High Resolution(s) (Mode 2)

What can I say, seems that it's the time of year again to make public my resolutions for the coming annus mirabilis in a desperate attempt to shame myself into just possibly keeping some of them... which actually seems to have bloody well worked last year as, miraculously, I was a really good boy and somehow kept all of of the buggers (yes, every single last fecking one of 'em!). Yippee-ki-ay, melon farmers !!! So, suitably emboldened, it's once more into the breach, etc...

1. I must avoid buying an iPod. My loyal old Creative Zen is finally dying on its well proportioned backside after four years and one feckless drop from a great height too many. Much like myself, the short term memory is fecked (it doesn't "remember" what track that you'd last listened to in the current playlist when you shut it down) and it is crashing with increasingly alarming regularity. Rats. Now, I've generally always regarded the Apple offering as a beautiful looking but hideously overpriced trend junkie plaything... however, my mate Stevo at work got himself an iPod Touch for his Christmas and, frankly, in the flesh it is a glorious beast to behold, incredibly easy to use and oh, so pretty. Must... resist... must... resist... must.. resist... (actually, let's face it, given that not doing so would involve Uncle Mex possibly spending money in some form, this is probs a very safe bet to get kept, I'd say)
   
   
2. Learn to schpeak (a little) Dutch. Yesch, of coursch! In April, I'm heading over to the Roadburn Festival in Tilburg, the premier Doom / Stoner metal boutique gathering in Europe (nay, the world!). Yee-ha ! Saint Vitus and Cathedral on the same bill ??? You betcha ! Crikey, I might even put in an appearance on the Thursday to see Amon Düül II if I can be, erm, bothered (funnily enough, I am expecting some feelings of über relaxed lethargy over there... in Holland... at a stoner rock festival. And I think my short term memory problems might just, somehow, be related... hmmm, any ideas, dear readers ???). Anyways, I know they all speak Englisch over there (exshept Schteve, obviouschly) but I'd like to go to just one of these countries without being an ignorant arse, for once, and make some kind of positive effort.


3. Write another bloody game... possibly even on a DS! Given the wonderful worldwide reception of contemptuous apathy for my blessed ickle Columns game, I'm going to do another one. I've still got tentative plans about doing some kind of shooter but will probs crap out and stick to, yes, a colour/shape-based puzzler. Not going to do it in Delphi or Python this time, tho'... I'm toying with the idea of doing it for the DS and may have to resort to C, C++ (oh, balls), or even, ulp, assembly... (anyone got a spare ARM946E-S manual handy ???).
   


4. Make easy money from "The Power" kicking a$$! Jeez, what did I tell you folk, it's like buying feckin' money. Don't say I haven't shared my simple wisdom with you. Mr Taylor is head, shoulders and torso above the opposition. As Raymond van Barneveld (five times world champion himself, world no.2 and someone regarded by Sid Waddell as the second greatest dart player of all time) put it, "I don't know what to do to beat this guy - I'm practicing ten hours a day but it obviously isn't enough". We shall not see his like again. So weigh in while he's still interested.
   

Aye, that'll do for starters. Keep on rocking in 2009, pop pickers !

Made with the help of -

Mogwai "The Hawk is Howling" - My mostest favouritest track on this whole elpee is called "Danphe and the Brain". Must be a typo. They say Danphe, I say Daphne. Danphe ? Daphne ! Daphne ??? Danphe !!! Let's call the whole thing off !

The games of our lives

I've seen it folks. Nerd heaven. It exists. I've been there. There doesn't even have to be any death involved (except maybe for those last vestiges hipster aspiration, never a problem for Mexton). Yes, last Thursday night, Video Games Live at the Royal Concert Hall. Two and a half hours watching and listening to the wonderful RSNO trawling through the game music back pages all the way from Pong and Space Invaders (yes, they had the violins doing the honours for Pong's minimalist bleeps and the double basses grinding out the marching invader "tune"!) right up to the contemporary full bhuna orchestral scores from those new fangled 3D graphics demos that they are trying to pass off as games to the kids today such as Halo 3, God of War, blah blah [yawn].

In between the two extremes was where the real gold was to be found, a quick trawl through the late eighties arcades, my spiritual home, with Ghosts 'n' Goblins, Rastan Saga and the mighty Out Run, the latter being especially well served by an impromptu solo piano medley later on in the proceedings, a glorious slice of none-more eighties hawaiian shirted heaven! Other highlights for the big man were the Mario medley (especially the piano genius Martin Leung playing my old favourite, the Benny Hill-esque über jolly SNES Super Mario World level two music) and a finishing blast of selections from Castlevania right at the death. A spectacular night's entertainment, so good that I just had to eschew my usual self-imposed five word review limit for one night only (unless Maiden are amazing at Twickers next Saturday, always a possibility).


Had a ticket for Radiohead at Glasgow Green on the Friday but didn't go - any gig was going to be a come down from the bleep worship. It was peeing down with rain and, perhaps more importantly, the third week of the League of Legends darts was on Setanta - gotta get your priorities straight, right? Though I will admit to almost regretting it after seeing blingmeister Bobby George unfastening his right breast pocket after every 180 he hit and flashing his man boob. Eeewwww. Still, another great evenings telly. Been reading Sid Waddell's "Bellies and Bullseyes" for the past couple of weeks so was well up for the darts. Just a shame Sidney isn't providing the tonsils for the tungsten tickling this time... "At the age of 31, Alexander of Macedonia wept salt tears for there were no more worlds to conquer... Eric Bristow is only 27". Yes, there really is only one word for that - magic darts !!!

Made with the help of -

Journey "Revelation" - Aaargh, Davros, we should have feckin' went to see 'em!!! The wee Fillipino chappy on the mic is a vocal Perry doppelgänger! And this new album is a belter to boot. Goddammit !!! The rest of you, stop that sniggering at the back there!

A Megablast from the past...

No, I can't quite believe it myself. The search, the sacred quest that I've been on for years, nay decades (-ish) is finally over. Yes, you all thought that I was just a nutter with an overactive imagination on top of a worrying fetish for ancient arcade shmups (as well as a selection of cute, furry animals but we won't go there) but I've finally cracked it. That bloody game that I told you about, the one with the uncredited rip-off of Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu as part of the soundtrack. Okay, so it wasn't Thunder Cross after all, that doesn't matter (I'm 99% sure that both games were briefly in Electronic Experience together at one time). No, it was an old skool Taito belter called Megablast !!! And here's some footage (with lovely audio) to prove it...



Ah, the wonder of KLOV and an internet world chock full of sad, demented loonies interested in the same kind of obscure, ephemeral nonsense as the big fellow. YATA!!!

Made with the help of -

Autechre "Amber" - Lovely old skool experimental techno for a gnarly old skool gamer to drool over while rocking like it's 1991.

You Say You Want a Resolution?

Hallo meine freunde (oops, still in frisky Fräulein stalker mode), the new year has finally reared its ugly head and it's now time for making known my plans for world domination once again. In the spirit of this article in the current Wired magazine, I thought that I would kick off the year by sharing some of my nerd-specific resolutions for the coming annus horribilis mirabilis.

1. I really gots ta get myself a Wii. Someone, somewhere will have the feckers in stock again at a reasonable price, at least by the spring... after which time the mighty Wii Fit will finally be available in the UK. Oh, yes. In fact, PDC World Championship Darts 2008 could just be getting a look in around that time as well... Hell, it's a public service helping Miyamoto-san and co beat back the brain dead 3D FPS HD acronym flogging hordes...
   
   
2. Must continue to keep the feck away from social networking sites. Enough already with asking the big man for links to his Facebook or MySpace pages. Fuck off. Am I prepared to suck on a meaty slice of the Gates / Murdoch corporate cock for the dubious privilege of getting relentlessly spammed by a million "friends" that I either don't know or never gave a flying fuck about in the first place? I really don't think so. Did I somehow get into this ole computer thang because I'm some ultra ebullient people person with some latent desire to buddy up with 101 random cunts? Fuck, no. Gimme some anti-social networking, I'd buy that for a dollar. Yessir, keeping out of the road of all that nonsense really won't be a problem for old Mexton. And you can take that one to the bank.
   
   
3. Yes, make 2008 the year of the Linux desktop! Well, okay, round at Uncle Mex's house, that is. Haven't had a proper Linux installation since I punted the old P133 a couple of years back. Will probably plump for an Ubuntu /Kubuntu partition and use that for my internet access, Python hacking, etc. I'll tell you this, XP is the last feckin' version of the beast of Redmond's piss awful operating system family that I'll be having as my main desktop platform. I think my next x86 will be a Mac, for starters...
   
   
4. Hi-Fi separate system, make it so! Next music system will be separates based, that is a cast iron certainty. I've had more than enough of the recent CD playback behaviour of recent micro systems where the player has somehow decided to take it upon itself to add in its own little gap between every track, regardless of how the original disc was mastered. Horrid stuff that really fucks up your listening experience of whatever Live Evil it is you are listening to. Wretched, awful (yet apparently wilful) negligence and stupidity, increasingly common at the lower end of the market with those players engineered to play MP3s straight off CD-R/RW discs. Balls to all that. ASAP the big man will be off down to Richer Sounds to get things sorted and circumvent this silliness.
   

Hmm, s'pose I'll have to check back here later on to see whether I have actually kept any of these promises, if I remember. Bugger.

Made with the help of -

Van Der Graf Generator "Pawn Hearts" - If I need reminding just what a glorious singer the mighty Peter Hamill is, I stick on a cold blast of this little beauty. A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers on yo ass.

Stay on target... Stay on target !

I can't wait to see that thing flying. Don't fancy it's chances, though...

Porkins: "I've got a problem here."
Biggs: "Eject."
Porkins: "I can hold it."
Biggs: "Pull up!"
Porkins: "NO, I'm all ri--aarrggh!"


Made with the help of -

Rush "Snakes and Arrows" - Yes, I am a software developer, I am a Star Wars fan and I do listen to Rush, so that's 10,000 nerd spotting points to you and a fuck you very much.

UPDATE (08/10) : "Here goes nothing..." oh dear :-(

UPDATE II (17/10) : A-ha, the real story at last...

The rain in (erm, North Berwick) falls mainly on the plane(s)...

Had a lovely day out last Saturday at the Museum of Flight over at East Fortune to watch their annual air show. Beautiful little place doing sterling work looking after marvellous old planes, it's a wee slice of heaven for anyone with lurking jet-boy propeller-head tendencies (guilty). The weather was half decent (for the most part), the bacon butties were tasty, tho', sadly, the doughnuts were scandalously AWOL... I worship and adore the old kites they have on static display and in bits in the maintenance hanger. In fact, I still get a cheap thrill from walking by the huge Vulcan bomber that they have sitting outside the main building (sighs)... what a commotion that old girl would have made in her heyday...

Anyway, as for the show, the Red Arrows are always good fun and there was plenty of old prop goodness (including a wonderful old Lancaster) but, for me, the undisputed highlights where elsewhere... For starters, a mighty, twin rotored Chinook gave a rare air show performance for us and it truly was an extraordinary sight... like some ungainly Glasgow bus being dangled around the sky on two strings by an unseen, celestial puppet master. How the hell does it stay in the air? Beautiful noise it made, too, like some giant bizarro stealth Flymo. No, really. The other wonder was the Typhoon, which came on right at the end of the day as the heavens opened up and the rain started hissing down. What a glorious racket it made, especially when the hammer was being put down, a sound like the very fabric of the sky itself being ripped apart. In fact, it moved so much air that half a dozen alarms went off in the car park as it made its nearest low level pass. That awesome, bassy roar it eminated when at full tilt scythed its way mercilessly through the chests of the agog spectators, a feeling going so deep that it shook their very ancestors right down to their bones, I tell you... Give me a live album of that every week... Heavy metal bursting through the sky indeed...

BTW, that pic I've posted isn't one of mine, sadly. I did buy myself a camera recently but have been struggling to get to grips with it. Yes, yes, the lens keeps steaming up when I try and snap my favourite subject, har de har. Ach, f*** it, insert your own tripod jokes here...

Made with the help of -

Galaga '88 - Super cutesy graphics, ridiculously silly sound effects, some lovely music, gormless little aliens saying "Ohto ohto!" to you, and the inevitable classic old skool shooter game play, that's galactic dancin' for ya! What's not to love ?

How we used to live...

Okay, I was a wee bit late to the whole MAME party, mainly through the fact that I'd been keeping a P133 alive for the best part of ten years, a situation due in no small part to being too tight to upgrade my heartfelt concern for the environment - the old bird struggled enough emulating a PC Engine (with the sound turned off and the frame rate w-a-a-ay down) that I rightly felt it would be rather a waste of time getting it to try and crunch its way through the arcade version of Chase HQ...

However, I finally got around to getting myself up to speed the other week at long, long last and have had an absolute whale of a time gouging my way through stacks and stacks of the old classics... Out Run, Salamander, Gryzor, et cetera ... but the current favourite has to be the mighty Green Beret. I'd forgotten how good that old girl was, bringing back all those hours I'd spent down Sweaty Betty's every other weekend trying to get past the end of that second level (bah, making those lovely doggies the end of level baddies is not playing fair with the big chap, boo hiss). Anyhoo, got to be still worth a look to any discerning gamers out there... jeez, a couple of hours knifing and / or flamethrowing some pesky Russians doesn't half make a chap hungry... note to self : must remember to dig out "Raid over Moscow"...


BTW I - if anyone au fait with POW rescue behind Soviet lines is looking at this, please let me know how the hell you kill the paragliding karate bastard who parachutes in with his smart arse machine gun every so often from level 2 onwards ??? He's no danger but I keep missing the fucker with my rocket launcher and he jumps off before I can get down and knife him in the cojones...

BTW II - on a completely unrelated note, it seems the TV Cream blog bloke is an old school Genesis fan as well... nice work, fella

Paradise Deferred (Redux)

Bah, this game programming lark is a royal pain in the cojones. I've been trying to motivate myself to finish that godawful sideways scrolling shoot 'em up that I've been rattling on about for, oh, months now but I have been seriously struggling... sadly, the "can't be arsed" factor is hideously enormous, exacerbated by the huge number of fiddly little bastard details that always need to be attended to before making real progress. I've actually somehow got a fair old bit of the infrastructure well in place but there always seems to be something else that needs properly designed, and it's always something that hadn't been previously accounted for... and, frankly, after spending most of my 9-5 workday ploughing through acres of ill-considered, back-of-the-fag-packet designed shit intricately planned, well-architectured, high quality code, I'm not always in the best frame of mind to spend the evenings or weekends peeing away my precious drinking time doing similar into the wee small hours. Not when there's a third series of Deadwood to be watched...

Aha, I hear you cry, the big sh**bag is making his excuses and baling out already - what a complete Colin Hunt. Well, naw, that ain't the case... not at all. The sideways scrolling job will get finished at some point, maybe even this summer... but my new years resolution was really based around just getting a game written in Python with a view to subsequently getting it running on Linux as well as Windows... and then going on and seeing about getting it running in an OLPC development environment. Well, that project is still very much on, only I've retrospectively decided to walk before running (er, actually after trying to run in the first place but bollocks to pedantry) and have started converting my old "classic" Columns rip-off to Python / PyGame from the original Delphi / DirectX version. A much less technically onerous endeavour as well as a pretty damn fun way to really get into the guts of the new language without fighting it quite so much at every bleedin' step (e.g. cursing stupid things like the lack of basic, multi-dimensional arrays in the standard Python library the other day - WTF ?!?). In fact, it's going to be a cool wee proggy to hang any graphical and musical doodlings from in the way that I'd originally intended the Delphi version to become. Well, I've started so I'll finish as old Magnus used to say. This thing will definitely get done. I've said so in public. So there :-P

In the meantime, here's a picture of one of the models for a putative end of level baddie from that wannabe R-Type / Gradius clone to keep y'all satisfied. It was going to be a picture of another (partially) furry German but the big man thought better of violating the old Blogger terms of service. Ho-hum.


Made with the help of -

The Byrds "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" - Oh, how old Uncle Mex loves the sound of some steel guitar on a Sunday morning. Glorious. Gram Parsons R.I.P.

Doctor Knobb's Journal

Howdy kiddywinks! Y'know, despite being a professional (smirk) code monkey for, oh, nearly ten years now (Jesus wept), this blog has been markedly lacking in the area of tech talk. I did (and still do) intend starting another blog for my idle musings on what's going on in the world of my favourite weekday dev tools and suchlike but, in the meantime, I thought that I should take this opportunity to do a wee bit to fill the gap on this blog. Oh, joy untold. Umkay, let's crack on...

Feeling a little demob happy at the prospect of my short Easter hols, I decided to crack open the copy of Delphi for PHP that has been sitting in my in tray for the past few days. One very quick, lightweight install later (no .NET dependency baggage) and I was working up a little database front-end application quicker than I can knock up a chip butty. The work flow is exactly like classic Delphi... design your forms, code your event handlers and press F9 - super quick and super simple. It comes bundled with Apache and an Interbase version so everything is in the box, good to go, for creating your own self contained little web app. And, by crackly, I really do like it! It's just so, well, Delphi...

I'm even warming to the clunky name - Borland confused the whole Delphi naming issue in the first place by renaming their version of the Object Pascal language as the Delphi language and now they've (or rather CodeGear have ) done a complete volte-face and seem to be now branding their whole symbiotic IDE / VCL development model as Delphi... and are consequently now back to referring to the language under its old flamin' moniker. Typical Borprise SNAFU, the big yin thought - people will get mixed up and wonder why this new "Delphi" has nothing to do with Pascal at all and wail about how idiotic the powers that be still are after all these ignominious years... However, now actually having used the PHP tool myself, it makes absolute bleedin' sense - it really feels just like "classic" Delphi... except that this one has PHP sitting underneath it and, of course, it now targets the web. Bloody great I say. Even better, the new PHP VCL that underpins the whole endeavour is essentially a managed open-source project, meaning it can (and should) take on a whole life of its own outwith CodeGear's efforts - definitely the way forward for the Gearheads in the face of the .NET onslaught, IMHO - keep away from the M$ woodchipper, it'll be the death of you guys...

Sadly, AFAICT, the Slashdot crowd haven't (yet) taken to it and have kicked it before even giving it a fair go but frankly they can go hoist themselves - IME, those tossers can be broadly characterized as a plague of relentlessly negative, fundamentally ignorant, dogma driven cock suckers so fuck them. Balls to the naysayers, it is a defo winner for the old school Delphi guy - if Kerrang reviewed development tools, this is a 5K job, no worries.


Anyway, away from the grindstone, I have been working on that Python game project that I mentioned previously. Honestly. It's just that, well, progress has been dog slow... bloody hard work it is, developing games, way above the actual coding process - the design, infrastructure, and support tools all take up as much time as anything else. Coding in a language you've never used before might also just slow things down a tad... :-) I will get something finished within the next month or so, we'll just have to see how it goes from there, stay tuned. BTW, I do love Python, it is so flippin' terse - though getting used to duck typing again is hard after coding mainly with Pascal all these years. Still, one does like a challenge now and again...

BTW, don't worry readers, it's back to prattling on about eisbärbabies next week, okay ???

Made with the help of -

Trouble "Psalm 9" - Bought the re-issues of their first couple of elpees the other day and they are marvellous examples of their eighties doom epoch... I'm going to see 'em at the blessed Wolves Civic at the end of May - yippee! Jeez, Sabbath Heaven & Hell and Trouble in the same year... you're spoiling us, Herr ambassador...

Before I go, my favourite quote of the week on my deities comes from the pages of Metal Hammer : "Part Dio, part Sabbath, all guaranteed to fucking rule" :-)))