August 30th, 2009
Guilty as charged: I haven’t updated my blog in a month in a half. That would be my bad, but in my defense, I only got my ADSL line installed and activated on Friday. However, I now have a wonderful 4Mbps connection with which I can exceed my monthly bandwidth allowance even faster than before.
I’ve also been spending the last while splitting my free time between development on Albert’s pet project, TweetMeUp, and a theme for this site that isn’t Kubrick.
Thank all that is good, right? More on that when it comes, though.
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July 15th, 2009
It seems that everytime I read the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, I’m struck with the notion of writing again. Paired with my nostalgic resurrection of Dongo Weener, this has resulted in the actual output of words stringed together to form sentences, which in turn were concatenated to form paragraphs. I’m sure that if I keep this up I’ll end up with something like a narrative, but I’m not making any promises.
Here!, see for yourself:
Explosions. Everone loves those things to bits, barring the things that get blown to bits in the making thereof, but they didn’t really have a say in anything to start with, so we won’t dwell on that particular aspect. Just look at any entertainvid and you’ll see an abundance of things getting blown up in spectacular ways, with more debris flying around than you can embed in your torso. Flash!, boom!, bang! Everyone gets all excited and point at the lovely devastation all around.
Nearly everyone, anyway; the Pascifists of Serenita XI don’t like explosions, but their idea of action involves spilling their coffee, which hardly makes for riveting viewing.
As with all things in the Universe, however, sometimes you get a species that just decide to take things that one little step too far. For example, humans managed to take the ability to post images of cats on the Internet to a level where no other intelligent life deigned to stoop to. Returning to the explosive subject at hand, we introduce the Garflaxians of Rghut IV.
A Garflaxian isn’t the kind of alien you’d want to bring home to meet your parents, considering that their idea of a formal introduction is a salvo of guided missiles armed with gigaton nuclear warheads. To the abject misery of the rest of the Universe, they’d finally grown tired of reducing their solar system to a handful of craters posing as planets, and had set their sights (literally and figuratively) on the rest of space.
And so, this is where our story begins.
I think it shows promise, and I intend on annoying my Twitter followers with choice snippets at irregular intervals. Poor bastards.
Tags: Writing
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April 26th, 2009
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
So, apparently Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars ended up performing rather poorly, selling just shy of 89,000 units during its March release month.
I bought GTA:CW about a month ago, finishing the main storyline last Tuesday, and found it to be the best portable game I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing. As I’ve been telling other gamers I know, GTA:CW is an extremely good reason to buy a Nintendo DS if you don’t already have one. Given the technical constraints of the DS hardware1, GTA:CW is a testament (and indeed, a monument) to the ability of dedicated programmers to push a platform to its very limits without noticeably sacrificing elements in the game to achieve their goal.
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Tags: Games, grand theft auto, nintendo ds
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April 20th, 2009
Every now and then a game comes along that grabs your attention and never quite lets go. For me, the list of games that fall under this classification include games such as Ultima VI/VII, Might & Magic III-V, Darklands, and finally, Fallout 1 and 2. I’m probably forgetting a number of other had-to-play games, but the above is by no means a comprehensive list. Anyway, all of these games are, by now, more than a decade in age, with the latest entry being Fallout 2 in 1998, and the earliest being Ultima VI, released in 1990. Compared to the graphical overkill of today, it shows. But, as any roguelike player or developer (to name but one subset of gamers who aren’t concentrated on cinematic-quality polygon-based rendering) may tell you, flashy graphics don’t make the game: it’s the gameplay that makes it. And, judging by the number of times I’ve replayed all the above games, these titles definitely had a lot of gameplay going for them.
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Tags: fallout, Games, mass effect, rpg, xbox
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March 16th, 2009
I rounded up a couple of people last week to join in on a Paranoia XP play-by-email (PbEM) game. So far I’ve got three active players and a couple of lurkers (i.e. CC’d recipients). The first game update was sent out earlier today, but I’m still waiting on responses from the players.
I will be posting a timeline of events as they unfold on this site as a set of pages. Keep them peepers peeled!
If anyone else wants to join/spectate on the e-mails as they happen, drop me a line or your e-mail address and I’ll get in touch.
Tags: paranoia, play by email, rpg
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February 23rd, 2009
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Consider Phlebas cover
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Against a Dark Background cover
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Dune cover
In the aftermath of my 24th birthday, I can proudly announce the addition of two new items into my bookshelf, one new to me, and one a familiar friend: Consider Phlebas, by Iain M. Banks, and the classic Dune, by Frank Herbert.
I had previously read another of Iain Banks’ science fiction novels, Against A Dark Background. Initially, I had mixed feelings about the book, since I recall being vaguely confused about what the whole book was meandering towards. Once it got there, though, I appreciated both the setting and the story a good deal more. For some reason, I’d picked out Consider Phlebas as the next Banks novel I’d like to read, a fact my girlfriend pounced on when trying to figure out what to get for the momentous occasion of the commencement of the next cycle in my aging process. So far, I’ve gotten up to page 142 of the 467 between the covers, and I like what I’ve been reading so far. I actually haven’t realised how starved I’ve been for some new science fiction material. Once I’ve finished Consider Phlebas, I fully intend on re-reading it. Come on, every book needs at least one re-read.
Regarding Dune: man, I love that book. It’s probably one of my all-time favourite novels. Ever. Which is why it’s heartbreaking to see it given such a despicable front cover. For crying out loud, the word DUNE consists of several tiny little five-pointed stars clustered together. Really now. It’s a hard science fiction novel, not My Little Fucking Pony.
In other news, the Wordpress gallery tag thingy isn’t that great, but flowing in all of the covers would probably have looked even worse.
Tags: against a dark background, birthday, books, consider phlebas, dune, frank herbert, iain banks, novels, science fiction
Posted in Arb | 2 Comments »
February 17th, 2009
While helping a colleague with a defect regarding things that should not happen but were and caused the whole tower of sticks to come tumbling down, I noticed a block of code that follows more or less the gist of the pseudo-sample below:
if(lots of conditions)
{
doSomeStringCopies();
if(a certain condition)
doSomething();
doSomethingElse();
doFinalStringCopies();
}
Bear in mind that the consistency of indentation of the actual code was nowhere as nice as above.
Notice the problem? doSomethingElse() will be called irrespective of the secondary condition, resulting in bad things happening because a certain field does not contain a valid value for the doing of something else, but is entirely valid in terms of the business rule.
This is why you always surround your compound code structures with braces: because you never know when someone’s going to slide a “fix” into your code and neglects to add the braces. Several people (who have obviously never been burnt by this problem, and if they have, they should have their keyboard license removed from them) might think that bracing a compound structure which contains only one statement makes the code look uglier or more unreadable, but it definitely makes it a lot more maintainable.
(As an aside, I have a feeling that this is one of my more poorly written entries. Shame on me, I know.)
Tags: Development, programming, Work
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February 12th, 2009
…with hard drives.
The event logs of a dying iPod.
A few years ago I bought a Seagate 160GB hard drive, anticipating my imminent requirement for more disk space. Eventually, the time rolled by where I actually needed that space, and that’s when the abovementioned hard drive crashed spectacularly. It has since been replaced with a new unit which has (touch wood) been working smoother than yo’ momma’s thighs.
Fast-forward to a few weeks ago, where visions of impending doom filled my head when, once again, I had hard drive issues. Luckily (if you can say that) it was only (hah!) one of two things: my primary IDE channel had given up the ghost, or the cable connected to the primary IDE channel was busted. I haven’t tested either one of these hypotheses yet: my hard drives are working on the secondary IDE channel and that’s all I need to know.
But now, the latest victim in this sordid string of sick storage devices is my 3-month old 120GB iPod Classic. I’ve checked the drive’s SMART data in the iPod diagnostics menu, and the reallocated sector count is firmly within the range of 2500-3000, with more sectors pending reallocation. Never mind the fact that some tracks are irrevocably broken, pausing halfway through the song before skipping to the next file. The window pictured above is the Event Viewer on my computer after attempting to playback (i.e. read from the iPod itself) one of the affected tracks using foobar2000 (which, it so happens, gave up with an I/O error after quite some time).
So this weekend it’s off to warranty claims with my iPod, and with it goes just about any musical entertainment at work for the next week or two. Barring a daily selection of media to copy to my flash drive, of course. 512MB has never been so piteously small a capacity…
Also, Albert will now be chortling with self-righteous glee as karma destroys my iPod, after I (naturally) poked fun at him when his iPod Touch’ home button went on indefinite strike. That’ll teach me to laugh at other’s misfortune (even if they are part of the Turtleneck Cult and thus actually deserve it).
(Damn it, there goes my replacement iPod too.)
Tags: ipod
Posted in Arb | 1 Comment »
January 12th, 2009
A few months ago, I started working on a J2ME game called MegaTrader, which eventually fell by the wayside as I finished up on my honours work and settled into my new work. Lately, though, I’ve been spending some time again drafting ideas and notes on the game; notes I thought I’d write up here for the sake of commentary and the sake of getting it down in written form.
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Tags: Games, j2me, mobile, programming
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December 25th, 2008
Honestly, sometimes I wonder what the fuck is wrong with people.
At this point, I’d like to share a little gem of a quote regarding stupidity: “I say we just take the warning labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself.”
With that out of the way, I was reading an article about some or the other group getting all flustered about the upcoming Grand Theft Auto DS game, because it contains a mini-game which basically amounts to a version of Dope Wars. The inclusion of this now causes the glamourisation of drugs.
Right.
So, considering the games I played and the music I listened to when I was younger, I should’ve committed suicide (Marilyn Manson), blown out the brains of my classmates before offing myself (Doom), stolen cars and indiscriminately murdered innocents (GTA1), slept with, robbed, and murdered prostitutes (GTA3), killed a number of policemen (well, fuck, pretty much all of the GTA games), et cetera.
It’s retarded. Just because some people have problems distinguishing between fantasy and reality, and the concept of actions having consequences, doesn’t necessarily mean that all people are going to go out and have a GTA-inspired crime spree.
But, lest we forget, in the apologetic society we live in, we always have to cater for the lowest common denominator, and good grief, is that denominator ever so low, and ever so common.
Nyak.
Tags: Games
Posted in Games | 1 Comment »
