In A Roundabout Way

AWOL

2009-07-12T12:47:00.002+01:00

Yup, i've been... elsewhere. The reason is, generally speaking, life in that it's been rather "variable" of late and i've had a lot on my mind, none of which was really relevant or indeed worth documenting in this blog.

Since i'm here, one techie thing i've just found incredibly annoying is how Blogger handles autocompleting on post tags; in order to enter "life" as a tag i couldn't simply type "life" and then a comma because it insisted on completing it as "lifestyle change". It's either an annoying feature on their part or Blogger is trying to tell me something.

Here's one i made...

2009-05-26T15:47:00.003+01:00

Today i've been spending some time writing a new CV; i'm not specifically planning on any jobs to go hunting for (well, there's one i'm going to send it towards once i've proof read it and got the Boss to take a look) but it might be time to go hunting for more... well, lucrative employment. It's been rather weird writing a CV after a decade of not needing one and i've been putting it off for a few weeks because of that. i'm finding myself wondering what exactly i need to include, how far back in my employment history to go and so forth. The education history was amusingly brief, four GCSE C or B grades, one for a subject that doesn't exist in the modern curriculum ("Computing", back in the olde days when they taught BASIC programming in schools) and all about as unrepresentative of myself or my current skills as it's possible to get! And i'll be honest, i've had to either look up or pretty much guess a few dates because i can't remember that far back any more...!

i've decided that it's time that my build server was rebuilt as well. i'm never keen on rebuilding computers (at least, not the ones i use personally) because it always takes me an age to "settle in" afterwards; this machine was rebuilt recently and i've still not finished straightening the start menu out and so on...

Phishing season

2009-05-05T19:17:00.002+01:00

So i was checking my emails earlier and in my spam box was a reasonably well done forgery. It purported to be from PayPal and stated that a £100 transfer of funds from my account had been cleared for a subscription to a website called Play And Connect... that was something of a surprise since i've vever heard of the bunnies i'd apparently given a ton to and only ever had that much money in my PayPal account twice and neither was this year!

So despite it already being filed as junk, i did some digging around; Play And Connect haven't got a site up right now but there's a note saying they've nothing to do with the emails, that meant a little digging around through the email itself to see where the "trick" was. The sneakiness laid within the "cancel" link, the text version pointed to PayPal.com but the actual link read PayPal.co-uk.***.pl (i've not posted the full domain, but it was only three characters long) followed by a legitimate-looking command string. Presumably the less tech savvy readers would either not look at the real link or if they did merely see the PayPal at the start of the link and miss the .pl domain.

One little twist is that the reply address points to a parked domain, PayPals.co.uk (note the plural) and i assume that's because if they'd forged a straight PayPal address it would've been picked up by the spam scanners far more quickly.

Computer says "no"

2009-03-20T20:23:00.003Z

In fact my work box decided to constantly say that it was "unable to run" just about everything so i pretty much took it as read that the nearly three year old installation of Windows 2000 had finally eat itself. But we can rebuild it, we have the technology and it's been lying around waiting for a few final parts for a couple of weeks now; the new version of the machine known as Ikaruga goes from 1.5GHz up to 2GHz and now has three (count 'em) 80Gb hard drives... and none of my development software so i've got a couple of days installing to get through before it'w workable! [Sigh]

Enter my domain

2009-02-11T18:07:00.007Z

i launched a new website at the start of January, it's called Retro Tat and is pretty much just me playing console remakes like Outrun 2 or classics collections like Midway Arcade Treasures, looking at assorted LCD-based toys and having fun with NES and Megadrive hardware clones; i mention it now because it seems i forgot when the site actually went live and the next bit at least requires knowledge of it...

Y'see, when i was putting the thing together, i decided that rather than splash out on a .com or even .co.uk address, since it was going to just be a personal indulgence i'd get the cheapest domain going; so i grabbed a .info and paid the princely sum of £1.14 for it - bargain. At the same time i was registering the domain i looked at the alternatives and the .com was unavailable, it was in redemption and had been for over a month so i decided that "if that ever comes free, i'll get it" but thought no more of it at the time. About two weeks after the new site went up, it did come free and the first i knew about it was getting an email from one of those firms that picks up domains and tries to sell them on for a profit... three emails arrived in total, each asking $99 for the .com and saying about how much better it was. Since i'm a little less than rich at the best of times i duly ignored it and the two reminders that followed.

Probably for the best really because a week later a second company was in touch, this time offering to do exactly the same as the first but for half the price - wow, now i'm impressed, $49 to get a domain makes the $1 or thereabouts i paid look so huge doesn't it? Well, i had to be held back otherwise i'd have bitten their arms off (nothing to do with the domain, i'm prone to acts of random and surreal violence) and promptly ignored the reminder from that company too; i remember saying that, if things carried on the way they were going, they'd be offering me a tenner to take it away sooner or later... instead the domain has been detagged so now it costs the same as any other .com to register!

There isn't much point though, at the moment i've managed to get to the top of Google for the search term retro tat on the current domain and i'm more than happy with that; .com domains are fun to have, but for a site i fell into doing by accident and am just doing for the fun of it, the money for a flash domain could be paying for a supply of coffee to fuel writing. Speaking of which...

Driver disks

2009-01-14T13:40:00.003Z

Today i'm re-installing (along with two other machines) a desktop computer with a clean copy of Windows XP. The install goes okay, then i need to find the drivers for the motherboard, video, audio and network but there doesn't appear to be a disk... instead there are drivers for the monitor. Has anyone in the history of computing ever installed monitor drivers? i mean, every monitor i've ever unboxed (and that's quite a few now, for the facility i'm currently upgrading we're talking thirty one machines) came with a disc but i'm i've done anything more than use them as coasters... do they actually serve a purpose other than making the manual rigid?

Now i've started thinking about it, i'm wondering if i should pop one in the drive to see what's on there... i bet it's blank!

i'm 18, honest!

2008-12-28T19:34:00.004Z

i've just been reading a report on the BBC news website about how culture secretary Andy Burnham is wanting to have all websites rated for content. As is usually the way for these things, Mr. Burnham hasn't actually presented any sensible or logical way to actually achieve this, just said it should be considered. Well okay, i'll give it some consideration... it's a stupid idea. i wasn't really rebellious during my teenage years but even i drank before i was legally allowed, looked at pornography on a few occasions behind the bike sheds and frequently i saw movies rated over my age. i wasn't meant to be able to achieve any of that and there were and indeed still are legal safeguards in place; the point is that, as a teenager, i and my friends felt the need and found ways to circumvent those safeguards.

Around the same sort of time, computing was just starting to become prevalent in both homes and schools; in both cases there were protections in place to prevent users in general doing certain things, either it was the copy protection to prevent the illegal distribution of computer games or password protected user accounts on the school network. And again those safeguards weren't impervious to attack, as with the physical safeguards such as age restrictions, they were actively seen as challenges, to a certain degree rites of passage that would win favour with peers.

And any measure Andy Burnham or the people he's brainstorming with regarding this issue come up with has to survive that; it's going up against children aged from nine upwards and, since i have some experience providing computing services to kids in that age range, he might as well be putting bullseyes on the firewalls because that's how they're going to be seen. There are probably few things more scary to a network administrator than a teenager on a mission, just about everything bar the kitchen sink will be thrown at whatever security measures are put in place on school networks and any little chink in the armour will be leveraged and widened as far as it can go; i've heard stories of supposedly secure systems where kids have found vulnerabilities in the way Windows Explorer displays printers to get access to drives and shares they weren't meant to and from there install software - and i've seen first hand that spyware can, regardless of user level, install itself past managed desktops and firewalls so there are ways and means for a creative child to see what their parents don't want them to, just as there have always been and, regardless of what campaigners think, will always be.

Don't get me wrong, i'm all for protecting children from seeing things that are meant for a mature audience and, although i may be a more liberal parent than most as to what i allow our kids to see, i do take measures to at least monitor what our kids are up to such as checking the caches from time to time and watching what is going through our gateway machine. What i have absolutely no time for is the concept of slapping age ratings on sites or the people who believe that this is going to keep kids away from that content if they really want to see it; the only thing that can police children on the internet is their parents, trying to do that kind of policing at an ISP level is just passing the parenting buck. That isn't the job of the state or legislation, it's not the job of internet service providers either - if parents are worried about what their children might see online then they should be watching where those children are going. And if they haven't the technical knowledge to do so, it's time to start learning rather than expecting someone else to do it for them.

Comedy sax scenes

2008-12-23T14:20:00.006Z

One common trick for editors on a certain kind of television clip show is to produce a montage of accidents with the inimitable Yakety Sax dubbed over the top... although it's better known by another name, the Benny Hill theme tune. And now you, i and indeed everybody else can play at being a clip show editor with the aid of the fantastic BennyHillifier - simply feed it a YouTube video address or ID code, sit back and enjoy as the audio is stripped and replaced with that tune... i find that it works particularly well with skateboard accidents and a couple of scenes from Doctor Who and Matrix Reloaded!

Santa's laughter

2008-12-08T10:47:00.005Z

Y'know... i don't like Christmas much (i may have mentioned it once in passing...?) and i suspect that most of the problem i have is that it feels somewhat hypocritical getting excited about something i can't put any actual faith behind. That does rather affect other things so here i present, in a twisted and bitter way, an alternative Christmas top five:

5. Father Christmas Do Not Touch Me by The Goodies
i think this has to be the most dubious song ever... i'd be surprised if a cover could be released now, the idea of Santa getting it on (even if only by insinuation) when dropping off gifts isn't exactly kid friendly! For those who haven't heard it, the gist is that the title is repeated a few times and then the last word removed for the next iteration, so it begins as "Father Christmas Do Not Touch Me" and on to "Father Christmas Do Not Touch" and so forth. The gist changes when it reaches "Father Christmas Do" and the finale is the singers shouting "Father"!

4. The Night Santa Went Crazy by Weird Al
To a degree this sums up Christmas in a way; the idea of the sheer pressure the "season to be jolly" places on people making them snap and wig out. Fortunately, some of us just play violent video games instead... Carmageddon on the Playstation was a great one for a long time, pretending the pedestrians were Christmas shoppers as you drove through large crowds.

3. I Wanna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek by the Go Gos
This has to be the ultimate representation of the fake bon homie, starting as it does with a Dalek presenting the listener with seasonal greetings. This one is really a product of its time musically and is hilarious for all the wrong reasons with the line about feeding a Dalek sugar spice being a personal "favourite" that i'd describe as toe curling if listening to the entire song didn't make it impossible to walk for at least five minutes.

2. Make A Daft Noise For Christmas by The Goodies
Despite originally being released during the 1970s, this is a startlingly appropriate song considering the current financial climate since the premise is that, since nobody can actually afford a "proper" Christmas, it would be better to simply make silly noises since they're free. i doubt our kids would go for it...

1. Santa's Laughter Mocks The Poor by The Attery Squash
The song that stoked the boiler for this train of thought and probably the most cynical Christmas song ever that doesn't involve death and destruction somewhere along the line. As with t he Goodies' "Make A Daft Noise", it focuses on the stifling commercialism and mentions that nagging doubt that just about any adult has (or at least should have in some cases) in the back of their mind that going into debt for bigger, shinier presents may well be a hideous mistake.

And just to "balance" things a little, a quick top three of Christmas songs that either aren't or at least shouldn't be on "feel good" compilation albums:

3. Stop The Cavalry by Jona Lewie
For some reason, this anti-war song seems to get everywhere despite the only reference being the line "wish I was at home for Christmas"; it's a fairly tenuous reference in the same way that Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas" only mentions it in passing to reinforce a point about someone else's situation.

2. Let It Snow by Vaughn Monroe
There is no point in this song where the festive season is mentioned, in fact it's a love song and revolves around a couple parting in much the same way "Baby It's Cold Outside" does. For some people, myself included, the first real exposure to this is probably the end credits for the first two Die Hard films...

1. Fairytale of New York by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl
Now, i adore this song personally but it's only about Christmas in the negative. The opening line says it all; "It was Christmas eve, babe, in the drunk tank", that says it all really!

Travelling in time

2008-11-19T23:43:00.003Z

The Beeb have just released onto the web a series of documents from their archives that cover the genesis of Doctor Who; these documents range from an initial report from a couple of staff members regarding science fiction on television in general that was written in 1962 through to a Radio Times article on the pilot story and the audience research report taken in December of 1963. The general report and follow-up are interesting reading in themselves but the one that really grabbed my attention was a treatment for the show by Sydney Newman and C.E. Webber, which is interesting for various reasons - when describing Dr. Who's machine and approaches to avoid:

"If we scotch this by positing something humdrum, say, passing through some common object in street such as a night-watchman's shelter to arrive inside a marvellous contrivance of quivering electronics, then we simply have a version of the dear old Magic Door."

i quite like the "dear old" bit, it's rather charming... but what did we get in the form of the TARDIS? Almost precisely that! The synopsis however goes on to talk about not actually seeing the outside of the machine at all, offering the option of a coating of light-resistant paint (research into which had apparently been carried out at that time although, since we don't have "invisible" objects in everyday life, presumably it didn't pan out) and has notes about characters going through the motions of partially concealing themselves as they move their arm in and out of an "invisible" object (there's a hand-written note as to how to actually achieve this onscreen). There are further notes that "wherever they go some contemporary disguise has to be found for it", which is rather like the way the TARDIS is supposed to blend into her surroundings but fails to due to a knackered chameleon circuit.

The characterisation for the Doctor (referred to throughout as Dr. Who) is also at odds with the final rendition and the document lists two "secrets" of the character, one of which is hugely at odds with the Doctor that fans know and indeed love; at one point they say that he "malignantly tries to stop progress (the future) wherever he finds it, while searching for his ideal (the past)" and whilst this idea did appear the show during the Jon Pertwee story "Invasion Of The Dinosaurs", the Doctor was very much on the other side of the argument and thwarted the plan to roll time back to a "golden age". Some of the Doctor's darkness and mystery did remain for the final drafts of the pilot however and at least some of the second secret, the idea that the Time Lords (not named in this synopsis) would be after the Doctor because he was "monkeying in time", remained but wasn't fully realised until the end of Pat Troughton's tenure.

The final paragraph was particularly amusing, featuring some fairly random suggestions for plot lines to consider and, of the four below, the two highlighted in bold appeared as "End Of The World" with Christopher Eccleston and insinuated as part of the Doctor's future (which has yet to be seen) during the Sylvester McCoy story "Battlefield":

"By the third story we could first reveal that [the TARDIS] is a time-machine; they witness a great calamity, even possibly the destruction of the earth, and only afterwards realise that they were far ahead in time. Or to think about Christmas: which seasonable story shall we take our characters into? Bethlehem? Was it by means of Dr. Who's machine that Aladin's palace sailed through the air? Was Merlin Dr.Who?"

Small quote file update

2008-10-25T11:27:00.003+01:00

Well okay, bloody vast quote file update; i've just added over a hundred and fifty new gems to my random quotes and then spent the usual twenty minutes spooling through and looking for the typos that have knackered the array... but it works now and i've got over 900 in the "database".

One side effect i've noticed from all that spooling through all of these new arrivals (and indeed several hundred that i didn't "borrow" from the large list i was reading) is that everything i'm writing seems to be geared towards getting myself quoted regardless of the fact that i'm writing in places where i'm pretty much sure that nobody will. i'm not sure if it's just my perception of my own pretentiousness or if i'm really doing it as well, which is even more confusing. So i'll stop here rather than say something i know i'll regret in a month when i'm re-reading this!

Slowly catching up

2008-09-03T19:45:00.004+01:00

Yesterday i got my hands on a second hand Playstation 2... one of these days i might buy a console when it's current again! Along with the machine we picked up four games for a tenner from Gamestation and i was more than a little happy when my beloved found Strikers 1945 1/2 with a deal sticker on it! Since then i've added Steel Dragon EX (which comes with the original 2D Steel Dragon and that in turn surprised the hell out of me by being Gekoih: Shooting King under another name!) to my collection from another Gamestation and have a selection of 2D and 2.5D shoot 'em ups courtesy of eBay and Amazon on the way including Psyvariar, R-Type Final and Gradius V. i'm therefore rather happy today!

The irony of buying a PS2 and then stocking up on mostly 2D games hasn't escaped me, by the way... we did get some other stuff but that was for the kids!

Up and running... twice

2008-09-01T03:10:00.003+01:00

The new video card arrived just before the weekend so i'm back to using something that isn't the onboard hardware - yay! The new arrival is a GeForce 6200, has 256Mb of video RAM compared to the old MX440's 64Mb and fanless to boot; it's had a little exercise over the weekend since i've been prodding code together and running emulators (i've noticed that the onboard video does very badly with emulation for some reason) and all appears well.

Something that wasn't appearing well this weekend was the syndication on my websites of the assorted blogs i "keep"; Google in their infinite wisdom decided to change the format of the XML streams that Blogger distributes and, for some bizarre reason, they seemingly hate carriage returns now so the entire feed is a single bloody line which confuses things when trying to view the source. And all the tagging suddenly changed so my Atom decoders silently and catastrophically broke without warning; at least the breakage wasn't for too long, fortunately i actually appear to have regular readers now (yes, i'm as surprised as anyone) and Andy very kindly emailed me to say something was up about half an hour after i'd noticed whilst trying to arrange syndication of the dev blog on the Bullet Mechanics site.

i've basically just rewritten my Atom feed decoder from the ground upwards, so where the old version was a hybrid based on someone else's PHP code, this new one is all my own and built on the XML news decoder that a couple of my sites use. All this unexpected PHP work is why it's gone 3am and i'm still bloody awake...!

Can you smell burning?

2008-08-27T22:08:00.004+01:00

My battered old GeForce MX440 has finally pegged it... the card itself seems to be okay but the fan has totally seized up; even with the electric fan aimed squarely at the open case (which is how i kept the previous board going when the CPU fan conked out) it would only last about fifteen minutes before major changes to the display caused the card to lose sync! Ho-hum... so no PC coding for the next couple of days until the replacement card i got on eBay for fifteen quid shows up then. [Sulk]

Endings and beginnings

2008-07-11T15:22:00.002+01:00

Well, the 2008 season of Doctor Who finished on BBC1 last weekend and overall i've enjoyed it a lot; as i've previously written, Donna Noble has grated a few times for me and the temporary "new and improved" model (to avoid any spoilers, i won't go into detail) from the last episode started off very irritating before turning into someone that would have been fantastic as an ongoing companion for the Doctor but not much good for the audience so something was going to happen. Having the gang all there at least in spirit (with appearances by Mister Smith, K9, Luke Smith, Ianto Jones and Gwen Cooper, the latter being the subject of a very funny throw away question from the Doctor about her having ancestors from that area of Wales) was wonderful and that vast TARDIS set didn't look cramped with so many people in it. The endings for the various characters were a mixed bunch, hopefully the little trio that wandered off into the sunset headed by Jack is a hint of things to come for Torchwood and Rose finally getting her man was probably the highest point even if a little sad considering it wasn't poor old Mickey... and Bernard Cribbins was superb. All in all, a good finale to an enjoyable season, i know that not everyone enjoyed it but this isn't their blog so ppphhhpppt!

Starting up a few nights ago on BBC1 was their new drama Bonekickers, starring... erm, him from Hustle and her who played Martha Jones' sister in Doctor Who although i didn't recognise her until i had a look on the IMDb if i'm totally honest... there was a review i read online somewhere that described it as "Time Team meets CSI" and yes, i can see where that came from. All of the character cliche boxes were pretty much ticked off one by one; forthright and uncompromising team leader who has something in her past to build a story arc around? Check. Eccentric expert who gets most of the best one liners? Check and wonderfully lecherous with it. God bothering lunatics? Check for a third time and with some cool swords since they were supposed to be faux Knights Templar. New member of the team who is there to act as a way to introduce the lead characters to the audience and is contractually obliged to stuff something up before redeeming herself? Bingo!

The story was... well, rather silly really and an excuse to drag out a few cliches whilst the acting, especially from Julie Graham as the aforementioned uncompromising leader with a mysterious pass-time she's picked up from her mother was a bit stilted for at least the first five or so minutes but considering it was the first episode and had all the character exposition to squeeze in along with a load of pyrotechnics and so forth, it was enjoyable. Again, other people have said less favourable things but personally i'm looking forward to seeing where this one goes now all of that setting up is done.

Loads of fun...!

2008-06-19T15:01:00.005+01:00

Wa-ay back in November 2005 i managed to get a C64 loading from an audio CD; all told it was a slightly silly idea but that's never stopped me. Today some new car CD adapters arrived courtesy of eBay (there are literally [i]hundreds[/i] of the things on sale) and i'd found an enclosure that was originally used to house a Cumana CDROM drive for an Acorn Archimedes (and still contains and powers the interface board) and wedged a battered but relatively reliable Asus 52x CDROM drive in there; the reason for the drive change was that the Asus has two buttons, play/next track and stop/eject so that audio tracks can be selected from the drive without it needing a computer connected. i never did find a caddy or indeed the 6x CDROM drive i wanted to use for this project, which is a shame because it had all the controls and a really nice LCD panel that gave the drive status and what track it was currently looking at... it would've been bloody perfect for this "project"... oh well, here's a video of the CPC loading Cybernoid 2 from the CD drive perched on top of it's monitor:

The postie's just been!

2008-06-11T12:17:00.004+01:00

i just got some nice new toys in the post, two of my smaller C64 games mastered onto 8K cartridge. Here's the Kikstart C16 cartridge with it's very nice looking box and inlay...

...and here's the Invasive Action cart in action, with my Action Replay 6 to one side and actually disconnected from the machine which hasn't happened in a very long time...

They both look rather spiffy and, although i've been a bit reticent about the whole cartridge mastering thing (since it's more about revisiting existing code rather than writing new stuff and only smaller projects at that) now i actually have the things in front of me i'm rather pleased about it all. Whilst the Kik C16 box looks very professional indeed, i have ot say that the likkle cardboard carton used for IA is quite charming in it's own way too. In both cases i'm the owner of cartridge number zero too. =-)

Life's little surprises...

2008-06-06T14:06:00.003+01:00

Okay so... erm... it seems i'm diabetic [bemused expression] - although i'm not sure if it's type 1 or 2 at the moment, but the smart money seems to be on type 2 so far. i went to my GP last week because i was feeling tired all the time, since then various people have taken assorted samples and i was forwarded to the specialist clinic at Jimmy's. This has, it must be said, come as a bit of a surprise; i'd assumed the tiredness was just my being a bit poorly and generally lazy or something and easily "fixable" (although the bloody-minded part of me would've sulked for days over the idea of a diet and then probably avoided it like the plague anyway) but it seems that things are a bit more... well, permanent.

Which is a bit of a bugger all told because it's probably going to need significant lifestyle changes and that stubborn side of me is aghast at the prospect of changing what and especially how i eat, of getting [shudder] regular exercise and so forth. But after a bit of wallowing and pessimism yesterday i've decided to put some effort in; the registrar i spoke to yesterday said i should get a thirty minute brisk walk in every day... well i can do that, so this morning i shouldered my laptop bag and left the house at about 10am for a 40 minute walk and i'll have another on my way back. Of course, i do have the concern that i'll not be able to keep this good start going (certainly it's a bit more difficult on Tuesdays or the weekend as such) but i'm actually quite willing to see how much i can do at the moment.

So, right now it's a quarter to one and i'm sat on a bench in a rather nice park, the weather is nice and bright but not too warm and i have a bottle of pineapple and passion fruit sparkling water which i got from a pound shop and had to check to make sure it was sugar free, something else i'll have to get used to doing from what i gather. And i'm and tapping away at my (t)rusty old Compaq Armada lappy with some pleasing results; in the two hours i've been here, i managed to write over 750 words for various publications and now this blog entry which i'll have to cut and paste to Blogger when i get home. Who knows, if i get into the habit of doing this i might get around to restarting work on that book i wanted to write...!

Selling Out - part 2

2008-05-23T00:04:00.003+01:00

Yeah yeah, i sold out and signed up to bloody Facebook; it finally got to the point where i was getting so many add requests it was easier just to give in rather than keep explaining! Still, this one is going far better because i've used me real name for a change and people have been adding me (and i've added a few myself) quite frequently; compared to how MySpace went on sign-up i'm quite impressed... more importantly, they've got options to syndicate blogs on Facebook so both of mine are filtering through - i wasn't even vaguely impressed with MySpace's lack of support for RSS or Atom feeds...

All this social networking stuff has set me thinking though, i might have to start my own but it'd be for grumpy bunnies like myself, so more an anti-social networking site; people will sign up and resolutely refuse to interact with the other members, upload pictures or blog. i want to register MyFacelessTwitLink.co.uk for it and i bet the advertising will be worth a few pennies...!

More of the same

2008-05-20T19:37:00.002+01:00

i've just seen a variation on that virus propagation i mentioned previously (see the post "naughty, naughty) except this time it was relying on Doubleclick for the kick through; to reiterate, if you see anything that mentions a video and points to a URL that ends with video.exe don't touch that link. Doesn't matter if it came from someone you know and, to be frank, it's always best to ask the person about any attachments if you weren't expecting them - i doubt i have to say that considering the majority of my audience, but this time i'll do it anyway.

Take two blogs into the shower?

2008-05-17T16:47:00.005+01:00

In order to confuse myself even more than usual and because a few people said it'd be a good idea (and i'm easily led) i've decided to start keeping a development blog alongside this one; it'll just waffle on about whatever i've been coding at any particular time (assuming of course that i've had any time to code, this writing lark seems to be taking up loads of time right now!) and this blog'll continue to be about more general things and probably updated no more frequently because it really relies on me having something i'd consider important enough to write about. If anyone is feeling ~~nosey~~ interested, the new dev blog is over there and will eventually be syndicated into my site, i've planned to rewrite my Atom feed handling a load but, as with the coding, it's a matter of finding the time...

Speaking of writing, i haven't already mentioned it but i'm now writing for Retro Gamer on a monthly basis, reviewing new games for 8- and 16-bit machines - i'm just getting ready to start my third two-page set of reviews and issue 51, the first issue where my writing appears, is apparently due out around Thursday next week and the subscriber copies are already turning up, so i've received me first complement for the stuff what i wrote; that's a serious relief because i was starting to get a little nervous! Hopefully i'll have a few other excuses soon to write, blog and code if all works out... very cryptic i know, but when i know what's going on (and that is fairly rare, me knowing what the hell i'm doing at any one point in time!) and it's all reasonably set in stone, i'll talk about it...

Issues with religion

2008-05-14T11:56:00.000+01:00

i was reading an article on the Beeb news site (it appeared as part of a random RSS syndication) the other day, an account of a recent lecture by the Archbishop of Westminster where he said that he wanted to encourage "people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem". i'm an atheist and, as a general rule at least, try to behave in a similar manner towards those with religion and i'd like to think i'm fairly tolerant with it, as long as everyone is happy with their own lot and don't want to convert or kill others using religion as an excuse we can all get on splendidly; coming to our front door to "sell" me a religion isn't entirely wise because i'll happily give as good as i get and i do know the arguments (my own lack of faith is based on over twenty years of on/off consideration) but in more general conversation i'll simply avoid the subject to keep the peace.

So all is well and a bigwig within the Catholic church wants to promote tolerance, yes? Well no unfortunately, because after that promising start Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor went on to say that "the hidden God is active in [the lives of those without faith] as well as in the lives of those who believe" and that's the bit which annoyed me. To my mind, treating atheists with "deep esteem" means accepting that they do not share your beliefs and what the Cardinal said in full, essentially, is "they may not believe in God, but he's there in the background of their lives". When i discuss religion with others who have a faith, i don't say things like "you're wrong, there is no God", i may not believe myself but i don't deny others the right to disagree but by saying that God is in atheists' lives, the Cardinal is basically telling us that we're all wrong and that simply cannot be described as esteem of any kind, let alone deep.

Naughty, naughty...

2008-04-20T15:07:00.003+01:00

i spotted a nasty way to propagate viruses earlier, Gmail had already categorised it as spam so i assume it's getting on a bit now but i'm still... well, impressed is the wrong word since it's a way to trick people into opening a almost certainly harmful file but it's pretty ingenious all the same. What it does is uses an apparent hole in Google or more accurately in Google's advertising accountancy system; when you open an advert from Google it gets passed through a tracking system that keeps count of which adverts are displayed and visited, before being kicked forward to the actual site. What this little exploit does is use that tracking system, the email that it sends from infected machines starts http://www.google.com/ and most people consider that a trusted site, but the rest of the address is just some gunk that's been borrowed from a legitimate advert and, at the end of the string, it passes Google a different address. That address is in Poland and points specifically at a file called "video.exe"

i doubt i have to say to anyone technically-minded enough to be reading the drivel i write knows not to click on an email attachment or link with a .exe suffix but this is sneaky... the URL itself is over ninety characters long so it "buries" the file extension and, more importantly, although it doesn't obfuscate things very much this way if you know what to look for, the use of Google's name is probably going to "sell" this link to a fair few people...

Terrible Phorm

2008-04-15T11:30:00.002+01:00

Phorm, for those unaware and they're doing their best to keep people that way, is all about advertising; at the moment, when you see a banner on a website, it might have some degree of targeting towards you but more often than not it'll be for some random product or service that you have no interest in. What Phorm does initially sounds quite promising, it means that as long as the sites you visit are all signed up, you get specifically targeted adverts. If it sounds slightly insidious then that's because it is, but that isn't the whole story because there's the question of how the advertisers know which banners to place and that comes down to deals that Phorm is trying to arrange with the various UK ISPs, BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk; what they essentially want to do is insert their systems within the link between the user's computer and the outside world in order to gather data on what that user is viewing. To placate people they're saying that the data would be collected anonymously and that they're only interested in trends, so if a significant number of users visit a site that sells decorative cakes and later go to somewhere selling fancy dress, there's the assumption that more users would do the same if they were aware of the fancy dress site and Phorm's clients can therefore target advertising on the cake site.

So what's so bad about that you might ask? Well it's not so much the idea of targeting adverts (although that in itself is rather insidious but it's been happening for years now), but there is a huge questionmark over the whole concept. The basic model seems to be that when a user's browser puts out a request for a new site, that request gets side-lined by Phorm's hardware, anonymised and stored - the request isn't passed on and instead they're relying on the way that web browsers automatically send another request if the first gets misplaced for some reason - in other words, Phorm are in ur internets, reading ur HTTP requests. Is that a problem if it's anonymous you might wonder, but the question is more a case of can we trust marketing people to stick to those particular guns or even to have the guns out in the first place? All we will have is Phorm's word that they're not keeping far more data than they're claiming and there's very little that we or even the people at the ISPs can truly keep a tab on what is and isn't going through their virtual T joint. Or indeed what comes out on the way back to the user, again there is only Phorm's word that they won't tamper with the results of searches to inject their clients into results favourably and it wouldn't take much work to actually achieve that.

If the company had a spotless or at least a relatively clean history this would still be an issue of some concern, but Phorm seem to have a consistent record of attempting to conceal or suppress the truth around their endeavours; a Wikipedia article about them was ham-fistedly edited by someone directly involved to remove true but possibly damning information, trials have been held of the system in the last six or so months that saw tens of thousands of BT broadband customers monitored without their consent or even awareness and most attempts to get information out of them regarding the system and it's uses rarely gets more than a "no comment" unless it's someone like the BBC in which case the PR drones come out in force. If that weren't enough to make people suspicious of the company, the fact that they were previously called 121media and produced, amongst other things, adware should set off a cacophony of alarm bells. They even claim that different logged-in users will be treated independently so goodness only knows how much actual data is being harvested.

The Phorm "service" (for want of a better word) will be "opt out", in other words users will have to be aware that their browsing is being monitored in the first place and that they've got to do something in order to prevent that happening - that is assuming, of course, that opting out actually works and, considering 121media's previous connections with dubious advertising techniques, the idea that the Phorm opt-out works just like the unsubscription addresses on most spams (or in other words it just confirms that you're there to be advertised at rather than getting you removed from anything) wouldn't be hard to accept. If anyone wants further information, there's always BadPhorm and the aforementioned Wikipedia article, although i'll add the usual disclaimers about Wikipedia and not taking it as gospel at this point...

i bought a terrible DVD...!

2008-04-12T13:13:00.003+01:00

i watched one of the daftest films i've ever seen yesterday evening; I Bought A Vampire Motorcycle was released in 1990, put together on a shoestring budget and lots of friend and family goodwill and probably one of the funniest things i've sat down and watched for a while. Starring Neil Morrissey, then already well known as the slightly gormless sidekick Rocky in Central's Boon but well before he started hanging around with Martin Clunes or indeed voicing one Robert the Construction Worker, this is essentially "Boon does comedy horror" since a large number of cast and crew were "borrowed" from the hit ITV show! Although Morrissey gets the lead role here as Nick Oddie (or Noddy to his mates), both Michael Elphick and David Daker appear as coppers and other members of the cast and crew are present throughout including the late Tip Tipping performing some of the more adventurous stunts.

Even more surprising were some of the other cast who weren't directly involved with Boon (or appeared for an episode) who were persuaded to appear; Burt Kwouk makes a short, silent cameo as the somewhat menacing owner of the chinese takeaway, Daniel Peacock, who regularly appeared in the Comic Strip productions and the television version of Whoops Apocalypse appears as Buzzer, the first victim of the titular creature but the biggie has to be Anthony "C3PO" Daniels playing the priest that Noddy rather desperately finds on finally working out that his bike is a killer. There's loads of wonderfully cringeworthy one-liners, quite a bit of blood, guts and bodily fluids (seriously, this is one film that doesn't sit well with popcorn!) and a fair few cheap but very cheerful sight gags such as Noddy ordering a pint of cider and a crossbow bolt, fired by the leader of a motorcycle gang, thudding into the bar next to his hand. The vampire bike (a Norton Commando, apparently... and still buried in the producer's shed as one of the extras demonstrates) goes from being quite menacing to highly amusing as the special effects budget doesn't quite manage to make it seem realistic, the cast really go for it as do the extras who are mostly friends and family of the film makers (or the writers, producer and whoever else was available in some cases) and it's topped off with a silly soundtrack. In short, worth a couple of quid on DVD!

What a weekend...!

2008-04-05T20:00:00.004+01:00

Well, yesterday saw the finale for Torchwood season 2 and i must admit that it was more twisty than the average helterskelter! Captain John was fabulous and i'm hoping he's going to be a fairly regular character (as were the 1900s Torchwood ladies...!) and Gwen really came into her own. i'll admit that i cried at the end, but i'm a soppy get and it was a very sad moment; i won't say exactly what happened in case there are folks reading who haven't seen it yet, but the entire episode was an emotional roller coaster that somehow managed to go out on a high from the biggest low point. i do hope a new season has been commissioned because it really needs to be continued.

And as Captain Jack and company head off into the sunset, a certain police box comes barreling out of an ethereal tunnel nearby because the Doctor is back. i can't remember if i've previously mentioned my doubts about Donna coming in as a full-time character but generally speaking she's more like the Donna at the end of "Runaway Bride" and, apart from a few moments that were vaguely reminiscent of the late Lauren (the scene where the two finally clap eyes on each other being the one that springs to mind) she didn't get on my nerves as such and the quiet moments with her grandfather with the telescope,the truncated version of which appeared in the trailers, were very well done on Catherine Tate's part and far better without the bit about the Doctor that was added. The Adipose were incredibly cute little creatures and i was quite pleased with how their part of the story ended... i suspect a few people would've found them a little too cute with the little waves and so forth but i liked that and it was in keeping with what they were meant to be...

And i simply have to mention the fantastic Bernard Cribbins in there as Donna's grandfather simply because it's about bloody time he had a proper turn at being in Doctor Who rather than one of the Hammer movies - although you'd think he would know the significance of the little blue box! And his little dance... well, it might be considered over the top but he's Donna's relation so it must run in the family! And speaking of guest appearances, there was another that i won't mention specifically but it was at the end and i really didn't expect it that early in the season - who knows, perhaps that particular "ghost" will be turning up throughout? It'd be a killer way to do the "no doctor" story for this season...

And a little "television moment" that's just happened as i was writing this blog, one of the Thunderball machines on the National Lottery Live jammed up and stopped working on air - not an Earth-shattering moment but still a point of note.

It's got Pong on it

2008-03-08T13:12:00.002Z

The more astute visitors to my site (assuming of course that there are visitors, i've never been entirely sure that the counter hits aren't just a figment of a deranged imagination and then worried about whose) will have noticed that my likkle corner of the web has gone through a bit of a revamp! Yes, T.M.R's Workstation has been through a sort of spring clean (do websites have springs?) and in the process has gained new downloads in the Backward Engineering section as well as a new covert art render for the just-released Blok Copy which i'm rather pleased with. In fact, the release of Blok Copy has seen both the Workstation and the main Cosine site being upgraded, although the design of the latter remains the same and just the way it handles things has been updated so that it now handles a couple of browsers that it previously caused to stutter.

So what's this Blok Copy thingy i;ve mentioned a couple of times then? Well, it's a new game from Cosine for, surprisingly to us as well as others it would seem, the Commodore PET - or more specifically, it works on 40 column PETs with 8K of RAM or more. The code (which features some nice touches like PET model detection and vertical blank sync, something of a first for the PET as far as i'm aware) was knocked together by yours truly, the screen layouts by Bizzmo and me and i've managed to wedge what i'll call music in there too, although i'll struggle a bit to stop laughing as i do so. PETs don't have sound out of the box (well, the majority of them don't, some of the later models have a "bell") but there is, so i've read at least, a relatively popular hardware hack that connects to the parallel port and i slapped a crap step time music driver together and got it playing a version of SLL's "End Theme" and some sound effects. All told i'm rather proud of it for a first attempt on a machine with no user-defined graphics and it seems to have gone down well with the playtesters so i have me fingers crossed...

Watching Torchwood

2008-03-05T23:23:00.001Z

One thing i always find slightly annoying with drama that's aimed at an adult audience is when the writers feel the need to be nasty to the regular characters; it's almost the norm with Spooks for example, at least once a season there's a death or a similar yanking of the heart strings, be it Harry and Ruth finally getting together before she's forced to run away and hide, Colin being killed, Zaf disappearing or a myriad of other situations and that show isn't alone. We have, it seems, to watch these characters really suffer for it to be considered real i suspect.

Torchwood makes its characters suffer as well and we suffer along with them, the multi-story thread that was Owen's death being the most recent example and the effect was increased by the Torchwood Declassified after the episode where he was shot, lots of commentary from Burn Gorman about how he'd like to go out in a similar fashion as the hero and RTD saying about how hard it was to take the step of killing a major character... what a sneaky trick that was! Instead of him dying we end up with Owen the zombie, slowly going out of his mind, being relieved of duty and, as we found him at the start of tonight's episode, perched on the edge of a building... but as usual for Torchwood, all isn't as it seems and he was there purely to save the woman who was planning to end it all. i bloody cheered when i realised that Owen was going to come out of the other side of the ordeal and would be staying with the team, i really did.

Torchwood is part of the Doctor Who universe in that respect, it will be nasty to it's characters but, at the end of the day, it's rarely terminal and we love it all the more for that...

Charlie Brooker is our leader elect

2008-02-16T12:58:00.005Z

Today's post is about music and bear with me here because the chain of events will probably take a bit of explaining... to start with, i'm a subscriber to the B3ta mailing list on the grounds that it's always good for a laugh as long as you don't get offended easily. So i was reading this weeks installment over a cup of tea and one of the things that caught my attention was a YouTube video for a song called "Charlie Brooker Is Right About Everything". So i had a listen and was grinning like a wazzock by the end and something at the back of my mind said that the style was familiar...

The song itself is by The Attery Squash and there was a link on the YouTube page so i went to have a look around; it turned out to not be an actual site, instead it's a domain with framed forwarding that poijnts to the group's MySpace page and that in turn has a link to their store. And lo and behold, there were options to buy the original and the extended mix of "Charlie Brooker" for eighty pence a bloody pop! "That'll do me" thinks yours truly, and promptly loads the shopping trolley with both mixes and heads off to the checkout and, even better still, being able to pay with PayPal. After my purchase is made and the files downloaded to Ikaruga's hard drive i take a closer look at the shop page and there, squirrelled away in the "about" section, was the reason i was finding the style familiar; Ricardo Autobahn, one half of Attery Squash, was also involved with Cuban Boys, whose "Cognoscenti Vs Intelligentsia" (or the "Hamsterdance Song" as most people'll remember it) was probably one of the best things to be released in 1999. In fact, they made quite an impression on me at the time because they gave away some freebies and previews on the site and the Christmas of that year (or at least i think it was that year...!) was pretty dull and the only real memory i have is of spending a huge amount of time playing and eventually completing Carmageddon on the Playstation with assorted Cuban Boys tracks hammering out of the amp my PC was connected to as background music.

This was, at least in internet terms, quite a long time ago though and i remember visiting the Cuban Boys site four or so years back and being forwarded to a different project called The Beatbox Saboteurs (which i've just found out was a renaming of the Cubans and i downloaded all the freebies they had at the time as well) but, since these memories were bouncing around, i tried the old The Cuban Boys site address and... it was working again! Not only that, they've got a new track out for 2008, "The Penthouse Messiahs", and guess who just got all four mixes through their online shop? The lineup has been reduced to two of the original members but the sound is still very familiar and, as if to confuse matters further (something the Cubans seemed to enjoy immensely) the other two members who didn't return are now called Spray and one of these members is Ricardo and now i need some ibuprofen because this is getting hideously confusing but the cover on their site of the Cadbury's Flake theme called "Flakey" had me in bloody stiches!

So i've found some new music i like a lot from a couple of indie groups, rediscovered another group i have some incredibly fond memories of has returned, downloaded about forty tracks including six i was more than happy to pay for (and that's a first in itself, i've never paid to download music previously) and covered topics in this blog such as hamsters, kittens, Charlie Brooker, Flakes, messiahs and Terry and June and therefore have the most ridiculous list of labels i've ever added to a blog - and it's only one in the afternoon too!

Selling out [sigh]

2008-02-05T21:37:00.000Z

Okay, so i've sold out and... i'm not sure i can even bring myself to say this, but i've got a bloody MySpace account! [Spit!] i'm doing so under protest as such and it certainly doesn't affect my opinion of the thing in the slightest but, since a few people have badgered me a bit here and there, i have a presence on yet another "social network". [Sigh] And if anyone says "thanks for the add" i might just lose the plot. The whole "social networking" thing is just too much faff really, there's loads of examples out there but nothing seems to be compatible with anything else; i can't, for an example i've already come across, get MySpace to read the Atom feed from my blog over and syndicate it, i'd have to start the damned thing from scratch using their bespoke blogging system instead and i've only just got used to this one. And as for the page code... well, the word "random" covers it fairly well, the shape of the pages seems to change on a whim and everything shuffles about during loading. Opera doesn't seem particularly keen on it either...

In other news, i'm just in the process of writing a couple of reviews for ZX Shed so my name'll be up in lights or something soon... the February update of Oldschool Gaming on the other hand has been pushed back a month because everyone still has a hangover from Christmas or something and i'm still waiting to get a purchase order for any work for Retro Gamer! i still seem to be doing a fair bit of writing though, and close to bugger all code right now... i really need to redress that particular balance. i have a few plans on that front, but it all comes down to available time.

eBay urine extraction

2008-01-29T02:54:00.000Z

Okay, so i was browsing randomly around eBay as i occasionally do when i find myself unable to wind down at night and i decided to look for Zipstik joysticks since they're my favourite digital sticks; they're robust, the square fire buttons are comfortable and the microswitches take a severe hammering. i found six auctions in total, and five of those were asking what i'd call a reasonable price a couple of quid for the stick (or in one case, for two) and a few more for shipping, which is fair enough; the sixth, however, was listed as mint and boxed and for some reason (greed, i think it's called...?) the seller wanted twenty five quid for the thing and that didn't include postage! The original retail price of the Zipstik was about a tenner, so where that figure comes from i have no idea... but it does make you wonder how often people get away with urine extraction on that sort of level.

Resident Primeval

2008-01-26T15:06:00.000Z

So, i was just sitting, here watching the repeat of last Saturday's episode of Primeval and slurping about the fifth cup of tea of the day and i've been pondering... previously, i've relatively glibly described it as Power Rangers Dino Thunder for adults (which is a bit of a cheap shot i suppose, although i'm not sure as to which direction said shot was aimed) and Harry Hill has previously referred to it on TV Burp as ITV's answer to Doctor Who but, considering the way it's currently heading, it's become more akin to Torchwood; a team of individuals with their own skills and quirks, working together to protect the world from threats that arrive through holes in time and space - Torchwood calls it the rift, Primeval has anomalies but it's the same difference really, innit. Although it does beg a few questions as to why these threats are so localised; granted, the rift (and the second one that the Doctor closed at the top of Canary Wharf) and it's localisation explain it for Torchwood since they've pretty much built their house on the graveyard, but the anomalies in Primeval are far more erratic but, for reasons that haven't been explained in any form, seem to focus on a relatively small area in current time. Are there no swirly, glowing thingies in other parts of the country or indeed other countries?

One thing i am finding a little annoying (as opposed to the way the anomalies work, which is just puzzling) with Primeval this season is Cutter's reaction to his world changing and love interest Claudia suddenly becoming quite literally a different person; yes, most people would be confused and upset by having what they consider reality radically altered in that way, but Cutter is a scientist and, more importantly, had already spent a lot of time dealing with anomolies that twist time and space into knots. No, i don't want him to just accept it and carry on regardless because that would if anything be even worse, but a rational man like Cutter would surely realise that he's sounding like a gibbering idiot and, as Connor of all people had to tell him, that he'd be better off keeping schtum until he knew what was actually going on. Now that's happened, hopefully we'll get to the bottom of what happened and perhaps even find out what caused the changes to happen.

Strange addictions

2008-01-15T11:12:00.000Z

i do occasionally worry about how my mind "works", someone on the Retro Gamer message board sort of challenged the other posters to complete a game called Killer Cobra on the Amstrad CPC and i've been playing it on and off for the last couple of days. It's basically a clone of Scramble (and in part of Super Cobra) but with very fast scrolling and some pretty evil level layouts. So far i'm getting to about level 5 before it gives me a kicking; the tanks on the ground start firing air bursts that are quite hard to see at the speed this game moves and explode around the height of the ship, making them hard to avoid. Top score is just over 40,000 but i will admit to "score whoring" to get that...!

So what other news is there...? Well not a lot really, still recovering from the financial destitution that is Christmas and the new year, spending quite a bit of time looking at getting some freelance work doing websites (i'm very cheap if anyone is looking... and not just in the way you're thinking!) and so forth, but what i laughingly call "normal services" should resume shortly. The moving of the blog has made getting new entries up a bit easier, so i might even say stuff occasionally. Erm, like this.

Out with the old

2008-01-08T17:39:00.000Z

Well, here is my all singing and all dancing new and improved blog. Okay, there's possibly a touch of sarcasm there because i've run a blog for close to four years and all of the features i plan to make use of with this one were present there too, but this is a bit of a break from that; previously it was all handled by my own scripts that, whilst relatively efficient, were starting to show their age somewhat since they were some of the first pieces of PHP i produced... i've toyed with rewriting the entire thing on several occasions but simply haven't had the time to sit down, decide on a system that carried over the existing content and made it easy to manage (changing of months required manual modification of a couple of pages on the server!) It also seemed like a good idea to "retire" the old news page, since it was rarely updated and was making the site look like it was stagnant... okay, so the site was stangnant but i didn't want it to look that way! i plan to continue where i left off in 2007, with an eclectic, erratic mix of whatever crap crosses my mind at the time of posting - so chances are that only the Boss and a few of my more masochistic friends'll be reading the thing as usual.

So 2008 got off to a wobbly start, with power failures rebooting the server unexpectedly when i was out last week and a longer outage knocking out a large area for a couple of hours the other day and, just to add a little icing on the cake, our dish washer appears to have gone mad and trips the breaker whenever it's plugged in. That might not seem like an issue to some, but we're not exactly a massive data centre here with UPS, the web server sits in a small cubby hole in the kitchen! If one of the appliances loses the plot and outs the power, everything shuts down!

What happened over Chrimble then...? Well, we survived and that's always a good start but there wasn't a fat lot of telly to be had really; obviously, the highlight for me was the Doctor Who Christmas special, Voyage of the Damned, which was probably the best seasonal story to date and saw cameos from some legends of British telly and cinema, Geoffrey Palmer as the captain of the Titanic, Clive Swift as an "expert" on Earth customs and my particular favourite (despite being a tiny cameo but, judging from the trailer at the end, he'll be reprising the role) had to be Bernard Cribbins as the newspaper vendor. Tennant was his usual, impressive self (there were a few moments where things went a little overboard but that's the norm now for the snow-festooned single parter it would seem, the scene with the two hosts and the Doctor in flight bugged me just a tiny bit) and Kylie Minogue was really good as Astrid. The ending was a little bittersweet and again that seems to have, ironically, become the norm at Christmas and an "everybody lives" moment wouldn't go amiss next year (he writes on the off chance someone at the Beeb is actually reading) but the story and special effects did the whole Poseidon Adventure genre proud.

i've just seen Hot Fuzz for the first time as well and enjoyed it hugely; i would've been surprised if i didn't to be honest since Shaun Of The Dead and Spaced are still regular background footage when i'm working, but somehow they've managed a film that almost feels like an American blockbuster and wedged it into sleepy rural England. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are... well, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, their real-life friendship shows and the two characters they play, who obviously start off on opposite sides of the fence since this has a few "buddy cop" moments throughout, are likeable and it's easy to be sympathetic. Similarly, the rest of the cast are nothing short of amazing, ranging from Kevin Eldon of League Of Gentlemen fame (speaking of which, i saw LOG's Apocalypse over Chrimble and really enjoyed it a lot despite having had doubts previously), Edward Woodward, Jim Broadbent (who has only ever done one thing i didn't like and that was a couple of minutes as the Doctor for a Comic Relief skit), Timothy Dalton (who i didn't realise until Loony Toons Back In Action was so flexible as an actor)... the list goes on. The two disc edition is packed with extras, my favourite of which simply has to be Edgar Wright's first go at the cop/serial killer genre, an amateur (well, very amateur but not ugly for it, surprisingly) production called Dead Right, starring assorted friends and families and made on a shoestring budget with VHS camcorders and some absolutely appalling puns and breakages of the fourth wall.

Well, that'll do for starters, i've got to write the integration stuff to get the blog over to my site yet... fingers crossed having the thing more accessible will lead to it being updated a bit more frequently as well but i don't like to make promises i'm not totally sure of keeping if i can avoid it!