Scott Morris'
Bastion of Truth

I have a Treo 650. I quite like it. It’s essentially a Palm OS5 device like my Sony Clie, but with a phone bolted on to it. What’s not to love?

One of the nicer things about it is the presence of a small slider on the top of the phone which turns the ringer on and off, which is a far more civilised way of putting your phone on silent than rooting around in menus. The silent mode on phones out to be used more often by people, especially if your ringtone is La Cucaracha.

Another demand I make of my phones is to wake me up in the morning, as I’m too cheap to buy an alarm clock. The Treo manages this adequately, with a rousing midi rendition of Reveille, although why it can only be set in five minute increments rather than any arbitrary time baffles me.

Except, that is, if you’ve inadvertently left the slider on silent, in which case you are left politely unstirred by a rousing rendition of absolute silence.

I’m not saying that this is the single most retarded design choice in the world, just that it’s in the top five or so.

Charting Yuri Orlov (Nic Cage)’s life as a gun runner, rising from flogging off AK-47s to tinpot warlords to flogging off attack helicopters to better funded tinpot dictators. If you want to, you could miss the point entirely and decry it for glamorising the SALE OF DEATH, although you’d have to skip the fact that Orlov isn’t particularly likeable, albeit not the puppy-torturing evildoer typical Hollywood mentality would demand of such a character. The progress of his business and evasion of zealous fed Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke) makes for intriguing viewing, but if you are of the point missing variety then you’ll welcome the absence of subtlety with which the satire disclaimer is brought up in the final act. Top performances all round and script that has the temerity to credit its audience with some semblance of intelligence means that this gets the thumbs up from these quarters.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Something of an odd choice for Japanese game design deities Treasure, this. Departing from their recent run of Triple A shooters to do a sequel to the top notch Sega Saturn Guardian Heroes, an RPG tinted side scrolling beat ‘em up characterised by huge, er, characters, fairly spectacular spellcasting effects and the kind of graphical zooming trickery that set jaws dropping amongst those who hadn’t yet subscribed to the prevailing wind of 3D killing off 2D gaming. Above all, it was a tremendous amount of fun as we’ve come to expect from that particular codehouse. Jaws dropped again when the news came that Nintendo’s humble pocket system would play host to this welcome yet unanticipated sequel. Surely it could never do the original justice? (more…)

File this one under “never install any operating system until the alpha geeks play with it for six months after launch to fix the crippling bugs”.

Installing the shiny new MacOS X Leopard on to the less shiny old iBook that I have kicking about as, egregiously enough, a spare laptop (oh! Such wanton excess! Swiftly, to the vomitorium!) would seem to go without a merest hint of a hitch. After slapping the disk in the drive, setting the thing running then forgetting about it for a while, it’s drops one off to the updated Desktop including its really stupid looking new reflect-o-dock and mildly retarded transparent menu bar. Also, whoever came up with the idea of Stacks assuming the icon of the last file to be dropped into the folder needs to be brutally cudgled until they have been suitably chastised.

These, however are mostly eye candy related issues. Of more pressing concern was connecting up to the Network Attached Storage box containing a 750GB drive largely full of music files. Mmmmm. Music. Off we go, connect to server, enter the NAS’s address (192.168.0.2, IP fans!). Act slightly puzzled by a new login option that seems insistent on logging in with a name/password, which doesn’t exist as an option on my NAS, or as a guest. Well, guest seems like the better option. Click!

Boom.

If you answered b) The system crashes like a total feckin’ Colin, congratulations! You win the respect of your peers, should you have any.Days of alternately changing every vaguely related setting possible and hitting it with a hammer have yielded the vast improvement of it now simply not connecting, rather than seizing up so badly it has to be powered down. Awesome.It’s always a brave move for a company to change their business model. While it might be a laudable example of chutzpah, changing from “it just works” to “it doesn’t work” might not be the crowd pleaser Apple were apparently expecting.

Edit: 12th Feb 2008: The 10.5.2 update seems to have fixed pretty much all of the above. Huzzah! Only took four months!

I’ve been moving slowly over to MacOS X systems lately, in large part because my MacBook could easily defeat my antique Wintel PC in a cage match and still have energy left to humiliate Ken Shamrock. Once you get your head around the Mac user’s strategy of largely relinquishing control and conforming to doing things the way Apple thinks you should be doing it, it all works rather splendidly. The inveterate hacker part of my hindbrain rankles at it somewhat, but the older I get the more I appreciate something that ‘just works’ with out the endless fannying around that characterises most Windows experiences.

Anyway, the time came to drag my PC into the modern age, largely because I want to play Bioshock. One minor spending spree later and I have a deliciously dinky Shuttle case, 2GB of turbo-nutter RAM, one not-quite-turbo-nutter-but-with-capacity-to-plug-one-in-later Core2 Duo and a nVidia 7600 based graphics card. Nifty. The hard drive, a 500GB beast, for this was repurposed from the existing machine.

Now, here’s the thrust of the piece. When you plug a drive into a Windows XP machine, as the old machine was, and go through the ritual of formatting and assigning drive letters (which itself is an asinine process, but that’s another rant for another day), the default option is to turn it into a ‘dynamic disk’. I wager most people when faced with the options of ‘dynamic disk’ and ‘basic disk’ will have no clue whatsoever as to what the difference is. Certainly I did not. On doing some subsequent reading before writing this, it’s certainly the better technical option. Excellent. No problems, then.

Well, apart from the fact that you cannot install Windows Vista on a dynamic disk, for reasons that seem to be clearly mentioned precisely nowhere. I assume XP is similarly afflicted. No problems though, as the disk was already emptied of everything it ought to be a simple-ish matter of the Vista installer program re-partitioning and reformating the drive into something it can work with.

Except it can’t do that. It just sits and stares back at you with cold, disinterested eyes. It’s not going to install, it’s not going to reformat, it’s not going to budge. You can try to stare it down, but you’ll lose. What an excellent way to introduce yourself, Mr. Vista! Truly, “the Wow starts Now”. Or rather doesn’t. Start. Now. Or at all, without help.

How to progress past this sticky wicket? Delving into my archive of arcane resources I majick up a disk containing Ubuntu 7.04, which happily boots a functional OS straight from a DVD and can run the GNOME partition manager software. This can be used to delete the dynamic disk and leave it in a raw state that Vista can work with. Excellent, now the otherwise blissfully smooth install can continue. Should you find yourself in this situation, the gParted live cd will be a less hefty download that can achieve the same ends.

While I’ve barely used it, initial impressions are that Vista does seem overall a more pleasant OS experience than XP, but I’m not seeing anything to justify the £370 list price of a shiny new copy of Vista Ultimate or any of its myriad derivatives. It’s a little more cohesive, but still nothing like as unified as the MacOS X it’s imitating. It’s a little better, but seemingly not by much more than a nicer skin and a sidebar. It’s not that there’s very little ‘Wow’, it’s that there’s very little new that’s the issue here.

The real thing that gets my goat here isn’t the money it costs, or the seeming lack of advancement over the aged Windows XP. It’s that for something that’s claiming to be the best and most intuitive Windows ever to issue forth from Redmond I had to boot into Linux to install the fecking thing. If this is something that open source, zero cost to the punter operating systems can do, and have been able to do for years, is it too much to expect the same capability from the company that’s by far the biggest dog in the yard?

In today’s “Fringe Interest”, we talk about a problem that affects the Sony Clie NX70 pda, specifically my Sony Clie NX70 pda, and if our lord and master Google is to be believed, no one else. In case anyone is left scratching their heads over this issue in the future, here’s how to rid yourself of this damn spot. If you’ve got a problem, yo, I’ll solve it, check out the hook as the DJ revolves it.

Ice, ice, baby, Vanilla Ice, ice baby.

Um, sorry. While Vanilla Ice is certainly a problem, it’s probably not the one at hand. However, if for some strange reason you’re trying to play an MP3 from this horrible man, it may well be. These sentences come to you courtesy of the Seamless Linking Corporation, all rights reserved.

The problem is described thus - on slapping your MP3 files in the appropriate directory for the Sony Audioplayer app to find them, it bafflingly only plays about two seconds of them before skipping on to the next. This is teeth grindingly frustrating, especially when the solution is something not hugely intuitive, albeit something that admittedly should already have been done as best practise.

Essentially, make sure you’ve downloaded the latest Sony drivers to allow the Clie to support the Memory Stick Pro, not just the standard, out-of-the-box support for common or garden Memory Stick. Yeah, yeah, obviously you should have put this on already but note this - without the driver the Clie happily recognises and uses the MSPro, and most apps save to and run from MSPro without the driver. Also, as the driver isn’t stored in the permanent flash memory, after a hard reset it doesn’t get automatically restored along with the rest of the system.

Which as it turns out was my problem, as I knew I’d installed it so didn’t bother checking, making for weeks of frustrating irrelevant setting tweaking. Conveniently, I’d forgotten about having to do a hard reset that had removed it in the interim. One three second install later and the problem evaporates.

So concludes this episode of “Fringe Interest”, we hope you have found it both entertaining and informative.

So I’m at a loose end t’other day, being in the rare position of having a few hours to kill and no immediate idea of what to do with it. Glancing around my immediate environs I spot a copy of ye olde EA game Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, part of the long-running, surely needs no introduction from me RTS series that’s about as old as I am. Seeing as I never quite got round to finishing this back when it was first released, I figure I’d slap it on the ol’ hard drive, fire it up and give it a quick blast.

Theoretically, this is an excellent plan hampered only by EA’s coding being so, shall we say, sub-optimal that the thing just wouldn’t work. Installs to hard disk fine, then just falls over on having the temerity to attempt to play it. Patched to the latest revision. No worky. Do the usual messing around with the never-yet-useful compatibility options of WinXP. No worky. Download and install 60-odd meg of the latest graphics drivers, a ludicrous size itself worthy of another rant. Still no worky. Consult Google. No answers, but lots of whining about it’s status as ‘fuxxored’.

I have, naturally, solved this problem. I have solved this problem and can now happily make mincemeat of red commie scuzzbuckets to my little heart’s content. How have I solved this? Why, by heading off to the ever useful Megagames website and downloading the No-CD patch, which in this case is perhaps better described by calling it an ‘Actually Make Game Work’ patch. So despite having paid good money to the corporate monolith for a legit copy of the game, the reward that gave me was a few hours of needless head-scratching that I wouldn’t have had to endure had I just downloaded the damn thing of a newsgroup in the first place. Grrr.

It’d be unfortunate were this an isolated incident, but hardly noteworthy. Of course, it isn’t, as between plain poor coding and increasingly ludicrous DRM and anti-copy measures all of which are defeated by serious pirates within days, anything you buy has a better than evens chance of falling over at some point. Some of the ruder schemes will even see a game refuse to install if you’re running perfectly legitimate CD image mounting software like Daemon Tools or Nero Drive Image, for no readily discernible reason I can come up with. Again, if you’d taken the dark path and downloaded it this is handily stripped out for you. Sure, the publisher doesn’t their pound of flesh but at least you can play the damn thing.

Piracy is often sited as the force that will destroy software development, typically by, er, software developers and their Federation Against Software Theft PR branch. If so it’s taking a damn long time to do it, as any number of playgrounds with any number of C90 tapes stuffed with ZX Spectrum games will attest to.

Piracy had better not be stamped out. It’s the only way most of us can actually play the damn things even after buying them.

I suppose they could just be coded to work in the first place.

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Bwahahahahahaha! I crack myself up, sometimes.

It’s a science fiction book.

Wait! Give it a chance. They’re not all as bad as the Star Wars books, y’know.

Ender’s Game sets itself on an Earth of the not inconceivably distant future, with a crowded, population controlled world preparing itself for a seemingly inevitable future war with an insectoid alien menace, an advance force of whom that they’ve just barely managed to fend off. Deciding that nature needs a little help in producing a suitable leader for the Earth forces, a little genetic fiddling of the Wiggan family sees a generation of exceptionally gifted children. Valentine has a little too much empathy in her to make an effective, ruthless military leader, and Peter is a few shades too close to psychotic. In accordance with the Goldilocks theorem, the third attempt, Ender, is hoped to be just right. The consequences if he’s not are grim.

Surviving six years of a childhood alternately tormented by his elder brother and protected by Valentine, Ender is taken away to an orbital battle school by a military leadership determined to push Ender to his limits, even if that does mean alienating everyone else from Ender, already marked as an outsider by being younger than any other recruit, and cutting him loose to survive or fail on his own wits and intuition.

Of course, you don’t get pegged as humanities’ last best hope of victory without having some aptitude for the role. Navigating a course of unwanted rivalries to be put in charge of his own squadron of children for the zero gravity wargames that the school and the book’s title revolve around, the consequences of pushing Ender to his limits and beyond prove to be compelling reading.

Ender’s Game is often held up as one of the best sci-fi novels of recent years, and there’s few bones to pick with such statements. Indeed, enough people seem to be voting with their wallets for the series to support three direct sequels telling the rest of Ender’s story and another three concerned with the kids from battle school and Peter Wiggan’s ascent to hegemony of Earth. Ender’s Game isn’t just a hugely enjoyable novel in and of itself, it’s the introduction to a series that deals with consequence and identity in ways that haven’t been seen since Phillip K. Dick.

Now, I’d be recommending you read Ender’s Game were it the only time Card had put quill to slate, or however it’s done these days. Instead of this, I’m recommending you read Ender’s Game because its direct sequel Speaker for the Dead is as good a book as I’ve ever read, but would be best enjoyed by absorbing this novel first.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Of all the classic games in this current retrogaming fad lauded for their playability in lieu of the graphical fripperies that many more clock cycles are devoted to in this age of technological wonders, one example stands head and shoulders above all others. One game that scrambles Chuckie Egg. That flies higher than Jet Set Willy. That sends Sabrewulf Head Over Heels. That really needs no more cut-rate puns to enhance its reputation. That game, of course, is Advanced Lawnmower Simulator.

Tapping into the Great British obsession with all garden based activities, this barnstormer was released to an unsuspecting world in April 1990 to the astonished silence of all, particularly publishers Codemasters who had their own prolific line of ‘Advanced’ prefixed games but crucially not in the lucrative lawnmowing sector. Providing the most comprehensive grass cutting simulator that has yet to grace the world, you take the role of young, idealistic uphill gardener Fingers McGovern as you try to take your company to the top of the gardening world. Starting off with only the standard issue ‘Patio Sprintette’ mower you have to build up your reputation and equally importantly your bank balance as you progress up the ziggurat.

Upgrading your lawn tending technology as you go, you’ll have to face stiff competition from your rivals and the never ending forces of nature in your quests to keep lawns the country over neatly cropped. Will you be able to join the halcyon ranks of the gardening elite such as Percy Thrower and Alan Titchmarsh or will your burned out career end up on the compost heap? Perhaps a more important question, will you be able to tear yourself away from one of the best games ever created?

You almost certainly will, given that the game revolves solely around holding down the ‘m’ key for a while. Advanced Lawnmower Simulator was a practical joke perpetrated on unsuspecting readers of the popular and deeply funny Your Sinclair magazine, receiving a glowing write up in the April 1990 issue from Duncan MacDonald, one of the most popular Speccy writers of the time, now an author having recently released the novel S.C.U.M.. Confirmation of the gag came in the next issue, with Advanced Lawnmower Simulator appearing on the covertape with a writing credit of none other than MacDonald.

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This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

You wouldn’t look twice at this game if you saw it sitting on the shelf in your local gaming suppliers. At least in the U.S. it gets the slightly more exotic name of Ninja Five-0, but for it’s British release Konami no doubt thought we’d assume it’s a football game and they’d missed out ‘Preston North End’ off the end of the name. So we get a generic title, a generic and unimaginative cover picture and a generic write up on the back that really isn’t going to convince the idle browser to splash out thirty notes on it. That’s a great pity, as it’s one of the best games that’s yet graced Nintendo’s pocket rocket.

As the title suggests, you take control of a ninja who happens to be a cop. Fair enough. There’s some tortuous plot to justify the fact that you’ll go up against a coalition of common thugs, military types and other ninjas, but it’s hardly essential to your experience. Something about masks and the quest for power and whatnot. To this end, or because of this, or perhaps in spite of this (I wasn’t paying much attention. The important thing is that there was ninjas present in some capacity) this alliance of evil takes over certain buildings key to their plans, whatever those happened to be, such as the airport, the factory by the docks, the banks and, err, a cave. Your job is simple, rescue the hostages they’ve taken in each building by simple means of slicing and dicing the bad guys until they’re reduced to small puddles of blood. (more…)