gamers surprise

Well, while I've been waiting to find a Wii available for purchase, I decided to buy a new game, Star Wars: Battlefront II, for my PS2.

I expected I would enjoy this (in part because I'm kind of a Star Wars nerd), but I thought my wife, who loves video games but doesn't have any experience with shooters to speak of, would not enjoy it.

To my surprise, we have played the game quite a bit in the past several days in split-screen mode, and she has thoroughly enjoyed it. Note that she is not a Star Wars afficianado (I have frequently had to tell her which ships were friend-or-foe when playing the space missions -- she doesn't know the difference between an ISD and an A-Wing. Fortunately I was around to help out. :-)

The multiplayer experience in this game was surprisingly satisfactory, and my only complaint is that the story mode was a bit short. That is made up for in part by the Galactic Conquest strategy game, though compared to some of the story missions it might be a bit too easy.

She's getting good enough at this, that I may soon feel willing to start playing competitively against her, instead of just doing cooperative missions. Still, I wish more developers would do games that allowed for cooperative play.

Mobile Sun Ray and WPA-PSK and 3G

A brief note: I've gotten WPA-PSK working well with our next generation Comet (mobile Sun Ray client) product. (Note: it has a different code name than Comet.) So finally you can have a very secure wireless connection with a mobile Sun Ray.

Also, we still have not yet released our VPN firmware, but that should be coming RSN. (Its has basically been complete for a while, but has been hamstrung by legal trying to get rights to release code that we developed using NDA information from a certain well-known vendor of VPN equipment.)

I've also demonstrated this working over HSDPA and GPRS/EDGE. It is quite nice with HSDPA. With GPRS/EDGE, its usable, but only just barely. I'm looking forward to testing it with Bluetooth -> 3G/3.5G networks soon.

3g goodness

I recently purchased a Cingular Wireless 3g card (the Option GT Max), and I've been playing with it under Linux for another project relating to thin clients.

One of the things that I've discovered is that this basically exposes itself as a normal USB serial port. I'm seriously considering adding support to OpenSolaris for this device. If you thing the ability to use 3g networks under Solaris sounds interesting to you, please let me know!

finally got a signed SCA

Just a quick note that I finally have a signed SCA which will allow me to start contributing stuff with Tadpole/General Dynamics IP back to the Open Solaris community.