I've started a new Tumble Blog at sleepoverrated.com.

Check it out there's lots of information up there and its an easier domain name for me to remember.

blog boredom. I haven't posted for awhile I know. I've been so stacked working three jobs. There was an interesting article I was reading out of slashdot The Digital Bedouins and the Backpack Office today. It describes the telecommuting workforce and how they travel around while maintaining their working hours.

It got me thinking that I've been living that lifestyle lately. Well at least outside of the daytime work hours. At Christmas I was snowboarding in Whistler mountain and would come back off the hill and do some freelance work for a company in London. It only works if you have work to be left alone with. In the evenings I work for a sports startup company. I have to deal with time shifting and deligating tasks to people I don't see. Its hard but what we do is come together every two months to have a brain storm and company meeting. For the first year I was working on the startup I didn't see anyone and would just talk over the phone. Now I know who I'm dealing with and actually have some social credit with them before we have to get down to business.

I'm actually in better balance this year but I'll see if I can keep it up, contracting really helps since I don't have to work until its done anymore during the day.

There's a new single card solution for DS roms now. Before you had to use the passme2 and a card reader but now you just need the M3 DS Simply and it'll let you run a rumble pack in the GBA slot. This is great news because in the DS Lite the classic M3 Player sticks out too far and the PassMe2 is prone to freezing if the card is bumped if you leave it in. I expect to order this one in march.

Watch this space in january, I'm planning a new site network to lead me back into contracting in the new year. I'm getting really interested into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) lately. It seems like its a lot of black box testing of the various tricks that google and over crawlers use to rank sites. Pretty much the main thing to do is to write good content. I'm planning on writing 250 words a day in the new year. In the mean time here's some links to get you started

Build A Successful Site In 12 Months
seomoz

I had a dream about DotNetNuke CMS last night, how pathetic is that? Well I'm off to NYC in a couple weeks to flush out the plan for next year with my CEO and the rest of the team. Which is nothing compared to Threeboy going to the Playboy Mansion next week.

Well its been awhile, I've been neglecting this blog for the last 4 months it seems. Since then I've setup a flickr account. I'm on last.fm. I also started in on fire poi last january and I've done it a few times this summer. Loads of fun.

If you've seen my IM reconnecting every 15min its cause of the new 2.4.0.2 version of azureus. It took me awhile to track down that it was the reason. Mainly cause I don't trust my linksys router. I downgraded to 2.3.0.6 and everythings fine again. I think it might have just been that I did too many auto-updates because when the new jar files are installed from the auto update it's not the same as the distribution package that you can download.

I just finished metroid prime hunters on the ds. Great game but as soon as I played over wifi I got seriously owned. I don't know what the guy did but just as soon as I was in line of sight I was dead. usually it takes 50 shots or something. Weird.

really I didn't go anywhere so I can't give you a "sorry I've been in tibet" excuse or something. I've been really busy and working lateon a side project on top of work. That and my day job is kicking off with a new version of the training software I've been working of for the last year. This time it's got a cms building flash files, pretty cool.

Strokes - "and now my fears comes in threes"

So I was trying to get starwars battlefront 2 to load but it kept crashing at the loading screen all the time. Then one time It got all the way thru and I managed to play a level and then it crashed. It got me thinking, it's probably something specific to my machine. So I searched and searched about how it was crashing to desktop and it turns out that its got a problem with dual core cpu's and you have to set the affinity of the application to run in uniprocessor.

The program you need is imagecfg it lets you set the affinity for individual programs. I got it going just so I could see how bad the single player missions are, egads there's an easy difficulty and an hard one and thats it. So it got me thinking, hey what about these other games that have been acting weird and no one else is getting problems with it, so I gave it a go too.

Fable - crashed to desktop sometimes, video stutering (fixed)
Farcry - video stuttering, haven't tried yet
Darwinia - missing graphics (fixed)
X3:Reunion - missing warp animations, buggy (need to try)

and some others that I can't remember, it's like this magic elixer that fixes all of my gaming woes.

It's been in development off and on over the last few years but the new truenuff backend is up with a whole lot of additional functionality. Give it a look threeboy is in the process of doing truenuff tv too and will be putting up new comics this year too.

So I've had problems with winamp dying out and my work computer needing a reboot before it starts working again so I've been playing around with Pandora which is a music discovery service that you put in the artist or song you want to hear more of and it finds similar artists.

Well here's how it works, the artist that you picked to hear their radio station, well you only hear about 3 of their songs regardless how many albums they have. Then you hear a bunch of indy music that has some of the same style. Well obviously they need another tag called 'crappy' so when you pick a cool artist that uses guitar your not going to get some crappy guy trying to sound similar. The good news is that there's plenty of similar artists that you'll get into but I found that the best way to find new artists is if it's acoustic guitar or folky cause there's plenty of those guys out there trying to sell blood to pay for their demo.

so in summary, just goto the playlist of a radio station you like such as KNDD, CFOX and whoever else you like. Then go onto P2P and download their whole discography just to see that they have 8 albums that has one song that you like. You should listen to my friend ali's band Leno, they're cool but I can't find them on the internet cause their googlerank sucks and I wonder why.

I had a couple sick days on friday and monday and got over a cold that was dogging me friday morning. I loaded up on multivitamins and orange juice most of my four day weekend.

I finally finished off doom 3 and it wasn't as scary as people made it out to be. it was definetly a dark and evil atmosphere but at the end of the day you could predict things in the game well enuff to avoid them and hardly take any damage. I used the shotgun for most of the whole game and would occasionally switch to the plasma gun to take down the super infantry guys. the last boss sucked but the levels were amazing, I think I need to start playing these games on nightmare just to hold my interest longer. I'll still play through the expansion but I'll probably give it a little time to let all the evil get out of me. Once you play through the game you realize how bad of a remake the movie was. There was a lot of gameplay in this one and I'm glad I played it without the flashlight mod.

Infected has been better than I expected. It's got a cool medal system in levels where you need to finish them with a certain time or rescuing X number of civilians or even combos too. It makes the game great as a 5 minute pickup game. It does loose its appeal when played repeatedly though.

Civilization 4 is an amazing progression in the CIV serives. It makes me realize how much I suck at civ, I can never play at a higher level than cheiftan and I end up getting frustrated at the higher levels and reloading old autosaves when I loose a battle or something. I think I need to trade tech more and build up alliances and better defend my cities. I'll read through a guide and get back at it.

well back to work.

I was out in Ashburnham this weekend and it was really relaxing. I realized that my list of games that I have to play through is getting longer and longer. That first year of living in london with nothing but my old laptop really made it hard to play anything but snes emulators and my gba sp. Now I've got my PSP, PC, GBA SP and I'll be getting a Nintendo DS shortly too. That's a pretty full platform list.

Right now I'm playing through The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap on my GBA SP. It's got the graphic style of four swords but plays like a classic zelda. Nintendo really makes solid games I'm really impressed, I had thought that my SP was never going to be used again but I barely notice that it doesn't have a super high res screen like the PSP.

On the PSP I'm playing Infected and it's pretty fun but there's something about a lock on shooter that doesn't feel like you have any skill other than circle strafing, I mean wow thats mad skillz, or not. I'm playing StarWars Battlefront II too but the interface is pretty crap except for the space fighting, I think It'll play a lot better on the PC version so I'm going to give that I try.

On the PC I just finished Quake 4 it was pretty cool, I thought the bosses sucked though, nothing memorable just a shoot til its dead puzzle. It's not like the typical boss system where you have to shoot one place and counter the attacks with a certain technique and then it changes and you have to coupe with the new attack styles. The game had a few memorable scenes like in the processing centre cut scene. Overall it's a quick game and a blast to play even if the bosses sucked. I actually found some of the mini bosses harder than the main bosses.

Now on the PC I'm playing through Doom 3 and then I'll play through the expansion. I had played through a bit ages ago on my old system but I couldn't even handle it on the lowest detail settings so It's been a god run. It's not as scary as people say though. Black and White 2 has been really cool. I'm on the second island with the japanese and it's getting really tough. The game is a lot like the original but includes armies and more buildings too. I had planned on playing through as evil after playing through as good but I still have to finish the good campaign first. I get in the odd game of BattleField 2 at work and we just picked up the expansion Special Forces. It adds tear gas, grappling hooks, zip lines,night vision and more vehicles and night maps too. It's a lot more infantry focussed this time and you can really hall in a large group of troops with a zip line down to a flag point from a neighbouring building.

After I get through these I'll carry on with AOE3,CIV4,King Kong,FEAR,Deus Ex 2,Gun,GTA San Andreas and others.

It's funny how copyright has become an oxymoron of late. We live in a time of never ending copyright extensions. A lot of work that should have entered the public domain is still being enforced by industry associations. One example of this is how even "Happy Birthday" requires royalities to appear in movies which is why you never see it in any. It reminds me of Hugh Grant's character in About a boy where his dad had written a christmas song that was supporting him through royalties. Yes radio stations are commercial organizations and can pay, but should film makers be affected by that. The royalties after long periods of time have often been bought out by corporations in order to bring in a sustainable revenue instead of supporting the artists decendants. Do we really need to pay Michael Jackson for the rights to use music from the Beatles.

Like any corporation the RIAA is trying to maximize profit. The would prefer to get every penny from every last revenue stream out there. There's always been talk of revenue from used CD sales but since that's too hard to administer they've stumbled on how digital tracks are non-transferable because you can't differentiate a copy from selling the original track.

So when Taiwan decided to violate Tamiflu's vaccine patents and produce their own supply because Tamiflu was not able to supply a sufficient ammount is it not piracy. Piracy is often defined along the lines "illegal copying of a product such as software or music" but can it be considered Piracy if a product is being withheld. The instant reaction when star wars 3 was released the week before it reached theatres was that it was that it was wrong. So what did this release do? It did not effect the $848,376,827 that it made at the box office but it did result in a minor shakedown of the pirate distribution chain. The other side of the coin is Abandonware products where they are no longer being sold and are no longer products but the company will not release it into the public domain because it may want to produce a shovelware product in the future. They would much rather see their work disappear from history than to see someone use it without their conscent.

So where does that leave us. Obviously a communist society is not the answer but as consumers we should not accept the corporate line and DRM solutions that restrict how we use the media that we purchased. The fact is that piracy is a alternative means of obtaining media, it's the most convient for mainstream media and does not restrict how you use it. It's actually easy to predict what apple will do next by seeing the consumption of media in the pirate circles. TV shows have become very popular over the last 3 years and it was only a matter of time before someone brokered a deal to offer TV online. The only difference again is that the shows offered by apple have DRM to restrict how you use them (which is easily broken) and the quality is significantly lower than the HDTV broadcasts that are available online. Apples selection only really consists of music videos and the TV show Lost so until the catalogue expands it's not exactly a one stop shop.

Until DRM is seemless any progress in online media will be hampered and piracy will continue to be the easiest solution to people that would've bought it if they could. Don't you wish that the record companies would have hired Shaun Fanning back in 1999.

So it's been a big week in the psp scene. First off a buffer overflow was found in the PSP 2.0 firmware and then the PSP firmware downgrader was released. The story starts last year in japan when the psp was originally released with the 1.0 firmware. People began to develop homebrew apps and emulators to run off their memory sticks. Then by the time sony released the PSP in north america it came with the 1.5 firmware. The 1.5 fireware kept the homebrew applications from running but in June of this year they released a loader to load homebrew apps and umd binaries. Then later Fastloader was released to be able to run PSP Iso images. Everything was great in psp land until sony released firmware 1.51,1.52,2.0 which fixed the exploit that was being used to execute apps. Now fast forward to the present and 2.0 is now able to run apps and theres a working downgrader so any psp can be made to run games. The next step will be to see a release of a loader on the 2.0 firmware so that users can run games and use the 2.0 web browser. Luckily my psp had 1.5 on it.

**Update: here's a walkthrough on hackaday for the downgrader.

14 days until the O2 XDA Exec comes out on October 10th. It was listed on the O2 site for £199.99 but they've pulled down that site since. I haven't really used my NGage QD much for games but I know with wifi and a vga screen I'll be using it alot for movies and internet use. I plan on picking up a sandisk 2GB SD card with it. Here's the specs

Windows Mobile 5.0 (which includes 'persistent memory')
Intel XScale PXA272 520MHz processor
ROM 128MB (used as storage)
Ram 64MB (used for running apps only)
3.6” 640x480 65k transflective colour backlit LCD
up to 4/2/20/200 GSM Talk/3G Talk/PDA/Standby time
GSM Tri-band (900/1800/1900), UMTS Single-band (2100)
GPRS class 10, UMTS 64/384
Bluetooth 1.2, Infrared and mini-USB connector
Wireless LAN 802.11b
SD/MMC/SDIO slot
3.5mm Audio Connector
Stereo Speakers
Integrated camera (resolution 1280 x 960) with LED flash and 2nd CIF camera for 3G video calls
Integrated antenna
15 buttons (Answer, hangup, PTT, OK, Start, Camera, Power, VoiceRecord, 5-way nav
56-key QWERTY keyboard with light sensor to auto-adjust backlight
Removable battery (1620mah)
Weight: 285 grams
Minimum Activesync version required 4.0
PC operating systems supported Windows 2000/XP (no support for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT)
Supports Activesync synchronisation of video/audio files in conjunction with Windows Media Player 10
Screen: 640 x 480 VGA resolution
Enhanced O2 Active interface
Power Save software
Three setup modes - Full O2 Active, Intermediate and Corporate
Dimensions are 81mm x 127.7mm x25mm

so the HTC Universal is almost here. Hopefully it'll be around when I get back from vancouver. If you haven't heard the specs its: Windows Mobile 5.0, built-in QWERTY keyboard, UMTS/WCDMA, a large, rotating VGA touch screen, 1.3 megapixel digital camera, 96MB of ROM, 128MB of RAM, 520MHz Intel XScale processor, SD memory card slot, WiFi, and Bluetooth. and 3G.

I think thats faster than my parents computer.

I'm back to vancouver for my little sisters wedding next week and I'm going to try and get my hot food tolerance up to a vindiloo before I go, which means another trip down to brick lane next week with the lads. I've been having some trouble with my servers... well all but the windows server back in Canada. That was due to an unexpected power failure due to my mom being spontaneous and turning stuff off cause there might have been a power outage. I didn't look for that rating on my ups.

It looks like the bsd server just needs an fsck but the rack mounted linux server lost a drive so I'll have to go buy another and get the bad one warrantied in the mean time.

I've been calling in favours with tgs to get these servers back up and running, and thats been about a month so far cause he was on vacation.

hmm, well I'm moving the servers into the crawl space to avoid this kinda problem in the future.

Hey everybody I'm still around, I just got back from greece last weekend and I've been having to walk a lot around london cause the tube is closed more than usual. Feeling really tired this week for some reason, I've been getting home and trying to read harry potter and ending up just falling asleep. threeboy was being an ass and kept telling me what the ending to the book was, it doesn't matter cause I still have to read it anyways. I started reading a copy I got off the net and things weren't adding up that well and there were descrepences and finally I realized I was reading a fake copy so I got the real one. I'm off to pakefield this week for my churchs week away called home focus. I got a friend of mine to make me some fire poi so hopefully he's come through on that.

I'm looking at a new system again, here's the specs

Athlon 64 4000+ (2.4GHz) Socket 939 OEM
DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 SLI-DR
1GB (2x512) OCZ PC3200 EL Platinum Rev 2 OCZ4001024ELDCPER2-K
Gainward PowerPack! Ultra/2400 PCX GeForce 6800GT, (256 M
Thermalright XP-120
Vantec Stealth 120mm
Maxtor MaXLine III (7b300s0) 300 GB Hard Drive
Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW 20" Widescreen LCD

my work subsidizes up to £2000 of computer purchases a year so I might as well make a dent in that. The LCD's are too expensive over here to get a nice 23" so I'll just settle for a 20". I'll set my current 15" LCD as a secondary monitor and eventually hook it up to an mac mini and use Synergy to control it from my PC with the same mouse and keyboard so that it operates as a secondary montior on a second system. You can even stop it from moving over to the other desktop by using the scroll lock key. Its still under developement too so they'll be adding support for more than two controllable systems.

I'm off to the London Geek Dinner tomorrow night which should be some really cool chats with some of the heavyweights out there.