tl;dr

Harmonix in sordid top-selling-game-gets-sequel shocker (more from Eurogamer)!

The best bit is that Harmonix are not bastards. Although RB2 will ship with a complete set of new and upgraded plastic instruments (because, hey, I didn’t have enough already), the game will work perfectly well with the old ones, and indeed the new ones will work in the old game too. This also applies to DLC, tracks you buy for the game from the Xbox Marketplace. DLC bought for Rock Band will be playable in Rock Band 2, and vice versa. All good stuff. I just wish there was some way to carry the 60-odd tracks over from the disc of Rock Band into Rock Band 2 as well, so I wouldn’t have to be swapping the disc over mid-session if I want to play, say, Enter Sandman.

However, this means the European release of Rock Band on the PS3 and Wii (which was scheduled for the vague date of “summer 2008″ will come only shortly before the US release of Rock Band 2 (September 2008), and only a few months after thre European release of Rock Band on the Xbox 360. I suspect this means we’re not going to get Rock Band 2 for months and months either, unless they do something radical like skip over Rock Band on PS3/Wii entirely and just release Rock Band 2. That doesn’t seem likely. So, argh, as I’m going to have to wait months again. Stupid staggered worldwide releases, this is worse than Nintendo.

Edit for an update later: it’s seemingly been confirmed (albeit to a site I’ve never heard of) that it’ll be out in Europe in September.

Personal

On 28th June 2008, we marked my mate Scott’s eighteenth birthday (his 12th eighteenth birthday in a row, fact fans) with a curry at the surpassingly excellent The Cinnamon Tree. I heartly recommend their mixed shashlik, which was very lovely indeed. However you should be cautious as to their green chilli chicken…

…which Toby ordered. The light was quite dim in the restaurant and the colours are all out of whack on this photograph; in person, the curry was much greener in colour than the brownish you see here. It was green because of a very simple reason — it was approximately 75% green chillis, with a further 20% consisting of pureed green chillis. These were the sort of thin, long chillis you see used in a lot of Indian cooking, like the ones in this picture, and they were pretty potent. I have no idea how he ate any of this, and yet he very nearly finished it, much to our collective surprise. Bravo!

Click here to see the rest of the photos.

Personal Photos

Awesome! I came second on the fifth BETEO photography challenge with this entry, on the theme of Degeneration or Dilapidation:

Read on for some of my rejected pics as well as a discussion of how I took this one.

Read more…

Personal Photos

John Gruber writes:

…the more I think about it, the more baffled I am that Narayen said anything specific at all. Talking about technical progress only serves to focus attention on the fact that it is Apple’s decision, and by all appearances, Apple does not want Flash on the iPhone.

He then goes on to list some reasons this can’t happen, including technical (Apple don’t want inline media in the browser for performance reasons), legal (the iPhone SDK specifically does not allow any VM type environments, which certainly disbars both Flash and Java), and commercial (Apple are quite enjoying their control of the iPhone environment and would really like to not give a chunk of it to Adobe). Clearly Apple are quite serious about this, as they went to some efforts to write a special YouTube application, including a bunch of stuff on the YouTube server end like different codecs and whatnot, entirely so they could do YouTube without doing Flash.

That said, I don’t think it’s very hard to decode what Abode are doing here. The legal problems Apple could resolve if it chose to do so by simply giving Adobe a special licence. And although the iPhone is very slow by modern computer standards, Mr Gruber himself claims that it’s is roughly on a footing with the original “Pismo” G3 Powerbook. I’m pretty sure I’d used some Flash apps on machines of that era and that they worked, perhaps not well. So I don’t think the technical argument is unsolvable.

No, the real reason Apple don’t want Adobe — or anyone else — to port Flash or Java or any of those things to the iPhone is simply control. Apple want to control what can run on the iPhone so they can sell more apps through the iTunes App Store, which is a reasonable enough thing for a commercial software/hardware vendor to want to do. There isn’t much Adobe can do to change this… except to attempt to strong-arm Apple by going directly to the iPhone users, all wounded and bruised and sincere, and saying “well, gee, guys, we wrote this real pretty Flash thing for the iPhone and all and we’d just love to give it to you for free but them nasty types at Apple just won’t let us! We know! Why don’t you just go call them and let them know what you think of that?” They are gambling that enough people want Flash on the iPhone badly enough that they’ll pressurise Apple. I wouldn’t like to call whether or not this will work — ask me in a month when I have my iPhone and can tell you if I find the lack of Flash annoying or not — but I’m sure this is what they are up to.

So I think what Adobe is up to is pretty easy to understand, and I find it vaguely odd that Mr Gruber, who is normally so goddamned sharp, finds this so mystifying.

Personal iPhone, Tech

I have been sorting out my digital photos over the last week or so, collating them, resorting them, and getting them organised onto my new NAS. Came across these two, one of which I thought I’d lost and the other I had completely forgotten about!

The left hand one, with the long hair, was taken in May (I think) 1998 in my mate Richard Hardwicke’s room in Oxford University. The beardless one was June 2004, which was the last time I was clean shaven. I shaved it off on a whim. I grew it back a week later!

Personal Photos

I’m writing unit tests for a large solution which consists of a bunch of projects. Some small, calculation, utility type projects are in managed C++ and the rest are C#. When I run my tests under the GUI I get this error on one of the C++ DLLs:

Instrumentation error while processing file Util.dll:
Error VSP1014 : Unable to open file 'F:\src\Util\bin\Debug\Util.dll' for writing..

Now, under Team Suite 2005, this seems to be a well-known problem but that Knowledgebase article does not describe what is wrong here. For one thing, the error message is different even though the error number is the same. For two, this is my DLL so I have the PDB file for it. And for three, if I hop to the command line immediately after this error and invoke mstest.exe manually, the test runs fine. I don’t get the same error and code coverage is generated.

For now I think all code coverage will have to be done on the command line, as I’m completely stymied now. I can’t see any way around this.

Personal .Net, Coding, VisualStudio

I always forget how to fix this, so here it is for my future reference: if it annoys you when you freshly install gvim on Windows and it does Windows stuff like ctrl-v as paste or not allowing you to visually select by pressing “v” and tapping the arrow keys, you need to find your system wide .vimrc file (<VIM_INSTALL_DIR\_vimrc by default) and remove lines like “”source $VIMRUNTIME/mswin.vim” and
“behave mswin”.

The gvim config file comment character is a double quote, remember!

For some reason I am missing the “Edit with Vim” menu, perhaps these are some fixes.

Personal Coding

Hmmm, interesting. Writeup on Engadget here if you’ve missed the highlights. Some thoughts:

• No word yet on UK pricing, although Apple claim it will be “the equivalent” of $199 around the world ($299 for the 16Gb model) — representing a 50% price cut over the outgoing 2G models. The BBC claim that is £100 but if it sells here for £100, with the UK’s high import taxes and VAT, I’ll be exceedingly shocked. O2’s site just says “come back tomorrow”. Teasers.
• Also about pricing, it sounds like Apple are abandoning the business model they used with the iPhone 2G, where there were no operator subsidies on the hardware and you could walk out of the shop without a contract. Engadget notes “both pricepoints require a contract”.
• I’m very surprised that it didn’t get a capacity bump to 16Gb/32Gb but in light of the vastly reduced RRP this is likely a cost-cutting measure. It has been suggested to me that we may see a capacity bump in the usual late autumn iPod update window — that seems possible.
• The battery life getting longer is a welcome boost and not one I saw coming. Having gotten used to charging my current phone, a 3G HTC TyTN running Windows Mobile, every single day, the iPhone 3G’s 5 hours of talk and 300 hours standby sound like a very nice upgrade.
• The unnamed GPS manufacturer who said he was “shitting himself” about a GPS iPhone needs some new trousers — unless he works at TomTom, who are not taking this sitting down. Apple not supplying their own turn-by-turn navigation solution creates a good opportunity for these guys.
• Man, the iPod Touch is a terrible deal now! No wonder they are giving them away.
• Vaguely disappointed by the things they didn’t fix — no MMS still, no copy&paste (that anyone has found yet). Apparantly it can bulk delete SMSs now though.

Overall? I’ll see you in an O2 shop on July 11th! If hackers break it all the better — but if not, I’m out of contract and on an O2 SIM-only tariff anyway, so upgrading to the proper iPhone tariff isn’t a great hardship. At least then I’ll get that hella nifty visual voicemail.

Personal iPhone, Tech

Is it just me or is this still rather half-baked, even now in 2008? Everywhere I turn I run across tiny little rough edges. Like this one: I am using Team Suite 2008 to generate code coverage data during a unit test run. I hit Run Tests and get 48 test run warnings, one per test/per referenced DLL, that say

“Code coverage instrumentation warning while processing file FooBar.dll: Warning VSP2013 : Instrumenting this image requires it to run as a 32-bit process.  The CLR header flags have been updated to reflect this.”

So, yes. It simply cannot do code coverage on a 64-bit process. I’m running Vista x64, so naturally Visual Studio is starting up a 64 bit process, which the code coverage tool immediately fiddles with the CLR to drop it back to x86. This generates tons of sprurious warnings which (to top it all off) can be disabled on the comman line but not apparantly in the GUI. God knows what would happen if I were unit testing some subtle bug that only happened on the x64 platform.

On top of this, you still can’t Edit And Continue a running piece of code in the debugger properly if you are running x64. On my old Windows XP x64 workstation, it flat out didn’t work; now on Vista x64, it requires some messing around to breakpoint all running threads before it lets you get into the code.

I guess there must be some deep seated bits of the Windows API with some strongly held assumptions of 32 bittiness behind the scenes, and that what I am seeing are the rough edges of that hackery.

Personal .Net, Coding

Look, I really liked Bioshock. I’m not sure it was perfect — I cannot disagree with some of the arguments made by Tim Rogers in his rambolic review of the game, such as: why in this incredibly detailed world, with all of the effort that has been expended on some pretty incredible verisimilitude, are there gun dispensers everywhere, with cutesy designed graphics? Why does the dude stab that unnamed needle into his arm? Why is he eating all those crisps out of the bin? Worst of all, why does everyone who used to live in Rapture seem to have some sort of audio-diary-related tourettes, obsessively recording all their innermost thoughts onto charmingly anachronistic tape recorders and then leaving them lying around? So, yeah, not perfect but on the other hand the fact that these logical flaws would go unnoticed in most games but are so jarring in Bioshock is a testament to the tremendous work done by Ken Levine et al on the gameworld.

Regarding these inconsistencies, incidentally, a newsflash for Tim: they are there because it’s just a game and not the Second Coming of entertainment. Bioshock still does a lot of Accepted Game Things like bandages that somehow heal damage from falling. It’s not ideal, necessarily, but it’s not the biggest problem either.

Anyway. Bioshock made money and with money comes the idea that perhaps there is more money to be made. But… this is not a game that lends itself easily to sequels. It has a proper beginning and ending, with no room in the plot for obvious expansion, beyond the widely-mooted idea that Bioshock 2 will be a prequel somehow portraying the fall of Rapture into anarchy (which could work, I guess, with careful writing).

But wait, what is this? We’re getting a movie of it alongside the release of Bioshock 3?! THREE?! I’m an optimist and all, but even I find it hard to convince myself this is going to end well. I have the uncomfortable feeling that right now, the Bioshock franchise closely resembles the nuke in the closing scenes of Dr Strangelove. Some Take Two senior market dude is about to put on a home-made Big Daddy costume, get on top of it, and start jumping up and down trying to drop it on the world, whilst waving his big powerdril around and yee-haaing in an offensively Merkin manner.

Personal Games