Aquarionics

I went to Gamecamp. It’s becoming quite common in reports of this event to wax lyrical about the location for a little while first, so I’ll do that. It was held at 3Rooms (I’m sixth from the left in that photo), which is a PR venue belonging to Sony’s PlayStation division. Effectively, it’s where they take journalists to demo new products.

It’s pretty.

Level 1 is white. It’s a large loft-style space, split into areas with screens and curtains and shelves, with textures and soft furnishings everywhere, bright splashes of colour, Huge Sony Bravia TVs everywhere (all with PS3s attached) sunken sofas, shelves full of interesting-looking tat, bright and airy and absolutely glorious.

Level 2 is black. It’s a dark bar with mirrored surfaces and a (non-alcoholic) bar, with a raised area surrounded by sofas and a coffee table with board games. There are huge jars of Jelly-Belly scattered around, and a large projection screen with a PS3 attached.

Level 3 is green. It’s is a roof garden with views over central London, wooden tables and chairs, sofas and plants. Relaxing and bright.

The entire building is exactly where I would live if I didn’t have limitations of money. I am not in any way kidding, it’s wonderful, and designed specifically for me.

Enough about the venue.

Reports about the event are around from mssrs Gillen and Curran, and are entirely accurate and worthwhile. It was an “Unconference” style thing, in the style of Foo & BarCamp and other such events. I ended up going to a session on “Indy tabletop RPG games are flourishing. We’re not competing with computer games. Really. We mean it. See? They don’t scare us with their billion dollar budgets. Not even a little” and another on how to play a russian card game called Durak. After that I kind of got distracted by Echochrome and Rock Band. I went to a session on “The Revolution” in which under-21 gamers got shot, the Wii didn’t, and mandatory installs did. The sessions I did go to were fun, and though them I’ve become more interested in indy roleplaying games – since that was the aim of my first session, that’s probably a good thing – including Dogs In The Vineyard, a game about Mormon cowboys. I should set one of these up at some point. Also there was the inventor of the game Baron Munchausen, which various people in Cambridge were playing while I was Maelfrothing a couple of weeks back. The entire event was wonderful, and I look forward to the next.

The (video) games that I played:

Echochrome, upon which I’ve splattered forth fanboyism before is quite good, but doesn’t live up to the idea. The controls are a little slow – often you’ll fail a level because you simply can’t rotate the screen fast enough – and imperfect (Sometimes you’ll connect up a ledge but it doesn’t connect because it needed to be connected at the edge 90^o instead). It may have been that the demo came from early code, though. Either way, since I have neither a PS3 or a PSP, it’s all distinctly academic.

Rock Band Rocks. There is little more I have to say. I spent more time on guitar than anything else, simply because there were two of them. Drumming is hard, singing is easy, YMMV. Guitar is the most polished of the experiences, fairly obviously, but the ability to declare both players as lead guitar fails on 90% of the library as it simply randomly assigns one to be the bass line if it only has one guitar track. I sang Creep, by Radiohead. I do that a lot.

GTA4 also rocks, but you possibly don’t need me to tell you that bit.

I didn’t expect Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson to be the new London Mayor. I hoped Ken would carry on, because I live in (the outer edges of) central London, and everything Ken’s done over the last eight years to join up the transport network has improved the live of me, personally. I am a fan of the congestion charge, and that it isn’t on account, because it means taking the car into London means you have to do admin, and so people don’t do it. It’s a simple tactic, but it’s made the transport network work, as the buses can get around.

I can’t help but wonder if Ken Livingstone would have been expelled had he remained Independent as he was when he first got elected. Whilst the righteous anger of the London suburb belt and South London waxed wroth, I’m not sure it could not have been overcome had Ken not also had to face the backlash against Labour’s first decade. The mayoral position, for all that Ken is a card-carrying classic breed Labour member, has never really been a party political one, until now, where the hopes and dreams of the Conservative Party now rest with the haystack who walks like a man. The London Mayor is now officially a beacon of politics for the rest of the country, where Ken’s strengths were always where he was just trying to get London to work properly. Capital though it is, the idea of my local government becoming a national issue, requestioning every little bikeshed decision to see if the Conservatives could possibly be allowed to run the country again.

I’d like to think people have a long enough memory to realise the parallels between now and ~1995, before we swapped the men with the blue ties for the men with the red ties, and tried something new. However, until either the Liberal Democrats tie their act together with a neat little bow and start actually getting press for policies, or another political party is formed somehow; we’re just going to flick back to blue in a couple of years mostly because we don’t like red anymore.

I’m also – too many paragraphs beginning with “I” – not a fan of a number of Boris’ policies. The idea of building 50k affordable homes is a nice one, but given that he’s mayor of London and not, say, the Home Counties, where does he intend to build them? And with what money? As I understand it, any excess budget is – rightly – going to make sure the city doesn’t collapse under the weight of the Olympics; during the run up to which the administration will be running their reelection campaign, a fact which amuses me. He wants to put the congestion charge on account also, which misses the point somewhat. The money the congestion charge is – £5 to bring your car into the centre of London – isn’t much more than a token, really. It’s more the fact that you have to pay on the day or within a few days. It’s administrative faff, which puts people off more than the charge does, otherwise the city-boy types will just set up a direct debit to take the money out and ignore the thing completely. The reason the congestion charge is important to me, personally, is because it means that buses are suddenly able to get from A to B without a traffic jam, meaning they’re a viable form of commute. I’m in favour of people who actually have to go into London with a van and cannot justify a “Fleet” account (And here I mean things like plumbers, rather than those who cannot be bothered to drive to the nearest tube station. They can pay for parking with the money they save by living far from where they work. I’ve little sympathy for the people who complain that they cannot have their outer-suburbs cheaper housing/rent and keep their inflated London salary) getting a discount or something, but the point of the exercise is not so much to charge people to get into London. This is not to say that the outer-London transport network doesn’t need a great deal of expansion, it does, but inner London transport was actively broken and the money to fix outer London did not go – as the suburbs appear to think – to upgrade the Jubilee line with gold plated fire alarms, but to bailing out the private companies that almost caused the entire underground network to go bankrupt.

None of which is actually Boris’ fault, but his campaign policies did seem to mostly focus on capitalising of feeding money into the areas the previous administration didn’t have enough money to give to, balanced against mass-populist whitewash. Neither of which contained any reference to where they were going to get the money to spend on this thing. What’s the betting the rise in my – already high – council tax is higher this year than last?

If I sound panicked about this, it’s because almost all of the policies thus far explained are either going to require more money from taxpayers, or a poorer quality of transport inside the capital, or another inconvenience for me; all of which starts to drain on my ability to remain living in the city. And if I, an engineer with a reasonably good job, cannot afford to live on the outskirts of the city I work in, something somewhere is drastically wrong.

All of which ignores the other issue, which is Johnson himself. For – more than once – referring to Africans as “Picaninnies”, for being banned from various other cities any other person would have been shot at dawn. I see Johnson’s election as a triumph of celebrity over talent or policy or politics, as much as Schwarzenegger’s election was, and I’d prefer for this city, and this country, to be less of a laughing-stock than it already is.

Ideally, we’d also win the cricket, and while I’m wishing I’d like a pony.

London has elected Boris Johnson mayor of London.

This is Not Good. However, I am – from now – reserving judgement until he actually manages to screw up. Clock starts in three and a third hours.

New design is New, and is light and airy and calm, which is nice. It’s also simple, which is even nicer. I’ve still got to fix the right hand column, which is a bit texty and stark. I’ve also got to fix my admin system, which is displaying all text boxes at 40 characters wide, which is annoying. New things include the replaced Gallery (Well, part of it. Actual viewing of sets and pictures is still handed over to Flickr, but that’ll change when I get another burst of arsedness)

As I mentioned, I have bought GTA4, and a 360 to play it on. I fail at resistance to shiny. However, I haven’t had much of a chance to play on it due to going places and doing things. I shall fix this now.

I went to GameCamp London, which was fun. There are photos on Flickr and in the gallery.

1. Thursday, 22:00: Accidentally buy an XBox 360
2. Decide it needs to talk to the network (before playing any games on it)
3. Current Network: Desktop (“Tsunami”) & 360 plugged into Belkin Wireless Router, laptop and Wii talk to it remotely. Cable modem is upstream on Router.
4. 360 cannot phone home due to closed ports.
5. Open ports
6. All ports not documented.
7. Fuckit(1): 360 in DMZ
8. 360 can talk to home for twenty minutes, then cannot anymore.
9. Reboot router
10. Reboot modem
11. Another 20 minutes
12. Fucket(2): Play GTA4 for a while, ignore the network. (Friday, 02:00)
13. Saturday, 06:00: Up early, decide to fix network.
14. Fiddle around with ports for a while, decide the route is at fault.
15. Attempt to reroute everything though just a hub.
16. Realise that takes away the single point of entry for the cable modem, which can therefore not connect.
17. Also: No DHCP server. Things complain at me.
18. Fortunatly, I have a spare firewall box (“Boilingpoint”) which still has IPCop on it from when it was my firewall in Bedford (and, before that, in Reading and Cambridge)
19. Boilingpoint has a network card and a PCI ADSL modem. On-board motherboard has no network. Turn out boxes of hardware looking for spare network card to use for upstream connection.
20. Fail. Find old desktop machine whose motherboard does have onboard networking, and cobble together bits of it and Boilingpoint until it works. (07:00)
21. (07:10) Machine stops booting (Fans spin, nothing happens), fiddle with connections and reseat ram to fix it.
22. (07:20) Machine stops turning on at all.
23. Transfer everything back to Boilingpoint, which at least boots, for fucks sake.
24. (07:45) Get tea, shower, email, clothes.
25. Find spare network card in sock drawer.
26. Install network card into IPCop
27. Attempt to reconfigure IPCop as GREEN/RED instead of GREEN/RED
28. Discover I can’t remember the root password for boilingpoint (Installed ~2003 and has Just Worked since then)
29. Decide to screw this for a game of sontarians, and install Smoothwall instead (IPCops website is down. Brand loyalty is strong within me. Plus, Neuro’s been recommending Smoothwall instead forever)
30. Realise I can’t install Smoothwall for the same reason I can’t bypass root on boilingpoint: because the reason it became a firewall box was that the PS/2 ports don’t work anymore, so cannot access it locally.
31. I don’t have a USB keyboard.
32. Plug the hard drive and network cards from Boilingpoint into Tsunami (Desktop) and install Smoothwall onto hard drive on that
33. Transfer everything back over.
34. This doesn’t work due to hard-drive naming.
35. Cannot SSH into new box because default smoothwall install doesn’t have SSH.
36. Cannot access web interface either. Don’t know why.
37. Resolve to borrow a USB keyboard from someone.
38. Now have to leave for Gamecamp London. Do so (10:00)
39. Gamecamp is awesome. I’ll write more about it soon.
40. After Gamecamp, go to party. After party, borrow USB keyboard from friend. Get home (02:00)
41. Discover that Boilingpoint predates having USB ports on the motherboard.
42. Search for PCI USB card we used to put a USB ADSL modem onto boilingpoint before we got the PCI modem.
43. Fail
44. Swear. Go to bed.
45. Have another thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat, and didn’t get up until the following morning.
46. This morning: Decide to fix this once and for all.
47. Search for ages. Find USB card in box with university diploma in it, on top of a book case.
48. Repress momentary flash of optimism.
49. Install PCI card, configure Smoothwall
50. Access web interface.
51. Configure SSH!
52. Configure DHCP!
53. Connection to cable modem (RED) doesn’t work.
54. Swap network card roles a bit to see if it is a driver issue.
55. Isn’t.
56. More tea.
57. Remember that ex-NTL Virgin Media customers will still suffer from the fact that once Virgin have a MAC address for the connecting machine, they won’t accept a connection from anything else.
58. Put network back together. Access interwebs.
59. Discover that Smoothwall corp count MAC spoofing as a premium fucking feature, not to be fucking included with the free fucking distrifuckingbution.
60. Am a little put out by this.
61. Find out how Smoothwall works a bit, and hack the config file to run ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:11:22:33:44:55 to set the mac address when the RC script sources the file.
62. There are more elegant solutions than this, including paying for the software.
63. Get a DHCP address!
64. Get a connection!
65. GET THE INTERWEBS!
66. Boot Xbox 360. Remember the Xbox 360? This is a song about Xboxes.
67. Cannot connect to XBox Live.
68. headdesk
69. headdesk
70. headdesk
71. Find a guide to opening up all the required ports to make an Xbox 360 work though Smoothwall
72. Assign the open ports to a static DHCP record
73. Xbox refuses to pick up the DHCP record.
74. Cut all electricity to the network, TV & surrounds and everything for a while.
75. Bring up everything in the right order.
76. Xbox still picks up a standard DHCP address. Same one, in fact.
77. Give in and move all the port forwarding to the address it wants anyway.
78. Connect to XBox Live.
79. Play GTA4.
80. Get stuck.
81. Write up all this.

1. Hate technology.