Like F1 2010, the newest F1 racer from Codemasters is hard, really hard. Or, it can be really easy. It all depends on how many assists (things like, traction control, or automatic gears) you have turned on. With the game assisting you as much as it can, it’s fairly trivial to drive an F1 car around the track and keep it there (setting a quick time is something different altogether). However, turn all of the assists off and I can barely get the car to corner without a huge amount of concentration. If you accelerate slightly too quickly, or put a bit too much steering into a corner, the car will spin. This level of assistance is really designed for the true racing sim aficionados, who are playing the game with wheel and pedals. I am not that good, nor am I using a wheel, so I apply a small amount of traction control, as well as ABS brakes. I don’t have the concentration or multi-tasking ability at that level to do gears myself either, so I stick it with automatic gears.

Actually racing

When you start a career, you have to start with one of the lower teams in F1, I chose Williams. The first track of the season is Albert Park in Melbourne, Australia. From years of starting career modes and playing demo versions of F1 games, I know this track like the back of my hand. I have the difficulty set to Intermediate (the difficulties are: Amateur, Intermediate, Professional and Legend). When I get things right, this difficult is too low for me, as evidenced by qualifying in 2nd place in my Williams. However, when it came to the race, it turned out it was more than enough.

In the short 20% (12 lap) race around Albert Park, I took Lewis at the end of the first lap to lead. By lap 7 I had spun 3 times and was in 20th position. The concentration required to play this game well, is immense. Last night apparently I didn’t have it. What was satisfying in weird way, was that I struggled to catch up with the guys around me after I had spun. On previous racing games, I would spin, then catch up and overtake the opponents easily.

I have always found in the past that the qualifying was always considerably harder than the race, and even qualifying 10th-15th would let me win the race with some ease. However, this version seems to be the right way around. I out-qualified myself, then struggled in the race.

I will say, however, that the AI completely and utterly sucks. I’ve never played a racing game with such bad AI. Even Mario Kart has better AI than F1 2011. Sure, they can drive a lap quickly, and they seem to get into battles with each other, which is interesting. But they barely seem to even notice that you’re on the track, constantly doing stupid things, getting in your way, ignoring the blue flags that mean they’re supposed to get out of the way. It is incredibly frustrating, especially when playing multi-player, and you end up smashing into the back of a slow moving AI car, who has decided to crawl around a corner. Not just that, but sometimes when you spin out, or move over to let a faster car come through (to avoid blocking them and getting a penalty), the AI decides to just come and sit extremely slowly behind you, thus giving you a penalty!

The biggest challenge in this game is competing with yourself, if you’re not interested in doing that, you won’t enjoy F1, the AI doesn’t offer any kind of rewarding experience and you’ll often struggle to find friends who are at the same level, since the difficult varies so much (the varying levels of assistance that you can turn on per player does solve this a bit I suppose).

I retired from my first race of the season in Melbourne, because I was too angry to carry on. This is what’s so brilliant about this game for me. The only other game that has come close to eliciting such an emotional reaction from me is Championship/Football Manager. My mood was completely and utterly destroyed last night be my failure. I was gutted, I felt like crying. I know that if I’d concentrated more I could have beaten Hamilton and won the race, but instead it has been recorded as a DNF and gone down as 24th. That sucks.

The game is fantastic for that, with only the AI seriously letting it down.

If you’re an F1 fan, you should get this game, you’ll need a controller of some sort though, the keyboard really doesn’t cut it.

Update:

Also worth a mention is the tyres. F1 rules state that you must use 2 types of tyre during a race, a softer quicker tyre, and a harder slower one. Codemasters have got this spot on in F1 2011. You have to warm up your tyres and you feel yourself struggling for grip with the harder tyre and when you put the softer, quicker tyre on, you can feel the grip, the speed, the confidence you gain is brilliant. This is of course if you have tyre simulation on, otherwise they’re all the same and boring

I have recently switched to using Xubuntu 11.04 for my media PC installation. XBMC is my choice for controlling all of this (I may write another post sometime explaining my setup in more detail, but for now this is about a specific problem).

I use the media box for more than just watching/listening to stuff, not much more, but enough that every now and then I need to come out of XBMC (although without quitting). There is a handy keyboard shortcut to toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode ‘\’.

However, when I switched into windowed mode, all I would see was a black screen and a mouse-cursor (another major bugbear with me and XBMC, but that can wait for another time). After searching online and finding nothing, I decided it was time to just start hacking around until I found something that at least helped me diagnose the problem.

Turns out it didn’t take me very long at all, once I’d found the Window Manager settings in XFCE, I noticed that compositing was turned on. Turning this off sorted out my problems straight away. Although I love the compositing features in Linux in general, they are not needed for a media pc, so I have no problems leaving this off.

I hope this helps someone, and if it’s me reading this suffering from the same problem again, then you should have remembered this and not wasted so much time looking for the problem again you idiot!

Hopefully someone will find this useful.

Golden Rules

• Golden Rule #1
• Golden Rule #2

FAQ

• How often should I commit?
• Should I work in the trunk, or in a branch?
• What should I do with uncommitted changes?

Golden Rule #1

The trunk should ALWAYS build and be stable. Obviously there are going to be times where a bug is introduced into the trunk, but we must do our best to avoid this. Therefore, do not commit changes to the trunk, if those changes cause the project to not build.

Golden Rule #2

At the end of the day, you shouldn’t have uncommitted code on your computer. Hard drives can fail, disasters can happen, your local computer is not backed up. However the servers and repositories are, make sure all code you have been working on, is committed.

How often should I commit?

You should commit as often as you think is necessary. However, a rough guideline would be to commit logical ‘blocks’ of code, rather than at time intervals. If you are working on a feature, or fixing a bug, commit the parts that fit together, as soon as they are working. If your bug is to fix a spelling mistake, commit as soon as you have fixed the error.

The reason for committing like this is because it makes it easier to follow the code changes. SVN is not just a place to store code; it is also a history of the changes made. If something you did caused the application to break, it is far easier to identify the problem if you committed in logical ‘blocks’ rather than just at the end of the day, or every hour.

Should I work in the trunk, or in a branch?

As a general rule, if the change you are making is very small and unlikely to break anything, you can work in the trunk. However, since the trunk needs to be stable all the time (Golden Rule #1), any more significant changes, or changes that won’t be completed by the end of the day, should be branched.

If in doubt, create a branch and work in there.

What should I do with uncommitted changes?

At the end of the day, all code should be commited. But Golden Rule #1 says that unbuildable code shouldn’t be commited. So what happens at the end of the day when your code won’t compile? Golden Rule #2 says it needs to be committed.
This is what branches are for. As a general rule if you’re unlikely to finish a change by the end of the day, then you should create a branch and work in there.

At the end of a day you shouldn’t have uncommitted code on your computer.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I switched. To try to see if I could cope with Chrome as my everyday browser. I thought I’d write a short piece on my experiences:

Chrome 5 dev channel vs Firefox 3.6.4b.

Note that this is not a ‘fair’ test, Firefox had many many more installed extensions, this is only my observations so please don’t complain if I wasn’t fair.

I’ll highlight anything that I found to be different or of note between the browsers, if I don’t mention something (like page rendering for example), then that’s probably because I don’t notice a difference.

Start up time.
This was pretty much the main reason that I started looking at another browser, my Firefox set up at work takes so long to start up, we’re talking minutes rather than seconds, and that’s too long for me. I am fairly certain this is due to the number of extensions installed, but Chrome is very very quick at loading up. Chrome 1-0

Adbock Plus
I hate ads. Actually, that’s a little harsh. I hate annoying in my face ads that are irrelevant to me. Unfortunately this is the vast majority of ads that are found on the internet, so I block them. In Firefox, I use the excellent Adblock Plus extension. Therefore I was quite pleased to find this extension available also in Chrome. However, in Chrome (and this is probably a limitation of Chrome rather than the extension writers) the ads show up first and are then actively hidden from me. Causing my page to flicker as it’s loading. This is only slightly less annoying than the actual ads themselves. Firefox levels to 1-1

Pinned Tabs
I first found out about pinned tabs, through an extension in Firefox, however I didn’t realise just how much better the pinned tabs are in Chrome, especially in the dev channel. I use the pinned tabs to have Gmail, Twitter and Google Reader open all the time. The great thing (so great in fact, that it might keep me using Chrome) about the pinned tabs in Chrome, is that when the title of the page changes, a subtle glow shines over the tab, alerting me that something has changed (a new email, tweet or reader article). Also typing a new address into a pinned tab, opens it up in a new tab, so that your pinned tabs aren’t disturbed. This is a big win for Chrome, 2-1

Memory Usage
Ok, so Chrome has a separate process for each tab. Whoop-de-do. Firefox almost never crashes for me, I don’t tend to go scooting off around the internet onto dodgy sites, and I tend to avoid flash (more on flash in a sec) if I can. Chrome takes up an exorbitant amount of memory. Firefox equalises again; 2-2

Youtube Videos
For some reason, youtube videos look terrible in Chrome, then shear and tear all over the place. Not sure if this is a dev channel thing or not, but Firefox doesn’t have that problem. 2-3 to Firefox

Tab Performance
Seemingly, when a tab has been open for a long time in Chrome, the rendering is removed? I’m not really sure what happens, all I know is that when I come back to a long un-used tab, it’s white, and takes a couple of seconds for Chrome to render the contents of the tab again. It’s not really a problem, but it’s annoying, and a problem I didn’t have with Firefox. Firefox takes a bigger lead; 2-4

More On Tabs
So I’m scrolled half way down a page in Firefox, and I press F5 (refresh). The page reloads (back at the top) then Firefox handily jumps me back to down where I was previously. Chrome seems to try to do this, but more often than not, it’s slightly off from where I was before. Which tbh, is damn annoying! Surely it can’t be difficult to put me back where I was. Or not even move me at all?? Firefox romping away now; 2-5

Fancy effects
This is neither hear nor there, but I felt like giving Chrome another point (I did say this wasn’t fair). Opening a new tab in Chrome is nice, they slide. Same when closing them. It’s just nice. Chrome generally looks newer than Firefox.Nicer than Firefox; 3-5

Extensions
Firefox has soooo many more extensions than Chrome. I know Chrome is catching up very quickly, but still. There are some extensions such as Smart Bookmarks Bar that just haven’t been produced yet for Chrome. Others such as the Define extension, are just not possible to do in Chrome due to Google not allowing the user-interface to be modified.
Chrome’s only redeeming feature when it comes to extensions, is being able to install and un-install them without having to restart the browser. But still: Firefox scores again 3-6

In summary, it seems that Firefox is trouncing Chrome still (for me anyhow). However, those glowing pinned tabs, and the loading time and the look and feel of Chrome make it hard to go back to Firefox.
Perhaps I’ll have a look at fixing those 2 issues in Firefox tomorrow, but as of now. Chrome stays.

SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) modifies a table by simply dropping it, then re-creating it again with the new definition. However, when a table is replicated you’re not allowed to drop it (all kinds of nasty things could happen). Of course SSMS doesn’t tell you this is the problem, it just complains of something similar to this:

"Error validating the default for column 'rowguid'."

The only way (that I’ve found) round this, is to manually alter the table. Something I got taught at University, however I don’t use it much in practice so had to look it up. Luckily the syntax is nice and simple:

ALTER TABLE [table]
ADD [column] nvarchar(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT ('')
GO

This will add a column with the name ‘column’ to the table ‘table’ that is an nvarchar, with a max size of 50, that isn’t allowed to be NULL, and has a default value of an empty string.

Hopefully this will help someone, at the very least, it should give me somewhere to come back to if/when I run into this issue again.

Replication is great in theory, unfortunately, it is one of the most troublesome areas I’ve had to deal with.

Since I was the one who setup and researched SVN and Trac, I was fairly comfortable setting up a new repository or new Trac project, however it was quite daunting for any body else to step in and do, and even more daunting for me to try and explain the process to people.

Now that 2010 (twenty ten?) is upon us, it was decided we would move all active projects (those that we are still supporting) into SVN and create Trac projects.

We have about 50 applications that are still being supported, so even split among 4, I didn’t really want to have to go through the process of creating repositories and Trac projects for all of this, so I started looking into a way of scripting this. Since I’ve really not done much scripting before, it took me slightly longer than planned, but 2 work days (work was snowed off for 3 days this week) later and the script is ‘done’, so I thought I’d share it here, and share the difficulties I had. Maybe someone will find this useful.

If you just want the script, it’s available here.

The first thing the script does is ask for input from the user, for the project name (we decided to insist that Trac project folder names and SVN repository names were kept the same). It was also decided that we’d use underscores to seperate words in a project name.

I’ll go through the script, picking out the ‘interesting’ or parts that I struggled with.

set /P project_name=[Enter Project Name]:
set nice_project_name=%project_name:_= %
set project_name=%project_name: =_%


The /P on the set command allows you to set a variable to a line of input from the user.
For Trac, I wanted the project name to have spaces in, as it was nicer, so nice_project_name goes through the project_name variable, and removes the underscores (_) and replace them with a single space.
Then it does almost the opposite, to allow the user to enter the ‘nice’ project name instead of with underscores, I make sure all spaces are replaced with underscores.

mkdir %svn%%project_name%
svnadmin create %svn%%project_name%

Setting up the SVN repository couldn’t really be any easier. (If you’re having trouble with this bit, make sure that the svn bin directory is setup in your windows PATH variable).
Simply calling svnadmin create with the directory of the repository you want to create as the first argument and hey presto! a new repository.

Setting up Trac is almost as simple as setting up SVN was, the command you have to run is longer, and I had a bit of trouble with the project description as you’ll see in a minute.

mkdir %trac%%project_name%
call %trac-admin% %trac%%project_name% initenv "%nice_project_name%" sqlite:db/trac.db svn %svn%%project_name% --inherit=c:\trac_conf\trac.ini

If you’re using the nice_project_name variable, you need to make sure it’s surrounded with speech marks, since you’ll get complaints if you have spaces in the project name.

By passing the repository location to Trac, it’ll nicely link the 2 together for you, so you can see your source code from within trac, and (as you’ll see later) be able to close tickets from commits.

The only added thing there of any interest, is the --inherit=c:\trac_conf\trac.ini part, which allows us to use a single config file for trac. When given a file to inherit, Trac is smart enough to only include the parts that have changed in the project specific trac.ini file.

I then needed (well, I didn’t need, but really wanted) to include the description of the project. I could find no way to do this nicely, so I had to ‘hack’ a solution together.

set project_conf=%trac%%project_name%\conf\trac.ini
echo Project configuration file: %project_conf%
echo [project] >> %project_conf%
echo descr = %description% >> %project_conf%

This basically finds the project specific trac.ini file and bolts the description part of it on to the end. It doesn’t check to see if the description is already there (it shouldn’t be) and it’s a complete hack that I am not at all proud of. However, after spending several hours searching for a ‘nice’ solution, I gave in and this works.

Another thing that developers where I work didn’t seem to quite grasp, was the base folder structure to use in SVN. At the top-level, we wanted 3 folders: trunk, branches and doc. A fairly standard layout, but we ended up with all kinds of things, so I put this into the script as well.

set repoURL=file://localhost/Repositories/%project_name%
svn import c:\Repositories\.global\base %repoURL% -m "Create base folder structure."

This was another thing that took me longer than it should have done to figure out. I was trying to find a way to create a folder in the repository, without checking out first, I couldn’t. So the solution I settled on, was to create the folder structure somewhere on the server that was hosting svn, then just import that folder into the repository, thus creating our top-level folder structure.

The next thing I wanted to do, was be able to close Trac tickets from an SVN commit comment, so it was time to set up a post-commit hook in SVN. These go in the hooks folder of your repositiory.

Since this was again a step I didn’t want other developers to be concerned with, I scripted the creation of these hooks too.

set svn_post_commit_hook=%svn%%project_name%\hooks\post-commit.bat
echo call "%%~dp0post-commit-run.bat" %%* ^> %%1/hooks/post-commit.log 2^>^&1 >> %svn_post_commit_hook%

Because I wanted to be able to log the output, the first file post-commit.bat just calls the post-commit-run.bat file and outputs it to the log file in the same directory.

set svn_commit_hook=%svn%%project_name%\hooks\post-commit-run.bat
echo Project configuration file: %svn_commit_hook%
echo @echo off >> %svn_commit_hook%
echo "rem |%1 and %2 come from the post-commit.bat that runs this. They are the repository and the revision number." >> %svn_commit_hook%
echo set APPFOLDER=%project_name% >> %svn_commit_hook%
echo call C:\Repositories\.hooks\post-commit-run.bat %%1 %%2 %%APPFOLDER%% >> %svn_commit_hook%

Since all of the repositories will do the same thing, post-commit-run.bat just calls the global file, which looks something like this:

set REPOS="%1"
set REV="%2"
set TRAC_ENV="C:\trac\%3"
call C:\python25\python "c:\trac_conf\trac-post-commit-hook.py" -p "%TRAC_ENV%" -r "%REV%"

trac-post-commit-hook.py is the original found here on the Trac website.

If there’s an easier way to do any of this (especially the description bit of Trac) then please let me know.

I hope this post at least helps someone out, I had quite a lot of fun automating this, I might have to look into what else I can script to make my life easier.

I’ve put all the files (I think) needed for this to work (you will have to edit paths and such) into a zip file that you can download here.

I know that I haven’t posted an update to this thing since my most read post about google wave (since then I have received an invite, got all excited, then realised its too buggy for everyday use). Anyway, that isn’t what this post is about.

I’m going to talk about badminton. The new season has started, and this time round I’m playing in 3 teams. The same 2 from last year, Blackminster B team, should have got into the A team, but my form hasn’t been good enough and Stow’s mixed team, where we are the defending champions.

I’m also playing in the Worcester league with Blackminster, its a new format, and what seems like a higher standard (we’re playing in the 5th division, and we’re by no means walking it).

Although we’ve had some good games so far this year, I am yet to lose an overall match (shouldn’t say that, I have 2 matches in the next 2 days). I’ve enjoyed playing at the higher standard of the Worcester league, because I really struggle for motivation sometimes. I wish I was playing high quality matches all the time, because I feel I could be a better player than I am.

I’ll try and post more stuff about things going on. Of course you can keep up with me on twitter.com/completenutter2

I just finished watching the Google Wave video on YouTube, here.

Google have come along with a new technology called Wave. Watch the video to find out more about it (be warned, its a video from the Google I/O developer conference, so its a little techy). Basically they have stepped back from the way we currently communicate with each other (e-mail, IM, SMS) etc and, reinvented it. Its hard to explain, just watch the video (its long though).

There are times when I think Google are becoming the new Microsoft, the way they’re taking over everything and the way they buy new companies, however… Google keep proving me wrong, time and time again they surprise me.

I’ll try and summarise the features that I can remember (guess they’re the good ones):

• Live – All communication when using Wave is live, even the typing, so no more “Buddy is typing…”. Waves come and go in your inbox, even the search is live.
• Open Source – Woo! This means that other people can create their own Wave servers. Different wave servers can communicate with each other, using something called Foundation
• Collaboration – A wave is basically a smart document, or conversation. A smart docusation if you would. All the people involved with the Wave can edit the Wave at the same time and all the changes are displayed live on all the clients. Impressive
• Playback – When you are added to a Wave after it has already started, you will see all the edits/comments/conversations in the Wave already. Google have come up with a playback feature, which lets you see how the Wave was constructed. Another impressive feature.
• Extensions – Google demonstrated some pretty cool extensions, check them out in the video.
• Rosy – Live Translation! This was probably the most impressive feature of Wave, Google demonstrated two people conversing, one in French and another in English, Wave was translating what was written, in real time!

Overall I was very impressed with Google Wave, obviously as a developer I find this thing interesting anyway, but hopefully this will change the way people communicate world wide. For the better. Open protocols, Open source.

Google have impressed me today.

With this add-on the Firefox will utilise the notification system that comes with Ubuntu Jaunty:

Firefox Download Notification

Get the add-on here.

Update: So it seems this only works with the completed download notification. Hopefully the author will integrate it further into Firefox in the future.

This film was one of the rare occasions where I had issue with the quality of the production. Although I’m a bit of a video/audiophile when it comes to quality, I’m usually quite good at getting into a film’s story/action. However, the people behind Star Trek seemed obsessed with sun glares all the time, meaning at times (especially the opening scenes), you could barely see what was going on. I’ve read comments from JJ saying that he admits he was wrong and he was going for a unique style, which I appreciate but I think he went just a bit too far.

Another concerning obsession seemed to be the closeups, made worse by the venue (I’ll get to that a bit more later on). Technically its nice to be able to see every single piece of facial hair on Chris Pine’s face, but it does detract from the film a little.

So that’s the technical side of the film, now onto the story, which at first watch seems very good, impressive, very Star Trek like. I was concerned this wouldn’t be Star Trekky enough for me, but it didn’t disappoint where that was concerned. Perhaps the bad guy could have been stronger and it was a bit confusing trying to work out just when he was from, but no real issues here. However, when you look back at what was said, this is an ‘alternate’ time-line. Which is quite clever for them to do, but also very dangerous. This now gives them the freedom to do whatever they like with the Star Trek universe, without concerns for the series that were set further along the ‘original’ timeline. It might work, but it also runs the risk of alienating the Star Trek fanbase.

Apart from that the film was excellent. The right mixture of action, likeable characters, characters you could dislike without it being annoying and comedy. Simon Pegg could have done with a bigger role but no doubt that will come in future films.

Speaking of future films, I really hope that they don’t rush out the next film, as much as I enjoyed this film and can’t wait for the next one. Hollywood has a tendency to rush sequels out of the door, in order to cash-in on the hype. This works with some films, where they were already intended to be shot like this (eg. Lord of the Rings) but other films like the Matrix have proved just how badly this can go. I’d rather wait an extra year for a quality film, than go next summer for an average film.

Oh, one more complaint, this time not about the film itself. IMAX is a wonderful technology and I urge you to see the film on an IMAX screen, just not the Birmingham one. The facilities were dire at best. Not even a real popcorn machine, just bags of sweet popcorn. The seats were too close to the screen, no way to book a seat number, so everybody is scrambling to find a seat. Very poor. I might have to wander down to the London one and see if that’s any better.

Overall I’ll give the film 8/10, which is high coming from me =)