Well with my various posts about problems with TalkTalk I should probably point out that I did sign up. Less than a month later and it’s now live. And contrary to my expectations everything seems fine.

My router reports a connection speed of about 2.2 Mbit/s and I’ve had a combined download speed of about 120KB/s (including about 50KB/s from a peer-to-peer program). The only negative thing is that my modem and start up pack hasn’t arrived (my official go-live date was yesterday) but since I have a router and I’m perfectly capable of setting it up that’s not a major problem).

Also, my upstream bandwidth is apparently 288 Kbit/s. Not wonderful but good enough to stream reasonable video (I’ll post more about a cool app called Orb some other time.

I recently posted about BackBase, an expensive (for commercial use) AJAX development thingy*. Well Google have produced something similar for free Google Web Toolkit.

Although the end results are the same (as far as the user is concerned) there are important differences. The BackBase software is entirely client side. You write server stuff as normal, output BackBase code and the browser with JavaScript handles everything. The Google system is client and server orientated and odes more work on the server. The server also has to be running Java. It also has better browser support.

This could be a reason for me to learn Java, something I’ve managed to avoid for quite a while now…

* It’s actually an XML based markup language combined with a real time JavaScript processing engine.

I said I’d write about it yesterday. Well I was so busy actually using it that I forgot :P

The first thing I should point out is that Microsoft do not officially support home users installing MCE themselves and as such I have an OEM copy. Despite that the installation was painless although it does have it’s oddities. Most notable is that the installation makes no mention of MCE, it just says “Windows XP Professional”. Also unlike other versions of Windows this comes on two disks, the second disk containing the media center stuff as well as some tablet PC stuff. One final comment about installing is the disks are labeled (system-wise) incorrectly). It will ask you to install “Windows XP Service Pack 2 disk” when it really means “Put disk 1 back in”.

Since I don’t yet have a TV card I can’t use much of the really cool functionality of media center, but I did try playing a DVD and immediately hit problems. My DVD drive came with PowerDVD which is not supported by media center. Or to be more precise PowerDVD 5, the version I have, isn’t compatible. If you plan to build an MCE PC it is vital you have a compatible MPEG 2.0 decoder (All the options I’ve seen have been software but I would assume older machines with hardware decoder cards will work). So I downloaded a trial of PowerDVD 6 (which uninstalled my OEM version 5) and everything worked. Unfortunately version 6 isn’t free.

I’ve created a clever German flip card gadget for Google homepage. It displays a German word for a few seconds and then shows it’s translation. And then repeats with a new word. The vocabulary is very small at the moment but it will increase by at least one per day.

At the moment it also limits itself to 5 words per viewing. That is after showing five cards it loops (if it didn’t you’d never actually begin to memorise them).

Google Homepage

To use Google personalised homepage, you must have a Google account. When you have one, go to “Personalised Home” (links for that and to create an account are in the top right corner of Google’s homepage).

Adding the Gadget

From your personalised homepage, click “Add Content”, then “Create a Section” and then put the following URL in the box: http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk/gadgets/flip.xml . Then just click “Go” and you’re done :)

If anyone is interested I might extend the idea to be more flexible.

LocationFree TV is one of Sony’s new ideas intended to revolutionise the way we watch TV. You buy a LocationFree base station, connect it to your TV and internet connection and then watch your TV on any internet device, say your PSP.

Well of course you could plug an MCE computer into the Base Station instead. But this is where it gets a little silly (but in an oh so fun way). The Base Station has an IR blaster that allows it to control other IR devices, in this case your media centre PC. Your PC is incidentally controlling your set top box with it’s own IR blaster.

Will Wright, creator of the Sims and SimCity is working on a game called Spore. Spore will not only be a god game, but will be the god game. In fact it may become the best game ever.

It sounds like a combination of Sims, SimCity, Civilisation, Populous, Humans, Command & Conquer and 3D Studio Max.

The game starts with you controlling a little micro-organism (a spore perhaps) that has to survive and eat things and not be eaten by other things. You have a nicely textured but relative simple top down view of your little creature swimming around. Survive long enough and get enough food and you can lay an egg. This is the central theme of the game - your creatures evolve. But you choose *exactly* how they evolve. Need another tail or a couple of spikes? No problem. Put what you like where you like. The game works out how your creature should move and attack. Evolve a few more times and the game switches to 3D (well it was actually in 3D before but you were limited to a fixed camera angle and movement in a single plane).

Once in 3D, the goo you were previously swimming in is revealed to be a pond of sorts. You continue evolving and getting more complex. Add legs and you can walk out of the pond. Or maybe you’d just like fins and be the best sea creature around. Or perhaps you want legs and fins and get the best of both worlds. Your choice.

And so the game continues with your creature evolving. Eventually so does their brain. You can manufacture weapons (designed with the same flexibility as the creatures) which your creatures work out how to use (even if that means holding them with their tails because you forgot to give them hands). By this stage you control a whole tribe.

Of course other tribes will spring up and they have to be dealt with. So make some tanks or something, all with an agonising amount of control.

After that it just keeps going. Control the planet, fly to other planets, control the solar system etc. The sheer scope of this game is unbelievable.

Search Google Video for quite a few clips of the most ambitious game ever conceived.

Complete review from GameSpy of their showing at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference which is more in depth.

If you use Google personalised homepage, you can add Google gadgets to them. A Google gadget is just an XML file (or more usually the XML output of some dynamic page) that is displayed. There is a well developed API and you can do quite a lot of nifty stuff with them. But they don’t seem to be that popular (searching for Google gadgets, with Google gets very few relevant results).

There are quite a few in their gadget directory but very little mention of them outside Google…

You may possibly have noticed the intermittent availability of the site during the last hour. Well I’ve been fiddling around trying to get my clever “restart Apache and MySQL if they crash” script working.

To that end, I did something unexpected: I wrote a shell script in bash. Not something I ever came close to trying before but it was surprisingly straightforward. The implicit availability of regular expressions everywhere definitely made things easier.

Have a look at this bash scripting guide for more info…

I previously ranted that being unable to have two ASP controlled forms in a single ASP.NET page is a serious flaw. They may be a way round it though. I would assume that ASP.NET can’t output two “smart” forms (the ones with runat="server") on the same page but I’m pretty sure that there is nothing stopping a HTML page itself actually holding two of them. Of course that could be wrong.

Essentially all you have to do is load the extra forms using AJAX and I think everything will work.

(I’m working a on a page (not in ASP.NET) that has a table of data with a status column. Each column needed to have a drop down box letting you change the status. Since the number of statuses is large I decided to have a link that AJAXly changed into the dropdown box and a button when you clicked it. Of course you could click all the links and not submit any of the forms leaving you with a page that actually has a bout 30 forms on it.)

The Matrix was quite a good series of films. But without any extra interpretation left most viewers reasonably underwhelmed.

Well see what you think of this theory.

It’s specifically about the second movie, The Matrix Reloaded (there is a link to one about Revolutions too) but I think the second is where the most understanding is required.

It also has a prediction about what could happen in the third movie (it was written before it was released) and I think I like it more…