Anthony Bailey

Recommended listening: Master of Puppet. In this podcast...

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0100

Recommended listening: Master of Puppet.

In this podcast Technometria’s Phil Windley talks to Luke Kanies, author of host config automation tool Puppet about separating instance and class when it comes to configuring hosts and their roles, expressing config as code to avoid a combinatorial explosion, treating it as code when it comes to testing and version control, and the power of a good DSL: expressing problems simply makes solving them trivial.

Games as art, as art.Storytelling is cool, but as a former...

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 18:48:02 +0100

Games as art, as art.

Storytelling is cool, but as a former speedrun producer I have a slow-burning interest in the non-fiction fringes of machinima, particularly those that focus on the games themselves.

A fascinating example I (finally) noticed last week is a series of Half-Life 2 “critiques” by GooseGoose Productions. Like their creator Mark Gillespie, I’m sufficiently in awe of this series of games that I would have happily indulged simple fan-boy “wasn’t this bit cool!” reminiscence - but this is only one factor in his (necessarily spoiler-laden, by the way) pieces on episodes “zero”, one and two.

Gillespie makes the obvious argument for games as significant cultural artifacts and quality narrative inventions, but also promotes what I believe to be an equally correct but less widely accepted position on games as visual art per se, revelling in Valve’s architectural and design aesthetics. His creative background helps: I loved when, as an oil painter, he’d get all excited about any one particular texture! In a more conventional machinima mode, he also occasionally interjects some of his own work as imaginative hypotheticals, Garry’s Mod style.

(tag: machinima)

Review: Bulletproof Web Design

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:23:59 +0100

Review: Bulletproof Web Design:

Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case…

Lossy transfer

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:01:48 +0100

My partner Julie switched PCs a month ago. I handled transferring her data. Today we discovered that a valuable subset (various branding images for her business) did not get transferred, and are lost.

I feel bad and stupid. There are seventeen excuses, and parallel worlds where because other parties (code included) acted more sanely, it didn’t happen. But it’s mostly my fault, and my responsibility.

I’m really sorry, Julie.

Evil business idea: serve ads to robots

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:09:52 +0100

People make money through advertising on the Net. When humans go to a server and ask for a response, the server has an opportunity to give them an ad as well as what they really wanted. In some edge-cases (like when the page that was asked for doesn’t exist) the server can give them an ad instead of what they really wanted. If the site doesn’t exist, a DNS service can play the same card. (Grrr.)

But it isn’t just humans who ask to be given content. Robots (autonomous running programs) are always hassling servers too. Unless they’re proxying for humans who are going to read the response later, we don’t currently tend to see this as an advertising opportunity.

Until we try to. For example, sometimes robots are the minions of evil. Computer crackers run programs to look around the Net for vulnerable servers that they can break into. Normally a good firewall says “go away”. What would happen if it served the robot an advert instead?

Of course, most robots can’t understand adverts. But the system could take something of a honeypot approach, and wrap the advert in a more carefully crafted response that the robots would think the human who owned them ought to look at. Gotcha!

This wacky idea is probably ultimately evil. If you want to get the best return from adverts, you have to tune them to your audience. Apart from stylish black hats, most of the products and services that evil crackers want probably make the world a worse place. Also the idea has an evil twin: delivering adverts to honest system administrators by wrapping them in faux interesting responses to whatever their good robots end up sending to you.

Portal, reprojected: I do like this game, and its mods....

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:03:04 +0100

Portal, reprojected: I do like this game, and its mods. Here’s a great example: WeCreateStuff put together this 2D Flash variant of Portal you can play in your browser, then reconverted it back into this huge set of maps for the original game, with some bonus BTS sections and eye candy. It’s a wondeful mod, and kind of weird playing the 2D puzzles reprojected back into 3D, especially all the “keyhole surgery.”

"Minority Voted Eight, Most Just Still Use Nine (Planets)"

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:25:01 +0100

“Minority Voted Eight, Most Just Still Use Nine (Planets)”

- I finally got fed up with the Astronomical Union revoking my very educated mother. I’m very late to the party.

http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:53:29 +0100

http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/: Great concept (edit away Garfield and leave Jon) with scarily effective results. (Recommended by Mike.)

Way to begin a book

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:19:00 +0100

I’ve been using Ruby (mostly spare-time Rails, but) for a while now - longer than the couple of years after which I usually seek out a good book on getting the most from a programming language.

Despite Ruby 1.9 timeliness the PickAxe looked a little too referencey, so today I borrowed the office copy of the second (late 2006) edition of The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton.

Not far in yet, but I’m hoping you can judge a book by its introduction, which recommends Pirsig, quotes far and wise on the trade-off between necessary simplicity and complexity, and references Hofstadter, including asserting Fulton’s Second Law: “Every rule has an exception, except Fulton’s Second Law.”

There's no home-like place

Wed, 28 May 2008 00:33:17 +0100

In an effort to fill out my social graph without locking it up inside a walled garden, I recently added XFN and FOAF contacts to the page that is me. Nothing too exhaustive - I just listed current and some former workmates, blogroll, family and a few old friends. (If I forgot you, dear reader, please yell at me!)

So, I was looking for pages that represented these people I know, and I was surprised that only 23% of them had a homepage under a domain they owned. Another 23% had a hosted blog or social network presence like LiveJournal or Facebook, a few had a page care of an employer or similar, and 24% had only a LinkedIn page - so for a full half of my contacts, someone else owns their identity URL. And for 27% of people I could find no web presence at all - they don’t even exist yet.

Identity 2.0 has a way to go, I guess.

"I wasn’t sure I wanted to be part of a world where people were encouraged to overfeed their..."

Tue, 27 May 2008 22:28:00 +0100

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to be part of a world where people were encouraged to overfeed their pets.”

- Mark Dolan, presenting The World’s Fattest Pets And Me. I think I may have detected a mistake on your part, sir.

"Quake causes landslide, damage, deaths; uses format, model, engine."

Tue, 13 May 2008 22:15:56 +0100

“Quake causes landslide, damage, deaths; uses format, model, engine.”

- Powerset are gradually coming out from undercover; they now demo their semantic search restricted to Wikipedia. I suspect it’s just poor presentation, but I found the apparent category confusion in their Factz for “Quake” amusing.

Where Twitter fits

Tue, 13 May 2008 21:26:59 +0100

I’d like to recommend this recent Gillmor Gang show (80min audio, transcript available.) The conversation wanders down the usual blind alleys, but by the end they’ve done a good job of locating Twitter-like services relative to other communications such as IM, e-mail, blogging, IRC, and microblogging; likewise the underlying protocols and technologies, the subscription mechanisms, the usecases, the trade-off between centralized and devolved service ownership, and the role of service aggregators.

http://epsodic.com/

Thu, 08 May 2008 20:08:00 +0100

http://epsodic.com/: Epsodic is a bizarre service (allegedly in private beta) that seems unaware of and unknown by machinima. From their blurb: “Here at EPSODIC, we have developed a new, sociable way to share your favorite game play moments with anyone, not just fellow gamers! Instead of relying on screen capturing or recording your game, our patents pending platform recreates your game play into a short-form, cinematic clip with a coherent story.” It seems to upscale your original gameplay into a fancier rendering (like replaying a Quake .dem in a beautified engine.) And make suitable cutting/editing choices. Question is: does it only work with NetHack, or what? (tag: machinima) [Update: epsodic, not episodic as previously linked!]

Words respond to need

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:17:55 +0100

(And parents like to watch their children grow, and be fought over - hence this post.)

When first coined, the term “machinima” meant a movie recorded and played back within a game engine. The movie Quad God caused great controversy - if you captured the recording as an AVI and perhaps even enhanced it with a few after effects, was it still machinima? The emergent, necessary answer was “duh, yes.” A later question was: did it matter if the engine wasn’t a game engine? “No, not really.”

For a while it looked like the term might need to evolve further still. Perhaps machinima was an attitude to film-making, rather than a particular medium? (Phil Rice recently made the analogy of defining a lion by its courage, rather than as a species.) Certainly for a while the interesting core of the “machinima community” was usefully captured that way. But the far better term “anymation” is now gradually filling this need.

That leaves “machinima” free to stabilize on something reasonably objective whose fine details don’t really matter; except, perhaps, when deciding whether or not something can be entered into a machinima festival. I find that the AMAS definition - “Machinima is film-making within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies” - still works great after many years, due to its carefully open wording. (For example, “video-game technologies” rather than “video-games”, which would have left Moviestorm et al out in the cold; and “film-making” rather than e.g. “visual narrative”, which would have unfairly hurt mood/impression genres, documentary, etc.)

(tag: machinima)

feedsum.com development diary for 4 days following 26 Apr 00:00

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 02:09:27 +0100

feedsum.com development diary for 4 days following 26 Apr 00:00:

Another attempt at the magic - harder to discourage this time. Works for localhost, tests fixed … (28 Apr 23:28)
Attempt to discover the $root_url of a running instance of the app, so that the…

"database: app13377"

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:27:21 +0100

“database: app13377”

- from the database.yml that Heroku generated for my first test application. Is it disrespecting my mad h4x0r skillz?

What does BDD offer TDD die-hards?

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 01:27:14 +0100

What does BDD offer TDD die-hards?:

“As a long-serving test-driven developer, I want to understand how behavior-driven development differs, so that I can decide whether or not to join the revolution.”

Introduction

A couple…

It happened in the background

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:12:00 +0100

The Scotland on Rails session on at the same time as mine was actually the one I wanted to attend the most: Andrew Stewart was talking about the various options for handling long-running tasks. I’m not smart about Ruby background process stuff and have been messing around this week-end with various issues regarding fork vs thread resource use on my tiny virt host, and the Rails test environment’s use of transactions to roll-back the db breaking all my attempts to reproduce production issues under test. This causes bad background feelings.

On the up side, I installed git intending to make another attempt to get a little bugfix I made a year back applied to Rails now they’re using this patch-friendly source control system - and found it was actually applied seven months ago and went out in Rails 2.0. This causes good background feelings.

Contentful slides. From my talk at Scotland on Rails 2008, with...

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:58:00 +0100

Contentful slides. From my talk at Scotland on Rails 2008, with some screengrabs from the live demo inserted.

Downloads are as follows:

Powerpoint, including my script/notes (1.7M)
PDF (669K)
Script/notes as text (26K)

See my older blog entry on Contentful Testing for an overview of the topic.