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"Many people hack together shell scripts quickly to do simple tasks, but these soon take on a life of their own. Unfortunately shell scripts are full of subtle effects which result in scripts failing in unusual ways. It’s possible to write scripts which minimise these problems. In this article, I explain several techniques for writing robust bash scripts." This looks really useful.
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"I wanted it to be always on, with no dialling up required, and for it to automatically recover from network outages. I wanted the display to be big, but not intrusive. I didn't want a video conference. I didn't want people to be able to log in from home, or look back through recorded footage. I wanted to be able to wave at the folks in the other office every morning and evening, and for that feel normal." This is very good, and Tom is smart.
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"Brogue is a Roguelike game for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux by Brian Walker." It's REALLY good: stripped-down and straightforward, as Rogue was, but with nice mouse implementation and a lovely auto-explore mode. Really rather nice.
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"Hannah Montana Linux is a free operating system based on Kubuntu with a Hannah Montana theme." You know you've made it when you've got your own OS.
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"Faded is a super simple fading image and content viewer for jQuery. Easy to setup and design to your specifications. Features auto generated pagination, an awesome sequential image loader, some fancy crossfading, essentially no CSS required and a number of custom option for you to set if you like." Looks nicely coded, too; duly noted.
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"Building a series of Golf-themed Audio Novels is not the route to financial success." These are all true.
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"The book — by which I mean long-form text, in any format — is not a physical thing, but a temporal one. Its primary definition, its signal quality, is the time we take to read it, and the time before it and the time after it that are also intrinsic parts of the experience: the reading of reviews and the discussions with our friends, the paths that lead us to it and away from it (to other books) and around it." James, as ever, is very, very sharp. This is good.
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Open source DAW for Linux and OSX.
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"I keep coming back to EoPS (I am re-reading it as I write this) because it’s short, it’s easy reading, it’s funny, and much of its advice is timeless. In a way, you could say its age is even a plus-point, because it makes it obvious which of the rules are of their time and which are fundamental." Sounds great.
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"All yeahs in a baby are always the same height." Crazy markup preprocessor of the day, with suitably entertaining documentation.
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"It seems to me that Transgaming have done more to hurt the Mac gaming world than anyone else. The idea that you can turn your product into a Mac game OVERNIGHT, without employing ANYONE WHO SEEMS TO CARE ABOUT THE PLATFORM is an absurd thing to peddle."
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"Tig provides a simple command-line yet visual interface to Git." An explanation of what Tig does, and why you might find it useful.
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"Tig is a git repository browser that additionally can act as a pager for output from various git commands."
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Marvellous – case study of all the packaging concepts for the bonkers House Of The Dead: Overkill. Lots of gnarly, grindhouse-inspired graphic design going on here, and many things that are as good as the final version.
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"With no planning, we all started acting as if we were people in a real office. Almost immediately we began to adopt characters and send officious announcements. Soon we were referring to characters in the office who didn’t exist in real life. Meeting rooms were booked, couriers arrived, servers went down, timesheets were requested, and embarrassing emails were accidentally sent to everyone in the company." Phil is right; it's a wonderful, bonkers piece of improv-email theatre.
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"Record gives you unlimited audio tracks, world class effects and mixing gear, and a whole new take on music recording." Lovely: seamless Reason integration, virtual Line6 Pods, and a DAW-ish bit of software that works the way my brain does. Excited!
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"In this article, let us review 15 practical examples of Linux find command that will be very useful to both newbies and experts." I've never really understood find, so these are very helpful.
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"Ikaruga doesn’t treat you mean because it wants to see you fail. Ikaruga treats you mean because it wants winning to feel wonderful. But the more I became addicted to that mechanic, the more uneasy I started to feel. Volunteering to be beaten and humiliated on the promise of eventual pleasure? Isn’t there a word for that?" I can't get on with Ikaruga – too much of a memory test, too much punishment, not enough pleasure – but I can totally understand these sentiments. Lovely writing.
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The Wire has started airing on German TV, in a dubbed version; fascinating interview on how to translate it whilst keep the flavour of the original show.
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How come I have not seen this before?
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Preserved at least in the screengrab of this post: today is the 15th anniversary of the release of Doom, and Offworld have reskinned accordingly. Fun.
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"The outcome of this rampant illegal software copying is that Windows is seen as "the first world standard" and any attempt to push a cheaper alternative is strongly resisted. They consider it trying to cheat local people out of getting the same quality of software that is used in the developed world, even though it's a legal way of getting quality software for free." Not what you'd expect, but totally understandable: as said before, there is a middle class everywhere, and it has the same aspirations everywhere.
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…and here's a tiny bit that got cut from the final interviewer, from Tom Chick's own site. Spielberg talks in more detail about balancing storytelling and gameplay, and expands a bit on the cutscene problem.
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Tom Chick interviews Spielberg on games for Yahoo!. Spielberg is consumate and smart, as you'd expect, but also well-grounded; he really does _play games_. "Yes, I've played Half-Life, of course" – the "of course" is the important bit.
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“Sackboy will be tremendously popular and this is the perfect time of year to knit the little chap. Knitting and customizing him means that he will be utterly unique and a very cool accessory. We’re very lucky to have him in the magazine and we hope that he’ll help to increase the already sizable crossover between the great communities of gamers and knitters, online or not.” Frankly smashing. I wonder if Mum's looking for a Christmas knitting project?
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"In short, [MSG] defies many of the characteristics we normally ascribe to a tabletop RPG — in the context of a very cynical, and very cool, cyberpunky future where even the minimal constraints on corporate action that currently apply are removed, and any residual ethical norms for businessmen are considered the domain of chumps. Excellent, in a word." Ordered, based upon Greg's writeup and also the fantastic downloadable version of the ruleset. Now, to find some players.
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"It turns out that G1 firmware revisions RC29 and earlier literally interpret everything you type as command-line operations, so if you happen across a legit command, it's going to get executed." Now that's what I call a show-stopper. Wow.
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'“Games are great,” Robert Dvorak Jr. said. “You a learn a lot about strategy, you interact with people, you use tools and creativity. I’m a gamer, period.”' Also: lovely that Brookhaven celebrated the 50th anniversary of Tennis for Two.
Pulling from Git over a non-standard SSH port
13 October 2008
I must have lost about six or seven hours trying to get a Rails application deploying from Git in the past week. I could push and pull from the repository, but could I get the thing to deploy via Capistrano? No, I could not.
The problem, as far as I could tell, was not with Capistrano. It was a simple SSH problem. I block port 22 for SSH on the server in question, for security reasons, and use a different port. But, no matter how I specified it, Git was insistent on trying to pull over 22. I did a lot of Googling, and found lots of conflicting answers, none of which worked.
And then I learned my lesson. That lesson is: when Linus tells you what to do, you do it:
Use the “
.ssh/config” file ;)
So I configured a hostname in .ssh/config on the server, and everything worked instantly.
A lot of problems tend to come down to SSH, it seems. After that point, everything went swimmingly.