Recently in Rant Category

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.

...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.

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.

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

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.

I tried to fill my car with diesel this morning, as you do. I could not get the nozzle to fit into my car. After risking a potential comedy-person-looking-down-the-barrel moment (which probably would have blinded me, had it gone wrong), I gave up and went into the kiosk.

Tiredly, the lady asked, 'What type of car are you driving?'
'Er, a diesel?', I offered weakly.
'No, what make?'
'Er, a Merc?'
'Oh, there - it works for everything but Mercs.'

Well! I stormed out of there in a flurry of English non-complaining. I feel discriminated against! I mean, just because a lot of Mercedes drivers are cocks doesn't mean we all are! They're fiddling with the pumps now.

In my mind, I stormed back in, having changed into all-black clothes, with a big leather jacket and a beret. The theme from Ironside would play. I summon all my righteous indignation and demand: IS IT COS I IS IN A MERC? YOU AIN'T GOT DA RIGHT!

In my mind.

ps. If by some astounding chance a Daily Mail journalist reads this article: This is a bendy-banana story. The pump was damaged, it's not a conspiracy. I am kidding. Go back to scaring people with dishonest stories about immigration. Stick to what you know.

An interesting article on the ridiculousness of Britain's libel laws:

www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/31/simon-singh-science

 

My gorgeous HP laptop shipped with Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit. For the most part, I'm pretty happy with this - VIsta 64-bit is very stable, pretty fast, and properly supported by the vendor. There is a little problem, though, and I want to share it.

THERE'S NO FUCKING FULL-SYSTEM BACKUP FEATURE ON VISTA HOME PREMIUM.

Let me run that by you again:

THERE'S ...

Ok, enough. My point, even though this is my blog that hardly anyone reads so I don't actually need a point and anyway so what, is that it is criminally stupid to ship an OS without a proper backup program. Every (NT-based) version of Windows before Vista shipped with a basic but entirely competent backup system.

Vista Business has a full-system backup, but Vista Home Premium does not. This is odd; for a business user, the chances are that (a) you have a standard OS image that someone else manages, and (b) you would be a fucking idiot to have data you need only on the laptop. [The world isn't short of idiots, of course, so that kind of data loss happens all the time.] On a home PC, you'd have none of that; further, you're unlikely to have someone competent enough to reinstall for you. It's completely the wrong way round - home users have more need for a full backup than business users.

So now I have to buy something to do a job XP could do perfectly well for itself. Let's see how that goes.

I just read this wonderful article by Andrew Rawnsley in the Guardian. It's truly tragic that our national debate is dominated by grubbiness on the part of our elected representatives. As Rawnsley says, more tragic still is the repeated, hollow cries of 'it was all within the rules'.

I do not believe for a second that our MPs, many of whom are very highly educated, believe for a second that the public's issue is whether or not they acted within a set of self-imposed, poorly-enforced rules. The issue is that what they are doing is clearly wrong.

A non-MP defrauding the taxman in this way would be jailed. MPs set their own guidelines, stretch them far beyond their spirit and to the very limits of their letter, and then complain when the taxpaying public and their other representatives, the media, take the time to notice. It's absurd, and I think that most MPs know that very well.

I'm all for MPs being paid better. We'll get better MPs that way.

I have a replacement PS3, my venerable launch-day PS3 expired. The extended warranty worked rather well, to be honest. I have a shiny new console, some new games, and some money left over. Can't complain about that.

However...

I had put a 320GB hard drive in the old PS3, and (naively) thought I would be able to slap it into the replacement model and go. Nuh-uh. Complete epic fail on boot. After waiting for something, anything to happen, I had to reformat and reinstall the OS image from a USB stick, then start the tedious reinstall process.

The last backup I had was from 21 January. Restoring it took about two minutes, which is easily explained: It only restored a fraction of my files. At least my game saves were there. None of my stored games were there, nor any of the updates, nor any of my Singstore purchases.

I can redownload the games. That's just a matter of time. Lots and lots of time. The Singstore stuff was harder, I had to call Sony and ask them pretty please if they would sort it out for me. Crap.

I think that it will take me a few days to get fully working again. Until then, every time I put a bloody disk in I get asked to wait for a hundreds-of-megabytes download. Then, when the update's downloaded and installed, more often than not I have to wait ages for the installation. What a royal pain in the arse.

Whilst ranting about installations: If a game as hench as Killzone 2 doesn't need to be installed to the hard drive, then neither should anything else. It's time PS3 developers stopped being lazy just because every PS3 has a hard drive. It sucks to have to upgrade the drive or ration your games due to lack of space on a 60GB disk.

And finally: What the hell is up with the installation time for Bioshock? It takes about 20 minutes, even on my superfast 320GB drive. Why? There's no excuse for that.