February 2006 Archives

Here at Crussell towers I have instituted measures to ensure the dreaded avian flu doesn't take over. As of midday today I have declared the airspace around the property to be a no-fly zone and have hired militia with shoulder-mounted weapons (local 10-year olds with catapults) to shoot down any air-based creatures (including flying squirrels) and/or cartoon protesting, flag-burning loons (they're a minority you know ...).

I have also contacted the US President for support in this matter, a communique issued from the White House this morning said officially they couldn't support my cause but they'd send a crate of sub-machine guns by DHL and follow it up with a visit from CIA operatives disguised as the gasman. I shall, of course, accept the offer but intend to watch my own back for when they get fed up with my totalitarian rule and fund the family pets in an effort to create a coup, overthrow me and install a puppet feline government until they can dispatch suitable "advisors" to begin the take-over of my street (it may have already started - a man wearing a Haliburton cap called yesterday on the pretence of selling life insurance but I'm sure he was casing the joint for re-building contracts - it was the knowing wink to Mr Rash the black and white cat that gave it away ...

Fiends! Romans! Countrymen! The end of the world is nigh!!! (and so is the future of the traditional turkey dinner if this flu takes hold - who wants a chicken with a cold for lunch ?????)

However ... set building has proven to be a bigger pain in the posterior then I'd planned for and so far it's taken two whole evenings just getting the comcorder to play nice with the PC, the lighting set up and the fairly minimal sets and backgrounds up to speed.

FMS should weigh in at about five minutes and is the story of an inventor who creates a robot to make sausages for him (I didn't say it was 24 now, did I ?) Anyways, the robot runs amok after trapping his head in a microwave oven, havoc occurs and in a big finale the inventor finally defeats his evil creation with a cannon - what more can you ask for from a low budget production? It's hardly Brokeback Mountain or the Blair Witch Project (but then are no gay cowboys or ghosts in it).

FMS will be my second short animation, the first one, Zombie Attack can be downloaded here if you're foolish enough to be interested. In the mean time it's back to work for Crussell. Honestly, I don't know how George Lucas does it ...

Short description: Roll a big ball-shaped magnet around and pick things up with it.

Long Description: The King of the Cosmos has lost all of the stars from the sky so he tasks a tiny robot prince to roll his Katamari (magnetic ball) around, collecting everything from paperclips to cars and houses in order to build up bundles of stuff big enough to replace the stars.

Or at least I *think* that's what it's all about as I've only ever played the game in Japanese and I don't speak the language!!

God only knows where the game's creator got the idea from, and when you see it in action it's a very strange looking thing indeed - a very retro 3d look and nothing like the photo-realism of PGR on the XBox 360 but it's so damned addictive it's frightening.

I first got my hands on it when a my good German chum Herr Schleuss brought in over for a GeekWeekend(tm) and I've raved about it ever since.

Anyways, at the beginning of February the new version We Love Katamari was released in the UK and I set off to purchase a copy, sadly, it seems the High Street retailers aren't stocking it, my local Game store got one copy in and it went straight away - since then they haven't had any more. It's a crying shame as the game is a total winner, so if you get the chance and you own a PS2 look out for it and grab it wherever you can. PSP owners can check out the mobile version in August, unless you order it from American or Canadian sources who should have it next month.

But ...

It was necessary for me to reconfigure my D-Link Ethernet-to-Wireless bridge to conform to my home subnet (new router is 192.168.0.x, bridge was expecting 192.168.1.x). Anyways ... for TWO HOURS I tried factory resetting the bridge, changing the cable used to hard configure it and even resorted to two laptops and a desktop machine in case something, somewhere was going wrong and I just couldn't see it.

It turns out that nothing was wrong, but D-Link fail to mention that in order to reset the bridge to it's factory defaults you have to hold the bloody reset switch in for 10 seconds ...

There's nothing like good documentation, is there ?

Thanks to blood, sweat, tears and a rather spiffy algorithm which does some top secret behind the scenes shenanigans, we take a wide range of parameters and suggest appropriate matches for books based on how readers "scored" those parameters - it produces some interesting results ...

Yesterday we launched a second product, BlogCode, which performs a similar service, but for Weblogs. So far it's been runaway success and one of the things I'm really pleased with is the Web Services side of things, there's some quite cool stuff in the offing, but the first taste of what we can do with the data is the BlogTool (cast your gaze to the right-hand side of the page and keep scrolling till you hot the box which says "BlogCode matches for this weblog". It's a dynamic tool which updates every hour or so and lists the logs which are the closest match to my own fair effort - quite nifty even though I do say so myself.

So, there you go, ego massage mode off and back to work, but if you do feel like supporting this blog, feel free to nip over to BlogCode and give your opinion - go on, you know you want to !!!

If you take someone's blog as being a statement about their life, my life is a rambling, incoherent series of rants and semi-conscious burblings interspersed with odd lucid moments of pure clarity - I had no idea I was so interesting!!!!

Anyways, to celebrate two years of mogging (blogging for morons) I shall take the opportunity to announce that with my good German friend Herr Schleuss I will be making "high quality" lego movie. This magnum opus, cunningly entitled Metal Gear Sausage will (hopefully) be ready for release at BreakPoint 06 in Bingen, German at Easter, if I get off my fat arse and set about filming this week.

Anyways, in my constant search for new and groovy tools I found this little beauty for Firefox which integrates a blog editor suitable for Blogger, Moveable Tye and WordPress directly into your browser, something which is not only useful but also waves the middle finger at Micro$oft and the tragic Internet Explorer (I tried the Beta release of 7 last week and was utterly horrified to doscover that after years of R the best they can add is tabbed browsing and RSS feeds. Nice. Work. Guys. :|