I mentioned that I recently bought a Nintendo DS. At around the same time, I ordered a wireless access point from Ebuyer so I could play Mario Kart DS over the Interweb.
It didn’t need to be anything special. The DS only supports the older WEP encryption standard, and - being a paranoid bastard who thinks the TV is watching me - I wouldn’t use wireless networking for anything important no matter how secure it was supposed to be. So all things considered, this heap should have suited my needs perfectly, allowing me to connect my DS while blocking everything else out.
Ebuyer sent me a DVD writer instead. Bad start to my quest, wasn’t it? I sent it back to Ebuyer, who promptly told me that they don’t actually sell what I’d ordered, refunded only part of what I’d paid, and stopped talking.
So now I’m up to ordering this thing from Novatech’s special “so cheap it must be a mistake” range. We’ll see what I get this time. I am expecting a purple elephant.
I’ve complained about Plusnet a few times in the past. They’ve variously allowed bits of my site to be deleted due to dodgy default security settings, deleted my whole site themselves, deleted my site again, changed some important configuration settings without bothering to tell anyone and contributed to trapping huz.org.uk in domain-name pergatory for nearly three weeks. On Saturday and Sunday I couldn’t connect for about 24 hours, which thankfully halted my EVE obsession but also meant I couldn’t send a very important email. I was on the verge of running out to buy a modem and shake magazines in the hope that an AOL trial CD would fall out. Before you ask, no, the “important email” wasn’t an Evemail.
Aside from that, I still insist that Plusnet are pretty good.
This time they’ve decided to up the ante with an unstoppable act of wanton destruction. Unbeknownst to me, since I couldn’t even CONNECT, the following ominous message appeared on the Service Status page on Sunday morning:
“Our network engineers are currently investigating an issue where customers are not seeing any email displayed in their mailboxes.”
Do you know why customers were not seeing any mail displayed in their mailboxes, readers?
It’s all GONE.
Yes, this evening I’ve had a quick trawl through the updates on the Service Status page. Cluelessness gradually turned to suspicious caginess which, by this evening became “oh shit guys, hope you’re sitting down: 700GB of email gone :o :(”. The story goes that some hapless employee accidentally typed a mythical “delete everything” command while mistakenly logged in to the wrong servers. The mirrored backup system did its work and dutifully replicated the change, so the backups are toast as well.
Oh dear Plusnet, oh dear. They’re sending the data to a data recovery firm, who should - since the disks were yanked out of the system, probably in a blind panic, immediately after everything was bummed - be able to recover everything.
700GB of data to be recovered, though? More like the biggest bill you’ve ever seen.
Remember the good old days when email spam was straightforward? You’d crack open your email account to be met with a deluge of subject lines promising HOT HOT SEX and WILD, WILD, WILD TRACTION ACTION - and that was just the ad for Microsoft Monster Truck Madness - and perhaps the odd message, buried within it, from your mate who’d just discovered the Internet. Life was simpler then.
Nowadays, spammers go to all sorts of lengths to make their subject lines look innocuous, and one of their favourites is including a common name in the hope that it’s yours. You know the sort of thing: “Hi, Dave!” or “Check this out, John Smith!”. That’s some good spamming, and fairly likely to be semi-successful.
Then we have the cretins who bombard huz.org.uk’s role accounts:
Pantograph… Snaffle?
Good work, guys.
Nintendo’s ethos of putting the fun back into games - well, did it ever really leave on their consoles? - works wonders on the Nintendo DS. Features which might at first seem like gimmicks, like the touch-screen and to a lesser extent the built-in microphone, add depth and immersion to the gaming experience in a way I hope the Wii’s ‘revolutionary’ (ho ho) new control interface will.
I have only one complaint so far, Nintendo. In the good old days, attempting to be naughty with text input would more often than not result in a hasty smackdown from the game in question. Why, then, was I allowed to teach Animal Crossing’s sweet, innocent Bree the following rudery?
Honestly. That takes some explaining when people try out my town.
Something funny happened to me on the Interweb today. Funny strange, not funny ha ha. To understand what it was, you’ll need a cursory understanding of P2P - but let’s face it, you’re here reading this site, so it’s more than likely that you do.
After a largely unsuccessful evening scouring the Internet for fast torrents - of Linux ISOs, cake recipes and other non-illegal things, natch - I thought I’d struck gold. I’d happened across one that sped off at ridiculous speeds immediately, just the sort of torrent I’d been hoping to meet all my life.
But wait! It turned out that my torrent had some horrible skeletons in the closet. I was about to click µTorrent’s “peers” tab to peek inside, and cover myself in human remains.
This is what fell out all over me:
You’ll notice that the IPs listed are all very similar - in the 38.100.xxx.xxx range, mostly, with three outliers which are also very similar. The vital statistics of each peer are different, but the client is the same in each case.
What’s that all about? Is someone, as Ryan suggests, trying to “law me up”? Or feed me with a horrifically corrupted file which I will spit out in disgust, eventually leading to lifelong Bittorrent bulimia? Or something else?
Answers on a postcard, please.
Ryan tells me that his Psychonauts site has had 913 spam comments posted to one of its news articles, and 1400 to another. That’s quite a lot, so it prompted me to have a look at my top secret log of comments that have been censored by this site’s crack team of moderators - or, more accurately, simply blocked by some fairly straightforward filters.
Can you guess how many have been blocked since last Sunday, 18th June, readers?
The answer: 1134. Man, subtlety is not the spammer’s strong suit.
No, no it doesn’t. Talking smileys are, in fact, very annoying and adverts about them, which shout “Hello!” at you when you mistakenly hover over the banner, are just one of the reasons why I usually browse with Flash disabled.
Thankfully, with Windows XP SP2, Microsoft made it easy to disable Flash in Internet Exploder. Here’s how!
1) Go to Tools > Manage Add-Ons
2) Choose “Shockwave Flash Object” from the list.
3) Click the Disable button.
4) Click OK.
And like magic, the blight of Flash will be gone from your browsing experience. It’s a bit of a pain in the arse to re-enable it when you actually want to use Flash - in other words, when you visit YouTube - but it’s infinitely better than having a profusion of badly-made pulsating banner ads flickering in your face.
If you’re using Firefox, avoiding an epileptic fit has never been easier. Simply install the FlashBlock extension and every Flash applet will be replaced with a placeholder. If you actually want to be subjected to the horrors within (or you’re on YouTube), all you need to do is click the placeholder and the Flash will play as normal.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Just another adventure game in the extensive and (almost) uniformly excellent LucasArts portfolio. However, it is special to me in a couple of ways:
1) It was the last LucasArts adventure game to be released for the Amiga, and consequently the last LucasArts adventure I played until Curse of Monkey Island.
And…
2) I have just replayed it for the first time in over ten years, this time in its full IBM-PC compatible, VGA, CD-ROM’ed, talkie glory. It is excellent.
I mean, really excellent. Due to the many significant shortcomings of the Amiga conversion, I had never been able to fully appreciate its charms. Playing Fate of Atlantis on the Amiga was more an ordeal than a game: it was inexplicably slow, running at approximately one frame per second on the Team path (not a word of a lie), the music was restricted to just a few of the PC version’s main themes reused over and over, and the graphics were a pale shadow of their full 256-colour glory.
Playing it on the PC was a revelation. The voices really work. The interplay between Indy and Sophia is well-written and funny. The dialogue system is sophisticated, with Indy able to comment to Sophia about most aspects of the current environment. And the story is real Indiana Jones. All of this was hidden under layers of frustration on the Amiga.
Fate of Atlantis has leapt from being “just another LucasArts game” to being one of my favourites. As a testament to how much I must have enjoyed it really - and much to my disappointment - I hadn’t forgotten how to solve a single puzzle, even at the distance of ten years. But that didn’t detract much from an excellent gameplaying experience.
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?
You know what they say about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
It’s bloody stupid, that’s what they say. And, by and large, unless you find yourself stuck on a desert island with only a sledgehammer for company, with a self-inflating liferaft tucked safely away inside an enormous peanut, they’d be right.
Having heard about the wonders of XML from all sides for months - hell, I’d even sampled the delights of XML in C#, where retrieving data is pretty much a one-line chunk of code thanks to the devilry hidden within System.XML - I thought I’d use it to store the runtime settings for my C++ application.
More fool me for spending HALF AN OOOUR trying to wrap my head around the various XML libraries out there. Half an hour? More like two days. They’re vast, overcomplicated and completely ill-suited to doing anything less complex than running a nuclear reactor while juggling XSLT transformations with your eye stalks.
You’re also expected to extend them with reams of your own code before you can even begin to play with them.
Fortunately, before I went completely insane, I had a look around for an alternative. And I found a great one. A C++ class that reads data from a humble .ini file? Invoked with a single line of code?
Exactly what someone should have written for XML.
