Things I am playing with at the moment

by AdminTim

Like most tech-boys I normally have about 3 or 4 projects that I’d like to be doing if I had the time to do them, access to a PC at a reasonable time.

So far the this list consists of:

  1. Playing with QuickFix/J, I won’t say exactly what, as I have been sitting on this project for ages.
  2. Tinkering with this blog. I must say I am hugely impressed with WordPress. It’s all very slick and just works. Even more impressive that it’s all done in PHP which is generally the spawn-of-the-devil to code/debug
  3. Do some coding work on Formatted Dataset API. This is useful little library written by and old Sybase Consultant, which hasn’t had a new commit in 3 years. I recently had to Maven-ise it for a project I was doing here, and I would be nice to add that back to the Sourceforge trunk. I’ll have to check with the owner for CVS/SVN access.
  4. Pick up a new language, I’ve been flirting with Ruby/Rails, and forcing myself (with little real enthusiasm) do plough through a C# book. Other candidates are JRuby (duh), Groovy (unlikely) or one of the new breed of functional langs on the jvm (Scala or Clojure).
  5. A little app for my wife’s card making habits. This I’ll probably tie in to the picking up a new lang. Possibly building out the back end using Rails, with an FXRuby front end. It amused her no end last night when I started gathering requirements and sketching out a schema while watching Heroes in bed.
  6. Re-read my Spring book. That seems to be taking off over here.

Of course half this stuff will never get done, but it’s still nice to have a list.

Tough Public….

by AdminTim

Looks like geekdom might be eating it’s own young again, only to eulogize them while still picking the bits from it’s teeth.

It’s already? happened once with FireFly, and looks like the same thing is likely to happen Dollhouse, and Heroes has been getting huge amounts of flack since the rather-botched finale of Series One.

Much can be said about the inflated expectations of anything with Wheadon’s name attached to it, or the all pervading evil-ness of Fox executives or why the US Network don’t give sleeper hits a chance like those nice HBO people.

Suffice to say, your geek-dom can be either fantastically loyal or can turn on a six-pence and rip your meta-phorical throat out.

To be quite honest, I can’t really see why unmitigated dross like Smallville (and to a lesser extent Lost, which disappeared up it’s own backside long ago) continues to have legs, while Heroes gets a bad rep.

I mean, if you go back and look at a look at some old Buffy’s, aside from one or two very innovative episodes, it does have its fair share of annoying characters and repetitive episodes.

I suppose it comes down to billing, all the best regarded sci-fi seems to have started as sleeper hits (Buffy, X Files etc) but once the driving force behind the show moves on they are expected to have a 100% hit rate by both exec and fanboi’s alike.

Freeing Comments

by AdminTim

As this is log is a bit like Robin Bloor’s opinion of C++, i.e. write only, I don’t suppose anyone has noticed that I had to set the commenting to registered users only because of comment spam.

We’ll I’ve just installed one of those nifty Java script and cookie spam-bot blockers and opened the commenting up again.

I’ll see how well this one works….

I14 Mission Architect details

by AdminTim

More CoH news, they’ve announced more details on the new Mission Architect Feature

On the official website

On the Official Boards

and on Massively

On the Yay-side

  • full XP for all missions (they were thinking about only have partial XP)
  • Full Character costumes (I wonder, can you save your characters constume to disk as a template and import it into the MA creator ?)

On the Boo-side

  • Ticket drops – rather than random enhnacement drops you get tickets that you can cash in at a “Ticket Vendor”

More complexity, now we have Vangard Merits, Merits and Wentworths to which we now add this ticketting system. They did a good job collapsing down the complex salvage system, only to re-invent more complexity with the proliferation of Merits/Tickets.

I predict a merger by I16 at the lastest.

As to MA itself, I might play with it, as I think I’ve seen pointed out somewhere else, we are going to see quite a lot of “XXX-MyToon-XXX” origin missions.

These would be fun within a SG, but not sure what the wider audience would be.

Still, as I’ve never really done Base Architect, this might be a fun way to “pay back” into the wider community.

A Team Again

by AdminTim

Another run out by the A Team, this time with the welcome addition of Ice Mash (Ice/Mace Tank), to the usual suspects (Handshake, Ramblin Syd and Misadventure)

The main bad guys were Malta, with the odd Nemesis (for it was he) and Carnie’s thrown in.

Not bad, back in the groove again, laying waste to all and sundry fairly efficiently, with not too many face plants.

On the sole front, I’ve got back into playing Psy Girl again. She’s finally up to level 33 now, and I treated her to a new costume slot and costume. Still in the green and black theme, but this time with an aura. Now she’s as green and glowy as the mobs she dowses with Rad.

Open Government ?

by AdminTim

Nice little bit of news here that HM Government is looking to go into Open Source…

UK government backs open source

Obviously they are looking at the “free as in beer” aspect to save a few pennies after shelling out huge amounts to various banks.

I’d be curious if they take this any further, as my understanding is that if a piece of GPL/LGPL/APL? software lands on a Third Party clients environment, all of the source code should be available to the Third Party, including the bespoke IP.

That is if you get to use a Government application which lands a piece of Open Source software on your PC, you have the right to see the code of the whole thing.

To be quite honest, developers being developers, I’d be utterly gobsmacked if this wasn’t the case already, but it would be interesting to see if they’ve thought through the implications…

BTW if you reead the BBC article,? it’s nice to see Ingres getting a mentch. I’ve always had an affection for it, esp as it’s the first relational database I used in anger….

Out with the new …..

by AdminTim

Started playing a couple of couple of my older toons solo recently, Shadow Hood, a level 23 DM/SR scrapper (and my first ever toon) and Psy Girl a level 32 Rad/Psy Defender.

It kinda reminded me what I liked/disliked about them. SH is basically a toggle-up and go toon, which is ok for a bit of mindless pounding, but it gets a bit boring after a while.

PG is awsome once you’ve greened up the bad guys, and her output is great when within the virtuous-green-circle of Radiation Infection/Enervating Field, but outside that Defender damage sucks a bit.

Plus the Knockback from TK Blast or her Nemi Staff can knock mobs out of the debuff AoE (esp if you accidentally hit the mob you’ve anchored your debuff to).

At least she isn’t boring though…

Things I thought were bo****ks but turned out not to be #1

by AdminTim

This is the first is an occasional series of things that I assumed were complete bo****ks, spouted by vested interests or fanbois but actually turned out to be correct……

#1 Replace the earbuds that come with your MP3 player with a separate one.

An earbud is? just an earbud right ?

I mean that aren’t that big and surely the difference in sound can’t justify shelling out over 50 quid for 2 small bits of plastic and a lump of wire.

Earphones maybe, but not the little buds.

Well, through general hamfistedness, I managed to cut one the earbuds off the one that came with my little iRiver, so I went to Argos and got a set of “not quite the cheapest” earbuds.

Phillips ones I think.

The difference in sound quality was quite amazing.

So while I’m never going to be able to justify shelling out huge sums on such things, I can definately see the wisdom of doing it…

Badges ahoy

by AdminTim

Another back to the future run out for the A team last night, this time a little badge-whoring was in order.

Multiple runs at the Valentines content was in order, with the team consisting alternately of…

Power Jenny
MisAdventure
Ramblin Syd
Handshake
Hearts Desire

With the required red being provided by Sloe Djinn (a low level Brute)

The Ganneymeade and Snap Tooth mishes were farmed a bit for badges and costume items. Suffice to say, most of the team ended up more Beautiful or Handsome