Limi’s Concept Zone

The title could definantly sum up the past week and a bit with work, play and everything else.

So to start things off, this Thursday is the UK’s launch for Unreal Tournament 3. Which should provide to be a really fun day since im hopelessly addicted to the entire Unreal franchise. Back in the days of Unreal Tournament 2004 I created UTAN which helped stop cheaters from ruining games and matches, after years of tweaking it was very successful. That aside back to the launch. So I’ll be going around Omega Sektor like a child on about 10 cans of red bull mixed with a random controlled substance professional.

So if im not banned from Omega Sektor after that, I’ll be returning there later in the month for a preview of Kwari. I’ve been keeping an eye on this since it has a very similar idea to Prizefight, and I have been invited along with other people from around the country to give it a play. It will be intersting to see how they handle the answers to the big 5 questions as so far they have been very skilfully dodged…

1. Lag, since the client/server code is generated by you, just how good is it?
2. Packet Loss, what happens with PL? Do I lose my ammo?
3. Bullet Recognition, again, just how good is it when working under different circumstances?
4. Anti-Cheat, I think it also speaks for itself…

Ok ok, its the big 4, I couldn’t think of a 5th.

Sandwiched between these 2 events I will also be at i32, which for those uninformed people is the biggest LAN in the UK and is held at Newbury Racecourse. Where I’ll be once again acting as Assistant Tournament Manager. It seems this time the schedule for the event has gotten even more crammed compared to last event. So this time im not even bothering to take my full rig as last event I didn’t even use it! Laptops ahoy!

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Yes, it’s finally happened, Gmail will now support IMAP! Now I have been using Gmail for nearly a year, and one of the features I missed was the ability to check my mail over IMAP. But the question is, how much Gmail functionality has been lost or compromised in order for this to happen?

Gmail doesn’t currently support folders of any kind, it has “labels” instead, which act in a similar way. That you associate a word with e-mails, more like tagging really. I would probably suggest that labels will exist as folders, as its the only way to keep some sanity, otherwise no one would use IMAP at all.

However, what about the lovely threading view that Gmail does, this obviously won’t follow into IMAP, which is a shame, because its one of those things that actually cleans up my mailbox. If you happen to be on a mailing list of any kind, it threads out the e-mails you receive, so that you can read it like a forum post. But this will be lost with IMAP.

Other things lost would be the Google searching and the archiving of mail, I can again only guess that archiving will exist within IMAP as another (albeit rather large) folder on IMAP. Which sort of defeats the purpose.

As nice as it is for Gmail to support IMAP, I think that the number of features that will be lost just make it like any other e-mail service, short of the fancy tech name and the hype it has surrounding it, but the majority of these hype features are lost. But I guess they are always available at the web-site, but does’nt that defeat the purpose of offering IMAP?

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Ever find that you are searching through various programming language’s API sites, and wished that there was an easier way of doing it all? Well I found this site the other day called GotAPI, and on their site it allows you to specify which API’s you are interested in, and from there you get a very clean interface in which to search through them with.

So instead of having to have 5-10 bookmarks for all the different languages I now only need the one. It’s very fast searching and uses the standard web 2.0 style of ajax. But it’s done in a way which is very useful rather than showing off the fact its ajax and it being intrusive and annoying.

You can have as many languages as the site supports open as they all load up in tabs at the top, so you can search between them by just clicking the correct language. It also includes API’s for various databases and major sites such as Flickr as well, so it’s not just useful for programming.

The bottom line, there’s no adverts, it’s fast, free, and all in one place. GotAPI

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Mark Rein talks about the release of the UT3 demo hopefully within the next 2 weeks

read more | digg story

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For those who don’t know, StumbleUpon is a great way to alleviate boredom. But this post isn’t going to be about what it is, or how fantastic it is at showing you interesting pages. This is more of a post regarding its unique marketing capabilities (let alone it being more viable for traffic than digg.com)

vs.

I’ll start with why I think Stumble is better than Digg. Firstly with Stumble, it only takes the submission of the site to be viewed by at least 150 to 200 people. While your site is still being shown to this subset of users, think of this as your submissions trial period. If during this time no one hits that “I like it!” button, then your site will fall off of Stumble never to be seen again. I believe this to be a better submission tool than diggs. With Digg, you must submit, then either hope your friends spot it and help, or that the traffic on your site is enough to provide promotion.

With digg there are so many more factors at play, they have their unique algorithm which unless you’ve seen the source code, its all just speculation and guess work on what makes a post go popular. All that is known is this…

“While we don’t disclose exactly how story promotion works (to prevent gaming the system), I can say that a key update is coming soon. This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy” - Kevin Rose (digg.com founder)

There are many issues with digg but I am not going to go into them, if you want to read more about that see this page which sums up digg criticism.

StumbleUpon however operates what appears to be a much simpler algorithm, which I have been observing while creating this blog. As I wrote earlier, upon the initial submission of a page that site will be given approximately 200 views. In these 200, if anyone uses the “I like it!” button, that link is given another 200 views. So far I don’t believe there is a upper cap to this, as once you have viewed something on Stumble you aren’t ever shown it again so essentially if you have an interesting page for people to see, you could get exponential views over time.

However, there are some catches, so before you run off and start “discovering” all your blogs pages you’ll want to take this into consideration. During the “trial” period of the first 200 users, if you go and discover another site it will choose between the ones you submit and only send traffic to one of them. So you need to stagger your submissions in order for them all to be seen. Not only that you also need to pick carefully the main topic and tags you apply to your submissions so that they get viewed by the correct demographics and will contain a high chance they they click that magic button.

You should get my predictions on the number of hits if you use StumbleUpon with what it was intended for… Stumbling. If you just want traffic fast and think that Stumble is the key to that, look elsewhere, you need to invest time and take an active interest in its community and members to achieve guaranteed traffic. Signing up with an account and just discovering your own pages will get you no where.

So on reflection, the StumbleUpon algorithm isn’t as simple as it appears, but becomes simpler once you actively use their service. If you compare Digg to Stumble, the more you use Stumble the more weight you have, the more you use Digg the less weight you have. This essentially makes it harder and harder for links to be seen by the masses, especially since its user base is growing extremely fast. The posts in their “upcoming” sections just don’t get a look in as the sections get flooded with the same news.

Most importantly, remember to press the “I like it!” for this page!

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If you own a Wii you can get a free jacket to stop you destroying your nice big telly with one of these jackets that Nintendo are giving away. They don’t look too cheap and useless either, they actually look rather chunky which you can see in the picture below. Nintendo have also said they are shipping these with new Wii’s sold. They have also been designed in a way that they are easy to remove when you need to change the batteries (something which my current covers have issues with).

If you want your own, simply fill out this form if you are in the UK, or if you are in the US, call 866-431-8367.

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Earlier I had written about the release of Ext JS 2.0, and since then some examples have been released on their web-site to show individual elements rather than them all combined in one application. So for people to see, here are some examples…

Advanced Tabs,
Anchoring,
Data Grid,
Tree Panel

There are some more examples on their web-site, which you can find here.

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I have previously written about vandalism on Wikipedia when I was constructing Wikipedia Vandalism Watch. After continued watching and reverting on Wikipedia I started to notice trends in the vandalism, and that most malicious edits almost always included certain phrases and symbols. Some of these are hard to separate out from real edits, and others are not. The most used and easiest to detect phrase is the good old “!!!!!”. So I toyed with the idea of incorporating some sort of Recent Changes RSS feed reader, and then adding in some text checks, but with Wikipedia Vandalism Watch being a read only client, i.e. just shows you edits from flagged users I didn’t think this to be much use. So instead I went about creating a new application, this time an unattended robot to scan for, and automatically remove vandalism.

Admittedly this sounded much easier than it actually is when I started, with various hurdles getting in the way, one example of which is the Wikipedia token editing. Which means you can’t just send a POST request to the server to edit an article. Once things like that had been solved things slowly fell into place. About half way through development I started the Request for Approval process. This is done by the Bot Approvals Group, as this allows them to regulate the standard that bots are made to before you are allowed to run them on Wikipedia. But of course, I can see you asking already, “it’s Wikipedia, and public web-site, how could they stop me?”. Well the simple answer to that one is that if a bot is spotted without being approved, the bot, and your account will be banned straight away. Bots without approval are not welcome on Wikipedia in any shape or form, as unless its been approved it could at any moment go off the rails and destroy many articles before someone could either turn it off or ban it. It’s also the ruling with approved bots that if your bot does the same thing, the owner is responsible and he or she should clean up the mess.

After some discussions with some members of the Bot Approvals Group of how the bot worked, and how it detected vandalism I was granted a trial of 50 edits in the main name space. This trial was completed quite slowly due to the restrictions that were applied to my bot, of 2 edits per minute for 40 reverts, then for the last 10 reverts, I could let it run as fast as it could find vandalism. After a few false positives along the way, and some conflicts, the trial was completed.

At the time of writing, the bot has completed the trial and is currently awaiting news and information on how to proceed. If you want some more technical information, or just to see what the bot is currently up to, check out its User page on Wikipedia.

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IRC Log from the UT3 Developer Question and Answer session held last night on irc.enterthegame.com that I attended. Some interesting questions were answered.

read more | digg story

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Well it’s that time o’ year again, so just a quick post t’ tell everyone its talk like a pirate day! YARR! I’ll be spendin’ most o’ me day codin’ away in t’ bilges o’ t’devotii ship, toss me a grog if you could be so kind!

T’ get more information on t’ day, here be t’official site! Avast me hearties!

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