Despite the seeming lack of activity KeePassX is alive and we are proud to announce the first 2.0 Alpha release.

KeepassX is not dead. Which is great, since I’m using it daily and was afraid there might never be another version or rewrite after there was no news for more than a year. For a while now the commits over at gitorious have been going though, which at least is an indicator that things are being worked on – even if there’s no saying yet if or when an upgrade is going to be released.

Who are the “fat guys who know C++” [...] They aren’t interested in tweeting, blogging, or giving talks at conferences. They care about building and shipping code. They’re more likely to be found in IRC chat rooms, filing JIRAs for Apache projects, or spinning out Github repos in their spare time.

An amusing and even a bit enlightening read with a sarcastic tone.

The rogue messages displayed to U.S. users read: “This operating system is locked due to the violation of the federal laws of the United States of America! Following violations were detected: Your IP address was used to visit websites containing pornography, child pornography, zoophilia and child abuse. Your computer also contains video files, elements of violence and child pornography! Spam messages with terrorist motives were also sent from your computer. This computer lock is aimed to stop your illegal activity.”

Ever noticed that official text never contains exclamation marks? I’m not aware of that there would be sentences which start with “also”, either.

User interfaces

If you know me then you’ll be aware how unwilling I am to put up with a bad UI. A great UI is an essential part of any modern game – or at least it should be. Making the UI fun to interact with lessens the impact of immersion breaking when players have to sift through menus in order to change settings, find items or read up quest information. While most of the things I’ve seen in the demo have been pleasant – like the skill wheel – some haven’t. I really wish we could get away from using sliders for things they’re just not suited for. Making the face selection or hairstyle selection a slider makes no sense at all, because in contrast to, say, jaw width, different hairstyles are not polar opposites on an index. Thumbnails would be a preferable option. Using sliders for this sort of option is also detrimental to online games because you can’t easily show which ones are new either due to a patch or an expansion. Using thumbnails you could easily slap some small “new” signage onto the newly available ones. Try that using a slider.

Character looks

I’m never quite sure what to think of the character models of TSW’s character models. While I may be spoiled by the extraordinarily prettiness that TERA Online left me with, I’m just not convinced that their facial features are up to the latest standards in video gaming technology. They look okay when compared with older games, but they’re most certainly not up to date with the latest tech. On the other hand that might be just me expecting more of little details again.

Little touches

TSW has a certain love for detail which can’t be ignored. The developers offered only some examples during the demo but I was impressed how well things are designed.

• Songs heard in karaoke bars may trigger new quests due to their lyrics.
• You get a UNIX inspired hacking terminal when accessing foreign computers but after a successful hack your program may obtain a HTML-formatted copy of the data which makes accessing the information on your device significantly easier and enables pretty graphics all the while explaining why this was possible.
• The three different factions may arrive at key locations of main quests in different way, all the way fitting in with each of their story arc and characteristics.
• The crafting system is a kind of memory game which uses different ingredients as well as their position on a grid to determine the outcome of crafting. That process is aided by the option to dissect your equipment – called “transcribing” in the game world.
• Time travel to a certain dungeon in the past is done via a trance.

There’s other things that make me want to play the game too. Their achievements are linked to real bonuses, like money or items, not only nice pictures. Dangerous environments facilitate the need to be constantly aware of your surroundings in battle. There are obtainable “lore pieces” that tell the whole story behind TSW and form a narrative line on its own.

If there’s one game I’m incredibly curious to see how much of a success it will become, it’s TSW. Yes, I keep Guild Wars 2 in mind, but that’s unnecessary, since GW2 will be successful anyway.

Admittedly, if it wasn’t for another student from university asking me if I want to go I wouldn’t have left the house that evening. Now, that being said, I enjoyed most of the evening. I initially agreed to go because Anja had struck lucky and the first thing she told me about the Long Night stirred my interest.

At the Medical University

The Medical University of Graz (to be more precise: the Ludwig Boltzmann institute for clinical-forensic research) offered something slightly less common amongst its many lectures and presentations that evening: an interactive criminal investigation – you were to solve a murder case.

Using hints (read: answers that were tied to letters) you were supposed to solve the case and guess the gleamingly obvious codeword. For those of you that are reminded of Tom Turbo (link in German), you are quite right. The first step was talking to the three suspects (for a lack of time that consisted of checking three short written statements). Due to the shortness of those statements I personally couldn’t get to a conclusion, but my colleague decided on the right thing. After some discussions I still can’t understand her way of thought on that, but I’ll leave it on that. As the room was separated there were two more activities to do at the “crime scene”, as well as a bonus task. We were to check the smear tests from each suspect’s steering wheel for blood, compare tracks left by tires and make a semi-detailed scribble of the environment because there are no cameras. After leaving the crime scene we headed to the “lab section” to check the seeds gathered from each suspect’s shoes ², check a computer model in order to determine which murder weapon was used and compare some DNA tests to see if our most likely suspect left traces on the murder weapon.

After all it was a nice little excursion into the processes used by police and an amusing possibility to try some of the things one only knows from TV on your own.

At the FH Joanneum (University of Applied Sciences)

In hindsight – or rather looking at the plan – I realize that there indeed was a station done by the Journalism & PR team’s Web Literacy Lab. That’s what I intended to check out that evening. Where I actually ended up was the station for Information Management demonstrating how easy it is to do a man in the middle attack for unencrypted VoIP telephony. Though we had an inspiring conversation there I ended up thinking that there wasn’t a station done by the Web Literacy Lab and was slightly disappointed. A short visit to the “Computers of the Future” section didn’t really improve my mood as the things there were neither particularly new nor that amazing. I assume that comes with optimizing demos for all kinds of audiences (children included).

The takeaway

I think next year I’ll try to start earlier into the evening that 19:00 in order to check out more of the various presentations. Nevertheless I’m delighted that Austria offers such an interesting event once a year. Check out the website to see just how many institutes contributed on a nation wide scale.

About Realtime Journalism

The term Realtime Journalism is used for two different combinations of synchronous actions.

• Sync of coverage with event
  This is the part that we are all very familiar with due to its roots in live coverage of events through more traditional media like TV.
• Sync of event with queries
  This part however is where the fun for students of Computer Science and nerds in general is. Due to the availability of open data as well as an abundance of APIs with different proprietary data providers it’s now possible to show an incredible amount of data corresponding with different newsworthy events easily. Reporting on an earthquake? Show maps that are color-coded with the amount of damage that occurred. Reporting on a convention? Monitor the twitter hashtag to see what visitors are thinking. The possibilities are manifold, considering the essential tool that ushahidi – more on that later – might become.

While we are used to the first part, a sync of queries with events in order to display related data in realtime is huge opportunity to improve reports and stories without the need to stretch the length of a story. I’m confident that while not every audience is ready for this kind of information bombardment the trend will be going towards displaying more relevant data without the need to look it up yourself. Critical analysis of gathered information may become harder due to the increasing amount of sources which may not yet have reached the credibility they should have while others may be mistaken from time to time.

Technology

I admit that I wasn’t only there to listen to the lecture but to get to know a few new toys on the web which might not be in the center of attention yet. To say the least, I wasn’t disappointed.

• I had already forgotten about PubSubHubbub, which is a neat extension to the RSS protocol in order to serve new posts even faster to subscriber via the usage of hubs between the publisher and the user. In essence it uses Push instead of clients having to poll for new items. I read up on that while checking out RSS publishing for my old blog.
• Storify is a service that may use different sources like Facebook feeds, Twitter feeds and much more to create interactive, realtime updating stories. Though it sounds interesting, a short demo during the presentation immediately showed me that it’s not my type of thing.
• Facebook has its own livestreaming service called “facebook live talks”. No chance I’ll be using that, thank you very much.
• Ushahidi could be the reporting tool of the future. It’s open source, it’s a service and it’s data and visualizations thereof are incredible if the demonstration’s level of awesomeness can be recreated in real world usage.
• Google Hangouts provide means of realtime video conversations with multiple partners via a browser plugin. I’m not on plus, I don’t have any reason apart from curiosity to go there and plenty of other things to do. So I haven’t tested hangouts. According to Heinz it’s based on the HTML5 capability “Websockets” which are intended for realtime communication on a software level, modernizing the static web. Admittedly, thanks to a large part to AJAX, it’s not that static anymore, but still…

Final Thoughts

From all I heard I came to following conclusions:
There is a big emphasis on what I’d call DIY information. It’s all about enhancing and enriching your own findings and reports with related information and where applicable open data.
You can’t ignore social media anymore, not after what happened in Egypt 2011. Let’s end this post with a quote from the lecture.

Connectivity and interactivity have definite results: The observer becomes an actor. The image of the classic neutral journalist is no longer crystal clear.³

• Bungie released an infographic showing the collected stats of the Halo stat tracking program when they shut it down.
• You don’t want to face Hulk in a debate.
• In a disgustingly hateful comment a user of Readability shows his appreciation of Readability developing an Android version of their application but not releasing it on Google Play initially. Mind you that the app is free and he is in no way entitled to demand anything. Although I admit that releasing it on the Amazon Market with a headstart was definitely not the smartest idea.
• Microsoft is definitely not my favorite company this week. According to this article they plan to introduce commercials for the Xbox Live service. Now, while I personally don’t watch video content on my 360, it is troubling to see that there’s another venue being invaded by commercials that can’t be disabled. The tiles on the Dashboard containing ads are already annoying enough.
• If you’re familiar with Team Fortress 2, you should check out this post about the 9 types of students.

In terms of reading I’ve finished Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, C.C. Hunter’s Taken at Dusk and – I’m quite embarrassed to admit that I had to look up the title although it’s not even been a week – Jenna Black’s Deadly Descendant.

“It’s a successful part of our business, we’re very pleased with the growth and it continues to do really well. Clearly there’s an audience out there who are happy to purchase a product at full ERP six or so months after [its retail release].

I get the impression that said audience isn’t particularly smart. That price policy could be compared if STEAM neither gave incentives like DLC or bundles nor reduced their prices when prices drop in retail. The only reason Microsoft can afford to do that without driving away its customers is that there’s no alternative download location than their store. A more open ecosystem would not allow this kind of thought.

The Tera launcher needs some major streanlining. ~Kevin VanOrd
Also, streamlining. ~Kevin VanOrd

I don’t mind that it takes up a lot of screen estate. I mean, realistically speaking I won’t be using it for other activities than clicking the “Play” button, right?

As I’m not interested in PVP I picked a PVE server and set out on my journey. At least that’s what I thought I would do. During extensive character modification the game crashed. I sighed and tried again, because all progress was – of course – lost. Have you ever heard of auto-save, game devs? That might be a fine place to integrate it. Of course, you could also fix the bug that sends the game crashing when you extensively modify a character and enter your chosen name. This might not apply for both genders or all races, however I had said problem for both castanic¹ and high elves². I can’t tell if the problem is the same for humans³. After some time I figured out that I can enter the name first and start customizing after that to circumvent the crash.

Starting out

Starting to dig into the whole customization thing I figured one thing out fast: You may customize your characters head (hairstyle, makeup, beard, facial features) to a great extent. All that you may change about your body is the skin tone. Now, call me focused on female secondary gender features, but in a game in which you walk around in annoyingly skimpy clothing for a considerable amount of time, I’d like to actually enjoy looking at my character. Read: Either I have to endure the silly castanic running animation or put up with the high elves oversized breasts. No, playing a male character is not an option. Unless it’s a baraka .⁴

Before the whole customizing, however, you chose your class. I don’t want to be a support character because I prefer doing things solo, even in MMOs. I’m also not much for ranged classes. That meant that priest, mystic, archer and sorcerer were out. I’ve never been a fan of axes or defensive classes, so beserker and lancer were out too. I decided on slayer which is an offensive class wielding a greatsword.

Interestingly, En Masse decided to display the recommended player skill level on the class selection screen. I’m pretty sure I chose the slayer because it had 3/5 stars in contrast to the warrior with 5/5 stars. I played nearly all of my time as warrior anyway, but I’ll get to that later. After you’ve finished customization you’ll be asked wether to play the prologue or start at the Island of Dawn. At least after you’ve been forced to check out the prologue on your first character. I’m all for hands-on tutorials, but don’t get me wrong here. I’ve been so confused to suddenly find myself as a level 20 character that I checked the Internet to see why I didn’t start at level 1. Well, the prologue not only teaches you the basics of combat but also means to give some background information.

So I created another character to check if only specific classes start at level 20. And that was my high elf, which I’ve now played for several hours. She’s a warrior, dual wielding swords. I would’ve preferred daggers. After several hours of play I even got an armor that is not just a corset and panties. It’s still skimpy. She also wears combat heels. You know, for the time when you have to kick an enemy really hard. Gosh, they’re so incredibly ridiculous, it makes my head hurt everytime I see them in a video game.

I enjoy the combat. There’s not much to tell. Skills, combos, targeting via reticle, evasion, block. All in place.

What’s bad

The things I’ve mentioned above are not bad per se, however, those are things that don’t target my specific taste. That’s fine. Bad things follow in this section.

UI trouble

There’s an option to scale the UI. It does fine, except that it scales all UI elements, including the font-size. It’d be preferable to scale font-size and the size of UI elements like buttons independently. Combined with the scrubber that does that is another idiocy:

Let’s assume you have a window open and use the clickable lower right corner ⁵ to scale it:
Result: The window scales and everything within is blown up. Previously readable fonts are blown up to laughable sizes.
Expected result: The window scales and its content reflows. Font size does not change. Ever worked with CSS in web development? Then you know what it should behave like.

• It might be a nice idea to allow individual preferences for the tabs in your chat UI. However the font-size for chat should be globally adjustable.

Inconsistency

• There’s a sequence, right after the initiation into the army proper of uhm… the land starting with “V”. It’s Valkyon, I’ve checked. The audio and the subtitles don’t match up at all. This fact is made worse by the subs being on by default.
• I realize having keyboard shortcuts in dialogue is equally helpful and awkward. It’s even more awkward if you don’t use variables to read the player’s set shortcuts and use the default bindings instead. Confused much?
• On more shortcut trouble: Consistently colouring those would be preferred. Don’t colour it once and don’t another time.
• Why the hell are keyboard configurations character-specific? If I want SPACE to be my interact, then let me. Don’t make me change everything for every new character again!

Other annoyances

• Quest monster camping. TERA spawns monsters quite frequently. The condition for the orcan having the black feather (his name started with “A”…) spawning was actually his dead body disappearing. Still, there was a group of three people on my server who blocked that boss by targeting him with a ranged attack every time he spawned. Several other players were standing around cursing because those were stealing the boss every time, so no one was able to complete their quest. Considering that that group probably got the quest immediately since kills are shared within a group they were trolling. Quite successfully, I might add.
• Armor colours are only applied for a limited time. Why shouldn’t dyeing your amor be permanent? Unless you want players to pay via micro-transactions for permanent armor colours I guess.
• We’ve had several hours to be amazed by the Isle of Dawn during the introductory hours. Please refrain from making the pegasus fly all over it again and make it head straight through your Star Gate imitation.
• For heaven’s sake, make the armor preview discoverable ingame! Put it into the help section ⁶ or armor remodelers’ dialogue. I had to google for several minutes to find out that the key combination is CTRL + RIGHT CLICK.

Conclusion

It is worrying that there was so much cynicism and “been there, done that” attitude before the game has even launched. ~Bozanimal

I’ll probably not be paying for this game, though I might give it a second look during the open beta and might even write a little follow-up article. You should however checkout this blog post I came across which just happens to point out how disappointing in terms of lore and devoid of replay value TERA is.

Ending the fun

By now you might’ve seen that everybody and their mum complain about ME3′s ending. That it didn’t reveal enough details. That it wasn’t sophisticated enough. That it wasn’t a perfect match as the conclusion of an epic trilogy. I’m looking at both my friends Leonhard and Thomas here.

The game basically offers three different endings with two distinct flavors. There are the options to destroy the reapers, merge organic and synthetic life and control the reapers (from best to worst) as well as a distinction if you saved or destroyed the Collector’s base in ME2.

Leonhard got the “mediocre” ending, also called “synthesis” in which organic and synthetic forms of life are merged. In his mind that was actually the best ending considering the outcome for EDI and Joker, who get to continue their relationship, and for life in general, since it seems like a great step in evolutionary terms. Too bad that Bioware doesn’t agree with this point of view. Therefore this ending isn’t considered the “best” and my friend was upset with the way Bioware handled his view of possible evolution in an imaginary scenario.

I don’t actually remember what Thomas told me about his choice for the ending but I clearly remember him being disappointed when talking to me about how meaningless your choices were. Although he used some rather ominous terms to describe his findings at that time in order not to ruin my surprise when playing.

Personally, I have not yet seen any of the endings, although my Total Military Strength is nearly enough to be able to choose the best ending when the issue arises. Right now I’ve looked up the possible outcomes and also don’t consider any option the best.

Dissolving conflict

However, I found something else rather baffling. The entire Mass Effect series is a game that – in my opinion – is very much about choice. The decisions you make define more or less the state of the galaxy which is a concept I am rather fond of. Sometimes you’d like to reverse your decisions though. I always found myself being a friendly and peacemaking person when I’m in Commander Shepard’s (lady-)boots. The universe in which I live is mostly peaceful and does not try to slaughter each other at every opportunity. I also don’t shoot every guy ¹ in the head just because I don’t agree with them. Unless there’s no other way, but many times there will be another way, for I am a charming person whose charisma has often managed to solve a situation without casualties.

So when I realized that the quarians had gone to war with the the geth and the geth were forced to accept the help of the reapers in order to survive I was displeased, but according to some research it was possible to keep them from tearing each others’ hearts out ². There was just major problem. I knew I rewrote the geth in ME2 thinking they might be allies during the fight in ME3 ³. I knew I successfully defended Tali at her trial. The only variable I had to consider was wether I solved the conflict between Tali and Legion in ME2 or sided with one of them. Unfortunately I seem to have done that and there’s no way my actions in ME3 can make up for that. So I won’t be able to prevent them from war. However I don’t want to take sides in this idiotic conflict since I have friends on both sides of the battlefield.

That means I will have to play the whole of ME2 again in order to change one tiny decision. I definitely won’t change my decision to rewrite instead of destroy the heretic geth since they are a great war asset. And judging from experience a complete run of ME2 with almost every DLC and full completion took me around 17 hrs on Insanity when trying the last time. This should be fun. Unless – and that’s the reason I have to do this crap again – I have too little paragon points again in order to stop Legion and Tali from arguing in ME2. Meh.

On the other hand I might save my the cerberus crew in ME2. Or not, since I enjoy Legion’s company during all the side missions.

• The plan for the Linux Days 2012 of Graz is final. I’ve discovered that our workshop (with small presentation) will be held before noon. How do I put this… I don’t think that’s going to improve my performance.
• I’ve recently won a competition over at one of my two preferred Xbox 360 news sources and received two games. I’ve only looked into JASF yet, not into Birds of Steel. To be honest that might take a while since I’ve now received my copy of Mass Effect 3 and ordered Deus Ex: Human Revolution really cheap.
• I’ll be starting to catch up with my reading starting from Monday and might write a review of Susan Cain’s Quiet, a book which I think I learned a lot from.
• You might find my online playing Mass Effect 3 during the next month.

But before I jump head first into ME3 I need to elaborate on my initial thoughts of JASF so I won’t forget to post them.

Before I even begin I want to clarify that I’m aware of the difference in budget to AAA dogfighter titles like the Ace Combat or H.A.W.X. franchises.
So far I’ve enjoyed my trip to Genericstan as Razor, a pilot from Generic Western Coalition. I didn’t pay that much attention to the story since the presentation is occasionally kind of poor. Where triple A titles would’ve placed a nicely rendered cutscene, JASF – which I continuously want to spell JANE – strikes you with a wall-of-text. It’s not as bad as it sounds though, as the WOT will be read to you by one of the voice actors which uses this accent where I’m never sure if it just sounds cheesy to me or if it really is. Also they are angry about the aggressive force but on the first opportunity to lash out all you hear is “glorious president” this and “glorious president” that even though he gave priority to snatching the enemy’s oil fields instead of disabling their WoMD.
One thing that caught my eye was the jerky scrolling of the WOT, even though it scrolled smoothly when in auto-scroll (voice is reading) mode. I’m not quite sure about the latest games from AC and HAWX but the last ones I’ve played (Ace Combat: Fires of Liberation and H.A.W.X. 1) didn’t have in-flight loading screens when updating mission objectives. That is an immersion breaking annoyance.
There’s one more thing. I’m not sure if it’s my eyes or if it’s a bug in the game but sometimes it looks if my cockpit doesn’t have a glass dome. It seems as if my head is out in the open during flight which would be bad.

Please, let me demonstrate a part of the wrongness of Mass Effect Datapad for iOS. ¹

1. The iPad screen is huge and you are still unable to get 10 updates in there without having the user scroll? This is ridiculous. I’m reminded of Krystian’s commentary on Mass Effect 1‘s interface fails.
2. The + Button links to facebook and twitter? What for? To see more? Why do we even pull @replies without context? Where does this whole screen make any sense?
3. I especially like the “Show more” button. I haven’t tried it on the iPhone, but on the iPad it isn’t clickable. It’s simply text saying “show more” without any interaction. Great. /sarc

There’s also a slightly bizarre and incongruous high-score system, which may be another attempt to encourage replay value. This isn’t a game that needs that sort of thing. It would have been nice if Ubisoft Shanghai had had the courage of its convictions, left it out and let the adventure stand for itself. This is about survival. It’s not about whether I got 100 per cent.

This makes me want to cry. Didn’t we already establish that leaderboards belong to competitive games, not immersive single player experiences?

• Ron sent me this great video about how words can make a considerable difference depending on what exactly is said.
• There’s an adorable letter from a cool, nerdy uncle to his niece introducing her to the internet.
• A tipp on lifehacker mentions that you can click and scroll to change the volume while over the volume tray icon in Windows. Well, that’s the same for OS X. But I really miss the behaviors of GNOME in that line, because you just need to hover over the icon instead of clicking and scrolling.
• While playing Assassin’s Creed: Revelations there were a few occasions where I wasn’t quite sure why the game didn’t do what I wanted it to do. For some hints about bomb crafting this thread at GameFAQs was quite helpful.
• Pre-Purchase now: Yesterday must be one of the best headlines I’ve heard in a while. It’s from Steam’s feed.
• In another cash grab Capcom already shipped “additional content” on the disk and only sold codes to unlock the content separately. How nice of them. /sarc
• I might be visiting the Zero Waste Fest!2012 in May.

processing…

Recently I’ve read James Swallow’s Deus Ex: Icarus Effect and Nate Kenyon’s StarCraft Ghost: Spectres. Both were excellent sci-fi themed books that fit nicely to the images the video games they belong to painted. Unfortunately I was lazy enough not to read the description of the Deus Ex book before buying which led to me wondering where Adam (the most recent game’s protagonist) was. Well, the book isn’t about Adam. It’s more or less set around the events of the game. Meaning, some of it takes place before the game and some during the game as far as I understood it from not having played the game yet.

In other news the situation at our university is in total disarray right now but I’ll probably rant about that in a separate post where I need to give vent to my anger.

Update: It seems I had a little problem with the links earlier. Sorry about that.

Graz houses three different locations of the Tribeka.

at the Grießkai

There’s one at the Grießkai, which is the bigger one of the two I’ve yet visited. It’s lower floor has quite some modern chairs and tables, as well as some high bar-like tables with the corresponding high seats. There’s a long waiting table and a glass case containing all sorts of delicious treats for a sweet tooth. Usually there’s already a line of at least two people in front of you even though the waiters and waitresses are always busy. Sometimes maybe a little busy with themselves but this is a case where I really don’t mind since I feel in this venue that behavior actually even improves the atmosphere.

The upper floor houses a lot more tables and chairs. This is – combined with the free WiFi (I’m not using that. At least not without VPN.) – one of the reasons that I’ve seen a lot of workers with laptops and tablets there. During the holidays it’s mainly a students’ meeting point since they’re not in school. Or pretty much all other days it’s a healthy variety of university sutdents (more), business people (less) and walk-in customers. I’m rather sure I’ve also seen some designers and journalists there according to the stuff on their screens (no, I’m not gonna pretend I’m not curious).

You can get that weird feeling sitting there. This belonging and not belonging thing. When you’re among strangers and know you fit right in there. It’s definitely an in-café. So actually I’m still wondering why I get that feeling there. I’m usually far away from mainstream. Maybe it’s the fact that the personnel is around my age that makes me feel comfortable there.

near the Old University of Technology / Mandellstraße

That’s the place I visit more frequently than the first place. It’s not exactly close to my home (about 10 min with the tram) but the closest Tribeka. And since their Hot White Chocolate is mind-bogglingly delicious ¹ I can definitely imagine being there every day. I mean, I could. I think this place just isn’t as cozy as the other. There’s no second floor and the first one is very crammed with tables and seats – especially during the colder seasons. You might as well sit outside when it’s warmer or take your beverage with you but I think you’re losing a part of the style that way.

Nevertheless you may want to consider it when looking for a nice place to sit down for an hour and have a long chat with some friends, like I recently did with Pete and Matthias.

Judging from the amount of laptop users I’ve seen there I will simply assume there’s also free WiFi at the place.

the last refuge

There’s also a third venue which I haven’t visited yet. I may do that sometime in the future and update this article with my thoughts on that.

conclusion

Tribeka also has its coffee delivered to several restaurants all over Graz (e.g. the Rondo). These restaurants often display this prominently and proudly.

I might not like coffee at all but I can enjoy a great café all the same. Tribeka is part of the student culture that’s very prominent in Graz and should therefor be checked out by visitors to get a feeling for Graz’s coffee culture.

Update: I seem to have some trouble remembering the Markdown syntax lately. This is the second post which had bad links before the update. Even worse, this article was published while it was still unfinished. I’m terribly sorry for that and pulled it. When you read this it will already be the finished version. Again, I’m terribly sorry.

The Propeller is a restaurant whose main target group are students – a fact that can easily be guessed by its location near the Karl Franzens University. It’s not your ordinary dive bar however. The Propeller has something that quite a lot of student’s bars miss: class. Make no mistake, you’re not amongst the high society there nor are you in some elitist club. You’re in a laid back restaurant that manages to combine class, good food and a relaxing atmosphere into an ambiance that I enjoy quite a lot.

Leonhard once called it “an uptown student’s restaurant” ¹ which I think is a pretty accurate description. It’s perfectly fine to show up there with your friends, your family or your date. I can pretty much say that everyone I’ve dragged there has had a good, lasting impression.

For example when my father was in town for a weekend he had dinner with me on the first day there and was positively surprised – I get the feeling that student’s restaurants are said not to be particularly great most of the time. The second day of his visit was spent with his wife and some friends of hers eating at a hotel restaurant if I remember that correctly. According to him the food at the hotel was no match for the Propeller.

I’ve been there many, many times and there has only been one occasion when I wasn’t satisfied. While I can generally recommend their “Create your own wok” thing I’d advise you to stay off the shrimps. Not that they aren’t delicious. It’s just my humble opinion that 3 tiny shrimps for 3€ are not really a good deal.

Anyway. Most of my visits were for their excellent “Schuberpfandl”. This highly recommendable dish consists of pork fillet, Spätzle, mushrooms and cream sauce and is served in a pan. I am particularly fond of the Spätzle-cream sauce combination. Also the amount of food in the pan is exactly right for my appetite.

Recently I’ve been there with Matthias for one of their specials. The Indian weeks didn’t only sound great but also made for an astoundingly refreshing change from the dishes I usually order there.

While I had the Chicken a la Madrocas ² – marinated with a Madrocas curry spice mix and aromatic rice – Matthias ordered the Tandoori Chicken with rice. We generally agree that the rice was superb and the meat very tasty. Another thing that’s important to mention is the quite short time it took for the food to arrive – another positivum. While I didn’t find the lack of additional side dishes like vegetables or a creamy sauce that bad, Matthias seems to think that the Tandoori Chicken is not usually served this way. On the other hand we both agree again that for a theme weeks offering the whole thing was fine.

You may want to check out their website for some pictures of the location – If you’re on a device without Flash, you’re not missing anything short of an annoying animated text. I was also quite sad that the link for a newsletter is not working. When clicking I’m only presented with a blank page.

I also want to add that since the last but one time I was there they seem to have set up separate smoker and non-smoker areas which is a huge plus.

One more thing: I’ve heard a lot about their lunch buffet which seems to offer a good variety of dishes and is reasonably priced. However I’ve only once made it there in time for the buffet in a about two and a half years of studying in Graz. Unfortunately I wasn’t in the mood for something big that time and went with a salad.

Should you visit this place: Yes.

Of course, after having some slight repercussions during last year’s course (read: the Ubuntu partner repository not being enabled on a live CD and therefor not being able to install Skype for demonstration purpose) we want to make sure we have everything ready and tested twice or even thrice.

However, since my primary machine is a Macbook Air these days, I’ll have to prepare something that houses the required Ubuntu installation for the Linux Days. That basically gave me 3.5 options:

• Virtualbox (open-source, except some proprietary extensions ¹, free, preferred)
• Parallels (commercial, complex integration with OS X, 30 day trial)
• VMware Fusion (commercial, 30 day trial)
• dual booting (not in consideration, rather: use a different machine)

As you can easily see the obvious choice was Virtualbox. Usual procedure: Download, install, install extensions, mount iso, roll. Except for the “roll” part. For some reason the sane defaults didn’t do it. To enable network access I had to switch the network options from NAT to bridged to be able to get a connection.

After having solved that tiny problem I was going to test the installation. I rushed through the installer’s questions and went away from my laptop for a while only to come back seeing that I was logged out. Unfortunately that only offered one conclusion: Something bad had happened. I logged in, went to Console and found that the Macbook had restarted after a Kernel Panic. Damn.

So I had to consider the other options again. Checking the date gave me a little more time however, since the Linux Days would otherwise not be included in the 30 day trial. I’ll also try Virtualbox again without Oracle’s extensions to see if that works better.

Interestingly though Virtualbox seemed to require less resources than older versions, since the fan in my laptop wasn’t constantly running on full speed.

Have little doubt. I might not be able to guarantee that this year everything will work perfect. Nevertheless we will try to prepare everything as well as we can given that there’s work for university and us having social lives too.

Update: Fixed typo in title

There are no references to run-time library functions, native Windows API is used instead

After showing that to some of my colleagues one of them managed to make me laugh quite a bit:

Sven: A usable coding language that uses native Windows functions? Fascinating. There’s still hope for their platform. ¹

Most of the time when there was a discussion about a game’s length it referred to the time needed for a full run without loitering and completion of a reasonable amount of sidequests if existing. This estimate of gameplay length was intended as a guide to guess how long they will need themselves. Of course, given the tendency that a lot of games incorporate minigames and other optional possibilities that guesstimate is rather inaccurate. There’s nothing wrong with that.

What is wrong is the tendency of artificially prolonging gameplay time via activities that the majority of players won’t find enjoyable. Often these activities feel a bit disconnected from the main gameplay and/or the plot. Some of you might argue that this is the way that subscription based games ¹ make their money. Artificially prolonging gameplay time may not be a nice tactic, but for this kind of service it’s the standard business tactic.

So, what I’m trying to say is that the artificial prolonging of gameplay time is indeed detrimental to a single player game. The more story driven it is the more this rule applies.

If you need proof for yourself you can check out Mass Effect 2 (ME2) and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (ACR). Both of those fall horribly into this trap.

ME2 has the minigame in which you are mining for minerals via launching probes onto various planets (read: pressing one button over and over again) and scanning planets for the minerals (read: moving an infuriatingly slow target reticle with the analog sticks or the mouse). Sure, the minigame isn’t necessary to advance the story, but you’ll need the upgrades for weapons, etc. in order not to die.

ACR has even two of those atrocious flaws.

The first is called “Den Defense”. It’s basically a built in tower defense minigame that does nothing in terms of plot nor is it particularly good in terms of equipment or monetary revenue. Add to that the fact that the camera angle is a pain in the arse and you have something you will want to avoid at all costs – since losing one of those minigames has annoying consequences. Furtunately Ubisoft gives you an option to avoid those nearly entirely, making them pointless in the process, as Yathzee pointed out. ²

The second flaw is “Desmond’s Journey”. Aside from the fact that this must be Ubisoft’s try to breath some personality and background into one of the most generic, bland and plain boring characters in recent gaming history the first person puzzle game sequences suck. They are counterintuitive, frustrating and incredibly clunky when compared to the main gameplay. Given that they proved to be almost unanimously hated on the Internet I’m still amazed that Ubi thought it a good idea to release additional content which prominently features the game’s worst mechanic.

Now, I don’t say that minigames shouldn’t be done. Rather, my point is that the developer should have a clear focus of what makes the game great and how the minigames relate to that as well as how to advertise the distracting content ingame. Be aware of your strengths and don’t let the unimportant things take more time away than necessary from the core gameplay experience.

Update: Typo correction in title

That’s not to say that I won’t enjoy playing a game with friends every once in a while – I do. But the more heavy on story a game is the less I’m going to enjoy playing it with friends. I’ll give you an example.

I bought Borderlands on STEAM when it was discounted from 35€ to 7,5€. I did so to play together with Ron and Manuel. Aside from the fact that that was maybe even half a year ago and I still have yet to play with the latter, I’ve completed the story once with Ron, as well as two of four DLC packs. Now did I enjoy the time? Yes and no.

Yes, because it was nice having backup in tense situations, having someone to talk to while fighting through all those hordes of enemies and sharing some of the best moments of Borderlands is an experience that shouldn’t be missed.

No, because I have a hard time waiting for my friend to finish shopping. Or re-equipping or changing his style of play – which he does far more often than I do. I’m pretty much a constant gameplay wise. I’ll choose a style that fits what I want my character to be and stick with it for the game. I particularly hate the discussions that come up when changing areas.

Are you finished yet?
No.
Why not?
Because I’m not sure which weapon to take.
Again?

Aside from me losing my patience from time to time, it was a good time. I’m also rather sure that I have my own weaknesses that I’m not aware of right now.

The bigger thing that is happening in my brain is an internal argument wether I do really enjoy this. I’m very much a Single Player person who’s sole argument for playing a game often is the story and not the gameplay. However, for such a story to have an emotional effect on you, you need to live, or at least feel the story. You have to be immersed in the fictional world presented to you. That immersion is lost when you’re on Teamspeak, Skype, Mumble (name your poison) due to the fact that the other person is generally not willing to roleplay. To cut a long story short: Someone yelling “LOL” into your ear during cutscenes may very well screw up the experience for you, depending on your own playstyle and your bullshit tollerance.

And finally: Stop messing with my targets while I’m aiming. I hate it when its weak points move due to you shooting with a rapid firing weapon.