So, along with a whole host of other geeks, I’ll be at OpenTech 2005 tomorrow. NotCon was great fun, and I’m hoping that this year will be just as good… and that I’ll manage to network just that little bit more. If not, you’ll probably find me on the backchannels as twra2. Anyhow, it’d be great to meet any of you going; I’m probably bringing along a 6-gang extension lead for those precious power sockets, and will be lugging a copy of Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows, v1.1 (5.25″ floppies still shinkwrapped!) to donate to the Internet Archive. I might also have my DS.

Looking forward to it a lot… and do say hi.

Eurogamer report on a terrifying new computer game released by the National Alliance (roughly, America’s answer to the National Front). Entitled Ethnic Cleansing, it’s colossally offensive to just about anyone. As is traditional with about 50% of EG news items, it is essentially a rewritten press release – but goshdarn if the tone and content of that release aren’t scary enough. And to cap it all, there’s a quote from the NA chairman. I want to write more about this, but for now, just don’t have time; instead get over to the news article and make up your own mind. There’s so much in it that defies belief. And yet also, demands comment. I’ll see if I can rustle up anything further in future.

Pretty much since I got this Powerbook, I used an old, battered copy of BBEdit for my text-editing purposes. I quite liked it; I mean, the main thing I liked about it was the whole 9-point Monaco thing. Seriously, for me, text-editing on the Mac meant nine-point Monaco.

It integrated into FTP quite well, but sometimes its PHP syntax highlighting was wanting a little. I couldn’t afford to shell out the $100+ necessary for a copy of BBEdit 8, though.

A couple of weeks back, I realised that, now I was on Tiger, I could try out those text editors I was so interested in previously. The brief chance I had to use Textmate wasn’t enough to get familiar with it, and by the time I had the chance to spend serious time with it, my 28-day trial was up.

So I tried skEdit. And was pleasantly surprised. It has a “site” feature, for managing whole directories and subsequent SFTPing to mirror the structure on a server. It’s smart enough to auto-fill your classes and ids out if there’s a properly-linked CSS file in your site structure. It’s also got excellent code-hinting (wherein it reminds you of syntax for styles or functions), and the auto-completion, once you’re used to it, really speeds up the writing of code.

Add to that good snippet handling, good code tidying, and great auto-indentation, and it’s a really nice editor. The best bit? It’s $20 – for a lifetime licence. My demo ran out yesterday, so I bought myself a licence. I haven’t looked back – it’s been that pleasant an experience, and it’s already proved its worth over three seperate projects. It has some shortcomings – it is, after all, a text editor designed for web development, and doesn’t quite have the featuresets of Textmate or BBEdit. However, that’s all I need; I use a different text editor for note taking and writing, and the rest of my development is web-based. So with that caveat in mind, skEdit comes strongly recommended.

I finally did it.

Today, I deleted all trace of Movable Type from my webserver. Specifically, MT 2.661 – don’t think I was, like, up-to-date or anything. I kept it on the server to run sideprojects with – and in case WordPress turned out to, like, suck (which it didn’t, though it was touch-and-go for a while).

Bye bye, 11mb comment database, full of adverts for casinos and illicit videos. Bye bye, another seven-odd mb of Perl cgi. I’ll miss you.

I really will. Just because I’m getting rid of it, doesn’t mean I don’t like it. I know that MT3 is streets ahead of the old junk I was running, and as an enterprise blogging/CMSlite application (with a decent templating language), it’s fantastic – and remarkably powerful. Despite the colossal overlap, WordPress serves a slightly different niche; a niche that I mainly fit into, but where I don’t, I’ve got the capability (thanks to new found PHP-fu) to make it fit me.

I moved to MT from Blogger, when I bought this domain, and it was a very good move; I spent the couple of days before my exams revising, and when not revising, trying to wrangle MT into my cgi-bin directory. I swore I’d do it after them, but it seemed so easy, you know?

Fortunately, both turned out OK. But now it’s time to say goodbye to an old friend. My hosting company told me I was over quota, and I needed that 20mb of diskspace gone; I need space for my own systems, projects, applications.

Still, you lasted two years, despite all the trend-hopping around you. That’s got to be good going for any install of a web-app. Right?

OK, so I’m having two problems here, which I’ve discovered after installing a local version of MySQL (for development purposes).

Firstly: with MySQL, any user I create other than root can’t connect to the database. Well, they can through the mysql commandline program, but CocoaMySQL and PHPMyAdmin refuse to let them connect. Root, however, can via any means. Even though it’s only local and for testing purposes, I’d rather use a different user to root. But I’ve got no idea what’s going wrong. Any advice, anyone?

Secondly: my PATH variables don’t persist. I’m using tcsh as a shell, and when I add /usr/local/mysql/bin as a path, it works fine… until I close that terminal. And when I open the terminal, it hasn’t persisted – but it’s still listed in my .tcshrc file. I have no idea what the hell is going on, I’m not that advanced, and it’s a bit annoying.

So: does anyone have idea how to solve this? Lazyweb, do you have any ideas?

Anyone?

Update: solved the first problem. The trick is setting passwords with the old_password() function, as the clients are still using the old hashing algorithm.

See the title. Still at work, staying put until the Met give further advice on how to get out of here. Just wanted to keep anyone reading this site up to date.

Still, it’s quite scary just being at the moment.

(This is what I’m talking about, if you’re not aware).

So, I’ve been contemplating a (slight) redesign of this site. And one think I’d like to do is get a selection of the links so lovingly stored in WordPress’ Link Manager. Unfortunately, I can show them all, all from a category, or none. What I’d really like to do is pull a few of them at random from the links database. There is at least one plugin out there that does this, but it requires a seperate text file of links. Given WordPress already stores the links in a table for you, there’s no point reduplicating.

So I wrote a plugin to do it. It’s the first plugin I’ve released publically, incidentally.

The plugin adds a new template function to display a user-specified number of links, optionally with their descriptions, in whatever format you desire. The links are pulled from the database randomly. It’s also possible to not have the links displayed in the browser, but simply returned as an associatve array – so you can process them yourself.

From my brief testing, I can see that it works pretty well, though I haven’t really tested the array-returning functionality. Anyhow, there’s more about the plugin on its dedicated page on this site. You can download it from there and read the full documentation. I hope you find it useful. If you’ve got any problems, bug reports – just drop an email to the usual (and obvious) address.

Ah, my lovelies have come back to me: Consolevania season 2 has begun, with the release of episode 1 last night. You can find links to downloads or torrents on the CV site. It’s very good – really into its stride now, and balancing entertainment with something-approaching-information. For those of you who aren’t aware of it: four Glaswegians talk about videogames, and occasionally review them. They also do a series of skits with their alter egos. It’s very funny, and spot on. The Batman Begins review this month is a particularly highlight. Do go and download!

I like Sudoku. I quite enjoy Sudoku, as, it seems, does a vast proportion of the British population. Various people have, in recent weeks, used up an awful lot of newsprint trying to look at why it’s so popular, trying to out-Sudoku rival publications, and none of it seems very satisfactory. I mean, they bang on about how it appeals to both men and women – as opposed to chess problems, which are primarily male, and cryptic crosswords, which in my experience appeals equally (and usually equally little) to both men and women, but I think they’re missing the point.

The reason it’s popular is that it isn’t a game. It’s an exercise.

When I was on holiday in Spain I read Pat Kane’s The Play Ethic. It was one of the first non-fiction books I’ve read in years. I picked it up off the pile of free, unreviewed books at work, mainly because it looked interesting and thought it might tie into my grand-overarching ideas about histories of play and gameplay.

I was right. And it was also a lot more than that; if anything, it reassured me of my path and approach to life, offered some advice, and also steered me away from some things.

Now, as it was a non-fiction book I was reading relatively seriously, I decided to take notes – or at least as best I could in the succession of bars I read it in, pen in hand, tapas fork in the other. Unfortunately I became slightly too absorbed as I got into it and the notes fade away – although I do now remember underlining a fair bit in pencil, which I probably ought to aggregate with the rest. So a more formal set of notes on the Play Ethic – and, indeed, me jogging my memory to all the bits I found most interesting – is still upcoming.

But there was one paragraph, a third of the way through – after the notes in my Moleskine have all but dried up – that was good enough to write down.

“Somewhere, in the space created by some facility of the next generation of mobile and wireless devices, there will be a need for people to organize their random societal paths into some useful, effective flows (represented at the moment by the blogging movement), waiting for some general crisis of meaning or purpose to bring it all together in a flash.“

Kane mentions blogging but I think he means more; for me, his description calls to mind almost all forms of social software I’ve used (or can think of). The “crisis of meaning” isn’t a crisis of information-overload that can be solved by RSS; it’s a larger crisis, I believe, which leads to a realisation not only that all this information is important, too big, and must be read all at once, but also that it must all talk to each other. And I’m not sure that some uber-social-software will solve that; rather, it seems to be the language of communication, a framework for bringing knowledge together, that Kane anticipates. He’s essentially describing a world built not on the web but on web services; Web 2.0, the Semantic Web, whatever that whole concept is called this week.

Social software, along these lines, facilitates a drawing-together of knowledge – shared or personal. And this sharing is playful, just like the first networks we form as children. The more I think about this, the more I come to this conclusion: social software is inherently playful. Ludicorp, who we all know from flickr and Game Neverending demonstrated that explicitly – but there are so many other companies, products in this sphere that all are playful – full of play – in their own way. Some of them may agree more than others on that point.

Why is play such a useful idiom for social software, and indeed social networks? Perhaps it’s a trust thing. As we play, we begin to trust our playmates, as well as the tools and toys of our play. And trust leads to relaxation – calm found in the state of play – and so we end up choosing to play more often. The Xbox marketing team were having a surprisingly good day when they added that vital final word (signifying not only the market-leading Live service, but a crucial rhetoric for any player) to the console’s slogan:

it’s good to play together.