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On Being Freshly Pressed

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WordPress
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Like most folks on WordPress, I see the Freshly Pressed blogs each time I log in. If a title or graphic interests me, I will go and check it out. I was recently pleased to see one of my own posts listed as Freshly Pressed.

There are two main effects of being Freshly Pressed. The first is that the hits to the blog go way up. Second, that post is flooded with comments.

In regards to the blog hits, it might interest some to know that it is a spike in two ways. First, there was a massive increased of hits from previous days. Second, the hits are a spike in that they are very large on the pressed post but there is little spread to the other posts. As such, it seems that people come to see the post and then most depart without looking around much more.

I did notice that the hits were greater on the second day of being Freshly Pressed. But this might be due to the day of the week rather than due to the second day being a spike day. I suspect that the long term impact of being pressed will be very modest or even minimal. My 15 minutes of blog fame, so to speak.

As far as the comments go, I suspect that people are mainly drawn to comment on a Freshly Pressed post out of a desire to funnel traffic to their own blogs. This is, of course, sensible and all part of the blogging game. However, some people are clearly interested in the post itself and have some interesting and relevant things to say. As with the hits, the comments also seem to be a spike. They increased dramatically and center on the post. While I did get some extra comments on my other posts, the comments are clearly focused where they can do other bloggers the most good-on the Freshly Pressed post.

I’m reasonable sure that the hits and comments will soon return to their previous quantities: good, but hardly remarkable. On one hand, I will be sorry to see my fleeting minor fame fade away. On the other hand, being Freshly Pressed is a bit like hosting a free beer keg party: people you don’t know show up, tap the kegs and leave…most likely to never be seen again now that the kegs are dry. While having such a party is fun for a while, having one everyday would get a bit tiring.

In any case, I appreciate the folks at WordPress picking my post and I am glad that so many people stopped by to read, comment, and plug their own blogs.

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Tanking Personality

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For All of You Tank
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To run instances (dungeons) in the World of Warcraft, you generally need a party of five characters occupying three roles. The roles are tank, healer and DPS. The healer role is self-explanatory: this is the character who heals the others, thus keeping them from dying. DPS (damage per second) characters are the damage dealers-their job is to kill the monsters. The tank’s roll is to act as the shield for the party. To be specific, the tank’s job is to keep the attention of the monsters off everyone else so that they can do their jobs.

While each role has its challenges, tanking is probably the hardest role. After all, the tank has to judge how many monsters to engage, keep them occupied, watch for wandering monsters, and keep and eye on everyone else. If the tank fails in his job, the result is usually a wipe (that is, everyone dies). Not surprisingly, while players appreciate a good tank (or they should) they tend to be rather harsh with tanks who fail. Also, being a tank is costly-since the tank is taking the most beating (and will tend to have expensive gear) the tank’s repair cost for his gear will be the highest in the party. Given these factors (difficulty, abuse and cost) most people chose not to play tanks.

Of course, some people do have to play them-otherwise people would not be able to run instances or do the dungeon raids. In addition to the need factor, there are also other reasons to play a tank. One is that the wait time to get into a dungeon will be rather low. As tank, I usually wait about a minute before getting into a random group. As a DPS, I usually wait 8-15 minutes. Another reason is that some people enjoy the challenge of tanking. A final reason is similar to that given by Plato: being a good tank means that you do not have to suffer with a bad tank.

Tanking, I have found, seems to require certain traits. I am not claiming that only people with these traits can tank well, but it seems to be the right sort for the job.

First, there is the matter of knowledge. A good tank has to know how to craft his character, what gear to use, what abilities to use, and the tricks of each fight. As in real life, ignorance is a major killer. Some of this knowledge can be gained by reading on the various web sites about character builds, optimal gear, boss fights and so on. However, just as in the real world, experience is also very important. It is one thing to read about how to handle a situation, quite another to actually do it.

Second, there is situational awareness. While all players need to be aware of what is going on, the tank is responsible for the whole party and the monsters. While most players just look at their health, the tank has to watch everyone in the party to see if anyone has attracted the attention of the monsters. If this has happened, the tank has to get the monster’s attention back on himself quickly. A tank also has to keep an eye on what is going on around the party. For example, there are often wandering monsters and the party can blunder into them (or they can wander into the fight). The tank also has to be aware of what the monsters are doing and act accordingly. Many of the boss fights in WoW have tricks that make the difference between death and victory and the tank has to be aware of when the situation arises for such tricks. A tank also has to be aware of the condition of his party and where they are. While some tanks expect everyone else to simply keep up, that is a good way for a tank to find himself alone in a roomful of monsters or to suddenly find that the healer has almost no mana.

Third, there is timing and resource management. In WoW, character abilities generally have cool downs and use resources. For example, the paladin’s consecration uses mana and takes time before it can be used again. Roughly put, simply mashing buttons does not work-the abilities have to be used in the proper order and the tank has to decide how to manage resources such as mana (paladin), rage (warrior, druid) and runes (DK). As in real life, good timing and resource management leads to success. Poor management and timing leads to failure.

Fourth, a good tank keeps his cool and remains calm. Just like in real life, panicking or freezing tend to have bad consequences. While a good tank will generally not be in bad situations, they can easily arise. The healer might lose his connection, a hunter’s pet might accidentally pull extra monsters, a DPS character might make a targeting error and pull extra monsters, or some people might just leave the dungeon without warning. As a tank, I have encountered all of those situations. One of the most “interesting” was in the Halls of Stone Tribunal of Ages fight. As the fight started, the healer disconnected and then another person suddenly left the party (probably to avoid being killed). This left me, a DK, and another DPS character to finish the fight. I had just hit level 80, so my gear was not epic. The other players were under 80, so their gear was not epic either. But, no one panicked and each person played his character amazingly well and thus we won the battle. Of course, this does not always work out so well-sometimes remaining calm merely delays an inevitable death.

While I was somewhat reluctant to try tanking, I have found that I really enjoy it. I suspect that much of it is because I have the right sort of personality for the job. It also helps that I am resistant to insults and have a quick wit (these are important when making the mistakes that are inevitable part of learning to tank).

As a final point, while folks often consider video games to be a waste of time, I have found that tanking does have real life benefits. To be specific, I have found that it helps me hone the above qualities and this is useful in real life as well.

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Suspended?

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Those who visited this blog recently probably noticed that it had been suspended because of a TOS violation.  No doubt there was some speculation about what terrible philosophy had earned the wrath of WordPress.com. It was, however, nothing so dramatic.

Like many bloggers, I use Zemanta to automate a lot of tedious chores, such as creating tags for posts and links within blogs. When I used Zemanta to create links in my blog on health care, it created a link to a diet pill web site that is on the “proscribed list” for WordPress.com. Thus, my blog was suspended. As I write this, I can see that Zemanta is ready to stick in the link to the diet pill site again. Obviously, I won’t be using Zemanta to create links anymore.

If your account is suspended and you have no idea why, check to see if Zemanta has added such a link to your site.

Also, here is what to do if your account is suspended.

First, when you try to log in to your account, your password will be rejected. You can, however, request that the password be changed by clicking the “I forgot my password” link. You’ll get a new one. However, if you do not have any blogs that are still active, you’ll have nothing to log into.

Second, contact support. The url is http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/. For a suspended blog you will need to fill out the form without logging in. This is because you can type in the blog url if you are not logged on; but must select a blog from a drop-down menu if you are logged on. Suspended blogs do not show up in the drop down menu.

Explain the situation (that your blog is suspended) and ask why. Be brief and polite.

Third, wait for a reply. In my case, I had to remove the offending link. I was able to get into my blog dashboard and went to the posts. There I entered in the offending url in the search field. I found it, deleted it and the blog was back up shortly.

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Netdrive

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Image of a Western Digital 250Gb SATA Hard Dri...
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Last semester I arrived at my office only to release that I did not have my USB drive in my pocket. Since I keep my grade files on it, that was a bit of a problem. Fortunately, the files on my office PC were actually up to date. I later found my drive amidst the ferns by my door-I had accidentally pulled it out of my pocket when getting my keys.

Naturally enough, I wanted to find an easy solution to the problem of having my my grade files readily accessible.

In the past I had used the somewhat awkward solution of emailing the files to myself. Of course, that is a bit of work and technology is all about letting people be lazy (plus distributing porn or killing people).

I thought that the easiest solution would be to have an internet drive, but I did not want to rely on a third party that could go belly up or even pay extra money for a service. Since I don’t have any budget from my school, the free part is rather critical.

Luckily, I remembered Netdrive, which was once developed by Novell. I found out that a program with the same name and function is still being made. It is free for personal use and well worth it. You can get it here.

The program itself does not provide storage. Rather it does the rather neat trick of mounting a site as a drive on your PC. That way you can navigate it like a normal drive. The most useful feature is that if you use it to connect to a FTP or WebDAV server that you have read/write access to, you can use it exactly like a hard drive. That is, you can copy files to and from it by dragging and dropping. This is much more convenient that the usual FTP program approach.

One concern I did run into is that some sites (such as some web hosting sites) will work with the program but have rather limited name conventions that they accept. If you run into problems trying to copy files with names such as “Ethics Fall 2009” (as opposed to ethicsfall2009) then that might be the issue you are running into.

If you already have your own website with FTP space, you can use Netdrive to turn it into a network drive. If you are a broadband subscriber, the odds are that you have some modest space available-just check the ISP web site for the address you need. In the case of Comcast, it is upload.comcast.net and you use your account name and password to gain access. I have also tried it with Yahoo hosting as well.

When using a site as a drive, be sure to be aware of space and usage limitations. Also, it is a good idea to make sure that important files are backed up-you never know when that site might have a problem.

Naturally, you should also be concerned about security. After all, the files will be sitting on an FTP server. In the case of my grade files, any intruder would need to have a copy of the software to read them as well as the password needed to get into them. So, I’m not too worried about that.

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Death, Decency and the Web

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That people have always behaved badly is beyond doubt. As such, the internet cannot take the blame for people behaving in evil ways. However, the internet makes it easier for people to engage in immoral behavior and easier to hide behind the veil of anonymity.

One recent and sickening example involves the death scene photos of Nikki Catsouras. She died in a horrific car crash in 2006 and, as per procedure, CHP officers took photos of the crash scene. For some reason two officers decided to leak the photos and they soon began appearing on web sites. Oddly enough, some people began making hateful and cruel comments about Nikki Catsouras, thus reminding us that we share the planet with people devoid of decency and moral sense.

Perhaps the most terrible thing is that someone emailed one of the images to her farther. This twisted monster went so far as to send it as if it were a property listing email so as to ensure that he opened it. I can only imagine what sort of person would take the effort to do this sort of thing and why they would do so. The only answer I can come up with is that this person is evil. I am not going to claim that they are mentally ill. The sort of planned behavior denotes evil, not a brain malfunction.

In response to the web sites that started displaying the photos, the family tried taking legal action to get them to cease and desist. Of course, the sort of people who would run such sites are not exactly the best of people and hence they would not be inclined to respect the wishes of the family or do what is right. Also, such sites would no doubt tend to be operating outside the reach of the law anyway.

Not surprisingly, the family then brought a lawsuit against the CHP. The judge was sympathetic to their plight, but ruled that no laws were broken. Presumably there is not such a law because it was assumed that the police would not leak such photos. After all, doing that would be both unprofessional and ethically dubious (at best).

In light of the leak, there should be a law that prevents such photos from being released to the public. Naturally, such images should be available in cases in which there is legitimate need (such as for evidence in a trial) but it should not be legal to leak them to the internet. The case under discussion shows the clear harm to the families that has and can occur from such leaks. Assuming that the law should protect people from harm, then this provides a reasonable justification for such a law.

Naturally, people will raise concerns about the broader issue of placing restrictions on distributing images via the web. After all, as the arguments usually go, if the law starts restricting some images, then broad censorship will follow.

While this is a slippery slope fallacy, it does raise a point worth considering. Placing restrictions on images and other media does run the risk of eroding liberty. While no sane and decent person wants the photos of Nikki Catsouras’ corpse to be distributed on the web, the challenge is writing a law that would limit such awful behavior without infringing on reasonable liberties.

While it might seem easy to write such a law, it would actually be rather challenging. For example, a law against posting images of the dead would be absurd. This would, for example, make it illegal for me to post a picture of my grandmother and I on Facebook.  It would also be absurd to have a law against gruesome images-that would make many news and even medical images illegal. Having a law against offensive images would also be problematic-so many people are offended by so many things.  Perhaps the right wording can be found that will make just the right images illegal while allowing all the rest. If so, there should be such a law.

Normally we rely on decency and a sense of shame (or at least fear of retaliation) to prevent such behavior. The anonymous nature of the internet enables people to act without the shame or danger of being exposed and that makes it more likely that people will behave badly.

While I do suspect that the internet does help people become worse, this is mainly because they can get away with behaving badly and without the correction of punishment or condemnation, they will simply grow more corrupt. That is, of course, one danger of the internet: it provides people with an amazing  ability to be evil anonymously and this is no doubt a very heady drug for some.

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