Culture – Page 4 – Roo's View

Fantastic Contraption

I ran into this flash based web game a while back, it sucked up a couple of nights while I compulsively played through the first 18 levels. I was going to post about it back then, but decided against it as there are plenty of other discussions about fantastic contraption out there already.

For the geek crowd, it should probably be renamed to fanatic compulsion. Today I saw that two of my coworkers had just recently come across it (one of them with a physics background no less!) – they were both clearly trapped by this meme-like game. Consider this posting a warning – it is a huge time suck.

The game allows users to save their contraptions, and share them with others via a link – so a little internet searching will find you solutions to view if you need hints. As well, once you complete a level, you can see the solutions others have saved. Pretty neat how 5 simple elements can be combined to create so many solutions.

Astute readers may notice that I’ve posted a Google Chrome screen capture. This was actually taken running on Ubuntu using Wine. Instructions came via LifeHacker, but be warned lots of things don’t work (like any https:// connections). There is of course also CrossOver Chromium, but this is basically Wine linked to Chrome – so it suffers the same shortfalls. I used Chrome here because for whatever reason, the flash engine included with the Wine setup is much faster than the one embedded in my Firefox (same machine). I have more opinions on Chrome, but will save them for a future discussion.

Wikipedia

So the other day while I was posting about my experience setting up SlimRio I found myself referencing Wikipedia as I often do while blogging. I’ve always felt that Wikipedia is a great resource, but I had never really bought into the culture or gotten overly excited about its existance and what it represents. At IBM’s Impact 2008 conference one of the ‘keynote’ speakers was Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales, and one of my coworkers who was also there was very excited about being able to hear Jimbo talk about his part in helping create Wikipedia. His talk was interesting, but it didn’t change my thinking about Wikipedia.

The event that did changed my thinking about Wikipedia, was my first attempt to edit and update a page. I had noticed that the Rio Receiver page is tagged as an orphan – it only has 1 link and requires at least 3 incoming links to change this status. After my edit to the SqueezeCenter page to add a reference about SlimRIO it now has 2 links. I had assumed I’d need to register and all of that nonsense, but Wikipedia allow for completely anonymous edits so I was done in a matter of minutes.

We often forget the web is a scary place. If you find it on the web news it must be true, like the recent United Airlines share plunge triggered by bad reporting. Wikipedia does invest in preventing and reporting abuse, however the sense of responsibility when making an edit is still quite something. Giving back to the community is one of the reasons I have this blog, Wikipedia is another outlet to do the same. Where the two activities differ is in the scope. A blog is effectively an indepedent news source, whereas Wikipedia is a community effort.

I think I finally “get it” about Wikipedia. It has me thinking more about crowd sourcing and Amazon’s mechanical turk – I don’t think we’ve tapped the full potential of this idea yet.

xkcd

Most folk who read this will know about xkcd – but if you don’t, I highly recommend you check it out. There is a pretty reasonable wikipedia article on it as well.

Today’s comic cracked me up..

Reading xkcd is not only humorous, it is educational. For example, the term Rickroll was brought to my attention a prior to the YouTube April Fool’s joke via xkcd – of course, this might simply serve as evidence of how uncool I am. More recently Hack a Day posted on a security concern with how ISPs are using failed DNS lookups to redirect people to advertising – to prove the point the security research rickroll’d users visiting the bogus links.