Martin A. Brooks

Game review: Assassin's Creed 2

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:23:00 GMT

Following my original review of the first Assassin's Creed game, I was dearly looking forward to reviewing the new episode in the series. Alas Ubisoft have taken the skull-smackingly stupid decision of making a single-player game need access to the Internet to work.

Don't buy this game, you will be funding idiocy if you do.

What next, Ubisoft, will you be making me not buy the upcoming Splinter Cell, too?

Filesystem-based greylisting for Exim

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:47:00 GMT

I have written a filesystem-based greylisting engine for Exim. See here for details.

Automatic email archiving

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:22:00 GMT

If you're on as many mailing lists as I am, you might find this to be handy.

If Apple made computer racks....

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:59:00 GMT

* It'd be called the iRack.

* It'd be machined from a solid block of aluminium.

* Units would be 'i', not 'u'. One 'i' will equal 1.1686634u. The mounting holes will be suspiciously Apple shaped.

* The UPS would be built in and would use a non-industry standard connector. You can't change the battery yourself.

* There would be no exposed screws, bolts or hinges. There would be a glowing Apple logo on the front.

* Only equipment bought from the Apple Store can be installed.

* Got a problem with your iRack? Simply take it down to your nearest Apple shop after booking a Genius appointment.

* The built in accelerometers will automatically invalidate your warranty if your rack gets tilted.

HOWTO: Building a mail server with Exim, Dovecot and Squirrelmail

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:35:00 GMT

It's been a while since I've blogged, I find Twitter a bit easier to keep updating. In the fine tradition of itch-scratching, I recently rebuilt my own personal mail server based on a virtual private server from Bitfolk using Exim, Dovecot and Squirrelmail. You can find the HOWTO here, I hope you find it useful.

Game review: Velvet Assassin

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 23:32:00 BST

This game should have been the one that made me forget about the likes of the early Splinter Cells and Thief III. This game was born in the era of the expectation of hideously overpowered graphics cards, tons of memory, multiple cores and physics processing units.

Graphically, it is quite good. And what is used to distract you from merely "quite good" graphics is piss-poor linear game play, poor controls, sterile environments and, in fairness, excellent voice acting.

This game has everything wrong with it that you would expect when a moderately successful console games is crammed onto the PC platform by people who've never played any of the sneak'em'up greats. Such developers should be forced to complete Metal Gear Solid, all of the Splinter Cells and all of the Thief series before getting their hands on what should have been the best stealth FPS ever to grace a personal computer.

"Execute over 50 different brutal maneuvers to deliver a quick and silent death to enemy soldiers" the marketing says. What that says to me is I have 50 different brutal maneuvers at my fingertips, choice mine to dispatch an enemy. Bollocks. What in practice happens is you sneak up behind your unsuspecting target and click the left mouse button. That's it.

At this point it can go two ways. 1) You take out the enemy and have time to drag to corpse into the shadows. Jolly good. However what happens depressingly frequently is option 2. Our heroine turns into Miss Stabby and goes to town. Definitely killing the target kraut but taking so long about it that you get caught by the next chap walking along. Repeat.

Then you get moments of sheer comedy:

Kraut #1) Deary me, look at this puddle with the electric cable running through it!
Kraut #2) Mein Fuhrer! Someone could electrocute themselves!
Kraut #1) Ja! Let us hope no-one throws that big switch over there while we are walking through it.
Kraut #2) Nein! That would be awful!

Krauts 1 & 2 proceed to splash about in the water.

Don't buy this game, I did, and it's rubbish.

Twitter

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:14:00 BST

I'm known for being an early adopter of new Internet fads. You can now stalk me on Twitter, mart_brooks.

Scan

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:00:00 BST

I've historically not been the world's biggest proponent of Scan International, a PC systems and components company based Oop Norf.

Earlier this month, the 2 yearly tech refresh for my games rig came round and technology has moved on as it is wont to do. I thought I'd revisit the fun of building my own games rig and starting pricing up the components I wanted. The shopping list ended up as:

CM Cosmos S case
Enermax revolution 1250W PSU
Asus rampage extreme II mobo
Core i7 940 processor
Noctua NH-U12P cpu cooler
6G Corsair dominator memory kit

Including delivery charges, it turned out that Scan were the cheapest supplier, and were the only one that claimed to have everything in stock. With some trepidation, I placed the order, paid extra for saturday delivery, sat back and waited.

All the stuff arrived, exactly when it was supposed to.

Piecing it all together was simple enough, but I hit a pretty fundamental problem in that the machine would not even post if more than one memory stick was installed. With more trepidation, I called Scan support.

They quickly hashed the problem down to either an out of date BIOS, or a faulty mobo. A BIOS update later confirmed the "faulty mobo" theory. I paid for a new mobo and shipping, these arrived next day.

I await the fun of getting the faulty mobo through Scan's returns department, but, so far, I'd have to give them a 9/10 for performance.

The Peter May Badminton Club

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:56:00 GMT

A shameless plug for my badminton club who've just joined the Internet at http://petermaybadminton.org.uk/. To say the site is basic is perhaps an understatement, but alas their web designer (i,e, me) sucks.

It's just polite to ask first

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:25:00 GMT

It seems Feedage.com have start republishing my blog content (and have rejigged it to include their own content and favourite links) without checking with me that it was okay to do so. The answer is no.

Some Vista and hardware hate

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:56:00 GMT

As I mostly use my home PC for playing games, I tend to try and keep it reasonably up to date in terms of both hardware and software. Earlier this year my graphics card's memory went a bit funny meaning I had to buy a new one, then my gaming mouse started having tracking problems, so I replaced that and, last week, the primary hard disk on my system decided to lunch itself. At the time I was unable to determine if this was hardware or just the filesystem getting spaghettified. Given the number of times Vista had crashed due to the graphics card problem I would not have been surprised either way.

I decided to buy a new disk in the form of a 300G Western Digital VelociRaptor, which merited a Vista reinstall. This then freed up two 500G disks for me to test and perhaps reuse. I decided to RAID1 the two disks so I could have a little bit of protection against disk failure. Obviously all my important data is backed up properly anyway.

Windows Vista Ultimate 64 edition, Microsoft's flagship desktop OS has no support for software RAID1.

I'll say that again, just in case you skipped over the sentence: Windows Vista Ultimate 64 edition, Microsoft's flagship desktop OS has no support for software RAID1.

I can RAID0 the two disks, I can create a spanned volume across the two disks, but no RAID1. After a couple of hours of Googling in sheer disbelief, it turns out to be true. Instead I've had to, for now, hook up my two disks to the motherboard's RAID BIOS thingy.

I paid nearly £200 for an OS that won't do RAID1.

Snow!

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 07:14:00 GMT

Seems we got about 1cm of snow overnight. Let 3 days of London-wide transport chaos commence.

Grand Theft Auto 4, Steam and vapourising graphics cards and dodgy drivers

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 10:36:00 GMT

I was very pleased when GTA IV finally made it out for the PC. I'm a long time fan of this series of games and, ever since announced, has been on my Buy On Sight list of games. A few weeks I was in my local Tesco and noticed it on the shelf and was just about to pick it up when I remembered it would be out on Steam.

I mostly like Steam, but see previous blog posts for a rant or two.

The price in Tesco was good, but I was sure Steam would be cheaper so I waited. In vain as it turns out. Buying a physical dual-DVD box set with colour manuals and nice big fold-out map turned out to be cheaper than downloading the game on Steam. How can that make any sense? I digress.

GTA IV's world is astonishing. Unless you've played previous games, and to some extent even if you've played previous GTA games, you will have no concept of just how vast and richly detailed it is. Want to go for drive? Just *ahem* borrow a nearby car and take it for a spin. Turn left, turn right, accelerate away and watch as the city lives and breathes around you and reacts to your actions in it.

Bored of driving a car? Perhaps you'd prefer a van, or a bus, or petrol tanker instead? They're all there. As are a couple of helicopters. Oh yes. Climb into the cockpit of one of these, spin up the rotors and soar up into the air and take in the vastness of the city below. Want to go buzz some peds? No problem, just try not to dent the rotor blades on the street lights and power lines, that rarely ends well for you, or for people nearby.

Park a petrol tanker across a busy intersection, take a nearby window cleaner's lift up to the roof of a nearby building and watch as the traffic backs up. Notice a few small crashes as cars attempt to get pass the blockage, doors open, people get out, fists are waved and insults yelled. Grab your handy RPG and send a rocket into the middle of the intersection. Watch as the explosion causes cars to spin through the air, fires break out causing more cars to explode, pedestrians get caught in the inferno and run around of fire screaming. Police sirens start wailing and the screen gets covered in tiny red dots...

Tiny red dots? Huh?

A few reboots and many driver reinstalls and version changes later and I conclude that my graphics card has decided to give up on me. Specifically it appears that some of the on-board memory has gone bad. Luckily it's a BFG card which comes with an insane warranty so I gave them a call and they had no issue with replacing the card, but regretted that I wasn't likely to see the replacement for about 10 days. A bit of a pest for me, I do need my PC.

I gave Toby at Wired2Fire a call (readers of my blog may recall this is where I got my games rig from) who very kindly agreed to part-ex my would-be warranty replacement card against an new one from stock that he could ship same day. I ended up with a BFG GTX 280 OC, it's a lovely lovely thing and knocks one thing off my "would like to buy" list, an Ageia Physx card; this thing comes with the Physx chipset on-board. Installing the card was no problem though I did have to use an extra 12v rail from the PSU and it needs 1 x 8 and 1 x 6 MOLEX connectors. I used two 6 ways and a (supplied) converter to populate the 8 way. (Add to shopping list: 1000W modular PSU). I installed the driver, spun up GTA IV again, and.... BSOD! Ghm.

Many driver re-installs, driver upgrades, downgrades, hacks and fiddling with BIOS settings I was still getting the same problem. Google was utterly resplendent with advice and suggestions from lots of other people who've had exactly the same problem with many GeForce series card all the way back to the 7s. I finally cracked this by installing the current beta driver for this card and managed to put in a good 4 hour session with no complaints at all.

London Perl Workshop 2008 - 29th November

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 06:44:00 GMT

Thanks to Mark Keating of Shadowcat Systems for daring, and succeeding brilliantly, in organising this year's London Perl Workshop. Attended and supported by many of the usual suspects, it was also great to see a whole bunch of people there who'd not only not been to an LPW before, they'd not been to any Perl workshop before. I'm especially envious of the first-timer who won the Canon 1000D in the raffle.

A new job, a new OS and new chairs, and a trip to the zoo

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:54:00 BST

I have a new job, starting on August 11th, working for a quite well known e-commerce solution provider as a Senior Systems Administrator. After spending 7 months mostly dealing with Windows problems and problems with a certain piece of almost-unheard-of commercial software, it's going to be a challenge to get back into working at a UNIX hosted Perl shop. I'm looking forward to it.

On the subject of Windows, I finally decided to give my games machine a new operating system: Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit edition. I've read all the negative reviews, all the reasons to stick with XP and, in all fairness, I find the criticisms wanting. It's fast, pretty and runs Crysis at a very acceptable frame rate. Also I'm fan of ReadyBoost. Vista 64 seems happy with all my 32 bit games and utilities, games being my main reservation. This is my gaming PC after all.

We bought some chairs, having finally found some that matched our table. Visitors no longer have to be stunned by the sheer variety of pick and mix chairs we have, they now all look the same.

Kamel, Sonia and their 3 year-old daughter,our niece, Matilde, came to visit. The theme for the trip was definitely "Let's go look at some animals". We had a trip to Bedfords Park to insert carrots into deers, a trip to Old MacDonald's Farm to feed all the usual farmyard suspects and, finally, a trip to Whipsnade Zoo, easily the best zoo within a convenient drive of London.

Random statistics

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 12:27:00 BST

Of all the Italian females I know, 75% of them are called Francesca.

A few words on the basics of spam filtering

Wed, 07 May 2008 17:30:00 BST

Spam filtering is a bit like the various Pop Idol auditions.

Firstly, the candidate needs to actually find the audition site. You'd be amazed at the number of turnups who say "Hi, I'm here for $foo" and are told "Uhh, not here, sorry." "Oh."

Next you get those who've turned up at the right place but for the wrong reason.

"Hi. \0x121\0x310\0x023........" "Uhh, okay, Knitting World was last week."

Next you get those who turn up at the right place but don't listen.

"HI" "He.." "MAIL FROM" "but I've not said hel...." "RCPT TO"

Next you get those who turn up, but haven't read the rules.

"Hi" "Hi there_how_are_you" "Ummm, no."

Next you get those who turn up, understand the principles, but can't remember who they're supposed to be talking to.

"Hi." "Hi." "RCPT TO: AAAAAAAAA@foo.com", "Who?" RCPT TO: AAAAAAAAB@foo.com", "Eh?"

And finally, you get those who turn up and sing like they've snorted dysentry-infected liquiturds[0] a few minutes before.[1]

[0] My word, hands off. [1] Yes, *.{cn, pl, hk, tw, ru, tr} I mean you.

More toys

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:24:00 BST

For some reason there's a lovely feeling of satisfaction when you wake up one morning and think "You know, I need more hardware." It's an even greater satisfaction when you can actually justify doing so. This morning I've asked Dell to supply me with a 2950 consisting of dual quad-core processors, 8 gigs of RAM, eight 10k disks, hardware RAID, lights-out management card and dual hot-swap power supplies. This box will be an additional front end mail server for AntibodyMX. It's been some time since I've had chance to use 64 bit Debian, so I'm looking forward to seeing how that works out.

Game review: Assassin's Creed

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:58:00 BST

I was slightly dubious about buying this game. I was torn between a huge variety of reviews, some loving it, some loathing it. However I've been waiting for so long for a good sneak-'em-up to come along (where art thou, Thief IV?) that I decided to give it a go.

I like games with a good story line, Assassin's Creed definitely has an intriguing plot but it spoils it by requiring the player to sit though cut-scenes for a remarkable (subjectively) percentage of the game, especially during the early stages. The short version of the plot is that you have been kidnapped by a medical research facility who stick you in a machine that accesses the contents of your genetic memory. One of your ancestors was a member of a secretive organisation of assassins, by reliving parts of his life you are able to gain access to more memories which are locked away. Got that? Good.

You unlock memories by performing tasks such as saving a citizen from being beaten up by the guards, acting as a bodyguard, collecting flags and, obviously, assassinating certain people. You have nine people to assassinate but, before doing so, you must carry out investigations by eavesdropping or pick-pocketing or beating the crap out of someone to gain information about your target. Sounds tedious? Well, to a certain extent it is, except....

You will be distracted by the stunning, utterly stunning, in-game graphics. Stand atop a roof, pick a house in the far far distance, make your way towards it. No load times, no cuts, just seamless progress towards your gorgeously rendered target. But even here there's a problem. My monitor's native resolution is 1600x1400 which Assassin's Creed supports but won't allow me to turn anti-aliasing on. To enable AA I have to drop to 1280x1024 which ruins the game because it's fixed 16:9 aspect ratio leaves thick black chunks of unused screen estate at the top and bottom of the picture.

There's no in-game save, your progress is automatically saved at certain points along the story. Realising this, I waited until I was at a point where, to me, it would have logically saved my progress and then quit to do something else. The game hadn't saved and I had to replay a chunk of the game including a couple of long unskippable cut-scenes. Frustrating.

In game travel is frustrating, too. You're given a horse which can walk, trot or canter. The default speed is "trot" however if you go past a guard at anything but "walk" and he'll immediately start hacking at you with a sword. Why? We're not told.

The AI is pretty good but has some serious holes. If a guard is chasing you and you break his line of sight, climb up onto a rooftop and duck into one of the indicated "hiding places". The guard will follow you up onto the roof, but won't think to look in the covered gazebo that's the only possible place you could have hidden. Instead he'll wait until the game decides you've eluded him and then then just wander off.

This is a great idea for a game with stunning graphics that's been let down by tedious game play. The engine is clearly capable of much more, let's hope the next game in the series fixes the oversights.

Yes, Eva, I'm still alive

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 21:04:00 BST

Just busy beyond belief right now. Thanks for asking, though :)

March already, first hangover of the year

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 09:58:00 GMT

Last Friday I was out at The Master Gunner with several people from a particular technical mailing list. It's not often I get drunk, and it's very very rare for me to get a hangover. I managed both on this occasion.

Last week I was nicely surprised by Dell's desktop support. The chap I ended up speaking to was helpful, knowledgeable and came back with timely and relevant information about the problem I was experiencing. It turns out that Windows XP SP3 is missing a particular hotfix that prevents machines with the Realtek ACL888 HD audio chipset from installing the driver. Trying to manually install this hotfix results in an error indicating that the hotfix should already be installed. Luckily, there's a slightly modified version of the hotfix available that will install on SP3 allowing the Realtek driver to install correctly.

The DIY Continues....

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 11:10:00 GMT

Lynda and I had a good chance in Norway to improve our DIY skills. Painting walls and laying laminate floors aren't especially hard things to do, you just need time, patience and practice.

So far we've completely redecorated our main living room and we're now working on the room opposite, this can be thought of as either living room #2 or bedroom #2. It used to be blue, very very blue indeed. It's taken many coats of paint just to get in back to a fairly neutral white and we've so far applied one coat of the final colour, a kind of creamy white called Almond White.

When not covering myself in paint, I've been getting stuck into Crysis, one of the many game titles I've been looking forward to playing. It's an interesting game, though I'm not yet in love with some of the gameplay mechanics. Perhaps I just need a bit more time to get used to it.

Invaluable Support

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:58:00 GMT

Those of you who know me will know that I'm no shrinking bloom when it comes to dealing with bad customer service (yes, Apple, I mean you) and so, for once, I'm delighted to share with you an example of near-perfect support.

Wind the clock back a few months and Martin takes delivery of his new gaming rig from Wired2Fire . It's an Intel QX6800 based machine, with 4Gb RAM, an Nvidia 8800 Ultra OC graphics card and couple of 500Gb disks and more fans than your average harem. It's quick, very very quick.

After a couple of months I started noticing stability problems. The machine would sometimes reboot at random, when it did I would struggle to get any video output afterwards. On one occasion the machine lost all its BIOS settings. After a couple of diagnostics sessions on the phone, Wired2Fire suggested a Return To Base to get the motherboard swapped out. W2F are not to far away so I drove the machine to their office and, their Head Honcho, Toby got on with the business of sorting my machine out.

Since the motherboard swap out I've had zero problems. This is what you'd expect, right? Alas it seems that people no longer expect timely fixes to their problem, they're happy for weeks of tooing and froing whilst a problem is diagnosed. Congratulations to Wired2Fire for just getting the problem fixed.

I look forward to buying my next gaming rig from you in 2010.

TURN IT DOWN!

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 15:54:00 GMT

The vast majority of commuters would like nothing more than to enjoy some peace and quiet on our journey to and from work.

If you must listen to personal music, fine, BUT KEEP IT TO YOURSELF. Why should normal people have to put up with the annoying relentless tinny background susurration because you think you look cool with your iPod?

TURN IT DOWN.

Likewise the even more braindead morons who honestly truly believe that we actually want them to play some piece of techno crap out loud on their mobile phone.

TURN IT OFF.

Spending a couple of hours per day in a tin can with dozens of pairs of armpits is bad enough, don't inflict more misery on us with your crappy MP3 collection.

Thankyou.

Call of Duty 4: Steam download problems

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 10:57:00 GMT

If you're having trouble getting Call of Duty 4 to work, try doing this:

Right click on CoD4 and look for "Delete local content", do so and Steam will start downloading again starting at about 92%.
When this has completed, right click again and look for "Verify local content", do so and Steam will start downloading again starting at about 70%.

After that, you should be good to go.

Another Valve / Steam stuffup

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:49:00 GMT

2146 on November 12th and I'm not yet able to play Call of Duty 4, despite having parted with 70USD on the promise of "play it as soon as it's released", or very similar.

I can't say I'm entirely surprised, The Orange Box was a cock up and that was Valve's own content. Either way, I'm not best pleased. Come on, Valve, you have some of the best title on the planet under your belt, you have the delivery mechanism that puts cash straight in your bank account, SORT IT OUT!

In court today.

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:30:00 GMT

Today I was in court for the first time ever. Lynda and I used the rather efficient Moneyclaim site to claim back what we considered to be unjustified deductions from a deposit on a rented 1 bedroom flat.

Without going into many tedious details here, we won. Crescent House Group Limited of Wanstead have been ordered to refund most of the disputed amount.

If you're looking to rent property in east London, you may wish to check that it's not owned by Crescent House Group Limited, 14 High Street, Wanstead, London, E11 2AJ.

Gravy

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 22:25:00 GMT

Having just attempted chicken gravy for the first time ever, I can assure you it's worth the effort.

It's also self-perpetuating. The chicken you cook today becomes the stock you use to make the gravy for the next chicken you cook. And so on.

Hardware review: TomTom GO 720

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 16:30:00 BST

I've long been thinking of replacing my trusty 2005 edition of Microsoft Autoroute with something a little more exciting. So, a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a TTG 720 from my local Currys. Inside the box you get the unit itself, a combined charger and USB cradle, a manual, a CD-ROM containing the TomTom HOME application and a sucker mount to attach to your windscreen.

The unit starts pretty quickly and, in the car park at Bluewater, almost instantly picked up a couple of satellites, supporting up to a maximum of 12. The interface is very very intuitive, I've not yet had to remove the manual from its shrink-wrap. Plotting a route is a matter of a few taps on the screen and the supplied postcode database has been more than sufficient to get me to almost all of the places I've needed to go so far.

I quickly adapted to driving with the unit, the large clear display means you need to do no more than flick your eyes for a second to see what the road layout is around you. The supplied voices are more than adequate, spoken directions are clear and unambiguous. The unit varies the notice it gives you of a direction change depending on the speed you're travelling at. At motorway speeds you'll be warned of an exit you need to take about 2 miles in advance. At urban speeds, it'll start instructing you a few hundred meters away.

Dynamic route recalculation works very well. I deliberately took the wrong route once or twice, sometimes turning onto a one way street. The unit quickly recalculated the best route and steered me back on track. When driving on the M40 in heavy traffic I asked the unit to find an alternative route that avoided the M40. It directed me off the motorway at the next exit, onto the A404 and then along to the M4 to continue my trip towards London. You can subscribe to TomTom's traffic service which, using your mobile phone, will check for traffic problems and try to route you around them. I have not yet tested this service myself.

The TomTom HOME software allows you to update your unit, getting new maps, new points of interest and map updates from the Internet. I found the version supplied with the unit to be incredibly buggy. Luckily there was a newer version available which has fixed many of the issues I noticed. It still does have the annoying habit of crashing with unhelpful errors from time to time, this seems to be related to connectivity issues to TomTom's website.

It's not totally perfect, there are some interface annoyances. For example, you can't disassociate a mobile phone from the unit without first enabling bluetooth. Overall I'm very pleased with the unit, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

Game review: Medal of Honor - Airborne

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 15:41:00 BST

In general I've been a big fan of the MoH series of games. I own them all and they tend to get past my "pirate before you buy" game filtering system.

A word about that, I suppose. PC games are expensive and my expectations from an expensive computer game are quite high. I'm not going to part with my money unless I'm certain the game in question is worth every penny. Case in point, the Splinter Cell series: Splinter Cell, awesome; Pandora tomorrow, incredible; Chaos Theory, amazing; Double Agent, buggy piece of crap.

SC: Double Agent was a console port that was doomed for several reasons. Firstly, it required a graphics card that supports shader model 3, secondly, for many people, it simply didn't work out of the tin and required hacks to config files to get it to work. When I did finally get it to even start the tutorial the game crashed within a few minutes and subsequent restarts resulted in further crashes, graphics glitches etc. All this fun for £29.99. Have you tried getting a refund for a computer game recently?

So yes, I pirate before I buy with a few exceptions, one of those being the MoH series of games.

MoH: Airborne is, as with all this series of games, set of various theatres of combat in World War II. In this case you play the part of Boyd Travers a Private in the 82nd Airborne Division. Each level of the game starts with you aboard an aircraft a few seconds away from your drop point. The jump out of the plane, your parachute opens and then you pick a landing point and start with the usual MoH run around and shoot all the bad guys whilst achieving objectives.

The game play itself is quite reasonable though you will be quick to notice the AI being both omniscient and skull-smackingly dumb simultaneously. Your squad mates will cheerfully wander into your line of fire (fortunately without consequences for you or them) yet, at the same time, use your sniper rifle's scope to zoom in on a enemy soldier in the distance and he'll pretty much immediately jump into cover and then start taking frighteningly accurate pots shots at you with an automatic weapon held in one hand and waved randomly over the top of a wall. Ooooh-kay.

"You have full control from the moment you jump. Steer your parachute and start fighting anywhere" the back of the box claims. Well that's not quite true. For starters you jump from an impossibly low altitude giving you a very short time to move significantly around the map. Then you'll aim for a rooftop a little way away and smack into an invisible wall in the air which pushes you around to a less favourable landing zone. Not quite what I'd call "start fighting anywhere".

Frustration will set in when you die, and you will die many many many times. When you die you are transported into the boots of another soldier just about to just out of an airplane. You then land and continue the mission where your left off, well, nearly anyway. One level is set in an old train yard with enemy snipers lurking in every awkward location. You'll spend a long time just working out where these buggers are, carefully pick them off one by one, die and..... every single one of them respawns, every single time. Arrrgh.

This is not a bad game, unfortunately neither is it a great game. If you're a fan of the previous MoH games then go buy this one, you'll forgive the annoyances because of the great atmosphere and attention to detail. People new to the MoH series will, I feel, not enjoy this so much.

Redundant

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:14:00 BST

I have been made redundant. Fotango have been an excellent company to work for and I shall greatly miss working with the many highly talented individuals I've met over the past 15 months or so.

I'm actually quite sanguine. This will give me the opportunity I've been looking for to spend more time working on AntibodyMX; there's a couple of features I've promised clients. I can then have a bit of a break and figure out what I want to do next.

An open letter to Valve Software

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:36:00 BST

Dear Valve

It's 21 hours and more than 30 minutes in to September 17th, 2007. Why can't I yet play the Team Fortress 2 Beta, dammit?

Love

Martykins xxx

Metablog

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:04:00 BST

It's nice to see Simon blogging again.

Sufficiently Advanced Technology

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:00:00 BST

So I had a bit of a surprise earlier today. At the top of my keyboard I have a row of "media" (for want of a better word) buttons. Under windows they do things like turn the volume up and down, launch a browser, have your mail client create a new email and so on. As a long time Linux desktop user I've become used to these buttons doing nothing.

Imagine my surprise today when I jabbed the "Calculator" button by mistake and.... A CALCULATOR APPEARED. Further experimentation revealed that Kubuntu, without any fuss, had silently made all these buttons work. Ain't modern technology a wonderful thing?

Fotango

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:58:00 BST

I'm getting a lot of personal email asking me about the current situation with Fotango. At this time I am not able to answer your questions as I could be putting both personal and professional relationships in jeopardy.

Please direct all questions about Fotango to Gina Jones, European Corporate Public Relations Manager at Canon Europe on +44 (0) 208 588 8000.

France and an upcoming BBQ

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:19:00 BST

Lynda and I decided to go shopping in the Carrefour near Calais last weekend. The excuse being that we needed lots of food and beer for our upcoming barbecue and not that we both enjoy food shopping, mai non.

The trip over was very smooth, we arrived very early for our train (I way overestimated the time it would take) but we were able to book onto an earlier train. To get on to the train you drive along a copiously overmarked road, up onto a bridge and then down onto the platform. Drive along the platform and then into the train itself. Loading is efficient, we waited perhaps 10 minutes before the train started moving. If you have a book to read then the 30 minute crossing passes very quickly indeed.

The Carrefour is part of a huge shopping centre just next to the port. There's also a number of shops that'll be familiar including a Tesco duty free, or whatever duty free is called these days, beer and wine shop.

After a hectic day of consumerism we returned to the UK with about 20 bottles of wine, 72 cans of beer, a dozen different cheeses, many different cuts of meat, including some horse steaks for Bob; we now have quite a full fridge.

This coming weekend is our first event in the new house; a combined barbecue, housewarming and birthday party for Lynda. We have a lot of friends coming over from the continent, the house is going to be very full indeed.

Spotting stock spam

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 20:07:00 BST

The whole stock spam situation is getting a little ridiculous. First we had simple text in an image then, when we plugged OCR engines into our spam filters, we had distorted text in an image, then when that damage was routed around, we had distorted text on a psychadelic background. A little later on we got rotated distorted text on a psychadelic background. Very recently, we got the next step in the arms race, all of the above embedded in a PDF file.

Someone somewhere must be making money from these penny stock scams, enough to make it worth their while to keep upping the bar. The PDF file idea is neat but assumes the mail client of the recipient will display a PDF inline. Some do, some don't and we all obey the "Never open a binary you weren't expecting" safe hex guideline, right?

Wrong, of course.

Stock spams will carry on being sent for as long as enough people make the price needle shake just sufficiently in the right directions so as a sharp trader can wring a profit out of the deal. The stocks "advertised" in these spams are invariably pink sheet. The fact they have to resort to probably legally dubious, and certainly morally dubious, methods of bumping the price should surely be a large neon pointer that something is amiss. Alas, on average, people are stupid.

At the last Fotango hackday, I spent a little bit of time working on a SpamAssassin plugin that picks out one of two characteristics of these emails and scores them just a little bit. I have been running the plugin on my front end mail servers and, yesterday, the plugin flagged over 400 messages. Knowing my mail setup this means that this represents somewhere between 5 to 10% of the actual number of messages that were sent. I only filter mail for a few hundred domains so if we scale the numbers up even a little bit, someone somewhere is really keen on generating even the tiniest of interest in the symbols in question.

The low value of these stocks means that vast numbers of shares must be traded to make the kind of money that would make such low-handed tactic worthwhile. To my knowledge, stock trades are all recorded. Surely it can't be that hard to match the symbol in question up to a heavy purchase followed by a heavy sell? This would surely make it possible to identify the individuals and, I'm sure, companies who see saturating your mail server and polluting your inbox as an easy route to a quick profit.

Games machines delayed

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 11:59:00 BST

My new games machine (Intel QX6800, 2Gb RAM, BFG GeForce 8800GTX Ultra OC 768Mb) has been delayed due to the supplier running out of..... wait for it..... operating systems.

I intend to do a full review of the system when it arrives but at least the manufacturer has the decency to not try to say the delay is caused by a third party. Bah.

Ubuntu +1

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 13:15:00 BST

Last night I attempted to install Ubuntu 7.04 on an Acer Ferrari 4000 series laptop. This laptop has lots and lots of whacky hardware in that has thwarted many a Linux installer in the past. Ubuntu got it all right first time in about 3 clicks. Wireless, 3D, bluetooth, my odd USB gaming mouse, the lot. I'm very impressed.

I was on call over the weekend so I spent most my time in the house. Lynda and I unpacked a couple of boxes and generally tidied up. I did one task I'd been putting off for days: unsnarling a huge tangle of cables. Oh, and I finally got the stereo put back together.

Planning for redundancy

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 18:14:00 BST

Not in the work sense in this case. This weekend has mostly been taken up with building and installing the 4th AntibodyMX node. All four nodes are in different buildings, on different power and on different networks, I'm thinking this is probably enough redundancy for now. I'm very pleased with all of ABMX's hosting partners so far, so I don't mind mentioning them by name. In order of time hosting with they are: ORE NET, Web Tapestry, Servology and, as of yesterday, Bogons.

The new node will get a week or two to burn in. My personal mail weighs in at about 200 messages per day so that's a nice steady stream of mail to push through it.