Friday, June 26. 2009Programming Mindfuck
I've spent today at work changing where some data is stored and upgrading it to a new format. When that was done I set about changing all the existing code to use the newly stored data, the problem was that after only three hours of doing this my mind had completely gone I was just unable to think about what I was doing. I was literally typing out a function without really being able to work out what the function was meant to do, which I'll tell you right now is not the easiest of things to do; later when I left work and had reached the train station (about 15 minutes) I was finally able to work out what it was I was trying to do and was even more amazed when I realised that what I had written with my mushed mind was in fact correct. I know for a fact that other people at work have a similar problem and it takes about 10 minutes after leaving work for their mind's to start processing anything other than whatever problem they were working on; maybe this topic title should be programming is a mindfuck.
Sunday, June 7. 2009It's That Time Of Year Again
Holy cow! Three updates in one day, the fact that I am procrastinating from doing my CIPP University assignment is in no way obvious.
It's Download time again! The usual crew are going to heading down to Donington Wednesday afternoon for our fourth annual download trip; I've even got a week and a half off work for this. Just looking at the line-up for this year, I'd like to go and see (in no particular order): - Korn - Slipknot - Killswitch Engage - Devil Driver - Lacuna Coil - Dir En Grey - Dream Theatre - Marilyn Manson So based on that, it looks like most of the bands I want to see will be on Friday, which leaves Saturday and Sunday to checking out a load of random stuff I haven't heard before. Good times, I love doing that since I normally end up finding some hidden gem that I'd like to hear more of. I'll hopefully be taking a camera of sorts (although I forgot mine, I left it at my flat) so I'll have to find one from somewhere else 
Sunday, June 7. 2009Rant Tags Off
So to be fair to the PS3, I said that my experience has so far been mostly good (although I have a feeling this is because I haven't tried to do anything complicated with the XMB yet). I guess my good experience comes from the fact that there are a few games I enjoy playing on it, and also the fact that I can use my debit card in the PlayStation Store which is something I can't do in the XBOX Marketplace (they don't accept Maestro cards).
The games in question are WipEout HD, and Ratchet and Clank. As I said before, WipEout HD is the main reason I bought a PS3, so finding out last week that there was going to be a DLC expansion for the game caused me to almost go running around the office like a crazed fan  I have never played a Ratchet and Clank game before this one, and I feel now that I have been missing out. I love it! The humour in the game is fantastic and somewhat dark (which is also the main reason I love Portal so much) and I'm having a great time playing it, even despite the fact that I sometimes get stuck (game play wise) in a level, and that the enemy collision detecting often screws up a bit leaving them stuck (physically) in walls.
Sunday, June 7. 2009Rant Tags On
I've given up on the week # thing, these updates are now just too infrequent to bother calculating it any more.
Warning: Rant ahead, if you are a PS3 fan-boy stop reading now. I don't need your hate. For my birthday this year I bought myself a PS3 to go with my nice new 42" 1080p HDTV, this now completes my collection of current generation consoles as I also have a 360 and a Wii so I can tell you that this opinion comes from someone who isn't biased to a particular console. So why did I buy it? Two main reasons, I had a shiny new TV and wanted to see what all the fuss about Bluray was, and I also wanted to play WipEout HD; now leaving aside the fact that buying a console that cost almost £300 to play a £14 game is perhaps a sign of insanity on my part, I have to say my experience so far has been mostly good, bar one thing, "installing... please wait". I believe this video (32 - 38 seconds) pretty much sums up my opinion on installing games on the PS3. A friend from work lent me some games to play, one of which was GT5, I had 10 minutes spare before lunch so I thought "Hey, I'll give it a go"... WRONG! It took 10 minutes just to install the damn thing to the hard drive (what the hell is this, a PC?!) and then took another 20 minutes to download and install updates; perhaps I wouldn't have minded so much if the hassle of getting the game to play was worth it, but it distinctly wasn't and I only played the game for about 10 minutes before moving onto another game I had been lent. The most amusing thing about the near constant updates, is when I bought WipEout HD from the PlayStation Store, downloaded it, went to play it and was told that there were five updates for the game... I'm sorry, but I just downloaded over a gigabyte of data and now I need to download more?! Why can't you just update the version you have on the PlayStation Store so that I don't have to bother with this? Oh right, yeah, that would make sense wouldn't it; can't have that. Oh, and just don't get me started on the XMB. No seriously, don't.
Sunday, April 5. 2009Week #76 - Fences And What I Do
Wow, it's been a while and this is actually going to be pretty short since I've taken to using Twitter to post updates on since I can do it more informally and whenever I feel like it.
Firstly, I've been using a program called Fences to help sort out my desktop icons and so far I'm finding it really handy to be able to group up my icons and not have Windows randomly decide to re-arrange them for me... bliss. You can see my desktop here. Secondly, BlitzTech (where I work) has released a video of some of the features of the BlitzTech SDK, including the Scripting and Behaviour (State Machine) system which I am currently responsible for developing and maintaining. If you want to see what I work on on a day to day basis then you can find the video here (it's the "Tools Demo" one).
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