Things have been crazy busy recently but I seem to finally be getting on top of things. Been having fun dealing with git-svn – I’ve been using git locally and syncing to an svn server for coding at work and I’ve found it generally quite nice though working out how to do merges between branches that are tracking svn branches is a bit of an arse. I think I need to be looking at rebase for pulling changes from master (which is tracking trunk on svn) into my development branch (that’s tracking a dev branch on svn) but I’m having issues doing so, which has been annoying and confusing to say the least. I need to experiment more I guess. I wish I was just using a pure git setup but oh well.

I’m also writing this on my phone using the new wordpress android app. It seems quite nice so far, reasonable interface and generally gets out of your way. I also have been using GDocs for syncing with google docs which has been useful. Nice to have a note taking, document writing app that can do that well.

I saw the Sonic 4 trailer the other day and wow, everything I could want about a classic platform game brought to the present day. I generally don’t enjoy modern games and am somewhat indifferent about them. Sonic 3 & Knuckles was probably the last truly great sonic game and I’ve glad to see a return to the roots of the franchise. This is what sonic is about, not this bullshit 3D action games with bad stories and crappy characters. Sonic 4 looks like it is back to focussing on what Sonic games shoulfd be all about – fluidity of movement and speed. Momentum, even. I can pick up Sonic 3 & Knuckles any time and enjoy it like I did the first time around. There are few, few games nowadays I can do the same with.

I feel a little sad because, working at a company that is heavily focused on multiplayer PC gaming, I feel a little off. I’m just not interested in the latest FPS, regardless of the awesome features and enhanced tactics, etc. They all boil down to the same thing for me and I’ve just got bored of the genre. Quake 1 was the last FPS I truly enjoyed and I still have fond memories of it, back when I used to write maps and mods like crazy for it. Quake 3 is fun, and I occasionally play on Quake Live to relive those days but it just doesn’t have the same charm Q1 did.

Final Fantasy VIII was released on the PSN today and so I will be getting that most likely. I enjoy the Final Fantasy games and it is one of the few franchises I’ve found I actually enjoyed the transition from 2D to 3D of. Speaking of PSN, I find I enjoy playing Fat Princess quite a lot. It’s fun, cute and simple, while still having enough bite for it to not be an entirely throwaway casual experience. It’s lightheartedness also makes it easy to pick up or put down whenever you like though and I think that ability to easily engage or disengage with a game is a key feature for any modern game, sadly most in my opinion require more of a long term commitment just to play effectively. I want the challenge to be one of skill, not of who can slog the most hours. Conversely, I also find many games far too short, which is why I tend to stick to RPGs. I can sink easily 70 hours into a quality RPG because of the rich world and storyline combined with the ways battles work and are paced. In most other games I tend to complete them too soon for my liking and end up feeling disappointed. Either that or I end up getting frustrated when games ruin the difficulty curve to force you to grind or otherwise drastically change your play style without warning in order to inflate the hours you need to play. I’m not much of a gamer, and what little gaming I do tends to be console based these days, much like in my youth. PCs are patently superior for certain games such as RTS and FPS games but there are just not enough decent ones that introduce something new enough and interesting enough to make it worth the effort to deal with both Windows and the eternal hardware arms race that seems to exist. I don’t have the money to spend on components I will only use occasionally and need to be replaced when broken. My PS3 is an appliance I can replace relatively easily, it’s convenient. I just can’t be bothered with dealing with things on a PC.

I tend to enjoy more indie/non-mainstream things nowadays as well I find. My music tastes are eclectic and spread pretty wide and I’m open to new things. I enjoy playing oddball, often unheard of roleplaying games and the odd weird indie computer game. I like experiencing the new ideas and expanded boundaries people are creating when making massive profit from majority markets isn’t a primary concern. I think that, most of all, is why I generally play fewer games, especially from the FPS genre, nowadays.

I really need to work on mmy games programming course but I still have next to no spare time, sadly. I hate having a bunch of ideas in my head and no way to express them. I also need to get back into writing. Between doing this judging on protagonize and work I’ve had little time for anything else. Many ideas that need releasing there too. The DRYH game on Google Wave is going well, it’s very enjoyable. The D&D I’m playing on there as well is quite good, though it’s progressing a little slowly. Hopefully things will pick up soon though.

Only a few weeks till Dru and I will be in Canada. I’m really looking forwards to it. I need a holiday and some time to just hang with my wife and my friends so this will be a welcome break.

Anyway, that concludes this rambling test of Wordpress for android.

Well, I’ve been ill – still. For the last six months or so I’ve had stomach cramps and generally unpleasant gastrointestinal issues which have come and gone and they’ve been rearing their ugly ahead again this month. I’ve had bloodtests and given various samples and what not so hopefully they can figure out what it is and get me sorted.

In happier news, I’m enjoying the new job. Multiplay is a cool place to work, full of fun people and interesting projects. Sometimes I get the odd surprise when I realise just how big they really are, having not had much experience working for large companies wheeling and dealing with heavyweights in the gaming industry. It’s pretty exciting and even though it’s a complete arse to get there, it’s totally worth it. That said, I will be so glad when I can drive there. This commute as it stands is slowly killing me. At least everyone there is really understanding about the commute, my various ailments and so working from home is an option, though I try not to take advantage of it too often because I feel bad shuttered off at home and miss out on the working atmosphere in the office.

Which leads me on to the driving. So far, so good. No major incidents as of yet, no remnants of children to be scraped off the instructors car quite yet. It’s been interesting, I started off my first lesson on hills, my second lesson was on ice and in my last lesson I had the pleasure of being on a steep hill I couldn’t see over, when two buses came over all while I had a white van man right behind me. Considering this was my first time ever on roads with other road users, this was mildly concerning and I screwed up a little, but not so badly anything bad happened. To me shame the instructor (who is a very nice woman working under the AA) had to intervene a bit on that particular incident, but not to worry, it’s early days yet. The main issue I find I have with driving is getting feedback from the pedals. My feet are often pretty numb and so I find it hard to tell whether I’m pushing down on them or not. Gentle pressure on things like the accelerator I can’t feel at all and so I have to judge by ear. It also doesn’t help that my giant clown feet in my huge boots keep catching on the footwell when pressing/depressing the clutch. Hopefully I’m going to get some trainers at some point which should alleviate some of those issues.

The AA website is a bit shit and makes paying people a bit of an arse. You’d think something like that would be fairly important. I might have to resort to cheques or something.

At the end of February Dru and I are heading over to Canada to stay with our good friend Asheyna, whom we met on Protagonize. Collaborative writing, bringing people together – NickB should use that as a sickeningly cheesy tag line I’m really looking forwards to it, I could do with a holiday, this commute and busy period at work has taken it out of me a bit. It’s odd, I never really saw myself as the kind of person who needs a break from work. I’ve always enjoyed what I do and so holidays have mostly been “you don’t have to come in” days to me, rather than a respite from working. With this commute though, that has changed which makes me feel a little sad. Something else that I find mildly depressing is that I rarely do any coding outside of work any more. Admittedly, I rarely do much of anything outside of work at the moment – I get up at 0530, spend and hour getting ready then get to the train station for 0711 to reach Southampton by 0800 where I catch a bus to the ferry terminal for 0810 where I catch a ferry at 0835 to reach Hythe by 0855 where I then get a lift into work. Then I do the whole thing in reverse, starting at 1800 and arriving home at around 2030. That leaves me barely any time to do anything and the weekends are spent mostly recovering on lack of sleep so thinking isn’t high on my list of pursuits, usually I vegetate to mindless internet browsing, watching TV and the occasional PS3 game session because I’m just too exhausted for anything else.

Now, that sounds a lot worse than it is. It’s not like I’m zombified the entire time, but I am sufficiently tired that it’s just hard to do anything that I want to do, because I never feel very ‘fresh’ mentally. Squeezing in a Warhammer fantasy roleplay on Thursdays and a D&D 4th Edition on Sundays is taxing enough, but I’m glad I do them, if I did nothing at all every night I’d go insane. Monday nights on the G3 Show are becoming problematic for me at the moment. Admittedly, this is mostly due to the poor performance of the train system. The weather recently has thrown a complete spanner in the works and it takes them forever to fix anything. To their credit though, I’ve found SouthWest Trains’ twitter information feed very helpful and it’s been nice to actually know I’m going to be late before hand so I can give people warning or decide to work from home.

Speaking of roleplays, I’ve decided to fulfil my ambition to play a Don’t Rest Your head game by playing it from the other side of the screen as a GM. Normally I don’t GM very much, it’s both a lot of work and I don’t like my game-running style meshes well with a lot of my players, at least not to my observations, which whether it actually is the case or not still demoralises me enough to make most of my games fail miserably. However, these Don’t rest Your Head games I’m running are different for two reason. Firstly, Don’t Rest Your head is an awesome systems that seems likes it was designed for the exact kind of narrative control I like to use, with an awesome setting to boot. Secondly, I’m running the games on Google Wave for players I’ve never played with before. Running it in a non-real-time way gives me time to perfect things and think ahead, so there isn’t so much pressure to plan ahead before each game or on improvising quickly during a session. So far, I’ve found Google Wave works very much like running a game on a forum or site like RPoL.net is. The real-time aspects are useful and I plan on writing some gadgets to help with things like dice rolls in the Don’t Rest Your Head format, which should be nice. All my players are also from Protagonize. That site is slowly becoming the center of my internet life. Don’t rest Your Head is such an awesome system and setting, I highly recommend it. I also bought the supplement Don’t Lose Your Mind which has some really awesome Madness talents. I strongly urge you to check out DRYH and DLYM at Evil Hat. You can buy them in the UK without paying crazy international delivery prices from Leisure Games. I’m also playing in a D&D 4th Edition game on there

Speaking of Protagonize.com, I volunteered my services as a judge in the current unofficial poetry tournament. It’s been pretty fun and I’ve tried to make a real effort to give some good critique on each poem, though this last found has suffered a bit due to being busy at work. I’ve had some nice feedback on my feedback – it’s always nice to be appreciated.

February looks like it’s going to be yet another busy and interesting month. I’m looking forwards to Canana and meeting Asheyna in person and hopefully some of my other friends from Protagonize that happen to live in Vancouver including NickB himself.

And that’s this last month or so.

I was writing a new chapter of a story on Protagonize and didn’t notice that the server migration they were doing happened to star during the course of my writing. I click submit and pow, my work was gone as the site didn’t exist any more. I thought I might have lost it but luckily Chrome still had it and tried to repost it every time I did a refresh. However, I had no way of getting the text out of Chrome as it would not display the original text entry form. Crap. I had two choice, either wait until the migration was complete or lose my work.

I decided to wait and the migration went through fine but one last problem! The server had changed IP address and none of the DNS had updated yet! I set up an entry in my hosts file expecting Chrome to honour it but it ignored it. Oh noes!

So, I did what any self-respecting geek would do, set up my own DNS server, changed my computer to use that as it’s primary DNS and had that DNS server use my hosts file. That way Chrome was unknowingly using my hosts file and all was well. I saved my story chapter and got it posted. Geek solutions for the win!

Here is how I did it (obviously this is only applicable to Linux, Ubuntu Karmic in my specific case):

# edited /etc/hosts and added the new protagonize DNS entry
sudo aptitude install dnsmasq
# edit /etc/dnsmasq.conf and added the line: listen-address=127.0.0.1
/etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart
# edit /etc/resolv.conf and added this line as the first nameserver entry: nameserver 127.0.0.1

I also decided I wanted to keep using dnsmasq as a local DNS cache (for faster DNS queries and dealing with evil issues like this) so I added an entry to my

/etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf

file (which controls what happens when your computer gets new network details automatically via DHCP, which is what I use on my network) to ensure it updated the

/etc/resolve.conf

with the entry for the local DNS cache. I did this by adding the line

prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;

I won NaNoWriMo!

I’m completely chuffed. it’s a story I’ve wanted to write for ages even even though this particular revision of it is absolutely terrible, I’m proud to have finally completed it none-the-less. I may edit it come March in NaNoEdMo but for now I’m just blown away to have achieved it at all.

If you feel the need to read a piece of utterly terrible literature that emerged from some in-depth world-building combined with basically no story planning whatsoever, then you can find the story on Protagonize.com. It’s called Triad: Hath Three Parts Wrought, and it’s a piece of shit but I love it

Yesterday evening (and most of the very early morning today) we had a party round Lorcian’s new flat as a sort of belated house warming. We did a massive radio show special for around 5 hours or so on TGR with several of the other GRN DJs that came down to visit. We had a laugh, everyone got very drunk and we played highly disturbing, homoerotic Japanese muscle flexing games on the Wii (which I apparently have a knack for, I held the highest score of the night!)

In other news, I’ve completed a whole month at Multiplay! It’s been awesome and I’m really enjoying myself there. There been some minor technical hiccups since switching from developing on a Mac to using Linux (everyone else there is using Windows but I’d literally go insane if I had to) but I feel I’m really starting to come into my role there and hopefully things will progress a bit faster now that I’ve found my feet. I still miss Textmate and any of the alternatives I’ve tried have various issues. At the moment I’m using netbeans, but it’s terribly slow when doing code completion after having been running for a few hours, especially on a large codebase like I’m working on. I’d like to try the E text editor but it’s been an arse trying to compile it under Linux on Ubuntu Karmic. I might try running the Windows version with WINE, though I don’t fancy relying on a non-native piece of kit for my primary editor.

I’ve recently switched to using the Chrome browser daily builds from the karmic ppa and damn, it’s crazy fast. I am astonished at how fast it runs and for now it’s become my primary browser. It really makes the web an entirely different place, the difference is that much.

So yes, it’s been an interesting month. Rubbish and filth are piled high where both Dru and I have been ignoring chores, housework or basic human hygiene in lieu of writing as much as we can in any spare our we have so we’ll have some interesting times ahead but all I can think of now is how awesome it is to have finally won NaNoWriMo.

Hell yes.

I’m starting my new job in a few days and am consequently filled with both excitement and apprehension. It will cost me about 10 times as much as my commute costs now to get there each month, which will probably end up actually costing me money, even given the extra pay, initially. The commute is quite long as well and while I’m confident I can do it without a doubt (I’ve deliberately been waking up early and going to bed late to acclimatise myself to the longer hours due to travel) I can’t say I’m perfectly happy about it, mostly due to not knowing the route very well have only done it end-to-end once. Also, I’ve not had much time to practice or find out additional information because annoyingly I’ve been very busy the whole of the time since I was offered the position and haven’t been able to do any research, such as whether or not I can buy a season ticket on the Hythe Ferry.

I’m still pretty cut up about leaving SonicIQ. It was my first full time job and the first job of any kind where I was paid to do what I love, so it holds a special place for me. I’ve wanted to help it grow and become something more and invested a lot of myself in it so leaving it behind is a bit of a blow, especially since the only reason I was looking initially was out of fear the company would fail during the recession. This appears to not be the case any more – as my new job approaches we seem to be getting busier and busier. Typical really. However, I have no regrets. Multiplay looks like it’s just as awesome a place to work as SonicIQ is and I’m excited about starting there, the reduction in responsibility (I wont be managing several servers anymore as far as I’m aware) and the increase in pay helps too. Still I can’t help but feel a little bit bad about the whole situation but oh well, life must go on.

In other news, the last ever LUGRadio Live was awesome, as was OggCamp that followed the day after. Hanging out with a bunch of geeks and learning about cool projects and other things for 2 days straight is about as awesome as it gets. Managed to get some hacking in on some google wave gadgets despite the dodgy wireless.

I probably shouldn’t have gone. A few hours before we left, I went to pick up my new bike. As part of the commute to the new job I will be cycling and not currently owning a bike I’d purchased one at Halfords and was going to pick it up. I haven’t ridden a bike in quite a while, perhaps as much 10 years, so I’m a little rusty as you might expect. Anyway, I grabbed my bike and was a little wobbly at first as I got used to it again but was fine after about 5 minutes. 10 minutes into my journey home though I had quite a bad accident. I basically decided to go down a steep hill, a bad decision by itself but compounded by the fact the hill was coated entirely in wet leaves. Thin road tyre + wet-leaves + 40-ish degree decline hill + me going faster than I probably should with super-sensitive brakes = FAIL.

I lost control and hit the ground. I don’t remember the impact and think I may have passed out for a second or two but I remember skidding down the hill on my side for about 2 or so meters and feeling very dizzy and sick. It was quite lucky really as any slower and my fall would have curved me into the road down the hill where two cars were right behind me. Any faster and I’d have slide into the two lanes of busy traffic at the bottom of the hill. I guess you have to see the bright side in these sort of things. I picked myself up but had to stop shortly and sit down lest I faint. I had a mild concussion and was seeing stars but generally fine. Some nasty scrapes that by now are mostly healed and my keychain was terribly bent so I guess I fell on it with some force. The bike was looking trashed at that point, one brake handle was screwed up, the rear gear assembly was poking into the spokes and the chain was going back on. I was too out of it to do much about it so after a sit down I walked the bike the rest of the way home.

10 minutes of owning it and I’d almost killed myself and probably cost myself a lot of money for repairs. Bloody fantastic. This didn’t exactly inspire me with confidence for this commute I was to be undertaking.

Luckily my friend lostprocess fixed the gear assembly partially by bending it back into place and my brother-in-law Owen applied his epic handiwork skills to fixing the rest of it. It’s more or less fine now, bar some scrapes. I feel nervous going down even the faintest slope though. The bike goes incredibly fast down even the most shallow of slopes under no power but gravity itself. I need to practice my braking more.

After that we needed to head up to Wolverhampton for LUGRadio so we left almost immediately, opting not to go to A&E as I was mostly feeling fine by then. However, being out of it I managed to forget my wallet. Luckily I didn’t need it to check into the hotel. Dru managed to forget her money as well when we went out after arriving at the hotel (which was very nice) so we had to borrow stuff from lostprocess, bytey and darksatana. Despite the seemingly unending chain of fail the weekend was awesome, so that was a plus.

I’m apprehensive about NaNoWriMo this year. I’ve done zero planning or prep work as I’ve been too busy, I’m writing a sci-fi romance and I’ve never really been one to read romance let alone write it. With the new job and the long commute I’ll have even less time to complete it than usual. Considering I’ve failed every year til now and those years were not quite as hectic I don’t see this ending well.

One final random thing before I go. I was composing a poem/song on the way to work in a lullaby-esque style about a man who murder/suicides with his baby son because his wife died during childbirth and he resents him for it. I’ve entirely forgotten everything about it except the tune now, annoyingly. Cheerful mornings as always for me

However, what happens when you want to write some tasks you can run on any remote server? What happens if you don’t have any servers and you want to build some dynamically and then run some remote tasks on them?

Well, I’ve been asking these questions and I found an answer that helped me out and thought I’d share it here.

Using the dependency system of rake and the lazy role evaluation of vlad along with the fact that it provides some very useful public class methods (so they are presumably safe, rather than hacking into the internals with send or the like) I wrote the following simple test script:

require 'rubygems'
require 'highline'
require 'vlad'
task :server_config do
  ssh_string = HighLine.new.ask 'Enter the SSH details of the server you want to connect to: '
  Rake::RemoteTask.role :server, ssh_string
end

desc 'Run stuff on a server'
remote_task :server, :roles => :server do
  run "echo 'hello i am a server'"
end
task :server => :server_config

What’s going on here is that I have a remote task using a role server which as of yet I haven’t defined. When I run rake server that runs the server task. The server task is dependent on the server_config task which sets up a role ’server’ with the given string (ideally something like user@server.com). The remote task then executes, evaluating the value of the role, which is now set to the users input, and connects to the server you’ve set at run time. How awesome is that?

Of course, this is a contrived example, you could use a system to setup roles automatically from other things rather than pulling in user input but the lesson to take away here is that is is possible to use vlad tasks on dynamically defined targets easily.

Generally I find random drunk people sitting alone in the dark at midnight rather odd and vaguely pathetic, I don’t really understand why you would want to do that, but I guess, never having been drunk myself, that I’m beyond understanding such notions. More odd though was the boys attitude and things he was saying. It made me realise just how alien some youngsters seem to me nowadays. Of course, I can hardly base my opinion of all teenagers on an unwanted conversation with one drunk, teenage boy, but nonetheless it was a weird experience.

Essentially, the boy kept insisting he was a ‘grebo’ and that he knew me because I must hang around with other grebo’s, apparently being one myself. This slang a wasn’t familiar with but when I got home a quick search on urban dictionary revealed he meant something along the lines of ‘rocker’. Apparently.

Anyway, after several protestations that I knew neither him, nor any of the people he was referring to, nor any of these other groups of people he kept spouting (emos, goths, chavs, grebos, etc) he just seemed to reset and repeat the questions ad infinitum. It was as if he just couldn’t comprehend that I might not subscribe myself to one of these social castes. It wasn’t as if he disbelieved me, or as if he thought what I was saying was impossible, it was as if not being in some kind of caste was an entirely alien concept his mind and he just couldn’t process and it so just threw any of my protests out of the window as a result. It was a if his mind could not comprehend me as an independent entity and so kept grasping at straws so it could fit me into it’s conceptual world-view.

I found that mind set frightening and disturbing both. When I’m around teenagers of that age, I find I don’t understand them at all, I don’t understand why they do the things they do or ays the things they say. It’s frightening, not in a threatening way but in a more introspective way. When did the world become full of aliens, when did I lose touch with this great swath of humanity that was only 5 years old when I was their age?

I even feel like this to a certain extent with some people only 5 years younger than me or thereabouts, though the effect is lessened somewhat but there is still this strange tint of alienness about them, something unknowable, inconceivable, incomprehensible that I can’t even conceptualise to put into words.

Getting old, I guess.

My good friend bytey directed me to a useful guide on rooting and flashing your phone. I went a little further than that and so I thought I’d share the process with you.

I first followed the above guide but stopped when it came time to installing a new firmware, instead just following the rooting, recovery and HardSPL instructions. Once that was done, I ran into trouble.

I decided to download and install cyanogen 4.0.4. To use the Apps2SD functionality, you need to partition your microSD card so it has a ext3 partition and a fat32, which I did using fdisk and the mkfs tools under linux. I opted to have the fat32 partition be the first on the disk, followed by the ext3 one. I’d heard that problems happened with large ext3 partitions so I made sure to keep it to 1GB or less.

The install process went along easy enough, I downloaded the firmware from the cyanogen mod site and renamed the update-blah-blah-blah.zip file to update.zip and placed it in the root of the SDcard then powered off the phone. I booted the phone into recovery mode by holding the home button and tapping the power button, did an Alt-L to show the menu, Alt-W to wipe the phone and then Alt-S to flash the rom from the update.zip.

Voila, one reboot later and I’m running cyanogen!

What happened after this resulted in me screwing up my install. I installed the cyanogen updater from the market and tried to install the enoch theme with it. When the updater tried to apply the theme the screwed everything up and I had to reinstall cyanogen.

What I should have actually done was install the cyanogen recovery image first. I did this by downloading it from the cyanogen website, opening a terminal on the phone, su-ing and then typing:

flash_image recovery /sdcard/name-of-cyanogen-recovery-image.img

After installing that the cyanogen updater worked a treat for installing the enoch theme and I was away!

Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a full revision history of provisioned changes to a servers configuration and wouldn’t it be nice if every time you pushed your app it was magically deployed and set up and running? Yes, yes it would.

At SonicIQ we developed a tool similar to gitosis, a tool that uses git to manage git repositories and access control. Building on some of the principals learnt from that I think it would be possible to use a git managed server configuration file that target servers could checkout out and use for configuring themselves, their checkouts happening either periodically or triggered by post-commit hooks somehow. Those servers would need a minimum of software running to be able to parse the config files, determine changes (easy to do with a git repo) and then implement them automatically without manual intervention. These self-deployment servers could also handle requests from app repositories (again via post-commit hooks) and automatically deploy sites when new versions are pushed out.

I can see obvious problems with this approach, such as security concerns (having a server that can basically reconfigure the entire system based on commands sent over a public interface) and management issues due to configuring post-commit hooks and what not, but generally I think the concept is pretty sound and other similar systems already exist such as puppet which are no doubt better and more robust, but I quite like the idea of building a distributed deployment and configuration system on top of git, if only to see if it’s a feasible approach.