Archive for December, 2007
Merry Christmas!
Tuesday, December 25th, 2007Gaming?
Monday, December 24th, 2007The computer gaming market nowadays is so large that almost whatever type of game you like, you will have enough of them to play for several years. I am at the stage where I do have way too many games to play, and too little time to play them. However, there are a few games that have been dominating the amount of time I play recently.
Company Of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
The expansion to the original CoH game adds the British into WW2, and also another German army, along with campaigns for both of those sides – essentially doubling the size of the game (The original only had an American campaign, but is about as long as British and German combined).
Now, for those who haven’t played the game at all (Multiplayer version at least), you firstly have a choice of which team to play on. Allies give you either American or British, Axis old German or new German. Once in the game, you get experience from a number of things, and put these into skill points, giving you a number of special abilities depending on which army you are playing with and what tech tree you choose to play with.
I always used to play with American, mostly playing Armoured (there is also Airborne and Infantry). Armoured gives you a number of really good tanks and upgrades for tanks, airborne allows you to drop paratroopers and other things in to the map and infantry allows you to get some brilliant infantry and call in artillery strikes on the enemy.
However, since British were added, we have tended to play as German. The main reason for this is because the British are too expensive to play with, and although the units are much better than Americans, you can’t really afford to lose any as you won’t be able to get any more for ages. New Germans on the other hand, are also more expensive but mostly have tanks, giving you the advantage of not losing anything as quickly (and once you have the right type of tank, you can win fairly easily against the computer – not tried against real people yet).
Anyway, it is a good game, and at £18 from Play it was certainly a good buy.
Although I haven’t played many other games recently, the other people in my house have. World of Warcrack is a game that has always seemed to be a fairly good game every time I have seen it, but not worth the subscription fee you have to pay.
Unreal Tournament 3 – Much improved graphics over UT2k4, and also works in Linux. To be honest, the lack of game support is one of the main things holding Linux back, so hopefully more game development companies will follow UT3′s lead.
Hellgate: London – From the makers of the Diablo series, a game that I do actually want to play. Due to the way they have done the MMORPG part of the game, I will probably actually play that rather than the single player if I do get it (they are the same, just one is multiplayer).
And finally, although it isn’t a game, Zero Punctuation is a brilliant place to find reviews of games. Although not really safe for work, etc, the reviews are exceptionally funny, especially given how most of them are entirely accurate. Go look for yourself. Well worth it.
Oops.
Saturday, December 22nd, 2007And I have failed.
It has been about 2 weeks since I last blogged, which was never my intention. The main reason for it though has just been because I have generally been too busy. I have about a week and a half off work now, so I should hopefully have enough time to write some more stuff (writing this on the train back to Reading).
There are several things I would like to blog about, mainly my general feelings having been in proper full-time work for 6 months, and a number of less professional things like computer games (been playing a few recently) and Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), and I am sure I will come up with a number of other things.
So, that is that for this brief post. The only things stopping me writing about other stuff are those pesky placement logbooks we have to submit every month …
HTML Spacer/Checker
Sunday, December 9th, 2007One of the most useful things I have made in the past few months is a tool to properly space HTML (as it is shockingly hard to actually do that in the source code, and keep it nicely intented after modifying it a lot), and also find where tags aren’t closed properly, are closed too many times or the tags are closed in the wrong order.
It is something that was partly spawned from the compilers unit I did last year at uni, as it is basically a recursive descent HTML parser, and as such it does a fairly good job of parsing the HTML. There are a few bugs in it, but I think it is mostly usable even with the few small bugs.
I have used it on numerous occasions, and quite simply it is amazingly useful. Just a quick warning though, you can quite easily get lots of errors , and they can all spawn off one or two small errors earlier in the script, so make sure you fix the first one first (This is generally good programming practise anyway).
If you want to try it out, go to:
New Blog!
Sunday, December 9th, 2007Well, I’m back!
It has been a while since I last had a blog that I actually updated, mainly because over about the past few months I have been trying to make my own blog entirely. Yesterday I realised that I haven’t made any progress on it since about September, and decided to install WordPress, which I have had some experience with in my job.
One of the things I have had in my mind for the past few weeks was the design for the blog, which you can see now. It is actually about the 4th design (only one I implemented for wordpress though), and my favourite of them all. I still need to code something to change the image at the top, but before doing that I will need to decide how to make it change. The options being either having it random, or based on some other information like the current weather.
So, hopefully I will update this a bit more often. Still a few things I need to change on it (things like the About page, links and the previously mentioned header image), but that should be done fairly soon.
This blog has already had a few visitors, including the people I live with and Renegade who have been commenting on the design, and SEF (You found it surprisingly quickly). If any of you have any comments on the design, please feel free to tell me either via email or in the comments here.




