blog.ratio.dk

I present here the problems I’ve run into, trying to get a proper online experience with Fifa 10 PC, as well as the solutions I’ve devised.

Problem 1: Connectivity

Trouble connecting to other players. Errors like the other player has disconnected or similar that stops the game before it actually begins.

Solution

In most situations this is probably caused by people sitting behind a router. When your opponent tries to connect to one of your ports, and you’re behind a router, the router will not carry the connection through unless it’s configured to do so. So you have to tell the router to forward requests for certain ports to the machine running Fifa 10 – something called Port Forwarding.

The ports you need to forward are (taken from the manual page 17)

• TCP/IP: 30440-30449
• UDP: 3658, 3659, 9570

I’ve omitted the ports 80 and 443 because you don’t need to forward those – or you shouldn’t.

Problem 2: Players quitting the game prematurely

If you’re losing the game, this is not a problem at all. So if you’re losing all games you need not read this section. However, if you’re winning a game against a poor sportsman, that person will quit the game before it’s over. This can be extremely irritating, and will cost you a win in the statistics unless it’s near the end of the game – in which case you’ll be awarded a win anyway.

Solution

Do not play opponents with a DNF (did not finish) of above 8%. This is absolutely crucial. Especially opponents with a lot of games played (say 200) that have a DNF of above 5% are very likely to be quitters.

It also helps to play opponents that match your skill level. In the online menu you can choose CUSTOM MATCH and then Create Ranked Session. The subsequent screen lets you choose only to play opponents that have a DNF of 10% or lower, and even opponents of the same skill level as you.

Use that and be picky. It’s really worth it getting a good game instead of getting a lot of worthless games that are ended prematurely.

Problem 3: Games are lagging

The games are lagging. It takes a while before a command issued to a player is carried through. Periodical lagging.

Solution

Be picky. In a lot of games you can’t see the opponent’s ping. Try asking about what it is, and if the other player can’t read, just find another game. I only play games with a ping below 85ms (or around that) simply because it’s no fun to play slow/lagging games.

Be sure to use your geographical knowledge as well. If you can spot that the flag of your opponent indicates that he’s located very far from your own location the game will probably be lagging, just because of the distance the information has to travel.

What the headline said.

I’ve deployed the `Magic: The Gathering` Engine which is now available via

http://magic.ratio.dk/home

Basically it’s a deck builder that takes the prices of cards into account. It took some work to get it up, but I’m rather contend with the result. In any case I hope I’ll be able to take advantage of it when building decks in the future.

Hopefully others will find it useful!

Hard drives can be empty, and they can be mostly full. But they are never entirely full, are they?

Non-full hard drives are a nuisance to me. That being said, I’ve been looking into different ways of combating this phenomenon. Here’s a couple of solutions that don’t really work.

1. Find something useful to do with the free space like writing poetry in weighty Word documents that take up a couple of megabytes for each file.
2. Ignore it and rejoice because it’s nice to have free space, why not?
3. Enjoy life and drink plenty of coffee.

Only one of these options is really feasible, and while it might be a good bet, it’s also possible to combine it with the correct answer to the question posed a long time ago.

On a Windows XP SP3 installation you will have access to the recommendable program that is fsutil. It comes with the system. For the sake of the example, let us say the drive letter in question is D.

fsutil volume diskfree D:
This will print you the amount of free disk space free in bytes. Let’s say the number of bytes free is 1234567890, why not. That’s just over a gigabyte! Now copy (or remember if you’re so inclined) the number of bytes free, and let your fingers dance to this command.

fsutil file createnew D:\MY_FILLER_FILE 1234567890
Discounting external factors the D drive will now be full – not just close to. Incidentally it might be a bad idea to do this on the system drive (usually the C drive) as it’s very fond of disk space being free there. Try it though if you want Windows to suffer.

Note: Tested on Windows XP SP3 with the version of fsutil that come with that.

Here’s a thought.

Could I please be equipped with a DC output in the next version? Seeing as I enjoy eating and thus generating far more energy than needed to sustain my bodily functions, it would be a neat feature. I’m sure there’s lots of other people in the industrialized world who would benefit from this as well.

As it happens I don’t know much about this. However, seeing as this is a blog and all, I don’t really have to, since someone have have already taken the time writing such a guide.

http://www.vectorspace.dk/2009/06/encrypted-partition-on-debian-5-0-with-secret-key-on-usb-stick/

It goes through the steps of

1. Encrypting a partition
2. Putting the key on a USB stick
3. Auto-mounting the USB stick with the key at boot up
4. Making sweet coffee

in a rather concisely explanatory manner.

Now I think I’ve used up today’s quota of English gibberish.

Thanks for reading thus far :).