rant – hinterlands

When contract hunting goes wrong: TEKsystems & Allegis Group

I was approached by a recruiter from TEKsystems who were looking for a Linux systems administration and automation type person for a project with one of their clients. I took a look at the job description, and it seemed like a pretty good match for my skills, so I was happy to apply and for TEKsystems to represent me.

I was interviewed three times by members of the team I would be working in over the course of about two weeks. The people were based in Sweden and Norway and, having previously lived in Norway, I felt brave enough to try out bits of my very very rusty Norwegian. The interviews all seemed to go well and, a few days later, I was offered the role which I accepted. A start date of May 15^th 2023 was agreed.

I consider it a sincere and meaningful compliment when I am offered work, so it’s important to know that, in accepting this role, I had turned down three other opportunities, two permanent roles and one other contract.

As this role was deemed inside IR35, I would have to work through an umbrella company. It’s usually less friction to just go with the agency’s recommended option which was to use their parent company, Allegis Group. I duly went through their onboarding process, proving my address, identity, right to work and so on and so forth. All pretty standard stuff.

As May 15^th approached, I was conscious that I had not, as yet, received any initial onboarding instructions neither directly from the client or via the agency. Whom did I contact on the 15^th, when and how? As this was a remote work contract, I was also expecting delivery of a corporate laptop. This had not yet turned up.

Late in the week before the 15^th, I had a call from the agency saying that there had been some kind of incident that the team I would be working with had to deal with. They had no-one available to do any kind of onboarding with me, so would I mind deferring the start of the contract by a week?

It turned out it was very convenient for me. A friend of the family had died a few weeks earlier from breast cancer and the funeral was on the Friday beforehand and, as it happened, my wife and daughter also got stranded in France due to the strikes. A couple of extra days free to deal with all of that were helpful, so I agreed and everyone was happy.

Towards the end of that week, there had still been radio silence from the client. The agency was trying to obtain a Scope Of Work from them which would lead to an actual contract being drawn up for signing.

The next Monday was a bank holiday and, on the Tuesday morning, I got this message from the agency.

Hello Martin

We would like to update you to confirm we are unable to continue with your onboarding journey, and as such your onboarding journey has now ceased.

We wish you all the best for your future assignments.

Many thanks,

OnboardingTeam@TEKsystems

Needless to say, this was rather surprising and resulted in me attempting to get in touch with someone there to discover what was going on. No immediate answer was forthcoming other than vague mentions of difficulty with a Swedish business entity not being able to take on a UK-based resource. I was told that efforts would be made to clarify the situation. To the day of writing this, that’s still not happened. Well, not for me at least.

At the end of that week, it became obvious that whatever problem had happened was terminal for my contract, so I started back contact hunting and reactivating my CV on the various job boards.

I asked TEKsystems if they would offer any kind of compensation. I’d acted entirely in good faith: I’d turned down three other offers of work, told other agencies I was no longer available and deactivated my CV on the various job boards. It seemed fair they should offer me some kind of compensation for the lost earnings, wasted time and lost opportunities. They have declined this request leaving me entirely out of pocket for the 3 weeks I should have been working for them and, of course, unexpectedly out of work.

I’m obviously back looking for my next opportunity and I’m sure something will be along in due course. This is a cautionary tale of what can go wrong in the world of contracting and, if your next contract involves TEKsystems or Allegis Group, you might wish to be extra careful, making sure they are actually able to offer you the work they say they are, and that you get paid.

Buying a custom gaming PC from Overclockers UK

My current workstation and gaming PC is slowly disintegrating. I built it myself from components some 6 years ago and it’s simply wearing out. Several USB ports don’t work and Windows sometimes bluescreens with errors that suggests bits of the motherboard are getting tired. I don’t really have the spare time needed to build a high-end PC and make a great job of it, so I decided to treat myself to a pre-built custom system. After hunting round, I settled on Overclockers as the company to buy from.

Their system configurator didn’t quite give me what I wanted, so I contacted them and asked if they could customise further which they could. I put together my list of requirements, they send back a price. I paid, cash wired to their bank account, upfront and sat back and waited for my new shiny liquid-cooled PC to arrive.

The system shipped. It shipped to the wrong address. I had provided Overclockers with a billing address and a shipping address. They shipped to the billing address which is almost guaranteed to be unoccupied during regular working hours.

A simple mistake. It happens. I contacted the courier who were unable to redeliver again that day, but promised they would deliver it to the shipping address the next day.

Next day, my new shiny PC arrives. I opened the smaller of the two boxes, one for spare components and so on, and immediately see a problem. The spares and cables and whatnots are not branded with anything I specified, wrong motherboard and wrong graphics card. I call Overclockers who suggest that the component boxes may have been mixed up and can I please open the main box and check. I do. It’s someone else’s computer. I later learn that my system has been shipped to somewhere else. Overclockers’ mistake? Courier’s mistake? It doesn’t really matter. Overclockers have a courier come and pick up this system.

Meanwhile, my system makes its merry way back to Overclockers’ HQ and I, confusingly, get an email asking what I’d like done with it. I suggest shipping it to the shipping address and could I please have an AM delivery so I don’t potentially waste a whole day. I offered to pay for whatever that was going to cost. Overclockers said it was no problem. Super.

My PC finally showed up at Friday 8pm. The more astute amongst you will spot that 8pm is not exactly an AM delivery. Overclockers’ mistake? Courier’s mistake? I have no idea, the question has not yet been answered.

I unpack my new PC. The first thing I notice is that there is a bolt rolling around in the bottom of it. Stuff can come loose in shipping, so what. I find that the bolt belongs to a radiator housing in the bottom of the case, there’s a hole, a loose radiator and tool marks around the hole. Not ideal, but the system’s not going to be moved around much so no big problem. Despite being an SLI system, there was no SLI cable installed linking the graphics cards. Simple to fix, but a silly thing for an expert system builder to miss.

One of the customised things I asked for was the pre-cabling of some SATA drives bays: one for a blu-ray writer and two for a pair of big SATA disks I use for bulk local storage. None of these were done. I call Overclockers about this, and the loose bolt, and they say there’s not much that can be done without returning the system to them. As I’ve no interest in another game of couriers, I grumble a bit but then do the cabling myself.

Over the next day or so I had almost no chance to really push the new system. It ticked over happily, was lovely and quiet and lovely to look at too. On Sunday night, though, the headphones went on, the office door was closed and I got on with a bit of GRID 2, with all the visual effects turned up to maximum. I settled down for a couple of hours of hard racing. After about an hour, the screen froze, went black, and all the system fans kicked into life.

I powered off, reached for my mini-torch and opened the case. What I saw sickened me: liquid coolant leaking from the CPU block, down onto a graphics card and spilling on to the motherboard. It was impossible to tell whether the CPU had simply thermally shut down or if the coolant had shorted something expensive. It kind of didn’t matter.

The next morning I called Overclockers who arranged to pick the system up. I asked if they could sort of the cabling and the loose bolts while they were at it. They agreed.

A couple of days later, I got an email saying the system had been repaired and was on its way back to me. The next evening I get a call from the owner of the billing address saying that a courier had tried to deliver something with my name on it. They had shipped to the wrong address. Again.

I had now run out of patience and I asked for a full refund. To their credit, Overclockers didn’t argue on this and they said one would be arranged. As it was convenient for me, I asked to keep the Windows 8.1 licence and the SSD. As it was convenient for them, I agreed to pay for these again separately, they would then issue a refund for the full amount of the original transaction. I didn’t ask, but I kind of expected they would simply wire the cash back to my bank account.

After 3 days or so, nothing had showed up, so I called and they said that processing a refund might take up to 7 working days.

Today, 10 days on, nothing had showed up, so I called them and they said a cheque had been issued on the 4th and had been sent to……. you guessed it, the wrong address. The owner of the address had not had a cheque arrive.

They offered to send a new cheque to the right address. I suggested they simply wire the money to my account, I was told this was impossible due to the people who would have to do that being in Germany. No, makes no sense to me either. I asked if the cheque could be sent by special delivery, for which I was happy to cover the costs. This was, of course, not possible.

So, 5 weeks after placing a cash order for a high-spec custom PC from Overclockers UK, I have no PC and they have a large amount of my money.

Please consider this post next time you’re thinking of ordering from them.

(Update: 15/4/2014: A handwritten cheque arrived from Overclockers this morning. )

No writing nasty things about the 2012 London Olympics, okay?

As mentioned on Twitter, in the Terms of Use of the London 2012 Olympics Web site is this:

Links to the Site. You may create your own link to the Site, provided that your link is in a text-only format. You may not use any link to the Site as a method of creating an unauthorized association between an organization, business, goods, or services and London 2012, and agree that no such link shall portray us or any other official London 2012 organizations (or our or their activities, products, or services) in a false, misleading, derogatory, or otherwise objectionable manner.

So, just to be completely clear, the 2012 London Olympics is a disgraceful waste of taxpayer’s money at a time of austerity in public spending. The corporate sponsorship and outrageous curtailment of freedoms inflicted on visitors is un-British and a national disgrace. I can think of no other occasions where so much public money has been splurged with so little accountability. Public scrutiny will be curtailed too, behind the sham of a private company.

Oh, and how can you call it the London games when chunks of it are happening in other countries?

On the size of the solar system and manned space travel

Today a few news outlets picked up the confirmation of the discovery of an Earth-like planet in the habital zone of a star 600 light years away, but the closest such planet discovered so far. This has created an excited buzz as indeed it should. Life certainly exists elsewhere in the universe, and we know a planet like ours can sustain life quite well, albeit grudgingly at times, so finding a planet like our own “just” 600 light years away is indeed exciting.

Well, is it? Alas I am a bit meh about the whole thing.

Let’s assume that there’s a civilisation as advanced as ours there. The bads news is that we’re never going to visit them, and we’re never going to establish meaningful communications with them. Let’s look at the best possible timeline.

A “Hello Kepler 22-b” signal sent today will reach them no earlier them December 5th 2611 so we’ve got some finger tapping to do between now and then. And we’re assuming they’re looking for a signal, and spot it, and can decode it. If they do all that, and send us back engineering plans for their FTL communications device right away, then we’ll be getting those no sooner than December 3211, twelve centuries from now. And then we merely have to build a device designed by an alien species who almost certainly won’t be using the same engineering principles we are.

Remember what happened to the Mars Climate Orbiter?

Okay, so while we’re waiting, let’s send a ship up there. Twelve centuries is plenty of time to develop space exploration technology. At some point during this maybe we will figure how to build a useful FTL communications device, in which case we can beam the specifications over to Kepler 22-b. It’ll be at least a 600 year wait for them to get back to us, but no harm in trying.

If we’re sending a ship, and we don’t have FTL yet, manning it isn’t really an option. At light speed, it’s a 600 year trip, at half light speed it’s 1200 years, and so on. People just don’t live that long so we’d be looking at building a generation ship, currently way beyond our current technology, and beyond anything we’re likely to achieve in the next century at least.

Unmanned is easier, and we’re good at that. We’ve had probes in space for decades that are still working just fine. None of the complexities of life-support, all that’s needed is a nice big nuclear plant for electricity and a nice big antenna for talking back to Mother Earth. Cunning use of orbital slingshots, especially using the gas giants, means we could get this baby really moving through space. With the nations of the world behind the project, we could launch this inside a couple of years carrying all the knowledge we dare share with the Keplians. And then, again, we sit back and wait, and work on that FTL communications device.

The fastest speed attained by a probe launched from Earth is about 157,000 mph. This was achieved by Helios probes using the Sun’s gravity well. We have a pretty good grasp of orbital mechanics, so I don’t expect it’d be too difficult to design a slingshot approach to the Sun that would take our probe, accelerate it to this sort of speed and then send it in exactly the right direction to meet up with Kepler 22-b in a few years time. That was sarcasm. We have zero experience of sending probes into interstellar space, the existence of a planet tells us nothing about how to navigate a probe through distant gravity fields to get there. Despite the moon’s gravitational interaction with the Earth being quite well understood, Apollo spacecraft on trips to and from the moon routinely had to use course-correction burns to make sure they attained successful moon orbit and earth re-entry.

So we do build our probe, and we do manage to find a course to send it on its way at 260,000 (we got better) km/h. What next? Well what happens is we wait. A long time.

The Solar system is big, much bigger than most people realise. At the center is our Sun and one of the furthest significant objects from it we know about is Pluto. Worst case, Pluto is 48.871AU from the Sun, that’s roughly 7.38 billion kilometers. Time to get there at our probe’s speed is 28,120 hours, or 3 years. Not too shabby. Alas Pluto is not the edge of the solar system.

Voyager 1 will beat our probe to interstellar space. It’s currently about 2.5 times further away fom the sun than Pluto is. Being generous, launched today, our probe will get there around 2020. Voyager 1 was launched in 1977. So off into the inky black and on to Kepler 22-b.

Alas this is still not the edge of the solar system.

It it theorised that there is a sphere of leftover junk from the formation of the solar system called the Oort Cloud. It’s thought to be where some of our long-period comets come from. Recall that Pluto, at worst was about 49AU from the Sun? Well the Oort Cloud is thought to be 50,000AU from the Sun, and marks the edge of the Sun’s gravitational influence. Conveniently, this is quite close to the distance of 1 light year. Less conveniently, this means our probe is going to take the thick end of ten millenia to make it this far at best speed. Keppler 22-b is 600 light years away, so a mere 5 and a bit million years in space for our probe.

I would like to think that mankind will travel between the stars. But it’s not going to happen in my lifetime, nor is it likely to in the next several centuries. Looking out into the universe to see what we can learn is great science but, really, we need to focus on making sure we survive as a species, something we seem determined not to do.

We should have had a permanent manned presence on the moon by now. We have taken all the hard work done to get us to the moon and allowed it to be washed away. With the end of the space shuttle programme, the country that worked hardest to put a man on the moon now has no way of putting a man in orbit. And we watched and allowed that to happen.

I consider myself to be an orphan of the Apollo project.

A shopper’s tale

I swing the car round the roundabout and through the switch back that leads into the car park. This is done at 3mph due to the enormously oversized MPV in front which ignores the roundabout entirely and has trouble negotiating the bends. The MPV indicates right and then drives straight on taking the next right instead, ignoring the No Entry sign.

I take the correct right and swan up and down the car park lanes looking for a free spot, I eventually find one, after removing the stray shopping trolley, and park. I walk back across to car park to the main entrance smiling slightly at the sight of a traffic jam around the MPV as it tries to park in a space between two badly parked cars. It eventually squeezes in, and one very small woman gets out.

I mentally flip a coin: basket or small trolley. Tails, small trolley it is. I walk to the main trolley corral and find it empty, I wander to the nearest trolley deposit area and spend a few minutes finding one with steering that attempts to obey the laws of physics. With my new friend pushed gallantly ahead I walk back to the main entrance. Fifty meters later the wheels lock solid, immobilising the trolley and tarnishing my soul with the resulting mental swearwords. I head towards the baskets to find none available and proceed down the checkouts looking for one that’s been abandoned. Success! I walk back from checkout 18 to 1, and proceed up the travelator to the upper floor where CDs, DVDs and other housewares are kept.

I walk on to the moving belt and stride upwards. A woman ahead has parked her trolley right in the center, “excuse me”, and I breathe in and try to squeeze past. The next obstacle is a small family. Husband, wife, trolley and 3 crack-fuelled pixie-demons coated in the sticky remains of high-sugar, high-caffeine bribes to stop them sucking the souls out of passers by. I decide it’s not worth the risk and wait as the belt takes us up to the first floor and the speed of a snail swimming through a bucket of treacle. The pixie-demons emit unspeakable slime.

Looking round at the signs overhead, I spy the section I’m looking for, it’s at the far end of the next aisle. I turn the corner into the lane and am confronted by the living dead. A hugely obese woman takes step and slow painful step towards me pushing a trolley, mouth open and respirating heavily. An item takes her interest; she parks her trolley sideways across the aisle and stares vacantly into the middle distance when suddenly the sounds of souls in extreme external agony come from the empty air. She answers her mobile phone and her deep concentration of the ensuing conversation means she fails to notice the queue of traffic backing up behind her. I take the long way round.

The trip back to the food floor is easier; I slalom past the trolleys and manage not to cause serious injury to the kids Heelying down with me. Must try harder. I consult my list, just 6 items required but scattered around the store. I need a plan.

I mentally map out a route that takes me past everything I need, but avoiding the busiest junctions. Let’s go. Dairy proves no problem, nor the fresh meat, nor the veg. I narrowly avoid splintering my knee on a trolley being piloted by a 6 year old boy and duck into the Asian food section to be confronted by the entire Indian nation, in miniature.

After a moment, I revise my estimate of the number of children present down from several millions to about 12. I soon learn to appreciate the training they have been given. I move to one side and two or three of them cunningly move to block me whilst maintaining the air of innocence. I break right to avoid them and nearly trip over another child who’s moved in to flank me. Only acrobatics save the kid from the lifelong mutilation of having the wires of a shopping basket imprinted on its face. I grab the item I need and head for the last section required: wine and beer.

It’s quiet, too quiet. I hastily pick up the bottle of wine I need and head for the checkout. With just a few items in my basket I head to the Baskets Only queue and am delighted to find a till with just two people in it, one being served and one waiting.

I should have spotted the trap a mile away. I am such a fool.

The chap waiting has been there so long that he’s near fossilised. I peer over his shoulder to examine the situation and glance into someone’s Hell.

An evil harpy crows over the contents of her shopping, picking an item out at random and asking “So how much is this one?” and then “It never said that on the shelf!” after the till jockey blips the item through once more. “Well I don’t want it, or this one”. This continues.

Hideous as it is, you have to admire the sheer malignance here. When shopping on a budget, don’t bother looking at the prices carefully, just jam as much as you can into a basket, then hit the “10 items or less” queue and debate it with the poor sap manning the checkout. Brilliant.

Several centuries pass, my turn arrives.

“This is buy one get one free.” I awake from my hibernation. “Hmmm?” “It’s buy one get one free, and you only have one.” “That’s okay.” “I can go get one for you.” “NOOOOOO! I mean, No, thanks”, avoiding another millennium rooted to the spot. I pay, decline the Computers For Fools vouchers, I leave.

I return to the car and on my way find that a BMW X5 has parked next to the MPV mentioned earlier. It’s parked by the MPV’s driver side door and I estimate the very small woman will need to slim down to nanometers to get into her car. It’s tempting to hang around to see the resulting argument but I think I’ve had enough fun for one day. I go home and start to prepare dinner, chopping the onions mask my tears.

Email: Managing users’ expectations

That email has established itself as a universal communication medium is a credit to all those who contributed to the standards that define its implementation.

Truly, only “www.” is a more familiar as an Internet medium for information exchange and, even then, HTTP is routinely dumbed down to “it’s on my Facebook” and other similar paradigms. This is not a criticism, it’s a tribute to the Internet’s ongoing integration into our everyday lives.

People seem desperately confused about email. It’s an aged beast and it suffers from having been reinvented and redefined over a long period of time to meet the demands of a succession of users with different expectation levels.

Stepping back a bit, SMTP as a protocol was originally designed to be incredibly tolerant of all kinds of problems. It had to be. Shonky links, low bandwidth and infrequent network connectivity meant we needed a protocol that could deal with the idea that messages could be significantly delayed. SMTP has a built in a mechanism for notifying when things aren’t going well, and makes a really good effort to tell a sender that things didn’t work out and the message didn’t make it. Then things changed.

Sending files over the Internet is sometimes hard. I know! Let’s extend email so it can transfer files.

Not everyone can type in 7 bit ASCII. I know! Let’s extend email so all character sets can be represented.

Sending messages in plain text isn’t always desirable. I know! Let’s extend email so it can handle PGP/GPG mail.

Attachments are okay, but what if there were some way my image could appear in my email body. I know! Let’s extend the message format so it can do that.

Text is boring. I know! Let’s extend email so I can send HTML content.

You get the idea. Email has evolved far beyond the original specification and still fails to meet users’ expectations. And it should not, because they confuse email with instant messaging and with a reliable file transport mechanism. If your users want messages to be delivered instantly, use an instant messaging system, not email. If you want files transferred, use some kind of file transfer protocol. Anyone training users to expect anything other than “it’ll almost certainly get there, probably today” out of email is creating a rod with which to beat themselves when deadlines tighten. The right tool for the right job.

An open letter to Ubisoft

Dear Ubisoft,

I was just in my local branch of Tesco and was delighted to see that Splinter Cell: Conviction had been released. I can tell you, I have been a long-time fan of the Splinter Cell series and was looking forward to adding this title to my collection of Ubisoft games.

Alas my fears that you would have not learned from your previous failings with regards to what is reasonable copy protection for your software were entirely well founded.

Look at the stack of games in the picture above. As I tend to buy games I want as soon as they come out, I usually pay a premium price. That stack of games represents something like £200 of hard-earned money that I was delighted to part with. I buy software, I don’t pirate it, I am not the person who you should be alienating with copy protection crap.

Some forms of copy protection are merely inconvenient, like requiring the CD or DVD to be physically in the drive. I don’t want to load content off a slow CD or DVD. I want to read it off the 10,000 rpm Raptor disk I have for exactly the purpose of making games load quickly. I don’t want to have to keep a stack of game boxes lying around in case I need the activation key you so very expensively printed on each one.

For Assassin’s Creed 2 you decided that a standalone game would require an Internet connection to work. I wrote at the time that I couldn’t countenance such stupidity and that I would, for the first time ever, not buy a Splinter Cell game if it was similarly protected. It is, so I didn’t.

Let’s spell this out Ubisoft, I didn’t buy Assassin’s Creed 2. I didn’t buy Splinter Cell: Conviction. You have stopped someone giving you money because you have this insane idea that one day you’re going to create some kind of copy protection that actually works (despite decades of evidence entirely to the contrary) and paying customers won’t mind the inconvenience of the ever-more-desperate ideas you come up with. Your system here has already failed, look here.

People who want to buy your games will do so anyway. People who want to pirate your games will do so anyway, and are waaaay smarter than you. I am reminded of this comparison from the world of movies.

So, tell me, Ubisoft, which game of yours would you like me not to buy next?

Please stop over-engineering your antispam system

I’m obviously entirely partisan here, having a significant interest in an antispam and antivirus email filtering service called antibodyMX. That aside, can I please ask you mail administrators to stop making make filtering decisions based on really, really, shonky premises? Thanks.

Today I responded to a posting on a mailing list for the MTA that antibodyMX is based on. The point of the the post isn’t really relevant here, save that the sender was seriously suggesting that the list adopt a standards-breaking policy, but I responded citing a technical issue and was surprised when my email to the original poster was rejected.

The reason it was rejected was that the original poster had decided that the presence of the word “adsl” in the DNS-resolved name of the connecting host was an indication of a spam-sending host. This is an interesting idea, and for the non-technical reader, it’s best summarised as being bollocks.

The reasoning behind this idea isn’t, well, unreasonable. Most Internet users these days are on some kind of ADSL connection and most use the cheapest ISP they can find. Most forward/reverse DNS entries for IPs in these ranges look like “adsl-1.2.3.4.SomeISP.net/1.2.3.4”. Many of these users have simply no idea about sensible security so thousands of these home PCs are spam zombies. Is it so bad to assume that mail traffic from such ranges is bound to be spam?

Back to my rejected email. The regular expression rule the mail system owner had decided to use was badly flawed. It decided that my mail server called “olga.hinterlands.org” looked so much like the word “adsl” that rejecting mail from it (hey! all the right letters are there!) was the sensible thing to do. Subsquent emails went along the lines of “so what if I do <this>?” “No, that’s broken, too” “And how about _this_?” “Sorry”.

This worries me for lots of reasons. Firstly, a lot of perfectly legitimate email comes out of ADSL ranges. Small companies use these all the time. Secondly if you must enforce this sort of thing, (your server, your rules after all), at least bother to test your filtering is doing what you expect. Test the damn thing and don’t make other email administrators have to deal with the fallout from your local policy.

Some Vista and hardware hatesta

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.

Game review: Assassin’s Creed

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 1600×1400 which Assassin’s Creed supports but won’t allow me to turn anti-aliasing on. To enable AA I have to drop to 1280×1024 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.