Zed Shaw's latest project - Fret War

http://www.fretwar.com

by tspnemeto • 17 years ago

49 37 17 years ago

Fret War is a guitar competition site where contestants try to defeat lesser guitarists in weekly rounds playing randomly generated music. Awards are given each week for interpretation, accuracy, speed, and uniqueness.

aston• 17 years ago

From his most recent blog post:

  There’s a good chance the site will crash if this blog post 
  hits the nerd sites, so just ignore Fret War until it’s stable.

jrockway• 17 years ago

There's a good chance that Zed is saying that to get his site posted to all the "nerd sites".

chasingsparks2• 17 years ago

The information collected is actually pretty interesting. I assume voting will have something to do with sounding good in addition to speed and accuracy. Besides making a cool site, he just crowd-sourced music production (everything is released with a CC license).

cmelbye• 17 years ago

Using Ruby on Rails and running on Mongrel, I assume?

chasingsparks2• 17 years ago

He posted sample python code for the rating system in a blog post.

http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-11-6.html

Scriptor• 17 years ago

I think Zed's pretty much done with Rails. He said he'd only use it if absolutely necessary.

garndt• 17 years ago

Chances are he used django for it. He has blog posts on his new found love for django and his ratings code is in python. According to the Lamson (his project) FAQ, Lamson was influenced by django's features and structure.

cturner• 17 years ago

Whatever it is, it's really fast.

zedshaw7• 17 years ago

Nope, not rails (troll). It's a web.py application combined with a Lamson application. The frontend is run through nginx and I use some heavy caching tricks to make it fast as possible.

The primary design for hosting costs (scalability) are:

1) http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpAdditionModule to serve static headers and footers so the framework doesn't.

2) Javascript determines the login state of a user and then displays user state links.

3) Generation of the site is "out of order" for convenience of generation/caching, and then javascript knits it back together. We'll explore more of this later.

4) Caching for about 5 minutes on most pages, depending on usage.

5) Use of http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpProxyModule#proxy_store to do page caching for content that needs to be dynamically generated very infrequently.

6) Gzip compression (should do precompression really) and other tuneups.

7) Using Lamson to accept posts via email so that they're processed off-line and statically generated. This is also really easy for people to use and easy to setup, so triple win.

It's currently not close to a production setup, but I'm going for making it easy to host on a small server to keep costs low. Part of that is just not using the framework when possible.

For statistics, right now the Nginx server is getting a modest 4-10 req/sec for html, but the backend is only serving about 1 request a minute thanks to all the above. Also the site really doesn't accept uploaded content via HTTP except say for photos.

Hope that helps, I may blog about it more later.

apu• 17 years ago

Wow, someone else using web.py, and that too for a "real" project! I always feel like a n00b for using such a stripped-down "framework" but after spending some time trying Pylons and Django, I found them both to be too "heavy-weight" for me.

What do you like and dislike about web.py?

didip• 17 years ago

Hi Zed, did you roll your own session and caching library?

In the past, I've had a few problems with sessions on web.py, like AttributeError (Googling around, one of them is still there https://bugs.launchpad.net/webpy/+bug/204084).

antidaily• 17 years ago

The concept isn't clear enough. Either that or there's not enough content yet. Or maybe I have to sign up? I'm confused.

9oliYQjP• 17 years ago

I might check this out if they had a category for bass guitars.

SwellJoe• 17 years ago

Why would it require a bass guitar category? It appears to be entirely about generic scales and such. Just play it a couple of octaves down.

vorador2• 17 years ago

Because it could get way harder ?

dzohrob• 17 years ago

who wants to spend time learning to play this?

http://fretwar.com/static/data/round/1/media/xzibitonics_C.m...

spudlyo• 17 years ago

Jamming to randomly generated music doesn't sound like everyone's cup of tea.

zedshaw7• 17 years ago

Well the challenge wasn't to "jam" to it, it was to be able to play it. I did it, and I'll say it was way too hard for most guitarists.

This was on purpose to act as a sort of implicit "invite only" mechanism. It kind of worked a bit too well.

The next round will be more "jamming" oriented and open ended so more people can play.

rick888• 17 years ago

Did zed ever get another job? (didn't he leave to California a couple of months ago?)

zacharydanger• 17 years ago

https://www.dropbox.com/about -- He's an engineer at Dropbox now.

unalone• 17 years ago

Hot damn! I'd never have expected him to find his way there, but it seems like it would be a good fit. A smart ambitious guy who hates bullshit, and one of the few companies that it's impossible to accuse of bullshitting. I wish them both luck.

acarabott• 17 years ago

Seems like 'web 2.0' guitarwar.com right?

tptacek2• 17 years ago

So, this is GuitarWar, right?

zedshaw7• 17 years ago

http://runplaybook.com/ is just rsync, right?

:-)

tptacek2• 17 years ago

Not even. It's mostly straight SSH. With a little Ragel thrown in.

vorador2• 17 years ago

I think that there's a display bug under firefox 3.0.5 (ubuntu) : the order of the labels of the fields of the signup form is wrong.

By the way, why is it required to have a twitter account ?

_fzct2• 17 years ago

It's not required, but preferred.

Locke1689• 17 years ago

I don't like the idea. I prefer playing with other musicians, not trying to beat them. That doesn't even sound fun to me.

_fzct2• 17 years ago

Sure, you might prefer jamming with other musicians. But Fret War really is for guitarists who're keen on developing technical proficiency,, composition and improvisation skills. To be technically proficient, you always have to strive to be better than others, not necessarily "beat them".

Zed Shaw's latest project - Fret War

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