I'm using a wiki (SnipSnap) as a writing aid when working on fantasy stories. Great for writing stuff like character backgrounds or history material for my own reference.
Argh! Ever since J.K. Rowling got past him in terms of sales, everyone's been reminding us about that. But Rowling is probably ahead in illegal downloads! You know, "these modern times we live in" and all that! And the bootlegs are, reportedly, properly OCRed and proofread too, unlike, reportedly, Pratchett's works! As a Pratchett fan, I lament the sad fact that shoplifting is such a slow way to boost readership!
So, um......can't give recommendations on this department on what to do, but...
(How do I indicate something's been updated or deleted without triggering duplicate entries in everyone's feed reader?)
RSS 2.0 has <guid> element or something along those lines. Atom has <id>. Those are supposed to give a single, unique ID to entries so they can be differentiated. Of course, the knowledge of site authors / CMS authors about that, and reader support for such niceties, mmm, spottyish stuff...
Yup, Metal Gear Solid is on PC too. At least the MGS1 and MGS2 are. They'll probably port MGS3 eventually too.
(Gah, there it sits on my game pile. I didn't have enough horsepower in my computer to run it earlier, and now, when I do, I don't have Windows. =( Seemed like a cool came, based on the little I played it. Wish they give a TwinSnakes treatment to it too! Would love to play it on the Cube!)
MGS was actually released for Game Boy Color too. Well, actually they took Japan-only title "Metal Gear: Ghost Babel" and not-so-discreetly renamed it for world release. Main plot doesn't have much to do with MGS on PS or PC, but the VR missions are mostly same as in MGS:Integral / MGS PC.
"Metal Gear Solid was released at the same time as Ocarina of Time, which is why I have yet to play Zelda. Who cares about a deku tree when there are terrorists with nukes to stop?"
And the writer even bashes the wrong game with wrong game! You don't splat Ocarina of Time with MGS. Nope! You need Final Fantasy VII to splat that. Duh. The writer obviously has no anti-Nintendo trolling skills at all and should stop doing that right now. There are rules to be followed, you know, otherwise it will just look ridiculous!
Because the Open Source Community(TM)(R)(C) wanted to show that they don't want to "innovate" by making stupid puns on the original product names, but rather "clone" the commercial market by following the lead and pulling silly names out of the hat? =) =) =)
Also some musician might want to explain in detail why in some instruments Cis != Des. I'm not quite of the exact thing myself, but it had something to do with the ways how some instruments are tuned or played.
It's disheartening when the reviewer clearly hasn't played more than 15 minutes into the game that you just spend 16 months creating.
Okay, I'm getting sidetracked here...
Know what's even more disheartening to me as a game fan? I stopped watching game TV when I realized what these people were doing: Okay, the game makers spent several months or even years making a game. These people cherish the game for one five-minute appearance. (Three of which are spent showing kEwL pre-rendered FMVs from the game.) And in the remaining time, they have barely enough time to say whether they think the game was good enough to spend money on. If I were to be a pessimist and say the success of the game hinged solely on these reviews, I'd say it'd be absolutely sickening to think how they treat the games. Game TV show crunches a game that took a long time to make, and for everyone who bought it, a month or two's evenings to play through, into a three-sentence review, says it was "kind of okay" and slaps it some semi-arbitrary rating, and that's the last we'd hear of the game, ever. (And frequently is, if you rely only in this TV program to get your game information!) What kind of message does this program give? "We're drowning in games, make less of them" to the publishers and "we don't care enough of these games to demand our producers to get us more air time to do this properly, so all you get are really chopped reviews, sorry", secondly, to the viewers.
TV is the worst possible medium for game reviews, you just can't cram information about, say, five games to a 30-minute weekly program. It's a little bit better medium for in-depth stuff like interviews, documentaries and like.
If humans have serious trouble spotting that, how could computers, with their admitted inadequacy to process natural languages, do much better? They might easily spot one kind of errors while humans easily spot the other kind - either way, you're left with trickiest of the errors.
I don't trust grammar to algorithms that fail to understand an insect's love of fructose without some severe special-case hackery.
I say if there are cases when good language matters, I mean, really matters, we can just feed the thing through a centuries-old invention. It's called an "editor". It's some kind of an organism that almost resembles a human being, but has the capability of finding lots and lots of unspottable errors from text.
Too bad punctuation can effect the meaning of a sentence and so your analogy is flawed
But that doesn't make the original discussed issue itself go away. I know I can't come up with waterproof analogies, but that's okay because usually people won't start arguing about their applicability, they stick to arguing the actual issues. =)
Copy and paste some C code from a random PDF or web page and tell your editor to indent that. Then try to do the same thing with Python code.
If you copy code elsewhere, especially from some project that uses completely different editor settings, you get some really weird results. (And I think Guido even said it was a mistake of allowing both tabs and spaces, too! Bet he likes Make syntax, too!)
And I tend to disagree with the goodness of "less typing" and validity of "less confusing". "Less typing" is for people who are pathologically lazy. (One frigging letter more!) "Less confusing" just isn't - I don't mind redundant things if that just makes the things more clearer. (Why do we capitalize the first letter of sentence and add punctuation to the end? That's redundant and nobody gets confused if you drop the punctuation since there's always the capital letters to tell where the sentence starts, right? Not really.)
Well, the greatest utility of these things comes only handy if you're not getting the "flashes there for three seconds" boot. Simpler boot loaders probably need more tweaking in the cases when things don't just work like they used to.
For example, yesterday I installed a new hard drive and copied my shit over from the old disk. When I was done, I spammed the bootloader back to the MBR and rebooting I went. Turns out I had forgotten to update the actual bootloader menu file to correspond to my new partition map (my root partition changed from/dev/hda3 to/dev/hda1). Kernel panic, can't find init. Duh!
Had I been using LILO with any kind of configuration error at all, it would have been another drop to BIOS to set the CD-ROM as the boot device again, booting to Gnoppix again, editing the file, reinstalling LILO, another BIOS trip to set the boot device, and another reboot.
But over last few years I've been using GRUB instead - and the thing comes with a full command line interpreter, boot menu system and a boot sequence editor. I just edit the boot command to point to the correct boot device and root partition. And then just hit b. Bam! It boots! So here I am.
RSS isn't shiny for headlines. Or maybe just them - you get some idea of what's going on without reading the articles. =)
RSS is shiny for content/summaries though, at least for those feeds that provide it. Bloglines and RSSowl, for example, show article blurbs, even with HTML and images. Boom! Read the first few paragraphs of the article and decide whether or not to read the rest of that stuff.
And if the court hesitates to hear from some deceased Dutch fellow, some still living Americans might be able to convince them otherwise - namely Joseph Kruskal and Robert C. Prim.
And since the court stuff is turning into a gigantic comedy already, why not let Knuth do the talking =)
Does gimp still use GTK+ of some version or some other for its toolkit?
The GIMP still does, of course. CinePaint, a rather notable fork of GIMP, however does not, at least not for everything - the thing is being ported to use FLTK. (I haven't used CinePaint at all and I can't find any docs on the project status, but at least the Debian binary seems to depend on both FLTK and GTK+ right now.)
All I can say to the Lazarus folks is... thank you!
Even if I don't have Dungeon Siege myself (and no Windows right now to run that one either, hope that's temporary), this is major news: A really slowly developed community mod of really big scope has been actually finished! I hope this will serve as a big motivation to all of the other modding groups who have these big game remake ambitions. If it happened once, hell, it can happen again! Now I just hope Ultima IX: Redemption and Ultima VIII: Exile will get more wind under their wings, they seem to have accomplished so much and if Lazarus got their stuff together, they can, too!
So thank you, Lazarus, and good luck, the rest of the modders everywhere! Truly, this has been a great year for everyone who's been quietly working on fanstuff in their basements, hope next year is, too! =)
Yep, the only problem is that I don't listen to what the wise and respectable and leet People Who Have Played The Game Longer Than Me say and think OPTIONS=number_pad is the way to go. (The reason I don't listen to them is because I'm an Emacs guy and even when I use vi, the arrow keys seem to work just fine. =)
And thus, Nethack usually needs a full-blown 105-key keyboard, and that's not an option on most laptops. Darn.
The kioslave is cool, just that it has some annoying sides:
Can't set the compression quality.
An annoying abuse of resources: amaroK uses the kioslave to play CDs. In other words, it rips the data and plays it. As a result my Athlon XP 3000+ is always skipping while playing CDs, but my father's old 486DX-33 isn't. =/ I think I'll stick to gnome-cd and workbone to play CDs.
Plus it's a thingy that's only visible to KDE apps too... I hope someone makes a FUSE thing to rip CDs. "cp/mnt/cdripper/track_1_vorbis_q6.ogg a_random_song.ogg"
i take it i should stick to a very solid LAMP base then look into ruby on the rails once i have some real code under my belt?
Perhaps - it's not exactly the simplest of platforms to get. You'll definitely benefit from understanding the basics of web development.
make sure i don't learn some trendy language that dies in a couple years?
A valid concern, though I personally wouldn't be too worried. Even in case Rails might fail to gain momentum, at least Ruby language should be able to stick around - it's already getting established as the part of the landscape. Plus, Rails uses the hot paradigm of MVC web apps - there's competition on this area too, and people are using it a lot in other languages, so knowing the paradigm itself might help.
and i assume this isn't a good language for someone with very little (essentially no) experience to jump into and try to learn?
Ruby might, in itself, be a simple and easy-to-learn language, but you'll probably start to appreciate those things only after you know how to program somewhat, as in know how to do many tasks in other scripting languages or how to do complex things in OO languages.
As for Rails itself, knowing some Ruby and good idea of some things OO can do would be a good idea.
also, how is this implimented? does it preform operations serverside that output the html/xml/whatever code in a similar fashion as php?
Yep, that's the basic idea. Though the way you separate your code and HTML, and how you organize the code, is quite different from stock PHP.
does it include database software in the ruby framework or do you still need something that is/is like Mysql to handle databases?
Yes, if you are going to do a database-backed app (and most Rails folks usually are doing just that), you need an external database. It tries to make the thing abstract enough so you don't practically need to care much about what DB you use - MySQL and PostgreSQL are both supported, as is SQLite (so you don't need an actual database server running, though sqlite isn't exactly full of neat features) and many others.
Though there's other things that can be used as the data backends, like Madeleine, which is used by Instiki. But some serious wizardry is needed for that, I hear...
You can use Konquerer as your file manager while in Gnome.
And KDE apps do like it if you toss in a file from Nautilus, too.
I use several GTK+/GNOME apps (Just to name a few: Nautilus, Eclipse and a couple of other SWT apps, Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, GNOME Dictionary, ALSAMixer and Terminal - I can't stand Konsole, gnome-terminal has its bugs but overall is less annoying), and a handful of Qt/KDE apps (GNOME doesn't have anything quite comparable to Scribus, Psi or especially amaroK). And Window Maker as the WM. Everything working nicely in perfect harmony. =)
In case you didn't notice, Slashdot is almost an archetypical weblog, evolved from CmdrTaco postings of "Linux possibly seen somewhere" with a few people commenting, to "Here's a link to this cool nerd site, AGAIN", with hundreds of comments. It's about a few people providing links and letting people comment on them or anything that fits the topic.
And games.slashdot.org is definitely one of the finest game blogs I've seen, right along with Kotaku, so cheers to them for winning. Um, well, kind of a dubious prize, but still.
Game community sites, in general, should be awarded too in my opinion...
Was the other 10% enough to make it worthwhile to use the wiki method, or with hindsight would you have been better off just sitting down at your own computer and writing it using a word processor?
Well, I think so - even when it didn't take that much workload off me, the bits done by others have been interesting enough. Plus, the guide aims for completeness and I'm not really covering every corner of the game as I go, but other people were generous enough to cover some already.
Plus, the alternative would have been what folks at gamefaqs seem to do: "If you have any suggestions, please e-mail me." Followed by a really huge list of contributors. Okay, I've noticed that if people do that, it works - but it's definitely slower than letting people directly edit the things they find inadequate. I've often read a game FAQ and wished to find that little Edit link somewhere, if I have to fire up Thunderbird and let it download today's 200 spam mails while I compose my reply, my interest kind of fizzles.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm using a wiki (SnipSnap) as a writing aid when working on fantasy stories. Great for writing stuff like character backgrounds or history material for my own reference.
Argh! Ever since J.K. Rowling got past him in terms of sales, everyone's been reminding us about that. But Rowling is probably ahead in illegal downloads! You know, "these modern times we live in" and all that! And the bootlegs are, reportedly, properly OCRed and proofread too, unlike, reportedly, Pratchett's works! As a Pratchett fan, I lament the sad fact that shoplifting is such a slow way to boost readership!
So, um... ...can't give recommendations on this department on what to do, but...
Actually, I think it was Mort, not Reaper Man. But the basic idea of what you said was correct =)
RSS 2.0 has <guid> element or something along those lines. Atom has <id>. Those are supposed to give a single, unique ID to entries so they can be differentiated. Of course, the knowledge of site authors / CMS authors about that, and reader support for such niceties, mmm, spottyish stuff...
Yup, Metal Gear Solid is on PC too. At least the MGS1 and MGS2 are. They'll probably port MGS3 eventually too.
(Gah, there it sits on my game pile. I didn't have enough horsepower in my computer to run it earlier, and now, when I do, I don't have Windows. =( Seemed like a cool came, based on the little I played it. Wish they give a TwinSnakes treatment to it too! Would love to play it on the Cube!)
MGS was actually released for Game Boy Color too. Well, actually they took Japan-only title "Metal Gear: Ghost Babel" and not-so-discreetly renamed it for world release. Main plot doesn't have much to do with MGS on PS or PC, but the VR missions are mostly same as in MGS:Integral / MGS PC.
And the writer even bashes the wrong game with wrong game! You don't splat Ocarina of Time with MGS. Nope! You need Final Fantasy VII to splat that. Duh. The writer obviously has no anti-Nintendo trolling skills at all and should stop doing that right now. There are rules to be followed, you know, otherwise it will just look ridiculous!
Because the Open Source Community(TM)(R)(C) wanted to show that they don't want to "innovate" by making stupid puns on the original product names, but rather "clone" the commercial market by following the lead and pulling silly names out of the hat? =) =) =)
Also some musician might want to explain in detail why in some instruments Cis != Des. I'm not quite of the exact thing myself, but it had something to do with the ways how some instruments are tuned or played.
Okay, I'm getting sidetracked here...
Know what's even more disheartening to me as a game fan? I stopped watching game TV when I realized what these people were doing: Okay, the game makers spent several months or even years making a game. These people cherish the game for one five-minute appearance. (Three of which are spent showing kEwL pre-rendered FMVs from the game.) And in the remaining time, they have barely enough time to say whether they think the game was good enough to spend money on. If I were to be a pessimist and say the success of the game hinged solely on these reviews, I'd say it'd be absolutely sickening to think how they treat the games. Game TV show crunches a game that took a long time to make, and for everyone who bought it, a month or two's evenings to play through, into a three-sentence review, says it was "kind of okay" and slaps it some semi-arbitrary rating, and that's the last we'd hear of the game, ever. (And frequently is, if you rely only in this TV program to get your game information!) What kind of message does this program give? "We're drowning in games, make less of them" to the publishers and "we don't care enough of these games to demand our producers to get us more air time to do this properly, so all you get are really chopped reviews, sorry", secondly, to the viewers.
TV is the worst possible medium for game reviews, you just can't cram information about, say, five games to a 30-minute weekly program. It's a little bit better medium for in-depth stuff like interviews, documentaries and like.
Yup, and whoever wants screenshots and lamentations of the translators, here's some.
I'm not really sad though, the GBA version is really cool and certainly better translated =)
(And what was with that "Funny" moderation? weird...)
I know Debian has "Virtual RMS", but I think SuSE is really going weird if they implement stuff like this. Weird syslog messages from SuSE boxes:
Jan 4 06:47:45 localhost esr: gunning some processesIf humans have serious trouble spotting that, how could computers, with their admitted inadequacy to process natural languages, do much better? They might easily spot one kind of errors while humans easily spot the other kind - either way, you're left with trickiest of the errors.
I don't trust grammar to algorithms that fail to understand an insect's love of fructose without some severe special-case hackery.
I say if there are cases when good language matters, I mean, really matters, we can just feed the thing through a centuries-old invention. It's called an "editor". It's some kind of an organism that almost resembles a human being, but has the capability of finding lots and lots of unspottable errors from text.
But that doesn't make the original discussed issue itself go away. I know I can't come up with waterproof analogies, but that's okay because usually people won't start arguing about their applicability, they stick to arguing the actual issues. =)
The almost canonical counterexample:
Copy and paste some C code from a random PDF or web page and tell your editor to indent that. Then try to do the same thing with Python code.
If you copy code elsewhere, especially from some project that uses completely different editor settings, you get some really weird results. (And I think Guido even said it was a mistake of allowing both tabs and spaces, too! Bet he likes Make syntax, too!)
And I tend to disagree with the goodness of "less typing" and validity of "less confusing". "Less typing" is for people who are pathologically lazy. (One frigging letter more!) "Less confusing" just isn't - I don't mind redundant things if that just makes the things more clearer. (Why do we capitalize the first letter of sentence and add punctuation to the end? That's redundant and nobody gets confused if you drop the punctuation since there's always the capital letters to tell where the sentence starts, right? Not really.)
As for lower rate of confusing constructs - er...
Well, the greatest utility of these things comes only handy if you're not getting the "flashes there for three seconds" boot. Simpler boot loaders probably need more tweaking in the cases when things don't just work like they used to.
For example, yesterday I installed a new hard drive and copied my shit over from the old disk. When I was done, I spammed the bootloader back to the MBR and rebooting I went. Turns out I had forgotten to update the actual bootloader menu file to correspond to my new partition map (my root partition changed from /dev/hda3 to /dev/hda1). Kernel panic, can't find init. Duh!
Had I been using LILO with any kind of configuration error at all, it would have been another drop to BIOS to set the CD-ROM as the boot device again, booting to Gnoppix again, editing the file, reinstalling LILO, another BIOS trip to set the boot device, and another reboot.
But over last few years I've been using GRUB instead - and the thing comes with a full command line interpreter, boot menu system and a boot sequence editor. I just edit the boot command to point to the correct boot device and root partition. And then just hit b. Bam! It boots! So here I am.
RSS isn't shiny for headlines. Or maybe just them - you get some idea of what's going on without reading the articles. =)
RSS is shiny for content/summaries though, at least for those feeds that provide it. Bloglines and RSSowl, for example, show article blurbs, even with HTML and images. Boom! Read the first few paragraphs of the article and decide whether or not to read the rest of that stuff.
Too bad not all feeds provide blurbs though =/
And if the court hesitates to hear from some deceased Dutch fellow, some still living Americans might be able to convince them otherwise - namely Joseph Kruskal and Robert C. Prim.
And since the court stuff is turning into a gigantic comedy already, why not let Knuth do the talking =)
Will the new Intel processors be reported as "YepStillIntel", too, instead of the old "GenuineIntel"? =)
(If you don't get it, do cat /proc/cpuinfo on just about any non-Intel x86-compatible box =)
The GIMP still does, of course. CinePaint, a rather notable fork of GIMP, however does not, at least not for everything - the thing is being ported to use FLTK. (I haven't used CinePaint at all and I can't find any docs on the project status, but at least the Debian binary seems to depend on both FLTK and GTK+ right now.)
All I can say to the Lazarus folks is... thank you!
Even if I don't have Dungeon Siege myself (and no Windows right now to run that one either, hope that's temporary), this is major news: A really slowly developed community mod of really big scope has been actually finished! I hope this will serve as a big motivation to all of the other modding groups who have these big game remake ambitions. If it happened once, hell, it can happen again! Now I just hope Ultima IX: Redemption and Ultima VIII: Exile will get more wind under their wings, they seem to have accomplished so much and if Lazarus got their stuff together, they can, too!
So thank you, Lazarus, and good luck, the rest of the modders everywhere! Truly, this has been a great year for everyone who's been quietly working on fanstuff in their basements, hope next year is, too! =)
Yep, the only problem is that I don't listen to what the wise and respectable and leet People Who Have Played The Game Longer Than Me say and think OPTIONS=number_pad is the way to go. (The reason I don't listen to them is because I'm an Emacs guy and even when I use vi, the arrow keys seem to work just fine. =)
And thus, Nethack usually needs a full-blown 105-key keyboard, and that's not an option on most laptops. Darn.
The kioslave is cool, just that it has some annoying sides:
Plus it's a thingy that's only visible to KDE apps too... I hope someone makes a FUSE thing to rip CDs. "cp /mnt/cdripper/track_1_vorbis_q6.ogg a_random_song.ogg"
Perhaps - it's not exactly the simplest of platforms to get. You'll definitely benefit from understanding the basics of web development.
A valid concern, though I personally wouldn't be too worried. Even in case Rails might fail to gain momentum, at least Ruby language should be able to stick around - it's already getting established as the part of the landscape. Plus, Rails uses the hot paradigm of MVC web apps - there's competition on this area too, and people are using it a lot in other languages, so knowing the paradigm itself might help.
Ruby might, in itself, be a simple and easy-to-learn language, but you'll probably start to appreciate those things only after you know how to program somewhat, as in know how to do many tasks in other scripting languages or how to do complex things in OO languages.
As for Rails itself, knowing some Ruby and good idea of some things OO can do would be a good idea.
Yep, that's the basic idea. Though the way you separate your code and HTML, and how you organize the code, is quite different from stock PHP.
Yes, if you are going to do a database-backed app (and most Rails folks usually are doing just that), you need an external database. It tries to make the thing abstract enough so you don't practically need to care much about what DB you use - MySQL and PostgreSQL are both supported, as is SQLite (so you don't need an actual database server running, though sqlite isn't exactly full of neat features) and many others.
Though there's other things that can be used as the data backends, like Madeleine, which is used by Instiki. But some serious wizardry is needed for that, I hear...
And KDE apps do like it if you toss in a file from Nautilus, too.
I use several GTK+/GNOME apps (Just to name a few: Nautilus, Eclipse and a couple of other SWT apps, Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, GNOME Dictionary, ALSAMixer and Terminal - I can't stand Konsole, gnome-terminal has its bugs but overall is less annoying), and a handful of Qt/KDE apps (GNOME doesn't have anything quite comparable to Scribus, Psi or especially amaroK). And Window Maker as the WM. Everything working nicely in perfect harmony. =)
In case you didn't notice, Slashdot is almost an archetypical weblog, evolved from CmdrTaco postings of "Linux possibly seen somewhere" with a few people commenting, to "Here's a link to this cool nerd site, AGAIN", with hundreds of comments. It's about a few people providing links and letting people comment on them or anything that fits the topic.
And games.slashdot.org is definitely one of the finest game blogs I've seen, right along with Kotaku, so cheers to them for winning. Um, well, kind of a dubious prize, but still.
Game community sites, in general, should be awarded too in my opinion...
Well, I think so - even when it didn't take that much workload off me, the bits done by others have been interesting enough. Plus, the guide aims for completeness and I'm not really covering every corner of the game as I go, but other people were generous enough to cover some already.
Plus, the alternative would have been what folks at gamefaqs seem to do: "If you have any suggestions, please e-mail me." Followed by a really huge list of contributors. Okay, I've noticed that if people do that, it works - but it's definitely slower than letting people directly edit the things they find inadequate. I've often read a game FAQ and wished to find that little Edit link somewhere, if I have to fire up Thunderbird and let it download today's 200 spam mails while I compose my reply, my interest kind of fizzles.