Extracting Torrent from StarCraft 2 Installer

starcraft II installer

It’s a week before every certified geek in the world would drop everything to get their Zerg on.

Now, a lot of people have already reserved their copy of StarCraft II from DataBlitz, but I’m more of a digital download guy: less clutter for my room, the better. Fortunately, Blizzard is now using this opportunity to sell the new Battle.net as a viable digital distribution platform just like what Valve did when they made Half-Life 2 a Steam exclusive.

Unfortunately, as with Steam half a decade ago, the current version of Battle.net is crap in terms of actually distributing the data. Unlike Steam’s high-speed global CDN, Battle.net uses BitTorrent. Now that would be nice if only their BitTorrent client isn’t crap — the one bundled with their installers gives you limited settings on how the torrent is downloaded and shared.

Thankfully, it’s easy to extract the torrent file from their installers. All you need is a Hex editor.

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Gmail powered e-mail addresses through Google Apps

I’ve finally found some time in my busy schedule to post something about the recent changes in this site.

my business card

As part of making my “freelance” status semi-official, I’m currently migrating stuff from www.bryanbibat.com to this site, www.bryanbibat.net. You might have noticed that I’ve already merged my old blogs to this single blog as well as modified the links in my portfolio pages to point to here.

Another change is the shift from using my Gmail/Yahoo Mail account to bry@bryanbibat.net, and this is what I’ll be talking about today.

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Agile Software Development

I never got around to post the follow-up article on Lean and how it relates to software engineering. Now, over 7 months and a huge scandal that made people skeptical about Toyota’s lean manufacturing later, here’s the post on Agile software development.

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Robot Zombie Software Developer!

mirrored sites

As mentioned in my earlier Tweet, I’ve begun streamlining my sites to make them more functional instead of just being yet another outlet for my thoughts (we’ve got social networking sites for that).

First thing on the list was to replace my Sweetcron Lifestream with a single page portfolio. The reason behind this is simple: when people go to my website, they would expect to see information about me and not a stream of all of my social networking site activity.

As to the design of the page, I only had two main points to keep in mind:

  • It has to immediately convey “I’m Bryan Bibat, software engineer. Here are my works, and if you want to hire me, contact me here.” Anything more than that would make my site less useful.
  • It has to reflect my identity.

The identity part is a bit tricky, though I could summarize it as “simple, yet subtle”. As you can see from the redesigned bryanbibat.com, everything is simple. No flashy graphics, just a clean one-page HTML site. The subtle part is the inclusion of jQuery for the scrolling and the lightbox — both unexpected features.

I think the more subtle (or should I say, more “bry” :P) part of the whole redesign is the “mirror” gimmick. The image above would spoil you already but anyway, here’s the gimmick: visit both bryanbibat.com and (my newly rented site) bryanbibat.net.

Yup, each is an opposite version of the other. The symbolism behind that, I leave to the reader. Heck, I might just be screwing around with the visitors and there might not even be a deeper meaning behind it. :D

The fun part? The HTML code for both sites are exactly the same.

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That’s pretty much the biggest change that I’m going to do for this streamlining thing. The other stuff is mostly invisible to my network anyway.

A Battlefield player plays Modern Warfare…

MW2 and BC2

I’ve talked about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 even before it hit the stores. Given that I am one of the people who actually boycotted the game, I never got the chance to play it. Instead, I chose to wait for a couple of months to support a game that actually supports the PC gaming community: Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

By chance, Activision decided to let the game be free this weekend. They also lowered the price, possibly both as a bid to deal a blow to the continuous migration of players from their game to the competitor’s, or as a last minute move to promote the game before shit hits the fan. Whatever the reason, the key here is that I get to play MW2 and compare it with BC2.

So how does the “biggest launch in entertainment history” compared to the current underdog?

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