The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here's an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 32,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 12 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
200km in a single month, because of a game! Walking! I guess that’s more than I would usually walk in a whole year. And that’s actually one of the points in favour for the game. But the frequency of having a bad feeling after a session of Ingress, an emptiness if you will, has steadily increased. And last Friday was the tipping point, I have decided to stop playing it. For the next month, at least.
Ingress?
In case you haven’t heard about Ingress here comes a very short introduction. Ingress is an augmented reality game by Niantic Labs (a Google company). You play it on your GPS enabled Android or iOS device. Your smartphone acts as a scanner for your physical environment. Think Tricorder from Star Trek. Basically you have to go outside, walk around, discover, conquer, link and defend portals.
Portals? Well, a portal isn’t something were you walk through, like you would normally do. The story behind the game clears the name up: recently CERN discovered some new kind of matter: exotic matter (XM). XM is very mysterious and it’s amount seems to steadily grow. The term portal refers to a gap where high concentrations of XM leak into our reality.
XM is used as the power source in the game, every action requires some amount of XM. Their are two factions fighting over the usage of XM. The Enlightened, who take it as a good thing, that should be exploited. And the Resistance, who think it’s bad and influences the free will of humankind.
Noteworthy real-world things, made by humans: a monument, a graffiti, a historic building or bridge, a train station, some statue, a wayside cross, an information board … are – or can become – portals. There are tons of portals around you (at least in densely populated areas). Usually they were previously discovered by other players (called agents in the game’s jargon). The game encourages you to discover even more portals and you get an achievement (Seer badge) for accepted portal submissions.
I submitted well over 1000 new portal candidates and 187 were accepted by now (as you can see on my stats page, below).
There are quite a lot more badges and of course an experience points system (called AP in Ingress). To reach higher levels you have to gain AP. Which you get through capturing portals, modding them, connecting them through links and fields (a triangle of connected portals), and destroying such things from the opposing faction. Until level 8. Afterwards you additionally need to achieve badges in specific colours (bronze, silver, gold, platinum and black). The current maximum is level 16.
The game encourages team-play for higher level agents. Since you need eight high-level agents (level 8 and higher) to establish a level 8 portal. Only high-level portals emit high-level items. Which you need to fight the opposing faction and equip more portals.
As you can imagine, the game has no end and no winner. Despite the fact, that their are areas that are dominated by one faction, sometimes even to the point of extinction of the opposition.
The Good
Meet New People, World-Wide
This is really fascinating. Regardless of the place you are visiting, everywhere are some agents of your own faction, playing the game. They give you a warm welcome. They are happy, that you are there. They volunteer in taking you around. Amazing. That gave me a little bit the feeling of being at home everywhere.
Just after a few days playing Ingress, I was invited into the local communities (I played in my hometown, as well as the city I work) and they were nice and eager to help out. As always I was skeptical and started it slowly and became really “involved” after a little more than a month.
Learn About Your City And It’s (Hidden) Treasures
Even if you decide to be a lone wolf – play alone, ignoring your local community – you will learn a lot about your city. Many things that are worthy portals I haven’t noticed before and I was passing them quite often. One example: wayside crosses. There are really, really a lot of them around here. And I haven’t noticed even one before.
I even did some background research and learned quite a lot about the local history and the story behind some statues, historic sites and architecturally important buildings.
Visit Areas You Wouldn’t Otherwise
To achieve the Explorer badge you have to visit, for the Pioneer badge to capture distinct portals. To get them you will go, where you haven’t been.
Your team members will propose farming spots or field-operations (e.g. creating some big fields to provoke the other faction) that requires you to go to even more unknown locations. You will become an expert regarding the neighbourhoods, towns, villages and the streets that connect them in a pretty wide circle around your usual whereabouts.
Be Outside And Become A Little Fitter
You have to leave your house to play. You are outside. All-around-the-year. You are exposed to all kind of weather, which should help strengthen your immune-system. You walk most of the time. You will exchange a big, lengthy and lazy meal with some more Ingress-time. You will loose some weight and you will get fitter. I did, at least.
Develop A Keen Eye For Note-worthy Exceptional Things
Because you can propose new portals and you even get a badge for that, you will develop the “ultimate-portal-submission-vision”. I found myself watching TV and always looking for things in the background, in the scenery, that might be, or become, portals. But you definitely should keep that to yourself in front of outsiders, it’s really annoying them.
Good Feeling Of Achieving Something
A successful field-op, e.g. creating big layered fields (many thousand mind units) alone or with a team, is something that gives me that “yeah-I-did-it-feeling”. That good feeling of accomplishing something. The same is true, but a little less, when you completely cover your neighbourhood with fields of your colour.
The Bad
Neck Pain
Walking around and looking most of the time on your smartphone in your hands creates tension in your neck muscles. That really hurts when you play too much. It’s even worse when playing while driving. My phone is attached to the central ventilator and I have to take a suboptimal position to reach it. My whole body hurts after half an hour of playing.
Ecosystem – Wasted Gas
Driving. That’s a real bane. Ecological speaking. You waste so much gas. But you have to drive. Otherwise it would be impossible to create big fields, which is the ultimate goal of the game. The faction that controls the most mind units “wins”.
The Company
Niantic has some pretty strict rules. Especially regarding community made extensions and alternative clients. They don’t like it when you play around with their API. Many agents have been banned, because of that.
On one hand they encourage agents to find hidden codes in their official media, no small feat. But on the other hand damn experiments with their API, which requires a similar set of technical skills.
Another aspect: customer support. Personally I haven’t tried to contact Niantic directly, but one member of my local community had: one might say, they are not very responsive.
Furthermore the decision process regarding new portals is broken. Many new portals that were rejected when I submitted them, became later live when someones else did. That really sucks. The process itself seems to slowly grind to a halt, as well. When I started, it took them less then 60 days to accept/reject a portal. Now (8 month later) you won’t get a reaction earlier then 110 days after the submission.
Cheaters
Despite Niantic’s strict rules their are of course alternative clients out there. Even a bot, that plays by itself. Wherever you want. It emulates natural behaviour. I was personally a victim when a bot captured my long time portal (the Guardian badge). How do I know it was a bot? Well, it cleared out a cluster of portals in an order that’s not possible given the actual landscape. It even had access to areas that were closed to the public by that daytime.
There are even some cities that are owned by bots, if you believe the reports that are regularly shared on the games official Google Plus community.
One-Dimensional
The game has some interesting aspects, I have outlined above, but basically it’s always the same: you capture some portal. Shortly after, someone of the other faction takes it over. You recapture it. It’s taken over. And so it goes on and on and on …. that’s annoying.
In terms of gear, that the portal emit, through hacking, it really doesn’t matter much which colour the portal has, they emit nearly the same number of items. So, what’s the whole point?
Too Slowly Evolving, Lack Of Revolutionary Changes
The game is evolving, no question. But way to slow for my taste. I almost quit in February, but then they announced the new levels (from 9 – 16).
Sadly the only things that change when you level up beyond level 8 is the amount of XM you can carry around and the distance you can link and recharge portals. I had hoped for level 9 to level 16 gear, opening the game completely up again.
But no. Too revolutionary.
So you basically keep playing for the profane reason that your stats page shows a higher number. Questionably, but that kept me moving for another few month. I’m level 12 now and need thirteen approved portals more to gain access level 13. Whoohoo. Ehhh. No.
Farming Sucks
Farming? Basically it’s the act of systematically hacking a cluster of closely located level 8 portals (or the level of items you need most, level 4 and level 6 are common as well) to gain items you need to keep on playing.
Sooner or later you come to the point were your inventory is pretty empty. So you locate the next existing farm (or initiate an event to create one) and then you keep walking in circles. That is a real pain in the ass. Simply boring. And since you choose, because of portal density, often the same spot it’s even more boring. Walking the same circles again and again.
When you are really serious about defending some territory and have an active opposition you have to farm daily or even more often. And you don’t get any action points for that. There is a Hacker badge, so that compensates it a little.
The Ugly
High Addiction Potential
You want to keep your neighbourhood, your home-zone, coloured in your factions color. You get praise for that, like “Nicely green over here. Good job.” Others thank you when you upgrade their home-zone’s portals. You go out and kill portals to remove interfering links, so that others can build fields. That’s the extrinsic factor.
Some good amount of peer pressure.
But there is also a strong intrinsic force that might carry you away. Here are some phrases I regularly kept saying to myself:
“I really want that next badge. Today.”
“Ahh well, only that other 3 portals. Everything is pretty green then and maybe I can link over to that other portal.”
“Just one time back to get that key and then I can close that ugly hole in my green blanket.”
“Oh. Just that next street. There has to be something portalish.”
“Only two more rounds, then my inventory should be really full.”
“My inventory is so full, I can’t drive-by-hack … OK, then I will go over to that blue fortress and destroy something.”
“Ah damn, I started it. I will destroy everything.”
“Shit I’m almost out of bursters, I have to farm again.”
“20 minutes, not more. I promise.”
“Oh shit another hour has passed.”
The stats page and the badge system are really strong factors to motivate numbers addict (like me) to keep playing the game.
Stifle Real-World-Live
Even when I was not in the field, I thought about the game. About potential fields. About (missed) opportunities to submit even more portals. About places to fill up my inventory. Sometimes to an extend that it was obvious to the people around me, and that really deserve my full attention.
Wasted Time and Energy
I love to create meaningful things. To learn about new things. New technology. New methods. To make something that’s useful. Ingress is just a game, after all, and I wasted much time and energy that I could have used to produce or learn something more important.
24/7 Non-Stop
The game never stops. When you don’t play, others do, so everything you made previously, might be wiped out when you are sleeping, working, …
Wrap Up
Having all that said, it’s still your choice and just my very personal opinion and decision. It’s a fantastic game (most of the time) but it has some serious drawbacks in my opinion. A special thanks goes to the fantastic communities I was a proud part of. I’m sorry if this decision feels too sudden for you.
Keep hacking, or not.
I’m off. Agent LirielBaenre is on (temporary) retirement.
… to keep his hair.
Today I stumbled upon the “Made With Meteor” web page. It’s basically a simple web app that allows you to promote your own Meteor app. At the same time you are helping the ecosystem, because you can showcase what is possible with Meteor. The top-voted app is Pintask, a really cool Trello clone. Clone is not the right word here, since it’s outperforming the original in many aspects.
After registering and playing around with the app, I found an email by one of it’s creators Denis. He contacted me and asked for help. Since he made a (silly) bet with his colleague that the app will have 200+ votes on April the 30th (on “Made with Meteor”). If not Denis will shave his head off. So please help him, to keep his hair. All you need is a Meteor developer account and than please click on the tiny arrow.
Copyright: Menshealth (http://www.menshealth.de/style/haut-haare/pflege-tipps-fuer-die-glatze.188197.htm)
Well. After a quite long break. I’m back. At least sort of. I don’t promise anything. And nothing you might have to say, or not, will change this. How could the latter …
It’s hard to tell, why I actually stopped blogging.
The great and beautiful blogger Rarasaur once asked why so many blogs simply disappear or are neglected after some inspired and flourishing first month. I did just that and still, I don’t have a simple answer for her.
I liked blogging – putting this words together feels awkward, it’s really been a while since I wrote something – and I still like it.
My enthusiasm started to fall apart as I was forced into a quite long blogging break, aka summer holidays. Afterwards I couldn’t really muster the time and power to pick up the pace again. I tried. I failed. There were (and still are) quite a few distractions, either. Prominently an engaging software development project.
The main problem might have been, that I put to much pressure on myself. I was following advises from the blogging gurus. Like: make a schedule and keep to it; create a series; be predictive for your audience; it’s all about continuity and expectations.
I guess, that was simply to much. To much of a burden.
There is another aspect: my character. It forbids to become really good at anything. I can become quite good, even very good (in some cases and with enough force). But not perfect, no specialist, no guru. I’m a generalist par excellence. And that really bothers me at times.
As soon as something becomes too detached from the reality around me – no obvious connection to the lives of others, no impact, no sense – I flee. I stop doing it, just to see if there is some consequence. For at least an extended period of time.
So this is my last promise: I WON’T PROMISE ANYTHING.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 38,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 14 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
I recently updated my little full-text search project Spomet. I made some major changes to it’s API. As a consequence I just finished updating my earlier tutorial post, that covers the creation of an example app using Spomet for search. While doing this I realized two things: this tutorial is really long and it’s too basic for anyone who has already some bonus-miles riding the Meteor.
So I decided, to write this post: An in-depth, concise and to the point guide on using Spomet. It should serve as the main documentation for Spomet.
Get the package
In case you are using Meteorite / Atmosphere you can add Spomet to your app with:
mrt add spomet
If you prefer using plain Meteor you can grab the package code on GitHub and place it in a suitable folder (e.g. packages/spomet). Don’t forget to add the package to Meteor afterwards (e.g. meteor add spomet).
Adding Documents to the Index
Before searching makes any sense, there have to be some documents in the index. To achieve this, there are two functions to choose from. The first is Spomet.add, the first parameter is a hash and the second a function:
Spomet.add
text: 'the text that should be found'
type: 'post'
base: someRefId
path: 'description'
,
(result) ->
# the result is the hash from above
# substituted with omitted default values
# and the version number given
Spomet.add, well big surprise, adds a document to the index. The hashkeys type and path are optional and will be substituted with default values (‘default’, ‘/’) in case they are absent. The final function-parameter is optional as well. In case it is present it will be called when the document was successfully inserted with the initial document hash as parameter, extended with the version number used and eventual document parameter substitutions.
One thing to keep in mind though, the document gets added even if a document with the same identifying parameters (type, base, path) already exists. Internally there is a version number as a final part of the documents ID. This number gets increased. To actually know what version number was used you have to register the callback.
In case you don’t want to make different versions of the same document to be findable, there exists the second insertion-function: Spomet.replace. It adds the document and removes another occurrence of the same base document (identified by type, base and path). Spomet.replace takes optionally a second parameter, a version number. If this second parameter is present the specified version gets removed while the new document is added. If the parameter is absent the document with the biggest version number gets removed.
As the final parameter of Spomet.replace you might provide a callback. This one gets called with the document specs of the removed document, without the text parameter, though, and the same hash that get’s return from Spomet.add. Both are wrapped in a single object of the following form:
{
added:
text: 'the text that should be found'
type: 'post'
base: someRefId
path: 'description'
version: 2
removed:
type: 'post'
base: someRefId
path: 'description'
version: 1
}
Spomet.replace adds the document even if there is nothing to remove.
Removing Documents from the Index
There is one function to remove documents from the index: Spomet.remove. I takes a hash parameter as well and removes all matching documents. Any combination is allowed. For example:
Spomet.remove path: 'description'
removes all documents with the path: description.
Spomet.remove accepts a callback as it’s final parameter as well. The callback function is called with an array containing the documents, that were removed. The documents in that array have the following form:
{
_id: "q6gQuRYayvnGttyyF"
base: "hiexeuv2kbyQ2Jnt8"
created: Mon Nov 04 2013 08:34:36 GMT+0100 (CET)
dlength: 22
docId: "custom-hiexeuv2kbyQ2Jnt8-custom-1"
indexTokens: Array[35]
mostCommonTermCount: 2
path: "custom"
text: "This is some test text"
type: "custom"
version: 1
}
Trigger Searches
You basically have two options. The first is to use the search-box that is provided by the package. The second is, use the search functionality but use your own implementation to trigger searches.
Use the Built-In Search Box
The built-in search-box provides autocompletion (using Bootstrap’s Typeahead) and uses the 1.000 most often frequented words, that are stored in the fullword index. There is a hash to configure, besides other things, the number of words exposed to the client. It’s accessible through Spomet.options from the server and has an attribute called keywordsCount. Alter it to the number of keywords you would like to expose to new clients.
To include the search-box you place the following code in your template of choice:
{{> spometSearch}}
This template call accepts a hash parameter to alter the way the textbox with it’s buttons is rendered. Currently the template tries to access fieldSizeClass, to get information on how wide the search-box should be rendered, and buttonText, to get the text that should be displayed on the search button.
Use the Plain Engine
You can use an arbitrary number of separate searches in your app and you are free to omit the provided search-box. You have to instantiate Spomet.Search and call find on the instance.
mySearch = new Spomet.Search mySearch.find 'something'
To implement your own autocompletion you might want to access the collection Spomet.CommonTerms. The documents in this collection are primary ordered by number of indexed documents containing the keyword in question, secondary by the keywords length and have the following form:
{
_id: 'tRNE233c45DTrne'
token: 'meteor'
tlength: 6
documentsCount: 1
documents: [{docId: 'type-base-path-version', pos: 7}]
}
Like above, the number of keywords (tokens) is constrained by Spomet.options.keywordsCount.
Customization
In case you don’t want to search using all indexes you can explicitly set the indexes to be used during search:
mySearch.setIndexNames ['fullword', 'threegram']
The following indexes are currently implemented: fullword, threegram, wordgroup and custom.
Accessing The Results
Spomet.find doesn’t return anything. Instead, following the main Meteor paradigm, Spomet provides a reactive data source that updates itself and dependent user interface elements, while the search is underway. You access it with:
Spomet.defaultSearch.results()
in case you try to access the results from searching with the provided search-box. And with:
mySearch.results()
in case of a custom search. In either case the 20 documents with the highest score are published, sorted by score. You can alter this globally, by changing Spomet.options.resultsCount and Spomet.options.sort.
Besides this global options you can control the sort order, the number of results and the offset (for paging) on every Spomet.Search object. The methods for this are:
mySearch.setSort
score: 1
mySearch.setLimit 50
mySearch.setOffset 50
The results() function returns a Meteor.Collection.Cursor object and the documents in this collection have the following form:
{
base: "cYeWPQ4s3uc8Aewmr"
type: "custom"
interim: false
phraseHash: "b32d73e56ec99bc5ec8f83871cde708a"
queried: Mon Nov 04 2013 09:33:37 GMT+0100 (CET)
score: 0.43085068485657296
subDocs:
"custom-1":
docId: "custom-cYeWPQ4s3uc8Aewmr-custom-1"
path: "custom"
version: 1
score: 0.43085068485657296
hits: [
{indexName: "threegram", pos: 1, token: "not"},
{indexName: "threegram", pos: 2, token: "oth"}]
}
The search results are grouped by base reference. In my experience this makes it easier to handle the display of the documents that are referenced in the search. The subDocs hash points to the actual matching documents (the documents that where added to Spomet), with their score and the actual hits.
The hits array holds a reference to the index (indexName), with which it was found, the offset (pos) in the document and the actual matching (sub-) string (token).
The attributes base and type are the same as from adding documents. phraseHash is a MD5 hashed representation of the search query. Queried is simply a timestamp when the search was first issued.
Searches are cached to improve performance. This search cache is flushed as soon as there are documents added or removed from Spomet.
The interim flag signals, if this result was created by a plain lookup in the local fullword index (true) or if the result was processed (or is currently being processed) on the server (false).
Controlling Index Usage
You have seen above, that you can control the indexes that should be used while searching. Additionally you might want to disable some indexes globally (for searching and indexing). You can achieve this by calling the corresponding Meteor methods:
Meteor.call 'disableFullWordIndex' Meteor.call 'disableThreeGramIndex' Meteor.call 'disableCustomIndex' Meteor.call 'disableWordGroupIndex'
There exist corresponding enable methods, in case you want to re-enable an index later.
Adding Your Own Index
The implementation of indexes is pretty straight forward, actually. I haven’t tested it, but it should be possible to include your own index pretty easily. The following gist shows the threegram index. The inline comments should help you to get along. Keep in mind, though, indexes are exclusively for the server-side.
Oops I did it again. Last Friday I participated again in Olimex’s weekend programming challenge. It was the 30th. This time we had to come up with a numbers converter, which should convert arabic to roman numbers. For example: providing 34 should result in the output XXXIV. My current hammer is Meteor, so I made a little client-side-only Meteor app that does the trick. You can see it in action here.
My initially imagined solution worked out straight, so I finished in less than an hour on Friday night. In retrospection, the hardest part was constraining the input to valid numbers. I haven’t done this before, but will need this soon in another project. Which made the hastle worthwhile, I guess. At first here is the template code. Actually nothing fancy here.
The following gist shows the logic:
I have an array of arrays that hold the roman symbols. Every sub-array represents the two valid symbols for each decimal place. One below 5 and one for 5 and above. In roman there is a different symbol for every 5 steps.
The function updateRoman does the actual conversion. I step through the provided number, represented as a string, from left to right using the strings length as the offset for the roman symbols array. The switch statement handles the different cases. Special are 4 and 9, in those cases the ‘next’ symbol is used and instead of the usual addition, a subtraction is used by placing the lower symbol on the right side of the ‘next’ one. For example IV for four instead of IIII.
As a result I set a session variable that stores the roman representation. The session variable gets read in the Template.main.roman helper, which in turn gets called from the template. Since session variables are reactive, the UI reflects automagically the new value.
The keydown handler is responsible for letting only valid characters (0-9) through. At first I check if the key code of the pressed key doesn’t represent a control key (the arrow keys for example). If it’s not a control key the default behaviour (e.g. putting the value in the textfield) gets suppressed.
Next I check if the pressed key represents a digit. If the string is empty zero is not allowed otherwise all digits get through. I append the character representing the current key to the textfield and trigger the conversion function.
That’s it.
