Limi’s Concept Zone

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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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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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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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of days you will have heard about the strike action that the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union (RMT) are currently conducting over the Underground in London.

Tube staff walked off the job around 6pm yesterday and will be putting their feet up for 3 days until 6pm on Thursday. If their “issues” and “complaints” aren’t sorted by this coming Monday then the same thing is going to happen all over again! So obviously they aren’t content in causing havoc for millions of people for a nearly a full week, they threaten to do it twice.

Anyway, to see the impact of this strike just ask anyone who works in London. I have heard lots of stories this morning of people being unable to get to work due to bus’s being overloaded or simply just not being able to cope with the sheer number of people needing them.

Needless to say, ranting about this sort of thing won’t make it stop, and it won’t stop RMT (and all the other unions) abusing the privilege of striking and using it more as a bargaining chip than a last resort. Over the pond in USA they have something called the Railway Labor Act, which basically boils down to their Rail and Airline staff not being allowed to use strike action unless it is the last resort. So it’s something that may help (well, you never know! :P)

10 Downing Street Petition: Ban London Underground workers from engaging in strike action.

Overall though, the meaning of striking I think has been lost over time. When we look back at when striking first popping up it was due to various serious issues over working conditions and how people were treated. When we look at it now its over stupid and silly reasons that should never ever end up in strike action.

If you are on Facebook, there’s a lovely group regarding these strikes, and you can find it here!

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If you were at i31, you would have heard about Kwari but you might not know what it was as the PR team that attended the event didn’t actually explain. Kwari is another company cashing in on the idea of playing FPS games for money, except its slightly different. Instead of piggy backing off existing games like Counter Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, they have created their own for their deathmatch playground.

Instead of paying an amount to have access to servers, or paying per match, you simply pay for the bullets you use…

“Every time you hit another player in Kwari you make money. Every time you are hit by another player it costs you. Every shot counts. How much is down to the stake level you play in. But this is not the only way to win.

Doing damage to yourself, breaking crates, use of certain map features or picking up additional weapons, pickups and health packs may have a fractional cost attached. This cost is transferred between a series of jackpots, prizes and awards available in the game, all of which can be won by any player, regardless of the skill or stake level of game they prefer to play.”

Now this sounds like quite a reasonable way to do things, as they created the game they can change whatever they like, all the way from gun accuracy to level changes whenever they please. However this also has its downsides, as the game will never come close to being played and balanced as much as something like CS:S. How much tweaking will be required so that the game is “fair” and “balanced”? Unfortunately though something they can’t control are the players skill levels, and from first impressions there doesn’t appear to be any seeding information in their initial posts about it all that I could find. It would probably be suicide to launch the game without seeding, as all it takes is one skilled player to ruin the experience for everyone else.

“At no point does the house take any of this cash – if you win it, it’s yours. You can get your winnings back to your real bank balance easily and quickly.

The game is free to download, you’ll need ammunition and this is the only place Kwari charges for anything. Think of us as your virtual arms dealer – we supply you with ammo (which works in all weapons) for a fixed cost. Depending on your style of play the amount of ammo you need will vary.”

I guess that the company behind Kwari will primarily make their money from wasted ammunition, and secondly by placed advertisements on their websites and within the game itself. Let’s hope its not too “pushed” to the user. Alternatively, if advertising is even going to be used, it will no doubt spark the whole BF2 In-game advertising saga again.

With the game being so heavily based on hitting your opponents and not wasting your ammunition, what happens with regard to lag… packet loss.. and bullet recognition. This game is being built, from what information is available, on a completely new engine, lets hope they get it right, or at least have the coding skill and knowledge to fix it when the first play test online shows just how bad it really is. A post has appeared for this topic, and is awaiting a reply from the development team.

To wrap up, possibly the most important issue that the team have generated for themselves with creating their own game, is of course, cheating. Not using existing games with tested, experienced and mature anti-cheat systems (Warden, VAC, Punkbuster, etc) will only generate a buggy, light and easily defeated anti-cheat system. They either best have a programming genius working on their anti-cheat, have snapped up someone from EA (where a number of Kwari employees have come from), or thirdly and finally, haven’t gotten that far into development and subsequently will bodge something out when that time comes. A post has also appeared on the Kwari forums regarding this topic, and as of today, is also still waiting for a reply from the development team.

It seems that the team behind this project have a lot of work on their hands, not only to produce a FPS game to the current high standard that gamers expect, but also anti-cheat software, an entire money system, an integrated payment system. All that while still managing to make it all work together without any issue.

Good luck to the team behind it, as your going to need it!

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The Trades Union Congress today decided that employers should re-consider the blocking of various social networking sites, with particular emphasis on Facebook. It seems that rather sort more important issues like the striking of prison staff, they would argue this instead…

“It’s unreasonable for employers to try to stop their staff from having a life outside work, just because they can’t get their heads around the technology.”

I disagree with the banning of web-pages in the workplace anyway, if the employees are completing their work at the level expected and hitting deadlines on time then there is no reason. If they are missing them or not producing great work, then if these social networking sites are to blame, then I see no problems in removing access to them. I’m of the work ethic that if your at work your being paid to be there and work, not play around on social networking for extensive time periods.

However its a double edged sword, block access to social networking sites and you could upset your employees so much that their work levels drop even more than they were previously.

I’m glad I work from home and therefore I have to regulate my internet access myself, and as long as I get my work done to the required level and I don’t miss my deadlines, the odd 5minutes here and there don’t hurt. I would say to a point that it does improve my work as I take mini-breaks which take my mind off complex tasks, so when I come back I have a semi-fresh mindset again.

Overall though, I think the unions should be arguing over more important issues than this.

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This being more of a generalised post about the shitcocks lovely people who use the Underground everyday. The people who seem to be in their own little world of acceptability who think that they are the sole being on the planet and that they could do no harm… those are the people who I choose to write about now.

So yes, the tubes all went to hell this morning (a tad worse than usual, with a fire causing the closure of the Paddington Underground entrances for the District & Circle and Bakerloo lines). Which means that the only Underground station running of out Paddington would be the Hammersmith and City line, which it appears the world is trying to get onto at the same time. Due to this massive number of people coming and going there were extreme numbers of people moving off and onto the platform. So the Underground staff decided to give priority to people trying to get off the platform, which is usually a sensible idea, since otherwise its just going to end up with someone under a train. But due to the slowness of these people who appear to be oblivious that there’s about 200 people waiting to get down onto the train that’s waiting, by the time they were off the platform, the next incoming tube had arrived. So just as we were about to move down, we would get stopped and have to wait again. Repeat this for roughly 30minutes and you have some pissed off Londoners trying to get to work. But as if the annoyance of waiting for 30minutes wasn’t enough, people were pushing their way up the queues to also get down onto the Hammersmith line, queue shouting and screaming here for at least 5minutes. Luckily at this point the TLU staff had realised that the crowd was getting.. unamused to say the least, and stopped people getting off the incoming train until we had a chance to actually get out of Paddington.

Also following onto the list of annoying people, are the people who have backpacks (ok, I have one too but…) decide that when at rush hour on the Tube, they should keep their bag on their back and take up double the space! Rather than taking it off and putting it between their feet. It seems people have forgotten that bags can in fact go on the ground and the floor!

And finally, there’s the people who try to get on the trains before letting other people off, however this one is easily combated with a “oh I am sorry did I stomp on your foot” or “I am sorry, did I just fall off the train elbowing you in the chest.. I am SO sorry”.

The Underground is fun

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Well, after being exposed to a blog at my new job, I decided it was probably about time I had my own to scrawl down anything I felt like. However, I will refuse to allow this blog to decent into the madness of “omg, my life is crap, wahh wahh wahh” because well.. thats sad. So this place will probably be used for exposure for various Plan B programs i’m writing. Plan B being the “organisational” (loosly put) name for little programs I create nown and again.

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