Archive for the 'Geekdom' Category

themes

Published
by
Tim
on Wednesday 7th of May, 2008
in Geekdom
. 4 Comments

The K2 theme has been updated to wordpress 2.5. So I’m back to a pretty theme again.

To wordpress or to not wordpress.

Published
by
Tim
on Friday 28th of March, 2008
in Geekdom
. 0 Comments

Wordpress is very useful, it makes things pretty, it makes things easy.
There are still some things that really really annoy me though. Most significant is code blocks. If I use code or pre tags, then for some reason html tag inside them still need to have their brackets escaped. I’ve given up trying to figure it out. I could get plugins that fiddle with things, but there is always the risk that the method will break in the future. I’d prefer to store the data in the database as plain old text, but wordpress just doesn’t work that way.

Another thing that bothers me about wordpress is it’s code base. Every now and then I dig around the php files to see how things are done, it bothers me that things are so messy and seemingly hacked. A perfect example of this is the way wordpress implement it’s import export feature. Yueuck! Php can be a really messy language when it feels like it.

Now that I’m actually writing code and dealing with xml documents daily, these things bother me. If there is one thing I can’t stand it’s dealing with xml documents in an unstructured way. If there is one thing I love about C# it’s how I can just use xml and xpath so naturally. Note: there are plently of things about C# that do bother me.

Anyway, back to wordpress. Implicit in my frustration at wordpress and code blocks, is math markup and the web in general. Ideally I want to be able to type latex directly into the post editor and have it rendered correctly with no image links to think about. I hear there are plugins for this too.

I’m seriously considering moving to a new CMS. Something smart and well designed. Something that has a design philosphy behind it. It would probably feel like over kill just for a blog, but what the hell. I’ve no idea when I’ll get the time to look into this though, so I’ll probably just stick with this. I might have a look at drupal again and whatever else I find when I can though.

Fun

Published
by
Tim
on Sunday 30th of December, 2007
in Gaming and Geekdom
. 0 Comments

I’ve been working on my own game engine. Not because I think the world needs another one, but because it’s easier to understand and I learn more from a primitive one I’ve built myself then learn someone else’s. It makes me appreciate just what goes into a real one. I haven’t even got mine to bounce a ball around yet.

I already have one that does that I made a breakout clone with, but this one will be better. If I ever get it to that stage that is. I want it to use an embedded Lua interpreter for all the game logic. I also want it to use guichan for the gui. It’d be nice to be able to load the Gui from Lua scripts. That sounds pretty ambitious, so maybe I wont get that far. I definitely want to have the game logic for each level run from Lua scripts though. Some objects could have scripts attached to them that run when something happens. eg. triggers, or OnDeath scripts for various characters or whatever.

I’m thinking of the way nwscript does it or metaplace will do it. Metaplace got me motivated to experiment, since it’d be nice to learn Lua, so I can be ready to toy around in it when it hits open beta.

So far I’ve got a bare skeleton of an engine, it loads SDL and paints any game “objects” from a list. Objects so far are sprites and text.

K2

Published
by
Tim
on Wednesday 21st of November, 2007
in Geekdom
. 0 Comments

I updated wordpress and the K2 theme. It’s pretty amazing how much K2 has evolved. The rolling archives were extremely buggy previously. Now when you click on ‘older’ you get a bar for rolling through the archives that sticks to the top when you scroll down the screen. All ajax.

Also I’ve finally noticed that wordpress has proper tag support now. So the archives have a tag cloud now. I tagged a few older posts, but there’s no way I could be bothered doing all of them.

I’d never bother with any of this just for the sake of this blog, but since it all comes free with the theme and wordpress, that’s pretty slick. Open source wins again I suppose. Now I just have to get around to upgrading Ubuntu to Gusty.

Hark! Cease this affront to freedom

Published
by
Tim
on Thursday 15th of November, 2007
in Geekdom
. 0 Comments

Wow xkcd is getting fabulously ridiculous. Stallman fights for freedom!

Feed reading the weird and wonderful

Published
by
Tim
on Monday 30th of July, 2007
in Gaming, Geekdom and Politics
. 0 Comments

I’m losing myself in the blogsphere. It wasn’t so bad when I just had bookmarks. It’s impossible to follow them all once you have over 20. As long as you’re content with the hassle, which of course I wasn’t. So now I’m collecting them all in google reader. Of course now that leaves me with a never ending supply of sometimes extremely interesting news. From blogs from weird intelligent gamers, political and activist sites, and enigmatic performance artists.

This is both a revelation and a problem in that I stay up real late surfing like I’ve never surfed before. When I first had my sudden hungering for blog-eye (late night blog reading), I was pissed with most of the feed readers and seriously considered writing my own. I made up a long list of all the things I’d want in one. When I started to realistically plan it, I culled it down a lot to the easiest bits. Then found that google reader satisfied most of them, with the added bonus that I wouldn’t have to do any work.

There is one major problem the shits me though. I can read endless amounts of posts, but what if I want to keep track of particularly good articles? Bookmarks completely suck. StumbleUpon (which I use for site discoveries) doesn’t seem suitable for individual posts.. Blogging about them myself takes too much work. I just need a new feed of good things. Oh the pain! Maybe something could be whipped up in Yahoo Pipes. But how the hell would I submit an article? Ideally it would be a single button on firefox that adds it to a feed, but I can’t be fucked figuring it out. I’m sure it could be done, just fetch the referrer or something within a pipe which will add it to the existing feed?

However it doesn’t really satisfy me, I’d want to be able to add tags too. Maybe I can work something out with wordpress here… It has some pretty groovy plugins, maybe add a new category that doesn’t show up, but is listed separately?

Anyway as an example of my dilemma I present a list of interesting articles I’ve been reading (that I could find again). The John Pilger ones are exceptional as always.