Peter Wooley’s Blog

My Top Picks may be a little late (2007 was so last last year), but my research of these items really went all the way up to end of 2007. I began writing this article in December of 2007, but finally finished it here in the second half of 2009.

Best PC Game: Portal

Portal, released by Valve Software and bundled in The Orange Box, has been a source of several late nights. This puzzle-gone-wild game takes game mechanics as they have been and shoots a hole right through ‘em. The one astonishing feature that makes this game incredible is in its title, the magic of portals. Armed with a gun capable of shooting two connected portals, you can fire one portal onto a wall next to you and one in the ceiling high above you and when you run into the portal next to you, you’ll come out of the portal above you and fall to the ground. It’s a fairly simple idea that becomes complex quickly, both in the physics of the portals themselves, as well as the mind-bending solutions to the puzzles.

When I first heard about a team of students who hacked the Source engine to create Portal, I was more than a little interested. Once I saw the concept implemented in an early version of the game, I knew it was something awesome, possibly novel to video game-dom. Upon seeing it, I had to get to the bottom of how it was done. While I gave up much quicker than I should have back then, the developers gave me a treat, as developer commentary was included in the game that overlays narration by the developers and graphic enhancements to explain concepts as you play through the game. I can’t say I could code the thing myself, but I have an understanding of how the portals work and am still as mystified by them as I was before.

Someday, I’d love to see the gun integrated into Half-Life.

Best Wii Game: Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock

I know, I know, Super Mario Galaxy was the Game of the Year, and I do love it, but Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock for the Wii provides such an emotional high when you rock out on your guitar controller and become one with the song. There is literally a moment, when you’re playing a song that’s a real challenge, where the song seems to slow down and the colored notes seem connected to your fingers.

The Easy, Medium & Hard modes offer a pretty gradual learning curve, which fit my play style as well as that of my wife, sister-in-law, brother-in-law, other brother-in-law, and even father-in-law. Expert, on the other hand, was a real challenge. I still remember the moment I beat Slow Ride—the first song in Expert—standing in the living room of Kara’s parent’s house, lights off, not expecting to make it through the final solo. Somehow, perhaps magically, I beat it with 3 stars. While I continued through Expert mode and beat a few of the sets, beating Slow Ride I’ve yet to beat Through the Fire and Flames on Expert and assert my claim as the true Guitar Hero.

I’m running out of podcasts to listen to on my commute. With two hours of driving every day, I’m managing to burn through more audio than I ever have. Currently, my favorites are StackOverflow, Software Engineering Radio, and Hanselminutes. I’ve been catching TWiT Live, but haven’t clicked the three buttons it would take to subscribe in iTunes.

Given the nearly two months since I started at McAfee, I’ve now officially caught up on everything. Late last week, I tuned to the radio to find something entertaining. There’s a #fail. In the morning, I couldn’t escape the morning shows. In the afternoon, everything sounded the same. In frustration, I ended up turning off the radio and just sitting in silence.

Silence isn’t golden

After two sessions of silence, I realized that I wasn’t just sitting with my thoughts, but rather noticing every sound in and out of my car. My fan makes a really annoying clicking when the dial is set below the 3rd setting. Combustion engines are loud and rumbly—why don’t we have plug-in commuter cars yet? You really shouldn’t buy cars with a light-colored interior; they can’t hide dirt and just look dingy all the time.

Embrace the Classical

Yesterday evening, I remembered that I had skipped one station in my search for listenable radio: 89.9 All Classical. For three trips now, I’ve been listening to the sounds of Strauss, Bach, and other composers I will never remember. Suddenly, I wasn’t listening to my car, or the outside world, or my tangential thoughts, I was thinking about my life, dreams, and goals. (Do note, I wasn’t paying that much attention to the music, sorry Strauss!)

I even came up with a list of things I want to do in the very near future:

1. Build a Social, Browser-based Game
2. Host my own 1U box at a Colo
3. Beat Super Mario Galaxy (I have 35 stars)
4. Write software to make a tangible object move
5. Finish development of a Web App that’ll fulfill a dream
6. Bonus: Hold my newborn baby

Now that I have the content for my drive, I need to figure out how to make the trip shorter so I can get some more work done!

What George Orwell may not have realized when creating 1984’s Newspeak was that a language that could shrink rather than grow might actually be a good idea. For the past two years, Gilad Bracha and a few other folks have been working on a new programming language, called Newspeak, that might actually be able to start off with a mind-bendingly huge feature set, but do it all with just a few brilliant concepts and stay remarkably small in the process.

Josh, a co-worker of mine and a Serial Language Enthusiast, let me know about this new development. Part Smalltalk, a splash of Beta, a helping of Self, and a sprinkling of Pixie Dust makes this language one to take a look at. In Episode 140 of Software Engineering Radio, Gilad explained the concepts of the language. Three things jumped out at me:

1. Class hierarchies, as in Classes within classes within classes. Classes, Modules, Namespaces, and Mixins are all handled with the same construct. Top-level classes are Namespaces and you can have multiple instances of these as Modules—giving you side-by-side deployments—and Mixins come by default as all parent classes are dynamically set at runtime.
2. Dynamic Typing is used, which I love, but they’re working on implementing Pluggable Types, an optional typing system that will allow custom type grammars. Though, keeping a dynamic runtime, the types will only be checked at compile time, which is basically the opposite of ActionScript 3 running without strict mode.
3. Network Aware. The language knows the Internet, as indicated on the Newspeak homepage:
   

   …we believe in a notion of service oriented computing that allows for off-line operation and leverages the inherent advantages of client devices, while utilizing the strengths of the network.

For someone working on the web, this is exciting stuff. Going beyond simply being aware of the network, Newspeak will not only sync with data from the cloud, but with the entire application—running application code client-side. It’ll be like updating the latest version of TweetDeck through AIR’s update system, but only the modified application objects and data will be sent over the wire. Now this next part is purely conjecture, but as multicore processing will be a focus of Newspeak, an implementation of Erlang-style actors may not be out of the question, and hot-swappable code could make the entire update process as smooth as butter.

What I have to disagree with

From Episode 140 of Software Engineering Radio (starting at 2:06), Gilad says,

The real goal of Newspeak is to create a really nice environment where you can program for the  web without worrying about the web, without dealing with all the mechanics of different languages: CSS, HTML, DOM, Database back-end, whatever. In general, to create a language—not just to run in a web browser—but a language for a network world.

Hold it right there! Newspeak sounds like a great idea, but I’m not convinced it will allow people to “program for the web without worrying about the web.” If anything, this sounds like ASP.NET and its automagic markup, styles, and scripts that makes kittens cry. While the day may come when HTML will be treated as the Assembly language of the Web, we are far from it. With so many browsers, so many brand new ideas, and so much further to go in nearly every aspect, from content, accessibility, features, and speed, we’ll be lucky if we get there by 2030, when IE finally implements the CSS3 Template Layout Module.

By then, I will most likely be the old, cantankerous coot that still remembers the days when developers knew why you put the <script /> at the bottom and how to style a <ul /> to make drop-down navigation without JavaScript. But, with HTML5 still on its way and CSS3 being slowly implemented module-after-module, I doubt I’ll have to be very cantankerous anytime soon. Until then, I’ll be playing with a new language and seeing what this Internet fad can really do—even if it isn’t reinvented by Newspeak.

As you have no doubt heard, Tyler Sticka has announced that he will be leaving McAfee. Many of you know that Tyler and I attended the Art Institute of Portland together and, since then, we formed the first Interaction Design team at US Digital (along with Erik Jung), taught at the Art Institute of Portland, and were working closely on Enterprise software at McAfee.

Designing and developing with Tyler is an exhilarating experience. He’s quick, thoughtful, and engaging—and I know he’ll continue to go further as he takes his next step.

With our history, I imagine some might think I’ll be leaving to join Tyler in the near future. I want to say that, while working with Tyler is a ton of fun, I have no plans to leave McAfee. My current role has been, and is, an exciting challenge. With just over a month and a half under my belt, I’m enjoying both the people and code I get to develop with. The five day work weeks have been a little tough to get used to, along with the commute, but free soda and fast-paced, testable, continuously-integrated web development is awesome.

While we may not be working under the same roof, do not fret; professionally we are not done.

Recently at the Art Institute of Portland, I gave a presentation to my Advanced Scripting class on lessons web app developers can take from World of Warcraft. While playing one night, I stopped and pondered all of the things that just work. I began to consider why WoW was so wildly successful and thought about what I could take from my experience as a player and apply to web development. The presentation is hosted below, which will be most easily understood if coupled with the notes following.

What’s the big deal?

• World of Warcraft (or WoW) reached 11.5 Million active subscriptions before Christmas of 2008.
• The graphics engine was originally built sometime during or before 2001, making it around 8 years old.
• Nielsen reported that during 2008, WoW players played an average of 671 minutes (or 11 hours) per week.
• In the past week, the quest titled Jack Me Some Lumber was completed over 680,000 times.

World of Warcrafting Web Applications

• The basics of a Web Application and WoW are similar:
  • Each attempts to create an Internet-based experience where users are given functionality they would not have in an offline or computerless world,
  • Each is served from servers that can crash, software that has bugs, and tubes that can get clogged,
  • And each has the imperative of creating an experience worth their users time and, potentially, money.
• As WoW is one of my main non-web hobbies, I want to justify why I spend my time (Over 75 days, logged in) and money ($727.48).
• As I started to pay attention, the plethora of applicable lessons became obvious.

Take the time

• Blizzard first announced development of WoW in 2001, and released in November of 2004. Basically, three years.
• Development was well under way by 2001, so it is not unreasonable to assume at least a year of work had gone into it by then. Essentially, 4 years, if not 5.
• Lesson: Spending the time to do it right, even when others beat you to the punch, works quite well. (Save for Windows Vista.)

Use iterative design

• In the nearly 4½ years since WoW’s release, it has released two expansion packs and 18 substanial content patches.
• Each update has brought with it brand new content: locations, dungeons, enemies, gear, pets, and more.
• In the same way, gameplay has evolved immensely. The Talent system, which “can make your character a specialist in one of their available class roles, change their entire playstyle, and offer countless combinations for you to experiment with”, has been modified several times.
• During the beta, the entire system was ditched until a better one could be created.
• And all of this came with no apology. The developers of WoW changed the game in a way they felt was positive and defended it vehemently.
• Lesson: Change your app to make it better, and defend your decisions.

But!

Listen to your users

• Whether you’re just starting development or making your 7th version: involve your users.
• For every content patch in WoW, Public Test Realms are used to test out new game mechanics and features. And people are excited to help. The testers copy their character or use a pre-made one and play, knowing full well their progress will be wiped out by the time the patch goes live. But, it’s new and cool and fun—and they feel privileged to get involved before other people.
• During the development of Wrath of the Lich King, I got a picked randomly for a spot in the Beta. I loved it, I even bragged to my friends.
• I spent an entire evening running around the new continent, Northrend. Barely anyone else was there; it felt like I was the very first person to see it. It was awesome.
• Once I had run around, I tried playing the first Heroic player class: the Death Knight.
• Lo and behold, they had implemented a feedback system. Everything quest you were given in the game could be rated for ease-of-use, obviousness, and even fun. With that data, they modified quest explanations, changed quest rewards, updated the map, and made their application better.
• Lesson: Change your app, but base your decisions on real feedback.

Offer something addictive

• In my freshman and sophomore year of high school, I played Diablo II 6 – 8 hours per day. I had a good handle on my classes, so no one really noticed. And I was “working on my computer”, so my parents were cool with it. What I was discovering is the power of flow and addiction.
• As Diablo II is a Blizzard title, I couldn’t wait to see what they would come up with in the MMO space.
• Strangely, where Diablo II used the chance of finding better and better items to hook me, World of Warcraft used social networking.
• Don’t get me wrong, I loved leveling, doing quests, and getting better and better gear; but World of Warcraft actually slows you down, in those areas. Leveling takes longer than in Diablo II, there is no true power leveling, quests can be very, very long, and new items are more based on hard work than chance.
• What was encouraged, was connections with other people.
• It starts off slowly. Some hard quests suggest grouping with other people. A chat pane is always available, where people discuss everything going on (for good or ill). People can create guilds where groups of people can wear a tabard and have chat channel just for them. Dungeons (or instances) provide great rewards, if you can get 5, 10, 25, or 40 people to complete it together. And you can always talk directly to someone, no matter where in the World (of Warcraft) they are.
• The best part: WoW makes shy geeks, like me, cooperate with other players in ways they wouldn’t do in the real world.
• Lesson: Create something unexpectedly addictive, and introduce it slowly.

Customize, Embrace & Extend

• Customization of the game experience is essential in WoW.
• On curse.com, there are 3,993 addons to install, ecah modifying the user experience in their own way.
• Personally, I use 25 addons. One of which allows me to easily coordinate specific spells with other Paladins. Another makes the chat interface a little more usable with a timestamp, clickable links and color-coding. And another still throws everything that’s happening to me and everything I’m doing to others all around my character—so I try to comprehend it.
• In a recent patch, Blizzard introduced a new Calendar feature. Unfortunately, there were several addons that already served this function. Being rather bold, the WoW Calendar implemented several features the others couldn’t offer, such as always up-to-date holiday schedules, a tie-in to their external wowarmory.com, and a more unified look and feel.
• They saw a feature the community had made, and improved upon it. This ruffled feathers with the developers of the other Calendar addons, but they can continue to develop their addons and make them better—possibly pushing Blizzard to implement more functionality in their own feature.
• Lesson: Give your community tools to customize their experience, but don’t be afraid to work with them to better the core experience.

Make it less expensive

• World of Warcraft started at $50.00 for the original game. Over time, it dropped to $40, then $30. When The Burning Crusade was released, the original game could be found for $20.
• If you pay month-to-month, WoW costs 14.99 per month. If you pay every three months, it’s $13.99/month, and every six months is $12.99/month.
• If you buy WoW with both expansions today, it would cost roughly $80 ($39.99 + $39.99) for the first free month. If you bought the games when they were new, you may have paid as much as $220 ($79.99 + $69.99 + $69.99). Same games, 64% cheaper.
• Usable business models on the web are few and far between, but maybe consistent price drops on web apps over time could be the next big thing?
• Lesson: If you’re charging for your app, make it cheaper over time.

Make it pretty

• WoW is beautiful.
• It’s cartoony, colorful, and adorable.
• It uses a graphics engine that is pushing a decade old, but still pulls off some amazing scenes.
• Whatever you do, make your app a joy to use.
• Pay attention to how many clicks a user must make.
• Use eye candy.
• We all know that craigslist works well, but looks awful. It can still work well and look good.
• Lesson: Even with web limitations, make your app gorgeous.

I’m always interested to hear feedback. Let me know if you agree or disagree with anything I put forward here, or share lessons you’ve found in WoW.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve accepted a UI Development position at McAfee.

This June 1st, I’ll join an amazing group of people developing the best software in the industry. In addition, I’ll be working with an old friend who recently made a similar transition.

With this great opportunity, I must bid farewell to the wonderful people of US Digital. The experience and guidance I’ve received over the past two years will be indispensable as I move forward. I will forever remember the dynamic and collaborative team, along with the many challenges overcome, problems solved, and triumphs shared.

(Apologies to Tyler Sticka for the image and, subsequently, Alex Ross for the illustration.)

“I can’t generate 1000 images—it’s not practical, I can’t use a server-side script—there’s the sandbox and it’s lame, but there has to be some way to just use JavaScript to generate pixel data,” I thought.

Since releasing Gmail FavIcon Alerts version 2.5, I’ve spent a ton of time trying to figure out how to make it better. Thankfully, users were more than happy to help. After talking with some friends, I realized that the key feature missing from all of the favicon message count scripts was dynamic unread message count—being able to know exactly how many messages you had by looking at your favicon. But, how could this be done? Embedding the images as base64 is how most of the scripts work, but base64 is lengthy, and storing 1000 iterations to give exact unread message counts up to 999 would be ridiculous in both size and scope.

Thankfully, while teaching the WDIM355 Client-Side Scripting class at the Art Institute of Portland, the students showed quite an interest in the Canvas tag. After playing with it for a bit, they detailed how they were using it. The methods currently available consist of things like fillRect(), strokeRect(), and drawImage(). It felt like Flash, but lower-level, geekier even.

It suddenly made sense: draw the unread count over the icon using the canvas tag! Starting on a Friday evening, I began. First, I drew a red square in the middle of  a 16×16 pixel Canvas, and it worked! I started drawing shapes, patterns and anything I could to test the speed and capabilities. I couldn’t have been happier. Then I hit a snag: images.

Working with images is never the best experience, but drawing them with the Canvas tag, it turns out, is just plain awful. Because speed is important, the script really needed to keep the images embedded. Base64 is great for that, but I discovered a little issue with the drawImage() function of the canvas: you have to supply it with a standard Image object or HTMLImageElement. This didn’t seem like a problem, until I started setting the Image.src to a Data URI. For some reason, I couldn’t get the images to load and I kept getting the NS_ERROR_DOM_SECURITY_ERR error. After quite a bit of searching, I discovered that, for security reasons, Image objects can’t have their src attribute set to a Data URI!

After nearly giving up, I took a break with my wife, and at some point during the break, I came up with a crazy idea: use fillRect() and a 16×16 array to draw the image, pixel-by-pixel. Crazy, you say? Loco, indeed. I spent the next hour writing the loop and adding each individual hex value into an array. I argued that writing a script to do it would have taken longer—I was wrong. After a bit of number confusion on my part, I got it working and it was beautiful. Literally, pixel-for-pixel, it matched. I had to take a minute to enjoy the hack that sat before me.

The last step was to add the numbers, which turned out to be the easiest part. I created a pixel map of Tyler’s pixel numbers, did some math and drew the background. Even though it took a bit more tweaking, I basically came out with the finished product!

It took plenty of hours, involved several people I’m grateful to, and was some of the most fun I’ve had hacking since I first picked up the script! And now, the script has now been featured on Lifehacker twice, for 2.5 and now 3.0! And it just past 8,000 installs!

I had a conversation with Tyler at US Digital many Thursdays ago about what makes music “good”, in objective terms. Anyone who has spent more than a half hour with Tyler will know how he feels about music. I’ve known him a bit longer, and have had several conversations about music, but never one that got so rudimentary. He said, and I have to agree, that good music is honest.

While listening to a story about the movie Juno on NPR, I heard both the director and screenwriter agree that honesty is what makes a movie great, so it seems only natural that music works similarly. Of course, how does someone judge the honesty of a track, an album, an artist?

The whole discussion arose over my general dislike of Björk, an artist praised in many geek circles for her electronic stylings and eccentric nature. She tends to use excessive amounts of dissonance between her vocals and instrumentals, and it drives me out of my mind. The music often feels uncomfortable throughout entire tracks, which pulls me out of the music and causes me to focus on the vocals and instruments. Bringing this up with Tyler, he expressed that he’d rather hear a track full of dissonance than perfect harmony, if it track felt more honest.

This point has been rolling around in my head for over a year and here’s what I’ve come up with: I’m terrible at judging the honesty of a song. While I’m not “into” pop, my default reaction is not repulsion to today’s Top 40. I can’t listen to an entire track, but it doesn’t upset me deep within my soul. Upon further inspection, I’m nearly always turned off by the cookie-cutter nature of the instrumentals and terrible lyrics.

On the flip side, discordant music cannot stay within my earshot for very long. I need to stop the terrible sounds that assail my mind. Thankfully, mostly because of Tyler, I’ve given some of these sounds another try and grown to love them—My Bloody Valentine being an exquisite example.

In essence, pleasing sounds make me happy, but once I can find the heart of the music—it’s honesty, I suppose—I can make a lasting decision about the music I listen to. That means I love Radiohead, The Submarines, and Howard Shore, but I still can’t stand to listen to Björk.

I’m now more curious than ever to hear how everyone else finds “good” music.

Earlier this evening, I tweeted:

“At intermission of Oliver [the Play]! It kind of makes me want to try some acting again, or at least working in fiction.”

Following this, @kmcdade suggested I join NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month.  Considering it sounded like something I’d want to be a part of and it had a sign-up form, I went ahead and dove in. Little did I know, this is the real deal.  The idea is that you write a novel—a whole—novel in the month of November. It’s a brilliant idea. It’s a terrifying idea. As I dove deeper into the site, finding the Vancouver, WA region forums and reading all about it, I realized just how inadequate I would feel trying to do this. People have done this many years in a row, they already have their plots decided on and are attempting to figure out how to add more drama. Here I am, pushed to do a little writing because of an Oliver Twist performance and an itch I’ve never scratched.

I backed away from the forums, decided against joining the region group (then they’d know I was there, right?), and ran to the seclusion of my blog. If I did do it, without joining a group or comparing myself to other people, I wonder what I would write about? I use to have this recurring dream about the death of a man’s fiance and his dealing with her death. It ended with a rather epic scene on a hotel rooftop, in the rain, where the man discovers the guy that killed her. I used to think about a story that took place in near isolation. The protaganist walked around and dealt with keeping his surroundings healthy, while he thought back on how things were. I had fun trying to craft ways that for him to be isolated, the space station was the most fun. An abandoned town was terrifyingly nice, as well. I had a romance or two, this before I found romance myself. I tried fan fiction for Starcaft, Diablo, and Warcraft, but those never worked out.Oh yeah, I had written down the opening for a story several times! It starts with the narrator recalling. The scene opens up on a happy little suburb, with the yonger-self narrator watering the flowers outside of his house. Out of nowhere, he’s abducted by three men. I can still remember how it played out in my mind. The problem with that story is that it never had a plot, only an introduction. I do wonder what happened to that guy, though. Obviously, he’s alive. Maybe I will try this writing thing out.

After watching Tyler give his This is Not a Graphic Design presentation (which I wrote about), I got to thinking about the horror that is presenting. I worry a fair amount. I can totally believe that Laurence Olivier would throw up before each performance. However, I really do love presenting. I suppose I am teaching a class at the Art Institute and I have and do present and show-off my portfolio to clients and on-lookers whenever someone will look. Granted, what excites me enough to share and teach is oft more technical than most, but they’re things I would have enjoyed hearing (then I could have learned them earlier!) and I think others would too.
With that solidly in my mind, I began to think about what gets me up the morning, why I love going into work at US Digital, and how others might benefit from it. Since Wednesday night, I’ve been rolling the idea of talking about the LAMP stack. Granted, at work we’re not using all the correct applications (our M is MSSQL not MySQL), but I’ve worked with true LAMP, WAMP, and several other unmentionable stacks, and there’s a small project that I’ll be dedicating some time to that will be using it to LAMP to its fullest.

Obviously, the LAMP stack is nothing new to many developers, but I do believe people miss the benefits and power of Linux and especially Apache. Along those lines, I’d want to expand the talk to not only LAMP, but building the perfect workflow: from using Subversion (or other SCM software) to VNC to Mantis Bug Tracking to PEAR to PECL and all of the things that I believe make the perfect Web stack.

What do you think? Would you care to listen to how to build the perfect Web stack from the ground up? If so, let me know in the comments!