It sounds petty – hell, it is petty – but the anti-piracy warnings that seem to come standard on all DVDs seriously annoy me. These things can’t be skipped with the “fast forward” or “next scene” functions so I’m forced to be reminded every time I watch a movie that I didn’t actually copy it… presumably if I had copied it, those warnings could have been edited out.

This has been a feature of the PC gaming industry for some time as well. To combat the problem of piracy, game makers started requiring CD keys, or that CDs be left in the drive at all times, or in some extreme cases advanced solutions are implemented which makes things harder for crackers but much worse for legitimate users. Regardless of all this, the games eventually get cracked anyway and the pirates get their game; maybe they just had to wait an extra couple of weeks.

Anyway, the point of this – and this applies to the music industry as well as DVDs and games – is that it sucks to pay for something and then be treated as a potential thief. I recently picked up Galactic Civilizations II (currently $29.95 by the way, awesome deal for a great game) and it’s quite a breath of fresh air. I’ve installed it on my desktop PC and my laptop and I can fire the game up on either completely disc-free. This is how it is supposed to be. The developer even lists this as a feature on its official site:

• “No CD copy protection. Once you install, you never need your CD again. You can even use the included serial # to re-download the entire game from us years from now.”

Brilliant.

As it turns out the blog theme I was using wasn’t compatible with the latest version of WordPress, which I upgraded this site to last night. I spent half an hour or so looking around for a good theme but there’s a real lack; it seems that most wannabe theme creators are only in it for the resulting Google traffic as most themes are seriously poor, even those from “designers” who publish a dozen themes on their own dedicated site.

Then I stumbled upon this one which is a decent blend of colour and simplicity. I’ve simplified it further for my cause and plan to tweak it a bit more still.

It’s the winner until I happen to see something better!

Hi there. You may want to make a coffee; this post went longer than originally planned.

My name is Matt and you might remember me from such Internet hotspots as Gameplanet Store, Gameplanet Forums and, well, Gameplanet. You might be noticing a bias, but I like to think that what I lack in variety I make up for in commitment and on that note I am proud to have been associated with these companies in some capacity for around eight years.

Professionally, I’m a self-taught* PHP programmer, systems admin and general I.T. response team working in a LAMP environment full-time for Gameplanet Store. In my career so far I’ve never dealt with anything else, and at time of writing I’m yet to see a strong reason to change; LAMP quite simply gets the job done and gets it done at the best price possible.

That said, I have on occasion dabbled with C++ and Java, but without having genuine projects to hold my interest my experience in “real” languages remains limited. My desire to explore the rest of the programming world is low because, along with time constraints(!), I find the Web to be an interesting medium. Off the top of my head there is a couple of key reasons for this:

Firstly, getting everything working isn’t enough; even a normally lightning-fast site can be brought to its knees by a sudden influx of traffic. It is at this point that technologies such as load balancing, caching, expensive and sometimes complicated server arrangements and not-normalized – but very efficient – database trickery begin to show their true worth and the fact that our business needs to evolve technically as it grows – as do I – keeps me on my toes.

Secondly, the always-evolving nature of the Web makes us as an online-only e-commerce business terrified to sit still for long periods and so we continue to search for new ideas, tweak existing code, modify what used to be well-established pages and, on occasion, rewrite huge blocks of code entirely – sometimes, frustratingly, at no difference to the end user – and, other times, more obviously. (More on the latter in posts to come.)

Away from work I try to find (make?) time for a variety of interests including video games – at present I’m an Xbox 360 man – and, to a degree, athletic pursuits – currently consisting quite unimaginatively of weights and running. I spent most of my years at high school playing basketball instead of studying, and apparently developed a passion for fitness along the way. I am also attempting to learn to play the guitar; just don’t ask me to play you anything.

* For the record, I genuinely mean this in the conventional sense that I am not University educated; to the handful of clever people who have answered my countless questions over the years (and continue to do so!) I thank you. To be able to learn from people who are smarter than me makes my job a lot easier!