Goings On

Been a little while since I last posted anything, I've nothing to write really but I'd like to point out a few things that have been going on. I've been in full production mode.

Firstly, I've begun contributing to hehe2.net, a 'Linux Advocacy' blog run by Rami Taibah; as I've learned, it's actually quite a popular establishment in the blogosphere, and several of its articles have ended up being pointed to by numerous news sites like Digg.com. My first submitted article garnered over 900(!!) Diggs, and the second getting a little over 800. Working with this guy has been an absolute pleasure so far, and it's also giving my material a level of exposure that I've never experienced before. The whole experience has been fantastic, and hopefully it's to be the start of something even greater.

Apart from that, my online portfolio has also received a rather significant facelift, so here's how it's looking at the moment:

(Yeah, it shows Himclub.com dead-center on the main page... hope you don't mind, Klaus ;) )

Working With IE6

Back in 2003, if w3schools is to be believed, 71% of people on the internet were using Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, thus making it the standard at the time for web browsers. When you made a website, you made it with IE6 in mind, and that meant you made it without upholding web standards in mind.

The reason for this, is because Microsoft's Internet Explorer series of browsers had, by way of bundling them with Windows computers and deeply integrating them with the OS, effectively forced everyone to use it in some capacity; and face it, most casual computer users see the IE icon on their desktop and think of it as “THE INTERNET”. The concept of replaceable web browsers, at the time, was an alien one to a lot of people, and it still is that way today.

With IE6 holding more than 2/3 of browser market share, IE's developers were in a position to make the web conform to standards set by them, instead of making a browser that conformed to the standards set by the web.

In all of the languages that go into creating web pages, there are universal standards that are set, and all browser developers and web designers are encouraged to stick to them; this is to ensure a seamless and identical experience for anyone that accesses any web page, regardless of their browser or their operating system. IE6, though, decided to ignore these for a large amount and make their own rules. Thus, web designers had to make special exceptions and hacks just to get their pages to display in IE6. Basically, it was a colossal pain in the arse for everyone, because of Microsoft's ignorance of standards that made for pages that would only display properly for some people and not others.

This was all five years ago, and IE6's successor has arrived so this kind of problem should be something that a designer or end user shouldn't have to worry about.

Unfortunately, that's not so.

Internet Explorer 7 arrived in late 2006 and along with it's new GUI that made a half-arsed effort at blatantly copying the layout that Mozilla pioneered with Firefox, they also improved their browsers conformity to web standards from being a complete joke to merely very bad. For a web page developer, this alleviates some of the headache, but the fact of the matter is they still need to make hacks and exceptions just to make their pages work for the majority that still use the IE family of browsers – I can attest to this personally from experience. This is further compounded by the fact that in 2008, seven years after its release, 26% of the online market still uses IE6.

IE7 is already nearly two years old and its successor is almost around the corner, and it seems that Microsoft has done very little to promote it. There's no reminders popping up for IE6 users to remind them that the browser they're using is obsolete, Microsoft's other services rarely even mention that it exists. And of course, you still have those folks that think the little “E” icon on their desktop with the circle around it is “THE INTERNET”.

So, what can be done about this? Personally, I'm in favour of simply abandoning IE6 altogether, regardless of how many people like to use it. It's a poorly made, ancient relic of a browser and it just doesn't do the job anymore. People who use it need to get the message in their heads, it needs to be drilled in, plastered up and blinking in bright flashing neon, “Using IE6 to drive yourself through the internet is like driving down a highway in a car constructed of balsa wood and held together with dried spit, and you need to upgrade like yesterday”.

I'm sure this sounds like a rather anal kind of topic to be ranting about, but people who make websites will know what I'm about with this. Designing with IE6 in mind makes web designers want to strangle puppies.

So, for those few that read this, do your part and make sure, if you're using IE6, (Go to Help > About Internet Explorer to see if you are), do your part and upgrade it to the seventh version, or better yet, use a different browser altogether. Please, think of the puppies.

Starting a web design company

So, I'm going to try my hand at starting an independent web and graphic design company. This is something that's been in the works for quite a long time, but it's always stayed on the backburner for a couple of reasons, partly because I was preparing to move overseas from Australia (which happened 3 months ago), and more so because I really had no idea of how to go about it.

I was a Multimedia student at TAFE for a year before I dropped out in favour of my overseas jaunt, and while that one year really didn't teach me anything I didn't already know in terms of skills, it actually gave me the tiniest bit of insight to the industry needed to give me a lead on where to go.

Thus far, I've got three basic goals in this endeavor, two of which I'm working on very slowly. Firstly, a company of course needs a name and an identity. For now, I'm just using my name but I intend to change that (I don't want to look like I'm up myself). Secondly, a portfolio is needed to show off what I'm capable of. Ironically enough, before I started trying to assemble said portfolio I realised I really wasn't capable of a whole lot, and in fact since I started trying to create pieces to include in it, I've been learning as I go.

This actually shows quite a lot in the folio itself; the first four (!) major revisions thus far were absolutely terrible in comparison to the one being built now, which itself I'll probably end up tearing down and starting again.

To illustrate:
This is one of the later versions, which I was happy with from a layout viewpoint (following the 'Holy Grail' of web layouts), but when I showed it to a friend he was quick to point out that he's not into 'websites for goths'. Lesson learned: Don't forget you have a target audience, and you are not it.

Since then the entire thing has been given a more 'light' makeover, and another mistake I made that I'll be remedying is that my layout was table based, and no CSS was used at all: For casual internet people that probably means nothing, but it's extremely bad practice and it does affect everyone; layouts that are table-based and devoid of CSS are high in bloat and content that has to be repeated, which means a more sluggish and unpleasant experience for both designer and user.

It's only recently that I've learned to use CSS in an effort to keep the page's content and the page's presentation as seperate from each other as possible, which is really something that any designer should keep in mind.

My third goal is, once the folio is finished, simple advertising. I've no idea really how established web authors go about getting their names known, but I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Hopefully this post has been somewhat insightful. :|

July 22 Desktop

Clean & simple.

Ubuntu 8.04
Wallpaper - Feisty Fawn Default
GTK - Clearlooks
Window Borders - Blended
Icons - Oxygen Refit Orange

A tale of loss

Today I'd like to share with everyone a story that traces along nearly 8 years of my life, stemming from my childhood and finally being laid to rest last year. This is the heartbreaking chronicle of something that will never be: and that thing was called Decay.

In the spring of 2000 (I think), my twelve-year-old self been running high on inspiration after playing various action games on the computer, and decided I'd set to work on making my own. At the time I was unhealthily into gaming (though that habit hasn't really died out completely, it just got swept under a rug), and with school holidays starting I was ready to roll up my sleeves and take on what would end up being the longest-running project of my life thus far.

At the time a friend of mine was pretty into the idea of making something too, so we decided we'd put our heads together to make my grand vision come to life. In coming up with a name, we wanted it to be along the lines of “Something of Something”. I'd thought the idea of having the word “Decay” in it would be cool, so for a while it was called “Something of Decay”. Later on, I finally relented that I wasn't creative enough to come up with something for the first “Something” and so the project ended up being named “Decay”.

Decay was set to be a first person shooter game, put together entirely by yours truly and his keen acquaintance, using the game Duke Nukem 3D as a base. But my vision stretched far beyond that of first person shooter games; I wanted a real, emotionally sound reason for us to be running around in corridors/city streets/jungle terrain with a shotgun decapitating pixellated sprite enemies.

And so, I set to creating a storyline, which as it turns out, ended up being more of the focus of my work than the game itself. You see, Duke Nukem 3D didn't come with much editing capability at the time besides some basic game coding, a level builder and an artwork program. The code was a simple in-game language (called CON files, one or two of you may remember them), and it wasn't flexible enough to allow me to integrate a proper storyline complete with cutscenes, endings etc. So, what I did instead was fill in the story between game 'episodes' and save them in text files, trusting that people would actually quit the game, and go to read the ending in a separate file once they had finished a given episode. How naive I was! But that was how I did it.

The story line's original form, in all of my maturity at the time, envisioned a futuristic cyberpunk world, in a crime-ridden New York, where the regular police force was more-or-less overwhelmed and the last line of defense was in the form of a squad of something like six or seven “elite” war veterans, each with their own skills. (Yes, six or seven people were charged with the role of defending an entire city... great idea Ian.) The player would take up the role of one of said “elite” dudes named Christopher Emmerich (once again, great name Ian). The game started out as an ordinary day at work, but ended in a massive conspiracy involving, get ready, zombies, nuclear weapons, an invasion from Spain of all countries (PRICELESS idea, Ian), government coverups and topped off with a gripping love story in between all these earth-shattering plot twists. (sic)

And guess what? After a year of on-and-off development, numerous restarts and changes to the plot (Spain was cut out, or changed to another country, if I recall correctly... I guess I was starting to get some sense about the political climate), and long after my partner in development had dropped out of the project and found something else to entertain himself with, I finally was to declare the game finished. Sure, the game was still a total mess and some of the levels were so rushed it only took seven seconds to complete them, but it was still a contiguous product with a clear beginning and end, and you could play it from start to finish. But, I had a problem: this was 2001 at the time, and I was in a poor-ass family situation at the time with no access to the internet, so I couldn't exactly just throw it up onto the www and wait for any praise. I couldn't even publish it to pass it around to anyone in town that gave a crap: No CD burner. All I had was a ZIP drive, something that would contain the game on it but no one else had a drive of the same sort that I knew of at the time.

Then, disaster struck: The family bought a new computer, one without a zip drive, and the one I'd been working on was sold. With no burner and no network or anything, my only choice was to hastily copy all of my work onto a zip disk and hope that someday, somehow, I'd get access to another zip drive and be on my way to finally bring my project into the limelight.

Fast-forward to 2004. Three years had passed, and well, I'd more-or-less forgotten about it. But one day, I had the burning desire to resurrect this project and polish it up, then maybe distribute it; after all, all this work had been done, why throw it away? Unfortunately, the zip thing still wasn't resolved, so my only choice, realistically, was to start over. So, I did, but with a number of changes: I was using the Unreal engine to build on, and the plotline had been completely rewritten and significantly retooled from my previous envisioning. My baby would see the light of day after all!

Three months later, I came to the realisation that working with the Unreal engine and producing enough content to constitute an entire game was far, FAR beyond my abilities. So, I gave up on the game element and began working on the storyline exclusively. Fuck it, if my baby won't be a fantastic new game then it will be a fantastic new book!

Then, disaster struck again. The computer was completely messed-up from the abuse that its clueless users had given it (including me), and so it had to be wiped clean. But my work was on there!

It was done. My baby was gone.

From there, after its two colossal failures, I supposed that Decay was something that just wasn't meant to be. Perhaps it should be condemned to my head and my heart, a memory that I will forever cherish, but would never be able to share. I moved onto other things. I was going on seventeen, and the twelve-year-old me that had originally come up with all of this was little more to me than a hazy vision of the past. But I still had that zip disk sitting in my drawer, safe and sound, all that work from all those years ago still preserved in its inaccessible state, like a time capsule.

Then, something happened last year. I found the disk and at this time, I couldn't even remember exactly if there was even anything on it anymore. After all, seven years had passed, and my recollection of the goings-on in the year 2000 weren't so great. In any case, I had access to the internet now so jumping on ebay and ordering a zip drive, even if it was just for this one disk and then doomed to the trash, wouldn't be too hard of a task.

I asked around casually if anyone in my TAFE class had a zip drive stashed away that they'd be able to lend, and lo and behold, one of them did! After a month of waiting and repeated probing (the guy is a lazy bastard, no names), I finally had it. The drive was extremely battered looking and seemed like he'd fished it out of the trash himself, but I'd got it for free and it'd do the job. After all this time of not seeing my work, it'd be the ultimate nostalgia experience for me, and maybe even something that I could perhaps pick up and see how I could improve it with seven years of gained maturity and experience.

I took the drive home, hooked it up haphazardly, stuck the disk in... and there it was! “Decay.zip” was there, waiting to be unearthed!

Hastily, I began copying it to the hdd, and then it stopped with a CRC error. The disk wouldn't eject. I eventually got it out, but the battered old drive had ripped my disk to shreds.

I was completely shattered. It wasn't just unfortunate that this had happened... it was adding insult to injury, as if some force in the universe was laughing sadistically as I tried and tried in vain to recover my old baby from the abyss of nothingness. I still have the disk in case I either gain the ability to travel backward in time or repair destroyed magnetic media.

So, that old dream now lays in pieces, to be cherished by none but myself. But, I've learned a few lessons from this ordeal: Back your shit up, and back it up properly. And don't let your emotional attachment channel into haste, haste that can lead to costly and in my case, irreversible mistakes.

Procedural Everything

I'm watching Mira playing Diablo II at the moment, and thinking quietly to myself about how many times we've played it over now, without getting terribly bored. One of the biggest points, I figure, is that the levels, monsters' attributes and a few other things are generated at random, ensuring the experience isn't the same every time. These are done via a formula that's been programmed into the game, providing parameters and rules which the game obeys to generate a unique experience with each playthrough, requiring no further input on the part of the developers. This is a kind of primitive example of what's called procedural generation; using a formula to get the computer to generate something.

For a really extreme example of this, you should check out a game called .kkrieger, a shitty game in and of itself but a fantastic proof-of-concept. The game is under a 1/2 megabyte to download but produces graphics comparable to your typical first person shooter circa 2008. We're starting to see this process used more in videogames, and I can see the reasoning for it; it takes the gruntwork off the designers' shoulders and lets them do more in the way of actual game design as opposed to concentrating on anal details that don't make much of an impact to the user's enjoyment of the product. That makes sense, as demand for bigger and better games is way outstripping the resources of a typical, honest development house.

What I was really wondering about is how this kind of procedural generation has the potential to be implemented in pretty much any sort of media, if an engineer were clever enough. On a primitive level, we could use it to make a pattern to use as a background for a website. Why not use it in the aural sense? Random sound effects to use in movies, or dare I say it, entire music that's randomly generated according to rules specified by the person wanting to listen? How about books that are written procedurally? That probably sounds retarded, but it's already been done in a crude manner. We've all seen 'random story generators' that piece together a fable by arranging pre-written events and outcomes. Employed on a more advanced level, it doesn't seem far-fetched to me that in the future, we might just have authors that write in a particular style, then see that style adopted by a computer to write hundreds of unique books in that style.

But of course, what makes a particular influential book or record to be so influential in the first place, is that it tried something new, that went against the formula.

Maybe this wouldn't be a great idea after all. Maybe we're already seeing it done anyway, in most of the movies we watch, the music we listen to and the books we read; assembly-line, cookie-cutter content that's pumped out by people, yes, but people thinking in a very computer-like manner. Why does so much music sound so similar on the radio?

June 11 Desktop

Cbf posting theme/font wallpaper names and links, but if you actually want them let me know.