From Bottleneck.org
France 2010
I got back from a week away in France recently, I took a few photographs, and also recorded a couple of walks around the area in the Google Map below.
I Have Never Voted Tory, But...
As I write this, it looks likely that the UK is going to be in hung parliament territory at this general election, with the Conservatives having the largest number of seats.
What this means is that, with no party with an outright majority, the current Prime Minister (Gordon Brown, Labour) has the right to remain in office until it's clear that he cannot command a majority. Of course, one would normally expect him, if he tried to do so, to be voted down on the Queen's speech, or to suffer a vote of no confidence, at which point the Queen would normally invite the party with the most seats (the Conservatives) to try to form a government.
The way out, should he wish to remain, is to spend the next few days trying to do deals with other parties (the Liberal Democrats and/or others) to have them agree to support his government. Given how far short of the required number of seats for a majority Labour are falling, this would be most likely to take the form of a coalition government, with representatives from both Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the cabinet.
One of the conditions that the Liberal Democrats would impose on such an arrangement is certain to be electoral reform. We could expect to see a referendum on electoral reform over the coming months, and then the dissolution of parliament again, probably within 18 months to two years, followed by another general election under the new electoral rules, some form of proportional representation.
I believe the proportional representation is a fairer system than the current first-passed-the-post system, and that any situation in which the United Kingdom has a wider range of parties who can have a genuine influence on the country is a good one. I want to get away from politics that are about "I'm not the other party, so if you don't like them you must vote for me" and on to politics where parties actually have to be elected on their own issues.
So you might think I'd be in favour of a Labour-Liberal Democrat pact that forms a coalition government and brings through electoral reform. In many ways, I am - but not right now. I've come to the conclusion, and I hate to say it, that a minority Conservative government would be the best thing for the country right now.
The problem is that the nation, while it hasn't fully endorsed the Conservative Party, has certainly sent a message that they no longer want Gordon Brown in charge of the country. My fear is that, should Labour manage to hold on to power by forming a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the people of this country will feel cheated. They will feel that they have no real influence over the outcome of the elections, that sly double-dealing by politicians has taken place to stifle the opinion of the electorate. In that case, I fear that, even after electoral reform, the country en masse will turn to the Conservatives, believing that still stronger tactical voting is the only way to guarantee the outcome they want (Brown out). Those who saw hope in the idea of voting for a third party this time will abandon that idea as a failed experiment.
And what of that electoral reform? What happens at the referendum? The Conservative message will be clear: "Look how Labour and the Liberal Democrats conspired to overturn your election result, to force themselves back in to power despite the clear wishes of the country. Look at how now they have forced their way back in to power, and realising that they cannot win an election under the current system, they're trying to change the system to their advantage" I suspect that would be a message that would be believed by a lot of frustrated and angry voters who thought that they had already evicted Labour once.
With a minority Conservative government, there is sufficient opposition in the house to keep in check the worst of the Conservative ideas and to keep the Conservative government continually under scrutiny. I hope that it will lead to more debate, and more possibility for parties to find common grounds that provide a reasonable compromise that works for the majority of the country. Ultimately, with a minority government the next general election will probably have to occur much sooner than another five years, which limits the degree of impact the Conservative government could have. Perhaps by the time we get to that point, the Liberal Democrats and Labour party will have been able to explain the case for electoral reform to a more sympathetic ear, the ear of a nation that's got the result it wanted, and by then may not be any happier with it than they were with Labour.
So, I've never voted Tory, but... I hope that they form a minority government, in the hope that in turn leads to us getting a second chance to vote for real change.
Far Cry 2
One of a number of PC games I got for Christmas last year was Far Cry 2. I quite enjoyed the original Far Cry game, so it seemed natural enough to go for Far Cry 2 and stretch my graphics card a little. I recently completed the game, which took a hell of a long time really; it's a big game, with a huge "open-ended" world to explore. Overall, I really did enjoy the game, but in some ways frustrating, so I thought I'd share my thoughts with you.
1. It's not Far Cry 2
It's essentially a completely different game to the original Far Cry, which can come as a bit of a surprise when you've bought it because it's called "Far Cry 2". It's still a good game, and I still enjoyed it, it's just not what I expected.
Okay, so both are set in large scale worlds which are graphics-rich, and they're both essentially first-person shooters with optional sneaking. The original Far Cry, though, essentially walked you through a linear storyline, whereas Far Cry 2 provides a whole range of missions, only some of which advance you through the main plot.
It took a little time to figure out which missions are going to advance you through the plot. I tend to play one plot-driven game at a time, and work through it to completion, after which it sits to one side and gets picked up for a bit more fun or side exploration at a future time when I'm less absorbed in it. Which brings me on to the next point.
2. When you're done, you're done
Yup, once you've completed the main plot line of the game, you can't dip back into the map in single player mode and carry on exploring, driving around, trying out the hang-glider, perfoming the various side missions you might have missed, nothing. Game over. Either start again or load a save game, both of which pop you back into the plot line. Given the huge range of the game, this is disappointing. While it might not seem logically consistent with the plot to be able to continue past the end of the game, there's no reason there couldn't be a "free time" mode to let you pop back in and carry on exploring as though you were at a point in time prior to the end of the game. As it is, if you want to "do everything", then it will take forever to complete the main plot line.
Speaking of exploring...
3. It's a real pain to travel across the map
The map is huge, and littered with checkpoints and enemies. That means that getting between any two points on the map means fighting multiple battles. All before you actually get to the place you were trying to get to in order to, er, have the big battle that forms your mission. So it takes forever to get anywhere, and as a result it takes forever to complete missions, meaning it takes forever to advance the plot, and forever to complete the game. All because you're spending all your time driving a little way down the road, fighting out a checkpoint, healing, recovering ammo, driving a bit further... oh look, another checkpoint!
Then, you reach your destination and complete your mission. Excellent. Now you just need to go and get another mission. Which, if you want a mission that will actually advance the plot line, means going back to where you came from. Through all those checkpoints. This very quickly becomes repetitive and frustrating.
The bus system does offer some help, assuming you're near one of the five bus stops per map, and so is your target; generally they're not. The river system is a bit quieter than the road, but still has enemies, is slower, and not every target is anywhere near a river.
Oh and by the way, if you clean out a checkpoint, then run in to a roaming technical that shoots you up a couple of turns down the road, you might think it's a good idea to pop back to that cleaned out checkpoint for the health pack that you saw there. Bad idea. Once you're a couple of turns down the road, the checkpoint is now suddenly repopulated with bad guys.
Which leads us to...
4. It's repetitive 5. It's repetitive 6. It's repetitive 7. It's repetitive
Travel is dull and repetitive and consists of clearing out checkpoints every few minutes. The missions are essentially all the same and can all be completed by just shooting all the bad guys in an area. The format of every mission is "go to A (with inherent multiple checkpoints en route), kill all the bad guys, pick something up, go to B (checkpoints), kill all the bad guys, do something with the thing you picked up." Unless you choose to follow your buddy's add-on mission as well, in which case you can include "Go to C (checkpoints), kill all the bad guys that are trying to kill your buddy."
Then after all that, you can go back to the place you started (checkpoints, checkpoints, checkpoints) and get another, identical mission.
8. Malaria is bad
Ok, so that's pretty self-evident, but I mean in the context of the game.
You have malaria, which means every 30-40 minutes of real-time play, your vision goes all blurry and you have to take a malaria pill before you can really function again. This I didn't mind particularly, it rarely occurred in the middle of a fire-fight and I thought it added an element of challenge.
The problem is, your pill bottle only has a few malaria pills in it. To top them up, you need to go and perform a mission for someone who has some medicine to give you. You know what that means? No? See items 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 above. Of course this mission doesn't advance the plot.
9. You're stuck with the same weapons all game
This is untrue, but here's the problem. Weapons you pick up from enemies are much more unreliable and jam more often, so you don't really want to bother. Weapons you buy from gun shops using diamonds are much more reliable and can always be replaced free of charge at a weapon shop, but the weapons shop has a limited range of weapons available. You can increase the range of weapons on offer by doing missions for the weapons dealer. Which brings us back to items 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 again.
This wasn't a major problem - I found the three weapons I was happy with, upgraded them as much as possible and stuck with them through the game. It's just a bit of a shame.
10. Diamonds are forever (difficult to find)
Finding diamond cases out on the map is tricky. Even when you're in the locality of one, they can be well protected with bad guys, and in an obscure location, access to which requires extreme lateral thinking. Once you've dealt with all of that, you're rewarded with anything between one and three diamonds.
Bear in mind that for most missions you'll earn a reward of between 10 and 40 diamonds, so soon you have loads of diamonds that you can't actually spend on anything (see 9 above), and you quickly realise that life's way too short to bother with finding diamonds out there on the map.
11. What was the plot again?
I'm trying to avoid spoilers here, so I'll try to keep my comments general. I was disappointed in the plot itself. I found it hard to follow, most of the time. I felt it took me in directions with which I didn't feel particularly sympathetic. It became obvious that on the rare occasion you were presented with a choice in the main plot line, it didn't actually make any difference to the final outcome. Even the final choice of the game, which I expected to take me to two different end points for the plot actually both result in the same ending. Which wasn't an ending I particularly cared about by that point in the game.
Also, wouldn't it have been nice if your choices of side or extra missions, or the way in which you chose to persue them, or the degree to which you helped or used the help of your buddies, or the extent to which you opted for APR versus UFLL missions actually made a difference to the plot choices and ultimate outcome of the story?
Egypt
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| I've sorted out, and put online, my photographs from Egypt which were taken on my holiday there over the Easter fortnight this year. | 
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Overcast in Liverpool
Last weekend I got out with my camera and took some photographs on an overcast day in Liverpool. I'd never actually been to Liverpool before, it seemed to be an excellent city to wander around with a camera, and they're doing amazing things on the water front to make it a nice place to be.
Microsoft-bashing
Microsoft has been forced by the EU to offer a choice of browsers to users. Through blindly following a link somebody posted on Twitter the other day, I ended up at the BBC's Have Your Say page on this subject. Reading this page is a mistake for any rational human being, as you'll quickly discover if you spend any time reading the amusing collection of the most stupid comments which have been collected together on the spEak You're bRanes (sic) website.
So, having got to the Have Your Say page related to Microsoft offering a browser choice, I was very quickly infuriated by the degree of ignorant Microsoft-bashing and free-software smugness on display.
I feel before I continue that I should declare any bias. I am not a Microsoft "fanboy", and I do have some idea what I'm talking about. I am an IT professional, and I've been involved with computers as long as I can remember. My primary technical skills lie much more in Unix and Linux systems than in anything to do with Windows or Microsoft, and this very website is managed by me on a Linux server. I have no particular pro- or anti- Microsoft or Linux/Free Software stance.
Having said that, I use Windows 7 64bit at home with Internet Explorer 8 as my only installed browser. This is a conscious, informed and reasoned choice on my part, and I believe I'm qualified to make it. So let's take a look at why I am supposed to be wrong about this.
The arguments put forward on the Have Your Say page seem to fall into a number of camps. So let's look at each of these, and let me explain why it doesn't work for me.
1. Free browsers and operating systems are the best, I can't believe you all still use Windows
- "How quaint. You mean there are still people who use Windows?"
Grow up and stop being so smug about it. If you want to use free software, then by all means do, but if you can't offer any reasoned argument for why your choice is better, then don't expect anyone to take you seriously, or indeed ever find you anything other than an utterly smug cock. There's really nothing to answer in this point.
2. Microsoft products are too expensive
- "I'd be happier using MS if they charged a reasonable amount for their software. They are far too expensive."
Fair enough, I've got no problem with the idea that you might not think their software is good value for money. I happen to think it is good (enough) value for money. Here's what I get with my current version of Windows 7:
- An easy-to-use operating system
- Out-of-the-box support for a vast array of hardware
- A web browser
- A gaming platform
- Basic tools for producing documents
- A web server
- A media centre including PVR capability
- DVD authoring software
- An email client
- ... well, lots of stuff
Of course all of that is available for free on Linux. Well, except the gaming platform and the "easy to use" parts. I just find it all works together a lot easier and more simply with Windows, and I'm prepared to pay for that, just as Microsoft are at liberty to charge for it. As a society we seem to be increasingly assuming that we have a right to service without having any expectation of needing to pay for it.
3. Internet Explorer / Microsoft products are unstable and crash all the time
- "I installed it and it crashed my PC, which required a rebuild to resolve the problem. Nice one Microsoft, I see you still peddle third rate flakey applications that dont work"
I just have to disagree. I keep my systems updated with the latest patches, and I very, very rarely see Internet Explorer crash or Windows blue-screen, and normally when I do, it's an error in third-party software or drivers that cause it (e.g. Flash, or in a device driver). Now I will accept that the software and OS should be resilient to the effects of badly-written third party software, but I believe that Microsoft are as close as anybody to this, and that it simply does not happen often enough for it to concern me (and believe it or not, I've seen Linux panic enough times as well!)
In general, when I find someone telling me that "Internet Explorer crashes all the time" I find a myriad of third party tool bars, aborted installations and upgrades, or other general user fuckwittery which has made their machine an unstable pile. Have you all ever considered that it might be you who's breaking your PCs?
4. Internet Explorer is utterly riddled with security holes and your identity and money will be stolen if you use it
- "as someone who used to do Internet Banking using IE6, I am lucky I didn't get hacked"
Yup, it's all down to luck. Nothing to do with there being nothing particularly unsafe about the browser you were using. Where is the evidence of all these potential identity-stealing vulnerabilities you're worried about anyway?
I've used Internet Explorer for my online banking (and everything else) for years and guess what - I've never been hacked. (Please do not take this as a challenge!) I keep up-to-date anti-virus on my machine. I keep it patched with the latest updates. I don't download and install ropey software from all over the place (and I think this is the key mistake you might all be making out there!) just stuff that I believe I can trust. I occasionally run the free version of Ad-Aware across my PC just to feel good about myself.
A variant of this is "Using a less popular Browser reduces the risk of being attacked"
Well, you're quite right, people do tend to target the more popular software. I'd go on telling everyone to use the browser you use, since it's less popular. Erm.
5. Internet Explorer is slow
- IE is pretty slow and only used when I need to check something works in it
If you say so. It's fast enough for me, and I don't tend to find that page rendering times are the limiting factor in my enjoyment of the web. Flash is a bit slow, though, and my broadband might be a bit slow sometimes, too.
6. Other browsers have better features built in or available as add-ons
- "I find AdBlock Plus absolutely invaluable ... other useful little touches too like spellcheck in web comment forms"
Well done, this is the only argument that I believe has any real weight behind it. As it happens, Internet Explorer has all the features I particularly care about. I just don't find the adverts that offensive, and to be honest if we all start blocking them it begs the question of what other horrible means the site designers will have to come up with to raise revenue.
I don't believe that, if you look objectively at the products, there's anything fundamentally bad or evil about Microsoft products. It really boils down to this: Microsoft bashing is fashionable.
So there we have it - that's why I'm happy enough with Windows and Internet Explorer. It works for me, it performs the functions I need it to, it's sufficiently simple that I can stop being an IT professional when I get home and just use my PC. What's so wrong with that?
News Feeds
I've added an RSS feed showing new pages on this site to the menus on the left of the web site - I've been meaning to do it for some time, but have only just found a sensible-ish way to do it. It's still a bit rough and ready, mind!
I've also added a bit to the About Me page listing the particular news feeds to which I subscribe, some of you might also find some of them interesting. Here they are again:
| Feed | Web Site |
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