Articles and Opinions written by Graham W Wöbcke

Vectrex Games

2010-10-22T10:01:00.001+11:00

The very first video games system I was exposed to that did not connect directly into the TV's aeriel socket was Milton Bradley's Vectrex System which was released in 1983 in Australia. The system was powered by a Motorola 68A09 chip running at 1.6Mhz. Inside there was also 1KB of RAM (that is no typo, 1 kilobyte) and a 8KB ROM (4KB of the ROM was taken up by the built-in game Mine Storm). All software was 8KB cartridge based and had a 9"x11" black and white monitor and inputs for two analog self-centering joysticks with 4-buttons or a light pen. All of the games are vector graphics based and to achieve colours, you place a coloured overlay in front of the monitor. The nice thing about the overlays is that it tells you also what action each of the four buttons performs. Now taking these specs into consideration, the programming feats to make these games is quite amazing.

The 4 Vectrex Cartridge Games I loved playing

Cosmic Chasm

You need to control a special craft that has a laser, a drill and a defense shield inside a space station. You need to follow the map and choose a path from one room to the next to progress towards the central chasm of the station. In each room you must destroy the enemy while avoiding the core of the room that throbs and expands. Once you have destroyed all of the enemy ships in that room you will need to choose an exit and carefully drill through a force shield to continue on. Once you reach the central chasm containing the space stations power source, you must plant a bomb to destroy it and escape quickly, by retracing your path back to where you started and escape the explosion. You then progress into harder levels each time you complete a level. I had a lot of fun with this game.

Solar Quest

Solar Quest is a game based on the Asteroids genre, where you control a space ship and you must shoot as many alien ships as possible. The twist to this game is you get bonus points rescuing any survivors before they are pulled into the sun in the centre of the screen by it's gravity. You can spin your ship in a circle as well as using thrust and hyperspace exactly like in Asteroids. There is the addition of a Nuke, where you have the opportunity to destroy everything on screen in it's path - which at times is handy. There are various types of enemy ships to destroy and some do not fly in a standard flight pattern which is also another difference to Asteroids. This was my favourite Vectrex game.

Armor Attack

Armor Attack is a birds eye view game in a town in the midst of war where you control a jeep doing the best you can to defend what is left of the city. Your jeep must stop tanks and helicopters that fly overhead. The chopper can enter and exit the screen at any point, and this keeps you guessing. If you are cornered, you can try to use the buildings to assist your cover and with both the tanks and helicopter firing at your jeep, you must evade their fire to survive and then destroy them to progress to the next level. Tanks require 2 direct hits to destroy them, as the first hit will only immobilise them but they can still shoot at you.

Hyperchase

Hyperchase is an extremely quick time trial style racing game which is fun to play. Considering the processor speed of the Vectrex, this is brilliant programming and the way the scenery moves as you speed along is quite masterful. You control an F1 style racing car with 4 gears and you need to be able to control the car and effectively change the gears to do well at this game. You will need to avoid traffic with careful steering and as the perspective of the road changes, you must also adjust your centre of steering which adds to the challenge. Failure to do so will see you slam into the trees on the side of the road, hit the side walls inside the tunnel, take out a telephone pole or be cleaned up by another vehicle. The challenge of beating your previous time keeps you going back to try to better your current best time. Great fun.

The color overlays for the above 4 mentioned games

*The above image is made from a scanned manual posted on The Vectrex Museum

Vectrex Review - Classic Game Room via YouTube

Vectrex Today

Today you will find working units and cartridges on ebay and other retro gaming goldmines if you are keen to experience this device first hand. There is also a fairly active homebrew game community and you can get these games on cartridges via various enthusiast groups. If you prefer to check this out via emulation, your best bet is to try it via MESS for a Windows based PC. There are also other emulation options available for Mac, XBox or PSP.

Links to More Vectrex Information

The Vectrex Museum
Vectrex on Wikipedia

Fonts for New Designers

2010-09-28T07:44:00.002+10:00

A common question that is asked is: "I'm a student (or new designer) and I need a good collection of fonts to get me started. What do you recommend?"

The short answer to this question is there is no real defined answer. There are many factors that need to be considered such as the market you will be working in, what kind of systems you have in place and of course, what is your budget.

In a publication by FontShop.de (yes, its in German - but you can still see the font names and list easily) it listed the following as the Top 10 fonts of all time:

Helvetica
Garamond
Frutiger
Bodoni
Futura
Times
Akzidenz Grotesk
ITC Officiana
Gill Sans
Univers

My personal recommendation

If I was starting out a career in design today I would start out with 6 complete font sets and gradually build a collection over time. I would make sure that the 6 font sets I selected were usable for both print and web work and we fonts that can have a wide scope of usage. I would also purchase OpenType fonts where possible. When selecting your essential font sets, remember you can always get special 'one-off' use fonts from free sites like dafont.com when you need them, so make sure you have a solid collection of these essential workhorse fonts. I recommend getting 2 serif, 3 sans-serif and 1 calligraphic (scripted) font set to ensure you have some variety.

My Essential 6 Font Sets

Helvetica Neue (sans-serif)
Adobe Garamond Pro (serif)
ITC Cheltenham Std (serif)
Eurostyle LT Std (sans-serif)
Futura (sans-serif)
Snell Roundhand (calligraphic)

Your personal preferences to fonts may be different, and you might prefer FF Din over Eurostyle LT or Warnock Pro over Adobe Garamond Pro, but that is the beauty of design.

Fonts For Students

We all know life as a student can lead you to cutting corners financially just to get by. So, if your on a tight budget, here are some free fonts that you can use to get your collection started.

Fontin Sans (sans-serif) http://www.josbuivenga.demon.nl/
Bitstream Vera Sans (sans-serif) http://www.dafont.com/bitstream-vera-sans.font
Gentium (serif) http://www.dafont.com/gentium.font
Pigiarniq (sans-serif) http://www.tiro.com/syllabics/resources/index.html
Lido STF (serif) http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/storm/lido-stf/
Exmouth (calligraphic) http://www.dafont.com/exmouth.font

Photoshop Retouching - The Snare Drum Image

2010-09-23T06:47:00.003+10:00

This post has been updated slightly since it was originally posted on gwdesign.net and it explains how I changed an image of a snare provided by a member of the PearlDrummerForum to show what it would be like with the finish he liked on a particular drum kit. Read Thread Here

The version of Photoshop used in this article is Photoshop 7.01. If you are using a version higher, you might use slightly different tools but the technique to achieve this remains the same.

Here is the photo of the kit that was provided.

And here is the photo of the snare drum, a Yamaha Akira Jimbo 13x7 Snare with maple hoops. Lucky for me, it was a high contrast image as this makes it a lot easier.

OK. So where do we start? Well, we obviously load the snare image inside Photoshop, but we should also do a few other things before we start any work. I created a blank document the same size as the snare image and I then added the snare image as Layer 1. Underneath Layer 1, I added a solid colour layer that is bright and one we would never expect to see in the image. You will see why we do this later, but I selected a bright pink colour and created Layer 2 underneath Layer 1. Take a look at the layer pallete here to see what I mean.

Right, time to make some non-destructive edits. In Photoshop, I find I very rarely need to use the Eraser tool. I always prefer to use a non-desctructive method of editing called masking. If you have never done masking before, I will explain to you how to do this now.

The first masked layer we will create is one that will allow us to change the finish on the drum but leave all other elements as they were in the initial image. So, the first thing we should do is duplicate Layer 1, so it sits above Layer 1 on the palette. I have also renamed the layer to a more meaningful name, in this case, Drum Finish. We can then refer to this Drum Finish layer later on with ease, knowing that this is the layer we are using. We now need to make suire we have selected that layer so click on the Drum Finish layer so it is highlighted. Now at the bottom of the layer palette is a row of icons. We need to select the second icon, the one that looks like a rectangle with a circle inside. This creates a layer mask for the currently hightlighted layer. Click on this icon and we should now see a mask layer to the right of the preview icon for the highlighted layer.

With layer masks, we use the brush/pencil or fill tools to paint with either black to hide areas or white to show them. Firstly, turn off Layer 1 by clicking on the eye to the left of Layer 1 in the palette. We now start to paint with black to hide all of the areas of the drum other than the part that contains the drum finish. When doing this, we will notice that the pink colour starts to appear. This is great because we now know that the mask is doing its job and is hiding the areas we do not want to change. Continue to paint with black until you have masked out all that you do not want to change. If you make a mistake, simply undo or paint over with white to restore the masking on that section. As you can see, masking is a very powerful and useful tool to know how to use effectively.

Once we have masked the Drum Finish layer fully, your image should look something like this:

Don't worry if your masking is slightly rough, it should still give a nice result. I have also purposely left in pieces of shading and black to add to the appearance of the final image.

Right, so now we are ready to start applying blending options to the Drum Finish layer and we can start to change the appearance of the drum. We firstly need to sample the finish from the provided photo and create a pattern with it so we can use it. Due to the different lighting inside the photo, I have taken two samples, one from the brightest part of the finish and one from the darkest part.

Here are the two samples I took.

As you can see they are quite different but they both have similar tonally due only to the different lighting. So, what I decided to do was increase the contrast of the darker sample and add in some grain to create one high contrast sample and then use that as a pattern. Here is the sample I worked with.

OK. Now using this sample, I created a pattern in Photoshop [Edit-Define Pattern] so I can then use it later as a pattern overlay blending mode. To create a blending option, simply right click on the selected layer and choose Blending Options. You'll see the Layer Style window appear as below. Here we will need to use the pattern we just created on a Pattern Overlay. Place a check mark in the box next to Pattern Overlay and your options will appear in the right hand section.

Your drum finish should now look like blue bubbles because this is the default pattern. We will need to select our pattern from the pattern list by clicking on the button that opens the pattern picker and then selecting the pattern we created. Your drum will now have that grainy look from the pattern but it will be too intense. As we created a high contrast version of the pattern, we will want to reduce the opacity of the pattern to compensate for this. I reduced the opacity to around 25% and liked what I saw, so I went with that. Click OK and the blending mode is applied and this is how the drum should look now.

To keep the sparkles but make it slightly darker, we change Blend Mode from Normal to Linear Burn. As the underlaying colour of the drum finish is white, the pattern is burnt into the white and darker pixels are shown.

That was all that was asked for but I had some further fun with this drum by creating two more masked layers, one for the drums wooden rims and one for the drums hardware. Here are three other versions of the drum that I made. The green drum was using a Color Overlay layer that was using the Color Burn Blend Mode.

This drum was made by adding a Gradient Overlay layer, with a standard black to white gradient. The Blend Mode of this Gradient Overlay was set to Linear Burn so that the black was retained but the white was replaced with the green on the Color Overlay. The gradient was reversed so the black was on the top rather than the bottom and then the opacity was set to 66% on the gradient and the scale of the gradient was set to 55%. I also applied a black Color Overlay layer with a Blend Mode of Overlay and an opacity of 42% on the wooden rims to make them look more rich.

This final drum was made by applying a red Color Overlay and a Pattern Overlay on the finish layer. I then applied a black Color Overlay layer on the hardware with a Blend Mode of Pin Light and an opacity of 40%. Finally, I applied a black Color Overlay layer on the wooden rims with a Blend Mode of Color. I then set the layer style of the wooden rims layer to Linear Burn.

Here are a few other images I made for the fun of it:

A 'cracked' finish with satin hardware

The original finish with gold hardware

The green finish with black hoops and black chrome hardware

Right, so there you go. That is how we can manipulate an image in a non-destructive manner and achieve excellent results. I have provided the photoshop source file for you to download and use so you get a better understanding of this process. Good luck and enjoy Photoshop!

Sharp x68000

2010-09-16T11:21:00.016+10:00

The Sharp x68000 is the one computer system I wished I had the opportunity to own and I only discovered it via emulation and going through the retro ads on ebay and other sites. This is because the x68K was only released in Japan and Australia only had the Amiga and Atari ST on offer. Having used both the Amiga and Atari ST, I was keen to learn more about this other Motorola machine which sadly never made it here.

I've learnt quite a bit about this machine through reading retro magazines, system manuals and a few Japanese websites dedicated to this system. I will be compiling all of the details I know and mentioning my top 10 games as well so there is another reference to this vastly unknown, yet wonderful system which was produced between 1987 and 1993. I will also mention some details about x68K emulation on Windows and Linux - and no need to panic or scream as the system's bios and OS software has been released into the public domain, as have many of the systems games and applications.

Japanese TV Ad for the x68000

Specifications

Let's start with some hardware specs for the standard X68000 ACE model which was released early 1998 (source: x68000 User Manual):

CPU
- Motorola-Clone 68000 CPU (HD68HC000) made by Hitachi
- Running at 10 MHz
ROM: Total 1Mb ROM
- 128Kb BIOS
- 768Kb Character Generator (16x16, 8x16, 8x8 - JIS 1+2)
RAM: Total 1Mb RAM
- Upgradeable to 4Mb
VRAM: Total 1Mb VRAM
- 512Kb Text
- 512Kb Graphic
Other RAM/VRAM
- 32Kb Sprite VRAM
- 16Kb Static RAM
Screen Resolutions
- 256x240, 256x256
- 512x240, 512x256, 512x512
- 640x480
- 768x512
- 1024x1024
Screen Colors
- 65,536 Total Color Palette
- Max. 256 Simultaneous Colors on Screen
Sprites
- 16x16 pixels
- 128 sprites per screen
- 16 sprites per line
- 16 colors per sprite selectable from 16 palettes
Graphics
- Hardware scrolling
- priority control
- super-impose
- 2 backgrounds
Sound
- FM Synth
  - Yamaha YM2151 paired with a YM3012 DAC
  - 2 channels (stereo or 2 mono)
  - 8 voices
  - 8 octaves
  - Noise Generator
  - Sample Rate 22KHz
- ADPCM
  - OKI MSM6258V
  - a 4 bit mono PCM
Expansion Slots
- 2 slots available
- 4 slots available on Pro models
Input/Output Ports
- VGA Monitor Port - 15/24/31 kHz refresh rates
- Component RGB In/Out - equipped for NTSC-J Cable TV
- 2 x MSX Joypad Ports
- Headphones Jack
- Microphone Input
System Case and Input Devices
- 2 x 5.25" floppy disk drives with 'soft eject'
- The tower case looks like two connected towers, with a retractable carrying handle
- Software controlled power switch
- QWERTY keyboard, 113 keys
- Single Button Mouse

Hardware Upgrades, Variations and Known Issues

RAM Upgrades
- Many models were upgradable to a total of 12Mb RAM
- The majority of applications and games did not require more than 2Mb RAM
- Street Fighter II is an exception and I believe it will not run with less than 4Mb RAM.
CPU Upgrades
- XVI Model (1991) - Genuine Motorola 68000 CPU running at 16 MHz
- X68030 Model (1993) - Genuine Motorola 68030 CPU running at 25 MHz.
Hard Drive: Models named with "-HD" contained an internal hard disk drive
- SASI Hard Disk Interface
  - ACE-HD: 20MB
  - EXPERT-HD: 40MB
  - PRO-HD: 40MB
  - EXPERT II-HD: 40MB
  - PRO II-HD: 40MB
- SCSI Hard Disk Interface
  - SUPER-HD: 80MB
  - XVI-HD: 80MB
  - X68030-HD: 80MB
Power Supply Issues
- The power supply was always 'on' - no switches other than the front power button
- Most common hardware issue with the x68000 was the power supply blowing up.
- Power Supply Repair Instructions are found here

Operating System

The X68k ran an operating system developed for Sharp by Hudson Soft, called Human68k, which features commands very similar to those in MS-DOS (typed in English). Pre-2.0 versions of the OS had command line output only for common utilities like 'format' and 'switch' while later versions included forms-based versions of these utilities, greatly improving their usability. At least three major versions of the OS were released, with several updates in between. Other operating systems available include NetBSD for X68030 and OS-9.

Early models had a GUI called "VS"; later ones were packaged with SX-WINDOW. A third GUI called Ko-Windows existed; its interface is similar to Motif. These GUI shells could be booted from floppy disk or the system's hard drive. Most games also booted and ran from floppy disk; some were hard disk installable and others require hard disk installation.

Since the system's release, Human68k, console, and SX-Window C compiler suites and BIOS ROMs have been released as public domain and are freely available for download. So if you are incredibly 'moral', with the system's bios and OS is public domain you will at least be able to emulate the machine without feeling guilty!

Emulation

With the system notoriously difficult to import, and with it's flaky power supplies, heavy weight and last of all, cost, makes it a difficult machine to import and maintain. However, with emulation of the x68000 almost 100% accurate, you can experience this machine in all it's glory using an emulator under Window or Linux.

The emulator I recommend is WinX68k High-Speed V0.95 on Windows. I have decided to host the WinX68k High Speed 0.95 emulator with System Roms plus my top four games as shown below inside the single zip file.

Many other XDF, DIM and HDM disks for the x68K can be found at Japanese Computer Emulation Centre.

My Top Four x68K Games

Rygar - Probably my favorite arcade game ever
Flying Shark - Like 1942, but harder
Final Fight
Gradius

For further reading about this wonderful machine, take a look at the page on Wikipedia. For more information on Rygar, take a look at my post dedicated to Rygar by Tecmo.

Rygar by Tecmo - Retro Gaming

2010-09-09T19:20:00.006+10:00

I have recently 're-discovered' the sheer brilliance of Rygar - an arcade game I used to pump coins into as a kid up at Terry's Corner Store. Playing this game again brought back memories of all of the fun I had after school with my 'spare' pocket money.

Here are two screen shots of the Sharp x68000 version of Rygar:

About Rygar

Rygar was created by Tecmo in 1986 and is is a scrolling 'platform' game where you play as Rygar, the "Legendary Warrior". Moving through the levels, you will come across many different enemies, increasing in skill the further your progress.

Your main method of attack is via your Diskarmor, a large chain wielded disk (shield) weapon. landscape. During the game, you can acquire one of five special power icons to assist your attacks. These are:

Star Icon: Provides a longer chain to hit your enemy from a greater distance.

Crown Icon: Provides a stronger disk to hit more enemies with q single attack.

Tiger Icon: Gives ability to jump on enemies and kill them.

Cross Icon: Gives a temporary shield lasting from 10 to 45 seconds.

Sun Icon: Gives ability to shoot directly upwards, rather than the sweeping motion.

The other great attraction to Rygar is the number of hidden bonus items that can be found. There are hidden golden stars (which give you an extra life when you have collected 7 of them), hidden bomb icons that clear the screen of all enemies and time icons that extend your time in that round. On Round 13, there is a star tree (shoot the area around the tree and bonus stars appear) and there is a hidden parchment that will award you 1000000 points!

Arcade Flyer and Service Manual

The Rygar service manual is available for download in PDF format. Below is the Rygar arcade flyer.

Emulation and Rygar

Sharp x68000 Version

The best version of Rygar available on emulation is the Sharp X68000 version. It is almost a perfect arcade machine port and is such a great version of this game. To play this game on your PC you will need to get a Sharp X68000 emulator and the Rygar disk image. See my post about the Sharp X68000 to download the emulator and Rygar rom. Have fun!

Other Versions

Commodore 64: Lemon 64

ZX Spectrum: World of Spectrum

Useful Web Development Hacks

2010-06-24T15:34:00.001+10:00

Here are some useful Web Development hacks I have come across that I find are very useful. This list will grow in size as I add new items from time to time.

Set the default font-size to 16px

Based on the formula 1px = 0.75pt = 0.0625pc

You can now determine that:
16px = 12pt = 1pc = 100% = 1em

You may also want to experiment with this method using * instead of body inside your CSS. It is important to note that this method may not be suitable if you are designing a site with accessibility requirements, but it will work well in a 'heavy' layout with boxes, images and tables.
Target IE6 and IE7 Browsers Without Conditional Comments
By performing this hack, your CSS will not pass validations, but knowing that this hack will avoid conditional comments makes for a cleaner and easier to maintain CSS file. To do this, we simply prefix the CSS property declaration with an asterix to target IE7 and below and an underscore to target IE6 and below. Here is an example:

Try it. This example will display text inside a paragraph tag with color #333 in IE8, #666 in IE7 and #999 in IE6.
Stop Skype Toolbar Ruining Your Page Design

I use Skype a bit but I am increasingly frustrated with the way the Skype browser extensions hijack your page designs and add in click-to-call buttons.

A while ago Skype acknowledged a special Meta Tag to not do this, however, it seems this is ignored. So, if you want to rid your site of this, just add in a special space character between the numbers and the Skype buttons will be gone. In the example below, the country code 61 is used for Australia, then 2 for the area code (you drop the prefix 0), and finally separate the number how you like with the same special character:

which will display the number like: 61 2 8123 4567 minus the Skype toolbar annoyance.

I hope you find these as useful as I do in your web work.

Useful Classic ASP Tips and Functions

2010-04-05T09:54:00.028+10:00

ASP String Functions

The first code snippet is a little function that converts text into mixed case, or sentance case. It basically seeks out spaces in a string and converts the first character after thhe space to a capitalized letter and the remaining characters before the next space to lower case.

Mixed Case Function

ASP seems to lack a URL Decode function but has a URL Encode function available. Here is a function that can decode any URL Encoded URL or variable. I found this script a while ago on another site and have used it when necessary.

URL Decode Function

Here is a practical example of when you would use the URLDecode function - to record the search terms someone has use to find your site in Google. This functions examines the string to see if it contains "google." and if it does, assumes the string contains google keywords and seeks out "q=" inside the string. If it also finds this, the stripStr is now created with the prefix "GOOGLE:" and the key words are appended to the end.

Google Search Terms Strip Function

This next function is a short and sweet function that will strip HTML tags out of any string. It uses regex expressions and is very fast.

Strip HTML Tags Function

This snippet is a little function that strips out specified special characters. It basically seeks out any of the characters that exist in the array and removes them all.

Strip Any Character Function

This next snippet is a simple function that will check an array for any occurances of a particular string.

Check In Array Function

General Classic ASP Tips

Lately I have needed to perform a lot of redirects from old pages to new pages. Some of these old pages have decent rankings in search engines, so how do I make sure these new pages retain this ranking? By using a HTTP 301 Redirect (HTTP Moved Permanently). Here is how you code a 301 redirect in ASP:

301 Redirect

If you are wanting to redirect to your default page name (index.asp,default.asp etc.), it is a good idea to redirect only to the folder name and leave off the name of the page like:

Response.AddHeader "Location", "/subfolder/"

Scrape External Site Content With Classic ASP

There are many times were you have wanted to grab something from another site that isn't provided via RSS. You could type it in, but that would be time consuming. So how do we do this? We scrap the content from the site using the XMLHTTP object. If you have read the previous article on how to cache an RSS feed, you will no doubt say many similarities here in this article, so I won't re-explain those portions. So let's have a look at the code.

The code contains two functions, LoadThePage and GrabTheContent, and there names self explain what they perform. LoadThePage saves a copy the external HTML into an XMLHTTP object. GrabTheContent manipulates this object and returns a string that we can use. We give this function two paramters, the text at the start of the section we want to grab and the text that ends what we want to grab. Pretty simple. For this example, we will be using http://birdsinbackyards.net/species/Cacatua-roseicapilla as the page we retrieve text from.

Now the main portion of the program firstly it checks the date stamp of the application variable from when it was last cached and if necessary, retrieves a new cache. We do this so we don't hammer someone else's website and slow down the performance of our page (and to not annoy the other webserver with heaps of connections). Once we have either retrieved a new cache or used the existing one, we display the contents on the page. So we would see these results:

Description

The Galah can be easily identified by its rose-pink head, neck and underparts,
with paler pink crown, and grey back, wings and undertail. Birds from the west of
Australia have comparatively paler plumage. Galahs have a bouncing acrobatic flight,
but spend much of the day sheltering from heat in the foliage of trees and shrubs.
Huge noisy flocks of birds congregate and roost together at night.

Ok. So that is nice but how would we format this retrieved text? How do you remove the HTML tags?

To strip the HTML tags, we will be using a function I have previously published named stripHTML. What this function does is strip ALL HTML tags using regex and returns plain text. Now to format the text appearance, we will need to use the string REPLACE function to change/remove/insert tags into appropriate places. Essentially, you scan through the retrieved page and add in the formatting you like. We will finally present this text inside a DIV with an inline style applied. So we would firstly add in the stripHTML function as shown previously on this page and then finally, we would change how the text is presented at the bottom of the script to this:

So let's take a look at how it appears now:

Description

The Galah can be easily identified by its rose-pink head, neck and underparts, with paler pink crown, and grey back, wings and undertail. Birds from the west of Australia have comparatively paler plumage. Galahs have a bouncing acrobatic flight, but spend much of the day sheltering from heat in the foliage of trees and shrubs. Huge noisy flocks of birds congregate and roost together at night.

There you go, much better. Exactly the same results as the first example but much more readable and adaptable to your site after using your formatting.

Cache an RSS Feed in ASP

If like me you work a lot with XML and RSS, it will be necessary to cache it to reduce the load on systems. ASP would normally request the file each and every time the script is loaded in the browser. The following method caches an RSS feed for a specified period of time, thus reducing the load on a server greatly. I am going to assume you understand the RSS 2.0 format in this example.

Essentially, the script checks the timestamp of the application variable, and if it has been longer than 1 hour, it will reload the RSS feed into an application variable, otherwise it will use the existing content inside the application variable rss-html. If the script needs to retrieve the RSS feed, it loads it into a DOM object and then parses the RSS looking for <item> tags. We then create a string for each of the RSS fields we are interested in storing. Whiel we parse each <item> we add a delimiter inside these strings "#%#" to separate the entries. Once we have finished parsing the RSS, we are left with three strings.

We now split these strings into arrays using the split function, seeking the delimiter "#%#" we previously used. Once the elements are inside three arrays, we loop through with a FOR loop until we reach the end of the arrays. We can process each of the elements as we loop through and format as required. The reason I prefer not to feed the RSS straight into an array is because we would need to determine the number of records and redim the array, where as with the method I have used, you create a concatenated string that can be easily split later at the delimiters and feed into an array.

I hope you find this caching method useful.

Galah FAQ and Diet

2010-01-27T04:54:00.003+11:00

I have decided to compile a small Galah FAQ. I hope that it can help out people who are interested in keeping one of these parrots as a pet and it helps if you just have a general interest in birds. I would just like to make a tiny disclaimer saying I am not a bird expert or an avarian doctor, just an enthusiast and active pet keeper.

Galah FAQ

How Old Can A Galah Live For?

In the wild a Galah will rarely live past 25 years, but in captivity, if well looked after a galah can live for 50 to 60 years.. so you will have a friend for life.

How Can You Tell The Sex Difference Of A Galah?

The easiest way to tell the sex difference of Galah's is to look at the eyes. The males have a more dark, almost brown iris (area of the eye that surrounds the pupil) while the females have a lighter, pink iris. Other characteristics that can help you determine sex is that males seem to have a better ability to talk and females tend to sit on a perch with there legs apart more frequently than males.

How Can I Tell How Old My Galah Is?

Determining age is a little more difficult, but you can get an idea by again examining the eyes. The number of wrinkles around the eye (in the white area) is one way of aging a bird. Other ways include the number of layers on the beak and by looking at the feet. Generally, the more wrinkles around the eye, the older the bird.

How Many Types/Species Of Galah Are There?

There are to my knowledge three major sub-species of Galah - Western, Eastern and Northern. The most popular variety in captivity seems to be the Eastern variety.

What Sounds Does A Galah Make And Can They Talk?

Galah's make a fairly high pitched "Chet Chet" type sound when flying around in the wild. They will also make a much louder screech when threatened, fighting or having fun. Galah's are very clever and can learn to talk, or rather, imitate people's voices. The male galahs seem to be much better at this than the females. Galah's are also very good at impersonating everyday sounds such as a whistle, a horn or a telephone ringing.

Is It Normal For My Galah To Make Grinding And Sneezing Sounds?

Galah's will grind their beak when they feel safe and relaxed, usually before they sleep. When a Galah goes to sleep, they will quite often turn their heads 180 degrees around and rest their head on their back feathers. A heathly Galah will require around 10 hours sleep a night. A Galah will also sneeze when preening there feathers as a way to disperse the dust they have collected from their feathers so this is perfectly normal.

Should I Give My Galah A Bath?

Galah's are quite cutious when it comes to water so I don't really advise giving a bird a bath. A much better method is to either use a water bottle with a squirter nozzle and give them a misty spray so they fluff out or as my bird loves, being held in front of a air conditioner or enclosed fan for about 30 seconds to blow off the excessive dust.

My Galah Chews Everything - What Can I Do?

Galah's chewing objects is a natural method of keeping their beaks in top condition. It prevents overgrowing and discomfort if the beak is not regularly used. Make sure their enclosure has some inedible objects to chew to keep them occupied. Try wooden perches, rope perches, plastic chain, old belts (buckle removed), old shoe soles and thongs.

A Galah's Diet

Galah's like to eat seeds, nuts, berries and fresh corn. In the wild, they are known to eat grasses, leaf buds. flowers such as Gravillias and Banksias, seeds and on the occasion, insects for extra protein. It is essential that a Galah has fresh water daily.

From Woolworths/Coles you should be able to find a good staple seed diet such as "Lovitts Small Parrot Seed Mix". Try to avoid products that contain more fat and sugar than the other varieties - Trill has improved it's mixture in recent years.

You may also give your bird a few treats a week. I always give my bird a protein treat and a dairy treat and I will sometimes give a flower treat. When offering treat foods, you can measure them using a teaspoon, never giving more than a rounded teaspoon worth.

An example of a protein treat is some boiled egg, cooked salmon or a big 'chicken wing' bone (with no meat, gristle is ok). An example of a dairy treat is a spoon of plain custard, plain yoghurt or a square of hard cheese. For flower treats, only offer banksias and gravillias but be careful as giving the wrong flower type can poison the bird.

Here are some Diet do's and don'ts:

Never feed Galah's many sunflower seeds - while they love them - it will kill them due to their high oil/fat content over time. A Galah's diet should not be more than 10% fat and sunflower seeds contain over 35%.
Each day make sure your bird eats something fresh other than the seeds. This could be some fresh fruit like a cherry, passionfruit, pear, banana, peeled fig and berries like raspberry or blackberry (my bird does not like strawberry but I have read others do). Alternatively to fresh fruit, try lettuce, boiled spaghetti (no sauce) or a spoon of mashed potato (no butter), mashed pumpkin or boiled brown rice. You can also offer carrot and apple but the bird will usually use it to chomp up and make a big mess.
Only give a maximum of one or two protein and dairy treats a week.
Only let them drink water and change the water daily or every second day, depending on the mess.
In the morning, they will happily have a spoon of soft weet-bix or the crust off one side of your toast, but not too often.
Never feed your Galah lemons, grapes, soy products, cabbage, cream, chocolate, anything with caffeine, beans or avocado. It will kill them or make them very sick. Limit the amount of peas that you feed your bird - sugar snap peas are fine a few times a week.
Remember a Galah's crop is about the capacity of a rounded (not heaped) teaspoon, so never overfeed them.
Fresh corn can make birds aggressive if given too often. Try to only give it once a week.

Here is an example day menu that I give to my bird:

Morning: Check water and seeds in cage (and refresh if necessary) and offer a piece of toast crust - the bird will then graze more on seeds if still hungry.
Lunch: I'm usually at work so they will graze on seeds during the day. You can install a hanging device that will hang pieces of fruit or vegetables so they can have some variety while your away at work.
Evening: A teaspoon of boiled egg and a piece of fruit or some vegetables like mashed potato - the bird will still graze more on seeds if still hungry.

So there you go, hope you all have a better understanding of Galah's.

Photos of 'Pinkie' - My Galah

Here are some photos of our pet and best friend, Pinkie the Galah.

A very young Pinkie

Pinkie on her 'play tree' that I made

Pinkie about 3 years old

Pinkie almost 7 years old

A Decade In Review

2010-01-01T07:49:00.012+11:00

I've neglected this blog for a while and it's been a long long time since I last posted. This is partly because of my 'offline' commitments including work, marriage and the birth of my first child Violet Rosa. So I thought my final post for the 2000-2009 Decade should be a review/list affair, just like the 100,000 other sites. On a personal level, some of the most memorable events for me include:

Sept. 2000: My wife working at the 2000 Olympic Games in the Olympic Village as Assistant Entertainment Manager
Oct. 24, 2000: Getting the courage to propose to Teena at the Aria Awards held at the Sydney Entertainment Centre
Sept. 11, 2001: Watching the September 11 events unfold and confirming that human nature is so messed up due to greed and power.
Nov. 02, 2002: My Wedding to Teena on Sydney Harbour
July. 23, 2008: The Birth of my Daughter and first child, Violet Rosa
Sept. 22, 2009: Signing The Contract for our first home - and what a NITEMATE this was.

So anyway, here are some lists based on my own (un)biased opinions and with so many options available to make these lists, they are bound to offend someone. I will post lists of 6 or 7 items in the following categories: Memorable Photos, News Events, Epic Failures, The Web, Technology, Science, Sport, Video Games, Music, Movies, TV and Gone But Not Forgotten. I will also continue to add images and text pieces to this list after the initial post on December 31, 2009 to make this a more complete article.

Lists for the 2000-2009 Decade

7 Of The Most Memorable Photos

World Trade Center, 3 Weeks before 9/11
Ira Kasoff MD, Liberty State Park, NJ

The third and largest wave comes ashore at Thailand’s Ao Nang Beach on Dec. 26, 2004.
(Reuters)

A fire truck moves away from out of control flames from a bushfire in the Bunyip Sate Forest, 125 kilometers west of Melbourne on Feb. 7, 2009
(AP Photo)

A man walks his dog through Observatory Hill, Sydney on Sept 23, 2009 during an eerie red dust storm.
(AFP)

Hurricane Katrina Eye Wall, as taken by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) aircraft.
(aoc.noaa.gov)

Mark Visser surfs an 11 m (36 ft) wave at Cow Bombie, near Gracetown, 280km south of Perth on Sept. 28, 2009.
(Reuters)

Mars' northern orange sky and horizon as seen by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University)

6 Of The Most Memorable News Events

Sept. 11, 2001: World Trade Center Attacks - 2,973 victims died as a result of the attacks where four commercial passenger jet planes were hijacked - with two of these planes crashing into the World Trade Center Towers bringing them to their collapse.
Oct. 12, 2002: Bali bombings - Islamist terrorists bomb nightclubs in the Kuta beach area of Bali, killing 202 people (including 88 Australians) and injuring and burning a further 240 people.
Feb. 7, 2009: Black Saturday Bush Fires - Victoria experiences the worst bushfire disaster recorded in recent history, with fires that last for weeks fueled by dry weather, arson and electrical failures.
Dec. 26, 2004: Indian Ocean Tsunami - An earthquake measuring at least 9.0 strikes off the of Sumatra in Indonesia and triggers a powerful tsunami with waves up to 30 metres high that hit 11 countries.
Aug. 29, 2005: Hurricane Katrina - A Category 5 storm that devastates New Orleans with floods that last for weeks after the Levees were breached. The US Government's handling of this natural disaster confirmed to the world that the Bush administration was also a disaster.
Apr. 25. 2006: Beaconsfield Miners -A seismic event triggers an underground rock fall in the Beaconsfield gold mine in northern Tasmania. Todd Russell and Brant Webb are trapped 1km underground and are rescued from the Gold mine they were trapped in two weeks later on May 9. Their colleague Larry Knight was not as lucky and passed away shortly after the mining accident.

6 Epic Failures

2000: Y2K Bug - Businesses spent BILLIONS working on ways to ensure the bug that didn't happen, didn't happen (sic.).
2009: Carbon Tax - Another money making and taxation scam. Sure, the world's weather is changing - it could be primarily caused by human actions but let's consider and research into other things like Increased Solar Flares Activity on the Sun, Magnetic Field Changes, Solar Winds, Climate Historical Data etc.?
2003: Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction - Sure Saddam was a tyrant but look at the state of the world now after the Bush Administration's interventions. The comment "there is no doubt" made before the US Senate Armed Services Committee by General Tommy Franks in March 2003 but some months later he "retracted" on the non-biased Fox New network (cough) saying that "No one was more surprised than I that we didn't find (any)"
2006: Facebook - I don't get this waste of bandwidth. People spend far too much time on this site, posting about idiotic things or unjustified opinions. Facebook in my opinion is just another mechanism to deliver spam, self-promotion and pointless babble. It also seems to have the ultimate 'goal' of you performing all of your internet activities inside of the site. Unfortunately, if you are serious about promoting your event, business or service, it seems you must have a presence even if you dislike it.
2009: iSnack 2.0 - Never change something that works, but more important, never let an overseas company control something they have ZERO concept of. Vegemite is true blue and tried and tested, leave it alone.
2007-2009: The Global Financial Crisis -It started with with the sub-prime mortgage crisis (caused by risky mortgage loans even with bad credit) in 2007, and the overwhelming reliance on hedge funds and shadow banking. Then during 2008, Lehman Brothers filies for bankruptcy, and other financial firms and banks followed. The stock market crashed and the US Government bailed out many companies so they can continue to act in the same way they did prior to the crash, which is complete and utter irresponsibility. I expect a bigger crash in the first few years of the next decade, because lessons have not been learned and governments still don't care.

6 Of The Most Important New Web Sites During 2000-2009

Gmail (2004) - A free, advertising-supported web-based email site, with over 7GB of free storage and access to POP3 and IMAP services provided by Google. Also known as Google Mail in the UK and Germany. I can't live without Gmail.
Wikipedia (2001) - A free, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation which contains approximately 14 million articles (3.1 million in English) that have been written by volunteers around the world.
YouTube (2005) - A video website where users can upload and share videos which was bought by Google for $1.65 US billion in Nov 2006.
Skype (2003) - A website that allows members to make voice calls for free over the Internet to other Skype members and for a small fee to landlines and mobile phones. Also includes instant messaging and video conferencing facilities.
Flickr (2004) - An image/video hosting website and online community. Used to share personal photographs and to host images that are used in blogs and social media. Very popular for groups but I prefer Picasa for personal photos.
Last.fm (2002) - A UK-based Internet radio/music community website that uses a music recommendation system to build a profile of each user's musical tastes based on the songs they listen to either online or in their own music collection. This then allows users to create a playlist from any of the audio tracks in Last.fm's music library which can be listened to on demand. A subscription fee of 3 Euros per month is required if you live outside the UK, USA and Germany.

7 Technology Moments That Grabbed My Attention

2008: Apple Releases the iPhone 3G in Australia - After being 'tortured' for almost a year by our US friends who owned a rotatable touch screen phone with built-in ipod, email and a web browser, it was finally released here. Love it or hate it, this phone changed mobile phones forever. With an App Store with thousands of useful (and millions of useless) applications to choose from, this makes this phone very compelling. Poor Palm and Nokia. The Blackberry is still a great device for email and business but in my opinion, Android will most likely be the main competitor to the iPhone in the coming years. I've jumped on board with Android and am so far very happy. WebOS also looks promising, so let's hope it gets the attention it deserves if it is good.
2005: Sony Releases the Sony HC-1 Digital Video Camera - It was one of the first consumer affordable HD (1080i) digital video camera that used a single CMOS chip. This video camera was awesome.
2002: Adobe Releases Photoshop 7 - While version 5.5 introduced web-based features and version 6 introduced Vector Shapes, Blending Options/Layer Styles and Liquify, version 7 introduced Full Vector Text, a new repair tool called the Healing Brush and many other improvements. Finally, Photoshop felt robust and had a more snappy performance than previous versions. Unfortunately, it's turned out in my opinion that this was the last decent version of Photoshop.

While some of the newer versions have added some nice features such as Smart Guides (CS 8.0), Hierarchical layer groups (CS 8.0), Smart Objects (CS2 9.0), Spot Healing Brush (CS2 9.0), Multiple Layer Selection (CS2 9.0), Quick Selection (CS3 10.0) and Auto Align (CS3 10.0); the performance and overall bloat of these later versions has left me returning to Version 7.01 which I continue to use today. I do use CS3 as well however I still prefer version 7 for the vast majority of the tasks I need to perform. My opinion of CS4 is that it just plain sucks on a PC.
2001: The launch of DVB-T Digital TV in Australia - DVT-B (Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial) transmits a compressed digital audio/video/data signal using MPEG, which allows for higher quality audio and pictures to be transmitted. To receive these transmissions, you will need a digital receiver; either built-in to your TV or via a set-top box.

These transmissions allow TV providers to transmit more than one channel and each digital channel transmitted has a much higher resolution than standard analogue TV; with the Standard Definition transmissions being the equivalent of "576i SD" and High Definitions transmissions being either "720P HD" or "1080i HD". DVB-T has also opened the way for Widescreen Panel TVs to be a standard product inside everyones home.

A note: Freeview Certified Devices should be avoided at all costs. These devices plan to place restrictions on your set-top box or TV by stopping your right to skipping ads on recordings or by stopping you from moving your recordings to another device such as a portable media player. This is just outrageous, and Freeview continues to hides it's true intentions behind a marketing platform that appears to compete against current PayTV offerings.
2006: Apple's iPod Nano 4GB 2nd Generation - The original iPod released in 2001 changed the way we listen to (and purchased) music again, just like the Sony Walkman did in the 1980s. I had never used or owned an iPod until the 2nd Generation Nano, which was released in Red towards the end of the year. It featured a scratch-resistant, anodized aluminium casing with multiple colour choices (silver, green, pink, blue, black and later red), a 40% brighter display, vastly improved battery life, a search option, and finally, gapless playback of audio files.
2007: The Asus Eee 701 PC - The original Asus Eee PC was small enough to fit in your backpack without breaking you back and it was able to run many of your common desktop apps at a decent speed, albeit with the smaller screen resolution. It helped coined the term "Netbook" which to this day still do not make a lot of sense to me. I can recall fixing issues over a VPN via 3G using one of these wonderful machines. I upgraded the RAM to 2GB and with the SSD drive, Windows XP was very responsive.
Nov 2000: Launch of the Playstation 2 in Australia - The PlayStation 2 is the best-selling console ever, having sold over 138 million units worldwide and it also has a library of over 1,900 games available.

6 Unforgettable Moments In Science

Jan 2004: Mars Exploration Rovers - Spirit & Opportunity, explored Mars and have made many amazing discoveries - including the composition of the planets surface, finding frozen water and the Rovers sent back some amazing photographs too.
2009: Swine Flu - A new strain of this respiratory illness is identified in Mexico and later renamed H1N1. It kills thousands of people around the world and is declared a pandemic by the W.H.O.
New Planets Everywhere! - In July 2005, inside the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune, a new icy planet named Eris was discovered and was announced as the 10th Planet in our solar system. Around 1 year later, both Pluto and Eris were downgraded to dwarf planet status, so now our solar system has just 8 planets, ending at Neptune. Another notable planet discovery outside our solar system is Gliese 581d. In 2008, it was the first planet to be considered earth like and is approximately 20 light-years away in the constellation of Libra. In late April 2009, new observations of Gliese 581d confirm the planet is within the "habitable zone" where liquid water and, therefore, life could exist.
2000: The Human Genome Project - A 'rough draft' of the human genome was released in 2000, followed by a more complete version in 2003, and the sequence of the last chromosome was published in 2006 - though the genome still hasn't been 100 percent mapped, the progress of this project is exciting.
Nov 2009: First Atom Smashed - Scientists at Europe's Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) hoped to recreate the origins of the universe with their Large Hadron Collider and after initial problems in the middle of the year, it successfully smashes its first atoms in November.

6 Sporting Memories I Will Not Forget

On September 15, 2000, the Games of the XXVII Olympiad open in Sydney.
Australia defeats Uruguay to qualify for the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany, participating for the first time since 1974 - only then to be knocked out by that dive in the World Cup in the game played between Australia vs Italy
England wins the 2003 Rugby World Cup after a drop goal by Johnny Wilkinson just before the full-time whistle
2001 NRL Grand Final where the minor premiers Parramatta Eels lost 30-24 to the Newcastle Knights after trailing 24-0 at half time.
Boston Red Sox win the 2007 Baseball World Series
Liverpool FC wins the FA Cup Final in 2001 (2-1 vs Arsenal, two goals to Owen in the last 7 minutes) and 2006 (3-3 vs West Ham, 3-1 on penalties)

6 Video Games That Made Me Waste Too Much Time

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) PS2
Advance Wars (2001) Game Boy Advance
Pro Evolution Soccer 5 (2005) PS2
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II (2004) PS2
Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (2001) PS2
Gran Turismo 4 (2004) PS2

6 Albums That Inspired and Surprised Me

Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory (2002)
P!nk - I'm Not Dead (2006)
Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002)
No Doubt - Rock Steady (2001)
Rob Zombie - Past, Present & Future (2003)
Buckcherry - Black Butterfly (2008)

6 Movies I Can Watch Many Times

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
Finding Nemo (2003)
Apocalypto (2006)
Casino Royale (2006)
Madagascar (2005)

6 TV Shows That Stop Me In My Tracks

Doctor Who (2005-present)
Yo Gabba Gabba (2007-present)
Criminal Minds (2005-present)
Family Guy
CSI: Miami
Spicks and Speks

7 Celebrities Gone But Not Forgotten

John Ritter: Sept. 11, 2003
Steve Irwin: Sept. 4, 2006
Farrah Fawcett: June 25, 2009
Christopher Reeve: Oct 10, 2004
Patrick Swayze: Sept. 14, 2009
Michael Jackson: June 25, 2009
Richard Carleton: May 7, 2006

Texas Holdem Poker

2009-06-30T18:22:00.000+10:00

I am going to dedicate one post to Texas Holdem, a form of poker that has gained enormous popularity recently due to TV coverage and celebrity tournaments.

Poker Hands - What hand beats what?

People who know me well know that I love to play Texas Hold'em poker at any opportunity I get. Whether it is playing with friends on a Saturday night, playing online or going to a club for a weekly tournament, chances are I will do what I can to be involved. That being said, I am no Phil Ivey, Gus Hansen or Hoyt Corkins in the way I play but I am usually not the table fish either.

So I have decided to write few articles about poker and what I have learnt about this wonderful and at times frustrating game. This first article will be basic information about what hand beats what.

Texas Hold'em Poker uses a standard 52-card deck regardless of the number of players playing. The standard deck features 4 suits of cards (Spades, Diamonds, Hearts, Clubs) each with 13 face values. These face values are ranked highest to lowest as: Ace, King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, Ace. It is important to note that an ace can count as both a low or high card.

The object of Texas Hold'em is to achieve the highest possible five card hand by using your two hole cards (the two cards you are dealt) and the five community cards on the table. There are many other elements of this game such as betting and bluffing however I won't discuss them in this article. So how do you know how good your five card are? Below, I have listed the ranking of winning hands, starting with the strongest first and ending with the lowest ranked hand.

Ace, King, Queen, Jack and 10 of the same suit

5 consecutive cards of the same suit (for example,5,6,7,8,9 of diamonds)

4 cards with the same value (for example, 8 of hearts, 8 of clubs, 8 of diamonds, 8 of spades)

3 of a kind and a pair, with the 3 of a kind being regarded first (for example, 7 of diamonds, 7 of clubs, 7 of hearts and 4 of spades and 4 of clubs)

Any 5 different cards of the same suit (for example 3, 5, 6, 9, J of hearts)

5 cards of any suit in consecutive order (for example, 7 of clubs, 8 of diamonds, 9 of clubs, 10 of hearts, J of spades)

3 cards with the same face value (for example, 10 of clubs, 10 of hearts, 10 of diamonds)

2 sets of pairs (for example, 2 of clubs, 2 of hearts and 6 of diamonds, 6 of hearts)

2 cards with the same face value (for example 3 of clubs and 3 of hearts)

In the event that no one has any of the above hands, the player with the highest card wins.

Kickers

Kickers are the leftover cards after a hand is declared. They determine who wins if players have the same hand. Since not all hands have "leftovers", kickers only apply to four-of-a-kind, three-of-a-kind, two pair, one pair, and high card situations. Here is an example of how kickers work.

As you can see, both players have made two pairs - a pair of 2s and a pair of 10s - however, Player 1 will win because the kicker they hold is a 9 of Hearts, while for Player 2, it is the 7 of Clubs (from the community).

Strong Hole Cards

When playing Texas Holdem Poker, you are always dealt two cards known as hole cards. Using your hole cards and any of the five community cards on the table, you are required to make the best five card hand possible. So what makes good hole cards? I will list three examples of strong hole cards:

A Strong Pair
Probebly the most obvious answer would be a strong pair. If you are dealt a pair of Aces or Kings, chances are your going to do well with this hand, unless your out drawn or out bet. Other strong pairs include Queens, Jacks and Tens. If there are 4 players or less, I would also count a pair of Nines as a strong pair but play them a little more cutiously.

Ace or King With A Strong Kicker
Another good starting hand would be Ace and King, also known as "big slick". These hole cards essentially give you a high card of Ace with a King kicker and they can be used to make a straight. Other good hole cards include Ace and Queen, Ace and Jack, Ace and Ten, King and Queen, King and Jack and King and Ten. These hands are even stronger if they are suited eg. Aces of Spades and King of Spades as they also allow you to play for a flush draw.

Suited Connectors
This is where you are dealt two running cards of the same suit. An example of this would be Nine of Hearts and Eight of Hearts. These hole cards allow you to play for a flush or a straight.

Determining The Strength Of Your Hole Cards

You must try to always have a good idea of the strength of your hole cards and how it plays against other players hole cards. You can calculate your pot odds pre-flop using the same principles as the five example above but you will need to factor in your opponents hole cards to determine your hand strength. This can be quite an art as you don't get to see your opponents cards all that often, and you will need to look for signs of strength or weakness know as tells to help with your decisions.

Below are a list of common groupings of hole cards vs other hold cards along with their odds pre-flop so your have a better idea of the strength of your hand.

Pocket Pair vs. Smaller Pocket Pair
VS

The Kings are 4:1 favourites but this can vary depending on the number of outs available to make straights.

Pocket Pair vs. Two Over Cards
VS

Known as the coin-flip situtation but the pocket pair is usually 5:4 favourites. If the pocket pair is very low such as two fours, the odds change to 50:50 because the pair does not interfer with the over cards straight possibility.

Pocket Pair vs. Two Undercards
VS

4:1 in favour of the pocket pair. The two undercards may increase in odds if they interfere with the pocket pairs ability to make a straight.

Pocket Pair vs. One Overcard and One Undercard
VS

7:3 in favor of the pocket pair. If the over/over hand contains an Ace and a 2,3,4, or 5 the pocket pair doesn't interfere with your straight chances and the odds increase.

Pocket Pair vs Same Card and One Overcard
VS

Almost the same as the above scenario, 7:3 in favor of the pocket pair. The pocket pair's advantage can end up as low as 5:3 if it's against suited connectors.

Pocket Pair vs Same Card and One Undercard
VS

This is the worst situation you can be in as you are totally dominated. It's around a 7:2 in favor of the pocket pair. Even if the pocket pair is up against a suited connector, it is at best 4:1

Two Overcards vs. Two Undercards
VS

It's typically 7:3 which might be a surprise. If the undercards are significantly far enough away from the overs and suited without matching an overcard's suit, it can reduce to 3:2.

Overcard and Undercard vs. Two Middle Cards
VS

This is usually around 3:2 in favor of the overcard/undercard. It can reduce the advantage to almost 50:50 with a middle-suited connectors that don't share a suit with the over/under and where there is no straight interference.

1st and 3rd Highest vs. 2nd and 4th Highest
VS

Varies from a 7:3 to 3:2 advantage for the 1st/3rd hand but mostly just falls around a 2:1 edge for the highest card.

Dominated with same high card
VS

Usually the person with the high kicker wins 2 out of every 3 times, but as the kickers get lower, the edge starts to disappear because of split pot possibilities.

Dominated with same low card
VS

The dominated hand has 5:2 odds at best if it's a suited connector vs. two unsuited cards without little chance of making a straight. Otherwise it's 2:1 in favor of the higher hand. If the low cards are really low (A3 vs. A2), there is a significant chance of a split pot.

Same ranks
VS

If it's suited vs. offsuit, the suited cards gain a slight edge due to the flush possibility but in any other case, it'll be 50:50.

This is all part of the fun of poker, deciding what hands to play and how strongly to bet on them. This is why I enjoy this game so much.

Hole Card Nicknames

Hole Card Nicknames
You would have previously seen me talk about "big slick", a nickname to describe Ace and King hole cards. Some other hole card combinations also have nicknames and here are some of the more common ones you might hear when you next play in a tournament or online:

American Airlines Pocket Rockets	Big Slick Anna Kournikova	Big Chick Little Slick
Ajax Blackjack	Johnny Moss	Cowboys King Kong
Royal Wedding	Kojak	Katie Big Al
Sigfried and Roy Two Ladies The Hilton sisters	Maverick	Quint
Hooks Jokers	JT	Dimes Tension

Some other hole card nicknames you may also hear are:

Ace and Eight – Dead Mans Hand
King and Nine – Fido, Canine
Queen and Three – San Francisco Busboy
Jack and Five – Motown
Jack and Four – Flat Tyre
Ten and Nine – Countdown
Ten and Five – Five and Dime
Ten and Four – Convoy
Nine and Nine – Popeye's, German Virgins
Nine and Five – Dolly Parton
Eight and Eight – Snowmen
Seven and Seven – Sunset Strip
Six and Nine – Big Lick
Six and Six – Route 66, Cherries
Five and Five – Nickels, Speed Limit
Four and Four – Sailboats, Magnum
Three and Three – Crabs, Treys
Three and Two – Mississippi Slick
Two and Two – Ducks

Pre-Flop and Flop Odds

One of the factors that helps determine if you want to play with your hole cards is the number of outs you have (ways you can make a winning hand). For this reason, some players may prefer to play Ten and Nine over say King and Queen because those hole cards have more outs than the King and Queen, though I would personally play the King and Queen over the Ten and Nine. Below are five hole card examples showing all of the available outs and before the flop odds for each of them:

If the flop contains:

three Kings or three Queens => four of a kind (9799 to 1)
two Kings and one Queen or two Queens and one King => full house (1087 to 1)
Ace, Jack and Ten => straight (152 to 1)
two Kings or two Queens => three of a kind (62 to 1)
both a King and Queen => two pair (24 to 1).
a King or a Queen => a pair (3 to 1)

If the flop contains:

two Jacks => four of a kind (407 to 1)
one Jack and any pair or any 3 of a kind => full house (101 to 1)
Note - You cannot make a straight
one Jack => three of a kind (8 to 1)
any pair => two pair (5 to 1).

If the flop contains:

three Tens or three Nines => four of a kind (9799 to 1)
two Tens and one Nine or two Nines and one Ten => full house (1087 to 1)
Jack, Eight and Seven or Queen, Jack and Eight or King, Queen and Jack or Eight, Seven and Six => straight (76 to 1)
two Tens or two Nines => three of a kind (62 to 1)
both a Ten and Nine => two pair (24 to 1).
a Ten or Nine => a pair (3 to 1)

If the flop contains:

three Sixes or three Fives => four of a kind (9799 to 1)
two Sixes and one Five or two Fives and one Six => full house (1087 to 1)
three cards of same suit as hole cards => flush (120 to 1)
Eight, Seven and Four or Queen, Seven, Four and Three or Nine, Eight, and Seven or Four, Three and Two => straight (76 to 1)
two Sixes or two Fives => three of a kind (62 to 1)
both a Six and Five => two pair (24 to 1).
a Six or Five => a pair (3 to 1)

If the flop contains:

three Tens or three Fives => four of a kind (9799 to 1)
two Tens and one Five or two Fives and one Ten => full house (1087 to 1)
Note- You cannot make a straight
two Tens or two Fives => three of a kind (62 to 1)
both a Ten and Five => two pair (24 to 1).
a Ten or Five => a pair (3 to 1)

So you can see, the many combinations of hole cards available give you many combinations of available outs. When your hole cards have more outs, your odds of making a stronger winning hand is increased and if you cards are suited, you will also have the option of playing for a flush which further increases your winning odds.

With that said, all of these odds change as each community card is displayed and you may need to re-evaluate your hand. Now let's take a look at an example of a round of Texas Holdem.

Texas Holdem Full Round Example

This post is going to go through an example round of Texas Hold'em and will hopefully illustrate the way things can change from one community card to the next. This example will not include any betting or bluffing, which is something I will talk about in later posts. This example game will contain four players.

Bill

Joe

Mark

Kim

The Flop

At this point, Bill is holding King trips and is looking very strong. Joe is holding the rags and although there is a chance he could make a few inside straights (6-7-x-x-10) or (4-x-6-7-x) or (x-4-x-6-7), it would be best for Joe to fold. Mark is holding ace high and 4 spades so he is sitting on a flush draw. Kim has four cards in a run and needs either a 9 or and Ace to make a straight.

The Turn

A jack on the turn made things very interesting. Bills hand has not improved but is still very strong. He may believe he has the best hand out there because he is holding trips with the highest card on the board. The Jack of Clubs does not help Mark with his flush draw and Kim has now a pair of Jacks as well as a chance of making a straight.

The River

The river brings joy to some and pain to others. Bill, while having three Kings no longer has the strongest hand, but there is a good chance he won't realise it (yet). Mark has made a flush with five spades and has the winning hand. He should know he has won this hand and should not try to show Kim or Bill the strength of his hand. If betting was involved in this hand, he should bet an amount he knows they can't resist calling or even better, re-raising. Kim has the potential to get hurt the most. Kim has made a straight and would feel very confident that they are holding the highest hand. Again, if betting was involved, Kim would most likely bet but if Kim bets too strong, Kim stands to lose a lot of chips or go out all together.

So, as you can see, Texas Holdem has many twists and turns and this is part of the attraction of the game. Mark, while he did not start with the strongest hand, ended up winning with the strongest hand, in this case, a 'nut flush'. I hope this helped understand how the game works without betting and bluffing. When you add in those elements, you are never quite sure who has what cards.

Basic SEO for your site

2009-06-28T07:26:00.005+10:00

Part One - Google Sitemaps

I'm going to write a series of articles on SEO showing all that I have learnt and tips I have picked up. SEO is becoming an essential part of every web developers skill set, and those without it will be left behind, and possibly without work! In all of these posts, I will use a fictitious website (at the moment) - www.thelawnman.com.au - to illustrate the examples. In my first artilce, I am going to talk about Google Sitemaps.

Google XML Sitemaps have been around for a while now and it is probebly a good time to starting to become familiar with them. They can help you to achieve up to date indexing in Google, which in turn should help you with search placement.

A Google XML Sitemap allows web developers to provide Google directly with a master list of all their site's critical pages for indexing/crawling. The sitemap data is recorded inside an XML file and it includes a list of URL's belonging to the site, the date the page was last modified date, how often the site is updated and the sites priority.

These Google XML sitemaps generally helps Google index your site but if your site is small (say under 10 pages) or is not updated very often, the Google XML Sitemap may not help much at all, especially if your site is already inside the index. It helps most with trying to keep the latest postings/versions of your page in Google. Larger sites with lots of pages should benefit as sometimes not all of your pages are appearing in the Google index.

Google XML sitemaps will in many cases not improve your page rankings, but by having the most current version of your site in Google's index, this can help improve your results in Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). This is due to you being able to make an update to a page and Google's index will have this page updated more quickly than without the XML sitemap. This effectively means that with more frequent spidering you can help get your latest site version in the index, and this should help with your sites rankings.

If your site is small or your prefer to you can create your XML sitemap manually. The structure is not difficult to follow and even an XML novice will be able to follow the structure of the XML sitemap. If you prefer automated tools that require little changes to the output, then I can recommend VIGOS GSitemap which is a free, easy to use tool that will help you create your XML sitemaps with ease.

Here is an example sitemap:

Submitting your completed XML Sitemap to Google is relatively straightforward. After the file has been created the first thing you want to do is upload the file to your server, preferably at the root level eg. http://www.thelawnman.com.au/sitemap.xml. Now you will need to log into the Sitemap console using your Google account login. From here you can add a site to your account. To do this, simply enter your top level domain where it says "Add Site" eg. http://www.thelawnman.com.au/. This will add the domain to your account and allow you to then submit the XML sitemap you have created. You will now be taken to the site summary page for this site. You will see a text link that says "Submit a Sitemap". Click on this link to enter the online location of your XML sitemap. Once you have entered in the location, click "Add Web Sitemap" and it is recorded.

So, that's it. It is quite a simple process to get a sitemap added into Google. There is one final thing that you can do and I recommend you perform this optional step - you should verify your Sitemap. This can be easily done by placing a specific meta tag on your home page provided by Google. Verification allows you to access crawl stats and other valuable information regarding your Google listing.

Google XML sitemaps are great. We love Google!

Part Two - The Top of your Page

The top of your HTML is some of the most important 'code' you are likely to write if you are interested in obtaining a good search engine position. I'm going to break down the four most important factors and hopefully describe it in a way that helps.

1. Title Meta Tag

The title tag is displayed as the headline in Search Engine Result Pages. This title tag should be easy to read and contain your main keyword phrase toward the beginning of the tag. Don't put your company name first, unless you are huge company already like Amazon or Ebay. People are more likely to search for products or services on offer, not your name. I think it is a good idea to capitalise every word in your tag as well. Titles should be five to ten words long, no more than 70 to 80 characters.

2. Description Meta Tag

The description tag is the paragraph will be displayed in the Search Engine Result Pages. Your description tag should be designed designed to attract customers and it should compel the reader to act right now and follow your link. If you do not include this description tag, search engines will sometimes display the first text on your page (which may not be the best option). When writing your description, you should approach it as though it is a proper sentence and follow proper grammar and the use of punctuation. It is also a good idea to try to include your subject and geographical references to where you are, like your city name. The description should not exceed 150-200 characters in length.

3. Keywords Meta Tag

The importance of Meta keyword tags fluctuates among different search engines. Some people deeply involved with the SEO community debate as to whether or not they help at all. I advise using relevant targeted keywords as they do seem to help with rankings, especially in Yahoo. Avoid stuffing with too many keywords. Just use relevant tags that apply directly to the content of that particular page, and don't overdo it. Remember this simple 'rule': if your total keywords on a page has a value of 100, each keyword you use takes a percentage of that score. So, if you use 5 keywords, they each have a score of 20/100. The higher the score, the more powerful your keywords can be.

4. Revisit Tag

While not a search engine optimization item, the "revisit" tag may help a search engine spider to return in so many days to re-index the site. This may be of great importance to when your site updates its data and you are trying to get your latest content inside the index.

5. Robots Tag

The Robots Tag was created to provide developers a method of keeping pages out of search engine indexes who cannot upload or control the robots.txt file at their websites. The Robots Tag that may contain one or more of the following keywords without regard to case: none, noindex, nofollow, all, index and follow. Here is a break down of these keywords:

none - ignore this page (equiv to: noindex, nofollow)
noindex - page may not be indexed
nofollow - do not follow links from this page
all - no restrictions (equiv. to: index, follow)
index - include this page
follow - follow links from this page to find other pages

You can also specify actions for specific robots, like GoogleBot for example. This can be helpful if you find you are being crawled frequently by robots not offering any value to your site, and you wish to limit it to just GoogleBot and MSNBot for example.

One new keyword that has appeared is NOODP. This refers to the description displayed on search engine result pages and DMOZ. Some search engines will take the description of your site from DMOZ over your own description tags. Use this tag if you do not wish for this to happen.

6. Put .CSS and JavaScript into External Files

For search engines, excessive or poorly formatted code at the top of your page will have a negative impact on your rankings. By including your CSS and JavaScript in external files, you will increase the amount of text a search engine can read in your page. If you have too much HTML/JavaScript/CSS code, the text content usually won't be seen entirely.

So what is an example of a good header?

So now, using out example website - www.thelawnman.com.au - which offers lawn mowing services in Sydney, here is an example of a good header targeting three keywords: lawn mowing services, tree lopping, garden maintenance

Of course, this article did not discuss selecting appropriate keywords or displaying appropriate content, but it should be a guide to help you create an effect page header.

Part Three - Six Quick Tips for Web Developers

1. Always use the standard HTML tags for headings, bold text and lists.

The HTML has tags for headings, bold text and and ordered/unordered lists and you should always use them. By using CSS, you can practically style them anyway you like. By using a H1 heading tag for your headings, strong tags for important text and ul, ol and li tags to create lists will help search engines understand what text on that page is a heading or what are the more important terms on that page.

Using our lawn mowing example from the previous post, here is an example of NOT making a heading in a good way for SEO:

[sourcecode language="html"] Garden Maintainence Services [/sourcecode]

By applying a CSS style to a paragraph tag that makes text larger and bold doesn't tell search engines it is a heading, but rather, it will treat it as though it is a paragraph of normal text because it is a paragraph tag. A much better way would be to define a style for your heading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6) in your CSS file. The better way to make a heading is this:

[sourcecode language="html"] <h1>Garden Maintainence Services</h1> [/sourcecode]

2. Always use ALT text when adding an image.

As search engines can't read text inside an image, by adding ALT text to your image tag helps the engines understand more about that image. You can use it to place more keywords and phrases into your page but don't keyword stuff the ALT tags as this is frowned upon and can get you blacklisted.

Here is an example of using ALT text inside an image:

[sourcecode language="html"] <img src='/images/gardens.gif' width=400 height=300 alt='Garden Maintainence Services'> [/sourcecode]

3. Avoid Canonical URL issues and never place session IDs on the URL.

Search engines see http://thelawnman.com.au, http://www.thelawnman.com.au, and http://www.thelawnman.com.au/index.html as three different pages. To correct this, you should always link to the preferred domain and at the root level ie. http://www.thelawnman.com.au/. You may also wish to use a redirect to point all of your pages to this preferred option. If you have signed up at Google and are using Google Sitemaps and the Webmaster Tools, you can also select your preferred domain that Google uses. We love Google! How good is that.

If you are using sessions, make sure your Session ID (especially if you have a PHP site) is not added as a parameter PHPSESSID to the end a URL on your PHP page eg. PHPSESSID=34467908. This can be extremely problematic for your site's search engine ranking. Search engines will see a unique PHPSESSID in the URL every time they visit a page on your site, and in turn think it is a different page each time and even worse, it could be viewed as lots of duplicate content and your site may become banned. Turn off this setting in your PHP.ini file or ask your server administrator to do this for you.

4. Have a unique, meaningful TITLE tag on each and every page.

Unfortunately, this is an area HUGELY NEGLECTED by many web developers. By not having a meaningful title tag, you are reducing the amount of traffic to your site greatly. Each and every page has different text, content and images so why would it not also have a different title? Why use a title of "untitled-1" when you can put meaningful words about your page in the title. It is also a bad idea to use one generic title across all of the pages on your site.

So, using our dummy site map from Part One above, here are three titles for those three pages on our site:

http://www.thelawnman.com.au/

[sourcecode language="html"] <title>Lawn Mowing, Tree Lopping and Garden Maintainence Services in Sydney :: thelawnman.com.au</title> </code></pre> http://www.thelawnman.com.au/work-request.html <pre><code> <title>Work Request for Lawn Mowing and Garden Maintainence Services in Sydney :: thelawnman.com.au</title> </code></pre> http://www.thelawnman.com.au/current-work.html <pre><code> <title>Current Work Schedule of The Lawn Man's Garden Maintainence Services in Sydney :: thelawnman.com.au</title> [/sourcecode]

5. Do not use "click here" or "read more" text links unless absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately, this is also an area HUGELY NEGLECTED by many web developers. By not using meaningful text inside links, search engines cannot establish whether the link actually links correctly to the same subject as mentioned the link text.

An example of this is to search for "click here" inside Google. You will find the top result is actually for Adobe Acrobat Reader. This is because millions of pages use something similar to this:

[sourcecode language="html"] To install the latest version of Acrobat Reader <a href="www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html ">click here</a>. [/sourcecode]

So, it is important to have meaningful text inside your links as well. Let's say we wanted to link from the homepage of our lawnman site to the work request page. The best way in which to do this would be:

[sourcecode language="html"] If you would like The Lawn Man to work for you, please fill out the <a href="http://www.thelawnman.com.au/work-request.html">Work Request for Lawn Mowing and Garden Maintainence Services</a>. [/sourcecode]

The link text contains many of the same keywords in the TITLE tag and META data used of the work request page, so the search engines can determine that the link pointing to that page is one they can trust.

6. Where possible, use the W3 Validators on your site.

Your site does not need to be technically perfectly to rank high in the search engines but having a validated HTML page will help ensure that search engines (and browsers) will accurately see your page. Try using the official W3C Validator. Validating generally identifies areas of your HTML code that is redundant, unnecessary, or not accepted across all browsers. All of which will help make your site more search engine friendly.

8 Apps I Have Installed On My USB Stick

2009-04-12T08:58:00.004+10:00

These are 8 apps I cannot live without and I have managed to get portable/freeware versions of them and they all fit nicely under 256MB.

1. Google Chrome Portable

Google Chrome is my preferred web browser and this portable package allows you to take your bookmarks, extensions and saved passwords with you. Combined with LastPass, you will never want to use another browser setup again. http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/google_chrome_portable

2. Filezilla Portable

FileZilla Portable is the portable version of the FileZilla FTP client and it allows you to take your server list and settings with you everywhere. It supports resume on both downloads and uploads, SFTP and an intuitive drag and drop interface. http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/filezilla_portable

3. Skype Portable

Skype Portable offers the same functionality as the installed version and lets you connect to others via instant message, audio conferencing and video phone - and you can take it with you everywhere all configured. http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/skype_portable

4. MWSnap

MWSnap is a small yet powerful hot-key snapping (capturing) program that snaps images from selected parts of the screen. Supports BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG and GIF formats with configurable color depth and quality settings. http://www.mirekw.com/winfreeware/mwsnap.html

5. Foxit PDF Reader

Foxit PDF Reader is a fantastic alternative to Adobe Reader, that allows you to view and print PDF files. Unlike Adobe Reader, it opens PDF files very fast, without any delay. It supports all the standard features, browser integration, and also select/copy of text from the documents. http://portableapps.com/apps/office/foxit_reader_portable

6. Notepad++

Notepad++ Portable is a text editor that includes support for multiple languages and an extensive plugin system. It also offers Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding in many programming languages including C++, HTML, ASP and CSS, plus auto-completion and regex search/replace. All other text editors feel inferior to Notepad++. http://portableapps.com/apps/development/notepadpp_portable

7. PeaZip Portable

PeaZip Portable is a portable version of PeaZip, an open source application that allows you to extract over 130 different kinds of archive files. PeaZip also creates self-extracting archives, splits/joins archives, supports strong encryption and secure deletion and much more. http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/peazip_portable

8. WinMerge Portable

WinMerge Portable is a text file differencing and merging tool that allows you to compare files and determine what has changed between versions. You have the option to merge changes between the versions and the differences are highlighted so you can easily see them. With syntax highlighting, line numbers and word-wrap, this is one the best programmers tools around. http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/winmerge_portable

If like me you like portable/no-install apps, take a look at these great sites:

Preferred Kit Specification

2008-04-09T03:12:00.005+10:00

Here is a bit of dreaming and progress to my ultimate drum kit.

My kit would be most likely maple shells, 6-ply thickness. I would use medium weight uncoated heads on the toms, an Evans EMAD on the kick batter side and a medium weight coated head on the batter side of the snare. I have recently purchase a new Pork Pie Maple Little Squealer Snare that I am very happy with. Pork Pie Drums is such an under-rated drum company and it is easily on par with the more well known DW Drums, both with build quality and sound quality.

My drum set configuration will eventually be

Drums	Size		Zildjian Cymbals	Size
Small Kick Large Kick Rack Tom Rack Tom Floor Tom Floor Tom Maple Snare Steel Snare Soprano Snare	20"x16" 22"x18" 10"x8" 12"x9" 14"x14" 16"x14" 13"x 7" 13"x 6" 12"x 7"		Avedis Deep Ride or K Heavy Ride Avedis New Beat Hi-Hats Avedis Medium Thin Crash Avedis Medium Thin Crash Avedis Medium Crash Avedis Splash A Custom Splash Oriental China Trash Avedis Breakbeat Ride Avedis Special Recording Hi-Hats	20" 14" 18" 19" 18" 12" 10" 18" 18" 12"

Pork Pie Maple Drumkit

Here is a photo I took of my current gigging kit a half year ago.

Eee PC Article In March 2008 APC Magazine

2008-02-29T07:10:00.000+11:00

Articles like this one really annoy me, especially when it is called a "cover feature" and no one puts their name to it. The title of the article is "Deals better than a $499 Eee PC" and is featured on pages 16 and 17 of the March 2008 APC magazine.

The interesting point before I start is that the subheading states "ASUS brilliantly marketed the Eee PC as a revolution in portability and price, and it's selling like crazy. But, if you want a cheap notebook rather than a highly portable one, there are much better deals." Ah, so I get it now, we are comparing full sized entry-level laptops to the Eee PC.

Reading the article, it appeared to me that it may be a "paid advertorial" however one or two truths regarding the Eee PC managed to make it into the article, all in the name of fairness of course. Here are just five quotes from the article that I will use to show how bizarre this article actually is:

"... we took one (Eee Pc) home to work with … it became obvious that the device has strengths but also plenty of weaknesses. Ironically, chief among its weaknesses was its price. Feature for feature, the Eee PC is not a good deal when compared to the cheapest entry-level notebooks on the market. The Eee PC's outstanding quality is its portability. With inbuilt Wi-Fi and weighing only 0.92kg, it's great for travelling and staying connected through wireless hotspots, bettering any PDA or exorbitantly expensive UMPC's."

OK. So we are comparing the Eee PC to the entry-level notebooks available, but one of the biggest advantages of the Eee PC has been mentioned - it beats using a PDA.

"… enthusiastically promoted by ASUS as ideal for people wanting a bargain notebook for themselves or their kids. And this is where the Eee PC doesn't hack it. With it's tiny screen, cramped keyboard, insignificant storage and poor battery life, it's up against proper notebooks costing just $100 more. But this was probably far from the minds of those who rushed out to buy one with that sub-$500 price flashing in their eyes."

Ah no. I'm pretty sure most people bought an Eee PC because they were tired of using PDAs, especially when most PDAs cost more than the Eee PC. Some people may have bought one because they were tired of carrying a heavy notebook to write documents, read ebooks and surf the web. Sure, the Eee PC has only a 4GB SSD drive on board and the keyboard is kinda small, but you get used to it. It seems though that this article writer/s have never heard of using the SD card slot or a 'new technology' called external USB storage to expand storage capacity or add on an external CD/DVD drive? How about the fact that the usage of the SSD removes all of the consistant 'whine' that is made when hard drives spin? But, I detect the 'paid Eee bashing' starting.

"Henry Lee is Acer senior product manager for retail notebooks. His $749 Acer Aspire 5315 notebooks costs just $100 more than the Eee PC thanks to Acer's $149 cash back scheme. The Acer notebook recently won an APC Editor's Choice Award for being a great-value entry-level notebook. For $100 more than the Eee PC, it's a full notebook with Vista, a hard drive and DVD burner."

Well, well. What a generous offer - and fancy this laptop winning an editors choice award and then featuring all through this article. Do I trust these editors choice awards anymore? And please, do not use Vista as an arguement to get something - Windows XP sales are going nuts since Vista was released.

"Screen size. The Eee PC's screen is Lilliputian, just 7in a native resolution of 800x480. It comes as a disappointment when you realize the 7in screen doesn't fill the 10in space that's available on the machine. The 7in screen is surrounded by a black bezel that takes up the spare space."

This quote made me laugh out loud. The first quote I provided from this article stated that "it's outstanding quality is it's portablity", yet it bashes it's screen size? I am also starting to wonder if the writer/s even used an Eee PC before writing this - the 'bezel around the screen' actually contains a pair of stereo speakers, a backlight and an inbuilt 0.3 MP webcam. Plus, for everyone who has used a PDA and Windows Mobile knows that screen widths of 360/480 pixels wide is far more 'Lilliputian' than 800 pixels wide.

"Battery Life. Given it's small size and flash drive, we really expected the Eee PC's battery to last several hours. So we were disappointed when the little machine ran out of puff after three hours, putting it on par with the big Acer Aspire 5315, which powers a massively bigger screen, hard disk and a Vista OS."

OK. Let compare lemons with oranges shall we? Seriously, let's compare the number of cells, amp ratings and battery life times of these two machines using the publically available battery specs of the Acer Aspire 5315 and the Eee PC.

Acer Aspire 5315 - 6-cell, Li-Ion, 4000mAh: up to 3 hours battery life*

Eee PC - 4-cell, Li-Ion, 5200 mAh: 3 h 30 min battery life

Well, the Eee PC has less cells, and therefore will recharge faster and be lighter. The published battery life of the Asus is UP TO 3 Hours with an asterix clause - meaning under certain conditions only. Storm in a teacup?

I have a subscription to APC and I am afraid if these kind of "cover features" continue I will be reviewing whether the subscription continues.

Basic Parse With PHP

2007-09-28T09:30:00.001+10:00

Quite often, you will want to take the information provided freely on another website and include it on your own. This post will explain how you can do some basic parsing using PHP.

I will now describe how to obtain value for the current US Dollar exchange rate against 1 Australian Dollar from Yahoo!'s finance site. This is probebly one of the simplest parse requests but it is still quite useful to understand. Here is the current exchange rate:

I will now explain how this is done.

[sourcecode language="php"]
<?
$open = fopen("http://au.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=AUDUSD=X&f=sl1&e=.csv", "r");
$results1 = fread($open, 32);
fclose($open);
printf ("1 AUD = %01.4f USD", substr($results1, 11, 12));
?>
[/sourcecode]

This simple program is only 4 lines long.
Line 1: Specifies what URL you are retrieving the quote from and it is being assigned to a varaible named $open.
Line 2: Read the URL and stores the first 32 bytes inside the variable $results1. You can change the byte value of 32 to what ever you feel is necessary to complete a job.
Line 3: Close the connection to the websites specified in the variable $open.
Line 4: Formats the output using printf, to 4 decimal places (float). Only the information contained inside the substr is displayed in this format.

Of course, no one should be writing code without some form of re-usability, so here is the code inside a function that can be called to display the value of any known currency type.

The function named QuoteExchangeRate works in exactly same manner as the first example, but you can now pass to it two variables specifying the exchange rate you are after and the code that Yahoo! finance understands. So QuoteExchangeRate("AUD", "USD"); specifies that we are want 1 Australian Dollar (AUD) changed into US Dollars (USD).

You could also set the script up to use values passed on the URL by using QuoteExchangeRate($_GET['from'], $_GET['to']);. You would then need to call the PHP file with the parameters ?from=AUD&to=USD to achieve the same result.

You can specify other currencies very easily, such as QuoteExchangeRate("AUD", "GBP"); which will display 1 Australian Dollar in British Pounds:

You can also reverse the lookup by specifying QuoteExchangeRate("USD", "AUD"); which will display 1 US Dollar in Australian Dollars:

How to parse RSS with PHP

RSS is a very important part of the internet now and it is being widely adopted by many sites as a method of keeping browsers informed with the latest news and offerings.

In the example script, I will show you how you can parse an ebay RSS feed based on search criteria that is passed to it via a URL variable named st eg. parse.php?st=searchtext. The code will be split up into sections and I'll explain how it works underneath it.

[sourcecode language="php"]
<?php
// create rssItem class
class rssItem {
var $rssItemTitle;
var $rssItemLink;
var $rssItemDescription;
}
// working variables
$feedTitle = "";
$feedLink = "";
$feedDescription = "";
$arItems = array();
$itemCount = 0;
// feed variables, expects ?st= on URL
$searchTerm = str_replace(" ","+",$_GET['st']);
$rssFile = "http://rss.api.ebay.com/ws/rssapi?FeedName=SearchResults&siteId=15&language=en-AU&output=RSS20&saprchi=&sacat=-1&saprclo=&ftrv=1&from=R10&satitle=$searchTerm&ftrt=1&catref=C6&fsop=1&fsoo=1";
// descriptions (true or false) goes here
$showDescriptions = true;
[/sourcecode]

The first part of the script is used to create a class and define variables. We create a class named rssItem to hold our RSS data. Inside this class we create variables that we need to use to store the various elements of the feed such as title, link and description. We also define some working variables to hold information as required and we configure a link to the RSS file we require plus we define an array to hold the headline objects. There is also a boolean variable set to either true or false for determinign whether it displays the item descriptions.

The next three functions are based of functions that are found in Chapter 22 of the book PHP Developers Cookbook by Sterling Hughes [Sams], an absolutely invaluable source of PHP inspiration. At the bottom of this post, I will list the four PHP books I own and refer to solve all my issues.

[sourcecode language="php"]
function startElement($parser, $name, $attrs) {
global $curTag;
$curTag .= "^$name";
}

function endElement($parser, $name) {
global $curTag;
$caret_pos = strrpos($curTag,'^');
$curTag = substr($curTag,0,$caret_pos);
}

function characterData($parser, $data) { global $curTag; // get the Channel information first
global $feedTitle, $feedLink, $feedDescription;
$titleKey = "^RSS^CHANNEL^TITLE";
$linkKey = "^RSS^CHANNEL^LINK";
$descKey = "^RSS^CHANNEL^DESCRIPTION";
if ($curTag == $titleKey) {
$feedTitle = $data;
}
elseif ($curTag == $linkKey) {
$feedLink = $data;

}
elseif ($curTag == $descKey) {
$feedDescription = $data;
}

// now get the items
global $arItems, $itemCount;
$itemTitleKey = "^RSS^CHANNEL^ITEM^TITLE";
$itemLinkKey = "^RSS^CHANNEL^ITEM^LINK";
$itemDescKey = "^RSS^CHANNEL^ITEM^DESCRIPTION";

if ($curTag == $itemTitleKey) {
// make new rssItem
$arItems[$itemCount] = new rssItem();

// set new item object's properties
$arItems[$itemCount]->rssItemTitle = $data;
}
elseif ($curTag == $itemLinkKey) {
$arItems[$itemCount]->rssItemLink = $data;
}
elseif ($curTag == $itemDescKey) {
$arItems[$itemCount]->rssItemDescription = $data;
// increment item counter
$itemCount++;
}
}
[/sourcecode]

These functions - startElement, endElement, and characterData are used to extract the data contained inside the XML document. So to parse an XML document in PHP, you will need to define three functions to handle what the parser encounters:

the start element of a tag - Function startElement - eg. <item>
the end element of a tag - Function endElement - eg. </item>
the data within these tags - Function characterData eg. This is a test item.

The way we handle these functions is by setting a global variable ($curTag) to a string containg all the parent tags separated by a caret (^). You could change this to any other character like a comma or a colon if you wish. This would mean that the $curTag variable could hold a value similar to ^RSS^CHANNEL^ITEM.

Once the parser has for example found the <ITEM> tag, we have to check for when the parser has found the correct $curTag, and extracts the data via the characterData function. This function checks if the $curTag contains something we want to extract, and if true, assigns it to our variables. The characterData function is able to extract the general information inside the RSS as well as any items it comes across. For each item this function comes across, it creates a new xItem, and inserts it into our $arItems array with the data it has found in the RSS.

[sourcecode language="php"]
// main program portion - start parser
$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();
// use our above functions when elements or data is found
xml_set_element_handler($xml_parser, "startElement", "endElement");
xml_set_character_data_handler($xml_parser, "characterData");
[/sourcecode]

We now start the actual parsing. Luckily, PHP has a standard function for XML parsing. We can easily activate this by declaring a variable that accesses the PHP function xml_parser_create(). Once we have done this, we have access to the other XML functions built into PHP. The code tells PHP's XML parser we want our to use our functions when the parser comes accross a start tag, end tag, or character data.

[sourcecode language="php"]
// open the RSS feed as specified in $rssFile
if (!($fp = fopen($rssFile,"r"))) {
die ("could not open RSS for input");
}
// if successfully opened, parse the file
while ($data = fread($fp, 8192)) {
if (!xml_parse($xml_parser, $data, feof($fp))) {
die(sprintf("XML error: %s at line %d", xml_error_string(xml_get_error_code($xml_parser)), xml_get_current_line_number($xml_parser)));
}
}
xml_parser_free($xml_parser);
[/sourcecode]

This portion loads in the RSS file as specified in $rssFile and if found, assigns the contents of the RSS file into the variable $fp. We then proceed to parse through the data we have found using the xmp_parse() function until there is no more data to process. There is also some inbuilt error trapping should there be an error inside the RSS file. Once done, we close down the XML objects used by using the function xml_parser_free() so that we reclaim any used memory.

[sourcecode language="php"]
// write out the items
echo ("<html><head><meta name =\"description\" content=\"$feedDescription\"></head>");
echo ("<body bgcolor=\"#ffffff\" style=\"font:normal 13pt 'Trebuchet MS', Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times;color:#333333;\">");
//echo ("Link to feed: <a href=\"$feedLink\">$feedTitle</a> ");
for ($i=0;$i<count($arItems);$i++) {
$trssItem = $arItems[$i];
echo ("<a href=\"$trssItem->rssItemLink\">$trssItem->rssItemTitle</a> ");
if ($showDescriptions) {
echo ($trssItem->rssItemDescription);
echo (" ");
}
}
echo ("</body></html>");
?>
[/sourcecode]

After we have successfully parsed the RSS file, we have our data inside our declared objects and variables and this will make formatting it on the screen relatively simple. Essentially, you loop through your array with a for loop starting from zero to the upper boundry of the array. You then assign the current array item to a temporary variable and print out each element. As each element in the array contains an object as specified inside your rssItem class, you will need to access your data using something like $trssItem->rssItemTitle to get the item title. This continues until you have displayed all of your arrays elements.

Let's now see the script in action. Click here to run the script that will search ebay.com.au with the search term "twilight zone pinball" and parse the returned RSS. Enjoy this script and make your own copy on your site.

Recommended PHP Reading

If you are an absolute PHP beginner, one of the best books to learn with is PHP/MySQL Programming for the Absolute Beginner by Andy Harris.

Choosing An Electronic Drumkit

2007-08-31T09:48:00.009+10:00

I've been playing ddrum electronic kits since 1992. I still own a ddrum AT module, a ddrum4 module, a ddrum3 pad set and a ddrum4 cymbal and hi-hat pad set. I have also used a TD-20 with the full Roland pad setup quite regularly so I think I might be able to offer you some insight.

I will firstly give my opinion of some modules and then give a list of questions you need to make sure you answer or you will quite possibly not be happy with your purchase.

In my opinion, Roland gear is generally over-rated and I feel most people who recommend them are either new to electronics or have not used any other electronic gear for an extended period of time. With that said, with the exception of the hi-hats, the ddrum3 and ddrum4 modules are still better at reproducing accurate drum sounds than the TD-12 and TD-20. Roland really has the hi-hat down and it is one of the areas ddrum lacks, as it only has 4 possible hi-hat sounds - closed, open, half-open and foot-chick. The other areas ddrum could improve at the number of inputs, amount of memory and sample dump speed.

The Yamaha DTXTREME IIS is quite a good unit and I believe the Roland TD-20 is only slightly better than the Yamaha, but I would choose the Yamaha given the choice between the two.

I also have an older Alesis D4 and that module was good value for the price. I believe the DM5 is much better than the D4, but I have never had an opportunity to play a DM5. If budget is your primary concern, look at the cheaper Yamaha kits or even the TD-6 (ick, i know -- contradiction). An Alesis DM5 would be a good choice for someone only wanting to trigger effects, kick and perhaps snare sounds.

--opinion over--

Ok, so when you are buying an e-kit you need to answer these questions:

Does the module have enough inputs for my pads/triggers? You will need a minimum of 10 inputs in my opinion - kick, snare, rim, 3 toms, 3 cymbals, hi-hat.
If I want to add pads/triggers in the future, does the unit have the capability?
Am I happy with the sound quality? (not the salesman)
Can I add in new sounds or my own custom samples? Can I save my own kit configurations? Is the interface easy to program?
Can I connect the module to a computer and does it come with computer editing software?
Can I hear the playback via headphones?
How many outputs does the unit have? Can I split the drums and cymbals to different output? Can I assign an output for the snare and kick, independent of the toms and cymbals?
How easy is it to set the pan? How easy is it to adjust the gain and threshold?
Does the module have on-board effects? Do I care if it doesn't (such as you already own a decent effects unit)?
Does the module have a click track? Again, do I care if it doesn't?
Does the module have the ability to accept a sound source input so I can play along to music tracks? Again, do I care if it doesn't (such as you already have a mixer)?
When I strike one pad hard, does it trigger sounds from other pads?
When I strike two pads at the same time, can I hear both sounds being triggered? If you have a dual-zone pad, can you strike the rim and not hear the pad sound? And vice-versa?
When I strike a pad softly and build up to loud hits, how good are they dynamics represented?
When I play a press or buzz roll, does it sound like a snare drum or a 'machine gun'? How easy is it to adjust the threshold or gains on the trigger inputs to reduce this?
If your concerned about the noise made when striking the pads, how loud is it when the pad is hit? Can I change the heads to mesh heads to further reduce the impact noise?
What is the quality of the hardware and pads/triggers? Are the pads single or dual-zoned? Are the cymbal pads choke-able? Do the pads offer position sensing depending on where the pad is hit?
And finally, does the kit fit into my budget? If not, if I really want this, how long will it take me to get this?

Regardless of which module and pads you choose, make sure you answer those questions honestly and you are happy with the answers. I hope this helps someone choosing their electronic drum setup.

Which electronic drums did I choose?

I am still using ddrum. The ddrumAT was my second e-drum system after I first dabbled with the Alesis D4. I now own and use a ddrum4 unit, which I use with ddrum3 cast precision pads and ddrum4 cymbal and hi-hat pads. I can't speak highly enough about the ddrum4, especially regarding the sound quality and reliability. I like to use the ddrum4 triggered with an accoustic kit live in a mix of about 60/40 with mics. Below is a photo of my ddrum4 pad kit which I practise on.

For those interested, here is a scan I made of the ddrumAT Manual in PDF format [approx. 4Mb]. You can also download the ddrum4SE Manual in PDF format [approx. 3Mb].

Recently, Clavia has sold off ddrum to Armadillo Enterprises in the USA. I am waiting to see what develops of this.

If you are interested in more information about the ddrum4, take a look at Armadillo's site or visit the ddrums.com forum.

Here are some pictures of my setup:

Favourite ddrum4 Sounds

In the days when the ddrums.com forums were alive, we often debated about our favourite sounds. These are still the sounds in my favourite 2 kit setups.

P01 - Rock Drum Kit

KICK_112 Heavykick4 dd3
SNRE_132 SON 14x10
RIM_134 Rim of 132 SON 14x10
TOM_304 DW 10Dipl.S&H.mid
TOM_305 DW 12Dipl.S&H.mid
TOM_307 DW 16Dipl.S&H.mid
CYMB_723 DCride1 DRY6S
CYMB_715 KAcrash3 3S (Pitch +3)
CYMB_715 KAcrash3 3S
HHAT_704 DChihat1 DRY7S

P02 - Pop/Dance Drum Kit

KICK_220 Record Kik 11
SNRE_248 Record Snr 3
RIM_200 MIX 5S
TOM_265 Drowned tom 1 (Pitch +6)
TOM_265 Drowned tom 1
TOM_266 Drowned tom 2
PERC_005 Cabasa
CYMB_021 Zild splash 10
CYMB_715 KAcrash3 3S (Pitch +4)
HHAT_200 ASRXHat9009

If you have these sounds for your ddrum4, give them a go!

Visited a Natropath

2007-07-03T08:12:00.000+10:00

After putting up with bad sleeping habits and a few other health issues, my better half said that maybe I should give a visit to the natropath a go. So I went and it was quite an experience.

The entire first visit took almost two hours and I was tested for a variety of things including zinc definciancy and protein levels. A small blood, saliva and urine sample was also taken and tested.

After the results were determined, there is a possibility that I am wheat intolerant. So, for the next few months I am going to undergo a strict regime to eliminate certain foods from my diet and then I will have some tests to determine the effects of certain foods in my body.

The strict regime includes:

No grains - this means no wheat, rice, barley, oats, rye etc. at all -- so no bread, pasta, flours etc.
No high sugar fruits - this means no bananas, grapes and melons, and reduce fruit juice intake
No high carbohydrate vegetables - this means no peas, corn, potatoes and cashew nuts.
No high sugar foods and drinks - so no honey, sugar, icecream, soda etc.
A maximum of two serves of dairy a day
Eat a serve of protein with each meal - it could be eggs, meat, fish, nuts, legumes etc.
Reduce intake of alcohol - avoid beer, and spirits made from grains and corn
Each morning, I must drink a glass of water with lemon juice

So that's it -- it might seem extreme at first, but is only cutting out 11 foods. I can have steak and salads, chicken and vegetables, lamb hot pot etc. as normal, but just without the grains or other vegetables that are not permitted.

Edit: Jul 17, 2007 - After two weeks, it was determined that I am wheat intolerant and I am now allowed to re-introduce rice, oats and bananas but I must avoid wheat, barley and rye. I also need to avoid peas, cashew nuts, raw grapes and melons as these can also give a reaction similar to wheat intolerance. I can also have corn and potatoes occasionally.

Wish me luck :)

The London Olympics 2012 Logo

2007-06-07T03:01:00.002+10:00

I normally don't get involved with issues such as this, but this one, I couldn't resist. Why on earth would an Olympic Committee go with such a horrible logo, that does not represent anything to do with London or British culture. The logo they used in the bid was a much better design and in my opinion much more representative of London itself (the ribbon represents the Thames). There are even theorists saying that this 'crappy' logo was approved so Gordon Brown could boost his poll rating by 'saving' the Olympic bid or it was approved to raise the profile of the London games - this may be the only thing it has achieved.

Anyway, see the bid logo and new 'logo' for yourself:

Unveiled on June 4th, Lord Coe unveils the logo for the 2012 Olympics in London claiming it is "ambitious, interactive and youth-friendly". Organising committee chairman Lord Coe said: "It meets the biggest challenge we have over the next five years, which is reaching out to young people."

For the first time, the logo will be used for the Olympics and Paralympics. Coe added: "It is interactive and absolutely at the heart of what we need to do - engaging the attention of young people through new media and the virtual world they can get transported into. It will be imperative that it is flexible. I think it is way beyond any simple logo. It reaches out to young people in new and creative ways and uses the language that they understand and all the technology that is familiar to us."

Anyone else laughing with me? How can you spend £400,000 on this? Imagine the cost of the website..

With all the artistic talent in the UK, this is an insult to designers. The view of the UK public seems to reflect this as well. The BBC website even asked the public to submit ideas. This is the best idea submitted in my design opinion -- very clever and well done.

Here are some public comments taken from the BBC page source:

1. What ever % of my tax went to pay for that design at a mere £400,000, I would like a refund and then further compensation to have to look at this logo for the next 5 years.

2. £400,000. For that. Utterly ridiculous. Being in a class of 14/15 year olds, we designed 2012 logos based upon the rugged structure, and came up with fantastic ideas, promoting 2012 and also repesenting London and England as hosts for the Olympics. This is trying far too hard to communicate with youngsters. Yes it may communicate with them, but in the totally wrong way.

3. Genius! How about the inclusion of some TXT SPK, Sir Seb? I've wiped better looking logos from my backside.

4. Who in their right mind wants to wear a t-shirt with this logo or have it on their phone. It reminds me of the apprentice, the episode with the trainers. The naf trainer design that the women's team came up with. And if you shrink the logo down slightly, it becomes unreadable and the london text disappears. Plus it says '20R' not '2012'.This is the dome all over again, when they were deluded into thinking that the content inside the dome was what people wanted to see, when in fact it wasn't.

5. I have just figured it out. The cost breaks down as 25 pence for the design and £399,999.75 to register the trademark.

If you are in the UK and you hate this logo or you are a fan of the Olympics and would never buy any merchandise with this logo, sign up on the online petition here: http://www.gopetition.co.uk/signatures.php?petid=12539

Source of Quotes and Article Excerpts: BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/articles/2007/06/04/2012_new_logo_feature.shtml

Edit: June 2011 and the logo still looks like amateur rot.

20 Minute Drum Practice Session

2007-05-07T09:05:00.007+10:00

Option A: Rudiments

If I only have a small amount of time to practice drums, and I don't want to practice a particular song, this is the program that I follow. This is also an excellent warm up before a gig. I hope it helps some of the other drummers out there.

Single Hand Four Stroke Roll

This little exercise is great for limbering up the forearm muscles. It's also a great practice exercise for developing arm and hand strength and speed! The idea is simple: play quarter notes only with the right hand. When you have finished with the right hand, move to the left hand. When you have finished with the left, go back to the right. Do twenty (20) reps of this pattern, keeping the speed and stroke weight consistent (ie. no accents).

Paradiddle

It's our 'old friend' the Paradiddle. The object of this one is to maintain a consistent tempo through the various speeds. Again, start slow, then speed up; first leading with the right, then with the left. Do twenty (20) reps at 5 different tempos.

Triplet

With triplets, each quarter note gets three beats, instead of just one. Again, twenty (20) reps at 5 tempos.

Flams

A flam variant that works through those little, fast, intricate doublets and triplets. Work at a steady speed. As usual, twenty (20) reps at the same tempo.

Double Stroke Roll

Start this one slow and work up to speed, hold, then slow down, taking roughly 1 minute per repetition. Pause for 20 seconds, then repeat. Perform this for 5 reps.

Accents

Example one will help with dynamics while working on doubles and triples. Work through it as previous routines. The second example is the Paradiddle but with accented strokes on the ONE.

Example One

Example Two

Paradiddle Rhythm

In Rhythm 1, the paradiddle is played between the snare and the bass drum. This is probably the simplest application. "Pattern 1" above starts the paradiddle with the snare; "Pattern 2" starts it with the feet.

Option B: Songs To Play Along With

Sometimes, when you only have 20 minutes spare to play drums and you don't feel like rudiment work, you might prefer playing along to some songs instead. I have specifically created a CD for my practice needs and the first six songs on the CD are songs that are challenging yet offer you fun when playing them. At the risk of getting flamed, here are those six songs:

Toto: Hold The Line - Drummer: Jeff Porcaro
Stone Temple Pilots: Plush - Drummer: Erik Kretz
KISS: Detroit Rock City - Drummer: Peter Criss
Boom Crash Opera: The Best Thing - Drummer: Peter Maslen
Beyonce: Crazy In Love - Drummer: Gerald Heyward
Jamie Cullum: Singin' In The Rain - Drummer: Sebastiaan de Krom

So you can see, they are a fairly varied bunch of songs covering a couple of popular music styles. I wonder what six songs other drummers would choose?

Paringa Estate - 2004 Estate Pinot Noir

2006-08-18T08:01:00.001+10:00

I haven't posted a tasting note for a while, I have had the flu and I have been quite busy due to an unexpected but thankfully easy to deal with issue at work.

Around 2 weeks ago, all the family in Sydney got together to have a dinner to mark Samantha being 1 month old. Some of the people in my family don't really like complex wines so I had to choose carefully. I also didn't want to spend a lot of money either as there are some people that I feel don't apprciate wine and would not mind if it was a $6 bottle of Lambrusco. So, I selected a ready-to-drink Pinot Noir from Paringa Estate on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria that cost $24 a bottle - the 2004 Peninsula Pinot Noir.

It turned out to be a wine that everyone enjoyed very much and went down as a great success. The Pinot Noir (14.6 % vol.) is made from 100% Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir grapes. The rich red/purple colour of this wine is fantastic and left a vivid purple colour on the side of the glass as I swirled it around. I found it's palette ranging from plums to cherries with a hint of coffee. There is also a subtle taste of oak which added to the taste and smell sensations of this wine.

The tannins are very soft and smooth which made everyone enjoy this delightful, very easy to drink wine. I think this wine would also go very well with turkey, pork or italian style red meat meals like Osso Buco or Polpette (meatballs).

If the Peninsula Pinot Noir is the entry level Pinot Noir offered by Paringa Estate, then the Estate and Reserve series must be completely outstanding! I can't recommend this wine enough - I'm off to get another 6 bottles before there all gone!

Australia 0 - Italy 1

2006-06-28T06:09:00.002+10:00

It was one probably of the worst calls of the whole 2006 World Cup. Neill does indeed commit to the tackle or more to the point, to block the cross/shot, but Grosso doesn't cross/shoot. Instead, he pushes the ball into the middle and then "falls" over the torso of the sprawled Niell. Grosso made contact with Neill not the other way round.

In the Brazil/Ghana game played on the 27th June, in the 13th minute, see Adriano pull almost exactly the same "trick" as Grosso. In the Ghana penalty area, the goalkeeper did exactly as Neill had done against Grosso. Adriano got a yellow card for diving which was the correct decision. Don't start preeching protecting the goalkeeper stuff either. If anyone thinks that if that game was Italy vs Argentina or England or Germany and the exact same thing happened between a defender of one of these teams and Grosso, that the referee would give a penalty 15 secs before full time - no way. There would have been a riot.

Not much more to say really, but here is a quick game summary.

After 3 minutes, Toni jumps for a cross and heads it just wide. Scott Chipperfield makes an excellent tackle in the 13th minute to stop Toni from having another scoring opportunity. Australia had a lot of possesion in the first half and at times, it looked like Italy was watching the passing and just waiting defensively for a counter attack opportunity. In the 19th minute, Gilardino has a go with a scissor type shot on goal but Schwarzer is able to make the save.

A few minutes later, Toni again has a shot on goal and Schwarzer makes a good save. The Australians are giving Toni too much room in my opinion. 23 minutes into the game, Vince Grella gets a yellow card and is not pleased. A minute later, Viduka gets his head onto a set piece but is unable to generate the power needed to beat Buffon in the goals. In the 28th minute, Fabio Grosso gets a yellow card and disputed the decision. A minute or so later, Chippefield takes a bouncing ball and shoots it on goal but Buffon saves it and is able to stop it moving out before there is a rebound. This was the best shot in the first half and a good save too.

At 34 minutes, Toni again has a volley in the box but it is blocked by a defender for a corner. Again, it's Toni who gets his head on another one but sends it over the bar. The rest of the first half is fairly defensive though Craig Moore was lucky not to get a yellow card for a challenge on Toni towards the end of the half.

The second half starts of in a similar manner, with lots of Italian defense in their goal and Toni firing yet another shot at the goals that again misses. In the 49th minute, Cahill is shown a yellow card for saying some words to the referee. One minute later, a red card is shown to Materazzi as he is charged with taking down Bresciano outside the box. I thought it was a yellow card offense and a bit harsh. Italy are now down to 10 men for the remaining 40 minutes. In the 55th minute, Luca Toni is substituted for another defender, Andrea Barzagli, in a move that looks like they are playing for a draw and only attacking on the counter.

In the 58th minute, my man of the match, Chipperfield turns and a blasts towards the goal but it is again saved by Buffon who is showing his class in goals. Chipperfield has had more shots on goal than Viduka and I thought he should have been substituted at the 60 minute mark. Wilkshire gets a yellow card in the 61st minute. Australia starts to send more men forward and the ball starts to spend a lot more time down the Italian end of the field. Del Piero falls over in the 65th minute and gets the free kick for Italy. Schwarzer forced to tip the Pierlo shot over the goal and Australia finally clears the following corner.

Totti makes his entrance for Itay after 74 minutes and the crowd goes nuts. Del Piero is taken out after a very quiet game. Make me wonder why Guus left Viduka on when his game was just as quiet. At 79 minutes, Cahill turns and trys his luck and gets a corner. The corner is headed over the bar by Cahill who is disappointed with his attempt.

81 minutes gone and Alosi comes in for Sterjovski. Hiddink looks for a late game goal but its a bit too late I thought. Two minutes after the substitution, Bresciano shoots with his left foot and it sails over the bar. At 88 minutes, Iaqunita and Neill wrestle in the Australian end as tempers start to flare due to the closeness of this game. Gattuso is shown a yellow card. Aloisi has a bicycle kick shot right on 90 minutes but mis-times it and misses the ball completely. Three minutes of injury time is added.

91 minutes gone and Zambrotta is booked for game delay. And now, at 93 minutes, the controversial event. Grosso goes down in the box. The referee awards a spot kick and Totti put the ball in the net and sucks his thumb like a baby. Feelings of disappointment, disbelief and sadness all at once - losing with 10 second left due to a dive. This game deserved extra time.

Nintendo 64

2006-05-31T06:50:00.004+10:00

This was the last cartridge based console I bought, way back in 1996. I initally purchased this console with two controllers and three games: Super Mario 64, Pilot Wings and Wave Race. These are still excellent games almost 10 years later and they all possess something many of today's modern games lack - fun and playability. Who cares about accurately rendered 3D environments or 15 minute cut scenes! Give me gameplay anyday. On that note, here are some of my absolute essential N64 games:

Super Mario 64 - Released in 1997 by Nintendo

Super Mario 64 contains 15 massive 3D worlds that are cleverly laid-out so that there's never a dull moment. Each world requires Mario to find seven stars, and also find a hidden secret star, in order to move onto the next area. This game recaptures the classic gameplay style of the orignal 2D series that was on previous Nintendo consoles. This is just one game that has excellent replay value and is fun for everyone from children to adults.

Golden Eye 007 - Released in 1997 by Rare

GoldenEye was the best game in 1997, and to this day is arguably the best FPS to ever come out as it is the game that revolutionized the First Person genre. There is a lot more to do in this game than just blow away your enemy. Goldeneye 007 is built around 18 varying levels that must be played through in linear fashion in the easy mode, which will open up the possibility of playing the game in harder levels once completed. You will need to master all the different weapons available, as in some levels there are only a one or a few weapons available. You will also need to perform covert operations in typical Bond style all based on actual events from the Golden Eye movie. Awesome.

Wave Race 64 - Released in 1997 by Nintendo

Wave Race 64 features nine challenging water courses featuring buoys, ramps, mines, hairpin turns and more. You can compete in single races or in championship mode, which has three difficulty levels. The higher the difficulty level, the tougher the courses become and the more routhless your opponents get. The challenge of the game is to race with the realistic water/wind physics inside the game (the first game to do something like this) and to also maintain max power the entire race - miss just one buoy or crtical track section and you lose it and need to build it up again. Great water racing game.

Pilot Wings 64 - Released in 1997 by Paradigm Entertainment

Pilot Wings 64 is the best flight sim for the Nintendo 64. You choose a character and tackle flying assignments with various craft to gain your pilot wings. You are required to successfully complete challenges with a Hang Glider, Rocket Belt and Gyrocopter. If you make great scores during your challenges, you can open up bonus games. These include Sky Diving (Parachute), Birdman outfit (complet with wings and feathers), Jumble Hopper (huge bouncing device) and the human cannonball where you try to hit a distant bull's eye on a target. Heaps of fun.

Banjo-Kazooie - Released in 1998 by Rare

Banjo-Kazooie is a platform game that features a goofy honey bear named Banjo. Banjo runs around in tight yellow shorts and carries his raucous, red-crested bird friend Tooie in his backpack. Together, the bear-bird duo must use teamwork to complete various challenges and to rescue Banjo's sister Tootie from the ugly evil witch Gruntilda, who wants to steal her beauty. Bottles, a mole with Coke-bottle glasses, is around to teach everything from the basic moves to advanced techniques that they need to survive. On your missions, you will need to collect musical notes, Jiggys (puzzle pieces), Jinjos, Honeycomb pieces (adds to life bar), and Mumbo tokens. Some doors are locked with musical spells where you must have a certain number of musical notes in order to open them while new areas require puzzle pieces to complete the locking puzzle to open them up. This is great family entertainment and a welcome change from the plumber :)

Mario Tennis - Released in 2000 by Camelot

Mario Tennis is an arcade style tennis game featuring Mario and all the usual friends including Luigi, Peach, Toad and Bowser. You can play a quick 2 game set to a 5 set marathon match and compete in a tournament against all the characters. With a simple, yet realistic game control, you can mix up your game with lobs, volleys, and varying degrees of topspin and slice. Strike your serves at exactly the correct time and your serve is much more powerful. There are various courts and surfaces to play on, all with various degrees of ball speed and bounce height. With singles mode, doubles mode and challenge mode, and the ability to have up to 4 players on the court at once, there is lots of game options available. Great fun.

1080 Snowboarding - Released in 1998 by Nintendo

1080 Snowboarding is an action packed snowboarding game. You race your character through six mountainside tracks while attempting to score the highest amount of points by performing trick moves (in trick mode) or by getting through the course as fast as possible (in time and match mode). Match mode puts you up against computer opponents that you are required to beat over 4 to 6 courses. With 30 different tricks to master, you have plenty of tricks to try and the harder the trick, the higher the score. With the excellent graphical detail adding to the game (includes falling snow and powder) and split-screen two player mode, this game is great fun on your own or with a mate.

All-Star Baseball 2000 - Released in 1999 by Acclaim

All-Star Baseball 2000 is a great baseball game that features 30 major league teams and stadiums in full detail. You can play the game in a variety of modes including exhibition, season and playoffs. The control mechanism of this game is where it really shines. You have excellent control over pitching, batting and fielding. You can line up and send pitches into exactly the spot you want. When batting, you can shift the bat and direct your swing so you can target left field or right field with ease. It is also easier to make double plays due to the manner in which you can throw to and between the bases. The game also reacts slightly differently when game conditions change. Weather and surface effects a teams performance, home games can slightly favour the home team and player streaks, slumps, and errors based on real life posibilities. The game also features commentary from New York Yankee broadcasters John Sterling and Michael Kay. My favourite baseball game on the Nintendo 64.

Ridge Racer 64 - Released in 2000 by Namco

Ridge Racer 64 is based on the arcade classic and it does a pretty good job of maintaining all the fun from that game. You race against 19 other cars on 8 different tracks (includes all tracks from the original Ridge Racer). You must drive as quickly as possible to complete sections of the track in the specified time to reach the checkpoint to extend your time. While going fast, you will need to control and manage the drift your car possesses when it goes around high speed corners. Failure to do this will result in your car smashing into the side walls or spinning out. This is one of the quickest racing games on the Nintendo 64 and with its four-player mode, there is room for everyone to join in. Drift away!

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Released in 1998 by Nintendo

Considered by many to be the greatest single-player video game ever created (not in my opinion, but close), Zelda - Ocarina of Time features young Link who lives in the Kingdom of Hyrule. Link starts out as the only elf without a fairy, but Link soon meets up Navi, and sets out on this adventure which inevitably turns into a rescue mission for Princess Zelda. Link is lead through dark dungeons, villages, into a volcano, to the bottom of a lake, through a haunted desert, into a magical forest, into a giant tree, inside the belly of a beast, and even through time. Link must defeat strange monsters lurking in the area and stop a growing evil spreading thoughout the land. And a vast land it its, taking a very long time to explore it all. This is not one of those one weekend RPG games and it is also far more rewarding to find the objects and secrets of this game than to use a guide. One of the best RPGs around.

Tasting Notes: Hardy's Oomoo Shiraz 2003

2006-05-25T08:32:00.001+10:00

My first post for a while, been a bit busy with work. So, for a change of pace, here is one the best $10 shiraz wines I have had for a long time. Usually, a $10 wine can be very hit and miss, but the Hardys 2003 Oomoo Shiraz is a wine that I enjoyed very much.

I picked up three bottles from Dan Murphy's to have when the family came around. The Oomoo (14 % vol.) is made from 100% McLaren Vale shiraz grapes that are grown near the Torrens river, west of Adelaide.

The rich red/purple colour of this wine is very vivid and I found it's palette ranging from plums to blackcurrant with a touch of dark chocolate. It also has a hint of mint and a spicy aftertaste. The tannins are very soft, most likely due to the ripe fruits, making this very easy to drink. I think this wine would also go very well with Osso Buco or a beef stew.

For $10 a bottle, how can you go wrong. Get a few bottles of this so you can save your favourites for yourself!

Sid Meier’s Civilization I

2006-05-03T07:29:00.002+10:00

Civilization I is the game that started it all. What a gaming masterpiece. I recently re-acquainted myself with this wonderful game and lost 4 hours of time.

Civilization I is a turn-based strategy game where up to seven civilizations are spread across the world, each starting with next to nothing. You can play the game on five different skill levels and with over 9 different civilizations, each with their own points of differences and advatanges. You will be involved with a battle to conquer the globe and along the way, you must deal with balancing your economy, maintaining civil order, and keeping your population fed. Throughout the game you will engage in war, develop diplomatic and trade relationships with other civilizations, and eventually send a spaceship to Alpha Centauri.

The beauty of the game is that there are no set paths a player is forced to take and you are open to test your own strategies. You can spend time and money conducting research advancements like Iron Working, Engineering and Combustion to enhance your civilization's technology. You can build a strong millitary to defend your civilization and use them when necessary to attack other civilizations.

You can expand your civilization by creating many citys and encouraging population growth by using settler units. These settler units can found new cities, explore the surrounding area and create roads, irrigation lines, mines and even railroad tracks between your cities. Roads allow units to travel further during their turn and also enhance trade between cities. Trade and commerce are especially important if you want to maintain your military and cities. You can also build Wonders of the World to give your Civilization the historic appeal and to keep your civilians happy.

It's totally up to each individual player how to proceed, but those looking for success will strike a balance between all of these elements. I am so glad I spent some time again with this fantastic game. More information about the entire Civilization series can be found at civfanatics.com

Tasting Notes: Gartelmann 2004 Ambrosia

2006-04-21T11:17:00.002+10:00

The last time I visited the Hunter Valley, I discovered this treasure of a winery in Lovedale. Set in an Australian bush setting, this winery has established vines of over 35 years of age. The significance of the magpie on the label becomes clear if you take the time to get to know Jorg, the friendly owner of Gartelmann. The magpies swoop down and feast on the bugs that are attracted to the vines and therefore the requirement of sprays on the vines is greatly reduced. Gartelmann is also well known for its olives and has also won awards for it's Chardonnay, Semillon and Shiraz wines.

I recently decided to re-aquaint myself with this lovely wine and a nice cheese platter. The 2004 Ambrosia (9.5 % vol.) is made from hand picked semillon and chenic blanc grapes that are grown on a high trellis system for maximum ripeness. The sweetness of this wine is not from botrytis, unlike many other dessert wines. The rich golden colour invites you to try this sweet wine and I found it's palette ranging from apricots to marmalade to toffee.

This is right up there in my list of favourite desert wines. Highly recommended. $24 a bottle.

Gartelmann Cellar Door

Liverpool Football Club

2006-04-11T09:22:00.002+10:00

Some people call it soccer but it is globally known as football and I have always called it that. I follow two teams closely in the world game and have done so since 1977. I follow Fiorentina in the Serie A but my favourite team is Liverpool FC and I can remember many of the greats from the late 70's/80's as though it was yesterday: Ian Rush, John Barnes, Kenny Dalglish, David Johnson, Kevin Keegan, Graeme Souness, Bruce Grobbelaar, Mark Lawrenson, Peter Beardsley, John Aldridge, Craig Johnson, Steve Staunton - and let's not forget some of the more recent players have also been such great inspiration: Steve McManaman, Jason McAteer, Robbie Fowler, Steven Gerrard, Paul Ince, Dean Saunders, Michael Owen, David James, Patrik Berger, Ronnie Rosenthal, Danny Murphy, Jamie Carragher, Harry Kewell - and I've left many others out I know.

Home Ground Location: Anfield - Liverpool
Club Founded: 1892
Most Recent Trophy: Champions League 2004-05
Last Premiership Win: 1989-90
Theme Song: You'll Never Walk Alone
Web Links:

http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/ (official site)
http://www.koptalk.com/ (Fans Site)

Harrington, NSW

2006-04-11T08:43:00.002+10:00

Harrington is a small town (population ~1600) located 20 mins North of Taree and 55 mins South of Port Macquarie. This is where my extended family enjoys our holidays in the summer. The fishing is amazing and the tranquility of the place is addictive. Take a look at these photos and judge for yourself.

Harrington Lighthouse

Crowdy Head Trawlers In Dock

Crowdy Head From The Air

The Gantry - The Ultimate Fishing Spot

The View From The Top Of Pilot Hill

Harrington Town

Recording Acoustic Drums

2006-04-09T02:55:00.001+10:00

General Drum Recording Notes

Before you commence any recording, you need to configure your kit accordingly. Firstly, I would check the sound absorbing/reflecting qualities in room. This effects the drum sound and how the drums will sound recorded. Take a 12" tom and hit is a few times in various parts of the room and try to determine if it sounds bright/dark and/or boomy/smuthered. Once I have found a location where to my ears my tom sounds bright and boomy (unless I want a dark and smuthered sound), I set my kit up in that location.

Just before setting up my kit, I need to decide on what drum set configuration I will be using. 99% of the time I would start with a 'standard' 5 piece setup (kick, snare, 3 toms) as a guide and work from there. Other considerations before I setup include:

Decide whether to add an extra tom or two (add a 16"), remove a tom to make it a 4-piece kit (the 12" for me) or even swap the tom sizes (have a 16" instead of the 14")
Does the song require double kick work? If so, will I use two drums or a double pedal?
What kick drum front head settings? (no head, a head with a hole or a full head).
What size and type of snare to use? Fortunately for me, I only have a 14"x5" brass snare and a 14"x5" wood snare, so this decision is not so difficult.
How many cymbals and hi-hats will I be needing? Is one crash enough? Do I need splashes and/or chinas? Double hi-hats?
What type of sticks should I use? (or maybe brushes)
What type of beater will I use on the kick pedal? (rubber, felt or wood).

Now, after the kit is setup, it is time to tune the drums as close as possible acoustically to the actual sound I want recorded, applying any muffling if required. After the drums are tuned (the best I can do), I now need to eliminate any excess noise from the kit such as squeaks and rattles.

If there is a spare mixer input and mic available, try to use it as an ambient mic placed at a 'sweet spot' in the room, and a certain distance from your drums. This will add 'liveness' and an ambient character to your drum sound.

Now, if you are lucky to be working with a studio engineer, let them do their job and help you get a great sound. If you find your sound is not to your liking, simply tell them what you want. Occassionaly, you might find a engineer who has very set ways in how they want drums to sound. Just kindly remind them that you are paying for this studio time and as the customer, you want the drums to sound how you want them. Communication is key!

Oh, and try to stay cool and play for the song, using your normal manner and style.

My Preferred Recording Settings For The Snare Drum

place mic 1-2" above the rim and facing the head at 45 deg
more 'beef' - mic closer to the head
less 'beef' (thin) - mic more away from the head
My preferred EQ settings: increase 8-12 kHz to keep it crisp, reduce 2-3 kHz to keep drum from sounding boxy (unless you want that sound) and roll off extreme low end (below 50Hz) to avoid a muddy sound

My Preferred Recording Settings For The Kick Drum

place mic 2-3" inside the front head, aimed at beater contact spot
more 'attack' - mic closer to the beater contact spot
less 'attack' (airy) mic more away from the beater contact spot
My preferred EQ settings: increase 6-8 kHz to increase stroke definitionand reduce 1-2 kHz to add punch to the sound

My Preferred Recording Settings For The Tom Toms

place mic 1-2" above the rim and facing the head
My preferred EQ settings: increase 6-8 kHz to maintain stick attack, increase around 120Hz to add sustain and a beefy sound and reduce 2-3kHz slightly if the toms sound boxy

My Preferred Recording Settings For The Cymbals and Hi-Hats

"overhead" condenser mic's are best
if one mic, place it several feet above the kit pointing straight down
if two mic's, place one mic at around 60 deg. and the other at around 120 deg., arranged so they are nearly touching, with their signals panned hard left and right in the mix for stereo imaging
if a separate mic is used for the hi-hat(s)/ride, place the mic so it is facing down at an angle, about 6-12" from the top of the cymbal
My preferred EQ settings: increase 16-18kHz slightly to keep it crisp andincrease 1-2kHz slightly to promote 'bell' sounds

My Preferred Mixer Settings For Drum Tracks

set all mixer controls to the lowest position ie. 'zeroing' the board
bring in kick drum, panned centre, adjust EQ
bring in snare, panned centre, adjust EQ and EFX
bring in toms, panned left (high) to right (low), adjust EQ and EFX
bring in cymbals, not as prominent in the mix as the rest of the kit
bring in ambient mic if used, gradually until the mix is just right

My Preferred Reverb Settings For Drum Tracks

choose an appropriate reverb 'room' for the track ie. hall, stage, room, plate etc.
slower tracks can use more reverb than faster tracks
sparse arrangements can also use more reverb than busy ones

My Preferred Compression Settings For Drum Tracks

don't use on whole kit unless a squashed sound effect is required and if your compressor allows, set cutoff frequency ranges as appropriate
you can use a moderate amount on the kick to tighten the track and give it punch -- as a start point, use the 4:1 setting and then set the threshold so that most of the loud hits fall between the 4db and 6dB range

8-bits – Commodore 64 and Apple II

2006-04-08T08:03:00.006+10:00

As tragic as it may sound, "8-bits" has changed my life. I discovered 8-bit systems way back when in 1982 and I have had a soft-spot for them ever since. Here are some details of my favourite 8-bit games and the systems that ran them:

My Favourite Eight '8-bit' Games

Impossible Mission - Released in 1984 by Epyx

You are Agent 4125, sent to crack the secret code of Elvin Atombender who is planning on destroying the world. Guide 4125 down elevator shafts into rooms, exploring for clues and combining these clues to form a code word. Amazing gameplay, and one of the first games to offer digitised speech.

Boulder Dash - Released in 1984 by First Star Software

Guide 'Rockford' through a maze-like Cave, digging dirt, pushing and dodging boulders, while collecting the required amount of diamonds to open the next level door. A gameplay classic.

The Last Ninja - Released in 1987 by System 3

Puzzle solving, arcade adventure game with ninja fighting. It has some of the best graphics and sounds ever produced on the C64 and most people who owned this game rated it in their top 5. Brilliant.

Archon - Released in 1983 by Electronic Arts

Dark vs. Light - A chess-like game were you must destroy the opposing side or take control of the five 'power squares' on the board. When two pieces 'meet' on the same square, a fight is initiated in which only one piece comes out alive. Each piece has their own traits, some much stronger than others, making for a variety of combinations in fights. A classic.

World Class Leaderboard - Released in 1987 by Access Software

One of the first double disk games I ever bought! I enjoyed the original leaderboard, even though it only was comprised of fairways and greens and water hazards, so when this came out with the additions of trees, bunkers, and rough, plus the ability to play real-life golf courses, I could not resist it. Playability wise, many golf games are still based on the Leaderboard games to this day.

Into The Eagles Nest - Released in 1987 by Pandora

Before First-Person Shooting games like Doom and Wolfenstein, we had Into The Eagles Nest. Played from a top-down perspective (like in Gauntlet), your mission is to rescue three hostages captured in WWII who are being held somewhere in Eagle's Nest, a German fortress. You must destroy the fortress up once you have rescued all the captives. It is a fast, and sometimes frustrating game, and remember to use your keys wisely.

Yie Ar Kung Fu - Released in 1985 by Imagine

You play Oolong, who wants to follow his father's footsteps and become a Kung Fu Grand Master. To achieve this, you must defeat ten opponents, some with weapons such as Shriken, Nunchuckas and Tonfun. You can perform moves such as the flying kick, punch, round house kick, and leg swoop against your opponents, with some moves being more effective against some opponents and not others. A fun, power-bar based beat-em up.

Curse Of The Azure Bonds - Released in 1989 by Strategic Simulations, Inc.

The second game in the AD&D Forgotten Realms series, it is one of the best RPGs I have ever played. You construct a party of up to 6 players, using different 'races' and skills eg. Human Cleric, Elf Mage, Dwarf Fighter etc. and you guide them through the Forgotten Realms in search of the bonds. If you have played it, you no doubt would remember the Drow in the castle, the Black Dragons and the Bits O' Moander. Addictive RPG.

Microprose Soccer - Release in 1988 by Microprose

This was the forerunner to the great football game Sensible Soccer. This game changed the way football games were perceived and still stands up quite well today. It included features never before seen in football games at that time: it was the first game to use 'aftertouch', allowing you to swerve the ball after kicking it; the field view was the bird's eye view, allowing you to plan passing moves and defend more effectively; and it was the first football game to include bad weather!

California Games - Released in 1987 by Epyx

California Games is the fifth in the Games series, and is my favourite. It has six events: Half Pipe, Surfing, Foot Bag, BMX, Roller Skating and Frisbee, that require skill and precision to score high points. Try to tube ride the wave, 720 in the halfpipe, backflip on the BMX and double horseshoe the foot bag for maximum points. An entertaining game for up to eight players at once.

Hardball - Released in 1985 by Accolade

This was the best baseball game for a long time. Easy gameplay and excellent graphics made this fun for even people who didn't really understand baseball. The game offers a behind the pitcher view which is similar to how you see it on TV. When pitching, you put in the direction indicated to select that type of pitch and this is confirmed with the fire button. You can then select how high/low/wide/inside the pitch goes over the plate. The batter attempts to hit the pitch by pressing the fire button or by pushing right and pressing fire to bunt. Fielding is easy too, just move towards the ball and push in the direction of the base you want to throw to while pressing fire to throw to that base.

IK+ - Released in 1987 by System 3

A karate game with some of the best music, animation and background graphics seen in 8-bits. You start as a white belt and work your way through to yellow, green, purple and finally black. Points are awarded to a fighter who knocks down an opponent with a successful kick or punch - one point for a good hit and two for an exceptional one. Try to score five points before the others, or to score the highest within the 30 second time limit and you progress to the next round. The lowest scorer is eliminated. The player has fourteen different moves accessible via directional movements in conjunction with the fire button. It is this simple gameplay and the exceptional graphics and sound that keep you coming back for more.

Lode Runner - Released in 1983 by Br0derbund

My sister will agree with me on this one as this was her favourite game. The concept was simple, challenging and fun. You just run around the levels, climbing ladders and moving across poles with the aim of collecting all the gold. You can dig holes in the ground to make a quick escape or to trap your enemies as they attempt to stop you from completing the level, but don't let them get to close or they will hinder your attempts and you will lose a life. 8-bit gaming at it's best.

Uridium - Released in 1986 by Hewson

Tremendously addictive and challenging, this sideways scrolling space shoot-em-up is a space game with a difference. The game requires to you destroy as much as possible while seeking the docking point on the opposite side of the level. To get there you will need to dodge various types of missiles and survive the alien attack formations.

About The Machines

Commodore 64 (C64c)

Specifications

Year: 1983
CPU: MOS 8510 @ 1MHz
RAM: 64KB - Cartridge socket for RAM expansion
ROM: 20KB
Sound: SID 6581 - 3 Voices, 8 bit mono
Video: VIC II - 320 x 200 in 16 colours
Text Mode: 40 x 25
External 170k 5.25" Disk Drive or Tape Drive
Required a TV or Commodore Monitor like 1701

Apple IIc

Specifications

Year: 1984
CPU: MOS 65C02 @ 1MHz
RAM: 128KB - expandable to 1MB
ROM: 32KB
Sound: Internal Speaker
Video: 280 x 192, 590 x 192 (Hi-Res) in 16 colours
Text Mode: 40x40 or 80x40
Internal 140K 5.25" Disk Drive
Shipped with 9" Monochrome monitor

External Links

If you wish to read more these marvelous machines and the games and applications that ran in just 8-bits, take a look at:

Apple IIe/c:

http://apple.duke.net/main.html
http://apple2history.org/

Commodore 64:

http://www.lemon64.com/
http://www.c64.com/

16-bits – Sega Megadrive (Genesis)

2006-04-07T10:23:00.001+10:00

While "8-bits" may have changed my life forever, a particular 16-bit console blew my mind. The first time I saw Sonic The Hedgehog on a Sega Megadrive, I was lost for words and have never been the same since. I enjoy this console so much I have collected over 150 game cartridges over time. Here are some of my favourite games on the system:

Sonic The Hedgehog - Released in 1991 by SEGA

A fast-paced game with a blue hedgehog (Sonic) and his efforts at preventing the evil Dr. Robotnik from mechanizing the world. The coluorful graphics, catchy theme tunes, and challenging levels makes this probebly my favourite game ever.

Road Rash 2 - Released in 1992 by Electronia Arts (EA)

Road Rash 2 is a fast motorcycle road racing game with the added danger of on-bike fighting. Your opponents will use fists, side kicks, chains and crowbars to try to slow you down or knock you off, and you must stay on the road. With all this going on you will still have to dodge the cars and policemen on bikes and finish in the top 3 for prize money. You can return the violence against your opponents if you wish:)

Lemmings - Released in 1992 by Psygnosis

Lemmings are the cute but clueless little people who are known for committing suicide by running off cliffs, down holes and into fires. You have the chance to save them by giving selected Lemmings a special ability, and by using combinations of these abilities you can safely guide the Lemmings through the level..

World Cup 94 - Released in 1994 by US Gold

Similar to Sensible Soccer, it offers in my opinion much better game speed and controls. You also have the ability to accurately perform set piece plays and curl the ball when shooting for goal. Possibly not the greatest soccer game for the MegaDrive, but definately my favourite.

NBA Jam - Released in 1992 by Sculptured Software/Midway/Acclaim

Probebly the best known arcade basketball sim that still is great to play even today. Even though this version is different slightly to the arcade version (less players, less graphics/sound effects) it still permitted up to 4 people to play at the one time (with the appropriate adapters of course). Even with those fantastic dunks, the game playability still makes it one of the best basketball sims ever.

Mutant League Football - Released in 1993 by Electronic Arts

This is a futuristic depictions of American Football and I still laugh when I play this today. You can kill the referre, blow up players and break their bones while still having to make a touchdown. Great two player fun.

The Punisher - Released in 1994 by Marvel Games

The Punisher is a former Vietnam veteran whose family was murdered in a random and senseless killing. He now devotes his time soley to killing any criminal he comes across. This is one of my favorite 2D slug-em games and I still play this today. You can pick up items like baseball bats, knives and guns to assist him and you can restore health by breaking objects and consuming food.

Castlevania - Bloodlines - Released in 1994 by Konami

You can play one of two vampire hunters as they battle a mysterious countess who is intent on reviving Count Dracula. Many ghouls, bats and undead to destory in your quest. Another fun 2D beat-em up style game.

Prince of Persia - Released in 1993 by Br0derbund/Domark

This is possibly one of the most intuitive platform games of its time. You play as a young Arabian hero, you must rescue the sultan's daughter from a forced marriage as she is your true love. The vizer whom she is to marry is aware that you are going to attempt to save her and he imprisioned you inside the deepest dungeon in the palace. You will need to escape, fight guides, dodge traps and solve puzzles before your final encounter with Vizer. Great game still today.

Desert Strike - Released in 1992 by Granite Bay/Electronic Arts

You are an apache helicopter pilot who is required to engage in campaigns centred around the Gulf war of the early 1990's. You will need to become an expert at air-to-air and air-to-ground combat, and have the ability to control the helicopter during tight situations. It is played from a top-down 2D perspective rather than a cockpit view style of game and is a whole lot of fun to play.

RBI Baseball 93 - Released in 1993 by Atari/Tengen

An arcade-style baseball game rather than a sim that is fun to play and even better when you have a friend to play against. It has all of the typical baseball options like pitch selection, batting stroke, steal bases and also offers manual or automatic fielding options.

Aladdin - Released in 1993 by Capcom/Disney Software/Virgin Games

Probebly my pick for Disney platform games, you play as Aladdin, who discovers a magical lamp that leads him on all sorts of adventures. Based around the Disney movie, you will need to complete tasks and puzzles to successfully complete this platformer.

Pebble Beach Golf Links - Released in 1994 by T&E Games

A truly fantastic golfing sim that has a highly detailed course and some excellent background tunes as well. Animation tends to be a tiny bit on the jerky side, and it has the same course-building lag time problem as many of the earlier golf games, but it offers many options that Leaderboard did not have. This is for mine the all-time best Megadrive golf sim.

Shining Force 2 - Released in 1984 by Sonic/Climax/Sega

This is where RPGs like Vandal Hearts and Final Fantasy Tactics got their ideas. The first game in the series was great but this is the best RPG on the Megadrive. Based on an entirely new story in which the Shining Force team reunites to deal with a revived King Zeon, the Evil of All Ages. Lots of gameplay hours, heaps of enemies, allies and weapons.

Gauntlet 4 - Released in 1993 by Atari/Tengen

Take your pick of four different warriors - barbarian, valkyrie, elf, and sorcerer - and go toe-to-toe with hordes of evil uglies in the ultimate coin-op dungeon crawler. Bring your friends over and waste a few hours on this classic.

Wimbledon Championship Tennis - Released in 1993 by Sega Sports

A great single-or-multiplayer tennis game that is the best available on the Megadrive. The graphics are very good, the animation is smooth, and the sound and gameplay are just perfect for a tennis game. The number of hours I've spent playing this..