Archive for the 'Computing' Category

The BBFC are killing games retail

Published
by
Sal
on September 19, 2007
in Games
. 0 Comments

Imagine spending $20+ million on a high-profile video game only to find that puritanical film-industry censors deny you the ability to market your product, even to consenting adults.

A couple of months ago, The British Board of Film Classification, the organisation who put those age-certificates at the start of home-videos and movies decided not to award a certificate to Manhunt 2, effectively banning this product from both the retail and rental markets. This week, the British government has publicly backed the BBFC’s position on Manunt 2.

Rockstar have two options - either modify their game such that it is compatible with the BBFC’s hazy standards, or seek an alternative channel to sell their game. My hunch is that they will go for the latter.

Ultimately, the people who will be most hurt are the shops that sell games. Only this week Richard Branson offloaded his last-remaining shares in Virgin Megastore. HMV have been reportedly close to bankruptcy for a long time, and with the exception of Blockbuster, the stores that sell and rent video games are becoming rare on our high-streets.

These are painful times for games-retailers, and now the government is denying them the right to retail what would almost certainly have been a popular title.

RockStar will take the BBFC decision as a strong hint that if they want to keep both their creative freedom and their freedom to sell products they will need a new distribution channel: One that is entirely free of influence of the censors and politicians who like to meddle with the market.

Selling games directly, online is the obvious solution, simply because there is no effective means of censoring sales of software online, and given the international nature of the Internet, no one country will be able to enforce it’s moral-standards globally.

If retailers had any sense they would be petitioning the BBFC to get out of their way and let them sell the games that people want. Unfortunately I fear this will not happen since retailers are afraid of offending the “family values” groups that have lobbied for video game censorship.

In the long-term the games industry will win - retailers and the BBFC will no longer be relevant, and the games producers will have their own mature distribution systems which connect directly with the customer, free of government and censor’s interference.

Scratch - Smalltalk based realtime programming (for kids)

Published
by
Sal
on February 14, 2007
in Development and General
. 0 Comments

According to the OLPC project (One Laptop Per Child), the people who are building a sub $100 laptop so that kids in developing countries can become 3lit3 hackers too, the new device will come pre-loaded with a visual smalltalk based development studio called Squeak, and a fun animation / programming toy called Scratch.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/jxDw-t3XWd0" width="400" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I found the video mostly very annoying, once you skip past the beginning they get into a demo of the environment. Basically it’s a drag & drop scripting environment with an emphasis on animation and sound.

You can program flash-style animations and drag and drop the scripts in real-time - the animation changes in real-time as a consequence. I guess that the individual modules are objects written in Smalltalk, which can easily be extended.

I also like the idea that these laptops will present new users with a whole bunch of new programming languages and VB is not one of them.

Yahoo Pipes

Published
by
Sal
on February 8, 2007
in Computing
. 0 Comments

Yahoo’s latest invention is amazing: Pipes allows the user to visually mix and mash all kinds of web-based RSS and Atom feeds. Have you ever wanted to combine a number of blog feeds into one, and then filter the content according to some simple criteria… that’s the sort of thing that Pipes can take care of really easily.

Later today I will have a go at using it on one of the sites I run where I face exactly this challenge.

Yahoo Pipes Logo

For now, be gentle on the system. It’s still pretty new, crashes often and has no support for the kind of scripting that would make Pipes truly useful, however I can see where this application is headed, and I am sure Google are just kicking themselves for not having invented it first.

Context-Free grammar CS Paper Generator

Published
by
Sal
on January 18, 2007
in Computing
. 0 Comments

You want that job in IT but dont have the right credentials? If like me you slept through university, skipping classes and exploiting university for maximum leisure potential then you may have missed out on the opportunity to publish any scientific papers.

dia0.png

Fortunately, this system uses a context-free gramar to generate all the papers you might ever wish to submit. Click on the important looking diagram to view some pre-generated twaddle written by some made-up names.

Phoenix Wright, Ace Atorney

Published
by
Sal
on April 17, 2006
in Games
. 2 Comments
I’ve been playing “Phoenix Wright, Ace Atorney” for Nintendo DS. This is Capcom’s revival of the interactive fiction genre, almost 20 years after Infocom’s golden age of IF.

Phoenix Wright is a playable legal-soap opera; where Ally McBeal style, you have to guide Phoenix and his pals around a series of investigations and courtroom interactions. Phoenix is a defense attorney

The real drama takes place in court where Phoenix has to do battle with his arch rival, Edgeworth the prosecutor. Edgeworth has a nasty habit of coaching his witnesses and creating false evidence. He just hates to loose.

This court is run by a credulous yet officious judge who seems to be willing to accept any of the prosecution witnesses’ testimonies on face value. Naturally it’s up to Phoenix to defend his clients (who are always innocent).

The courtroom drama unfolds when Phoenix gets to cross examine the witnesses. For each statement they make Phoenix can “Press” them for more details or “Present” some kind of evidence that contradicts their testimony. The way to win the game is by spotting these gaps and contradictions.

As with the best courtroom drama, the fun comes from the sudden reversal of fortunes; One minute you could be about to loose the case, but a single observation might be enough to turn the whole thing. Fortunately Capcom have provided a cast of odd and well-scripted characters whose plots all intertwine.

Of all the game machines I own, it’s the DS which seems to be getting the most on-time at the moment. My super-de-duper Athlon 64 gaming PC can give me spectacular graphics and immersive experiences, but the developers of such big titles seem to be obsessed with delivering hundreds of hours of repetitive “play it safe” gameplay.

On the other hand, Nintendo and it’s associates seem to be churning out no end of bizarre, innovative and highly playable games.

Yay Nintendo.

Tron 1.0.1

Published
by
Sal
on March 22, 2006
in Art, Computing and Fiction
. 1 Comment

Released in 1982, Tron is an animated feature film from the Walt Disney Corporation. This film combines live action with CGI and traditional cell animation. The artistic result is way ahead of it’s time; indeed we can safely argue that Tron is the visual forerunner of the cyberpunk genre. The “computer world” of Tron has inspired the alternative realities of more recent works such as Sega’s “Rez” and “The Matrix”.

Tron - Widescreen - AC3 [XviD]-1.png

Tron’s plot is a thinly veiled allegory for the great debate between operating system pioneers Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tannenbaum; spesifically the eternal battle between advocates of monolithic operating system design vs micorkernel. Tron’s producers take a very one-sided view of this argument – the monolithic “Master Control Program” is clearly the bad guy, however in their credit, this was merely the received wisdom of the age. Regardless of the computer-science flaws, the film is visually superb entertainment more than twenty years after it’s original release.

Tron - Widescreen - AC3 [XviD]-3.png

That isn’t to say the film has dated; It certainly has – while the animated sections remain compelling, the live action segments set in the real world appear ludicrous and clumsy. They lack the panache of the virtual-reality scenes and only serve to provide a somewhat redundant set-up for the entirely self-contained animated sequences that form the body of the film.

The live-action epilogue is also baffling in it’s redundancy. I suspect the film producers were trying to provide some kind of revenge themed closure, in which our hero replaces the corrupt manager of the company; Once again, this live action sequence detracts from the final sequence of the animated section where we see “Flynn” rise god-like from the spinning wreck of the “master-control program”. We can only assume he has made it, but his absence from the cyberscape after that moment leaves us in doubt.

One of the film’s main strengths is it’s sound-track. The score was composed and performed by Wendy Carlos (an associate of the recently deceased synth-pioneer Bob Moog), with help from the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s evocative, subtle, original and entirely spoilt by a number of unimaginative prog-rock tracks by a band called “Journey”. Fortunately there are only two sections of prog-rock in the film, both of which are somewhat redundant.

Perhaps by now you have twigged, that it’s my intent to correct some of these flaws. In a nutshell, we have an visually superb film spoilt by some unnecessary, badly-filmed live-action sequences. Thanks to affordable digital editing software I can now take my DVD copy of this film and completely strip it of all of it’s flaws, leaving a shorter, more challenging and ambiguous film.

When you remove the “real world” from Tron you get a completely different effect. Without any orientation, we do not nececarily know from the beginning what the nature of these characters who inhabit the virtual world are.

We see Clu apprehended and apparently crushed by a “recogniser” at the start of the film. In the original version Clu is destroyed and replaced by his alter-ego. In my version he is merely thrown into the “game-grid” as a result of his capture. Naturally that also explains his colour change. In Tron, the MCP’s agents are predominantly coloured red, whereas the fugitive programs are pale-blue.

Of courese, if the real-world does not exist then how do we explain Clu/Flynn’s change of manerism and his claims to be a user. Before his apprehension he makes no reference to userdom (the equivalent to divinity in the computer-world). Is Clu delusional or perhaps some kind of computer-world mesiah.

My reduced ending also adds a delicious ambiguity to what in the original version is shown to be a clean escape. Clu/Flynn is propelled upwards in the disintegration of the MCP. He is not shown to have been destroyed, but nor is he shown to be safe, or re-united with the programs that he has saved from assimilation. We are now free to interpret the nature of his escape for ourselves.

Tron - Widescreen - AC3 [XviD]-2.png

Sadly, the film Tron and it’s soundtrack are copyrighted works. This means I cannot legally distribute a copy of this movie, however I will release my “Edit Decision List”, the recipe for you to take a copy of the Tron film and re-create my edits. This will be released into the public domain, which means that anybody is free to view this classic work of science fiction is it was meant to be.

Wordpress RSS2 content importer, now with enclosures

Published
by
Sal
on February 12, 2006
in Free Software, General and PHP
. 1 Comment

Last night, while most crazy young people are out getting sorted for E’s and whizz, I decided to stay in and migrate the Exciting Hellebore Shew and Epistaxis Archives over to Wordpress. To my dismay it appears that the standard Wordpress RSS importer cannot handle enclosures, so there is no way to import a podcast series.

Rather than cut & paste seventy episodes of Epistaxis Time, I hacked up a new RSS2 importer based on the existing design, but using Magpie RSS to parse the RSS feeds. As a result we have a new parser that is more able to cope with the nuances of RSS2. You can download my code as a SVN diff here: http://svn.stodge.org/wordpress_rss2_import/magpie_rss2_import.diff

In order to make this work you will need a recentish version of Magpie RSS in a folder called ‘magpierss’ somewhere in your PHP search path. Just apply the diff at the root folder of your Wordpress installation. This works best if you got Wordpress via subversion… it’s much easier than downloading and unpacking tgz or zip files.

Starforce obviously do not understand the “Streisand Effect”

Published
by
Sal
on January 31, 2006
in Games and General
. 0 Comments

… because if they did they would know better than to try to intimidate Cory Doctorow for criticising their products. They would know that an effect to chill certain kinds of free speech is almost certainly going to provoke a backlash. It’s really not such a difficult concept.

Doctorow recently revealed that the Starforce anti-copying technology uses hidden malware which is installed onto gamers’ computers without permission or notification. He also noted that Starforce installs a driver that can seriously degrade the performance of a CD drive on a Windows PC.

As usual, Linux and Mac users need not worry about this sillyness.

Updare: The Consumerist is covering this story - I think it’s about to get very big.

Join my Animal Crossing Clique

Published
by
Sal
on January 21, 2006
in Games and General
. 0 Comments

I’ve been playing an imported copy of “Animal Crossing : Wide World” the new network enabled game from Nintendo. It’s gobsmackingly cute, but I need more friends to play with. If like me you are hooked on this game, why not add me and some of my pals to your list. Dont forget to leave your name, town-name and friend-code in a comment on this message.

A screenshot of Animal Crossing

  • “Dobson” from “Hoon”, 2276 9658 8136
  • “Ringworm” from “Cowfold”, 1289 1257 5835
  • “Snoots” from “Dogtown”, 1503 8623 7384

Add these three names to your friend-list and write your details including your name, town-name and friend-code on your notice-board. That way all the other players will eventually get round to adding you. If you play regularly make sure you tell us when you leave your gates open.

This is what happens if you oppose Microsoft

Published
by
Sal
on November 27, 2005
in Free Software
. 1 Comment

In the same week that a cover-story from ZDNet revealed that a major reason for not disclosing a migration from Microsoft to Open-Source products is the expectation of PR backlash, we see exactly what Ingrid Marson described in principle occuring in Boston.

Peter J Quinn is famous for being the IT officer in Boston who first proposed migrating the state’s thousands of workstations from Microsoft Windows and Office over to Linux and OpenDoc. While this is bound to be an expensive migration, all of the experts agree that keeping state documents in a free and open format like OpenDoc is likely to be the best way to ensure that documents remain readable for the forseeable future.

For having the temerity to suggest buying less Microsoft products, it appears that Peter has the latest latest victim of a powerful PR machine.

Of course big companies like microsoft have people to do their dirty work for them, and in this case it’s globe staff-writers Stephen Kurkjian and Robert Weisman, who no doubt became jealous of Maureen O’Gara’s reputation for bottom-of-the-barrel muckraking.

Strangely enough, their article makes no mention at all of the conflict which has made Massachusetts the focus of attention of both Microsoft and the Open-Source companies. The authors no-doubt felt it would undermine their story to mention that Peter has proposed a migration away from Microsoft products and this would cost the software monopoly many millions in annual revenue. More seriously, this would allow Microsoft’s rivals to get a foot in the door and establish some serious competition.

It’s not a surprise that Microsoft have unleashed their full brigade of spin-doctors, publicists and lobbyists to drag any who oppose them into the gutter.