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Project Halo talks to Fropco
Halo.Fropco has interviewed the Project Halo: Webwar Evolved team about their work in progress. The interview itself is beefier than the one put up at the Junkyard last week; more info, pretty pictures. If you’re curious about where these guys are going, and how they plan to get there… go read this!
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Halo 2: Precognition, part 2
Battleground: Halo has posted the second installment of Viper’s Halo 2: Precognition article (the first installment was posted a couple of weeks ago). This one uses the novels and the game as its basis for speculation, as opposed to the print articles the first part used. Again – it’s speculation, not fact. Read it, think about it, but don’t get mad; he’s not claiming that any of this will actually happen. (While you’re over at BGH, say goodbye to Rams; he’s stepping down as Assistant Site Director as of next month. We’ll miss you, Rams!)
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Bullets?
Today’s Guest One One Se7en comes from Crouchelle, and it clears up one of the great mysteries of Halo PC.
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The Valiant Master Chief
I never knew Cortana was edible… Calvin and Halo showed me the error of my ways.
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Thursday’s Writing
13 (approved) pieces for you today in the Fan Fiction section:- The fight for Omega Centauri. Part four: Sound the alarm, by Aonghus Maher
- The Seventh Battalion: Chapter One, by Ajax
- Hidden Threat: Chapter 1 – Briefing, by NBD24
- Halo Installation 01, Chapter 2, by FOrunnER
- The Battle for Earth: part 1, by CommanderElite
- Halo Wing – Chapter One: The More Better Plan Still, by Ermac of VGPro
- Prologue: Zion, by Scimitarex
- Halo: Dark Aftermath Ch. 2: Ambush, by Nick Kang
- Our Cursed Souls: A Field Master’s Tale, by MadJackal
- Athenians-II Chapter 6: Battle for M-2568 Part 2, by ZackDark
- Hit Hard Ch. 2 — Global Defense —, by Nick Kang
- The Dimensional’s Last Stand:Part 2, by skseifer
- Forced Betrayal (Chapter 8: The Last Stand), by CoLd BlooDed
You gotta wonder at the people who CONTINUE to submit non-Halo fiction…
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Crow feathers stuck in my teeth
It has been pointed out to me that my gentle ribbing of Stuntmutt over yesterday’s One One Se7en strip was unfair – and so far off the mark as to warrant this apology. So here it is. It is clear, as evidenced by last night’s release of a Security Hotfix for Halo PC, that Stuntmutt’s strip, far from being out of date, was SO topical that it PREdated the real news… the man must use a crystal ball. Or, possibly, the rounded bottom of a crystal vodka tumbler (seen from the inside). In any case, we’ll never doubt his prescience again. Today, at least.
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Who needs a debug kit, anyway?
XLNC dropped off another set of beautiful hudless screenshots on our forum recently; he’s even trying his hand at reproducing existing Bungie shots (at much higher resolution, of course). Never ceases to amaze…
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Halo PC Hot Fix
A security update has been released for Halo PC this evening; you can find details (and a download link for the updated version of the dedicated server) over at Bungie.net. At the moment, it’s not clear what this means for Mac clients… there’s no patch for Macs yet, so as soon as all the servers have upgraded to handle this security threat, Mac users will be left with no place to play. We’re going to leave HBO-Subnova running 1.03 for the time being, just so they have a home in the HBO family… but apparently, the Mac patch is being worked on, so hopefully the delay won’t be too painful.
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Weekly Bungie Updates Archive Up-to-date
Gah. I managed to forget to add this almost until the next one came out… but last week’s Frankie’s Weekly Bungie Update, posted at Battleground Halo, has now been added to the Updates Archive. Sorry about the delay!
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Stick Halo
Dr. Nick pointed out another Stick Halo Flash animation; it’s more of a teaser, but still fun. (It would be a LOT smaller without the Halo soundtrack…)
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One One Se7en v1.02
Even Stuntmutt’s main One One Se7en strips are subject to posting lag sometimes…
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I Always Thought It Was Pretty Illogical Too
So what is a Light Bridge, anyway? Halo: Resolution looks at the question.
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Dialogue Databank updated
Recently, Captain Spark sent in another large batch of dialogue snippets for our Dialogue Databank. We’ve put up the first 20 – there are still a number of Grunt and Jackal quotes to post. Before anyone gets on my case – yes, I realize that some of the quotes here are static; they show up every time you pass through the area in question. Live with it.
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Hellface on Halo Editing
progamerz has posted ‘Molkien’s Q&A on editing’ over at the Gearbox forums. This is a set of 20 questions about the Halo Editing Kit, answered by Gearbox programmer Hellface. Lots of good info! Thanks to rapture for pointing it out.
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Teamwork, by Halo.Fropco
Halo.Fropco has put up an article about teamwork, and how important it can be. Much of it is common sense… but as my youngest is so fond of saying, common sense isn’t really all that common. Give it a read!
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HiRes Halo 2 at GamersGallery
GamersGallery.com has put up 16 super-high-resolution versions of the early Halo 2 shots; swing by and pick up 3000-pixel-wide versions today. Glad to see those promo calendars are going to good use!
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Take This Cron Job And Shove It
Earlier this week, I began migrating all of the sites hosted by Synfibers that were using the PHP-based CMS called Drupal from version 4.2 (and one site that was hosted on a modified 4.0 installation) to the latest and greatest edition, 4.3.2.
For the most part, the process was pretty painless. Unlike some previous upgrades, there were very few times I had to manually alter a site’s database to get the new code tree to work, and most of the time these were mentioned explicitly by the upgrade script. The first day I did one site, and let it sit overnight. When everything seemed to be fine, I did five more sites the next day.
That’s when everything seemed to slow down to a crawl, about every fifteen minutes or so. I thought it was the scheduled cron job that updates the database with XML newsfeeds and so on; I figured some of the newsfeed URLs were bad or had malformed XML, so I started weeding out the feeds, removing sites that had invalid XML or sites that didn’t seem to have active newsfeeds anymore.
Then Verio tech support emails me, warning of dangerously high CPU usage in some Apache webserver threads, and suggests that it might be due to Googlebot. I thought at first it was again the cron jobs and that he just wasn’t familiar with my usage of Drupal and the need for these cron scripts to be run frequently. However, as it turns out he did, and he had already dismissed the cron jobs as a potential cause because the times when they ran didn’t seem to match up with the times when these high-CPU-usage Apache processes were spawning.
So that meant that either the search bots were the culprit, or somebody was DDOSing Synfibers. That seemed unlikely, so I started changing some things. I used robots.txt to exclude cron.php from their view, figuring that perhaps the bots were hitting that page and causing multiple cron script instances, which might bog things down. I took a look at top on the server and noticed some Apache processes going as high as 95% CPU utilization, in effect bringing the server to its knees.
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The Covenant will NOT get you out of homework.
Today’s Calvin and Halo gives you one more reason to be mad at Bungie. They just don’t make reality like they used to…
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Guest Strip Line
Today’s Guest One One Se7en comes from GLADIATRRR3000, and looks at… the Guest Strip Line. Having been to DisneyWorld in the past couple of months, I totally sympathize. (The irony here is that this strip was submitted in… let’s see… 2002.)
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The latest news about the Halo series of games from Microsoft