Watched Mystic River last night. Mystic River is a very well acted film, I can now understand why Jonathan Ross holds it in such high regard. All of the main characters where excellent especially Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. Kevin Bacon was not bad either as was Lawrence Fishburne. The interweaving of the characters is very neat, and the events and how things pan out is clever. Laura Linney’s character through much of the film was subdued, however in one scene totally shows her true colours.
Monthly Archive for February, 2004
Been playing a fair bit of my GBA lately, mainly Doom, Streetfigher Alpha 3, and Mario Kart. All which I love. Saw that Super Ghouls and Ghosts was on sale on play.com so I ordered a copy today along with the headphone converter which I have been trying to get hold of for a while. Nintendo’s GBAis without a doubt the best portable gaming platform.
As far as the portable gaming arena is concerned Nintendo has enjoyed the most sucess, however this year might actually be the year of the portable, both Nintendo and Sony will be launching new systems. Sony’s PSP on paper sounds amazing, and with Sony’s past track record I think Nintendo may actually have a rival. The GBA SP is almost a year old as well, and surprisingly Nintendo made public a couple of patent applications concerning a dual-screen portable last month showing that they are clearly working on something special.
Another suprise from Nintendo has been the confirmation that a Gamecube followup is planned. Now I like the sound of this but it does worry me. I can’t help but think that Nintendo would fair better by becoming a software only company. It was strange though that in a press release they stated they will not be commiting any resources into new platform technology like Sony is, they want to concentrate on gameplay.
Sony have signed a very big deal with IBM. to use their 90nm process for fabricating their next generation of silicon being used in the PS3. Likewise Nintendo already use IBM’s Power4 for the Gamecube, now that Microsoft have also confirmed that IBM will be making a G5 based chipset for X-Box 2. This could mean that all 3 platforms have some commonality. What I would love to see is some level of standardisation, be it hardware of at the API level. My main concern being time to market for titles, as complexity of hardware grows software development time leaps by a larger factor. The general adoption of open API’s would definately help, though it is probably just a developer’s dream.
The end to another hectic week, did plenty of running around early on in the week sorting out various problems for some of the people I have been doing work for the last couple of weeks. Still working on a hefty bit of work I got involved with last week however it involves dicking around with Oracle which is fine, but slow because it involves installing and configuring various Oracle instances for development and testing purposes. Also did some more server building this week, have to go place the server at the hosting facility on Monday.
I heard a couple of days ago some more of my friends from APR were leaving, so we had a big friday night drinking session at Smithy’s in King’s Cross, the number of staff from the old London team is getting smaller and smaller I think there are only a handful of people left. An interesting night was had by all. Only thing that remains to be said is good luck to Khilna and Andy who are now free of a daily trip to Cambridge as well.
Been a while since I blogged anything, plus I found that a had a couple of things that where still in Draft mode so I went and published those. Been busy doing little jobs for the last week or so, have started working on a site update at last, will probably include a full shop backed by Amazon, looking to use the Web Services toolkit in some way though I have not fully decided the best way of doing this.
Need to register another domain and renew this one should probably knock together a site for advertising my services in some fashion just going with people I know might wear thin in a month or so. Some other interesting programming tasks are also heading my way though, of course I can’t really say much yet but I think it will definately happen. Spent a bit of time at Host Europe this week doing some server install work which was fun, I love building Linux servers! Looks like I will be doing more work in that area come next week, have to rebuild a server I picked up yesterday to host a web backed application I used to do some work on.
Should really get signed up for RHCE soon as well, the number of Linux contracts is definately on the increase, should make for an interesting couple of months. Should probably get the JCP done as well, though I think that is going to be a little bit simpler to deal with. Novell is set to launch their certification program as well, might have to look into that as an alternative though I’m guessing the demand for that is not even registering right now since it’s a new qualification.
