Rioki's Corner

The Escapist recently reported on the Torrent Freak’s latest numbers on piracy. I hate when things get reported in this form. They are not wrong, but things like that are taken with a very strong bias.

I will just take the PC number stated in the report, since they are by far the biggest:

For starters I doubt on the correctness of the numbers. How did they collect the data? I will assume they mean downloads via torrent, the numbers come from Torrent Freak anyway. To get accurate data they need to track the users of all torrent trackers, that is including all private trackers. It is impossible that they have access to every private tracker, especially since many are invite only. Also many users follow multiple trackers, so there is a source of duplicate entries. Finally some versions are incomplete, broken or malware infected, so people tend to download multiple versions of one game to get a running install. At very best they give a roughs estimate of actual pirated copies.

This website is generated with jekyll and hosted on Amazon S3 but how does this all work together?

First off there is jekyll, a blog aware static site generator. What jekyll does is it takes input files written in HTML, Markdown or Textile and applies a HTML template with liquid. The result of this is a fully static website.

Since the input to jekyll is mostly text files, it applies itself to put the files into source control. In my case I used git. As backup and for posterity I push the changes to a public repository hosted by github. If a team would maintain the website, this would be the main means how changes to the website are shared.

I recently looked into Ruby on Rails to see what the hype is or rather was about. I even found a niffty introduction to the subject and found along the way the nifty little language ruby. I probably will not use it for any serious projects, but it is nice to know I have a new tool in my tool belt.

I wanted to show a coworker my new found knowlage about this niffty language, but when trying to use gem I was locked out. I was quite aquinted with installing gems directly by downloading them and invoking gem locally, because of my previous jekyll experiance, but there should be a better way.