Our House
I swear, I’m going to track down those Maxwell House singing people and kill them all.
I swear, I’m going to track down those Maxwell House singing people and kill them all.
I’m going to rewrite the authentication system at some point this weekend (hopefully). I’m using this as an excuse to figure out something to follow Eric’s Oscar segment.
Cluster is back up and functional again. Usernames and passwords are hidden behind the server-side PHP wall, so now you have to hack my shell login to see them (instead of just being a lucky guesser of filenames).
I have also learned PHP functions (not that great of a feat), which has allowed me to outsource some code to a utility file.
The form insertion known bug is also gone now.
Don’t blame me for this, blame the Inquirer.
Yo Meta, if you want in on this, just write me a comment.
I liked this quote from bash.org because it’s true. I found it on Slashdot linked in a comment from a story about the subject at hand. Amazing how incestuous the online world is.
And, now it’s on my blog, so it’s in a whole new tier of predominance.
So, the school thing was a little too much to handle today, so I have this cool little proof of concept to show off. Check it out.
It’s a circular story-writer. The key concept is the “ball,” which passes from person to person as posts are made. The concept I have running here has three users: brandon, eric, and kristin … in that order.
Now, doing the wiki thing was possible, but I was using this as a PHP instructional project, and I didn’t want to learn sessions at the same time. Plus, sessions are a pain in the butt even if you are competant with them (as I used to be in ASP), so I wanted something more elegant.
Therefore, there is no “User Name: ” field to type in. Either you have the ball or you don’t. A future iteration would have an administrator for cleaning, editing, and rearranging. Requiring the posts to follow each other sequentially removed the need for a time-based variable.
Storage is done using text files on the server. There is currently a known and benign HTML form insertion bug that would allow a (registered) user to insert output when it isn’t their turn, but they would be required to rewrite my form and execute it from outside the server. I’m not losing sleep over that.
Passwords are also public if you can guess the file name (please don’t). :) The best way to handle that is to actually build a PHP array to hold them instead of just using [what I might take the liberty to call] a “glyph-separated file.” I used multiple characters as a delimiter so I would not be requred to escape file text.
All in all, I think this is pretty dang interesting. Hmm?
It might be generating enough heat to warm a Siberian household, but my little 2.8GHz Prescott is ripping Pinnacle Studio a new one on a 100 minute DVD encode.
My message to all Top Chef contestants: “You all suck. Please pack up your knives and leave.”
I’ll begin this by pointing out that I never finished either Dragon Warrior II or III. I rented them as a youth, and on-cartridge saves made finishing an RPG quite a task. That being said, owning I and IV made me see DW I as a pure anomaly, an artifact of history.
II has changed my mind; II is evolutionary, not revolutionary. The implementation of multiple save points and multiple party members bring it into line with a Final Fantasy I. An interesting feature of the “ancient” games was the lack of per-monster selection. You attack a “group” of two slimes and the actual attack placement is random (or implemented as a quiet heuristic in the game system). The strategic catch to this is that if both slimes, say, disappear before the attack, your attack is wasted (i.e., not redirected). This requires that the player devise a number of heuristics for directing attacks to maximize damage and minimize taken damage.
I have enjoyed this little quirk more now (perhaps because I am playing the game at 2.5x game clock!). One fairly interesting aspect of this is that the heuristics must change as the relative strength of your party against an enemy group increases. The big jump is when one player is able to kill the strongest enemy in one hit, at which the entire battle strategy must be rearranged.
Most of this is totally common sense. However, the mechanics of it are of interest to a wannabe game designer.
But, all in all, DW II is DW I’s legitimate son, not a redheaded stepchild.
One complaint: my party is a bunch of pansies (two magic-users supporting a magic-less tank???). And, HP does not increase sufficiently at level, although the wavelength on level gains has shrunk considerably (it’s good for sanity to jump two levels in thirty minutes to an hour).
I can’t tell if there is a fourth party member, but these two losers are really making me mad. Maybe I should actually let them start casting offensive magic…