mjg59

• I'll be speaking at the UKUUG Linux conference in Manchester this November.
• The ACM have chosen my article on power management from Queue last year as a shining example of such things, and republished it in Communications where you may now peruse it at your leisure. Fanmail may be sent to the usual addresses.
• I'll be in Boston from the 7th to 11th of December, and New York from the 11th to 15th. I will be endeavouring not to break any bones in the process. Might actually ensure I have travel insurance this time.
• I'll be presenting at LCA next January. Current plans involve spending a week in Melbourne afterwards and a few days in San Francisco on the way back.

• Visit Iceland. It sounds like it might be relatively cheap soon.
• Make this I²C code work.
• Get dynamic power state switching on ATOM-based Radeons working. This probably involves actually plugging the card in.

billyabbott

A while back I wrote a bit about how annoyed Call of Duty 3 made me and how it epitomised pretty much everything I dislike in a lot of modern games. Well, finally tonight I played through to the end and finished it.

Now, I don’t finish all that many games, being crap as I am at playing said games (although I have completed a lot more in recent times, which either points to me getting better or games getting easier…I assume the latter), and normally there is a feeling of elation or at least satisfaction - even Tony Hawk P8 and Halo 3 gave me that much - but with Call of Duty 3 the only real feeling is one of relief that I can now trade it in and free up a gap on my gaming shelf to fill with something more worthy of my time.

Why more bile now, you may ask? That is a question that I can answer easily - the ending: more than any other part of the game it showed everything that makes me want to feed the game disk into a wood chipper with the outlet nozzle aimed at the faces of the games designers. My first problem is that I died on that bit three times. Now, that’s not normally a problem, with the end of  a game being hopefully one of the most difficult bits in the game, but in this case I died AFTER I FINISHED THE GAME. There are four pieces to the section from the last save point to the end - I would give a spoiler warning here, but the more I ’spoil’ the game for you the less likely you are to waste your money or time on it. Here are those four pieces:

1) Clear the building - This is just more of the same as the rest of the game. My one major annoyance is the random pieces of small debris on the ground that you can’t move over, making your dodging grenades and random gunfire slightly more difficult as you can’t tell where you can move without looking at your feet at all times.

2) Snipe the mortar teams - I wish there were more sniping sections, as they work quite well. My only problem being that they are a bit easy and the facility to hold your breath to steady your aim is never needed, unlike in Call of Duty 2 and 4 (the good ones).

3) Use the big mounted guns to blow up the armoured cars and then some tanks - Here comes the crappy ending. Firstly, to control these big guns you need to rotate the mount and raise and lower the gun, both of which are operated by rotating the joysticks, in an attempt to make it “realistic”. Unfortunately, all they achieve is broken controls that randomly jump the gun around and don’t allow small adjustments - exactly the things that rotating wheel controls should allow you. There is also no indication of how often you can fire the gun, leading to you aiming at an armoured thing and pressing the button repeatedly while bullets ping around you (miraculously causing no damage) and the guns on your target point lifelessly at you. Despite these two major setbacks for gameplay, I did not die at this point at any time during the four attempts that it took to complete the section.

4) Blow up a couple of tanks with a bazooka - the big ending? Really? You pick up a bazooka, aim it at one of the lumbering tanks, fire and it blows up. Repeat. End. Rubbish. It was at this point that I died legitimately on attempt three, if you can call suddenly dieing with no explanation legitimate.

So, after that you finish the game and, in my case at least, die for no apparent reason. Once you have blown up your second tank, the Canadians come in to finish off the job and drop bombs everywhere - I assume it was one of these that killed me a mere moment after the XBox 360 achievement “Won the War” (which to be awarded you need to “Complete the single player campaign on any difficulty setting.”) appeared on the screen as having been completed. The tense music had stopped playing and the patriotic rallying end of level music had started and then my character fell over and it said Mission Failed. The first time I swore a bit and though it was an unlucky bug, the second time I swore and decided that the QA team needed beating. Fourth time I hid in a building and survived.

I then left it to roll its incredibly long credits and sat down to write this little rant to make myself feel better. While writing the paragraph above I turned to the television to see if it was done yet and noticed the longest list of names ever scrolling up the screen. Alphabetically ordered there were about 20 names per screen and almost every letter of the alphabet had at least a screen of names. I wondered what it was a list of and squinted at the grey on black text in the background that seemed to be trying to hide who the people were - Activision QA and Testing Team. Several hundred of them. And still I died twice in a place where I shouldn’t have been able to. This makes me cry.

I had a long chat with one of the guys on the Dead Space roadshow team at Sci-Fi-London, and I expanded in some depth (much to his delight, I’m sure) about my annoyances with a lack of polishing to games these days, and my hopes that Dead Space wouldn’t fall into that trap. I found his comments interesting - I mentioned that I reckoned another month of QA would have done a world of good for Star Wars: Force Unleashed (which I bitched about before and now have sitting by the door ready to trade in, despite not having finished it) and he said that a month of QA would cost the company millions and therefore it wasn’t likely to happen as long as it was releasable. The games industry does now take in more money than the movies and it’s nipping at the heels of the music industry and as such the investment in games has become immense, and projects of that nature are too big to be in the hands of mere computer people. The software is dragged from the hands of the engineers and then from the grip of QA to be thrown to advertising people before hitting the market, and the polishing is relegated to the unimportant end of the money machine. I don’t think it’s quite as bad as that, but there’s definitely a lot of games that come out too early for their own good.

Well, I hope that Dead Space doesn’t come out like Call of Duty 3, and I hope that Force Unleashed holds its trade-in value for the next couple of weeks until Dead Space arrives, as I am nothing if not a cheapskate.

http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/journal/index.pl/id_cake-is-a-made-up-drug

Anyway, this month they're pushing "Healthy Booster Cakes" which are "freshly prepared healthy afternoon cakes, packed with healthy ingredients to help give you energy, and boost your immune system." The energy bit is obvious - they contain sugar and fat. I do wonder how they "boost" the immune system though, what the active ingredient is, and whether they have any actual evidence that the ingredient works when dispensed in cake form.

And if their cakey drug delivery mechanism does work, I suggest that they patent it, get the hell out of the cut-throat sub-contracted catering industry, and make a huge great big pile of money in the pharmaceutical industry.

As previously mentioned, I'm going to be doing once-a-week cooking for the foreseeable future. This is what I made today.

I had: aubergine, a bit of butternut squash (left from last week), carrots, cavolo nero, celery, courgettes, fennel, gem squash, green beans, leeks, two large mushrooms (left from last week), onions, and sweet potatoes.

And I made:

• Roasted carrot spread
• Tian with fennel, butternut squash, and mushrooms
• Sweet potato, quinoa, and cumin hash browns (as in that recipe with sweet potatoes instead of potatoes)
• Cavolo nero, sweet potato, barley, chickpea, and sausage soup/stew
• TVP meatballs
• Roasted gem squash and fennel risotto
• Red-cooked tofu and aubergine with shirataki noodles
• Cheese olives

I replaced two of the eggs in the tian with half a packet of tofu blenderised with creme fraiche and plain yoghurt, since we had tian last week too and I wanted a less eggy version this time. It was more liquidy than usual, but I don't know if this was because of the mushrooms or the tofu substitution.

The TVP meatballs worked pretty well. I used 100g TVP granules, toasted in a dry pan before being rehydrated with hot vegetable stock, soy sauce, liquid aminoes, and Worcestershire sauce. Once this had cooled, I added finely chopped celery and red onion, finely-grated carrot, a handful of blenderised dry breadcrumbs, a couple of heaped tablespoons of flour, some squeezy garlic, and two beaten eggs.

For the soup/stew, I started by frying cubed chorizo in a dry pan — the fat renders out of it so you don't need to add oil — then took out the chorizo and fried some sliced onions in the fat that was left. The barley was soaked for an hour before it went into the soup, since otherwise it soaks up all the liquid and there's no flavour left for the rest of the ingredients. The cavolo nero went in right at the end, for about 7 or 8 minutes, until it was just cooked.

I still have most of the leeks and celery, and some carrots and courgettes and aubergine, but they'll keep.