Saturday 30 November 2013

YouTube Censorship?

I've just been the victim of censorship, on the internet, I'm sat here on the internet and I can pretty much get to see anything I want from this seat... I can see frogs put in blenders, I can see car crash victims, I can see men in Bikini's impersonating women... Yet I can't watch a video by a YouTube comic?


I find this fascinating... I'm now furiously going to find an internet gateway obfuscator just to see what is so fancy I can't watch it...

Friday 29 November 2013

WarThunder Crew Skills & the New IL2 Game

The other night, I got to enjoy a couple of hours in WarThunder.... Not a terrible successful evening, as I started to try and gain some skill points for my US crews - who are pretty much totally untrained (less than 30 skill points total for each, one crew was zero!) anyway, after two arcade battles I had earned about 11 points per crew and assigned them, so kept going, by the time the evening was over I had about 30 skil points on each crew and over 50 on one of them, and had upgraded my P40E as well as my F4F some.

However, I started to look at the Pilot skills information:


You can view this same information on the warthunder wiki here.  And I noticed the tally, 11472 total points... so to max that out at the rate I was earning them is going to be over 3500 games, per crew... In arcade.

By the number of evenings I get to play, and the number of games I get in on an evening that's over 350 weeks for me... Yes WEEKS... Either I need to vastly up the quality of my play - and so earn more points - or I need to find more time to play?... Neither seem very likely.

However, I could accelerate crew training, but I'm not going to, I'm not going to spend gold on that, I get the feeling many of the really good guys do, but I'm intent on grinding, slogging, my crews up manually... and only spend accelerated crew points once, and I regretted it, because I had one superior crew and the rest boring crews.

WarThunder however is not the only WW2 flight Sim holding my interest though, the old war horse franchise "IL2" is back soon, with their new offering...


The appeal of that Sim is the attention to detail, they're aiming to model bullets passing through aircraft with meticulous detail, not the huge broad strokes of WarThunder's damage model.

Thursday 28 November 2013

Minecraft Texture Pack Selection...

I've been looking at texture & resource packs for Minecraft, Dataless882 (check him out on YouTube) led me to my eventual selection "Misa Realistic".




Wednesday 27 November 2013

John George and Ringo go Deaf as Paul Warbles

I always loved Eric & Ernie, and though this item comes from a documentary about them, it shows something up in stark relief....


And that is that Paul McCartney actually can't sing very well, we all saw, or rather heard this at the Olympic opening in London, but since then I've seen him singing live and he seems to always get gushing reviews, its like he's  only getting reviewed by insane fanbois... or Yes men, and I mean this is getting embarrassing to him now, more so than the yes men George Lucas listened to about Jaja fucking binks.

Anyway, this still comes from the documentary about Eric & Ernie on the BBC, you can see this now for a bit on the BBC iPlayer, the first item of which was a skit with the Beatles...

And you'll see John and George singing just find, but Paul seems to just gap his gob open and closed, he's not singing the same words, of if he is his younger self has the same problem with his fat old cheeks as he has now, with them wobbling in the way of his warbling.

Tuesday 26 November 2013

Ambassadors


What, it's over?  I really don't get this now, I missed the BBC advertising the advent of a new Mitchell & Webb creation, and then I slowly warmed to the series, not least because the funny bits were few and far between, but then as the guest turns appeared, the characters started to flesh out and the story started to unfold... puft its over.... 3 episodes?


Hmmm.... Not happy....

It tipped its hat to so many other BBC comedies, with the plot, the girls in underwear, the secret listening crew, to mention just a few.  I feel this needed a rounding of six episodes to solidly launch it.  I know other comedies used to get 30 minutes x 6, and this got 60 minutes x 3, so it received parity, but its political satire for it to expose the nerve and then tickle it into laughter took longer.

So I feel as though once established the series just went missing, indeed I spent a good while searching iPlayer and TV On Demand services looking for the episode this week which I assumed I missed... Only the Wikipedia entry set me straight as to their only being 3 episodes.

Monday 25 November 2013

Where the fuck is our £180?

The wife and I have been saving a little bit of money each week, all year, so we can buy the kids (nieces and nephews) a nice Christmas gift, this cash was kept in an envelope at the in-laws, and the wife went to collect this on Friday.

Now, she remembers picking it up and counting it, then thinks she put it down again... Somewhere, or in a pocket, or whatever...

Yes, you get the picture, it has been lost.

So, no Christmas pressure off of our wallets, oh no, utter and total waste, and not only that, but the wife has lost it, I'm pretty sure she dropped it outside here in the street between the car and the front door, and some lucky bastard has walked off with a £180 Christmas bonus...

But the wife of course, blamed me... Now, I admit I just asked her to think about where she'd last seen it, what pocket it was in, what she was wearing... so you know, I was being unreasonable, asking her to THINK!... And then of course, asking her to do things a set way, like... Keep money in your purse... or better yet, as I originally suggested keep the fucking money in the savings account in the bank so it can't get lost!

Oh no, all my fault, my problem, mine to sort... So annoyed, so utterly and fucking annoyed with it all.

Sunday 24 November 2013

More on GTAV - Review

I got stuck into GTA5 last night, and on some levels I was impressed, but on others wholly unhappy.


The controls, in my opinion, are far too twitchy, the AI traffic getting in your way is more annoying than ever, especially when you see the run through and you go to do it and ludicrously your car slows, or their car accelerates totally out of place for the situation.

I also hate the aiming mechanics, the aiming dot on my TV is so tiny as to disappear in the background most all the time, also the set pieces of missions, some of them are so annoying, I was in a car chasing my boat being towed; for example; and the car would literally slow just to give time for the dialogue to be played... and then when one character had to leap from the car onto the towed boat, I was behind the trailer, pressed against the boat for like 2 minutes... No jump, I finally move, so there's no boat to jump onto... the AI character leaps forward and under my wheels for the big fat "Mission Failed".

It just feels so glitchy, I'm going to let the game update tonight, by attaching to the internet with the console at last, but I've purposefully played the game away from updates to see how they let it be released, and you know what, it's not as impressive as the news coverage would have suggested.

There are bugs... Like you get a visual crash with static and then the system resolves this and recovers, but its very jarring.  You have floating and moonwalking animations, you have really rather poor facial animation of the characters going on.  Some of the mouths don't sync at all, especially on prominent supporting characters, like Michaels wife Amanda.

And then there are problems with the character switching mechanics, like I was Michael, I was told to change to be Franklin, so I did... The game changed me back to Michael and informed me to change to Franklin again... because it was mid-tutorial... in the mean time... "Mission Failed"...

The wife was sat there watching "Mission Failed"... "Mission Failed"... and my frustration showing, and she was saying... "just turn left"... on the motorbike.. yeah, sure it don't turn it just pirouettes, no finesse.


Then the map in the bottom left, yes its showing me where to go, but its 21 inches from the view point I'm looking at to the map on the bottom left, at least on my screen... And you can't take in the map without actually staring at it, the reason... its slightly transparent, so you can see textures through it... Road textures especially look like static on the mini-map, it looks like the sat nav is having a hard day with static... and that distracts from being able to take in the mini-map's information.  Also the oblique angle its at (isometric) is not as easy to read as perhaps a 2D top down mini-map would have been, especially with fast moving car chases...

And that's the big appeal, the big world in this game, but until you get to know the place - and its a big place! - you're going to have to use the mini-map, and its too short sighted, too small a heads  up of what's coming in the early game to plan where you're going.

So to be fair the game's good, but not as spectacular as everyone would think.

The other problem I have is the jaggies, I've watched the YouTube, I've checked out how it should look, on both PS3 and Xbox360 before buying the console just for this game, and it looked ace.

I've had it, seen it, checked my display settings are good... all to no dice, it looks so jaggy in places on this PS3... I dunno, maybe I'm spoilt by my PC which easily out performs this PS3 by 3 or 4 fold, but right now GTAV on the PS3 does not look like any of the footage I've seen recorded... And this isn't to start a flame war.  I'm just saying is all.

Saturday 23 November 2013

GTV5

I got a PS3... No, not one of the refurbs, though I got a refurb online the blue rays were all duff so I got a nice new PS3 slim for Christmas... It came Tuesday.


Now, after making the wife suffer the hugely long GTA5 install period she went to bed, but this was lucky as the first thing - after initial missions - that I ended up doing was going to a lap dance and pulling the dancer whom the character took home and he bedded... receiving a morning text saying "I can hardly walk"... lol

Not quite the same as GTA3 - the last game in the series I played - where the hookers would get in the car with you, but you'd only get a comic bouncing of the car springs... GTA5 has "evolved" and so I had full pixelated titties jiggling across the screen.... much to my own chagrin.

Friday 22 November 2013

Sketches of Unidentified Bodies

Reading the news there is a call for a European wide website, or database for all unidentified bodies to be searched for, a great idea and one I can't believe has not been implemented before in our information age.


However, as part of this reading I ended up looking on the UK Missing Persons Bureau website, and looking at their case search pages... 

There was no-one there I knew, but I did see lots of the sketches made of some of these poor people, their last images on Earth in many cases... Some where photo's of reconstructions as clearly nature had taken its tole and they were only skeletal remains.  But some here quite life like sketches doing honour and making the person look real.

However, some of the sketches on there... looked like they were done by blind brick layers, some sketch artist who was only telling people they could draw, the pictures were terrible, childlike, lacking any skill, or depth or flair for art at all.  And worst of all, apart from looking awful these terrible sketches, if anything, detract from the chance of anyone recognising the body.

Terrible, there should be some level of competance in such situations, surely, even just getting a budding amateur whom has the nack with a pencil, rather then whomever was got in on some of those pictures.

Thursday 21 November 2013

Minecraft My Lair

I promised some shots of my Bond Villain hide out in Minecraft, here are some.  They include the cane growing beach, the enchanting area, the outlined storage area and some other bits & bobs.




Oh and one of my branch mine shafts has run into a bit of a labyrinth.



Wednesday 20 November 2013

Maths: Zero Factorial in Code

Sometimes maths really confuses me... I have to be honest, I work with computers because I'm pretty good at asking them for results for things, and I know really quite well how to feed a calculation into the machine.

But, the source of these calculations is generally going to be mathematical and I find maths just to be so annoying...

Here's the information from Numberphile about Factorials...


Right, so they started with the factorial of 5 (5!) being 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120.  And yes you can do this and ask your computer code to do it for you:

int factorial = 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1;
cout << factorial;

Not problem, we can even write a program to do this function for us, quickly...

int factorial (const int& p_Factorial)
{
int l_result = p_Factorial;
int l_temp = p_Factorial - 1;
while ( l_temp > 0 )
{
l_result = l_result * l_temp;
l_temp--;
}
return l_result;
}

This code follows the first example they give in the video, and it presents correct results for all factorials of 1 and above.  This also matches with the graph drawn in the video.

This also goes back to what is stated in the video around the 0:45 second mark... "you can go down to 3 x 2 x 1", does Dr Grime mean you can take factorials down to one?  If so, then this code is correct, and this rule controls the while loop in there.

Except of course zero raises its ugly head, and breaks everything, now to explain zero the pattern above is not followed, a new pattern is invented, and this is where it gets sticky for computers and my brain, because the new pattern is not multiplication, its division...

If we approach the pattern above as multiplication, then my brain tells me the pattern, the parameter even, for the function starts 0, and then ends.  So to my mind zero factorial is immediately zero and the function ends:

int factorial (const int& p_Factorial)
{
int l_result = p_Factorial;
if ( p_Factorial > 0 )
{
int l_temp = p_Factorial - 1;

while ( l_temp > 0 )
{
l_result = l_result * l_temp;
l_temp--;
}
}
return l_result;
}

Or in fact I'd like to make the function throw an "invalid argument" and only let it calculate for integers of value one and above.

But this is not the pattern held to, no as you can see the pattern becomes "Take a factorial you've not calculated and use it as a parameter into the local calculation" this is a bit alien to a programming language function, take something you've not calculated as the parameter... what?

So, the function becomes something cyclic, or even two functions:

int factorialPreStep (const int& p_Factorial)
{
int l_result = p_Factorial;
if ( p_Factorial > 0 )
{
int l_temp = p_Factorial - 1;

while (l_temp > 0)
{
l_result = l_result * l_temp;
l_temp--;
}
}
return l_result;
}

int factorial (const int& p_Factorial)
{
int l_result = factorialPreStep(p_Factorial+1);
l_result = l_result / (p_Factorial + 1);
return l_result;
}

Now, the function "factorial" will always need to be passed 0 or higher, and it'll therefore always pass 1 or higher to the pre-calculation.

The full application therefore is:

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

int factorialPreStep (const int& p_Factorial)
{
int l_result = p_Factorial;
if ( p_Factorial > 0 )
{
int l_temp = p_Factorial - 1;

do
{
l_result = l_result * l_temp;
l_temp--;
}
while ( l_temp > 0 );
}
return l_result;
}

int factorial (const int& p_Factorial)
{
int l_result = factorialPreStep(p_Factorial+1);

l_result = l_result / (p_Factorial+1);

return l_result;
}

int main (int p_argc, char** p_argv)
{
    cout << factorial(5) << endl;
    cout << factorial(4) << endl;
    cout << factorial(3) << endl;
    cout << factorial(2) << endl;
    cout << factorial(1) << endl;

    return 0;
}

And we see the output:


Right, so this code works?  With zero?...... HMmmm, lets see....


Yes, it works for zero factorial, which as per the video comes out as one, but this was by using the division pattern... 1 / 1 = 1, that's fair I get that... But it is not the same as the original multiplication pattern.

The original pattern, the original function, is a x b x c... so 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1.... What is that pattern for one factorial?... Well the pattern is just 1... so what's the pattern for 0... well it's bleeding 0....

As a programmer this is an obvious avenue of research, we like to find multiple ways to get the same result, usually so we can find the most efficient solution for runtime, but what we don't like is two seemingly matching patterns, giving different results...

So for this code we could have written:

    cout << factorial(5) << endl;
    cout << factorial(4) << endl;
    cout << factorial(3) << endl;
    cout << factorial(2) << endl;
    cout << factorial(1) << endl;

as:

    cout << (5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1) << endl;
    cout << (4 * 3 * 2 * 1) << endl;
    cout << (3 * 2 * 1) << endl;
    cout << (2 * 1) << endl;
    cout << (1) << endl;
    
The pattern is right, the results are right, the code is right, but then we add 0!...

    cout << (0) << endl;
    
And it most certainly is not right, the pattern is broken, so was it a valid pattern?  Well it must have been because we use this pattern in our loop to calculate the prefactorial step...

Argh, see my head just exploded.... I hate maths for this.

And it only hurts my head more as I understand my solution code, and that solution code works... GRRRR.

Tuesday 19 November 2013

Blogger View Counts at Zero?

I noticed this on the 19th, all the view counts listed in the posts page of my blog show as zero.

My stats page shows hundreds, if not thousands of views, and other demographics, but the original old, working, view count per post is currently zero on every single post, even posts I know have multiple views...


I have no idea why, but the latest 100 posts on my blog all now have zero views… they had hundreds… now zero… and then the second 100 posts have stats as normal… then the third 100 are missing stats…. And then the remaining 187 all have stats…

100 without… 100 with… 100 without… 187 with….


And its not my viewing them in lots of 100, because if I switch to lots of 25, I get 4 pages… 4 x 25 being 100… all without stats… then 4 x 25 with stats… and 4 x 25 without again… the pattern is consistent, but these are posts which I know have been viewed, I can see comments on them, and people going to them on the other stats pages….

Something really odd is going on somewhere, and it's on their side.


------------


Addendum: Whilst writing this post, the stats have all returned to normal... something was going on.. something odd.

Monday 18 November 2013

Full Real WarThunder

I got two fly outs in Full Real Battles.... and I made two air kills, survived one mission, and was shot down by an Me410 in the latter... So I'm at a 2:1 kill to death ratio... yay me. lol.

The controls are still not fab, big problems with the trim controls at the moment, and I'm also finding the rudder control on the X45 to be a bit of a pain...

The biggest obstacle to getting into Full Real Battles by the way was not actually the controls in the end, once I watched Kreb's video setting up his controls and later PhlyDailys I got it sorted.


No the big obstacle was the actual take-off and landing tutorial, which kept pausing and then starting up again with pressing keys, but by the time you pressed the key one already had to have applied rudder etc, but you hadn't because you'd been paused... and boom crashy crashy.... I fudged it in the end by accelerating to 100% throttle on the brakes, pressing to by pass all those messages up to the rudder... and then fast pressing the rudder before slowing down, taxi'ing back to the start point on the runway and doing the take off without being interrupted in one whole run.

So, Gaijin, your Take Off and Landing Tutorial is utterly shit!

Sunday 17 November 2013

Full Real War Thunder

Please note, this was drafted and scheduled BEFORE the post of the 14th about my Full Real Control headaches... I might be buying a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro soon....


A while back I posted about going into War Thunder with my Track IR and trying Full Real Battles.

Well, that itch is back, but since the move I've been sorting things out and I've found the Track IR and the Flight stick... So the time is now.

I'm going to go through a short series of Full Real flights, I originally flew full real settings in IL2 Forgotten Battles, where my favourite plane was the 109 F-4, but the 109 has terrifying torque problems at take off and landing.


So, I may go with a twin engine aircraft to get used to things and then build up.

I have however been looking at Full Real Battle recordings from PhlyDaily and Kraut...



I think before I go into an actual battle I need to do a lot of take off and landing practice, circuits, touch and go landings and then go into battle.  I plan this to take the form of at least 2-3 hours getting used to the controls, then at least 10 take off and landing cycles in an aircraft, then some practice using the flight stick and Track IR in historical battles and finally going into a full real battle.

I am also wondering whether it might be time to up my graphics card from the single 4xx series to a 6xx or a dual 6xx series...?

Saturday 16 November 2013

CV's

I can't tell you why, least not right now, but I've just had to sit down and write up my CV.

I hate CV's... I help my mates do theirs from time to time, but I've been with my current employer over 9 years (it is in fact 10 years very soon) so I don't have call for a CV.

So the one I've just put together its kind of like a "this is me, ask me owt you want" kind of thing, I mean I'm midway through my 30's and been a professional programmer for nearing 14 years, so I guess what Comprehensive School I went to, and what GCSE's I got is pretty much pointless to stick on there.

As a consequence my CV is like two solid pages just recaps of my jobs, references and then a little introduction as to who I am written in the third person.

Now to hit the streets with it.  And one of the things I remember about the last time I went through a round of recruitment is that recruiters always - ALWAYS - change the contact information, this is of course to protect their revenue stream, they ask for their fee (which at one time was 10%) for finding the right candidate.  The trouble is, we're in a depression, things are hard, so I'd rather a potential new employer have my contact details, not use a recruiter and give me - or invest in my desktop equipment they give me - that fee.

I'm letting my CV circulate of its own will, but I will say this, I've just posted it off to a company I've been in awe of in Nottingham...

I have a funny feeling I went to an interview with these guys when they were based out at Sandiacre, but I was not told who they were, and I think I pretty much failed that interview because of my own lacklustre interest in what they were talking to me about back them.

But I'd suffer any amount of tribulations to get to interview again, not least just to talk to them and know who they are.

I mean, as a serious C++ fan boy, games are the performance item to look at for me.  More than the sedate world of the desktop, so I'd love to talk tech with them, but to work with them.... Droool.

Mind you, would I prove to be too much of a know it all bastard?...

Friday 15 November 2013

The Fake Xelous's

I am interested in the prospects shown in EverQuest Next, I've even dabbled with signing up for the Beta, but I really can't dedicate the time to it, I can't even find that much time at the moment to do any gaming in my own time - three hours this week and I only got that by staying up way longer than I should Sunday & last night.

Anyway, just now I did pop over to the SOE site to sign up, and god damn it, but someone already has my handle.

I hate it when this happens, some douch who is not Xelous has the name Xelous.

There's a lot of yanks doing this at the moment, for a none-sense made up word I came up with on Yahoo in 1997 its really annoying that other people use the name now.

But anyway at SOE, I thought no way have I missed signing up as myself on there, so I sent out a series of request my password resets, to my various xelous related e-mail addresses, to see to which I might have signed SOE up to.  None came back.

So it must be some fake douche bag out there pretending to be me.

Thursday 14 November 2013

Lighter Linux Format?

Being quite a Linux fan, I'm also a Linux Format subscriber.


The only magazine I buy, and subscribe to, I even contribute in some small ways to the magazine having had a letter or two printed and sending in a popular code item about writing a Virtual CPU from this very blog.

So I was a little shocked to see Graham, the editor, is leaving with this latest edition, some of the regular writers are leaving too... It is a tangible blow to the publication.

But as big a blow as it may have been, I do wonder whether signs of it have not been on the horizon for a few months, because the magazine has gotten a little lighter, it may only be my imagination, I may go to the stack of back copies I have in my new man loft and take a look at the thickness, but I remember I could read the copy cover to cover, now it seems that the distance cover to cover is about 5-7 pages less... And then suddenly these staff departures?

WarThunder - Full Real Control Headaches

I write most of my articles for this in advance of when you actually get to read them, so when I talk about last night, what I actually mean is Wednesday night... For you see, I bided my time, I sorted the man loft out and cleared up a load of junk, and then I coaxed the wife into going to bed and set about sorting out my flight stick and head tracker.


All seemed to be going well, my flight stick is an old - but much loved - Seitek X42 - I wish I had a 52, but a 42 will do (plus its more manual than the 52 and suited to WW2 sims).

Next I launched WarThunder and set about sorting the stick out, and I think I made an immediate mistake, I said to set up Mouse & keyboard - I wanted to keep arcade controls as mouse and keyboard and then just set the Full Real Battle controls to the sticks.... "What a mistaka to maka".



My head tracking worked fine, and after adjusting the centering key it was perfect, but then I set about setting up the controls to the game... Buttons were fine.... but the Axis, oh the axis caused me such trouble.

The roll axis was correct, but pitch was inverted, the throttle was also inverted and it kept zeroing at brakes - which I didn't want and which was not mentioned in the controls chart - and it'd max out at WEP where as I wanted it to max out at 100% and then use a button for WEP!

Eitherway, my first flight ended in a very quick fire ball of death, because I'd not turned off the mouse control, so as I used my sticks the mouse also input controls and the aircraft just did a lazy turn to starboard, dipped it's right wing and flew into the ground.

Once sorted I did a take off and a few circuits at low speed with the gear up, all seemed fine, but then I came into land and the ground effect was terrible eventually I clipped the prop and came to a stop, luckily in one piece and 20 seconds later I was repaired and ready again.

The second flight was better, I performed the take off and circuits and even landed!  But I could tell the aircraft needed those trim controls sorting, also I figured I should set up the radiator to a button on the hotas, because of WEP use and overheating the oil on things like the Hurricane, and Zero expectially.

Well, I don't know what else happened, but between the landing and the tweaking the controls the next flight was near impossible to control, I got up but getting down again I clipped the prop once again.  But this time it was definiately the trim, specifically the elevator trim.

I tried to set the trim controls to a thumb swivel, but no good, the controls go very annoying.

After an hour and a half, I set about playing some Arcade and forgot all about Full Real Controls out of frustration.

Unfortunately arcade brought me a new frustration, loosing my kills as assists!  The most annoying of all was whilst in my Do-217-J1 I put a whole heap of cannon shells into a B25 (not the easiest target to take down) I had his tail ruined, wings shot up, port engine burning, gunner unconscious and leaking fuel... I was still firing my machine guns into him, when a P40 drifts past wafts his wing at the B25 and boom, the B25 is down and he gets the kill... I had thought they'd fixed this!

Later I also upgraded my US aircraft line up to the Rank 5 mainstays (P40, F4F, A20) cost a pretty penny... But I immediately felt how cumbersome the A20 is, not like the Beaufighter at all... And the F4F, what a heavy lumbering beast, how ever did it stand up to Zero's?

The P40 has a superb rolls rate, but it does wallow around the sky a bit, especially when forced to low-level to defend ground targets and it has to turn rather than zoom.  But my overwhelming memory of these new Rank 5 USAF crates is how their controls lock up fast in a dive, I was constantly diving at 0% with flaps to avoid it, but of course everyone else (possibly upgraded) flying arcade UFO flight models just floated away from me.

The best action I did capture, unfortunately its over 2gb of data at the mo and I didn't process it last night - I'm at pains to process it until YouTube gets reverted back and google+ stops being forced upon us.

Addendum: It may not be me, it might be the stick...



Wednesday 13 November 2013

Protesticles

I just watched a video of a chap protesting in Red Square Moscow... By nailing his testicles to the cobbles....

No, I'm not joking, apparently he nailed them to the cobbles... The strangely blurred out (I can't think why video) can be seen here.

Minecraft Bond Villain Isle

I said I'd get back to you with the seed for my Bond Villain style island map, here is that seed:

-3154600398380805972

The island you appear on is devoid of trees.

In my main copy of this map I've dug the top of this island off and build a wood & glass villa.  Now I managed this feat of engineering a wooden villa on a treeless isle by importing some fir tree saplings.

I also have a deep branch mine well below, and the latest innovations are a rail system spiralling down in a 5x5 space to the mine.

But, this is just the seed, and this is how you start out...



Hotmail Continues To Grate

The new Outlook mail, replacing Hotmail, which I've mentioned before on this very blog, continues to be an absolute pain in the arse...

It was working about two hours ago, now look at it...


Just look...

What use is this?

The fonts are screwed  up, icons missing, the panels overlap and you can't see what's going on... I'm seriously tired of how bad this Outlook system is.

Oh, and before someone says "Oh you're not using IE, that's the problem"... This is how it looks from IE... Even worse...


Tuesday 12 November 2013

Google Goofs with Plus

I'm an avid YouTube watcher, I enjoy many topics, but the number of the subscriptions I have whom are mentioning the Google+ comments bullshit on YouTube... We have...

Jingles... "It sucks doesn't it"

Boogie (aka Francis)... "I tried to put up with this new Google+ bullshit"

Dave (aka EEVBlog)... "Hello McFly... Hello... I'm approving... It's retarded... It just doesn't work"


This debacle is just on going... I personally hate the system, they've removed functionality I enjoy, such as the addition of a time into the comment so you can link what you're saying to a specific moment, then it used to allow me to reply to a comment, right now I don't know how to address a comment to a specific recipient.

And then the "Real name" thing.. I've seen Hitler posting... And the big JC... Santa and fucking Gandalf... Like he's not busy enough... it's like What the fuck!?!!?

This is Google's biggest visible change ever, and its abigger flop than anything that they've had flop before.  I hate google+, I only use my google account for gmail and this blog, it happens they own YouTube so that's linked in there too, but I don't specifically use Google+... I like blogspot, and I like YouTube, and I used those services on their own merit.  The fact they're piggy backing Google+ on those more used, more popular interfaces says a lot, if Google+ was as all invasive and defined the social space then fine, but it doesn't, so to make it impact on YouTube is a pain in the back side, stupid.

And as that mad Aussie bloke says better... "this is just Evil".


Addendum, after writing this yesterday, Boogie has been back on camera, lets see him in action:



Another Addendum, I've made one reply to one message in the new system... Look what appears in my inbox linked to my YouTube account... This is new, it never did this shit before...


That's just an hour in my small inbox, on a small comment on one video, I usually post all over... And I went into my Video Manager area to look for my YouTube inbox... No, my YouTube inbox is gone, its sending messages out to my own personal e-mail... just swamping me in mails, I can't imagine how terrible this would be for a content maker.

And then I've spotted more issues with the new system itself... Like if someone has relied to a comment, you used to be able to click "Show Comment", so the new message could be linked back in a tree to the comment it was about, this is called a discussion, and its how we as humans converse...  Now however, you only get the name of the person you're replying to, and you click it and the site takes you to their profile page... Not to the comment... So the context which 90% of comments sit in has been lost, totally lost.

I'm beginning to really hate the new system, and I'm happy to see big contributors, like boogie standing up to this shit.