Considering merging feeds

Would it bother anybody if I merged together my feed from this blog and from my EVE tumblelog? Just a thought, since I tend to throw smaller bits over there, particularly if I have little or no additional commentary. The actual content would stay all EVE-related, though! (I’d make the feed URLs redirect appropriately, so my readers shouldn’t have to do anything yourselves.)

I’d appreciate any feedback (positive, negative, neutral, orthogonal) you might have.

Current Wordpress plugins v3

I’ve not done one of these in some time. And since the tools I use on the site have a lot to do with why I enjoy writing it (and, hopefully, why you enjoy reading it), fairness demands that we share.

Anti-Feed Scraper Message: Some sites re-use our content without permission. I’ve had it happen to me with this site. While this plugin does nothing for manual copying of what I’ve written, it does tend to have an effect on the automated scrapers.

Disqus comment system: I really don’t know why I didn’t use this before. While anyone can still comment without registering (a key feature for me), it allows the community to retain individual ownership of their words and connect it to their own profiles. Even better, you won’t end up with yet another set of credentials to remember.

FancyFlickr: If you’ve seen my Screenshots page, you’ve seen what I do with it. I really like the ability to connect specific photosets to this blog, and it looks nice. I should tweak it a little more so it doesn’t kill your CPU when rendering the page, though.

Inline Google Docs: Great for bringing in tabular data I already put in a spreadsheet. I have mixed feelings about it, because I have a metric buttload of Google Docs and it lists them all in my post editing page, which can get really annoying. I may replace this, tweak the plugin myself, or just look closer at configuration options.

Shockingly Big IE6 Warning: Because you shouldn’t use IE6. I mean that. Seriously, don’t.

SSG Wordpress Google Audio Player: So I can share my dulcet tones with you…

WP Greet Box: I like giving new visitors a little something extra, to encourage them to subscribe or otherwise stick around. But mostly just to treat them nicely.

WP Render Blogroll Links: Once I realized my blogroll had reached unwieldy proportions, I needed to move it out of the sidebar. This plugin let me do that.

Any other suggestions? Any of these causing undue pain or frustration for you?

Industrial exploitation

…or so a pilot named “Lightening Bug” [sic] seems to believe. I popped into Offikatlin on business in my Mastodon. LB sat in a heavy interdictor on the gate. Note, a HIC with a scripted warp disruption field can obviously trap a deep space transport despite the built-in warp core stabilization. So like any well-prepared and well-trained lowsec hauler, I aligned to my destination, engaged my MWD and cloak, and when the MWD cycle ended, decloaked and warped off. LB did not appreciate having her prey escape so easily.


[ 2010.02.27 19:49:14 ] Lightening Bug > nice exploit
[ 2010.02.27 19:49:16 ] Lightening Bug > reported


Perhaps the pilot in question should follow the advice she has in her own bio.

“Like everyone else, you want to learn the way to win, but never to accept the way to lose. To accept defeat–to learn to die–is to be liberated from it. Once you accept, you are free to flow and harmonize. Fluidity is the way to an empty mind. So when tomorrow comes, you must free your ambitious mind and learn the art of dying.” — Bruce Lee

Not all victories result in a ship explosion: she didn’t get a killmail and I completed my business in the area. Though I suppose the pirate losing to the industrial makes it an exploit, right?

Emo critics

Roc Wieler posted a fairly thoughtful response to CrazyKinux’s desire to revamp his Blog Pack. Some of that response had to do with the feed in Capsuleer, the iPhone application Roc helps develop, possibly including less reading material. As far as that specific concern goes, I think that the Capsuleer devs need to consider their own data sources. Whether they want to continue depending on one data source really goes to the heart of what that part of their app does, and as I don’t use it, I don’t have much of an opinion there. The team there can undoubtedly decide for themselves how they’d like to proceed.

But then CrazyKinux responded that he would personally choose the blogs and increase the count to 50. At least one other blogger put together a great response, with which I agree for the most part.

Oddly, some folks got even more upset. I can’t speak for them, but to represent their views fairly, I think I can say that they feel that the blog pack should be determined by a larger group of people based on varying criteria. They feel a sense of community ownership in the listing, and CrazyKinux should feel pride that his efforts have created that sense of ownership.

I’m not CrazyKinux so I don’t have to feel that. Instead, I’ll speak bluntly.

Have you lost your ever-lovin’ mind?!

I’m not kidding. CK does a lot of work trying to filter through the huge number of EVE blogs out there to assemble his blog pack. Personally, I don’t know that I agree with every assessment he makes, but he does a good job overall. Some folks make the leap from there to assume that everyone thinks that these blogs represent the “best” in some universal way, as if that could even happen.

Some time ago, we had the EVE Fiction Blog Pack. I’ve seen lists of pirate blogs, too. If you think we should have additional sub-communities, great. Go create it. Self-organizing, ad hoc communities can really survive and even thrive, so show us what you can do. Or don’t create one: personally, I’ve opted to list every active EVE blog I can find in my own blogroll without highlighting the “best”. I’ve considered doing themed listings, too: exploration, industrial, fiction, etc., because of my own interests. Personally, I’d like to see CK put together a list of the blogs he thinks represent the best of what the EVE community has to offer, but I’d also like to see you (and you and you and you, too) put together a similar list. Not by voting someplace, as if that can be quantified, but so I can say, ‘hmm, I like blogger X’s stuff, I should read the blogs he likes because I’ll probably like them too.’

This doll is emo. Don't be like this doll.

But you know what really gets me madder than a sack of hornets? When a sense of ownership turns into a sense of entitlement. “The list is popular and therefore we should get to decide what’s in it, because otherwise I will be sad and left out and the community will die.” As much as I appreciate CK’s hard work, the EVE community won’t die based on what one single person does or doesn’t do. We’ve grown past that. I’ll keep writing what I write (and so will many of you) because of the people that read it, not because I want some badge of approval from one single person.

Just please stop going all emo on us. Nobody likes emo. And if you think I mean you, then I probably do. So pull up your big-boy underwear and help with whatever crowd-sourced ad hoc folksonomy flash mob <insert more buzzwords here> you want with your own project. Or tell CrazyKinux what you’d like to see in his list. Or just enjoy what other folks do, because after all, that’s why they do it.

Post 0×0100

So this is my 100th post… if you’re counting in hexadecimal. (256 for the rest of you apes still working in base 10.)

I have 853 approved comments, 210 current subscribers, and 277 average daily visits from 187 average daily visitors over the last month. And I can’t easily describe the happiness when I saw how many of my readers, including many who I respect and admire as bloggers in their own right, spoke up in public support of my blog over at CrazyKinux’s blog pack evolution post. It just tickled me to no end and filled me with all sorts of warm, fuzzy emo goo.

One side note: the blog is Ecliptic Rift, not Epileptic Rift. I never even use blink tags!

Anyway, thanks to everyone, and I have every intention of keeping this thing going and growing!

Miniprofession analysis

Right now, miniprofessions in EVE get boring quickly. Sure, I love scanning down sites and taking lots of screenshots, but when it comes time to use my codebreaker or analyzer modules, basically it comes down to sitting and waiting.

Pilots can’t actively do anything to reduce that waiting time, as we have a classic geometric distribution here. With Hacking IV, a Codebreaker I module, and no rigs, you have a 25% unlock chance and thus will take an average of four tries. If you have Hacking V, a Codebreaker II module, and an infrequently-used Memetic Algorithm Bank, you have a 52% unlock chance, which takes an average of two tries (or median of one, if you want to get really precise). The same calculations apply to Archaeology and its modules and rigs.

If the only way to improve things comes down to skill training and equipment, then what the pilot does when actively out in the sites doesn’t feel as fun. Maybe CCP could do something about that, though.

Personally, I’d like to see some sort of mini-games implemented. Skills and equipment should still matter, but perhaps a small mathematical puzzle or cryptogram could speed up the process. Alternately, success could improve the quality of the loot or discoveries. Due to EVE’s international nature, some of these might prove difficult for localization into other languages, but no doubt those dedicated and professional game designers sitting on top of the world can come up with something appropriate.

How would you improve the exploration miniprofessions?

Dominion has succeeded

I got a lot of really interesting feedback and conversation when I suggested on Twitter that Dominion has experienced wild success. We’ve seen major shake-ups, lots of fights, and an evolving sovereignty map. Okay, I’ll admit it hasn’t seen unalloyed success, but the problems we’ve seen are natural in system performance tuning.

Essentially, when you want to improve the performance of a system, you find the major bottleneck and remove it. This only means that the system performance improves up to the next bottleneck. (Note here that the actual method of bottlenecks will vary, so that a given problem could actually crash the system rather than slow it down.) You keep iterating through this process until the effort needed for the next iteration is larger than what you’ll gain from the performance increase. That is, when you reach the point of diminishing returns in cost and benefit, you stop.

Prior to Dominion, the bottlenecks largely came from design. POS spam, area-of-effect doomsday weapons, relative ease of maintaining Sov 4 (and thus cynojammers) everywhere, all that jazz. Once that went away, we started seeing even more massive fleet fights and all the shakeups. Plus, some alliances either couldn’t afford the sov bills or couldn’t manage their wallets appropriately. As far as I’m concerned, that amounts to the inability to properly direct your alliance.

After that, though, we found out that node capacity is the next bottleneck. While CCP does deserve some criticism for their initial handling of the problem (right after I commended them for riding the Cluetrain, sigh), they’ve finally made substantial improvements so that these fights can actually occur. They still need to do more, of course, but even once they’ve done that, we’ll just run into the next bottleneck. Unfortunately — actually, not — such is our voracious love for this world that fights and struggles will just expand to fill available capacity up to the next bottleneck.

But we’ll have lots of fun in the meantime.

Examining terms of service for hosting providers

You should always read your agreements before you sign up for them. Let’s talk about terms of service for hosting companies. Keep in mind that I write from the perspective of someone who’s a licensed private investigator and has years of hands-on “street experience” in network forensics, Internet investigations, acceptable use policy development and execution, and US federal, state, and local law enforcement liaison. I am not, however, a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. This is my thought process as I consider a ToS document. Factor that in however you like.

I wouldn’t ever sign a contract or any other document riddled with spelling, grammatical, and copyediting errors because that tells me they haven’t taken due care. That is, if they haven’t taken the time to make sure it’s readable, why should I take the time to read it? Attention to detail matters.

Further, if a contract specifies particular availability guarantees, then goes on to say that they make “no warranties of any kind” including for “any and all service interruptions,” then I have serious concerns about their business. Seriously, if you run a real business, get a lawyer to review this sort of thing.

And pardon me for sticking with my Fourth Amendment rights, but I don’t want to work with a provider that “may disclose any subscriber information to law enforcement agencies without further consent or notification to the subscriber upon lawful request from such agencies. We will cooperate fully with law enforcement agencies.” Given that this is my profession for many years, I can say with substantial authority that this sort of unswerving cooperation leads to bad things and abuses. “Lawful request” means many different things to many different people and it may not mean what you think it does.

Also, if somebody offers “unlimited” something, they should not go off and redefine “unlimited” to mean “limits we think are pretty high”. That’s dishonest at best and will almost certainly lead to problems later. (Ask those wireless companies and ISPs that have had lots of PR black eyes). If they offer tremendous amounts of resources above and beyond what their competitors offer, that’s great, but I don’t want to see anybody make the leap from puffery to outright deception. Because, yes, if you offer unlimited transfer amounts and I max out what you offer, that’s not a denial of service. That’s the logical extrapolation from what you said I could do.

Finally, ‘reserving the right to revise its policies at any time without notice’ sounds like what Darth Vader told Lando Calrissian: “I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.”

Now, all that said, what do I want in my hosting relationship?

I want a host that does not discriminate against my lawful content, including content related to my profession. I want a host that takes reasonable steps to secure and monitor their infrastructure but without treating me like I’m the enemy. I want a host that affirmatively stands up for me and doesn’t actually hold their customers directly responsible for their legal costs. I want a host that will treat me with respect when they want to make changes in our deal. I want a host that pays attention to what they’re doing and gives me every confidence that they will provide a well-designed, well-administered, professional service.

I’d like to see the hosts that specifically market to me and my fellow EVE players move in this direction. Because right now, a controversy has sprung up with Lonetrek Web Hosting (managed by an alliance mate of mine). I don’t want to bash anyone, particularly people whom I firmly believe want to do the right thing and just have some growing pains, as is the case here. I just want other players (and Anthony) to have the information available to make good, well-informed decisions, whatever those final decisions may be.

UPDATE: Anthony did a total re-write and, in my view, the new version of his terms represents a major improvement over the old ones. As I said, I knew he just wanted to do the right thing, and thus I didn’t want to present my opinion as an attack or bludgeoning. Props!

Tumbleblog launched

I set up a tumbleblog for stuff that doesn’t quite make it here. It’ll have quick links and other EVE bits, with plenty of updates but not a lot of drawn-out commentary. Please give me a follow there, and of course I’d love to reciprocate to other Tumblr blogs.

Referrer traffic distribution

Highlighting other folks

I looked over my referrer[1] stats this morning and noticed something interesting. As you might expect, the sources for my traffic don’t have a uniform distribution. Some sites send more traffic than others. But, even more interesting, they have a fairly classic power law distribution. For example, I threw together this chart of my January 2010 referrer stats[2]:

Or see the actual table:

So, lots of love to CrazyKinux, Mynxee, Kirith Kodachi (one of my ‘blog idols’), and Star Defender!

[1]: Yes, I know the official spelling is “referer”. But the official spelling is wrong, so let’s not go there, okay?
[2]: Stats for different referrer URLs from the same site have been combined. For example, if I got traffic from a blog’s home page and several separate posts, I combined them for this analysis.