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Ok, so its unlikely I will post at this blog again, it will be left up for the old posts, but I have moved over to wordpress.

Visitors - please update your bookmarks!!

http://whyamistilltyping.wordpress.com

See you on the other side!

I finished CoD4 last night on veteran I am still blown away by a game which, paradoxically, is neither new nor revolutionary in concept or implementation. Full review to follow shortly. I am also in the middle of redesigning the site template and seriously considering moving over to a self hosted wordpress blogging system. Stay tuned :)

I previously wrote a brief article about gOS - the new cheap FOSS pc that brings Google Apps combined with Linux to the masses. Interestingly today I came across the 'dev kit' version, for $60 you can buy the motherboard and processor out of this PC which normally retails for > $200. This is a hackers dream as the main criticism with the initial gOS was the fact that it came in a shockingly large ugly case for the size of the internal components. I was sorely tempted to buy it in order to harvest the internals and build it into a slim client. This dev kit would make it a lot easier (and cheaper) to do however its only available in the US at the moment.

An enterprising student from Norway has been coding a top-down view RTS version of VALVe's hit, Half Life 2. It is only in a very early state at the moment, although there is a download (how many mods can claim that ) available along with some screen shots. This initial release is mostly a tech demo demonstrating the developer's idea and hints at how the sides will be split. The UI looks lifted from CoH, so I hope he does not get into any legal difficulty as a result. The overall idea is quite good, but by no means unique as a Halflife 1 mod called Natural Selection combined the best elements of RTS and FPS as early as 2002.

Even still I am curious to see which direction this game will go, however in a market flooded of late with RTS games, it makes me wonder whether being HL2 themed with be enough to maintain peoples' interest past the initial wow factor. On the plus side, Half Life 2 has a great story with a variety of well defined characters which will bode very well for this mod. I am excited at the prospect of commanding squads of rebels and or combine soldiers and it could work out very well even if the game play only mimics Company of Heros in style.

   

So... the iPhone, a product that has evoked a mixture fanatical praise and unrelenting critism in recent months. I am not one to jump onto trend bandwagons and am a firm believer that early adopters either have unusually high stress tolerance or are so obsessed with being ahead of the curve that they don't mind being the corporate guinea pigs that frequently get screwed over. This is a story that has repeated itself time and time again, the Xbox360, the PS3, the Nokia N95 etc. Equally the early iPhone adopters discovered not only a fairly rapid price drop but discovered at their expense the ruthless tactics Apple was willing to adopt to deter what they say as illegal modification. It has been suggested that apple had to act to curb to unlocking, not only to protect their activation and monthly income streams but also as a contractual obligation towards AT&T who paid for exclusivity.

But anyway this is old news, today I spent about twenty minutes playing with an iPhone at an O2 store and I must say I was impressed. My first thought was that is was a lot smaller than I thought it would be. One of Apple's strongest achievements has always been selling a lifestyle. The cornerstone in this is simplicity and ease of use; a mantra Apple customers have come to expect from Apple's hardware line. In this the iPhone does not fail, from simply outstanding looks and build quality, to a gentle gliding interface which just makes it feel like the UI is gliding on air. The integration with Google apps is also impressive as noted by several reviews. Whilst this is true it is important to note apple are not the first to do this. Infact java based midlets have been available do a while for a variety of platforms. An important caveat to note is that there connectivity features work brilliantly in the confines of the O2 store whilst served by their wifi. Real world performance and charges cannot be factored in but invariably the essential bandwidth required will not always be available and where it is it is likely to be costly, especially given the rather limited data plans included in the contract price.

I was impressed with the iPhone but there is no way I would buy one. Whilst the clean interface and the quality of the engineering may be enough to detract from a lack of more advanced features, it is Apple's policy of stifling F/OSS development coupled with a very poor security model (root/ring0 privileges anyone) which put me off. Apple will continue to develop this young product line and like many I am looking forward to revision two. It's a great looking product, but like a cheap commercial printout, look closely and you are going to see imperfections.

I found on the VALVe software shop two of the coolest products possible from the VALVe franchise.... a head crab and a vortignout in cute plush fun furry form!! Ideal presents for a geek? I think so...

But enough of the alliterations, I also found plans to make home made headcrabs. At the moment the VALVe store is soldout and whilst we wait in hope for more stock, feel free to try your hand at this.

 

I have been browsing game retailers today making a list of games I want to play. Its not fair - there are some excellent titles just over the horizon and do I have the time to play?!?!? Bah as if :) To make matters worse, my gaming rig needs to be retired. A complete upgrade has been on the cards for a while but I have been umming and ahhing trying to decide what to buy into. I first started thinking about this a year(!) ago but have been delaying and delaying, there has always been something exciting on the horizon stopping me. Whether is was the release of Dx10 cards, the Dx10.1 revision, Penryn, 1333 MT/s FSBs, ATi/AMD X2xxx series and now (finally) AMD's purported Core 2 Duo Killer and the x3xxx. At the moment a G0 Stepping Q6600 looks like a great buy along with a 8800 GT but it would be sheer lunacy to dive in with AMD releasing its products in just a few days. It has come to a head now as I can't play recent games at my native monitor resolution (1280x1024 - its a 17" and I will likely upgrade that as well.) I don't really want to ruin games like Crysis or World in Conflict by playing them at their minimal settings so I have been holding off. It is a double edged sword however, since there is so much being released soon and so much good hardware already available, its hard to know when to take the plunge and hand over your hard earned money....

So without further ado let me outline games which I am particularly excited about at the moment.

#1 In what looks like a cross between CounterStrike and Tom Clancy's GRAW, Call of Duty 4 looks simply stunning. If you have not yet seen any trailers / previews then I highly recommend checking out the following videos.

I simply cannot wait and am annoyed my current system wont let me play it properly....

#2 Whilst graphically Crysis looks amazing, I was rather disappointed to witness the strength of the Korean soldiers in the demo. I play all my games in the hardest difficulty setting (No HUD and everyone speaks Korean baby -oh yeah!) and whilst I enjoyed the feeling of vulnerability coupled with the god complex thats inescapable in Crysis's nano suit, it was disappointing that I could unload 10-20 rounds into the chest of a Korean soldier and have them not even flinch. The game is very much geared to getting up close and personal where you can either break their necks or sever their heads from close range (which works beautifully) but in light of this, the demo did indicate a lack of sophistication of medium range. The combination of exceptional cinematic atmosphere, graphics and physics should make this game an instant hit I just hope the 'body armour' the soldiers wear is toned down for the final release.

#3 Taking a break from the time honored mechanics of real time strategy games, World in Conflict is as refreshingly different as it is back breaking for modern hardware. The lack of traditional base building / micromanagement is refreshing if a little odd at first. Thankfully the bullet tracers that looked like Storm Troopers laser blasts have been fixed and now the game looks a lot more realistic, although I still am hanking for the first person view demonstrated in the early videos of WIC.

Watch the above trailer and tell me you don't long for a first person shooter that intense :) I played the demo (on 'low' settings - BAH) and this is a game I am definitely coming back to once I have upgraded.

#4 Spore. Does anything need to be said about this game? From the initial developers conference video that we all saw years ago (yes the fourty minute one) to the more recent videos, Spore looks simply fantastic and is beautiful in its simplicity and power. I simply cannot wait for this game to come out so that my weird guys can abduct your weird guys :)

#5 Medieval Total War II has been out for a while but I still have not had a moment to play it. I have put a lot of hours into Rome: Total War and really enjoyed it and the thought of an upgrade to that engine that applies per character details is very appealing.

#6 F.E.A.R Perseus Mandate is coming out over here in two days. I still have mixed feelings about it but I will definitely be playing it. I just hope its a lot better than the first 'sequel.'

#7 Prey came out a while ago and curiously its now available at the bargain price of just £5 from Game! Whilst based on the now aging Doom 3 engine, the game has a refreshing blend of old style puzzle solving that I found quite fun in the demo. That coupled with the brutal killing efficiency and the 'walking on all surfaces' seen in the demo SP mode made me thirsty for more of the same. Multiplayer was limited to classic deathmatch but was still worth trying out.

I have been playing around with Xfire recently as well - add me : T0TM5 is my username. Now I just have to figure out where on my site I stick the damn widget :)

Woohoo! The eagerly awaited Daedalus R13 is here after a four month break between releases! Here is what StrmnNrmn had to say today:

Whilst StrmnNrmn has not been working on increasing compatibility, he has been working on optimising the dynarec stack which should allow for a 10-20% fps increase in exisiting games. I have downloaded it and will post feedback when I have had a chance to get to grips with this new release.

Download 1.0 , 1.5 source for R13.

I came across a second sequel to the amazing fear today entitled Perseus Mandate. The official trailer is below. It is unclear at this stage whether this game will pick up after extraction point, however I hope it is a completely new instalment albeit in the same universe.

The problem is, whilst fear was an excellent game which made stunning use of particles, slow down and a creepy little girl called alma, that was a couple of years ago. The original game tied up the storyline quite nicely, however leaving a beautiful opening for a sequel with Alma's stunt at the end. I eagerly awaited a continuation of the storyline only to be presented with Extraction Point, a game that answers very few questions and just serves up a few extra hours of game time in the same environments as the original. Whilst some new bad guys and weapons were added, recent game sequels have shown that this is not enough, particularly with a cinematic game like F.E.A.R. Needless to say I was bitterly disappointed with Extraction Point. Now we have Perseus Mandate that, on the surface, looks like another cheap effort to use the F.E.A.R engine and content to sell a few more games.

It should be noted however that in the original, you (the player) are a hapless member of F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon) and that you are charged with investigating strange occurrences and circumstances. The fact that, right from the moment go, you are thrown into the twisted universe of Fettel and Alma almost makes the player forget this and take up the time honoured, if tired, role of unlucky bystander #1 who surprise surprise is either unknowingly the answer to the game or unsubtly, a human tank that bulldozes through the levels.

I think the key to Perseus Mandate will be treating it like a completely new game rather than as a sequel. The problem is that games have moved on considerably since 2005 and coupled with the rather unique engine of fear means that this game will have to do something or offer something very new or different in order to achieve its potential. Thankfully the trailer shows several interesting new events/ways in which the game plays with the player's mind. I hope that whatever story the developers choose to tell, they generate the atmosphere as well in the original.

There are so many 'horror' games on the market but most use the over used system of dark corners and imps/zombies jumping and lurching around. F.E.A.R was one of the few games that attempted to get under your skin by constantly putting you on edge and it worked remarkably well. As such I am quietly optimistic, as I dearly would love a game that matched the original in terms of atmosphere and immersion.

Anyone who is a fan of the BattleStar Galactica Universe will know that, aside from the cringe worthy delay before the final season, there will be a feature length movie aired in the US at the end of November. It turns out 'flashbacks' (read 2 min previews) are available on SciFi's website but are only available to US ip ranges. Never fear, some friendly person has uploaded them all to youtube for those of us outside the US. However I must say I am disappointed, I found them rather reminiscent of the Webisodes at the end of season 2 - disconnected and lacking in any excitement, particularly in the new Adama's voice acting.

Whilst at least the webisodes were referred to and built on by the first few episodes of season 3, since this movie is set ~4,000 days into the First Cylon war, it is unlikely that it will bring anything new to the table with regards season 4. Although the secret weapon that is hinted at is quite a tasty idea which could potentially be linked into BSG Season 4. I am still very much looking forward to seeing the movie when I can here in the UK, however I wont be watching any more of these Razer flashbacks as they are not adding very much, particularly if they are snippets of the movie, I would sooner wait and see the whole thing in its entirety rather than have sections or the ending ruined. Roll on Razer and I can't wait for Season 4!!!

So it appears the delightfully peculiar (but awesome) Stephen Fry has started his own blog. By the looks of things he will be 'blessaying' about gadgets and other Fryish trivia. It is strange to think of Stephen Fry as a celebrity - after all, he just humbly gets on with the job, providing witty satirical entertainment rather than having a fan base of screaming morons and making an ass out of himself. In this modern age of A (to H) list so called 'celebrities,' it is a refreshing change to see someone who unassumingly is so unfazed and unspoilt by the lime light while still retaining his character, which is almost its own subtle brand. Indeed, its hard to read his blog without his hearing his voice in the back of your head.

What he has posted so far is a lot of fun to read and I wish him all the best on this latest endeavour.

Image source

Woohoo! Today I breached the four thousand unique visitor mark! I just want to say a big thank you to you, my visitors - without your constant patronage I wouldn't have any enthusiasm to update.

Also, I now have both RSS () and email () notification of my new posts. In order to receive RSS updates you will need a suitable RSS reader - nice list here. The way it works is, everytime I post something new, a new entry is put in my rss feed which is automatically loaded by your RSS software. This then gives you a brief synopsis of the story giving you the option to visit my site and read more. Email notification is simpler (as it only requires an email account) and is handled by Feedblitz on my behalf. This means you do not have to worry about your email address falling into the hands of spammers because the only person that stores it is Feedblitz. They have an established privacy policy and millions of people who use them daily.

For either of these options, click on the envelope or rss icon on my side bar.

I have known about the openbios / linuxbios project for a little while now, but today I discovered a video demonstrating an early build running on a standard 2Mb flash EEPROM. Not only does it completely replace the standard Award BIOS but it boots to a graphical (if lightweight) X11 server in just a few seconds. Although this project is still fairly new (shown by limited compatibility) the concept of having a unified, free bios that allows fast prebooting into a graphical environment is appealing. I believe Macs do something similar, they boot into a very stripped down GUI giving graphical boot options. This idea is not new and ASUS demonstrated a couple of weeks back a motherboard that has an embedded linux distribution ready to boot before windows. The technology is called Splashtop and allows access to email, skype and the web from a stripped down linux environment.

More and more I am seeing a trend towards 'at-an-arms-length' computing and I have mixed feelings about it. Whilst linuxbios would allow better / more efficient booting into a Linux (or other OS) distribution, having a stripped down environment where you could then VNC or telnet into another more powerful system is an interesting idea with lots of potential applications. Imagine a media center PC that was fast (as in instant) to boot and silent due to all the processing being done on another machine on the network, it would be an ideal mediacenter environment. Similarly there is a low murmuring that has been increasing in volume for the last few years concerning a complete shake up of the traditional computing environment. It essentially started with web '2.0' i.e. applications as a service. The whole idea of being able to log into a personalised environment in a web browser is an appealing one, be it a web operating system like eyeOS or just a social networking environment like Facebook. Not only can you have access to your personal space/files/environment remotely, but instead of buying a powerful machine and maintaining its software and hardware, buying a thin client and computing entirely online. Many people simply do not have the technical expertise or the time to properly maintain their home computers. Simple tasks such as regular defragmentations or temporary file cleanup and data archiving often are not done regularly. Many computers I see do not even have basic security programs running. A secure thin client running on a whitelist basis would not need such constant attention and any security would be handled remotely by the application provider. Potentially providers could offer really cheap, low power machines with a monthly payment, which would serve as a lease for an online operating system and storage space.

Although there are potentially a lot of benefits, there is something about relying entirely on a network that is outside your control, (the Internet) a service provider that could have a dubious privacy policy (look at AT&T) and a locked down client which does not appeal to me. I have very much bought into the F/OSS philosophy and the concept of being locked into a proprietary system does not appeal at all, let alone relying on a foreign (i.e. outside my home system) network - especially with my ISP's service record.

"The chemicals [in the iphone] are suspected of causing birth defects and gender-bending effects."

According to the article from the Independent, the iPhone contains several classes of compounds not known to play well with the environment or the human body. Among them are phthalates (?) which are cheifly emplyed as plasticisers and used to lower the glass transition temperature (Tg) of plastics making them more durable. I dont fully believe all the effects claimed in the article, but it makes for an entertaining read.

Full Article

Well I promised a few posts ago I would outline how to glitch the facility map so as to remove Ourmov. I thought everyone knew about this glitch but as I read through more and more sites I could not find any mention of it. So, here is the video - be kind to me, this is my first submission to youtube :)

Well I went to Electroworkz yesterday for the first time in many weeks. It was great fun as always and I have a couple of nice welts on the top of my head for good measure.  I have re-uploaded all the airsoft galleries but unfortunately they are still on the old template. I don't have the time at the moment to sort them out but I will do soon. With regards to photos from yesterday, the few I took are here and there are also some more on Arine's Airsoft forums on this thread.

**Note - another site has gone down shortly after me posting a link to it. I think my site is cursed. I will update the link when Arnies completes their DB check.

I noticed a post on a blog I read - The AT wire, that a new Simpsons game is in production. Being a junkie for anything Matt Groening creates, I am eagerly awaiting this release. For now, here is the youtube video.

The site that streams Beyond The Red Line's videos appears to be down for maintenance I found the sign rather amusing.

Also the season 4 BSG trailer is up on you tube I simply cannot wait for the new season. The end of season 3 was so different and shocking it took me a good few hours to digest what we discovered about the Cylons and 4 of the final 5. Absolutely amazing TV!

Is anyone else starting to get concerned about the Storm Bot net? This is a topic that seems to have avoided mass media interest, despite having first cropped up in January this year. There are a number of factors which make this worm very different from prior such outbreaks. Up to now, worms would spread as fast and far as they could in order to achieve maximum power and publicity before activating a payload. This historically has been in the form of DDOS attacks. What makes storm so dangerous, is that it appears to be extremely well coded. Once a windows machine is infected, it silently joins the pool without any overt signs to the end user. The way in which the worm spreads also makes it hard to both detect and provide an effective countermeasure against as the worm's code changes twice an hour as well as its constantly evolving social engineering based attacks. Users have been lured with offers of free music or emails purportedly to be emergency notifications of a dangerous weather front in Europe. In fact the name of the worm comes from those initial emails.

Each infected node communicates with others via a specially designed peer to peer network, rather than a single central server and each node can function independently should it need to. It is hard to get an estimate as to the number of infected clients are present throughout the world. Estimates vary wildly from 50-70 thousand to 1 to 50 million. Think of the bandwidth this worm not has available and how devastating such a DDOS would be. In the past DDOS attacks, when not virus related, came from a fairly narrow range of IPs allowing the targeted systems to block provinces or even continents of IP addresses. Whilst this would render the site completely inaccessible from genuine users in those areas, at least the site could provide partial service to other areas of the globe. With Storm, there does not appear to be a way to defend against an onslaught on such diverse scale given the world wide distribution of infected clients. Worryingly the bot net has not yet been very active, experts estimate it as running at around 10% capacity with a small number of nodes (tens of thousands only) spreading the infection and other nodes either dormant or sending out spam messages. It is conceivable that over ten billion spam messages have been sent already. There are signs the bot net has been retaliating against efforts to halt its progress with several sites either being hacked or suffering DDOS attacks.

Whilst I do not wish this post to sound like I am scaremongering for the sake of a post, I am genuinely concerned as to the lack of public knowledge / media attention on this matter. Whilst a google search of 'Storm Botnet' will yield a fair amount of information, a conversation with several of my informed friends revealed very little in the way of awareness. Certainly for me, a bot with purportedly enough power to wipe countries off the Internet is a cause for concern as it should be every windows PC user.

So as any returning visitor will note, I have implemented a blog formating to this site. I did this because the majority of what I post will be in the form of topic news items / blog posts. As such it made no sense just taking on new entry after new entry and silently archiving old posts where noone would ever see them again. Whilst that still might happen with this system, at least it is easier to view previous posts by category / date. I will be transitioning everything over to the new blog format given a couple of days.

The software I am using is completely free and open source, as such I would like to say thank you to the developers by pointing it out to people who might be thinking about starting their own blog. Its called Thingamablog and it has a whole host of cool features and a good support forum. The only thing I dislike is the ping function, which alerts a blog resource (default is weblog.com) when a blog is updated. Whilst this is actually quite a nice idea, the site in question is being hammered by spammers which makes it completely defunct sadly.

I was a bit disappointed to discover the 7.10 release of ubuntu wont be officially out until the middle of the month. However the team are making solid progress with a lot of new features now implemented. It leaves me with mixed feelings, seeing the long list of new gadgets and fancy things the new release will have as per default. Whilst I love the idea of Beryl/Compiz window managers installed and ready to use on first bootup, along with several features like fast user switching and the search appbar, it makes me wonder what kind of performance hit we are going to see with the default installation compared to 7.04.

It all feels highly reminiscent of Vista and I really do hope that I am wrong in this prediction. I have been toying, not quite switching over, to ubuntu since 5.04 and overall I think the project is going from strength to strength, however the number of bugs and issues that were still present, even in 7.04 makes me wonder why these little bugs / gaps in the interface are not the primary focus of this new release. Whilst many of the improvements Gnome 2.20 adds to this release will be met with enthusiasm, I can't work out why a good portion of their development time is spent working on their PIMs (e.g. Evolution mail client and Epiphany web browser.) Not all the PIM programs are like this though, there are some that seem genuinely useful and important to have in a good window manager. Given the massive use of firefox and mozilla, in my opinion, some of these default programs seem more like wordpad, IE and Outlook Express (now Mail in Vista.) Sure they have some user base, but for a lot of people, they are the first programs to be replaced either by Microsoft or Mozilla offerings. Perhaps it would make sense for these programs to be spun off to allow the core dev team to work on the more pressing issues with Gnome. I am not, however, advocating removing these programs from official distributions of Gnome as this would leave a gap for end users who just want Ubuntu to work without hassle. Sadly I am not experienced (or Gutsy enough) with Linux to install a bleeding edge version (like 7.10 tribes 4) - I will have to be patent a little while longer and I guess if I don't like it I can just move my favoritism over to another distribution. I love Linux