GameLog 117 & 118

Been up the farm fighting fires over the past week so the count is down somewhat.

Depths of Peril (10h) - Filled out a weekend after Ben and Levi started playing it again. $20 was an easy buy to go past level 7. Should probably get back into it to finish a lev 25 character. Still trying to figure out if it's best to just concentrate on the story or grind the others into the dirt as soon as you can.

Dominions 3 (10h) - Listening to 3 moves ahead got me interested in this one again. The demo is still long enough to get a good jump into the game. I'd buy the full version if it were <$30, but $50 for a 3 year old game is a little too steep.

Bejewelled Blitz (5h) - 311K. New week 269K. I can pretty consistently get above 100K and am attempting to get the 75K-100K up to 5 star before the 50K - 75K one. ~20 left to go on the 50K one, and about 90 on the 75K one, but I'm getting about 5 to 1 75K's over the 50K badges so it'll be close.

Quake Live (3h) - De-stress after work

Tiger Woods Golf 10 (2h) - Got my 4 amateur wins and am averaging ~67. Only need to see out the season to get up to the pro's.

Wii Fit (1h) - Soccer heading and advanced marbles.

Geodefense Swarm (1h) - Figured out the scoring mechanism rewards killing them right before they exit, so it's even more interesting to finely tune a level to get a high score.

Trackmania Nations (1h) - couple more laps around the F1 circuits.

GameLog 116

Bejewelled Blitz (4h) - New version has a lot more options for matching, and not having to wait before matching another triple means that it is more skill based too.

Tiger Woods Golf 10 (4h) - Couple more rounds. Still going great. Hopped online for a go at some of the public tournaments and people were averaging 21 under in one round! Got to 13 under using super tiger, but I'll have to get into the swing of it more before heading back online.

Zynga poker (2h) - had some weird sleeping patterns over the weekend and found myself waking up to play poker at 4 in the morning. Usually that almost bed time.

Wii Fit (1h) - Couple of Skiing attempts.

Geodefense Swarm (1h) - The goto game on the road at the moment, but only in dribs & drabs.

Trackmania Nations (1h) - couple more laps around the F1 circuits.

Smart phone GPS Illegal?

A recent article by the News Mail stated that Smart phone GPSs are illegal. The headline certainly caught my eye, and the picture of a policeman holding up an iPhone sporting a GPS app certainly nailed the point home. Wha ??

I rang the police department later that day for clarification. If using the GPS features of an iPhone are classed as using a phone, what about using other features such as, say, listening to music? If this point stood, you may as well fine everyone with an iPhone. Fortunately the clarification made the point clear: OPERATING a phone is illegal. Using the phone in hands free mode for any feature is acceptable.

GG News-Mail. I think that distinction is critical to the balance of the article.

MOTORISTS are being warned that smart phones such as the iPhone will cost them a $300 fine if they are used as a navigational device while on the road.

Uhh, I would expect the people who have shelled out ~$50 for GPS maps have also shelled out for an in-car cradle to make it easy to use, placing it in exactly the same legislative position as an ordinary GPS unit.

By the way, I don't see any laws against using a laptop while driving. Maybe the legislation surrounding phones needs to cover distractions in general caused by in-car devices?

GameLog 115

Revelling in not having any more assignments or Uni work. Guilt free gaming!

Civilization: Beyond the Sword (20h) - Pulled out my old HDD to scratch the Civ4 itch. Various modes of 3v3, Meso-America scenario and Fall from Heaven II total conversion.

Dwarf Fortress (15h) - 2 more settlements taking shape. Was thinking of documenting one, but the seasons seemed to just slip away.

Tiger Woods Golf 10 (10h) - Happened across a 2nd hand Wii, and I liked TW10 enough that it was worth the purchase (and the Wii Fit board sounded alright too)

Majesty 2 (2h) - Bogged down a little about 1/2 way through. Bit disappointed you can't build temples anywhere.

Wii Fit (1h) - New Wii and its exorbitant battery demands now graces the living room. Record of 505 on Soccer heading, one miss early in the piece.

Bejewelled Blitz (1h) - Nearly time for the new version!

Geodefense Swarm (1h) - iPhone game recommended by a number of podcasts (or possibly Rabbit on a number of different podcasts). Nice mix between TD and puzzle.

Wordle cloud

Fiddled around with Wordle pointed at this site. Pretty awesome service, and making the images creative commons makes the site more useable. Pity there isn't a way to automatically embed the generated image into the post, but a cut/paste isn't that hard:

GameLog 110-114

Wow, been almost a month. When I'm doing Uni assignments it doesn't feel right to spend time writing up these reports. Doesn't stop me playing games tho, that's crazy talk ...

Dwarf Fortress (20h) - Back to building holes. Tried to get into the adventure mode, but it seemed more obtuse than fortress mode without any of the roguelike niceties. 3 lots of immigrants so far, but having issues with water. No streams on the map, so it's rainfall into puddles for the time being until I can get some beer production going.

Majesty 2 (15h) - Plays a lot like the original, even having the same sound effects for the iconic parts of the game ("More gold your Majesty"). I like the Heroic hall to pull back surviving heroes from previous campaigns, makes a good addition and adds a sense of continuity to the whole thing. Maybe 1/2 way through the scenarios.

Knights of Honor (10h) - After sweeping up with Zeta, I talked through the game with Greig and lamented on the easiness of the game. Decided that the traders broke the game, so I started another in the Scottish highlands on the hardest difficulty level with a caveat that I won't hire traders. Certainly made the start more interesting, but once I broke out and took a few provinces, the game fell into its usual pattern.

Majesty (10h) - Bundled with the pre-order of Majesty 2 over Steam. Played pretty well how I remembered it, and the new expansion areas are tough!

Pirates! (7h) - Had a hankering for some old piratic action. Played better than I remember as I think I was too concerned how it compared to the original. Sword fights were easier than I remember, and I played through a whole career in under 5 hours. Might have another go in the later parts of the game and go for a monster score.

Quake Live (5h) - Listening to some LO3 for QuakeCon had me pining for the good olf days. Fired up QuakeLive and it felt good to go back to Q3. Some maps I remember, some are new. Aim is a little off on the rail, but TF2 has kept my rockets honed.

Bejewelled Blitz (5h) - Even though the gamesd only go a minute, they are still entertaining and addictive. I've managed to work out enough of a strategy to typically get >50K per go now, but the randomness of the fall somehow adds to the replayability.

Poker (4h) - Landed 1st in the multi-table tournament to net 500K. Was a weird game. Wasn't caring that much about it as I was heading to bed. Played loose and luck was definitely on my side.

Tiger Woods Golf 10 (3h) - Picked up the Wii version for Mark's Birthday and promptly played a round or 2 while he slept. Looks ilke a Wii is heading our way, so I'm debating whether I'll borrow Mark's or get my own copy...

Mafia Wars (2h) - lvl 35. The other Facebook app that I play to fill in a bit of time. Bit too formulaic, but it's got enough variety to keep me hanging around.
Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 (2h) - More Cameron help

Flight Control (2h) - Succumbed to every site recommending this game for the iPhone. Plays well, but the hype put it into a 'meh' category. Boredom killers go to Paper Toss / Tower Bloxx / Flight control, with other notables being CivRev and iGo when there's more time on offer. Highscore chart is great though.

Trackmania Nations (1h) - Couple of laps after tea with 2 squirmers on my lap for added difficulty.

Paper Toss (1h) - Flick. Flick ... Flick.

Tower Bloxx (1h) - Played a bit with Cameron again.

No sound on Windows 7 Virtual PC

Installed a Windows 7 virtual machine onto the barebones XP64 system here at work to test how it's going to go as a personal research environment. Installed fine, but had issues with virtual machine additions and sound. The fix for virtual machine additions was an upgrade to Virtual PC 2007 Service Pack 1. The new additions loaded fine, but still no sound? Not even a soundcard detected.

More googling revealed that the VM needed Vista as the chosen OS on install to set the correct sound driver. I knew this and had definitely set it up that way, but possibly SP1 reverted that change. Anyway, to remake the VM:

1. Run the wizard to create a new VM from inside Virtual PC 2007 SP1
2. Select "create a new virtual machine"
3. Name it as a new name (or v2 on the old name)
4. Select "Vista" as the operating system
5. Select "use an existing virtual hard disk" and point it to the VHD file of the old VM

That done, I fired it up and it picked up the sound card, but couldn't install drivers for it. Seeing that the virtual hardware is the most generic available it must be something to do with how it is being displayed to the operating system. More googling showed that you may need to reinstall the virtual machine additions:

1. Uninstall virtual machine additions
2. ignore any errors coming up about services being in use, they get cleaned up on the restart.
3. restart.
4. Install virtual machine additions again.
5. Restart.
6. Sound!

A couple more updates and I'll store this VM as a blank to base future W7 VMs off.

Intern rollercoaster

Signs you've been playing too much rollercoaster tycoon:

... when every problem can be expressed with a rollercoaster. Check the intensity rating before riding again.

Primary Wedding

Primary Celebration Evening culminated in an all staff dance ala JK Wedding Entrance Dance. As Bret was sick, Gino and I led out the dance as the "ushers". Awesome fun.

Twitter SpamBot

I noticed a random follow on Twitter this morning and it looked suspiciously like a spambot for the semi-ad as the latest post. It may very well not be, but it got me to thinking how easy Twitter makes SpamBots over something like IRC or other personal mediums:

Twitter is public facing. Tweets are generally aimed at no-one in general, just informative.
- This model makes it easier to construct spam as a likely tweet that may be taken as a legitimate message

People generally tweet something of interest with a link to follow.
- This is and almost perfect medium to do short pitches.

More and more people are using link shorteners.
- With the actual link obfuscated, and the increased tendancy of people to click on the link, it opens the possiblity of bait and switches.

Not all tweets are statements, there are fair few that are responses to others. In fact most of my tweets are responses or queries, but that's probably more my style. Could SpamBots mimic responses?

Twitter exposes many half-conversations and non-relevant conversations into your stream.
- With increased tolerance to flotsam in the stream, even short pitches sent as a response to a random person (who would have no idea what it was about, but couldn't do anything about the way it was structured or composed) would fit into the stream quite easily.

Not all tweets are promotions either. All the flotsam makes up a persona and the one thing that the turing test has taught us is that representing personas is damn hard to do with AIs. But why build one when you can copy one?

Twitter exposes millions of personas in their entirety to the world.
- Simply pick an identity at random and copy their tweets onto the spambot, inserting relevant pitches where necessary.
- In later evolutions, copy people that give the types of responses you want to emulate and the volume to limit any jarring differences. Don't target people that have the mimicked person in their friends list, but are on their recommended list (similar interests / many FOAF) for greater appeal of copied information.

And why stop at one? You could easily find a group of people that have a good conversation going and emulate the lot of them, while inserting pitches, pitch responses, and even legitimate RT's! A veritable soap opera played out on your twitter feed to help sell .. err ... soap.

So many opportunities and so many fundamental traits of twitter to feed off that it's almost inevitable. The intriguing thing is not that spambots could exist under twitter (they do already), but that they have the ability to easily embed themselves for a long duration. Maybe we need xkcd's couple testing: