Playing With Sharp Objects

For those of you using Mint for web site statistics, I have an Adsense Pepper plugin that some will find useful. The original author hasn’t been on the support boards for a while, and the plugin only worked for an older version of Mint, so I took the Pepper and ported it to Mint v1.2. This is still a work in progress as I am trying to work out an issue with Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox/Seamonkey browsers and multiple recordings of clicks - they do not allow a Javascript event to be attached to objects (links in this case) inside of IFrames so another method has to be used to record the click on page exit. This Pepper has been corrected for a recent path security issue brought up on the boards. If you find this useful, please consider the tipjar.

UPDATE: One word of warning. After you install this, do not click it to test the pepper. Google is extremely sensitive about this and will kick you out of Adsense when they review accounts at the end of the month. Just trust that it will do the job. Believe me, I know. Note that these stastics are only seen by the Mint administrator, so this does not violate article 7 of the Adsense Terms of Service regarding disclosure of “click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance.”

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The latest version of my patched Feed On Feeds sports OPML that validates properly. To enable this, I’ve added the following to the feeds table:

`date_added` timestamp NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,

and the following to the config.php:

define('FULLNAME',"My Name");
define('EMAIL',"email@x.com");

And added date editing to the recently added edit form. For that you get a neat little icon you can post to your site:
. You can see my OPML list to the right.

But why is OPML important? Well, this format lets you properly share your feed URLs with others from one file. Not in some useless bullet list of links for people to copy and paste, but in a live dynamically generated way that RSS readers can export and import. However, as Dave Winer recently demonstrated, OPML is not fully useful unless there is some filtering, preferrably by tagging, so that lists can be shared by category. No one wants to wade through my list of 100+ feeds to find the few nuggets they are looking for. To this end I plan on integrating this OPML support with the planned tagging feature. I’d also like to somehow integrate that with Typo’s tagging, but that’s further down the todo list.

SNIPER TRAINING BETA

Your Internet connection is down and you can’t play on
xbox live. You’ve been wanting to get your skills up
and reach that next level in Team Snipers. But, wait!
You have four controllers, a decent size tv, and the
blessings of scotch tape. The solution: play Halo 2
with bots!

INGREDIENTS:

• Halo 2
• Xbox
• At least a 27” tv
• 3-4 xbox controllers (any type)
• Scotch tape

DESCRIPTION:

Bot training can help you train with the sniper rifle
when no one else is around to play. Taping down the joysticks of the xbox controllers
allows them to run around while you try to snipe them. This will help you hunt them down, get your shots in, and
take them out without risk of being killed by another player. Alternately, 1337 players can practice “no scoping”. Playing this for a while will get you some
laughs and killing sprees.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Once in the main menu in Halo 2 create a Sniper Training gametype. Here is exactly what you will need to do in
order to have a perfect Sniper Training Halo 2
gametype.

MATCH OPTIONS:
Rounds - 1
Score to win Unlimited
Time limit - none

PLAYER OPTIONS:
Respawn time - 3 seconds
Suicide penalty - none, you really shouldn’t get yourself killed here
Shields - normal
Motion Sensor - on

TEAM OPTIONS:
No teams necessary.

SLAYER OPTIONS:
No bonus points
No suicide loss
No death loss

VEHICLE OPTIONS:
No vehicles whatsoever - that would be cheating!

EQUIPMENT OPTIONS:
Starting weapon - Sniper Rifle
Secondary weapon - Beam Rifle
Starting Grenades - NO
Grenades on map - None
Weapons on map - Sniping

In the end you should have two to three xbox
controllers with tape on the joysticks to keep them moving, sign
them in, pick
a map, set gametype to Sniper Training,
and fire away. Changing the position of tape on joysticks is the biggest modifier. This changes the turning radius and direction of a bot and will take quite a bit of experimenting. In some cases you may end up with a bot that looks straight up while spinning in place - not a good
thing.

ADVANCED
Train with a friend as a teammate, or possible as a live target that fires back! For an added bonus, try to see who can rack up the most bots per minute. When you graduate from this one, you’re ready to go public.

THINGS NOT TO DO WHILE PLAYING:
-commit suicide
-jump off cliffs
-some how get killed by “bots”
-screen look
-Don’t camp, it won’t help you out and the bots won’t
fire back anyway.

THINGS TO CHECK FOR AT THE END OF THE GAME:
-amount of headshots
-compare kills per minute
-percentage of shots hit

TESTING
Here are some test results with maps we’ve played.

Burial Mounds - Not too big, not too small, Bots don’t get caught in fixed patterns as often.

Relic - They drop like lemmings into the water, but the bots had large swaths of land to cross before death.

Lockout - The bots are too confined, and about 90% of the time get stuck in corners.

Gemini - They always get stuck in fixed patterns in the small rooms, and changing tape position didn’t help.

Coagulation - Too big, hard to find the bots. Bots actually ran the tracks like real players.

Zanzibar - Spawn points become predictable! 50% of the time they get stuck in corners.

Waterworks - WAYYYYYY to big!

Headlong - 85% of the time the bots stayed in
buildings.

Midship - Not strictly a snipers map, but turned out to be the best because of the few corners. The bots actually ran around the map like real people, mainly because of the circular nature of the map. This passed a
sort of Turing test as some of the bots were confused for being players.

Foundation - The larger circular path meant the bots ran around more like real people and didn’t get stuck in the rooms for long. It helps if you can move the debris away from the edges of the rooms so that bots don’t get stuck.

BONUS!!!
To test player reaction to the bots, we took a team of four bots into Team Training on XBox Live. The first game landed our team on Gemini, where as we predicted they got stuck in the spawn room. Three of the four opposing team dropped, but the one remaining player
landed sweet multiple kills each time he ran into the spawn room. This worked for slayer matches, but once we got into an assault match in Ivory Tower, it was a disaster. The next match in Ivory Tower was Fiesta and again we
had bots that ran the map almost like real players. Without shooting back, the opposing team thought they had a real set of newbies on their hands.

Special mission Relic: Stop the Lemmings
We went back to Relic, both signed into one team and had the other two bots signed into another team. Basically, don’t let the bots fall off the cliff to their wet doom. Once one of the bots reaches -10, end the game. The winner is the person with most bot kills.

MAPTACULAR MAP PACK!

Bungie’s MAPTACULAR MAP PACK was the last five maps in
the Halo 2 map
collection. The maps were Terminal, Relic, Gemini,
Elongation, and Backwash.

TERMINAL
Terminal is a train station located in a city on
Earth, where teams can
play on a battle field which consists of a large train
platform in the
center(where civilians would enter train), a parking
garage, two bases
(one of which connects to the train platform, and the
best part…a run
away train! Do not ride the train or your corpse will
be hurled far into the sky by the ever-loving
guardians! This map is common for matches
like Capture the Flag and Assualt, where the defending
team receives a Wraith at the beginning of
gameplay, much to everyone’s frustration. This map
is also one of the most modded downloadable maps,
usually involving a respawn mod that lets the opposing
team easily predict your spawn point. However, the
map falls under the “large” category, so I give it an
8 out of 10

RELIC
Relic is an island containing a whole slew of
interesting features.
This map is usually
played with the Team Slayer playlist, Team Skirmish
Playlist, Big Team
Battle Playlist, and 6v6 Playlist. While it may be
included in all these
playlists, it is still sometimes be hard to come
across. At the human base, the team is provided with
a Warthog, sniper, a few magnums, and one
or to Battle rifles. The main feature is the
controllable teleporter. They offensive team has
close access to the teleporter, but only once it has
been turned on at the other base.
The sniper or rocket launcher are available with just
a short walk on the beach.

The other team’s large base towers into the
sky from the center of the island. They are provided
with a few plasma rifles, plasma pistol, needlers,
carbines, a sword
and shotgun underneath the base. This teams is always
on the defense, defending the flag, or base from the
bomb, and must always protect the teleporter. Once
the offensive team gets a guy into their base and
turns on the teleporter, they can swarm through time
after time.

This one’s excellent for 6v6 games. I give it a 7 out
of 10.

GEMINI
This map is based on the huge Covenant ship, High
Charity. The Gemini name is apt for its perfect
symmetry. One teleporter takes you from one
side of the map to the other, and two others teleport
you directly across
from each other at the top of the map. These are
great
for campers. At the center of the map is a giant
statue of one of the Prophets, with a lift behind it
to launch you 15 feet onto the level above it. This
map doesn’t play well with
objective games like Capture the flag or territories,
but proves insanely fun for oddball, king of the hill,
slayer, and team slayer. The open area around the
tree is just waiting for mass chaos. I give this map
an 8 out of 10, because of its overall creativity and
amazing colors. Purples, pinks and blues give
it a great look, but those colors make it too dark in
some places.

ELONGATION
Elongation is a map that was dug up from the original
Halo: Longest. This involved two hallways where you would just run up
and down them in mass
carnage. As it was one of the most confined maps of
Halo 1, it created
intense battles with rockets, and even the normal
weapons set created
cool battles of flying lead and frantic explosions.
Elongation has taken this to a new level two
conveyer belts that run down the two long hallways.
Boxes are transported down the conveyer belts,
providing temporary places to hide, eventually falling
down a hole where an inattentive trooper will die.
Areas of Longest which you had to jump up to, now have
ramps in Elongation, so no more impossible jumping
puzzles! This map, like Gemini, is symetrical, and
the same weapons are on
both sides. There are also windows all over the map
which allow you to gaze upon Earth from orbit - but
don’t stare too long. I give this map a 9 out of 10,
mainly because of the great translation from the Halo
1 map to the Halo 2 map.

BACKWASH
What do you want me to say about this map?? Well,
Ratrace from Halo 1 was better, and that map sucked.
This map is extremely foggy, based on a swarm world
with twisted trees where one might expect to find Yoda
himself. It also contains a poor weapon set - the
only map that has the Sentinel
Beam on it - and provides very few grenades. A
central tower with four lifts take you into an
extremely small room housing a camoflage. There is a
shotgun squirreled away under a tree trunk. There is
one
sword on the map; because of the poor weapons set, it
is hard to kill the person with the sword. I feel
that if the map had a better balance of weapons it
would be more tolerable.

Two bases, blue and red, are directly across from each
other, providing for great skirmish matches. You can
get this map with gametypes like Neutral Flag and Team
Ball. Both of those gametypes can get very
competitive and make up for the extreme lack of
grenades on the map. With all
the bad and little good I said about it, I normally
leave this game if I get it in a non-ranked match. I
give this map a 5 out of 10.

UPDATE: Try our Sniper Training with bots on these
maps as well, especially Warlock.

If you’ve been plagued by Firefox memory leaks like I have, you need to read this article which covers the browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers preference value. This concerns how much cache is reserved for browsing. The default setting expects you to page back up to 8 pages. Because of tabbed browsing, I almost never page back, so I’ve set this from the default -1 (also equivalent to to a value of 0. My memory usage is now down by 33%. Thanks for the tip!!
Update: More tips on how to tune firefox.

I’ve added the ability to “star” feed items for viewing when you click on the starred link in the menu pane. This is good for saving articles for later private viewing. Note that “starring” keeps articles from being pruned, but does not save them from a deleted feed. This update requires that you add this column to your feed_items table:

`star` tinyint(1) default '0'

First time users will have this created for them along with the required column for publishes.

This update fixes a long standing issue where selecting published would not show the Recycle checkboxes as being checked. This fix is also applied to the new starred items. As usual the full package can be picked up from here.

The next and last update I will do will include tagging, but contrary to this week’s furious pace of updates, this one won’t come for a while.

It was easier than I thought to add edit capability to FoF 0.1.9
You can get the updated version in the same place.

Clicking the “e” in the feeds pane lets you edit that feed by bringing up a form in the view pane. Click “Save” and the feeds pane will update with your changes.

Those looking for my Todo list application can find it at http://www.shokk.com/Todo/. It’s a very simple Ruby on Rails applet that lets you make a prioritized list with tags for different tasks and sort by tags, priorities, or tasks. Good for simple viewing from a web based device like a Palm Treo.
Update 2006-02-12: a little cleanup to make the interface a little less ugly and making the tag cloud use different sizes for different tags.

The Amazon sidebar for Typo can be found here.
Untar this in the root of your typo install, then restart your server. Fill in your Amazon ID and the individual ASINs that you would like to advertise in the block. The next feature I’ll add is picking image size.

Update: This has been renamed to amazonblock since the latest Typo trunk includes a block called amazon that has a different function.

Those looking for the PHPNuke Stock Quotes module can find it here.