I thought it funny to see this when I logged in this morning, ever skeptical I logged into twitter.com to check and was only slightly disappointed to find out it was just twitter counter having a funny moment – 1,473 followers would be nice.

I am quite unsure how I stumbled upon Zeldman’s article titled “Stop Chasing Followers”, however it struck quite a chord with an article I have been prodding the odd word at for weeks and now have the opportunity to finish.

It would appear that by and large the internet community is split between those who care about their follower statistics with their shallow, selfish and quite often big-headed discourse on the subject in contrast to those who don’t or rather whom take the high-horse and say that they do not; now please do not misunderstand me, statistics are incredibly useful and in truth I myself keep a keen eye on those collected for photogabble, however they can be easily misunderstood:

It is the quality of those whom visit you and not the quantity that at the end of the day truly matter, it is entirely irrelevant even if you are receiving ten thousand visitors a month – as if only three of them have left a comment or engaged with you in some other way then realistically you have only reached out to those three individuals.

It is a shame that the internet has become the playground of those whom wish to “1-up” one another with meaningless statistics of follower numbers in their twitter and facebook pages, visitors on their blogs and even phone numbers in their address books. None of this matters because at the end of the day you are simply just adding more noise into an already noisy auditorium and those whom are the movers and shakers within this online domain, those who you want to read can’t see the field for the corn.

What you want to do, rather than focus on meaningless statistics, is put your time and effort into building up discourse with other people who share similar interests to yours. If you run a blog on parenting, go and read up on other blogs within the same genre and become an active reader on their websites, commenting and even guest posting where available. Eventually you will yourself become noticed as people follow this bread crumb of interest back to your blog and begin directly interacting with the knowledge you publish.

Last Friday, both myself and David from MBS Photographic took a trip to the City of London for the purpose of taking some high quality commercial HDRi photography of the many various sights in the one square mile that is known as the City of London within London. The above is one of the many HDRi photographs I took during the night and it can also be seen in slightly larger detail here on deviantart. The full sized image is a huge 413MB 32mega-pixel image at 300DPI resolution and contains extremely stunning detail! We shall be making prints available of this work very soon, so get in touch if you would be interested in purchasing one.

The one huge problem I have with social media is the disturbing trend of people adding absolute strangers to their “friends” lists just for the sake of having more friends than other people they know. While queuing for a ride at Alton Towers I overheard someone’s daughter whom couldn’t have been much older than maybe twelve or thirteen brag about having more than seven hundred friends on facebook to her friends and obviously everyone else within earshot in the line; this sort of behaviour is frightening for one reason: you do not know many of these people!

I have kept the friends list of my facebook pretty low profile, within its exclusive pages contain the names of actual people I know, have known (went to school with, ex-colleagues, university friends, etc) or friends of friends met at parties whom I keep in touch with. At most I have at any one time less than two hundred people linked from that list and have no inclination to grow more because its already an impossible task keeping up with the amount of information blasted at me on an hourly basis, as it is.

As it stands, we as a culture are growing ever more information saturated and I can only presume that more events such as that depicted in the above screen shot, will become ever more prevalent to those of a younger and more impressionable age, caused simply due to our natural instinct to one-up everyone else and add people we do not know, giving them access to our personal space and information.

If you search google for “wysiwyg JavaScript” you will find many full feature “what you see is what you get” editors written in JavaScript and developed for use within html forms. However many of these have dependencies upon external libraries such as jQuery or simply have everything plus the kitchen sink included; if your developing an online word processor this many not be much of a problem to you however within the recent development work I have been involved in I just needed a good quality WYSIWYG editor, written in JavaScript and with only the basic text formatting features included. I am still unsure how I stumbled upon TinyEditor by Leighber, however stumble I did and it has proven perfect for my simplistic needs while having a few more extensive features for future expansion only when required and best of all it is a stand-alone package!

Other WYSIWYG editors I discovered and tested during my hunt where the jQuery based jwysiwyg project and the more complex wymeditor. While these were too complex for my needs they do work quite well and I would recommend you give them a go before making your mind up.

The one problem I do I have with TinyEditor is the unfortunate lack of a paste from word feature, I am hoping that this does become included soon because it is the only additional feature that is a must with WYSIWYG HTML editors due to paste from word screwing your nicely formatted code up upon submit.

Well I am so very glad that this was not a clever April Fools on Google’s part, because running quake 2 in your browser within the HTML5 canvas tag using a version of OpenGL amongst other cutting edge technologies, aside from being one more nail in flash’s coffin is absolutely amazing and something many “techies” have seen coming for a long time but up until now had now way of explaining it to the common man!

The quake2-gwt-port was released yesterday April the 1st and like many I was dubious as to its reality due to it almost being something too good to be true, however after three hours of pain-staking building I managed to finally get it working. Due to the difficulties I encountered getting it working both under Debian with the 2.6.26-2-686 kernel and those simple problems found when doing the same within OSX, I have documented my findings here to help others in their quest at deciphering googles (at the moment) poor documentation on getting this to work!

Disclaimer

The information contained within this article is a journalised version of the notes I made while I went through the process of installing quake2-gwt-port, they have been published here for informal purposes only and you follow them at your own risk. I can not be held liable if your following the below in any way breaks your computer, just because it didn’t break mine, doesn’t mean it wont break yours. In other words getting this to work on your system can only really be done if you know what you are doing.

Compiling quake2-gwt-port under Debian

The first problem I ran into when attempting this under debian on my test server was the fact that java was not previously installed so running the following command quickly sorted that out, however it did take a few hours of searching and downloading 100MB+ files from the official JAVA website before I noticed that the second post on the google code page gave the answer.

apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

Once java has been installed you need to install vorbis-tools and lame as these packages contain dependences that enable audio within the port, however while vorbis-tools will install through apt-get with no problems, the same can unfortunately not be said for lame. To get apt-get to install lame I had to update my /etc/apt/sources.list file with an additional source as documented within the debian wiki here and then run the following commands to update apt-get cache and install lame and vorbis-tools.

apt-get update
apt-get install lame
apt-get install vorbis-tools

As a side-effect of the aforementioned additional source added to the apt-get sources list, apt-get kicks up the following fuss when you update it following the changes to /etc/apt/sources.list:

W: GPG error: http://www.debian-multimedia.org lenny Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 07DC563D1F41B907
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

I would ignore these, and simply remove the additional source from /etc/apt/sources.list once lame has been installed as we know it’s something we have done to cause the error, and its not stopped anything from working (yet, as far as I know).

Finally so that you can download the source from google code, you should also install mercurial, this can be done within debian and many other Linux distributions through the following apt-get command as documented here.

apt-get install mercurial

For some reason on my version of debian the shell variable JAVA_HOME was not set up by the installation of Java (openjdk-6-jdk), therefore I had to crack open nano and edit /etc/profile to include the following just before the line that reads unmask 022:

JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk"
export JAVA_HOME

If JAVA_HOME is not set then the compile process of Quake II will fail and you would have waisted 12 minutes waiting for the command line to tell you that.

Once you have followed the aforementioned you should now have the following required packages installed mercurial, openjdk-6-jdk, lame and vorbis-tools. Your now ready to download and build Quake II for debian using the following simple steps:

1. Load up your shell and cd into your home directory or other such workspace where your comfortable and run the following command to get a fresh copy of the code from google code:
   hg clone https://quake2-gwt-port.googlecode.com/hg/ quake2-gwt-port
2. cd into the newly formed quake2-gwt-port directory
3. Run ./build-dedicated-server this will build the tools and the client and server code.
4. Next Run ./install-resources which will download, unpack, and convert the original Quake II demo resources, for reasons of copyright respect these have to be downloaded from their source and cant be packaged on google code.
5. Due to a glitch in the way the above two commands install the code, you then have to copy the created gwtquake from maven-build/server/target/gwtquake/war/gwtquake to /war/gwtquake using the following command: cp -r maven-build/server/target/gwtquake/war/gwtquake war/qwtquake
6. Everything is now ready to run using the command ./run-dedicated-server [port]

On my debian set-up I encountered several [WARNING] notices during the resource install but those where mostly related to character encodings and did not halt or impair the install. As I installed this on my server I have not been able to test it works within a browser due to a lack of time, however the install under osx is a much simpler affair.

Compiling quake2-gwt-port under OSX

Please Note: you must have OSX developer tools installed before you can compile anything.

As OSX does not come with vorbis-tools or lame installed you have to grab them yourself, fortunately with the fact that OSX is basically Linux with a pretty user interface doing so is very easy. To install the additional components required for the compiling of quake2-gwt-port under OSX I would recommend installing homebrew,over the much bloated MacPorts as given within the google code instructions. Installing homebrew is a very simple task indeed, first read through the online install instructions so you know what your doing then simply run the following two lines of commands:

sudo chown -R $USER /usr/local
curl -Lsf http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tarball/master | tar xvz -C/usr/local --strip 1

Once that has completed installing the required items for compiling the quake2-gwt-port is as simple as running the following lines of commands within OSX terminal:

brew install vorbis-tools
brew install lame
brew install mercurial

Once that is done you can continue with the instructions 1 to 6 above under the debian install guide.

Playing quake2-gwt-port under OSX

Hopefully the install went smoothly and you are now ready to play with your new toy, unfortunately just sending any old browser to http://localhost:8080/GwtQuake.html wont work as almost all modern day browsers are not compatible with HTML5, or if they are its only half an implementation due to the protocols still being on the drawing board. Two browsers that are compatible with the quake2-gwt-port are Google’s own Chromium browser and Webkit (click on links for download pages), which I presume to be the developers version of Safari due to its icon but I may be mistaken.

To get Webkit to play the game you first have to run the following command in terminal to enable webGL to be utilised by HTML5:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitWebGLEnabled -bool YES

To get Chromium to play the game you have to first pass it a set of variables as you start it up, to do this, in your terminal cd to the applications folder where you have saved Chromium and run the following command to load Chromium with WebGL enabled:

./Chromium.app/Contents/MacOS/Chromium --enable-webgl --no-sandbox

Review of Game-play in Chromium and Webkit

At the moment I am unable to get the game to run in Chromium with sound, however with Webkit while audio played amazingly well as did single player, when I set it up to run the demo it crashed every time. The performance in Webkit was also noticeably better than in Chromium, with Webkit hitting 40fps at one point while Chromium lagged behind with an average of just 10fps! I have included below some screen shots of each browser playing the game and shall post updates when I get the version installed on my server working multi-player with some systems in my house.

If you have attempted getting this to work, like the article or have something to say, please add your comment below; I always try to respond to all comments posted here.

Well this made me smile, I hope it does you. There has been a horrific lack of content updates here on photogabble as of late, while cogs have been turning on other projects and indeed on the reboot of photogabble itself I just haven’t felt up to writing a huge amount for photogabble. On top of that I have a lot of draft posts, however many are oddities such as the above, that while fleetingly interesting; lack any real talking point other than the obvious – nice arse.