brainsnorkel.com

Via Discourse.net a great NYT story about road safety and traffic engineering.

To make communities safer and more appealing, Mr. Monderman argues, you should first remove the traditional paraphernalia of their roads - the traffic lights and speed signs; the signs exhorting drivers to stop, slow down and merge; the center lines separating lanes from one another; even the speed bumps, speed-limit signs, bicycle lanes and pedestrian crossings. In his view, it is only when the road is made more dangerous, when drivers stop looking at signs and start looking at other people, that driving becomes safer.

“All those signs are saying to cars, ‘This is your space, and we have organized your behavior so that as long as you behave this way, nothing can happen to you,’ ” Mr. Monderman said. “That is the wrong story.”

The Drachten intersection is an example of the concept of “shared space,” a street where cars and pedestrians are equal, and the design tells the driver what to do.

[...]

“This is social space, so when Grandma is coming, you stop, because that’s what normal, courteous human beings do,” he said.

[...]

Mr. Monderman drove him to a small country road with cows in every direction. Their presence was unnecessarily reinforced by a large, standard-issue European traffic sign with a picture of a cow on it.

“He said: ‘What do you expect to find here? Wallabies?’ ” Mr. Hamilton-Baillie recalled. ” ‘They’re treating you like you’re a complete idiot, and if people treat you like a complete idiot, you’ll act like one.’

There’s a software engineering message here somewhere :)

I take back what I said about “one of the most trouble-free MMOG launches evah!” One of the most successful launches ever has turned into one of the stickiest scalability problems ever.

Slashdot games reports that Blizzard are actively pulling World of Warcraft from shelves until they resolve scalability issues. All of Blizzard’s community web forums are up and down regularly. Surprisingly large numbers of subscribers have resulted in a proportionally large problem for Blizzard.

This is the most telling quote from the ensuing thread:

by Datamonstar (845886) on Wednesday January 19, @08:47PM (#11415323)
It’s gotta feel damn good to actually pull your product because too many people want it. Seriously, this problem has gotta be the “best” problem Blizzard could have had with this game.

One of the consequences of restricting supply is that demand is still there. The street price of WoW on eBay just made quite a bit of a leap.

I’ve not experienced many problems. One of the advantages of only playing casually on a US Eastern Time Zone server, I guess.

My hope is that they quickly fix their scapablility problems and get around to launching this feature.

Do your loved ones a favour. Consider installing the netcraft anti-phishing toolbar for them. IE only I’m afraid (I’m mid-way through a Mozilla adoption scheme)

The Toolbar community is effectively a giant neighbourhood watch scheme, empowering the most alert and most expert members to defend everyone within the community against phishing frauds. Once the first recipients of a phishing mail have reported the target URL, it is blocked for community members as they subsequently access the URL. Widely disseminated attacks (people constructing phishing attacks send literally millions of electronic mails in the expectation that some will reach customers of the bank) simply mean that the phishing attack will be reported and blocked sooner.

The Toolbar also:

* Traps suspicious URLs containing characters which have no common purpose other than to deceive.
* Enforces display of browser navigational controls (toolbar & address bar) in all windows, to defend against pop up windows which attempt to hide the navigational controls.
* Clearly displays sites’ hosting location, including country, helping you to evaluate fraudulent urls (e.g. the real citibank.com or barclays.co.uk sites are unlikely to be hosted in the former Soviet Union).

Please download and try out the toolbar.

Link!

…is also timing, it seems.

NSW’s longest serving, and arguably, most successful treasurer must have been saving up to time his big announcement so that the media would give him some attention and provide some long-wanted kudos. Who knows if Michael Egan timed his resignation to coincide with Mark Latham’s resignation from federal opposition leadership and his seat of Werriwa. Who knows if Peter Cosgrove decided if it was a good time to jump in with his plans to retire after 40 years in the ADF and an undertaking not to enter politics (again)..

Whether it’s “get all the bad news out at once” or “I can’t wait forever for a good time to announce this” it’s a tragedy that two of these events aren’t going to get the media bandwidth they deserve.

Scrivener’s Error notes:

In an opinion released earlier today (PDF image file, 2.5mb), Judge Cooper essentially held that Cobb County, Georgia may not constitutionally require schools to put a sticker proclaiming that evolution is only a theory and not a fact in science textbooks.

Which got me thinking about other places you might find timely warnings about the delicate theoretical fabric that society is foolishly taking for granted…

• On 50km/h signs: Reducing the urban speed limit to reduce traffic accidents is a theory not a fact.
• On coffee machines: Putting the milk in first to make your beverage “creamier” is a theory not a fact.
• On Christmas presents: Santa’s existence is a theory not a fact.
• On software: That this software will work as advertised is a theory not a fact.
• On the refrigerator: That the light goes off when you close the door is a theory and not a fact.
• On pay slips: Tax cuts for high income earners and subsequent trickle down effects are a theory and not a fact.
• On your car’s ignition: The electromagnetic principles employed when starting your car are a theory and not a fact.
• On clothing: That vertical stripes make you look thinner is a theory and not a fact.

I wonder what other objects should have stickers on them?

Yes, more WoW.

Last night I encountered what was either a very enterprising individual with poor written English, or a farmer bot. I was out in the middle of nowhere trying to finish a quest when a very very high level character runs up to me and says “I got items!” Then he put several very nice items that my character can’t use in my trade window. I said that they were nice items and that I did not want to buy them. He then cast some buff spells on me, said “OK, GL” and headed off to pester another PC I could see on the horizon.

The most notorious farmers are called the Adena Chinese Farmers who have a long time presence messing with the economies of Everquest and Lineage. Because of the real world market for in-game cash, apparently some organizations can run a profitable business hiring cheap labour to “staff” characters in game and have them working in teams sharing powerful characters 24/7 — extracting in-game cash through working on quests, killing rich mobs and selling/trading items to other players in game. The “bot” moniker refers to the poor communication skills of non-native English speakers on a predominantly English-speaking server and their driven behaviour — which sometimes verges on the robotic. The people behind the bots are real people and participate in the game with a kind of commercial friendliness, so it’s not capital-E Evil — these characters monopolose in-game resources in the same way that a large and single-minded uberguild’s characters would do.

Broken Toys links to a fantastic WoW forum entry which has a cheat sheet for helping with communication with Chinese farmers.

[...snip useful phrases...]
ru liao quai yao lan diao le
The cheese is going to hell.

qing wen che shuo zai na li ne?
Excuse me, where’s the toilet?

er…. qing wen ze li you duo shao ge zhen zhen de ren zai wan ya?
Er…. how many of you guys are human?

Ni bei sha shi le? Rang wo yong mo shu lai shi ni fu huo
You’re dead? Let me fix that with some reincarnation magick. (refering to rez spells)

wo hen xi huan ni. Wo men ke yi jiao ge peng you ma?
I like you. Can we forge a friendship together?

da jia zhen tao yan wo
Everybody REALLY hates me.

qing wen ni you mei you kan dao mou xie xiao ai ren? ta ze yang ai, you bai fa he hu xu, shou shang dai zhe zhui
Have you seen this dwarf? this short, white hair and beard, carries a club in his hand?

Via Terra Nova: Blizzard announces 600,000 sales in Australia, New Zealand and America. They also claim to have supported 200,000 simultaneous users during holiday season peaks. Not too far short of the 800,000 estimates pre-Christmas and certainly the biggest thing outside of Japan & Korea since Everquest.

My little dwarven hunter is just a drop in this ocean.

One of the bugbears of MMOGs is lag. Dropped packets, server load, and excessive packet round trip time all make for an interesting experience. The mail system in WoW is one of the indicators that the servers are struggling… that and having to wait in a queue when you log in. WoW has a postal system where characters can send each other notes, money and items — and even arrange for cash on delivery.

My guess is that Blizzard are paranoid about the synchronization and duplication bugs that have allowed the economics of other games to distort or collapse. I suspect that they are running all transactions through a serialized transaction processing system to make all item/currency transfers ACID (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, and Durable), and journaling everything to keep a tight reign on the economy. The mail system seems to be a second-class citizen in a centralized WoW accounting system — mailed items do not arrive immediately, so they are queued somewhere. Pushing mail onto the queue takes a long time under load, and pulling mail seems to take even longer. Kudos to Blizzard, though. The servers typically survive peak load, get better and hum along in short order, even at the expense of the mail system. Some other MMOGs just die. Maybe WoW does die, but it’s not that visible to users.

Another insight into the underlying implementation is evident in an occasional strange behaviour of camps/collections of mobs (moving objects - or monsters).

Everquest makes you wait 30 seconds when you moved from one zone to another, and you couldn’t see into one zone from another — they were hidden with curved corridors, strategically placed walls, odd placees to put a mountain etc. Almost all of the WoW world can be traversed as a seamless experience. In WoW you can walk for an hour crossing a lot of countryside, passing camps, cities, dungeons, farms, mountain keeps, gnomish drag racers — the usual stuff.

Each camp of mobs seems to be implemeneted as an autonomous process. How can I tell? Sometimes you’ll be weeding out smugglers and trappers at their sekrit advance camp right next to the alliance’s local watchtower when they will start to lag, run with their legs underground or start beating on you even though they’re half a mile away. On these occasions it’s not unusual to see the evil denizens of this camp just fade away before your eyes… all of them. Sometimes it even happens when everything is going swimmingly.

*Pop* they’re gone. Just tents, wrecked cartwheels and fixed scenery are left behind. Even the fireplace they spend their time plotting and sharpening their knives around is gone. Wander down the road and there is a pack of coyotes waiting to mug you. Some of them even wanders close to the smuggler/trapper camp — so it’s not the whole virtual world gone insane, just this camp. Ouch, you are being burned — because the local game client knows where the fireplace should be and you just stood in it — even though it’s not visible anymore.

And then — *poof* — all of the smugglers and trappers fade back into existence around you, complete with fireplace. Process restarted, mobs ready to give up their traps, nets and linen swatch collections while you defend the human hinterlands again.

Maybe this is a clever load balancing strategy — move the most active camp processes onto underutilized CPUs, or move underutilized ones off busy CPUs. Maybe it’s an occasionally run process sanity audit. Maybe it’s just a process dying and being restarted. Maybe it’s some human having a bit of fun by messing with my brain.

I’m probably completly on the wrong track, but in spite of that it hints at a very nicely designed, and well-partitioned server engine. Surviving huge numbers of users and keeping them happy, wanting more and paying US$10-14/month each for your entertainment is quite a testimony if they can keep it up.

European release of WoW is slated for this month.

Billmon’s blog stirs, briefly, back to life. A very worthwhile observation.

Sub-Saharan Africa is home to just over 10% of the world’s population – and almost two-thirds of all people living with HIV. In 2003, an estimated three million people became newly infected and 2.2 million died (75% of the three million AIDS deaths globally that year).
– UNAIDS 2004 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic - Executive Summary

Thus far, aid agencies had estimated the death toll at 50,000 and warned that it might eventually run into hundreds of thousands. More than a million people had fled their homes.
– Another human tragedy

As a child, I would wonder why my parents were visibly and audibly upset by television images of local car accidents while they obeserved images of earthquakes, typhoons, war, disease and famine with a kind of guilty silence.

I suppose that from the perspective of a comfortable Australian existence a car accident is a too familiar and awful tragedy that could believably happen to you or someone you’ve met. A civil war that kills 50,000 people in a faraway land is hard to imagine. A civil war harvests its victims slowly, quietly and with motives that are hard to package in soundbite-sized television news items — an excellent technique for keeping the mass media uninterested. Evidence of state-sponsored genocide can only hold the world’s attention briefly.

Western attitudes to HIV/AIDS rarely move beyond ambivalence. A wave of illness that washes away lives and leaves buildings standing isn’t televisual.

The Sumatran earthquake and tsunami are like a car accident in our neighbourhood — It could have been me — It’s something I’ve had nightmares about — the accounts allow me to easily understand the tragedy. The immediacy of the images and accounts from a region with good access to cameras, communication and travel provides a shared experience that’s impossible to ignore.

Empathy with victims of this earthquake has inspired an army of volunteers and unprecedented generosity. The challenge for individuals is to help direct this outpouring of assistance into a sustained interest in less visual tragedies.

I resonated with Chris’ excellent sermon notes:

But the challenge for the world – as individuals, communities, and nations – is to make that generosity last? We must meet the immediate needs of the victims; but will we go beyond that? In this New Year, when the next major news event happens, when the next new reality TV show begins, when the next football season comes around, when some local gossip or scandal drives the tsunami pictures from our screens - will our generosity extend to helping the decade-long task of rebuilding nations?

I hope that now many people will begin to remember the other less visual, and ongoing tragedies and sustain some energy for helping those people as well as the survivors of 26-12-2004.

The Howard government’s response to the earthquake and tsunami has been generous and responsive. There are nits to pick (Where are the details? Mention the UN!), but on the whole the response is something Australians are proud of. Our regional neighbours find our response an encouraging change after a period of Australian arrogance and foreign policy gaffs.

In the face of a generous and well coordinated response it’s easy to see why the Labor party can’t get much airtime. Government announcements of assistance aren’t news stories that require a balance interview. The only opportunity to increase political capital is to support the government’s actions, offer comfort to those affected and provide new insight into methods of assistance. Letters to the editor complain about a lack of Labor party visibility. Half-hearted interviews with Kevin Rudd are treated as a distraction by voters. It’s a hard time to be called “The Opposition.”

Another possible reason for a lack of participation have emerged. This is not good news.

Opposition Leader Mark Latham is suffering from a repeat attack of acute pancreatitis and has been confined to his bed on doctor’s orders.

Doctors are performing tests to try to find the cause of the latest attack.

Mr Latham suffered from pancreatitis last August, shortly before the federal election campaign started.

On that occasion, he was treated for the painful condition in hospital.

Acting Labor leader Chris Evans is expected to make a statement about Mr Latham’s condition today.