webvictim.net

I’d like to extend an open invitation to all readers of this blog. If you’re an IRC user and you fancy talking to some really cool people, you should join #insanespot on irc.netgamers.org.

I recently became the owner of this channel as a result of the old owner being inactive, and so I think that gives me the right to start recruiting people to join!

I’m there pretty much all day every day, so stop by and check it out if you fancy it. They really are awesome people, and we promise to make your day more enjoyable :)

So, after being nudged into updating by a mysterious commenter, it’s time for another entry. It’d been time for quite a while, actually - I’d just been my usual lazy self and neglected the blog.

I spent Thursday afternoon - Monday evening at i34, a LAN party near Coventry which was hosted by Multiplay UK. I drank lots of beer, played lots of games, didn’t get nearly enough sleep (partly thanks to staying up late, and partly due to sleeping in a tent) and had an amazing time.

I went with what I suppose you could call a clan - we’re known as [CantFitMyN. The reason I say “suppose” is because we’re hardly fantastic gamers - we can hold our own, but we’re definitely not professionals ;-)

That said we did actually win one of our Team Fortress 2 matches over the weekend, although we didn’t qualify for the tournament in the end. The whole point is to play for fun though, and we got many compliments on how sporting we were and how fun it had been to play against us.

The question now is when I get to go and do it all over again! i35 is at the end of October, and it’s rather tempting to try and go, despite the inevitable cold weather.

We’ve put many photos online - unfortunately Facebook has just died when I’ve tried to get links to the albums, so I’ll have to update these at some point in the future…

I really like sun. I really like Fridays. I really like drinking Diet Pepsi.

That is all for the moment. Today is a good day. :)

It’s been a lovely weekend. My best friend Matt and I held a bit of a barbecue and gaming evening at his house on Saturday which was great fun - Sarah, Louise and Jo came round and we played Monopoly, baseball on the Wii and Guitar Hero. We also got rather drunk which was fun, until such time as I got a phone call from my brother saying that he’d had a car crash. It turned out that my parents couldn’t drive and neither could I, but I got a lift down to go and see him as he sounded a bit shaken up on the phone.

When I got there, it turned out that the car that hit him had driven off with a broken radiator - my brother’s car was in a pretty bad way, so they must have hit him pretty hard. I just let the police do their job and gave my brother a comforting arm round the shoulders - not a lot else I could do really. I’m unsure if they’ve caught the people who did it yet or whether that’s still in progress.

I watched the European Cup final last night, thought it was a brilliant game - Spain totally deserved to win as they were all over Germany from about 15 minutes in until right at the end of the game. Torres scored a lovely goal, and Spain were unlucky not to get two or three more.

It’s rather hot today. Work is going alright, but it’s a bit loud thanks to the 3 HP DL140s running by my feet. Configuring servers is a noisy process!

My parents are away at the moment, and so my brother and I have my house to ourselves. This is absolutely awesome, and means that I can do lots of things I wouldn’t usually do at home. The place is starting to look a bit of a state, actually, but it won’t do it any harm.

I can’t describe how nice it is to be able to leave something on a table when you go out, and then forget about it and have it still there three days later. It sounds bizarre, but it’s such a change from the way things usually are in my house that it’s unbelievably refreshing. Unfortunately it’ll all be over next Tuesday, but I’ve only got to finish work today and then I’ve got four days off. Sweet.

In other news, Today’s XKCD is pretty similar to the way that I think in a lot of situations. Neuroses are fun!

I’ve recently got quite into watching the previous series’ of “The Apprentice” - it’s really compulsive viewing. Once you start, you can’t stop watching… you just want to see more of what happens. I’m going to try and get myself up to date on all the old episodes (I’ve got ever episode to date ready to watch so far) and then get into the current series - see if I can manage to make it there before the current run finishes.

I’ve also been levelling my warrior up to 70 on the ever-addictive World of Warcraft. I’ve been doing this most evenings for the last week and a bit, and I still haven’t got bored with it. I think that WoW is one of those games that you just fall in and out of wanting to play - it never quite gets too old for you not to carry on, you just might not renew your subscription and forget about it for a couple of months. Then at some point in the future, you always come back…

My brother’s got himself “Age of Conan”, which looks rather cool. Don’t think I’ll be purchasing it myself just yet, but never say never!

I just bought myself a Saitek Eclipse II keyboard and Logitech G5 laser mouse as the latest equipment to add to my computer rig, and I have to say that they’re fantastic. The keyboard is smooth beyond belief and a complete pleasure to type on, and the mouse is one of the nicest peripherals I’ve ever held.

It’s amazing how a good keyboard and mouse can improve your computing experience :) Now I just need to convince work to buy them for my desk there as well…

In a display of what is probably one of the geekiest things I’ve done to date, I took a day off work yesterday to get hold of GTA IV and play it non-stop from when I got in until such time as I had to go to sleep.

My verdict so far is that it’s an absolutely amazing game. It’s easy to get used to and very intuitive - similar enough to the old GTA games to still be a classic, and yet includes so many new features that you wonder how on earth you’ll ever manage to explore all of them. The list of “achievements” that you can get on the Xbox is absolutely mammoth, and I’m not far enough through the game yet to even understand how to get some of them.

A few of my favourite things about GTA IV:

• You can now get taxis to wherever you like on the map, if you don’t want to drive. This is fantastic for the times when you die after starting a mission and don’t want to have to drive there again.
• The handling of the cars is much more realistic. The Xbox version uses the analog triggers for acceleration and braking, as most Xbox driving games do, and although it takes a bit of getting used to, it’s far more fun when you learn to drive properly. Any rear-wheel drive car will fishtail its way down the road forever if you don’t release the accelerator, and you actually have to brake properly for corners now. I’ve no doubt that some people will say this is a bad move, but I think it’s a step in the right direction.
• There is a much improved social aspect to the game. After you do business with people, you can go out drinking with them, play darts or pool, go bowling, to a cabaret or to the strip club… there are a load of mini-attractions which make the game more detailed and fun.
• In relation to the previous comment, you actually get drunk if you drink. In one instance, my cousin invited me out drinking so I went with him, and we got riotously pissed. I opened the front door of the bar to leave, and fell down the stairs, injuring myself. I managed to lurch my way out onto the road where I’d parked my car and tried to drive us both home (despite my cousin’s warnings that I was too far gone), and it proved to be a bit of a mistake. Not only could I not keep the car going where I wanted to, a police car saw me drive off and chased me down for drink driving. Elements of a game like that make me smile, as they show fantastic attention to detail.
• If you do the social things with people, they will like you more. Getting certain people to like you more will unlock “special abilities” they have, which will help your progress through the game. The fact that it’s totally voluntary is great, as it means that you choose your own path through the game.
• In a similar way, you also get to make decisions which will affect your storyline. So far it’s just been me choosing whether people live or die, but it’s great to have the freedom of choice. There was also an instance where I had to choose which of two people I wished to kill to progress with the game.
• The developers have removed some of the less fun elements from previous games - for example, in GTA: San Andreas you could make yourself fat if you ate too much, and if you didn’t eat enough you would lose weight and eventually starve, losing health. Although this was a novel idea, it just turned out to be a total pain in the end, as you’d be on your way to kill someone, miles from anywhere, and suddenly the game would tell you that you were starving and in danger of death. Very helpful… not. It also appears that things such as “driving skill” have been removed, and are now down to the player rather than an imaginary scale.

I could go on about all the things I love about this game, but I think the only thing I can say that does it justice is that you really must try it. If you liked the previous GTA games you will absolutely love GTA IV, and even if you weren’t a fan, it might be worth trying to get back into this one. I’ve always usually found GTA “clunky” on consoles and therefore played on PCs - using analog sticks is not as easy as a good old keyboard and mouse combo - but I’ve actually started to get used to playing GTA on the Xbox, and I can see that console controllers offer some benefits.

I can’t wait to get home again tonight and play it :)

I went to my first funeral for fifteen years yesterday. My dad’s best friend’s father died a couple of weeks ago after being in hospital for a while, and my family and I went to go and pay our respects. It was a lovely service, filled with just as much happiness about his life as sadness that he had gone, and the weather was beautiful.

He was 92 when he died, just a month short of his 93rd birthday. That’s a good, long life for anyone these days. Rest in peace, George :)

One of the main aspects of my job is being a PHP developer for an online e-commerce platform which sells flights, hotels and holidays. As most online merchants will tell you, selling stuff online and allowing electronic payments can be a risky business, as there are lots of people out there who will try to put expensive transactions through on stolen credit cards, hoping that the goods will be dispatched and they’ll be able to do a runner before the card is reported stolen and blocked by the bank.

Selling flights is no different - there are a lot of people who will try and put expensive flights through your system and pay with a stolen credit card. You can usually spot these fraudsters a mile off - they try to make bookings to dodgy lawless places (Lagos, Accra, Addis Ababa, Johannesburg, Nairobi etc) that usually depart with the next few days, invariably with a card registered under the name of a third party. We’ve been selling flights online for a long time under various different platforms, and as such we have a fraud checking system that highlights bookings that might be fraudulent for review.

A little while ago we got what I think is probably the moodiest, dodgiest and most obviously fraudulent booking we’ve ever had on our system:
- The route is Dubai to Accra via Addis Ababa and Lagos
- It’s due to depart in three days’ time (20th April)
- The flight is with Ethopian Airlines
- The email address is registered in Ireland, despite the card being registered in England
- The name on the card is entirely different to the name of the person booking

I wonder who on earth thought they could get away with it?!

Just for a chuckle, I present to you all a PHP version of the recently-famous “FizzBuzz” program in the style of Code Golf!

98 bytes of pure FizzBuzz excellence.

EDIT: I know I could have made this shorter (and have done since) but it’s just a proof of concept. Besides, if I posted all my shortest solutions, everyone would be able to answer easily when it comes round to the actual Code Golf challenge…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqzovAbMhcA

This is the Manic Street Preachers covering Rihanna’s “Umbrella”, and my god, it’s fucking excellent. So much better than the original it’s untrue!