Good computer games have been around for a long time. "In the beginning", you could say that the idea was just kicking off, it was an experimental thing, very small market and few titles. But the 90s certainly made games omnipresent and ever since they've just been around us.

Obviously, when something is new, there tends to be slight adoption by enthusiasts, but not much beyond that. People in marketing will say that you've become successful once you've succeeded at selling your product to people with no special interest in it. Then you know it's good enough "for everyone", not just those with an acute interest in the topic.

But by those standards, games have always been a bit of a special case. Even though they are unquestionably popular, they're not quite like other integral elements of our culture. I used to wonder many years ago at how it was only guys who seemed interested in computer games. All through elementary and well into junior high, I was really into games, and most of my friends were too. But girls weren't. It seemed like an anomaly.

Girls may not buy the most expensive stereo, but they will buy a stereo, they like music. They may not buy the most expensive tv, but they will buy a tv, they like watching tv. And so on, and so forth. So what was so specific about games that had such a gender based appeal? Was it because games weren't made for girls? Probably. Was it because studios didn't know what kind of games girls would play? Probably. Was it because the market for games among guys is naturally bigger? Possibly, but that's just guesswork.

I would say that games reached some kind of threshold in the 90s, early 21st century. When I was growing up, games were becoming better all the time, they were developing quickly. New techniques and new technologies made games published 2 years apart really show that they weren't contemporaries. Of course, I'm generalizing here. But I think that at some point we reached the end of that sharp gradient. I just get the feeling that techniques that came up are now fairly established, and they are continually refined as new hardware allows it. But I don't see that kind of pace of evolution that I did back then. As such, the number of things you could do in a game have been discovered. I don't think games today are offering vastly new ideas than those 5 years ago. Compare that to the mainstream switch from 2D to 3D, that one was huge.

So what I hypothesize is that games have been an established thing for a while now, and studios know what they can and can't achieve, and they don't expect the technological landscape to change drastically in the near future.

At the same time that games have matured, it seems to me that the genre has specialized too. It has narrowed its spectrum to the kinds of games that really are successful. What is the single most popular genre of games right now? (From my perspective, at any rate.) It's shoot-em-up-games. Or at least that's what we used to call them then, I don't know what they are called now. It was Wolfenstein, then Doom, then Quake and so on, it's the Counter Strike genre of games. And there are tons of them. When I see people talking about games they play, it's overwhelmingly this genre of games. At the same time, other genres have suffered greatly. Where is the Settlers, the Transport Tycoon of our time? Many genres have just gone lost it would seem. I certainly feel like the variety today is much narrower than it was 10 years ago, even though there are probably more studios and more titles out there.

So who is playing these games? Reports have shown that when it comes to the most popular genre of games, it's teenagers/young adults. Guys say below 30 who love this stuff. This is the target demographic now.

Coming back to the question why girls aren't interested in games, I was reminded of this issue when I saw an article by a female game developer. In an effort to characterize the female attitude towards games, it would seem that a) women don't enjoy this super popular genre because they find the violence boring (so do I, for that matter) and b) they don't like playing games that are hard to figure out. Obviously, there are very few women *in* game development to begin with, so ideas that would be popular to everyone aren't being heard. Which produces a line of product that doesn't appeal to women. Which again makes women unlikely to go into game development and change the status quo.

Disclaimer: Before you flame, I take the following exceptions.

1. I don't consider console games, I'm not interested in consoles, and I probably never will be.
2. There has been a recent surge in online game play with fantasy games, which seems to be more gender inclusive. As such, this opinion may have been more accurate a couple of years ago.

I think we all agree it's very important to be politically correct. You shouldn't say spokesman, it's spokesperson. And you better not say Black, it's African American (whatever that means). But did you notice that there are still some shockingly backward phrases in popular use?

For example, Congressman and Congresswoman. What an outrage! I'm going on the record right now with Congressperson.

Likewise, all of our superheroes are in dire need of renaming too. Spiderman becomes Spiderperson, Superman is Superperson, Batman is Batperson, Wonderwoman is Wonderperson. The Green Lantern keeps his name, as lame as it is.

A lot of famous people have said lots of interesting things about success. Little did I know the success I was about to experience when I opened this blog in 2003. It is today what it's always been, an outlet mostly for various gripes, observations, recent events etc., of no interest to anyone. Why blog? Because I feel like it (bad guys in movies always say "because I can"). And I also thought that in time I would find it amusing to read back old entries, relive the past so to speak, which I actually don't really do.

But it turns out that this blog does have a wide appeal after all. Why is anybody's guess. In the last 6 months or so interest has intensified to the point where I get 1,000 comments a week. The absolute majority of these are friendly, well meaning, helpful spam bots who want to make sure I hear about the best deals that can be made. Whoever said machines aren't friendly?

So, as more and more spam bots have found my blog and spread the word to all their friends, it's become increasingly important to make sure I'm a good host to this populous demographic. My spam bot friends have a lot to say, and they won't stop at arguing points for topics that were covered here a long time ago. The Wordpress community has helped me ensure that while I don't miss out on any spam comments, the human readers on here, who don't know my bot friends, and don't appreciate their intelligence and sense of humor, only see the human content.

Wordpress ships with Akismet, and you want to turn it on right away. But to decrease the number of spam comments, you may want to consider the Bad Behavior plugin in addition. It blocks certain types of traffic outright, not just posts but also pageviews.

The last two weeks I experimented to see whether it makes much of a difference. First I ran Bad Behaviour for a week, counted how many spam comments I got and how many were blocked. Then I ran for a week without it and counted the spam comments.

May 17-25
832 spam comments

866 spam comments blocked by Bad Behavior (out of a total 1,196 requests blocked in total)

May 25-June 1
1,320 spam comments

In both cases, all spam was caught by Akismet, so nothing actually gets published. But the difference is in how much spam is submitted and ends up in Akismet's temporary 15-day archive.

Conclusion: Bad Behavior is worthwhile. :)

Portable music players are to me a very welcome addition to our lives. A lot of time that was previously completely wasted can now be exploited. All the waiting is so much better, waiting for the bus, waiting at the post office, waiting to cross the street. Oh sure, we had portable players the last ~25 years, but the reason they've become so universal lately is how convenient it's become to use them. Yes, for something to be practical matters a great deal, there's hardly a better example.

And yes, mp3 players are great... for music. Just like pens are great for writing letters. But that's not all you can do with them. Hey, after all it's an audio player, not a music-only player. And hey, music is great when you're on the road. But when you're out there a long time, no matter how much music you have, it does get a little boring. So how do you pick up that slack? Why not try an audiobook.

I actually don't play much music on my player anymore, anytime I'm outdoors I use it for spoken audio. Unfortunately, portable players generally suck for this. It's as if noone thought of it, gee what if someone wanted to listen to something longer than 5 minutes?

Obviously, audiobooks tend to be longer than songs. Depending on how it's divided up into tracks, it's sometimes very inconvenient to play them. If you miss 30 seconds of a song, it doesn't really matter. But if you're listening to prose and you get interrupted, you want to seek back those 30 seconds to hear what you missed. For audiobooks, easy seeking in tracks is pretty important.

My old iRiver ifp series used to choke on tracks longer than about 30 minutes in length. It would play the track, and go past this limit, but the duration on the display was now out of sync with the audio. For these long tracks seeking was completely broken past this limit. Unless there's been a firmware upgrade in the last 6 months, this is still the case for everyone. Not only that, the seeking function was pretty much the weakest part of the interface, it was very impractical and very often I would accidentally skip to the next track instead of seeking forward (holding the button vs pressing). Incredibly annoying.

This seems to be the trend in general, seeking is a marginal thing, no one is making it easy to use on their portable player. Another inconvenience is that some players have displays so small that long artist/title/album names are a pain to check, it takes forever to scroll them.

So what to do? Well, you can hack around it. It's not an elegant solution, but it's a solution. Divide all these long tracks into short tracks, so your player won't choke on them, and so that you only go 5 minutes back if seeking isn't reliable.

tracksplit.rb will do just that. Run it in the directory where you have your longish tracks (it accepts mp3/ogg) and it will chop each one into pieces for you. It also renames them sequentially (so I assume you know what tracks you have), so the order in which they were alphabetically is preserved. The originals are deleted (after all, this is just a copy for your portable player, right?).

The actual heavy lifting is done with mp3splt, which cuts tracks into pieces without re-encoding. :cap:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
#
# Author: Martin Matusiak <numerodix@gmail.com>
# Licensed under the GNU Public License, version 2.
#
# Note: this script uses mp3splt to split mp3/ogg files at a set length.


# set the length in minutes for each track, eg. 5.0 = 5 minutes
$track_length = 5.0


if ARGV[0].nil?
	$duration = $track_length
	puts "Track length not given, using standard track length of #{$track_length}"
else
	$duration = ARGV[0].to_f
end

if not system "which mp3splt &> /dev/null"
	puts "Erratum: mp3splt not found on system"
	exit 1
end

$pattern = "*.{mp3,ogg}"
files = Dir[$pattern]

if files.empty?
	puts "No files named \"#{$pattern}\" found, exiting"
	exit 0
end

w = (files.length / 10) + 1
files.each do |file| 
	i = files.index(file)
	newfile = "%0#{w}d_@n" % i
	cmd = "mp3splt -t #{$duration} -o \"#{newfile}\" \"#{file}\""
	puts cmd
	if system cmd
		File.delete(file)
	end
end

Ps. This happens to be my first adventure with ruby, so report breakage please ;)

Yees yes, that fantastic game we played in the early 90s. Remember it? Of course, who could forget. :cap: Getting that prince unscathed through all those tunnels, traps and past all his enemies was great fun.

Ah, the days when Ms-Dos was our operating system of erm... choice and we gave the keyboard a good workout.

Prince of Persia kept reappearing in new releases, but as far as I'm concerned once you kill the classic 2D game play feel, it's all downhill. The story lines for the later versions were also tediously complicated, nothing like the elegant simplicity of the classic. The original and the sequel, those are the two I played back then.

And now you can re-live the experience yourself. The Unofficial Prince of Persia Website has all the scoop, with plenty of extras. The oldest versions (1 & 2) are considered abandonware (which means no one is there to collect) and are up for download from the site. There's also cheats and walkthroughs if you get stuck (ah, how much easier it is to play these games nowadays when you don't have to figure it out yourself :D ).

Not only that, the walkthroughs for the sequel even have captures on google video, so you don't even have to play it yourself. :D

"But wait a minute", you say, "didn't you say Ms-Dos? How am I going to play these games? I've moved on from Dos by now." Funny you should ask. There is a Dos emulator called dosbox, which gives you a window into Dos, if you will. Inside there you can play any Dos game, and dosbox has a pretty long list of supported games.

Enjoy Prince of Persia! :cool: