Marketing fail
Posted by Johnnie
Lazy programmers
Posted by Johnnie
I use Moviestorm on a daily basis, but I have to switch fairly regularly between Moviestorm version 1.0.4 (our current public release) and the cutting-edge (read: broken) development version, which is only accessible by compiling and running our current source code. If I’m running a demonstration, or answering posts on the Moviestorm forums, I’ll boot up 1.0.4. I’m also currently writing a whole bucket load of documentation, though, and that’s being written against the latest development version.
The problem with the dev build is that it changes daily. In fact, often it changes hourly. And, every so often, you’ll find a little bit of functionality that hasn’t quite been raised to the usual high standards of absolute perfection that we’ve come to expect from Moviestorm. Little bits like this genuine example from the current dev build:
Online Machinima Film Festival 2008
Posted by Johnnie
Congratulations to all the nominees and winners of this year’s Online Machinima Film Festival. I’m really annoyed that I couldn’t be at the ceremony this year, but my run-by-idiots ISP didn’t switch my new ADSL line on until a few hours ago. Anyway, gratz to everyone, and congratulations to the OMFF team on a job well done.
Early morning clothing fail
Posted by Johnnie
Here is a tip for increased success in life, which I give to you, my faithful reader (or perhaps even “readers”) out of the goodness of my extensive heart. Following this rule faithfully will guarantee a less troublesome life. The tip is this:
If you have recently moved house, and your new house is – literally – next door to a primary school, do not, under any circumstances, get out of bed at about nine o’clock and wander round in front of your open bedroom window in nothing but your boxer shorts.
This tip was brought to you by I Hate Sheep – making the world a better place, one idiot at a time.
In which Julian Clary is the entirety of Faringdon Tube Station
Posted by Johnnie
There are two great things about Paul Kerensa. Actually, there are probably more than two, but I only know about two so I’m going to tell you about them. First of all, he knows tiny bubbly sexpot of comedy loveliness Lucy Porter. Secondly, his website features the utterly brilliant Comedy Tube Map, which is so damn clever it makes my eyes cross.
It's true - the British are all sexually repressed
Posted by Johnnie
A little while ago, I was asked to make a short comedic music video for Moviestorm to demonstrate some ideas we were trying out with the future technical implementation of the software. The result was the now-infamous Clubland Will Never Die, which features Yours Truly exploring his feminine side.
I seem to have started a trend. That renowned director, Alan Smithee, released a parody video today featuring non other than our illustrious CEO, David Bailey.
Watch this, and fear.
In all seriousness, it’s great to work for a company that’s brave (and forward-thinking) enough to allow us to do things like this.
Symptomatic of the lack of excitement in my life
Posted by Johnnie
Today I found a pork scratching in my bag of pork scratchings that was at least twice as big as any pork scratching I have ever before encountered. That was a worryingly important milestone in my week.
Johnnie's weird infatuations number 2458
Posted by Johnnie
Kristen Schaal. On the Daily Show. What a wonderful day this has turned out to be.
Peter Rasmussen
Posted by Johnnie
Peter Rasmussen was one of the cornerstones of the Machinima community. He died earlier today.
Hugh and I have already put up a short tribute to Peter on the Machinima For Dummies blog, but I want to take a few lines to add my personal thoughts as well. I Hate Sheep is my personal blog, covering whatever subjects I happen to be interested in at the time and containing no opinions but my own. This particular post is as personal as it gets.
First of all, a little about the man himself for those who didn’t know him. Peter was a very independent guy, a loner in many ways. I got the impression that he couldn’t help but furrow his own unique path through life – he was one of those people who simply couldn’t have done it any other way. I wouldn’t want to leave you with the impression that Peter was unsociable or uncommunicative, though. Far from it: he was immensely likeable and always eager to help others, and to share his considerable experience and expertise. Like many Machinima heroes, he did all of this willingly and with no expectation of any sort of payment or reward.
He was also a superb – simply superb – director. He possessed an inate feel for camerawork and way of simplifying characterisation down to the pure minimum. You can see his skill in pieces such as Killer Robot or Stolen Life. Stolen Life, in particular, is a flagship piece, and easily amongst the best machinima ever created. It was a deserving winner of the Best Picture award at the 2007 European Machinima Festival. To my eternal chagrin, I still haven’t got around to buying a copy of the DVD.
I didn’t know Peter very well, if I’m being honest. I have no doubt, though, that he’d be staggered by the amount of people who held him in the highest possible regard. I have an email thread in my in-box between Peter and myself, and a note on my to-do list reading “Contact Pete R to finish conversation”. I’ll never be able to tick that box now, and I have no doubt I’ve missed out on a fascinating and worth-while conversation.
He will be deeply missed.
Will we ever kill Office?
Posted by Johnnie
Microsoft Office. God, I hate it. But it’s held an overwhelming market share for many, many years. As far as I can tell, this is for three main reasons:
- Everyone else has Office, so everyone else can read the .doc that you email them
- Non-technical users feel comfortable with Office. They know how to use it, and don’t have the time or the inclination to learn a new interface.
- The management bods responsible for I.T. purchasing at big companies don’t realise that there’s an alternative. Often, Microsoft offers them a very cheap bundle deal for a bunch of Office licences. If you’ve already got ‘em, you’d be stupid not to use ‘em, right?
However, with the latest iteration of the Office behemoth (Office 2007), Microsoft have really shot themselves in the foot. They’ve discarded two of these three killer factors.
- First of all, they changed the format of all their documents, so that Word (for instance) now saves in .docx rather than .doc as it previously did. This means that you can no longer be sure that the person you email your document to can read it. If they’re running Office 2000, for instance, they won’t be able to open the file you saved from Office 2007.
- They also changed the interface. Gone are the familiar menus and buttons, to be replaced by a totally new paradigm: the Ribbon. It’s now much harder to transition from Word 2003 to Word 2007 than it is to go from Word 2003 to Open Office Writer.
Here’s the strange thing: it doesn’t seem to matter. People still use Office, doggedly persisting even though their daily routine is now nothing more than a series of increasing frustrations and blockages.
The reason for this can’t just be down to ignorance. I know there’s still a general perception that Office is the only show in town, but Open Office and the like have had a much more visible presence recently. So why? I don’t have an answer. If you still use Office, either by choice or necessity, do you fancy telling me why? I’m genuinely curious.
Update: It looks like OpenOffice.org version 3 will feature a mail app and a calendaring app, which would make it a serious threat to Microsoft Office.
Update 2: foobar has blogged a pretty in-depth dissection of the average Microsoft fan-boy, which is well worth reading.
Update 3: Red Hat Magazine has a short but excellent dissection of the shortcomings of Microsoft’s OOXML specification.
Update 4: The updates just keep coming – the imminent adoption of rejection of Microsoft’s OpenXML format as an ISO standard seems to have sparked a lot of discussion. If you can’t wait for OOo v3 for an Outlook-killer, you might want to try Spicebird, a fork of Thunderbird that adds in Calendar support (via the Sunbird codebase), RSS support, and more.