Category Archives: Games

“King Of Kings”

This is one in a series of images from Okami recently posted at Dead End Thrills.

Seeing games like Okami or Xenoblade Chronicles running in high-definition via Dolphin only reinforces to me that the Wii had some amazing art direction in its games lineup that was hampered by the low resolution of the system’s output.

Not upscaling when using backwards-compatibility on the upcoming Wii U further compounds the error. These games would look great with a little upscaling and full-scene effects love, but we’re not going to get to see it.

We have the best systems engineers in the world at Automattic. They’re even better than you think they are because what they do is silent and unnoticeable, like ninjas.

They just keep the service running solid, day after day.

Barry on WordPress

Yesterday, Valentin Bartenev, a developer at Nginx, Inc., announced SPDY support for the Nginx web server. SPDY is a next-generation networking protocol developed by Google and focused on making the web faster. More information on SPDY can be found on Wikipedia.

At Automattic, we have used Nginx since 2008. Since then, it has made its way into almost every piece of our web infrastructure. We use it for load balancing, image serving (via MogileFS), serving static and dynamic web content, and caching. In fact, we have almost 1000 servers running Nginx today, serving over 100,000 requests per second.

I met Andrew and Igor at WordCamp San Fransicso in 2011.  For the next six months, we discussed the best way for Automattic and Nginx, Inc. to work together. In December 2011, we agreed that Automattic would sponsor the development and integration of SPDY into Nginx. The…

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A Better Kind of Penguin

He’s coming for you. With the spamhammer.

A little while back, Google made a pretty big change to their search algorithms with an update that they call the “Penguin” update.

Penguin was specifically designed to punish backlinkers who are using certain black hat techniques such as keyword stuffing and things like comment and article spinning. What happens is that these spammers are checking Google Webmaster Tools (or receiving email updates) and are receiving messages that their ranking is being negatively affected by spam blogs or comments they have left on WordPress.com blogs.

Then, we at WordPress.com get emails that look like this (my paraphrase):

We need to have our links removed from your website ASAP. Below are a few URLs where we found our links. This may not be all of the links on your site. Please ensure that you remove ALL links to our site.

After this they provide us with the URL of their site (it’s usually something that’s basically pure spam) and then a list of all the links they know of across the WordPress.com network. This leads me to laugh, quite often out loud, because:

  1. They have just alerted us to a spam campaign on WordPress.com and likely elsewhere and given us exactly what we need to investigate,
  2. They have just admitted to us spam comments, entire spam blogs, or even sponsored post content that exists on WordPress.com and that we are looking to get rid of anyway, and
  3. The best part about it is that if it’s not that bad we could just leave it alone, do nothing, and possibly punish the spammers more than if we were to remove everything.

It probably doesn’t sound like much to you, but it’s one of those little things that amuses me and causes me to enjoy what I do.

Watch Dogs

This was the game of the day for me yesterday. The premise is sound and the gameplay looks to be amazing (though it remains to be seen how scripted it will be).

And some early gameplay:

I find it interesting that there’s a bunch of games that intend to play on our fears of digital control and data collection.

Why Ticket to Ride Isn’t Coming to Android

Ben Kuchera, interviewing the CEO of Days of Wonder:

Hautemont joked that Google created a platform so open that it’s barely a platform anymore. The physical versions of Ticket to Ride are a specific size, and it takes a non-trivial amount of work to make that game fit well on digital devices with comparatively small screens. The good news is that with the iOS platform you need only aim for two screen sizes to hit 100 percent of all devices.

Things are not nearly as simple when you look at Android as a whole. “When you take [a game] to a platform that has dozens of different form factors, screen ratios, and so on, the work is not quite as simple. The question for us, it’s not that I don’t like Android… the question is how could we do that in a way that is satisfactory, and that’s when things start falling apart.” Everyone wants a version of Ticket to Ride that plays at least as well as the iPhone or iPad version, and they want it to run perfectly on their own phone or tablet, running their own version of Android. Trying to deliver the quality Days of Wonder is known for across all the variables of Android is simply cost prohibitive, and Hautemont has no interest in lazy ports.

Besides, there’s also the issue of customers paying for the game.

The Android ecosystem simply makes things too hard for both developers and users.

There’s something to be said for simplicity.