As a side-project at work, I’ve been working on an ant task to generate an atom feed of something. The something’s not really important.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, I did a quick search on google for a Java library to take care of the feed processing for me. Sure enough, Rome seemed to fit the bill.

Merrily testing away in my Eclipse workbench, I quickly wrote the code to generate my atom feed. All was good with the world. The planets may or may not have aligned. And then I came to run it through ant.

Unfortunately, that’s where the problems started…

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Just posted my write-up of Factory Manager.

Being critical, it maybe suffers from too much description and not enough reviewing. I may well revise it at some point, if I find the time, but with so many other games, places, and who knows what else to writeup, it may just end up being a learning experience. Let’s just hope I learn from it Even if I don’t it’s still not /that/ bad .

One annoying part of developing Eclipse plugins which generate deployable JEE applications is that the server you use for deployment is often set up and started through the runtime workbench.

This means that to test your code, you need to configure the code lookup in your runtime workbench – a pain if you have multiple runtime workbenches, or frequently clear your runtime workbench metadata.

An alternative approach, which I use, is to disconnect the debugger from the runtime workbench and connect it in your base workbench. This post details how.

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Today, I followed a link from twitter to this page.

The page details a letter-response-newspaper article sequence of a letter sent to the Ritz hotel in London asking for a definitive answer to the age old argument of which comes first: the cream or the jam?

Unfortunately, the Ritz answered incorrectly. I am sad for them. You see, they state that

The Ritz London would prefer to encourage the “jam then cream” option

which is patently foolish.

It would be churlish of me to not to explain why however, and so I refer people to the relative thickness/viscosity of cream and jam. If one applies the jam first, and then the cream, the required pressure from the hand via knife to dispense cream unto scone displaces the jam. Conversely, jam is relatively free-flowing, and thus glides effortlessly from the blade to reside in its rightful place; regally upon the top of the cream.

Hopefully the Ritz will realise the error of their ways and recant.

Herd of horseeples

Last night, I finally managed to get a game in of Agricola: Farmers of the Moor. This is the first expansion to Agricola, and as mentioned before on my blog, I was not expecting this to be available in English at Essen this year. To my delight, however, Z-Man games pulled through and had it available for €25, and thus it was with a big smile on my face that I came home from day 1 with my copy.

Events conspired to prevent me from playing until last night, but I’ve finally got a round in, and posted my thoughts on the game. You can read them here.

4-day pass to joy at Spiel 09

I am just back from the Internationale Spieltage 09 in Essen. The phrase of the weekend has been, quite simply, “so many games”. When I get time, I’m going to add full reviews (as far as I can recall) of all the games, as well as my experiences on the convention itself, but here I’m just going to jot down some initial thoughts. Particular highlights for me were Comuni (a 2008 game), Dominion: Seaside and the presence of the English version of Agricola: Farmers of the Moor from Z-Man games.

Read on for a list of all the games I’ve played over the weekend, and a couple of words on them.

All in all, Essen has been an amazing experience, topped off with some excellent dunkel in the Rüttenscheider Hausbrauerei, and I’m already looking forward to 2010.

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Among the masses of walking and climbing gear I seem to posses these days, two items which have had issues recently are my walking boots and my waterproof trousers.

I’ve had to return both items twice in the last year, and it’s interesting to compare the two companies. This post details the first return.

Two and a half years ago, I bought a pair of Scarpa ZG65s from Cotswold Outdoor, shortly before I walked the South Downs Way. Rated B0, these are definitely walking boots, as opposed to mountain boots, but they’ve served me well and are a good fit.

Around Christmas 08, I bought a pair of Páramo Cascada trousers from The Mountain Factor in Ambleside. My waterproof trousers at the time were a pair of Marmot lightweight own-brand-material overtrousers. The Marmot trousers were great, except for the way they leak through the pocket zips; not much use! At the time, I was looking for a new waterproof coat also, and was umming and ahhing about Páramo vs soft shell/hard shell combination. I figured I’d try the trousers and if they were a revelation I’d go for the coat too.

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According to GS1 UK, the British branch of the global barcode regulator, there were 100 stores scanning at the till by 1984. It was 5,000 by 1993 and 10,000 two years later. By 1995, the figure was 20,000 and GS1 ceased bothering to count. The barcode had won.

Source: BBC News ‘Magazine’ article

Is it just me, or does this article say there were 10,000 scanners in 1995, and 20,000 in 1995? Does this mean it jumped from 10,000 to 20,000 in the course of that year? I’m genuinely not sure; this passage is pretty hard to comprehend.

The article goes on to say:

The next big thing in barcodes is people using their mobile phone cameras as readers.

It doesn’t bother mentioning why this is important. I’ve decided this article is poorly written.

I wanted to watch an avi file on my XBox 360 this evening, as I do every now and again. The TV in the living room has no PC connected, and the XBox is the easiest way of playing video as it’s always hooked up. You’d think. XBox’s are supposed to play media.

Currently, my housemate’s XBox is in the custody of Microsoft after suffering the Red Ring Of Death, and as he plays more than I/has the 120gb HDD to my 20, we’ve had his HDD plugged into my XBox. Fail #1 of the story, I guess; if Microsoft could invent a console that didn’t habitually fail to work, there would have been less faffing in the first place.

As part of my watching such files each week, I get the joy of the XBox failing to decode them. I have no idea why, but each week the XBox delightfully informs me that it needs a media update to play the files. This, of course, despite me having installed it the previous week. This also involves logging into XBox live. Fail #2.

Unfortunately, said housemate transferred his gamertag to another XBox over the weekend. Grr. Ok, so fine, I’ll transfer mine over. So after (twice, I had to take 2 stabs to remember the info) typing in all my email and password details (fail #3 – god it’s painful typing on the onscreen keyboard. I don’t know the solution, but it can’t be this), I get told that new Live accounts can’t be created. Which is annoying for the following reasons.

• The obvious; the service is down
• It spits you back to the main menu, which if you want to try again means you have to type everything in again on the awful on-screen keyboard (see above)
• I’m not even trying to create an account

But ok, fair enough, I’ll just plug in the other HDD. Except no. Fail #who knows, I’ve lost count. My gamertag, though not added to the new HDD, is now ported away from the old one. It’s in limbo. And of course, I can’t pull it back to the old HDD, ’cause the service is down (I know, I tried).

ARG!

I’m not loving Microsoft tonight.

Starting to really look forward to Essen 09 now, with less than 3 weeks to go.

Uwe Rosenberg

I’m a big fan of Agricola, which I own and have won the 3 games of  Le Havre I’ve played so far (which always adds to the enjoyment, but it’s a good game anyway). This means I’m really looking forward to both contributions from Uwe Rosenberg this year.

The new Agricola expansion, Farmers of The Moor, promises to add another layer of complexity to the game. Players start with a board layout including forests and moors from which wood and peat can be harvested for energy. At each harvest, a player must not only feed their family, but heat their house also. I was sad to see a couple of forum threads on the ‘geek that suggest the English version of this game wont be available to buy at Essen. Guess it wont be too long to wait though, and on the bright side it will leave more space in the boot for other games.

At the Gates of Loyang is the third “trading” game from Rosenberg, the rules of which can now be downloaded. The only game of the 3 to sport no central board, I read somewhere on the ‘geek that this was actually the first game of the 3, and it’s just taken this long to refine. I’m really itching to give this one a spin, and hopefully pick up a copy.