It’s been a while again… I had a lot of exams in January so didn’t really post because of the workload… and since the exams finished I kind of haven’t posted either. There’s been lots of stuff I’ve meant to post about - but that’s not really coming to mind right now.
If you hadn’t seen it yet, I have a new car now! My MK2 Punto served me well for ~4 years but I decided it was time for something a little faster. I now have a Grande Punto Sporting, which I acquired soon after the New Year and still enjoy driving immensely. I feel it’s such a perfect next step for me; it’s faster, but not ridiculously fast by any stretch of the imagination — but it has awesome handling (lowered suspension, low-profile tyres, all-round disc brakes) making it very hard for me to get into trouble with it
In other news, at a recent LAN party for the Bristol University Computer Gaming Society, a bunch of people decided to make tribute to the ending of the game Portal. It had been done at previous LANs, but this time it was filmed properly. I took all the footage home and made a proper “music video” of it. Hope you find it amusing!
Not surprisingly to you I’m sure, I had this song in my head A LOT after I finished work on this video yesterday. It was… annoying… going around in my head whilst I was trying to get to sleep. Sadly I could not join my comrades for the performance because I was filming. We are all pleased with the end result - well done to them for such a good rendition and pitch-perfect singing (and being brave enough to do it in the first place).
You might remember that I posted a while ago about the short film I made to illustrate what my group got up to over the year we spent making a computer game from scratch. I’m pleased to report that I can finally show you (a slightly edited version) of it!
I showed it to the lecturer who ran the group project unit. He really liked it, and suggested that the Head of Department might be interested. He was, and he wanted to put it up on YouTube via their Bristol account. So there you have it. The film is also embedded on their Computer Science admissions page:
I said it was slightly edited: the HoD did request that I remove some of the footage from the start which basically just showed us pratting around. Of course that kind of footage would not very interesting to prospective students’ parents, but we did think it was rather funny…
I saw The Golden Compass this evening. I am a great fan of the books, but despite forewarnings that it did not hold up well in comparison to the books I went anyway. I’m glad I did because I found seeing the world visualised thoroughly entertaining.
The film was, of course, preceded by 30 minutes of adverts and trailers. One thing I found interesting (since taking the Animation unit at Uni.) was that so many of the adverts are using exactly the same techniques. There is loads of Rube Goldberg type stuff going on (i.e. really complex setups to do really simple things - like the Coco Pops which happen to fly all around the kitchen before managing to land in a cereal bowl). Also many just generally have a large clump of identical objects all moving together to create a big/pretty/swarming/burning/whatever mass.
Also, I just have to make a special mention concerning the gentleman who pulled out right infront of me on the roundabout as I left the cinema car park. I was forced to come to a complete halt on the roundabout to prevent going into the side of the his long estate car. No apology in the form of a raised hand etc. was made by the driver. I usually find that large, thick, white, give-way lines, and roundabouts are a good indication that stopping may be required. Oh and incase you’re wondering - I was probably doing less than 5MPH at the time (it’s a car park roundabout) - which allows you to visualise just how close to him I was before he decided to move out on me.
The new Winamp looks rather neat with its redesigned skin. However, it has this ‘feature’ called the “Multi Content Viewer” - otherwise known as “a blank space which is three times the size of the player window” which they have bolted onto the side. I really want to get rid of this, but I can’t find out how. It even forbids you from just resizing the window so that you can hide the stupid thing. If anyone knows how to make it disappear or disable it I would be grateful…
The image below shows you what I am talking about (note my useful annotations to illustrate various neat aspects of the design). It’s just such a great way to ruin a really nice looking skin. Duplicated information: check. Useless information: check. Massive blank space that you can’t make any smaller: check.
Now while you can stop it telling you such fascinating information as what decoder it is using to read your audio files, that just leaves behind an even bigger un-shrinkable blank space so your choices are somewhat limited.
Well I haven’t posted for… ages. University has been extremely busy of late. I’ve never done as many units at the same time before and the workload is therefore pretty high.
I’m soon going get a little bit of a break from deadlines for a few days and I have allowed myself a break today by constructing my Mini ITX computer. Yes - that’s right - a million months later from when I started to build this computer and I FINALLY have the thing running (hopefully stably) in a REAL case. OMG.
Here’s a super quality mobile phone camera picture of it. To the right we can see some victory Strongbow. This computer is quiet, damn quiet. It is inaudible sitting >1m away, and even so you have to strain pretty damn hard to hear it over typing/general background noise. It’s awesome. Power consumption is gonna be pretty low too, of course, but I haven’t wanted to turn it off to plug it into the wattmeter yet! The case is a Nexus “Psile” - I think the styling is really nice, but it doesn’t seem to have been designed by people who build computers. It was a little fiddly; having to remove the motherboard to install a PCI expansion card is pretty odd (and irritating) for example.
Edit: Just checked my previous posts. Seems my first post introducing the Mini ITX idea was Jun 17th - so instead of a million months make that 6-and-a-bit. Amazing that it took six months of wrestling with my retailer to finally end up with a stable motherboard…
Been a month since I posted a picture of the 3D model of my car. I devoted a fair bit of time to it this weekend and things are coming along pretty nicely I think.
The big problem I am having at the moment is making all the pieces of the car [look like they] fit together seamlessly. (E.g. I haven’t tried to fix it yet but you can see big gaps around the rear light cluster). I probably just don’t know the right technique but I’m finding it pretty awkward.
Last year at Uni we had to do an epic year-long group project where we made a computer game from scratch. We made a first person shooter set in our Departmental building. I bought a camcorder at some point along the way, and started to film us as we worked (or mucked about) with the idea of making a video log of our work. A month or two after the Uni year finished, I finally got around to creating this vlog over the Bank Holiday weekend just gone.
I enjoyed making it so much, and watching all the footage brought back many great memories. I hope that it will be as entertaining for people outside of our project group as it is for us. When I can think of a good way of sharing it over the inets (filesize is pretty big) I will do so. I would like to put it on YouTube but I need to check the people in it are okay with that…
So I was playing CSS last night, as you do. A lot…
There is this admin plugin (Mani Admin Mod) which most servers worth a damn run. One cool thing it offers is the ability to blow somebody up (usually along with half their team) for killing a teammate. It does, however, have one annoying feature where it can spam messages to the chat once in a while like “Plz donate to us or we’ll have to shut down!!11″.
[Shutting down, incidentally, would be a very serious problem for me, because I would then only have 9,999 other servers to choose from]
Anyway I was noticing these messages now and then, and ignoring them immediately, but one really managed to grab my attention:
“Please note the language on this server is German.” [verbatim]
That really had me stumped; every spam message, every player on the server, and the server language, was English.
It’s been a while since I posted about the mini-ITX computer. That’s because it’s still pretty much a complete disaster.
The mainboard I purchased (Jetway J7F4) is still suffering from completely random hard lockups, which occur on average about once a day during normal use (web, music, MSN, IRC). I am currently engaged in correspondance with the retailer who sold me the board, but as usual with them things are progressing very slowly. I am being asked to give reproducble steps as to how to make the board lock up so that they can test it. Ummm.. the entire ‘point’ of random locking up is that there IS no way to reproduce it… it just cannot be done. If it could be reproduced by some deterministic set of events, you’d think I might STOP DOING whatever it is so that my board wouldn’t be so unusable.
We recently had to change ownership of our internet account with Virgin (previously Telewest) due to a departing housemate. We were promised no downtime, but they disconnected us without warning for two days (note that our outgoing housemate had paid his bills to cover those two days). To add insult to injury, when our “welcome pack” finally arrived and the new modem (um, we already had a perfectly good one?) was installed - you are then forced to sit on hold for half an hour just so Virgin can flick a switch and activate the stupid thing. Yes, the number is 0800, but that is not free on mobile phones. I just hope it counted towards my free minutes. Until you make this call you can’t use the service which you have already paid and subscribed for.
[I wonder if the people who ring Virgin’s sales department are held in a queue for thirty minutes..? ~~]
The only good thing is that despite a brand new internet account, and a brand new modem with a brand new MAC address — my IP address seems to have remained the same, so my website went back up immediately…
