The Dancing Poodle

You’ve gotta love TIME photography…

TIME.com: Hurricane Katrina | After the Deluge

Yes, these are real domains…

Thanks Sim’

That was a question asked of me at a job interview yesterday.

Excuse me?? I thought this was for a Software Engineering position?

Apparently so - basically it came down to whether I could approach a left-field question logically and rationally. The fact that I laughed and then ran from the room screaming probably didn’t give that impression (just kidding). Unfortunately, the one question they asked to check out my C++ skills was pitched just as my brain decided to run its monthly virus scan, and so my assurances that I was a C++ guru probably didn’t impress them either. Rats!

Anyway, another job interview today, so hopefully my brain will stay engaged for the duration… although it says it can’t promise anything…

Eeeekkk!!! Wallace & Gromit’s “entire history has been destroyed in a fire”. Fortunately, the Were-Rabbit stuff seems to be safe…

I haven’t read all of this yet, but from the look of things, Tanya Anderson may have a valid case. Some examples of her allegations include the following:

When Ms. Andersen contacted Settlement Support Center, she was advised that her personal home computer had been secretly entered by the record companies’ agents, MediaSentry.

The record company plaintiffs employed MediaSentry as their agent to break into Ms. Andersen’s personal computer (and those of tens of thousands of other people) to secretly spy on and steal information or remove files. MediaSentry did not have Ms. Andersen’s permission to inspect, copy, or remove private computer files. If MediaSentry accessed her private computer, it did so illegally and secretly. In fact, Ms. Andersen was unaware that the trespass occurred until well after she was anonymously sued.

Could be an interesting battle…

I finally got around to creating a project on SourceForge, so I’m now able to run a decent blog (decent system for the blog - the content is still the same). I was able to import all my posts from Blogger, thanks to this page by Andy Skelton.

Oh, please update your links…

In the next day or two I should be uploading the source code for OpenLP 3 (very alpha) to OpenLP’s CVS repository. It’s written in C++ using wxWidgets and should compile under both Windows and Linux. Of course, OpenLP have just released the public beta of OpenLP version 1.

May as well mention this as well… DVB Decoder is a project I’ve been working on over the past few months, basically as a tool for troubleshooting Digital Video Broadcast Transport Streams. Essentially, it allows a user to open up a pre-recorded transport stream (recorded using a Digital TV tuner card or similar) and analyse the stream to a pretty low level. Currently it’s been written in Visual C++ using MFC, but I want to cross over to wxWidgets before I release anything so that (hopefully) the thing can run under Linux too.

Glenn asked about a Quality mic & headset. I was just in Thick Dick’s, and saw what he might be after. Glenn, have a look at this. It’s USB 2.0 to boot!

Oh, and they’ve also got give-away copies of the First-Person Demo of F.E.A.R.

Installed the first-person demo of F.E.A.R. last night and had a quick play. Noticed the ratings were pretty severe - Gore, Intense Violence and Coarse Language. Yep, it had all that, and that was just in the intro sequence!!!

While I didn’t actually get to any action bits (I think I’m about to, but since it was getting late and I was alone in a dark room (and am basically a coward at heart), I thought I’d stop for the night before I got scared. Anyway, to my first impressions…

I guess it’s inevitable to compare any new FPS game with Half-Life 2, whether it’s a fair comparison or not. F.E.A.R. (just FEAR from now on - I get sick of doing all the ‘.’ strokes) is, graphically, a little bit darker that HL2, reflecting more of the thriller / horror flick genre (compared to HL2’s action). As indicated above, there is a lot more language and blood, which means it probably won’t go on my most-played list (especially with two impressionable boys running around my house). Gameplay is similar to HL2, although it would be nice if there was a standard keyboard layout for all FPS games: W, S, A & D control movement as always, but crouch is C (really difficult to strafe right while crouching without shifting your hand), and CTRL (crouch for HL2) seems to start up a bullet-time mode.

Ah, bullet-time! Max Payne made such effective use of you, yet HL2 lives without offering your abilities…

Where was I? Oh yeah… One nifty feature is the way ladders are used. In HL2, you just walk up to a ladder, and you’re climbing or descending. Except when you miss the ladder at the top and start falling (still, it’s descending in a way, I suppose). FEAR requires you to deliberately mount a ladder (using F, rather than the slightly more accessible E key), but then moves through a very cool animation as you move onto the ladder (eg turning around and coming down backwards, etc). And it seems that you slide down ladders rather than actually climbing. Not sure how all this will work in the middle of a firefight, but it seems cool for now.

One last nifty feature is the addition of a config program (in the main program directory) that you can run and set up monitor resolutions, etc, before launching the program - very handy when you accidently select an incompatible display mode and your screen goes black every time you run it (as happened to me).

Anyway, I guess I’ll play a little more over the weekend so I can continue this first taste of FEAR (or would it be a second taste?). All I ask is, “Don’t hurt me!!!”