It has been such a very long time since there was a record that really mattered, a record that can get under your skin. Something that tries to take on the world, chew it up and spit it out, snarling and cool all at the same time.
Rowan :: May.30.2007 :: Personal Entries, Reviews :: 2 Comments »
Spent an enjoyable evening yesterday playing the Viking Game with Jen and family (yes yours truly really knows how to live it up of an evening). It’s a Tafl game or basically one where the teams are not equal. The King (who has a small guard of pieces) has to escape and the attacking team have to prevent the king escaping and ideally surround him with four pieces in order to run him through.
Thinking ahead is actually harder than something like draughts, because the pieces are not constrained to only move once square at a time, they can move any distance as long as their path is not blocked.
I haven’t found a computer equivalent that reproduces the board game we played exactly - only one that runs in a DOS box where the king can win by reaching the edge of the board, which makes it fairly easy for him compared to the version we had where he has to escape to one of the four corners (which are more easily blocked). I suspect this is balancing on the part of the producers of the boxed version because it does seem a bit easier to be the king at least going from the first couple of plays. Also that old DOS game seems a wee bit hard… 
If anyone knows of a more recent Linux variant of this game, do please let me know.
Rowan :: May.29.2007 :: Games, Personal Entries :: No Comments »
MU allows you to limit the amount of disk quota the blogs can use out of the box. However many site admins may want to be able to change this value per blog and for this an extra plugin is needed.
The plugin that seems to do the job is z-space (WPMUDev page) by Dylan Reeve, based on earlier work by some other developers with which it is backwards compatible. It’s an MU plugin meaning it is auto executed for every blog rather than appearing in the normal plugin dialog. The plugin adds a nice readout to the dashboard giving an indication of space used. It appears to have been fixed by another developer for WPMU 1.2.1 according to the WMPUDev page.
When testing, a word of warning. Make sure you’re doing so as a user rather than the site admin, or the quotas won’t necessarily take effect.
The one drawback to the plugin I can see is that if you upload a file that takes you over the limit, this will be stored even if it takes you significantly over the assigned quota, this also makes the status bar look a bit odd. It would be nice perhaps to be able to disable this or have a maximum threshold over quota that is allowed. Further uploads will be prevented once over quota (the file will not be saved after it has been uploaded). It would be good if the upload button was disabled if the blog was over quota.
It looks like Dylan is also working on a Premium blogs plugin which despite being in the early stages looks really promising. I can personally envisage wanting to have different levels of premium blogs with different levels of disk space / plugins etc.
Rowan :: May.27.2007 :: Web Apps, Wordpress MU :: No Comments »
I’ll confess something, for a while I got sick of thrillers. Slowly discovering plot detail from impossibly dangerous situation to impossibly dangerous situation whilst enduring the odd quiet bit just got… old. Perhaps absence makes the heart grow fonder however, because I really enjoyed Panic.
Rowan :: May.15.2007 :: Books, Reviews :: No Comments »
I’m currently fiddling around with Lyceum and Wordpress MU in an attempt to decide which is most suitable for a little community site I want to get going.
Installing MU is as simple as uploading the file base to the web root (or other location of your choice) and then visiting the site. Pop in your database details and off you go. You must choose at installation time whether to use subdomains or directories for your site - the language implies this cannot be changed later.
Cosmetically, MU looks an awful lot like Wordpress (yes I know it IS Wordpress but I’m sure you know what I mean!) both on the front page and in the admin area, whereas Lyceum has a customised front page and admin area. Given that you’ll probably customise a fair bit this doesn’t matter overmuch, but there is a certain logic to the MU setup of having the admin bits and bobs within a tab in the familiar Wordpress admin area.
Whereas at the Lyceum site I found things easy to locate at a glance the MU site doesn’t seem to link very visibly to http://wpmudev.org/ which seems to be quite an indispensable resource for plugins and themes, even if a lot of contributors seem to have difficulty updating their contribution pages with the new releases. After ten minutes of browsing I’d already added the per user upload quota plugin which is an absolute must have for my site. I’m sure there is a good reason there isn’t a flipping great link on the main site of course The site may even have been superseded for all I know.
It’s going to be quite interesting working out which of the systems will do what I want with the least work - a hard bit is definitely going to be deciding which database setup is better. I’ll blog along as I come up against interesting differences and issues.
Rowan :: May.02.2007 :: Lyceum, Web Apps, Wordpress MU :: No Comments »
After adding a PCI soundcard to my machine for the purposes of having a gameport my Kubuntu 7.04 install wasn’t always choosing to use the on-board Intel chip for sound meaning I could near nothing. The solution seems to be the following
sudo asoundconf list
Names of available sound cards:
au8830
Intelsudo asoundconf set-default-card Intel
sudo /etc/init.d/alsa-utils restart
* Shutting down ALSA… [ OK ]
* Setting up ALSA … [ OK ]
You’ll also need to restart any apps to get sound, there is no need to reboot to get Amarok working
Rowan :: May.02.2007 :: Linux, Quick Solutions :: No Comments »