heavydog

I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of short stories recently. There are quite a few podcasts where people read short stories. One that has impressed me is Escape Pod hosted by Stephen Eley. He often reads the stories himself, but he also has quite a few guest reads on the show.

They have the odd lemon, well, I say that, what I should say is they have the odd story which isn’t to my taste, but the majority of the stories are excellent. Two that are though were outright amazing were Edward the Bear and the Very Long Walk and Homecoming at the Borderlands Cafe. I’ve listened to quite a few of the backlog now (about 40 odd) and the quality is consistently high.

Anyway, head over there and subscribe, it’s well worth it!

As you may or may not have read below, depends on how often you stop by, I did actually win NaNoWriMo last year. 50,000 words in a month. It’s amazing what the brain can do if you force it to think hour after hour fueled with diet coke, snickers and Nine Inch Nail - Year Zero to help.

Anyway, I did say I wasn’t going to show anyone until I’d edited it and re-written parts etc etc. But, now I’ve read it through myself, it’s a bit simple plot-wise, the characters are thin and it’s interspersed with random gibberish as I fell asleep at my keyboard.

To that end, I’ve put it online in the hopes that someone will read it and offer me any feedback - should I edit it and rewrite parts? Is it worth spending the time? Did I waste many precious hours on a blithering bucket of bilious carbuncles? (Actually, the answer to the last question I already know, no, I didn’t waste any time, I thoroughly enjoyed doing it.).

So, click the link below, have a read and let me know what you think … please!

The Centre of the Earth is an Attraction

Research published in December showed that Catholicism is now the most popular Christian denomination with more worshippers attending mass than Church of England services.
Reuters UK

While it doesn’t scite it’s source, it’s an interesting statement!

Update: The Times agrees.

I know that I post one of these “It’s been a long time since I posted anything on here” posts at least once every six months, but it always surprises me that sooo much time has lapsed since I last vomited my mind onto the interwebs.

With that said, here’s some content:

I recently finished my first every short story entitled “Extremely Bad Luck“, you can read it by clicking that title, or clicking here: http://oort-cloud.org/?q=node/539.

That’s all for now!

I’ve got an XBOX360, a thing which I am immensely pleased about. I’ve also got Assasins creed, a thing which I am not so immensely pleased about. It started well and I was thoroughly enjoying it before I got to the third section and thought “Hang on, haven’t I done all this before?”. You see, Assasins Creed is a bit … samey.

Don’t get me wrong, visually this game is an absolute stunner, pretty much setting a new benchmark for the way games should look on next gen consoles. The first time you round a corner and see the first city spreading out in the valley below you is a real jaw-dropping moment. The first time you swan dive from a viewpoint, or perform a retaliation kill will cause you to spontaneously whistle through your teeth in amazement.

But a game isn’t all about the way it looks.

It’s about the gameplay. Isn’t it? Assasins Creed starts with some phenominal gameplay and then, well that’s the point, it just does the same things over and over again. Without giving too much away, there are several set peices you need to do in order to learn enough about your mark to then be given the go-ahead to stab ‘im up good. These things never vary from level to level, they are always “Pick Pocket”, “Interrorgate”, “Evesdrop” and “Talk to Informer” the latter being either collect some flags an idiot has carelessly dropped or stab someone (or two, or three) who your informer doesn’t like. There are also side missions, well, side “mission” and that is to “Save the citizen”. Someone will be having a bad day at the hands of the city guards and it’s your job to rush in, kill the guards and talk to the Citizen. They will then tell there brother/husband/uncle/dog who will tell their mates and then you’ve got either a walking camoflage point, or some people who’ll get in guards’ way if they’re chasing you (more about guards in a moment). But that’s it. There is little more to the game, save the assasinations. Some assasinations will take you a fair amount of time, especially if you have to get into a castle, or somewhere similar.

But thats it. Seriously. The same 7 or 8 tasks over and over again, set in some of the most beautiful computer game environment ever made.

Somebody dropped the ball.

On top of that are the guards. The guards who roam about the city have some not bad AI. They will chase you up buildings and through tunnels, so no problem there. The guards on the roof tops? Idiots, all of them. When you climb up onto a roof, they will stand there and say things like “You’re not supposed to be up here.” and after a period, will start to fire their arrows at you. But they won’t give chase or do more than stand there firing arrows until you nip behind something and out of their line of sight.

‘Fair enough,’ says you, ‘can’t ask much more from a city guard.’

Well, you can, you see, after an assasination, you’re most sought after, meaning that any guard who sees you will raise the alarm and soon you have five or six chasing you, if you run up onto the roof tops they’ll run up too and chase you there as well, yelling “Stop him!” and “He’s an assasin” and “He’s just murdered so-and-so!”

Then you’ll hear “You’re not supposed to be up here.” as you run past a rooftop guard seemingly oblivious to whats going on behing you.

*Sigh* dropped the ball again.

It’s these little things that make the game so much less impressive than it could be. They could have mixed up the tasks a bit. For example, evesdropping: instead of just “Sit on bench, look at someone, press button to evesdrop on someone who is a hundred yards away in a crowded market square you couldn’t possibly hear even if you had 20th century technology.” you could have “Get within so many feet of this person and listen to them, if they spot you, you have to try again.” - that would have been more fun.

The thing that really amazes me most is that the biggest plot twist, the thing that, if saved for the end, would blow your mind, is used to open the game. What a waste.

Even after all that though, I still go back occasionally, not for the gameplay, but for the mindless sprinting across rooftops. Anyone who played Spiderman2 and just webbed round the city for hours on end will know exactly what I mean. It’s not Spidey, but it sure is purdy.

Some people will have you believe that the reason Assasins Creed is shit is because:

… you have to understand that the game has had to be limited in order to make it accessible to the lower-spec XBox 360.
The Golden Monkey’s Blog

While that is quite obviously the largest peice of bullshit ever written on a webpage, even if it WERE the case that the game was “limited” in order for the XbOX360, I doubt anyone, during the entire lifecycle of the games’ development, ever said:

“We need to make this accessible for the 360 - let’s remove most of the gameplay elements and keep the pretty, pretty.”

Because that, ladies and gentlemen, would be hamstringing the game JUST so you could have pretty visuals on the PS3. Plenty of great games on the 360, and no. Gears of War didn’t push the 360 to it’s limits; Assains Creed is a far more punishing game visually yet there’s still plenty of stuff left to do on the 360.

The Library of Congress, which is purported to be the biggest library in the world and the research arm of congress, has recently launched a new project in conjunction with Flickr. In order to enhance the quality of their photo library, which is incredibly huge, some 14 million prints at the moment, they’ve decided to create a Flickr page to be the new home of 3000 of the 14million prints.

The idea is that Flickr users will recognise people or places in those photos and add the relevant tags to them. It’s a fantastic idea, but unless Flickr has a special deal with the LOC, then it’s fundamentally flawed. Let me explain…

A photo has attached inside it’s very file something called EXIF data. This data, amongst many other things, including the lens used to the the photo, shutter speed, apeture, ISO, contains all the keywording and meta-description data you could need. If, when you import the photos onto your computer, you add meta data to each of them, everywhere that you use the photograph (be it Flickr, Zooomr or Photobucket) those sites will use that meta data, the EXIF data, to infer things about the image and add them to your upload. That’s how Flickr auto-generates tags and how it knows who uses what cameras.

Wind it back a bit. If you add tags and meta data to an image on Flickr, you’re adding the tags to FLICKR and not to the actual picture. As Thomas Hawk has previously blogged about, Flickr doesn’t add the tag added to it to the meta data of the photo. What I want to know is, how does the LOC get that meta data, added by Joe Public, back into the original file (because, I can guarantee that the Library of Congress stores these images as multi-megabyte files and not the Jpeg you see on Flickr).

Unless they have a special relationship with Flickr, then I don’t see how this project can be anything other than a Flickr based project. This data cannot be taken back into the library unless it is done manually.

Your visit to the Library of Congress to research some photos will be able to be done just as effectively as if you’d never left the comfort of your armchair.

If you’d like to read more, then the LOC blog post is here and Flickrs’ news about it is here.

I love what Flickr do, but not giving you a way to export your tags in a meaningful fashion is a hamstring.

Yes dear readers, no posts for a month! Why? you ask, here is why:

I’ve won NaNoWriMo. 50,000 words in a month. What a month!

Now to find me a publisher…

NaNoWriMo begins tonight at 12:01 and I shall be beginning too!

I’m psyched, ready to rumble. I’ve got the writing bug. Every fibre of my sumptuous and well presented being is straining at the leash to get this gibberish out of my head and into some kind of digital document, probably guarded closely by the great and omniscient god Google.

Have I got a plot in my head? Have I fuck, I’ve got this half conceived idea rattling around in the lowest recesses of my brain. It’s formed enough to allow me to get to grips with some characters and an opening scene. From there? Who knows?

I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow. I’d like to blog about my experience, but I need to write 1,667 words a day, so the blogging may be out the window. You can always check my progress here: Mikes profile at NaNoWriMo.

When I read that this book was written by a ‘director of specialised management consultancy’, I took a sharp intake of breath. How can someone who isn’t a developer write a book about a subject as in-depth as a PHP framework? Surely he’ll miss the point? At least he’ll miss out pertinant information about how the framework functions? It’s core? You need a larger understanding of OO PHP and frameworks to make the best use of CI, no? He’ll fail to explain the concept of MVC well enough to the novice developers this book is aimed won’t he?

I was right.

David Upton has written a book that falls short of appealing to the hardcore PHP developer market who would be interested in a book about CI frameworks and has over-reached when it comes to trying to explain how to create a basic website with what is possibly one of the most powerful frameworks available. On a few occasions he outright insults and belittles those readers who actually use and understand the intricases of PHP by referring to them as ‘geeks’ from the first chapter.

Claims like CI saving you time and reducing the amount you code, thus making the site faster, are misleading if you only want a simple brochureware site with a contact form and a means to include a common set of elements on each page. Of course, he is perfectly correct if you want to write a web application — but who is this book aimed at?

There are some good chapters in this book though, ‘Code Igniter and Objects’ is a more high-brow look at how CI actually functions, for the most part it’s well written, but it occasionally glosses over points that need expanding — the section on namespaces comes to mind. ‘Production Versions, Updates and Big Decisions’ is another good chapter, although this wouldn’t be anything new to a long-in-the-tooth developer. Finally ‘Resources and Extensions’ is a good overview of some of the better extensions and add-ons available for CI.

Overall, this book will only satisfy the needs of a very niche group of developers. Those who either know about PHP, OO and frameworks but have never laid eyes on CI, or those whose needs are basic and need a framework because it will save time in the short term, this brings about issues of whether CI is neccessary for those with only basic needs however.

The books biggest shortcoming is it doesn’t really show you anything that User Guide hasn’t already explained in detail, or that the forum can provide with a brief search and they’re both free. It misses out one of the most poweful tools in the CI kitbag, Hooks, and that is unforgivable. This is, however, the only book about CI. So if you’re after something to read away from the computer, then it might be worth chance, otherwise, visit the CI website where you can find all that’s in the book and more.

Igglepiggle, iggle onk. What’s in the Night Garden?

My son and I love to watch In The Night Garden; a BBC childrens TV show based on the goings on and characters of that land of the Night Garden. The inhabitants of the Night Garden are strange and interesting creatures such as; Igglepiggle, he carries a red blanket, has a bell in his shoe and a rattle in his hand. He falls over whenever he is frightened, surprised or just mildly taken aback. Upsy Daisy is the Night Gardens token mixed race character. Although she sleeps in a sentient bed, outside under the stars. Makka Pakka is a tiny little dude, makes himself busy by stacking rocks in a “Blair Witch “style and washing everything and everyone with the same sponge. Then there are the Tombliboos, the Pontipines, the HaHoos and the Wottingers.

Not to mention Ninky Nonk and Pinky Ponk.

As you can tell, my house is a shrine to the Night Garden. I am as equally enamoured to the gratiutious goings on as my offspring. I love it. I even made a website in tribute. It’s a way to find out what goes on In The Night Garden after the cameras have stopped rolling, check it out: fromthenightgarden.com.