Wednesday, October 1, 2008
For the last weeks a strain of a cold virus has traversed the land. I have caught my share and been less than my usual self for a couple of weeks - it is only lately I feel the strength return.
The upside of this, is that I have taken the time to level up a rogue. Previously, I have considered the non-hybrid classes slightly boring, as your role typically is very limited. However, the classes capable of healing or tanking face another problem - others would rather them stick to tanking and healing, instead of working as a damage dealer. Which of course made the hybrids less hybrid.
Levelling a rogue is quite a different experience. When people invite you to a group, there is no question about what function you will perform - you do your crowd control, and you kill. No buffing, no auras, no nothing. Truly a simple life.
Before reaching outland, I levelled as a subtlety rogue. While I read in most places that specializing in combat and using swords would be the best way to level, I found the survivability of subtlety far too tempting. Also, it made PvP possible while levelling. Hemorrhage was useful, the added bonus damage helped make up for my bad weapons.
After reaching Outland, I quickly got my hands on some daggers. I respecced to assassination, all the way to Mutilate, and put the rest in the subtlety tree. My damage got much higher, I would estimate around 50% increase. In practice, it changed me from doing slightly less damage than a same-level hunter, to passing him with around 20% margin. Of course, to use Mutilate effectively, it did require some setup. I suddenly could use nothing but daggers. Getting behind the target was usually not an issue, but I also needed my poisons to kick in. For killing thrash mobs, there usually was not enough time to both wait for poisons to be applied and use finishers, though I tried to use Slice and Dice when time permitted.
While good in groups, assassination has been truly outstanding for soloing. A normal fight goes like this:
Stealth > Cheap Shot > Mutilate > Kidney Shot > Mutilate > Mutilate > Envenom
Due to having Improved Kidney Shot and Find Weakness, the second Mutilate hits much harder than the first. So that’s the time to use Cold Blood for a little extra burst. Usually the enemy is dead halfway through the sequence described above.
Monday, September 22, 2008
For the last couple of weeks I have been ill, with an unfriendly cold. Few things are as frustrating - at first it is simple to know you are ill, with the fever keeping you down and an annoying voice keeping people at a distance. Then after the first days, you start to feel a little better, but still lacking the spark. Trying to do the things you always do leaves you only halfway there, quickly learning your limits. I would say that has been my last week, sure I’ve gotten things done, but more through willpower than anything else.
The only thing that I really enjoy about being ill is that eventually you get better (unless you are really in trouble), and the feeling of regaining power is truly awesome.
So here I am. Feeling awesome, ready for another week.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Dagfinn Nordbø wrote about the standard of the comments and debate in the Norwegian online newspapers. He is not the only one to notice how unproductive and unfriendly some of these comments are. While there are exceptions, where mistakes and misconceptions in the article can be corrected, that is not usually the case.
In my view, there are several reasons that the debates and comment fields have been used in this manner. These could also serve as action points, and some of them are already implemented on some of the sites.
- A purpose
Just adding a comment field, or a forum section does not a good debate make. Even I can create an online forum, it seems like many have added it “because everybody else has”. There is also this train of thought that it is “free user-generated content”. The imfamous 4chan(NSFW) is also filled with user-generated content, that does not mean it would be an awesome addition to any site.
- The right people
Forums or comment sections usually become so much more interesting when they are used for two-way communication. Getting the right people not only write articles and start threads, but also participate in the debates are important. If authors do not see the point of participating, why should anyone else?
- Moderation
The modern press typically hates censorship. This is part of the reason given as to why they prefer the users moderate themselves, not by appointing moderators but by giving the users the ability to report unwanted content. A more recent addition in these forums have been the ability to “vote” for a post, which means it will be more visible. While this is a step in the right direction, there is no real replacement for having professional moderators.
In my opinion the main problem is that these comment fields and forums were implemented without considering what kind of content one would want, and what steps had to be taken. With so many visitors every day, there must be many good posts and comments that not are written. Steps should be taken to make these forums and comment fields used in better ways.
Last week I spent some of my extra income (from working at Opera Software) to buy a good flatscreen TV. They’ve been showing in stores for years now, and eventually I gave in to temptation. The TV of choice was the lastest Samsung 40″ LCD (LE40A656). Originally the plan was to get one of the Sony Bravia screens, but the one from Samsung was slightly cheaper, and got equally good reviews.
At first, the LCD picture seemed strange, very bright and burned out colors. After some light adjustments, partly using the onscreen controls, and partly my head adapting to the screen, there was one issue that stayed with me.
Artifacts
While the awesome “Yes, Minister” series was a little soft on the edges, it looked good on the big screen. But watching the summer Olympics was really not a pleasure, with huge squares and ringing effects clearly visible around the contestants. I dragged a scene from the 300 trailer into Adobe Photoshop, and exported with various JPEG compression levels to show exactly what I mean:
The left part exhibits the strongest artifacts, wheres the right part is in near-perfect quality. Furthermore, the faster and more dramatic the action is, the more artifacts will be on the screen. So fast-paced action and sport events, which are two common reason to buy that new TV, will look bad. The big question is, why does the cable company offer “HD-TV” channels, with higher resolution, when the they can’t allocate enough bits and bytes for the normal channels?
Sending normal(SD) TV in shit quality is not the way if you want us to buy HD-TV from you, guys!
Several reports have been made on the war in South Ossetia, which is recognized as an independant nation by Russia, but considered a part of Georgia by almost everyone else. It has been very unclear what is actually going on, but it is clear that the Georgian government have made a much greater effort to communicate with the international community.
Recently, a russian soldier posted images to a russian online forum. Be advised that these are unedited images of the war and results thereof. While the images are disturbing, it is good they were published. Once again the Internet gets used in a good way.
For the most part, comments on online newspapers in Norway are not really fruitful discussions. However, today I stumbled across an article where it proved very useful. Dagbladet had an article about two divers from the brithish olympics team, claiming that the 26 year old Aldridge was blaming his 14 year old partner for the loss. After reading the comments I looked at the orignal article, which Dagbladet had based their story on, which clearly portrayed a more balanced picture.
Glad the comments for once did something good!
Towards the end of a project for mobile or another portable device, we often need to improve the loading speed and cut down on space used. When using PNG graphics, you can get far by simply re-compressing the file and stripping away uneeded information. While there are GUIs that will let you do this, it is not very hard to automate this in Windows. Check out Folder Options | File Types | PNG | Advanced, and press the “New…” button to add another action for this file type.
I have added all the 3 below, and based on my experience PNGOut provides in most cases the best compression, as well as having the advantage of overwriting the input file. Which means that I search project folder for .png, right click, hit “Optimize with PNGOut” and grab a coffee.
Quietly tests ALL possible compression levels, and overwrites the input file.
C:\optipng.exe -q -zc1-9 -zm1-9 -zs0-3 -f0-5 "%1"
Quietly removes all metadata, such as colorspaces and gamma levels, saves the file as <old_file>_CRUSHED.png.
C:\pngcrush.exe -rem gAMA -rem cHRM -rem iCCP -rem sRGB -brute -e _CRUSHED.png "%1"
Quietly removes all metadata, and overwrites the input file with the output if it is smaller.
C:\pngout.exe /q /y "%1"
PS: There are no advantages to doing the same optimization twice, but chaining the tools one after the other occasionally yields better results in my experience. Also note that the options I use are the most CPU-intensive I could find for each tool. There is very little space gained by doing this, so feel free to go with the defaults if you want to save some CPU cycles.
This post was inspired by Neil Turner’s blog.
The first barrier is broken, as this is my first post. Hopefully it will pave the way for an avalanche of quality posts on this blog. While I have been writing before, I have never really liked the blogging software. The latest version of WordPress seems to be of quality, and among the default themes was one I really liked.
Right now there are so many things going on, but I will try to share my thoughts here once a week. Topics will be around my work as a graphics designer, my master studies and some gaming tactics. Until then, take care.