I’m also a parent with a daughter I love dearly. Which, as you can imagine, can create friction between the two interests. Kari loves video games too. We play Minecraft together – exploring caves and looking for diamonds and avoiding monsters. She knows what kind of games she can play – and why she can’t watch dad play his more mature games.

I’m lucky, I grew up with a Gameboy in my hands and had supportive parents that looked over my shoulder every once in a while. Some parents didn’t. I know folks whose first interaction with video games was via the unrelenting requests of their children to buy the latest Sega Super Mega Ultra Station 2000 for Christmas.

I was inspired by Mike Krahulik from Penny Arcade and decided to reach out to my daughter’s principal to see what I could do to help educate other parents on video games. Below is the email I sent to her this evening. If you’re an adult who cares about young people growing up in a positive gaming culture I urge you to do something. Communication and education is far more powerful than talking heads and fear mongering.

—

Dr. Vogelsang,

I’m Chris and my daughter, Kari Koerner, is in Ms. Parker’s 1st grade class.

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about video games in mainstream media. Katie Couric just did an hour-long piece that, while she has good intentions, makes video games look like something the devil came up with. Here’s a good retort if you’re familiar with the piece. The whole thing is a bit crazy and like most things, the truth lies somewhere in between.

I want to talk to other parents and teachers about video games. Not some boring 45 slide PowerPoint, but an honest chat with literal examples of what games are really like, how to find games that are appropriate, and how to guide our children to the right games, in the right context, at the right time.

This past March my family traveled to Boston for Spring break. Kari, Jackie and I went to a convention called Penny Arcade Expo or PAX for short. It’s a huge gathering of 70,000 gaming nerds from all walks of life. People who love board games, Dungeons & Dragons, card games, classic video games and yes, even the modern blockbuster titles we hear about in the news. People traveled thousands of miles to see new games and hang out with people who share the same interests. And you know what? It was the most amazing group of kind, interesting people I’ve ever met.

The guys who started PAX are behind a webcomic called Penny Arcade. It’s a series that is always mature and sometimes offensive, but spares no victim in being brutally honest about video games and the culture that surrounds them. They are very outspoken on issues such as this and just this morning posted an article about an idea they had. You can read it here (Warning: strong language). The gist, if you don’t wish to read it yourself, is that one way we can help is to educate other adults on the ins-and-outs of video games. They inspired me to reach out to you to see what I can do for Bowles and the Rockwood School District.

It’s awesome to be a nerd and I’d like to share my knowledge and enthusiasm with other parents and teachers. I threw together a rough outline that I hope might give an overview of what we’d talk about.

• Explain what ESRB ratings mean. Show them how to use these ratings to determine appropriate purchases (There’s also a free and pretty awesome ESRB app for smartphones).
• Demo some recent games of various ESRB Rating Levels.
• Show what it’s like to play certain games (walk through a level from a couple different games).
• Talk about hand-held gaming like Nintendo DS and Apple iPads. These systems too have very mature games (like Resident Evil) alongside Mario and Pokemon.
• Talk about online gaming, like Xbox Live. What will kids hear when playing with anonymous strangers.
• Talk about parental restrictions. All systems released in the past 7 years have some from of parental restrictions, many associated with the ESRB ratings.
• Talk about social pressures. Kids want to be popular and included.
• Talk about what impact parents can have on other children when they visit their house (to play video games).
• Talk about how to educate other parents in a polite manner about video games, the ESRB and the implications of inappropriate gaming.

Let me know what you think. I’d love to grab lunch and chat if you’re up to it. If you have any ideas of a potential opportunity to get a group of interested parents/teachers in a room I’m all for putting something together.

Yours,
Chris Koerner
clkoerner.com

They have a new app out called Status Board that allows you to mix different data sources to provide at-a-glance information on your iPad. What is even better is that it can output to a HD display for big screen status board updates.

At work I help manage a MediaWiki environment that we use to document stuff.¹ Lately I’ve been trying to figure out how to leverage the MediaWiki API and the External Data Extension to manipulate data from external sources and content within the wiki.

With a few minutes time I figured out how display statistics from MediaWiki on a Status Board!

Basically I use the MediaWiki API to return some XML into a wiki page. That page is then in turn included as an HTML widget in Status Board. The result is something that looks like this:

Here’s the secret sauce. First create a wiki page to house your content. Then use the #get_web_data function of the External Data extension to pull in a xml feed from the MediaWiki API. Here’s what my code looks like for query of the number of jobs currently in queue.

{{#get_web_data:
url=http://yourwiki/wiki/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=statistics&format=xml
|format=XML
|data=Jobs=jobs,Pages=pages
}}</pre>
<div style="width: 100%; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 42px;">Jobs in Queue</span>

<span style="font-size: 74px;">{{#external_value:Jobs}}</span></div>
<pre>

Then in Status Board enter in the address for your wiki page using the &action=render² attribute.

http://yourwiki/wiki/index.php?title=wikipagetitle&action=render

Some other examples, as you can see in the screenshot above, are a list of the N newest articles, most recent edits, or even additions to specific categories (at the bottom). The sky is the limit!

—

¹Hints are apparent across my posts as to what we use it for, but needless to say it’s cool.

²Which is suppose to be depreciated, but has been around for many versions now.

CMA Menubar Item

As a Playstation Portable owner I was happy to hear that they have a native Mac client. Back in the PSP days we had to hike both ways uphill in the snow with third-party software to sync content to our Macs.²

However – oh, you knew this was coming – there is an issue with how the application is installed. By default, and with no way to change this setting via the application’s preferences, it will run at login for all users. Trying to remove the login item via the Users & Group preferences pane will prove frustrating.

(All? All what? Oh, All Users…

WTF Sony.

Here’s how to remove this. Note: if you update or reinstall CMA, you’ll have to do this all over again. Yay!

First navigate to the “Macintosh HD/Library /Preferences” folder and look for a file called ‘com.apple.loginitems.plist‘. This is not the same as your User directory (~/Library/Preferences). You should be able to open it with something like TextWrangler.³

If the only entry you see in the entire file is for Content Manager Assistant or CMA.app feel free to just delete the file. You’ll be prompted to enter  your admin username/password to remove the file.

Update: SkatyGarcia on Reddit schooled me on a much better way to remove CMA from startup. Instead of all the mumbo-jumbo I describe above, instead click the ‘unlock’ icon in the lower left of the Users & Group preference pane. Enter your admin password and then you can remove CMA from the list. Much more logical than my directions.

Restart your Mac, check the Users & Group preference pane and curse the developers at Sony (nicely, they did make an otherwise useful app).

I hope this helps regain some control and relieve some frustration for other Mac/PS Vita folks out there in Internetland.

—

¹Isn’t it weird that the app is named “Manager Assistant”? Is it a manager or an assistant? Or maybe it’s the Assistant to the Manager?

²Some pretty good third-party software.

³Both awesome and free, might I add.

It’s also relatively easy to create a list of all defined values for a given property. In fact, this idea uses this template as a basis for what follows.

However, I found that it’s not very intuitive to navigate to a list of all values of a property and see what other articles have that same property value. In order to see a list of all articles that have a particular property value you’d have to navigate to an existing page with that property and then perform a semantic search from there. Or know that there’s a page called Special:SearchByProperty that you could use.

Example of Special:SearchByProperty results

I wasn’t satisfied with that, so I made a fancy list that’s actually really easy to implement and can be used across an entire SMW for other property values too.

The result is a list of all values for a given property that provide hyperlinks to a list of all wiki articles with that property value. It uses the Special:SearchByProperty page for displaying results.

First, I created a template called Property Values Columns. You can use it like so:

{{Property Values Columns|<em>Name of Property Here</em>}}

Here’s the contents of the “Property Values Columns” template¹:

<noinclude>Use this template to list all the unique values for a given property.

== Template code ==
</noinclude><includeonly>
*{{#arraymap:{{#arraydefine: valuess
 | {{#ask: [[{{{1|}}}::+]] | mainlabel =- | headers = hide |? {{{1|}}} | limit = 10000 }}
 |,| print=list, sort=asc, unique
}}|,|@@|[[Special:SearchByProperty/{{Space|{{{1}}}/@@}}{{!}}@@]]|<li>}}
</includeonly>

This is what it does.

1. Gets a comma separated list of property values for whatever property you’ve requested.
2. Parses the name of the property and each unique value to build a URL.
Example: http://wikiname.com/wiki/index.php/Special:SearchByProperty/Property Name/Property Value
3. The secret sauce is another template called ‘Space’ which uses the #replace function to replace all spaces ” ” with the “-20″ syntax used in the Special:SearchByProperty query.
3a. The “Space” template contains the following:
{{#replace:{{{1}}}| |-20}}
4. Return the results as a series of list items.

The result is an list of all unique property values that when clicked will query the wiki for all pages containing that property value. You can then use some custom styling to format the results. In the example below I wrapped the template in a div creating two columns.²

<div class="twoColumns">{{Property Values Columns|Accounting Unit}}</div>

Pretty cool huh?

—-

¹The template has a weird name, I know. You can obviously change the name to something more fitting for your use.
²The div styling in my demo is stored in common.css and looks like this: .twoColumns li {width: 35em;float: left;padding-right: 20px;}