on a crazy April Fool’s Day episode and we’re going with the “sell out” idea.
madlep: Got me
madlep: haha, I like it
Nailhead [CP]: To make it a bit more believable, we’re going to mention it here and there on the show leading up to April 1st. That will be our “first” episode under a new management.
Nailhead [CP]: The reason I’m telling you about it is because you run a popular TF2 blog and could maybe help spread this rumor.
Nailhead [CP]:
madlep: This is a nicely thought out plan. I love a decent april fools bit. I’m in. What do you need?
Nailhead [CP]: and maybe you could get in on some of the fun too.
Nailhead [CP]: I was thinking that somehow you could get “leaked” information about the purchase. I’m not sure exactly how though.
madlep: “anonymous source” is always good
Nailhead [CP]: It would be cool if the community first hears about this from you and not from us. We could, in turn, be somewhat annoyed that the word got out too early, before we could properly tell the public.
madlep: I’m liking this. I’m lazy, and I usually only remember its april fools the day before, and replace the front page with a splash page saying “OMG HAXED BY 1337KIDS” on april first.
Nailhead [CP]: hehe
madlep: I could say that a game server rental company approached ubercharged about advertising on the site, and they mentioned buying control point
Nailhead [CP]: We’ve been plotting for a few weeks now
Nailhead [CP]: ah nice!
Nailhead [CP]: I lke that.
madlep: Of course, I was “morally repulsed” by the idea and had to let the community know
Nailhead [CP]: most excellent
madlep: So when do you want to kick this whole thing off?
Nailhead [CP]: I was thinking before the next podcast maybe?
Nailhead [CP]: before next Wednesday
Nailhead [CP]: perhaps over the weekend?
madlep: yup. no probs
Nailhead [CP]: haha nice, this is gonna too cool.
madlep: hah. Yeah, looking forward to a bit of mayhem
Nailhead [CP]: We’ve been trying to think of the kinds of restrictions that ooberservers.com would put on the show.
Nailhead [CP]: One would be to make it a 30 min show.
madlep: You’d have to roll the same annoying ad every 5 minutes
Nailhead [CP]: ooh yeah
madlep: Contractually bound to have at least 15% of the air time devoted to ooberservers.com
Nailhead [CP]: haha
Nailhead [CP]: I’m going to redo the whole intro and outro too.
madlep: Forbidden to mention any site that isn’t on the “ooberservers.com game network”
Nailhead [CP]: Control Point, brought to you by ooberservers.com
Nailhead [CP]: ah yeah
madlep: ooberservers.com is a professional organisation as well. No “game handles” are to be used at all - even when referring to community members. All people must be addressed by first and last names
Nailhead [CP]: maybe we announce that there will be a flood of new servers too.
Nailhead [CP]: lol
madlep: and you guys have to wear a tie while recording
Nailhead [CP]: too funny
madlep: 20 new servers
madlep: all with in game ads
Nailhead [CP]: yeah, people are gonna hate the saturation of servers.
Nailhead [CP]: we could announce that our forums will be closing and new forums on ooberservers.com will be up and ready.
madlep: haha yeah, and all sigs must have a reference to ooberservers.com
Nailhead [CP]: also, video episodes are forbidden as well as streaming.
Nailhead [CP]: hehe
madlep: all episodes must be purchased over iTunes - and are ladden with DRM
Nailhead [CP]: ooh yeah, moving over to a pay per episode model.
Nailhead [CP]: Good stuff!
madlep: Yeah, this is gonna rock. Anyway, late here. I’m gonna crash
madlep: Good luck with it
Nailhead [CP]: cool thanks!

In line with the new mission statement, here is what is rocking with Halo 3.

Update: Unfortunately the epic piece of Halo 3 machinima has been taken of the tube of you by the author. So we have sourced alternative entertainment.

HAMMER TIME!

So I’ve flogged the TF2 horse about as much as I can, and it’s time to move onto other things.

Don’t worry though, this site will stick around still - I’m just changing direction a little.

So there will be no Team Fortress 2 talk any longer. From now on, this site will be devoted to Halo 3. I mean TF2 is cool and all, but there are way more Halo 3 players. So I gotta go where the crowds are.

Welcome to the new brand for the site. It’s now called uberchiefed.net.

Enjoy.

Gotta be one of the best Wordpress plugins ever. This is the reason why anonymous, unverified comments are enabled on this blog, and why you aren’t overrun with ads for viagra, anti-depressants, and links to porn sites.

Its been an interesting few days. I’ve been contacted by a company related to the game industry about a commercial arrangement with ubercharged.net. I was tempted by it for a bit, but after thinking it through I decided that the changes they were wanting just weren’t worth it. So from the point of view of this site, there really isn’t much to talk about.

The interesting bit though, is who is selling out:

The guys over at Control Point do a great podcast, and I’m sure they’ve thought it through and all. But if they’ve signed up to the same conditions this company was talking about for ubercharged.net, they should probably rename it to “Control Point TF2 Informercial Podcast”

How do I know this? Here’s a little snippet of a steam chat I had between me, and a representative of the company. Lets call her “Susan” (not her real Steam ID)

Never tell your password to anyone.
Susan: Hi there. Are you able to talk now?
madlep: sure. Whats up?
Susan: Did you get a chance to read over the draft contract I emailed?
madlep: Yup.
Susan: What did you think?
madlep: It seems like I’d have to make a lot of changes if I signed up to this deal. I don’t know if I’m all that comfortable with them.
Susan: Well, its a starting point, and we are open to negotiation.
madlep: I really don’t think I’m all that interested after reading it. Its tempting and all, but I was doing the maths, and I’d need to give up my day job and work on ubercharged full time to reach all the traffic and content targets etc in there. And if I did that, I’d be earning less than I am now with a “real world” job.
Susan: Maybe, but there is room to grow, and you’d be doing what you enjoy.
madlep: I don’t think I’d enjoy it with all the ads and sponsored articles I’d have to do. The whole site would basically be an infomerical for you guys.
Susan: Think of it as being part of a network providing real value to the gaming community. You’d be working to build up the network and help people that way.
Susan: A lot of other sites are on board already. This is going to be quite a big deal.
madlep: Other TF2 sites?
Susan: There are fansites for a whole range of games: Counter Strike, Battlefield series, UT3.
Susan: In the TF2 area, the “Control Point” podcast team has signed up. I think you’ve heard of them.
madlep: CP? Wow.
Susan: Yeah, we’re quite excited about it. Especially with the strong community they bring.
madlep: Good for them I guess. If that works for them, then thats great.
madlep: But I still don’t think I’m interested. It just really doesn’t fit with me.
Susan: OK. We’re still open though. If you are still thinking about it, you know how to get in touch with me.
Susan: I’ll talk to you again in a few days to see if you’ve changed your mind.
madlep: Sure. Whatever. I don’t think I will.
Susan: You never know Thanks for your time
madlep: No probs. Good luck with it all

Update 28th March 2008
The guys have addressed the issue in their latest podcast.

Update 2nd April 2008
Yup. This was all part of the setup for the CP guys elaborate April Fools gag. Nice work by the Dead Workers guys :D.

Currently I’m running Team Fortress 2 on a MacBook Pro dual booting between Windows and OS X using boot camp. Now I’m on a glorious mission to add Ubuntu into the mix for a triple boot setup.

Its entirely possible that I’ll balls the whole thing up and end up with a MacBrick for a few days till I get it sorted. So if I suddenly go AWOL, and am not playing TF2, and don’t respond to emails, thats why (not that much different to normal really…)

I was kinda happy with the setup I had using Mac OS X for development work and Windows for gaming and pissing around cross platform testing. Anyway, then I got shifted over to a Ruby on Rails project (which is a bit more interesting than the back end Java development work I was doing), and I need to run against Oracle. Which Mac hates. So I need to boot into Ubuntu to get any work done. Man, this stuff shouldn’t be this hard.

Update
It all went quite smoothly in the end. Only lost one business day to getting it all set up (I was expecting way worse). The only gotcha I encountered was resizing the OS X partition to create the Windows and Linux partitions. Diskutil in OS X lets you resize partitions dynamically without splatting the current drive contents, but it doesn’t play so nice when you’ve been using the partition for a while and you’ve already got fragmented data all the way up into the areas that the new partitions will require.

I bought a copy of iDefrag, and ran the off line compaction operation. That cleared it all right up.

From there, the guides on Installing Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro and Triple Boot via BootCamp Ubuntu were invaluable.

After that it was another day or so getting the Ubuntu environment set up for development (installing Ruby, Rails, Oracle, NetBeans etc), and I was good to go with a nice triple boot system.