Dave I/O

STOP THE PRESSES

Though I’m fully aware that it makes me a tragic human being, I play EVE Online, having moved to it from World of Warcraft after hitting the level cap there and finding nothing else to do – unless, of course, I started talking, interacting, and then raiding with people I didn’t know to start with. Because I’m an antisocial bastard sometimes, this didn’t appeal.

Fortunately, a few years ago, a friend of mine told me about EVE. She told me that it was an MMORPG for grown-ups, with a far more open world, an older playerbase that managed to keep the clarity that it was essentially a game about internet spaceships, and generally a more interesting and rewarding experience. I gave CCP, the EVE developers, a bit of money, and created my character. I then proceeded to get hopelessly hooked on a game that was playable in any mood, whether you just wanted to do some sedate mining and chatting, explore and learn about the backstory the sights to be seen, or run around space blowing stuff up.

She was absolutely right about the majority of the playerbase. This isn’t a game for teenagers with ADHD. It’s fast-paced in the microcosm but slow-paced in the grand scheme of things, unforgiving of short-term failure, and exceptionally deep. People were pleasant. Even when combative, in a world where the loss of a ship has significant consequences, you’ll almost always see “GF” in local chat, from both sides, when a player vs. player battle finishes – meaning “good fight”. It’s a game about internet spaceships. Everyone remembers that.

What EVE does have in common with WoW, however, is unremitting chauvinism.

If you have a female avatar, you can expect nonstop trash talk about your menstrual cycle. If you demonstrate that you are in fact female outside of a combat situation, you will be unable to interact as a player for all the clunkily catapulted flirting that is launched in your general direction.

Great example: I listen to EVE Radio, and pay a premium subscription, because it’s genuinely brilliant. Fantastic range of DJs playing a fantastic range of music, with intelligent discussion about stuff both in-game and in the real world, and organised events.

Tonight, a female DJ came on, and the in-game EVE Radio channel devolved into a disgusting mess of testosterone and pseudo-adolescent lust. Let’s look at some of the ‘intelligent discourse’ that DJ Violent Cupcake ended up getting. Player names are redacted because it feels like the right thing to do.

And my personal favourite -

Stay classy, EVE Online. Now, I know that this is just one situation, but I’ve seen stuff like this happening in local chat all over the EVE universe, and the same holds true for my time playing World of Warcraft. Gendered comments are used to smack talk or flirt when someone believes a player to be female, but there’s no gendered language between males.

Female players can be one of two things: the false stereotype of the unskilled female player, or ‘hot’, ‘sexy’ or ‘fit’ because they play a mostly male-dominated game. What it seems that they can’t be is skilled players in their own right, where gender is an irrelevance.

I know that I’m sounding humourless about this, but I genuinely think there’s nothing funny about pushing someone out of a group that they want to contribute to and be part of simply because of their gender.

Am I on the money here? Do you play WoW, EVE or another MMORPG and see or experience what I’m talking about, or am I just frequently in the wrong place at the wrong time and oversensitive to gender inequality? I’d love to hear from you, lovely readership. Pop a comment in below if you’ve got opinions on this one.

Here I am. I’m British, my lower lip keeps moving oddly to one side and I want to talk to you about an American initiative to destabilise the basic functions of the Internet, so that music labels can make more money.

You can do something about this, regardless of whether you live in the United States or not. Hit http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa for a prettier video with more technical detail, and details on how to contact your representative with your thoughts about SOPA and PROTECT-IP. If you’re a US citizen, get in touch with them. If you’re not, spread the word. SOPA and PROTECT-IP will affect all of us – for the worse – sooner or later.

EDIT: it has been brought to my attention that there is a significant likelihood that Private B. Manning is a transgender woman. Taken from a chat log published by Wired magazine between Manning and Adrian Lamo:

“I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me… plastered all over the world press… as boy…”

As such, I have removed the photo that was previously included in this article, altered my pronouns and removed all mention of Manning’s name at birth where possible (unfortunately, the permalink can’t be changed). If this turns out to be untrue, I hope people realise that I don’t believe that accusing someone of being transgender is in any way a smear. One can be a saint or an arsehole, and one’s gender has nothing to do with it.

Thanks for reading, it’s important. Anyway, here’s what you came for.

Private Manning, as you’re probably aware, is currently on trial, charged with about fifteen bazillion counts of generalised ‘being inconvenient’. What it comes down to is the fact that the US military believes that while a Private in the US Army, she passed information to WikiLeaks which was subsequently made available to the public. This information allegedly includes a video of a US Apache helicopter attacking civilians, and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables ranging from non-classified to top secret status.

I want to make one thing clear: this article is not about Manning’s guilt or innocence, or the rights or wrongs of what she is accused of doing. That’s been covered elsewhere by people more informed than I am; you can form your own opinion on the matter. This article is about some didactically valuable flaws in her attempts to maintain privacy and security, regardless of whether those attempts were in favour of the US military in her role as an analyst, or to cover her tracks as a whistleblower.

Manning made a few crucial errors that allowed the court access to a fairly large base of evidence that would otherwise have been inaccessible, as it would have been encrypted or obliterated. Unlike the UK, the United States has no mandatory key disclosure law, since the Fifth Amendment allows citizens the right to refrain from acting in a manner that might stand to incriminate themselves. As such, if you encrypt something and you choose not to reveal the key, US law provides no mechanism to coerce you into handing it over.

Other than waterboarding and the bore-worms, anyway.

This is about more than just how one person screwed up, though. Look at the Arab Spring – the Internet, and technology in general, was key to those uprisings. The credit goes to the people, of course, rather than Twitter – but without today’s communication technologies, it would have been much more difficult for them to achieve the numbers and degree of organisation required to make a difference.

I’ve taken a lot of this information from the excellent write-ups of the court sessions posted by bradleymanning.org. You can read them yourself if you’re interested in how the case is going – Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4.

Alright, I’ll stop wittering and get down to it. After the jump are a few things Manning got wrong, and how to avoid them if you ever need to do something on the quiet.

Read the rest of this entry »

So I was having a bit of a World of Warcraft evening (shut up, yes, I know, shut up) and visited one of the new Cataclysm areas after hitting level 80 in Icecrown.

It’s an underwater zone, but not as infuriating as you’d think as you get a permanent water speed and breathing buff for free. Anyway, that’s beside the point. The point is this quest that just popped up out of nowhere, as some quests do – no quest giver, no turn-in NPC, just ‘Quest Discovered’ in the HUD and then ‘click to complete’ afterward.

This is the quest.

Dude really hates eels.

Dennis Ritchie, creator of C and father of UNIX

As you may have heard, Steve Jobs – CEO of Apple and wearer of one of the most iconic polo-necks of the Information Age – died recently after a long battle with cancer. I firmly believe that any death is sad, no matter who it is – a mass murderer or a saint – and Jobs’ death is no exception.

Because of his iconic stature, the entire Internet exploded with messages of remembrance for Jobs. Seeing that was wonderful, for the most part. Richard Stallman, or ‘rms’ as he prefers to be known, a very loud proponent of the open source movement, let rip with a mindblowing dick move as he publicly stated that “Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died” and that “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.”

I don’t want to do that here. Steve Jobs should be posthumously lauded as a business genius and a visionary. He brought excellent technology to consumers and created a market where people would pay premium prices for premium hardware. He made tablets and mobile devices take off in a way that had never happened before.

The thing that irks me is that in the shadow of Jobs’ death, another extremely important man – in fact, a giant that Jobs stood on the shoulders of – has been largely allowed to pass away unnoticed. Read the rest of this entry »

Rendered by magic.

The use of ‘magic numbers’ in code is a well-known antipattern, meaning a common but bad practice. It refers to the inclusion of set values without documentation of their purpose, making it a thorough pain in the arse for anyone other than the original author to maintain and fix code that relies on them.

0x5f3759df, or 1,597,463,007 in decimal notation, is one such magic number that appears in the Quake 3: Arena source code, in a genuinely beautiful hack committed by John Carmack.

Here comes the maths bit, concentrate

When you’re doing 3D rendering, you have to find the square root of x (where x is a variable input) rather a lot.

Carmack’s code contains a fast way of working out the inverse square root of x, which can be written as 1/sqrt(x). With that information. we can work out sqrt(x) easily -

x * (1/sqrt(x)) = sqrt(x)

The beauty here is that we don’t have to be exactly correct. 3D modelling can operate in tolerances. If our result for sqrt(x) is out a little bit, that’s okay – nobody will notice that the reflected light levels are off by a tiny amount. Carmack’s code accepts this and embraces it. Here it is, trimmed a bit for clarity but with original comments -

float Q_rsqrt(float number) {
	long i;
	float x2, y;
	const float threehalfs = 1.5F;
	x2 = number * 0.5F;
	y  = number;
	i  = *(long*) &y;  // evil floating point bit level hacking
	i  = 0x5f3759df - (i >> 1); // what the fuck?
	y  = *(float*) &i;
	y  = y * (threehalfs - (x2 * y * y)); // 1st iteration
	return y;
}

What it does is generate a guess for 1/sqrt(x) very, very quickly. With that information, Newton’s algorithm (which is used to intelligently refine a guess for any mathematical function) only needs one iteration to get to a tolerable margin of error.

Turns out that, on the processors of the time, this is four times faster than asking the CPU to find the square root by itself.

So where’s the magic?

Read the rest of this entry »

This happens.

Like many geeks, I’m tech support for my parents and occasionally their friends. As I’m sure you’ll also feel, it’s extremely frustrating at times. I was having a chat with our resident Uberherrin of Colouring-In, @Alilouisa, who was going through the same drama and hitting the exact same stumbling-blocks with her parents. Common themes seem to be;

• Confusion of where one UI element ends and another begins (for example, a window in OS X and the menu bar at the top)
• Seeing common widgets (for example, a file browser) as unique and unexpected each time they appear
• Inability to apply conceptual knowledge of one UI widget to a similar widget (for example, the native file browser and a Java clone)
• Inability to segment and mentally track layered windows (thinking of a 2D pane rather than a 3D space)
• Visibility as an identity to presence (“I can’t see it, so it’s not open”)
• Inability to track what should be single-clicked and what should be double-clicked (menu items vs. icons)
• Inability to apply common sub-concepts from one application (for example, open, save, close, undo) to another application

All of this smells to me like a completely different conceptual model of a modern windowing user interface to mine. The mental picture that the majority of the younger generation have seems to be completely different to that of the majority of the older generation.

I’d quite like to find out exactly what different types of people see. I’m looking for the following four types of people to look into this -

• Under 35, considers self technically apt
• Under 35, considers self technically challenged
• Over 50, considers self technically apt
• Over 50, considers self technically challenged

For the last three, I doubt they’re particularly high in my readership numbers – so if you know someone who might be willing to help, please pass on the details at the bottom of the post!

Participants are welcome to participate anonymously if desired.

I’ll take care of setting up the environment, but what I’m aiming to do is get as many people in each category to perform a few tasks in a fairly simple application, while talking me through their experience.  I’ll record the session and the audio, and then afterward I’d appreciate a few paragraphs about the experience – what was confusing, what was obvious and any other thoughts.

Volunteers greatly appreciated – this isn’t something I’m doing to make money, but more something that I think might be useful to the community at large to make both web applications and native applications more accessible to everyone. I’ll post the results in full on Geekosaur.

If you’re interested, give me a shout on Twitter to @syn or by email to uistudy at dave dot io – thanks!

Okay, that headline is probably a bit sensationalist – but it’s a worst-case scenario in a situation where the worst-case scenario is just about feasible.

You’ve seen Facebook’s Like buttons all over the Web. I don’t use them on Geekosaur, but a blog is a perfect example of a site that would get value from them. If you read a post that you enjoy, and you want to share it with your friends, you hit Like. Your browsing isn’t interrupted, and it’s shared on your Facebook Wall for your friends to read. Simple enough.

Opt-in sharing: the way we all like it.

Facebook have decided that the opt-in sharing model isn’t ‘share-y’ enough, and introduced something that they call Frictionless Sharing. With Frictionless Sharing, you authorise Facebook once – this can be through something as benign-sounding as logging in with Facebook or linking your Facebook account – and then everything you do can be shared on your wall without any further action on your part. The granularity of what gets shared is up to the site.

Frictionless Sharing, otherwise known as "a bit creepy".

You read an article, up it pops on your real-time ticker and potentially your Wall too.

Spotify is using Frictionless right now. Whenever you listen to something, your friends get to hear about it -

Like last.fm, but sneakier.

For Facebook, this makes perfect sense. You’re not paying for Facebook, and that means you’re the product, not the customer. The more data Facebook gets about what you do online, the more effectively it can target advertising at you – and that means more clicks and more money for them. It’s not necessarily evil, it’s just a business model.

It’s just a business model that’s worth becoming aware of, before something ugly happens – for example, a job listings site letting everyone you work with know that you’re looking for a new position.