The Mothership

There’s something funny going on at Google…

Looking through the site logs, I see a number of hits from people coming from search engine results. That’s not all that unusual; that’s what they do, after all. The strange thing is, I seem to be abnormally highly ranked for some of those searches.

For example, for a particular pop-culture phrase my site is ranked #5 by Google at the moment. That’s even higher than its original appearances on SA and the Flash animation it inspired! There are also plenty of other sites that have discussed it considerably more in-depth, yet for some reason my one-time throwaway reference to it appears before the vast majority of them when it shouldn’t even be in the top 100.

Likewise I get a lot of hits for Diablo 2-related searches. I have discussed that topic in somewhat more depth, but there’s a different problem here — the searches are usually seeking raw information, whereas the discussion here usually assumes a working knowledge of that information already. I’ve had to go back through those articles and add links back to sites that provide the background and raw info just so those people who were searching for it won’t have completely wasted their time visiting here. You’d think that they’d have found that info first in their search, but no, somehow they wound up here first.

It’s possible that due to the way search engines like Google rank their pages, blogs are becoming overrepresented and overranked relative to their actual value. What would previously have been hidden on some subpage that few people would have linked to before is now present on the front page for some period of time, and the front page is highly linked among all of the blogger’s friends, which drives the ranking of the page up. Even when it moves to the archives, it still inherits some of the rank indirectly from the front page.

Discussions of topics on blogs aren’t necessarily all that useful, either. Like I mentioned before they typically assume a certain degree of knowledge about the topic already and are just relating it to that person’s own life or experiences, which may or, more likely, may not help someone who was just looking for somewhat more generic information. If you’re looking for technical specs on some product, do you really care that I bought the neon green version of it? The traditional blog format of putting multiple entries on the front page and often the archives also tends to group information together inappropriately. You may have hit a blog page from searching for terms ‘foo’ and ‘bar’, but they might have been from completely separate, unrelated entries.

Potentially the more useful information on the net is now being buried in a sea of overranked blogs. I don’t know if this is really a trend overall though; this is just what I’ve noticed for a few topics on my own site. Anyone else noticed the same thing?

I was getting a bit tired of the same old playlist on my PocketPC, so I took over 400 of my favourite MP3s, transcoded them to ~96kbps Ogg Vorbis format, and wrote a script to randomly pick out around 256 megs worth of them each time it was run, to build new playlists that would fit in the memory card. The hardest part of all that was not the transcoding, or writing the script; it was just getting the damn files transferred to the PocketPC.

About the only way to transfer files to it is to open it up under Explorer, and drag and drop files into the folder you want, and the ActiveSync program takes care of copying them over. However, attempting to do so would invariably halt and cause the USB connection to break after three or four files were copied. I’d have to resync, delete the partially copied file, and restart the copy where it left off. That would be merely annoying except that after a while it wouldn’t just break the connection, but it would also corrupt the memory card.

Now I had to reformat the memory card, but guess what, Windows CE doesn’t include any way to format cards. I had to go looking for utilities on the net, and most of the ones I ran across were commercial bundles of utilities, and I wasn’t about to shell out money just to format this stupid card. I finally found a free set of tools to do the formatting, and could use the card again.

I also finally found out that other people were having the same problem, and that there was a patch available for ActiveSync that fixes problems with large file transfers, and applied it. Now the files are transferring properly and there haven’t been any breaks or corruption yet, but it’s going very slowly at around 100K/s. Even with an old USB 1.0 connection it should be ten times faster…

Though in the end it’s now working, it’s frustrating that it had to be so much trouble in the first place. Devices like PDAs are supposed to just work right out of the box, but they couldn’t even get something as basic as transferring files working properly…

It’s amazing how much crap accumulates on our computers. While working on something, I hit an unexpected ‘out of disk space’ error, so I started poking around trying to find stuff to get rid of so I could free up some space. It didn’t take long, and I figured I may as well spend a bit of time tidying up my whole system.

After I was finished I had deleted over 19 gigs of files. This system only has a 40 gig drive to begin with. Multi-megabyte trace files from bugs long since fixed, database snapshots from customers from years ago, source code from previous versions that’s no longer needed, online manuals I’d saved to disk and only used briefly, ten-line test programs written to quickly check something, software installed and used once and then forgotten, temp files from programs that failed to clean up properly, and all sorts of other junk was hiding about in the nooks and crannies of the filesystem.

It’s especially fun when you find files with no immediately obvious use, in a vaguely-named folder, with no documentation. Anything I couldn’t figure out within 30 seconds got thrown in the recycle bin.

Of course it’ll probably only take me a couple more months to fill the drive back up with junk again…

The latest 2.6.0-test10 Linux kernel has been released and is expected to be the last in the test series before an official release, and in keeping with old traditions like the ‘greased weasel’ series, Linus has christened this one with the name ’stoned beaver.’

(*eyes Linus suspiciously*)

There is, of course, another EQ expansion on the way. I can almost remember back after the first one had been released around three and a half years ago, and Verant’s attitude was “Eh, we *might* make another one…” Of course if I had a cash cow like that I’d milk the hell out of it too.

There hasn’t been an official announcement, so for now there’s just rumour, speculation, and a few tidbits discovered in the test code. There will be new zones and spells, as always, some new alternate advancement skills, and the addition of a new class: the Berserker.

Managing classes is a tricky business. The things players do in these games really boils down to one of three areas: Healing, Hurting, and Helping. Thus all you really need are three classes, one to handle each area. That’s a little boring though, so to add some variety you can subdivide and overlap the areas a bit. Hurting can be done through toe-to-toe melee, spells, or minions, which can be separated out into the Warrior, Wizard, and Mage. Take a Warrior and reduce his ‘hurting’ ability a bit, but add a bit of ‘healing,’ and you’ve got a Paladin. Or mix the melee and spell ‘hurting’ abilities and you’ve got a Shadow Knight. The problems are, you have to make each class sufficiently different that they’re not copying each other too much, each class has to be useful for something so that people want to play them, and they have to be relatively equal in power (‘balanced’) so that people aren’t too jealous of each others’ power. There wouldn’t be much point to playing a Warrior if a Paladin could do everything the warrior could do and more.

It’s not clear yet what kind of class the Berserker will be, but just from the sounds of it it’ll probably be a melee damager primarily, maybe with some special skills of some kind. They have to do something to make it different enough from the other classes to make it interesting, though.

Well, that’s one more milestone passed. As of this morning, at 220.2 pounds, my BMI is no longer classified as ‘obese’ but is now a mere ‘overweight.’ Slap a business suit on me and I’d blend in perfectly with the lunchtime crowds wandering about downtown…

From a company memo:

I’d love to see their reaction when they find out why ports and cables are labelled male/female…

(Note: More info here.)

Winter sucks.

Oh I don’t mind the snow, or even the frigid temperatures we get here. Having lived in Alberta for 21 years now I’m long since used to those.

No, what really annoys me is the *ice*. Here in Calgary, the temperature often wanders back and forth between below-freezing and above-freezing, especially in these early days of winter. An early storm this year left us with a fair bit of snow lying around, but because of these temperature swings it melts, and then refreezes, and melts, and refreezes again, and so on, until there’s layers of ice everywhere. In the parking lots. On the sidewalks. On the overpasses. On the stairs and hills.

The ice alone isn’t too bad since you can adjust your stride to account for it whenever you see it, but…then it snows again. Now not only is there ice everywhere, but it’s hidden.

Time to start taking the LRT again…

One of the more annoying things about EverQuest is managing all the little trinkets you pick up. There are quest pieces and spell research components and blacksmithing/armouring materials and loads of other crap, and often it’s hard to keep track of them all. With hundreds of different items and combinations, it’s nearly impossible to even remember if you have certain pieces.

Have I got all the pages to put together to make the Potent Pants of Perniciousness spell? Um, maybe, hold on while I go check all 16 backpacks in the banks of all eight of my characters… And even if I don’t, someone else in the guild might. When combined together we might have enough parts to make a lot of things, but not even know it. It’s hard enough to keep track of your own stuff let alone the rest of the guild.

So, I’ve been working on this. Basically all I have to do is update a text file listing what parts I have, and this script will automatically calculate what I can make from those parts, and also tell me what parts are still missing for other possible combinations. If, say, a beastlord wants some Play Teatime With Animals spell, she can check here and see that I’ve got page 7 for it, Joebob has page 35, and she’ll just have to go and find or buy page 142 to finish it.

Of course that’s being somewhat idealistic. People are lazy after all, so who knows, a week from now I may have completely given up on keeping the lists up-to-date. In fact I’m so lazy tha

One feature players had asked for ever since EverQuest launched was the ability to transfer your character to another server. Maybe you discovered too late that your friends were on a different one, or you didn’t get along on your current one, or it was too overcrowded, or something. However, all such requests were instantly denied; Verant didn’t want people hopping fom server to server because the designers behind EQ had a specific ‘Vision’ in mind, a set of principles and ideals about the nature of the EQ world. To them it was more than just a game, they were building virtual communities of people, and to allow such transfers would dilute the community. It would be harder to make groups of friends and keep them together if people were coming and going from the server at will, and it would allow unscrupulous people to dodge their bad reputation too easily. Similar reasoning was behind the decision not to allow your character’s name to be changed — if that character had a reputation, he was supposed to be stuck with it.

Fine, fair enough, it’s their game so they make the rules. The often-mocked slogan of EQ is “You’re in our world now,” after all.

Money talks though, and a few years later they caved in and introduced a character transfer service and a name change service. The catch? Well, there was a price to pay, starting at $50 per request to be exact. A rather excessive amount for what is essentially just fiddling with a few database entries, but a lot of players were apparently desperate for services like this. A fair price is whatever someone’s willing to pay, after all… The other catch is that when your character is transferred from one server to another, he loses *all* of his equipment. You arrive on the other server without even a basic weapon of any kind. This was part of their attempt to hold on to the last shreds of The Vision — sure you could transfer, but you’d have to suffer for it.

Well, the EQ team must have failed their save vs. temptation, because lo and behold, now you can buy a character transfer with items service. For a mere $75 you can move to another server and keep all your stuff, as if you’d played there all along. The Vision is dead and buried, finally. (Whether that’s a good thing or not is debatable; people’s opinions on the Vision varied wildly.)

Those people who bought the previous transfer service and lost all of their equipment in the move must be mightily pissed-off now…

There was a full lunar eclipse tonight (well, almost full — I think the sun held on to a teeny little barely-noticable sliver), and I managed to snap a few photos.

My camera lacks manual controls, so the inconsistency of the following pictures is from me mucking about with various settings seeing if I could do better. They’re in chronological order, left to right, top to bottom.

The very last one is the darkest it got, and it was actually darker to the eyes than you see in the picture here. As is typical in these eclipses, the moon didn’t really vanish, the rest of it just became very, very dim, and the camera manages to pick it up better than the eyes alone do.

Red Hat has just recently announced that they will no longer be offering the basic, free Red Hat Linux distribution and will only sell and support their Red Hat Enterprise Linux package, meant primarily for businesses. Their CEO has also come right out and said that “I would say that for the consumer market place, Windows probably continues to be the right product line.”

There is already much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how Red Hat has turned traitor, this is a slap in the face, blah blah blah. And I have to say…I don’t care.

Not just because I don’t use Red Hat on my systems, but because Red Hat simply isn’t obligated to push Linux onto the desktop. One of the great things about the Linux world is that you’re free to do whatever you want with it, and if Red Hat feels that their best chance of success is to focus on the business market, then they’re perfectly free to do so. There are plenty of other distributions out there, so if the others think they can do a better job on the desktop, now’s the time for them to take their shot.

Is their CEO right about Windows? Well, partly… Although Linux is perfectly viable, the desktop market they speak of extends all the way down to people who barely know where to plug things in and what to do with the funny-coloured round thing in the jewel case. Vendors have already dumbed down the installation process to their level, but mostly only on Windows. You can grab any random piece of hardware at the store and be assured that there will be full Windows drivers right in the box, but there’s no guarantee that it will work on Linux at all unless you check complex device support charts first. That’s not really Linux’s fault since it should be up to the vendor to provide the drivers, but it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Linux is great once you’ve selected the proper hardware for it and installed and configured everything properly, but not everyone has a Linux guru handy to help them out.

It’s all perfectly fine to me — I’m a hobbyist user, not a casual desktop user, so all these little quirks and such don’t really bother me.

Well, it is now officially winter. The first clue probably should have been the snow that’s been piling up for the last week now, but that’s not necessarily a reliable indicator. We had a freak two-day blizzard back in September, but that didn’t last very long.

No, the reason I now declare it winter is because my body is telling me so. A lot of people are attuned to the weather through various aches and pains and trick knees and whatnot, but the surest sign my body gives me of the change in seasons is the delightful gift of Spontaneous Nosebleeds. You’ve got to love waking up at 1am, slowly realizing you feel a trickle coming down your septum, slapping your hand to your face, and trying to make your way to the bathroom while still 99% asleep…

It seems I’m not the only one either; is this a widespread problem?