My favorite April Fool’s web page so far this year

Fun and quick, if you know anything about MMO or even other computer RPGs.

My favorite part is the “Epic Quest Arc“, or maybe:

Note: Chickens are a recurring comedic theme in Magic:The Gathering, and this also isn’t the first time they’ve surfaced in LOTRO.

Posted in Fun stuff, Games and virtual worlds, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Software Auf Probe

We all know insulting wordplay such as “Windoze,” deserved or otherwise. (Personally, I prefer the more subtle “Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away.”) I just learned one in German, however, that I’m guessing is less familiar to English-speaking readers. “Software auf Probe” translates, roughly, as “Software in test.” Any resemblances to long SAP adoption cycles are purely intentional.

Posted in Enterprise applications, Fun stuff, SAP | No Comments »

Guild Wars game notes

I had the opportunity to interview Mike O’Brien and Pat Wyatt, founders and lead developers for ArenaNet, makers of Guild Wars. This led to two lengthy posts on the technology of Guild Wars (overview) and the database technology of Guild Wars. Those were really, as the titles suggest, tech-focused. This post, by way of contrast, is just to share interesting game-related tidbits with fellow Guild Wars players. I came away with three key notes:

1. Don’t hold your breath for an auction house. (The reasons are spelled out near the end of the database post.)

2. Cartographer titles really are calculated based on what fraction of the total possible pixels you’ve opened up, of course with a few grace percentage points so that you don’t need to really open EVERYTHING to get the 100% title. It’s that simple. (And it makes sense. They store the character’s map anyway; there’s little effort in also noting its size.)

3. Persistence (non-instancing) isn’t as hard as they thought, and they didn’t think it would be all that hard anyway. So in Guild Wars 2 they will have “more sense of a world,” even as there are also plenty of instanced areas ala the current Guild Wars.

There also is tons of cool stuff in the tech posts, and I hope you have a chance to look at them!

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Technorati Tags: Guild Wars, ArenaNet, NCsoft, MMORPG, RPG, game

Posted in ArenaNet, NCsoft, and Guild Wars, Fun stuff, Games and virtual worlds | 5 Comments »

The technology of Guild Wars (overview)

Being an analyst has its perks, the main one being that you get to have some really interesting conversations. And so I recently had the chance to interview Mike O’Brien and Pat Wyatt, two of the founders and lead programmers for ArenaNet, makers of the Guild Wars MMORPG (Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Game).

If you play games of this sort, it’s surely obvious to you why you should care. But if you don’t, maybe you should be interested anyway. After all, Guild Wars is a graphics-intensive SaaS offering that easily supports 100,000 simultaneous users, while managing a gig or so of fat client even over dial-up speeds. Every user is a potential hacker, whether for fun or actual real-world cash profit, although we didn’t actually talk about security very much. And ArenaNet provides all this on a relatively shoestring budget; in particular, Guild Wars subscription fees are precisely $0.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ArenaNet, NCsoft, and Guild Wars, Fun stuff, Games and virtual worlds, Online and mobile services, Software as a service | 4 Comments »

Burning issues in an analyst’s life

Below is an actual email I sent to my Computerworld editor, the incomparable Tommy Peterson.

So anyway, I visited Intersystems today, at the insistance of PR lady Rita Shoor, even though it seemed a phone call would have sufficed. Notwithstanding that this was a relatively longstanding meeting, Linda scheduled a dinner for us in Cambridge with my stepdaughter, which is basically good, because Intersystems is in Cambridge, but forgot about my meeting, and wound up scheduling the dinner for 9:30. Rescheduling ensued, but when I drove to Intersystems for a 2:30 meeting, it was still in flux. I was in an odd state anyway driving to the meeting, because I was already rather tired (my sleep schedule oddities), but psyched from having FINALLY posted the white paper online that represented my biggest writing project in almost a decade (because of the number of sponsors).

Despite several wrong turns at the tricky address of 1 Memorial Drive, I arrived in plenty of time, or even a bit early. I’d worn my hooded leather jacket due to the rain, but since I was in a parking garage, I decided to leave it in the car. “What can possibly go wrong that would make me need this jacket, I thought, except for a fire and building evacuation? And how likely is that??”

So I go upstairs to the meeting (after walking fruitlessly up many flights of stairs and then back down, in an error that seems common among newcomers to the building). But all is good, and there’s a very pleasant start to the meeting (as well there should be, given the GREAT column I wrote about them last year). Before long, however — you guessed it, there’s a fire alarm. After much noise and disruption, it turns out that it’s a REAL fire, and we evacuate, through the smell of smoke, that is stronger on the lower floors.

So I’m outside in a cold drizzle in my shirtsleeves. After a few minutes of stoic schmoozing, I’m reunited with the meeting folks, including Rita Shoor clomping over in 5 inch heels (her estimate) with somebody holding an umbrella over her. At my urgent suggestion, we decamp to continue the meeting in a restaurant, and they select the nearest one (with Rita commenting along the way about said heels). We’re evidently the first people to have this brilliant idea, and continue the meeting in quiet. But soon a flood of people has the same idea, and the place has techies hanging from the rafters, noisily. We continue the meeting over the din, but with some interruptions. We learn there had been a notice of substantial time before the fire department would let people back in (hence the exodus across the street). We further learn that the apparent cause of the evacuation is a fire in a red Toyota parked in the garage underneath the building, which concerns me, because I indeed arrived in a red Toyota. However, it is clarified that this car was on a different level of the garage than mine, and I relax, and we continue to discuss the glories of Ensemble.

A little while later a young man dashes in, wet from the rain, and inquires whether Curt Monash is present. I learn that one part of the prior information had been wrong; the fire had NOT been on a different level of the garage than the one I’d been parked on. In fact, it is my car that had burned up. More precisely, the engine compartment was burned, the sprinklers had suppressed it, the fire department had staved in the windows, everything was soaked, and the car was almost certainly totalled.

And that, Tommy, is why although you will get a column before I leave on my flight Monday, it may not be as long BEFORE Monday as you had requested, and as I had originally intended.

Posted in DBMS vendors and technologies, Fun stuff | 1 Comment »

Cool map of internet ownership

I just found the CIO blogs post with the really cool map of internet ownership. Click on the map and keep enlarging it. Read the text to see how not to misinterpet it.

Truth be told, I haven’t looked at it long enough to get any analytic usefulness out of it whatsoever. Still, I think it’s cool.

Posted in Fun stuff | No Comments »

Typo of the week!

The Register offers an eye-opener:

The UK’s keenness to push through tough data prevention laws during its stint in charge of the European Union (EU) has won it the “Internet Villain Award” at this year’s net industry awards.

Either that’s the best typo of the week, or things are really dastardly over on the Sceptred Isle …

Posted in Fun stuff | No Comments »

When bloggers get silly

I generally find blonde jokes to be stupid, demeaning, and above all incorrect (I’ve known plenty of very smart blondes). So in the face of very limited competition, I am inclined to agree that this is probably the best blonde joke ever.

Apropos nothing, I don’t think I’ve yet shared with blog readers my favorite glossary entry either, originally from the documentation to Inference Corporation’s expert system tool ART and gleefully plagiarized in my Application Development Tools from A to Z:

Recursion: See recursion.

Posted in Fun stuff | 1 Comment »

Click Here, You Idiot!

One of the better online spoofs in quite a while has come along, in the form of a lengthy marketing letter. CLICKhereYOUidiot parodies all those marketing letters that are directly deprived from newsletter promotions. And yes, I know about the latter, having been in the subscription newsletter business once …

Like all parodies, it can be a bit heavy handed, but it’s worth a visit and skim.

And it reminds me — does anybody have a copy of the classic site Hey Idiot? That one had the most star-studded creative team of all: Larry Ellison, Mitchell Kertzman, and David Roux. If memory serves, Larry came up with the idea, Mitchell came up with the name, and David wrote the copy. The basic idea was a company that sold only one product — it’s own stock. And there was one rule — each sale had to be at a higher price than the last previous sale …

Here’s all that’s left of Hey Idiot on archive.org. If anybody has more of the site saved, I’d love to see it.

Posted in Fun stuff | No Comments »