Battlefield 3 was finally released in Ireland and the UK and elsewhere yesterday. I had a few games early in the evening and then later played with a few of the guys.
Yes, stats aren’t everything but looking at a killcam all the time isn’t fun either!
The Indie Royale bundle is offering Sanctum, Ares, Nimbus and Gemini Rue for a knock down but slowly increasing price. It started at $2 but it’s currently showing as €3.67 here. The more people pay the minimum the higher the price, pay more and the price goes down.
I already have 3 of the games so I’m not buying but Sanctum alone is worth the entry fee.
Today Ireland goes to the polls to elect a new president. The job isn’t as important as in other countries, but one of the primary roles of the President is to veto new laws if they are unconstitutional. Nevertheless the election campaign has been downright dirty and negative as the hopeful candidates can’t really attack each other on policy issues.
It was the same last time. Skeletons are dragged out of closets, old events rehashed and exposed to the light of day again. There must be a better way of electing the first citizen?
I know who I don’t want to vote for: Dana, Sean Gallagher, David Norris, Martin McGuinness or Mary Davis. The remaining candidates, Gay Mitchell and Michael D Higgins, haven’t made any impression on me. A random number generator would make more sense than trying to decide among that lot.
Last I heard Sean Gallagher was in the lead, contrary to opinion on Twitter, and to this ballot taken by expats.
What’s more important for the country are the two referendums. There is the referendum website but since I guarantee that it will be gone by this time next year here are the two questions being asked of the Irish populace:
Referendum on the pay of judges
This referendum is about whether the pay of judges can be reduced in certain circumstances. At present the Constitution does not allow for the reduction of the remuneration of sitting judges.
Referendum on inquiries by the Oireachtas
This referendum proposes to give the Houses of the Oireachtas (the Dáil and Seanad) express power to conduct inquiries into matters of general public importance and, in doing so, to make findings of fact about any person’s conduct.
I think I’ll be voting no to the first amendment, and possibly no to the second one but I’m undecided about that. That’s the amendment I’m most interested in but have heard the least debate about on radio. This post seems quite clear on the changes, admitting that some aspects are still vague and letting the chair of a committee decide the rights of witnesses is worrying. Will this second amendment bring us “broadly” in line with other countries?
Here are the two amendments, for history:
Proposed amendment – judges’ pay
At present, Article 35.5 of the Constitution states:
“The remuneration of a judge shall not be reduced during his continuance in office.”It is proposed to replace this with the following wording:
5 1° The remuneration of judges shall not be reduced during their continuance in office save in accordance with this section.2° The remuneration of judges is subject to the imposition of taxes, levies or other charges that are imposed by law on persons generally or persons belonging to a particular class.
3° Where, before or after the enactment of this section, reductions have been or are made by law to the remuneration of persons belonging to classes of persons whose remuneration is paid out of public money and such law states that those reductions are in the public interest, provision may also be made by law to make proportionate reductions to the remuneration of judges.
Proposed amendment – Oireachtas inquiries
At present, Article 15.10 states:
“Each House shall make its own rules and standing orders, with power to attach penalties for their infringement, and shall have power to ensure freedom of debate, to protect its official documents and the private papers of its members, and to protect itself and its members against any person or persons interfering with, molesting or attempting to corrupt its members in the exercise of their duties.”It is proposed to renumber this as 15.10.1° and to insert the following subsections:
2° Each House shall have the power to conduct an inquiry, or an inquiry with the other House, in a manner provided for by law, into any matter stated by the House or Houses concerned to be of general public importance.
3° In the course of any such inquiry the conduct of any person (whether or not a member of either House) may be investigated and the House or Houses concerned may make findings in respect of the conduct of that person concerning the matter to which the inquiry relates.
4° It shall be for the House or Houses concerned to determine, with due regard to the principles of fair procedures, the appropriate balance between the rights of persons and the public interest for the purposes of ensuring an effective inquiry into any matter to which subsection 2° applies.
(First image via this Reddit thread)
I’m still at the stage where I just mash the attack and evade buttons in combat. The first video above shows a simple but better technique by evading enemies with jumps and the second one is the “Perfect Freeflow 2.0” achievement showing how to do the following moves in slow motion.
1 – Standard Strike – PS3: Square I Xbox 360: X
2 – Stun – PS3: Circle I Xbox 360: B
3 – Evade Jump – PS3: X I Xbox 360: A
4 – Counter – PS3: Trianlge I Xbox 360: Y
5 – Special Combo Takedown – PS3: Trianlge+Circle I Xbox 360: Y+B
6 – Special Combo Bat Swarm – PS3: Square+X I Xbox 360: X+A
7 – Special Combo Disarm And Destroy – PS3: Triangle+Square I Xbox 360: Y+X
8 – Special Combo Multi Ground Takedown – PS3: Circle+X I Xbox 360: B+A
9 – Aerial Attack – PS3: Circle, Left Stick+X, X I Xbox 360: X, Left Stick+A, A
10 – Beat Down Finisher – PS3: Circle, Square (8 times) I Xbox 360: B, X (8 times)
11 – Batclaw Slam – PS3: L1+Trianlge, Square I Xbox 360: LB+Y, X
12 – Ultiamte Stun – PS3: Circle, Circle, Circle I Xbox 360: B, B, B
13 – Ground Pound – PS3: R2+Triangle I Xbox 360: RT+Y
I now wish Battlefield 3 wasn’t coming out on Friday as I won’t have time to devote to this amazing and beautiful game!
Bonus link: Combat, Gadgets, Upgrades, Riddler Challenges, and More!
The never ending journey to WP Super Cache 1.0 continues. Go grab the development version of the plugin on the download page as there have been a few changes since my last post (where I announced support for mixed https sites among other things).
Some of the changes:
Only thing is, I need your help. The development version is running on this multisite install of WordPress and it’s working fine but I really need feedback, especially before 1.0 comes out.
So, if you’re comfortable with WordPress please go visit the download page and install the development version. Thanks!
The latest Battlefield 3 trailer makes me wish the game was out right now and that I had a PC fast enough to run it. PS3 and Xbox 360 for me!
I honestly have no idea what’s happening here. Were the customers inside there closing accounts? Is that reason enough to close the branch and lock them inside?
Why would security guards drag a woman into the bank? Was it because she was attempting to take names while she was outside the bank? Can they be charged with common assault? I presume she wasn’t trespassing as she was on the pavement.
It makes no sense.
Meanwhile in Spain, tens of thousands can peacefully protest without any police in sight.
More: Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Dame Street.
Poor Phil, star of his own Youtube video, “Man hit in the head with a basketball”. Sore head?
Yes, I just watched that episode of Modern Family. Great show. I hope they got their stop sign …
Prince of Persia, an amazing game released in 1989 on the Apple II and ported to most platforms of the day but not the Commodore 64 for some reason.
In 2 days time the game is due to be released on the C64 in EasyFlash format, a cartridge format for the C64 but luckily Vice also supports it so I’ll be able to play it under emulation. Looks great doesn’t it?
Edit: Announcement post and download page for C64 Prince of Persia!
Have you recently installed Ubunty 11.10 and are you marvelling at the Unity Desktop? Not many are. Marvelling at the desktop that is, but it’s growing on me. I said that last time too so we’ll see how it goes.
Anyway, the point of this little rant is to tell you to avoid or be very careful with CCSM, or “Compiz Config Settings Manager” as it’s known to it’s enemies. This little app allows you to edit practically everything related to Compiz settings. Literally everything!
Unfortunately it can also lead to a world of pain. After fiddling around with it I went into the preferences and clicked on the “Plugins” link at which time my desktop froze and I couldn’t even CTRL-ALT to a different session. Forced reboot was the other of the day.
When I finally got back in my external monitor wasn’t detected and I was left with a 1024×768 display. I spent a few hours trying to figure out what the hell had gone wrong. I deleted .config/monitors.xml and tried editing it but nothing worked. Eventually I rebooted a few times and suddenly my monitor was recognised again!
Then it was on to the workspace switcher. It didn’t work the way it used to. I hesitantly fired up ccsm and dug into the settings in Viewport switcher, then in Rotate Cube, then Desktop Wall. It was then I discovered I couldn’t deselect “Desktop Cube”. ccsm would segfault every time. Switching workspaces using the cube was painful as my hardware just isn’t up to the task. Open windows would flicker slightly after I rotated the workspace. Eventually I discovered that I could take drastic action to restore normality. First I had to login as a different user and then go into my home directory and then move some configuration directories out of the way.
mkdir bak
mv .gconf .gconfd .gnome .gnome2 bak/
After logging in again I fired up ccsm and Desktop Cube was disabled! I usually switch between workspaces using CTRL 1-4 and I was able to configure Viewport Switcher to do just that with a minimal sliding animation.
After looking in the bak directory it appears that Compiz stores it’s configuration data in various compiz directories in .gconf/apps/. I suspect it’s enough to remove them rather than all the Gnome configuration files.
I like Ubuntu 11.10 so far, I’m getting used to Unity but the top menu bar feels to me like it’s crowding out the screen. The lack of Unity themes included is troubling too as there are only 4 (2 of which are for visually impaired users by the looks of things). I’ll have to go look for some more.