Rebuilding All Projects..

Well it’s Monday, and I’m sitting here waiting for a massive solution to build after getting latest from Source(un)Safe for the first time in over a week (for fear of someone changing something that would break the build of my app that was working fine for client testing). Needless to say it’s quite a long wait, so I thought a blog post might be in order.

 

Please Mr. Google Man

The PortableApps obsession I mentioned last week led me to try SunBird for the first time. Sunbird is, in a way, the calendar equivalent of FireFox and ThunderBird in that it is the free and open source Mozilla answer to time management. Besides being able to locally manage your schedule and appointments, Sunbird allows you to subscribe to external calendar feeds in the iCal format. I thought this would be pretty nifty, since Google Calendars allows you to publish both your public and private calendar views as an iCal feed (among other formats). I was quite disappointed to discover that an iCal feed is exactly that-a one way feed. For me this limits the usability of Sunbird’s usability somewhat, as it’s all good and well to be able to use it to view my google calendar(s), but I can’t use it to add or edit events, so I still end up having to visit the website.

Now I realize that this is no fault of Sunbird’s authors, nor necessarily of the creators of the iCal format.. but I’d really like to see the ability to use the app as more than just a viewer for my online calendars. After doing a small amount of digging it seems that there is a bit of a hacky way to get this kind of behavior out of the latest version of Sunbird, but unfortunately the PortableApps version isn’t quite so recent, so for now it would appear I’m out of luck.

 

Whack that piñata

No, this isn’t another Viva Piñata obsessed rant.. ok so maybe it is a little. I had the interesting experience of playing Samurai Warriors 2 last week for review, and damn it makes the enemy AI in just about every other title in the long history of games look good. That includes the ghosts in Pac-Man and the slowly strafing spacecraft in Space Invaders-they at least managed to dodge your attacks on occasion by means of their slow sideways crawl. Except for the commander characters in SW2, the enemy AI (and for that matter,  the ally AI as well) is basically nonexistent. They pretty much just stand there and let you hit them over and over and over again. Hence the piñata reference-in fact I suspect a piñata might just give up more of a fight-and I’m not even talking about the animated ones created by Rare. The game is pretty damned ugly too. It would appear that it is a direct PS2 port though, so I’m not entirely surprised. EA and some of the other publishers have come under fire for some of their earlier games of this generation being cheap ports from the PS2 and Xbox with some shinier graphics and a few extra features (or even fewer features in some cases), however at least they bothered to add to the graphics. SW2 has, at best, some upgraded textures on the character models. It doesn’t even manage to look like a modern PS2 game.. it appears to be a few generations old. Very sad, and to top it all off, it plays about as well as it looks..

(yup, still building..)

Mind Quiz also doesn’t look like much, but it does the job considering it’s basically just a PSP IQ test. It’s actually quite fun in small doses (which is what it is intended for anyway) and daily Brain Age tests have quickly become a part of my and Natz’ routines.

 

Ok, the build is finally done, that’s it for today.. go on, nothing more to see here..

No more excuses..

They’re kind of pointless at this stage. Just be happy I’m posting, ok! I went past an old colleague of mine’s blog, and felt much better about mine-he hasn’t posted in months :)

 

I haven’t really been keeping an eye on much in the tech world lately, what with the fun and games (notice the dripping sarcasm) of project tests at work, so I don’t have much there. Then again, considering everyone who’s anyone in the tech world showed their wares a few weeks ago at CES, so there’s bound to be a short supply of news for the next month or so anyway.

 

Gaaaaames!

In Xbox Land, I completed my review of Lost Planet this weekend, and the game certainly is worth checking out-even if the controls are horrible and the plot seems like it was thought up during a corporate drug testing session. The bosses in the game are amazing; they really feel like something out of a classic 2D game, dwarfing the main character and even the mechs that you use. It’s like someone watched too much Starship Troopers and (rightfully) determined that it was about time someone created a game with those bugs in it that didn’t totally suck.

I finally managed to get my Gears disk sorted out, so I’m playing that again as well (restarted on Hardcore though) and we played some awesome 6 player system link at a friend’s place last weekend. It really is incredible how much easier a 360 LAN is than a PC one-even with the game patches.

I also managed to get a lot of my old Xbox games traded in for some credit and bought copies of PGR and Kameo; and traded Star Trek Legacy for Table Tennis (which is an awesome game-even Natz is loving it). So right now I have way more games than I have time for-I need a sabbatical just to catch up!

 

Plug and Play

Some of us at work managed to organize USB sticks at a killer price, so we developed a renewed interest in stuff that could be used to fill the sticks up last week. In our search we uncovered www.portableapps.com, which hosts an open source launcher that runs a selection of apps straight from any portable drive. The format is pretty simple, so in no time at all we had some cool extras like our favorite calculators and sysinternals tools running off our new devices-along with some of the PortableApps standards like Miranda, Firefox and Open Office. Running apps straight off an external device really highlights how crappy it is to have to install things in Windows and have them infect multiple folders and your registry, helping in every way possible to retard overall system performance. With a couple of low level exceptions like your firewall, with PortableApps you could be running almost all of your day to day tools off your trusty thumb drive. Besides keeping your hard drive and start bar uncluttered, this saves you from having to reinstall all this stuff when the inevitable Windows reinstall comes along.

 

That’s it, short and sweet. I hope I’ll get back into routine again soon, but considering I have been hoping that for the past two months, I’m not betting on it :)

Xbox IPTV and... Telkom?

Xbox IPTV and... Telkom?, originally uploaded by FlintZA.

I managed to miss yet another week! Big surprise, except this time I have a
really, really good excuse, even better than the stupid Siemens UI. I spent
the weekend (including Friday afternoon and Monday morning) drinking saline
through a straw in hospital, thanks to the dodgy water down in the Natal
midlands where we went for a wedding. Actually to be entirely accurate it
was the food prepared with that water-we avoided the water itself (which was
a yellowy brown colour) after we first saw it oozing out of the taps. Natz
also got quite sick (as did some of the other guests) but fortunately not
sick enough to end up in hospital.

The main event

Anyway, it's a pity I missed last Friday of all days, because I was really
looking forward to writing the post. Last week was CES (the Consumer
Electronics Expo) which is an event that dwarfs even the now defunct E3 in
just about every respect. Of course all the major international players that
have anything to do with cool gadgets and software were there, and it was a
platform for some pretty huge announcements, including Apples long rumored
iPhone, which will be released later this year in most territories. Still no
news of an SA release though, I don't think Apple realize that while SA is
small potatoes when it comes to media players, it is a major market in the
cellular industry thanks to our phenomenally high penetration rate. Of
course I'm not that interested in the iPhone, not least of all because it
will be a closed development platform, and the big stuff as far as my
interest is concerned came from Microsoft.

After the unexpected success of the Video Marketplace on Xbox Live last
year, Microsoft happily punted a new use for the '360- that of an IPTV
set-top box. Now this on it's own is no big surprise, I have been predicting
a move like this for the Xbox brand for some time. In fact it's been pretty
obvious since the 360 came out and it's media capabilities became evident
that the whole Xbox 'project' has been an elaborate (and very successful)
way to get hard core gamers, the fanatic zealots of the consumer electronics
world, to do their marketing for them. After the dismal failure of
Microsoft's Web TV devices, some smart suit in Redmond realized by giving
gamers a console with kickass capabilities and a robust online service, they
would sell any additional functionality to other consumers in their homes.
That's my theory anyway, and every move Microsoft has made in recent months
(Zune, a unified micropayment system, XBLA, Video Marketplace) seems to
validate it.

Anyway, as I said, no big surprise. What was interesting, was a partners
slide from the presentation that started doing the rounds on the web.
Together with the expected logos some of the large American and European
telcos, who's logo should appear but our own much maligned fixed-line
monopoly, Telkom. It is widely known that Telkom has been testing IPTV
technology in preparation to begin offering media services, possibly within
the next couple of months. Telkom themselves admitted to such technology
testing in partnership with Microsoft. So the big question now is: will Xbox
360 be the delivery mechanism Telkom chooses for IPTV? There have been all
sorts of questions along the lines of how this will affect capping and so
on, but they are for all intents and purposes irrelevant. There is no reason
why Telkom couldn't exclude certain ports in cap calculations or use some
similar mechanism to get around their infamous data caps. Line speed
capability has also been questioned, but again I think this is a minor
issue, Telkom may not offer customers any speeds higher than 4Mbps, but that
does not mean that is the physical limit of their infrastructure. They are
simply offering customers a service just fast enough to outpace their
competition and still maintain control over their dismally low cap
allocations (to prevent competition with their own business data products
that are priced at much higher points and earn them even more of a profit).

Any IPTV offering that Telkom invests in would need a number of things.
Obviously some kind of TV 'decoder' would be a must, and the Xbox 360 is a
proven multimedia device that is already accepted by many as a primary means
of viewing and listening to content. Services would also be required, the
ability to browse available content, parental controls, guides, storage,
DRM, etc. All of this is offered 'out the box' by Microsoft's Live service,
and the backend technology behind that system is tried and tested and in
place all over the world. Content is of course another issue, and once again
Microsoft is already ahead of the curve on this, with agreements with major
networks and studios already wrapped up (of course localized agreements will
need to be established, but this is nothing new).

Finally, one of the biggest technical arguments is international bandwidth.
Well that too, is a non-issue. Microsoft's Live service is not a centralized
one, it already makes use of regional caching, with nodes in critical areas
to increase performance. Both MS and Telkom are more than capable of
providing such a data center locally. So perhaps it's time to start
considering whether renewing that DSTV subscription is such a great idea..
Maybe Telkom and Microsoft will be the ones to save South Africans from the
pay-TV monopoly that MNet spawned.. won't that be ironic.

Dumb Siemens..

Happy New year to all! I hope everyone head a great festive break and is all revved to go for a brilliant 2007! Believe it or not, I didn’t neglect this blog for the entire break, I actually painstakingly tapped out a relatively long post on my cellphone on Christmas day and emailed it through Flickr along with a shot of our little Christmas tree (complete with glowing fibre-optics in its branches). Of course true to form thanks to my incredibly user-unfriendly Siemens CX65, I failed to attach the photo correctly and Flickr bounced back the mail. I only became aware of this much later when I came into work and found the bounce in amongst the mountain of bounce spam that seems to be giving Google Mail’s spam filter a good run for it’s money. New Year’s resolution number one for 2007: When upgrade time rolls around, stick to a Nokia or Sony-Erricsson.

Anyway, enough of that and on to a reportback on the silly season break. As short as it was, I got to do lots of what I love most-vegging. I played lots of games, I watched Natz play lots of games and we both watched lots of CSI and DVDs. Besides having Rainbow Six to play through for review, my Christmas ‘loot’ included Viva Pinata, so I had more than my fair share of stuff to play. Sadly my Gears of War disk seems to have been miraculously damaged, so that was out. I will get it skimmed at some stage because I want to finish the damned campaign, but between Rainbow, Viva and that elusive six black pearl achievement in Hexic it really didn’t dent my game time too badly.

I completed Rainbow, and to be honest it just didn’t grip me like GRAW or even Gears. It looks good, but doesn’t wow like either of those titles, it plays well but has enough irritations to dim the shine a little, and the Tom Clancy storylines are really starting to get a bit too samey-never mind the infuriating ending.

Viva on the other hand is exactly what I expected-and as brilliant as I expected. As was the case with Loco Roc, it is physically impossible to not be happy while playing this game. It is just too colourful and cute and endearing for words.  To be honest I doubt children of a young age would ever see the full glory of this game, as it gets wickedly challenging later on, with a mind boggling amount of things going on in your garden. Rare have really created a masterpiece in this game, and no management game has grabbed my attention like this in years. If this doesn’t turn out to be one of the top sellers this year, it will be a tragic blow for originality and creativity in the industry.. lets not see another Okami/Clover studios episode please.

Another Gem on the 360 lately is the Live Arcade shooter Assault Heroes. This one has a real classic arcade feel to it, with a look that won’t let you forget that you’re playing on a powerful console. It’s a scrolling shooter that gives the player(s) control of little assault vehicles in order to mow down as many enemies as possible with the varied (and beautifully rendered) weapons on offer. It’s a blast in solo and an absolute jol in co-op. Pity the same can’t be said for Novadrome. Yuck! Lets leave it at that.

 

Well that’s about it for this post. I need to get some actual work done J Happy 2007 and happy gaming to you all!