Moving Operations

I’ve now got a personal domain, which will let me do a number of things and offer greater control over the media and so forth that I have. So I’ll be moving there from now on. This blog will still be around for historical purposes but I’m going to be updating jtiong.com a lot more frequently.

Love, Peace & Shotguns

LAN Party Intranet site

I’m working on the intranet again – I have a fascination with getting something that really works going. I’ll be open-sourcing the resulting platform once it’s hit version 1.0 (which will be a while). But you can find out more about the system on my personal blog.

FragFest FebLAN II

I attended FragFest’s FebLAN II event yesterday at St. Mary’s in NSW, along with Goldfish, Missingo, Navillus, RSM and Ucosty.

• all in all a good day – was nice not being on the operating side of things, so I could check things out
• Missingo joins the SOGC team as the newest admin for games and competitions
• It was far too warm in the venue, so much sweat!
• We discovered Cath’s Cakes over in St. Mary’s – quite an awesome pie shop
• My video card survived the day of gaming
• Sleeper – my LAN PC, is currently in a 95% optimal state for LANning, it takes me a single trip from the car to bring all my gear into the venue.

Props to the FragFest team for running the event!

SOGC XIII and beyond!

Well, it’s been a while indeed! Just a quick update:

– the SOGC is currently going through a rebrand; stay tuned for plenty more info.
– there’s a whole swathe of new back-end systems we’re working on

That’s all for now, folks

PS3s, PSPs and iPhones

So, I’ve found that Windows Media Player 12 (WMP 12) doesn’t like monitoring folders like WMP 11 does. It’s a little bit irritating.

The last time I tried messing around with this, I used an app called TVersity which was okay – it worked, and did what it said it did. I recall just not having time to set it up – back then I wasn’t as interested in home media centres, being content with just accessing stuff on my PC – but nowadays, the lounge is becoming a more tempting room to hang out in (I think I’m getting old).

So, I hooked it up and again, TVersity works – straight off my Windows Server 2008 PC which stores all the media, so that’s a good thing. There’s a few nifty new features I noticed; I can now stream media straight to my iPhone or PSP as well, over the network – although that’s more great for sitting in bed catching up on the latest episode of Chuck or something.

I only really have one gripe – and it’s more from lack of experience in using TVersity — the way it organises my media is annoying. I’ll be patient and give it a bit more time, and I’ll probably post about the experience here. For now, it works and that’s all I was looking for.

You can check out TVersity at: http://www.tversity.com/

PS3 media centre

Some of you readers know, I’ve got a home theatre setup with nice comfy couches, and a projector usually hooked up to a stock standard DVD player. In recent developments, I’ve genuinely started wanting to move away from the PC for my entertainment needs (such as TV shows – goddamn NCIS, why must I be hooked on you so!?)

I’ve decided to use the phenomenal capabilities that Windows 7 Ultimate’s Media Centre offers – to try and stream stuff, in combination with hooking up my PS3 to the intertoobs so that I can watch everything on ABC’s iView as well. I have to say, I’ve been impressed so far, and it adds the novelty of me trying to add millions of mp4 converted TV episodes (from legitimate DVDs of course – these were originally to watch on my iPhone) — to a big media library in Media Centre so that my PS3 can see it all o.O

Fun fun

the intranet site

Recently, in the last two events of 2009; the SOGC used intranet websites developed by yours truly to provide information to the attendees of that particular event – with somewhat reasonably good success. Both sites that were released were different, each featuring different aspects of the evolution and design of our intranet site; something we’d like to be a really significant part of the SOGC experience at our events.

The first release at LANoWEEN 2 – involved a more technological side of implementation; users were able to register feedback, and sign up to competitions through the intranet site. Making the system actually pretty efficient; this wasn’t a feature complete site, but it took us in the direction we wanted to head, and feedback overall was pretty good based on several testers for the event.

The second release at ForceLAN – was a design based release. Which you can actually click that link to see. Here, the design of the site was pretty much finalized, and all that was left was to marry off the tech to the design and voila, we’d have a great site to use! Unfortunately that’s not the case, I’ve started advancing some of the work on the site and what could almost be called feature creep has started to occur.

I’m going to jot down a few of the features we’re looking at:

• live server status pages
• feedback forms with graphical summaries
• competitions control and results management

These three are the biggest features we’ve got at present, and are being very slowly worked on as we speak. The code is entirely raw and hand-written with none of the proper educated conventions of a real PHP developer (I’m a self taught PHP coder, so it’s not exactly pretty) – the one forgiving thing is that being a LAN based site, rather than a WWW based site means that optimizations are not as consequential. Client and User connection speeds are significantly greater than what is available online.

It’s not really noticeable to the crowd themselves, but I’ve started moving back from the frontlines as it were, and started managing the team and working on the servers to help boost the guest experience as much as possible. Leaving people with far better public rapport like Russell (Nokturnal) – and his superior sense of humour to the commentary is something I’m more than happy to do.

Our team’s structured in such a way that we have an enforcement group, a competitions group, and a support group. The three main areas of the LAN really. But that’s another post for another time

I’m still alive!

So, it’s now post-ForceLAN, and we’re going into hibernation for the 2010 year of events in terms of the public eye.

I know I’ve been extremely absent from the blog recently; I do apologise – in that time I accrued something in the order of nearly a dozen post drafts on a variety of matters. But really, things have been happening so fast, and so chaotically I never got a chance to finish any of them beyond a paragraph.

That said, I now think I’ll just wipe the table clean (get rid of all the drafts) and here I am ranting on something more current and related to the SOGC rather than bitching about DJ Hero and Modern Warfare 2; I’m going to stick to my guns and try to keep this blog more LAN organiser related, as well as semi–techgeek-gamer related. There’s three things I’m going to talk about in this post – more relevant to organisers than our gamer patrons; but for those of you who do stick around and read this, I hope it’ll still be handy or interesting info for you.

1. Live Mesh for our team files
2. Our ForceLAN Feedback form
3. Our new server: KANAKO

Those are all pretty geeky and ambiguous titles… allow me to explain.

Xbox Live gaming, and gamer rankings

warning: I swear a bit in this post – I usually swear like a sailor normally so for most people who know me, it’s business as usual. However, if you’d been reading recently you’ll find that my swearing kind of petered off as I tried to moderate myself a bit there.

I have to admit, I’m supposed to be quite the gamer; yet recently, it seems I haven’t done any gaming apart from polishing off Uncharted 2, and randomly lurking around in Aion. So yesterday, I was doing the usual soul crushing chore of my credit card balances and noticed that I have an active subscription to Xbox Live, Gold. I decided I would take a moment to see what all the hullabulloo was about and actually get some gaming done on a console, which is practically unheard of for me. I grew up playing the PC, sure, I had the Nintendos and Segas everyone else had, but for me, gaming was on the PC as soon as I touched Doom back in … ‘94? Since then, I had never taken console gaming seriously or given it any real credit.

So, I decided that “today will be the day” (actually, last night) to try out Xbox Live – and see just how well it works. I also chose to use one of the more popular games, Gears of War 2 in horde mode. This plays out just like Invasion in UT2004, or the ending scenes in L4D where it’s you guys against the masses.

There was a secondary ulterior motive to my little venture into the realm of console gaming (specifically XBOX gaming) — the SOGC is looking into implementing gamer medals and conjunctively, research into a way to rank our members in terms of gaming skill and competitions is also becoming of interest. (The team will probably murder me for disclosing that feature prematurely. So if I disappear… D: )

It is with confidence I can say, Xbox Live works – it’s quite a good system, and easy to use. It’s multiplayer for the brainless, bottom-of-the-barrel fucking idiots who can’t figure out PC multiplayer for crap. More importantly, it’s fun. The matchmaking system works somewhat well – considering I was unranked in all games, and had never been online in Gears of War 2 prior to this (mind you there was a fucktonne of patches to download) – and I was quite intrigued by it.

Microsoft uses a Bayesian applications to their ranking system to determine matchmaking – it’s a good system, well grounded in maths and social theory – called TrueSkill. It’s an alternate form of social engineering – a field of study I find myself greatly interested in – by all regular standards, sports nowadays and any other form of competition generally use something called the Elo rating system. I won’t burn all your time by digressing into the rating systems, I’ve linked both the whitepaper and the wikipedia article on the systems respectively – they’re interesting if you’re into all that background stuff.

These algorithms unfortunately only work for match-making systems; unfortunately with the SOGC – we’re grounded entirely in a Tournament format of competition. One day however, I’d like to implement a ‘Challenger’ system into our competitions; but for now – I think this may be just a pipedream. So last night’s foray into competition, tournament and gamer ranking formats was unfortunately, while educational, still unsuccessful.

I did learn however, that Xbox Live is pretty fun – it takes all the thought and effort out of having to game; just like how fast food takes the effort out of cooking food for yourself and instead gives you the convenience of slowly killing yourself. Xbox Live does that to the technical skills of the gamer population. I’m wondering if it’s a bad thing.

Site upgrades

Recently, we had a little bit of an upgrade to various features on our website. Most of these won’t be immediately obvious to our visitors at the SOGC website; but they’re a big step forward. Initially there was a bit of a stumbling stone, where a lot of the team were questioning what was going on with the site. As of tonight, that’s mostly settled, with ucosty taking over development of the site entirely, while I fill the site up with content.

So far, it’s been pretty fantastic; we’ve now got sponsor bio pages (down the bottom) and more excitingly, a new photos link at the main menu at the top of the site. This is great as that was one of the missing things from our site since this new version went online. For us at present; the next big thing is working on a corresponding theme for the forums. I’m branding our current design theme ‘charcoal’.

It’ll be a fairly straightforward port of the current SOGC site (I hope) – so stay tuned for some interesting developments on that front.