Jack Arnott writes for Eurogamer in the Football Manager 2016 review:

Anything beyond that, though, and, once again, I'm stumped. It won't tell you whether you've lost because you were closing down too much, or too little. Or because your defensive line was too high, or too low. Would Prozone analysis have helped me tame those pesky Shrews? Not without a hireable in-game performance analyst. This is no panacea for those, like me, who crave some FM feedback.

[...]

Despite a couple of neat additions, Football Manager 2016 is an iterative release that's sadly short on big new ideas.

None of this directly applies to this review or the quality of the game but is a bit more generalist rambling on my part -- I feel SI is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
It's difficult to make a game that is seen as holding realism above all other values and then see it being criticsed for lack of feedback.

The hypothetical version that sorts this out would be surely used by all real world managers as this gives them the winning formula for winning their own leagues! The marketing of FM being used by real world managers only strangthens this conflicted ideal in my mind.

With all features already in the game the developer might be making enourmous investments now to advance the simulation just that little bit, unable to make great leaps as there is no great leap to make.

I used to think that making Football Manager light was the solution to create a more playable game but as people expect "all of the realism with less options" I don't think that is ever going to work either.

As long as it keeps selling though they would be silly to overhaul it, as it would alienate the existing fanbase.

I'm hoping there will sometime be an approximation of the FM lineage but with fun and passion as the core values under a different name, perhaps with fantasy clubs and players, silly things happening, no numbers and passion for the athmosphere of football.

#games

If your website has mod_rewrite enabled but the URL's generated by SilverStripe still contain 'index.php' then SilverStripe is unable to detect mod_rewrite. Adding the following line to /mysite/_config.php will address the issue (Thanks DsX):

Director::setBaseURL('/'); // fixed index.php in the URL's

#aside #silverstripe

I was suffering from lack of concentration later in the workday, until I stumbled upon the Pomodoro focusing technique. I've been a lot more productive and in a better mood since I started using this two weeks ago:

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The technique uses a timer to break down work into intervals traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. These intervals are known as "pomodori", the plural of the Italian word pomodoro for "tomato".

The method is based on the idea that frequent breaks can improve mental agility.

I created an AutoHotkey script that uses timers and a global hot-key I set for WinAmp to automatically stop and start the music after instructing me to work / have a break. It works really well for me.

#link #projects

From 2007, but a great video full of advice, and a fantastic example of pechakucha 20x20 presentation style.

#life #link

Steve Gibson pointed me to a guide to setting your desired privacy level in Windows 10. This version of Microsoft's operating system follows the 'always socially connected' footsteps of smartphones and therefore makes privacy assumptions. Using this guide you can check if they match your expectations.

#link #windows

This morning I integrated our PowerShell processes into FogBugz by writing a small module that submits occurrences of all errors to BugzScout. You might want to do something similar so I did this write-up.

Broadly it works similar to BugzScoutLogWriter that I developed previously for integration with SilverStripe CMS. In this case however, we need to do the following things:

1. Set the script to stop on all errors so they can be trapped instead of ending the execution of the script.
2. Capture the error details and submit them to FogBugz
3. Have an error occur. ;)

I've published the code in a Gist for you a have a look. I include the function in every script I use.

#powershell

Hide Trackbacks is a WordPress plugin that hides pingbacks and trackbacks from your website comments.

I've updated the plugin to indicate it works correctly with WordPress 4.2.

#hidetrackbacks #link #wordpress

In your datamodel you might have a Enum field such as this date-based dropdown:

public static $db = array(
    "Year"        => "Enum('2013, 2014, 2015')"
}

Internally, SilverStripe stores the index, so that when you retrieve the value in methods such as onBeforeWrite, instead of 2013 you will receive 1. Use the function below to retrieve the label of the Enum:

public function EnumLabel($field_name) {
    $enumValues = $this->dbObject($field_name)->enumValues();
    $label    = $enumValues[$this->$field_name];
    return $label;
}

// $year = $this->EnumLabel('Year');

#aside #silverstripe

When adding a filter on a DataList sometimes you need to do a <= rather than a <. Unfortunately the LessThanOrEqual and GreatherThanOrEqual search filters do not exist in SilverStripe 3.0.x, they were added in 3.1.

Therefore we have to write our own where clause like the following example:

// Return all the sessions on or before the $date
$sessions = new DataList('AcademicSession');
$sessions = $sessions->where('"SessionStartDate" <= \'' . $date . '\'');

#aside #silverstripe

Apple blogger John Gruber started off a new debate about these issues recently, when he noted that a 537-word text post on the website iMore.com weighed in at 14 megabytes. (Fourteen megabytes of text should correspond to about 7m words, or about 10 times the combined length of the Old and New Testaments.)

Gruber blamed iMore.com, but really it’s not the website’s fault, since to a very large degree the owner of the website you’re visiting doesn’t actually control what you see, when you see it, how you see it, or even whether you see it. Instead, there are dozens of links in the advertising-technology chain, and every single one of them is optimising for financial value, rather than low-bandwidth user experience. Many pages, if you’re on a slow connection, simply time out; they never load at all.

When you are a website owner, you are responsible for all the content on your site. If you don't have any control over the ads, then that's a process issue that should be addressed.

Why not band together with a few large sites and create a standardised ad submission and review system that advertisers can integrate into their content tools and websites can set criteria about ads on their sites.

Maybe the bigger problem is that those websites cannot afford to reject ads.

#link #web