EPT
Interview with R1CH, the Wizard!
I know I've promised you this a while a go, but a lot of things kept both me and R1CH busy. Again, if you haven't read any of the previous interviews please click here. I hope this interview lives up to your expectations. Of course, constructive feedback is always welcome.
![[image loading]](/staff/RaGe/R1CH.jpg)
Hi R1CH. Please state your full name, place of residence, age and approximate iCCup level.
Hi. I'm Richard "R1CH" Stanway, 26 years old and currently residing in the lovely islands of The Bahamas while looking to move to the US or Canada. Does iCCup go as far down as E? I think that's probably where I'd be, considering 2008 marked my first win vs the CPU.
So you have started getting in to StarCraft really recently. What made you go back to that old game and how did you discover Team Liquid?
I've played StarCraft on and off since release, mostly at LAN parties. I was amazed by some of the players, they actually used the keyboard as well as the mouse! Usually we played 3v3s and I ended up on an island somewhere and spammed nukes the entire game.
I actually only bought my copy of SC and BW in 2002 so I could play again for nostalgia. One of my friends showed me a whole ton of UMS maps (I'd never played UMS before) and that really got me into it again. Then at some point FakeSteve posted a thread on some forums which I visit (Something Awful) about the SKY ProLeague Final being broadcast live.
I don't really remember exactly how I got involved with TL, I imagine it must have been related to the live streams though as it became increasingly difficult to get good quality live streams at the time and I devised a way for me and my friends to get a more reliable stream and it spread to TL IRC and... somehow I ended up on the site.
It seems like we got lucky, haha. Can you tell us a bit about your perception of TL? What it means to you and how it got so successful?
At first TL seemed a little weird to me, I'd browsed around the site before while searching for some of the music used at one of the games. The whole "ten commandments" and the fact there was this huge website dedicated to just covering the foreign scene made it look like a very dedicated community which I wasn't sure would be very accepting.
I spent a lot of time on the IRC channel before really getting involved on the site, and that helped to get a better idea of it all. I still spend more time on IRC than the forums, probably because outside of the admin work I do for TL, I don't really have that much to contribute
.The TeamLiquid staff has in the meanwhile already nicknamed you The Wizard. You can fix practically every computer problem. You can make any programming project happen. How extraordinarily skilled are you?
Well, a lot of the stuff I do isn't really that complicated when you have a good basic knowledge of the field.
I just never seemed to find any one particular area in computing as my "main" field, so I have all kinds of different skills under my belt - from x86 assembly and architecture through C and HTML/PHP, Windows API, security / reverse engineering, and of course all the TCP/IP and protocol / networking knowledge needed to bring you the TSL and other streaming stuff.
I've worked with computers pretty much all my life - at two years old I had my first computer, a BBC Acorn Electron with the cassette drive loader and all the works, and it's just continued logically from there
You did A LOT for the TSL. Without you it would never have happened. How many hours did you invest in TSL overall?
Oh I have no idea... I didn't really keep track. But I was around for several hours before and after every event from the group stages onwards, whether it was monitoring the live stream, checking anti-hack status or whatever.
A lot of work went into behind-the-scenes features that most of you probably never even noticed. The TSL was a very unique challenge as I'd never done anything on that kind of scale before. We ended up using eight servers and I wrote a perl based client daemon for each server that allowed it to be somewhat controlled from our main TL server. One perl script was responsible for balancing the connections between the eight servers and handled every connection to the stream. VLC was used on our streaming servers (<3 VLC) and Debian GNU/Linux and it's fancy-pants package management helped make setting the servers up a snap.
I was also responsible for the overall streaming system - I'd looked into prices of professional CDN services and lots of other options we had for broadcasting, but their prices and contract terms were outside what I thought was reasonable for the TSL. The great folks at SoftLayer (where tl.net is hosted) gave us no trouble with having the TSL run from their network, with its bursts of over 1 gbps.
The other challenge of the TSL was of course the client-side - recording and getting everything to the Internet. We ended up using Windows Media Encoder, which performed a less than stellar job - every time the stream crashed was a result of the Windows Media Encoder failing in some obscure or random way.
Oh, and of course the overlay. When I heard we were doing live streams, I knew we had to have an overlay. I posted a request in the graphics forums asking for images, and someone questioned whether we could even technically do it.
Overall the TSL was a lot of fun to do and I hope we can make Season 2 even better.
They shouldn't have doubted The Wizard. Let's talk a bit more about your daily life. What are your hobbies?
I don't think you need to guesss that this is inevitably going to come back to computer stuff
. There isn't that much to do over here (I'm not on any of the main tourist islands, so it's pretty quiet), so I spend a lot of time on my PC. Team Fortress 2 is my favorite game at the moment (yes, even above BW, because I'm actually good at it ).I'm also hoping to travel to the US later this month for QuakeCon, which I've been attending since 2003. I develop a pretty popular Quake 2 client called R1Q2 and used to code a mod called Gloom, and there's a lot of us that still chat online and we usually meet up every year for QuakeCon which is always a blast.
Who's your favourite non-staff TL poster?
Hmmm, tough one. I'm probably going to have to go with MasterOfChaos since he is also a programmer and develops the incredibly useful ChaosLauncher / LatencyChanger plugins. He also gives a lot of good suggestions for TL - only this morning I implemented a CSS change as he suggested, so that the "resize images" option on the forums no longer causes images to be invisible until the page finishes loading.
He is also the reason I got into BW plugin development - CPU Savior and the ForceHamachi plugins wouldn't have happened without him! And I'd be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to pimp CPU Savior - it helps the environment and saves the planet by making your CPU use less energy when playing StarCraft! Get it today!
I definately have to agree that MasterOfChaos got way less credit than he deserves. I don't know if you have read my previous interviews, but there's one feature that keeps coming back. Do you know what I'm talking about?
I do read your interviews, but it's been too long since the last one for me to remember any recurring feature
Basically, I mention a poster and two 'descriptions'. You pick the one you consider fits him/her the best.
As I already mentioned, I frequent IRC way more than the forums, so I may not have the slightest clue who you're talking about, but shoot
In that case I'll ask some IRC regulars too. Let's start with dronebabo: troll or active contributor?
Active contributor, definitely. He gave me ops on in #teamliquid before I was staff, so he gets massive e-creds for that.
Katoan: Attention whore or cute?
Attention whore.
Artanis: Just another TL member or just another GosuGamers admin?
Obviously just another GosuGamers admin, he's always flaunting around his big capital GG letters everywhere he goes. That guy has no modesty!
Moltke: A genius with heaps of sand in his vagina or a poser?
Obviously a poser.
yubee: Too cool for school or too dumb for standing up?
I'm still waiting on the Kennigit vs Yubee Bo50 before I pass judgement on him. Based on the Bo9 vs Manifesto7 however, things aren't looking good.
haji: A changed man or undercover TL workhorse?
How about "Strong candidate for Purge 2008"? I can't really say whether he has changed since again I've only recently spent any considerable time on the forums and even that's not much.
That was it! I hope you enjoyed the interview. Any last shoutouts?
Thanks for the interview, I'd like to give a shoutout to SASC and #gloom!
![[image loading]](http://img366.imageshack.us/img366/5797/80457512b5x0kobemrwizaroa4.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/wizard.jpg)
