Annoyingly, the site was down for several hours this morning, putting a major crimp in my efficient mood this morning. Apparently Dreamhost are having (yet more) woes with their NFS servers. Still, all is well now.

Yet more spam in the Akismet box though – it makes me wonder how there is value in those things, and just how much money the people sending the spam (or at least the people paying to have the spam sent) are actually getting back in for it. I’m still thinking that the Internet will have to go the way of the micro-transaction as the only way of getting rid of the spam. By which I mean, having an account through which you pay some pittance of an amount to send emails and/or post comments on blogs. Some amount small enough that an average person will hardly notice (like 0.1p per post), but that makes the sending of millions of emails/comments more costly than it’s worth.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it would be tricky to set up a site/plug-in that manages a system like that. Say 10000 free comments/emails a month, but you have to register and log-in to post/send. Anything more and you have to enter credit card details to unlock unlimited posting, and are billed at some fractional rate. Get buy-in from the ISP’s so that people automatically get an account with their ISP so they don’t have to register manually. It would have to be nicely integrated, and you’d have to persuade site owners to set it up… Anyway, enough distractions.

Planning for our 3 month project is pretty much settled for now, we should be signing agreements soon and getting cracking on the work. It’s a big pile of stuff, but I’m confident we can manage it – as long as the development kits turn up in a reasonable time!

A big sigh of relief this morning – back at my own desk, drinking my own coffee; no more 45 minute commute. Also feeling substantially healthier than last week, thankfully. I’m conscious of the factor over-working played in my body’s rebellion against me, and so even though I have a huge stack of work to be getting through, I am going to make an effort to only work 9 till 5, Monday to Friday for a couple of weeks to give my system a break.

On the agenda for this morning: some routine checking up on our finances and future, some emails and phonecalls to make relating to our next project, and then some planning work. I’ve decided to use the manual XP recommended way of tracking work (8×5 cards, with items written on them), for which I need to actually go and buy some stationery, but I am putting that off until tomorrow.

A minor side note: since the forums are currently sitting dusty and unused, I’m going to put them into hibernation until they are needed again. While I like the idea of a discussion and feedback place, there isn’t much call for that for the next little while, and the constant phpBB security patching process is quite annoying. It is also, even fully patched, a potential security hole in the site, so minimising our exposure seems prudent. Plus the fact that it makes the site seem stagnant, and if the blog is the only frequently updated part of it, I’d rather that be explicit.

Have been feeling more than a little run down over the past few weeks, I’m sure due to the 6 day weeks since the start of the year. As a result, the cold which has hit me the last week or so is doubly unpleasant. But the end is in sight! I’ll be winding up my contract position at the end of the week, and turning my attention fully towards our next job – the prototype educational title. I hope that the return to working from the home office and lack of commute will allow me to return to more sensible working conditions (and update this blog more often). Anyway, in the meantime, some ginger and lemon tea for steaming, and making sure I have a ready supply of tissues.

WordPress compromised.

Only briefly, but it was up here for a couple of days at least. 🙁 Anyway, all fixed up now, and its unlikely the exploiter would target such a small blog as this.

Still, on a much brighter note, we’ve had some funding approved for our prototype plan, and are now just waiting on some PSP development kits and some other details to get started on making things! This is for the educational title alluded to previously, of which I will share more details when we can.

Various updates to the website software this week, nothing major, just security fixes for WordPress and MediaWiki. Dreamhost have also been having some data-centre issues recently which have meant some downtime, but nothing major.

Other than that, the last couple of weeks have involved a bit more relaxation for me in an effort to not go crazy before I see the spring-time. A weekend holiday and more time reading books rather than coding has helped a bit in that respect. I’ve still not had much time to myself though, down to more planning efforts for our educational prototype, and a bunch of other niggling paperwork things that I’ve had to sort out. On the bright side, as we’re coming towards the end of our second financial year, we have a lot more information that I can look back over and see just how much the business costs to run, and so better estimate our finances for the future. There’s still more paperwork for income tax, National Insurance, VAT, corporation tax, and all of the accounting obligations we have as a limited company, but it’s all fairly routine now (if still somewhat annoying).

Coming up over the next few weeks we expect to hear something more concrete about our new project, and so Pete is doing a lot of groundwork around that accordingly. I must say that I’m also looking forward to working more time in the home office, and avoiding the 45 minute commutes to Barco!

Not had much of a chance to stop this week, so this one will be brief. Much of this week was spent looking at a plan for a prototype for our educational title – trying to find out what’s achievable in a fixed time-frame with fixed resources isn’t the best way to make a game, but in some respects it’s good (at least you know when you have to aim for). Add to that a bereavement in the family, a driving test (which I passed), and the usual 6 day week at Barco, and there’s not much time left for fun things!

Hopefully next week will be more relaxed, and will include: investigation of a couple of small games for pitching to XBox Live Arcade or Nintendo’s Virtual Console, some build framework things for our engine re-factoring, and finishing the second dungeon in Twilight Princess .

One of the many bug-bears I’ve developed working in the software industry is about bad user interfaces. When I was at university I did a course on human-computer interaction, and though I didn’t think it at the time, I realise now just how valuable it was. I firmly believe, now I’ve seen the fruits of so many bad user interface designs, that the course should not only be compulsory, but it should be repeated several times throughout the degree, just to drive the point home.

The particular bit of software that has inspired this rant is the software for this:

my new phone, the O2 Ice. Hardware wise I can’t fault it – sleek, light, good build quality. Software wise, it’s awful. More than awful, its so bad I find myself shaking it in the air and cursing, trying to resit the urge to bash it off the table in frustration. Almost everything in the user interface runs contrary to even basic usability principles. Buttons change function radically as you move between screens, resulting in a single extra accidental button press (of a button that you need to press), will wipe out a laboriously crafted message, without saving it anywhere, or more crucially prompting if you are sure. Conversely, when you are sure about an operation, for example deleting messages, it prompts you, then, just to make you grind your teeth, prompts you to press okay on a screen that says only ‘deleted successfully’. Why do I need to click okay on a message telling me that you’ve done what I asked you (twice) to do. Sure, tell me if it fails, but don’t tell me if it succeeds. I assume it will succeed!

Worst of all though is the behaviour when a new message comes in – I pull the phone from my pocket and see the message prompt displayed on the screen. Great, all good. But because its not a clamshell design, I habitually lock the keypad before putting it into my pocket. And the act of unlocking the phone causes the message prompt to disappear, and I have to go search through three levels of menus to go find the message that’s arrived. And that’s only for SMS messages, if a multi-media message comes in, pressing any key just freezes the display on the animated message icon – no feedback, nothing. Eventually I found out that holding the power key will free things up again, but that was one of the “don’t throw it across the room, it’s the only phone you have” moments.

Fact is, user interface problems aren’t generally hard to solve. Some of them are tricky because you have design constraints (say only being able to use a one button mouse, or limited feedback options. But in general bad user interfaces are down to bad designers, and there is no excuse for it. The end-user does not care, in the slightest, about how good your software is underneath; if it feels like crap to use, then they will hate it, and you have failed.

Games are normally a bit better in this regard, partly because the limited control mechanisms force us to spend more time thinking about input mechanics, but also because a game that doesn’t feel easy to control will drive players away in droves. Even still, it still makes me curse in frustration every time I use a tool that was chucked out of the door with a sub-standard UI, and everyone is stuck with it just because there are no alternatives on the market. (Rational Rose I’m looking at you…)

I generally don’t publish code from the videogames because I don’t believe that code quality is as important in that industry. Short of the occasional patch, once the product is shipped, it’s done; there’s no ten-year lifespan to worry about.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I don’t even know where to start with it, short of saying that if any games developers are reading it, you should cover your eyes, now.

Finally – corporation tax return finally done for 05/06. Okay, so I’m only 2 months shy of having to do the 06/07 return, but there you go. Many thanks have to go out to Robert Turner and the people at Benson, Wood & Co of Airdrie, who did most of the work. Amount of tax owed: none! It would have been a few hundred pounds due to the fact that the Treasury changed the rules last April to eliminate the lower tax bracket that allowed companies to turn a profit of up to 10,000 UKP without having to pay tax . I guess that’ll teach me for actually running a games company that turns a profit eh? There was me thinking that all the other businesses in the industry losing money hand over fist were doing the wrong thing. 😉

First off, sorry for the hiatus in posting over the last month, the combination of massive busyness with work things and the pressures of finding just the right Christmas gift meant that blogging kept getting shuffled off the bottom of the to-do list. But here I am, bright eyed and bushy tailed, with a big stack of Chrimbo goodies, a newly printed end of year corporation tax return, and a big pile of unfiled paperwork, ready to bore you all to tears again.

It’s a miserable day in Edinburgh today, and the bus on which I write this is filled with coughing, sniffling people. Since it takes me about 45 minutes to get across town to Barco in the morning, I’ve been using the time to get some re-factoring done on the code, as well as writing up various project tenders and plans. There are NDAs to be faxed off too, although that’s mostly because we need to be under NDA to get costs on the development hardware to fill out the rest of the business case. Pete’s proposed a technology project that is interesting, but we need to work out all the numbers to see if it’s a profitable use of our time.

I’m still waiting to see the fall-out of the Christmas period’s sales, but it seems much as I expected so far. Microsoft ‘hit’ their target of 10m X-Box 360s shipped, although I suspect at least some of that is telling retailers and wholesalers to hold stock and they can pay for it later. But some fudging of the numbers seems to be standard practice. Sony seem to be much the same – claiming 1m PS3s shipped, although there are quite a few sightings of PS3s beginning to pile up in shops – the initial surge in demand has been mostly from people buying to re-sell, and its not been backed by any sort of real consumer demand since then. Nintendo are claiming similar but slightly higher numbers, but the crucial difference is that people are actually buying them to use, and its still quite hard to find consoles (and in fact extra controllers or copies of Wii Play) around Edinburgh. But that’s probably to be expected given the lower price point.

Looks like Phillips have finally got a title worthy of recognition supporting the ambX hardware that they were trying to persuade me to develop for last July at Develop Brighton – Supreme Commander were making a big fuss about their ambX support last week. I must admit I like the concept, and it sounds very easy to support, but it can only ever be an afterthought – a polish point for a good title – since the number of people out there who are serious enough to buy it has got to be pretty small. But then I don’t know market demographics on that sort of thing. Certainly I’m happy with headphones for my games, I’m not desperate for a surround sound experience for PC gaming.

Anyway, I’m almost at my destination now, so time to wrap up. I shall endeavour to keep blogging higher up the priority list for the rest of winter; with any luck my schedule will be a little looser now the holiday season is out of the way and the girlfriend is distracted by Rayman Raving Rabbids.