Author Archives: William Chambers

Ohayocon 2011

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So it’s been nearly two weeks since Ohayocon 2011 and I still haven’t written a post about it. Well I’d better change that.

Thursday (the day before)

So on Thursday I spent the morning out and about with my mother before heading over to Ryou’s at around 6 pm. I was lucky enough to be invited over to spend the weekend there which saved me a couple hours on the bus each day. I got the chance to just chill with Kyra, Ryou, Sophia and Trent most of the night, which was ironically one of my favorite times of the trip. There’s something to be said for just relaxing with friends, even without any of the ‘events’ that our busy lives always seem to have.

Eventually we got tired, everyone kinda wandered off to sleep and I camped out on the couch for the night.

Friday (the first day)

So at about 4am I woke up thanks to my awesome allergies deciding to give me fits. I just had a snack and toyed with my phone until Kyra woke up. It was actually kinda funny, because I doubt she thought anyone else would be awake before her. Everyone was awake by around 6am-ish and we got out the door at around 7am, I can’t remember exactly.

Anyway, we eventually got to the Hotel downtown and were sorta lost. Eventually con security was spotted so we knew we were in the right place. It was actually funny, because we were outside their registration room and con security was going to a ton of work to prevent a line from forming early. So we all kinda clumped into a circle as close to the door as possible without actually really being in any kind of line. Thankfully I was pre-regged AND there about 3 hours early, but even then the line was pretty long. It was around the room by the time they opened reg at 9am.

After getting our badges, we mostly wandered around randomly for an hour or so, a few friends who didn’t pre-reg showed up and Ryou and most of the gang went off to hang with them in line. IIRC it was just me and Kyra who said the heck with that and ended up wandering together for basically the entire day. I’m actually really pleased that happened because I got to find a friend I didn’t think I had. Kyra and I never really had a chance to talk before then so it was pretty cool to get the chance too. The rest of the day is somewhat fuzzy since I took so long to write this up, but I think this was also the day I drug Kyra over to get her lunch, which was rather amusing since for someone who wasn’t hungry, there wasn’t any left. Yay for sushi shops!

Was this NOW or on the second day?
I should probably mention Kyra and Ryou both went off to the rave, which I just camped outside for. Since it was late I left my cell with kyra so she’d have a clock to know when they had to head out since I’d never find them in the rave. As a slight aside, I find it really awesome that I can trust Kyra with my cell like that, since I’m generally a slight bit paranoid, but I was totally comfortable with that. ^_^ I have such awesome friends…

Eventually we headed back to Ryou’s with Christina, Kyra, Ryou, Philip and Trent. We were pretty much dead-tired, so with Trent on the bed and phillip on the bed, Nikki and I camped out on the floor. Actually wasn’t that uncomfortable, one of the advantages of being young I suppose.

Note: Am I forgetting someone? I think I am…

Saturday (the second day)

We woke up around 8am, and started getting ready to go. Kai and Callie showed up for the con which was pretty awesome. I decided to head back to my place for a shower and offered it up to whoever wanted one also. Christina was the only one who decided too, so Christina and I headed over to my place thanks to a ride from my father. It’s amazing how good a shower feels after a full day wandering with a backpack on. So after that, we headed out to the con. It took a bit but we were able to find everyone easily enough thanks to Kyra texting me location updates. ^_^

This day was a bit random, I spent most of the day with Christina, wandering around randomly with Kyra and Callie part of the day as well. Nothing overly special happened, for most of the day, but it was still amazing fun and I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.

At around 5pm it turns out Christina needed an emergency ride home for things, so I called him up and thankfully he helped us out. I rode with them out to Christina’s and everything worked out. Once I got back to the con I texted Kyra to find where everyone was. I then found out that Kai was sick, so I rushed up to outside the dealers room and found them there. It was really, really worrying but we were able to get in touch with her aunt who came down and picked her up. She was ok in the end.

So the second that was over, Ryou goes off to do whatever it is she does, so me and Kyra hangout for the night.

Then we get word that our ride had broken down, so I got to call in a mayday with my father, who had just went to sleep, at 1am. Awesome. Ryou decided to stay the night with Nikki, so Kyra, Phillip and I headed back to Ryou’s for the night.

Note: Am I missing someone?

Sunday (the final day)

Quite honestly, I’ve mixed the days to so much I can’t remember the specifics anymore. However I know it was a totally awesome day, although we were a tad down without Kai to hang with us.

Summary

So I had a totally awesome time and I’m really looking forward to the next con. I’m not sure what day but I even had a chance to get a couple of my friends food, which I think surprised them. They’re always somewhat hesitant to take it, which is silly. Why would I begrudge feeding a friend? I know they’d help me if I ever needed it, so of course I’m beyond happy to feed them some. :) It’s always awesome to surprise friends like that. As an amazing side note, I found people trust me with their problems, and let me help them work things out. Leaves me feeling really good. :)

P.S. I need to take notes at the end of every day for all the cons so I don’t forget as much.

We are not enemies, but friends

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We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. - Abraham Lincoln, from his First Inaugural Address.

February Website Revamp

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This seems to be a monthly occurrence, but hopefully this will do the trick. Yet again, I’ve chosen to revamp the site and change the website to Drupal. Beside the obvious style changes, It will allow me to easily create separate areas on the website for different topics. This seems important to me because of how many drastically different topics I want to write about. From Cosplay to Anime/Manga to Photography to Art, Programming, Writing and assorted other things, it’s important to allow people who only care about one of these to see just them.

I’ll be working for the next couple hours and then continuing work tomorrow to bring back previous content and get some photos back online. So I hope everyone enjoys! Leave a comment if you have any requests, I’ll be sure to get to all of them that I can.

Three new 360 games

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I’ve been lacking in posts recently, and the reason is I just got three new Xbox 360 games. Mass Effect 2, Resident Evil 5 and Red Faction: Guerrilla thanks to Gamestop’s “Buy two used games, get one free” deal. I’ll probably be writing reviews on all three but I’ll write super-short ones here for as far as I’ve gotten.

Mass Effect 2

Actually planning to return it to get a VGA cable instead and buy it new instead. Buying it used is a bit of a ripoff as it’s only two dollars less, minus DLC. Why a VGA cable? The text is too bloody small without an HDTV. Bioware claims it’s a design decision, and because of this I no longer have much respect for them. If you make a mistake, you admit it, you don’t pretend it was on purpose. If I’m actually able to read it on my LCD screen however, it’s a great game.

Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil 4 with a new paint job. Not really a bad thing, but not ‘great’ either. Mostly fun, although I’m not really happy that they didn’t return to a city/mansion environment. Personally I like them better, but that said, it doesn’t really ruin the game. It’s not really hard, but it is pretty fun for sure.

Red Faction: Guerrilla

If you like blowing stuff up and driving through buildings, get it. Otherwise, don’t bother. Basically the entire game is all around blowing up buildings with awesome physics. It’s fun, really fun for short arcade-style gameplay. Otherwise, it does get a tad dull.

Managing Tasks

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Keep track of tasks has always been something of a pain for me. It’s not always that I don’t know what needs done, but getting that information out of my head and into a format that someone else can understand can be difficult. I’ve recently been attempting to find a solution for CubeCreate and have come to a few conclusions.

Nothing will be perfect. So don’t even try. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t strive for quality, but don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

Managing the list should not take long. This is very simple, but also very important. Don’t spend too much time updating your list. It should be easy and quick to update to both encourage you to use it and let you get back to the work that needs done as quickly as possible.

Why is a task list important? Because otherwise people don’t know what you’re doing and what needs done. Every project, even single-developer projects need a task list, if for no other reason then to prevent feature creep. If you were to stop working, or go on vacation, who would takeover? If you’re the only one who knows what needs done, it’ll take days for another developer to figure out what you were trying to do.

I’ve kept this list as short as possible, and only touched on the highlights to keep from boring people. For CubeCreate, we’re currently using a wiki page as our project-wide task list. It works well enough, and while I think a more polished solution would be better, it’s not worth the energy it would take to develop one.

Hopefully this has helped. What task management system would you recommend? Leave me a comment and let me know.

Christmas 2010

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Merry Christmas! I figured it was mandatory to write some kind of happy cheerful Christmas post today so here it goes. Today I had lunch with my parents and spent some required family time opening presents and talking. Then the Christmas movies came on, so I decided to abandon ship and watch some anime instead. But which anime? Perhaps something with a Christmas theme like Love Hina? Well sadly I don’t happen to have any, but I’ve found something that is strangely just as enjoyable and heartwarming.

The Twelve Kingdoms. It no real relation to the holidays and honestly I’m not sure why I like it as much as I do, but the characters are well developed and it has a plot, which, while not exactly earth-shattering, still manages to break the mold and feels very unique and magical.

The quick summary is this: A high school girl is brought to another world and dropped into a world of samurai and yoma. I honestly can’t say too much without giving away the plot, but It’s important to stick with it a few episodes to let it grow on you, because the beginning is a tad confusing at times.

With that, I think I’ll get back to watching it. I hope everyone has a great day. Please leave a comment if you know of any good holiday-themed anime/manga you’d recommend!

2011 Blog Revival

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Welcome to the revival of Bios Elemental. I’ve officially decided to revive my blog and attempt to bring you at least three posts a week with the goal of writing a post every day of the week. This is part of my new years resolutions that I aim to accomplish for the upcoming year/s.

I’ll be writing about different things, but it’ll have a focus on Free/Open-Source Software. However I will not be limiting myself to this and expect to frequently have articles about closed-source products and web services. As I’m working on CubeCreate, you should expect a number of articles related to it as well. This includes game reviews and perhaps some guides as well.

I’ll be enabling a contact form shortly that will allow you to submit suggestions for articles and I’ll do my best to take these into account as well. Well with that, thanks for reading and hopefully by the time you do there will already be a few other posts written. :)

Super Quick Update

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It’s been quite some time since I finished writing a post so I figured I’d do a quick post to let people know I’m still alive and what I’ve been working on.

1. Most of my time is going to CubeCreate, a Free, Open-Source game engine based off Syntensity and Cube 2/Sauerbraten. We’re actually getting pretty close to our first release so I’ll be keeping people updated on how things are going.

2. I’ve been doing most of my work on Haven, the web application for managing CubeCreate content, servers, user accounts, etc. It’s been based on various Python web frameworks over the past year but we’re finally to our final destination, Pyramid. It’s the product of repoze.bfg and pylons developers merging their efforts and I can honestly say it is easily the best framework I’ve ever seen. It’s got amazing docs, great devs and is very feature complete without being Bloated.

3. I’ve also been doing extensive work organizing the CubeCreate community and playing firefighter with a couple conflicts that have arisen. We’re still a very small (but growing!) project so it can be difficult to avoid issues, but so far I feel we’re handling things splendidly and I’m quite pleased with the result. I’m also in discussion with various major community members working on ways to avoid conflicts in the future so we’re tackling the problem from all directions, not just hiding the symptoms.

I’ve still got plenty of projects on the table and CubeCreate is only getting better so stay tuned because I’ll be updating things more often!

Using ToscaWidgets with repoze.bfg

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ToscaWidgets is a really handy python form framework that saves lots of typing when it comes to creating forms. I decided to use it for my BiosImg project to get a feel for things, but I ran into a small problem.

Even after I had enabled the tosca middleware, it still wanted to use genshi rendering. This is a problem because I want to use mako for the project and having two template libraries would be pointless.

After some help from twillis and mcdonc in the freenode #repoze channel, I was given the solution. I promised to blog it to help others with the same problem, so here’s the relevant part of the ini file.

[pipeline:main]
pipeline =
egg:Paste#evalerror
tosca
egg:repoze.tm2#tm
sql

[filter:tosca]
use = egg:toscawidgets#middleware
toscawidgets.framework.default_view = mako
stack_registry=True

As always, please be sure to comment if this was helpful to you. Also feel free to suggest any fixes/updates that may be needed.

Blender 2.53 Beta on Fedora

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Running Blender on Fedora 13 runs into a small problem which probably exists with some other Linux distributions. The error is as follows:

./blender: symbol lookup error: ./blender: undefined symbol: gzopen64

As far as I know, this is not a problem on Ubuntu because the zlib package for Ubuntu is compiled with gzopen64, or so I’ve gathered from several searches.

The fix for this bug is thankfully rather simple however a few hours searching didn’t really find any solutions so I wanted to write this up and share the solution.

You’re going to need to compile zlib. In my case, I found ubuntu’s zlib source tarball did the trick just fine. Just type this into your terminal.

wget -c http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/z/zlib/zlib_1.2.3.3.dfsg.orig.tar.gz

Extract it and cd to the directory. Then compile and make it as follows.

./configure
make

Note that you may have to install some extra packages. I’m not sure what these are because I already have a ton of development packages installed butit should be pretty easy to figure out.

Now you’ll need to prefix the patch to your zlib install to your blender launch command. This will vary depending on where you have blender and zlib. Here’s mine for an example:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/william/.applications/zlib-1.2.3.3.dfsg/ /home/william/.applications/blender-2.53-beta-linux-glibc27-i686/blender

If this has solved your problem, please let me know in the comments below. If it doesn’t work out or if you have any suggestions/tips for the article, I’d love to hear them.