The Champagne Murders
Year: 2005
Rock Exchange
This weekend I hope to release Rock Exchange, my latest WikiGame on the RockMonkey wiki. I’m just finishing performing some tests and fine-tuning on it now. Here’s a screenshot:
In Rock Exchange, players will be able to invest their hard-earned Rocks (a unit of currency) in shares in the various pages on the RockMonkey wiki. The value of these shares will fluctuate based on several characteristics, and players will have to play the odds in order to know when to buy and when to sell to gain a return on their investment. A page’s shares fluctuate based on:
- Popularity: so if a new page seems likely to attract the attention of a lot of passing Googlers, it’s worth investing in, whereas an “in joke” that’s died out is not. Similarly, players can manipulate wiki page links in order to attract interest. The most valuable indicator of popularity is how many people come to the site for the first time, entering on a given page.
- Investment: investment in pages will put positive pressure on their value, but selling shares damages this value by flooding the market – who’ll be first to pull out of a high-flying page, thereby forcing other shareholders to suffer?
- Interference: there will be several methods for people to drastically interfere with the value of their shares and the shares of the other traders, but these won’t necessarily be immediately apparent.
- Random factors: the rock market, like the stock market, is an unpredictable animal, and there’ll be a small amount of luck in any investment.
The game’s pretty much “ready-to-play” in it’s most basic form right now, but I want to run it alone awhile longer and see if I can improve the balancing factors in it.
Client Of The Day
Oh, some of our clients are funny. A client of ours, who hosts her web site and e-mail with us, calls me up because she has difficulty getting access to her webmail:
Her: “My e-mail doesn’t work.”
Me: (not knowing much about her configuration) “Are you using a web browser to check your e-mail, over the web? Or are you using some other program, like Outlook or Outlook Express?”
Her: “What?”
Me: “Are you using Internet Explorer?”
Her: “Yeah. [my co-worker] sent me a link and I went to the page and it worked. So to make it easier in future I saved it to my desktop. But now when I click on it I get the
user name and password thing and then it doesn’t work.”
Me: “So… you’re clicking a shortcut on the desktop, and you see the user name and password boxes. You put in your user name and password… what do you get?”
Her: “Page Not Found.”
Me: “Could you tell me the address your web browser says it’s at?”
Her: “The what?”
Me: “The thing written in the white bar at the top of the screen.”
Her: “Okay, it’s C:\Documents and Settings\Meriel\Desktop\login.html.”
Me: “Umm. When you made this link on your desktop, how did you do that?”
Her: “I clicked File, then Save. Why?”
Me: “Right. What you’ve done is you’ve saved a copy of the login page onto your computer, isn’t it? But your webmail is online, so that’s not working.”
Her: “But I wanted to be able to read my webmail offline, because I’m only on dial-up and it’s a lot faster to open things from my desktop.”
Me: (bangs head on desk)
Frag!
Frag! arrived this afternoon, earlier than expected. If anybody wants to come around to The Flat in advance of Naruto Night this evening, we can have a quick blast at it… what do you think?
In other news, Predictive Solutions, with whom we share the offices on this, the first floor of the Aber Technium, are closing down. Now who’s buffets am I supposed to gatecrash?
Article #11012
[this post originally appeared on AvAngel.com; a copy is archived here]
It looks like the shit has hit the proverbial fan as far as Diogel is concerned. AvAngel.com, and all other sites formerly part of the Big McLargeHuge collective, is very, very dead.
This site is coming back online by installments. Watch this space.
Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. We apologise for the inconvenience caused.
Dan And Alex
Thanks To Y’all
Thanks to those of you who put up with me being mopey last night and eventually fixed it by getting me drunk. That was fab, thanks.
Hangover’s starting to kick in, now.
Lord Fear’s Copy Of ZoneAlarm
Dan And Alex
The Abnib Real Ale Ramble 2005
Wow; there seems to be a lot of interest in the idea I just blogged. That’s brilliant!
Now there’s just the small matter of arranging how everybody who wants to go is going to get there, and where they’re going to stay once they have. To this end, I’ve set up a web page: The Abnib Real Ale Ramble 2005. Take a look there for the most up-to-date information about who’s going, where they’re staying, who needs lifts, who can give lifts, what’s going on, etc. etc.
Like Real Ale? Like walking around the Welsh hills in winter? Get involved! Yay!
Knightmare Night tonight! Double-yay!
Llanwrtyd Wells Real Ale Ramble
What’s everybody doing on the third weekend in November? If I could find reasonabley-priced accomodation (everybody likes camping, right <wink>), who’d be up for the Llanwrtyd Wells Real Ale Ramble – two days of trekking over hills and being fed real ale at various points along the way?
From the web site:
The Real Ale Ramble is held annually in conjunction with the Mid Wales Beer Festival. All the walks begin from the centre of Llanwrtyd Wells, the smallest town in Britain. This is an area where the pace of life is relaxed and traditional, where the inhabitants are friendly and welcome visitors who come to enjoy the unsurpassed scenery of this little known part of Mid Wales.
The Real Ale Rambles are non competitive, the entry fee for 2004 [think they mean 2005 – they say 2005 everywhere else, and the information seems to still be accurate] is £16 per person which covers 2 days (booking by the day will cost £15 per day) and there are choices of 10, 15 or 25 miles daily. All routes are waymarked, and a refreshing glass of Real Ale will be free to all registered participants at the various checkpoints en-route. All walks take place off road, so you can enjoy the beauty of the landscape, forest, moor and mountain in this spectacularly beautiful area of Mid Wales. Those who finish their chosen walk can purchase a medal or badge and track suit badges will also be on sale.
I’ll get an information pack on it’s way to The Flat. And before you ask, Llanwrtyd Wells is less than 2 hours drive away.
A Cynical Timeline Of The Internet
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Google Talk
In case you hadn’t seen, Google Talk has been released, a free multiplatform instant messaging system (akin to MSN Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM. There’d been rumours that it’d be coming for months and months: not least thanks to Google paying for several of their summer job students to help code Gaim, a free, open source, multiplatform, multiprotocol instant messanger client.
Google Talk is different from the other major networks out there in several ways:
- It’s based on Jabber, an open standard for decentralised instant messaging. This means that anybody can – and is invited to – write a program that can connect to it. With MSN Messenger, for example, if you want to use it on Linux, you have to use a program which “hacks in” to the MSN protocol – Microsoft don’t endorse this: but with Google Talk, anybody is allowed and indeed encouraged to connect using any tool they like.
- It also means that it’s decentralised: unlike most major networks, which only let you talk to people on the same network, it’s Jabber back-end means that you can use Google Talk to talk to Jabber users on any other server. This provides redundancy, reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, and maintains the open-ness of the standard. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to have been realised, yet, and Google Talk users can, so far, only talk to other Google Talk users.
- Jabber can also be extended to communicate with other IM networks. I don’t know if Google intend to provide this functionality, but other Jabber servers already do, letting you talk to MSN, ICQ, AIM, IRC, and Yahoo! users, to name but a few, using just one account (your Jabber account).
- Oh yeah, and Jabber, like all the best IM networks, lets you leave offline messages for people to pick up when they come online, which is a godsend if you’re trying to carry on a conversation with somebody who’s just gone offline and is likely to come back online soon, so an e-mail seems overkill.
- Not to mention the fact that the Google Talk client is pretty slick. No ads, voice-chat as standard, and a low memory footprint.
You can download Google Talk and give it a go yourself: your user name is your GMail account (need one – get an invite from ByteTest.com, or leave me a comment and I’ll invite you). Or you can use any other Jabber client (such as the fantastic Gaim, to connect – your user name is your GMail account, server is “gmail.com”, and “connect server” is “talk.google.com”.
Hopefully Google will open up Google Talk to be able to talk to other Jabber users, and eventually, other networks, soon. In the meantime, have a play with this most fantastic new messaging service. See you on there.
Reply #13108
Going to be registering a website thingy tonight to mess around with. Any hints/tips/advice from all you people who know about this stuff would be gratefully received. I am, after all, officially computer illiterate.
Register your domain name with somebody respectable (won’t rip you off or otherwise fuck up) like Easily, who’ll give you a domain name (whateveryoulike.co.uk) for as little as £9.99/2 years.
As far as hosting is concerned, I can’t say a bad word about the fantastic DreamHost, who now provide hosting for me, Paul, Claire, Matt (from SmartData), JTA & Ruth, Statto… etc. etc.
I’m not sure if it still works, but if you sign up for their Crazy Domain Insane offer ($9.95/month), paying for the first year up-front, and use the promo code “777”, they’ll give you the first YEAR for the price of the first month. Which is nice. And as it includes a free .com domain name of your choice, that’s pretty fab, too (saves you heaps of cash, no commitment to stay with them more than a year anyway, etc.). They’re pretty damn good.
Drop me an e-mail if you want any specific help/advice on such geekibits. Will see what I can do.
Google Guide Quick Reference: Google Advanced Operators (Cheat Sheet)
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