Derik in Minnesota

06:50 pm - 19 days, 351 Words and Patient Zero

When the Transformers Wiki was deciding to relicense its content under the Creative Commons, we spent a lot of time discussing it. I mean—an insane amount of time. The GFDL’s relicensing option offered a single up-or-down choice; stay with GFDL or switch to Creative Commons. Why bother?

Well, because the community is concerned about potential problems our license might cause for Hasbro. CC-BY-SA is not a ‘play license,’ it’s court-tested and carries significant consequences.
The question that we kept coming back to: So what if some official Transformers publication re-uses a portion of our content? Of course, what are the odds of that happening?

( Read the rest of this entry » )

08:15 pm - 10 of the Most Ridiculous Transformers, Ever

The Street Level blog recently posted a list of the “Top 10 Most Ridiculous Transformers, Ever.” Their choices were boring– all from the original cartoon and not very ridiculous at all.

As a Transformers nerd, I know exactly how ridiculous Transformers can get.

01Name: Piano Transformer guy (no formal name)
From:Generation 1 Marvel UK comics “Target 2006”
Year: 1986
The meek “Piano Transformer guy” transforms into a Player Piano in Maccadam’s_Old Oil House, a time-and-dimension-spanning bar on Cybertron. Maccadam’s is recognized as neutral ground by Autobots and Decepticons, and both sides rub shoulders and knock a few back. Here the Piano Transformer guy runs afoul of a foul-tempered Decepticon with no taste in music.

02Name: Esmeryl
From:Japanese Transformers Victory manga “Heroic! The Victory War”
Year: 1990
Esmeryl is the wife of the thoroughly badass and yawn-inducingly boring latter-day Decepticon leader Deathsaurus. At the end of the Victory series, just as the Autobots had defeated the Decepticons and were about to destroy them, Esmeryl appeared and begged for the Autobots to spare them– revealing that Decepticons only stole energy to feed their families, cue the appearance of hundreds of adorable Decepticon children crowding around the ones about to be executed. (Needless to say, the Autobots caved.)
Esmeryl, like her husband, appears to transform into a dragon-like Kaiju. Esmeryl is apparently sterile, having no children of her own. Instead, she and her husband adopted a human boy and turned him into a cyborg. Awww…

03Name: Misfire
From:Generation 1
Year: 1988
Misfire is a Decepticon with no aim. He couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn from the inside of a barn. Repeatedly flunked out of Decepticon Military College, only granted an honorary graduation after the college itself was destroyed by Autobots.
Misfire is a Targetmaster, partnered with a smaller robot that transforms into his weapon and aims for him, freeing him up to concentrate on other battlefield tasks. Unfortunately, his partner goes by the codename “Aimless“…
Whichever Decepticon human resources assigned them as partners should really be fired.

04Name: Pepsi Convoy
From:Generation 1, Japanese toy-exclusive
Year: 2005
There was a “Pepsi Optimus Prime” in the United States as well, but here it’s just Optimus Prime disguised as a Pepsi delivery truck. In Japan he’s a completely separate character.
Product of the same NASA experiments that created the Japanese superhero Pepsiman, Pepsi Convoy is a tiny robot who live in Optimus Prime’s freezer and battles the forces of an evil Decepticon-owned pizza chain with the power of his CO2 gun.

05Name: Sky-Byte
From: Robots in Disguise
Year: 2001
Sky-Bite is Megatron’s right-hand-’bot, a fearsome figure as he cuts through the air in his atlmode of… a singing shark?
Apparently Sky-Bite used to be quite fearsome, but he took one to the head in his first appearance, and ever since then he’s been a bit… off. A vain, preening insecure prima-donna who write Haiku’s to his own accomplishments… but is devastated when Optimus Prime criticizes the derivative imagery and non-cohesive structure.
Sky-Bite is pretty much pure liquid awesome, even in a series like Robots in Disguise (which was a comedy.)
How can you not like a guy who sings his own theme song?

06Name: Legion
From: Kiss Players
Year: 2006
At the opposite end of the comical-to-creepy scale from Sky-Byte is the Legion, an army of penis-tongue’d Megatron-lookalike Decepticons created when Galvatron crash-landed in Japan and his immune system went nuts. The Legion exist to rape (or possibly eat) little girls and use them fashion horrible new bodies for themselves.
Opposing the Legion are the government-sponsored Kiss Players, a group of abused girls who give Transformers special powers by kissing them. Nudity, fetish-vomiting, panty shots and a human-on-transformer rimjob follow in short order.
Bravo Japan, way to avoid Western stereotypes about your country!

07Name: Drift
From: IDW’s modern Generation 1 comics
Year: 2008
When IDW relaunched their Transformers comics All Hail Megatron, they decided to really shake things up by introducing a new character; Drift.
There’s nothing wrong with that, Transformers adds new characters on a regular basis. But Drift is that special “designed-by-committie awesome” quality; he’s an albino-japanese-streetracer-taciturn-former-Decepticon-honorbound-samurai-ninja.
How awesome is Drift? Look at that picture? He has three swords. Three at once!
Drift’s actually been pretty inoffensive in the actual stories he’s appeared in, but any character IDW Comics refers to as “our Wolverine” during interviews has a real uphill climb towards acceptance.

08Name: Break
From: Beast Wars Neo
Year: 1999
Break is a insubordinate foul-mouthed snot-nosed pubescent ‘git who turns into a penguin.
When his injured commander Big Convoy made a rare confession that he was proud of his crew, Break replied by insulting the size of his penis.
He also sounds exactly like Naruto, since he has the same voice actor, doing the same “type” of voice for both characters.
Basically: “Penguin Antagonist Naruto” sums up Break pretty nicely.

09Name: Shortround
From: Transformers Cybertron
Year: 2006
Shortround is a Decepticon nerd. Now, Decepticons have a certain tolerance for nerds when they’re using their nerd brains to figure out how to steal cable or design esoteric doomsday weapons… but Shortround collects toys. Specifically rare, convention-exclusive, limited-edition toys, which he’ll often wander off his mission parameters in search of.
Between his giant clumsy pincer hands, his unrequited crush on his sexy nipple-flashing teammate Thunderblast, and his tendency to vomit napalm when nervous, Shortround makes a surprisingly touching metaphor for adolescence.

Ah… my teenage years. I remember the first time I vomited napalm…

10Name: Signal Lancer
From: Transformers Cybertron
Year: 2005
Signal Lancer isn’t much of a figher– he’s a civilian. So when the entire population of Cybertron evacuated to Earth and took disguises, he chose a nice safe altmode; a stoplight. Signal Lancer was a stop-and-go running gag throughout the Transformers Cybertron series, but he proved himself surprisingly useful in a pinch and when the series ended he became a cartographer, mapping Earth and the galaxy.


So there you have it. 10 ridiculous and odd Transformers. This barely scratches the surface. There’s more than one Transformer that turns into a toaster after all, and no one can forget The King, no matter how hard they try…
I’d like to thank TFWiki.net for suggesting some of the more obscure ‘bots on this list.

10:36 am - Five Servos of Seperation - Kevin Bacon Goes to China

Continuing what appears to be a vague Transformers theme to my recent posts… for the second time in a week, the new episode of Transformers: Animated has “dropped early,” or as TFW2005’s news post so tactfully put it:
Once again, Cartoon Network and Turner Broadcasting have succeeded in leaking another upcoming episode of Transformers Animated.
Passive aggressiveness aside, as a lifelong Transformers geek, this is a bit distressing. The current TV series– widely regarded as the best thing Transformers has done in over a decade– has been relegated to Timeslot Hell by the network airing it. And why not? TF’s viewership is less “sticky” than other Cartoon Network series (tending to tune in just for this show) and while CN wants to target a demographic that skews older, the show is widely downloaded by that demographic since they have no desire to get up in the wee hours of the morning to catch new episodes.
Cue a positively-reinforcing cycle of downloading depressing ratings with results in a bad timeslot, which encourages more users to download.

Are you being served?

Cartoon Network allows users to view the episodes online via their website– a few weeks after their premiere, so as not to depress ratings. In theory this encourages viewers to watch the episodes when they’re broadcast instead of online.
In practice it really just make the online video service completely irrelevant, it is tasked itself to “reruns,” not premieres. Youtube doesn’t have an arbitrary imposed blackout period on new episodes, so people watch it there instead, an hour after they’re broadcast.

At least, that’s the normal state of affairs. Recently however you’ve been able to watch the episodes on Youtube before they’re broadcast. Cartoon Network uploads the episodes several days or weeks before their premiere, and simply doesn’t “hook them up.” By changing a few episode numbers by hand– viola!
No, actually, it’s even worse than that. Because you can’t watch the episodes through Cartoon Network’s player (which includes matrix to track viewership,) you can only download the files directly with no advertisements, and no way for CN to know someone is watching.

This is distressing from a security standpoint (the files should not be downloadable at all, let alone for yet-to-premiere episodes,) but more dishearteningly from a systems standpoint– because the CN video player backbone already has in place has a very simple mechanism built into it that would prevent this sort of thing… they simply choose not to use it. (I decompiled their player code last night to check, it’s there!)

Channels of Distribution

What does piracy mean in practical terms? When the episode dropped early I uploaded copies of the .flv files onto my own server for a friend in Canada, since the Cartoon Network site is geo-locked for United States visitors only. From there is gets murkier– a hidden copy of the link was posted on an internet message-board, when very few people seem to have noticed it. But analyzing my server logs, I can see a series of people accessing those files with no referring URL, which means they got the link instant-messaged to them from someone– like a game of “telephone.”
Two hours after I uploaded the files for one guy in Canada, a link to my server was posted on a Chinese message board, and there are suddenly have several Chinese Transformers fans downloading it from me. …Oops.
10 hours (and a signifigant chunk of my monthly bandwidth allotment) later, that’s trickled down to nothing. The episode finally made its way to Megaupload, and from there to Torrent sites (the reverse of the usual pattern!) where much vaster numbers of people will download them. I have no idea if the versions being uploaded came from my server, or via someone else independently exploiting the same security flaw. It’s about 50/50 odds either way– one badly secured file was “transformed” into 30,000+ downloads in the span of about 10 hours. The episode won’t air for another 24.

That’s slower than usual. Usually it only takes 3 hours.

Is There Life on Mars?

The music industry spent a decade fighting the idea of digital music before embracing it– with restrictive Digital Rights Management. They’re now slowly coming to terms with the fact they have to give that up too– because by the time they came around, the consumers had already embraced devices that made that way of doing things a restrictive nuisance.
Television fought the same battles– and is now finally grudgingly releasing their content on sites like Hulu, generally under the same “watch the episodes after a blackout period” system, kneecapping their content in the name of protectionaism for their broadcast advertizers.
And as-can-be-expected, because viewers want to see them NOW, a network has spring up for encoding and distributing the episodes hours after their air– “Fuck your blackout period.”
These pirated episodes, unlike the ones on Hulu.com, have no advertisements whatsoever. If Hulu offered the episodes the same time that they aired… there would be no pirate network. (Or at least it would be very small.)

So the question really becomes… how can the networks sell ad-space on a pirated television show when the people doing the piracy cut out ads?

I argue “yes,” but that’s a subject for another time.

09:46 pm - The Second Law of Thermodynamics and SQL

Late Monday TFWiki.net (the Transformers wiki) suffered a serious database fault in the midst of what should have been a routine software upgrade, completely wiping out about 9 months worth of data and fragging the user accounts.

Causes

The root cause of the fault remains obscure. It was accompanied by a spate of mass-vandalism. TFWiki attributed the problem to the “Bookworm Virus,” and a message was posted on an “underground hacker website” claiming responsibility for the hack.

The actual chain of events is more ambiguous. While the database crash and subsequent vandalism may have external causes, complicating factors that rest squarely with the TFWiki host. He failed to make a database backup prior to upgrading the software, so when the database imploded, there was nothing to revert back to. The next obvious choice– revert to one of the regularly-performed backups– failed when an increasingly-frantic ransacking of the host’s archives revealed that there were no regularly-performed backups, the TFWiki server hadn’t been set up for them. Oops.
(This is perhaps more a matter of concern for members of the Blank Label Comics whose Webcomic archives and subscription databases are hosted on the same server and presumably also not being backed up.)
This follows the Transformers Wiki’s semi-tradition unfortunate timing; Wikia buggy Monaco “upgrade” was rolled out during the 2008 Transformers convention (while all the admins with the power to fix things where gone, but also a peak-traffic time,) they migrated to their new host (located in Houston) just as Hurricane Ike was causing rolling blackouts throughout Texas, and the Bookworm Virus struck right after the TV-movie that kicked off Transformers Animated’s final season.

Effects

 “Yesterday is yesterday, if we try to recapture it, we will only lose tomorrow.”
    –Some Guy
TFWiki is moving on. With the prospects of any sort of database backup turning up looking increasingly remote, TFWiki is digging in, scraping the Google cache to recover page text (a process that even with scripts helping will take between 2-6 days) and resigning themselves to reformatting by hand more than 8000 pages of raw html.
Myself, I’m weeping, because I’m resigning myself to reformatting the templates.
It would be one thing if the loss was total– then you could give up. But the job ahead– recovering 9 months worth of work by hand, is simply dishearteningly large. All the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men will put Humpty Dumpty back together again. …at a cost of time and effort roughly equivalent to the the original construction.
 “In a system, a process that occurs will tend to increase the total entropy of the universe.”
    –The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Order does not spontaneously arise from disorder. Ice cream doesn’t stay frozen in a hot room, piles of cards do not snap up into neat houses, and eggs do not spontaneously unscramble themselves.

And yet… while entropy will never decrease in a closed system, it can sometimes decrease locally, like the unscrambling egg this is merely phenomenally unlikely, not impossible.

Most of my friends call me a “tech-guy.” The dirty little secret is… every tech-guy has a tech-guy he calls for advice when he runs into something that’s out of his depth. Mine is Andrew Burton, he’s one of those guys who blogs about programming languages for fun. I wanted advice on customizing Warrick, a cache-scraper script written in perl. Like all good tech-guys Andy listens for about 5 minutes before veering off on a tangent and asking if we have access to the server’s SQL logs.

In the past Andy has, in desperate straits, had to re-create a deleted database without, well… a database, or a backup or export of any sort. This involves writing custom filters for the Server’s SQL activity logs and rebuilding it forward in time, piece by piece. Where a normal “page export with history” has dozens of revisions per page– this method has dozens of queries per revision. Reassembled in such a fashion, like building a human being from a map almost molecule by molecule, TFWiki’s 500,000 page revisions for 27,000 pages will translate into tens of millions of individual SQL queries. If every file is in place and intact, and every filter properly coded… this method can be used to grow a new functioning database architecture, atom by atom, from… nothing really. And this has worked for him in the past.

I give it about a 1 in 3 odds of success. It pretty much depends on everything being perfect and getting prying the logs out of our less-than-impressive host.
A 33% shot of seeing an egg unscramble is pretty good odds.

So yeah. Andrew Burton. He performs thermodynamic miracles.
(I’ll let you know how this one turns out.)

06:43 pm - The last helicopter out of Wikia (Moving Day) UPDATED

Third in my ongoing series on departing from Wikia... is Moving Day.

Teletraan 1: The Transformers Wiki is moving from Wikia, and will (by Monday,) be relocated at tfwiki.net on a dedicated server. (At the moment that URL directs back to wikia.)

Never ones to leave a cheap opportunity for drama unexploited, our dedicated server is in Houston, Texas, and is currently being pounded by Hurricane Ike. The tech-guy manually patching the rolling DNA problems this is causing is actually in the hurricane.

(I'm sure that's all very dramatic, but this is real life, not a movie of the week. The tech-girl actually performing the import is in Canada, safe and smug from everything but lying politicians, and she's bypassing the DNS problem entirely by using the server's dedicated IP address.)

Wikia coughed up an updated image archive with a minimum of problems. (We had to bounce the request off a few different people- but that's just because the person we'd made arrangements with to do so was on vacation.)

The database has now processed ~5100 article out of ~27,000. Assuming that it processed Namespace:0 first... that means it's about 3/4 done. (Annoyingly the progress counter does not give you a readout on the number of actually revisions processed, which would remove guessing.)

Total time, all told, looks like it's gonna be ~48 hours. Basically we put up a notice and told people "Refrain from editing," and they've mostly done so. (Annoying that it fell on a weekend... but that's life.) The move becaun on September 14th, approximately 2 weeks after the arbitrary date we were originally shooting for. Into the slippage fit several personal and work emergencies, shipping problems, and a hurricane. All told, I think it turned out alright.

Still to come- is the promised server-requirements rundown and recap of the import process. And maybe a discussion of ads...

---

As a community the TF Wiki decided some time ago we were NOT going to be sabotaging the wiki on our way out. (It being fairly pointless to do so anyway... too simple to revert.)

Still, having butted heads with Wikia over our ideas of the way things should be done on far too many occasions (we thought the experience of not-logged-in-users mattered, they thought we should stop complaining as long as we didn't have to see layout-destroying ads,) TT1 came to a collective agreement that while we'd be leaving the wiki intact, the stuff that represented our community was goign with us. And so starting at around 7PM CST, began the mass deletion of user pages that their users have been flagged, community portal pages, policy pages, user notice templates, any anything tied to TT1's unique way of doing business. Nothing on the main site was affected.

Now, I knew that was coming, but I have to admit, I got a dark, dark chuckle when I saw </i>this</i> 10 minutes ago...

06:15 am - Macroeconomics of Autobots and Decepticons (with apologies to Lawrence Lessing)

Recently I've been playing Battle for the Allspark, a free online game created as a glorified promotion of the upcoming Transformers console game. (more information) In it, players choose be either Autobots or Deceptions and battle across 20 geographic battle zones. The side with the most wins has the zone (tracked live,) and the faction with 11 zones has control of the mythical "Allspark."

Simple game right? Whichever side tries harder wins, right?
Maybe not.

Holding Out for a Hero

Players choose between 7 robots of varying strength, speed and armor. And at registration, they're presented with a choice: Autobot or Decepticon?

Both sides are perfectly balanced, there is no advantage to choosing one side over the other.
So, naturally, players chose the Autobots over the Decepticons at a 2:1 ratio, after all, they're the good guys!
(I chose the Decepticons. Not to be contrary, I think Megatron had a good argument for the unilateral reallocation of foreign energy sources in the depths of a fuel crisis.)

So now, you have two armies that are prefect equal... except one it big, and one is small.

Small is Beautiful

Fighting in Battle for the Allspark isn't a massed battle. There are has 20 battle spaces in each zone, to fight an opponent, you simply step onto his or her square. Autobots may battle Decepticons, and vice versa. No internecine fighting allowed. This is really more organized dueling with team scores.

As a consequence of this setup, since each match was between one Autobot and one Decepticon, the Autobots advantage of numbers was completely negated. They could not rack up twice as many wins in a zone with all their extra Autobots- in fact half their army had to wait and take turns at their less-numerous opponents.

Militarily, the two sides were perfectly balanced... at first.

Experience Matters

The Game has a ranking system. At 20 wins you become a Lieutenant. At 60, a Captain and so on. And the points that you earn by winning against opponents boost your stats- making you stronger, faster, and more armored.

This is where the size of the Autobot army proves its downfall.
With twice as many Autobots as there are Decepticons, the Autobots were competing with one another for experience.
In 100 soldiers fight 1000 battles, 66 of them are Autobts, fighting an average of 15 battle each and winning 7.5, and 33 of them are Decepticons, each fighting 30 battles and winning 15.
Decepticons gained experience twice as fast as Autobots, because of their own relative scarcity.

Day of the Decepticons

For the first month of the game's operation, the rank system was inactive (read: not ready,) and the Decepticons enjoyed a slight but noticable advantage. Without ranks and the high-level attacks that came with them, the results of their higher score were harder to see.

But once the ranking system did go online, the game changed, almost literally overnight. 90% of the zones fell to the Decepticons, with the remaining Autobot strongholds being eroded until, about a week into the new regime, the map turned entirely red, and the Decepticons conquered the world.

Rank also brought a marked change in tenor to the game. Players who had dabbled before took to the fight with a deadly earnest, and a palpable psychogeography emerged. Where before players wandered between the zones at whim, often choosing whichever zone they lived, now they charged into zones into contention (and often charged out again, leaving it to be retaken an hour later.) The conflict had become personal, and a new phenomenon emerged: cheating.

In a world there the Decepticons hold the advantage, which side needs to cheat more?