They’re studios, and they’re friggin’ awesome.
Over the past couple of days I’ve started to make the Google Document for the RPG project into a design document / implementation guide to work from when I start coding.
While Google Docs is a decent enough tool for design, the resulting mess of text and ideas is a complete mindfuck to work with.
Rather than make long, essay-like posts every now and then, I’m going to try making shorter posts more often - so, here goes.
The E71 currently has some issues in software where, in some situations, it will take pictures with a 5-6 second lag after pressing the button (despite the phone making the requisite noise) - and the photo will come out with a purple tint!
I phoned Nokia Care, and the advice I got was to check the colour balance settings on the camera software. Considering these consist of ‘normal’, ’sepia’, ‘greyscale’ and ‘negative’ - I don’t think so somehow… and how would that explain the lag? They’ll be phoning me back tomorrow after checking out any further reports from European users.
It’s clearly a software issue, and to be honest I just wanted to know when the next software version was out - but nevermind. I wonder how many people have actually contacted Nokia Care and reported this as a problem?
My new Nokia E71 doesn’t like my theme very much!
I also can’t post from the phone; the Nokia browser crashes straight away on loading the ‘New Post’ page, and while Opera Mini can load the page, it craps out on the draft auto-saving - it won’t do the autosave, so the script stops dead. Seeing as it disables the Publish button while it does this, I can’t get it to post. Ah well.
At least Opera Mini seems to do a better job of rendering the theme accurately; it’s small - very small - but it’s perfectly formed.
Speaking of the E71, I’ll post a review in a few days; I’ve not had it long, so I’m still discovering it’s nuances. I’ll spoil it a little though; it’s a gorgeous phone to hold and to behold, and I have the feeling that I’ll be the envy of some when I attend AmeCon 2008 this weekend.
I decided to take a look at the EHT Visits plugin to see what kinds of visitor numbers I’d been getting.
Turns out that this website’s really started to gain some traction: I’m up to the second page of Google results for ’super special awesome’, and there’s some referrals coming through from my Twitter page - while I have an iMac, I currently don’t have access to it, so the Safari user from the 28th certainly wasn’t me!
I had been considering changing this over to a Tumblelog, but now that I look at it, I don’t see that the effort is really worth it…
I’ve added this blog to Facebook, which means that all the posts will be made into individual notes.
Okay, so it means I don’t get comments in one place, but it does mean that this gets a bit more coverage…
I’ve just taken a quick look at Facebook’s new profile system and layout.
While it’s not going to offer a bucketload of new features, it certainly seems relatively intuitive. Adverts have taken a much more prominent position (in fact, they now have their own dedicated column on profile pages), but the design is now wider, meaning that more content can fit on the screen at any given time.
The ‘Boxes’ system is the biggest thing for me: the one thing that always gets on my nerves is finding said person’s wall on their profile page through all the applications they’ve added - you know, one application per silly little quiz, with a bucketload of adverts for other similar quizzes and apps surrounding this image-based result, desperate to get you to click through to another site or have data mined by yet another source. The fact that I no longer have to see these as soon as I click onto someone’s profile is a definite good thing - means I can get to the stuff I need faster.
Currently I can’t get Firefox 3 to load new pages on the new system, where Safari 3.1 Windows will load the pages perfectly. (EDIT: The problem seems to be sorted out. There was a problem with how Firefox handled re-written URLs, in that it was appending things instead of replacing them.)
It’s certainly more successful than the new version of Last.fm - but that’s for another post.
Check it out for yourself if you’re on Facebook: login, and then go to http://www.new.facebook.com. You can switch back to the original profile at any time, at least until this is rolled out permanently.
http://kotaku.com/5025018/final-fantasy-xiii-coming-to-xbox-360
… pwwwwwn.
I signed up for Google Apps For Your Domain through Dreamhost’s practically automated system - so now my email’s handled by Gmail, and I get access to things such as a personalised calendar, and Google Docs.
I put up a word-processing document for the Mystery Dungeon RPG and shared it amongst the four of us who are working on it, and this evening me and Avalix have been working together on the ideas sheet. It works really well! It updates live as changes are made by all parties, so it makes a really useful collaborative environment for working on this kind of stuff. Genuinely useful, and dead easy to work with.
I’ll have to remember this in future!
It’s become a theme of late!
Since my last post about Twitter, when it was working just perfectly, there’s been all kinds of problems.
Now, they’re down for maintenance to ‘prepare for the holiday’. I hope they’re ‘preparing’ by bringing everything back online!
Google have been ordered to hand over the logs of every video that’s ever been watched by any YouTube user, along with logs of every video that’s ever been deleted for any reason, to Viacom as part of their on-going copyright infringement lawsuit. According to the BBC News article on this, the viewing logs alone are 12 terabytes.
I hope that Google fight this with everything they have. Handing over this volume of data is unnecessary for the case in question. I guess the main fear here is that this may continue with the inevitable flood of similar cases that will be bought in the future - not because I’ve watched copyright-infringing movies on YouTube, but because it’s an infringement on basic privacy.