Moving? Buying a House

I've been thinking about the process of moving house (which I've just completed recently).
To sum it up a few things I've noticed:

• You have to love the property when you are considering buying, you have to want it and feel it is perfect for you. That way by the time you get it, you'll merely tolerate it.
• It doesn't matter what budgets you make, it's more expensive than you think
• It doesn't matter ho careful you are, there's more wrong with it than you thought.
• Fixing things takes a lot longer than you thought.
• It takes a lot longer to get stuff done once you've moved in
• Ever wonder how old married couples get that way? I have stopped doing so.
• It soon becomes clear the work you need to do on it will never end. This is good, and this is bad.
• You'll always grow to fill the available space in the house, try and make sure you have room for expansion one way or another
• You have more stuff to pack than you thought.
• Rental agencies have become worse in the last couple of years at moving out inspections, but that's another story.

All in all a positive experience. I'm not looking forward to doing it again though.

My Storage/RAID System

So I thought I would document what I have as my computer architecture in my house and the advantages and disadvantages of it.

The core of the system is the file server, the core of that is the raid card: an Adaptec AAR-2820SA. PCI-X for bandwidth into the card. The PCIX severely limited my choice of motherboard so I had to go for quite an expensive one, the advantage with this was that the bus architecture meant that it could support a transfer from the GigE interface to the memory at the same time as a transfer to the PCIX bus without contention. Initially 1Gbyte memory and 2GHz of processor.
I installed the at time current version of Fedora Core, configured 3 * 500G drives as RAID5 and started to do some profilling.

I apologise for the lack of exact numbers ahead, but this was quite some time ago I did this:
What soon became apparent was that individually the performance of the system was close to the theoretical maximum. That is, for writes of data to the RAID, the performace limitation was the speed of the 3 hard drives, with caching effective (i.e. a number of short writes) the only write speed limit was the PCI-X bus. Similarly for reads I could source data as fast as the drives could spool it. In terms of network performance I could (for none application data) get up to 80% the capacity of the GigE interface (it took 5 other computers working together to be able to sink/source this much data). All seemed perfect.
However I soon noticed some problems: For samba transfers of a mixture of files the data throughput was about a quarter of this, it didn't take long to blame the network protocols or at least Microsoft's implementation of them (NFS was better than windows networking, but still not perfect).
After much fiddling with things like packet sizes and various bits of Samba config the solution I hit on was to go the dumb approach and dump a whole extra bunch of ram in the server, now up to 3G. This was where things got weird, because at about the same time I had bought 3 * 750G drives and expanded the array across these extra drives so that the raid card had twice as many drives to access and so by the numbers should be limited only by the PCIX bus (i.e. able to saturate the GigE interface for large file transfers):

Tests of raw transfers hadn't changed, if you were just streaming TCP traffic without NFS or Windows networking then everything was as fast as it always was. However any windows machine I threw at it was unable to get more than 20% GigE network utilisation, if you threw 2 windows machines at the file transfers then you got 20% aggregate between the 2 machines (usually 10% on each machine). This pointed the finger of blame squarely at a problem on the file server. Interestingly at the same time you could happily have an NFS transfer going (getting about 60% = 75MB/sec) without impacting the performance of the windows transfer. This confused me like nobody's business!
A check of what was going on on the server showed that under the maxed out windows condition most of the system memory was being used for file cacheing. over 2.5G of memory seemed to be being used by the kernel, as the transfer progressed the usage increased until this plateau was reached and then this slowly decreased after the transfer completed. Interestingly regardless of the state of the memory usage the transfer rate never changed. This made no sense as if the memory usage was as a write cache then the transfer rate would have been impacted when the plateau was reached, but the transfer rate was constant. If it was a read cache, then why did it die off quite so significantly at the end of the transfer?

Frankly I've never figured this out and it still haunts me why the windows file transfer performance is so poor, I can only think it is something to do with poor implementation of the protocols by Samba because they were reverse engineered; however the tests I have read online seem to indicate that Samba's performance is superior to native Windows!

So my performance confusion aside how do I have it configured?
Simple, with an 8 port card I have 3 drives as 1/2 of the array, 3 more as the other 1/2 and then 1 as a hot spare. When I need to expand the array I buy 3 of the largest hard drives available at the time. e.g. I first bought 3*500G, then 3 * 750G, then 3 * 1TB the 3 * 1TB replacing the original 3*500G. Since the my controller allows raid5 with online expansion it's quite easy, in the first place you simply expand the drive array onto the extra space, then grow the drive to the maximum size (my) Linux supports (2TByte). This means that for example at the moment I have 2 raid 5 arrays across the array. Each array occupies all 6 drives(most efficient use of parity drive), the Linux drive size limit means that multiple arrays are needed. Hoever it does mean that the top 250G on each 1TB drive is unused. In theory I could create a new drive in this space, but I am not yet desperate for space given the file system management issues this would cause, but I'll explain that later.
These arrays are stitched together into a single file system in Linux via LVM. I do this because I prefer 1 large file system as I find it easier to manage by using that and quotas than by having many individual file systems of different sizes. However I have found by profilling a performance hit my using LVM to stitch too many logical volumes into a single file system, so I try and keep the number of logical volumes stitched together in LVM to below 4 (after a restore from backup I've recently been able to get it back down to 2 logical volumes for a 3.4TB file system).

So how do I do all this?
Well to create things in the first place:
In fdisk, access the partition (our raid arrays are always sdx)
fdisk /dev/sdx
and add in a partition

Create a physical volume on the partition you have just created
pvcreate /dev/sda1

If it doesn't already exist then create a volume group called anything (e.g. mainvg) using the partition that now has the pv on it
vgcreate mainvg /dev/sda1

create a logical volume called fslv of size 550G (for example) using volume group mainvg
lvcreate -n fslv -L 550G mainvg

Then you need to make the ext3 system from fslv. The resize options are set to what I believe are the maximums to allow it to be expanded later.
mke2fs -j -E resize=1073741824 -b 4096 -i 16384 -L fs /dev/mainvg/fslv -E resize=1073741824

I personally disable mount checks and interval checks for my large data partitions - then run them manually occasionally. Don't forget to run them though as I once did and later regretted.
tune2fs -c 0 -i 0 -r 0 /dev/mainvg/fslv

Create an fstab entry for it (using your favourite editor to edit /etc/fstab)
/dev/datavg/fslv /data/fs ext3 acl 0 4

then mount it using the fstab entry
mount /data/fs

If you're using selinux then change security context
chcon -t mnt_t /data/fs

And you're done.

Let's assume that later you buy more drives and add them. At this point I go into the supplied drivers and use them.
cd /usr/StorMan
./StorMan.sh
Then use the GUI to expand the partition onto the new drives and then expand the partition as appropriate. If you're creating a new partition then using what is said above and below should be enough to figure out what you want to do depending on if you're expanding the current file system or adding a new file system.

Resizing is tricky with lvm, as there is no pvresize command, otherwise you could just re-size the partition in fdisk then use ext2online. Instead we expand the drive, add a new partition, a new physical volume and then add that to the volume group and then expand the file system to use the rest of the volume group.

In fdisk add a new partition to the end of current drive. If you want to do this without rebooting partprobe should do the job, however I've had mixed success with that tool, so these days i just reboot at a convenient time.

Next extend the mainvg volume group by adding sda2 (or whatever identity you're up to) to it
vgextend mainvg /dev/sda2

extend the logical volume by 10G, or however much you need to (ideally the exact size you just added) - you can itterate this to use every last gig!
lvextend -L +10G /dev/mainvg/mainlv

Finally expand the ext2 file system to use all space available on the lv
for old systems:
ext2online /dev/mainvg/mainlv
for newer systems:
resize2fs /dev/mainvg/mainlv

And that's it.

Now to do performance monitoring I usually just time a copy of a whole bunch of data. A mix of small and large files are normally good (I find my video collection and by photo collection make good large and small file size datasets), as long as the dataset is appriciably larger than the total of all the caches involved.

For network performance file copies are a good test, however to get raw throughput rates:
On the server
nc -u -l 5000

On your other computer (192.168.1.45 in this case is the IP address of the server you are testing):
pv < /dev/zero | nc -u 192.168.1.45 5000

I normally try this with a number of computers at once to be sure that the server is my limit, not the other computer, of course if you do this then each connection pair needs a different port number (i.e. change 5000 to 5001, 5002 etc) One thing I've just discovered and need to run on my next set of tests is keeping an eye on stuff in /proc for hints, e.g.
watch less /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_mem

So all that said and done, what next?
Well at the moment the architecture seems to have plenty of life left in it. Were I buying it now there'd probably be equivalent PCIE RAID card available. I managed to get hold of a full tower case that had 6*5 1/2" slots, this meant I could have 2 of these in giving me proper hot swap on all my drives. By the way they are absolutely fabulous except for 2 problems, first the drives get quite hot and second don't lose the drive mounting screws that come with them, replacements are next to impossible to find.
However I don't think in the future I'd go to the extra expense of using hardware RAID, although the performance of the card itself is awesome, and appreciated for times when I'm doing some re-organising of my data it's really not needed for even the most demanding home applications(which is what mine is). In the future I'd spend less on the raid card itself and the motherboard and just do software raid, comparisons of performance with friends who have done this mean that mine may be the fastest, but I really don't think it's worth it.

As for how do I backup this 4TB behemoth? That's a story for another post...

Seagate Warranty

I would complain to Seagate directly about this, but there doesn't seem to be an appropriate forum.

For years I've used the Seagte Barracuda drives, particularly for my raid arrays and on the occasional times I've had failures (2 failures out of a dozen drives I believe) they've replaced them without fuss. They have been the most reliable drives I've ever had and over the years I've had a few...

It seems that seagate is reducing its warranty from 5 years to 3 years It seems most of their returns happen in the first 3 years, so that's all they need to cover. This is rubbish in all senses. For a start if they don't get many in their last 2 years, then it can't cost them much can it? Also there are a few reasons I buy seagates, the first and most important being the 5 year warranty. Of course in the past I have had really good experience with their low failure rate and their returns procedure when they do fail, compared to my experience with Western Digital and Maxtor they are fantastic in both these regards.

Given all this I have 3 ways to protest:
* Write this winge
* Restrict my Seagate purchases to the models that still have a 5 year warranty (if this is still possible)
* Go the opposite route and stop paying extra for what I consider decent drives and go back to buying the cheapest possible drives I can and rely on my raid array and backups to save me when I have lots of failures.

Granted by myself I can do nothing, but as always if everyone does at least one of these and doesn't buy the crap they are now peddling then it can only be for the best to show them what the consumer wants.

It occurs to me that maybe I am an odd user: I don't track the computer upgrade cycle, my desktop is over 5 years old and still works fine for what I use it for. My newest computer is my server (3 years old) that got bought simply for it's I/O system needed by the raid card I had bought (PCI-X). However I buy new drives for the raid array every year or so. Still the drives I bought 3 years ago are still in use either in the array or as part of my backup system, they are still VERY useful and would be really annoyed if they failed tomorrow; for seagate to state that 3 years is the useful life of a drive is to me repugnant.

So I'm voting with my feet!

Jazz review

I've had my car now for the past 4 years. It's a Honda Jazz and has so far done everything I've asked of it, however always worth having a check and thought it was worth looking at what else was out there; suffice to say I've come to the conclusion that the Jazz is a sufficiently good car that I'm not changing it any time soon.

So in typical me style, let's look at its good and bad points:
Good:

• Carrying capacity - can be converted into a van like back which is great for carrying anything up to and including a 3 seater sofa.
• People Capacity: Can fit 4 large adults in or 2 large + 3 small ones in the back. Even someone with long legs like me is fine and there is plenty of headroom.
  
• Size - Externally it's quite small which is good for parking.
• Good visibility - not as good as a land rover or similar, but fabulous for a small to medium car.
• Good fuel economy. Your only choice is a petrol engine. I used to get about 50-60mpg, now I get 40-50mpg. It depends on the speed I'm doing. But it has definitely gone down as it has aged.
• Good enough handling. It's not going to challenge a Lotus Elise any time soon, but it is predictable and with that engine you can certainly have some fun provided you're willing to rev the engine like crazy and deal with the understear.
• Excellent Engine. Again it's not going to win any prizes for power (my 600cc motorbike produces more horsepower); but that's fine, it becomes a challenge to get some performance out of it: and that is fun. Especially since the engine loves to rev unlike any other car engine I've ever driven and it's great fun.
• The front windscreen wash jets have a fabulous spray pettern that works brilliantly.
• Electric windows all around (more useful than I thought it would be)
  

Bad Points:

• Comparatively expensive to maintain - Honda parts and servicing aren't the cheapest on the planet.
• Rubbish rear wash squirter. It's like a 5 year old peeing on your back windscreen.
• Wiper blades are none standard - so you have to buy from Honda
• Car stereo is intentionally none standard size. This is sold as an anti theft device, however it is a bloody pain as it is now really showing its age (no mp3 or aux in being the big ones) and there is nothing I can do about it.
• The wing mirror fold in motors should be automatic
• The passenger electric window should have the auto function like the driver side does. Not having it is just petty bean counting.
• No rear window intermittant wipe
• Hondas are expensive to buy but this is supposed to be balanced by a high resale value. Unfortunatly a recent valuation on mine (a low milage, full service history in perfect condition) proved this wasn't the case.
• Poor street cred*
  

I believe the new model Jazz fixes most of these problems, but they're all very minor and livable with so no plans to buy that until this one breaks.
But if you want an all rounder that will carry a huge ammount to the tip one minute, and take 4 large adults out for a meal the next, and you want low tax and fuel consumption then i think you'd be hard pressed to find a better car.

* Hondas and especially the Jazz have poor street cred, they're seen as an old man's car. I don't mind this at all though, in fact I somewhat revel at it. reminded of the days when people used to take the piss out of me for driving a tiny Fiat Uno; and my retort was just that I was compensating for something. I try and claim the same applies now, but I don't think I'm fooling anyone.

Civilisation Revolutions

I've had a lot of difficulty writing this review for a simple reason; I don't know how to pitch it. Let me explain:
When I first started writing this blog I made the decision that yes it would be a bit random, and certainly not cutting edge, but the audience had to be wide; particularly for computer games it had to appeal to people like myself (Who have been playing computer games all be it intermittently almost all their lives - since the BBC back in 1982 when I was 4), to my partner (who frequently expresses how much she hates computer games and is on a mission to discourage me from playing them), right through to my flatmate (who works for a games company).
So a review of civilisation is tricky as if my memory serves me correctly I had a copy of back in the days of the Atari ST, if not then we certainly had it on at least one of our Amigas. This is a game therefore that spans nearly 2/3rds of my life and yet the question still needs answering why am I still so addicted to it? Why do i still find myself going on there with the intention of playing it for half an hour or so and still be there at 3am unable to leave the computer?
From that you can guess that the new version is just as addictive as the earlier versions and in my eyes the remake has lived up to the old ones in terms of playability. More importantly for me it is very playable on the XBOX and also (my flatmate informs me) on the DS.

So if you are familiar with Civ, then you can stop reading here, yes it is as addictive as the earlier versions, yes the interface does work on a console, yes that sim speak the avatars use is bloody annoying, but you can turn the volume off for that at least, and no it doesn't really add much to the previous versions of Civ except possibly a balancing of all the modes of combat and some pretty animations if that's your thing. If you enjoyed civ in the past and want a solution for your surrent games platform of choice then civilisation revolutions should leave you at the very least sleepless, even if you disagree with some of the fine tuning changes they've made.

For newcomers then, what is Civ?
Well a turn based strategy game where the aim is to become the dominant civilisation on your map. This can be achieved in a number of ways:
Military
Simply wipe out enough of your competitors that everyone else is crushed beneath your mighty war machine. IME this is one of the easiest ways to win the game, and often the most fun, still where's the challenge in easy.
Culture:
An interesting concept introduced in the new game (to me) is culture. Each city produces culture and you can do things like build temples and cathedrals and wonders (such as the hollywood wonder) to enhance your culture. If you are cultured enough neighbouring cities will want to join your culture. This is an interesting feature of the game as on my first time playing as a military domination I lost 3 of my major cities to my neighbour because i was pouring all my resources into building fighting units and the citizens of my industrial cities thought "bugger this, we'll join an interesting civilisation" and left me. Sure I swiftly concoured them back again, but that was enough of an experience to mean that the next game I played to win a culture victory which added a very interesting spin to the game with a significantly different set of objectives. i.e. every other method of winning requires a large number of cities, with culture you can win with a powerbase of just 3 cities (provided you supe them up enough)
Economic
Easy, get the most money, build the world bank, control the world. (You think that's your sword you're waving at me? You still owe me money for that :-)
Scientific
As part of civilisation you research new technologies, get to the stage of building a spaceship the soonest, and get it to Alpha Centuri before your capital is taken, then you win the game.

So lots of strategy, a multitude of tactics. Certainly not hot paced blowing aliens up stuff, but IMO far more entertaining. (BTW don't get me wrong, i still love those types of games, just see my gears of war review, it's just a case of different things for different moods).

So what else? If you're not convinced by now you never will be, so I thought I'd share some of my tactics I use while playing the game, I'm not saying these are perfect, but it may save you some time in figuring these out for yourself:

At the start of the game, siting your first city asap is vital, unless you start at a totally rubbish place, I would accept the square you land on just so that you can get producing things as soon as possible.
Attack those barbarians - they're always an easy kill.
Send your first military unit out exploring, use your second or 3rd to guard the city.
Once you have a couple of militia exploring and a guard on your first city, found a second and third city asap.
From this point on always make sure you have at least one guard unit in each city. Later in the game you'll need more then one. Three units of the same kind can be combined into an army. An army can normally defend itself against an attack by any unit of the same technology level. If you need to withstand a determined attack, (multiple units) or attack from a more advanced foe, invest in city walls. These sort of things though you don't need to worry about until later in the game.
Look very carefully at the terrain before you found a city: You need some food and some production (unless you wnat to buy everything), some science/money. You can site a city to be very rich in one of these, but you need at least a little of all of them. Also don't site cities too close to each other, once you have a courthouse you will be able to utilise squares 2 away, so don't site cities any closer thn 4 squares.
Decide early on the end game you want, ideally before you start the game - this will help choose the civilisation you want to play as.
For a military victory this is my rough plan. Early on get as many cities as possible, spread them out sparsely. As soon as you run out of land to expand into (you come across a neighbour in every direction), stop and build more cities in the bits you have missed until you they are as close as economical (4 squares). Identify which cities are your production cities and which are your money cities and skew their resources appropriately. Wherever you have the chance put the effort into food so that your city will grow, then swap effort to production/money as needed. Pour your research effort into military technology, if you don't have the most advanced military units available then you are very unlikely to win the game this way. If you are the first to get catapult/canon for example then that is the cue to go on a concurring spree. Build roads from your production cities to your cities nearest your neighbour you are preparing to attack. First make sure your base of attack city is well defended (remember which units at which technology level are best at defence and attack) then send them out with a defence force too. Once you have the initiative, press it. I often find that the computer will anticipate my above moves and prepare the nearest city for such an attack, so I will where the map allows have an initial attack on the city it expects me to attack, then in a few turns change my attack to another nearby city where there are probably less defence forces and therefore quickly capture that one. This blitz style method worked for Hitler and it can work for you too. Once you have the hang of this technique the military victory all comes down to perfecting the flow of resources and troops. Pay attention when you capture a city what it is good at and what it needs and build it up appropriatly. Always try and stay at least equal with technology and if you can get ahead and go on a spree. Once you get sufficiently large you can have two attack forces which can (if you do a thrust with one force, then with another) be very effective at catching the computer off guard.
So I would start with a military victory as that gives you the basics of resource management that you need for all the victories.
Technology Victory. Similar to the military one, but your emphasis is very much on the tech. You will at times find yourself well ahead of your neighbours in technology and therefore during these times I press my advantage and take their cities as is convenient. Also this is a stratogy to go seafaring and have bases on multiple continents. Go exploring with settlers early and have a base on each major continent and you'll be surprised how easy you can overrun your neighbours. If doing this though beware of being overrun by other's culture - you'll need to build temples/cathedrals and city walls in your seed city unless you go concurring. Watch carefully which cities are producing lots of science and equip them with libraries and universities.
Culture Victory.
A good victory to go for if you find yourself with a few very strong cities close together. Especially if this is on a large continent shared with many other civilisations. You'll eventually absorb your neighbouring cities. One tirck I found is if you're feeling a bit militant and you notice your nearest neighbour's city is on the verge of converting then go and concur the city beyond the one that is about to convert and you'll get two cities for one.

Governments:
Democracy - great if you're on a build phase where you're trying to strengthen your existing cities and don't care about going concurring. Equally good if you're falling behind others materially, but are more advanced technologically and need them to declare war on you(because you can't declare war on them as a democracy). An absolute must for culture or economic victory. I tend to use this if I'm not feeling very aggressive, often then I'll end up being ahead in one area which will mean someone declares war on me. At that point you can usually use your advantage to get at least two cities of theirs before they offer peace. Then throw your resources into getting those new cities up to spec and repeat the process.
Communism - Good for growing the number of cities as settlers are very cheap. Not bad for military either
Republic - a good one for a concurring phase as you can declare war and are reasonably productive

If I can think of any more things to do I'll add them later...

Witches Of Eastwick - In Ipswich

This weekend we went to see the Witches of Eastwick production in Ipswich. Quick summary, I enjoyed it, but there were so many ways it could have been better.

Let's start with some background and disclaimers on my part:
My first exposure to Witches was to crew the show for The Festival Players in Cambridge.
My second exposure was that when I liked the show so much I got the soundtrack from Amazon (the west end version was all they had). This compared poorly to the Festival Players version as although without a doubt the quality of the singing was better, it had far less soul and wasn't half as much fun to listen to. Also they didn't have on it one of the best songs of the show: "The Glory Of Me" instead they had "Who's the Man"; this is fine though as that reflected the original run of things, not the re-worked one.

And so now we get on to Saturday's performance, I was almost giddy with anticipation, the first time actually seeing one of my favourite shows (when you're running the fly tower for a show you may not be able to actually watch it, but you can still enjoy it). So lets first get onto the stuff that was good about the show and make the inevitable comparison to the production that I was involved with:

• The singing was better than either production(including the west end version). For once when the witches sang "Perfectly in Tune" they actually were. And as for a Darryl who could actually sing - well that was a wonderful change from the west end version.
• The set was produced to the high standard you would expect from a professional touring show
• The wealth of new songs might not have been what I was expecting, but they brought fresh light onto a show I thought I new very well.

Now of course we have the problems with the show

• Marti Pellow was being a ham. The fact that the audience applauded him simply for walking on stage was a very bad start, but the fact that he carried on acting like a spoilt attention seeking child throughout the show almost ruined it for me, was it not for his stunning rendition of some of the songs I could never have forgiven him for his shoddy and unconvincing performance. I was not the only one who totally lost belief that Darryl as played here was capable of seducing these women. For those who didn't see it, he frequently rubbed various body parts in a very exaggerated manner that was as idiotic and unconvincing as it was inappropriate. This man has clearly read all the worst bits of Michael Green.
  
• The tech was very very limited. No arrival of Darryl through a trap door, no flying witches, only a few seconds of the self playing cello (and that was pretty pathetic), no pretty much anything; they even cut the exploding tennis ball and the frying pan kill. If an amateur group can do these things on our budget, for a single show run then that's the least I'd expect from a professional company doing multiple show runs.
  
• The lighting design was very basic - I have done better myself in Edinburgh in a 2 hour get in; and I am no lighting designer, just an enthusiastic amateur.
• The three witches never really gelled as a trio, individually their performances were the best I have seen/heard, however they didn't convince as a whole.

So all in all the individual performances were very good, together and with very harshly cut back tech they failed to deliver what I'd expect from even an amateur production, never mind a professional one.

Edit:
So after reading some online reviews in a few different places, this has brought me to a simple set of conclusions: Either they saw a different show, we are looking for different things/find different things entertaining, or all critics are idiots - which I'm sure they'd agree counted for me.
Thinking about it more the show was about Witches - it needed the Magic; which they cut out all of it. It needed great music and dialogue, a lot of which they cut out for new music (which might yet grow on me and is subjective so I'll save judgement). It needed charisma from Daryl most importantly he needed to be believable that he could seduce those women and I'm sorry that even if i had been a teenage girl with a crush on Marty, his idiotic gyrations and pissing about on stage would have instantly turned me off. As a 30 something man who always was suspicious of him anyway it was a sure fire way to blame him for the failure of the shows in my eyes, and the eyes of everyone who saw it.

Gears Of War 2 Review

First impressions:

• Lots of cutscenes - about half the game play time feels like I'm watching cutscenes
• To add to that, it seems like someone in the first one complained that there wasn't much story, so they've tried to make up for that and then some.
  
• They have kept the duck and cover mechanic that was so much fun in the first - this is a good thing
  
• There are a few annoying parts where you need to shoot a moving target - very easy with a mouse, (How I anticipate the game was designed) not so easy on the XBOX 360 gamepad that I'm using.
• I'm first playing on the normal difficulty level and there seems to be an aweful lot of level and scare monsters. I'm looking forward to re-playing it on a harder level.
• The AIs for your companions is the best i have come across in any game - they are actually willing to push ahead without you having to force them forwards
• Ammo is (on this difficulty level) plentyful.
• They've (mostly) avoided the current trend in current generation FPSs of making everything 20,000 different shades of grey + blood. There are blues and yellows and everything. This is a very good thing - I can see the georgous game that I'm playing.
  
• The actual combat itself is fun! Contrast this to Prey.
• No more bezerkers (yet). I hated these levels in the first game - the first one was fun/new/challenging; by the 3rd time I was bored and fed up. So far they've avoided this and that's for the best. In a game that's supposed to be a fast paced shooter, sneeking around and stealth are a welcome occasional change of game mechanic, but still not what I bought the game for - stick to what you bought the game for.
• So far no vehicle section - again this is good. If i wanted to play a driving game I'd break out the steering wheel and play PGR 4 - unless they wanted to support using the steering wheel as a method of controlling the combat vehicle - then that would be cool! (for the first time anyway).
• They have a habit of doing: checkpoint, really boring easy section, section that requires you to learn new skill/figure out puzzle. So having a difficult bit after a boring bit means you have to play the same boring bit several times - which grates!
  

Overall, a lot of fun and a very very good looking game. Just don't take it too seriously, even if the person who wrote all the cutscenes that break the flow of the game did.

Vauxhall Automatic Gearboxes

Sometime last year I had the opportunity to borrow my parent's car whilst mine was being worked on. It was/is an automatic Vauxhall Corsa. This being a computer controlled manual gearbox rather than a traditional automatic gearbox. It was also a small engined car for having an automatic gearbox so it's problems showed even more. For the record though I have a Honda Jazz with a similar sized engine so I believe I was comparing like with like.


Why did I hate it? Let me give you an example. Suppose you wish to overtake someone on the motorway. My normal move would go something like:
* Realise you want to overtake
* check you can/plan your move
* indicate /double check planning
* Start to move lanes, change gear, accelerate to pass
* finish off the move

However doing anything above a minor acceleration means that the automatic gear box takes about 3 seconds to change down a gear and sort itself out ready for acceleration. This changes the overtake sequence to:
* Realise you want to overtake
* Floor the throttle
* Check you can/plan your move
* indicate /double check planning
* Abort the Throttle if needed otherwise:
* Start to move lanes, Finally the car starts to accelerate to pass
* finish off the move

Don't get me wrong, once its started to accelerate it goes fine, it just somehow takes an age to get itself in the right gear and then get the drive train engaged.

The other gem it has is when you pull up at traffic lights it has a habit of putting itself into neutral and not telling you. This would be fine if it took itself out again - it doesn't it just sits there in neutral with you revving the engine wondering why you aren't going anywhere. The fix I've found is to always stick it into neutral and then only put it back into drive as you wish to pull off.

The point being that to drive it i found two strategies where the gearbox system worked as you'd expect:
1) Drive very sedately
2) Drive very very aggressively.

Anything inbetween and it found itself in the wrong gear and you'd be bricking yourself while the car twiddled its thumbs and woke up.
Not recommended.

Nokia E90 Review

So after having had a number of mobile phones over the last decade a few months ago I got a Nokia E90. In an executive summary I'd say it's certainly not the smallest phone I've ever had (nore the largest - since I first got a mobile back in 1998) but it is certainly the best as a central point to run my life.

When I chose this phone I had the following constraints:

• Not a Windows Mobile device - friends who have had those proved to me it was too slow and unstable.
• Not an Iphone (No I won't use Apple's bastardisation of the English language) - Too trendy
• Needed to be good for web browsing
• Needed to have a full keyboard
• Needed wifi

Which pretty much said I had to have this phone or a Blackberry, and the Blackberry was too corporate for me to have it for my personal phone.
So decision made, what are its good points and bad points:

Good Stuff:

• Between the supplied tool to sync with outlook, goosync and google calender I can synchronize my private life calender and working life calender allowing me to always know when I am available and friends/family to check my busy status without needing to ask me.
  
• Built in SIP client is damn handy
• The notes application + keyboard is brilliant to suppliment my aweful memory for everything from Birthday present ideas to things to write a novel about.
• Always having a web browser, GPS, WiFi capable device with you is a godsend.
  

Bad Stuff

• Camera shutter button doesn't start camera application- which is annoying when you just want to take a quick picture.
  
• During a phone call going into tools/active keys crashes the phone
  
• Birthday detail in contacts does not show up in calender.
• Pictures (flickr etc) don't scale properly, you can't zoom in either which with the aspect ratio of the internal screen makes them unviewable.
  
• Web browser doesn't remember logins/passwords
• Search in contacts only searches first and last names, other details are ignored.
  
• Cannot change default calender or contact settings; e.g. Alarm on, sync type etc
• No timer application
• Deleting all note content deletes the note - I'm sure this is an intentional feature, but for things like my shopping list note it's bloody annoying.
  
• Phone number or text in txt messages cannot be copied into the clipboard, same for web pages. This means that if someomne sends you a text with a phone number in it, you cannot dial that number. Likewise if you get a web page with a postcode on it you cannot feed this into the mapping application without remembering the postcode yourself.
  
• Wifi cannot be simply turned off. Once it is connected it is neigh on impossible to shut it down.
• No spell checker for anything
• Any applications you have installed are uninstalled on a software upgrade
• No indication of where the infra red port is in any manual or webpage I could find - had to find it out by experiment.
  
• Would be nice to have multiple web browser windows open in a similar manner to tabbed browsing.
  
• Being disconnected from a wifi point doesn't give you a handover option to an alternative connection - you have to re-start everything you're doing.
  
• Calculator has no advanced functions e.g. Sine pi square

To summarise it is the most functional phone I have every had and I wouldn't want to be without it and know of no phone/solution that would do a better job. However it really is suffering from traditional Symbian problems and the integration between applications is so poor as to be a joke; sharing data between applications is clearly something that was added on at the last minute rather than a clear design objective.
It occurs to me that this is where the Iphone is strong, they have got the integration working and so seens much stronger than it might otherwise be.
I fear that most of the problems though mostly aren't a question of polish, but of a fundamental design flaw in the Symbian architecture so we won't see a fix anytime soon, even the replacement model I would expect to be equally inconsistent.

The Force Unleashed Review

So I got the Force Unleashed a few weeks ago when it was released and have been slowly playing it. How on earth people are raving about this game is beyond me, it commits all the cardinal sins of gaming!

• Jumping puzzles
• Quicktime events
• Rubbish Level design that requires you to complete puzzles IN A CERTAIN ORDER - it's not enough that you have to kill all monster A , then use force lightning to activate Item B then Kill uber-monster C then use force grip on item D, you have to do it in that order or you are trapped. If you choose to kill uber monster C first, then try and move item D then forget it. You must restart the level and kill things in the order the designer intended. Even if you manage to figure all that out (in my case in exasperation by going to a cheat website) they finish it off with a bloody Jumping Puzzle
• Quicktime events
• Rubbish level design that makes it blatantly obvious that you have to destroy item A but no hint that you have to use force grip on item B to set you up for another bloody Jumping puzzle to jump through destroyed item A
• Endlessly re-spawning enemies
• Storyline Cliches that a fan-fic writer would be ashamed to use. Yes I knwo some people have raved about the story and yes I knwo I haven't finished the game yet, however I stand by what I said so far.
  
• Quicktime events for every kill more troublesome than a small mouse
• Scenery that's impossible to tell the difference between a ledge you're supposed to jump onto in order to progress and a pretty backdrop that you can't leap onto and any attempt to do so will plummet you to a quick death
• Buggy Buggy levels/engine. I'm hitting about 3 glitches per session. Be it going to a part of the map that leves you endlessly falling, or the entire screen turning white and all that happens is your character re-draws leaving a trail of you behind it as you move around or getting a monster into a place where you can trap them and attack them to your hearts content, but they never feel any hurt from the attacks you do.
• Suspension of disbelief problems. I mean seriously, I know it would ruin the game play if every single time I used a lighsabre it instantly killed the oponent, but it is seriously hard to suspend disbelief when I have hit this guy with a lightsabre literally 20 times and he still is runniing around looking like I've merely insulted him with a mildly naughty word.
• Further to the lighsabre problem I think they'd be better off if they embraced this problem that the lightsabre is too deadly. You could have foes who knew this and therefore tried to keep you at arms length or used some tactics other than stand as close to me as possible and try to hit me with their blaster. Embracing this problem and comming up with ways around it would make the game interesting and fun. As it is it's more just a case of trying to memorise as many combos as possible and follow a linear path.
• Some of the combos are ludicrous - how on earth is a lightsabre infused with a little bit of force lightening anymore deadly than the lightsabre itself???
• Bloody Quicktime events!!
• The block system is ok for a computer game, but does not tie in with the films at all. While you are blocking blaster shots you are totally vulnerable to all other attacks, you are also incapable of launching a new attack without making youself totally open to new blaster attacks. This means that you can with great ease be pinned down by a bunch of stormtroopers and the only way to escape is to take the odd hit or two while you start dispensing with the stormtroopers. Luke never had this problem!
• And back to the lightsabre - from reading other online reviews I know I'm not the only person who has pretty much given up on the lightsabre and just stuck to a combination of force lightening and force push to get most things done. If the lightsabre is supposed to be the jedi/sith's main weapon then why make it so feable compared to the other powers?
• Object Throw problems - One of the best ways to deal damage seems to be the ability to grab items from the scenery and throw them at your opponents. While I'm sure this works fine on a PC where you have a mouse to control it with finness, on joypad on a console (as I play it) you've more chance of hitting yourself than your enemies, especially of you're having to use an item not directly in line with the enemy.
• Poor Auto-Targetting. For things like force lightening you need to rely on the auto targetting which frequenty sees a nearby flower as more of a threat than the Giant 40 foot high Rancor that is 2 inches behind it.
• Camera with a mind of its own. In front of me I have a horde of stomtroopers, to the left of them there is a a random beast i forget the name of; I am running towards them. So what does the camera choose to look at? You've got it, it swings around to concentrate on a stormtrroper I just dispatched and is now fading away into nothing behind me.
• Inconsistent difficulty. last night I was working through this planet of mushrooms (inventive level design or what?!) And was cutting through the enemies like a lightsabre through a jedi's arm. A blast of lighting or two, or a lightsabre slash, or a force throw would be enough to dispatch any of them. Very easy but still quite fun. Then you get to the end of level boss and he kills me in about 5 seconds and it takes me about an hour of practice to string together a sequence of combos that work to kill him. Now I have no issue with really easy games, or really hard games. If it's genuinly that I'm bad at the game i can accept that and try an improve my technique, but this was just so inconsistent that it was infuriating and felt like the game was suddenly lauging at me.
• Baddies that die when they're damn well ready for it! After the previous end of level baddie I must have got my combo skills up to the mark because I took 95% of the health of this guy in about 10 seconds worth of combos. Clearly the game wasn't happy with this because suddenly any further hits didn't do any harm. Then a new lot of monsters spawned. Killed them quickly. Still can't cause damage to the maion dude. More Monsters spawn. Dispatch them quickly, no harm possible to main dude (even though by their health meter they must have been at about 5% health) And now another monster. Kill That. Finally a last attack of the main dude and my favourite thing - quicktime events to finish him off. Disbelief doesn't just have to be suspended, it's turning blue from a force choke.
• Unskippable cut scenes. I'm fine to make them unskippable the first time, but after the aforementioned sudden encountered difficulty wall, listening to the same cutscene 50 times doesn't do much for your mental state.

At it's heart there's a really good game here if you look hard enough. The new physics engine is very cool, I like the RPG style levelling up system they have in place, and despite all it's flaws I do enjoy playing it, but it could have been so much more. It really is buggier than an autum holiday by a scottish loch - as I say 3 times per session is the average for restarting a level due to a bug in the game. maybe I just explore the maps more than their testers did, but I find that hard to believe since I'm rubbish at finding all those holocrons you get bonuses for finding so I don't think it's that.
There really is a lot to be had out of this game and it does have so much potential that if they'd lost their obsession with jumping puzzles, quicktime events and remembered that a lightsabre is a Jedi's/Sith's main weapon, oh and perhaps tested it! If I can find this many problems without trying then their testing department should be wither sacked, or listened to my senor management. If all that was done you really would have had a great game. I wonder if many of these problems come from the designers both being too close to their own game to see the flaws and from testing it on a PC rather than on the Xbox. It really does have that feel as if how I'm playing it isn't how it's supposed to be played. I feel that like Spore this works better as a technology demonstration than as a full game in its own right.
All of that I could cope with if there was feedback to tell me where I'm going wrong, but for all the work they've clearly put into the physics engine, they seem to have put next to sod all emphasis on the actual gameplay itself and what makes pretending to be a sith warrior fun.

Oh and will someone please tell Lucasarts to lose their obsession with the Star Wars franchise. There are plenty of stories that would allow you to have warrior wizards combined with cool technology - especially if you wrote one for yourself. I can see why they are trying to milk more money out of star wars, I just wish that with this game that doesn't sit well with the rest of the Star Wars canon they'd have shown some inventiveness. Thus follows my commandments to Lucas Arts:

• Do something other than Star Wars
• Test your game on all the platforms you release it for - ideally with people who are rubbish at the game
• Learn that quicktime events aren't fun - I have Rock Band/guitar hero for pattern matching games and they do it much better than you ever could
• Realise that jumping puzzles don't work for console gamers; at best they're a distraction from the main game, at worst they make me long for a dictionary of swear words so I can learn some new ones to hurl at the computer.
• Fix the auto-target algorithm to prioritise based upon enemy threat/HP level
• If you're going to have a camera algorithm that will happily re-orient itself mid battle, try and make it re-orient itself onto enemies that are alive and a threat to you and more of a threat than the one you're currently attacking.
• When writing your storyline, get a 5 year old to read it. If he thinks it's corny and has poor dialogue, then give serious thought to re-working it. Either that or embrace the fact that is a corny story and therefore not the strongest part of the game so don't make such a big deal of it.
• I will admit the Imperial March is one of the coolest bits of music ever written, however this isn't a reason to use it for 1/2 of the soundtrack. Write something new!