In the movie The Avengers our planet earth is threatened by a powerful alien army. The secret organisation S.H.I.E.L.D. is desperately trying to prevent the evil demigod Loki from opening a dimensional portal which would allow this alien army to invade. To be able to succeed S.H.I.E.L.D. is trying to build a team of super heroes, the Avengers. But most of the possible candidates are not exactly team players and a lot of them don’t trust S.H.I.E.L.D. in the first place. Only when the catastrophe seems to be almost unavoidable the Avengers finally stop to fight each other and join in a desperate effort to stop the invasion.

The Avengers features the well known mix of spectacular action, comedy and interesting characters which made the other Marvel Comics based movies worthwhile to watch. But with multiple featured super heroes, an excellent cast and even more spectacular action sequences the film surpasses all its predecessors.

If you like entertaining action movies you should definitely watch the The Avengers. Silke and I both enjoyed it very much.

The game play is similar to Mass Effect 2: a role-playing game with third person shooter action sequences. But a lot of details have been improved:

1. Combat was somewhat static in Mass Effect 2. As your character only moved slowly and couldn’t run very far you had to fight from cover most of the time. Advancing during combat had to be carefully planned. In Mass Effect 3 combat is much more dynamic. Your character is faster in general and can run, jump, climb up latters and most importantly dodge attacks by rolling. This allows you to move around in a fire fight without getting killed while trying to flank your enemies. Close combat is also much more feasible as you character is now able to perform a heavy melee attack.
2. The weapon system has changed significantly. All character classes can carry all types of weapons, even at the same time. But carrying more weapons causes a weight penalty which slows down the use of biotic and tech powers considerably. This penalty depends on the class. Soldiers can carry the most weight but have limited powers to start with. Sentinels on the other hand should carry less weight if they want to use their powers frequently.
   There is now a great variety of weapons.They differ from each other in accuracy, fire rate, damage, ammunition capacity and weight. You can also apply up to two upgrades to each weapon to customise it according to your preferences. This allows you to create a set of weapons that fits your individual play style best.
   Heavy weapons can no longer be carried around all the time. Instead they are only available at certain points in a few levels. While you are carrying a heavy weapon you can not use your normal weapons. If you switch back to them you will drop the heavy weapon.
3. The power system has also been refined. Each power has now six levels. Starting at level four of each power you can even pick one of two variants of the power. You e.g. have to decide whether you want more damage to a single target or damage to multiple targets. This allows you to tune the characters to suite your game style even further.
4. The graphics have been improved as well. Levels for example look much more detailed now. The display of the Mars surface with a sand storm at the horizon looks particularly impressive.

In between the action sequences there is room for a lot of story splot. As the war is taking its toll on the galaxy the atmosphere is quite dark. This is reflected in the mood and behaviour of all the characters in the game. All of them show a lot of emotions and sometimes even require the player’s care. But there are also bits of comedy in form of highly entertaining dialogs that you can either witness or participate in.

As in the previous parts Commander Shepard is sometimes faced with tough decisions. Sometimes the fate of an entire race depends on her leadership. And there is not much room for error as you need to gather as much allies as you can if you want to stand a chance of rescuing Earth from the Reapers.

On top of the brilliant single player mode Mass Effect 3 also features an excellent multi player mode. Up to four players cooperatively fight online against eleven waves of enemy forces composed of either Cerberus, Geth or Reapers.  The battle takes place in one of six different maps. Players have to create a character for playing multiplayer which uses the same classes as single player characters and has similar biotic and tech powers. It is even possible to unlock alien races which enables you to create a Krogan soldier, a Quarian engineer , an Asari vanguard or any other of a dozen combinations. As every character class and race has their different strengths and weaknesses you get a new game experience with each of them. By completing missions you gain experiences for upgrading your character and credits for buying equipment packs in the store. Packs will contain a random selection of useful items like rocket launcher ammunition, medi-gel, weapons or character unlocks. You never know what you will get in advance. Besides being very good training for single player combat the multi player mode is a lot of fun. It can also contribute to the success of your single player campaign by increasing the military strength of the forces that Commander Shepard is gathering.

The only downside of Mass Effect 3 is the ending. It caused a lot of public controversy. Fans campaigned against it and even the BBC reported about it. I was very disappointed by the ending at first:

1. Playing Mass Effect is about the choices you make. And Mass Effect 3 beautifully incorporates all the decisions from the two previous games. Even characters which only appear in the predecessor for a single scene can make a difference. But when the final chapter begins it all boils down to ruthless calculus as Garrus would say.
2. The game has multiple endings with quite different consequences. But the problem is that they all look almost identical. The small nuances in the final cut scene just don’t provide enough feedback. And none of them felt like a victory.
3. The ending doesn’t provide closure. It leaves too many questions unanswered and instead raises new ones.

However my perception changed radically after I watched the following video. Although I still don’t like the ending very much I have to admit that it is a masterpiece.

In the meantime BioWare have  announced that they are working on something that provides more closure. Let’s see what they come up with. I guess that at this point I don’t want them to change the ending, I just want Mass Effect 4.

The Hunger Games is set a few hundred years in the future. After an apocalyptic war a single large city called Panem is left in North America. It rules over twelve districts, smaller human settlements that provide Panem with resources like food. As punishment for a rebellion against Panem 74 years ago the districts have to take part in the Hunger Games each year. One male and female tribute between the age of 12 and 18 from each district are chosen via a lottery. All the twenty four tributes have to fight each other in a massive open air arena. The games last until only one of the tributes is left alive.

When Katniss Everdeen’s little sister Primrose is chosen Katniss volunteers to take Primrose’s place as the female tribute for district 12. She does that knowing very well that she is mostly likely going to die in the arena. Together with a Peeta Mellark, a boy from the same district, Katniss is immediately send on her journey to Panem. Their only ally is Haymitch Abernathy, the only surviving district 12 tribute. But as Haymitch is a drunk Katniss’s and Peeta’s situation is desperate.

The movie is a decent adaption of the novel. There are of course parts of the book’s story missing but the essence has been preserved. The movie is also less violent than the original, probably to get an age 12 rating. Jennifer Lawrence‘s performance as Katniss Everdeen is good which is key to making the film work.

I can definitely recommend watching the The Hunger Games. It’s a good movie based on an excellent book which provides both action and food for thought.

1. Lose some weight.
2. Save the galaxy from the Reaper invasion.

I achieved some progress on the first part and lost a few kilos so far. Naturally not as many as I hoped for but my weight is definitely going down.

I have however fulfilled the second part by finishing the single player campaign of Mass Effect 3 today. The Galaxy is once more save. No reapers, no Sith and nothing else lurking out there.

Let’s hope that will change soon.

The good news is that I didn’t notice for almost two weeks because NetBSD RAIDframe handled the situation smoothly. It kicked the broken disk out of the RAID array, reported the problem in the nightly e-mails (which I somehow missed) and kept the machine up and running. Well done RAIDframe, have a cookie!

Of the above video solutions only Flash works under NetBSD’s amd64 and i386 ports, but often not very well. While NetBSD 6.0 should improve that situation with the updated Linux emulation Flash will still be limited to the x86 ports. So how can you create a web page with an embedded video that is NetBSD-friendly despite all these technology problems?

Fortunately the new upcoming HTML5 standard can help here. Although it is still under development a lot of its aspects are already supported by modern browsers. One of them is the video element. It allows to embed a video into a web page with only a few lines of HTML code. Here is a simple example for a video element:

<video height="320" width="240">
<source src="my-video.ogv" type="video/ogg" />
</video>

This allows video playback in e.g. Firefox under NetBSD without any extra plugins. There is however one small problem: there is no single video file format that is supported by all browsers. Safari, Internet Explorer 9 and most mobile browsers only support MP4 files. Firefox and Opera however only support OGV files. Only Google Chrome supports both video file formats.

Fortunately the HTML5 video element allows you to specify multiple different video file format. Here is an improved version of our example:

<video height="320" width="240">
<source src="my-video.ogv" type="video/ogg" />
<source src="my-video.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
</video>

In this case the browser can pick either the MP4 or the OGV video file. There are various programs for creating video files in MP4 or OGV format. If you are lucky your video editing software will already support generating MP4 files. If it doesn’t you can try the ffmpeg program to convert the video file into an MP4 file. Although ffmpeg can generate OGV files as well I would recommend ffmpeg2theora for this job. It can read the same file formats and generates OGV files whose audio information is correctly played back by Firefox.

If you create a web page with video using the above recipe it will work on a large number of platforms. Playback of this video has been tested with Firefox (NetBSD, Mac OS X, Linux, Windows), Safari (Mac O X), Internet Explorer 9 (Windows), Opera (Linux) an HTC Desire Z under Android 2.3.3, an iPhone 4 and an iPad. Only an iPhone 3GS refused to play the video simply because the video’s resolution isn’t supported on that hardware.

Here is a little movie clip of Silke and Vader playing in the snow:

Not sure who of them had more fun.

Last Sunday Silke and Vader passed their final assessment (grade 4) with Merit. Vader is now a Proficient Hunting Retriever. Here is a photo of him with all his ribbons.

Here is the traditional photo in the corner of our kitchen to commemorate his second birthday:

The weather was really good for this late in the year. It mostly rained during the night and the sun was shining during the day. Silke and I seized the opportunity and went on extensive walks with our dog Vader. This was an excellent way to enjoy the stunning scenery. As I probably couldn’t find adequate words to describe it I’ll simply let the pictures do the talking.