May Contain Nuts

I’ve been itching to get off of the dark blue design for a while now… it was a fun theme to build, but I never felt like it was really all that readable. Perhaps I shouldn’t take The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’s advice when it comes to blogging (“change your website to use dotted lines and tiny, unreadable fonts wherever possible”)…

Anyhoo, continuing with the product warning label concept that goes so well with the title of this blog, I put together something a bit fresher, with some larger font sizes for added benefit to those who prefer to actually read my blog. I’m still working out the exact design of the sidebar, but I’m aiming for something similar to the US nutrition facts label, because the idea amuses me. So, my apologies for the archives going missing for the moment… they’ll be back in a little while.

As a side note, this theme was designed entirely in Pixelmator. I wanted to see if I could use it for something more serious than minor photo touch-ups and image resizing. Turns out, you can. It takes a little more effort to work with than Photoshop because it’s missing any sort of vector tools, but it gets the job done pretty well. Between this and DrawIt (the Snow Leopard version, anyway), I’m really not missing Photoshop all that much. Pixelmator’s PS brush support and DrawIt’s awesome bitmap filter tools cover the vast majority of my Photoshop use cases for design.

Next up on the redesign table: Revision 1. And boy does it need some love… (also need to update my portfolio, heh).

I think I need to work on my witty titles…

As I alluded to on Twitter earlier, I’m trial-running an app called Delibar for OS X that syncs with Delicious for bookmark management. The problem I’ve had with Delicious in the past is that there’s no really really good solution for Delicious that integrates with Safari, on account of Safari’s lack of an official plug-in architecture. There’s a handful of 3rd party apps and a couple of SIMBL “plug-ins” that support Delicious in various ways, but nothing that ties directly into Safari’s bookmarks system to sync it with Delicious directly, and give me access to those bookmarks from Safari’s bookmark bar (yeah, I’m annoyingly picky). I’ve also tried to switch to Firefox on the Mac, but it seems slower than Safari, and it’s always just different enough from the rest of OS X to annoy the hell out of me whenever I try to use it long-term (again, picky…).

Ultimately, I took some time to reflect on how I use my bookmarks in an effort to figure out how best to approach the issue of keeping them organized and accessible in as many places as possible with as little fuss as possible. What helped the most was when I stopped thinking about my bookmarks in such a monolithic, all-or-nothing manner, and approached them on a more purpose-driven basis. To make my point, a little bit of informative explanation is probably in order.

Upon reflection, I use my bookmarks for three things: first, I use them for regular, everyday sites like comics that don’t have RSS feeds, forum links, and some work-related items. These tend to sit towards the right side of my bookmark bar in Safari, and get used with relative frequency (once a day or more).

Second are the bookmarks I create to be sure I “get back to” a certain site, because I want to spend more time reviewing the content, or because I want to show it to someone else who is unavailable while I’m looking at it, or because I think it’s neat, but don’t want to clutter my bookmarks folder with something I’ll probably look at once or twice a year at most when I’m looking for something to spark my creativity (or whatever). These tend to pile onto the left side of my bookmark bar, and thus have an annoying habit of shoving the frequently-used bookmarks into the “>>” chevron menu. I also have an annoying habit of ignoring them despite their prominence, because they’re more often just in the way.

Finally, there are the bookmarks I create to make sure I have the content available for future reference. These include things like troubleshooting articles, interesting (but not immediately useful) jQuery or WordPress plugins, application websites, and articles on subjects I’m interested in learning more about (or that I think are awesome). These are rarely-used but important for me to keep around in case I need them in the future, but tend to end up poorly-categorized because of the rigidity of Safari’s folder-based bookmark system.

I’ve also noticed that I tend not to use bookmarks on my iPod all that much. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re effectively hidden all the time and thus out of sight, out of mind, or if it’s because my mobile browsing habits are just different from my desktop ones, and I tend not to visit the sites I’ve bookmarked as much. Either way, cutting down on bookmark cruft in MobileSafari will be nothing but helpful in keeping only the stuff I access most frequently at my fingertips; everything else will still be accessible, but through different means, as explained below.

What I’ve decided upon is a system that puts each type of bookmark into a system that best supports what I’m using those bookmarks for. Thus, I have a more complex – but easier to mind-space – three-pronged system that I’m trialing starting today.

First, for my frequently-used bookmarks, I will continue to rely on MobileMe’s bookmark sync to keep everything consistent from device to device (including my iPod). There are a few bookmarklets on my bookmark bar now for MobileSafari-specific actions (such as a tool for displaying the title text of an image, which is useful for things like XKCD), and then my commonly-accessed bookmarks, which tend to break down into folders much more cleanly than my other two types of bookmarks.

Second, for bookmarks that I make just so I can check out a site’s content at a later date, I’ve started to use Read It Later, which should help cut down on the number of tabs I have floating open between Safari and Gruml (my desktop RSS reader) from day to day. I’ve also downloaded the service’s free iPhone app, so that I can, for instance, poke at stuff while I’m on the couch, rather than at my computer.

Finally, I’ve decided to start using Delicious again as a way to house all of my “type-3″ bookmarks that I make largely for reference purposes. By splitting these bookmarks away from my main bookmark content, I’m less averse to using a separate app in OS X to access/maintain them because I won’t be losing toolbar-level access to all of my important/frequent bookmarks as a result.

Not the fun part will be getting everything re-organized, because having just started, everything’s sort of all over the place at the moment. It’ll probably take a day or two of concerted effort to get it all cleaned up and properly categorized, but I think it’ll be worth it in the long run. Once I’m done, I’ll have a concise collection of bookmarklets and frequently-used  bookmarks in Safari, a consolidated collection of “things to get back to” on Read It Later that I can check regularly, and a nice tagged archive of “stuff” reference links in Delicious.

Now I’m off to work on my organization. Wish me luck!

It’s stupidly hot in the apartment, I’m exhausted, the kitchen smells exactly as bad as one might expect it to when cleaning out the fridge for the first time in 5 months, and I had entirely too much molé for dinner.

No wonder I feel ill…

(Incidentally, I’ve also concluded that certain pithy thoughts are still simply too long to effectively cram into Twitter’s 140-character limit. For some reason I find humor in the fact that this post will be auto-tweeted when I hit “Post”.)

Honestly, I forgot this was even still in existence until recently… and so have a lot of other folks, apparently… only 30% of the sites listed in the Guild of Archivists webring are even still active now (where “active” here means “doesn’t go to a squatter page”), and only a handful of those seem to be actively participating in the webring itself by putting up the links.

Effective next Friday, April 10, the webring will be shut down. If you’re one of the few sites still displaying the webring content, please remove it by then. Thank you.

I have a confession to make…

I’m not really all that excited about the prospect of OpenURU anymore. I’ll definitely still play, and check out what the GoW and others are able to do with the game if/when it’s finally released, but from the standpoint of being actively involved in its development, I’m just not feeling it anymore.

Mostly it’s because I just don’t have any time to devote to the conversations and debates. I would be doing a disservice to other contributors by getting involved when I know I can’t keep up with the responsibilities that go along with pitching in I’ve pretty much voiced my concerns and ideas for what needs to be done to make Uru work well already, so I feel comfortable handing those ideas off to everyone else to do with as they please. However, for me Uru has finally hit the “death by a thousand paper cuts” stage. I’ve been through so many ups and downs with this game that I’m just tired of the roller coaster now, and I’d like very much to get off and ride something else.

The biggest draw in Uru (and Myst in general), for me, has been Cyan’s art and story. Since I’m not getting either anymore, my interest has frankly waned. I’m also less than optimistic about the prospects of OpenURU’s success without some serious (and I do mean serious) work to refine the game’s most basic elements of story and interface. Again, since the ability to affect change in either of these arenas seems unlikely to be granted to us by Cyan at this point, I’m just not interested in trying to put more band-aids on a game that’s already been cut up into itty bitty pieces and stitched back together again at least three times.

What I want is something new. Even if it’s just printed text on a page, I want to learn something new about D’ni. There’s 10,000 years worth of characters and tales in Cyan’s mythology, and I desperately want to see more of it come to light (I realize they’d have to invent it before it could be printed, but writing a story is still far cheaper and structurally simpler than building a whole game). And as much as I enjoy fanfic, I’d like instead to see something unique and interesting come from Cyan. I know that’s simply not going to happen – Cyan seems to have reverted to the halcyon car-net days of Myst’s development (poetically, the project those left “at” Cyan are working on is Myst for the iPhone) – but that’s what I want.

Failing that, I’ll still work with anyone interested in building a Cyan-sanctioned Extended Universe. DPWR’s resources are still available for use and expansion, and I have no intention of changing that fact. Unfortunately, development of the site is still nowhere near where I want it to be, partly because I lost time to work on it, and partly because I postponed development after it seemed like Invision Board 3 would be coming out at the beginning of this year, thus making even more work for me in the long run (that has yet to happen… now it’s looking more like June. Awesome). Still, there’s plenty of work that can and should be done in the Archive. It’s slow-paced, laid-back work that I enjoy doing when I have the time, and tonight I decided to do a bit of work, inspired by the frenzy of activity on the Battlestar Galactica Wiki after the series finale last week. Hopefully I’ll have time to keep up with what I’m doing before I forget what I was working on. Anyone else interested in pitching in is welcome to do so.

I’m also noodling with a few game concepts again (another reason my creative inclination toward Uru has waned), and hopefully I’ll have more done with them next month. One in particular is a fairly simple project that I keep over-complicating and putting off… if I can get it finished hopefully I can hawk it for a few bucks a pop and make a little bit of extra cash.

I’m sure at least one person in the community has noticed that I haven’t been saying much in public these days. I want to take a moment and apologize, as well as lay out why that’s the case.

First off, I’m definitely not trying to ignore folks. If you’ve PMed me on DPWR, sent me an email, or otherwise tried to contact me and been met with silence, I’m sorry. I’ve been super busy at work for the past couple of months, and the onset of winter coupled with the fact that the sun sets around 5:00 PM here has left me feeling incredibly lethargic when I get home for the day. I typically manage to find the time and energy to read my email and skim some news feeds before collapsing on the futon for the night and zoning out to MythBusters, Countdown, Daily Show, and Colbert Report.

As some may also have noticed, I seem to have stumbled into helming Mysterium in 2009. This is super-convenient since I actually live in the host city, but it’s also a lot more work than even I thought it would be, mostly because I’m trying to keep the ball rolling while keeping a master plan for both the planning process and the event itself in my head. There’s also a fair amount of pressure, whether real or perceived, to pull this off well because of how passionate about Mysterium its attendees are, and that’s not really doing wonders for my psyche either . I can easily see why Eleri decided not to be in charge again this year, and honestly can’t fathom how Scraper managed to do it for 8 straight years (I think it’s safe to say I won’t be chairing the committee for 2010 if I can possibly avoid it).

I’ve got so many things to do in terms of digital projects and general around-the-house work that I’ve gotten a little overwhelmed lately, and when that happens my brain tends to go into full-on lockdown mode, at which point not much ends up getting done, which just increases the number of things I need to do later and furthers the cycle. It’s incredibly frustrating, and I’m going to try to work myself out of it over the next month or so.

So, with that said, I need to go do laundry, contact a few people about Mysterium stuff, start a load of dishes, and see if I can start banging on one of the various gaming projects I’ve got rampaging through my head. Then tomorrow I get to veg out to lots of food and good company, so that’ll be an awesome and welcome reprieve before heading back to work Friday.

I’m not dead! I’m just acting like it!

I’ve been mulling this over for more than a month now, since I brought it up to Blade as part of our conversations about the GoA after attending the GoMe meeting in August, and have finally reached a conclusion: I can no longer be the sole point of development and administration for DPWR.  The site has gotten large enough, and I’ve gotten busy enough, that I simply can’t handle the work load anymore.  Unfortunately, because of DPWR’s history, transitioning to shared ownership will not be an easy thing.  The code has never been under source control, and development hasn’t exactly been what one might call “professional” at any point in time.  DPWR is how (and why) I learned PHP, and a lot of what I do with the site generally consists of hacking and modifying existing files in Invision Power Board, with poorly-documented and poorly-commented results.

What I want to do is essentially start from scratch in some ways.  I want to start with a virgin installation of IPB and the various components that I use for DPWR (Links, Gallery, and Wiki), and then build the current feature set back into the site.  It’s a fair amount of replicated effort, I know, but I think it’s the only way to start off on the right foot.  To make things potentially easier, I’ve already subversioned the current files so that there’s a base point of comparison that can be built from and re-implemented whole-cloth where appropriate (and possible).  In addition to re-programming the PHP, I would also like to tackle modifying the site’s skin as well, since it’s got some rather obvious legibility issues and needs some love to pull it more in-line with the Guild of Archivists concept (Tweek being the awesome person that he is has provided me with his “Guild Pub” emblem for the GoA, which I’d like to run with).

Ultimately, my goal is to get everything updated and moved to the live site by the end of the year (just in time for IPB 3 to come out and start the process all over again ).  Since most of the stuff on the site doesn’t need much (if any) modification to work, and all of the really hard work of getting the Archive to support tags has already been done (it just needs to be re-implemented into the vanilla install), I think the thing that would take the longest would be the skin.

I’ve decided to do this now (rather than wait for IPB 3 to come out) for several reasons: 1) I want to make sure that the site is actually maintainable by a small group before IPB 3 comes out and the really hard work of porting the Archive component to the new version begins, 2) I want the site to be able to support all of the requirements that being the host for the GoA puts on it ASAP, and 3) I don’t have the time to do any of this by myself anymore.  I’ve got one pro bono web design project I’m working on right now, and will hopefully have a contract for another site by next month.  Coupled with the 3 months worth of other small-to-massive-sized projects I’ve accumulated over the summer without a Mac to call my own and the fact that I’m at work 9 hours a day, I just don’t have the ability to throw myself at DPWR the way I did when I was 15 without a care in the world .  (On a side note, it’s actually kind of scary that I’ve been managing this site since I was 15… it originally launched on Homestead on June 30, 2000)

So, if you’re a PHP developer interested in helping to get DPWR on its feet, please leave a comment with some way of getting in touch with you, or email me and let me know you’re interested.  I realize I’m asking a great deal with no real compensation (all I’ve got are my gratitude and appreciation [as well as my most profound apologies for the current sorry state of the code base]), so I don’t exactly expect a stampede of volunteers, but anyone willing to lend a hand would be very, very greatly appreciated.  I’ll discuss the details of how to get to the SVN source, as well as some other guidelines and requirements, privately with anyone who volunteers.  It’s not nasty, mean, paranoia-inducing “OMG SEEKRETS!” stuff, just stuff that I would rather discuss in confidence because it has to do with a non-open-source project .

So yesterday the most wonderful thing happened… I finally got a new Mac.  Y’know, to replace the one that I had sold on consignment at the end of May?

Last night was spent getting applications and personal effects moved onto the machine from the extenal life boat drive and setting up not one but two installations of Windows XP (one for Boot Camp gaming, the other for running 3DS MAX in a VM so I don’t have to restart the computer all the time).  This in and of itself took almost an hour to set up for, because I needed to create a slipstream disc with XP SP2 on it (I was unsure of the slipstreamable status of SP3, and didn’t want to risk it), and the process for doing so, while not necessarily complicated, was hampered by a lack of certain pieces of software that ultimately became unnecessary once I found nLite, which did all the hard work for me.  Trying to do it on Vista was also not entirely conducive to the process, as said missing pieces of software were incompatible with the new OS, but in the end I managed to get it done.

So now I have three different computers running on one machine, each with their own name (the new iMac’s name is Apollo, courtesy of Oscy, the Boot Camp partition is named Hephaestus, ’cause I thought the fact that he forged lightning bolts was somehow appropriate and amusing, and the VM machine is just called “MaxBox” because I was feeling incredibly uncreative by the time I got to that install).  There’s still a little bit of work to do to get everything back exactly as it was on my PowerMac, and I need to max out my machine’s RAM as soon as financially possible, but beyond that, I’m back in the saddle again.

So now comes the apology part…

Over the past three and a half months, my only computers have been the one at work (which I’m typically supposed to, y’know, be doing work on), the Dell hooked up to our television for the original purpose of watching downloaded movies and TV shows, and a G4 eMac running Tiger that probably wouldn’t have even been able to serve as a boat anchor thanks to its lack of a handle on the top (language warning on that link, btw).  Needless to say, this was not supposed to be a long-term solution to the problem of me consigning my G5, and with regular platitudes promising payment “early next week” for the better part of two months, I was never really motivated to come up with a seriously functioning secondary setup for my needs.  As a result, my access to (and general tolerance for reading) forums, chats, IMs, and even emails was rather substantially degraded, as I had no interest in setting up a whole ‘nother machine with my accounts and preferences and whatnot when a new iMac was perpetually just around the corner, and using a TV for a computer monitor (even an LCD TV) is something I regularly refuse to wish upon my worst enemies.

Anyway, the thrust of the above paragraph’s worth of justifications is that I have been rather remarkably unreliable this summer, for which I sincerely and humbly apologize.  I’m doing my best to get back up and running at full capacity as quickly as I can, and hopefully by the end of next week I’ll be moving full steam ahead on several things that were supposed to be done mid-last-month, and following up on some emails and other communications that have sat far too long unanswered.  As far as inconveniences go, I realize that being stuck with a computer attached to a TV is far less problematic than having one’s house flooded by a hurricane, but this has been a pretty crappy summer for me, performance-wise, and the computer issues only compounded my general apathy towards the world.  God help me if I’m ever stuck in a hurricane, you may never see me again .

Also, Mister Cloak, I want to apologize directly to you for not only not answering your IM last night, but dropping offline almost immediately after you sent it… my connection to Steam last night was not exactly reliable… I think I was on and off about 10 times in the space of 5 minutes at one point.  Finally I just gave up and signed out completely.

Our office just got a penis enlargement spam message.

Through our FAX MACHINE.

I kid you not.  I’m going to see if I can abscond with it at lunch and scan it for the sake of posterity.  And humor.  Mostly humor.

It’s been a bit of a while since I last posted something, so I figured I ought to.  Nothing fancy, just a bit of a status report on what’s going on with me.

After months of saying I needed to do so, this month I finally started tearing through the Archive cleaning up attachments and re-tagging entries as appropriate.  I’ve got a running list of entries that need a bit more TLC (or a lot more, in some cases) that I’ll need to come back to after I finish the initial clean-up push, but so far the list is only about 30 entries long out of the 900 that currently exist (so, roughly 3% of the Archive).  I’m almost all the way through the collection of journals and notes (which are being split into 2 groups for organizational simplification), after which there’s just people, places, objects, speeches, and translations.  That may sound like a lot, but I’ve already gone through Ages, plants, animals, DRC research, and all of the D’ni culture sections (DRC Research was a bear… I think most of the really screwed up attachments were in that tag).

On a related note, is anyone having problems accessing the Archive?  I just discovered that for no apparent reason a couple of my staff members can’t see anything in the Archive… if anyone else is having this problem, PLEASE let me know!  I can’t fix it unless I know it’s broken!

I’m also hard at work on a number of game ideas.  A couple of them are a lot more advanced and will require considerable time in the modeling, texturing, and figuring out how to do stuff in the engine departments, but one of them I’m actively developing right now.  Some of you may recall my little Labyrinth project from last year’s ill-conceived attempt to enter into the Unity Top DOG competition about 3 weeks from the deadline for entries.  Well, I’ve decided to do it up proper with much better graphics, a whole slew of Labyrinth boards of varying difficulties, and way fewer bugs.  Right now I’m working on laying out all of the game boards, and trying really hard not to make them overly-difficult in the early stages.  I don’t think the game will end up being easy by any stretch of the immagination, but I’d at least like it to be somewhat challenging without making your brain explode.  The current design plan calls for 30 boards across 4 difficulty settings: 8 each of easy, medium, and hard levels, plus 6 more “tutorial” boards for practice, training, and introduction to some of the wackier elements of the game.

I’m also still working on getting a new iMac.  My G5 has been sold, but the buyer is also getting a whole mess of additional hardware and software from Mac Odyssey as well, and has yet to pick up the G5.  Since I don’t get my share of the sale until the buyer has committed to keeping the machine a couple of days after pick-up, I’m still waiting.  Fortunately, the delay may in fact work out in my favor: Mac Odyssey got wind that a number of last-gen machines that failed to sell in the education sector are being pushed into the non-Apple Store retail sector at discounted prices (this being Apple, “discounted prices” could here mean a minor reduction, but any reduction is money I don’t have to pay!), so I may be able to work out a deal on a much nicer Mac that I’d otherwise be able to afford.

Changing gears, I’ve been keeping quite busy at the job I’m actually paid to do as well.  I’ve been making continued improvements to the software I’ve developed, and am working on ways to further improve the standards-compliance and design flexibility of the HTML I generate.  I’m also teaching a two-hour-a-week “class” on XHTML and CSS, which may be the single best thing I could have done for my own understanding.  It’s one thing to teach yourself… it’s another thing entirely to teach others.  I think I’ve picked up more tricks and all-out skills since I started teaching this stuff than I have since the first couple of weeks of learning it.  I’m also continuing to make advances in what I know about ASP.NET and C#.  While I’m still rather utterly lost on some of the bigger concepts, I’ve been able to start playing within small things those concepts to start broadening my understanding.  For example, yesterday I fixed a bug in an ASP.NET control adapter that replaces the table-based layout of the standard control output with CSS-stylable DIVs and list elements.  Initially, I was unable to assign attributes to the control through the C# code-behind, which prompted a bit of research and finally a bug-fix that resolved the issue, so now my radio button list has its onclick attribute once again.  Hooray!  I still couldn’t actually write a control adapter from scratch, but I now have a bit more knowledge of how to edit an existing adapter to suit my needs.

Anyhoo, I’d best be getting back to work… plenty to do, and no time to do it in .