Hello all! Gosh it has been a little while since I was here, so please bear with me whilst I clean the cobwebs and shoo the feral wildlife out.
The more keen eyed of you will have noticed my twitter feed (on the right of this page) receiving a lot more attention from me than my weblog and the reason for that is fairly simple, it is much easier to microblog and post little snippets than for write full articles. I have never been a fan of just regurgitating content without at least adding commentary or (hopefully) extra insight, hence the reason I have veered so sharply away from doing so on here. But on twitter, by necessity, everything is μ‘d down which is both appealing and restricting. Plus also I can periodically reveal the quirkiness of my personality in 140 characters or less.
Irrespective, I have been tweeting a lot and noticing more and more how popular Twitter has become. Take a look at this snippet from my stats showing just how much the traffic has grown to my post instructing on the embedding of twitter into wordpress.
Twitter is more than a microblogging facility, but there are a number of different ways in which it can be used. I use twitter as an almost light version of facebook despite the fact that I know (or follow) less than an order of magnitude fewer people than on facebook.
Whilst I am on the subject of facebook, I can’t stand the new layout! Now I know facebook has a history of changing things and the public backlash is almost as predictable as the tides, however with the new ‘layout’ I believe is rather more than a stylistic change. It almost feels like there has been a paradigm shift within facebook to try to tap onto the twitter phenomenon and this I find both silly and uncomfortable. Both twitter and facebook serve two completely different purposes no amalgamation of functionality will make me think otherwise…
Speaking of which, I was just browsing through the recent wordpress news and found a new theme which appears to be the result of an extramarital indiscretion between Twitter and WordPress. I mean come on, has the whole world gone insane? Whatever next, Windows Live microblogging??? Oh… Again don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter, I just sneer at the less than subtle attempts by the other ‘major’ players to hump the leg of reinvention.
But enough of my rant. What else have I been upto in the last two months to warrant my silence you ask ? Well, not a huge amount really, my (now no longer that new) job has been keeping me busy both in terms of the work and the learning I am doing around the various subjects. It is both exciting and highly gratifying that the areas I am learning (and working in) are opening up new avenues and have precipitated a greater appreciation for the technologies I so love. Apart from that I have been gaming a lot in whatever spare time I can scrape together between one code block and one uninterrupted quantum of sleep. Recently I have played Mass Effect, Farcry 2, Doom 3, Supreme Commander Forged Alliance as well as a bit of Fallout 3 and I am looking forward to writing about each of these in turn, time permitting. I would also like to start writing about more technical matters (coding paradigms and JS / CSS / C++ code snippets) but given how widely that veers away from the rest of the content in my weblog, I may register a new website and do that there. I have some great ideas for domain names, just a case of figuring out the hosting and (*sigh*) if I have the time to maintain it.
Anyhoo, this has turned a little rambly. Comments / email / @KonradS follows welcome.
There are two rather good sites for anyone interested in UK politics by mysociety.org (which is a third incidentally). They are WhatDoTheyKnow and TheyWorkForYou, the former providing a framework for making freedom of information requests to various ministries and the latter for keeping an eye on your (and other) MPs.
But this isn’t just shameless linkblogging, I found a rather amusing freedom of information request applied for by ‘Lewis’ to the Ministry of Defense. In his request, ‘Lewis’ asks about our nuclear missile codes as well as specifics about warhead capability.
[I would like to] ask whether the UK has the launch codes for them, and if the british (?) do i request a
list of all the nuclear missles owned by our country …
Rather unsurprisingly, the reply was a little vague :
[ We ] strongly [are] against disclosure … as release would provide highly classified information to potentially malicious parties concerning the UK’s nuclear deterrent…
Surely everyone knows that the UK’s launch codes are printed on a cracker in Gordon Brown’s pocket.
This so that, if ever caught (or hungry), he could simply consume the codes at the tax payer’s expense.
So there you have it, a useful resource and an anecdote all in one post, what else would one want?
For reference, full reply from the ministry of defense.
Minifigforlife, who apparently are not licenced by Lego, have come up with a, dare I say it – a rather cool range of accessories of the budding Lego adventurer. However they have met with a fair amount of criticism from around the world chiefly for their ‘terrorist’ Lego man which some say bears a striking resemblance to a Taliban fighter. Ok, I would have to be blind not to see where the critics are coming from, but for such hysteria over a toy?!? I seem to recall from my childhood that I was playing with Lego Pirates and other such miscreants. Infact, I am fairly sure I once built both the ship and the island fortress in this picture. Good times .
According to wikipedia, the Pirate range started in the late 1980s, so as you can see it is a bit late for Lego to turn around and condemn “violent” and, in their eyes, “non-family friendly” toys. Granted Lego themselves have nothing to do with this new range, but for papers like The Sun (and others, but I feel like picking on The Sun) to write headlines like “Osama Bin Lego” is simply absurd.
Of course violence and terrorism are not concepts to expose young children to, but in this Nanny state we find ourselves in, it never ceases to amaze me how people can get worked up over such petty things. I highly doubt that a child would think along such lines anyway – this is simply a fun baddie like countless others before in the varies Lego franchises. Admittedly this is the first time the Lego ‘bad guy’ has come to vaguely resemble a particular ethnic or social group before (if we don’t count pirates for a moment) but I am sure no disrespect was meant. In fact, I would challenge that such a stereo type (perhaps we should include Call of Duty 4 in this) is as contrived as the pirate characters were in the first place.
Long and short of it? Stop getting so worked up over nothing – I leave you a particularly nice construction that is definitely not suitable for all ages .
A previously unknown company called Valve, released ten years ago, a game called Half Life. Heard of it? Thought you might have- although believe it or not, Gordon Freeman’s debut on our gaming systems was initially more of a ‘quickie’ technology showcase, designed to make the industry take note of this up-and-coming game developer. According to Ars technica:
Initially, Half-Life was supposed to be this quickie FPS that would give the company a resume and get us on our feet to do whatever the real thing was that we were going to do. We could learn some stuff doing this, then we’d do some other thing.”
I remember borrowing a friend’s copy of the game and playing it on my first self-built pc, a relic with a 333Mhz AMD K6-2 processor and 128Mb of RAM, gosh 1998 seems such a long time ago… Despite being a phenomenal game in it’s own right, redefining the baseline for game narrative and story telling, the mod community is what really developed Half Life’s appeal. Mods like Day of Defeat, Counter Strike, Natural Selection as well as literally countless others all attracted their own fan-bases and showed what a small group of fans could accomplish. To this day, the degree of flexibility and mod-ibility of the Half Life engines present a target for other game development houses to aspire to.
Well, ten years later and Half Life has been a remarkable success proving to the world that a guy in a lab coat with an unhealthy penchant for physics problems can have the most amazing adventures and get the girl. To celebrate, Valve are offering this classic for $1 over at their online store Steam.
Just a brief post to direct anyone who has or is considering buying an Android device to an article detailing a rather shocking security glitch. It turns out, probably due to a botched debug code cleanup, that the devices run with a terminal in the background capturing any and all keystrokes!
When the phone booted it started up a command shell as root and sent every keystroke you ever typed on the keyboard from then on to that shell. Thus every word you typed, in addition to going to the foreground application would be silently and invisibly interpreted as a command and executed with superuser privileges. Wow!
Be careful what you type in your text messages or URLs otherwise you might end up with a trashed software stack…
Just a brief post to tell everyone that the PC beta for Call of Duty 5: WaW has started. You have to register with CallofDuty.com who will email you a beta key and then download a ~866Mb client. I have only played it for about a couple of hours so far but I am quite impressed. The engine feels very CoD4-like but the maps and game-play are very different to reflect the World War 2 setting. Lots of new options and weapons so plenty to check out, including the fantasitcally sadistic inclusion of a pack of dogs as the 7-kill perk. Not sure whether or not it is quite up to Call of Duty 4 grade or not yet though….
Since the first mobile running on Google’s Android software platform was announced, I have been eagerly awaiting it’s release here in the UK. Well this week it finally happened, so yesterday I went into a T Mobile shop to have a play with one. Unfortunately it is a bit of a mixed bag, whilst looking quite stylish (it looked a bit ugly from the photos) there are a number of bad points about the G1 which unfortunately terminally let it down.
First off, the slide. I actually rather like this part, despite being highly dubious about overly elaborate mechanisms, the G1 screen slides up and to the right cleanly and locks into place with a fairly reassuring click. The problem is the G1 is not comfortable to hold in the horizontal position, and I found the keyboard buttons to be inadequate for any serious use. However the most serious problem with this was that the screen was not fully locked into place. Given that it is a touch screen the fact that the whole screen section flexes backwards and strains against the sliding mechanism, even the smallest amount of force is exerted against it, is very worrying.
The touchscreen itself worked quite well and Android has definitely incorporated several design elements that Apple initially came up with. However it feels like Google were as eager to incorporate finger swiping functions as they were not to look like they were copying Apple and as such there are two different ways of scrolling through icon menus like the ‘desktop’ and the application menu which just feels silly and inconsistent. The overall layout and design of the menus and functionality felt poor and counter intuitive. This was felt especially in the web-browser which, whilst working well ( and really showing how nice the screen was) felt clunky and unfriendly to navigate and use. There was also an issue with flash plugins but I am assuming that would be fixed by an update.
Overall, the G1 very much feels like the unfinished article. The black one looks surprisingly nice in the person, but an inconsistent GUI / navigation system lets it down as well as the quality of the screen sliding retention mechanism. Still, thankfully this is not the Android phone, but the first version running the software platform. I have high expectations of future phones and can only hope that meager sales will not put off other companies from adopting this platform.
I came across a cool trailer for the upcoming Call of Duty release scheduled to be unleashed in mid November. The video has certainly whet my appetite but I find myself a little cynical about this release. Given the resounding success of Call of Duty 4 (I can’t believe it has been out so long already) and my general apathy towards World War 2 shooters, bred by continual disappointments from previous releases, I feel like a kid who just unwrapped a game at Christmas from a distant relative and is on his way to his PC excited but quietly hoping it doesn’t suck. Given the (so far) direct correlation between odd and even numbered Call of Duty games being forgettable and awesome respectively, lets hope CoD:5 breaks this trend.
Even if it ends up ultimately disappointing, the trailer is awesome – I am an absolute sucker for cinematic games and trailers.
T Mobile launched the first mobile based on the open source Android platform earlier this month. Although from a design prospective I am less than impressed with the device, I am extremely excited that this hitherto academic project is starting to gain mass market traction. Open source projects all too commonly go the route of the GP2x, OpenPandora or OpenMoko- accruing a loyal fan base but never really breaking out into the main stream. (I highly recommend taking a look at some of those projects.)
The fact that there is now a mass market device running the Android software stack is very encouraging, however with an industry behemoth like Google behind it, there was no way this project was going to roll over and die quietly. So, until it launches here in the UK (and wherever you may be in the World) you can try out a emulated version on T-Mobile’s website.
Today I got my grubby mits on a copy of Stalker: Clear Sky and showing an uncharacteristic amount of self restraint, didn’t rush home to play it immediately. When I did fire it up I was initially left with mixed feelings. However, I have now played about three hours on the hardest difficulty setting and thus far quite enjoyed the experience.
Clear Sky is a prequel to Shadow of Chernobyl, set in a larger Zone around the NPP. There is a fair amount of new content and a lot of the original terrain has been rejigged which adds greatly to the excitement. You wake up as an anonymous loner who has *just* survived a massive blow out which cooked the other members of your party. The similarity to the original title ends there though, and players are immediately put to work as a member of the Clear Sky faction – a group of scientists who are studying the Zone. The game starts quickly, throwing the player into the nearby swamp and introducing them to a lot of the ’strategy’ concepts early on.
Do not get too excited about the strategy side of things – I was of the mistaken impression that it would involve a game play cross between the original Stalker and a Battlefield style with resources and areas of influence. Unfortunately it is a lot more basic than that and really just expands the completely superfluous Stalker ranking system of the original game. To those of you wondering what I am talking about.. you have made my point for me. The feature was completely superfluous and merely tracked the player’s progress through the game based on how many people they had killed. Fast forward 18 months and Clear Sky expands this concept by formalising the factions in the PDA and providing nifty bars showing faction influence, disposition to the player and ‘resources.’ Any hope of any deep strategy is wiped out here as the stats can so far simply be interpreted by: powerful faction – lots of pointless side quests, otherwise ignore. The side quests are the biggest disappointment thus far for me as they seems to be generated from the template : “Go 5 to 10 mins out of your way and kill something” which gets very old very quickly. Scripted side quests are however interesting and having met a deserting Russian Army driver who promptly tried to double cross me I am cautiously optimistic about the rest of the game. Let this be a warning to you – don’t trust people you meet hiding under a bridge. :p
Despite the use of the original locations, models and textures Clear Sky is a very different game. The story is just as engaging as the original, if not more so, as it makes full use of the fact it is a prequel to interweave some of the key characters from Shadow of Chernobyl into the plot. Who knows, maybe even Strelok will make an appearance later? The engine has been greatly upgraded and now includes a lot of beautiful weather and lighting effects coupled with a day night transition system which turn a game already dripping in atmosphere into something almost surreal in places. The atmosphere is largely thanks to the authenticity of having a development team from the Ukraine. The moody, functional architecture from a post Soviet era comes accross naturally and is sufficiently alien to many Western players to really add intrigue to this already very different world. Greatly improved textures and sounds coupled with the graphical enhancements and interesting developments to the AI really make the game stand out for me, and although it will never have the same level of graphical polish as something like Call of Duty 4, there have been moments already which have left me in awe. Sadly players who played the original will be frustrated that some of glitches still present in Clear Sky. Randomly disappearing NPCs, occasional clipping bugs, annoying side quest spawning (and timing) all remain, although many bugs have been fixed.
Bugs not-with-standing, I have only played this game for a very short duration and even by my overly critical standards the game is, so far, highly enjoyable and definitely worth buying. I will write more when I have had a chance to get deeper into the Zone.
Twitter is more than a microblogging facility, but there are a number of different ways in which it can be used. I use twitter as an almost light version of facebook despite the fact that I know (or follow) less than an order of magnitude fewer people than on facebook.
Minifigforlife, who apparently are not licenced by Lego, have come up with a, dare I say it – a rather cool range of accessories of the budding Lego adventurer. However they have met with a fair amount of criticism from around the world chiefly for their 
Since the first mobile running on Google’s Android software platform was announced, I have been eagerly awaiting it’s release here in the UK. Well this week it finally happened, so yesterday I went into a T Mobile shop to have a play with one. Unfortunately it is a bit of a mixed bag, whilst looking quite stylish (it looked a bit ugly from the photos) there are a number of bad points about the G1 which unfortunately terminally let it down.
