MaW’s Blog

Last night was the 50th Eurovision Song Contest. Most of you probably knew that. Many of you won’t care, some actively hate it. I found it rather enjoyable, although the voting was as bizarre as always.

Still, my worst fears were not realised: Moldova didn’t come close to winning, despite some worrying votes from various countries. They were by far the worst song, although Turkey put in the worst performance I think — the number of obvious mistakes in their set was shocking.

I’m not going to comment on the United Kingdom’s final score, because I have no idea why we garnered so few votes. Greece did, however, have a reasonable song — one of the best, possibly. Well done to them and hopefully they can afford to host the contest next year after their expenditure on the Olympics.

Yesterday I bought myself a Nintendo Gamecube. Nice little thing, purple with a groovy orange light on the top. Not sure orange exactly matches, but… got a Wavebird wireless controller which is very nice. Three games as well, which should keep me occupied for a while. They are:

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker — cel-shaded Zelda excellence. Looking forward to The Twilight Princess which is due out late this year I think. I might even have finished Wind Waker by then.

Mario Power Tennis — very silly, very fun.

Super Monkey Ball — if Mario Power Tennis is silly, Super Monkey Ball is absolutely insane. Roll on!

So what have I been doing during my latest absence from blogging? Well, as might not be surprising to most of you, I’ve been playing City of Heroes. Finally got Nettle to level 36, got picked up by a very good random group (apart from the defender’s tendency to try and snipe things and get killed, which is totally not necessary when there are other snipers on the team) and did the second respec trial. Dead easy really - must get round to doing the first one some time!

At the weekend I installed my new hard drive. It’s a 200GB SATA drive (Seagate and very quiet) exactly the same as my existing 200GB SATA drive. It replaces two IDE drives (noisy), one of which was starting to get unreliable. All is well of course until one gets around to installing Windows XP Home on it (Linux was already on the existing SATA drive; Windows was on the dodgy 40GB IDE which is now headed for oblivion). In theory of course, one should be able to load the SATA drivers at boot time, because the XP installer doesn’t have SATA drivers in it (this is the SP2 version, couldn’t they have bundled a few?). So then comes the first big shock: Windows XP is incapable of loading drivers from a CD at boot time. After I stopped swearing about this, I found that my motherboard comes with a couple of floppies specifically so that you can install Windows XP on SATA drives using its on-board SATA controller. The trouble is, I have no floppy drive in my computer.

A few minutes with a screwdriver and mum and dad’s PC corrected that.

Unfortunately, loading drivers from both disks didn’t help Windows see the drives. Ho hum. Check the motherboard manual just in case it says something. Why so it does, here’s a clue - there are only drivers for the SATA controller which is linked to the RAID chips, not the normal one which the disks were plugged into. How very odd. Plug the disks into the other one, Windows sees them, installs onto the new one just fine.

The trouble is, Linux doesn’t like the RAID controller and I never did put any effort into getting it to boot off it. So now I need to get Windows liking the normal SATA controller enough so that I can swap both disks back to it. As it turned out, that was pretty easy, because the motherboard driver CD has those drivers on it. Tip for Microsoft: when Longhorn comes out, I know you’ll have put SATA drivers in the install kernel by then, but could you please allow extra drivers to be read from arbitrary locations in an ISO9660 filesystem? Thanks.

Then I had to get the Linux bootloader (GNU Grub) installed on the new disk so that Linux could be booted again. Stick in AMD64 Gentoo 2004.2 LiveCD, boot off it (non-framebuffer kernel, for some reason the framebuffer on the CD doesn’t work for me). It comes up with both disks visible, so I mount / and /boot and chroot into the installed system, run grub, some panic with the config file and disk designations, forgot the root= line, haven’t got the pretty pictures woring yet, but it does boot and work fine.

So that’s all over and done with. Except that my music is mysteriously missing - will have to stick the 120GB IDE drive back in at some point and copy it over again.

Anyway, last night I got my hands on LEGO Star Wars, which is to be perfectly frank an extremely silly game. Short in story terms - it only took me a few hours to play through the entirety of Episode I - but lots of fun. It’s not often a game has me laughing out loud. Seeing little LEGO men fighting with lightsabers is just too good. It also looks beautiful. They recommend nVidia cards as they use Shader Model 3.0 and nVidia’s fancy shadow technology, and I’m sure it looks excellent on those, but it’s jaw-dropping enough on my Radeon 9800 Pro. Since I’m intending to get an nVidia card next time, I should get to see it in even more glory soon (the shadows are a bit lax, I must admit).

So it won’t take me long to finish Episode III (not too much of a spoiler for the movie actually, as there’s hardly any explanation of what’s going on beyond a brief bit of text at the start of the level, this is probably why it was allowed to be released before the movie comes out), so what then? Free play mode of course! In keeping with the general silliness of the entire game, you can go back and play any level you have completed with any character you’ve unlocked, in order to find all the secrets, get more money, and buy more silly accessories. Which include moustaches for your LEGO characters. Since it’s impossible to find half this stuff using the characters you’re given in story mode (I’ve already run into a few places I need people who can jump higher - why Jar Jar Binks can jump higher than a Jedi I do not know, but I suppose they had to give him something to do) this should prove interesting. Or at least highly amusing.

Definitely the best Star Wars game I’ve heard of since Jedi Academy.

Well, it was last night actually, but I couldn’t resist being able to use as a title for this Entry a line from the folk song ‘Lowlands’, which is sung by June Tabor (excellently of course) on the Oysterband Big Session Volume 1 CD. Which everyone should get. There’s a song about making beer (John Barleycorn), one about the end of the world (When That Helicopter Comes), one about sex (The Cuckoo’s Nest), one about commercialisation (Country Life) and even a song which makes very little sense at all (Ten Thousand Miles) but which is good.

But I digress.

Last night I had a dream. A strange dream it was. It probably doesn’t surprise anybody to be told that it was about police recruitment. I do that moderately often, although rarely in such detail as this (not accurate detail, just detail of some sort, as it wasn’t a very realistic dream).

Firstly, it seemed I must’ve got through the initial stages of trying to join the police, because I had been stashed in a small room much like one in a University hall of residence on a big park-like campus somewhere in… err… Britain, I assume, since it was definitely an English or Welsh police force involved.

There were other applicants there. While we stayed there, we had to complete a sort of combined fitness/obstacle course/memory test. The dream seems to have skipped over some of it as I remember dreaming that it was a lot longer than I remember actually dreaming about (that made sense in my head, honest). But there were three bridges to run over. One was like the bridge over the A10 between Impington and Milton, which I cross on my way to and from work each day. Concrete, footpath-sized. The one in the dream was rather steeper though, and over a deep deep chasm.

The second bridge was a rope bridge with a deck made of wooden slats. Each of these was painted a different colour and had two words on it. We were supposed to remember as many of these pairs as possible, while crossing the bridge as fast as we could.

The third bridge was styled much like the cycle bridge over the A14 at Milton, which I also cross on my way to work (my brain is clearly a dreadful inventor, so it has to steal bridge designs for dreams. It has to steal characters too, more on that later). Except that it was very narrow, had steps up the side we went up, and required one to slide down a pole to get to the ground at the far side. The far side was a street which looked like it came out of Paragon City (which is the virtual city where City of Heroes is set). In fact, if you come in-game and go to Kings Row, you can go and stand on it. As I said, my brain is a terrible plagiarist. Well, either that or I’ve been playing too much City of Heroes, hmm?

Anyway, on that street stood a Sergeant who was asking each person coming off the bridge to recall things from the second bridge, usually by saying a word and expecting us to shout back all the words which had been paired with it on the bridge slats. I did appallingly, because I’d gone over the course far too fast, but I was first off and had done a good time and apparently they’ll substitute speed for memory. Odd indeed.

After that it seemed the residential thing was over, because we were at the local nick (although I very much doubt my local nick looks anything like this one did) and we were waiting for an interview. One of the officers was a familiar character from The Bill (plagiarism again), the others had indistinct faces. While we were waiting for the interview to start, we chatted amongst ourselves. One girl was wearing half blues and wondered why we weren’t. We told her we hadn’t been issued with uniform yet, and she seemed surprised because she’d gone and bought hers already! We thought this was silly. I can think of someone I’ve encountered in real life who could have been that girl.

Then we got called into the interview room. It was a sort of two-way panel, as there was all of us candidates (about eight), facing off the panel of five, all being interviewed simultaneously.

The thing that really makes me think I was playing too much City of Heroes is that we suddenly all gained floating text above our heads with our names on. That and the first question involved the interviewers calling up a hologram of a level 30 hero who’d just got themselves an aura, and asking us what the range of the power was.

Then I woke up, before I could explain that auras aren’t powers and being merely cosmetic, have no effect on other people at all so it’s irrelevant to ask what range they had.

So am I mad, or did I just play too much City of Heroes this week? It’s actually the best dream I’ve had for a long time, so perhaps I’ll get to revisit this bizarre little alternate universe and find out what happens next.

Just to let you know that yes, I’m still alive and doing the usual things, no nothing massively exciting has come along for me to write about, and yes I have been playing too much City of Heroes. Check out the gallery for a few screenshots from City of Heroes EU.

In other news, I think I finally figured out how to do the positioning system for Growl. It’s not the total solution I originally intended, but it’s probably more practical to do it this way than the way I wanted to do it — which was far beyond my small mind’s ability to cope with.

But before I can engage on that again, time for work.

Well I’ve had it a while now, and first impressions aren’t borne out. When I got it I thought it was great. Now I think it’s brilliant. The changes to Mario 64 over the N64 version are fairly profound even if apparently minor, and the entire game seems to play much less frustratingly than it used to. It’s a bit bizarre having 3D on a handheld, but with the PSP as well we’ll just have to get used to it, as it’s definitely here to stay.

The hardware design isn’t perfect though — the shape could do with some attention, and operating the touch screen using the thumb pad results in a very greasy screen. There needs to be a better thumb pad design, as that method of control is fairly important for Mario 64. You can play with the stylus, and in fact it’s the only way I can handle the slide in Cool Cool Mountain, but it’s tedious to play like that all the time. Also highly impractical on the train. Still, the basic concept is good, and the gameplay promises to be a lot of fun. The Mario 64 DS minigames aren’t bad either.

I’m now waiting for them to do a Zelda for the DS. I’ve ordered The Minish Cap, but that’s a GBA game (they play great on the DS of course, its screen appears to be of higher quality than that in my sister’s GBA SP). I wonder if they could do a cel-shaded Zelda on the DS hardware, as that would look fabulous. Failing that, I’d be happy with a port of The Ocarina of Time, as I never got to play that seriously on the N64.

In the mean time, I shall of course be getting Yoshi’s Touch & Go (controlled entirely using the touch screen and the microphone but although this sounds quite dodgy it appears that it’s actually a work of genius), and Wario Ware Touched!. The latter at least is out for the UK launch on the 11th of March.