I read a Usenet posting that annoyed me this week. I might as well quote it, because I’m lazy.

The author was called to a friend’s relative’s house to investigate the strange behaviour of their PC. As the author expected, it was stuffed full of spyware and other nastiness, but curiously, it was in an even worse condition than that. Key services, such as its USB capabilities, its sound device and even Norton Antivirus were disabled. The owner didn’t have the experience to screw up her computer so royally, so what had happened? Quote:

She had phoned a number out of the local paper of a PC ‘expert’ who could solve any problem. He had come round and fiddled with the PC for a while and ‘Run something where he got rid of a lot of ticks in boxes’ (msconfig) - a few reboots and he had told her that the PC was damaged beyond repair and she would need a new one. The one she had was a Dell that she paid £900 for a couple of years ago and he wasn’t even selling her one - he said ‘Get another Dell because this would have happened a lot sooner on a cheaper PC’.

The bill for his expert advice lasting less than an hour?

£175 + VAT.

What? Arrrggh. Not only was the cretin unable to fix the problem, he advised the owner that the only way to solve her spyware woes - for that is all they were, before he wrecked everything else - was to get a whole new PC.

As the owner fortunately knew, PCs are not damaged ‘beyond repair’ unless they are actually a smoking heap on your kitchen floor.

This story really annoys me for a couple of reasons. For one, I see self-styled ‘PC experts’ advertising in the local paper all the time. I’d never dream of becoming one - far too much hassle - but I imagine that the majority are hard-working individuals who know their way around Windows and have chosen an innovative way of making some cash. They, and indeed all PC geeks, don’t deserve to have their reputation stained by idiots who have no idea what’s going on.

Secondly, everyone knows someone who’s, shall we say, a computer novice. To be honest, they don’t know their Internet Explorer arse from their Task Manager elbow, and they probably don’t want to, either. The idea that someone is making money off their ignorance - especially when they’re completely useless - is annoying.

And that’s why I saw BT’s Home IT Advisor service advertised a few days ago and thought “what a good idea”. It’s £9.99 a month (and you can ask them as many trivial and irritating questions as you like), or £25 for a single incident. Spywared-up? Computer won’t boot because you’ve had some monkey playing with it for £175 an hour? Call BT, who you can - presumably - trust.

I’m surprised no large company has thought to offer it before. Yeah, so there’s only so much help you can offer over the phone, and I dread to think of the huge array of differing circumstances the phone advisors will have to cope with, but it’s a start. Until computers are clever enough to take care of themselves, it sounds like a great service for the computer newcomer.

Could be a bit cheaper though.

It’s amazing how much gashness it’s possible to write in a very short space of time.

Take updates on this site, for instance. How long does it take me to write the typical one? Probably about as long as it takes you to read them. That may be a little bit of an exaggeration, but not by much - I’m sure it takes me longer to find hyperlinks and come up with a hilariously witty headline than it does to write the entry itself.

Of course, I’m a perfectionist. Writing the entry may be as quick as a flash, but it takes me many minutes of clicking the magical Admin button, waiting for the ‘Browse News’ page to load, clicking the Edit button and hacking away to make me happy.

Why didn’t I split the Browse News area into multiple sections? It may have been all right when this thing had no content, but man it takes a long time to load now.

No matter. At least it doesn’t take half an OOOUR.

Why am I writing about my amazing abilities to pour forth utter drivel into cyberspace? Well, actually, it’s because I’m partaking in that most sacred of activities: procrastination. I’ve been doing it a long time, and it’s a tough habit to break.

I’ve been procrastinating so long, in fact, that it took me until 1am tonight - or this morning, whatever - to begin work on a 40-page project report.

A 40-page report that had to be handed in in 14 hours.

Had, mind you. The timer is currently at seven and a half hours and counting. Downwards.

I think I may have pushed myself too far this time. Even my ability to type bullshit nonstop doesn’t quite stretch that far.

Posting this clearly isn’t helping, but it’s taking my mind off the inevitable. And isn’t that what procrastination is all about?

C++ is a confusing, excessively low-level programming language for someone used to the relative safety and comfort of the well-designed, garbage-collected world of Java or C#.

It makes a distinction between objects declared locally and objects declared on the heap. Local objects disappear, Java-style, as soon as they go out of scope. All well and good. For every object you declare on the heap, you get a pointer back. You must keep track of these - if you lose them, the objects they point to aren’t gone; they hang around, clogging up vital memory. You just can’t access them any more.

There’s a document entitled “How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot”, which serves as an amusing comparison of various programming languages. The entry for C++ says:

You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can’t tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying “That’s me, over there.”

Sounds about right to me. You see, multiple pointers - even multiple pointers passed between multiple objects - can quite happily point to the same object, which makes for extra headaches when it comes to deletion time.

Delete the object from the ‘wrong’ pointer? All the other pointers are now pointing to invalid areas of memory, and your program crashes when it tries to dereference them. Forget to delete the object at all? Your program sucks up more RAM than OpenOffice on a spreadsheet binge, and the only way to free it is to restart your program.

But the worst thing about pointers is how useful they can be, or so I’m told. No more creating copies of objects to pass around, even if it does happen automatically - so inefficient, pfft! - you can just refer to the exact same thing from multiple places!

It’s just a shame it gets incredibly confusing fast.

Today’s target for my bile and rage is Just Adventure+, a rather smaller site than last week’s Slashdot, but no less deserving of a good cussing.

Follow that link and you’ll feel like you’ve been smacked in the face with a horrible design unchanged since approximately 1989, mostly because that’s what will have just happened. I can overlook that - looks aren’t everything - but what’s this tagline? “The largest and most-visited adventure site on the Internet”? I don’t know what they base that on, but even a cursory comparison of the membership and posting figures displayed on their forums and those of their less shit competitors will disprove that. Dubious claims aren’t cool!

On to the primary purpose of any good gaming site, the reviews. They exist to tell you what’s hot and what’s not. Unfortunately, what’s not hot on Just Adventure+ is, apparently, Monkey Island 2, considered by everyone except them to be one of the high water marks of the genre. There are two reviews on JA+, and the highest mark is a B-. What’s that mean according to their review guide? It’s “a superior game”, but “lacking either the innovation or perfection required for a grade of ‘A’”. Hmmm.

That should be enough by itself, but hey! This is a rant! Let’s take one more of their reviews, this time with reference to a review I trust more from vastly superior site Adventure Gamers. The game: Hauntings of Mystery Manor.

Have a look at that review from Adventure Gamers. Looks a pretty lame game, doesn’t it? The sort of game someone could (and indeed, did) knock up in Adventure Game Studio by themselves? Yes. AG’s score of 1.5 stars (out of 5) looks entirely justified. Now let’s have a look at Just Adventure’s version.

“Nothing short of remarkable” it says. “Final grade: A” it says. That makes it “one of the best games available”, and it “should be on the shelf of every adventure gamer”, according to the grading system guide. Tally-Ho, when you wrote this review, did you have a crush? Are you the author’s mum? Why weren’t you edited into oblivion?

Again, as with Slashdot, it’s not so much the concept of the site I mind. Everyone is free to create their own little corner of the Web - I should know that. It’s the fact that JA+ loves to tout itself as the biggest and (by implication) best adventure gaming web site in existence, when it’s clearly rubbish, that rubs me up the wrong way. If a single person arrives at JA+ and think it’s representative of adventure gamers as a whole - basically undiscerning idiots who will welcome bad games as the second coming because they are “produced and published by ONE PERSON![!!!!]” - then JA+ has done everyone a great disservice.

Phew, that rant was a long time in coming. More cussings-in soon!

“Do you get paid for this shit?”

Slashdot is a horrible site, but for some reason I still feel compelled to visit it on a daily basis. The only thing worse than reading a story on Slashdot is reading a comment on Slashdot, but for some reason I end up doing that too. Why? I don’t know - probably the same reason I keep buying stuff from the iTunes Music Store, despite it repeatedly shagging me in the face in new and interesting ways. The concept of Slashdot is good, just like iTunes should be good in theory - but the execution, oh man.

I really wouldn’t mind so much if it was a little site run by one guy in his spare time - although there are countless such sites better produced than Slashdot - but this thing is huge. And owned by some big technology firm. But what do we get? Stories full of bollocks, people asking the same stupid questions every week (”how can I organise my books at home” just today!), and the ‘Funny’ comments. Oh, those ‘Funny’ comments. I think I must have broken my funnybone or something.

Their links to positive Linux stories (Linux nearly ready for your nan!) are often good for a laugh, at least. Now that’s funny.

Do they get paid for this shit? The sad answer is yes, they do.

Haven’t had a good rant on here for a while.

Apparently spammers, not content with spamming-up my comments, have now moved on to abusing my email form (now defunct). What fun! This time they’ve concocted an ingenious wheeze for injecting their own headers into the generated emails, allowing them to add their own ‘Cc:’ and ‘Bcc:’ lines with impunity. That allows them to fire emails off to all and sundry - in addition to me, the unchangable ‘To:’ addressee, of course.

This is all possible thanks to the wonders of injection for the PHP mail() function. It’s simple enough: you shove in some magic characters when filling in the form, and suddenly you can write whatever you want in the email headers. Not good.

Why is this still possible? It’s 2006! The first time I came across a problem like this, it was on a MUD. Yes, that fine piece of 80s technology, friend of university procrastinators everywhere. (The only friend, but we won’t go into that.) You could exploit badly written code to inject your own, wreaking all kinds of havok if you chose your mark carefully.

Sound familiar?

Why is the PHP mail() function so stupid? Why is it left to the PHP programmer to prevent this nastiness? Why is it left to any user of any similar function to consider all these possibilities? It’s not reasonable to expect PHP programmers each to duplicate each others’ effort, all to thwart the same idiotic flaw in a built-in function.

I’m sure it’s a simple oversight on the part of the PHP developers - as are most flaws allowing this kind of injection - but hey, it’s not called a rant for nothing. Bloody PHP, and bloody spammers.

Energy efficiency = more cash 2 you. Or so the old advert said.

BBC News recently had an article about the ’standby’ button prevalent on many consumer electronics - TVs, hi-fis - and the effect it’s having on energy consumption across the UK. Slashdot, that bastion of great journalism, picked up the story and it got over 700 comments, way above average. Now I couldn’t be bothered reading any of these, but I think that suggests it was a bit of a hot topic. And so it is a hot topic here. The needless waste of energy has always been a bugbear of mine.

Whether it’s an office full of brightly-lit CRT monitors merrily displaying login screens to each other all night and all weekend, or a nation of TVs left on ’standby’ mode - apparently using two-thirds of full power in some cases - it’s just annoying. The government is rightly trying to encourage people to cut down on their energy consumption, not least because they don’t really want to build any more of those nasty, loss-making nuclear power stations. Manufacturers are getting better at cutting ’standby’ energy consumption - but there’s a fly in the energy-saving ointment.

As you will be aware if you read my Luddite rantings, analogue television is going to be turned off in 2010 or so, replaced with its digital cousin, Freeview and digital satellite. In the same government committee meeting as some clever blokey said that “digital TV represents nothing of benefit whatsoever”, it also transpired that “the impact on the UK’s electricity consumption from forcing people to buy set-top boxes for every TV and analogue video recorder in their house is significant”. To the tune of £7 of electricity per set-top box per year, in fact.

Let me introduce BSkyB, who require every customer to keep their digital set-top box switched on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, as a condition of their continued subscription. The idea is that Sky may want to squirt a software update down the line once in a blue moon, and the box had better be around to receive it. Let me also introduce Panasonic, whose set-top boxes consume 18 watts on full power - and 17 watts on standby*. I’m sure Panasonic aren’t the only ones with similarly pointless ’standby’ modes for their digital TV equipment.

Not that you can sensibly not use Standby mode on a lot of these devices, anyway. Guess what happens if you disobey the almighty Sky and switch your digibox off at the wall? You have to wait over 30 seconds for it to reboot itself when it comes back on. If you switch a Freeview box off? It forgets what channels it can receive. A Kenwood hi-fi? It comes back on in its flashy in-store ‘demo’ mode. Great.

Hope Tony’s getting those nuclear power stations ready!

* These figures are from memory of reading the tech sheet in the back of the manual, but each is no more than 5 watts out. And the two figures are very, very close.

The iTunes Music Store is a really useful thing to have around. It’s reasonably priced for single tracks, and as long as that’s all you’re after, it’s a great way of ensuring you get hold of a reasonably high-quality copy of your desired track quickly and with the minimum of fuss. No more messing around with dodgy P2P applications only to receive a blippy, dropout-ridden mess time after time!

Of course, it’s not perfect. The fact that you can buy a real, physical CD album for only fractionally more than you can download one from iTunes is a disadvantage, but not a major one. After all, if I was locked in the house and for some reason needed to play Dark Side of the Moon three times backwards to escape, the ability to download it on iTunes would seem quite handy. But that’s the only situation in which I can see myself doing it.

There’s one huge disadvantage though. There is no way to re-download the tracks you have purchased. You have to take care of them after the initial download, backing them up and re-importing them in iTunes as you move from computer to computer. Now here’s the major problem: the tracks are DRM’ed (Digital Rights Management’ed) to stop you naughtily passing them on to your friends. So surely… if some catastrophe befalls your computer, even if you have copies of these magical music files, won’t the same mechanism stop you using them? Aren’t you a bit bummed in the face?

Maybe not. I’m sure there’s some clever “associate my music library with this account” trickery available in iTunes. But I don’t think it’s reasonable, or sensible, to expect the user to keep backups of their music files. Of course, anyone who doesn’t back-up their documents is asking for trouble, but music files? Hardly top of the priority list.

You can freely delete your ripped music files and simply rip them again on your new computer - why not allow iTunes Music Store purchases to be re-downloaded? Buying something digitally is patently not the same as buying a physical item, and as such it is difficult to think of them in the same way. If you lose a CD, you know it’s gone. If you lose a computer file you downloaded, there’s got to be some way to download it again - right? Right? I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking this way. But in iTunes’ case, I’d be wrong.

Curse you Apple, curse you.

“For a large fraction of the population, digital terrestrial television represents nothing of benefit whatsoever,” said some clever blokey in parliament.

Yes, but we’re still being forced by the government to switch over in 2009, when the analogue signal is switched off. This will be a bit of an annoyance for me, since the only way I can receive digital television is via satellite. It will be less than convenient to install a satellite dish for every TV in the house (of which there are three).

More importantly to me, do I want to give Rupert Murdoch (owner of Sky, of course) lots of money just so I can watch TV? Here is a hint: no.

And I’m one of those lucky people who actually understand the technical workings of this digital TV malarkey. I can do it with the minimum of head-scratching. Despite this, even I can’t be arsed with the switchover. Analogue television delivers a 625-line colour picture and stereo sound perfectly well and digital TV gives you, er, well, the same thing actually. Except with added MPEG artifacts and a cheery “no satellite signal is being received” message when it rains.

Bloody onward march of technology.

You may remember that I am banned from Xbox Live. Not only that, but I signed up with a credit card that has now expired, so when I started getting reminder emails from Microsoft about my subscription, I thought it would be quite safe to ignore them. My subscription would lapse and I would lose my account.

The email headed “Your Subscription Cannot be Renewed” just confirmed what I already knew. They wouldn’t be able to take any money from me and everything would be fine. Hooray.

So imagine my surprise when I checked my credit card statement and there was a charge for £39.99 from “Microsoft Online Services” for another year of Xbox Live. Cheeky sods! Even being banned from the service and having an expired credit card on file isn’t enough to keep Microsoft’s grubby paws off your cash, it seems.

In fairness to Microsoft, after a brief phone call and a short argument with the person at the other end over whether the email had said “cannot,” or “might not be renewed”, I got my money back in full, despite leaving it nearly a month between seeing the charge and complaining about it.

And the person on the phone didn’t seem to be able to tell that I was banned - which was a bonus. I didn’t really want a phone lecture on the evils of modchips.

The lesson here? Microsoft = bastards.