Train Simulator 2 arriving soon

For all the geek train nuts out there, it’s been confirmed that Microsoft is working on a second version of Train Simulator. The lead developer, Rick Selby has surfaced with a blog so people can track progress. (I wonder if he knows there’s a Puffing Billy station named after him?) In fact, the official site links to numerous developers’ blogs.

I’ve played both Train Simulator and its main opposition, Trainz… to my mind, Trainz is probably better, and they’ve kept working on their product over the past few years, as TS has been somewhat neglected (and I haven’t had it installed in quite some time partially because it won’t run without Admin privileges).

Windows Vista imperialism?

There’s some disquiet about the Windows Vista Games menu, highlighting the fact that use of parental controls will mean any game without an ESRB rating won’t appear. The ratings apparently cost US$2000-3000 to obtain, which means they’re effectively out of the range of independent games developers.

So I guess Snood and the like wouldn’t appear on the Vista games menu.

What I want to know is — are the North American ESRB ratings going to be forced onto every user the world over who wants to use the parental controls?

I’m not going to claim for a moment that the Australian government’s Office of Film and Literature Classification is perfect, but I do want to know if the Vista games menu when used by Australians will be showing Australian ratings (G, G8+, M, MA) rather than the unfamiliar North American ratings (C, E, T, M, A). And likewise for every other country.

We have enough troubles with products constantly defaulting to US English. We don’t need another North American standard rammed down our throats.

The Diamond Age comes to TV

SciFiWire reports that a team led by George Clooney are working on a miniseries of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. (via Tony S). Hmm. Well that could be very good… or it could be very bad. I reckon that book’s a prime example of the imagination of the reader being bigger than a screen would allow.

Perils of outsourcing

With outsourcing, many big corporations are becoming much more fragmented than they were before. It’s often a gradual process, with a bunch of internal staff first being moved only in name, but over time it takes hold in more concrete ways: being kicked off the email system, moved to new facilities off the internal computer networks, deleted from the corporate directories, that kind of thing. (As well as untold “new” people joining the fray.)

Which can mean a lot of inconvenience. Suddenly the outsourced people have all their phone numbers and email addresses change. They can’t easily find contacts within the company. And vice versa. Emails which contain sensitive information and formerly only got sent internally are going out on the live, insecure and slow internet.

VPNs and other hoop-jumping has to be set up just so people can work, and that’s before you start moving whole servers and applications outside the cosy confines of the corporate network.

And God help you if you want to set up an appointment with some busy people who are no longer viewable in your calendaring software.

Is it all worth it? Who am I to judge? Pah, what would us geeks know about it, anyway?

Cool XML stuff

A bunch of XML Tools from the good people at Got Dot Net. The particular one I needed was XSD Inference, which creates an XSD from an XML document. I needed it to use with some code to validate XML against XSDs in VB6. It seems XSDs created from XML with some tools (I’m looking at you, XMLSpy — though maybe it’s fixed in later versions) won’t work properly using VB6/XML Parser 4 (which is what I’m using, at least for some of my stuff).

Earth-Destruction Status

I think we can all agree there are many issues with life on earth. A solution that may not have occurred to many of us is total destruction of the earth.

This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

Current Earth-Destruction Status

Please insert the Visual Studio .Net Prerequisites disk for visual studio.net

I’ve done this before, it should work: I’m running .NET on this box. I was installing .NET onto our build box here, and I kept banging my head up against step 1:

You have inserted the incorrect disk. Please insert the Visual Studio .NET Prerequisites disk for Visual Studio .NET

Hmmmm says I, it certainly seems to be labelled “Visual Studio .NET Prerequisites disk for Visual Studio .NET”. Oh, hang on, it says “Visual Studio .NET 2003 Prerequisites disk, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Tools for the Microsoft Office System 2003”. Surely that’s the same thing? I’m installing off the “Visual Studio .NET 2003 Enterprise Architect” disk, they’re both yellow, this all seems right.

But it was not right. What I instead needed to do was grab the DVD that has all this stuff on it: it’s version includes the prerequisites right in the VS2003 install directory. Silly me. I should have known there were many versions of VS.NET. Some of them will install.

Apple iPhone

Apple has announced the iPhone — which at first glance looks like an iPod (with video) combined with a phone combined with an internet browser (a version of Safari).

Of course, most phones now have similar functionality. This looks like it’ll have a bigger screen (with a soft keyboard — byebye click wheel) and of course Apple’s nice design should mean it’s easier than most phones to use.

With past false-starts like WAP, and the constraints of most existing mobile phone internet browsers, and the cost and geekiness of PDAs, perhaps this will be the thing that brings mobile internet into the mainstream.

And if you’re wondering if it’ll work outside North America, well apparently it will be GSM quadband, so my guess is it’s only a matter of time before it’s widely available throughout the western world.

PS.: Apple’s press release mentions availability: iPhone will be available in the US in June 2007, Europe in late 2007, and Asia in 2008 …

Update Friday: Cisco’s Mark Chandler blogs about the trademark infringement suit

Your host for this evening

Ages ago I had meant to post some old articles from 1997/98 that I’d found on a floppy disk. For some reason I only did two, but I’ll resume re-posting, as some of them are mildly interesting and/or entertaining.

The field of computer systems development always involves decision making. To make a decision requires discussion, postulating, debating, and yes, arguing. And there is one issue in the field that is probably subject to this process more than any other. Although it may arise in less than half of the system development projects that run, I suspect that most computer professionals have at one time or another found themselves sitting in heated discussion around a table trying to answer the question:

“What are we going to call the box?”

There is no more thorny issue than this. A new computer has arrived. It’s a server, so practically everybody will need to use it. It has to be installed, and somewhere along the line, it has to be named.

Naming children is easier. Trust me, I’ve been through both experiences. At least when children are concerned, you’re limited by their sex, and generally by social considerations, such as giving the poor kid a name they’re not going to hate, and that people know how to pronounce and spell. Plus there’s usually a maximum of two people who really have a say in the decision.

But naming a computer is much, much harder. Everybody wants to use their favourite cartoon or sci-fi character, or their favourite planet, or their favourite name from some obscure piece of mythology. Apart from four letter words (you know the ones I mean), just anything goes.

Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s easy. This is when some boring corporate standard comes into play, and the project manager decides that he or she is too gutless (or at least, lacks the political clout) to buck the corporate standard, no matter how boring it is.

It’s during these times that new computers end up with boring names like “nus202” and “vax24”. And while they may be lacking in personality (and they are often almost indistinguishable from their siblings in the computer room), at least they’re usually easy to remember and spell.

But if upper-management doesn’t dictate something, what do you do? I’ve been on projects where just about everyone had their opinion, and we ended up having to do a kind of informal vote. It was either that or a pie fight, and a pie fight would’ve left the conference room in a less than ideal state.

Some organisations have a series of machines to name, and so they work out a theme. Planets is popular (though people tend to shy away from Uranus), and I’ve also encountered fish. One place I worked, we used characters from The Simpsons (Homer is common), but we got bored with it after a while, and switched to other cartoons.

In the end it doesn’t matter. But it definitely helps if everyone knows where the name comes from. Once the mail server I used was called “Banjora”. I still don’t know what that one means.

The joys of the Loewe TV service menu

I’ve got a Loewe Profil TV. A few years old now, but going pretty well. Apart, that is, from some scan line thingies appearing at the top of screen when it’s in 4:3 mode. It started happening when the TV (and I) moved house some time ago. I assume it got a bump.

Finally I’ve got into the Service Menu and adjusted it so they don’t appear anymore. Some people give dire warnings about the Service Menu — that you can seriously screw-up your TV if you mess with it too much.

With that warning in mind, I’ll document how to get into the Service Menu so I can remember it for later, as it’s fairly forgettable.

  1. Press the Menu button on the front of the TV (not the remote)
  2. Use it to scroll down to the Service Menu option
  3. Press the Menu button on the remote (not the TV)

Voila, you’re in. From there you can adjust all sorts of settings. Me, I fiddled the Geometry settings. It’s a bit like all the stuff you can do with a computer monitor.

I bumped up the Vertical Amplitude a bit, and lowered the Vertical Position a tad, and it appears to be gone. (Touch wood). Certainly easier to fiddle with it yourself than have to call Loewe’s support line and organise a technician to come out and do it.