Today was the 11th September, 9/11 – not a good day for more than one reason as most people could attest. It was an unusual day at work, mainly because hardly anyone was there! Most of our production staff had gone to a big defence show in the Docklands, London aside from me and a few others. In general I was hoping for a Friday in which I could do a lot of work for once. Every Friday normally goes tits up for me. Well today NOTHING could go wrong because there were hardly any production staff in the first place…

Well the peace didn’t last long when two mates texted me saying that all hell had broken loose in Harrow, as there was a 9/11 protest outside Harrow Mosque, which I believe is in the final stages of construction.

Upon checking various websites I realised that this protest wouldn’t be a dozen or so people waving placards around screaming at the top of their voice, it was rather serious.

The English Defence League (EDL) have already been protesting in Luton and Birmingham recently, mainly because they are opposed to Islamic Extremism. They believe the religion to be extreme in it’s own right. Today they were due to arrive at this mosque in large numbers.

On the other hand, the UAF (Unite Against Fascism) were there in even greater numbers to rally support. Now it’s fair to say that the EDL wouldn’t have stood a chance in Harrow. I’ve lived here all my life, and the town at present couldn’t be more bloody ethnically diverse if it tried. We have all pretty much got along for many years now, although tensions are high just outside Harrow, in my home town of Wealdstone – the very place I was trying to reach today so I could go home and just eat after a hard day at work with no money for food! In short, the UAF didn’t need to go looking for support – it came to them.

I sat in the 140 bus counting the number of hot chicks I saw as it passed through a busier than normal Harrow Town centre and then right outside Debenhams got stuck in a typical traffic jam. The mosque was 6mins away down the road, so I ended up getting off the bus and walking down – I had to get through the protest just to reach my town.

It was madness and it was clear that there were young kids from outer boroughs pretty much looking for trouble. I had already made my mind up that if anyone would cause trouble it would be most of the hyper-charged young Muslim kids who were here for reasons not related to the protest.

My iPhone along with Twitter kept me abreast of the news here as people were tweeting all over the shop. ControlB was a star and kept regular updates on twitter. I popped into Skippers for a bite as I was starved. The place was getting colossal amounts of business today and the chap behind the counter was all over the place. Nomnomochipsnomonom! Christmas had come early for this shop.

I realised that I still had to get home and by now the UAF led protesters had gathered in size. Most watching from afar, whilst the central group occupied the main road despite community leaders asking them to allow vehicles through. Chants of "Whose Streets? Our Streets!" rang out.

It was now 5pm, the time at which the EDL were due to arrive. I believe I spotted Tony McNulty, Harrow East MP although I could have been wrong. There were well over 2000+ people here, it was a mixed race affair for the most part.

A group of ‘outsiders’ did arrive, weather they were the EDL members is unknown but they were kept away by the riot police and prevented from moving forward. At one point a large crowd of muslim youngsters charged up the Bridge road but I never saw it. No idea what that was about. There were clashes with the police though and bottles and bricks were sadly thrown. I wasn’t too pleased – so much for the ‘peaceful’ protest.

These clashes can be viewed in two ways, were the kids goaded by the ‘outsiders’. Pictures taken at JessHurd.com seem to suggest so, then again why were people ‘armed’ with bottles of bleach amongst other thngs?

I had been joking around with the police just moments before as I spotted a young asian copper who was about 4ft tall, she looked like Yoda looking ultra cute in her helmet setup.

One thing was clear, the EDL really didn’t stand a chance of coming to Harrow and getting their point across. However having said that I do get a distinct feeling that on the day, the EDL may have got the last ‘laugh’. Our town came to a standstill and the riled up kids clashed with the riot police – all this without the EDL having even been there.

I finally reached Wealdstone and did some shopping for food before walking home with my face firmly planted on the iPhone as I read the latest goings on via Twitter. A lot of thicko’s over Twitter kept referring to ‘RIOTS IN HARROW’. Last time I checked, the term RIOT didn’t refer to a couple of people chasing another bunch of people about. All in all, this wasn’t the Friday I was expecting – yet again.

Other Articles…
http://throughthescarydoor.blogspot.com/2009/09/nazi-scum-humiliated-in-harrow.html
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/09/english-defence-league-humiliated-in.html
http://www.uaf.org.uk/news.asp?choice=90912
http://www.demotix.com/news/unite-against-fascism-demonstration-harrow-london-0

So you can imagine my joy when I saw a transforming 2GB USB drive on the interwebs, in the guise of Ravage himself! Sadly it’ll be available come September 2009. So far it’s only available for pre-order stateside from BigBadToyStore for $42.99. I’m sure some UK retailer will snap it up too. Do want!

Back in July 2008 I decided to try out a little known application for the iPhone by the name of Twinkle, developed by Tapulous. I was instantly hooked as it used the geo-location functionality of the phone to let you know when people are nearby. You could search for users within a specific kilometer radius around you and chat to them, in addition you could enlarge or shrink that search radius to suit. Seeing other twitter users who were within range of you and chatting away was horribly addictive.

Twinkle was basically a superb (and still is) location aware chat client that allows you to upload photos to your Twitter account as well as update your status. Addictiveness knows no boundaries and I was pretty much ‘Twinkling’ on the way to work whilst on the bus, as well as doing the same whilst in the office at work and then on the way home. I’d be constantly ‘chatting’ to complete strangers via 140 character long messages, similar to SMS texts if you will.

Behind all of this was Twitter. In its simplest form, it is a website where you can broadcast short messages up to 140 characters max – to anyone who has signed up to receive them (known as a follower). In turn you can also become a ‘follower’ to other twitters. Your followers for instance could be say ten of your best friends or if you’re a well known celebrity like Stephen Fry, 190,539 crazed fans. Twitter started off fast and is gaining momentum and a frightening pace. Balls to Myspace and the Facebook’s of today, they’re nothing by comparison.

Twitter went mainstream fairly recently on February 5th 2009 when a US Airbus Flight 1549 hit some birds and lost power in both engines. The plane slammed into New York’s Hudson River, with everyone on board surviving. The most incredible thing was that there was a person on-board the flight using Twitter as his prime means of reaching the outside world. How he managed to remain calm and type away amongst the turbulence is another thing altogether.

As far as the UK is concerned Twitter is everywhere over here. Two celebrities have helped its popularity soar over the recent months. Stephen Fry as well as BBC presenter Jonathan Ross who was recently suspended for various reasons I shall not bother getting into. The tabloids got wind of Mr.Ross utilising Twitter to talk to his fans and Twitter received a great deal of national press coverage. As for Mr.Fry, well he got stuck in a lift and decided to ‘tweet’ some photos of himself in the lift with various strangers. In Ross’s first chat show following his suspension Fry discussed Twitter with Ross and that was enough to get the thing even more publicity.

The premise of Twitter is as described by the website.
"Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

With that statement in mind, you may think that this is another Facebook – it isn’t in the slightest, it is so much more. Everyone uses the service in their own unique way. You could add your latest tweet as "I’m taking a dump", or simply "I’m at a Phil Collins concert" (with an attached photo of the stage area. You could use it to keep in touch with friends because its usage is so much more flexible than plain old SMS texts in that a complete stranger can see what you’re talking to your friends about and simply join in the conversation.

I had a great time during my lunch hour a week ago chatting to a guy in Darwin, Australia because he had seen a screen shot of my jailbroken iPhone 3G that I had uploaded and wanted to do similar things with his phone.

Twitter is far from a fad, it is what you want it to be. In the right hands it can be a time killer, a news source, a business tool, a way to keep in touch with distant or even close friends – whatever you wish. There are a lot of people out there who will simply follow the trend of criticising yet another internet phenomenon without actually trying it.

1. Try it! – Before you bash the thing, give it a shot. Sit back and search for friends or celebs and generally see what people are doing.

2. You don’t have to use the website – There are heaps of programs out there that making Twittering easy. They’ll either sit at the side of your screen and appear with a single click, or you could see if you can get one of the many Twitter style apps for your phone. There are quite a few on the Apple iPhone platform. I use Tweetie for twittering and I use it 90% of the time. Other Twitter applications consist of TweetDeck , Twitterfeed , Twhirl and Twitterific .

3. Confused? – Don’t be. I still get confused about certain things and I have been using it solidly for a couple of weeks now. You aren’t alone so don’t be afraid to simply put out a tweet saying "How does <insert feature> work?".

4. Use it however you like – I use Twitter to publish my little daily thoughts, odd moments during the day when only a photo can express things or I will comment on blog articles published by friends. My overall goal is for my Twitter feed to detail my blog activities and just general day to day ramblings.

5. Twitter on Mobile Phones – If you have a suitable powerful smartphone, then look for Twitter applications on it. The iPhone 3G excels in this area with its GPS functionality enabling you to search for other users around you and so forth. Tweetie , Twitterfon and Twitterific are the most popular applications for the iPhone. All mid-high end phones in 2009 should have applications that utilise Twitter in some form. Don’t ignore them!

Finally I have a bone to pick with someone. See back in July 2008 when I first discovered Twinkle, I was MOCKED by my good mate PR who said things like "Oh if I want to chat to people I pick up the HOUSE PHONE" and so forth. So it highly amuses me that he was HE who just recently signed up to the service and then I followed suit and re-signed up myself!

So for those unfortunate souls who wish to follow me, my Twitter ID is Kainz_UK.

1.21 jigawatts!

Lately I’ve been pondering about broadband in the UK and it’s present progression. For years now UK Internet service providers (ISP’s) have been under almost constant fire, by it’s customers, watchdog associations and of course the government trying to kerb illegal file sharing. Sod all that though, what really scares me is the state of our infrastructure.

We are constantly being bombarded with news of faster speeds from our two most common internet providers, Virgin Media with their 50Mbits/sec pilot scheme, as well as BT barking on about their 100Mbit/sec trials in Kent, presumably where you have to have your PC situated right next to the exchange…

Whilst this news grabs the headlines and makes gamers, and downloaders glee with delight, it makes me rather concerned. If this really does happen ISP’s will be struggling to cope with demand. Read More

We’re not alone!

NASA has scheduled a media teleconference Wednesday, May 14, at 1 p.m. EDT (17:00 GMT for us Uk’ers), to announce the discovery of an object in our Galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years.

Taken from the NASA.gov website:

"A video file about the discovery will air on NASA Television on May 14. NASA TV is carried on an MPEG-2 digital signal accessed via satellite AMC-6, at 72 degrees west longitude, transponder 17C, 4040 MHz, vertical polarization. NASA TV is available in Alaska and Hawaii on AMC-7 at 137 degrees west longitude, transponder 18C, at 4060 MHz, horizontal polarization."

See? I knew it! Aliens really do exist and they’ve found em!

Silence from Creative after customer revolt

Picture the following scenario. Imagine if you had gone out and purchased a Creative Labs Soundblaster of some kind, there’s loads of them around but the most popular ones would be their Audigy and XFI series cards. Now imagine smiling when you saw that ‘Vista Compatible’ logo on the box, meaning that the card would work on Microsoft Vista. So you purchase it, take it home and install it into your PC. You would then either:

• Install the drivers from the included CD
• OR simply get and install the latest drivers from the Creative website

You would now have a fully working card right? You should be able to use all its capabilities given that it is ‘Vista Compatible’. What would you do if you found out that it wasn’t really ‘Vista Compatible’ ? This is what thousands of creative soundcard owners have been asking themselves for years now. Creative’s soundcard drivers have always been laughably poor, even back when I used them on my Audigy 2 in Windows XP, but it turns out that their new XFI drivers are just as bad. There are no decent working drivers in Vista at present I am led to believe. Because the Creative ‘Soundblaster’ moniker is such a powerful one – your average joe public just assumes that the product adds high quality sound to your PC, and will then go out and purchase one without knowing all this.

A driver modder known as Daniel_K decided to come up with his own modified drivers that restored functionality to these cards – everyone was happy, well except for Creative. One would think that they’d embrace his skills and maybe hire him, but instead they decided to do him for copyright issues! Daniel_K was warned on the Creative forums to cease activity, and what then followed was a backlash that I have never seen before. The forums were filled with thousands of unhappy gamers/soundblaster owners ranting and mocking Creative for ignorance. For a corporate company as big as Creative, they should be able to afford driver engineers to develop the best drivers possible but no. Instead they just rehash and rebox card after card to make even more money – and it works.

Since Windows Vista arrived on the scene, driver vendors have struggled to come up with decent functionality with their drivers as they have to work with new API’s they aren’t used to. As I have stated in the past, Creative were one of those companies that ended up admitting that their Audigy 2 and XFI drivers were poor in the first place. Nebula Electronics who made the once extremely popular Nebula TV Tuners have all but gone silent on customers with regards to their Vista drivers since the release of the operating system in 2007. Despite it having the best TV software around, I have stopped using mine, and so has PR because they are just incomplete and flaky in Vista for well over a year now. Even their forums have dried up with no Nebula feedback.

Back to Creative though. I am a huge admirer of them and their products, well mainly their portable music and peripherals rather than their soundcards, which I have stated have always been top notch build and spec wise, but useless driver wise. They started the whole thing off, they brought music to the very early PC’s, just simple beeps from a soundchip embedded on a bit of PCB back in early 1987. It all went pear shaped as they branched out and kept rehashing soundcards to keep a foothold on the market. However the tide has changed, and they are suffering.

Built in sound capabilities on PC motherboards have already reached the point where they require little system resources and sound superb. Other soundcard manufacturers have been rising over the past year and are building far superior products. Auzentech, Asus, Razer to name a few, and they all work fine in Vista. There is no doubt that Creative are about to feel a backlash that they’re not used to. Lately they have failed to deliver a good sucessor to the Creative Zen Vision:M – their once flagship audio player. They have now seemingly focused on developing peripherals for the Apple iPod – their very own competitors. If this wasn’t enough to be concerned about, I would also be concerned about this, not that it means much to the company as a whole.

Yesterday, Creative via one of their forum moderators stated that they have listened to the feedback (feedback? you sure?) and decided to work with Daniel_K in supporting their driver development programme. Is this a case of way too little, too late? To be truthful, I hope he tells them to shove it. I truly respect, and admire what you’ve done Mr.K. I gave up on Creative cards a long time ago and have never had an XFI so I have no idea how bad it’s drivers were, but poor Creative drivers was why I went out and bought an Auzentech Meridian, a truly awesome bit of kit. Good luck with Creative.

You can read Daniel_K’s full story Here.
Full Creative/Daniel_K story Here.

It’s that time of the month again

WordPress 2.5 arrived rather quietly overnight last night so it’s time to look into upgrading this blog again. For those who aren’t clued up on how big a upgrade this is take a look-see at the Screencast and the screenshots of the new dashboard interface.

A list of 2.5 compatibile plugins can be found Here. So next weekend I shall attempt to upgrade this blog, with possibly disastrous results. I may need to move to the latest K2 build at the same time I predict. Hoorah!

It’s been a long time coming!

Welcome back! http://interplay.com says it all. The awesome Californian outfit, responsible for some of the best old school games during the 90′s have returned. Amongst their massive titles was of course the Star Trek games – Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Judgement Rites.

Another classic title, was their Descent series – regarded by many as having some of the best AI code, even by todays standards. Descent is what I really remember about Interplay, and why I first fell in love with their development style. Then came the incredible MDK, and Earthworm Jim to name another batch of top selling titles. Even bigger than all this was the late 90′s title Fallout, a title set in a future post-apocalptic world. Even bigger than every sodding game above was the colossal Freepsace series. Yum yum!

Welcome back! (again!) I now worship your glowy logo and website.