How to configure Gamer's Internet Tunnel

A while back some friends and I had a PS2 LAN party and played Gran Turismo and TimeSplitters 2. Back when we played, the PS2 still came with a firewire port, so Eric and I bought a firewire hub and some cables, and Andy came over and we all played together, which was pretty cool, although the firewire cables were pretty short, and having to use TVs instead of monitors made things a bit of a pain. Eric discovered that there was a tunneling program out there that would allow us to play TimeSplitters 2 over the internet, so that we could play without having to haul around the consoles and televisions. The only catch was that you couldn't just fire up the PlayStation and connect to a gaming service online, because there were no actual TimeSplitter 2 servers out there. But, somebody did build some tunneling software, and we were able to get ahold of it and get it to work. The one big hassle in doing this is that each player has to configure his tunnel proxy to point to the other players', and all the players have to point to each other on the correct ports, on the correct IPs, etc. to make it all work right (oh yeah -- since it is tunneling software, everybody has to have unique non-internet-routable (i.e. internal network) IP addresses). We found that it was difficult to keep straight who should be pointing to whom on which ports and which internal IP addresses we should use, so I wrote a JavaScript app that made it much easier.

You can find my app at GIT helper.

Friday morning blues

If the words "children" and "custody" are part of your vocabulary, you probably know what it feels like on the days when you have to say goodbye for another week when the children leave you and go back to their other parent. It always feels terrible not to have the people you love the most with you all of the time, but it is especially bad the first few hours after saying goodbye. At least on school/work days, like today, school and work are a distraction that lessen the pain, but it's still there.

I don't have a point or a moral here, other than to say that if you have family and don't make an effort to spend time with them, there's something just not right, and it should be made right.

Proximity strategy game

Found this game in the User Friendly link of the day; warning: don't click the link unless you are game-addiction-resistant! I don't often (as in, never) go in for strategy games, but this one got me hooked.

It's a lot of fun and you should give it a try.