Disqus - Latest Comments for goosmurf

Re: New – AWS Global Accelerator for Availability and Performance

goosmurf — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 00:35:03 -0000

I note that Sydney is missing in the list of regions in the final paragraph.

Was this accidental or is Sydney excluded from the Global Accelerator edges?

Re: What Is the Most Popular TF2 Map?

goosmurf — Mon, 21 Jul 2014 00:33:06 -0000

No maps were specifically omitted.

The data comes from Australian servers only and I've never actually seen cp_orange played in Australia.

Re: Visualising 70,000 rounds of Smurfy TF2 - Jarate Chop!

goosmurf — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 07:41:03 -0000

We had considered post-game feedback but then we have no historical data to compare against. Running controls would be technically better but there's no reason for us to believe that the results from past games with randomly assigned teams should not be comparable to the new system.

Other suggestions we had considered were whether "gg" (good game) at the end of round may indicate good or bad games. The trouble with that is that many players say "gg" out of habit as a mark of good sportsmanship, irrespective of whether the game was good (challenging) or not.

We're not trying to capture or understand the broader target of game enjoyment. We do take steps to ensure the community is generally friendly but the team assignment system is really about making the games challenging for everyone irrespective of where they lie on the regular/new/casual/experienced/inexperienced player spectrums.

There may be other data we can tease out of the logs. This is really only touching the surface of the data available. I wish I had infinite time! :D

Re: Redesigning Instapaper on the Web

goosmurf — Sun, 08 Sep 2013 09:03:54 -0000

I can't agree more with this comment.

The utility of Instapaper for me was that it is a simple stack of articles I wish to read when time permits. As I browse many sites I can quickly add interesting articles to Instapaper and read them at my leisure.

Now you're forcing me to read via some retarded UI. I am not interested in that. If it continues this way I'll be cancelling my sub and going elsewhere.

Re: Telstra T-Box, Serviio and DTS

goosmurf — Sat, 31 Aug 2013 20:47:37 -0000

Ooh interesting. What platform are you running it on?

I'm using FreeBSD 9.2.

Re: Telstra T-Box, Serviio and DTS

goosmurf — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 10:53:33 -0000

Haha, thanks for posting. Nice to know it helped someone!

I haven't had much luck with Serviio though TBH - it would randomly crash whilst playing and I never figured out why... still haven't found a good DLNA server for my T-Box.

Re: Book Shopping Comparison Engine

goosmurf — Sun, 23 Jun 2013 09:25:04 -0000

Hi Matias,

This is a rather old blog post and since I wrote it a fantastic service called Booko (http://booko.com.au/) has popped up. It only services Australia but it might provide some inspiration for you and Piranhas :)

Re: Oh Malaysia

goosmurf — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:38:44 -0000

Oooh cool will have to check it out :D Thanks!

Re: How far has Microsoft fallen?

goosmurf — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 08:38:00 -0000

I think Mr. Horowitz gets it but you missed the point of this post. Joe Consumer should not have to think about CPU architectures! MSFT messed this up by using the "Windows" brand in Windows RT when as you say it's a completely different architecture, and won't run anything that 99.9% of the software consumers associate with Windows.

Re: Gambling in virtual economies

goosmurf — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 22:39:24 -0000

Getting money into all of these systems seems to be a problem. VISA and MasterCard always get their cut at some point :)

It's been a curiosity of the TF2 economy for a long time that despite the official Valve store being the only way for keys to enter the economy, at US$2.50 a pop, the market price for keys is about half that. It makes no sense unless someone is buying the keys using stolen "cash" of some sort.

Recently there was a story about Russians possibly cashing out stolen credit cards via the TF2 economy. The story is fairly involved so here's the tl;dr: "A group of Russians bought >5,000 Keys from Store today using illegitimate credit cards and bought few hundred Buds from TF2 Outpost at an ridiculous price of 28-30 Keys (The average yesterday was 25.5 Keys). They have been doing this for quite a long time and their activity today is alarming."

Source: http://forums.steamrep.com/...

Re: What Is the Most Popular TF2 Map?

goosmurf — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 20:14:55 -0000

tc_hydro is in the full list linked in the post - comes in at #56 :)

Re: Mayor wants answers over Telstra breakdown

goosmurf — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 20:11:26 -0000

"Our region certainly doesn't want to miss out on the NBN rollout, but the question I see is should we be relying on physical infrastructure or go to wireless or satellite," he said. "If we become too reliant on NBN what will happen if a main point is severed?"
I'm curious - what do people think is on the other end of "wireless" or "satellite"?

At some point everything comes back to something physical. The marketing may be cloud this and cloud that but all of us live in the real physical world...

Re: Piracy as a catalyst for progress

goosmurf — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 09:05:10 -0000

Interesting data points. I agree, 80k is a remarkable number given the barriers (including awareness!).

Re: Per folder mail notification in Thunderbird

goosmurf — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 22:16:25 -0000

Thanks, it's nice to know others are finding it useful too :)

Re: Is Facebook the best group discussion tool we have?

goosmurf — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 06:25:48 -0000

Campfire doesn't appear to have an email interface... neither does IRC :D

I use IRC for work but one of the bad things about it is it doesn't inherently have any threaded-ness other than the [occasionally incorrect] assumption that lines closer together are probably related.

The general pattern is one of us finds an interesting link, posts it, and discussion starts. But it could be days between such posts so having a specific app open for it is over the top. So email is ideal since we have email already open somewhere. Sometimes we "necro" old threads when new developments occur which is why search is handy.

Ideally I don't want to have to run the service, already have too many hacks to maintain. :)

Re: Summer Reading Blogroll

goosmurf — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 21:33:04 -0000

One of my fave tech blogs is
http://perspectives.mvdiron...

James talks about a lot of the real world plumbing behind the cloud, covering datacentres, networking and power.

Re: Customer Service Done Right

goosmurf — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 20:37:42 -0000

They didn't ask so I didn't mention it :) I don't think they care coz from some Googling it seems others have had the same replacement-without-questions experience. It sounds like they will replace it regardless of cause as long as it's still under warranty.

Re: gzip support for Amazon Web Services CloudFront - nomitor

goosmurf — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 21:30:04 -0000

Its working here. If you could provide some details of your config maybe someone can help...

Re: List of Database Commands

goosmurf — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 06:24:20 -0000

Just noticed the "dbstats" command is missing.

{ dbstats : 1 }

This will provide storage stats for an entire DB, instead of needing to iterate across collections using "collstat".

Re: Flickr, SmugMug, and Facebook Photos - nomitor

goosmurf — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:57:52 -0000

That's a nice optimisation. Do you have any examples of sites that do this?

Re: MongoDB 0.9.2 Released

goosmurf — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:31:20 -0000

Simon: yup :)

Re: Only Life - Just went against the grain of current financial...

goosmurf — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 06:53:22 -0000

Credit card debt is never good regardless of economic conditions. :)

If you still have a significant amount on the remaining card I'd look at taking a transfer of the balance to another card as there are/were many offers of the first 6 months interest free. Also investigate transferring the debt to a personal loan as the interest rates on those are high but still lower than typical CC rate.

Re: How You Can Write Killer Ad Copy - SMX Sydney 2009

goosmurf — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:25:08 -0000

So you're the spam^H^H^H^Hmastermind behind those eye catching ads... at least I know who I can turn to when I need some copy written. :)

Re: Only Life - The fundamental flaw in ebay is that the auction...

goosmurf — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 03:23:14 -0000

They're obviously aware of this "problem" but I'm not sure it really is a problem for eBay. Part of eBay's success is due to the often false impression that buyers can grab a bargain.

If in a perfect eBay world everyone put in their maximum bid under the current automatic bidding mechanism then the resultant price is set by the highest bidder. The perfectly rational buyer would then either have won the auction because they have the highest bid, or walk away from the auction because someone else has the higher price. However from experience most buyers aren't rational and enter into a bidding war for whatever reasons. This means that as a rational buyer you will almost always lose to an irrational buyer and hence it is smarter to not bid until the last minute (sniping).

Hence the current system caters to both types of buyers at the expense of the seller whereas an extension based system would cater strongly for the sellers but drive up final prices for all buyers. I'd guess that the tradeoff is then buyers vs sellers and on the assumption that buyers outnumber sellers it makes sense to keep things as they are.

Its worth considering that not all real life auctions get extended either. If you're bidding on a house then yeah the auctioneer has time to push for higher bids but presumably if you're at the fish markets where they're trying to clear out that morning's catch they want to move along swiftly so you make your bid and that's pretty much it, kinda like sniping.

Re: Impressions of Coogee Beach on a busy day

goosmurf — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 06:12:29 -0000

lulz. :)