Inside LAN-O-THON

Friday, July 27, 2007

Steam- Update News

Weekly Update 7/28/07

Ok this has to be my slowest week yet. Honestly I've done squat. Well I did a few small things- I got the logout button working on my new site. I played around with phpbb3. attempted to install ubuntu. (microsofts vm'07 hates it, got a different vm to try). I help my cousin move. (I'm still tired from that). I went to the gym. I got a slurpee. (Where would I be without those delicious smooth frozen caffeinated drinks?) and I'm going to sleep.....

ZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz.......


O wait! I can't sleep!!!!!!!!! I have to pack for my vacation!!!!! My family is spending 2 weeks in Europe!!!!!!! (Ok. If I keep this up, exclamation points are going to be an endangered specie) I leave next week. If they have internet I'll post some pictures. We're going to Budapest, Viennia, München, Zurich and a bunch of cities in between. Btw, On my Birthday, I'll be in München ( probably without internet) so thank-you in advance for all of you who will write on my facebook page.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Game server Memberships

As you may know,The LAN Party Initiative is sponsoring a couple of game servers. To fund these, I'm selling 4 levels of memberships- Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum.

Bronze $3 for 3 months
Reserved Slot on one server

Silver $3/month
Reserved Slot on both servers
Immunity from the crazy admins
ability to kick nonmembers
ability to play sounds.

Gold $6/month
Everything above and ...
Temp ban players
Manage maps
trigger map votes
ability to hard restart the server.

Platinum $12/month
Ability to permanently ban users
Full Mani-Admin tools
(below- one server only)
Have rcon access
Have root server access
Ftp access to add maps

If I sell out of reserved slots, I will buy more slots for the server.

Buy for three months and save 11.11% (aka. silver for 3 months = $8)

Please paypal the money to crocodolljr@cfl.rr.com and include the membership level you want, your gamer handle and steam id in the message box. If you don't know your steam id, see the link below. Please

allow me at least 12 hours to set up your account.

http://support.steampowered.com/cgi-bin/steampowered.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=112

Thanks
Matthew

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Suprise Revealed

I have been hyping this surprise for quite a while now. With a little luck and a lowball ebay bid
I am the proud owner of 4 Chauvet Intimidator 2.0, a USB to dmx adapter and plenty of cable. Below is a quick demo by one of the lights.
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This video is a better demo.

One more quick demo. This is one features a possible scene from my LAN Party light show.
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See this page for more info on the lights.

Weekly Steam Message


Friday, July 20 2007


Last month, we announced the Steam Community, which will let you connect with friends and other gamers, create and join groups, and organize matches. We're adding the final polish now and are right on target to launch the beta version at the end of the month. More details on the way.

A note to owners of Half-Life 2 and Episode 1: If you buy the boxed retail version of The Orange Box, you can simply hand-off the games you already own to a friend. Or, you can give away the games within Steam. When you install the Orange Box, Steam will identify the duplicate games and let you send them as gifts to a friend, which will enable them to download the games from Steam for free.

THQ joined Steam this week, kicking things off with three great games: Company of Heroes (widely regarded as one of the best RTS's ever made), Titan Quest (RPG) + the Immortal Throne expansion, and Full Spectrum Warrior + the Ten Hammers expansion. You can read more about the starting line-up.

If you're looking for a cool indie game to play this weekend, check out Gish, the 2005 Independent Games Festival Grand Prize winner. It's a platformer set in subterranean sewers. You play as a ball of tar. Enough said.

Weekly Update 7/22/07

Sorry for being a few days late with this update. I spent the the weekend up in north Georgia helping to celebrate my maternal grandparents 50th Anniversary.

My grandmother wanted a BIG party at her house but that meant that there was a lot of work to do to get everything clean and setup. I spent most of the party directing cars were to park. (It got me out of some of the say hello to this person who hasn't seen you since you were an infant talk). Overall the party went well and every one had a lot of fun but now I'm exhausted.

I did get to escape for about an hour after the party to go visit my paternal grandparents lake cabin and go for a boat ride to have a nice break.

Now back to LAN Party news....

LAN-O-THON v4.0
I have a new sponsor to announce.... GIGABYTE (Thermal Division) . They are donating one of their mid tower GZ-X1 chassis for us to giveaway. I don't now what it will be prize for yet, but I can't wait to give it away!

Inside LAN-O-THON
I'm going to start my FreeBSD Install article this week. I've been playing around with some different configs using Microsoft's free Virtual PC 2007. It's a great free way to try out different operating systems and such. I've was running a couple of virtual pc's running all week. I have my plan nailed down. I'm going to do a video walk through because I'm lazy and sick of writing long articles. I may transcribe it later in to a nice text article. It is going to be a multi part thing so expect How to do a basic install and get a gui installed

The LAN Party Initiative
I have our Counter-Strike: Source Server setup and ready to go. (Click here to play) If you don't own the game, you can buy it over here. I also setup a stats site for you to see how you rank against everyone else. Im still crafting a nice motd (the front screen you see when you connect) for the server. I still plan on setting up a HL2: Deathmatch server once they come off backorder. I'm going to be on playing the server Monday night if anyone would care to join me.

MCD Portal
My web software is one step closer to being done. I finished the ACL and login system. I'm going to start on the log out page and the user admin panel.

I'm going to post a picture showing off my LAN Party secret I've been talking about soon.


Sunday, July 15, 2007

New CS:S Server for us!

Tonight I ordered a Counter-Strike: Source for our group. I hope to have it setup and ready go by tomorrow afternoon. I hope to see you all on it!

Friday, July 13, 2007

Weekly Update 7/13/07

LAN-O-THON v4.0
I got an interesting email out of the blue from a company interesting in sposnoring our event. I'll let you know how it pans out.

The LAN Party Initiative
I'm still planning on getting a Counter-Strike: Source and a Half-life2: Deathmatch server for our group. East coast Source servers are still backorder at gameservers.com. Consider supporting the group by shopping online using these links. To raise addtional funds I'm going to sell reserved slots for $3 dollars (good for a spot on each server) or add $3 dollars more and get some admin privileges such as setting the map rotation. Discuss this more over here

Inside LAN-O-THON
I've started work on my freeBSD article. I'm trying a few different things out to see what works the best. My box is a little slow installing it so its going to take a little while.

MCD Portal (the CMS I'm writing)
The CMS I'm writing is looking great. I got the registration and login forms done, sessions and user/group data inheritance works. A lot of the code is a mess but I'll work on it later. Next is applying the Acl info from the user session info.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Crazy Guy Video



This has to be the most absurd adaptation of gaming to real life. This guy loved his third-person game perspective so much he created a rig to experience it in real life.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Installing FreeBSD

Well I started to install a fresh copy on my webserver but I forgot to install a few parts and so now I'm starting over again. FreeBSD is fairly easy to install. Not windows easy but easy enough. It's getting all of the extra modules installed is the hard part. By default, the only things FreeBSD installs is the command line. This is great for servers and advanced users but makes its hard for Windows users to transition. For ease of configuring my new server, I'll have it install a GUI which I can later disable when I'm done. Since FreeBSD 's command line default, its the installer is not as pretty as some of the Linux's but prettiness doesn't affect it's function.

So now I'm onto attempt #2.
I'm currently waiting on my machine to finish installing the list of ports I want. Ports are software that are in a master list of software available for FreeBSD and makes it easy to find any software you want to install. Hopefully I'll post chapter 1 of my install article tomorrow.

Saturday, July 7, 2007

Teaser Pic #2

Ok here's a little bit more revealing picture. Next week's pic should give it away completely.
Start your guessing. If you're a good at google you'll get close to the answer quickly.

Friday, July 6, 2007

Weekly Update 7/6/07

LAN-O-THON v4.0
I haven't heard back from any more companies on sponsorships. I did follow up with a guy from thermaltake so hopefully I'll have banners up soon for them. I'll post another picture of my LAN Party surprise tomorrow.

The LAN Party Initiative
I'm going to get a Counter-Strike: Source and a Half-life2: Deathmatch server for our group soon. East coast Source servers are still backorder at gameservers.com. These server cost money to run so consider using these options to support it. To raise addtional funds I'm going to sell reserved slots for $3 dollars (good for a spot on each server) or add $3 dollars more and get some admin privileges such as setting the map rotation. Discuss this more over here

Inside LAN-O-THON
I bought a hard drive to setup freebsd on so this week I'll start working on my server guide.

MCD Portal (the CMS I'm writing)

The CMS I'm writing is coming right along. I got the display block system setup and now I'm starting work on the first module- Users which is probably the most critical as it controls user registration, login and who has access to what and I started laying out the database setup for it. The first subcomponent I'm have to tackle is the ACL (access control list). the ACL is the bit of code that detrimes whether not a user has permission to access a component and will allow me to grant indivual users the rights to somethings like add news articles but not others like delete those articles. I've never used such an advanced ACL setup like this but I'm using the ACL componet of the Zend Framework so going to be fairly easy I hope. My goal is to have a working site by the end of July. The next module is news and then search and then I would like to work on recreating all that ALP can do using my new cms.

Personal
My parents family room remodeling project is getting closer to being done. The walls were painted and the floor got tiled this week but we are still waiting on the trim, finish electrical and windows to replace the old ones. I can't wait to be done baby sitting this project so I can work on other things.

My dad took off work today so he could finally clean and prep the sailboat he bought used a few months ago. He's been so busy that we've haven't gone sailing on yet and it's just been sitting in storage so I'm glad the boat's getting one step closer to being sailable. The picture left is the only picture of the boat I have at the moment. Its from the sales listing so I have no idea who the guy on the boat is. I'll try and remember to take a new picture tomorrow.

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Source Engine and Steam Client Update

Source Engine
  • Fixed VAC icon not showing up in server browser
  • Fixed the Buy Favorites button not working
  • Enhanced sv_pure's output
  • Fixed delay when disconnecting from a server
  • Fixed a rare crash in Day of Defeat: Source
  • Made demos record screenshot and jpeg commands
  • Added the cvar cl_playback_screenshots to control whether or not the screenshot and jpeg commands are replayed while playing back a demo
  • Fixed the Add/Remove/Edit/Import buttons in the dedicated server's Bans page

Steam Client
  • Added a "Go Offline" option in the File menu, which will let Steam run without an Internet connection
  • Fixed localization of "English" in language dropdown for Dutch and Norwegian languages
  • Fixed the ATI Hardware Promotion not being accepted on 64bit versions of Windows
  • Fixed the mouse wheel not scrolling when the cursor is over a flash image

[source]

Monday, July 2, 2007

Teaser pic

A week and a half ago I hinted that I had a surprise for the LAN Party and when I was writing the (very lame) weekly update and last week I forgot to post the teaser pic I promised so here it is.

A few hints: It was one of those low ball bids I didn't expect win on ebay and people will want to borrow it for their own events.

Stay tuned for a better pic next week.

Help support The LAN Party Initiative

I want to rent game server to run CS:S and HL2DM so all of you to play against each other all semester long but my funds have run out so now I'm starting a fundraiser.

All you have to do is use the links below when you go shopping online. It doesn't cost you anything but I'll make a small commission off of your purchase. Use these links when you're buying your text books this fall or buying computer parts. If you shop at a company that I haven't listed, leave a comment and I'll look to see If I can get a link for it.

Other Options
  • Make a Donation via Paypal (see the "Donate Now" button in the right hand column)

Sunday, July 1, 2007

Weekly Update 7/1/07

Ok I now I'm late but not much happened this week. I spent a good bit of time supervising our remodeling project. the drywall is up and is going to be painted tomorrow. Last night, I finally started working on my CMS (Content management system) using the new Zend Framework and the SWAT Application system as a template system. I want a block driven template system and thats what Swat is all about and is much better than Smarty. I probably will butcher the integration of the two since they both try to do some of the same things but it should work.