ShrimpWorks

Well I’m back from JHB :P.

I just spent my entire weekend playing EVE Online - a MMORPG type affair based in space - if you’ve played Microsoft’s Freelancer, you’ll have an idea of what this game’s about. Only difference is that EVE is a million times bigger, has thousands of players online at any given point (all in a single, living universe), is nowhere near as linear or dull, and the graphics will blow you away.

The best way I can think of for describing this game would be “OMG”. It is absolutely massive. Over the entire weekend I trek’ed around maybe 10-15 solar systems at the most, yet there are hundreds available. Every time I arrive to dock at a station, or pass by a stargate (transport between systems) there are ships I have never seen before. There are NPC-based missions galore, there are hundreds of player-run corporations, doing mining, production, peace-keeping, bounty hunting, and who knows what else.

This is absolutely THE most open-ended game I’ve ever laid eyes on… You can do absolutely anything. For example, you could set yourself up with offices and a production facility in a station, then go out and mine for ore and stuff, bring that back, refine it, buy some blueprints for a ship, build the ship with the refined ore, and sell the ships to other players. You could even buy ore from other players who do the mining for you, or buy new blueprints from traders bringing them from systems 20 jumps away.

It’s quite amazing… Get someone with a full subscription to give you a 14-day trial, download the client for free, and give it a bash :).

http://www.eve-online.com/

*sigh*

Seems I’ve been called off to head office again at literally a day’s notice. I was heading up next weekend though for a LAN with the Avatars (the UT clan I’m in), so I guess it isn’t all bad. Only problem now is carting around my PC, a new LCD monitor which I’ll pick up while I’m there, 2 weeks worth of clothing, and my laptop. Going to have to courier the PC up and have someone courier it and the monitor back after the LAN :(.

Internet is also blocked during office hours in head office, so I’m basically stuffed as I can’t exactly go home and see to things in the evenings. Where I’m responsible for a bunch of projects, websites, etc online, this isn’t exactly helpful at all. Hopefully I can still SSH home every now and then… Can’t even use VNC since my PC’s going to be all over the country.

Should be back by Monday the 28th… They don’t even know where I’m going to be staying while I’m up there.

*sigh* I hate this :(.

*sigh* Look at me starting a million projects and never finishing any of them :P.

Well this one, I fully intend finishing at least. It’s a wxPython GUI front-end for Dosage (http://slipgate.za.net/dosage/) which basically has the sole goal of making managing your comics easier for the mouse potatoes out there (and makes Dosage more accessible to the average Joe user who doesn’t want to mess around with command lines and stuff).

At present, it doesn’t do much, it simply builds a nice tree of comic modules (virtual modules are displayed as branches) and allows you to add those to a list (which basically makes up your ‘subscriptions’), and lets you select one or more of those and have Dosage download the latest strip for them.

OK so not much is going on… Thought I might as well pass along some general knowledge.

Changing the resolution of a Linux console is a fairly simple task (and requires a reboot) and is generally a nice thing to do if you intend using the console a lot.

Start off by logging in as root, and open your Grub menu file (mine is in /boot/grub/menu.lst). Next, find the option that would normally boot your Linux system (probably looks something like the following):

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.8-1-386 root=/dev/hda3 ro

Now, simply append to the end “vga=788”, so it ends up looking something like this:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.8-1-386 root=/dev/hda3 ro vga=788

The “788” is a code which tells the console to be 800x600 with a 16bit colour depth. Check out a table ot codes for all resolutions and colour depths by clicking the “read more” link below this post.

Save the file, reboot, and enjoy :-).

For reference, here are some VGA codes:

   Colors ( depth) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
   ---------------+-------+-------+--------+---------+---------
   256    ( 8 bit)| 769    771     773      775       796
   32,768 (15 bit)| 784    787     790      793       797
   65,536 (16 bit)| 785    788     791      794       798
   16.8M  (24 bit)| 786    789     792      795       799

I thought that it’s about time I messed around with proxies, so yeasterday I set up Squid on my server, xan.

The configuration looked like a bit of a mission for a first-timer such as myself :P, so I whipped out Webmin and slapped on the Squid module. I’ll take a look at the config options it generated some other time and do it by hand in future.

I must say the variety of options available is quite impressive. The access control lists are particularly exciting too, there’s a helluva lot that can be done with this stuff.

It’s only being used for HTTP at the moment, and is doing an excellent job. I’ve managed to get AWStats to do some basic reporting for it, so I can see who’s using how much bandwidth, viewing how many pages, what file types are being accessed, etc. I’m a bit of a stats junkie :P.

Overall I’m pretty impressed…

Seems I’ve spent most of today writing Dosage (http://slipgate.za.net/dosage/) modules - managed to find a whole load of comics, and ended up making 10 new modules.

It’s surprising how many comics have their main images sliced in half somewhere midway through the image (so it ends up being 2 images which Dosage obviously won’t handle), I found some that even have each panel in a separate HTML table cell :-/.

Not sure if it’s bad web design or whatever, but it’s a pity since they’ll never make their way into Dosage…

I’ve put my Python POP3 MailBox class up, it may be of some use to someone… Read the comments and stuff within the script for full details.

Download: http://shrimpworks.za.net/filemgmt/singlefile.php?lid=3

Well as expected, my little wxPython dict client is finished.

I decided to install the File Management plugin to let me put this stuff on here somehow… So check out pyDict in the “Files” link on the top-right of the site.

Or simply go here: http://shrimpworks.za.net/filemgmt/index.php

The ReadMe explains the basics of how it works and stuff…

Well I installed dictd on xan (this server) yesterday, and it seems to be working great for Nooblet (my IRC bot, powered by Supybot - http://sypybot.com/) since my ADSL is capped. Accessing it over the LAN and internet works great as well, though I have been hunting for a decent Windows dict client - they don’t seem to exist.

Anyway, so I’m creating a quick little client in Python/wxPython with the dictclient module (http://erwin.complete.org/devel) . Not intended to be a great big feature packed client, it just needs tolook up words after all :D

Should be done in a few hours…

So I thought I’d try out the highly praised Ubuntu Linux. I thought to myself, what better way to try than with their LiveCD - no need to mess up any existing setups.

Anyway so I downloaded the ISO, and after burning the CD, noticed it had a Windows auto-run feature. So I ran it, and was presented with a nice little window asking if I’d like to install Windows versions of OpenOffice.org, AbiWord, Audacity, Gimp, PDFCreator, Thunderbird or Firefox. That struck me as rather odd for a CD that’s supposed to be convincing you Linux is better (“Hey! No need to convert to Linux, just check out all this cool Windows software!”).

So I’m thinking oooookay, so I decide to try out the Linux bit of the disc. Everything boots up nicely, nice little GUI boot loader with a couple of options presented in easy-to-use menus, nice splash image hiding all the auto-detection of hardware and genreral stuff that goes on at boot time (pressing Esc kills the splash image so you can check that everything’s okay in the background). Once it booted up into Gnome, everything looked cool. Nice default desktop setup, theme, etc. I realised at this point that my router had DHCP disabled, so Ubunto had me offline. There’s a ‘Network Setup’ option in the “Actions” menu, which presented me with a nice little wizard for IP, DNS, gateway, etc options. Upon completeing this wizard and closing the application however, nothing would work at all. Icons on the panel did not launch applications, and neither did anything in the application menu. I’d have restarted X, but with LiveCDs, they seem to terminate and reboot as soon as X shuts down.

So anyway, I restarted the whole thing, but with the router’s DHCP enabled. Everything worked cool, the applications on the CD all worked as expected. At some point I entered the Network Setup again and needed another reboot though. Seems as soon as that is run it kills the setup…

It’s a very minimal system though, nothing really useful on it beyond OpenOffice.org - and who uses a LiveCD to do their general word processing. It even had Synaptic - but it prevents you from installing software or even updating the packages list.

I also tried Gnoppix, which is based off the Ubuntu LiveCD, but it suffered the same network configuration application problem, as well as lacking any interesting software. It also included all the Windows software Ubuntu had. In fact the only real difference I saw between Gnoppix and Ubuntu was the boot up splash image. Most of Gnoppix is still ‘branded’ as Ubuntu.

I think if they dumped the Windows software from these CDs, they’d be able to load on a LOT of extra Linux software to impress potential users more, as well as making it more useful as a general-use LiveCD.

The only thing that would make me want to install a proper Ubuntu system at some later date at the moment would be the fact that it’s a full desktop installation out-the-box, with the ability to install anything else on demand thanks to its Debian base.

For the moment I’ll be sticking to Knoppix when I need Linux-on-the-go, which it loaded with tons of useful and fun stuff (pity about KDE, though).

Heh, I’m feeling sort of blank lately… :(

Finally my Naruto collection is up-to-date thanks to |sAvAgE|, and he’s filling in the missing parts of the Full Metal Alchemist series too. So I’ve started watching FMA from the beginning again.

Something is REALLY wrong with the IS FTP server. I think they must be doing shaping for non-IS customers properly now :(. Updated a bunch of xan’s (this server) packages last night and it took an age to download just 27mb.

How kewlies is that - UnWheel has taken it’s rightful place as the #1 voted driving mod of 2004 (across all games supported by modDB). Hehehehe.

Might as well list all UnWheel’s achievements to date for the fun of it ;)

Make Something Unreal Contest - Phase 2 (UT2003):

• 1st place, Best Non-FPS Mod
• 1st place, Best Vehicle
• 1st place, Best use of Karma Physics

Make Something Unreal Contest - Phase 3 (UT2004):

• 3rd place, Best Non-FPS Mod
• 2nd place, Best Vehicle
• 1st place, Best use of Karma Physics

Make Something Unreal Contest - Phase 4:

• 7th place, Best Non-FPS Mod (can’t win em all ;-))

Make Something Unreal Contest - Grand Finals:

• Finalist (results pending)

Other accolades and awards:

• Bundled as one of 11 mods in the retail Unreal Tournament 2004: Editor’s Choice Edition.
• 1st place in ModDB’s Mod of the Year - Driving category.
• Awarded PC Zone UK’s Essential Choice, and featured on cover DVD twice (Sept + Oct 2004).
• Featured Mod on FilePlanet’s homepage (EC/MSU Phase 4 version).
• Featured on several magazines’ cover disks throughout the world, including UK PC Gamer (Dec 2004).

Not too shabby, hey?

Here’s something that’s been keeping me quite entertained recently. Outer Space is an online multiplayer space game where you try to explore and colonise as many systems as possible while forming alliances with other players to try to keep alive.

Sounds pretty simple… But throw in a huge tech tree that you can research to improve your production, research, population, ships, etc, and things become complicated pretty quickly.

The game is turn based, and each turn lasts an hour, so you need only check up on your empire once an hour. Or if you build up production, research and fleet order ques, you can check in even less often if you like.

Check it out: http://www.ospace.net/

Requires Python and PyGame

Well I got the E-Check list problems sorted… Was reusing odd variables :-/

Improved preview functionality in the core and GUI, and added a message source viewer. Also populated the list of accounts properly with a wxCheckListBox that lets you select the accounts to check. All working nicely.

Someone told me I don’t talk enough in IRC… :P

Well today I got multiple accounts working as well as writing/reading to/from a config file thanks to the ConfigParser module.

Improved the body retrieval in the MailBox class so it doesn’t die when there’s an attachment or some other weird part of a multipart message. Also on the GUI side of things needed to sort out some problems with different character sets, so now non-ASCII messages are encoded to iso-8859-1as needed.

There seems to be some problem now with the message list box returning the incorrect message selection, so trying to preview the last message in the list results in the first one being previewed… heh.

Todo: Fix list problems, selecting of messages for deletion.

Okay well I’ve been working on this for a while now - a new version of my aging “E-Check” application.

Brief into to E-Check: It’s a small utility that allows you to preview your POP3 mail accounts before downloading their contents into your email client. If there’s a message you don’t particularly like the look of, you can select it and have it deleted before it ever reaches your Inbox.

E-Check was written in Delphi 3 using the Indy (at that time it was knows as Winshoes) suite of networking components. There are currently a number of problems on Windows XP, and of corse, it doesn’t run on anything but Windows.

I’m re-writing it as modular as possible in Python. Currently I have a very nice “MailBox” class that connects and collects headers of all mail messages on the server. Extracting information from each of these messages is extremely basic, just call MailBox.GetSubject(msg_id) for example returns the subject of the message requested. Yes, I know Python has a whole suite of email utilities (and I am in fact making use of a couple of the functions/objects it provides - thanks mithrandi), but this seems (to me anyway) a much more simplified way of managing and accessing email messages, plus you get the whole ‘mailbox’ effect…

Anyway, with that class doing it’s own thing, I can pretty much plug it into any GUI. Web-based mailbox previews? How about checking your mail via a WAP device? “Python for Delphi” would allow me to re-make it almost the same as it is now (bound to Windows still though). At the moment, I’m running with wxPython though. Had a bit of trouble getting to grips with sizers and stuff, but now I’m building most of the GUI by hand (tried loads of builders and things) and it’s working out pretty well indeed. Cross-platform too.

To-to for right now: Multiple account support and saving/loading config info to/from file.

Well, after mucking around for a couple of days with possible layouts and trying to decide on Python or PHP, I gave in and took the easy way out and decided to try some pre-built blogging/CMS software…

I found Geeklog (what you’re looking at now). It seems to be a nice blend of blog and CMS… I think I can get it to do what I want it to with a minimum amount of effort :P.

Umm anyway, this is going to be my personal site type thing where I put my stuff and things…