I went to NoFluffJustStuff this weekend with coworkers. Spent the weekend in Reston, VA, USA (near Washington, D.C.).
While the nerd level remained high across all the sessions, we spent the nights enjoying live music in small bars in Georgetown and Alexandria.
Downtime consisted of trolling for coffee and reading source material for my WFRP campaign (that is about to get underway again after 4+ weeks off). 
With my new PostgreSQL backend, I'm planning some migration of ACD and other services currently “in production.”
Some downtime will be expected, but it should be short. Everything is conceptual at the moment, because there will be some feature loss with moving to the new blog platform series. I'm hoping to improve some resource management on the server at the some time by consolidating the engines running on the backend.
This is a peek behind the curtain how a geek's mind works...
Looks like work will impact the weekend a bit.
I'll be pushing a lot of bits this weekend.
Argh.
The consensus is... do it. I'm "talking" to a couple of people about content, format, &tc.
More importantly, I'm talking to my players about another session! Damn, more than 6 weeks since the last session.
Babies and families do take precedent. No faults there.
Let's play!
Anybody think there is a need for a U.S. based Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay podcast?
I'm mulling the idea over as I expand my campaign wiki. With all the whining on other podcasts about GW and general ignoring of WFRP in the podcast space (if I hear Luke Meyer plug Savage Worlds one more time I'll puke), me thinks there is a niche to fill.
Thoughts. I would need a co-host though.
There are a lot of "What's your IP" services on the net. This is not about those.
I had a need today to load a shell script with the IP address of my interface at work. ifconfig told me, but it was noisy. So I crafted the following one-liner on the command line then used it in the shell script (depending on your distro, you might have better ways, but this solved an immediate need):
IP=`ifconfig en0 | grep -w inet | cut -d ' ' -f 2`
Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman are hacks. Probably a lot better than me, hell, I've never written anything, so by default they win.
As a teenager I really enjoyed the original trilogy of the Dragonlance Chronicles. As an adult, I'm finding it a slog to get through the last one.
The sad thing is that when I went to the well of the local public library to re-read the series, they came mismatched and disjointed. Volume One came as a graphic novel that I finished sitting on the crapper. Really.
How apropos as the library then sent Volume Three. Three weeks later I find myself thinking, Do I really want to finish this? Maybe I should, at least I don't have to read Volume Two. It'll be like turning to the last page.
The punch-line is that I somehow had remembered four books, one for each season. Indeed there were four and the library called to say they had Dragons of Summer Flame waiting for me. I picked it up, read the dust jacket and quickly realized that "Volume Four" was not part of the original series, but a “return to Krynn.” Ugh! What a soap-opera. I released it immediately.
Maybe my tastes have changed in the last twenty years. Or my standards are higher. Probably the latter.
After almost two years on a pre-order queue comes the promise of a December 2008 release. Panzerblitz: Hill of Death.
Not your father's Panzerblitz? How about not my Panzerblitz... :)
The box art is very evocative of the legacy of Panzerblitz/Panzer Leader. I even like the color. Alas though it is not with critics. And at least one very valid criticism... the photo is a Photoshop'd very well known one from the Battle of the Bulge. British, yes. Period, late, but passable. Operation? Not even close.
But if finding a photo from the Battle of Hill 112 means delaying this game. I say, eh. So what.
As I prepare to start my WFRP campaign again, I've been recruiting Evil Overlords.
Wow! I could not have gotten a better group! A couple of slots are still open, but because I believe there is a cyberstalker in my group, I'll keep "undercover" the exact details. Finding Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay players was key though. I'm very impressed with the submissions to date. There are world mechanics in play that might have wars starting... the PCs won't stop anything. All PCs do is fuck up well laid plans of the GM... ;)
Of course I'm just kidding. It's fun to poke the PCs with sticks. Sharp swords, curses, and disease are good too.
Not familiar with the Evil Overlord faction system? Check out the seed idea at You Meet In A Tavern!
The high pressure area being... gaming. At least I got 4 posts in this month. Ugh. That is weak as I think about it.
Yet, talk of getting together for a game has returned as the first month of the newborn family member comes to an end. As a father I can sympathize with those first six weeks... as most fathers can.
But my nerdery advances along other fronts, to continue the metaphors.
One item I want to share with you is Ajax proxies for working with remote XML documents or feeds. There are many ways to do them, but I learned one recently that I really like: reverse proxying leveraging the mod_rewrite + mod_proxy modules of Apache HTTPD
There are other methods and patterns, like the PHP proxy, the Java servlet HTTP proxy, and many others. Why do I like the mod_rewrite + mod_proxy method? Simple, it's dead simple. Plus, any sufficiently advanced website will likely leverage hosting services going beyond the free or economy commercial host. This will likely translate for some, not all or most, developers having access to Apache, or other HTTP, server configurations or configuration resources.
How simple? I was able to pull a remote XML resource into my local namespace with two lines of code! Take a look:
... RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^/river/(.*)$ http://newweb.erh.noaa.gov/ahps2/xml/$1 [P] ...
With those two lines I can consume the XML feed of river levels from the NOAA Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service (if I know the document name of course) in my local namespace and workaround the same-domain security restriction of Javascript!
What exactly is happening there? I'm turning the RewriteEngine on (for the host, if not already on) and then simply stating a request for /river/ and anything following it (the (.*)$ a regular expression for anything following it) be passed to the URI specified then through mod_proxy using the [P] (also stated as [proxy] for the more succinctly-challenged).
Most of the other patterns require far more code gymnastics to perform the same thing. Additionally, the above method is far more powerful than using mod_proxy alone, as well as being a little more secure, as a misconfigured proxy can be an open proxy. And open proxies are bad things.
James Maliszewski's Grognardia is a fantastic blog to read about role playing games, the history of the hobby, and the old school revolution. But what's great about his recent post, The Shoulders of Giants is how it reflects on Avalon Hill and AH's indirect influence on the RPG hobby, as well as how it influenced him.
I know I was greatly influenced by AH and I miss the games of AH terribly (you'll understand in a moment just how much). My father introduced me to board wargaming with Tactics and Panzer Leader. And as senior, VietNam and Gulf war seasoned DOD logistician, handed me my ass more times I wish to admit too. I played both those titles for more than a decade, through college (a military one!) and have owned at least two copies of Squad Leader.
Today, I'm an "game master" and enjoy the role-in-role-playing games more than the game part, but have a well grounded grognard's respect for game mechanics because of Avalon Hill.
James traces the history of Avalon Hill well. James mentions AH licensees, and rightfully cites that "most [of Avalon Hill's titles] are in the vault somewhere, unlikely ever to see the light of day again," he does not mention by name Multi Man Publishing. MMP licenses the rights to Advanced Squad Leader and publishes new rules and scenarios, as well as, promoting the game and the hobby of wargaming around the world. MMP is also releasing an updated version Panzerblitz (which I wrote about here)! I'm such a fan of Panzer Leader I built my own copy!
And for those that want to get more grognard geek on than they can handle, visit The Hundred Years War and read the definitive book on wargaming, The Complete Wargames Handbook, by James F. Dunnigan, designer for Avalon Hill and SPI.
The library delivered Robert E. Howard's The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, the first of a three volume set published in 2002–2003. It is a definitive collection. The first thirteen stories in the order they were released by REH, not a perceived order by those that came after, or a forced chronology.
The Forward and Introduction are alone worth reading. The opinion of pastiches by authors that came after, or of those that attempted to finish the unfinished is raw and frank. An opinion to which I heartily agree.
The problems with buttons and column headers leaking through the z-indexes in IE 7 and IE 6 are corrected. Finally.
Many apologies for the delay. Busy would not properly define my state of affairs. The orbits of the many things going on around me is entertaining on levels undefined, but to those that follow ACD, most damaging to this blog. And to the WFRP game I have been running.
The party has not meet for 4 weeks. Aside from my state of affairs, a key player just had a baby boy: Rutger Harrison... a great name BTW! His teenage son was a player too, so the party was down two PCs.
And thus play is on haitus.
I carved out some time to improve the Inns of the Empire tool. Some minor visual enhancements are included, but one problem in IE6 is still present: double display of Inn-cidents. Not precisely sure what is causing it, it doesn't behave that way in any other browser and the JavaScript is pretty precise about what to display.
I continue to do more than lurk and will be posting regular again very soon!
When I stop to recover my breath and look over the edge of the foxhole at the incoming fire from life, work and hobby... it's amazing I'm still having so much fun!
Enough poor metaphor... I'm still alive and thinking about things WFRP and random tech topics.
Work has promoted me so attention gets focused on understanding the role, at and away from work. But I get to nerd on new technologies and kick the ass of developers still stuck developing in IE.
And I fixed the IE bug in the Inns of the Empire tool. Just have to promote it to production.