October 12th, 2011 by Chris
To the people behind the ARG: Please don’t take the following in the wrong way. I think you did a very very good job – the amount of effort that went in to this must have been incredible and I really do appreciate it.
Over the last week (or thereabouts) I have been participating in the Ubuntu-Advertising team’s ARG – http://www.thisisthecountdown.com
On the whole, the game was entertaining, puzzles were interesting and there seemed to be a good storyline. There seemed to be a relatively constant flow of puzzles to work on and progress was driven by the players (who were definitely fun to work with)
Sadly, there have been a few aspects of the game which have made it hard to enjoy properly. For the last few days, puzzles have lead to information, but were a dead end. We got the information which drove the storyline slightly – but no new obvious clues. This leads to people generating more and more fantastic ideas about what the information we found actually means, whether a typo in a file is a clue or a typo, whether an overlay on a video is an anagram, a code, or just the name of the camera the video was supposedly taken on. And given long enough without any new information and once the obvious things to speculate about haven’t turned up anything people start ‘seeing’ clues in the tiniest of details, which don’t actually lead anywhere. Instead, we are all waiting for the person running the game to flip another switch on the server to give us the next puzzle and the wait for a new puzzle is both jarring and frustrating. Which brings me to the next issue with the game.
Timezones. All of the puzzles in the game seem to have been released after 11PM UK time (after midnight in most of Europe). This means that people in Europe need to either stay up until 5am to help contribute to problems being solved (as I did on saturday night/sunday morning), or go to sleep to be able to function at work the next day and wake up to find the puzzle has been solved and you didn’t get a chance to contribute. This game seems to be targeted almost exclusively at players in the US, which is a little unfair given the global nature of the Ubuntu community. The preferable solution would be a constant stream of puzzles, where each new discovery gave a clue to the next (which would eliminate both the timezone issue and the problem of looking for clues where there are none). Another possible solution, if waiting for the GM to flip a switch is unavoidable, is to have the new content released evenly across 3 time periods; 6-8pm in each of the US, Asia and Europe. It may not be possible for one person to work on all of the puzzles if they are released like this, but then at least that way everyone will have a chance at getting the first shot at part of the storyline.
One of the characters in the game particularly annoyed me: The security guard which was presented as the ‘face’ of WSASec. Up until that point, WSASec had been (quite effectively) portrayed as an intelligent and slightly menacing organisation. When Pinwake changed to WSASec in IRC I was expecting something quite special, an adversary. Instead, we got a bumbling security guard who didn’t know anything about computers and was more interested in arguing about who is the best with computers, us or his computer scientist friend, rather than advancing the storyline. This original interaction took place around 8pm UK time. To make matters worse he then left, saying he’ll be back when his shift finished at 10pm Ohio time. Yup, thats right, 3am UK time. At which point a new puzzle was released. Why couldn’t the 3am conversation have happened at 8pm? As far as I can tell, the 7 hour gap didn’t really add anything, just left people twiddling their thumbs for that much longer. All the security guard really did was to hide the main countdown for a few hours by “breaking” the computer, but there wasn’t any change in how long it took.
Which brings me to the next issue. Countdowns. There are two problems with countdowns in ARGs. One is when the players can’t really do anything to change it. They could be super clever and solve all of the puzzles really quickly, and then get left doing nothing while the countdown finishes. If the countdown is an integral part of the storyline, players should be able to have an impact on it. If we do well, it should speed up / end early so we actually feel like we made a difference, rather than just being distant spectators. I realise that companies use ARGs to launch their products, and they like to know when they will be launching them, but I believe that if a company chooses to use this route for marketing, they should be willing to incorporate some uncertainty about the release date to make the game that much more engaging. The Valve ARG for Portal 2 was the same. Yes, Portal 2 was released early (about 10 hours early) – right in the middle of a planned party, complete with big shiny red button to launch the game. The players never really had any impact, it was always going to be released then, and the realisation that your actions, no matter how hard you worked, never _changed_ anything is quite deflationary.
The other problem with countdowns is when they don’t have anything exciting at the end. One of the most annoying things possible is to be sat there waiting for a countdown to end, after you’ve had days of excitement building up to it to see….another countdown. It starts to get like Sony’s announcements that they will be posting an announcement about posting an announcement about holding a press conference about the PSVita – each time you get to the end of a period of waiting like that to just get presented with another countdown sucks that much more interest out of the game.
The above is probably more ranty than it should be and casts more of a negative light on the ARG than perhaps it should. The puzzles (when I’ve managed to work on them) have been interesting, challenging and rewarding, and I really do thank the people who have put the time and effort in to designing/writing and running this game, you have done a very very good job. Which is what makes the above points all the more frustrating – they are all that stands between “very very good” and “absolutely mind-blowingly amazing”.
June 22nd, 2009 by Chris
One feature seemingly missing from the iPhone mail client is the ability to send messages from an alias identity on a mail account. Suppose you have main@example.com, but all mailing list emails are sent to mailinglist@example.com, which is an alias for main@example.com. If you want to send an email from mailinglist@example.com, you would have to set up a second account, which would duplicate the main@example.com account emails (which is messy, in my opinion).
Now, Apple seem to have (perhaps inadvertantly) managed to enable a way of having proper aliases in iPhone OS 3.0. Essentially you need to create a list of email aliases seperated by commas in the “Address” field of the IMAP Account Information. This must be done after the account has been created with the 1 main email address, or it complains about being an invalid address. Once the account has been set up with the main email address, create a new note. In this note, type out the list of email aliases you want, starting with a comma:
highlight and copy this text to the clipboard.
Then go to “Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars” then choose your email account. In the address field, paste the copied text after the existing main address and save the changes. Now when you compose an email, if you click on the “From:” field, you should have an option of your main address, or any of the aliases you created.
April 20th, 2009 by Chris
This thing has been pretty empty for a while; I feel I should probably write something more often.
On the 28th July 2008, I was diagnosed as type 1 diabetic. I had symptoms for a long time which I (mostly) ignored. This has already proved to be a particularly stupid decision.
I suspect that I had high blood sugar levels for almost 2 years before I was diagnosed. Every minute your blood sugar is outside the “normal” range causes damage to all of the small blood vessels in your body. Some of the main areas of damage are your kidneys and your eyes. When your kidneys are affected, it causes them to become less and less effective. As yet, I have no symptoms of this, but diabetes can eventually lead to kidney failure. My eyes are a different matter. High blood sugar levels damage the capillaries behind the retina. This causes them to weaken and bulge, to the point where they can burst, leaking blood into the eye. The result of this is “floaters” appearing in your field of vision, which look like small fuzzy spots that are virtually impossible to look at directly. A lot of people have some of these; having a couple of these is normal.
Once these blood vessels have burst, it reduces the blood flow to areas of the retina. This can cause parts of the retina to die, leading to black spots in your vision. If this continues for long enough, it can lead to being legally blind.
It can take many years for this sort of damage to begin, but it can also progress very very rapidly. At the moment, I have the initial signs of damage to my eyes – bulges in the blood vessels. This scares the **** out of me. At the moment my vision is unaffected, but some day it will probably start to go wrong. The worst part is that I have no idea of knowing when; it could be tomorrow.
The only way I have of stopping this is keeping as tight control on my blood sugar levels as possible. This involves many injections of insulin each day, and regularly checking my blood sugar. Since diagnosis, I have pricked my finger over 2600 times, and I have given myself over 1000 injections. Every day for the rest of my life I will have to give myself at least 2 injections, sometimes up to 7 or 8. Food no longer holds any joy for me. I have to calculate the carbohydrate in everything I eat; if it contains any more than the amount in a jaffa cake, I have to consider doing an injection for it.
Oh yeah, and if i calculate the injection wrong, I risk passing out due to low blood sugar, which would be really nasty. I’ve managed to avoid passing out so far, but I’ve come close (or felt like it) a couple of times. It starts off with a light headed feeling, with a weird feeling when moving limbs. Next, comes the shaking; at the point fine movements are very difficult (typing is a difficult; similar to being drunk). This quickly progresses to feeling incredibly faint with intense hunger and a strong sense of panic. This is as low as my blood sugar has been,and I hate it. Something as simple as walking 5 mins to sainsburys can bring this on, so I have to carry round a supply of sugar to bring my BG back up.
All of this (and more) is constantly in the back of my mind; I have only had a few occasions where I could totally forget about my diabetes without the constant worry of what my blood glucose (BG) level is doing, and it isn’t usually long before my mind drifts back to the thoughts of “What if my blood sugar is high? Is it going low? Do I need to test my BG? What exercise am I planning on doing? How much carbohydrate can I afford to have for my next meal”, as well as the million other diabetes related questions constantly swimming around my head.
This is what I have to deal with every day for the rest of my life, no matter what else is going on.
May 20th, 2008 by Chris
Number 1 - My blog being added to random planets without me being asked.
It would seem that the entirety of the ubuntu-uk.org planet userlist has been duplicated by MooDoo for his own planet, as he doesn’t like the “members only” policy. I believe that the correct thing to do in this case is at least ask people if they wish to be added to his planet.
*Edit* As a planet like the one set up by MooDoo already exists, he has now redirected the domain to point to the existing planet, which doesn’t add people without them asking *Edit*
© cjo20.net | Chris Oattes. All Rights Reserved.
January 16th, 2008 by Chris
Find a HOW-TO here:
http://cjo20.net/remote.htm
EDIT: I no longer use this remote, I hope the guide remains accurate
December 3rd, 2007 by Chris
Everyone should go have a look at FreeRice.com. It is a relatively new site that claims to donate rice to the World Food Program, who then distribute it to people who need it. The way they fund this, is by providing a simple (but entertaining) word game, with a small advert on each page (I didn’t actually notice the advert until it was pointed out to me). The game is a series of multiple choice questions, where you have to choose the most similar word to a given word from a list of 4. For each correct answer, they donate 20 grams of rice.
To make the game more interesting, each word has a “difficulty” associated with it between 1 and 50. It starts by asking a few random words to get an idea of what level you are at. Once it has determined a suitable level, it ask you questions from that level. If you get 3 questions right, you go up a level, and if you get a question wrong, you go down a level. This means that it adapts to your vocabulary to give you words you have a chance at getting, but not making it so easy that it is boring.
October 17th, 2007 by Chris
A friend just sent me this link. The instructions make it much easier to read email discussions with many levels of quotes.
Note: Using ubuntu, the user preferences are in ~/.mozilla-thunderbird, not ~/.thunderbird. You will need to create the “chrome” subdirectory and the file “userContent.css” yourself.
May 22nd, 2007 by Chris
A PhD student at the University of Bath recently told me about a (relatively) new type of touchscreen, which relies on “Frustrated Total Internal Reflection”. (see here). Basically, Infra-Red light is shone down the inside of a sheet of acrylic. When something touches the acrylic, the light is reflected away from the object, where it can be picked up by a (slightly modified) webcam.
This image shows what a webcam underneath the touch screen picks up (Image from http://www.whitenoiseaudio.com/touchlib/). This image can then be processed to pick out the bright “spots”, and the coordinates on the touch screen worked out.
The big advantage of using this method to detect interactions with the screen is that you are not limited to just 1 point of interaction at a time. For example, in a paint application, each finger could be a separate pen/ paintbrush. This also means that the number of users that are able to interact at the same time is only limited by space around the touchscreen.
These touchscreens are also relatively cheap to make. The main expense is a projector (which cost around £300), but all of the other components can be obtained for < £100. Someone has blogged their attempts to make a screen.
Below is a demo of a FTIR touchscreen:
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
And a link in case the player doesn’t work.
It also seems like there aren’t too many problems getting this to work in Ubuntu, so I’m hoping that I may be able to build one myself sometime soon 
May 14th, 2007 by Chris
You should visit http://moon.google.com and zoom right in…
April 30th, 2007 by Chris
A friend at work just sent me this link: http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Feisty#How_to_improve_sub-pixel_font_rendering_for_Feisty.
It tells you how to get much much smoother fonts in Feisty – I recommend that people try it out.
[Edit: As Gord pointed out, this will only applies to LCD displays]
