Dishonored

Last night I finished playing through Dishonored, a game I'd been wanting to play since its release but hadn't got around to until this past week. My verdict on it is that it's an absolute masterstroke. It pretty much perfectly blended together the stealth elements of Thief with the combat/power management of Bioshock, both of which are games I've played and enjoyed.

It was interesting to see that I got a different ending than my wife as I'd largely gone for the 'low chaos' route of trying to not kill people, whereas she'd gone through and had ended up on a 'high chaos' route. Characters reacted differently towards me and apparently even the ending part of the game played out differently for me because I hadn't gone through killing everyone. While good/bad systems have been in games for a while now, it was interesting to see this one play out as I genuinely had no idea that it would have that sort of effect on the game.

The level of choice as to how you played through the game was also impressive. Once you get out of the 'hub' area and off to the area where you're going to carry out your task you pretty much have free reign as to how you go about it. For instance, on the last level my wife opted to sneak as best she could through the front defences, which was problematic due to the number of guards and electric fences that were about, whereas when I attempted the same thing, I snuck my way around to one side and found an outlet pipe that I snuck into, bypassing pretty much all of the fuss. Then, once you reach your target, you get the option to outright kill them, or work out a way to take them out of the picture non-lethally.

There aren't many games I can think of that give you such a level of choice when playing through it, but Dishonored was a welcome change and while I don't feel another game in the series is needed, hopefully this isn't the last we see of this style of gameplay.

IIS7 doesn't like +'s in your URL's

So today I've been trying to sort out my apt mirror for Ubuntu having just moved it to a Windows server. The netinstall would start fine then keep saying there was a problem with certain packages and I couldn't work out why.

After a bit of detective work I realised that it's IIS having issues with the + signs in the package names. A bit more detective work and I found this workaround:

Request limits and URL processing

The following changes result due to additional restrictions on how IIS processes incoming requests and their URLs.

11) Request URLs containing unencoded “+” characters in the path (not querystring) is rejected by default

You will receive HTTP Error 404.11 – Not Found: The request filtering module is configured to deny a request that contains a double escape sequence.

This error occurs because IIS is by default configured to reject attempts to doubly-encode a URL, which commonly represent an attempt to execute a canonicalization attack.

Workaround:

1) Applications that require the use of the “+” character in the URL path can disable this validation by setting the allowDoubleEscaping attribute in thesystem.webServer/security/requestFiltering configuration section in the application’s web.config. However, this may make your application more vulnerable to malicious URLs:

As it says, I wouldn't use this for an externally facing site as it can make it less secure, but mine is for internal use only.

FIXED: DNS resolution in Windows 7 when connected to a Linux-based PPTP server

Right, I racked my brains over this one for the past few days unable to working why when I was connecting to the Linux-based PPTP (pptpd) server I put together in the office I couldn't resolve any hostnames without using the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name).

I read various posts on many sites with people having the same problem in Windows XP or Vista and a registry fix which was even suggested by Microsoft to solve the problem, alas though I'm using Windows 7 and this didn't work.

After much chin-rubbing and head scratching I found the answer!

Go into your VPN's connection properties and into the Networking tab. Go into the properties for IPv4 and click on Advanced. Go into the DNS tab and enter your DNS suffix in the box near the bottom labelled 'DNS suffix for this connection'.

The next time you connect you should find you can now ping/access hosts using just the standard hostname.