Races

I am of course speaking about Starcraft races. I am very lousy player with all of them so take this post as a advice to worst players out there.

Terran

Nice race with great defense possibilities. If you like turtleing they are great and once you reach 200/200 your army is most powerful thing there is.

Protoss

Really powerful race with great units for offensive play. Real problem is when you need to defend. There is not too much special abilities out there so there are not trouble to manage when you have a big army.

Zerg

Insects that reproduce really fast. Their abilities are something not seen in any other game so playing with them is a really good fun. Units tend to get very specialized in late game so you may have a problems with deducing proper ratio of them.

Which one do I use?

I haven’t decided yet. :)

Since all races are somewhat same (in regards with power, unit-wise they are totally different) once you get to know them, it all comes to personal preference. In that light, terran does not suit me - they are just too plain.

I played with zerg a lot and they definitely have nice air units but somehow I never use their special abilities to full extend so defence from terran army is a huge problem to me. Especially when terran goes around hunting my overlords and then attacking me with invisible wraiths. Although they are not meant for that, defense is (for me) much easier with them than attacking. But if you can attack early there is no force that can resist.

Protoss is my current favorite since it allows me great land and air army. Detectors are fragile as zerg’s but my economy is not hurting as much when I lose them. There are also invisible units there so harassing other players just comes naturally. With successful harassing, there comes a victory also.

[2010-02-15: I decided. I will be the Protoss. :)]

Process Explorer

I am using various Sysinternals’ tools from time when they were still called Winternals. Among all those tools there is one I use every day - Process Explorer. It is replacement for Task Manager and you can even configure it to use it’s shortcut (Ctrl-Alt-Escape). However there are few problems.

Selecting a program

Task Manager allowed you to select program by typing first few letters. Typing EXP (fast) would select explorer.exe. In Process Explorer there was same feature but somehow it got lost during updates. If you type EXP there you will end up with P*.exe selected. This caused me to kill wrong program few times. This is fixed in Process Explorer 14.

x64

Although Process Explorer does support 64-bit windows it does it by packing 64-bit executable within his 32-bit executable. Solution is definitely strange and has one awful consequence - it needs write rights to his directory in 64-bit Vista.

Good things

Everything else :). My favorite would be search for open handle - it solves that problem when one process is holding file open and you cannot delete it (or eject usb drive) because of it. Also useful is option to track memory usage history per application. Total control over what exactly is displayed is just a cherry on top.

OIB

Today my government (Croatian) started with distribution of our personal identification number (SSN as Americans know it). It is greatest invention since sliced bread or so they tell us. One could even be puzzled on how we managed to live without it for all these years. But wait, we had that number before.

JMBG

From ex-Yugoslavian time we inherited our personal number. It was 13 digits, 12 were data and 1 was checksum. When I say data, I mean real data - you could find person’s date of birth, gender and region of birth. This came in really handy with medical software. Just take JMBG as unique identifier and extract date from it to get persons age (something that doctors like to know).

Although that was very handy, it was doom of it. Some people here don’t like others to know their age and since split of Yugoslavia, ex-republic of their birth became a no-no subject. There was even law passed that removed it from every ID. That was not a smart move.

OIB

Our new identification number consists of 11 purely random digits - that means harder to remember of course. It should replace JMBG and since verification algorithm is different that also means update of every application that uses it. But there are good things to it also.

European union uses up to 12 digits so we are compatible with them if we ever enter. Here I need to say that I am sorry it is not 12 digits - plenty of barcode symbologies encode even number of digits more easily. It also uses standard ISO 7064 (aka as modulo 11,10) encoding of check digit which is always good.

Conclusion

There is not even an intent of it.

I do think that they could have done better job at defining that number (e.g. making it even number of digits and/or encoding date of birth inside of it) but we need to learn how to live with it as good as we did with JMBG.

My first step to it was to write some C# code to validate it.

Best Game There Is...

I do not play a lot. Occasional game now and then is enough to satisfy my need for gaming without taking too much time. When I look back to last 10+ years, I played mostly Duke Nukem 3D, Unreal Tournament and similar ones. I played few RTS games also, my favorite being Dune II and Warcraft II (it seems that there is something with those II’s). Space simulations like TIE Fighter or X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter were more than welcome to make use of my joystick.

Now

Illustration

I don’t play any of those games now. It seems that they got just boring with time. I have always liked human opponent in a game so FPS gaming was first to go when my friends and myself started to work more and play less. Space simulations were next to go (along with RPG games not named here) since they just take too much time. RTS games just got boring after passing all levels and regularly beating computer in games.

I took a look at new games but since I am business laptop user they were either too ugly on my integrated graphics card or unplayable at all. And I am not big fan of graphic-intensive games - in my personal opinion game does not need to have great graphics to be a great game.

However once upon a time I installed GOM Player since I needed something small to replace my favorite BSplayer which went in spyware bundling ways. Player was really good, no spyware, no commercials except occasional commercial for something called GOMTV in his status bar.

It took me a while to take a look at that site and there was Starcraft Tournament at the moment. I did played that game way back when it was released and it didn’t hold any particular appeal to me but I took opportunity to take a look at it again. All those games were Korean but surprisingly there was also English commentary for them. I was hooked up. Games were great and commentary made them understanding to me. Since that time I am following all games eagerly waiting for next Sunday. Before that time only thing I never missed was F1 race. Now add Starcraft match to that.

Just watching?

After watching few games I tried playing it myself and I must confess that I really liked it. I flied through campaign, both from original and Brood War expansion. I do fight computer occasionally but that is way too hard at my level - I can just hope to survive first few attacks. Fortunately there are some friends that like that game also so I have opportunity to beat somebody from time to time. I do play with random players on battle.net also (although it is very hard to find good 1-on-1 map without never-ending minerals or 20 geysers around). At this time, my win score is 0 but I did play some nice games.

It is strange how I see that game (old 10 years) in different light, mostly thanks to Tasteless’ commentary of game that held no appeal to me before that. Whether this is just short-time crush or real long-term relationship only time will tell…