James Titcumb

I hardly have time to play video games these days, but the few times between Freyja running me round, the dog licking me to death, and the odd bit of open source contributions, I like to play good games that I can engage in, but not have to pour my whole life into playing. Unfortunately due to my lifestyle, this rules out a multitude of games I’d like to play (or at least check out), such as MMORPGs that generally require a subscription – of which £5 a month normally I can’t even justify. Recently the only times the 360 has been powered up is when friends have come over and we’ve had a bit of a Call of Duty shoot-up. This review does come over a year after the original release, but I’m still only part way through playing it.

Nevertheless, when I do have some spare time I love sitting down and playing Fallout: New Vegas. I loved Fallout 3 and played it for hours. In fact I was still playing it when Hannah went into labour with Freyja and still loved it. I still haven’t played it as much as I’d like to and there’s still so much to explore and discover in the game, even though I’ve already completed it.

Fallout: New Vegas does not disappoint me. From the word go it was already better – the character creation sequence is 5 minutes or so rather than the lengthy drawn-out character creation process in Fallout 3. Much improved – thank you Bethesda for letting us just get on with playing the game.

You start the game dead (as good a place as any I guess?) and if you’re used to Fallout 3 everything will be pretty familiar. There are new additions such as temporary skill magazines (which confused me at first – why are my skills disappearing after a while? Don’t fret though, the permanent skill books are still there, but even harder to find!), and the ability to play in Hardcore mode. I’m not hardcore, so I didn’t do this, but from what I hear it makes you have to eat and drink and sleep just like a real person would have to do amongst other things. I can see that getting annoying after a while, but I suppose for those with plenty of time on their hands can become all part of the challenge. Good to see it’s optional though!

There are some monsters which make a comeback (such as the practically invincible-to-a-new-player Radscorpions – why are they so hard to kill?!) and some new breeds and varieties that will shake things up a bit. The whole storyline is obviously based around New Vegas and I spent quite some time not being anywhere near New Vegas, but trying to get there without being slain instantly by an angry swarm of Deathclaws at Quarry junction. Nevertheless the story takes a real engaging turn when you get to New Vegas and has been really gripping, typical of Bethesda games.

Overall I think the game is slightly more difficult (and I’m playing it in “casual” mode, where food/water/sleep etc. are not a strict requirement!) than Fallout 3. The storyline is just as strong strong, but disappointingly there are very few graphical improvements on Fallout 3. As soon as I complete this, I’ll be onto Skyrim to take in the delights of the new engine and the next TES game. However judging from my progress in New Vegas so far, I don’t think that’ll be for another year or two yet!

My overall rating for F:NV? I’d give Fallout 3 a 9 our of 10 and this is probably a 8 out of 10 due to only minor improvements, and much of the same stuff.

For some time now I’ve had a problem in Avant Window Navigator where Eclipse and Outlook (don’t ask…) were appearing as separate icons. The first answer here was pretty much the solution. I use the built-in awn launcher editor to manually add my launchers. However this means you cannot specify extra hidden fields such as how to match the Windows up. Thankfully this wasn’t too complex. I went into ~/.local/share/applications and created two files with these contents:

outlook.desktop:
[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Office
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec="/home/james/bin/outlook.sh"
Hidden=true
Icon=/home/james/.icons/outlook.png
Name=Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
StartupWMClass=OUTLOOK.EXE
Type=Application

eclipse-php.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Programming
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec="/opt/eclipse-php/eclipse-php"
Hidden=true
Icon=/opt/eclipse-php/eclipse.png
Name=Eclipse for PHP Developers
StartupWMClass=Eclipse for PHP Developers
Type=Application

The important part is the “StartupWMClass“, which (annoyingly) cannot be specified in the awn launcher configuration. To get the correct StartupWMClass value for your application, in a terminal write:

$ xprop | grep WM_CLASS
WM_CLASS(STRING) = "OUTLOOK.EXE", "Wine"
$

Then click on the window you are trying to find the StartupWMClass of. The one you want to use is the first one returned, OUTLOOK.EXE in this case. Then all you need to do is open ~/.local/share/applications in Nautilus, and drag the .desktop file down into awn where the “+” sign appears. BOOM! Now my little yellow blips appear next to the original launcher and means I don’t keep opening multiple instances of Outlook/Eclipse by mistake!

this is so how’s the android voice recognition work on writing a blog sites and I really hated on my phone. I’ve noticed the long sentences take a while to process this thing apple stock. and I still haven’t figured out how to do area jamaica. do androids credit I’ve noticed that I’m in love so there is quite a lot of background noise. this isn’t going to well so I’m going to hang out. I hope apple theory is better than this.

Yep – this morning I took and passed my first Zend Certified Engineer qualification. As with all the candidates, we are bound by a Non Disclosure Agreement, but my tip for anyone wanting to take the exam is to practise and revise more. I found the questions much trickier than I thought they were going to be (based off the PHP5 mock tests I had left), but rightfully so. Good times people!

Oh yes, by the way I know the link doesn’t work yet, but I’m informed it can take 24-48 hours for my Zend Yellow Pages entry to become live… It’s live now

Facebook often make changes and users backlash and threaten to boycott Facebook and all sorts. I actually sympathise with Facebook. It is difficult with so many users to make even small changes as people get so used to clicking in particular places to get certain information. Change is bad for the masses, but to evolve Facebook and keep it fresh, it must be done. The masses calm down after a week or so when they get used to the change and realise it’s actually quite useful.

Facebook’s latest change today makes sense from a design perspective – it looks nice and saves a tiny amount of fragile space. They have entirely removed the “Comment” button when commenting on statuses and photographs. I don’t have a problem with hitting enter to post a comment – but what about people who can’t press enter? Smartphones come to mind (I sometimes use the full Facebook site to get to event details as the native Android app doesn’t have much more than an event summary) and also users with disabilities. What about those who can’t use keyboards and have to use a mouse or other pointing device? How are they to hit enter? It’s only a brief musing and there are probably ways around it, but there is something comforting about having a button to click. In a web where we are trained to click on-screen buttons to make stuff happen, it seems odd to have to click a physical button to get an action to happen - despite me spending half my life in a Linux CLI hitting “Enter” to make things happen – I know, double-standards, right?

So what are your thoughts on this? Is it more or less useable? Should there still be a clickable link or button to submit the comment form? Do you care? Does it matter? Am I just fabricating rubbish to blog about because I’ve run out of things to talk about? Is that a three-headed monkey over there?

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