Grickit

This Week in Wesnoth - 01/20/12

2012-01-20T23:53:00.002-05:00

Lots of great good stuff This Week in Wesnoth. All the news is kind of what inspired me to start doing this. I'm a little afraid future weeks won't be able to live up actually…

With only a "read the rest of this story" link to serve as "further adieu", here we go!

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This Week in Wesnoth - 01/13/12

2012-01-16T22:31:00.004-05:00

Hello and welcome to This Week in Wesnoth; a shiny thing I just invented. I wish I'd thought of it Friday, but hey let's just pretend.

If I stick to this, I'll go over things that have happened each week in the Wesnoth community. Since this is my blog though, you'll mostly see things through my experience. It's like a dev-blog from the least important, most crazy developer.

You might see a side of the community you didn't expect. Spoiler alert!?
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Corrupt Sheriff

2011-11-12T20:13:00.000-05:00

So a friend of mine recently asked me why don't I start my blog back up and talk about politics there (instead of spamming IRC and twitter)?

I can't believe I never thought of it.

Ordinarily I don't care about local politics, but a headline in the paper today caught my eye so I guess it gets the honor of being my first political post.
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Latest IRC Bot

2011-01-15T12:42:00.004-05:00

So I've been working on this project for a little while now. The source has been available since nearly day one. I actually released it before I did Gambot. I've already shown it off to a few people, but here's the formal announcement (after the jump).
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Gambot: The Life of An IRC Message

2011-01-13T22:09:00.000-05:00

Time for a more technical post about Gambot. I have had a few questions about the bot. There's one person in particular that really, really wants to make an IRC bot (hello dipseydoodle), and according to Mr. Raymond part of being the open-source, hacker, tech-savvy, guru I want to be is sharing. Time to get into some actually useful facts about my bot then.

The best way to describe its innards is just to watch a message go through it.
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DDoSing Frogatto

2011-01-12T17:01:00.003-05:00

When I heard from the Frogatto team that iPhone sales (and even the free downloads for computer) were doing poorly I began thinking of ways I could help (having done nothing else to contribute to the project thus far). The perfect plan came to me a few days ago after watching Notch bring down yet another indie game website.

And today, after three failed attempts, that plan came to fruition.

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Chrome Speed Dial

2011-01-11T18:21:00.001-05:00

Having nothing better to talk about, I decided to show off my newly re-setup Chrome Speed Dial Add-on.

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Gambot: Fragmentation

2011-01-11T18:10:00.001-05:00

In the tragically long length of time since my last blog post on the subject I put my bot through two more major overhauls and finally released it.

The source is available at http://tinyurl.com/Gambot with hosting kindly provided by the awesome folks at the Wesnoth UMC Dev project. It does partially serve Wesnoth after-all.

At some point I'd like to get technical about it, but I think for now all I can manage is a quick overview of my philosophy.

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No promises

2011-01-11T16:25:00.000-05:00

BLAGHRAWRA

Yes I stopped again. Okay this time I make no promises, no schedules, and no plans. That way maybe it will feel more fun. Good plan, yes?

An Update on the Robot

2010-07-21T08:36:00.003-04:00

Oops I stopped blogging again didn't I?

Well if I did it was to start working on my IRC bot, which is now finished. If you want to play with it, it's home is in ##Gambot on freenode.net I haven't yet created a help for it yet, and I need something to blog about, so let's go over the commands list shall we?
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The Big Switch

2010-07-16T11:04:00.000-04:00

It occurs to me that after the big Vista re-installation I have done only three things that only Windows can do.

played Need for Speed Underground for about an hour
fiddled with UDK a little bit
worked with PixelActive Cityscape for a few hours

However I have done, or wanted to do many things that are (supposedly) easier to do on Linux, so right now I am downloading Xubuntu through wubi and it may well become my main operating system.

For the few PC games I play once in a blue moon, I still get to keep Vista perfectly in tact. And I seem to remember recieving an email that Unreal was working on Linux support for the UDK anyways. This means the only reason for me to stay on Windows is because it's familiar.

That's not a good enough reason. We'll see how this goes.

Summer Beta Testing Trilogy: Part 3

2010-07-15T10:04:00.003-04:00

I'm going to be rather brief about Medal of Honor because it is futile (and not just because nobody will ever actually read this). There are two parties that Medal of Honor information might interest.

Logical people who know what makes a good shooter
Sheeple who will go out and buy every new Medal of Honor or Call of Duty game on launch day (if not sooner) simply because it is a new Medal of Honor or Call of Duty game.

Enough people in the first group have already written about this game that everyone in the group now knows what a crapfest it will be. And the people in the second group will never, ever, ever, be persuaded to learn about the game before hitting the big shiny preorder button, or be persuaded against dropping fifteen dollars on a three map pack!

A brief rundown of why ~~the latest installment in the Battlefield series is amazing~~ this game even worse than the Modern Warfare dualogy after the jump.

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Summer Beta Testing Trilogy: Part 2

2010-07-14T22:25:00.001-04:00

Need for Speed World... I think that if everything that is wrong with this game, and that will be wrong with this game can be summed up in a single sentence, then the best sentence for that would be "They expect you to pay real money for nitrous."

If that wasn't enough to make you steer clear of this horrible video game idea, or if you'd like a little more elaborate description of why it's an awful game idea, then you know; click the read more link.
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Summer Beta Testing Trilogy: Part 1

2010-07-14T09:32:00.010-04:00

I've gotten invited into three betas so far this summer. All of them were earlier in the summer actually. I just wasn't blogging then. And when I say invited I mean they actually emailed me and asked. Yeah. Two of them were supposed to be pre-order only, so I guess EA just loves me. So I'll have some information on Medal of Honor, Final Fantasy 14, and Need for Speed World.

I didn't actually get to play FF14, and I'll be ranting about why. NFSW's closed beta likewise would not run, but I did get to play the open beta. MoH's beta went smoothly (as it was on PS3) and, ironically, it was the worst experience of the three.

I'll take these in chronological order, so first up is Final Fantasy 14.
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Gambot — a Perl/ColdFusion IRC bot

2010-07-13T10:14:00.003-04:00

For some time I've been working (and by working I mean an hour or so every once in a blue moon) on a server side scripting language extensible IRC bot framework. When I finish it you'll be able to use it to configure IRC bots in languages like PHP, Coldfusion, ASP, et cetera. There are two restrictions on the language.

It has to be used to create a web page
It has to be able to output a plain string with absolutely nothing else on the page (no html or js or anything) other than that string. Not even an opening html or body tag.

I, of course, am using ColdFusion for my first bot. I'll get into how this framework (and the CFML bot) work after the jump.

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Minecraft

2010-07-12T21:17:00.007-04:00

I just found this cool new java game (as in you can play it in your browser). It's being developed by a one man team, and yet in the few weeks since I found it, I have gotten more enjoyment from it than many games created by large corporations.

The premise of the game is simple. The world is made of cubes. You break these cubes and you collect them. You can then replace those cubes wherever you like. The most simple thing would be to dig a hole. Then use the dirt you collected while digging to build a stair way back out. And of course there isn't just dirt. There is also trees to get wood. There is stone, coal, iron ore, gold ore, diamonds, lava, water, obsidian, sand, gravel, cobblestone, cloth, and others I can't remember now and maybe even a few I haven't discovered yet.

But it is not just that simple hole in the ground. No way. There is so much more it's unbelievable from a one man indie team (plus a really good musician) who's been developing for less than a year.

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That New Car Smell... Tainted!

2010-06-07T09:33:00.001-04:00

So yesterday I wiped my computer and reinstalled the OS. It wasn't all that painful as I thought it would be. It took about an hour to back everything up to an external hard-drive . The OS re-installation took a little under three hours. Then we get to the bad side though...
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Mag Beta Launch

2010-01-04T16:51:00.002-05:00

So the MAG beta started this morning at 8 a.m.
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Funny Chemestry Poem

2010-01-02T19:13:00.000-05:00

I found this today.

Little Willy's gone away
Little Willy is no more.
For what he thought was H20
Was H2SO4

Displaying HTML Code In Blogger

2010-01-02T13:49:00.012-05:00

Yesterday I gave a sort of tutorial (more of a lecture really since I didn't actually give you code). It was a pain inserting the HTML code for the less than and greater than symbols, so I set out to find an easier way of displaying HTML code in blogger posts. I finally found an easy way of doing this.
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Saving and Pause

2010-01-02T10:26:00.007-05:00

A game recently came out called Demon's Souls (hard to pronounce no?). It's gotten very good reviews and acclaim, and all that such and such. Its main selling point is that is it is "hard" (as discussed in that link if you bothered to click it). The main thing I want to talk about here is its lack of a pause.
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Map Exploration In a Browser

2010-01-01T22:27:00.012-05:00

I'm working on a browser based game called Valianca which I will discuss in a later article. While making the game I came up with a way of exploring a map inside a browser that I have never come across before. I wanted to go over some of the methods I used for this. If you're not a geek then don't bother reading this one. You won't care.

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Free Bird on Ukuleles

2010-01-01T21:45:00.008-05:00

The best part starts at 2:30

Colors

2010-01-01T16:33:00.001-05:00

Hopefully some of my friends will start reading soon. I've prepared a few templates, and I want to know which one you guys like best. Comment away (and suggest new colors, or other changes).
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Posts Backgrounds

2010-01-01T14:47:00.010-05:00

I'm testing some formatting changes to posts.

Posts are now highlighted in the color that you see in the upper corners of the page and the sidebar section title bars. Comments are now formatted just like sections of the sidebar. This will make it much easier to distinguish individual posts and comments from each other.

I also introduce you to the Daily Blurb at the top of the page, and I moved the monthly poll to the left.

I've also assigned some new variables to handle these things (rather than just flat out assigning the colors) so if anyone wants this template for thier blog let me know.

Happy reading.

Final Fantasy 14

2010-01-01T14:25:00.005-05:00

FF13 isn't even in the states yet and they're already most of the way through FF14's development. Go Square! See for yourself. They're accepting beta signups at:
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Rescuing Sasuke

2010-01-01T12:04:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I said that rescuing Sasuke would be a bad (read: retarded) end goal for the popular manga/anime called Naruto. I don't have any readers yet else I'd have die hard Sasuke fans yelling at me. Here is WHY that would be a retarded end goal.
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Re: Blogging and Me

2010-01-01T11:17:00.005-05:00

Blogging and Me was apparently a very disliked article if the three raters are to be believed (one of the "Dislike"s was me though). I didn't like it either (as I just told you), but I made up my mind about the one questions I posed in it. I'm going to post at least once per day, but possibly many times per day if I have many things to talk about.
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MAG Public Beta

2009-12-31T17:54:00.007-05:00

The beta for MAG went up for public download today. You can get it in the playstation network store. Here's how it works:

Download a 250mb download manager/launcher from the store.
When it opens it will download a 35mb patch for itself.
Once it's done patching itself it will download the 1.8gb game files.

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Blogging and Me

2009-12-31T17:22:00.010-05:00

I've got this blog now, and I'm doing some thinking about how exactly I want to run things. Do I post multiple times a day, once a day, weekly, monthly, or whenever the heck I feel like? I've seen what happens when one posts with no schedule (hint: what happens to your goldfish when you forget to feed it a few days in a row?) It ends up like your xbox 360 (which is to say "dead").
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One Piece

2009-12-31T17:09:00.009-05:00

So Naruto finally started boring the crud out of me. I dunno what's up with it. Itachi is a good guy and Orochimaru is dead, but Sasuke is still emo and Naruto is still weak. Eight years and we're no closer to the end goal than we were at the begining of the story. We don't even know what the end goal is supposed to be! Rescuing Sasuke would be a stupid end goal for obvious reasons which I won't explain now because it would make an excellent topic for when I run out of ideas to post about!
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Welcome

2009-12-31T16:48:00.003-05:00

So I have a lot of hobbies and a lot of random spammy thoughts. I figure it's time to get a blog. The only real purpose for this post is so I have something to look at while setting up the layout. Real posts to come.

-Grickit