January 29, 2016 at 05:09AM

Today I Learned: 1) There is a website called "willyoupressthebutton.com" which gives you a hypothetical button to press, or not press. If you press the hypothetical button, you get some really good thing, stated by the site, but it is accompanied by something really bad, also listed. For example, one button I ran across would let you visit any place in the world for a week, but the whole time you would be there, a large spider would be nesting in your hair. Do you press the button? Another one: You will become immortal and live forever, but everyone will hate you. Do you press the button? Warning -- the site is lightweight but add-heavy. If you find this sort of site annoying, do not go there. Warning -- this site has an extremely fast action loop and high addiction potential. If you do not have time to spare, do not go to there. 2) The Hanon exercises, a staple of piano education, were written in the mid 19th century by, well, Hanon, who was FRENCH. For more than a decade, I have assumed that Hanon was Italian, or perhaps Austrian or German. Not so, not so. 3) One of the biggest rate-limiting steps on game developers deploying patches is vendor quality assurance, or QA. Any developer has to put new code through rigorous tests before deploying it, or it is pretty much guaranteed to have bugs, which in the case of games, can be, well, game-breaking. Testing takes time and resources, which means it can take a while for patches to get from developers' computers to players' machines. Today I learned that even after a patch has been tested in-house, there is an additional layer of testing performed by the QA departments of the *platform* on which the software was released (i.e., Microsoft for an Xbox game, Apple for an iTunes app, etc). The vendor QA team makes sure that the new patch isn't malicious, doesn't break anything obviously, and otherwise meets the quality standards of the platform. This additional QA testing takes between 7 and 14 days for a patch for a typical AAA console video game, which can be a big chunk of the time required to churn out patches. Having a layer of vendor QA also incentivizes developers to spend longer testing and verifying their patch, because if anything goes wrong, it will remain live and unfixed for a MINIMUM of a week before any counterpatch can possibly be deployed. This and lots of other interesting tidbits on engineering the guts of video games from this tech talk at Rackspace by Jon Shiring, one of the engineers from Respawn Entertainment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayF8e8q_aA8