Outlook Continues to be Dreadful

Today Microsoft Outlook is back at it's old habits of being utterly dreadful.

So I need to put "29th" with the the in superset, it used to do this itself, but not any more.... now you get "2  h" in normal and "9t" in superset... Dreadful!

 

 

Geoffery Barnes (Bans) Spammed Me

This is a post about the worst beginner programming post I've ever read...

I've been hounded by someone, I'll call them "LN" they have mailed me and told me that they really like one of my articles from June 2012... Checking my clock, I've posted a whole host of other stuff since.  However, they seem fixated on that pretty old post and strangely have mailed me that it makes perfect reading for "juniors as well as experienced programmers".

I'm really not sure what they're referring to in that month of posts I go from inappropriate references to Ghost Busters, to peoples awful toilet habits to talking about the English football team and shit... Yes, I have a post titled "Hyperdefecation".

In essence this emailer is full of utter crap, so what are they trying to do?  Well they've references another blog I do frequent "coding horrors", but again their comment is off the mark...

Then they ask me to look at their 3000+ word post, except this article is not written by "LN" it's written by one Geoffrey Barnes... And good old Geoff is very quick to reply to comments on his article, he loves his article... He maybe loves it enough to start hassling folks through e-mail, or even setting up mail spam bots to hassle folks with this supposed programming experience? Maybe...

The problem with this?  Well, he's hassled me... The article isn't very good, and I'm going to review it... Right now... So, get a cuppa, take a seat, and lets digest the glorious fail that is:

Because, yes folks, it's not actually very insightful and draws from some very dubious sources...

For example, it quickly attempts to establish weight for the arguments to come, with the statement:

"according the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, in the United States"

Fabulous, the US government... Except, the link does not go to the US Bureau of Labour and Statistics (yes, I'm English and spell Labour correctly) no the article goes to the "webopedia" website, think of a lower market wikipedia here with less over sight.

This page on webopedia does indeed have the above "fact", however it's attributed to "Hour of Code" not the US Government. And Hour of Code is part of "Computer Science Education Week" and it-itself does not state this, at least not clearly, anywhere... So that's article argument number one blown right out of the water, just by a little clicking.  I was at this point immediately put off this article which is trying to give itself false gravitas.

I persisted in reading however, clearly LN wanted to convey some message to me...  The very next paragraph then called out to me:

"most beginning computer programmers spend too much time deciding on which programming language to learn first to the point that much time is wasted choosing the programming language…"

This is what we call an oxymoron you are not a computer programmer until you can program, therefore you must have picked a language to be a computer programmer, so you can't as a computer programmer spend anytime to pick your first language... Does anyone get my drift here?  This is sloppy, poor writing, seemingly just to add another link to another "Loud Programmer" article, it's sham within sham right now.

"…time that could have been spent actually coding something useful."

I feel this about the time I've spent reading this article, but let me continue, because we're just getting warm.  And we actually have a valid point... I was hoping for the first of many... "the key point that helped me choose.... was to decide on the particular field I was interested in"... this is exactly right, this is the exact way you choose a programming language, just as you choose any other tool, you have to make sure the tool is fit for purpose, it's no good trying to be a system software engineer (like myself) in a language like Java, you can't write a near bare metal requirements demanding system in Java.  But you can write one in C or C++... So you chose that language to fit your purpose!  This however is not terribly insightful, it's common sense.

What's next in the article then?  Well they present this wonderful graph...

Which tells us the square root of fuck all... "Trends"... Okay... And the vertical axis... "Occurrences"... Right, where were these "Occurrences"..... Python, C++, HTML5 and C all get 6... Six ... What does this mean?  Its complete and utter gibberish nonsensical tosh.

Before the language points begin there's yet another ill thought out quote:

"Almost all major software including mobile applications, desktop applications and web applications have a web based back end, including your anti-virus software."

We're still not enlightened as to whom shat out this thought provoking turd, but lets pick through it... 

Everything has a "web back end", no... What most everything has is some form of remote server based resource, that is we must differentiate between "web" and "networked / intranetworked / internetworked", for you see long before there was an internet as we know it today there was "client-server" computing and before that there was time-sliced multiplexed computing with everyone sharing the same machine, so many writers in technology ignore this history they confuse and cloud their writing by simply jumping to "web", it's not the web, and I hate you saying it's the web, the "web" is perhaps what you view in your browser; that why they're called web-browsers; and yes the server your anti-virus talks to to update it's signatures could be connected to the web, but that does not mean it's back-end is on the web, nor does any of this tell you that almost all programs have web-back-ends at all, they have servers perhaps, but this is just a leap too far, and sets the tone for the following passage.

For the author takes to the high-road, talking about people bashing PHP, but he clearly loves PHP... Personally, I love the security loop-holes in old PHP and it has been superseded on the back-end by better technologies.  But when done right it has a use, and of course that use is in serving dynamic web content easily.  However, the author says it's "THE" (yes the capitols) the most popular programming language... This is in red, just to lend emphasis, clearly he really likes PHP... But then the points to back this argument up... "80% of the web is powered by the one programming languages, PHP"... Really?  Who said?  What stats, I can't find this statistic anywhere.  They also state Facebook is powered by PHP, this is not strictly true, it's written in XHP runs on HipHop for PHP on the back-end, but on the client-side is full of Javascript and I believe there's some Erlang in there.  The author though is set on his premeditated PHP kicker so none of this is mentioned.

"As a PHP Developer you have a large pool of web development projects"... yawn, all you have is web development, that's all you can use PHP for.  Is it useful?  Yes, is it the "BEST" for freelancing?  No, not really, would you get lots of work?  Sort of, but you need so so many supporting skills, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, not to mention some experience in setting up the back-end server services you require to actually run the PHP.  Is PHP a good place to start?  Hell no, the price of entry is HUGE, and you're going to see no return on this initial investment until you're very very good.

His next point?... JavaScript... Well I've already explained this is a huge helper in PHP, but it's a huge helper in any web development task you have, however, there's some huge leaps here... Angular JS and a whole host of other libraries are mentioned, but there's just no getting over the author has literally ignored the biggest draw to Javascript, it's cost of entry is zero, you literally write some code and run it in your browser... The problem?  They've utterly ignored HTML, you have to write javascript into an HTML document within which to load into your browser, without this basic understanding this most elementary concept no-one can make the choice to learn Javascript, like PHP it's an also ran with HTML, so your actual time to entry is quite large, cost zero, but time huge.

I do however agree with their comment "learning Javascript programming will simply make your life easier", yes it will.  But alone it won't make you a programmer.

We do get our first editorial cockup here, there's a "Note" here.  A note appears in text when it's optional to read, or you read it without it causing any impact on the flow of the topic at hand.

NOTE: Get milk tomorrow.

You continue your writing as though the reader has no idea about the content of the note, the author of this article however utterly and totally misses this point, and continues to converse with the reader immediately.

Also the content of this note, dubious, not backed up with any points of reference, it is (just as all my writing it) the opinion of the author, yet it's juxtaposition-ed to have this faux gravitas to the lay reader.

Python comes next, perhaps the first language even I would have to allow them to call a programming language for real, rather than a scripting language or presentation language (even if you do write python "scripts" rather than compile it down).  I like python, lots of people do... The author however has a bit of a fantasy splooge here though.  He says that python is the most popular technology on Stack Overflow... Or rather he rips off someone else's diagram saying this, lets look at this:

Unfortunately, again there's no source given for this statistical testicle, I however can present you with this page from stack overflow themselves, with the most recent developer survey where the % categories visited is listed thus:

Python is on there, it gets a whopping 32% but it's not first on the searches.  That's how you quote a reference Geoff.

So who's next?... C# and the .NET framework... It allows you to build web applications for the Microsoft Internet Server.  No, it doesn't, C# (as well as others) are languages which let you write programs which run on the .NET framework.  Which is (I'm ignoring Mono.NET) written by Microsoft to run on all their platforms, desktop, server, internet information services.  Microsoft created .NET as a virtual machine to run their .NET byte-code as a competitor to Java, in terms of market role the two are very similar, both have their own pro's and con's.  As we touched on at the start of the whole article they are yet another tool in your arsenal, however the author pretty much gets .NET all wrong, most least as he's suddenly talking in the present indicative about his not having ambition to learn this language, as he's never wanted to work in a big corp or Microsoft friendly environment.... Dear author, none of your writing thus far makes me want to employ you as a programmer, well at least not as anything other than a web programmer, and even then I'm not too sure from the page's simplistic presentation.

Next up?  Java.... Erg, Gets this totally wrong and is talking personally.  My biggest gripe is with the comment "API back end for most mission critical applications like banking".  I've interviewed for roles in back-end banking, they do not use Java, banking, trading, stock exchange.  Hell even home crypto-mining uses C++ or at a push C, and have done since the 1970's with little plans to change.  Mission critical is not Java's forte.

However, here's comes the authors hard on for web development once again, as he's talking about "Java programming for web development".  Utterly ignoring Java on the desktop but still failing to make the distinction between java as a service (e.g. Jakarta/Tomcat or WebSphere et al) and the classic applets.

What's the hate on Java?  Some crass commentary about not everyone getting on with it... Excuse me, were you not trying to introduce people to programming?  I've created articles about just that, with Java... and they're magnitudes better than this horrible article, check them out here.

To be honest I'm loosing the strength to go on, for next we have a passage on "Mobile Application Development"  there's another statistic mentioned, this time with a reference from Statista, which is a valid reference... Except the reference itself is second hand, the author is quoting a second-hand source as direct fact, it's not.  This is not correct writing, but on the statista reference page there's a "Show Source" link, where does this go?  What font of all knowledge does statista pull its facts?... Well we can't find out, the link goes to the "buy access to us", so their source is themselves?  And good-old Geoff has quoted this as a first hand source?

Who's next on the hit parade?... Swift... From Apple... It's easier to learn than Objective C... As a beginner programmer reading this article, this is yet more utter tosh, they have no point of references, Objective C... You may as well say Swift is easier to learn than Quantum Physics.

But as a beginner you follow a tutorial, so the tutorial for Swift maybe good and the tutorial for Objective C bad, alas I will never know, and nor will the reader of this article.

Moving swiftly on "Java for Android"... Same article smell, new day.  Java is Java right?  The android bit?... Well you're writing Java code to put through something like Buildozer to get an Android app.  I have so many issues with this whole bit that it could be it's own post here on my now longest blog post ever.

The major problem with this idea of writing just one language for Android demeans the android platform, since I've written Python and compiled it to run (with Kivy) on Android.  And Java is intrinsically cross-platform so has nothing directly related to Android.

So the red text greeting "in order to build Android applications you need some skills in Java" no, no you don't, you can write Python or HTML or Javascript and do lots with Android, Android is just an operating system like Windows.  My major problem with this?  This article is meant to be about encouraging beginner programmers, limiting their options is NOT a good move.

And now the biggest steamiest pile of shite?  C++... "C++ is the best programming language for developing computer games".... No, C++ is the one of the better ones for producing fast code, as it's closer to the metal of the computer than anything mentioned thus-far in this whole article, that's why game developers often opt to use C++ for their most low-level components such as developing the graphics engine.

Our Geoff here has a very narrow and limited experience with programming, he's clearly a web or game guy with nothing in between, because in mentioning C++ he's not mentioned C, between the two they've been used to write all the operating systems he's been using to write this very article, all the compilers to create the software he's been working with, the PHP, Java, Pearl, Javascript and python, all of those interpreters are written in one or the other.

There's in fact so much missing in his mention of C++ as to be an insult to programmers everywhere.

The last ticket point on this parade of in practicality?... C#... Again... What gives?  I'm only going to comment that it says... "C# is a dream choice... to learn a multi-purpose programming language"... Multi-purpose, that's games and web then... Thanks Geoff.

His conclusion... I want to rip my own arm off just to have something to smash his keyboard into splinters of plastic to save any poor fuckers from reading such twoddle ever again.

Does he give any tips on which language to pick?  Nope, does he give any clues as to resource to start from?  No!  Does he answer the question where to begin?  Yes...

Yes, he answers... with a Question...

"What is your best programming languages to learn for a beginner?"

We were reading your fucking article to get that answer you schmuck!  You just wasted everyone's time... And what the fuck is wrong with Coffee?

Addendum:  I've had a look through who our little Geoffrey is, seems he is "Loudprogrammer.net" and he has lots of other article... I took a look at one other... His list of influential programmers, and I noted next to Don Knuth he had a link for his boot... Which he used to sell for $22... But now gives away free, this book will show you how to become a $50 an hour earning programmer... in 7 steps... and he has a lovely quirky plaid jacket and glasses on in his picture... Except, on this page his name has changed to Geoffrey Bans... Not Barnes any more... If this guy can't consistently spell his name don't buy his book, don't read his articles.

Oh and when his spam bot bitch starts to nag mail you.... Blog about it, because this guy is a dick.

People: Email & Names

When you interact with someone, say face to face, you get to gauge who they are, what they're thinking, the subtle and many clues from body language, posture, intonation and even just where they're looking tell you an awful lot about how that person works, how they think, whether you agree with them.

However, when you're communicating digitally, via e-mail or text, you loose this personal grip.

One has to therefore rely on the face value of the information presented, is it spelt correctly, is the grammar correct, have they thought out the reply and addressed all your requirements from anything you sent them?

In my case I am often asked things like... "What do you do to better yourself?"... "Or have you done anything of note recently"... And I'm asked by people who have read my blog, or CV, or just know me... And I often say "Have you read my book?... Have you read my Blog?"

This kind of interaction puts me on a huge downer, why should I bother with this person if they've not performed what I consider the basics of due diligence?

Then there's my huge pet peeve in E-mail... I send a mail... "Dear whoever, bla bla... Xel"... They reply... "Dear Zel"...

No, not "Zel"... "Xel"... spelling, and it's not just spelling, it's that you've been given the answer right in front of you, if you can't have been bothered to take the last thing you read, and put it into the first thing you write, you're being lazy or worst still you're being purposefully obstructive and annoying, because this grates on me so much.

I once worked with a lady called "Grace", she hated being called anything else, "Gracie", "Gracy", "G-dog"... All really, really annoyed her... and people did this day in, and day out, her final response was to stop communicating with these people with their own names... Even our co-boss, who was a "Mr Khan", he became "Mr Purple-Whipple-Snapple"...

When he queried this, she said "if you wish to call me G-Dog, I will call you anything I like also".

It was the perfect most polite and poignant reply on this matter ever seen, but it took a silly outrageous example to make this clear, if you can't call "Robert" a "Robert" on the next page, or a "Susan" a "Susan", or even a "Xel" a "Xel" don't reply.

Development : Phone Link

I wonder around all day with an Android phone in my pocket, however, I can't always answer it... "No Problem" I can hear you cry "leave it to go to answer phone".

However I purposefully have no answer phone, if you can't get a hold of me, you can't get a hold of me, but what I would like is a method of receiving a message which I can digest in my own time, not a voice mail, not a text message, I want to be able to have left my phone at home and still get the information from it that I've had a call....

I'm a developer... I can do this right?!!??!

Well, yes and no, first of all I started with a Java Application which would read the missed calls log and forward it to one of my servers, this worked, but didn't let the person at the other end know I had been made aware of the missed call, it also logged junk mails and just gave me the number.  If I didn't recognise the number I could be left lost.

So, I set about a but of middleware, I had the missed calls log forward to my server every few time it changed, the server then looked up each number on a white list and a black list.  If found on the white list is looked for them in contacts and sends them an automated message that I had received a missed call and to e-mail me...

Fine for contacts.

Last week however I went a step further, if a number is not black listed it looks them up as a contact then if not found it googles for them and looks scrapes the top ten results.  E-mailing the number and these search results to me.

I've today added a series of regular expressions to pattern match any number or name from the results, and if more then two match it flags it as a contact and googles for them, finding an e-mail address is the target... It will go to my various e-mail addresses and alias, looking for previous missives and will send them a mail that way.

The person has to have had a contact with me, this is not blindly spamming people, and I had had to use a POP3 connection to one of my own email providers as Virgin Media stop SendMail from just working... But, so far it's worked.

Today alone I've had nearly eighteen calls, and it's sent about five messages today, since last night (when I started it) it's send just over twenty in total....

I dub this "Phone Link" for Android, and I may very well push it out to the world if I can polish it up a little and not have it so closely bound to my various e-mail services.  What do you all think?

People : Email too Old?

Today I had the issue of someone calling me, repeatedly, and I asked them to simply drop the information in an e-mail (my well published e-mail - it's right there on the right of this page, and they had it right in front of them).

Their reply however stunned me.... "Don't you have twitter?"

My reply... "Yes, but not for this, email it me."

"Can't I send it you over whatsapp?" They persisted.

"No, just e-mail it me, it's a PDF or something yes?"....

They continued "So, how about through the cloud?"

"Just e-mail it me, as an attachment!" I was getting exacerbated with them at this point.

"But" they began "but e-mail is so old".

I felt like ripping my hair out, there were reasons for this request, firstly I could get their return information, second the attachment was over 35mb and finally I didn't want to have any complications about where to send the information.  They had my e-mail address right there, right in front of them.

The net result, so far, however is nothing has arrived, no sign of it... I'm tempted to phone them back and point this out, but I can't be bothered... Phones, like me, are so last century after all!

Ubuntu Server - Automatic E-mail of Status upon Boot

As the multiboxer project has grown, I now need to support multiple bug reporters (I have three helpers now, if you've not donated yet and joined in you're missing out!)....

So with the new bug reports I'm looking at establishing a server at home, with a private IP and allowing the helpers to post their tickets there.  The trouble is, the loft man lab, where the server is stationed, is serviced by wireless only.  The signal strength is good, and I'm not going to throw a cat-5-e cable up there because I've spent too much time fixing walls and removing old dead telephone cables as it is.

The server is a Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS box, and when it boots I want it to e-mail the testers, and me, its IP Address.  This way I don't have to faff about with dyndns (as much as I love them, their usage terms are a pain in the arse for free users now-a-days) or any other dynamic domain name service.

Now, the IP mailing just needs to send the interfaces information out, through a few tricks the IP of eth0 is the router outbound IP, and I've carefully opened port 80 for them to chat to it over the web...

So, to set this all up... We need a script to wait an amount of time, then get the adapter information, and then e-mail it...

sudo nano /usr/sbin/bootmail.sh

The script then looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

echo Waiting...

sleep 30

echo Getting Interface Info

ifconfig > /tmp/ifinfo.txt

file=/tmp/ifinfo.txt

echo Sending mail...

function mailalert(){

  echo Calling Mail...

  sendmail -F "noreply@Git-Server-VM" -it << END_MESSAGE

To: user1@gmail.com,user2@gmail.com,xelous@hotmail.co.uk

Subject: Multiboxer IP Update

$(cat $file)

END_MESSAGE

}

mailalert

echo Complete

You can look at this yourself in detail, I'm noting it for reference myself...

You save this file and then have to allow it to execute:

sudo chmod +x /usr/sbin/bootmail.sh

And finally we need to add it to the boot script, so its run as the server comes up...

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

And before "exit" at the bottom add:

/usr/sbin/bootmail.sh

Reboot your server and you'll now get an e-mail of the IP interfaces sent out...

I may later improve the script to add the bug reporters to a known user group, use echo & cat to output the members of that group into a file, and use that list as the "To" field.  But for now, with the happy few of us, this will do.

Now, I would have previously (as you can tell by my older blog entries) used Subversion.  However, I'm managing this project with Git, so I may also now set up the Git on this server, and put a centralised copy of the code onto it, securing it with SSH... Pretty sure there was a good tutorial on setting this up on a server in a recent Linux Format...

Multiboxer - Support - Knock back

I'm sat with my IDE open, and multiple World of Warcraft clients setting up my macro's for healing.  I have the two alpha testers for today on skype, and I have over 150 views on each of my Multiboxer posts on this very blog...

What I don't have is any supporting sponsors :(

I think this may change when I release the beta (time & function limited build) software with some World of Warcraft and Neverwinter and Runes of Magic profiles, so people actually can get their mits on the software and see it is real, and it does need help developing.

But what I also have with me is a pair of e-mails, you see I sent this project off to see if an old contact (who works in games) wanted to support the software, his response is a no... This wasn't a surprise, I'm pretty sure I pissed the guy off, and they only work in game publication, not actually in game tools or play support tool production.

Happily though the chap didn't tell me to go forth and multiply, what he did do however was send the message onto a chap called "Andrew".  Now I have no idea who Andrew is, but he's maybe been to these very pages to have a look, so hello Andrew... but his reply is rather odd... Let me paste it here...

"its probably good for subscription games (ie. encourages more subs) like WoW, but I don't see a benefit for F2P."

And this is where so many people working in the game business don't connect with their audience, he doesn't see the point really, that's what this says... he doesn't see why you'd want to play a half dozen characters at the same time, and he doesn't see the reason you'd want to do this in a Free to Play game...

Hmm, lets digest why I want to play multiple accounts at the same time... Its more of a challenge, and I can access loot from PVE content without sharing with others, I can explore and enjoy PVE content without the need for friends online, a guild, or Pick up Groups (vomits)... In PVP I get a huge, and legitimate, play advantage over others (how many multiboxers do we know who got Grand Marshal in WOW?)...

That is a lot of the reason I used to play WOW with my guild, but without my guild a multiboxer is the only way to go... It has only one down fall for me personally, the cost...

So to mitigate the code... Free to Play... 

Would I like all those advantages of playing content and comptetitive play in a Free to play game?... YES!  Of course I would, in fact with F2P titles there can be a slightly more obvious advantage to having your own group and that is many free to play games have fragmented audiences, they don't have the player numbers or the popularity of WOW driving them, so populations can be sparse.  Starting out in Runes of Magic - which I've done multiple times - can be quite lonely.

With my own team I'm not lonely.

This leaves me wondering who this Andrew is, and whether he's been to see the amount of YouTube videos of other Multiboxers using other software, and the high costs of those software suits compared to what I'm trying to produce?

P.S. Before anyone gets off of their high horse exclaiming "Who does this Xelous think he is?"... I work for a multi-billion euro international gaming company... I'm a software engineer for them, working on graphical front ends and gaming interfaces... I spend a LOT of time talking to a LOT of different companies and developers... So I know what I'm doing in a gaming company sense... This project, just like for my contact above, is not in my employers genre of interest.  But it is in my genre of personal interest.

Lovable Linus

So, the register made a big thing yesterday of another outburst from high linux overlord Linus Torvalds about SoC architectures, you can read this here.

But they seem to have missed the slightly more creepy reply to that discussion thread by one Neil Brown...

"As you wish."

We all know where we've heard those words before...

Email Etiquette

I have an annoyance to run past you all, if you receive an e-mail from someone, lets say... "Robert", and they sign their name "Robert", do you then do and reply "Hey Rob", "Hi Bob", "Yo Robbie"...?

No, any sane person replies Robert, they put Robert you reciprocate.

So why is it so hard when I write my name...

"Bla bla, whatever whatever... Xel"...

And then I get a reply..

"Morning Zel"...

Its the height of bad manners, there's a whole raft of names who get this... Joanne and Joanna.  Robert.  Christopher.  Jonathan.  Elizabeth.  Hundreds of names, and hundreds of mails and you still get this bullshit of people being lazy.

I find it insulting, they've clearly not read your mail, or they've pictured you I one mode and you're someone else.  I'm sure if a psychologist has ever, or does ever, notice this and study it they'll come up with some dominance thing, the reply is trying to domineer who you are to dictate or homogenise you.

I went to college with a guy called Jon, his name was "Jon" not Jonathan, not John, Jon... Jay Oh Enn... Jon... And I remember even asking him whether it was short for Jonathan, or spelt different, I think at age sixteen I blurted out "That's a bit odd".  Which is doubly weird of me as my actual name is Jonathan and I prefer "Jon", and forever get "John" or "Johnathan" or "Jonathon".

It annoys me, If I reply "Jon" then you recipricate, if I stick with Jonathan, you stick with Jonathan... If William sends William you send William, not Willy, or Bill, or Billy!

Outlook Web Mail

Here's my review of outlook web mail - which I've oft moaned I've been forced into using - from a working e-mail system to this piece of shit.... And that's my review...

ITS A PIECE OF SHIT

And just so you can see just a few of my problems with it, a picture speaks a 1000 words.

And yes, I've tried it on all the major browsers, I try to use it from different locations (i.e. different internet connections) and from different Operating Systems.  It just does not function sufficiently, and I'm fast becoming forced to have to resign myself from using it - after over 15 years using that e-mail address - which is a major MAJOR ball ache.

E-mail Hacked, WarThunder Ruins Economy & Minecraft restart

What a bit of a roller coaster time I've been having, lots of personal stuff, but then technology has slowly crept back into me.

I'm still enjoying WarThunder - though less so with the currently fucked economic model (I have Spitfire Vb and Vc, as well as two differnet model 109's to buy - all for 100,000 credits, whilst only able to earn about 10,000 per game, this means I'm going to take about 50 games to earn the cash -  and I only get to play 2-3 games an evening, so this is over a months grind to just play the next level of aircraft) and to be honest I can do without a grind of a game.

They did a good job with the April Fools joke in game however - I did enjoy flying in the My Little Pony Airforce, and the artwork was top notch, however I'd have been happier to see an economy fix.

Also, there was an event on Sunday where for winning your first and fifth fight you'd get gold eagles, I never saw this advertised, I never understood the text in game, and I never won in the one game I played that evening, so I never got any gold eagles and this makes me sad, from such PR highs to lows all in the space of a weekend.

The other technology news was that one of my e-mail addresses was hacked, by a chap in India, whom I thoroughly intend to visit and castrate.  Seems he trawled and then trolled my Yahoo e-mail password and started to spam people in my address list at 3am.  The next morning my wife asked "Why were you up at 3am sending me this"... and of course she'd clicked the fucking link, so I had to wipe the laptop, and change my yahoo account and all manner of things.  But being in possession of an ounce of technical nouse I fired  up a virtual machine and tracked this link mailed around down, I also tracked the links in the dozens of failed mail daemon delivery messages spammed from my account.  And they all went back to an educational establishment in the Punjab.

I sent a mail to the administrator of said Educational Establishment, but I don't hold much hope of them cracking down on this shit, not least because this place in the Punjab appears to be a rocky stoney mountain when you look on Google earth, but the image of the site as shown on their web page looks like a none-descript office building from Droitwich - no offence to Droitwich.

The other thing that's been going on is Minecraft - I've had minecraft since it first came out - I've even studied the java code under the hood - yes I'm that much of a geek.  But I've only really played it once.

I started to play it again - mostly as I'm so agreeved at WarThunder - but also because I'm still without power on my main gaming PC so wanted something I can run on the laptop whilst on battery power.

Anyway, I've started to enjoy Minecraft some, I have a little railway, I've got a cow farm, and I'm starting to automate somethings with the seemingly magic redstone.  I've been to the nether and I plan to open a big mining facility to discover more diamonds.  But I'm also tempted to start to record my exploits, and make a series of progress videos.  IJevin on YouTube does a good job of this, but he does seem to appear with lots of gear start off the bat, I'd rather show everything in real-time - or at least sped up in places - to show every rock, every seed, every stick gathered and how it came along.  But this is a pipe dream, I don't have a voice for YouTube video commentary, and I don't have the time, though I've love to have more YouTube content.

Fake NC-Soft Account E-mails

I'm sure all you lovely, non-existant, reader type people out there are smart enough not to fall for this one, but there is current'y a fake spam e-mail making the rounds perporting to be from NCSoft.

The e-mail uses quite bad English, to try and accuse your of having been identified as using an out of game money service.

Here's a snippet of the stupidly bad e-mail:

"When you receive this message at the same time means that you have a routine account of our recent examination, was checking your account we have the evidence to prove that involved in the controversial game currency transaction so we had to take the necessary measures.

Please visit our web site [Fake URL woz 'ere] as soon as possible to activate your account or we will suspend your account."

That is pretty much how the mail appears in your inbox [or spam box], except it's not in italics.

So, don't fall for this silly scam, and scammers, learn to speak the lingo before going solo.


Soon to come, a new post about my adventures in getting to grips with DDO.

And I'm also playing another F2P MMO again Runes of Magic. Which I first had a play of back in September 2009.