When ever the bassline of Hiding Fading [6.1 mb] kicks in on my walkman*, I expect it turn into Ten Places To Die [7.9 mb].

Incidentally, Six By Seven are a bit rubbish these days aren’t they? I really liked The Closer You Get though.

Also this xmas, for the lover of teutonic indie-tronica** in your life, maybe you’d like to use this Ms. John Soda wrapping paper I made.

*ipods should always be referred to as walkmans, non ipod mp3 players should be referred to as ipods.
**That’s not a real genre, I just made that up.

Finally picked up a Wii (will I ever not feel stupid saying that?) from the lovely people at Camden Gamestation last night. First impressions; the control is good (after I reallised how it worked and switched off the lights behind the tele which were interfering with the IR sensor*), I got much more into the simple tennis, boxing etc. than I expected I would. I played Zelda only briefly, graphically it’s not much over a Game Cube game though the draw distance seemed better than you’d see in a title for that platform, but hey it’s a Zelda game and tomorrow afternoon I’m going to sit down and get properly into it (I’m sooooo looking forward to using the remote to shoot arrows).

There’s allready some pretty decent stuff in the online shop too including (in ascending order of excitingness) F-Zero, mario 64, the 5 player PC Engine version of Bomber Man and… Gunstar Heroes! And it plays all the GC games I tried out.

Overall I just get the vibe (did I just say vibe? I’m sorry) that there are going to be some really great games for this system, it’s the same feeling of possibility that I had when I first played on a DS.

Having said all this the 2 games I’m looking forward to most at the moment are both on the PS2 and both by the sadly disbanded Clover studios [1][2] (Are you mad Capcom?).

My friend code is 8288 0120 9486 9319
stick yours in ther comments if you have one.

*So in addition to the tilt sensors and accelerometers in the remote, you’ve got a couple fo infra-red sources on the ’sensor bar’ which you put next to your TV, the Wii triangulates with these to locate the controler in space. We have a light fitting behind the TV which has a couple fo lightbulbs spaced about the same distance appart as the sources on the sensor bar. These were causing interference and the control position kept jumping about as it locked onto the different sources of infra red.

haven’t done this for a while…

create your own visited country map

really need to go to the Netherlands and Ireland, then I’ll have pretty much completed Western Europe. (except for the Vatican City and Luxembourg bonus areas)

(including opinions)

My Wii arrived in Camden today, unfortunately I can’t collect it until Thursday because of the typical xmas social log jam. Which is annoying as I really want to get on with playing Zelda and making purile urine jokes.

Thought bubbles…

Speech bubbles…

• steinberg
• owly

New camera and a new scanner.

The first in a series of 3 or 4 posts about programing so if you didn’t stop reading when I went away for a month or so maybe you should consider doing so now.

When I first started writing Perl, coming from a C/Java background, I was frankly horrified by the looseness of the typing and all sorts of other stuff . To add some much needed order to the proceedings I’d always use strict in order to get the interpreter to complain about things like out of scope variables and unexpected barewords. The fact that I was predominantly using BVP* helped to shield me from the barely constrained anarchy that Perl can so easily descend into.

Thing is once you start using Perl it’s easy to get frustrated with other languages, the occasionally wierd syntax and appallingly convoluted OO support kind of sucks you in (Ok, the OO support doesn’t suck you in, I would gladly never use another Perl object, which frankly make the whole issue even worse) because you get so used to it’s easy dealings with files and text processing that using anything else becomes a pain. It’s also faster than Ruby (approx 10-20 times faster, that matters for the kind of thing i tend to write at home i.e. brute force solutions to the weekly puzzles in New Scientist).

Anyway, the other day I figured out that if I turned off strict I could do things like use a variable name in a function call, not as an argument, actually as the function name. Part of my brain recoilled at the idea but I did it anyway, because it would save me about a page of code and you know what? I liked it. I know it’s wrong, and I know it’s the road to hell but I liked it. Unfortunately now I’m addicted, I’m doing things like using varibles as the names of other variables. And I’m doing it at work, If our perl guy ever found out I’d be in trouble, he’d probably treat me like an alcoholic and talk to me in an understanding tone of voice whilst explaining how our standard modules can help me (in 12 labourious steps) get through my problem…

So anyway, now I’m worried that I’m becoming a Perl Guy, before I know it I’ll be attending London Perlmongers and who know’s where it will end. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to find out.

Help me Python, you’re my last hope.

*BBC Vernacular Perl cf. BVE (I’m reading the language instinct at the moment)