The Code Cave

Live from SxSW:Geolocation in games and Online

Ξ March 8th, 2008 | → 1 Comments | ∇ An Uncategorized Post |

I am at SxSW for a week and the introduction of this session was so incredible I thought I would live blog it and share my notes:

SxSW using geolocation in games and online (03/08/2008)
11:48 So here I am at SwSW at the second session I’ve hit for the day. and So far this is a blast
11:49 This session doesn’t apply to my job directly but it is incredibly high on the geek coolness factor
11:50 I started describing old school geocaching from 2000 talking about how you used GPS to go and find “treasures” out in the woods
11:52 But there is now all sorts of cool stuff going on. Like zork based games where you get to a location and your phone/device/whatever gets messages saying “In front of you is an old man searching though a basket” when you get to the right location
11:54 They have also been covering things like vertical games where in a big city you have ppl up in a tall building guiding your team mate through a maze down on the city street.
11:56 Now there are also competions going on with things like Nike Plus which has run tracking, mileage and geolocation built into the shoe and ppl are competing with others for how far they go etc
11:57 So why can’t you do things with points as you are going. A little transmitter at different locations indicates that you get a power up or get extra points for the run.
11:57 This technology is really fascinating.
11:58 The idea of bringing movement into games has taken off with the wii and Dance Dance revolution

11:58 This brings things into a new level as it turns the real world into a game
11:59 New term I am “Geo Curious”

12:00 They are talking about how the iphone doesn’t have true gps right now
12:01 I am really glad that I flashed the leaked GPS enabled ROM to my Verizon Titan right now. I just wish I could pick up more satelites. I’m waiting for them to ask who has GPS on their phone
12:02 The fuzzyness of GPSa is causing difficulty in creating Zork based games
12:03 GPSa is where your phone determines location based upon the cell towers that you are talking too.
12:03 So right now rooms when you are making a phone playable game has to be 100mx100m

12:04 However with TRUE GPS you can have a game that is within 2ft
12:05 “Conquest” was a game that divided a city into 8 zones and as soon asa team was within a zone and then the could shoot the “semicodes”? (Zombies?)

12:05 However they players who knew more could cheat if they knew where the edges would be.
12:07 These games can be done by ppl txting a certain codes that are available only at certain places. I think they said “crossroads” did that.
12:07 The maze game I talked about before that was done from building looking down at a maze was actually called “pac-man(hattan)”

12:08 ppl were dressed in pacman suits and they were guided by their partners with their cell phones.
12:09 Lower tech games just had you call and say things like “I am the king of spain” but the one panelist dialed the wrong number and really freaked someone out.
12:10 So the terms are “Relative Location” “Definate Location” and “Fuzzy Location”
12:13 “Crossroads” used GPS and you were looking at the map on your phone. and using that on a virtual map to guide you around an artificial environment as you are working around the real world.
12:14 I totally love the idea of this walking over the goal that you have and suddenly your phone buzzes in your pocket and gives you your next goal
12:15 However as with many things the technology is not QUITE there yet.
12:15 We are sooooooo close to very exciting things.
12:16 ppl with the Titan/Mogal/XV6800 can get to within 2 ft and that is wondererful

12:16 But atm I am off the ivory coast since I can’t get any sats.
12:17 There are also other issues beyond technology
12:17 There is a social aspect that has to be considered.
12:18 In even just geocaching, while burying an ammo box in the woods is OK, using it as a geocache in timesquare is not smart. Neither is a metal pipe.

12:19 This also CAN be dangerous. in a game in a city ppl walking out into traffic with their heads down is a REAL possiblity.

12:19 Playing games in the street can be a real danger.
12:20 Some one from the Discovery channel is in the audience asking a question (OK someone lolkatz that)

12:20 She is discussing Shark tracking and other similar technology to improve this type of game “Shark Hunters” was the show they did on this…
12:22 BTW for those that don’t know http://GeoCaching.com is a great site.
12:25 Another question is about using this in the news media. Obviously tagging photos is one idea but if all published media had was tagged with a location the possiblty is incredible
12:26 Google and other search tools would bring news really directly to you things that really directly affect your world.
12:26 In the blogging world there is of course http://GeoRSS.org
12:27 There is also a website that I can’t think of right now that is designed to show the whole world in photo format with geo location as well. The never metioned it today but I’ve been to the site. It is @jeremywright’s twitter feed.
12:29 There is a question about whether a city planner or ski results person came to one of the panelist how would they respond. Could you work together to create an official map.
12:30 RFID is actually an tech that would work better for this sort of thing. It could be used to create a more persistant game board in a city. The idea is brilliant. Seatle shoudl do that to bring ppl in.
12:31 This would be a similar idea to the “Skateboarding in the city” movement

12:31
Links
12:31 WhereIgo.com platform for creating your own games
12:32 Areacodeinc.com
12:32 loki.com (spelling?)
12:33 And that wraps up this session. That was really neat.
12:41 This Live Blog has now ended.

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On Image Use and Death of the Mouse Plus 70

Ξ March 1st, 2008 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Copyright Law, Things that catch my eye, b5media |

I was involved in an email discussion this morning and once again I realized that I’ve transferred my creative energies from writing new and interesting blog articles over to email discussions and forum posts.  So I’m sharing this with you and will hit post instead of send.  (Oh and btw make sure to save as a draft in Windows Live Writer before pasting from an HTML email.  Some formatting causes WLW to go into an infinite loop.  As a result you have to rewrite your brilliant and concisely worded opening paragraphs again.  And they are just never as good the second or third time through and your daughter will get upset because you told her you would do her swimming lesson at 11am and that is already well passed.)

At b5media, Inc. we no longer allow the use of copyrighted images unless the blogger has obtained permission from the copyright owner or a representative thereof.  The use of copyright images is not something that most Bloggers bother to think about.  If you see a neat wilderness photo you want to share, you post it.  If you see a picture of an actor doing something… unusual, you might just toss it up on your blog.  If you write an article about Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, of course you’ll want a head shot above their name.  If an image is used on another website, it is considered polite to copy the image locally to your account so that you are not stealing bandwidth.  Most people certainly want to respect the rights of a photographer and want photographers to be paid, but those thoughts usually don’t enter our mindset.

Well for a blogging network of well over 300 blogs, image concerns are amplified.  Respecting creative rights and intellectual property is extremely important to us.  Heck, we make our living from IP too.  OK and yes, admittedly the $20K fine for each image in violation of the law could add up to a sum that would leave anyone weak at the knees.  So, liability is of course a concern.  If b5 takes a hit, that could affect the livelihood of hundreds of Bloggers.   So this is matter we take very seriously.  We have to. 

There’s been some discussion by our Bloggers and Channel Editors this morning on the subject of image use and here is my contribution:

COMMON SENSE DISCAIMER: Everything in this email/post is only the personal opinion of a geek and is not said in my capacity as a b5media employee. It may or may not be the opinion of the powers that be in b5media, inc. Therefore, nothing in this email has any relation to b5media, Inc. policies. Anything that you believe says or implies otherwise should be ignored. 

“creator’s date of death plus 70 years”

BTW you can thank Disney for that stupid law. It irks me because it means that rare recordings of things like the Danny Kaye performances I like cannot legally be shared and so they become rarer and rarer parts of collections and eventually parts of our culture are lost. Why should a 65 year old scratchy recording of someone reading a story about an inchworm be unsharable? It’s all so that we don’t send around copies of a horrible black and white cartoon of a poorly drawn mouse driving a steam boat and so that stores on the beachfront in Miami can’t airbrush said mouse onto a shirt (or wait does that happen already?). The law in Austrailia is a generous 50 years and the US is trying to push the Ozz to move to 70 years as well.  We have made other countries do this already. And 70 is just a “Magic Number” anyway and one should always avoid “Magic Numbers”.  (A principle I was taught early on in my coding carreer.) 

Yes this is a hot-button issue for me J

Links:

An interesting article on the 2002 case that extended this law.

WikiPedia’s discussion on the various “free license” differences out there. It will be helpful for those put their own pictures on the various hosting services out there. 

The relevant part is here:

For image creators:

If you are the creator of an image, you can choose any acceptable free license. You can multi-license your image under different licenses, if you prefer. The license must not prevent commercial reuse or derivative works.

GNU Free Documentation License - GFDL-self - Written by the Free Software Foundation. People are required to attribute the work to you, and if they make changes or incorporate your work in their work, they are required to share their changes or work under the same license.

Creative Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike - cc-by-sa-3.0|Attribution details - This is one of several CC licenses. This version permits free use, including commercial use; requires that you be attributed as the creator; and requires that any derivative creator or redistributor of your work use the same license. The desired attribution text should be included as a parameter in the template.

Creative Commons: Attribution - cc-by-3.0|Attribution details - Similar to the above, but does not require that derivative works use the same license.

Free Art license - FAL - A copyleft license for artwork; modification and commercial use are allowed, provided derivative works carry the same license.

Attribution - Attribution - The copyright holder allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed.

Copyrighted Free Use - CopyrightedFreeUse-Link|[http://www.yourwebsite.com/ Your website] - Same as above, but attribution is not required. However, as a courtesy, you would appreciate a link back to Your website.

Public domain - PD-self - The creator permanently relinquishes all rights to the work.

NOTE (TO B5 READERS): b5media does not fall into the same business category as Wikipedia. Should you see “fair use” stuff on various Wikipedia pages, just be aware that various points may directly contradict our policy. I personally wouldn’t try to argue using Wikipedia’s “fair use” policy after violating b5media’s image use policies.  That’s why I didn’t like to their policy. ‘nuff said.

Also the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) http://www.eff.org/ always has interesting reads (like this http://w2.eff.org/bloggers/ ) and advocate changing the laws rather than breaking them. I don’t always agree with what I read there, but it is always interesting.

You learn something new every day: 404.html file size issues?

Ξ February 21st, 2008 | → 2 Comments | ∇ HTML, Microsoft |

I found this in a friend’s 404.html file:

< !--
- Unfortunately, Microsoft has added a clever new
- “feature” to Internet Explorer. If the text of
- an error’s message is “too small”, specifically
- less than 512 bytes, Internet Explorer returns
- its own error message. You can turn that off,
- but it’s pretty tricky to find switch called
- “smart error messages”. That means, of course,
- that short error messages are censored by default.
- IIS always returns error messages that are long
- enough to make Internet Explorer happy. The
- workaround is pretty simple: pad the error
- message with a big comment like this to push it
- over the five hundred and twelve bytes minimum.
- Of course, that’s exactly what you’re reading
- right now.
–>

Does anyone know if that is still the case? I haven’t come across this before, but it is sure worth knowing about even if it is ie6 specific…

Tip Tuesday: Manipulating Graphics files for your blog

Ξ January 22nd, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Tip Tuesday, Tips, Techniques and Technologies, WINDOWS, WordPress |

When working with graphics files on your blog, it is always smart to optimize their size for their targetted use. A simple corner picture does not need an original size of 8.1 mega pixels. On a windows machine, MS Paint can handle that sort of transformations, with a little pain and bloodshed. I’ve also written and posted here a console app to do the dynamic resizing. Gimp is awesome, but it is over kill.

I strongly encourage Windows users to check out Infranview. You might look at the site and say “Oh it is just a viewer”, but it is soooooo much more than that. Though it is the one of the best picture viewers out there, it also handles basic graphic manipulation better than most other software out there, even the pro stuff.

File resizing is very simple. However following their “It is trying to be simple for beginners and powerful for professionals.” goal, it allows you to, in the advanced menu, choose from various resampling methods in case the image just looks wrong when you resize it. Most programs use the 1 method the programmer preferred and you are stuck with it.

You can get it here:
http://www.irfanview.com/

and once you load the plugins from here:
http://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm

(I prefer this mirror for downloads.)

You’ve got a powerful graphics manipulation tool that can even accept any photo shop 8bf plugins that you have lying around.

(BTW xnview is a infranview knock off, but it does have pocketPC and Smartphone support and works nicely as a viewer on those platforms)

A Random Utter from the Laser Tag Arena

Ξ January 13th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Brian Layman, Things that catch my eye |

Mobile post sent by BrianLayman using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

52 in 52: Book 2 Island of the Blue Dolphins

Ξ January 11th, 2008 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Brian Layman, Things that catch my eye |

A new way to support your in-laws

Ξ January 11th, 2008 | → 2 Comments | ∇ An Uncategorized Post |

It’s happened to you.  You know it has.  You were just starting to relax when the phone rings.  It’s you father/mother/in-laws/girl who you knew in highschool that kept asking for your new number each time you moved.  And they, sounding kind of guilty, say “I’m having a problem and I was wondering if you could help me…”  And so begins a 3 hour long discussion involving phrases  like”OK tell me each letter you typed” and  “No I meant hit the space bar, not type s-p-a-c-e” and ending with philosophical discussions of which button really is the “right” mouse button anyway. 

While up in New York at my in-laws, I even got a support call from their neighbor down the street.  Because they knew I was out visiting and had heard so many good things about me and couldn’t I help them with one quick thing?

No don’t get me wrong, I am glad to help and am eager to do it.  But that doesn’t mean it is without pain!  I have even gone to extent of installing Ultra VNC on my both of the computers at my in-laws house.  I’ve modified their router to route a custom port to each and created a custom page so they could tell me their current up address.  (http://myip.thecodecave.com btw.  Feel free to use it and even scrape it for use in custom apps for determining the external port if  you like.  It will always only return the ip.  No ads or other junk.)

That works swell, but had to wait till I was there to put everything in place.  Now there is another solution

Citrix has started a public beta of a program called GoToAssist.  This application goes pretty far beyond what all other custom solutions can do. Benefits include

1. All is started from a single url that can be emailed to a person.
2. No software pre-install is required (There is an app that sends the invites to the computers to be controlled - available only for Windows).  The person needing help only clicks on the url, accepts the certificate and a small client is automatically installed.  1 startup registry entry is added.
3. You can view/control not just PCs but MACS! from your Windows computer.
4. No firewalls were harmed during the production of this program.  You don’t need to open any ports.
5. Advanced features like send/pull files and request diagnostic report are available across all platforms.  (I don’t even know how to determine which programs start automatically on a Mac, but the report can tell me which they are)
6. Permanent/unattended sessions are supported.  There does not need to be any interaction to resume sessions if that’s how you want it to be.

So, the public beta is open at http://express.gotoassist.com and you should go check it out!  They are wide open to accepting new testers at this point and chances are that strong beta testers will get a good discount on the software.  And really good beta testers might get a really good surprise.  Citrix even has a good paid tester program that is worth your investigation.

Hat tip to Chris Pirillo for pointing out the beta program.

Here’s something neat… a screen shot of me supporting my own machine as it shows me supporting my own machine which shows me… well you get the idea…

I decided to report that one, but it actually handled it fairly well.

52 in 52 Book 1: Lyon’s Pride

Ξ January 8th, 2008 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Brian Layman, Things that catch my eye |

Ready for 2008

Ξ January 7th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Brian Layman, Things that catch my eye |

52 books in 52 Weeks

Ξ January 2nd, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Announcements |

I’ve recommended Rob Miller’s plugins before. I’ve had his Now Reading plug in installed on this blog for a while but some how, in a way neither of us understood, the authors and the titles got mixed beyond my desire to fix.

While browsing his blog, I came across a 52 books in 52 weeks challenge reference. And like others, I took up the challenge.

I didn’t record many of the books I read, but I know that I did easily pass the count of 52. Here in fact are 56 books that I read since Jan 1 of last year:

Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Childeren of the Mind
Enders Shadow
Shadow of the Hegemon
Shadow Puppets
Magic Street
A war of Gifts

Fred Saberhagen
Berserkers
The Empire of the East

Sara Paretsky
Bitter Medicine
Blacklist
Fire Sale

David Eddings
Pawn of Prophecy
Queen of Sorcery
Magician’s Gambit
Castle of Wizardry
Enchanters’ End Game

Guardians of the West
King of the Murgos
Demon Lord of Karanda
Sorceress of Darshiva
The Seeress of Kell

Catherine Asaro
Primary Inversion
Catch the Lightning
The Last Hawk
The Radiant Seas
Ascendant Sun
The Quantum Rose

Anne McCaffery
Changelings: Twins of Petaybee
Maelstrom: Twins of Petaybee

Freedom’s Challenge
Freedom’s Choice
Freedom’s Landing
The Tower and the Hive
The Rowan
Damia
Damia’s Children

Cornelia Funke
Inkheart

Kevin J. Anderson
Eragon
Eldest

Terry Goodkind
Phantom

Ben Bova
Mars

Kate Jacobs
The Friday Night Knitting Club

Philip K. Dick
Minority Report and Other Stories

Johann Wyss
The Swiss Family Robinson

J. M. Barrie
Peter Pan in Scarlet

Josepha Sherman
Vulcan’s Soul

Robert A. Heinlein
The Rolling Stones
The Star Beast
Double Star
Starship Troopers
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Variable Star
Voyagers

BTW I have since found out that the original challenge was to write and review 52. We’ll see if I can do that next year. I met the challenge I had set for myself for this year.

Cheers all!