Year: 2006

Anniversaries

5 years since the Xbox, and hence Halo was launched…

4 years since Xbox Live was launched…

Just over 2 years since Halo 2 was launched…

I guess it’s not a big stretch to expect Halo 3 to launch around this time next year but there was some news today of upcoming developments. Firstly there’s a multiplayer Halo 3 demo coming next spring and to wet the appetite a new screenshot was shown.

Halo 3

More of a surprise is that there are new maps for Halo 2 coming next spring. I still regularly play and enjoy Halo 2 so it’s great to see a more than two year old game get extra content, even if it is paid content and a final chance to extract some money from Halo 2 players. The only restriction is that you need a 360 to enjoy the new content.

Reading about the Xbox Live anniversary brought back memories of my first time on Live. I was beta testing the UK service and it was a Friday afternoon when I first plugged in the headset and booted up the beta Moto GP. I had no idea what to expect so picked a random game (there were only a few available) and joined. Only three people in the room, one of which was a Climax developer. This was amazing. Silky smooth, no lag although it felt a bit odd talking to other gamers. The next Moto GP session had around eight players. Still great although the voice chat was brought to a crashing, jarring stop. ‘Who’s that fanny thats in front’ could be heard…from the mouth of a wee Glaswegian ned. Unmistakable. ‘Oot the way ya prick’. Ouch.

Funnily enough those two sessions sum up all thats been good and bad about Xbox Live. Great online gaming with real and virtual friends with the occasional (slightly more than occasional on Halo) annoyance of some wee turd running his mouth off. Americans in particular. Still, it was a revelation and revolution that is now being copied by Sony and to a certain extent Nintendo. Console gaming just wouldn’t be the same without it. For all the abuse that Microsoft received (and still gets) it should be applauded for bringing out Xbox Live. Roll on the next four years.

Oh no….ReviewMe

The following is not a paid review

Time to get used to that (without the not) or the words sponsored review appearing on blog posts from now on. ReviewMe is a new pay per post venture for bloggers and advertisers. Bloggers register at the ReviewMe site and once they have added their blog to their account the site works out the price your site is worth depending on Technorati, Alexa ranks and subscriber numbers. Advertisers can then ask you to review a product on your site – review it (good or bad) and you’ll be paid half your site value. I registered and my site price is $40. So if asked to review a product and if I did so I would be paid $20 into my paypal account. Indeed I could be paid $20 from ReviewMe by linking this review to my account. I won’t.

The whole thing just stinks. For me paid reviews will always be devalued. For each blogger that reviews honestly there will be another ten that will review positively so that advertisers use them in the future. How many blogs will be set-up just to do paid reviews? For me it’s another form of viral marketing that will only devalue the usefulness of bloggers and their tech reviews. Ventures like ReviewMe only increase the value of forum sites – AVForums, Apple Discussions for example, where most people are reporting honestly about products and issues and helping other users. Would you trust a blog post that someone’s been paid to write?

New WordPress Plugins

I’ve installed a couple of new WordPress plugins that are very useful so I thought it was worth sharing the goodies.

The first one is best applied to WordPress 2.0.5 and above and is called Clutter Free. It’s role in life is to allow an author to disable unused components of the create post screen in WordPress, so giving a faster loading and clutter free page. Works a treat and gets rid of a lot of unused functionality…for me at least.

Second is Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0WP. Certainly a mouthful but is saving me from more spam, this time via the old comment form I used to employ. Over the last few days I’d received over 200 comments via the Contact form linked to at the top of the site. It was making it difficult to pull out good comment from spam. This new plugin seems to have done the trick and since implementing last night has seen two good comments succeed in reaching me and 25 spam comments being removed. Joy. Hopefully others can get mileage out of them too.

Sky by Mobile on the k800i

I’m still loving the k800i but Sky haven’t updated their Sky by Mobile app to support the new phone. No matter – there is still a way to run the app and remote record.

Firstly download the following file to your pc – http://mobile.sky.com/SBM/SonyE_vid/SkyMobile_SonyWithTv.jar. Then transfer the file to your phone. Running the app on your phone will ask you to install it. Say Yes and pick a location that suits. Running the app for the first time will allow you to enter your username and password. From then on it should connect with no issues (unless the Sky site is down). I didn’t have to change any other settings (with T-Mobile UK) although your mileage may vary depending on your carrier. More info can be found on AV Forums for getting it to work on O2. There is now really no excuse for missing that recording.

WordPress 2.05

A new update to WordPress is available today with over 50 fixes, mostly bugs. This is a small step towards the bigger upgrade that will be 2.1. As usual take a backup before proceeding of both files and the database. Today’s update was the first time I had to depend on the backup after I messed up during the update of a directory (so that’s what replace means).

I also took the opportunity to move to a new theme – Unsleepable. I liked the simplicity and while I was at it I reduced the posts displayed down to a more manageable number. I don’t have much design skills but this may be my last off the shelf theme in that I might start to hack my own css together in future. Maybe.

Sony closes Lik-Sang

Lik-Sang is a well known Hong Kong company specialising in the import games market. For the last year they have been fighting a legal battle with Sony who were opposed to their importing of PSP’s. Last Friday a judge in the UK found against Lik-Sang and due to the possibility of other legal cases being raised Lik-Sang have decided to close.

Greedy Sony bastards. While I had no intention of buying an import PS3 it’s another example of a huge global player wanting 100% control over everything. Importing wouldn’t be a business if companies:

  • Had simultaneous worldwide hardware and software releases
  • Removed region restrictions – DVD and games follow the same region encoding
  • Sold at a fair price across the globe

Import PSP’s and games could be had cheaper from Hong Kong, including shipment than buying from a UK high street. While Sony is protecting the PSP’s (shrinking) market it also smells of further PS3 delays for Europe and a potentially high cost for games. Rumours are of £60 & £70 price point for PS3 releases which is taking the urine.

Talk about the big boys bullying the small firms! Lik-Sang did have one parting shot, pointing out the Sony exec’s in the UK that had enjoyed their import service.

Furthermore, Sony have failed to disclose to the London High Court that not only the world wide gaming community in more than 100 countries relied on Lik-Sang for their gaming needs, but also Sony Europe’s very own top directors repeatedly got their Sony PSP hard or software imports in nicely packed Lik-Sang parcels with free Lik-Sang Mugs or Lik-Sang Badge Holders, starting just two days after Japan’s official release, as early as 14th of December 2004 (more than nine months earlier than the legal action). The list of PSP related Sony Europe orders reads like the who’s who of the videogames industry, and includes Ray Maguire (Managing Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Alan Duncan (UK Marketing Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Chris Sorrell (Creative Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Ltd), Rob Parkin (Development Director, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Limited), just to name a few.

Goodbye Lik-Sang – a reliable company providing a good service to the UK and Europe that will be missed. Yet another proud day for Sony.

Parallels or Boot Camp?

Switching to Mac was made easier knowing that Boot Camp or Parallels were available so that Windows would never be far away for those 3 or 4 apps that do not exist on Mac that I need to run. However both take different approaches – which one to choose?

Parallels
Parallels is virtualization software that creates a virtual machine into which you can install Windows XP – Windows 3.1, various flavours of Linux, Solaris and even RC1 of Vista. Once you select your guest O/S you then install the O/S using your own media as you would on a normal machine. It’s easy to have many virtual machines and makes backing up fairly trivial – all can be done fromm the Mac without the need to reboot. Installing XP and Vista worked well and installing the included Parallels Tools meant that it was easy to share files through a shared folder and also your mouse would move seamlessly from the different environments without having to press keyboard commands to kick out of each window.

Pro’s

  • Flexibility
  • Good speed even though it’s a virtual machine
  • Ease of use – starting up a virtual machine and using XP without a reboot saved a lot of time
  • Multiple OS’s without much fuss

Con’s

  • No 3d support of graphics card
  • Although performance is good it’s still running a virtual machine meaning it’s slower than it could be and is also taking resources away from OS X
  • USB support – only 1.1 and to get devices to work meant hacking with the Apple library files
  • Still in beta (well release candidate)
  • Peripheral support – no guarantee of compatibility
  • Cost – $80

Boot Camp
Boot Camp takes a different approach, allowing you to install Windows XP SP2 using a drivers disk that is downloaded from Apple and allowing you to swap at boot between OS X and Windows XP. Only a Windows disk that has SP2 files on it is supported so you may have to slipstream an original disk to get a working cd. Once you’ve burned the Apple driver disk you create a partition using an easy to follow gui, insert your Windows disk and the Mac will reboot into the Windows install. Install XP as normal and after a couple of reboots you have a working Windows. Installing the drivers will give you a Windows that supports the iMac’s built in Bluetooth, iSight, graphics card and sound.

Pro’s

  • Full driver support of your hardware including 3d acceleration
  • Cost – it’s free and will be incorporated in Leopard.
  • Compatibility with software is greatly increased
  • Performance of Windows using Boot Camp is better than virtualization software

Con’s

  • Switching between OS’s requires a reboot
  • Still in beta
  • Hardware platform is different to normal PC so potential for driver issues
  • Only supports Windows XP SP2

My Choice?
I loved Parallels. Having that much flexibility without having to reboot was a joy. Firing up Visio to finish off some work in XP while iTunes ran on the Mac with Flock running in the background was superb. I also had no crashes during my time with Parallels. I didn’t like hacking with USB files though and I would still consider USB unstable with the latest Parallels release candidate.

Boot Camp while not without issues has performed well. Fast, great XP support, all my hardware now supported and easy to swap between OS X and XP via a reboot. To be honest the reboot was always my issue with Boot Camp but I need access to XP probably at most once a week so I can live with the reboot. The other issue with Parallels is paying $80 now when in spring next year Leopard will have Boot Camp built in. As I’m unclear just what Leopard will offer I’m not prepared to buy Parallels now – I’ll stick with Boot Camp.

As a test I ran Company of Heroes under Boot Camp. One of the latest PC games it plays like a dream and on my iMac looked superb while keeping good speed (this was at 1920*1200 although I don’t think all the nice effects were on). If gaming is your thing Boot Camp is the only answer. If multiple OS’s are your thing then it’s Parallels. If it’s infrequent access to Windows XP then save money and download Boot Camp.

Tangerine

Tangerine is a new beta app for the Mac that has one major aim – to create playlists for iTunes based on the Beats per Minute (BPM) of a track. It also wants to do that quickly while looking good at the same time. First impressions are that it manages all three.

AnalyzeOnce installed and running Tangerine will locate and analyze your iTunes library. There are issues if your library is located on an external drive but mines detected without a problem. The analysis is very quick – Potions website states around 3 tracks every second but obviously the anaylsis will be dependant on your library size and your encoding quality. Once analyzed it’s then down to you to create playlists based on the BPM that’s been associated to the mp3 file.

Playlist OptionsBy using sliders to easily change the criteria it’s easy to make varied playlists – from fast paced workouts to slow burners. Once complete the playlists is displayed and you have the option of saving it in your iTunes library. Another nice feature is the ability to write the BPM values back to iTunes allowing you to use the BPM within iTunes itself.

Completed Playlist

All the basic functionality worked well but there were one or two quirks especially with the BPM analysis. It seemed to mark some real slow tracks with very little beat with a high BPM. However it didn’t mark any of the faster tracks incorrectly so hopefully this can be addressed before official release. The look and feel of the app though is terrific. Once the playlist has been generated it is shown in the Tangerine window along with it’s album art. There are also some nice speech bubbles used to show track info. Playback controls (more accurately playback info) could have been displayed with more clarity though – again something that could be addressed before 1.0 release.

Some features I’d like to see – ability to use a playlist as a source for the newly generated playlist rather than the whole library. I’d also like to pick genre or ratings (you can select use predominately higher ratings) and base new playlists on those criteria. Actually I can pick genre or ratings – you just need to add a rule in the preferences which you can enable/disable to you liking. Nice. I guess the one thing it really does need is a readme…and a help file.

This is a really handy app for gym bunnies or runners that want to tailor there playlists to not only good songs but songs that match their pace. I’ll be using it to generate some game based playlists – high for racing games (or Lumines), low for something like golf. One little point to finish on – the installation screens on Mac are great and Tangerines is one of the best. Enjoy.

Tangerine Install