I’ve never carved a pumpkin before, I’ve always found Halloween a bit of a silly celebration and really haven’t taken much interest in it at all. But me and Andrea picked up one anyway and decided to have a go. And you know what, for a couple of amateurs it turned out pretty well…
I’m always interested whenever I hear Hugh Laurie is doing sketch comedy again, so it was with great excitement that I downloaded Saturday Night Live with him as guest host.
Why is this programme still so hugely popular? It was almost completely devoid of any humour whatsoever, none of the other performers were interesting or memorable, and most of the sketch writing was lazy and uninspired. People complain about the sketches on Studio 60 not being funny, but it seems like they’re just copying SNL perfectly.
Beck were excellent in both of their performances, and the puppets performing with them were a neat touch. Hugh did his best with what little was given to him, but while his song was great, it was just an old Fry and Laurie holdover that I’ve seen him do better before. Strangest of all was the Most Haunted sketch, complete with Yvette Fielding reference. Do people in the US get this show and know who she is? Seemed like a very British reference in a very cheap gag sketch.
Me and Andrea are going to attempt to learn German, in fact I would hope that by the end of 2007 if we take a trip out there we won’t be ridiculed for being lazy Scots who couldn’t be bothered to learn the local tongue.
I’ve always liked the language, I’m not sure why. I only did it for a year at school, my wish to do it as a Standard Grade level scuppered because it clashed with something else on my chosen timetable (Speech + Drama probably). I’ve read a bit of the book so far, and we got some CD’s as well, and I’m surprised at how much I’ve remembered from not only my previous brush with the language, but also just in the few hours I’ve had time to look at it for.
It might be a different matter altogether however once I move onto more advanced topics. I see some mighty big words in the later pages.
Here’s another one from my big book of text editor complaints - indenting.
In TextMate and TextWrangler (plus a lot of others, but this time not in skEdit) if you select a block of Perl and press tab it disappears, replaced by a single tab character.
No, no, no, NO!
My code should be indented, not replaced with a tab. Why would I want to replace it with a tab? In all my time writing code I’ve not once thought that a block of Perl was useless and would be better served by being a tab instead. Indenting on the other hand, I do all the time, and it shouldn’t require two fingers to perform the keyboard shortcut to make it happen. And you know what? When I press shift+Tab, then I’m expecting my code to be de-indented (is that a word?) by one. Then I can take whole big blocks and move them in and out quickly.
Smultron, skEdit, jEdit, they all get this right, how do the most popular editors get it oh so wrong?
I mean at least make it an option.
I seem to complain about Perl editors on the Mac a lot, mostly because none of them seem to understand the basic functionality that they should offer.
I edit a lot of files, and can easily have upwards of 40 Perl scripts open at the same time. They can be on different servers, for different websites, for different bits of software.
In the minds of the authors of TextMate and skEdit, this is not a situation where tabs are allowed. Instead I have to open them all in separate windows.
That’s not because they don’t support tabs, they do. But only inside a project, rather than simply opening each new document in a new tab by default (you know, like would be sensible) or allowing the user something like Cmd+T. My web browser lets me open a new tab whenever I want, so why doesn’t my text editor?
Tabs are a good thing. I can see all my open documents at once. Things are even better when I can re-arrange the order of those tabs, or when I get more than one row of tabs. Giant tabs are no good, I want to be able to see 30, not 6. But heck, just allowing me to use them at all is better than nothing. Why is it considered good to see all the files in a project, but not those that are simply open?
Thank goodness for Smultron and Komodo.
I got a book from the authors of the very popular Triforce blog, entitled Game-On: From Pong to Oblivion, The Fifty Greatest Video Games of All Time.
I’ve done a full review over on WE, but I wanted to mention it here nonetheless. It is a book that you will most certainly disagree with, there is a distinct lack of any Amiga titles for instance (which is odd, because wasn’t Byron the editor of The One Amiga at some point?), but I like to think that’s the point. It’s not your top 50 games, or mine, it’s theirs. And as much as you’re likely to disagree with their selections, I like the fact it may spark some debate.
I got the new Robbie Williams album today and after one listen I can proclaim it to be "not half bad". He took a lot of flack for the first single from it, Rudebox, but I have to admit to having liked that track. He went in a new direction and managed to not get burned doing it, with a nice combination of humour and electronica.
It’s not all like that either, in fact the album seems to wend it’s way through a number of different styles. And even when it does dip into more electronic sounds, it never sounds obviously like somebody else either, it’s not a 1980’s Human League album by any stretch.
A few more listens will obviously be required to make sure I haven’t horribly misjudged it, but there was nothing here that makes me think you should instantly avoid it.
Spent the whole day bashing away at Chatbear, producing a good solid few hundred more lines of code or so. Things really are progressing remarkably well, and I’ve got the following week off work to see just how much I can do. In my head I’d been thinking that the end of October would be a good deadline to try and meet, but I’ve realised already that there’s probably not much chance of that. It always seems like what I’m doing is relatively minor, just some updates to the admin system and a bit of a design refresh, but the more time goes on the more it seems like I’m just re-writing everything apart from the board code itself.
It’s that time of year again where I bust out the old debit card and go looking for some new clothes. I hate clothes shopping, I find that almost every store is just trying to be just a little too hip for it’s own good. With their young "I get very drunk on Saturday nights" staff and their overly zealous top 40 soundtrack. But mostly it’s the way they look at you, like you don’t belong there. And there’s not many places I belong, so it’s not something I particularly want to be reminded of.
And then there’s trying things on, which although is usually done behind the relative safety of a curtain, still feels like I’m getting naked in the middle of the store for everyone to see. OK yes, maybe I’m a little paranoid, but just because your paranoid doesn’t mean to say they aren’t watching you.
No, I’m much happier doing my clothes shopping from the relative comfort of my own home. Where there are no eyes watching me, whether I’m naked or not.
Argos started taking pre-orders for the Wii today, which they were nice enough to notify me of via email. And guess what, I pre-ordered right away. I was going to order from Amazon, but they don’t seem to be taking any yet, so rather than risk the chance of not getting one I went for it. Argos’ system has no concept whatsoever of pre-orders either, so I’m not sure how much I trust them. They’re apparently going to deliver the Wii to me on Tuesday. Now while I’m sure that’d be lovely, it’s not actually out until December 8th so I’m hardly holding out much hope.
Amazon totally screwed up my 360 order last year, despite ordering from them right as they started taking pre-orders, so hopefully Argos will do better for me here. My games and controllers have already been on order from Amazon since mid-September.
I’m trying a little experiment this week, going to bed at 11pm instead of 12am and getting up at 7am instead of 8am. So far, so good. I like having that extra hour in the morning, makes me feel better that I’m not just falling out of bed and into the car for work. Plus the extra hour allows me to have breakfast before I go as well, although so far I’m finding that just makes me even hungrier than I was before come 11 o’clock.
As the night goes on however, it always seems like by going to bed at 11pm that I’m missing out on something, like terribly important things are going to happen within that last hour of the day. Sometimes it’s hard to cram everything I want to do between getting home from work and when it’s time to sign off.
Back when I had my Amiga, I used to write games using AMOS. For many years this would be where I would spend most of my programming time. I’d draw the graphics in Deluxe Paint IV, capture sounds using a £50 audio capture device I had, and also rip the occasional graphic from a commercial game using my Action Replay cartridge.
I spent many hours working on these things, easily weeks on a single project. Clearly it shaped the kind of programmer I am today. I would often rewrite the same game over and over, trying to make it better, taking what I’d learned the last time and applying it to the next version, in a very iterative software development process. I also started lots of games that I never finished. Nothing much has changed there either. The one I spent the most time on was International Tig, a copy of a Bullfrog game that they played on the TV show Games World, where one player would have a virus and needed to chase the other players around the screen and infect them with it - before they themselves were chased.
With getting my Amiga back (or at least, an Amiga back), I was able to fire up some of these games again and see what they were like. Most of them were far worse than I remember them, and seeing AMOS again after so long was a strange experience. Unfortunately the only version of International Tig I could get working was a Christmas release, while code for other versions loads up it seems to stall at startup, as if some graphics files have become corrupt. Not a surprise on a 10 year old floppy.
I took video of one of the games, PicPairs, essentially nothing more than a Picture Pairs game, and placed it on YouTube for the sake of history. I had obviously intended to send this for inclusion on an Amiga Power coverdisk, but never did.
Which is probably for the best.
I bought myself a copy of Sensible World of Soccer for the Amiga from ebay today, boxed and ready to run. I got my Amiga back and all the stuff with it, with the sole purpose of doing a video feature about that game, but then I found out I only had disk 2. So ebay to the rescue.
I’ve been playing a little bit tonight, and it’s still as marvellous as ever. It’s so nice to play a game that doesn’t lose any of it’s playability just because they were limited to one button, I’m fed up playing games that require me to be a memory man just to get anywhere.
Went Hamilton Accies, got beaten by St. Mirren in the first round of the cup. I think the chairman may end up sacking me.
Here’s an interesting little site, Instructables. Basically people tell you how to make things. All kinds of different things too, things with paper, cheap things, electronic things, food, art; it’s all here.
That’s it really, I just thought it was neat.
I tried out the demo of Phantasy Star Universe for the Xbox 360 today, a massively multiplayer game.
It was absolutely terrible. The design is awful, with almost completely illegible menu text, horrible looking locations, and certainly not the look of a next-gen title. Like every game I play these days, the control scheme was overly complex, requiring me to remember not only what every button on the controller does, but also how to get to things through a series of unhelpful menus. I gave up about 3/4 of the way through the tutorial without doing a mission because I was so disgusted with the whole thing.
In a time when World of Warcraft towers over every other MMO, with the finest living world ever created in a game (and it’s not without it’s problems), half-assed attempts like this shouldn’t stand a chance.
We spent some time at work today drawing elephants on the whiteboard. I’m not quite sure what started this silly idea, but eventually almost everyone got involved and a wide array of creatures could be seen.
In my head, I think I know how to draw an elephant, I’m pretty sure what one looks like, but put a pen in my hand and tell me to draw one (or anything else for that matter) and it never quite comes out as I expect. The skill in drawing seems to be little to do with how you hold the pen or what technique you do to achieve a particular effect, and more about having the kind of brain that can remember enough detail about an image to convert each of it’s attributes into a set of recognisable lines and shapes. My brain is apparently not wired that way.
So, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. What an odd business decision.
The Tube has a better interface than Google Video of course, but you could just hire a UI designer for that. And the Tube is hipper with the kids, so has more videos, but after they’ve been sued into oblivion, Google Video would be left standing. Just because you know they have better lawyers. And more money.
YouTube doesn’t make any money either, or so they say. It’s also said they spend a million bucks a month on bandwidth. But if Google have any plans to put ads before/after those videos, it’s pretty clear most of their users would disappear pretty fast. So using it as a money making scheme seems a little, I don’t know, far fetched. Especially since a large proportion of the videos viewed are actually via an embedded player in a blog somewhere.
So what are we left with after all this? Well, two rich founders that’s for sure. But I think we’re also left with another crazy dot-com boom business choice. YouTube is great, it’s simple, it’s reasonably fast, it’s cleanly designed, it’s free. Replace it with something that doesn’t fit all those criteria, and those kids that give it that hip moniker will desert it faster than a fat man leaves a restaurant when he hears they’re out of pudding.
In the past couple of days Smith has been cancelled (it was crap anyway) and now Kidnapped, which is actually pretty good, has been limited to a 13 season run.
American television is strange. The problem with Kidnapped is not that it’s a bad show, but that the network didn’t promote it quite as well as all their others. But it’s not because they wanted it to fail, it’s simply because the US has this strange system of a million different new shows, and the new series of existing shows, starting at the same time. There’s no possible way for somebody to check out all of them, and even if they did, how could they then possibly keep up with them on a weekly basis?
That’s the benefit for me of course, with each show that gets cancelled, that’s one less for me to watch for the first time. And there’s no shortage of shows I haven’t done that with yet.
I tried Vista back with beta 2, and as I wrote back then, I was not impressed. It took ages to install, ran like a dog, looked like crap… not the next generation operating system Microsoft have been promising.
Well with RC2 out, what should be the final test version before release, I thought I’d give it another try. So I wiped the laptop down and fired up the install sequence. Immediately, the improvements were noticable. The install sequence was far simpler and far faster, eventually dumping me into the desktop. The graphics performance is much improved as well, and since my laptop graphics card isn’t up to giving me the proper Aero transparencies (despite the fact that it’s able to run World of Warcraft OK, but we won’t get into that), it was nice to see the improved visual style for those with crap hardware.
Everything is far more polished, and I quite like the general Vista look with the black taskbar etc. The security system is improved, but it’s still annoying. All these stupid popups making me confirm everything that I want to do. And when I copied over Secure CRT settings from another machine, it point blank refused to let me remove the “read only” setting from the folder. In the end, I switched off their new stupid security system. I do fine without it in XP and I’ll do fine without it in Vista too.
Both Vista and OS X are going down the same route, making their Explorer/Finder handle a users files with increasing ease. With lots of metadata and search tools everywhere. But what about users like me? I have no use for any of that stuff whatsoever. I do all my stuff online, I use a browser, a text editor, an FTP client and a remote shell. I open files from remote servers, edit them, and save them back to a remote server again. I don’t really have local files at all, short of music, which I organise within iTunes and it’s tailored interface anyway. So from that point of view, Vista offers me nothing. The next version of OS X, the same.
Where’s the innovation in areas other than file management?
I had the compelling urge to pick up a drawing pad, some pencils and an eraser tonight, looking for a little bit of a change from the heady world of web programming.
I started off by drawing a female eye, which on it’s own, didn’t look too bad. It had the right shape, the right amount of detail, and although it didn’t quite have that sparkle of light on the pupil that is required for an eye to look just right, I was fairly pleased. So I decided to draw the other eye. And the nose. And the mouth. And the hair.
And what I ended up with was perhaps the kind of woman that Frankenstein’s monster would be more than happy to go on a date with. She not only appeared to have fallen from the ugly tree, but she most likely hit every branch on the way down.
Next time I’ll just skip the line and go straight to drawing the mutants.
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