Jul 31
From my Google Reader shares
Jul 31
It’s always amusing to hear the reaction when you tell people you do/don’t use Twitter/Facebook. It’s been about a year, maybe a little more since I started using Twitter. It’s an interesting thing that’s captured people. Someone at the wedding said “I don’t care if you’ve been eating a taco today!” It’s true that for general or normal people, you may not get the same degree of interest as someone in the spotlight, but if you use it among friends you’ll find interesting tidbits of info about people without having to ask.
I also find that it’s a more accessible style of RSS. If you follow the right people or even use search you can be kept up on really current events. Interesting you can lag behind quite a bit as well. I’ve been doing daily Starcraft 2 searches and I’ll find some gems but the bulk of the news in that area is people finding out there’s no LAN which is month old news. Lots of news sites are also on Twitter so like I said, you can use this as a much easier to use/understand RSS client.
I guess there’s a lot of quality control that’s difficult to filter for new users. Do you want to know when someone is pooping or do you want to be kept up to date with [insert news outlet of choice]? Another problem is what software do you use to keep up with Twitter? I suspect most people assume that you can only access it from the web site and have no idea that there are really great suites like Tweetdeck around, although personally Tweetdeck eats up too much memory for my tastes.
Twitter has this sort of raw, behind the scenes feel to it though. When you’re following someone with more than 50,000 followers you feel like you’re getting an uncensored window into the actual person that doesn’t have to be fed through some PR machine. For now I guess there’s going to be a sharp division on whether or not you find it useful, but I’d advise getting a username you want now.
Ok on to Facebook. I’ve always been against the MySpace/Facebook trend because I always considered them Geocities 2.0. I mean looking at MySpace you still get that feeling, those layouts are generally horrible. Secondly, I already had this site locked down and didn’t seen the need to have accounts there.
As for Facebook I just lumped it in there because it seemed like they went hand in hand, but I broke down and snagged an account. The user base is just stupidly large. I’m very irritated that I lost out on the facebook.com/timothyhanson page so I dunno what I’m going to do about that. I guess you can’t have it all.
Looks like another button for the Around the Web, though that does throw off the sizing of that area. I really need to find a Pandora button to use as well.
Jul 30
5 years ago I made a huge mistake in choosing which content management system I’d use as the backend of this site. I chose something that wasn’t popular which is the main point against it. For what I used it for it worked great (cutephp) but I was trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist and now I’m stuck with tons of old content that’s on a crappy template and not protected by spam.
I’ve updated my site to run php5 stuff and I’ve broken the loose method of keeping all my old posts (shove them onto a separate page and call it a day) organized. The old pages still work but the search throws out errors. Quite vexing.
There’s no easy way to export from Cute to WordPress without just manually moving entries. If I did this the comments wouldn’t move over which is another annoyance. I think I’ll take my time the next 6 months and start copying things over one at a time and seeing what happens I guess. Very cumbersome.
In other news, I’m considering taking the reader shares off the front page and making it a separate page entirely. I suspect this is a very easy thing to do so hopefully it’ll be whipped out pretty quickly. If it isn’t easy, then I’m throwing my hands up in failure.
Jul 30
From my Google Reader shares
Jul 29
From my Google Reader shares
Jul 28
I had this whole long thing written up about the fundamentals of RTS (specifically Starcraft/Warcraft) games thinking about how to better elaborate on a starting point for new people. I’ve since decided it’s not learning how to harvest with probes and when you should start making buildings that’s really important to getting into games, but really the nuances of each element of the game that are really the defining characteristics between the gaps in player skill.
For instance, you can have too many people on a mineral patch. If this happens then your remaining probes will find another patch nearby, however the delay in this action will cost you some early minerals. In Starcraft 2 the AI for this is much much much better, but still something that you might not know or realize until later in your playtime. Even though the basic rule of thumb is always to be making your probes/drones/scvs you will hit a limit on effective resourcing. Long before you hit this limit you should have expanded.
Units are designed to counter other units generally speaking. From what I’ve been reading it seems like counters don’t intend to be as hard as they were in Starcraft 1, but I’m hoping that’s just a random statement from the developers. What this means is, if unit A is designed to counter unit B, and you’re making unit B and your opponent is making unit A, you should probably stop making unit B. There’s no amount of brute force (again generally speaking) of throwing the unit inferior to the opponent that will make you come out on top. There are a lot of units in Starcraft so this is something you’ll have to research on your own.
Cliffs and hills are much more advantageous in Starcraft 2. In Starcraft 1 if a ranged unit was attacking from the top of a hill it is possible (if the attacked unit is ranged) that the player at the bottom can attack up the hill with a chance to miss the target. In SC2 this is gone, unless you have a unit that can see up the cliff, you cannot fight back.
Right clicking is context sensitive and generally does what you want it to. Be aware however that if you’re under attack right clicking to move your units can doom you. When any unit is selected, right clicking on the map tells them to move unconditionally to the spot you tell them to go to. If you instead press “A” or issue the attack command and then right click, they will move but stop if they run into combat and fight. It’s really easy to spot and punish noobs for right clicking and issuing the wrong orders.
Holding position to help create chokepoints in Starcraft is also a very important skill. If you’ve seen battle report 3 you’d know just by seeing the force fields go up how important this can be when faced with an overwhelming army and you aren’t quite ready for it. If you combine the hill advantage on your incoming base ramp with a blockade you create a situation where the ability for mass melee units becomes less effective since they’re unable to surround you. With range you create line of sight problems which plays out to your advantage. There’s also the new tall grass map mechanic that might be useful for escapes as long as you hold your battle line right at the perimeter of the grass.
Space bar is a special hotkey that takes you back to the last unit transmission. If a unit comes under attack and they shout that out and you’re looking somewhere else, if you press spacebar your screen will center on that last transmission. In SC1 it only did the last immediate transmission, but Warcraft 3 had a transmission queue that you could cycle through. Don’t waste your time scrolling around the map/minimap when you can just press space bar.
Speaking of queues, buildings can queue up many units for creation, however it’s in better practice that you shouldn’t probably use more than the 2nd spot for the queue if you can avoid it. The reason for this is that you’re spending money for the long long term when you can spend that money on more immediate things. If you have only one barracks and you are constantly trying to make 7 marines or something, you’d be better off making at least 1-2 more barracks and limiting the line. In the end you’ll be able to make 3+ marines at once as opposed to waiting for 7 to come out in order.
Those are the really basic nuances of Starcraft. Some advanced ones from old old Starcraft 1 were the reaver drop. In Starcraft 1 the reaver is the siege weapon of the Protoss. It attacks very slowly (time between attacks) but hits very hard with aoe damage. Someone noticed one day that when you drop units out of a shuttle they attack immediately. They then thought about what would happen if you were to pick up the unit and drop it out again faster than it’s attack speed? Well it turned out at the time it would fire regardless of cooldown. What ended up happening is that pairing the reaver with the shuttle made it a rapid fire death machine. It was eventually patched so that it wasn’t as potent. Stuff like this learned in the game is what’s going to be really important compared to the really fundamental things you learn as you cruise through single player. You may never even notice or learn of things like this and once you face off with someone that knows the trick you’d be at a crippling disadvantage.I really can’t wait to see what all kinds of things will be discovered in Starcraft 2.
Jul 28
From my Google Reader shares
Jul 27
From my Google Reader shares
Jul 26
From my Google Reader shares
Jul 26
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| Glover Wedding |
Went to my buddy’s wedding this weekend and I did the worst scheduling for flying in and out. I was booking a flight on a site and the prices were a bit too high, well while I’m looking a super cheap flight popped up and so I took it. However it was booked for LAX and everything is closer to John Wayne in the south. So I had to rent a car which made the flight cost as much as the next highest booking price, so I saved no money.
Anyway, the wedding was at a beautiful winery in the middle of the mountains. I don’t have captions up yet but will get around to it. I’m beat from traveling at the moment. I unfortunately forgot to take a real camera, so the image quality is pretty low quality from my cell phone.
