Lighttpd+PHP on Ubuntu

Submitted by William Chambers on Mon, 02/08/2010 - 19:30

Lighttpd is basically a light-weight version of Apache. I find it very useful for development as I don't have the wasted resources being used on Apache when there's just a handful of people actually using it.

You will need the following packages,

sudo apt-get install lighttpd php5-cgi

Next you'll need to enable the fastcgi module and restart the lighttpd daemon.

sudo lighty-enable-mod fastcgi 
sudo /etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload

Now you can symlink the www directory to a Web directory in your home folder. This will make it easier for a single developer to manage the files, but don't use this in a production environment.

Warning: Be very careful to type this command correctly.

sudo  rm -R /var/www
sudo ln -s /home/$USERNAME/Web /var/www

And you should be set.

Syntensity Community Website

Submitted by William Chambers on Sun, 02/07/2010 - 18:33

I'm going to start work on a Syntensity Community website. It will kinda be the quadropolis of syntensity. The question is what cms to use.

I can go fully Mediawiki and this will allow basically anyone who registers access to edit and create pages. Or I can use Drupal which will allow people to submit articles, pages, maps, files and so forth and have them approved by moderators. Note: This site is running drupal.

Both systems have large amounts of flexibility, and I'm certain that moderation would not gum up the works as much as most may think. so take your pick. Personally, I'm a fan of Drupal but I also think Mediawiki can be pretty awesome.

Which CMS?
Drupal
33.3% (1 vote)
Mediawiki
33.3% (1 vote)
Other (Leave a comment)
33.3% (1 vote)

Compiling Syntensity

Submitted by William Chambers on Sun, 02/07/2010 - 00:22

Syntensity is a game based on the Cube2 engine, the same engine that powers Assault Cube, Blood Frontier and Sauerbraten. This is notable because it is very simple to crate your own maps in-game and the engine itself is fully open-source.

Syntensity builds on this with vastly improved scripting support which lets players create complete gamemodes without having to recompile the entire game. This means the player can join a server and play a totally different gamemode depending on the server. It's this that sets intensity apart from the pack.

Because Syntensity is still in development, features are rapidly being added and improved and it is often advantages to have the very latest development version. This also means that there may be more bugs found, but I find the risk acceptable for access to the latest features.

To start, you will need some packages.

Ubuntu 9.10: sudo apt-get install git-core cmake scons g++ libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev

How to replace Half Life 2

Submitted by William Chambers on Mon, 01/04/2010 - 03:00

Half Life 2 is one of the most successful games of all time. With over 6.5 million physical copies sold, it is undeniably a hugely successful game. Additionally, the strong modification community that has arisen around the Source engine (Which powers Half Life 2) has spawned several generations of fan-created games, many of which easily rival their commercially created cousins.

Herein lies the question. Why would so many people invest so much energy in creating games on closed-source platform? Because the games are tied to the source engine, only those who purchase a game powered by the source engine can play. Furthermore, these games can never separate themselves from the engine without a complete re-write of the entire game.

The answer is really several reasons. Notably, people don't know about the alternatives. Game engines such as cube (Which powers Sauerbraten and Assault Cube) go unnoticed in the sea of commercially produced eye-candy.

Choqok Alpha2

Submitted by William Chambers on Tue, 12/15/2009 - 03:00

I just have to take a moment to plug Choqok, a KDE Microblogging client with support for Identi.ca and Twitter. I've been using Version 1.0 Alpha2 (0.9.4) for a couple hours now and while I've had someone tell me that it's been out for 2 months already, I don't recall ever seeing these improvements so perhaps I'm late, but I'm impressed enough to write a review anyway.

Overall the most notable improvement would probably be the UI. It's much more organised and compact overall and really makes things overall just less-clunky. I suppose that's not much of a compliment but you should consider that the point of a microblogging client is really just to stay out of the way.

The other important update for me was the "read-only" mode for accounts. An example of this being useful is my twitter account. I set it as read-only and don't have an input box at the top. This is because Identi.ca posts to twitter automatically for me.

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