The Quern

It's All Grist for the Personal Mill

Posts Tagged Cool Link

New Ethshar Serial Starting

Jul 13

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | No Comments

After too long, Lawrence Watt-Evans is spinning up a new Ethshar serial — The Final Calling.  His Ethshar novels are excellent light fantasy, and are notable for having both a great amount of interesting, powerful magic as well as very believable, human characters that for the most part treat magic as just another phenomenon to deal with or use as they go about their lives.  They’re loosely-connected, for the most part; you can fairly easily jump in at any point.  I’ve enjoyed every one of these novels thoroughly since the first one — The Misenchanted Sword — was published when I was in high school, back in 1985.

The way these serial novels work is that every week, assuming enough contributions have come in to pay for it, he’ll post a new rough draft chapter.  Anyone in America who contributes $25 or more will receive a printed copy of the completed book (thresholds slightly higher for other countries).  It’s already paid through Chapter 11, and I haven’t sent my $25 yet, so I’m guessing this is going to be a pretty successful serial.

This seems like a pretty good way for authors to be paid to continue work on series they enjoy, and which have a strong fan base, but for some reason are not appealing to traditional publishing houses.  Lawrence Watt-Evans has used this model successfully for two Ethshar novels in the past, and is serializing a science fiction novel (a sequel to his earlier Nightside City) simultaneously.

Check it out if you enjoy light fantasy written with wit and intelligence!

Tags: , , ,

It Seems I’m Actually A Woman…

Mar 17

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Humor, Reviews, Websites, Writing and Philosophy | 1 Comment

I had not come across this before, but there is an online analyzer for prose that purports to determine if the author is male or female, apparently by counting the frequency of certain keywords in your text.

So I scraped the front page of my blog and fed it into the analyzer.  Although the count was close, my “female count” was about 10% higher than my “male count”, so their algorithm guesses that I am female.

As a control, I also fed in the only actual female-authored text on the site, the post I Want Glue Teeth, which was written by Robin.

I’d love to be able to report that it thought she was a man, but actually the female/male ratio on that article was about 2:1, so at least Robin is more of a woman than I am, which is as it should be.

Oops!  Gotta go!  Gloria Steinem is guesting on Oprah today!

Tags: , ,

Implicit Association Test

Feb 10

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Reviews, Websites | No Comments

There’s a very interesting website that purports to test your unconscious association between different classes of things.  Many of the tests are to identify whether you have a implicit preference for certain types of people (black or white, old or young, slim or overweight, etc.) but there are other tests that operate on names or religious imagery, etc.

The tests are apparently based on reaction time and number of mistakes made.  In the race/weapons test, which is the only one I’ve taken, you’re shown pictures of white and black faces and asked to quickly press a key to categorize them as white or black.  You’re then shown pictures of harmless object or weapons and also asked to quickly categorize them.  The system then shows you pictures of faces and objects interspersed, and asks you to categorize them as “white or weapon” or “black or harmless”, and then switches to “black or weapon” and “white or harmless”.

It appears that what it’s measuring is whether you will more quickly/easily be able to associate black faces or white faces with violent objects based on how fast and accurately you can categorize the images you are shown.

I was pretty fascinated with this methodology; it seems pretty valid to me, and I’m interested to try out some of the other surveys.  I’d love to know the heuristic they use to grade the results.  Interestingly, they give you a questionnaire at the end where they ask you how valid you think the study is, and I suspect this is a major part of their analysis.  They try to give you an out — one of the questions gives you the option to say that the survey reflects the culture to which you’ve been exposed, but doesn’t say anything about you personally, while other options let you say you think the test is a valid reflection of your conscious or unconscious preferences.

My guess is that those people who achieve “desirable” results (no association of weapons with race) will be more likely to ascribe validity to the survey and to believe it reflects their true outlook, and frankly that might be the whole point of the study.  Regardless of whether the picture association component is meaningful or not, they could just be measuring how much more likely you are to put faith in a seemingly authoritative statement that tells you something good about yourself as opposed to a similar statement that tells you something bad about yourself.

Ah, psychology is great!  No other field of science gets to combine experimental design with stage magicians’ sleight of hand.

Tags: ,

New IF Links

Nov 23

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Reviews, Websites | No Comments

infocom[1]I’m adding several of the better IF sites to my blogroll.  These are good places to get IF interpreters, IF games, information and reviews about games in the genre, and, in some cases, lively discussions about the current state of IF and directions it can be taken.  Check them out, and let me know if I missed any good ones!

Tags: ,

Auto-Tune the News

Sep 4

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Humor | No Comments

51390167I don’t think I’ve laughed this hard in a long time.  If you’re not familiar with Auto-Tune, it’s a real-time voice modulation technology that can correct the pitch of pretty much anything from the spoken voice to musical instruments.  It’s used in all music, but is particularly prominent in modern rap and R&B.  Certain artists, notably T-Pain and Jamie Foxx, use it very heavily, to the point of severe vocal distortion.

There are at least eight installments of “Auto-Tune the News” out on YouTube, and all are hilarious.  I’m waiting for these guys to start doing the Digital Shorts for SNL; they’re good enough…

Tags:

C# vs. C++ — Swimming With the Current

Aug 14

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in C++/C#/SQL/Web Programming, Computer | 2 Comments

1696193472_34d83c57f3[1]I know I just posted on the glories of smart pointers in C++.  I love C++ like a brother, and I have many C++ friends, but this article does a great job of illustrating, with wit and great examples, one of the most important truths about programming that I think I can pass on, and it’s not flattering to C++:

If you can manage it, try to swim with the current.

The link above is really a series of articles comparing the development of a simple application to read a Chinese dictionary in both unmanaged C++ and C#.  You should read it — it’s very interesting and educational — but the upshot is that although the C++ author eventually got his fully optimized performance to exceed that of the fully-optimized C# program, it took a large amount of very touchy, bug-prone work to do so, while the naïve version of the C# program already had great performance out of the box, and was easily optimizable to speed up further.

Why is this?  You can blame Microsoft’s substandard support for C++, and that’s probably partially right.  You can blame the glacial pace of improvement in C++ Standard Library design and performance, and that’s probably partially right as well.

But why are both of these situations the case?

The fundamental reason is that, for most non-systems programming tasks, the state-of-the art — the current — for development on Microsoft platforms is strongly flowing toward C# and .NET.  .NET is getting the benefits of new technologies and new advances in the craft of software development, and C++ really isn’t.  You can still paddle around in the C++ backwater, but very little in the way of support and improvements is going to be coming your way.  TR1 is very nice (and very overdue) but at this point it’s almost too little, too late.  Those of us who have to stay in the backwater are just going to have to get used to the faintly stagnant smell.

For most development, the current heading toward C# and .NET is almost certainly a good thing.  Personal computers are not the same as they were when C++ was first rising to dominance in the early 90s.  Multicore machines are the norm now, with multiple orders of magnitude more memory and disk storage than ever before.  Modern CPU pipeline optimizations are so complicated that trying to hand-optimize assembly code for a modern processor is almost laughable; a compiler will always do a better job than you can now, and that certainly wasn’t the case 15, even 10 years ago.

When you have memory to spare, a terabyte of hard disk space, most of the work you are doing is manipulating top-level UI constructs, your minimum-spec machine has an 8-core processor, and preventing obscure malicious exploits is a priority, does it make sense to use a language designed around minimalist efficiency, where threading is a foreign operation bolted on with great difficulty, memory is managed manually out of the box, security is an afterthought and you end up with a static executable optimized for the lowest common denominator of machine?  Or might it be better to use a language with built-in garbage collection, easily-used multithreaded constructs and just-in-time optimization based on the environment the app is running in?

C++ is a great language for many purposes, but the current has passed it by for user-level application programming.  Swim with the stream if you can!

Tags: , ,

Cool Link: IFDB

Jul 27

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Interactive Fiction, Reviews, Websites | No Comments

old19infocom[1]If you are interested in interactive fiction, the IFDB is an invaluable resource to help you find good games.  With the wide variety in genres and quality available in interactive fiction, having a central clearinghouse to hold reviews and ratings of the various offerings is very valuable.  And although there are a couple of other sites that offer the same service, IFDB is apparently the most active and up-to-date.

If you are a fan of interactive fiction, you can probably find something you’re interested through the reviews at this site.

Tags: ,

Cool Plugin — WP-Syntax

Jul 11

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in C++/C#/SQL/Web Programming, Computer | No Comments

nerd-cake[1]I hope to eventually have some more programming-related updates here; I’m working on a solution at work to add compile-time type-safety to Windows message passing that will make a good article (or two) when I’m done.

In the meantime, I have my IFComp updates, although vacation and the sheer number of other projects I have at home is cutting down on the amount of time I have to code in Inform 7.

What both these types of posts need, however, is a good way to format code.  By default, WordPress does not do a good job at all with code samples.  Luckily, however, there are a wide variety of plugins available to do a better job.  The one I chose is WP-Syntax, which leverages the GeSHi highlighter engine to do formatting syntax highlighting for a wide variety of languages.

None of these languages include Inform 7, but syntax highlighting wouldn’t really do much for Inform 7 anyway. For that language I’m just happy to have a nice box and a good font, which I get by default.

Here’s a (nonsensical) example for C++, to show off the highlighter features:

template <typename T, typename U>
class Complicated <T *, U> : public ComplicatedBase
{
public:
    Complicated(const CString &szData) 
    { 
        if (szData.IsEmpty())
        {
            m_szData = "Error";
        }
        else
            m_szData = szData;
    }
    virtual ~Complicated() { /*do nothing*/ }
    void SomeFunction() const;
private:
    CString m_szData;
};

…and another for SQL:

SELECT t1.a AS Name, t2.b AS Something_or_other
FROM Table_1 t1
    INNER JOIN Table_2 t2 ON t1.t1_ID = t2.t1_id
WHERE t1.c BETWEEN 4 AND 8
-- had a GROUP BY here...

Pretty cool, eh? The drawback is that the very nice visual editor in WordPress is not compatible with the formatter, but I can live with writing in raw HTML to get results this nice.

Tags: , , ,

Greedy Goblin is Wrong

Jun 27

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Reviews, Websites, Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

phil[1]I’ve promoted Greedy Goblin and his website in the past due to the very interesting economic analyses he’s put out, mostly stemming from his skill in making valid and insightful analogies between real world economics and the simplified economic model in the game of World of Warcraft.  Unfortunately, I think he’s been way off recently.  In his latest couple of articles, he’s falling into the trap of the elitist-raider mindset, and it’s leading him to make some analogies that are erroneous, inapplicable, and which lead to some incorrect conclusions.

In his latest posts, he’s attacked Blizzard’s move to change the badges dropped by lower-level raid instances.  In a nutshell, the policy change is that at some point, all instances that drop badges, from Ulduar 25 down to heroics, will drop T8 badges.  At the same time, T9 badges will be introduced for the top-end content.

Like many elitist raiders, Greedy Goblin attacks this as welfare, implying through this analogy that the “undeserving” are receiving handouts at the expense of the “deserving”.  He correctly notes that there is no taxation in World of Warcraft, so no one is directly hurt by this change.  No one is receiving less loot.  It’s not even really inflation — there may be more badges available to buy higher-end gear, but vendor prices are fixed, and the higher supply of badges should cause more BoE epics to be available on the open market, a deflationary pressure if anything.

No, what really gets the Goblin’s goat is that it is now easy for someone else to get what was hard for him to get earlier on.  It’s all about class distinction, and the reduction of the difference in gear that has him so worked up.  To the elite raider, gear is wealth, skill, social status, and self-worth all wrapped up together in a neat little package.  Having this difference reduced threatens the ego of the raider from several different directions.  It’s no surprise the hardcore are up in arms about this, but it does surprise me that GG is drinking the Kool-Aid as well.

GG attempts to rationalize his position through an odd definition of what he feels the Gross Domestic Product of WoW is, a fairly ridiculous concept on its face.  His definition, pulling from of all things World War II, is that it is the number of high-level boss kills in the game.

I think this is borderline insane.

It’s like saying that the Gross Product of a gymnasium is the number of super-heavy barbells lifted in a given day.  The hardcore bodybuilders might like that definition, but what about the guy that’s there to run on the track?  Or play racquetball?  Or hit on women?

The truth is that nothing of real value is produced in WoW through boss kills.  The boss you kill is just dead for you.  Others can freely take that boss on at any time.  And even the ones you kill only stay dead for a week — they just keep coming back as long as Blizzard cares to run the server.  And periodically, Blizzard adds new content; new high-level bosses to kill.  It never ends, and nothing permanent is ever accomplished.  You may gain skill and experience as a player, but there is no permanent achievement in the context of the gameworld beyond simply experiencing the content.

GG used to understand this.  His earlier posts talked defiantly about how he enjoyed and took pride in making money in-game as opposed to spending long hours raiding.  He’d at least acknowledge that the “M+S” and “socials” had a legitimate right to enjoy the game in the way they chose.

But now he’s a found a way to buy himself into the elite tier of raiding, and his outlook has changed.  Now he tries to define an overall value metric for in-game activity, and surprise, surprise, it’s based on how many top-level boss kills are achieved — exactly what you’d expect from a member of a top raiding guild.

Let’s look at this objectively.  There are many different servers in the game, with varying levels of hardcore raiders.  Is a high-pop server with many advanced guilds “richer”, more “affluent”, than a low-pop server with a fewer number of hardcore guilds?  Simply because Yogg-Saron is being killed 8 times per week on one and twice on the other?  Is one gym better than another just because it has more hardcore bodybuilders pumping iron, and for no other reason than that?  It’s patently absurd.

Elite raiders simply need to face the fact that Blizzard doesn’t see their $15/month as morally superior to the $15/month of the “M+S”.  Will they cater to the elite with new gear and new content?  Yes.  Will Blizzard set things up so that a permanent class difference is established and enforced by game mechanics?  Hell, no.  They want everyone to have a shot at the content that they spent cold, hard, real-world cash to develop.  That’s how they keep the masses, the paying masses, in the game.

The elite get to see content first, get the best gear first, and have the achievements and titles first.  That’s their value realized from their superior skill and effort.  But Blizzard is always going to make it so the masses can follow along at some point; they want them to see and experience the content as well.  They want them to stay in the game.

So consider it a time value of money problem, Gevlon.  It’s economics.  You used to be good at that.

Tags: ,

Cool Link: Ironic Sans

Jun 21

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Humor, Reviews, Websites | No Comments

kemingad[1]I ran across Ironic Sans the other day and was immediately impressed.  The link I followed was for a wall of outlets, which was impressive enough, but the rest of the site also seems to be a real fund of intriguing and amusing ideas from the fertile brain of David Friedman, a photographer in his offline life.

Histographic steganography, monoblock Tetris, and the “bulbdial clock” can all be found on this blog; if you are interested in the intersection of technology, design, and pop culture you’ll probably find this a good read.

Tags:

The Quern is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache