Mike Salsbury’s Blog

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I was diagnosed with Acid Reflux disease (also known as GERD or Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease) several years ago.   I wasn’t surprised when the doctor made the diagnosis. My mother suffers from it, and I suspect that whether he knew it or not, my late grandfather did as well. So, what follows here is my knowledge and experience as a sufferer of Acid Reflux syndrome.   It should not be construed as medical advice or treatment guidelines. For that, you should seek the advice and services of a qualified medical professional.

What is Acid Reflux?

If you’ve ever had a “burp” that brought a little something to the back of your throat, that was most likely acid reflux, where some of your stomach contents were sent back up your esophagus and into the back of your throat. It’s unpleasant to say that least, but it’s much more than that.

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admin Life acid reflux disease diet, acid reflux medication, acid reflux symptoms, acid reflux syndrome, acid reflux treatment

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Variant)

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admin VB and VBScript form, form completion, html, Internet, VB webbrowser object, VB6, Visual Basic 6 WebBrowser Object, VisualBasic, web browsing, WebBrowser Object

So I was playing “The Godfather” last night on my friend’s xBox. Besides the fact that the xBox controller is the most evil and insidious invention on the planet, the controls were pretty straightforward and easy to use (but they’re better on a PS2 controller, I’m sure). To start off with, the beginning cinematography is absolutely outstanding! Graphics, story, voice acting, all the elements needed for a great game are present right from the very start. The story starts off with (extremely minor spoiler) a brief tutourial that ends with a man being gunned down in front of his young kid. Guess who that kid grows up to be? That’s right, he’s our main character and I’ll bet he’ll want a little taste of revenge before it’s over.

To begin with, the world is HUGE, looking like something that came directly from Grand Theft Auto. Starting off you’ll create your own character from menus that look very reminescent of Tiger Woods golf. I didn’t mess with this too much and just hit “randomize” to continue on (God was he ugly lookin’)….but character creation is very in-depth and looks like it could take quite a while to perfect.

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admin Games game, godfather xbox game review, review, The Godfather, XBox

Earlier this year I reviewed the EXCELLENT game “Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse” by Aspyr. In the review I mentioned that there are some areas I found really difficult to beat without using cheat codes, but I never told you what those cheat codes were or how to use them.

Cheating with Stubbs is pretty easy. First, open the Notepad program on your system and create a new document containing only two lines:

cheat_deathless_player 1
cheat_infinite_ammo 1

Save this file with the name “init.txt” (the exact file name is critical). Move the file into the directory on your PC where Stubbs is installed. If you’re in the right directory, you’ll find “stubbs.exe” there. The next time you launch the game the cheats will be installed.

When you play with cheats enabled, it won’t look like they’re working at first. You’ll only know they’re working when you don’t die after losing all your health.

NOTE: When I last played the game, having the “deathless_player” cheat on prevented me from being able to complete the “poison the water supply” task. The game locked up instead of moving on to the next cut-scene. You will need to save the game before starting that part, then move the “init.txt” file away from the “stubbs.exe” program, and start the game again without cheats to get past that area.

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admin Games ammo cheat, cheat code, cheats, code, codez, god mode, infinite ammo, infinite life, life cheat, PC, stubbs the zombie, stubbs zombie infinite cheat, windows

I’ve played a number of massively-multiplayer online games [wikipedia.org]. I have played Ultima Online for 6-7 years, Earth & Beyond from the beta test to its death, Eve Online for a few weeks, and City of Heroes a few times. I’ve come to the conclusion that rigidly-defined character types detract from a game’s “fun”.

As Raph Koster [raphkoster.com] discusses in A Theory of Fun for Game Design [amazon.com], games are abstract versions of real situations and decisions that we have to deal with in life. Perhaps this is one reason why researchers have indicated that surgeons who play video games make fewer mistakes [usatoday.com] in the operating room. The games help them sharpen eye-hand and decision-making skills that translate into actions they perform in the operating room. While it may not be the reason we play, games help prepare our minds for dealing with real life.  They allow us to try our hand at things which would be expensive, dangerous, or impossible to try in real life – and we learn from those experiences.

Koster suggests that games are fun when they provide a challenge that’s just a little beyond our grasp, and get tougher the better we get at dealing with the challenges.  When game designers limit players’ options by saddling them with characters that are artificially limited, they remove some of the challenges and strategic options.  This makes the game less fun.

For example, consider checkers [wikipedia.org] and chess [wikipedia.org]. In checkers, you have two types of pieces (regular checkers and those you’ve “kinged”). Pieces can move in only one way. Chess meanwhile, is more complex. There are many more kinds of pieces to move, and each piece has a unique set of rules governing how it moves. The chess player has many more options available to use to “trap” or win against the opponent than the checker player.  Both games can be fun, both can be challenging.  All things considered, chess is more challenging and for most people more fun than chess.

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admin Games character classes, character design, character types, characters, game design, MMORPG

To me, what makes an MMORPG fun is a combination of the following factors:

• The ability to tailor my character’s skill set (i.e., no rigidly-defined character types that prevent me from combining the skills I want to combine in one character)
• The ability to adjust a character’s skills if existing skills turn out to be uninteresting or useless to me
• The ability to play “solo” and still enjoy myself, with the option of greater reward for teaming up with other players
• Making PVP combat an opt-in feature
• The ability to own virtual property in-game, like a house, store, or similar place
• A way to conveniently sell loot and crafted items to other players, even when I’m not playing, and a relatively easy way for other players to find the items I’m selling and vice-versa
• A variety of equipment options that allow me to tailor my weapons and protection to the enemy I am dealing with
• The ability to craft items in the game, and the fact that some items are “rare” to obtain and/or create
• Regular additions to the in-game content (enemies, quests/missions, equipment, etc.)
• A mechanism for turning in-game money into real money within the game, and vice-versa (this includes allowing in-game items to be sold on eBay)
• A reasonably large “universe” in the game, featuring a variety of locations and “themes” (e.g., desert, polar, tropical, etc.)
• The ability to travel to previously-visited locations nearly instantly
• In-game activities, story lines, and other content that I can optionally choose to be part of
• Some “instanced” content, to eliminate the effect of other players “camping” or “farming” popular areas
• Gaining of skill through USE of the skill, not through anything related to “leveling”

Notice that the above list doesn’t include a number of things:

• Fancy 3D graphics and sound effects (UO has a very dated 2D look and I don’t mind that.)
• A musical soundtrack (This is one of the first things I turn off anyway.)
• In-game characters voiced by human beings (I can read just fine.)
• Prohibition of the sale of currency and items on eBay (or elsewhere)
• Extensive customization of character appearance (I honestly don’t care if my character doesn’t look “unique” so long as I can recognize which one’s mine.)
• In-game social events and locations, like discos or weddings (These are optional to me.)
• Official “groups” like guilds, super-groups, clans, or corporations (These often wind up being more trouble than they’re worth.)
• Support for audio chatting in the game (i.e., a “TeamSpeak” equivalent)
• Efforts to eliminate “farming”, “camping”, or other such acts (People are going to do this anyway. If you have “instanced” content then these activities won’t unnecessarily harm other players.)
• An assurance from the developers that no character can progress faster than any other (I don’t care if someone else’s character hits level 20 in 2 days while I only get to level 10 in the same time.  If I want to level as fast, I can create a character just like it.)

I have yet to find an MMO that offers all the things I’m looking for. Ultima Online and Eve Online come close, but don’t quite make it.  Earth & Beyond failed miserably.  City of Heroes and City of Villains fail even more miserably. World of Warcraft delivers on most of them.  Pirates of the Burning Sea delivers on several.

admin Games fun, game, Games, gaming, good, massively multi-player online, MMO, MMORPG, onlinegaming, reasons why

In looking over my web server logs for the past year, I found that a significant number of people were searching for information about this particular Trojan.  I suspect the reason they came to my site is that I mention it in my review of the free open source antivirus program, Clamwin, which happened to detect this Trojan on one of my systems.  Given that I wasn’t quite sure what it was, either, I figured I do a little research so that the next one of you to come to my site looking for the answer to this question will find it instantly.  It took a bit of digging, but here’s what I can tell you.

Java.Downloader.Openstream.A is one of the aliases of a Trojan also known by the following names (or at least is related to these):

• Troj/Openstr-B
• Trojan.Java.Openstream.w
• Java.Downloader.OpenStream.A
• Trojan-Downloader.Java.OpenStream.w
• Java/OpenStream.W
• Java/OpenStream
• Trj/Downloader.DMY
• Java/Openstream.W

Doing a search on the above names can provide more information.

This virus spreads during web browsing on Windows PCs.  It downloads and runs a program from a website.  The program it downloads is apparently a variation on a Trojan called “Win32/IstBar”. Computer Associates also categorizes this program as Spyware, meaning it can capture personal information and transmit it to others.

My advice to you is that if your antivirus program detects this Trojan on your system, have it remove or delete the infected file.  Run another virus scan of your entire computer (all drives, all files, all directories) after doing that, since these Trojans often drop another “payload” (virus, program, etc.) on your system.  That other program is usually the dangerous one, and your antivirus software should pick it up.

It may also be worthwhile (for Windows users) to use a tool such as “Hijack This” to determine if there are any programs set to run at startup which should not be running.  (I can’t really advise you on specifically what should and should not be running at startup on your system, as each computer can be different and not everything running at startup is bad.)  Hitting “Control-Alt-Delete” to bring up the Task Manager and looking at the processes running on your system can be helpful as well.  Processes that are unfamiliar could be viruses, Trojans, or spyware running on your PC.  (Again, I can’t tell you which specific processes those might be, but you can usually do a search on each process name that appears in your list and often find out if it’s something safe or potentially dangerous.)  In any case, I don’t recommend disabling anything in Hijack This or killing anything in the Task Manager unless you’re sure you know what it is.

admin Windows Support java openstream trojan, java.downloader.openstream.a, openstream virus, trojan

I recently read about the “M4 Message Breaking Project“, which is a distributed computing experiment being done to crack some previously-undeciphered messages transmitted by the German military during World War II.  The messages were encrypted by one of the “Enigma” encoding machines, which the Germans thought were unbreakable, but which the Allies secretly had cracked soon after they went into widespread use.  During the period of time between the use of the “M3″ encryption machine and the much more robust “M4″ device, there was a period of time during which the Allies were unable to translate the messages the Germans were sending.  The M4 Project has 6 messages believed to be from this time period and is using “borrowed” computer time on a number of PCs and Macs around the world to decode these historical messages.

So far, the project has cracked one of the 6 messages, which was a message from German U-boat commander Hartwig Looks of U-264, indicating that he had been forced to submerge during an attack due to the enemy’s use of depth charges.  The message also provided the last known coordinates of the enemy vessel.

The current message been analyzed by the project has not yet been decoded as of this writing, though several passes over the “decoding space” have been made. 

I’m currently running the client on my home PCs when they’re not doing anything else for me.  They’ve contributed a number of “chunks” of analysis to the project already, with more delivered every few minutes/hours.

If you’re interested in contributing some of your own computers’ time to the project, all you need to do is download the client software, install it, and let it set to work.  The client software is quite well behaved.  It will generally only consume computing resources when your system isn’t doing something else, so you don’t tend to notice that it’s running your CPU at full-tilt.

admin Cool Web Sites decryption, Distributed computing, encryption, Enigma Machine, M4 Message Breaking, M4 Project, World War II, WWII