dhakajack.templaro.com

My dear mafia friends -- Having read through various reports about Zynga, the company behind Mafia Wars, I've decided to yank the game from my facebook account. Their CEO went on at some length a week ago, gloating about distasteful things the company did to gain market share. I have no problem with companies that offer free services in exchange for some advertsing or access to information, but some of these reports suggest that Zynga has crossed the line into deceptive business practices.

Dear Reader (and I flatter myself by thinking that there might be one. Even one.),

I have been pulled back from the precipice of forgetting entirely about this whole blogging thing by the completion of Rover's Day Out, an interactive fiction piece mentioned previously in the blog. In fact, if I recall correctly, it was the last thing I entered in the blog before going off the rails entirely.

Rover's Day out is a "text adventure", similar in some senses to the text-based computer games which were popular in the 1980s, but quite a bit updated.

A cool video of the milky way (galaxy, not chocolate) rising. Taken with not-too-exotic equipment.

While working on the RileyCon website, I got sidetracked by needing some 3d graphics, so I took a few days to work on learning Blender. Halfway through that project, I had an idea for a new interactive fiction game, so I'm now digging an increasingly deep ditch in project space by embarking on a new IF project.

The RileyCon site upgrade is poking along.  Upgrading from version 4.73 to 5.16 of drupal didn't break too much, and with some cosmetic retheming (they changed the way that floats are cleared, for instance), everything worked OK and looked like the old site. The next step, from 5.16 to 6.10, was a major leap however.

A couple days ago, I installed XAMPP on my MacBook Pro.  XAMPP is a web stack that lets me work on websites offline by acting as a local version of the webserver that normally hosts the internet-visible version of my websites. XAMPP makes this pages available only to me, so I can mess around with them all I want, without having to offend the world with web page experiments gone awry.

Not every post has to be about websites, but that sure is the nature of it at the beginning of a project like this.  In putting this site in place, I've thought about what to do with previous content that I had up. One option would be to merge it into this site, with or without its own template. For some older content, however, this wouldn't be ideal -- here I am thinking of pages that were designed to be lightweight, and have a very web one-point-oh feel to them. For the most part, they were hand-coded, when XHTML/strict was not even a consideration.

OK, more stuff is working now.  Not that it matters to anyone on the reading end of the blog, but there's now a rich-text formatting package installed that lets me type in new stuff in technocolor, with lots of formatting features more or less along the lines of MS-Word.  The editor was unfortunately named FCKedit thanks to the initials of its creator. I see on its website that the project is now being renamed CKedit -- no surprise there.  

Laziness, the fair weather friend of all well-intentioned computer efforts, has motivated me to attempt a blog post using GoogleDocs as an editor. Since I don't yet have a WYSIWYG editor in place on this site, and I haven't set up a system for otherwise including pictures in content, this saves me a lot of work. 

Yes, it's that time again. After two years of not fiddling with websites, I find myself once again setting up a website using the Drupal web framework. Previously, I'd set up sites for a few specific purposes either in Drupal itself or the CivicSpace offshoot. This site is different in that it is intended just to be a fun play area for me. I can't bring myself to call it a blog, but let's face it, that is more or less my intention. That, plus a place to stuff all the random bits of information that I think might be of even marginal interest to other people.