July 2003 Archives
"So, what did you get up to this morning?"
"Oh, I jumped the English channel."
While browsing today I came across this transcript of a speech prepared for Richard Nixon in 1969, in the event that the Apollo 11 lander was grounded permanently on the moon by a technical failure. I'd heard about the existence of this speech before, but I'd always assumed it was an urban myth.
Reading it is like peering into an alternate reality. A strange experience.
This is quite wonderful. Mark Shuttleworth, entrepreneur and the second civilian to visit the International Space Station last year, is also a ray-tracing enthusiast. During his stay in orbit as a guest of the Russian space program, he used his laptop to render a scene designed by two renowned POV-Ray artists.
The resulting image is the first work of art ever to have been created digitally in space. It is beautiful, evocative, and incredibly detailed, and stands as a testament to what POV-Ray can do.
It's also available to buy as a poster.
I'm in a good mood tonight, so I don't feel like writing another rant about Windows Media Player, that pitiful half-arsed excuse for an application (oops, nearly destroyed the mood). I'm not done with ranting about it yet, believe me, I just don't have the necessary vitriol in me at the moment.
Instead I've cleaned out some of the more useless junk from the sidebar and added a section that lists some of the stuff I'm wasting my free time on at the moment. Astute readers will notice that there are categories for TV shows and computer games but none for written material, and if and when I work out a daily routine that gives me time each day to curl up with a book, I'll rectify that oversight. Since I'll be changing that section of the sidebar periodically, I really should try to figure out a way to edit it without having to upload and rebuild templates, but I'll leave that fun-sounding task for another quiet evening.
RSS feed visitors won't have a clue what I'm talking about, I imagine. Never mind.
I'm still posting with Zempt 0.3, by the way. I could have made a long post about it, but I'm not sure there's a point in doing so. The only relevant information is that Zempt passed the clc test with flying colours, and that I'm now doing all my blog publishing this way. If you're a Movable Type user running Windows, I highly recommend you check it out.
Another entry in the Why Using Windows Media Player 9 for Six Months was a Honking Great Waste of Time and Effort series.
Performance
At first, WMP9 didn't seem to be too much of a hog. It started up reasonably quickly, and most operations were fast enough to cause no annoyance. But over time, either my growing media library has affected it adversely or my tolerance has changed, and it's come to act like a complete dog.
A rescan of my mp3 directory for the media library (to add new files or clean out old ones) now takes minutes and locks out all access to the controls of the player while this occurs. Hard disk access seems particularly excessive when the process involves removing deleted files from the media library, as if it's searching my entire hard drive to locate the missing files before finally conceding that yes, I've intentionally deleted them. Any operation involving the media library has an unacceptable response time attached to it. And when, in mid-play, I try to skip to the next track, I have to listen to a couple of seconds of repeating, stuttering music -- why did they let it do this? (There's no crossfader on my version of WMP... a rant for another day.)
I have an Athlon 900 machine. I just want to play some mp3s. Is this really a task that ought to bring my computer to its knees?
This post was going to be about Zempt 0.3, but as I started to write it, I realised that what I really wanted to write was a rant about Windows Media Player. But why write a rant when you can write a series of rants?
See, I've had it up to here with Windows Media Player. When Version 9 was released, I (like many people) were impressed and enticed by its sparkly glory, and the fact that it was the first release of WMP since version 6 that didn't clearly suck 5 minutes after you started using it.
No, it's taken me a lot longer to discover that WMP9 sucks. Almost exactly 6 months. But now I'm ready to cast it into the dirt, and my carefully organised media library, playlists and ratings along with it. I can see clearly now that I was misled by obvious deceptions. I was a fool. So for the sake of my sanity, here's the first in a series of indeterminate length where I will explain (rant about) the things in WMP9 that really piss me off.
And if anybody knows of a free, elegant, alternative media player that matches the features of WMP9, preferably also doing them properly, I'd like to know.
The rating system
Yay, the rating system! Rate a track anything from 1 to 5 stars, and it'll record your preference, allowing you to make auto-playlists of the tracks you rated highest. What a cool feature, I'm going to rate all my tracks, this will mean I can easily weed out all my bad music! (bounces around gleefully)
Astute readers will see that my error was in making the assumption that the rating system actually worked properly.
The ratings system in WMP9 doesn't work. The tooltips say that if I rate something 1 star, it'll never play again. Is that true at all? Take a wild guess. By my observation, a 1-star rated track plays as frequently as a 5-star rated track, assuming both tracks are in the active playlist. And another thing. Unrated tracks increase their ratings automatically when they are played, whether they were manually selected for play or not. So if you've got a long playlist that you leave running, all the unrated tracks in the playlist will gradually rate their way up to 5 stars, polluting your automatic 'favourites' playlists to the point of near uselessness.
It must take special Microsoft talent to screw up a promising feature this badly. The rating system could so easily have been great. But play with it for long enough and the truth comes out -- it's just a poorly implemented gimmick.
I don't know why it's so important to me that I have an opinion on stories like these -- of course they don't involve or affect me in the slightest -- but it's the kind of thing I'm inclined to rant about. Sorry...
Not sure where I stand on this one. On the one hand, I'm not sure Activision has any real right to complain. I can't imagine that any promises were made to them that Star Trek would maintain a certain level of quality, because such a promise would be impossible to guarantee in a creative pursuit like television and film production. But I think I'm leaning toward rooting for Activision on this one, because whatever you personally think of the current state of the Trek franchise (and just to be clear, I think it's a festering, puerile, embarrassing, derivative pile of donkey dung) you have to admit that Enterprise on its own makes for a much weaker franchise than a few years ago, when we had Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and a healthy and ongoing series of TNG movies.
I suppose that in this case, it's all a question of licensing and whether Activision are making good games with the stuff they've got to work with. And I'm not sure they've been doing that even when they had good source material... although there have been some decent Trek games on Activision's watch (Bridge Commander was reasonable, and the original Elite Force was truly one of the best things ever to carry the Voyager name) they've also produced some less than stellar ones, and failed to fully exploit the material at their disposal (DS9 could have been the source of some fantastic computer games, but the opportunity was squandered).
So, it comes down to the lesser evil. Activision have been negligent in exploiting the license, churning out mostly uninspired drivel. But Viacom really have let the franchise stagnate -- under Berman and Braga's continuing leadership, viewers are turning away in droves knowing they've seen it all before, a decade ago, except that back then it was done much better. I'm rooting for Activision, but not because I think they're totally right. I just want to see a court rule that Star Trek sucks. It'll be good ammunition for flamewars.
trioptimum.co.uk will keep you up to date on this crucially important news story.
Ooh, Zempt 0.3 is out. I've been waiting for that. The next post will be made from Zempt, and my impressions will follow at some point after that.
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