Can’t say I have much interesting to report, besides lots of work on BiosHub. But regardless, Happy Holidays. ^_^
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So I’ve been having some pretty wild times as of late which is my only excuse for not updating this. My goal of getting three posts a week turned into a post a month, if I was lucky. Rather then continue to insist on utterly perfect posts, I’m just going to throw things up and see if they stick. ^_^
Going to keep this short with a quick summary of what I’ve been up too.
- Got a job at Wendy’s as a sandwich maker
- Got a job as a server admin for a major Minecraft server host
- Got an offer to move on with a couple friends in Indianapolis which I’m aiming to do
- Put in my two weeks for Wendy’s in preparation of my move
- Started getting traction with an online community I’m forming called BiosHub
- Continued planning conventions and website ideas
Short, but a pretty solid summary. I won’t bother promising I’ll write more often, but I’m thinking of integrating with Google+ so it’s a little more lively at least.
Decided I’d post a couple of the articles I’ve found particularly interesting today.
Freegamer: the challenges of developing long, plot-heavy FOSS games – Can you make a long plot-based FOSS game? I tend to think you can, but really this article reaches stronger then just plot-heavy games. Can you make ‘any’ hyper-detailed game and expect to be successful without being a AAA title?
Some thoughts on Copyright Assignment by Michael Meeks – This is a really good article about Copyright Assignment and some of the pros and cones associated with them. It’s surprisingly neutral, although the author isn’t a fan of Copyright Assignment.
So I’ve decided to think up new ways to write updates. One of the things that seems to slow my writing is actually deciding what to title posts. I only noticed just today that another project, Dwarf Fortress, writes short news blurbs every 2-3 days and I’ve looked over how exactly they do it.
Most of the posts are by one person. They’re usually bulleted lists of bugs fixed and different updates, sometimes accompanied by a paragraph or so explaining what’s been going on. Post titles are simply the date, only changed for releases in which case it’s the version number + the date.
These rather short updates are easy to digest and while they’re usually not terribly in-depth, they prove the project is active and present the image of someone who actually cares about his community.
So do I have a point in writing about this? I’m going to try a similar approach. Go for two or three paragraphs a post on whatever happens to be going on, hopefully every two or three days. We’ll see how it goes.
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.
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.
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.
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. 
Nope, I’m not dead. I just haven’t had a whole lot to report recently. This is going to change soon though as CubeCreate gears up for an alpha release and Haven goes live.
In the meantime, I’ll report on what I’ve been up too. Most of my work has been focused on Haven and a few small pylons applications which I’m making to split major features into smaller pieces. For example, BiosImg is a tinypic style website which I’m designing to test different ways of handling user uploaded images.
On a similar note, I think I’ve finally figured out the basics of repoze.who/what and that is very good for the future of Haven. A strong well-tested auth system is very important and repoze.who/what is for sure better quality code then I could work out in a few hours.
I’m continuing to look at Turbogears 2 but since the project seems frankly somewhat dead at the moment, not to mention their lack of support of Pylons 1.0, I think I’ll simply end up porting a few handy features over.
Running Dwarf Fortress on Fedora Linux is mostly straight forward however SELinux can cause some problems. Strangely, SELinux is what prevents it from running but I was unable to find any logs of the access denial. This is the error it returns:
./libs/Dwarf_Fortress: error while loading shared libraries: /home/william/.applications/df_linux/libs/libgraphics.so: cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied
The problem seems to be in SELinux. I found a workaround that seems to work just fine. I’m not sure if it’s best practice or anything but it got Dwarf Fortress running just fine. Be sure to replace the path so that it’s pointing to wherever you’ve put Dwarf Fortress.
sudo semanage fcontext -a -t textrel_shlib_t /home/william/.applications/df_linux/libs/libgraphics.so sudo restorecon -R -v /home/william/.applications/df_linux/libs/libgraphics.so
And you should be set. Please leave a comment if it helped.
