Santa brought me a wicked cold for christmas. I haven’t been sick in over 3 years, so I guess I was due. Still, it’s no fun. Sadists can enjoy webcam shots of me suffering on my living room floor watching endless hours of tv. Always one to look for the positive side, I’ll note that I’ve watched quite a few excellent movies, including The Chumbscrubber, Enron: the smartest guys in the room, Serenity, The Constant Gardener, Oldboy, plus a couple of others I’ve already forgotten. I also think I’m on the road to recovery since my head is feeling slightly less foggy today. We’ll see what tomorrow brings, as they say. Now back to my living room floor - today I’m going to try and do a little reading, with one of my christmas gifts:

On tap.

It’s that time of year again - the family are looking for a christmas list. Here it is.

I could use upscale casual clothes, the kind of stuff I wear to work - wrinkle free slacks (34 waist 32 length), wrinkle free shirts (I wear a large), basically anything you think I could wear to work. I’m good on jeans though.

Joe Boxers. ONLY joe boxers, no brand subsitutions.

I need a mid-season coat, something to wear in the fall and the spring. Heavier than a fleece, lighter than my winter parka. I had a nice coat kirsten got me several years ago for this, but I’ve worn it out.

I keep a wishlist in my wiki, see: http://www.metamusing.net/wiki/index.php/DavesWishList. Of the things there, I would especially like DragonQuest VIII:

or Shining Force Neo as a fallback:

or a pc game:

(that’s the expansion pak to Battlefield 2 above, called Battlefield 2: Special Forces. Hopefully Amazon will add a pic soon enough)

I ask for a version of something like this every year. I have the world’s most complicated home stereo setup, and it’s only going to get worse this year with all the new consoles coming out. Everyone chip in and buy me one of these:

I really want a Gamepark GP2X. You have to import them, they’re manufactured in South Korea. They go for under $200. Everyone chip in! Lik-sang is a reputable vendor I’ve dealt with a number of times. It’s everything cool about the PSP except the wifi. Order one quick if you are going to go this route, it has to get shipped from Hong Kong.

Ok, so you’re not brave enough to order something from overseas for me? Get me the Nintendo DS mario kart bundle. I want the GP2X more but if you waited till the last minute, this is an acceptable substitute:

Nintendo DS Mario Kart Bundle at Amazon

I need a coffee table. Surprise me. Smallish, preferably with some storage - by way of example check out the KOLSVIK at ikea.

I have a minor fetish for pens. Surprise me.

My amazon wishlist is chock full of books I want. I got on a zombie kick around halloween and added a ton of stuff, best to ignore all the zombie books. It will take me the rest of my life to work through those. Some suggestions from my list:

Astute observers will note a lot of the items on my amazon wishlist are out of print or otherwise unavailable. Surprise me with a couple of those.

I have a thing for keyboards. My current object of obsession:

Though you may be tempted to do so as the ultimate in surprises, do not buy me an xbox 360. They’ll be at least $100 cheaper when they PS3 ships and whatever reliability issues they’re having right now will be sorted out.

I crave a 19″ 4:3 <8ms monitor with dual dvi inputs. Since only Jesse will understand that, buy me a newegg gift certificate instead and I will put it towards the monitor.

I crave an ipod nano. Buy me an apple gift certificate and I will put it towards one.

I need a pair of insulated snow pants.

I need a pair of snowshoes. Modern light weight ones.

Find me the world’s coolest light-weight walking stick.

Ok. That should be enough variety for everyone, I’ll stop here…. err wait, no - one more wish: Bush in chains. Now I’m done.

Believe it or not I’ve been trying to get a webcam working with this site for its entire existence, more than 6 years now. I actually had one running briefly back when I was running this site using windows and IIS, but that experiment didn’t last long (the OS I mean), and neither did the webcam. The problem has been getting appropriate drivers for the webcam working - back in the days of serial cams, no one, and I mean no one, outside of uber uber geeks was working on that stuff, and of course the camera manufacturers paid no attention to producing drivers for Linux. These days lots more folks are producing drivers but it’s still an issue of needing pretty good linux chops and the right camera to get things going. Needless to say, as you can see from the link in the column to the right, I’ve finally managed it. Kudos go out to the following folks:

Christian Magnusson, for his almost working set of drivers for the USB Quickcam Messenger I have.

hugelmopf and the other contributors to the ubuntuforums.org thread that helped me tweak Christian’s script such that it would work on my ubuntu-based box.

Erik Bosrup, and Kathleen More for their javascript, which I used to get the cam pics onto my site.

The webcam pic will update every 3 minutes, though depending on how you’ve set your browser’s cache you may need to force-reload the page to get a new picture to show. If you catch me doing something embarrassing or amusing, send the picture along and I’ll put it in my image gallery.

If you’ve got a pc and are playing World of Warcraft, check out the WoWmodelview and WoWmapview, which let you fly through the World of Warcraft world and examine the 3d models in the game. This is kind of spoilerish in that you can take away some of the fun to be had exploring the world and discovering new monsters, but it can also be helpful if you’re struggling to work your way through one of the game’s instance dungeons and want to explore it offline without the penalty of dying repeatedly. Both are free, open source and relatively small downloads.

I love tactical rpgs. They’re one of my favorite gaming genres, and I buy and play almost every one that’s released, often even the stinkers. One of the kings of the genre is Square’s Final Fantasy Tactics, a game I’ve spent more time playing than perhaps anything aside from the Civilization series of games. I was psyched to discover that there’s now an open source project to develop a cross-platform tactical rpg engine inspired by classics like FFT. It’s called Galaxy Mage, and while it’s in very early alpha it’s already in a state where you can play it - there are a couple of maps, a couple of unit types, a rudimentary AI, and a working 3d graphics engine. If the genre interests you this is one to watch, here’s hoping it becomes as succesful as projects like Battle for Wesnoth.

Bitvise Tunnelier is a free for personal use ssh/sftp client with a great interface. If you’re on windows and want a gui for your file transfers, this is definitely worth a look. It’s displaced putty on my pc as my client of choice.

…so now I want to build my own. Check out this excellent and well-reviewed set of instructions for building a mame cabinet. Not to expensive - leaving out the cpu and monitor my guess is this cost well under $300. This is going to be my spring project, though I will probably go with an lcd monitor and a small form factor pc to power it.

A bonus friday fun link for everyone - check out warrock, a free battlefield 2 clone from South Korea. It’s a free download and well worth checking out if you like team and class-based first person shooters with vehicles. The graphics aren’t up to the level of Battlefield 2, but it’s an otherwise competent riff on the same theme and runs on lower end hardware. You can’t beat the price either. Mind, if you’re going to check it out make sure to use Internet Explorer, their website is awful and firefox has some difficulty with it. Also note that you’ll have to register to play, and as you might expect this is Windows only.

Imagine a juiced up riff on the classic boardgame Risk that adds diplomacy, fortifications, and cultural production but maintains the simplicity of Risk’s basic gameplay. Sound interesting? Check out conquerer, a free, web-based boardgame. Then go ahead and throw down the gauntlet if you dare, as usual I’ll take any challengers.

I shall name no names, nor will I say at which job I encountered this, to protect the not so innocent and the more than slightly dumb. At one of my places of employment we ran Apple Xserves. I’m not a big fan of them, but whatever, they’ve done their job more or less. Anyway at one point we had installed a new machine in the racks and I was busily installing its software layer. I noticed performance was pretty sluggish but didn’t give it a lot of thought, I figured I would get to the bottom of it as I went through the install process. As I walked out to lunch I noticed the screen of the laptop of a coworker of mine and one of the main system admins, a brand new laptop, running an opengl screensaver at an atrocious framerate. I made an offhand comment about poor performance and he got a gleam in his eye. ‘You know what that is? come here!’ He proceeded to show me how he had configured our brand new xserve to run an opengl screensaver, then connected apple’s remote management tool to the machine across the network, and he was streaming the video from the xserve to his laptop.

!!!

Nevermind the overhead of running an opengl screensaver on a server, which is bad enough, he compounded it by some incalculable order of magnitude by streaming it across the network. This fellow was the main web systems administrator and this was not an issue of him thinking he would just experiment with a new box - he was surprised when I started berating him for wasting system and network resources. It hadn’t occurred to him that these might be issues.

He lost access to the server that day, right after lunch.

The scenario - like me, you have multiple computers running multiple operating systems, and your bookmark collection is scattered across them. You’re looking for a better way to manage this. Check out foxcloud for one approach to this problem. It’s a firefox extension that can be configured to either store your bookmarks on the foxcloud servers, then synch to any browser that has the extension installed, or if you’re running your own server you can configure it to use ftp or DAV to store your bookmarks on your own server. This is a pretty slick solution and since you can run it on your own machine you can presumably get better performance than you’ll see with a shared server solution like del.icio.us (though now that they’re owned by yahoo this will probably improve) or storing them on the foxcloud server. It’s free and runs across all platforms firefox runs on. The only downside to it is it doesn’t support sftp.

I blogged about fate, the excellent little $20 diablo clone, several months ago. Seems like I’m not alone in liking it - it’s turned into wild tangent’s best selling game ever and as a reward they’ve offered up a free bonus pack. If you already have fate, the download is a click away. If you haven’t yet tried it and you enjoyed diablo/diablo II, I guarantee you’ll enjoy Fate. Check it out.

What if you could get those tape drives off your network? Anyone who’s had to work with them knows how much of a pain in the rear end they are, and how tedious the process of managing the tape library is. An Indian company has come out with a really novel solution to backups called StoreGrid, which stores backup files on the unused disk capacity on your network. They’ve correctly observed that most computer users use only a fraction of their available drive space in the business environment and take advantage of that. It can be configured as a p2p application or in the traditional client-server backup model, and it’s cross platform -Linux, Mac and Windows are all supported. There’s even a free windows version you can check out that’s feature limited but still very useful.

They’re targeting this at the home and small business market and pricing it accordingly - $20 a seat. I think it’s brilliant. Not only is that pricing model lower than what you would pay for equivalent products, it removes a piece of the skilled labor required to manage your backup system and relieves a headache for support staff and small business owners. If I can get this running on my Linux box it’s going to become my new backup system, and this is well worth a look for folks who are running small networks in their homes. I’m willing to bet a large sum of money that none of you have an effective backup strategy on your home network, if you have one at all.

Ever wanted to run your own 3d mmorpg? There are a variety of emulators out there for everquest, dark ages of camelot, Ultima Online and so on, but at best they’re quasi-legal and most of them are flat out illegal. There are also projects like Crossfire, which is a fun game but 2d only and with a relatively unsophisticated engine - it plays more like gauntlet than a modern computer rpg. I discovered Minions of Mirth this week and am flat out amazed. It’s best described as an everquest clone - the graphics are slightly better than the original everquest and the play mechanics are somewhat similar - but it’s also much much more. First, in terms of mechanics, it has something unique (to my knowledge) in mmorpg’s - a multiparty system that allows you to adventure with a group of your own characters. It’s a bit clunky in practice but it’s novel and allows you to effectively ’solo’ your way through the game with your adventuring group.

The game also charges no monthly subscription fees and comes with a server bundled with the product, allowing you to run servers for your friends. Right now that’s for mac and pc only, though a linux server version is promised and they hope to produce a linux client version as well.

What’s most interesting though is how entirely mod-able the game is. Want to add in the smurf village from the original diku muds? You can. Think every 1st level mage should start with tiltowait? Know a little python? Add it in. You can modify the games graphics using free and open source software to build 3d models and texture and animate them, you can add in new landmasses (zones, in mmorpg parlance) again using free open source tools, and you can completely change the underlying game logic and add in new features.

This is the game I wish Neverwinter Nights had been. While I had tons of fun with NWN, and even ran a server for a year or so, I quickly tired of its repetitious tile-based game graphics. With Minions of Mirth they’ve got the fundamentals right - fully 3d, fully modable by anyone who’s figured out how to use the toolsets used to modify first person shooters. I have really high hopes for this game - there are tons of free Ultima Online shards out there and my expectation is that over the next year or two we’ll see an equivalent explosion of Minions of Mirth servers.

The full game is scheduled to release on December 15th, but if you buy it now you can get in on the beta for only $25. You don’t even need a net connection to play - if you jones for that MMORPG experience but don’t have a net connection, you can run your own local server and play on that.

I should note that while I’m really enthusiastic, this is early days for this product - it’s somewhat thin on content and the graphics are a mixed bag even by the standards of the previous generation of graphics engines. Both of these will improve over time as folks add in their own custom content, just as it has with NeverWinter Nights, but if you’re considering a purchase bear this in mind.

As soon as they release the linux server I’ll have this running here on metamusing - I’ll let folks know when it’s up and running.

So perhaps your read my recent post about the publication of George RR Martin’s A Feast for Crows and are considering picking up a copy. Given how complex the series has been, with its huge cast of characters and ever shifting alliances between them, you will probably find it useful to take a look at Vincent Briscuso’s excellent compendium of information on the series, including an incredibly comprehensive set of chapter summaries for all the released books (with the exception of the most recent). This is holiday reading material for me as I prepare to dive into the new novel.

So you’ve been reading me wax enthusiastic about wikis for the past couple of years, maybe you’ve played around with one, and you just don’t buy it as an organizational tool. Perhaps you’ll find TopXNotes more to your liking - it’s a traditional shareware ($20) macosx app. While it doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, it’s very well thought out, has a tiny footprint, a great gui, and a great templating system. Worth a look if you’re on a Mac and looking for something more sophisticated than stickies.

Danish researchers have found a way to store hydrogen as ammonia bound up in a tablet of sea salt - apply the catalyst and the hydrogen is released, apply more ammonia and the tablet is recharged. This is pretty slick stuff. You can read up about it on dtu.dk, a Danish technical university’s website.

[via digg]

Earlier this year I was working on a project and needed a quick way to tie an sql table to the web. I ended up going with dadabik and I don’t regret it, it’s worked out well. But today I stumbled across an interesting alternative - MyDBO. It takes a very different approach to a similar problem. It’s basically an extensible code generation framework and is much more flexible than solutions like dadabik. At first blush I thought it would end up being more complex to work with than dadabik, but having tinkered a bit I think we would have actually had an easier time of it on the census project if we had used MyDBO - we ended up making a significant number of changes behind the scenes with dadabik which we wouldn’t have had to do with MyDBO. This is worth a look if you do a lot of mysql-php-webwork.

It doesn’t get much more convenient than this. I just had to do this today and went looking for a tool. xls2mysql is a free php script that takes the data from your excel file and converts it into tables in a mysql server. It’s not perfect - it cannot detect field types and the maximum file upload size over http that your server allows will limit the size of the data set you can import, but for lots of simple tasks this is a handy script. Of course you can do this already with phpmyadmin if you export your data out to csv, but if you’re not running that and don’t see yourself getting it going, this is an alternative.

Only a few days after I mention a GUI for Synergy on OSX, I find an even better one. This one runs on OSX and Linux and comes with everything you need - download, run and you’re all set. If you need to share a mouse and keyboard amongst multiple machines, Synergy is the stuff, and if you’re doing it on a mac, Quicksynergy is going to make it as easy as it’s going to get to get it up and running.