Trigger Finger

Perhaps three or four years ago, Steam was a swear word in my world. It was some buggy piece of bloatware that I was forced to use for some of my favourite games.

But for the last 2 years or so, I can only applaude valve for what they have done. Steam to me, is now THE model of what the future of desktop gaming should be modelled on. A great and very stable client that is a one stop shop for digital distribution of games. For the last 18 months to 2 years (is that when Team Fortress 2 came out?), whenever I want to buy a game for the PC I always check to see if it is available on Steam first.

Sure they are not always the cheapest (though if you are patient they often have great sales), but I can buy the game online in a few clicks, it starts downloading straight away and usually at a very decent speed. Then with the game downloaded, updates are delivered automatically pretty much for the lifetime of the game. The community integration and friends list makes it the ‘Xbox Live for the PC world.’ The best part of all is that after a format of my computer, I can just install Steam and instantly redownload the latest version of all my games without worrying about activation or other DRM nightmares.

Now, the Valve gods have truly pulled a masterstroke in announcing a Mac client to be released in April along with Mac versions of all their big titles such as Team Fortress, Half-Life, and Left for Dead series. Not only will they be native versions of games (no emulation yay!) they are fully cross compatibile with the PC versions meaning I can play in the same servers as my PC using buddies.

This is a great day for Mac gaming, and giant step for the future development of Mac as a gaming platform. I suspect they are the only big company out there with the balls to try and become the defacto ‘appstore for games’ before Apple does it. Having this kind of distribution and tools already developed for simultaneously developing mac and PC versions of games (OpenGL and DirectX versions are built simultaneously when devs checkin code) should not only mean a bright future for fans of Valve’s games, but their engine can then be used by other developers to bring cross platform goodness to all us Mac users.

And if you are still not convinced by Valve’s good intentions then read this:

“They are also adding a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge”

I would have happily rebought some of my favourite games for a mac version, but I don’t need to! As I own the games on the PC, I automatically own them on the Mac (this only applies to Valve’s games as far as I can tell).

My Mac Pro is licking its lips with anticipation for April already! Bravo Valve… Bravo!

I have spent quite some time on several occassions on here praising the awesomeness that is Windows Home Server. So it’s only fair that when the shit hits the fan, I spend a similar amount of time cursing the entire ancestoral history of everyone involved with Windows Home Server! continue reading »

In summary, an MMOFPS, on Xbox360 and Playstation 3, based in the Eve Online universe, and linked to the Eve Online MMORPG universe on the PC. Those playing Dust 514 fight for control of the planets within Eve, whilst those playing Eve Online continue battling over space.

The best bit…. the two games are linked to each other so Eve Online players can hire Dust 514 players to take planets for them to profit from within the Eve Online world.

Sheer frickin genius!

I am in the middle of writing a Snow Leopard preview piece, but with rumours of the latest build being the gold master, I have to say Apple’s ‘just works’ slogan can be thrown out of the window if this really is release code.

Two particular apps I can’t live without Xmarks for Safari and iStats Menu Meters are just two of a slew of applications that are broken, broken broken.

Xmarks for safari in particular is a troublesome one as it seems there is no fix is in sight. This post on the official support sight seems to suggest they have not yet even got a concept of how to make this essential Safari plugin work under Snow Leopard.

Input Managers are no longer supported on Snow Leopard – so most Safari plugins need to be re-written in some other way.
So guys – you will need to wait a while for XMarks to figure out an alternative way of doing the plugin

Among other apps to be causing me trouble this far are Cyberduck which crashes on startup, Mail which is refusing to send/receive mail on demand and iMovie which has crashed 3 times in 4 attempts to encode a project. Boot up times in 64bit mode are some 250% slower (30 seconds as opposed to 12 seconds for 32 bit mode) and a lot of niggly glitches have hit my Mac Pro 2009 Nehalem since Snow Leopard was clean installed onto the box.

Let us know of any apps you find that don’t work in Snow Leopard. The verdict so far, could this be Apple’s Vista?

Update: Here is a good post where many users are listing the apps that they find work or not work, very useful if you are thinking of taking the plunge.

Thanks to a nice bloke called ‘Magnus’ I have been made aware that the commenting system is b0rked with a capital 0. I did think it was strange that there was no comments on anything since April (when we changed to the new look). The problem is that you the commenter should be able to post without being registered, but you supply an email and answer a simple maths question. The problem is that you can’t see the question

Thanks to a nice bloke called ‘Magnus’ I have been made aware that the commenting system is b0rked with a capital 0. I did think it was strange that there was no comments on anything since April (when we changed to the new look). The problem is that you the commenter should be able to post without being registered, but you supply an email and answer a simple maths question. The problem is that you can’t see the maths question which makes providing the answer quite difficult

Soooo, I need to dig into the code and see what the problem is, but in the meantime, if you log in as a registered user you will be able to comment without issue. I have posted Magnus’s comment as myself for now (couldn’t not post it when it was so complimentary )

Thanks for your patience and thanks again Magnus for bringing it to my attention!

UPDATE: The problem is now fixed, but I have had to introduce some stronger spam criteria instead of the maths check. So if your comment doesn’t show up straight away, then it’s in the approval queue and I will approve the genuine comments as quickly as possible. As always the easiest way to hassle free commenting is to register and then most of the checks are removed because I have the added tool of a mighty banhammer

Sometimes you still get pleasant surprises when fishing around for a game to play like I did this week. I was firing up Steam to play Arma2 (heavily flawed genius just like Operation Flashpoint was I am sad to say) when a Steam promotion popped up offering Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War 2 for half-price. I ummmed and arrrred and then clicked buy.

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My real job is as a Systems Specialist running one of the world’s largest retail websites. It’s a huge operation which requires a knowledge of the whole scope of today’s typical enterprise technologies. The size of the environments and breadth of scope is what keeps me interested and enthusiastic as I typically get to play with anything and everything. However, from an operations perspective, one big problem is performance monitoring and getting the metrics you need, when you need them. In the past we had a huge bunch of hacks and scripts stacked up like a house of cards, just to get a few measly bits of performance data. I was yearning for a single, supported solution that could give us wide-ranging and ‘live’ performance data on any component of our environments, whilst not creating any kind of performance overhead. continue reading »

I am pretty stunned by this collection of imagery from shown in great detail at New Scientist. continue reading »

Despite looking so cool, calm and collected throughout the trial, each of the four accused were fined 930,000 big ones and 12 months of ‘grip the soap hard’ time.

I can’t understand it myself, the defence should have been so simple. Challenge the prosecution to find any torrent on TPB that couldn’t be located by google. Case closed your honour!