I’m not a videophile but I do have a HDTV and since I work for SCEA, it’s not surprising that I have a Playstation 3. Since Sony is one of the members of the Blu-ray Disc Association it was no shock that they wanted to use Blu-ray for the disc format of the Playstation 3 which was released in late 2006. The other format, HD-DVD had its supporters, including Microsoft which released an add-on drive for their Xbox 360 gaming console which is normally DVD based.

The competition between the two formats also affected the movie studios who had to decide which format to get behind. Paramount supports HD-DVD exclusively and Disney is exclusively Blu-ray. Most other studios, took a wait-and-see attitude while the consumers were forced to take a gamble on one or the other or abstain until a victor was decided. Each format had its advantages and certainly had their own share of supporters and detractors. They kept their eyes on each other with player cost and movie prices remaining in-line with one another. It wasn’t looking good and many were predicting a protracted battle.

That battle may well and be over as yesterday, Warner Brothers which was remaining neutral and supporting both formats decided that starting June 1, will be releasing their new and back-catalog titles in the Blu-ray format exclusively. It’s not set in stone, but I can’t think of how Blu-ray won’t end up being the only hi-def format by the end of 2008.

I’m happy since not only does my employer have a vested interest, I have largely committed to the format with my decision to purchase all three Pirates of the Carribean movies and the Harry Potter box set in Blu-ray. Granted, they wouldn’t stop playing if Blu-ray ended up losing, but I didn’t want to have to think about getting a new disc player and have become quite accustomed to seeing movies all purdy-like.

I don’t write about work too often and that’s usually because I’m not sure what crosses the line of sharing too much. Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about it if someone else makes things public first.

SCEA (my employer), started a public blog a little bit ago and a recent article talked about the upcoming title, Warhawk, and how many of their game servers are running on off-the-shelf PS3’s. While not directly by my effort (I don’t support online games) it has been really cool seeing the setup get installed in the data center that is all of 100 feet from where I sit.

Please read the article as it give some additional details and links to some more pictures. The ones they used are o.k. but I think they could have done better.

Behind The Curtain: The Warhawk Servers

But wait. It’s not my fault. Really! I noticed this past Thursday that our Internet connection at home was a bit spotty. I looked at our provider‘s status page but didn’t see anything applicable. I figured that our router had gotten a little wonky which happens on occasion and resetting it did improve things. I also got quite a few bounced messages of spam. That, too, isn’t too uncommon as the sending address for spam messages are often forged so I do occasionally get bounces to spam message that I didn’t send.

Friday morning, I found that I had received thousands of bounces and that our connection was almost unusable again. I logged in from work and stopped the mail server to investigate further. It turns out, that not only was the sending address forged, someone was using my mail server to originate spam. Ugh!

I pulled out my Postfix book and was able to tighten up the sending restrictions to only allow valid sending addresses (it was previously allowing anything@peay.us). I then had to clean up the thousands of queued up messages before I could start up the mail server again.

It took the better part of the morning which I feel bad since I was at work. I suppose it counts as professional development, but I can’t help but feel a bit embarrassed that the personal mail server of a Systems Administrator was originating spam. At least it wasn’t an open relay. I do know better than that!