shivan.org

My project for the night was to create a script to generate an RSS feed for WTF Comics. WTF Comics is a comic set in the Everquest world that has a continuous story line. A very entertaining read for a former EQ addict like myself. WTF Comics was one of the few sites that I check that doesn’t have an RSS feed yet so it seemed like a good project.

What I thought was going to take me an hour tops was a good four hour affair spent learning (and relearning) the following things:

• Mozilla’s View Source feature changes HTML tags from upper case to lower case. I ended up fighting with a regular expression in vain because I didn’t know Mozilla didn’t just colorized the source but also fucked with it.
• Regular expressions suck. I can’t believe that after a billion or so years of evolution on this planet the apex species on this planet would be satisfied with regular expressions as a basic form of pattern recognition. Grrrrr…..
• There are multiple different RSS standards with different XML formats. Did you know that RSS 1.0 is actually much more complicated and has more bells and whistles then RSS 2.0? I will have to sit down and read through the specs one of these nights. For now I’m happy with copying the RSS 2.0 from working examples and having validators be happy with it.
• I hate regular expressions.
• My hosting company apparently configured apache to treat any filename with “.py” in any part of it as a CGI script. Unfortunately it also thinks “foo.py.gz” and “foo.py.zip” are CGI scripts too….
• I really hate dealing with regular expressions.

The feed is available here and the script is available here (useless screenshot here).

I got an email today from a local reporter who is pondering writing an article on local bloggers. Not knowing that such things exist I started doing some google diving for “new paltz blog” and other search terms and found the following gem:

“I came for fun and freedom. There’s no place else I’ve ever been where being a woman is such a plus,” explained Loreli, 22, from New Paltz, New York. “Flash a bit of nip at a Defcon vendor and you can basically get whatever you want for free. I think it’s so weird that some chicks have a problem with that.”

Now I’m trying to figure out if I’ve ever met a Loreli…

Roads: The roads in the New Paltz area were quite horrible after 8 inches of snow fell overnight. As usual the state managed roads, Route 32 and Route 299, were clear and well taken care of by the DoT but all of the roads taken care of by the local crews were muddy slushy messes. This has been the trend all winter so far.

Credit: I went to pay my MBNA credit card using their bill payment website and was greeted with a notice that I must upgrade my version of Netscape to use the site. I was rather angry considering I had been using their website to pay my credit card using various forms of Mozilla on Linux for at least two years now. After installing and configuring a User Agent Switching extention for Mozilla Firebird I was able to pay the bill without problem.

After I finished with the website I gave MBNA a call to let them know it was an issue for me and it only took about two minutes of phone time until I was directed to the appropriate department. The man I spoke with apologized for the problem and then started telling me about how to change the User Agent string in Firebird as a temporary workaround.

I was quite shocked at this and told him I had already done so but thanked him for the effort. He then mentioned they were working on fixing the problem on their end and that he had helped several Opera and Safari users with similar problems today. (Yes, tech support for a major bank actually knew what ‘Opera’ and ‘Safari’ were and how to support them. Amazing!) For a soul-less evil credit card company MBNA does seem to do a very good job with customer support.

I mentioned this story to a few people on IRC and one of them pointed out the irony of the official financing company for Apple products locking out Apple’s own web browser. Hopefully this will be fixed soon (and I have no reason to doubt it).

If you are bored check out these Everquest II Screenshots. The screenshots themselves range from decent to pathetic but that isn’t the reason I posted this. Check out the comments people have submitted for each screenshot. The comments for the higher numbered screenshots are very funny.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I really do not want to be playing Final Fantasy XI for more than another month or two. The game world is decent, NPCs interesting, jobs and abilities are accepitable, but the people and the grind suck.

The game has three fatal flaws. The first is the Linkshell system. It simply does not encourage community, at all. Linkshells are over glorified chat channels. Instead of guild tags over your head there is the color of the bead. This is understandable under the context that in a multilingual environment guild names in other languages would distract from an role playing environment. Unfortunately this tends to destroy a sense of belonging to a ‘group’ (I’m sure a sociologist would have a better term for it) since there are only so many colors and colors are not very expressive at all. There is also the fact there is little to no role playing at all in the game.

The second flaw is the level grind. Square-Enix has put tons of content in the game. They have many zones where you can level, many quests and missions to do, and places to explore for all level ranges. No one ever uses this content. There is a ’set in stone’ leveling progression in this game that you can’t get around unless you can convince people to leave these key areas and explore with you.

The problem is you can’t guarantee safety and experience because very few American players have ever been to these places and without a tight knit community its hard to encourage people to go with you. So you end up having to go to these ’set in stone’ places to get a group. And since the mobs are often so incredibly hard a group is a must in the game. I don’t consider forced grouping to be a downside of the game, it is just a trait of a game and I take it as it is (since I’m someone who likes grouping anyway).

The job system makes this even more of a problem because you are often grouping with people who are doing the level 1 to 30 grind for a second or third time. These people grinded their way to 30 the first time at the usual spots and will be damned if they have to endure “substandard” experience at unfamiliar spots. They want to get back up to 30 as soon as possible and I can’t blame them. I feel the same urge myself with my Bard. People say the game really starts after 30 (as the bulk of the content of the game is not accessible before then). They may be true but I’m too much of a jaded MMORPG burnout to wait for the magical level when all of the evils of the game will go away and the players will be in content bliss.

And finally the third fatal flaw of the game is the players. Simply stating “Jesus… what a bunch of dumbasses” would not be fair. This game seems to have an abnormally high number of people new to MMORPG games and not willing to learn or accept tips on how to play. Then there are the general assholes who think they can do whatever they want and end up doing the usual camp stealing, training on groups at zones, etc. There are quite a few experienced MMORPG players or newbies who are clearly making an attempt to learn but I’m starting to think they are the minority.

I don’t know about you… But I could use some ribs… Tasty.

I’m starting a new job at the end of February. I will be giving up my job as academic support and System Administrator and taking a job as a Network Administrator. Time to read all those Cisco books I have laying around.

Played around with FRAPS a bit as a replacement for FFXI’s horrible screenshot functionality. The “shareware” version seems to work fine for simple screenshots of DirectX based games. I leave the Frames Per Second indicator off as it slightly depresses me to know I’m getting 10 to 12 FPS during battles in front of Delkfutt’s Tower in Qufim Island with the 20 other people usually standing around. The menus in the game are still quite responsive even with the low frame rate.

The Mozilla Firebird “Flash Click To View” seems to have issues with recent versions of Firebird nightlies and it has not been updated in a while.

I noticed over on mozdev.org’s Extension Room that some kind soul has written his own version: http://www.suteki.org/downloads/flashblock-0.3.xpi.

The Flash Block notice with this version uses softer colors and fonts and doesn’t stand out as much on your typical page.

Today I worked on setting up OpenLDAP as an authentication server for a Linux lab. It was a pain to figure out but it only took a few hours compared to the week or so it took me to get Solaris properly working with Sun’s LDAP server.

I found these two sites to be very helpful:

• Authentication using LDAP
• Using OpenLDAP

I decided that 1:30am was the perfect time to give Gnome Blog another try to see if I can get it working with my slightly customized pyblosxom install. I had problems using it before and assumed the software was buggy but it turns out the problems were ones I created myself.

I needed to delete two lines of code I added to the blogger xmlrpc API plugin within pyblosxom and add a total of two lines of code to properly generate a correct ID for use with the ‘pyfilenamemtime.py’ plugin. Making these changes also fixed a problem I had with BloGTK’s handling of entry titles.

It is amazing how simple pyblosxom code is and yet how powerful it is. (And the python xmlrpc library looks near godly as far as ‘cool hacks in few lines of code’ go…)

Total time spent on all of this (and not sleeping): One hour.