The rubber band effect

I hate the rubber band effect of video games. The phrase was coined in relation to racing games – in some games, no matter how well you do the other cars are always 2 seconds behind you. You could drive a perfect race, easily passing everyone else only screw up at the very end, and watch as the rest of the cars all pass you perfectly. It’s almost like they are attached to your car with a rubber band, and it sucks.

The effect also applies to other games where the game is made artificially hard be changing the chance of success outside of the players skill. Instead of developing a better AI for the opposing forces, which makes you play smarter and harder, the game takes shortcuts. Giving an enemy a one-shot-kills weapon is a perfect example of this. It doesn’t matter how much health you have – if you linger just a little too long, you die. It doesn’t reward the skill of the gamer, it just makes it a matter of luck if you get through.

My most recent encounter with this is Lux Touch, a Risk-style game for the iPhone/iPod Touch. It’s a quick diversion while waiting for the bus, or to fire up when Qais is sleeping in my lap. My frustration comes in that I will often have 10 or 15 armies attacking a country with 2 or 3. I wind up with nothing, and the defender has 1 or 2 left – which they use the next round to invade me. It seems that instead of making the AI harder, the developers just skewed the statistics against the player.

It’s maddening, frustrating, and makes me want to stop playing the game.

Home Network – Logical Layout

I’ve talked enough about my home network in the abstract. Today, I’m going to walk through the diagram of how things are setup, and where I want to go next. Part of the motivation of this is to setup NagVis, so I can have a slightly prettier picture of my devices and their dependancies than Nagios gives me by default.

So, here’s the network layout map I’ve worked up quickly:

Current Network Layout

So, the walk through. I’ve got my Airport Extreme hooked up to the cable modem. It’s bridged with an Airport Express, so we’ve got solid network coverage throughout the whole house. It also allows me to attach the Vonage modem directly to the Airport Express in the home office – where it’s easier to use. Additionally, not shown, I’ve got a set of cheap desktop speakers connected to the Airport Express, so we can play music throughout the whole house.

The HP Photosmart is also hooked up to the Airport Extreme, which allows anyone on the network to use the printer. I’ve also got a Seagate FreeAgent drive hooked up, for quick file sharing and the backups of my wife’s laptop. This way, her network use doesn’t rely on my desktops being awake.

My primary workstation, Godzilla, is hooked up to the unmanaged GigE switch, along with the fileserver (vault) and the time machine backup server (thor). This way, my backups and media manipulation don’t show up on the network statistic graphs. Also, I didn’t have enough ports free on the Airport Extreme to put everything on one device.

You may notice right that I don’t have the Xbox hooked up to the network yet. I need to get a second Airport Express to do this, or move the Vonage modem into the entertainment unit. I considered getting the network adapter for the XBox, but it’s damn close to $100, which is the same price as the Airport – and with the Airport, I can hook up a second set of speakers to the AirTunes network, as well as a switch, so if I decide to wire a computer to the television, I’ve got multiple network ports to play with. All network related purchases are put off, though, as there’s other things I want to buy before I extend the network. Another other option, of course, is just getting an AppleTV, as the point of networking the XBox is that I can play media from my computer back on the television.

Addictions

This has certainly been an interesting week. Today is Monday, and a week ago today was the last time I drank any caffeine, in the form of sweet tea at lunch, and last Friday was the last time I had any coffee. It’s strange to have had this gone through so easily. I’ve tried in the past to just cut down on coffee, and it’s never worked. I’ve always wound up miserable and angry at everything around me. This time through, though, it’s almost like I never drank coffee before. According to Wikipedia, withdrawal symptoms last about a week.

Well, it’s been a week now, and this has been the easiest addiction to break, ever. Quite literally, I forgot to have my coffee last Saturday morning. Smoking took weeks and weeks of feeling angry, out of sorts, and unable to concentrate. It was a constant battle with my desires was really hard to get through.

Home Network – Time Server

This is really a lot easier than it sounds. In essence, you have two of your computers talking to time sources, and then checking with each other to make sure they agree on what time it should be. If your internet connection goes down, or your hardware time source goes flaky, you keep a somewhat sane time on your home network until the problem is repaired. This also allows you to reboot your time servers, or do maintenance on them without disrupting the home network.

Running your own time servers has the added benefit of having the time stamps on all your logs match, and allows you to run your own time-sensitive services. Perhaps AFS or Kerberos? If you want to run an OpenDirectory or ActiveDirectory system, you’ll need time sync, as you’ll be using Kerberos.

So, cutting to the chase – here’s the config on the two Solaris Nevada time servers, vault and thor:

vault (/etc/inet/ntp.conf):

server time5.apple.com
server time4.apple.com
server ns3.oit.unc.edu
peer thor

driftfile /var/ntp/ntp.drift
statsdir /var/ntp/ntpstats/
filegen peerstats file peerstats type day enable
filegen loopstats file loopstats type day enable
filegen clockstats file clockstats type day enable


thor (/etc/inet/ntp.conf):

server time6.apple.com
server time7.apple.com
server ntp-1.vt.edu
peer vault

driftfile /var/ntp/ntp.drift
statsdir /var/ntp/ntpstats/
filegen peerstats file peerstats type day enable
filegen loopstats file loopstats type day enable
filegen clockstats file clockstats type day enable


Also be sure to have several different external time servers in the config files. At times, time servers go bad. The protocol is designed in such a way that if one source goes bad, it can easily fall back on the remaining.

Home Network – Firefly Media Server

Part of my quest to simplify my electronic life at home has been to shift all media other than photos off of my primary desktop and on to an external file server. This means that at my house, one doesn’t have to use my desktop to listen to music, watch TV shows we’ve ripped from purchased DVDs or movies we’ve done likewise with. The failing of this, of course, is that it’s not user friendly to pull up a music collection on a shared file server, and then try to reference the files in iTunes. You almost always get duplicates or missed tracks, and the delay between playing a song and hearing the music start can be maddening.

There, of course, is a solution to this. The FireFly Media Server, formerly known as mt-daapd. It uses mDNS broadcasting to show up in any copy of iTunes that’s running on the network, allowing anyone to easily play from the library stored on the file server in a native interface. It has the added benefit that when you leave the network, there are no traces of the music left on your computer – which makes my wife happy. The only downside is that you can’t make playlists from within iTunes – you have to go to a web interface to set those up. Happily, you can make smart playlists.

Sadly, I lost my build notes. I do, however, have links to other people who have gotten it working. It’s worth it, trust me. Especially when you hook up the speakers in the home office to an Airport Express, and anyone can stream music to it.

• http://www.barchard.net/files/firefly_on_solaris.html
• http://forums.fireflymediaserver.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7245