What a woeful display of footballing ‘excellence’…. the best players we have… give me a break.

If you disregard the disallowed goal, England’s display was appalling… completely and utterly outclassed by the Germans… I know who I’ll be supporting from here on in.

These are some of the highest paid people in the country and yet to look at them… what the hell do they get paid to do? Can’t pass… can’t defend… can’t run… the list goes on! But stick them in their clubs and they all play great. What the hell went wrong?

Is it Fabio Cappello? The formation? What???

The only player worthy of a mention is David James who was superb and the one player I think who deserves an honorary raspberry is Wayne Rooney… talk about over hyped… he was pitiful. So many times over the last week or so have I sat and watched as he’s given the ball away… failed to keep up with the game… I know he’s been injured but please… if he’s not up to the job, he shouldn’t be on the pitch.

Overall, I can describe the England performance as woeful… completely and utterly woeful. Before today I would have said they were lucky not to have gone out. Now, they deserve to go out!!!

Welcome home boys!

Well… first we had the scrapers… now we have the spammers… Since about 4:30pm my blog has seen an inordinate amount of traffic originating from all over the place… the one common thing… all of it is apparently referrals from a site that pushes software for getting your links around and about the web. I’m not going to give them the recognition they are after by putting the domain on the front page, so if you want to know more, read on…

The site listed as the referrer is www dot submitter software dot com… they succeeded in posting 5 comments, all punting a piece of software to help drive traffic to your site by abusing shareware software sites and their PAD files… whatever they are. The software in question is actually produced by a another company, so I can only assume that submitter software is an affiliate looking to increase their earnings… maybe I should drop the software house a mail I thought… let them know about the unscrupulous tactics employed by people pushing their products… then when I looked at the products produced by this company I figured they’d probably applaud.

Of course, there could be a perfectly legitimate reason why my site was being spammed… maybe the site owner purchased advertising services from the company they make a mention of on their site and they had no clue what they would do to increase their traffic. So… Rebekah Hudson of 177 Captain HM Shreve Blvd, Shreveport, Louisiana (with the email address kphudson@comcast.net), I’d love to hear how you are involved with submitter software dot com (other than being the registrant).

So, how to stop this kind of crap if your site gets blitzed by this sorted of traffic… well, it’s actually quite simple if you can modify the .htaccess files and your server has mod_rewrite enabled. Google the search string +”block” +”referrer” +”apache” and you’ll get quite a lot of pages that provide details of how to block visitors based on referrers.

Well well, what a bloody farce! Upgrade to AVG Internet Security (the business version) and ICQ stops working… if you’re having problems with ICQ being unable to connect (the incredibly informative ‘Oops, something went wrong’ message), read on.

I don’t use ICQ very often, so imagine my frustation when I tried to use it and it wouldn’t connect.

Wracking my poor PHP addled brain the only change that I’d made to my laptop that I thought would have an impact was the introduction of AVG Internet Security suite. I upgraded the laptop from AVG Free largely because I’d been starting to use it for commercial purposes and because I wanted the extra security provided by the paid up product.

Anyhow, I digress… the problem with ICQ… when I tried to connect, I would constantly receive the ‘Oops, something went wrong’ message. ICQ devs, listen up… MAKE YOUR BLOODY ERROR MESSAGES MEAN SOMETHING FFS. That is just such an unhelpful message it’s untrue… what went wrong? did the world stop spinning? did the little ethernet elf get lost on his way to my router? did a gremlin of the global net munch my packets as they winged their way to your servers? Who knows… something went wrong.

So, not wanting to contemplate the possibility that technology could kick my ass, I’ve just spent the best part of 3 hours tinkering with firewall rules, turning it off (and watching ICQ connect), tweaking more and turning it back on only to have ICQ fail again. Desperate times called for desperate measures so out came the install for WireShark. And what did I see… well, when it connected, there it was, clear as day, the TCP/IP connection establishment phase. With the firewall on however, nothing. A quick email to AVG tech support brought only the suggestion that I completely clean my configuration and then run a series of diagnostic tests (after I spent several hours configuring the dam thing to handle profile switching for 2 LANs, 2 WAPs and my mobile phones internet sharing, I think not. So thanks guys, helpful as ever).

And now I’m ranting, so I’ll move swiftly onto the solution…

The problem I believe was timing. My laptop isn’t exactly brimming with clock cycles, so the time AVG spent traversing it’s firewall rules resulted in a socket timeout (at least I think thats what was happening… ‘Oops, something went wrong’ is oh so informative). To get around this, I trawled through AVGs configuration options and discovered the priority rules. I added a rule to them to handle the ICQ connections to port 5190, apply the configuration and hey presto… one connecting ICQ client.

A word of warning… do NOT change the email address or password on your PS3 using the XMB account management options (as far as I can tell this applies to any firmware version from 2.50 onwards). There is an increasing number of players who are reporting that when they do, they start getting this error. Once that occurs, it seems the only fix is to wipe your profile and lose your game saves. Some people only report a trophy sync error, but others… as I say are resorting to the deletions of hours of gameplay to solve the issue.

This is hardly an acceptable solution, so SONY… get your bloody finger out and get a fix for this. We already have one account that is broken… how long before the other breaks! We are running firmware 2.53, and have changed the email address associated with an account after installing 2.50.

• Blu-ray.com
• Playstation.com (Europe)
• Playstation.com (US Forums)

Update:- The 2.60 firmware update appears to fix this error for a large number of people. See this post for more information.

Just a quick word of advice about the downloadable content available for LittleBigPlanet.

If you download costumes from the PlaystationStore and they aren’t available for your character, make sure you have logged in to your PS3 account and fired up LBP. You must do this to ‘activate’ the content for your character.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be stated anywhere (at least I couldn’t find it) and as a consequence, I ended up purchasing another copy of one of the custome sets when all I really needed to do was login as me and start up LBP.

So, if your content isn’t available immediately, make sure you have logged in and have fired up LBP with you your character.

In recent months I’ve had a few of accounts sign up, providing the most basic of details and matching usernames, nicknames and email addresses, all of which were linked to spamming.. needless to say, they got banned. But more annoyingly in the last month or so, someone has hacked the site. Thankfully it appears they broke something before they could do any damage.

The upshot of this is that I’ve turned off signups since these people seem to be able to break captchas and other measures, so…. if you’d like to get involved in discussions on my site, drop me a mail introducing yourself and I’ll get you a user created. I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but unfortunately thats life on the internet these days. Oh happy times

Just thought I’d make a quick mention about this issue to try and help someone else being bitten in the ass by it.

I have used a fully paid up version of AVG Anti-virus for a while, and I finally upgraded to their internet security suite. Now, my machine was running ZoneAlarm (even though I’ve been sat behind a NAT router and firewall for quite a while), so just in case my machine didn’t like the firewall in AVG, I decided I would be sensible and leave ZoneAlarm installed, just in case I needed to do a quick revert.

So, I removed ZA from the startup and promptly stopped the True Vector service and set its state to Disabled.

AVG was installed and appeared to be operating normally, with one exception… it said it wouldn’t do on-open scanning for spyware without the latest security patches, so off I go and bring my machine up to date… 68 patches (you can tell I’m not a huge fan of Microsoft’s update system).

Great I thought… updated security software… updated OS… everything is rosey

How wrong was I!!!

As soon as I’d rebooted, it became clear that something was very wrong… I could no longer synchronise my mobile phone… I could surf (for a while), I couldn’t resolve domain names… to put it mildly, my machine was right royally screwed.

I tried everything I could think of, and was getting so desperate that I actually uninstalled 58 of the 68 patches… I reinstalled ActiveSync… until I noticed something… during bootup, I was able to ping the machine, then it stopped responding… during shutdown, it suddenly became responsive until the card was stopped by the OS. Clearly I was dealing with something in the user domain, not the OS domain. The new AVG… I uninstalled that… no difference… ZoneAlarm

I uninstalled ZoneAlarm and suddenly everything sprang into life… domain resolution, ActiveSync… everything.

So, in conclusion, simply disabling ZoneAlarm isn’t enough to stop it completely cocking up your network stack somehow. You have been warned… if you no longer want it, uninstall it, because if you don’t it will screw you up big time.

Thanks a bunch ZoneLabs

Just a word of warning…. if you are thinking about purchasing services from GetPro Internet Services… DON’T!

I am still waiting for the services I ordered to be provided (10 days after I paid for them). Moreover, PayPal are being as obtuse as ever now I’m trying to get a refund.

So, in one or two words…. don’t use GetPro Internet Services (getpro.co.uk). If, by any chance you are the owner/admin of GetPro and you can justify why you’ve not answered my mail (I ordered two IRC bouncers on 10th October 2007 and emailed you within a couple of days about them), then lets hear it…. but I will say this… I don’t need the service now as I’ve had to obtain them from elsewhere, so you can either give me a refund or, I’ll pursue it with my credit card company.

Yet again, games are in the firing line and now I’m getting really angry.

First off, what am I playing at the moment…

Last weekend, I took great pleasure in punishing my enemies with a stake gun, a shotgun and my current favourite the multifunction circular saw with functions called ‘Pain’ and ‘Killer’. I am of course, currently playing my way through the top game ‘PainKiller’.

For those who don’t know (most likely the same people who want to see all but the tamest of games banned) you play the part of Daniel (IIRC), a guy who died in a car crash. He has one or two ghosts in his closet so he’s trapped in a world between heaven and hell, trying to stop Lucifers armies in the hope that he will be reunited with his girlfriend/wife.

Nice story. Brutal game. And you know what, I absolutely love the satisfying squelch when a stake punches its way through your enemies chest or head and pins them to the wall like a discarded ragdoll… all limp and lifeless. If you’re lucky, they explode.. body parts flying in all directions, blood splattering around the place.

Before this, I was killing my colleagues in Doom 3… well… when I say colleagues I mean the zombies/demons/aliens that WERE my colleagues… great fun pulling the shotgun out and blowing holes in them.

Before that, I was killing aliens in Quake 4 and before that, militia (I think – not really got that far into the story yet) in FarCry… great fun… sneaking through the jungle, jumping out and popping them off.

Ok, I’m sure you get the point… I’m a gamer… have been for a long time (since the introduction of home computers around 1981/82) and here’s the astonishing fact… I have NEVER once been tempted to shoot someone, beat them up, run them over, race my car around the streets of my home town or anything else that maybe depicted in games. Why? Because I know that a game is a game and reality is reality and that the difference is, in reality there are consequences… consequences you have to live with.

And why do I know this… because my parents paid attention to what I was doing on the computer… I could only play games they allowed me to until I was old enough to understand things… of course one of the main differences between then and now is the realism that can be achieved with games… Doom 3 scares me… thats why its rated 18. Notice… 18… scarey, gorey content with lots of blood… rated 18 meaning its only suitable for adults.

So, if you are a parent or guardian and you let your kids play games that are rated to old for them… you are poor parents and you are failing in your social responsibilties.

Thats where I stand… I’m an adult gamer and I know the difference between reality and a work of fiction/fantasy, so please stop trying to ban games designed by adults for adults. We like playing games too you know and I really don’t want to be playing kids games all the time.

Onto the story… the banning of Manhunt 2 by the BBFC… this is outrageous. Keith Vaz is getting on the bandwagon (as usual) and the media still haven’t got the facts straight. Every time Manhunt is mentioned, the story is linked to the 14 year old boy who was muredered by a ‘friend’ (I’ll use the term loosesly) in a manner that his mother claims was inspired by the original Manhunt. This led to it being withdrawn from most games stores in the UK. The facts of the case are that actually it wasn’t the murderer who owned the game… it was the victim (14 years old playing a game that was rated 18 – How did that come about? Did his parents not monitor what their CHILD was doing?) Furthermore, there was no evidence to suggest that the murderer had ever played it.

Its terrible that her son was murdered, but to blame an ADULT game being played by a CHILD (NOT the murderer) is absolutely absurd. Of course the media saw the equation Adult game + Kid = Murderer and thats was that… Manhunt was doomed, even though they got the facts wrong… and to this day, the correct facts are never mentioned.

So, once again… DO NOT BAN GAMES – Instead, do the following:-

• Ensure they are correctly certified
• Ensure that the people selling the games only sell them to people who (according to the classification) are allowed to play them
• If you are a parent, monitor the games/films etc. your children watch/play. Don’t expect that this responsibility can be put on someone elses shoulders
• Come to the realisation that banning something will only make some people want it more
• Don’t treat adult gamers like children – We are ADULTS afterall and are quite capable of deciding whether or not we want to play a game

Now, this (along with a story about Law and Order : Double or Nothing being dragged over the coals because it apparently includes an image that could be a still of the CCTV showing Jamie Bulger being abducted and the story about Manchester Cathedral being used without permission by Sony) has prompted some interesting comments on the BBC’s Have Your Say.

Overall, the posts are similar to what I’m saying… adult gamers want adult games to play. We aren’t children, we are generally well adjusted and we are more than capable of realising that games aren’t reality and that in the real world there are consequences.

So DON’T BAN GAMES!

Story Links:-
Manhunt 2 banned by censors

Edit: Link to have your say no longer works (January 3rd 2010)
BBC Have Your Say – Have games gone too far? (http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?threadID=6610&sortBy=1)

I’m sure that most people will have had an encounter with Jehovahs Witnesses at least once. If you are a Jehovahs Witness, then I make no apology if you are offended by the content of this post, its just unfortunate that you are a part of a religion that so openly forces itself on people. And to be perfectly honest, I’m sick of it.

My take on religion at the moment is that they are all trying to get new followers. So lets consider some of them.

Roman Catholic… You think abortion is wrong and that contraception is wrong also… look at the suffering your religion has caused just because of these two items. You have converted countries to your ways and their people pay the price. So as far as I’m concerned you can take your hell marys and deposit them where the sun doesn’t shine. Your priests are notorious for abusing children and their position of trust while the powers that be sit idly by and do nothing.

Jehovahs Witnesses… You knock on peoples doors and waste their time. When will you learn to take no for an answer. I got collared yesterday… My opening line was something along the lines of “No thanks, I have no place for religion in my life” and still they carried on. Now I’m normally really polite, but my patience is wearing thin. Every so often they appear on your doorstep and preach. Pretty soon, I’m going to stop being polite and start being down right rude. If I want religion I’ll find it.

Mormons… As far as I’m concerned I have 0 time for anyone that will let their children/family/friends die over the simple matter of a blood transfusion. I don’t care about any other aspects of your religion. This single aspect of it is enough to reduce my respect for you to 0.

Islam… Any religion/culture that effectively says I am subordinate to men… kiss it, although I get the impression that this is largely due to the interpretation of the Koran rather than the actual content. But again… I’m surbordinate to men and I should cover myself in a gown so that no man can see my flesh… LOL… sorry, but this is the 21st century. I am NOT and will NEVER be subordinate to men. My other big problem with Islam and Muslims is that they think they are right and are (courtesy of their extremists, which seem to be quite copious in numbers) out to change western society so it fits with their somewhat outdated and very biggotted views. Enough said.

Jews… This is a touchy subject because of course you had a rough ride at the hand of Nazi Germany… but then you proceed to create a jewish state… in this process you force the Palestinians out of their homes and take over their land… then you wonder why they start bombing you??? Wake up. I don’t condone blowing people up and killing people, but then I don’t condone stealing peoples land. I guess my thoughts on Karma apply here.

Creationists…. An umbrella term I guess for people who are so blinded by the crap they’ve listened to, that they put stickers on books about evolution stating that the book is wrong and that god made the earth. You have 0 clue and more importantly, 0 proof that god created earth, where as those of us without our heads in the clouds can appreciate the wealth of scientific evidence available that totally disproves the ‘god created earth’ theory.

I could continue, but these are my major religious wind ups at the moment. Religion in general is mind control for the masses. It is possibly the single biggest cause of war in our history and I want no part in it. Any of it. I don’t need a god to believe in. I don’t need to be told how to treat thy neighbour. And I certainly don’t need to listen to some of the garbage that gets spouted by extremists. I’m fairly certain that no religious texts tell you to bomb, slaughter and maime based on another individuals religion. I’m also fairly certain that they all preach understanding, yet this is one of the key things that is lacking in the world today.

Now, I’ve ranted above and slagged off some religions/view points, but thats because I’m sick of the abortion debate, I’m sick of Jehovahs Witnesses wasting my time, I’m tired of hearing crap like ‘Islam has been vilifed since 9/11′… In short, I see, read and hear too much about religion.

At a time when our planet is facing some of its biggest threats, we are fighting amongst ourselves. We are all human and yet we fight like cats and dogs based on so called religious texts that in many cases are hundreds and hundreds of years old. If we are to survive beyond the 21st century, then we need to cast aside our differences and learn to live side by side and to do that, those of us who want no part in religion should not be subjected to it at every turn. That means no overt religious displays, no door knocking, no preachers… if people want religion they will find it. We should educate our children about all the religions, but we should not force our own views upon them, but instead we should allow them to find their own way, when they are good and ready.

I wish that every religion… and I mean EVERY religion, would stop trying to convert people to their religion. I’m sick of hearing Islam this, Budhism that, but at least they don’t come round and knock on your door and then try and tell you that you need god unlike the Jehovahs Witnesses. If I want god, I’ll find him (or her)… in my own way. I have no need for some religious gimp to tell me how to live my life and how I should treat other people. I have no desire to join a religion that doesn’t treat me as equal because I’m a woman, nor do I have any desire to waste my life sitting in a church singing hymns etc. And I certainly don’t want anything to do with a religion that can allow people to die for the sake of a little medical intervention.

We… that is we, the people of this planet… are one. We are the same. Regardless of skin colour, country of birth… we are all human. We have to learn to live together. Together we are strong… divided we will fall. In this time of uncertainty, we will need the collective skills and will to survive of the whole planet. We have achieved so much in the fragmented world we call our home. Think what we may be able to achieve if we were all united.