MrKniceGuy.com

Author: mrkniceguy

  • Ninja’s are awesome. Ryu is THE Awesome.

    Ninja Gaiden II

    I had a chance to played the Ninja Gaiden II Demo last night for a few minutes. I was doing some work on the ‘box (don’t ask) and needed something with some serious GPU pull but without any spinning media. Well, I happened to see the new demo for Ninja Impossible x2 and thought I’d give it a go. Not only did it work for my test, the game is super sweet! Having played Gaiden on the Xbox I moved smoothly into the control system, pleasantly surprised when I didn’t die once during the whole demo (I have a feeling that was on purpose, it didn’t get the nickname Ninja Impossible for being a cakewalk).

    The battle system is awesome. Fighting 10 guys is a challenge, but you feel Ryu’s power as a ninja in your hands. A lot of the elements from the first Xbox version are back, with the item store and save locations being roughly the same. The demo did it’s trick though because by the end I wanted more.. and then they cut me off wanting.

    So far the game has received decent reviews. Definitely for fans of the series and not a casual gamer. I will be picking it up eventually but will probably wait for the first price drop.

    Ninja Gaiden II is rated M for Mature.

    M Rating

  • A little history lesson for you

    Hulu (streaming TV shows! Sweet!) has the Colbert Report in full episode format. I had to see what was on last night and found this little gem. Enjoy.

    So there you have it. Solid proof that we have already done the Black President thing. I wonder if we’ve had a Hispanic President and missed that too?

  • Twitter. Fun but unreliable. For now.

    Well, I have had a lot of fun using Twitter over the last few weeks. Not only have I found some fun people to follow (no close friends yet… until Jvanti starts updating!) but updating from anywhere via text message is pretty cool. I can post an update on my way home from work and let people know what game I’m planing on playing that night. It’s all great… when it works.

    But lately it seems Twitter has been experiencing some problems. With some serious technical hurdles, they seem to be going down for small amounts of time at least once a day. Lot’s posts have been popping up regarding their frustrations with the service. I was beginning one of those “down with Twitter” posts when I started writing this article… until I found out some interesting things about the service.  While some of these facts are history (they are upgrading the service as we speak) they can still affect Twitter and are interesting (on an Uber-Mega-Geeky level!)

    1. Twitter runs (ran?) off of a single MySQL server replicated onto two slaves. I don’t even really know what that means but it sounds really hard.
    2. Did you just say 3 machines run Twitter? Yes. Used by lots of people, you’d expect a little more hardware.
    3. If one of those servers goes down, it is caught by a real person, monitoring the database, and is switched and repaired by hand. Then the failed database is rebuilt. This can shut the site down for up to half an hour.
    4. Someone (no names were mentioned) was responsible for some major outages. Internal drama but the Twitter team is quick to point out “Twitter is a team—we share responsibility for our victories as well as our mistakes.” It is mentioned this person is a former employee though.

    So the next time you see this image with the notice:

    Twitter Whale

    be thinking about the poor guy on the other end, trying to rebuild that database.

    [Photo by Florian]