The place I had with Tobias and Jonah in Binghamton in 2002 was my favorite place so far in life. It was awesome. Here’s a panorama of the living room after we’d decorated it:

We went with a nintendo sprite and phallic object theme.

The ceilings were so high in this place. Also, we didn’t have wireless ethernet. I still prefer wired to this day.

The bar. I miss the bar. I bought the bar new from Oak Express when we were decking the place out.

That bar and I have had good times.

It looks like good times were had immediately prior to taking these pictures, actually.

The mantle. The white mage and black mage represent the eternal battle of light and dark over conquest of bananas.

Our living room even had a jew!

Jonah was usually in the living room. Living.

We had a ‘Community Oriented Policing’ propaganda poster on that door. Don’t know why…

And we’re back! I also was planning on getting an enormous television, but am glad I didn’t. I’d've basically been destitute that semester without money for rent, food, etc.

For the first time since 2001, I’m taking place in a verge compo.

I’m on a team with Gayo, Zathras, Hyptosis, and Ustor, and we’re Making an M-game. Hopefully this will get the Zeldalike urges out of my system.

We’ve got a walk’n’slash demo at this point, several chrs, a massive amount of raw mapwork, and music engaged. Still left to do are the tool scripts, the actual map-scripting, and playtesting. We’re on schedule for now, but I’d like to be ahead of schedule just because tragedy can strike at any moment.

Tragedy is a ninja, see…

A screenshot of code for Syn

As a brief gruedorf update, I’ve completed moving the old site’s code from mysql_fetch_row() to mysql_fetch_assoc() on all queries with tablename.* on their select clause.

I can now move forward with the beta site’s schema changes unimpeded.  

Hell truly is revisiting old, crufty code made by yourself.

As an unintentional side effect, several old bugs have cleared up.  Apparently in the past I added fields and some time later noticed bugs and never correlated the two events happening.  

Hell truly is revisiting old, crufty code made by yourself.

I added a screenshot of the last two days of gruedorf progress for Syn, who apparently likes screenshots.

Even with my widget, I seem to miss the mark sometime in posting to gruedorf in a timely fashion. I’ll need to make a version 3 of it where it starts ringing annoyingly when alerted people get under 24 hours to go.

Even though I may be late in posting, I am not late in doing. Over the last week I’ve committed 20 new revisions to the verge-rpg.com repository. Go me.

This weeks changes bring us thread stickiness, thread deletion/undeletion, and message deletion/undeletion, all with lovely YUI dialogs for the administrator.

I also created moderson, who is like testerson but is only a moderator and not a god-like admin. peon remains sad and lonely.

I was planning on closing out the last of the forum stuff today, but I thought it’d be a good idea to move over to bbcode instead of using filtered html, for various reasons. This quickly became a thorn in my ass.

The way that the old code works on query-fetching is to have a query like:


SELECT message.*, user.username FROM ...


And then it’d unpack the results from the query like this:


list( $a, $b, $c, $d, $e, $f, $g, $h, $i, $j, $k, $l, $m, $o )
= mysql_fetch_row( $result );

$this->_id = $a;
$this->_message_board_fk = $b;
$this->_parent_fk = $c;
/// ...and so on


This served my younger, more innocent 2003-self just fine. However, my older, wiser, more curmudgeonly current iteration is bound slightly by the whippersnapper’s naive choices. For one, the moment I add a field to the `message` table (like, say, a ‘version’ field to switch upon different rendering techniques), that field’s value suddenly becomes what used to be `user.username` prior to the change. Which is… inconvenient, at the best.

Then I had the task of finding a BBCode parser. After vetting a few (one of which had bbcode smileys BASE 64 ENCODED WITHIN THE PHP FILE), I went with the PEAR one, which still needed a bit of grooming and prodding to get to work in my multi-platform, non-PATH-munging world.

After several (annoying) hours, I now have a working bbcode parser working in my CakePHP project, safe, snug, and committed as of r182. Hooray!

So, I have a problem.

I love my iPhone and Zune 120, but I hate albums that don’t have cover art.

A simple modification to the ocremix.org masthead, to use as cover art for mp3 players! (click thumbnail for full size)

And a lot of my music comes from Overclocked Remix.

Now, they have several compilations and all of those have cover art, but there are so many delicious standalone tracks based on video game music.

• Tracks like Ilari Nieminen’s ‘Lake in Ontario?, which is a superawesome Yes/ELO/Prog Rock remix of a few of Final Fantasy X’s themes.
• Tracks like The OneUp’s ‘Terra Haute’ , which is like a Chuck Mangione rendition of Terra’s Theme from Final Fantasy Six.

I could go on. There are too many good tracks. Regardless, they always come up with a terrible default album art in modern mp3 players. And so, I took it upon myself to spend 3 minutes making something appropriate. And here it is fo you to enjoy as well!

Jonas:

maybe we need to autoinvestigate all governors all the time

McGrue:

Who watches the watchers?

Who makes steve gutenberg a star?

Jonas:

the watchmen watchers watch the whatchers

what

was

wat

McGrue:

Who watches the watchmen?

The watchmen watchers watch the watchmen.

Who watches the watchmen watchers?

The watchmen watcher watchers watch the watchmen watchers.

Who watches the watchmen watcher watchers?

The watchmen watcher watcher watchers watch the watchmen watchers.

…

…Which watchmen watcher will we watch?

Jonas:

Who watches the watchmen?

The watchmen overseers oversee the watchmen.

Who oversees the watchmen overseers?

The watchmen overseer auditors audit the watchmen overseers.

Who audits the watchmen overseer auditors?

The watchmen overseers auditors scrutinizors scrutinize the watchmen overseer auditors.

Who keeps an eye on the watchmen overseers auditors scrutinizors?

The watchmen overseers auditors scrutinizors eye-keeper-on-ers keep an eye on the watchmen overseers auditors scrutinizors.

Who eats the watchmen overseers auditors scrutinizors eye-keeper-on-ers’ lunches in the break room?

The watchmen overseers auditors scrutinizors eye-keeper-oners break-room-lunch-thieves eat the watchmen overseers auditors scrutinizors eye-keeper-on-ers’ lunch.

Why are the watchmen overseers auditors scrutinizors eye-keeper-oners break-room-lunch-thieves still hungry?

The watchmen overseers auditors scrutinizors eye-keeper-oners started ordering in.

What are the watchmen overseers auditors scrutinizors eye-keeper-oners ordering today?

The watchmen overseers auditors scrutinizors eye-keeper-oners are ordering oh I don’t know lets get Thai since we had pizza twice last week and there’s a new place I want to try.

This last week has been light on the gruedorfing and more heavy on the drinking.  Oh, when will I learn?

Several hours of work, however, were invested into investigating why I couldn’t get variables from simpletest by id.  To make a long story short, form element values in simpletest won’t be accessible if the element you want is in a malformed <form>.  In this case, there was no form tag at all, and so I was SOL until I tried actually making my html valid.

Feh.  Valid HTML.

Anyways, now the insidious bastard that was test_admins_can_edit_anything() passes.  Revisions 161 and 162 of the beta vrpg codebase happened this week.  I believe this is the last of my major infrastructure blocks, now, so the rest of the forums tests should go much quicker next time I sit down and tackle fleshing out the functionality.

There was a young fellow named Rex,

With exceeding small organs of sex

When charged with exposure,

He replied, with composure,

“De minimis non curat lex.“

mcgrue:

Latin limericks? really?

jonas: 

really.

mcgrue: 

It’s awesome.

I appreciate it.

I had to wikipedia the punchline, but it was awesome.

jonas: 

so did I

that was the best part

I like some learnin’ in my dirty jokes

high brow + low brow = awesome brow

(limerick courtesy of hitchens)

There’s been a grave injustice and I don’t know who else to write to to get it resolved.

You see, Ben recently gave me a user name and password to contribute to his blog. A triumph for free speech, at first glace. But once I began to write some well researched prose about why evolution is wrong and how Harri Krishnas were responsible for 9/11, I noticed that I didn’t have a “publish” button. Instead, I had a “Publish Pending Review” button.

As Ben well knows, we do not practice prior restraint in this country. I cannot abide being censored by an unchallengeable authority such as “McGrue”. I’m sure you agree serious actions need to be taken to remedy the situation immediately.

Furthermore, the free exercise of my religions is being impeded, as a central tenet of my religion is that I’m always right and everyone else should be forced to listen.

He also may have impeded my second amendment rights when I tried to shoot him.

-Jonas

PS: Also the preview button didn’t work the first time I clicked it, and as a result I feel like I’ve been forced to quarter soldiers in my house.

There are now 4 characters on screen. Whee.

So, Sully’s Battlesystem had a problem.

It worked well as long as you had character 0 in party slot 0, and character 1 in party slot 1, but as soon as anything changed from that configuration… shit got real.

The problem was due entirely to vergec’s type-poor environment.  In the battle system party[party_idx] and party_idx were used interchangeably.  Hey, they’re both ints and they look the same, right?

After identifying the source of the issue, it was a matter of a global search on “party[” and identifying the spots where it was misused.  I’ve also wrapped this whole operation in a function to give a level of english for humans to see and go “oh, maybe I should give thought to this.”

This whole conundrum is a non-issue in the modern world of programming, what with fancy objects and classes and types.

The most fun part about this is, once I solved the party reference problem, there was a renderstack problem of exactly the same type, where renderstack references and sprite references (which are stored in two different int-indexed global stacks) were used interchangeably. I was already in the mindset to solve this issue.

The whole task is documented between r187 and r197 in the sully svn repository.  Top to bottom the tasks were about 8 hours of braining and typing.

It’s my fault for continuing down this path of madness, but there’s a massive amount of code and effort in this so I have lock-in.  Converting the whole thing to Lua would still have these issues to track down.