Posted on by mwhybark

Dawn of Aces

Only those who don’t know me as intimately as a spouse or sibling will be surprised that once, about five years ago, I spent all of my spare time online in a massively-multiplayer combat flight sim known at the time as Dawn of Aces. The sim, based on World War 1 air combat, appealed to a specialty audience, and given that the developers’ company experienced something of a wild ride on Wall Street in the day and offered a mass-appeal product which used the same code, Warbirds (same deal, but World War II – much faster and more powerful planes, planes that don’t disintegrate around you in flight if you attempt to adjust the family jools), fell into near-oblivion. For the past five years it has been nursed along only by the fading devotion of a few afcionados and in particular one Matt Davis, who by sheer dint of obsessive-compulsiveness became the operation’s key graphic and historical designer from his remote compound deep in the wilds of untamed Texas.

The developers have been located in ‘the Triangle,’ in Research Park, North Carolina, for years. Every time I visit my folks I think about dropping by but don’t, largely because my peacenik pinko commie worldview is most unlike that obstreperously and understandably displayed by my fellow aviation obsessives, century-long beneficiaries of the grandest sustained state industrial investment campaign the world is ever likely to see. Despite our irreconcilable religious differences, we loves us the aeroplanes.

Thus, I have been happy this week to discover a marketing tie-in between Dawn of Aces and the film Viv and I observed this weekend, Flyboys. The film’s marketing budget provided the developers with the budget to develop new WW1 based content inspired by the film for the game. The long-moribund MMOL arenas are running about 30 participants at any given time, and that’s enough to make a dawn patrol fun once again.

Rumour has it that tomorrow will see the open release of new flight content, including the film’s Nieuport 17 and additional planes. I am seriously considering taking time off work in order to familiarize myself with the game as it stands now.

Currently, the WW1 stuff has been rolled into the WW2 stuff (in a separate online arena) and with nearly no-one flying the older planes I have not been able to justify the cost of a subscription. Now, though, I’m in for a month or two. What’s amusing and amazing me is relearning the ins and outs of this extremely technical game. Happily, I can still recover from a stalling spin in a Camel, which means there is a certain amount of bicycle-riding involved. What I don’t recall is the plethora of slash-and-dot invoked keyboard commends, the esoteric raw-text configuration files, and the deep magic of determining, designing, and implementing one’s personal joystick button-command-set.

Never a brilliant pilot, I am happy to note that I am able to fly sustained furballs under a realistic flight model tonight, on my second day back in the cockpit. Prior experience tells me the importance of having both my stickset and damage awareness well in hand before heading out to meet my fellow obsessives in the internet skies.

One additional factor which initially appeared promising but tonight frustrates must be addressed: five years ago, I played this game on a 21“ screen, a very nice display for its’ day. Currently, we employ a DLP projector for numerous entertainment purposes, including DVDs and the like. I had harbored great hopes for the sim on the screen, which displays the view from a Camel cockpit at approximately life-size. Alas, the default colors associated with the games’ informational displays are uniformly illegible when rendered into NTSC colorspace. It stands to reason that they are editable via the proliferation of raw-text config files; yet to date, the collapsed social network affiliated with the game provides no clues or cookbooks.

Ah well. It’s up to me to see if this crazy thing will get airborne again. Contact!

Posted on by mwhybark

Cringely on Apple iTV

Cringley has some interesting things to say about Apple’s announced iTV strategy. He makes a big deal out of using iTV to bring video-based iChat to the living room TV set and talks some trash in Redmond’s direction.

What’s funny about this to me is that I have my Mini set up with my old Firewire iSight for just this purpose, and we use it to talk to my folks at least once a week. It works great, but it’s not a mindblowing extension of the technology by any means. Despite that, I think Cringley’s argument, that Apple is aiming to capture the base platform for convergence, possibly by integrating their tools into the sets themselves, makes a great deal of sense.

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Too early, too late, what good's the money if you ain't got the time

I was looking at the rumor that Palm will release Q4 Cingular-only EDGE-enabled Treos this fall, and came across a forum post claiming that Cingular salesbots are noting that the release has been pulled. However, now I can’t find it and there are numerous posts on a multiplicity of sources claiming a European release date of September 12 followed by an October release in the US.

So I turned to solving the problem of direct keyboard access to the Mini, our current media center box. Ideally, I want a compact bluetooth keyboard with an integrated pointing device. Compact(!) bluetooth keyboards abound, but none that I noted included a pointing device (although the ever-forward-thinking FrogPadders are apparently thinking about it).

However, two integrated multi-port USB-slash-bluetooth hubs are available, in theory. Unfortunately the $19.99 DTech hub appears to be safely ensconced in containers at sea, whilst the considerably more attractive (in a borg-y way) MSI hub, retailing at $89 but street-cheaper looks to be in stock here and there.

Alas, this still fails to solve my preferred mouselesscouchpotatohoodness (how does that work in the German?). Additionally, I note in fora reaction about the USB-slash-bluetooth hubs, there’s clearly a market for a Bluetooth USB hub, wherein one might pair the widget and hang one’s devices (est qu’il-y-a’n accent? Je n’sais pas) USB off the CPU sans wiring to the boîte.

Net result: Thrift and desire, one. Profligacy and entitlement, zero.

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JP not Patches

I was saddened this week to hear of the passing, at 76, of my former professor and friend and all-around character J. P. Darriau, at home in Bloomington, Indiana. J. P. grew up in NYC during the war in a Jewish neighborhood, and one of my favorite memories of him is this grey-headed child of French Catholic emigrants to the States singing Yiddish songs about baseball at a piano during an evening of performance art circa 1989.

J. P. came to Bloomington in the early sixties and remained a prof at IU until his retirement in 1996. He was my professor in three classes and became my friend during the first. He opened his home, over the years, to innumerable members of my cohort, usually something I would discover much later.

During the first class i took with him, which he insisted on holding in his backyard sculpture studio instead of on campus, all the members of the class were charged with researching something about transformative performance traditions and presenting our findings in the context of a performance. While the details of my research are somewhat hazy, as I recall I determined to compare and contrast the European use and abuse of alcohol to the indigenous and pre-Colombian use of tobacco. I spent about $100 on various interesting beers and about the same amount on a selection of high-end tobacco, including what must have been among the last tins of Balkan Sobranies imported into the US before the Yugoslav civil war destroyed the factory.

I loaded all this on the back of my mountain bike and sprung this on the class, insisting that we had to consume all the beer and smoke all the ‘baccy in the three hours set aside for the class. J. P. was not happy with me and gave me an additional assignment to make up for the drunken debacle class that day was transformed into, and he explicitly enforced a no-booze policy on these classes after that day. But he certainly had his share of the goods I brought that day and there is no question in my mind that our relationship was deepened and cemented that day.

J. P., you were a good man; a hardworking, insightful artist; and a thoughtful, challenging, at times baffling but always deeply engaged teacher. My world is richer for having you in it, and I owe you more than can be told for your role as my mentor and as a contributor to the alternative culture of my hometown. R.I.P.

Posted on by mwhybark

Zilliness

I have been keeping an eye on Zillow’s valuation of our house this summer, largely for morale-reasons. Currently the site lists the home as valued at well over 100K more what we paid for it in October. Anecdotally, I have heard that Zillow tends to err on the side of inflating reported values. It’s certainly what I expect the site to do, as a way of creating stickiness – it’s certainly working very well in drawing my repeated site visits.

Curious to see if anyone has done a systematic analysis of what Zillow’s reported values for a given property are in comparison to what people are actually paying for these listings, I was disappointed to find that no one’s done so in a careful, large-scale way. Are you listening, Consumer Reports? For that matter, are you listing, HouseValues and Redfin? Careful competitive analyses of competitor’s datasets over time could be a great marketing tool!

However, I did not come up wholly dry. This Phoenix-area blogging realtor did a quick set of reality checks on some recent sales in the Arizona community, and while I’m guessing he must have cherry-picked, he found little correlation between Zillow’s estimates and what he takes to be real-world market values. In two cases, he found gross overvaluations based on inaccurate data at Zillow, and in cases of homes currently listing, he found that Zillow was undervaluing the homes, based on his opinion of the market.

His basic critique is reasonable enough – you can’t trust an automated valuation service to provide accurate estimates because the actual condition of the property is likely to vary from that represented by the available data. I’m also not surprised that he feels the site is undervaluing homes that he is involved in developing listings for – the more capital there is in his market, the more there is available for him.

I am surprised that Zillow’s valuations do appear to be on the conservative side. I suppose that after this summer winds down and Seattle’s market cools down to match the rest of the country’s slowing sales, I’ll have a better sense of things. I was amazed to see that so far this summer nearly every house that has sold in our immediate area has well topped $400k. Wonder if it will hold. I hope so, now that we’re in it.

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Echo

It’s weird to be back on the Hill for the first time since the shootings. The Stranger just published their minute by minute account online, and the headlines of both the P-I and the Times banner news of the dead.

Walking by Rainbow Grocery on the way to eat from Group Health, I glanced inside and saw an old acquaintance from Bloomington who worked at Madison Market for many years: he must certainly have known the two young men who also worked there who died in the shooting.

The neighborhood feels like it did after 9/11, and something like it did during WTO, but not excited or argumentative or full of any sort of promise. It’s a shocked and grieving feeling. I have seen half a dozen folks pause and gape at the headlines blaring from the newspaper boxes.

Posted on by mwhybark

Vidpod

I have spent a portion of my weekend messing with RSS and The Democracy Player, per the instructions linked, and so far, so good, although my DSL speed is slow enough to consign this to permanent experiment until I finalize the LAN setup and shanghai one of the G4s as a dedicated media server.

The Times has a look at the burgeoning world of IPTV content production: As Internet TV Aims at Niche Audiences, the Slivercast Is Born.

One of my longtime colleagues has been oriented to providing IPTV instructional programming for over a decade now – it really seems like this should be his moment. I wonder if he has rights to all the content he’s produced over the past ten years? On a related note, I wonder what would happen if I started considering my weekly pitchlist as the basis for video content as well? In particular, a subset of my story ideas are always how-tos, reviews, and explanatory material. A typical magazine story yields 500 to 700 words and takes less than a minute to read, in my experience. If that 700 words could be recast as a three-minute-script and shot at the time the article is prepared, I think there might be a decent microcontent media property, as long as the subject matter is sufficiently consistent.

Some of these ideas could also very productively apply to SIFFblog, I think. Hmmm.