The Creed of Assassins

Assassins Creed, the latest offering from Ubisoft, looks absolutely phenonemal. People raved about Gears of War, and rightly so, but now it is out - Assassin's Creed deserves as much attention.

In it you play an assassin during medieval times, a similar game to their popular Prince of Persia series. I recommend watching the videos to better describe it.

Voting for nature

I've posted this on my main web development blog too, but feel I should post it here too.

Publicity for organisations that are trying to save the worlds species is a good thing; but not in the manor that ITV are now trying. ITV, a British TV channel, has a new program called "Extinct" to raise awareness of 8 species that are dying out and will soon be extinct - to this I say well done, something should be done and the fact that they are trying is commendable. What I totally disagree with though is the way they are going about it - they are asking the viewing public to vote for which animal to save. That is just wrong, it's not the X-Factor, or some other talent contest, we're talking about lives here. They should all be saved. Grow up ITV - dumbing down television is one thing, but this is just sheer stupidity.

The Gears of War

Just days ago I bought an Xbox 360 bundle that came with Gears of War. Yesterday, after about 7-8 hours gane play I completed it. Absolutely brilliant game - they paid so much attention to detail, it's just a shame it's quite short.

Commenting

Well I've now realised that having moderated comments turned on is not necessarily a good thing - especially when you forget to check. I've set Blogger to send me emails whenever a new comment is posted so I can read it and make it live. Ooops!

It's been a while

Okay, so just lately I've been neglecting my Blog here on blogger. Probably because I'm trying to keep my main one going, and also another new one on Vox. The good thing about Vox is it connects with other services such as Flickr so it can easily show my photographs too. Fun.

It's been a busy month, fairly tiring actually. Been doing so much at work, and I know there's still a lot more work scheduled for me to do yet. Oh well, thats the joys of web development I guess. Though saying that I did get the fun job of implementing the new design for our Intranet at work though - first design related thing I've been asked to do since moving onto their design team.

Many, many more tutorials online now.

• 404 Searches with htaccess
  
• Phasers and Lightsabers in Photoshop
• Gravestones in Photoshop
• Accessibility and the Law
• JavaScript Best Practices
• Water effects in Photoshop

I have also done a recent tutorial on Regular Expressions as mentioned in my previous post. I think the next few tutorials on the lead up to Christmas are likely to be ones for Photoshop, 3D Studio Max, and Blender. If there are any specific tutorials anyone would like, please go ahead and ask! The first Winter / Christmas themed tutorial will be for Photoshop and will show how to create snowy text.

Regular Expressions and Validation

Although a day later than intended, and a page longer, my new tutorial on Regular Expressions has now been released for your viewing "pleasure".

Regular Expressions are a popular way of performing complex string matching on variables. To anyone who is relatively new to them though, it can be daunting. This guide shows how to use them, with examples for using them in validation techniques.

Article: Regular Expressions and Validation

Photoshop Tutorials

Recently I've been adding a lot of guides to my main site, some of them regarding the usage of Photoshop. So far, for Photoshop I have added:

Phasers and Lightsabers in Photoshop
"Web 2.0" style logos
Reflections in Photoshop

And I intend on doing one about 3D reflections - if anyone has any suggestions for further tutorials please let me know from the contact form on my site, or by leaving a comment.


Thanks :)

Using Microformats

Over on New Earth Online, I have now released my latest article on Microformats, and what they are and how to use them.

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

Enjoy: http://newearthonline.co.uk/article/115

Visit to Stonehenge

At the weekend I visited stonehenge for the second time. The previous time I went it was cloudy and horrible, and it was so long ago that I didn't have a digital camera - I was using a 35mm Canon. This visit for the most part was along the same lines, it was cloudy, it rained, so I got the pictures I wanted with it being full of dark horrible clouds. Luckily the sun came out after a while, and I got a few that looked quite cool.

I'll be getting them added to Flickr soon ;)

Invasion of Privacy?

According to an article on vnunet.com there are plans by one of the major DVD manufacturing companies to embed chips into the discs so that their movement can be tracked to help combat piracy. Now this just screams "wrong" to me. I'm not sure how it can help combat piracy, but it will help to track wherever you go with the DVD, and to some degree what DVDs you own as once more and more discs have these chips they will know what chip embedded discs are in the same locale.

Developing Software by the 15% Rule

"Before undertaking a development project we create a statement of work (which acts as a contract and a specification) that outlines what we’ll do, how many hours it will require, and how much it will cost the client. As part of the contract we commit to invest up to the amount of time outlined in the document plus 15%. That is, if the statement of work says that the project will take us 100 hours to complete, we’ll spend up to 115 hours (but no more). As to where-fores and why-tos on how this works, read on."

Software by Rob : Developing Software by the 15% Rule

Recently saw this quote, and couldn't agree more with it. Software development is something that is extremely hard to accurately schedule due to the nature of it. Obviosuly going past the stated time will cause increase in cost of the project (thinking of labour costs etc.) and this will mean less profit, and past a certain point would become a waste of time.

technorati tags:software, development

Stingray! Stingray!

One of my friends over at Bloopy has created yet another one of his badtaste masterpieces. This time it features the crew of the Stingray, and a certain wrestler of crocodiles.

Watch: Revenge

New Site Design!

Well finally after a week of designing it, my new website design has gone live. So far I've published articles there that cover web development and web design. Articles so far include topics such as "Understanding Apache htaccess" and "Making Mobile Content".

Summer Memorabilia 2006

The other weekend I was at the NEC, Birmingham (UK) for the summer Memorabilia convention. Whilst there they had a stage interview with Marina Sirtis (Cllr Deana Troi of ST:TNG), Garret Wong (Ensign Harry Kim of ST:Voyager), and Robin Curtis (of several Trek movies). Whilst being interviewed they were asked what the future of Star Trek on television is. Garret's answer was that there are no plans, at least not until Rick Berman's (executive producer) contract lapses so Paramount don't have to involve him.

Well the video is now up on YouTube, so go watch!

Paramount vs. Rick Berman