Bartlet for America!

Martin Sheen is not getting nearly enough love in today's IMDB poll. Get out there and vote people!

Spore of the devil.

Anyone who is not excited about Spore is dead inside:



That video is three years old, and still inspires anticipation with every frame. And now with the release of the creature creator (which everyone is talking about), the scope of what has been developed in the last three years is becoming obvious. Sandbox games tend to be addictive, but sometimes lacking in creativity, substituting storyline for repetitive grind. Addictiveness, I have no doubt about - from the creator of The Sims, we have come to expect no less - but will it be fun?

And that's the one potential worry about the game - will, after the initial burst of excitement, there still be a challenging game to play underneath? Or will it just be a case of doing whatever you like, however you like? The problem with the latter is that total freedom isn't fun, because there's no sense of achievement to anything. I'm reasonably confident, though - with amazing scope and a great looking presentation and concept, it'd take a gameplay flaw of massive proportions to sink it.

Despite mentally pigeonholing myself as a 'gamer' I generally only buy a couple of games a year (time restrictions more than anything else), and this is a dead cert for my Autumn purchase at this point. Short of GTA4 or HL:e3, Spore is the most exciting thing I can imagine having in my hands.

RSS: Simply Sublime.

I can remember a time, way back in the mists of 2007, when I used to have an HTML page on my computer listing the sites I was interested in, and whenever I had a few minutes free, I'd click through a few of the link and read back through the latest updates. Before that, I used bookmarks, and before that I just remembered a rough list of sites I wanted to check every so-often. All these methods, however drifted into that part of memories reserved for the lunacy of youth when I finally started to use RSS feeds last year sometime.

Initially I only had a few sites on there - the blogs of some friends and family, a couple of webcomics, and (i think) the BBC news feed. But the paucity of links didn't matter at all, as the advantages were immediately obvious - I was transformed from a searcher to a hub. Rather than crawling through an increasing list of sites, hoping to find updates, the updates now came to me. I could read and respond to an item of interest as soon as it appeared, and I was never concerned that I had missed a potentially interesting development.

As well as being an enormous time saver, it helped to expand my web horizons too. Back before I used a feed reader, I rarely read the blogs of people I did not know personally, and part of the reason for this was, I think, that I never felt connected enough to their story. It's difficult to motivate yourself to keep going back to a new blog, hoping for new bits and pieces to read, unless you have a vested interest in the subject matter. With the new posts delivered to you, however, there's no requirement on your part for explicit commitment or frustration. Instead you're alerted to new information as and when it becomes available, and it feels more like you're following a blogger's train of thought, making the whole thing much more rewarding. And this advantage is reflected in the ease of adding a new blog to your reader - with often only one or two clicks, you've got a new stream of information coming in.
In addition, there is no need to give up on old inactive feeds - even after 6 months of silence or so, long after you'd have stopped checking manually, an update can pop up, surprising you and either heralding a new chapter of writing, or just providing an update of the time missed. In either case, it's giving you the opportunity to (without any effort on your part) stay up to date with even the least consistent of bloggers.

While inactive feeds are allowed to remain, not all feeds remain indefinitely. Feeds that update too frequently without having a great enough density of posts I'm interested in will get the boot, along with any new feed that doesn't particularly impress me within five or ten posts. The only feed that escapes the former rule is Ask Metafilter, who's 50 updates a day or so are just short and potentially-interesting enough to warrant it being kept. Boing Boing, w00t and the BBC news feed have all perished through being too active and not relevant enough. In general, though, I've kept the vast majority of the feeds I've started reading.

Since I moved to RSS, I've gone from following six or seven sites to more like seventy. Not all of them are updated particularly often, and I don't read everything on the ones that are, but I never miss anything of interest to me (how many things in life can you say that about?), and I see things I might not otherwise have read, opening the possibility of picking up new interests/knowledge.

One thing I have found, however, is that a number of my friends that I might have anticipated would use them don't, and this surprises me, given how incredibly useful I find them. So, am I preaching to the converted, do you all use rss feed readers already, and if not is there any particular reason why you don't?

Postwhore + 1

In case people hadn't noticed, there's a link on the right there, by which you can find out the number of posts each author has made on the blog. I wish I could get it to display in the sidebar (and believe me I've tried) but I don't think it's possible at the moment. In any case, it should give you an idea of where you stand.

Not that number of posts necessarily implies mental, physical or moral superiority, but... well... no smoke without fire, you know...

Also, a quick link to a joyous resource: How many times have you wondered how to get from one page to another on Wikipedia in the shortest number of steps (maybe you've even played the Wikipedia game). Now, all questions will be answered by Six Degrees of Wikipedia:

Derren Brown to Stephen Lynch in four steps.
Goth to Chav in three steps.
Rape to Comedy in two steps.

What's the largest separation you can find? Honestly, I'm having trouble finding any above four. It's like finding googlewhacks - trying to think of totally disconnected concepts.

My first five, with the restriction that they were both articles rather than disambiguation pages, is: Elkalyce argiades to Riesz representation theorem

Facebook, I actually rather like you.

This is a vague response to Andy's post of a couple of days ago on the shortcomings of Facebook, and the applications system in particular. While I'm sure some (most? (all?)) of it was tongue-in-cheek, it seems to me representative of many people's reactions to facebook as an easy target for criticism. I'm certainly not going to claim that facebook is perfect, that it is the pinnacle of the social web, or that it is without some fairly serious problems, but I do feel that a lot of the criticism it gets is unwarranted, or, at least, overblown. So, here's my rundown of the things that make facebook great:

It's a web app: Facebook is constantly evolving, without the need for user-interaction. Where a local application needs your permission to install an upgrade (and so is only likely to prompt you occasionally, for fear of annoyance), the facebook developers can and do upgrade their code continuously. There is no delay on bugfixes, and obvious problems can be fixed as soon as they arise. This means that judging it on particular problems is less useful than for more fixed-state applications, for which a particular problem may be around for much longer.

It's still young: Social web applications have been around for a fair while now, but with the expansion of the web in the last couple of years, the latest generation (facebook, myspace, bebo, friendster) now have a large enough userbase that they are interesting other businesses for the first time as a marketing tool. The fact that this is only just happening means that the 'rules' are yet to be made, and the users when those rules are made will have a lot of power over the form they take. Want to make sure that advertising doesn't ruin social sites? Make sure you are still using the service when the as the marketing starts to take effect, so that you can make your reactions known. And this 'service youth' is not just restricted to marketing opportunities, but to the whole social model. For the first time, a community the size of a country is using the same software at the same time. We won't know the problems or opportunities that this might create until they happen, because it is an entirely new type of business, but it seems silly to leave just when it's getting exciting.

It's extendible: The Facebook Development Platform is a hugely exciting tool, taking the 'user generated content' idea to the natural next step by allowing users to define parts of the software for themselves. See something that might be fun and useful, but does not exist? Write it yourself and put it out there. Naturally, the apps that thrive will be the ones that are spread around most easily (at the moment these are mostly viral pyramid-scheme type apps), and this is probably the largest annoyance to the community in general at the moment. While the 'youth' point might excuse the fact that this problem was not anticipated, the 'web' application' point should imply that something can be done about it relatively quickly. And, indeed, a solution has begun to emerge, providing a number of different alternatives to let the community filter the types of applications it wants to see.

It needs to be good: I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating - there is no use for a social network with no community. If facebook do something that pisses off users to the point that they leave, they are risking their entire business model. This is not to say that the model is fragile since people become attached to any software, and will take a certain amount of bad service in their stride before looking for alternatives. However, with the fact that everyone and their brother is able to write a social app nowadays, it becomes more and more important for facebook to stay ahead of the game. If someone else comes along with an app that is percieved to be more secure, more user friendly, more accessible, facebook will need to react or lose users. And such an app will appear if facebook is percieved to have weaknesses. This combined with the relatively small cost and time-investment required online, means that facebook must react quickly to users to give them what they want, rather than (as in other business models) being able to do the bare minimum and still rake in the cash.

So I don't think that the percieved application problems outlined by Andy should be enough to force anyone away from facebook as a social app. Firstly, it it your friends, not random people, who are causing these problems, and it should be relatively easy to convince them to stop (and if not, why are they your friends). And, secondly, as mentioned above, the problem is clear, important and fixable, and is therefore being addressed by the developers.

While I don't think that people should use facebook if they do not enjoy it, since otherwise all pressure on them to keep the service good goes out of the window, I believe that people need to be aware of what is being done, and what can be done, and that rather than a fixed product, facebook is something that can and will change according to the wishes of the community.

Who's Gary?

I've always wanted to try D&D, but never really found anyone else who was interested. Hence I don't really have anything to add to Gary Gygax's death. I never really knew anything about him, my experience being limited to his appearance in Futurama, and what I have read since his passing. In either case, D&D was clearly a massive milestone in the development of modern RPGs, both tabletop and digital, and the news has reawakened my desire to try it out.

In addition, his death has been very well represented in the webcomic section of the blogosphere by (in order of preference of the comic in question): PA, xkcd, OOTS, Weregeek.

Dotty

I'm physically going to stop this from being a lengthy post, firstly because I'm pretty tired and intend to head to bed soon, but also because if I write a really long entry on the topic I am about to address people will probably stop reading half-way through either through boredom or fear for my sanity.

Recently, one of the most overused but also (when used correctly) most effective punctuation marks in the English language has been bastardised in various places by various people who, in my opinion, should know better. I am talking about the ellipsis, also known colloquially as the "dot-dot-dot". This much maligned punctuation mark has become the easy way out in the age of SMS and email, in that many writers use it to save themselves from having to think about what punctuation mark they should actually use (e.g. "Hi... How's it going... It was great to see you last week... Would you like to meet up again soon..."). This, I generally have no real problem with. "Text speak" is fast becoming a variant of English, and the context in which language is used has always had an effect on how it changes and evolves. So the overuse of ellipses in this context, whilst invariably weakening its effectiveness as a punctuation mark, is not what I'm talking about.

Open a popular magazine or tabloid newspaper today and you are quite likely to see the ellipsis being reduced from what it should be. The poor thing can't argue for its correct formation itself - it is, after all, simply a punctuation mark. So I've decided to speak up for it, as I'm pretty sure if it could it would be shouting at everyone misrepresenting it today. Recently we have seen the rise of the two-dot ellipsis (e.g. "All of a sudden.." - it makes me feel nauseous to create it even in an example). There is no excuse for this. It is laziness plain and simple. A quick scout around the internet tells me that the only place a two-dot ellipsis means anything is in computer programming language. Now, I may be jumping to conclusions, but I'm pretty sure journalists are not confusing the programming version with the English version. They just can't be bothered. Why hit the "full stop" key three times when you could save precious nanoseconds by tapping it twice? Irreparable damage to punctuation is being done by these people, damage that will no doubt have to be undone by myself in my future teaching career in English.

I will cut this post here, otherwise I am likely to work myself into a spiteful and pedantic rant. But I leave you with this: any time you see one of these bastardised ellipses with its third dot missing, find someone to point it out to, and make sure they know how an ellipsis is meant to look. Laziness shall not prevail. I will fight to keep the ellipsis the way it was intended to be written, even if it is a fight I undertake on my own. However, I sincerely hope it is not...

Storage (or 'how to make Telf giggle excitedly and dance around like a schoolgirl in 20 easy steps')

I mentioned before about my problems with storage space, and this week I finally decided that I needed to sort out some kind of a solution, since I was having to uninstall games to make room for new downloads. Hence, vaguely in the style of Andy's 'step by step' posts, I present

How to make Telf giggle excitedly and dance around like a schoolgirl in 20 easy steps:

1: Buy new hard drive.

2: Buy fancy external enclosure for new hard drive (and it's future siblings):


3: Remove rubber bands from cabling inside enclosure and instantly regret it, as a million feet of unleashed cabling takes up all the space in the room:


4: Examine metallic 'wings' quizzically.

5: Search fruitlessly for instructions.

6: Carefully attach 'wings' to hard drive using screws provided and guesswork:


7: Remove wings and reattach them the right way round.

8: Attach hard drive inside enclosure using screws provided:


9: Realise that putting the hard drive at the top will mean attaching subsequent hard drives becomes much more difficult.

10: Unscrew hard drive and reattach at base of case:


11: Attach power and SATA data cables.

12: Buy cheap and nasty RAID controller card from Hong Kong:


13: Insert controller card and connect to enclosure with eSATA cable.

14: Power on enclosure and computer.

15: Install drivers.

16: Spend 6 hours trying to get Windows to recognise that the drive exists.

17: Throw cheap and nasty RAID controller card from Hong Kong in the bin:


18: Buy new RAID controller card for 5 times as much from company in UK.

19: Install new RAID controller card and connect eSATA cable.

20: Watch with delight as Windows beeps appreciatively and begins formatting process:


So, clearly not finished yet, but looking a lot more hopeful than it was a couple of days ago. I shall keep my fingers crossed. The enclosure from Starmount has five slots, so hopefully I'll be able to add up to 5TB, which should do me for the next year at least. Also I should mention Starmount's awesome delivery time. I ordered the enclosure and (second) controller card from them, separately, at lunchtimes at work, and in both cases, they arrived before 9am the next morning. So, top marks to them and Royal Mail for that.

File storage.

I've been somewhat lax with my attempts to post regularly on here, and still have a number of posts to do at some point, but I've been tired and busy and am now going to be away all of this weekend, so if my silence was a bother, it will continue to be, and if it was a relief, enjoy it while it lasts.

For now, I thought I'd put up an interesting and irritating problem I've run into with my computer. I've reached the point where the amount of downloaded TV I have can no longer fit on a single 500GB hard drive. This is, naturally, a bit annoying, as I'm going to have to move stuff around and find somewhere else to start storing it. The more interesting problem is that I want to keep the downloads in a form in which I can find a specific episode of a specific program. At the moment, this means I've got them in folders according to program and subfolders according to series, so Lost > Season 1 > Episode 3.

The easiest way I can think to try and maintain this when starting to move some of the videos to a new hard drive is to move the first half of the folders (alphabetically) onto the new drive, and continue to add files to the appropriate drive, depending on the name of the series. There is no problem with this, apart from that it's not a permanent solution, and as I download more, I will end up having to constantly shift round files from disk to disk.

The alternative is to find some sort of indexing program that would act in the way that iTunes does with ripped/downloaded music and add another layer of abstraction to the file system. This would allow me to dump the files wherever I liked without having to worry about keeping them in a human-readable order, since I could always access them through the indexing layer.

The second option appeals to me in a logical way, since it seems like the most efficient way to allow my collection to grow, but it bugs me that if I do for whatever reason need to find a file (if my indexing program/system breaks or crashes) it'll be far more difficult than it should.

So, I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts on this - which system should I go with, and, if the second one, can you recommend an indexing program?

'Is' and errs

This article is something I stumbled upon this evening, and considering the recent posts here about Facebook I thought it fit rather nicely into the discussions.

I'm not going to do a huge entry on my own feelings about Facebook, as they can be summed up neatly in a few sentences. I use it, mainly for convenience of contact with friends (especially as MSN slows down my rubbish laptop too much to bother running it). I preferred it when it was solely a university-based social networking site. I also preferred it without most of the applications (a few of them, such as Flixter the film review application, I love; some I use but wouldn't miss if they weren't there; the majority I wish didn't exist). I've grown to accept how Facebook has changed now, and I use it the way I always have. Occasionally it grates on me that I feel I'm going to get repetitive strain injury from scrolling down some of my friends pages - past the aquarium, the horoscope, the "Which Buffy character are you?" frames and the Little Britain quote generator - just to see their wall.

Anyway, it seems James Rivington (the guy who wrote the article) has developed a loathing for Facebook which started when the applications were introduced and has continually increased ever since. Fair enough, I too find the applications annoying as I stated above. However, Rivington then appears to take his hole-picking and hatred to a new level. He comments on Facebook's decision to remove the mandatory 'is' from the beginning of your Facebook status, and basically makes this out to be a huge problem and one that will encourage people to be vain and post irrelevant status updates.

To a limited extent I see what he means. The unavoidable use of 'is' does point users to a particular type of status. However, I don't think that taking away the 'is' has made a huge amount of difference. It just gives people that little bit of extra freedom in choosing their own verbs with which to start their status updates. Rivington's fears of vanity and pointless statuses seem trivial, as I'm fairly sure most of the people who wanted to be vain and write pointless things on the internet did that perfectly well with an 'is' in front of their name on Facebook, and will continue to do it just as well without one. "Chad is MONSTER HOUSE PARTAY 2NYT BRING BEER OOH YEH!!!" will simply now become "Chad MONSTER HOUSE PARTAY 2NYT BRING BEER OOH YEH!!!"

Essentially, Rivington comes across as someone trying to find further reasons to hate something they've already stated they hate. He talks about people loving the sound of their own voice, but seeing as his article is a mixture of weak criticism and repetition of his own opinion, maybe he should take a look at the ironic status his own article has placed upon its writer.

by their own petard.

When the guys from Penny Arcade announced that they were taking time off from reviewing games in order to create one, game publishers of the world began to sharpen their knives for the sweetest revenge of all.

However, with their game not out yet, we have a vaguely similar, if a zero-budget, pixelated and sardonic one in Art of Theft.

With the game coming from the keyboard of 'Yahtzee', he of the Zero Punctuation reviews, it was only a matter of time before a parody review appeared. It doesn't have his Yahtzee's accent going for it, but matches him for wit and humour, as well as doing a good job actually reviewing the game.

245 votes

From Sickipedia:
Also, and to stay with the image theme: Thanks to the xkcd store I now have a shiny new olde-style online community map on my wall.
This makes me smile every time I look up from my screen. :D

Links of a 2.0 nature.

I have been intending to write something long, rambling and uninteresting about gay marriage on here for a while, but Jabberwock has put down pretty much exactly what I would have said, so you may as well read that.

Also, looking back at this particularly embarrassing post, I realised that I missed a great opportunity to plug 'awkward things I say to girls', which is linked over there on the right, but hasn't been mentioned explicitly on here before. It's a great series of stories about situations this guy has got into while talking to girls. I can definately relate to his description of his mental processes and stumbling attempts at humour, and his writing style is brilliant and regularly very beautiful. As well as being hilarious. It's not updated very often any more, but read through the archives - it's well worth it.

Since I've been posting a fair number of link-based posts on here, I thought I'd try out del.icio.us, a social bookmarking program that, again, I had been intending to start using for ages. I'll put anything that requires comment on here, but I'll probably link a lot of stuff on there that'll never make it onto here, too, at least until I can work out how to automatically feed my updates through.

And, as if in some kind of web 2.0 frenzy, I have also finally got a flickr account. I had previously resisted this because the photos that I took tended to be more of the mates-getting-pissed variety than the artistic variety. With my early Christmas present (from me to me) of a new and slightly less amateur camera, though, I've decided to at least try and do something a bit different photography-wise. I'm no expert, but hopefully I'll improve, so check out my account every so often to see what I've added.

Any artistic merit those photos have comes pretty much entirely from the intelligent stuff the camera is doing with focus, exposure etc, btw...

Nice try.

Great article on Ted Nelson and Xanadu, neither of which (whom?) I had ever heard of before. Via Coding Horror.

Lol, RL n00b.

Finally, someone talking in a language I can understand. I found these a while back, and I've definitely posted these somewhere before, but I can't remember where. Certainly not here, though.

Part 1: Preparation
Part 2: Conning
Part 3: Spawn Points

UPDATE: As promised in the comments thread -
Part 4: Chat

Yay! :D

I has syntax error?

Posting links without real discussion is somewhat poor form, but firstly, I'm at work, and secondly, there's not a huge amount more to say about this, other than it's the funniest idea I've seen in a long time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE

pwnt

These pix have won teh interwebs.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/goopymart/sets/72157594362502502/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/apelad/sets/72157594388426362/

The world is boring

I receive A Word A Day email. Most of the time I find them interesting; every so often however, they provoke a response of more than just interest, but genuine intrigue and wonder. The most recent edition did this.

The word of the day appeared as follows:

supramundane (soo-pruh-MUN-dayn) adjective

Above or beyond this world.

[From Latin supra- (above) + mundus (world).]

Being both an English graduate and someone interested in words and etymology, my thought process went something like this: 'Hmmm, if supramundane means "beyond this world", does that mean that mundane, a word I, and I'm guessing most other people, associate with banality, can also mean "of this world"?' I decided to look it up in the nearest dictionary I had to hand. Sure enough, here is what I found:

mun·dane/mʌnˈdeɪn, ˈmʌndeɪn/ Pronunciation Key [muhn-deyn, muhn-deyn]

–adjective

1. of or pertaining to this world or earth as contrasted with heaven; worldly; earthly: mundane affairs.
2. common; ordinary; banal; unimaginative.
3. of or pertaining to the world, universe, or earth.

[Origin: 1425–75; L. mundānus, equiv. to mund(us) world + -ānus -ANE; r. late ME mondeyne, MF mondain, L as above]

So mundane does indeed mean both 'boring' and 'of this world'. Looking at the Latin that the word has formed from, it seems to me that a definition pertaining to the world came first, with the 'boring' meaning following.

'Where is he going with this?' Well, it just interested me that at some point it has become acceptable that something of this world is also boring, so much so that they now share the same word; indeed, as I said before, I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of people today, when asked for the definition of mundane, would say the one about banality, and might not even know the one about being of this world. I'm not sure I've managed to reach the crux of my point yet, so I'll attmept to get to it now.

The last thing I would describe the world as is boring. Yes, everybody gets bored from time to time, but to describe the world as boring when there is such a cornucopia offered to you in this life would just be ignorant. All you need to do is go and find it. Easier said than done in some cases, but still no reason to say that the world is boring. I'm not saying that during the formation of the word mundane over hundreds of years people consciously thought the world was boring, but the dual definition must have come about for some reason.

I'm not sure how cohesive this entry has been, as it was instigated by a stream of consciousness and slipped in and out of that throughout. But next time you're bored with (as far as you're concerned) nothing to excite you, remember the words of Bill Bailey: 'Mercury - nothing; Venus - nothing; Earth - fridge magnets, hummus, Spandau Ballet, anything you can think of'. Just remind yourself of some of the ways the world could potentially entertain you, and you can be certain you've only begun to scratch the very tip of the iceberg.