Month: June 2009

Categories
computer games design games design iphone MMOG development programming

Want to help write a simple RPG for iPhone?

Now I’ve recovered from GDC illness, I’ve got a little free time again, and I’m starting one of the iPhone games I wanted to write. This is a “for fun and learning” project, so it’s deliberately chosen to be low maintenance / easy to make a first version / easy to extend later / etc. I need artists, designers, quest-writers, and programmers.

Well, I don’t *need* anyone; I can do this all myself. But I’d rather do it with other people, and I thought there might be some hobbyists reading this who’d like to do something similar.

EDIT: there’s now a googlegroup for people working on this. You *must* contact me first via email (see below) or your request to join will be automatically rejected. http://groups.google.com/group/dmclone

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Categories
security server admin

Making MediaWiki secure (and fixing some config annoyances)

(this assumes you are running Debian on your server; if not, I suggest you switch)

Mediawiki. One of the world’s less secure wikis? Probably. I use and install it a lot, and it’s usually “the compromise wiki”: it’s weak at a lot of things, but it’s the “least worst overall” a lot of the time. Here’s my current standard fixes and tweaks.

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Categories
conferences massively multiplayer network programming programming

Everything you need to know about being an awesome MMO Tech Director

Really? O, RLY?

Well, no, probably not – but this is the kind of opening statement I often make at industry-conference parties. In this rare case, at LOGIN this year, I was showing something on my laptop at the time and happened to *type* my opening salvo, rather than just say it.

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Categories
bitching maintenance

Why am I ignoring you? (Sorry, I didn’t know you’d called)

I just discovered something rather annoying: people have been leaving voicemail on my cell phone. Please don’t. I can almost guarantee that I’ll never receive the message.

Normally, this doesn’t happen: I have a recorded message explaining:

  • don’t leave a message – I won’t receive it. No, really. Don’t leave one “just in case”: you’re being self-delusional. I WILL NOT receive it. (It’s amazing how many people struggle with this concept :)).
  • if you need to contact me, you should already have my email address; if you don’t even have my email, then you shouldn’t have my phone number in the first place
  • if it’s urgent, you can try sending an SMS, but if I wasn’t answering the phone, it’s probably switched off or out of cell reception, so I might not see the SMS for a while either (but at least I’ll see the SMS as soon as I’m back in range / switched on)
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Categories
amusing security

A Spam a day keeps the madness at bay…

Every now and then I scan through my auto-spam folder and see what’s in there. Sometimes the subject lines are hilarious. Other times they teach you about new kinds of phishing attack that are being attempted.

Mostly, they just say depressing things about what it is to be a human in the 21st century.

All the following were yanked from spams I received in the last few weeks (I just did a subject line sort for what was left since the last mass-deletion). I have to say … the depressing, “makes you want to kill yourself if this is the kind of email you receive and respond to” ones have mostly disappeared, which is good. But the ones about MEGADICK that used to make me LOL have sadly faded away :(.

Lost in translation? (aka “WTF?”)

Be a bedroom business master!
Make your hose’s radius great
Fertilize your male tree
From now you don’t need a crane to lift your instrument up!
Come now, pay less!

Sounds painful…

Your manhood will come back to you like a boomerang
Load into her like a geyser!
With a bigger tool you can break not only hearts but splits
Hammer your pile in her
Pills of lion stamina
Make her your rod’s slave
Best doping for night monster
Replace your pant snake with python!

Someone call the cops?

Your drawbolt will go deeper in
Pound her, more and more
Make your love gun active and effective!
Good shells for your love gun
Find how to drill her better

There goes my self esteem

Your instrument is so tiny she barely finds it in bed?
You have no stamina any more to satisfy your loved one
Greatness is measured by the size of your manhood
This watch will add some elegance to your taste
Losing your popularity as a man?
Get a diploma for your career!
Masters degree with no efforts
Show your girlfriend that there can still be a lot of flame in your bed
Feeling unneeded in bed?
What does a frog want with you?
With a monster device you will feel like a man
From now you will be able to satisfy every size – queen!

Telling it like it is, man

Man empties gun at car, victim survives
Why lie? I need money
Bacterial infections are stopped by Amoxicillin

“Optimism” (aka “O, RLY?”)

We cure anything from headache to cancer
Worldwide delivery instantly to your home
Go here for guaranteed boner
If you can’t beat CEOs … join them

Kindness

Free money
Wanna beer?
Sexually aroused
I can help you
We go to cinema tonight

… and threats

Fucking fill this form
I wanna worry you
Universal decision for men who want to stay men
We will not let your manhood die … call us
You are disqualified!
Get a degree
Suck it
List of conditions
Get your nice hair returned to you
Your friend in trouble
Click or cats gonna die

The men from UNCLE

Erase message after reading
We’ve found your car
Don’t settle for less than 15x power!
Respond, please
Medications that you need

Bad day

We canceled the exam
We canceled the conferences
Forgot keys, forgot phone

Story time

What’s this?
Shocking! Rihanna was cursed
A giant outside
Sitting by the well playing

To Much Information

That shit made my day
Celebrate independence day with a hard boner

Categories
iphone

May 2009: Survey of iPhone Developers

There’s 45 million iPhones out there, and tens of thousands of iPhone Apps – we know this, and we know that the top-10 apps make millions of dollars each. But what about the developers, the people *MAKING* these apps – do you have any idea who they are?

There is/was no widely available info on who these people were, how they worked, etc, despite the many companies making strategic decisions on this stuff right now. The small teams, especially, are largely on their own, and even if someone did a big, expensive, report they don’t have the money to pay for it (I include myself in that group).

At the start of May, I created an online survey to find out some more info about “who” the people are that are currently developing for iPhone – from one-man-bands through teams of part-time friends to large development studios.

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Categories
databases programming

Export spreadsheet to plain XML with OpenOffice 3.x (works!)

Microsoft Office:

  1. Costs stupid amounts of money
  2. Isn’t very good
  3. Is only available on windows
  4. …but “usually” works

OpenOffice:

  1. Is completely free
  2. Is an almost exact clone of Microsoft Office circa Office 2000/XP
  3. Is open-source (so that sometimes you can easily fix it yourself, quite surprisingly!)
  4. …but apart from the Microsoft Word part, “often doesn’t work”

I’ve been using OpenOffice’s Word clone as a complete replacement for Word for the past 3 years, and it’s been perfect. Previously, I used to use Word *and* OpenOffice, because the latter had some big bugs left in it.

Sadly, OpenOffice’s Excel clone is … often shockingly buggy. I won’t go into the details. But this post is about one missing/broken feature in particular: OpenOffice by default saves / exports XML which (for most people, and all simple uses) is unusable/unreadable – and is very hard to convert with XSLT. Read on for a script that will fix this for you…

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Categories
PHP programming

Now I remember why PHP is so easy to hate…

(aka “why do my include/require/include_once/require_once files not work / seem NOT to be included, even though they are?”)

PHP has a mechanism for including files inside each other. The architects of PHP didn’t really think much about what they were doing with a lot of the core language features (witness the foolishness over Register Globals), and file import/include/require is a classic example.

This is one of the most fundamental features of the language, and it’s screwed up. It “seems” to work, so long as you write simplistic enough / small enough apps. The bigger your app, the more likely it is you’ll discover how poor this part of the language is.

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