Category Archives: Internet

Comments

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Firstly, thanks for the comments, while I blog mainly for myself it’s nice to know people read the posts and feel they’re worthy of commenting.  I do enjoy the feedback obviously.

With blogspot, I *think* you guys got a notification, or had the choice? to get a notification when your comment was approved and/or if it was replied to.

With WordPress out of the box, I don’t think you get that.  I’ve been looking and looking at comment plugins but can’t find a small unobtrusive supported plugin which gives that functionality, so if you do comment on a post, for now I think you’ll just need to check it every now and then to see if I’ve replied, or if anyone else replied.

Edit: There’s also the recent comments widget on the sidebar, so you can see if someone’s commented and you can subscribe to the specific comment rss feed too I guess, which might be useful if you want to track comment updates.

Twitter, I really don’t get it?

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I don’t get twitter, and I’m not the only one.  A search on google for ‘Twitter Don’t Get It’ returns a fair number of hits.  I sort of maybe understand it if you’re mobile a lot and you want to blog some little snippet updates, or if you’re travelling and want to do a little web journal for people to know what you’re getting up to.

And ok, not everyone wants to run their own blog, but there’s a myriad of free blogging services like Typepad, WordPress, Blogspot that you can use.  What’s so fun about micro-blogging?  Surely it’s bad enough reading the junk that my brain puts together in general but I do try and write something interesting or meaningful every now and again, and make the effort of reading it worthwhile.

Is anyone really interested in the minutae of life to the extent they want to hear my internal monologue that’s constantly running or see what I’m up to every three minutes?  I’m missing something I guess.

Clearly, I’m all for more use of the internet-web-pipe-matrix and I don’t object on principal to people using it for anything they want.  So yay, go for it, micro-blog away.  But every time I think ‘i should sign up to twitter’ I end up wondering why on earth I’d bother, and why the hell anyone would read what I wrote anyway (if I wrote anything at all).  It’s especially confusing to find people who do blog and also use twitter.

It’s why I don’t really use Facebook that much, it’s really just micro-blogging with bells and whistles.  I signed up because it is a useful way to keep in touch with friends and let them find out how to get in touch with me, but I don’t find myself using it because if I want to ‘say’ something, I either blog it so everyone can see, or I mail the person I wanted to tell directly.  I sort of update my Facebook status message (essentially, Twittering in disguise) every now and then but don’t get the urge very often.

I suppose I do sometimes find the status updates of my friends interesting.  Hmm.

But they should just blog instead :p

I’m tempted to write a page which lists what I’m doing at various times of day, in advance, something like,

Weekday

1am -> 7am : I am sleeping
7am -> 9am : I am getting ready to go to work
9am -> 5pm : I am working, or returning home from work
5pm -> 1am : I am at home, staring at a) the computer, b) the television

Weekend

1am -> 7am : I am sleeping
7am -> 1am : I am at home, staring at a) the computer, b) the television

There you go, no need for me to Twitter anything.

Up or Sideways redux (cross MMO communication)

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I wrote a lengthy blog post about vertical or horizontal scaling in online roleplaying games, and Leigh wrote a just as lengthy comment.   He made some interesting points which I thought I’d address in another post, rather than writing a lengthy comment in response to his lengthy comment.

I’m going to quote bits of his comment but you should really go and read the comment as well.

I’ve often wondered what a game can do for these types of people, who are, let’s face it, just after more experience, a higher level, or a bigger pot of gold than others in their peer group. While I do like the idea of more horizontal progression I think it ultimately leads to another dead end – it just takes players longer to get there.

Perhaps.  And maybe horizontal expansion of that kind won’t interest a lot of players either, but what I think it provides is a flatter range of power which lets new players get involved quickly, without totally destroying the ability of people to progress into new things.  If it’s done correctly.

How good would it be to have a chat system that shows all the channels available, makes it easy to set up your own and invite people, and gives a wealth of topics to talk about?

Without a doubt this is something I totally agree with.  It’s certainly something I don’t think many games exploit as well as they could.  There’s an increase in the tools to build web-based communities, but I know that a lot of players are only ‘in the game’ mindset, while they’re in the game, they don’t want to spend a lot of time outside of the game working on a forum or website.  If there were easier ways to communicate on a global level within the games, it would help build community.

One of my big bugbears with WoW is that you can’t (or couldn’t when I played) talk to people if you weren’t in their alliance (i.e. horde vs alliance).  You can’t even set them as a friend and see if they log on.  Ok, so there’s some big PvP element in WoW and you don’t want alliance members tipping off the hoard about their every move – except if they wanted to they could just IM them.  It’s stupid to prevent poeple talking to each other because of some in-game alliance mechanic.

Games should be doing as much as possible to facilitate communication, to allow persistent channels to exist, allow poeple to take part in those channels even if they’re not in the game perhaps.  As you said, there should be an easy way to view all those channels and take part.

That covers another big hatred of mine, which I’ve mentioned previously, enforced geographical splits.  Splitting up friends based on where they live to allow you to make support easier reduces community, it doesn’t build it.

Second Life doesn’t have a ‘game’, it doesn’t have a goal, it doesn’t have any progression mechanic, and yet it has huge communities built up around it, friendships, relationships.  I’ve not really delved deeply into the chat side of Second Life but I know people who spend a lot of time socialising there.  Which goes to show you don’t need a game to build a good community, but you do need good communities to build good multi-player games.

We’ve recently started using XFire to keep in-touch with friends spread through a lot of games.  A persistent channel we can join and read from within just about any game, even if chatting isn’t always easy.

Here’s what we should be telling MMO producers.

  1. Give us good channels, good communication methods and no restrictions
  2. Develop a standard for MMO chat
  3. Implement cross-game MMO chat services

How cool would it be if you could log in to your favourite chat channel (say #lunatics) and chat as EQ2.Realm.Nickname with WOW.Realm.Bob and LOTRO.World.Billy and SL.Vegas.Sarah.  Each of those people could be in their own virtual game world, using the chat system and communicating with their own native tools in the chat channel and everyone could take part.

I know MMO producers want us to stay with their game for ever, but if they provided a cross-MMO communication device that was standard, people wouldn’t feel obliged to leave a game just because a bunch of their friends had, they could keep in touch.

We want cross-MMO communication tools built into our games and virtual worlds, and we want them soon.

The circle is complete

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So, welcome to the new blog at perceptionistruth.com.  The circle is now complete, I’ve gone from running my own blog, to trying livejournal, to running my own blog, to trying blogspot and now I’m back to running my own blog using wordpress.

I’ve intentionally left the site pretty open, you can leave comments without having to register, we’ll see how much spam I get and see if that needs reviewing.  You’re welcome to register of course if you wish.  For previous comments I’m slowly going through and adding in a URL against your name so it goes to your primary blog/site, but there’s no way of re-associating those comments with an account (as far as I can see, at the moment), so you won’t be able to re-edit any of them.

Feel free to comment on the layout and design, just don’t expect me to do much about it!  I’ve spent about 3 months going through a lot of WordPress templates, from dark with light text to light with dark text and everything in-between.  Traditionally I prefer dark backgrounds and light text, but I can’t deny that the inverse somehow looks more professional, and at the moment Mandigo (the template I’m using) doesn’t offer an inverse colour scheme.  I may play with Mandigo and see if I can hack the mighty amount of css it uses to invert the colour scheme somehow, but no promises.

I’ll miss the neat feature on blogger which included the last entry from each link in your ‘blogroll’, but I’ll cope with plain old links.  However, I’m sure there are plenty of funky plug-ins I’ll end up playing with on WordPress that fill my need for toys.

Welcome aboard, please update your book marks and links.  The main site is perceptionistruth.com and the rss feed can be found at http://perceptionistruth.com/feed/.

The circle is almost complete

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I’ve bought (another) domain name and will be migrating this blog to a self-hosted WordPress install over the next day or so. Because I can (before you ask). Like people build their own kit cars, because they can.

Here’s a quick FAQ for my millions of readers,

1q. Will you be providing re-directs from the blogger site?
1a. No

2q. Why?
2a. Because there’s like 3 of you who read this blog, update your bookmarks already.

3q. But you’ll lose your hundreds of external links to your post on thumb tendonitis?
3a. Yes, stop following me around already with the thumb thing.

More news later when I get the domain sorted. The only sad thing is that I’ll need to either become my own OpenID provider or stop using OpenID to haunt other people’s blog comments sections.

Black to White!

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Found this handy little bookmarklet on a website, if you click it, or bookmark it and use it, it turns the web page you’re looking at to black text on a white background. Obviously, any images or heavily CSSed elements may still render in the original colours and vanish, but it’s handy if you truly can’t stand the colours a site has.

Transmogrify Website Colours
(Right click and choose Bookmark, works in Firefox, can’t promise it’ll work in other browsers, you can then either use it from your bookmarks menu, or whack it onto a button bar or something).

New version of Picasa!

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I see there’s a new version of Picasa out (beta v3) which has the feature I’ve really been wanting – the ability to sync albums from the picasa software to the picasaweb website. Previously you had to just upload photo’s, and if you changed them, scrap the web copy and re-upload them. Now it looks like you can create a local album, and upload it, and then if you add / change photo’s in the album you just resync with the web copy, which is going to be very nice.

I just wish Picasa would pick some kind of standard for storing captions inside PNG files, instead of leaving them as totally separate in the picasa.ini file (it stores captions in the EXIF data for JPG files, but there’s no clear standard for doing so with PNG’s). I stopped converting my scans into JPG’s when storage became so cheap, I’d much rather keep them as PNG’s because you never know what you’re going to do with them in a few years. Hopefully it’ll make it into a later release.

If you’ve got a lot of photo’s and don’t use any software to manage them I can’t praise Picasa enough, it’s not perfect, but it’s really easy to use and I love the way you can make ‘edits’ to the photographs and the actual image file remains unchanged (unless you want to comit the changes) and the edits are stored as procedures somewhere else. Just great IMO.

Update:
UK Version is here http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa3-setup.exe

gmail over SSL

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Google have added an option to force gmail to use SSL for everything rather than just for the initial login/authentication. I strongly advise you turn it on.

Go to your gmail account, choose Settings, and then at the bottom of the first page make sure ‘Always use https’ is selected.

You’ll need to patch gmail notifier if you use it – full details here.

The result of this is that all the traffic between you and Google is encrypted while you’re reading / checking / sending mail. It prevents people from hijacking your session over wireless connections or snooping your conversations.

word verification

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so i did it, i went back and added to blogger everything i can find that i ever blogged, wrote or posted. so the archive of my complete inane rambling now goes back a good few years, and has all the stuff from live journal, some random posts i made in some forums, a few non-blog posts i wrote.

took three goes over a few days to get everything in, and the most painful bit is that after about 25 blog posts in a 24 hour period blogger adds word verification to each post entry, so i have to copy and paste the entry, update the time, and then type ‘khhbjbsdzxuahbas’ 89 times before submit works.

some of the google word verification links are truly evil.

i don’t suggest anyone goes back and reads any of the crap i posted, i really just included it so everything is in one place (blogger let’s you export stuff now, so i can back everything up with a handy single click).

if you read any posts though, read this one -> me and people, and this one i asked grete to marry me which seems like as good a place to start blogging as anywhere.

one thing that’s clear from reading back all my old blog posts is the number of recurring themes and how it’s always the same things i worry about. also, it’s 12 years since i started posting snippets of my life in public places (i.e. outside of fidonet, which started much earlier, i’m not sure if i’ll post any of the fidonet stuff, i have sudden deja vu that i’ve spoken about that before), and it’s clear to me that i have some basic need to be heard. when i’m not blogging i’m sending blog-like e-mails to the gemmellfantasy mailing list, or making blog-like posts to various website forums.

now that most of the content at www.darkstorm.co.uk/tony is in blogger i’ll need to decide what i’m doing with that site.