I thought I wouldn't bother with the third Star Wars movie. I really did. Well no, not really; it took me exactly five minutes to snap out of it and stop lying to myself: I was going to watch the movie in the theater even though I knew it's going to suck, much like Matrix Revolutions or Terminator 3. I can't help myself. It retrospect it amuses me that I'm willing to spend money on a purely mainstream product I know there's no chance I'll enjoy, but then - it's Star Wars, if I didn't go I'd feel left out...

Anyway, bottom line - I did go and did see it in the theaters. And it did not suck. Not even remotely as much as I feared it would. Now admittedly I've read the various "it doesn't suck" quotes on the 'net, but being my usual sceptic self I had to see for myself. I wouldn't call it terrific, though; it has two major problems without which it would probably have been the best in the series: crappy dialogues that seem to have been written by a 6-year old (particularly the various Padme vs Anakin scenes), and Hayden Christensen. Not even Ewan McGregor, whom I hold in very high regard since Big Fish, was able to keep me from noticing how poorly the dialogue is written, and not even the really terrific action scenes and utterly astounding visuals could keep the grimace off my face whenever Anakin came on-screen. Add to that an anti-climaxic Darth Vader experience and what you have is a pretty decent movie that could've been the biggest thing since, well, Lord of the Rings. A crying shame.

I had a completely opposite experience with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: I was never a big fan of the series (yes, I read all of them) and had very low expectations. When the trailer came out I was plesently surprised to find that I thoroughly enjoyed it and laughed quite a bit, so it was with mixed feelings that I went to see it in the theater. Suffice to say that when the lights came on for the half-time break I was quite surprised: 45 minutes had gone by, and I didn't even notice. This movie is funny as hell! It's well-written, well-acted and even well-designed (visually); there are a lot of subtle jokes (as opposed to the incoherent in-jokes I originally expected) and this just made everything even better. I'm also very happy that the authors of this movie didn't give in to the fanboys, which means the authors did have some artistic license - I actually prefer the movie to the book this way. So in summary: this movie rocks. Watch it.

I had reasonably high expectations for Sin City: I like dark films and the trailer seemed very nifty. I had no idea what the movie was about though (never read the comic, nor could be bothered with previews) so I had no idea what I was getting into when I went to watch it. All in all I dub this film "high quality garbage." The production values are as high as it gets, but it doesn't stop the movie from being generic comic-based film-noir. The plot lines are overly simplistic and what the movie lacks in story-line it makes up for in insane amounts of gratuituous violence. When I made this argument a friend of mine challenged it, saying that I enjoyed Kill Bill immensely despite the level of violence which was at least as high; now don't get me wrong - I'm not squeamish and enjoy a good violence scene at least as much as the next guy, but the difference is that where violence in Kill Bill is intentionally portrayed as ludicrous and works to advance a simplistic plot (not to mention homage to '70s Hong Kong action flics), the violence in Sin City is not portrayed as ludicrous at all and works mostly to take the place of a nonexistant plot. It may work in the context of a comic, but I've never been a comic fan, so for me it merely detracts from a quality production. That said, the acting is top notch and the graphic design is absolutely beautiful, but as a whole Sin City is one movie I'm probably not going to watch again.

Finally I have a recommendation to make: grab Oldboy from the nearest Blockbuster and watch it. It's a Korean movie and I'm not sure how to best define it, but it's combination violent, disturbing and thought-provoking, with incredible acting, visual design and music to boot. Heartily recommended. Also, if you get the time, check out Kung Fu Hustle - I think it's in the theaters (in Israel) right now, or will be soon.

Tidbit time:

• Raymond has an über-interesting post on the potential security issues with C's strncpy, including an interesting bit of history.
• Senthil Kumar's found out an interesting detail regarding the equality (==) operator in .NET System.String.
• GAIM joins in on Google's Summer of Code project. I just wish I were a student living in the States with enough free time...
• Remember the old Amiga game Cannon Fodder? Well I found this promitional (?) video for the CD-32 version of Cannon Fodder - so funny it's disturbing.
• A pretty interesting post at The Register claims Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system was a complete flop as far as security's concerned, but it marked an interesting shift in the company (and therefore the industry).
• I don't find myself completely disagreeing with Roy Osherove that often, but his his take on The Grudge is completely opposite my own: the movie was not scary at all, for the most part very poorly acted and I came out of the theater feeling as though I've just wasted 37 NIS (the price for a preordered movie ticket in Israel, approximately $9 US - way too high anyway) and two hours of my life. On the other hand, I've found White Noise quite appealing; it didn't scare me proper (only System Shock 2's managed to do that in recent memory), but it did leave me unsettled, which is also pretty unusual. Probably the only good horror/thriller I've seen in ages is 2002's The Ring. I openly admit to not having seen the original Japanese version, nor have I seen the supposedly great The Sixth Sense. Working on it.

Paniq came out with a new album a couple of weeks ago, the second track from which is called Elektronische Musik (can be downloaded from here). It's in German though, so make sure you read the lyrics.

Despite my lately-discovered tendency for open-source evangelism, I constantly use proprietary software in my day-to-day computer exploits. Here's a list of a few of the more useful ones:

The Thunderbird nightly build for yesterday seems to kick quite a bit of ass. It's just as stable as the 1.0.2 stable build, has a useful spellchecker, works like a charm with the BiDi Mail UI extension and feels over-all very solid. Can't wait for the official 1.1, so I could recommend it to other people.

Yes, CSS2 is very cool, but apparently way more problematic than I originally thought. It seems even minor details are the cause of much consternation, giving headaches to programmers and designers alike.

The whole thing started when I noticed that the blog title ("banner") was not displayed properly on my grandfather's machine (Internet Explorer 6); it appeared as though the text class wasn't handled properly. Give or take 20 minutes later I found out that I accidentally used a class="banner" declaration where in the CSS it was defined as A.Banner. Apparently Mozilla was misbehaving in ignoring the case. At first I thought Microsoft finally got something right with Internet Explorer 6, then figured I might as well delve a little deeper into it and figure out which behaviour is right.

Enter the CSS2 specifications, specifically section 4.1.3 Characters and case, where it is clearly stated that CSS is assumed to be case-insensitive "except for the parts that are not under the control of CSS". This a very subtle distinction, which apparently goes on to include the "... values of the HTML attributes "id" and "class"".

Now, seeing that I love to be standards-compliant, I naturally included the correct <!DOCTYPE> declaration in the beginning of my blog template, putting Internet Explorer in standards-compliant mode; unfortunately I did not read the CSS2 specifications carefully enough and therefore did not properly understand the case-sensitivity issue.

Therefore I will quote what I perceive is a very good piece of advice from Zen and the Art of Website Maintenance:

Last but not least, let me touch on the issue of case sensitivity. CSS selectors are not, by definition, case-sensitive. However, if the page language within which they are used is case-sensitive, then they become case-sensitive. HTML is not case-sensitive [HTML 4.01 is, though, so take care! -TG], so CSS is not when used within it. But XHTML and XML are case-sensitive and so, therefore, is any CSS used within it. Given this, the only sensible choice is to regard all CSS as case-sensitive: this will save you from considerable pain in the future.

And to sum the whole thing up: yes, Microsoft seem to have done something right for a change, and Mozilla does indeed misbehave (unless, which is just as likely, I've missed another subtle but important issue...)

One of the features carried over from my first website (amazingly still available) is a digital rendition of the ingame music from the Amiga version of Defender of the Crown. Back in the year 2000 I had this to say:

Defender of the Crown is a computer game by Cinemaware, originally released in 1986 for the Commodore Amiga and later ported to every major platform (including the PC, C64, ZX80, NES and Atari ST). The game is branded an "interactive movie" and was one of the earliest Amiga games released. It was used by many Amiga enthusiasts to demonstrate the abilities of the computer, and with good reason: the game had beautifully drawn graphics by James D. Sachs and never-before experienced atmosphere.

One of the most prominent aspects of the game is its music. I've heard the game's music throughout my childhood as I went to a neighbouring Amiga owner and played this and many other wonderful Amiga games. The music was composed by Jim Cuomo, who now pursues a career as a musician.

The music here is recorded from the Amiga version via an Amiga emulator, specifically Fellow 0.3.3. Due to an emulator handicap the WAV files produced had some bugs which I fixed using Sound Forge 4.0. The tunes are now almost identical to the original Amiga ones (as verified using my A500+), depsite a somewhat shoddy MP3 conversion using MusicMatch 4.0.

The tunes provided are distributed with permission from Jim Cuomo, who was also gracious enough to send me one of his CDs entitled Gameplay, which contains excellent revisited tunes from several computer games he had composed music for. He also permitted me to post the Defender of the Crown tunes from the same CD - they will be added in a few days.

I am still, unfortunately, missing the Love theme (rescuing the princess) and the victory/loss themes, the latter of which will be posted as soon as I finish working on them.

At the time free hosts were usually limited to 5 or 10mb per user, and my having no desire to pay for storage meant it took more than a few days to post the Gameplay sound snippets - more like 5 years. Also, scratch the comments about Fellow 0.3.3 and MusicMatch 4.0; I've re-recorded some of the tunes from my A500+ (softkick'ed to 1.3) and re-encoded everything with OGG Vorbis (which means stereo [in the new recordings] and much higher quality for just slightly larger files - well worth it in my opinion). When I find the time, all themes will be re-recorded from a proper A1000 (512k, kick 1.0) through a more modern soundcard with lower SNR. I also pledge to re-rip and re-encode the GamePlay tracks properly.

Avast! Files off ye starboard bow!

In-game recordings:

• Game Title (1.30mb, recorded from Amiga)
• Meeting Robin (752kb, recorded from Amiga)
• Holding a Tournament (356kb, emulated)
• Raiding a Castle (516kb, emulated)
• The Garrison (617kb, emulated)
• Love Theme (to be added)
• Victory Theme (to be added)
• Loss Theme (to be added)

GamePlay CD tracks:

• Castlekeep (The Garrison) (1.82mb)
• Dashing (Raiding a Castle) (2.18mb)
• Rebecca (Love Theme) (2.07mb)
• Victory (1.72mb)

I've updated the blog's design to something a little more to my taste. I hope you like it, and would very much welcome comments!

I've been mucking about for a few hours with dasBlog themes, CSS2 and relevant technologies and learned a great deal. CSS2 is so damn cool! Back in the day - what, four years ago? - I used to have a bunch of perl scripts to do the style/content seperation for me utilizing a bunch of macros. Nowadays it's not only a great deal easier to seperate the content, CSS2 also helpes you avoid a lot of HTML hacking and HTML bloat: no more hacking tables where design elements go. It kicks ass!

That said, there are a few things that are nontrivial with CSS2. For example, check out the blog title; notice how the horizontal line stops next to the text. The border itself is easy enough (see next section though), but it took me a little while to figure out how to make it 'stop'. Eventually I settled for the following hack:

1. A <div> section acts a container for the entire blog title and contains two additional <div> sections
2. Both sections have the exact same content. The first section maintains the appropriate flow and layout for the page but is not itself visible (it has style="visibility: hidden")
3. The second section floats over the entire container (style="float: left")
4. This is where it gets interesting. The lower part of the second section must cover the lower border of the container; originally I did this with a <br&rt; tag, but as I suspected this proved problematic when the client text size was changed. Eventually I settled for an additional padding-bottom: 2px; style for the second section, which solved the issue nicely.
5. Finally we want the horizontal border to stop before it hits the text; the solution couldn't be simpler: just add padding-right: npx (in my case I used 5) and you're good to go.

Next stage is to find out how to gradient the border when it gets close to the cell. Also, the whole thing might've been easier with a table and a couple of columns, but not nearly as fun

Finally, I have to rant: Microsoft IE programmers are a bunch of shitcocks. Even in standard-compliant mode (why in the hell do I have to, as an author, worry about IE modes anyway? Why isn't it standards-compliant to begin with?) the damn thing just doesn't process CSS properly. In my case it turns out that dotted borders simply do not work in Internet Explorer (except for Mac IE version 5.5 or something bizarre of the sort); if you're reading this post using Internet Explorer you're probably seeing a solid border around the post itself. This is NOT the correct behavior. IE displays dashed borders instead of dotted ones; this looked aweful, so I used a couple of hacks to get IE to display solid borders instead. And this is just one of myriad bugs. I wonder if they'll get fixed in IE7, but would advocate a move to Firefox regardless.

I am not a regular reader of Jackie Goldstein's blog, but I make sure to catch up every now and then; today I encountered an interesting post in which he discusses a long-overdue improvement to ADO.NET: the ability to specify a batch size for a DataAdapter.Update statement. One of the stupidest shortcomings of ADO.NET 1.0 and 1.1 was that it would make a round-trip for each changed row, which in the case of large updates or over high-latency networks results in horrible performance.

Apparently ADO.NET 2.0 includes the ability to specifiy the batch size, however there are some things worth knowing about this behaviour (specifically, less commands issued to the database do not necessarily equate less round-trips on the network; also, as Jackey puts it, "creating batches of different commands every time would wreak havoc on the query plan cache." Jackie goes on to link to a post in Pablo Castro's (the ADO.NET Program Manager) blog, which explains these issues in a little more detail.

An interesting read, certainly.

First, if you're up for a decent laugh, go ahead and read A Gamers' Manifesto. You may have noticed the odd discrepency between this post's title and that article's; it's intentional - I do not presume to represent the gamer crowd as a whole, and for several very good reasons:

1. I'm about as mainstream as the guy next door who never seems to shave, or shower, or do anything other than moan and occasionally groan something that sounds oddly like "braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains." I certainly enjoy an occasional hit as much as the next guy (UT2k4 anyone?), but other than that I'm definitely not your run-of-the-mill Israeli gamer. For one, I actually buy my games, which appears to be a particular oddity that even my absolutely closest friends can't fathom. Second, I often play older games (sometimes on their native platforms) because I enjoy them and do not mind their being old or technically outdated. Third, I consistently despise games heralded as breakthroughs by many of my peers; and lastly, I find myself playing less and less games and wondering why, exactly, that is. I used to play practically every game out there; there are few games from the '90s I haven't played extensively or at least taken for a spin.
2. Gamers, even intelligent ones, look for different things in different games. I openly declare the original Doom to be one of the greatest games I've ever played. It's certainly mindless, quite repetitive and lacks any manner of story or plot. It doesn't matter. I've spent countless hours (must be about over a month in total) playing this particular title because it was so thoroughly satisfying. In recent years, however, I've heard people blaming Doom for starting a "dangerous trend in computer gaming" of mindless action games with no plot. Hate to break this to you: mindless action games were out there way before Doom (the arguably first computer game ever, Space War, was one). Besides, mindless action is definitely good for the soul. Still, it doesn't stop me from enjoying the more thought-inducing genres, which only goes to prove my point: people (especially gamers) enjoy things differently.

That said, I have several comments about A Gamers' Manifesto. Let's go by the numbers:

1. I agree with the gist of the thing (tough, smart AI), but not with the particular example. Doom III was meant to retain Doom's simple, mind-numbing but gratifying gameplay, and does so extremely well. Playing Doom III was a religious experience for me: everything I loved about Doom - the suspense, the heaps of enemies, the challenging gameplay, the gameplay mechanics - is there. Giving the Lost Souls a proper AI would be like giving George W. Bush brains; it's great in theory, but it probably won't make the world a better place.
2. With this I cannot possibly diagree. Games have been getting less and less diverse for years, and the studios that create the few exceptions usually get financially whacked: where are Bullfrog and Lionhead Studios these days? Do you recall the financial fiasco that befell DreamWorks' completely revolutionary The Neverhood, or the lackluster sales of the completely original Loom?
   Customers are obviously responsible, but it's also a result of the astounding costs involved in creating a top title these days. Twenty years ago you could've been a 15-year old mashing on his C64 and be pretty well off, but nowadays you need heaps of people and money to create even an astoundingly bad title like Chrome. I firmly believe, however, that tools will get progressively better, allowing less people to make more detailed, more immersive games in less time and effort; it's just a question of time. When that happens, the ball will be in our (the gamers') hand again: will we buy the creative titles? Will we reward creative persons and game studios? Time will tell.
3. This is an interesting throwback to the time when the in-game graphics were so bad you had to tantalize your customers' imagination with interesting background stories, or beautifully drawn imagery on the packaging (recall Defender for the Atari 2600?). I think concept art has its place, but it's not good enough. Screenshots don't cut it nowadays either; I distinctly recall being thoroughly unimpressed with the Doom 3 screenshots and mesmerized by Half Life 2's, and Doom 3 turned out to be the more graphically impressive of the two (HL2 is no slouch, though!).
4. The image made me laugh my ass off, and though I do not play adult games I find myself more than a little disturbed by the analogy (which is closer to reality than I originally thought.)
5. It should come as no surprise that men do not know how to cater to women. I'm a guy, I do not presume to understand women, and wouldn't know the first thing about what they'd be looking for in a computer game. My immediate thoughts are "something cute," which is the exact stereotype and which only goes to show that game designers are probably equally in the dark.
6. I couldn't possibly agree more. Save points are OUT, quicksave is IN. Still, I'd like to add that having quicksave/load available is no excuse for poor gameplay, and actually having to use it every few minutes equals shitty gameplay (Half Life again).
7. Finally someone put it into words. Loading screens are bad, however I'll add that while I would definitely prefer not having to wait at all, as long as I'm kept waiting at least make it worthwhile. Half Life 2 had 30+ second loading times per 2-10 minutes of gameplay (reminiscent of the first game), while Doom 3 would take the same time to load an area you would play anywhere between 15 and 60 minutes, which is much more acceptable.
8. Woah, I'm glad I'm not a football fan.
9. If I had a nickle for every time a bug in a game forced me out of the "obvious" game space and into an invisible barrier, I would be one rich monkey. Too bad I don't.
10. YES! This is the one thing that's been driving me insane these last few years. Artifically linear gameplay was one of the things that annoyed me most about both Max Payne, Half Life 2 and even Painkiller; it drives me insane not to be able to walk into a room or a corridor "just because." Half Life 2's electronic barriers were better in that respect, but certainly not the solution. God damnit, if you want to trap me in a long corridor, at least don't pretend there are locked rooms and find some more reasonable way to make it plausible.
11. The voice acting and cinematics comments are spot-on. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a classic example of this; it could've been one of the best games of 2003 had it not been for astoundingly bad voice acting ("I saw my father turn to sand!") and horrible camera controls.
12. While I agree with the authors' frustration, I can't see any other solution. Some of their comments are certinaly acceptable (particularly the RPG triggers), but for example I consider ammo starvation much less an issue than most of my fellow gamers: although I haven't played Resident Evil for the GameCube, many single-player first person shooters - Doom 3 and Serious Sam for example - require (at least in their higher difficult settings) careful expenditure of ammunition. I consider this part of the challenge, not an artificial way to inflate difficulty. That I reserve to just throwing 50% or 100% more monsters at you in the higher difficulty setting, as is done in most games. I think it's a lot more challenging to have to use the lesser weaponry where possible against tougher monsters so you have enough ammo for the big guys. As for instant-faliure levels, I have two words for you: Half, and Life.
13. I completely disagree. There should be the option to unlock everything, but starting with low-class weaponry is part of the FPS tradition (as well as a direct cause-and-effect for gameplay), and unlocking content (or upgrading your car) is a huge part of the fun for certain types of games. Remedy's excellent Death Rally, or the astounding 2D shooter Tyrian, would be a great deal less fun if you could just start with the toughest ship.
14. Oh, I don't know. I love crates.
15. I'm increasingly worried about intellectual property issues, in particular software and concept-based patents. I was not aware of the effect patents have on gaming, so this is something of an eye-opener for me. I'll be sure to keep updated on this subject.
16. For that matter, stop with the multiplayer bullshit. I don't particularly like multiplayer, and would definitely prefer to pay less for most games and just not get the multiplayer capabilities.
17. Again, I'm not sure I agree. As long as you have a DVD drive and MPEG-decoding capabilities, since the console is stuck in your living room connected to your TV anyway it might as well play DVDs. Or audio CDs. But I'd rather the other, nonnatural features (PC-oriented features) be left out of the initial product, and either added later or just left to 3rd parties. It's obvious that Microsoft and Sony want their respective platforms to be the centerpiece of the living room, but I'm not interested in paying for it since I'm not going to be using it.
18. I don't play any massively multiplayer games, so I'm not very familiar with the subject - but I don't like the sound of it.
19. Unlike most people I don't have issues with jumping puzzles in first person shooters, providing the controls are adequate. That is part of the problem, a lot of games did that really, very badly (again Half Life comes to mind) but a lot of others did it just fine - proof of that is that I do not recall jumping puzzles that did not suck, and I've played a lot more FPSs than I can recall jumping puzzles. (Did that make any sense?)
20. Buggre that for a larke. (tm)

That said, I much prefer PC gaming to console gaming; I do not get along well with the incresingly complicated controllers (still stuck in the D-pad+A/B buttons era), I hate the low resolution and crappy displays (good televisions are getting cheaper, but still prohibitively expensive) and the whole set up doesn't work for me. However, I must face the harsh reality: I spent the equaivalent of $1500 on my last machine (sans monitor!), and after 1.5 years I can already feel the hardware getting dated. Gaming PCs are ridiculously expensive and short-lived. I'll probably spend the money for my next two PCs on a next-gen platform and a really great HDTV-capable display and be done with it.