March 20th, 2008
I just got an email in from Gamespy offering places in the Xbox 360 beta of Battlefield: Bad Company. It’s only open to people who have a Gamespy Founders Club or IGN Insider subscription (there were public keys, but those have been given out already), those who meet that requirement (and have an Xbox Live Gold account obviously) can follow the link for a beta 360 experience. Unlike the Call of Duty 4 beta, there’s no waiting time (the CoD4 one was a good idea, but the errors that led to people not being sent keys turned into a fiasco) - as soon as you fill out the form, you get your key onscreen.
The beta itself starts on the 25th of March - there’s no indication as to whether this means the usual Xbox Live launch time of 9am, or 12:01 GMT, or 12:01 Pacific Time, or whatever.
PS: Sorry for the atrocious pun, couldn’t resist
Tags: Battlefield, Battlefield Bad Company, Computers and Internet, Games, Gamespy, Xbox 360
Posted in Computers and Internet, Games | 2 Comments »
March 20th, 2008
Although Wordpress 2.5 missed its release date last week, there is now a ‘release candidate’ available. For those of you who have lives aren’t familiar with software development stages, a ‘release candidate’ means that the software is considered to be in a release-worthy state, but isn’t officially released yet. Of course the practice of releasing ‘release candidate’ versions for public download over the internet means that the term is now almost as much of a joke as the ‘Google Beta’.
Wordpress 2.5 RC1 is now running on this site. Although its main visible change is in the administration interface. The new interface is - aside from the mysteriously buggered plugin upgrader which presumably is the reason why 2.5 missed its release date - very good indeed. Much easier to navigate, a fresher colour scheme, pretty much everything that I thought was wrong with the Wordpress admin interface seems (touch wood) to have been solved. There is also however a new feature for readers in that your Gravatar will now be displayed alongside your comments - if you have one. Gravatar is a service that - once you register - will allow you to associate an avatar with your email address. Whenever you leave a comment on a Gravatar-using site, it will check your email address against Gravatar’s database so that your avatar can appear. This saves you registering accounts on a billion different blogs (well, other websites too, but blogs are the main users of Gravatar) just for the purpose of having an 80px square image appear next to your name.
Anyway, if you see anything that looks screwed up then I’d appreciate it if you could drop a comment on this post - not that I’m expecting Wordpress to be buggy or anything ;P
Links
Tags: Blogging, Gravatar, Wordpress, Wordpress 2.5
Posted in Blogging | No Comments »
March 14th, 2008
The Video Appeals Committee has ruled - for the second time - that the BBFC’s decision to ban Manhunt 2 had no justification and should be reversed. It seems that the censor - which is now largely discredited - will respect the decision this time. The ‘casual, sadistic’ (their words) violence the BBFC objected to would earn a film a 15 certificate at most. Their claim was that the ‘interactivity’ of Manhunt 2 created a greater potential for harm (you see the BBFC thinks it has the right to ban ‘harmful’ things even for adults).
Let’s be clear what these sorts of games do - you sneak up on whoever you’re going to ‘kill’ and press a button combination. Then a ‘kill’ sequence of varying grisliness is played. So in essence Manhunt 2 features footage of deaths being played following the selection of the footage via control buttons. No different from a DVD with scene selection - in which the violence can be far more graphic.
It’s about time we stopped giving these Daily Mail-ingesting autocrats control over what entertainment products adults are ‘allowed’ to buy. This is a democratic country, with a legally protected right to free speech. The only legitimate limitation on whether an adult buys a DVD, or a game, or a piece of music, is whether that person has made an informed choice to do so. The PEGI rating system can provide the necessary protection for children - especially if the government makes those ratings binding on game sellers, which they aren’t at the moment - without violating our rights by preventing content being made available to adults. Let’s hope this decision is the final blow to an organisation that is long past its sell by date.
Tags: BBFC, Games, Manhunt 2, News, Politics
Posted in Games, News | 1 Comment »
March 6th, 2008
After its discussion on This Week in Tech, I decided to start using my dormant Twitter account again (hence the new links in the sidebar). The plugin I’m using to do this is a bit carp. For example it is showing my most recent tweet as being 3 weeks ago instead of 7 minutes and, rather astonishingly, placing the allegedly ‘3 week old’ tweet above ones it (correctly) dates as an hour hold. Never mind - it’ll do until I can find/write something better. A side effect of this is that those of you who are RSS-averse (or just want to do everything via Twitter) should now be able to get new notifications of posts on here by following me on Twitter.
Tags: Blogging, Computers and Internet, Twitter
Posted in Blogging, Computers and Internet | No Comments »
February 29th, 2008
Well it seems that in my essay-writing exploits last night I failed to notice that the graduate endowment is gone (after the SNP drafted its death warrant in June). Ah well, gives me an excuse to get the utterly fabulous February 29th in my blog. What’s more puzzling is that Neo Labour and the Tories (no surprises there) voted against, on the basis that it wouldn’t reduce student poverty. I know that bending the truth (not to mention the expenses rules :p) is in vogue in Neo Labour, but I fail to see how they can claim that reducing the financial burden on every single student by over £2200 (about a fifth of the average total debt per student of £11,000) will not reduce student poverty. We should all be happy - once again we live in a country committed to the principle of free education, and (even better) we no longer live in a country run by Neo Labour con artists.
Tags: Education, Graduate Endowment, Neo Labour, News, Politics, Scotland, SNP, Top Up Fees, Tuition Fees, University
Posted in Politics | 2 Comments »