Slack Aliss's Dump

A proper apology!

2012-01-20T13:09:00.002Z

It's a long time since anyone from Holywood actually impressed me, but today Mark Wahlberg gave an apology for some stupid remarks he made in a magazine interview (http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/16627609) and here's the important part: "I deeply apologise to the families of the victims that my answer came off as insensitive. It was certainly not my intention." (my emphasis).

Far too many people's apologies replace the work 'that' with 'if'. They just don't get it. If you've offended someone, you're the one at fault, you're the one apologising... so apologise. Don't imply that the offended party are at fault for being sensitive (as suggested by the use of 'if').

Re-read the above apology with 'if' and you'll see what I mean.

Cancellation of Nimrod MRA4

2011-01-27T21:15:00.002Z

Wow, a Tory government has actually cut something from the UK defence budget that it actually made sense to cut: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/27/nimrod_scrappage/ (not that that makes it any more likely that I'll ever vote for a Tory candidate at an election should I ever have the misfortune to live in the UK again).

Property developers threaten globally important seed bank

2010-08-14T15:54:00.002Z

This could be a very bad sign for our future as a species when even the highest authorities in a major country (in this case, Russia), with all the information we currently have on climate change and decreasing global bio-diversity, to put the interests of a property development company (the-scientist.com) above those of a globally significant seed bank outside St Petersburg (BBC).

(Summary: the Pavlovsk experimental station is a seed bank of thousands of unique plant varieties that grows on a 70 hectare plot outside the city of St Petersburg, and Russia's Supreme Arbitration Court has given rights to build on the land to the Russian Housing Development Foundation, which will destroy nearly 100 years of work to preserve this globally significant resource to build houses)

Pass this on, and pass it up ... to your MP, your senator, your governor, to whatever representative you have available at a political level that can apply pressure to the St Petersburg authorities to save the seed bank.

Scottish Crannog Centre

2010-08-11T08:40:00.006Z

A crannog is a round-house on an artificial island constructed on wooden pilings or stone in a loch or lake. They are almost exclusive to Scotland and Ireland, where there are significant networks of interconnected waterways. There is only one known in England. European lake dwellings tend to be multiple buildings on square platforms.

Last week, I visited the Scottish Crannog Centre at Kenmore (Loch Tay), near Pitlochry, with my family (wife and two teenage daughters), and I would thoroughly recommend the place to anyone with an interest in pre-Roman civilisation in the Celtic parts of Europe. The reconstructed crannog at the Centre is based on the Oakbank Crannog which is just along the loch-side from the Centre. Oakbank was occupied for around 200 years around 2,500 years ago (over 500 years before the Romans darkened British doors). Crannogs were in use from around that time right up until the 16th or 17th Century A.D.!

There's a good exhibition of materials about the distribution of crannogs around Scotland, and about the relatively new field of underwater archaeology. This is followed by a guided visit to the reconstructed 10m diameter crannog on the lake (reached via a wooden walkway). I would have liked to have been able to spend more time on the crannog itself, but the next group of visitors was waiting with their guide. Once back on the lake-side, our guide gave us demonstrations of some of the technologies and crafts available to the crannog-dwellers. (Including hypothesized lathes, techniques for making holes in stones, drop-spinning, the use of a saddle quern for grinding wheat, and fire-starting) - we could have a go at all of these too.

Being as this is a tourist site, there is a shop - but it's a good one, with no kilt towels nor the excessive bagpipe music you usually find in Scottish tourist-trap shops.

The staff were excellent - knowledgeable, engaging, and genuinely interested in talking to the punters. Our excellent guide was Rachel, and we also chatted with Dirk for a while after our tour.

The roads around this part of Scotland are a bit narrow and twisty - even compared to home on the Isle of Man, so be aware it takes time to get places. However, it is well worth the effort of going to the Scottish Crannog Centre. It's open 10am - 5.30pm between April and October (off-season visits by appointment).

We intend to return in a couple of years to see what else they've discovered and developed on the site. Yes, even my teenage daughters agree.

Update: here are the photos.

Bionic Legs now an achievable reality

2010-07-16T19:39:00.002Z

My great uncle Ken was an inventor. Not one you've heard of, like Edison or Dyson, but one of the little guys who invents practical aids for people with disabilities. Unfortunately he died suddenly on the operating table in 2005. That was a shock and a shame at the time, for all the obvious reasons.

Today I discovered something I'm sure uncle Ken would have been very impressed to see: http://www.gizmag.com/rex-robotic-exoskeleton/15736/. And there's a video of the device in use too:

Robert Irving and Richard Little deserve every success with this device. It may not be fast, but it is clearly a device that has enormous potential, and I'm sure REX 2, when they build it, will be stronger, faster and lighter.

Well done guys.

How good a photographer are you really?

2010-07-07T21:02:00.003Z

For my 40th birthday last October, I received sufficient cash to finally indulge one of my minor ambitions of the last 10 years: to go from film SLR to digital SLR photography. So I bought myself a cheap Sony dSLR, an α200K. Then at Christmas, I added a Sigma 70-300 lens. Nothing showy or pricey, just enough to learn the ropes. I already had my tripod so I don't count that as new expenditure, but even so, I've spend over £400 on kit!

I joined flickr.com, as you can see from the left side-bar. I even paid for a 'pro' account (primarily so that I can upload my photos fullsize), and I don't regret it.

Then I found the Sony α group and started reading their forum. Guess what, about 60% of the posts appear to be 'what new kit should I buy to shoot X' (where X is some broad category of work, like sports, or nature, or sunsets), and most of the answers are: spend £hundreds (at least) to get some specialist lens, filter system, tripod, or even a new camera body, like the α900, at around £2,000 for the body alone - no lens!

Now comes the complete antidote:

The iPhone Fashion Shoot - Lee Morris Shoots With The 3GS Fstoppers from FStoppers on Vimeo.

Firstly, of course, they're using amazing pro lights (most of the time - except for two $50 floods from Lowes), a studio space, a great model and so on, but at the center of it all is an iPhone 3GS, and an excellent photographer.

You really, really, really don't need all that fancy kit the 'pros' and the shops tell you (sounds like the audio-extremophile stuff I was writing about a few years ago). Yes, you need great conditions, and in a studio, that means loads of light, but it seems that the old adage: "cameras don't take photos, people do" is as accurate as ever, if not more so.

Sense About Science

2010-05-23T13:54:00.003Z

Bear with me... I'll get to the title of this posting in a moment.

I was reading my RSS feeds on Bloglines.com as I do every day and I came upon feed item that pointed me to a Slashdot.org posting about the death of Martin Gardner (a great writer about science and maths - I had one of his excellent books when I was 16, but seem to have lost it now). This lead me, as many interesting things do, to James Randi's post on the same subject - they were close friends apparently. And finally we get to the subject of this post: there was a small link at the bottom of James Randi's blog for a site called 'Sense About Science'.

I must admit, I'd never heard of these folks before, but just had to link to them from here because I completely agree that scientific debate must be free of 'he-said, she-said' argument and the chilling effect of the threat of libel action being taken when two scientists disagree. Just think what would have happened if British Chiropractic Association had won their case for libel against Simon Singh (what a coincidence: the Sense about Science guys were also supporting Simon Singh). Would you want to try to de-bunk bad science if the supporters of the bunkum could silence you with a libel suit? Can you afford to get caught out like that? Of course, this works both ways. If we want to be able to de-bunk poor science, we have to allow what we think of as poor scientists to question the science we judge good. However, the key difference between good and bad science is that good science is supported by independently, objectively reproducible proof, where poor science tries to hide behind waffle and important sounding names.

So there you have it, a trail of internet wanderings: from RSS feeds to a rant about the importance of free science. And there ends the lesson for today. ;-)

Moving (backwards) with The Times

2010-03-26T09:24:00.002Z

The Times and the Sunday Times are about to make a seriously retrograde step. They are about to throw up a paywall around their news services. Now the BBC report only says 'charging to access their websites', so there's no direct indication whether News International intend all their content to be behind the wall, or just the articles (as opposed to the headlines), but either way, this is an idiotic decision.

If, and boy is that a big if these days, the Times and the Sunday Times were the only sources of (reasonably) trustworthy news (and thereby hangs a much more complex tale!) on the internet, then moving their content behind a paywall might entice people to spend money getting access to that news, but the reality is significantly different from that. I can state, with a pretty high level of confidence, that I've not needed to go to the Time nor the Sunday Times in many years. I've not wanted to go there either, for just as long. In fact, I don't think I've even bothered going there in at least 12 months, and even if I did, it was only because I found the news somewhere else, and happened to click through to their sites. (So much for the 'aggregators are stealing our content' argument - I'd never have gone to their sites in the first place if it weren't for said aggregators!)

Now, I'm not suggesting that my pattern of usage (or lack thereof) of the News International sites is normal, but I bet there are many, many, many thousands of regular users of the internet in the British Isles that somehow manage to avoid using the Times and the Sunday Times with very little effort, and very little loss to their understanding of the world. In fact, given the nature of some of the other titles in the NI stable (the Sun and the News of the World - two rags that push a particularly atrocious example of the UK equivalent of a red-neck world view), I'm sure many people are better off getting their news elsewhere.

There are so many free alternatives to NI sites, that they are simply wasting their time.

Goodbye, the Times and the Sunday Times, you won't be missed.

Freedom to mis-represent the truth?

2010-01-29T13:14:00.002Z

If ever we needed proof of the scant regard for the truth as exhibited by British newspapers, here is an excellent example from that bastion of press honour, The Times.

Chew on that, Mr Murdoch!

Are you going to the wedding?

2010-01-25T22:44:00.001Z

I don't normally do this, but I though this video was so excellent I had to include it:

2010-01-23T09:21:00.000Z

Hopefully this is a better looking stitching together of the previous panorama. However, it's quite dark at the left end, and a a bit over-exposed at the right end as a result of trying to even out the colour throughout.

Panorama of Douglas Bay

2010-01-02T19:30:00.009Z

This is a panorama of Douglas Bay, Isle of Man. I took it from the end of the Victoria Pier, and the Tower of Refuge just nicely fell into the center of the image.

The original image is some 24,800 by 2,300 pixels, but neither blogger nor flickr seem to be happy with such an enormous image, even though it's only 8MB. Oh well.

Update: Thanks to a good friend, you can now look at the real photo, by clicking on the preview above.

Update 2: My friend's site appears to have been terminated, here's a link to the same shot at Flickr.

Security Theatre

2009-12-30T15:47:00.004Z

Before I get started, this post is likely to come across as a bit of a rant. If you don't want to read my half-formed, lefty crap, at least read the article by Bruce Schneier on CNN that inspired it. It's much better written, and far more important that it gets wide coverage than my version. ;-)

Having said that, if you're still with me, here goes: wasting money bugs me, especially when it's a government that's doing it for the purposes of appeasing the 'voice of the people' (see the end of this for more on that meme!). When governments spend enormous sums of money on visible security activity at airports this gets me particularly riled because it's pointless. I quote from Bruce Schneier's opinion article on CNN:

Often, this "something" is directly related to the details of a recent event. We confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on airplanes. We tell people they can't use an airplane restroom in the last 90 minutes of an international flight. But it's not the target and tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning.
If we spend billions defending our rail systems, and the terrorists bomb a shopping mall instead, we've wasted our money. If we concentrate airport security on screening shoes and confiscating liquids, and the terrorists hide explosives in their brassieres and use solids, we've wasted our money. Terrorists don't care what they blow up and it shouldn't be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in their tactics or targets.
Our current response to terrorism is a form of "magical thinking." It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.

Of course, the result of this 'magical thinking' is also the terrible changes that are taking place to the due process of criminal proceedings at law. The introduction of arbitrary periods of detention without charge, the holding of terrorism-related trials in camera, the rhetoric of hatred of any other political or cultural outlook than our own... this is dangerous stuff that just serves to increase the threat from those opposed to our way of life. Back to Bruce:

Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we're doing the terrorists' job for them.

So, when you're thinking about who to vote for in future (in the UK general election, for example), why not challenge them to stop the damage that's being done to our relatively free way of life, pull back from culturally aggressive stance in international politics, and stop stoking the flames of the conflicts that spawn terrorist acts.

p.s. on the 'voice of the people', it appears the ‘newspapers’ are being deemed to be the ‘voice of the people’ in that mad country, the (dis-)United Kingdom, so a populist, theatrical, approach to security is the inevitable outcome. Of course, it is the broadcast & newsprint media that treat said ‘newspapers’ as ‘the voice’, in addition to their weak lackeys in Westminster. It’s a vicious circle of bullying and subservience maintained by those with the loudest voices, the deepest pockets and the least integrity.

Camera Update

2009-12-28T22:45:00.004Z

Christmas gifts have come, and I now have a Sigma 70-300mm zoom lens for my camera. I've tried to photograph the moon with it, but it's amazing how difficult a subject it is. It took 16 shots before I even got something remotely better that a white blob in a black sky. The best I could do in 24 shots is in my photostream, but believe me, I'll be trying that again once I get my cable release!

I also tried to shoot the constellation of Orion - a nice easy constellation to recognise in our northern night sky. Last time I tried, I accidentally left my camera in noise reduction mode, which gave photos that consist of a dozen seriously blurred stars. This time I tried without NR... and instead got a dozen faint blobs with trails that indicated the camera had moved somehow during the 6-8 second exposures. Not quite sure how this happened, but all I can put it down to is that a) my house is old and I was on the top floor, where the floor-boards are not the smoothest and most solid in the world, b) I was manually pressing the button, and c) maybe I breathed on the camera on it's tripod just a little too loudly? So, next time, I'll go to our back yard, so the tripod will be on brick, and I'll use my new cable release... expected from Amazon any day now.

Learning, learning, learning...

Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change

2009-12-27T22:25:00.002Z

It's taken me a while to figure out my reaction to the train-wreck that was the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, but what finally got me to the point where I can write something was this story (via Chris Samuel's blog in Oz) about China being the force behind the failure of Copenhagen.

Now I'm caught between "I can't believe China could act so terribly" and "Huh, now they've found their scapegoat." This does make we wonder why the 'western powers' didn't make it clearer at the time that China was the source of the problems and either shame them into proper action (a strategy unlikely to succeed due to the lack of the need for the Chinese leadership to respond to any kind of democratic process), or simply to exclude China and set the world on a path to economic exclusion of the country too - I'm sure there are other countries that would be very willing to take up the manufacturer industries currently supplied by China.

There is an interesting kicker in Chris's blog post, and that's from his wife - Donna, who commented on the post thus:

If China railroaded Copenhagen then isn’t it time those of us in Western nations stopped filling our Christmas stockings with cheap Chinese goodies whilst ignoring its those very actions that drive China to want to exhaust its ‘fair share’ of the ‘Industrial Revolution’. We may not have power over our leaders or Copenhagen, but Western buyers do have pocket power without which they can let China know what they think about ethics. Think about that next time you reach for your credit card for that latest gadget. Which regime are you supporting.

I guess this is the small-scale, personal approach to implementing the strategy I suggested above.

Photos

2009-11-23T17:17:00.004Z

Recently I replaced my aging Canon completely manual SLR with a whizzy new digital SLR. Okay, so it's only a Sony alpha 200K, but it's new to me and fun not having to consider how many shots I can take before I run out of film.

I went for a wander this afternoon - first real opportunity since getting the camera with decent weather, and the best of the results are here.

Obligatory 9/11 post

2009-09-01T09:12:00.001Z

There's been a lot of talk of gross government sponsored conspiracy theories surrounding the events of 9/11, and I'm still to be convinced that any government is truly that competent (why assume a massive, all-encompasing, conspiracy when there are much simpler explanations - the principle of Occam's Razor).

However, this article was sent to me by my Dad, who is rather more convinced of the sheer evil of the US government under George Bush (jnr).

I'm waiting with interest to see if the report is taken up by any more news sites than just a local California newsletter, but if taken at face value, this does seem a reasonably un-rabid, professional, and worrying report. (Not so, many of the readers' comments at the bottom of the article!)

Of course, if other media sites ignore this, it could be that they simply don't give the organisation credence, but conspiracy theorists will say that the report will be suppressed by the uber-powerful US government, and they'll tell the global media to ignore it too, and the global media will obey them... for some obscure reason. Pretty much a no-win situation there then. ;-)

Alan Turing Petition

2009-08-31T08:56:00.002Z

If you're reading my blog, you're probably the kind of person who knows exactly who Alan Turing was, not to mention the Turing Test (which I also mentioned in my previous post). However, you may not know that he was convicted for gross indecency (in admitting to an actively gay relationship) in 1952, which led to him being chemically castrated, his loss of security privileges, and his loss of work with GCHQ (wiki), and thence (it is thought) to his suicide in January 1954.

Why do I bring this up today? Well, enough is enough, this man deserves a better ending than this. He deserves a full apology from the UK government for their treatment (legally, morally and chemically), and I'd like to see him acknowledged as one of the greatest minds ever to come out of UK science and mathematics. Every computing professional in the country owes this man a debt of gratitude for his work in establishing the science of computing, as does, indeed, the rest of the country for his code-breaking at Bletchley. (though, obviously, he was not alone in either field by any stretch of the imagination!)

There's an electronic petition being lodged with the UK government, and here's the BBC article that brought it to my attention.

The Monomyth vs. the Automyth

2009-08-08T12:03:00.002Z

I subscribe to the GameSetWatch RSS feed, and generally flick through their headlines on Bloglines (an RSS aggregator that I thoroughly endorse, especially the beta version) in a spare moment or two each day. Most of the content leaves me quite cold, but this article actually caught my attention!

I've read around half of Joseph Campbell's book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but got bored and bogged down in his continual obsession with his Speilbergian father-son conflict as the driving force of all narrative. (Or is that perhaps, Speilberg's obsession in his movies with Campbellian father-son narratives?) His 1940's writing style doesn't help, but then Christopher Booker's 2005 re-tread and elaboration of the material, The Seven Basic Plots (or here for the US), suffers from the same obsessions, is nearly twice as long, and could have done with some serious editing down to reduce redundant repetition. (Mind you, I did get 80% of the way through this one)

So, I've not read every last word on the subject of the monomyth, or the seven basic plots, but I believe I have an amateur understanding of them. (Yes, go on, my opinions are incomplete and therefore entirely invalid... feel free to go read someone else's blatherings instead).

(note to the reader that chooses to continue, where I use a male pronoun, please feel free to substitute a female one if it helps you)

Quick summary: hero in the 'normal' world is challenged to go beyond the boundaries, overcome 'evil' (the father) in some way, returning changed to the 'normal'. There are, of course, many more details to monomyth, and the seven basic plots (quest, rags-to-riches, overcoming the monster, voyage & return, comedy (ending in love or life), tragedy (ending in some form of death), and rebirth) have more subtlety than that, and the article at GameSetWatch gives a more complete summary of the basics.

However, they mostly miss the point that elements of good story telling also involve subverting the monomyth, or the expectations of the basic form of the plot chosen (consciously or otherwise). For example, the hero might return from the experiences unchanged in himself, but the 'normal' world might instead have been changed as a result of his actions.

Anyhow, the point of that article is to ask why, if the monomyth is so well explored by Campbell and his acolytes, has no-one actually built an 'automyth' - a monomyth generator. This is the intriguing bit. It's all very well stating that there's an algorithm for a story, and even that one can subvert (invert?) or skip one or more, or most, of the 17 steps in the algorithm, but without a detailed language to express a world model, or two (possibly more) in which to run that algorithm, automation is just a dream.

How does one tackle filling in the steps in the automyth algorithm? Perhaps by giving the machine a library of options:

people: farm boy, new advertising executive, grizzled mountain man, washed out detective
places: Alabama USA, the Shire (or an analogue of), a moon-base, a small shop in London
challenges: alien invasion, disease, death of a parent, financial ruin (personal or global)
monsters: the boss, an out-of-control robot, the Devil, the judge(s)
assistants: the girlfriend, the grand-parent, the old mage, the bestest buddy, the advocate
... and so on

But does this actually achieve anything? Can we build a grammar with which to join these elements? Do we need to?

I think what we're looking at here is a new expression of the Turing Test (a test where one person cannot distinguish which one of two subjects is human, and which one a computer, by means of asking questions). And if we define a world, or set of worlds, within which the automyth machine will operate, we have a limited Turing Test (the questions are limited to a specific subject).

At which point, can we talk about applying this to ludonarrative generation? Certainly we could build a quest generator (a la Diablo II), but that's only a subset of the challenge. Can we really express enough full plots. I think not, at least, not until we have a way to describe the entire world to a computer, give it a way of imagining alternatives, then (and this is the really difficult bit) giving that computer a way to judge which of those alternatives could actually hang together as an alternative. This is such a big job, I think I'm off to do the laundry instead.

VirtualBox on Windows Hosts

2009-08-06T08:36:00.002Z

A friend of mine has just written up his comments on installing Ubuntu as a virtual machine on a Windows host using VirtualBox 3.0.0 (the latest version at the time of writing, 3.0.4 has been released now). It's clear from his instructions that this is a fairly simple process, with the possible exception of a gotcha around networking. However, I did notice one other issue with his instructions that will probably come back to haunt him in some six months time or so... and when it happens it will be hard to find the cause.

As a side note, I'm also using VirtualBox, but on an Ubuntu host, to enable me to have a Windows XP running occassionally whilst I use Ubuntu for most work, even though I am writing this whilst running Vista (dual boot on the same machine).

Andy, you might want to be careful about using a dynamically expanding disc file for your root file system. NTFS is notorious for fragmenting files as they grow - especially if your file is living on a partition with other activity. And as we all know, the more fragmented a file gets, the poorer the performance becomes as the disc heads have to seek across more and more diverse areas of the disc to get to the content of the file. Where you have a virtual file system in a file, this is only going to get worse, because the file system you have inside the file will have no knowledge of how the data is distributed over the real disc, so it can't make any decisions over data distribution within the file system that have any meaning on the disc platters.

To avoid this, you need to be able to set a specific size for the virtual disc file. However, this will require a little pre-set-up work. First you need to decide on what is a sensible, reasonably future-proof size for your root partition. I notice that the VirtualBox installer chose 8.6GB ... that sounds quite reasonable to me, though I'd be tempted to go for 10-12GB myself. Next, you need to defragment your chosen disk partition until there is a region of free space at least as large as your desired file, and as few other gaps as possible (in order to give NTFS as little choice over where it puts the file as possible).

Now you can click the VirtualBox "New" button, to create your virtual machine.

This same issue affects the Windows page files, by the way.

Logging out with HTTP Basic Authentication

2009-07-16T20:57:00.005Z

This post arose from the fact that I have an application running on an application server that doesn't seem to support HTTP BASIC authentication very well (Glassfish v2, if you're interested). So I have a web-server sat in front of the application server, doing the authentication, and passing through all authenticated requests to the application server behind. (This configuration also works around a bug in Glassfish v2, where the HTTP response size is wrongly calculated on static resources, which confuses Seamonkey, although Firefox copes ok)

There is a downside to this arrangement, and that is that HTTP BASIC authentication doesn't really support the concept of logging out!

As normal with a Java web application, the logout operation is a matter of invalidating the current HttpSession, throwing away any cached user configuration, and redirecting the user to a 'you are logged out' page. This can be achieved by having a filter or a servlet pick up the 'logout' request, mark the HttpSession associated with the current HttpRequest object, and deleting the JSESSION cookie that identified the session. The response then just needs to contain a logout message, or redirect, or whatever you desire for your site.

That's all well and good if it's just the web application involved. However, in our scenario, we have web server to consider too. As it stands, there's nothing in the HyperText Transfer Protocol ('HTTP' to you and me) that allows the web application to tell the web server that the HttpSession is over - the application doesn't talk to the server, so (according to almost all the web sites I could find with Google) there's no way to tell the server to invalidate it's knowledge of the end user and their credentials.

Or is there....

The key factor is that it is possible to make the server re-challenge the user for their credentials in the same way as they were when they started using the application, and this can be made to have the same effect as logging them out. Note that the critical fact that previous web-pages on this subject seem to have missed is that HTTP BASIC authentication has a realm parameter.

By knowing what the realm is that the web-server used to the authenticate the user, we can cause the browser to re-authenticate against that same realm, by challenging the browser with an HTTP 401 (just like the web-server does).

The process (in my application) works like this:

The user clicks the logout link to go to /logout.html, which tells the user they are being logged out. This is a nice-to-have page to make this process a little more friendly, you could skip it and go straight to the next step
The browser pauses for 1 second on this page, then redirects to /logout
This url is mapped to a logout filter, which does the normal session termination activities I mentioned above. But in order for the next step to work, the filter also registers the current HttpSession key with the LoggedOutServlet (storing it in a singleton HashSet of keys), and creates a has-logged-out cookie with the HttpSession key as the value of the cookie.
The logoutFilter then redirects to /loggedout which has been mapped to the LoggedOutServlet in my web.xml:


<servlet>
  <description>Logout Servlet</description>
  <display-name>LoggedOutServlet</display-name>
  <servlet-name>loggedout</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>
    com.xyzzy.web.LoggedOutServlet
  </servlet-class>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
  <servlet-name>loggedout</servlet-name>
  <url-pattern>/loggedout</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

The LoggedOutServlet looks for the has-logged-out cookie. If cookie exists, and the value is in the servlet's register of logging-out keys, then the key is removed from the register, the cookie marked as deleted, and an Unauthorised (HTTP 401) response is returned to the user:


response.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_UNAUTHORIZED); // HTTP 401
response.setHeader("WWW-Authenticate", "Basic realm=\"xyzzy\"");

The user is then prompted by the browser to re-authenticate. The critical thing here is that the realm (set to 'xyzzy' above) is set correctly in the response. If this is done, then the web-server (which must be authenticating with the same realm) will correctly re-authenticate the user if they try to login again. So the consequence is that the user is effectively logged out, and cannot get back into the application without being challenged for their credentials again. This works because the browser has been asked to authenticate against a specific realm, so that will be used in the authentication process, and will force the web server to full re-check the user's credentials - refusing access if they get it wrong.

NB. all the urls used in this process must be accessible without logging in (i.e. anonymously).

TreeSet and implementing the Comparator interface

2009-07-01T11:32:00.006Z

Time for a bit more technical content. You might begin to discern a pattern here: gotchas in equals(), hashcode() and Java Collections.

My experience of Collections thus far has taught me that most of them are built upon detecting object equality through the equals() and hashcode() implementation in your class. See my earlier post and the posts of Andy Beacock referenced therein. However, today I ran into problems with objects vanishing in a TreeSet.

Back to the requirements first. I have list of Bank Account objects I wish to show on a web-form, but that list should also be modifiable by the user with an Add Form, and a Remove button on each listed account. So far so good. One more thing, the list has got to be in account name order on display. For this example, a Bank Account consists of a pseudo-primary key (id), a Bank Name, an Account Name, an Account Number, and a Sort Code. The id is not shown, and the records are unique by Account Number and Sort Code (and therefore implicitly by Bank Name).

Obviously, Bank Names should should not really be store in a Bank Account record - they should be stored separately and referenced by foreign key, as indeed, should Sort Codes - in fact, in an ideal world, the Bank Account record would be an id, a name, an account number and a foreign key to a branch as identified by the sort code. However, you know as well as I do that this is not an ideal world, and most of the time, we have to deal with the world as we come to it.

So, back to my slightly contrived example. I'm going to ignore completely all the contextual information about display technology, form interaction, transactions, etc., and concentrate on the core issue: SortedSets are nasty wee buggers!

There are two ways to manage the display of sorted data: sort on insert, and sort on display. If you're displaying often, and inserting & deleting infrequently (as in this example), sort on insert is preferable, otherwise you spend a lot of time sorting your data again and again with no change to the data.

Having looked at the implementations of the SortedSet interface, we really only have one available in the Java SDK (I'm staying away from the Apache Collections for now), and that is TreeSet, for which you specify a Comparator at construction time. Naively, I assumed that my comparator would just be interested in the Account Name - that's the field by which I wish to sort, after all.


@Override
public int compare(BankAccount o1, BankAccount o2) {
  return o1.getAccountName().compareTo(o2.getAccountName());
}

(I'm leaving out the normal defensive programming and exception handling for clarity)

However, my BankAccount class implements equals() and hashcode() as normal, with the sortcode and the account number - these being the 'business key' if you like. So, on this basis, I expected TreeSet to sort on name, and use equals() and/or hashcode() to determine whether the Set contains a given BankAccount on insertion - in the same way that HashSet would.

Ooops, no.

Turns out that TreeSet doesn't use equals() or hashcode() at all. It uses the Comparator for sorting and contains() checking. So now, my Comparator implementation looks like this:


@Override
public int compare(BankAccount o1, BankAccount o2) {
   int result = o1.getAccountName().compareTo(o2.getAccountName());
   if (result == 0) {
       result = o1.getSortCode().compareTo(o2.getSortCode());
   }
   if (result == 0) {
       result = o1.getAccountNumber().compareTo(o2.getAccountNumber());
   }
   return result;
}

Now I have data sorted on insert and display, and the data doesn't get lost if someone enters two accounts with the same Account Name.

In conclusion, I think that the only reason this gotcha got me was that I was motivated to use the TreeSet simply by the requirement to sort by name, so I wrote the Comparator with only that in mind. A correct implementation of really should include the business keys of the entity under consideration... of course, I'd just done that, I might have had even more trouble with the sort-by-name requirement (i.e. a non-key property).

I want one...

2009-06-19T11:30:00.002Z

I've been talking about A4-sized panel computers for years, but never had the wherewithal, money, time, guts or technical knowledge to make good on the idea. Now someone else has done it, and I want one.

HashCodeBuilder is great, but ...

2009-06-18T10:48:00.006Z

In real life, I'm a Java programmer, so I thought I'd bring a little technical content to this blog for a change. This issue came up today at work, when I spotted something weird in how some objects were behaving in a HashMap, something like this.

When doing domain modelling, one of the important things to get right is the definition of the equals() and hashcode() methods. I'm going to use a class that's used to represent a compound primary key in a Spring/JPA/Hibernate environment. The PaymentMethodId class has an owner, and two currency codes - one for the source of funds, and one for the destination of the funds, to allow for currency conversations between the two.

@Embeddable
public class PaymentMethodId extends CompositeId {

    @Column
    private Integer ownerNumber;

    @Column
    private String  sourceCurrencyCode;

    @Column
    private String  paymentCurrencyCode;

    /**
      * Compare unique business key (number, source code and payment code)
      */
    @Override
    public boolean equals(Object other) {
        if (this == other) {
           return true;
        }
        if (other == null || !(other instanceof PaymentMethodId)) {
           return false;
        }
        PaymentMethodId paymentMethodId = (PaymentMethodId) other;
        return ((this.ownerNumber == null ? paymentMethodId.ownerNumber == null
                                          : this.ownerNumber.equals(paymentMethodId.ownerNumber))
            && (this.paymentCurrencyCode == null ? paymentMethodId.paymentCurrencyCode == null
                                                         : this.paymentCurrencyCode.equals(paymentMethodId.paymentCurrencyCode))
            && (this.sourceCurrencyCode == null ? paymentMethodId.sourceCurrencyCode == null
                                                        : this.sourceCurrencyCode.equals(paymentMethodId.sourceCurrencyCode))
        );
    }

    @Override
    public int hashCode() {
        int result = 13;
        result = (ownerNumber != null ? 19 * result + ownerNumber : result);
        result = (paymentCurrencyCode != null ? 19 * result + paymentCurrencyCode.hashCode() : result);
        result = (sourceCurrencyCode != null ? 19 * result + sourceCurrencyCode.hashCode() : result);
        return result;
    }

}

I've left out constructors and getters and setters as these should be obvious.
As you can see, I like to make use of the 'trinary if' expression for brevity. Just imagine how much more complex these methods would be if written out in full!
Anyway, similar to Andy Beacock's post on this subject, we can firstly simplify the above as follows:

@Override
public boolean equals(Object obj) {
    if (obj instanceof PaymentMethodId) {
        PaymentMethodId other = (PaymentMethodId) obj;
        EqualsBuilder builder = new EqualsBuilder();
        builder.append(getOwnerNumber(), other.getOwnerNumber());
        builder.append(getSourceCurrencyCode(), other.getSourceCurrencyCode());
        builder.append(getPaymentCurrencyCode(), other.getPaymentCurrencyCode());
        return builder.isEquals();
    }
    return false;
}

@Override
public int hashCode() {
    HashCodeBuilder builder = new HashCodeBuilder();
    builder.append(getBrokerNumber());
    builder.append(getSourceCurrencyCode());
    builder.append(getPaymentCurrencyCode());
    return builder.toHashCode();
}

Note the use of getters instead of properties - as Andy mentioned.
However, the important bit that really is the reason for this post is the last line:


    return builder.toHashCode();

It is vital that you don't write:


    return builder.hashCode();

Notice the subtle difference? The hashCode() of the builder itself is worse than useful as it will vary every time the method is run, so any Hash-based collection code will find your object has a different hashCode, every time it asks, risking the integrity of the data.

The "Two Source" rule?

2009-05-07T06:41:00.003Z

Just like I've said for ages, journalists tend to get it wrong on most stories, in some critical detail. In this case, journalists from 'quality' newspapers were found to have taken a mis-quote from the wikipedia page about Maurice Jarre (film composer, father of Jean-Michel), the quote actually coming from someone else entirely, and then printed it in Maurice's obituary. So, these professional journalists have broken the 'two source' rule that professional journalists are supposed to honour - you should have two independent, reliable sources for any fact in a story.

Okay, guilty as charged, I've only used one source, slashdot.org, but then I'm only a blogger so I don't count because my writing is too risky anyway.

Alexander Mosley, RIP

2009-05-06T23:03:00.004Z

Even in the world of F1, there have got to be times when we just stop all the back-biting (guilty as charged!), and pray for others (if that’s your thing, or whatever alternative you prefer). It is a terrible thing for a parent to lose a child, whatever the circumstances, and for that my prayers are with Max Mosley and his family tonight.

(I just wish the BBC news story didn't have to trawl up dredge up reminders of the last time Max was in the headlines - it's just not relevant to the current situation)

Once more with feeling...

2009-04-03T10:04:00.003Z

'O! Say can you see by the dawn's early light'... a perfect example of the Streisand Effect in action. And here's the article in question.

Knife Crime in London

2009-03-18T21:13:00.003Z

For roughly the last year or so the British media (including normally credible sources like BBC News) have been making a massive fuss about every case of mortal injury involving a knife, especially in London.

Now that last part, 'especially in London,' is completely normal for the British media. For some reason the rest of the country is rather lower in their priorities than their maids' long-term health. Not sure why this is... perhaps the fact that most of them live in London and the so-called Home Counties, and look down their powdered noses at anyone that even considers living beyond Reading, Winchester, Oxford or Cambridge.

Now I find out (thanks to the Register) something that I've suspected all along: the pattern of knife attacks in London is no different than normal (and hasn't been for some time!). Quel surprise!

Just another case of media hype, just like their claim that the entire UK was in mourning for months after the (admittedly quite sad) death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Whereas the fact is that most people were shocked for about 10 minutes when they heard the news, a little subdued for the rest of the day, gave most thought for her sons, then got on with their lives until the funeral brought it back to mind for a bit, from which point they put it behind them.

Voyage

2009-03-18T18:42:00.000Z

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

What is it?

I was a young boy, just striking out on my own path at the town library when I first came across Jules Verne. My introduction to the French man's works of speculative fiction (as sci-fi used to be known) came in the form of the Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I loved it; I still do. There is one difficulty with Verne's work, however. It's all written in French, and so every time I read his work, it is through the filter of a translator's pen. This shows up in Journey to the Centre of the Earth in the fact that there are two main translations of the book, and they're completely different. The main character in one of the versions is a completely different man, in name as well as character, from in the other.

So it seems than game developers seem to like following in this tradition of 're-interpretation' rather than translation. In particular, the recent “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” and “Return to Mysterious Island” games were inspired by Verne's stories, rather than faithful reproductions. In this context, I was concerned to find out what Kheops Studio (the makers of the “Return to Mysterious Island” game) had done to Verne's story, “Journey to the Moon”.

Well, the answer is that they've done the same as they did with their first game - Voyage is a Verne-esque telling of a story that starts with an idea that he had. This is not to say that the result is somehow 'wrong', it would simply be a mistake to say that Kheops have told Verne’s story verbatim.

What we have instead is a nonlinear, point-n-click, mostly pre-rendered 360° bubble-based adventure game telling the story of Michel Ardan, a wild-hair, moustachioed 19th century French explorer, and his journey to the Moon. And, yes, he actually reaches the Moon, where Verne's characters did not.

Is there a plot?

The game begins with our hero, Michel Ardan, waking up in a bullet-like space capsule in the company of Barbicane and Nicholl - his fellow space explorers, after the violent launch of the capsule towards the Moon. However, he soon discovers that all has not gone well since the launch.

As I've already made it clear that Michel reaches the Moon, I think it fair to also mention that he also encounters intelligent life there. The backbone of the story is Michel's encounters with the Selenites, (from the Greek 'seleno', being the Moon) and his efforts to return to the Earth. Along the way he discovers some of the story of the Selenite civilisation and their relationship with Earth. And, of course, there are plenty of puzzles along the way, but then it wouldn’t be much of an adventure game without them.

Notable Features

In this highly puzzle-oriented game, the puzzles are pretty varied. Some involve the decipherment of the Selenitic written and spoken language – a tuneful thing that’s not as hard as it sounds; a fair few puzzles involve combinations of inventory items, some are mathematical in nature, some mechanical, and some are just pure logic. A number of the over-arching goals can be achieved through a variety of means. This is the source of much of the game’s nonlinearity. If you get stuck somewhere, you can often make progress in other parts of the game before coming back to the sticking point.

In addition, there are a number of optional side puzzles that aren’t essential to your progress towards home, but which reveal some extra facet of lunar life. From roughly halfway through the game (at least as I played it), you gain a small ‘helper’. The ‘helper’ is there to reveal information, clues and your score. Certain puzzles require you to have achieved a specific number of points before you can obtain information or inventory items. However, obtaining sufficient points is again possible in a variety of ways. Solving parts of the Selenitic language, or deciphering mathematical puzzles or manufacturing chemical substances using the Selenitic machines all improve your score.

Ardan automatically keeps a comprehensive log of his experiences. This includes some of the conversations, the details of his investigations as to what happened in the space capsule before he woke, and a number of key diagrams regarding his objectives later in the game.

A notable pair of features in this point-n-click adventure is the inclusion of a small number of timed sequences early in the game, followed by some hand-eye-coordination-based jumping puzzles. Unfortunately, these puzzles all result, upon failure, in the death of Ardan, but he is always resurrected to a point immediately before the timed sequence or jump began, so there’s no real penalty in failure, other than a certain gathering frustration. On the plus side, once each jump has been successfully performed, Ardan will be able to repeat them without the player having to beat the puzzle again. I found these a minor irritation rather than a serious problem.

Graphically, the experience of Voyage is colourful and imaginative. With our modern knowledge of the Moon, we would expect the palette of this game to be rather dull and leaden, but Kheops Studios clearly know better, with good texturing, a rich palette of colours, refined animation, and very detailed modelling.

Most of the audio in the game is top quality. The music is unobtrusive, but appropriately used to set the mood at various stages of the game. The voice acting of the Selenites is excellent – I particularly enjoyed their native voices, which are rather harmonious. The English voice acting was good, with the exception of Ardan himself, whose narration and accent I found jarred slightly. I think he was supposed to sound like an educated Frenchman speaking English – presumably he sounds better in the French version – but in English he came across as stilted and slightly manic at the same time.

Any other novelties?

Not having completed a Kheops Studios’ game before, I didn’t realise quite how much they like inventory combining puzzles. However, to their credit, the required combinations aren’t extraordinarily illogical, though some are surprising. A nice feature here is the pictorial log that is kept of all the successful combinations you’ve made throughout the game – this simplifies the task of re-creating earlier combinations later in the game.

An intriguing novelty in Voyage is the requirement that you don’t just have to click on a button to make the machines work, you have to understand what those machines are going to do. A number of the machines will ‘work’ by you pressing buttons, but will only do the ‘right’ thing when you understand them properly.

There are at least three puzzles that can be attempted several times, to a number of standards – in each case, the lowest standard is sufficient to ‘solve’ the puzzle, but you can significantly improve your overall score by achieving the higher levels. A feature here that is rather useful is that if you find that you’re weak in one puzzle – perhaps figuring out the Selenitic mathematics defeats you – you may well be able to make up for it with the sounds of the their spoken language.

Oddities

Now we reach the only really odd thing about this game. Although there are five profiles under which you can save your game, you must select your profile during level 1 of the game – however, there’s no warning as to when level 1 ends, so no indication when you should choose your profile. The manual states that level 1 is the capsule level, but it’s not clear whilst you’re playing the game when this level ends. So, I suggest that anyone playing this game saves their first game immediately the first cut-scene ends – thereby choosing a profile and eliminating any risk of getting caught out like I did.

Of course, if you’re not sharing your computer with other people, this oddity problem won’t even affect you, but it did me, so I choose to mention it.

Conclusions

This was an enjoyable telling of a Verne-inspired tale, though I’ve found it helpful to ignore the connection with Monsieur Verne in the long run. I would certainly play another game by Kheops Studios. So, to summarise: a point-n-click adventure, featuring a good story, some hand-eye coordination, a few timed sequences, plenty of opportunities to die, but with immediate resurrection to before the fateful decision was made, unlimited saves, but an odd profiling system, a variety of logical, mathematical, inventory, linguistic and mechanical puzzles, one musical puzzle, and no slider puzzles, nor mazes.

From a technical standpoint, there were very few graphical bugs, nor audio glitches, except during the final cut-scene, which was a shame, as it concludes with a nice little twist to the story. The game has no patches, and no serious crashes.

So, all in all, a good game, but not spectacular, hence the final grade.

Grade: B

What do you need to play it?

Minimum Requirements

· OS: Windows® 98SE/ME/2000/XP

· CPU: 800 MHz Pentium® III

· RAM: 64 MB

· CD-ROM/DVD-ROM: 16X Speed

· Video: 64 MB DirectX® 9 Compliant Video Card

· Sound: DirectX® 9 Compatible

· Input: Keyboard, Mouse and Speakers

Recommended Requirements

· OS: Windows® XP

· CPU: 1 GHz Pentium® 4

· RAM: 128 MB

· CD-ROM/DVD-ROM: 24X Speed

· Video: 64 MB DirectX® 9 Compliant Video Card

· Sound: DirectX® 9 Compatible

· Input: Keyboard, Mouse and Speakers

(I used Win XP, AMD XP 2400+, 512 MB RAM, and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP)

Puzzles in Myst games

2009-02-21T11:58:00.003Z

The GameSetWatch blog has a posting on puzzles in the Myst games. It's not quite consistent - the intro promises more than the body provides, but the conclusion is right:

Fairness, novelty, and integration are all important for making good puzzles, but what makes the puzzles discussed here stand out is their payoffs. Each of them has a moment of epiphany, where the odd structure of the game world suddenly makes sense, and all the pieces fit together. Because they are especially tricky, the reward is sweeter, and the player feels a greater sense of accomplishment.
It's this puzzle with a twist that is the greatest strength of the Myst series. By starting with a solid puzzle and then adding a twist, developers can make their own puzzles stick in players' memories. This doesn't just apply to adventure games, either; any kind of game that uses puzzles will be better-served by a cleverly crafted obstacle rather than just another game of Nim.

I've long loved the Myst games, and certainly don't think they're the reason the adventure genre has suffered over the last decade. If they are, it's because other game designers struggle to match the quality, internal consistency, and production values of the Myst games. (Frankly, I think that's more connected with the adrenaline-fueled, frame-rate obsessed FPS crowd that just don't get the more cerebral pursuit of the Myst games.)

I will say though, that there is one puzzle I thought stuck out as really not belonging in the Myst canon, and that's the dreadful Dream puzzle of the Serenia Age in Myst IV. Far to subject to the vaguaries of colour vision and a long way from fitting the criteria of the article at the top of this post.

Hydrogen fueled cars

2009-02-17T20:37:00.003Z

On the Register today they're talking the LA Times talking about the Honda FX Clarity, (also on wikipedia and Top Gear's site) the first commercially available (albeit only in Southern California) hydrogen fuel cell driven car.

Top Gear did a great piece on this car just before Christmas. James May loved it, he waxed lyrical about it, they even got Jay Leno to say how much he loved it too - though his comments focused more on how it was going to save his beloved petrol-drinking race cars by allowing the petrol to last longer.

Now Dan Neil (who?) writing for the LA Times writes off the hydrogen fuel cell idea as a cul-de-sac in development. Just because there's no network of hydrogen filling stations outside of Southern California. I beg to differ mate. There's a massive, coordinated, reasonably resilient network of filling stations already out there. All we need to do is persuade them to carry one more product: liquid hydrogen. I'll come back to this later.

Ok, let's step back one moment and look at why we would want to use hydrogen over batteries first of all. The only car remotely comparable to the FCX Clarity is the Tesla Roadster. Fast, good looking (based on the Lotus Elise), and run on batteries. Tesla claim a range of 220 miles on a full charge, as opposed to Honda's claim of 270 miles on a full tank of hydrogen. The Tesla is a two-seater; the Honda a family saloon (Dan Neil says, "Lincoln-Town-Car huge, and the trunk is a spacious 11 cubic feet."). The Tesla has a huge composite battery made of 6,831 lithium cells (essentially laptop batteries!). Yes six thousand, eight hundred and thirty one of them. Imagine how much that must weigh (actually, it's 450kg). No wonder there's no room for passengers!

Top Gear's analysis basically went along the lines of, the Honda is going to succeed because it is so much like what it replaces ... the normal, standard, family saloon of today. No big leap in behaviour for the motorist, no big change in the experience of car travel, just an enormous change in the type of fuel and emissions.

Finally, on the cars themselves. The Honda is made by ... Honda. One of the world's largest (if not the largest) car companies. The other by Tesla Motors... who? Even if they are backed by Elon Musk, co-founder of Paypal, that's an awfully long way from the scale of Honda.

Now, back to the choice of fuel. It is clear that producing liquid hydrogen takes about four times more energy than the Tesla needs for the same range:

Tesla: 53kWh for 220 miles
Honda: 240kWh for 270 miles worth of hydrogen, (or 195kWh for 220 miles to match the Tesla's maximum range)

But the big difference is in the behaviour required to support the difference. With the Honda you go to the fueling station and fill up the 4kg tank when you run low. It takes a couple of minutes, just like a conventional petrol tank. With the Tesla, you plug it in every time it runs low ... for three and a half hours (!) at 240v (great if you're on 120v in the USA). So where do I plug it in if I have no garage, or if my parking space is some distance from my home?

See what I mean about changes of behaviour?

Finally, back to Dan Neil's biggest complaint; that there is no network of hydrogen fuel stations. This could be solved reasonably simply by the simple expedient of mandating any new fuel station must install and maintain at least one hydrogen pump, similarly any existing station wanting planning permission for changes must install and maintain a pump, and every other existing station has two years to install at least one, with increasing penalties for every quarter thereafter when they don't have one.

By that simple change, the suppliers have a distribution network, where the cost is widely distributed (maybe the local or federal/national government can give a subsidy to sweeten the deal if they install more than one at a station), and the car manufacturers have the opportunity to sell new cars all over the place. Consumers would finally have a real choice that makes the possibility of switching away from oil a real, practical and most of all normal change. Just change the pump you visit on the forecourt - just like going unleaded or diesel.

With a company the scale of Honda behind the FCX Clarity, they could easily ramp up production to meet demand were the pumps available, and that demand would just as easily justify the investment in the pumps and infrastructure. Not just a win-win, but a win-win-win-win: car manufacturers, fuel distributors, consumers and the global environment.

Update: a number of commenters on the original Register article have been talking about using replaceable batteries, rather than charging up your own battery. Given the sheer size of the Tesla battery (which seems to be what you need to get a sensible range out of an electric car) and weight of it (450kg), the idea of a filling station (or equivalent) storing hundreds (possibly thousands) or batteries fully charged, and transporting said heavy objects around the place every day (or charging them on site - imagine the electricity supply required to do that - 70 amps for 3.5 hours per battery), doesn't strike me as being in the least bit practical. And how do you propose a driver in poor health, or not built like Arnold Schwartzenegger is going to handle swapping over batteries like that? You might as well suggest that the hydrogen fuel tank of the FCX Clarity is swapped out every time, instead of filling it with liquid hydrogen.

Channelling Douglas Adams from 1999

2009-02-13T20:27:00.002Z

If you've never heard of Douglas Adams, you're an unfortunate individual. He was not, as some people might claim, the greatest author of the late 20th century, but he was one of the most influential. If you doubt this, just think about how much modern story telling owes to the success of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: writers like Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and many others in the speculative fiction world would not have got their breaks without Adams. (Ok, enough unsubstantiated waffle)

Today I was reading the TechDirt blog, as I often do, and came across this article. However, it was not that article that really got my attention so much (sorry Mike) - it's their stock-in-trade kind of commentary on the madness and desperation of the old-skool media types trying to defend out dated business models. No, it was this little quote:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

This comes from an article (warning: the text has the wrong text-encoding, you might want to change that, probably in your browser's View menu) that Douglas Adams wrote in 1999! But he's absolutely right. (though I question his choice of 'thirty', being as I'm still a tech-fan at forty).

Enough talk of the recession already

2009-01-23T21:41:00.004Z

Everyone knows that most of the world's major economies are in recession now, or if they're not, their economic growth has slowed significantly. Given the exposure of our banks to bad debt (brought on by a mixture of idiotically bad lending by the banks, and idiotically imprudent spending by their debtors - i.e. the rest of us!), this is hardly surprising.

However, there is one more factor that is really important in how we look at our economy, and that stock prices, and so much of the stock price of a company is based not on their balance sheet, their order book (in those rare companies in the UK that actually make something these days!), or their actual assets (fixed, personnel, or intellectual), but upon the confidence investors have in the company. Take a look at Apple over the last two years (compared to the Nasdaq and Dow Jones indexes). There's a massive dip in Apple shares in Feb 2008. Why? They'd just released the 32GB iPod, they were leading the market for legal music downloads with the iTunes store, and the video store was doing well too; the future looks seriously rosy. So why did their shares drop from $199 (Dec 28, 2007) to $119 (Feb 25 2008) - a 40% drop in 2 months!

I can't find any logical reason in the news archives, and the Nasdaq and Dow Jones (also shown on the above graph) show only a gentle slide at that time. (Dow dropped 1000 points (7%) and NDQ 321 points (12%) over the same period). This is confidence at work. It often has no discernable connection with reality outside of the trading floors of London or New York.

More recently, many many investors have lost confidence in the shares of the banks, with some reason, it appears. But something that is really, really not helping matters is the continual talk of economic doom and gloom by every news organisation I come across. Do these people (Robert Peston, I'm looking at you!) not realise the harm they're doing? Surely it's time to start either doing something to help, or at least coming up with real solutions. Fundamentally, the global economy is still producing plenty of goods. Global warming provides all sorts of opportunities for innovative thinking about ways to invest in our future. The world won't stop spinning on it's axis just because a few bankers mis-incentivised their traders and lenders so that it was in the traders' and lenders' interests to make extra-risky decisions.

Stop being part of the problem, and start finding the solutions. Look for the good news in the economy, and help me look forward to listening to BBC Radio 4's Today Programme tomorrow morning instead of dreading what new depressing statistic is being published to make me fear for my job in the finance sector.

President Barack Obama

2009-01-21T21:19:00.004Z

From here:

W. E. B. DuBois started to teach so that Rosa Parks could take a seat.
Rosa Parks took a seat so that we could all take a stand.
We all took a stand so that Martin Luther King, Jr. could march.
Martin Luther King, Jr. marched so that Jesse Jackson could run.
Jesse Jackson ran so that Barack Obama could win!

Cleo Fields at the State of the Black Union February. 23, 2008

This says so much to me about how the way the political geography of the US has changed in just two generations (Rosa Parks sat in the 'wrong' seat on a segregated bus in 1955). Not everyone around me appreciates just how significant this is for the United States, but it gives me great hope for the future if such seemingly impossible odds can be overturned.

Who among you, even in 2007, really could have said with any kind of confidence that 2008 would see the Democratic race for the nomination for president would be between a woman and an African-American man, let alone that the resulting candidate would win?

p.s. if you can watch BBC programs on iPlayer, I recommend this recent program on Barack Obama, it's available until 7:59pm Tuesday 27th January 2009.

Tips and Tricks

2009-01-20T10:05:00.002Z

I don't often feel the need to write about anything particularly technical here, but today I feel the need to publicize this excellent tutorials site. As an example of how useful I've found it, I had a peek at their Eclipse tutorials.

I've been using Eclipse for Java web application development for about 6 years now, and it's an excellent platform. However, there is a minor issue with upgrading eclipse versions. Each time you upgrade, you really need a clean install in the eclipse directory. So far, so good. The downside of this is that you lose all your plugins - one of the greatest strengths of the eclipse platforms - so that I usually have to write off a days work to do an upgrade (consequently, I'm still on the Europa release, as opposed to the more recent Ganymede release).

Now, this inertia isn't a huge problem; in fact, I'd say it's only an annoyance that hits once or twice a year, but it would be nice to have a solution.

Introducing 'externalised eclipse plugins'. It's surprising what you can learn when your not expecting to see anything remarkable on a site.

Now, you may say that any eclipse user worth their developer chops will have already have solved this problem three years ago, but so what. I'm still learning new vi tricks after more than 20 years daily use. But I'll take new learning any way I can get it.

So, if you're a developer in the Web arena, take a look at avaJava's Web Tutorials, you never know what might strike you.

Steve Jobs' Health Issues and Apple

2009-01-16T23:16:00.002Z

I know a lot of people have spent a lot of electrons talking about this one, but I have to have my go, that's just how it is.

Steve Jobs is only the CEO of Apple, he is NOT the god of product design, nor the only reason that Apple has grown so much since his return. Jobs returned from NeXT and Pixar at a point where Apple was quiet, but was lucky enough to have some very talented people hidden in the R&D departments. In contrast to Apple of the 80s, instead of spewing money all over the place in the hope of getting some ok products, Jobs made some canny decisions to cut effort in areas that were never going to make serious money - WebObjects I'm looking at you - it's just a framework for websites, not a money-maker. On the other hand, he and his collegues in management seem to have been very smart in recognising the strength of the iPod and it's simplicity. Of course, the alternative interpretation of the success of the iPod is a mixture of Apple-fanboyism plus just happening to hit the sweet spot in growth in the market for MP3 players.

Now that Apple is successful, and still growing, the fact that Steve Jobs is taking a break (that might turn out to be permanent) really shouldn't be causing everyone to suddenly pull their investment out of the shares. Afterall, Steve Jobs did not design the iPod (nor any of it's variants), nor the current crop of Apple laptops, nor the iPhone.... and someone else will be able to do the same for future Apple products, providing Apple continue to employ excellent designers and product creators.

Now let's let the guy take the time he needs to to get well. He's only human at the end of it all.

New Year's Resolutions?

2009-01-13T13:11:00.002Z

I know, I know. Every year it's the same. People bemoaning their inability to keep their New Year's Resolutions, but this one (go to the end of the column) made me laugh out loud:

The two-faced god [Janus, the Roman god of the New Year] would have coughed hard at my official New Year resolutions, which were — life being shorter than a wren's blink, and all — to be both nicer and more honest. Have you tried it lately? It's like trying to sit up by lying down.

The only scenario in which it works is on country walks, where a rigid etiquette governs all encounters.

You can say 'lovely weather', 'gorgeous dog!' and 'Happy New Year'. You cannot say 'those are some comedy dentures' or 'I bet that's not your husband!'

The minute I hit the roads, it all went awry. I gave way meekly to a thundering 4 x 4 Death Star, even though I had right of way, and the beast swept past without acknowledging my gesture.

I wanted to follow them and beat them to a foaming pulp.

This was three days into January. But what is life without challenges?

Sir Jackie Stewart vs. the World

2009-01-05T09:54:00.002Z

You've got to give Sir Jackie Stewart credit for sheer balls and a willingness to pull no punches. As reported via grandprix.com, he's been talking to the Times again. I agree with what he says, but the real kicker is in the last line of the grandprix.com report:

"Stewart's comments will not go down well with those on the receiving end."

Ya think?

Matt Smith?

2009-01-04T17:24:00.002Z

Who the heck is Matt Smith? The BBC have named this nobody as the replacement for David Tennant as the eleventh Doctor Who. Watch the little movie at the start of that article, and it's clear he's not even been properly briefed on how to talk about the role. 'Iconic' is about the only thing he can say. And what's with those bonkers hands? Is that the 'Doctor-ness' Piers Wenger is talking about in the same article?

This kid grew up in the hiatus between the old Doctor (killed off with Sylvester McCoy's incarnation, that was cursed with the worst ever assistant Mel, played by Bonnie Langford <>), and the 1996 TV movie with Paul McGann that made the modern seasons possible. Matt Smith wanted to be a footballer... sounds like a Doctor Who geek from his childhood ... NOT!

Sounds more like the BBC wanted to hire a real cheap nobody to save a few pounds, instead of the real actors named as possible choices before last night:

James Nesbitt, serious actor with loads of credits,
Patterson Joseph, another serious actor with loads of credits - he's even been in a couple of episodes of Doctor Who,
John Simm, the talented actor who played The Master in 2007. Also has a lot of credits, an unlikely choice because that would confuse people.
David Morrissey, another good actor who'll never now play the Doctor because he played such a key role in the 2008 Christmas Special, appearing to be a future incarnation of the Doctor.

See, all far too experienced, far too expensive. Let's have a cute nobody with an asymmetric haircut that'll appeal to the teenage girl demographic because he looks like an emo rockstar.

Creative Zen X-Fi

2009-01-04T11:31:00.002Z

For the last few years, I've been using my mobile phone as a multi-purpose device: phone, SMS, diary, sudoku generator and MP3 player. This Christmas, I asked for a real media player for music and video, and rather than follow the stampede towards Apple, I've gone for a Creative Zen X-Fi (the 16GB model with WiFi). It's small, light, plays lots of formats and, importantly, comes with a decent pair of in-ear headphones.

Most importantly of all (apart from the obvious 'does it play music & videos' functionality), it doesn't require me to use that dreadfully clunky and unresponsive piece of software called iTunes. I'm running Vista 64-bit, on a decent PC - plenty of RAM, and a fast dual AMD CPU, so there really is no excuse for iTunes to run slowly when nothing else does.

It's taken me a little time to find the sweet spot in video format to minimize audio glitching - but it was just the realisation that you have to run the supplied video converter software at the highest quality (& slowest conversion speed, of course) to get the best results.

I've not returned to work after the holidays yet, so I've yet to see how the device functions in that part of my life, so expect more on this another time.

One odd thing though, and it's really a criticism of Google, or the 'net as a whole. When I google for information about the X-Fi, I get the best part of 10 pages of people either selling it, or 'professional' reviews. On those pages where there are comments from real people, there's so much Apple/anti-Apple fan-boi noise that sensible, vaguely objective experiences are hard to find. Where have all the bloggers and sane people gone?

Happy New Year 2009!

2009-01-01T00:01:00.000Z

I'm curious to see what 2009 brings.... could be good, might be not so good.

Money vs. Democracy

2008-12-28T13:00:00.009Z

Via Chris Samuel's Blog:

I've read various news items, and other blogger's posts on the subject of electronic voting machines in the US with a mixture of shock and disbelief. I am constantly staggered at the way the US electorate is allowing their electoral system to be sold off to commercial interests that clearly have no interest in democracy or accountability.... oops, sounds a bit like the US government (regardless of ~~species~~ party people corporation(s) in 'power').

F1 and the Isle of Man

2008-12-16T19:26:00.002Z

It's not often that the Isle of Man gets linked with F1, but with Lewis Hamilton's World Championship, they've decided to do a range of commemerative stamps and a first day cover.

I found about this via grandprix.com, a site I visit daily for F1 (and other 4-wheeled motorsports) news. However, they seem to have missed something the nature of the Isle - motor racing is a big deal here: there's racing of various forms throughout the year, not just the Tourist Trophy (TT) for motorbikes in June!

IOM Post did another range of racing stamps earlier this year too.

Here! Here!

2008-12-08T20:43:00.004Z

Time for me to come clean about where I live... well, a bit anyway. I live on one of those offshore territories that Barack Obama seems not to like. It seems the Financial Times of London doesn't like us much either, but at least a few logical, sensible American professors of business & law do!

I work in the financial industry and am regularly required to attend Anti-Money-Laundering training, despite working in the IT bowels of the company, rarely having contact with customer data, let alone customers. Even so, I am well aware that our company has strict requirements to 'know our customers' - including identity and source of income statements. Long gone are the days when any dodgy character in a trilby and macintosh could show up at the door with a suitcase full of bundled $50s and expect us to do business with them... apparently a few have tried, and have never been given the time of day!

Anyone still accusing at least the Manx authorities of shady behaviour should check out the behaviour of the UK government when they ~~stole~~ froze the assets of KSF in London including legimately held Manx deposits. Or the attitude in the US to corporations registered in Delaware (section entitled "DELAWARE: AMERICA’S OWN HOME TO CORPORATE ANONYMITY" at the bottom of the article).

Hypocracy in international government? Never

Oh, and now the Pope wants to have a turn with the hypocracy hat, Mr-I-run-the-biggest-untaxed-repository-of-obscene-wealth-in-the-world!

Is Hamilton the F1 Champion?

2008-11-02T19:49:00.004Z

Well, he finished 5th, and that was all he needed to have 98 points to Massa's 97 (having won the final race), but what does it say for the credibility of the FIA and their stewards that I'm just waiting for them to find a way to penalise Hamilton or McLaren such that he looses it by one point instead?

However, a final note on the grace of the runner up - Filipe Massa showed true class when he thanked the crowd for their support, and did not partake of their disgraceful treatment of Hamilton on the run into parc fermé. It's not true that nice guys finish last - he did win the race, and nearly the championship, but it is clear that we have not seen the last of Massa in the top places in the F1 championship table.

An exciting end, to an exciting season. Afterall, how long is it since we've had a season with 7, yes, SEVEN different grand prix winners?

... actually, it was 2003 - one of Michael Schumacher's 7 championship years, but not one of his most dominant. So not so long :)

The terrorists have won

2008-09-15T12:07:00.002Z

For the last seven-plus years, the US government have been chipping away at the human rights of everyone entering or leaving the country. This article is the most eloquent description of the results of this process of security theatre.

Give up Al Qaeda, you've won. Not by destroying things, or spending money, but by getting the idiots on Capitol Hill to destroy the liberties of their own citizens.

P.S. Over 20 years ago I visited the Soviet Union, at the height of the Communist regime, and my experience of travel to, around and back from that famously restrictive and 'dangerous' country was easy. Yes, the boarder guards were quite meticulous in their examination of your passport, but at no time did it feel like someone was about to turn an Uzi on us, or send us off to Siberia forever. I'll bet the victims of the article above couldn't say the same for their experiences at JFK airport.

'Chicanegate'

2008-09-11T17:25:00.002Z

The FIA (or at least their proxies the race stewards at the Belgian Grand Prix) have done it again: making decisions that appear to almost all commentators to favour Ferrari over McLaren. Some people fired off rants within scant hours of the decision, others have taken a little longer.

In the light of Massa's 'unsafe release' exiting the pits in Valencia (which earned him a mere fine, but a GP2 competitor at the same event a stop-go penalty!), contrasted with Hamilton's 25 second penalty for 'not slowing down enough' (what, a full car length and 6.7km/h slower isn't slower enough?) after using the escape road in wet conditions!

Come on, this may be a perception, but there's more evidence gathering almost every race weekend now. The FIA is rotten to the core - it's clearly more interested in helping Ferrari than being fair. And the Mosley affair hardly adds to the lustre of the organisation, whatever the 'democratic vote' of the strangely represented federation said.

Google Chrome

2008-09-10T18:43:00.003Z

Yes, everyone is writing about it, but is everyone writing sense?

No.

Thank goodness for people like Ted Dziuba at the Register. Even if his article has little flecks of spit around the edges where he gets a little "wound up", shall we say.

Basically, a whole load of should-know-better tech journalists have been writing all kinds of rubbish and hyperbole about Google's latest beta product, some even going as far as to suggest that it is an operating system... oh my Lord, could they be further from reality? It's an application, in the same sense as Firefox, notepad or Microsoft Excel. An operating system is concerned with hardware and providing services to applications, like those I just mentioned.

Addendum: another blogger's comments on the same TechCrunch article that got Dzuiba going.

RIAA Pays $107,951 to Alleged Filesharer

2008-08-15T21:43:00.004Z

I post this not because of any personal interest but because it is clear that the RIAA are very good at publicising anything that looks vaguely like a win for them, but are very quiet (as are the rest of the mainstream news media) when things go the other way.

The RIAA has settled Atlantic vs Anderson with prejudice - they accept they brought the case in error, and have accepted liability for Anderson's legal costs (and interest)... the bill: $107,951.

It is time that the RIAA (and their mates at the MPAA, and alied organisations in Europe) realised that, whatever the rights & wrongs of copyright infringment, they cannot simply assume that someone sharing files over a P2P connection is automatically infringing on the rights of those they claim to represent. As more and more musicians come out either in opposition to the restrictive & punitive behaviours of the record companies, or even in direct support of free file sharing, surely they have got to see that the music industry revenue model has to change as consumer demand simply won't support their existing profitteering methods.

The market has spoken, all hail market forces... except where there inconvenient to a big corporation like Disney, Sony, RCA, UMG...

Barbara Bauer Redux

2008-08-14T00:00:00.002Z

Back in May, I wrote about literary agent Barbara Bauer, and her attempts to sue Wikimedia for comments by a third party in the Wikipedia. A perfect example of the much-cited Streisand Effect.

Now the case has finally reached judgement, the EFF reports that the New Jersey judge has dismissed Ms Bauer's claims as federal law protects online forums and bulletin boards from liability for their (non-staff) contributors' comments. (Section 230 of the CDA)

I told you so.

And, of course, this information will cause another round of "isn't Barbara Bauer ignorant of the law" posts... more negative publicity for the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency.

Ah, the lawyers strike again, and walk away unharmed, and no doubt hansomely paid for their time and poor advice. Can anyone say "professional liability"?

Anachronox

2008-07-20T14:28:00.002Z

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

What is it?

Anachronox is one of the few games that developers Ion Storm ever actually released. Unlike the massive hype and disappointment that surrounded their best-known game Daikatana, Anachronox had a relatively quiet time on the shelves. Development began, using the aged Quake engine back in 1997. But by the time the game was released in late 2001, the developers had upgraded it to use the Quake 2 engine. To very good effect, as it happens.

The game is now available on the Sold Out label, rather than from the original publisher, Eidos Interactive. In fact, Eidos's website no longer even mentions Anachronox. This is a shame.

Anachronox is a role-playing game with plenty of adventure attached. It isn't just a sequence of fights with bigger and bigger enemies, though the game does contain its share of combat.

Is there a plot?

Plot? What plot? Well, as a matter of fact, there's plenty of plot. That's what happens when you have a game with seven player characters and a wide range of non-player characters. Seven? Yes, seven! The main character to begin with is Sylvester Bucelli or, as he's better known, 'Sly' Boots. He's a detective. You know the drill; private eye, down on his luck, up to his eyeballs in debt to the local crime boss, seems to have a drinking problem (well, he does live above a bar), desperate enough to take any job that comes his way before the debt collectors start extracting payment in 'un'-kind, if you know what I mean.

From such an unpromising start on a weird tech-planet that used to be occupied by an unknown race of aliens, we travel to a number of other planets, space stations and space ships, meeting, beating and greeting a wide variety of humanoid, mechanical and alien creatures. Including a planet! (I'll say no more on this subject, because I want to leave that one as a surprise for you!)

All of the characters have a backstory associated with them. This succeeds in giving them a little more depth than is often the case. Some of those other characters join Boots in his various quests to, you guessed it, 'save the universe from the forces of chaos.'

How do you play?

Okay, enough with the clichés, on with the game.

As I'm coming to expect from these games, the controls are right hand on the mouse (for the camera), left hand on the 'W, A, S, and D' keys for driving character movement, plus a few other miscellaneous keys for menu functions. When there are multiple characters in the active party (there are never more than three in the current party, even though there are seven to choose from), you switch between them by using the 'tab' key. During a later part of the game, you control three sub-parties, swapping between the sub-parties with 'shift-tab'. As complex as this might sound, I found it worked out just fine, as the level of complexity in party control ramps up gently through the game.

If you're a lefty, there's no reason why you can't swap hands, and have the mouse in your left hand, and your right hand on the cursor keys.

Most of the time, the lead character will run around the environment, although there is a walk option (holding the 'shift' key whilst moving forwards). Interaction with the world; opening doors for instance, is achieved by left clicking with the mouse.

Menu functionality - load game, save game, options menu access, quest goals, inventory and character/party status and so on - are activated using the function keys. F1 leads to the menus that are framed in terms of Boots' Life Cursor - the device through which his former secretary continues to 'live' after the fatal accident that is the subject of one of the subplots of the game.
Inventory is handled in a simple manner - each character can equip five items of weaponry and shields, and all other items are held in common. There are a few inventory-based puzzles, one of which involves the smelliest, greenest, most disgusting-est sock I have ever known.

Notable Features

Each character has a 'World Skill' - lock picking, in Boots' case, computer hacking for one of the other characters. Using this requires a Ctrl-click. The game provides a nice 'Seems Interesting' cue when you come across a place where a world skill is applicable. However, it does not indicate which character's skill it is that's applicable, so the indication can come even when you don't have the relevant character in the active group.

These World Skills require the player to succeed in a mini-game to cause the skill to work. In the case of the lock picking skill, the player has to break a combination lock with the aid of a Sonic Screwdriver-like device. These mini-games require some small degree of reactions and dexterity, and so might cause some players some difficulty. Keep a junior member of the household handy if this should prove to be the case, because some of these are essential to getting through the game, though plenty of them are only used to gain extra healing items.

Combat is handled turn-wise. In any given combat situation, you can only have three party members involved - the controls for more would obscure the screen for action. Each character and opponent gets turns in which to shoot a weapon, use a hi-tech device (MysTech), apply an inventory item, use a combat skill or move. Combat takes place in the same view as the rest of the game, but movement for all participants is limited to a grid of positions in the 'arena'. Each of the characters has his or her own set of unique combat skills and weapons, some of which have 'area-based' effects, but most of which are targeted at an individual.

Having played Gooka - the Mystery of Janatris a few years ago, I found the combat system quite easy to get used to as the systems in the two games have much in common. So much so that, despite knowing I'd selected the 'Normal' difficulty level at the start, the combat seemed very easy for about three quarters of the game, only to ramp up quite steeply in the last 10%. All the same, I found it enjoyable to do, and the graphical effects in combat are rather good.

The environments in Anachronox vary widely from the conventional spaceship interior, to artificial worlds with gravity set in arbitrary directions - like an M.C. Esher drawing. There are also natural planet-side, space station, and hive environments to tickle your fancy. Furthermore, there are lots of mini-games, above and beyond the characters' world skills. These include a space-age checkers game, a Galaga clone, a sequence comparable to parts of the arcade game Descent, and river rapid riding. Some are optional, and most of the harder reaction-based mini-games can be skipped if you find them too hard. I skipped a couple when the option was given to me.

Any other novelties?

The biggest novelties in this game were the wide variety of environments, and the (almost) fair balancing of male and female party characters -- 3 male, 3 female if you count the Life Cursor, 1 other, and an android -- all of which had plenty of opportunities for being involved in the adventuring. All (bar one) of the female characters were decently dressed too! And for the other, the costume made sense. Well. Nearly, anyway.

The Anachronox developers, Ion Storm, are no more as a company, but individuals from the team have continued to provide unofficial support for the game, in terms of community building and the provision of patches. It is thanks to them that, amongst other things, the game can be played on Windows 2000. They've also fixed a number of bugs, and provided a more comprehensive configuration program for the game.

A really nice feature, I felt, was the availability in the shops of comments from the various party members as to the usefulness of particular items. Each team member was shown either facing away from the player, or towards, to indicate whether the currently highlighted item was applicable to them. Not only that, but this feature was subtitled with comments like 'Boots really likes this item', or 'Boots doesn't like this item', to indicate whether an item is better, as good as, or worse than the one(s) already in the inventory. I think this one was underused... or maybe that's just because I didn't spot it until some distance into the game.

Oddities

As with any product, there were a few things that let Anachronox down. The cut-scenes, of which there are many, some fairly lengthy, all play without interruption. This is good if you don't want to miss anything the first time through, but it is particularly annoying if you have to re-load from a save game just before a big cut-scene.

Due to the graphical scaling method used to give the game more graphical modes, there are graphical glitches around text which I found distracting. Some of the text for some areas of the menus was also small and difficult to read - particularly when examining the details and getting the characters' comments for items in the shops. I've since discovered that by dropping the resolution to one of the more original settings, the graphics look much cleaner.

Conclusions

This has been an enjoyable experience. Anachronox may not feature the smooth, high-polygon count graphics of games in 2005, but the storytelling, the variety of settings, the music, voice acting (which was universally excellent, by the way) all combine in a way that is rarely seen to provide an engaging game. In fact, during a long weekend when my family were away, I found myself playing Anachronox for three days straight, and taking an extra day of leave from work to play for a fourth!

One final warning, however, if you have a problem with running around 'a lot of twisty passages all the same', beware. There are times when you are in location A, you realise you need to be in location B, but you have to spend five minutes running through half a dozen complex sections in between, including several loading screens. I suppose there is always a price to be paid for an extensive, wide-ranging and engaging environment.

Grade: A-

What do you need to play it?

Minimum Requirements

PII 266 MHz (or equivalent)
Windows 95B/98/ME
64 MB of RAM
12 MB 3D accelerator card with full OpenGL support
DirectX 7 (included)
4x CD-ROM drive
Controls: Windows-compatible keyboard and mouse

Recommended Requirements

AMD Athlon or Intel Pentium III processor
Windows 98/ME
128 MB RAM
16 MB 3D accelerator card with full OpenGL support
DirectX 7 (included)
8X CD-ROM drive
Sense of humor

(I used Win XP, AMD XP 2400+, 512 MB RAM, and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP)

Obituary for Common Sense

2008-07-14T11:24:00.001Z

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:

Knowing when to come in out of the rain; why the early bird gets the worm; Life isn't always fair; and maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children.

It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an Aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims.

Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.

Common Sense was preceded in death by his parents, Truth and Trust; his wife, Discretion; his daughter, Responsibility; and his son, Reason. He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, I Want It Now, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I'm A Victim.

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on.

If not, join the majority and do nothing.

-- From comments on The Telegraph (with apologies for the heavy-weight JavaScript content of the page).

Insult to Italy & Silvio Berlusconi

2008-07-08T17:27:00.004Z

Well, the White House might have apologised, but that doesn't mean the quoted text isn't right about international opinion on Italy & Silvio Berlusconi anyway. However, "the four-page description of Mr Berlusconi [that] had been taken from the Encyclopedia of World Biography" appears to have been removed from the site... on the other hand, I can't find any indication in the Internet Archive or Google that it was ever there in the first place!

What's going on here?

2008-06-24T19:34:00.002Z

Found via Slashdot, Gizmodo have a short article on the Lego archive. I can't believe Lego had the foresight to do this: they've actually stored a copy of almost every Lego product line ever sold still in their original little plastic bags in those brilliant flip-top boxes! Talk about your trips down memory lane! The video shows all my favourite sets - the small space Lego sets, the big Lego Technic car.

Before I discovered role-playing in my early teens (in the early 80s), I played with Lego virtually every weekend, the first gift I ever gave to the woman that is now my wife was a small Lego set (flowers and chocolates are just so passé), and even when I was trying to design a platforming game as a 27 year old, I still went back to Lego as a prototyping medium. Not only that, but my children still have my collection in the toybox, and it comes out from time to time, even though Lego no longer seems to hold children like it used to.

I loved the creativity of building my own toys, and what toy today gives you the tools to make cranes that span a garden? (ok, the string did, the driving & lifting mechanisms were a little smaller)

Psychonauts

2008-06-17T22:26:00.002Z

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

What is it?

We've had to wait seven years for Tim Schafer to create a new game, and this one went via Microsoft for a while, so no wondering about the delay then. (Can anybody see a release date for Longhorn yet?) But now, Majesco have released Double Fine Production's new opus.

Well, it's a biggy! It's been hyped by some, especially those who remember the early Monkey Island games, Grim Fandango (one of my personal favourites) and Tim Schafer's other games. It's new; it's flashy; it's weird; it's manic; it's Psychonauts! For the hard of hearing, please oblige me by imagining big flashy graphics around the name.

This game is a little off the beaten track for 'Boomers, I think. It's an adventure, in that there's a lot of plot, plenty of puzzles and loads of exploring. However, there's lots of action – running, jumping, punching, blasting and flying. Not to mention the RPG element of character development. This is what an action-adventure hybrid should be like, in my (not very, I guess) humble opinion.

Is there a plot?

Yes, in contrast to many action games I've come across, there most certainly is. Razputin has run away from his family, who're Circus acrobats, to the Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp with one aim in mind; to become a Psychonaut. A full-blown psychic warrior and secret agent, just like his heroes, Sasha Nein and Milla Vodello, who just happen to be trainers at the Summer Camp.

Raz has to learn all the psychic skills on offer, venture into some of the strangest minds in the psycho-verse, do battle with everything from confusing rats, through catfish, lungfish and censors, all the way up to mad butchers and evil, fire-juggling, acrobats. All the while learning new skills to over come some of the strangest puzzles I've ever come across. For example, how on earth do you persuade painting dogs to overcome their fear of a raging bull to advertise the next fight of a completely self-centred matador? Look out for the wrestlers – they bite!

I liked the story in Psychonauts – somehow it manages to stay quite logical and 'together', despite the twists and turns of the game play, and the non-linear way in which you can visit the different places in the game. Some of the plot elements were predictable, but, like all good short stories (let's not pretend this is War and Peace, now shall we), there's a decent twist at the end.
How do you play?

Obviously, this is not a game that's suited to a point-n-click user interface. Okay, so we've alienated a large chunk of the 'Boomers audience, but wait, there's more. This game is has a mere 13 button controls, not to mention that the camera is controlled by the mouse – no wonder Majesco/Double Fine recommend a game-pad. The default controls have you using your left hand for movement and two selectable powers, plus jumping, 'psi-floating', and other controls for interacting with objects and people. Then your right hand is on the mouse controlling the camera (to which Raz's movement is relative – 'forward' is in the direction the camera is pointing, 'left' towards screen left, and so on) and punching and the third selectable power, on the right mouse-button.

The inventory and skills list are accessed via the '[' and ']' keys, but within those areas, individual items are selected using the direction keys, or a pair of direction keys in a compass-like fashion. Not the most immediately obvious inventory system, but it works.

With there being 8 different powers and only three buttons to activate them (by default, 'Q', 'E' and 'right click'), some of the puzzles require you to think carefully about which powers you want available to you on short notice.

Notable Features

There's lots of psi-powers, lots of items to find (including a scavenger hunt sub-plot), brains to recover (and people to re-brain), psi-cards and markers to achieve – some hidden in some remarkably obscure places, and in all the minds there are figments – translucent icons representing themes from the character of the mind you're in, mental baggage and safes. Finding figments and psi-cards is essential to the development of Raz's powers, whereas finding baggage and safes just fill in back-story on the various characters and add to the overall experience.

The worlds are weird, wild, wacky and very colourful. They're detailed and fun places to play in. When you're not dodging axe-wielding butchers, fiery spiked juggling clubs, beefy censors and Dr Loboto that is!

Added to this mix of graphical excellence is a sound track of enormous extent. This game comes on 5 CDs and installs to take 3.6GB – the sound effect archives take up amost 1GB of that. And I'm not including the cutscene files in that either, because they take another 1.5GB on their own! You might expect, with such a massive amount of data that there's been some mix up, and a lot of duplication, but no, as far as I can tell (in the several weeks it has taken me to play this game), there is very little duplication of resources. This game is huge! Not only that, but it has a remarkable level of replayability – well there's another point in it's favour over almost any other adventure game!

Any other novelties?

I think this entire game review should really be in this section! It is clear that Double Fine & Majesco have put a great deal of imagination and creative effort into this game, and it is replete with ideas and challenges. Even the platforming elements of the game don't seem like something from the 80s (when platform games started), but then, perhaps that's down to the perspective warps and gravity games that they've played. Ah, the benefits of playing a game in a world as warped as Tim Schafer's mind!

Another novelty for me is to find that, without exception, the voice acting is exceptional! And there are some little gems of performances by Armin Shimerman (Quark, from Star Trek Deep Space 9) and Dwight Shultz (Murdock, from the A-Team). See if you can spot who they're voicing.

Oddities

There were a few occasions when the game crashed to the desktop, despite me having installed the second patch available from psychonauts.com, but because of the frequent auto-saves the game makes (every time a 'loading' screen appears), I lost very little progress.

The most confusing thing for me was realising when Raz was in the 'real' world, and when he was in the mental world of someone's mind. Sometimes the 'real' world is sufficiently odd as to be confused with the truly weird places in some of the character's minds. Just wait until you see the world of the Milkman Conspiracy!! That's got to be the most warped and wonderfully conceived game worlds I've ever seen.

The other oddity, for me, is the 'Teen' rating the game has been give. Perhaps the game ratings people think it's not appropriate for under 13's to consider the insides of their own minds? On the other hand, some of the story ideas are quite nightmare-ish. Including the giant bunny-chasing butcher with a pair of bloody cleavers. Okay, so maybe I was wrong... 'Teen' is the appropriate rating, though in reality some under 13's will be fine with this game, and neither of my girls has had any Psychonauts-induced nightmares despite watching me play much of the game, and playing the early parts of the game themselves.

Conclusions

I have to admit it, Psychonauts is a pretty amazing game. It has big worlds, fun game play, a story that beats many traditional adventure games, very good pacing, great graphics, sound, voice acting, and almost flawless performance. Best of all, it has kept me occupied for hours, not just battling with frustration over my inability to perform some combination of obtuse moves, but with enjoying the challenges, and wanting to find out what happens to Razputin and his friends.

If you've ever wanted to blast things, set things on fire, throw things, levitate, see through other people's eyes, be invisible, confuse your enemies, and deflect energy attacks, then this game is for you.

Well, Tim, it seems that adventure games ain't dead, you just helped them move to another level!

Grade: A

What do you need to play it?

Minimum Requirements

Windows 98 SE/2000/XP.
1.0 GHz Pentium(R) III and AMD Athlon(tm)
256 MB of RAM
64 MB GeForce (tm) 3 or higher or ATI(R) Radeon 8500 or higher (except GeForce 4 MX)
DirectX9.0c or higher (included on game disc)
DirectX(R) 9.0c or higher compatible sound card
Hard Drive Space: 3.75 GB minimum hard drive space
CD-ROM: 16X or better
Controls: Windows-compatible keyboard and mouse

Recommended Requirements

Windows 2000/XP.
2.0 GHz Pentium(R) III and AMD Athlon(tm)
512 MB of RAM
128 MB GeForce FX 5600 or higher or ATI(R) Radeon 9600 or higher
DirectX(R) 9.0c or higher and EAX(R) 2.0 or higher compatible sound card
Controls: Game Pad (optional)

(I used Win XP, AMD XP 2400+, 512 MB RAM, and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP)

Cable Madness Redux

2008-06-15T14:14:00.007Z

Back in November of last year, I wrote about the insane Pear Anjou audio cables for audio-extremophiles (a.k.a. idiots with too much money to spend on audio kit). Now the same kind of idiocy has infected Denon network cables. Below are two images, which link to their relevant product pages:

Now, what's the difference between these two products? Okay, so the Denon ones are in a flashier package, with nicer cable wrap, and indeed, might be made using a higher quality of wire, but how (given that they're exactly the same length; 1.5m/59in) can anyone justify the 56x multiple in price? The bog standard CAT-5 ethernet cable on the left will cost you £4.45 (including VAT (UK sales tax)) whereas nice blue, fabric sheathed cable on the right, that does exactly the same job is... wait for it... $499 (or about £250 at today's rate, or £499 if Denon do what many electronic hardware manufacturers do in the UK and just swap the $ sign for the £ sign).

So, to take the optimistic view, that's a 5500% markup for little difference in product. And given that ethernet is a digital signal, your network is either there, or it's not, quality barely comes into it.

You have to ask yourself what the mental state is of someone setting such insane prices. Are they laughing out loud (hysterically, perhaps), or do they think their customers are 7 sandwiches, a magnum of champagne, and a crate of strawberries short of a picnic?

If a post like this can prevent just one person from supporting such outright exploitation of a market sector that's clearly under-educated and over-financed, then I've done my good deed for the day.

The Mouse that went to the Moon

2008-05-30T19:42:00.003Z

I love a good underdog story, and in the past the Ansari X Prize (for sub-orbital space flight), and now the Google X Prize (for lunar landing) have both excited my interest. The little guys try to do what it took NASA billions of dollars and a tragic number of lives to achieve.

A few months ago (Sept 2007) Bob X. Cringely (my favourite computing & tech. blogger) announced the formation of Team Cringely to attempt to get a lunar rover to the moon within 18 months (by 1st April 2009), and for only $5million. Fantastic!

Now Bob says they're not going to bother with competing for the X Prize after all, but here's the good news: they're still going to the Moon, only this time they're going to send 24, yes, twenty-four rovers! The man is either mad, a genius, or a mad genius! Now, of course, they're free of the X Prize rules - which, if Bob's comments are anything to go by, are pretty weird - and are real pirate underdogs. The result:

Comment 1:

If you place a micro-dot on one of the rovers with the names of my kids on it ( I have 3) I'm in for a 1000.00. Sell 999 more and you have 20% of your budget! Cheers and good luck. Mike

Comment 3:

Now yur talkin - how do I donate a few bucks to the cause?

Seems I'm not the only one to think Cringely et. al. have done the right thing. All power to you and team, Bob!

The FIA General Assembly

2008-05-28T12:52:00.003Z

The forthcoming meeting of the FIA General Assembly (on June 3rd) cannot come soon enough. Max Mosley vs. News of the World privacy case does not signify - regardless of the outcome of those court proceedings, and any claims of entrapment, the truth of the BDSM habits of Mosley is clear. He did participate in the activities claimed (and videod).

Consequently, Mosley's position as the chief representative and primary authority figure within the FIA is severely compromised. He is simply not the right figure for the job, especially given his father and mother.

It is time that the FIA voting members stood up to Max and his cronies, and cleaned out the house. And forget about ever appointing Jean Todt in his place. His pro-Ferrari bias is even more obvious than Max's! Perhaps Gerhard Berger (despite his Ferrari-driving past) would be a better choice.

GrandPrix.com have a similar post on this subject.

Broadcast vs. Communication

2008-05-27T11:16:00.003Z

It seems that most of the mainstream media companies (Viacom, Disney, NBC, CNN, etc) think the internet is a broadcast medium. They put stuff up on their pages, users just consume their pap, just like TV, with very little control other than the channel, or the big red button (the ultimate choice not to bother). They want to control how that material is seen, and prevent anyone from using it in any other way. But immediately, everyone that views it gets a local copy (with the exception of streamed stuff) in their browser if not their cache too. It's not just an ephemeral signal, here now, gone now.

In contrast, the web is, and always has been, a communications medium. I put stuff up (like this blog), you can consume it if you like, but (and it's a big but) you can put up a response of your own, without need for any more license than I. Your response can be a comment here, or in your own space; a blog, a forum, a web-page, on IRC, or some new medium I don't know about yet, or have forgotten about.

Of course, the internet goes much further than the web: email, nntp, gopher (are there any gopher servers left?), ftp, and many more protocols not normally visible to mere mortals like you or I.

The future of the internet as a (reasonable democratic) communications medium depends upon the 'long tail' standing up to the big media companies, the organisations representing them directly (RIAA, MPAA, BPI, I'm looking at you), and those that don't officially (national governments, I'm looking at you!) to ensure that the internet remains a domain of free expression for the exchange and development of ideas.

Addendum on Everest Death Wishes

2008-05-20T15:07:00.000Z

If you're sat a Everest Base Camp, looking up at the summit region and you see the kind of weather shown in this video, you don't leave Base Camp, unless you and your entire climbing team have a Death Wish.
And the first thing you do on a day when you're looking to climb from Base Camp to the summit is to check with the local meteorologists as to what weather conditions to expect later in the day - and if they indicate that the weather at the summit is going to be the kind of weather shown in the video above, you don't leave Base Camp, unless you and your entire climbing team have a Death Wish.
And if you're part way up Everest and discover you've been let down by some stupid meteorologists, and discover that you're in the kind of weather shown in the video above, you head straight back to Base Camp, unless you and your entire climbing team have a Death Wish.
Were the entire climbing team involved in the fake Chinese ascent of Everest with the Olympic Torch a bunch of suicide cases? Or are they just too afraid of the Chinese security services...

Microhoo! Round Two

2008-05-15T08:36:00.003Z

The loudest merger of 2008, Microsoft and Yahoo rumbles on. Round One may be over, with Microsoft having withdrawn their bid, now that Yahoo have asked for $37 per share (rather than the $33 Microsoft were offering) but now we have Round Two. Ding! Ding!

The Yahoo shareholders wade into the ring... this is beginning to sound like a WWF tag match!

Eric Jackson (Ironfire Capital, Yahoo shareholder), from the BBC article on this subject, said, "Yahoo's stock has essentially been flat for the last four years while the market has gone up over 30% and Google has gone up 440%. So the comparisons are stark and the board has not been doing its job."

And what is the job of the Yahoo board? To service customers? To bring more eyes to their advertisers' properties and increase their sales? To encourage discourse and the development of the Web into a globally available, multi-cultural resource for the furtherance of humankind?

No! The only legal responsibility of the board, in a public company is "to increase shareholder value." Baldly put, make the rich investors richer.

Guess what, selling Yahoo to Microsoft at $33 a share (the offer from Microsoft) would garner roughly $44.6bn to be split between the current share holders, assuming MS buys all the shares to achieve the takeover. That's an awful lot of 'shareholder value' that's locked up in the company. Ah, but there's the key.... it's locked up in the company, and the corporate vulture set can't get their grubby little mitts on it, unless MS buys Yahoo from them, at a 70% premium over the price at the time of the offer ($19.18) ! The actual trading price on the NASDAQ of Yahoo shares leapt a staggering 48% on the day of the bid (1st Feb 2008) to $28.38. Even now, 3 months later, with Microsoft's bid withdrawn, the stock price is still in the mid- to upper-$20 range. Boo hoo! I want my money back!

Never mind the serious lack of similarity between Microsoft and Yahoo. One uses a lot of real computers, the other is Microsoft. One has a search engine that has some market share, the other has a search engine nobody uses. I'd never even bothered to look at Microsoft's Live Search until researching this post! And now I find that the results pages look like a direct rip-off of the Google pages. I guess Microsoft does love Google after all, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all that. Anyway, along with many other commentators, I don't see what possible synergies there are between Microsoft and Yahoo that could outweigh the massive organisational paralysis and technical nightmares that a merger would cause.

Finally, a final note from the BBC article on this subject: "In 2006 [Carl Icahn (another major Yahoo investor)] unsuccessfully pushed for the break up of Time Warner. In a recent interview on America's 60 Minutes programme he said: 'Maybe I made a mistake, but I made $300m on it. So is that so bad?'" Well, if your motivation is purely personal enrichment then, no, that wasn't so bad. Damn the consequences, good or bad.

It would clear my mortgage anyway.

Myst IV Revelation

2008-05-14T14:36:00.002Z

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

What is it?
The sequel to the sequel (Exile) to the sequel (Riven) of Myst! Just like Exile, this is a point-n-click adventure, in full screen, 360 degree bubbles. Chronologically, this game comes after Exile; Yeesha, the baby at the beginning of Exile, is now a bright, engaging 10-year old, and Atrus (played, once again, by Rand Miller, CEO of Cyan Worlds) is starting to show some age, with a distinguished display of greying hair and beard.

Okay, I have to come clean, right from the start. I've been a fan of the Myst games since 1993. So, you can imagine the sense of excitement and anticipation I felt when a certain package arrived on my doormat! I've been really good this time. I've not looked at the preview screen shots, I've assiduously avoided any Myst-related threads on adventure forums; I know next to nothing about Myst IV Revelation. Until now....

Where does it come from?
Again, like Exile, this game was not written, nor developed by Cyan (the originators of the Myst story) however the first "ident" movie is the wonderful Cyan one that sends shivers down my spine!

This game was developed for UbiSoft by Team Revelation, under license (and with artistic and plot oversight) from Cyan. Development of the project started well before Exile was complete, and you can tell from the quality of the game that it has taken all this time to produce. There's just so much in it. It comes with two whole DVDs of resources -- giving an 8GB (yes, eight gigabytes) full install. Even the minimum install is a whopping 3.5GB!

Is there a plot?
Of course... it's a Myst game! Atrus introduces the story by telling us that his sons, Sirrus and Achenar, weren't killed at the end of Myst (as some people had supposed) but remained trapped. Now we find out how Atrus and his family -- Catherine, his wife, and Yeesha, their lively (roughly) 10 year old daughter -- have dealt with the situation. You're invited to help out.

Those sons of his seem to have been the bane of Atrus's existence, providing the plot and motivation for three out of the five Myst games so far.

This is also the second Myst game to have its plot written by Mary DeMarle. She also wrote the story for Exile, to such good effect, and this one is similarly excellent, fitting the canon of Myst-lore well.

How do you play?
Starting in Tomahna (Atrus's family's home), you solve puzzles, fix machinery, go on wild rides, decode texts & sounds, etc, in four Ages. The Ages are spectacular, but I don't want to spoil any surprises for anyone. So I'll just say that the Ages are bigger, more elaborate and more fully realized than anything in Exile. Riven only rivals this by dint of it being set almost entirely in one Age, rather than four. On a personal note, I have to say that Tomahna is my favourite Age in this game; I could live there myself.

Navigation is simple, being entirely mouse driven. The customisable hand cursor is used throughout, making smoothly animated transitions between idle, pointing, grasping and touching forms. You can change the colour, transparency, and handedness of the cursor in the Options menu. A nice touch, enabling you to control how visible your cursor is.

Hotspots are rarely difficult to find - there's no pixel hunting here. Controls on machinery are clear in their location, if not their function. But then the game wouldn't be true to the Myst genre if Atrus's mechanical wonders were obvious in their layout.

The Puzzles don't interrupt game play and plot...they're essential to progressing the story. They're not just in the style of "here's a fancy puzzle-lock, you don't get to see the Treasure Chamber until you can figure out this sliding tiles game". There are some very novel puzzles right from the get-go. And the final puzzle is a complete doozy!

Just so you know, there are no mazes, nor sliding blocks, but there are sound puzzles and a timed sequence.

Notable Features
The live acting is excellent. Rand Miller is the *only* person who can play Atrus, much as he'd like to escape the role! Yeesha (Juliette Gosselin) is lovely. Sirrus and Achenar were played by Rand and Robin Miller in Myst, and are now played by Brian Wench, (a US TV actor) and Guy Sprung (a Canadian TV actor). Both are excellent, bringing back to life those two apparent psychopaths from the first game with great flair and enjoyable characterisation.

Technically, the live action sequences are integrated very, very well with the pre-rendered elements, animated environment, and real-time effects. Characters interact with objects, pass through doorways accurately, and show up as distant glimpses through intervening structures very smoothly. There's a great sense of the characters being real within this world.

Inevitably, I have to gush glowing praise for the graphics in Myst IV. Every time we have a new Myst game, I am astounded by the leaps forward made by the development teams, be they Cyan themselves, Presto (Exile) or Team Revelation. The Ages are stylish, intricate, beautiful (in their own ways), and fantastically brought to life by the optional immersive features. Even without the optional material, there is life in the environment, with moving water, animated insects, lightning, wind and wildlife. However, if you turn on the optional effects, the overall picture is stunning. To take Tomahna for example, the trees move in the wind, the waterfall is shrouded in mist (not myst, sic!), smoke rises from the kitchen, birds and insects flutter around the vegetation and scattered leaves blow in the breeze.

This game really is a tour de force in world realisation and photo-realistic environments!

As with Exile, the music for Myst IV was composed by Jack Wall. I've always found his material beautiful, haunting, dramatic, and brilliantly applied. He has linked this game stylistically and thematically to the earlier games, without just re-using Robyn Miller's material. There's also a song by Peter Gabriel (who also composed music for Uru: Ages of Myst), which fits in very well where it comes. No spoiler intended.

Any other novelties?
ALIVE technology - most objects and surfaces within range of your hand can be touched to find out what they sound like - walls, books, glass windows, plants, equipment; all sorts of things. Some objects can be used without appearing to have any true part in the game -- lovely extra colour, to bring you deeper into the game. This addresses one of the longest held gripes of many point-n-click adventurers; the fact that the game environments almost always include many objects about which the user is curious, but can never actually explore (for example, in Syberia, all those 1st floor doors in the hotel in Valadilene that went nowhere).

The game also allows you to have objects take on a degree of soft focus based upon their distance from the user. I must say that I really didn't like this feature, and turned it off as soon as I discovered it was optional. I like my world to be as clear as possible; I can get all the blurred images I could possibly ever wish for, if I take my glasses off.

There's the built-in hint system, using hints from Prima (publishers of the Strategy Guide for Myst IV, amongst many other guides). Level I, II, and III hints provide gentle nudges, pointed clues, and complete instructions for the various puzzles. There is a warning every time the hint system is about to reveal more information (almost every click whilst using the hints). This gets annoying very quickly. Yes, I know using this hint may "affect my gaming experience". Enough already!

Part way into the game, you obtain an amulet of memories that is used to give plot and character developing colour, especially by allowing the player to hear the characters read out the contents of their various journals. This makes absorbing the information in the journals a much more enjoyable aspect of the game than it has been in previous Myst games.

A camera may not be a novelty to adventure gamers anymore. There was one in Timelapse and many other games since. But the Myst IV camera is one of the most useful ever. We all know how difficult it is to take good graphical notes for Myst games; the clues can be so subtle. Well, the camera and viewer (with its note taking function too) make taking notes so much easier, it's almost simple to use Atrus's crystal viewer. Not too simple of course, because the clues are hand drawn, but still, much easier than puzzling out clues copied down late at night by someone who's own drawing skills leave much to be desired!

Problems
I'm sorry to say that my playing of Myst IV was marred by a number of bugs.

First of all, there's a compatibility issue with ATI Radeon cards (7000, 7500 and in my experience 9000 too) where the 3D environment is masked out by sandy squares. However, UbiSoft have a fix for this on their support site; a modification to a configuration file.

Secondly, the game has periodic crashes to the desktop. The game never crashed my PC, but did quit suddenly at a number of places, and never reproducibly, making it very hard to diagnose the cause. Therefore, save often; but this leads to the third problem I suffered.

As you accumulate save games, the menus get slower and slower. So either limit yourself to, say, ten save slots, or find the save directory and move save files out of the way, or periodically delete old saves from within the Load Game menu.

Conclusions
In a nutshell: magnificent! This is my favourite Myst game yet. There are the awesome Ages, with perilous heights, stunning scenery, fantastical creatures. We get plenty of lifts, cable car rides, amazing machines, intriguing and challenging puzzles.

Flies in the ointment: blurry focus (can be turned off), massive full install, virtual CD/DVD check, and graphical problems that weren't completely solved until I'd finished the game. It's a shame that after three years of development, there are still issues in the game. These issues, including the save game slow-down and repeated crashes to desktop, contribute to a slight tarnish on the overall product. I'll be betraying my fan-dom of the Myst games by saying that I was willing to work around the issues, and have been able, I feel, to see the gold underneath.

Grade: A-

A patch solving the issues mentioned above would convert this into an A+.

What do you need to play it?
Minimum Requirements
• 700 MHz Pentium(r) III or AMD Athlon(tm) or better
• 32 MB DirectX(r) 9-compliant video card (800x600 display)
• 128 MB RAM (256 MB required for XP)
• 3.5 GB free hard disk space
• 4x DVD or faster
• DirectX 9.0-compliant sound card
• Windows(r) 98SE/2000/ME/XP with DirectX 9.0c (included on DVD)

Recommended Requirements
• Pentium(r) IV or AMD Athlon(tm)
• 64Mb or more DirectX(r) 9-compliant video card (800x600 display)
• 256 MB RAM
• 8.0 GB free hard disk space

(I used Win XP, AMD XP 2400, 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP)

Everest?

2008-05-08T07:31:00.004Z

China claims that the Olympic torch has been taken to the summit of Mount Everest.

First question : why?

Second question: what distinguishes the location shown in this video from any windy, snowy, rocky, slightly elevated, location in any part of China?

Third question: why is there no evidence of breathing equipment on the climbers? Oxygen support is required for all but the most extreme mountaineers at the summit of Mount Everest.

Answer One, Two and Three : they didn't do it.

The Streisand Effect Strikes Again

2008-05-05T20:44:00.004Z

I find it quite amazing the number of people who fall for this lawyer-dream-cum-true behaviour where some offended party chooses to sue an internet site for libel or defamation or just to get them to pull particular content. Many people have done this, but every time they do, all they get is a bloody nose and a whole lot of publicity they never wanted in the first place... example: Barbara Bauer is a literary agent and somebody doesn't like her. So instead of just telling their friends and neighbours not to use her services (perhaps they don't have any friends or neighbours who're in the market for literary agencies?), they created a page on Wikipedia to describe her. Now, that page kept on being restored and deleted, and it actually appears to have survived for 10 months from May 2007 to March 2008 (wiki deletion log).

So Ms Bauer decides she doesn't like this, so she's suing Wikipedia. No, not the author of the defamatory article; Wikipedia. It's about time somebody at whatever passes for a Bar Council or a Law Society in the States needs to hit the entire legal profession upside the head with a big clue stick. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) means you cannot sue the service provider (in this case Wikipedia) for what their members chose to post. I'm sure there's something in the US Constitution on the subject too!

So Ms. Bauer, welcome to the Streisand Effect. You make an ill-aimed fuss about something you want kept quiet, and what happens? Everyone hears about whatever it is you want kept quiet. Me? I'd never heard of you. Now? I'm left with the impression (rightly or wrongly) that you're a poor literary agent with a penchant for scatter-gun litigation. Sure sounds professional to me!

What's worse is that you'll now go down in history (via Google's indexes, Yahoo! indexes, MSN Live Search indexes (maybe), Altavista, Ask.com.... not to mention the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive) in that way, but not at Wikipedia because not only have they deleted the article, no-one can create an article with that name any more.

Note: the Wayback Machine will have articles about the Wikipedia case, it doesn't actually have the Wikipedia article itself ... at least I couldn't find it. I'm not sure which is worse in terms of publicity: an article few people are likely to read, or many many articles of opinion scattered across the 'net, based upon journalist's reporting of the case. So we may all be quite wrong.

Scratch that. I do know: Ms Bauer, the correct way to handle this would have been by a simple appeal to the administrators of Wikipedia. Only an idiot involves lawyers where a simple email would more than likely have sufficed.

Analogy

2008-04-16T12:46:00.002Z

Apparently found on the archives of talk.bizarre from September 1998, here is a fascinating analogy for the stock market. Seems remarkably apt, especially given this article from yesterday on the BBC.

Both go a long way to explain the mess the markets now find themselves in. But the most frustrating thing is that, of course, everyone suffers from the financial fall-out of their adrenaline & testosterone addictions.

To: Microsoft, Re: OOXML

2008-04-02T16:48:00.004Z

Shamelessly copied (and modified) from Chris Samuel, down under:

Dear Microsoft,

RE: OOXML

Due to massive irregularities in the voting process in ISO, the requirement to use patented media formats such as MP3, the enforcement of old date bugs in the standard, and the sheer inappropriateness of using the fast-track process for your massive XML document format OOXML I will not accept it as an agreed ISO standard, even though you managed to con enough people into voting buy enough votes for it.

Aliss

p.s. please feel free to copy my copy to your heart's content, but please give credit for the original to Chris!

The Moment of Silence

2008-04-02T16:43:00.002Z

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

What is it?

The Moment of Silence (TMOS) is the newest adventure game from the House of Tales, the German outfit that brought us The Mystery of the Druids. Right away, I have to admit that I really didn't like The Mystery of the Druids, but I stopped comparing the two games pretty quickly. TMOS contains none of the graphical bugs and immersion-breaking missteps of The Mystery of the Druids, so this is the last time I'll mention it.

Okay, so now we've dealt with some of my prejudices, let's get on with the game at hand. The game arrived in a standard DVD-style box and this was the first surprise - it comes on DVD. I had thought that the DVD format was limited to the really big-budget guys like the Myst franchise and Half-Life 2. But, obviously, I was wrong, as it seems to be taking over further down the market. This is a Good ThingTM, because it means developers can offer games that can honestly claim "spectacular set pieces and dramatic action sequences", "over 75 rendered and animated locations", "more than 500 interactive screens". All of which, I must say, TMOS does indeed deliver.

Is there a plot?

Oh yes! Most definitely - this game is completely plot driven. The main character is Peter Wright. He's a communications designer - an ad-man, so to speak - working on the government's latest political campaign for anti-cryptography legislation. His world, as is so often the case in such games, is turned upside down by the sudden arrival of a S.W.A.T. team at his neighbour's apartment. Peter's neighbour is dragged away by armed police, leaving his family stunned in the doorway. At this point, Peter makes what might be considered in the real world to be a critically bad move... he goes round to his neighbour's place to see if he can help. But, I hear you saying, there wouldn't be much of a game here if he didn't! And you're absolutely right. Anyway, the story leads from here in Brooklyn to locations in various parts of New York City -- including Peter's office and Greenwich Village -- and then beyond to the tropics, the Arctic and even off-world for a time. Along the way, some of Peter's recent history is revealed, which makes his reactions to some of the story elements more than a little surprising.

The environments in this game are somewhat reminiscent of Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner'. However, this game has none of the empty spaces, ultra-busy streets, dark drama, or the rain of that film, though it does rain during some of the sections. We're talking 2044 here, 40 years hence; the world is governed by a democratic super-state with Big Brother-like tendencies. Technology has moved on in a surprisingly understated manner - people carry messengers (hand-held video phones), desktop computers look pretty much like the current advanced models with some nice enhancements (like no tower to get in the way), and the Internet has been renamed GlobalNet. Of course, GlobalNet is still used primarily for chatting, email and publicity, very much like today. Public transport has advanced - the maglev train is the subway of the future, and Peter mostly uses automatic cabs to get around locations in New York. Other transport media are used too - aeroplane, zeppelin, space elevator, skidoo and rocket. But most of the time, Peter is on foot.

How do you play?

The third person user interface of TMOS is mainly mouse-driven, with a couple of keyboard controls to summon help (displaying the exits from the scene) and Peter's Messenger, when it is available. Left clicking moves Peter around the world and performs actions (picking up objects, starting conversations, pressing buttons and applying inventory objects to people, the environment or other inventory objects), and right clicking gets descriptions of things from Peter's point of view, or de-selects a held object. As this is a third person game, navigating Peter around the environment is done using the mouse. This has one major drawback. It can be difficult to navigate in confined spaces and there is a particular problem with controlling Peter within his own apartment. This is really rather distracting when the start of the game requires you to spend some time in said apartment finding things.
The Escape key brings up the standard game menu for saving and loading games and setting options. There aren't many configurable options - just the voice, music and sound effects volumes and subtitles. What more do you really need?

Puzzles in this game are varied. There are inventory-based puzzles, including object-combining ones, and as we've come to expect, not all of the solutions are obvious applications of the particular objects. There are conversation trees - some of which are quite deep. Other puzzles include combination locks and dentistry, of all things.

Regarding the conversation trees, it would be nice if someone could finally sort out conversation trees so that you don't get comments from characters before the main character should know the information. Using the multiple choices in an order other than that displayed on the page gave rise to out-of-order information. If there are dependencies between conversation branches, then the dependent branches should simply not show up until the leading branches have been traversed, even if this leads to fewer options appearing at a time. Sadly, TMOS falls foul of this sufficiently often that I gave up trying conversation options in the order that seemed interesting and stuck to the order in which they're listed on the screen.

Notable Features

TMOS comes on DVD. This is important and the DVD-style game box makes this clear in five places, and just so you don't miss it, that's the same number of times as in this review. I repeat, this game comes on DVD - got it? ;-)

To those people who have an issue with StarForce protected games, be warned, this is another one of them. However, the only problem this caused was that the DVD sometimes was detected improperly by the StarForce disk checker if the DVD had been in the drive for a long time before starting the game, so I had to try to start it again.

This is also a big game - 3.4GB full install. It is somewhat unusual in that you install it normally, and then you use an extra button on the AutoLauncher to convert the normal installation into a full install.

The developer has already patched the game; however it is a small download when compared to many others currently available. The AutoLauncher has a "Check for updates" option that simplifies the patching of the game quite considerably. I didn't try the optional GameShadow program that comes with TMOS, as I'm not a fan of programs that scan the contents of my hard disk looking for games to upgrade - even if it is under my control.

Any other novelties?

I'm not sure if this next comment really counts as a novelty; in an ideal world, it certainly shouldn't. The voice acting in TMOS is almost universally excellent. The box claims "over 35 professionally voiced... characters," and indeed there are a goodly number of characters, though I didn't count them all, and they are all well acted.

The one exception, and this may be the reason I had some trouble getting excited by this game, was the voice of Peter Wright himself. Now, given his circumstances, I can understand why he's somewhat unhappy at times, but I feel the game suffers for his downhearted presentation - he needs to show more anger and outrage, and less numb melancholy.

Oddities

TMOS offers two levels of anti-aliasing in the hardware settings section of the AutoLauncher. However these caused the game to crash to desktop when starting, so I gave up on them. Apart from this, the game was remarkably stable - I can't, in fact, recall any other crashes or hang ups whilst playing it.

I rather liked the developers' idea of how the mobile phone will change over the next 40 years - into the mobile video phone. The device seems useful and usable; with a simple menu and "start call" and "end call" buttons. However, the phone is used very little within the game, compared to how it could have been used. It is interesting that the phone acts as a metaphor for Peter's identity. When he is without his phone, he is a non-person; when he has it, he is a functioning member of society.

What went missing -- beyond the essential excitement that a game of this quality should engender -- were certain sound effects. With such a richly rendered environment, including objects that Peter can comment on but which turn out to never be used (something we adventurers regularly ask for), it seems odd that the House of Tales didn't take the opportunity to include footstep sound effects. There are times when Peter walks on pavement, carpet, vinyl, metal plating, concrete, and puddled surfaces, plus varied indoor spaces where you'd expect some of the sounds to reverberate around the room.

Conclusions

The Moment of Silence is a very professionally made, tightly plotted, well-acted (in the main), good-looking game that would justify all but the highest of price tags. Just one problem -- it lacks the sparkle and excitement I need to really recommend this game. It is a good example of the conspiracy theory genre, and certainly didn't fall into the trap of predictability. I'm usually a pretty good plot-spotter in mysteries and movies, and I didn't predict this ending before I got there, although I did have some of the elements quite early on.

Okay, I lied; one more mention of Mystery of the Druids: TMOS is much, much better than Mystery of the Druids. Finally, this game comes on DVD, so make sure you have a DVD drive before you buy.

Grade: B

What do you need to play it?

Minimum Requirements

Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP.
Pentium II 450 or equivalent
64MB RAM
32MB 3D graphics card
DirectX9 - oddly, DirectX 8 comes on the DVD
DirectX9 compatible sound card
2x speed DVD ROM drive.

(I used Win XP, AMD XP 2400+, 512 MB RAM, and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP)

P.S. Dekker was a replicant, so there!

AOL & Compuserve

2008-03-29T11:15:00.002Z

It occurred to me this morning that the Google universe has now become, by growth and stealthy usefulness, an ecosystem rather like AOL and Compuserve once viewed themselves.

AOL and Compuserve were gateways to online content. You connected to their servers, through their browser, and spent most of your time reading their content, providing eyeballs for their advertisers, and contributing to their forums (or email lists). Eventually both providers opened up access to more of that new fangled 'internet'-thingy... and gradually their own content whithered away, so that they're little more than search and portal services.

On the other hand, as we all know, Google started as a search engine with a friendly logo, (Rather remeniscent of the "Don't Panic!" of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) but has gradually grown to provide all sorts of services, and a portal homepage to boot.

Specifically it struck me that I use (in no particular order):

Google Mail
Google Search
Google Homepage
Google Reader (RSS feed reader)
Google Analytics
Google Documents
Google Checkout
Google Maps
Google Earth
Google Finance
Google Notebook
Google Images
YouTube
... and ...
Blogger (did you know that?)

Check out this list for yourself... you might be surprised just how involved in your life Google has become.

I'm not sure at this point whether this is a good thing or not, mostly because it's never caused me any problem to be so entangled with Google, but that, in its own right, causes me anxiety ... what about resilience, and availability? And can I really trust the big cuddly, cool, fluffy corporation that is Google never to anything evil with my data?

Financial reasons

2008-03-25T19:49:00.003Z

Something a little unusual for me: my boss sent me a link today to a blog from an analyst in the UK financial sector, and the content is actually interesting. Everyone is complaining about the so-called 'credit crunch'. That self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling prophecy that financial doom is going to cause another global recession.

Whilst Chris Skinner (the blogger in question) isn't actually saying the crisis isn't upon us, but he is at least writing about the real causes: machines being given too much unchecked freedom, people not recognising and managing risks, and the regulators being too divided and ignorant of their own markets to due a proper job.

I especially like the "young pups every 7-10 years" cycle in the second post, and the details of the Northern Rock situation (about half-way down the third post) - Northern Rock's business model was to be carrying over 3 times more debt (as client mortgages & similar) over the deposits of their clients. So for every £1 in the bank, there was £3.25 in debt! On top of that, they only had £1.5 billion in insurance, against that £90 billion debt! No wonder there were problems when they couldn't keep the wheels oiled with inter-bank loans.

Competing with 'free'

2008-03-14T15:54:00.002Z

Dealing with the fact that music now fits into the category of 'infinite goods' is proving mentally challenging for many in the music publishing business. Not so Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame.

His recent album distribution plan has a number of options for the 'purchaser':

1. download the basic album for free
2. ...
3. various packages of extras and DRM-free file formats: small costs from $5 - $75.
4. ...
5. the exclusive limited edition (only 2,500 copies) primo version at $300 a pop.

Despite the fact that option 1 is widely executed, gross sales in the first week alone are $1.6 million.

Now that's what I call competing with free and still making a living!

The Internet is not Especially Dangerous to Kids!

2008-03-04T18:10:00.004Z

This news from Techdirt needs to be pushed out there as much as possible. All to often the Internet is portrayed as the most dangerous place for kids in the world. It simply isn't true because, well, kids just aren't as stupid and unaware of simple stranger-danger as the more nanny-ish of adults out there would like to think.

Is this a control issue? The adults don't understand what the kids are doing, so get all over-protective?

Come on parents, grow up, and learn to judge risk online like you do in your own lives, not just by using the standards of the circulation-whoring headline-grabbers in the old media industries (newspapers, magazines, television and radio, in case you're confused over whom I'm blaming).

Update: rotten.com has this disclaimer on their site that also makes the point rather nicely.

Fairy Tale

2008-03-02T15:07:00.003Z

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

What is it?
"Fairy Tale", or "Fairy Tale About Father Frost, Ivan and Nastya" to give it its complete title, is another point and click adventure from Eastern Europe. The developers, Bohemia Interactive Studio, are a Czech outfit, based in Prague. The eponymous Tale is inspired by Russian folklore, and focuses on the story of a young girl, Nastienka (Nastya), and a hero, Ivan.
The game is described by the publisher, Cenega, as being suitable for 'Any child able to switch on a computer' with parental assistance, but 'ideal for children aged 6 years'. This seems to be reasonably accurate. The game is not difficult to operate, nor overly complex in it's puzzles, but I'd be very impressed by a child of 6 who can play the entire game.
Because this game is aimed at people so much younger than me, I'll once more be asking Purple Bear (my 10-year old daughter) for some comments, in an effort to overcome the old fogey effect. Her comments are in bold italic text.

Is there a plot?
Yes. The Fairy Tale is the stories of Nastienka and Ivan. Nastienka is a young girl who has a new stepmother and stepsister to use and abuse her in classic fairy story ways. Ivan is a young hero, leaving home in search of a bride, learning humility along the way.
The two story threads are nicely interleaved; we begin with Nastya before switching to Ivan. They eventually meet, before diverging again to continue their stories. The player must help Nastya to overcome her overbearing stepmother, weak father, and annoying stepsister, and help Ivan learn some degree of humility - he's a particularly obnoxious character to begin with. I don't want to give away any more of the plot because it is about the only element in the game that is surprising. I will say, though, that Father Frost doesn't appear until very late in the game - in retrospect, his inclusion in the title is rather surprising!
I found the game fairly easy. The story was interesting and different from other games I've played. The game was not scary at all, and I think the story turned out right in the end.

How do you play?
When you start the game, you're dropped straight into the beginning of the story; a grandmother is telling a bedtime story to her grandchildren - this element returns from time to time in the game as a break between the four acts. Even to load an existing game, you have to hit the Escape key to get to the menus. The menus are simple - New, save and load, options, credits and exit - what need is there for more? Options are limited to subtitles, colour depth, special effects and sound volumes.
As I've already said, we're dealing with a point-n-click adventure. It is played in a full screen playing area, from the third person perspective, with the mouse only. There is an extensive inventory of objects to use to solve the puzzles in the game. Inventory items are changed by activities; some puzzles require the combination of items. Puzzles vary from knitting socks to extracting bears from fallen tree stumps, from defeating robbers to escaping a fiery dragon. The majority of puzzles are inventory based, but not exclusively.
The inventory is shown on a pop-down, translucent bar across the top of the screen. Most of the time, the inventory doesn't get in the way, but there were times it popped down when I didn't want to see it.
It was fun to play two different people at different times in the game.
I like the bits where Squeaky the Bat was talking and the words were upside down. The names of the characters were very unusual. But my favourite parts were Baba Yaga's dancing, and the .
Human Misery was my favourite character because she was so different from the other characters.

Notable Features
Unusually, in my experience, the manual for Fairy Tale is surprisingly informative! It is a slim affair - a mere 6 pages of information, plus credits and space for notes. However, once the author gets past the installation instructions and the detailed description of the user interface, there is a useful set of hints on adventure game playing strategy, for example, "Think 'game-like.' Improvise. You don't necessarily use all the items you find for their primary purpose. For example, a horseshoe can be used in various ways, such as throwing."
Now the game doesn't actually require you to throw a horseshoe, but if granny just gave an 8-year old child this game (it is suitable for 6 year olds, remember), and the parents have no adventure game experience, consider how useful strategy hints are going to be for all concerned! The same goes for the detailed description of the user interface.
Okay, I've covered some of the nicer features... now the downsides. The graphics and the voice acting.
I know we all say in those polls on the game factors, that the story is king, well that may well be the case, but why are we still dealing with animated games with characters that could have been drawn by a high-school student, rather than a professional artist - and if they weren't drawn by a professional artist, but by a programmer in his spare time, why didn't the developers hire a professional artist?
Now the worst factor: the voice acting. This was a real area of weakness. Most of the characters sounded like they'd been instructed to impart the opposite emotion into the lines than what was needed - or at best that any old reading of the lines would do! I only hope that the characters come over better in the original Czech. That's a do-over, guys - especially Nastya's stepmother.
There is also a key that Ivan has to retrieve early in his story, but there seemed to be bug around this as a couple of times through the game, we couldn't find the key, despite solving the relevant puzzle.
I think that the menus were quite simple to use. The key bug was the only really annoying bit.
The pictures were all quite flat, and even though they were quite colourful the game looked boring. If I could change anything, I'd change the graphics from 2D to 3D. .
I didn't need much help to play the game, except with the missing key problem and when I couldn't find the pub in the town.

Any other novelties?
The biggest novelty in this game is the use of Russian folklore as inspiration. How many times have we been to Atlantis, Egypt, a medieval land of fantasy, or Outer Space? Too many to count. But how often have we seen a game set in rural Eastern Europe? It doesn't sound an exciting prospect, but in the context of this story, it works well.
Conclusions
This game shows some promise. It has a novel (apart from the troublesome stepmother) story, given the current state of the art of adventure game writing. The interface is reasonably solid - though it did hang a few times. But, and this is a big but in my opinion, the game is severely let down by the voice acting. I feel it is especially important to get this right with games aimed at children because of the story telling aspect of the game.
The worst offence against gaming, however, was the dire execution of the voice acting. I know an evil stepmother is supposed to sound bad, but this one sounded like she'd had a stroke.
This is not really a keeper, for me. I would never replay it.
I'd say that some of most of the girls in my class would like the game, but not the boys. Even though I finished the game, I think it was a bit boring. I don't want to play it again.

Grade: C+

What do you need to play it?
Minimum Requirements
• Pentium(r) III 733 MHz or Athlon(tm) 733 MHz
• 32MB nVidia GeForce2 / ATI Radeon video card
• 256 MB RAM
• 400 MB Hard Drive
• CD-ROM or CD/DVD-ROM drive 8x
• Mouse
• DirectX certified sound card
• Windows 98/2000/XP with DirectX 8.1
Recommended Requirements
• Pentium(r) IV 1.5 GHz or Athlon(tm) 1.5 GHz
• 64 MB nVidia GeForce 4 / ATI Radeon 9600 PRO video card
• 512 MB RAM
• Sound card with 3D sound support
• Windows XP
(We used Win XP, AMD XP 2400+, 512 MB RAM, and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP)

Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks, Oh My!

2008-02-28T22:00:00.002Z

I read the Techdirt blog every day, generally via the RSS feed. Their usual themes are business models, law, and economics, with a US bias. One of today's posts is one of their best ever (IMHO), giving decent definitions of the above concepts: Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks. Oh my, indeed! It's nice to see these terms laid out simply and straightforwardly.

Patents: grant a monopoly to an inventor for 25 years.

Copyright: protects your creations from unauthorised copying, in order to incentivise future creative effort.

Trademarks: protect the public from confusing Bob's Cola with Coca Cola.

One of the most interesting points on the post though, is the 7th comment, where "Jerry in Detroit" points out that property is subject to property taxes, so why isn't so-called 'intellectual property" subject to property taxes? Default on your tax payments, and have your patents/copyrights/trademarks put into the public domain.

How interesting.

I wonder why we've never heard of such a concept from the US government? Perhaps Rep. Howard Berman (the "Representative from Disney") would like to bring such a bill to Congress?

Three weeks!

2008-02-22T20:10:00.002Z

An update to a post I made on Jan 29th.

My replacement Netgear Ethernet-over-power (or HomePlug) unit has arrived. As expected, it's an XEPS103 unit - with built-in power supply for a Netgear router like my DG834G. This has the benefit of meaning you can plug the router into a socket, and get it's ethernet connection from the same socket.

The whole process was a bit more painful than I'd hoped, but no more than I'd expected. I ended up phoning A-Novo (Netgear's UK rep. for this recall) three times. The first time, the person who picked up the phone immediately dropped it again, putting me to the back of the queue! I was therefore, not a very happy bunny by the time I got to speak to a real person. At which point I discovered that Netgear had failed to supply A-Novo with sufficient replacement kit to cover the returns they were getting. How helpful. Not only that, but A-Novo were getting (& giving) mixed messages about when they had (or had not) been sent kit, and when they were expecting more.

However, all in all, another week of waiting, and on my third call I was informed that my unit had been shipped. Being as I don't live in London (or anywhere close to it!), I didn't believe the girl on the phone who said I would be receiving it 'today'. I received it two days later, but given my location, that was acceptable. So, now, 48 hours later, my network is still working, and I no longer have long cables trailing around doors, and up stair-wells.

I will have no problem choosing to buy Netgear equipment again in the future.

Inaccurate Journalism

2008-02-22T14:26:00.002Z

I've said for many years that, as soon as you find a news story about which you have first-hand knowledge, you'll find that the journalists reporting it have made fundamental errors, and will often have failed to check their facts.

My Dad appeared on local radio in the city where I grew up, commenting on pre-Christmas retail trading (funnily enough, he worked in retail, and so knew something about this subject!), and usually found, when listening to the recording later, that his comments had been mis-edited, or mis-interpreted by the journalists. There have since been other cases in my own experience, though nothing all that important.

Now I get to point you to a detailed example in someone else's life. Joel on Software was interviewed on the subject of Microsoft's recent release of API documentation, and he has posted a correction for the benefit of anyone unlucky enough to read the journalist's mis-interpretive garbage. Mind you, Joel himself had to later post correction to his own correction! Which perhaps just goes to show how easy it is to screw up in this media business.

The opposite of the Wii-mote

2008-02-20T07:13:00.002Z

Nintendo are pushing the Wii as a vehicle for increasing gamer fitness, by use of whole body movements, so how about this new Emotiv device (from Kotaku and the BBC news sites) as a complete antidote to all this bouncing around in front of the telly.

A fourteen-point sensor net, plus a gyroscope, are supposed to pick up 30 basic commands direct from the head, face and brain and transmit them wirelessly via a Bluetooth dongle to the computer. Seems an obvious choice for Prof. Stephen Hawking and many others with various bodily paralysis conditions, not to mention people who have difficulty with keyboard, mouse or game-controllers. But what will the rest of us do? Sit there drinking coke and eating nachos whilst thinking about killing the next Zombie?

Intriguing technology all the same, and not as expensive as I'd expected: $299... no price in GBP, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was £299, but that's a topic for another day.

Google's answer to MicroHoo

2008-02-13T12:58:00.003Z

From a comment on New York Times BITS:

If i were google, i’d prepare to spend 44 billion on a counter-attack, not to buy yahoo, but to develop a wifi-enabled mini-laptop running an open-source OS (like the asus eee) and giving it out free of charge to every man woman and child in the USA. With one bold move google could break microsoft’s back overnight.
— Posted by stephan baishanski

Hell, why doesn't Google just buy Asus and give away 250 million eeePCs? (Okay, so 250 million times $300 (retail 2GB model at Amazon.com) is $75 billion, not $44 billion, but surely that's pocket-change to Google, and the cost wouldn't be the retail price anyway.

My only question is, so what about the rest of America, Europe, Africa, and Australasia?

Flashy product promotion

2008-02-12T18:38:00.000Z

Now this is what I call a good use of Flash! (give it a moment to load)

HEMA is an international retail organisation with stores in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg and Germany, but it's pretty clear from the above linked site (as opposed to their normal site) that someone there has an excellent sense of fun.

It's rather reminiscent of the world's greatest car advert or one for the gourmet, or student's of automotive dance.

Enjoy.

Superbowl XLII

2008-02-04T10:40:00.000Z

On Friday I found out that this weekend was Superbowl Weekend - the XLII (42nd one, to be precise). Now American Football used to be one of my few indulgences with respect to the culture of the USA, way back when Channel 4 used to show it around 11PM. It later moved to the early hours, at which point, (surprise, surprise) the viewing numbers dropped so much that they decided to stop showing it altogether. So now, in the UK, we get one dose of gridiron a year on terrestrial TV.

In the recent past, the event has been broadcast by ITV, so I went searching around the commercial TV station listings for Sunday, and could no find no sign of the event. Oh dear, thought I. Yet another year where I go without. So imagine my pleasure when I discovered, quite by accident, on the wikipedia.org page on Superbowl XLII, that it was going to be on BBC2! No commercials need apply!! Yes, I know many citizens of the USA watch the Superbowl just for the ads, but, frankly, I couldn't give a damn for ads, US or UK.

So, for once, my TV license fee has gone to pay for something I actually want to watch! (soap-opera producers, soccer companies, 'reality' show makers, go spin!)

Finally, the game itself? Brilliant.

In the run-up to the event, the New England Patriots have had an amazing season - unbeaten though the regular season, and the play-offs. They were even taking pre-orders for 19-0 merchandising before the weekend! (19 wins, no losses - the full 2007/8 season)

Every pundit out there though the Pats would walk it. The New York Giants, on the other hand, had a poor start to the season, but ended with a 10 away-game winning streak, but are led by a much criticised quarterback, Eli Manning.

In the game, it became clear quite early on that both teams were up for this. (In the past, the Superbowl can be an anticlimactic conclusion to a tense and exciting series of playoffs). The Giants defensive team (and their defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo were absolutely stunning. The Pats might have been leading 7-3 by half-time, but the Giants were winning the ball game! Then, in the last two and a half minutes of the last quarter, the Giants and Eli Manning were given their moment to really make the winning plays. They made over 83 yards in 12 downs, to score a touchdown (received by Plaxico Burress) with 35 seconds on the clock. The Pats just couldn't bring it back from there, though, to give them credit, they tried very hard!

All in all, a game that had me awake throughout (not an easy task when it starts at 11:30PM and goes on until 2:30AM!), and on the edge of my seat (absolutely literally) for the last 5 minutes of play (that took about half-an-hour to play because of timeouts, etc).

Go Giants!

(trademark lawyers, please take note, I am not infringing the NFL's trademarks because I'm not trying to convince any member of the purchasing public that what I have here is the Superbowl XLII event - no consumer confusion, no trademark violation)

Nancy Drew, Curse Of Blackmoor Manor

2008-01-31T21:36:00.000Z

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

What is it?
This is another instalment in the well-known Nancy Drew series. In fact, this is number eleven. Think about that for a moment. Eleven games based on a dramatic character. That's not IV, that's not IX, that's XI. That's even more than the Final Fantasy series. I think that counts as a successful series. Okay, so we're in multiple, multiple sequels territory here, and if the developer and publisher haven't completely nailed this one, there is something seriously wrong with the world... or at least their QA procedures.
The Nancy Drew games are marketed with a particular market segment in mind; the 10+ female gamer. So, as I am lucky enough to know one such young lady quite well, I thought I'd bring her along and let you hear from her too. She's known as Purple Bear (her choice!), she's my 10-year-old daughter, and I'll be dropping her comments in from time to time.

Where does it come from?
The character of Nancy Drew was originated by Edward Stratemeyer, alongside the Hardy Boys and many others. Since then, she has solved around 350 mysteries, written by many different authors. A number of the stories have been made into a long running TV series. Then in 1997, Her Interactive decided to specialise in adventure games aimed at the female pre-teen and teen market, and chose Nancy Drew to lead their campaign.
Seven years, and eleven games later, they're still going strong. However, this is the first one to involve international travel; it is set in England - more on this later.

Is there a plot?
This is a detective mystery; what kind of detective mystery would it be if it didn't have a plot?
Nancy has been invited to England to visit with Linda, daughter of her neighbour, Mrs. Petrov. Linda has recently married an English diplomat, Hugh Penvellyn, gaining a stepdaughter in the process. But Linda is no longer seeing visitors, and has taken to hiding behind a curtain in her bedroom. Now this would not be much of a mystery if it weren't for the location. Linda now lives in Blackmoor Manor on the misty moors of Essex, in a 14th century manor house. There are rumours of family treasure, and of course, there's the Beast that haunts the moors to add a little spice to the mix.
Purple Bear would like to add, "The story fits together well. Some bits were surprising, but nothing was really scary. I did feel concerned about what was happening to the characters. I think LouLou is my favourite character, because I like the way she talks and acts. Finishing the dragon puzzle made me feel good."
Being British, I can see there are some nasty holes in this plot. For one thing, Essex does not have moors. Fens (wet-lands), yes; moors, no. Therefore, the house should be Blackfen Manor. Worse, Penvellyn is not an Essex name - especially not one that would have survived from the 14th century. This story belongs in Devon or Cornwall - on Exmoor or Dartmoor! Where they have moors, dark manors, rumours of beasts, and ancient families with names like Penvellyn! Perhaps somebody at Her Interactive thinks that Exmoor is in Essex?
Having said all that, inaccuracies aside, I agree with Purple Bear - the story does fit together nicely, and drives the game throughout.

How do you play?
In common with the other two Nancy Drew games I have seen -- "Message in a Haunted Mansion" and "The Final Scene" -- Curse of Blackmoor Manor is a first person, point-n-click adventure game. The user interface is clean and clear. The older games have a slightly more cluttered main game screen, so this is an improvement. The menus are structured the same as the earlier games -- with the usual buttons you'd expect to see on any game. However, a notable feature of the Nancy Drew games is the 'Second Chance' button. Essentially, just before critical moments in the game (moments when you can die, or the game ends prematurely), there is an auto-save which means you can immediately return to the point before the mistaken decision.
Purple Bear says, "I like playing in the first person; it feels better to be in control. It was easy to use things in the game, and it was quite good that the tool bar covers the talking. The main part of the screen is much bigger than in Nancy Drew, The Final Scene."
Game play is all about talking to the people in the house and on the telephone, collecting clues from written and pictorial materials, and solving puzzles. The game contains a nice selection of puzzle types, but there is a sliding tiles puzzle, a maze, and a couple of timed sequences. There are two levels of difficulty to the game; 'Junior Detective' and 'Senior Detective'. Junior Detective gives more help and hints, and is more generous with the timed features. Since Purple Bear and I are both new to Nancy Drew games, we started with Junior Detective, but on replay, I'd certainly go for Senior.

Other Notable Features
Neither Purple Bear nor I had to make much use of the Second Chance button. In fact, I deliberately tried a few things just to see if I'd need the Second Chance as a result. There are some nice "game over" moments to see if you do, and of course, they don't affect your overall progress.
Purple Bear points out that, "LouLou [the hint system] is a good source of information if you use her right. The main characters were easier to get information from than LouLou, but less fun. But sometimes LouLou could be annoying, like my little sister."
I must comment on two particularly annoying features. Firstly, the cursor; although it is clearly drawn, and indicates what actions are available (moving, magnifying, acting, doing nothing, and speaking), the active spot of the cursor is somewhere in the centre of the image, rather than at the top left point, where most arrow-like cursors are active! I found this particularly annoying in Nancy's phone / web-browser device.
The second annoying feature was the accents of the characters. Several of the British accents are weak, and the American origin of the actors comes through to spoil the experience from time to time. Once again, Nancy is played by Lani Minella, and several of the other actors have played roles in previous Nancy Drew games, but there is little evidence of British acting talent being used to voice British characters. Jonah von Spreecken's "Cockney" accent brought tears to my eyes. Let's put it this way; Dick van Dyke did a better Cockney accent in Mary Poppins!
Puzzle and game clues and hints come from all sources in the house; people, pictures, objects, books, maps, diagrams and Nancy's mobile phone / web browser. Of particular note is LouLou, the parrot. At turns annoying, as only a parrot can be, and endearingly amusing, LouLou adds significantly to the humour and fun in the game.

Are there any other novelties?
Not really. I've never played a game with such a strong notion of the passage of time before, but this appears to be the norm for Nancy Drew games, so it's hardly novel.

Conclusions
As a complete experience, I enjoyed playing this game, even though it is aimed at a completely different market segment from where I would normally be found. The puzzles were not in the least bit trivial, despite playing at 'Junior' level. There were no graphical glitches or game play bugs, but there were some crashes-to-desktop. I am certainly not ruling out playing other Nancy Drew games - older or newer.

Cons:

2 timed puzzles, 1 maze, 1 sliding tiles game, and 1 sound-matching puzzle
35 save game slots
Annoying mis-positioned mouse hotspot
Plot hole the size of Essex
Some really rather poor English accents
A few crashes-to-desktop.

Pros:

Variety of puzzles
Good story and entertaining characters
Nice environment, and graphics, though the people are somewhat cartoony
Some replayability due to the different difficulty levels and complex dialog trees
Atmospheric music and well placed and helpful sound effects.

I'll give the final word to Purple Bear: "I think the game is aimed at the right age group. It's not too easy and it's not too hard. But I needed a little bit of help with some of the puzzles. I look forward to playing more Nancy Drew, in fact I'd like some more for my birthday or Christmas."

Grade: B

What do you need to play it?
Minimum Requirements

Windows 98/Me/2000/XP
400 MHz or greater Pentium II or equivalent class CPU
64 MB of RAM
300 MB or more hard drive space
16MB DirectX compatible video card
16 bit DirectX compatible sound card
12X CD-ROM drive

(We used Win XP, AMD XP 2000, 512 MB RAM, and an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP)

Product Recall

2008-01-29T19:32:00.000Z

I've never been affected by one of these before, but there you go.

Netgear (a credible manufacturer of network hardware) have a bit of a problem with a relatively new device: the XE103 HomePlug network adaptor. It appears that someone forgot to do proper testing of the device in a 220/240V environment (i.e. all European and most African and Asian countries). The circuit that allows the device to run at 240V overheats and fails, in my case within 48 hours of installation. The resulting little brick is a sorry sight with no blinken-lighten or activity of any sort. But my XE104 4-port switch is unaffected (thankfully!).

But, for that first 48 hours, I was really happy with my ethernet-over-powerline network. It allowed me to remove 5 long cables (including two strung through the stair-well between two floors of the house!) and put the wireless hub / broadband modem / ethernet router in the centre of the house (it's a very neat Netgear DG834G 54Mbps Wireless ADSL Modem Firewall Router with 4-port 10/100 switch that has given me very, very good service for more than two years solid). Best of all, the powerline kit really is plug-and-play... no setup at all, unless you want to change the network password.

So, anyway, the courier will come and collect my XE103, and return it to Netgear's UK representative, at which point, an XEPS103 will be sent out. This is a more bulky device with a power supply for a compatible Netgear router builtin... which, on extra thinking, will be rather handy given how I've relocated the router next to a single socket, so that should work out okay afterall! In the meantime, my poor desktop PC is routing through a laptop sharing it's wireless connection via it's ethernet port, as re-connecting all the cabling I disassembled on Friday would just be so disheartening!

Not bad... a company releases a faulty device, recalls it properly, and still comes out smelling if not of roses, at least not of dung. (Though I reserve final judgement pending the actions of the courier and Netgear's UK rep A-Novo)

Links: the press release, the registration website, and the details of the replacement device on offer.

Pure genius

2008-01-12T14:29:00.001Z

Sir Edmund Hilary RIP

2008-01-11T19:19:00.000Z

I heard the news of the passing of Sir Edmund Hilary today. This guy was the first person of European descent to stand on the summit of Mount Everest, the highest point on the surface of the Earth. At the time it was quoted as 29,002 feet - a number I will never forget, though now the numbers are 8,848 meters, or 29,029 feet.

As a young lad, in the late 1970s, I read the Ascent of Everest by John Hunt. It's not a big book - it's only a few hundred pages, in a roughly A5 format, but it is a description of the 1953 expedition to Mount Everest that he led, and that enabled Sir Edmund to reach not just the roof of the world, but the very pinnacle. I found it absolutely fascinating. It was not because of any deeply moving purple prose about the achievements of the expedition, but the simple presentation of the facts of the work, and the technologies they used to achieve the summit - the ladders, clothes, and open system & closed system breathing apparatus.

Remember that this was in the period before GPS, satellite phones (in fact Sputnik didn't even fly until 4 years later!), carbon-fiber framed geodesic dome tents, high performance fabrics & climbing boots or rescue helicopters. These guys did it with cotton, wool, leather, WW II radios, aluminium, wood, steel, ridge tents, and kapok. I don't think they even had nylon ropes!

So, serious kudos to the John Hunt expedition, and all those who made it possible.

In the long run, however, I think that Hilary's contributions to the Nepalese people through the Himalayan Trust will be of greater real significance than his climbing. The Trust has helped to establish clinics, hospitals and nearly 30 schools in Nepal, to the lasting benefit of many. For this, Hilary deserves great credit in inspiring people to go beyond simple personal glorification and climbing achievement, and to really put something back into a relatively deprived society that has long supported the ambitions of foreigners to climb in the peaks of the Himalayas.

Sir Edmund Hilary, RIP, but may the Himalayan Trust continue long in your memory.

Here, here!

2008-01-08T14:10:00.000Z

Oh, boy, it's not often I read a piece in the Times and agree with virtually all of it, but in this case, my own experience of the British rail network over the last 20 years of regular, cross-country and metropolitan travel is completely born out.

The British government needs, as a matter of urgency, to re-nationalize the railways, in order to drop prices by 10%, and plough all the profits, currently passed to the share holders, into the infrastructure. The rolling stock is generally okay, but the track, stations and signaling hardware is in dire need of a major re-fit. The staff needs increasing to levels where you can find people who actually work on the station on the station, and not staffing (through some contracting-out) the appalling platform 'cafe'.

Finally, scrap all these stupid fare structures ... getting from A to B should have two prices (standard and first class), regardless of when you travel, how much notice you have of when you'll need to travel(*), what route you choose to take(**), whether you make stop-offs along the way, or what colour the fabric of the seats in the carriages.

(*) "what do you mean, my mother is critically ill in hospital, I urgently need to get to Oxford NOW, but I have to pay £250 because the only train available is a commuter route and I didn't give you six weeks notice of my intention to travel!"

(**) common sense (that so-rare of commodities amongst public servants!) to be applied so that people don't get a ticket from Didcot to Bracknell, and then go via Inverness!

Remote Sensing Archaeology

2008-01-08T13:08:00.001Z

I've long thought that geophysics and related sciences have more to offer archaeologists than the occasional magnetic survey or resistivity map. How satellite photography and other remote sensing technologies are being used to find significant archaeological sites worthy of further investigation. So much so, in fact, that some archaeologists are using Google Earth to search for sites. By the way, if you've never played with Google Earth you really should!

Cosmos Magazine has this article on the subject of satellite imagery and GE archaeology.

How long before someone uses high resolution imagery of territories that were covered by rising sea levels after the last Ice Age to find a significant city-level settlement?

I suggest looking around the coasts of the Mediterranean, and Northern Indian ocean! I'd put money on a site around the scale Çatalhöyük (in Anatolia, Turkey, and at wikipedia) - a 'city' thought to have had around 10,000 inhabitants up to 7,500 years ago. Since the last Ice Age was at it's maximum around 20,000 years ago, and ended roughly 12,000 years ago, and Homo Sapiens has lived on the planet for some 150,000 - 200,000 years, I think there are bound to be flooded settlements in shallow marine contexts. It's just a matter of finding the right form of satellite image.

DRM meets stupid

2008-01-08T10:01:00.000Z

If ever there was an illustration as to the ultimate stupidity of DRM, this article at Techdirt comes close to perfect. The guy legally buys movies from one source, with DRM, then buys a new monitor that supports HDMI and it's associated DRM restrictions, and all of a sudden his legally purchased movies don't work any more.

The response of the companies concerned...? Downgrade to a lower-spec monitor. Duh!

Motley Fool trashes music industry

2008-01-04T09:06:00.000Z

Just when you thought the RIAA was gaining traction in it's desire to get us to pay through the nose for every single format of music we use (i.e. they want to stop even ripping legit. CDs for personal use), the Motley Fool investors' advice site weighs in on the side of common sense and fair use.

From the last paragraph of their article:

As I've said before, a good sign of a dying industry that investors might want to avoid is when it would rather litigate than innovate, signaling a potential destroyer of value. If it starts to pursue paying customers -- which doesn't seem that outlandish at this point -- then I guess we'll all know the extent of the desperation. Investor, beware.

Once the investor community starts being wary of financing the likes of 'Sony, BMG, Warner Music Group, Vivendi Universal, and EMI', it's clear that the writing is on both sides of the wall! No doubt the RIAA will just take this as a sign they're having an effect (along the lines of 'no publicity is bad publicity'), but when the real money begins to talk there have to be some more crinkled foreheads in the boardrooms of A-media-rica.

Gooka, Mystery of Janatris

2008-01-01T16:07:00.000Z

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

Where does it come from?

Hmmm, a game from the Czech Republic? Sounds interesting! I've enjoyed games from unusual European countries before; The Longest Journey, Faust (Seven Games of the Soul), and Rally Trophy (okay, that's about classic rally driving, but still a game) spring particularly to my mind.

So, I've done a little research. Not enough to spoil the game, but something to be going on with before I get my sticky little hands on the disk... now hang on, is this based on a story, called "Gooka and Yorimar," by Richard D. Evans, or by Vlado Risa? Confusion reigns.

Okay, lets get this straight. It's "Gooka: The Mystery of Janatris", but that makes it Gooka 2; there was a Gooka game published in 1997 too. It's based on a novel by Vlado Risa, or his Western European pseudonym, Richard D. Evans. Aha! Now I've got it!

Next problem, is this a point-n-click adventure game (as indicated on the back of the box), or an adventure/RPG hybrid, as I've discovered having completed it.

Confused? Yes, I was. Thankfully, once I started playing the game, things got better.

What is it?

As I've already said, the back of the box gave me the impression that this is a point-n-click adventure. However, once you get into the manual, it becomes clear that there's a degree of character stats development, and combat. Now, we're not talking about a reactions-based, laser-blasting, gore-fest, but combat it is. I'll come back to this later.

So, after my moment of confusion, I set off for my adventure in the land of Janatris.
This game actually is, for the most part, a point-n-click adventure, but from the third person perspective. Just like Grim Fandango, The Longest Journey, Syberia, and many more excellent games, we watch our hero, Gooka, progress through an environment that could have come straight out of Medieval Europe. Except... there are bits of future tech dropped in seemingly at random!

The graphical content, both environment and characters, is nicely modelled, and well rendered (on my 2-year-old graphics card), but the character animation is a bit sluggish, and Gooka is not good at opening doors - he reaches out to them, but they then open without his holding the handle - and in many cases, without his hand being even close to the door.

For the most part, the world is quite natural in appearance, the buildings medieval, and the creatures quite believable. All the creatures, except the rats and the humans, are fictional. The special effects, particularly as used in the combat sequences, are really rather nicely done, with subtle volumetric effects and swirling colours, even on my old graphics card. The overall look of the graphics approaches that of Schizm II, or Broken Sword 3 - quite coherent environments with attention to detail and vegetation that works close up.

Is there a plot?

You want plot in an adventure game? Well, you got one here; fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles... well, almost all of that. And I'll leave it to the reader to discern which one isn't in the game. ;-)

The story works something like this: in Gooka's absence, someone has attacked and burned down his house, injured his wife and kidnapped his son (Yorimar, of the original book's title). Upon Gooka's return home, he has to fix everything. Just as you'd expect from an upstanding citizen, really.

So, it's off to the monastery to find out what's required to save Lidra, and what's happened to Yorimar. Suffice it to say that both these tasks require Gooka to travel to various parts of Janatris (the planet) and cooperate with and fight against a variety of people and creatures to reach his goals.

How do you play?

The game play here is generally quite linear, with periods of wandering, trying to achieve larger plot milestones. However, the milestones occur in a particular order, and you can't go backwards through the story, nor skip milestones.

The environments encompass a variety of settings: buildings, towns, beech, dockside, countryside, jungle, caves, a ship, and low- and high-tech castles.

You can use your mouse to achieve everything in the game, so perhaps this is the reason for the 'point-n-click adventure' description. There are keyboard alternatives to most actions, so you can mix and match mouse and keys to suit. Also, the Escape key is used to skip dialogue lines, which is handy as much of the dialogue is laboriously voice acted. The subtitles option is rather handy to get the story without waiting an eternity for the dialogue to finish. The Escape key also enables you to skip some animations (like rolling dice, or opening doors), but beware! therein lies a game crashing bug. This is rather more serious, as the use of the 'Escape' key is particularly useful to skip slow animations, but if you use if at particular animation transitions (I had trouble pinning down exactly which ones), the game will crash.

The combat sequences in the game are turn-based; you, your allies, and your opponents each get to take turns choosing an action to perform. The order of action is determined by the relative speeds of the people concerned. The fastest go first, the slowest last. I found that it was reasonably easy to learn how to do combat like this, but even the earliest fights are quite hard. Thank goodness for the AutoSave that happens before every fight. Although the game manual does describe the combat, it is lacking in the screen shots that would clarify that description.

Many RPGs involve the use of magical powers as well as swords and so on. In Gooka, we have the unusual feature of telepathic powers. However, when it boils down to it, they're basically magic spells by another name. Most of the time, Gooka's telepathic powers are used to boost his performance in combat - some powers are attacks, some are defences, some are temporary 'power-ups'. Many of Gooka's opponents and allies (whose actions during combat are also controlled by you, the player) have Mind skills, which the opponent character AI makes use of quite effectively.

The most unusual aspect of Gooka's combat skills, was the ability to shift power from his physical (Body) to mental (Mind) score, or vice versa. But the downside for me was that it seemed that the only way to win the majority of combats was to use a particular strategy which emphasized just one of those way beyond the other.

The puzzles do have a nice variety: some involve inventory items, one is a series of three timed sequences, one is audio, one is a small maze, some are pattern based and some numeric. For me, it was the dice game (no-one tells you the rules and I've never played that game before!) and the combat-based puzzles - especially the unavoidable milestone combats - that caused me the most difficulty. Until, that is, I discovered the combat strategy that worked, almost without fail, for the remainder of the game.

Conclusions

After playing this game for a few days, I began to get to like it, in a general sense.

The weaknesses are the frustrating combat issues and the dice game, the voice acting (dull & lifeless), and the lack of dramatic sound effects - a shipwreck should cause some distress in the characters involved, and make some noise to say the least! Furthermore, there were a number of times when the game would hang with a confirmation dialogue box back on the desktop, complaining of 'vertex errors'. The game didn't crash with these bugs, and clicking "OK" brought the game back. The 'Escape' key bug I mention during the dice game is rather more serious, and would be a serious candidate for patching.

However, I would say the real strengths of this game are the plot and variety of puzzles and environments. After two weeks playing, I can say that, because of these elements, I would go back and play Gooka again, which is more than I can say for many pure adventure games.

Overall grade: B.

What do you need to play it?

Minimum Requirements

Pentium® III 733 MHz or Athlon™ 733 MHz
32MB nVidia GeForce2 / ATI Radeon video card
256 MB RAM
400 MB Hard Drive
CD-ROM or CD/DVD-ROM drive 8x
Mouse
DirectX certified sound card
Windows 98/2000/XP with DirectX 8.1

Recommended Requirements

Pentium® IV 1.5 GHz or Athlon™ 1.5 GHz
64 MB nVidia GeForce 4 / ATI Radeon 9600 PRO video card
512 MB RAM
Sound card with 3D sound support
Windows XP

(I used a homebuilt PC running Windows XP, on an AMD Athlon XP 2400+, with 512 MB RAM, and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP graphics card)

50th post

2007-12-31T19:46:00.000Z

I claimed first post (obviously), and now I claim 50th post. Just in time to also wish everyone a very happy and peaceful Gregorian New Year.

There are, of course, many people out there to whom January 1st 2008 is someone else's New Year celebration by someone else's calendar. To those, I wish peace and happiness anyway.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (2003)

2007-12-17T19:46:00.000Z

Originally posted at GameBoomers:

What is it?

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (or PoP4 as it will be henceforth known), is an action-adventure, set in an Arabian environment.

Yes, I know that means lots of complicated controls (there's about 12 keys and the mouse is used too) and doesn't fit into our usual point-and-click preference here on GB. But, this one is worth the effort, I think.

The highlights (to be described further, below) include some pretty acrobatic moves for our leading character, stunning graphics, and game play that Core Design would kill for!

Where does it come from?

Surely we all heard of Jordan Mechner by now? No? Well, he's the guy who wrote the original revolutionary, 2D, rotoscoped Prince of Persia. It had a simple plot: bad guy kidnaps princess, street kid (rather like Aladdin) has to rescue her, by exploring the castle, fighting the bad guys and solving the puzzles. By the way, he also wrote the Last Express - a title that's probably better known around here. [Smile]

Prince of Persia 2 and 3 both took this idea and did it again... 2 was more platform-y, and 3 full 3D (quite a lot of fun, IMHO, but a bit clunky by today's standards).

Is there a plot?

Yes. And it's not the same as the previous three games. The Prince (yes, he's been promoted since starting these adventures) has stolen a mysterious dagger and has been tricked by the Vizier (never a character to be trusted in an Arabian tale), into using it to release demons upon the land. Now it's his job to clean up the palace and save the kingdom.. and there's a pretty girl to chase, rescue, and (possibly) marry too. Ahh, what would life be without 'structure' to our games.

Having said that the story is somewhat clichéd, the story telling within the game is nicely presented in frequent short cut-scenes giving you a preview of where you need to try to get to (some rooms need this preview to give some shape to how you approach them), and some rather nice flash-forwards that give hints of the acrobatics yet to come. This is something I think has been done well here, and other developers could learn from this!

How do you play?

As I've already mentioned, the controls for this game are reasonably complex (though less so that Outcast, IIRC). However, it's a case of one hand on the mouse, to control the camera (rotation about the Prince) and click to use the sword and do some moves (I'll come back to those in a moment [Big Grin] ), and one hand on a small area of keys (centred around W,A,S,D) for control of the Prince and his weapons. After a little practise, I found this worked fine, despite my usual preference for simpler controls.

Okay, those acrobatic moves. One word... WOW! The first time I saw the Prince do his wall-running stunt, I knew I was immediately back where I was when I first played Tomb Raider back in 1996. Our hero is a stunningly well animated guy, who does moves that would make Ang Lee proud - if you enjoyed the 'ballet' in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", then you'll love this!

Of course, this being a Prince of Persia game, there's fighting involved. Not all the time, certainly, but there are times when it gets a bit involved! There are always more that one opponent... but the Prince always manages to outclass them in the end! I did find some frustrating periods with some of the more difficult timed sections (a major part of this game) and some of the later fights. Though I think these added to the challenge, rather than putting me off.

Any other novelties?

There is one idea introduced in PoP4 that I've never seen before... a rewind function! Once you have the dagger of time in your grubby little hands, you can rewind up to 10 seconds of action at almost any time. So you missed that jump (after all, this is a platform game to a certain extent [Wink] ), not to worry... rewind will take you back to the point just before you made it. Be warned, however, the dagger does not have infinite power.

The graphics are wonderful. Not a glitch anywhere! No pop-up polygons nor limbs vanishing into walls. Something else for Core to take notice of. The palace is nicely modelled and feels quite real. My only quibble is that Prince of Persia 3D actually managed to look beautifully decorated (if slow & jerky in places), whereas these environments are a bit more staid... so far, of course.

The bad guys are as well animated as the Prince, with a nice level of detail, and plenty of attention to visual effects and so on. They even come across as reasonably intelligent on occasion, except for their willingness to throw themselves at the Prince who's clearly a rather special chap! [Smile]

I have a rather limited sound system, so although there are nice bits of voice-over commentary, and good sound effects, and music, I can't really say anything about any 5.1 or EAX issues. The sounds are well done, and keep the mood well. And the voice acting is so much better than many adventure games where the voices could be considered to be rather more important!

This next point counts as a real novelty in my book: the game has been remarkably stable in these days of game patches being released the day after the game hits the shops! AFAIK, there is no patch. But then, in my experience, there is no need for one! The only crashes I experienced were during a period when the entire machine was being unreliable, due to a hardware fault.

Ok, this is an adventure game, so what about the puzzles. Well, most of them are physical. There are places where the Prince has to jump between columns, climb walls (which he does rather more dynamically than Lara Croft ever did), creep along ledges, dodge things, etc. There are a few moving block and lever puzzles, but as the game progresses, the Prince gets more moves.. rope swinging, and narrow wall-top walking, and his sword gets updated a few times, so there are puzzles that make use of these abilities.

What do you need to play it?

Win 98 SE/Win ME/Win 2K/Win XP

Pentium III 800Mhz or faster

256MB RAM or more

Geforce 3 or better (Geforce 4 MX is explicitly *not* supported)

DirectX 9.0b (on the CD, although the website claims 9a is sufficient!)

(I used Win XP, AMD 1300 Thunderbird, 384 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP)

Conclusions

Downsides: Limited saves... this game is more in the console style than a normal PC game. Non trivial hardware requirements (for the time).

Upsides: Novelties like rewind. The story telling. The graphics. The acrobatics! And the overall excitement. This is what Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness could and should have been, but is so far short of. [Frown]

In fact, I found TR: AoD so dull and lifeless that I got no further than the bomb (people who've play AoD will know what I mean). PoP4 is so much more exciting, it took me a month (of 2-4 evenings per week) to complete. And, like PoP3D, it's one I'll come back to in the future.

Unfortunately, this game has received a rather muted and somewhat negative reception in the reviews I've seen thus far. The notable exception to this is JustAdventure's review which is nearly as positive as mine. And GameSpot ran a series on the final days of the PoP4 project.

If you enjoy action, this is a definite winner, and so, finally, I have to give this game an A!

Upcoming content

2007-12-17T19:41:00.000Z

Over the next little while I will be publishing some of my older game reviews. Most of these were written under the auspices of GameBoomers: an adventure/RPG website and community with an excellent atmosphere and very, very little of the back-biting and nastiness I find in many other online communities, game based or otherwise.

Review of an awesome Microsoft release

2007-12-16T17:09:00.000Z

Well, finally, Microsoft have figured out how to release an OS they can be proud of, and that we, as consumers, can be satisfied with upon installing. (Open Source issues notwithstanding, of course)

Coding Sanity has an excellent review of this new product: Windows XP.

Laugh? I nearly cried!

Neil Stephenson Interview

2007-12-12T13:33:00.000Z

Slashdot has an excellent interview with Neil Stephenson. It was done in their usual style of getting the Slashdotters to submit questions, and getting the victim (sorry: interviewee) to respond by email.

I particularly enjoyed his discourse on Dante vs. Beowulf writers (question 2), but that's mostly because I agree with his analysis. Mind you, most contact I have had (or read) with (or involving) the Dante style of literary types leads me to the "they're a bunch of snobs that wouldn't know a good tale if it grew out of their .... um, the end of their spine" conclusion!

Speechless!

2007-12-07T13:34:00.000Z

What is the difference between McLaren and Renault?

1) Ron Dennis vs. Flavio Briatore?
2) McLaren was close to beating Ferrari to this year's F1 World Championship, Renault were little more than also-rans?
3) British vs French? (okay, probably not this one as the reality is that the majority of the Renault F1 racing team is probably British anyway, because most of F1 is British too)

Personally, I suspect the FIA is the corrupt puppet of the fourth son of the leader of the British Union of Fascists (the fore-runner of the British National Party). It doesn't give a shit for fairness or even the appearance of consistency and legitimacy.

I will never watch another Formula 1 race until the FIA is divested of Max Mosley, or they learn how to actually govern fair play in their sports.

If the Pear Anjou cable wasn't enough

2007-11-25T08:44:00.001Z

Try this link for over-priced, physics-ignoring, guff for the gullible audio-extremo-phile. This one had me rolling on the floor!

Is it a rip-off, or just a remarkably clever business model?

2007-11-23T12:53:00.000Z

I think most people are aware that, should you so desire, you can spend unimaginable amount of cash on audio equipment, and you may well get some nice gear along the way. However, there are some audio companies that take this to an extraordinary degree of geek-ish-ness. Case in point: Anjou cables from Pear Cables.

Take a couple of minutes to read their product description. It's laced with a goodly mixture of science, pseudo-science and just plain hokum! And the price? $7250 for a 12 foot pair! Just to get an electrical signal from your stereo to the speakers. That's just obscene.

And I'm not the only one to think so. Techdirt (a tech blog I read regularly) have this article on the on-going discussions between James Randi (a professional debunker & skeptic) and the general audio-extremo-phile community. He wants someone to prove that Anjou cables give an audibly perceptable improvement in the sound emanating from the speakers, than using Monster cables (another audiophile supplier of cabling, but without quite the same obscene prices: just $80 for a pair of HDMI cables).

Now my question. Is the Pear Cable company having a laugh at the expense (pun quite intended!) of the audio-phile community? Are they deliberately trying to make a fortune out of mis-guided snobs, who's knowledge of physics comes from the back of cereal packets or the inside of an audiophile magazine like Positive Feedback Online? Or are they serious.

Surely someone who has the technical nouse to be able to manufacture decent cables (which, admittedly, the Anjou ones appear to be, though not quite to the degree suggested) must have the technical knowledge to know that most of the claims are pure snake-oil?

The final word, however, goes to Gizmodo with the excellent post that first brought this subject to my attention, and to their most recent post on the subject of the James Randi challenge: Pear Cable Chickens Out of $1,000,000 Challenge, We Search For Answers.

Perhaps someone at Pear has realized the idiocy of their claims? Well, they're still selling the cables, so perhaps not.

The 2007 Formula 1 championship

2007-10-30T21:52:00.000Z

Time to fulfil some promises - a posting on the 2007 Formula 1 championship.

Well, what a damp squib of a finish that was. Okay, so well done to Kimi Raikonnen for picking up the ball that McLaren so comprehensively dropped. It was all over, bar Alonso phoning in a totally weak performance, at the fourth corner (at the end of the Lake Descent straight) when a panicing Hamilton out-braked himself and ran wide.

The result of the 2007 Championships: both were given to Ferrari, one by the FIA, and one by McLaren.

Let's hope that the 2008 season has as much good racing, and none of the stupid manipulatory antics by the FIA.

Speaking of anniversaries...

2007-10-17T00:46:00.000Z

I've completely missed my own 1 year anniversary.

After 40 posts (this is number 41) since August 15, 2006, I'm still blogging, albeit less regularly than some people.

Planned posts for the next few weeks:

the North West Passage and the outrageous territorial claims thereupon
insane, or is that just seriously delusional, audiophile equipment prices (google 'Pear Anjou cable' for a taster!)
the 2007 Formula 1 championship (rant or celebration TBD pending the Brazilian GP this weekend)
and finally, you never know, I might even post some directly identifying information about myself at last

ttfn!

Congratulations Microsoft

2007-10-02T06:24:00.000Z

From Slashdot.org (which is 10 years old this month, btw!):

FFII awards Microsoft "Best Campaigner against OOXML Standardization" prize
FFII president Pieter Hintjens explains, "we could never have done this by ourselves. By pushing so hard to get OOXML endorsed, even to the point of loading the standards boards in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, and beyond, Microsoft showed to the world how poor their format is. Good standards just don't need that kind of pressure. All together, countries made over ten thousands technical comments, a new world record for an ISO vote. Microsoft made a heroic — and costly — effort to discredit their own proposal, and we're sincerely grateful to them."

(slashdot discussion, original press-release)

Amazing how well ballot-stuffing, strong-arm tactics, and vote-buying works in getting exactly the wrong message across! One just has to suspect that Microsoft knew just how weak OOXML is before they even submitted it to ISO.

Hats?

2007-09-26T16:05:00.000Z

From a comment on Coding Horror blogpost on Egoless Programming:

A woman goes into a shop to buy a hat. The hat maker takes a length of ribbon, and deftly folds and twists it into a beautiful hat. "How much?" she asks. "Two hundred dollars," he replies. "For a length of ribbon!?" she exclaims. He smiles and just as deftly disassembles the hat, and hands the ribbon to her. "For the hat, two hundred dollars. The ribbon is yours for nothing."

And the followup:

To use this analogy, I think programmers are like the hat maker. In the olden days of programming, it was the art of creating the hat that excited and impressed people. These days, it is the collection of hats they have created.

I like this way of thinking.