This has the potential to be massive. High performance computing on virtually any device, delivered over the Internet. The barrier to this right now is latency. The problem with services like Onlive at the moment – aside from massive data usage – is a noticeable disconnect between your actions and the movement of your character.

It sounds like Nvidia may have solved the problem…

Oh, and here it is in action:

Formerly a seldom-talked-about photo workflow program, Bibble 5 Pro was a very decent bit of software.  It had a built-in Noise Ninja plugin, all of the tools you would need for processing your images and a tasteful dark UI.

Nowadays it is called Corel Aftershot Pro and yes, it’s still got everything it had before.  It’s $59.99 at the moment  (about £37) and is available on Windows, OSX and most importantly – Linux.  You can download it in both 32bit and 64bit .deb packages and .rpm as well.

It may not be quite as pretty as Aperture and it may not have the ability to create photobooks and have Apple print them, but if anything, it offers a little more control than Aperture does.

On the left hand side you’ll find your libraries and anything to do with the files themselves.  On the right you’ll find your toolbox, which is made up of a number of tabs – standard; colour; tone; detail; metadata and finally, plugins.  If anything it can be a little daunting finding your way around, but if you are used to this sort of application it shouldn’t take you too long to settle down.

The bundling of Noise Ninja is an inspired touch when compared to Aperture’s rather disappointing noise-cleaning abilities.

Aftershot feels pretty responsive to use, even in a virtual machine, so a native installation should zip along nicely.  It’s only 135mb when installed, so it isn’t going to clog up your hard drive either.

It seems like Corel are on the ball with their RAW file support.  An update was issued last month (1.0.1) that added support for the D800, D800e, Canon 5D Mk3 and a dozen others.

Yes I know it isn’t free software but ideology aside, surely the best thing about Linux is not having to put up with Windows?  I have no issues with paying for software on Linux, as long as it runs on Linux.  If I was going to move my workflow away from Aperture and onto my Linux box, Aftershot seems like a pretty good alternative.  It’s polished, it supports presets, it runs on Linux and is cheap. Win.

The chances of Rockstar Games releasing a lemon are quite remote however, but it’s always worth making sure.

IGN

9/10

Gamespot

GamesRadar

CVG

This one’s a bit more negative, but after seeing the other reviews this one confirms what I thought it might be like. A bit too linear and a bit too repetitive.

They actually received hundreds of complaints from people who took offence at the negative review (why it is their place to disagree I don’t know) so they posted a follow-up video addressing the complaints…

Hmm, maybe I’ll hold off on this one…

It’s one of the many reasons why I’ve stopped dealing with Windows at home – it just isn’t worth the hassle or the expense.  Clearing a new PC of crapware can take hours and hours of your time.  Typically each application will need to restart the machine to finish uninstalling and this adds to the time spent on it.  You could do a fresh installation if only they gave you the Windows DVD, but they don’t.  Instead you get a recovery DVD (which you often have to burn in your own time) that just reinstalls the crapware your computer came with.

ZDnet reports that Microsoft are to charge $99 to turn your PC into one of their “Signature Editions”.  A Signature Edition PC is one that has avoided the OEMs unhelpful desire to load your new PC with trialware, bloat and unneccessary applications and therefore runs faster, boots faster and doesn’t ask you for money every half hour or so.

The trialware is there for a reason – it subsidises the cost of your new PC and is a bit of a moneyspinner for the OEM.  So, this is how this works.

1. OEM gets paid to load your new PC with junk
2. You pay Microsoft to cleanse your PC of junk
3. Microsoft and the OEM both end up with money in their pockets.
4. You lose either way.

Inspired bit of business there.  Isn’t it amazing what you can do with a monopoly.

It isn’t clear how their technology works, but according to the article it appears to be little more than a torrent-specific denial of service attack.

We used a number of servers to make a connection to each and every p2p client that distributed this film,” Klimenko says of the technology test. “Then Pirate Pay sent specific traffic to confuse these clients about the real I.P. addresses of other clients and to make them disconnect from each other. (emphasis added)

Now, the UK outlawed Denial of Service attacks way back in 2006 as part of the Police & Justice Bill (clause 40)  and given the decentralised nature of the bit-torrent network, it is entirely likely that this is a denial of service attack and would fall foul of the law.

Curiously, Pirate Pay has found some financial backing in the form of uber-troll and occasional developer, Microsoft.  Microsoft’s interest in bringing down the torrent network may be entirely focussed on the rampant exchange of dodgy Windows & Office disc images & perhaps Xbox software.  If you were to give them the benefit of the doubt, sure, it seems like a good reason.

However, whilst illegal sharing does happen on the bit-torrent network, it isn’t in itself the problem.  Bit-torrent is still a very popular way to share genuinely free software such as Linux & UNIX distributions.  When torrent traffic isn’t being throttled by ISPs, sharing an ISO using bit-torrent is a far less resource intensive way to get your software out to the community.  The load is shared between the other seeders, rather than your poor server.

What an unfortunate side effect to their apparently noble mission to stamp out piracy, eh! The hit taken by their Open Source competition is the sort of collateral damage they can live with.

When you wrap text in the <code> and </code> tags, it’ll display it like you’d see it in a basic text editor, but anything within those tags, should they contain certain brackets or characters may be read as code WordPress doesn’t like and therefore stripped out.  Fortunately there are alternative character codes you can use to display the bracket or character you want.

Head into the HTML editor (ie not the Visual one), type <code> at the start of the line you want to add and where the offending character appears, replace it with the string of text in this list that best fits:

< = &lt;
> = &gt;
/ = &#47;
] = &#93;
[ = &#91;
" = &#34;
' = &#39;

Don’t forget to close the expression with </code> when you are done. So, if you want to, as I did in my previous post, include a line such as ifModule mod_expires with the pointy brackets at either end, you would type:

<code>&lt;ifModule mod_expires.c&gt;</code>

Thanks to this page for the info – it had me puzzled for a while.

Anyway, if you wish to earn yourself some more traffic, the one thing you are going to need to keep in mind is how quickly your site loads. For a while now, Google has been using page speed as a criteria in its rankings. Head along to the Google Pagespeed site, type in your URL and see what score it gives you. Helpfully it’ll also give you some recommendations for what you can do to improve your score, but I’ll go through a few of the things I’ve found to help below.

It’s easy to load a simple HTML page quickly. It’s a single page of HTML, there’s nothing complicated for your server to do. A WordPress site on the other hand…bit more complex. Before your page loads, the server has to take your database, your theme, your plugins and anything else you have bolted onto it and somehow mash them all together so that it looks like the site you created. Anything you add to it that is either large (an image perhaps), complex or even just poorly optimised will slow the whole thing down and frustrate your visitor. Thankfully, there are a few things you can do to help yourself.

Leverage Browser Caching

There is going to be a lot of things on your site that will change frequently, but there will be a lot of things that are not going to change for years – images, documents you’ve shared, theme components etc. Fortunately you can use the browser of your visitor to your advantage by telling it how long a shelf-life these various files have. This is perhaps one of the more “scary” optimisations you can do as it involves manually editing your .htaccess file. If you screw up your htaccess file your site is unlikely to work at all. On the plus side, adding a few lines to the file is well worth doing. For this, you are going to need an FTP client, your FTP login details and some courage.

For an FTP client I recommend Filezilla. It’s free, its open source and it works for me. Login to your site through the FTP client and look for the .htaccess file. Before you do anything else, make a copy of it somewhere on your computer – you’ll need to pop the old one back in if it all goes wrong. Open the live version for editing using the default text editor (Notepad on Windows, Textedit on OSX, Gedit on Linux for example). Make some room at the very top of the file and paste the following code into it:

## EXPIRES CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 2 days"
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES CACHING ##

When you have done that, close the file and it’ll probably ask you if you want to replace the old file with this new one – say yes. Your .htaccess file should now tell visiting browsers that your image files have a one year shelf life, text/css has one month and so has JavaScript & flash. The “ifModule mod_expires.c” bit is in there to stop it failing to load if the mod_expires module isn’t loaded on your hosts Apache server. Cheers to this site for the tip. If you don’t have mod_expires enabled on your server, this won’t work for you I’m afraid.

Caching

Caching your WordPress site allows it to present static pages to the visitor rather than compile it for every single user. Caching will help reduce the load on the server’s CPU and keep things moving more smoothly. I must confess I’ve had no experience with W3 Total Cache, but WP Supercache has worked fine for me.

Once installed you may want to tweak a few settings according to taste. I’ve taken a few screenshots of mine just to give you an idea, although you’ll need to tweak it further according to your other plugins should they conflict with it.

You probably won’t notice much of an improvement immediately, but once it has been running for a while it should have built up a reasonable stash to throw at your browser.

Caching Other Things

Believe it or not, other things can be cached, specifically your database and your widgets. If you have sidebar widgets that only change once in a blue moon, you might as well cache them. Similarly, you can reduce the burden on your database if you cache it. For this I have had some success with WP Widget Cache and DB Cache Reloaded Fix. The WP Widget Cache plugin will enable a new setting or two underneath your widget in the Appearance menu. This allows you to choose when the cache expires and needs to be reloaded. You can either choose a time or have it automatically expire when a new category; comment; link; post or tag is added. If you cache your tag cloud, it would make sense to have it reload when a new tag is added, obviously. You need to do this for each widget you want to cache.

Minify

Google Pagespeed may well recommend that you minify your code, be it css, html or JavaScript. Fortunately you can get a plugin or two to cover this. I use Better WordPress Minify which takes care of the CSS and JavaScript. I haven’t minified my HTML because it appeared to make WP Touch Pro very unhappy – oddly. Minifying your code puts it on a bit of a diet, removes any extraneous guff and makes the files smaller to download.

Watch those images

Uploading large images to your site isn’t going to be great for your page speed. Fortunately, built into WordPress from 3.3 onwards is the ability to scale images on upload. It just needs to be enabled with a plugin conveniently titled Enable Image Scaling on Upload. This will shrink anything bigger than 1024×1024 down to something more manageable.

Go on a diet

No, not you, your site. Think of WordPress plugins as fat – you need some fat to survive, but too much is bad for you. Only keep the plugins you really need and uninstall the rest. Plugins that help you cache, go faster & carry out the essential functions of the site are fine, but those that do something needlessly fancy like this fancy tag cloud are probably not going to help you in the speed stakes. By default you may have “Hello Dolly” installed…can’t imagine why they put that there…

Keep your database healthy

Comments, whether they are genuine or just spam will fragment your database over time. Installing a plugin to give your database a clean every now and again is probably not a bad idea. For this I use Tentblogger’s WordPress Database plugin. The plugin will tell you exactly how much space it can free up at any given time. Run it after deleting a few hundred spam posts and it’ll probably report a fair few KBs worth of space to free up.

Use Google Libraries

If your site uses jQuery, Mootools, Dojo or anything else that Google has on its own servers, you can use their libraries instead of your own.  The Use Google Libraries plugin allows your site to use Google’s own AJAX Libraries API and save your own server from serving up these files.  I’ve not thoroughly tested this yet, but initial impressions are positive…

I can’t recommend this as a way to improve your page speed.  It actually slowed my site down by two points.  Ok, it’s only two points, but it’s heading in the wrong direction.

The end…

That’s all I’ve got for now. If you want to go a step further, you could try a CDN service like Cloudflare. Cloudflare sits between your user and your server, caches your site and delivers your page from the nearest datacentre they have to your user. The problem with a conventional host is that they’re often in one part of the world and your visitor is in another. If you go to Webpagetest.org you’ll be able to see how long your site takes to load from a variety of locations around the world. The further away your visitor is, the longer it’ll take to load on their screen. If there is a Cloudflare server nearer to them, it should load a little quicker. There are other benefits too, such as added security to keep malevolent miscreants away from your .htaccess file!

Anyway, hope that helps someone.

…and here’s IGN’s analysis of it.

Given NaughtyDog’s recent history, I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this when it comes out.

Chairman of the Punjab Information Technology Board, Umar Saif, said the project was designed to “facilitate better access to educational content and tools”, adding that it was the first project of its kind on such a scale to use open source software.

Excellent.

People like to suggest that Apple is closed and “draconian”, but alternatives to Safari have been available on the iPad for quite some time now. The decision to limit browser choice is a return to the dark old days of an ugly, anti-competitive Microsoft. Fortunately, they’re not as relevant as they used to be, the competition is stronger than ever and sooner or later, MS will be were RIM are now, clinging onto the business market.

I don’t think I need to comment on Windows 8 again (unless it’s something really funny). It is of little consequence, lets be honest. I used to think that Windows Phone 7 would sweep the mobile market clean using Microsoft’s old guile & determination that saw them obtain a prominent position on the desktop. Then I remembered that they didn’t earn that position in an entirely legal way and on merit alone they just don’t have it. Alas, Windows Phone 7 is going nowhere fast and dragging Nokia down like a pair of concrete boots.

The tablet market is one for Apple to lose and I can’t see them doing that. Windows 8 RT is too late, hamstrung and has too much ground to make up.

It does sound like HP will be on the list of companies using Windows 8 RT when it launches, but they didn’t have a great deal of success when they were using a tablet OS that was actually good, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up too much about that.

1. Clear your caches – I originally stumbled upon this pearl of wisdom after installing Lion to find that it was really rather sluggish compared to Snow Leopard. A clear out certainly helps. Open a Finder window, go to ~/Library/Caches and put everything from that folder into the trash (follow the link for more information). Reboot your machine and if everything is still working (it should be), empty the trash.
2. Maintenance Scripts – An old UNIX feature that is set to run during the small hours or after waking from sleep. Open a terminal window and type: sudo periodic daily weekly monthly and press enter. Type your password in and when the cursor returns, the task is complete.
3. Repair your permissions – File permissions have a nasty habit of getting messed up over time, so it is always wise to repair them once per month or so. Open up Disk Utility, click on the drive for OSX and click “Repair permissions”.

When that last little job is complete, you’ll hopefully notice that your mac has a bit more of a spring in its step. If you are still finding things a little sluggish, you may want to consider a RAM upgrade, providing you have some room for more. Crucial.com has a very handy RAM configuration wizard here, they’re very reasonably priced and will despatch your RAM to you in double-quick time too.

Since the shift to 64bit, OSX (and every other OS for that matter) is going to be far happier with more than the one or two Gigabytes of RAM your machine may have come with. 64bit addresses are twice the size of 32bit addresses, but that’s a post for another day. Four Gigabytes is a useful starting point, but if you can get 8GB or more into your machine you should be set for the foreseeable future. At around £30 for an 8GB kit for the most recent iMac, it’s a bit of a no-brainer – providing that your Mac will support it.

The BBC reports that the Video Standards Council is to take control of the age ratings for video games. This basically means that anyone caught selling a game with an 18 certificate to someone who is underage can face a jail term.

About time too, although I don’t think the retailers are the problem.

Creative Industries Minister Ed Vaizey said: “It will give parents greater confidence that their children can only get suitable games while we are creating a simpler system for industry having their games age-rated.”

At the end of the day, how many 8 year olds have £40 in their pocket to spend on Call of Duty or GTA4? It’s the parents who are buying the games for their kids, but they are the ones blaming the games when their little darlings start re-enacting violent scenes from these games in the playground.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of Wolfenstein 3D. Released in 1992 it was one of the earliest entries in a fledgling first-person shooter genre. It spawned a few sequels of its own (Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein and a free-to-play online game called Wolfenstein Enemy Territory), but it should be credited for inspiring every other FPS game since.

If you are feeling nostalgic, you may be pleased to know that you can now get your hands on the original title for free, in your web browser. There’s no installation required, you just need a modern HTML5 compatible browser. It recommends you have at least Chrome 16, Firefox 11, Safari 5 and if you must use IE, you’ll need version 9.

It’s amazing to think that in 20 years, we’ve come from a place where games like Wolfenstein 3D was at the leading edge of what was possible. These days we can play the same game in a web browser.

Don’t mind me, I’m finding everything amazing at the moment. It still amazes me horrifies me that anything from the 90s is considered retro these days.

Always good for a laugh on a lazy Sunday morning…

The writing was on the wall when Apple bought C3 Technologies, a 3D mapping company from Sweden. You can see what attracted Apple to C3 in the video above. They have highly detailed 3D maps covering a good number (apparently a hundred or more) of cities and clients under their belt.

They’ve also bought a mapping API company called Placebase and a Canadian mapping firm, Poly9.

9to5 Mac, who didn’t cite a source (“trusted sources” is a bit of a cop-out) suggests that the new mapping service will finally get an airing in iOS6.

To be quite honest, that isn’t much of a leap of faith is it. It’s the next big milestone release and there are no sources to hold to account if they are wrong. Still, if the new mapping service looks anything as good as C3s offering it can’t come soon enough.

As it turns out, the reason for this – if Techcrunch is to be believed – is quite deliberate and really quite poor form. The backdrop to this is that Facebook isn’t much of a platform for advertisers, performing badly compared to traditional banner ads thanks to the sheer number of mobile users with small screens. I would wager that Facebook’s ability to generate ad revenue is a large part of that $85-$95bn valuation.

Highlighted posts may appear higher in the news feed, stay visible for longer, and appear to more friends and subscribers. However, they’re not colored differently to make them stand out. And to be clear, this is not like Twitter’s Promoted Tweets which is designed for businesses. Facebook Highlight is for the end-user.

So, rather than hope its enormous user base clicks on its ads, Facebook is considering charging you to have your status updates show up on more of your friends computers. Really not a great idea Mr Zuckerberg.

Seriously I think Facebook is going about this the wrong way. I won’t pay to have my status updates seen by more than 12% of my friends, but I would pay handsomely to have all of the inane comments about Simon Cowell’s latest TV cash-cow silenced and hidden from my news feed.

Google+ anyone?

You see, I’ve discovered the Google pagespeed tools and have been trying to follow its recommendations for reducing the loading times on this site and the articles within it.  It has since turned into a bit of a game for me and rather like overclockers and their endless fiddling & tweaking to eek more power out of their system, I’ve been tweaking & experimenting with my WordPress sites.

As it turns out, there are a few things you need to do in order to make these back-end changes run smoothly.

Firstly, if you use Cloudflare you need to turn on development mode.  If you don’t, there is a good chance your visitors will be greeted by a Cloudflare-branded DNS error.  You’ll also not see any of your changes immediately unless you flush your cache every time you fiddle with something.

Secondly, if you use WPTouch Pro, the iPad theme appears to have issues with certain minifying plugins.

I think I’m almost done fiddling now, so feel free to enjoy the site as you did before.  Sorry!

Oh, if you try Google Pagespeed with your site and keep getting the “leverage browser caching” message, perhaps the simplest way of doing it is to modify your .htaccess file via your FTP client and add the code from on this page here to the very top of your .htaccess file (found in the root of your site’s directory).  I used Filezilla as a FTP client and the default mac text editor.  Make sure you make a backup of your .htaccess file first though, it’s somewhat crucial to your site.

The alternative appears to be W3 Total Cache, but if you already have WP Supercache installed it’s a bit of a pain to replace it and get it set up with your other plugins.

There is one thing to keep in mind with this code though.  It will only work if your Apache server has the mod_expires module installed.  You’d best ask your web host about that.

In a bid to separate the incredibly gullible from their cash, Leica has unveiled a camera that can only shoot in black & white…

The Leica M Monochrom lacks the Bayern pattern filter and therefore is incapable of producing a colour image.

The boffins at Leica insist that because it can’t see colour, the sensor captures “true luminance”

every pixel records true luminance values to deliver ‘true’ black-and-white images that are significantly sharper than comparable exposures from a camera with a colour-sensitive sensor

In order to capture these “sharper” black & whites you’re going to have to cough up £6,120…body only. If you want a lens with that, Leica are offering a nice 50mm f2 prime for £5,400, but that is money you could be spending on a high-end DSLR, a used Honda S2000, an awesome holiday for your family, a hot-tub or a really good psychiatrist.

£11,520 for what is really just a digital rangefinder and a slow 5omm prime.  Another one to file under oh Hell no.

Good news for all you Welsh, Scottish, Irish, French & Italian rugby fans! There is now an official app to allow us to keep track of our favourite club or region.

As far as rugby apps go, this is quite swish. The screen is divided up into four rows of thumbnails, with each row able to slide left or right to reveal more content. The top row consists of the “match centre”, featuring previews of upcoming games. However, if you tap the shield in the top right corner the club selector appears, allowing you to view just the content for the club of your choice.

In the remaining rows you’ll find match reports, news and league-related links to the social networks and phone numbers for each of the club ticket offices. If you drill down to club level you’ll get fixtures, tables and squad information.

It’s a nice app, very useful, but we’ll have to wait until next season to really get any use out of it.