SteveStreeting.com

The last few weeks have been pretty hectic for both myself and my wife, with weekends and evenings frequently acting as extensions to the regular working week as much as anything else, and as such the trip we’d booked to Paris a few months back kinda snuck up on us - pretty much before we knew it, we’re sat in a cafe blinking at the sun, frantically trying to excavate memories of school French lessons buried under 15 years of neglect.

Our ‘planning’ consisted of remembering to pack in time, and rushing about to buy a new camera the day before, since ours suddenly decided that it wanted to pursue a new career as simply a pint-sized viewer of existing photos, rather than actually detecting and recording anything new (translation - le CCD est mort). As such we mostly winged it, alternating between ‘doing’ the major sights and just wandering about aimlessly to see what we’d encounter. Luckily Paris is a perfect city for that, easily walkable with great public transport, the architecture and layout is interesting in itself, and the smaller streets are peppered with curios shops, art galleries and cafes that will sell you delicious coffee and heaven in a pastry casing every 20 feet. A perfect environment to point randomly in a direction and decide to see what’s over there.

It reminded me of Rome in that regard, with the exception that if you suddenly realise you’re an hour’s walk from the hotel with flagging feet, there’s always a Métro station nearby to come to your rescue. We’d been warned that the Métro could be confusing, but once we tried it we struggled to know what the fuss was about and used it all the time. Maybe it’s familiarity borne from my frequent use of the London Underground in years gone by, but it really couldn’t be simpler - even the busy hub stations were pretty easily navigable provided you kept your wits about you. All in all, hugely convenient and much less claustrophobic than the London equivalent, since the trains are larger and both directions typically run next to each other, rather than in separate tunnels like in London, which makes the stations roomier and less stuffy.

Culture abounded of course, we spent most of my birthday in the Louvre and still only covered about 2/3rds of it, and even then not in a level of detail that could be considered any more than ‘passing’. Expecting crowds, we headed to the ‘big hitters’ early to leave time for more leisurely exploration later, but it’s perhaps telling of my psyche that whilst gazing at one of the most celebrated paintings in the world I was easily distracted by how our new camera’s face recognition algorithms locked on to the Mona Lisa’s face from way across the room. Somehow exclaiming ‘cool!’ and tinkering with a new gadget in the presence of a 500 year old masterpiece seemed disrespectful, but I couldn’t help myself. So I’m a geek and a philistine.

The only issue we did have was that on our return flight from Charles de Galle didn’t go particularly smoothly - on arrival the airport didn’t seem to have any record of our return flight, and for a while the check-in staff were all Gallic shrugs and ‘come back in 15 minutes, maybe it will show up then’. Eventually they figured it out and it turned out the flight did exist despite never showing up on the departure boards, just as I was trying to phone the airline myself (this was a brand new route on a budget carrier, so it was feasible they’d reorganised it without telling us). After that we got to stand in a passport control line for 40 minutes, rather bizarrely since we were leaving rather than arriving, while 2 bored-looking officials flanked by huge lines of unoccupied booths (I assume everyone else was on lunch) processed the hundreds of people all gazing repeatedly at their watches wondering if they would make it to the gate on time. It certainly convinced me that if I was looking for an alternative international hub to go through for future trips, Charles de Galle would not be high on my list. Gatwick and Heathrow might be chaotic cattle markets, but at least they exude an air of efficiency most of the time, which was entirely absent here.

On the whole though, a great short break - just long enough to unwind a bit, but not too long as to let things pile up too much If you sent me an email or something in the last week, rest assured I’ll be catching up in the next few days.

I’ve been having a bit of a crappy week, with a particular project taking way longer than I had expected and causing me to explore the darkest crevices of my mind looking for new and creative ways to swear at it, with only mixed success. Cue long hours, too much coffee and Red Bull, and some seriously knotted shoulder muscles. That’s why it was an especially nice surprise this morning to find a box on my doorstep, containing an unexpected gift from a friend & long-time Ogre user in France (tuan kuranes) - a bottle of Champagne and also a bottle of a local speciality, Chartreuse.

I’m not much of a drinks expert, despite this not being the first time I’ve received locally-themed alcohol from people using / benefitting from Ogre, so I looked it up, and it has quite a history - originally developed (or learned / adapted from an earlier alchemical recipe, details are sketchy) in the early 17th century by Carthusian monks as an ‘elixir of long life’ and all-round healing potion.  Even though it’s produced on a larger scale now it’s ingredients are still only known by 2 monks at one time, allegedly. It’s also incredibly alcoholic, at 110 proof (55%) - guaranteed to put hairs on your chest. Or remove the hair from your entire body - it’s probably 50:50.

All in all, very interesting stuff. I immediately thought of Absinthe when I saw it, but it’s mostly the colour and strength that they have in common I think. I’ve tried a little already with some ice as advised, and its very, very unusual. The best way I can describe the taste is if you imagine grazing on the more herbal elements of your spice rack and then gargling with lit paraffin. I’m sure I can taste oregano and thyme in there, as well as the more obvious anise - but there are 130 plants in there somewhere according to the site. It certainly does taste medicinal! It’s a bit much for me undiluted, I’m going to experiment with mixing it later - orange juice and hot chocolate seem to be popular options. It’s apparently good to cook with too, in small doses.

In any case, it’s great to experience unusual local produce like this; I always like to try local food / drink when I’m away on holiday or business, and I’m grateful to Paul for sending a little bit of France my way, brightening my week, and generally spreading the Ogre love. Kudos for picking something as green as the big dude himself, too

Grr. I hate it when departing politicians, particularly unpopular ones, decide to do a ‘farewell tour’. They’re an unmitigated waste of time, resources and news coverage - Blair did it and I found it grossly distasteful then, and now it’s Bush’s turn. The very act of touring countries shaking hands, getting all chummy with the native leaders is so undignified - the personal relationships they’re seeking to form / rejuvenate serve nobody but the individuals themselves, since once the administration changes it’s a total reset. Thus, I see these tours as self-indulgent ego stroking - no change there then for Mr Bush. He’s doing his trademark brash smirk / swagger combination in Downing Street today, and no doubt getting on the tits of most British people he meets, even if the crushing weight of his ignorance won’t let him recognise it.

Bush is already a has-been, with his only remaining notable acts likely to be a few last-minute pardons or favours for his chums before his sweaty hands are prised from the tiller of the economic powerhouse of the world. He’s clearly thinking about his legacy - but having presided over arguably the darkest period in American politics since at least Nixon, and in all likelyhood surpassing even that, this man has absolutely nothing to be proud of, except perhaps spawning an unintentional bi-product - that he has hopefully reinvigorated the more intelligent citizens of the USA to get involved in politics again to try to make sure that an administration like this doesn’t get their hands on power next time.

So, sod off Bush, you swaggering, arrogant, bigoted, egotistical ignoramus. Please do let the door hit you on the ass on the way out, assuming you can figure out how to open it in the first place.

I’m not a heavy user of eBay, in fact until about a year or two ago I’d never used it. Unlike some people who routinely buy tons of DVDs & games etc that they want to offload later, I tend to mostly buy stuff that I want to keep, and anything that I finally want to get rid of after a few years, I give to a charity shop. I did however find it useful to sell off my laptop last year, and I’ve since used it to sell a couple of bits of PC hardware I didn’t need anymore - they weren’t the kind of thing a charity shop would really find a use for, I can’t imagine a Granny picking one up there and thinking ‘oh yeah, I could really use a Mini-ITX board to run that media server I fancied building’.

However, I’m now getting rid of all my PS2 hardware, since its remaining raison d’etre was Guitar Hero which has now been ruthlessly usurped by Rock Band. Since it’s all only a year old and I’d quite like to offset some of the significant financial outlay for Rock Band, I naturally turned to eBay.

I figured I’d put a Buy It Now option on the PS2 hardware itself, and was pleased when someone took it up. However, I was less pleased afterwards to receive a forged PayPal payment confirmation email, sporting a delivery address in Nigeria. The email was quite a good forgery, they got the layout spot-on and they tried to hide their forged links behind Javascript-laden images, but really the effort was wasted since there were a couple of fatal flaws that even a total moron should have spotted:

1. The address was in Nigeria. Internet scam capital of the world. Duh.
2. They had inexplicably decided to add £100 to the amount (supposedly) paid for no good reason. Clearly the idea was to get people so excited that they would ignore the other issues, but I’ve always been taught that if something looks too good to be true, it usually is
3. The excuse as to why this email was not backed up with eBay / PayPal transactions was frankly ludicrous: “the amount will not show up until you send us the shipping reference number”. Shyeah, right.

This was the first time this had happened to me, but even so I’m stunned that people are taken in by this sort of attempt. Obviously I cancelled the bid and re-listed, but from what I read, people really do fall for this kind of thing; high-end mobiles appear to be very popular in particular. How dumb do you have to be to mail a £300 phone to an address in Nigeria on the back of an email that says that the money will magically appear once the item is in the mail? Maybe greed turns off certain parts of some people’s brains - wave the prospect of way more money than the item is worth in front of someone and maybe they’ll put common sense on hold.

In the end it’s a minor annoyance this one time. I’m actually surprised I didn’t have the problem with my laptop, which was valued significantly higher than the PS2 - maybe it was the Buy It Now option that was the honeypot. At least feel included in the whole Nigerian scam Internet phenomenon now - sure I’ve had the 419 emails for years but those are so impersonal

I feel like I’m becoming something of an advocate for Apple machines these days, which is not something I ever saw coming. I hadn’t even used one until almost 12 months ago, and like many long-time PC users am guilty of having poked fun at them in the past (hur hur, one mouse button, hur hur, poor game support) but now that I’ve had one for a while, I’ve changed my tune. I’m finding that I can heartily recommend them for quite a wide cross-section of users, particularly when it comes to a portable machine.

My parent’s XP-based Dell laptop keeled over and died recently and while they’ve managed without a PC for a little while (!), they’re missing it. They’re faced with being forced (in practice) to switch to Vista if they buy a new Windows laptop, and they’d heard bad things about it (and not just from me I might add, their friends bought a Vista machine recently and have complained to them a lot about it) so were wondering what to do. My parents aren’t particularly technical but know their way around a computer, so long as nothing goes wrong, and aren’t looking for a gaming or power machine, just something that does email & internet, office tasks etc. Someone else in the family ‘knows someone at Microsoft’ (join the club ;)) and suggested to them that if they were reticent about Vista, the sequel would be out next year so they could always look forward to that, but of course that got me chuckling. I explained that not only was Vista several years late, so predictions about the release of a sequel are somewhat premature, at this point we have no idea of what it will be like.

They even asked me what I thought about desktop Linux, since they’d seen it as an option in one or other shop they went into - something that surprised me actually. However with no on-site support from me (since they’re now 3+ hours flight & train time away) I considered that to be a recipe for disaster, given my experiences even with the latest Ubuntu. Great if you’ve got a tech you can call when things go wrong, not so good otherwise, so I ruled that out.

So, my advice? Although they’d probably be ok with Vista, particularly since SP1, given they would have to re-adjust to Vista’s changes anyway, and given the kinds of things they want to do with it, I really think a MacBook would be a better fit for them as very casual, relatively non-technical people. I didn’t recommend this lightly, because they’re not made of money (being retired) and they will have to save up a little more than they would have to buy a budget Vista laptop, but I honestly think it will be better in the long run for them. There are no drivers to worry about, OS X is definitely easier for regular people to use even counting the adjustment from Windows, and in general everything usually just works with considerably less faffing about. The software to do most of what they want is already there as standard, and works in a consistent fashion. I also think face-to-face support is more readily available if they can find a Premium Apple Reseller; they had been shocked at the outrageous prices they were quoted just to *look* at their slowly dying Dell to see if it was economically fixable. Small Apple specialists seem to be better at providing that kind of more personal service if our local premium reseller is anything to go by, certainly more so than unit-shovellers like PC World / Currys.

Simply put, I honestly think people like my parents will have a better experience with a Mac longer term. I’ve advised them to find a decent reseller first and play with one to make sure they’re happy with the idea of making the transition, and that they’ll have some local hardware support to make them feel comfortable given I can’t be there to organise it, but I think if they get over that bump it’ll be plainer sailing for them.

Physical goods are a pain. They take too much time and money (and oil / carbon emissions) to move around, they require high-street retailers to stock them who skim ridiculously fat margins off the top (or rather from the middle upwards), meaning the creators don’t get anywhere near as much as they should for their product, and worst of all, you have to wait for them to arrive instead of being able to get them right now.

Yeah, I’m petulant because Rock Band hasn’t arrived yet (and yes, I know since it needs instruments the rant against physical goods is tangental, but I don’t care). It was dispatched a couple of days ago, but it’s most likely sitting in some warehouse right now waiting for someone to get off their arse and move it somewhere else. It’s a bank holiday on Monday too, so I won’t get it now until at least Tuesday, if I’m lucky. Sucks. I haven’t looked forward to a game this much in quite a while, so I just want it to arrive already so the fun can begin. I’m not quite desperate enough to go down to the high street and pick it up at the outrageous price HMV are asking for it though. Ok, more outrageous.

I see GAME reported problems fulfilling preorders so I guess I should just be glad I have a copy heading my way. I also saw a number of people responding to that story with disappointment - they wanted Rock Band to fail in Europe to send a message about inflated pricing. To be honest, I knew that was never going to happen - if you want Rock Band, you want it; you’re not going to sit around moping about the price while other people have a ton of fun. It was always going to be pricey, and with the Play discounted price (now almost matched by Amazon I see), it’s really not any more expensive than was originally envisaged. Sure, it’s still damn expensive, but we always get ripped off here in Europe, just look at how a $60 game in the USA becomes a £50 game in the UK when exchange rates are almost $2:£1. In that context Rock Band being $150 at Amazon.com and £140 at Amazon.co.uk (I got it a little cheaper from Play on discount) doesn’t seem quite so unusual, even if it does stretch the already tenuous argument. But Harmonix are right about one thing - you can’t get anything like this anywhere else right now (and personally I don’t think you will for a good while, unless GHWT really surprises me), and that’s why they can get away with it. Personally, if I have to be a little poorer to have a whale of a time with my friends & family then I’m happy to do it - I love social gaming. If that means I’m caving to corporate greed, so be it - I’d rather be happy than right

To my everlasting disgust I finally caved in and signed up to Facebook today. My singular reason was that a friend of mine has just moved to North America (to complete his years-long transition to the dark side) and he’d stated his intentions to publish most of his personal stuff there rather than blogging about it, so with much grumbling I now have a placeholder account to let me peer into that little den.

Now that I have my own account rather than peering quizzically at other people’s (over my horn-rimmed spectacles perhaps, as is implied when people hear I don’t use it), I still say Facebook has so few new ideas that it’s absolutely criminal that it’s valued so highly. It does the job sure, in a vaguely pedestrian way, but I see nothing more than a few tiny refinements on what everyone else has already done a ton of times before.  I still reckon it’s on borrowed time until someone else does something sexier and the student population move on to the next fad - just like they did the last 2 or 3 times. I’ve lost count of the number of social networking sites I’ve been invited to over the years (since about 2003/4 when they started getting popular), and after having gone through temporary membership of a few by 2005/6 I just got totally just bored with the whole thing. Now that I’ve finally joined Facebook, I’m fully expecting one or more of my friends / family / contacts to invite me to join the next thing that ‘everybody’s using’ in about 6 months - that’s normally how it works. Yawn. I certainly can’t be arsed to obsess over the content of my profile all over again. No, I’ll stick to LinkedIn where I can actually derive some (small) tangible business benefit, and my blog which I control and is thus doesn’t have to be moved / recreated every time fashion changes. And no, I don’t feel the need to start twittering, we all know where that can lead.

But the thought of being a part of something that that pompous, vacuous git Zuckerberg benefits from - ugh. I think I need a shower.

The blog has suffered a little since I’ve had a very hectic week, with multiple clients to keep happy, a couple of social events and since most of last weekend was taken up with organising Ogre SVN conversion and various chores I seem to have had very little downtime - my only gaming all week was a couple of hours on Crackdown. My energy seemed to finally run out last night when I found myself dragging my half-comatose body to bed by 11pm - completely unheard of in our house. A little recharging required this weekend I think. I might even allow myself at least some time off during the bank holidays next week for a change.

Of note, I finally got around to trying the newly update Trackmania Nations Forever today, and it’s a lot of fun just like the previous iteration. This time we have dirt track sections and water which were previously reserved for the commercial Trackmania United, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same, which is no bad thing. Easily the best free game you’ll play, and I also really like their take on online play modes - short tracks which are easy to iterate & restart quickly if you screw up, everyone being ‘ghosts’ to everyone else means you’re fully in control the whole time and the random elements are removed - IMO it just makes the whole experience less frustrating than other competitive online games I’ve played, where the high skill level of a minority of players can easily damage the experience of more occasional players. TMN is one online game you can dip an and out of now and then and rely on having fun each time, which is a rare thing in my experience. Definitely a recommended download.

Everyone and their dog is playing GTAIV right now of course - I’m not, mostly because I have way too many games to play already, I might pick it up later on when I have more time. The uber-hype has put me off to some degree, I understand how ‘cool’ it is to be able to run around New York Liberty City doing whatever you want in some ways, but I do also wonder whether the absolutely teutonic effort that went into creating that is such a good thing on a grander scale. I mean, it’s clever for sure, and the anecdotes it will no doubt create for players for some time to come will be entertaining, but given that it cost $100m to create it, I can’t help thinking that the money could have been halved, and the remainder spent on creating 10 other ‘fresher’ game ideas like N+ and the like. How much money did it cost to make the world open enough to allow you to get drunk in bars, beat up random people and have realistic individual responses, watch TV, and the FOX-baiting practices involving ‘women of negotiable affections’? It appears that lots and lots of people want to have the freedom to engage in those sorts of activities in a game, but to me it seems rather pointless. If you like watching TV, or getting drunk and falling over in the street, feel free to go do that for real, you don’t need a game to do it (unless you’re a minor, who no doubt revel in that virtual ability) - I wouldn’t consider that to be a gaming experience I would particularly pursue myself, and in a way I consider it to be something of a waste of game creation talent and funding. I’m sure it rounds out the virtual world wonderfully, but it still seems rather frivalous - really, I don’t want to live in a game world, if I did I’d be playing WoW 16 hours a day, and thus the simulation of minutae seems to me, well, wasteful. I remember thinking the same thing about Shenmue all those years ago - sure I can use a vending machine to get little figures, and go do a day job in a highly realistic fashion, but this is a game for christ sakes, how much of a waste of effort is that? I guess I can’t judge until I play it but still, it makes me shake my head to think of how much money was spent making unnecessary things like the hooker animations (unless you’re 13, in which case you probably think they’re entirely necessary). The weird thing is that I can see the point if it’s a fictitious world - fantasy, far-future, post-apocalyptic, whatever - because then that world is something you can’t experience any other way. But all that effort recreatign New York - anyone can go walk around that right now if they want, or any similar city near them. Sure, they won’t be able to do the stuff that Niko gets away with, but all those everyday things that have so painstakingly been recreated can be experienced right now, for real. Is there really any merit to recreating them all in a game? I dunno, maybe I think about these things too much.

Finally, I’m also open-sourcing (MIT license) my wxWidgets-based MVC framework for Ogre that I built last year, as the foundation of an app I currently have in cold storage due to changing priorities. I figured other people might as well get the benefit out of the framework in the meantime, since plenty are always asking for a good basis for tools. It supports all the good stuff you’d expect like proper MVC separation, switchable tool-based controllers, generic property and event systems, 4-pane ‘cross’ layout, maximisable viewports, dockable windows, rubber-band selection implementations etc. It’ll be joining the other 50-odd projects living in Ogreaddons right now, hope you enjoy it if that’s your cup of tea.

I’ve been a little busy for the usual diatribe these last couple of days (a fact for which no doubt the Intertubes will be grateful) so for the moment my spleen will have to simply tolerate the increased pressure in anticipation of future venting .

In the meantime, here’s an interesting site I found recently: TED. It’s made up of a ton of videos of presentations from quite interesting people on a variety of subjects including creativity, technology and politics. All round great bloke Johnny Lee even makes a short appearance with his Wii hacks in one of them - the head-tracking I’d already seen of course, the digital whiteboard & touchscreen I hadn’t. But you can pretty much grab any video from the site and get a 20 minute talk about something that’s usually mentally stimulating and perhaps a bit tangental to what you might normally watch.

I’m just quaffing on one of these at the moment and it occurred to me that in an international context it might be blogworthy, since maybe it’s not that widely available around the world. Irn-Bru is a Scottish carbonated drink that’s been going for about a hundred years now, and it’s, well, odd. It’s bright orange, but it doesn’t taste remotely orangey. It’s as refreshing as a citrusy drink, but it tastes nothing like fruit, or quite like much else on this planet. It’s got more than a slight hint of barley sugar, but it’s nowhere near as cloying as that might suggest, and there’s clearly something else in there too. Irn-Bru is an enigma.

I love it though - I don’t chug canned drinks that much any more, but when I do it’s nearly always Red Bull (or the cheaper British imitator, Red Rooster which is surprisingly good) or Irn-Bru. There’s something pretty unique about it - they won’t tell you exactly what’s in it (which is pretty common in traditional Scottish fare), but they hint it might have something to do with girders - at least they used to, until they were forced to remove that from their advertising because it was misleading to the public, given that there weren’t in fact any genuine girders in there (just some kind of ferrous additive), and obviously, consumers could be confused by that. If they had been hit rather hard in the head by such a girder in the past, rendering them drooling halfwits perhaps. 

Anyway, it’s got all the ingredients any hacker needs in a drink - water, carbon dioxide, caffeine, sugar, additives and a weird flavour. Perfect, and you can drink it in greater quantities than Red Bull without the unfortunate side-effects, such as being so hyper you’re convinced you can see 10 seconds into the future I’m not sure how widely it gets distributed outside of the UK but if you haven’t tried it yet, give it a go if you see it.