Sidewaysgravity Blog

If you were one of the unlucky ones like myself to order your game at BestBuy, you probably were not able to get the game until Monday the 27th while most preorders from gamestop were able to get the game the Saturday before. With that said, once I got it home and plugged it in I was pressed for time and skipped the update and went straight into the game. It was fun and smooth sailing, getting to know the easy controls and learning to jump, dress, stick, and all sorts of other things. After playing around for a while I ran the update and then it would let me connect to the servers to use the online funtions. This is where the frustration came into play. Day one the servers I think had a heart attack and since levels, friends, trophies, scores, menu system are all integrated to the online functionality, then if the network fails, the game fails.

I was constantly watching a frozen screen waiting to get into a menu that I would eventually have to get out of due to delays. Playing a game online was nearly impossible since it took to long to load any level. I was successfully able to invite some friends into our game where they were froze half the time and vice versa when we went to their game. All in all the first day was a fail for the network and a success for the game. Later that night the servers appeared to be turned off again and did not appear to be back on untill 2pm tuesday.

I did have a chance to play around online a little tuesday as the servers were back up, and I must say the game is a lot of fun and the online section is great!! So far I did not have any issue with the online system today, but that might just be due to the fact that it was 2 in the afternoon when most people are not online. Tonight will be the real test to see how the network does under stress… hopefully well.

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Today on my luch break I was surprised to read on Playstations official blog about a delay for the soon to be released LittleBigPlanet. Apparently a complaint was made about two specific phrases in one of the songs in the game. It contained two phrases taken from the Qur’an, which is a holy book for the Muslim faith. Although I will give Media Molecule credit for being sensative to their consumers and not wanting to be offensive, I do not fully agree with the need to delay the release date.

I have heard speculation that the song lyrics could just be a delay to give more time for a joint release of playstations Home along with LittleBigPlanet, but it is just pure speculation as to whether this is the case. To be honest, at this point I dont care about Home or its release.

LittleBigPlanet was set to hit the shelves on Monday, October 21st, just 3 days away, but has now been pushed back until the week of the 27th. I doubt their will be time or need to recall all the games and redistribute new ones. I think it is more likely that they will use the extra week to develope a patch for the game to be ready as soon as it hits the shelves.

If anyone gets the game and knows what they are looking for, I would be interested to know if it is something fixed in the patch or if they are recalling and redistributing the copies.

Click here to check out the Playstation Blog Article

Update. According to Media Molecules blog, they are going to replace the discs with a newer one and a patch has already been created and is ready to go. This still seems a little overkill for some song lyrics. You can check out their blog post here.

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With only a week before LittleBigPlanet hits the shelves, the people at Media Molecule have upped the excitement not only with the limited beta, but also showing off some new costumes for sackboy, the mgs4 costume being my favorite. To learn more check out mediamolecule’s website.

Update: These costumes as posted on the playstation blog will be considered a premium and cost $1.99 each! Two thumbs down for that one Sony.

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During the past week or so the country has seen a drop in gas prices that hasn’t been seen for a long time. I have been fortunate to live in Wichita (KS) where it is said to have the cheapest prices in the nation. I have seen in just a matter of weeks the price go from $3.50+ to it’s current price of $2.49.

While most people give a sigh of relief, it makes me think about why it is cheaper. In the last few weeks to my knowledge their has been no new oil fields tapped into, at least nothing that would change global demand. If the supply demand has not changed, then why have the prices dropped? The situation makes me wonder why gas prices were so high in the first place.

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One thing that has bothered me with the iPod touch since I got it was how to pause the music while I was working within an app. It wasn’t until this morning that I discovered by accident how to access your volume, play, pause and skip to next and previous songs.

By double tapping the home button from any program or even the home screen you can get a small mini navigation tool for your music. If you haven’t found this yet I hope of helps to enjoy your iPod, and if you already knew about it I’m sure your wondering why it took me so long to finnaly figure it out.

If you know about any other helpful tips or tricks for the iPod, please me me know.

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Over the last few months the need to know how to use paypal on a basic and advanced level has come up several times so I decided to take the time to get to know paypal a little better. Although the process was “fairly” simple, there did not seem to be a real easy step by step process to follow to get things put together. At times I had at least 3 to 4 different development documents opened trying to crossreference them to see what to do. In the coming weeks I will be providing a multi part Guide on how to get going with paypal, from starting an account to implementing the final product.

read more »

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Outlook could not connect to the server

Recently I encountered a problem with setting up emails at a large corporation with email hosted through mediatemple. The computers initially were able to connect, send and receive messages without a problem. But after a day or two we noticed some problems with the email. When the computers would try and connect, about 50% of the time they would error out with a message saying the server disconnected and you could not send or receive emails. This would last for about 5 minutes and then go away as if nothing happened.

There were a couple things I found out while troubleshooting this problem which helped to lead to the eventual solution.

• no matter how much I tried, I could not duplicate the error on a machine at a different physical location.
• there were no anti virus programs interrupting the connection.
• when one machine would get the error, all the machines would get it.
• I could get email from a different domain through mediatemple at the same time it received the error for the first.
• There was no problem with the internet connection while the symptoms occurred.

Once I saw that all machines received the error at the same time I thought that their might be something limiting the amount of connections to the server. I called mediatemple to see if their was anything that might limit the connections to the email and sure enough there was. They gave me a link to a knowledge base article about how to increase the maxperip setting for the imap. The only problem is we werent using imap, it was pop3. They said that it didnt matter that it was for imap, it was used to control both… but it did matter and it did not fix the problem.

After some more searching around I found that there was a way to set the maximum connections per ip for pop3 email. The file was in the same folder and named pop3d. Essentially it was the same change mediatemple recommended but specific to pop3 email.

Once the change was made, and I restarted the mail services, the error went away and has only shown its head once in the last month and it immediately went away. If you are experiencing the same issue than the article in the knowledge base for resetting the imap courier connections is a great article and you can follow it almost word for word. All you need to do is make the same changes in the pop3d file instead of the imap file specified.

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One of the great things about the ps3 is the ability to download demos and try out different games before you buy them. With the 80 gb hardrive, space is not an issue, so over 50 games can become a burden to sort through. I have wanted a sorting feature for a while but have not been able to do so until tonight. The feature I wanted had been available since I bought it, but I never knew.

To sort the games into folders use the following steps.

1. Select the Game that you want to sort.
2. Press Triangle button and Select Info from the menu
3. The Album Field should be highlight, select it to edit.
4. Enter a name for the Album (This will be the folder it will be stored in).
5. Once done press circle “O” to return to the game menu.
6. Repeat the process for all the games, sorting them into albums. (ex. Demos, Arcade, Racing,  Shooter)
7. Once you have edited all the albums, select triangle from the game menu and choose Sort By option.
8. Choose to sort by Album.

Finished. You should now have all of your games sorted into the albums that you set up. If you do not specify an album for a game, it will be put into an Unspecified folder.

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It seems like the more I watch what is happening in the economy of our country the more it appears that no one really knows what is happening. Only days after a bill to inject 700 billion dollars into the system and the economy is lower than it has been since back in 2000.

It amazes me that after the urgency to get this bill passed, the constant messages of how important and vital it was, the government seems to be sitting on it’s hands trying to figure out what to do with it. It’s like they never thought they were going to get the money. With 700 billion to spend, now what? Once again we have jumped into something without thinking it through.

If this doesn’t sound familiar it should. It wasn’t very long ago that our President told about the urgency that we go to war in Iraq, only to find out later that it wasn’t planned out. I’m not the type to hide my decisions, I fully agreed that we needed to go into Iraq, and I still think that decision was right. But where we failed in Iraq was in the planning phase, to fully think things through.

We are now not even ten years down the road and we are jumping once again head first in to the pool. The problem is that no one thought ahead to fill the pool. I agree that some sort of action needs to be taken to help the economy, but it should be thoroughly planned out. They should have an idea of where the money will go even before they ask for it. If they didn’t know ahead of time what they would do, then how did they get the 700 billion dollar figure.

I will give credit to the citizens of the country, I think if it was up to them the bill would have never passed. That was one of the reasons that it failed to make it through the first time. I don’t know that people are necessarily against the bailout, nobody wants the economy to fail. Even though most people want all the companies that got us into this mess to suffer, overall I think we just want to see this planned out and done right the first time.

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I’ve had my iPod touch for a couple of days now and found another reason to like my Airport Extreme.

While in the parking lot heading home I realized I had a close to full strength signal on my iPod from my base station which was a couple hundred feet away, five stories up, and in the corner of an old brick building.

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