Aquarionics

About five years ago, I was watching an F1 parade and I had a Grand Idea. I would build a game based on the idea of being an F1 manager, only with more interesting things, like alien technology. The USP would be that on a saturday the people in your league would race, and you would be able to make decisions on the fly as to your strategy and tactics. I did some diagrams and thoughts around this, build up a prototype, plugged some numbers in, rewrote it all in OO PHP, buried it in soft peat for a couple of years, realised I wasn’t interested enough in F1 to make a game about it, even with alien technology. It was called Racr, and it would have had a new name before release. The codename before Racr was “Escape” because it’s close to F1.

Three years ago, I was signing up to a webhost in order to take advantage of their “100GB Web Space!” promotion to solve my backup problem. My backup problem – at the time – being the reasonably traditional “I don’t have any backups”. Part of the package was a domain, which I needed to choose on the spot. By this method, I bought the domain PiracyInc.com, and my mind started to whirr a bit.

I took some of the files from Racr, filed the serial numbers off, plugged in some pirates and monkeys, and had a better idea. Piracy Inc. Now, mentioning projects on here has been a death knell for them for a while, but with any luck this will stop here. Having written a couple of abstract scripts and some ideas, I started coding it about three years ago in Django, because it was New and Cool. Unfortunatly, the webhost I was with for the domain didn’t support Django very well, and I spent most of my development time dealling with differences between my local environment and the live one, Cpanal funtimes, reasons why fcgi had broken today and, on top of this, learning a brand new envrironment which was rapidly drifting towards 1.0 and kept on rendering the foundations of what I was trying to learn obsolete. I could have stuck with a single version, but a) I was trying to learn how to do this, and learning the Wrong Way to do it was a waste of time, and b) I was trying to build For The Ages, and doing it in a way I *knew* I would have to rewrite quite soon was pointless too. A lot of this was because development tended to be in bursts of a few days every month or so, but in the end I spent more time fighting the development environment than coding things, and gave up.

At the end of January last year I sat down and Did Stuff. I wanted to write this thing, and what I know how to write is PHP web applications. I’ve used most of the PHP frameworks, and I’ve got major problems with most of them. Zend pulls things out of thin air too often, Code Igniter has a Mahoosive God Object problem (They do not, obviously, see it as such), and all the others tend to have a 4mb footprint before you can write “Hello World”, so I decided to do this freestyle, building an MVC framework as I went. Obviously, for a full professional project, I’d highly recommend using an existing framework and staying within it, because the flexibility and things you may lose by doing this are ofset by the fact that multiple people have to work on it and understand it. However, I also believe that it’s important to understand where the problems with writing a framework are, and the line between a design decision and a pile of crap. Actually trying to do it all yourself gives you a far better perspective of why you wouldn’t want to.

Within six hours of starting the new version, I had decided to split out the framework into a different project, which is called Plank (Because it’s what a game about Pirates is built on). It’s designed to be light, flexible, and include the ability to use almost any Zend Framework plugin. I suggest you don’t even think about using it, it’s not even close to stable or ready.

Anyway, so I’ve been working on that, and some of it has been fun and interesting. A couple of weeks ago I had a problem with suicidal ex-captains shooting themselves in the head, and yesterday I attempted to rebuild an economy from scratch.

49% of my current constituancy voted four years ago. They voted for Labour, well, enough of them did.

58.9% of my current constituancy voted yesterday. Enough of them also voted for Labour for Meg to keep her chair, but it took ages to find this out. Mostly, it took ages because the polling stations were unable to cope with the demand.

Unable to cope.

40% of the people in this area could not be bothered to walk, put six ticks in six boxes, and decide who would help rule the country on their behalf, nor their local council. That’s quite good.

Why is it good? Well, with 60% of the area voting, there were multi-hour queues and people being unable to vote because of the cut-off time. Imagine what would happen if the entire area gave a fuck? Where would we be now?

Because of the fact that 10% more people gave a fuck, we didn’t get either General or Local election results until 15:00, at which point we learnt that Labour had won the whole shooting-match for our local area. Independent Candidate Denny de la Haye, who campaigned on a platform of direct democracy, got 96 votes including mine and his. Another candidate was down under the party alias of “Direct Democracy (Communist) Party” got 202 votes, and I can’t help but wonder if some of that is from people who meant to vote for Denny. OTOH the member standing for the Communist League got 102 votes by themselves, so possibly not. Hackney’s non-major-party list appears somewhat oversubscribed, with 12 different possible MPs to choose from, 5 of which I’d never heard of before I saw the final candidate list.

(Yes, we had two different communist factions standing against each other. No, I do not feel the need to make a joke about them working together.)

Generally the entire election has been one large advert for Proportional Representation, unless you’re in one of the top two parties, and even one of those has seen the light.

Talking about seeing the light, Barking and Dagenham cleaned their council of BNP members, and a record turnout saw Nick Griffin personally told to fuck off where he came from.

In the end, it appears a lot of the people who said “I agree with Nick” went and bottled it in the booth, leaving LibDems short on seats, but it also gave a new set of people an appreciation for the online echo-chamber: Sadly it doesn’t extend to the real world every time.

And finally, the ghost writer who wrote Danny Dyer’s column for Zoo magazine got Danny Dyer some kind of record for worst advice in an ‘advice’ column – a hotly-contested award. The magazine has a) made a donation to Woman’s Aid, b) Apologised completely for the entire massive-ratings-boosting encounter, c) Stopped paying Danny Dyer not to write a column with his name and image on it, d) Pointed the army of justy angry critics at a man who is guilty of allowing someone else to write under his name and, basically, said “Go, sic him!”

V O T E

Originally uploaded by swanksalot

If you complain,

but don’t engage

when you can,

you are part of the problem,

and your opinion,

while I respect it,

is invalid.

You can spoil your ballot

or vote for the bastards I don’t like,

I don’t really care

(Except I do, just a bit)

but if you’re not counted,

then you don’t count.

On my home from work last week, I went via Asda.

Specifically, I went via Asda to pick up for that evening, milk and bread.

I bought some food for that evening, a George Foreman Grill to replace the broken one my brother bought me for christmas many years ago, Green Apple vodka, coke, lemonade, elixir of holy hand grenade, pizza, duck, pasta, a kitchen timer, a pizza cutter, seven pairs of socks,

and a small foam axe:

I am aware that there is a rule of “Do not go shopping when you are hungry”. I’m pretty sure I need to expand that to “Do not go shopping when you’re distractable” or possibly just “Do not go shopping when you are me”.

Depite my great and brand new phone and its wonderous open-sorcery, I still don’t hate Apple.

I mean, I assume my new phone is great, as I write this it still hasn’t arrived.

I said, at the end of that article, that the choice of whether I wanted to waste my battery life is mine, the choice of what I install on my computer is mine. This is because I am a geek, and it matters to me.

I actually believe that there is not a right to tinker. In fact, having worked Desktop Support for a while in both professional and power-user contexts, I am firmly of the opinion that the right to tinker by someone who “knows better” than the guy who set up the system is, sometimes, to be nuked. From orbit. Twice.

In fact, the concept of giving a barely-computer-literate a machine that will work one way, can do the things it should do and also let them change the wallpaper, is a Very Good Idea, because it would minimise the amount of time I, or someone like me, spent on the phone or in a dusty back-office attempting to work out how to revirginise the PC in front of me.

(My favourite, ever, was a machine with a Windows 2000 install where they had infected it with a couple of buckets of spyware, and then ran out of diskspace as the porn-bot-net it was running filled up the hard drive. They had then seen the “Compress Drive” option when looking for ways of gaining space back. As a result, you had a PC running out of memory, where all its swap files needed to be decompressed in memory before access. It ran like almsot frozen blackstrap molasses)

One of the favourite metaphors surrounding the closedness of the iPhone & iPad ecosystems (For those of you playing at home, the iPad and iPhone can only get software via the “App Store”, which required apple vet every piece of software available. The vetting process is currently inconsistant, which is bad, but there is no other way to install stuff, which people see as worse) is that of the car engine, and how this turns the computer industry from the old days where you could see where all the bits went, into the modern car industry where everything is hermatically sealled under a plastic case. The complaint is that the barrier to tinker with your stuff is now higher.

I can accept some of this. I have been tinkering with computers for longer than I can remember. one of my earliest memories is crawling along the carpet to behind the sofa, and pressing the magic button on the white thing that made the numbers go to zero. This – I found out many years later – was the tape counter on a Commadore 64. My first computer was this same C64, where the entire interface *was* a Basic input shell. Shift Run-Stop, Press Play on Tape. I can see how people would say that this meant more people would become computer programmers when they grew up, but I think we’ve already passed that. With PCs up until Windows 95 and the Rise of the Mac, you *had* to learn the basic concepts of computer command lines to use them, be it the ability to type “cd games\Doom” “doom2″ or the inner workings of the config.sys file on the boot disk you created for when you wanted to play Theme Park.

The rise of GUIs pushed a lot of the people who would have become programmers, I think, to having their first experience of source code to be HTML. It just shifts a bit, and if it means that people do not have to understand how a computer works in order to use it, that’s possibly even better. To continue the car simile for a bit, it’s not as if the rise of BMW-type sealled engine blocks entirely removed the people who know how your car works. I’m pretty sure that the people with the mental tendancy to tinker with code aren’t going to be put off forever because their phone or their video player doesn’t compile things for them, as they’ll gravitate to the ones that do, and if it means that I can know my non-existant Uncle Martin has bought an iPad and I won’t be spending the 27^th December scrubbing spyware from it, so much to the better.