Playstation 3: First Impressions

The long wait was finally over 3 months ago, and I was the proud new own of a Sony Playstation 3. Blissfully gaming away, its hard to believe the long struggle in attaining a PS3 in Australia. Unlike countries on the NTSC video standard, the release of the Playstation was delayed until March 23rd, 2007 for all countries on the PAL standard. Agonising as the delays were, it was worth it!Like any kid with a new toy, I marvelled at the ease in which I was able to connect to my wireless broadband connection using the in-built wireless network card, and get straight into the online store. Awaiting me was several demos, a bunch of hi-def trailers, and the full version of Tekken 5 Dark Resistance for $15 or so dollars.

Not to mention, I was comfortably lounged on the couch, with the freedom of movement that only a wireless dual analogue controller can provide.

So wireless freedom aside, here is a short highlight list, which may encourage you to join the next generation of consoles, if you haven’t already!

Games 

If some of the downloadable trailers are anything to go by, the array of games being released in the next 6-12 months looks very, very promising. Their is the impending release of Rainbow 6: Las Vegas, Collin McCrae DIRT, and of course the big one, Grand Theft Auto 4. Add to this to the current lineup which include highlights such as Resistance, FEAR (although the controls in this game suck) and Motorstorm and you’ll be wishing someone would subsidize the time you spend on your PS3!

Don’t forget, a blockbuster game on a console is now equivalent to a PC game, in that game patching and new content are common occurrence. That means new levels, new challenges, bug fixes, all that good stuff – anyone who’s ever played Battlefield 2 on PC will know exactly what a good game patch can add to a game (Jalalabad anyone?)

Resistance: Fall Of Man

My initial game purchase was Resistance, and its certainly a great insight into next-gen gaming. The graphics are smooth and highly detailed, with great level design and plenty of nifty things to shoot at. Most will notice the physics right away, as objects interact with each other in a very realistic manner. Have a read of my Resistance: Fall of Man Review here

Online Content

Owning only one game for the first 3 months is not bad as soon as one sees the delights of the playstation store. Accessed from the Playstation OS, the store contains a mix of free demos, free and paid full games, free and paid game items, and free videos (mostly game and movie trailers).

Within 8 hours I had downloaded absolutely everything I could, and between the demos, trailers and the local video shop, its still hard to get bored with the PS3. It’s all very easy to just plug in the credit card details and download the paid stuff.

Controllers

The dual analogue controller has grown up, and has some nice revisions from the previous Playstation 1 and Playstation 2 versions. For starts, the shock vibration system is gone. Bummer, yeah, but it doesn’t take too long to appreciate the newfound lightness of the controller. There is a PS button in the middle between SELECT and START that lets you do important things like:

• Turn the Playstation off
• Turn the controller off (good when the batteries and you have to switch controllers)
• Reassign the controller
• Quit a game

The motion sensor is pretty cool, although I haven’t had much opportunity to use it except as a virtual steering wheel in the frantic Motorstorm.  I’m guessing that there will be some really good usage coming into the next crop of games – in fact I hear that in Rainbow 6 it can be used to steer a mini camera through air vents!

The L2 and R2 triggers are more Xbox like, allowing for more accuracy when pressure is important, such as when used as accelerate/brake. There are also lights on top to indicate what number the controller is (eg. 1, 2, 3 or 4) as well do a bit of flashing here and there when something important is happening.

Obviously the cost of wireless controllers is that the they need charging up. But you’ll be relieved to know that the battery life is both very long, and if you have a spare controller its easy to switch. On top of that, you can always plug in the USB cable and charge it up anytime even while gaming.

Summary

When news broke of the PS3’s delayed release in Australia, I seriously considered buying an Xbox 360. I don’t want to start an Xbox 360 vs PS3 war (not in this post at least ) but I think we all know which console is superior on virtually any level. The Playstation 3 is THE console to own for at least the next 5 years. So what are you waiting for?

Resistance: Fall of Man Review

Resistance: Fall Of Man

My initial game purchase was Resistance, and its certainly a great insight into next-gen gaming. The graphics are smooth and highly detailed, with great level design and plenty of nifty things to shoot at. Most will notice the physics right away, as objects interact with each other in a very realistic manner. Possibly the best example is shooting at the round cylinders littering the alien levels, where you can shoot at one explosive, and then watch as it explodes and sets off a chain reaction of explosions, sometimes to great effect against the enemy.

Speaking of enemies, the AI holds it own, not revolutionary but certainly good quality. Enemies will sometimes decide they are facing imminent death, and will retreat to find some support. Likewise when they are in numbers, they ain’t backing down!

After completing the single player mode with a mate in co-op mode I was satisfied on the most part with the single player campaign. But a good single player mode doesn’t cut it in this new age of internet capable consoles.

The multiplayer in Resistance has slowly grown on me, and it is now my sole purpose for booting up the game.  The community is steadily growing in size, and you don’t have to look hard to find some very worthy foes. Of course, you have to start somewhere, and in most games there will probably be a “first timer” who invariably turns into cannon fodder.  The multiplayer modes are quite diverse, ranging from shotgun carnage in a tightly enclosed bus yard, to massive levels where strategy is king. The popular multiplayer modes include all the favourites, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, as well as a few other less popular, but all the same fun, modes.

Disable Overtype Mode In Microsoft Word Permanently!

By default in Microsoft Word, when you hit insert key, Word jumps into overtype mode, which writes over the text at the cursor instead of inserting new characters. This drives many people insane. The fact that it is a default behaviour remains to be seen.

How to fix overtype mode:

There are two options to remedy this:

1. Go to Tools > Options > Edit > Overtype Mode

And uncheck the Overtype mode box.

OR

2. Kill the Insert Key:
1. Start Word
2. Click on the Tools menu
3. Click Customize
4. Click the Options tab
5. Click Keyboard
6. Under the Categories dropdown box, select All Commands
7. Under the Commands dropdown box, select Overtype
8. Under the Current keys downdown box, select Insert
9. Click Remove
10. Click Close until the dialog windows close.

Thanks to the guys at tech-recipes.com, where I discovered this information after years of using method 1! this guy deserves a medal!

Top 5 Movie Scenes of All Time

I feel privileged – how many people can honestly say they have cut themselves on a pair of barbeque tongs? Well i’ve done it and it hurt like… ok it didn’t really hurt, but who would’ve thought it was possible?

As amusing as web development talk is, I think its time to break it up a little with one of my other major loves – movies! And what better way to crack into this massive industry than to share my thoughts on the top 10 movie scenes of all time?

In order to retain my sanity, I dared not order this list, so IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER, here we go!

Gladiator – Maximus Unveiling

Context: I think the below dialogue says it best!

Dialogue: My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.

Why it’s so cool: Superbly acted by Gladiator Rusty Crowe and Emperor Joaquin Phoenix. By this stage of the movie the audience is just itching for this kind of confrontation, little do they know (at least on first viewing!) that rusty is going to come up with such a kickass verbal spat directed at the emperor.

Trainspotting – Rent Boy spits the dummy

Context: The only non-junkie, Tommy, in this group of friends decides his junkie friends stand to gain from a nice climb up a big hill in Scotland. Fed up, Mark Rents (Rent Boy AKA Ewan McGregor) sits down and has a blast about how he hates Scotland.

Dialogue:
Tommy Doesn’t it make you proud to be Scottish?
Mark “Rent-boy” Renton It’s SHITE being Scottish! We’re the lowest of the low. The scum of the fucking Earth! The most wretched miserable servile pathetic trash that was ever shat on civilization. Some people hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to get colonized by. We’re ruled by effete assholes. It’s a shite state of affairs to be in, Tommy, and all the fresh air in the world won’t make any fucking difference!

Why it’s so cool: This scene is great on two levels – firstly its just so funny to see a bunch of city dwelling heroin addicts being dragged along on a nature walk. Secondly the outburst by Rent Boy is totally unexpected, and extremely funny!! This is an extremely good movie and for me this is the peak of McGregor’s performance in the film.

Apocalypto – Fear Conquered

Context: After being chased around for hours on end by a gang of fierce warriors, Jaguar Paw, wounded and exhausted, has a revelation and parts completely with his own fears. This is a series of awesome scenes where Jaguar Paw seeks to even the odds between himself and his pursuers.

Dialogue: N/A

Why it’s so cool: This is such an uplifting and inspiring set of scenes!

In a sense the whole moral of the story starts to come together and a strong sense of reassurance emerges after a long period of intense suspense. The hunter becomes the hunted. Jaguar Paw uses his jungle skills to outstanding effect.

Mel Gibson; love him or hate him, you cannot deny he’s made some pretty fine movies.

Braveheart – The Speech

The Context: Mel Gibson strikes another win for me, with William Wallace’s speech in Braveheart. With a sizeable Scottish army presenting itself on the battlefield, outnumbered 4:1 by the opposing Brittish Army, a large portion of the Scottish decide its better to go home than to go into battle. Enter Scottish hero, William Wallace (Mel Gibson)… on a horse.

Dialogue:

William Wallace: Sons of Scotland! I am William Wallace.
Second Soldier: William Wallace is seven feet tall!

William Wallace: Yes, I’ve heard. Kills men by the hundreds. And if HE were here, he’d consume the English with fireballs from his eyes, and bolts of lightning from his arse.
[Scottish army laughs]
William Wallace: I AM William Wallace! And I see a whole army of my country men, here, in defiance of tyranny. You’ve come to fight as free men, and free men you are. What will you do with that freedom? Will you fight?

Soldier:Against that? No, we’ll run, and we’ll live.

William Wallace: Aye, fight and you may die, run, and you’ll live… at least for a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin’ to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take… OUR FREEDOM!

Why it’s so cool:This scene almost makes me wish I was Scottish!

Fight Club>- Meet Tyler Durden

Wow where do I even start with this movie? It is pure torture trying to pick a scene, but this one is pretty classy.

The Context: Our nameless main character played by Edward Norton, battles with his insomnia as he jets alls over the US assessing car accidents for his employer. He awakes to discover Tyler Durden sitting next to him, and the rest is history.

Dialogue:

Tyler Durden [pointing at an emergency instruction manual on a plane] You know why they put oxygen masks on planes?
Narrator: So you can breath.
Tyler Durden Oxygen gets you high. In a catastrophic emergency, you’re taking giant panicked breaths. Suddenly you become euphoric, docile. You accept your fate. It’s all right here. Emergency water landing – 600 miles an hour. Blank faces, calm as Hindu cows.

Why it’s so cool: If you have seen Fight Club, no explanation is needed. If you have not seen Fight Club, make the $2 investment at your local video store, you will not be disappointed!

Agree? Disagree? Think I have an appalling taste in film, or have made some glaringly obvious oversights? Make a comment!

The Golden Rule of Design: KISS

A sincere thanks goes out to my borderline insane visual communication from my latter high school years – it all started when we had to build a scale house out of paper materials, architecturally acurate to the last detail. What I failed to see was that my fantastic H shaped house had a roof that was incredibly complex, nearly making me overshoot the project deadline trying to figure out how to build a roof for the thing!

My teacher told me something thing that really stuck, and it continues to be a good way of kick starting the creative process when I find myself staring aimlessly into space.

The rule is called KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid.

The “stupid” part is a reflection of how many of us tend to act out of instinct – so many ideas are floating around that we want to do everything and anything. When a designer sits down and scribbles down how the design will work, perhaps only one person can make sense of it – can you guess who? The user is not stupid, the designer is stupid for expecting others to realise their vision.

Can you think of a top site that does not follow the rule of KISS? Look at Google’s phenomenal growth; once upon a time there was no Google Tools, Google Maps or Google Earth. Despite these tools being generally easy to use, what could be easier than the original Google search design that has barely changed in years? One logo, one search box, one submit button, and a few links at the bottom.

What the other major search engines failed / fail to notice, was that this very simple idea worked. This very simple idea kept people coming back over and over again to something that delivered what they wanted, without any hoo haa. Sure it helped that Google also generally returned the best results, but my opinion is its success lies in the simplicity.

Some sites have the benefit of only providing one function while others are obviously far more complicated. Take my home away from home, www.sitepoint.com as an example. The initial navigation is brilliant:

Home | Articles | Books | Kits | Videos | Blogs | Contests | Marketplace | Forums [search]

They do not enjoy the luxury of having one or two simple goals for their website, but they have the benefit of very well organised content. They started with perhaps one or two of the above sections, and expanded. Now they are enjoying a thriving forum community and a rising star status amongst the web community, not to mention a huge turnover thanks to a user base that keeps coming back.

I’ve been reading “The Usability Kit” from SitePoint.com of late, and it has a very useful set of points that I would like to share – in fact I keep them permanently pinned on the wall next to me!

• Provide effective navigation and orientation
• Provide appropriate functions
• Provide access to help and support
• Minimise Errors
• Give the user control
• Support the user’s prefer way of working
• Speak the user’s language
• Keep the user informed
• Be consistent
• Implement a clear visual design
• And for good measure, my addition: Keep it Simple Stupid!

How to Market a Website Using Google Tools

Google is kicking some serious butt with their range of free tools for webmasters. Google’s tools are so much more advanced than any offerings from Microsoft or Yahoo or any of the minor players, that there is no real need to mention them at all!

Google has cleverly devised this set of tools, knowing the high probability that the website owner / marketer is probably going to use Google Adwords which coincidentally links in beautifully with the rest of the software.

The cornerstone to understanding a websites success is to measure its performance on a goal based level. For an E-Commerce site, the most important goal is usually a sale. Other sites may consider new members, contact from the visitor, number of blog comments, or even whether certain pages are viewed or not.

Enter Google Analytics: The most comprehensive, free website reporting software I have ever seen. It gives you all the basics such as number of visits, where the traffic is coming from, and traffic over time which are all standard features in the majority of web statistic programs. But the real strength of Google Analytics is the comprehensiveness of information even on the very basic levels;

• How does my traffic changed over time?
• How much traffic do I get from a certain continent, country, state or even city? And more importantly how important is this target group to my campaign?
• How long do visitors spend on my site?
• How often do visitors return to my site after the first visit?
• Visually, how do people navigate my site?
• How often do people abandon the steps to my shopping cart, instead of completing the transaction?

And so it goes on, and on, and on. Even by answering these basic questions, Google Analytics lets you drill down, compare two different time periods – would you like to see that as a bar graph or a line graph?

Unleashing Google Analytics beyond its basic purpose is where the fun starts. Track your transactions dollar for dollar – even look at an overlay of your site, with visual representations of which buttons and links are used most frequently.

Their new interface has some good features – ability to email and create pdf’s from reports, and a wider ranging context for each set of data you view.

A picture might be forming in your imagination of Analytics being the silver bullet – but you’d be mistaken – Analytics is only providing you with virtually every useful bit of info that it can possibly gather about your site’s visitors. The onus is still on the web marketer to analyze, understand and fine-tune.

Google has really hit the nail on the head with Analytics. Installing Google analytics at its most basic level is a breeze for anyone familiar with website building. Thomas Multimedia can setup Google Analytics on your site to whatever level of customisation you require. Information is power!

PHP and why you should use it

PHP is a programming language that is arguably one of the easiest to learn, cost efficient and common languages out there. It is used primarily to create dynamic website content. By dynamic I mean that it flows and it can change in a way that static website content can not.

With so much time invested by individuals and businesses in establishing themselves with a programming language, bias is inevitable, and you don’t have to dig deep to find someone criticising PHP. But then, the same goes for any language. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages.

What remains a fact is that PHP has been popular in the past, is popular now, and will continue to be popular well into the future.

Some of PHP’s advantages include:

• Considered easy to learn as far as programming languages go, meaning it is very well known in the web development community
• Hosting is more common and cheaper than for any other language
• Large range of turnkey php applications available, some free, some not. Examples include WordPress, (the software this forum is running on), phpBB and wikipedia.
• Abundance of free online resources

Here is a classic usage for PHP;
Situation - A shop owner wishes to supplement their traditional shop with an online shop, in the form of a 500 product website.
Solution A: Build a static website, and make 500 separate pages to accommodate each and every product.
Solution B: Build a dynamic website, create 1 product page and create 500 database entries

So what is the difference? In any case, the shop owner / web developer is going to have to process 500 products. Sure this sucks, at least initially.

PHP starts flexing its muscle when we get to the ongoing management side of things. The shopowner has decided that the product pages would convert better if the pictures were at the top of the page, instead of at the bottom;

Static Site: guess what – 500 product pages = 500 pages to download, change and upload – say goodbye to your trip to the beach this weekend!
Dynamic Site: 1 product template = 1 file to change, 500 ‘pages‘ updated in one foul swoop.

The reason for this miracle of time saving is because PHP, in combination with a database language such as MySQL can join forces to create what you seen in your web browser on the fly. As a page is loaded, PHP instructs the database to return the relevant information for the product in question.

This is but one hypothetical situation – but instantly you can see the scalability of PHP. This is really only the tip of the iceberg.

One of the cool things about PHP as one delves into the “web development” field, is that as you look for more and more advanced concepts every day, the inbuilt functionality is sure not to disappoint. I’m yet to hit a point where I think, “damn I wish I could do that in PHP!”.

Perhaps years down the road one might hit this roadblock, but as long as the team behind PHP keep there eyes on the ball, and the community remains strong and innovative, that day will*never* come. The point here is that who knows where the internet will be in 10, 20 or 50 years time.

Further Reading:
Comparison of Programming Languages
PHP
PHP Usage Graph
Programming Movers and shakers

PHP Server Side Includes

One of php's most practical solutions is a server side include.

Consider the navigation at the top of every page on this website. At time of writing there is 7 unique pages on thomasmultimedia.com.au, excluding this blog. If I were to add a new page to my site, would I not have to update each and every page to show the new link?

What a horrible sounding job -- what if I had to make 2 or 3 changes to each and every one of those pages? In the context of 7 pages this might take say 10-15 minutes to open, change, save and upload 7 files. But what about if I have 20, 50, or 1000 different pages? This could take a day, if not a week!

What a horrible way to spend a week... and yet i'm sure someone, somewhere, in a deep, dark dungeon has slaved away at this menial task for hours on end.

All bow to King server side include!

A Server Side Include is a fairly ordinary file that is created for a website. It can contain any kind of web friendly content, but the most common usage is to display the same things over and over on different pages. So utilising this fantastic technology I have 1 file that contains my main navigation. If I want to rename, add, delete... or make any change under the sun, a server side include is my friend. I change the file once, and like magic every instance of the file is now reflecting the changes. Cool huh?

For any web people who have just read this post, don't worry, I won't leave you in the dark about how to do it - my favourite method is php.

For Dreamweaver users, use brackets - the above will leave a lovely/nasty little php symbol instead of the visual contents of the file. Try this to have the file contents display perfectly in your design view:

Remember that the path can be relative or absolute. If you work with folders for example, you may need something like this if the current file is located in its own folder.

You can also use the absolute path, which is commonly required in configuration files of popular applications. You will need to know your absolute server path, which frequently looks something like this:

Need help setting up server side includes or developing your site in some way? Read about Thomas Multimedia's web design services