You can snag the video (31mb) from eve-files here:

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/0803/qcwa-battle1-3-08.mkv

To play mkv files you need either the codec pack for windows media player:
http://www.cccp-project.net/
or VLC player:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Personaly I use VLC for everything as its awesome

The evening started well after a hard day at work I was looking forward to a quick frag fest on the strangely enjoyable Call of Duty 4, even better my new mouse (a razer copperhead no less) had arrived to replace my ailing 10 year old MS intelli mouse. After booting up the computer I unplugged my old mouse and put in the new one following the instructions no less. Everything appeared to be going to plan windows detected the device right name and everything finished installing and then promptly told me in no uncertain terms it wasn’t working. Now USB stuff normally works but not being unused to this kind of activity i decided to take it out and plug in my old one and have a search on Google, only that didn’t work either…

Some time later after trying to reinstall a MS intelli mouse and being told it cant find the drivers I start to wounder whats going on looking in the manual add/remove hardware and using the option to specify the drivers reveals the interesting fact i have NONE whatsoever on my system. After panicking somewhat and ringing my friend James we decide a rollback to yesterday is the best option while praying that I actually have it turned on like a coward and haven’t disabled it in a fit of balls out bravado I find I have at-least a tiny bit of luck and rollback to Sunday evening. Mouse works all is good.

Or so I thought even now I’m unsure if these events are related CoD4 was working at the weekend but now it seems it is not. The Antichrist of anti-cheat software long lamented among geeks as an abomination had finally decided to strike with a strange episode of self abuse and stop working. My first indication of the terror was a warning telling me something called PnkBstrB.exe was not talking to the server. After some digging I found a program that apparently could check the status and reinstall to solve any problems. Even later I discovered that that Satan corp (evenballance) was lying and infact there installer did nothing except tell me thinks where not working.

It comes down to this, there are two programs punkbusterA and punkbusterB, A runs all the time as a service and starts B when you play a punkbuster game, as such they should both be in the services bit of administrative tools. Unfortunately for me only A is there no B its like they had some kind of falling out and now when A calls B wont answer. Re-installing with the helpful installer tells me that its installing B but then it wont run since is not appearing in the services bit I conclude its outright lying since the service isn’t even there to run. While googling for this information I came across lots of nice information about the punkbuster support tickets and how people had been waiting weeks or even months for responses. One hopeless soul with a problem similar to mine got the answer read the FAQs after 3 weeks… looks like Satan corp is really into kicking people when there down. Brilliant!

All in all an evening of my life wasted and in a way cant help think its problems like these that drive people to the excrement munching depravity of consoles. Oh well looks like I’m reinstalling windows again this weekend…

Update:
mouse installs/works fine on girlfriends laptop. Lovely.

Now one thing I thought that would be pretty cool would be a server monitor plug-in, there was nothing currently out there so using my non existent knowledge of widgets I tried my luck… and failed terribly I just couldn’t get the server to query correctly at all. I guessed someone must have done something similar to this in PHP the answer was GameQ. Its a nice little library that wraps everything up nicely and gives us back a lot of really easy arrays using this and my basic understanding of plugins I managed to knock up the server monitor you see on the 9m website

I have plans at some point to improve and hopefully release the widget under GPL when I have a better understanding of how to deal with the configuration side of things, until then its all hard coded configuration. If anyone’s interested at all in the source code drop me a line.