A quick note: I’ve upgraded MobileTFL to version 1.0.0.9.
+Fixed critical bug due to data format changes.
+Reworked parsing of source data so it’s less sensitive to format changes in the future.
Apologies for the rapid releases, but hopefully the app should be good “long term” as of this release.
There will be one further release in the near future consisting solely of cosmetic changes.
A quick note: I’ve upgraded MobileTFL to version 1.0.0.8.
+Improved loading speed (less start up lag)
+Fixed critical bug due to data format changes
I’m planning on listing this app on Windows Mobile Marketplace when it launches later in the year for a small fee (£1.50 ish).
Don’t be alarmed if you see this happen. The software will remain free to download from the web (likely relocating to www.electricheadsoftware.com), however there will be above mentioned small fee for those wishing to show support / download it off Marketplace to cover initial costs (certification / enrolment in Marketplace isn’t free).
I’m looking forward to seeing how well a small utility app can do in the wider Windows Mobile “consumer” market as a test bed for a few future projects. I’d appreciate it if people showed support if they fell it appropriate.
There was a piece on Kotaku this weekend looking at the development at AI in games, It specifically set out to ask leading figures what they thought of the development of virtual “beings” in games,
“Kotaku set out to ask experts in the fields of Hollywood movie magic, theme park creators, robotics experts and AI specialists to answer the question: Do the AI-controlled characters in games qualify as robots or some other form of artificial life. Are those creatures who are at the player’s mercy in Lionhead Studio’s Black & White games truly virtual beings?”
Inside the article was a rather worrying quote from self declared futurist Thomas Frey, executive director of the DaVinci Institute,
"In short, our games have indeed evolved into crude life forms," said Frey. "Innovations in the digital world are happening exponentially faster than in the material world, so the digital beings in games will soon become far more lifelike, and will eventually step out of the screens and exist as 3D avatars, interacting with us, much like other people."
I always get a little upset and slightly concerned when people from places like the DaVinci Institute (from their "about us" page: "Launched in 1997 as a non-profit futurist think tank, the Institute has emerged as a centre of visionary thought, attracting both a national and international following of idea junkies and business leaders alike.") start to talk about things like programming and AI. I always feel like these kind of think tanks highlight a bit of a problem with the development of new technology.
All you learn is that "futurist thinkers" actually have no grasp on the practical implementation of the technology. I’m all for creative thinking and speculation, but somehow implying that very simple game mechanics are going to develop rapidly and with little to no point into some Skynet like Ai is simply absurd.
Thankfully the Kotaku article actually asked someone with half a clue (Chris Darken, conference chair for Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment and an associate professor of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School) who equated videogame AI to an expert system.
In all honesty it’s a stretch to even call them that. The problem domain that your average game AI lives in is so rudimentary small that I’d rather use a phrase closer to "novice system".
Game AI is nowhere near close to simulating human behaviour, near all "humans" are scripted, and the most simulated behaviour comes from games like Spore or The Sims where the actual behaviour is so generalised (eat/sleep/mate/die) that any nuance of actual behaviour is lost and what results is little more than a general abstraction to suite the purpose of game mechanics; which is utterly perfect for the task at hand, because honestly, developing something more sophisticated would be a huge undertaking with no practical benefit to the game project.
I’m honestly perplexed as to why some gamers seem to think building “AI” is appropriate for a game. The term AI is exceptionally misleading and would likely never be appropriate unless you were working on something that wasn’t as strictly defined as your average “regular” game environment.
Imagine playing a game where a key NPC suddenly decides that they just weren’t into the plot anymore and just stopped playing, a “real AI” of this nature just isn’t for purpose. I’m not suggesting that what we perceive as “AI” in games doesn’t have room for improvement, far from it, I am however suggesting that games will never lead to developing a “true” AI, simply because it’s not an appropriate avenue to approach game design from.
People need to realise that good path finding is not the same thing as intelligence, and that they probably wouldn’t actually enjoy a game where the AI attempted to simulate sentience. It’s work enough dealing with other players in a multiplayer game, let alone having to contend with a simulated intelligence in a single player oriented experience.
Just a quick note here as I had to do a lot of digging to fix this issue.
Issue: HTC Diamond (potentially other models) not waking up from “sleep mode” when you have an email send/receive schedule. Instead, when you wake the device up it establishes a connection immediately and performs the check.
Problem: It appears the root of the problem are two registry settings that define how long a process is allowed to attempt to wake a device from sleeping before it is terminated by the OS. Evidently checking email takes a number of seconds. I’m not sure what the default value is in a stock ROM, but in a few of the custom ROMs I’ve used this value is 1. 1 seconds generally is not long enough.
Solution: Change the following registry settings to a value in seconds that represents the tasks you’re expecting to wake up your device. I’ve got my device set to 15 and it happily collects email while sleeping and provides a glowing / audible notification.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\Timeouts]
“BattResumingSuspendTimeout”=15
“ACResumingSuspendTimeout”=15
I’ve been working with WiX ( wix.sourceforge.net ) for generating application installers over the past few weeks.
The project is rapidly evolving (if I recall, it was one of Microsofts first forays into open source development) but as a side effect finding up to date documentation can be a little taxing. The documentation is good and quite comprehensive, but often subtly incorrect or outdated.
Anyway, we have a few services at work that require certificates to be installed at install time into the Windows certificate store. Previously we had a couple of custiom actions designed to configure the user and store, but after a little investigation it appears like this functionality comes for free in the Wix toolkit.
It’s confusingly in the IIS extensions, which is a bit of a misnomer- it’s only in there because it was originally designed to install certificates for web servers, however it works perfectly for any certificate.
So how do you do it? In Wix3, ensure you first have a reference to WixIIsExtension.dll (in the default install, it’s in c:\Program Files\Windows Installer XML v3\bin) in your project if you’re using voltive, or manually linked if you’re building on the command line. The following example is of a fragment which installs two certificates, one as a Root certificate authority and another as a certificate in local machine.
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<Wix xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2006/wi”
xmlns:iis=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/IIsExtension”>
<Fragment>
<Directory Id=”Directory_Certificates” Name=”Certificates”>
<Component Id=”MyRootCert.cer” Guid=”*”>
<File Id=”MyRootCert.cer” Name=”MyRootCert.cer” Source=”..\..\Path\To\MyRootCert.cer” />
<iis:Certificate Id=”Certificate.RootCA”
Name=”MyRootCert.cer”
Request=”no”
StoreLocation=”localMachine”
StoreName=”root”
Overwrite=”yes”
BinaryKey=”Certificate.RootCA.Binary”
/>
</Component>
<Component Id=”RandomCert.p12″ Guid=”*”>
<File Id=”RandomCert.p12″ Name=”RandomCert.p12″ Source=”..\..\Path\To\RandomCert.p12″ />
<iis:Certificate Id=”Certificate.MnpTestCertificate”
Name=”RandomCert.p12″
Request=”no”
StoreLocation=”localMachine”
StoreName=”personal”
Overwrite=”yes”
BinaryKey=”Certificate.RandomCert.Binary”
PFXPassword=”myCertPassword_Optional”
/>
</Component>
</Directory>
<Binary Id=”Certificate.RootCA.Binary” SourceFile=”..\..\Path\To\MyRootCert.cer” />
<Binary Id=”Certificate.RandomCert.Binary” SourceFile=”..\..\Path\To\RandomCert.p12″ />
</Fragment>
<Fragment>
<ComponentGroup Id=”Component.InstalledCertificates”>
<ComponentRef Id=”MyRootCert.cer” />
<ComponentRef Id=”RandomCert.p12″ />
</ComponentGroup>
</Fragment>
</Wix>
People just love to go on about search engine optimisation these days. They LOVE it. SEO experts are put on pedestals as the salesmen that just keep selling, even when they’re not at work. If they’re not going to do it, their competitors will, after all.
Except SEO is a mugs game, the “experts” are full of shit and it’s pretty much all lies. I’ll give you this one for free. By the end of this post I’ll have walked you through how to search engine optimise your web presence and with any luck, you’ll see the benefits. Before I do that, I’m going to give you a little background information.
The person that “manages” the SEO in your company (if the job listings for “SEO Managers” are to be believed) are sharp, sales focused individuals with a good grasp on technology. As such, these individuals are relatively well paid, for a general sales job anyway.
I did a very quick sweep of some job sites and came across the following job listings. These represent a fair sample and are pretty much the average (source http://www.totaljobs.com/JobSeeking/SEO.html).
SEO Manager £35000 - £45000 per annum + Bonus + Benefits
SEO Manager £35000 - £41000 + benefits
SEO Marketing Executive £30000 (SEM / PPC / Adwords / Analytics)
SEO Web Leader £30000 - £45000 per annum + Benefits (Featured job)Other Supporting Figures (http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/seo.do)
UK excluding London average salary £30,267
% change on same period last year +5.27 %
There are multiple pages of results that look the same as that cross section. The average amount an “SEO Manager” pulls in as a base salary appears to be around £35000. That’s not mathematically accurate, but it’s a reasonable estimate.
So what does an “SEO Manager” really do? Well, interestingly one of the job listings above really gives the game away. “SEM / PPC / Adwords / Analytics”. To decompose the acronyms “search engine management”, “pay per click”, Google Adwords and Google Analytics.
Lets dissect each of those job roles one by one and work out what your SEO Manager is doing for you.
Search Engine Management
This is actually a reasonably interesting category because it doesn’t mean very much. The real wins in “SEM” will be done by your programmers or your middleware CRM systems. I’ll explain some of the valid techniques for “SEM” below, however, it’s important to note that “search engine management” doesn’t really mean anything at all and should be something to happen naturally as your website grows.Pay Per Click Submissions
Daily, this role tends to involve the exporting of a product list from a database, and importing it to a number of PPC sites, such as Kelkoo and PriceRunner. Often a very simple task to automate, despite PPC sites having a tendency to ask for data in weird and wonderful formats. This bit of the job description probably covers nagging the PPC partners when they invariably don’t list your products in time.Google AdWords
Daily, logging into your Google account, monitoring the Estimated Cost / Day on some keywords (and when I say monitoring, I mean “stopping bidding when they look too expensive”) and using the very friendly Traffic Estimator Sandbox to pick new links to bid on. Not a hard task for a seasoned marketer of any kind.Google Analytics / Analytics Software Of Your Choice
Adding a 2-3 line piece of JavaScript into your website and then logging in to your analytics package, to monitor the progress of your site, broken down into graphs and exportable data.
You could almost be fooled into believing that anyone could be an “SEO Manager” with roughly a days worth of reading the Google help documents and learning how to use a few very simple tools. Oh, you were thinking that too? This is a job your marketing department should be doing. Don’t have a marketing department? It’s not hard, it’s your job, and I can help you with some very simple tips.
You see, the good thing about Google is that they’re on your side. Google thrive for two reasons.
Google want to list you as much as you want to appear at the top of page 1 (and, seeing as nobody reads past the first two pages of search results, better keep off page 3+).
So lets make it easy for Google to find you.
In the dark ages of the internet (or for the sake of argument, the early 2000’s) people were always trying to sell tips related to manipulating your Google “page rank”, the magical algorithm that Google uses to determine who appears at the top of the search page. There were even some tips that worked. That was 2002. Before we go any further I want to make one thing explicitly clear:
You can’t fool Google’s search results for your website.
SEO That Works
Got it? Excellent. So what can you do?
Lets take a fictional product in a reasonably established market. You’re a company that develops interesting light fittings and lamps, and you’re about to launch a new range of touch-sensitive-base lamps. Sounds plausible.
Luckily for you, Google is really really good at indexing websites, but there are a few simple tricks that help Google index you thoroughly and quickly.
Make sure your URL, page title and keyword densities all say the same thing. Ever wondered why if you search for anything on Google the Wikipedia link is always in one of the top three places? This is why.
Google indexing puts a lot of weight in to the relationship between the URI of your website, the title of your page, the header tags (H1) and the keyword density of your content. To work using the above touch-sensitive light example a URL of http://www.touchlamps.com/shop/Our-New-Touch-Lamp.html would rank higher for the search term “touch lamp” than http://www.lighting.com/shop/touchlamp which would rank higher than http://www.homeware.com/products/123. Likewise, if there were two shopping sites www.lamps1.com/shop/lamp and www.lamps2.com/shop/lamp if the page title of the former was “buy items” and the page title of the latter was “buy touch lamps” the latter would rank higher. Having the H1 and H2 tags on your page relate to lighting or touch lamps would further endorse your page rank.
What should you take away from this? Ensure that for each page of your site, the keywords that you want to be linked to for are frequent in the top 1/3rd of the page.
Sitemaps help you tell the search engines how often you expect any given content to change, and suggest a frequency of re-checking to allow their indexes to be permanently up to date.
There’s no use in trying to see a new product if the search don’t know you’re trying.
It’s all about who you know. The internet is brilliant for spreading word of mouth so make friends with other sites that share either your interest, or interest in your products. Nothing works better than a little positive PR.
Do you sell a product that has a rabid fan-base? If so, consider searching for user forums or big sites in the user community and throw them some freebies. This is a common trick in the ultra-competitive market of technology resale. Supply fan sites with free samples in exchange for links and you’ll find that your page rank improves as a consequence.
Google and other search providers give “bonus points” to your ranking if you’re linked to by other locations that also rank highly for the same keywords. Thus, you might take a financial hit for sending out products (worst case) or just be willing to help out other resources by linking to other useful content (if you’re not a retail entity), however the SEO-bonus and goodwill produced from such an effort will be worth far more.
Having a URL schema that looks something like http://shopping.netsuite.com/s.nl/c.851077/n.2/sc.10/category.285/.f is the quickest way to punish yourself and your website for no reason. I picked that URL at random, it’s a website based on Netsuite’s web platform and their CRM produces some of the worst URLs I have ever seen (I just searched for “netsuite /s.nl” due to pre-exposure to their URLs in search of an example, I couldn’t comment on the actual content of that URL).
If your developers or your CRM aren’t producing human-readable URLs, get new developers or get a new CRM. It’s really that simple, it’s taking part in the online market with a self induced handicap. Url rewriting is very simple, and doesn’t even have to be perfect to be good enough. It’s well supported using mod_rewrite in Apache or a handful of ISAPI filters on IIS up to IIS6, and supported natively with HTTP modules from IIS6 onwards.
Look at it this way, what do you prefer: http://www.hotlamps.com/shop/123/touch-lamp or http://www.hotlamps.com/shop/s.nl/c.851077/n.2/sc.10/category.285/123 or http://www.hotlamps.com/shop/123. I would always vote for the first URL, it reinforces what you’re attempting to sell, plays into your page rank bonus for Url to content relationship and just makes far more sense to a visitor.
Use URL rewriting or you’ll regret it.
You’ve done all that and you’re still not getting traffic? You’ve got a brand new touch lamp you’re trying to sell and just can’t get the page impressions? Thinking about hiring an “SEO Manager” to make all your problems go away? Stop. Buy your visitors.
I’m not a marketer (and that’s probably obvious by now) but if you’re doing all the right things and people just aren’t seeing your product, it’s time to look into your cost-per-acquisition of a new customer.
You’ve just decided you need to go through with an online marketing push for your new flagship range of lamps. A quick Google search (13th Jan 2009) leads with two sponsored links. One for “Touch Sensitive Lamps” and another for “Touch Lamps at Amazon”. In addition to that, the sidebar (sponsored links) point to “M&S Lighting”, “Touch Lamps at shop-com.co.uk”, “Touch Lamps? at dealtime.co.uk” (a price comparison engine), “Lamps Touch”, at supaprice.co.uk (also, presumably a price comparison engine), Ask.com, and Shopzilla.co.uk/ComparePrices.
Two things strike me about those results. The first is that most of them are price comparison engines buying sponsored ad space for the minimum buy price. The second is that there aren’t many players in the “touch lamp” market past M&S so buying links should be easy.
Regardless of your hiring an “SEO guy” or not, you’re going to buy buying Google ads. It’s a fact of life in a world dominated by a single search provider and even more dominated by a single Ad provider. You have to do two things, buy the right keywords, and play the price comparison engine game.
Buying The Right Keywords
The really great new is that Google has a fantastic tool available to you to predict how well buying clicks will go for you. To maintain the current example, I ran a few phrases through the sandbox (find it yourself at http://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox) and got the following results:
| Keyword | Est. Cost Per Click | Est. Ad Position | Est. Clicks/Day | Est. Cost/Day |
| “fancy lamp” | £0.00 - £0.65 | 1 - 3 | 0 | £0 - £1 |
| lamp | £0.80 - £1.08 | 1 - 3 | 3,214 - 4,021 | £2,580 - £4,330 |
| lighting | £1.05 - £1.52 | 1 - 3 | 5,981 - 7,484 | £6,270 - £11,410 |
| “touch lamp” | £0.66 - £0.85 | 1 - 3 | 17 - 21 | £20 |
| “touch lighting” | £0.81 - £1.01 | 1 - 3 | 1 | £1 |
| bedside | £0.57 - £0.74 | 1 - 3 | 238 - 297 | £140 - £220 |
| “bedside lamp” | £0.80 - £1.14 | 1 - 3 | 6 - 7 | £5 - £9 |
| “touch light” | £0.55 - £0.72 | 1 - 3 | 4 - 5 | £2 - £4 |
Using readily available tools, it doesn’t take any kind of expert to recognise trends when provided with tabular data. You basically want to buy a good spread of keywords with the lowest CPC vs. the highest Clicks/Day, but more likely, meeting somewhere in the middle. From the above predicted results (and remember, they’re just predicted trends) the two sure-buys seem to be “bedside” and “touch lamp”. Which makes perfect sense.
My one word of warning when buying traffic is to be careful not to get carried away. I’ve worked for a company that crippled itself buying really obvious keywords and costing itself more to purchase some clicks than the profit margin on the item. That’s commercial suicide. Know what your recommended cost-per-acquisition is and don’t go over it, however good an idea it seems.
Playing The Comparison Engine Game
I don’t have very much to say about the comparison engines. They often charge you for submission and position, and they index so many products that they have instant high ranking on search engines. They minimum bid on any keyword that you can buy and are very prolific.
I’d pick just one or two to participate in, and closely monitor the ROI on any payments you make to them. Don’t let them hold you to ransom, just remember that any links you’re paying for on comparison engines are placed side by side with the links of your competitors. So make sure you’re the best OR the cheapest, but don’t presume the links have much value.
So Should I Hire That SEO Manager Anyway?
That’s totally up to you. But as a rule of guidance, if you were to be selling a new range of touch lamps, you’re SEO Manager would have to bring in 28500 potential sales per year to make hiring him anywhere near as efficient and worthy as just buying 90 days worth of Google ads for “bedside”. You could save your £35k, ensure your developers are doing the right thing and get the same results, for nothing.
Tricking Google
Earlier I said that “you can’t fool Google” and I really meant it. Over the years tonnes and tonnes of tricks have been developed to exploit the way page rank works.
A few of the most common tricks were:
You’ll be pleased to hear that these techniques, along with being the digital equivalent of fly-postering, not only don’t work, but negatively effect your rank. Google have something like 4,500 developers. A large portion of them will be dedicated to stopping people tricking and abusing their ranking algorithms. Don’t waste time trying.
Footnote
I used to work as a developer on a large eCommerce website specialising in IT equipment and hardware. I was responsible for writing all the code that dealt with search engine optimisation and wrote the majority of the web-facing code.
I met many many people who claimed to have some secret source, I read lots of aging documents on Google page rank (whatever you read is out of date, page rank changes daily) and sat through too many meetings with brain dead SEO consultants who couldn’t advise anything concrete past their smoke and mirrors.
Worse than that, I saw some of these consultants hired to “improve” our page ranks in a number of unsuccessful and unquantifiable ways. I’ve seen consultants cost tens of thousands of pounds delivering nothing when that money should’ve been spent on traditional advertising and content creation. I’ve seen companies try and buy so many links it forced them to near bankruptcy.
I wouldn’t call myself an expert on SEO, but I certainly know what doesn’t work. After three months of working on “SEO” the only things that ever worked for us, were good content, good links and purchasing Adwords.
I hope you take a few good practices from this, but more than anything, I hope you don’t buy into the SEO bullshit.
If you want proof that regularly updating content works, go search for “David Whitney” on Google. My humble website ranks above any other (source http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=david+whitney&btnG=Google+Search&meta=).
Good luck!
I’ve had quite a busy night this evening. I’ve been trying to finish watching the third season of Alias (about 5 years too late on that one), ended up starting an article on best practices for build automation and integration testing in the .NET framework, worked my way towards watching the double episode première of the new season of 24, got tired, and now can’t sleep.
So a little bit of lazy doodling took it’s place.
Trying to clean my head of oceans and deep dark red so I can move on to other things. I’m not really sure if I like anything about this apart from the reds in the sky.
I still have a few huge pieces stewing both on paper and in my head which I should get around to finishing but working entirely in red is exceptionally soothing, and thus, distracting.
Bed time.
Now Playing: Nine Inch Nails - In This Twilight
Another day another slightly amusing interview snippet.
So apparently Microsoft are taking a hard stance on including a BluRay drive for the Xbox 360. To quote Kotaku quoting Robbie Bach:
“It’s not a feature we get a ton of requests for. We really don’t. When you ask people the list of things they want to see us spending time creating in Xbox, Blu-ray is way, way down on the list.
The second thing is, from a technical perspective, it doesn’t help us in the core of what Xbox does, which is in gaming. We can’t have publishers produce games on Blu-ray disc. Because then they won’t play on the 28 million Xboxes we’ve already shipped. So it doesn’t help us in the core gaming space.
The third thing, and this maps to all three of those, is that it costs a lot of money. And so the scenario is, OK, let me get this straight: I’m going to add something to the product that’s going to raise the cost, which means the price goes up, consumers aren’t asking for it, and by the way, my game developers can’t use it.”
It’s a move I entirely agree with, but I can’t help but feel that they’d be cutting off this nose to spite their face if they didn’t end up offering it as an optional extra?
There’s a clear and good reason not to include a BR drive as internal. It makes absolute sense, it’d further fracture the already slightly divided 360 user base (really, who buys an arcade?).
That said…
Stating that there isn’t demand sounds like conjecture and a little bit of FUD to me. Microsoft look like they’re using it to try bolster the movie download business for themselves. If they felt that HD-DVD was demand worthy of a console addon when far less people were interested, then it only makes sense that there is more interest now that a format has been decided. Avoiding BluRay out of interest makes it seem like backing HD-DVD was actually a move to undermine Sony.
The drives aren’t even so expensive to make these days (combined BR/HD-DVD/DVD-RW drive for about $99 / £50 on general sale), but there would be considerable development time porting a java virtual machine to the 360 (presuming one doesn’t already exist), and lets face it, Microsoft don’t have a great history with the JVM ;)
That said, I’m not aware of the market realities, but the critic in me would suggest they just don’t want to feed any licensing revenue into Sony and they’re more than just a little bit bitter.
That and they probably want to avoid inferiority comparisons when Sony go on their next “ah ah ah! we have Blu Ray included! that’s why we’re more expensive!” rant.
Personally? I’m not interested in a blu ray drive for me 360. They’ll likely use one on the next xbox as it’ll be the dominant format for high capacity disks by then, it’s only logical. Either that or they’re going to take one hell of a gamble on worldwide infrastructure. It’d be a fun bold move but probably one that’d cripple them as much as choosing BR crippled Sony for the first half of this generation. Not exactly a good business move.
At least they’re saying no categorically.
Everyone loves lists. Everyone. So much so that entire music TV channels appear to exist solely to tell me what the top X of Y are. So, to do the blogging equivalent of locking the stable after the horse has bolted, here are a few reasons why I enjoyed 2008.
Music
I really hate picking my favourite music of a period because there are never quite enough places to note everyone. Below are the CDs I really remember enjoying this year. They’re in rough order and all of them albums below pleased me in very different ways. Some of them are predictable choices for me, A Perfect Circle side projects, Porcupine Tree front-mans solo album, Opeth, Nine Inch Nails, but amongst them are a couple of bands who were both new to me and won a constant rotation. Textures deserve a special mention for being by far my most enjoyed CD this year, while the Ashes Divide CD, whilst flawed in a few places, was my most played.
Honourable mentions: Frost* - Experiments In Mass Appeal, Metallica - Death Magnetic, Made Out Of Babies - The Ruiner, Ayreon - 01011001, Cynic - Traced In Air
Biggest disappointment: Tomahawk - Anonymous
Best live performance: Ministry
Games
I’ve had a big year of gaming. I finally quit World of Warcraft in the latter half of 2008 which afforded me plenty of time to play just about everything that came out. This year was slightly off balance with a most of the games that seemed to be worth playing arriving in the second half of the year. Nothing this year grabbed me like Mass Effect did last year, but of the games I played this year, the following are worth a mention:
Honourable mentions: WoW (for the good times), Gears 2, Fable 2, Mirrors Edge, Prince of Persia - all games that deserve their strong reputations, all second half of the year games. I’ve probably forgotten the first half of the year now.
Biggest disappointment: That Sonic Unleashed was terrible, that Nights2 was mediocre.
Most anticipated for 2009: Heavy Rain (despite not owning a PS3), Mass Effect 2 (with any luck!)
Films
I somehow saw far fewer films this year than I normally tend to. I’m not sure if that’s indicative of the quality of the films or just my lack of attention. I have an unlimited cinema pass yet seemingly I’ve just seen nothing at all. That said, I remember really enjoying:
Honourable mention: Zack and Miri Make a Porno (oh so Kevin Smith, but very funny for it)
Technology
Surprisingly the software that’s impressed me this year has all been very mainstream. Certainly a year of lots of software maturing to a point where it’s excessively stable and usable.
TV
I’ve been watching less and less TV, and seemingly slipping towards more light comedy than anything over this past year. Too many long evenings writing software leads to shutting off your brain eventually. I have been watching a few shows religiously however.
Pretty much in that order. South Park is the one piece of TV satire that’s consistently on the mark and funny, the Terminator series is a lot more grown up than Fox would like you to believe and How I Met Your Mother, while stealing from Friends and Scrubs in an odd hybrid, is very entertaining and endearing. Also an honourable mention goes to The Big Bang Theory for making me feel at home with television personalities.
I should really get around to catching up watching Heroes and Lost and Dexter, but they require a little more engagement than the above.
So there we have it. I’d list books, but the books I’ve read this year have been all the “obvious” computer science books that people always say they’ll get around to reading but never do (books like The Mythical Man Month and The Pragmatic Programmer) so I’ll not bore you with yet another predictable list of the best programming and computer science books ever written. I’m fairly certain you can find that list on CodingHorror.
I enjoyed those things in 2008, and I hope you check at least a few of them out.
I value time. In fact, I value time above all else, I really believe it’s the only commodity that you never get back. I’m not a religious man, I hope something great happens when you die, I’ll settle for something interesting, the thought of nothing terrifies me.
So when I say I’m a “recovering” World of Warcraft player with (well) over 100 days /played over three years (not ultra-hardcore, but reasonably so) and I haven’t logged in for over two months, many people would probably react in utter confusion as to how somebody that values his time so highly can so fruitlessly waste it on a repetitive game like WoW.
It’d probably also surprise you to know that when I look back on my life and mentally prepare the list of “things I regret”, I don’t think that spending three years playing WoW will be on that list. There are lots of things I regret about playing Warcraft. I regret missing films, the odd social event, I regret angering my partner, I regret putting on weight, I regret being the caricature that South Park made so famous, but I don’t regret playing the game.
I spent a good year and a quarter of my time playing WoW as an officer and raid leader in a medium sized, social, adult raiding guild (hello “Home of the Ghost Lords”!) and I loved every second of it. I spent a good four months driving home from work during my lunch hours to plan raids, running through sign-ups for that evening. I spent all my evenings reading up and planning subsequent raids, and I spent the time in between raid start and getting home quickly raid-prepping whilst eating off my lap. Sounds like the rock and roll lifestyle, I know.
The funny thing about a medium to large sized Warcraft guild is that it functions as a tidy little ecosystem representative to some degree of the larger world, much like high school. Only in this world, instead of teens desperately trying to find themselves, you’re paired with adults with the largest sense of entitlement you’ll ever meet. That’s not a criticism per se, it’s just the attitude that emerges regardless of best intentions. The other curious thing that emerges, is that you start identifying the traits of natural leaders easily.
A natural leader, in any realm, is a rare and delicate commodity. I’m no fan of middle management and business meta-work and I believe that anyone that desires to have power over their peers should never be given an ounce of it. That’s the archetype of a bad manager at work, someone obstructive and destructive to a team dynamic. World of Warcraft encourages the most unlikely of natural leaders to come forward and do what they do best, they naturally lead.
There’s a very special kind of chemistry that just works when a raid is planned by somebody that nobody will argue with. They don’t not argue because the leader has a singular vision that’s universally approved. Often far from it, they don’t argue out of respect and trust in someone with such presence that they’re willing to see through the raid on his judgement alone.
These are the people you need leading your business projects, your art projects, your rock bands. These are your superstars, your thinkers, and the people that should be given control, often without themselves realising it.
You learn a few things when you’re managing a team of 25-40 people every night. The first thing you learn is how to say no. In business, it’s easy to say no, any unobservant middle manager type can say no to something. Try saying no to 10 people who are paying for the privilege to attend. Once you learn how to say no with tact and grace, you never forget. You learn politics far surpassing your average workplace micro-dramas. You learn team selection. You learn to play to individual strengths and weaknesses with subtlety. You learn how to use humour to control a crowd and how to be serious to drive one. You learn to trust strangers to do their jobs. But most importantly of all, you learn how to keep moral up (WoW wipe nights aren’t anyone’s idea of fun).
You also start to notice the anti-patterns and their real world equivalents. You notice the meta-workers. Anyone that’s played the game will be able to identify them. The rogue that browses wowhead for 16 hours a day checking out gear upgrades only to stop raiding when he achieves them. You know who to flag up as a no-show or unreliable team member, you can identify the middle managers of the world, the players that re-open endless debate on trite subjects of non-interest just to make a noise. The sales people / DPSers that are all talk and no performance. And you always notice the people that just never meet deadlines, whilst simultaneously hoping that they’re not your healers.
You also notice that however hard they try, people that just aren’t leaders will never be able to learn to be.
I’m a software developer by trade, so there’s a certain amusement value that comes from seeing these same stereotypes in the work environment, purely because the type of mind that’s conducive to working in IT and the type of person that plays RPG’s are often one and the same, so perhaps the similarities resonate more in my field than most, but if you think you ever want to manage people, I’d recommend you try some raiding first.
I miss playing Warcraft, and I miss going to work from the night job for a bit of easy graft. I miss the guild in particular and I played with fantastic people from all wakes of life and nationalities. But I’ll always remember, regardless of if I relapse or not, that I had the honour to encounter three genuine leaders, even if they don’t know it yet.
Your teams are broken if your leaders aren’t doing the leading and the troops aren’t naturally rallying.
If you’re going to take anything away from this post: