7 Things

Thanks Lorna for tagging me! Honestly, I really like it!

Now the idea here is to write up 7 things that people didn't know about you.

1. My full name is Andrew Mark Aitken. I'm known as Mark because my grandfather was known as Andrew and hollering the same name would have caused confusion. I can't tell you the amount of times I'm asked why I'm called Mark instead of Andrew. And it seems to be a family tradition, my Dad is 'Thomas Russell Aitken', known as Thomas. Weird...
2. I used to work as a delivery van driver for my Dad's company. I think I spent around a year delivering in Glasgow, and through fate landed my first job in IT delivering to a company. I handed my CV in to the company and was awarded my first job on a helpdesk! Was one of the best times in my career - learning about development as the Internet emerged to what it has now become! Without that chance meeting, I wouldn't have gotten into IT at that stage, might have been later. And only after working for 5 years in IT did I go back to get a degree in Computer Science (which I achieved with Distinction!).
3. I have two sisters. Laura (32) and Hollie (18). Laura lives in Maybole, Hollie just moved to Glasgow recently. Hollie blames me for her interest in IT, she is an avid game player and has an interest in programming to boot.
4. I'm a frustrated architect. I discovered technical drawing at the age of 13 and loved it. Only when I went on work experience and saw one guy produce 20 drawings which looked identical that the client rejected did I realise that I didn't want to spend my life pushing a pencil over paper like that.
5. I have a dreadful memory! In fact it might be an attention thing too. I need to keep lists with me at all times and rely on my organiser more than the air I breathe to get things done! As a result, I'm fanatical about keeping to do lists for things. If it's not written down, I simply can't remember to do it.
6. I'm the worst kind of geek. I can't stand to not understand something. This is my major downfall when it comes to actually delivering stuff - I just love pulling things apart! My worst accident was with my car, tool the cylinder head off to learn more and couldn't get it put together again. Cost me a few quid to get someone to come help me... Means I have a constant battle to stick to my to do lists and try to avoid delving into interesting things as they appear! On the plus side, it's also the thing that drives me to learn new things!
7. I used to play guitar avidly but let it slip to the side when my time became more occupied with my 3 kids. I have an absolutely stunning acoustic guitar from my Dad from my 30th birthday which I'm ashamed to admit spends too many evenings in the guitar bag.

So now the tricky part. I have to tag seven people, but can only think of 5 who might actually respond. They are:

Simon Davies, Vince Naylor, Chris Reid, Douglas Lindsay, Justin Atkins.

The unlinked guy don't have blogs.

For these people, they need to follow these rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post — some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

Happy writing!

(follow me on Twitter)

Like A Hole In The Head

When I was a kid, I had a lot of time on my hands, most kids do. I chose to spend a fair whack of it playing games on the Commodore 64, the Spectrum, Amstrad, Amiga, Megadrive, Saturn, etc...

i.e. I played a hell of a lot of games.

One of my friends who I played games with in those days recently said he didn't think he'd be alive when a game as good as GT4 came out (yes, GT5 looks better).

However, I've just finished looking at footage for GRID for the PC.

Take a look at this video if you can
http://uk.gamespot.com/video/939158/6191707/grid-crash-damage-engine-demonstration

For me, I was always aware the graphics side would reach these levels, and clearly will continue to improve. But the physics engine that demo shows just looks utterly stunning.

So, do I need another game on my list of things to play? No more than a hole in the head.

But it's still utterly stunning what developers can achieve these days.

(yes, probably will end up getting this, looks far too nice to miss out on).

Orb Streaming

I found TVersity was lacking in terms of it's ability to keep running.  The service crashed on my PC and seemed to take longer than I'd expect to stream films.

The actual quality of the films wasn't too hot either, but certainly considering the software was free I had zero expectation so wasn't really disappointed.

I stumbled upon another package name Orb.  Their site does a good job of explaining what the software does, but in a nutshell:

• Your PC securely broadcasts it's presence to the Orb site.
• Via the Orb site, you can browse music, photos, videos located on your home PC
• Supports the Wii, iPhone, Smartphones, etc..  Most UPMP's
• Allows you to access ALL your files on your PC
• Allows you to upload to your PC

Pretty good features for free software.

I found the media streaming quality to be really good and the features suitable to my need.

One really neat feature.  There are a bunch of links to Flash games suitable for playing on the Wii.  All the games are free, so basically I just found a bunch of free games.  Most are poor, but a few are pretty good.

I realised while playing with this stuff that my home PC is woefully underpowered.  It's time to upgrade...  Maybe TVersity will run better with new kit?

Maybe?  I?  Could? get a TV card too to watch streaming Internet television stations on my regular TV in the front room?

TVersity - Wii Streaming

I mentioned that I had started to look at streaming video from my PC to the Nintendo Wii in an earlier post.

Well I downloaded TVersity, installed and played around a bit with it. I also needed to download the Opera browser for the Wii, cost around £3.50 from the Wii Shopping channel.

After around an hour of installing and faffing around, I managed to get select media on my PC showing on the Wii. I had an AVI file of the short series Hogfather on the PC, selecting it on the Wii was a simply matter of browsing a web server running on the PC.

The web server hides behind it the TVersity magic which is a flash encoder. This software reads a file on your PC, uses DirectShow (I think) to then re-encode the file into a flash based stream (like YouTube). The result is the ability to open any file from the PC for which you have a codec and set it up suitable for viewing in a simple open format.

TVersity is free, so really this all seemed to be too good to be true... and I found out it might be.

There are a few problems which prevent me actually using this to watch movies.

1. Something is causing the videos to stutter around 5/10 minutes into them. It may simply be that my PC is too slow or is running something which soaks up the bandwidth.
2. It's a real pain not to be able to fast forward a film. I tend to shut down the PC at night which means the encode process needs to start again. You can't fast forward into non-encoded video.
3. The actual frame rate is very similar to YouTube quality video. I'm finding it very painful to try to watch at 15 frames per second with all the real detail knocked out of the videos.

I probably have very unrealistic expectations of the setup given TVersity costs zilch.

The answer I think will be to upgrade the home PC. It's a lowly Athlon64 3Ghz wit 1Gb memory. Quad core seems the way to go here or really fast dual core.

So my adventures have paused for the moment until we get around to that job.

Meantime the setup does have a few nice tricks which I'll still make good use of.

- I can listen to my music in the living room by streaming it to the Wii. The sound quality is very good.
- Using the Wii browser I get a good experience browsing the web. Handy if the main PC is in use.
- The setup seems to cope OK with using TVersity to recode some of the videocasts I watch. Seeing these on the television from the sofa instead of a smaller monitor at the PC is a delight. Particularly for the ones which last a good hour (i.e. PodTech and Channel9 videos).

I'm also not abandoning hope that there is another method to do this. Maybe Nintendo will support AVI's and USB storage devices? Time to go Google...

Wii Stream

We were lucky enough to receive a Nintendo Wii this Christmas. Suffice to say Boxing day clocked up around 9 hours of gaming when my family got together on Boxing day.

I'm a terrible geek when it comes to new things. When I first got my PSP, within a week I'd managed to get an emulator on there running megadrive games, custom web browers, SNES games and more. I cannot help myself!

And now that I'm back home and the holidays are done, I turn my attention to the Wii. It may not be the most powerful new kid on the block, but there is a fair bit of oomph in there.

My interest is in playing movies through it.

A friend at work pointed me toward http://www.tversity.com/. There is a media encoder which encodes videos to flash on the fly and streams them to a web browser. Since you can download Opera for the Wii (500 points I believe), it is possible to use this combo to pull movies, music, pictures, etc all through this package.

Best of all TVersity is free (they accept donations).

So guess what I'm doing this weekend in any spare time I can find...

Any advice appreciated from other Wii Streamers out there ;-)

Things I Found Funny

Sorry, this is a direct RIP OFF from Dare's posting today.  But these gems are too good not to share.

XKCD: Pickup Lines: "If I could rearrange the alphabet..."

YouTube: A Cialis Ad With Cuba Gooding Jr.: From the folks at NationalBanana, lots of funny content on their site.

YouTube: Microsoft Surface Parody - "The future is here and it's not an iPhone. It's a big @$$ table. Take that Apple"

Enjoy.

Desktop Tower Defence

Lorna warned me off of this, but I didn't listen. The most simple of games, luring and addictive, give it a shot.

(hehe!! This feels like Halloween 3, with the silver shamrock egging everyone on to just try it. The consequences are horrific (but in a cheap sort of 80's horror way)).

Should you double unbracket when writing? I never know...

Off to Berlin

I'm at a conference for the next 3 days in Berlin, specifically at the Estrel Conference Centre to attend the Business Insight 2007 conference.

Looking forward to some of the content at the conference, but will miss the family... At least I get to buy a cool toy for them or something similar on the way back!!!

PS - Bryan Adams was awesome. Really good old skool rock concert. :-)

Bryan Adams

Off to see him at the SECC tomorrow night with Allie. Promises to be a really good gig I think!

Australian Pink Floyd

Went to see these guys playing on the 31st of March. Totally awesome. Few pics and a vid here, but the quality is very poor (sorry).

The stage was setup in the same type of form as the Pulse tour. Good light show, all in all costs around £25 per ticket.

I can't remember the entire play list, but included:
- Shine on you crazy diamond (of course)
- Another brick
- Breath
- Money
- Learning to fly
- Great Gig in the sky (Beautifully performed. My absolute favourite song of all time)
- Set the controls for the heart of the sun
- Pigs (Three different ones) - it wins my award for most freeky Floyd tune
- Us and them
- One slip
- On the turning away
- Astronomy Domine
- Comfortably Numb
- Wish you were here
- High hopes
- Time
- One of these days (I'm going to cut you into little pieces)
- Careful with that axe Eugene (ha ha!)
- The Wall

I know I've missed at least 3 more...

Highly recommended if you get the chance and are any degree of a fan. I'd go back to see the exact same gig again!