Dweebos

One of the projects I’m working on currently is for Wright State University.  They do an annual exhibit called the Tunnel of Oppression.  It is a multi-room exhibit, each room focuses on a theme, like racism, sexism, ableism, etc.  The idea is to raise awareness of the many forms of oppression in society and also to show how each of us individually is part of the problem.

What we are working on is to put a version of the tunnel online, so it can be used throughout the year in student classes and by the public.   We have developed an online 3D interactive environment that you can walk around in like a video game, and there will be video clips, audio clips and lots of images and text as well.  Here is a working demo that should run in your web browser if you have java installed.

We are using a 3D game engine called JMonkeyEngine to develop the system.  It is an impressive piece of software and is open source java.  It is not very well documented but there are alot of people using it and participating in the forums, so I’ve been able to figure it out so far.

The board for playing games at pente.org has always been pretty bare, its just a plain tan board with some lines on it.  The benefit of that is it makes it easy to resize the board for whatever size screen the user is playing with.

I’ve thought of replacing it over the years with something fancier but I’m not very good with graphics.  But my friend Peter is, its his job at http://www.designs-on-display.com, and he has made some awesome new boards that I plan to incorporate at the site sometime, hopefully soon!

Take a peek.

-dweebo

So the simpler pente.org front page I talked about earlier is live!  And it did end up growing to be a pretty big release, with every web page having visual changes to it, so let me know if you find issues.

Features

• Guests can no quickly login to try out the site without registering
• Simpler intro page, register page and features page for guests
• New header/footer on all existing pages
• Wider web pages, went from 800 pixels to 900.  That allows turn-based games and past games to be viewed in a larger view.
• No more ads anywhere for players who have donated
• New “dashboard” page for logged in players with quick access to turn-based games, messages, player stats, player avatar

Now that all that is done there are some other tweaks I can do, but one thing I want to add to the right of the dashboard area is a widget listing the top 10 active pente players by rating.

Maybe other widgets could go there too like most active player(s), new rising stars, donors, who’s online, etc.

Of course I’ve got some other side jobs starting soon, so who knows if I’ll get to it anytime soon!

-dweebo

Last weekend my 4 year old son Aiden and I went for a camping overnight adventure….in our backyard!  We made a fire, roasted marshmellows and then climbed into the tent, hopefully to sleep I thought.

Earlier in the summer we got to the tent a little early and it was still light out, birds were chirping, and we just couldn’t fall asleep.

Aiden was rolling around for about 15 minutes or so as I laid quietly, until I mentioned casually that I usually fall asleep better when I lie still for a few minutes.  So he proceeded to lie quietly for a minute or so and then shouted out “Daddy! It worked!”.

Too funny.

-dweebo

As I discussed earlier, I want to try to make the pente.org homepage simpler for new players, in order to get them to try the site and hopefully like it enough to come back.

Make a simpler front page, sounds easy, but it’s one of those remodeling things that easily becomes a big project quickly. Like when my Mom wanted a new toilet seat and 6 months later we had an entire new bathroom. I would love to change the whole site design, and change from an html table layout to use CSS instead, and also would like a new look and feel. I started to attempt this last week and quickly became discouraged. The changes are just too big, and I am NOT a web designer. Picking colors for me is like writers block. Reminds me of when I go to Home Depot or Lowes and my wife Sarah shows me those little 1″ square paint color swatches. Which do I like better?? I can’t even answer, my mind just shuts down and eventually she tells me to go look at power tools and leave her alone.

So instead I am going to try a more incremental approach. I’m going to stick with the ugly green for now. I’m going to mostly keep the current site the same. I will create a new front page using CSS that sort of looks the same but is much simpler, and with it a few pages to see the pente.org features.

From those small steps I should end up a simpler front page, and maybe provide a starting point for a bigger site redesign in the future.

And if anyone out there has a good feel for design stuff and wants to help me out picking colors please let me know!

-dweebo

My dedicated server was down for from 1pm to 3:40pm due to something going horribly wrong at my hosting company.

I guess they have been having power problems lately, the site has been down at least 3 times within the past month which is pretty rare.  I remember there was a period of time awhile back where my server had been running continuously for almost a year, without even a reboot.  I hope those days return!

Everything appears to be up and running again now.

-dweebo

Beginners in Pente often struggle with the basics of the game, and it isn’t usually fun to win a game just because the other player misses an open four! (ok sometimes it is…)

When playing over-the-board, some of the original Pente instructions suggested warning your opponent when you make a threat (open 3 or 4).  For pente.org I’ve always thought it would be cool to highlight the threats on the board, provided of course both players agree to it.

I have implemented threat highlighting for a new Pente program I’m working on (more about that later) and maybe if it proves popular I’ll see about including it for live or turn-based games.

I was going to include some of the code for how I draw the highlighted portions using Java 2D, but after looking at it I realized it is horribly ugly stuff!

I’ve been tracking page visitors to pente.org with Google analytics for a year or so, it has a ton of nice graphs and features for tracking and I don’t have to manage anything.  I haven’t really fully explored all the options, but one of the interesting things is the bounce rate.  The bounce rate is the number of visitors that only view the first page of the site and don’t click on any links. It seems very high for pente.org, at over 36%!

My theories for why that is so high are

1. Slow load times, the first page is slower than the rest because of the java applet.  It seems to take forever for java to load initially.  Plus there are alot of database calls to load other things on the page.
2. Too much information.  There is alot to see on the first page, and probably hard to figure out everything for new users.

So I would like to lower the bounce rate by redesigning the main page to be simpler for new users to quickly start playing!  For already registered players it should go to a page that has links to join the game room, see their old games, see their turn-based games, read new messages, etc.

The other feature which I’ve mostly coded already is to allow guests to login to the game room and play (unrated) games.  Hopefully if people can just login and play without having to register that might get them more interested.

I just need to find the time now to work on an improved main page.  I don’t really enjoy web design work as I’m not much of a designer, so I’ve been putting that part off.

-dweebo

For the past year or so I have been partially commuting to work by bicycle on occasion.  I live about 17 miles from my office so it is not practical to ride the whole way there and back.  I have done that a few times but it ends up taking close to 3 hours for the whole trip.  So most times I drive about 7-8 miles towards work, park in a parking lot somewhere and ride the rest of the way.

Yesterday was one of those days, but on the way home it was just such a nice day and I was really flying along that I just went right past my parked car and rode all the way home!  I even managed to average 15mph on the slightly uphill journey, which is very good for me, especially with all the stopping at lights/stop signs.

Of course this morning that meant I had to drag myself out of bed after staying up until 1pm and get back on my bike for the 7 mile trip to the car, ugh.   I just need to remember that soon the days will start getting shorter and colder and I really won’t feel like commuting…

Then when I got into work and unpacked my lunch I found that my mediterranean pasta decided it would explore the inside of my bag.  Everything’s better with olive oil right?

-dweebo

Was trying to find a specific process to kill today on a solaris machine at work. But a

ps -ef | grep Process

didn’t help much because we run 3 or 4 instances of the program on different environments. We pass in a config file for each environment, but I couldn’t see that from the ps listing because it truncates the process information. Some days I just kill them all and hope no one notices.

But today I was looked via google that doing

/usr/ucb/ps -auxww | grep Process

returned the full process information and then I could kill the correct process.