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Knotty Geeks Episode 14 - Starcraft beats University

Post #: 85
Post type: Podcast
Date: 2011-04-04 15:57:13.000
Author: Jeremy Reimer
Tags: Knotty Geeks

In this exciting episode, we brave the cold outdoors again to bring you the exciting battle of Big Truck vs. Even Bigger Truck, and the heart-stopping drama of tiny little loud birds!

Oh, and we also touch on how our entire society is changing right before our eyes, from the collapse of the venerable British University System to the fall of traditional publishers. It’s all part of the theme of Acceleration, marked out by Data Points!

All this, plus the rise of Starcraft!

Links from the show:
http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm - The decline and fall of the British university
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/03/the-dawn-of-starcraft-e-sports-come-to-the-world-stage.ars - The Dawn of Starcraft: e-Sports come to the world stage
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/tech-giants-to-enable-ipv6-on-world-ipv6-day-in-june.ars - World IPv6 day
http://www.the-gutters.com - good comics about comic industry
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/ebooks-and-self-publishing-dialog.html - Self publishing beats traditional publishing
http://www.pvponline.com/2011/03/26/rube-goldberg-de-vicing/ - Scott Kurtz gives up on National Cartoonists Society
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1139619&start=120 - Great discussion on the cloud and open source goals

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My Starcraft article was published on Ars Technica!

Post #: 84
Post type: Blog post
Date: 2011-04-01 12:20:43.000
Author: Jeremy Reimer
Tags: Gaming

The lights of the metropolis shine brightly on the clear summer night. Down on the bay, a crowd gathers around a giant outdoor screen. Spotlights flood the area as the audience, now exceeding 50,000 people, work themselves into a fever pitch. The two teams come out on stage to deafening cheers. Teenage girls scream as one idol from each team is chosen for the first round of combat. They each enter a booth. The music swells, and the video game begins.

It sounds like a science fiction story from the future. But this event actually happened in the past, in a place where such things have been commonplace for over ten years. This was the 2006 Proleague finals held in Seoul, South Korea. The game being played was StarCraft.

The Dawn of Starcraft: e-Sports comes to the world stage

----

The article got tweeted by GSL Starcraft II commentators Nick "Tasteless" Plott and Dan "Artosis" Stemkoski. Artosis even briefly mentioned it on the air at the 37 minute mark here:

The GSL game where Artosis and Tasteless mention my article

I’m so excited!

Comments (1)

Pirate Bird!

Post #: 82
Post type: Blog post
Date: 2011-03-23 21:41:39.000
Author: Jeremy Reimer
Tags: Gaming

Those of you who watched the GOMTV GSL Team League games last night will know what this means.

The rest of you, well, it’s a Pirate Bird.

(I drew this, so it’s my fault)

Why HTML 5 sucks!

Post #: 81
Post type: Blog post
Date: 2011-03-11 16:29:26.000
Author: Jeremy Reimer
Tags: Software

The idea behind HTML 5 was a good one: make sound and video clips a part of standard HTML code that anyone can use on any platform without having to use Adobe’s proprietary Flash plug-in. Great! Long overdue, in my opinion.

Then, sadly, everything went wrong.

I already knew that the video tag in HTML 5 was a complete train-wreck. Some browser manufacturers had decided to support H.264, others Ogg Theora, and then Google came along and started pushing WebM. But that’s video, something where new codecs are still being created and the state of the art is still very much in flux. I could forgive things for not being all sorted out.

Audio, I thought, would be trivial. So when it came time to include a podcast playback control in my Monarch blog engine (you’re reading through it right now!) I decided to test out HTML 5’s audio support to see how well it would work.

The answer is worse than not at all.

Internet Explorer 8, of course, ignores the tag and displays nothing, but that’s forgivable because honestly, who uses IE any more? Only dinosaurs and old people who really like things to be extra-slow. IE9 will supposedly support it, assuming the sun hasn’t become a red giant and consumed all life on Earth by the time it is released.

Firefox, on the other hand, commits an even more unforgivable sin: it CLAIMS to support it, but then won’t play MP3 files! Ogg Vorbis only! Look, Mozilla people, I understand this Noble Crusade For No Patents in Codecs, but MP3 is supported by every other sound playback system in the entire history of time. Five dollar portable music players support it. I think my breakfast cereal supports it. This is ridiculous!

Now, we get to Chrome. Great browser, Chrome. Supports HTML 5 audio tags and plays back MP3s. Great, right?

Yeah, until you put more than one on a single page. Then it tries to play them all at once, ignoring the autoplay settings, and freezes the entire web page. (EDIT: It's worse than that, actually. It freezes the ENTIRE BROWSER! Not even sandboxing can save it!) Great, Chrome. Nice job.

I downloaded a Flash audio player (the same one that the audio module in my old blog running Drupal used) and everything ran fine. Multiple instances, no problem. Runs on every browser, too, except the iPhone/iPad, which don’t support Flash.

The idea of replacing Flash is a good one. It was neat seeing the Knotty Geeks podcasts load up on my iPad in a web page and being able to play them. But freezing Chrome and not working on Firefox is a complete deal-breaker, and this doesn’t show any signs of improving any time soon.

Flash is here to stay for the time being, folks.

Comments (5)

Knotty Geeks Episode 13 - The Lights in the Tunnel

Post #: 80
Post type: Podcast
Date: 2011-03-04 16:40:50.000
Author: Jeremy Reimer
Tags: Knotty Geeks

In this episode we invade a Starbucks in Surrey and drive people away with our incessant commentary on the FUTURE! Will it be a bleak, dark, apocalyptic future where everyone is unemployed, or will it be a happy future where everyone is unemployed?

One thing is for sure: the computers are coming to take our JERBS and there’s no stopping them. Best to be prepared.

The Anybody Story:

This is a little story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.
There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.
Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.
Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job.
Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it.

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

Reading list:

What Technology Wants
Where Good Ideas Come From
The Lights in the Tunnel

Apache Solr search engine: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

Why does work not happen at work: http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work.html

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I love Korean Starcraft

Post #: 77
Post type: Blog post
Date: 2011-01-13 12:01:53.000
Author: Jeremy Reimer
Tags: Starcraft

I can’t get enough of it. Whether it’s the new GSL in Starcraft II or the classic Starcraft I MSL, OSL, or Proleague, I’m completely addicted to watching it.

And I’m not the only one. People are making pilgrimages to South Korea just to hold up epic signs like this for the TV cameras:

Comments (17)

Monarch Thing-A-Day Challenge!

Post #: 75
Post type: Blog post
Date: 2010-12-13 11:34:59.000
Author: Jeremy Reimer
Tags: Monarch

Now that Monarch has been released to the public at version 0.24, I’ve decided to crank things up a little bit.

Starting today I will add one feature per day to the system. They may not always be big features, but they will address missing functionality that the old system (both Drupal and PHPBB) offered.

I have no particular order that I plan to do these in, but I’m trying to hit the most obvious ones first-- the ones that you would use all the time.

Monday’s feature is a Last Post link, to let you instantly jump to the last post in a thread by clicking on the name/date in the "Last post" column.

EDIT: Testing smilies in blog posts. :D :D

Comments (38)

Knotty Geeks Episode 12 - I made something!

Post #: 73
Post type: Podcast
Date: 2010-12-11 11:44:34.000
Author: Jeremy Reimer
Tags: Knotty Geeks

It’s a pretty big episode this time, with big announcements for the future of Knotty Geeks!

We start off talking about our latest and greatest iGadgets, briefly discuss our trip to Sacramento for Amiwest 2010, review the amazing new book What Technology Wants, and then get into my big news: the release of my brand-new, written-from-scratch forum/blogging system called Monarch, written in newLISP!

The new system includes a podcast module, on which Knotty Geeks has found its new home.

Links from the show;

AmiWest 2010 Report:
http://www.amigafuture.de/kb.php?mode=article&k=3628

What Technology Wants (also available on Kindle)
http://www.amazon.com/What-Technology-Wants-Kevin-Kelly/dp/0670022152

Monarch Content Engine - Jeremy’s new blogging application!
http://jeremyreimer.com/monarch/main

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Knotty Geeks Episode 11 - Bad Coders At Work

Post #: 72
Post type: Podcast
Date: 2010-12-11 11:03:15.000
Author: Jeremy Reimer
Tags: Knotty Geeks

In this episode, we get scared of the wind and venture inside Wick’s Cafe, only to find ourselves face to face with eating and drinking noises, light reggae, and... ourselves.

We talk a little bit about creating art in 2D and 3D, the current state of smartphones, and then get into the history and future of programming, a subject we know virtually nothing about.

Links from the show:

Jeremy’s new "Star Gamer" 2D comic, made on a Bamboo tablet:
http://jeremyreimer.com/monarch/comic?c=Star%20Gamer

Malcom Gladwell’s "10,000 hours to become an expert" book Outliers:
http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/index.html

Coders at Work - the most entertaining book about programming you’ll ever read:
http://www.codersatwork.com/

The Dunning-Kruger effect, where you are too incompetent to know you are incompetent (maybe that’s us?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

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Knotty Geeks Episode 10 - The Fourth Way... is LISP!

Post #: 71
Post type: Podcast
Date: 2010-12-11 10:58:52.000
Author: Jeremy Reimer
Tags: Knotty Geeks

We’re back! The weather has finally allowed us to venture outside to brave the scary world outside Wick’s Coffee. In this episode, we talk about the Gervais Principle, work/life balance, Timothy Ferris and the four-hour work week, Penny Arcade dissing the iPad, and somehow end up discussing... LISP? Is that the language with all the stupid parentheses?

Notes from the show:

Knotty geeks episode 10 notes

The Gervais Principle
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/

They actually produce, but are not compensated in proportion to the value they create (since their compensation is set by sociopaths operating under conditions of serious moral hazard). They mortgage their lives away, and hope to die before their money runs out. The good news is that losers have two ways out, which we’ll get to later: turning sociopath or turning into bare-minimum performers. The losers destined for cluelessness do not have a choice.

Timothy Ferris and the 4-hour work week
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/

Life doesn’t have to be so damn hard. It really doesn’t. Most people, my past self included, have spent too much time convincing themselves that life has to be hard, a resignation to 9-to-5 drudgery in exchange for (sometimes) relaxing weekends and the occasional keep-it-short-or-get-fired vacation.

The truth, at least the truth I live and will share in this book, is quite different.

The Fourth Way
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Way

Gurdjieff taught people how to increase and focus their attention and energy in various ways, and to minimize daydreaming and absentmindedness.

Tycho destroys (and then buys) the iPad
http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/1/29/

That iPad presentation had to be the worst thing I’ve even seen on on the Apple stage. There is a part where they - I am not making a joke - there is a part where they try to make creating spreadsheets seem awesome. Jilted may be the word. Of course, we’re at the second wave of commentary now, the reflexive defense phase, but I’ve seen this practiced arc too many times to feel its pull. Apple didn’t make a case for the device.

Paul Graham on LISP
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

So if Lisp makes you a better programmer, like he says, why wouldn’t you want to use it? If a painter were offered a brush that would make him a better painter, it seems to me that he would want to use it in all his paintings, wouldn’t he? I’m not trying to make fun of Eric Raymond here. On the whole, his advice is good. What he says about Lisp is pretty much the conventional wisdom. But there is a contradiction in the conventional wisdom: Lisp will make you a better programmer, and yet you won’t use it.

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So who am I?

I'm a writer and programmer. I write science fiction stories and novels.

I am the writer for the upcoming documentary series Arcade Dreams.

I also write technology articles for Ars Technica.

I'm the creator of newLISP on Rockets, a web development framework and blog application.

Email: jeremy.reimer@gmail.com

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