Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category
Refreshing an old idea
I have long been a fan of the saying to the effect that it is entirely fruitless to cry over spilt milk, meaning that if one has no control over something then there is no point in worrying about it. This seems at first thought entirely obvious and I imagine most try to follow it, but very often fail: psychologically it is very easy to worry or to fool oneself into thinking that one has some modicum of control over something enough to justify said worrying, or maybe that by worrying one creates some kind of control. I don’t know, I’m not a psychologist, but the saying in itself seems to hold a fair amount of merit. This week I’ve decided to try to make a renewed push in my own life to follow it. While this is all too easy to say and far more difficult to follow, I think I’ve been succeeding in it lately. This half term holiday has not been brilliant in several ways so far, and yet I have managed to remain very positive and rational. Firstly, it is already Thursday and the amount of work I have got done is not fantastic. More importantly, I have completed a large integration exercise over several days and yet did not achieve a fantastic score (since improved upon by fixing silly mistakes). Crucially, I found myself starting at certain problems for an hour, requiring help from a friend for one and being forced to work backwards from a computer-generated answer for another, and also being unable to see how my numerically identical answer can be rearranged into the form in the answers in the back of the textbook for another of the seventy-eight questions. So I’ve been dissapointed: I imagine others in the class will not have spent so many hours (I reckon about fifteen but several of those were with heavy IM distractions. Still far too long) on it and will not have found certain ones so hard, and may have even done the one I had to work backwards on. However, I am not letting this bother me. As I have written about many times before, I have a constant tendency to be unhappy with my academic performance unless everyone else is doing far worse than me, something I am ashamed of. But this is just an irrational circular argument. So I intend to ignore it, for there is no use metaphorically crying over it. So far I am succeeding. Now I merely have to reconcile my usual cynicism with such a policy.
Another multiply dissapointing thing that has occured this holiday is repeated crashes from various causes of Warcraft III roleplaying games, run over a VPN with a few friends. Warcraft III, as many will know, is a strategy game at heart involving various traditional fantasy races battling it out. It’s an old game but is still incredibly popular despite there now being many more fantasy games out there without the limitations of the engine. This is primarily because of the huge number of custom Warcraft III maps/levels available, since the game’s included world editor is supremely flexible; these then get distributed through playing online. There is Defence of the Ancients or DotA, with a massive cult following, that is used in international tournaments. One struggles to find a game of DotA where you don’t find yourself being automatically kicked for not being on their list of safe players (these are people who won’t disconnect and ruin a game since there is no way for players to take the slots of those who leave). There are various other quick-fire games of some skill: in Sheep Tag, some players as sheep construct farms with narrow passages between them that the other players, the wolves, attempt to destroy in order to catch the sheep. If the sheep survive for a certain length of time (as long as they are not all captured, captured sheep can be released by teammates) then they win.
Then there are the roleplaying maps, my favourites. There are some fixed maps with clever methods for saving heroes so that games can be continued, featuring the usual simple quests and collectable equipment and skills. But it is the entirely flexible RP maps that I most enjoy. These have gone through several generations of names and improvements but the most commonly played at the moment seems to be Secrets of the Depths RP, or SotDRP, though they all work pretty much the same and in fact use much the same terrain or actual playing environment. In an RP game, the player uses various commands to create cities, towns, camps, armies, navies and heroic adventurers with no limits on resources. The game then has two clear aspects. The first, which is probably the one I prefer, is constructing bases and camps and other such niceties to set a backdrop for the story. By rotating, resizing and making invisible structures, intricate and attractive creations can be wrought. Then the actual roleplaying begins, which is effectively like DnD or Exalted with props and effects. The system allows you to name and speak as characters, and while it may seem like an odd way of telling a story it actually turns out to be a great deal of fun, especially when it is with people you couldn’t conveniently meet up with otherwise. The crashes, then, stem from the limitations of Warcraft III as a game. Because RP maps are such a massive hack, Warcraft III’s saving of multiplayer games (a feature absent from many other games which is a shame) doesn’t work fantastically well. And if someone disconnects, that is it: there is no way to get them back in. So the dissapointment stems from losing all the building done, which can take several hours. But I intend to push on with the recurring plot a friend and I have established.
A week with the iPhone 3G
I’ve long been a big fan of the iPhone, which I’m sure needs no introduction: this device is a mobile phone at heart but can also browse the web in the same way a desktop does, pinpoint you on a map using GPS and give routes and directions, use instant messenging (MSN, YIM, AIM, Google Talk etc.), act as a scientific calculator and a great deal more all in a neat little device. Last Tuesday it came out on Pay as you Go, and I decided to go for it, the main reason being the Internet access available anywhere with a mobile signal, and secondarily for the phone side. Given that I don’t use my mobile phone much PAYG is ideal for sending the odd text and receiving (but never making) calls. I won’t go into the dull story of actually getting hold of the thing here, *mumble* silly debit cards. Porting my old phone number between networks also wasn’t much fun, but I managed.
Despite the hardened geeks of freenode staff heckling me as an Apple fanboy who was buying a locked down device for a ridiculous amount of money, my experience so far has been extremely positive. The iPhone may be missing a lot of features (its camera is of low quality compared to other phones and has no flash, it can’t forward text messages, it can’t send multimedia messages, it can’t bluetooth files around etc.) but what it does do it does so very well, and software features can be added later. In hardware terms it’s fantastic: a below-par camera doesn’t bother me as if I want to take photos properly I would use, er, an actual camera. So while there are things that I would change, things that can be changed in software updates I do hope Apple will roll out (which is likely given that now Google’s Android platform has arrived there is finally some smartphone competition to force Apple into improvements), I have in my pocket a fantastic little device. It is my web browser, SMSer, e-mail reader, music player, direction finder, IRC and SSH client, emergency torch (we had a power cut tonight so this was handy), Twitter client, notepad (although I still like having my trusty ‘collected notes’ commenplace book), clock/alarm/stopwatch/countdown, ping/whois utility, light distraction (simple games), eBook reader (not yet, I intend to look into this), RSS reader (this is one of the main reasons I got it, to try and keep up with blogs and things, and of course once you have the web a world of opportunity is opened. Having all this with me all the time is great.
I could blah for ages about all of the things I’ve just listed but I’ll try and keep to the more notable pros and cons. Firstly, what stands out? The touch-screen interface is very effective. Only very occasionally do I find the phone not doing what I want it to do and this is usually because I have my other hand touching the phone and pressing buttons without me realising. Everything flows together nicely and I am getting pretty fast with the on-screen keyboard. Even if it takes up half the screen during use, and is very easy to hit the wrong keys on, the auto-correct means I don’t go wrong very often, and it is learning things that I type frequently already, such as ‘fn’ for freenode which it would probably thechange to an actual two letter word for any other users. The IRC client that I have been using turns off auto-correct and the amount I rely on it very quickly becomes apparent: my messages to the SilentFlame channel last night were often extremely garbled. The lack of copy-and-paste abikity is a pain but software problems can be fixed, and with the ability to e-mail URLs and the like it’s not that bad. As shown in the picture attached to this paragraph, texting is done very well. Messages are sorted into a conversation view with whomever you have messaged. For me this is fantastic. Not only does it mean I no longer fail to understand replies to my messages sent after I have forgotten entirely what I wrote, but as a user of Gmail since 2004 I am obsessed with keeping archives of all messages so this makes me happy.
Since I’ve had the phone for over a week I have certainly experienced some less pleasant aspects, but as noted above these are mainly software related. The phone has crashed several times: hard reboots don’t always get all the downloaded applications working again, although they often do. Updating a particular app often fixes all the rest. In general the phone can be quite temperamental and slows down a lot at times for no visible reason. There are no background processes, meaning that I can’t stay connected to, say, Google Talk, and go and do something else as nothing can run unless it is actually on the screen. The built in e-mail client is rubbish (thankfully Google’s iPhone-adapted Gmail web-based app is brilliant (as shown next to this paragraph) so I can use that, but that is of course slower than a local program) as it doesn’t support threading at all so is utterly unusable for me as I have mailing lists clogging up my inbox (which is out of control right now, so sorry if an e-mail of yours still hasn’t been answered). Many people have complained about the e-mail client and it could definitely do with improving. The battery life of the phone is appalling when the web is used over WiFi or 3G as these both drain battery, but this is because battery technology just hasn’t caught up with transmission yet. In terms of off-phone issues, 3G coverage really isn’t fantastic so I am often reduced to dial-up Internet speeds. This is fine in my view for reading e-mail and RSS feeds, but it is a shame O2 don’t have better coverage. Being as the iPhone is Apple, I am forced into using iTunes to both activate, upgrade and backup the phone, and to download music onto it. iTunes is in my view a terrible piece of software that I personally find very hard to use, so I’m annoyed I have to use it, but I know a lot of people love it.
While the iPhone may be a great device, I’m obviously not keen at all on the locked down nature of it. As soon as people heard I was getting it, most of the school seemed to commence shouting me down as a consumerist and a capitalist, with my feeble defence of wanting it for a very specific purpose of web browsing not bearing much weight. Philosophically it is very unsound. It’s using a corporate operating system with Apple vetting all applications that can be installed on it. But while I would never choose this over a free alternative, these is not in this case an alternative. I run my computer on Ubuntu because it’s great both functionally and philosophically, but I have Windows installed because I have to in order to play games. I have the iPhone as it is the best choice if I want a phone that does all of the above. So I think I’m in a reasonable position, given the world I’m in.
Overall then, I think my £350 has been spent wisely as I have a great device that does what I expected and does it well, giving me something very useful to have around. Given that I spend my money on little else, I decided to go for it, and am pleased I did. I heartily recommend this to people who would make use of the web to the extent I do. If not, it’s not worth it, as it’s then just a fancy phone with a nice MP3 player.
Scribblings migrated to WordPress
I’ve been toying with the idea of moving my blog to WordPress for ages now, and I finally have, mainly due to my discovery of the rather nice new theme I’m using. Google’s Blogger and I have been in a happy relationship since I started this blog back in April 2005 (that’s not actually very impressive as it was so skittish and irregular back then) but there are various reasons why staying with Blogger isn’t ideal. Blogger has some nuances such as, by default, setting the date and time of your posts as the time you started to write them, not the time you finished them, causing me to have to edit it every time I published a post. WordPress however does things more intelligently: you hit publish, and the time that would make sense is put on the post. This is good. WordPress also has categories as well as tags, which means I can split this blog neatly into the fact it does so many things. So after I’ve spent time categorising all my old posts, this blog will have a seperate soapbox section, and a diary section, and things like that. The move is almost seamless. Pretty much everything is at the same address as it was before, but some of my permanent links have changed because of annoying Blogger behaviour of shortening then where WordPress doesn’t. Sorry about that.
I’ve also renamed my blog again, back to ‘Intellectual scribblings’ (it was once ‘XyrWeblog | Intellectual scribblings’ – gargh how horrible). This is not an expression of arrogance. It’s just a nice little phrase that I rather like and I think it at least reflects the aim of this blog, even if it doesn’t reflect the reality. This is a lot nicer than simply ‘Sean’s blog’ which doesn’t really hold any meaning at all. There are a few issues with this new theme that are worth pointing out: the artistic scribbled labels aren’t always visible and obvious (try posting a comment and you will see what I mean) and the text is a tad small. But I really like the notebook idea since I have taken to using a notebook regularly of late, and so I think I’ll stick with this for a while. Now let’s try actually writing some decent content – after I’ve fiddled with things like the link list and post categories and the like…
A few thanks are first in order. Thanks Google for running my blog for ages, thanks the WordPress team for the free software, and thanks Evan Eckard for the beautiful theme.