Yeah. So it is a well established fact that DRM in general is evil. Not only does it only harm people who try to do the right thing by going out and buying the damaged products, it doesn’t work. It will never work - there is always a way around the stupidity.

Damage my music files that I’m paying to download so they can’t be used without the magical blessing of your licence program? Fine, I’ll play them, catch the audio feed, and save the data into an un-encumbered file. There are programs that you can buy off the shelf at Target that will do this for you. I don’t condone the theft of intellectual property, I’m a bloody paying customer…

For the last few months now, I’ve been a subscriber to Napster’s service. I had registered because I needed to find an individual song for a project I was working on (from the Spongebob Squarepants Movie of all things). Turns out, because of DRM garbage, I had to take an extra hour out of my day, create a perpetual payment agreement to let Napster charge money to my PayPal account, and then transfer them 99¢ in addition to the monthly fee, etc…

Well, my wife and I had fun playing with the whole Napster thing after that. We installed it on her computer (Windows XP MCE) and in so doing augmented the thing’s FM tuner with a much broader selection of music. We downloaded and listened to all sorts of music that we’d never have bothered picking up off of the shelves otherwise. All told, we’ve probably spent $50 or $60 on the service.

Not much later, something came up and I actually wanted to get my hands on that Spongebob song again. After all, I’d paid a buck for it. Turns out, my licence had somehow expired? Or something. I never was able to download the file again - at least, not in anything other than the normal completely crippled format. I shrugged this off and carried on.

About a month ago, Penny was traversing the collected works of Wierd Al, and found two or three songs that she really wanted to share with her brother. So, Napster was installed onto our laptop, with the intent of taking it down with us when we visited. The licence says that you’re allowed to download the files onto three separate computers. Tell that to the program. It turns out that you’re only allowed to download it onto one machine - you then have to use networking or data cd’s or something to import the files across. You can’t even re-stream it on another client if you’ve downloaded it on one elsewhere (this is probably what ate the soul of poor Mr. Squarepants). So… long story short, we weren’t able to share the song with her brother since the computer we’d downloaded the files to was 120 miles away in our bedroom.

Last week, I decided to do something with Napster. I don’t even remember what it was. I think I was just going to create a random playlist of stuff to listen to while I worked on writing the party daemon for the mud or something. It wouldn’t let me listen to anything. And I’m on the machine we’d downloaded the files to in the first place. They force me into downloading a newer client version, fine, no biggie there. So I patch the thing and music still won’t play.

I get complaints that they can’t acquire licences for the songs in question, and advice to log into the client program. It’s the bloody program telling me this error in the first place… I am guessing that a lot of this problem is because they’re trying to do nasty MSIE things to me and I have castrated the stupid program to prevent it from harming my computer any more than it already does.

So, I decide that enough is enough and I want to cancel my account. Turns out, the only way to do so is OVER THE PHONE. Yup, you created your account via the computer and when you finally get fed up of the service, you have to wait until business hours and get put on hold in order to turn the stupid thing off.

I just found the button on PayPal to cancel the billing agreement, so I yanked it and wrote a moderately scathing complaint.

And why am I ranting about this? Because I was reminded of Sony’s recent crimes against humanity by Snarky’s new blog. Beyond the sentiments in my comment on his post…

Breaking standards is a Bad Thing™. The format of CD audio data has been standardized forever. Once we start letting people bully us into accepting damaged goods in the form of CD’s that don’t comply to decades-old standards… we’re opening ourselves up to crap like this. Not only is it now possible to infect your computer with a virus by inserting a Frank Sinatra album, there is every chance that you will have trouble playing the disc in your car, etc…

The mindset behind a company that would flagrantly abuse their market share and compromise the security on hundreds of thousands of their customers’ computers is beyond me. What Sony has done is not only vile and unsavory, it is downright illegal. They installed rootkits on government computers. They deserve the backlash they’re facing - and more.

I am proud of my people for standing up against this stupidity.

There is a war coming. Proprietary file formats are going down… eventually. And there’s no telling how many innocents will die in the conflict. Sigh.

Posted by Ammon as eat at 1:51 AM EST

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Yay! Just heard back from Google. I passed my phone interview and am being scheduled for another one. Hopefully, after this time around, I’ll be hopping a plane to Cali and signing papers, ne? I hope, I hope, I hope…

We could really use me having a real job. Would mean we could pay off debt, get a second car (though with the trouble it’s having right now, Penny’s more in favor of scrapping it), and - most importantly - Penny could stop working and turn into a mommie.

Posted by Ammon as eat at 12:43 AM EST

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Ok, so the thing works. I created a 13mb ogg vorbis file that lasts 26 minutes. Intro/exit music clipped from Paul Simon’s You Can Call Me Al (for obvious reasons and under what I am assuming constitutes fair use and all that jazz) and with minimal editing, it took me about an hour to put the thing together.

http://atuin.simud.org/podcast/storytime-01.ogg

I’m probably going to play with other audio codecs. Specifically, I want to see how Speex performs in this sort of environment. Assumedly, it will do really well.

So far, response is good. I’ll work on all of the other website-related (RSS, etc…) aspects of this project later, but I don’t need to worry about it much until wossname happens, second episode.

Posted by Ammon as eat at 12:27 AM EST

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As a result of NerdTV, and the sudden realization that my PDA can play audio files while stuffed into my pocket, I’ve been hunting for other good material to listen to on the bus, etc…

Now, the concept of ‘podcasting’ audio content is not new to me. It was a project that Hance and I were looking into implementing for the radio station somehow, but obviously that never happened. So, I’ve pretty much ignored things until I wound up with the perfect excuse - and with a portable device myself.

So far, I like it. I like it a lot. I’m having a hard time finding good podcasts, and while I would normally not be too upset about bumping into lame content online, the fact that it is audio makes the experiment a bit more… painful? when you download and try to listen to yet another bad recording of drivel.

Today I listened to the EQ2 Daily podcast. The podcast of course being weekly, but whatever. It was 70 minutes long in a 50mb file. I listened to most of it while walking about 3 miles home (scenic route) from taking Penny to work (our car’s in the shop). I am not playing EQ2 right now, but I listened and I liked it. Almost, they persuaded me to un-cancel my account.

I’ve been throwing around the idea of an internet radio station for quite some time now. In addition to KAMP, I ran one of my own for over a year until the program I was developing got chewed up when Morpork’s HD went kaput. Danny and I were very much planning on generating original content to be intermingled with the music feed on a regular basis. We’d come up with several show ideas, etc…

Now, the odds of my ever reviving said radio station project are weak - I no longer have the incentive to develop the program right now. But, the desire to produce some of these original shows… is pretty solid. One show in particular.

Since I have a decent headset that I had grabbed for reasons of being able to talk to family, I don’t think I have any reason NOT to sit down and produce something for the mud. I’ve got plenty of interesting content, I have a potential listener base, and it would give me something to do with myself when I’m burnt out on programming, etc… I could interview people over Skype, etc… It would be neato.

And so, I am about to see what I can do to come up with a show. Segment checklist and suchnot are in the works as soon as I stop typing into this little box.

Posted by Ammon as eat at 11:53 AM EST

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I’ve just churned out the first nonmagical combat type ability to hit the mud in a while (the last one was damage soaking, which has been around for one or two years).

The idea for the warcry command had been floating around in my little brain for a bit now, but when Snarky went and wrote a completely social version of the command before skipping town for the holiday, my hand was forced and I had to actually implement the thing

The basic idea is that you can shout a warcry right before entering combat and generate a good bit of adrenaline for yourself. Sufficiently skilled fighting types will also be able to psych their enemies out.

The effects last just under a minute at maximum skill levels but the command is cheap to use and, in most cases, pays for itself within a few heartbeats of starting combat.

The skill used here is combat.tactics, and is set at maximum difficulty (cost) to advance. There will be numerous additional commands that use the tactics skill, but none of them will offer very many practices per use. Currently, one warcry results in 1 practice plus a bonus for each additional enemy affected. Two enemies earn 3 pracs, three enemies would earn 6 pracs, four would earn 10, etc… But the command stops practicing at level 25/100, so even if players manage to find a way to warcry against 20 bunnies at once, they’ll hit the cap fairly quickly and will not be able to abuse the system any more.

In an effort to make sure the ability wasn’t heinously unbalancing, I’ve done the math for a maximum effect warcry. This is with capped skill and a perfect roll.

Cost:
16 endurance
Buffs:
700 readiness + 28/hb * 14 = 1092 total readiness
7 endurance/hb * 28 = 196 total endurance (-16 = 180)
Debuffs:
17 hb of stun
-140 readiness/hb * 10 = 1400 total readiness

So… the buffing effects on the shouting player have a maximum of 28 hb of duration, with the haste effect wearing off long before the invigorate does.

The debuffing effects have a maximum potential duration of 27 hb and because of the way things work, they will start on the heartbeat after the battle begins (where the buffing effects happen on the first hb). So, both effect sets will potentially end at the same time.

In total, a disparity of 2492 points of readiness are created plus whatever happens over the 17 hb of stun. On average, combatants regenerate 200 points of readiness every heartbeat. So, an average 400 points per hb are generated over the duration of the stunning (total 6800).

This gives us a grand total of 9292 points of readiness, or just over 9 whole bars. Most melee actions cost less than a whole bar and most spells cost multiple bars. This makes the effect incredibly powerful for fighting types and useful - but not terribly useful for spellcasters (since they have potential for better results with their spells).

Either way, this means that the ability (when capped) could give a swashbuckling type player over 10 free hits on their enemy before any retaliation happens - and then we consider that getting hit also affects the victim’s readiness… it is possible to drive your enemy’s readiness so far negative that even given high health and armour, they still never get a chance to retaliate after how many times they’ve just been pummeled.

I like it, but that 16 end cost feels a bit low. I think we’ll have to at least triple the cost, just to make it non-trivial - a dwarf character with no skill and good stats has a little under 100 endurance to spend. The sort of character who is likely to have maxxed tactical skill is also likely to have maxxed endurance skill - and could have as many as 218 points to spend. 16 points that regen after 3 hb feels more than a bit pointless - esp when they’re about to earn 180 more.

So, the base cost will probably need to go from 2 end up to 20 points, I think. This makes it cost something for beginning users, but won’t result in paralysis from lost endurance. And the max cost will probably be going up to 50 points.

Otherwise, I think the total effects are good. Saving throws are currently still a work-in-progress, but nobody is going to get high tactics skill any time soon so I doubt that we have to worry about unresistable warcries very much.

Posted by Ammon as play at 8:55 PM EST

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