In my opinion their last LP was seriously under-rated and this LP is even better. Mechanistic and limber, it’s fucking vicious. It’s got all your metal tropes, but is precise and emotive — a record of tightly controlled and clearly expressed rage.

I have to make mention of the production on this album; it’s fantastic. The drums in particular are excellently recorded and mixed. Rather than a low-end rumble of kick-drums, they’re mixed into the mid-range, which suits the fast and mechanical rolls across the toms, the punctuated kicks and blast-beats.

Agalloch - The Mantle

Many black metal bands have been open to traditional/folk influences and honestly, the results are usually complete shit. Agalloch have dodged that bullet here, by framing the integration of folk in acoustic-rock. Beautiful melodies and crisp guitar. It doesn’t have the form of black metal, but it certainly shares the spirit of much of it. Yearning and sorrow and loss.

I honestly didn’t expect to like this album so much, but it’s very good.

Menace Ruine - The Die is Cast

Traditional European music passed through the lens of black metal. Cold and bitter elegies smothered in distortion and pinned down by dim, cavernous blast-beats. It’s a bizarre but beautiful combination.

Mord - Christendom Perished

Basically these guys are fucking pissed off and hate everything. Not particularly innovative, but if you want some harsh and unremitting black metal, these dudes will sort you out.

This is complete bullshit. I’m strongly opposed to the idea and I think it’s a huge mistake. I won’t enumerate all the reasons why — I think that’s all going to be thrashed to death in the coming days — but I do have a number of specific objections that I want to highlight.

Firstly, this means removing choice and competition between Merb and Rails, which despite the occasional friction, I considered to be a good thing. It doesn’t benefit the Ruby community to shift back to one monolithic framework.

I choose to use Merb for practical and philosophical reasons — basically it’s smaller, faster and easier to grasp as a whole. The development process has also always seemed more transparent and open to contributions from outside the core developers. It was a real viable choice to Rails.

But, what’s most irritating about this decision is the secrecy. There is a community of Merb users and developers who weren’t given a chance to comment on or participate in the choice. Instead we get one secretive clique schmoozing up with another secretive clique. It’s damned rude.

The end result is that the term Merb Community has no meaning to them. They don’t give a shit. If you ever used Merb, pimped it to clients or other developers, bought a Merb book, made a plugin, paid for training or went to Merb Camp — you’re being treated like a sucker. They’ve just given you a kick in the balls and you’re being told you’re gonna love it.

I’m damned bitter. I hate the idea and am disgusted at the lack of transparency and condecention implied in the decision.

I now have no interest in Merb at all. They can go to hell.

EDIT: For a good explanation of the merge, read this post by Matt Aimonetti. I’ve since tempered my views a little — although I’m still against the merge in principle and hate the secrecy surrounding the choice — Matt has helped put things into perspective.

Check it out, bo!

A few mildly interesting things for you web-wonks out there. It validates as XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1, something this blog doesn’t do — blogging software makes that hard. It degrades nicely without CSS, since the mark-up is nice and semantic. It also behaves itself if Javascript is missing — the CSS accounts for the default state and then has a few tweaks when Javascript is available.

That’s an interesting trick — when the JS loads, it attaches a ‘javascript’ class to the body tag. We can then use decedent selectors in our CSS to supply JS specific styles. Degrades nicely.

In the future I think I might experiment with some pre-loading or at least a loading display to make the experience a little nicer.

Lastly, this will break in Internet Explorer 6 and has some issues in Internet Explorer 7. I am indifferent. I’ll fix ‘em, just not right now — in your face Microsoft!

Gears of War 2 [Xbox 360]

A sequel to the original… um of course. Not much to be said about this is you’ve played the first one. It’s still essentially the same game, but louder, bigger, more explodey. I really enjoyed playing this one. I still have some complaints about the combination of needing precise aiming and the twitchy controls, which can be frustrating at times, but all in all a blast to play.

Grand Theft Auto 4 [Xbox 360]

I honestly did not expect to like this game at all. I hadn’t played the previous ones and wasn’t taken in by the open aspects of the game. I don’t know if this is because GTA4 is an improvement or just because I was missing the point, but I finally got the appeal of GTA. It’s basically a bunch of mini-games with some open-ended car driving. GTA4 adds a genuinely interesting story-line — not without it’s flaws, but more than passable — and solid character development, which went a long way to keeping me playing.

Wario Land - The Shake Dimension AKA Wario Shake It [Xbox Wii]

A competent and solid platformer. Not terribly original, but extremely well made and beautiful to look at. All the sprites are cel-animated — not the clichéd 3D version, but actual hand-drawn animation — which look really awesome. I also really appreciate the fact that it has an extremely simple control-scheme — a nice change considering how complicated some games are.

Dead Space [Xbox 360]

OMG. This one caught me by surprise. I was aware of the game and understood it’s premise, but wasn’t really hooked on the idea of playing it. I was a bit cynical about the fact that it was EA producing it I guess. Well, looks like the company is finally serious about making something other than sequel-ware, because Dead Space rules.

Sci-fi Survival Horror. The protagonist is stuck on a malfunctioning space ship full of corpse-eating mutants. Nice! You get to patch up the ship and fight off said mutants. A really horrible/beautiful looking game, clever design, plenty of variety and at times genuinely scary.

The scares are mainly from being terrorised by freaky monsters, there is none of the creeping-horror that you might find in games like Silent Hill. Sometimes this works, sometimes it’s a little predictable, since you know that given a certain set-up — say supplies at the end of a hallway — monsters are gonna jump you. If you know it’s going to happen, it’s a bit harder to be scared by it. That said there is some genuine tension, largely due to the environments — the lighting effects are important and extremely well done.

Enjoying this one a lot.

Somehow I’ve found myself listening to more and more Black Metal. Like most forms of music, pretty much all of it is awful. For Black Metal it’s pretty obvious where things can go wrong; the awful production values, the temptation to just play the same riff for minutes on end, the blast-beats ticking over through every moment in the song, the at times ridiculous mythologising and ugh… the corpse-paint.

Just the same, when it’s good, it’s fucking awesome. Sometimes when it’s meant to be scary or oppressive, it really is. Sometimes it really does express the horror and sorrow of living. Sometimes it really does touch something inside your heart.

So here are some of my picks for awesome Black Metal and related releases. Admittedly some or most of these aren’t strictly BM according to your more boring fans and critics, but whatevs. At the very least BM is the axis they swing around.

Wolves in the Throne Room - Diadem of Twelve Stars

I put this release first because it’s my favourite. Much BM is weighted down by what I consider frippery — the stupid mythologies and uniforms. WITTM eschew most of that thankfully.

To be honest I find it a little difficult to articulate why I like this album, after all, there is so much that could have gone wrong with it. It has the dim screechy vocals, the operatic backing, the blast-beats thrumming away under everything. The difference here I think is that WITTR’s skill matches their intent. It is oppressive, it is sorrowful, all without being ridiculous.

Having some beautiful chord progressions and really epic breakdowns also helps. I really dig it. If you only listen to one album on this list, make it Diadem of Twelve Stars.

Queen of Borrowed Light

Wolves in the Throne Room - Two Hunters

Again with WITTR, they really are that good. Basically, what I said above. Seriously check these guys out.

Vastness and Sorrow

Krallice - Krallice

This is what happens when Prog and Black Metal collide — an explosion of awesome! This album basically takes the spazz-prog-metal of bands like Behold… The Arctopus and Oct and applies them to the BM format. The similarities aren’t surprising considering that Krallice shares members with the aforementioned bands. The resulting songs are built of complex and shifting guitar-lines. They stay true to the demands of the genre by repeating to the point where you think you’ll go nuts, then moving in a direction you hadn’t expected.

I honestly didn’t expect to like this one, since on first listen seems very dense and uniform. But since listening often means patience and adjusting your frame of reference, I gradually came around to it.

At it’s core this is actually a very taut and emotional album. The final song Forgiveness in Rot really seals the deal for me. Just beautiful stuff.

Live in some guy’s backyard… or something.

Sunn O))) - Black One

Well yes, I had to get a bloody Sunn O))) release in here somehow. FYI, the name is pronounced as just ‘Sun’. They’re a polarising band. Some people really love them and most people who’ve heard their stuff hate ‘em. It’s pretty easy to see why. Sunn O))) typically operate as a drone, doom, noise outfit. No drums, lots of low end, very very slow and typically sans vocals. Basically, you either like letting bass-noise fuck you over, or you’ll hate this stuff.

Personally I’m on the fence. I may come to like it, but right now I’m more curious. This particular release however, I do like. Strictly speaking this is not BM, but it does riff on the atmospherics, vocals and general aesthetics of BM. Basically it’s BM sans-drums, terribly slow. It’s also frankly scary shit.

Bathory Erzsebet

I’m an Expert, Let Me Get All Experty

In other words, don’t try to dumb everything down so that a theoretical every-man can use the system. That’s a lofty aim, but seriously unlikely to succeed. I’m not talking about the admin and administration interface, I’m referring to the bits that let you actually build the site — the templates, styles etc.

Plenty of systems expect you to do ridiculous things like edit templates inside a web interface. Bah! I have a text editor for that. Just expose the templates to me in the file system and let me hack them as I need.

Themes? Utterly stupid. No serious CMS should have anything like themes. They increase the complexity of the implementation for little benefit. Having to hack a theming engine because it’s doing something stupid or is otherwise inflexible is annoying.

Basically, if we assume that a CMS and accompanying templates/styles will be set-up by people who understand how websites work, we don’t need to try and get clever with the implementation.

Extending the System Should Not Mean Using a Narrow API

If you use a CMS for a lot of client work you will have them ask for custom functionality. This is inevitable, so it’s vital that you are able to extend the CMS without going insane.

This comes in a number of forms:

• Plugins for common components — image galleries, forums etc
• Custom, site-specific code
• Over-riding default behaviour in the CMS itself

Most CMSs attempt to solve this by implementing a plugin API. Initially this seems simple enough, but it has some draw-backs. Generally you are limited to what the API gives you.

As for modifying the code in the CMS proper; OMG ARE YOU CRAZY? If you’re reduced to hacking the CMS into a custom version, you will lose your shit at some point in the future. Firstly, you need to maintain those changes — think you can remember the modifications you made in someone else’s code-base all those months ago? Secondly, upgrading is going to kick your arse, because you’ll need to remerge your hacks, then make sure they work.

Let’s Make Yet Another CMS

So that’s all basically an introduction and justification for making another CMS. As part of my work at Freerange Future we’ve been developing a new system. I know, I know, every web-shop seems to go out and make it’s own CMS, but honestly, this is gonna be worth it.

It’s built on top of Merb, MIT licensed and implemented as a merb-slice, meaning we can easily over-ride it’s behaviour and still upgrade it without going nuts. I also t plays nice with your own code.

Most importantly in my opinion, it doesn’t assume you’re an idiot. It won’t hold your hand, instead it assumes you know enough Ruby to be dangerous, but can be trusted not to take an eye out with it.

It’s called Gluttonberg and it lives in a repository on Github. The README and Wiki go into a little more detail about the implementation and features we plan to build, so if you’re curious, please have a look.

It’s obviously still a work in progress so if you’re interested in contributing please just message me on GitHub (lukesutton) and I’ll give you commit access to the main repo, no questions asked.

With the power of Gluttonberg, it’s my hope that we can power-slam the entire internet.

So the first thing to note, is the the Class object actually has a #new method. This just creates a new class which you can then assign to a variable.

new_class = Class.new

A class isn’t so useful without methods, so you can pass a block to the new method which will act as the body for the class definition.

new_class = Class.new do
  def cry!
    "waaaagh!"
  end
end

new_class.new.cry! #=> "waaaagh!"

It’s a regular class so you can do everything you usually would — subclass, instantiate, mix-in modules etc. Still, it’s not very nice having a class reference inside a regular variable, what you really want is to stick it in a constant. Seems easy enough, but remember we’re talking about doing this at run-time, so the code you’re calling will be inside a method. You cannot assign values to a constant inside a method. Oops. Luckily there is a way around it.

An evil little method called Object#const_set. So, if we define a class like this:

class NeedsToBeMoreDynamic
  def self.make_a_class!
    const_set("NeedsToBeMoreDynamic::KaPow", Class.new)
  end
end

NeedsToBeMoreDynamic.make_a_class! #=> NeedsToBeMoreDynamic::KaPow

Right, that seems dead easy, but there is one caveat and it’s a big one, so be careful for $DEITY’s sake — #const_set will actually hijack an existing constant. That means if you’re not careful you’ll make things screwy. You can actually overwrite references to class definitions. That’s bad… obviously.

Don’t let that put you off though, this is definitely a handy technique to know.

So of course you would do all you can to both discourage piracy and encourage honest people to register your software. I have a lot of sympathy for the situation small software companies are in and I make a point of registering software I use. Sometimes though, I think developers just get it wrong.

Case in point, Omnigroup’s limitations for the Omnioutliner demo are stupid. It limits an outline to twenty items only. Bah! Nowhere near enough to seriously use it. You can toy with it, but you’ll never get the outline to the point where you want to use Omnioutliner’s clever features — the point where it can actually differentiate itself from the other outliners on the market. I would much prefer a full-featured, time-limited demo.

This dialog really put me off. I was happily poking away, then BAM, FAIL. It was unexpected and it annoyed me. So fuck it I say. I think I’ll buy a different outliner.

All releases are licensed using Creative Commons and are free to download.

I’m very proud to have the first release on the label, using my Rule of Three alias. So if you have ears and are willing, go and have a listen.

Ads for games. Wow. Watching these is like watching any other ad on television — pointless.

DS Demos… of old or frankly boring-sounding games — Sight Training? *Yawn*

The game catalogue is potentially interesting, since it could prove to be a good way to track upcoming stuff or otherwise find interesting games you might have missed previously.

It’s got no hope of doing that in it’s current form. For starters the catalogue is anemic. It only holds a small proportion of recent releases. Additionally, the actual information on each game is limited and very dry. Marketing copy, bullet list for number of players etc. No screenshots, no videos.

So much more could have been done with this. For example I would like to be able to flag an upcoming release and have new information about it sent to me periodically and a message when it’s finally been released. I forget game release dates sometimes, so that would be useful.

But typical Nintendo, anything outside of making games — which they do very well — tends to be under-cooked. The interface is lovely and it has a lot of potential, but as of now it’s a waste of time.