I have been running this blog for several years now and it was starting to show. In short upgrade after upgrade to wordpress had built up a ton of bloat making it fairly unusable for me and eventually led to the RSS feeds braking. To this end I have spent the last 2 days rebuilding the site from scratch and feel I have now reached the state of the existing site. Please let me know if there are any problems.
PS Wordpress limit XML imports to 7mb. Mine was 15mb. Now imagine how fun it is to trim a 15mb XML file - not good.
As much as I hate Sky, I hate ITV even more. And today is no exception with the announcement that ITV HD will be a Freesat exclusive. So rather than rolling out their channel to the largest established HD platform in the UK (Sky HD) they choose to go with the unproven service that just launched.
There is no technical need for it to be exclusive to Freesat. It all comes from the same satelite orbiting the Earth regardless of which service you sign up for. BBC HD which is available on both proves this. As far as I can see the only thing they need to do is maintain two EPG formats - thats it.
We all know how well it went the last time ITV were a platform holder (hint: horribly) and it looks like they are well on their way to screwing things up again.
Not that I watch anything on ITV.
Here is my progess so far. Been hitting it hard 
I have been saving this rant since last week due to the blog issues. I still think it’s relevant.
When I read this blog post by the BBC’s Darren Waters last week I started to get very angry. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it I can make a cool rational judgement - something I suggest Mr Waters tries.
“The BBC’s announcement of a deal with Nintendo to put the iPlayer’s streaming service on the console makes something of a mockery claims by Sony and Microsoft that their consoles are the true multimedia machines.”
I don’t care which side he is on but the fact is that he and the BBC should not be taking sides. It’s all very well to brag about how amazing your online video service will be on the Wii but it’s another thing to shit all over Nintendo’s competion. It’s called impartiality buddy.
Now to the techie meat of the issue. Any browser that supports the latest flash can play iPlayer content. So that’s why Wii and PS3 support is on the way - they have browsers. The catch is that this is the low quality version, the high(er) quality video must be downloaded. Unlike that BBC blogger I have a PC connected to a large screen and attempted to watch Doctor Who via the flash player this week. It looked horrendous. I couldn’t watch it. The same video I couldn’t watch will be what is offered on the Wii and a download option can never be implemented that platform.
People don’t mind watching YouTube videos on their PCs in tiny windows but when you stretch it out on a huge screen they will not be impressed.
Warning! This review of Mario Kart Wii might be considered pretentious, overwritten, unreadable and harmful to your health.
Bad Journalism! As written by Edge Magazine.
It’s Mario Kart people, not Bioshock.
[via Andy via IM]
Since the upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 this site seems ok from where you are looking but is rather messed up behind the scenes. It has been widely documented on the Wordpress forums that there is an issue with TinyMCE and the WYSIWYG interface. I have the issue and like many people with the same problem cannot resolve it using any of the methods described to me. XML-RPC in Mars Edit also seems to be broken. The only thing that seems to work is ScribeFire in Firefox. I’ll be using it until Wordpress is fixed. Let me know if there are any problems.
The Vista-capable lawsuit is finally yielding some facts about Nvidia’s record of horrendous driver support for Microsoft’s latest OS. This is of particular interest to me as last year I switched over to ATI after many months of problems with my Nvidia card under Vista (which worked flawlessly in XP). This caused me a lot of wasted time and my wallet was significantly lighter by the end of it. According to the newly released documents they were responsible for 479,000 crashes making up 29% of the total logged!
17.9% are Microsoft’s fault, those are the crashes that made me switch back to XP even after shelling out for the OS and new hardware for it.
If you are not already excited about the imminent release of GTA 4 I highly recommend you checkout Edge’s in depth interview with Sam Houser that covers the development of the entire series and where Rockstar are headed in the future.
The one thing that hasn’t been covered to date by the official PR channels are the multiplayer portions of the game. Aside from magazine leaks much of the detail is going to be discovered when the game ships and gets into people’s hands. Make no mistake about it, 16 players in Liberty City is a huge deal
Thinking back to first 2D GTA games which had network multiplayer on PC I remember how fun it was due to the variety of ways you could take the fight to your enemies. Shoot a rocket at their car, car jack them and back over the splayed out body and so much more. Then the GTA 3 trilogy came about sans multiplayer but that didn’t stop enterprising modders from trying to get some kind of network play going. Through all the bugs and glitches I played Multi Theft Auto with many a university house mate and everytime it was clear - this could be a gem of an experience if done properly by Rockstar.
I am more intrigued by this than the main game in a lot of ways. Crackdown, while a great co-op experience, was unfortunately limited to 2 players leaving me a few times having to pick between friends. The technical challenge involved in getting 16 players synced up in an open word environment must have been hard to overcome and I will be blown away if the online experience is smooth.
The secondary issue is the split player base. My friends who know a lot about games own Xbox 360s. My friends who are less well informed own PS3s (or intend to). From everything published the 360 version is looking to be the best in terms of performance, online play and exclusive downloadable content. Those three facts won’t make a damn bit of difference in the UK as GTA is associated with Playstation very strongly over here. As such I won’t be able to play with everyone I know.
Hopefully some fresh information will come out in the next few weeks. Hard to believe it’s only a month away. This time things will be different!
The time was right for a new venture so here it is, my new collaboration with Andy Griffiths is a site dedicated to Steam news and information that we like to call Steam Report.
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