Biodegradable Geek

Quake Live is a free, manly game to play. QL is a version of Quake 3 that runs as a browser plugin for Firefox, Safari, and IE. It features a skill-matched game finder, a friend’s system, and other modern features. Think a Lite, browser-based version of Steam. Quake 3 came out in 1999, and people have been playing it on a regular basis since. That’s about 11 years ahead of you if you’re new (doesn’t mean you can’t become excellent fast.)

The following Quake Live tips apply to those games: Quake 3, Quake World, Death Match Classic, Warsow, etc.

Quake Live Tips – The Basics

The point of the game is to control the map, not to get the most frags. Kills happen because other players are trying to take over your territory.

Don’t chase your opponent. Chasing is predictable, and will almost always get you killed if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Pay attention to your opponent. What items are they picking up? Their usual routes (surprisingly predictable,) etc.

Pay attention to what your opponent does when their health is low. They will either become very aggressive and erratic, or change their route and generally keep their distance from you.

Learn to strafe jump. It’s not as easy as in Counter-Strike <1.1, but it’s a skill that you can carry into other shooters (listed above), and is a core part of the game. Quake Live makes this easy with a movement practice mode and video tutorials.

Use a low sensitivity. Mine is 1.5. It’s more accurate, and you quickly learn how much force to give the mouse to flick the crosshair if you need to. You don’t need to do 180s and 360s. Once you become good, you will know where opponents are likely to come from, and have the crosshair always in that general direction.

Use ASDW to move, and bind every weapon nearby. I use R for rocket, Q for rail, E for lightening, F for shotgun, etc.

Learn the maps. Duels are a great way to learn maps. You can also learn a map by deciding on a specific item route to follow, and then following it until you’ve memorized it. Then memorizing another route, and so on. For example, rocket to RA to rail to MG to shotgun to rocket to RA ….

Use the right gun for the job. QL/Q3 has the most balanced arsenal in a shooter. Every gun including the machine gun and gauntlet are useable and very powerful. In some situations a machine gun is better than a rocket, such as when the opponent is very far away.

Quake Live Tips – Beyond Basics

Learn the amount of seconds each item takes to spawn. Then learn to countdown internally exactly when that item will respawn. This isn’t as hard as it sounds. Begin by only focusing on big items such as Red Armor (RA), Mega Health (MG), etc. You have to control the map (items), and also be able to spot what your opponent has, and both require that you know when items were taken, and/or when they will respawn. You can make the timer count up or down via

Control important items. Focus on controlling at least RA, MG, rocket and rail.

Try to predict what your opponent has equipped. There’s a good chance your opponent will have equipped whatever items were in the immediate vicinity. If they’re walking out from near the lightening gun (LG), they probably have the LG out. This is especially true in pubs and when you know your opponent just spawned or did not pick up a better gun. If there’s a common route, like from rocket to RA, and you know the RA had spawned recently, your opponent likely has RA with rockets a’blazin’

Fire at spawn points. QL has a very low invincibility time when you respawn, and you can die again right away. Memorize the spawn points in each map, and shoot at them when you expect a respawn. If you frag someone, and you know there’s a spawn point behind you, turn around and begin shooting. If they respawn at that point, they’ll be welcomed back with a rocket or balls of plasma.

Watch demos (replays.) Get the Firefox demo player and hop over to ESReality.

You have to actually play the game. Playing is how you get good. I put this tip at the end because people who don’t read up to this point, who will close this page and go play, don’t need the tip. People who read through this entire page are more likely to also be the type of person looking for a shortcut to becoming pro at QL – there are no shortcuts. You have to play the game, and enjoy every loss. Experience comes from playing.

Quake Live Links

Quake Live – Official Site

List of command variables

Learning how to code is like learning anything else – You have to do it. The hardest part is figuring out where to begin, and then you need some mechanism to show you that you’re making progress. The latter is important because it motivates you to keep going.

First, have a goal. I initially wanted to make AOL “punters” (apps that kicked other users offline) and malware. I found them interesting. Do you want to program games? websites? Facebook Apps? Apps for OS X?

Once you have the goal, do research on how those apps are made, particularly on the language used, APIs/libraries used, and so on.

When starting, you will be learning a lot of concepts that you will see no use for. If-then statements, variables, etc. You might understand the basic idea of what a variable is, but might wonder – why would I ever use this instead of putting the value in directly? At this stage, it’s important that you remain persistant and just go through the examples/exercises in your book (or those provided by your tutor). I noticed that most people will struggle through the first set of concepts, and then lose interest and quit after seeing that they aren’t doing anything interesting. One day, you’ll be doing something and everything will fall into place. An A-Ha moment.

You’re learning a bunch of stuff that doesn’t really connect with each other. How does printing “Hello World” to the screen eventually become a 3D game? How do I go from a console app to a window app? How does knowing what a variable or constant is translate to a web development project?

It’s a plateau — and I want to stress that this applies to almost anything, not just programming. You begin by learning a lot of stuff, very slowly making progress, and over time you begin to see that you kinda “know” what’s happening behind the scenes of the apps you’re using. After that, learning because easier and quicker. Getting to that level requires persistance.

My Turning Point – Stop Asking “What Should I Code?”

When I first began coding, I had the mentality that I had to “learn how to program” before “making app X” – This is logical but the way I structured in my head was important in impeding my progress. I divided learning how to program and making app X into two separate goals. It was a problem because it migrated me away from the goal of “making app X.” I began asking the wrong question – what should I code to learn how to program?

Instead, I should have been asking – what should I learn next, to reach my goal of making app X? I broke down app X into individual tasks, and then began learning how to do each one. For example, let’s say my goal is to program a game.

If I ask “what should I code to learn how to program?” I will spend a lot of time learning things I might not need anytime soon (or ever), I will get nowhere near reaching my goal, and will become unmotivated and quit before getting there. Instead, I would break down the game into individual tasks (this requires research) and work on learning each one.

Let’s see, I need to figure out how to make a window/draw things on screen. That becomes my new short term goal. I dig deeper and learn that I need to learn the Windows API. I learn that the Windows API is how one draws to the screen. But the Windows API is another thing I need to learn, so that becomes the immediate short term goal. Digging deeper, I realize that the Windows API is just a bunch of functions with some conventions that I need to memorize.

Now my goal is somewhat clearer. I begin reading about the Windows API, making different small apps to make sure I understand what I’m reading. Eventually I am able to draw a window and controls. Great. I still don’t have a game. What’s next? I need to draw graphics. I dig into how it’s done and learn that the Windows API provides a set of functions graphics. I’m familiar with the Win API and so I just begin learning the graphics lib. I make a few dozen apps drawing basic circles, loading bitmap images, etc. Now my goal of making a game is starting to take shape in my head. I can mentally structure how the game will be, minus a few concepts I might not have learned yet.

Persistence.

(draft)

I’ve been using Firefox since the first public beta, and the one thing always on my wish list was fixing the sluggishness and unbelievable memory consumption (2 GB of RAM?) that results from keeping Firefox open for too long. This is still on my wish list today (almost 2010), and I know it’s unlikely to be fixed. In fact, I’ve realized that – Zen Moment – the ‘patch’ must come from within.

The Mozilla team claim it is a feature and not a bug. Firefox stores pages you’ve been to so that you can go back to them instantly upon hitting the “Back” button. This means that FF’s memory needs grow as you browse the net, and leaving a page doesn’t necessarily mean the page’s memory has been deallocated. It makes sense, but in practice it results in Firefox becoming unresponsive. You can go into about:config and edit hundreds of settings, but I’ve never had any success with any of them in any version of Firefox on any OS. Ever.

I probably don’t use Firefox like the majority of users, and certainly not like the developers intended. For one, I don’t close it. In fact, I’ve never voluntarily closed Firefox in my life (I don’t shut down). I purposely crash it and then re-open it so that it asks me to load up all my previously open tabs. This clears out some memory and restores responsiveness making Firefox useable again.

Why don’t I just close it? Because I usually have a minimum of 50 tabs open across several FF instances, and some of those tabs are actually those “Oops, this is embarrassing…” windows that let you choose what tabs to re-open when you re-run a crashed Firefox. That means some of the tabs hold the potential to open up dozens or even hundreds of more tabs.

I feel relieved when Firefox is unable to restore my tabs. Life starts anew.

I keep tabs open that I intend to go through (never!), and I keep different sets of windows/tabs open depending on what I’m doing. i.e., cooking tabs in one window, work tabs in another, research tabs in another, etc. But this isn’t restricted to Firefox. On my Linux desktop I have 2 displays and 8 virtual desktops, making that 16 workspaces, and they’re usually always full. Since I have the RAM/power to run this setup, it’s smooth… except for Firefox and most other browsers (not Chrome).

On this desktop I worked around the Firefox memory problem by creating multiple profiles and using different profiles for different tasks (one for work, one for multimedia, etc). This also allowed me to crash one without affecting the others. It’s a temporary and crude solution until Firefox natively supports multiple processes like Chrome (see Electrolysis.)

But while there are some workarounds, fixing the technical issue isn’t going to increase productivity much. Having more sites open will probably make things worse. The habit of putting things off for later is inherently the problem. Having many sites/apps open is normal only amongst abnormal people. There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with it, but I don’t feel it’s very efficient, even if it may seem so at the time.

I’m generally disorganized and severely ADD-ed, and so this issue doesn’t only exist digitally. My desk is just as messy as Firefox. I have pieces of paper, napkins and anything else I jotted down notes on. I have unopened snail mail, opened but unchecked mail, and mail that has been checked and separated into 2 piles, those that require a reply and those that are to be trashed. There’s books I’m reading (multiple), and always unsorted pages of ideas/diagrams/blueprints of things I’ll probably never get to.

I’m obviously spreading my attention span thin. Going back to Firefox, if there’s an important piece of news on a page buried beneath other sites, I subconsciously still have “must read that article” somewhere deep in my head. It probably doesn’t result in any noticeable effect on its own, but when multiplied by 100x, the decline in calmness becomes significant enough to kill productivity. It produces a weak feeling of anxiety or overwhelmingness.

Earlier today, RIM released Blackberry Desktop Software for Mac (10.5.5+ required). It lets you sync your iTunes music with your Blackberry, sync your contacts and appointments with “popular Mac applications,” add/remove apps, and transfer data between your Mac and BB.
This 26 meg app is nice, but RIM needs to get going on a Mac port of their SDK. Sad considering most of it is just Java, with EXE wrappers. Fortunately there’s Openberry and other workarounds.

The short tags in PHP have been deprecated as of 5.3.0. Short tags provided a shorter alternative to the annoying-to-type <?php and <?php echo. Instead, you could use <? and <?= respectively. This was great but it caused problems when working with XML files, and the short_tags option was disabled in the PHP config by default on some implementations.

To make life easier, I created this vim mapping that will expand <? to <?php and <?? to <?php echo. You may change the abbreviation as you see fit. Simply place this in your .vimrc

inoremap <??    <?php echo  ?><Left><Left><Left>
inoremap <?     <?php  ?><Left><Left><Left>

Re-open vim or type use :source ~/.vimrc to reload the config. Now just type <? or <?? in insert mode.

Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of the spam comments on my blogs contain links concealed behind smilies. This helps you place any URL on a forum or a blog, without raising any red flags, as would happen if you blatantly add links to your posts or signature. It’s not obvious that this paragraph is just here to build a backlink to another site

Why the hell would you want your links where humans don’t notice them? Because machines do notice them, and your purpose is to have as many sites link back to you as possible. This artificially raises the rank of a site in the search engines. Whether this method actually helps or not is questionable. It helps, especially if done on a big level, but the point of this post isn’t to discuss SEO. It’s to raise awareness of this what I’m noticing to be an increasingly common tactic.

This idea isn’t new. Adding URLs to a 1×1 pixel transparent gif for tracking purposes is old and common, but this is now being used to build backlinks.

You can make this impossible by disabling UBB/HTML in your blog comments. Other methods include adding a border around smilies which are clickable.