Lord d'Eath's Stuff

Once again I'm typing this from the train, since the Cardiff -> London journey is painfully long and boring.  At least this leg of it isn't too late - a three-hour trip around midnight is the worst.  Yes, it's that time again: time for another Windows Live Session.  Pre-event details of today's programme have been somewhat thin on the ground, but that just leaves me with more to write about on the way back and that will keep me at least slightly occupied, so no doubt further down this post will be a pseudo-update written on the way back.  I say pseudo-update because I won't actually be able to post this to the 'net until I get home, by which time I will have already written the second part, so no one other than me will notice it being written in two sessions, apart from the fact that it will read totally differently - not least because the frequency of typos in my writing increase dramatically at that sort of time.  Not that I'm perfect now, of course - I just managed to save this document as "blogpsot.txt" - but there is a much greater liklihood of the existence of errors later on.

Anyway, on to possibly more interesting matters... A lot has happened since my last reasonable-length post and now I have the unenviable task of trying to recall it and transcribe it into a hopefully comprehensible format.  I can tell you now that there is no chance in hell of anything I write about for the rest of this half of the post being in any kind of logical order - you will just have to read about it in the order I decide to write it.  It certainly saves me a lot of effort

Firstly, seeing as it'll be mentioned and utilised throughout the rest of this post quite heavily, I imagine, I have written myself a nice (yet fairly basic) gallery application for this website.  None of it is particularly pretty - and don't even think about asking me for the code so you can use it on your own site; the admin control panel for it is almost non-existent: I much prefer to avoid writing much of an ACP and instead just use phpMyAdmin for most control, with any ACP being reserved solely for tasks that would be difficult or otherwise time-consuming to achieve manually - but it works quite nicely, I think.  Thanks to PHP's EXIF extension I am able to have it extract a lot of interesting information from photographs I add to the gallery, such as the make and model of the camera that took the photo, etc.  ...Well I think it's interesting information, at least.  It also allows me to extract the thumbnail of the photo if the camera stored one, which saves a bit of processor time generating one with PHP itself.  As such I'm likely to link to a whole album on the gallery instead of adding clickable thumbnails in the post itself.  We'll see how things go - it's definitely interesting, anyway.

On the subject of additions and/or changes to this site, you may have noticed that there is another section to the sidebar on the right-hand side of this page detailing my "DC:X Status".  This is simply indicating whether or not I'm currently playing Dark Century: X - the Neverwinter Nights persistent world I have been playing on for the best part of three years (not continuously, you understand - I have to stop to sleep occasionally).  It merely checks the DC:X Players Online page and if it sees any of my characters in the list it indicates that I'm online and which character(s) I'm currently using.  Having said "characters" it only recognises two of my characters - Frin Antin (my rogue/fighter/shadowdancer halfling) and Vilmar Di'ren (cleric/paladin/wizard elf), though I very very rarely use any of the others so it's hardly a problem.  It's also my first practical use of AJAX (that's Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, not the cleaning product).  AJAX is, for those of you who don't know, basically a combination of technologies that, together, allow for web sites to be updated without having to reload the page.  GMail (sorry, that's Google Mail in the UK, thanks to a stupid trademark dispute..) was one of the first well known applications to utilise it and is widely attributed to kick-starting a wave of web sites using; some for useful purposes, some just because they could (and, arguably, shouldn't - it has a number of drawbacks if used incorrectly, but you can read more about those in the Wikipedia article I linked to above). Since the players online web page that has to be referenced is on a remote server (which, in turn, contacts another remote server), the loading times for it can be a few seconds, so if the PHP script that generates pages for this site was to retrieve that information itself it would add a number of seconds to the page load time, leading to pages taking anywhere up to five seconds or so to be generated - and that's before they're sent to your browser for rendering.  I thought that this delay was totally unacceptable so I just added it with AJAX: once the page has been loaded your browser will fire off a request for the data and process it appropriately; in the meantime you are able to continue reading the page or navigating away as you wish.  Seamless.

Pagination has also been added fairly recently (that's those page numbers above/below the list of posts on the main page) so all the bizarre posts I made years ago are now available for your viewing, uh, pleasure...  They aren't very interesting and don't make a hell of a lot of sense so it's probably best to ignore them, but the feature is there should you wish to use it.  There's nothing more to say about that, I don't think.

I've just signed up for 360 Voice which allows my Xbox 360 to write its own blog.  Isn't technology amazing these days?  It's currently only accessible at http://www.360voice.com/blog.asp?tag=Zweiblumen but I plan to syndicate it onto this website sometime soon, I just haven't had time yet.  I only registered on Thursday and have been too busy with exams and so on since then to write the required scripts to copy its contents to this site's database.  Shouldn't be too long away, though.

Speaking of exams I've had three and as such have one left, which is on Thursday afternoon.  It's maths, but assuming I only need to attain 40% to pass the module I've already passed.  The two courseworks I've completed were worth 50% together and I got around 90% on average between them, so that's 45% give or take.  No need to panic, therefore, which is good, as most of the module sucks pretty badly.  After that I apparently have a few months of doing not a great deal which is good.  Haven't yet decided exactly how I will spend that time but I'm sure I'll find something to do.

It occurs to me that it has been so long since I last made a decent post here that any photographs I add to the gallery and mention here will actually span two cameras.  I bought a new digital camera over Easter for about £250 (including 1GB memory card which I'll mention in a moment).  It's a Panasonic Lumix LZ-2, which sports a 5 Megapixel sensor, some kind of funky "optical image stabiliser" which really does help to reduce blurring of images, a pretty crazy battery life (I've taken well over 200 photos on it so far, and have yet to change/recharge the two 2500mAh AAs I put in it when I bought it).  The feature that really makes it rather cool, though, is the 6x optical zoom (which combines with the digital zoom to give an overall zoom of 24x, but no one sane cares about digital zoom).  Need I say more?  Cameras at this price rarely have an optical zoom above 3x, so having one with a 6x zoom is pretty impressive.  So therefore some photos will have been taken with that, and some will have been taken with the old Fujifilm FinePix A210.

And about that card: it looks like a standard 1GB Secure Digital (SD) card, but it can be folded up to produce a very basic USB connector, removing the need for complex and annoying memory card readers.  The only real problem with it is that it is a bit wide, so if you have your USB sockets aligned serially (i.e. - - - -) as opposed to in parrallel (i.e. =) you find that the SD card can easily occupy space that would otherwise be needed by the adjacent ports, so an extension cable is handy there.  Thumbs up to Sandisk for making the thing, though, as it works very well (and fast, too).

Other recent purchases include a bluetooth wireless keyboard & laser mouse set - Logitech's MX5000:

some new speakers - Logitech Z-5400 - pretty expensive, 3 digital inputs (2 optical, 1 coaxial), THX certified, Dolby Pro-Logic II, etc, etc, and the subwoofer is a little over 12" in all dimensions:

They're by no means the best available (the Z-5500s are, obviously, better) but they're more than what I need so they're perfect .

Oh and I've bought gods know how many more Xbox 360 games:

• Oblivion is every bit as awesome as the reviews state.  I played it for days and days (my main save hit over 100 hours of continuous gameplay and I hadn't finished everything) and I am still very impressed by it.  It has its bugs, but hopefully they'll be resolved in a patch soon, at which point it will be beyond awesome..
  
• Burnout Revenge is also very very cool, at about the same level as Oblivion, just in a different genre.  The new speakers make it even better - it's incredibly cool to be driving at 209MPH through the middle of two lanes of traffic and hear the cars go past you on both sides with insane realism.  Those speakers are pretty useful on Perfect Dark Zero, too, allowing me to hear people sneaking up on me on all sides.
• Speaking of Perfect Dark Zero there's been a patch recently which allows bots to be used in Dark Ops game modes (except Sabotage, it seems) and gives bots various "personalities".  I use the quotes like that because, while I agree that those such as the Judge Bots are real personalities (going after the person with the highest score), I fail to see how the Ghost "personality" is one - what sort of personality is being invisible?  There are also going to be some new maps made available on the Marketplace along with an update to the Xbox 360 Dashboard itself which will add, amongst other features, background downloading (at last!) and a download queue of up to six items.  The background downloads will be paused during Live games to reduce lag, but will continue during all other games.
• Kameo is also graphically impressive, though while the story exists and is fairly cohesive (unlike PDZ's which leaves the player with the feeling that the story was very much an after-thought, but it's a FPS that was geared to multiplayer gameplay so who cares?) it's also pretty short.  The people that say that they can complete it in a day are not lying.  It took me two days because I had never played it before and was not playing it continuously for those two days, but it was still pretty short.  It was for that reason that I refused to pay the full £40 for it and instead waited for it to become available for purchase second-hand for a price that more realistically reflects the duration of the game.

And some more that I don't really have enough to say about to mention here...

E3 - the annual electronic entertainment exposition in Los Angeles - has just passed and was very interesting, to say the least.  The press conferences are the main things to talk about, so, in order:

• Sony:
  Sony's press conference left a lot to be desired which, to a Sony Computer Entertainment non-fan like myself, was a good thing.  I must admit that I didn't actually watch this press conference as it was so unbelievably dull, but I have since read plenty about it to know roughly what it was like.  The small part of it that I did watch was some bloke just reeling off tons of sales figures in what amounted to a childish "my dick is bigger than yours" argument.  Yes, Sony, we know that the Playstation 2 was the dominent console of the current/last generation (Xbox/PS2/Gamecube), but E3 is supposed to be a showcase of what's to come in the future not for you to gloat about your current marketshare.  No one but your deluded fanboys give a damn.  Beyond that there were only a couple of note-worthy points.  Firstly, the PS3 will be available in two variations much like the Xbox 360.  However, unlike the Xbox 360 (and cleverly kept secret by Sony), the cheaper (read: affordable) version won't be upgradable to match the specs of the more expensive version.  According to the Sony press conference the only difference between the two will be that the cheaper one ($500 - still more than the most expensive Xbox 360, remember) will have a 20GB hard drive while the more expensive one will have a 60GH hard drive.  A closer examination of the literature about them, however, reveals that the cheaper one will also lack a memory card reader (probably no big deal), WiFi connectivity (also not a huge problem - wifi introduces a nice amount of lag which could kill games anyway) and a HDMI output, which is required to watch most Blu-ray movies in high-definition - exactly what Sony are marketing it for!.  Microsoft were, for a long time, considered the devil in the computer industry (which is overlapping with the console industry now), but Sony is rapidly stealing that crown from them.  Also worthy of note is the release date of 17th (I think - I'd check but y'know I really can't be arsed - it's only Sony, after all, and yes, I'm biased, big deal - this is a blog post, not an independant review).  The big thing about the conference, though, is their "new" controller.  It's essentially the same controller that they've used in the PS1 and PS2 which is, in itself, a good thing.  However they've made it wireless (also good), made 2 of the shoulder buttons into triggers (took them long enough - both of the "current" gen consoles did that) and, here's the big one, added motion sensing technology, a few months after Nintendo announced that their next generation console would have motion sensors!  Now, I'm not suggesting that Sony would be as sly as to copy the features of the competition but, uh, it's hard to avoid the blatant similarities.  The PS3 controller won't do the full positioning stuff that Nintendo's console will, but it will still do tilt/movement sensing to some degree.  I've heard that the demo of it during the conference was rather shaky, giving the impression that the technology had only been added to the system fairly recently (maybe after Nintendo made their announcement?) but who knows.  Sony has to contend with both the insanely high price of their console (£500 for the non-screwed edition? No chance!) but also with both Microsoft's console being very good (the Xbox sucked for various reasons until quite late in its life) and Nintendo's console being innovative and cheap.  However big their current user base may be I am seriously doubting that very many people will buy a PS3 simply because they have a PS2.  How many parents are going to buy a £500 console for their kid when they can buy both of the other consoles for the same price?  Very few people care about HD movies so Blu-ray is hardly a selling point - the VHS->DVD transition was a big enough jump for people to notice and it didn't require people to buy brand new TVs to utilise and as such the PS2 being a cheap DVD player as well as a games console was a good buy, but a combination of most people not being able to tell the difference between 480p and 720p/1080i, and the fact that Blu-ray is only one of two competing formats for high definition video will most likely lead people to not care about Blu-ray in the PS3.
• Microsoft had quite a challenge ahead of them to have an impressive conference compared to Nintendo and Sony, because the Xbox 360 has already been out for 6 months or so and as such they couldn't talk about how cool their console will be, because we already know.  However they certainly did succeed in wowing their audience.  They have set themselves a target of selling 10 million Xbox 360s by the time the PS3 launches in November.  An ambitious target, but with a bit of luck people who have been waiting for more information about the PS3 will now decide to buy a 360 instead after having heard about the PS3's price.  They also demonstrated something that they're dubbing Live Anywhere which is exactly what it sounds like - you will be able to connect to "Xbox Live" from wherever you are.  Your Windows Vista PC will connect to Live, showing your currently online friends, any messages you have, etc, as will a Windows Mobile enabled mobile phone.  The really cool thing, however, is cross-platform gameplay.  For the first time ever, to the best of my knowledge, console (Xbox 360) owners will be able to play against PC gamers on the same game.  They demoed this with Shadowrun (a game which looks interesting but doesn't really live up to the Shadowrun name, apparently) and it was amazing.  Also announced around E3 was a few new accessories for the 360: a wireless headset which is similar to the bluetooth headsets that people use on their mobile phones and PCs, but for Xbox360s, and with improved sound over the wired headset; a wireless receiver unit for the PC that will allow people to use their wireless Xbox360 gear (controllers & the aforementioned headset) on a PC, and a wireless steering wheel.  I'm very interested in the first two and not at all interested in the latter.  The conference finished with a trailer for Halo 3 - whose existence has, up until this point, been denied by Bungie - its makers.  I downloaded the trailer onto my 360 and with speakers volume turned up a bit, it sounds insane.
• Nintendo really stole the show, though, with their Wii.  Name aside, it looks to be a brilliant console that doesn't deserve the flak that they got over the name.  Nintendo realised that the name would cause controversy, too - at the press conference Reggie said "Thank you to those of you who wrote good things about [the name] the moment you head it...  Both of you."  They then proceeded to demonstrate various games, all of which looked very fun, using the motion-sensing controller which has been dubbed a "Wii-mote" by various people due to its resemblance of a TV remote control.  They also showed the new Zelda game, Twilight Princess, being played with the Wii-mote, which is a little further than they had previously announced - up until then all that we knew was that the game would have "some added functionality" on the Wii.  It turns out that they're releasing a totally separate version for the Wii, on launch day, alongside the Gamecube version.  If there's one way to sell consoles, it's to ship Zelda with it.  Unfortunately they didn't actually mention a release date or price, just that it will be available in the fourth quarter of this year (and various people in the industry are speculating that it will be priced between $200-300, so under £200 is a very distinct possibility, leading to the claim I made earlier that people will be able to buy an Xbox 360 and a Wii for the same price as the useful PS3).  Their conference finished with three Nintendo execs and a competition winner from the audience playing a game of virtual tennis up on stage.  Very cool

Right, I should have arrived at London by now and should have been at Piccadilly Circus already, but we got held up just before Reading (a train broke down on one of the platforms so only one platform was available...) and are now thirty minutes late.  Will certainly be interesting to see if I can get to the event on time.  Still have to get from Paddington to Piccadilly Circus on the tube.  And having said that we're just pulling into Paddington now.  Updates will follow when I carry on writing this on the way back.

Pseudo-update
Well it's 22:44, I'm sat on a train in the seat number that my reservation ticket says is mine, the reservation ticket on the seat says London Paddington -> Cardiff Central and the train is supposedly headed to Neath, which is somewhere in Wales (somewhere West of Cardiff, I believe) so hopefully I'm on the right train.  And right on cue the driver listed the stations we're stopping at and Cardiff Central was on the list, so woohoo, apparently.  The train won't get to Cardiff Central until 1:30am, which means I have just shy of three hours to carry on writing.  This document is already 20 KB (~3500 words) so I dread to think how long it ends up being by the time I'm finished.  Hopefully long enough to make up for my lack of blogging activity recently...  Also I managed to actually get to the train on time without being ushered onto the train by some random dude this time, which is the first out of three attempts that I've managed that.  Go me!

On to the event.  It was primarily geared towards developers today, though because Live is all Web-based stuff it's developing that I'm actually capable of, which is a nice surprise.  A guy named Koji who flew over from Redmond for tonight demonstrated creating Live Gadgets for Live.com, which are essentially web-based mini-applications that sit on a user's personalised Live.com page and do... stuff... They're entirely JavaScript- and XML-based, both of which I'm at least fairly familiar with, so it's stuff I can do and might try my hand at sometime.  He also demonstrated adding Live Local maps (think Google Maps but by Microsoft, branded with the Live stuff and with a somewhat different layout) to a website, though the website in question was written in ASP so I can't honestly say I understood a hell of a lot of it, but the JS code that he was actually showing off was easy enough.  Having said that I've just had a play with the Google Maps API myself so it will take a bit of convincing me before I use Live's version instead (my Google Maps-driven app uses custom tiles, not images of satellite photos/maps of the world, and I don't know if Live Local supports that...).  On that note, we were told that extra high zoom satellite imagery (that probably wasn't taken from a satellite, but more likely a plane) of the UK will either become available very soon or is already available, with similar imagery for the rest of Europe following "soon".  An example was the London Eye which was shown in very impressive detail, so the sooner that's available the better...

Koji then showed some C# code that produced a Windows application which would query MSN's search servers and display the results.  Not too exciting, but interesting to see how easily it was achieved.  The really fun (for some of us, at least.. part was him adding a Tablet PC drawing area to the form so he could just write the keywords on the screen.  Most of us were very impressed by the accuracy of that and made more than a few of us want to buy Tablet PCs...

One of the final things I remember (it's slightly worrying how difficult it is to recall events that transpired just a few hours ago, isn't it?) is a demonstration of Live QnA by Phil (who was at the last Session, as well) which seems to be Microsoft's answer to the most popular search application in Korea - which is possibly the only market in the world where Google isn't #1.  It is essentially a question & answer forum for users.  Rather than merely searching for web sites users ask a question on the site and other users then have three days to post answers to those questions.  To add an element of search (and a lot more usefulness) to the service, though, before you post your question you are given a list of similar questions to see if people have asked similar/identical things in the past and you can see their answers in an attempt to save on repeated questions and also to allow people to get their queries answered as quickly as possible.

Phil managed to not know how to use the tagging system, too, and accidentally added all his tags as a single tag, which doesn't seem removable...

Shown during this demo was a UI element that will apparently be getting rolled out across the whole of the Live service catalogue - it is essentially a drop-down list from someone's display picture and name containing links to their Contact Card, their Space and their Profile.

Phil also showed a mobile version of Messenger with support for Voice Clips, image transfers, nudges, display pictures, etc., which was pretty cool, though I was unable to get any decent photographs of it because mobile phone screens are seemingly very difficult to photograph properly.

He then announced a small competition of sorts; everyone placed their name into a "hat" (read: cardboard box) and the first five to be pulled out would be sent brand new Philips smart phones.  Trust Ben to be one of those five .  Oh well, no smartphone or anything else for me, since I can't afford anything cool for a while

The guys from Heaven (the French people who are organsing these Sessions) then gave a brief presentation about a new "Windows Live RSS Hub".  The slides say "strictly confidential" so in the spirit of confidentiality I photographed every slide.  This will basically be "Your official website for unofficial news about Windows Live" and it is just a service that aggregates a whole load of Windows Live-related RSS feeds into one web site in a very funky AJAX-y style as is popular these days.

One of the slides featured an image that was remarkably similar to my Mod Supervisor badge on the Mess.be Forums...

Before we left (actually the draw for the phones was right before we left, so this is sometime before then) some dude with a video camera was interviewing various people, which just so happened to include dwergs and Zero1.  I don't know what was said by either of them, as I wasn't anywhere near the interview area (very deliberately!) but I have a photo!  The camera got good use tonight, I can tell you that much.

And on the way out back to the tube (half-run to the tube station, stand around impatiently on the tube, half-run out of the tube station to the train) we got a chance to photograph a sign I saw back in January but didn't have the presence of mind to snap at the time.  It turns out that the sign was, in fact, a sign for the building we were in, and I happened to walk past it when I was Lost In Soho (not something you want to do too many times in a lifetime unless "adult entertainment" is your thing) last time.  Most people won't know why it's funny/interesting, and most of those who will were actually there, so it's kinda pointless me posting it here, but tough.

Oh and another thing happened just before we left.  Remember in January where we were given a fairly cheap-looking USB pen drive thing?  Well this time we were given a funky keyring which will detect the presence of WiFi hotspots in the area, as well as Bluetooth, apparently (though I've yet to get anywhere where there's Bluetooth devices so I haven't been able to test that).  And underneath is a button which activates a less-than-impressive-yet-still-practical LED, useful for finding key holes in the dark, I guess.  Pretty quality, anyway.

So, it's now a quarter to twelve.  This means that I still have 115 minutes before I arrive in Cardiff.  Seemingly I was unable to write as much about tonight as I was able to about not-tonight.  This is probably a good thing for you as it means you have less to read, but it's bad for me as I now have to entertain myself for 115 minutes.  Laptop battery is saying "4:23 hours (55%) remaining" which is fair enough as all I have running is TextPad with as many apps closed as possible and the WiFi card disabled, but as soon as I started doing, well, anything else that's going to drop.  Will see what it's like editing images and powering my SD card for a while.  The last thing I need is for the battery to run out before I get to Cardiff, which would leave me seriously under-entertained

By the way, I've had to apply perspective correction on all photographs of projections, as I was sitting very much at an angle, and white balance seems to be totally out on a lot of them, but I didn't have time to fiddle around with it then, and I don't have the patience to fiddle with them now, either.  They're readable so you'll have to live with it. .