Gamer Clarity

I had a bad time getting off my addition... Addiction?... What am I talking about?  Drink?  Drugs?  Women?... No I'm talking about Azeroth.

Yeah, I was addicted to World of Warcraft, in a big way, it came after a time being a member of a top flight Day of Defeat teams - Yes, I was once a hardcore FPS player folks - Enemy Down ladder anyone?  Yeah, old school....

And myself and another couple of players on the team (waves to Chaplain) were looking for something else to play, and it was the weekend before I started a new job - the job I currently still have technically - and a friend came to stay (waves to Paul) and he'd just bought a new game "World of Warcraft".

Now I knew about Warcraft, I'd played the RTS games (I even still have my copy of Warcraft II on the shelf behind me) but I'd not ventured into any MMO ever before; yes EverQuest and even Ultima had passed me by.  And I went out that night and bought the game from the local Asda.

I rolled a human, a Warrior (flexes muscles) and I roped Chaplain into playing too and that was it, I was hooked... I played every hour I could, my day was get up, boot PC, walk dog whilst machine booted and kettle boiled, back in tepid tea, toast and check the auction house and may be pick up a few nodes of metal ore before work.

I'd work until lunch when I had an hours gap at that time, and I lived 10 minutes away from work, so it was drive home, see the dog, feed him, and check the auction house, check my mails, post messages to guild members (yes I ran a guild) planning the nights activities (usually an instance for either myself as the main tank or the main guild priest to get gear - so everyone else could get theirs that little bit more easily) and it was back to work.

I'd blaze through the afternoon and be setting off home as soon as I could, arriving home I would walk the dog again and either we'd stop at the local chip shop for a kebab or I'd call for a pizza on the return trip, that would arrive when we got home and the dog would curl up around my feet whilst I played and ground and quested all night long.

I found achievement beyond my normal day, I found organizing the team purposeful (at the time I had gone from running a team of folks at work, to being the most junior developer, a hard knock so I channeled my team building and drive into the guild - not always to great success, but I ran two different guilds in my time - one a family style small team the other a vast ramshackle affair of infighting and subterfuge).

After years, I mean years, the vanilla game, The Burning Crusade and through to Wrath I played all day everyday, in Wrath I became a top flight PVP terror (not on the arena circuit, but out in the world, world PVP baby!)  I digested every tip, watched hours of "WarcraftMovies.com", I lived and breathed that game.

I was still playing ten years ago when I had a revelation, at work I had the chance to start to lead product, to do that my focus, my drive, my energy had to be focused back on work, away from play.  I'd already diluted my Warcraft time anyway - as by then I also ran two accounts (carrier pilot) in EveOnline and a multi-billion ISK empire and a small corp of players.  But work needed my focus.

I had met my future wife as well and frankly grown up... "When one becomes a man, one has to put away such childish things"... So I quit, boom, overnight, my final two characters a 68 priest and 78 druid were to be the last I took to higher level, Wrath was the last expansion I played.

All my characters now sit in the pergatory of the unsubbed account, but I yearn to see them again.  I'm sure you've all seen my efforts to set up my own server (an on going affair I might add), and it's that yearning for the old days which drives me to want to do that, time is the only stopper.

Time, the one element missing when I quit before, the yearning was there, but time is short and you have to focus.

At the moment at work I'm focussed on a delivery of a new product to a new market, I need that time back to myself, but I also need a release.  The current gaming trend for high impact, high drama, like PUBG is not doing my relaxing any good, the stress of World PVP would not in Warcraft either, and Eve - forget it, nerve wracking - so maybe my original home World of Warcraft PVE, on EU Thunderhorn server?  Maybe my old characters are still there?

Xelous the 60 warrior.

Eylomae the 60 hunter - who must look completely out of place in 2018 with a full set of Beastmaster (tier 1 I called it, but I've recently learned it's considered tier 0.1 - if it's even called the Beastmaster armour set at all!).

And all the rest, Blackthorn my bad-ass 80 Mage... 

I thought I might resubscribe the other day, it hit me like a pang in the gut, to call Chaplain and say "3pm Stormwind Gates, EU Thunderhown, Xelous will march back into town".  But I couldn't make myself do it.

So much has changed in the game, some maybe for the better, but to my play experience, to my recapturing the past so much has changed for the negative.

The moment of clarity shone through, I can never go back, I am still a gamer, though of which game is yet to be seen.

Virgin Media Cable to Wet String Maybe?

It has been just under a month since I started to measure my internet connection speed, I've been paying for 50Mbit, and receiving pittifully less at all times of the day, and huge dips during what is tabbed the "peak time".  We get massive slow-downs whilst streaming - constantly - opening say ITV player and then opening a web-site for wikipedia totally freezes the player until the whole wikipedia page has loaded - remember wikipedia is mainly text, there's very little media data being exchanged, but the player is just cut off; it's dreadful.

There's no reason for this, when I was paying for 200Mbit I was receiving around 33-36MBit at all times, so deciding to pay for only 50Mbit I was to save money and still get this speed I had had - since I never ever got more...

But it seems this is totally beyond Virgin Media, they're playing speed throttling shenanigans....

However, the clever chaps at Andrews and Arnold engineering might just have the solution for me... Wet string...

That's right, they're sending internet data, so that I presume is TCP/IP with the string acting as a conduit for the ADSL signal... Impressive, more impressive than my paid for cable service!

World of Warcraft - Classic

Its happened, the announcement with not quite enough information, but it did happen and the WoW orientated internet has slightly melted over it, everyone and their dog on YouTube have posted opinion pieces on whether this "in development" service will fullfil their desires.  I have no opinion in that, instead I'm going to talk about my Warcraft Experience...

I first met the world that is Warcraft with "Warcraft II", which I remember my brother and I bought whilst on a trip into Nottingham, we bought it from GAME on Lister Gate, and talked about it incessantly as our parents made us trudge around Marks & Spencers, rather then rush home to play immediately.

We played this on our Intel 80486-SX2-50Mhz, with 4MB of RAM and a 128K S8 video card - VGA baby!

I don't remember finishing the game, I have to be honest, I don't remember it that much... However, I still have the game, the exact box we bought is proudly on the shelf, and has been visible behind me in most of my YouTube videos.  And in 2000 I returned to play the game in full, as I had played AOE2 to death, was vastly disappointed with C&C3 Tiberium Sun and so wanted to return to Azeroth.

Fast forward to the release of WoW, and a friend (Hi Paul) came to stay for the weekend, and he brought this game with him... And I walked under the trees of Elwynn Forest for the first time, killing pigs with his level 6 Dwarf Paladin... And I loved it.

The moment he went home on that Sunday evening, I went to the Asda superstore in Long Eaton and I bought the game, the original game, with the first edition of the manual... Many years later I threw this away, when I moved house, I still kick myself for that, and remember distinctly looking at it all in the bottom of the empty dustbin...

But at that moment this was brand new, and I set up my account and went to it... I didn't understand my friend would be on a completely different server to me, so I just allowed the game to pick any server it liked.  I wanted to play and adventure in the game, so I picked the what I thought of as the "single player" option... PVE.  I did not understand what an MMORPG was.

Into PVE I stepped, Allience, Human, Warrior... And there I was, I remember I played three evenings around Northshire Abbey alone... Just three evenings, about 2-3 hours, maybe 6 hours played total, just to finish the Northshire Abbey quests and then I was sent by this NPC to "Goldshire"...

There were no loading screens, I thought I had moved from one zone to another when I left Northshire, I saw the section of map discover, and I thought this is huge - whilst only looking at Elwynn on the map.... And then I right clicked..... And the map stepped out... These slabs of undiscovered map... Darkshire to the south, Westwall to the West, Lakeshire... OMG this is a continent.

And then I right clicked again.... Two continents, two whole continents... I was a very small cog in a very large world.

The the server crashed, this was a three-four days after release.

When everything came back up, I set about questing, and I overwhelmingly remember it taking so long, like a week into my experience I was wearing all white gear from quests, and was eyeing up an Axe - purchased from an NPC - for 10 silver.  Which was a hell of a lot of money.

I remember playing with a friend who had rolled a Paladin, when he sat down to drink, I sat down to drink, I didn't understand what drinking did, I didn't read the tool tips, I was so naive.

A week further on, and my hours sunk into the game expanded and expanded, I was sleeping less and playing more, I used to drive home from work at 12noon, play 30 minutes, not eat, then drive back to work... Where I would leave the second it ticked past time, to get home and play again.

I soon had more friends in the game with me, and I helped form a guild... "Arx"... Named for the Latin word for fortification or castle.  I designed the natty guild tabbard in dark royal blue, a white tower on the chest and suitably lush borders... And we started to level.

I hit 40, and thanks to my side-line of mining - selling stacks of copper bars for 10 silver in general or by mail - as I didn't know where the auction house was - I'd not been to Ironforge (the only place there was an Auction house at launch!), but I hit 40 dirty poor...

I set about that evening going further afield, I travelled to Stormwind and then through to Ironforge, and I found more and more quests, I found the auction house, and saw I could sell the copper stacks I had for 35 silver each, 50 silver as bars... So I did, and made money for my mount so much more quickly.  Back to Eastvale I went to train and buy, a brown mare whom I always referred to as "Nelly".

And I travelled the world, meeting new people... It happened in the swamps outside Theramore, I met a night-elf.  The first I'd ever seen, she was a hunter, level 32 ish, and running... I was mounted, I didn't know any different, this was a female character... I spoke to her, and she spoke to me, we quested together... She joined my guild... THANK GOD she actually was a women... (Hi Sue).

I fancied the pants off of this woman, and rightly so, I saw a picture a while later (grrr baby, grr), I made the mistake of that same assumption before... Not so much fancying, but wondering... "Is that actually a dude?".... (Hi Nick, aka Eve - lol - yes we wondered for a long time mate, before you joined vent!).

The trouble then started really, you see I was a warrior, and the guild main tank, and I was struggling and pushing myself to level and gear up... The first little niggle was my co-guild leader (Hi Chaplain) was also a warrior, so there was a little trouble there that what I had, he had, what he needed, I needed.  This was solved later as he rerolled to a rogue, but we're talking very early vanilla, and having two warriors was a pain.

We also vastly lacked casters, we had a lovely priest (Hi NW), but he would never come into vent, or certainly never spoke, making it hard to dungeon - however, he was a world class top notch priest.  We had the lovely Sue as her Hunter, a Paladin (aka Nick), Chaplain in his Warrior or Rogue.  And then a rotation of different team members, we had a Druid (Hi Hlaalu), we had a warlock (whos name I forget) and that was about it... For a long time.

A friend from work rolled a Dwarf paladin I think, and he got very very drunk and that caused a fraction between WoW in my down time and my work life, so he left the server to play elsewhere.  We then had a few other paladins come and go, and then another female warrior - but she often wondered off to play Horde... True Blue represent, we ain't dealing with no half-Hordies here.

Mage and Warlock were always missing from our group, and it showed.

But we did get Strat and Scholo on farm, meager progress, but we had it on farm, we could go there over and over.  The next chapter of drama was about to burst all over me, a few of the folks in the team were not really grasping the idea of progress, about gearing up, some folks would go spend two or three hours skinning or picking herbs then go sell them, or skill up, and wonder why they were still taking a load of damage - inspect, because you're still wearing level 40 gear, you're level 58.

Another person took an aeon to get from level 57 to 60, and when they finally did break the level cap, they were too busy farming gold for an epic tiger mount... To be frank it all got slightly derailed, but I had pretty nice gear, and kept increasing it by going PVP Battleground farming... Knight Captain, thank you very much, gave me boots and leggings and some other bits to augment my gear, sadly though I lost the plot here, I fell out with Sue... I fell out with a bunch of other folks, and basically kicked them out of the guild.

Chaplain and I re-rolled new characters, I think Nick did too, and we later swapped to a PVP server.

I never enjoyed another Warrior like that first one ever again, I never met as good a healer as I had in NW the priest again, and PVP started to take over.... I rolled my own Hunter, and outdid Sue's progress - basically as she'd moaned she couldn't gear up, I got a full tier 1 (as it was then) including the cap and bow of bones form dark-master gandling, and the chest piece form General Drakkish, I had the full set... Just to point out - spend your time and you get what you want... And I did this before she'd progressed further.

I'll be honest, it was petty, but I fancied her, it was all I had to brag about - look at my gear - eyebrows waggle - I look back on that boy and laugh now, but that doesn't mean I don't miss that kind of playing, and as you can see from this text, I still know so much about the game at that time.

I miss being the sort of thotbott for the guild, literally, anything vanilla and Alliance, and I could pretty much answer on the spot.  I had learned the game.

As BC dawned I ventured as my hunter into the new lands, and I enjoyed them, but I also started my favourite of all my characters, a female human mage... Yeah rocking the female toon now... and I went full fire, never frost, I levelled for 1 to 70 in about four weeks full fire, in every dungeon I could get to, and I got into the level 70 PVP world, especially in AV and WSG.

I also re-rolled a new Hunter, a female one, which I also levelled quickly to 70, and I played DPS classes, no more tanking from me, though I did have a level 70 warrior for the good-old times.

I was mid-way through the vast and complex attunements in BC when Wrath was announced, yes I was not a progress attainer in BC, I just enjoyed it, thoroughly.

I never high-end raid in BC, I tried sun-well a little before Wrath came out, but I said to myself I would try to Raid in Wrath.

It never happened, I took my mage, blasted through the PVE to get to 80 and went dungeons and collecting my marks, and just went full on PVP.  I had a lovely full set of Gladiator gear, when it was very hard to get that.

However, I hated arena, I hated the starting of the crossing of realms, I hated that everything felt the same.  I loved the game, and still progressed my hunter to 80, and then started a druid - who strangely got a full set of tier gear raiding Black-temple as a level 70, but I never level capped everything.

I did Gruuls lair with a guild I had joined, fell out of love with the game, and stopped playing long before Wrath's era was over.

Since then, I have played on Nostalrius, but I missed my team, I missed the feel of my original server.

I fear that many of us have rosy tinted glasses when it comes to Vanilla, what I miss is the server, the knowing everyone, the need to know everything and travel, the RPG aspects.  And I can't help but think today players want instant gratification, they are not going to await for travelling to get somewhere, they are NOT going to want to plan their hearthstone and flight routes for optimum action in a quest hub, they want to point, click and win.

Will Classic servers work?  Perhaps, will they be Vanilla servers?  No.  That time has passed into legend.

Developer : How Big Is Your Floppy?

What are they teaching kids today?  I've just had the pleasure of talking to a gentleman whom has received a degree in computing from Stanford in the United States, I'm sure he paid a fortune for this education... He didn't know how many bytes were in 1.44 megabytes.

He literally said "about 1.44 million".  This was related to an old format of file being taken and converted for transmission over Wifi, the size of the data was relatively immaterial, but the source; historically speaking; was a 1.44 megabyte HD floppy disk, and though the floppy was long gone, the format of the file with it's limitation was not.

It got me thinking though, he was sat there, I'm sure earning more than myself, and he only had a jogging mental map of memory sizes, so I took a look at the Standard website, particularly the CS101 course... sure enough:

• "Byte" - unit of information storage
• A document, an image, a movie .. how many bytes?
• 1 byte is enough to hold 1 typed letter, e.g. 'b' or 'X'
• Later we'll look at storage in: RAM, hard drives, flash drives
• All measured in bytes, despite being very different hardware
• Kilobyte, KB, about 1 thousand bytes
• Megabyte, MB, about 1 million bytes
• Gigabyte, GB, about 1 billion bytes
• Terabyte, TB, about 1 trillion bytes (rare)

(Source: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs101/bits-bytes.html)

Yeah, a terabyte is rare?... NOPE!... A kilobyte is not "about" anything it is exactly 1024 bytes, and a megabyte is not about 1 million bytes, it's exactly 1024 kilobytes, therefore exactly 1048576.  By using this "about" prefix they had made a megabyte sound 4.8576% smaller than it actually is, that's not insignificant!

And so forth.

This looks very much like an out of date page, but it is the first search result from google too!

Even wikipedia gets the right values before this page did!

Story Time : Fantastic Rack Mount Mistakes #3

Technically this is not a rack mounted mistake, but it was a mistake made by someone with a rack mounted unit.  A loooooooottttttttt of years ago, around the turn of the millennium in fact, I worked at a company where they used a Windows 2000 Server to collect a series of information, from memory, I think it ran Websphere and Jakarta Tomcat as middleware, connecting to a Microsoft SQL Server back end.

This server gave me nothing but trouble, I had to bring it down to publish new software to it, then bring it all back up again, because of some wierdness, and worst of all, I was only a user on the machine, I never saw it, was never in the same room as it, it was hosted in a data centre far away from me.

Remoting into it on late 1990's internet (because they'd not upgraded) was painful at 14kpbs, so much so that connecting to it from home was easier, where I had the first generation "Diamond Cable" (later NTL, later Virgin) broadband... at a blistering 512Kbps.

The main problem was, I needed someway to get the server to tell me it's IP, it could change, and the network guy at work used to handle this by crystal ball gazing, and copying the new IP into an e-mail and sending it to everyone.  Of course at home, I didn't get my work mail... Humpf.

The system however was all just Java, and after about 18 months I got the chance to move up the suckling chain of management within the project, and I immediately pointed out to the directors that we could drop all this Windows stuff, and the expensive licensing, by going to this new system called "Linux".

As a result I ended up at an open day presentation in the middle of Birmingham, with speakers from RedHat and Suse.  The talks were pointless, the guy from RedHat wore a T-shirt saying "Suse is shite", and the guy from Suse wore a suit and talked about professionalism; not very constructive, it all wanted to pull the admins in the room into the "are you a pro, or are you a hacker" division.  Neither talked about the distribution.

I therefore decided to learn about Linux myself, and I started a new server, initially just an old Pentium II machine with 32Mb of RAM, it was soon found to be a little bit better and a hell of a lot cheaper than the Windows Server, so I got a new shiny machine (my first commercial rack mounted server, I forget the model, I'm pretty sure it was a Compaq, as I'd seen the Proliant at my previous place of work and think I told the boss to get one).

This machine arrived, and it ran seamlessly pretty much from the get go, as had a couple of disk deaths in it's time, but there was no problem with it.

With the problem of it being in the remote location however, I had a trick, I created a script, like this:

ifconfig > config.txt

traceroute www.bbc.co.uk >> config.txt

cat config.txt | mail -s BootMail xelous@hotmail.co.uk

rm config.txt

The result?... I had it send me a mail whenever it reset, so I got the IP information, and a trace route listing to the outside world (I think the original place I used to trace route to was Altavista!  And it didn't go to hotmail, it went to my old NTL provided e-mail address.

What's the mistake here?... Well, that NTL e-mail address linked to my virgin e-mail address, which forwarded to my MSN address, which turned into Hotmail.

And... You may have guessed it... The other day, that very server was turned on somewhere, somehow... It had a network connection, was powered on, and it sent me a mail!

It was in Worcestershire, I think, and I could still SSH into it!

I changed the daily greeting to tell them they're server is insecure, disabled the script which was e-mailing me, and this pretty much ends our story.

The failure?  Don't plug things into your network, into your rack, unless you know what they're trying and going to do.  EVER!

Story Time : Fantastic Rack Mount Mistakes #2

Nothing is going to compare to the first post I made in this little series, but this was the first server room moment I had had to deal with.

I started work at a location, not very far from where I live now, and there was a little server room, again an old NCR mini-computer but this time it was running a custom cut of SCO-Unix, this machine was important, it handled everything for the whole midlands operation of this company.

And it was my first day...

There was a rack with kit on the right, and a rack with kit on the left, and you walked down the gap in the two... This was particularly bad, as it left you no room to move in there.

I was being shown around by the previous guy, whom was leaving, and I was really nervous... (Jim if you're out there, I hope you remember this).

So, we'd just concluded the tour of the server cupboard when I noted a black fleck in the air flow around me, another and another.  "Jim, there's black stuff".

Before I had the words out my mouth we got an awful smell of burning, everything was still on though.  All the network switches, the minicomputer, the UPS's the PC's running MSMail... Everything was still on, even the CRT monitors....

Something was certainly going wrong through, Jim stepped to the top of the room, leaving me in the middle isle, and he slid down the back of the rack and took a look, suddenly his arms were up and he's pulling the cables from a CRT monitor, and he yanks it down, it's clearly burning!

I pull the side door open and he skittles this thing down the corridor where it comes to a halt, happy it's not in the server room and not actually burning up we turn back to see what mess has been done.

The air has already been filtered so the soot removed, everything looked fine.  Except, unspotted by myself (I was only a few hours into this role) there was a little warning light on one of the UPS's, warning that it was on battery only.... I missed it, Jim missed it... Don however didn't miss it, as suddenly at the main door Don skidded into view, and nearly body tackled the pair of us inside the room, as he was down on his hip pulling at the mini computer.

"There's no power!"

The minicomputer was still on, but pressing a key on a terminal it was reporting it was busy shutting down.  The UPS was warning it had low power.... The company was offline.

Everything stopped... from ray role to purchasing, stopped.  Over 200 people, stopped.  COSTLY!

What had happened was as Jim had gone around the back, he'd stood on a cable, the mess of cables to be honest, behind the rack.

And one of them was the female to male coupler for the UPS to the wall, the plug was still in the wall, disappearing into the mess of cable, and then a cable emerging and plugged into the UPS, so it looked fine... and the UPS was connected to the minicomputer, with nice screwed in connectors... Hard to remove.

But this coupler was just laying there in the morass, and it was hard to see, and it was not screwed together at all... And it had come loose.

Needless to say, Jim was never remembered for saving the room from the fire, but remembered for unplugging the minicomputer.

Story Time : The £220 Commute

Today; at least the today at the time of writing this, not when I publish it; has been a troublesome day.  I got up very early, the plan being to get petrol and then go to the pony...

(Ours are Gerty in the black center, and Magic on the right)

Anyway, this plan was interrupted after about 50 feet.. I reversed off the drive, pulled forward and opened the windows to air the car out... And I heard an ominous flapping....

Pulling over, immediately, I found that I had a nail in the rear passenger tyre...

Yup, that's the sucker...

And this tyre was flat... I have a spare!... but... but... Looking at the rear drivers side tyre... it's flat too.. I don't have a picture of this, as I didn't want to stand in the road to take it, I'm in the UK, remember, so you can figure out that the drivers side would have been in the road.

So here's another wider shot of my flat passenger side...

It's only 6:45am, plenty of time to get this fixed before I'm late to work...

So, I give up even looking to change the tyre, there's some air in them, get to the tyre place!

Shit, it doesn't open until 8:30am, so I had the highlight of my day, I left the car on their forecourt and went for breakfast.  A long walk, collecting no Pokémon I might add, later and I had black coffee and a croissant.. Oh la la.

Walking back however and they were opening up, and they happily helped to get my car on the ramps before they officially opened.

Two punctures?... Nope... Unrepairable, so two new tyres, SHIT!  I'm skint, proper skinty poos... Credit Card to the rescue.

But then... "There's another puncture here mate, looks like a different nail type"... And it was a very different nail type... It must looked something like this before it went in.

So a large outer disc, with a hollow shaft and a much smaller inner disc, which had been deformed into a sort of blob when it'd gone through the rubber wall of my tyre, what had then happened was the tip pierced the first disc took a 3mm diameter of rubber then the bigger head had formed a half decent seal on the outside, so I only had a very slow puncture.

Touching this outer disc with a screwdriver the chap changing the tyre got it to fly across the room impressively pinging off the concrete floor; we'll say nothing about the health and safety worries this might cause some of you reading at home.

Anyway, the result was a third new tyre... So what the hell, in for a penny, in for Two hundred Pounds, do all four!

So, four mid-range tyres and an alignment, I'm two hundred and twenty pounds down but by golly I'm back on the commute, and seeking my desk, not least because I need another coffee and a sit down.

Phantom Capacitor Blown

Ever hear a capacitor let go?.. Ever had that deep stomach lurch as you hear a piece of electronics give up the blue ghost?

I did last night, stood up to plug in a new USB device - a new USB Flash drive - and as it went in... I heard, through my headphones, what I distinctly remember to be the cry of the god of capacitors, Pop!

But the machine stayed on... Okay, okay, damage limitation, shutdown, power off.. power off at the wall...

Open the machine, check the caps around the CPU, check for leaks, check for bulges, check for anything.... Nothing...

But I heard it??

Maybe it's the USB device itself.... Pull the plastic casing off (I wish they'd make them less robust)... Oh, there are no caps on it, and there are no obvious signs of damage, save the now chopped open case...

I heard a cpacitor go, I'm sure I did... I stand up again to push the PC back into place.... Sit down... Pop!

Holy shit, the same noise, but the power is off...!!!! It's the wiring in the house itself, it's the breaker, it's... It's.... It's my fucking belt buckle hitting the desk.

Doh.

Gaming & Films - Blade Runner 2 - Robin Hood X

What has been going down in groove town?... Well, I have to say, Elite wise, not a lot... I've been very busy with the office job, doing 12+ hour days all week.

I've finished the project I was on however, and am happy to sit now puzzled that everything was such a rush, because unlike some other developers around here, when I say something will get done... I do it.

Anyhew, I did just spot this: http://deadline.com/2015/02/blade-runner-sequel-harrison-ford-denis-villeneuve-1201382634/

Immediately, I just think.... "NOOOOOOOOO"..... A long strong voice, showing my lineage as a chronic moaner and critic... Just... "Nooooo"....

This then came to my searches and it sums things up....

Or perhaps this.... 

But, I dunno, we're yet to see Ford in the new Star Wars, maybe he can still act and this isn't just like letting Paul McCartney still sing (he can't sing anymore, if you didn't realise and his nurse hasn't told him).

More closer to home, I also spotted this film ditty...

http://deadline.com/2015/02/a-third-robin-hood-script-enters-the-fray-this-by-king-arthur-scribe-joby-harold-1201382551/

Yes, a "Pirate's of the Caribean" style hood romp... Hmm... I wonder if like "Into the Woods", it'll be a fucking musical?!?!?

So, if I'm not up to Elite Trade Data code, what am I up to?... Well, the office is nearly all sorted, I'm also signed up to Twitch now, OpenBroadcaster and some other options are being tweaked about with, so expect some live streams of gameplay, of development and perhaps even a special once a week segment of the wife hassling me whilst I play (this is particularly funny, as she doesn't know anything, but insists on playing Zombie games, then complains how gorey they are!).

Expect to see more gaming content over the weekend!

Story Time - Programmers Sleeping

Once upon a time I was a loud mouthed, big headed, my code could never be wrong, I'm invincible... 

Kind of programmer...

Over time you will, unless you never go out, you will meet programmers who know more things about you, either about everything, or about certain specific things, and you have to learn to evolve and understand they just know more than you.

They might have been through the problem you're wrestling with for the first time, they might have worked on the base system, or they might just recognise the pattern of the problem you've got.

So don't just dismiss these folks, they know what they're talking about, and even if they don't take it, analyse where they've gone wrong and you learn from it, do not do what happened to me...

We're about six years ago now, and we had a graphical system, this system had been running games from many different sources for several years (about four) so it was a tried system, the hardware was known, it had known bounds and I personally had handled maybe a dozen different people working on it before, their games all worked, and I turn around and can see 32+ games working still to this day.

One thing I don't see right now however is this game from this one guy, because... He's a douche, and I don't actually see him because he no longer works here, of all the folks in his department he was the first gone of his own accord, because... well because he was one of those programmers, one of those people who never really grew up, he considered himself above reproach, he was perfect, his code was perfect and any issues were yours.

So, let us just dive off to games, games at their heart have a loop, which reads/updates the data, plays sound and critically updates the graphics, that's the core of all games from Battle Chess to Call of Duty, this game loop is time critical, if you delay the update or the display the game will look like it's stuck, or juddering, people often call this lagging, but the problem is that loop for interrupted to things didn't look smooth or play smooth.

But computers are fast! So for most trivial problems the data can be updated and the display redrawn faster than the hardware is actually limited to, so the hardware is done and sat idle waiting for the next rendering of the game.

This is called the sleep or delay, and games use this time to do other things, like perhaps check for updates or sort data.

Now this delay has to be controlled, you have to make it a fixed length, or set it up so that the machine works out how long the work it did was since it last drew the screen, and wait for the difference in time to smooth out the drawing.  This makes the game play smoothly, makes animation behave smoothly...

So, if you have a loop and you just randomly sleep for X time, but then the data processing you're doing takes longer than X the game will look like it's stuttering.... How can this happen?...

Well, how about this code:

while ( true )

{

    Update();

    Draw();

    Sleep(1000);

}

So, we update, then draw ,then sleep for 1 second.. okay, but what if the processing in "update" takes 800ms, how long will we take between draws now?... How about 1.8 seconds!  So that cycle the game will look like it took nearly twice as long to draw, and animations will stutter.

What has this got to do with programming?

Well, once upon a time this very code above strolled into view, and the programmer working with it kept saying "your machine is making my game stutter, it runs fine on my machine"... His machine being a more powerful machine with dual core and more RAM... So I pointed this out, he then set about trying to explain it all away.

When he then showed me this code, I just pointed at the sleep and went back to my desk, it was not my job nor part of my remit to work or debug his code, I saw this problem was simply he wasn't changing how long he slept for, but also he was very confrontational, because the contract with the "Sleep" function on Windows (the platform we were using) is not quite what most programmers expect.

You see sleep will go away and pause a process/thread for X amount of time, and it will come back to continue processing up to or after that time... Up to or after... Not immediately, so in a game you can't guarantee that the Windows Scheduler will pick up your thread and come back to your program immediately after 1000ms above!

I told this chap this, and he flat argued, he even went so far as to print out the MSDN documentation pointing out that I was wrong, and I was a wanker, and he went on a tirade around the office.

It was only later I went back and pointed out that he was referencing the sleep function for Windows Mobile, not Windows XP, and going to the right Operating System on the MSDN page, it said "upto or after the delay".

He didn't say sorry, he didn't say anything, he actually sat down and said "fat wanker".

Lucky for him my boss was stood right there and heard him say this, so I left them to it, but I never spoke to this cunt every again, he left the company soon after, he'd apparently agitated not just me but about six other people, arguing when they knew their stuff and then insulting them.

He was perhaps the third worst person I've worked with at this company.

http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/04/02/sleep-variation-investigated/

For information about how sleep works, and how variable it can be, check this out.

Story Time - French Souvenirs

Souvenirs... When I was a kid I used to go places, I can't afford to go places any more, but when I was a kid I went to places... And everywhere I went I bought the family little gifts back, to remind them how much they like me, kind of like emotional bribes, so I could gauge how much they did or didn't miss me and suck up to them and retake my place in the pecking order of bullshit... No, no in reality it was just something we did... we got little gifts, little souvenirs.

Now, I understand you buy yourself a little souvenir, so you remember your trip... like from Egypt I have really nice bed covers, and they're over 14 years old now and I still remember being asleep in Egypt everytime I go to sleep in England...

But when I was a kid I brought gifts back to others... France, Twycross Zoo, the Royal Concert Hall Nottingham, Wollaton Hall Nottingham... Nottingham Castle!... All these little places made a little bit of cash off of me and I remember to this day that no-one really kept these little things.

Except one person, my Nan... She still has a painted rock I bought her from France, it was just a washed rock from the beach, someone had painted a scene of a harbour on it... Only now odes it strike me as strange, because we neither visited, nor saw, a harbour.  The shop I got it from was around the corner from the hotel we stayed in, and the hotel was just on a road in the middle of a Pas-De-Calais town, very dusty, a little smelly and I remember getting told off for throwing Marmite sandwiches from a window... when a) I didn't have any Marmite sandwiches and b) don't like Marmite!

The Hotel had dubious plumbing, the escape ladders were made of copper pipes and looked so unsafe as to make you wish you could just throw yourself out the window.  One of the toilets would not flush.  And the food was so bad that I think of the whole 5 days of meals they served we only ate one and that was the one with chips (fries)... They served raw fish, horrid paté and just guck.

When we ran into a local we either made friends or hated them, very much like the aforementioned Marmite in that respect.

But this was the 1990's, still before everyone spoke English, so it was a struggle to actually communicate, not least because most of us were pre GCSE, we were year 3 as was, not year 4/5 and only got on the trip to make up numbers.

However, I do remember my first application of French, we were dumped on the outside of a town by the bus.  Totally alone... this would never happen today, and I think only happened because the three French teachers wanted to go to a bar and get more drunk, however, dumped on the outskirts of this town we were told in the middle was a market and we had to make our way there and ask at least three people directions....

This turned into me walking a head of a group of kids my age, because I was confident - with a then brown belt in Karate I was pretty happy I could fight off an attacker, be they French or otherwise.  So we marched through this town like the Germans in 1940 had.

Two French kids kept staring and shouting something at us, so I gave them a Nazi salute... Literally the finger under the nose and arm out... they ran off in shock... Only later did I find out this was illegal...

We turned this corner and were basically in a dusty looking, very hot summers day, street lost... There was a man in his garden so I went to him...

"Excusey moi missuurrrr"  I still speak French like this, so must sound like a retard to them, but that's a whole other story...

"oooooo eweeeeey lay marrrrrr-shhheyyy ssssiiiii vvvvooooo play"

Meaning, I thought "Excuse me sir, where is the market please?"... He looked at me, and snored, turned his back and went into his house... I fucking tried al-right France, I tried, and you were so rude to me... If you come here and falteringly ask in English "Where's the market please", I'll tell you, and even help you along so I understand you... I won't just snort and walk inside my house.

I dunno, all these years later I remember him doing that, maybe I turned him on, maybe he went straight in and started furiously masturbating.  Whatever he actually did all I remember is "he's a French wanker"... So, well done him for casting all the stereo types about French people listening to others attempt to speak French.

Around the next corner however our saviour appeared, a man in the street, walking a long, he was smoking, wearing a leather jacket and a black polo neck - on this hot day - he looked the typical French guy... I hit him with my now famous line... and he looked at me puzzled, then in a broad Leeds accent said... "Just round that corner mate".

Story Time - Worst Meal Ever

I've told stories about women and dates, so now for something just simply funny... or Disgusting... I have a dog, well we have four now, but I used to just have the one a golden Lab named Dude... You can find a picture of him on these very blog pages...

Anyway, when I first met the wife Dude and I moved in with her, and my Mother got all uppity that the wife was not looking after Dude, and started to send him food parcels, like some refugee prisoner of war... Needless to say, Dude loves the wife more than he loves me, and so these care packages were not needed...

But, one day one of these packages turned up, and there were three pies... Cottage pies... The wife got these... But being my skatty brained wife she didn't read the note, she cooked two of them whilst I was at work, and she and Dude had a right royal meal, then I got home... And the wife put the third pie into cook.

Slathering, because I know how nice my mothers cottage pie was, I tucked in... To this slimey, greasy, strong smelling thing... It was disgusting... But I was so hungry I ate it... It was meaty, very meaty, and covered in gravey after all...

I kept saying to the wife, this does not taste like my mum's cottage pie, and she's saying "mine was lovely"...

Anyway, I get through and look at the pie dishes the wife took them out of... Mine was plastic... hers and Dudes were porcelain... that's strange sending the dog a pie in a porcelain bowl... Hang on... Mine was plastic... 

A telephone call later.... and I'm sat there... I've eaten the cottage pie made of dog food...

Yes, my mother sent best minced beef for the wife and I, and one made of Aldi - Earls - dog food for Dude... The wife, just cooked two and never thought... Hmm, maybe the plastic one is different.

I've never quite gotten over this trauma, but suffice to say, Dave Lister is correct, dogs lick their balls to take away the taste of the food.

Confession Time - D&D

I've got a confession for you all... I have never played Dungeons & Dragons... There, I've said it, I hope we can move on after this.

Now I'm not including the online incarnation of the game, which I've played, and also blogged about...

I'm talking about the actual pen & paper, around a table, D&D...

I'm not sure where or why this passed me by, it is exactly my thing, but I think my trouble is I don't want to be a player, I think I want to try my hand at being the Games Master.

I dunno, I wonder if you can D&D via skype?... Anyone want to try?

Story Time - The Stand Up

This story could also be called "Little Red Riding Hood on the Sofa, in the Mr Men ear rings".

In a previous post I talked about my worst ever date, well another time I got stood up... Yep, it happens to us all... The difference here is that in most cases we've been stood up and don't get the booty...

.......

However... In this case, I'd already had the booty... Let me explain...

A week before the fable stand up, it was a mutual friend's 21st Birthday, and he had a party... So we got together, and it was fancy dress... Now I'm not big on the fancy dress, I have no costumes, and I had been working 6am to 9pm most days, as a consequence my Fancy Dress is my Karate Gi and belt.

Off we run to this party, and there's this girl, she's come as Red Riding Hood... Oh yeah, now I drove everyone around and when we got out my car she gives me this big hug... Okay it was cold, but not that cold... And she's all over me, she's pretty, dark hair, dark eyes... Nice looking.

I'll be honest, I'm single, I'm enjoying the attention, after the time at this (strange) disco we head back to my friend's house and we're all friendly, this girl is still all over me...

It's getting late, we're talking 2am gone, and everyone is falling about passed out or sleeping, anyway, she's next to me on this sofa, cuddled up to me, and suddenly she's hands all over me, she's trying to get my junk out my trunk; I cope a feel, I get busy on there and soon things are going on on this sofa, with people passed out all around us... I don't know whether to take her to my car or what, but... come morning she kisses me and makes her way home.

I'm all smiles, and leave with her number handed over...

I give her a call, and arrange to meet her later the next weekend.  And I call again mid-week just to you know keep in touch...

Saturday rolls around, I'm all pressed and dressed, I pull up at the arranged place, and I wait... And I wait... And I wait...

I figure, she's a girl, she was in fancy dress last time we met... Lets give her an hour... So I give her an hour...

Now this is before mobile phones, this is before the internet is a big thing, so to get hold of her I have to go find a street telephone box.

I call, her house mate answers, she comes on the phone... dead quiet... and I just quietly say... "You're not coming to meet me are you?"...

"No"... She squeeks.

"Right, okay, no problems babe"... I'm friendly, I just want to check before we slam the door on this, she was nice... "I'm guessing you want me to loose this number and never call again?"...

"Yes"  She's a little angry...

"Right, well that's a shame, but okay, good bye"...

As I hang up I kind of hear half an ounce of confusion, which I can't be sure of, but to this day I'd like to think meant "hang on, this guy is kind of reasonable"... But what ever, shut down, home I go.

I get home, watch some TV, think nothing of it and get a hold of some other friends and arrange to go out to meet them the following week, one of them being the guy who had the 21st party... So I'm at least going to tell him about the escapades.

Next weekend, I head out meet these friends and immediately get a strange vibe, the guy seems dead smug, and the lass we're with is all giggling at me... I ask what the matter is...

"We know you got stood up"

But before I could reply, or tell them about the sofa banging, they both laugh... "We knew she was, she told us, she called us"... And then the guy says... "Besides, YOU can have your shot AFTER I've had mine"...

Now, let me explain this guy is a ginger, with a big lump in the middle of his forehead, he's fat and quite boring... I'm a heavy metal listening, heavy drinking, hard working good bodied black belt in karate... Go figure the chances he had.

But I sit back, all calm, and just look at them, inside I'm laughing, I had my shot, and I scored!... Have my sloppy seconds, I'm thinking...

The guy had, until this moment been my friend, but this day ended that because basically sitting there laughing at me when he knew she'd not come pissed me off... You don't do that to a friend, firstly you don't cock-block, if you want your chance have it, but if you've seen a girl garlanded around your buddies neck like this guy saw her around mine he should know to back off and wait... To sit and laugh is just a bit sick.

Then I just filed the guy away into the pile of douche bags in my minds eye.

Unfortunately about a year later, I had to file the lass who was there that day away into the same file, but for different reasons...

And it annoyed the shit out of me, this guy being all high and mightly... Proper childish... "I want my try with her", "I knew she wasn't coming"...

Dude I already had her, I banged her on YOUR sofa, at YOUR party, where YOU spent more time in the Kitchen than with your guests, and YOU took us to that strange disco... I had her.

I'm also fine with her not wanting to meet up again, but I have the strong susicion that this episode, the first and only time, I've ever been stood up was something of your concotion, that you talked to her and you said something about me behind my back... It's a shame you did that.  Shame on you.