You'll Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villany

Obi Wan could well have had the yahoo message board for SCOXQ.PK (formerly known as SCOX) in mind when he spoke the immortal line about Mos Eiseley.

If you want a good example of idiocy and grade A lunacy then pop on over and have a read. Just don't take anything said on there at face value.

Somehow the message board has degenerated into a Linux vs Windows flame fest - with each side just as bad as the other. According to one side Linux is the best, Windows is evil. According to the others Linux is broken beyond repair whilst Windows is perfect.

You've just got to hope that no-one takes this collection of pond-scum from the bottom of the gene pool seriously as they aren't doing anyone any favours.

Lets face it, it is entirely possible to run Linux full-time these days without worrying about recompiling the kernel when you reconfigure your hardware. That hasn't been true for nearly a decade (if not longer). Most hardware works as well in Linux as it does in Windows, which is actually pretty amazing when you consider the lack of official support for most hardware (most of the drivers are written by volunteers).

Windows too can work perfectly well for a lot of people. Personally I prefer Linux but hey, horses for courses folks. I certainly don't spend all my time editing configuration files. Linux works for me and doesn't get in the way. Your mileage may vary.

Is it worth getting into a flame war over? Not really. I'm a big fan of open source AND freeware software (something to do with me being a tight-wad) but it doesn't mean that I can't appreciate the fact that there are some pretty good - albeit expensive - commercial alternatives too.

The problem is that it is getting hard to recommend the commercial as the benefits no longer outweigh the costs. I'd guess this is why Microsoft (and other commercial companies) are fighting so hard against Open Source.

Cavern Lander - Tech Demo 1

Over the Easter weekend I've had a browse through the code for "Cavern Lander", which started as an experiment with the RetroRoids code to see how much work it would take to add in gravity effects.

I'd got it to a point where it pretty much worked before a large dose of the curse of the hobby programmer known as "real life" stepped in and curtailed my coding activities for a couple of weeks.

To get myself back up to speed I decided to pick up the code again - and after sorting out some niggling bugs and cleaning the code up further I'd got a stable code-base to build the game on.

I'm not counting this as a proper demo release purely because the game is so early in its development - but as a technical demo to see how a gravity game would work I think it does its job quite well.

The initial feedback has been positive too so I'll spend some more time on the game over the next couple of weeks and see what I end up with.

The game itself plays a bit like a cross between Lander, Thrust and ChopLifter, in that you have to pilot your ship through a series of caves, land to rescue miners and transport them to the blue landing platform at the start of the cave complex.

Currently the main hazard is gravity itself, but the final game should add more features like fuel and gun emplacements into the mix.



For more information (and screen shots) head on over to http://dans-remakes.sytes.net.

Yesterday's Pizza

Here I am, enjoying that "morning after" feeling. Actually I don't feel too bad all things considered, eating the remains of yesterday's pizza has helped me feel a bit more human.

Yes, I was out and about last night, experiencing our Great British "pub culture" first hand.

Its been a while since I've hit the town, and to say it was a bit unfamiliar was an understatement. One thing that I did notice was that at the venerable age of 34 I was the oldest person by a clear ten years in some of the bars (and that is including the bar staff too).

I think that I've finally accepted the fact that I have now officially become an old fart.

Clue number 1: I hated the music.

Clue number 2: I didn't recognise any of the songs.

Clue number 3: I found myself complaining about the price of things ("A drink costs HOW MUCH?!?").

Clue number 4: Realising that I was one of the oldest people in some of the bars.

Clue number 5: Even though the outside temperature was below zero, I was one of the few people wearing a coat.

A night out certainly isn't cheap. I went through around £40 last night. Mind you, ten pounds of that was admission to a nightclub (and cloakroom fees). Having to queue for half an hour to get in was just rubbing salt into the wound.

Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy myself. I'm just glad that my social life doesn't revolve around clubbing these days.

Boxer Hockey

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but Boxer Hockey is a seriously strange web comic with some amazing art work.



I've been reading it pretty much since it started - and although it is still fairly irregularly published it tends to be well worth the wait.

There are quite a few strips in the archive, so if you haven't already seen it then now is a pretty good time to start.

Fun with a Sun

One of the joys of working in I.T. is the sheer variety of tasks that can await you.

Today I've had the pleasure (ahem) of dealing with a disk upgrade on a Sun A1000 raid controller, connected to a Sun Ultra 60 running Solaris 8.

On paper the job is straight-forward. Simply add the new disks into the array, use them as a raid 5 set, configure a new partition in the new container and adjust the vfstab to mount the new partition at the correct point on the system.

Easy, no?

Stage 1 was started last night. To check how our raid was currently set up we went to check the Raid Array Manager software that comes with the A1000. Not installed. How about disksuite them? Nope. Not installed either.

We couldn't locate the Solaris 8 install CDs but found the Raid Array Manager install CDs so we installed that, and as per the instructions halted and re-booted using "boot -r". And heres where the fun begins.

Now it couldn't see the existing partitions on the Raid, even though the Raid Array Manger showed that the Raid was connected and that the individual drives were healthy.

If you ever find yourself in the situation where you need to see what SCSI devices are attached to your Sun box then this might help.

After halting your box (so you are left at the "ok" prompt) do the following:

setenv auto-boot? false
reset-all
probe-scsi-all
setenv auto-boot? true
boot

Depending on the circumstances you may need to do "boot -r" instead of just "boot". The difference is that "boot -r" will detect and re-create device nodes as needed.

After a bit of investigation (thank you Google) I removed the Raid Array Manager software, at which point "boot -r" rediscovered the existing partitons. For some reason though it has re-named the device nodes for the RAID disks so I still had to edit the vfstab (after creating a backup of the old one just-in-case) before the server would boot again correctly.

So the alternative is to locate the Solaris 8 media and install DiskManager.

I can see why my colleague had trouble locating the disks. In the end I found them in an un-marked cardboard box, on top of a disused filing cabinet, right at the back of our software store-room.

Disksuite is now installed and the partitions are still visible, so we are now ready to try putting in those new disks. . . . .

Taking the Rough with the Smooth - Version 2

This is partly a replacement and partly a follow-up article to Taking the Rough with the Smooth, as the original doesn't really get across what I wanted to say, or more importantly, why I felt the need to say it.

Not long before I wrote that article I'd received my first piece of hate mail. In the couple of years I've been publishing software online (since 2002 in fact) I've been lucky in that the correspondence I've had from users has been positive, even from those who've had problems. So this one came as a nasty surprise.

I'm not going to repeat the email in question, but needless to say it was far from encouraging or constructive. When people contact me with problems, I usually go out of my way to help resolve their issues. More out of habit than inclination I did the same here. I thanked the sender for taking the time to get in touch, explained some of the points he had raised and promised an updated release which would fix another issue that he'd had.

Needless to say I didn't receive a reply.

I didn't feel very good about myself after that. Even though I hadn't done anything wrong (and forgetting the positive things that people had said about the same game) I felt thoroughly de-motivated.

I'm always very nervous about releasing stuff online whether it is a game or a blog entry, so this was a serious blow to my self-confidence.

This got me to thinking. Why am I putting myself through this? What am I getting from the many hours of my time I pour into each game? What gives some ungrateful twonk the right to pull the damn thing apart?

The answer to why I do it is easy. Positive feedback, the thank-you emails, unsolicited reviews on other sites, those are the things that keep the spirits up.

Discovering that RetroRoids is this weeks "Game of the Week" on Games4Mac.dk has really brought this home to me. I didn't submit the game to them. They found it, wrote about it, and linked to it. More importantly, they liked it!

I suppose that is what I mean by taking the rough with the smooth. To get the plaudits I've got to keep on risking criticism, I've also got to learn to be more thick skinned about it.

RetroRoids - Games4Mac Game of the Week

I've just had a nice surprise courtesy of Games4Mac - a German MacOS games site. RetroRoids has been named as their "Spiel der Woche" (which roughly translates as Game of the Week).

Wow! Fame at last!

Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon

There had been a few things that I was going to write about this weekend, but the dreaded "man-flu" kept me feeling sorry for myself and away from my keyboard, so here is a late weekend update of the posts that would have been.

Star Trek: Of Gods and Men - Episode 2

I was lucky enough to get an early viewing of the second episode and, I've got to say, I enjoyed it. I'm still not sure about the shaky-cam look to it as it doesn't really fit in with Star Trek, but that aside it is well worth a view. There will be a full review (with screen captures) later on this week.

Site Traffic Update

Well, far from getting banned from Google (although this site currently has a Google Page Rank of zero) I've ended up with a traffic increase, but not from T2000. In fact, I've not seen a single hit from their site. No, in a surprisingly ironic twist all my additional traffic has come from Google, to some of my earlier posts. And rather than doubling my traffic, it has nearly quadrupled it! I think there is probably a moral there somewhere.

RetroVaders Updated

In another surprising twist I've released a small update to RetroVaders. This was mainly to add a "deadzone" to the analog joystick routines, but I've also converted the sound and graphics formats to help reduce the file size of the game (for the Windows and Linux versions this has halved the file size). Download it from the usual place.

. . .

Now that I'm feeling back to normal again (or as normal as I get anyway) I'll be looking to mix things up a bit over the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned!

Dead and Dying

I was going to post something about the PIN for Google Adsense arriving in the post today, but, to be honest, I really don't feel up to it today.

I've got that wonderfully grotty feeling that my wife sympathetically refers to as "Man Flu". So with that in mind I'm off to take some more flu medicine and sniffle in a pathetic manner, whilst I wait for it to take effect.

Things to do on your day off #1 - Reconfigure Your Network

Around this time last year I invested in a cheap-and-cheerful Dynamode BR-6004 Wireless Router and a LinkSys wireless PCI network card. This was to allow my children to access the internet from their bedroom without me having to run cables through the house.

The downside to this was the built-in four port hub. For some reason there was a noticeable delay when accessing the internet when directly wired in to the hub. This meant that for browsing the web the my kids PC felt faster than the directly wired one.

I'd never found a way around this, but as the actual download speeds were OK it was something I was willing to put up with.

There were some other issues with the router. One of them was that you had to run Internet Explorer in order to configure the modem. FireFox or Konqueror just wouldn't work correctly with it.

None of this was reason enough to ditch it so I've stuck with it, albeit slightly annoyed that the kids had a better browsing experience than I did, and I was paying for the damn thing!

Last week however a colleague gave me a second hand SiteCom WL-025 Wireless Router that he no longer wanted. Although on paper it should be a worse router than the Dynamode one, in practice it works a damn site better. The network delay has gone, network encryption works better (even if it supports less protocols), the web configuration works with Firefox, and the network connection speed appears faster too.