Twitter me this, Batman

I don’t do Twitter. Nor do I do Facebook. Or MySpace. Or any of this social networking junk*. Social networking, to me, reads as “online popularity contest”. I don’t need to compare the number of, mostly virtual, friends I have with someone else. Nor do I need to deliver constant smalltalk to them.

Obviously, I blog. Sometimes. But I’ve been doing that a while and, I assure you, it’s more for my benefit than it is for yours.

Christopher Walken however, now there’s a guy who catches people’s eye. Wouldn’t you know it? He’s on Twitter too and, frankly some of his content is superb:

The Pope is in Africa “reaffirming the ban on condom use.” His old stuff was funnier. I don’t get this new material. Too edgy for my taste.

Dance for me Chris! Dance!

*Oh, I am on LinkedIn, but that’s for professional reasons rather than social ones.

One for the old-skoolers

NFG’s Arcade Font Lister is a cracking little trip down memory lane of times spent wandering around a small dingey arcade at one end of Ilford watching the attract modes of games like After Burner, Wonderboy, Contra and Gradius.

The site also allows has a neat tool allowing you to create your own phrases in any of those fonts and with a variety of effects.

Finding a logo for your retro-gaming blog just got a whole lot easier 🙂

Nearly perfect

I love software. There’s so many tasks PCs can perform and good software can make all the difference in the world. Of course, leading industry standard software is quite pricey and can be overkill for many. Fortunately, there is an amazing amount of well produced software out there in shareware and freeware land.

For those of you that follow my newsbites (look, they’re over there in the sidebar) you’ll see that I often highlight findings from the consistently excellent Lifehacker site. Through this site I’ve learned tricks and discovered software I’d never have thought to try. Their comments section is often filled with additional information from incisive readers. It’s about as far away from the cesspit mentality of gaming blogs as you can imagine which is ironic given that Lifehacker’s parent media company also runs a rather well known but exceedingly trashy games blog.

Anyway, currently I’m looking into text editors. The value of a good text editor can’t be understated. If you find yourself editing any sort of scripting file then you’ll appreciate just why text editors are still one of the more important applications on a computer. Notepad is enough for many and it is purposefully designed to be a light and simple text editor. My textual needs can’t be met by Notepad any longer. I’m frequently viewing lengthy game FAQs, ansi art, XML or other language files. Notepad will display them all, but there’s more to a text editor than just text.

Syntax highlighting, multiple files and line numbering in a good text editor
Syntax highlighting, multiple files and line numbering in a good text editor

I had used UltraEdit for quite some time but I realised it was just far more than I needed and the level of detail in the menus was offputting. Up until very recently I’ve enjoyed using PSPad and can’t really complain. However, following a Lifehacker “Hive Five” article where readers were asked to nominate their favourite text editors a clear winner emerged in the form of Notepad++.

Notepad++ is both free and open-source. It features a plug-in system and is therefore extendable. In its default form it seems to host the right amount of features without being too overwhelming. If a feature isn’t available then there’s probably a plugin to cover it. One such feature I like is for a text editor to be able to edit a file on a remote server – something that can be done with all three of the text editors mentioned above. Notepad++ doesn’t have this feature built in as standard but available through a plugin. The choice is yours. It’s worth noting that that particular plugin is included in the install file for Notepad++.

So far, everything I’ve checked out in it is great with the exception of one single thing. And it’s a small, niggly thing, but it gets to me.

Top: Notepad++'s rendering of ANSI characters
Notepad++ vs MS-DOS - MS-DOS wins by TKO

Whilst the image above may seem like nonsense it’s not. It’s part of a text file that features ANSI characters. These characters are used as crude graphic blocks to build a block image with. I’ve been arguing with Notepad++ over this and it simply doesn’t want to play nice.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that Notepad++ detects the type of file being fed into it and displays its content accordingly. For example, when it detects an XML file it colours it as you see in the first image. This aids comprehension. It is easier to spot different parts of the language as key parts of it are highlighted in different colours. This is a great feature of modern text editors.

Notepad++ allows for teaking of its presentational styles. You can change colours and fonts at will for each different language it supports. You can add user-defined languages for anything it doesn’t already know.

When it comes to ANSI content, we hit a wall. Notepad++ correctly recognises the language and displays it according to its predetermined style. However, this is the one style that it doesn’t allow editing of. Not through its interface anyway. The styles, it seems, are defined in an XML file but, as yet, I’ve been unable to get it to acknowledge my preferred changes for that particular language.

A user-defined style should work! But no. Because it doesn’t override the file format that is already recognised by default like the ANSI content is. Bugger.

To be honest, it’s not the end of the world and those sort of files are unlikely to ever be edited by me as opposed to merely viewing. It’s just an annoyance that I’ll either want to use a separate program just for that filetype or put up with it being rendered incorrectly in Notepad++.

Amidst global recession, third world poverty, terrorism and some of today’s more pressing issues I can’t really complain. It’s just a bit annoying.

If you use Notepad++ and have overcome this issue, please let me know how you did it!

Star Wars: Battlefront 3 leaked footage

There’s a lot I could say about this but I won’t. Personally I can imagine the spot a lot of Free Radical’s staff must feel put in given that many were made redundant just before Christmas 2008.

However, NDAs are there for a reason. If work is produced by a human for a company and it’s clearly been stated that the company owns the work then that’s that. If I was an employer looking at a portfolio of work you’d purposefully publicised without permission and in direct conflict with the owning company’s wishes then I’d have to consider just what sort of discipline and professional outlook you have and whether you’d treat me the same way as your last employer.

For those that don’t have to (or choose not to) consider that side of things, enjoy the blurry footage and stirring music.

Update 22/01/09: Looks like LucasArts have got shirty on sites hosting the leaked footage and it’s been pulled.

Balenolad

No, I’ve no idea what the word means either.

It’s the self-appointed name of an old school-buddy of mine who has just started to tip his toes into the fascinating and incredibly exciting world of blogging. He’s off to a good start and I think you’ll find his writing and attitude far more easy going than my typically angsty and confrontational style.

Check him out.

Oh, and you earn brownie points for identifying the origin of the phrase that adorns the top of his site. 🙂