Orbus

I just finished reading Orbus, by Neal Asher.
Orbus is the third Spatterjay novel, although none if this takes place on that planet. Orbus is an Old Captain, a long time infectee of the Spatterjay virus, which turns biological creatures into super tough, effectively immortal creatures. The longer you have been infected, the tougher you are, and Orbus has been infected for a very long time. He has to be careful around normal people, shaking hands alone is fraught with danger.
But then, there's also a Prador, Vrell who was more recently infected by the virus, but Prador are inherently tough, being huge alien crab-like creatures.
The story takes us quickly into the no-mans land between the Human Polity and the Prador Kingdom, where the warships of each side are not permitted, and the rest of the novel is one long violent spatterfest. Brilliant, and thoroughly enjoyable violence, mostly involving the spattering of giant crabs, but the Polity war-drone Sniper also takes a massive beating.
New technology originating from the Jain, and further fleshing out of Prador politics and history adds interest and deeper flavour than the spatterfest would suggest, and the pace of events leaves you constantly turning pages.
This is now my favourite Spatterjay novel, even over the excellent The Skinner.

Blogging Less

You may have noticed. I've been writing here less. I blame my slate. I just spend much less time in front of the PC now. Hopefully, as I'm getting used to having it, I'll feel less like I want to use it all the time, and more like it's just available whenever I need. If that makes sense. The games are such massive time wasters, but I think at some point the novelty will wear off and I'll go back to more constructive things. I should look more into Cocoa Touch, and perhaps write something for the iPad, but then no idea has particularly inspired me yet.

iPad Review

I've now spent a week with my 64Gb WiFi iPad. I'm just going to cover here what I think is important, so if you want more information there are plenty of detailed reviews around.

Standout:
Casual browsing of the web on this device from the couch is simply awesome. The finger navigation is so natural, fluid and much more relaxed than mouse usage and clicking. The screen in general really is gorgeous.

Good:
Playing free and very inexpensive games that rely on touch and accelerometer use is great fun. It's a whole new experience that is so different from a DS Lite or a PS3 or a PC. This will probably wear off, but it's novel and just plain fun.
The typing in landscape mode is really quite good, but I'm still getting used to the autocorrect and prediction. You really have to look at the keys though because there is no feedback for what you are pressing. I wouldn't want to type a long blog post on it yet but maybe after more practice it will be ok. It's really good for short messages. Facebook is brilliant on this device and I don't think it even needs an App. Reading news is great, especially via the new "The Australian" app, which is excellent. The AirVideo app is brilliant, because it streams DivX and Xvid video from my PC into the iPad, and can also convert and add to iTunes for loading in iPad format. Battery life is closer to a phone than a laptop which is excellent. I use the iPad stand from Apple to browse news while eating breakfast. That's sweet.

Bad:
While I love the look and feel of the brushed aluminium back, it scratches really easily. I've put an Invisible Shield on it today to protect it. This should also help with grip, as it is a little slippery, and you do NOT want this to slide off your lap onto the floor. Ever. Safari just isn't as customisable as Firefox, and I miss that, especially not being able to block ads. The App Store is bloody slow. Apple needs to boost their servers. It's bad in iTunes, it's bad on iPad. Also, iTunes on PC is unintuitive, slow and hangs. It needs a complete rewrite.

Yet to see:
The glass screen seems really robust, and some reviews have shown it is actually hard to scratch, so I may hold off putting the Invisible shield on the front, until I see what the shield surface is like on the back after a week.
I'm yet to see what the long term reading of iBooks is like. The text seems perfectly fine to me, good, high resolution, and the screen brightness is nicely adjustable to conditions. I'm yet to see if my eyes suffer after reading for 90 minutes. Be good to see actual recent books for sale in iBooks too.

Android 2.2

Looks like Android 2.2 (FroYo, for Frozen Yoghurt) is looking really good. Not only is there a massive increase in speed, but this is the clincher for me: it can provide a Wi-Fi hotspot. On Friday, I should get a Wi-Fi only iPad, and didn't bother getting 3G because I just wouldn't use it often enough to justify the extra cost, and then having to pay for an extra data contract. No. However, if my next phone is Android 2.2 capable, I can just tether it to the phone's connection via Wi-Fi. That's just friggin awesome.
Today Dad showed me his brand new HTC Desire and damn, it's sweet. With FroYo, I could easily be swayed in this direction for the next phone. For now though, my Nokia E61 struggles on. Maybe it will throw a rod or something soon...

Day of the Triffids

Just read Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham, and even read a print from 1960 complete with pages falling out.
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. Written in the 1951, it hasn't really aged. The only thing that dates it is the very reserved English prose and conversation, which you really don't find in more modern novels. Given the situation, some of the good British stiff upper lip is almost amusing.
I found it interesting that the Triffids really aren't the centrepiece of the novel, and really, could have been replaced with something else, and have had the same effect. The main concept of the novel is that all but a very small proportion of the population of the world go blind one night, whilst watching strange green lights in the sky, possibly some sort of comet. The novel is really about how those remaining deal with the situation, and struggle to survive amidst lack of power and food etc, but also the political and ideological struggles and conflict as they come to terms with how best to move on and try to survive as a species.
Much of it was really quite disturbing, with wide spread suicide, murder, plague, and generally everything going to hell. Then of course, you throw Triffids into the mix, and it really spices things up. Triffids are plants that can uproot and walk around, but also have a deadly stinger on the end of a long lash sprouting from their tops. Not so bad if you can see them coming, but then they also become a much larger menace as they are free to multiply, and humans are not.
Well worth the read.

T-Hub Thumping.

I've been having a look at the Telstra T-Hub as a friend of mine mentioned it. It is essentially a touch screen phone base station, but it communicates over wifi with your network. Actually, it has to use wifi, there's no hard line connection and it only works with a Telstra HomeLine or broadband connection. It doesn't use VOIP, which I find really weird, but clearly Telstra are trying to get people back onto its copper lines. That's not going to work. Copper lines are dead except for DSL, and with any luck a fibre network will get rid of those.
The actual device looks like a half decent touch screen, the same as the Tabbee, only Telstra have crippled it. OK, it does web surfing via Opera, and does Youtube and a few other tricks. It's $300 and you have to use a Telstra connection. Vomit. Get a cheaper broadband connection with a wifi router, use VOIP and get a decent tablet.

Portal is teh Awesome.

Portal is teh awesome. And now it's free. So download before it's too late. I just played the first 18 levels or so. Brilliant.

iPad AU Bend Over Pricing Factor: Zero.

Excellent. Thanks Apple. Recently I suggested $AUD 895 a zero Bend Over Factor for the 64Gb iPad in Australia. It will be $879. It's actually lower than my estimate, but I was being conservative on the shipping front, so if I had chosen $23 for shipping, I would have had it spot on.
I guess I'll be pre-ordering tomorrow then.

[update - done. 64Gb wifi iPad in the pipeline]

[update - 3 days later, looks like the first batch are gone. Next ship date is June7. This report seems wrong as my details show it is still due to arrive on May 28]

Prepare for the flip.

We're going to see some big changes in the way we use computers in the next few years. Most consumers, when not at work, just aren't going to need full desktop workstations like we do now. I'm including Mac, Windows, and Linux here, desktop, mouse driven workstations. The vast majority of stuff we do while not working, at home, is consuming content with occasional writing, tweeting, email etc. Yes, there are always going to be people at home who want to produce more, either writing, programming, video, whatever, but not most.
Replacing the desktop for consumption will be touch based mobile devices. Phones and tablets. Mouse based operating systems just don't work well in this environment. Operating systems designed from the ground up for this purpose are going to drive this. We've seen the iPhone prove this, and iPad is pushing it further. Android can compete, and in the next couple of years we'll see others try, including Microsoft's Phone 7 OS, and the competition will really make mobile computing explode. I suspect the heyday of laptops and netbooks is gone too.
Content producers, workers, are going to be using desktop workstations for a while yet. You just need a bigger surface, better multitasking and more input richness than a mobile device can provide. Personally, I think Windows 7 is really good in this space, but that's a religious war for another day.
Still, this is bad news for Microsoft and Intel, unless they can move in this direction faster. Microsoft may be able to follow Apple with Phone 7, but they are three years behind at least, with another six months until anything happens. Intel just don't have anything decent for mobiles, ARM has it all over them.
It's going to be all Apple and Google in a few short years. Let's see what HP can do with Palm and WebOS.

[Update - some iPad experience showing exactly this]
[Update - TechCrunch calling it the Third Wave, this site agrees with the threat to Windows]

Shadow of the Scorpion

Just finished reading Neal Asher's Shadow of the Scorpion.
An excellent insight to, and deepening of Asher's main Polity character, Ian Cormac. This is a twinned and then intertwining tale of Cormac of him at age 8 or so, and as a young man just having joined ECS, Earth Central Security. Everyone's parents shape their lives, and in Cormac's case, probably more than usual in a sense.
I particularly enjoyed seeing how a young, little trained Cormac gets out of some fairly bleak situations as we see how he starts to develop into the character we love in the other Cormac novels. Damn, he's one hard bastard when he needs to be, but we also see him suffering, and wondering about his hardness too.
Gore. Classic Asheresque gore. Unrelenting violence. Destruction. CTD explosions. Finishing with a fantastically gruesome death of the baddie. What's not to like?

Upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx

I upgraded my Ubuntu domain server to Lucid Lynx. The upgrade went fine, and there are lots of little incremental improvements, which is great. What isn't great is samba not starting properly when the machine boots. I've found some references to this. Hopefully there will be a bugfix coming. Annoying.

How to fix Windows XP after using McAfee

McAfee borked your computer?

Install Free AVG. McAfee has been rubbish for a long time. I've personally seen it let through some nasty malware recently.
First, you'll need to fix your PC though.

Dragon Coast: light vs dark

Dragon Coast continued last night, and we started with a long discussion on mechanics of light (Pathfinder RPG rules). Some of the interactions between light and darkness spells aren't particularly well explained, but we came to an agreement on the topic before starting the session. Which was lucky, because the characters were affected by magical darkness for most of it. Well, not that lucky, as none of them actually used any significant light spells to counter it, so we didn't need our revised light/dark interaction mechanics.
Generally darkness spell effects are pretty weird, and even using the usual "it's just magic" explanation, it's hard to relate these to the real world. I think we agreed at one point that darkness spells used some sort of anti-photons to produce their effects. We shied away from the whole anti-photon hits a photon interaction discussion. In the end, it's just game mechanics, and doesn't matter.
Rule clarifications are:

• dark/light spell effects suppress any light/dark spells of lower levels in their area of effect
• dark/light spell effects and light/dark spell effects of the same level suppress eachother in their overlapping areas of effect, leaving any lower level and natural light or darkness spell effects in effect.
• dark/light spells can be used to counter or dispell light/dark spells of equal or lower level at time of casting.

Also

• standard ride checks apply when using a Phantom Steed (spell) except for "Control Mount in battle" as it wouldn't get spooked by battle, and "Fight with a combat-trained mount" as it isn't combat trained.

Also,  First Character Death. Thanks Taedor.

Flash Fiction: Colourblind

Pick of the month : Colourblind byDr. Michael Schaper.

Dragon Coast campaign restarts

The Dragon Coast campaign I'm running restarted on Tuesday night. The session notes are up. We're still missing a character, but hopefully he'll start this week.
Naturally the first encounter was complex and difficult to manage, but we seemed to get through it smoothly enough, with the PCs kicking ass.