This is a call to everyone eligible reading this to make sure you use your vote today, in particular in the European elections. Due to the proportional representation system used and the fact they're mobilising their support effectively, there's a non-zero chance that some very nasty people might get some seats if the turnout is low. Doesn't matter who you vote for, so long as it's not them.

On the other hand, I was amused to learn that the flyer for the aforementioned nasty people featured a Polish Spitfire, American construction workers, Italian pensioners and an ex-Scots Guardsman who has since described the nasty people as "scumbags".

An experiment. This may or may not happen every day, and almost certainly won't happen at weekends.

1. Universities push for higher fees: is this just a play for more government funding?
2. Jubilation as march on Pakistani capital forces president to climb down over law chief: I'm not going to pretend to understand Pakistani politics
3. 2010 World Cup Qualifying Chances: England basically certain to qualify?
4. The Most Interesting Statement I Read Today: do big-money (baseball) teams really pay the same for skills as small-money teams?
5. Graduation rates of tourney's No. 1 seeds vary: ignoring the obviousness of the headline, shows up that "student athlete" means something very different at different universities.

Thanks mainly to Björn Giesler, Fuse now has a pretty functional Wii port, which is available from WiiBrew. When I compiled this, I couldn't find any particularly simple guide as to how to set things up to compile an Autotools application on the Wii, so I'm posting this in case anyone else needs it.

( Instructions )

As most people reading this probably know, I am the primary author of a Spectrum emulator. For much of the infrastructure supporting this, I use the facilities supplied by SourceForge, and in particular Subversion for source code management. Version 1.5 of Subversion introduced the new merge tracking facility. However, while SourceForge are running v1.5, a repository upgrade is required to use the merge tracking facility, and there is no indication in the SourceForge documentation as to whether the repositories have been upgraded and/or how to do this if they haven't (at least that I could find), and a non-trivial web search didn't reveal much either. However, a slightly drawn out Support Request with SourceForge revealed the answer:

1. Obtain a backup of your repository via rsync
2. svndump your repository
3. Reupload that dump file (this creates a new repository, which will be in the upgraded format necessary to support merge tracking)
4. Resync any hook scripts you were using from your project's Admin/Subversion page.

This seems a rather drawn out method to replace what could be done by one command on the server, but it does work, so...

If all that didn't make any sense to you, don't worry. I'm just posting it in case anyone else is trying to do this.

Aka "that's another right mess you've got us into". Two comments here:

• While the Football League is saying "the referee's decision is final", the FA managed to do better.
• Reading's Stephen Hunt is quoted as saying, "We can't do anything about it. It's not our mistake, but what can you do? You can't say 'no ref, it wasn't in'". Ummm.... yes, you can.

In English, the words for our planet ("Earth") and soil ("earth") have the same root. Is this true in other languages?

I wrote about the possibility of a crowdsourced Spectrum games app before. Well, I've now done it and give you Spectrum 2.0.

Contrast and compare: 2005 United States Grand Prix and 2008 Brickyard 400. One organisation manages to create a complete farce, the other something at least a little better.

With respect to the comments at end of this coverage of this story, one does have to wonder exactly what principles the esteemed Mr Gwynne thinks we should be basing the law of the land on, and whether he would suggest we return to trial by ordeal.

Maybe my natural cynicism was correct after all :-(

Behind the times here as I've been working out of the country...

• D&D 3e OGL: Chaotic Good
• D&D 4e GSL: Lawful Evil. Except we can't choose that anymore, so just plain Evil then :-)

D&D 4th edition is something which WotC's marketing department is trying to present as a radical departure from previous editions; from what we've seen so far, this may not be as far removed from the truth as a lot of marketing hype - it does seem like the designers started with an idea of what they wanted the game to be like, and took the elements of previous editions of D&D which fitted with that model, but dropped the ones which didn't, even if they were the "core mechanics", most notably Vancian spellcasting (having a fixed number of spells per day).

Now, I like the feel a lot of the metadesign which has gone into the game which I think can be summed up by the sentiment expressed in the multiclassing preview that there shouldn't be "bad choices hidden in the rules". There's obviously an implementation issue of getting that right in a system with the complexity of D&D, but that's "just" a matter of playtesting. However, the thing I'm not necessarily liking the feel of (and this is something which I haven't seen explicitly expressed anywhere, but something I think I'm picking up) is the move towards a less narrative style of game; D&D has always been on the edge of what I like on the scale of "abstracted mechanics for the sake of making a good game", and it seems to me that 4e is moving further in that direction, if nothing else because there's no other way to get the designer's desired "balance" between all the classes. Of course, another reason for this could be that it's easy to preview the game mechanics, but much more difficult to preview the fluff, so we're getting an unbalanced view of what 4e will be like.

(Partially inspired by this debate over at Critical Hits, but something I've been meaning to post for a while anyway)

Point. Counterpoint. That is all.

Back in "the day", Ocean published a large number of ZX Spectrum games. Just because I haven't seen it done before, here is a graph showing how the programmers of each game interconnect, with thanks to World of Spectrum from the data and graphviz for the layout.

Like many other liberals, I was somewhat disappointed with the West's response to Musharraf's declaration of a state of emergeny in Pakistan last year, but admit to being pleasantly surprised when first elections happened, and even more so when the elections appeared to be reasonably fair.

In the same vein, the situation in Zimbabwe has become pretty terrible over the past few years, with the Western powers showing little to any inclination to intervene in any significant way (although credit must be given to Gordon Brown for refusing to attend the EU-Africa summit in December due to Mugabe's presence). As such, I held little faith that the current Zimbabwean election would turn out to be anything other than a farce. However, the election results so far seem to show at least a degree of fairness, with the MDC gaining something close to a majority in parliament.

Of course, neither of these situations are really resolved yet: there hasn't been any form of showdown between Musharraf and Gilani in Pakistan, and the presidental election results in Zimbabwe are taking a while to appear, but it does seem that, at least to some extent, democracy has reasserted itself in both countries. Was I wrong to criticise the West's action in both cases, or were they doing the best they could in difficult situations?