At present I am starting to notice this happen again with the current crop of titles, and there have been some issues that, well, just piss me off.   $59 dollars for a new game?   Come on.   Flaky DRM schemes and installation limits?  Fine, treat me like a criminal.   Piss-poor ports of console games at full price and months late?   Oh, you must think I have no choice in the matter…   That being said, I’m not abandoning PC gaming or anything.   It’s just that for me, the benefits bar is slipping, and the hassle bar is rising quickly.  

As this post title indicates, I think that board games might help fill the gap in PC gaming.   I want to play something that is engaging, fun, and has complexity.   It should be social, and if I play badly I want to daydream about how I will do better next time…   There is a lot to like about a good board game:

• It only takes a few minutes to set up
• It is easily portable
• Most are designed to be completed in 1-3 hours
• Most have an easy learning curve

They aren’t perfect though.   Two player board games usually aren’t that fun, and some times you have too many people or an odd number of people.   Still, they can be simpler affairs than LAN’s, and just as much fun.  

So here’s what I’m thinking.   Sometime in the next few months, I would like to host a board game night at my house.    The basic format would be dinner, the game, and optionally a movie (or another round or game).   I’m looking for a minimum of three players, with a max of six.   Google bots are not invited, even if they have been faithful readers of this blog.  

As for the game, I’ve listed three possibilities below.   I do not own any of these, but would purchase the one to be played, unless it could be provided by someone else.   I will take suggestions for other games as well, but if you suggest scrabble you are not grasping my point   

Axis & Allies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_and_Allies

I played this a number of times in college, and it never failed to please.  I think I’ve played the three main variations, including Europe and Pacific theatres.  

The Settlers of Catan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers_of_Catan

I’ve never played this game, but it looks intriguing.   Looking at the wikipedia page, it sounds a lot like Civilization for PC, which I love, but incidentally hate because it can take ten hours to finish a game!

Heroscape

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroscape

I haven’t played this game either.  I really like the idea of an RPG/D&D style board game.   I played one as a teenager called Hero Quest but it is out of print, and full versions now go for over a hundred bucks!   One thing that might not be so great about it is that there seems to be a lot of “add-ons” for this game, which screams money pit.   I did see that you can buy a “master set” for under $40, and if this could provide several evenings of entertainment it may be worth it.  

Now, in my web design class, we’ve been working with two development environments for HTML and CSS. there was Adobe’s Dreamweaver, and the considerably less fantastical Crimson Editor, whose only real upside was that it was free. As the deadline came closer, I decided I would throw the site together over a couple days on Dreamweaver by staying at the lab late, but thanks to some kleptomaniacs in the building, the room that I was told would be open until as late as 10 at night, was locked by 4 o’clock and not accessible to the public. Thus, over the course of a weekend, I hammered through the antiquated Crimson at home, productivity and morale boosted by Kit’s graciousness to lend me a 17″ Samsung he had laying around for dual-screening.

Development went rather well, my only real obstacles consisting of aesthetics such as rounding the corners of divs. One trouble, however, ended up being a stalking predator in the grass, waiting for the opportune moment to strike; I was having issues with my divs moving to where I wanted, and accidentally planted the seeds of woe by designating their position as “fixed” in the CSS.

The following day, I wrote the final few pages, and posted the link to my site on our class discussion boards. When I went to view the site and make sure the link worked, to my horror, I discovered that the “fixed” positions that had been defined to me as keeping a div in one spot, “even when scrolling,” had in fact removed the idea of scroll bars completely! Sections of the pages were cut off by the window borders with no way of viewing them. After researching the positioning system deeper, I was enlightened to the concept of absolute positioning with relative positioning for divs within divs.

One would think that this task would be simple to carry out, and for a seasoned web-designer, I’m sure this scenario is a non-issue, but this was hardly my case. Diving back into my code and changing the positioning caused my page to detonate beyond all readability. The following battle that lasted for 3 hours straight showed me just how much my page was a cobbled together catastrophe of ropes, crudely nailed wooden planks, and duct tape. divs, and classes were created and destroyed like the primordial matter in the early stages of planck time following the big bang. Phantom divisions shunted my text about on the page while I struggled to re-size images and rebuild navigation bars. At last, I emerged somewhat victorious, my mind flayed by the channel cast of HTML and CSS syntax. At a time during the war, I thought Dreamweaver, which I at last had access to, could prove a secret weapon, but by that time my code was so gnarled that Adobe’s interpretation of my code was unintelligible.

It was submitted at the eleventh hour, and is almost everything I wanted. Feedback is appreciated:

Welcome to Your Future.

NX Technology, to briefly summarize, is similar in concept to RDP or Terminal Services on Windows, it basically provides a network ready way to log in and connect to a graphical desktop environment on a computer that you are not physically in front of.  The X Window System, the de-facto graphical backbone for Linux, has been able to send GUI over the network for years, but in practice it has proven inefficient and only feasible on the fastest of networks.  NX on the other hand, uses a combination of compression and caching on top of traditional X11 making for a much more bearable remote desktop experience.  As always, Wikipedia has a better explanation than I’m able to provide here.

A company called NoMachine provides commercial client and server NX software, selling Linux and Solaris server software while providing a free NX client for all the major OSes (including Windows).  Until recently, the only notable freely available NX server for Linux was FreeNX which took NoMachine’s open source core libraries and wrapped it up in a bunch of convoluted script files.  A small team has been incorporating the FreeNX code into an Ubuntu PPA, but have been having trouble maintaining compatibility and releasing bugfixes to the FreeNX code.  One quick glance at the author’s site reveals that it has been a couple years since any official updates have occurred.   Now here’s where it gets interesting: last year Google GPL’ed its own internal version of the Free NX server called Neatx, which gives the open source community a fresh platform to work with.

Installing Neatx on Ubuntu 10.04

I found the process of installing the NX server to be fairly straightforward, using the new PPA add script introduced in 9.10, I added the FreeNX Team PPA repository:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:freenx-team

This slick command takes care of finding the FreeNX Team’s Launchpad PPA software repository and adds all the necessary keys etc. to be able to get the software contained within.  After the script has finished its magic you’ll need to update the repository cache:

$ sudo apt-get update

Then, install the necessary pieces:

$ sudo apt-get install neatx-server

This will gather all of the necessary NX server components and dependencies including things like the OpenSSH server.  And that’s it!  I had to reboot to get the SSH server up and running, but other than that, no additional configuration was required!

Update: a comment left by a reader indicated that rebooting the server is not necessary even after a fresh OpenSSH server install, and I am to expect that everything is ready to go as the install finishes (thanks to Woden for the feedback).

Connecting to the NX server from another computer

On a your client machine, point the freely available client from NoMachine to the new Neatx server’s address, accept the key and presto!  You now have a slick remote desktop solution for Linux, congratulations!

Sean gets credit for finding this one.  Watch in HD fullscreen for the full effect!  Note the particular attention to detail; the cinematography is great!

• rich text editing – I want to feel like I’m writing in a real word processor and not some crappy little widget.
• Seamless drafting, publishing, editing – I don’t want to have aborted posts because of some browser timeout, or accidental posts I wasn’t ready to publish, etc
• Simple image handling – It’s 2010, where is my drag-and-drop picture inserts into the text body?
• Post Preview – I want to know how it looks before I publish.

So far, Live Writer has done an exemplary job of handling these tasks… I’m impressed

Stephen Torrence has done a great service by recording and sharing a number of his translations of songs that catch his attention into American Sign Language (ASL).

HowStuffWorks.com interviewed Stephen to get some insight into the process he goes through in writing his translations and the details may surprise you.  The effort he puts into each of his translations shows, and it’s no wonder!  Each one of his recordings are the result of take after take, he’s not simply taking the words of the songs and dryly regurgitating them—he’s  carefully performing each phrase and verse, employing full use of his face and manner to great effect.

So, if you have even a passing interest in ASL and seeing some impressive performances, I recommend you take a look at Stephen’s collection on his YouTube page.

And with that, I leave you with the song that got me here: Stephen’s excellent performance of Jonathan Coulton’s “Still Alive,” Enjoy.

Apparently those in affiliation with the Mafia carry chain-fed Belgian FN Minimi PARAs in broad daylight, and would waste their ammunition at the drop of a hat in order to kill a homeless person.

Update  This pic summarizes my festival experience: