Why I love Twitter (and the internet in general)

Every so often I run into someone who snorts dismissively at my use of Twitter (follow me here). Today is a perfect example of why I value the service as much as I do.

First, there was that crash landing of a US Airways jet this afternoon. It first came to my attention via Twitter, and I was able to watch the story develop. In retrospect that seems a little macabre, but the point is, a breaking news story came to my attention first via Twitter (and I heard about it before anyone else in my office did via traditional news alerts). Of course, knowing about that crash as it was happening wasn’t all that important in the long run — I could easily have read about it later.

But for another example, I was at my computer tonight when @MarsRovers sent out a tweet: “Live on Ustream, 10pm ET: Rover Principal investigator Steve Squyres will give a one hour talk on the rover”.  I’m a big space fan so I jumped over to Ustream and was able to catch most of the talk (which was fabulous). Since it was live, had I not heard about it via the immediacy of Twitter, I would’ve missed out.

I’ll grant you that there’s a lot of noise on Twitter, but sifting through people you follow cleans that up a lot. I will “test-Follow” almost anyone. If they do nothing but send out updates about what they have for breakfast, then I drop them. Simple as that. It seems silly to me to discard a whole communications system just because some channels aren’t worth listening to. There’s some story about babies and bathwater that springs to mind…

I need a project

This idle lifestyle of being a Gamer is starting to wear me down a bit. I’m feeling a real itch to create something, but I don’t know what. I need a personal project of some kind. Something fun to build (and, duh, I should point out that when I say “build” I really mean “code”; it’s not like I have a workshop with a table saw and drill press any more!) but small-scale enough to be manageable.

Anyone have any ideas? I’m thinking game-related but it could be something to do with blogging or other aspects of community building, too.

Bloggers: Check your RSS feeds

This is a public service announcement from me, your faithful reader, to all you bloggers out there.

RSS feeds rock for those of us who read a lot of blogs. It gives us a 1-stop location to see what new posts are out there in the blogosphere. I urge you to subscribe to the RSS feed of your own blog and take a look at it now and then, and think about it from a reader’s perspective.

There are basically 3 choices as to what you’re going to put into your feed: the entire post, a title and summary, or just a title. Let’s look at these options.

Putting the entire contents of a post into your feed is perfect for your readers, but of course it means no one needs to actually come to your website (unless they want to comment), which can be a problem if your site is ad-supported or you just want to analyze traffic patterns at your site.

Putting a summary of your post in your feed gives readers an idea of what the post is about so they can decide if they want to ‘click through’ and read the rest of the post. If you do this, you should probably write a custom summary, not just let your blogging software grab the first paragraph or something. If you don’t feel like writing a summary at least keep in mind that for some segment of your readers, that first graph is going to determine whether they read on or not. Using a summary forces readers to come to your site to read the entire post, which gets ad revenue and good analytics for your website.

The last option is title only. This is a bad idea, unless you write incredibly intriguing titles (I’ve yet to see an example of this). When a reader is deciding which posts to read and which to skip, it becomes really easy to skip just a title with no more information about what the post is about. Presumably your #1 goal is to get people to read your posts (if your #1 goal is go make money, you’re in the wrong business!) and by only giving readers a title, you’re working against your own best interests. You have to entice readers to read you!

This may all seem really obvious, but I have a few blogs that I follow that only offer a title and I have to confess that even though I’m interested in reading this bloggers, I often find myself skipping them because I’m not sure what the post is about. It’s so much easier to hit “Read Next” and bop on down to the next blog in my reader’s list.

For your sake and mine, at least give us a summary!

My go-round with cybercrime

This post isn’t game related.

Monday I got our monthly bank statement from our “extra” checking account. I was horrified to find over $200 in charges to iTunes on it. Since this isn’t our main account, there wasn’t much money in it, but the Overdraft Protection had kicked in and now we were in the red. A quick check showed our ATM cards were all where they were supposed to be, so I immediately called the bank (Citizen’s Bank).

The very unhelpful person I spoke to couldn’t do much for me. She claimed she couldn’t deactivate the cards or in any way ‘freeze’ the account so more damage couldn’t be done. I’d have to go to a physical bank to do that. She did offer to start the paperwork on an affidavit to file a fraud report. Said that it would arrive for me to sign in 7-10 business days, and after I signed it and returned it an investigation would get underway.

After I hung up with her, I contacted Apple. They were even less helpful. There was nothing they could do, said I should speak to my credit card company (even though the charges weren’t on a credit card) and/or file a report with the police.

A bit of googling revealed that iTunes fraud is really, really common. And no, I don’t have an iTunes account connected to that checking account.

Tuesday, the banks were closed, so I had to wait until this morning to speak to someone, wondering all the time if even more funds were being sucked out of my account. Once I got there, the Customer Service rep started digging into the details of the situation. She discovered that it was Angela’s ATM card number that had been used (wouldn’t it be nice if our bank statements showed this info?) so Angela had to meet me at the bank to sign the affidavit. The rep did all the paperwork, canceled the card, got the signature and told us it’d take about 10 business days to get reimbursed.

I was chatting with her while waiting for Angela to arrive, and she told me that “most” of the claims that she saw were related to iTunes purchases. And that indeed, Apple wasn’t the least bit interested in helping consumers, or the banks apparently. Now this is 1 rep speaking, so you have to take it as hearsay. But I didn’t leave feeling warm and fuzzy about Apple or iTunes.

I feel a little better now. We still have to cover the overdraft until we get reimbursed, which is annoying but not crippling. I just wanted to share my experience and encourage you all to keep an eye on your credit card and banking statements and make sure nothing fishy is happening.

Honestly I have stacks of statements from this account that I never opened since we so rarely use it; I’m not even sure why I opened this month’s. But you can be sure I’ll be checking all my accounts every month, and probably checking them online once a week to boot. We don’t know how/when the info got stolen, though we’re going to do some checking. The last transaction Angela made with her card was to her hosting provider, and that was in the middle of October. Before then she hadn’t used the card in months. I don’t want to name names until I know for sure, but I suspect her provider has a security hole in their system.

Warhammer client. What directory holds what?

The point of this post is to help you with debugging or moving preferences from one install/computer to another. I’ve determined what I’m writing just from poking around and you’ll probably want to confirm this data with someone smarter than me.

Logs
Let’s start with the Logs directory. Inside it is a Communications directory. A level deeper is a directory for each server you have characters on, and then inside that a directory for each character. So for my character Meglivorn I’m looking in:

\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\logs\communication\Averheim\Meglivorn

Averheim being the name of the server. Anyway inside here are 4 log files. chat.log, combat.log, guildnews.log and system.log. These are all text files and contain a *ton* of information if you feel like writing a parser for them. Here’s a snippet of the system log:

[08/09/14][12:55:57]You receive Druchii War Pendant.
[08/09/14][12:58:02]You sold Worked Highstaff to Galmaer Silvermoon for 1 silver and 20 brass coins.
[08/09/14][12:58:06]You sold Druchii War Pendant x2 to Galmaer Silvermoon for 24 brass coins.
[08/09/14][12:58:28]You have purchased a new ability.
[08/09/14][13:00:51]Jobildo has invited you to join the Casualties of WAR guild.

and the combat log:

[08/09/14][12:26:45]You have learned about Eltharin, Language of the High Elves
[08/09/14][12:26:45]You gain 104 experience.
[08/09/14][12:27:40]You gain 700 experience.
[08/09/14][12:28:19]You gain 700 experience.
[08/09/14][12:29:02]Your Eagle Eye hits Dark Sprite for 52 damage. (21 mitigated)
[08/09/14][12:29:02]Dark Sprite’s attack hits you for 9 damage.
[08/09/14][12:29:03]Your Grim Slash hits Dark Sprite for 28 damage. (11 mitigated)
[08/09/14][12:29:04]Dark Sprite’s attack critically hits you for 13 damage.

And so on. The only odd thing I’ve found is that /tells *seem* to go into a separate directory, named your character name + ^M. So for Meglivorn, his private chats are in \logs\communication\Averheim\Meglivorn^M Inside that directory is a file for each person you exchanged /tells with.

Check out the logs though. There’s a lot of data to play with in there.

Notes
The notes directory holds the current patch notes from the launcher, in case you don’t feel like logging in to read them

Interface
Next is the interface directory. You might not have one of these yet, but if you’re going to install modes they go in interface\addons\{nameOfMod}. e.g.:

\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\interface\addons\CurseProfiler\

These are the ‘static’ files for addons.

User
Now let’s look at the user directory. Inside it is your UserSetttings.xml file. This contains screen resolution, key mapping, and a lot of other stuff controlled by the User Settings GUI in-game. There’s an audio_log_settings.xml file too, which I assume holds audio settings. Rocket science this ain’t.

But when moving clients, you probably really want to bring over
\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning\user\UserSettings.xml

Inside the user directory is a nested interface directory, and inside that an AllCharacters directory. And inside that, a huge list of subdirectories, including ones matching the names of your addons. This is where all the settings for addons and various chunks of the UI are held.

I think a lot of this gets auto-loaded from the server. For instance inside EA_ActionBars is a SavedVariables.lua file (standard name for UI setting files) with the hotbars slots indicated, but there’s no character name attached to them. It possibly contains hot bar settings for all characters, but still, I quickly logged into my freshly installed client and although the UI was in its default layout, the hotbars were correct for that character, so that data must’ve been loaded from the server. On the other hand, the physical layout of the windows themselves didn’t. The EA_BackpackWindow has a SavedVariables.lua that contains the items in each characters backpack, and we *know* that info is held on the server, so this must be some kind of caching mechanism.

An important file is the settings file in EASystem_ActionBarClusterManager. This file contains all your UI layout settings, so you’ll probably want to bring that over.

Also, if you’ve ever tried to scale ActionBars using the mouse you probably found it to be tedious to get them all the same size. It looks to me like you could edit this by hand:

EA_ActionBar1 =
{
buttonCount = 12,
columns = 12,
buttonXSpacing = 0,
barId = 1,
modificationSettings =
{
true,
true,
},
buttonXPadding = 6,
buttonYSpacing = 0,
show = true,
buttonYPadding = 5,
showEmptySlots = 46,
caps = true,
buttonFactory = "ActionButton",
background = true,
scale = 0.93,
selector = 43,
}

Change the scale factor to be the same for each action bar, and voila. I’m intrigued by the other options here, too. If you made the bar 10 columns and 20 buttons, would it have 2 rows of 10, or just have half the bars hidden? Some experimentation is in order.

By the way, this is all in an AllCharacters directory. It appears that you can make custom settings for your characters by putting them in interface\{server_name}\{character_name} if you like. You’d have to do this by hand; as far as I know there’s no way to do it using the GUI.

A peek into the Warhammer client directories

As mentioned in my last post, I installed a new “fresh” copy of the Warhammer client off the retail disks. Before nuking the old one I took a quick glance at the two side by side, and here’s some of what I found. This isn’t a complete list; I did drill into every directory to compare things.

New directories in the retail client are GDF and Support. GDF looks to have something to do with patching, and Support contains a bunch of Help HTML files. Worth looking at if you’re having trouble.

The old Beta server has one directory and a few files that retail doesn’t. *Presumably* these are no longer needed, but of course I take no responsibility if you delete them and it totally fubars your install. The directory is audio and holds, unsurprisingly, a bunch of mp3 files with names like Music-Test_Fanfare_Chaos08.mp3. I’ll be holding on to these!

Now we get to the file level and again I’m not going to list everything. 3 directxfiles, d3dx9_30.dll, d3dx9_34.dll and d3dx9d_34.dll are in the beta client but not retail. These aren’t very big though. dev_zones.myp is huge, though, a bit over 3 gigs. .myp seems to be the basic data file ‘bundle’ extension for Warhammer Online. There are also some Player_Guide files that you d/led for beta.

On the retail side, there’s a world.myp which presumably takes the place of dev_zones.myp, though its a bit smaller, about 2.8 gigs. And there’s the opening video (I assume) video.myp, which is a 1.5 gigs or so. I wonder if we could nuke that to save space once we’ve watched it?

In my next post I’m going to talk about what some of the other directories are far.

Use your PS2 to stream media to the living room

The Industry Standard brings us an article about QTV:

QTV by BroadQ uses a $30 piece of software to repurpose a PS2 as a digital media set-top for a TV or home theater. All users have to do is pop the DVD into their PS2, turn it on, and they are ready to either stream local network content or Internet shows like Revision3’s Digg Reel without leaving their sofas.

Brilliant idea. I’m going to be on the lookout for a copy of this software, and in the meanwhile I’ll dig out and dust off my old PS2.

Reiser leads police to body

The strange and fascinating case of Hans Reiser continues, though it seems things are drawing to a close. He’d been convicted of murdering his estranged wife, Nina, but maintained that he was innocent and had nothing to do with her appearance. Then, two days before sentencing, he led authorities to a body (not yet confirmed to be her) buried in a shallow grave a mile from where Nina was last seen. Details: Convicted husband leads authorities to body

I’m not sure why this case has grabbed my attention. It’s a sad fact that people are murdered all the time. I guess it’s because Reiser is such a geek. I have this weird mental image of us geeks as basically good and non-violent people for some reason. Totally naive of me, of course.

Anyway if you haven’t heard about the case, Wired has a lengthy and pretty interesting story on it from a while back. It was written before the trial and, as I remember it, paints Reiser in a somewhat sympathetic light while still remaining objective. I’ll admit its been a while since I read it though.

Hans Reiser: Once a Linux Visionary, Now Accused of Murder

Simplifying the “home theater”

So my project for the day was to re-do my ‘home theater’ setup. I put that in quotes because we’re talking, y’know, the living room, not a dedicated home theater in a separate room. My goal was just to get components plugged in so that I could turn them all completely off, rather than have everything in ‘standby mode.’ Good for the environment, and good for the electric bill, right? But of course I didn’t want the DVRs turning off, nor the hubs.

Once I started pulling stuff apart…I was pretty amazed. I ended up with a huge pile of gear I really no longer need to have hooked up. First, my ancient Laser Disk player. I haven’t turned that on since I moved into this apartment a few years ago. Next, VCR. Can’t remember the last time I used that. DVD player? Just collecting dust, since the PS3 upscales DVDs so nicely. I found out I had a wireless bridge running that was supplying ethernet to the XBox. Not the XBox360, mind you…the old XBox. And speaking of the old XBox, tear it out and stick it into storage. I don’t have time to play all the new games I want to play; I’m never going to get around to playing those old XBox 1 games.

Now I was really getting into the spirit of things: I pulled out the #2 Comcast Box, and the Tivo that was hanging off it. I never watch Tivo anymore because I can no longer tolerate SD content delivered through an s-video cable (the best my Tivo Series 2 offers). I’ll either put the 2nd Comcast box in the office, or turn it in and save the $10 or $12 that Comcast charges me every month. I did end up re-connecting the Tivo just to see if it gets its podcasts (like Cranky Geeks) via ethernet, or if it somehow is pulling them now through the cable. I can’t imagine how it would be… anyway that still might end up going. I had an Airport Express out there to stream music from my computers to the stereo, which I last did about 18 months ago. And I never print to the printer hanging off of it. So out that went.

Suddenly, a brace of switch boxes and y-cables were no longer needed, so I got rid of those, several of which were powered. Which mean fewer plugs and so fewer power strips.

That whole side of the room looks so much neater and uncluttered now. I’m using 3 power strips. One will be ‘always on’ and has the Tivo, the Comcast DVR and the single remaining ethernet hub on it. One controls the receiver and the XBox 360. And one (plugged into a different circuit) controls the TV, PS3 and Sub-Woofer. So when I’m turning out the lights at night, I can just toggle off those power strips and all that energy going into keeping all this gear on standby no longer gets wasted.

Now my big challenge is… where to store all these gear I tore out!!?