TrickyTrucks is okay fun single-player, but what really makes it fun is the competition. For this, it has built in scoreboards, per track. Attempting to beat certain people’s times on tracks is the fun.

What it lacks is a cross-track scoreboard, i.e. some kind of championship, and/or notifications of people beating your scores. Even Audiosurf, one of the… most entertainingly engineered indie games recently, got this right.

I implemented one.

After some initial beta testing (and ensuring I was near the top of the championship), I messaged the TrickyTrucks author with the source of the scraper and of the web interface, asking for permission to link to the website on the official forum, so others could join us in competing for the championship title.

An aside, on licensing: Both of these components were released under the BSD. That allows anyone, including the TrickyTrucks author, to use the code for any purpose, including incorporating it into his official website. The component split was done such that there was a neat interface for him to implement on a non-scraper backend. The best result for me would be for there to be an official API and an officially hosted version of the site, such that I never had to do anything ever again to continue appreciating it.

An aside, on development costs: Reverse engineering binary protocols is a nightmare. Especially so with only access to a read client (with no source). Especially so when there’s no way to get the server to return things consistently or with user-specified plaintext. Especially when the protocol has (what you believe to be) NIH compression. Don’t ever, ever try and pay someone to do this unless they really, really want to.

He replied that this would be fine, but only if I removed the link from the website to the source. I, grudgingly (given it was already in the wild), did so and posted on the forum.

His response? Delete the post, and change the server to have some additional, weak protection against 3rd-party clients.

What. The. Hell.

(Eventually he sent me details of an API to use, but I’d lost interest by then.)

This post brought to you by libspotify being incompatible with most 3rd party DLLs, probably due to the copy protection on their DLL. Copy protection. On something that requires a paid account, verified against their server. Please tell them what you think about this on my GetSatisfaction thread (apparently this is what passes as a bug tracker these days).

This prompted me to waste ALL WEEKEND porting foo_input_spotify to libdespotify. foo_input_spotify will increase the value of their product. Why are they making my life miserable? Perhaps it’s unintentional. Time will tell.

Developers:

• Better awareness of “unicode”, especially the terminology (the word ‘unicode’ itself, encodings, etc.). Joel on Software’s article on Unicode is a good start.

  I’m going to blame the developers for user’s inability to grasp “unicode”, as it should be on by default, and should be very hard to break.

• Better awareness of displays. There are a whole range of types of display, not all of them are 4:3.

  There might even be more than one display present, I don’t expect you to make use of both of them, but it’d be nice if you didn’t assume that the primary one was the only one.

• Better awareness of Limited User Accounts (also Least User Access). This applies equally to Windows developers (Vista will be very annoying when applications need elevated privileges, even if they are avaliable) and to those writing software to be packaged (or to manage packages) for linux distributions (desktops tend not to be multi-user machines, your old ethos is dead).
• Seperation of Content and Display (ie. MVC). Your application or website has something to offer it’s users(/visitors), they want to be able to access it. Websites with 400kB of navigation, menus and (precious, precious) advertising; applications with wooooshy! buttons and pretty colours may be “cool”, but they suck for people who want to get the Content out.

  RSS, Google Sitemaps and various web-services are a good start, but they’re not benifiting the end user (much) yet.

• Integration, applications should look and feel alike. Microsoft are terrible at this (see Windows Media Player and Office 2007, for instance), and they’re not helped by some libraries.
• I’d also like to see the GPL die a horrible, fiery death, but that’s the subject of another rant.

Industries:

• The Music industry. Many people have argued this to death. You can’t charge what you think you can charge (99p for a DRM’d, low-quality track, for history’s sake) and expect people to care. DRM is fine, but it (significantly?) reduces the value (and hence the price) of your product. Go adopt AllOfMP3‘s business model where price has some relation to the quality of the product.

  As a specific wish, I’d like the Ministry of Sound to put their archives up for sale under that model. They’re not making you any money as it’s currently impossible to buy most of the cds.

• The Movie industry. With the release of Vista, and PCs (or XBoxen) moving under people’s televisions, you have a whole range of media protection features, use them, and people’s fast internet connections, and start renting us stuff.

  £3 for a single play of a movie (in HD) five days after release would be both awesome, destroy piracy and really piss off the cinemas. Oh well.

• All the others: Staggering releases around the world is lame (TV and Game industries, I’m looking at you).

The internet:

• Communities: Most community sites as of now are either dead (on the soul side), (ie. Slashdot, Digg, Reddit), or heading that way (Myspace, Facebook, Youtube). Can social communities exist on the internet? Evidence suggests not, oh well, we’re not going to lose much.

  Wish: Webmasters need to work out that their site is NOT a community site, before it’s too late. You know who you are. Please?

Predictions on timescales for any of these, anyone? I’ve picked some that very few people care about, or that, in general, people disagree with me on, and I can’t see any of the above happening in 2007.

We shall see.

Having read Skumby’s Hi!! How are you?! I was thinking about how it extends to text-based conversation. Much of my human interaction currently is via. text-based mediums, such as MSN, SMS, Jabber, IRC and Sametime (although, luckily, not the version that’s inflicted on the public ).

Starting with IRC, specifically, support channels for various topics (ie. freenode‘s ##c++ and ##java), where people will go for help and support (from volunteers). In general, when a new body turns up, there are basically three things that happen:

1. They get it right, ie. they don’t do one of the below, this doesn’t, however, necessarily mean that they’re going to ask a “smart question“.
2. < new> hi?

3. < new> ne1 have ne experience with {blank}?

   or
   < new> can i ask a question about {blank}?


Both of those questions are complete time-wasters (and would never get to “How are you?!”), the second set admittedly yields some information (maybe even enough for a no), but contains no information that wouldn’t be in your “smart question” anyway. Grr.

On to MSN/Jabber/Sametime.

If someone contacts you, they want something. Three categories again:

1. They’re bored, and want you to share something interesting you’ve done.
2. They’ve something absolutely positively awesome that they can’t wait to share with/inflict on you.
3. They want something non-social, ie. something physical, or help, ie. for you to actively do something.

All three of those will probably start with a “Conversation Header” (“Hi!” “Hey.” “How’re you?” “Fine thanks, you?” “I’m okay, thanks… say..”), which is of no value to me as the receiver.

Even worse: I leave myself connected to MSN/Jabber/Sametime(/IRC) 24/7 (or as close to as possible). Why? So people can contact me. I might not be sitting there reading what they write, as they write it, but I’ll (almost) definitely read it at some point. How does the “Conversation Header” ‘help’ here? It stops them giving me even the slightest clue what they were wanting to talk about. Grrr.

On to SMS: the ultimate communication mechanism.

I love SMS. It fixes all of the above, everything:

• Charging per message.
• Limiting the length (160 chars on real phones).
• (according to reliable sources, my sister (no, I won’t link to your myspace page)) makes it much easier to type properly, and complete hell to try and write txt spk, thanks to predictive text.
• No guarantees on reply times.

So, in conclusion, to make the (textual) world a better place, etc.:

• Don’t waste people’s time to be polite in text. It has none of the possible advantages of “Conversation Headers” in normal speech.
• Make people care about what they produce, by making their life difficult and/or charging them.

Bah, humbug.