stuff we write

How To Do AZURE developppment in VS2010

2010-04-11T17:37:00.002+01:00

Azure links for VS2010

How to get chrome os

2010-04-11T17:35:00.000+01:00

Nice run

2009-10-11T11:21:00.002+01:00

Went for a nice jog this morning in some nice soothing light rain. Went up the canal, through town, through university parks which was nice and back home through Norham Gardens. I took it nice and slow. Very good considering I raced yesterday very well. I am generally happy with my running form but can improve.

A simple way of saying how people work.

2009-10-07T20:31:00.002+01:00

Here is an article explaining in very simple terms how some people work.

http://tinyurl.com/yclp8b2

olympics article

2009-10-05T17:45:00.000+01:00

I was reading an interesting article about the new olympic hosts for 2016

http://tinyurl.com/yc83xzm

Wont Stop

2009-10-03T18:51:00.002+01:00

I am listening to Wont Stop by OneRepublic

Interesting bike news in Oxford

2009-10-03T12:29:00.001+01:00

Very interesting good news about the future of cycling in Oxford. Is very good.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/oxford/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8281000/8281139.stm

is listening to Automatic by Tokio Hotel.

2009-10-02T16:47:00.001+01:00

is listening to Automatic by Tokio Hotel.

Cherwell School

2009-09-15T16:05:00.000+01:00

Here is a link to the Cherwell School website.

cycle run cycle

2009-09-15T15:59:00.002+01:00

I did a cycle run cycle yesterday. 5K bike 5K run 5K bike in the morning. And I maintained my weight at 84.1 kilos. I was disapointed to see that I had not lost any weight this morning.

Running Again

2009-06-30T09:16:00.001+01:00

Completed day 5 in a continuous series of runs. It was not as hot as yesterday, and I had a drink with me. Run at shotover tonight, well thats the plan.....

lunch

2009-05-26T12:42:00.002+01:00

I listened to "Scouting for Girls", "Heartbeat". Thanks matthieu, that all sounds very positive. I had a baguette with bri and bacon, that was not so good.

And a cookie, that was not so good either.

so lunch was not so good.

Matthieu and christine ran round burgess field, well done. I wont get to run until tomorrow morning on therunning machine.

2009-05-26T09:40:00.001+01:00

http://open.spotify.com/track/1QNFYOBCpo8Pl6CYNGLFQz

spotify:track:1QNFYOBCpo8Pl6CYNGLFQz

Pictures in the blog

2009-05-13T16:55:00.000+01:00

Doesnt seem so easy to put pictures in the blog.

From NorthernIreland

Breakfast at the hilton

2009-05-13T09:35:00.003+01:00

Fruit covered in natural yoghurt and added honey.

I was a happy man.

From NorthernIreland

This was the tea and cafe inthe room

Red Nose Day

2009-03-13T16:32:00.005Z

Today is Red Nose Day. I wore a red t-shirt and a red jumper . I donated a total of £1.15 to Comic Relief. My form teacher gave my form class a class detention because we were talking too much in registration. Three people in my class did a sponsored silence and 2 of them had broken it by break, thanks to my class. 2 Pairs of people tied their feet or hands together and stayed like this all of the school day.

First lesson we had drama, kind of boring and the teacher had no Red Nose Day spirit. Second lesson was IT in which our teacher said "if you donate to Comic Relief I will let you have a fun lesson". In Music we listened to pieces of music about trains and then made our own. At lunch, I played football. In science we looked at what electromagnet are used for in everyday life. In history we looked at The Tennis Court Oath, to do with the french revolution.

After school I went to my drum lesson. When I got back I looked at the OxFringe program and only saw one thing that looked interesting. OxFringe is sponsored by The Midlands co-operative which is awesome which means something good that I dont really know what.

S.W.A.T. film review

2009-03-11T17:27:00.005Z

S.W.A.T. is an very, very, very good film. It is an action film about a S.W.A.T. team and like all action films it is set in LA(Los Angeles, United States). This is a very good film, it is better than James Bond, Mission Impossible, etc, anyway what I'm trying to say it is an awesome film.
It is directed by Clark Johnson and was released in 2003
One of the main characters is played by Samuel L. Jackson, he plays Sgt Hondo(his nickname) who is the leader of the S.W.A.T. team. He plays this role very well and it is nice to see Samuel L. J playing when he was a bit younger. Another of the main characters is Jim Street played by Colin Farrell, he is kind of the big main character as he is the most seen character in the whole film.

The film starts with Street and his partner helping to stop a hostage situation, his partner shoots a hostage by mistake but to help the hostage, he gets fired. Street gets demoted to cleaning boots and repairing guns. Sgt Hondo is commanded to contsruct another S.W.A.T. team. Street is his driver and eventually Hondo asks him to join the team. Street grudgingly accepts.
The team qualify to become a proper S.W.A.T. team. The team eventually are set a big challenge in which they shoot lots of bad guys and cool stuff like that.

I really think you should watch this film if you like action films or even it is just an awesome film.
It doesnt seem to out of date as it was released in 2003. I would give it 10/10.
Here are some links that might interest you.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0257076/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samuel-Jackson-Farrell-Michelle-Rodrigues/dp/B0000UI2RS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1236795273&sr=8-1
http://www.lovefilm.com/product/20305-SWAT.html

Prince of Egypt

2009-03-10T17:48:00.004Z

I watched this film in religous studies in school. It is about the story of Moses with a bit of a tweak. At the start it says
"this is a biblical story that can be found in the bible" duh!. Of course it is in the bible anyway also
"James Bond is a biblical character that can be found in the bible in Timothy 3:14." James Bond is probably more realistic than the bible and a lot better read(or watch)
Right onto the actual film, well it is a film about Moses, I already said and how he grows up in Egypt as Pharoah's son, then he runs away after killing a bad guy. There are some bits in the film where I am pretty sure they wouldn't be in the bible.
I would advise this as a film for kids under the age of 10 to watch as it is educationl ish and child friendly.
6/10

Office Space film review

2009-03-08T07:41:00.003Z

Office Space is meant to be a comedy about a guy who goes to work at a place called Initech and he gets bored of his job. He therefor tries to get fired. I wont tell you what happens next because it would spoil the film. It isnt laugh out loud comedy, it makes you smile from time to time.

The film was made in 1999 and is set around just before this time. Peter Gibbons who is the main character is played by Ron Livingston and I think he acted the part very well. All of the acting seemed to be good and I would like to point out Stephen Root played a very good part for Milton Waddams who is a tubby Initech empoyee who mumbles a lot and no one really ever listens to him.

Overall it is an ok film, it isnt bad but neither is it wonderful. I might say a lot of films are ok, well that is ok because if a film is good enough to be on DVD or in cinema, then it is bound to be okish depending on what type of film you like and dislike. It is a good friday night film to ust sit down and watch, because it is comedy with a quite simple plot.

The blog isnt dead

2009-03-07T06:16:00.003Z

The blog isn't dead. I know this might not be true and I may never post to this again but I will say this anyway.

This morning I am up at this early hour(6am) to get ready to depart for the national inter-counties cross-country race in Nottingham. I will hopefully see Mo Farah run. When I get back I will try to meet up with the local OxClean team and help my community by cleaning up my already clean streets.

I may get back to publishing film reviews but, I don't know whether I will again. This blog will not die.
Matthieu

Goodbye all

2009-02-21T11:29:00.003Z

For all of you who followed this blog, I have created a new one on Wordpress because it's a bit better, plus no-one else posted to this blog so I thought I might as well get an individual one.

My new blog is here:
http://claagnut.wordpress.com/

I also hereby resign from the Blogger service on my Google account. Long it has served.

The Blogger blog is dead, long live Blogger!

2nd snow day

2009-02-06T08:57:00.002Z

It's just been announced on the school website that we're going to get all of today off as well.

Which is a good time for be to be editing yesterday's footage. I've noticed that MoviePlus has an annoying tendency to just crash if it's asked to deal with several video sources of different types. ie. I try to get it to decompress a batch (yes, a batch) of .divx files and it just crashes. decompressing the files individually works fine though. Oh, and if I use my normal tactic of doing many things at once on the computer, it decides to give up. Interestingly enough, under the reason for error, it blames DivX Inc.

Oh and in the DivX decompressor settings you can tell it to force a 'film' effect which means that film looks more like, film. As in photographic film that you put on a little reel. It makes it look a bit less sharp and digital, more artisty and stuff.

MoviePlus doesn't let me use the DivX decompressor to decompress DivX files (I use FFDShow). However, in the DivX player, it's decompressed in real time and the resolution/aspect ratio/colour is all preserved.

Here's what we did yesterday:

Snow day

2009-02-05T17:42:00.003Z

This morning it snowed lots and I went around with my friends and built a snowman and a igloo which got up to about shin height before we gave up. We had fun. This is the BBC weather forecast for tomorrow:

It should snow tonight. And then, I'll get Friday off and have a basically extended weekend!

Movie Night, Red Alert 3.

2009-02-03T17:24:00.004Z

I have been prompted by someone at school that it's been a while since a movie night was held. Of course I would pull for this movie night to be held at my house seeing as I have a projector, sofas, social standing that comes with being that guy who everyone goes round to his house and has a good time. Also, I would get to pull first dibs on films watched. That along with the awful casual mini-games supplied at occasions like this (see previous postings). My friend has recently passed his birthday (16 years). Seeing as it's a significant milestone I would expect a rather more extravagant party than most years. We'll have to see, but it'll leave room for one of my movie nights for sure. So under the assumption that I would hold a movie night, these would be the films I currently consider as definitely worth watching:

Dune. Everyone I talked to seemed to have heard of the book or the film, but nobody had actually read or seen it. Strange. It is a totally kick-ass sci-fi film though
Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny. It would totally satisfy those immature ones among us who revel in simple toilet humour. I do occasionaly chuckle at those types of jokes. I mean I watched all three futurama films. If I think it's funny I laugh. Damn them who do not laugh. I'm referring mostly to parents here.
Full Metal Alchemist: the Conqueror of Shamballa. As I already demonstrated with my parents it's impossible to understand without having watched at least 60% of the FMA saga beforehand. I did find myself writing in History that Edward Elrich had prevented the Munich Beer Hall Putsch by calling upon his powers of Alchemy.
This could be easily substituted for FMA because it's of the same Anime-Sci-Fi theme: Casshern.

The Red Alert 3 expansion pack now has a trailer (that link is likely to expire soon). It wasn't difficult to predict that there was going to be an expansion pack seeing as it's EA and that's what they do, just look at what they did to Command and Conquer 3. Three comments to make about the trailer: There's a new actor playing one of the American Faction Generals who is the same person who played Gretchen in Prison Break Season 4. I'm not going to get over that. At the end of the trailer there's that russian guy who shouts at the start of Hell March. That's awesome. Just skip to the end to see what I mean. The new character's name sounds about as silly as just calling someone 'Yuri' and then giving them a whole new faction based around the fact that they can do wierd stuff using their psychic rays. Oh, wait! That's what they just did. Did anyone see that obscure reference to Red Alert 2: Yuri's revenge? Plus one to me! The new character is called Yuriko, that's such a giveaway. Another point about the Red Alert series in general, is that I now fully understand the satirical, semi-cheesy view of the cold war. The whole point is that nobody is right and the game is just there to enjoy the strategic battles which took place. I have decided to scorn those who look upon Command and Conquer as not a true strategy game. It may have somewhat departed from realism, but it sticks by it's beginning design principles of quick decisions and simplistic combat. There's no faffing about looking at wind speed and stuff, it's just common sense that a big gun on a wall will defend better than a big gun in the middle of a field.

Matchstick has been hassling me for the last couple of weeks to save my gains from my new job for something later on. I have amassed £140-ish pound and earlier on he came into my room and said 'can you spare £30 for Mirror's edge and Xbox LIVE Gold?'. I know we discussed it earlier, but still, save away for a rainy day, then buy a Zune.

it's all broken

2009-02-01T10:05:00.006Z

This morning the rest of the family are out running. I tried to get my videos shell folder in my user folder to show up on the start menu. Apparently there's no way to do this as the only way I found was to show my personal folder as a list. This doesn't include the Games folder which doesn't seem to be part of the file explorer and exists as it's own application. In relation to that, I tried to get the Rainbow Six 2 disk added to Steam. Which failed because it has to be a game which is compatible with Steamworks. Unreal Tournament 3 uses Steamworks and can be added to Steam, Rainbow Six 2 uses the Unreal Engine 3. It's just an observation but it would be nice for someone to fix this sometime because you can buy Rainbow Six 2 on Steam and I don't like putting a disk in every time I want to play, especially if the disk is scratched and the only way a computer will recognise it is in a Blu-Ray drive. I think that's because Blu-Ray drives have greater precision and can see past the scratches. I'm no expert but it's something like that. Anyway, I put the Videos folder in the folder:C:\Users\MyUserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu

That didn't work, which was quite predictable. I deleted the folder in the start menu and for unknown reason this meant that it deleted itself from my user folder. It was too big to fit in the Recycle Bin so it just got erased.

I downloaded some recovery software and realised that it gets steadily harder to recover whatever you've lost because every time you do something on the computer it gets recorded on the Hard Drive and soon all your precious data is lost under layers of useless data.

I managed to recover: Some episodes of Full Metal Panic!, the IT crowd series 3 (missing episode 4), Some game captures of Team Fortress 2, a bunch of uncoded camcorder videos.

I lost: All 3 futurama movies, various little video projects I had working, some feature length-films which I had already seen.

The biggest loss is that of my little video projects because now I have to start over from scratch.

Yesterday, me and matchstick re-did the face on my Vegas 2 character. I played for about 10 minutes and got these awesome screen grabs:

Actually that's the only screen grab that allows me to upload. I'll put more up when the internet's not being such a pain.

UPDATE: Here are the rest.

Things work!

2009-01-30T18:02:00.002Z

I took the non-working Rainbow Six CD from one computer and installed it using my magical Blu-Ray drive. And it works, fools. I wonder if it's possible to add Rainbow Six CD edition to Steam and then run it within Steam. I haven't tried but I will. In the install settings I clicked French (Canadian) for a laugh seeing as it was made in Montreal. And as I have already proudly said, I visited the studios where it was made. Now I can't seem to change it. I'm happy with it though. It's funny. Another funny thing is what it did to my face when I tried to use it on my character:

School Assembly

2009-01-28T16:59:00.003Z

Our new deputy-head-teacher gave his first assembly this week. And it was actually worth listening to as he is a good speaker. It should be a requirement for people who want to stand up and take an assembly at school that they actually prepare properly. But, I'll be honest right now, that wasn't the only reason I thought his talk was good, he talked about change and reform and he slipped in the fact that about %80 of schoolchildren of our age play computer games and that about %70 of teachers have never played a computer game. I know that my form tutor owns a PlayStation but he never really talks about it much, it pleases me to know that there's someone high up in my local school hierarchy who actually understands virtual worlds. Of course this guy might just be trying to make good first impressions and that he might turn out to be just one of those narrow-minded old fools who pretends to understand young people. However, as first impressions made, they were pretty good.

Other teachers when they take assemblies talk about general good morals. In primary school we were read out stories from the Bible. I used to think it was liberating that I only had to go through Assemblies once a week. That was 4 years ago and I predicted a change in Assemblies from general talks about why we should be behaving better, doing better schoolwork, patronising rubbish about 'the world outside of school'. To a meeting at which essential information about the running of the school would be issued. The management has a chance once a week to address us face-to-face and instead of informing us about useful stuff we should know about the school which is relevant to us now, they try to instill in us a sense of right and wrong. It was heartening to see that for once a teacher had actually bothered to prepare an introduction speech which students are actually interested in listening to. There's the possibility that if no headteacher is found in interviews that the new deputy would be elevated to head-teacher rank. If we had the chance to vote, I would vote for him.

A new deputy head has arrived at the school and I think he's a good guy.

At lunchtime I attended an introductory session in Government and Politics at A-Level. It was quite dis-heartening a first because the only other person who arrived was a pretentious git who I had been trying to avoid for a while, naturally he thinks that climate change is a lie and that all Muslims are terrorists. Bit of a wanker really. Anyway, after a while a few other people came along. Surprisingly most of them were rather proudly socialist, which I hadn't really anticipated, all of course barring the pretentious one, and this other boy who seemed to have no opinion on the matter (then why is he wanting to study Politick?). My American friend happily pointed out to me what a bunch of fools our parliament is as we were being shown film of 'Prime Minister's Questions'. The whole house was acting like angry schoolchildren with the portly speaker in the middle helplessly protesting 'order, ORDER!'.

It should be fun next year.

Synergy

2009-01-24T15:11:00.002Z

I just downloaded Synergy mod for Half-life 2 and played for about half-an-hour. It lets you play co-operatively with your friends. I never got the chance to play the co-op Half-Life campaign becuase everyone was too interested in playing specially built co-op maps which come along with the mod and kind-of tie in with the Half-Life 2 storyline in the sense that you're a group of resistance fighters taking over a city controlled by Combine soldiers. Still, it departs no further than the original Half-Life expansions detailing in greater detail the events which occured at Black Mesa. And it supports the fan-made single-player levels which bring greater depth to the overall story. Actually, it supports a fair bit but I can't find the entire list just yet.

I want to get Half-Life 2 on another computer so that I can play it co-operatively with someone else at home. Thing is that whenever I ask for the parent's credit card and my reason is to buy another copy of Half-Life 2 (of which I already own one copy) it's just a no-brainer for them. And I have an unfortunate reputation for throwing money at things on small impulses and chances that it might turn out to be really fantastic. And I already bought a set of games this month (just after I got my laptop, Multiwinia, all that). However, it would help with the Source SDK becuase it's not totally happy with me pre-loading the Half-Life 2 map and model files without actually having permission to run the game. Oh well, as part of my noble effort to get parents to experience this brilliant medium, I shall tonight sit down with them and get them to experience a little bit of the Half-Life 2 (single-player) story.

Bottom line is: Half-Life 2 remains the most fantastic game ever made. Synergy mod just made it even more fantastic. Parents will play and appreciate games or, if not, they'll understand just a little bit.

Tokyo Babylon

2009-01-24T09:57:00.002Z

I just finished reading Tokyo Babylon volume 6. As far as I can tell, someone was stabbed in the eye and will go blind soon, but they're a vet and can get a blind dog anyway. The victim's friend feels unhappy that he didn't get stabbed, which makes no sense. The attacker only stabbed him because she was in an unstable mental state so it's okay and she doesn't go to jail. Also, the attacker's son got an organ transplant and one or two characters in the book can speak to birds becuase they made a bet with a man under a cherry tree.

It takes some skill to twist such a demented and bizarre story in just one small manga. I'm taking it right out of context becuase I didn't read any of the other books in the series but at least it's all artistic and stuff.

No DivX here :(

2009-01-22T18:24:00.004Z

I found out that the DivX web player can only play files which are actually hosted up on the internet somewhere. I would be fine with this if it didn't mean that A. We have to keep one computer on all the time to be serving up content to the web and it uses up electricity and therefore money B. I'm not sure how many people would try watching it but I'm not willing to risk our bandwidth, I've already tried setting up a TF2 dedicated server and then took it down about ten minutes later, internets cost money and C. Because I'm not so excited about my video that I'm going to write a HTML file, put it in the right directory and make sure everything works, because it was a test after all, and the test was a resounding success, go me. Except for the fact that the only place you can see my video is on Facebook. If you're not my friend on Facebook then sit down comfortably and imagine sittting in the back of a canoe on the river. Imagination is much better than actual video and I'm sure it comes in High Definition. Apart from that, I've been getting a lot of people coming up to me at school and saying stuff like 'I saw your video review of Left4Dead on Facebook, can you do another one?'. And therefore I might go do another video review, thing, depends.

I spent loads of time tonight on Faceposer. I'm doing well, but I'm using the SiN Episodes: Emergence version and I can't find where the sound files for the game are. I'll be switching to the 'actual' Half-Life faceposer soon as I've got a plan to download Half-Life 2 onto my laptop and play co-op using the Synergy mod. This would actually be the most awesome thing in the entire universe ever, however when I told Peter he just said he didn't like Half-Life very much, despite the fact that he's never played it. Screw him, I'll coerce one of my friends or Matchstick to play with me.

Speaking of which, I went around to a friend's house the other day to celebrate 'after-mock success' or something like that. It degraded into one of those sad Wii ads where two girls are jumping up and down with Wiimotes going 'gaming is sooo fun' while playing some shitty mini-game. Although after a while I did get to play COD5 co-op. On the Wii. And I was told by the guy next to me that 'Call of Duty looks like really bad and unimaginative drivel at first but' apparently 'it grows on you and you appreciate it a lot more'. I played it enough to confirm my prejudices and I still don't recommend it.

Matchstick exchanged Halo 3 for Quantum of Solace earlier in the week. Seeing as I've been mean and negative about almost every game I've played this week, I'll carry on by saying that Quantum of Solace is mediocre. It has no real strength. It is most certainly not the 'spiritual successor to goldeneye'. Whoever wrote that must have been under the influence of drugs/alcohol/excessive media hype at the time. If you really want a good spying game, get any one of the Spliter Cell games before the Double-Agent one. If you don't care how much spying is involved and just want to do a James Bond thing, check out the Goldeneye: Source mod for Half-Life. Gameplay is a bad version of Rainbow Six: Vegas's cover-shoot-capture objective style (you'd understand if you'd played it). Except that in Quantum of Solace all emphasis on strategy and realism is thrown to the wind because HE'S JAMES BOND. It had 'fun moments', a bucket load of quick-time events, and it got me 250 gamerscore. I would mention that at times the quick-time events are a 'good' thing. But that's a whole long detailed story and nobody wants to hear it. So thus concludes my rant: You can't watch my video; I went to a party; Quantum of Solace: the Videogame, is mediocre.

Looking through the crystal ball

2009-01-18T13:54:00.003Z

I'm looking at university courses to take after my A-Levels to make sure I take the right A-Levels to take said courses. I made an account on the UCAS website and I took this thing called the stamford test, here's what subject areas it threw up:

Modern Foreign languages
Media/Radio/TV/Film
General Engineering
Electronic Engineering
Surveying (I'm not quite sure what this is)
Arts and Crafts
Town and Country planning
International Studies
Politics Based
Computer Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Building/Architecture
Design Studies
Physics Based

And here are 6 courses which, would be on my short-list:

University of Derby
Computer Games Modelling & Animation

Requires at least 2 A-Levels and 'any Art/Design subject at grade D'. Above 200 UCAS points.

Computer Games Programming

Requires at least 2 A-Levels or the equivalent. Above 200 UCAS points.

University of Cumbria

Journalism

Requires any subject related to the course at grade B (I assume this would be English). Above 240 UCAS points.

Bournemouth University

Computer-Aided Product Design

Requires an interview, >260 UCAS points and 'Key Skills such as use of ICT and Communication'.

Warwick University

Politics with International Studies

Requires 3 A-Levels, the eqivalent of 2 A grades and 1 B grade. Also, you get to spend a year abroad!

Staffordshire University

Scriptwriting

Requires >180 UCAS points.

DivX

2009-01-18T10:20:00.004Z

I recently bought the DivX pro pack. I didn't necessarily buy it for the ability to do one-step conversion of .MOV files from my decidedly broken camcorder. I bought it because I think that the DivX Codec is ultimately useful because it can encode HD video in a file size small enough to be put up on the internet, and it includes the DivX web player. And it allows you to burn DivX videos to CD. And it does useful stuff which I might use sometime in the future. Okay, so now that I've established why I bought this, I'll compare it to what I have already. I paid $23.79 on the DivX website, this was purely error as I didn't see the drop-down box in which you choose which currency you want to pay in until after the order. I calculate that it cost £16.15. This includes VAT, and it said £14 (excl. VAT) on the main site so I wasn't ripped off that badly. Still, look for the currency box. Also, there's some faffing about at Steam who've changed the currency rates to 'reflect the current economic situation' and made all the games more expensive in Euros but cheaper in Pounds. Don't ask me how it works.

Here's a comparison of the file sizes thrown out by different formats of the same video:

.NSMOV file from camcorder: 245,590 KB
.AVI file converted using MP4CAM2AVI (some strange free converter): 255,744 KB
.DivX file converted using the DivX converter at 720p HD settings: 246,072 KB
.MPEG file exported at Draft settings from Serif MoviePlus 5: 447,296 KB

Okay, so the reduction in file size isn't that great. And it took a fair while longer (I didn't time it) to convert the file in the DivX converter than in the strange open-source converter. And it forced me to download Quicktime before it would acknowledge .MOV files.

And here's my quality comparison, which shows that apart from a few little things, both output videos look pretty much the same:

Thus concludes that to the untrained eye, I shouldn't have bought DivX Pro. However, it does make video editing easier by having a really really nice user interface. And It's better than spending £10 on a game because games are not as useful, the parents would approve.

The comparison screenshots are taken from a video of Peter and me (or me and Peter) in a canoe with the camera attached in the middle. I might upload it later with my flashy web player.

Bye Bye rover

2009-01-12T21:47:00.002Z

Sad that this is the only picture I have of the rover. But it is now gone. Sunday was just a bad day.....

Raymon Blanc

2009-01-10T12:55:00.002Z

I just saw Raymond Blanc about 15 mins ago. I was cycling so I couldn't take a picture of him. I was cycling along outside his resteraunt(Brasserie Blanc) in Oxford. He crossed the road to the side of his resteraunt. I recognised him and then confirmed it was him when he took off his hat and went into his resteraunt. I am happy to have seen him and now my day is much better.
Matthieu

I think James Bond is an idiot

2009-01-08T16:24:00.004Z

I'm 53 minutes in to the Bond movie Quantum of Solace and 007 still hasn't ravished every virgin in the land. There may be hope for him just yet.

Oh, wait, just watch until 57 minutes in. If all secret agents were like that, we'd have a lot more problems to worry about. Namely the secret agents going though parnters faster than they do condoms. It's not cool. And, and, it's a children's movie, and some children actually want to be like James Bond. Heck, some adults want to be like him.

Product placement

2009-01-08T16:10:00.003Z

I'm 17 minutes in to the bond movie quantum of solace and I just spotted a multi-touch xx-inch tablet PC being manhandled by Mi5 (or Mi6, who cares?). I was resentful of the huge microsoft surface on display in 'the day the earth stood still'. And now this is getting ridiculous. I hate being subtly sold stuff which I won't be able to buy anyway. No more product placement please. It's annoying.

Also of note, can Daniel Craig not pretend to be a. Cool or b. Italian. He is neither and if he's to be accurate, he should play a russian.

Apart from that, I am enjoying Quantum of Solace so far.

Update: 20:28: Daniel Craig walks into a hotel and stabs this guy to death and steals a briefcase off him. I have no idea what his motive is for doing this and I presume that it will serve some purpose later on.

Fell shoes

2009-01-08T14:27:00.003Z

These are my fell shoes. New Ballance Xtera's .. They are not fast but they take me to adventuous places. I can go anywhere in these. Oh! except upstairs, and on peoples living room carpets!

My spikes, I love my spikes.....

2009-01-06T13:55:00.002Z

These are my spikes, and I love them. I put them on my feet and they make me go fast.

Beware: Anti-American rant below

2009-01-05T21:38:00.003Z

It's 9:40 and I've just finished watching Eagle Eye. I would like to write down an intersting line said by this boss guy right at the end 'the very safeguards which we put in place to protect our libery do in turn infringe upon it'. Take that Police State! It was a film which tried very hard to be an intersting sci-fi take on what it would be like if a giant big brother network of cameras was controlled by a super-powerful computer. And then the plot takes a turn by deciding that Americans killing a bunch of civillians in Afghanistan was a violation of the American Constituion and that the current regine needed changing and therefore put in place a plan to kill the president. All that I actually have no problem with, I think it's good to change America's regime if it's not upholding it's constitution. but actually, this is America and the machine is wrong. Only the humans are right to uphold their proud nation and murder innocent people of foreign countries for oil. The film tries to be apolitical while at the same time providing a undercurrent of 'oh no it's the police state' and loads and loads of flag waving and American patriotism. So therefore I conclude that this film must be struck from my good graces because it was confusing and ended really really badly. As in the machine died and the humans won (yaaay) and the American Constitution remains unchanged. The moral of this story is non-existent because the current moral that humans should decide makes no sense because those humans are cruel and greedy.

Also, the big super-computer kind of looks like GLaDOS. Which is possibly the most intersting thing about this movie. Or the fact that is featured Shia LaBeouf. Eagle eye is a reference to the American eagle as it's national symbol.

Whichever way you look at it, I would have been better off learning something useful than watching that film. Even though I have nothing useful to learn at the moment.

snails

2008-12-30T08:26:00.002Z

On Monday we ate some

cost versus price versus quality

2008-12-30T08:14:00.004Z

At breakfast I was forced to explain a phenomenon which although I will relate it to gaming can be used anywhere else. I first encountered it on a forum reading about middle-aged gamers who juggled a job with a virtual world. See Ben X. Anyway, the way Peter looks at it is that you have three variables: Time, Cost and Quality. If like me your time (for playing) reduces then you want the Quality to stay excellent for what little time you have to game. This means that the last variable: price, increases due to increased quality. Steam thankfully breaks this equality by supplying unbelievably cheap games which are of equally unbelievable quality (depending upon whether you like deep thoughtful adventure games with more emphasis on story) all this is supplied in short, episodic content. Granted, the Half-Life episodes won't take you under an hour to experience each one fully but the time you play will be as entertaining as you can possibly make it for the price. You play for fifteen minutes and come away completely amazed by the absolute masterpiece and genius. This is what I'm experiencing. I want to pay less to play better games for shorter amounts of time. It's all possible given that independent games which are of significantly increased quality are available for cheaper through steam. Another point made by Peter was that the price of the game was insignificant compared to time and quality. Ergo, there is little reason to buy a game of mediocre quality (bad story, not incredibly fun to play, not artistic) and play it for a long time even though it cost you £4. One's total entertainment achieved from that £4 was not enough to compensate for the incredibly limited game-playing time I have.

A problem I face however is that I should not buy a game of high quality for low price and then play it for longer due to the fact that it is so completely amazing. I'm slowly making myself through Half-Life 1 because if I play for long periods of time my time/cost/quality balance falls out of place. In fact if you look at my steam stats I have played Half-Life for 1.2 hours in the past 2 weeks. And that's been the average for the last 2 weeks as well. Which makes about 2.4 hours of high-quality playing time for 79p. That works out at 8p every fifteen minutes. This would be almost insignificant if not for the fact that Half-Life is one of the most entertaining games I have ever played.

Some people spend spend a long time on big expensive games which are of mediocre quality. This is wrong because they try to get more entertainment out of their game by playing it for longer while they save up for the next hugely popular game. But you can't get more entertainment out of a bad game by playing it for longer.

And that is why when my laptop arrives I will set up a new Steam account and buy many independent games at low prices, but not necessaruily play them for long.

You can also relate this to the completion of mock test papers to be completed dutring the holidays by replacing cost with oportunity cost. I should really draw a graph later on to represent this.

SiN

2008-12-30T06:59:00.002Z

I briefly mentioned this yesterday, but I just watched the trailer to SiN Episodes: Emergence. It's like Half-Life, not in the story, but in the gameplay, the story looks pretty good having read the introduction. It's powered by Source, and it just has this feel which makes the world look so like a generic Source-powered game, it brings back feeling of Half-Life. This is definitely going down to play on my new laptop. Although it is only one episode, and I don't know what happened to the others. I was going to say that I wanted to play Red Alert 3 since I spent most of since I woke up poring over it's website. But, by the looks of everything, SiN overtook that. I know that looking at just a trailer is not much foundations for awesomeness. Further searching finds that the develloper, ritual entertainment, made the port for Counter Strike to the Xbox. They worked on Counter Strike: Condition Zero. And they made an expansion to Delta Force: Black Hawk Down. And the game was endorsed by an early form of Games for Windows on XP.

I'm going to consider it.

After much consideration

2008-12-29T20:49:00.002Z

In my last post I listed items which were reduced on Steam. Well as a matter of fact there is an all-round %10 reduction on all things on Steam. There's also an additional reduction on other stuff as well. This ends January the second. By then my laptop will have arrived and the following games (possibly) bought:

Half-Life: Opposing Force
Half-Life: Blue Shift
Darwinia+Multiwinia
World of Goo
Tank Universal (depending on what it's like)
Oh, and maybe Counter-Strike: Source.
Out on a limb here: Aquaria?

Today I went to town and was sorely dissapointed by almost everything in HMV. I tried to open a bank account at Co-Op, but didn't have my real passport so was declined. I walked around Zaavi looking at all the things that were on clearance, none of them so cheap as to be worth buying and some things like £2 special editions of Tribes: Vengeance were too good to be true so I steered clear of them. In fact I was looking for Another World, an independent, artsy kind of game which stood out from the rest. However, I was treated with lots and lots of First-Person-Shooters and popular games which sell. The only thing vaguely appealing was Red Alert 3, and that was only available for £34 in WhSmiths. Rather disappointingly it's not on Steam, or at least I don't think so because Steam is messing up quite a lot.

I also browsed Blu-Ray disks in HMV, my laptop is going to have full HD screen (1080 pixels high by 1920 along). It seems that as with video games nothing is really breaking the mould and being adventurous with this, the best Blu-Ray films I saw were big-budget-hollywood-smash-box-office-hits, such as Batman Begins and well, that's about it really. I watched 'my beautiful laundrette' last night and despite the resolution being bad, the film itself was marvellous. And it doesn't help that Blu-Ray disks average at about £20 in price.

Tomorrow I might go watch 'Yes Man' with Matthieu, under the weary inquiry as to whether it'll be any good. Who knows, the Spirit looks to be awesome and I'll watch it as soon as I can, possibly with a friend from school. Or the tale of Despereaux.

I'll leave with another nod to a good game, I noticed that SiN Episodes: Emergence on Steam is actually modelled on the Source engine. Instantly turning it from a bizarre game which I never thought worth a look to an intersting game with seemingly limitless potential for fun. Maybe as soon as I get my laptop I'll ignore my pre-PC hoarding phase and start playing so-called 'mainstream' games that the rest of the apes of my age play. Screaming 'Gears was nang innit!'.

Another list of intersting games

2008-12-29T07:21:00.002Z

I recently found this site abandonia where is hosted old games. I recently ordered a new laptop and my graphics card isn't up to sratch to play today's demanding games. Therefore I'm going to play loads of retro arcade games and Source games because they run on almost any computer.

Another World. I'll go to town today because I swore seeing it there. An old adventure game which was re-made with better graphics.
Doom II: Hell on Earth. I don't mind if it's probably an 18.
Prince of Persia. I played the later versions so hey, why not play the first one?
Prince of Persia 2. Just before Prince of Persia 3D. Which was awful.
Wolfenstein 3D. Because I think my dad probably played it. Or the Escape fron Castle Wolfenstein. Not the remake.
Turok - Dinosaur hunter. I'm just curious really as to how this will turn out.
Earthworm Jim. It's famous, apparently, so I'll give it a bash.

Other games which are on Steam:

Commander Keen.
Il-2 Sturmovik. I've always wanted that game. And now it's on Steam. For cheap!
Beyond Good and Evil. Seems political.
Trials 2. It's an evolution of a flash-based motorcycle game. All cheap through!
Multiwinia. I never bothered to finish Darwinia so it might be a good start for Multi-Player action. Or Command and Conquer Red Alert 3. If I don't get that on Xbox. Which I surely will.
World of Goo.
Gish. Same as above and below, really.
Eets. Also on Xbox LIVE Arcade.
Aquaria. Looks, kind-of-alright, I guess.
Vigil - Blood Bitterness. Why not? It looks artisitc.

And there was another game which I considered putting down but then forgot about when I was writing the list. According to my calculations, all that up there should cost £50. If each game is £5. And then I can but some movie-editing software.

Psycological ramblings

2008-12-28T15:11:00.005Z

This post falls just after two events. Firstly, there was us going to France to ski. Secondly, Christmas occured. My flight left from Heathrow (Terminal 5!) where I picked up an edition of GAMES. The UK's favourite caps-locked glossy fronted broadsheet magazine which covers almost every aspect of gaming. Anyway, it got me mulling over gaming on the flight. Magazines which come out per month are obsolete in terms of news because they compete with the internet which (in the case of gaming blogs like Kotaku or Joystiq) update every ten minutes or so. Gaming magazines need to move towards having more articles, less pictures, less reviews and more generally intersting things about gaming that you can't find on the internet. The other thing which came across me was that many people try and classify 'interactive media' (Best not to mention 'games'. Sounds childish.) as art. I myself think of Half-Life 2 as being the closest video games have come to being called art. Now, this mostly stems from the fact that the environment in Half-Life 2 is so pretty as to have been designed by an artist, everywhere you look the world is visually appealing as to call it art, not to mention the sound, the music, and the emotional responses you get from the various actions which happen to you as a person within Valve's brilliant world. All this combined is enough to call a game art. However, other mediums which involve stories with plots and characters, such as books or theatre are not necessarily classified as art. For example one would not say that my holiday read 'Starship Trooper' was art; merely an intersting yet simple story. Therefore if some games are simply not visually attractive enough or don't have good enough elements of that which we would call art but they still have a story then they can be considered part of the medium for storytelling.

Often games come up to a schism when it comes to merging a good story with interactivity, or vice versa. As Yahtzee Croshaw puts it, it's like having gameplay and story locked in seperate rooms and you can only stay in one room, always peeking through the door's keyhole to the other room. That may have been wrong since it was a while since I saw his commentary on Braid, but the point still stands. Games which properly manage to maintain interactivity with a world which involves characters and a plot can be part of games as a storytelling medium. Even stubbornly open-world games like Grand Theft Auto or Just Cause are unable to extinguish the fact that they play out a perfectly lineat story with characters and a plot. They are still linear experiences, they just give the player direction. MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft are even better at this, they give the player freedom to create his own story and the direction offered by the game is often un-noticeable.

One of the criticisms often levelled at World-War 2 shooters is that the story is already there and known to all: the Nazis loose. Innovative attempts to divulge from this version of events usually end up offending a large proportion of people. In fact, games have very rarely dived into that grand lake which I regularly frequent called politick. Some games have subtle nods to politics, but they never venture far from there. Halo's rather blatant religious tones was accepted quite graciously by the christian community and is the one example I know of a quite major game pushing something which was at first glance quite controversial. Storytelling in games is still in it's shaky steps, there are great examples which won't name but it's coming along. Art in games is still a long way off, but a difference needs to be made between labelling games as art and labelling games as a medium. The two are seperate and it does the industry no credit to try and merge them as one under the banner of higher public acceptance of our hobby.

PS: I just found this site after looking up games and art in google.

Are games getting cheaper?

2008-12-17T16:04:00.004Z

There's an interesting article over at Joystiq. Also, there are intersting articles relating to gaming at the Escapist. But, they're just journaliostic genuises and it's quite rare that Joystiq write full blown articles. I didn't actually read much of the article but I got the idea that is was about playing games over the internet. Now, I just went to Amazon, as one does, to see what games are out in the UK. As it happens Left4Dead was on sale. Now, when I say it was on sale, it has been reduced from £49.99 to £39.14. Thankfully this includes 'Super saver delivery'. So my maths is a little easier. However, when I look at the same game on Steam - Valve's content distribution system, I find that as part of a promotion for 4 copies, Left4Dead costs £20.24. Why? To order a physical copy to be installed on my Xbox I need to pay an extra £18.90. Hmm, I ask myself, is digital distribution really better. I bought Valve's Team Fortress 2 some time ago for about 8 pounds. Yeah. And the price on Amazon is £14.67. If I went into my local game store in town, I assure you that that price would be magically pushed up to £20. Now, I may not make the smartest of financial decisions, but by and large, Digital Distibution is insanely cheaper.

I'd like to apply all of what I just said to the movie rental industry and Blockbuster versus Netflix but it might take a bit longer to explain, so I won't. However, things are cheaper when you download them. And I'm not even an early adopter, Steam has been around since 2005, so has Xbox LIVE marketplace and Amazon dvd rentals.

Also, some guy on Joystiq likened Asteoroids to Super Stardust Portable. That guy, wherever he is, whatever he does, is totally wrong. Geometrey Wars 2 and all those other re-made old franchises are nothing compared to Star Control 2. Which many including me still rate as one of the best video games ever made, excluding anything made by Valve, and possibly Halo. I was quite annoyed when I wanted to buy Team Forteress 2 and I tried to get across Valve's awesomeness to one of teh parents. They don't seem to understand that games are art. Certain games. Valve, make art, make games. In fact, I think it must have been last week, a senior minister in the UK government declared games as an art form and nobody listened, shame on you, you snobby ignorant bastards. Matchstick is watching 24 chrono downstairs, but he's promised me a TF2 match. I wonder when this will happen however as it's been about an hour since he went downstairs.

Wait, he's just shouted at me to get a move on. I'm really excited, this could be half as awesome as Counter Strike.. !

In other news,

2008-12-14T07:55:00.000Z

I installed Team Fortress 2 on two computers yesterday, which should at some point lead to all out team deathmatch. I am annoyed that Team Fortress 2 doesn't have any bots, apparently MatchStick knew this but thought I wouldn't mind.

MatchStick watched the re-make of 'the day the Earth stood still'. I was forced to watch the original on the last day of term by a slightly odd physics teacher at school. And having watched the trailer for the re-make, I can safely say that the original was better by far.

I almost forgot, the thing that came through the post from LOVEFiLM was a bunch of vouchers for films, except you had to give them to people who didn't already have a LOVEFiLM account it was a marketing trick. I'd like to give the CEO of LOVEFiLM an advertising leaflet and tell him it's a christmas present and see how he reacts. It almost says 'infect your friends'. Netflix couldn't come sooner.

Weather

2008-12-14T07:15:00.002Z

I was listening to the news this morning, and when he came to the weather he claimed that it would be 'wet and cloudy throughout england, with scattered showers'. That was really vague. Ok, and then he said 'temperatures will range to a high of 1 degree in Northern Ireland to 6 degrees in the North-East'. So then what's the temerature going to be like in Oxford? I'd rather he not try to cram the weather into two sentences and make it so unspecific it could apply to just about anywhere. The news in the newspaper's worse, they don't list Oxford in the newspapers we read (the Independent, the Guardian) they just show a graphic with different icons hanging over bits of the UK which aren't heavily populated. And if you're getting to the end of the newspaper you must be really starved for news. On to the television news: it's unnecessary to have a man standing in front of a greenscreen pointing out where the clouds are going to go, we have eyes, we can see the little animation. Not only that, but they stop the animation at times like 4:00 AM when only the dusbin men are awake, and then they like fast-forward to 1:00 PM. So the morning's obviously not important then. And when they come to predict what happens on Friday, it's just not worth listening because they don't know what's going to happen on Friday, they barely know what's going to happen in two days time. When the journal finishes and it's slightly too cold they show a graphic of someone with a coat on and then the presenter makes a bad joke which nobody lstens to because they're all dying in the huge Tsunami that he's quietly ignored because he was too busy being a cock. When you want to see the weather: go to BBC.co.uk/weather. Save your location. Look at the twenty-four hour prediction. It's all you'll ever need.

It's not like I think the met office doesn't do a brilliant job, just that their methods of presenting weather forecasts are ganz schlect.

Mirror's Edge

2008-12-05T17:01:00.002Z

I just saw the Mirror's Edge Downloadable Content video on Youtube. It's awesome and it rocks. I do not care if it's not from Valve. In fact it was published (develloped by DICE) by the most uncreative money-grabbing arseholes in the entire videogame business. They bought out Westwood studios and killed the Command and Conquer series. They make loads and loads of annoying sport games which nobody ever buys. And yet they were capable of such mastery (bear in mind that I have only played it once) I am convinced that this game rocks despite nearly everyone I know trying to convince me otherwise. A bit like Portal in more ways than one. Also, it's to be introduced on PC with PhysX acceleration from Nvidia. This could be the polish seeeing as it is really a physics based game. But I've seen console titles sucessfully include PhysX. Unreal Tournament to name one (also Electronic Arts). So I'll leave the final judgement up to when I play it. But all I'm sying is that it has potential so everyone now stop saying bad stuff about it. Stop. Now. Games are Art. Go away.

Now I'll shamelessly link the trailers that I watched like the good marketing tool I am:

PC trailer (fingers crossed it comes out on steam)

DLC trailer (+324 points for the mind-blowing techno soundtrack)

Hey, guess what, this game features a woman. And she hasn't got disporportionately large breasts. That has got to be a first somewhere.

Lists to write

2008-12-05T16:26:00.004Z

Here are the projects which I aim to have a go at by or during Christmas:

Put LEDs inside the A B X Y buttons of one of the Xbox controllers. And in doing so sharpen up my rusty soldering skills
Investigate Arduino boards. I had an idea for a panel of multi-coloured LEDs which each lit up at random intervals, and it's sort of possible.
Make a video of why Jeremy Clarkson should not be.
Put steam on the laptop and try to play a LAN game of DEFCON with the family. If overly simplistic dumb games can't appeal to them then maybe sophisticated (and I'm not talking about Half-Life) Real-Time Strategy games would do it. Or I could borrow a Wii.

Actually I was joking when I said we could borrow a Wii. I would NEVER EVER EVER do that, without quoting GlaDOS: it would be the dumbest thing.

Also, my reading list is:

Freedom Next Time - John Pilger
The last book in the Timura Trilogy whose name I have forgotten but it's by Allan Cole and it's on my Christmas list.
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx.
Jonathan Neele's book on climate change.

There's no reason for alarm.

2008-12-01T21:36:00.002Z

I just recieved this E-Mail from LOVEFiLM. What will it be I wonder? Could it be enough to stop us from converting to their deadliest rivals Netflix... ?

I also just checked the Lovefilm site. No clues there. It seems we're in the dark on this one. Anyone care to explain?

Mamma Mia - why was that film made?

2008-11-27T21:38:00.004Z

I just finished the family musical classic of this year: 'Mamma Mia'. A film which unly just overtakes High School Musical: Karaoke edition in how incredibly soul-crushing it is. Attention dumb people spoilers: Within the first five minutes of watching I realised that the 3 men who come to the island go and marry the 3 women. What an incredibly predictable load of crap. If I had it my way, the three men would fight it out FarCry style on a deserted tropical island. The two annying women whose names I can't remember would die in freak accidents. And then the character who's supposed to be getting married is involved in a suspect biological accident whoch renders her horribly disfgured and unable to speak. That way the whole problem of old disco songs being sung by people who can't sing is solved. Also, everyone on the greek island speaks greek and nobody's got the slightest clue what's going on.
Actually I'll be honest, I watched only a small proportion of this film, I gave up at some point and left, then had to finish it off this evening for the sense of completion. One of Christine's friends watched it twice. I'm reminding the world that Christine's taste in films is dictated solely by whether it's not in English or was reccomended by one of her incredibly tasteless student-friends. Also, it took up one of my free blockbuster dvd credits. I could have spent my time watching a sci-fi classic/anime/thought-provoking artistic masterpiece. But no; Mamma Mia. I'm not even going to try to explain the plot, it's so simple that Christine understood it. Which is normally a standard most films have trouble attaining.
It's late and Peter's elders arrive tomorrow (yaay, old people... !) but really, I must sleep, and be lulled to sleep my Mark Steel's rants about revolution. I leave you with a clip of one of what I consider to be the best musicals ever made, Tenacious D: the Pick of Destiny

And I make no apology for the bad language, it's about 2398 times more intelligent, witty, funny, and actually worth listening to than every other musical I have ever watched. Take that West Side Story!

Pirate economics.

2008-11-27T15:53:00.005Z

This is the fruit of a boring Busniness Studies lesson. I was thinking about pirates and no work had been set so I wondered what happened if I tried to apply normal economics to 18th Century Bucaneers. If anything it's a really simple way of teaching little children the basics of economics. You know the Pirates of the Carribean Role-Playing-Game did teach me a thing or two about trading and diplomacy, even if it was only a game. So did Star Control.

If a pirate ship attacks a navy galleon and plunders a thousand dubloons of treasure and the ship's cannons cost Captain Morgan two hundred gold coins on loan from Holland at 2.1% interest per year. The quest to track down and board a navy galleon took 3 years. After capturing the navy galleon how much proft did Captain Morgan make? Also, the exchange rate between gold coins and dubloons is one chest of dubloons for every two chests of gold coins (chests are of a standard size).

If you don't know what a dubloon is. Look on Wikipedia!

If Captain Morgan makes 20 dubloons a month from plundering sugar, rum, wood and spices from frigates. He has to pay his trusty crew 10 Dubloons a month. And to buy his ship he initially invested 100 dubloons. When on his mighty quest does he break even?
If Captain Morgan sails around Port Royal he can attack up to 7 ships a week for 3 weeks before the navy can respond to the merchant ships's cry for help. After that he must hide in his secret island for 3 weeks before attacking again. If the pirate ship hangs around the shipping lanes it can board two ships every week but is never caught by the navy. Which is most efficient? Or, if Captain Morgan buys two ships, he can have one in Port Royal and one on the shipping lanes. Or is it better to have both ships focusing on the shipping lanes?

If anyone actually works out the answers to those be sure to tell me.

In other news I was wondering if I got a laptop there are a bunch of cheap (£30-ish) GPS adaptors which I could sync with Google Earth and they would perform the same operation as a £600 dedicated handheld or in-car GPS. Of course a laptop is less portable than a handheld but if I bring it on car journeys then it would well replace a normal GPS in-car system. See this website for a way of putting your GPS position on Google Earth.

Also, Audriy (Ukranian boy) showed me this quite controversial Youtube Series the Pinky Show. It's interesting. Clickyit!

Experiencing work

2008-11-08T09:33:00.003Z

This title kind of makes me sound like some lazy fool who's never done any work and is dipping his toe into contributing to society. Well, I have done work before. I go to school every day and that's more work than most adults imagine. Especially when I have a day that goes Maths, Chemistry and Business Studies in the morning.

I was going to take on work with Ode at Harcourt/Pearson education. However now Ode no longer exists and I needed a placement fast. I saw a sign in the Fairtrade shop denoting that volunteers were welcome to come in and help. I was in a hurry for a placement and I do kind of have a thing for 'ethical living'. About two months later I was sitting on the front steps of the shop wondering what I had let myself into. It's important to note here that the participators of the St Michael at the Northgate shop are 'volunteers' that is they're there because they want to be and they truly belive in the future of the Indian/Vietnamese/African/Chinese/Brazillian children they're trying to save.

So from here it's also useful to point out that every person was completely devoted to their cause. I worked with a whole range of people, from north oxford ladies with nothing better to do, to missionary students, a guy called Dan who I swear having seen before and who has a speech defect, depressed people, disabled people. Somehow causes like these seem to attract all colours of society.

And every day I got to go out for an hour and read Mangas in Borders. Possibly the best bit of my day. I got to stock all the various goods which came through the shop. The thing is that the stock was not ordinary like shoes, it was full of bizarrely interesting items. Of course I wasn't expecting to find things like 'health elixir' or magical bracelets. But every day I would come in to find that more grain or cocoa had arrived from far-flung corners of the orient. It was strikingly familiar to the Pirates of the Carribean role playing game. Minus the boat and the sailing. But it still smelt of that adventure. The spices just in from barbados. You know, that kind of thing. And of course I was constantly reminded that it was all in a good cause.

Things I gained from Work Experience at the Fairtrade shop:

An Onya bag (See the play on words there? It's a bag made of parachute silk which packs away really small)
Loads of muffins (They were out of date so we got them instead)
Ubuntu cola (It sounds exactly like that Linux OS!)
Some chocolate (Matchstick wanted some)
A ten pound voucher (In gratitude for my services to society)

And I learnt a couple of things too 'free trade' is just another word for globalisation. And if a product is 'ethically sourced' it means it wasn't good enough to be called 'fairtrade'. So watch out steady consumers for this dastardly trick.

Favourite revolutionary slogans.

2008-11-03T20:11:00.002Z

Be realistic, demand the impossible!
They are buying your happiness, steal it back!
Boredom is counter-revolutionary.
Stop replastering, the structure is rotten.
I want nothing of a world in which the certainty of not dying from hunger comes in exchange for the risk of dying from boredom.
Everyone wants to breathe and nobody can breathe and many say, "We will breathe later". And most of them don't die because they are already dead.
The revolution is unbelievable because it's real.
A single nonrevolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of permanent revolution.
Happiness is a new idea.
Alcohol kills. Take LSD.
Workers of the worls, have fun!
I take part, You take part, He takes part, We take part, You (plural) take part, They profit.
Humanity will not be happy until the last bureaucrat is hanged with the guts of the last capitalist.

Actually maybe some of those are too extreme to print on T-shirts and wear.

Maybe I'll just keep them as E-Mail signiatures.

Waiting for this dam laptop.

2008-10-30T17:23:00.007Z

When at the winter festival this year the traition of giving money to me comes around I shall (probably) demand nothing but cash and a 12-month subscription to PC format and Xbox LIVE gold. With this cash I shall purchase the world's best value-for-money laptop. My laptop for me that nobody else but me can use. The following is my list of my software that I want to install on my laptop:

Arr! Bullets!
Paint.NET
Google Chrome
Google Gears
Google Picasa
Google Desktop
Skype
FRAPS
Steam + Half-Life Source, Counter Strike 1.6, Team Fortress Classic
Latest version of Rising Eagle
Including the Source SDK with Faceposer, Hammer and the other one
Star Control 2
Visual Studio 2008
Searchable English-German dictionary
A whole bunch of codecs + conversion software for my camcorder
VLC media player
Serif MoviePlus X3

That's just about all of them, it should stay simple for a good while.

Oh, and here's my criteria for a good laptop:

Screen width more than 9 inches but less than 16 inches. And of a reasonable resolution.
Price under £650 but over £450.
Has enough 'Oomph' to multitask a lot.

Also today I connected up the Xbox and the PC through Windows Media Center. Something which I've been trying to do for ages. In preparation for the Netflix integration which comes with the New Xbox Experience. Wahey!

Anyone know a good way of doing text-based adventures in XAML?

More on silverlight charting

2008-10-30T11:29:00.001Z

delay gives us a silverlight chart builder and a very informative post about using the charting stuff.

Ruud Boeke has looked at the zoom in this post.

Tim Heuer also has a look.

Chad Cambell looks like he has done some tutorials already…

I’ve been waiting for a silverlight chart control for soooo long ….

2008-10-29T09:15:00.001Z

Link to the actual silverlight toolkit.

Jesse Liberty’s post about the silverlight toolkit.

Tim Heuer’s post about silverlight toolkit.

Delay’s Overview blog post

Mike Snow’s blog post about silverlight toolkit.

Silverlight chart code

2008-10-27T13:53:00.001Z

I am still looking for chart controls for silverlight.

Silverlight Chart UserControl from Gady Elkarif's Blog.

Microsoft Chart Controls

2008-10-27T08:38:00.001Z

I have to look at the Microsoft Chart Controls. I was going to code the charts for lostkilo myself, but perhaps I can use these. I wonder how they can be integrated with silverlight.

GLADOS would like to remind you that you suck at physics based puzzles.

2008-10-26T14:31:00.006Z

I'm posting this just after my previous article about me being completely self-sustainable because videogames and general discussion don't mix with dreams of independence. I missed out something to do with sustainability earlier: toilets. The eco-hab comes with a dry toilet. A dry toilet is something which puts poo and wee in a bucket and accelerates it's decomposition. It turns excrement into compost which I would then put on my crops in my field. Brilliant!

Now that that's over I'll talk about Portal.

Actually I also bought Worms. I'll talk about that as well.

Portal: Still Alive (1200 Microsoft Points)

Named after the internet famous single 'Still Alive' by Jonathan Coulton. I already played the original Portal game on it's own on PC and the Still Alive addon features the original game. Or rather Portal, the original game, features a Still Alive addon of another 14 test chambers. The addon was meant as a way of getting Portal out onto the Xbox 360 over the Xbox LIVE Arcade. The Orange Box was brilliant value for money as a console game (It was half-price on steam. I opted for buying each game individually.) And Portal was meant as a brilliant value for money

standalone game. 1200 MS points is £10.20. I bought Portal on it's release for just over £5.

Hence the 14 extra levels which if you take away the cost of the original game is about 37p a chamber. Each chamber is about 15 minutes of the most original, mind-bending gameplay you've ever experienced. I think that still fits with Valve's value-for-money strategy here. I've only played about half of the new test chambers so far but so far they've been amazingly tricky with some things I hadn't seen in the original puzzles (button reskins, cubes which self-destruct if there are more than one of them, that sort of thing). The Xbox controller handles the gameplay perfectly (better than mouse and keyboard in my opinion). Portal in it's ultimate simplicity only uses up 5 buttons (X, A, B ,Left Trigger, Right Trigger). No problems with the controls. Also, I was told that the Orange Box on Xbox 360 had optimised the 3D world to run better on an Xbox. This may be a complete lie as I never played the Orange Box. But the HD which outputs from the Xbox looks significantly different from my analog PC output. Hey, for the sake of comfort I even set the Portal graphics to simulate a PC monitor (yes you can do that!). Portal is amazing and I won't comlain about more of it. So if you've played Portal on the Orange Box there's not much more for you in the addon. If you've never played Portal, you don't know how much sophisticated culture you're missing out on, go by it

now. If you played Portal on the Orange Box on the PS3 and are annoyed that it's all buggy and/or you want more then get an Xbox. You fool.

Worms (800 Microsoft Points)

My Portal review was long wasn't it? Well I bought Worms because I had a spare 800 points after buying Portal: Still Alive. It's still very much the same Worms as my last 2D worms game Worms World Party. I say 'my' last worms 2D game because the Open Warfare series's graphics were a little too advanced for my old ugly nintendo DS (I have yet to look into the DSi and the PSP 3000) and the Wii worms game was

A. Nothing different from normal worms gameplay

B. On the Wii.

C. Had an amazingly cheap title (a space oddity)

So now we come to Worms on XBLA. It keeps a simple and basic set of weapons. I remember Team 17 outlined this a few years back before Worms 4 Mayhem. It was on one of their blogs or something, the basic set was Shotgun, Bazooka, Grenade, Uzi, Ninja Rope. Worms on XBLA keeps to this formula. Of course included are a sample of the wierd new weapons like airstrikes, cluster bombs, banana bombs. But there's nothing outrageously silly like a concrete donkey or a holy hand grenade. Also, the Exploding Barrels don't explode with fire and thre are no fire weapons included in hte weapon set. Don't know why. The controls seem unintuitive, but I'll get the hang of them. There's a zoom feature, it's useful yet annoying at the same time. You can assign different teams to different controllers. And it's really just classic Worms gameplay, in 1080p High Defenition, on the Xbox.

Plus it's better than Battalion Wars II!

I also watched about half of Burnie Burns's talk on internet media, machinima and Halo. I can't summarise what he said because I didn't understand most of it and I only watched half. But it's quite interesting so I recommend you give it a quick look.

Also I'm listening to Killerpilze's 'ich hasse dich' at the moment. Give it a listen.

And I'm simultaneously litsening to the new Doctor Who radio series. Don't give it a listen (It's a bit 'meh').

The future of housing

2008-10-26T13:30:00.005Z

I was just casually reading the 'filler' bit of this weekend's Observer when I chanced upon an article about ecological housing. I know that this kind of thing gets done all the time in fancy showrooms or is organised by well paid architects. Eco-homes are always one-off concepts which never make it out into real life. This newspaper article proposed real-life eco homes which actually work and aren't just the result of someone's unchecked imagination. One which caught my eye was this Eco-Hab (link in the title) which was ugly as hell but looked... feasible. Upon further research (see link in title) this dwelling can be prefabricated and installed very quickly in almost any environment. Second interesting and mostly important thing is that a fully-furnished pod costs £36,800. That looks like a big number but the average cost of a house in England is £219,262 (see BBC survey 27th August 2008). A field on the outskirts of Oxford was £50,000 ish (see the land directory). Planning permission for those eco-homes is not difficult as they're only 2 storeys high and they are ecologically friendly. You're also allowed to claim back VAT because the government likes eco houses.

In terms of actual ecological value it comes with loads of insulation (natural sheep wool), under floor heating, and it's all made from non-harmful materials built to blend into the natural environment. You're also given the option to add solar electricity, wind turbines and solar heating and some weird (recycled) rubber layer to the outside which adds extra insulation. This leads to my inevitable daydream: Me living outside a major city (like Montreal or Munich, or.. somewhere nice) with a warm pod, my own electricity, wireless internet and organic vegetables or a goat in the field. I would be entirely sustainable and independent for about a quarter of the average price of a house in England. And I would have an electric moped and a railcard. I know that this all sounds very hippie but it's better than living in a house in a town with a mortgage.

Portal and the National Video Game Archive

2008-10-22T16:57:00.003+01:00

Haven't posted in a while. That's because I've got Twitter now. But I'd just like to announce that I'm now a fan of the National Video Game archive and have signed up to support them. Next week is half term holiday and I'll be going to GameCity 3 where I can suggest to them to put Star Control 2 in their archive. Also I'll hopefully get to play some really really old and undoubtebly crappy videogames with atrocious graphics. Fun!

Second thing is that Portal: Still Alive just broke into the Xbox LIVE arcade. I had previously toyed about with the idea of buying and downloading certain games to the Xbox's Hard Drive but was held back because Peter was unwilling to surrender his credit card details to Microsoft. However times have changed, I consider 'Still Alive' to be the unofficial sequel to Portal. I never got to play Team Fortress 2 and never got to play the Orange Box on the Xbox 360. As far as I'm concerned Valve make the world's best games and there's no way that I'm not going to play Portal on the Xbox. Unless I run out of money. Or if I just play it at GameCity 3 like I did for Left4Dead (which I now realise is probably an 18).

The following is the announcement for Portal: Still Alive from E3

And the promotion video for the National Video Game Archive (might not work, it's Vimeo)

I'm now off to listen to Mark Steel's rambling about Religion on BBC 7.

Willen lake run

2008-10-21T14:06:00.001+01:00

I just finished my run round the Willen Lakes in Milton Keynes. It is probably the last time I will run this route as I finish in Milton Keynes soon.

View Larger Map

Doing Design

2008-10-16T16:45:00.001+01:00

Jesse Liberty talking about doing more design work. That I know I need to do. So perhaps he is right, should I buy a book?

http://silverlight.net/blogs/jesseliberty/archive/2008/10/16/something-new-coming-pocket-mfa.aspx

Smart move from Microsoft

2008-10-16T11:54:00.001+01:00

One page to unite them all. I think I am going to need this.

Microsoft/Web

Uk .NET BLOGGERS

2008-10-15T08:58:00.001+01:00

Simon Evans
http://blogs.conchango.com/simonevans
Simon Sabin
SQL Server MVP
http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/simons

Lee Dale
http://leedale.wordpress.com/
David Christiansen
http://www.davidchristiansen.com

Frank Kerrigan
http://www.frankkerrigan.com
Gary Short
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
http://www.garyshort.org/

But it works on my PC!
Random thoughts of Richard Fennel on technology
http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/rfennell/default.aspx
Granville Barnett
http://gbarnett.org

Andrew Westgarth
The Random Thoughts of an ASP.Net Code Monkey
http://www.andrewwestgarth.co.uk
Chris Webb's BI Blog
http://cwebbbi.spaces.live.com/

Karl Wagner
KBlog
http://blackice.aeroxp.org
Thomas Lee's Web Log
Under the Stairs
http://tfl09.blogspot.com

BM Bloggers
The blog of the Black Marble development team
http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/bm-bloggers/default.aspx
Jeff and Scott
Keeping the tangents documented
http://blog.usingtangent.net

Ziemowit 'Jimmy' Skowronski
Lazy Developer
http://devlicio.us/blogs/ziemowit_skowronski/default.aspx
Ben Hall's Blog
http://blog.benhall.me.uk

Christian Wade
For All Things SQL Server 2005
http://blogs.conchango.com/christianwade/
James Knowles .NET Blog
My blog on developing software in .NET and other ramblings
http://www.unwindsoftware.com/blog/

Stephen
All about me learning and using C#
http://csharpner.blogspot.com/
Gary Rowntree
A Gadget Freak; A Geek who can Speak
http://garyrowntree.iblogs.com

Mike Hadlow
A log of the joy's and fustrations of .net development
http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/
Greg Young
Occasionally I get lucky
http://geekswithblogs.com/gyoung

Steve Scott
The Big Dreams of a Little Mind
http://scottyisblogging.blogspot.com
Tim Haughton
Console.WriteLine( WittyTagLineGenerator.Create() );
http://blogitek.com/timhaughton

Vivek Ayer
NET: The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything
http://geekswithblogs.net/vivekayer
Colin Angus Mackay
Stuff that's in my head
http://blogs.wdevs.com/colinangusmackay

Amazon Web Services UK Blog
Amazon Web Services, Products, Tools, and Developer Information, with a UK focus and flavour...
http://aws.typepad.com/aws_uk
John Winstanley
http://spaces.msn.com/members/JohnWinstanley/

Ian Smith
Software Development in a DotCom world
http://www.irascian.com/cs/blogs/ian_smith/
Dave Oliver
Dispatches from a Devitect
http://www.geekswithblogs.net/sabotsshell

David McMahon
http://www.xmlexperience.com
Edward Daniel
http://esdaniel.net

Ian Wijesinghe
A Byte Of Life
http://www.ianwij.com/weblog/
Guy Smith-Ferrier
The Latest Blog Entries from 1 Chap From Blighty
http://www.guysmithferrier.com

Daniel Fisher
lennybacon newtelligence powered
http://www.lennybacon.com/
Learning VB.NET
Benjimawoo - One man. No tagline.
http://BenTheVBDeveloper.blogspot.com

Blog of a .NET Convert
Blog of a relative newbie to the .NET programming world. Care to watch me learn? :)
http://www.systemsharp.net/blogs/rashton/
Life's a Bench
Technology, Photography and occasionally a Norwegian Music blog, by Dave Verwer
http://www.dvhome.co.uk

Caleb Mohon's Blog
Life inside the academic institution
http://mohon.net
Keni Barwick's Blog
rants and raves of all things Microsoft Mobile
http://blogs.conchango.com/kenibarwick/default.aspx

SimonS' SQL Blog
Ramblings on SQL, SSIS, TSQL and other stuff by Simon Sabin
http://www.sqlJunkies.com/weblog/SimonS
Liam Westley
His incoherent ramblings
http://www.geekswithblogs.net/twickers

Nothing Else Matters
gadgets, geekness and all things randomness
http://blog.lukesmith.net
Ian Blackburn's Weblog
http://www.bbits.co.uk/blog

CodeDebate
Anton Delsink
http://spaces.msn.com/members/codedebate/
IanG on Tap
Ian Griffiths in Weblog Form
http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/

Exigency In Specie
Thoughts from, and the lives of a Canadian and a Brit living in Southern England.
http://www.peat.me.uk/
Shaun O'Callaghan's Blog
Life Outside the Academic Institution
http://exaura.org/shaun/

bigwavebay.org
Jonathan Blackmore's Blog
http://bigwavebay.blogspot.com/
PhilipStears
.NET Programmin'
http://www.thespoke.net/myblog/philipstears/myblog.aspx

Sarah Blow's .Net Mobile Blogs
A world of technology in the wireless age
http://geekswithblogs.net/waterbaby
Neil Cowburn
Never Stop Exploring
http://blog.opennetcf.org/ncowburn/

Blogtastic
Mike Roberts on life and technology
http://mikeroberts.thoughtworks.net/blog/
Fairview 3
A place I call home
http://www.fairview3.clara.co.uk/

Oliver Sturm's weblog
http://www.sturmnet.org/blog
VB-tech weblog
a day in the life of a self employed .NET developer!
http://weblog.vb-tech.com/nick

Mike Taulty
Microsoft UK DPE
http://mtaulty.com/blog/
Mike Pelton
Microsoft UK DPE
http://blogs.msdn.com/mikepelton/default.aspx

Phil Winstanley
British Microsoft ASP.NET MVP & ASP Insider
http://weblogs.asp.net/plip/
Ian Smith (Irascian Ltd)
Software Development in a DotCom world
http://www.irascian.com/cs/blogs/ian_smith/default.aspx

Simon Harriyott
Simon's Software Stuff
http://www.harriyott.com/
Solid Quality Learning
http://www.solidqualitylearning.com/blogs/

James Crowley
Random thoughts from a UK student and .NET developer
http://weblogs.asp.net/james_crowley/
Jonathan Hodgson
Coding in the Community
http://www.jonathanhodgson.co.uk/

Simon Thorneycroft
Coding in the Community
http://www.syncadia.com/blogs/st_jh/default.aspx
Peter Foot
.NET Compact Framework MVP
http://www.peterfoot.net

Richard Costall
Costall Blog
http://www.costall.net/Blog.aspx
Richard Blewett
.Net Meanderings
http://www.dotnetconsult.co.uk/weblog/

Barry Dorrans
idunno.org
http://idunno.org/
Dave Sussman
Writerus Drivelus
http://blogs.ipona.com/davids/

Daniel Moth
.NET Compact Framework MVP
http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/
Craig Murphy
The Social Programmer
http://www.craigmurphy.com/blog/

Mehra Nikoo
Thoughts on .NET, SOA, Enterprise Architecture & More!
http://mehranikoo.net/mysite/
Ian Cooper
Stacatto Signals
http://spaces.msn.com/members/iancooper/

Benjaminm's Blog
Indigo, web services and extreme programming
http://www.benjaminm.net

MVC,LINQ,Silverlight pattern

2008-10-03T15:41:00.001+01:00

I want my new application to use ASP.NET MVC, with LINQ to SQL and Silverlight on the front end. So I am looking around for existing patterns. This seems to be a really obvious architecture to want to create, and there are several people that have laid down examples of how to pull all this together.

There is the MVC Storefront.

and according to OdeToCode there is BackgroundMotion. And another solution from Fredrik Kalseth.

Scott Barnes talked up project Nexus. But there is nothing doing there yet…

And there is this from asp alliance. But it seems short on the required detail.

the day the Earth stood still... again!

2008-10-03T14:40:00.002+01:00

Major announcement here. There's a trailer in circulation for a remake of the 1951 classic 'the day the earth stood still'. This is not funny. Whoever decided to ruin such a brilliant movie by warping the story and polishing it with 21st century cheap computer graphics effects should be fired from their job as head bastard. A quick search shows the part of Klaatu being played by the drug dealer from 'a Scanner darkly'. Apparently the film updates Cold War themes like nuclear warfare to more contemporary ones, such as "humans vs. nature" and humanity's generally violent nature towards itself. What a load of hogwash. I don't like this. I didn't like the Prince of Persia movie and now this happens. Why will they not leave old films alone?

When it comes out I'll go and see if it can dispel these earlier prejudices. Until then I'm going to treat this film with the utmost suspicion.

Bad chocolate day

2008-10-03T09:40:00.001+01:00

I wonder if this is going to be a bad chocolate day. I least I went running last night. So perhaps I deserve some chocolate! Its Friday, that's another good reason to have some chocolate. And I’ve eaten all my fruit, and its only 9:30…

Lots of anime sites for pierre

The PC Gamer Showdown

2008-09-30T06:50:00.006+01:00

On Saturday I took the train and a taxi to Stoneleigh park where they were holding the PC Gamer Showdown. The park itself is ganz huge and so was the exhibition hall. Upon display of my visitor booking info, I was showered with free gifts. A PC Gamer Magazine, A hugely detailed guide to COD5, A green Darwinian (yaay!) and a T-Shirt. There was actually more swag at another stall but it was the kind of swag you get at gaming tournaments which you have to pay for. I played many games at the various screens and most of the time it was the first time that I had played that game. So what that follows are nothing but first impressions:

Tiger Woods 09 - A complex control system makes for a complicated game which I wouldn''t play anyway because I'm not a golf fan. And it was on the Xbox. The wii is where this sort of crap really shines through. Stars: *----

Dead Space - Explore a mutant filled spaceship abandoned in an unknown quarter of space. I haven't yet seen the film but the gameplay seems pretty simple to me. You shoot monsters until you run out of ammo, then smash their faces until they die and then kick their bodies until you're sure they're dead. It might get repetitive but my 20 minutes of adrenaline-filled blood soaked combat were amazing. Plus there are some logic puzzles around the way. But nothing that is so hard as to actually make you drop the controller and have a frenzied thought sprinkle to try and work it out. Case in point: Prince of Persia. Stars: ****-

Mirror's edge - Here we go for another sophisticated game. I had never even heard of Ayn Rand's theory of Objectivism until I was introduced to Bioshock. Nor had I understood Valve's 'don't mess with nature' theme until I played Portal. Mirror's edge is of the same 'games are art' line. You start off in a dystopian city where information everywhere is controlled and monitored, freedom of speech is repressed. Y0u are a courier. You run from building to building carrying information in packets to pass on to recipients at the end of the mission. This involves heavy use of parkour and being shot at by policemen. Rather brilliantly I think, you are not given a gun, you must dispatch of the policemen by jumping on them or hitting them in some way. Btw, the original footage in the game trailer was the bit I played, how awesome it that!. Stars: *****

Army of Two - This is the impression of the game I was given from the media coverage/magazine reviews/what my friends told me it was like: Army of Two is full of mindless violence with no plot, bad AI and is just generally a rubbish game. I didn't actually realise it was Army of Two until about ten minutes into the game when I realised that my buddy had this awesome looking mask. The magic moment came in the second scenario I played, in which it is revealed that the whole storyline is based upon Eisenhower's military industrial complex. Even the two-player gameplay was delightfully intuitive. Salem went down in a firefight, so Rios dragged him out on his back to a place of cover while Salem provided covering fire. I really really enjoyed it. Oh, and it was made in EA Montreal, which makes me happy. Stars: ****-

FarCry 2 - Another title made in Montreal, this time in the Ubisoft studios. Unfortunately the guy showing off the game wasn't French-Canadian. But he did give me a free bag, so he counts as equally cool. I have no idea where the story for FarCry 2 comes from, where we left off in FarCry: Vengeance Jack Carver was a genetically-enhanced beast fighting his way around the Jacutan Peninsula. In FarCry 2 there's a guy who looks like Jack Carver (but isn't) without the genetically-enhanced "I've got claws and I can jump fifteen metres high" look. And he's fighting his way around some un-named African country. I laud praise upon the day/night patterns, the realistic fire, the High Dynamic range lighting and the complete diversion from Crytek's Crysis Warhead . All these things are great indeed. Shame it turned out that when you make a realistic game in a realistic country it takes so bloody long to drive everywhere. Still, it's not as bad as Armed Assault. Stars: ***--

Left 4 Dead - As much as I resent the phonetic spelling of the word 'four' in the title, it's a nice reference to the fact that this is in fact a four-player game. And it's made by Valve so even if they made a game which featured the recurring dialogue of a Russian Heavy describing the many uses of a sandwitch in killing sentries I would still love it anyway. Valve seem to be on a roll here, there was Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, Team Fortress 2 and now Left4Dead. Gameplay is as usual excellent and full of adrenaline. The four-player co-op works brilliantly. The only question left to ask is 'When am I going to play Counter-Strike 2?'. Stars: *****

Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction - This was the last game I played and it's probably what made me leave after my five-hour-ish gaming spree. The textures are overwhelmingly bright and colourful. There's a distinct lack of High-Dynamic-Range lighting. This can be overlooked by the insanely high polygon count. The cartoon style actually surpasses Crysis in terms of visual excellence by fooling you into thinking you're just watching a very interactive CG film. This leads me onto my next point: the gameplay is nauseating and requires you to re-spawn again and again and again until you feel very small and powerless against the great button-mashing challenges which lay ahead of you. After jumping off the wrong cliff a countless number of times into the wrong sea I was compelled to do something better with my life starting at that point. So I quickly walked outside, called a taxi, called Peter, then realised that the thing I most wanted in the world at that moment was to go back inside and try jumping off the cliff one more time. Stars: **---

Motorstorm - Another PS3 title. I played only two or three races and lost all of them. I couldn't figure out how to change vehicle from my agonisingly slow monster truck to the cocky little ATVs who I was competing against. The controls were alien and unfamiliar. They seemed to highlight the problems of the wrongly-shaped PS3 controller. The graphics were unimpressive (not bad, but just not awesome enough to be good). The mud effects were irritating. And the gameplay was repetitive. I probably need more time sitting down in it's world but it didn't appeal to me. Stars: **---

Battlefield: Bad Company - I've heard many good things about Battlefield. Many of them I'm delighted were true. My prejudices of Battlefield were based around the (excellent) Battlefront series. Actually the two games are completely different but the objective-based tactics which make up it's core are completely unchanged. I saw another game like this one, Frontlines: Fuel of War. I ignored it. The witty comments by the members of Bad Company are completely justified and make them seem like real characters, not just AI helpers. Stars: ***--

Too Human - Because I was feeling adventurous and full of good spirit I decided to dip my toe into Too Human. It is universally acknowledged as a bad game which is fundamentally broken. And my conclusion after playing it for half-an-hour were that... It's a bad game which is fundamentally broken. I think the game designers were taking the mickey when the thought of letting the player wield the mighty shield of [insert well-known norse god here]. However I do think that as a story it has a lot of potential. Shame it was such a rubbish game. Stars: *----

There were loads more like a beat-em-up DragonBall Z game. A funny RTS which was more of a RPG whose name has eluded me. Dawn of War (I'm not sure which one) and some games like Sims 3 or Brothers in Arms which were announced or presented but I didn't get to play them. Anyway, it's late, I had a great time and I would definitely go again. Even if it means traveling to Germany. In fact, especially if it means travelling to Germany!

The second teenager has arrived.

2008-09-20T13:38:00.004+01:00

Between the coming-of-age of Matthieu, the Bike update to Burnout: Paradise and a ton of homework it's a surprise that I ever have time to sit down and write. But at the moment Matthieu's going to the ice rink to celebrate his Birthday with all his friends who don't like me and I don't like them either, Christine's gone to... well she's just gone but she'll be back in a while though, Peter's acting like a good dad and ferrying little Matthieu to the ice rink and back and when he returns he's going to get back to work on cleaning and plugging in Christine's PC as I am writing this on the laptop and I want to type on a normal keyboard and the laptop's battery is slowly dying.

There was a new Microsoft Zune released this week. Or last week. Anyway, it got me all excited until I realised that the old Zunes still hadn't come out in Ingland yet. This means that I'd have a wait of about 2-3 years before I saw a Zune sold in a high street shop in Oxford. However as are the wonders of the internet I can have an old zune imported from Canada, yaay! Even much more to my surprise was the revelation that the new zune wasn't actually anything special, it was a re-launch with new software (which you can download for free here anyway).

I leave you with what I consider to be the best Mp3 advert so far without revealing that it's trying to sell you a zune until the very end:

Happy Birthday Matthieu

2008-09-17T13:23:00.003+01:00

13 today.

You got a record by Greenday called American Idiot.

A stunt kite.

An XBox game called skate. (and here).

A book I cannot remember which one.
Edit by Clagnut: Actually that was a book I bought and it was called 'By royal command'. Had no idea what it meant but by the time of this edit, Matthieu is aready half-way though it. More than what I can say for Pride and Prejudice.

A 20 pound note.

Farseer and silverlight 2.1

2008-09-16T08:46:00.001+01:00

Trying to find a simple tutorial for the farseer physics engine and silverlight.

Here is an old getting started item but I think its silverlight 1.1

Joust uses silverlight2 and farseer Here is the source code.

Ah Laumania has some source as well, this time silverlight 2.0

Is there a new computer on the horizon?

2008-09-12T18:16:00.016+01:00

I'll explain this very briefly to you. A guy in my DT class managed to make his dream computer for £300 and he enthusiastically railled that it was easy to get an amazing computer for that price. I have £500 floating in my bank account, unused through steady accumulation. Therefore I made the decision to run headlong into this as a new project. The following are the results of an internet hunt for components which all work together and hopefully don't cost too much as a new computer to put in my room. I haven't included a monitor because they cost loads and I'm over budget already. Here's what I found:

Components:

Graphics card: Sapphire Radeon HD 4870
RAM: Corsair Dominator DDR2 (4x1Gb)
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11

Motherboard: ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe

Sound Card: Creative sound blaster Audigy

Speakers: Creative GigaWorks HD50

CPU: Intel Pentinum 4

Optical Drive: Pioneer BDC-202 Blu-Ray SATA Drive

Power Supply Unit: Antec EA 650

Case: Antec Twelve Hundred

Mouse Mat: Razer Goliath Control

Keyboard: Razer Lycosa

Mouse: Razer Deathadder

Costing:

Graphics card: £196.35
RAM: £50.95
Hard Drive: £51.11

Motherboard: £153.93

Sound Card: £30

Speakers: £100

CPU: £57.25

Optical Drive: £84.54

Power Supply Unit: £70.11

Case: £121.83

Mouse Mat: £ 11.17

Keyboard: £44.70

Mouse: £33.52

Total: £1,005.46

[I really, really want to play Crysis or Half-Life: Lost Coast]

[Plus I want a soft plushy chair to watch Blu-Ray movies in]

Linkq page

2008-09-12T09:35:00.001+01:00

10 linkq myths

Linqpad

You can use SqlMetal to generate the dbml file and the Dbcontext classes.

What's wrong with the layout?

2008-09-11T17:58:00.007+01:00

I have figured out what's actually wrong with the blog. It's not google's fault. Sorry google for saying you lost and that actually your company is brilliant at making the internet a better place and that it was all PeterMarshall's fault. He changed the layout to make it fit. This defies google's matra that simple is cool by making simple just difficult and eye-straining. Don't worry though, the layout sticks now. There's no going back.

Music's happening

2008-09-11T17:13:00.005+01:00

I'm sitting here trying to sift through hundreds of Mp3 files trying to distinguish good music to put on my Mp3 player. I'm like a hunter in a field trying to see the gazelle apart from the tall yellow grass. Eating grass sucks, gazelle is much better. Imeandred onto the blog and was schocked to find that all the graphics are gone and the page is nothing but bare text and hyperlinks. I'm using google chrome. I could tolerate it's inability to run silverlight content, it's refusal to let me see Vimeo. However you might know that Blogger is a google product. I got chrome because I use google products and am so used to them that actually having a browser which supposedly seamlessly integrates with the cloud couldn't do any evil. Plus it's really simple, faster than Firefox and has added features. Anyway, google chrome not loading google blogger properly = FAILIURE. At the moment I'm listening to Kanashimi no Kizu by Nana Kitade (picture on the left). Not bad music really, but then not worth a download either. Killerpilze is a good band, they've been playing in the study every morning since school took up again. Also in music news, Les Cowboys Fringants have a new album called the expedition but it's not out until 23rd of September.

I present to you: Richtig Scheiße by Killerpilze:

And just before anyone asks. I know the drummer is young. He's like twelve or something. What's he doing in a rock band? It's wierd.

today

2008-09-10T08:31:00.001+01:00

The new Prince of Persia is a douchebag.

2008-09-05T15:57:00.003+01:00

This in today: new pictures of the Prince of Persia movie set and the actor playing the Prince have come up as filming just began in Morocco. First of you would know that I don't like any of this. I mean I personally think that Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time was a brilliant experience. The 2nd iteration in the trilogy wasn't worth buying and the third game was so completely obscure I wasn't able to find any shop in town selling it. So imagine my surprise when I hear of another game being made, turning the 'trilogy' into a 'franchise' and that a film was on the way. I do admit that as a story, POP has the best set-up for a conversion to film. Except for Half-Life, but Half-Life is always better than anything. Oh, and Halo, that would make a good film as well. Anyway. The new Prince is fool and I wish him to repetitively fall down a bottomless pit after trying to solve a logic puzzle without resorting to looking up a walkthrough on the internet because Persian Princes don't have the internet. They have daggers which can re-wind time so that they fall down the same pit again and again and again. Fun!

Cut and Pasted Microsoft links ….

2008-09-02T13:59:00.001+01:00

The following weekly report and other resources described below can be found on BlogMS - http://blogs.technet.com/blogms/.

The Monthly Report for all articles published during August-2008 is now available. There were 877 new articles published from 01-Aug-2008 to 31-Aug-2008. 183 Microsoft Team blogs searched, 149 blogs had new articles.

Resources on BlogMS

· Microsoft Team Blogs Directory – A full listing of Microsoft team blogs and feeds - 183 in total.

· Microsoft Team Blogs OPML Files – OPML files can be used to import the list of team blog feeds in your news reader or aggregator.

· Subscribing to Essential Microsoft Newsletters - Essential newsletters that you should be signed-up to.

· Microsoft Connect – Getting Involved Early: - Information about Microsoft Connect.

holiday - normandy

2008-09-01T19:26:00.004+01:00

On our holiday in Normandy. Walking across the bay of mont st michel.
We cycled from
Ouisreheam to Bayeux
(day in Bayeux)
Bayeux - Coutances
Coutances - Grandville
Granville - Genets
(day in Genets)
Genets - Vire
Vire - Caen
Caen - Ouistrheam

Back from holiday

2008-09-01T11:56:00.001+01:00

scaleing the silverlight control to the browser size… http://silverlight.net/blogs/msnow/archive/2008/08/26/silverlight-tip-of-the-day-33-how-to-scale-your-entire-app-and-its-elements-to-your-browsers-size.aspx

centering the silverlight control in the browser…http://silverlight.net/blogs/msnow/archive/2008/08/29/silverlight-tip-of-the-day-34-how-to-center-your-silverlight-application-in-your-browser.aspx

something to listen to about silverlight game development..

http://www.sparklingclient.com/silverlight-as-a-gaming-platform-%e2%80%93-bill-reiss/

Ha! when I have time, and that is never going to happen… I need to get my mp3 player in to work, transfer the file, and play it in the car, and that will never happen. Oh well…

no sleep this morning!

2008-08-21T05:28:00.005+01:00

This is really the second time this week that my body clock fell out of sync. The first time was a quite bad sleepover in which we didn't actually ever go to sleep... then I slept until 5 PM the following day. This time however all I did was to wake up a little earlier so that I could make observations of the moon for the astronomy course I take. I woke up at 5:11 with sunrise occuring at 5:58 I thought I had a wide berth. Couple this with the map on the left showing cloud cover in the UK for 4:00 this morning (it's taken off the BBC website so it may not be there tomorrow) I live under the fantastically white layer in the south of ingland. Too much cloud. And despite sunrise being almost an hour away I still had a fuzzly twilight which I might either put down to light pollution or just the early sun reflecting off the underside of the clouds. Then of course when I looked up the Moon rise and moon set times in the realisation that the moon may already have set. In fact it rose at 9:24 PM last night and will set at 11:46 AM this noon. It's meridian passing was at 4: 17 AM which means it should have been above the horizon nearly directly north or directly south of where I was standing. Advice for next time: Bring a compass, check the weather beforehand.

Holidays in france and Kung Fu Panda

2008-08-13T10:47:00.002+01:00

I am currently in Salies de Bearn in France on Holiday with my step grandad. I went to see Kung Fu Panda with him and I thought it was quite a good film. The animation was amazingly good quality, the plot was good because nit wasnt quite qhat you wanted it to be. I cannot comment on Jack Blacks role in the film as it was in French andit wasw played by someone else I think, if it was Jack Black in tthe French version it didnt sound like him and he can speak good french. This film is worth going to the cinema for and is really good to watch if you have a child of any age(up to about 14). That is all, my holiday is good, and it is all fine.
Matchstick

Links cow poo and languages

2008-08-06T09:26:00.001+01:00

Making flower pots from cow poo.

256 gig Solid state drive on their way soon.

Getting Students interested in language learning. and similar stuff to be explored sometime.

Liz Yelling and the young athlete camp

2008-08-01T20:28:00.003+01:00

I just came back from a week of running at the young athlete camp in Wellington College that is run by Full Potential and Adidas. It was a good week. The highlight was interviewing and asking Liz Yelling questions. Liz Yelling is 4 time national cross-country champion, etc and is going to Beijing to do the olympics for the marathon. This was very exciting and I got to talk to her. The reason we could talk to her was because her husband was one of the coaches at the camp.
I went to the camp last year, it was and is very good for any kid that runs for club or county or better.
Matchstick

Ignaz Semmelweiss

2008-07-21T12:58:00.001+01:00

Ignaz Semmelweiss from Pierre Marshall on Vimeo.

I finished Halo 3!

2008-07-19T17:39:00.007+01:00

It's ben a while since I bought Halo 3. About 2 weeks. I didn't write about it on the blog because my very first impressions were awful due to bad lighting and the fact that local multiplayer doesn't support bots. Yeah, you try playing a 1-on-1 duel in forge and you'll soon realise that you need more than two people to start a proper match. I've stepped ahead of myself by mentioning Forge here. It's one of the 'extras' which come with the game. Other Extras include the Theater (I will explain later) and a Matchmaking option which just chooses a game for you depending on your skill and ability. I can't use the online multiplayer features seeing as I don't have Xbox LIVE. This sort of sucks.

EDIT: I now have Xbox LIVE. The online multiplayer features are irritating. I can't move up from the rank of apprentice and I'm not going to try.

What Happens to Old games programmers

2008-07-17T08:40:00.001+01:00

Where do they go when that last games has been written and they are too old to be with the youf.

They retire to wales of course to raise sheep. As this site proves. This is Jeff Minter's blog. Nice sheep!.

New Shoes Run

2008-07-16T14:03:00.001+01:00

I just went for a run in my new shoes. They felt – just like new running shoes.

My new shoes are Nike Air Pegasus (2007). Last years model, because they were cheap. (45 pounds). From www.sweatshop.co.uk

Here is a review from Runners World.

The latest update to Nike's time tested shoe for the neutral runner, the Pegasus. Offers improved natural motion cushioning, an enhanced fit and is Nike+ enabled. Features:

Air unit provides fantastic cushioning throughout the stride
Phylon midsole which is lighter, more cushioned, and more durable than standard EVA
Soft PU crash pad at heel to assist with impact absorption as the foot hits the ground
Nike's unique waffle fill outsole means that this is one shoe that isn't afraid of a bit of mud!
Full length Carbon Rubber outsole gives great durability
Flex Groove Pattern at forefoot for a faster, more responsive toe off

Bone Shaker

2008-07-16T09:40:00.001+01:00

I fancy doing this event in September The BoneShaker Duathlon I think I could use my normal bike. I am planning on entering some cyclocross races this year as well. This event is on 21st of September. In Wantage. So that is quite close by.

Didcot 5 and 2

2008-07-14T08:53:00.002+01:00

Here are the results of the Didcot 5 and 2.

I came 61st Peter Marshall M 44 MV40 Oxford City AC 38:09 18. I think the 18 means 18 Male Vet 40. Oh Well. And I was a minute slower than last year.

Christine came in 1st Lady in the 2 mile

32 Christine Marshall F43, 16+, 17:54 1.

Clagnut came in just ahead 31 Pierre Marshall M14, U16, 17:50 14

And Matchstick came in 5th in the U16 category. 6 Matthieu Marshall M 12 u16 13:36 5, which is fantastic for someone who is only 12…

We did not take any photos, but we used Pierre’s video camera, perhaps we can embed some video here.?

Tour De France

2008-07-04T15:44:00.005+01:00

I am happy to find that google streetview has come to Europe to cover the tour de france.
Some of the routes we have ridden in Britany last year are there.We cycled this road on our first day.
The main web site for the tour de france.

IronRuby etc.

2008-07-03T10:12:00.001+01:00

Because I was looking at the book Rails for .NET Developers I went to see how IronRuby was getting on - Link to the IronRuby Home Page.

Augsburg

2008-07-01T10:11:00.001+01:00

Pierre is in Augsburg this week.

Wikipedia entry for Augsburg

Visitor website for Augsburg English Version

Listening to Internet Radio

2008-06-30T15:39:00.001+01:00

I have several ways of listening to the radio whilst I work.

There is Virgin Classic Rock and that gets me through the afternoon. I do also listen to BBC Radio 2 but you need the real player and right now, that i snot available to me. I recently downloaded the NOXON radio player that emulates a physical internet radio. On the NOXON player I have recently listened to OUIFM3 as this has a mixture of both French and English language music (But the adverts are starting to annoy me.) I used to listen to LastFM, but I find it too full of stuff that I have never heard of before, and also it seems to have an American slant to all the music, either that or its some very very obscure european stuff.

OpenId and me part 2

2008-06-29T16:28:00.002+01:00

Evidently, if I am going ot use OpenId in the web site I am creating. I better get myself an OpenId. Ha! Actualy this was dead easy.
I used MyOpenId. An it was created in a jiffy.

my OpenId is (http://PeterMarshall.myopenid.com/)
What I intend to do, is create a website that only accepts people that have an OpenId.
Hmm, is that stupid. Well, I can use the id as a unique key in a table. AND I dont have to worry about the mechanics of maintaining user id's.

But it is restrictive......

OpenId and me

2008-06-28T16:11:00.003+01:00

I wanted to create a site that used OpenId. Well as it happens the Oxford Geek Night had a talk about OpenId from Simon Willison on exactly that. But I didn't go! I was just a simple choice, hard day at work, go to Geek night or a swim. The swim won. However I can still get a lot of information about OpenId and everything at Geek night as the nights get very good after event write up. Its a pity the video is in .mov format. I dont seem ble to view those. I can however listen to the podcast now on the 1 hr daily comute.

OpenId Libraries for Python, Ruby and PHP but thats not what I want. And I know this information is out there somewhere as I looked at it last week. What I want is OpenId for ASP.NET MVC.

Ah! found it Johan Danforth blogged it. Scott Hanselman also. But this isthe link I wanted. OpenId Support for .NET Johan also pointed to MyOpenId as a potential provider.

So that will be saturday afternoon then....

OpenId.Net

Silverlight GammerTag

2008-06-27T15:59:00.001+01:00

Here it is

Thanks to XBOX Friend Watch