JulioBiason.Net » Rants

First you don’t read; then you don’t know how to do math

Julio Biason — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 01:54:15 +0000

Note: This is a WoW related post. If you don’t like MMOs, games, think Blizzard jumped the shark with the “Wrath of the Lich King” expansion, rage quit the game after a paladin killed you in one cooldown or simply aren’t interested in WoW at all, you can skip this.

Today, reading WoW.Com (which is not run by Blizzard, I must say), I read this article about Prot Paladins outhealing Holy Paladins in PvP. As a protection paladin that does the healing job in PvP, I thought it would be worth the read. But the problem show up right in the first paragraph: The author’s solution is remove the Spell Power plate from the game. Wait, WHAT?

For those that don’t know WoW or don’t know how paladins work, here is a brief explanation:

Paladins can fill the three roles in a group, depending on the abilities (or talents) they chose: A healer paladin would take talents from the “Holy” tree; a tanking paladin would take talents from the “Protection” tree; and a damaging (DPS) paladin would take talents from the “Retribution” tree. Of course, there is always some mixing of talents from different trees (e.g., for PvP, a retribution paladin would pick some talents in the protection tree, to improve his survivability), but most points would go to the proper tree.

Also, there is the difference of gear. Since damage is what retribution paladins are going after, they would chose gear with more “Strength” and “Attack Power”; tanking would go with more “Stamina” and “Defense rating” and some “Strength” and “Agility” (I’ll not dwell on how those two attributes help survivability at this point); healing would go after “Intellect” and “Spell Power” (just to know, the more spell power a healing paladin have, the more powerful their healing abilities will be.)

At it’s core, the paladin is a caster. This means that most of it’s abilities are not normal attacks, but magic spells and since everything paladin related is magic, the “Spell Power” can help the class a lot. As the holy paladin is the only one that have gear with “spell power”, talents exist in the other trees to help them: The retribution tree have a talent called Sheath of Light, which increases the “spell power” based on “attack power” (which makes sense, since the retribution paladin would go after “attack power”), holy paladins have Holy Guidance, which increases the “spell power” based on total “intelect” (which helps them to have better heals) and the protection tree have Touched by the Light, which increases the “spell power” based on the total “stamina” (again, makes sense since “stamina” is the base survivability stat tanks go after.) Those talents help retribution paladins to make more damage, the holy paladins to have better healing and the protection to keep the enemy they should prevent running around and killing everyone else attacking just them.

Now that we put the basics down, comes the part that “don’t read”: The Blizzard forums point the problem of Protection Paladins using Holy Paladins PvP (Player versus Player) gear. The author’s solution is to remove the “spell power” plate from the game since holy paladins are the only class that have a use for it. First of all, removing won’t solve a thing, since PvP gear is “bought” with honor and, thus, doesn’t affect any other class. Every class is capable of getting honor no matter what (some may have some difficulties, but it’s not impossible.) But he seems to confuse the PvE part of the game with the PvP part. In a PvE (player versus environment), you go into what it’s called an instance (which is put as a cave, house, cathedral, building), kill some monster till you get to the big monster and, when he’s killed, you get your rewards in the form of new gear. Since holy paladins are the only ones interested in plate with “spell power” (the other plate wearers have no use for it, not even non-paladins) if there isn’t a holy paladin in the group, the gear is lost — it can still be sold, but it’s basically lost ’cause it comes to “it could be some gear that other class could use”. That’s the life of playing a game with random number generators: You can’t just say “I’ll go there and get that gear” ’cause you don’t have any control over the gear that will appear.

And the part that “don’t know how to do math”: As I pointed, holy paladins are interested in gear with “intellect” and “spell power”. But with holy guidance, if maxed to all available points, increases spell power by 20% of the total intellect or 10 intellect increases your spell power in 2. Since your gear also have spell power already, that’s a good trade off.

Stamina, for protection paladins, just turn into health and no other stat. But you may remember that talent that helps Protection paladins to have spell power based on stamina. If you put 3 points in that talent (which is the maximum), you get 30%, which basically makes 10 points in stamina give you 3 more spell power points. Things are starting to look clear, don’t they?

So take a look at this: Let’s take a piece of the PvP gear for holy paladins: the chest. It have 115 stamina, 50 intellect and 98 spell power. For a holy paladin, that means the total spell power of that chest is 118 spell power. For a protection paladin, that means around 132 spell power. And no, you can’t have both talents due the amount of points required to enable those abilities.

Also, just to add insult to the injury, you may notice that there are two “slots”, available for gems. The most powerful intellect gem gives you +20 intellect and the most powerful stamina gem gives you +30 stamina (the gem color is not important, in this case.)

So, removing the spell power plate from the game would help? OF COURSE NOT! If paladins where changed to use mail to have spell power, it would still gave protection paladins more spell power than holy paladins and the overheal would still be there.

The proper solution isn’t so easy, though. Reducing the stamina from the PvP holy gear would damage holy paladins survivability; reducing the spell power from the talent in the protection tree would hurt their ability to keep an enemy attacking everyone in the raid; increasing the Spell Power returned in “Holy Guidance” would make holy paladins in PvE too power to be compared to any other healers.

But there is one insightful comment in the article: Make the amount of spell power increased by stamina based on the total “defense rating”. That stat is only used in PvE by protection paladins and it’s not so helpful in PvP. Since the holy paladins have no use for that, the PvP gear have none and, thus, can be used as base to not hurt protection paladins (since their have large amounts of defense rating anyway) and not overpower holy paladins.

Why the new Star Trek bothers me

Julio Biason — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 22:55:23 +0000

For a while, I’ve been ranting about the new “Star Trek” movie by J.J.Abrams and written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. This morning I finally realized why it bothers me and why the line “OMG, boobies in Star Trek?” makes me giggle.

First, let’s take a look at the list of main Star Trek characters in the series:

The Original Series: James T. Kirk, Spock, Dr Leonard “Bones” McCoy, Montgomery Scott, Hikaru Sulu, Pavel Checkov, Uhura (and let’s throw Christopher Pike just for the sake of it.)
The Next Generation: Jean-Luc Picard, William Riker, Geordi La Forge, Worf, Beverly Crusher, Wesley Crusher, Deanna Troi, Data.
Deep Space Nine: Benjamin Sisko, Kira Nerys, Odo, Julian Bashir, Jadzia Dax, Quark, Miles O’Brien, Jake Sisko, Worf (yes, again), Ezi Dax.
Voyager: Kathryn Janeway, Chakotay, Tuvok, B’Elanna Torres, Tom Paris, Harry Kim, The Doctor, Neelix, Kes, Seven of Nine
Enterprise: Jonathan Archer, T’Pol, Charles Tucker III, Malcolm Reed, Hoshi Sato, Travis Mayweather, Phlox.
Go on. Go clicky-clicky and try to find the two that doesn’t fit. I’ll wait.

Did you spot the two?

Ok, the answer is: Wesley Crusher and Jake Sisko (although I made it hard for you to noticed why Jake doesn’t belong there.) They are the only teenagers in the whole list of series that were main characters (there we some kids in “Voyager”, but they would appear in only one or two episodes.) All the others look like they are in the late twentys or early thirties (with a few exceptions that look more like they are getting into their fourtys.) And that also includes non-human, ageless forms, like Odo, Data and the Doctor, and the ones with longer lifes, like the Vulcans. Even the youngest crew of all series, the Voyager (they were going into final training before going officially into service when they were transported to the Delta Quadrant) looks like they were in the later twentys.

And that’s why the new Star Trek bothers me. All the actors (with the exception of McCoy) look like they are in their early twentys and in full operational status already. Even in the original series, when the Enterprise goes into its official mission of “explore strange, new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations”, Kirk looks like he’s in the late thirties. And now you have a Kirk that looks like he just out of puberty.

Yes, there were boobs in the TOS. But they belonged to mature females, not some out of puberty, hormone full chick.

To me, it looks like the tone of Star Trek changed from “When you get out of your studies and do some real life training, you may be a member of the most important ship of the human race” to “jump into the most important ship of the human race! All you need to do is be able to talk!”. Sign of the times, maybe, when you’re supposed to finish college and be a full experienced whatever-they-call-you-in-the-field. But, still, Star Trek looks a little bit tainted with an “easy way to get there” view.

But, then again, I’m an old trekkie (although I never remember if the proper way is trekker or trekkie…)

Mac OS applications are not very friendly

Julio Biason — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:24:57 +0000

Long before having a Mac, I learnt about it interface and the Application/Window relationship on Mac OS.

You see, there is a fundamental difference between Linux/Windows application and Mac OS application. While in the first two the window is the application (and closing the windows, closes the application), on Mac OS it is not quite like that: you can have an application running without any windows (it would still show on the task list and it would have a menu on the top, but you may have no windows at all.) It makes sense for some applications to don’t have any windows, as it makes sense for some applications to simply disappear if there are no windows open.

Examples: if you are using some text editor, when you close your window/document, it really means you are done? Maybe not, maybe you just want to close that document before starting a new one. In this case, it makes sense to have the application still running. The same goes when you have more than one document open: displaying it as two separate windows make them independent of each other and you can choose how to work with them (that’s something it took years to Microsoft to realize and dump the MDI [multi-document interface] Word was using since it was called Word.)

So, basically, what you have on Mac OS is that every document should be a window and closing all documents don’t close the application.

One of the things that annoys the hell of me is trying to use Mac OS applications in a Mac OS way. One example is Safari: If you follow the idea behind the window/application Apple introduced, you’d have one Safari window for each site. The thing that annoys me on that is that there is no visual feedback about what it is doing. Firefox have the spinning circle, Safari has nothing. To make it display any feedback, you have to enable tabs, which means you’d start opening tabs for every page, which is not the way you should use this. And, to be honest, have a single, dangling tab just to display a damn spinning circle is quite stupid.

Mail.app is another application that completely fails on user feedback. I have some 20-something filters and my IMAP server is not that fast. So, when I start the application, it does nothing. Then it beeps. And displays nothing. And then, suddenly, it displays the mail counts. And there is this space in the sidebar which says “Mail activity”. A completely lost space which could be used to display, for example, “Retrieving your email”, “Applying filters”, “Checking new mail on folder X”.

Other applications simply decide not to follow the window/application metaphor. One example is PhotoBooth. I really like to take a picture of me from time to time and update my 15-something social networks site (well, from “time to time” more likely to be “every year or so”.) The thing about PhotoBooth is that, if you close the window, the application closes too.

Software Update is ever worst. If it doesn’t find an update, it displays “There are no updates” and, when you click “Ok”, it simply disappears. No window, no application, no nothing. What kinda of user feedback is that? Show the user that the update list is empty and let the user close the window or the application. Like every other Mac OS application.

And, on top of that, all those applications where produced by Apple itself. And I won’t even comment about iTunes, which doesn’t even follow the default theme you’re using.

Hypocrites

Julio Biason — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:52:48 +0000

It seems that Steven Spielberg decided to start a “boycott the Chinese Olympics” campaign. And a lot of people are following him. The whole thing is just to raise the public attention to China not following most of the human rights.

And that comes from people in a country that invaded two other countries that were not in direct attack and killed several innocents calling them “war causalities”. Not to mention that the government is now the terrorist of its own population.

Mr. Spielberg, you are an hypocrite. Why don’t you look at your own country instead of messing with other countries problems?

Write once, run in just one place

Julio Biason — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 02:20:43 +0000

Oh, Mono running natively on Mac OS X, thanks to Gtk+ Native widgets. But “MonoDevelop has pretty much the same feature parity than Linux does. There are a few missing features that we hope to resolve in the future, and there is plenty of room to improve.” Because multi-platform languages aren’t.

Edit 1: And no, this is not a post to prize Mono. All credit goes to the Gtk+ guys who managed to do the hard work of porting Gtk+ to use the native widgets. Actually, I’m pretty disgusted that De Icaza is again trying to sell Mono taking credit of other people’s work.

I’m out of sync with the movie critics

Julio Biason — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:58:06 +0000

I hate George Clooney. Really. Every single movie he does make me like him less and less. His acting is not convincing and he doesn’t have facial expressions. Yet, every single critic says he is an awesome actor and that his latest movie, “Michael Clayton”, is so awesome it should get an Oscar. When I saw it, I wanted to pee on Clooney face and burn the theatre down, just to enjoy a little bit of my lost 2 hours in the cinema.

When I was in the plane back to Australia, I saw Ratatoule (or whatever, I don’t care if the name is wrong.) I thought it was unimaginative, boring story about “accept who you are” for kids. You know, the same thing they say in kid movies over and over again. I mean, I’m seeing that message since I was a kid. Yet, critics say that the Academy should reconsider its position about the movie, as it was ranked higher than the “best movie” movies.

Really, critics don’t know movies.

Windows shell utilities are another victory for Cygwin

Julio Biason — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 02:49:08 +0000

C:\Symbian\UIQ3.1SDK\epoc32>find --help FIND: Parameter format not correct

C:\Symbian\UIQ3.1SDK\epoc32>find -h FIND: Parameter format not correct C:\Symbian\UIQ3.1SDK\epoc32>find /h FIND: Invalid switch C:\Symbian\UIQ3.1SDK\epoc32>find FIND: Parameter format not correct C:\Symbian\UIQ3.1SDK\epoc32>find /? Searches for a text string in a file or files. FIND [/V] [/C] [/N] [/I] [/OFF[LINE]] "string" [[drive:][path]filename[ ...]] /V Displays all lines NOT containing the specified string. /C Displays only the count of lines containing the string. /N Displays line numbers with the displayed lines. /I Ignores the case of characters when searching for the string. /OFF[LINE] Do not skip files with offline attribute set. "string" Specifies the text string to find. [drive:][path]filename Specifies a file or files to search. If a path is not specified, FIND searches the text typed at the prompt or piped from another command.

C:\Symbian\UIQ3.1SDK\epoc32>grep 'grep' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.
And that’s why I’m installing Cygwin on my computer now…

Apple just likes what you bought from Apple

Julio Biason — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:41:24 +0000

I sold my soul to the devil. And now I’m paying the price for it.

I bought a MacBook Pro. Shinny stuff. “Let’s give it a fair go”, I thought. So I let it installed (and did not replace it with Ubuntu) and tried to use its applications. And I must say one thing: while I can’t use Windows ’cause I feel like it is always trying to get in your way, OS X doesn’t. It is almost like Linux (well, GNOME, actually, since it is my preferred desktop environment), except for the stupid default options (tab just jumps over text fields, why?)

As any good geek, I broke the system by forcefully removing Python 2.3 (which is part of the system). And, since I couldn’t find a package to reinstall it on the CDs, I decided to format and reinstall everything.

After almost two hours (why every installation need to check the DVD integrity?), I had a system running again. Time to setup the most used application in any computer I had: the music player. So, because I had synced my iPod with iTunes before formating, I thought it would be just a matter of pluging the iPod, point that this is my computer and that is my iPod and everything would be fine. Wrong.

You see, I set up iTunes with my iTMS account. So I could transfer the songs I bought there to the computer. But there was no fucking way to say “now transfer all other songs.” iTunes refused to open the iPod songs and I couldn’t find a way to say “this is MY iPod, you freaking stupid piece of computer crap.” There was only one option: erase and sync (which meant I would delete everything on my iPod and then copy the songs I bought from iTMS to it. Bu-bye 6000 songs, hello 100 songs. Not good. Because I’m really fussy with my songs, I made a backup of all of them on my external drive. So I had to copy all of them back to iTunes, then I could erase my iPod and sync again.

Honestly, I felt like I was using Windows again. The operating system decided to get on the way I do my stuff. Why can’t I just use my iPod was a big USB drive and ask the computer to copy them from one side to the other?

E assim desanda a cultura brasileira…

Julio Biason — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 13:28:10 +0000

Duas semanas no Brasil foram o suficiente pra encontrar o porque esse país não vai pra frente. O motivo é simples: a capacidade intelectual do brasileiro foi pro brejo.

Não teve um dia de noticiário em que um entrevistado na rua falhasse na capacidade de manter os pronomes e os substantivos no mesmo número. “As pessoa têm que aprender a usar as ferramenta.” Não foram um ou dois acontecimentos isolados; foi todo o dia. Sem contar aqueles com a capacidade de falar sem dizer nada, que também não foram casos isolados.

Sem contar o anúncio da prefeitura do Rio de Janeiro tentando chamar a atenção com “show de fogos de artifício com efeitos 3D!” No final, o que eles fizeram foi colocar baterias repetidas em posições repetidas, de forma que o mesmo conjutno de fogos aparecesse mesmo visto de posições diferentes. Efeitos 3D minhas bolas! Mas claro, ninguém saberia explicar o que eles queriam dizer com “3D”…

Ninguém consegue mais falar português e tem gente que usa expressões que não fazem o menor sentido. Começaram bem, j´ esquecendo como é que se fala. Daqui pra frente, é só ladeira abaixo…

O fenômeno “Tropa de Elite”

Julio Biason — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 10:27:41 +0000

Incível como “Tropa de Elite” faz sucesso aqui no Brasil. Isso é uma das coisas interessantes sobre o filme. A outra coisa interessante é a quantidade de pessoas que realmente não entenderam o filme. A quantidade de piadas usando frases do filme é absurda.

Primeiro tem a Gang (“A loja que te entende”, mas que tem o pior setor de marketing do Brasil) espalhou vários outdoors com coisas do tipo “Em 2008, não espalhe lixo, ou tá com nojinho?” e “Em 2008, não brigue nos estádios ou pede pra sair”. A Claro (ou alguma outra empresa de celulares) saiu com uma propaganda com crianças querendo pegar o Papai Noel; um deles dorme e os outros aparecem dizendo “Pô sentinela, pede pra sair”.

Quantas piadas sairam sobre o filme “Filadélfia”? Nenhuma. Por quê? Porque é um filme sobre conscientização social. Assim como “Tropa de Elite”. Só que as pessoas resolveram ver o filme como piada. Ou seria que a violência no Brasil é piada? A corrupção na polícia é piada?

O filme é um filme crítico. Quantos não viram a crítica àqueles que puxam um baseadinho, dizendo que eles estão apoiando a violência nas favelas? Quantos não viram um pai de família, querendo fazer o certo e sempre com medo de tomar um tiro por aqueles que não se importam? Ou os filhos da classe média-alta com sua visão limitada do que é certo ou errado? Aparentemente, muito poucos.