Harold's Home The moving finger writes...

I have uploaded the pics I took on our recent holiday in Barcelona. This is probably only of interest to those who were there but anyone can join in and look at my amazing skills as a photographer. Clicky the pic below for the entire set.



Unfortunately the weather let us down a bit with lots of rain. I also have to say that going to Barcelona between christmas and the new year is perhaps not the best idea as lots of stuff will be closed. I did get to eat some good food and the difference between what the Dutch call ham and what the southern countries sell under that name is stark and leaves our own ham look like a pasted together pieces of watery meatstuff.

Camerawise the iPhone held up a bit better than I expected, although the lack of any kind of zoom is very limiting, especially when taking pictures of large objects such as La Sagrada de Familia. I did manage to get some nice shots of plantain bark which always leaves me amazed at the beauty in nature.

The Sagrada is still not finished and my good friend Harold (k) mentioned it probably never will as the unfinished work of Gaudi attracts loads of visitors for the town, which is a shame as the insanity of some of the detail is simply stunning. I also like the fact that many of the details are taken from nature but that might just be my personal idiosyncrasy.

Seems I forgot to pay this years' hosting bill and the provider only noticed early this month so they sent me a double bill, one for 2008 and one for 2009. Only I didn't notice that I got 2 bills and thought I'd have enough time to pay for 2009. When I didn't pay promptly they disconnected the domain which unfortunately means the www.virtualpetrock.nl domain was unreachable for the past 10 days which I only noticed last night after I got back from christmas holidays abroad.

Sorry about this folks, I have payed up and the site is back online. You can go back to uploading your stats.

I was browsing the app store just now and came across a very funny thing which I screenshotted to share.



Night stand is an app that allows you to use your iPhone as an alarmclock. I haven't used it but I'm very tempted right now, who knows what might happen!

Heh, I should go into American politics.

US officials flunk test of American history, economics, civics.
US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent

I scored 84%, getting only questions 4, 6, 11, 13 and 27 wrong. Not too shabby for a bloody foreigner, especially as I had to resort to logic and reason for a lot of these as understandably the finer details of American history and its constitution isn't high on the Dutch curriculum in schools.

via Inessential

It is always sad when one of the sites you put a lot of time and effort in shuts down. This is the case today as I am preparing to shut down the Raidbooking System (RBS for short). So I thought it might be appropriate to write a little about the biggest web-project I have been involved in outside of my regular job.

Before I started playing World of Warcraft four years ago I had read a lot about it. I had always been a fan of the Warcraft RTS games so jumping in on a Blizzard MMORPG, and one available on a Mac as well, sounded like fun. The info that was leaked and released before the game hit the shelves was tantalizing. We learned about a badass dragon queen called Onyxia who it would take 40 people to defeat, we learned about an old elemental god down in a massive lava-filled cavesystem called Ragnaros. To be able to reach Ragnaros you'd have to kill his 9 luitenants first.

When I started playing the game seeing Ragnaros and especially Onyxia dead was my long term goal. I started up the game for the first time and had to choose a server, as I already knew I wanted to play a Tauren, a humanoid creature with decidedly bovine ancestry, I chose to play on a server called Thunderhorn. This seemed appropriate. My character was a warrior called Riktor after one of the more obscure Archchancellors of Unseen University in Pratchett's Discworld series. I played Horde, one of the 2 opposing factions in the game. The factions cannot talk to each other, are in a virtual state of war and cannot cooperate except by staying out of each other's way.

When I reached level 60, the maximum at the time, I did a lot of regular dungeon crawls to get better gear and hone my skills, soon I would be ready for Onyxia! Or so I thought because it turned out that while Thunderhorn had a lot of players, the raiding scene (a raid is where you take 40 people into a dungeon to defeat the truly hard stuff), especially on the Horde side was lackluster. It took quite a while for the Thunderhorn community to get into raiding and even then there wasn't much to choose from. Most raids are organised by guilds (a social group with their own chatchannel not available to anyone else, some other games call this clans) and I didn't want to leave my old guild and join a new one just to see some stuff, even if that was an old god or a fierce dragon guarding her eggs.
Luckily a guy with the character name of Doktahantha (Dok for short) from England had the same feeling, he wanted to raid but didn't want to leave his small guild that was a group of mostly friends from real life. So he started a coalition, a loose-knit group of people with the same idea, do the hard stuff but in a more relaxed environment, without too much strain put on being the absolute best and more on having fun. Much ridicule was levered at The Coalition and it was said that a group like that could never get far and certainly not defeat one of the old gods. We proved them wrong by putting on the heat and forcing the top Horde guild to farm insane amounts of consumables to actually defeat the endboss 2 hours before we did, without using all those expansive materials.
To facilitate this coalition Dok created a webbased system called the RBS, a system where people could register their character and then sign up for raids. The system also incorporated loot tracking and a DKP system. DKP, for the non MMO players, is a system that allows you to track how much effort and time people have spend with a raid, the more you are involved the more points you have. In that way you earn points for bosskills, learning bosses even if you don't kill them, being on time, staying the whole raid etc.. In a way it's a loyalty scheme similar to airmiles, if you spend a lot (of time) you get points that can then be spend on loot: getting better weapons, rings, necklaces or armor which would then help your performance and, given enough loot spread evenly around, help progress to the next boss or even an even harder dungeon.
Many raids use separate tools for tracking attendance and DKP, most have forums beside that and sometimes separate blogs. The RBS combined all of these in one system, written from scratch in PHP.

So I joined the coalition (it didn't have a fancy name, it was always just "The Coalition", at first because we couldn't think of one and later because the name became so well known). Pretty soon it became clear that the raidgroup as a whole needed some more involved people to take up some duties, such as leading raids, explaining tactics, administering DKP and handing out loot when we killed a boss or got an item from a trash mob. (A trash mob or mob is a non-boss monster you have to kill, designers put in Trash to vary the pace of the dungeon and prevent people from running in and getting 15 great items for very little effort. Trash is often on a respawn timer as a sort of penalty for not being well enough geared or skilled for the actual dungeon. It can also reward you with a rare drop to help you get a bit further.) So I offered to help out a bit with the admin side of things and handing out loot. I later switched characters to play a Druid called Stonebreaker, as we were always short on healers and had enough warriors.

Pretty soon it became apparent that though the RBS system was a great thing, there were also some omissions or plain bugs. So I offered to help out and code some stuff, even though my PHP skills weren't that great to start with. Dok e-mailed me some files and I would implement some changes or bugfixes I'd thought of and then send them back whereupon Dok would upload the files and we'd improved the system a little bit. After a while Dok knew that I was up to the task and I got FTP access so I could work on the files directly without all the necessary back and forth. From that day on the system improved greatly as we were both coding and feeding off each other's ideas. Blizzard also introduced smaller raids that were designed for a maximum of 20 people and we incorporated those into the design of the site.

After a while Dok applied for a job at Google and got it. When he did his Warcraft play time decreased dramatically as working for the biggest dot com in the world is bound to do. By that time I took over all the daily running of the site as well as working on new stuff. Dok still paid for the server but it might be days between him being able to find the time to actually check out what was happening. So it shouldn't come as a big surprise that one day the entire system collapsed because he forgot to pay the bills. Because he was traveling out of the country at the time he didn't notice for a week. By the first day I had 30 anxious people chatting to me, by the third day I couldn't log in to the game without getting 60 people wondering when the system would be back up. So I made the decision to register a domain and host the files myself. Dok might be back the next day or it might take a few weeks more. Meanwhile raids were still going but the logistics of keeping track of who got what loot, who was really entitled to loot and who actually signed up and could be expected had become a nightmare.
So I bit the bullet and starting hosting the RBS instead.

This lead to another wave of innovations as I had a little bit more control on the new server and by that time me and Woorg, an online friend from Sweden, started working on a new guild to tackle the newest dungeon, the coalition would still remain but there would come a new section on the site especially for the new guild, using the same basic tools and framework. By now 2 separate raidgroups were using the site and I improved a lot of things on the backend to make administration easier.

All was well but in 2007 Blizzard released the first expansion for World of Warcraft, this expansion brought massive changes to the game. There would be no more 20 man or 40 man dungeons. Instead raids would be for either 10 people or 25. The idea was that you'd start out with a few groups of 10 and then later move on to the harder stuff that required 25 men.

Unfortunately as any child can see getting from 40 to 10 and then to 25 does not make a lot of sense and a lot of groups were harmed by this design choice. Blizzard decided to scale down the number of people allowed in a raid so organising would become easier. To field a 40 man raid you would need about 50 people that were willing to commit one or more nights a week.
To field a 25 man raid you would only need between 30 and 35. So on the face of this this seems like a good idea, it is easier to get together 30 people than 50. But then there's the curious fact that 30 people do not fit into 2 10 man groups, and they'd all need to do those. Running 3 groups was not an option due to real life commitments, you never get everyone to show up! This created massive logistical nightmares and hours spent trying to design a schedule where we could gear up everyone without leaving people behind. You'd then have to transition from 20 people being able to play on a night to having 25 being able to play. Of course real life interferes and you'd never get all your members to show up at the same time so the problem isn't that great but you still need a healthy reserve of people on the night itself as inevitably someone will get stuck in traffic, have to work late or deal with homework or will be ill.

As I said the new design messed up a lot of things for many groups. Ours was no different and due to the fact that raid encounters were extremely hard for a group such as ours meant that the Coalition faded away and stopped raiding. Shortly after the new guild folded as well and people transferred server, stopped playing altogether or joined other raid groups that managed to weather the changes. I did the same and moved on to another raid group.

This was by the end of 2007 and since then the RBS has been maintained but not in much actual use. I did put in a chat as a last measure to allow people to keep in contact with former friends but over the year the use of the site has steadily declined. We went from 100 unique visitors a day to about 5 visits a week. Even I don't visit the site much anymore as there simply is no community left, everyone has moved on. As such I felt the time was right to shut down the site and not renew the domain.


Over the years the RBS has served a good purpose, finding and offering raids for people that are not able to commit 5 nights a week, people that have a job or a family and can therefore not raid till 3 am, people that may not be the best payers in the world but that are a lot of fun to be around. And it's sad to see it gone, but in a way it has been surpassed, raiding became a lot harder and it isn't quite so easy now to raid if you do not have the organisation and critical mass of a big guild or several closely allied guilds. Blizzard promises raiding in the upcoming expansion will be a lot easier and should allow almost anyone to compete, even if their skills are a bit less than a no lifer who neglects school or work and just sits at the computer 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. We'll see.

In closing I thought it might be fun to post some statistics I calculated:

Number of characters registered: 972 (some people have multiple characters though)
Number of raids organised: 609
Number of items dropped: 4,272
Bosses killed: about 1,000 (most of them many many times of course)
Number of raid signups: 11,910
Number of people blacklisted: 14 (a measly 1.4 %, due to misbehaviour)
Frontpage newsitems: 463
Number of comments on news: 3,624
Number of Private Messages sent: 4,898
Number of e-mails sent between the raidleaders: 2000+
Lines of code to keep the site working: 13,250 (estimated)
Number of tables in the database: 45
Size of the MySQL database: a modest 16.3 MB

The statistics may be modest if looked at in relation to a social site such as MySpace but for a community of only a few thousand people on one particular game server they're actually quite impressive.

So today I'm a bit sad but I am also grateful for all the support I've had over the years and being able to participate and help out in the community that once was. I also learned a hell of a lot about PHP. And that has helped me a lot in real life as well.

Hehe, macuser has a funny article on some production flaws in the new macbook laptops. This reminded me of the student that came to my office a few weeks ago who wanted to get his Macbook on our wireless internet. Problem was he had a laptop with an azerty layout. You cannot believe how tremendously annoying it is to type on one of these things if you've never done that before.

While I cannot type blind at all, in fact I type with 2, 3 or even sometimes with 4 fingers, subconsciously I have a pretty good idea where keys are. More so than I realized and this was extremely disconcerting. Typing things I use fifteen times a day, such as my password, took ages as I had suddenly had to find every single key!

I could probably live with a keyboard with no visible B key as long as the B was where I supposed it would be, but I won't ever see the beauty of azerty after so many years of qwerty.

Gaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!!


I'm working in MCMS and trying to add a form to pages I create. Unfortunately I cannot add a real form as the entire page already is one and nested forms are not allowed in HTML. Normally when things are not allowed you can sneak around and do them anyway with a reasonable expectation of getting them to work as browsers are very tolerant of errors and whatnot.
Not so in this case!

I did manage to find a way to work around it though by just inserting the needed form elements without <form> tags and then using a very small bit of custom javascript. This custom script will rewrite the normal action url of the resident form and overwrite a few of the default values with nothing. This could probably be handled a bit better but I'm unsure of whether javascript supports a function like PHP's unset().
<script>
function doForm()
{
theform=document.Form1;
theform.action="http://atoz.ebsco.com/home.asp";
//strip surplus unwanted values that reside by default in MCMS pages
theform.unwanted.value = "";
theform.unwanted2.value = "";
theform.submit();
}
</script>

And then the search button can have an onClick event as follows:
<input onClick="javascript:doForm();" type="submit" value="Search" name="cmdSearchSubmit" />

Unfortunately I cannot add javascript to my pages as they're deleted right away, so I'm stuck in limbo with nothing to show for my efforts accept an angry post.


Update: good friend Jurjan (of Virtual Pet Rock fame) emailed me to suggest that if Microsoft's crappy management system deletes script tags I might be able to put the javascript into the onclick handler of the submit button. This works like a charm! So instead of calling a function I just put the entire javascript there like so:
<input onclick="javascript:theform=document.Form1; theform.method='get'; theform.action='http://atoz.ebsco.com.www.dbproxy.hu.nl/titles.asp?id=7713&linktype=' +theform.linktype.value+ '&SF='+theform.SF.value+ '&ST=' +theform.ST.value+'&WW=' +theform.WW.value; theform.__EVENTARGUMENT.value = ''; theform.__VIEWSTATE.value = ''; theform.__EVENTTARGET.value = '';theform.submit();" type="submit" value="Zoek" name="cmdSearchSubmit" />

It's may be a bit clunky but it works.

I read a christian newspaper at work and I was going to rant about some of the stuff in there (I really shouldn't read that kind of thing, I know, it's very bad for my blood pressure) but instead I got distracted by this piece from the BBC website: Fire crews hunt escaped hamster which is actually a lot more fun. I do hope the hamster is well.

Another fun thing I read today is that in the long term it's getting colder. News is really amazing sometimes. Here we are in the middle of october and we're told it will get colder. Next they'll try to tell you it might snow this winter.


Updated below.
Aaaaaaaargh: I just read the links in the side bar to the BBC article and there's another brilliant hamster-related gem there:
Runaway rodent collared by police.
A hamster was taken into custody after walking into Cheltenham police station.

Promised good friend Harold (k) to send him the url of Wordsplosion but figured more readers might enjoy it. It's a blog dedicated to bad spelin, "problematic quotes" and apostrophe's.
I like it better than Photoshop Distasters which are sometimes a bit far-fetched.

One of the things I'm most proud of to have ever developed is my Astronomy Picture of the Day download scripts.

Even though I created the scripts for this back in 2003 I still get occasional mail about this. Today someone called Trevor Sayre mailed me he was inspired to create an actual application to do the same thing.
You can download the app here: http://bluetain.com/downloads/FetchAPOD.dmg

Although I haven't seen the code for the app I can confirm that it works on my Mac and that it doesn't appear to contact anything else than the Astronomy Picture of the Day pages. If all this scripting stuff and editing CRON files is a bit over your head you might want to give this a try. You will need a Mac, the app appears to be a Universal Binary so it will probably work on older G4 and G5 based machines.

Here's Trevor's mail:
I saw your APOD to Desktop Perl script plus Applescript set and decided to make an app to do the same. I even mashed together a nice little icon for the app. You can, of course, set the app to run at start-up if one wanted to have the background set to most recent with any reboot. As well, you can just have it lying around or on the dock and run it to have the background updated. Thank you for the inspiration and I hope you like it! Feel free to post it on your site if you'd like.

I am aware that since my scripts were written there have been a number of apps that do the same thing on sites like MacUpdate. I haven't tried those but then the developers never contacted me.

I'll keep using my own scripts as they've been running perfectly every day for 5 years straight but it's cool there are options.

Update: Trevor mailed me that he'd be happy to release a slightly different package so you can see the applescript that does the real work: http://bluetain.com/downloads/FetchAPOD.zip

It's pretty elegant I must say and a lot less hassle than my perl + osascript combo. The picture is downloaded to the ~/Pictures folder, to prevent flooding the system it's named the same every day.
I also misspelled his last name which is unforgivable but which I have corrected above.