http://www.haroldbakker.com/ PHP, Cocoa, Mac OS X, Webdevelopment, dreamweaver extensions, movies, sillyness. en-us Harold Bakker Copyright 1999 - 2004 Fri, 07 Nov 2008 14:07:47 +0100 Fri, 07 Nov 2008 14:07:47 +0100 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=534 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=534 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.]]> Games http://www.haroldbakker.com/?action=comment&article=534#comments Fri, 07 Nov 2008 13:43:36 +0200 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=533 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=533 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.]]> Apple http://www.haroldbakker.com/?action=comment&article=533#comments Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:06:44 +0200 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=532 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=532

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.]]> Webdesign http://www.haroldbakker.com/?action=comment&article=532#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:49:38 +0200 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=531 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=531 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.]]> Ramblings http://www.haroldbakker.com/?action=comment&article=531#comments Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:56:07 +0200 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=530 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=530 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.]]> Funny http://www.haroldbakker.com/?action=comment&article=530#comments Sat, 04 Oct 2008 10:05:23 +0200 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=529 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=529 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.]]> Apple http://www.haroldbakker.com/?action=comment&article=529#comments Wed, 01 Oct 2008 22:56:14 +0200 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=528 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=528
When tragedy strikes the southern pelagic islands a young man (or a boy on the way to becoming a man, only there's no one left alive to do.. something.. with a sharp knife and the need not to scream) called Mau starts to question the things he's always taken for granted. The gods he's believed in seem to have forsaken him and ripped all those dear to him away. Faced with the need to survive Mau does what he has to to survive. Gods are irrelevant and do not catch and cook fish. Nor do they bury the dead.
In a way it's a classic "my God why hast thou forsaken me" story. Mau has lost everything and so starts to question the old rituals and habits he'd been brought up with.
Joining Mau after a devastating tsunami are other survivors washed ashore. Mau must build a new nation but the people around him seem to crave the certainty of the old ways, their comfortable gods and customs.

So Mau struggles with his new-found atheism, wondering why people cling so desperately to the gods that have let everyone they cared about die. Why do people believe in gods? Do the gods actually exist? But if they do why don't they seem to care? If the gods do not seem to care is there any harm in acting like they in fact do not exist? Why not live your life based on logic and reason instead.

Of course, this is a Terry Pratchett story, so while the gods are indifferent they are still there, or at least their voices are heard in people's heads. There's Locaha, the god of death, who sometimes talks to Mau. This is not the kind Discworld Death though, the one who speaks in ALL CAPS and has compassion even if he must witness horrors. Locaha doesn't have that, this is a cold hearted death who revels in suffering, he's likable in his own way though, because, like Death, he's there to do a job and he doesn't particularly care which way it's done. And there's the Grandfathers, the souls of long-dead tribal warriors, that command and demand things from a befuddled boy who's never been taught the things a man needs to know to appease the gods. The Grandfathers who demand sacrifice and a return to order.

Joining Mau is a trouser-man girl, a white ghost girl, called Daphne. Well actually that's not her name but she likes it better than her real one. She too struggles with the way she's been brought up and the fact that none of her upbringing is really relevant when you're shipwrecked on a tropical island. She struggles with what she's been told and how the way the world actually works, the way science explains things and can lead to new insights.

Both Mau and Daphne live in the world as they see it. Though coming from very different backgrounds their struggle is essentially the same: what makes the world tick is not some uncaring or even non-existant god. The trauma you've suffered is not some punishment from the gods, it's just something you have to deal with. It's happenstance that determines the environment you're in and it's up to you to live your life as you see fit.

Of course the novel has lots of Pratchett witticisms, for example the part where Mau tries to explain why the Grandfathers get offered beer every day, which is then drunk by birds:

'Er, the way it works is that the birds drink the beer but the spirit of the beer flies to the Grandfathers. That's what the priests used to say.'
Daphne nodded. 'We have bread and wine at home,' she said, and thought, Oops, I won't try to explain that one. They have cannibals down here. It could get ... confusing.
'I don't think it's true though,' said Mau.
Daphne nodded, and then thought a bit more. 'Perhaps things can be true in special ways?' she suggested.
'No, people say that when they want to believe lies,' Mau said flatly. 'And they usually do.'

Of course there are people who've come to the island who want to convince Mau of the existence of the gods, like when they find some statues in the cave of the Grandfathers.
'Behold the gods, demon boy!' says an old priest.
'Yes, I see them, gods of stone' replies Mau.
'Why should they be of flesh? And what stone shines like that? I am right, demon boy, in my faith I am right! You can't deny it!'
'I can't deny what I see, but I can question what it is' says Mau.

And to me that makes him the one of the most likable heros in any of Pratchett's novels.
]]> Books http://www.haroldbakker.com/?action=comment&article=528#comments Sat, 27 Sep 2008 11:37:07 +0200 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=527 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=527 I wrote with horror about my inclusion in a web 2.0 workgroup.

I'm happy to report that in exactly 1 year and 1 week nothing at all has happened. Like most web 2.0 ventures this one was dead on arrival. No emails were sent, no meetings were set up, no teamsite was made to discuss stuff. Nothing. Zip. Nada.
Which is probably for the best, as there are serious problems with the thinking that web 2.0 is somehow of immense value.

There's a huge problem with the whole web 2.0 thing of user-generated content and that problem was brought to my attention last week when I joined Hyves, a social networking site with a primarily Dutch base. (It's like Orkut or Facebook but for the Dutch.) The problem is that the masses do not really have a clue on how to generate content. And web 2.0 websites generally make it too easy for people to just add anything and everything. They don't control, thinking the super-intelligence of the web will take care of things. This is a fallacy. And a pretty big one.

Take a look at the screenshot below. It's part of the interface where you can enter your favorite authors, a similar screenshot could be made of the bands you like, the composers, the whiskies, the food, your scientific heroes, etc. etc..

I'm trying to enter the fact that I like Michael Marshall Smith's books. There's some checkboxes of popular entries and a field you can use to enter other ones, a drop down lists hints based on letters typed so far.
Only which Michael Marshall Smith do I actually like?


For the record: they all mean the same author. Some are spelled wrong, one mysteriously list a book after a comma, one tries to hint at the fact that Michael Marshall is the same person as Michael Marshall Smith (writing in a different genre, much like Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks are the same author). Even with these oddities it's obvious there's something wrong, there are 2 entries with exactly the same spelling error, there's 4 entries that are spelled correctly. *

User-generated stuff like this is all well and good but there have to be controls. And it's up to the designer of a website to set up restrictions.
In the library business this problem was realized hundreds of years ago, which is where thesauri and subject classification comes in. Controlled lists from which a cataloguer must choose when entering new objects. Not everyone can enter new terms, write-access to these lists is very restricted and often has to go through a review process. While this may not work on something like a social networking site we can clearly see some method of deduplication wouldn't go amiss and would definitely help a lot in getting everyone on the same page.

Web 2.0 has a long way to go before basic stuff like this is sorted out, not just in this one isolated case but all over the board. When it is, maybe it will be taken more seriously.

*) By the way, the capitalisation of The Never Ending Story (a children's book by Michael Ende I enjoyed a lot when young) is wrong as well. The horror!]]> Webdesign http://www.haroldbakker.com/?action=comment&article=527#comments Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:36:06 +0200 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=526 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=526 I was going to do a review of Spore (I wrote about the Creatrure creator earlier). Unfortunately I'm rather busy actually playing the game.
Instead I'll point you to Tobold's review with which I have to agree completely, and make do with some short notes. The first stages of the game don't really offer that much, they're fun to play but ultimately they make up very little time in the game. Replayability there is almost zero. The space age though is truly awesome.

I'm currently busy gathering money to upgrade my ship's weapons, defenses and making alliances to get escort ships so I can journey to the center of the galaxy. Unfortunately the solid center of the galaxy is occupied by the Grox, a race that takes up everything except the outermost of the spiral arms of the galaxy. As they are extremely xenophobic they don't like you travelling in their area and will attack you at the drop of a hat. Making friends with them is not an option.

I have fun travelling around in my Mars Attacks lookalike flying saucer only with bigger guns and some weathervanes. Why weathervanes? Because they're available! Heck, my tanks had hippy flowers on them.


Almost every action you take in the space age has consequences, which is fun. Some alien races want you to abduct other aliens or remove items from other homeworlds. Which tends to piss off those living there, making it very hard for you to get in their good graces again. You can improve relations by trading and setting up traderoutes or doing missions. There's a vast variety of items to gather, some purely cosmetic such as abilities to shape seas and mountainranges, some useful such as rare upgrades. There's also a lot of incentive to simply explore as you can meet new races, find rare treasures or simply sell tradegoods for massively inflated prices.

There's a lot of brouhaha on the internets at the moment about the copy protection in this game. I don't think the copy protection applies to macs but even if it does I'm not particularly worried. From what I've read about the Windows version it allows for 3 installs before you have to contact EA games and lets be honest, as much fun as the game is it's not one you'll play for the next 4 years. Besides, lets be even more honest, you and I know a LOT of the people complaining have never paid for a game in their lives and they're just pissed off they can't easily rip a copy from a friend who does pay for his games.

A solid 4 out of 5 stars for the game, with the added note that replayability seems low, especially for the first stages.
]]> Games http://www.haroldbakker.com/?action=comment&article=526#comments Mon, 15 Sep 2008 22:08:17 +0200 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=525 http://www.haroldbakker.com/?article=525
I wrote about the earth destruction website a while ago and last week they announced that in fact the world has been destroyed by those wacky scientist guys at CERN.

Read the latest update: http://qntm.org/?board



And to think Mentos just released their Fresh Cola flavor which I really enjoyed as well. The humanity!]]> Funny http://www.haroldbakker.com/?action=comment&article=525#comments Sat, 13 Sep 2008 15:53:24 +0200