It’s about coming up to another one of those birthday events soon, the kind where you get together with a few close friends, have a meal, a few beers, perhaps watch a movie, before whiling away the rest of evening playing a board game. And as it’s in the UK, you only need a few guesses before you’ll stumble upon which game that will be.

Now I don’t claim to be any kind of expert in the field of board games, but that serious lack of diversity in most UK households makes most games evenings feel like you’re stuck in the same old rut again. Take a look at Wikipedia’s list of popular games, and you might see what I mean. Ignoring those that aren’t easily or commonly played in groups, there’s Cluedo, Monopoly, Risk, and Trivial Pursuit. And let’s face it, if a household has anything, it’s probably one of those. Of course, there’s plenty of fun to be had there, but to be honest there just isn’t enough variety in what’s usually available.

Team Fortress 2

I had originally written this post, long lingering in the limbo of the drafts bin, pointing out a number of weaknesses with the game as it stood. The most recent patch has done much to address those problems, and is a welcome and rather unexpected update, given Valve had denied there would be any releases for Team Fortress 2 until 2009 on account of the amount of work going into their latest release, Left 4 Dead . I’ve gone through and added some comments or changes where necessary, to reflect the recent update, though on the whole this post retains its original state.

Moses and the Eleventh Commandment

The war against file-sharing that currently rages primarily over the Internet will ultimately be lost. That’s my prediction. I can’t support this argument with any authority, being no expert in the fields of law, politics or technology, but instead make my statement on the basis of many years’ observation from the wilderness. But the trends all point to this being the case. File-sharing has become a mainstay of this new generation, a fact which has forced most corporations and organisations to rethink their strategies and come up with ways to stem the tide. We have already seen many changes in this direction, such as the explosion of digital content that is now available online from legitimate sources. But in addition to this carrot, the war is also being waged with a stick, as organisations set out to have legislation passed to clamp down on file-sharing activities, and new technologies are created to lock down digital content and prevent its spread. So what will the future bring?

Whilst installing the latest version of Juice, a cross-platform podcast receiver on Windows Vista, I came across a rather simple error that prevented the program from functioning correctly on the first load, and then from loading thereafter. The error log generated the following output (where xxx indicates the username):

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "gui.py", line 4, in ?
File "iPodderGui.pyc", line 3573, in main
File "ipodder\configuration.pyc", line 468, in __init__
File "os.pyc", line 154, in makedirs
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'C:\\Users\\xxx\\My Documents\\My Received Podcasts'

Fortunately the fix seems to be quite simple and pain free (though a bit of a hassle to implement manually), found courtesy of Randall’s Life .

A recent Wired article has certainly provoked some controversy amongst bloggers. Claiming that blogs are history, and that Twitter, Flickr and Facebook are the future, the post’s author Paul Boutin recommends that anyone who’s thinking of starting a blog should stop, and anyone already writing one should pack it in.

Whilst I wouldn’t normally comment on a post of this ilk (given my feelings about bloggers who blog about blogging) it seems pretty clear that unless Boutin is giving us a tongue-in-cheek excuse for a debate on web trends, he’s essentially wrong in his assessment. After all, it comes as no surprise that Boutin proclaims the fall of the blogosphere from the comfort of a blog entry, nor indeed that he rails against his own ilk in decrying the “tsunami of paid bilge” that ranks highest on the Technorati charts. The idea that blogs should be abandoned on account of the fact that personal blogs rarely garner any extended readership or popularity calls into question why authors set up their blogs in the first place, and why indeed they should switch to other means if popularity is their main objective. Boutin upbraids blogs for being text-only affairs, a charge which I daresay isn’t especially accurate, particularly since it is easily possible these days to integrate precisely those services that are supposed to supercede blogs, such as Flickr or Youtube.

logoleafy3

I recently came across a wonderful idea for providing peer-to-peer lending to entrepreneurs in developing countries. The idea seems akin to the principles of the Grameen Bank, providing microcredit in this case primarily as a form of aid. The system allows people with spare cash to browse potential applicants and offer them money in the form of a loan. Kiva works with what they term experienced ‘field partners’ to provide the loans, these bodies being established and recognised sources of finance (which may charge interest on the money to the borrower). Eventually the loans are repaid and the money can be withdrawn, redistributed or donated to Kiva to help cover their organisation’s costs. Of course the levels of finance are fairly miniscule on the larger scale, a far cry yet from providing the many milliards needed to create the level of sustainability needed in many parts of the developing world, through stability, infrastructure, education etc. Yet Kiva has plenty of room to expand, and importantly the principle behind the organisation is sound, in trying to create a direct link between people in the developing world who need capital (and know what they want to do with it) and those with the money and the conscience to try and help. Time will tell how effective Kiva’s mission will be.