Ramblings

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Security questions, my number one most hated thing online.  I can see the logic behind these questions, the web site verifies personal information with your answers in case you misplace your password, username, etc.  So what is my problem with these very nosy fields?  Well first off who would want to tell random-shopping-place.net her maiden name, or his favorite pets name?  I’ll admit most of the information is not worth much to most people, but I recently logged onto a site where they wanted five different security questions.  Questions to choose from ranged from favorite band to favorite elementary school teacher.  One question guys, that is my limit.

Ignoring the personal information and the question addicts, what else do I have against these questions?  Well first rewind a bit and think about why they use these questions.  Typically these questions are used to restore account access after you have been compromised or forget your information.  Occasionally some people want answers just to change your log in info.  Why do web sites feel the need to verify that the one with valid credentials can also answer a bunch of personal questions?  Its just another useless security layer that might prevent <1% of unauthorized accesses for the retards using ‘password’ as their password.  Security questions are nothing more than a retard test, and having to pass a retard test each time a user wants to log in is insulting to everyone; or at least it should be.

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DollarsSalary is a big deal for a lot of people. In fact its such a big deal for some people that they will sacrifice themselves or their coworkers to squeeze just a little more $/hour. In general I think its safe to say that most people work for money. Right? Generally, people work to make money, and by that what I really mean is that people work to make enough money so that hopefully someday they will not have to work anymore; at that point they hope to enjoy living off the interest accrued from whatever retirement package they choose to use when they started working.

Well, what is money? What are those greenishCreative Commons License photo credit: hickoryhollow113 pieces of paper or numbers on a bank statement? They are just a means to achieve an end; in other words, retirement. Sure you go on vacations, buy big houses, marry someone, but if you take a step back and look at the purpose of these little bills to any civilized human being on the planet you will see that it all leads up to the point where all of a sudden there is no reason to continue working anymore because you have enough invested that even 4% return will pay your salary each year.

Ultimately these pieces of paper are your retirement, nothing more. They certainly do not represent any real wealth, as millions found out last November. Do not get me wrong I am not going to discuss what some call “The Federal Bank Conspiracy.” Which includes theories explaining the devaluation of the dollar, global government, criminals in fancy suits (although you would do yourself a favor by learning a little bit about the origin and meaning of those green bits of paper). I am just going to explain some of my own reasons for not defining my life by my eventual retirement.

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PAX Wrap Up

masseffectSadly, Pax is over, fellow gamers are packing up, and exhibitors are leaving before the cleaning crew shows up. There was a lot of SWAG, a lot of people, and a lot of games. I mentioned a few booths in my first post, so this time I am going to try and cover some notable booths I did not mention or did not get a picture of the first time around. I am trying to cover some of the major features here, but this is by no means a complete feature list.

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PAX Day 1

pax lineDay one of the PAX expo is officially over and I have some pictures and information about the exhibitions to talk about. The day started harmlessly enough, we queued in the queue room to wait for the exhibition hall to open. While we waited the enforcers made sure we were not bored by entertaining us with internet memes and blow up beach balls.
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Unique character names in MMOs have long been a pet peeve of mine.  I am sure most of you have experienced the frustration when your favorite character name ends up taken by some else, and if you are like me it might take as many as 20 tries to get an available name.  Well, here is a question for all you MMO programmers, why the hell are you still using character names as a unique identifier?  There are so many better options to identify players in the world, every name does not need to be unique.  In fact I frequently find that running across players entitled ‘FancyPants12′ or ‘Moooo4me’ does more damage to game play than a simple change would.  When I am in the process of being adsorbed into an MMO through very nicely executed immersion techniques, stumbling onto these players breaks flow, ScreenShot_071107_195300disrupts my concentration and I find it harder to follow the story line (or even care about it).

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I bring this up because this last weekend I started playing Aion.  A very nice game that I have high hopes for, but its probably the first MMO that I am actually interested in a bit of the lore; I even went so far as to read some of the important quest text.  Its shocking yes, but they really did do a good job making the player feel like they are not just a drop of water in an ocean; which is worthy of recognition in itself.  Unfortunately, Aion suffers from the unique name dilemma so while I am trying to rescue the damsel from a horde of black winged bandits I am constantly running into ‘XXSlayerXX’ or ‘RoGeGardian’ and that is just terrible from an immersion perspective.

But what can be done about it?  After all, a lot depends on character names.  PMs, brokers, mail, friend lists, etc etc.  Obviously a new system has to enhance game play, not restrict it.  I propose a system where each character is assigned a unique number, not a name, which can be used for all these means of communication with just a little extra effort on the programmers side.

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Pax 2009

pax10So a few things happened and it appears that I will be attending Pax West 2009.  Being someone who did not know the convention existed until about a week ago I like to consider my position at PAX as ‘complete noob.’

Anyway why I am I posting this?  Well I have nothing to say about Pax in particular, like I said I have never been there and my general understanding is its like an E3 only good and open to the public.  I was roped into taking this trip by a friend and we plan to spend a week along the west coast.  That being said Pax started out as only a minor side attraction for us, as we had already planned on traveling out there.  It was not until I started reading about community events and enthusiasm that a lot of people seem to have that I started to seriously look forward to attending the conference.

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A quick update today, I have graduated college and am officially in the work force.  Great time to do so I know, luckily I am under no emergency to get a new job, but I am looking.  Therefore, if you are visiting here and you like what you see, please visit my About page to download my resume, cv, and portfolio.  I am willing to relocate ( eager, in fact ), and prefer jobs that are interesting and will challenge me to learn and improve my existing skills.

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Contrary to the many many posts about ’10 reasons why ubuntu is the next #1 consumer desktop’ or ‘Switching from windows to ubuntu’ this post is about my experience with ubuntu and why as of this moment I am reinstalling windows vista.

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So in my last article I touched on the subject of what I termed static factories. I did a little searching online and found the original article that first gave me the idea.  Apparently this type of design is called pluggable factories.  A term I had forgotten until just now.

Here is the basic idea, you have x number of objects your program can create.  These objects are all children of a base interface.  You have cleverly created an abstract factory to create the various instances of your objects, but there is a problem, you are asked to add several new objects and/or remove several objects.  So you jump back into your code and make a new object or remove an object.  You compile your code and try to use the new object, OOPS, you forgot to add it to the abstract factory!   Or, after removing the object you run some old data and OOPS, your program crashes as it tried to return an instance to a class that does not exist.

To be fair, if your program was written correctly it would not compile in the latter case, but that is besides the point.  Sometimes abstract factories can be a pain in the ass.  So, here is where pluggable factories step up to the plate.
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With my old hosting service expiring I decided to move the site to my new host today. Along the way I upgraded word press 4 minor versions (oops), and grabbed some popular plugins. I also liked this theme a bit so I am going to be using this for a while.
I know its probably one of the most overused themes but I rather like it and I am a computer programmer, not a web designer, so I really do not care about how the site looks. The most important thing is that people who do read these posts get the information they were looking for. So with that, I look forward to the coming months.

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