That reminded me how happy I am that I don’t own a Gaming PC anymore. It was just a waste of money and time and on top of that frequently very frustrating: the noise, driver problems, hardware incompatibilities, and so on and so forth.

The quality of the graphics produced by the PlayStation 3 might not be state of the art anymore. But they look good enough for me. And I can actually focus on playing games instead of faffing around with the system.

Luckily I ordered the two new hard disks via Amazon who offer an excellent return service. They already sent me a replacement hard disk before I even shipped the broken one. Let’s hope this one works better.

So the pivotal question is whether Super Mario Galaxy 2 is as good or even better than the first part:

1. If you have played Super Mario Galaxy in the past the intro and the first two levels will look very familiar.
2. The space ship which serves as the base of operations is a bit dull compared to Rosalina‘s observatory in the first game. And the Luma in charge of this space ship is somewhat annoying.
3. Fortunately things get better from here. In the second Galaxy your character Mario encounter’s Yoshi, a tame dinosaur, which he can ride on. Riding on Yoshi provides the player with a lot of new abilities. Yoshi can jump higher, eat enemies or swallow projectiles and fire them back at your opponents. By eating different kind of berries or hot chillies Yoshi gets even more astonishing powers like floating or super speed.
4. Mario himself can also acquire new powers e.g. by eating magic mushrooms. Among Mario’s extra powers are creating and walking on clouds, drilling holes or squashing his enemies by transforming into a rolling rock.
5. The design of the levels is as brilliant as in the first part. Checkpoints are now clearly marked by Bowser flags which Mario needs to touch. Some of the levels are however frustratingly difficult. You frequently wish for more checkpoints or more time.

All in all Super Mario Galaxy 2 is fun to play just like Super Mario Galaxy. But it somehow doesn’t have the special touch to it that made the first part a real masterpiece. It is nevertheless one of the best Wii games I have ever played.

A few afterthoughts on the whole affair:

1. It is very disappointing that one of my server grade Seagate Barracuda ES.2 hard disks died within little over two years.
2. The good news is that Seagate offer a five year warrantee on this model. I am therefore entitled to a replacement which I have requested via their website.
3. Before you return a faulty hard disk to Seagate they however ask you to run SeaTools to get an error code. The quality of this tool is really impressive. You can download a bootable ISO image with a DOS version that doesn’t seem to work. I tried it to boot on both my HP Proliant ML110 G4 and on an old Pentium 4 PC but it hung after loading the main program. As a result I had to use the Windows version. This version of SeaTools has a charming Windows for Workgroups style user interface. But to be fair it got the job done in the end and confirmed that one my Barracuda hard disks was indeed broken.
4. Seagate’s warranty serviced turned out to be very good. I shipped the broken hard disk, received the receipt acknowledgement on Tuesday and the new hard disk on Friday. The replacement hard disk is only a year old and looks brand new.
5. Considering that only one of the disks was really broken I’m still a bit puzzled why the second hard disks initially showed problems as well. In a system using SATA with its point-to-point connections you would hope that disks don’t interfere with each other. But somehow they seem to do nevertheless which is not what you would hope for.

Anyway, I’m decided to give the two Seagate hard disks a try and installed them as the second RAID 1 in my server.

Last night both of the hard disks in the primary RAID 1 volume of my server started to report bad blocks. As a result one of the hard disks got removed from the volume. Two attempts to add it back have failed because parts of the other hard disk cannot be read as well. My attempt to create a backup of the file system containing the bad block revealed more bad blocks and locked up the remaining disk. I will have to restore the data from last Saturday’s full backup.

I just hope the partially working hard disk will keep running until the two replacements arrive.

Last Friday Chris suggested to take advantage of the brilliant weather and go on a punting trip. As this sounded like an excellent idea we decided to join in and take Vader with us, while Silke also used it as an excuse to try a new Muffin recipe.

The following day we met with Chris and Jeremy at the Mill Pond in Cambridge and hired a punt. It was a really lovely day and the city centre was densely packed. After enjoying the sunshine for about half an hour in a nearby park we could board our punt. Vader was a bit nervous at the beginning because being on a boat was a new experience for him.

But after a while he really started to enjoy the trip.

Thanks to Chris’s and Jeremy’s formidable skills in handling a punt we made it all the way to the Byron’s Pool where a weir divides the river Cam. When we got off the boat we met Islay, an eight month old Labrador puppy, and her owners. Vader had a lot of fun playing with Islay and the two dogs zipped around us like bats out of hell.

After all that excitement and exercise Vader got very tired on the way back to Cambridge. After a few minutes he was sound asleep in the punt.

Overall we all had a really great day. Vader handled his first punting trip very well and enjoyed it like the rest of us.

If you want to see more pictures of our expedition please have a look at Chris’s blog posting.

What makes BioShock 2 a really good game is the excellent design and the elements of roll-playing and strategy games incorporated into the story:

• The underwater city Rapture is a fascinating scenario. Its inhabitants managed to build this monument of  human ingeniousness but failed to establish an utopian society. As a result the would-be paradise turned into hell on earth. This is very well reflected in the grandeur of the architecture which is now mostly in ruins.
• At the beginning the main character’s abilities (and armament) are very limited. Over time he can however pick up two types of genetic enhancements, Plasmids and Tonics. Plasmids provide active powers like telekinesis or the ability to throw fireballs. Tonics provide passive abilities like camouflage or faster movements. These enhancements are however not easy to procure. A few of them can be found in secret locations but most of them need to be bought with a substance called ADAM. And collecting ADAM proves to be challenging as well. The player frequently needs to decide how to make best use of the limited supply of ADAM.
• Over the course of the game the player encounters a number of minor characters. Some of them are friendly, others are hostile and a few can even switch sides depending on your behaviour. All in all they are very well written and voiced which contributes  to the atmosphere of the game.
• The player frequently has to defend a Little Sister against fiercely attacking Splicers. But thanks to an arsenal of special weapons like trap rivets, mini turrets and proximity mines it is possible to prepare for such a confrontation in advance to get the upper hand in the fight.
• The behaviour of the main character during the game decided the ending of the story.

BioShock 2 doesn’t feature an original game concept but it is really well made. Overall it is definitely worth playing and even tops the first game, BioShock.

Last Tuesday we could finally watch Iron Man 2 in a local cinema. Just like the first part it is full of humour, action and amazing special effects. Robert Downey Jr. delivers another brilliant performance as Tony Stark, AKA Iron Man. Tony Stark’s attitude towards his status as a super hero is still refreshingly relaxed and his worst enemy is once again his ego. Even after a healthy dose of self-discovery and the unavoidable fight against a supervillain he remains a big kid which really enjoys flying around in his armoured suit and doesn’t take life very serious. This refreshing attitude is what makes this film really enjoyable.

While Iron Man 2 is not quite as good as the first part it is still very entertaining and definitely worth seeing. According to The Internet Movie Database there will be a third movie as well which I’m looking forward to.

1. Samba 3.3.12
   NetBSD’s Samba package (version 3.0.37) is outdated and no longer supported by the Samba team. The new net/samba33 package provides a newer and above all still supported version. The upgrade worked without any problems on my home server and didn’t require any configuration changes.
2. PHP 5.3.2
   I’ve mentioned in the past that I have doubts about the security of PHP. But as PHP is required for the software used by my blog it is installed on my web server nevertheless. Since a few weeks pkgsrc provides the latest stable version via the lang/php53 package. As this version receives the best security support by the PHP project at the moment the new package helps me to keep my home server safe.
3. MySQL 5.1
   Sun (Oracle?) have recently announced the end of the active support for MySQL 5.0. Fortunately the new database/mysql51-server package provides MySQL 5.1 which is still fully supported until the end of this year.
   Updating my home server didn’t work very well initially because InnoDB support was missing (or not enabled?). However, in the meantime this has been fixed in pkgsrc. You therefore don’t have to dump and restore your database (although creating a dump before an update is always a good idea). Instead you only need to start the new server and run mysql_upgrade afterwards.

Owing to all these new packages I’m less concerned about the security of my home server, at least for now. For this I would like to thank Takahiro Kambe who added these packages to pkgsrc.

Last Saturday Silke and I went to London with two friends from Germany. This trip was only possible thanks to Andy and Michelle who kindly offered to watch our puppy Vader for the day. The highlight of our visit was clearly watching The Phantom of the Opera life on stage. This musical is still shown at Her Majesty’s Theatre where it has been running continuously since it first opened in 1986.

The show was absolutely brilliant all the way from the first note of the overture to the great finale. I was especially impressed by Gina Beck who played Christine Daaé. She has a truly amazing voice and her rendition of the song The Phantom of the Opera was probably the best I’ve heard since Sarah Brightman’s performance on the original CD recording.

It was a truly unforgettable evening for all of us. And I’m looking forward to the next musical that we will enjoy life on stage.