Struggling between Choices

This article has been originally posted on my blog of Gamespot(UK).

Last year when I came to the UK, soon after then I got me a new Xbox 360 from Game.co.uk as well as a Dell desktop after Christmas. The desktop was intended to run scientific simulations for my own project in the first place, but I thought it'd never hurt to consider adding an awesome graphics card. So that's why I chose XPS 430 with a Radeon HD4850.

Now here comes the problem. As people know cross-platform videogame has become a common phenomenon. Almost every highly hyped game, which is supposed to attract as many gamers as possible, now goes to cross-platform for attracting more audience from the potential consumer pool. So for people having multiple platforms, they have to choose one particular platform to play each game. Mostly this doesn't bring any trouble, in my opinion, unless you have a PC with other high-definition consoles.

The problem with a PC is its flexibility of hardware. A user can think of any combination of hardware subject to some constraints, e.g., budget, hardware availability, etc. When I was looking for a desktop at the moment, one of my consideration was to play Crysis. Eventually this Dell machine proves to be capable of this task. This also means it is capable of beating the performance of Xbox 360. Then owning this PC somehow complicates the consideration of choosing a videogame between a PC version or a Xbox 360 version.

The fact is the PC version of videogame is always cheaper than its console counterparts. Choosing the PC version is more economic, and I have better graphics performance too. Sounds pretty good, eh, doesn't it? On the other hand, we PC gamers all well know there are many exclusive issues in PC gaming, for example, the annoying DRM and the hardware compatibility. Sometimes I just wonder, why should I spend so much time to make a game run on my PC? Why not just go to a console version and let the online service deal with other things for me? I did a lot patching and setting configuration by myself before, but at the time I only played PC games and didn't worry about such things. I got no choice. I had to make it work on my PC before enjoying the game.

Now I have more choices, and I have to weigh all the pros and cons between these choices, just like all other things in my daily life. This is exactly why I feel so annoyed and be struggling between the choices. I simply want to have fun with the games. I hope the whole experience can be separated from that in real life. When I start thinking about the budget, the technical issue, the hardware performance, and so on, before really playing the game, more or less it has already buried my passion and enthusiasm to the game. As so that the gaming emerges with all other daily experience, eventually it is not that fun and interesting. Perhaps sooner or later, I will give up gaming at all one day.

Services.exe Eating All Memory under Win XP SP3

Yesterday I encountered a strange situation in which all the 2 GB RAM of my laptop, with Windows XP SP3 installed, was completely depleted. I found there was a process, services.exe, steadily consuming more and more memory, and I suspected that there was a memory leak under this process. I recalled that I just installed COMODO System Cleaner a few days ago, so I thought this issue could be related to this application or something it had done, which was a bad sign since it involved registry cleaning.

I tried searching for some information on the Internet. Thanks for the dual-boot layout I built on my laptop, I rebooted into Ubuntu and looked for possible causes of this distracting problem. The reason that I felt this was very distracted was that in just five minutes my laptop could be very sluggish, even nearly disabled, because all the 2 GB RAM was occupied and the system was using virtual memory.

Fortunately I found some clues soon after the searching. Some users reported the same problem after updating COMODO System Cleaner and receiving Windows update. For some unknown reasons, a memory leak is built under such a condition. I felt this could not be a coincidence that I also had COMODO System Cleaner installed and got Windows update before this problem happened on my laptop. The apparent solution for me was to uninstall COMODO System Cleaner and fix registry by using CCleaner after that. Then, after reboot, the system is back to what it should be and works perfectly. COMODO System Cleaner is not vital for my daily usage under Windows XP, thus I decide not to re-install this application back to the system.

It is not the first time that I find two applications clash to each other. For example, sometimes Avira AntiVir and PC Tools Spyware Doctor falsely reported a Trojan found, which was just a normal file from another application. But a clash causing memory leak is much worse than that, because this can make system disabled. Hopefully I will not have the same problem in the future like this.

Academics To Increase Recognition through Better Web Design and Technologies

Ever since the development of World Wide Web, having a personal web page has become a must for many academics. The web page can introduce one's research interests, collaborators, contact information, etc. This is a very practical approach to gain some recognition on the Internet, especially regarding that these web pages are usually hyperlinked from those of the department or the university. Academics usually have access to resources of web server in their university. IT service might grant them free web space to create their own web pages as they wish. Sometimes, IT service could also provide some awesome tools for that purpose. Still, it has been bothered me for years that most of the academics' web pages just plain suck, and they seem not to embrace new technologies, like XML and Flash plug-in, at all that corporations have already extensively adopted on commercial web pages.

The first issue of these web pages is that many of them are bugged by bad designs. This could be understandable since, after all, most academics are not professional in web design. However, sometimes while seeing these academics' web pages, I feel so astonished that how one can lack a basic aesthetic sense to such a terrible, unbelievable limit. Unbalanced font sizes, ill-organised frames, meaningless background and font effects..., there are tonnes of problems can be pointed out on many academics' web pages.

Indeed, academics are not supposed to be good at web design, therefore the remedy for this issue should fall on IT service of the university. For instance, IT service could recruit web designers or incorporate with professional web design studios to establish a general, universal template for web pages used in the university. In this way, academics can use the template to crate their own web pages by merely adding content without worrying about the layout. The personal web profile ePortfolio of the University of Warwick is such an example. This approach is just exactly the same as how blog service providers like Wordpress and Blogger do.

Another issue is related to the fancy term Web 2.0. While the conventional web page based on HTML focuses on providing information to the readers, only a few academics probably have thought of adopting new technologies to interact with the readers of their web pages. Some of the academics have already embraced new techonologies to collaborate with each other through blogging, twitter, and many other rising format of academic writing. It is a pitty that one does not use the resources provided by the university to increase the extent of the web content.

Imagine you, a post-graduate student, are able to track research updates from a Nobel prize winner through RSS reader. Imagine you, an academic staff, regularly update your reserch progresses on your web pages in the form of blog, and many other academics leave comment to exchange their ideas with you. They find your web page becuase they are looking at the same thing, and they just see your blog entries, thanks for the high page rank with your university, on the first page of search results by Google. There are more exciting possibilities of progressing academic research through adopting these new technologies.

Perhaps many are worried about web abuse, spam, or vicious competition between researchers, so only a few academics tend to share their ideas openly on the Internet. Perhaps many are just too busy to learn the way of improving web pages and adopting new technologies. When World Wide Web emerged from horizon, academics (more specifically, scientists) were the first group to embrace it. I am wondering then why our pace is so slow to catch the newest wave, while it seems the whole world has caught up the trend.