I’m actually really pleased with how powerful the system is turning out. I’ve got geolocation support in (manual, or auto if you upload using the official WordPress apps from iPhone, Android etc.), EXIF processing (camera model used, time taken, etc.), “People in this photo” and optional visitor tagging (like Flickr!) and more is already in. It’s also structured entirely in HTML5, uses Canvas to render images smoothly, and uses some neat tricks to protect images from theft and hotlinking.

It’s still a work in progress, but it’s coming along nicely. I need to get the iPhone and Android mobile interfaces polished up, and implement a few more details into the system, but all in all it’s pretty much there.

I’ll take a month or two sampling the dog food here before I push out a beta release of the Theme for everyone to try.

Nope.

This is brilliant timing, and it isn’t a direct attack on Apple. It’s clear that all Amazon cares about is being the leading ebook retailer, not whether their hardware sells more than the iPad or any other device for that matter. That’s why they have an ebook reader/store app for every device on the planet; you want to use an iPad, not a Kindle? Great! We’ve got an app for that.

What we’re seeing here is a gold rush. Even if the iPad was a commercial failure (it won’t be), the hype surrounding it has force fed the reality of ebooks in the faces of the mass market for the first time.

People who would never have otherwise heard of ebooks now have.

People who always assumed they’d be complicated have now seen a dozen video demos of iPad and it’s “Books” app, and have realized they aren’t.

How many people watched Charlie Rose’s interview with David Carr and Walt Mossberg about the iPad? It was border line pornographic.

People are going to want an iPad, but not everyone will be able to afford one. That is the Kindle’s new target demographic, and how it will ride out the iPad storm.

Now all they have to do is assure their ebook store beat’s Apple’s own in terms of price, quality and catalog size. The flood gates are open, and I think it’s going to be a good time to be Amazon.

Anyway, here’s what I wanted to share: Since Buzz integrates heavily with Google Reader, you can use it’s “share” bookmarklet to forward links on to Buzz. Here’s a Bookmarklet I hacked together that works really well for this…

javascript:window.open('http://www.google.com/reader/link?url='+
encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+
'&srcURL='+encodeURIComponent(location.href));

Just drop it in a bookmark, load up a page you want to share and click. You can add a note too, if you like.

Enjoy.

I just hope Blizzard let’s us skip his soap opera speech with the next reset. /facepalm

I also finished the Glory of the Hero achievement and grabbed a snazzy Red Proto-Drake. Go me. :)

Razer Naga MMOG Mouse

I’m a PC gamer. I grew up on PC, and the platform will always be my first choice when it comes to picking up the latest and greatest titles. Don’t get me wrong; I love my consoles too, but if there’s a choice between a controller and a mouse and keyboard, you know which route I’ll go.

I don’t have to tell you PC gamers are hardware enthusiasts. Whether it’s that sweet quad core machine we just built or the glowing array of peripherals on our desks, we’re always looking for an upgrade to improve not only our games’ performance, but our performance in those games.

Being a fan of Massively Multiplayer games since the mid-90s, I was very excited to hear about Razer’s new “Naga” mouse. Although it isn’t the first mouse designed specifically for MMO gamers (the poorly received SteelSeries’ World of Warcraft mouse holds that award,) it is the first non-specific MMO mouse, and will work in any you throw at it.

I should note that although Razer has released drivers for the Mac, and the mouse works great under OS X, the configuration software has not been updated to match the macro recording functionality of it’s Windows counterpart. I expect they’ll be updating the OS X software to support this soon.

Features

Aside from the trademark Razer sensor and response time, the Naga features 17 buttons (12 of which are on the mouse’s “button grid” on the left side) which can be configured in a variety of ways using the driver software. Razer has worked with addon developers to provide customized hotbar layouts for World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online, though they are entirely optional. Since I’m a big fan of the Bartender addon in Warcraft, I opted to continue using that.

Although the Naga launched with somewhat limited customizability for the 12 grid buttons- which was a big complaint amongst MMO players- the latest driver firmware allows you to fully configure the buttons, including recording key-press macros.

Comfort

Although the Naga looks a bit intimidating and bulky at first glance, I was surprised to find it a tad smaller than the Logitech G5 I had been using for years. The mouse slants ever so slightly to the right to make the button grid friendlier on the thumb.

Size comparison: Logitech VX Nano, Razer Naga, Logitech G5, Logitech Performance MX

Razer includes training bumps (I’m not sure what else to call them) which can be attached to the grid buttons to train your thumb for placement. I attached mine to the “2″, “8″ and a smaller one to the “12″ buttons and was able to get fairly comfortable with the grid layout after about 4 hours of play. Once you become accustomed to the layout, they are easily removed.

The overall feel of the mouse is superb, rivaling even my beloved G5 in comfort.

Configuration

As I mentioned, each of the keys on the Naga can be configured however you like using the driver software. By default each of the grid buttons on the Naga are assigned to your 1-0, – and = keys, just as they appear at the top of your keyboard, and are listed from 1 through 12 on the mouse. This means, by default, your button grid will click the corresponding hot bar entry in your game.

This should work great for most players in most MMOs, but you can record macros to change this behavior.

Real World Use

UPS delivered the mouse to me last Friday, which game me the whole weekend to adjust and tweak it before my Warcraft guild’s raid on Tuesday and follow-up on Thursday.

I installed the driver software but opted not install Razer’s customized version of Dominos, as I’m a big Bartender fan. There is no additional functionality Razer’s addon provides; it just has a action bar layout that matches your Naga’s button grid. I ultimately customized my Bartender installation to provide a similar appearance.

On my Rogue, I found my thumb growing tired a few dungeon runs in. Being a melee class that pretty much constantly spams our attacks, the default grid layout didn’t work out very well. Sinister Strike, for example, ended up being the 2 key on my mouse. I dare you to try spamming that with your thumb on this mouse and liking it. Worse yet, in fights that required me to be more mobile, I found the “thumb spam” made it difficult for me to activate the right mouse button and move in a timely manner.

Certainly, I don’t think Razer’s intention for the Naga was to use the button grid in this manner.

Realizing this, I changed my Naga’s grid to use macros of CTRL+1, CTRL+2, CTRL+3 and so on; these are my buff buttons, and although they are used often most have a cool-down of between 30 and 120 seconds, so it works out perfectly for this kind of setup.

My Bartender Configuration

I kept all my spammy attacks on my keyboards 1-0 keys, which I was already used to using my other hand for, and all my buff keys to the grid on my Naga. This meant even as I was casting my melee attacks, I was able to remain mobile and pop cooldowns as they became available. Boom! There’s the efficiency boost I was looking for with this mouse.

By the time raid night rolled around I was well versed with my new configuration, and definitely saw an improvement in my overall performance. More importantly, I *felt* much more efficient and comfortable.

On my Priest, who is sadly still far below raiding level, I saw similar improvements. I kept my more frequently cast spells on my keyboard, and moved most of my Shadow and less frequent Holy spells to the mouse. Fortitude and Shield, for example, was great for moving to the Naga’s grid specifically for Battlegrounds, as you’re constantly popping those on your allies as they respawn or make a break with the flag for your base.

Final Thoughts

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I’ve seen a definite improvement in my efficiency since I began using the Naga, and I expect this to grow as I become more comfortable with the mouse, and adjust my play style and what spells make the most sense on the grid.

Considering you can configure the buttons using macros, this mouse makes a lot of sense not only for MMO gamers, but PC gamers in general. I can’t wait to try out the upcoming Dragon Age mini-expansion with this mouse. Switching party members, popping potions, casting buffs, etc. should be a breeze with the Naga.

Likewise, I could imagine more than a few uses for those 12 extra keys in everyday applications, like Photoshop.

At $79.99 I can see no reason why every MMO player shouldn’t be using one of these. Whether you’re a casual player or a end game raider, you’ll notice a great boost to your efficiency in the game.

My singular complaint is that the Mac drivers have fallen behind in functionality, as I play Warcraft on my Mac quite a bit on the road; I suspect Razer will resolve this issue in the coming weeks, however. That issue aside, this serves as a fantastic Mac mouse as well. I’ve always had issues with my Logitech mice feeling a bit wonky in OS X, especially the scroll wheel performance, but the Naga works perfectly straight out of the box.

While the film starts out strong enough, the ridiculous finale spoils the whole affair.

Denzel Washington plays a mysterious vagabond who’s been roaming the desert wastelands of America for 30 years. He’s on a mission to deliver a bible… somewhere. He isn’t really sure where. A voice told him to head West, though, so that’s where he’s going. He calls it faith. I call it a lazy writer, but whatever. Apparently the voice also trained him to be a super ninja samurai bad ass too, because he’s really good at beating up cannibals and rapists without getting a scratch.

The Book of Eli

Long story short, he strolls into Oldman’s town looking to recharge the battery on his beat up iPod. It just so happens Oldman has something of a book fetish, and he’s been hunting for a King James Version for a long time. Oldman discovers Washington is carrying one, yadda yadda, insert cool gun fights, a few dozen heads getting chopped off and that hot chick from That 70s Show and you pretty much have the movie.

Now, for the most part I really enjoyed the action in Book of Eli. I loved the dialog between Denzel and Gary, and their casting was spot on. Oldman knows how to play one hell of a bad guy. Unfortunately, the last 10 minutes of the film completely ruined what was otherwise an interesting, albeit bizarrely bible-thumping adventure.

Seriously, if you’re going to make movie goers sit through 2 hours of low budget desert landscapes, give us an ending that doesn’t make everything that happened in the movie irrelevant. Twist endings are fun, but only when they don’t turn the film into a ridiculous pile of nonsense. Deus ex machina at it’s worst.

Great acting.
Fun action.
Shit script.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Battle.net Authenticator

Account security in massively multi-player games is a big concern. If you play World of Warcraft, you know how often accounts are compromised. In the last 6 months we’ve had our guild bank emptied twice when high-ranking members had their accounts compromised, and a handful of our lesser ranking members have had their hacked characters’ inventory and gear liquidated and traded to, presumably, gold resellers. Blizzard isn’t alone in this problem, of course. Even NCSoft’s Aion, a very recent MMO release, is having major issues with this. Simple truth of the matter is no MMO account is safe from being hacked, phished or brute forced and compromised when all we use is traditional username/password schemes.

However, there is a solution to this; authenticators. Blizzard and Square Enix both sell a hardware key fob solution to secure accounts (in the case of Blizzard, there is a free iPhone app that does the same thing.) Essentially, it adds a second, randomly generated password to your account that changes every ~30 seconds. So, you login with your traditional username/email and password, press the button on your key fob, and enter the code to login to the game or access your account management settings.

If you’re familiar with Paypal’s Security Key program, it’s essentially the same thing.

Obviously, there are great benefits towards using security tokens like these to secure online accounts. Someone could lift your username and password from a phishing scam, but they still couldn’t access any important element of your account without the random token. No two key fobs will generate the same code at the same time, so it’s nearly impossible to brute force. Even a keylogger installed on a player’s computer is rendered useless, unless the hacker is somehow watching your input in real time and enters your token as you do within that 30 second window (not likely.)

Blizzard and Square have tried to push players towards getting their accounts secured with authenticators by offering perks like vanity pets and increased storage space for your characters, but I’m still surprised at how many players are completely clueless that these devices exist. That might be changing in the case of Warcraft, where word on the street is Blizzard will be requiring the use of these security tokens with or perhaps even before the Cataclysm expansion is released. This means Blizzard will either be shipping these devices out for free, or will be bundling them in with the Cataclysm retail box.

Bizarrely, the community seems divided on the issues of whether this is a good thing or not. I don’t see the negative, outside of the minor inconvenience of having to remember where your device is, and the pain of getting your account reset if your device is lost (or, as was the case of a few friends of mine, when they upgraded their iPhone firmware and rendered their security tokens broken. [This issue should be fixed now, though.]) I love the idea of the security token mechanism, and I expect virtually every MMO going forward to begin supporting this kind of authentication, perhaps even mandatorily.

Until we get there, though, there are a few stop-gap solutions companies like Blizzard could put into place to help secure accounts without investing in new hardware.

Password Case Sensitivity — The most obvious flaw in Blizzard’s security system is the fact that their passwords are case-insensitive. So, if you’re a clever player, and you used a variety of capitalization in your password to help protect it from brute force attacks, those efforts are for not. Seriously, who thought this was a good idea? You dramatically cripple the effectiveness of your security system by not including this.

Login Strikes — It’s an obnoxious feature when you forget your password, but it’s a great way of combating brute force attacks. Banks use it all the time for online account access. Essentially, you have X attempts to login before logins are disabled for Y minutes. So, if someone is brute forcing your password, they only have a very narrow window of attempts before they’re locked out from trying for awhile. Hackers use automated scripts full of combinations of commonly used passwords, dictionary words, and frequent number combinations to throw at a authentication system like an MMO’s to try and guess what your password is.

My only guess as to why Blizzard in particular hasn’t included this particular function is that our accounts are getting slammed with brute force attempts far more often than we may realize. If this is the case, we could potentially be frequently locked out of our own accounts because of these anonymous attacks, causing an increased number of calls to these companies support centers. In this case, the only way these companies could combat this problem is by offering a means of changing your username, which can be difficult from a technical standpoint, introduces a level of complexity to the system, increases the odds of players forgetting their usernames (and thus, potentially increases support center calls.) In the case of Blizzard, username changing isn’t an option, as you now login with your email address instead of a username with the Battle.net system.

Still, this would be an option for many MMO developers, and an option worth serious consideration.

OpenID — Here’s an interesting thought that crossed my mind; why not allow players to use OpenID to identify themselves? Decentralize security from your database and put it in the hands of the more tech savvy players. Obviously, it wouldn’t be an option for most of the market’s player base, but it could be an interesting experiment and lead to some fascinating innovation by the community. Allow players to build their own authentication mechanisms and secure their accounts through their own means, whether it’s usernames and passwords, or image-based schemes, or riddles, or whatever. Crowd-source your security.

Finally, there are two other avenues we could investigate to improve the current security token scheme we’re seeing. These are USB-Based Security Tokens and a Standardized Token System. One complaint I hear against security key fobs is that they require you to keep track of them, and require you to go out of your way to input the code. Granted, this only adds a few seconds to the login process, but it is an obnoxious element. Instead, why not use a USB key approach? The player plugs their security token into a free USB port. The game detects the hardware key, and inputs their randomized token for them during the login process. This still requires you to know where your key is, but assuming you only play from your home, you can just leave it in a USB slot and not have to worry about it. This might be a complicated for web-based account management though, but using browser plugins (*shudder*) it would be possible to still take advantage of the token system.

Also, considering that more and more MMO developers will begin introducing and perhaps requiring security tokens, wouldn’t it make sense to have a standardized token system for all MMOs? Our key chains could potentially be full of these things (if you’re an MMO addict like I am!) in a few years to come. If a third party stepped up and said, hey, we’ll sell your company branded security token hardware for your games, offer a simple API to integrate it into your authentication process, and allow players to use a single key to access all their MMO accounts, this company would make a fortune. Seriously. Somebody out there needs to get off their asses and do this.

So, there’s some random food for thought on MMO security. What would you suggest developers do to secure player’s accounts? Do you like the security token approach? Why or why not?

I’ve started looking at sites like Deviantart, SmugMug and, as I said, Flickr for inspiration. I intend on using HTML5 for the structure, WordPress for the backend, and CSS3 and the Canvas element for some polish. I want it to be dead simple, but also beautiful — of course, minimalist designs are often the hardest to pull off respectfully.

Here’s some early mock-ups:

So, at this early stage in the design process, I ask you; what photo sharing sites do you love, and why? What elements would you like to see in a photoblog theme? If you built Flickr, what would you change?

2010 is upon us, and the air is full of excitement for a clean start and a fresh outlook on the opportunities ahead of us. This year, I plan to devote some time working towards revitalizing my blog. Like many, I’m notoriously bad at getting distracted and neglecting it for months at a time. It’s easy to lose track of time and fall behind on posts. That’s why this year I’m taking part in Project 52, the brainchild of Anton Peck (who was in turn inspired by a tweet from Chris Wallace.) It’s a project with a pretty simple objective: post stuff, and post it often.

Once a week, share something new. Whether it’s a review, or a technical walkthrough, or just what’s going in your life: blog it. Blog the ever loving sweet crap out of it.

I won’t call it a New Years resolution because, well, I never keep those. I’m just going to hope for the best and see where it takes me.

Happy 2010, everyone, and best wishes for a happy and successful new year.

Photo “happy new year 2010″ by mugley.

My variation of this Automator workflow will:

• Detect when a Kindle is mounted.
• Confirms if you want to sync your device with Instapaper.
• Deletes any old Instapaper files on the device.
• Downloads a fresh Instapaper archive and places it on your Kindle.
• Asks if you want to dismount the Kindle, and does so if chosen.

Once you have this workflow in place all you really need to do is plug your Kindle in and wait for it to do it’s thing. Couldn’t be easier.

One issue to be aware of: while you have your Kindle mounted, any insertion of USB drives (or anything that will show up in /Volumes for that matter) will start the script. I’m looking for a workaround on that one, but it’s a relatively minor issue. Plug it in, sync it, unplug it. That’s the point of it, anyway.

You must also be signed into your Instapaper account through Safari for the Instapaper archive to be downloaded successfully. Automator uses your Safari session to grab the file.

Finally, the script should work with any number of Kindle devices, but only one may be plugged in at a time for the sync to work properly.

Download

You can download my workflow and customize it for yourself. You’ll want to move the file to your ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Folder Actions directory and work with it from there. Alternatively, you can build the workflow manually.

Install the Workflow

1. If you downloaded the pre-built workflow, ensure it’s been copied to the location I mentioned.
2. Open Finder and press Control+Shift+G. In the prompt, enter “/Volumes” and press Enter.
3. If you don’t have the path bar enabled in Finder, go to the View menu and select “Show Path Bar.”
4. Right click “Volumes” in the path bar and select “Folder Actions Setup…”
5. Attach the “Update Kindle with Instapaper.workflow”, ensure both checkmarks are checked.

Plug in your Kindle, and watch the magic. ;)

Build The Workflow Manually

1. Open Automator and create a new Folder Action. Set the “receives files and folders added to” drop down to “Volumes” (select Other, then press Control + Shift + G and enter “/Volumes”, press Go and then OK.)
    
2. Add a “Run AppleScript” action with the following code:

   on run {input, parameters}
   
     tell application "Finder"
       if exists disk "Kindle" then
         return input
       else
         error -128
       end if
     end tell
   
     return input
   end run

3. Add a “Ask for Confirmation” action. This will allow us to cancel our Instapaper update if we’re not ready for a fresh copy.
    
4. Add another “Run AppleScript” action to check for any existing Instapaper files on the Kindle, and move them to the trash for us.

   on run {input, parameters}
     
     tell application "Finder"
       set kindleFolder to "Kindle:documents:" as alias
       set instapaperFiles to every file in kindleFolder where
         name of it contains "Instapaper-ReadLater-"
       move every item of instapaperFiles to trash
   
       -- If you'd like to automatically empty your trash, uncomment:
       --empty the trash
     end tell
     
     return input
   end run

   Lines 5 and 6 should be on one line.
    

5. Add a “Get Specified URLs” action. Delete the default URL and add http://www.instapaper.com/mobi.
    
6. Add a “Download URLs” action. Point the Where value to your Kindle/documents folder..
    
7. Add another “Ask for Confirmation” action. This time we’ll be asking whether we want to dismount our Kindle or not.
    
8. Add one more “Run AppleScript” action to dismount our Kindle from the file system, allowing us to just unplug the device without any further steps.

   on run {input, parameters}
     
     tell application "Finder"
       if exists disk "Kindle" then
         try
           eject "Kindle"
         end try
       end if
     end tell
     
     return input
   end run