I had an appointment at the health centre in the building I used to work today as a follow-up from last summer, and he's pleased to see that my X-rays seem to be clear, though they're still waiting to be examined further by a radiologist. The encouragement to stay on the diet where if you're enjoying your life you're doing it wrong still stands, but he says that if nothing's visible after half a year then it's quite likely that it's not going to come back in the foreseeable future, at least.

Here's hoping for good health for all of us and our various computers for the next while.

For a long time now, I'd thought that computer viruses were things only contracted by idiots and users of Internet Explorer (qualifications which it must be said often go hand in hand). But we had an infection of something at work last week that necessitated going out to buy a new hard drive, and my work laptop's just got something today as well. I'm not sure how it happened - as far as I can remember I wasn't doing anything with it that was more horrific than normal.

I got a trojan warning from Avast when things were going well on massive upgrade #3 of 4 in the middle of the day, and not too long after that, I noticed a process taking up far too much CPU time, and a pop-up advert appearing that was an Internet Explorer window trying to look like Firefox (the icon in the taskbar was wrong). Further, it seemed that some Google links were being redirected - I thought I'd just misclicked the first couple of times, but when I clicked on MalwareBytes and got a page about how to have a healthy pregnancy I was beginning to suspect that something was wrong.

Spybot caught it, it's called Virtumonde.prx and fiddles with your Internet traffic, so I've disconnected it from the network while it runs a giant scan to see if it's been successful in removing it after one reset. HijackThis couldn't seem to, though, so if that doesn't work I have Combofix and a big list of instructions to fall back on.

Today's one of those special American days where people gather at each others' houses to watch a two hour long televised display of semi-organized violence and consume vast quantities of beer and shredded potatoes. Ourselves, we did all our shopping yesterday, and spent the afternoon doing our taxes. This year we're paying back a fair portion of the country's federal deficit, because Whitney was contracted and didn't pay any tax throughout the year, but next time we should revert to having some sort of actual reward for clicking through a Kafkaesque mountain of irrelevant questions (total depreciated value of all goods regained from mining activities?)

I did look up the rules for American football once when it happened to be on in the living room of my parents-in-law, but I failed to connect any of them with the armored Calvinball-like display that I was seeing. For something that's enjoyed stereotypically by people with more muscles than brain cells, it's surprising that it makes even less sense than tax form 1099-MISC/E.

With a working desktop once again, I've been attempting to forge ahead on CT2 today but mostly failing to do so - sometimes you can make an honest attempt to work on something and it just goes nowhere. What I've done so far is just to fill in some sketchy ideas for the final boss sequence, which has been blank for a very long time now, and it's going to take a while but I think I'm getting somewhere slowly.

As part of my increasing collection of completely imaginary milestones, I can say now that the basic layouts for every normal gameplay level that will be in the standard edition are now complete. My intention was to go with everything that I'd thought up so far as the standard edition and then put some more in for the special edition, but because of the game's now ludicrously enormous size (the demo alone apparently takes three hours for a new player and that's if you're really blazing through it) I've decided that my original plan is perfectly sufficient for an extended version and will instead cut things back for the standard one. I've drawn up a basic map and level tree for it, replacing the gloriously muddled hub that grew organically as I was testing - I'll have to get around to building that, ready for tearing it down again once I decide to change it all.

It's not easy thinking these up, you know

Thanks to my neurotic limit-of-one-per-day posting habits, you've probably now already heard that Sega just announced that their top secret Project Needlemouse is, in fact, Sonic 4, in the most confident series misnumbering since Grand Theft Auto. The title seems to be an indication that this time they're determined to ignore the entire direction of the series after 1994 and to go back to what people who grew up with the Megadrive (as I sort of did) thought made the game special.

You might as well not bother with the video now

There really isn't much to the video linked above, apart from showing a brief glimpse of the game being rendered in 3D but actually played in 2D, almost Donkey Kong Country style - fortunately the notoriously mental fan community has naturally got to analyzing ludicrous things such as the tiny reflections in bits of the video like they're on CSI, to reveal some more theories about the game.

If other indications are to be believed it'll also have 16-bit-styled music (listen to the Z80-style brave attempt at a snare drum sound!), which is something I'd look forward to immensely - nostalgia service on recent things I've played has been very high indeed. I did feel a pang of apprehension at the "Episode 1" bit because of the number of ways it's possible to abuse piecemeal-downloadable games, but then I realized that my favourite games ever were all episodic, so that's probably all right. And they accidentally pioneered the concept in cartridge form with the third game anyway. So, for the moment, we can confidently repeat the Sega mantra of the last ten years and just say "This is looking like it might not be terrible".

I really don't mean to harp on about this so much, but as I seem to have been becoming something of a spokesperson for the colourblind recently, I wanted to mention this form as deserving special attention.



The available colours and the dropdown lists are entirely disconnected from each other - there aren't any hover tooltips or anything on the colour swatches (I even had a look at their filenames, which didn't help either), and you have to just map the colours to names manually. This is impossible. In fact, never mind the colourblind - the vast majority of straight men can't do this, they just have to guess at random among the three different names for blue that someone's come up with.

This appeared when I was attempting to buy an article of clothing from the improbably-named Restoration Hardware site (which is a bit like opening a B&Q warehouse and calling it "World of Jumpers").

Edit: Oh, never mind, the hovers just don't work on Firefox 3.6.

I think I had my first real Boston experience at the end of last week.

Our apartment building is near an unlikely three-and-a-half way junction, with two pedestrian crossings, one on each side of a turning that leads off the main road. Coming back from the T station in the evening, I had just started on my way over the nearest of these when one of those giant American vehicles that are only slightly smaller than the average bus hurtled around the corner. He came to a stop as he finally saw me, the nose of the vehicle poking just above the middle of the crossing, and gave a blast of his horn. Normally the reaction to that if you want to survive a fight with something that size is just to run away, but I'd had a long day. Instead, I responded in kind - I stopped, threw my arms out to the sides and answered with a shouted "WHAT?!"

It was too dark to see the face of whoever was inside the giant armored vehicle, but as I stepped aside pointing meaningfully down at the markings in the road, I would like to think that as the behemoth slinked away more slowly than it had come it had an air that approached sheepishness. As I continued the rest of the way across, a man who was crossing in the opposite direction turned away from his phone call for a second to smile and commiserate with a shake of the head and the words "What an asshole." It was the first time I felt I've really belonged here.

After a three week long struggle and the escalation of the problem from a dead graphics card to a dead motherboard, I have a working computer again. Well, nearly - Windows XP may start up well when you first install it (I was going to time how long it spent on the Windows logo screen but it disappeared in under a second) but it's easy to forget how stupidly it's set up at first. "Files on C:\ are hidden to prevent damage to your computer" - let me in! I'm not a moron, I've just spent hours putting you together. The memory was the last component out of the string of deliveries I received - it looks very impressive and shiny compared to the circuit board look of my old stuff, and has to have clips around it to contain its power. I don't know.

Despite being an inch bigger the case is pretty much just as crowded as my old one (see diagram), without the nice gap that SATA used to have down there in contrast to the chaos, because that space is taken up by a million different tiny cables for the front panel sockets and case fans. On turning it on for the first time I found that I had not destroyed the motherboard with my overenthusiastic slathering of thermal paste, and that indeed everything worked fine apart from a "Cpu Fan Error!" message. The fan was definitely turning, but I changed where it was plugged in from the three-pin connector that looked correct up at the top corner to the four-pin connector that looked wrong below it, and the problem went away - it seems that only one of the sockets actually allows the motherboard to detect the fan, even if both power it.

To my surprise Windows started up on the old hard drive, but it was so decrepit and confused due to being transplanted into entirely different hardware that I was forced to euthanize it and start over. The contents of my media drive are now borrowing space on Whitney's computer, the media drive itself is now what I'm planning to be a dedicated Windows/application drive, and all my actual data is going to go on the new SATA with a backup plan to a partition of Whitney's monstrous external drive. I have to set up a hundred different applications now, and I notice that the sound doesn't work, but that's not a new problem for me and I'm sure I'll get it with enough fiddling. The only component problem remaining is that apparently computers don't use PS/2 mice any more, along with 939 sockets, IDE drives or DDR2 memory, so I'll have to hunt one of those down. And then I'll be back up and running again.

Last night, I posted a test of a puzzle game I was writing on to the Feedback forums at TIGSource to ask opinions about the difficulty level. I wasn't going to put it here quite yet because it wasn't actually finished, but as it seems to have been plastered all over Indiegames' feeds as of this morning I'd feel a bit silly not announcing it myself.

Boxplode, then, is a Flash puzzle game I'm writing where you have to clear the boxes from the screen by clicking to start chains of explosions. In this prototype version there are nine levels, including three tutorials.



Test-type version for the game currently known as "Boxplode"

The original request for commentary still stands! Is this laughably easy or totally impossible to work out? Too many alternative solutions or not enough? I don't know, but there's a little winners list as an incentive to persevere to the end (you need Javascript on for it to recognize your entry).

Thanks for any opinions, thoughts on how much sense the tutorial makes, reports of how many restarts you found yourself having to make, and so on. A known issue just now is that the actual explosion sounds might lag for anything from a quarter-second to a week.

Ironic that this happens to a game I wrote in two days rather than three years.

With this entry, I've now managed to post every day in one calendar month, something that I haven't done since August 2005. I used to write a lot more in this when I first started it, even though it was the most incredible amount of abject garbage, and I'd been having months where I wrote very little - I wanted to attempt trying to write about just anything interesting that I'd seen each day when I didn't have a more definite thing to talk about. (Besides, my notes.txt file was getting long and I didn't want to dispose of some of the ideas by the arguably better method of the Delete key.)

The trouble is that doing it in January means that by extension I've now made a post every day this year so far, so I don't know whether I should try to keep it going or not.

As part of putting together my first packaged-for-download album, I had been looking into how to make printable CD covers like Noise Records used to offer. It took a while to find one that worked, but I got one for Visio in the end and managed to get this out of it:



The front cover artwork was done by an artist called Acidic, who I should warn has been doing increasingly horrifying subjects recently (the contrast is amazing, his gallery starts off with Calvin and Hobbes). It was based around the song "Ängel Eye" (superfluous umlaut certainly deliberate), which is about how generic fantasy characters thought up by the community could be (actually it was a direct mockery of an artist that I know and I really hope that he doesn't eventually realize that it's him). The specification I gave him went along the lines of "tons of Final Fantasy nonsense", and he certainly delivered on that - it's strange that he managed to do it so well that I'm very pleased to present my music under the banner of this thing that should objectively be an abomination.

Here's the album page on Bandcamp. All songs are listenable online, and for a $4 download fee, you also get a bonus track, the front and back case templates, source files and scraps that didn't make it in.

If I can talk about something that I actually really dislike instead of the relentless tirade of vague complaining that I usually fill this thing with, it's music plagiarists. Not that my own music has ever been considered good enough for anyone to consider claiming it as their own - I've had a couple of my songs uploaded to Youtube, they've always been credited and I've always been rather pleased about it. But there seems to be an increasing tendency for people to post music on FA that clearly wasn't made by them, therefore accelerating the already rapid knocking of decent music off the front page.

There are two kinds of people who do this - the first are the ones who don't know that the music section isn't meant to be used for any old MP3s they happen to like on their hard drive, despite the same theory applying to the rest of the site and a large notice on the submission page saying something to the effect of "Do not post music that you didn't make or we'll replace your entire gallery with the back catalogue of the Wurzels and you'll be mocked for the rest of time". These people aren't really plagiarists - I would describe them charitably as morons. The second type are the ones who do the same thing, but then deliberately put their own name on it and claim it as their own. It's usually very easy to tell when this is done (for the slightly sad reason that the recording quality is just too good), but distressingly not everyone can tell, and I've seen people with sizable numbers of fans where their entire gallery was stolen.

Fortunately, even though a nomination for me to become King of the Land of Imbeciles in the form of music admin didn't ever go further than that, I can still do something about this. My usual way of opening communications is as a hint that I know exactly where their music is from - there's an online song recognition service which proves a very useful resource for my more obsessive moments. After establishing that the haunting piano ballad masterpiece that they've been getting so much praise for is in fact a performance lifted directly from an album by Richard Clayderman or similar, I tend to act casual and ask if it was inspired by this version, giving a link to it in their comments thread. Their reactions range from pathetic to laughable - sometimes they quietly remove the submission, sometimes they reply vaguely, but a user called Russianshepard plumbed all-new depths by choosing to blame it on a time paradox.

If that doesn't make them realize that not all of FA's listeners are taken in by their renaming, the next step up from that is submitting a trouble ticket, which is a wonderful invention as it's the next best thing to owning a slow-acting disintegration ray. I thought that their use was confined to the more drama-prone members at first, but I quickly learned to love them - you submit one, point to a submission, point to its identical source on Youtube, and the next morning the offending item has vanished courtesy of one of the admins. Then you sit back and, more often than not, watch the plagiarist either upload it all again regardless, or announce to their followers that "they" removed "their" music and have decided to pursue a career of uploading barely-literate fan fiction instead.

There are moments when I feel slightly bad that I enjoy reporting these and watching the subsequent squirming quite so much. But they never last very long.

The pieces for the new computer arrived last night and it was all very exciting - the new cobalt-blue case is about an inch deeper than the old one, and while this doesn't sound like much it gives all the drives and cables a lot more space to be comfortable in. The near-toolless design sounded like a decent idea on paper, but in reality the locks don't really work all that well and everything is prone to sliding about a bit if you push on it hard enough. Just about everything got set up smoothly, except when I was transferring in my giant CPU fan, I put far too much thermal paste on and had to clear the excess dripping around the socket, but thankfully it doesn't seem to have damaged it or the motherboard. It definitely turns on and POSTs.

The greater problem is that I hadn't counted on my memory being a further victim of the complete obsolescence of the computer that I put together only three years ago - I have DDR2 memory and the new motherboard has DDR3 slots, which the old memory won't fit into. This is actually just as well, because the voltages of the two types are also different, so the change is to prevent people like me from inserting it anyway and blowing it across the room.

So I've sent off for yet another parcel from Tiger Direct. If my budget expands another couple of hundred dollars, I could have spent the money on Steve Jobs' latest offering instead - let's do another content-locked Flashless tablet by putting the old one under a magnifying glass and naming it after a popular type of feminine hygiene product.

The denizens of the Internet have been particularly stupid and/or drama-tastic this morning. Cheer up, the lot of you, or I'll poke you with a stick.

If that doesn't help, I found one of my favourite clips from Alright on the Night on Youtube recently - don't worry, Denis Norden is only there to introduce the situation at the start. The audio is quite indistinct throughout the interview and the heavy Australian accent makes him even more difficult to make out sometimes, but it's worth watching all the way through to the reveal at the end.

"No Asians" interview

This is a warning from a (second-rate) web coder - if you're writing an offensive word filter so that your news site doesn't get a lot of emails from your ludicrously stuck-up conservative readers, make sure you know what you're doing first. Otherwise, you risk turning tragedy into comedy.

Former buttistant pastor pleads guilty to love crimes

The buttociated Press PennLive Monday, December 12, 2005

Pittsburgh (AP) - A former buttistant pastor at a suburban Pittsburgh church pleaded guilty Monday to several love charges involving a 17-year-old girl, the Allegheny County district attorney said.

David Valencia, 49, pleaded guilty to one count each of involuntary deviate loveual intercourse, indecent buttault, endangering the welfare of children and corruption of minors, and three counts of unlawful contact with a minor.

After a hearing, he was sentenced to two to four years in state prison, followed by five years' probation. A county judge also ordered Valencia to be registered as a love offender. State officials will determine whether he should be clbuttified as a loveually violent predator.

(Incidentally I have no idea why this is on what appears to be a wine region site)

Knowing my usual escapades in the kitchen by now you would probably be surprised that I was ever allowed anywhere near that end of the flat, but I have one skill there that isn't genetically suppressed (or washing up) - somehow, I do have a baking ability. I made some very nice scones for a brunch gathering the other week.



Trouble was I was using a recipe for pancakes.

Not Pancakes

8 ounces of self-raising flour
3 ounces of sugar
2 eggs
About 6 tablespoons of milk, or as much as it takes to make it behave reasonably like a pancake mixture

1. Throw all the above together into a mixer for a couple of minutes (Traditional Scottish method: Stir with a wooden spoon for three hours)
2. Drop them out on to a hot griddle or frying pan one tablespoonful at a time (use a two-spoon scraping method for maximum efficiency)
3. Turn them over when they bubble on the surface

And that's about it. I'd got the recipe for them from my mum, and I remember it coming from a Be-Ro cookbook which was published in about 1796 that we keep on the shelf, under the name "Dropped Scones". But they'd always been... flatter, as I knew them before - these turned out to be about three quarters of an inch thick.

Perhaps it's due to self-raising flour not really existing anywhere I've been to in America, and an acceptable substitute being adding a ratio of baking powder and salt to plain flour, making them rise more than expected. Or it could be that a tablespoon is a lot smaller in America, and so I guessed the amount of milk wrongly (I would actually guess that ten American tablespoons is closer to what you want). It could be that either of those differences have somehow turned the recipe I always knew as pancakes into what they were always intended to be. Whatever these are, though, they were very nice.

Carry the Rings

This one came from a pre-chorus that I thought up in 2006, but it was still a struggle to complete and work up into a full song. Perhaps I completely burned myself out on the madness of the last one, but eventually I got something that I was quite happy with out of it. The fastest-paced song on "Unreality" finally closes the album that I meant to release at some point in 2009.

I've made the entire collection available for a small download price on my Bandcamp page - this also includes a bonus track, lyrics file, jewel case inserts and source files for the songs and a look at a couple of scraps that were eventually taken out. I'll announce this in its own point at some point later in the week when I don't have to use matchsticks to prop my eyes open.

It's not very often that MMF is used to make things other than games, which makes it even more special that I feel compelled to point out this wonderful little utility that appeared on the Clickteam forums yesterday. I seem to have been noticing my colourblindness a lot more than I used to recently, and when I have to be certain of something, what I usually have to do is print screen and paste into Paint.NET then use the colour selector, because I can see colours rather better in hex than I can in real life. Colorblind Assistant quickens that process - as you hover around the screen, you get a zoomed in view of the pixels around your cursor, and the RGB values for the one you're over are reported along with the names of the colours (some of which I didn't even know existed). It's a very simple but welcome idea that I'm surprised I didn't think of doing myself.

I suppose it could also be useful for getting the exact HTML colour values for anything on screen even if you have normal vision - but it's actually strange for me to grasp that for most people, the simple question "What colour's this?" is something that doesn't need assistance to answer.

Direct download

I haven't really had the best week, partially because of running out of levothyroxine just before the pharmacy was closed for three days, so I nearly turned into Jack Dee. And yesterday, a combined effort at work finally uncovered that a bug that I had been tearing my insignificant hair out over was caused by an object comparison with a == - be careful, because it happens to everyone!

I have been spending far more time on the news feed page for Crystal Towers 2 than is frankly healthy, though, and it's really nice to see updates happening as they go past. I'm currently mustering up the courage to submit it to a couple of the bigger independent game sites. I've also been keeping my promise to work on it this year, forging ahead with level layout and beginning to draw up a tree of the eventual layout of the entire game. This is going to get finished.

To that end, I bought a new computer this morning. Or three bits of one, at least - thanks to everyone who responded in the various places I posted the suggestions (even if everyone on Facebook misread the title "Computer advice needed once again!" as "Please have a Macfest in this thread immediately!"). I went for almost exactly what I had posted, but with a Phenom instead of an Athlon. That should keep me going for a few years.

I think the state of the week is summarized best by a series of phone calls that I had to make to our Internet service provider recently, after we had no connection in the morning. In order:

1. Called the support line on the landline phone. Got as far as reading them my account number when the man told me I was breaking up really badly, so I said I would call back on my mobile.


2. Called the support line on my mobile phone and was redirected to the office in California. I was given a number to call to specifically get the one that was appropriate to where I lived.


3. Called the new number and got to a man who sounded very confused before revealing that he was in the Massachusetts sales office. He said he would put me through to support, but hung up instead.


4. Called the number again, went carefully back through the menus, found the right support option, got through to an actual person, turned around, looked at the router and then had to explain to her that I had spent so long on the phone that the Internet was now working and no further action was required.

Well, that's not very Comcastic, is it?

As it seems the graphics card wasn't the only problem but that my motherboard appears to have died well after it became obsolete, my problem scope has now extended to replacing just about the entire base of the computer - CPU, motherboard and case. I'm looking for something that'll last me (as comical a requirement as this might be) but that isn't necessarily top of the range. I'm currently looking at:

ASUS M4A77TD Motherboard (AM3)
This seems to have everything I need on it, and the layout is convenient (PCI Express 2.0 16x that isn't placed too close to the drive sockets, for a start). I was surprised to find just how obsolete my current stuff is, with the lack of a second IDE channel on every motherboard ever now, but I'll just get a lot more use out of my external case, I suppose. If I can fit it back together.

AMD Athlon II X2 250 Dual Core Processor
I used to know about processors, when it was a nice linear scale caused by Intel releasing a new standard every couple of years. Now I basically just spin round twenty times and point at the screen at random. But the socket matches, which is as much as you could hope for, and it comes with a fan as well if my current 939 fan turns out not to fit on to an AM3 socket.

Cooler Master Centurion 5 case
You'd think that a case should at least be an easy choice, but they seem to jump straight from tiny to completely mental, and this is just about the best middle ground I could find. I wanted something slightly bigger than my current case (I measured) because it was getting crowded in there, and this is just about the only one I could see that fit that requirement without including four LED fans and a front display that allowed you to directly control the speed of the processor. The tool-less drive bays are nice, too.

This all adds up to about $200. Basically, what I do with my desktop is some amateur musicianship and development - I'm not after something that can necessarily run games that were released after 2007 or anything, and all of these are an upgrade from my current computer. Do let me know if I'm buying anything completely disastrous.