The Herald has published an article this morning talking about the early findings of a Auckland University study designed to measure the metabolic rate of children aged 14-16 playing EyeToy, versus other children engaging in jogging, cycling, soccer or cricket.

You might think that as a gamer I would encourage research that might prove that playing games can be as good for your body as exercise. Well… not so much. It all sounds pointless to me.

Aside from the questionable results presented in this first report - amongst other claims they list jogging and cricket as if they yield the same results - what exactly is the study meant to prove? Some games let you move around, and moving around expends energy? No kidding!

The key thing the researchers are forgetting is that fat kids probably aren’t likely to play an energetic game in the first place.

Why is it that some days it feels like 90% of your time is taken up doing 5% of the work? An issue in the form of Apache not doing what I wanted it to do arose over the weekend while I worked on New Site - few hours lost there - and now a glitch with the workaround implemented today has so far amounted to an hour or so of extra work in the form of troubleshooting and repair.

The fortunate thing about working on a new project is that you can make mistakes; the unfortunate thing about working on a new project is that you can make mistakes.

Sigh.

/me gets back to work.

The NZ Herald is carrying a story today confirming that the Government will go ahead with its ban on the sale of spray cans to persons under the age of 18. Additionally, taggers (if caught) will be penalised more harshly than before with fines and community work.

Whilst I welcome the initiative, I’m not convinced. Heavier penalties are all well and good but the chances of a tagger getting caught in the act are unlikely to improve and that means tagging will remain a relatively risk-free crime.

Criminals over 18 I expect will be welcoming the news - it should give them a nice new source of revenue.

One of the new front-end features I’m most excited about with our new site is the ability to browse categories by “brand”. What this basically means is that you will be able to filter a category down by some of its most prominent franchises or characters. As an example, if you were looking at the PlayStation 2 home page you might see the following brands:

• Buzz!
• SingStar
• Final Fantasy
• Need for Speed

I’ve named our top four PS2 brands by product count in this example, but there are loads more and I’m really quite excited about the potential that this feature has for our existing product ranges as well as the new ones that we plan to introduce when New Site goes live. In all honesty, gaming isn’t the best example, but hopefully you’ll share my enthusiasm once everything is done and you can see the results.

On the technical side of things, the brands concept is a shift from the way we’ve done this sort of thing previously. I won’t go into great detail, but with Gameplanet Store we have an enormous category tree which contains top level categories like DVDs, Games and Music and, below each of those, things like DVDs > TV Series or Games > PlayStation > Action. Then, if we wanted to make a special page for, say, “Final Fantasy Games”, we would add a new invisible category, add each item to the new category, and pull the results based on that criteria.

With New Site, we plan on consolidating the category tree so that it’s reserved for real categories (genres, if you prefer), and then building tricky pages by the use of branding as well as a couple of other new backend categorizing tools we’re developing. A comparison:

Gameplanet Store:

Category = DVDs > TV Series > Comedy > The Simpsons

New Site:

Category = DVDs > TV Series > Comedy
Brand = The Simpsons

Because the branding is not tied to the category, we will also be able to show you category-unspecific pages so that you can see The Simpsons Game, The Simpsons Movie and The Simpsons Sing the Blues all from the one section.

This may seem like a subtle change on the surface but it will give us back-end flexibility with our content management and, most importantly, it will give you more browsing options so that you can better find what you’re looking for.

UK techie site Techworld recently published a story sporting the headline “Encryption could make you more vulnerable, warn experts”. Whilst being attention-grabbing enough to warrant a read by any security conscious programmer, I have to say that the story inspires more fear than it should.

In a nutshell, the article claims that encrypting data has the potential to wreak havoc on a business in the event that a decryption key is lost, forgotten or, worst yet, stolen and held for ransom. Gosh. Scary. These may be valid points, but what the article doesn’t go into is that these problems are not a result of using encryption; they are a result of having a badly designed or insecure system in the first place.

A poster to a Slashdot discussion on the subject sarcastically compared the logic to things like door locks and deadbolts - basically, it’s all well and good when it works; but what if you lock yourself out? Then, quite clearly, you’re screwed, right?… but, perhaps, if you’d done some research before you started and figured out how the system worked, you wouldn’t have let it happen. I believe the same thing applies to encryption, and Techworld’s article certainly hasn’t discouraged me from protecting sensitive data.