Avianto's Journal

Getting connected is becoming a crucial part in the business field. So naturally, an office must has an internet connection. It is just the way to compete in this information age. For office’s management this could opened a can of worm.

Indonesia Specifically

In Indonesia, access to internet is quite expensive, unreliable and not quite widespread. Not many people has internet access at home, most of them are accessing internet in the office. Talking about ethics, using internet at the office should be limited to office’s purpose. Now considering the fact that not all of the employee had internet access at home, the employee used it not only for business related purpose but also their own personal purpose. True, this is a breach of business ethics but the question is, what kind of internet activities could be considered as ‘business purpose’? This lead to a big question on how to manage internet access policy in the office.

Intrigued by this issue, I started this topic on my favorite Indonesian technology mailing list, teknologia, and not surprisingly, the topic received numerous respond which could be read here (in Indonesian) – the discussion is still going there, feel free to join the mailing list and the discussion.

Based on the discussion there, my own experience and also some informal discussion among some numbers of managers and employees, I decided to write this entry and hope, I will do a small survey and research on this issue soon to create some sort of guideline about ‘the best business practice for office’s internet access policy’.

Main Issue

Separation between ‘personal’ and ‘business’ purpose in the office is not very clear. Of course browsing porn sites and online auction to buy a baby crib are clearly defined as personal purpose but when it comes to access ‘social networking’ website, suddenly the fine line between ‘personal’ and ‘business’ is blurring. For example, accessing Friendster is considered as personal purpose, but if the employee use Friendster to look for contact information of his long lost friend in hope to create a business contact, is that a personal purpose? Another example, accessing Wikipedia to gather information about a particular subject could be defined as business purpose, but again, what if the employee using Wikipedia to read a subject about lawn mower (this article exist in Wikipedia, look for it if you don’t believe me) then is that a business purpose (unless the employee is the office gardener, of course)?

Since the nature of the Internet is not strictly rigid, this main issue created headaches among management. Business is always about profit. Profit gained by maintaining productivity and efficiency. While the meaning of ‘productivity’ is becoming vague in this digital era (compared to the industrial era, when productivity equals the amount of product created per man hour), the term ‘efficiency’ is still has solid meaning and valid.

Type of Policy

There are many variations of office’s internet access policies, but I managed to make three basic patterns. Each pattern usually had some shared variables especially in the detail. The implementation may varies but still follow or combine these three:

1. No access policy

   The most easiest and widely adopted by management. This is a no-brainer. No access means no complexity of controlling it.

2. Limited access policy

   The management provided the access but limited it with some restrictions. This is the most adopted policy by management. The restrictions are varied from blocking access to some websites (or some keywords in URL), blocking access to different port other than HTTP and/or SMTP (normally blocking the port to instant messenger services) or limiting the amount of traffic for a certain computer (like 50MB per computer per day).

   While this policy is the most adopted policy, this is also the most complex policy to implement. Monitoring which website should be blocked will definitely costly and some smart employee might be able to use port tunnelling to bypass port restriction. Limiting the amount of traffic will also need to be monitored since it is possible that the current limitation is actually prevent the legitimate big business data to pass through (especially with the auto refreshing data and AJAX nature of many of current sophisticated websites).

   Although this policy probably sounds good on paper for management, the implementation of it usually creates dissatisfaction among employee because usually the point of view of management is not well translated and understood by the employee. The worst case scenario is the management does not really understand the need of their own employee. For example, it is faster to just open instant messenger and buzz a fellow programmer to ask him/her to send the latest development code than open an email client, type the request, send it and wait for the reply. In my own personal experience at my campus, it was hysterical that I could not access any website with “games” in the URL when I was teaching “Game Design and Programming” course.

3. Free access policy

   This is the dream of most employee but the nightmare for most management. Many managements are reluctant to adopt this policy but there are also some management viewed this policy as ‘the service’ for their valuable employee. This policy is vulnerable to abuse and also presenting high risk especially if most employee are not technology savvy. Normally, most IT company are implementing this policy, although there are some anomalies, since most of their employee are understand well enough about security issue.

   But this policy could also mean the management doesn’t have the knowledge about how to handle the Internet access. This case is the worst case since this kind of implementation will create chaos.

Many companies implemented the combination of these three basic patterns and usually each department inside the company had different policy. At certain level this was a good decision but only if the management understand the need of each department really well. Was I suggesting that there are some managements who do not understand the need of their own departments? Yes, I was, unfortunately most of time.

So what will be the best practice then? For that I will have to write about management and employee issue first and that will be on my next entry: Internet Access Policy in the Office (Part 2): Management and Employee Issue.

Since I started blogging again a couple of days ago, this blog was under spam attack very heavily. I tried many setting of the default spam protection and somehow it wasn’t stopping the incoming flood of spam. Sometime I set things wrong and then some of you were complaining that you were not able to leave any comments. Sorry for that, it was totally my sloppy mistake.

First

Thomas advised me to use Akismet plugin. It worked quite good but it was not eliminating all the spam and for me one spam was too many. And somehow in MT4, there are no indication whatsoever about how this spam filter actually work. It said, Akismet works transparently but actually, I don’t want too much transparency since it make me feels uncontrollable. But somehow this plugin worked beautifully to reduce my daily spam and hopefully this plugin was not eating the real comment since I don’t know where I could find the page that shows all the captured spam comments. Somebody help me with this? Thanks.

Final

I am not really fond of CAPTCHA since it reduce accessibility and usability especially for those who are using text browser or any non-graphic enabled browser. But it seems like the fast and quick solution for my spam problem now. So starting today, I put CAPTCHA feature in the comment form and it work beautifully. Hopefully in the future, once I’ve got a better way to handle spam I will remove it.

Rest

So hopefully, I solve the comment spam problem for now. I am still looking for a more efficient, effective, accessible and usable way to do this. If only I could make some free time – it’s been quite busy lately with Real Life™. In the mean time, sorry for the inconvenience lately and if you are still unable to comment here, please send email to avianto@gmail.com and I will try to solve this problem right away.

Thanks for all of the support lately (33 comments for my first entry after two years were just wow, thanks people).

Notes: This entry is a summary of my ‘Visual Gaming’ and ‘Game Design and Development’ introduction session. As a part of education process, this one is a Fair use as it may contain a few citation from other books or writings. Feel free to recite, add or even criticize it and use it for your own purpose.

Game is a simulation of a simulation. It is a subset of reality. It is created to control the uncontrollable. It is to take a small part of reality and simulated it within the rules created by a common man. In other words: Game is not real.

People love to play game because it is not real. Reality is rarely associated with the term ‘play’ and of course saying ‘playing reality’ would sound too corny. Playing game is the way to escape from reality and involve oneself into a simulation where the environment is controlled and there is some certainties in dealing with it.

But no, I will not discuss the ‘Philosophy of Game’ with this one – I will discuss it later, as it will need many research, readings and of course, thinking. This entry will discuss about creating game. What are the important parts to be considered to create a successful and enjoyable game. As most of us already know how to play game, wouldn’t it be great to know how to create one?

So this is Part I of many entries I will write about creating game and in this part, I start with the very basic thing, what is the elements of game?

Elements of Game

Game depend on three basic elements; the goal, the rules and the mechanic. Each of the elements is hierarchical and the first two have to be the easiest to understand and mastered while the mechanic is the element that defined the game.

The goal sometime interchangeable with the ‘winning condition’, although some games doesn’t really have a ‘winning’. The goal could be as simple as score as many points as possible to the elimination of the opposition or in those non-winning game it could be to get better more and more in each stages. In short, the goal is the condition where a player is considered the best in the game. This element has to be very easy to understand and actually, there is no point of playing game if a person doesn’t understand the goal, isn’t it?

The rules is the controlling element. This is the part where the way to achieve the goal described. For example, soccer game has a very simple rule: to achieve the ‘winning condition’, one team must sent one ball into their opponent’s goal without using their hands. That’s it, pure and simple and with this simple rule, everybody could play a soccer game by just using an empty street and a couple of stone to create the goal. There are additional rules, of course, such as the ball must not go outside the field line, the goalkeeper can hold the ball inside the penalty area, each team must consist of 11 players and so on. But the basic rule is practically simple and everybody could understand and follow it without too much hassle. Another sample of the rules is a chessboard. Without a chessboard, there is no chess game. Again, very simple.

The mechanics, also known as ‘game play’ – but I prefer the word ‘mechanics’ as I find it is quite confusing using the term ‘playing the game play’, is the way rules manipulated to achieve the goal. For example, chess game is defined by the goal of elimination (of the king piece specifically) and the chessboard. Thus the mechanic is the one which responsible for determined how many chess pieces used and how each of different chess pieces moved. In soccer game, the mechanic is the way the ball played within the field. Each game has their own specific mechanics and it should takes time to master them.

The mechanic is the differentiator between a beginner and a master. Those who able to understand, mastered and control the mechanic are those who are known as masters. In chess game, the master is the one who understand expertly with the mechanic of the chess piece’s movement. In soccer, master players are those who has total control of the ball mechanism. They are excellent with dribbling, kicking, tossing and other manipulation with the ball. In addition, a master goalkeeper is the one who knows how to anticipate the incoming ball.

Those three elements are the key to a successful and enjoyable game. The first two are obvious since there will be no game without them. The mechanics part is the tricky part, it should be easy enough to understand but not too easy so everybody could mastered it in short time. Most of the game design discussions usually talk about the mechanics design and creating a creative and innovative mechanic is the most important thing in the game design industry.

Next I will write about translating these elements into a very specific game industry, digital game (video game, computer game, mobile game and all those game created digitally) industry. Until then, keep on playing!

This year I become one of the honorary judge for Bubu Awards v.04. Again. Remember 2003?

Two years has been passing and to no one surprise, nothing actually change or improve with most of the participants. I know that two years in this digital era is just a blink of an eye but c’mon, where is the improvement?

Let’s go back in history…

Why 2000?

I’ve been involved in web development area since 1995 (10 years? Wow…). I’ve seen the rise and the fall and the survival of dotcom. I’ve been in this environment too long for not noticing the failure of \”state of the art\” technology, user frustration, information overload and how World Wide Web become World Wild West.

In 2000, Jeffrey Veen released his book The Art and Science of Web Design. This book blew my mind and became one of my main references. Even though at that time I was already supporting the Web Standards Projects, I was still not so sure about the whole situation. It was 2000. Mr. Veen’s book changed my perspective and I started evangelizing user oriented website.

It’s not easy back then. When \’blink\’ was more valued than experience. Lots of resistances, cynical comments, marketing jargons and all of that. Slowly I found people that have the same concern and together we learned, exchanged information, shared tips and tricks.

But it was 2000.

Now, 2005

Not much change, really. At least in the Indonesian web development community. Still the same old song. It is still the year 2000. The web is still as polluted as ever with confusing navigation, difficult to find information and frustrating user experience.

The statement above answered Mr. Veen’s question “How much progress have we made in five years time? Is either the art or the science of web design any better now?” on his entry about releasing his great book in digital form (PDF), for free. You can read the entry and get the book here. Go get it, read it (the entry and the book) and get enlightened. And please, stop polluting the web.

And while you read the book, let me feel the chilling everytime a Bubu Awards contestant website slowly appear in my browser…

Thesis defence

I will have my defence on June 17th, 2005. So my thesis should be printed, bound and delivered around early June. That means around two weeks from now. Yikes.

Kompas issue

It seems that this particular issue created a turbulent among blogger and other online communities like mailing list. Kompas was acting childish. That is my opinion. I probably will write about this later, time allowed.

Antiblog

This one is still related to the previous issue. It seems that there are some people really against blogs and bloggers, but still waste their time to leave flame bait comments — go figure. I have no grudge against them as I always said that blogging is always about choice and if someone doesn’t like your choice then so be it, you can’t make everybody happy, can you?

Podcasting

Again related to the previous issue. A person, who remains to be anonymous, said that “podcast” is nothing but an MP3 file. Err… no, in fact podcast doesn’t has to be audio. It could be anything, including pictures or videos. And to say that “podcast” is “just” an audio file really put you into a clueless, even ignorant, person. The different between podcast and “an audio file” is the method of delivery. Podcast is using RSS feed as a method of delivery and it is using a podcatcher software to automatically grab the file. While most podcaster websites still have direct link to their podcasting file, they do it just for the matter of convenience for those who doesn’t use a podcatcher software. Dude, you were shooting the street lamp and then boasted that you were shooting the moon with that argument.

There you go. Some of my recap of the previous weeks. Lots of things are happening here and there. It would be an interesting thing to watch where the Kompas situation will turn and for those who are against blogs and bloggers, why don’t you just stop bothering yourself by leaving flammatory comments — or trolling? Do something else better, well, you DO have something else better to do, right?

Will be back on my regularly, yeah right, writing schedule after I am done with my thesis. Later.