Categories
Personal Development

A Nice Walk

I finally had a chance to weigh myself on a scale and found that I was 185 lbs. That’s 5 lbs heavier than I was when I last visited a doctor who told me to try to get back to 150. My watch has been feeling a bit tight lately.

So one day this past week, I took a walk for about an hour. I was half expecting to get winded 20 minutes into it, but the walk was great. I also came up with game ideas while walking. Bonus!

Steve Chandler mentions that walking exercises the mind since your arms and legs are cross-patterned. When you take walks, it actually helps develop your mind’s ability to think creatively. Chandler will take walks when faced with difficult problems and claims that he always thinks of a solution by the time he finishes.

It’s a bit sad that an hour of just walking was more exercise than I’ve gotten in some time. I plan on making walks a regular habit. Besides wanting to be healthy in general, I like the idea of being more productive because I won’t need as much sleep. I’ll sleep better and more efficiently. Also, the more oxygen getting to my brain, the better I’ll be able to think, especially over long periods of time.

Hopefully I’ll lose some weight, but I’m more interested in being as athletic as I was in high school. I suppose I would have to join a soccer team. I can’t wait.

Categories
Marketing/Business

Superstitious Pigeons

Seth Godin wrote wrote an article a few years ago in Fast Company called The Threat of Pigeons and Other Fundamentalists. He claims that not too much has changed today.

It basically talks about how people make business decisions based on what they think the truth is. Pigeons, it turns out, are superstitious. If you put them in a cage and feed them at regular intervals, they do whatever it was that they were doing when they got fed. They apparently believe that if they got fed while spinning around, they must be getting fed BECAUSE they were spinning around.

Contrast with a company that becomes successful while concentrating its resources on some specific aspect of the business. If that aspect doesn’t apply anymore, how long will it be for the leadership to adjust its view? If the company did the equivalent of spinning around while becoming successful, it will be difficult to persuade the people involved that they are being superstitious.

The article caught my eye because PigeonGB is my handle when I play games. It was a nickname in college.

Categories
General

A Game I Will Never Make

I will never make a Texas Holdem Poker game. Ever.

Why? Because hundreds of trackback spam and comment spam just came through the past couple of days. One was for male impotency pills. The rest were for some online poker sites.

And if I do make a poker game, I would fear that people would assume that my company is the one behind all of the spam that I’m sure others also get. I don’t need the bad association.

Who can face themselves in the mirror knowing that they are making money by being so much of a nuisance? When these spams trickled it, they were manageable. Now I am afraid that if I don’t periodically check in a few times a day, I’ll be overrun. Luckily I manually approve these comments so that they don’t get published, but it is getting to be a lot of work.

Categories
Game Development Games

TIGRS: The Independent Games Rating System

The Entertainment Software Rating Board acts as the video game industry’s self-regulating body to enforce and apply ratings and marketing guidelines among other things. Unfortunately, if you aren’t a multmillion dollar publisher, you might find it difficult to contact the ESRB to get your games rated.

What do indie game developers do? They either continue to push, hoping to get heard eventually, or they sell their games without worrying about the ratings.

Enter TIGRS, The Independent Game Rating System. It’s simple, clear, and free. There is no need to go to some licensing board who will take their time to approve an expensive grant to claim that your game is kid-friendly.

It is also well-designed. The colors were carefully chosen so that the small percentage of the population that is colorblind can still comfortably read the ratings.

The author has granted the freedom to use these works so long as you don’t claim authorship. The only request is to not abuse the fact that you can basically give yourself an E for Everyone rating when you have clearly made a game that deserves an A for adults.

In the end, I think it should be fine. You can’t confuse an E game for an A game. A problem I can see is that someone from Japan will think a game is for everyone whereas someone in America will see the game as too racy for children. Similarly a game will be perfectly fine for American audiences, but will be deemed to violent for Japanese children. Different cultures will have different standards for E, T, and A.

But maybe I’m wrong and there will only be minor quibbles about whether or not a game has cartoon violence or realistic violence. TIGRS will be more effective when more people use it, of course. I think it is a good idea, and it can evolve as needed.

EDIT: the system is fairly new and changes were made. It will no longer use E, T, and A ratings. It is also easier to create the rating. Now, the website is really useful for publishers and customers alike.

Categories
Politics/Government

Can’t Watch My Own DVDs Without Being Called a Criminal

The Chicago Sun-Times ran an article last week about DVD Jon cracking Google’s new video service.

Johansen, 21, became a hero to hackers at age 15, when he posted software called DeCSS to unlock the Content Scrambling System, or CSS, which the film industry used on DVD movies to prevent illegal copying. The act made Johansen a folk hero among hackers.

I wrote my response, and they published it! Below is the unedited version that I sent to them. I think the version they printed makes me seem like a better writer as it is more focused and clear.


Your article about DVD Jon claimed that he was a hero to hackers. While he is, I am not sure your readers were reading “hackers” correctly and assume that he is simply a criminal.

DVD Jon’s work has made it possible for DVD players to run on Gnu/Linux systems. He managed to decrypt the copy protection method used on DVDs that he himself owns so that he could play them on his own software or back them up, which is allowed under Norwegian law.

The MPAA, RIAA, and other groups have managed to take more and more rights away from customers. In exchange, we haven’t really gotten anything. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act makes it a crime to just own the means to circumvent copyprotections, and this law was passed under the thinking that the creators need the overreaching protection to continue to innovate. Instead, there has been less innovation from these industries and more lawsuits. You can even look into how the DMCA has been abused by companies such as Walmart and Best Buy. Actually, I would enjoy reading that expose.

They don’t want me to watch my DVDs in players that aren’t approved by them. DVD Jon made it possible. He’s a hero to people who don’t want to stay stuck with RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, or Apple approved systems. There should not be anything criminal about playing my legally purchased DVDs on Gnu/Linux in an open source player. Unfortunately, it is.

By the way, people taking newspapers and running off with them isn’t the same thing as downloading a movie. In the first case, there is one less newspaper to actually sell. In the second case, there is no theater that is now missing a film canister. It isn’t theft. It’s copyright infringement. Stop spreading misleading statements from the media companies.

Gianfranco Berardi

Regarding the newspaper theft vs. movie copyright infringement, the link above will take you to a different set of commentary that the Sun-Times editors made regarding the recent court decision against Grokster. The part I was referring to:

The issue now is twofold. First, file-sharing systems will continue to evolve, and the music and movie industries will have to continue fighting them in court.

Next, doing so will help in the larger battle to make the public understand that musicians, writers and artists — and the much lower paid technicians and others who support them — have a right to make a living just like anybody else. People do not, generally, grab newspapers from newsstands and hurry off with them, first because the vendor might give chase, and second because it is wrong. That second understanding, regarding stealing music and movies, is gradually filtering into the public, who initially reacted to file sharing with the typically greedy reflex of anyone confronted with apparently free goods: They took them. Now they are not so quick

I’m tired of the media companies telling us that copyright infringement is the same as theft. The courts say it isn’t, but these companies insist on misusing the term and misleading the public. It’s called deception. These companies would have you believe that every CD album downloaded off of a file sharing network doesn’t just mean one less CD sold (the logic doesn’t follow if you stop there either). They want you to believe that the downloader is somehow taking money from the recording artists.

Let me ask you: the last time you “stole” software or music, did your bank account increase, even by a few cents? Did you find extra spare change in your pocket? Money in your wallet?

And if we aren’t talking money but instead are talking about the nebulous “intellectual property” rights of the artist, did you somehow gain the rights to reproduce said software or music?

No. You didn’t. Because you weren’t stealing. You were infringing on copyright.

Not that I advocate it. Copyright infringement is a serious offense. I’m just getting tired of the public’s seemingly willful desire to be ignorant of the situation.

On the other hand, I think that the situation today is heavily in favor of the copyright holders and leaves the customers and users with little of the rights they originally had.

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is an example of a law that changes the nature of copyright. You can still have all of the fair use rights you gained over the years. But if you try to circumvent the copy protection measures put in place, no matter how lame they are, you are committing a felony. A felony! To play DVDs you already own! To create MP3s and OGG Vorbis files from your own music collection! Hell, just having the means to circumvent the copy protection is a felony!

You’re allowed to play with all of the toys in the toy store, but you can’t open the front door because the handle is locked. Owning the key is a felony.

So while I think copyright infringement is wrong, I also think that the copyright owners today have too much power over the customer.

I don’t buy my music from iTunes or any company that sells music that is under Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). I buy them from places such as Audio Lunchbox. They get my money because they treat me like a customer rather than a criminal.

It’s sad that the bar has been lowered to the point that customer service means “We won’t assume you’re guilty!”

Categories
Politics/Government

Thoughts on War and Politics, Virtual or Real

I read webcomics, and one of my favorite is CTRL+ALT+DEL. I enjoy reading the thoughts of the comic authors, and Thursday’s Of war and controller ports talked about war.

Battlefield 2 was recently released, and a number of people have been enjoying it. I haven’t played it yet, but I should probably add this game to the list of games I should play. In any case, Absath talks about how people are playing Battlefield 2, which is meant to entertain, while real soldiers are fighting and dying. He also stresses the importance of remembering that it isn’t just a statistic when a soldier dies. There are families and friends involved. Many people are affected when each soldier dies.

He also made the following point:

I’ve said this before- I don’t care if you feel the war in Iraq is justified or not. If you don’t support and respect our troops overseas that are fighting and dying to defend our country, whether you think it needs defending or not, you are no kind of human in my book.

Please note that the following will likely upset a lot of people and is fairly off-topic from what I usually cover. I seldom will write on such topics in the future.

Now, maybe I just don’t come into contact with enough people, but I have yet to meet someone who was against the war AND the troops, and so I don’t think such a reminder is really necessary. I was under the impression that whether you support or are against the war, you generally didn’t want the American troops to be hurt. Then again, I’ve heard about crazier things that people have thought or done, so maybe there are such people in America. In that case, those people are just as bad as “right to life” advocates who don’t think twice about bombing abortion clinics or shooting the doctors that work there. But I have a feeling that such people don’t actually exist, but there are those who would like you to believe they do.

I think that an informed public that is allowed to give their opinions, even when those opinions disagree with those in power, is what makes democracy work. I’m tired of hearing how anyone who is disagrees with Bush’s policies are “aiding and abetting terrorists” and “putting our troops in harm’s way”. How absurd to think this way!

Which helps terrorists achieve their goals more? Allowing people to oppose the current President’s policies openly, or forcing everyone to follow the policies without complaint? One is what democracy not only allows but was created for. The other paves the way for a police state.

There are those who will read this and think that I am just spouting “liberal nonsense” and make the outrageous claim that I am both against the troops and supporting terrorism. Do me a favor and read it again. Do it. We’ll wait for you right here.

Done? Now, honestly think to yourself how you can love America and hate that different opinions exist. How do you reconcile being a patriot while making false connections between political opposition and terrorist support? It’s how the United States works! People are not only permitted to question our leaders. It’s our responsibility!

I can’t pretend to speak for any of the soldiers, but I think it would be horrible to believe that I am fighting to defend freedom for America only to come home and find that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are torn up to allow only group to be free.

I don’t have a purely left or right idealogy. The left has their problems as well as the right. Basically, I’m just tired of people making non sequitur arguments without being put into check. Being opposed to war doesn’t automatically make you opposed to the warrior. Being opposed to the President’s policies doesn’t automatically make you opposed to the United States. Exercising your rights to free speech doesn’t make you a terrorist.

It makes you American.

So can someone explain how they can profess to love America but can’t stand Americans? Can your right to provide a dissenting opinion bother you so much that you would rather have it taken away than abused? How can you still call yourself American after that? And how can you claim that you yourself aren’t aiding those who are against what America stands for?

This July 4th, please remember that we have brave soldiers fighting and dying for our freedoms. Please remember that those freedoms aren’t threats to America. Specifically, your ability and your fellow citizen’s abilities to complain about the government’s policies should be a point of pride. To consider it as simply a tool for terrorists is to insult America and those who stand for it. Celebrate your freedom! Do not be ashamed of it.

I cannot say “Thank You” enough to those who defend my freedom to say what I just said above. Some nations would try to prevent me. Some people here would prefer that the United States do so as well.

Categories
Personal Development

Learning Something New

microISV had posted a link to Advice from an Entrepreneur by Harry Newton. After talking about how much better off he was than the rest of his class, he then provides some advice to their children and to everyone else.

It is always great to see nice, bulleted lists of things you can do. My favorite is “Learn a new skill every six months”. Steve Pavlina will periodically talk about how investing in yourself is the smartest investment you can make. When you improve your skills, you improve your ability to create value. Hey, it makes me feel better about buying software and game development books every month! Joking aside, I know that every time I learn something new, I am adding a new key to my collection. It opens a path to learning more new things and improving my ability to create and be productive.

When you learned how to read, you paved the way to learn how to write. When you learned how to write, you paved the way to learn about writing well. Now you can write letters, blogs, IMs, emails, books, pamphlets, and many more things. And those things will probably allow you to learn about something new, such as how web servers work or what is involved with publishing. And so on and so on.

To be more pragmatic, learning a new skill every so often prevents me from stagnating. It keeps me competitive.

Categories
Game Development Games

IGDA Meeting: Willy Wonka Post Mortem

Tuesday was the IGDA Chicago chapter meeting at Dave & Buster’s. High Voltage Software‘s Matt Corso discussed what it was like to develop Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Wonka was plagued with licensor demands. Normally a licensed title might have the developer, the publisher, and a single licensor, but this game needed approval from about five different sources, including Tim Burton! The game had a tight schedule and needed to be released to coincide with the movie. The movie itself was also completed on a short schedule, so the project team did not have much to go on except the original book for a long time.

Over 15 design documents later, one was finally accepted by everyone and they set to work. They created their own art assets, only to find that the concept art from the movie set looked completley different. A number of times they had to scrap any work they had done and start over. They were required to use the sets from the movie, which meant that it would be difficult to create a game around them. But restrictions promote creativity and they managed to make a game that was fun for the actor who plays Charlie. He found it incredibly fun to have free reign of the sets when in reality he was not allowed to go in certain areas.

One thing I found weird was the convincing the team needed that combat wasn’t necessary. The licensors demanded that there would be no combat and that Charlie Bucket could not get hurt or killed. “How do we add combat to this game?” “We need combat!” These comments were common in the group. Matt said that while he likes games that involve heavy combat, he also likes games like Animal Crossing which are fun despite a lack of combat. From the way Matt described it, they made a puzzle game with Oompa-Loompas that could be used as tools, such as in Pikmin or Lemmings, although he never named those games. He made it sound like the lack of combat was frustrating the development team.

In the end, the game was made, missing its target date by only three days. Licensor demands, the lack of assets from the movie, and the constant reworking of the game were identified as the causes of much discouragement.

I personally think that the development could have been less hectic if they wouldn’t have tried to build their own art assets and levels before the concept art and movie assets were available. Also, licensor demands for change were fairly drastic, and I think that if both sides discussed the cost of such changes that it would have been more clear. Non-developers can’t be expected to understand that a request to change an entire level or gameplay mechanic results is in delays and work. It didn’t sound like Matt or the team made those concerns clear to the licensors.

Of course, I was not involved personally. I have no idea how much wasn’t said. I don’t know the day to day events that happen to a group that works night and day for seven days a week for months at a time. Perhaps any perceived dissent would have rubbed people the wrong way. Maybe the licensors were expecting to have their way without question. I don’t know, but I think that communicating concerns would have gone a long way to eliminating the Us vs. Them mentality.

In any case, it was good to hear a post mortem of a game. Reading the post mortem just isn’t the same. I hope there are more IGDA meetings like this one.

Categories
Geek / Technical

To Microsoft Apologists: Yeah, Right

There are people out there who try to justify or defend Microsoft’s actions.

Attackers are just:

  • jealous.
  • whining.
  • communists.
  • going after an incredibly large and therefore easy target.

Microsoft is just being extremely competitive, the apologists say. Other people are just complaining about their woes rather than actually doing something better.

And then I read these two articles:
Microsoft changes MSN.com to prevent Firefox from right-clicking
Microsoft commissions independent firm to study cost of updating Microsoft and open source software

The first one talks about how MSN apparently prevents Firefox users from right-clicking or middle-clicking on links. If you read through the posts, someone talks about how you can use AdBlock, a nice Firefox extension, to prevent it. But the real problem is that Microsoft has decided to introduce this problem that exclusively affects competitors. But they aren’t acting in monopolistic ways. They are just being competitive. Yeah, right.

The second one talks about the results of a Microsoft-commissioned study on the costs of updating your software in a real world setting. It says that Microsoft software is less expensive to update and patch than open source solutions. It has some great lines:

“We already know how to secure a Windows-based solution and keep it running smoothly,” says Stephen Shaffer, the airline’s director of software systems. “With Linux, we had to rely on consultants to tell us if our system was secure. With Windows, we can depend on Microsoft to inform us of and provide any necessary updates.”

Now, let’s ignore the fact that Microsoft commissioned this study. I don’t want to assume that Wipro was skewing the results because I don’t know the details of the study. It could very well be that patching software on Windows is a lot cheaper than patching software on Gnu/Linux. Of course, Wipro’s strategic relationship may have had a hand in it, but again, it may be possible that they conducted a study without a conflict of interest.

But let’s assume that the study is legitimate.

It claims that each patch is cheaper to deploy on Windows than it is for OSS-based systems. It claims that even though there is a larger volume of patches for Windows, the lower cost per patch negates it. It claims that when patches are available, Windows systems get patched sooner than their OSS counterparts. And it found that for both systems, best practices lower costs of patching.

But apparently the companies surveyed had a larger number of Windows servers than OSS-based servers. Also, Apache, which is open source, running on Windows would be considered in the Windows category, so the results can be skewed in some ways. The study doesn’t explicitly say such details, but claims that Oracle on Red Hat would count as OSS. In a Windows vs OSS study, Oracle, which is owned by NOT MICROSOFT, shouldn’t have been in question in the first place.

In any case, they are claiming that while the costs for management tools for Windows are higher than the costs for their OSS equivalents, those tools being used on many more Windows machines and patches aggregate. To make a really exaggerated point, $100 spent on a tool you use 100 times on 100 servers means that each patch job can be $0.01. On the other hand, $50 spent on a tool that you use on 50 servers that you use twice will cost you $0.50, which is much more per use. Now, ignoring that some of the cheap patches credited to Windows are actually for OSS servers like Apache and that patches to non-OSS, non-Microsoft software running on OSS-based operating systems might cost some money, and ignoring that it has been shown that it takes fewer Linux admins to administer more machines, they are claiming that because Windows has a higher distribution than OSS-based solutions that economies of scale affect the cost of patching.

So this study isn’t claiming that Windows is cheaper to patch by virtue of being Windows. It means that it is cheaper to patch because it exists in more places. By the logic presented, if a company had only one Windows machine among hundreds of OSS-servers, the cost-per-patch for Windows would be astronomical in comparison.

That part of the study shouldn’t have much of an impact on what you choose to deploy. Obviously retraining will cost you plenty of money if you choose to switch from one to the other, but it isn’t because of anything inherent with Windows over OSS-based systems.

On top of that, OSS-based systems can include a wide range of software. Gnu/Linux, BSD, OSX? Red Hat, Debian, Novell? No, we’ll just lump those together and then hope people can figure out that the costs for one might be incredibly different than the costs for another.

And my favorite omission from the study is the fact that the world’s economies didn’t suffer millions in lost revenues and productivity due to the critical vulnerabilities in the OSS-based systems running the Internet infrastructure. It was due to the Windows machines running in corporate environments.

Windows costs less to secure? Maybe, if you bend the facts the right way. Again, the PDF study didn’t explicitly explain how it conducted the study. META group validated the approach and methods used in the study, but can’t vouch for the conclusions.

I don’t think that OSS is inherently secure. It is software, and there will be bugs and exploits. But there are fewer critical failings in OSS than there are in Windows. Firefox had its first critical problem, and there were anti-OSS zealots crying out “I told you so!” and “Completely secure, huh?!” No one claimed that OSS has complete security. There will be problems.

Still, Windows beats Linux on security? Yeah, right.

Categories
General Linux Game Development

Fight Cancer; Donate for Research

I just found out that John Hall, former Loki worker and author of Programming Linux Games is fighting against stage IV (metastatic) Melanoma and is trying to raise money for cancer research. He is writing about his ordeal at http://overcode.yak.net/3.

PLEASE DONATE TO THE FIGHT AGAINST MELANOMA

Some friends and I have formed an American Cancer Society Relay for Life team called Team Melanoma. Our main goal is to raise money for cancer research. Please donate to our team through the following page:

http://www.acsevents.org/faf/r.asp?t=4&i=99915&u=99915-86454580

All money goes to the American Cancer Society. We’re asking for our donations to be used for melanoma research.

I haven’t donated to many charities in my life. I don’t exactly have an income that encourages donating to others. Still, thinking about it, I don’t currently have expenses that discourage donating to others either. Cancer is a disease that always affects “other” people, so when you find out that a bump or a tumor that you’ve been calling “no big deal” is actually a big deal, it is always a punch in the gut.

Please donate what you can.