Forthcoming on the Apple App Store: a genuinely useful, not-nerfed, not-fiddly, reasonably-priced file sharing app (Briefcase) which adds the ability to do iPhone-to-iPhone file transfers, and one of the best handheld games I’ve ever played.
Puzzle Quest in particular is significant. I got totally hooked on this on the DS last year, it gobbled up over fifty hours of my life — longer than I spent on any other game in 2007 except for Oblivion. It’s not even all that good when you take it apart (the writing is terribly hackneyed, the game balance hopelessly broken to the point where I was getting near instant kills towards the end) — but somehow, it is just, well, digital crack. And given how the game works it should play really well on the iPhone’s touch screen interface.
I won’t be buying it on iPhone. I can’t afford to go through that again. For god’s sake, I was having Puzzle Quest dreams towards the end, where I would awake sweating and shaking, trying to just match four more gems. But I recommend you do! In fact, I echo the comment on Kotaku by NaeemTHM:
EXCELLENT! Puzzle Quest in meetings, on the bowl, while my wife is talking, at funerals, during sex, while playing Puzzle Quest on Xbox Live, and on the drive to work?
Hell yes.
Personal, Tech, iPhone
iPhone
Hey, this is fascinating — it seems that WipeEout HD uses dynamic resolution to maintain 60fps. So, when the action is too hectic to manage 1920×1080x60, rather than drop frames or slow the game down, it scales the resolution then passes it out through the PS3’s hardware horizontal upscaler. That analysis has seen it vary between 1920 and 1280 horizontal pixels on a frame-by-frame basis. The linked article says overall it is less visually intrusive than the alternatives; if I get around to buying it I’ll have a look for myself.
I think that’s a very neat solution to a difficult technical problem.
Personal
Games
Sometimes, in EVE Online, corpmates will test their guns on each other. You need to be very careful when you do this though, because if you are too slow to stop, someone gets asploded by accident.
It takes a long time to hit F1, F2, F3, through to F8.
My Destroyer has eight guns.
These things are related:
Games
EVEOnline
Yet another app has been rejected for “competing” with Apple’s own apps, even though it doesn’t. This after the WiFi podcaster downloader also being rejected for alleged competition, and some apps being rejected for “limited utility” (yeah, because a dozen identikit ToDo apps are much more useful). Even Mac fans are unhappy.
I was really interested in the App Store, to the point where I was cursing my lack of a Mac to try it out. Clearly there is stacks of cash to be made. But if I was considering setting up a startup to write iPhone apps right now, I think I’d be reconsidering my business plan.
Personal, Professional, Tech, iPhone
iPhone
Some children’s author I’ve never heard of (he wrote the Artemis Fowl books apparently) will be writing a sixth HGttG book the BBC reports. After being asked to do it by Douglas Adams’s widow, he said:
My first reaction was semi-outrage that anyone should be allowed to tamper with this incredible series.
Hmm. At least we agree on that bit then. Seriously though. DNA had a remarkable writing style. Can this really end in anything but tears?
Personal
Rants
Just a few days ago I wondered aloud if VMWare are screwed following the abrupt departures of four of its eleven board members. Well yesterday they made a massive product announcement.
Virtual Datacentre OS further expands the already-best-of-breed infrastructure management tools to include the possibility of automatically expanding, on demand, your datacentre into another site (probably owned by a third party) somewhere in the cloud. One of the hats I used to wear was as a scalability analyst for the travel industry, where ecommerce traffic demands are grossly seasonal (it is not atypical to see 60% of traffic land in just two months of the year); I would have killed for some sensible model to rent extra capacity at just peak times. There is more analysis from The Register.
As part of this, they are publishing a new API, vStorage, which allows the integrated tools suite to command SANs to carry out disk provision, configure clustering, rollbacks, and failovers as VMs are created and taken online and offline. Again, The Register has good analysis of what this means; essentially, VMWare are once again blazing a trail into new and exciting territory that no other VM vendor has even thought about yet.
So, as m’learned friend James remarked, if all this awesome stuff happened on Diane Green’s watch — and as she only left a couple of months ago it must have been — why on earth did they get rid of her? And with her and her supporters gone, can VMWare keep up the cool stuff, or will the R&D falter now? There are exciting times ahead, for sure.
Personal, Professional
Virtualisation
My humble little blog has been getting a ton of hits over the last week or so, and buy a ton, I mean scores a day:
Where has this torrential downpour, and by that I mean drizzle, of hits come from you ask? Why, from Burger King’s national advertisement campaign for their Meat Beast Whopper:
In fact, the heavy use of Flash on Burger King’s website seems to have made it totally invisible to Google. Meanwhile I’m the first hit on all sorts of combinations of common search terms. Let another lesson from the “use Flash with caution” school of web design, kids.
Personal
Rupert recommended this recipe to me, so I’m putting it on my “todo”.
Put the butter (large knob), 2 glugs of olive oil, the sage (handful) and garlic (6 cloves, peeled, crushed) into a thick-bottomed, non-stick pan. Stir everything round and add the onions (5 red, 3 large white), shallots (3 banana) and leeks (300g). Season with salt and pepper. Place a lid on the pan, leaving it slightly ajar, and cook slowly for 50 minutes, without colouring the vegetables too much. Remove the lid for the last 20 minutes – your onions will become soft and golden. Stir occasionally so that nothing catches on the bottom.
When your onions and leeks are lovely and silky, add the stock (2 litres, beef/chicken/veg). Bring to the boil, turn the heat down and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes. You can skim any fat off the surface if you like, but I prefer to leave it because it adds good flavour.
There’s some optional mucking about with cheese on toast in the original recipe that I have omitted here for brevity.
Food
Cooking
The always-excellent A Somewhat Old, But Capacious Handbag wrote:
The Large Hadron Collider
Makes theoretical physics applieder.
It’s a machine for doing proton-smashing experiments at near light speed on an unprecedented scale in,
And almost infinitely safer than handing control of the US nuclear arsenal to John McCain or Sarah Palin.
Personal
Funny, Science
This really made me laugh. Not just for the puerile (but still funny!) “go pick my bums” but also the really enthusiastic response, “One desperate workforce, coming up!”.
Personal
EVEOnline, Funny, Games
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