Digital IBMer 2014 – Context and History

As you (maybe) know, I work in IBM on development and support of Learning Management System. Every year we are faced with challenge of so called Digital IBMer course. It’s course which educates IBMers on the latest cybersecurity threats, and all IBM employees need to go through it every year. From our perspective that means few thousands unique users in addition to standard daily load, and usually all those users try to make the course in about same timeframe (1-2 peak hours).

Digital IBMer 2012 was mainly about tuning our WebSphere App Server and DB2 configuration. During Digital IBMer 2013 shared proxies were the main blocker (there is a limit of incoming connections for each application).

For this year we worked pretty hard since last October to make whole environment ready. We’ve got our own dedicated proxy server, we’ve ran extensive performance testing, there was setup a super-cool monitoring tool ITCAM to help us analyze the system, we’ve added some other monitors on OS level based on various performance analysis experts advices, and in cooperation with AIX, DB2 and WAS L2 support we’ve tuned our environment settings. Simply said – we’ve made everything ready.

This should have been first year without any issues… 🙂

Issue with killing the Kayran in The Witcher 2

While playing one of the best RPG of nowadays The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (version 2.1) I’ve hit an interesting issue.

I was fighting the Kayran and chopped of all smaller tentacles, but when I’ve jumped on the big tentacle and the QTE has started (that part where you need to push button fast to climb) and when the bar was full, I’ve expected the bridge to come down, but nothing happened. I’ve fallen down anyway. I had to do the whole exercise over again and again.

This note in forum helped me to find the root cause. It looks like to be a bug – a frame rate issue. After lowering resolution to 1024×768 everything worked smooth.
NOTE: Your game resolution, not your monitor resolution.

Victorious – Inspirational Sport Video

 

“This kid’s gonna be the best kid in the world. This kid’s gonna be somebody better than anybody I ever knew.”
— Rocky Balboa.

“I’ma show you how great I am!”
— Muhammad Ali

“Don’t ever let somebody tell you, you can’t to something. Not even me… Alright? You got a dream, you gotta protect it. People can’t do something themselves, they wanna tell you that you can’t do it. You want something? Go get it. Period.”
— Christopher Gardner

“Great moments… are born from great opportunity. And that’s what you have here, tonight, boys. That’s what you’ve earned here tonight.”
— Herb Brooks

“I have wrestled with an alligator. That’s right. I have wrestled with an alligator. I done tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail. That’s bad!
Only last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalised a brick! I’m so mean I make medicine sick!
Bad dude!
Bad, fast! Fast! Fast! Last night I cut the light off in my bedroom, hit the switch and was in the bed before the room was dark.
All you chumps are gonna bow when I whoop him, all of you, I know you got him, I know you’ve got him picked, but the man’s in trouble.
I’ma show you how great I am!”

— Muhammad Ali

“Inch by inch, play by play. Until we’re finished. We’re in hell right now, gentlemen. Believe me. And, we can stay here, get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb outta hell… one inch at a time.”
— Tony D’Amato

“And for a long time now you’ve been hearing me talk about being perfect. Well I want you to understand something. To me, being perfect is not about that scoreboard out there. It’s not about winning. It’s about you and your relationship to yourself and your family and your friends. Being perfect is about being able to look your friends in the eye and know that you didn’t let them down, because you told them the truth. And that truth is that you did everything that you could. There wasn’t one more thing that you could’ve done. Can you live in that moment, as best you can, with clear eyes and love in your heart? With joy in your heart? If you can do that gentlemen, then you’re perfect.”
— Coach Gary Gaines

“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done! Now if you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain’t you! You’re better than that!”
— Rocky Balboa

“I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.”
— Vince Lombardi

Problems with Batman: Arkham Asylum

I understand that game developers need to protect their piece of work against pirates, etc. However, I am sorry, but I can’t accept if I spend my money on buying original version of the game that I will spend more than one day just by trying to make it run!?! Exactly this happened with my PC version of Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

To make it clear, I am running Windows 7 SP1 Professional 64bit on Intel i5 CPU with 4 GB RAM and nVidia GeForce 310M graphics card. And following steps helped me to make my game running.
Continue reading Problems with Batman: Arkham Asylum