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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
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by
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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Hi, I’m Isbe ‘Uwudee… who are you?
A week or so ago, in a lighthearted forum thread, Wado SG pointed out a silly little app that would give you your very own Bond Girl name. Stuntmutt was entranced. Unfortunately, he’s an artist and a comedian, not a programmer. Hmm. Let’s try that again. Unfortunately, he’s not a programmer. There we go. Anyway, he contacted BOLL, our resident… something, who whipped together a little tool; now, thanks to these two, you can have your very own Elite Name! (Color, too.) Check out the HBO Elite Namelizer… fun for the whole family!
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Not As Futuristic As You Thought
Good to know (thanks to today’s Halo: Resolution) that some institutions are still around, 500 years down the road…
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Monday Reading
Went the weekend without putting up any Fan Fiction updates… now there are 21 pieces for you.- Athenians-II Chapter 6: Battle for M-2568 Part 1, by ZackDark
- On The Run: The complete Sam’s Flashback Chapter part 1 of 2, by BloodBlade
- Galaxy 08 – Part Nine – Preservation, by Jillybean
- Neverland: The Rescue, by SOS.Odin
- Hit Hard, by Nick Kang
- Battle for the library, by Mr Revenge
- Halo: Speed of Darkness (Chapter One), by Thanatos 117
- The Dimensional’s Last Stand:Part 1, by skseifer
- A Series of Wierd Events – Sequel, Part Eleven[H_K], by Hunter_Killer
- A Series of Wierd Events, Part Twelve, by Hunter_Killer
- Halo – A Poetic Overview of the Races, by John
- The Darkness and the Light – Chapter 1: , by IAmDelta
- Forced Betrayal (Chapter 7: Stranded With Only One Option), by CoLd BlooDed
- Forever – Dimidium Facti Qui Coepit Habet , by Dispraiser
- Chapter One: Asteroid Invasion, by PBP
- Bad Memories and new, by Justin Van Patten
- Rifle trainning- the spartan instinct, by Preston
- Zero Script: The Untold War of Halo, by Guilty Spark
- Halo: The Aftermath pt. 3/5, by Matthew Buzas
- Battle for the Norah: Part Fourteen, by Sterfrye36
- Neu Haven: Chapter Three, by Blue Jaguar
Get to reading…
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Hail to 117
Last week, we posted about a work-in-progress, a musical tribute to Halo (and to its music’s creator, Marty O’Donnell), from Mothergoat. Last night, he uploaded the final product. ‘Hail 117 Anthem‘ is just over 5 minutes long, 4.7 mb big, and beautiful. If you like the work – his band, Windsor Medium, has a website up. Update: Mothergoat has sent along this description of the piece:The final tune is pretty theatrical. It’s what I envision as the struggle of the final battle, escaping an exploding moon, defeating the Prophet of Regret and his last minions, then eventual sadness of the death of a close companion at the end of Halo 2 (my pure conjecture based on First Strike).
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Marty to speak at GDC
Marty O’Donnell will be talking again the Game Developers Conference this year – the session title is ‘The State of Non-Linear Audio for Interactive Media‘. As of now, it seems he’s the only Bungie employee on the speaker list… but who knows, that might change. Thanks to thunderhawk555 for pointing it out.
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The Psyjnir Music Library opens its doors
We got a press release from Jester – a new website, Music.Psyjnir.Org (MPO) is now open to the public.Music.Psyjnir.Org (MPO) was built to serve the community as a central library for all Bungie fan music, conversion and scenario music, and any other morsels of audio goodness. And after seven weeks in development, it is now ready to greet the public. In addition to digging up some of the classics, we have exclusive releases including two new pieces by SilverBrin**** and four official Red vs Blue pieces by Grasshopper. And MPO will be ever expanding, so check in every once in a while.
We also highly encourage the community to come up with material we don’t already have, either from their own libraries or from those creative juices you’ve been waiting to unleash. As for me, I’m taking a much needed vacation.The Halo section is extensive – and as the release mentions, includes a few pieces you can’t find in our own Fan Music section… but you should definitely explore the rest of the site; there’s music from Oni, Marathon, and Myth, as well. It’s wonderful to see all this stuff catalogued in one place!
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Nobody Likes a Smart-Ass
A new EchoFourNineteen up at 343GS.com… can’t say I fully get it, though. (Check the Downloads section.) Thanks to IXIGhandiIXI for the heads-up.
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Frankie Say Relapse
Okay, last week, Stuntmutt had funny, topical Sunday One One Se7en that was linked to the Weekly Update Frankie had written the week before. I screwed up and forgot to post it. We’re not a pair to waste humor, though (God knows there’s little enough of it to go around), so we’ve edited the text a tiny bit, and released it a little late. It’s about Old MC anyway… just put it down to forgetfulness, or something.
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It’s a day for modeling
bentllama, Bungie animator and pancake lover, spent a bunch of time being helpful today. He pointed out a few things about Wraith’s Assault Boat – and then he pointed out a link to a thread on the CGTalk forum, with some really good advice for up-and-coming modelers (and even those who’ve been around a while). You never know when you’re gonna get a helping hand from a Bungie employee…
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Randy Pitchford expresses Frustration
Wow. Randy Pitchford posted a note on the Gearbox forums a couple of days ago – he lays the blame for any delays on release of Halo PC content (new shaders, the Halo Editing Kit, bug fixes, and so on) completely at the feet of “Bungie/MGS”. Homelan has asked for an official response from Microsoft on this one, so we’ll have to wait and see what develops… but it’s never a good thing when the dirty laundry starts coming out. If you gotta start pointing fingers, everybody loses – fans included. Thanks to Socrates, who picked this up over at Voodoo Extreme.
The latest news about the Halo series of games from Microsoft