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I’ve wedged another business trip rather hurriedly into my schedule, sandwiched betwixt (oh, you gotta love that word) our recent holiday and my impending departure for Siggraph in about 10 days. It came up at really short notice and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to fit it around my existing commitments, but luckily I was able to organise it to happen over this weekend, which just about worked (although I still have to leave early Friday). This will be my first trip to Sweden, specifically Gotland, so I’m looking forward to it, although my time there will be short and I’ll spend an enormous amount of time in transit. It’s a bit of a tortuous route, requiring 3 flights and a coach in each direction (Guernsey-Gatwick-Heathrow-Stockholm-Gotland), plus a short transfer to Heathrow Terminal 5 on the way out (uh-oh). I can’t really complain though, living on an island myself I know all about having to shuttle through onshore international hubs, you just learn to live with it - but I have it at both ends this time!

Should be good anyway - with luck some business and/or future partnerships will come out of it, but at the very least it should be an interesting trip.

I read today that ‘Pentagon uber-hacker’ (if you believe the US authorities, who presumably don’t want you to think that their security systems are akin to wet tissue paper) Gary McKinnon has lost his appeal in the Lords against his extradition to the USA. I think we can all feel sorry that a misguided but definitely non-malicious geek is going to get the book thrown at him.

Coincidentally, we also watched Sneakers last night, after I finally got around to buying it on DVD. It’s still one of my favourite films, even though occasionally it errs on being film-friendly rather than technically realistic (accoustic couplers in 1992?). The cast is fantastic, the script is great, and the appeal of a bunch of non-conformist, philanthropic hackers coming out on top is enduring.

What a shame life doesn’t imitate fiction a little more often.

Some people think I bash Microsoft a lot on this blog, and maybe that’s true, but I don’t think I ever do it unfairly. To prove that I don’t just comment on the bad stuff, here’s a major piece of positive news about the software behemoth: Microsoft appears to have fixed the flaws in the Open Specification Promise (OSP).

The major flaw in the OSP when it was originally announced is that the promise not to sue people who developed upon or used Microsoft protocols and formats extended only to those who operated non-commercially. This of course made the whole OSP basically useless, because the primary area where people want to inter-operate with Microsoft is in the enterprise, where, rather unfortunately, most companies do not work for free. Most enterprises are not particularly happy about engaging the services of purely voluntary organisations, at least in visible or critical areas, because of the potential exposure to core business functions; they need support contracts, even if in practice they don’t strictly need or use them - I’m sure that I’m not the only person at the sharp end of getting problems resolved who ended up getting good answers faster from nonprofit communities rather than official support channels.

Anyway, all of a sudden and with little fanfare Microsoft appears to have addressed this; on Friday they updated the OSP to remove the non-commercial clause. The surprising bit is perhaps not that they realised it was broken (I’m sure the beleaguered pro-open source elements in the company knew this from the start), but that the upper echelons allowed them to fix it. The rhetoric spouted by the likes of Ballmer does not gel with this kind of move, and even the recent high water mark of Ballmer committing MS to being more open had the look of a man who had a gun to his back, and it didn’t take long for him to start beating his drum about patents again after that. I’ve been skeptical the action on the ground would be free from gotchas or caveats, and the original OSP certainly reinforced this. No longer.

With this change, Microsoft has made a significant step in the right direction. Companies deploying & supporting the likes of Samba, OpenOffice & POI have operated under something of a cloud until now, glancing nervously over their shoulders in fear of suddenly becoming a target for the three hundred pound gorrilla beating its chest about patents and Linux, and customers felt the anxiety too I’m sure - leading to less credibility being afforded to those kinds of alternatives. If MS stay true to this agreement it really does open opportunities for better competition in the commercial sector, which can only be a good thing for customers. Keep this kind of practical change up Microsoft, and I might even start liking you again. Just get rid of that relic of 1980’s capitalism you have at your helm

The main problem with democracy is that you give the vote to a large number of people who don’t have the slightest idea what they’re doing. They’ll believe hype, be swayed by style over substance, and vote for what’s fashionable, or blindly along party lines. As Churchill once said, democracy is the worst form of government … except for all the other ones.

I think the results of the latest Sourceforge Community Choice Awards underlines this from a somewhat less critical perspective. I didn’t promote Ogre for this years awards mostly because I felt some of the award categories had become a bit frivolous and made it seem a bit of a joke. Take “Most Likely to Get Users Sued”, and particularly “Most Likely to Be Accused of Patent Violation” - for one, all software companies are exposed to the blighting trend of suppressing innovation by patenting trivia, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t encourage it, and for two, one of the sponsors of the awards this year is Microsoft, whose execs repeatedly bleat on about Linux violating their patents so it’s in pretty bad taste to have that category in there. Red rag / bull anyone? As it happens, we still ended up being a finalist in the “Best Project for Gamers” category, so thanks to the people that thought of us anyway, even if we didn’t prompt you.

Anyway, the winners were announced at OSCON:

• Best Project: OpenOffice.org
• Best Project for the Enterprise: OpenOffice.org
• Best Project for Education: OpenOffice.org
• Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition: phpMyAdmin
• Best Project for Multimedia: VLC
• Best Project for Gamers: XBMC
• Most Likely to Change the World: Linux
• Best New Project: Magento
• Most Likely to Be Accused of Patent Violation: WINE
• Most Likely to Get Users Sued: eMule
• Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins: phpMyAdmin
• Best Tool or Utility for Developers: Notepad++

I think this illustrates that the majority tend to dilute good sense - many of these winners are entirely illogical. phpMyAdmin as the next $1B acquisition? Come on, what planet are you on? Do you seriously think any business could make back that kind of investment on phpMyAdmin? OpenOffice.org the best project for Enterprise? Only if they actually start using it more, and in my experience enterprises are extremely unlikely to stop using Microsoft Office any time soon (it is appropriate for the Best Project for Education though, and would be appropriate in a Home Office / Small Business category too, if there was one). Linux is most likely to change the world? It’s done it already, although not single handedly by any means (at the very least GNU had a big hand in it). Notepad++ is the best project for developers? Sure it’s good, but it’s a Windows-only text editor, I’m surprised there wasn’t a cross-platform tool in this slot, like Eclipse or Code::Blocks. The “Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins” is phpMyAdmin? I don’t know any serious sysadmins who would consider that their most important open source tool - useful though it is, in production environments doing backups on demand via a web interface or tinkering with live data directly isn’t exactly a good thing to be doing on a regular basis, I’m sure there are many other open source projects that professional sysadmins would pick ahead of it, which makes me think the majority voting for it were people running small sites and not the sort of person you’d normally call a sysadmin.

I think this illustrates that popularity contests aren’t necessarily the best way to recognise achievement and potential. I appreciate the sentiments here - after all there are already other awards picked by ‘enlightened panels of experts’ so allowing the community to have their say is a good idea in principle (just like democracy ;)) - but I think in practice the results can be pretty meaningless in some cases, because those in the community who are experienced enough to vote rationally are drowned out by those who are not.

NB: Let’s just be clear - this post is not about me being bitter that Ogre is not in the winners list, honestly!

I was playing about with working in Photoshop today because I needed to polish off a logo for the new product I’ve been working on during what time I could find in the last few weeks (which has often been evenings and weekends), and while I was at it I decided to update the Ogre logo a little bit.

Yeah, I know - it’s totally derivative and shamelessly jumping on the ‘wet floor’ bandwagon, but I don’t care; I like it. I thought about putting a shimmery effect on the floor or something but I was already short of time.

I’ll be able to reveal the product I’m talking about soon, the legals have now all been signed so I’m getting ready to go. All I’ll say right now is that it’s a commercial Ogre add-on component which I hope will be quite popular among the higher-end Ogre users. I want to spend a little more time polishing it with my closed beta users before opening it up to a wider audience - the prospect came up on rather short notice so I want to concentrate on the loose ends and make sure the quality is there before unleashing it. I have standards to maintain

This is one of my favourite recent ZeroPunctuation episodes, after all what’s not to love when he can somehow find a way to include a Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Tich reference in a MMORPG review?

Damn, it’s not a bad situation to be in, but I suddenly feel even more swamped than usual with gaming opportunities. Rock Band continues to be a bottomless well of fun, with its continuous drip-feed of new content and experience-driven gameplay, it just seems to get more enjoyable as time goes on as the song library expands, and you get to grips with the less known tracks. However, my birthday just passed and I received 3 new games, two for the Wii and one for the DS, both fairly neglected platforms of late.

Okami was a title I almost picked up during my brief stint with a PS2, but I’m glad I waited since the brush interface is more natural with the Wiimote I’m sure. Obviously the ‘watercolour and ink’ graphical style stands out, as does the influence of Japanese legends and Shinto religeon, so it has a lot of individuality about it, which is what drew me to it. Funnily enough when you play it, it actually feels very much like you’re playing a Zelda game. Superficially there’s the fact that you’re a wolf going through ‘darkened’ lands with a weird little sidekick which has much in common with Twilight Princess, but it’s more than that - the gameplay structure is also very similar, in that it’s basically an explore-em-up, with a character who discovers more about themselves and the legend they embody as they progress, adds new powers, fights the minions of evil, through a combination of open-air regions with relatively random encounters, peppered with ‘dungeons’ (in essence). Even the tutorial style and visual cues feel very similar, even though the implementation is somewhat different. I’d be willing to bet the lead designer played a lot of Zelda - this game is definitely cut from the same cloth, which is no bad thing and it is very enjoyable. In fact after Wind Waker, Twilight Princess and Phantom Hourglass I was feeling a little tired of Zelda, not in terms of the pure gameplay mechanics but just because I don’t really like repeating myself so much - so it’s quite nice to find a game that uses a similar, very solid gameplay style in a new context, without having to go find the boomerang / bow / hookshot all over again.

Boom Blox is definitely a Wii game. Incredibly simple to pick up, you chuck balls at stuff or grab things and yank them - you can’t really go wrong with that. My friend’s 5 year old son picked it up in about 10 seconds flat and loved it, and I’m finding it strangely addictive too. Theres a kind of visceral satisfaction in chucking balls at things to knock them over, evoking memories of coconut shys and the ‘knock over the pyramid of cans’ games at funfairs that every bloke secretly likes having a crack at even if we do pretend we’re only doing it to win stuffed toys for partners/children. The puzzling elements of it mean it stays interesting beyond this, as you calculate various trajectories that you could try to get the whole level done with one throw. Great stuff, and I’m rather gutted to hear that it’s been a bit disappointing at retail. Hopefully it’s just a slow-burner, because it deserves to do well, or the world has no taste.

Finally, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, which a friend was kind enough to get on import for me because it’s still inexplicably absent here in the UK. Again, this is a game perfectly suited to its hardware, this is Brain Training for those who are more into lateral thinking than rattling off their times tables - in other words, right up my street, since my brain rarely likes to work in straight lines even when only moderately addled. It’s a weird fusion of Mensa test and Enid Blyton, so much so that I keep expecting to be awarded ‘lashings and lashings of ginger beer’ on the completion of a puzzle (”Rather!”) - the only downside to this theme is the distinctly painful Dick van Dyke accent that the Professor’s nephew has (cor bloimey guv’naar) which is a bit like nails down a blackboard for anyone on the east side of the Atlantic, but luckily fairly rare once into the game - a reason to be cheerful that the DS carts don’t have much space for full voice acting ;). The puzzles themselves are varied and interesting, and the more difficult ones have certainly had me chewing my stylus so far - the best ones are those that you initially think are impossible, and after staring for a while at the seemingly impenetrable fortress of logic you suddenly realise one of the walls is made of papier maché. Priceless.

Given that I have a lot of work backed up and am heading out to Siggraph in less than 3 weeks, this perhaps isn’t the best time to have this number of distractions, but I’m not complaining

E3 was on while I was away, so on my return I eagerly checked the various gaming news for what juicy nuggets had emerged - and that would be almost none.

It’s telling that probably the biggest news was that Final Fantasy XIII is no longer to be a PS3 exclusive - not even a timed exclusive, it’ll be multi-platform at launch (in the US and Europe anyway). A headline grabber for MS for sure, but while I get the feeling that this will be greeted with equal amounts of teeth-gnashing and gloating from the Playstation and XBox fanboy camps respectively, for everyone else located on planet Earth it’s really not that interesting. After all if you were already a Final Fantasy nut willing to buy 13 (plus) of these titles, you probably already owned a PS3 in preparation anyway. Personally I played one (FFVII, considered to be a high-point of the series, or so I’m told) and have no particular urge to play any more. But, I suppose there will be some who pick it up just because they can now.

My guess is that the staggering costs associated with making that kind of game, combined with a lack of the kind of crushing dominance of the market that Sony promised (and some might say, rather smugly took for granted for a while), meant that Square just couldn’t make the numbers work as a platform exclusive. I’m guessing they got a sweetener from MS too which no doubt helped their bean-counters sleep at night. Once again I have to shake my head at the unnecessary partitioning of the consumer market that a console war entails, and hope someday we move away from it.

Nintendo showed a shocking disregard for their platform - and while they’re printing money for doing fairly little I can understand why. The MotionPlus add-on for the Wii controller certainly looks interesting but is all potential and no practical use right now. They’re milking a few franchises some more, but really no future Wii games look interesting. My Wii has been off most of the time for the last year, with small resurrections for Super Mario Galaxy and now for third-party titles Okami and Boom Blox which I got for my birthday and are very good, but that’s been all too rare. Nintendo seem to be relying on the casual audience to buy the console by the bucketload and use it to play maybe one or two games at family gatherings, and for the core gamers to eagerly lap up fairly formulaic franchise revisions. For a company that occasionally comes out with pure brilliance (Wii Sports, Super Mario Galaxy), it’s being pretty uninspiring most of the rest of the time.

Microsoft is chasing the casual market like everyone else on the planet these days, nothing really to see there.

The single interesting thing at E3 for me was the official unveiling of Rock Band 2’s feature set and track list, which are both looking very fine indeed. I like that you can import ‘most’ of the tracks on the RB1 disk as well as the DLC so once you have it you can just play RB2 with hundreds of songs. They also appear to have addressed all the little niggling things that people (including me) have mentioned could have been better in RB1, like flexibility of the band setup. Nothing startling, just reassuring that Harmonix appear to be listening to what their customers want.

So, apart from that - yawn.

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.