I recently bought a small (30GB) solid state drive for my Media PC, with the intention of moving the large hard-drive data repository onto a network drive (more on that at a later data), making it even quieter.

My primary drive (250GB) was split into two partitions, a 30GB one for Windows, and the rest for data. Since I’d only used filled about half of that Windows partition, I had plenty of room for expansion, and thought it would be easy to shift the contents across to the new SSD.

As it turned out, this partition was about 100MB larger than the size of the SSD, which broke EVERY CLONE TOOL I KNEW. I spent a while trying to track down someone else who had done the same this as me, but as expected, the majority were always moving from to larger disks, a much easier task.

In the end, I did find a tool called XXCLONE which did the job perfectly. What makes this particular app unique is that it is more of a specialised file-copy tool than a block-for-block cloning program. So it just moves the files across (including all of the fiddly windows system and boot ones), makes the disk bootable and it’s job done.

I figured if I put something up here that contains all the terms I used in my failed searches, I may be able to save someone else trying to do the same thing a couple of frustrating hours.

A fascinating article about deaf children in Nicaragua independently developing their own (complex) sign language.

Found in a vendor’s code:
uint32 hoffTime;

It’s always HoffTime

When I was age 2, I caught mumps and as a result, I permanently lost all hearing in my left ear.

The good: I can block out all external noise at night by sleeping with my right side to the pillow.
The bad: I have zero audio placement ability, stereo effects and surround sound are lost on me, and when I wear headphones I have to configure winamp to force output in mono.
The ugly: There is a history of gradual hearing loss on both sides of my family, and I’ve only got one remaining ear to last me for the next 70-odd years. Since I am extremely partial to the odd bit of Metal indulgence, I’m pretty sure it won’t last that long without some outside assistance.

Thus, I present my new audiophonic weapon:

They’re fairly comfortable, and I don’t look like too much of a idiot with them in. They claim to attenuate by about 20db (reducing power to 0.01% of the original) without losing any of the range or detail. I’ve got Meshuggah coming up on Friday, so let’s see if they will save me or ruin the show…

I’m utterly hypnotized and unable to look away…

I use Excel quite a lot at work, and one thing which really annoys me is that I cannot easily compare two spreadsheets side by side with two monitors. Excel defaults to opening up a new xls file inside the already running instance.

I recently discovered two ways around this problem:

Method one:
You can open up a new instance of Excel by holding down the CTRL button for about a second as you click the launch icon. Then open the spreadsheet file up in whichever instance you want to use.

Method two:
Open an explorer window, then go to Tools->Folder Options.
Move to the File Types tab and select the XLS entry.
Click Advanced, then highlight the Open action, and click Edit.
In here, change the “Application used to perform action” to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\EXCEL.EXE" /e "%1" (or whatever you excel.exe location is.
Then uncheck the “Use DDE” box, and save.

Now, when you open an xls file, it will force a new instance of Excel to launch instead of opening it up in an already-running one.

If you use non-xls files, you’ll need to make this change to the file extensions of those as well.

This is apparently a standard feature in Excel 2007.

One long weekend later, and I’ve completed the game. The remaining chapters after all the driving bits were fairly varied, so I’ll go through them in order. Or at least, the order in which I remember them.

Sandtraps started off annoying the hell out of me. I described my disgust at the user-created jumping puzzles in the previous post, and the first portion of this chapter seemed to consist entirely of these. I eventually got so bored at shuffling slowly across the endless antlion-infested beaches that I ended up just sprinting to the next major landmass to save my sanity.

Gaining the abilily, shortly after this, to control your own antlion squadron did a lot towards making up for the earlier pain. Hurling a pheremone pod into a room and backing away as you heard the screams was extremely satisfying.

It’s a pity the other chapters featuring squad combat were so poor. I strongly suspect that the poor rebels got the same intelligence logic as the antlions. Games like GRAW offer finely tuned squad skirmish combat. Done properly, it’s a subtle blend of lateral thinking and extreme violence. HL2’s implementation however, made me spend most of the time (when I wasn’t being blocked from leaving rooms by my own team) aiming at the farthest corner of the map and telling my crack team to stand in the corner and don’t touch anything. It was far more effective to just deal with the situation solo, and use my squad as meatshields.

It was at around this point in the game when the concessions made to the ham-fisted controller user fell down. Aim-assist seemed either off, or innefective when trying to use the laser-rockets to take out the strider-walkers. I went from waltzing through wave after wave of useless enemies to being well and truly punished by the multiple-strider sections. The subtle aiming adjustments were not possible, and it was a frustrating grind trying to get past that whole section.

Fortunately, much like the antlions saved the pain of Sandtraps and Nova Prospect chapters, along came the super gravity gun to make up for the previous frustration. Of all the horrible verbs I’ve performed on games’ goons in my time (shoot, bludgeon, crush, decapitate), I think “fling” is the most satisfying.

Finally, we get to the ending. I finally understand the disappointment that others expressed at the time it came out. However, because I bought this as part of a box-set, I knew that there were going to be lots of unanswered questions that would stretch into HL2 episodes 1 and 2. Nonethless, a few tiny nuggets of clarification would have been welcomed with open arms.

All in all, I don’t understand the fuss about HL2. There were some nice ideas and concepts and some excellent atmospherics, but overall I think the game felt like a serious of gimmicks glued together without much thought towards storytelling.

Perhaps I’m missing the point, but I can’t help but feel that HL’s story is about as compelling as Halo’s. I’m sure if you read all the surrounding material, accompanying fiction and fansites, a lovely little universe will build up. From the perspective of someone who’s only played through the games, I’m not seeing anything more than faceless-goon-with-gun.

I will be continuing on to episodes 1 and 2, and of course Portal, and hopefully some more pieces of the puzzle will fall into place.

Many years ago, after trying out Counter-Strike, I decided that Steam was bad. I despise applications having “launcher” services which do very little other than constantly hog my resources and provide me with a barrage of adverts every time I accidentally click on the system tray.

The few times since then that I’ve seen updated versions have done little to dissuade my view. The downside to this is that without Steam, I have been unable to play the game that many have called the best of all time: Half-Life 2.

However, the recent release of The Orange Box on xbox360 has finally allowed me to rejoin a story in which I last immersed myself over five years ago.

Judging by chapter numbers, I think I’m about half-way through so far, having just started the “SandTraps” chapter. I’ll look back at what I’ve said here once I’ve finished to see if my opinion changes.

The Good:
The mood and atmosphere are excellent. Much like the first game, experiencing the story from Freeman’s perspective, without cut-scenes, is extremely effective. Only Bioshock comes to mind as having done this better. The first 15 minutes of exploring the dystopic City 17 are especially compelling.

Environmental interactivity is satisfying, although very occasionally veers into “Hey look! We have physics!” territory. Using flaming barrels to take out the ceiling leeches was a great example, the brick see-saw less so.

The level of challenge seems about right for me, perhaps a touch easy. You seem to be able to get away with a fair amount of stupidity before being punished. This may simply be a matter of having made the console version easier. I’ve certainly noticed the auto-aim is very generous.

The Bad
I’ve now been wandering around the world for a good seven hours since waking up dazed and confused on a train to dystopia-land. I know Dr Freeman is a man of few words, but he really only needs to ask six crucial ones to any other character in the game: “What the hell is going on?” I’m happy to accept that not everyone knows the big picture, but I’d appreciate someone explaining to poor Gordon exactly why cyclopic naked aliens are wandering around the world without a word said by anyone.

Gordon Freeman has no legs. I know this game is several years old, but it irritates me in every fps I play and this gets no exceptions. We live in a world where we can render millions of polygons in incredible detail. Please, please can I have just a few of them to relieve the suffering paraplegic fictional scientists of the world.

However, fortunately for our hero, he seems to be able to control most mechanical things with the power of his mind. This is good, because I seem to be spending much more time driving in a set of Mad Max-esque water and land buggies than I do walking around. I guess it’s not really a problem in itself, but it does lead me neatly on to my next gripe…

The Ugly
…Horrible, abhorrent, apocalyptically poor driving controls. I assume that the controls were this bad on the PC version, and I guess that if a keyboard and mouse is all you have to work with, you do the best you can. However, the xbox pad is a dream with driving games. There’s a standard setup that every title adheres to, and with a few exceptions, the controls you learnt in one title will map to every other one.

Now, I understand that the car is being driven telepathically by our limb-challenged protagonist, but there is NO excuse for cramming all the controls onto a single thumbstick. It would have been far better to map forwards/backwards onto the triggers. Additionally, it appears as though the direction you turn is almost completely independent of the direction you chose on the stick. It appears as though lazy design has resulted in some kind of “if (goingbackwards) then left=right” logic, rather than actually simulating wheels.

I don’t mind that this is a driving adventure with fps mini-games, but for heaven’s sake at least make the driving bit bearable.

And finally: jumping puzzles. If you thought this was going to be a complaint about the precarious bridge-crossing section, you’d be wrong. I thought that was quite enjoyable and made more sense than HL1’s “jump over this arbitrary hanging boxes” sections. No, what annoyed me was the problems that had to be solved by using the grav gun (or your own Prof. Xavier level telekenis) to build little steps that can be ascended. On each one of these I spend a good 10 minutes on trying to stack boxes on top of each other without the top one consistenly falling off. He might have an Phd in Theoretical Physics from MIT, but Gordon Freeman’s grasp of basic forces is spectacularly poor.

I’ll come back to this after I’ve finished the second section of the game and see if anything has improved.

Here’s another interesting article from Joel Spolsky. It really highlights the nightmarish complexity of maintaining compatibility with older versions of software.

After a hard day at work, I enjoy unwinding with a glass of wine and the subtle musical fusion of 8-bit-Jpop-electro-jazz-swing. Samples and awesome videos on their myspace page.