Category: General

Categories
Geek / Technical General

Upgrading from Ubuntu Edgy to Ubuntu Feisty

As I mentioned before, I tried to upgrade my laptop from Edgy to Feisty. I had read about upgrades from Dapper to Edgy being a problem, but I also read that upgrading to Feisty shouldn’t be.

I was wrong. After the upgrade, I couldn’t boot into Ubuntu. I would instead see the following:

Check root= bootarg cat /proc/cmdline
or missing modules, devices: cat /proc/modules ls /dev
ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/38ede6ac-6b2f-44d7-a635-deab88ae9381 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

I had to switch to the earliest kernel I had out of the four or five available before I could boot, and even then it was without a GUI. At least I could edit config files, and with network access, I could check in the changes I made to my project.

After trying a number of solutions I found online, I decided that I didn’t have time for figuring it out and will simply install Feisty over the existing borked-up install. I know Feisty will work on my Dell Precision M90…it’s the same machine that Michael Dell uses Feisty on!

I downloaded a Feisty install ISO, burned it to a CD, and popped it into the laptop. When I ran the install, it asked me about partitions. I told it to leave my /home partition alone. I had backed up the important things on there just in case. It formatted the other partitions (I only had /, swap, and /home), installed, and before I knew it, I had the familiar Ubuntu desktop in front of me.

Why the upgrade didn’t work for me, I don’t know. I couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong, and it turned out to be easier to just do a fresh install. The downside to doing so is that I need to redownload any applications and tools I had, such as multimedia codecs, Zim, g++, and autotools. Beryl doesn’t work quite right, but I’m sure I missed something when I set it up. The eye-candy is only useful for showing off at events anyway, so it can wait. B-)

Now that I have it installed, I’m taking it through its paces. Hardware accelerated video is working well, and I haven’t encountered any hardware that isn’t working, so at least there were no regressions there. Wait…Ok, I just checked, and my USB mouse was automatically detected. I had read that people had issues with USB in Feisty, so at least I’m fine. I found that it is mounting my Windows partition, too, which can be useful if I have to access data on that side.

I’m a bit disappointed that the upgrade didn’t work cleanly, and I’m worried about the reports that Feisty is a buggy regression from Edgy. Still, after the install, I’m back to working with my laptop.

Categories
Geek / Technical General Linux Game Development Marketing/Business Politics/Government

GPL v3 Released

The Free Software Foundation launched GPLv3 yesterday. You can read the wording of the license in its final form.

What does it mean for software developers and indie developers in particular? I don’t know. The GPLv2 was written over a decade ago, and this new version deals with software in the face of new technologies such as the World Wide Web. I know a number of businesses participated in the discussions so any silly arguments about the license being a tool for communism can hopefully be put to rest.

“By hearing from so many different groups in a public drafting process, we have been able to write a license that successfully addresses a broad spectrum of concerns. But even more importantly, these different groups have had an opportunity to find common ground on important issues facing the free software community today, such as patents, tivoization, and Treacherous Computing,” said the Foundation’s executive director, Peter Brown.

I am sure people will be talking about what the new license means and how it is different from GPLv2 for weeks to come.

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical General Personal Development

Feminism and Video Games

In What Do We Do About Video Games?, Roy looks at how women and race are portrayed in one of his favorite pastimes, and he isn’t impressed.

In a previous post, I’ve suggested that girl-friendly games aren’t needed so much as games that appeal to non-gamers. I still believe it, but I think that there can be a problem if you are attracting non-gamers using stereotypes and highly-sexualized imagery.

While I mentioned that women as playable characters seem rare, the problem with most of them is that they are highly sexualized. You have Samus Aran, Princess Morning, and a handful of others. And then you have Lara Croft and the Dead or Alive girls with their realistic boob physics.

Who within the industry is actually concerned about these issues? Should they be concerned? I think so. When most of the industry has no problem with hyper-sexualized female characters in games, what can you expect when games cross over into politics and social discussions?

Add to that the fact that the most vocal critics of video games tend to be people like Jack Thompson or NIMF (the National Institute on Media and the Family) who accuse video games of being murder simulators or promoting cannibalism- and you’ll find that a lot of gamers are particularly hostile towards criticism of gaming, even from fellow gamers. Women and feminists are made unwelcome in many gaming circles, and concerns about sexism and racism in games go unheard, ignored, or mocked.

While I am not a fan of Jack Thompson, he does make a point about the problems of an industry that does not self-regulate. Someone will eventually want to do the regulating for you. We’re already batting down anti-video game legislation right and left like King Kong on a skyscraper, and that legislations is about pornography and violence. What happens when people suggest that the Final Fantasy or Soul Caliber series is little more than pornography for adolescents, simply because of the way that the characters look? Grand Theft Auto is already considered pornography by some.

And that’s just the legal aspect of it. What about the gamers? If you think there isn’t a problem with girls playing games, read Monica’s comment on Roy’s post:

I have the double duty of being both a gamer and game designer. My bigges pet peeve is the fact I can’t even play Halo or Unreal online with out virulent harassment. And not only sexual but sexually violent taunts, come-ons, and threats, mostly associated with men and even boys who are virtually emasculated by a girl gamer who has the audacity to win, beat them, or even pick up an item that the male player wanted. After several incidents where I logged off of Halo 2 literally crying, my husband suggest I just stop playing online, and sadly that’s exactly what I had to do.

I love games and gaming. Heck, I’ve devoted my life to it. But I am worried about where this- well, it’s not even sexism, per se…it’s actual hate- comes from. I can’t help but agree that oftentimes my employers and fellow game-buying populace (myself included) are to blame.

Play an online game, and try to avoid encountering 11-year olds taunting you by calling you a “weak bitch” or any number of misogynistic comments. Young boys and men will tell you how “gay” you play. These aren’t a bunch of friends playing on your LAN. These are complete strangers saying hurtful things to taunt you.

Even when things seem nicer, it isn’t so great. If you’re a woman or playing as a woman, you’ll find that people will try to “help” your character because they assume you can’t do well on your own. If helping involves stealing your kills, preventing you from gaining experience, it doesn’t help and actually gets in the way.

Homophobia and misogyny can seem to be the rule when playing online, to the point that people don’t think of them as something that can be changed. Boys will be boys. Just ignore them, and move on. Get a thicker skin. I think it is just an extension of nastiness on the Net, and it isn’t something that should be tolerated.

Even if you ignore the other players online, the games themselves could do better. There is nothing wrong with sexy characters in games. Sexy isn’t the problem. You can have a sexy character that is still a strong female lead. The problem is ambulatory breasts and anthropomorphic sex fantasies as playable characters being the rule rather than the exception.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical General

Blogging Final Fantasy with Four White Wizards

Since I learned about Blogging Ultima, a number of other blogs have popped up involving other games. Besides Blogging DQ and Blogging Final Fantasy, Casey Dunham has decided to accomplish what he has always wanted to do:
Finish Final Fantasy with four white wizards!

If you are not familiar with the original Final Fantasy game, you had to choose four members of your party from a few standard characters. You had the Fighter, the Thief, the Black Mage, the White Mage, the Red Mage, and the Black Belt martial artist. The standard party involved a mixture of fighters and magic users, but the ultimate challenge was to try to finish the game with four white mages. I believe either the instruction book that came with the game or one of the Nintendo Power articles mentioned this challenge as being entirely possible to do. The challenge comes from the fact that white mages are not strong physical fighters so you can’t expect them to fight off enemies with their mallets, at least not in the beginning of the game. They don’t have many offensive spells, either. White mages are expected to provide support for the remaining party members. If your entire party consists of white mages, however, I can see even relatively simple battles becoming epic fights, and boss battles can be quite troublesome.

I never did finish Final Fantasy myself. I believe I stopped playing years ago when my party of a fighter, a black belt, a black mage, and a white mage received the canoe and could travel by river to the volcano. I never picked the game up since, but I still have it for the NES, along with the instruction book, the maps, and the Nintendo Power strategy guide. I remember some of the fights being tough with my well-balanced party, but four white wizards? I remember thinking that I would try to do so after I finished the game the first time through.

Good luck, Casey! I’ll be living this adventure vicariously through you!

Categories
Geek / Technical General

CAN HAS LOLCODE? AWSUM THX

If you have ever seen those pictures of cats with text superimposed over and if you are a programmer, you may appreciate a new language called LOLCODE.

LOLCODE is programming the LOL way. Every block starts with the keyword “HAI” and ends with “KTHXBYE”. There is a list of keywords on the website as well as some example code.

Here is the standard “HAI WORLD” program in LOLCODE:


HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

Here is something I wrote:


HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "IM IN UR TIMEZ"
VISIBLE "STEALN UR PRODUCTIVITYZ"
KTHXBYE

The language is still being formed, and people are making suggestions for syntax and constructs to be used in the language. LOLCODE on MONORAILS might even become the standard language of web development!

By the way, if you plan on doing something important for the next few days, don’t click on that pictures of cats link above.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Games General

Game Complexity and Player Expectations

In the May posting of Culture Clash, Matt Sakey wrote about teaching players what they can do in a game. Specifically, how do you let your players know what is possible and what isn’t?

I found that there is a big difference between people who play video games regularly and people who do not. If you set Space Invaders in front of either group, you’ll see that the ones who play video games regularly already know how to play. They’ll move and shoot pretty much how you expect. The group that does not play video games regularly, on the other hand, will give a poor performance. Basic skills such as moving the ship and shooting appear to be difficult tasks.

The people who play video games regularly will ask about power-ups and extra reserve ships and different weapon types. The people who do not play video games regularly will probably continue to be concerned with the mechanics of the game rather than even think about anything else that could complicate the task of “playing”.

People who play games regularly understand how games are expected to work; unfortunately, this existing knowledge also means that changes in how your games work might not be readily understood. The author noted that technical limitations forced games to limit what the player could do in order to prevent the game from being played in a way different than the designer/developer expected. If you were playing a first person shooter, you might notice that your rocket launchers never seemed to have an effect on the walls of a building. Realistically, you should be able to blow holes through walls and taking the fight elsewhere, but games generally weren’t designed to let you do so. If you could escape through such a hole, the map wouldn’t have been created to account for it, and you might fall through nothingness to your death. It would be considered a bug.

But if a game is created in which you are able to do all sorts of terraforming as a designed-for feature, how do you let your players know? People who play video games regularly don’t expect rocket launchers to do anything to the environment. People who play role-playing games don’t normally expect that their avatars, while able to smite down giants, can destroy wooden doors blocking their path simply by kicking at them.

Games are increasingly complex, sure, but the complexity is offset by greater freedom. They are becoming more like reality, in that many of the old checks – like limited or nonexistent physics in game worlds – are beginning to vanish. So yeah, it’s great for newbies. But oldbies are about to enter a period when games seem less accessible. If we don’t de-chunk, the old guard might miss out on some great game content because it simply will not occur to us that it’s available.

While the article focuses on the potential of new games to offer realistic choices for the player, I think something should be said about games that continue to put arbitrary restrictions on your actions. In real life, if I run into a group of enemies, and one of them might be bribed, I would still have the option of fighting all of them. In a game I played recently, I am able to cast powerful spells that destroy everyone in my path, and yet the game stopped me from doing the same action and getting the same effect just because I was expected to talk with a specific character instead of fighting him. Even when I tried to attack him, walls of fire would simply pass through this enemy without any effect. I was pulled out of the immersion and conscious of the idea that I was playing a game.

I don’t need the ability to decide to play solitaire or knit sweaters in the middle of a war zone in order to mimic the realistic choices I would have in a real war zone. I don’t need the ability to do such arbitrary actions. I do expect that firing a tank shell or grenade into a barn should cause some damage to the foundation. If these things pierce armor plating and destroy tanks, they should easily do damage to a rundown wooden structure. If it doesn’t get outright destroyed, it should have a nice fire going to scare out any enemies.

Categories
Game Development General Marketing/Business

Indie Game Dev Podcast: Interview with BlitWise Productions

Action has released another interview, this time with Mike Welch of BlitWise Productions, creator of DX-Ball and Scorched Tanks.

Mike discussed the importance of author recognition, working with Seumas McNally on DX-Ball 2, and developing a community for his games. While he isn’t deeply involved with the game development community, he watches it, usually with amusement.

I enjoyed hearing his opinion on the difference between working with portals and working for yourself, particularly from a recognition point of view. He mentioned some of the unexpected letters he has received from fans of his games, stating that if his games were sold on portals he would never receive such letters or recognition.

Mike definitely sounds like an indie.

Categories
General Linux Game Development

POTM for April: Vim

The general idea of the Project of the Month is to donate some money to an open source project and write a blog post about it. Everyone knows about the major open source projects, such as the Linux kernel or Firefox, but there are plenty of examples of open source projects that impact you in some way that might not appear on most people’s radars.

This month I donated to Vim, the improved vi editor that I use for all sorts of text editing, including coding and configuration editing. The main developer is using all donated money to help AIDS victims in Uganda, which is both a great cause and motivates him to do more development.

While a lot of developers like Visual Studio, and some of those developers use SlickEdit or Code::Blocks as alternatives, I prefer using Vim. It’s a text editor that I can use whether I am at my desktop or logging in remotely. If I move to a different computer altogether, Vim is pretty much going to work as I expect it to. Without it, I might have to relearn a different editor when I am at home, at work, at a friend’s computer, or anywhere else.

I used to use Nano when I first started experimenting with Gnu/Linux since it was the most similar to other text editors, such as Notepad. Once I learned that there are some editors that are much more efficient, I decided to to learn Vi/Vim. Now editing files requires less key presses, and my fingers almost never have to move far from the home row. If I could find a Vim plugin for Firefox to allow me to use it as an alternative editor for text boxes in forms, I’d use it.

I also find that I am still learning ways to improve my efficiency with Vim. Recently the main developer gave a talk called “The Seven Habits of Effective Text Editing 2.0”. There is a video, which is a little longer than an hour, and slides with notes. While I knew some of the tips, some of them were only recently learned, and the talk had a few new tips that should make my future text editing much more efficient.

I do have to say that it can take some getting used to if you are not familiar with Vim. Having a command and visual mode separate from editing mode in a text editor might seem counterproductive, but once you get over that hurdle, you can be up and running in no time. Text editing becomes much more fun and productive.

Even if you don’t care much for Vim, you can also think about using its cursor keys as training for Nethack. B-)

Categories
General Personal Development

Nastiness on the Net

I haven’t been keeping up with the blogs I normally read, so when I read the first line of Martin Fowler’s blog entry NetNastiness, I had to look into it.

Somehow I hadn’t heard that Kathy Sierra, of the Head First books series and Creating Passionate Users blog, has had death threats made against her. She canceled a presentation and talked about discontinuing the blog due to these misogynistic threats.

I do not want to be part of a culture–the Blogosphere–where this is considered acceptable. Where the price for being a blogger is kevlar-coated skin and daughters who are tough enough to not have their “widdy biddy sensibilities offended” when they see their own mother Photoshopped into nothing more than an objectified sexual orifice, possibly suffocated as part of some sexual fetish. (And of course all coming on the heels of more explicit threats)

I knew about Tim O’Reily’s bloggers code of conduct, but I didn’t know it was proposed in light of these death threats. I still don’t quite understand what the situation was, but apparently some well known, otherwise respected people were involved with the websites that hosted the comments.

Fowler wrote about the subject of nastiness on the Net in relation to these threats.

I worry that people who have interesting things to say and questions to ask are put off by the cut and thrust. They don’t feel free to speak. The freedom enjoyed by people who are nasty does deny freedom to others – and the nasty people belittle the fears of those they have silenced.

We can’t just sit back and say, “Well, that’s the Web!” It isn’t how I want my Web to be.

You may be thinking that this is taking it too far, some people will take offense at anything; following this logic leads to people who either say nothing, or speak in the bland platitudes favored by PR companies.

There is no need to go to the extreme of not saying anything for fear of offending someone. Fowler is right, however, in that we need to be aware that what we say may mean something a bit more than we intended. If you think that the nastiness is no big deal, you may want to ask yourself what effect it is having. Fowler’s entry touched on research that claims only 1.5% of women are involved in open source, even though 25% of women are involved in proprietary software development. His numbers are actually a bit different, as I got mine from a slideshow my friend sent me from the Flourish conference hosted in Chicago recently. One of the more interesting slides asked the question “Have you ever observed discriminatory behavior against women in FLOSS?” Just a little over 20% of men said yes, while almost 80% said no. Women, however, answered in the reverse.

And this is a study focusing on women in open source. What about foreigners? What about homosexuals? What about parents? What about students? What about race, or handicaps, or religious beliefs? How many people don’t feel welcome on the world wide web due to some level of nastiness that is tolerated in communities such as IRC channels, mailing lists, and blogs? It doesn’t need to be a misogynistic death threat to cross the line.

I want my Web to to better.

Categories
Geek / Technical General

POTM for March: WordPress

The general idea of the Project of the Month is to donate some money to an open source project and write a blog post about it. Everyone knows about the major open source projects, such as the Linux kernel or Firefox, but there are plenty of examples of open source projects that impact you in some way that might not appear on most people’s radars.

This month I donated some money to WordPress, an easy to use and quite popular blogging tool.

Yes, it is quite popular, supposedly “the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world”, but I figured that it was still not a household name and so was a valid project for the POTM.

My blog uses WordPress, and I have been pleased with how easy it is to use, update, and modify. While the default theme was pretty ugly when I started my blog in 2005, there were plenty of themes created by the WordPress community, which is great because I didn’t want to spend a lot of time creating my own theme.

There are a number of plugins for WordPress, and some of them are very useful. From blocking spam to adding special links easily on your blog, there are plugins for any number of purposes.

Relatively recently, WordPress.com was launched, which allows you to run a blog without needing to maintain your own host. While installation is incredibly easy, you may not want the hassle of maintaining your own website’s security just to run a blog. If you already have a blog using another system, WordPress has plenty of import options. You can import LiveJournal and TypePad, or even use an RSS feed as the source, among other options.

The community is great. I had to figure out how to get an RSS feed to Larry for just the POTM entries, and the IRC channel was a great source of friendly assistance. I don’t know if I have ever felt lost using WordPress since there is almost always someone around to explain something to me.

Thank you, WordPress community!