Bull on Parade

My Time with the Rift Beta

2011-02-21T12:48:00.000-06:00

Starting in December, there was a lot of buzz building up in the MMO community for Rift as the beta phases began. Scott Hartsman is the General Manager for the Rift team at Trion. He's known to many in the EverQuest community for his work and I think many players would say that EQ2 was at its best when Scott was at the helm as Senior Producer. When I heard he was heading up the team for Rift, my interest was piqued. On top of that, the team is also made up of veteran staff talent from other MMOGs (obviously many EQ2 vets, I've also heard Warhammer Online and other games as well).

The biggest feature comes from random PvE content generated in the form of the eponymous Rifts. These spawn around the map in different locations. They are commonly compared to Public Quests in Warhammer Online, since players are prompted to join together in groups and raids once they are within range of the event. There are multiple stages in a rift event as well, culminating in a boss fight. The difference between a rift and a PQ is that rifts spawn in random locations instead of always being in the same place. Rifts also come in minor (solo), major (group), and epic (raid) level flavors. The other major feature is the class system, which takes World of Warcraft's talent system to its logical conclusion. Players can combine up to three "souls" together to create their own combinations. For example, a Rogue character can combine a Marksman soul and a Ranger soul to create a class that has good ranged damage and a pet for soloing. Or they could swap out the Marksman soul with a Riftstalker soul and be able to tank. Because of this, some of the thoughts you might have had for the traditional roles of Tank, Melee DPS, Healer, and Ranged DPS don't always map directly to Warrior, Rogue, Cleric, and Mage.

I got into the beta in January. There is a lot you can customize during the character creation process, but only hair styles and skin color seem to really stand out to other players. I ended up rolling a Dwarf Shaman/Justicar on a PvP server and a Dwarf Paragon/Champion on an PvE-RP server. Both combinations made good solo builds as they allowed me to have solid DPS with good survivability. I didn't get a chance to make it through the Defiant newbie experience, but the Guardian quests do a good job of walking you through the basic storyline and letting you get a feel for combat mechanics. You end up battling in a pseudo-rift just before you are thrown 20 years into the future where the game's setting takes place. Conversely, a co-worker who tried the Defiant side tells me it takes place far into the future and the player is thrown back in time.

Most of the chat channels were flooded with arguments comparing Rift to WoW and WAR. Many in the Rift community have contributed good arguments detailing why this is not the case, but I think there is still some validity to these concerns. While it is not true to say that Rift is any one of these games with a flashy new skin, the team has clearly been inspired to evolve the mechanics from other MMO's. Like WoW and WAR, the questing experience has mostly become a single player experience. Most of the quests are geared for solo players with a dungeon quest at the end of the line for some additional loot. As you are making your way across the zone, rifts will open up in your vicinity. Ideally, you take breaks from questing to run over and help seal rifts with any other players in the area. Rifts always drop Planarite (similar to Justice Points in WoW) and occasionally some loot. Not only that, they will grow and start assaulting quest hubs and towns if left unchecked. So you have incentive see them taken care of. On PvP servers, there are some contested zones and areas that can be fought over, but nothing like the keep sieges that happen in WAR. That is the game in a nutshell.

I want to say that I really enjoyed my time during the beta. The game was very stable, both from a client and server perspective. The team was great about responding to concerns and making changes very quickly to adjust things that weren't working. Compared to the other Diku-inspired MMOs that I have played (WoW, EQ2, WAR, and LotRO), I think Rift is easily the better game with the possible exception of WoW. If you play WoW as I do, by soloing quests and doing a few random dungeons, I don't think you will find Rift to be as enjoyable as Cataclysm. I'm also concerned that as the player base in Rift gets to higher levels, most of the major rifts will become neglected ala WAR public quests. The last time I logged into Rift, I was questing in Gloamwood and there would occasionally be a request for someone to seal a rift in a far corner of the map.

I know that the team at Trion is very professional and committed to the game, but I don't think I will be playing Rift until it has had a little more time to mature and grow. I'm still having too much fun in Cataclysm to walk away from it and I don't like splitting my time between two games. That said, if you have an aversion to WoW, you should definitely give Rift a shot. I plan on revisiting Telara in 6 months or so to see how it is coming along.

More ways to sync Buzz updates

2010-03-01T13:36:00.000-06:00

The methods listed in my previous post still work great, but now there are some dedicated services for syncing with Twitter and Facebook that are popping up as well.

For Twitter, there's Buzz2Twitter, which is nice because it only pulls in your original Buzzes from the web and mobile. It will use either Google's goo.gl short URL service or your bit.ly account to provide links back to your original Buzz.

For Facebook, there's Google Buzz Sync. You can configure it to cross post all of your Buzz updates or just original postings. It does not currently offer the ability to link back to your original Buzz post, but I didn't consider this to be a huge issue since Facebook's commenting tools work just as well as they do in Buzz.

How to cross post Buzz updates to Twitter

2010-02-15T21:13:00.003-06:00

So you've got a shiny new Google Buzz account that you'd like to start using, but most of your friends and followers are still on Twitter, Facebook, and other services. There's a couple of ways to easily do this that I've found that all work well, it's just a matter of how advanced you want to get with your cross posting.

One thing to keep in mind: since you are cross posting between services, you will want to stop Buzz from pulling posts from the services you are posting to, otherwise you will create an infinite loop of reposts. Mostly this applies to Twitter.

Advanced Method - Yahoo! Pipes + Twitterfeed

Let's say you only want to cross posts updates you have directly posted to Buzz. You can use Yahoo! Pipes to filter your direct posts and only cross post those using Twitterfeed. I am using this to cross post to Twitter, Facebook, and identi.ca. You can also use it to post to Ping.fm or Hellotxt and all the services they support.

Visit http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.edit?_id=4e43d1c85f488bf9b311f7397fb8c579
Click the Clone button
Click the Edit Source button
In the Fetch Feed box, replace the text with http://buzz.googleapis.com/feeds/YOUR_GOOGLE_PROFILE_ID/public/posted
Click Save a copy in the upper right
Click Run pipe at the top
If it works, you should have from Buzz or Buzz Mobile
Right click on Get an RSS and copy the link
Visit http://twitterfeed.com/ and login
Click Create New Feed
Type Buzz RSS under Feed Name
Paste (Ctrl+V) your RSS feed from step 8 under RSS Feed URL
Click Continue
Select which services you wish to cross post to
Click All Done!

Easy Method - FeedBurner

This method works if you only care about cross posting to Twitter and was suggested by Google's DeWitt Clinton. I combined his suggestion with another user's in the comments that has you turn on the ping feature in FeedBurner.

Visit http://profiles.google.com/me, which will redirect to your profile
Copy (Ctrl+C) your profile URL (e.g. "http://www.google.com/profiles/dclinton")
Visit http://feedburner.google.com/ and sign in with your Gmail account
Paste (Ctrl+V) your profile URL under Burn a feed right this instant
Click next and then click Skip directly to feed management
Click the Publicize tab on the top
Click the Socialize tab on the left
Click Add a Twitter Account
Sign in to Twitter and click Allow to allow Feedburner to post
Change Post Content to "Body Only" (important!)
Click Activate
Click the PingShot tab on the left
Click Activate

Other Easy Method - FriendFeed

If you already use FriendFeed for you lifestreaming, you can also use it to cross post to Twitter and Facebook.

Copy (Ctrl+C) your Google Buzz feed, this will be in the format of: http://buzz.googleapis.com/feeds/YOUR_GOOGLE_PROFILE_ID/public/posted
Visit http://friendfeed.com/ and sign into your FriendFeed account
Click on settings under your profile picture on the right
Click on add/edit next to Services
Click on Custom RSS/Atom
Paste (Ctrl+V) your feed under Custom RSS/Atom URL
Click Import Custom RSS/Atom
Click on settings under your profile picture on the right
Click Twitter publishing preferences next to Twitter
Make sure that under the Post entries from section, one of the following are displayed: "All services (except Twitter)" OR "The services I've selected below:", with "Custom RSS/Atom (http://buzz.googleapis.com/f...)" checked
If you also want to post to Facebook, install the FriendFeed application in Facebook here

My Google Wishlist for 2010

2010-01-02T12:43:00.002-06:00

Gina Tripani sent out a tweet asking What do you want to see from Google in 2010? I figured it was worthy of a blog post. Here were my suggestions:

Lifestreaming support in Google Reader

Google Reader really is the best feed reader available, but there is big trend for users to get their news from others in their social network. While many social networking sites do offer RSS feeds of users' posts, you still have to visit the site to reply or comment on what was posted. For example, a friend of mine may post a status update on Facebook that goes into an RSS feed, but I miss the discussion around that update if I don't go to Facebook itself. The shared links and commenting features prove that they have the foundation to do this, I'd just like to see it taken the last mile.

Integrate Google Voice and Google Talk

I started using GrandCentral before it was acquired by Google and I've always loved the service. Google Voice is even better. The last missing piece of the puzzle is for Google to offer a good desktop softphone to place calls from. Google's acquisition of Gizmo seems to indicate they agree. I hope it results in them releasing a new, modern version of Google Talk for desktops, this time with proper cross platform support.

Give Wave better publishing and discussion capabilities

Google Wave really does have some amazing potential as a new way for people to collaborate and build data online. That said, I think it needs some work in two major areas.

The first is that there needs to be an easy way to publish the data you've built with Wave to another medium in read only form. For example, if a team builds some nice technical documentation in Wave, there should be a publish button that would export the wave content for a web server so it can be viewed by someone in a web browser. In this way, Wave could act as both the creation and version control mechanism for published content. It's also nice to publish the meat of the content you created sans the discussion used during it's creation.

Speaking of discussions, there needs to be a better way to moderate the discussion in Google Wave. Right now, large Waves (especially public ones) quickly become too hard to follow. Discussion becomes overwhelming and disjointed. This can probably be best remedied by providing better security around a wave so that read only views can be enforced or users can be banned from a wave entirely.

I'd love to hear from others on what they'd like to see from Google this year (or whatever your megacorp of choice is :-) ).

Not happy with Disqus Comments

2009-12-16T19:36:00.005-06:00

Since my blog doesn't get a lot of comment traffic, I decided that the Disqus Comments were overkill and I wanted to revert back to Blogger's comment system.

What I learned today: don't install Disqus Comments on your blog unless you are REALLY sure that you want to use them. Unlike IntenseDebate, they do not have a nice and easy way to uninstall their commenting system from your Blogger template.

To revert back, I had to remove their custom code from my template in the HTML view. Then I went to Settings and Comments to turn Blogger's comment system back on for new posts. What sucks is that any posts that didn't have any comments have now had commenting disabled by the Disqus installer, on a per post basis! Since I don't feel like republishing each post on the blog, many of my older posts now can't be commented on.

It suppose that could have been worse, but it's frustrating to see a service that is so becoming so popular have such a glaring weakness. Disqus needs to take a tip from The Data Liberation Front and offer a way to easily escape from their service if you want to.

Weekly Gaming Journal 06/14/2009

2009-06-14T23:49:00.001-05:00

Time for the (Semi-)Weekly Gaming Journal, round 2. I thought I'd start this week with some feedbacks on the various E3 announcements in addition to my normal gaming blog. Now that E3 is back to its previous level of craziness, it's impossible to be a gamer and not get excited about what you favorite game companies have in store for you. For me, this means SOE and Nintendo.

SOE didn't have much to show off at E3. Their only new announcement was the release of Kung Fu Hustle: The Game, which was kind of a let down. Not many details have been released yet, but I've read in a few places that its business model will probably be similar to Free Realms. I honestly don't see this game taking off in the US, as it is based on an extremely obscure IP. Even without the tie in to the movie, I just don't see many American gamers being drawn to a side scrolling, beat-'em up style game. SOE did begin to spill more details on The Agency, including finally revamping the website and releasing some gameplay videos. It could be a decent game, but unfortunately I don't think it will be a successor to PlanetSide's style of gameplay. DC Universe looks like the most promising game in SOE's future lineup. No announcements of any expansions for EverQuest or EQ2, but these are typically saved for Fan Faire anyway. So, in short, not much to really blow you away from SOE at this point. I suspect for the foreseeable future, SOE is going to continue being known as the house that EverQuest built.

I was more or less disappointed with Nintendo's efforts. All of their announcements were mostly sequels or slight revisions of previous games. After the past 3 years of seeing the Wii, the Wii Fit, the DSi, and Nintendo's ongoing list of innovative games, this year felt like a let down to me. It's been said before, but the features in the MotionPlus should have been included in the Wii Remotes from the start. The fact that it has become yet another accessory that you need to click in and out of the remote when you switch games makes it even more annoying. I would also feel pretty disappointed with Wii Fit Plus. That said, I will probably be picking up Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Metroid: Other M (even if the name is horrible). My wife and kids are excited about New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story.

On to EverQuest, I'm now up to level 30 in EQ2. I spent last week finishing up the few loose ends I had in Antonica. This week I split my time between Thundering Steppes and Butcherblock. I never did like TS, and in fact my previous two brushes with EQ2 ended after I spent more time that I liked in that very zone. It just isn't particularly interesting to me. While Nektulos Forest has a more atmosphere, it was never enough to keep me interested. Luckily, Butcherblock was added in the Echoes of Faydwer expansion and it is an excellent zone. Plus there's a nice nostalgia factor for those who played EQ1. The quests offer better XP and the zone is visually more appealing. Right now, I'm most interested in finishing my Feral Strength set (initial Berserker class armor) and starting my Brell Serilis devotion quests. Hoping to have a good bit of this knocked in the next couple of weeks.

Althought adventuring has been moving along nicely, finding the resources to keep fueling my crafting is getting to be more of a challenge as I only managed to get up to Armorer level 23. I spent most of the day yesterday and this morning running around TS harvesting. At least this leads you to new areas that you probably wouldn't have bothered to stop and look at if you were just questing as normal. Now that I'm level 30, I'm going to try and slow down adventuring for a bit until I can catch my crafting level up.

Although most of my time lately was spent in EQ2, I did manage to log a few hours in Free Realms getting a few levels on in Brawler and Miner. My wife picked up a couple of TCG starter decks for my son and me last night. We've spent some time today playing a couple of rounds and had a lot of fun. Andrew really loves board and card games, so I'm glad this gives us a hobby to keep up with together. Unfortunately, the card that contains your code to redeem for in game items was blank in both of our decks. I'm happy to say that the SOE support staff has been very responsive and they are working on getting us some codes.

Lastly, I spent a few hours in Vanguard this morning, trying to put in a little bit of time before my free month runs out. I started learning the Diplomacy card game last week. It's not bad and definitely adds something to interacting with NPCs. That said, the more I play Vanguard, the more obvious it is how so much of the game feels rough around the edges. For a 2 year old game, it lacks a lot of polish that some of its peers have. I think there are many interesting concepts in Vanguard, but the implementation is keeping it from breaking out. I hope that SOE continues to keep the game going, though. I think if SOE San Diego could meld mechanics from Vanguard, EQ2, and potentially pieces of Free Realms into a future title, it could be very compelling.

That's all I have for now. Here are the requisite character screenshots:

Weekly Gaming Journal 05/31/2009

2009-05-31T19:57:00.006-05:00

Lately I've been feeling the need to blog more often. I thought I would start by doing a weekly gaming journal covering my progress in whatever games I've been playing during the past week.

I cancelled my Warhammer account a few months ago after reaching rank 40 and renown rank 42. I still think it's the best game for RvR and there's a lot of other things they got right in the game design. At the time, though, we were trying to do a heavy crunch to cut back on our personal finances, so I decided to take a break.

In the interim, I tried playing around with some free to play MMOs and seeing what they had to offer. The only game I stuck with was Runes of Magic. A lot of people are billing it as World of WarCraft with a F2P business model. It's not a bad game, but it felt like a step back to me as progression can get very grindy if you don't spend the money on XP potions and other items. I may return to it at some point, but at the time I was trying to save money, so doing the whole RMT thing for in game items didn't appeal to me. I do recommend it if you are looking for a combat heavy MMO with a low barrier to entry.

Next I decided to go back and spend some time completing Half-life 2. I know, I'm way late to the party. I got Half-life 2 with Orange Box, which I mostly purchased for Team Fortress 2 and Portal. I also started on HL2: Episode 1, but didn't make it very far. During this time, I satisfied my multiplayer itch by splitting my time between Team Fortress 2 and Quake Live.

Not long after I finished Half-life 2, I got an e-mail notifying me that I had been accepted into the Free Realms beta (who didn't?), so I started playing that. I was instantly hooked. The graphics are the best I've seen in a F2P MMO and I am really impressed with the streaming technology they developed for the game. By time beta was over, I had gotten my son revved up for it as well (his current favorite past time is playing Wizard101). Unless you absolutely can't stand the cartoony game world, I think everyone should try playing this game at least once.

Playing Free Realms left me wanting to go back to something a little more achiever oriented. I started to get nostalgic for EverQuest II. I also considered going back to World of WarCraft, because I know more people that play it, but I think I prefer EQ for a couple of reasons. The community is more mature and close knit. Achievement whores get to show off their collections in their apartments and homes. Also, I feel like the crafting mechanics are fleshed out better. Since the only expansion I had on my EQ2 account was Desert of Flames, I picked up The Shadow Odyssey and reactivated my account. I rolled a Dwarf Berserker / Armorer, Atris Firebeard, on the Guk server.

This week was pretty slow for me. I spent most of my time in EverQuest II trying to wrap up my various quests in Antonica before moving out into Thundering Steppes. Not very good XP, but I enjoy reading the quest dialogs and getting the background of the of the game. It's always funny to me the way most starting zones in MMO's are written as if some major new Gnoll / Goblin / Kobold assault is just over the horizon and that you, the intrepid adventurer, have arrived at precisely the right moment to foil their plans. Not very original, but still fun to see what the game designers have cooked up. Right now, I'm up to adventure level 22 and crafting level 21.

I also spent a little time in Free Realms leveling up my Brawler skills, which I got to 7. Card Duelist is still my highest skill at 14. Not much to go on about here except that I'm pleasantly surprised that the Brawler dungeons are starting to get longer and more complex (but not overwhelmingly so). I just hope I don't have to play back through them when I level up Ninja, but I'm thinking I probably will since the space in the game is pretty limited at the moment.

After running around EQ2 a little yesterday morning, I noticed that SOE had given all former Vanguard players 30 days of free game time, so I started downloading the (huge) client to give it another shot and see if the game had changed at all. While I waited, I decided to dive into Legends of Norrath. I've been putting off playing the game, but after playing through the tutorials again, I started to get the hang of it. The game is very complex and it takes a little while to get your head wrapped around the rules and the strategy of completing quests vs. attacking the opposing Avatar. Now that I've gotten things figured out, I can say that I've throughly enjoyed the few scenarios I've completed. I plan on playing it more when I'm time deprived.

Vanguard had finished downloading when I got up this morning, so I jumped in and rolled a shiny new Dwarf Warrior on the Seradon server, which I managed to get up to level 5 in about 2 hours. This time I skipped going through the Isle of Dawn and went straight to the Dwarf starting site. I'm glad I did, as I got right into fighting and questing. If you've played EverQuest before, Vanguard is easy enough to pick up without any tutorials. The controls feel a bit loose to me compared to EQ2/WAR. You can definitely tell it's an Unreal engine game by the graphics, which I'm not a huge fan of. That said, I'm loving the layout of the world. Most moden MMO's feel very "flat" to me. Much like EverQuest before it, Vanguard is full of mountains with winding paths, deep valleys, streams and lakes, etc. This may be limited to the Dwarf starting area, but I had flashbacks of climbing the long road to Highpass Hold after traveling through the plains of Karana from Qeynos. Vanguard has done a good job of making me feel that I am traveling through a far off and distant world. I probably won't be subscribing after the 30 days as I can't justify the extra cost right now and I'm committed to EQ2, but if I ever upgrade to Station Pass again, I'll definitely be playing it more.

Whew! That was much more than I planned on writing. Hopefully I'll have this much to write about every week.

Pics!

Thoughts on the Zune HD

2009-05-27T22:26:00.002-05:00

Microsoft announced the Zune HD today. I thought I'd repost my thoughts from a comment I left on the Houston Chronicle's TechBlog (just a few grammatical / spelling errors fixed):

So far, it looks promising. The Zune has always had many nice features. Two things that concern me that I think might keep it from passing up the iPod Touch.

I don't see any mention of it being able to run 3rd party applications like the iPod Touch. Microsoft needs to really work on building an application store for the Zune the same way they have done with games on Xbox Live Arcade. Apple has one mobile OS for the iPod Touch and iPhone and applications run seamlessly on both. Microsoft needs to come up with a way for developers to write an application that will run on all of it's mobile offerings, including Windows Mobile phones and the Zune. They have the perfect vehicle for doing this in .NET, but they still aren't taking advantage of it. Bonus points if they figure out a way to also get those applications on XBLA.

The second thing that concerns me is the Zune Music Store. If you look at all of the subscription based music stores, almost all of them have migrated to focus on being a DRM-free, downloadable business model. I don't think people want to pay to stream music because WiFi is still not ubiquitous enough to justify it. Even if Microsoft was going to roll their own music store (again) and allow it to be based on DRM-free WMA files, I think they would find more success. Personally, though, I believe they should back off WMA and just partner with an MP3 based store such as Amazon or Napster.

Honestly, while I think the feature set is very compelling, I think they aren't quite connecting the dots through to the end. The iPhone and iPod Touch are compelling because they are mobile computing platforms, not just a mobile phone or PMP.

Album cover meme

2009-05-12T23:04:00.000-05:00

Saw this over on BullCopra. I thought it was an interesting experiment.

Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random... Read More” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
Go to "Random quotations" or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

Here are my results:

Adding Disqus comments

2009-05-05T23:39:00.001-05:00

Let's see how well they work...

Here, have a million dollars

2009-03-29T16:47:00.001-05:00

If you had a million dollars, how would you give it away?

I guess it would depend if I could spend any of the money on my family or not. I know I'd want to put enough away that my two oldest kids wouldn't have to worry about paying for college. I'd also want some put away so that Avery would always have enough to pay for any medical bills that might come up. If I couldn't spend it on my kids, I'd probably make sure my sisters had enough for their college tuitions.

After that, I'd definitely donate a good chunk to CFC International, which is a support group for families with children who have CFC Syndrome. I don't know we would have gotten by these past few years without everything we've learned through their conference and mailing list.

If there was any left over, I'd try to find a family like ours. Someone who is struggling to care of a special needs child, who finds it hard to make ends meet. I'd want to leave the remaining money anonymously with a message that says something like, "I've been in your shoes too. I hope this can help make your life a little easier."

So, how would you give away a million dollars?

Building Google Gadgets on Intrepid

2008-10-28T10:15:00.001-05:00

So, I've been playing with the latest RC of Ubuntu, Intrepid Ibex. So far, Canonical is on track to continue their stellar track record of producing another very impressive distro. My only complaint is that Evolution's Exchange connector is still a buggy pile of crap. As far as I can tell, that's not a distro-specific issue.

Anyway, I decided I wanted to check out Google Gadgets for Linux, since I use the Gadget sidebar from Google Desktop pretty heavily on my XP laptop at work. It took jumping through a couple of hoops in a few different places, so I thought I'd take my notes and put them all in once place. If nothing else, it will be useful for me in the future. ;-)

My first step was to try finding a repository with some pre-built packages for Ubuntu. I found some instructions for installing Google Gadgets on Hardy, but I couldn't find the packages after adding the 3rd party repositories to my sources.list. At that point, I decided it was probably better to just bite the bullet and compile everything from scratch.

The first thing I did was download the pre-requisite dev packages for GGL. I found a very nice build instructions addendum on the GGL support group that listed all of necessary packages you'll want to install for each distro. The package list for Hardy was still relevant.

I ran the following command at a shell to get the base packages:

$ sudo apt-get install libdbus-1-dev libmozjs-dev libxml2-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libltdl3-dev

Then I ran this to install the packages for the GTK port:

$ sudo apt-get install libxul-dev libgtk2.0-dev librsvg2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev

Since I don't use KDE, I skipped packages for the QT port. You can swap those for the GTK packages above if you swing that way.

Next I ran over to Google Code and downloaded the latest release of GGL. After extracting the tarball, you should creat the directories to build the binaries in:

$ cd google-gadgets-for-linux-0.10.2/
$ mkdir -p build/debug

Now we need to configure the make script and change the prefix from /usr/local to /usr

$ cd build/debug
$ ../../configure --enable-debug --prefix=/usr

This will take some time to configure. If all goes well, the script will output the following at the end:

Build options:
Version                       "0.10.2"
Install prefix                /usr
Install included libltdl      no
Build shared libs             yes
Build static libs             yes
Enable debug                  yes
Host type                     linux
OEM brand

Libraries:
GTK SVG Support               yes
Build libggadget-gtk          yes
Build libggadget-qt           no
Build libggadget-dbus         yes

Extensions:
Build dbus-script-class       yes
Build gtk-edit-element        yes
Build gtkmoz-browser-element yes
Build qtwebkit-browser        no
Build gst-audio-framework     yes
Build gst-video-element       yes
Build gtk-system-framework    yes
Build qt-system-framework     no
Build linux-system-framework yes
Build smjs-script-runtime     yes
Build qt-script-runtime       no
Build curl-xml-http-request   yes
Build qt-xml-http-request     no
Build libxml2-xml-parser      yes

Hosts:
Build gtk host                yes
Build qt host                 no

Now we just need to install everything...

$ sudo make install

More waiting. Assuming there were no errors, you should be able to launch GGL by hitting Alt+F2 on your keyboard, typing "ggl-gtk -bg -s" and clicking the "Run" button (drop the -s if you hate the sidebar).

If you're happy with everything, you can set GGL to run at login by going to the System menu, Preferences, and Sessions. Click the Add button and fill out the dialog like so:

That should be it! I've tried this on two Intrepid VM's without having any issues. Hopefully this will save someone else some time setting up GGL.

Cheeseburger in Paradise

2007-07-15T21:00:00.001-05:00

Yea baby.

Tumblelog for Shared Links

2007-06-16T10:33:00.000-05:00

EDIT: It's probably better to just hit my FriendFeed now. :-)

I'm now using Tumblr to grab all my links and post them to a tumblelog, bull tumbld down. Since I now have quite a few different places that I share links from these days, I thought it would be best to consolidate them all into one location and feed. Be sure to add the new feed to your reader, as I'm no longer splicing my del.icio.us links into Feedburner.

Benefit Crunch Time!

2007-05-18T16:15:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow is the big day! Brandy and I are really nervous. We've got the UHaul all loaded and ready to go. We are going to spend this evening baking up stuff for the bake sale (and by we, I mean Brandy and her mom :) ). I think we are as prepared for this as we can be. Now we just have to get everything setup on time tomorrow morning and hope for the best.

I'll be posting updates from my cell phone to Twitter, so check that page to see how we're doing as the day progresses. We'll also make sure and take plenty of pictures and upload them after the benefit is over.

Big thanks to all of the wonderful people out there who have helped us put this together. The support we've received over the last few months has been overwhelming. Hope to see you all there!

Checking Out Personal Bee

2007-05-10T09:39:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, Technorati announced that they had acquired Personal Bee from its owner. I'd heard of the site before, but hadn't used it until now. The site is billed as "media collection platform" that allows users to build their own personal news pages around stories that are important to them. This is achieved through the use of personal digg-clones that are driven by existing RSS or Atom feeds.

My initial reaction to the site was somewhat negative. As a general news source, Personal Bee doesn't have much to offer. You really aren't going to find anything there that isn't going to pop up on another high traffic social news service like Digg or Newsvine. Even if original, compelling news entries did pop up regularly, the layout and design of the front page is so poor that I still wouldn't want to use it. The various specialized "Bee Hives" are just collections of feeds from existing news sources. If you aren't satisfied with the existing options, you are free to create your own Bee Hive that contains just the feeds you'd like to read. Most people who would be interested in using this service are probably already reading their news in a feed reader, though.

So what does Personal Bee have going for it? First of all, I think it's a great way for existing small communities to combine their various blogs, link blogs, and personal feeds in one place. This makes it much easier to see what everyone is interested in or doing at once. See this example hive I made of some of the feeds from a group of my friends. Technorati could easily combine this with their Favorite Blogs feature to great effect. Still, the bottom line is the useful features that Personal Bee offers are buried and require a little too much for the average Joe to get much use out of it. I think they should drop the context of trying to act as yet another social news site and focus on providing tools to small communities to organize and share their existing collections of data. These are the unique features that set Personal Bee apart from the rest of the competition. If Technorati focuses on these strengths and cleans up the site's design and layout, I think it's got a great future.

Gun control poltics after the Virginia Tech shootings

2007-04-25T03:19:00.000-05:00

Since the Virginia Tech shootings, there has been a lot of discussion on gun control. Politicians and media personalities have come out in force to use the issue as a means to justify their own political agendas, which is almost as big of a tragedy as the shootings themselves.

I don't think one extreme or the other is the answer to the problem. The fact of the matter is, Cho had no prior record. He bought at least one of his guns legally and probably could have gotten a concealed handgun license too. Maybe if students around the campus were permitted to carry concealed firearms, someone might have dropped him sooner. But he also would have been able to bring guns onto the campus much easier. And if we took away his ability to acquire a gun legally, he just would have gotten a gun on the street somewhere else.

Removing guns from our society takes away our freedom to protect ourselves. But there have to be some places where guns can't be brought. We have to have some areas that restrict your ability to carry a gun. We need the freedom to go into certain public places and not feel the need to constantly watch the guy with a gun on his hip, in case he's planning something. Because the sad reality of the world is that if someone is determined enough to do something like this, they're probably going to accomplish it. The threat of being shot to death isn't going to deter someone who is already set on not returning from a killing spree. These aren't mentally stable people. It's been said time and time again: bad things happen to good people. If we break down and become irrational, then the criminals will win every time. What will define us is how well we can recover from these hard times and move forward.

MacWorld Updates

2007-01-09T10:49:00.000-06:00

Can't attend MacWorld in person? Keep an eye on stuff as it happens with Twitter, Flickr, and Technorati.

My predictions? Apple cell phone (almost a given), more info on Leopard, and a Spreadsheet application.

Using Odeo and Google Reader to manage podcasts

2006-12-10T23:11:00.000-06:00

While Google Reader provides some basic support for handling podcasts via it's Flash based audio player, I still prefer using Odeo to keep up with my podcasts. It's inbox oriented UI is superior to Google Reader when it comes to managing a large collection of audo content. Still, Odeo is not without its bugs. The TWiT stream, in particular, is frequently behind. I'm not sure if this is due to problems reading poorly formatted feeds or something else, but I forced me to begin looking for a better way to manage my favorite podcasts online. The (somewhat obvious) solution I've come up with is to manage my podcast subscriptions in Google Reader and subscribe to the subsequent feed in Odeo.

To do this, add all of your favorite podcasts to a single folder in Google Reader, in this case I chose "podcast".

After you have done this, click on Settings and then Tags. Click on the gray feed icon to make your feed public. Then, right click on the "view public page" link and select Copy Link Location or Copy Shortcut.

Replace the "shared" portion of that URL with "public/atom" and then run over to Odeo. Scroll down to the very, very bottom and click on the "Add a Feed" link to add your newly created podcast feed to the Odeo directory. From there, you will also be able to subscribe to it.

That's it, you're done! If you find yourself listening to podcasts from multiple computers, using Google Reader and Odeo is the perfect way to make sure you always have access to your podcasts. The feed you created above can also be added to iTunes, Juice, or any other podcast software that supports ATOM feeds.

Proof that WoW players are too gullible

2006-11-03T20:32:00.000-06:00

Community drama tricks from EverQuest apparently work in WoW too. Just so everyone is aware, unless you've got a scanned obituary, no one died.

Will Measure Map ever be released?

2006-10-28T09:49:00.000-05:00

Back in February, Google acquired blog analytics software Measure Map from Adaptive Path. At the time, I had hoped they would seek to quickly integrate the tools into Blogger (the design of the MM website bears more than a passing resemblance to Blogger!) This way I could get statistics about who was reading and commenting on my blog posts without having to resort to a third party service such as FeedBurner. Since then, very little has been mentioned about Measure Map. The Google Group for it is a ghost town. And there has been no indication that the technology will be rolled into either Blogger or Google Analytics.

I can't imagine that Google would buy a company without planning on at least making some use of their technology, but I've been thinking that they might have bought Measure Map more for the employees, rather than the product. Specifically, Jeffrey Veen. Today, I spotted this blurb on Twitter announcing that Veen is now leaving Google. Assuming it's true, I wonder what this means for the future of the Measure Map technology. The reviews for it seemed very promising, and I was hoping to be able to play around with it sooner or later.

UPDATE: It's also possible that I just have an over-active imagination. :(

Pictures of Avery video

2006-10-18T15:00:00.000-05:00

Here's a slideshow video of Avery that I put together today.

I made the slideshow in Picasa and set it to music in Windows Movie Maker. I really wish my old iBook still worked, because iMovie is so much nicer than WMM. Anyone know of any decent free or cheap video editing software for Windows?

Avery's Journey

2006-10-04T21:26:00.000-05:00

I tend to be a private person when it comes to speaking about the details of my personal life, especially when it comes to my wife and kids. But there are times in life that I feel I need to share with the world at large, and this is one of those times.

A few weeks ago, we were told that my son Avery has a rare disorder called Costello Syndrome, of which there are approximately 200 cases in the world. The major disadvantages of C.S. are permanent development delays, mental retardation, and a high risk of developing tumors. We've known that there was something different about Avery from the time he was born, but we were never able to get a firm diagnosis from anyone. So while the disorder is very serious, we are actually relieved to know exactly what he has.

Since C.S. is a genetic disorder, there is no cure for it. We have been told that our best option to improve Avery's quality of life is to get him as much therapy as possible. Since we have racked up a large amount of medical debt over the past year taking care of Avery and we have used up all of the available coverage our insurance provides for therapy, that makes things difficult. We have been tentatively approved for Medicaid, but it will require my wife to stop working in order for us to meet the income requirements. This also makes it hard for us to work out our existing medical debt ourselves.

So, we are asking for donations in order to raise money to take care of Avery. Additionally, we will be doing several benefit garage sales and dinners around the Houston area. We have set up a website and forums at www.averysjourney.org to provide more information about Avery's care. Any assistance you could provide would be greatly appreciated!

New cell phone

2006-09-13T08:56:00.000-05:00

The last few years, I've been using Verizon for my mobile service. I got sick of their crappy phones and lack of service features, so I switched to Cingular and picked up a Nokia 6102i in the process. Since I've mostly migrated to using web services for my applications, having a Java capable cell phone with a decent web browser has been awesome. It's also really changed my perspective on how useful even a cheap cell phone can be when it comes to keep yourself organized. I have Google Calendar and Backpack send me SMS messages for appointments and reminders that I have. And I can get my my e-mail, weather, and RSS feeds with the Google Personalized Homepage and Opera Mini. As such, it's pretty much made my old Palm obsolete.

A lot of this mobile technology has existed for several years in various forms, but luckily it's starting to get to a point where its price and availability are low/high enough to reach critical mass. Everyone needs to keep an eye on the mobile space, because sooner or later mobile appliances are going to be the consumer preferred platform for receiving communications.

Sorry about the mess...

2006-09-04T10:31:00.000-05:00

I'm moving over to the Blogger's new backend, which is currently in beta. I'm in the process of converting my template, tagging old posts, and other random items associated with moving a blog to a new platform. If you get spammed with old posts in your RSS reader, it wasn't intentional. :)

EDIT: I'm reverting back to a classic template for now, as there are still a lot of bugs to be ironed out with the new template builder. I'll tweak out a template on a separate blog for now.