My intention was to create a blog that was useful to people, a place that I could post up information to help people.

And I have helped people. I received a few requests for aid via the contact form and most of those problems I managed to solve.

But writing in a more formal way doesn’t suit me so much, I have discovered. I’m too crazy for that. I need more freedom.

And so Arteki will be slipping back towards a more personal blog. I will still try to write in an interesting way. It won’t be “Had eggs for breakfast. Work was ok. Tired now.”, there’s Twitter for that.

My posts will now most likely be shorter, about fun or interesting things I have seen/watched/done, e.g. my thoughts or opinions on a game I’ve just played for the first time, or my first time watching a particular movie.

But, no more!

Over the next week, Google will be making the transition back to @gmail addresses in the UK. I am very happy with this news and I will stop having to find a proxy when signing up for a new Gmail account.

Greg Bullock, who posted the announcement, has calculated this change will save 20 bonbons (yum!) worth of energy a day in keystrokes.

I am curious how the situation was resolved to allow them to reclaim the “Gmail” trademark in the UK. Nothing was posted in the announcement about this.

For those that don’t know, Google were forced to stop using “Gmail” in the UK because a company based in London had already been using the trademark for 2 years. I found the whole dispute quite laughable at the time, but at least it showed smaller companies could still stand up to the Google giant.

No one in this advert is shown to cover their PIN while entering it. To me, this is a poorly thought out video. ATMs tell us to cover the keypad while entering our PINs and yet Barclays, who have won awards for security, have produced an advert that teaches the complete opposite. It doesn’t just fail to show the keypad being covered, you can actually see the PIN that’s entered.

Users are the weak point in security and should be encouraged to keep their PINs safe. Yes, you need more than a PIN to access someone’s funds, but cards are still easy to clone due to the magnetic strip for backwards compatibility.

Not only is the PIN shown in this advert, entering PINs is the theme of the advert. Had it not been, I wouldn’t be so concerned.

Can people be easily influenced by such a short clip? I would say yes, especially on a subconscious level. It wasn’t until the advert ended (albeit a shorter version) that I realised the blatant disregard for security. People may not think they are paying attention to the advert, but the catchy beeps are there to draw attention. Adverts are designed to get stuck in your head, so the behaviour presented may well stick too.

Any thoughts or opinions on this?

As an aside, as a (student) programmer I find it frustrating that improvements are always being made to the computer aspect of banking security, yet a bank as high profile as Barclays can’t be bothered to show secure behaviour in an advert.

The above video is my first attempt at both a game review and videoing myself. So please be nice. If you can’t see the video, please ensure you are viewing this article on Arteki.com and are using a Flash-capable browser with the latest version of Flash installed.

Please find a transcript below. I have slightly edited bits to make it read a little clearer than it would have otherwise.

The following are corrections to what I have said in the video:

• There is a quest-log in the game. You can press the tab key to display it.
• You can press R to display the heads-up-display.
• The information section is indeed called the “Pandorapedia”.

Transcript

Hi there, I’m Gaby, aka eldris. Some of you may know me as the author of Arteki.com. I’m going to talk today about James Cameron’s Avatar The Game.

First impressions of [the game]: very bad – not because of the game itself, but because of the initial problems the game had.

The first problem I encountered was after installation, when I went to run the game I couldn’t get the shortcut I had made to work. I tried running the game and it crashed. Luckily, searching through some forums I came across the fact that it was the shortcut it wouldn’t run with, so I went into the installation folder. If you are having this problem, go into the folder you installed the game in and then go into the “bin” folder and load Avatar.exe. I would recommend first you listen to my next point though.

My next point is that (and I have to say that this is being played under Vista – I don’t actually have it installed on XP or Windows 7 to test it, so this is all Vista-based) when I eventually got it to launch, there was no sound in the game and nobody wants to play a game with no sound. The subtitles weren’t appearing either. So, again, I looked at the forums and read that there was a patch, so I hunted around a bit but I couldn’t find a patcher tool – when you click Avatar.exe it just goes straight into the game. But there is another file in there; I think it’s called AvatarLauncher. If you run that it should go through and check for patches first. So, before you go playing the game, run [AvatarLauncher]. The sound should work.

I will say that [the game] is still quite glitchy even with the patch. There are some bits of dialogue in the game were it just skips, so then you have absolutely no idea why you’re doing a quest. You just pretty much get the arrow on the map that tells you where you are going.

As far as I’ve seen there’s no actual quest-log, so you can’t see what you’re currently assigned to do. You just have to follow the arrow and if you’ve got any extra tasks then it’s quite hard to tell. I’ve only been playing the game for a few hours so far, so I suppose I’ve missed something there. I really hope I have because if there is no log or such for active missions, that is a bit ridiculous really in my opinion, because if you go away for a bit and haven’t played the game in a while, then you’re going to come back and you’re just going to completely forget what you’re doing.

And again, when that dialogue skips, you don’t want to just go off and do the mission it’s telling you to, you want to know why your character’s doing it.

I’ve just got to the point where it splits off into the two stories (I’m a little bit past that). Without [spoiling] it too much, there’s a point in the game where you get to pick whether you’re going to play for the humans or the Na’avi.

I picked the Na’avi because I see them as the good-guys. Having watched Avatar twice, I absolutely love their culture, so I wanted to play through as them.

It’s really very fun. I think the Avatars look very good. The colours are good; not as bright as in the movie, which is a bit unfortunate. Everything looks a bit… I don’t want to say flat, because obviously I’ve seen the film in 3D, but it’s got that appearance that games do where there’s just not enough contrast.

The weapons are quite good. I’ve found [that I’m] not very good at the kind of combat that this game has; I’m more of a “give commands and let them get on with it” player. For example, with Dragon Age [I played through] on easy, because I don’t like combat.

The Na’avi weapon set is incredibly cool. There are dual-wielded swords, which do quite high damage. At the stage I’m at they can pretty much one-hit kill a human. The only thing is, actually getting to the humans. I think it might be slightly unbalanced. Although, yes, you can one-hit kill them, getting to them requires that you don’t die while they’re shooting you and that is quite difficult because if there’s even just two or three people shooting at you, your health can drop really quickly. I haven’t got very far through the game yet [and] this is the first time I’ve played it, so I should expect it to be difficult.

There is a nice part where you can get life recovery. It’s not clear how you get them – I think it’s by collecting cell samples, but I’m not 100% sure. Again, they’re not very clear on these kinds of things. I could probably find it in the “Pandorapedia” (I think [that’s what] they call it – a bit of a rubbish name in my opinion, if that is [the correct name]). Even that is quite hard to navigate, because you have lots and lots of sub-menus – you have to pick a category, then a sub-category, etc. I think there are easier ways of displaying it than what they have.

Another thing where I think they haven’t displayed the information very well is with the heads-up-display. That only comes up when you’re in combat. I haven’t worked out a key combination to just bring it up so I can what skills I’ve got on without having to go into the other menu.

They’ve numbered [the skills] in a diamond shape. [I indicate a diamond shape with a hand gesture.] The diamond shows you the skills your character has. They’re numbered from the top, [I point to the top of the diamond] 1, [I point to the right] 2, [I point to the bottom] 3 and [I point to the left] 4, which means that 4 is [on the left], but on your keyboard it’s the right-most key [of the four skill shortcuts]. This is something where they haven’t helped people make a link between the visual display of the icons telling you which skill it is and the key you have to press on the keyboard.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find it hard to see [the 4th skill] on the screen on the left and then think “Press 4”, which is on the right. It’s just a bit unintuitive, I think. I don’t see why they couldn’t have just displayed them in a row across the top – I think it may have even looked better.

It’s the same with the weapons, although at least with the weapons you can use the [mouse wheel] to change between them, which is quite good, except I do tend to forget which way I want to scroll it.

It’s quite a good game all in all. I’m not sure it’s worth the price. I paid around £27 for it. I know it is a new game, considering which it is a good price (which was from Tesco), but were I to have the knowledge I do now I probably wouldn’t purchase it. It’s not a good enough game for that price, in my opinion.

I don’t know how far through I am, I suspect that I’m probably not that far through at all. I’m hoping that it will end up being a very in-depth and worthwhile game, but other than giving you skill upgrades and new weapons there’s not really much to it so far in the way of giving you new things. There will be new mounts; I should get an Ikran soon – I think I’m just about to start the quest for that.

The vehicles aren’t that great, I don’t think. They control very well, but there’s just something about them that doesn’t feel quite right. It would be nice if you could use your weapon [while] on them. That’s one thing – if you have a fight you have to keep getting out of the vehicle or off the mount and then fight. It’s just a bit tedious.

There is one thing I will say for [the game]. I have not got annoyed at any voice actors yet. That is one thing I do tend to get annoyed at in games if they’re bad, so the voice acting is quite good. It’s not as good as [in Dragon Age] , but considering it is a movie spin-off game where they haven’t actually got any of the actors from the film, except for one bit at the start, [they are] good voice actors. If you are a regular game player [where the game] has voices in it, you will know how annoying it can be when people have just got rubbish accents, or like in Oblivion where it’s the same person doing the voice for “all” the characters in the game.

That’s my opinion of Avatar The Game. I’ll be interested to know what you’ve found about it or if you’re having any problems running it let me know.

I honestly don’t think threatening these pirates will work. The Internet has created a generation of people who believe they deserve to get things for free. In fact, as an artist I come across a lot of people who just do not know about copyright and assume everything on the Internet is up for grabs.

Rather than creating a “3 strikes and your out” policy for Internet use, I believe there are far better ways to satisfy everyone. But copyright holders need to be willing to compromise.

Educate

If people do not know what copyright is, how can they be expected to follow copyright laws?

When I first used the Internet, way back at the start of this millennium, I was completely ignorant about copyright and would use copyright images in my art. I too believed anything on the Internet was free for me to use as I wished.

As soon as I learnt about copyright I stopped using images I found online unless I obtained permission. And I’m pretty stubborn, so if I can be convinced to change my ways, surely others can too.

Provide it for free, legally

When we watch TV we do not pay to watch each show. Channels pay for showing programs by advertisements. We do pay a TV licence in the UK, but then again we pay a subscription fee for broadband.

So why shouldn’t content be provided free on the Internet and paid for by advertisements?

Last.FM and Spotify are just 2 examples of companies providing free music streaming that is legal. They can afford to pay the licence fees by adverts and premium services.

Many TV channels and companies now allow people to catch up with shows by streaming them online. Most that I have seen contain adverts for revenue, although in my opinion they go the wrong way about doing it.

However, I believe that despite this free access to music and television people are still pirating because they do not want to stream; they want to download. This is especially true with music because of the desire to load them onto portable devices.

So what can be done to monetize free legal downloads? I would say that the same as for streaming can be applied. Adverts could be placed next to download links or shown for a time before the download becomes available. Adverts could even be inserted into videos (and although they could be removed, most people would not know how to do this).

Stop picking on the little guy

Many people do not look to make profit from file sharing. While I agree that companies do lose out on profit even if the sharers aren’t making money, I do not see the point in trying to bankrupt an individual making no profit when there are people making a lot of money from illegal file sharing, including sites enabling it such as RapidShare.

For example, fining someone $1.9m for sharing 24 songs ($80k each) is pretty insane when there is no way they could afford to pay that. I do not believe the music company could have lost anywhere near that much per song.

The likelihood is they were trying to send a message, but the reactions I saw to the case lead me to conclude the exact opposite happened. Cases such as that seem to make people more determined to take profits away from companies because they continue to make themselves look greedy.

Address the “something for nothing” view

If we could define why people believe they should get something for nothing, perhaps we could alter that viewpoint. I do not believe people deserve something for nothing. We get things for free either because the owner is generous or by unscrupulous means.

It is not just things such as music and video many people think they should get free. I have seen interviews in regard to the recession with people who complain that they cannot get loans! Many seemed outraged that their bank would not give them money.

Perhaps my view on this is old fashioned, but I do not like spending money I do not have. But many people seem to have no issues with getting into debt and spending money they don’t have.

Yes, I know I have drifted from the point, but now I shall get back to it!

When people buy things using loans or a buy-now-pay-later option, I believe many see it as getting something for free, or at least free temporarily. It is this frame of mind, along with the easy-access the Internet provides, that has likely caused some people to think many things should be free.

I will not exclude myself from that group. I do not buy music and I often find myself questioning why some things aren’t free (such as Spotify’s mobile version). Looking back on my own Internet use, I can say with some certainty that I want things for free because I used to take them for free online before I understood and cared about copyright. Please note the emphasis on caring about copyright. There are those who understand it and chose to ignore it. But I won’t lecture people on morals today.

There is no registration, so you can quickly set up a room for you and your friends to use, with a unique URL for your room. There is also a chat area so you can discuss the video while watching it.

Something I think a lot of people may take for granted is the ability to load a new video without having to create a new room. That feature could have been easily overlooked.

However, I think there is only a limited use for synchtube. It will not take long for the novelty to wear out on an idea like this.

The name is not the only bad thing about this change.

Appearance

The first major difference I noticed was the skin, which a comment left by Sarah (who seems to have signed up just to leave the comment) on Echofon’s page on the Mozilla add-on site:

Twitterfox used to be a beautiful, simple add-on that easily would have gotten 5 stars out of me. This morning it updated itself to “Echofon”. Despite the name change being awful in itself, their new default skin is just HORRIBLE. It looks rushed, harsh on the eyes, and overall looks utterly rushed, sloppy, and non-user friendly. It’s like they don’t WANT you to look at it.

I have to agree wholeheartedly with that comment.

The new default skin looks to be based on Apple’s skin designs, which makes it look completely out of place in a Windows environment. I like the alternate skin even less.

Unlike Twitterfox, Echofon groups tweets by a user if they have multiple tweets in a row on your timeline. The name and avatar of the user only appears next to their first tweet in the group. This makes it incredibly difficult to scan through tweets quickly, as you have to slow down on groups so you know who wrote all the now nameless tweets.

As for the blank white box next to the “Messages” tab, when you start typing it shows you the number of characters left. It’s a necessary part of the interface, but when in its blank state it looks hugely out of place. Although the bottom of it is lined up with the bottom of the tabs, it doesn’t look that way due to the darker border the tabs have.

Short timeline

A major problem I have noticed with Echofon is that it only displays around 20 tweets in your timeline.

When I logged on today, Echofon informed me that I had 200 new tweets in my timeline, but it only displayed 21 of them (there was a 22nd one, but it was cut off after a few pixels). I’m hoping this will be a side effect of the changeover, but it happening at all shows Echofon is a poor product.

Users don’t seem happy

Aside from the bad reviews Echofon is getting on it’s add-on page, there is a fair amount of tweeting going on about the change. Quite a few don’t like the update.

I’ve also seen tweets from people who are confused about the change, which isn’t surprising as there was no notification given about the change.

Inevitably, some people do like the change, although less than don’t like it. Personally, I would like to knock some sense into them and show them why Twitterfox was better.

Did you use Twitterfox?

If you used Twitterfox, what do you think of the change? Please leave a comment below, I’d really like to hear from you.

Even if you don’t use Twitterfox, do you like the look of Echofon?

Today, I was contacted by Dominos (UK) about an offer they are having at the moment. That in itself is nothing unusual and only a little annoying.

What’s unusual, and incredibly annoying, is that not only did they send something through the post, they also sent my husband a text message. Furthermore, what we received in the post was in an addressed envelope such that it looked like a normal, non-junk letter.

Oh, but it only begins there. I also believe they were in breech of the Data Protection Act 1998 due to the fact they kept my data for longer than the purpose it was given (ordering pizza).

This got me thinking. Why do companies continue to market their products in ways that feels more like harassment?

How many times have you found yourself frustrated by direct marketing? All those unwanted telephone calls, letters, emails and now text messages too.

I’m sure that, like me, you got fed up with direct marketing a long time ago and wish it would stop.

Now think, how many times has direct marketing got you to buy their product? I’ll take a guess here and say very few have.

The intrusive nature of direct marketing probably leaves you feeling like doing anything but buying their product. But let’s take this further.

Does direct marketing put you off dealing with that company again? I know that’s the effect it has on me, and while I know I have a shorter fuse than some, I am not unreasonable.

If this is how direct marketing leaves us feeling, why do companies continue to do it?

I have a theory. Marketers have been telling companies for so long that direct marketing works, that the companies now believe them.

Whenever I think of marketing companies, I imagine a group of evil monsters laying in wait for other, unsuspecting companies that they can trick into buying their marketing strategies, and that they would lie and manipulate data until the cows come home. And let’s face it – data can easily be made to look like something it’s not.

If you happen to work in the marketing industry and you are an honest person, please don’t take offence. You are a rare gem and I wish you every success. We need more people like you in the world (except if you use direct marketing strategies ).

It is my opinion, as a consumer, that companies would be far better off if they used marketing that does not target individuals, i.e. does not make someone feel singled out.

I’m going to get you to think again (sorry about that, I’m sure you did far too much of it at work today). Can you remember more from an advert on TV than you can from a direct marketing attempt (a telephone call, for example)?

I for one can remember far more from a leaflet sent through the door last week than I do from the text message and mail Dominos sent me today.

And why is that? It’s because leaflets are not aimed at me. The text message was, and it violated my privacy.

So, to any marketers out there, please, stop with the direct marketing already. It just doesn’t work.

I don’t usually post about current news, but this has riled me up.

An employee at Rocky Mountain Bank messed up big time when they sent an email containing details of over 1000 customers to the wrong email address. They tried emailing the person again to get them to delete the offending email but when they got no response they contacted Google requesting they disclose the email owner’s identity.

Being the sensible company that Google are, they rejected the request and told the bank they must get a court order before such information could be disclosed to them.

That’s when things start to get crazy.

The bank followed Google’s “suggestion” to get a court order. Not only did they request the court order Google to disclose the Gmail user’s identity, they also requested that Google deactivate the account in question.

Surprisingly, or rather disturbingly, the judge ruled in favour of the bank. Google were forced to deactivate an innocent person’s account and pass on their name and contact details to the bank all because one employee screwed up.

I believe the ruling to be completely over the top and unnecessary. A fair middle ground would have been Google ensuring the email in question was removed from the email account. This would have solved the problem while not invading someone’s privacy and, as some lawyers are saying, affect the user’s right to communicate online.

Serious implications

I feel that this ruling could have a serious negative impact on the rights of people using the Internet. Judges seem to be like sheep and use rulings made previously as a guideline for their own cases. How many judges will now decide to shut down email accounts rather than put in some effort and come up with a fairer solution? Not only that, but this could easily extend to other accounts where information may be shared by accident, such as Facebook.

It is horrifying to think anyone could have their email account disabled even if they have done nothing wrong. Email accounts are the centre of online activity. It is the thing we link all of our other accounts to. If our email account is deactivated we could not only lose all our previous mails but also access to other accounts online if you happen to forget your password.

This is a sad day for Internet users everywhere. Apparently our accounts and the data they hold are insignificant and disposable.

Update September 29th, 2009 at 17:58 BST

According to CNET, Google and Rocky Mountain bank have agreed to dismiss the case and Google have been able to re-activate the gmail account. This is great news for the Google user, however I feel the damage done by this case can’t be undone so easily.

Google account disabled screenshot courtesy of gabrielsaldana

For all their highly qualified programmers, Microsoft don’t use the correct units for file sizes. In Windows systems data sizes are written in the binary size form, but labelled in the decimal form. This can be a bit confusing, so I’ll do my best to explain it.

N.B. Microsoft are not the only offender in this matter, but I mention them because they are at the core of many computer users’ lives.

If you are familiar with the difference between mega and mebi, giga and gibi, feel free to skip ahead. I won’t be offended. _Much.

Decimal units

Decimal data units are what you are used to seeing and what you will assume you are seeing on Microsoft systems too. A few of these unit prefixes are kilo, mega, giga and tera. They are commonly used to label binary data sizes and there have even been lawsuits disputing storage sizes.

Decimal prefixes can be represented as 10^x. These are the same prefixes used in every day metric measures, for example 1 kilometre = 1000 metres.

Binary units

Binary units are used less often and I know of some programmers and engineers who have never even heard of them before. A few of these are kibi, mebi, gibi and tebi. These are contractions, for example “mebi” is a contraction of “mega binary”.

Although many have not heard of these units, they are used more than you possibly realise because binary sizes of bytes are often labelled with decimal units in error, such as with Microsoft giving gibibyte values the gigabyte unit (GB).

Byte units in the binary form can be represented as 2^x bytes.

Comparison

This becomes much clearer when binary and decimal values are compared side by side.

(Please read “,” as commas not decimal points)

As you can see, in the higher units the difference begins to become substantial. We are now at the point that terabytes are becoming commonplace, but if the unit is incorrect you could be tricked by a 10% difference.

Microsoft and the units

Microsoft do all their workings in binary sizes of bytes (kiB, MiB, GiB) but label them as decimal (kB, MB, GB). To provide some evidence of this a will show you some screen-shots regarding hard drive size.

In System Information you can see that my hard-drive is 320,070,320,640 bytes. Dell advertised this drive as 320GB. This is the correct number of gigabytes, as 320,070,320,640 / 1,000,000,000 (bytes in a gigabyte) = 320 as a whole number.

To the left of the bytes is what Microsoft say the drive is in gigabytes: 298.09GB. This number is a binary representation, in gibibytes, but labelled as the decimal form, gigabytes: 320,070,320,640 / 1,073,741,824 (bytes in a gibibyte) = 298.09 (to 2 decimal places).

To summarise the point, my hard-drive’s size should be written as 320GB or 298GiB.

You can see this problem again in the drive properties dialogue box. In the screen-shot, used space, free space and capacity should read 122GB, 182GB and 304GB respectively, or the units should be GiB.

Why does it matter?

If you only ever use Windows and never look at the size of you hard-drive or other storage and never look at file sizes on the Internet or external media then it doesn’t matter, because you will only ever be working with sizes in the same form.

However, if you don’t live in a Microsoft bubble then you will come across decimal data sizes that don’t match up when Windows tells you the size. For example, you purchase a drive of one size and Windows says it is a different size, due to using the wrong units. This can become a problem.

How many users would consider that it is Microsoft that is wrong and not the smaller company they purchased the storage from? I certainly jumped to the conclusion that Dell were in the wrong about my hard-drive, until I looked in System Information.

These units are standardised for a reason, and that reason is so people know what values they are reading based on the unit provided. Microsoft using the wrong units could be compared to speeds in miles per hour being labelled as kilometres per hour, although there the difference in values is far greater, but you get the point.

Why don’t Microsoft use the correct one?

That’s not a question I can directly answer, but the likely hood is Microsoft have not yet adopted the IEC’s binary prefixes because they are still relatively new, having been introduced in 2000.

Microsoft’s operating systems have been around for far longer than binary prefixes and so it could confuse those who have been using Windows for more than 9 years if Microsoft suddenly made the change.

However, I do still find it odd that Microsoft chose to label binary multiples in with decimal units, because unit prefixes such as “kilo” and “mega” have been used in science for a long time. To call 1024 bytes a kilobyte when 1000 metres is a kilometre is just asking for trouble, because they went against the norm.

References & further reading

While writing this article I used several Wikipedia articles to make sure I didn’t get anything wrong. (Don’t worry, I checked the sources and other sites to confirm.)

If you would like to learn more about this topic, I recommend you read the IEC’s article on prefixes for binary multiples. That article explains things far better than I have. I suppose I could have just linked to it and not written a full article, but I wanted to input my own opinions on the subject.

There is also an interesting Wikipedia article on binary prefixes.