The collective of sites located within 030 were recently hacked altering code within pages. The malicious code has been removed from all pages and steps have been taken to prevent this from happening again. I suspect access was gained through a compromised WordPress Plugin. Possibly YAPB (Yet Another Photo Blog). Please be patient as all the sites are brought back up to speed.

Holy hell, after attempting this mission for the Sunshadow Syndicate for over an hour, I finally came across the solution while browsing a forum. Like myself, another gamer was beginning to think the mission was bugged. Turns out, we were piloting the wrong ship. Unlike other missions, this one doesn’t put you in the correct ship if you happen to be flying the wrong one. The wrong one being a Specter. The description of the ship says that you’ll heal yourself when hijacking another ship… what sounds like a useful ability. However, this ability also prevents you from taking control of the ship you’re hijacking, thus preventing you from completing this particular mission. Change ships and problem solved. You’ll be able to hijack and take control of a Consortium ship. I found the easiest place to do so was the Frozen Wastes.

Note, there is also no need to put any faction points into the Hijacking ability. The mission gives you the necessary requirements. After completing the mission, you will need to invest points if you wish to hijack again, although there doesn’t appear to be any value to hijacking so you’re points are probably better spent elsewhere.

• Kinetic Combat 1 (34/0/7)
• Kinetic Combat 2 – AOE (32/0/9) - focused on Force Breach and Slow Time
• Kinetic Combat 3 – Spinning Kick (29/0/7) +5 - trades AoE techniques in favor or Spinning Kick. 5 points left over to either maximize attack (Expertise) or defense (Mental Fortitude). 2 additional points could be put back in to Force Focus boost Force Breach.
• Balance 1
• Infiltration 1

• Annihilation 1 (31/8/2) – Rupture
• Annihilation 2 (31/10/0) – Fury
• Carnage 1
• Carnage 2 (5/35/1)

The new site for Extelligence Internet Services has gone live. This was my first project of what will hopefully be a successful line of many more projects to come. Pleased with how it turned out and more importantly, the owners are thrilled with the new site. Also, the first site I’ve done that’s fully responsive. Really liking not having to build different applications for different devices. @media is the best.

Little update to what Google’s doing. Music went live recently. I don’t believe you need an invite any longer and they increased storage from 10,000 songs to 20,000.

Honestly, I stopped trying to use it since it was taking ages to upload my library. If you have the time and patience to upload your library, congratulations, you have your entire music library anywhere you have internet. Note, that there is still no way to download music so you can’t use it as a backup to your local files. Listening through a web browser works well enough and the mobile app is decent. Actually plays music — unlike Spotify. But unlike Spotify, you actually need to own the music to have anything to listen to.

After a couple hours uploading music, creating playlists and generally messing around I have some immediate thoughts on Google’s new cloud music service (still in beta).

Things I like:

• Your personal collection of music available on any computer anywhere there’s an internet connection.
• iTunes Genius-esque, automatic mix creation based off of one song.
• Scrobbles to Last.fm if you install a small extension and use either Chrome or Firefox with Greasemonkey.
• Free… so far. Google says the service is free while in beta. I don’t know any information as to what will happen afterward.
• Streaming. Unlike iTunes Match, which actually downloads the song to the computer, Google Music becomes your music library. Regardless of the device you play the music from, the music is always stored and streamed at Google.

Things I don’t like:

• No means of discerning which songs to upload and which not to. Not a problem unless your library exceeds the 10,000 song max – like mine does.
• Uploading your library takes a long time. It’s based off your internet upload speed (which is usually a lot slower than the advertised download speed for your ISP). 4 hours for 1200 songs so far. This is disappointing since I assumed it would have some kind of library already in place that it could pull from according to what you already owned. If Google didn’t have it, then it would upload yours off your hard-drive, ala iTunes Match.
• Some songs won’t upload. I’ve found that those songs that I purchased when iTunes first came online that still have DRM won’t get uploaded as well as some file formats such as m4a. Note that m4p does work. This also means that you can’t take your friend’s music library with copy protection and upload it as your own.
• No way to export songs. From what I’ve learned, I believe this is coming. As for now, there is no way to download a song back to your hard-drive, unlike iTunes Match – which operates more as a true Cloud. This means it won’t work as a way of freeing up hard-drive space or recovering your library should your hard-drive fail or computer get stolen. You can’t upload your music then delete it off your computer and expect to get it back again later – which you could be able to do with iTunes Match. Hell, I don’t even know if deleting a song on your hard-drive deletes the song on Google. I hope not! However, this feature should be coming in the near future.
• Instant Mixes seems shoddy at best right now. For many songs it hasn’t been able to create a mix and the ones that it has been able to create don’t always seem to go well together. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t feel like Muse goes very well with Ben Folds Five.
• No control over meta-data once a song has been uploaded.
• Limited song ratings. Either you like it or you don’t. Which begs the question: why would you own a song that you’d give a thumbs down to?
• Gaps between songs. I’m assuming this is just one of the pitfalls of internet streaming.

So how does it stack up to other music players…

iTunes
I know there’s a lot of people that dislike it but to me, iTunes is still the holy grail of music players for Macs. Even against other PC options it stacks up near the top. With a plethora of meta-data options to edit, ways to sort and organize, as well as Genius mixes of variable length, iTunes does a lot right. Of course, if you’re using an iPhone or an iPod, there’s a good chance you’re using iTunes already and need a valid reason to switch. iTunes major flaw is that it’s restricted to a single computer. It’s library data can’t be easily transfered between computers so keeping a singular library on multiple computers is nigh impossible (without additional hit-or-miss 3rd-party software). iTunes Home Sharing tried to solve some of that as will iTunes Match. But both of these services require the music to be downloaded and still DRM free or authorized.

I can see Google Music being a nice supplement to how I listen to music but it won’t replace iTunes. Really it just means I don’t need to copy my library to other computers any longer or manage multiple libraries. Which is really worth it’s weight in gold. I’m mostly interested in seeing how Google handles changes I make to songs on my hard-drive. Will it pick up meta-data changes automatically? Will it automatically see the change but think that the change has created a unique song and upload it as such, thus creating a duplicate? Will is simply ignore the change completely until I delete it off of Google and re-upload manually?

Spotify
As is, I feel like this is Google’s closest competition. Like Google, Spotify scans your iTunes library (or other music library) and imports everything so you can listen from other devices. Spotify will also import iTunes playlists and it doesn’t upload anything. Which makes initially using it much faster but also means that if Spotify’s servers don’t have it, you can’t listen to that song anywhere else nor can you use Spotify as a Cloud backup server. The free version of Spotify is advertising based and limits the type of devices you can play music on. Unlike Google, you can’t simply play music in a web browser. You need to download the app. When you subscribe to premium services you get the option to play music while offline and play music on mobile devices such as Android or iPhones. With Spotify there’s no way to automatically create mixes of similar music based off of one song. I really love this feature which is one reason why I still love iTunes. So Google wins there. On the flip side, Google only plays music that you’ve uploaded, thus proving you own it. Whereas Spotify will play virtually anything, which explains the subscription fees and advertising. Ad there’s the major draw for Spotify (and Grooveshark for that matter): whether or not you already own it, if it’s on their servers they’ll let you listen to it.

Grooveshark
At this point we’re starting to move away from what Google Music is intended for. Grooveshark simply plays whatever you want. It doesn’t care about music you own and it doesn’t care about exposing you to similar artists. It is web-based however which makes it more accessible than Spotify but it’s also dependent on Flash which is beginning to decline in popularity and support. Grooveshark could very well play your entire library if your library is popular enough and playlists can be created and saved if you create an account.

Last.fm and Pandora
Finally, I’m going to include these two internet radio services. At this point, radio is completely beyond the realm of Google Music. I wish it wasn’t. I would love to be able to make a mix based off of one song that incorporated music I own plus new stuff. Internet radio is great for discovery or when you don’t really care what you’re listening to but sucks when you want to be specific. So for now, Google Music offers nothing in terms of listening to music that you don’t already own.

It’s important to remember that this is still quite new and still a Beta product. There’s going to be a lot of changes while bugs are worked out and features are added.

If you’re finding that your older plugins don’t appear in Photoshop CS5 you may need to run Photoshop in 32-bit mode. On a Mac just Get Info on the Photoshop application and select the checkbox that says “open in 32-bit mode.” On Windows choose the Photoshop application from the appropriate directory (x86 for 33-bit). Visit photoshop cs5 plug-ins