SteveStreeting.com

I read with some interest Matt Asay’s blog on TWiki, and what has happened over there as the company associated with the open-source project has basically decided to ‘reorganise’ everything, it appears in order to make itself more attractive to venture capitalists.

To be honest, I really don’t understand the motivation at all. All open source projects live or die by the strength of their community, and to suddenly break from it in the interests of attracting investment is crazy. Personally, I’ve never wanted to take VC money if I can help it - I’d prefer to run a small, self-funded and organically growing ship that I can stay in control of, and which I can apply my own brand of ethics to in balance with the need to make a living. Balancing open source and commercial necessity (we all have to eat after all) is tough, and it’s very different to running a regular proprietary software business, so you really can’t apply the same rules without undermining the very basis of the business.

Unfortunately open source poster-child examples like Ubuntu don’t help in many ways. Ubuntu manages to do everything the ‘right’ open source way while still having gazillions of dollars to spend on premises, staff, servers etc - but that’s only because it’s backed by an interested billionnaire who doesn’t really care how long it takes to turn a profit (and probably wouldn’t be too fussed if it never did). So in some ways Ubuntu makes it hard for others because it’s often held up as an example of how things should be done, when in fact almost no-one else can afford to do it that way, unless they can find a billionnaire of their own. Perhaps that leads to cases like TWiki for some projects, where ‘Ubuntu envy’ leads them to chase investment, but at the detriment of the reason they exist in the first place.

All I can say is that this will never happen to Ogre while I’m in charge. I obviously have to seek commercial opportunities related to Ogre, but I have a very deep line in the sand drawn many moons ago that I will never cross. At times people have asked me ‘what would happen if Ogre got acquired?’ - and I have to patiently explain to them that even if I wanted that to happen (and I don’t), it’s actually not possible in a traditional sense, since my company doesn’t own all the code. It owns a lot of it for sure, but the rest is community-contributed and licensed by TKS based on the contributor agreements - which in our case don’t ask for copyright assignment, just permission to use & relicense. This means that no-one could come along and ‘buy it up’, or at least not in the traditional sense. They could buy the domain from me I suppose, and the rights that TKS has, but could not fundamentally change the licensing conditions without approaching the contributors for permission. It’s commercially resticting, but I also see it as a key factor in reassuring the community about the intentions of my company.

When it comes down to it, in many ways having this restriction there is unnecessary - even if I was able to ’sell’ Ogre, or suddenly change the licensing, I would be stupid to do it, because it would immediately destroy the community, which is what has made it great. Someone would fork a new project from it, and with a bit of time, that would become the ’standard’ version. There might be some opportunity to ‘milk’ the codebase with custom commercial versions for a little while, but it wouldn’t last. The whole idea is self-defeating in the medium to long-term, as TWiki.net will probably discover shortly.

I’ve talked about business models and open source before, and that it can be necessary for companies like mine to mix in some proprietary aspects sometimes (e.g. optional add-ons) to make ends meet. However, maintaining the absolute integrity of the central open source project and its community at all times is absolutely vital. That’s the heart of it, and any business destabilises that at its absolute peril.

I’m here in Sweden again for the rest of the week, working for an interesting client who is making a sizeable investment in creating a long-term strategy on Ogre, which is obviously a good thing. It’s a little under the radar for the moment so I’ll leave it at that until a more appropriate time

Luckily my back held up for the trip, despite carting luggage and 3 flights with fairly small connection windows in between. I was really sore this morning, but I didn’t snap in half so that’s an overall positive.

I had to pass through Manchester airport this time, which was in many ways better than going via London and having to switch between Gatwick and Heathrow. I used to travel through Manchester every other week a few years back, either on my way to Dublin or to get into Manchester itself, but I can’t believe the place is still being renovated - it was last time I was there too.

Bizarre experiences while travelling:

• Watching a woman trailing about 100 metres of wool as she wandered through Manchester terminal - a ball of it had fallen out of her bag without her noticing and made it look like she was trying not to lose her way back
• A motion-activated recording on the entrance to the baggage reclaim that went off literally every 15 seconds as people passed it, explaining the very same thing over and over and over again. I was a hair’s breadth away from picking up the nearest fire extinguisher and smashing the speaker into tiny little pieces before it told me not to forget my baggage for the 376th time (after all, I had heard it this many times precisely because I was still waiting for that baggage she kept banging on about)
• Escaping from a labyrinth of booze and perfume - Manchester airport’s new layout involves a sign saying ‘Gates’ with an arrow that just leads into a sprawling mass of duty free perfume and alcohol stores. Sure most airports have these, but other airports at least have a ‘corridor’ around the outside or through the middle that leads to where you want to go (i.e. the plane) - not so here, you literally can’t see the exit, it’s just a chaotic maze with assistants hovering around every corner. Eventually I managed to find my way out, and without a single bottle of gin or Yves St Laurent. Lucky escape.
• As I was boarding my final plane of the day, the wife of a couple who were directly in front of me in the aisle suddenly started projectile vomitting everywhere. Literally spraying all over the place like she was auditioning for a part in the next Exorcist remake. Luckily her husband was in the way otherwise it could have been a Mr Creosote incident for me too. Nasty. This delayed my final hop while the poor cleaners got called in to deal with it.

I’m back at the weekend, anyway.

It appears that despite many people having their hands on the game, the ever-present review embargo appears to be stopping most from commenting so far, but IGN appears to have been the first of the game enthusiast sites to get a review of Guitar Hero World Tour posted.

I don’t go by scores personally, I advise you to read the full review. It’s only one opinion so far, but to me, there are a couple of elements that make it sound like Neversoft may have missed some fairly important points again. By far the most important thing I saw in this review is that in ‘band mode’, it only takes one person failing to immediately bomb everyone out of the song. They say there’s no option to ’save’ people like in Rock Band 1, and of course Rock Band 2 added ‘no fail mode’ which I can see us turning on, particularly in party mode. It simply sucks for everyone when the whole song fails in multiplayer because one person gets into trouble - the person failing feels bad, and everyone else gets their play interrupted - much better just to get a crappy score at the end (in practice in RB1 you can’t get less than about 70% because any less than that and you’d have failed beyond the ability for others to save you). Harmonix listened to the fans on this for RB2 - and since RB1 has been out for a year I would have expected GHWT to learn from this too and include RB2’s no fail mode, but in fact it doesn’t seem to even equal RB1 since you can’t ’save’ others. Quite an odd decision - but then the GH3 designers somehow thought boss battles were cool too.

One thing I do like though is that you can activate star power when you want with the microphone (not sure about the drums). When it comes to ’saving’ people this is an issue in RB1 - although the no fail mode will get rid of it.

Unsurprisingly there are some people complaining in forums about instrument failures already - drum pads not working properly, guitar slide bars being erratic, that kind of thing.  I’m not really sure why people thought GHWT’s peripherals would be immune to the same teething problems RB’s had - even though Red Octane have a large amount of experience, anything new always has a few rough edges, especially when you’re talking about mass production. It’s way too early to tell if this is just a small proportion or a larger pattern but it’s not really news - it would have only been news if things had gone perfectly.

So, not a great start on the review front for GHWT; I can’t say I’m that surprised considering the disappointing GH3, but we’ll see as the review embargo lifts what other people thought. I have to say that embargoing reviews until after the release date of a product is a little suspect.

[edit]Well, a few more reviews are in now and it appears IGN was on the lowest end of the scale so far. Still, the text of every review still seems to indicate that the band mode / party play is the weak point, due to the instant-fail,  clunky interface layout and less interesting band career mode. So, it looks like it depends on your play style - as someone who never really plays these music games alone (unless I’m practicing), co-op and party play are the #1 priority, so weakness in this area is a turn off for me (just like it was in the horribly broken GH3 co-op play, although this doesn’t sound as bad). Although the extra songs would be nice, on balance I think I’ll save my money and spend it on RB DLC instead. Those who haven’t taken the RB plunge yet might be good to get the hardware though, assuming the failures reported so far aren’t systemic.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I plan to get an electric guitar in the next month or two to complement the accoustic that I’ve been learning on. I’ve done a bit of research, assisted greatly by the responses given to my previous post (thanks chaps), and I’m pretty certain that I’ve found the right combination for the immediate future. I’m still very much a beginner so there’s no point spending a ton of cash, but nevertheless it doesn’t hurt to try to get the best I feel I can afford/justify.

Guitar - Yamaha Pacifica 112V (link)

I still like the feel of the Fender Stratocaster, but I also liked the sound of the Humbuckers on other models (like the Les Paul) - the Pacifica is a nice middle ground in that it’s shares the physical structure of the Strats while replacing the Strat’s 3 single pickups with 2 singles and a Humbucker at the bridge, which gives a good range of sounds when used in various combinations via the 5-way selector.

In addition, pretty much every review I read says the Pacificas are built considerably better than the entry-level Squier Stratocasters. From what I hear you’d have to pay around double the price for a Strat to get the same build quality, so what you lose in ‘brand power’, you gain in value for money.

I’m no expert, but from what I hear it seems like a good bet for someone at my modest level.

Amp - Line 6 Spider III 15W (link)

I don’t need anything particularly powerful, but something with decent sound and a few effects. Nothing too fancy or overwhelming, just decent quality sounds - I can always buy a Pod later if I want more range, or a bigger valve based amp if I want to go nuts, but both  are going to be overkill at this stage.

This amp seems to have gotten some good reviews as a beginner / practice amp and the guy in our local store recommended it too, although he’d sold his last one today so I couldn’t actually try it out.

I’m pretty happy with that lineup, it’s actually less than I’d budgeted to potentially spend originally (coming in around £200 in total), but on reflection is probably pitched about right for my current expertise, which can be classified as ‘can play a few songs barely adequately’.

Feedback welcome as always!

Like most people I’ve been following the current economic news with a mixture of morbid entertainment and mild trepidation. I’m not likely to be out of a job soon (my employer and I are on very good terms), but inevitably my work is part of the global economy, so I can’t expect to be completely unaffected.

There are a few interesting lines of thought in the blogosphere that I thought I’d share with you. Open source and related business models weren’t really around in any great quantity during the last big recession, so what precisely will happen in this area is subject to some speculation.

A Boon?

On the one hand, there’s the argument that when money is tight, companies will be more likely to investigate less high-profile, cheaper alternatives to the usual IT purchasing they do, which actually means that open source software actually stands to do better. In the good times, it’s easy to justify buying the majority of your technology from one very large vendor (Oracle, Microsoft, IBM etc) because it’s ‘easy’ - everything has a better chance of working together out of the box, you can expect common terminlogy and tools, that kind of thing. However, when funds get tight, people inevitably start examining all these things in much greater detail than they did before, searching for a budget to cut. There is an argument that says that staff are the most costly resource, and therefore if a suite of technology is familiar and easy (but more expensive), those costs will be recovered in staff efficiencies. However, there’s a problem with this argument - even if you accept that expensive proprietary software is easier to use than open source software, which is not always the case, savings in staff efficiency are non-tangible, compared to licensing and annual support costs which are very much tangible. Cashflow is also a big deal in almost any company, and the open source model of ‘use now, pay later (maybe)’  is highly attractive. And, when it comes down to it and your CIO needs to cut the budget, I’m sure you’d rather he/she cut the license/support contract expenditure rather than your job. That also makes sense for companies too - when the recession ends re-skilling is a pain in the ass, it’s much better to hang on to your good staff and save money elsewhere.

So in fact open source projects and the companies that provide products and services around them may actually be one of the few winners in a downturn. That’s certainly the impression I’m getting from bigger open source companies, and in fact even I have seen a modest upturn in business in the last month. It’s too early to tell whether this is a trend or just a coincidence, but I can hope.

A Drought?

Another opinion is that as the economy gets tougher, and people start to lose their jobs, they will start becoming more ruthless about earning money, and will stop contributing so much for free to open source projects, and to other volunteer activities. This is the view put forward by Andrew Keen - that the culture of ‘free’ only works during a boom, and that that will affect numerous Web 2.0 companies, open source projects and user-contributed sites like Wikipedia.

Personally I think the trouble with Keen’s argument is that he fails to acknowledge the widely different types of ‘free’ contribution / project, and the wide array of motivators people have for being involved. I can definitely see that in a downturn, companies that have significant burn rates and are built on the ‘attract people by the million now, figure out how to pay for it later’ will finally have to undergo significant reality checks. I’m all for this - the days of companies like Facebook attracting stupendously highly capitalisations without having anything close to a viable business model should be finally over, and not a moment too soon. Twitter have announced that they’re going to ‘find’ a business model next year - right, good luck with that.

However, the viability of these money-pit Web 2.0 companies is a completely different matter to the more organic open source projects and companies out there. I’m sure those that have grown their communities gradually and sensibly, rather than on the back of some ‘get rich quick later’ scheme, will be entirely unaffected by an economic downturn, because the communities are made up of people who want to be there. Sure, there will be cases where a community member is there only because of their current job / project, and the demise of that may cause them to cease being involved, but I’m confident that’s not a huge number of people. And besides, those leaving because of economic conditions may well be compensated for by the people that lose their jobs using open source involvement as a good way to network, keep their skills sharp, and to build a portfolio / reference work which they can use when obtaining their next employment.

Overall, although a recession is never a good thing, I think open source and related businesses are in a position to come out of it stronger, rather than weaker. Open source is no longer a pipe-dream - I remember having an argument with my (then) boss in 2000 about the viability of running some core functions on Linux instead of spending money on more Windows servers (with the inherent upgrade requirements, licenses etc); his opinion at the time was that Linux and open source were always going to be amateur and not ready for prime-time, and that the only sensible option was to buy into more Microsoft tech. He thought I was crazy to suggest that something non-proprietary might be viable for business - I challenged him that in 5 years he’d be proven wrong, and I kinda wonder whether he ever acknowledged that I had a point. There are many real, viable options in open source, and even Microsoft acknowledges this now, despite years of ranting and FUD about it from their blustering executives. When we come out of this recession, I think the scales will have tipped even further towards open source as a core component in the IT strategy of many companies.

OK, now I’m getting really pissed off. My back has got slightly better every day over the past week and a half - yesterday I went for my third physio appointment and everything was pretty hunky-dory, just a bit of soreness, but my range of movement was much better and his prodding barely hurt at all. I went more than 24 hours with no painkillers of any sort for the first time in ages, and this morning I felt great.

That is, until despite my being careful I accidentally twisted a very particular way in the shower and had a sudden sharp pain. It was only very fleeting, but now my back feels like it did this time last week - constantly sore and very painful to put any kind of stress on (e.g. bending down, carrying anything). To say I’m annoyed is a very large understatement. I need to be able to carry a rucksack with a laptop in it next week, and up until an hour ago I was feeling really happy that was going to be fine.

I’ve been doing some gentle exercise (walking) and it’s been helping a great deal, but it’s terrifying to know that I can do something so incredibly simple in the space of about 2 seconds to completely reverse my recovery process. It’s frustrating in the extreme.

Well, Harmonix confirmed the list of 20 ‘free’ DLC tracks included in the Rock Band 2 retail bundle, and here it is:

The 88 - “Sons and Daughters”
Authority Zero - “No Regrets”
Between the Buried and Me - “Prequel To The Sequel”
The Cab - “Bounce”
The Chevelles - “Get It On”
The Cocktail Slippers - “Give It To Me”
Dealership - “Database Corrupted”
Endeverafter - “I Wanna Be Your Man”
The Ghost Hounds - “Ashes To Fire”
Hollywood Undead - “Young”
Kutless - “The Feeling”
The Len Price 3 - “If I Ain’t Got You”
Lesley Roy - “I’m Gone, I’m Going”
Opiate for the Masses - “Burn You Down”
Semi-Precious Weapons - “Magnetic Baby”
Shaimus - “Like a Fool”
Thenewno2″ - Crazy Tuesday”
Tickle Me Pink - “The Time Is Wrong”
Underoath - “Desperate Times, Desperate Measures”
X Japan - “I.V.”

The first surprise that the entire list is made up of lesser known bands - a lot of people, me included, assumed that Harmonix was keeping some headliners in their back pocket to undermine some of the GHWT marketing; perhaps the inexplicably missing tracks from the recent Nevermind DLC for example (Come As You Are and Smells Like Teen Spirit, the two most recognisable tracks, were not part of the Nirvana release). But no, the entire list is staunchly ‘indie’, and it’s annoyed and delighted people in seemingly equal measure.

Firstly, the downside: everyone knows and likes headline bands and signature tracks. In a ‘party’ situation especially, almost no-one picks tracks they don’t know. That’s a shame, because there’s some real gems even in my current listing that occasional players just pass over in favour of playing the same few tracks they know all the time; I do try to counter that by picking different songs when I’m doing vocals even though that’s tough when you’re less familiar. Playing in the World Tour mode with friends resulted in them commenting on tracks they’d never heard of but ended up really liking. But, the fact is when people drop in for a quick party game, there’s a good chance they’ll resist playing anything they don’t already know, so most of these 20 songs will probably never get played in that setting, making them less useful.

On the plus side though, I’ve started listening to these tracks and I already like maybe 70% of them, and a couple have been really excellent. Harmonix have said in the past that one of their goals is to introduce people to new music, and by doing this they certainly tick that box - after all, where else but in a ‘free’ 20-song set could you pack in things people wouldn’t have heard of? Regular DLC from less well known bands tends to be cheaper in Rock Band, but there’s nothing like ‘free’ to really disseminate music.

It was always fun in the first 2 Guitar Hero games to play tracks from small bands the Harmonix team and their friends were members of, like Freezepop and Honest Bob And The Factory to Dealer Incentives, bands I would never have encountered outside indie gigs in Boston, and this track pack follows firmly in that vein. After getting over the initial shock of the fact that I didn’t recognise most of the names on this list, and after listening to some of the tracks, I’ve come around to the positive camp on this. There’s a really good range even in the small number of tracks I’ve listened to so far, some speed metal, pop/rock, blues/funk, indie, punk - so I’m sure most people will find something they like in here; I certainly have. While headline bands would have been an instant PR win, in the grand scheme of things it’s nice to be randomly exposed to some unknown music every so often - after all how would you find new bands you like otherwise?

I’ve been trying to use the mouse on my main desktop machine less, because it’s awkward to use when I’m typing away in my ‘recliner’ position which has been helping my back. On my MacBook, the trackpad is a joy, and while it’s possible to get keyboards with in-built trackpads, I like my current keyboard and don’t want to get rid of it, or to get a separate trackpad / trackball which will be awkward.

I don’t need the mouse most of the time anyway, VisualAssist makes it particularly easy to get around Visual Studio without the mouse (ALT-M to jump to a method, ALT-O to flip between header / source file, SHIFT-ALT-O to jump to a file, etc) and XCode is already pretty good in that regard, but navigating around Firefox with only a keyboard was a problem. Sure there’s CTRL-L and CTRL-K for the location and search boxes, CTRL-B for bookmarks, CTRL-TAB to flip between tabs etc, but once you’re on a page, following links was awkward - your only option was to tab through the links laboriously, trying to keep an eye on where the focus was going. Not fun.

Luckily, the Mouseless Browsing plugin solves all that. It places numerical ID boxes next to every link, and all you have to do is type the number to follow the link. It looks like this:

So by default you can type ‘6 Enter’ to get to the ‘About Me’ page for example. If I want to open that in a new tab, I type ‘6 Plus Enter’ (the numpad is the most convenient). There’s a bunch of configuration options, such as allowing you to turn off the IDs and just have them toggle on when you press a button, which is what I generally prefer (so site styles are not interfered with), or to remove the need to press Enter at the end of the sequence based on some timings. All in all, very useful.

Ok, so my suspicions about the reasons behind Rock Band: AC/DC breaking the usual customer-friendly mould of Rock Band appear to have been confirmed:

The reason “AC/DC Live” can’t be purchased at your local EB Games or Best Buy is because of the deal that AC/DC had already struck with Wal-Mart as an exclusive distributor of their upcoming album, “Black Ice.” The negotiations with AC/DC over the track pack required that Harmonix become part of the existing Wal-Mart agreement.

Even more damning is a quote from Angus Young to the Telegraph:

“We don’t make singles, we make albums,” said Young. “Way back in the Seventies, we drew these figures on the back of an envelope for our record company. We showed them how much they earned from us if we sold one million singles and how much they earned if we sold one million albums. The difference was staggering . . . If we were on iTunes, we know a certain percentage of people would only download two or three songs from the album - and we don’t think that represents us musically.”

Doesn’t represent you musically? What you actually mean is that restricting customer choice works for you financially, because if customers could only pick the songs they actually liked you’d make less money. My only dilemma is which box to check on my ‘why bands ignore their customers and don’t list on download sites’ form: is it the ‘Arrogant snobbery’ or ‘Money-grabbing shill’ box in this case? I think I’ll check both.

Any band that thinks they are somehow ‘above’ the people that buy their music and feel they can disallow customers from buying it the way they want have their heads firmly wedged up their own arses, and deserve everything they get when people download their music for free.

Yes, this is a rant; I hate this kind of attitude and I’m also cranky from not being able to play drums for over a week thanks to my back

Wow, Fable 2 is getting some pretty impressive reviews (both Edge and Eurogamer loved it). I was already expecting to get it, but the reviews have convinced me to pre-order. I love good (western) RPGs, particularly when they come loaded with character and Fable 2 seems to deliver that in spades. It sounds like for the first time in a while, a game fronted by legendary Peter Molyneux may actually live up to the hype. That’s not to say ‘his’ games haven’t been good in the recent past (and of course he doesn’t really crank the code anymore, he has a team to do that now), just more often than not they’re a bit overhyped and overrated - particularly Black & White, which I thought was a collection of really clever technology desperately crying out for a more entertaining game to inhabit.

Part of the problem is that when your back catalogue includes classics such as Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper (personal favourite) and Theme Hospital, and don’t mind talking frankly with the media, you can quite easily get into trouble with over-inflated expectations. Judging by the reviews it sounds like Fable 2 may be the first game originating from the Molyneux stable in 10 years to fully deliver (or nearabouts) on the jive-talking promises. Kudos to the team on a great job.

I’m a little disappointed that the reviews so far seem to have ignored the co-operative element, but maybe that’s down to the fact that the online co-op is due to be patched in at release (although why couldn’t they find a local mate to play with?). My wife and I will be playing through it completely co-operatively and it would have been nice to hear more about that.

Knowing my luck though it won’t arrive until after next weekend, and then I’ll miss a week because I’m travelling.