Aquarionics

Tabula Rasa

Tabula Rasa means a clean start, literally a cleaned tablet, a point to start afresh. It’s not only a game title, but an expression of what Richard Garriot wanted to do with this new game. Richard Garriot’s Blank Slate. Subtitle: “Stop judging me by Ultima”.

I’ve played a lot of MMOs over the years. I played Ultima Online before it had any expansion packs at all, I played EverQuest, Earth & Beyond, EvE, World of Warcraft, Asheron’s Call, EverQuest 2, Dungeon Runners, Guild Wars and, of course, my running habit, City of Heroes. I’ve currently got running subscriptions to Lord of the Rings Online, City of Heroes and, courtesy of Eurogamer’s Free Trial, 3 days of Tabula Rasa.

I played TR in beta, but didn’t get far beyond the tutorial, due to lack of time, a series of busy weekends when the servers were up, and the servers not being up when I did have time to play. I found the interface clunky and annoying, and there wasn’t enough explanation of how it was supposed to work. This was, apparently, something they listen to feedback on and have done better with, and I had fewer problems with the interface this time.

Tabula Rasa succeeds in at least one of its aims: It’s a different type of MMO in large areas. It falls heavily into some other clichés, but generally it’s a different play experience than the rest of the options on the market. The two things that separate it are the Sci fi world (In which it is not unique, but is rare. Admittedly, the options for new MMOs appear to be “There are too many Fantasy MMOs! Lets make a Sci Fi one instead!”) but, more obviously, the lack of turn-based combat. TR plays more like a First Person Shoot-em-up than the standard First Person Diablo 2 combat system. It has a more subtle class system – in that you don’t pick a class on creation, but instead take a series of choices at level boundaries which shift your abilities in a certain direction. For example, first you might chose between being a Solder and a Specialist, and then later take up the subclass Ranger, and later on a further subclass below that. It’s a system that works particularly well with the Clone mechanic, which allows you to take a copy of your character, strip back all its choices and skill point spending and build it back up as something else, You can then play this new character separately.

None of it’s new, though.

The crafting system is directly out of Current Generation MMO Design 101, the combat is remarkably similar to Planetside (A game I’m pleasantly surprised is still running), including the constant back-and-forth shifting of control zones. The only thing not similar to anything else in existence as far as I know is the GUI, and that’s one of the weakest elements of the game. I’ve frequently died in game as a result of not being able to activate a health-pack quickly enough. This might just be me, though.

Anyway, I’d recommend giving it a try, it’s got a lot of original elements. I will say this, though, download the client first (2.4 gig) before activating your trial key, as otherwise you might spend half your trial looking at the download meter :)

The Orange Box: Portal

Simultaneously, the best and worst thing about Portal is the ending.

You know the drill if you’ve seen the video. You have a portal gun which will shoot two doors into the scenery. You are being put though a series of tests. This is the game.

It is a puzzle game, created and built with the care and attention to detail that the Valve games all shimmer with gently. In the manner of an RTS game it continues to introduce new elements right up until the final element, you don’t get the full stack until you’re nearly finished.

This is unlike any other puzzle game, to a large extent. Plus, the ‘lab rat’ setting does give the entire game the feel of an extended tutorial, and the central mechanic doesn’t seem to be enough to base an entire game around. What makes the game is the environment.

You are… encouraged, I think is the word, though the levels by GLaDOS – a somewhat questionably rational AI, the knowledge you don’t have much choice but continue, and the continued promise of delicious moist cake. The lab itself is clean and polished, but the further you go though the game the more the facade starts to crack at the edges…

...and I’ll stop. The best and worst thing about Portal is the ending, it’s good because the actual arc and ending is one of the single most satisfying and well executed ending of a game for a long time (And proof that, despite appearances, Valve can write them) (You may have heard the rumour that The Orange Box contains a Jonathon Coulton song. It’s in Portal. If you ever intend to finish portal, do not seek out the song, yet). The worst bit about the ending is that it happens too soon. That’s it. For a game that’s $20 on its own, or free if you buy TF2 & HL:Ep2, four or so hours of this level of innovation is well worth it, and that’s without any of the bonus maps, challenges or the fact you will be promising cake to your friends for months.

As part of a new training protocol, this review will dissolve into internal references in three, two, o*fzzt*

My Terribly Organised Life II

It’s Been a while since the first one, so some updates.

Operating System

Home is Windows duel booting with Ubuntu, mostly in Windows since the main use for the machine is Games and Web, and since Web is Firefox, Windows means I can do everything, Linux means I have to switch to Windows for games, so it remains in Windows by default. Ubuntu is there when I need to isolate myself from the games to get some work done. But for today, there’s Bioshock.

Work is a Macbook, and so runs OS X. I no longer have a Powerbook at home :-(

Development

On OS X I use BBEdit. Windows I still – after seven years – use EditPlus. Under linux I use Kate. Under all of the above I use vim also.

I will – I maintain – one day learn how to use vim well enough as a multiple document editor to switch to it full time, Today is not that day.

Email

Email is sent from all the servers I get things at to a collection point on Cenote – my hosted machine – and there forwarded to GMail, which is now my primary email client. Between my phone, work, home and cafés, the main downside of web-applications – that you can’t access them offline – simply doesn’t apply to access to my email at the moment, and once they add Google Gears (Offline storage) to GMail, it’ll be – to a large extent – solved.

Personal Organisation

I never used Google’s Calendar site before, but work tend towards it so I linked up my accounts, and it’s become my primary organisation tool.

GCal syncs with iCal both ways thanks to Spaning Sync – Once Leopard is released, Google will probably start supporting the open Apple iCal Server stuff and this can be done nativly – and to Outlook with the Open Source Remote Calendars addon.

My Phone is an O² XDA (AKA HDC “Wizard” model) running Windows Mobile 2005 – which doesn’t quite sync to mac yet but will sync to my home Windows machine where it can sync calendars from Outlook. This is overly complicated, and I look forward to the day when I can sync all my devices from one machine, preferably a mac. My iPod also contains my calendars and contacts, again thanks to iCal.

Todo lists live on my phone, they sync with nowhere. This doesn’t work well, and I frequently forget to do things.

Data

I have a Global directory, containing Music, Documents and Projects which is rsynced to a server hosted by Bluehost, which gives 100G of space to play with for not much per month. Since I only got this a couple of months ago, I’m still rsyncing data to it, but eventually I will keep data synced across the external drive on my laptop at work (Music), my home machine (All Directories), Laptop (Documents and Projects), and development & hosting servers (Projects). I also need to add the Photos subdir to that, and automate the rsync process (rsync being done with cygterm (In conjunction with Puttycyg to replace Windows’ gods-awful command line).

If I need to access this – or any – external data, I can mount it over SSH as a drive. On linux with vfs, on OS X using macfuse, and with Windows using SFTPDrive, the latter being something I’m pretty sure should have an open source alternative, but apparently doesn’t, presumably because creating windows filesystems is apparently a headache from hell. All of these allow me to mount an external SSH server as if it were a locally connected hard drive, which is awesome.

Web

Firefox.

Also:

• Linky – Open Currently Selected Links In Tabs
• Wesabe – For uploading my bank statements. I’ll have an article about this soon.
• Firebug – The main problem I have with this now is that I can’t work without it.
• IE Tab – Until Firefox finally takes over the world and I every site works in Fx, I have this under Windows.
• Reload Every – Reload current tab every X seconds. Useful when debugging.
• FoxMarks – Syncs my bookmarks file so they’re the same from all my various browsers. Handy.

Websites

I still have an Aqwiki install which runs about a half-dozen sites – like Section.istic.net – including a private auth-only one. Comics are still being managed by an evolution of the same script I was talking about in 2004, which is now at hol.istic.net/comics. I moved from Bloglines to Google Reader a while ago – and have plans to resurrect the Aquaintances project to use Google Reader as a feed database (Meaning it will become an offline-reader for Google Reader, as well as it’s own coolness).

Also

OS X

• Sticky Windows – Turn windows unto tabs at the side of your screen,
• SSH Agent

Linux

• Screen – Under which:
  • IRSSI
  • SLRN
  • Mutt

Windows

• Putty – PuTTY makes Windows usable.
• Ultramon
• uTorrent
• AVG
• Civilization 4
• Lord of the Rings Online
• Neverwinter Nights 2
• City of Heroes
• Bioshock

Stuff I’ve never heard of

Suggestions?

Bioshock - Part One

(This review contains no plot spoilers for anything beyond the first fifteen minutes and the back of the box. It’s likely to be changed/updated when I play more of the game.)

The game starts with you underwater, watching stuff from the plane crash you just survived whizz past you. As the camera looks up, you see the dappled impressionistic maze of an oil fire on the water above, and you’re heading towards a black – and therefore clear – area within it. You surface, gasping, choking, wheezing for air, and then nothing happens for a little while, until your player realities this isn’t actually a pre-rendered cut-scene, the game really does look like this.

I’m not sure if Bioshock is the first PC game to use the new Unreal 3 engine, I know Gears of War uses it for the 360. It is absolutely magnificent. It helps that I’m running on a reasonable spec machine (which, less monitors, was less than £300), but at 1024*768, the game is utterly glorious.

The setting is an art-deco city – Rapture – built under the sea by a man called Andrew Ryan. The city was founded on the values of individualism, self worth and community spirit. Your job is to try to leave, and incidentally find out what the hell is going on.

In doing so, you get three useful things. The first is hardware in the form of weaponry. The second is magic in the form of Plasmids. The third is Adam. Adam works the way you’d expect XP to work in a normal RPG game. Wandering around the level are some apparently little girls, protected by giant monsters. When you deal with them (you don’t have to kill them) you get Adam, which you can spend on upgrading your abilities, like more damage. The bad point is the giant monsters. Nothing in the history of gaming hits as hard as these things do. They will pick you up by sticking a drill bit in you and throw you across the scenery, definitely enemies to clear a large space in the level before tackling. Fortunately, they won’t bother you unless you hit them. The first time you do so by accident (Say, for example, it opens a door and the Rocket Powered Grenade you just fired misses the Splicer and hits it) you will swear.

Also, you face the automated defense systems: turrets and CCTV. Fortunately you can hack into these if you get close enough, by means of a game of Pipemania. I have, in the last couple of days, got very good at Pipemania.

Most of the time you’re facing splicers, however, which are scary. Not in the “We can kill you” kind of way, but in the genuinely creepy kind of way. They come in various types: melee, ranged etc. But they won’t attack you generally unless they notice you, which means you get to observe them in their natural state.

Which is absolutely batshit insane.

They will mutter to themselves, bewail their lot, whistle nursery rhymes, justify themselves. On the minus side, it’s quite creepy to hear the various enemies voices echoing around the level. On the plus side, at least you know they’re there.

It’s faintly annoying that you can lay traps all over the level, change every turret to be on your side, but still when you reach for the Shiny Mcguffin Of Plot, four will have respawned behind you, and another dozen dotted around the level, but it keeps the levels populated with things you can harvest for cash.

So we move on to the story, without telling you anything about it. The story is told by means of the diary entries of inhabitants of Rapture, and by the people who have the frequency of the short-wave radio you’re carrying. You very rarely meet NPCs and never speak to them- the radio is one way – in this way Bioshock takes a leaf out of the Half-life school of design.

It’s a game of new shines on many old ideas. The classic “Kills = XP = Upgrades” from RPG-style games is tacked on, but with the twist of only one type of monster counting towards it (Which don’t respawn, obviously), and a couple of other twists I won’t mention. The upgrade system itself is interesting, you can rearrange which upgrades you’re using of any of the ones you’re purchased. Finding yourself running out of health? Swap a damage for armour. Can’t reach that ledge? Modify your plasmids a bit. You can set up traps, throw people into ceiling fans with a spring, electrocute the pool they’re standing in (And, if they’re not standing in a pool, set them on fire, then electrocute the pool they run to).

It’s not perfect. There’s a loot/inventions system that kicks in that seems distinctly half-imagined, the exact same fuzzy wave of static duration that goes over your vision whenever you pass under a water feature – from dripping tap to full waterfall, a slight apparent tendency to cling to dramatic clichés (balanced somewhats by moments of true surprise in the plot). The introduction of things like Plasmids without explaining what they are (even vaguely). But most of these are minor flaws in an exceptional masterpiece.

Oh, and one major flaw. You remember the thing where I “don’t like being treated like a pirate?”/journal/2007/03/24/Piracy Bioshock uses the new version of Sony’s Securom technology, which implements DRM on the game I bought in the store. I can – after many people complained to Take2 (who publish the game) – now activate it on this computer Five Whole Times! Unless I upgrade the hardware, which I can also do Five Whole Times. It’s lucky I didn’t spend forty quid on a game that they can restrict what I can do with my computer…

...except, wait…

I need not tell you that the pirates do not have to activate their copies of Bioshock, that they aren’t limited to how they use their computers. Take2 have apparently promised the developers that the activation will be deactivated at some point in the future. Also on the geeky-DRM style of things, various people claim that the Securom 3 system uses a rootkit, take with usual grain of condiment of choice. End technical rant, back to game stuff.

What haven’t I mentioned?

Oh, the sound. The sound is glorious, also. Echoy hallways, reflections of old 40s singles while you fill things full of lead, the whistling of the splicers and the creepy duel-tone singing of the little sisters.

This last paragraph contains a tiny spoiler, but not for the plot, just for one of the weapons you get later in the game. It is there because it’s just too awesome not to mention:

You get the ability to fire bees at people. And they are there, covered in bees. First time I used it, I shot a group of slicers from a way away, switched to my shotgun and killed them while they were swiping at the insects. One of them was carrying a cup of coffee. I like my coffee like I like my first person shooter games.

Covered in bees.

Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks by Christopher Brookmyre

I like this book.

This book is a book where one of the main characters is a geeky Browncoat – tautology, yes – it has a Duke Nukem Forever reference (A game now in production for ten years). And it’s about unsinkable rubber ducks. Well, kind of. It’s about mysticism and science and geekery and provability and people and research and jam and history and woo. Also, it’s funny in traditional Brookmyre style, it’s scottish in tone and language, and it will make you want to kill the author – but in a good way – on no less than three occasions, possibly more.

I like Brookmyre’s books, you should try one to see if you like them too. This is a good one for that purpose. All the characters save one are new – the narrator is a reoccurring from previous books – but you don’t need to know his history, so that’s fine.

Debugging Ajax

One of the problems with Ajax is that the server side of it becomes invisible. You send a request to the server with an ajax request object, and you can get output from the JS by firebug, or alert boxes, or whatever, but for the script running on the other side, there's no visible place for the output.

There are many ways around it, but my current favourite is Growl.

Growl is a notification system for OS X, where programs send messages to the central demon, and it pops up a little dialog message that eventually fades away. They're nice for debug, so I have this:

<?PHP
require_once 'Net/Growl.php';

$growl =& Net_Growl::singleton('Net_Growl', array('Messages'), '[Password]');
$growl->_options['host'] = '[MyIP]';

$GLOBALS['growl'] = $growl;

function debug($message){
    $backtrace = debug_backtrace();
    
    array_shift($backtrace);
    
    if (is_array($message) || is_object($message)){
        $message = print_r($message,1);
    }
    
    $title = sprintf("Debug - %s - %d", $backtrace[0]['function'], $backtrace[0]['line']);
    

    $GLOBALS['growl']->notify('Messages', $title, $message);
}

Pancake Day

Today, I did this:

I made pancakes.

I used to be terrible at pancakes – Ben always made them – but this is how you make pancakes:

Fail. Lots.

You need a decent sized frying pan – non-stick – a ladle and some batter. The batter is made out of some flour, a few splashes of milk, some eggs, optionally cinnamon, vanilla extract and sugar. The amounts of these vary from person to person, but I usually start with about 300g flour, a few eggs, and add milk and whisk until it’s fairly thin (liquid rather than sludge).

Heat your frying pan lots. Add a very small amount of oil. Ladle some batter into the middle of the frying-pan and marble-madness the pan until it stops spreading easily (this should, ideally, be almost exactly as it reaches the edges of the pan, if not, adjust amount in ladle or your expectations). Allow to cook for a little while as the shiny un-cooked batter parts turn into duller cooked batter parts as far as they are going to, and then flip.

To flip a pancake, either:

1. Remove the pan from the heat. Make a rapid movement down with the pan, whilst pushing it slightly away from you, so that the pancake has a “spin” on it as it exits the pan. Then catch it in the middle of the frying pan, not the edge. Or…
2. Get someone else to do (I) Or…
3. Use the slice. You coward.

Retrieve the pancake from the floor/ceiling/wall/cat, and/or leave it in the pan for a half a minute to a minute to brown on the other side. Place on a plate underneath another plate to keep them warm. This doesn’t work terribly well, so eat them soon.

Terrible hardship.

Always, and this is important, remember three important lessons:

1. The cook who doesn’t reserve some pancakes doesn’t get any pancakes
2. The first three pancakes you make on any day will be useless.
3. If a teflon pan catches fire, it’s not non-stick anymore. In fact, it is a Stick pan.

These lessons have been hard earned, learn from my failures.

Using a Samsung Z500 with a Powerbook with Vodafone Live over Bluetooth

Gosh, isn’t networking easier when you just plug things in? Ah well.

You will require:

• The “Generic 3G Scripts” from Ross Barkman’s home page
• Your phone to be connected to Vodafone Live.
• A Powerbook with bluetooth.

Download the scripts, unsit them and dump them in /Library/Modem Scripts

The easy bit is getting the Powerbook to talk to the Z500. You turn on Bluetooth on both and then “Setup Bluetooth Device” from the Bluetooth system preferences.

You’ll need to tap in the security number the Powerbook gives you into the Samsung.

The settings are as follows:

Phone Number/APN: “internet”
Username: “web”
Password: “web”

(note, these are for the UK Vodafone Live service. Ross Barkman’s site has listings for many others on his site. He is a god within our midsts and should be bought beer)

The modem type is “Generic 3G CID #1”.

That’s it, it should just work now.

Max Width and the mutant GreaseMonkey

GreaseMonkey is a Firefox Extension that allows you to run arbitrary Javascript files on pages from your client. This is cool, because you can do stuff to pages after they’re downloaded to make them work, or cooler, or both.

There are a large number of greasemonkey scripts already written and various people are rewriting more. (Actually, once my NDA runs out – and if my ex-CEO has given up on the idea – I may rewrite the fabled BrowserAngel project in GM)

So, with all that in mind, I’ve fixed something that really annoys me in a few sites I use, and have solved this problem with GreaseMonkey.

One of the problems with most aggregators which display more posts on one page is one of styling. If a single one of the feeds you can see puts in an oversized image, either the entire page/frame – and all the posts on it – is extended somewhere into the far reaches of horizontal-scrollbar-land, or just that post is, with the effect that you see the scrollbars for the rest of the page too. Also, you are probably going to have to scroll around looking for content. And it’s fugly.

One solution to this is the max-width CSS element. If you drop something like max-width: "100%"; into your CSS Style or userContent.css, it’ll force all images to have a maximum width of the area available. The down sides are that either everyone in the world needs to put it in their CSS files – which is unlikely – or you put it into your browser defaults. The latter causes it also to affect unwanted things, like if you view an image on its own there is no way to force it to display at actual size.

Max Width, btw, doesn’t work in IE 1 though 6. Don’t know about 7 yet.

My first solution to this was a bookmarklet which iterated though all the images on the page and made them all max-width: 100%, which works perfectly.

Here it is: MaxWidthifier

The downside is that Bloglines, which is one of the two places I have this problem has a frames interface, the Bookmarklet doesn’t work, because it only applies to the top level frame, not the containing frames. (The site with the problem is LiveJournal. Actually, most of the feeds with this brokenness on my Bloglines feed are syndications of LiveJournals & LJ Communities, but I digress).

So I’ve packaged the whole thing up into a GreaseMonkey user script, which does apply to the framesets, and defaulted it to apply to Livejournal and Bloglines.

Here is the Greasemonkey Script

Making the Lexmark Z515 work under Debian Linux

Lexmark printers are notorious for being crapper than a crap thing on St Craps day, whilst playing Craps in a pile of crap on the planet “Crap” within the solar-system “Crap”, especially under Linux.

Nevertheless, I bought one. Because it was cheap.

(It does, I should warn potential followers in my footsteps, come with a half-filled colour cartridge and no black. Factor in another 15 (The same cost as the printer, fact fans) for a full black cartridge. Cheap printers are a false economy. Lesson ends)

Much of the work of getting this all working under Debian has already been done, and much of this article cribs liberally from the Gentoo Wiki article for the same thing.

These instructions are for Debian Sarge (That’s ‘Testing’) and so should also work with Ubuntu.

This is what you do:

Preparation:

(I love Debian)

Grab the Real Linux Drivers from Lexmark:

http://downloads.lexmark.com/cgi-perl/downloads.cgi?ccs=229:1:0:389:0:0&emeaframe=&fileID=1151

Installation:

Create a new directory, and put the file you downloaded above inside it. Lexmark’s drivers all extract to the current directory.

Be inside that directory

Bypass their horrible “auto install” script by running:

and then extract install.tar.gz (which also goes to the current directory)

You should now have a whole host of useless files and a couple of RPMs (Because we all know that everyone uses deadrat, don’t we? sigh) so we turn them into Debian packages using Alien:

And then “dpkg -i” on both of them to install. Make sure the printer is plugged in and turned on, and then run:

followed by:

Which should say something like:

direct z600:/dev/usb/lp0 "Lexmark Lexmark 510 Series" "Lexmark Printer"

Cups

Setting up cups is somewhat beyond the scope of this article, but what the hell.

Default install of cups doesn’t let anyone outside the local machine access the interface. If this is cool, great, otherwise edit the /etc/cupsd.conf file to let in anyone in 192.168.* or whatever your network’s on.

Cups interface is on http://localhost:631 (It’d be useful if the package mentioned that while it was installing, or something) the admin password is your root password (the username is ‘root’) so don’t, whatever you do, ever access CUPS admin over an Internet connection until you change that behaviour. It’s a stupid bloody default anyway.

So. Click “Administration”, “Add Printer”, Fill in stuff, “Lexmark” (Use the top one, rather than “USB #1 Lexmark” or whatever), Make is – duh – Lexmark, Model is the only one it gives you, Print a test page to make sure it’s working, if it isn’t, then “tail -f /var/log/cups/*log” to see why.

Have A Lot Of Fun.