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Keen to ramp up the self-treatment of my recurring back problems, I hunted about for a good book on personal spinal therapy. I picked up a book a little while ago on pilates but found it next to useless, and although I’ve dabbled with yoga, so far I found the results a little random, and with seemingly little focus in these resources on the kinds of back issues I’ve been getting, I came to the conclusion that non-targetted application of these techniques was a very hit-and-miss affair, with potential to injure as well as assist. What I really needed was a resource that helped me deal with the very specific issues I was getting – and with backs, there seem to be a number of different things that can go wrong.

I found Sarah Keys’ book, The Back Sufferers Bible, through various review sites, and found a large number of people with what sounded like much more serious issues than I have highly recommending it. Sarah specialises in backs above all else, and has written a number of books on the subject over the past couple of decades. This book seemed like the ideal self-treatment text, so I ordered a copy, and it arrived a little under a week ago now.

I’m already quite impressed. The book goes into a large amount of detail about how the spine works, what can go wrong, and how to recover from it – more than any other book I’ve read, and contains much more information than I’ve got out of my various physio/osteotherapists in the past. Even better, I found within its various chapters an exact description of the recent problem I had, something she calls an ‘acute locked back’. Having had physios prod me and tell me my (latest, mid-back) problem was fairly unusual and hard to pin down, it was a great relief to see it described in such accurate detail – right down to how it felt immediately before, after, and longer term. Having seen so many articles that just focus on lumbar pain, I was so glad to find an author who clearly understood exactly what I had, and had exercises laid out specifically to deal with it. The text actually agreed with my most recent physio’s eventual recommendations, but what’s nice is that it has a much greater range of exercises to do, with more detail as to the kind of timescales involved, and when it’s safe to graduate from one type of exercise to another, and focussing on long-term recovery. It’s nice to see someone saying that the spine can get better too, and that it’s not inevitable that I’ll be on a downward slide for the rest of my life, provided I tackle it the right way.

One thing that the book also taught me was that dehydration was a risk issue. I’ve never been one to drink as much water as you’re supposed to in a day – for some reason I just don’t get that thirsty, and when we’re on holiday in a hot country my wife is always telling me to drink more, even though I don’t feel like I need it most of the time. Such a metabolism might be efficient in arid countries, but lack of water is one of the things that over a prolonged period of time can cause disc degeneration. So as well as my exercise I’m trying to remember to stay more hydrated.

So far, I feel quite a bit better. I’d dipped last week, which I now believe was mostly down to some over-enthusiastic drumming, but I’ve done some moderate drumming this week too, I’ve just been a little more sensible and combined it with the book’s exercises (as well as my daily walks), and I find that besides a little soreness, I’m able to cope much better and most of the stiffness, tenderness and most importantly the red-hot knifing pains, are gone. The exercises seem to be targeting my specific injury more effectively than other things I’ve tried in the past, and also allow me to start strengthening up my various trunk muscles again without putting adverse pressure on my spine; one of the problems I’ve had in the past.

It’s early days, but so far, so good. If it carries on like this, this book will have been a great investment.

It may be going on for 4 years old now, but GPU Gems is still a fantastic resource – in fact now that you can rely on being able to use the techniques it contains on a much larger array of hardware, it’s perhaps even more practically useful than it was on release. Graphical products outside the hardcore gaming space (and this is where Ogre gets used most) are increasingly catching up and using more advanced shader effects now, and so a resource like this is actually maturing rather well.

You can imagine how pleased I was, therefore, to hear that NVIDIA and Addison Wesley have now made the whole book available for free online! That’s a fantastic offer and if you don’t have the book already you need to follow that link immediately and see what you’ve been missing. There are another 2 books in the series too of course once you’re done with that one, although for now you’ll have to reach into your pocket for those

Thanks as always go to Kevin Bjorke at NVIDIA for bringing this to our attention in the OGRE Forums, and who of course had no small part in creating the book in the first place.

It’s easy for my wife to tell if I’m ‘properly’ sick; if I don’t have any interest in touching a keyboard for a while, it’s official – I’m ill. More reliable than any doctor’s prognosis. I came down with proper ‘flu for the second time this winter, which sapped my energy to do pretty much anything for the last few days. Sucks. I didn’t even have the energy to play any games until late in the weekend!

As such I passed much of my (waking) time reading. I like reading fiction, but these days it tends to be mostly limited to holidays and periods of illness because I seem to have so many other things to do – and a lot of my reading time is always taken up with technical volumes when I’m mentally alert. No such luck over the last few days, so the book I devoured this time was Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay, one of my favourite authors. I like Kay’s books because while being strictly fictional and regularly tinged with the fantastic, they’re always very much based on a real place and period in history, which gives them a solidity that many novels lack. A Song for Arbonne for example is loosely based around the Albigensian Crusade, and Last Light of the Sun revolves around the Viking invasions. In all cases he has a knack of creating very deep, believable characters and story arcs within the larger overall context that are hugely involving.

Ysabel was a little different to usual, being based in contemporary times, albeit with plenty of historical influence. Based in Provence, Kay does a characteristically good job of establishing the setting, and of weaving a simple modern day story into a historical fantasy / mystery. It’s slow to start, but once you get past the initial few chapters (in hindsight, necessary for establishing the normality of the setting and characters before beginning to spin it out into something larger & more unusual), it’s hard to put down. It might not be his best work (Tigana still holds that accolade, although many of his recent books have come close, particularly Lions of al-Rassan) , but it’s very enjoyable nonetheless. Recommended.

If you’re waiting on something from me, give me a couple of days since I’m still recovering & catching up.

It’s a sad day – Gary Gygax, pioneer of pen-and-paper roleplaying games and one of the original DnD creators, has passed away aged 69.

While I never played the original DnD (I was only a year old when it was released), Gygax had a hand in many of the seminal experiences I had with PnP RPGs. I’ve had a long history with them, starting from MERP (which all came about from reading LOTR) when I was 13/14 all the way to the present day. Having transitioned naturally through ICE‘s more complex systems after MERP for a couple of years, including Rolemaster and its derivatives, I remember encountering Gygax’s work for the first time through ADnD Second Edition in 1989/1990. It was something of a revelation – ICE’s systems were very technical in nature and time-consuming to play, and ADnD took what felt like a more vital approach to the genre without being ‘too’ simple – and it really gelled with our groups maturation and growing displeasure with overly mechanical gameplay. Really from that point onwards we started to move away from the kind of fixation with mechanics some systems promoted, and more towards the development of rich story and characters, and that trend has survived in our current group to this day – and Gygax’s systems helped that. It’s a principle that underpins our group’s hatred of miniature use today, which is promoted a lot in the latest edition of DnD – we think it encumbers the game horribly and roots you to a physical medium that takes too long to maintain and can’t represent really imaginitive scenarios quickly and easily. Personally I think it’s a cynical ploy to make people buy more products (the miniatures) and has nothing to do with the core values of the game. Leave arseing about with miniatures to the wargamers for goodness sakes, RPGs should be about character, mental agility & imagination, not counting grid squares. 

Yes, that’s right – we still game despite most of us having grey in our hair; we’ve been joined by some of our wives too now. It’s always good to get a bunch of people together, socialise and stretch the imagination a little bit – as much as I like CRPGs, even the best ones can’t hold the tiniest candle to an experienced PnP group – even MMORPGs don’t remotely cut it, since they only (barely) address the social aspect, their interactivity and scope for imagination are still desperately primitive. It’s terribly difficult to explain to people who aren’t familiar with the activity though, hence why over the years most of us have learned it’s often best not to try, for fear of sounding like a weirdo – most people ‘get’ playing games on the computer / console, but many seem to find it much harder to understand a bunch of people sitting around talking and somehow creating a collective story from that. Worse, popular culture often represents the activity as a bunch of nerds sitting around wearing capes / wizard hats, geeking over their +1 Cluebat of Smiting and acting out horribly clichéd fantasy stories involving 2-dimensional muscled barbarians and mysterious wizards wading through dungeons and rescuing well-endowed women grabed in armour of questionable protective merit. Which is nonsense of course – the reality is that we of all people are not going to tolerate crappy fantasy plotlines – after almost 20 years, our tastes are far more refined than that. Rich plots, believable characters, twists, interesting dilemmas, varied settings (contemporary, pseudo-historical, futuristic) – anything you can think of in a good book is what we’re usually aiming for. Oh, and none of us like dressing up and doing LARP, that’s one of the most irritating assumptions we come across. It’s a creative social activity enjoyed by mature, intelligent adults with a bit of imagination to chuck around, and there’s nothing quite like it.

Directly or indirectly, myself and millions of others can probably attribute a lot of our enjoyment of the genre to the influence of Gygax’s work, even when we’re using other systems (and we’ve used tons), so his passing definitely deserves to be marked here. RIP.

This has been on the cards for months, but I wasn’t able to talk about it until the book was actually out. Consummate software writers the Dietels have just released a new edition of C++ How To Program, published by Prentice Hall, and this time one of the additions is a sizeable chapter on using OGRE and CaseyB’s OgreAL to make a simple game. The C++ How To Program series is very popular, selling over a quarter of a million copies, which is reflected in the fact that this is the sixth edition of the book. I understand that it is often used to teach C++ programming in educational establishments, which is reflected in the pedagogical way it is written and the fact that it has lots of exercises. It’s a monster too, clocking in at a desk-straining 1200 pages.

The publishers approached me quite a few months ago asking if I would be a reviewer on the book, which I agreed to, so I’ve already read the chapter a couple of times. Whilst it by no means displays the power of OGRE, being as it is a relatively small introduction to making a Pong game, it is very good at introducing the basics and is aligned well for the target audience. I must admit when they said they were going to take the user through to a complete game using OGRE and OgreAL in a single chapter, I was skeptical. Even though it’s a very simple game, and quite a large chapter, I was still impressed by how much they managed to cover, and this is down to the Dietel’s writing style – they’re clearly very experienced at this and they managed to get a lot of information across very quickly without it becoming an unmanageable flood.

I know that if I ever come to write a technical book (one of my ‘someday/maybe’ projects in GTD-speak ), I can learn a lot from how professional writers like this go about it. My other ‘gold standard’ writer reference is Scott Meyers, who is targetting a more advanced audience and somehow manages to make deep technical issues very enjoyable to read – I often wish that he’d written Modern C++ Design, because whilst it’s a great book subject-wise, I can’t help thinking Meyers would have made it much more fun. Some day In many ways I treat writing on this blog regularly as training of a sort – a place where I can keep my writing skills at least semi-polished, and if people find the blog interesting / useful then perhaps a book might work sometime too.

I got my complimentary copy through the post today anyway, thanks guys! It was fun being involved – this is the second time I’ve been involved (as reviewer) in the process of getting a book to print and I enjoy doing it. It was also interesting to see how each publisher operates slightly differently in terms of the process – and although the projects are always really pressed for time, my experiences with both Apress (Pro Ogre 3D Programming) and Prentice Hall have been very positive. If you ever get approached to do a technical review for a book, I strongly recommend doing it. It doesn’t pay very well compared to the amount of time you need to put in, but I wouldn’t judge it from that point of view, as a ‘job’; but just as a good bit of experience to get.