Looking for a good open source Software Libre alternative to Google Analytics? I can't recommend Piwik highly enough.
Have fun.
If you visit my website you will notice everything is in a scrawly hand-written font now. This is a digitized version of my own handwriting. Here is how I produced it:
To get it as a web useable font:
Font-face declaration:
@font-face {
font-family: 'MyFont'; /* Use the real name of your actual font */
src: url('MyFont.eot');
src: url('MyFont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
url('MyFont.ttf') format('truetype');
}
You can do this with basically any TTF font, but watch out for the legal implications of using commercial fonts on the web. It's obviously fine to do it with a font of your own handwriting. There are probably lots of other free fonts you can do it with too, but read the licensing information first.
Here's to more flexible web typography!
Photo by Renee Glastonbury. Altered to obscure one nipple. :)
Sometimes you want to test a bit of PHP code on your local machine without installing a full LAMP stack. Mongoose is a web server that will let you do that.
Under Ubuntu I first downloaded and installed the mongoose source code, then I installed the package php-cgi and here is the script called phpserve that I use to launch Mongoose in the top level directory of my PHP project:
#!/bin/bash
mongoose -e error.log -r `pwd` -i index.php -p 8000 -C .php -I /usr/bin/php-cgi
After that you can browse to http://localhost:8000/ and you should see your site.
Enjoy!
A piece of the world I really enjoy.
This thing is great. I got it from VTech Industries for about $220 AUD. It is basically a mini GNU/Linux server with 2 giant hard drives in it. That price gets you a single 1TB drive and you can install your own drive in the other bay by removing the lid and dropping it in place. The unit, pictured below, is a bit taller and wider than three PC hard drives stacked together.
It comes with a reasonable web interface you can access over your LAN, but I installed the fun_plug hack on it by copying the files across the network and restarting the device - easy. That hack gets you SSH access, rsync, and a bunch of other Linuxy stuff.
We are storing our media and backups on it and it is basically perfect for that use-case. I now once again have a cron-and-rsync based regular backup of all of my servers in the USA, hooray! I'm also routing all SSH traffic to our ADSL router through to it so I can access the files on the device from outside our network if neccessary.
All in all I am very pleased with this purchase.
I have included a modified version of Benjamin Hardin's 2009 A* implementation in jsGameSoup. This is a nice general way for entities in your game to find a path between two squares on a two dimensional board with some obstructed squares. Check the demo here and the documentation here.
Have fun!
Recently I added Sean McCullough's Javascript implementation of the Perlin noise algorithms to jsGameSoup. These Academy Award winning algorithms by Ken Perlin are fantastic for adding procedural content to your games.
The RPG map above with grass, water, road, sand, and tree tiles represented in the different colours, was produced with the simplex noise demo here. It can randomly generate a basically infinite number of unique RPG maps of basically infinite size. Check the jsGameSoup documentation for more details.
I am ready for Global Game Jam, Perth 2012!
Not going to globalgamejam? Check out Wai-con - it was a lot of fun last year and the costumes and atmosphere are enjoyable even if you are not that into anime.
PS I'll probably throw on a little bit of Disasterpeace too. :)
The theme is "Ouroboros". Progress as at midnight day 1:
I have a reasonably concrete idea of where I am going. Hopefully there will be time to iterate on my idea and "find the fun".
End of Saturday night, day two:
Got some sleep. Lots of on the TODO list for today. About 7 hours left. :)
Here is what I ended up with at the end of GGJ 2012. I've cleaned it up a bit, got it working under Internet Explorer (mostly) and put it online here.
I ended up with more of a virtual world or virtual ecosystem than a video game. I ran out of time to put probably the most important thing into the game - game mechanics. Also no time for sound, the player has very little agency in the world, and there are no win or lose conditions.
Overall it was a lot of fun to build though, and I got some pretty neat new technology for jsGameSoup out of it, namely the isometric camera library, and a lightweight vector math library.
GGJ was also really fun just because of the social aspect of being crammed into a room with like minded people for 48 hours. Can't wait for next year!
I'm excited to let you know that my new EP is out now on UK label ChordPunch!
It's called squeakyshoecore EP and you can find it in most mp3 shops now. I would really appreciate it if you would give it a review, or tweet/facebook it, do a blog post, give it a listen, or buy it.
Visit the squeakyshoecore page to like/share it on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus
Any help you can give me getting the word out would be very appreciated.
Thank you so much!
I don't talk about my professional work a lot on this blog so this is a bit of a departure. Lately I've been very lucky to be working on some really interesting projects with really great people. Here is something I've nearly finished (shipping to app stores as we speak!) with the wonderful PVI Collective and friends:
how to play deviator movie from pvi collective on Vimeo.
deviator is an immersive, real-world, outdoor game which invites players to temporarily transform their city into a playground. your mission is to seek out 15 audio instructions hidden in public spaces and play as many of the games as possible. as a deviator you can explore the local area, play a series of on-site games, interact with on-site performers, receive points and send text messages within this application.
using gps and the camera on your phone, deviator allows you to select a game from an on-screen map, locate it and scan a strategically placed qr code to activate the game instructions. games are scored in terms of difficulty and range from activities such as "guerrilla pole dancing" and "ring-a-ring-a-roses", to "spin the bottle" and "twister". each game encourages the player to explore their public space in a new way.
There were just so many great things about working on this project.
The first tour of the work is showing in a few weeks - the last week of July 2012 - at Surge Festival in Glasgow, Scotland. I'll be there as "tech guy", so if you are a fellow geek into Free Software, video games programming, Pure Data, makerbots, etc. and want to share a beer look me up!
There will be other tours coming up around the world, and if you are interested in booking the tour at a festival in your city, please contact projects@pvicollective.com for more info.
Bye!
photo by Dirk McCormick
