Spontaneous Monotony

Just got this in from Amazon, and I’m fairly impressed. Sure, it’s pretty awful that they didn’t bother keeping the Soviet briefing videos, but this is nothing that a patch can’t fix (remember, EA have a tradition of releasing bug-ridden software and then patching it later, still-not-fixed Bf2 heatseeker bug ring any bells?). What I am really impressed by is the update to Red Alert. Let me explain – I spent several years playing Red Alert almost daily, and in all that time the AI never built planes. It would occasionally build planes, but only ever used the Paratroopers. Now it will use the spy plane, and build the fearsome MiGs (OK it only seems to build a maximum of two at a time, and you really need eight, but that might be due to lack of money on the map I was playing). Its nice to see small tweaks like that being applied rather than the game-screwing ‘lets modernise this’ attitude of the Sega Classics Collection.

This is mainly aimed at the Glasgow Uni students among you (and anyone else whose university uses the Athens authentication system) – a new extension for Firefox has been released.

The toolbar is created by the company which runs the Athens system (unlike some of the other integration extensions you get for Firefox, which are genearlly unofficial), and provides:

• An indication of which account you are logged in with
• A Log Out button

as well as two dropdown menus which contain most of the functionality

• Athens Options, which contains links to various account-related functions such as login and changing your password
• Athens Resources, which has links to every Athens resource you are entitled to access. This is, IMO, the main reason to have the toolbar – I’m fed up having to retype the Athens web address just to switch from Westlaw to LexisNexis or vice versa.

Oh yeah, almost forgot the link. Like just about every other fx (and tb, sm) extension on the planet, it’s available from Mozilla Update.

To cover any possibility of switching blogging systems (unlikely, I like Wordpress, but you never know what’s going to go wrong with the next release, I am now using FeedBurner for my feeds. You shouldn’t notice any difference – any existing subscriptions will still work, because I’ve written some Redirect Temp codes into my htaccess file.

As if determined to see David Cameron give him a sound stomping at the next election, Gordon Brown has dashed the hopes of those who hoped that he might be somewhat less anti-democratic. The news is that 90-day internment, identity cards (they really helped Madrid fight terrorism, didn’t they?) et al are all fine with him – even though the former is potentially a breach of international law:

In the determination of his civil rights and obligations or of any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time

(art. 6(1) European Convention on Human Rights)

while the latter will cost at least £18 billion, violate human rights and do absolutely nothing to achieve its stated aims. Oh and remember that Labour’s majority is down by 4 before the votes even start – they’ve lost a seat to the Lib Dems (that’s -2) and poodle is currently stuck in South Africa (remember what happened last week!).

EDIT: they won the vote. But (especially for people whose passports run out after 2010) it’s not all over – before ID cards become fully compulsory we will have a General Election, at which point everyone who opposes Blair and Brown’s anti-human rights policies can vote Conservative and get it all abolished.

Wikipedia is at a crossroads – the next couple of months will decide whether it continues to grow and improve, or implode under the weight of abuse it is currently suffering.

It all started with that RFC (those of you who are regular Wikipedia contributors will know which one I’m talking about) – the Arbitration Committee’s pointblank refusal to do anything about the abuse, due to several of the members being friendly with the admin carrying it out, has given many more admins the belief that respect for others doesn’t matter, community consensus doesn’t matter, they can delete whatever they want whenever they damn well choose.

There are of course plenty of people trying to stop this – but unfortunately not enough of them are admins. Dozens of people, who have between them made thousands of contributions, have already left Wikipedia in disgust at this betrayal of the community’s trust by a growing number of administrators.

If you are a Wikipedia member (even if you haven’t edited for a while) I ask you to get involved, to try and do something about this, and save the project from the enemy within