The Roost

While reading OS News I came across references to a couple of interesting gadgets.

The first is Touchbook, a funky netbook based on the very fine T.I. OMAP3 ARM processor. It boasts a touch screen which is an interface which could work well with these small portable devices. The twisty, flippy, detachable hinge also adds great flexibility to how you use it.

Then there is Mintpad

I'm not sure either of these devices is actually available yet, the Touchbook certainly isn't, but it's great to see people playing with form factors. Asking the question What should a computing device do?.

While waiting for the various telecommunications companies to sort themselves out after my move I have been playing A Vampyre Story. A game which proudly proclaims itself to be From the artists who brought you Curse of Monkey Island. Maybe that should have been my first warning. Not From the designers of Monkey Island, but From the artists.

I can certainly see the connection. The art style is quite reminiscent of CoMI, and the music too. In fact one piece has a such a similar theme that there's a noticeable jerk when it doesn't turn into the piece used in CoMI. Let me be clear, the similarity in art style is not a problem. In fact it's a good thing. Unfortunately as a game it is more disapointing.

Playing this game it becomes clear that the designers at Lucas Arts learned a lot about designing point and click adventure games over the years. Knowledge which the graphic artists didn't have. Too often I found myself randomly clicking items in a desperate attempt to find out what went with what. Other times I'd try things which seemed obvious (and turned out to be the correct thing to do) without having any good idea why I was doing them, other than that they were obvious.

Now these sort of problems would turn up in the old Lucas Arts games from time to time but the designers become very good at seeding clues to the problems in the dialogue and scenery descriptions. Thus, even when you missed the clue and had to resort to try everything with everything when you hit on the correct combination there would usually be a Eurika! moment when you realised what the clue was that you missed.

There also seem to be a few too many locations to move between. This was presumably done to give the impression of an expansive world with many options. However the puzzles are very linear. There is a tightly defined path to follow but if you turned right instead of left you can find yourself wandering off for miles trying to find something to do, only to come back and find it was in the next location in the other direction.

Then there ware the references. No Lucas Arts game of yore was complete without a Star Wars reference and they weren't afraid to break the 4th wall on occasions but this was kept fresh by not overdoing it. Vampyre Story has no such qualms. The game sometimes feels like it is purely a vehicle for making references to old Lucas Arts games. This got annoying quickly. Particularly when something was said which was obviously a reference but I didn't know what to.

This leads me to another problem with the references, telegraphing. Nothing was ever understated. At one point our heroine looks at a book on a bookshelf to see it's called something like Why I Like Chicken, by Leroy Jenkins. This would have been fine if it were simply thrown in there among the list of other silly books on the shelf. People who got the reference would get a kick out of it, people who didn't, wouldn't notice. But when the dialogue reads the book as Why I Like Chicken, by Leeeeeeeeeeeeeeroy Jeeeeeeeeeeeeenkins everyone is made aware it's a reference and people who don't get it get annoyed.

So finally we arrive at the central characters. Mona De Lafitte is an opera singer torn from her beloved Paris and turned into a vampire by the villainous Shroudy Von Keiffer. She suffers from having an annoying, squeaky mid-Atlantic French accent. Annoying and a bit weird. She doesn't seem to be able to make up her mind if she's French and learned English from Voice of America or if she's from the Bronx and is affecting a French accent because she's an opera singer. On a side-note, too many of her I can't do that comments are too long. These things should be short because we're going to be hearing them a lot.

She has a wise-cracking companion, Froderic the bat, as well. I don't know if they were chasing a Sam & Max vibe with these two. It feels like they may have been. If so, it falls flat. The to-and-fro between them doesn't really sparkle like it should.

My final gripe, though, is that I feel the game was somewhat miss-sold. It turns out it's episodic. I've not found any reference to this in any of the official literature relating to the game and I avoided the unofficial sources so as not to spoil my enjoyment.

I have nothing against episodic games in principle. I thoroughly enjoyed both series of the new Sam & Max games. They demonstrated, for me, how epesodic gaming should work. Short cheap episodes frequently released.

The problem with Vampyre Story is that it suddenly stops with a lead-in to the next episode and certainly no resolution. This would be fine if it was a 7pound;6 game from a series I knew was episodic. It is not okay from a £20 game which I was not expecting to be epesodic.

I felt a little guilty buying this game at a discount, wanting to reward the publishers for producing a game for a niche market by paying full price. Now I'm very glad I did get a discount because even the £15 I payed is too much for an episode.

Episodic games only work if the episodes are cheap and come out frequently. Once a month is a good figure. There is no sign of the next episode of Vampyre Story coming over the horizon. Who knows when part 2 will arrive.

However, having said all of the above, there are some things to commend this game for.

The ghost inventory is a nice idea. It solves the logical problem of Just how is my character carrying around a Sherman tank in his pocket? Items which can't sensibly be carried about ones person turn up in your inventory as a ghost. You can then use this ghost in the normal manner and when you find the place where it's supposed to be used Mona nips back to where it actually is and fetches it.

Good use is made of Mona's vampiric powers and weaknesses in the pursuit of puzzles. We are also promised that she will gain new powers in forthcoming episodes, which could be fun.

Returning to a matter I've discussed before, graphics in games, I like the combination of 3D actors in 2D sets. It makes a lot of sense for a game like this. Creating and animating a 3D model is an expensive process. However once it's done you can view that model from any direction for free. So creating Mona and getting her to walk costs a lot of money but once you've done it she can walk anywhere you like and be viewed from any angle. Having done Mona walking left-to-right you don't then have to do Mona walking top-to-bottom. The scenery, on the other hand is viewed from a fixed camera position. Creating this as a 3D model would be a waste as you'll never see it from any other angle. In which case, why not get a painter to do you a richly detailed background for less money?

In conclusion, this game is a bit of a disappointment. It has a pretty interesting premise, ripe with potential. Unfortunately that potential isn't really mined effectively. It also feels like a game designed by committee. It feels like someone has tried to identify the best bits from the old Lucas Arts games without really understanding them. I also feel like I've been sold an over priced dummy with the sudden dropping of the actually, it's episodic bomb shell.

I took this photo on the first day of my new job. It's quite a view from my new office.

Today I completed and signed all the contractual paperwork for my new job. As of a week today I will be an embedded software engineer working the University of Manchester's school of Physics and Astronomy. I will be working at Jodrell Bank on the Square Kilometer Array project. In particular the SKADS proof-of-concept project.

This is a fantastic opportunity to do really interesting work, I'm looking forward to it immensely. However the irony is not lost on me that despite doing an MSc and a lot of faffing around I have still managed to beat the Kingswood bunnies to Manchester.

There isn't much time to dwell on that though as, once the offer was made, they were keen that I start as soon as possible. This has lead to a lot of running around trying to sort out digs and to move there. It's still touch and go. I may have to spend the first week or so in a B&B. I don't want to rag on the letting agent too much, they don't know me from Adam and are just pursuing due diligence on behalf of their customers. However I was a little insulted to be told I was a credit risk and a little humiliated to have to ask my parents to be guarantors.

Still, the oddities of the housing market mean that I can move from a 1 bedroom flat in a not particularly useful are of Edinburgh to 2-up/2-down end terrace house pretty much in the centre of Macclesfield.

I don't know in which of the myriad versions they appeared but D&D is moderately famous for the various hands of Bigby spells. Popular ones include Bigby's Interposing Hand and Bigby's Grasping Hand. These spells conjure I giant golden hand which does something, like put itself between the caster and a target, or grasp a target so they can't move.

So, by way of a silly diversions, here are a couple of new Bigby's Hand spells:

Bigby's Talk to the Hand

A giant golden hand appears, palm facing the target. For the duration of the spell it is impossible for the caster to hear anything spoken by the target. This renders the caster immune to verbal insults or intimidation but not to spells cast by the target. After all, they can still speak.

Bigby's Pimp-Slapping Hand

A giant golden hand appears and slaps the target in the face. This causes minor damage but lets everyone around know that the target is yo' Ho and they dun you wrong.

Honourable mention to Order of the Stick for also expanding the Bigby canon.

Feel free to use the comment space below to give your ideas

It can be easy to become disheartened with the world when, day after day, we see people in public office being apparently willfully diceitful and dishonest to further their personal goals. Sometimes, however, a beautiful thing happens: someone shouts "the emperor has no cloths on".

The person pointing out the terpitude of government today is Dame Stella Rimington, former head of the Security Service.

The thrust of her argument is nothing which hasn't been said before by many people. Specifically, that the government has stoked the fires of the fear of terrorism and then used that fear as a pretext for passing laws which infringe civil liberties. But to have someone so obviously a member of the establishment, she is a Dame after all, point this out adds a little extra spice. To have a former head of an organisation whose job includes a certain amount of state sanctioned civil liberty infringement and general dirty trickery call the government out over this is a delight to behold and a damning indigtment.

This isn't the first time Dame Stella has come down on the side of civil liberties either. She is also on record as saying that there is little demand at the Security Service for the governments cherished ID cards.

It could be argued that her opinion holds little weight as she stood down as director general in 1996. This almost certainly means she is out of touch with the internal politics of the secret services although I'm sure she is still more in the loop than the rest of us ever will be. However she speaks from the position of a professional of many years standing. The fundamental problems and challenges do not change quickly, if at all. Her insight in all these matters is to know what is, and is not, useful to the Security Service prosecuting its business. If she says ID cards would bring little benefit and that the government is guilty of inflating fear to push their own agenda then I am inclined to consider that relevent.

The latest strip from Dork Towers speaks powerfully on the subject of every pissy web site in the world wanting you to create an account before you can do even the most mundane thing. This is why OpenID was created.

The way it works is quite simple, but effective. You nominate an OpenID provider (this could be a server which you own and run yourself) which you trust and they hold all the details you want to give them. Then, when a site wishes to authenticate you it contacts this server and presents it with the credentials you have supplied. That server then replies with a yea or a nae to confirm that you are who you say you are. The client website cal also request information from the OpenID server such as your e-mail address but it is down to the discretion of OpenID, and therefore you, as to whether they can have it.

The advantage of this should be pretty clear. All of a sudden you have a single log-on for all those web fora that you want to participate in but really don't want to create an account for. However, unlike Microsoft Passport, you can choose who you trust with your details or run your own server for the scrupulously paranoid.

As far as I can tell the only reason that web fora require this registration process is so that they can uniquely identify you should you start misbehaving and protect you against others misbehaving. OpenID is more than adequate for this along with a whole slew of other services such as your blogging site and your video sharing site.

Of course the likes of Live Journal and You Tube are loth to support OpenID. It becomes very hard for them to sell your details if they don't hold your details. They are not stopped from profiling your use, on their site, and targeting ads towards you however, because they still have a unique identifier for you. Just not one they control.

As you may have deduced I think OpenID is a good thing and would like to see it adopted widely. It's still quite a new standard so there have been some teething problems but when these are ironed out it should save us all a little irritation.

For Christmas I received a P45. My new job was terminated at the end of the probationary period without any coherent explanation. However the fact that the company laid off 5 people (from a staff of about 20) the following week probably tells you all you need to know.

So I am now back in the job market. Hooray!

I've applied for a couple of positions relating to telescopes. Apparently astronomers hire just before Christmas. One of these is with the Square Kilometer Array Demonstrator System (SKADS) project at the University of Manchester's arboretum. Looks like an interesting project involving the use of a phased array for the collecting surface. This is a bit of a departure for radio astronomy so all sorts of interesting stuff to be done there.

Even if I don't get the job I have discovered The Jodcast while look into it. This is a twice monthly magazine programme on the subject of astronomy which I recommend to anyone interested.

Highlights include an interview with Prof Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, discoverer of pulsars. She tells the story with an engaging style. It gives a very nice example of the scientific process in operation. It also reminds us of a time when your work backlog was measured in feet.

An audience with Sir Bernard Lovell (Part 2, Part 3 and bring a smoking jacket), pioneer of radio astronomy and founder of the Jodrell Bank observatory, is also worth listening to. I think the way that just about every pivotal moment in his life seems to have been a mistake or a lucky chance (or both) gives hope to use all.

I saw a newspaper headline board on my way into work which worked in so far as it made me hunt out the article it referred to, but not to the level of actually buying a copy of the newspaper.

I read the article, "Lloyds chief's snub for Scottish bank", with bemusement but not entirely surprise.

The Scotsman seem to be masters of self delusion. They rile about how this merger is no merger at all but, while it has been described as a merger, I think only the Scotsman thought it anything other than a takeover by Lloyds of HBoS. But let's just take a moment to expand that acronym. Lloyds are taking over Halifax-Bank of Scotland. Again, this was described as a merger but people I know who worked in BoS were under no illusions that they were being taken over by Halifax. So before the Scotsman, or the SNP who are also getting wound up about this, get too excited about the evil English taking over their beloved bank they should maybe consider that it is already an English bank. And what the evil English choose to do to their own banks is their business.

The paper points out that the chief executive of Lloyds is "'indifferent' to the 300-year heritage of the Bank of Scotland" and that "His comments provoked fury among Scottish business people". I'm not sure why. Lloyds are buying a business, not history. History can sometimes be an asset but for a bank other things are much, much more important. These same business people also "warned indigenous businesses could suffer irreparable harm at the hands of the new bank" which makes no sense at all. Good customers are one of the assets of a bank. If you buy a bank you want to keep its customers. Maybe these business people fear that they may be bad customers in which case it's only sensible for the new bank to look for ways to get rid of them.

Another bone of contention seems to be that there will be no representation on the board of this new bank of old HBoS staff. I can't say I'm surprised. These are the people who brought the bank to a position where it was ripe for a take over. These are not the people that a sensible person puts in charge of their company.

A different strand in the article appears to be an attempt to manufacture a conspiracy around the fact that "Northern Rock" and "Bradford and Bingley" were nationalised, at least in part, while HBoS wasn't. I don't buy the conspiracy. The reason HBoS was not taken into public ownership seems pretty obvious. Lloyds offered to buy it. The government doesn't want to be in the banking business and I don't think I want them to be either. They took on the other two because no one was offering to buy them. It's worth noting that the moment the government found a buyer for Bradford and Bingley's saving business they sold it.

There are good reasons to be concerned over the creation of a huge new bank which may distort the market but romantic (if inaccurate) notions of "the little Scottish bank" are not one of them. If we lived in a different society then there may be an argument for doing things differently. But the UK has chosen a free-market capitalist society in which case businesses buy other businesses.

The BBC recently announced it's The Box project. This involves adopting a standard shipping container belonging to Japanese shipping company NYK. The container has been fitted with a GPS transponder so it can be followed about its business for a year

I think this is a cool idea. It is an interesting way of providing a spring-board to discuss all sorts of matters surrounding globalisation and international trade. It manages to be engaging, drawing us into a subject which we may not have considered before. It also does it without being patronising.

There have been naysayers, as there always are. Some have blustered about the flawed methodology of painting the container in BBC livery, thereby distorting the results. I think they have completely failed to understand that this is not a scientific experiment but a means of introducing a topic. If it were an experiment they would have fitted hundreds, maybe thousands of totally anonymous containers with the transponders and wouldn't have mentioned it on national television and the Web.

Others have raised fears that this container, with its BBC livery, will be a magnet for smugglers as customs wont go near it. Quite why they think that customs officers are less likely than anyone else to want to get on TV I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the most inspected container on the surface of the planet for the next 12 months.

I shall certainly be following The Box's progress with interest.

Exciting news: Telltale Games, of the revived Sam & Max computer games, are to produce a Wallace and Gromit game. The video suggests that they have the look nailed. If they can get the scripts right then we're laughing. Signs are good since this is being presented as a co-production with Aardman Animation.

You may remember my earlier blog about the Skylon. That post was mostly about a single-stage-to-orbit craft however it mentioned the object which gave rise to its name, the Skylon.

Apparently there is an effort afoot to recreate this lost installation. The BBC have the story along with some video including some fine Chumley Warner era news casting.

I think this going ahead would be pretty cool. However if it's going to be done I think the new Skylon should be sited on the South Bank. It really has no meaning anywhere else. The fact that things surrounding it will be taller isn't really a problem. If it had not been demolished and sold for scrap taller things would still have been built in its vecinity.

I am not a natural Conservative voter and that doesn't look likely to change any time soon. However I have to acknowledge my respect for David Davis who, today, forced a by-election by resigning. His intention is to stand on a platform opposing the 42 days detention without charge.

It looks like a gang of British organisations is doing some interesting space science. Or at least plans to if they can find funding.

For anyone who hasn't seen it there is some video of test firing some penetrators into a sand bank. There are also some words explaining what it's all about.

We've been here before and the specter of Beagle II must be hanging over them. I hope they can get enough money to do it well because begging enough money to do it badly isn't worth the effort.

The average gamer is never going to be heard uttering Phwar! Look at the physics on that! but graphics will sell games.

In fact computer game developers seem to be involved in a headlong dash into the uncanny valley. This is a well known aspect of human perception. As a species we are very good at recognising other members of our species. This means we will happily accept photographs and other accurate depictions of people. We will also happily accept caricatures, cartoons and other inaccurate depictions. What we find deeply unsettling is almost-accurate depictions. Things which appear to be accurate but which are wrong in some way. This effect is known as the uncanny valley.

Personally I think graphics have got as realistic as they need to be. I'm much more interested in games which try to utilise the immense power of modern graphics systems in some other, more interesting, way.

A game which caught my eye (not my cash as I don't own the console it was released for) a while back was Okami. This game uses a style inspired by Japanese water colour paintings which reflects its foundations in Japanese mythology. They've extended the painting metaphor to the games interface. You can access special abilities by painting ideograms.

The next example of a game attempting to do something interesting with graphics is the mouthful which is LocoRoco Cocoreccho!. This game has adopted a style reminiscent of animation and illustration from the 1970s. This game is designed to be fun and the graphical style enhances that fun. The use of the motion sensitive controller adds a physical element to the gameplay which also enhances the fun.

I recently bought the Penny Arcade game On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness which, not surprisingly, resembles the comic on which it's based. There are two graphical styles employed. One is a 2D comic-like style which closely mimics the source material. The other is 3D but it employs a cell shader to give it the look of a comic or cartoon. This does not mean the developers have had to forgo flashy particle effects as can be seen in the accompanying screen shots.

When discussing this topic with a friend he mentioned a game called Vigil: Blood Bitterness. I had a look at the demo and while I'm not particularly enthused I do appreciate the highly stylised, almost monochrome graphics style. It adds to the dehumanised atmosphere of the setting.

So I assert that it is possible to do something other than trying to achieve photo-realism in computer games. What's more I think that a clever designed can enhance the feel of their game by careful and wise choice of graphical style. When you get right down to it great, and by that I mean appropriate, graphics can make a good game amazing but they can not make a poor game good. Take World of Warcraft as an example. The WoW graphics engine is quite primitive but it is used effectively to generate impressive vistas. The game has a cartoonish feel which re-enforces the sense of fun with which the game is infused. This does not mean we are not looking forward to the graphics being tarted up when Wrath of the Lich King is released. It just means it is not essential to our enjoyment.

I just came across this video which amused me. Nigel Kennedy, sporting the scruffy student who's been dragged backwards through a hedge look, plays his interpretation of the Doctor Who theme.

You will need a RealVideo player of some description to see it.

A nice opinion piece from David Braben on the BBC News site.

In it he relates his fond memories of the BBC Microcomputer and laments the apparent attitude in modern Britain of lionising the crass and stupid and denigrating intelligence. He also worries that this will have a terrible impact on the country and it's ability to make it's way in the world.

For a long time I have had great respect for technical authors. Being a software engineer I understand the need for documentation and hate having to write it. Therefore people whose sole job is to produce manuals and such get my respect. Technical writing is, in my opinion, a profession which does not get enough credit.

Over the past 6 months have really given me new insight and respect for their work. I've been dealing with software developed by scientists, and not computer scientists. Their documentation is terrible, where it exists. It is patchy, makes huge assumptions such as You already know how this works and generally often worse than nothing. Life is very hard when you're trying to work with incomplete or actually wrong information.

Not everyone is cut out to be a technical author. It's a proper skill to be able to write clear and concise documentation. I'm sure I'd be terrible at it. However here are my top tips to make everyone's life (including your own) easier.

• Use Javadoc or Doxygen. If you can't then pretend that you are. Provide a comment before every function briefly describing its purpose, inputs and outputs.
• Keep documentation up to date. Using in-source documentation helps here because it's right next to the code you're changing.
• Be very wary of using macros. They obfuscate the code by hiding type requirements.

I went to see Gamerz with bozobaggins and english_alien yesterday evening. It was the last day of the run and we walked into screen 6 of the Fountainbridge Cineworld to be confronted with the choice of any seat in the audetorium. Another gang of people came in after we'd selected some nice central seats. (with my right foot parked in a patch of something sticky) However I think it's fair to say this film will not get an extended showing.

We were surprised that there were any adverts at all before the film since it's hardly the sort of thing most advertisers would go for. Given the choice between this and From the makers of Scary Movie, another pointless series of dumb parodies of popular releases you know which they'd choose. Just goes to prove that they buy a block of advertising and adverts are applied randomly to the start of films. Many geeks might want a Jaguar XF but I don't think many could afford it.

The trailers, on the other hand, were will chosen for the geek market. Science-fiction, fantasy and comic adaptations.

But that was the just the pre-amble. On to the film. Our first impression was plain amazement at the quality of the print. I don't think any of us have seen a print that clean before. It was a thing of beauty. Pin sharp, no shake or wobble, no scratches, absolutely pristine.

As for the film itself I'm ambivalent. The cinematography showed some real flair and it was, in places, very funny. However the story itself didn't engage me. I'm not sure why but rather than a gripping narrative it was just a series of events. Intellectually I could see how each event lead to the next and how previous events affected the characters behaviour. I just didn't feel it. Maybe I was in the wrong mood to enjoy the film.

The whole story felt grimy. The grim housing estate full of schemies, drugs and violence would have been a good contrast to an idealised fantasy world within the game. Unfortunately that didn't seem to be the case. None of this was helped by the fact that our hero was basically psychotic.

A couple of random thoughts: At times the pure dead Weegie-ness of it all worked to the films detriment. The characters are never less than understandable, it just grated after a while. The physics lecturer is a great character and scenes with him in it were always fun.

There was also a feeling of anachronism about the central character. The film is clearly set in the present day, but our hero seems to have come from 1982. His magnum opus is written using a typewriter rather than making use of a computer at the local library. He has an extensive collection of Fighting Fantasy books on his bookshelf. These books ran from 1982 to 1995 and given that our hero is a fresher at the time of the film he would likely only have been alive for the last 5 years of that run. He also has an extensive collection of games but I didn't spot anything newer than about 1990. The very confrontational style of play portrayed of game master vs. players also harks back to the beginning of the hobby when it had just budded off from war gaming. Since then there has been a general movement to a more co-operative style where GM and players work together to tell a story.

I'm afraid I can't really recommend this film but I would still urge anyone interested to see it if they get the chance. I feel I did not enjoy it is much as I should and I have a nagging suspicion that the fault lies with me rather than the film.