Friday, February 23, 2007

How to get a Wii

Nearly 3 months after release, it is still difficult to find anywhere that has the Wii in stock.

You could pay over the odds at E-Bay, or spend all day trawling round the online suppliers hoping to get lucky.

I used a website that does the hard work for you, WiiPreOrder. They track all the online suppliers and pop up notifications when the Wii is in stock. You have to be quick, as even now some of the retailers sell out in 5 minutes, but it worked for me. I don't have any association to that site, but they provide a useful service.

Nintendo Wii review

Released on Dec 8th in the UK, and sold out out straight away, it has taken me until the middle of Feburary to get hold of a Wii. In fact, it is nearly 3 months since it was released, and all retailers still sell out as soon as they get their hands on a few units.

Bundled with Wii Sports, a 5 sport game, it retails at £179, which is a bargain as far as I'm concerned. Nintendo decided to go for mass market rather than high end graphics, and it looks like that has paid off for them. Sales figures for January show that the Wii sold 436,000 in the US, compared to 294,000 XBox 360's and 244,000 PS3's. In Japan, the Wii outsold the PS3 by 3 to 1 in January. No fgures are avilable for the UK.

Everything about the Wii package smacks of Nintendo. The Mii Channel, where you create mini lookalikes is great fun, and classic Nintendo. My kids think this is the best thing about it, and like going to the Mii parade to watch everyone mill about (we created Mii's for everyone in the family). The warnings to take a break during Wii Sports are a bit annoying, but again, that is a very nintendo thing to do.

The fact that Wii Sports uses the Mii's you have created in the games is the icing on the cake. Although to me the Mii's don't look like any of us, the kids seem to think they do and think it is hilarious watching 'themselves' swing a golf club or tennis racquet on the TV!

Wii Sports itself is fairly simplistic, and is a good demo of what fun can be had with the motion sensing controller. None of the games have any great depth, but they are all good fun (OK, except for Baseball, but that's Baseball I suppose). There is no great depth in the graphics, indeed some of the design strikes you as being a bit odd - none of the spectators in Tennis have any arms or legs, in fact the players don't appear to have any arms either, with a the racquet swinging around in mid air! Similarly in Boxing, the boxers don't have any arms, just a set of gloves swinging around in mid air as well. While this seems odd at first, it seems to suit the 'caricature' nature of the gaming, with your Mii being used as the player.

The Golf is quite difficult, as it seems to be quite hard to get any repeatability in the swinging action, but you do eventually get there. You need to underhit rather than go for power. There is a fair bit of aliasing in the trees and rough in the golf, but you get the feeling that the whole lack of detail in Wii Sports is more down to the rush to get it out there to show people what it can do, rather than the hardware's capabilities. It will take a while before we truly see how far the console can be pushed graphics wise.

All in all the Wii is great fun, and Nintendo have been successful in making the thing appeal to a wide audience, far beyond what a normal console generally has. Even the Wife has got up and had a go with Wii Sports, and believe me, that is some feat.

Carling Cup Final

Like the guy who books a wedding or something a year in advance, only to find it ends up clashing with an England World Cup semi final (as unlikely as that is), I have managed to arrange to move house the week of the Arsenal v Chelsea Carling Cup final. The chances of seeing the game were reduced anyway as it's on BSkyB (shitehawks); the fact I'm moving means I can't even slope off down to the pub for the afternoon to see the game. It will be one of those frustrating occasions of having to tune into the radio to listen to it.

It would be a fantastic achievement to win the cup, having used a second string side throughout the competition, but I'm confident we can do it. I'm sure Aliadiere can run rings around Essien, & Carvalho is bound to give away a few free kicks around the box if put under pressure, like he usually does.

I don't think we will have any problems being motivated for this game; we have been guilty in the last couple of games of looking like we only need to turn up to win, and putting in poor performances as a result.

Come on boys, bring that trophy home!

Monday, February 19, 2007

Are Blackburn as bad as England?

After the exciting, and, OK, nerve wracking FA Cup replay at Bolton, we were subjected to one of the worst games I have ever witnessed at home against Blackburn. Some reward that was for winning the nail-biter. It wasn't quite as bad as an England friendly, but then again, I gave up watching those ages ago, so I may be wrong.

Why Blackburn played the way they did in a cup game is a mystery, and frankly it's no surprise the number of fans in the away end was as low as it was if that is what they have to put up with on a regular basis. Don't they realise fans pay good money to go and watch these games?

Arsenal needed to show more guile, and it was only the introduction of Clichy, Rosicky and Adebayor late in the second half that made us look like we would put Blackburn under pressure. We only made two clear cut chances during the game - early in the first half when Justin Hoyte played a nice chip into Henry, and then late in the second half when Friedel saved from Henry & Hoyte in quick succession. We should have had a penalty when Aliadiere was blatantly tripped, and you wish the ref had given it, if only to save everyone the misery of having to watch Blackburn again. Then again, we would probably have missed it.

Now we have got Man City at home in the next round, if we win the replay.

In other news Arsene Wenger has been speaking about the quality of young English players coming through. he says:

"When I started, I wanted to produce a team with 60 per cent English players. We've ended up with 80 per cent or more foreign players because I haven't found enough quality among the English. But something amazing is happening. There is real quality among the English, in the under-16 and under-14 groups. We have to be patient. But the attitude of English players is changing and you no longer have the problem with alcohol - not like 20 years ago.''

The full article can be read here.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

New Linux Server results

After recently completing the installation of my new server to run SlimServer, I thought I would post some results.

My requirements were for a quiet, low-power consumption machine that would be easy to manage. I opted to build my own machine, based around a Jetway J7F2 mini-ITX motherboard. This uses the low power VIA C7 1.2 Ghz processor. The board is a fanless design, satisfying my requirement for low noise. As I will be using the server to house my music files, I opted for a large 320Gb Western Digital 3.5" drive. These are very quiet in operation. The system was built into a Noah mini-ITX case. I installed the maximum 1GB memory that the board supports.

The case has a fan, which is fairly quiet, and is the only source of mechanical noise in the system (apart from when the hard drive is reading/writing). I may yet remove the fan, but I need to see how hot the hard drive runs without it.

The ideal situation would have been to have a drive for the OS, and a separate drive for the music files, but the Noah case doesn't have room for this. An external drive wasn't really an option, with three kids running around the house leaving a trail of destruction in their wake ;->

For the OS, I decided to go for the Ubuntu variation of Linux. This was mainly because it was free, and a number of people on the Slim Devices forums were successfully running SlimServer on Ubuntu.

I was a bit apprehensive as I had no experience of Linux, but the install went smoothly. The install of SlimServer was equally straightforward, using the Slim deb package.

As I intend to run the machine headless (without a monitor/keyboard), I needed some way to control the machine from my main Windows XP desktop. This was easy, as Ubuntu has a VNC based remote desktop facility built in, so it was a simple case of installing the free edition of RealVNC on the Windows machine, and setting the preferences in Ubuntu.

Sharing the music files on the Linux machine with the Windows machine was a bit more involved, but I found some instructions on how to do this here, using Samba.

Now it is all up & running, the performance of the machine is very good. Considering it is a low speed processor by todays standards, it has no problems running SlimServer. When it is streaming music to the Squeezebox, the CPU runs at 15-30%. The system is using about 190MB of memory, out of the 1GB installed. I'm not sure why, but the interface on the Squeezebox is a lot quicker than when it was running from my much higher spec Windows machine. I think MYSQL runs a lot better out of the box on Linux compared to Windows, but I don't have any figures to back that up.

There are still one or two things to fine tune in the setup. The board supports ACPI power management (which means you can set the machine to do a safe shut down when pressing the power button, for example), but I need to fine tune this as at the moment Ubuntu pops up the standard shutdown dialogue, rather than just shutting down.

In the end, there was no need to worry about using Ubuntu, it all installed very well. The machine is a lot quieter than my noisy Windows desktop machine (an Acer), so I'm very happy with the results.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Why Linn do not use DRM

Thanks to 'The Smokester' on the Slim Devices forums for pointing this out on Linn Records web site. Linn, to their credit, do not use DRM on their digital downloads If ever there was a reason needed for music companies to avoid using DRM, this is surely it:

"...We have been testing the only known commercially available system (Microsoft WMA-DRM) and come to the conclusion that it is neither robust nor "developed". The faults and problems we have encountered are:

The "system" is a two part handshake license agreement that requires Linn and the customer to meet certain technical requirements. These requirements include for Linn:
Check the computer that is downloading the music is "compliant". This means that we must check that the computer that is downloading the music has not been hacked (Microsoft DRM has been hacked quite recently and not for the first time) to remove all DRM information and capability.
We need to interrogate the downloading computer via our web connection and to do this the contact has to be via Internet Explorer (only) which needs to have both ActiveX and cookies turned on. (If customers don't have these system requirements they won't be able to receive the licence to play the music they have bought).
By doing this, Microsoft will then be able to update the customer's computer to remove the hacked files.
There are versions of Windows Media Player in use and only the most recent ones can be checked. If a customer doesn't have this, they will need to download an up to date version of WMP before being able to play their music.
There are many operating systems in use and only some are supported in the test code. Once all three variables (the browser, Media Player and Operating system) are considered it is easy to imagine that we will only be able to download music to a very small subset of contacting customers.
Once we implemented the new system we tested it and it fails to deliver files with the correct "rights". The files we tested did not operate as intended.
Microsoft has dropped support of WMA (the only audio file format that can have the DRM applied) on the Mac platform. (7% of our customers are Mac users). Plug-ins are available but they require considerable user knowledge and skill. These Plug-ins only work on recent Mac operating systems and are third party support rather than Apple or Microsoft.
Microsoft DRM does not wok on a Mac meaning that any music downloaded to a Mac will not play in iTunes even when the Plug-in is used.
WMADRM'd files downloaded to a PC cannot be imported to iTunes for PC meaning that customers cannot add their legitimately purchased music to their iPod. The files only work when imported into Windows Media Player.
There is no other platform independent DRM systems that are commercially available.
As you can see from the above it is our opinion that the Microsoft DRM system does not work and that until such time that something does work our best endeavours to protect our artists' music will be to include the usage rights as above and ask our customers to agree to these rights when making a purchase..."

Friday, February 09, 2007

New server for SlimServer

Up till now I have run Slimserver from my main desktop Windows PC. While it has run OK, I have always been a bit uncomfortable with having to have the PC running and consuming anything up to 190W of electricity just to play some music. I thought about a NAS solution, but wasn't happy with the current NAS solutions. Instead, I decided to build a mini-ITX based system. These have the advantage of low power consumption (around 25W flat out), plus the board I chose (a Jetway J7F2) has no onboard fan, so it would also be quiet.

Initially I was going to stick Windows on the new machine, but in the end decided to go for Ubuntu, a flavour of Linux. I was a bit apprehensive, as I had no prior experience of using Linux (or building my own PC for that matter), but it all went rather well.

Initial impressions are that the interface on the Squeezebox is a lot snappier than when run from my higher spec Windows machine. But I will spend some time trying more things out before I come to any firm conclusions.

There were one or two Linux related pitfalls along the way, which I will document later, but it was a good learning expereince, which now has me tempted to run Ubuntu on my main machine...

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Who is Steve Jobs trying to kid?

In a recent open letter, the Apple CEO Steve Jobs called for the Music Industry to relax their stance on DRM. While the record companies may have insisted that DRM be in place before they would license their catalogue to Apple, it was Apple themselves who have placed the greatest restriction on the music bought on iTunes - that you can't play it on any non-Apple devices.

Jobs then went on to claim it would be a bad idea to license their 'Fairplay' technology so the files could be played on other devices, saying:

"The most serious problem is that licensing a DRM involves disclosing some of its secrets to many people in many companies, and history tells us that inevitably these secrets will leak. The Internet has made such leaks far more damaging, since a single leak can be spread worldwide in less than a minute. Such leaks can rapidly result in software programs available as free downloads on the Internet which will disable the DRM protection so that formerly protected songs can be played on unauthorized players. "

Sorry mate, but in case you hadn't noticed, your 'Fairplay' DRM system has already been cracked numerous times, check out http://hymn-project.org/ for starters.

It seems Apple would rather the record labels change their stance on DRM in general, rather than Apple have to license their technology to others. This currently seems unlikely, with the RIAA urging Apple to license their DRM technology to others.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Into The Final

The first game I ever saw at Highbury was against Spurs, back in 1980 or 81 when I was 10 or 11 - I ought to look up the stats and see exactly when it was. We won 2-0 (I think). It was a strange experience for me at the time, as I wasn't prepared for the atmosphere Arsenal v Spurs games generate. Not to mention the fact I somehow got separated from my Step Dad who had taken me! Now of course, I'm old enough to go without my Step Dad.

Last nights game was the first Arsenal v Spurs game I had been to since that first game at Highbury, and if everything else has changed, at least the atmosphere was as intense as before. In fact, for most of the game I forgot it was a semi-final, all that seemed important was beating Spurs.

There is no point in doing a full match report, there are plenty of those around. I thought Denilson stood out as being excellent, Diaby was good (once he was subbed we started to struggle in Midfield until the end of normal time). Aliadiere was full of running, and won us numerous corners - it's just a shame we never take advantage of them. His goal was just reward for the hard work he put in all night, and looked absolutely knackered at the end. In fact, all the team played well. Walcott did well in trying to get past people, but too often his final ball was poor. But he still got a great reception from the crowd when he was subbed, so that was good to see (or should that be hear?).

Our seats were 6 rows from the front in the Lower Tier. Although it was good to be so close to the goal (at the North End), once the ball gets past the half way line it is difficult to tell how far from the other goal the action is. I think I'll try for the Upper Tier again next time.

And if anyone thinks Wenger doesn't take this competition seriously, they obviously didn't see him talking to the team before extra time started - this was a man determined to win.

All in all a great night and great result that sent the travelling Spurs fans scurrying off early with the tail between their legs - long may it continue.