The Blog

So I recently ordered my own copy of Mortal Kombat and it arrived just a few days ago. Once in my impatient hands, I savagely tore open its containing box without a fragment of mercy; ending with something similar to this:

After that, I proceeded to remove the inferior plastic barrier that stood between me and the future of gory deaths that I’d be responsible for. Having taken care of the plastic with my razor sharp teeth, I pried open the casing open to reveal a fairly well decorated DVD and a booklet on the side. Naturally the booklet never experienced the faintest drop of my attention, but the DVD was pampered with the greatest of care. I removed it from its casing, popped it into my PS3 and enjoyed the awkwardly menacing side of me that enjoyed achieving the bloodiest of fatalities.

Today, with most things, you normally learn as you go along. Somehow, I find myself remembering how I use to value those little booklets that I now show no love to. In the past, before delicately removing the DVD, I would have carefully removed the manual and used it to avoid the learning curve. Now, I realize that it had been a long time since I had read a game manual and will probably be an even longer time before I read another one. So I wonder, are game manuals worth it or have they become a waste of our limited resources? I personally think they should be available on the website or on the game disk. Of course, I haven’t ruled out that I may be the only one who doesn’t care for the manuals, so let me know your thoughts on our Facebook or below!

An overly sized brick that weighed a ton in my hands, comprising of a 2D, black and white screen and some buttons. That’s exactly how the six years old me would have described a Gameboy. Even with its primitive characteristics, the Gameboy is a feature in an evolutionary timeline that started many years before its arrival. If we go back to the beginning of human time, I’m sure that you’d be able to find some relative of gaming regardless of how basic. Competition and play are part of human nature, so whether it was punching wholes in the ground or killing the most mammoths, games can easily be made of anything.
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I’ve noticed that there are some who hesitate when it comes to positively correlating video games and art.  Of course a statement like there is an art to playing (insert game) is invalid, but what about the finished product itself? This quote “Video games can never be art” by Roger Ebert has me stumped because games are simply hybrids of the art we take for granted everyday. For some, to appreciate a compilation,  one must examine each of the individual parts. To begin, what is art?
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If you’ve ever wanted to include some data from an RSS/Atom feed on a page from Ruby, you’ve probably run into this problem:

It’s completely unreasonable to hammer the feed provider with a request every time the page is rendered, but it’s no more reasonable to use a big relational database like MySQL just to cache some stupid tweets or blog posts, especially if your application wouldn’t otherwise need one.

But apparently this layer of persistance has been deemed out-of-scope by the creators of popular RSS consumer libraries such as Feedzirra.

So I wrote a little gem called feedzirra-redis to take care of this as transparently as possible. You can use it just like you would Feedzirra normally, but your feeds and entries do not disappear at the end of the script, so you can do the dirty work from a Rakefile via cron instead of in the web request/response cycle while your users impatiently twiddle their thumbs.

Installation

$ gem install feedzirra-redis

See the README and test suite for example usage.

Enjoy!

As June comes to an end, we remember that it brought more to us than the official start of summer. Below is a high level view of just a few of the projects and events that took place this month.

MLG Columbus
Lets start off with our biggest event, MLG Columbus. This month’s Pro circuit was held during the weekend of June 3-5 in Columbus Ohio and obtained notable success. Throughout the weekend, nearly 15 thousand people showed up to support their favorite gamers. That however, was nothing near the 22.5 million people who streamed the event from their computers. With the major updates we made to our systems, we formulated the equation for a very successful pro circuit event that tromped the ones before it.
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Several days ago, I was walking with my Agora Games t-shirt, which happens to bare the Major League Gaming (MLG) logo on the arm. Out of Dunkin Donuts, a young boy excitedly ran up to me. After catching his breath, he goes, “excuse me, do you compete in the MLG?” At that point I had gotten towed and was on the phone with the police so I simply shook my head no.
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Here at Agora we make use of dedicated hardware and virtual machines running on our providers’ respective clouds. In recent months, we’ve moved our RabbitMQ hosts onto hardware because we found that we could far exceed the CPU capacity of our virtual machines and it was far cheaper to run a small cluster of hardware hosts than a giant cluster of VMs. We used an existing, underutilized host for our primary traffic while awaiting delivery and installation of a new pair servers. Expecting a simple plug-and-play swap, I set out to test the new hardware before we made the transition. What follows is a harrowing tale into the deepest depths of modern hardware architecture.

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When we play video games, we are automatically transported into a world that stretches beyond the line of current reality. Within this world, you are granted complete freedom while omitting consequences. Many people play games because it’s a channel through which we can live out the impossible. While there are many other reasons, I question whether our attention spans are the only things being is injected into the games we play.
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Success pertains to anyone willing to grab it, however, the majority will experience it through different channels. A lot of people measure success by a person’s current status; what they have, who they know and ultimately where they are. Only, is this a correct scale upon which to measure a person’s triumphs? When measuring success, should you look at the point where a person has landed or consider the journey from where they made the initial jump?
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