Not long to go now! Continuing on from last week’s post. Here are the Painted Ladies, famous Victorian Houses on Haight St, San Francisco.

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference takes place from 8-12 June in San Francisco. I am heading over as part of a 30 strong InvestNI delegation for my first Apple conference since converting from the Dark Side last year. Its going to be pretty intense with tons of information on iPhone and Mac application development! So with the miserable, wet and cold May we are experiencing at the moment, I thought I’d cheer myself up with a nice picture of the Golden Gate Bridge:

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San Francisco is probably my favourite city. This will be my 3rd trip there (last time was my honeymoon in 2006) and I can’t wait to see it again! I’ll post some more pictures over the next few weeks…

With the season coming to a close, we are starting to hear a lot of excuses coming out of underachieving clubs and players. The biggest cop-out on the go starts with the phrase “If only” or “What if” . In the last week I have heard pundits, fans and footballers say:

• What if Gerrard and Torres had played more games together…
• If only Guus Hiddink had managed Chelsea from the start of the season…
• If only Man Utd hadn’t scored so early against Arsenal…

Every team loses players to injury, suffers loss of form, bad luck, dodgy refereeing decisions etc. What makes one team the Champions is that they dealt with the problems they faced better than every other team. Using squads to reduce impact of injury, bouncing back from bad results, good team spirit, not stopping until the final whistle etc.

This isn’t confined to football though. We are all guilty of wallowing in self-pity from time to time (myself included). Instead of looking for excuses, maybe we should spend the time looking at the underlying causes and trying to figure out a way of preventing them from happening in the future. Otherwise, we will be trotting out the same old What Ifs this time next year too.

It can be very useful to access your Windows filesystem on a dualboot computer (one with both Windows and Linux Operating Systems). Here’s how:

1. Open a Terminal window and create a directory to mount on to:

   $ sudo mkdir /mnt/win

2. For an NTFS Windows Filesystem:

   $ mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /mnt/win

3. For a FAT32 Windows Filesystem:

   $ mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/win

4. Go to your mounted folder:

   $ cd /mnt/win

Note: Don’t type the leading $, its the prompt. This assumes that your Windows filesystem is the first partition and is called “sda1″. If not, change the relevant command above to point to the right name. Also, if it’s NTFS, it will probably be read only access so you won’t be able to copy files to it. If this is required, it may be a good idea to creat a separate FAT32 partition that would be accessible to both OSs for sharing files.

If you want to know who the current best player in the world is, watch a replay of last night’s Barcelona vs Bayern Munich CL Quarter Final. Proof, if needed, that Lionel Messi is without question the best player on the planet. None of your hissy fits, gesticulating and theatrics to be seen. I had the privilege of watching Barca destroy Athletico Madrid earlier in the season and he was one of the most exciting players I’ve ever seen play live.

I suggest taking that trophy off your mantelpiece and wrapping it up nice and safe for Messi to take home in the new year.

Don’t get me wrong, you deserved it for your unbelievable season last year, and you have also done reasonably well this year, but football is a fickle game. I sincerely hope you improve your attitude and raise your game and push Utd towards an incredible season finale. Maybe then, you might be able to unwrap that award and put it back where it belongs.

OK I am a little late but it’s the thought that counts, right??

I am ashamed to admit that I have been neglecting the blog lately. I guess I haven’t really had very much to say of late. Nothing has changed there I hear you say! Even so,  I thought I’d give a quick round-up of the year to date…

Development

The new year has been a busy period. We have just finished the development phase of our next major release, my first since joining last year. Its been a step learning curve but we have managed OK. The next release will be a lot more involved so I am looking forward to getting going with that. It should see us through the rest of the year.

I have also lined up a few interesting side projects to keep myself off the streets at night. They are mix of web and iPhone apps using Ruby on Rails, the iPhone SDK and OpenGL ES. I am also hoping to take a look at Android development at some stage. It’s a very interesting time for independent developers. Every day seems to bring a new platform or app store announcement lately (Nokia’s Ovi Store, Palm’s App Catalog and as well as others by MS, O2 and Orange!). I guess with the amazing success of the iPhone’s App Store, it was inevitable that the other smart-phone makers would follow suit. It will be interesting to see how things shape up once the dust settles. I’m also hoping to climb out of my cave and go meet some other developers.

Gaming

It was a quiet Christmas in terms of gaming. I have been playing Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune on the PS3 when I find time. Its a 3rd person action-adventure game, similar to the Lara Croft series with a Gears of War style cover system. Its fun to play and the graphics are excellent, considering its over a year old. Overall, its fantastic value for money on the budget Platinum series.  I will definitely be picking up a copy of Uncharted 2 when it is released later this year. Also, the much anticipated Killzone 2 is due for release on the PS3 very soon. Unfortunately the Wii didn’t even get switched on over Christmas due to the dearth of quality titles. I am toying with the idea of trading it in for a DS or more PS3 games.

Football

Since I last posted, Stevie G was arrested, Rafa Benitez cracked, Arsenal have disappeared and Chelsea sacked their manager of 6 months. Meanwhile, Man Utd have went on a record breaking run of 14 clean sheets (and counting) and have stormed their way to a 5 point lead at the top of the English Premier League. They are currently English, European and World Champions, own the world’s best footballer (at least for now) and have an unprecedented quintuple in their sights. It’s a pretty good time to be a Red! I could be smug about it but I really don’t expect them to do a clean sweep. Barcelona are looking really strong at the moment and must be favourites alongside Utd for the Champions League. Also, it only takes one bit of bad luck (As Utd saw against Portsmouth in the FA Cup last year) and you can be knocked out. Everyone thinks the Carling Cup is a foregone conclusion, but I expect Spurs to be really up for it against some of the younger members of Utd’s squad. It should make for an exciting run in.

I have talked before of the troubles I had with my old XBox 360. Well the infamous RRoD claimed another victim – my brother. He has had his 360 just over a year now. As I have heard a number of times, he claimed Microsoft had fixed the RRoD problem now with new chipsets, lower powered PSUs, smaller processers etc etc. Last week he told me that he got three red rings but that it restarted OK after that. The exact same thing happened to me a week before mine died. I told him to pack it up and swap it for a PS3 before its too late. Unfortunately he didn’t take my advice and yesterday his XBox 360 died on him, just in time for Christmas!

The thing is, in my family there have now been a total of 7 XBox 360s bought in the last 2 years. To date, 4 of them have died while all those that are still living are less than 12 months old. Maybe Microsoft have fixed the problem with the new hardware but maybe not – only time will tell.

Moral of the story: Microsoft don’t care if they make rubbish hardware because people are still buying it. Just don’t do it!!

Update: My brother managed to get a lend of a brand new 360 over Christmas. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working so he had to bring it back to the store and exchange it for another 360. Rubbish!!

It is coming up to a year since I bought my Wii to fill the Christmas gaming void left by my RRoD XBox 360. Having always steered clear of Nintendo hardware, I had finally given in the the cutesy world of Mario and his friends. One of the biggest problems I had with Nintendo was that they constantly churned out the same old characters such as Mario, Donkey Kong and Zelda.

Now however, Nintendo seemed to be trying something completely different. The Wii promised a new era of gaming with its Motion sensors and accelerometers giving life to innovative gameplay instead of ever increasingly realistic shooters and racing sims. In the beginning it did deliver. Wii Sports was great fun, for 30 minutes. WarioWare was a riot, for about an hour. Luckily I had Super Mario Galaxy to keep me happy and content until my 360 was repaired in the new year.  Since then the only Wii game of any real interest for me was Mario Kart.  I had never been a big fan of the hugely popular racing game but thought I would give it a shot, especially with the steering wheel controls. It was ok. Not great. Not very exciting. Just ok. Exactly like every other MK I have played over the last decade, except the steering was a bit different (though not actually better IMHO).

After that, I stopped playing my Wii. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. Every now and again I’d take a walk into the Game store to see what new and nothing seems to change. Super Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart, Zelda and the like are still in the top 10, still selling at full price. You get the odd new game of interest but most of them are cross platform titles that probably run a lot nicer on my PS3 or dodgy old 360.  OK, Wii Fit was a big release for Nintendo and I tried hard to get one when it was released. Try as I might, all stores were sold out for weeks, until I eventually lost interest. After the hype had died down, £70 seemed an awful lot of money for a set of scales.

We are constantly bombarded with tales of how the Wii is outselling every other console by 10s of thousands of units every month. I’d be interested to see what the figures are in terms of game sales. It just seems like the trickle of new Wii games are either cross platform titles with a few Wii-mote gimic controls or strange Japanese titles aimed at teaching kids and non gamers how to cook or fish. The Wii was supposed to be a revolution in gaming but all I see is a cheap lump of white plastic gathering dust next to my PS3.

Come on Nintendo. Pull your finger out!

The Falcon is a futuristic-looking PC game controller from Novint that can provide a greater sense of realism to your favourite FPS game. Using a pistol attached to the main base, gamers get feedback from gun recoil, when getting hit, and environmental feedback from collisions and vehicles. It supports all the main FPS titles you are likely to care about too. At £165, this is probably for hardcore gamers.

I am a big fan of using the mouse for FPS games with its fast and intuitive control but I would love to try this out. I can’t imagine it being comfortable for hours of gaming, which is irrelevent now as I am lucky to get 1-2 hours a week these days.

Looks like everything our mothers said about spending too much time in front of the TV was true. Check out this poor soul who spent too much time on his Xbox 360. Don’t feel too sorry for him though, with his 37″ LCD head, he has become very popular amongst his peers.

As it turns out, Microsoft weren’t making rubbish hardware that died after a couple of days gaming after all. The infamous Xbox 360 RRoD is actually a failsafe switch added to prevent us all from ending up like this guy.

Thank you Microsoft. Thank you very much!