This might sound unreasonably cynical, but with half the internet posting up memorial notices, today's the day I like to remember the victims of the Manchester bombings of 1996 (as they're local to me), and those of all the other bombings in the IRA's various campaigns.

And the Americans and Libyans who paid for it.

 Oi!  Italian Government!  Will you please stop making my life a misery, and employ someone who actually knows about computers to draft your laws for you?!  I know you're a government, and therefore listening to experts sort of goes against the grain for you, but it'll work out in the long run, I promise.

*sighs*

Mary and I are re-watching Twin Peaks at the moment, and I'm feeling a very deep empathy with one particular character.  Not Cooper, not Harry, not James, but... Albert Rosenfield.

Now there is a man with an understanding of the state of humanity.  ;)

I like to think this is just the remainder of the paranoia bred and nurtured during my early school life (until the point where I decided to ignore the world and take stupid amounts of drugs[1]) but does anyone else occasionally get the feeling that everyone they ever met in their entire life is actually a complete bastard, laughing at them behind their back with other bastards, and barely containing their mirth when speaking directly at you?

The internet, of course, makes this so much harder.  It is widely accepted that one of the most narcissistic things you can do is type your own name into Google.  What is less well known is that it can be once of the most dangerous things you can do to your self esteem, because people still talk about you after you've gone.

It's worse if you've ever put anything creative out there, and the biggest danger in that case is that someone you knew a while back, old school friend, old workmate, whatever, finds that creative thing.  The best one of my old stuff I've found is someone who thought the hard pan of two tracks on the left and two track on the right in all my early music was a stylistic choice.  It wasn't, it's a limitation of composing and recording directly off an Amiga 500.  ;)

But for most people, it's the horror of finding something like a Facebook group, or a company message board, on which you find a conversation about you, by people you last met five years ago.  This always happened, but only with the advent of social networking sites has it been possible for the subject of those conversations to read what has been said about them.  ;)

People really need to remember that talking on the internet is not the same as talking down the pub.  The echo is much louder.  ;)

[1] Obligatory warning: Don't do it, kids.

I had call to reinstall your Reader software again recently (the Minami update arrived in PDF form) after having uninstalled it earlier in the year until you fix that gaping hole in the updater.

Everything looked like it worked.  For once you didn't install Google Toolbar when I asked you not to, and you didn't kill my machine like two years ago.  You did install Air, which I didn't want, and added some "quick start" garbage to my startup, but you can't have eveything.

However, you don't have to have it pop up an Explorer every time I turn the machine on, I can remember where I installed the program.  Particularly don't continue to do it when I've made it clear by removing your entries from the registry that I don't want you to do it.  That just gets you uninstalled straight away.

Doubtless I'll have to reinstall your glorified text viewer again at some point in the future, as people insist on using your shite-yet-portable garbage to send so much as a note to the milkman.  Its bad enough that every website seems to be written in takes-ages-to-load-and-can't-be-saved-out Flash these days, which is pointless, as the same effect can be achieved in far less memory and far faster in Javascript.

But please, try and get the whole installer thing right anyway.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/19/evil_cartoon_badness/

If this does become law, I shall invite Gordon Brown to a book burning.  I have nothing even remotely nasty, but as I read this, even titles like Negima, Ranma and Fruits Basket would be become illegal, simply due to the bathouse and hot springs scenes, and fanservice in general.

And where are you supposed to check if a book you own has suddenly ceased to be acceptable?

Hey!  Japanese Embassy!  This is what the UK Government thinks of your culture!

Regarding this story, I have decided to refuse to walk past any of those advertising billboards with stuff like "God is watching you" and other such quotes from The Bible on them in protest (there's three of them on the only platform exit to Leicester station, so it might be tricky getting home for a bit).

Honestly, the hypocrisy and double standards of some people is beyond belief sometimes.  Are you worried that we might be right or something?  Have a little faith in your convictions!  ;)

Who's bloody stupid idea was it to let The Pikeys Manchester City and The Red Scum Manchester United both have home matches on the same night?  Particularly when one of the matches is the Mickey Mouse League Cup and the other is the European Teams-Who-Came-Fifthish-In-Their-National-Leagues Uefa Cup.  Two totally pointless matches.  Anyone who goes to them is just lining the pockets of the owners.  Stop it.

And on a night when the city is gridlocked anyway because of 90% of the population forgetting again what all the white stuff falling from the sky is,  I could barely get out of the city centre in twice the usual time, and I was on a bike.  Honestly, games whould be played behind closed doors and the tickets sold for live television access.  Letting these people out of their homes just causes trouble.

A word of warning:  I got this phone from our work contract with O2 last February.  It's never worked properly (refuses to connect to any POP3 email account amongst other things) and today it packed up completely.  Looking at the forums, this is not an uncommon problem.

I wouldn't mind so much, as I;ve already got a replacement (another Sony, worryingly).  It's just that the K850i has taken my calendar for the next six months with it.  And before anyone says "Backup to PC," that was another thing that never worked properly.

Time was, Sony and Ericsson were bywords for reliability and battery life.  My previous previous phone was a K750, and that never gave me a single problem (Mary uses it still to this day).  Not any more.  Oh Sony, how the mightly have fallen.  Maybe you should stop treating your customers like shit.

That does it.

Part of my journey into work involves taking my bike on a train. Both my house and my office are a fair distance from the nearest station, so the bike is a necessity (having one expands the catchment area of a station by nine times according to official figures, apparently).

As part of the Glorious New Peoples Republic of Manchester Five-Year Transport Plan, the line on which I travel will be closed. Doctor Beeching's zombie appears to have seized control of GMPTE. It will be replaced (after a year of replacement bus services) by an extension of the Metrolink tram system.

Fair enough, there will still be a rail-based public transport route into North East Manchester. However, they don't allow bikes on trams, and they certainly don't allow them on buses. Therefore, the cycling part of my commute will expand from five miles each way to thirteen miles each way, and involve me riding through a part of Manchester that's usually on fire. Joy. Get a puncture there, and I'm dead.

So, enough is enough.  I refuse to be subject to the mad whims of chavvy bike shops and imbecile chauffeur-driven council mandarins, whose only experience of public transport is overtaking a bus in their limo, any longer. I'm going to get my motorcycle license.

Fortunately I already have a full (and clean, due to never being used) driving license, which means I don't have to take a theory test, and I'm over 21. So all I need to do is complete the Compulsory Basic Training, take the test on a 125cc capable of 100 mph or more, and I can instantly ride any bike. And I'll be able to give my girlfriend a lift into work as well. And motorbikes will be excluded from the congestion charge in Manchester.

So, congratulations Mr Green Public Transport Chief, you've driven me off the trains onto a private motorised vehicle. Well done you.

A couple of weeks ago, I must've ridden through a patch of broken glass on the way to work, because since then I've had five punctures, two on the same day.  After fixing each one I've dug yet more fragments of glass out of the tyres, and I finally decided that enough was enough and that I would buy some new ones.  These have been on the bike for at least a year anyway.

Now, my office is in Oldham.  It is, unquestionably, the armpit of the universe, with no redeeming features whatsoever.  A sullen little town full of narrow-minded cliques of outrageous stupidity and worldview that should be burnt to the ground to make the world that tiny bit nicer.  We have our office there because it is cheap, no other reason.

As you'd expect, it also contains an enormous branch of Halfords to keep the inbred chavs that live there supplied with expensive hatchback trinkets.  Ugh.  But they also have a bike shop attached.  So I went into the shop, found the tyre I needed, and asked for another one.  After ten minutes of the assistant searching in the back room, he was forced to admit that they didn't have any more in stock.  In fact, they didn't have more than one of any tyre in stock (and there were about twenty different varieties on the rack).  Apparently, people don't usually buy more than one tyre at a time.

I went and looked in a couple more bike shops, only to be told the same.  What the hell is wrong with these people?!  Surely both tyres on a bike degrade at a similar rate?  After all, they spread the weight of the rider equally between them, so surely it is logical that if one has worn out, the other one will have as well, and therefore both will need replacing at the same bloody time.  Good grief.  And none of the shops stocked proper bells either, just those crappy flick-hammer ones that no-one can hear.

So, new tyres will have to wait until Friday, when I'll get the time to go to the shop near the house which does stock more than just entire bikes for idiots that fall apart after six months.  And if they tell me that my rear assembly is worn down again, I'm going to get cross, because it isn't.

EDIT: The foolish spellchecker on LJ thinks I've spelt "tyre" wrongly.  Isn't there a UK English setting on this thing?  :P

For reasons of compatibility, accountancy, and laziness on the part of driver writers, my renderer at work supports four different systems.  DirectX's 8, 7, and 3, and OpenGL.  One set of EXEs and data has to work out-the-box on all possible systems.  There is no doubt a shrill cry of "Just support OpenGL then," about to issue forth from some lips, and I would if I could.  But remember those lazy driver writers I mentioned?  They didn't bother writing OGL drivers for their proprietary graphics hardware, and they won't let anyone else do it either.  Naturally, others only support OGL as well, hence the varied DirectX support (multi-versioned, as it's not as backwardly compatible as you think - for instance, DX7 does not run 100% reliably under vanilla XP Embedded, which is all I might have to work with).

(DX8 is for XP, DX7 for 2K and DX3 for, incredibly, NT4, would you believe.)

Anyway, for the last two weeks I've been tearing my hair out over the DX7 version, because it randomly bluescreens some PCs, and UEs some others.  I've got as far as tracking it down to a sysmem->vidmem blt call, which is no different to the eight grillion other sysmem->vidmem blt calls it performs before hitting this error.  Once and once only did I manage to trap it in a debugger, and it pointed to the blt attempting to write to memory it'd already freed.  Certainly nowhere near my code.  All I got from Usenet and MS themselves is the suggestion that driver writers these days don't test the DX7 pipeline very much these days, as it's been unsupported for ten years.  Thanks boys, I'll be sure to let the platform holder know that.

Fuck this, I'm going to go and learn Java.

Welp, the students are back in Manchester.  You can tell because the idiot content of the roads in the mornings just trebled.  Every time I got turned left on this morning it was by some just-passed-test teenaged gink in a bought-by-parents Punto.  And because the roads are full all the bus drivers are more sulky than normal too.  And add in the chaos caused by the fat political love-in at the GMex that's just ended, and you have a wonderful cycle in each morning.

Please car drivers, just bear this one simple fact in mind:

THERE MAY BE A CYCLIST ON YOUR LEFT, YOU FUCKWITS!
IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR YOU TO USE YOUR SODDING EYES?!

There are too many related news articles recently to link to any or all of them, but you'll get the gist.  I could employ my usual, rational, persuasive style for this rant, but instead I'll try the method favoured by the "other side", so to speak.. IE, shouting loudly:



CREATIONISM IS NOT SCIENCE
CREATIONISM IS BOLLOCKS
WE ARE ALONE IN AN UNCARING UNIVERSE
RELIGION IS AN OUTMODED METHOD OF CROWD CONTROL
END OF FUCKING STORY



Ah, I feel better.

I keep seeing this story everywhere - newspapers, news sites, it was even on the news programme this morning.  Must be a slow week.

Now, this may sound callous, and I know every news source carrying this story is either trying to be objective or sentimental, but surely stories like this would be more accurate and effective as warnings if they were headlined something like "Twat Electrocuted Climbing Pylon" instead of "Boy".

I mean, think about it.  Unless the investigation turns up evidence that he was somehow forced into the fatal act by the friends watching him, this is a presumably normally-educated teenaged boy who ignored everything his parents told him, walked past all the warning signs, climbed over the barbed wire designed to prevent people from doing exactly was he was doing purely for the sake of bravado, and died purely because of his own ignorance.  He was a fuckwit, end of story.

The signs they festoon those things with shouldn't say "WARNING! Danger of Death!"  That just encourages fools like him.  They should say "WARNING!  Danger of Dying Stupidly!"  And anyone who still ignores them should be publicly mocked, not tutted over sadly.  Tell the truth, stop making it look cool.  That'll stop the macho idiots.

Now watch me get vilified when it turns out the kid had a mental condition that compelled him to climb big glowing towers of electric death.

I just downgraded my LJ from a Plus to a Basic account, a power we newer users have only just been given.  This involved clicking through lots of dire warnings about what functionality I would lose, like upload space, advanced search facilities, etc.

However, all of this is completely outweighed by the fact that my LJ pages now load about eight grillion times faster, because now I don't have to wait for the ad servers to cough up their data.

This is my point:  I have absolutely nothing against advertising on web pages.  I'm capable of ignoring a portion of the screen, and, God forbid, occasionally they're even useful.  And if it means users don't have to pay to look at sites, I'm all for it.  What I can't stand, is that a seeming 90% of the page loading time is the ads.  Eurogamer, a site I spend a good deal of time on on a daily basis, is another prime culprit.  There, despite their size, the ads are relatively discreet.  But they take ages to load, (my connection speed right now is 4082 / 706 according to Speedtest.net before you ask) and they're Flash powered, which means they also leech computer power away from everything else I'm running.  The game I'm working on actually runs about 60% of normal speed when I've got a Eurogamer page open.

(I can get rid of at least the Flash element by disabling it in my browser, but then I can't watch any of the game trailer videos, because they're Flash-powered as well. ;)

I know these days the original download-speed related anti-ad argument is irrelevant, now we're all paying monthly fees rather than by the minute.  It's almost entirely an end-user experience thing these days.  But the solution remains the same:  Ad companies, you want to be more accepted?  Get better servers.

Over this bank holiday break, I've finally got around to playing Kingdom Hearts.  I've had a lot of people evangelise to me about this game, but then again, most of them like Metal Gear Solid, which should have warned me (If I want to watch a near-future military political miniseries, I'll watch GITS: SAC, thank you very much, because then I don't have the annoyingly twitchy stealth gameplay getting in the way, and the protagonist is a good-looking woman rather than a pensioner with a mullet).

I have nothing against the idea of Kingdom Hearts.  The worlds of Square and Disney are merged together very well.  No, where they get it wrong is in the actual game part of the equation.  It's by Square, so I was expecting frequent and repetitive combat, but unfortunately it's real-time frequent and repetitive combat, and, quite simply, Square are nowhere near as good at that as they are at turn-based.

Despite being real-time, everything except the Attack command is still on a menu.  And there is literally never time to access any of the other commands, except maybe swallow a potion in a panic (usually just after one of your companions has healed you, but you didn't notice in all the confusion, so you waste a potion).  And you can only access items you've equipped as well, which means you run out very quickly, even if you've got 99 of each in your bag.

Even the "shortcuts," which is the quickest way to cast magic, are two button presses away, and I've yet to successfully get one off in the heart of battle, unless I run a good long way away first.  So normal battles turn into random button mashing (you can get through just about all of them with your eyes shut, just constantly hitting X, I keep a book nearby for such moments), and boss battles consist of running away (as long as their continuous one-hit-stun-for-five-seconds attacks don't get you first), using up your magic at a safe distance, then diving in with the X button again and hoping.

There is an infinite Continue system should you die in a battle (and you will, because the difficulty curve has more spikes in it than a barbed wire fence) but, as you'd fear, this is "Continue" with a capital "C", meaning it doesn't put you back at the start of the battle, but back before the two-minute long unskippable cutscene that precedes it.  Every fucking time.  I watched Cloud get dragged off by Hercules over a dozen times before I finally managed to (just) beat Cerberus.

I've also yet to work out how to use most of the abilities I can equip.  Virtually none of them seems to happen on a button press, or via the menu.  I've got a sliding attack I got from Cloud equipped, but I can't make it work and no-one's told me how.

And the camera, ye gods the camera.  Dreadful.  Swinging about like nobody's business making even this gamer of more than thirty years feel ill.  Fortunately you can turn it to manual (but it's still automatic in combat).  However, you still can't direct it through walls, which means when you have a precision jump away from a wall to do (and there are plenty), you can't put the camera behind your character, making the jump incredibly tricky.

And, for that matter, why is the Jump button under the same digit as the Attack button?  That means you can't efficiently jump and attack at the same time - again, something you have to do because the bosses are all bloody enormous.

Also this game, more than most Square games, is rubbish at telling you what to do next.  I spent two hours in Traverse Town the first time I got there running around, battling random enemies, searching for the door that would trigger the next bit of the story.  And you don't move to different areas by pressing a button when at a door, oh no.  You go through automatically if you're close enough, even if you're mid-battle.  And you're usually attacked as soon as you go through a door anyway.

And lastly, because the combat is a real-time system, outside of it the X button isn't the default action on most objects - pressing X just means you hit the object (incidentally moving you forward so you have to reposition yourself, and sometimes smashing the object you wanted to jump on top of).  You have to use the context menu to do arcane things like open chests or examine objects.  I've been playing it for over eight hours now, and I really can't get out of the habit of just going up to things and pressing X to get things to happen.

Basically, this game is a trudge.  Maybe I've played too many regular CRPGs, but I really can't believe this control system got further than the testing room.  I'd love to recommend this to younger players (I have a nephew to start playing games ;) ) but he'd end up throwing the controller through the television within ten minutes.  The only reason I'm persisting is so I can play Kingdom Hearts 2, which is supposed to be better, and has Tron in it.  ;)
 

For the last while, we've been renting DVDs by post.  You know the type of thing - for a monthly fee you get some many DVDs sent to you one at a time which you watch, then send back to get the next one.  However, we've not given up, because the stupidity level of the world appears to have gone up another notch.

It all started so well.  Initially, we used Amazon's rental.  They let you have an ordered list, and we paid for two DVDs to be sent a month.  Then, a few months ago, they turned the entire thing over to LoveFilm.  LoveFilm do not have ordered lists.  They have an extremely low-res priority system, and you have no idea which DVD will turn up next - particularly as they seem to ignore the few priorities they let you choose anyway.

So we switched to Blockbuster, who still allow ordered lists.  Sadly, it went wrong from the second disk.  We were renting the whole of Samurai Champloo, one disk at a time.  The second disk turned out to be faulty, so we ticked the "faulty" box on the return slip, and also reported it online.  They promptly sent us the third disk, which we couldn't watch as we hadn't seen the second one yet.

At this point we discovered that they had no customer service information on their website.  Not even an email.  An intensive web search turned up a lot of people discovering the same thing, and finally an address that someone had found by trial and error.  We complained to this address and were told that the third disk had been sent because we hadn't marked Samurai Champloo as being a series to be sent in order.  We had, but it'd disappeared off our settings, as had the fact that we'd reported the second disk as faulty.  We told them this and they put the settings back, put disk three back on the list and sent us disk two again.

Disk two turned out to be faulty, again.  Suspiciously in exactly the same place as disk one (and we did try it in several players).  The pattern of scratches looked familiar too.  Incredibly, despite us marking the disk as faulty, it appeared that they'd sent us the same disk as a replacement.  We reported this fault as well, only for the website to tell us that we'd made too many fault reports this month.

A disk is either faulty or not, it doesn't care what time of the month it is.  Exactly what were they expecting people to do if more than one disk a month is faulty?  Etch the missing data back on with a pin?  And how do rental-by-post DVDs get so scratched anyway?  It's not as if they're subject to massive stress - they're in tough packaging for both trips through the Postal Service mincing machine.  I can only assume that previous users must have enjoyed the film so much that they decided that no-one else must ever see it, that they must keep the joy to themselves lest it become diluted in some way.

So, Blockbuster have been given the boot as well, and we are currently rental-DVD-less.  If anyone knows of a rental service that actually gives a toss, please let us know.  You'll find us in HMV's bargain section, scratching our names into the disks.
 

Recently, I've been playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates during the advert breaks whilst watching repeats of Top Gear on Dave and thinking "I really must get on with that life I used to have."

Anyway, apart from having a control system that I find irritating and unresponsive (No!  You can't change direction straight after attacking something!  Why would you want to do that?!), having that fucking awful collect-the-spells system (like FF8, which makes you afraid to use magic) and requiring of three hands (like most DS games - but it's worse this time, because I've only just finished Zelda: Phantom Hourglass) it has reawoken my loathing of boss battles, which even Zelda cocks up.

There is, quite simply, no reason whatsoever to have boss battles.  Apart from holding up the action, they usually require a technique that bears utterly no resemblance to any of the techniques you've been using throughout the preceding level, and which usually requires the use of some arcane bit of the scenery.  And you're supposed to work this out whilst you're in a blind panic trying to avoid the boss' one-hit-kill attacks.  I spent bloody half an hour trying to figure out how to get bloody Alhanalem out of that bloody crystal, all while he was bloody setting me on bloody fire.  And the really bad thing was you can't hurl controller across the room in frustration when using a DS without it costing you a hundred quid instead of ten.

(Seven PS2 controllers and counting, in case you're wondering - I'm the only person I know who spends more on controllers than than actual consoles, and I've crushed two PC mice as well.)

Weirdly this doesn't, and never has, irritate me when playing shmups.  Maybe it's because you just carry on shooting and dodging, which is what you've been doing for the entire level anyway.

I remember when it started.  The end of Quake, just me and Shub.  I was fully stocked with all the ammo I could carry for every weapon, and I emptied every single last bit into that giant evil jelly mold.  Not a thing.  So I turn to the scenery.  There is nothing in the room except a teleporter that seemingly took you to random places above the acid lake, and a floating spiky ball that I couldn't kill either.

Hours later, I finally figured out that the teleporter destination was the ball.  But that didn't help.  Eventually, the ball was inside Shub when I frustratedly threw myself into the teleporter yet again, and the answer was revealed - you used it to telefrag Shub.  How the fuck were you supposed to work that out?  If you didn't play multiplayer you wouldn't know what telefragging was.  I did play multiplayer - quite a lot, in fact, so maybe I was just stupid.  But it still wasn't remotely on my mind, because in Quake, you basically shoot everything and find the switch in every level of the game.

I shall persist with Ring of Fates, fuck knows why.  Maybe there's bit of a masochist in every Formula One fan.  ;)
 

I remember in my first post in this blog I promised a few rants on the subject of religion.  I have been atrociously lax on that subject, so here we go:

There was a programme on BBC 2 this evening, This World: Battle of the Bishops.  It's basically about the potential split in the Anglican Church about the ordination of homosexual bishops.

The main focus of the programme was Archbishop Peter Akinola, a noted opponent of homosexual just-about-anything, so you can imagine the fire and brimstone issuing forth on the subject (here's his Wikipedia entry if you want more).  But for me the most telling moment was when he was asked, were there not more pressing matters for his church (Nigerian) to be concerned with?  At that point he said, rather irritably, "There you go again, talking about poverty.  Poverty will always be with us."

In essence, this calm and gentle man of God appeared to be saying: We're never going to beat poverty, so rather than concentrate 100% on it, we'll have a go at the gays, because there's a much better chance of beating them rather than disease and deprivation.  Read that sermon out on a Sunday morning, why don't you.

By the great Dawkins[1], I do loathe the things people do in the name of religion sometimes.  Extra points for working out where the "burn you down" reference in the tags list comes from, as well.

EDIT: Did you know that LJ's spellchecker didn't recognise the word "blog"?  ;)  Or "programme," but I was expecting that.  ;) 

[1] Sarcasm, don't start.