October 2009 Archives

World of Goo recently had a well-publicised Radiohead-type “Pay what you want for the game” sale (here’s a summary). Cleodhna had downloaded it, so I decided to grab it and give it a go in a brief lull at work.

I played it for a bit, then quit - to discover that all of my windows on my main screen had been squashed and/or moved.

I have 8 virtual desktops (what Apple calls Spaces), and this machine was last rebooted a fortnight ago. That’s a lot of windows.

The basic problem appears to be this: World of Goo changes the screen resolution to something smaller, and switches to full-screen mode, but doesn’t do this in the right order, or misses out some other switch or API call. So Mac OS thinks it’s like you decided to change the screen resolution permanently, and goes through every window that doesn’t fit on the screen and resizes it.

Those many, many 80x40 Terminal windows? Resized to something like 80x30. Safari windows taking up most of the screen? They’re now shrunk down to half depth. A bunch of page scans open to pretty much full-screen, carefully positioned next to each other so I could flick from one page to another by clicking on the next available window? Again, cut to half size.

This is a basic issue of programming games on Mac OS X. Many, many other games get it right. There’s no excuse to botch something as fundamental as this.

World of Goo is now permanently gone from my machine.

Your only defence, in situations like this, is to be concave, so the sharks can’t find anything sticking out to bite (something I know thanks to Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach). Given that sharks also need to travel forwards constantly or they’ll suffocate, this suggests that sharks would be a rubbish enemy for Katamari Damacy.

I really want to believe in local government. I really do. Then I read stuff like this.

Says The Guardian:

Overall, local government spends 18% of council tax revenue on dealing with rubbish, but that masks a lot of variation between regions and councils. The English district councils spend 32% of their council tax take on waste, while Aylesbury Vale in Buckinghamshire spends 36%, Cambridge City Council 43% and Berwick-on-Tweed 37%. […] The UK currently landfills 57% of its waste, recycles 34% and incinerates the rest. Landfill is expensive, almost full and contributes to climate change. The landfill tax paid by councils to central government is currently £40 per tonne of waste, rising to £48 in 2010, and the methane emissions from organic waste breaking down in landfill account for 3% of the total UK greenhouse gas emissions. […] A spokesperson for the [Local Government Association] added that councils would prefer to keep the money they pay to the Treasury in landfill tax and spend it on better recycling services.

Of course they would, but that ignores the fact that this is the Government’s chosen policy. The fact that there is such a high (and rising) tax on landfill is deliberate. It’s to make the cost advantage of recycling, incinerating, or otherwise doing something other than burying household waste greater. Asking for a policy to be rescinded because you haven’t found a way of taking advantage of it is petty, weak, and deserving of contempt.

It’s like complaining that you can’t afford to pay more money to buy cigarettes, but if your local corner shop dropped their prices, you’d so totally spend that saved money on patches.

My mate Jamie, when running a game for us, would dole out experience points at the end of a session and ask if anyone had any reason for getting any extra. The more self-serving justifications he’d rebut with “that’s its own reward”. In circumstances where an island nation can no longer afford to wastefully bury what could more efficiently be re-used or turned into energy, complaining that, despite Government-led distortions of the market, you cannot find a way to accomplish what policy has made artificially cheaper, well, that should be a matter for all to despair. To decide that the solution to your inadequacies is to pay PR flacks for a random trade body, well, it fills me with no great confidence.

Also? I want to believe in journalism. But on checking the figures for Glasgow City Council, I find that I cannot.

I downloaded the latest financial statement from glasgow.gov.uk, which detailed expenditures of £16m for refuse collection, and £16m for street cleansing. Now, total income from government grants and local taxation was £1.393bn, which makes the amount of money spent on waste etc. look laughable. Confused, I double-checked the document, and then realised that only £168m of revenues was council tax, which made waste expenditure a far more expected ratio of 19%.

OK, so the Guardian’s story sounds like it makes sense. Except that the whole point of the landfill expenditure divided by council tax revenues metric is wrong. It implies that councils are only funded by council tax, which is clearly not the case (council tax is the third lowest of the 8 revenue sources listed by Glasgow City Council, of which “Rents (after rebates)” is lower by an order of magnitude than any other revenue source). So the metric of expenditure on x vs revenue on y is artificial, lazy, and misleading.

I despair again.

So now that the Lisbon treaty has passed a second referendum in Ireland, the Tories are looking for way to have a referendum anyway:

Senior Conservative sources say that Cameron will abandon a referendum on Lisbon if the measure enters EU law because he had accepted that it would be virtually impossible to unpick the main institutional EU changes in the Lisbon treaty. These are the new president of the European council, a new “high representative” for foreign affairs and greater powers for the European parliament.

One well placed Tory said: “There is virtually no hope of changing the main institutional architecture of the EU once Lisbon enters into force. If the treaty enters EU law you will find that a Conservative government will want to focus on repatriating powers that affect the UK. This is not going soft. If other EU leaders say they will not accommodate us, then we have the threat of a referendum on our reforms.”

So: the Tories want to change parts of the treaty, and that will require all 27 EU members to agree. If they don’t, they’ll hold a referendum in the UK. But so what? How will that do anything other than saying “Look, our citizens agree with us” (if they win the referendum)?

The sad (for the Tories) fact is that the UK has ratified the Lisbon treaty, and there’s no going back on it. Saying “we’ll have a referendum anyway” is childish and nonsensical, and as such is tailor-made to appeal to the Conservative base.

I read today that

David Cameron today announced he would impose a £25-a-week benefit cut on as many as 500,000 incapacity benefit claimants to fund a £600m back-to-work programme.

[…]

The “tough and tender” approach was being signalled by the Tories to show the party was willing to address the victims of the recession by offering extra apprenticeships and training and by modernising welfare.

The Conservatives claimed that medical assessments designed to test whether incapacity benefit claimants are fit to work will lead, on the basis of government research, to at least 500,000 current claimants being shown to be capable of working.

Labour say that they’re doing some of this already, and that there just aren’t the doctors etc. to fast-track all of this (and never mind that incapacity benefit has traditionally been used to park problem people so the dole figures look better). But that’s not what concerns me most.

The economy is currently in the shitter; nobody’s buying or selling much, house prices that were previously over-inflated are now coming back down to something approaching reality, companies are sitting tight and hoping that they’ll make it through without having to sack too many of their work force.

And David Cameron thinks the solution to all of this is to create more and cheaper labour for the employment market?

The policy appears to be two-pronged: 1) force people who could afford to live on incapacity, but not on jobseeker’s, into the employment market; and 2) try and train up existing long-term unemployed.

#2 will probably do as well as any such policies tend to do, which is to say somewhat, but not in a way that would startle the horses. (Assuming it only targets the long-term unemployed; there are plenty of people who have been laid off for no fault of their own, and will almost certainly be hired again once the economy takes off, and making them jump through hoops going to rubbish training courses is hateful and counter-productive.)

But #1 is either an act of class-based vindictiveness or a phenomenally bad understanding of the economy that asserts that, in a time of general bad times, what we really need is more competition at the bottom of the jobs market.

Actually, knowing the Tories, it could easily be both.