04.28.08

Boring Web Statistics

Posted in Uncategorized at 7:13 pm

So, friends might perhaps be amused to know what some of the highest-volume links to my site are.

One of the top hits on my site is Snails do it, to…, which features a frame from a scene in the excellent documentary, Microcosmos, which features two snails copulating. It apparently comes up on Google searches (especially image searches) on phrases like “snails”, “sex animation”, “sex movies”, “how to do sex” (I am not kidding!). I’ve even had a couple hits come in from searches on just “sex”.

Another popular destination is my setting of Mark Twain’s Cannibalism in the Cars, for which I’m right up around the top results in Google (I was the second link, when I just checked). I’m not sure if these people are largely Mark Twain fans, or it’s a popular school assignment, or what.

By far my most popular page from web searches, though (web searches as a whole make a fairly small portion of my traffic: most of my incoming traffic comes from non-search sites that link directly to me) is my post on the Best Pacman Strategy Guide. Which is a short paragraph that comes up #2 in Google searches for “pacman strategy”, and essentially links to Google’s #1 hit for that search. Go figure.

One page that used to get quite a few hits, but doesn’t any longer because I’ve added it to my robots file, which tells web spiders not to index the page for web searches, is this one. It’s a link to a harrowing tale of parents accused of child pornography over some very innocent family photos, taken during a camping trip. The brief paragraph describing the link apparently contained just the right words for my site to come up in web searches such as “naked children photos”… I’d just as soon my site not be found by such queries. Hell, maybe most of them come from diligent FBI workers and the like trying to sniff out the bad stuff, I don’t know. And I don’t care. I’m more than happy to lose that traffic…

(Originally, I wrote the above paragraph in such a way as to try to avoid invoking the same problem terms, so I wouldn’t end up with the same problem for this post, as I did the camping photos one. It then dawned on me, however, that talking about “snail sex” in the first paragraph and “children” in the last, pretty much guaranteed that problem anyway, so I’m resigned to just preemptively adding this post to my robots file before there’s a problem.)

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04.25.08

Jack Thompson Writes Take-Two’s Mom

Posted in Uncategorized at 11:47 am

So, Wired has a story on an email that Jack Thompson addressed to the mother of the chairman of Take-Two Interactive (Strauss Zelnick). Includes comparisons with Zelnick and “the Hitler Youth”, and scolds her for her failures to follow Biblical wisdoms like “train up the child the way he should go”, and sparing the rod, spoiling the child.

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04.24.08

Reflections on Wii

Posted in Video Games at 12:00 am

The Way Games Were Meant To Be Played

So, I’ve had my Wii now for over a month. I’ve had a chance to play several games, and feel like I’ve pretty much broken it in.

From the first moment that you play it, it’s very clear that the Nintendo Wii is something very special. It’s a completely new gaming experience. You play games in ways you’ve never played before, and everything feels just so surprisingly natural. Like, shouldn’t this be what playing games was always like?

Shooters, and games with shooter components to them, have you actually pointing at what you want to shoot, and pulling a trigger. Flying a spacecraft or feathered mount or what have you, consists of holding your remote sideways, and tilting it to be oriented just as you want your craft to be oriented. The same for the cow-racing game in WiiPlay: the whole game is controlled by the orientation of the remote: you never press a single button. Tilt the remote to the sides to turn the cow, tilt it forward and the cow puts her head down and runs faster, tilt it back and she slows. Jerk it upwards, and the cow will jump! It’s a very natural and fluid way to control things.

In Rayman: Raving Rabbids, one of the first challenges you face is cow-hurling, where you swing a cow around on a chain, letting go at just the right moment, to send the cow flying as far as possible. This is achieved by swinging the remote around in circles above your head. Another has you conking rabbits on the head as if with a hammer, by pointing at them with the remote with your right hand, and swinging the Nunchuk attachment down to conk them with your left.

The Wii is such a great way to play games, in fact, that I’m not sure I’d be able to enjoy games on the next “next generation” platforms, unless the Wii’s control paradigms have become an established part of how games are played on all systems. I’m not sure how likely that is, since I imagine Nintendo has patents up the wazoo for all this.

Games, Unworthy of Their Medium

Having said that, though, I’ve had a steadily growing sense of disappointment since I bought my Wii, and it shows no signs of abating. The problem is, that as terrific and amazing a gaming platform the Wii may be, I’ve yet to find any actual games that I can really sink my teeth into.

The games that I’ve enjoyed playing the very most so far, are WiiPlay, Raving Rabbids and WarioWare. and none of these are actually games so much as they are collections of minigames. That gives them tremendous freedom to really get down and explore the Wii control paradigms in fun, novel, and amazing ways; but you can’t very well play just minigames all the time.

Super Mario Galaxy is great. Super Paper Mario, Metroid Prime 3 and Zelda: The Twilight Princess are merely okay. What all of these have in common, though, is that they feel like their controls have been contrived to be Wii-like, rather than really “made with the Wii in mind.” Of course, in point of fact, some of them weren’t—Super Paper Mario and Zelda are both available for GameCube as well.

Sure, I may be swinging my sword/remote to make Zelda attack, but it doesn’t have the same direct immersion factor that, say, swinging your tennis racket in WiiSports has. Sure, Super Mario Galaxy may make heavy use of the “spin” move, which requires you to flick your remote, but no one can tell me they couldn’t just as easily have made that be a button press. There are levels and spots that take more direct advantage of the Wii controls, but they’re really not part of the core gameplay (despite all of that, Super Mario Galaxy is a gorgeous and fun game, and would be gorgeous and fun on any platform it was created on).

Similarly, the game No More Heroes, which features a protagonist with a friggin’ light saber, doesn’t have you actually swinging your remote around for most of the attacks: you press the “A” button. You do swing the remote for Fatality-style final blows, and swing the remote and nunchuk in unison to execute various wrestling throws, and the game play is, all in all, really great (if you completely ignore the incredibly boring and poorly done GTA-style gameplay of the intermissions between the actual fights). But it still feels like the Wii controls have been tacked on, rather than being a core part of the gameplay.

I picked up the brand-new release of Ōkami for Wii. I loved this game for PS2. It came out around the end of the PS2’s lifetime, though, when 360 had already been out, and everyone was talking about how great the Wii was going to be, and the question in everyone’s mind who played that game, I think, was why didn’t these guys wait and release this for Wii? It’s perfect for Wii! This is due to the fact that one of the core gameplay elements is the use of a “divine paintbrush”, where different strokes with the brush achieve various results. However, I’ve been disappointed to find that using the Wii to play Ōkami, has been less enjoyable so far than it had been on the PS2. It actaully feels harder to paint with the remote than it did to use the analog stick, which seems strange. I don’t think it’s that the Wii wasn’t as natural for it as we thought, but I suspect that the team that did the porting may have botched it a little: it feels like it could be more responsive than it is. And, the main attack is performed by flicking the remote, but somehow it seems not to register my flicks all the time; and even when it does, it doesn’t have the speed and agility that a simple button-press would have had.

I feel like the Wii is a terrific gaming platform that’s still looking for the right games, which is a real shame. This split between traditional-genre games which could really have been done on any platform, and these exotic and fun, but light minigame collections, makes me think that maybe Wii developers should be more adventurous in how they design the larger games. We live in an age when the accepted genres have long been established, nothing at all like the glorious 80s, when they were still trying to figure out just what the hell they were trying to make, anyway. Publishers perceive nowadays that any departure from the norm is a grave financial risk. But the Wii’s best bet, I think, will be in radically different, out-of-the-box game design. The minigames obviously recognize this, and maybe some of the better minigames could become springboards to larger, deeper games. But I think it’ll be a while.

Even Traditional Games, Finally Done Right

One thing that has struck me, though, about playing even “traditional” games on the Wii, is that even when you’re playing the sorts of games that could’ve been done on the GameCube or PS2, it still feels more natural on the Wii than it would elsewhere. As I already mentioned, Super Mario Galaxy isn’t, at it’s core, a “Wii game”: you’re still moving mario with an analog stick, and pressing buttons (or swinging the remote in a way that could easily be replaced by a button). But, when I’m playing it, my hands are sitting relaxed at my side, or on the legs of my lap: they’ve been freed. If I were playing this on any other system, my hands would be forced together, both grasping the same controller, less than inches apart. And forced into a position so that the thumbs are pointing toward me (to grasp the analog sticks).

But, since the Wii has split the control across two controller components, my left hand, while manipulating an analog stick and a couple trigger-like buttons, can still be laying with the back of the hand up, the thumb and analog stick resting on the side, in total comfort. The right hand, likewise, can be in pretty much any position I want it to be, since it’s not forced to share cramped space with the left. Hell, I can even just lay lazily on the couch, with my left hand laying on the floor, and still deftly manipulate my digital avatar in complete, as I lay in maximum comfort. It’s such a subtle thing, but it feels so right.

It makes me think of the controller revolution that the original NES brought about. Before then, controllers were like Atari’s paddles and joysticks, where you basically used one hand to do the actual controlling, and the other hand was just to hold the friggin’ thing in place; or you had the Colecovision/Intellivision controllers, with awkward an difficult (even painful!) buttons on the sides, and actual numeric keypads on the front. Nobody did things that way anymore after NES demonstrated the obviously right way to do it. Everything that’s come after that has been a copy of, or an improvement upon, Nintendo’s original controller design (though, sadly, I wouldn’t call Nintendo’s hideous N64 or GameCube controllers “improvements”). I sincerely hope that the same will be true for the Wii’s control designs: it should be the foundation for everything that comes after it.

At this point, the Wii has lost it’s “glow factor” for me, and I’m able to spend my evenings doing more important things, with occasional breaks to play Wii (as opposed to Wii monopolizing my spare moments). I’m still looking for the game that will excite me, but expect it may take a while. I’m still glad I bought it, glad I have it; but it hasn’t abated my hunger for the truly great game, that these days seem to come about once or twice per year (last year’s were Aquaria and Portal, and probably BioShock), and last only days.

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04.23.08

Music Tastes

Posted in Music at 9:09 pm

So, at this point, I’ve loaded up my Pandora profile with all my favorite music. Note that most of what it plays isn’t the music I’ve selected (though of course it plays that, too), but various music that shares traits with music I’ve selected. Pandora’s generally very good at finding new music that doesn’t necessarily sound much like the songs I’ve picked, but sound great anyway (and therefore, it’s a good source for finding new albums to buy).

Our other favorite source for music was the International Music Feed channel we could tune into on our Dish Network satellite TV. It played new music from across the globe. We discovered Joss Stone and Amy Winehouse through that channel… sadly, IMF is no more. It was bought and assimilated by another music channel, which seems a lot duller and plays a lot of documentaries. *sniff*

When I’m working on stuff at home, I like to listen to music, and the speakers on my laptop suck. We don’t have an “entertainment center”, so that pretty much means we listen to music on the TV. That was a lot easier when there was a decent music channel… but you can surf the net on Wii (if you buy the “Internet Channel” for $5, and have a wifi connection). I was dismayed to discover that it can’t handle Pandora (runs out of memory), so I looked around for alternatives.

It turns out that finetune.com is pretty decent, and has a wii-specific portal, so I’ve filled up my playlist on FineTune, and am pretty happy with that. Unlike Pandora, it plays exclusively my selected songs, so it may be a more accurate reflection of some of that… except that has a smaller selection of music, so it’s missing some important (but lesser-known) interests of mine. The Delgados, Propellerheads, Lunatic Calm, and Nickel Creek are among the under-represented. Besides that, you can only have up to three songs from any one given artist, so there’d be a lot more Massive Attack and Crystal Method in there to make up for the one Brittany Spears song I’ve got in there *blush* (”Toxic”. What can I say?).

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Wget, GSoC, …

Posted in Software Development at 3:12 pm

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted last. I’ve got quite a few posts I’ve been wanting to write, but I’ve been pretty insanely busy lately.

Aside from my new Wii (which I plan to post about again, later), my free time has been completely monopolized by my role as maintainer for GNU Wget. The main reason for my the upsurge in my activity related to this project, is that we’re participating in Google’s Summer of Code program this year.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, the Summer of Code (SoC or GSoC) program is an avenue whereby Google spends large chunks of money on fostering an interest in Free and Open Source Software among university student software developers. (See Google’s stated goals for GSoC.)

What happens is, a number of organizations and FOSS projects apply to join the program, and present lists of ideas for projects that students could take on during the summer. A number of students apply to join the program, and submit proposals for projects that they would like to do over the course of the summer. The organizations choose the project proposals they like best, and rank them in order of preference.

Google then decides how many students each organization will get, the organization communicates which students have the most interesting proposals, and—here’s the fun part—Google then pays each student a stipend of $4,500 to work full-time on the project over the summer. (The organization is also given $500 per project on which it has coached a student.)

I had been hearing of GSoC for some time, but had never really understood what it was. An interested student, however (Julien Buty), strongly encouraged me to participate in the program this year (as he wanted to apply for a project with Wget), and in fact got the ball rolling for me. I’m pleased to say that he wound up being accepted, and will now be paid by Google to work on Wget, to improve its handling of authentication over HTTP. One additional student was accepted, Saint Xavier, has also been accepted, and will be working on functionality related to internationalized domain names and web addresses.

This has brought in a real surge of developer interest in Wget, which is very welcome indeed. Up until now, the only active developer on Wget has been myself. Despite Wget being very ubiquitous in the Unix world, and used on millions of installations, it has recently had no real community to speak of. The mailing list has had only a handful of participants, and there are no active developers (sometimes to include myself—I have a day job, ya know!), only occasional patch submitters. But, even though we posted up our “ideas” page less than a week before the start of the student application process, we quickly began to see an influx of interested developers. In fact, along with GRUB, the GNU system bootloader, Wget proposals dominated the applications submitted for the GNU Project.

This ended up translating into a lot of work for me, though, because suddenly a lot of my time was being taken up responding to student questions, critiquing student proposals and giving advice on how to improve them.… Several projects needed to be specified in much greater detail before they could become a useful target for students to apply for, so I wound up spending a lot of time typing up rough specs, and discussing implementation approaches, as well.

While we were only able to choose two to participate through GSoC (which, in itself, was a happy surprise, as through most of the process we expected to get only one), several of the students whose proposals didn’t make the cut have continued on with the project anyway, because they’re interested in contributing and eager to learn and gain experience in the Free Software community.

An approximately equal number of contributors have also recently joined up outside of GSoC, thanks to Saint Xavier’s encouragement that I post a “help wanted” ad through GNU’s Savannah software development portal. I didn’t really think it’d grab much attention, especially as I knew that these ads were automatically closed after two weeks. Boy was I wrong! I got a new developer every day for the first four or five days after I posted.

Assuming it doesn’t fizzle out (it’s early to tell whether everyone will keep their enthusiasm for Wget over the long term), all this additional help means that I can actually realistically think about releasing version 1.12 before the end of the year, which otherwise would have been unlikely. I’m very excited about this, because there are a lot of features I’m going to be very happy to have. Julien and Saint Xavier are both working on pieces that are very high prorities for me for the 1.12 release, and I’m excited that updating Ted Mielczarek’s addition of CSS support to Wget was much easier than I’d hoped.

Perhaps soon, I’ll post an article that gives a better idea of what my pet project actually is, and why it’s so durn useful (as well as what its current shortcomings are, and what I hope to do in the future).

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