Well first off I’ll close the previous post and just state for the record that Ubuntu was not my idea. (cough). It lasted about a month before I got shot of it. Major problem was the lack of support for the USB 3G broadband dongle we have in the office. It is supported on 8.10 - and I’d like to see someone upgrade a Dell Mini from 8.04 LTS to 8.10 - it can’t be done. (Not on the one I had anyway)
Onto Saints, and well, League One next year. If the club still exists that is. I’ve heard a lot of people say that now is the time to clear out the dead wood and start again. Isn’t that what we said when we left the Premier League? I’m not sure Wotte is the man to lead us out of League One either. Anyway, first things first. Someone to buy the club would be good.
Now, onto bad news. It’s seems Duncan (Boidster) has red-lighted his 360 with an E74. I’ll be playing FIFA 08 by myself for a while then. Two to three weeks he reckons before MS fix it and send it back.
Onto house news and yes, our house in the quiet Dorset village has been sold. We’re now looking for houses in another area of Dorset, though we may end up renting for a while as we wait for paperwork to go through. If timing is something to be relied on this comes just a few weeks before I go to Tanzania for a week for the AIO Conference (African Insurance Organisation).
Sophie has started football training at school. So far she’s worn her Saints strip twice and scored goals in both games as her team went on to win. One week she wore her Birmingham strip and unfortunately her team lost. Doesn’t reflect reality does it.
Anyhow, it’s late and I must go - work tomorrow and due to stresses and strains I’m not sleeping too well. Must try harded.
I’ve got my grubby little mits on a new netbook (actually for the office but under my control - hehe!). It’s a DELL 12″ Mini, Inspiron 1210, and it’s come preinstalled with Ubuntu. In fact this is technically the third one I’ve worked on now. Vicky has replaced her six year old DELL laptop with one and Kirstin has one too for London trips so this is the third one I’ve setup.
This particular one though is being setup by me. So far I’ve got some useful apps on here. I’ve got Adobe Air on it too which enabled me to install TweetDeck. I’ve installed Citrix ICA Launcher too so we can make sure that the works new ASP product is as multi-platform as we expect it to be.
The laptop itself is incredibly light, much lighter than the Vista powered Latitude D820 that I hulk around. However I don’t think I’ll be doing .net development or web designs on the mini. Coding possibly, MySQL database management possibly but then I’ve got to think about three way code synchronisation and that may take some thinking about. At the moment I just have scripts that transfer stuff between the laptop and the office PC.
Mostly this laptop will just be used as a tool for data access on the go. It’ll also be ideal for movies etc on the train to London. Its exceptional battery life (60% left at the mo, which is apparently 3 hours 50 minutes) means its definitely up for the job.
Now I just have to get used to Ubuntu.
According to a report from the opening day of the GDC (Game Developers Conference) in San Francisco the mighty PC rules the gaming world as we know it. However, the provider of this report is the PC Gaming Alliance. It’s kind of like the Whiskas advert many years ago where we, the gullable public, were told that 9 out of 10 cats preferred it. Well, they’re hardly going to say only 2 cats out of ten ate it and one of those threw up afterwards.
The PC Gaming Alliance is bound to say they’re the best, just like the console world will now turn round and say it’s best. If there is in-fighting between gaming platforms is definately PC vs Console, rather than the sometimes ugly looking Xbox vs PS.
Some of the stats and claims in the report don’t add up - first off, PCs are meant to be more stable? Yes of course. I remember the last time I needed to update my video card drivers on the 360 to play the latest game. Or had to upgrade my video card because the latest and greatest game used new vector-bump-mapping-displacement-3d-technology code. It’s obvioulsy a regular occurence with my near 4-year old console. How many PC players can say they haven’t upgraded hardware or replaced drivers in four years and are still able to play the latest games? I would venture to say, not many - maybe one or two will come forward with outlandish claims.
Catch the original BBC report here : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7960498.stm
And please feel free to comment below.
Is it me or does it feel as though Christmas was only a few weeks ago? I was going to start this blog post with something along the lines of - a new year, a new blog - then I realised it was flippin’ March already!
Well, when I say new blog, what I really mean is there was a new version of WordPress and I was eager to update. I duly took backups of the old blog but found when trying to get WP 2.7 running off a 2.6 database with the new config elements it was getting to be a right pain so I thought - sod it - what’s three years of blog posts anyway. Maybe one day I’ll reimport the old posts, then again, maybe not.
On the tech side things are jumping on Twitter these days. You can follow me here http://twitter.com/fatherfil - you’ll also find a lot of the old Vagusnet and GameGuru regulars on there too, including Paul, Duncan and Gareth.
In fact, we’re all getting back together, in a different guise, as we launch our new project - TheGamesCast (@thegamescast) - Gareth now works for a very good PR company who we adore lots! Follow @thegamescast on twitter to be kept up to date with how we’re doing as the launch date gets ever closer.
Looking forward we’ve got the GadgetShow Live coming up in April which hopefully Paul, Duncan and I will be attending and then in June we’ve got E3, which we won’t be attending - something to do with having to pay our own air fare. Maybe next year! Something to aim for though isn’t it.
In the day job things are getting very busy. A hugely influential project is about to hit crunch stage as we prepare a big new feature and also a really rather big product-wide project coming up right behind that. We’re working with Bournemouth University and for that I’ve got a few meetings in London to attend. Keep a check on twitter to see when I’m up and if you’re in the city then let me know and we’ll meet up. Especially if you want to talk gaming. If not, then let’s meet up anyway and I can bore you with it.
As for football, well I’ll leave it at that.
