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  • Dark Liquid 10:29 am on September 26, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Reading aloud 

    If you want to host some audio somewhere, youtube works well enough for short pieces of content. The only awkward thing is that you can’t directly upload a music file – it needs to be a video youtube can understand. The easiest way to do this is to make an image you want to associate with your audio and then encode a video of that image with the audio playing. I messed around trying to do that and getting several files that I could play fine, but youtube would fail on. After some googling I found this little youtube audio encoding snippet on the ubuntu forums.

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    ffmpeg -loop_input -i image.jpg -i audio.mp3 -shortest -acodec copy output.mp4

    I expanded this into a little bash script, to make things a little easier:

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    #!/bin/bash
    if [[ $1 && $2 && $3 ]]; then
    ffmpeg -loop_input -i $1 -i $2 -shortest -acodec copy $3
    else
    echo "mp3toyoutube [input_image] [input_audio] [output_movie]"
    echo "EXAMPLE: mp3toyoutube image.jpg music.mp3 outout.avi"
    fi

    Nice. So what does this have to do with reading aloud?

    Well, I basically haven’t read aloud since childhood and inspired by g2LaPianistaIrlandesa’s post “Dig to the Roots” on the Protagonize groups about getting to the heart of story telling, I decided to give it a go to get back in practice and read the first (and currently only) chapter of my story “Don’t Shoot the Messenger”. DruidX also decided to jump on-board but also read a chapter from one of my stories rather than one of her own, namely the beginning of a crime drama called “Sick”. Youtube seemed as good a place as any for this, given the free storage and so finding out how to encode audio in such a way as youtube would accept it was necessary. If you’re interested in hearing the readings, they can be found on my youtube channel.

     

  • Dark Liquid 11:09 am on September 12, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Out of 1-10, Rating Systems Suck 

    I’ve long said that the rating system in Protagonize is inherently flawed because it relies on the honesty of it’s participants, both in that it relies on users not artificially inflating their own ratings and on user not artificially deflating the ratings of their peers. As a moderator on the site and as a coder who has a passing interest in reputation systems, it’s clear that relying on user’s honesty isn’t a workable solution.

    The other problems with rating systems is that there tends to be a large bias towards positive ratings. In Protagonize, where the people behind the ratings are anonymous to other users, there is a clear trend of ratings towards the 3.5-5.0 end of the scale out of a 0.5-5.0 range. Looking across the site, it’s clear that many things rated highly do not deserve these ratings and in an ideal world, the range of values would see a concentration of works rated around the 2.5 mark, with outliers at the more extreme ends of the scale. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case, though without access to the actual statistics I can only make this assertion based on my own observations, which will be prone to their own biases.

    From what I have observed, the majority of users on protagonize behave in the following way. Upon reading a work, if they like it, the will rate it highly, at a minimum 3.5. If they are friend with the author, they tend to naturally increase their rating slightly, making a 4.0 become 4.5, for example. 5.0 tend to be given out slightly less often, being reserved for either friends or for exceptional pieces of work. If on the other hand user dislike a work, they tend to abstain completely from rating a work, most probably because they don’t want to hurt the author’s feelings, feel like they are giving the author a chance to improve before they rate them accordingly or just can’t bear to have to think about the work any longer. Obviously this creates a strong bias towards high ratings, as low ratings tend to be a minority.

    Nick, the founder of protagonize, recently posted on the protagonize blog about the misuse of the term ‘hater-rater’. The terminology was originally aimed at people that deliberately try to warp the system by actively negatively rating people, usually those with high-ratings, in order to both lower those authors rankings whilst increasing their own relative to said authors, since they are essentially dragging the site-wide average down, putting their lower scores closer to the upper bounds above the average than the lower bounds. Over the course of time, the term has come to encompass anyone who makes any kind of negative rating, or people who rate lowly due to ‘not getting’ a piece of work, rather than any objective measure. Being branded a ‘hater-rater’ is obviously not something people want, which further leads people to instead abstain entirely from rating where they otherwise would have given a low rating. As such this leads to the above bias towards ratings that fall within the 3.5-5.0 range and I can see this perpetually refining itself as the new lower bound gets considered hateful, slowly narrowing the range tighter and tighter until rating become 5.0 or nothing at all.

    These problems are only exacerbated by people who write to achieve high ratings, rather than writing well and being rewarded with high ratings. Since your overall rating is calculated as an average of all your ratings, it makes sense, when trying to competitively climb the ladder, to write a much higher quantity of posts targeted at a group of friends you know will rate highly, rather than at actually trying to write well. This way, you can both raise your average rank whilst also building in increasing immunity to low ratings, by virtue of a overwhelming majority of high ratings.

    Seeing this problem some time ago, I wrote The Protagonizer’s Manifesto, a call to action for fellow authors to rate everything they read, all the time, and to rate them objectively, leaving their emotions and personal opinions for comments, which are far more suitable for relaying that kind of content than a single number. While I had many people agree with much of what I said, nothing much has changed. I’ve proposed a few other systems for ratings, but the core problems remain as part of any rating system. Namely:

    1. People abstaining from rating
    2. Only rating things positively

    Now, for a non-binary ratings system, both of the above pose a problem and lead to the biasing problems seen above. Facebook solves these issues by actually making use of abstinence as a form of negative rating. By allowing users to ‘Like’ something but not providing a way to dislike anything, nor a way to provide a more scalar value of how much one ‘likes’ something, they’ve eliminated both problems. Things that have more likes are better than things with less likes – that’s a clear and obvious metric.

    However, for protagonize, does a purely cumulative numeric metric actually provide a useful function? Let us first examine what functions ratings currently serve on the site.

    • Determining approval of an individual page of work
    • Determining the overall approval of an entire work
    • The visibility of that work on the site in terms of recent approval
    • The visibility of that work in terms of all-time approval
    • The visibility of the author in terms of recent approval
    • The visibility of the author in terms of all-time approval
    • The average opinion of the author in terms of ratings given by said author

    Does a purely binary system of rating still achieve these goals and further more, are these goals desirable? Using a purely cumulative system, the first six features are all met. Is the last one important, given this new model? Perhaps not, since opinion has been completely removed from the equation, as things are either good or not-good, so it can’t be said any author has an overall opinion but only that an author has liked a certain number of works. However, are those first six points desirable, what exactly do the serve in terms of usefulness to other users?

    For the most part, one would expect the visibility on the site to be a kind of endorsement or recommendation – an increased visibility implying one should read the work whilst a decreased visibility implying it is one to avoid. The problem with that assumption is that it has no context and provides no information about a work other than a certain number of other people ‘liked’ it. As an author, you don’t know why people liked something, which is not very helpful, while the existing system at least attaches some context to each of the scalar values it provides in terms of ‘Perfect in every way’, ‘Lack originality or suffers from serious mistakes’, etc. As a reader, all you know is that other readers liked this, but not why and as such you can only judge something on it’s perceived popularity rather than whether or not it meet’s your own criteria for what you consider good.

    Thus, in terms of recommendation, just listing things or increasing their visibility based on the total number of ‘likes’, for protagonize, seems to be little more than an impetus for those people who want to be at the top of a list, rather than actually any good, which promotes rating abuse such as fake accounts, liking friends work, reciprocal ‘liking’, etc. However, there are ways of dealing with those kinds of issues and there have been many papers on the subject, such as ‘Immunizing Online Reputation Reporting Systems Against Unfair Ratings and Discriminatory Behavior’. Most recommendation systems are based on correlations between you as some who rates things and others who also rate things, building a set of of items commonly rated by others that share many similar ratings to you, but for which items you have not yet rated. Something like this is perfectly applicable to protagonize and far more useful in terms of recommending things you may want to read than lists based ‘likes’ or the current ratings, but such system fall outside the scope of this.

    Ratings in the current context of protagonize are markers solely of personal reputation. It can be said that those with a higher reputation are better writers, or at least the implication is there, but due to rater bias and the increasing marginalisation of ratings to within such a narrow boundary, such reputations lose their meaning. Switching to a binary system doesn’t change this fact as the problems of gaming the system still arise, changing the issue from collecting high ratings to one of collecting ratings at all. So in terms of personal reputation, perhaps a non-numeric value is better placed for presenting this. Let us get to the heart of the matter.

    What qualities make a writer a good writer? What qualities make a work good or bad? Many of these things aren’t quantifiable or otherwise require intense computation to work out automatically. As such, trying to map this to any numeric system isn’t going to work. What’s needed is a more flexible system based on describing qualities of a work, rather than rating it good or bad.

    I’ve proposed a system like this before, based on tagging inspired by that which occurs in LittleBigPlanet on the PlayStation 3. In LBP you could choose from a series of adjectives to describe a work. I propose extending this format significantly to add the following features:

    1. Positive, neutral and negative connotations
    2. A system for indicating the reliability of any rater
    3. Increased context for enabling feature recommendation systems

    In this system, ratings would be given via three boxes. A positive, neutral and negative box. Into each box, you could choose several tags from a pool of attributes and drag them into whatever box you liked. For example, you might indicate you felt positively about the storyline by dragging the storyline tag into the positive box, while you might indicate you felt indifferent to the setting by dragging the setting tag into the neutral box and indicate your displeasure at the writer’s grammar by dragging grammar into the negative box. This first step of rating gives both the rater and the ratee more context into what exactly is being rated and what those opinions mean. Things that are not worthy of note need not be dragged into any box, essentially abstaining for those tags, but with a rich corpus of descriptors, abstaining becomes less likely. In terms of rating the reliability of raters, raters can be ranked based on how works they have rated have been rated by others. When one rater chooses to place grammar in the negative box while several others put the tag in the positive box, in can be said the distance between that rater is less reliable, having an outlying value rather than approaching the norm. From the distances these outliers have from the normal value, a reliability can be calculated and be used to scale the effect any outlying rating they have given accordingly. In terms of displaying these ratings so that they are useful, it would be encouraged to use several synonyms of various basic descriptors to avoid copying existing ratings or introducing bias when raters are choosing what ratings to give. For authors wishing to review their feedback, a tag cloud for each of the positive and negative values could be used, or perhaps just a list of the first few most popular tags (taking into account synonyms) for each of the positive, neutral and negative aspects. Lastly, the additional context these tags lend to recommendation system is obvious. Raters inclined to rate things positively in terms of grammar, imply a preference for things with good grammar, users using the sci-fi in a negative context a lot of the time can be said to dislike sci-fi. The benefit of using nouns for descriptors is that each has no emotional context except that which is given by selecting what box to put it in. As such, a author seeing sci-fi high up in their negative box need not feel badly, for it’s clear that many people who don’t like sci-fi have read the story, rather than there being anything wrong with it per se.

    Other ways of presenting a simple binary or trinary system with additional helpful context is to follow a method similar to getsatisfaction, where you state your mood (good, bad, neutral) and are then offered a way to contextualize that by adding tags or emotions to the rating. Such a system could work in protagonize where you choose good and then the option expands to let you choose what things from a list of items specifically made it ‘good’ or an option to add your own message while still maintaining your anonymity.

    The core issue is that scalar rating systems suck for subjective assessments. Basing a system around any kind of scalar rating is inherently flawed for a site like protagonize where everything is highly opinion based, or is quantifiable, but only by human beings and then only in a fuzzy way. Spelling, punctuation and grammar for example are all quantitative in terms of it being good or bad, correct words versus incorrect words, etc but a machine isn’t capable (yet) of accurately coping with ratings these and putting such ratings in the hands of humans is prone to error and bias. No, the only option is to get rid of a ranking system entirely, and instead encourage others to judge each other qualitatively and to punish those that try to game the system by unilaterally effecting the worth of all of their judgements, benefiting everyone.

    From that basis, it’s possibly to construct a quantitative ranking system based upon the number well-supported, agreed upon qualitative statements, weighted accordingly for the subject domain, which restores the previous listings, but in a much fairer manner, with additional context that makes such things much more useful for everyone involved.

     

    • nick 10:09 pm on September 12, 2010 Permalink

      Hey Andrew,

      First off, let me thank you for posting this. Taking the time to consider a core system of the site so thoroughly is much appreciated. I do recall you bringing up a similar system previously, but since we’ve got it all down on paper, so-to-speak, let’s hash it out a little further.

      Second, the system you suggest is actually very close to something I’ve developing for another site I’m working on. It’s funny that it parallels it nearly identically (without the nouns, but using descriptors/qualitative commentary, depending on an underlying -1/0/+1 system.) Not quite the same implementation, but surprisingly close. Great minds…? ;) Maybe I should give you a preview…

      I do have a few issues with the system you suggest as it applies to Protagonize, though. There are a couple of things that your suggested system doesn’t take into account that might cause (me) major pain in attempting to convert over. While I do really like the guts of the idea (particularly how this could impact dynamic recommendations down the road), these issues would need to be resolved before I could even consider implementing a new system.

      I’ll save a more in-depth discussion of these points for our beta forum (because I’d really like to hash them out more, and I’ll start a discussion there as well), but I’ll briefly mention my most pertinent concerns here:

      (1) How does this impact historical ratings?

      Obviously, one approach could be to wipe them altogether. Although I think that would likely end up with me hanging from my neck at the nearest tree branch, surrounded by angry Protagonizers with pitchforks. :)

      You’re likely aware that I’ve done a lot of research into ratings systems (hence the first change to half-marks), and I have been considering switching to a Reddit-like up/neutral/down (effectively +1/0/-1) system for a long time. Migrating to that system would be easy enough based on existing ratings, but migrating to a combined system like the one you suggest would be problematic. The only way I can see it working is to create a base initial rating that migrates our existing /5 ratings to a +1/0/-1 system, but with no descriptors selected to start. After that, future ratings would include the descriptors as well.

      (2) How would “Top Rated” lists around the site function?

      Would these be junked altogether and replaced with something else?

      The “Popular” list would likely be unaffected in that it is based on a number of aggregated factors, but our Top Rated lists (which I would be happy to remove) would need to replaced with something as-or-more valuable to authors on the site.

      Any suggestions on how that would work?

      My concern here is how aggregated ratings would show up, not only with respect to newly-rated material, but with respect to existing works as well that have been migrated to the new system.

      - Are we summing up the total of all chapters to form a total score?
      - Are we averaging the per-chapter rating and using that for rankings?
      - How does this impact an author’s overall rating?

      Which leads me to…

      (3) How are author rankings calculated in this system, if at all?

      A problem I can see right away is that if 100 of your “negative” ratings comprise of people who dislike sci-fi, even though you happen to be an excellent sci-fi writer, you will still end up with a horrendous overall rating.

      Obviously, the vocabulary selected for rating would impact this tremendously, and having subjective options like “sci-fi” (using this since you used it as an example) in addition to more objective descriptors like “grammar” or “plot” seems like it would make life a lot more difficult. I can see how this could be very valuable to generating recommendations, but I can’t see how it would work, realistically, given that attaching personal taste to numeric ratings could have a major negative impact on someone’s overall rating.

      There are probably other issues as well, but that’s a start. I like where you’re going with it, and I’d like to see if it could evolve into a system that could replace the current mechanism. Just needs a little more refinement.

      Cheers,
      -nick / protagonize

    • nick 10:13 pm on September 12, 2010 Permalink

      An additional concern: devising “reputation” scores for users based on their ratings patterns. I’m really afraid of how badly this could clobber our server (which is powered by 3 hamsters alternating in a wheel every 8 hours.)

      I’ve had enough trouble trying to aggregate stuff like total views (long story, it’s not as simple as a counter) that I’ve had to put a lot of complex calculation on hold until I can get better hardware. Building a ratings-rep system based on proximity to other ratings, and recalculating it on a regular basis, per-user, would likely bring the server to its knees.

      Obviously this is a perfect-world solution where if I had the hardware and money I’d love to do, but it has to work within the constraints of the existing system, as well.

      Okay, that’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll migrate the conversation over to the beta discussion…

      Cheers,
      -nick / protagonize

    • roclafamilia 7:24 am on October 21, 2010 Permalink

      Helpful blog, bookmarked the website with hopes to read more!

    • Delorfinde 3:07 pm on December 28, 2010 Permalink

      Wow, you’ve put a lot of thought into that. Yeah, I guess that could work on Protagonize, but what if you weren’t *quite* happy with the grammar, yet you still thought it deserved more than ‘neutral’? Would there be something in between?

    • Dark Liquid 8:55 am on December 29, 2010 Permalink

      Well I think a finely gradiated response is part of the problem, since lots of people have different ideas of what is good, bad, or somewhere inbetween, which is why people tend to lean towards higher marks than are perhaps deserved because the option is there. It’s why system like what youtube employ with just a like/dislike work well. You can be positive or negative or neutral (which is not rating at all in youtube’s case) and while you might not be able as an individual to mark something as super-awesome, over the averages of multiple different people rating, if something is good, than the rating should naturally average towards a higher value. Having a middle value allows people to say ‘it was okay’ without feeling guilty and having a single dislike option stops massively skewing result with hate rates, because there isn’t a super-effective ‘hate rate’ just one negative in a sea of other ratings. If you want to give more specifics about a work, then use a comment – otherwise a think a like/neutral/dislike system is suitable and more resilient to abuse.

  • Dark Liquid 6:33 am on August 1, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Albrecht, , , WFRP   

    Roleplaying is Awesome 

    The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game I’m playing in is nuts. My character, Albrecht, started off as a lowly thug before slowly progressing into the career of an interrogator and from there into the careers of a physician.

    During his life he’s made dodgy deals, been tortured and hideously scarred as a result, caught disfiguring diseases and survived, tortured people, plotted and carried out revenge and more recently got into quite an adventure indeed.

    The party was sent to assassinate someone in the Chaos Dwarf empire and on the way we were confronted by a slaving band. Before they could get close enough to see us properly we decided to fake being a slave band, with me playing the role of slaver and putting the rest of the group in chains (bar two, who would be my guards). Anyway, meeting with the slavers, they had a much larger group and so afraid we’d all get captured (assuming no honour amongst slavers) I sold the chained up party members into slavery for a tidy profit and got myself a ride to the city. The plan was to steal them back or buy them back later at the city where it was arguably safer, at least when it came to being grabbed and forced into slavery.

    Anyway, what happened next was that it became clear I’d been ripped off selling my friends and I had no chance of buying them back with my meagre sums of cash. So, gambling time!

    Through gambling, first in a bar with dice games, and later at the gladatorial arena, I managed to amass 27 million gold pieces! With that seed fund, I started looking into hiring some assassins to do our mission for us, after all this was a city of evil people and I expected assassins and assassinations were common place. Eventually, through setting up various meetups, dead drops and other indirect communications channels, I managed to get a clan of assassins to work for me on retainer. However, as proof I was serious, they wanted me to kill someone – another party member, one of my ‘guards’ that had been sticking his nose into fights that didn’t concern him and had consequently killed some guys from the clan. They’d tried to kill him themselves but so far failed. So, I found someone that looked similar, had him killed and roughed up enough so it’d be hard to say the differences weren’t from injuries and sent his head to the assassins. Not pleasant, I know, but I assumed everyone in thus city was a bastard slaver or warmonger or evil in some way so I had no qualms about it. Anyway, we still needed to make the party member disappear, so being a trained surgeon and physician, I did some face surgery. After some botched attempts that nearly left him insane, he ended up looking different, if a little messed up.

    Now, during my gambling I’d made friends with a hobgoblin that had a lot of money and seemed well connected. I’d heard some of my friends were sold to the gladatorial arena and through this hobgoblin learnt they were going face ogres and likely die. Using charm and gambling prowess, I convinced him to enter into a plan with me to deliberately leak info that the ogre were the next challengers (in order to manipulate the odds at the bookies) and to get some poisoned weapons over to the slaves. That way we could place a bet with huge odds against with a good chance at winning and making a tasty profit.

    It worked and at 3000-1 and a 1 million hold bet, I came away with 3 billion gold. Cha-ching! I also bumped into another party member at the arena and so got to talking with her owner. Eventually we made a business deal for me to acquire slaves (I’d used some trepanning I’d done previously on a dwarvish party member as evidence of my Dwarf pacification techniques, dwarfs being highly prized slaves) and got myself a massive ship and crew for a 10 million gold investment. I also offered to buy the slave back from him, using the story I’d need obedient empire stock, as I could hardly show up in the empire with a bunch of dark elves on my crew and so would need a fake crew for show whilst in port. Unfortunately, he wasn’t her owner, only her master, and so I had to go to the owner to buy her back. To make it seem legitimate I bought all the empire slaves they guy had (he only had two) and as luck would have it, the other slave turned out to be a spy sent by the same people who sent us. Turned out that the people we were sent to kill were some of the most powerful people in the world and we had no chance – basically we’d been sent to die – deliberately – our boss being an agent for dark powers previously unbeknownst to us. He also let it be known that there was a hit out on all of us and that my gambling buddy was their boss so all my assassination plans were in ruins. Luckily their retainer hadn’t been paid yet for this month! Anyway, with new slaves in tow, I decided it was time to leave before we got killed.

    I’d previously set up a deal to fund development of new battle mechs in exchange for the arena’s prized fighters (my friends that beat the ogres) but with my new timetable I couldn’t wait. I sent one if my guards to bribe/buy the slaves with 200 million gold and another with the same amount to buy assorted slaves and weaponry. In the meantime, I went to the bank, emptied my accounts and spent 500 million on buying warehouses full of weapons at the docks and as many orc slaves for dock hands as possible.

    Everything went smoothly and so I had the guard with slaves separate out the humans and bring them plus some weapons to the ship whilst leaving the 20 thousand goblin and orc slaves left over to be free at the opposite side of the city (and in charge if some wagons that just happened to be full of weapons). We just made it to the ship as the assassin clan came after us. I told my dock hands they were free and could help themselves to the warehouses and so the assassins were trapped between two armed riots of about 30-50 thousand slaves each. Quite the distraction to escape with. So everyone was saved, I saved 5000 human slaves and also made 1.8 billion gold. Also got a very, very fine ship (though I’ll need to replace the crew, though I’m sure my party plus 5000 freed slaves with access to weaponry can manage that).

    All of this achieved with planning, manipulation, lying, gambling, murder and other business dealings with evil people – and I’m one of the good guys!

    It’s stuff like this which is why roleplay games are awesome.

     

    • jade 10:29 pm on August 14, 2010 Permalink

      sounds really exiting and fun, is it a computer game your refuring to or live roleplaying with the gang?

    • Dark Liquid 2:07 am on August 15, 2010 Permalink

      This would be proper pen and paper stuff.

    • Dark Liquid 8:03 pm on September 6, 2010 Permalink

      Glad you found it interesting. Thanks for pointing out the typos, I’ll get onto fixing those. The adventure is still ongoing, the game-breaking amount of money being used for founding a village at first with the aims of carving out my own little empire :)

    • Zotis 8:59 pm on September 6, 2010 Permalink

      Stumbled across this when randomly google searching resource material for a web browser based role playing game.

      It was actually quite an interesting read :)

      You should proof read it though to filter out a few simple typos. Anyway, sounds like you had quite the adventure. Just thought I’d drop a comment, keep up the good work.

    • Zotis 2:05 am on September 9, 2010 Permalink

      Sounds like fun. Warhammer is great. Never really got into it much but I did have alot of fun painting some Ice Warriors of Valhalla, Russian WWII style.

    • Dark Liquid 7:57 am on September 9, 2010 Permalink

      Yeah, I’m not into the wargaming side of it at all but the roleplay (which is a distinct, separate product) is very enjoyable and uses d% for all roles. It’s incredibly lethal, which is why i live in constant surprise my character has survived this long. That’s all part of the fun though :)

    • Zotis 5:08 pm on September 10, 2010 Permalink

      I do play some DnD, and sometimes use Warhammer Fantasy figures, but I didn’t know Warhammer had a roleplay product. I also love Mechwarrior/Battletech. Though I have the sourcebook I never actually got the chance to play it table top.

    • Dark Liquid 5:59 am on September 12, 2010 Permalink

      Yeah, we’re playing the 2nd edition of the roleplay released by fantasy flight games. Its a great little system, though career progression can get a little confusing if you don’t track the right stuff.

  • Dark Liquid 5:23 pm on July 9, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , x11   

    Resolution Quick-Change for Games in Linux 

    I play the odd game or two under Linux and some games really, really hate running on a dual-screen system (using Nvidia TwinView), Either getting the resolutions completely screwed or having their windows or fullscreens positioned on one screen or the other, but the content of those windows pushed to the centre of dual-desktop meaning half the game is missing. The same thing occasionally happens only with mouse input in these games, rather than the graphics, so I can’t move the mouse past the invisible divide.

    Anyway, fed up with this and wanting a simple one-click solution I knocked up a shell script that I run from a button on my panel. First of all, I did a simple toggle with xrandr, but found I’d occasionally accidentally click it and switch res, annoying the hell out of me so I knocked up a slightly less automatic version. It uses zenity to give me a choice of one of two resolutions (a single screen one or my dual-screen one) and then uses xrandr to apply the changes. I would just use the Monitors app, but it complains about not supporting the driver and I just wanted something click and simple (the Monitors app is slow to start, plus that annoying not-supported dialogue adds an additional click).

    Here is the script:

     

  • Dark Liquid 2:38 pm on July 3, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

    Still Ill 

    I’ve been ill now since August 2009. That’s 10 months or so, at time of writing. I’ve had pills and potions, diets, X-Rays, examinations by multiple consultants, a sigmoidoscopy and so far, nothing. No idea what it is.

    The doctors are sticking to a diagnosis of IBS, which essentially means they don’t know either, IBS being a sort of catch-all term for any problem in that general area. The problems initially started as persistent diarrhoea, eventually though that subsided to be replaced with abdominal pain, which slowly grew worse and worse. My sides hurt, by lower abdomen hurts, just under my ribs hurt and my kidneys hurt. I’ve been taking codeine every 4 hours for almost 3 months or so now for the pain (it still hurts, but at least it hurts less) and I haven’t been able to sleep properly (even temazepam is having no effect whatsoever on my sleep patterns).

    I’ve been away from work for months, working from home because travel is too painful, walking at any speed for any amount of time more than a few minutes become agony. I’ve not left the house in months except to go to a doctor or hospital appointment. Lifting things like a full 2l bottle or a kettle hurt. Hell, sometimes (depending on when I last took a painkiller) just pushing open the doors at home hurts.

    As you might expect, this has caused all sorts of problems. Things aren’t ideal with work (and they have been incredibly helpful and understanding and I’m ashamed to say I haven’t kept them in the loop as much as I should have done, considering how good they’ve been about the whole situation) and I’m getting depressed by it all – being in pain all the time, being tired all the time and never going outside and not even being able to open a stubborn bottle for yourself tend to get you down after a while, especially when every single examination, doctor and consultant say there is nothing wrong as far as they can tell and slap me with a meaningless IBS label which does not help you at all.

    I’m just tired, both figuratively and literally. I just want it to end.

     

    • jade 8:03 pm on August 7, 2010 Permalink

      look i know ive said about it may be fibromyalia before, and ibs comes with that disorder alot.

      gabapentan or pregabalin are good for pain despite wht they are actually used for, i used to be on them and it helped me abit.

      maybe ask about them?

      also there are many anti depressents that help with sleep issues and pain, ive also had them in the past, amytripiline is one of the most well known.

      i dont mean to intrude in your life or be noisy i just thought id give you aome of my ideas, ive left messeges on your facebook page and lauras saying hi or how are you but you both havnt replied.

      if you wish not to be my friend, or whatever we are, maybe just aquaintaiances, id wish you would tell me and not just egnore me, if that is the case then thats fine i understand just let me know.

      or if not just tell me to mind my own bussiness with your health.

      anyway hope soon youll have an answer, it took aaages for me and i felt like just wanting it to end and i questioned my sanety, but there will be an answer oneday.

      -jade

    • Dark Liquid 10:51 am on August 8, 2010 Permalink

      The amitriptyline seems to be doing the trick for the most part so I think I’m more or less fine meds-wise. I’ve got a doctors appointment some time next week hopefully, so I’ll have a word with the doctors then, based on the follow up.

      As for ignoring you – sorry, I tend to rarely read facebook – all my posts there come from various third party tools and so I’m very rarely on the site at all to read comments, etc. You’re probably best off emailing me if you want a response, since I tend to check my emails all the time on my phone.

    • jade 10:26 pm on August 14, 2010 Permalink

      ah ok will do.
      i know we dont hang and w arnt really friends anymore since everyone went there seperate ways, but now you and laura are in touch with greg and dan again, i wonder sometimes if it was my fault, i know sometimes ppl thought me and james were bad for the group.
      but i would like to stay in touch if thats ok, not just because you may have what i have and i want to help with that all i can, but because i would just like to keep in touch.

      ive sometimes wondered if i could maybe join your roleplaying group again, but i bet i woudnt fit in and you are far away and i may just end up doing what i always do and not being reliable.

      i read your blog all the time, when there is an update anyway, i try read lauras aswell but she hasnt updated in aages, i dont know if any of you read mine still i know monkey used to but like i say everyone is moving on in life.

      anyway ranting now.
      hope you get some answers to whats up with you :)

  • Dark Liquid 9:21 am on April 11, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , barcamp bournemouth 2, bcbomo2,   

    Barcamp Bournemouth 2, day 1 

    So this year there is another Barcamp in Bournemouth. For those unaware, barcamp bills itself as a ‘self-organising un-conference’. For anyone not familiar with that particular piece of geek parlance that basically means that people turn up and organise their own talks and schedule the only preorganised part of the ‘conference’ is usually the venue and sometimes the basic catering.

    Anyway, yesterday was the first day of Barcamp Bournemouth 2, to start off I ran a small set of 1v1 games of Polarity and then afterwards went to an interesting talk on design and what it means and when copying the status quo isn’t design. Next I went to an interesting talk on concurrency and occam-pi and saw some cool demonstrations of the language and how the concurrency model worked.

    Afterwards Lostprocess and I did a session introducing people to Dungeons & Dragons, we only had a small group of people interested but we had a cool game and people seemed to enjoy it. The rest of the night was spent playing Polarity and Werewolf. I’d never played werewolf before but is was a cool exercise in lying, manipulation, people-reading and social engineering. I managed the get killed off in both games I played but I lasted a fair while in both.

    Suddenly it ended up being 2:30 and so it was time for bed!

    Looking forwards to the rest of the barcamp today.

     

  • Dark Liquid 9:53 pm on April 6, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: democracy, digital economy bill, government, i39, iseries, lan, politics   

    Guts, Games, Government 

    So I’ve been busy, busy, busy as usual and have once again neglected by blog. Shame on me.

    Over the last month or so a few things have happened, I had my hospital appointment about this illness I’ve been having and that also turned up inconclusive so I have no idea what’s going on. Some more appointments in the future, some more samples and maybe they’ll eventually figure it out. A friend of mine suggested another possibility to the list – Fibromyalgia, which led me to look into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I exhibit more or less all the symptoms of both of them, so that’s something to look into as well I suppose.

    Last Thursday I went up to Newbury as part of work to work as staff at the Multiplay iSeries LAN-gaming event i39. It was pretty awesome and I am absolutely knackered now. While I was there I was mostly in charge of the food ordering system but I managed to get a few games of Teeworlds in. I’d discovered Teeworlds at the event and it is by far one of the most polished open-source games I have seen. It’s a sort of 2D Quake 3 with Kirby-style characters and grappling hooks. The atmosphere at the event was really great and there were some great things going on. I managed to end up on the main stage during the pub quiz, having Jesus chanted at me by a few hundred people – a bit of a step up from the random yobs yelling at me from cars :) It was all great fun though, even for me as someone who isn’t particularly a massive gamer. I think I might have gotten a little bored if I hadn’t been working a lot of the time though, purely because I’m not much of a gamer, though the various exhibitors had lots of cool things to do as well. Sadly I managed to miss out on most of the freebies since I was busy working during much of the giveaways.

    I’ve also been trying to take a more active role in our democracy recently. Just know Dru and I watched the debate of the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Commons live on the BBC parliament website while simultaneously following and contributing to the online commentary on twitter. I was saddened to see that our representatives decided that representing us during an important debate on an issue that effects thousands of people wasn’t important enough to bother showing up for. At points, we only had 10 or so MPs debating in there out of the 600 odd we have to represent us as a country. Unsurprisingly, it’s been pushed through to 2nd reading. Some of the MPs at the debate actually knew what they were talking about and some made good, reasons arguments from the pro-DEB Bill and against movement about pushing it back till after the election because of concerns about being given time to understand it and debate it properly. Now it will have about an hour or so tomorrow before it reaches the final stages before becoming law as I understand it.

    As part of trying to be more involved I’ve been writing to my MP and contacting my local candidates for the election about their position on things. I’ve had a disappointing number of responses on the whole, some form-letters that while generally positive are vague enough to not really to commit to any affirmative action and also some good responses, such as the one from my local Lib Dem candidate about whole-heartedly agreeing with and supporting the Power2010 pledge, which I think contains some very important policies for overhauling our political system.

    I think half the problem with the way politics work at the moment is down to a combination of ignorance and apathy. A lot of people don’t feel represented or feel their voices are otherwise unheard and so don’t bother to join the debate at all. Some people feel that any choice is a bad one and so abstain entirely. I’ve decided that it’s mistake to act like that. Democracy relies on participation and it’s each and every one of ours responsibility to participate, not only to make our own voices heard, but to let those people that represent us know what we think. Our representatives can hardly represent us if they don’t know what we want and so we need to make ourselves heard by engaging with them. People are disillusioned with MPs and parties because they feel they only serve their own interests and that of lobbyists but if we don’t make them aware of their responsibilities to us and our opinions, they have no voices to listen to by which to form their policies other than the lobbyists and what not that are left the only ones speaking.

    To owe it to ourselves and each other to make public opinion heard otherwise we only have ourselves to blame when politicians become the mouthpieces of lobbyists and specific, minority interests that don’t reflect the overall public opinion.

     

  • Dark Liquid 8:05 pm on February 5, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , musings, rambling,   

    Ramblings 

    So, the doctor yesterday didn’t exactly have any answers about this condition of mine. I have many of the symptoms of IBS and I’m now on a course of pills to deal with that in the hopes that’s what I have. However, I have a bunch of additional symptoms that are somewhat concerning even though all my tests so far have shown no issues so I’m getting referred to a consultant. Hopefully these pills will sort me out but if not at least there is this consultant to hopefully fix me in the future.

    Things have been crazy busy recently but I seem to finally be getting on top of things. Been having fun dealing with git-svn – I’ve been using git locally and syncing to an svn server for coding at work and I’ve found it generally quite nice though working out how to do merges between branches that are tracking svn branches is a bit of an arse. I think I need to be looking at rebase for pulling changes from master (which is tracking trunk on svn) into my development branch (that’s tracking a dev branch on svn) but I’m having issues doing so, which has been annoying and confusing to say the least. I need to experiment more I guess. I wish I was just using a pure git setup but oh well.

    I’m also writing this on my phone using the new wordpress android app. It seems quite nice so far, reasonable interface and generally gets out of your way. I also have been using GDocs for syncing with google docs which has been useful. Nice to have a note taking, document writing app that can do that well.

    I saw the Sonic 4 trailer the other day and wow, everything I could want about a classic platform game brought to the present day. I generally don’t enjoy modern games and am somewhat indifferent about them. Sonic 3 & Knuckles was probably the last truly great sonic game and I’ve glad to see a return to the roots of the franchise. This is what sonic is about, not this bullshit 3D action games with bad stories and crappy characters. Sonic 4 looks like it is back to focussing on what Sonic games shoulfd be all about – fluidity of movement and speed. Momentum, even. I can pick up Sonic 3 & Knuckles any time and enjoy it like I did the first time around. There are few, few games nowadays I can do the same with.

    I feel a little sad because, working at a company that is heavily focused on multiplayer PC gaming, I feel a little off. I’m just not interested in the latest FPS, regardless of the awesome features and enhanced tactics, etc. They all boil down to the same thing for me and I’ve just got bored of the genre. Quake 1 was the last FPS I truly enjoyed and I still have fond memories of it, back when I used to write maps and mods like crazy for it. Quake 3 is fun, and I occasionally play on Quake Live to relive those days but it just doesn’t have the same charm Q1 did.

    Final Fantasy VIII was released on the PSN today and so I will be getting that most likely. I enjoy the Final Fantasy games and it is one of the few franchises I’ve found I actually enjoyed the transition from 2D to 3D of. Speaking of PSN, I find I enjoy playing Fat Princess quite a lot. It’s fun, cute and simple, while still having enough bite for it to not be an entirely throwaway casual experience. It’s lightheartedness also makes it easy to pick up or put down whenever you like though and I think that ability to easily engage or disengage with a game is a key feature for any modern game, sadly most in my opinion require more of a long term commitment just to play effectively. I want the challenge to be one of skill, not of who can slog the most hours. Conversely, I also find many games far too short, which is why I tend to stick to RPGs. I can sink easily 70 hours into a quality RPG because of the rich world and storyline combined with the ways battles work and are paced. In most other games I tend to complete them too soon for my liking and end up feeling disappointed. Either that or I end up getting frustrated when games ruin the difficulty curve to force you to grind or otherwise drastically change your play style without warning in order to inflate the hours you need to play. I’m not much of a gamer, and what little gaming I do tends to be console based these days, much like in my youth. PCs are patently superior for certain games such as RTS and FPS games but there are just not enough decent ones that introduce something new enough and interesting enough to make it worth the effort to deal with both Windows and the eternal hardware arms race that seems to exist. I don’t have the money to spend on components I will only use occasionally and need to be replaced when broken. My PS3 is an appliance I can replace relatively easily, it’s convenient. I just can’t be bothered with dealing with things on a PC.

    I tend to enjoy more indie/non-mainstream things nowadays as well I find. My music tastes are eclectic and spread pretty wide and I’m open to new things. I enjoy playing oddball, often unheard of roleplaying games and the odd weird indie computer game. I like experiencing the new ideas and expanded boundaries people are creating when making massive profit from majority markets isn’t a primary concern. I think that, most of all, is why I generally play fewer games, especially from the FPS genre, nowadays.

    I really need to work on mmy games programming course but I still have next to no spare time, sadly. I hate having a bunch of ideas in my head and no way to express them. I also need to get back into writing. Between doing this judging on protagonize and work I’ve had little time for anything else. Many ideas that need releasing there too. The DRYH game on Google Wave is going well, it’s very enjoyable. The D&D I’m playing on there as well is quite good, though it’s progressing a little slowly. Hopefully things will pick up soon though.

    Only a few weeks till Dru and I will be in Canada. I’m really looking forwards to it. I need a holiday and some time to just hang with my wife and my friends so this will be a welcome break.

    Anyway, that concludes this rambling test of WordPress for android.

     

  • Dark Liquid 7:44 pm on January 27, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,   

    This last month or so 

    Well, it’s been a while since my last post. What’s been happening over this last month?

    Well, I’ve been ill – still. For the last six months or so I’ve had stomach cramps and generally unpleasant gastrointestinal issues which have come and gone and they’ve been rearing their ugly ahead again this month. I’ve had bloodtests and given various samples and what not so hopefully they can figure out what it is and get me sorted.

    In happier news, I’m enjoying the new job. Multiplay is a cool place to work, full of fun people and interesting projects. Sometimes I get the odd surprise when I realise just how big they really are, having not had much experience working for large companies wheeling and dealing with heavyweights in the gaming industry. It’s pretty exciting and even though it’s a complete arse to get there, it’s totally worth it. That said, I will be so glad when I can drive there. This commute as it stands is slowly killing me. At least everyone there is really understanding about the commute, my various ailments and so working from home is an option, though I try not to take advantage of it too often because I feel bad shuttered off at home and miss out on the working atmosphere in the office.

    Which leads me on to the driving. So far, so good. No major incidents as of yet, no remnants of children to be scraped off the instructors car quite yet. It’s been interesting, I started off my first lesson on hills, my second lesson was on ice and in my last lesson I had the pleasure of being on a steep hill I couldn’t see over, when two buses came over all while I had a white van man right behind me. Considering this was my first time ever on roads with other road users, this was mildly concerning and I screwed up a little, but not so badly anything bad happened. To me shame the instructor (who is a very nice woman working under the AA) had to intervene a bit on that particular incident, but not to worry, it’s early days yet. The main issue I find I have with driving is getting feedback from the pedals. My feet are often pretty numb and so I find it hard to tell whether I’m pushing down on them or not. Gentle pressure on things like the accelerator I can’t feel at all and so I have to judge by ear. It also doesn’t help that my giant clown feet in my huge boots keep catching on the footwell when pressing/depressing the clutch. Hopefully I’m going to get some trainers at some point which should alleviate some of those issues.

    The AA website is a bit shit and makes paying people a bit of an arse. You’d think something like that would be fairly important. I might have to resort to cheques or something.

    At the end of February Dru and I are heading over to Canada to stay with our good friend Asheyna, whom we met on Protagonize. Collaborative writing, bringing people together – NickB should use that as a sickeningly cheesy tag line :) I’m really looking forwards to it, I could do with a holiday, this commute and busy period at work has taken it out of me a bit. It’s odd, I never really saw myself as the kind of person who needs a break from work. I’ve always enjoyed what I do and so holidays have mostly been “you don’t have to come in” days to me, rather than a respite from working. With this commute though, that has changed which makes me feel a little sad. Something else that I find mildly depressing is that I rarely do any coding outside of work any more. Admittedly, I rarely do much of anything outside of work at the moment – I get up at 0530, spend and hour getting ready then get to the train station for 0711 to reach Southampton by 0800 where I catch a bus to the ferry terminal for 0810 where I catch a ferry at 0835 to reach Hythe by 0855 where I then get a lift into work. Then I do the whole thing in reverse, starting at 1800 and arriving home at around 2030. That leaves me barely any time to do anything and the weekends are spent mostly recovering on lack of sleep so thinking isn’t high on my list of pursuits, usually I vegetate to mindless internet browsing, watching TV and the occasional PS3 game session because I’m just too exhausted for anything else.

    Now, that sounds a lot worse than it is. It’s not like I’m zombified the entire time, but I am sufficiently tired that it’s just hard to do anything that I want to do, because I never feel very ‘fresh’ mentally. Squeezing in a Warhammer fantasy roleplay on Thursdays and a D&D 4th Edition on Sundays is taxing enough, but I’m glad I do them, if I did nothing at all every night I’d go insane. Monday nights on the G3 Show are becoming problematic for me at the moment. Admittedly, this is mostly due to the poor performance of the train system. The weather recently has thrown a complete spanner in the works and it takes them forever to fix anything. To their credit though, I’ve found SouthWest Trains’ twitter information feed very helpful and it’s been nice to actually know I’m going to be late before hand so I can give people warning or decide to work from home.

    Speaking of roleplays, I’ve decided to fulfil my ambition to play a Don’t Rest Your head game by playing it from the other side of the screen as a GM. Normally I don’t GM very much, it’s both a lot of work and I don’t like my game-running style meshes well with a lot of my players, at least not to my observations, which whether it actually is the case or not still demoralises me enough to make most of my games fail miserably. However, these Don’t rest Your Head games I’m running are different for two reason. Firstly, Don’t Rest Your head is an awesome systems that seems likes it was designed for the exact kind of narrative control I like to use, with an awesome setting to boot. Secondly, I’m running the games on Google Wave for players I’ve never played with before. Running it in a non-real-time way gives me time to perfect things and think ahead, so there isn’t so much pressure to plan ahead before each game or on improvising quickly during a session. So far, I’ve found Google Wave works very much like running a game on a forum or site like RPoL.net is. The real-time aspects are useful and I plan on writing some gadgets to help with things like dice rolls in the Don’t Rest Your Head format, which should be nice. All my players are also from Protagonize. That site is slowly becoming the center of my internet life. Don’t rest Your Head is such an awesome system and setting, I highly recommend it. I also bought the supplement Don’t Lose Your Mind which has some really awesome Madness talents. I strongly urge you to check out DRYH and DLYM at Evil Hat. You can buy them in the UK without paying crazy international delivery prices from Leisure Games. I’m also playing in a D&D 4th Edition game on there

    Speaking of Protagonize.com, I volunteered my services as a judge in the current unofficial poetry tournament. It’s been pretty fun and I’ve tried to make a real effort to give some good critique on each poem, though this last found has suffered a bit due to being busy at work. I’ve had some nice feedback on my feedback – it’s always nice to be appreciated.

    February looks like it’s going to be yet another busy and interesting month. I’m looking forwards to Canana and meeting Asheyna in person and hopefully some of my other friends from Protagonize that happen to live in Vancouver including NickB himself.

    And that’s this last month or so.

     

  • Dark Liquid 11:45 am on December 12, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: dns, , , ,   

    Google Chrome and the /etc/hosts file 

    I’ve switched to using Chrome recently as my browser of choice but recently came across a rather annoying problem with it.

    I was writing a new chapter of a story on Protagonize and didn’t notice that the server migration they were doing happened to star during the course of my writing. I click submit and pow, my work was gone as the site didn’t exist any more. I thought I might have lost it but luckily Chrome still had it and tried to repost it every time I did a refresh. However, I had no way of getting the text out of Chrome as it would not display the original text entry form. Crap. I had two choice, either wait until the migration was complete or lose my work.

    I decided to wait and the migration went through fine but one last problem! The server had changed IP address and none of the DNS had updated yet! I set up an entry in my hosts file expecting Chrome to honour it but it ignored it. Oh noes!

    So, I did what any self-respecting geek would do, set up my own DNS server, changed my computer to use that as it’s primary DNS and had that DNS server use my hosts file. That way Chrome was unknowingly using my hosts file and all was well. I saved my story chapter and got it posted. Geek solutions for the win!

    Here is how I did it (obviously this is only applicable to Linux, Ubuntu Karmic in my specific case):

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    <code lang="bash">
    # edited /etc/hosts and added the new protagonize DNS entry
    sudo aptitude install dnsmasq
    # edit /etc/dnsmasq.conf and added the line: listen-address=127.0.0.1
    /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart
    # edit /etc/resolv.conf and added this line as the first nameserver entry: nameserver 127.0.0.1
    </code>

    I also decided I wanted to keep using dnsmasq as a local DNS cache (for faster DNS queries and dealing with evil issues like this) so I added an entry to my
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    <code lang="bash">/etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf</code>
    file (which controls what happens when your computer gets new network details automatically via DHCP, which is what I use on my network) to ensure it updated the
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    <code lang="bash">/etc/resolve.conf</code>
    with the entry for the local DNS cache. I did this by adding the line
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    <code lang="bash">prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;</code>

     

    • Matthew Wilson 4:39 pm on February 6, 2011 Permalink

      I just started getting this problem today, after upgrading to the most recent version of chromium.

      You helped me out by writing this up. Thanks so much.

      But that “dark liquid” drink is probably the most vile recipe I’ve ever read.

    • Dark Liquid 4:51 pm on February 6, 2011 Permalink

      No problem. And yeah, I won’t deny it – that drink is horrific. It has its uses though :)

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