These are a few comments after having the phone a few weeks:

The good stuff:

• The screen is fantastic, very very sharp and excellent colour range
• The phone is really fast most of the time
• Contacts management is excellent, although the facebook integration needs a bit of improvement
• The integration with google apps and services is fantastic
• The range of Android apps available is pretty good
• I like the live wallpapers, I’m looking forward to some more nice third party ones coming out
• The web browser is excellent – I’m really looking forward to the full flash support coming over the next few months
• Battery life – for this class of phone its excellent, I am able to get a full day out of it on light-moderate use.

The bad stuff:

• The screen is hard to see outside
• The bezel around the screen is too small considering the screen is touch sensitive right to the edge – if you hold the phone wrong and touch the edges it either ignores your input or clicks in a random location. This means its practically impossible to use the phone one handed
• The ‘pattern lock’ screen is utterly useless – when you draw the pattern you can see the smudges on the screen of the pattern. There seems to be no option to use a standard PIN/button combination
• The software still seems a bit flakey – but it is a brand new version, so hopefully this will get better in time
• The facebook app leaves a lot to be desired
• Lots of bugs related to the Messaging app – it seems to pick up the first word of some messages and make this the title/sender, so I have a number of messages with random titles

Things I want:

• An Android DropBox app
• Flash support
• Multi-touch support – the phone’s hardware supports it
• The ability to specify a border for the touch screen where outputs outside it are ignored – so I can use my phone one handed.

Some of my picks for the ‘best of android’:

• Locale
• Spotify
• Last.fm
• SMS Popup
• SMS Backup
• ShopSavvy
• Shazam
• Quickpedia
• Places Directory
• Meebo IM
• KeePassDroid
• Jewels
• handyCalc/handyConverter/handyCurrency
• Flood-It!
• Daft Machine
• ConnectBot
• beebPlayer
• Bebbled
• Barcode Scanner
• Alarming!
• Advanced Task Killer
• Astrid

Pay-as-you-go or Contract?

A phone like this consumes a massive amount of data, so my existing PAYG Three deal had to go – I hardly ever had a signal anyway. I contemplated a few choices, looking at contracts and what not. I eventually settled on two options, the T-mobile PAYG unlimited internet and texts SIM only deal for £10/mo, and the O2 deal which is similar but for £15/mo. After looking at the T&Cs and very very fine print, I ruled out the O2 deal as it only allowed for 200mb/mo ‘fair use’ – Fair? No… So I went with T-Mobile. While browsing their site I stumbled across another deal – a 6-month internet booster. The deal gives you 6 months of ‘unlimited’ (1gb/mo) internet on your phone for a £20 once off payment. So essentially £3.30 a month for unlimited internet. SCORE!

Closing Thoughts

Overall I really like this phone, it has a few annoying gripes that hopefully will get worked out, but its got a good solid foundation to build on with future iterations of the firmware. If you are after an Android phone, this is the one to get.

Mini aside

Apple announced their ‘iPad’ this week. Considering the hype this was a monumental let down. Essentially the iPad is a giant iPod Touch. It’s not even a bigger iPhone because it can’t make phone calls! There are plenty of rants about this device which I won’t repeat, however the one thing I think was their biggest mistake – no multitasking. What were they thinking…

I think people are going to buy this expecting a netbook style device with a touch screen and be incredibly disappointed. I have been considering a tablet style device for a while and was hoping that the Apple Tablet would be the one, it’s not – in fact my shiny new phone does a better job – it will fit in my pocket!

FreeStyleGames

FSG has been an incredible place to work, and November marked my 3rd year with the company. We shipped DJ Hero in October and the game was more or less univerally praised for being a refreshing take on the music genre. The game won several awards including best soundtrack. The studio also expanded taking up both more floor space and more talent. Hopefully we can keep things up in 2010.

Drop Box

Drop Box changed the way I used my PC in 2009. It put my most useful information in the cloud keeping it safe and accessible. Combined with KeePass you have an impegnable password safe to allow you to have a different password for every site you visit and help protect your online identity.

Spotify

Spotify was probably the biggest innovation in music since the MP3. It marked the turning point of the music industry from ‘let’s sue our customers‘ to ‘let’s give our customers what they have been requesting for a decade‘. Immediate streaming of a very large catalogue of music (including the new stuff) has pretty much left my MP3 collection to get lonely. Of course the industry is still screwing the artists, but they’ve been doing that for a very long time, so this is hardly anything new.

Steam

Steam has finally managed to do for the PC what the Xbox 360 did for console gaming. It has created a unified hub for gamers to connect through. It has also delivered us the digital delivery system that many of us had been pining for. Couple this with the recent batch of steam sales which brought many games that didn’t deserve attention at their full price firmly into reach and you have a very attractive package.

The rest

VLC – The play everything media player that I could not do without that lets me skip the annoying intro videos, copyright screens and piracy inducing anti-piracy videos on my legally bought DVDs.

Firefox – Chrome came close, but Firefox is still the best web browser around.

Torchlight - This little RPG game took me by complete suprise. I’ve spent days playing this game and it’s still got a lot of kick in it!

If you’ve got a wave account, you can send me a message using the box below!

There are a few things that particularly annoy me:

1. Emailing your passwords to you, or asking you to confirm passwords over the phone
2. Sites that limit you to a arbitary password length or character set
3. Sites that limit you to an arbitary password length and truncate the password when creating it, but do not truncate the password when entering it.
4. Requirements to change your password regularly
5. Not salting password hashes

The first one is particularly bad. It indicates that they are storing your password in a way that is reversible, meaning if the site gets hacked, your password is wide open as well. If they ask you to confirm your password over the phone, and I’ve had this from two companies, this is the height of security ignorance, because it means that they are storing your passwords in plain text and is completely visible to the operator taking the call.

Number two is just plain annoying. If you have a password setup that is longer, it means your password is not as secure as it could be. If I want to set my password to “{Y`>v[S]e7,f&HA8ZUK]rdbX-QFqt?t9!}a4z<wmgRa’YB25GYF:HBdK1V)/” then I should be able to. Number three is not only annoying, but can actually lock you out of critical accounts. A good example of this that prompted me to write this post was the Verified by Visa website. The website has a restriction on the length of passwords you can use, but it does not tell you this. Given its a fairly sensitive login, I naturally wanted a strong password for it – so I generated a completely random alphanumeric username and password. After accepting the password and confirming my other details the site happily confirmed my registration. Later that week I attempted to log in, only to find my password no longer worked. You see the site had truncated my password as I entered it, leaving my password some number of characters shorter. A password reset later to a shorter password and the problem was resolved.

Number four seems to be a fairly common problem in enterprises. At its basic level it boils down to top level IT management not understanding that imposing overly harsh restrictions on user passwords just leads to creative workarounds. See this slashdot post for some examples of this.

Number five is more of a technical issue than a policy, but simply storing passwords as an MD5 sum or some other basic hash is just not good enough. Take the following website. It provides a service to reverse an MD5 hash to a string by having a list of passwords listed against their hashes. It does not crack the password, you cannot ‘crack’ MD5 sums, because they do not contain the original data. However if the password is common enough, it can be reversed by being able to match one to the other. Salting helps to reduce this by mangling the resulting hash to something less common that is unique to the site.

Its time to enforce a standard password system across the web. Google, you want ideas of how to make the web better? Heres my suggestion. The standard should specify a set of requirements that all websites, enterprises and services should follow. It should apply to online and offline services.

Here are my suggestions for a spec:

1. No upper password limit or limit on complexity – want a unicode character in your password, be my guest!
2. A reasonable lower limit on password length with warning to the user when below the recommended length
3. No password retirement policites – ever!
4. Optional support for physical key generating devices such as RSA SecurID
5. No plain text passwords, passwords saved in hash form with unique salt per user per site
6. Client side password salting and hashing to not send raw passwords over unsecured links

As a user there are plenty of things you can do to guard against unsecure sites. My number one suggestion is the following free combination: DropBox and mobile KeePass. KeePass is a very useful tool that both generates and stores passwods securely. When used in combination with online service DropBox it makes a great tool into an essential one. DropBox provides two things – syncing of your passwords between multiple machines (work, home, laptop etc), and a history and backup in case of accidents. If you accidentally delete a password or your hard disk dies, DropBox has your back! To use it effectively use a different password for every site and store it in keypass, and especially never use a password that is the same as your email password.

It combines aspects of Wikis, IM, Email and version control into a single product that changes the way people communicate. I can already see how it would make communicating with family, friends and coworkers much more fun and immediate. Click the link for more info and a loooooong video demonstration of it in action. If you are not excited about it, you don’t know enough about it yet.

Google Wave

We also announced the involvement of Jay-Z and Eminem to the project to join DJ Shadow, DJ Z-Trip and DJ AM – including a limited edition version of the game featuring Jay-Z and Eminem. More info here.

Its great to finally be able to reveal some details about the project that I have been working on for a good long while now and am absolutely thrilled at the response that the game has got so far. Keep your eye out for more details!

Official DJ Hero website (now with song previews, video clips and pre-order information)

DJ Hero Tweet

See it below!

Anime: Welcome to NHK
Song: Faktion – My Insanity

Here are my observations on some of these games.

Prince of Persia – Liked

• Feels ‘smooth’ and ‘right’ and it just flows exactly as you would expect
• Looks good
• FUN
• Unable to die – Some people might consider this a dislike, but I like it. It lets me explore without reprise.
• No DRM – Thanks Ubisoft!
• Polished – Not seen any major bugs and the animation is well worth a mention – it’s superb.
• Music – The sound track is very good.

Prince of Persia – Disliked

• No arbitrary saving - what is this 1999?
• Formulaic – Although the levels are varied and the bosses are interesting, its all pretty much the same.
• Controls are a bit quirky, but this is only a minor point as you get used to it after a while.

This is not going to be my game of the year by any means, but its a good solid game that is a lot of fun to play in short bursts. It plays a lot like Assassins Creed in a lot of ways, or Tomb Raider with swords.

Beyond Good and Evil – Liked

• FUN!
• Nice to see a game focused around something other than killing for once – liked the journalism idea
• Enough content without dragging on for ages
• Funny in places
• Would have looked good 4 years ago when it was released

Beyond Good and Evil – Disliked

• BUGGY! Graphical glitches/artifacting all over the place and the more serious variety – I had to restore from save points twice because my partner fell through the clipping
• Controls, oh god the controls – Console ports are bad m’kay…
• ‘Save points’ – Console ports are bad m’kay…
• Difficulty spikes – Most of the game is not even remotely challenging, but then you get a few scenes that take 20-30 attempts and it totally ruins it. This is made worse by the controls.

Overall its a good game, and at the price it is on steam at the moment its an absolute steal. Be prepared to be quite frustrated at times though. I’m quite stoked that they are currently making a second one, unfortunate that its going to be console only though.

X3 – Liked

• Pretty

X3  – Disliked

• Steep learning curve
• Tutorial was bugged and not very informative
• Activation/Install limit DRM. Cut this shit out, seriously. (I found this out AFTER I had paid for it)

I’m going to try to get into this again but I’m finding it hard to do so because it doesn’t give you a lot of help to get into it.

Bioshock

I’m not going to say what I liked and disliked, there are plenty of good reviews, but I had a lot of fun playing it. I played the demo when it came out and got bored. It’s not until much later that Bioshock comes into its own.

icLogic rendering engine

What you are looking at is a wxWidgets core with an OpenGL render engine and Python scripting. The cross and square are separate objects rendered completely from Python. The frame rate is high and has been capped at 60fps. It uses 4-5% CPU when maintaining this framerate. When minimised this drops to zero.

Overall not bad for a few hours work!

A few weeks ago my motherboard pulled a wobbly and I bought a new one and reinstalled Vista. Apart from losing a license for Mass Effect and Spore (EA won’t be getting any more of my money until they cut the crap) I lost my Visual Studio settings. I always forget how much effort getting my development environment up and running again is until I actually have to do it. The settings themselves are not the problem, getting and compiling all the prerequisite libraries is.

To get Arctic to compile I had to install:

• NVIDIA Cg Toolkit
• NVIDIA PhysX SDK
• NVIDIA PhysX Drivers
• Boost (and Boost Jam)
• wxWidgets
• Corona
• TinyXML
• FMOD

Most of these are fairly easy to install – you run the setup and add the include and library paths to VS’s search path. Unfortunately this is not always the case as with PhysX that requires a dozen include and library paths before it will let you get on with stuff. WHY!

In the meantime, Boost had shuffled its include files around in the latest version so I had to change the code to make it compile again.

wxWidgets has always been a pain in the rear to compile, especially if you want components in it that are turned off by default (such as the OpenGL canvas). Strange then, just as usual it bites me just when I think I’ve got it sussed. The bane of my life – the linker error – or in this case all 455 of them. The trick seems to be adding #define YES_REALLY_COMPILE to the top of setup.h.in, and then realising that you had the WXUSINGDLL set in your project settings when you wanted to use the static libraries this time around.

After 3 hours (really), Boost finally finished compiling. When I try to link it says it cannot find the library. Great. Not knowing a lot about the boost auto-linking code – and I’m not sure I want to, especially given the recent crack that has made its way into the boost libraries – boost proto I am looking at you…

I went looking for the library and it is there in ‘boost_1_37_0\bin.v2\libs\regex\build\msvc-8.0\debug\threading-multi’. Anyway, some time after I discovered that I was missing the parameter ‘stage’ in the build command, and this apparently prepares the magic ‘lib’ directory for me.

So finally it builds. Does it run? No. Because to run it I need to export some geometry, which I can’t do because I left the software disks in Leamington Spa.