The Grey Area

Slowly going Chrome

2010-03-02T10:47:55Z

I've taken a long time to get there, but Google Chrome is becoming my standard browser. Not because of its blazing speed, or because it works so well with Google Apps, though both things are true and wonderful. It's really simple:

It starts quickly.

To explain: If I was someone that started an instance of Firefox at the beginning of a session and left it running, I'd stay with Firefox - it's great, it's easily fast enough, and it has great plugins and extensions. However, I don't do that - I run lots of complex apps in the browser now, my laptop runs for weeks without a full reboot which seems to be more than any browser can manage, and I have a stack of physical and virtual machines on my home network that I access all the time.

In all cases, when I hit the icon to start the browser, the clock is running and I get very impatient. Chrome starts incredibly quickly, it's like an old school browser. I don't know how they've done it, but I find that I can't do without it. Firefox always took a long time to start, even on my wonderful speedy laptop, but that wait seems unbearable now.

The effect is even more obvious on slower machines. Most of my virtual machines have limited memory, and it can take 30 seconds for Firefox to start. That's unacceptable; if a Microsoft application did that, it would be ridiculed. Chrome takes a few seconds at most, and I love it.

I think Firefox is reaching that stage in life where it is going to need some kind of precaching application that runs at system startup. Its precursor got there too, and where is the full-on Mozilla now? Something needs to be done. As much as I like Google products, I don't want them to own everything.

Avatar's amazing copy protection

2010-01-05T10:36:50Z

I loved Avatar. To me, it was everything the movies should be. It's not the greatest script, it's similar in many ways to Cameron's earlier movies and to other ecowarrior movies, and it is frankly a little corny.

None of that matters. For two and a half hours I basked in its visual spleandour, I enjoyed the earnest performances, and I was regularly awestruck with the scale of the achievement.

The only thing I was a little underwhelmed with was the score, which somehow lacked the majesty of LotR and Gladiator. To be fair, I'm not a big fan of James Horner, so it's hardly a suprise that I didn't like his score here.

My point, since I'm clearly no film reviewer: it hadn't occurred to me how difficult the digital 3D would make the lives of shakycam tapers. ('Pirate' is such an idiotic term in this context, don't you think?) I wonder if that fact alone is how Cameron got the green light for such an incredible spend on his movie. It must have really pissed the studios off to see animated features (to whom 3D is almost trivial) getting effective copy protection, yet not be able to use it for live action. No more, thanks to scuba boy.

I also wonder when we'll see a first 3D-only picture? I don't think it will take very long.

I think taping is a difficult issue. It's hard to sympathise with giant corporations who routinely gouge their customers and persistenly fill the theaters with low-brow shit because it's easier to keep movies rubbish than to take a risk. It's very easy, on the other hand, to see that shakycam taping is not helping that situation. If a movie has to make almost all of it's money on the first weekend because after that it'll be downloadable, the studios are going to take fewer risks because otherwise they'll be out if business.

The liberal part of me wants to believe that people are better than the studios portray them, that most people will pay a fair price for their entertainment, because that's the only way it can ever really work. Unfortunately, I can't really say that my (unscientific) observation of people's behaviour backs that up in any meaningful way. There are a lot of freeloaders in this world, and despite my fervent wishes to the contrary I really do believe that they just don't give a fuck one way or the other.

This is, of course, a somewhat negative assessment. Perhaps it's related to the recent experience with Borders bookstore in the UK. I rather liked my local store, with its Starbucks and even it's Game store. I bought from there even though I could have saved a few quid using, say, Amazon, because it's just common sense.

When Borders went into administration, the store was rammed. I will go out on a limb and say that many of the people so ramming were not your typical bookstore types. The promise of a discount from a stricken retailer was enough to tempt the vultures, exactly as it was with Woolworths the year before. Sickening. I don't imagine that many felt they were doing anything in any way distasteful, an impression reinforced by the number of 'sale' faces I saw. The regulars were walking around with sad eyes, but the mob were picking the carcus clean.

So no, I don't think most people care at all where their entertainment comes from. It's a commodity which, like the Internet, is viewed as an infinite pool of stuff from which fun is extracted. The people at the top are highly paid, so what the hey - fuck everyone else and give me that shakycam DVD right bloody now, Mr. Pub Seller Bloke.

The studios have made almost unbelievable mistakes when dealing with new media, but let's not burn the message with the messenger. Way to go James Cameron! Keep the vultures away for a little while, maybe you've given the moguls time to stop treating legitimate, paying customers like pikeys, because they're not smart enough to be able to tell the difference.

Why Doesn't Exercise Lead to Weight Loss?

2009-11-09T12:19:14Z

A NY Times article asks why exercise doesn't lead to weight loss. A good question. I know that no exercise leads to weight gain, that's for damned sure.

Thanks again to Blue's News.

Video games for the blind?

2009-11-09T11:36:46Z

I read (on Gamespot, via Blue's News) that a visually impaired gamer is suing Sony because its video games aren't 'accessible' enough. He sites examples of games (World of Warcraft) that has plugins with accessiblility features; that's reason to praise the WoW community, but hardly a reason to sue others.

Video games for the blind - what a contradiction in terms that is! The very word video is from the Latin videre, to see, combined with the 'o' as in 'audio'. I don't wish to come across like a rabid Daily Mail-reading reactionary here, but if you can't see, and the game is highly visuals-oriented, then you are pretty much fucked. It's not for you. That's actually not the game publisher's fault, however much one might try to bend the letter of the law to say otherwise. It's noone's fault.

Making computer games for disabled audiences is a great idea, and (since it is a business we're talking about here) it makes really good business sense to do so - it costs tens of millions to make a triple-A video game now, with no guarantee of success. Spending a fraction of the budget on a really, really good audio-based game would almost certainly bring success, along with tremendous positive publicity, and quite possibly a great deal more satisfaction than making a slightly better gorefest or pornographic driving experience.

I can't understand how it feels to be blind, but I know that I don't much like the feeling of someone trying to make their misfortune everyone else's problem. I hope this man's ridiculous case is thrown out of court, and that he goes away and finds a better way than this to deal with his unhappiness.

Google Apps + iPhone = good, finally

2009-10-15T10:04:54Z

Now that Gmail, including Apps, supports the Exchange sync protocol, the iPhone native email client allows a rather nice way of using Gmail. After a few days of really flaky performance when it was launched, and little filter surgery so that all my list traffic doesn't hit the iPhone inbox, I have a really slick almost-Blackberry experience going on. The Calendar and Contacts sync just works, and the email integration is very nicely implemented.

For example, the Gmail way of doing things is to put mail into the 'archive', not to delete stuff. This works especially well with paid-for Apps, where one gets 25GB of storage per user! So, the trash icon on the iPhone archives the mail. Actual deletion works differently. Sounds counter-intuitive, perhaps, but it's absolutely the right choice and it works really well.

That's something that happens a lot with Google applications. They may not always be the prettiest, but someone's really sweated details like that. It would have been trivial to make the trashcan delete stuff, and force users to (say) move to a special folder in order to archive. Instead, they chose to deviate from the canonical function and do the thing most likely to work properly with Gmail, risking the wrath of the legions of Apple UI fascists.

It's a bit arrogant to change the way the trashcan works, sure, but Google are still the industry's rockstars so to my mind that's the kind of thing they should be doing. When they stop doing 'fuck you' stuff like this, we'll know it's all over and start looking for the next big thing.

Full metal drumkit

2009-10-01T11:12:23Z

For years, I've been playing drums to amuse myself. Playing along to others' music is great fun, and it's better than not playing at all. However, now I need to play live, and whilst singing lead, and as with any skill there comes a point where you have to start taking it seriously in order to improve. With the drums, that can mean only one thing:

Drill. More drill. Then some drill.

This is my drumkit

Getting the kit setup right is taking forever, especially since I've started playing an acoustic drumkit at rehearsals. (Life's too short to cart the TD-12K plus extras around.) It needs to be set so that I can switch smoothly between kits. At the studios I have a badly-tuned, uncared-for Mapex kit, which has size-mismatched, barely-tunable toms on annoying, difficult-to-set brackets. I'm having to take in more and more of my own hardware to deal with it.

Meanwhile, at home I've had to make more space so I can set the TD-12K up as I want it, rather than the only way in which it fits. Playing 45 mins a day is ok, but I'm doing three-hour stints at times right now, and having a badly set kit is painful.

There are many like it, but this one is mine

Actually, there aren't many like mine, at least not that I've seen at gigs. Certainly not at rehearsal studios. It's a slightly jarring transition from crisp-sounding, predictable V-Drums, to crappy-sounding acoustic, as well as never quite getting the positions right. It's a shame, because it's another thing to concentrate on, when I have enough to think about already.

I must master it as I must master my life

Having to sing makes drumming a lot harder. Essentially, because I'm not a very good singer, when I'm singing the drums have to be on autopilot. Sometimes this is easy, when the beat is simple and the lyrics follow a somewhat normal rock pattern. Sometimes, it's incredibly hard, when the lyrics cut across the beat, or the beat has all sorts of accents in funny places.

I think that's enough of the Rifleman's Creed.

There really is no substitute for just doing the rudiments. So, whereas previously I might just have put an album on and challenged my fitness, now I sit with a metronome and a stopwatch, and crank out steady notes on various parts of the kit for a set length of time, to build strength. It's tedious, but it works. And it hurts. I need to do it, because the fact is I'm a bit shy. I need to know that it's all in order before I do this stuff live, otherwise I'll be tight with self-doubt, and I won't enjoy it. If it's not fun, what's the point?

So: Drill some more.

Flavio and Symonds leave Renault, F1 left in tatters

2009-09-16T13:08:12Z

When is the string of senseless Formula 1 controversies going to stop? Now one of the biggest names in the sport, and one of the most respected engineers, are out of a job, and a fine team stand on the brink of expulsion.

I can see why Renault have decided not to contest the FIA case against them, based on what I've read so far of the evidence as published by The Mail. Symonds' evasive answers to questions also leave a bitter taste. It's all very sad, that this should all occur because a racing driver was angry about being sacked.

F1 has been great this year, and it would be bad beyond words if it was all wrecked by a grubby little piece of cheating in a different season. The main cast have gone, let that be the end of this sordid affair.

Presenting... The Pearl Demon Drive double pedal

2009-09-14T10:48:06Z

I play drums as a hobby, and I'm in a band that are going to do (mostly) 80s and 90s heavy metal cover songs. I will almost certainly never make any money from playing music, it's just for fun. So it was with great trepidation that I made an outlay of £500 for a double bass drum pedal. Luckily my girlfriend is chipping in with some birthday present cash, because that's an awful lot of money for a hobby, especially a non-feepaying hobby.

I bought the Pearl Demon Drive double pedal, and I'm glad I did.

I'm not a good enough player to do a proper review of a drum pedal, so I'll go with what I know. The hype says this pedal is smooth, and it is fast. It's both of those things. Really, really fast. My old pedal was a bit cack, so anything would seem smooth after it, but I have to say I've never played a pedal quite like the Demon Drive.

The direct drive feature, where the footboard is connected via a simple mechanical linkage instead of a chain or belt, is one of those ideas that sounds like a gimmick. Then you play a direct drive pedal, and suddenly non-direct pedals seem a little old-fashioned. There is no lag. None. The footboard position maps directly onto the beater angle, with no delay on the upstroke. I'm not a jazz player, so I will miss the more subtle aspects of this, but playing fast is a dream - it's almost an embarrassment of riches.

Just as advertised, the slave pedal doesn't feel like a slave pedal. On every other double pedal I've every tried, the left pedal feels sluggish and/or at a different tension. You can compensate with spring tension, but that's not the point - it feels like you've got one slow pedal. The Demon Drive doesn't feel like that at all. I remember enough physics to know that it must be a little different due to the work going on inside the universal joints, but I can't feel it. Since I don't need to solve the equations of motion for the pedal system - just as well, because I was a bit crap at that even when I was supposed to be good at it, 15 years ago - I think it's easily good enough. I no longer care that it's a double pedal.

The conversion from split footboard to longboard is a bit more fiddly than the demo video suggests, but it took about five minutes to do. That's not a problem, because it's not something you're going to want to do, say, in between songs. It's a nice-to-have feature, because I want to try longboard, but I don't want to be stuck with it if I don't like it.

Right now, the jury's out on whether I prefer the longboard. I will have to convert back to split-board and try it, because right now I don't know where the extra speed is coming from. As it stands, I like the longboard a lot for fast stuff, but I'm not sure about it for slower, more expressive parts. I find myself sitting right back on the board so I can ground my heels properly, which makes it difficult to get soft hits because of the extra leverage. It's not impossible, as this is a very smooth and playable pedal, but it makes it a bit harder.

Right now, it feels like a lot of money well spent. I did a 90-minute practise session this morning, and there were a lot of smiles. I can no longer use the 'bad equipment' excuse for not being able to do some stuff, and I just have to get on with it. To my delight and somewhat to my surprise, a lot of parts that were out of reach are now really not too much of a problem.

Add to that the solid build quality of the pedal, the nice case it ships with, and the fact that it's actually nice to look at, you have one seriously compelling piece of kit. I love it.

VMware Server 2.0 FTW

2009-08-28T17:37:42Z

Last time I tried to install VMware Server, when it was in beta, it was a disaster. I had to do stacks of manual configuration, and in the end it was flaky and unstable. I know it's unfair to judge a program by its beta, but in my mind VMware Server 2 was a 'problem' upgrade.

So it was with great trepidation that I tried again, now the product is out of beta. I'm glad I did. Everything works smoothly out of the box, and it's running just great. It's not VMware ESX, that's for sure, but it's free (as in beer) and it's cool.

iTunes is so nearly useful...

2009-08-17T09:08:33Z

...and yet it fails to be a reliable way of getting legitimate copies of music.

I shall explain.

Every time I've gone to buy a single track from the iTunes store, it's been marked as 'album only'. For non-iTunes users, that means that whilst you can download most individual songs, the most popular ones - i.e. those you'd most want to download individually - can only be obtained by purchasing the entire album.

Traditionally, this is the point in the blog post where a big rhetorical 'why' would be deployed. That's not necessary here; it's perfectly obvious why that do this - money. At least, I'm sure that's the reasoning used to justify giving the user an annoying experience. Trouble is, I doubt that it actually works.

I'm one of those that believes that musicians, filmakers, actors and so forth should be paid for their work. So, whilst I frequently torrent stuff, if I watch it and like it, I make a sanctimonious prick of a point of buying it. Battlestar Galactica is the best example, but there are many others. I've spent a fortune on DVDs based on an initial torrent download.

Unortunately, the reverse also applies. If I've tried to do the right thing and buy legitimately, only to be frustrated by shitty DRM or brainless album-only restrictions, I really don't have a problem with torrenting the tracks I want, and paying noone. I tried it their way, and failed. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Short memories

2009-08-14T09:08:38Z

My group at The Big Bank are in the middle of a huge software deployment. Because so many of the team I'm in have left or are on holiday of one sort or another, I've stepped away from the day-to-day parts of the deployment, in order to do a lot of day-to-day work that noone else would do otherwise.

I figured that having the idea for the big project, doing the design for our company, picking the product, writing the main documents, and administering the special-case early deployment product would count for something.

I was wrong.

Now, I'm 'not involved', and that 'I'll be more involved for the next phase'. I am fucking involved! Every time they deploy one of those appliances, they're deploying something I have pushed through the initiation ritual of the Big Bank Ministry of Wasting Time and Money. Every time they look at the virtual machine it's installed on, they could see that the direct-to-VM deploy is something I suggested, almost everyone opposed, and now everyone seems to think is the best idea ever. Every time they lift a piece of config straight from the old systems and onto the new and it works perfectly first time, they might remember that it's specifically designed that way, to make it easier.

I guess you're only as good as your last status email.

Excessive packaging

2009-08-11T09:31:31Z

HP excessive packaging world record put to the test (thanks Blue's News).

Best in Class decisionmaking

2009-08-10T08:36:25Z

This is absolutely the way it is at The Big Bank, except that five people could never make a decision unless two were very senior executives.

No excuses

2009-08-04T09:59:28Z

The blogging software on the Blackberry wasn't up to much, but iBlogger looks a lot more like being useful.

So now I have no excuse for not updating more frequently. Damn.

Movable Type 4.3 upgrade - FastCGI bad

2009-08-03T22:56:32Z

Those nice folks at LivingDot just upgraded me to Movable Type 4.3. I was having huge problems with the automatic database upgrade, it was taking forever and failing randomly.

Then the penny dropped. Before the upgrade I was desperately trying to make publishing faster, and I put in a default fastcgi handler for .cgi files. Turning it off in my cPanel fixed the problem completely.

Silly me.

Anyway, the upgrade seems to have helped publish speed enormously. It takes about half the time it used to. Yay. Not really tried out any other new stuff yet.