Author Archives: JoJo

Play like a TWIT

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Playing as a clan makes FPS games so much more enjoyable. If you play CoD and you like Team Tactical then the chances are that at some point the TWIT clan has kicked your ass. ;)

As the name suggests, Team Tactical is all about playing tactically as a team, if you’re all running around like headless chickens, kill streaking, camping, playing split screen even though you’re just one person or doing jumpy spinny shit with a sniper rifle – just don’t be surprised when we chalk up a win. But hey, if you play us and win because your straight up better, we’ll gladly congratulate you… and then proceed to kick your ass in the next round. ;)

Things you need to know about us:

  • We practice quite a lot, by which I mean we play all the time.
  • We know each other really well – we have skill sets and load outs that complement each other.
  • We all have good quality headsets, Turtle Beaches – if you’re stomping around like an elephant then we will hear you.
  • We communicate constantly whilst we are playing, calling out tactics and enemy locations on the fly – we respond to situations super quick.
  • We don’t play cheap.

That last point is very important to us and really the motivation for this post. We don’t use n00btubes or heartbeat sensors unless we pick them up from fallen enemies, we don’t spawn trap, we don’t corner trap, we don’t glitch, we don’t boost and we don’t camp.

Guarding the flag, bombsite or bomb (think S&D) is not camping, that’s called Protecting The Fucking Objective. Ignoring the objective entirely and sitting in a corner racking up kills whilst the rest of your team valiantly tries to PTFO, that’s camping.

Killstreaking is for people who would camp, but have ADHD, running around the map racking up kills and ignoring the objectives. This is particularly evident in game modes like Kill Confirmed, seriously, the number of times I’ve died and seen people just walk away from a whole mess of tags is staggering.

Boosting and glitching are self explanatory. I was genuinely amazed this weekend that despite how easy if is to watch a game back and to report people and have them banned for 5000 days, we still managed to find ourselves in a game where two idiots boosted to an MOAB. Really guys, you didn’t think that having one of you at 25-0 and the other at 0-25 was going to give the game away!

So come on people, put down your RPGs and come play like men, you’ll probably still lose, but at least we’ll respect you. Unless you’re 12 and whine like a little bitch and threaten to “merk us”, in which case we’ll probably just laugh at you.

I’mma run to the right and then I’m gonna jump and shoot

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I got linked to this video on twitter by Jimmy The Snake*. I think it may be my most favourite video on the internet, even better than the sneezing panda, or anything with boobies in. For real. Not only is it hilarious, but it is bang on the money. I hate those fucking controller screens! As a gamer it makes me want to kick the developer squarely in the nuts, as a software dev it makes me die inside just a little bit.

I love MegaBomberman. I love my MegaDrive. Don’t get me wrong, I love my PS3 and CoD too, but not as much as I love my MegaDrive. MegaBomberman never left me feeling like I’d been screwed, the controls were simple and straight forward, I was never left wondering what to do. HD graphics? Nope. Online multiplayer? Nah. A bazillion different game modes? No again. But I could play that shit all frickin’ day!

I apologise to my colleagues for the ranting monologue I subjected them to after watching this video… but Far Cry 2 is sooooo shit… no, I’m not going there again. Just watch the video.

*Jimmy is responsible for my all time favourite game related quote: “Fuck my K:D, I’m winning this shit”. Check out his youtube channel!

This is Cornwall

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November was a busy month, the highlight of which was attending my bro Wayne’s wedding. The drive down to Cornwall was fun, my bro SMX is hilarious, we talked about some truly random things and solved several of the worlds problems during the 10 hours we spent in the Millennium Falcon. Only problem is we forgot how we solved them because we were distracted by the ridiculous names of the places in Cornwall that we drove past. As fun as the weekend was (carrot cake and Gatorade ftw!), it was also quite scary. New place, new people (everybody was lovely, but new is still scary), new food… and the small task of performing a bible reading at the wedding. I was so proud when Wayne and Em asked me to do it, really chuffed that they trusted me, but scared shitless all the same. I practiced for ages! Day of the wedding and inside the church I was attempting to hide my nerves by joking with SMX, “Imagine if I have to stand behind that massive gold eagle thing! Hahaha!”, a few minutes later I *was* standing behind that massive gold eagle thing. I know I didn’t look up once during the reading, I was just attempting to get the words out, eye contact at that point would have rendered me mute. But hey, I did it and I was pleased with myself. I wish my bro and his beautiful wife eternal happiness. Wayne has the coolest wife ever, she’s letting his bros join them for the end of the honeymoon. Technically, we are her bros now too (haha, I hope she reads that). Still, what could be better than sharing my favourite place in the world with some of my favourite people. The only thing that could make it more perfect would be if my sis Hev was able to come too. I have promised myself that one day we will all ride “It’s a small world” together.

Don’t hate the iPlayer…

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At some point iPlayer disappeared from the XMB on my PS3, I think it happened during the firmware update that made the iPlayer a dedicated app, but I cannot be sure. Since then I have intermittently seen the TV/Video option in the XMB and assumed that the problem had rectified itself, but then the next time I started up it was gone again. Having scoured the internet, it seems lots of people are reporting the same problem. I have seen lots of suggested fixes, mainly based on signing in and out of PSN/Home/Qriocity, but none of these worked for me (I don’t even have Qriocity or Home installed!). I stumbled across a solution completely by accident when trying to do something else, I created an extra user on my PS3, completely stock settings, signed in as the new user, deleted the new user, switched back to my regular user and suddenly the TV/Video option was back. All of this was done on firmware version 3.73.

From Joseph to Walrus (A Rose By Any Other)

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What’s in a name? A rose by any other and all that. Well my real name is Joseph, but nobody ever calls me that unless I’ve done something wrong and even then it’s only my Sister, my Mum or my friend Amy.

So what do people call me?

My family call me JoJo. This is the name I tend to sign on cards and stuff and this is what is stitched onto my custom made AF1s.

People at work tend to call me Jo, you’d be suprised how many people have a problem with calling me JoJo because I’m a grown up. It doesn’t bother me though. What does bother me is people who call me Joe, I don’t care how you cut it, Joe is not short for JoJo or Joseph. Jo-seph, think about it.

Jovis – My cousin Henry and his sister Milly before him were both unable to say Joseph and so they called me Jovis. It stuck.

Jofus – My friend Amy has decided that this is what you call people called Joseph. I have given her a million different nicknames so she can call me what she wants. Lil’ Feet actually inspired this post, so shout out to her.

Giuseppe, or Seppe for short. This one came from my friend Mark at school. Because I reminded him of a fat Italian chef.

Fat Boy/Chunky, also from school, self explanatory.

Walrus – I was given this name by Sarah Sadie Katrina Moore, a student from Utah who joined my school for year 10. She bought me a stuffed Walrus before she went home, I still have it. I think my friends Darren and Jim were Chipmunk and something else, I don’t quite remember. This was the first time I learned that I had a thing for accents and leads nicely on to…

Mr Lover Lover – Use your imagination. I was given this name as a result of a Sadie related rumour which it was easier to go with instead of arguing against. Didn’t do my street cred any harm. ;)

JR – This is old school, literally. My maths teacher used to call me this in year 7. He knew my middle name and also knew my younger brother somehow, he used our middle names to differentiate us (look, a maths joke).

JoHoMoFo – I got this name from Cosmic Badger. It was a result of my me explaining that my Mum had signed all of my Christmas presents “lots of love from MoFo” when she had mistakenly thought that MoFo was a pet name I had given her. At night, Cosmizzle and JoHoMoF roam the streets of Sussex and Kent fighting crime and freeing boobs. Okay, we don’t, but we totally should. Cosmizzle gave me possibly the best piece of advice ever. When I asked how I should approach a girl for her number, “Just don’t call her a twat” – I got her number.

You are free to call me any of the above, but the following names are reserved.

JoBro – My Sister Hev calls me this. No not that sort of Sister, even though we have the same surname (Cosmizzle, I still don’t think Stuart understands this). She is leader of the TWIT clan.

Bro – My bros SMX and Wayne call me this and I call them it.

My clan mates are my best friends in the whole world. They can call me bro. You *points at reader* can’t.

UPDATE: Today Amy christened me Panda. I think it’s going to stick. My fault for quoting Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Coming soon to a TV near you, “The adventures of Panda & Badger!”.

My baby just cares for me

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Whenever we went to my Grandad’s house as children my Sister would always insist that we spent some time watching one of the many videos of recorded music performances my Grandad had. My Grandad loved watching these tapes too and so never really argued. In fact, if we weren’t there he would probably have been watching them anyway, he was always arguing with my Nan when she asked him to turn “the bloody row down” – I guess I got my love of listening to music 24/7 from him. There are lots of songs I remember from these tapes, my Sister’s favourite was Rick Astley… that’s right, I was repeatedly Rick Rolled by my own flesh and blood!?

Years after the last time I saw these tapes, after my Grandad has passed away, we were all talking and I was trying to get everyone to remember one of my favourite songs from the tapes. All I had was a badly hummed tune and a description of the music video: the one with the white plasticine cat walking down the stairs. I was met with blank stares. Then a few months ago, this came on the music channels.

Woo woo woo… you know it!

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One of the things I’ve been working on recently is an in app editor for the OGRE based 3D GUI that forms the front end of one of our main products. One of the features that I added was the ability to switch between scenes with the click of a button. I was able to get this working on Windows with little difficulty, but on Linux I constantly got the same assert.

ogre/RenderSystems/GL/src/OgreGLSupport.cpp:56: virtual void Ogre::GLSupport::initialiseExtensions(): Assertion `pcVer && "Problems getting GL version string using glGetString"' failed.

I have revisited this problem several times in recent months and each time my investigation faltered at the same point. The first time a scene was loaded, everything was fine, the second time a scene was loaded OGRE failed to initialize the OpenGL Context. Something wasn’t being released correctly when the first scene was shutdown. I tried everything. With OGRE it should really be as simple as calling shutdown() on the root node and then deleting the root node using OGRE_DELETE, but it just wouldn’t work.

This past Friday I finally got it working though. The following code snippet is from the second time that OGRE tried to initialize the OpenGL render system. The dimensions of the target render window are wrong. For whatever reason, Qt was not able to finish initializing the container widget before I was grabbing the X11 info and passing this onto the OGRE initialization code. A simple decouple using a 1ms timer sorted the issue.

******************************
*** Starting GLX Subsystem ***
******************************
GLRenderSystem::_createRenderWindow "SomeWidget", 1059x0 windowed  miscParams: parentWindowHandle=135727904:0:56624998
GLXWindow::create used FBConfigID = 117

I’m not going to lie, I fist bumped like The Long Island Iced Z when I saw that model reload! :D

Dear Tim…

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I like the way Apple work. I like their vertically integrated approach and dedication to pushing the boundaries of technology. Life inside Steve’s walled garden is pretty epic, but that doesn’t mean to say there aren’t things I would change. After the release of Lion, the standing down of Uncle Steve and with iOS 5 imminent, now seems like a good time to list my annoyances and suggestions.

First off, let me say that customised notification sounds for texts/emails/etc on iOS is a super massive win, the same for unified notifications. If these weren’t features in iOS 5 then they would be near the very top of my list.

1. When you are sending a text message, right after you have hit send, the name of the recipient is replaced with “Sending…”. This lasts for all of two seconds, but feels like an eternity when you think you may have sent that text to the wrong person. The level of terror is heightened by the fact that there is no option to cancel the text.

2. Sure, I now have the option to merge folders, but Finder still feels awkward to use as none of the views feel quite right. I don’t like the way that files moves around the mouse pointer when you are dragging them either.

3. When I connect my iPhone to my MBP, it irks me that I have to launch iTunes in order to sync my contacts, calendar, photos, etc. Bring back iSync!

4. I would like to be able to combine my FaceTime account on my phone with the one on my Mac, so that both “ring” and I can answer either.

5. I know that you can get other browsers for iOS, but what’s the point if the first time I click on a link it immediately opens Safari? Allow me to choose the default browser the same way I would on my Mac.

6. An air like MBP. Lose the optical drive, add support for the external SuperDrive (maybe a new ThunderBolt version?). Replace the HDD with a phat SSD.

7. A pony. I’d quite like a pony.

Go hard or go home

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Oh man. What a couple of weeks. Bat. Shit. Crazy.

Last weekend my bro SMX came to stay (sup’ negro!). I learned several things:
1. He mumbles in his sleep.
2. Split screen CoD is harder than it looks.
3. I should have a pass code on my iPhone.
4. The number of hot girls walking past my window increased when he was in my room*.

As much as I missed SMX when he went back, at least he was available online. My other bro Wayne is about to drop off the map for an entire month. That’s like 30 sleeps. I can only imagine how many thousands of trophies he will be uploading to PSN when he gets back online. 79 days until Cornwall, 115 days until Christmas, 131 days until Florida. Bring on the winter! I know it’s kinda sad, but every time I open my wardrobe I look at my hoodies and think it won’t be long until I can wear them again. Yep, it’s sad, but true.

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for various reasons, and yeah, it got me down a bit, but even if I’m not smiling, it doesn’t mean I’m not happy. If I’m struggling to understand something then I might not be smiling, but I’m learning. I live for the thrill of the chase, it’s what I spend all day doing! As I’ve said before, when things get hard you can either give up or go harder and faster. When the music stops playing in my head, then it’s time to worry, but as long as I’m cruising through life to the accompaniment of my own soundtrack then everything is fine. Sometimes the most difficult things can be the most exciting, even if they terrify the shit outta me. Not planes though, they aren’t exciting, just scary. And moomins, they’re some scary shit too!

Haha! Later gators!

* I genuinely thought you were asking the name of the cat and not the girl.