• For starters, let me link to some of the posts I’ve made pointing to April Fool’s pranks in past years, including:
  • (2009) A wonderful spoof of the analyst business
  • (2009) Donald Farmer’s hilarious version of business intelligence
  • (2009) The Guardian’s translation of its news and archives to tweets (“OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5×6e for more”)
  • (2009) Google’s world-dominating, blog-writing AI with the personality of a pre-adolescent girl
  • (2009) Expedia’s space-travel offering
  • (2008) Netezza’s green box
  • (2008) LOTRO’s spoof quests — like other MMO folks, the Lord Of The Rings Online guys can be really funny. (But in retrospect I’m not so sure they were spoofs so much as a new comedic option in the game introduced on a cleverly-chosen date.)
  • (2007) My attempt to one-up Scoble et al., without much success.
  • (2002) A classic: Google PigeonRank
• I found a couple of sites that catalog April Fool’s pranks around the world (not just techie ones). The Museum of Hoaxes offers a curated approach, so their list is pretty funny. Another site lists just about every web hoax anybody bothers to submit, so it’s quality is more mixed (and a lot of the links now don’t work).
• While thinking about this post, I recalled and posted about some software industry pranks. The MSA/M&D ones still boggle my mind, but I couldn’t think of much else to match them.
• And then, of course, there was the time this blonde joke made, as it were, the rounds.

Meanwhile, this is as good a time as any to offer lyrics and music/video for the classic Leslie Fish filk song “Banned from Argo.”

Our proper, cool first officer was drugged with something green
And hauled into an alley, where he suffered things obscene
He sobered up in sickbay and he’s none the worse for wear
Except he’s somehow taught the bridge computer how to swear

Actually, this version has better sound and image quality, but the video part doesn’t speak to me.

Also:

• A collection of Dr. McCoy clips.
• A song combining Star Trek and The Hobbit.
• A video (large download) to Julia Ecklar’s beautiful song God Lives on Terra, with Star Trek:TNG clips interspersed with views of Wrentham, MA.  (I previously linked a hilarious parody of that song.)
• Another Bob Kanefsky parody song, this one based on a specific Star Trek episode. (Melody and performance by Leslie Fish.)

It’s pretty funny and actually somewhat informative. Check it out.

Meanwhile, another video has time-lapse photography showing the building of the Large Hadron Collider. I actually only watched from about the 7:30 to 8:00 marks, but that part was pretty cool.

• Like swimming in an aquarium
• Parrot fish and friends
• Rock lobster and friends
• Puffer fish
• Our home away from home, aka The Reef Resort
• Our cat away from cat

Happy summer Friday.  I leave on vacation tomorrow.

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.

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!

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.

Note: If you’re familiar with video RPGs but not MMORPGs, please just read on; the main salient difference is that in an MMORPG lots of people play at once. If you’re familiar with other MMORPGs but not Guild Wars, there’s one GW-specific design feature you should know of – Guild Wars is instanced. That is, a group of 1-24 players will get their own private copy of the game world. Any changes to the environment (e.g. player movement, monster-killing) are made only by them.

And if you’re not familiar with video RPGs at all, I suggest you stop working quite so hard and go play.

Here are some of the technical highlights I managed to glean in a brief half-hour conversation:

• The client doesn’t do much except graphical presentation and input preparation (including encryption). This is a deliberate security choice. They assume the game client is infinitely hackable, and hence limit its power to sending a small number of well-defined messages.

• Their servers run on blades – originally all IBM, now more varied. Generally these are 2.8 gigahertz dual-processor Xeon IBM blades with 2.5 gigs of RAM.

• There are a number of different categories of servers. These include: Authorization/log-in, game update download, actual gameplay, database cache, DBMS, several secondary game functions (e.g. guild membership, tournaments), and watchdogs overseeing the rest.

• Gameplay servers can support 2500-3500 users each, with the main limitation being addressable memory. (They run on 32-bit Microsoft Windows.) 3500 users is a bit uncomfortable. This matches well against the fact that character records are several 10s of kilobytes, for reasons I explain in this companion post on Guild Wars data management.

• There are 4 ½ million total lines of code.

• Their connectivity design goal is .0045 megabits/sec/user, and they’re close to achieving it. Dial-up is a fairly realistic way to play. (That said, as a player I can tell you it creates some lags that make a dial-up user less than idea to be partnered with.)

• Reliability is not just a nice thing for users, but an actual game integrity concern. There are possible exploits in MMORPGs that involve deliberately crashing a server when a goods-trade transaction is partway through. ArenaNet fights this both by focusing on transaction integrity (but not in the way you may think; I refer you again to the database-focused companion post) and by generally trying to make their database cache servers extremely reliable. Database cache servers typically stay up 150-200+ days at a time.

*Note: There is a high level of motivation for cheating in MMORPGs. One of the biggest is that professionals in low-wage but well-wired countries acquire fictional gold, so that they can sell it for real money. Gold sellers are a huge concern to ArenaNet.

That’s just some of what I heard. For more on the technology of Guild Wars, please see my companion post on the database technology of Guild Wars and Guild Wars game notes. This interview is also just one of several I plan with game and virtual world companies, so I hope to in the future address other kinds of issues, such as rules and AI.

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.