hræfn.net

Finally.

This is well timed, as I have lost the ability to share Google Reader articles.

The setup process was not the most straight-forward, but the instructions are clear and offer very helpful links throughout. The only obstacle I encountered was the need to enable Google Talk/Chat.

I have been using one flavor or another of PHPMyAdmin for almost the duration of the project. The app has become ubiquitous; every web host that I have used in the past seven years has had it as part of their control panel. I have installed it myself maybe a dozen times.

Late last year I moved everything from LunarPages to FatCow; I did not feel like paying for two years of hosting and FatCow was a little cheaper. For whatever reason, FatCow’s PHPMyAdmin would not import a 500kb SQL file. I hated the idea of installing my own version of PHPMyAdmin because

1. you either need to keep up with security updates or remove the installation and
2. it was already installed by my host!

So I looked at two alternatives. The first was SQL Buddy and I ran into similar issues uploading the file. I was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with the FatCow MySQL server, or maybe Comcast.

I finally settled on Adminer. Worked fine.

I have resurrected the blog portion of hraefn.net and converted to TextPattern. I like it so far; some teething pains tonight as I migrated from my local machine.

A few things are not working correctly, but it was important for me to get the site up and mostly functioning. I think a broken public website can be a powerful motivational tool…

I decided this week to once again install Windows XP onto my MacBook, and set it up with the couple applications I needed for work. Hauling a laptop to the office is not onerous, but the MacBook is a hell of a lot lighter than the clunker Dell. Nevermind that I need Windows to run Ventrillo during guild runs.

Having used Boot Camp before, I felt pretty comfortable with repartitioning my drive and fiddling with the Apple drivers. I spent an afternoon clearing some space; I removed ripped DVDs, a seldom-used backup installation of WoW, some software that came with the MacBook and a lot of downloads and log files. I grabbed the latest Boot Camp and ran the installer. One gratuitous legal agreement later, and I am attempting to set up a 20gb FAT partition.

Your disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved

Back up the disk and use Disk Utility to format the disk as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. Restore your information to the disk and try using Boot Camp Assistant again.

Damn.

I was pretty sure from the start the issue was fragmentation. The intarweb was not much help, but I was able to find a very nice defrag utility for the Mac, called iDefrag. Running a trial version of their software showed me exactly what I expected… the MacBook had no contiguous space large enough to partition.

So I bit. The software was easy to buy and I soon had a licensed copy. I rebooted the MacBook into Target Disk Mode and plugged it into the G5. An overnight Optimize cleaned up the drive nicely, but I was not done yet; I still had to run Apple’s disk utility to fix a small error that iDefrag had created. Not a big deal.

Now if only Windows XP did not make me feel so… exposed.

Development of our collaborative roleplaying game sort of came to a halt a couple months ago; quite frankly we had written ourselves into a corner. Writing a solid roleplaying game is hard, even when you have a great universal system like Fudge to work with. All those little “fiddly bits” were beginning to bump up against one another.

The ultimate goal was to create a simple but fun way to roll some pen and paper adventures in the world of Azeroth. The core rules needed to be elegant and fast-paced, which meant easy to understand and fun to play. Risus provides such a system. Simple game mechanics, tons of roleplaying required, a snappy combat system and plenty of die rolling.

The result is Mobsplode, a lot of adventure in a very small package. Some “bendy” rules to create Warcraft characters, some new stick-figure art, and a medium dose of free time have created a really fun game. We played a three-hour adventure last week, and everyone enjoyed the experience. We laughed our asses off at some of the situations that the players found themselves in, even when presented with otherwise straightforward situations. Mobsplode is definitely something we will be playing again soon.