A few years later, that changed. The last few months have seen many updates to Scrib. He is often seen on Freenode and converses semi-regularly with a variety of people. For now, he is just a chatbot (a rather wonky one at that) but he’s being actively worked on to have more than just chatbot features. His source code is now available on GitHub and a support forum has popped up over in the Scoundrels Community.

The most up-to-date information can be found over on Tenach.net

The first time I downloaded 32-bit libraries inside Arch Linux, I figured out that they can overwrite or modify existing files. After refreshing my install, I set about for a better way to run 32-bit programs. What I found was a wiki entry inside the ArchWiki. After going through the steps a few times, I decided to create a script that would automate the steps to make installing it again less cumbersome.

Since the process can be a bit intimidating for people less acquainted with Linux and the use of the terminal, I have made my script available for download. Let me know how it works for you!

Photo by Forest & Kim Starr (http://www.hear.org/starr)

This is the way I originally was going to do it until I let the temptation of using a binary overpower me. From this I have learned that if you are going to do something super specific with an application, do not install a binary. It is one of those common sense no-brainers which we are susceptible to once in a while, especially when we have become used to installing applications from binaries. All I can do is shake my head and laugh. After all, it is a learning experience isn’t it? It is just another one of those “trust your first instinct” things that I ignored.

So, if you are going to be installing applications to a workstation or server, make sure you that the binary will do everything you want it to, otherwise you are going to end up having to take several steps back, configure, and compile from source. What are your speed bumps?

I measured the ale I had left – half a pint, maybe a smidge less, then put the mug down where it had come from. Inhale, then exhale. The tension was just right, so I started the story the way I had countless other times in just as many places.

“Adventure takes the heart of many. Young, old, Human, Elf, what have you. This is a story of an unlikely four caught in unlucky circumstances. These four were united in a common goal; to seek out the grand wizards who live in the Wizard Spire.”

I paused, letting it sink into even the most drunk of men. More were watching now that I had spoken, and the buzz of talk seemed to be dying like the winds at the end of a sandstorm. With another sweeping look over the room, I continued.

“I wonder to this day if this Sorcerer Gwyn would choose differently, given the choice. It really doesn’t matter why a sorcerer would have the companions he did, as a sorcerer chooses his fellowship wisely. Peram, a Halfling with rather sticky fingers and a charming smile was his first companion. The second was a skilled Ranger who many called Talon. The oddest one in the group was Silk, a Brownie far away from his hillside village. They all met one day in a room that could very well have been this one and from there headed into the vastly dangerous sands of the Wastelands…”

Oh no, mine goes a step or two further. From what I know, a lot of people do their personal reflection with the coming of the new year. Mine usually comes twixt May and June. The beginning of May sees a bit of a lull in everything I do (I have only come to notice relatively recently thanks to the Operations Commander). The fun comes around the last week of May.

During the last week of May, I generally go on a house cleaning spree – I clean things you would think couldn’t be cleaned. I also do it all in record time (with a nifty machine, not unlike this Chronotheric Fluxing Capacitron).

After this initial burst of energy, I feel crazily in the mood to put forth exponential amounts of effort toward projects I have started and am a part of. The best part of this is that there is no “crash” afterword. If harnessed properly, I can stay productive for the rest of the year. That’s the hope at least. Generally some of this bleeds off into the aether, where those nearby become infused with desire to be productive.

So this is why I greatly enjoy May and June. The inspiration, productivity, and ability to intoxicate unknowing individuals, without their knowledge of course! Mighty dastardly, if I may say so myself.

Now, I just need to find a good way to bottle this and create an energy consumable that will sell faster than popkins at lunch!

Software Required

• Compiz must be running. You’ll also need CompizConfig, as detailed below.
• Terminal (duh)

1. Getting Software

The first thing we will do is install CompizConfig. For this we will open up the Add/Remove application. For those new to Ubuntu, you click Applications, and select Add/Remove. After this opens, search for compiz and check Advanced Desktop Effects Settings (ccsm). Now search for irssi and check it. Click apply, and when the programs are finished installing, you can close the window.

2. Creating a Terminal Profile

For the embedding to work, we need to create a new profile for terminal. We need to do this because Compiz will change the behavior of the terminal depending on it’s title.

Open up a terminal (press Alt+F2 and type gnome-terminal). On the menu bar, select Edit, then Profiles. Click New and name it “deskie” (or whatever else you want to as long as it’s a unique name).

Under the General tab, uncheck “Show menubar by default”. Moving over to the Title tab, name it deskie (or what you named it before, if different) and set to “keep initial title”. Under the Colors tab, select White on Black, or whatever will suit your theme. Next we will move to Background. Set the Transparency to 0% or whatever fits your theme. Under the Scrolling tab, disable the scrollbar. After you’ve done what you want with this, close out of the profile editor.

3. Setting up CompizConfig

Now open CompizConfig (under System -> Preferences -> CompizConfig). The first thing we’ll do here is search for Window Decoration, and click on it. Under Decoration Window, we’ll replace “any” with “!title=deskie“, without the quotes. Now search for Window Rules. Enable it, then click on it. We’ll be adding “title=deskie” (without quotes) to:

• Skip taskbar
• Skip pager
• Below
• Sticky
• Non resizable windows
• Non minimizable windows
• Non maximizable windows
• Non closable windows

After these are filled in, go to the Size rules tab. Click New and add “title=deskie” and set the height and width you want the window to be. When you are satisfied, close CompizConfig.

4. The Aftermath

If you want to see what you’ve done, press Alt+F2 and type “gnome-terminal –window-with-profile=deskie” as the command and hit enter. You should now have a neat “embedded” terminal. To move it where you want, hold Alt, then click and drag.

If you want one to load on startup, go to System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications, and click Add. Name it “Embedded Terminal” and put “gnome-terminal –window-with-profile=deskie” as the command.

That should work, as it has for me. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to let me know!

M-Lab is intended to be a truly community-based effort, and we welcome the support of other companies, institutions, researchers, and users that want to provide servers, tools, or other resources that can help the platform flourish.

Naturally I had to try some of the tools out, but it seems that either their servers are very busy, or I’m just not having luck connecting to them. Even with that, M-Lab has entered my bookmark list and will be checked out again later. I can’t wait to see what comes of these tools! I am sure that their Glasnost tool will be quite popular.

They have hosted IMDGC, and have attended SIEGE. These people work as IndieZen.

“Indie 2.0 is indies helping themselves by creating their own tools, toolchains, game engines, and organizing themselves into a self-teaching, self-mentoring, self sufficient organization that promotes collaboration and teamwork among Indie game developers, fostering an environment where we can help each other with the common things, leaving us with more free time to innovate.”

IndieZen is building a set of tools that will give independent game developers the freedom to create innovative games without being tied to a commercial game development studio, and to capitalize on each member’s strengths (freedom, innovation) while compensating for their weaknesses (less funding and manpower).

“The commercial tools expect you to throw a lot of manpower at a project because the commercial developers can afford a bunch of cheap labor. On the other hand, Indie tools need to take advantage of procedural content generation and toolchains that support modifier stacks, style sheets, etc.”

IndieZen tools include:

• Zen Engine (the game engine)
• Zen Core – a set of core libraries for cross-platform support found in languages such as C# and Java, but not C++ (IndieZen has added support using Zen Core.)

Zen Enterprise includes Zen Server, an application server, that is akin to Java/Geronimo, JBoss, and others.

“You might ask “What does that have to do with game development?” but this encompasses everything related to games, not just the core game engine. For FPS games, you need a community server to host your logins, your clan memebership, game location services, etc. For MMO games, obviously there’s a whole lot more involved than just the zone servers. Plus you need something for support tickets, customer relationship management, billing, etc. Zen Enterprise and related application services fills these roles.”

There are also technologies by IndieZen, LLC, that are not related specifically to games. Zen Spaces is a compute cluster and data grid, that is an extension to Zen Enterprise.

The Indie 2.0 Revolution is about independent game developers revolutionizing the game industry by playing by our own rules, not those of commercial studios. It is about making it easier to make games that leverage the strengths and compensate for the weaknesses of indie groups, allowing small, versatile groups to create more innovative, fun, and overall better games.

“A key reason I decided to make most of IndieZen software open source using a non copyleft license is because this revolution is much larger than any one individual or even larger than any one company…. Garage Games couldn’t do it because they’re trying to make a profit off of creating the technology. The correct way to do it is to collaborate on the technology and make money off of the games.”

The tools created by IndieZen are Free and Open Source, licensed under the ZLib license.

I personally started working with the AIR team when I first shed some light on the game here. The game has magnetized us Scoundrels, in such a way that now each one of us is partaking in the inception of this mighty creature. A Steampunk game is only fitting for us to be drawn to.

We are proud to say that The League of Magnificent Scoundrels is an official contributor to the project, not just as individuals, but as The Scoundrels.

Operations Commander Samantha (some of her work) has hopped aboard as a concept artist, while Master Engineer Edwin has joined my side as a web developer (I have been granted the position of web administrator). Nathanael, our resident Tinkerer, has also joined up with Edwin and I to create pixel icons for the website, as well as any other pixel art AIR may require. Joshua Tremaine, Archaeologist and oddball, has contributed ideas and some insight on how the website looks from an “end user” perspective. Our Scientist, and Brewer of Alchemical Goodness, is helping IndieZen with their engine and newsletter.

To help explain, let me expand on the latter challenge. When the first piece of our Runner group came to the Sixth World from the Fourth World (more explanation later), we were immediately trained to be Runners by a corporation held by Knight. We were to go see the Elves, but on our way there the Elves captured us, thinking us prisoners of Knight’s. Through this, we ended up working for both sides for a time, with our main mission given by Knight to give them information about certain Elves.

We were working both sides, and in one instance, Azitade contacted Mr. Johnson of Knight to arrange a dummy server with dummy information, with short notice. He arranged this, and some of our group, including our Troll decker Exodus, did not know about the set up. Neither did Knight’s headquarters that we were to break into.

Exodus, Drek, and Elk Foot made it to the floor we were supposed to. We watched over Exodus while he pilfered the information off Knight’s matrix. When he was done, he decided to plant explosives that he had with him around the terminal. (The troll likes to blow things up.) Before we blew it up, alarms sounded and we were greeted at ground level by some twenty or so guards. Using our combined abilities (and Drek’s seeming magnetism to bullets), we managed to escape. Luckily, Mr. Johnson also arranged for the patrol of the headquarters to be new recruits who thought this was a training exercise… until we totaled a few of them.

We gave the “stolen” data to the Elves, and continued working for them as well as Knight.

The way Shadowrun works, there was no reason for me to implement a conversion of the skill challenges. Everything from street thugging to corporate espionage, is an integral part of the game. Skill challenges of DnD are a commonplace among Shadowrunning. Things like taking out important people and flushing out spies are a day-to-day event for any good ‘runner group. Sure, you have plenty of shooting and hack’n'slash, but there is a much larger emphasis on stealth and hacking the matrix (by the way, this use of matrix predates the movies). There are sessions spent with characters solely gathering information, which Shadowrun (as well as a good group/GM) make fun.

Oh, to explain the Fourth and Sixth world references, Shadowrun’s timeline is based on events of the Mayan calendar. The Sixth World is said to start in 2011/2012 (the end of the known world and all that). We are presently on the “closing” of the Fifth World. It is only fitting to assume that DnD/fantasy is in the Fourth World.

This has got me thinking about a campaign that I want to run, and seeing how well it would translate into other tabletop games, such as a modified Shadowrun 3rd Edition (there are a few rules we don’t like, but we’ll not cover that here). There are so many possibilities. Being that it is centered around skill challenges, it would work perfectly into Shadowrun, and I imagine possibly even White Wolf games (though I have only played them once, a long time ago, so I really have no bearing on that).

When I have some progress, I’ll post about doing it the Shadowrun way.

I am very glad that I am able to do everything I need to on this desktop without having to be chained to Microsoft and their operating system. In fact, I’ve even been able to get more done – Linux just feels better and does not interrupt my work flow.

Both styles of databases have their pros and cons, and what you are doing should help dictate what sort of database you are going to use (not just what you want, but what is the best/most functional). There are a few things that should be looked into before you decide on what database structure you’re going to go with. Is the data static (hardly ever changed or added to) or is it dynamic (always changing)? Is the website that is using this database going to grow and evolve, or is it a “one time” deal?

Is the data static or dynamic? Flat file databases work very well with data that is meant to be stored and not altered very much, if at all. All you have to do is read the file and pull the data that you want, right? Generally speaking, yes. More specifically, you are going to have to find or make a structure/system for declaring how you data is going to be stored (for example, CSV or by line? The great thing about using a SQL database is that the main architecture is already there – all you need to do is define what the columns and rows will hold, and then create the code (in my case, php) to insert/edit/update/remove the data from the rows/cells.

Is the website going to evolve? For many websites, it is natural progression to add more pages and features to it, either to make it more user friendly or to accomodate other forms of data. Flat file databases can be a headache when it comes to large quantities of data (not to mention that you’ll see a performance degredation due to having to read a file [files can only be read from top to bottom]). SQL can link similar tables/rows together by using “joins”, whereas you may need several flat file databases to be accessed and then the data strung together via php, asp, or whatever else you’re using. SQL allows for a more convenient and modular design of your website. SQL is great for allowing greater scalability as more complex data is needing storage.

It is easier to change the code behind a SQL based site than it is to rewrite all of your parsing code when you allow for more complex data. So, unless you are using largely static data storage, SQL is a good choice for storing data.

At first, all of the results I had were pointing to MyISAM being better, but after making InnoDB’s buffer pool larger and setting autocommit to 0 (meaning that it won’t auto commit any transactions), the results still weren’t looking too good, other than the CPU consumption was considerably lower (10-15%).

One thing I really liked was the fact that it uses row locking instead of table locking, which means that simultaneous reads and writes can be done without having to wait for the table to be unlocked. MyISAM is good for small scale websites, as InnoDB performs slower if there are fewer than 100 or so simultaneous connections and if the data is small (below ~10MB per transaction).

For now I think I will stick to MyISAM for my everyday coding, but I already know a few sites that could benefit from an engine switch…

There is a new game that is entering the MMO arena, and that is AIR, the Aerial Steampunk Online RPG. This one caught my attention, thanks to a blog post by Dread Captain Robert, of Abney Park fame. Here is a small glimpse of what is to come:

AIR is a Steampunk Online Role Playing Game, where players can sail the skies, mine abandoned eyots, create mechanical constructs, concoct potent chemical compounds, join secret societies, and participate in large scale battles as a sky pirate, naval officer, or mercenary. AIR features a deep character development system where the choices your player makes affect his or her attributes and alliances. Take to the skies and unlock the secrets of AIR!

As it so happens, their forum is open to the public as of today. Their simple (as of this writing) forum style is something that I have been working on for the past few days. If you are into games, pirates, steampunk, or just plain looking for something new to check out, this would definitely be it!