Gav

Releases...

2008-06-18T19:54:29Z

For those who read my earlier post on Firefox 3, the final version is now out, and their download servers are now running smoothly¹.

In other news, valve released details of their next update to TF2: two user-made maps getting an official download distribution, plus a mountain of changes to my fave class: the pyro. Released tomorrow. If any of you lot don't have TF2 and are vaguely interested, they're opening it up for another free weekend this weekend, so if you can cope with the mega download, you get up to 48 hours of play without any monetary input. I think there's gonna be a whole lotta flame-gilling going on...

¹They're supposedly used to this stuff, and have a substantial mirror network in place. The initial demand for Firefox 3 floored their mirror network. After it came back up, they were shifting 13 Gigabits/second of download traffic. Phew.

TV: Chuck

2008-05-01T18:31:12Z

So, a nerd named Chuck has managed to end up with the entire contents of a sooper-sekrit NSA/CIA intelligence database downloaded into his brain; the original got destroyed at the same time. Each of those agencies have sent a top field agent to keep tabs on him (in both a good and bad way). Various hijinks ensue.

Superficially, Chuck has certain similarities with Reaper - the nerd in a dull job, the comedy-sidekick slacker friend, the secret life to complicate things. For me, there are some important differences that mean it makes somewhat more compelling viewing. The lead character is more sympathetic - Chuck may be in a dull job, but he's not a total layabout, and faced with the right sort of task (anything techie) he's highly competent. The two agents are interesting characters (in particular, Adam "Jayne Cobb" Baldwin is good value as the NSA agent) and the slacker friend is actually often amusing, rather than just being a jerk.

It's not all good - I've yet to see an episode that doesn't involve totally gratuitous shots of (blond female CIA agent) Sarah with minimal clothing¹. At least ST:Enterprise could wave the (pathetic) excuse that the scripts were so bad that the decontamination grease scenes were there to pull viewers in, and they made a nod in the general direction of equal-opportunity nudity.

Chuck doesn't need such gimmicks - the programme itself is plenty good enough on other grounds - and I resent being the target of such a blatant attempt at audience-capture-by-libido. It often breaks the pacing, too - there are times when the plot is fizzing along nicely, and we cut to a 30-second scene of Sarah getting (slowly) dressed for whatever's coming next, leaving me thinking "Yes, ok, she's hot. I noticed that already. Can we get on with the story, please?".

Back to the upside: the writers obviously know that the general premise is just a teensy bit silly, and play into it. The scripts so far (four episodes in) are snappy, and there are hints that it's even going to develop more depth of characterisation than would normally be expected for something so superficially glossy. The fight/stunt coordinators are earning their keep². It's obvious that the budget isn't that big, but it's equally obvious that they're making pretty good use of what they've got.

Overall: Chuck is fun. I am currently making time to watch it.

¹OK, episode 4 doesn't (much) - but they've got a (redhead female DEA agent) guest star, so there are totally gratuitous shots of her in her undies instead. For the purposes of this discussion: same difference.

²Yes, I know it's not the most realistic ever. See "silly", above. But it is choreographed, shot and directed well enough that the cast don't look like slow-mo robots carefully lined up to miss each other by a good foot or so, the audience can generally see what's going on, it can occasionally raise a smile as someone gets thwacked with some improbable object being used as an improvised weapon³ or Chuck looking terrified⁴ and they have the good sense to keep the fights relatively brief.

³UK Telly Censors' scissors notwithstanding [fx: glares at whoever hacked episode 4 to ribbons. I mean, so someone got hit in the face by a thrown plate. I don't see how that justifies removing the whole shot, given the (not-obviously-cut) fight the other week with people getting hit in the face with pieces of broomhandle, or that good old US TV standby, death by shooting, in the pilot]

⁴His skillset doesn't include combat. He knows it, and reacts accordingly.

Chuck at IMDB. Which reveals that it's confirmed for a second season.

TV: Reaper

2008-04-27T11:10:22Z

Being, the tale of a young man whose parents sold his soul to the devil before he was born, and his subsequent adventures hunting down souls who've escaped from hell while attempting to live a (relatively) normal life

I ain't hooked. Mildly amusing in general, but the lead character is just too much of a slacker for me to care, the "comedy sidekick" is the kind of self-conciously-wacky jerk I spend half my real life attempting to avoid, and the most interesting character in the whole shebang (Ray Wise as the Devil) is only on screen for a few minutes per episode at best.

That said, it's not bad. The dialogue has its moments, and the cast is generally watchable.

I'd watch it if I didn't have anything better to do, but my life's kinda busy right now and I don't care enough to make time for it. So: apathy attack.

Reaper at IMDB

Why heavy web users need to check out Firefox 3

2008-04-24T16:42:49Z

(With apologies to members of the choir who've heard this sermon before)

If you use the Internet a lot, you need to check out Firefox 3 when a flavour appropriate to your personal pre-release-software-comfort-zone is released (Beta 5 is out already, Release Candidate 1 is due soon, Final release is due in June). Here's why:

The primary methods that people use to return to sites they've visited before are the location bar autocomplete and Google. Which is crazy, because browsers have features to help with that - history and bookmarks (IE calls them "favorites"). Unfortunately, bookmarks are a pain to use, especially if you have lots of them and can't be bothered to organise them. I have at least hundreds, and only really do a cursory sort when I get pissed off at the mess they've become. I gather that makes me far more organised than most people. It's better than nothing, but a pain to use.

(Personal history diversion: One of the main reasons I stuck with Netscape 4.x almost to the very end¹, and swapped to the Mozilla Suite (now known as SeaMonkey) when I did leave, was bookmark handling. Back when NN3.x/4.x was my browser, search engines sucked (this was in the dark days before Google) so using bookmarks quickly became a habit if I ever wanted to find stuff again. In essence, the competition's bookmark handling sucked. Netscape/Mozilla's sucked as well, but was less sucky than everybody else's.)

I am somewhat boggled that this area has been neglected by browser manufacturers for so long. The Mozilla people reached the same decision some time ago, and decided to do something about it.

In summary, they've made bookmarks much more usable for both normal people and power users, and added loads of cross-linking between the address bar and history/bookmarks so that the autocomplete is scary-good at finding stuff you've visited in the past.

This work was known within Mozilla as "places". In essence, it's a complete overhaul of the way the browser handles history and bookmarks. It includes internal work to replace the mind-meltingly-awful Mork² data storage format that Mozilla inherited from Netscape with something sensible (SQLlite, for any techie readers) but also includes significant UI work to make the browser's internal history and bookmarking system more useful and usable for normal people, as opposed to organizationally-obsessed people prepared to spend an hour or two a month keeping everything neatly sorted and filed.

Places was originally slated for release as part of Firefox 2, but got dropped when it became clear it wouldn't be ready. Well, for Firefox 3, it's ready, and it's been surfacing gradually in the later betas.

There are lots of little changes, most of which sound trivial, but they add up to something that has changed the way I use a browser³ (and I'm still learning my way around the new stuff).

First up, the so-called "Awesome Bar"⁴. They improved the way the address bar autocomplete works. Like I said, it sounds trivial, but it ain't.

Essentially, rather than being a simple URL autocomplete, in FF3, the location bar now matches on all parts of a URL (not just the start of the domain). It doesn't just search URLs you've typed, it searches URLs in your history and bookmarks too. And page titles from your history. And Bookmark names. And any tags you've applied to bookmarks (of which, more in a minute).

It then sorts all the results based on match quality, how often you visit them, and how recently you last visited. I think it even pays attention to which items you picked from the list last time, and uses that info to try to guess better next time. Mozilla's Deb Richardson has a post explaining it in more detail. After a while, it becomes almost psychically good at finding the page you're looking for.

This rocks enough that it almost earns the right to have me use such a silly name as "Awesome Bar" with a straight face. Seriously, once you get used to it, you can't go back.

Secondly, general bookmark handling. You can bookmark with one click. A couple more clicks let you file it sensibly, or one click and some typing lets you apply tags to give you tag-style organisation.

The bookmark organiser, while superficially unchanged, has lots of new features to deal with tags, and includes the ability to build and remember queries across your bookmark library. Want a folder on your bookmark bar that dynamically includes all the bookmarks you've tagged with "wibble"? Easy.

Again, Deb Richardson has a post outlining bookmarking and smart folders.

Disclaimer: I'm only just starting to play with smart folders - despite it being on my wishlist ever since they added tagging, I only just found the relevant button, and I'm still bouncing off things - my initial experiments have been a bit bumpy, but I suspect that the problem is with my mental model of how it works, and it'll all go more smoothly once I get used to it. If/when it does work properly for me, it'll rock.

Like I said, if you spend large chunks of time on the web, you need to check these features out. I've never been a huge fan of tabs, so I don't regard them as a killer feature like some people do. The "awesome bar", however, is a serious contender for that description.

¹I think I bailed somewhere in the 4.7x series. I wasn't a web developer in those days, so I didn't realise just how bad The Scottish Browser was when it came to page rendering and CSS.

²ex-Netscape engineer Jamie Zawinski, aka jwz, said: "[Mork] is -- and I do not use these words lightly -- the single most braindamaged file format that I have ever seen in my nineteen year career." The primary sins are enumerated in comments in the perl source code he hacked up to read the beastie.

³The scary thing is, that's what an awful lot of people are saying. I don't think we're pod-people.

⁴This name sucks. But it's semi-official, and thus we're stuck with it. At least it's short, memorable and easy to spell, thereby beating many product/feature names I've had to deal with over the years.

blufive @ 2008-04-21T19:11:00

2008-04-21T18:14:02Z

Grr. [evil muttering] CSS2 :focus selector [in CSS since 199-frackin'-8] [more evil muttering] IE [growl] Not even in v7, [grr]. Pile o' steaming wotsits.

Sins of a Solar Empire Demo, first impressions:

2008-04-14T20:37:27Z

It's a cross between an RTS and Civ-ish 4X game (probably closer to something like Master Of Orion or Galactic Civilisations 4X-in-space than vanilla Civ). The research trees are quite large and resource gathering is by planet colonisation/development (like a 4X game). On the other hand, it's not turn based, and the pace feels relentless (like an RTS).

That said, the pace is actually quite slow in some ways - units take quite a long time to cross the map, making it a good deal more "strategic" than most RTS games, at least in terms of having to plan some way ahead to get forces into place.

It seems to have learned some good lessons from Supreme Commander (namely, Strategic Zoom) and more recent 4X games (lots of intricate detail, but kept under the hood with some degree of automation to avoid overwhelming people). Things seem to work pretty well, albeit with some learning curve, and I was kinda narked when the 90-minute time limit on the demo kicked in.

File under: I think I'll probably buy the full game someday.

linkage: Sins Of A Solar Empire

Music Pictures Meme Answers

2008-02-07T20:08:05Z

I posted the piccies last weekend, in case anyone else wants a go.

Answers :

Guns 'n' Roses. Picture chosen to make Axl less obvious, but there's no hiding Slash.
Ozric Tentacles
Alice Cooper
Lemon Jelly (no, I wouldn't have known them from Adam either)
No Doubt
(Carlos) Santana. Strictly speaking, it should have been the whole band, but since the rest of them have been changed more often than grandfather's axe (12 bass players so far, according to wikipedia...) this was the best I could really do.
Nina Simone
Dire Straits
Nat King Cole
Jeremy Soule. Most of you are going "who?". He mostly writes video game sountrack music, at least some of which I like.
Aerosmith. Another "pick the photo which camoflages the usually-instantly-recognisable lead singer".
Vangelis
Kasabian
Glenn Miller
Rammstein
The Stabilisers
Nightwish
Duke Ellington
Kraftwerk
Audioslave

People not getting the obscure ones is expected, but missing Dire Straits?

Scores so far:

For comparison: if I'd been hit with this completely cold, I'd probably only have got about 14 or so

IE8

2008-02-04T22:42:42Z

So, it turns out I was wrong about Microsoft's IE8 standards-mode rendering switch - they're proposing that web authors use either a meta element or an HTTP header as an opt-in.

My initial gut reaction: wow, that sucks.

This was announced with simultaneous posts on respected web-guru magazine and th e Web Standards Project by Aaron Gustafson, a member of the WSP Microsoft Taskforce. There was also a companion piece on ALA by Eric Meyer, another guru-level figure, in which he appeared to indicate tentative support (of which, more later).

There was a short pause, then the web-dev community went Ka-boom! Those initial announcements generated a lot of, um, vigorous debate. It often got pretty vitriolic. Shortly afterwards, a WSP co-group leader posted, clarifying that Gustafson was posting only as a member of the WSP Microsoft Task Force and not speaking for the WSP as a whole. Cue somewhat heated comment threads involving a who's who of web standards over who did what to whom.

Here are some of the more reasoned and non-insulting comments by qualified people (I've noted affiliations with rival browser makers where appropriate)

Jeffrey Zeldman (General Web Standards Guru, WSP member, proprietor of A List Apart)
Three follow up posts from Eric Meyer (Formerly Netscape (during the Mozilla years) Invited Expert to the CSS2 Working Group, generally acknowledged CSS guru). I'd recommend the third of those, in particular, as it provides an excellent summary of how this argument looks from the browser-developer's point of view.
Robert O'Callahan (Mozilla, rendering engine programmer who knows way more about web page layout than most of the web authors you've ever met put together). Further follow-ups here and here.
L. David Baron, (Mozilla, ditto). Follow up.
Ian Hickson (Google, formerly Opera, editor of the HTML5 and CSS2.1 specs, plus various bits of CSS3)
John Resig (Mozilla, creator of JQuery, formerly an independent Javascript Guru)
Maciej Stachowiak (Apple)

My distilled summary of those luminaries' comments (with apologies if I end up misrepresenting anyone):

This is a can of worms for other browser makers, potentially making it orders-of-magnitude harder to comply with users' expectations of how any given page should render.
this could make it much harder for new browser rendering engines to enter the marketplace. (Microsoft, do something anti-competitive? Never.)
It threatens to explicitly lock large chunks of the web into IE7 compatibility for long periods, creating a ball-and-chain for the whole browser and web development community.
Other browser developers are looking rather unlikely to join in on supporting this approach
Eric Meyer clarifies his position, saying that while he agrees that using meta tags is an improvement on previous switching mechanisms (doctypes, conditional comments, javascript sniffing) he thinks that it should be opt-in, not opt-out, i.e. the default behaviour should be standards-based rendering, rather than emulating old browsers.

Now, my more detailed/reasoned thoughts. Headline: This sucks in various subtle, evil and long-term ways.

Who wins? There are several interested parties here (list inspired by a comment I saw somewhere in the first wave of the hoo-hah, but can't find now)

Microsoft PR/Support (MSPR): The people who have to deal with the shitstorm when a new browser version shags websites
IE development team: who have to develop/maintain IE
Legacy Intranets: Understaffed operators of legacy intranet applications, who have to cope with their corporations upgrading the web browser on the 47 gazillion workstations that access the app)
Other browser developers: MS's competitors, both current and future, who develop/maintain other browsers, and have their own particular version of the shagged-website-shitstorm, which involves the added excitement of matching user expectations moulded by IE.
Ignorant Web Developers: Web authors who don't give a flying wotsit about standards, who just want their site to work for whatever group of users they have to pay attention to, which may be countable on the fingers of one or two hands)
Overworked Standardistas: Standards-supporting web authors who are severely constrained by a bad maintenance workload/developer resource ratio, who have to try to write forward- and backward-compatible cross-browser websites without changing a bajillion files and pushing the ensuing monster release though a testing/staging/release cycle every time a new major browser gets released.
Standards ninjas: Standards-supporting web authors who don't have significant problem with maintenance workload for whatever reason, e.g. they're prepared to let their sites break in dodgy browsers, or they are sufficiently well-organised/resourced for the changes to be easy to make.

(Aside the first: many of these categories are illustrative stereotypes; there will be people who straddle multiple labels, or are off on their own planet somewhere. I count myself as an overworked standardista)

In my opinion, MS based their decision primarily on the short-term interests of MSPR (who don't get the shitstorm), Legacy Intranets (who can let their corporation upgrade without shafting their intranet, then upgrade the app at their leisure, if at all), Ignorant web developers (who remain blissfully unaware) and maybe the overworked standardistas (same as Intranets).

(Aside the second: this feeds my barely-formed-bollocks-theory that large parts of Microsoft-the-applications-company, strategically, has been totally captured by the large corporates with installed bases of several thousand workstations, who have the power to meet face-to-face with upper-middle-level MS sales/management people and threaten them with the removal of 7-digit-per-annum cashflow)

The Standards Ninjas have to choose whether or not to use the meta tag, but it's not a monster change for them if they decide to go ahead.

Many of the standardistas (even the overworked ones) probably aren't that happy about this, though, because their sites may well just work in the new IE8 mode without any real changes. If they've done IE-specific hacks properly, they've done them such that an unknown browser (including IE8) will be presumed standards compliant until proven otherwise. All this is doing is putting another hurdle in their way before they get the pay-off on all the work they've already done.

The IE Developers get clobbered, because they're basically going to have to ship two rendering engines in one box - the "old" IE7 and the "new" IE8 - or put major amounts of special-case code in (which is bad, take my word for it). Theoretically, this could be a one-off step-change, and we won't have to go through it all again with IE9; in practice, the whole structure of the flag indicates that this may not be the case, and a future version of IE could easily do it all again.

Other browser developers also get clobbered, because they are forced to emulate the market leader, to a greater or lesser degree, or suffer the broken-sites-shitstorm. So they have to ship multiple engines too (except, they won't - they've pretty much all lined up on the "no way!" side of the discussion).

My main problems are with the signals this sends, and the long-term effects on the web at large.

First, the signals: this effectively tells all the people working hard to produce high-quality cross-browser code that Microsoft is happy to make them jump through hoops to make their sites work in IE8, but people who can't be bothered to learn to do their job properly (the ignorant web developers) get a free pass. To borrow a phrase much tossed about by financial regulators recently in the UK: this creates a moral hazard. The people who are working hard to Do The Right Thing get slapped in the face and forced to do even more work, but the people who are doing a shoddy job get let off the hook without any penalty. Remind me why we're supposed to do things The Right Way, again?

The long-term effect of this is straightforward: this creates enormous inertia which will encourage many web developers to stay on the IE7 rendering model for a very long time. Those web developers will write loads of pages that will be around even longer after that, forcing this same decision to get re-enacted every time there's a new browser version anywhere. This isn't a fix, it's just postponing the problem, passing the buck to your successors.

This "browser inertia" problem has existed since way back. Just ask the web developers who remember when Netscape 4.x ruled the world. The thing is, in the past, the "inertia" has always been tied to this or that browser version. Once the problematic browser version finally goes away (as NN4.x thankfully did a few years ago) the inertia goes away with it.

The difference here is that this new system decouples the "legacy" support from the actual usage of the legacy browser. It creates the situation where we could have 80% of users on IE8 or higher, with only 2% on IE7, but web browsers still need to keep parity with IE7 to avoid breaking all the "IE7-compatible" sites. This effectively removes any incentive for the "old" sites to upgrade. IMO, this threatens to stall the development of the web for as long as any browser implementing this stuff is the dominant market player. (Yes, the previous statement suggests one way out of this mess, which may well come to fruition sooner rather than later - there are countries in Europe where Firefox has a market share of well over 30%, and rising - us Brits are laggards at a mere 15% or so).

(Aside again: I think it's at least arguable that the trigger for the great Web 2.0/AJAX functionality leap of the last couple of years was at least partially due to all the relevant web authors thinking "oh, thank $DEITY! IE4/NN4 are dead! Now I can finally start playing with all this cool new stuff that IE5 introduced without worrying about trying to make it work in those fossils.")

The cynics may imply that this is deliberate policy to stifle the development of the web, creating an opportunity for the "rich web application" frameworks (like MS's own Silverlight or Adobe's AIR) to leap into the functionality gap beyond AJAX/Web 2.0, by holding HTML5 and its ilk back. Go read the MS vs DOJ Findings Of Fact for the background on why MS might want to do that. Summary: if people's productivity apps move off the desktop and onto the web, people are no longer tied to windows, and MS lose the Windows Tax. Personally, I reckon the primary driver really is the far more short-sighted "defuse the broken websites shitstorm", though they might regard nobbling one of Silverlight's major competitors before the race even starts as a nice-to-have side-effect.

I think that this perception of old sites holding the browsers back is somewhat misplaced. I'm pretty sure that most of those "legacy" sites are piles of crud emanating from the Ignorant web developers, or even full-blown orphaned sites (i.e. no longer maintained in any meaningful way). Many of them are probably coded such that they're going to be in quirks mode anyhow, and probably look rubbish even there. In fact, I bet many of them have always looked crap in whatever browser you use (or all browsers bar the one they were tested in - if you're lucky, it'll be one modern enough that lots of people are still using it).

Pretty much all those sites either "work" in quirks mode already, in which case they're going to keep working in the new quirks mode, or they're already stuffed, and none of this is going to make any difference.

Now, the bit that really gets me. What MS is proposing is this damn close to being a semi-decent solution. Meta/Http headers are a passable switch mechanism. The only change I'd really want is that suggested by Eric Meyer and many others: swap the default. The current proposal is totally backwards. Go to standards mode first (unless the page is obviously b0rked, like standards mode currently works). Use the switch to flip back to IE7 compatibility mode

At a stroke, that makes all the standardistas and the intranets happy (or at least happier). At most, the overworked standardistas and the intranets only need to make a small change to get "compatibility" with IE8. If they want, they can even do it at the webserver level (using the HTTP header) rather than updating all the individual pages. The Standardistas, if they've been cunning in the past and/or good at their jobs, with a dash of luck thrown in, probably don't even need to do that; their sites should just work in uber-standards mode anyway.

It also makes the Ignorant Web Authors happier than doing nothing - their sites may break, but they've got a simple "fix" to apply, which may even encourage them to do a bit more research into how to do things properly. Though, again, most of them are probably in quirks mode anyway, so this whole discussion is probably moot for them. Worst case scenario: it creates them one more round of run-around-and-fix-everything-while-cursing-Microsoft, but after that, all the leading browsers are in the same ballpark. Browser compatibility testing gets way easier for everyone, the IWAs included. Most of the cross-browser issues end up in obscure little corners where most authors (especially this crowd) rarely wander, or out on the bleeding-new-technology edge (again, most of the IWAs don't go there).

Reversing the default also removes the moral hazard; the incentive remains (as it currently is) to learn to do it properly, and produce a single set of code that works on all browsers, saving yourself work in the long run. Many people won't do so, but once they're doing their prime testing in IE8 (ETA: 1.5 years after they release it, so probably ~2.5-3 years from now) then, from their perspective, all the major browsers do much the same thing, and most of the problem goes away.

So: flip the default around, and this is a good idea. Otherwise, it sucks.

Finally, a word from the lemurs.

Band photo meme

2008-02-02T16:30:03Z

(via rhubarbfool)

Rules are

Put your music player on random.
Find photos of the first 20 artists/bands that come up (no repeats and no cheating).
Have people guess who the artists/bands are. (comments will be screened until later)
Make people do the same on their journal. If they feel like it.
Answers in due course.

(Some really easy, some would be really easy if I'd picked the obvious picture, some not...)

Mememe

2007-12-24T18:17:38Z

	I received 93 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Take the Sci-Fi Movie Quiz

I'll 'fess up to some lucky (semi-educated) guesses to get there, though. I don't have a Tron costume, but this userpic really is me...

(via alex_holden)

HTML Email is here to stay - live with it.

2007-12-23T11:20:25Z

A few weeks back, via the Web Standards Project, I learned of the Email Standards Project, a similar effort to encourage the adoption of HTML/CSS standards in email clients when rendering HTML emails.

All I can say is: about bloody time. Getting HTML mails to render consistently across different mail clients is a monumental pain in the arse. There are mail clients out there with HTML rendering in the same league as Netscape 4.x (translation: horrible) and it ain't just small fry, either. The ESP people highlight Google Gmail, Lotus Notes 8 and Outlook 2007 as among the worst offenders.

I'm disappointed, but not surprised, to see the announcement immediately attracted the usual rants about how HTML mail is evil and should never be sent/encouraged/tolerated/etc. I've encountered this viewpoint many times before, and while I'm sympathetic to most of the technical arguments¹, I have to say: get over it, people.

To get rid of HTML email at this point in proceedings would require removing functionality (in some cases, default behaviour) from the top 10 or so email clients (yeah, Microsoft are soooo likely to do that²) and significantly altering the behaviour of 99.9% of the email-using population of the world. You'd probably need to kill every marketing person in the world too. People like HTML mail. They like to be able to use bigger text, fancy fonts, and even (shudder) marquee and blink elements.

Ranting against HTML mail is an exercise in futility. The horse hasn't just bolted, it's sired offspring from every mare in the country, taking time out half-way to come back and nick the mints out of your pocket. Trying to shut the stable door at this stage just makes you look like a foolish, dogmatic, elitist zealot. This is the sort of thing that leads people to view standardistas/open source advocates/linux-weenies as a group of wild-eyed lunatics who should be avoided like the plague, and it's counter-productive, because it drives ordinary users away from even contemplating a better way of doing things.³

The ESP is an important part of a far more productive approach: make HTML mail work better for everyone. Speak to software vendors, and get mail programs to respect user wishes better, so that those who want to sent plain text mail can do so easily. Get mail readers to render HTML mail in a sane way (this, in itself, stands a good chance of significantly reducing the badnwidth usage - a lot of the current bulk is because people have to use 1997-vintage table layouts and tag soup to make it look sensible in major mail clients). Get mail senders to include plain text alternatives and build the mail properly so that people who read text-only can still read them. The last couple add up to improve accessibility, too.

¹saps bandwith, harder to construct programmatically, etc. There are compatibility arguments re: older mail clients, but most of them involve badly constructed mails which don't include text alternatives (see! they're trying to save bandwidth by not duplicating stuff!) or mails which have fallen foul of the appalling HTML rendering of some mail clients.

²Though they did completely shag the HTML rendering in the last outlook release - previous versions of Outlook were much better than Outlook 2007.

³To borrow liberally from a stock response to spam "solutions":

Your approach advocates a:

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) vigilante

approach to making email better. Your idea will not work. Here is why it
won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular
idea, and it may have other flaws too.)

(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) Most other software vendors will not put up with it
(x) Requires total cooperation from all email software vendors at the same time
(x) Requires total cooperation from everybody in the world
(x) Many email users cannot afford to alienate potential employers/customers

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Popularity of presentational twiddly bits like colours and fonts
(x) Public reluctance to accept removal of existing functionality
(x) Huge existing software investment in HTML Email
(x) Outlook
(x) The entire marketing industry

(and probably a whole bunch of other reasons I left out)

IE8, again

2007-12-21T19:21:45Z

There's more good news about IE8 - it won't have "hasLayout" either. The message revealing this is extremely light on details, but if this has the consequences implied, then a whole category of IE-related layout strangeness disappears into thin air with version 8.

IE8 News

2007-12-20T18:45:21Z

After a long silence, Microsoft have finally started talking about IE8 features, and it's actually good news - IE8 internal builds are now passing the Acid 2 CSS test¹.

While many will hurl (not entirely undeserved) general derision in MS's direction for being the last of the major browser vendors to get there², the important point is they got there. The Acid 2 Test is eeeevil. This means IE8 has substantial and wide-ranging fixes to their CSS support (including, but not limited to, position: fixed, float/clear, margins, generated content, ignoring bad declarations, display: table and associated gubbins) and also fixes to more obscure bits of HTML like the object element.

IE7 had quite a few fixes to CSS support, and was welcomed for that reason, but still lagged a bit behind the competition. If IE8 is passing acid 2, that's a huge leap forward. Once this version hits lots of users (probably a good 2-3 years after they release it, at least) this will finally open up to general use several areas of CSS2 that are currently off-limits. Headlines: position: fixed (menus that stay fixed in the window while the page scrolls, without frames), display: table (table-style layouts without table markup), generated content (tricky to describe, but it allows all sorts of cunning stuff). It will also significantly reduce the pain of making float/clear work cross-browser.

¹Unfortunately, someone managed to actually break the main Acid 2 test site recently, but the powers that be are on the case, and it should start working again sometime soon.

²Out of the big four, Safari were first (internal build 27 Apr 2005, general release (v2.02) 31 Oct 2005) then Opera (public experimental build 10 Mar 2006, general (v9.0) 20 Jun 2006) then Firefox (semi-public dev build 12 Apr 2006, general release (v3.0) early 2008)

Unreal Tournament 3 Demo

2007-11-07T19:49:12Z

Visuals

Superficially pretty, with the high detail models, subtle distance haze, lighting effects, and so on. But to my eye, once you get beyond extreme close-up at high resolution, all those details seem to smoosh together into a sort of grey blurry mess. This looked horrible at the 800x600 resolution the game defaulted to; it's better, but still an issue, at 1280x1024. There's lots of fine detail, but when that disappears (i.e. more than ten yards away) there's no intermediate-level detail to replace it.

Gameplay

Deathmatch, Team deathmatch, yawn. Been there, done that, having waaay too much fun with TF2 to care any more. My tastes in online shooty-goodness aside, it seems generally well done. Movement is slick, map design seems good (the two in the demo are a bit less claustrophobic than many UT2k4 maps, which is a plus for me) nice range of weapons, with a mix of old favourites from past Unreal games.

I'd be far more interested in the "warfare" mode (which is sorta "onslaught-with-knobs-on", I believe; Onslaught was my main reason for playing UT2k4) but I can't seem to find it in the demo.

Vehicles

I never played Vehicle CTF in UT2k4, but I fired it up to have a play with the vehicles, in the absence of Onslaught/Warfare. They all seem kinda slow compared to the old ones, which is unfortunate - some of the best fun to be had in UT2k4 was blasting around the landscape in a fast car, squishing enemies and performing ludicrous stunts.

The scorpion's new gun is more conventional, possibly more effective in many circumstances, but also more BORING than the old energy-ribbon-thing.

I'm not sure that turning the Hellbender into a two-seater and giving the driver control of the skymine is a good idea (the old way encouraged teamwork, as a 1-man HB was vulnerable, but a fully-manned one was downright dangerous to lighter vehicles and infantry). The new visuals of the skymine projectiles, while very pretty, make it damn difficult to see what you're shooting at, particularly when you combo (which is pretty much compulsory if you want to kill anything).

The raptor doesn't feel as fast and maneuverable as before, and I miss the roar of the old secondary-fire missile as it arcs away on a smoke trail - the new one is downright dull by comparison.

General Design Stuff

I've got lots of little niggles here.

In UT3's team deathmatch mode, player avatars are tinted their team colour. I think this has been done because it's the only way to get any sort of sane IFF, given the incredibly detailed/varied models flying around (and the "grey blurry thing" effect). Problem is, in amongst all the highly-detailed, realistically-lit models, it looks kinda silly. Part of what bugs me here is that UT2K4 did a pretty good job of this. As soon as you went team-based (rather than free-for-all) all the models gained huge slabs of primary team colour, and little coloured icons over their heads.

The game menus seem strangely unresponsive. There's an appreciable pause between mouse click and something happening. The menu items themselves are teeny-weeny things, in the middle of acres of space (OK, there's a fisheye zoom on the menu, so that items get bigger as you mouse-over, but that just makes them moving targets). This is a minor niggle, I know, but it's just amateur to have the first screens the user interacts with be such a pain to use. Again, UT2k4 did it better, if less prettily.

As for the very first welcome screen being "username and password, please" (which still often pesters me even after I've ticked the "remember password" and "login automatically" boxes, and frequently fails to login altogether)... Grrr.

OK, this is a pre-release demo, and some things may well be fixed before the final release, but I doubt it's all going to magically get better.

Conclusions:

The engine is an amazing technical acheivement, in terms of the amount of detail it can throw around, at high resolution, with decent framerates.
From an artistic standpoint, the models and textures are fabulous - up close. Unfortunately, at anything beyond in-yer-face-claustrophobic-deathmatch range (and the DM maps are more open than before) it's all very same-y.
The game they've built on all this? Not so much. I'm not finding any positive changes to the gameplay compared to previous versions; I'm not impressed by the new vehicles, and from a servicing-the-gameplay standpoint, the visuals are actually a step backwards. It feels like the "fun" element has been lost in the quest for stunning high-res screenshots and a high-powered engine.
I've been spoiled by TF2, in multiple senses. Not only have Valve provided such a high level of game design that other games seem boring by comparison, but the commentaries and interviews allow me to analyse and articulate the reasons WHY the other games feel dull. Scary.

TF2 has reminded me just how much FUN games can be, and the UT3 demo just doesn't hit the spot. Which is a shame, as I was really looking forward to it. I'm still interested in "Warfare" mode, but I'm not really going to buy the whole game knowing that all the game modes I have played are not of interest, just to check out one I haven't.

Fortress Forever vs Team Fortress 2

2007-10-01T19:16:32Z

So, it's time for Gav's Fortress Forever (FF) versus Team Fortress 2 (TF2) showdown post.

First, a bit of background. Before Counter-Strike became the most popular PC team-based online shooter on the planet, that crown was held by Team Fortress Classic, a Half-Life mod which was itself a remake of an old Quake Mod named Team Fortress. TF/TFC is class-based, each class having strengths and weaknesses (the Heavy Weapons Guy is slow but well armoured with a big gun; the Scout is fast, but lacks armour and firepower). The pace of TFC is slower than deathmatch games, and therefore less "twitch"-reflex based, with a bit more emphasis on being cunning.

Back in the day, I played TFC a lot, and only gave up when the online community withered to the point where it was almost impossible to find a fun game. So I'm definitely in the market for a follow-up (well, I was, because I've now bought/downloaded both of the main contenders).

The stated aim of the FF team (based around a core of old TF/TFC hands, including several of the best independent TFC mappers) has been to produce a Source-engine-based version of TFC, retaining the overall feel of TFC at the height of its popularity (so, before teleporters were (re-)introduced, but after conc-jumping became one of the primary attack techniques), with a few changes towards the original Team Fortress Quake mod. They've worked on fixing class balance issues, tweaked maps so they don't bog down into pointless stalemates too often, and retained all the old movement tricks like conc-jumping and so on. Providing more guidance for new players was also high on the list of objectives.

TF2, originally announced nearly 10 years ago, was famously a serial contender with Duke Nukem Forever at the top of various "vapourware" award lists for several years, and Valve went completely silent for long periods during development. Now that it's in public beta, the developers are finally giving interviews, and the commentaries included in the game give some hints at their aims, too. Their main objective appears to have been to increase the fun factor, primarily by encouraging team play, differentiating the roles of the various classes and helping new players stick with it long enough to get the hang of things.

Both teams have succeeded in their aims, but the divergent goals mean that the two games are rather different in feel. One of the headline changes in both games is the rebalancing of the classes.

Fortress Forever

Some of the classes get significant changes, but most stay pretty much the same as before. Here's the main changes, as I see them:

Pyro: The flamethower is somewhat more dangerous, the Incendiary Cannon is now affected by gravity (so it's a long lobbed shot, rather than a direct-fire rocket). Pyros can achieve maximum damage by lighting up their opponents with all three flame weapons in quick succession. The flamethrower can also be used as a jet to cushion high falls and provide a minor boost to jumps.
Medic: Healing an infection now provides a brief window of immunity from re-infection.
Engineer: Sentry guns can track and shoot invisible spies, but disguised spies are still safe.
HWG: The Heavy's ability to spew a never-ending stream of bullets is curtailed somewhat by gun overheating (though this can be bypassed a bit by even moderately skilled players, and may get tweaked in future updates)
Sniper: Non-fatal sniper hits now "tag" the target, giving the sniper's team-mates a (time-limited) ability to see that enemy through walls.
Spy: The Spy can "sabotage" a sentry gun, allowing them to (briefly) turn it on its own team at a later time. Spies also have limited invisibility, varying from almost totally effective when they stand still, to less effective as they move more quickly. The weapon shown by a spy's disguise will now reflect whatever weapon the spy is holding, so spotting them is somewhat harder than it used to be. A successful backstab while disguised will now instantly change the spy's disguise to his victim.

FF has added a system of "Fortress Points" which are the primary "score". While these reward kills heavily, there are lots of other ways to gain points - upgrading team-mates' sentry guns, healing other players, killing enemy sentries (with extra bonuses for killing high-level sentries) and more. It's not perfect, but it's a damn good start, and the developers will presumably build on it.

Team Fortress 2

TF2 changes things rather more drastically. The total removal of grenades makes a considerable difference, primarily by reducing the amount of damage a player can do in a very short space of time (thereby neutering the "charge in and spew grenades in the two seconds before you die" attack method) but also by removing grenade jumping in all its forms. The only explosive-jumping going on now is Soldiers (rocket jump) and Demomen (pipe/sticky bomb jump).

The classes:

Scout: The scout now moves even faster than before, and has gained the ability to do "double jumps", including drastic direction changes in mid-air. He's also gained some degree of comabt punch, with his scattergun being like a high-damage but short-range shotgun. He captures control points twice as fast as other classes. Still fragile, though.
Pyro: The pyro has been tweaked into the supreme short-range combat class. The flamethrower varies from "useless" at 5+ yards to "serious ouchy" at 3 yards to "almost instant death" at 1 yard. If they can get close enough, pyros are great at causing chaos and carnage in groups of enemies, both on offence and defence. Pyros are also a great spy defence, as disguised spies are much more flammable than team-mates.
Demoman: No grenades, no detpack; the pipebomb launcher has been replaced by a sticky bomb launcher, which works pretty much the same, but the bombs stick to the first surface they hit rather than bouncing around, so demos can now set pipebomb traps on ceilings or walls if they feel so inclined.
Medic: The medic has changed completely. No more infection, no serious guns at all, no grenades. What he does get is a "medigun", which beams health into teammates from a range of up to 10 yards or so. Once locked-on, it needs minimal effort to keep on target, even snaking around corners to a limited extent, and will keep the recipient alive almost indefinitely against a single attacker. In short, the medic is a major force multiplier, particularly in combination with high-damage-dealing classes like the Heavy or Pyro. To make it even better, after a certain amount of healing, the Medic gains an "Übercharge", which can be triggered at will, providing 10 seconds of invulnerability for both the medic and his target. Great for cracking heavily-defended bottlenecks, or holding the line until reinforcements can arrive.
Engineer: Building and upgrading is slower than before, but there's so much cool stuff to build. Teleporters are in, allowing an engineer to speed up the arrival of team-mates at the front line (a big factor in attack-defence maps). Dispensers now heal, as well as providing ammo, and high level sentry guns are considerably more lethal than they used to be.
HWG: The heavy is now the ultimate short-to-medium-range combat class. He'll mow down most classes in no time at less than 10 yards range, and hurt them a lot out to 20. The main limiting factor on this firepower is ammo consumption; expect to run out far quicker than in TFC.
Spy: The spy has also changed radically. Again, there's invisibility, but TF2's version is time-limited, intended as a tool to sneak past the front line before falling back on the usual disguise-based trickery. Sappers are an electrical widget that can be placed on the engineer's buildables (SG, dispenser, teleporter) to disable them and sap their hit points rapidly; a single spy can disable several sentries in seconds, and provide at least a temporary "hole" in an enemy defence.

TF2 has also tweaked the main scoring system, so that you gain points for kill assists (a primary method for medics to acquire points), defending capture points, knocking sappers off buildables and other team-oriented jobs. There's also a personal stats system, that tracks your best performances and tells you when you match or beat them.

Both

Both games have "hint" systems in place that provide little tips and tricks to help you pick things up. TF was always a game that needed such things, so it's welcome all round.

Other stuff

A few more quick observations...

Fortress Forever: TFC-style gameplay, mostly Capture-The-Flag based; Medics are a conc-jumping attack class; Movement is a little faster than TFC; Free! (as in beer) provided you've already got a suitable source game to run mods (Half-Life 2, for example)
Team Fortress 2: Streamlined gameplay, mostly control-point based; Medics are a support class that heal people; Movement is (generally) a little slower than TFC; Comes as a multi-pack with HL2, HL2:Ep1, HL2:Ep2 and Portal in Valve's "Orange Box" package; Respawn timers cause "bunching" of respawns into waves every 10-20 seconds or so

Team Fortress 2

2007-09-23T09:32:28Z

So, having waffled about Fortress Forever last week, now it's the turn of Team Fortress 2. Again, first impressions are very good.

It looks and sounds fantastic. Think crazy-60s-spy-movie-with-mad-scientists-kitsch, via The Incredibles[1].
Gameplay has been streamlined considerably; no grenades (apart from the demoman's grenade launcher) and most classes are down to one each of main, backup and melee weapons.
In the process, that means conc-jumping and bunny hopping are out (I regard this as a good thing)
The pace is, if anything, a little SLOWER than TFC.
much less Capture-The-Flag. Out of the 6 maps in the release, only one is CTF - a remake of the venerable 2fort. In its place is Warpath-style control-point action (including a radical reworking of Well[2]) and Dustbowl-style attack/defend (including an update of Dustbowl).
The most-changed class is almost certainly the medic, who is now actually likely to run around healing team-mates, rather than acting as a lone-wolf, leet-skillz-powered, conc-jumping offensive class.

In short, it's a big change from TFC. Fortunately, it has the gameplay to back up the looks - it's just buckets of fun, with a serious side order of "just one more round".

[1]It's also funny. Voice acting and scripting is superb. It's the little touches that make it - when a HWG really lets rip with his assault cannon, he'll start laughing maniacally (with matching visuals); everything the Pyro says is muffled to "mmmph!" by his gasmask, and so on.

[2]Seriously, it's almost completely unrecognisable. After playing it a couple of times, I finally started to notice the similarities, and I knew the old one inside-out and backwards.

Fortress Forever

2007-09-15T07:35:46Z

As some of you may remember, I was a big fan of Team Fortress Classic, back in the day, but gave up playing a few years ago. Well, us Team Fortress fans are being spoiled rotten this week. The official Team Fortress 2 goes into public beta in a few days, but just beating that out of the gate last Thursday was the first release of Fortress Forever (if you don't want to wrestle with the horrors of game site download arrangements like FilePlanet, there are official torrent links here[1])

I've not had time to form a detailed opinion yet (I only found out about the release yesterday afternoon, due to heavy-weapons-lurgy leaving me completely incapable for most of Thursday) but here are some first impressions:

As mods go, it's pretty slickly put together; masses of generally high-quality new models, textures and sounds, even a proper windows installer, to avoid all that yucky messing about with zip files
They've made a solid effort to put hints and tips in place, to help newbies figure out the complexities of TF
Based on a quick runaround, where they've remade TFC maps, most of the changes from the original seem to fix annoyances (for example, the centre bridge area of Crossover2, always a horrendous choke point, has been completely redesigned to avoid it being a total grenade-filled traffic jam like it used to be). In some cases, they've made apparently-subtle geometry changes that I suspect will actually have a radical effect on the gameplay dynamics of the map; I won't know for certain until I've played more of them.
They fixed the Pyro flamethrower to the point where it's actually useful again. hehe.
They appear to have crippled the Heavy, with an overly-onerous "overheating gun-barrels" thing[2], but there's stuff in the forums from the developers saying that's going to get changed pretty drastically in the near future.
The pace is generally a little faster than TFC
They've added a primary scoring system, always visible in the HUD, which includes lots of points for non-frag-related activities - so medics get points for healing team-mates, engies get points for fixing SGs that aren't theirs, and such things. Not sure of all the details yet, but it seems good.
initial gameplay impressions are really good - my first game was on "hunted", an old favourite of mine that became pretty unplayable in the latter days of TFC due to lack of players; it played really well.

I'm still a little worried that it may have suffered from some degree of Grognard Capture (Excessive nerfing of the HWG; I think the speed increase will favour the leet-of-reflex more than the sharp-of-mind; TFC's reversing of that balance, compared to most FPS games, was a large part of the appeal, for me at least) but only time and gameplay will tell on that front, and first impressions are good.

Overall, it looks pretty good. Much kudos to the FF team on a very solid first release.

[1] It boggles me that more games, both amateur and pro, don't make torrents available; this goes double for demos of pro games; the demo of a highly anticipated game will have masses of people wanting to download it in a short space of time, and probably be pretty big (1GB+ is not that unusual). So why do they persist in restricting distribution to blecherous download "services" like FilePlanet, rather than using torrents, which are designed to handle this precise situation?

[2] Rough timing: 2 seconds of continuous fire (a large chunk of which is restricted by the wind-up time) followed by 1 second of forced cool-down; combined with the slightly increased rate-of-fire of the soldier's RPG, this seriously re-jigs things against the HWG. I agreed with the veteran's consensus towards the end of the TFC era that the HWG needed to be weakened a little, but this is way too much. Have to wait and see what the developers' promised revamp does...

RIP Douglas Hill (1935 - 2007)

2007-06-28T16:54:21Z

Douglas Hill, author of the Last Legionary series (among others) was struck and killed by a car on June 21st.

Bugger.

The works of Douglas Hill - primarily the above-mentioned Last Legionary series, but also the Huntsman and Colsec series - were probably my favourite SF before I graduated onto the adult stuff. They may not have scaled the heights of literary achievement, but I loved 'em when I was 9/10/11. He was one of a small band of childrens' SF writers who introduced me to the idea that I might be able to get some of my spaceships-and-rayguns-and-aliens-and-other-strange-things quota from books, as well as TV and film.

Without that shove to cross the media boundaries, and given the (lack of) quantity/quality of much kiddie-friendly early-mid 1980s TV/Film SF, it's not too much of a stretch to a parallel world where my interest in the genre died in 1983 and I never met most of you lot, including calatrice.

I was fortunate enough to meet him at Eboracon (Unicon 2001, organised by psycho_machia and others, IIRC) and he was a very normal, friendly guy, who seemed to mostly be interested in writing stuff that got kids reading, and literary fame could go hang. Worked on me.

(via james_nicoll)

Our first family portrait

2007-05-13T09:28:37Z

calatrice, me, and Alexander at weston park last weekend

(click to enlarge)

only five months after she arrived (very quietly)

2007-05-13T08:24:51Z

several of you (particularly the ex-Warped crowd) may wish to say "hi" to funkylaura.

It's like TA, but BIGGER.

2007-03-31T21:22:07Z

(This post for computer strategy gamers who don't bother reading the games press much)

There's a new RTS game out, called Supreme Commander. It is, to all intents and purposes, a direct sequel to Total Annihilation (but they're not allowed to say so for legal reasons)

Why do I think this is special? The traditional RTS control system, which pretty much dates back to Command & Conquer and Warcraft 2, becomes a major pain in the proverbial when confronted with large numbers of units (say, greater than 50).

Most RTS games have countered this by coming up with various mechanisms to limit the number of units in-game. TA, on the other hand, changed other things to make it possible to cope with large armies (unlimited build queues, unlimited resources, big maps, big guns, relatively smart units).

Supreme Commander continues that evolution. Most of the innovation is in the UI - the level of control of building and factory production makes every other RTS I've played feel painful. You can assign one factory to assist another, so they co-operatively chew through the same build queue; there's a "repeat this build queue" button so you can leave factories producing your army while you go do something else. Also, the BEST mechanism for handling transport units I have ever seen, which extends to getting transports to assist factories, so that units come straight off the production line and load onto a transport, which then transports them to the rally point halfway across the map, without you having to lift a finger. It's actually possible to get your 200 tanks across a large expanse of water without getting RSI or dying of boredom.

Plus, it's great fun to march a group of MonkeyLords (warning: dialup-unfriendly picture) into your enemy's base and watch them chew it up.

It's not all rosy - some of the pathfinding can be a bit bizzare, especially when attempting to formation-move large naval groups, and experimental units can sometimes get a bit confused and bimble about aimlessly for several seconds, rather then fulfilling their orders (which are typically something like "I'd like a half-kilometre-wide swathe of destruction through the enemy base, please"). Also, SC is a bit of a resource hog. It really wants to be played at a resolution of 1280x1024, at least, if you want to see what's going on properly. I've got an Athlon 64 X2 4600+, with 2GB of ram and a Geforce 7900 GT - not quite an uber-leet gaming rig by today's standards, but it's no slouch, either - and SC has made it stagger under the load a few times.

Overall, though, it's a more-than-worthy successor to the mighty Total Annihilation, and the game currently occupying most of my (rather scarce) free time.

If you want to check it out, there's a bandwidth-busting (1079MB) demo available (which is also on a lot of game magazine cover disks at the moment).

RIP John Backus

2007-03-20T18:13:59Z

Via slashdot, I learn of the passing of John Backus (NYT obituary) co-creator of the Backus-Naur Form, and the guy who led the team that developed the Fortran programming language. Predictably, practically the first comment on the slashdot thread is knocking Fortran.

Back when I was studying engineering at University in the early nineties, I had to learn Fortran - my final year project involved writing a moderately substantial program using it. Well, the biggest program I'd ever written at the time. I learned a lot about the day-to-day stuff of programming from that project; it was probably the formative experience that convinced me that I'd quite like to do such things for a living. As a result, at times like this, I feel a need to leap to the defence of the language.

FORTRAN (from "FORmula TRANslation") may have flaws, but comparing it to C is like comparing the Wright Flyer to a Sopwith Camel. Yes, the Camel is the better plane, but I don't hear many people complaining about the Wright Flyer's poor rate of climb - as the name implies, it was pretty radical that it flew. Fortran, developed in the mid-to-late 1950s, was the first high-level programming language to see widespread use. Before it came along, programming was done in assembly language, if you were lucky.

In this context, "high-level" means two main things: "approximately readable by normal people" and "you don't have to worry about the precise design of the CPU you're running on". Assembler language is neither - it's pretty much a one-to-one mapping of the raw machine code into easier-to-remember mnemnoics like "LDA", "JSR" or "BNE" (I said easier, not easy), you need to keep tabs on exactly what data is currently in which bit of the CPU and tell the cpu when to ship stuff out into the main memory.

High-level languages like Fortran separate the programmer from most of that stuff by providing a more human-friendly language (usually built around a combination of real words and algebraic-style expressions) for the programmers to work with, and a "compiler" that translates the human-code into the machine-code. The designers of Fortran made a few mistakes, which have been fixed in many newer languages, but they didn't exactly have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others, because no one else had done it before. Criticising Fortran for its lack of (for example) Polymorphism is like complaining that the Wright Flyer didn't have seat-back DVD players (the early models didn't even have SEATS).

For all its faults, Fortran (albeit in an evolved form) is still in widespread use today. As its expanded name implies, Fortran is not a general-purpose language - it was invented specifically for the purpose of mathematical computation. They added native support for Complex Numbers well before support for characters (i.e. text) and there are some extremely high-powered mathematics code libraries available. If you want to do some seriously heavy-duty computational fluid dynamics, Fortran's still a contender. Which is why they taught it to me, 'cause that's the sort of thing aero engineers do.

Not bad for a programming language that's over half a century old (a milestone that the grand old man of programming languages, C, won't reach for another 15 years or so).

So, RIP John Backus. Thanks for inventing the most important tool of my profession.

aaand we're home.

2007-03-16T15:12:07Z

Thanks to all for the good wishes; I've been running around like the proverbial blue-arsed wotsit for the last few days, so I've not had a chance to respond individually.

For those who are interested, I posted a couple more pics on my journal this morning; I twiddled the bit that prevents it showing up on the friends list, as I figured that most people have limited interest in baby piccies.

New Arrival

2007-03-13T16:03:34Z

Alexander Robert Loveridge Long, 7lb 1oz, arrived at 09:43 this morning.

calatrice continued to fulfil her ambition of being medically boring - everything went smoothly, She and Alex are doing fine.

Recently Seen: Children of Men, BSG 3.01-04, Robin Hood (no spoilers)

2006-10-22T11:13:07Z

I've been very lax in recent months about writing these things up. So, a brief run-down of some recent viewings:

Children Of Men

Bloody Brilliant. I've not read the book (and given calatrice's enthusiastic anti-recommendation, probably never will) but the film is powerful, moving stuff. A proper grown-up intelligent British¹ SF movie. Go see it.

Warning for the squeamish: it's also kinda violent; OTOH, Cal (who is normally squicked by anything more bloody than Toy Story) seems to have coped fairly well.

¹OK, the writer/director's mexican, and I've no idea who paid for it, but it's set in blighty, was mostly filmed here, and *feels* British, so that'll do me.

Battlestar Galactica 3.1-3.4

Also brilliant, for several of the same reasons. I don't think I can say much more without spraying spoilers everywhere.

Robin Hood

Not bad. It's precisely the sort of Saturday tea-time swashbuckler they don't make any more. My 10-year-old self would have been glued to it every week, despite the rather frugal production values and spotty script (Contractions, guys? You don't have the excuse of being androids). However, my 34-year-old self is having an apathy attack and probably isn't going to bother watching any more of it.