The Blackbox

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was released on the 5th March, so is it any good?

In short – yes, it’s great fun to play, however there are a lot (and I mean a lot) of niggly little bugs in it which spoil the fantastic gameplay. Things which annoy me the most:

• Certain unlocks not showing in the kit menu – eg. medic kit and ammo kit not being selectable (although they are there in game to be used thankfully).
• “Spotting” people is a nightmare and very inconsistent. You can be looking at someone perfectly and it won’t register, yet you can spam the button nowhere in particular and spot people!
• The server browser is one of the poorest I’ve ever used. This isn’t a new thing, many games have them, yet this lacks the most basic of features.

All of these things are quite trivial really in the overall game. Compared to Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142, this game has the balance of infantry to vehicles almost perfect apart from there being a lack of anti-air support. The audio is fantastic and it looks like this could finally be the follow on to Battlefield 2, which has been a long time coming.

The UK launch date for the Apple iPad has been delayed from March to the end of April. Is it going to be worth getting one? The jury is still out I think. Could be a nice replacement for the Macbook around the house though.

Looks like YouTube are the next major site to drop support for IE6.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/youtube-will-be-next-to-kiss-ie6-support-goodbye/

.NET Magazine launched http://www.bringdownie6.com/ not long ago for the same reason – wish everyone would hurry up and take notice.

Someone at BBC News either has a great sense of humour or hasn’t realised what their headline implies!

Is there a flu pandemic? It would appear that there is in the form of swine flu.

www.isthereaflupandemic.co.uk

Recently been working on a proof of concept for using memcached to solve some of the challenges we face with our legacy system.

I’ve gone down the route of using Coolstack to get it all up and running as it’s very simple to maintain.

I’m currently experimenting with spymemcached as a Java client for communicating with the memcached server. It’s all looking good!

The Student Loans Company is possibly one of the most useless establishment that I have ever had the pain of having to communicate with.

I am now battling them due to a loan value being placed against a student loan account which had been completely cleared of any outstanding amount. The SLC claim that the money has been paid, the supposed receiver says no money was due or has been received – yet the whole the debt is being paid on a monthly basis when nothing is owed!

There is no choice in the matter because it comes out by PAYE and payroll won’t stop it until HMRC advise them to, which they won’t as the SLC says they are owed money – it is a horrendously inefficient and bordering on fraudulent system when it comes to mistakes being made by the SLC.

After numerous phonecalls, a letter was sent to the SLC, including all the requested information and we were assured it would be resolved. 1 week later we receive a standard letter response, with the issue not having been looked into.

We have replied once again and have now attempted to use the “official” complaints procedure to see how that goes, but seeing as it’s still internal to the SLC, I am not expecting a great response. Watch this space…

21 years after its initial launch, Red Dwarf is going to make a brand new appearance on our televisions once again.

Is this a good thing? Usually these types of projects spawn one of two things – a brilliant show, where it was like it never left us – or a shockingly bad attempt at bringing the show back to life. I am hoping that because it has the complete original cast, it will maintain the silly humour it had originally.

I’ve recently started playing with Aptana and RadRails under Windows, where I encountered a problem where Aptana wasn’t able to install gems, and it popped up the installation window each time I started Aptana. It is logged as a known issue but I wanted it working, so I persevered.

The upshot of it is, I looked at the Rails console within Aptana at what commands were being run. Most of the where, for example:

gem install rails -l

All I did, is take each of the commands run automatically from the console and removed the -l option:

gem install rails

Everything installed perfectly in no time at all, and it’s all now up and running!

I recently attempted to get media from my PC playing through my Xbox 360, to use it as a media centre, but quickly found that the Media Centre Extender on Windows Media Centre Edition and Vista, wasn’t allowing me to play DivX or Xvid encoded video clips.

As it turns out, you can’t actually do it through the Media Centre Extender, but you can get them to play through the Videos Share bit instead (a quick update is needed from Xbox Live – it should trigger when you first try to download the player). It’s obviously not as pretty as the Media Centre Extender, but it works perfectly well and that’s the most important thing.

I’m lead to believe that the reason for this is that the Xbox team have put support for playing these codecs in via their dash, but MCE doesn’t use any of this, as it is written by it’s own team as they are completely separate products.

Is it going to get fixed in the future? Apparantly not. Best start saving for a proper media centre pc!