Looks like during the upgrade to nucleus 3.0, I broke the RSS feed. Nucleus 3 looks for ‘feeds/rss20’, while Nucleus 2 lookeed for skin ‘xmlrss2’. At least a temporary fix is in place, and this link will have you updated again.
Goodbye Dreamfall, Hello Anarchy!
I’ve changed teams. fter two years working on Dreamfall, the new game in the Longest Journey universe, I’m back on Anarchy Online.
Why? I guess mostly because I felt drained. I’ve been working on that game for two years, including preliminary research, and I needed a change. I felt consrained by the role of lead programmer, too – it meant too little freedom for me. Whenever I ended up actually programming something, it was either some piece of glue that someone else needed, or I felt guilty because I was not doing one of a million other things.
So, back on AO now, and I’m falling into the nice after-expansion time when all the plans for what’s next are new and good, when the reality of time & money hasn’t destroyed all the high-flying plans yet, and the possibilities for what we could do next seem endless. Well, not endless, actually. Anarchy means working on a product that’s already out, for which the player’s idea of what kind of game it should be and what we are allowed to change is often frustratingly narrow, and you simply cannot do everything. In a way, I like that, too. Sometimes constraints are good.
First thing I’m doing: Port the whole thing from VC6.0 to Visual Studio .NET. No way am I ever going back to Visual C++ 6.0.
The server is dead, long live the server
The university had a scheduled power outage last weekend to install a new power supply for their high performance computer cluster. This meant my machine, whch sits in the same room, had to go down for a couple of days as well. And lo and behold! it did not come up after being turned off for 5 days.
The machine eressea.upb.de is built out of scrap parts. I’ve used it for 6 years, and it had 64 MB RAM and dual Pentium Pro 200 processors. It’s amazing how many services I managed to cram onto it, really. I was constantly battling with low memory, optimizing the hell out of the installation.
And now it’s dead.
I feel a bit sad about that. Although it means I finally got some new parts. This time, it’s two PII 450 CPUs, and a whopping 768 MB of RAM. Everything is suddenly snappy, the PHP pages come much faster, and still – it’s not the same baby I started playing with. It feels too big. I’ll never fill it out.
Rest in Peace.
Norwegian Goodness: BigBang
Among the things I like best about Norway is the music here. For a country this size, it’s amazing how much good music they put out. I mean, compared to Sweden, Norway is really unpopulated. Yet how many swedish bands do you know apart from ABBA? Exactly. Me neither.
Today it’s been BigBang that have been playing in my head, especially their song “Something Special”. I like it, so by extension, you will like it too. Try to catch it somewhere, and while you’re at it, buy the albums.
What is the music like? It’s good old Rock and Roll, they almost sound like a 70s band, with Hammond organ, alternating accoustic and electric guitars. “Wild Bird” and “Girl in Oslo” were big hits over here.
Did you ever write my name with a fountain pen
in your books or on a table, did you tell your friends
that I was someone special?
There’s a concert at Rockefeller next month. I’m off to get me tickets.
Charity Events
I’m back from running in the Great Gorilla Run and going to Africa on behalf of Save the Rhino, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. Both events were a blast, and Africa has definitely bitten me – I need to go back in the near future and see more of it.
Overall I raised around 3000 pounds for both events combined, which is a pretty good sum I believe.
- Pictures of the Great Gorilla Run.
- Pictures of Rhino Climb Kilimanjaro.
HOWTO: Reading cartoons with Thunderbird
If you have Thunderbird 0.8 installed, here’s how to read your favourite strips in an easy way:
1. Create an RSS account.
Tools -> Account settings -> Add Account -> RSS News & Blogs -> Finish the wizard.
2. Find an RSS feed for the strip.
Dilbert for example is at http://dwlt.net/tapestry/dilbert.rdf
3. Add the RSS feed.
Select your new account, and from the options on the right-hand side, choose “View settings for this account”, then click “Manage Subscriptions”. Select Add, and enter http://dwlt.net/tapestry/dilbert.rdf as the Feed URL. Make sure to check the “Show the article summary…” box.
You now have a folder that receives new Dilbert comics daily. Repeat with other cartoons you like. For some ideas, check out these sites:
http://dwlt.net/tapestry/ (Feed Url in the “RSS Feed” column)
http://atheos.de/funnies/ (Feed URL behind the little RSS icons)
Making progress
I can make a small fist again. My knuckles don’t bend enough yet, I can’t get a full 90 degrees bend and so what you see on the picture is the best fist I was able to do wednesday night. But it’s progress, and my physiotherapy specialist is happy. So am I. Today she said it would be okay to try a little climbing since I have no pain in the hand.
I am so happy.
This means that as soon as I can free myself from this desk, I’ll be out in Hellerud or Hauktjern. Since Morten is busy with all his excercising, and Jorunn simply hates climbing outdoors, I need a new partner. Mona, our new sysadmin, has agreed to come along. I’m sure she’ll outclimb me easily.
I’ve gotten an account on Flickr, an extremely easy-to-use photo site that I can warmly recommend. I especially like the upload tools they have and the clean layout of the site.
Apache 2
This server moved to apache 2.0 recently. Apache 2 has been out for so long, it’s a miracle I didn’t switch earlier. The machine here is a dual PPro/200 with 64 MB (as I have repeatedly whine about), and apache 2 is more resource-efficient and runs much better on SMP machines. The apache processes used to eat 12-15 MB, now they just use 6-8 MB, which is pretty decent.
Of course the whole thing wasn’t without problems. Migrating all my site-specific settings took me a couple of days — mod_python enabled directories, the php things, etc – and the SSIs still don’t work everywhere, I’m sure. But all in all, it’s much cleaner and I’m happy with the move.
Recommended.
Backups
Always make backups of anything.
At Paderborn, the software installation has always been somewhat deficient. Since I was a student in first semester, I’ve always compiled all my software, and today I still do this for Eressea. I make my own gcc, gdb, luabind, subversion, valgrind, libxml2, libiconv, spamassassin, screen, rsync and jam packages.
This isn’t good for my quota, obviously. Today I needed to clean up some stuff and accidentally deleted the entire software install. Bummer. I realized then that while all this was freely available software, it takes freaking forever to rebuild the whole shebang. That alone is worth taking a backup. I’m still rebuilding gcc now, for the second time, since 3.4 didn’t wok with luabind, and so I need 3.3 instead.
Free software that you can compile yourself is cool. But being root on a debian box and using apt-get is better.
Shit happened … again
Bicycle accident this morning:
Three broken fingers (breaks are inside the hand). Hurts pretty bad, and no climbing for the rest of summer if I’m unlucky. That’s my second break ever after the snowboarding crash this easter, and I’m taking it pretty hard. I’m just damn scared that it won’t heal back the way it was, and I’ll be stiff in the fingers or not able to put as much weight on them…
Shitty day.