Sinjo

I had my attention brought to another blog post earlier today (which for the purposes of this post, I shall assume you have read). Initially, my thoughts were that Google had gone and committed a rather large error, but I didn’t look too far into it as it wasn’t going to affect me and really had to set off towards home. When I arrived back I started talking about it to a friend, who immediately put me right. It turns out that Google Buzz is not exposing any new data to anyone without being allowed to. It is in fact aggregating already public data into, in my opinion, a pretty nice format.

What has happened here is a complete misunderstanding. Following the main example from that post (though it’s completely true of other services which Buzz can import from) Google Buzz will only display shared Google Reader items and comments that you publicly share. If these are private, then Google Buzz isn’t going to ruin your day and wave them around publicly.

To top this off, within Buzz there is actually a link (under Connected Sites, select Edit next to the Sharing With column) which takes you straight to the privacy options page, where you can go back and fix your earlier mistake of not correctly choosing your privacy settings. I’d actually say that, far from revealing your private data, Google have done a reasonable job of letting you protect your privacy in this case.

The hype that this has generated is rather saddening, and a reminder that people are all too quick to jump on the bandwagon. The author has posted a follow up, with a bit more explanation and as it turns out, a confirmation from Google of what I have focused on here (though this doesn’t have too much attention brought to it).

I picked up Mirror’s Edge in the recent Steam sales (along with far too many other games, which saw off a little more money than I’d hoped). I didn’t get it with any of my own expectations, only the knowledge that people had told me it was a must buy. Unfortunately the game left me wondering what had deluded these people into thinking something like that.

If you care about the story not being spoiled you may want to avert your eyes. The game starts with you being plonked down on a roof somewhere in some city where the graphical bloom goes up to 11 and stays there at all times. You’re taught your repertoire of jumping and fighting techniques in one go, god forbid you should forget them, and then launched into the game. The story is set in your regulation future dystopia, where the police are evil, the government are evil and concrete blocks are extremely springy. You’re not really given too much motivation to hate the government; you just take the game’s word for it and set about acting like a royal prick with a poorly explained briefcase fetish.

Sadly, the game play doesn’t even come close to making up for the plot. There is one route, and only one route, and any deviation from it will result in crunchy death as you faceplant into the pavement. Most of the time this route is helpfully painted red, but the game occasionally decides you’re more competent than that and lets you decide what to do. Don’t be fooled though, there’s one path, and any attempt at creativity will be duly rewarded with death.

Linearity aside, the game still manages to produce an unnecessarily frustrating experience. Every time you grab an object or ledge, you’re treated to a face full of concrete and have to stop and move the camera around, breaking the flow of the game. This, teamed up with the loss of momentum every time you jump over anything higher than a cinder block, caused a steady feeling of rage which didn’t really subside at any point in the game.

The lack of choice in paths reared its ugly head more than once during the game, but one incident stuck out more than the others. In a section in chapter 7 the character is running on top of some ventilation shafts and some pipes are highlighted red on the other side of the room. I spent a good half hour wall running along the wall that headed directly to them, only to be left disappointed at the game’s edge detection and plummeting to an inevitable death. It turned out that I was meant to run along a wall parallel to what I was aiming at and make possibly the most hilarious jump ever to reach the bars.

The edge detection was a constant annoyance. At times it seemed like the protagonist simply wasn’t trying, but as soon as a bit of concrete turned red it may as well have been a fucking spring board. The net result is that you only go where the game wants you to go, no matter what incredible leap that may involve. Occasionally it will even help you when you don’t jump far enough, and you’ll end up performing a mid air vault for a pipe or ledge.

Overall, I’m confounded as to why people recommended this game so highly. While it’s a nice concept, it’s totally marred by a lack of polish (no, not bloom, there’s enough of that) in the execution. Bring on the release of Assassin’s Creed II on a real platform.

Following the usual excess of hype that lead up to the launch of a new Apple product, I can’t help but feel completely underwhelmed. I’ll be honest, I’m not a user of any Apple products; however, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like any of them. The iPod is a nice music player. Having used a few friends’ I can say that I like the UI and that there was no huge learning curve to using the device. The iPhone was certainly responsible for pushing the idea of smart phones to a greater audience and once again did so in a nice tidy package that was very usable.

The iPad though, leaves a lot to be desired. It seems like Apple have produced an enlarged version of the iPhone (but not a phone, so really more like an iPod Touch), without applying significant work to it. It suffers the same issues as the iPhone, those being:

• A total lack of multitasking. Running applications in the background is not a new concept, and failing to provide such functionality seems like a massive step backwards. I’ve felt this about the iPhone for a while and it seems even more crippling for a device which truthfully should provide more.
• No camera included. While it’s obvious that this device isn’t for taking photos, I don’t understand why it doesn’t have a small, integrated webcam on the front. Being able to make video calls on, for instance, Skype seems like a reasonably sensible use-case for this device.
• Lack of a hardware keyboard. This is a more debatable point, but to me it makes little sense. With a device of this size I don’t envisage that an on screen keyboard would be pleasant to use. Selling a keyboard dock isn’t really a solution as you’re just increasing the amount of clutter that you have to carry with you to use the device as you want to.

I’m left not really knowing who this product is aimed at. Which group of people want a larger iPhone whose main advantages are negated by dodgy design decisions? It seems more  like they’re simply riding the wave of success which means that people will end up buying them simply because it’s the latest thing to emerge from the shinies factory.

As 2009 is drawing to a close I figured I’d do what I failed to do just before Christmas and write a blog post (hope you all had a good time). I don’t know exactly how to categorise this year. Overall I’d say it’s gone pretty well, I’ve had a nice time of it and quite look forward to going on into the new year without changing anything too drastically. I’m not going to label anything as a new year’s resolution as that’s a sure fire way to ensure you’ll keep it up for exactly two weeks. For me, the main thing is to keep a straight head in the next term, keep on top of work and see what comes out of it (this may look like a new year’s resolution, but it’s not, honestly).

With that spiel out of the way, there were a few things from 2009 which stick out in my mind. In no particular order, other than what seemed like a logical grouping at the time:

• Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question time: I’d never been a fan of his politics, and as expected this only reaffirmed my opinion. What did come out of this for me, was the showcasing of the ludicrous views that he promoted. If anyone was in any doubt, this displayed the truly regressive stance he holds on such a wide range of issues. All I can hope for is that people saw the same thing and went away realising that perhaps, as far as “alternative” parties go, there are better choices.
• America got a dose of change with the inauguration of Barack Obama: I’m not qualified to expand too much on this as I’ve not followed his actions especially closely this year. I’ll pick one thing out though; his policies on health care and the reform he wants to bring are a good thing. In Britain we’re accustomed to being entitled to health care, and it seems crazy that it would be denied to those less well off. Any policy which helps turn this around is a good thing. The Nobel Peace prize was a little premature though, seems like it’d be better to see how he does in his term before handing it out.
• Swine Flu: I nearly left this one out. The worst part of this (okay, not the worst part really, any death caused by it is of course above this) was the reaction of the general populace. People were panicked by what boiled down to regular flu with a higher chance of being caught. People don’t get like this over your average flu which goes round in winter and there was no need to worry so much over it. Go get your extra flu jab if it applies to you, other than that, go have fun and stop worrying.
• Jenson Button wins the F1 World Drivers’ Championship: This was a great season of Formula 1. It was thrilling all the way through and at the end we got the icing on the cake with a British champion. I hope we have this kind of close racing again next year as producing cars to this specification is no longer a new challenge. The introduction of the new points system should heat things up by heavily rewarding challenging for a win (new points are: 25, 20, 15, 10, 8, 6, 5, 3, 2, 1).
• Muse album release: Perhaps not too much of a landmark for the year, but something I’d been looking forward to and therefore I’ll sneak it in here. They departed once again from the precedent they had set, experimenting on the new album with some stadium rock (which has drawn comparisons to Queen), a true R&B track in the form of “Undisclosed Desires”, a few tunes in the kick ass style we’re used to and a 3 part symphony. I initially didn’t know what to make of the album. A part of me had wanted it to simply be a continuation of their earlier music, but it’s grown on me and I appreciate it more for being a different experience.
• Rage Against the Machine make Christmas Number 1: This was the first time I listened to the chart show on BBC Radio 1 and I was genuinely on edge throughout. That is until the internet took over and leaked the result part way through. It wasn’t totally certain, but as more of the order it listed was confirmed correct it seemed like Rage were in for the victory, and so they were. Having bought the song myself I was thrilled to see the pop machine dethroned and the smile wiped off Simon Cowell’s face. It only lasted the one week, and McElderry made it to the top a week later (congratulations to him, this wasn’t done to spite him), but the point was made.
• Joe McElderry was well gutted: Sorry, couldn’t resist. It’s not too bad anyway, apparently he’ll make some money out of all this music lark.

Let’s see what happens next year anyway. Overall try to keep a positive vibe going on into 2010. All the best to you from here!

Truthfully, this should be titled “Why I don’t like Facebook: A list of gripes”, but I’m going to assume that you are also a sane person and enter the same state of mouth-foaming rage at least once per visit.

My first gripe, and the one that I hope you all see for what it is, is the News Feed. This actually has the potential to be a relevant, up to date display of your friends activities yet falls victim to our good friend, the signal to noise ratio. Add enough friends (i.e. any at all) and sure enough a few of them will be addicted to one of those awful “click here to win” games. In itself this isn’t a bad thing, gaming is fun and I enjoy sitting back and losing a day or five to a new release. The problem arises when these applications decide that it’s time to unleash a tide of crap all over the feed. “Jim has bought an acre of land in Farm Simulator.” “Tom needs a cucumber to make a new recipe in Canteen Manager.” “Bob just bitch slapped his ho in Badass Mofo Gangster Pimp Wars.” Why? Why am I supposed to care? I don’t play any of these games. They are completely irrelevant to me. The annoying thing is that the correct behaviour for the feed isn’t even that hard to come up with. An application’s news feed items should only be shown to other users of that application. There we go, not so hard to avoid being irritating by default is it? The current workaround leaves rather a lot to be desired. I’ve spent a month or so spam clicking ignore on anything which looks vaguely like it might be an application and I have to say that my feed is now far more relevant and interesting. Worse yet. applications such as the ones I mentioned occasionally end up messaging me personally (i.e. appearing in my notifications). Whether or not this is the user at fault (in which case no, I don’t want to be “hired to work for you” in whatever crappy Roller-coaster Tycoon clone you’re playing) or the application deciding to take some rather intrusive liberties, I don’t want it. The sooner this crap leaves my sight, the better.

With my main irritation out of the way I’ll start tackling the smaller things in no particular order, the Facebook detritus if you will. Let’s start with suggestions. Friend suggestions make sense since it’s reasonably easy to spot groups of mutual friends and they’re quite likely to all want to add each other as friends. Telling me to “reconnect” with a random person I’ve not posted a message to in a while is damn useless. If I had something to say to them I’d say it. The reason I’ve not posted anything on their profile for a while is that there is nothing to say. In most cases it’s because we’ve drifted apart and weren’t that close in the first place. Truthfully, most people I have as friends on Facebook were added through the “oh yeah…he did go to my high school” process. Facebook unfortunately doesn’t know that we never really knew each other, so in all honesty it’s not going to be able to tell me who I actually need to keep in touch with. This feature needs dropping.

Moving swiftly forwards, groups seem to be mostly used for sheer irritation. This one isn’t actually Facebook’s fault, it’s mine. The real solution is removing the main offenders from my friends list, but some part of me feels that would be rather harsh (I’m wrong, it wouldn’t). The solution I’ve now adopted is to totally ignore everything other than friend requests and events in the requests section (and even then, I ignore events most of the time and only check when someone prods me through another means of communication). Inviting me to groups of the “Arbitrary number of people who wish for some unlikely event to happen” variety is a waste of your time. Stop it.

I think I’ll end this on a positive note, since Facebook decided to implement something I actually like. I started to use Twitter a few months back (http://twitter.com/ChrisSinjo) and have thoroughly enjoyed it. It presents a feed of relevant information (if it doesn’t, play the “unfollow” game for a few minutes) and limits the length of messages to 140 characters so that you only have to read a small amount to know what your friends are doing. With the introduction of the Live Feed to Facebook it feels like there is at least something approaching the same idea (although sadly the content is still full of noise). If this were limited to just status updates it would actually serve its purpose (a cookie to anyone who can find a way of achieving this in its current state). Perhaps they could go one further and make it non-mutual. Just because someone is interested in me doesn’t make me interested in them (another reason to like the Twitter model).

With the tweaks I’ve mentioned I think Facebook could become a much nicer experience for everyone. That said, go and at least try Twitter for a little while and perhaps you’ll see the angle I’m coming from. Do comment and tell me why I’m right or wrong, or even just troll me and tell me that I should switch to something open like identica. Time to start work on librebook isn’t it?

I’ll start off by saying that I’m rather pissed off at the moment. I’ll try my best to be as objective as possible in this post, but I suspect the tone will be rather negative. With that warning out of the way I’ll get onto my gripes.

Blizzard have decided that it’s time to force people to merge their World of Warcraft accounts into their battle.net accounts. In itself I believe this is a sane idea, and possibly one that is overdue (the option to do so has been available for quite a while, they only just started forcing it onto users). In itself this has caused a few problems for people. I’ve had a few reports from friends of the site giving some sort of error whenever they attempt the merge, and I’ve been completely unable to access the site on a couple of occasions. Overall, it seems that after a bit of persistence people have managed to perform the merge and log into their WoW account.

My second gripe (and only other so far) is the ridiculous way that account security is handled. Something which is probably never an issue for most people just went straight to the top of my list. It turns out that if you forget the answer to the security question on your account there is no way to change it. That’s correct, even as an authenticated user you can’t change this setting. In itself I wouldn’t have cared about this. I’m not a moron, I can remember my password (although apparently not my secret answer, yes I do appreciate the irony in this). However, in their infinite wisdom they have decided to require this answer to change the email address associated with the account. This leaves me in a rather crappy situation. My account is associated to an email address that I’m trying to move away from and I’m being denied the option to do so.

What infuriated me at this point was the response I received to my support request. It contained the following: “The problem you were experiencing is now resolved and you should be able to use all the features of your account now.” For some terrible reason this got my hopes up, but it turns out it was some canned bullshit. The website has not been changed to allow this, and I’m still in the same predicament. I’ve sent a reply, but I don’t hold a great deal of hope for it getting a proper response. If it carries on like this I’ll give them a call and see if their phone support is any better.

I’ll write more when there’s some advance in the situation, but for now it’s a case of waiting.

With the dust settling on another season of Formula 1, I have one thing on my mind which I certainly wasn’t expecting. After the unfortunate injury that Timo Glock suffered during qualifying in Japan, Toyota drafted Kamui Kobayashi in from his usual (albeit currently inactive due to the in-season ban on testing) role to drive in the last two races of the season. On the whole, there hasn’t been a great deal of success with this type of move this year. Both drivers that Ferrari chose to replace the injured Massa (Luca Badoer and Giancarlo Fisichella, in that order) struggled to get anywhere. Badoer was clearly more suited to his testing role, and Fisichella simply couldn’t adjust to the Ferrari having arrived from the Force India team (which to me seemed like a rather large gamble, and a step in the wrong direction for Fisi).

It seems that Kobayashi decided that this trend didn’t apply to him, and brought the car home 9th (Brazil) and 6th (Abu Dhabi) for his two races, both times ahead of his team mate, Jarno Trulli (although Trulli managed to cause chaos on the first lap in Brazil, and didn’t finish as a result). The results by themselves are impressive, and aside from some youthful exuberance in taking Nakajima’s front wing off, his driving showed that he was worthy of those results. He fought with the best of them (including our new champion, Button) and often looked an old hand. It would be foolish to disregard Trulli’s experience, and it remains clear that there are lessons to be learned for Kobayashi, yet I can’t help but feel that he’s already managed to show Trulli up.

With a bit of luck we’ll get to see how it plays out after the winter break, however it seems the young aspirant may be on the verge of having his F1 drive pulled out from under his feet. There seem to be early indications that Toyota will be withdrawing from F1 (usual reasons, lack of return in terms of success rate and HQ wanting to scale back their participation due to the economic climate), which could spell the end for young Kamui. If he’s going to race at all next year he’ll either need to be picked up by another team or get some sort of new sponsorship deal to continue his racing in GP2.

His other option, returning to Japan to work in his father’s sushi restaurant, is a lot less glamorous and would certainly be a shameful waste of talent. For the moment it’s a waiting game which may end up with Kobayashi searching for any team who’ll keep him in the sport.

UPDATE: It’s official then, we’ve lost Toyota. With a bit of luck we’ll have a Sauber run team appearing out of the also withdrawing BMW. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/8341602.stm

Having been down through France (Paris for 5 nights and Bordeaux for 2) and having had a great time of it (my first time there so lots of sightseeing and bits of French food I’ve never tried), half a week ago we set off to Spain. This in itself would seem simple at first sight, with trains and such running in the direction we wanted, yet it managed to become a complicated mess. From Paris to Bordeaux wasn’t a problem, but from their it was rather fragmented. From Bordeaux we were informed that there were no tickets on any of the trains going into Spain for the next few days, yet a few minutes later, having ignored the advice of the ticket saleswoman, we managed to get tickets for a train to Irún for the next day. Arriving there it turned out that they should have been able to go one better, with tickets available from Irún to Madrid.

Having finished that day of travel we found ourselves in Madrid Chamartin station, knowing there were no more trains that day and quite happy just to sleep there. Seeing us sit down with some sandwiches from a machine a guard told us we had to be out of the station before it closed in half an hour, and that he didn’t recommend sitting outside as there were parties on nearby roofs and falling bottles weren’t uncommon. A short trip later and we were in Madrid Puerta Atocha station and quite happy to just sit outside until it opened at about 5:30 (which was only 5 hours away by then) since it was a lot less deathy. We ended up staying in a fairly cheap room in an NH hotel (which are apparently a reasonably cheap chain of hotels along the lines of Travelodge). The next morning we took a train to Granada and then a connection to Almería where I’m staying for the rest of the holiday.

A few things have come out of this journey for me:

1) No matter how fucked you might seem there’s usually a solution.
2) Not knowing the layout and availability of the Spanish trains seems to be able to fuck you quite well, as none of the people selling tickets were able to piece together a journey like this for us by using multiple trains.
3) Travelling like this is damn awesome, not knowing exactly what you’re going to end up doing is quite fun in itself.

So on to today, and I ended up going on a quick boat journey (8m long yacht) which was made even shorter by the fact that I had more seasickness today than I’ve ever experienced in my life. I guess in retrospect the majority of last night’s bottle of wine and the beers I had on the boat were a bit of a mistake, but that’s life! Not sure what I’ll be up to for the last week and a bit, but the beach will probably be a main feature, with a possible quick overnight visit to another town.

While it remains to be seen if this works, I’ve just come across (well, more of a deliberate search) what seems to be a reasonable way to reduce comment spam. It adds a quick maths (not “math” as the plug-in author erroneously suggests) question to the Comments section which must be correctly answered in order for the comment to be posted. Akismet seemed reasonably good at catching spam, but I’m hoping this should properly keep the comments section clean.

http://www.herod.net/dypm/ to download it (comes with full setup instructions). Also yes, I am tempted to “sed s/math/maths/” the source.

EDIT 22/07/2009: Turns out it does something else to annoy me. The box moves itself about if you turn Javascript on/off, looks like someone decided it was okay to fix the layout with the *worst method  ever* (yes, this problem does override the Enlgish language pedantry from before).

Last week I noticed that I’d made a rather (un)hilarious security error and exposed my wp-config.php in my Wordpress setup to the world. This is bad, as it contains database credentials and some secret keys from the setup (all of which I’ve had to change since sorting this out). I decided it might be nice to write a small guide on a better setup which while not complete might mean that you’re able to avoid the mistakes I’ve made and possibly to point out a flaw I haven’t seen in this new setup. I did look at a couple of other solutions but this one seemed pretty nice to me.

While playing around trying to make this work I did find out about the giant goodie bag of awesome that is the unix find utility. In this case I was using it to change permissions on certain groups of files/directories, and some useful examples are given below. I sense it might come into play a fair bit now and might have some uses I’ve not thought of.

Before I set off with this one I’m going to issue a few warnings:

• Your distribution (if you are hosting this on a Linux machine) may have a package for Wordpress which makes for a much easier install, and (going with the example of Debian) receives quick, convenient updates through the package manager.
• You should be familiar with the Linux system including File Permissions, the Apache Web Server, and various other tools.
• If you get the permissions wrong as I did you can end up letting the world see your config files which include your database credentials and the keys you generate during the setup.

Those issues aside the set up process is relatively simple. As I’m using Debian (stable, which is Lenny at the time of writing) I may make references to Debian specific things such as the package manager apt. Let’s get cracking then.

First, you’re going to want to install all the relevant modules (run this as root):

apt-get install apache2 php5 mysql-server libapache2-mod-suphp

With those installed you’re able to get going with your basic Wordpress installation. I’m not going to duplicate Wordpress’s installation guide as that would be completely pointless, so here it is:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Detailed_Instructions

Once you’ve got Wordpress unpacked (I personally chose to set it up in my home directory ~/wordpress/ add a vhost config in Apache’s sites-available with the appropriate directory as the DocumentRoot, there are plenty of guides for this if you do a quick search) you should set about fixing its permissions. For this I chose to use the Linux find program. I don’t guarantee that this is the complete set of commands and you should probably check through the installation thoroughly in case I missed one out (I managed to do one of these quite incorrectly initially so I spent a while sorting out the mess I’d caused).

find ~/wordpress/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find ~/wordpress/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find ~/wordpress/ -type f -name "*.php" -exec chmod 600 {} \;

Having followed the Wordpress installation guide you should have a working database (I sort of recommend phpmyadmin for this, especially if you want to do this in a GUI) and configuration. Now for the important part. You need to configure suPHP, and to be honest this is almost completely trivial.  First enable the module:

a2enmod suphp

Then edit the suphp config file at /etc/suphp/suphp.conf so that it contains either the line:

check_vhost_docroot=true

or the line:

docroot=/path/to/your/docroot/

The first will allow suPHP to run anywhere you define a DocumentRoot in your Apache vhost, the latter will allow you to point suPHP to a specified DocumentRoot.

Finally, you need to edit your apache2.conf (found in /etc/apache2/) to turn off the standard apache mod_php. I personally use the following config as I have no use for mod_php within /home (however if you do you may want to swap php_admin_flag for php_flag so that you can enable the module for other php sites you’re hosting):

<Directory /home>
 php_admin_flag engine off
</Directory>

<Directory /home>
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php .php3 .php4 .php5 .phtml
suPHP_AddHandler application/x-httpd-php
suPHP_Engine on
</Directory>

That should do the job! If I’ve missed any hilariously crucial stage out then please slap me in a comment so I can add it in.

EDIT (27/05/2009): I probably should have actually explained what suPHP does. All it means is that any PHP files are executed as their owner. In my case the main benefit of this is that the config file doesn’t need to be readable to anyone but myself. Possibly a greater advantage, and one which becomes immediately apparent in a shared hosting environment, is that the PHP files are only executed with the permissions of the user. This means that as long as you’ve got sensible limitations in place on the user anyway, they shouldn’t be able to cause any more damage than they could from their shell (and there you can probably see the advantage of the php_admin_flag which they cannot override).