My room is an absolute mess. Normally I have crap piled on my desk, but today the crap has found it’s way to the floor. Unlike some days though, today is a particularly good day, as it just concluded a weekend that I look forward to: the World Cyber Games NZ Qualifier (aka xLAN).

For those not in the know, it’s an annual event held in Auckland. The winners of some selected tournaments go on to compete in the APAC finals, and then the world finals (this year held in Germany). It’s held on the weekend before the second semester starts back, people come on Friday and leave Sunday afternoon. Sleeping is optional, and very few people get over 12 hours of it. Many cans and cans of energy drinks are consumed. This year we had 760 people, so after crew, tournament computers and expo people, about 850 computers. About 900 amps of power was being constantly used, and you thought your last power bill was bad!

It’s not all tournaments though, as many people come to just have a few fun games with their friends. And not to mention, there are quite a few of us from waiKato who are crazy enough to volunteer, but we all love it. Especially when Zapman (aka Daniel (congrats, 4th ever plug!)) starts to be… himself. I’m the network administrator, and It’s no small job running an enterprise grade network comprising of computers you’ve never seen or configured before.

I strongly suggest anyone with an interest in computer gaming to come along next year, although you have to get in quick as seats sell out quite quickly. A splendid time is guaranteed for all. Ok, I’m going to end it here before my brain really goes to mush from tiredness (according to Google Docs this is 7th grade level writing… I’m very disappointed). And, finally, yes I did dance again. 4 times. Only one of them was any good IMO, I was very disappointed in myself, but if you wanna come back to my site in a few days, and I’ll of hopefully uploaded it by then.

• Comments [0]
• Categories [The Nerdery]

We fellow geeks generally tend to stick to the internets, after all, happiness is a warm mouse. But every now and then, we take a venture outside with a little help from our friends. Ventures like the SCMS pub crawl for example, is generally accepted as an enjoyable outing, and a splendid time is guaranteed for all.

But recently, there has been another reason for us to emerge from our darkened rooms; Geohashing. Simple description; people go to random locations around your local area every Saturday. Long, nerdy description (for geeks who don’t follow XKCD); First you find your graticule (the 1°x1° geographical co-ordinate, i.e. waiKato is -38,175) then you take the opening value of the Dow Jones, MD5 it, split into two 16-bit values, convert to binary and append it as the decimal point to your graticule and voila, you have a location. All you need is to find your coat and grab your hat, and hopefully a crowd of people turn up (for the benefit of the environment, you should catch the bus).

To give you an idea just how vast an area is covered, the area around waiKato extends from Te Uku (2/3 way to Raglan) to just beyond Waihi, and then from Papakura down to Te Awamutu. A lot of this area is private property and some of it ocean, and so it’s not always feasible to make it to a point. And of course, being a fairly recent concept, it’s not incredibly popular with those of waiKato yet. So far there have only been 3 known geohashes here; twice by a guy who likes to wear pirate gear (InvaluableKiwi; congrats on my 3rd ever plug!), and once by myself and my girlfriend.

So, would you like a bit of adventure on any given Saturday at 4pm? We’ve got a Facebook group going (search for NZ Geohashers), or read the wiki at http://wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing/. Who knows, if the Nexus ed and the rest of the club band is as keen as they claims they are, you might even score a t-shirt or something. Hell, I might even score a t-shirt or something… Final note; Across the Universe, like most things with Evan Rachel Wood, is a movie that you should watch at least once. Now. But before this Saturday.

• Comments [0]
• Categories [The Nerdery]

So sorry for the delay, completely forgot I was supposed to post these here and NOT just on my local development site x.x

I’m sure this rant has been done 100 times before 100 times better than I’m about to do it, but I don’t care. I hate the uni’s parking. Which is why I take the bus, unless;

1. I’m coming to uni after 1800
2. I’ve decided I can’t sleep and come to uni at 0430 (true story)
3. I’ve got to go get a parcel from CourierPost’s HQ in middle-of-nowhere-land before trudging to a lab.

And unfortunately, its the latter option that had lead to this rant.

While most people should be able to take the bus, or bike, or walk, it seems that the ever increasing costs will never meet the threshold at which uni students won’t drive to uni. I say ‘most’ as I do know of exceptions to the rule; those with disabilities, families of uni-goers, etc. And of course there are the few who occasionally need to use that curbside paperweight. But there’s the undeniable fact that a lot of the cars that frequent the uni aren’t really needed. But, unlike most rants, I have a plan of action for this problem.

It’s called a barrier arm and card reader. Just like the ones that Wintec currently uses. Before being granted entry into the student parking lots, you have to swipe your student ID card. If this is after a certain time of the night, or if this is the first time you’ve ‘swiped in’ this week, no problem, free entry. If this is the second visit this week, a small, but reasonable fee of $0.75 or so is deducted from your unicash account.

It’s enough of a deterrent for uni students to seriously consider leaving their cars at home, after all, look at the small amount of student parking Wintec students have. Not to mention it’s a much more appropriate way of paying for the parking security, then just charging all students. And, as entry (and obviously exit) is controlled by barriers, we know how many cars are in a given lot, so imagine being able to find out where a park is available by sending a text message. Or, better yet, reserving a park for another small fee. Wouldn’t it be worth 40 cents to know you’re going to get a park once you show up, without circling around?

So, what are your thoughts? Would you support such an idea? Post me a comment before I go crazy and bring this before some of the committees I sit on.

• Comments [0]
• Categories [The Nerdery]

Pop! Now, there’s only one person (actually maybe a few…. Hi!) who actually understands why I started this week’s column with a Pop instead of a Bang, but for those not gifted with fine mouth control, lets say this article spawns from the event that recently occurred in my flat’s kitchen. A light bulb blew. Now instead of simply marching down to the local light bulb dispenser, I used this as an excuse to purchase some 12 compact fluorescent bulbs and proceeded to refit my flat.

I can’t help it; everyone eventually becomes all environmentally-conscious these days for one reason or another. Its a great time to be a greenie too, what with electricity prices rising, and a prediction that there’s a 5% chance we’ll have blackouts. I’m currently pricing up new servers at work, and their electricity usage is a major factor of my decision. Unfortunately, it seems the most-efficient (not to mention the one that gets my inner geek’s freak on) solution, a blade server system, adds $15k to that of the exact same setup with rack-mount servers. Not at surprising, the same went for those bulbs; an initially higher cost that will repay itself several times over in the course of its life.

The same goes for modern laptops as well; they’re made with less material, use much less power, still provide enough grunt for most users, not to mention are much more convenient, but as they are so much more expensive most people opt for either cheaper, older laptops or big power-sucking desktops, which can use 30w while completely off. Seriously, you’re paying ~$30/year just to have your desktop plugged in while you’re not using it. Would somebody please think of the environment!

On closing comments, for those of you who prefer your web-based word processor of choice to have a Adobe Lightroom-esque interface, as well as niceties such as proper fonts and a flash-animated pulsating cursor, instead of actual functionality like copy+paste (I’m just sour it doesn’t work with my mac), should check out Adobe Labs’ buzzword. Before you get your hopes up though, you can’t save directly to PDF. Yes, I was also very disappointed and Adobe should be ashamed with themselves. Also, I’ve decided as I can’t come up with actual content for it, I’ll be carbon-copy posting these articles on my blog, (hmmm, I think you’re here now…) for you to enjoy a day early. Maybe I’ll throw in a couple extra words for you die-hards, like Good Night San Diego, and thanks for stopping by.

• Comments [0]
• Categories [The Nerdery]

As will be revealed in the near future (next week’s Nexus), I’m going to start posting my column here as well to try and attract feedback. For those not in the know, Nexus is Waikato’s student magazine, and The Nerdery is the name of a long-running column that I revived. I had previously called it static void Main(), but with new editor came the idea to rename my column to keep with Nexus’ tradition.

Don’t you just hate those days, just after you’ve had an absolutely awesome weekend, when something just starts to go wrong and creates a problem that you’re up till 1am trying to solve? I had one of those last night. I’ll give you a hint; it had something to do with Vista and how uncivilised and unprepared we really are for the 64-bit era. And thats my excuse to the editor as to why this week’s entry is late, and so if you’re reading this in Issue 9 its because Josh feels really sorry for me, in which case you should pat him on the back next time you see him. Anyway, on with the article.

My friend Daniel (congrats, you get the second-ever Nerdery plug!) recently spammed Facebook asking for ideas on how a particular website that we’ve all come to love or hate needs refinement. In true human style, instead of sending directly to him, everyone decided to reply to the entire group (strong deja-vu, after a certain incident with the student e-news mailing list), and so I also got a little inspiration and insight into what web designers love to neglect; consistency.

Now, consistency is one of these things that is often talked about but never really put into practice in the software world, and really has two parts, the first being the most but least important, design consistency. Despite all the common templates and HCI research, it seems people love to set their own standards in the hopes that others will follow it, which often leads to disastrous results. A good example of this is the ‘Brushed metal’ theme of pre-Leopard Mac OS X. Although Apple had set strict guidelines of how it was to be used, mostly for hardware-interacting parts of applications, Apple often broke these guidelines themselves because they thought applications with this theme looked better.

But there is an issue that can be solved today; identity consistency. Open ID and Live ID are two great ways to ensure a common and consistent profile on the interwebs, but they still are yet to really be used properly. Live ID is probably the better example; everyone has MSN Live Messenger, so why can’t we use that profile for Facebook and Bebo? Not only would it be convienent, but it would actually encourage users to change passwords more often, as they’d only have one password to remember. Not to mention, all that contact list harvesting would be much smoother. Maybe I’m just dreaming though…

• Comments [0]
• Categories [The Nerdery]