Jon has been mailing people to try and prod us into progressing with Freedoom. Apparently I signed up to make the HELP2 graphic. This is good news to me, as I distinctly remember signing up to make a level some years back, so it is a relief to discover that I'm not being held to that.

I had to go away and look up what HELP2 was, as it must be 10 years since I have seen it. It is the final screen that you see after pressing past the end text of E1M8 ("Once you beat the big badasses and clean out the moon base you're supposed to win, aren't you?" etc) — but only in the shareware version (in the retail version, you get the credits). It is the screen with id's phone number, please-pay-us-money hype, and some grainy screenshots of episode 2 and 3. And I mean grainy — think 320x200 screenshots, scaled down and cropped to 70x90, then inset back into a 320x200 splash screen). Would you buy a game on the strength of this?

Now, I know screens were smaller then, but even allowing for that, it's a crummy screenshot. Good for them that Doom sold on the strength of the Knee-Deep, and not by their grainy advertising screenshots.

Next I took a look at Freedoom's existing HELP and HELP1, which are fairly lame, so I reckon I can match those. A few minutes later I realised why — I made Freedoom's HELP and HELP1. Oh well.

One thing that I usually notice about open source games is the lack of a good introduction. With some games this is acceptable — games like Atomix are their own learning curve — but for others it is a serious obstacle to new players. What's the point of writing a sophisticated game, and then giving the player no explanation of what is going on? Some games come with little more than a one-line description, not even making the objective clear. That is why I went to the trouble of writing a proper, albeit ugly, help screen for Kye, and a set of introductory levels.

Undoubtedly the best I have seen, though, is Battle for Wesnoth. Not only does this come with an interactive tutorial, to walk you through the features of the game, but it even has a guided first battle scenario, which guides you through a real game. That's in addition to having a good learning curve in the first real levels. On top of that the game has excellent artwork, and some half-decent sounds too, making it one of the best open source games I have seen.

Doom 3's introduction segment, woven into the game, is the best I have seen recently in commercial games — both setting the scene, and allowing you to get used to the controls. But that's what you pay for in a commercial game, real developer time spent on boring stuff about telling you how to use your PDA; open source games too often fail to put in this effort. But of course Doom 3 takes it much further, using the opening section to providing ominous hints of the coming disaster — and making the later scenes more effective by showing you Mars City before the disaster, so you feel more a part of the crisis when it happens.

I have upgraded my site feed to serve Atom 1.0 — and of course completely broke newsdot. Nice.

I have been using RRDtool for a while now, for graphing the traffic on my home ADSL. It's a huge improvement on MRTG, but fairly hard work to use by itself, as you have to write your own data collection scripts. So, having come into contact with Cacti at work, I decided to switch to that. This is an example of a really great open-source network app, with a very slick and powerful web interface.

I was surprised, though, at there being no included script or graph template for monitoring Apache stats. So I have written one. This tarball contains the script, template to import into cacti, and instructions. Very much a first draft, though.

PS. Looks like I should have searched Freshmeat and not Google, as there is a package called ApacheStats for cacti. Ah well — I prefer the presentation of my graphs.

I am now a complete convert to Ubuntu for desktop systems. After 6 months of use, I am running it at home, on my laptop, and at work. For the laptop there is no contest, as I don't do Fedora or SuSE, and it is just too time-consuming to configure all the power management daemons, battery and wifi applets on Debian to get sensible enviroment (in particular, rt2500-based WLAN cards, in my case the Asus WL-107g, work out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 5.10, and with the help of Ubuntu's wiki worked fine in 5.4 too).

For work, having a current version of OpenOffice without hassle is a big win. And for home, having a supported AMD64 version gives it the edge; plus the UTF-8 locale support is much more complete. I even found myself on Friday forced (by time constraints) to use it on a machine doing server tasks at work, and found that it ran the software needed just as well as Debian, my usual choice (expect for one compile glitch, which was a real bug exposed by gcc 4). (I should qualify supported, though: only the Ubuntu core is supported, the universe and multiverse repositories, which just make available Debian's wider range of packages, are only unofficially offered by Ubuntu.)

My only complaint is the upgrading between releases. It seems poorly documented, and when run from within synaptic on my laptop at work, fell over spectacularly when it decided it could not operate in my locale nor use the gnome frontend to Debconf mid-way through the upgrade. Maybe that's my fault for running it in synaptic; but that's what the first page I found on the 'net suggested, and if they don't document the right proceedure, then it's still their problem.

Where do I cash in?

Hmm, a meme that isn't completely bogus - it reckons news.netcraft.com is worth half a million.

It is a good rule of thumb that, if you know little about a subject, you should buy quality — buy from a big name. That's why people buy HP computers from Dixons: people who don't know anything about computers can always buy from them and be fairly assured that they will get a working system. Only the geeks like me are going to build from parts, reuse scavenged parts thrown out from work, and buy components from suppliers listed in the small ads — at least, it's only the knowledgeable that can do so safely. It's the same in most things: novice stock market investors should buy Shell, and not Lastminute.com; non-mechanics shouldn't buy cars that "need work". You don't get bargains by buying safe. But the world is a market, and if you try to get a bargain when you don't know the goods, the odds are that the people who do know what is what are the ones getting the better end of the deal.

All the big-name companies have to do, to keep the privileged position of being the company that the clueless go to, is get and keep a reputation for being honest sellers and providing working, safe kit. So what to make of Sony's rootkit-infested CDs? Surely, with all the ad campaigns about pirate CDs being poor quality, no support, risk of viruses etc, the one thing you don't want to do is give genuine CDs a reputation for having viruses, since that immediately removes the "reasonable argument" basis for buying genuine CDs: the reason (apart from the law) to buy genuine is that you get a safe, clean, no problems product. Or it was. Who is ever going to buy a DRM-protected CD from Sony again? Who is going to agree to a EULA from a company that has shown it uses the permissions granted to detrimentally tamper with your computer? And used the fact that the users don't know what it is doing as an excuse? With this making major news outlets like the BBC, whatever made them thing that tampering with people's PCs would be acceptable?

But enough ranting; the above is obvious to anyone reading the case. This is just an excuse to pile in on boosting the Google ranking of Russinovich's blog post — now up to the 13th hit for Sony on Google!