All things different...

Thursday, February 19, 2009

OMG Star Fleet DVD boxes set is beyond words. I'm nearly crying with happiness.

Photos are taken of my TV so apologies for the poor quality. The 'episodes' menu plays the whole Star Fleet theme song on continous loop. 40 repeats and I found the will to press play on Episode 1. True Star Fleet fans will know every word unprompted despite being about 20 years since I last watched it. Thank you Fabulous films for doing this. Everyone must buy it now. Barry Hercules, despite not being a Space Pilot demands it!

#Karneval victims. They hang their victims 'cut off bits' like trophies. I didn't escape in time.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Titles that changed gaming history? - nah. Titles that Gary wasted his life away on.

MSN published this list of ten titles that impacted the gaming world. Fair enough. Haven't even played half of them.

So here's my list of "Games that Gary wasted his life away on". I must have racked up at least 100 hours on each (much more on some).

1. Emlyn Hughes International Soccer - Commodore 64.

OMG. I loved this game. So much so that my brother used to hide the disk (yes, disk after he used Freeze Frame to save the original to disk and then hid the original forever) so that I couldn't play it. Two player co-op was amazing, bouncing the ball on the top of your head as you ran down the pitch was incredible, and blasting the ball into the top corner of the net was simply divine. Never had as much fun on a game.

2. X-Wing / TIE Fighter - PC.

"You're all clear kid." I played this an immense amount. So much so that I didn't need to look at the keyboard to balance shields or direct energy to the blasters. Becoming a General was one of my greatest achievements. The main thing was that I was ridiculously good at this. Note I only ever played X-Wing and then TIE Fighter - never X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter.

3. Sensible World of Soccer - PC.

I nearly flunked University because of this game. I think I must have played it more than any other. Countless seasons, ridiculous number of goals. My best was a 24-0 victory England vs. Cameroon, I think. Only 3 minutes a half. I graduated in 1998. Nearly didn't thanks to this game.

4. Star Wars Galaxies - PC

Oh dear. What potential this game had. And for a time it was special. I wasn't as infuriated as some by the changes in gameplay that ruined it for most. For me it was the introduction of the Jedi playable characters that saw my lost interest. SWG has just added Hoth as a playable world. For a fraction of a second I was tempted to have a quick peek. Roll on 'The Old Republic.'

5. Fable - Xbox

I preferred this much more to Fable II, personally. Perhaps it was the originality. But I kinda lost interest in Fable II after a bit whereas this one kept my interest. I played it through three times completely. Interestingly even though I did it three times, every time I was evil. Oh well. Mwuuhahhahahaha!!

6. Elder Scrolls IV, Oblivion - Xbox 360

Every quest, every expansion, everything. Finished at level 47 I think. Could kill pretty much everything without having to heal myself. This game was (and is) staggering. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Fallout 3 recaptures some of the brilliance, but the post-apocalyptic setting is not as compelling as that of Oblivion.

7. FIFA '09 - Xbox 360

My relationship with FIFA '09 is love and hate. The game, mainly because of it's physics engine and frustrating football cliches, has caused the destruction of 5 Xbox 360 controllers. In fact I had to buy FIFA '08 again because I despondently threw my controller into the sofa only to see it bounce bak and hit my Xbox 360. The disk inside was scratched and became unreadable. It's a tremendous game marred by some technical bugs and some bizarreness in Manager Mode (if you're particularly successful you find yourself playing a cup tie and a league game on the same day!). That said I keep coming back for more even though it boils my blood at times.

8. TBA. Actually that's about it. Some others came close, Dark Forces, Half Life 2 (and add-ons) but for sheer time sinks these games have kept me coming back again and again. No doubt there will be others. I though that Warhammer Online would be the next one, but I lost interest in that fairly early on. Maybe Star Wars: The Old Republic will be next, but we've got a wee wait for that title. But you can bet that if a Star Wars football game came out that has big monsters in it it's likely to be on my list.

User interface metaphors dated or not? (part two) Bumptop, Surface, iPhone

"If our cars were as difficult to drive as our computers are to operate, they would never leave our garage" is the opening gambit by Michael Dertouzos in his book "The Unfinished Revolution". That's fairly true. And a driver of a car can pretty much move from one car to the next and drive that one as well - even when the steering wheel and pedals are on the 'wrong' side of the car.

It obviously took a long time for the steering wheel to become a standard in cars and there have been many attempts to change it (James May of Top Gear blogs about the 'wheel thing'. The steering wheel, because of its link with directing a car and the appropriate level of tactile feedback it provides is exactly the right thing for interfacing with a car. And remember, a car pretty much does one thing as it's a vehicle it moves from one place to the next and you might have to change direction a bit to avoid objects en-route (alternatively you just want to drift around corners at Mach 3).

So Mr Dertouzous' statement will drive most of my further ramblings on these topics. In my first post on this topic I mentioned that using a floppy disk icon for 'Save' could be perceived as being a bit dated. Yet a folder (when was the last time you saw one of those!?) representing 'Open' might not be. The thing is with comparing operating a computer with driving a car is that a computer can do a whole many more differing tasks than a car can. Indeed you can plug a mock up steering wheel into a computer and pretend to drive it.

So what attempts have there been to make operating a computer easier, faster better, or dare I say more natural.

Let's start with Bumptop. A demo of Bumptop was done at TED a few years back. Bumptop takes the desktop metaphor to the next level by fundamentally introducing the notion of three-dimensions and most importantly physics. I signed up for the beta what seems like a billion years ago but nothing has been forthcoming. Bumptop and the similar Real Desktop (which runs as a replacement desktop for Windows) still rely on the mouse / icon interaction method.

The Surface computer from Microsoft and Apple's iPhone remove the mouse as the method of interaction and use something much more natural, namely your hands and fingers. Again, physics engines are applied to add momentum and interactivity. Having been a user of the iPhone from the day of its launch in the UK I was mightily impressed by what Apple have achieved in terms of slickness and responsiveness. To date I've not had chance to have a go with a Surface computer, or the solution from Perceptive Pixel but the speed at which it responds does look very impressive. A demo of a news reader application for the Surface computer recently showed another example of where this type of user interaction adds novelty to the experience.

The combination of multi-touch, big screens and voice recognition has the potential to be awesome. In the Perceptive Pixel demonstration there's a mind-mapping example showing how a map of thoughts can be navigated. If the system could do speech to text I think it would be a fantastic tool for workshops.

So I'm one of the generation of people who grew up and adjusted to Windows and Mac as the primary way we interact with computers. Guaranteed my initial experiences of computers was very different having gone through experiences with Acorn Atom, Vic 20, Commodore 64, Amiga, Acorn Achimedes, IBM PS2 and Opus III to name a few.

But how will today's generation 'learn' computers? I'll move onto that in my next post on his topic.

How Google kills projects (from NYT) is not too disimilar to my approach.

"All of the shuttered projects failed several of Google’s key tests for continued incubation: They were not especially popular with customers; they had difficulty attracting Google employees to develop them; they didn’t solve a big enough problem; or they failed to achieve internal performance targets known as “objectives and key results."

It's interesting that in this New York Times article on How Google decides to pull the plug they don't cite "and management just don't get it" - unless, ofcourse that's the big about the big problem. But then again it's all about how to articulate the problem in such a way that management "get it".

But with all the management buy-in in the World if customers (or internal users in my case) don't buy-it, get-it, want-it, or know how to use-it then it's a no go thing anyway. So I think Google have got it right, as long as there's balance between popularity, attraction, the problem and performance targets then you're on to a winner - [yes, I'm making reference to the prophesy of the "One who would bring balance to management decisions"].

Saturday, February 14, 2009

User interface metaphors dated or not? (part one)

So I was thinking about user experience. Yes, it's a Saturday, it's Valentine's Day and I'm thinking about user experience in applications. A lot of us who have grown up with Windows and Mac (and perhaps the UI imitations in Linux) are all familiar with procedures like New, Open and Save when it comes to working with documents. Various applications have toyed with the idea that naming a document should come at the beginning or the end of the initial process. Some applications ask you to give your document name when you start a new one whereas most (I'm thinking primarily Microsoft Office here) ask you to give the document a name when you save it.

Saving. Is it me or is the idea of having a floppy disk icon for 'Save' starting to look a bit dated. Bizarrely more dated than the open folder icon for 'Open'. Others think so too - MrDoob for instance. I would imagine my niece and nephew (currently 13 and 11 respectively) have never seen a 3 1/2 floppy disk, let alone a 5 1/4 or 8 inch one.

Apple have one away with icons for New, Open and Save in recent version of their iWorks suite. The first screen grab shows the full toolbar icon set from Pages. New, Open and Save are available from the menu bar, but only in text.

In future posts I'm going to have a look at other apps that have adopted the 'no icon' approach to certain basic tasks.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Securing collaboration.

Michael Sampson is going all out to talk to companies about what the threat surface is for collaboration platforms. His research will prove to be interesting.

I'm most concerned about the combination of on-premise with off-premise tools when blended with SaaS offerings (try saying that after six Wodka's).

So take this example: Let's say you use a collaboration tool like MS SharePoint. You've got an on-premise installation that you use for more senstive documents , say M&A. The off-premise tool (perhaps hosted by Microsoft themselves) is for collaboration with external third parties - could be suppliers / contractors or customers. You rig all of this up in a secure way. Registration for the external site requires two factor authentication, you might even use SAML to federate your directory with another company. Some of your internal document content is in multiple languages and you've had submissions in French and Chinese. Now you've got someone in Hungary who can understand French and they can handle a translation - but there's no-one who can understand Chinese. So the innocently use the publically available Google Translate service to do a quick translation of the document - cutting and pasting it into the web tool. The translation is done and the response comes back via their browser. When they read the English translation the document makes reference to 500 employees being laid off by the Chinese company in Hungary. Such information vould be damaging to thr company's brand and is particularly sensitive.

Where exactly has that information gone in its traverse of the Web to get translated? Over the Internet not encrypted for a start and then possibly still residing on Google's server somewhere [Google say on the website they have developed their own transation software http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/faq_translation.html#google] helping Google to make better translations. Hmmm.... maybe you're not too happy about that.

</Rant>

For me, the biggest security consideration is related to these public SaaS offerings that innocently get used by employees. They're so used to using them at home for their own purposes that there's an assumption they're ok to use for work. Google need to take better steps (and they are doign to be fair) to secure these services and let us know more about what they're doing with this data we pass to them. Afterall it can't get any worse than a conversation I had with Google's UK Sales Manager about 3 years ago when I asked him about compliance and using Google Enterprise Apps. "Compliance?" he responded. "Compliance is boring".

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

XO laptop as ruggedised Kindle?

So Wired magazine think the XO makes a good, sturdy ebook reader. Http://bit.ly/13Z9d Well, I've got an XO and a Sony Reader (not a Kindle tho as Amazon still haven't brought them to Europe yet). I'm going to do some tests of PDF's on both to see.Rugged? Yes. Slimline? No. Look like a fool using one? Probably.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

RT @Lliu @Mona: Yep I've got pretty much the same experience in Chrome. Where's 'optimistic'?

Monday, February 9, 2009

Jasper bought. Hunt is on for me to discover if it's any better.

So after hunting through Saturn on the Koeningallee in Duesseldorf I found the last Jasper Xbox 360, in all it's 12.1 amp glory.First thing I noticed when I fired it up (after using the Internet connection sharing from my Windows 7 powered Acer Aspire One) was that it wanted to pull down the NXE from Xbox Live. I'd deliberately not connected a HDD at this point so I was given two options. The remaining space on my 256MB memory card or 214MB on the Xbox itself. Yippee.So I'll run it for a while and see how Fallout 2 gets on (apart from Oblivion it's the game that crashes most on me).And yes, the photo does show 2 xbox's and a PS3. Total of 5 Xbox 360's I've bought now. Shocking.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Bookcase now looking a bit more healthy.

More of a test using the multi-photo email for the iPhone than anything.

Quick tweak to see why it didn't post to twitter..

Friday, February 6, 2009

Random thoughts about using netbooks in the Enterprise.

OK. So in preparation for a talk I'm having with a certain large software company based in the Puget Sound area I thought I'd jot down my thoughts.

The topic is primarily around netbooks and what our interest in them is.

Well here goes:

They're attractive to business - they're cheap to buy.
They're attractive to people - most folks who see a netbook go, wow isn't that cute. It could almost fit in my pocket.
They have lower power consumption.
Portability.
You can still rig them up with a full-size monitor and keyboard / mouse.
They're designed for comms on the go (practically all of them have built in webcams).

And what's not so good.

The screen res doesn't lend itself to most enterprise apps. Try running SAP GUI on a netbook.
Apps like Office 2007 take up a ridiculous amount of space with the ribbon.
Because of the low spec of the netbooks there are questions about performance, especially when doing lots of things like encryption / decryption. How well does a netbook run when doing a video conference over an encrypted link on a netbook with an encrypted HDD / SSD.

I'm not so worried about wear and tear and robustness of the actual hardware. I saw a Lenovo S10e this week and it seemed sturdy enough. My worry would be that the low powered nature of the machine would mean it would have to 'go in for servicing' more often for tunes ups or even complete rebuilds. This might increase the overall TCO.

Would a netbook actually be used more than a laptop (even a sub-notebook) though? I still see a lot of situations where laptops are left on desks or in drawers. They're still too big for some people to want to carry them.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

@Lliu It's going to take more than a single tweet to answer the 'Drupal is to..' question. So here goes on posterous.

I would say Linux is to Windows as Drupal is to "an enterprise community platform - that is flexible, approachable and adoptable and has good support and viable roadmap". Unfortunately I'm not sure that this platform exists - it's certainly not SharePoint as the current version does not have any real community features or gets anywhere near the 7 principles of Drupal. I must admit my ignorance of Telligent. Despite E.ON being a customer (an older version powers our press release site for the UK) I've not seen where the community features have really enhanced, other than the obvious sites that are mentioned on Telligent's website. Typically large corporates do prefer a 'buy vs. build' approach and Drupal doesn't really have that necessary comfort blanket that you get from Linux just yet (at least from enterprise vendors who have put their support behind Linux) that you normally get from purchased products.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Posterous from an email

Having set posterous up now I can email it and it will update twitter, a test blog post I've setup on Blogger. Quite interesting, clearly then I wouldn't need client on my phone other than my email client (can also SMS like twitter has always done). Further tests need to be done. Like - where does the text file go that I attached? What about the scary picture? Would the picture automatically go to Flickr if I'd set that up too? It's supposed to according to the posterous website.

This is the text file I was talking about

So let me get this straight. Posterous is a bit like twitter but lets you post to multiple places (like Flickr, your blog, etc.) and if you happen to write more than 140 chars it will automatically create a link using http://is.gd to the rest of the post

I must say it's interesting at best. I'm not sure how the combination of 'Title' and 'Body' is going to workout. They tend to make sense with a blog or an email but when using twitter you've got 140 characters - that's it. No split of one from the other. So it's a bit of an experiment for me to see how this comes out. Needless to say I'll post again once I've fathomed out how it works (and if it's any good).

So let me get this straight. Posterous is a bit like twitter but lets you post to multiple places (like Flickr, your blog, etc.) and if you happen to write more than 140 chars it will automatically create a link using http://is.gd to the rest of the post