LocationFree TV is one of Sony’s new ideas intended to revolutionise the way we watch TV. You buy a LocationFree base station, connect it to your TV and internet connection and then watch your TV on any internet device, say your PSP.

Well of course you could plug an MCE computer into the Base Station instead. But this is where it gets a little silly (but in an oh so fun way). The Base Station has an IR blaster that allows it to control other IR devices, in this case your media centre PC. Your PC is incidentally controlling your set top box with it’s own IR blaster.

Will Wright, creator of the Sims and SimCity is working on a game called Spore. Spore will not only be a god game, but will be the god game. In fact it may become the best game ever.

It sounds like a combination of Sims, SimCity, Civilisation, Populous, Humans, Command & Conquer and 3D Studio Max.

The game starts with you controlling a little micro-organism (a spore perhaps) that has to survive and eat things and not be eaten by other things. You have a nicely textured but relative simple top down view of your little creature swimming around. Survive long enough and get enough food and you can lay an egg. This is the central theme of the game - your creatures evolve. But you choose *exactly* how they evolve. Need another tail or a couple of spikes? No problem. Put what you like where you like. The game works out how your creature should move and attack. Evolve a few more times and the game switches to 3D (well it was actually in 3D before but you were limited to a fixed camera angle and movement in a single plane).

Once in 3D, the goo you were previously swimming in is revealed to be a pond of sorts. You continue evolving and getting more complex. Add legs and you can walk out of the pond. Or maybe you’d just like fins and be the best sea creature around. Or perhaps you want legs and fins and get the best of both worlds. Your choice.

And so the game continues with your creature evolving. Eventually so does their brain. You can manufacture weapons (designed with the same flexibility as the creatures) which your creatures work out how to use (even if that means holding them with their tails because you forgot to give them hands). By this stage you control a whole tribe.

Of course other tribes will spring up and they have to be dealt with. So make some tanks or something, all with an agonising amount of control.

After that it just keeps going. Control the planet, fly to other planets, control the solar system etc. The sheer scope of this game is unbelievable.

Search Google Video for quite a few clips of the most ambitious game ever conceived.

Complete review from GameSpy of their showing at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference which is more in depth.

Just thought I’d announce the rather funky new tool from Google (yes, another), Google Trends.

It’s lets you see volume of search results against time for search terms. Best of all, you can use it to compare multiple search terms at once.

If you use Google personalised homepage, you can add Google gadgets to them. A Google gadget is just an XML file (or more usually the XML output of some dynamic page) that is displayed. There is a well developed API and you can do quite a lot of nifty stuff with them. But they don’t seem to be that popular (searching for Google gadgets, with Google gets very few relevant results).

There are quite a few in their gadget directory but very little mention of them outside Google…

OrbWars, my online game which I closed last year due to money and time concerns, will be returning soon! By soon of course, I actually mean I’m not sure when exactly, but that it will be in the near future - probably a month or two. The old website is back, nothing much on there at the moment, just a teaser image, but I’ll put updates on there as I get things finalised! Link: http://www.orbwars.co.uk

I’ve started a new page listing some of the story arcs from Stargate.

That is, it lists all the relevant episodes for the story arcs (useful if like me you own most of them and want tory and make sense of them without other stuff in between).

You may possibly have noticed the intermittent availability of the site during the last hour. Well I’ve been fiddling around trying to get my clever “restart Apache and MySQL if they crash” script working.

To that end, I did something unexpected: I wrote a shell script in bash. Not something I ever came close to trying before but it was surprisingly straightforward. The implicit availability of regular expressions everywhere definitely made things easier.

Have a look at this bash scripting guide for more info…

Have you heard of “managed” code? Generally it refers to code that has no direct access to memory and instead has to access everything through a protected interface of sorts. The main advantages are that a program can’t go poking memory that it shouldn’t and useful rules can be enforced like type safety.

The most prevalent example of managed code is nearly everything running under .NET/Mono. Admittedly you can mark parts as “unsafe” letting you use pointers and stopping the garbage collector arbitrarily moving your data around but most of the usefulness comes from avoiding this where possible.

The problem is, you can’t always avoid it. The main reason for this is you have to access existing non managed systems. Rewriting everything in managed code is not feasible and although you can lessen any problems by writing wrappers so there is only one point of contact between managed and unmanaged code, problems can still occur - the sort of problems the managed code was supposed to prevent.

Microsoft are investigating a solution. After reading that last paragraph, the form of the solution should be obvious but for the most part it’s unworkable in the real world - eliminate all unmanaged code.

A lot of people claim managed code, or specifically .NET is slow and inefficient. Well it is. But it can be made faster. Most inefficiency is caused by a lot of run time checks to make sure everything is as it should be. If the code lives in an entirely managed world however most of these checks can be removed since (barring random hardware failure) the program can be guaranteed to satisfy the run time checks at compile time.

For more details about Singularity, Microsoft’s research operating system written in C#, check out this article by James Larus, Galen Hunt, and David Tarditi over at MSDN.

I previously ranted that being unable to have two ASP controlled forms in a single ASP.NET page is a serious flaw. They may be a way round it though. I would assume that ASP.NET can’t output two “smart” forms (the ones with runat="server") on the same page but I’m pretty sure that there is nothing stopping a HTML page itself actually holding two of them. Of course that could be wrong.

Essentially all you have to do is load the extra forms using AJAX and I think everything will work.

(I’m working a on a page (not in ASP.NET) that has a table of data with a status column. Each column needed to have a drop down box letting you change the status. Since the number of statuses is large I decided to have a link that AJAXly changed into the dropdown box and a button when you clicked it. Of course you could click all the links and not submit any of the forms leaving you with a page that actually has a bout 30 forms on it.)

Almost immediately after I said the computer still hadn’t arrived (and when I had I just sent another email to the company), the computer arrived.