The above is the screen that confronts you when you boot up the program MISSION.exe which is the main game executable, there is also another two exe’s BRIEF.exe and MISINDX.exe however I believe MISINDX to be something that BRIEF works with so its better to leave it alone. BRIEF.exe when run gives you a menu structure to browse through and read the background infomation on the games story and indepth instructions on how to play the game. The graphics of the game are ascii in nature much like Karel3 and other rogue games of the time but not to the same degree of quality, with this said the game does have a lot of playability and I distinctly remember playing it for hours as a child. The theme of Mission Mainframe is similar to that of The Wizard’s Castle however instead of a castle your in a corporate building taken over by a malfunctioning mainframe, the aim of the game is to blast through the building level by level until you find the mainframe and win the game. Each time you play the game is different, beyond simply being able to choose your intial character from commando, secret agent, detective and private eye and setting up traits by roll of dice; each new game randomly builds up the map so no two games are the same.

While I do have a soft spot for this game there are a few niggles which fixed, would have made it much better, for one the top down map becomes very similar between floors very quickly and while I know its more about imagination and gameplay than being told what things look like a bigger screen area like that in Karel3 would have been amazing. With that said the game has quite a few moments of greatness, especially with the amount of modification you can do to your character to better yourself within the game. A must play for those whom are into classic dos games, especially the early open source home brew section. I have made Mission Mainframe available to download below so more people can enjoy it as I have yet to find another working download location and I would hate for such a great game to be lost to time.

I have included everything in the download zip file that I found with my copy, the CHR files are save games and you can see the last time I played this was 1999 a good 10 years ago, I have left them in the zip so you can play with a working character. Feel free to comment below on the game or any others I should check out.

[download id="5" format="1"]

There is too much emphasis put on New Year celebrations however from watching the fireworks live on BBC News 24 all I can say is what an anti-climax. This years celebrations where half-arsed to put it plainly there did not appear to be much in the way of celebration and those who where seen on the cameras being interviewed just weren’t all that cheerfull. Even the presenter found it difficult to come up with anything to say while the fireworks went off making the effort too say how long it took for the scene to be set up on the London Eye. I don’t know why I expected any different maybe becase the 2007 celebrations where quite a bit more entertaining than five minutes of bangs and a half interested reporters mutterings.

Then again we are facing a huge economic crash people saw it coming a mile off like a giant super-tanker about to crash on a paradise island – something could have been done but people where too happy to over-indulge and further screw up what little was left of the financial system to do anything about it. The problem there was ignorance and greed by a few and unfortunately we all have to pay the price for it, Woolworths have died a tragic death and now many other high-street brands are disappearing leaving a lot of smaller towns and city’s without valuable sources of children’s toys and clothes (in the case of Woolworths disappearing from Sittingbourne) or other commodities which people in such situations are having to more and more source from the internet – if they first have access to it and second knowledge to use it within that context. The economic crash isn’t just worrying because of the loss of big high street brands from rural high streets there is the loss of jobs which come as a result of it and the social unrest as a result of that. On top of all this there are the students to worry about, as with the banks tightening their belts students are less likely to be given credit thus student accounts and large interest free overdrafts dissapearing the scene leaving many British students with the conundrum of finding a job, keeping that job and working full-time/part-time to just keep afloat.

With a huge economic crash comes the recent problems in the Middle East with Israel attacking the Gaza Strip and causing world wide outrage not to mention the huge humanitarian crisis in the Strip which is worsening by the hour. It is hard to ignore that while both sides are attempting to utilize the worlds media to gain positive propaganda – both sides are in the wrong and have undertaken in unethical practices which need to be addressed.

So it most definitely is not a “happy” new year, it is a 2009 for what that is worth and it has for the most part not started well. All I can hope for is that the banking crisis gets sorted out and politicians stop pretending to be economists, students get recognised for the valuable resource that they are, Obama does some amazing things within his first 100 days as Americas first leader in a long time and that Israel begins to understand the serious implications its actions have and to that point all I have to say is I hope you had a nice new year; mine was.

Many in the green scene believe quite rightly in most cases that the words eco friendly and motor vehicle can not be married in the same sentence unless that particular mode of transport uses renewal’s such as fuel cells or electricity. However in our world of rising fuel costs and a more environment conscious society the car manufacturers have begun to, albeit slowly, bring about more and more environmentally friendly cars that are also light on the consumers pockets when it comes to fuel costs. The most environmentally friendly of these – the number one best eco friendly car in my eyes, is the Volkswagen Polo Blue Motion. This car is powered by a 1.4litre diesel engine however it manages to travel almost double the distance on one gallon of diesel than a 2008 edition of the 1litre petrol powered Vauxhal Corsa (the latest edition of my current car) in addition to this when you use the higher octane diesel that the engine is better designed to burn you’re offered an amazing 88.3mpg performance which many will agree is a figure worth noting when looking for a new car.

On top of the cars amazing performance when it comes to fuel economy, its emissions are below 100g/km for Carbon Dioxide and below 0.2g/km for Carbon Monoxide the two key global warming emissions from motor transport, this not only gives the driver an (admittedly snobbish) knowledge that they are harming the environment less than their fellow drivers they also are exempt from paying road tax as their vehicle falls into the governments VED band of A while most other cars fall into band C paying £120/year for road tax.

This tax break thanks to its low emissions and the typical cost of just £683 per 12,000 miles thanks to its fuel economy should make this car an interesting investment for any new car buyer who is both environment conscious and on a budget. It also looks really nice not only externally but internally too (click image for enlarged view).

However there are as with everything a couple of downsides worth noting, its 0-60mph performance is not too nippy at just over 12 seconds also you loose the air conditioning, electric mirrors and remote central locking. These have all been lost to reduce weight and thus make the car more economic, however given the choice between this car and one similarly priced with 60mpg performance and all the luxury add ons I can see people making the later choice just for the convenience. Priced at around £12,000 the Bluemotion is in the similar price band to these other choices however for me the saving of £120 a year in road tax and the fuel economy saving hundreds more makes it almost worth the price.

The Volkswagen Polo Blue Motion is a good first step by a car manufactur into the low emmissions, high efficiency vehicle market and while I am not in a financial position to buy one now in a couple of years down the road it will be first on my list of cars to look into and I can only foresee it getting even better by then.

Edit: Just a quick note this post on a car forum has stated that the car will have a 45litre tank giving it a theoretical range of 710miles. Across the road from me shell are selling diesel at £1.229 (29/11/08) so to run the car for 710miles it just costs £55 (Possibly £60 as that’s the price for normal diesel), a huge improvement on my 51 reg Vauhal Corsa which does an average of 400 miles on the same tank of petrol.

• Car Efficiency and Economy figures sourced from the ETA website,
• Further details where sourced from an auto express review,
• Images sourced from driveline blog found via google images.

An interesting thing to note however is that ping latency usually, even when it appears that the connection is being restricted, often never reach higher than 80ms. Also while the download speed, which should be around 3Mbit (on an 8Mbit connection almost three miles from the exchange) drops to the 56k speeds its been doing recently, the upstream rate has stayed at a constant 550Kbit (See graph above). If there where a fault on the line or as several people have stated too much strain on the copper wire I would be seeing correlation between the upstream and the downstream, something that the above graph obviously shows as not happening. Please note that the spikes in speed are from tests ran during early morning 1am to 6am, speed tests where ran using the thinkbroadband.com speed test tool.

As I write this the connection speed appears to be ok and I’m getting a constant 3Mbit connection at the moment, if you google for any broadband package your bound to find some chaff in with the wheat and it could just be that eclipse had a bad few days. However I shall continue to monitor the connection and post a further update is one is needed.

Don’t go anywhere near Eclipse if you ever want to download. Doesn’t matter if you have the top end unlimited package. Eclipse throttle ALL downloads. – Vambo

At 3am I can get a good 375kbs but at any normal time of the day I’m lucky to get around 50kbs. avoid them like the plague. – Not a Happy Man

Internet access is a total lottery and download speeds are pathetic. – Gabby

They still can’t get their act together to send an accurate final bill. I do not recommend Eclipse Internet Broadband. Ever. - Afmspace

Phoned their IT department to try and sort out the problems and in my opinion they were useless. - mdyches

Even though an unlimited, 8MB connection is promised, I continuously find it hard to reach a speed of 512kb - chimp14uk

So it appears i’m not alone, a large collection of bad reviews all documenting similar problems of poor service and terrible support. Unfortunately the broadband is paid for by parents as i’m staying at theirs for the summer and there is nothing I can do other than weather it out as they appear to be quite happy with it even with mine and my sisters complaints. While at university I have used ask4 and virgin broadband, both delivered me full 20Mbit broadband with no problems, we had one disruption with the virgin broadband and within a couple of hours of our call it was fixed I hate to imagine how long its taken eclipse to fix outages proof of their slowness is just a google away. Anyway less of the ranting, i’m off to look for an effective broadband package for going back to uni and possibly my own mobile broadband package for when at home.

As far as work goes I am happily plodding on with university projects. I have my final project to get done which is the front end of an online shop it has proven to be the biggest design job I have ever undertaken and as it is a major part of my degree I am excited that the amount of work I have done for it will be rewarded with a high grade. You wouldn’t believe the amount of paper work I have done for this thing! Other than that I have two papers to write, on on the status of television and another on how we have become a culture of fear dominated by a government manipulating that fear to its own ends for “our own good”. It is an issue I have a great deal of knowledge in and if you can talk for hours about a subject then writing an essay on it is going to be second nature.

Anyways I thought I owed people a little update on happenings, bbs.

After leaving my parents and spending a couple of days in Cardiff with Judy staying over at Helen’s with a bunch of other people I am finally back in Coventry but it seems a little empty all of a sudden. While at Helen’s she showed us all this pen she had found which is absolutely fantastic to draw with. It reminds me of traditional Japanese ink work however instead of using Indian ink and a brush it’s all contained within this pen. A lot of people there instantly wanted one but it seems the company producing them doesn’t sell outside of Japan. I hope Helen gets enough interest locally to warrant a bulk order so we can have some over here.

I like all my content to be based in one location and that location is photogabble, this is why I don’t use flickr or any other sort of community thing to publish my work through (other than deviantart). As you can guess this also means that although I really like being part of the tumblr community, I’d rather not have my content be just there and syndicated on photogabble. Instead I have opted for creating a new category called tumblrs on here and syndicated that feed on tumblr a feature which upon realising, I was very pleased and impressed with. However there are two problems with tumblrs’ feeds both with production and syndication. Impressively it can import any RSS feed you give it with the following fixed settings: Import as links, links with description, text without titles or photos. Initially I can see one distinct problem with that listing, the lack of importing text with titles however I looked beyond this and tried it out. This is where I hit a snag, one would expect that if you asked tumblr to import text without titles then it would import everything from the <content:encoded> tag and ignore the rest. Retrospectively upon selecting to import as links with description I would expect it to import the <title> and <description> tags, I suppose in that case it probably is what happens however my biggest problem with tumblrs syndication is that when I choose import text without titles it doesn’t collect from the content tag, rather choosing to stick with the description tag which makes absolutely no sense at all because the description is truncated at a certain word length and with no link back to the original all I’m going to get on my tumblr is a bunch of half posts with no link to source.

You may well realise that this is a huge problem and one which should be remedied, however my second problem with tumblrs’ feeds is with the production as they just don’t validate and make it very difficult for me to write a script plugin for wordpress so I can import all my tumblrs from tumblr and place them in my tumblrs category here, a method which would give me greater control over my content even though it would mean having to publish from the tumblr dashboard rather than all (blog and tumblrs) from the wordpress dashboard.

Lastly I believe my love affair with tumblr could become solidified if the ability to import text with titles was introduced and this bug of importing descriptions rather than content where to be fixed. Other than that it is an amazing service with a awesome user base to which I have no further disagreements with.