Category: Ramblings

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2006 in review: Games and gadgets

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight PrincessI wouldn’t say that we’re obsessed with gaming in our household, but we did somehow manage to acquire four new games consoles in 2006. Okay, so two of them were handhelds, but still:

  • a GameBoy Advance for Fiona
  • a shiny new DS Lite for me
  • an XBox 360 for the family (honest)
  • a Wii

The tipping point for the XBox 360 came in September, when Lego Star Wars Lego II came out. We had bought a new “HD ready” LCD TV (720p only, not 1080) over the summer, but we didn’t have any HD sources for it yet. We had to get Lego Star Wars II, of course, and the 360 version was in HD, and so was reported to be the best-looking of all the multi-platform versions. So it was just common sense to buy a 360 to play it on.

Game of the year, though, is without a doubt Zelda: Twilight Princess. I got a Wii at launch, and Zelda kept the whole family occupied over the entire Christmas and New Year period. We finally finished it early in January after clocking up about 200 hours of play time on our various save games.

Other games that were fun during the year were New Super Mario Bros on the DS, and Geometry Wars on the 360. I finally finished Halo 2 as well, which was tedious and had an annoying cliffhanger ending. But nothing else even came close to Lego Star Wars or Zelda.

I’m going to be facing an interesting choice over the next week or so, as various shops in the UK start taking pre-orders for the PlayStation 3. There’s no way I’m going to camp out in front of a real-world shop to get one, nor do I have any intention of buying one on eBay for more than the standard retail price. But if I could get my hands on a pre-ordered one from an online retailer? Hmm.

Arguments in favour:

  • It would replace our (old, noisy) PS2 with a quieter console with wireless controllers. (Apart from the N64, the PS2 is the last bastion of tangle-friendly wired controllers.)
  • It would give us a high-def video player without having to buy an HD-DVD add-on for the 360. And seeing as we’ve got one of the loud 360s (even without a disc in it, it sounds like a Tornado on take-off), I don’t think I want to use it as a player, anyway.
  • We could afford it right now, whereas money is likely to be tighter after the summer and the move to NL.
  • High resale value of it doesn’t work, or if I fancy a sudden infusion of cash.

Arguments against:

  • There isn’t a single PS3 exclusive either at launch or on the horizon that I want to play.
  • By the time there are PS3 titles I want to play, the console will be cheaper.

Hmm. Brain says no. Gadget Fever says OOH OOH SHINY WANT.

Gadget Fever needs a slap.

(And this is finally the last of the “best of 2006” entries. I’ll move on to talking about some of the interesting things we’ll be doing in 2007 soon.)

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2006 in review: Computers

I can trace the lineage of my PC, Frankenstein, back to 1995. He was originally built as a Pentium 100 with 8MB of RAM and a 1GB hard disk, and has been upgraded piece by piece ever since. Earlier this year he received one of his largest single upgrades in the form of a shiny new case (Arctic Cooling Silentium T1), new motherboard (Abit AT8, with silent cooling), new CPU (Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+), new graphics card (Gigabyte Radeon X800 XL with silent cooling), and a chunky new 320GB SATA hard disk. Whenever I make a large change like this I expect to have some teething troubles (driver issues and the like), but nothing quite like this.

Arctic Cooling Silentium T1 caseFirst of all, although the Silentium T1 is a gorgeous case with fantastic quiet cooling features, it is mostly incompatible with the AT8 motherboard. The AT8 has its IDE connectors mounted face out on the edge of the board, rather than facing outwards. Because the T1 is such a snug fit for an ATX-sized motherboard, this means that it’s almost impossible to actually plug in the IDE cables. In order to get the cables to fit I had to remove the primary internal hard drive enclosure (a sleeve of solid aluminium, mounted on heavy-duty rubber bands to dampen vibrations) and shave a few millimeters off the IDE cable connectors with a knife before I could get them to fit. And then I found that after having pried the drive enclosure out of its moorings, I couldn’t strap it back in again.

Secondly, the T1 uses some bizarre plastic brackets for fitting secondary internal drives (DVD drives et al.) and provides no instructions for their use. Through trial and error and judicious use of extreme force, I got the DVD and floppy drives fitted, but I’ve got a strong suspicion that they’re actually just wedged in solidly but at random.

(A floppy drive? In 2006? How quaint. It’s all because Windows XP is blissfully unaware of SATA, and requires drivers to be loaded up from a floppy disk when you install it. Actually, that’s not entirely true. If you have the knowledge and time, you can create a slipstream XP install disk which has them built in. Also, the Abit motherboard provides an “emulated PATA” mode for SATA drives, which fools XP into believing that it’s using an IDE drive, so you don’t need the drivers in the first place, but that somehow feels like cheating.)

In all the years I’ve been building PCs, this was the most frustrating set of components I’ve put together. If you’re thinking about buying a T1 case, I strongly suggest making sure that your motherboard does not have side-mounted connectors.

Anyway, with my hands bandaged up from the cuts and scrapes, the software install should have been easy, right? Well, sort of. XP went on, and the Radeon graphics drivers (normally a pain in the neck) came up without a hitch, and my apps installed smoothly. In moving up from a single core Athlon 2500+ to a dual-core 3800+ CPU I noticed very little speed difference in everyday tasks, but there did seem to be a decent performance increase when running my virtual machines under VPC 2004. But there were a lot of crashes and freeze-ups.

This was not comforting. I am used to XP being rock-solid stable, but I was finding myself rebooting on a regular basis. Reinstalling XP didn’t help, the problem was getting worse, so naturally I turned to the hardware. And that’s when IT HAPPENED. Memory check: OK. Hard disk check: chucka-chucka-chucka… Crap. Scandisk showed bad sector after bad sector, followed by a complete failure to come back to life. Hard disk failure again.

Okay, I could deal with that. After previous data loss terrors, I now have a good nightly backup routine going with Backup4All, and as I hadn’t been placing enormous amounts of trust in the rebuilt Frankenstein anyway, I was confident that I’d be able to recover everything from the external backup drive. Oh, poor naive me.

You see, I had noticed–but not paid much attention to–the external drive’s habit to occasionally disappear from Frank’s drive list, and not to reappear until after I rebooted–so long as it wasn’t switched on at boot time, because then it would stop Frank from booting up at all.

Note to self: pay attention to odd hard drive behaviour, not matter how innocuous it may seem. As it turned out, the external drive was also junk.

Deep breath. Perhaps it was just a faulty drive controller in the disk’s enclosure? I removed the drive and tried mounting it directly on an IDE channel, but no. It was gone, gone, gone. I could get the BIOS to recognize it, but that was as far as it went. Both my primary disk and backup disk had gone down the tubes at exactly the same time. What are the chances?

Skip to the end–by using an Ubuntu live CD and a (veeeerrrrryyyy slllooooowww) copy of HDClone, I managed to recover almost all of my data from the primary disk. All of my MP3s and photos were on the secondary internal drive, which was unaffected. The external drive turned out to be a paperweight.

All’s well that ends well, right? Well, no. The following month, the 400GB external drive attached to my Mac Mini also died. At least all it took down with it was about 150GB of ripped DVDs for which I own the original media. Sigh. At least two of the three drives were still under warranty, and the manufacturers (Maxtor and Hitachi) replaced them quickly and efficiently.

Lessons learned:

  • Sometimes, even doing nightly backups isn’t enough. (Although the odds are pretty good most of the time.) A better strategy would be a mirrored disk (RAID1, or an external disk clone using something like CCC) to allow for continuous operation, combined with an off-site backup for those total panic situations. On-line backup services (such as Carbonite) are very affordable now, and even big (300GB+) external USB hard drives are cheap enough that you can buy a couple of them for a rotating off-site backup schedule.
  • I used to enjoy building my own PC exactly to my own specification, but the effort is now surpassing the pleasure. I hardly play games at all on Frank any more (it’s consoles all the way for me now), and so I don’t need to sweat the best mileage out of every component. So: my next computer is going to be pre-built.

In fact, my next computer is going to be a Mac. The Mac Mini I got in 2005 (the original G4 version) just wasn’t fast enough to take over as my main machine, but it gave me a taste for OS X. (Right now it’s acting as a combined development web server and DVD player.) Now that the whole Mac line-up is running on super-fast Intel Core processors, the performance penalty is gone. And with Parallels as a mature virtualization product for OS X, and VMWare’s Fusion just around the corner, I don’t see any problem with running all my Windows apps inside virtual machines.

I run all of my personal software development projects inside VMs already. At home, most of the time I’m running iTunes, a couple of browsers, a couple of text editors, and a handful of other bits and pieces. If I want to fire up Visual Studio, I spin up a VM. This suits me fine, because it keeps Frank lean and tidy, but it also means there’s no software binding me to Windows as my primary OS. If I have to run VM to do perform a specific task anyway, then I can just as easily do that from OS X as from XP (or Linux, for that matter, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s still ass-ugly).

iMac 24 inchI’m thinking that 2007 might be the year of the Mac. Not sure what flavour, though. MacWorld is just around the corner, and I’m curious to see what it will bring. I don’t think I’d go with another Mini (just a bit too limited). I don’t do much computing on the move, so I’m not sure if a MacBook Pro would be right for me (a plain MacBook again would probably be too limiting). A Mac Pro would be lovely, but may be too much for what I’d use it for. Surprisingly, I find myself musing about the 24″ iMac. I’ve finally come around to the whole dual-monitor setup thing, and I’m starting to find my current 20″ display (a Dell 2007FPW) a bit cramped, so a Mac with a large built-in monitor sounds rather nice…

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2006 in review: Books

One of these years I’ll manage to average a book a week. By the half-way mark of 2006 it looked like I might make it in 2006, but then I started a contract where driving to work was more practical than taking the bus, and boom, there went my reading time. And with a final tally of 33, yes, that means I only read a book a month since July. Gah.

Cassandra French's Finishing School For BoysSo what have I been loving? Well, the stand-out title of the year for me was Eric Garcia’s Cassandra French’s Finishing School For Boys. From the cover, it looks like a sterotypical chick-lit novel. The first few pages read like the stereotype of a chick-lit novel. But once you get past that, it turns into a delightfully strange kidnapping caper set against a Hollywood movie studio background. The added knowledge that Eric Garcia is the author of the outlandish Rex dinosaur detective series and the inventive con novel Matchstick Men should be enough to tell you that this Cassandra French is anything but stereotypical.

Revelation SpaceI also tucked away Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series: Revelation Space, Chasm City, Redemption Ark, and Absolution Gap. It’s big, thick, meaty space opera that you can really sink your teeth into. I made a false start on Revelation Space a few years ago, but picked it up again at AlanR’s urging. It is a bit slow to start, but once you get in to the heart of the story, it’s a great feeling to realize that there are another three 600-page doorstops to carry on the story arc.

Make Love! The Bruce Campbell WayRobert Charles Wilson’s Spin is excellent, and a deserved winner of this year’s Hugo award for best novel. Christopher Brookmyre’s All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses An Eye is a fast-moving wise-cracking wish-fulfilment adventure yarn in which an ordinary woman is plucked out of her comfy Scottish life and plunged into a world of espionage and hi-tech mercenaries. And of course, Bruce Campbell’s Make Love! The Bruce Campbell Way is a wickedly entertaining tale of his (fictional) attempts to prepare for a role in Mike Nichols’ (fictional) star-studded film Let’s Make Love!. Maybe it’s something best enjoyed by Bruce Campbell fans, but let’s face it, people, who isn’t?

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2006 in review: Films

My favourite film of the year: The PrestigeI only saw 58 films in 2006. This is not a particularly good count, especially considering I have a subscription to LoveFilm which provides more back catalogue than any human can reasonably handle. (As a mater of fact, of the 58 films, only 19 were LoveFilm rentals. And I’m paying £9.95 a month for this service. Although I love the idea of having 40,000 films on tap, this isn’t exactly giving me enormous value for money. I think it’s time to re-assess my subscription package.) I also haven’t been keeping up-to-date with my quick reviews, although I have made sure at least to rate everything I’ve seen.

This leaves me feeling remarkably unqualified to comment on the “best” of 2006, because I’ve missed so many films that I know would have been totally awesome. So I’ll just point out a few really good ones:

  • The Prestige
    Suspenseful story of obsession, revenge, and deception between a pair of magicians in 19th century London. If you’re put off by the apparent historical setting (period pieces are not normally to my taste), don’t be afraid of this one, because you can actually see it as science fiction. The performances are nothing short of magnificent.
  • Harsh Times
    Another amazing performance by Christian Bale. I found his transformation from Home Counties to Homeboy somewhat disconcerting for the first few minutes of the film, but after that he totally owned the screen, giving a tightly contained portrayal of an Iraq War veteran failing to come to terms with life as a civilian.
  • Holly
    I saw this at the Edinburgh Film Festival with Richard of Filmstalker (your first stop for quality movie news), and was blown away. It’s a harrowing tale of ex-pat antiquities dealer Patrick (Ron Livingston) who meets a child prostitute and becomes obsessed with the idea of saving her. You’ll be hard-pressed to actually find this film anywhere, but it’s definitely worth making the effort to catch it if you can. Read Richard’s review.
  • Zathura
    Not an exceptionally original story, just a perfectly paced family adventure film.
  • Mission: Impossible III
    Again, not especially original, just a perfectly executed action blockbuster. Great set pieces, and edge-of-the-seat tension. Loved it.
  • Syriana
    Complex political drama that crawls all over the corruption that surrounds middle-east politics and the oil trade. Difficult to watch, but important to have done so.

Remarkably, I didn’t rate any films lower than 2 stars (“disappointing”) this year. Normally there are at least a couple of outright stinkers. The greatest disappointment was Superman Returns, which I felt was dull and emotionally aimless. I have higher expectations of superhero films, and especially of Bryan Singer.

The worst film I saw all year was probably Tenacious D: The Pick Of Destiny, but I didn’t have terribly high hopes for it in the first place. Which means that rating it as “disappointing” weighs disproportionately strongly.

My favourite movie people of the year are Christian Bale (for Harsh Times and The Prestige) and George Clooney (for Syriana and Good Night, And Good Luck). Christopher Nolan also gets awesomeness points for putting out yet another film that is going to hit my all-time favourites list.

I haven’t really been keeping up with my movie news, but there are a few films that I am excited about for 2007:

So, is there anything I’ve missed?

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Virtual worlds

Play MoneyI started reading Julian Dibbell’s “Play Money” blog back in 2003, probably as a result of a pointer from Edge magazine. It was a chronicle of his attempt to make real money from his trading activities in a virtual world–primarily the on-line role-playing game Ultima Online. He had originally set himself the challenge of making more money from trading than from his work as a writer, but he adjusted his goals downwards as the year progressed. He concluded his experiment in April 2004, and in his final month of trading managed to clear just under $4,000 in profit. That’s 4,000 real-world dollars.

In fact, this kind of money isn’t even unusual these days: Second Life now boasts its first millionaire (with a few caveats). The more interesting matter is how it is possible to make money in a virtual world at all. If you’re not plugged into the buzz surrounding them, it’s easy to see Second Life as an overgrown chat room, and World of Warcraft and its ilk as mere hack-and-slash fantasy games. Sure, the people who run the worlds can make money by charging monthly subscriptions, but how do the participants do it?

In simple terms, people are willing to pay to acquire goods they don’t have enough time (or skills) to build themselves. It’s just that in the case of virtual worlds, the goods have no physical substance. But that doesn’t make them any less real to the people who use them day in, day out in these electronic communities.

With his Play Money book, Julian Dibbell provides the background behind the blog. It’s uncomfortable reading in places. His game time and trading become an obsession, and although he says that they weren’t the cause of it, they certainly weren’t helping out when his marriage started to break up. But as well as the personal aspects, he also digs deeper into the economics of virtual worlds, and the sometimes cut-throat businesses that are growing up to service the demands of their inhabitants.

I have to admit to being endlessly fascinated by this, and the issues that flow from it. For example, there are figures that suggest that the average inhabitant of Second Life consumes roughly much power as a Brazilian. These numbers are heavily debated, but the fact is that a virtual person has a carbon footprint–a measurable effect–in the real world. And of course, as soon as real money starts to flow, the tax man is not far behind.

Beyond these immediate implications, there are also some enormous long-term issues to consider. Some of these worlds have millions of inhabitants. The people there are building houses, forming communities, participating in great deeds, and creating distinct cultures. What happens when the next big thing comes along, and people start to jump ship? What happens to the remnants of these civilizations? Is it important from a cultural and anthropological perspective to preserve what we can of these worlds?

World of WarcraftThe biggest online worlds may seem well-developed compared to their predecessors, but they are in still in their infancy with regard to user interaction and freedom of action. Despite being larger than any MMORPG before it, it is likely that World of Warcraft will have its number one spot taken from it by something bigger and better. But it’s possible that it, or one of the many others out there will stay ahead of the fickle curve of consumer demand, and will grow and evolve over the course of years and even decades.

And this is really interesting. Virtual worlds aren’t going away, and they are only going to get bigger and more populous. Business are opening offices in Second Life. If you catch the right world, and make the right investments (my guess would be virtual real estate), you may find yourself owning a tremendously valuable piece of some future metropolis.

I have created an avatar in Second Life, but I haven’t done much with him. I have a copy of WoW sitting on my desk, but I haven’t signed up for an account yet. Self-knowledge tells me that I could quite easily spend an unhealthy amount of time in these worlds, and right now I’m finding little enough time in my life for sleep as it is. But I also know that I immensely enjoy the total immersion of a good RPG, and despite the poor experience I had with Everquest a few years ago, I can see myself dipping my toes in the water again fairly soon. The possibilities are just too intriguing to ignore.

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Jack Walker goes down for one of Scotland’s largest ever frauds

A few years ago I briefly worked at Tribune Risk and Insurance Services just outside Dalkeith. It was only “briefly” because five weeks after I joined, the company was shut down by the Financial Services Authority. Over a hundred people lost their jobs, and more than 40,000 homeowners were left without insurance cover–two weeks before Christmas 2003.

John (Jack) Walker being escorted from the High Court after sentencing. Image taken from BBC News at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/6099842.stmWell, it has taken some time to get to this point, but this afternoon the man behind it all, John Kirke (“Jack”) Walker was finally sentenced to 4 years and 10 months in jail for fraud. He pled guilty to the charges in May of this year at Edinburgh Sheriff Court, but Sheriff Kenneth MacIver sent the case to the High Court for sentencing because he felt the five year maximum sentence he had the power to impose was insufficient to punish Walker for the magnitude of his crime.

Jack’s wife Evelyn, who founded the company, stood accused of the same crime along with one of his sons, but the court accepted their not guilty pleas. (How???)

In hindsight, Tribune’s collapse didn’t turn out too badly for me. It gave me the push to start contracting, a move I probably wouldn’t have committed to otherwise, and it’s where I met Alan Ramsay, who has become my arch-nemesis a good friend. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel bitter about it. Convicted criminal Jack Walker (how good it feel to say that–and with no danger of libel, either!) shat all over the people who worked at Tribune, and the tens of thousands of people he duped out of their insurance premiums. It is immensely gratifying to see the Scottish justice system taking a massive dump on him.

Mmmmm, schadenfreude pie.

A slice of schadenfreude pie. Recipe and photo by John Scalzi. Image shamelessly lifted from http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004492.html

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