Spontaneous Monotony

Yep, it’s the first anniversary of this blog’s creation (in fact, it’s EXACTLY one year since the first post – I checked the time stamps) – it has certainly changed since then (not least moving from MT to Wordpress, back to MT, back to Wordpress, to Textpattern and finally [so far] back to Wordpress) and I like to think that there are more of you reading it (I could probably find out if I could be arsed to actually look at the awstats log). Here’s to another fantastic year of blogging.

When updating the sidebar, I’ve just noticed that the RSS 0.92 feed (http://www.davidarussell.co.uk/feed/) is currently not working because I haven’t declared a namespace for the CC:License metadata. I’ll fix this when I get home tomorrow – right now I don’t have the time or state of alertness to do it properly!

I’ve played the Guild Wars: Factions PvP preview, and I am not particularly impressed. The new ‘glass’ interface is very nice indeed, but that’s available in the original campaign anyway. The new classes are distinctly underwhelming.

When we heard ‘Assassin’ and ‘Dual Wield’ many people were no doubt hoping for a Diablo 2 Barbarian-type character holding a large sword in each hand, instead what we get is a rather crappy subset of the Warrior – instead of Adrenaline, skills rely on Energy and being used in the correct order. Don’t expect to be a major threat to anything sturdier than a Monk primary!

The Ritualist is just a rehash of the Necromancer’s Blood magic (hell, they didn’t even change the skill icon colours!) – made even worse by the fact that many skills have to be performed within a certain radius of a Spirit (you can create those too – although there’s a reason you will ever see a Ranger using them, namely they suck) to be any good.

I’ll probably still buy Factions, since the new areas will be fun to explore and hopefully there’ll be some new skills for the existing classes, but as for ArenaNet’s claim (at the time of the original Guild Wars release) that each addon would be, like Guild Wars itself, ‘comparable to any other top-tier game’, BS! I mean, they recycled the old Guild Wars music for crying out loud – it’s not just the recycled White Mantle uniforms that’ll make the Battle Isle seem familiar.

Guild Wars was so popular because it was original, fun to play, and wasn’t done lazily like so many other games. Guild Wars: Factions has none of these attributes.

There are rumours circulating that Wordpress will lose RDF (also known as RSS 1.0) and RSS 0.92 functionality simply because the developers can’t be bothered maintaining it anymore:

Myself, skippy and ringmaster had a conversation a few days back in
#wordpress about feeds. We came to the conclusion that RDF and RSS
0.92 are basically way too old to still be in the WordPress core, so
they should be removed. If they are sorely needed by someone a plugin
can replace them.

(David House on the wp-hackers mailing list)

Bearing in mind that many older feed-reading programs can ONLY use one of these ‘old’ formats, and Wordpress is STILL using Atom 0.3 (which, if you apply this logic, is ‘way too old’, and should be replaced with Atom 1.0), I am just astounded by the fact that this suggestion is being taken seriously. If you have a Wordpress Trac account, then you can voice your objections on this page (by the way, a Wordpress Trac account uses the same login and password as the Wordpress Support Forums – so if you have a Forums account you can use that to login to the Trac site).

The “way too old” argument is empty. “It confuses the users” suggests that more work is needed on autodiscovery tools, not that the user’s options should be reduced. The “RSS2 and Atom are both competent feed formats. All feed readers these days are built to understand one or both of them.” argument isn’t unreasonable as far as it goes. But it makes the assumption that what’s offered by the different formats is the same, and should only be considered in the context of current syndication tools [...] I don’t really know why the WP folks are even considering removing RSS 1.0, their current source is reasonably well structured, and the inclusion of the corresponding template for RSS 1.0 is hardly significant bloat. All they’ll really achieve is irritating a segment of the community.

(Raw >> Wordpress and RSS 1.0)

Microsoft have decided that Service Pack 3, which will provided XP with numerous security updates, bugfixes and feature improvements, will be delayed until the second half of 2007, because developing Windows Bloatware Edition (aka Vista, wtf else do you call an OS that needs 2Gb of RAM?) is more important to them than keeping their current customers safe and secure.