This blog was spammed and sabotaged over the last week which is why I had not posted over the duration. I have since then managed to obtain control of it again and have freshly reinstalled WordPress on to my site, put in three new security measures and totally stopped spam on the blog.
I'm not sure how this happened but it could be related to the recent attack on WordPress blogs. I have also used this opportunity to improve security on the WeBlog WordPress blog.
In iOS 6.0 in October 2012, Apple release one of it's new built-in apps. There was much hype about what it would bring to the iPod, iPad and iPhone. It was a clean new feature that was designed to bring about a new way of organising payments and cards; keeping your loyalty cards and boarding passes in one place. For instance, Starbucks allow you to obtain loyalty points with your Starbucks card and pay with it, or something similar (I am not much of Starbucks guy, but I have been in for an orange juice or apple juice once in a while) and Passbook allows you to keep this loyalty card 'inside' your phone.
The concept sounds great, but with Apple's lack of NFC (Near Field Communication), it means that communicating with the cash machine or whatever must be done using an optical scanner that can read either barcodes or QR codes from a display like the iPhone retina display. Sounds ok though, doesn't it?
Well no. It's below par and it hardly ideal. I use my Subcard (which funnily enough does not have a Passbook option as of just now, and probably never will) on my iPhone 5 which I hand over once I have placed my order and am ready to receive the points. I always worry that they have just been making my sub up for me just before they touch my iPhone. I'm also concerned that if it falls out of his or her hands the responsibility will still lie on my hands. Passbook is a solution that was not well thought through, contrast with Google Wallet. Google Wallet uses NFC in most cases and allows smaller payments to be made by just swiping the phone over the NFC card machine. This seems too easy compared. It's also got loads of safety features such as remote lockout and all the rest. You can read more about Google Wallet here.
Passbook still only has five UK apps just now, namely iHotel, United Airlines, Lufthansa, American Airlines and Starbucks, of which I use just Starbucks. This was six months after the initial release of Passbook. I also do not understand why you cannot access the App Store from Passbook to see more Passbook apps after you have already got one Passbook card.
Passbook seemed so damn perfect, until the lack of apps and the lack of NFC made it become something I now just look at in disappointment.
My rant for today is with littering in the UK. I was on my way home from the local town, and as I was passing a house, I looked at the grass just outside their house and something that really annoys me is that they clearly spend a lot of time and money on their house, but people just do not seem to care and throw litter out in the direction of their grass.
Here's the other part of the story. When I was out shopping at a supermarket, people who had clearly been to McDonalds had just finished their food and they just opened the door and put it on the ground, now I don't get so annoyed when they do this in the McDonalds car parks (I don't like it but McDonalds put the Drive Thru and car park there), but when they do it in a car park for a supermarket, that's just plain lazy. Especially saying as the bin was about 3 cars away. It's also just disrespectful.
Do you upload images to a blog or website?
When you upload to a blog or website, compression is absolute key.
Firstly, always save as JPEG or JPG. JPG is the ideal photo standard for the web; as it is designed for fast transfer to the client PC and for a lower footprint on the web server. It works by taking out information that the human eye does not notice.
All images should be the minimum size that they can be before there is a noticeable difference or problem. For instance on our community shared blog, images for the top slider must be 662 pixels wide by 362 in height. If all images are uploaded this way, image file sizes become much smaller and therefore the web space (limited currently to 5GB) is cut down for this.
Another method of compression that I use is featured in my own software, Painter Pro. It allows you to select how much compression is applied to the image before it is saved. An alternative to Painter Pro that allows this is Paint.NET (another favourite) where when you save the image as a JPG it asks you if you want to compress.
Compression should almost always be applied to images, particularly now that mobile websites are a key part of any site.
WordPress built sites are under major attack from more than a denial of service attacks (DOS).
As a precaution, I have limited the number of login attempts on this blog to prevent people running malicious programs to crack the logins.
You can read more at Ars Technica:
Or from a WordPress founder:
Finally, a WordPress We Blog. The old blog has been scrapped and replaced with a new one. Anyone can now join and write with me and other bloggers! Here's why you may consider it:
- My personal blog brings in about 30+ views a day which can easily transfer over to this blog as I recommend and write for it
- The blog is run by me, and I know how to run the blog to make it successful
- It may encourage others to view your own blog
- It is created with WordPress
So if you want to be an author or editor, please get in touch.
Along with many others, I am eagerly anticipating the release of Haswell, Intel's next step on their roadmap. It will replace the current 'third generation' of the Core series known as Ivy Bridge and will bring new power optimisations among many other features.
Some of the new features that we can expect are the new LGA (Land Grid Array) socket 1150 for desktops, rPGA (Pin Grid Array) socket 947 and BGA (Ball Grid Array) socket 1364 for mobile versions, DirectX 11.1 and OpenGL 4.0 support for the built-in graphics chip featured with all Haswell chips. The merged southbridge and northbridge design known by Intel as the Platform Controller Hub (PCH) will receive a die shrink from 65nm to 32nm.
The chip will continue to be manufactured at 22nm and will continue to use Intel's Tri-Gate transistor platform, but it will be incompatible with Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge motherboards. If you are like me and hoping to get your hands on Haswell, wait until after the initial launch as with Sandy Bridge and later Ivy Bridge, I can no longer trust that it will be flawless from the release and will wait a bit longer before considering the upgrade on my slightly faulty Sandy Bridge.
What else would you like to see with Haswell? Comment below.
It was only last week I was talking to my brother about how Google was apparently dropping the WebKit browsing engine that they had used in Chrome since the beginning. Of course there had to be a reason behind this. The answer is Blink.
Blink is a new browsing engine which forks from WebKit (for those who do not talk tech this is when a piece of software is adapted to make a new piece of software and they go off in two paths, similar to Libre Office and OpenOffice).
So whilst Safari will continue to use the WebKit engine, Chrome and Opera will move to Blink. Firefox continues to use the Gecko Engine (which I despise) and Internet Explorer will continue using Trident. Have I missed any?
What does this mean for the Chrome user?
It does not mean much for you right now as a fork takes from the latest version of the software, so the first version of Blink will be the same as the last version of WebKit and therefore it will render similarly. However, in the future Google's development on the Blink engine may push WebKit down as Google may innovate more and more. On the other hand, it could go the other way and WebKit could bring a better browsing experience before Blink.
Will Blink come to mobile devices?
Yes! Blink will come to Android as well as desktop versions of Chrome. Part of the Chromium Project's latest browsing engine is that it will be featured on all devices in the same manner. So don't worry about your mobile not being the same as your desktop, it will look exactly the same.
Why is this happening?
Apparently, according to the Guardian:
The move follows long-simmering disagreement between engineers at Apple and Google over the best way to develop the rendering engine underlying the browser - with one senior Apple engineer saying that Google refused to incorporate key technologies into the main branch of WebKit, keeping them instead for Chrome.
Unfortunately, Google and Apple do not get on for the better of the open source project which as of March 2013 Apple now owns the trademark to.
In my opinion, this is just another problem between Apple and Google, showcasing the fact that the two of them should never be involved in projects together.
I thought I'd better clear all of this up. Apparently, 38% of Steam users dislike it. I am also not a huge fan of Steam and here's why:
I have a desktop PC which runs Windows 7, and if you know Windows you will know how you have to reformat your system every 6 months to retain its performance, otherwise, you will end up with loads and loads of things slowing it down (although I have currently had my PC like this for 1 year and 3 months). So what happens with Steam? You cannot just reinstall Steam and point it to the game executable (as of yet anyway). So Steam will never know that they are there without a lot of work.
My other major reason is because I hate third-party companies coming in and running the place. Look at how the App Store and Play Stores run their respective operating systems. Surely we do not want PC gaming to end up that way.
Steam is also full of problems. For a start, it takes up approximately a whole 50MB of RAM, but when I start chatting to others my RAM usage goes from about 50MB up to a whole 1GB. Now considering that is running in the background, that is a whole lot of RAM. That is totally unnecessary. Sure the amount of RAM in your PC is going up year by year but it does not justify wasting RAM. This test was performed on a MacBook Pro with a Core i5 and 4GB of RAM and a custom Core i7 system. The RAM difference between the Mac OS X version of Steam is about 800MB. I'd like it if you could run your games without needing to open the Steam client everytime.
On the plus side for Steam, it does offer excellent pricing, one market place for all PC games and exclusives that are brilliant.
That is why I dislike Steam.
One of my absolute favourite games in my lifetime (possibly second or third) is Age of Empires II. I have always liked strategy games and Age of Empires II is no exception to this. In fact, Age of Empires II was the first game that I had asked for, all the other games (Warcraft Orcs and Humans, Goldeneye and F1 Racing for the Nintendo 64 to name a few) were all bought for me without me having any say at all. I had the original game, The Rise of Rome, on my father's CTX Via Cyrix laptop and I occasionally played it whilst we were going away. I had been playing the trial of the game for a few months with my good friend Nick. We had our first multiplayer LAN game several weeks after owning it and that was the selling point of the game to me.
I got Age of Empires II just before my 9th birthday and it had a big cardboard box. The excitement was running through me and I could't wait to play it. I took it straight to my other really good friend Calum's house.
We played for hours and hours and I fell straight in love with it as I had expected. I went home and continued to play it.
I played it right up until about 2007, and then Windows Vista came out. Windows Vista caused a problem with LAN play as it doesn't support some of the protocols that Age of Empires II required. I tried and tried but I didn't get it to work properly - occasionally kicking me out and stopping me from playing.
I resorted to playing a game which although was beautiful and fun, lacked on the some of the LAN features in the previous. Age of Empires III was one of the best games I had played in a long time; however, it did have one serious drawback. When you create a map or scenario in Age of Empires III there is a huge problem when trying to play it over LAN as you could not choose one of your own maps without having to do many different programming extras. To me this seemed like a lot of work for nothing.
So in 2009 I remember signing some petition to have a remake of Age of Empires II for Windows 7 just as they did for Starcraft (you can download it from Battle.net or purchase the Best Seller version). Well to everyone's surprise they did release it again. On the 9th of April 2013 it is to be released (I already own it because I preordered) to Steam, where everyone can download the game. Right now my father, who has also downloaded it, is blasting the enemy with his Teutonic Cannon Galleons in the background whilst I am typing this and my brother was playing a game with me earlier. They all loved Age of Empires II as much as I did. Nick and Calum have also already purchased it. It seems as popular, if not more popular than it was before.
So now to the beefy bit...What I thought/think of Age of Empires II HD. Firstly, the game is nearly perfect in my personal opinion because it is a pure remake. That's unique in its own respect because there are so many games that are remade but with improved graphics and all the rest and it just doesn't seem to work as well as a pure remake. My original score for the game is 100, but instead of adding points I will deduct for the bad features in this case. Here are the bad points:
- No LAN play - I liked the idea of inviting friends to my house to share my local area network.
- Map size - there is no difference for the map size. The maximum size of a map is still 'Giant' and cannot be any larger than this. This seems a shame considering on a 1080p display like my own it feels like you get about an eighth of the map on the screen at once.
- The trigger editor is still the same and has not had any added triggers to help make the map editing more flexible.
- It has achievements - I dislike achievement based games. They make gaming too competitive and although I used to be a competitive gamer, I gave up on that and play games for leisure (as you'll see from a list of different games where I really play them once in a full moon).
- You cannot change the resolution - absolute nightmare if you do want to have a 1080p monitor but run the game in say 1280 x 720 progressive which I do. To solve this, run Windows in 1280 by 720.
- A few new confusing icons - the top left Food icon is the most prominent example. I get confused with Food and Gold and if it were not for the fact that I know the order of the resources (Wood, Food, Gold and then Stone), I would keep making the mistake that I made initially with thinking that the Food icon was meant to be Gold.
- Still as buggy as with the previous version - one of my favourite bugs is walking down cliffs which previously had trees on them. This can be done in the Map Editor by simply placing trees and then placing cliffs under them. As soon as the tree is chopped down units can walk up and down the cliff as they please. The Map Editor also sometimes hides the cursor and does not reshow it, which is really annoying.
- The biggest disappointment is that you can still only control 40 at once. This looks incredibly odd on the new resolution as on my 1080p display you use the first row and half of the second row and that's all that is used when you could have another 2 or 3 rows worth of units. An odd choice there.
However the new features that have been added to the game do make it worthwhile:
- New water effects (pictured previously) - the water is nicer than it was before, but was it needed?
- Maximum population is now 500 - an increase of 300 villagers or Longbowmen!
- Internet capabilities again - play with a random selected person or with friends
- Much higher resolution - much more on the screen
And some of the most important reasons for me to purchase it are as follows:
- Support for old maps (although they are still maximally limited as before)
- A pure remake is what I wanted, but it may not be what others wanted
As this game is still one of my favourite games of all time remade, I cannot really give it less than 9 out of 10. So if it were out of 100, I would end up giving it about 85/100.
