More In-Game Homage

I have written, not at all exhaustively but somewhat extensively about in-game homages before, including one example from Borderlands 2. But I was in Twitter and ran into some Borderlands tweets about their in-game homage, although they referred to them as "Easter eggs" which isn't exactly how I would contextualize it. I like the topic, and the two examples they had, so present them here.

Homage is a great thing, and we love to play with the things we love, so there is cultural play, and being in the know about things also makes us feel special, or clues people in to what they should know if they don't so they can be in-group. In-game homage about other games is fantastic, but interesting given intellectual property laws.

The first, and if you're a gamer you won't need these explained, is homage to Donkey Kong, an early Nintendo game I played in junior high in about 1983 in the back of Sage's Jr around the corner from my school, and where you played as now-famous Mario. "Donkey Mong" is holding a barrel above his head, about to throw it, just like Donkey Kong.

This one refers to a current favorite, Minecraft, both via the blockhead appearance and part of the text refers directly to Minecraft (this could be an approved homage for all I know, it's unusually direct in the text and most homages aren't, they change something small like Donkey Mong for Donkey Kong).

Fixing Gephi on Your Mac

TL;DR: Download JDK 1.6, then point a Gephi startup file to it maybe with one change (/Library... and not /System/Library...).

UPDATE: New Gephi is out!
Original post continues below.

The longer version is that Gephi, which I love, hasn't had an update (as of this writing) in quite some time (parts of it have, parts haven't) and it doesn't work with the newer versions of Java. The 0.9 version download file for OS X doesn't seem to be where the link says it should be (again, as of this writing in early October, 2015).

Apparently Gephi 0.8 needs Java version 6, not version 7 or 8. Java appears to have lots of parts, names, and maybe even v6 is "1.6" and v7 is "1.7" which I don't understand but I don't do Java so I'm not going to spend time figuring it out--I got Gephi to work, that was all I cared about right now.

My new laptop, to replace my five-year old one, didn't even have Java on it (ah, the purity of it all). I got the JDK (Java Developer's Kit) 1.6 from part of the Apple Support website, which is what you want.

But you have to tell Gephi about it, as far as I know. This article was awesome except it turned out on my machine not quite right (but close enough that I figured it out). Java wasn't where I thought it would be. This article on Stackoverflow helped me find Java 1.6, although note the article is about Java 1.7, so make the command this:

/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.6

(Ok now you don't need to read the Stackoverflow page, just run that in your terminal if you've installed 1.6 and don't know where it is.)

Turns out, I don't know why (and I don't care, it's working) Java 1.6 wasn't in /System/Library... it was instead in the same path but not the one in /System, it was just in /Library....

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home

So, put that line in the Gephi startup file near the top as per the directions (I made it the first command) and so far Gephi actually loads, which it wasn't doing before. Granted I haven't actually tried to do anything with it, and who knows if this will blow up other Java things (or maybe my machine really didn't have any Java on it at all).

Python, DictReader, DictWriter

Because I can never, ever, remember exactly how to code these. Example of both, basic.

data_list = []

with open(input_file, 'rU') as f:
  data_file = csv.DictReader(f)
  for line in data_file:
    data_list.append(line) # gets you a list of dicts

the_header = ['h1', 'h2', 'etc'] # column headers, a list of text strings

with open(output_file, 'w') as f:
  file_writer = csv.DictWriter(f, fieldnames=the_header)
  file_writer.writeheader()
  for line in data_list:
     file_writer.writerow(line)

Here I am going to experiment linking it as a script-tagged element from Gist via GitHub:

16th Century Maps for 21st Century Data Science

Maps bother me. I love them, and I'm not a geospatial GIS coding specialist, but I do visualizations, and we keep using the wrong maps. Greenland is a lot smaller than all of Africa, ok?

This is the map in my office kitchen:

It's the typical Mercator projection (projection, since you have to "project" a sphere onto a flat surface, which doesn't work well). Mercator came up with this map view in 1569, according to Wikipedia. Yet we still use it for 21st century data science! Granted just because something is old doesn't mean it's not useful, but in this case the Mercator projection was created primarily for navigation, that is, sailing the seven seas. When you present geospatial data the only thing your viewers are navigating is your data. As such this is totally the wrong mapping projection to use. Totally. Don't do it. Data visualizations are about accuracy, and using the Mercator projection starts you off with a completely inaccurate mapping. Greenland and Africa? "Africa's area is 14 times greater" than Greenland according to that Wikipedia article! Fourteen!

So what to do instead?

Wikipedia has a page of many different projections, I'd vote for one of the equal-area ones, and am a fan of the Gall-Peters projection (which was the centerpiece of a great segment on The West Wing), but you'll need to decide what's best for your use.

So, I'm a little upset about the giant Mercator map in my office, but with good reason.

Code for All Summit

Had a great time at the Code for All summit, held here at Civic Hall. Global meets local with a variety of civic tech people and a few government and NGO people thrown in. Code for All is the global offshoot of Code for America.

One nice thing to see was that yes, sometimes the best solution is SMS and not a fancy app.

That's me in the front row second from the left.

Music in an MMO!

Oh this is exciting, but I don't play each and every MMO (that would be insane) so didn't know about it.

Cheng, W. (2012). Role-Playing toward a Virtual Musical Democracy in The Lord of the Rings Online. Ethnomusicology, 56(1), 31-62.

There's no abstract, but here's an early paragraph:

In an attempt to honor the rich musical lore of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Turbine implemented in LOTRO one of the most elaborate player-music systems in any MMORPG to date. This system allows a player to perform both live and pre-recorded tunes that can be heard by other nearby players in the gameworld. A player’s musical performance is visually simulated by avataric motions and strings of colorful notes that float out of a character’s equipped instrument (see Figure 2). Examples of such instruments—each of which sports a different synthesized timbre and a range of three chromatic octaves along the Western twelve-tone scale—include the bagpipes, clarinet, flute, horn, cowbell, drums, harp, lute, and theorbo.

The wiki page seems pretty informative, and there's a website repository for the ABC music notation files.

I love it when people make things and share things, and music is community-based, a form of communication, and is very old! The oldest instrument we've found, a bone flute, is about 40,000 years old and it certainly wasn't the first musical instrument, since flutes aren't that easy to make.

Python, OSX, and Computer Name

Sounds thrilling! No not host name, but the name you give your computer -- so my multi-core beast is "NeXTcyl" (like a NeXT cube but a cylinder).

It was somewhat difficult to find, well, not the best way to do this in Python, but the only way I could find to do it in Python for OSX. Lots and lots of method for hostname: no no no Google, not that. You want to call out to scutil, a command line program.

import subprocess
this_computer = subprocess.check_output(["scutil", "--get", "ComputerName"])

Essentially, use the subprocess library to call a command line function, use the check_output component to get the output from it (important!), and the three parts of the command line command are all cut up into the different arguments you hand the call (also important!). I tried about four other approaches before this one, and then had to try about three different syntaxes to get it to work, since I couldn't find any good online help. Here you go. For OSX, not Windows or other *nixes. No idea what they will do (nothing bad, but maybe not what you want).

(Because I have a 3.6 GB file I don't want to put in DropBox, so I have a local copy on my desktop and on my laptop, but the files are in different paths on each, so I wanted a way to detect which machine the code was running on so as to call the right file path -- I could have just tried one path and if it failed use the other, but, I only just thought of that now.)