Saturday, July 18, 2009

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Saturday, July 11, 2009

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Saturday, July 04, 2009

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Monday, June 22, 2009

Is Radiant Silvergun really dated?


I've been playing a lot of Radiant Silvergun lately. It's sad to notice my Saturn stuttering more and more on those grainy but great MPEG videos in the game. The game really is a work of genius, its levels bathed in colour as they sweep and swirl around the screen, its bosses spectacular and challenging, its soundtrack mesmerizing. There's no doubting it's place amongst the greatest shooters of all time.

It's hard not to mention Radiant Silvergun without thinking about it's spiritual successor, Ikaruga. Ikaruga is, of course, also a stunning shooter. Its pace even more relentless than Radiant Silvergun, it demands constant attention and focus and is as brutally unforgiving as its older brother. Of course, we've had a stunning port of Ikaruga to Xbox live, but it looks like we'll never see Radiant Silvergun on anything other than the Saturn and the ST-V. I for one think this is a shame. The real reason we will never see a port is probably due to the effort it would take. The Sega Saturn had some very esoteric hardware, quite alien from anything in circulation today. Radiant Silvergun would certainly have been written in non-portable Saturn-optimised assembly code. Emulation would probably be out of the question, since the Saturn was so unusual that accurate emulation is probably impossible even for the Xbox 360. Basically, creating an Xbox live version would most likely mean starting from scratch.

Imagine if that were to happen, a high definition, widescreen Radiant Silvergun sounds very appealing and yet, it would never be Radiant Silvergun. It might even be a better game in its own right, but Xbox Live Ikaruga is Ikaruga through and through, but when the last Saturn in the world finally dies, Radiant Silvergun will die with it.

Personally, I think that is a shame. Treasure CEO Masato Maegawa recently said, when asked if we could look forward to a port of Radiant Silvergun for Xbox Live Arcade, "If you play Radiant Silvergun nowadays, it's certainly aged in assorted ways, and I'm not sure they're all good." Not counting aesthetics, in my opinion very little has aged in Radiant Silvergun, particularly not the game-play or level design. The game plays out like an epic space opera, its bosses stunningly varied and challenging, its pacing swaying between fast and slow, but never anything less than intense. In comparison, Ikaruga is a rock concert, its frantic, adrenaline pumping levels topped by an even louder, more intense boss battle at the end. Really, the two games are quite different, both brilliant and more than worthy of any hardcore gamers attention.

Even after all this time, there's not been a shooter that has come close to being a better Radiant Silvergun. There really isn't another shooter like it that I am aware of (please mail me if you know of one!) Let's hope that in two or three hundred years time, if humanity is still around, there's still some way of playing Radiant Silvergun. Be attitude for gains!

Saturday, June 20, 2009

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Saturday, June 06, 2009

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Saturday, May 30, 2009

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Saturday, May 23, 2009

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Saturday, May 16, 2009

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Saturday, May 09, 2009

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Saturday, May 02, 2009

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Saturday, April 11, 2009

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Saturday, April 04, 2009

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Monday, March 30, 2009

I believe in Karma again!

Sadly, in these modern times there are elements at work in our country that threaten our freedom and our way of life. Even more worryingly, one of these people is our current home secretary. Yes, whacky Jacqui, who wants to ban cartoon porn and make it so that you have to show an ID card to buy a pay-as-you-go mobile phone has been caught fiddling her expenses to buy pornography, courtesy of the tax payer.

Now, this is old news, but frankly its so funny that I couldn't help blogging about it, oh and hopefully Google might index these pages for the keywords "Jacqui Smith is an evil bitch" :)

Meanwhile, enjoy the story on the register!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/30/jacqui_expenses_entertainment/

Saturday, March 28, 2009

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Saturday, March 14, 2009

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Friday, February 20, 2009

Stardock Fences - Best desktop enhancement ever?

I remember when Yahoo Widgets (then Konfabulator) came onto the scene and suddenly all my geeky friends were plastering their desktops in weather forecast meters, network monitors and other such oh-so-useful little windows. Of course I was eager to try this for myself, but actually ended up uninstalling the whole thing because, well things were just not tidy. I am the kind of person that has a lot of icons on their desktop and they would get obscured behind widgets or tidy themselves away behind them.

Well, those champions of the custom desktop, Stardock Software have solved the problem. Fences, a new free program just released is the answer to your messy desktop related prayers. Now you can create little fances, or mini-desktops on your desktop. Stick your icons inside a fence and they won't go astray under any of the other clutter, er I mean useful desktop widgets, that you already have running. Such a wonderfully simple idea that it's remarkable nobody thought of it sooner. In fact, I'm told that the KDE 4 dekstop has a similar system. Linux doing a user interface better than Windows? Whatever next (I'm just kidding Linux fans, please do not flame me).

Have a look for yourself http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/ It's still in Beta at the moment but seems pretty stable.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Google Mail transition


These days I'm pretty organised within my digital domain. My bookmarks are all sorted by Diigo, my computer indexed by Google Desktop, important paperwork scanned and OCR'd and backed up. I've even had people compliment me on how quickly I can find information. Stark contrast to the state of my non-digital documents which I normally have to hunt through for hours to find a note I wrote last week.

In spite of this, my e-mail is, to be quite fair, a complete mess. My mum, bless her, has her inbox better organised than me. So I decided yesterday that it was time to do some serious spring cleaning of the old e-mail system. After all, e-mail, for all its insecurities and shortcomings, is still a vital part of both my business and my social calendar. Up until now I've been running my own IMAP server, which pulls down mail from my Yahoo and ISP e-mail accounts and makes it readable on whichever particular PC I happen to be using at the time. This system worked fine for the most part, but requires the PC running the mail server to be left on. External IMAP access was possible over the internet, but just watching the number of hack attempts on that port through my firewall made me feel a little uneasy, though moving the port to something random helped a lot. External access was also fairly slow from a lot of places. Researching alternatives, I noticed Google mail offered to do everything I needed, plus give me a snazzy web interface. Sure, there are privacy concerns with a service that seems geared to archive every email you ever write, but to be fair, you can't expect a great deal of privacy from any kind of e-mail unless you use PGP.

So that was the plan, move to Google Mail and sort out the mess that was my inbox. Starting with an inbox clogged with around 4000 messages, I decided to do some serious pruning and cleaning before I tried moving to Google Mail. I've always used Thunderbird for my IMAP email reading, it's way faster than Outlook. Firstly, I decided I would archive any e-mail over two years old. You might ask why I would want to keep mail this old and to be fair I don't have a good answer to that, but storage is so cheap these days you might as well. To archive off my old messages, I used a utility called Thunderstor. With this little utility it is just a matter of copying your messages to a local folder, running the program and saving the messages to a folder of your choice. That took a dent out of my inbox, but it was still a messy pile of digital papers.

Sifting through my E-mail, I divided things up into several categories. I'd like to see more e-mail from real people in my inbox, so firstly I set up filters to move all the various automated e-mail into separate folders. Mail shots from Amazon and Play (you might consider this Spam that I am actually interested in) automatically gets sent to an "Adverts" folder. I then set up separate folders for each e-mail newsletter I was subscribed to (I really should unsubscribe from some of these). Finally, I set up a separate folder for receipts (your order has shipped, etc), Ebay and for anything to do with my websites/business. Finally, for the forums and places I read, I made a "notifications" folder for those "xyz has replied to a thread you are subscribed to" messages. Running each filter as I created it seriously thinned out my inbox. For the folders such as adverts and notifications I set the retention policy to 180 days, thus automatically pruning older messages that were of no longer of any interest or significance.

At this point I was making good headway and I decided to set up my Google Mail account. This was all relatively straightforward. Enabling IMAP was a matter of ticking an option and then adding the account to Thunderbird. Google provide walkthroughs for each step, so its pretty painless. The guide I found at lifehacker also had some handy tips. Next up was the challenge of moving messages from my existing IMAP server into Google mail. I considered Mark Lyon's Google Gmail Loader, but that messes with the timestamps on messages which was unacceptable to me. In the end I opted to add both IMAP servers into Thunderbird and move my messages manually, folder by folder.

Manually copying the messages like this was way more time consuming than I originally anticipated. Largely due to bugs in Thunderbird. Messages with no subject would not copy, setting Thunderbird into some kind of infinite loop of logging onto my Google mail account and doing nothing. Furthermore, Thunderbird frequently gave up in the middle of a copy operation, one time even insisting that my IMAP server was not an IMAP server. It took a great deal of time to copy everything, but having got that far I was determined to see it through. For the last few messages I had to switch to Outlook instead of Thunderbird, I never though that an IMAP operation would work better in Outlook than Thunderbird, but there you go. I imagine that copying masses of mail between IMAP servers is not something people do very often and so has probably not been extensively tested by the Tunderbird developers.

Finally, with my mail all safely in the hands of mother Google (stop sniggering at the back, I already said you can't expect privacy for your emails unless you use PGP!) there was just the matter of bringing my existing Thunderbird message filters across to the new account. Fortunately this is easy as pie. Thunderbird stores filters in a plain text file called “msgFilterRules.dat”. It's in your thunderbird profile folder (on XP that's somewhere near C:\Documents and Settings\Bucko\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\(random characters here).default. Making the filters work on the new server was just a matter of a simple search and replace for the server name and bingo, next time Tunderbird started the new filters were in place.

So, a slightly more painful transition than I had anticipated, but now things are running nicely and I can't imagine going back to my old system. I notice a handy add-on for Firefox called "FireGPG" that even allows you to use GPG with Google Mails web interface. Would be nice to install this to my Ironkey to provide a portable GPG e-mail solution. Maybe I'll post again when I get that working. In the meantime, feel free to drop me a mail, if you know my address ;)

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Less than honest computer shops using WGA as a con-trick?

I know the digital rights and privacy advocate in me should really hate Windows Genuine Advantage, and I do generally hate it, but the software engineer in me sometimes thinks "hey, companies have a right to protect their IP don't they?" So while I might not agree with how Microsoft does things, I can at least see why.

However, what started out as an annoyance seems to have changed into something else altogether. WGA and its consequences are now part of the everyday lives of regular computer owners, which means that less than trustworthy characters can start to exploit the misunderstandings of members of the public to their own devious ends. A colleague rang me today to tell me about a somewhat shocking story that happened to a friend who took a PC to be repaired to a local computer shop in London. The PC would no longer boot and we believe said computer user had been the victim of some kind of Windows live messenger based phishing virus, which uses an infected system to prompt friends to download malware.

Taking his PC to the store and explaining that Windows would not start, the 'technician' didn't even bother to power the system on and instead explained that it was a pirated copy of Windows and that "Windows had blocked the computer". How he could tell this without even powering the machine we don't know, in the absence of a licence sticker there is still the possibility of a genuine retail copy of Windows being present. Of course, even with a pirate copy of XP on the machine, Windows is not 'blocked'. If your machine fails the Windows Genuine Advantage check, this is what happens:- (source - Wikipedia and my own research).

On Windows XP - If an instance of Windows does not seem to have a valid license, WGA displays a specific notice to the user and prevents non-Critical updates from being downloaded from Microsoft. That's it, that's all that happens, your PC is certainly not "blocked".

On Windows Vista, WGA validation failure has a greater impact. In addition to persistent notification and the disabling of non-critical updates, WGA also disables Windows Aero, Windows defender and ReadyBoost. The user is given a grace period in which to then pass validation, after which most of the operating system is disabled and Windows reverts to reduced functionality mode. Although since Service Pack 1 this no longer happens, instead you simply get prominent nag notices on systems not found to be genuine. Even in reduced functionality mode you can still boot your PC.

Even more shocking, when the victim asked the computer shop to install him a fresh copy of Windows, the 'technician' explained that this was pointless, the computer would be 'permanently blocked by Windows' and that it was now only good for scrap. Of course, he then pointed to his own range of 'fully legitimate' PC's and explained how they would never have any trouble with those. Just in case anyone isn't completely clear on this, this is complete and utter tripe. Systems which fail WGA can easily have a genuine licence applied to them, heck, Microsoft even give you the link in order to buy a genuine licence on any PC that fails WGA.

Sadly, this is yet another story of DRM gone bad. Anyone who fell for a story like this is not likely to have a positive impression of Microsoft and while WGA is designed to maximise their profits, stories like this only highlight how such draconian measures hurt the reputation of the companies they are supposed to protect.

Saturday, August 09, 2008

Watch the Phone Watch!


Being a life-long fan of Night Rider, I've always wanted to look at one of those wristwatch phones that have been popping up on e-bay. Well, my wish came true recently when somebody my dad knows bought one and lent it to me to see if I could get it set up.

The little device is pretty impressive. It recognised my SIM card immediately. Choosing a victim from the numbers on my SIM I dialled them up, expecting a one way call I was pretty surprised to find that there's a tiny microphone in the device, meaning you can actually talk to people by shouting into your wrist, just like the Hoff did in Night Rider! Well, not quite, the sound from the speakers was so quiet that holding a conversation was extremely troublesome, being as I had to hold the phone to my ear to hear my contact. Still, it's a step closer to my Night Rider fantasies than the camp sounding robot voice that's supposed to be KITT on my sat-nav.

Aside from working as a fully functional phone, the little device also packs in a MP4 player, a FM radio, an MP3/Media player and even some simple games. The screen is a touch screen (though if you hated the keyboard on the iPhone, expect dialing on here without a stylus to be extremely awkward). I watched a sample video on the media player which seemed to be a clip from King Kong and mighty impressive it was too. The audio was much louder than making a call, though perhaps if I had to hold my wrist up to watch a whole movie I'd be wishing I spent my money on a portable media player instead.

The phone/watch is bulky but not too heavy and will rest on your wrist without pulling your arm off. The more fashion concious non-geeks might want to wear something long sleeved to cover it over, but bearing in mind I used to wear my Tetris wrist watch (http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2005/05/vintage_nintend.html) I don't think that's a problem for the out of the closet geek like myself.

Sadly, this particular phone/watch has a faulty USB connector, meaning there's no way to use the headphones or to transfer media to the device. That seems to be the main problem with this model of watch, the flimsy USB connector that it uses. You can see a picture of the connector here on the left, sandwiched between my knees. The connector HAS to be small, but regretably the way it attaches onto the watch is not very secure. The headphones attached the same way and would work sometimes if the cable was given a wiggle, a sure sign of an edge connector that is on its way out. Some kind of plastic clip to hold the cable in place and prevent up-down movement weakening the edge connector is what is really needed.

So sadly I was not able to set the device up. I'm told the gentlemen who owns this particular watch is a particularly big sports-playing type of person, so I hope he doesn't think I broke it :)

A Phishing E-mail Classic

This has got to be the best phishing scam I've ever received in my in-box, needless to say I fell for it immediately and my Natwest account is now empty. Better than having an "info bandit" in it though eh? (click picture for full size version).

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Security tip for Pidgin users


Pidgin is a cool IM client that supports several different protocols. It's multi-platform, fast and pretty lightweight and so is pretty popular. If you use Pidgin regularly, did you know that it stores all your user names and passwords in an unencrypted file? On Windows XP you can find the XML files at c:\documents and settings\(your username)\application data\.purple

If you are sane, you'd never save your passwords with Pidgin. The authors of the software say that no instant messaging client provides security for your passwords, so they aren't even going to try. This basically leaves password security up to you. The best approach is to simply not store passwords in Pidgin, you can use a password manager like Roboform or SplashID to store them instead.

Aside from passwords, however, there's quite a bit of potentially private information stored in this .purple folder. Not only are all your user names stored in there, along with the protocols they use, but so are your entire contact lists. If anyone wanted the lowdown on who you consider to be a buddy, all they would need to do is open up one of these .xml files.

If you must store passwords within Pidgin, or you don't like the idea of your user name and other data being left unencrypted on your machine, you might like this little hint. You can move the .purple directory to a more secure location (perhaps a Truecrypt container - http://www.truecrypt.org/ ) by setting the environment variable "purplehome" to point to somewhere else on your machine. To set an environment variable in XP:-

Right-click on My Computer
Go to Properties -> Advanced tab
Click the "Environment Variables" button
In System Variables (the lower box), set a variable called purplehome with its value being the path to the new location (Example: I:\pidgin\Purple).

You then simply need to copy the .purple directory to the new location. Now, so long as you remember to un-mount your Truecrypt container when you are done yakking, your usernames/passwords and other sensitive data are fully encrypted. Moving the .purple directory might help protect against Pidgin password snooping malware too, so long as the malware doesn't know to check your "purplehome" environment variable.

A couple of caveats with this of course. When you are using Pidgin, your passwords are, of course, still unencrypted for all to see. Ideally, Pidgin would encrypt your passwords again as soon as you authenticated with MSN/Yahoo etc, but don't hold your breath for this kind of functionality happening any time soon. You can't dismount the Truecrypt container either, as Pidgin constantly writes to the xml files in the .purple folder.

Nevertheless, this approach certainly improves security a great deal over what is available by default. Yes, you could just encrypt your user data using Windows/NTFS own Encrypting File System (EFS), but a Truecrypt container generally offers better security than EFS. If you're really concerned about your privacy, Truecrypt 6 now offers a hidden operating system. Now you can not only encrypt your operating system, but hide it too. As ever, it's all about finding the right balance between convenience and security for you.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Xbox 360 number 2


Oh joy, look what just happened to my second Xbox 360.

Microsoft, this is pathetic! Maybe it's time I stopped being so hard on Sony for its lacklustre PS3 performance so far, at least you don't have to keep sending that back.

Sir Dewie, this is a "Red Ring of Death". Remember it, for you will see it one day too.

Back to Metroid on the Wii I think :)

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Very cool things Microsoft could do with the Xbox 360 and Xbox live

Yes, we all know that the Xbox 360 offers the best overall experience for core gamers. While Sony promise that their new home service will give Xbox live a run for its money, presently, neither Sony nor Nintendo can offer a service with anywhere near the functionality of Xbox live. That's not to say Xbox Live is perfect, far from it in fact, and as paying customers we have more right to moan than those who opted for a free alternative. Microsoft can and should do better, here are just a few ways they could improve the service.

Make Xbox live free


Of course, this is the most obvious option and something that many users have been hoping for. There can be little doubt that the yearly cost of Xbox live makes some potential customers purchase the Playstation 3 instead. While the service offers reasonable value for those that play regularly, for the casual gamer who wants to dip his or her toes into the on-line worlds of Bomberman Live or Guitar Hero 3 once in a blue moon, £40 a year seems unreasonable. Furthermore, if the service was free, many of us wouldn't feel quite so angry that Microsoft sees fit to charge us money for such things as themes and gamer pictures that are about the size of a large postage stamp.


How likely is this to happen?


It's debatable really. Many people speculate that Microsoft make enough revenue through content and advertising that they could make the service free. However, if Sony or even Nintendo were to offer a free gaming service comparable to Xbox Live, Microsoft may be forced to make Xbox Live free or risk losing a significant chunk of its Xbox 360 user base.


Better custom soundtracks with full/partial game control options


Anyone who uses the 360's admittedly excellent custom soundtrack option will have noticed this. Play a game with its regular soundtrack and complete a race or finish a level and invariably the music will change to something more befitting of your victory. Sit revving your engine on the starting grid and most games will stop the music altogether, until the green light comes on. Turn on your custom soundtracks however and this effect is lost, as the same tune warbles away no matter what the context of the game. Wouldn't it be cool if the game could be given partial control? You could even choose different play-lists for different events in the game (such as during a race, during the menus, or during a loading sequence).


How likely is this to happen?


This is the kind of functionality that should have been thought about from the beginning. It's unlikely to be added in now and its unlikely that existing games could be updated to take advantage of it. Maybe this is something we'll see in Microsoft's next game console.


Centralised stats-tracking and social networking with other live users


It's fun to track your Halo 3 stats on-line at Bungies website, or your Lewis Hamilton style racing exploits at Forza.com. Wouldn't it be nice if there was some sort of centralised page where all this information could be accessed though? I'm a fan of the profile page in the PC gaming utility Xfire, which allows you to take screen shots of your games and instantly upload and display them. Social networking tailored for gamers can't be far away, especially considering the lofty promises Microsoft had for user created content when the console was first released.


How likely is this to happen?


We saw a move toward this with the last dashboard update, where Microsoft added the bio section to your gamer card. Microsoft need to work on improving this service and also protecting privacy before we can expect to see an on-line service with the same features as Facebook or similar social networking sites.


Improve the friends system, allowing for notes to be taken for each friend


IF you're anything like me then your friends list on Xbox Live is probably full of people you played with once or twice, but now you can't remember for the life of you who they actually are. Unfortunately, remembering that Zacky123A was the person who you beat at Halo last month, and RedDawg34 was the person who shattered your Ridge Racer winning streak isn't particularly easy. The friends system in World of Warcraft allows players to add a one-line note to each player on their friends list. This is great for jogging your memory and reminding you that Mia32A wasn't actually the cute gnome you met in Westfall, but the rather butch looking warrior woman you met in Duskwood.


How likely is this to happen?


It's a simple idea and one that could be implemented easily, surely someone at Microsoft must play World Of Warcraft and see what a great idea this is. Let's hope to see this functionality in a dashboard update soon!


amBX support


the amBX system, invented by Philips, is a way of attaching lights, rumble packs and fans to your computer and then having the software on your computer control these devices to create a more emersive experience. In practise, the lights work the best, making for some truly cool ambient effects as you trudge down the corridors of the latest generic sci-fi first person shooter on the PC. Ever since the system came out, PC owners have been asking if there is a chance of seeing the hardware in action on the popular games consoles. The system even hooks up to a spare USB port, which the Xbox 360 has in abundance.


How likely is this to happen?


The official word from Philips is “not if, but when” but it largely depends on the technology proving itself as a viable mass-market accessory and not just a toy for PC gamer geeks.


Xfire Integration


Xfire is a free service on the PC that brings in-game IM and matchmaking to most popular PC game software. Microsoft is looking for ways to expand gaming on both Windows Vista and the 360. Its early efforts with games like Shadowrun, which offered cross-platform play and some of the Xbox live functionality on the PC haven't proven to be overly successful. What if Microsoft merged some or all of Xfires functionality into the live service? Ok, stop laughing, it could happen. It would mean that gamers could chat easily to their friends and see what games they were playing, even if one was playing on the PC and the other was on the 360. “Hey, you playing World of Warcraft again? Here's an invite to come play Burnout, so switch your PC off!”.


How likely is this to happen?


Pretty damn unlikely, if Microsoft bought Xfire and tried to charge for it, PC gamers would simply move to another free service, like Gamespy Comrade. Meanwhile, going to the trouble of allowing cross-platform/protocol chat would be unlikely to gain Microsoft any significant number of new customers.

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Microsoft shuts down Autopatcher, Windows users mourn its loss

Microsoft, in yet another instance of kicking it's most loyal user in the teeth, yesterday e-mailed Autopatcher.com requesting the "immediate takedown" of the download page. As a Windows technician and user for many years, this decision is gut-wrenchingly disappointing. As anyone who has had to repair PC's either in the field or in a workshop will tell you, Auto patcher is the time saving labour saving and most utterly useful utility you could ever ask for. Without Auto patcher we face a minefield of trying to keep updates on our PC, installing them one by one. Using Windows Update is sometimes not an option, a PC that may not even have a network connection available in the workshop (if the customer only has dial-up, or perhaps an incompatible ISP such as ADSL when you have Cable)

This is not just a sad day, it is bitterly disappointing. So much so, that I'm even going to write a paper letter of complaint to Microsoft themselves.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Do the improved security features of Windows Vista adversely affect system performance?

Check it out, you can read this post on ezinearticles.com

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While Windows Vista continues to frustrate some users, driver support and software compatibility is steadily improving and many users are starting to warm to at least some of its new features. There is no escaping the fact that Vista is slower than XP for many tasks though, The users who continue to be most disappointed with Vista are the high-end gamers, who have invested heavily in their gaming PC only to be faced with degraded performance and poor driver support under the new operating system. If we are looking for reasons why games run slower in Vista than XP, then looking into DirectX 10 and Vistas OpenGL support would be the sensible place to start. However, speculation has been rife on the internet as to what are the causes of poorer performance in Vista. Jeff Atwood, in a recent article on his blog pointed the finger squarely at Vistas improved security measures, namely User Account Control and Windows Defender. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” Jeff said and of course this is true, everything you run on your PC will consume at least some RAM and processor time, but how big an effect does Vista's new security measures have on performance? In order to investigate I decided to collect some benchmarks using various games under Vista, to determine the extent of slowdown that is caused by Vistas new security measures. Games are some of the most demanding applications your average end user wants to run and so make good candidates for testing performance.

The test O.S:-

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate, fully patched up until April 9th. Background disk de-fragmenting was disabled, but everything else was left as-is with a fresh install of the operating system. Most of the hardware drivers came directly from Microsoft, either as part of the Vista install or from Windows update. The exception to this being Nvidia’s now somewhat infamous video drivers, version 100.65 of the Forceware drivers for Vista were downloaded from Nvidia’s website and installed.

The test machine:-

The test machine was a mid to high end gaming rig, with the following specs:

Motherboard: Gigabyte Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9

Processor: AMD Athlon X2 4800 Dual Core Socket 939

RAM: 2GB DDR

Graphics: BFG NVidia Gforce 7900 GTX 512mb

Sound: Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS

Hard Drive: Western Digital Raptor SATA

The games:-

It was the intention to also collect benchmarks from 3DMark 2006 and Battlefield 2142, however it was not possible to consistently run these applications under Vista at the time of writing without experiencing frequent crashes. In the end, three games with different underlying engines were chosen, the games were:-

Unreal Tournament 2004

Far Cry

Prey

Test software:-

The benchmarking programs used in these tests are freely available over the internet.

UMark, which was used to benchmark Unreal Tournament 2004, can be obtained here.

Hardware OC Far Cry Benchmark, which was used to benchmark Far Cry, can be obtained here.

Hardware OC Prey Benchmark, which was used to benchmark Prey, can be obtained here.


Each game was run for 10 passes (15 for Far Cry, as the benchmark program did not offer 10 runs) and the final score was an average of each of the runs. The runs were done once with UAC and Defender turned off, once with UAC only and once with Windows Defender only.

The results:-

Unreal Tournament 2004 V3369 – Umark V 2.0.0 - Umark-DM Demo.4 (Deck 17 Deathmatch) - 1280x1024 – High Image Quality

UAC/Win Defender off: 102.64

UAC On: 102.52

Win Defender On: 102.65

Identical except for the tiniest fraction, the result with Windows Defender enabled actually clocking up a fraction higher. Fairly convincing proof that Windows defender has no effect on UT2004's performance. Unreal Tournament is an OpenGL based game and OpenGL is known to be somewhat slower in Vista. This would explain performance differences between XP and Vista when running OpenGL games.

Far Cry V1.4 – Hardware OC Far Cry Benchmark V1.5 - PC Games Hardware Demo – 1280x1024 – Ultra details, Default Shader, Direct 3D Renderer, No HDR.

UAC/Win Defender off: 71.12

UAC On: 71.8

Win Defender On: 70.94

Again, the difference is barely noticeable, turning Windows defender off did make Far Cry 1.21% quicker, not exactly likely to make the game play experience any better.

Prey V1.3 – Hardware OC Prey Benchmark V1.0 - Guru3D demo – 1280x1024 – Shader detail Highest – Filtering None, AA None, Boost Graphics OFF.

UAC/Win Defender off: 110.51

UAC On: 108.77

Win Defender On: 110.49

Windows Defender once again makes no difference, however turning UAC off made prey run 1.6% quicker. Again, not a performance boost that is likely to be noticeable when actually playing the game.

Conclusions:-

It would appear that neither Windows Defender nor UAC has any significant effect on gaming performance. However, there are some points to keep in mind when considering this data. Firstly, these tests do not take into consideration disk I/O times, which could be adversely affected by real-time file scanners such as Windows Defender. Naturally this could affect the time a game or level takes to load, as well as placing some extra strain on the CPU. Secondly, these benchmarks were collected on a dual-core system. According to the benchmarks on this site, Far Cry takes virtually no advantage of a dual core processor, with Prey speeding up around 17% when run on a dual core. If the games are under using one of the available cores, this theoretically leaves a lot of processing time free on the other core to take care of background tasks such as UAC or Windows Defender.

Once driver support improves and newer games start taking advantage of dual core processors, it would be prudent to run tests like these again. For the present crop of games however, there seems to be little if any point in disabling Vista security measures to try to improve performance.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Phantasy Star Universe

So, if anyone actually visits my blog who found out about it from my PSU card, please leave your comment here! :)

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

ADDQ #0,0D

At work recently I have spent the better part of around 3 days looking over some code that was malfunctioning. This particular piece of code is code that has been in our products for probably the better part of a decade. Recently it was updated and part of the update necessitated changing some data types from char to int. To cut a long story short, the problem wasn't actually due to any mistakes in the C code at all, but due to a bug in our cross compiler. Fortunately, our office eccentric is also an assembly language hero who was able to study the assembler listings our compiler generated and eventually determine that part of a register was not getting cleared.

Which got me thinking, how would we have solved this problem without someone like that to help us? I wasn’t taught anything about low level programming at university past the fact that it existed, they were too busy teaching me how to make polymorphic C classes and why I should never use arrays over vectors. It wasn’t even an option on the software engineering course, but as we all know, things go wrong, and eventually someone’s still got to know how to communicate with the computer at the lowest levels, especially when programming embedded systems. I can’t help but wonder where the next generation of assembly language programmers are going to come from, now that assembly language isn’t fashionable any more. After all, it is not like assembly is just some obsolete language like Cobol we can happily discard.

If this post as piqued your interest, go check out http://www.monroeccc.edu/ckelly/EASy68K.htm - I really should, but you know, there’s still so much more C++ I need to learn :)

Friday, February 09, 2007

Wisbar - My New Favourite PocketPC App

It's been a while since I saw any cool new PocketPC applications so when a friend showed me Wisbar I decided to pull my finger out and actually write a blog post about it. Wisbar gives you (amongst other things) a much nicer start menu and task switcher, yes I know that Pocket Plus already did a task switcher, but come on, stabbing away at that little X icon was still not quite as intuitive as it should have been was it?

Check it out at http://www.lakeridgesoftware.com/ I've only tried it on my Axim so far, I'm not sure how it will fare on the smaller screen of my MDA Vario but I do plan to give it a try.

Saturday, November 25, 2006

10 of the Best - Nintendo Gamecube Games

10 of the best – Gamecube Games

Eurogamer (http://www.eurogamer.net) recently ran several articles on the best ever games on the original Xbox. Several friends who are planning to buy a Wii but missed out on the Gamecube have recently asked me about the best of the Gamecubes back catalog, so here is my list of 10 of the best the cube had to offer.

Animal Crossing

Although strictly coming on the N64 first, Animal Crossing on the Gamecube was the first version to bring the concept to the masses. Animal Crossing is part sims, part role-playing game and part something entirely new altogether. There’s no time limits, health bars or hit points, the player is left to do pretty much what he or she pleases, be it fishing, digging for fossils or selling fruit to pay off their mortgage. Quirky, sedate yet strangely compelling, Animal Crossing is one of those titles that can make hours seem like minutes. Some people just don’t ‘get it’ but for the rest of us, fond memories of fishing tournaments and writing letters to computer controlled sheep are unlikely to fade any time soon.

Chibi Robo

Chibi Robo came along later in the life of the Gamecube, at a time when many gamers had turned their attention elsewhere. A shame, because Chibi Robo shines as one of the best platform adventures of the Gamecubes hardware generation. Playing as a tiny robot house-maid, you make your way around the Sanderson’s family home, trying to spread happiness. No small task with the Sanderson’s marriage on the rocks and their only daughter traumatised so much that she think she is a frog. As well as the Sanderson’s, Chibi must deal with the houses toys, which come to life after dark and include a lovesick squeaky dog toy, a psychopath teddy bear and Mr Sanderson’s favourite action figure. The game has a wonderful light hearted sense of humour about it, the same kind of humour that endears ‘The Simpson’s’ to adults and children alike. While the main quest is unlikely to pose a great challenge to experienced gamers, there’s more than enough here to justify the asking price and it’s so much fun to play. An essential part of any self-respecting Gamecube owners collection.

F-Zero GX

Microsoft may have muscled into the console race with their big brash X-Box but for the Nintendo fan-boys this was proof that the small efficient little box had some tremendous polygon pushing power under its hood. As fast as any racing title on X-box or PS2 for that matter, F-Zero looks absolutely stunning played on a HDTV at 480p (an option sadly only available in the US and Japanese versions) A futuristic racer with a grid full of comic-book style competitors, various story and grand prix mode and a host of customisation options, including the option to take your own craft design and play it on the superb coin-op version (if you were lucky enough ever to find one) the only disappointment was that it’s not possible to play the game online.

Legend of Zelda – The Four Swords

Played without a GBA owning friend or two, Four Swords can feel like nothing more than an easy remake of an (admittedly rather good) GBA title. Find yourself 1 to 3 friends who also own GBA’s however and this becomes one of the most enjoyable multiplayer titles on the system outside of Wario Ware. Play is split between the main screen and each players Gameboy Advance. When the party is split up, the action continues on the small screen until you are reunited again. You’ll have to cooperate to get through the games many dungeons, and to defeat some brilliantly designed boss creatures. To top it off the irksome but strangely likable fairy Tingle hosts some fantastic mini-games that would make for an enjoyable package in their own right. If you can find enough friends with GBA’s this is an essential purchase for your Gamecube library.

Metroid Prime 1 and 2

A triumph of game design, Metroid prime is a shining example of just how to take a 2D game concept and apply it to 3D perfectly. An absolutely stunning single player first person shooter, Metroid Prime (and its sequel Echos) dispenses with the obsession FPS designers have with emulating reality and instead moulds the games reality to fit in perfectly with the players ability to control Samus (the lead character). Instead of making the player perform awkward jumps and intricate platform sections, which serve to remind just how clumsy you are when trying to control a person just using a joypad or a mouse and keyboard, the platforms and pitfalls in Metroid are perfectly tailored to Samus’s abilities. With free-roaming games becoming all the rage, it is disappointing that the bulk of FPS titles are still limited to getting from point A to point B along a predetermined route. Not so Metroid Prime, which features a huge and vast map to explore across several varied and stunningly beautiful landscapes. While trawling across the huge map to a new area can on rare occasions become tiresome, the overwhelming sense of curiosity you now have to explore the next section of the game easily makes up for that. Add to the package a mixture of huge and brilliantly designed boss characters, a superbly atmospheric soundtrack and it’s easy to see why Metroid Prime became one of the best selling Gamecube games of all time.

Resident Evil 4

Although it was launched on the PS2 as well, it’s the Gamecube Resident Evil 4 that really shines. Graphically it’s noticeably more beautiful than the PS2 version and thus is certainly the version you want to opt for given the choice. The game takes the Resident Evil formula and removes the Zombies, replacing them with faster moving, more lethal humans. “He is not a Zombie” says the game when you search your first corpse, and it isn’t kidding. Be prepared for an intense atmospheric and superbly designed action adventure. Even the post game extras are worth playing through too.

Super Mario Sunshine

No Nintendo software library can be complete without at least one Mario title and this is the Gamecubes. After the sheer brilliance of Super Mario 64, perhaps some critics were expecting too much of this Gamecube offering. In the game, Mario is framed for vandalising the island resort he was visiting, and tasked with cleaning up the island and returning the shines (magical items that make the sun shine on the island.) Bright, bold colourful and happy, occasional awkward moments with the camera dilute, but do not spoil an otherwise hugely entertaining (and on occasion extremely challenging) platform game which is still probably the best platformer of the Gamecubes generation, but not of all time.

Super Monkey Ball

A launch title created by Segas Amusement Vision division, Monkey Ball (and its sequel) remained firm favourites amongst Gamecube users throughout the consoles life. The main game takes the Marble Madness game play concept and brings it up-to-date with bright crisp 3D visuals. Instead of guiding an inanimate marble, you are now tasked with rolling a monkey in a ball through all sorts of hazards and pitfalls. Later levels are insanely challenging and the game will keep average players occupied for months. Furthermore, it offers some of the best multiplayer mini-games on the system (even better than the ones offered with Monkey Ball 2) Monkey Target, as unlikely as it sounds, is one of the most fun post-pub games on any system.

Viewtiful Joe

Sega were the first to use Cel Shading on their brilliant Dreamcast title “Jet Set Radio” Since then other software houses have slapped the style onto all sorts of games. Viewtiful Joe uses the style brilliantly for its comic-book style capers. Essentially a sideways scrolling beat-em-up, with some platforming elements. Viewtiful Joe is an extremely polished product. As the game progresses the player earns VFX powers which allow them to slow down or speed up the action, allowing for some truly spectacular special moves to be executed. In spite of this, the game can be viciously difficult at times, sometimes to the point of feeling unfair. For players who are willing to persevere however, Viewtiful Joe proves to be a superbly designed and extremely exciting action game that is every bit of an adrenaline rush as any title on the other supposedly more ‘grown up’ consoles.

Wario Ware

Explaining Wario-Ware to the unenlightened is sometimes a little difficult. You have around 3 seconds to complete each mini-game, yes you read correctly, around 3 seconds. The mini-games range from snippets from Nintendo’s back catalogue to utterly bizarre tasks like inserting fingers into noses or slicing vegetables. Far more entertaining than it sounds (ask anyone who’s played it) what makes the Gamecube version stand out is its fantastic array of multiplayer modes. “Listen to the Doctor” in particular is a firm favourite with children, in this mode you are required to complete your mini-game challenge while doing something equally as stupid with your body, such as rubbing your head or telling a funny story. Complete your challenge but fail to do your silly task, and the other players will not applaud you by repeatedly pressing their controllers green buttons, resulting in a loss of points. An absolutely essential Gamecube purchase for anyone with a sense of humour.

Honourable mentions must also go to:

Donkey Konga

Donkey Kong – Jungle Beat

Eternal Darkness – Sanities Requiem

Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Metal Gear Solid – The Twin Snakes

Paper Mario

Skies of Arcadia – Legends

Soul Calibur 2

Wave Race Blue Storm

New version of Safeguard PDA

Utimaco have launched a new version of Safeguard PDA that seems to fix the security problem in the previous version. The new version is 4.11.1.2 and you should upgrade immediatley if you use this software.

Saturday, November 04, 2006

Security flaw in Utimaco Safeguard PDA

I was delighted when Utimaco (https://www.utimaco.co.uk/) announced that their latest version of Safeguard PDA would include PIM (E-mail, organiser etc) encryption for Windows Mobile 5 devices. As far as I am aware they are the first company to the market to offer this.

Unfortunately, from my experiences it seems that the product has a little way to go before it becomes really useful or even secure. Annoyances with the current version include the fact that it is impossible to uninstall the program short of performing a hard reset, furthermore, if you use your PDA for TomTom or other navigation aids, watch out, because even if you disable auto-lock in the settings the software ignores this and automatically locks your PDA after about half an hour.

Much more worrying than this though, it is possible to bypass the log on procedure altogether, here is how. This works when using the Dell Axim X51v PDA. I had PIM encryption turned on and no PrivateDisk volumes set up.

Log into the PDA as normal, now fill up all the available memory on the unit (not the storage card) an easy way of doing this is to use the recording option. Set the recorder going and leave it until all available memory on the PDA is used up. When this happens recording will stop and Windows will probably warn you that memory space is critically low.

At this point, wait until Safeguard locks the PDA and the Safeguard Authentication screen appears.

When this screen appears, try to authenticate, Safeguard PDA will reject your password even if entered correctly. Try it a couple of times to be sure that you entered it correctly and the software is rejecting it.

Now, perform a soft reset on the PDA. System will reset and instead of presenting the Authentication screen, it will present the Safeguard setup wizard and tell you that Safeguard is not yet configured.

Now Cancel the setup procedure. You are now given full access to the PDA including PIM without entering any password whatsoever. I have repeated these steps twice now and got into the PDA both times.

Of course I let Utimaco know about this problem immediately. In the meantime if you use safeguard be extra careful not to fill up your PDA's internal memory. Beware of any executables downloaded from the net or Bluetooth as these could exploit this flaw.

I'll blog again if I find out any more about this issue.