KODA

Bought a shiny new mouse today: the wireless optical Logitech LX7. Everything worked great out of box, until at around 11:30pm I decided to google around to see how to configure the tilt-wheel and back and forward buttons to work in Linux.

Big mistake.

It’s now 1:35am, and I finally have my solution. The trick is to use the evdev X.org input driver, as for some reason the mouse driver can’t handle all of my buttons. I followed sections 1 and 2 of this howto for the general idea of setting up evdev.

The problem is, none of the howtos I dug up really worked. Things sort of worked, but there seemed to be confusion about the number of buttons (xmodmap reported 9, while xev dumped events from up to #12). Also, the tilt wheel mapping seemed to be reversed. At this point, I began to suspect something was going awry, so I started looking over /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Here’s what I found:

I did a considerable realign of the chromakode.com front page today while chilling online with Whatah. We both decided out of the blue to redesign our websites, and after hours of tinkering, we both managed to overhaul them in an afternoon. There’s all sorts of new delicious markup-y goodness for you and your web browser to enjoy, as well as huge bandwidth wasting backgrounds a-plenty.

I decided to be a little bit risky this time and do some subtle transparency over large swaths of the layout… it shall be interesting to see the browser compatibility fallout from this one (I laugh at how badly this breaks now in IE) . Here’s a screenshot of it on my desktop for your comparison/reference. Also, here’s the original mockup I made when first envisioning the design. All in all, I’m really happy about the update. The typography is something I fussed with the most on this, and I finally feel like I can be satisfied with the lettering looking good on-screen. Yay! Well, I’m excited and exhausted.

Over the past few days I’ve become hopelessly addicted to the game Tremulous, ever since reading about it on NewsForge. While I originally thought of the NewsForge author’s opinion of Tremulous as “The best free software game ever” seemed a bit excessive, after trying it out and getting into the game, I have to agree. This is a seriously great game.

What piqued my interest was the fact that it was based on the Quake 3 engine, GPL’d, and would run on Linux. After downloading it and
giving it a spin, I must say I was shocked I had never heard of it before. It is possible that this is because the standalone 1.1.0 version was released less than 4 months ago, though with the quality and polish of this game, I would have expected to be seeing and hearing about it all over. The game looks and feels fantastic, and all of the graphics and user interfaces are very professionally designed. I really love the concepts of the buildings and units as well as the creativity shown in the popular maps, with tons of interesting and well-themed nooks and crannies. Tremulous also has a unique fast-paced mixture of Real Time Strategy and First-Person Shooter gameplay, which makes it fun but also strategically interesting.

A little while ago I told Whatah about a little obfuscated Python toy I had hatched together about a year before. Unfortunately, this hack was extremely version-dependent, so when I brought up the code (from the era of 2.3) to send to him, of course it did not work with Python 2.4. Well, I wanted it to work. So I got to tinkering again and this evening, with Whatah’s help, we have made this little critter much much more evil. Consider it a programming puzzle, a riddle written in Python. There shall be no hints, though if you are willing to run code before knowing fully what it does, you are a braver fiddler than I…

# Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
_=lambda _, __:getattr(_.__dict__, "values")()[__];__=__builtins__;___ =['\'<BZh91AY&SY', 'e3', '93', 'd9', 'e6', '00', '00', '12', '9f', '80pe', '00', '08', '08@@\\n.g', 'dc', 'a0 ', '00P', 'a0', '00h', '00', '00j', "9bS&\\'", 'a9', 'a7', 'a9', '906SH-f', 'c1', 'f6', '8cS', '12', 'a9', 'ad', 'c1', '08', 'ee_', '0b', 'd9d', 'c1', '17', 'd7', '93', 'bc', '9e', 'ceI', 'c0', '1a', '87guj', '0cc', 'aadF', '18', 'ec', '89', '12', 'fc]', 'c9', '14', 'e1BC', '8eOg', '983\''];_one = _(_(__, 92), 46);_1=lambda ___:_(__, 96)(___);_2=lambda ___: _one('', ___);_3=lambda ___:_(__, 112)(_(__, 0111+2), ___);_4=(98, 122, 50);_24=_1(_2(_3(_4)));_6=lambda __:_(_24, 4)(__);exec _6(eval(_one(r'\x', ___))[1:-1:1])

Just taking a break from schoolwork to test out the Wordpress “Updated Today” Plugin…

Enter the story game.

The latter part of this weekend and memorial day were spent debugging the PHP/Ajax story game I wrote about earlier. Why all this debugging you may ask? Well, as insta had put it, I dove in way too fast. I decided that I should move everything over to MySQL and custom database session management. This promptly led me to the brink of insanity and nearly giving up the project entirely. Well, while I have gone insane, I didn’t give up, and sure enough - last night I actually got it working.

Yay! This switch to a database backend has given me the control I needed to implement some new ideas from the past week. After some more MySQL tinkering, and throwing in some JSON magic to pack several variables into one refresh request, things are actually starting to look pretty cool.

Today was spent experimenting with something I’ve intended to for a long time: PHP and AJAX. I finally bit the bullet and started learning it in earnest.

This morning was spent searching for a suitable PHP toolkit to tinker with. The one I finally arrived at is the SAJAX toolkit, a moderately minimal framework for creating simple callbacks and recievers without having to go through the nitty-gritty of the lower-level XMLHttpRequest APIs. After playing around with it for a while, I really like it. There are some things that are quite confusing to me as a first time user, such as the asynchronous nature of things and the effects on variable scope - but all in all it’s quite a nice system to play with.

I also discovered a quite wonderful little Firefox extension called FireBug. It has to be the most clean and cleverly put together all-purpose debugger I’ve ever seen. It’s very beautifully designed, too. It looks to be extremely useful in debugging javascript, css, and xhtml source in the future. It sure helped me out debugging XMLHttpRequests today!

Whee! Somehow, tonight became an exercise in spontaneous javascript coding.

I was just hanging out early this evening when my good friend Insta popped up and said hello. I showed him a little error page I had been working on, and our conversation rapidly spiraled into a rather random little javascript idea of his that would make a “hella cool” error page. Well, I thought it was pretty hella cool too, so I proposed that we write it. He gave me a few starting pointers, and after a little while I was blindly blazing away at this language I had never seriously used before. Well, one thing led to another, and it turned out I would be spending the next several hours going from nearly nothing to DOM access in javascript to pull off this little effect.

Hmm, looks like something borked samba printing (and it’s respective smbspool) in Ubuntu Dapper over the past month or so. I just noticed my print attempts were failing last week, only to discover this ongoing discussion over in the Ubuntu bug tracker. There are some packages purported to contain the fix, too. [update: this fix does indeed work here]

Looks like they’re well aware of the problem… but really, a very similar has issue occurred before, only a few months ago.

I suppose that’s what you get for running beta distributions…

Writing CSS (CSS2) never ceases to amaze me. Whether it’s tweaking this blog, trying to re-theme a php app, or simply experimenting in the Web Developer Extension, I am always struck by how difficult and confusing it is to try to implement very simple design patterns.

Be it centering objects, making layouts use the maximum amount of space, or simply trying to use floats properly, I am always amazed by how seemingly obvious code does not work the way I should think it does. It seems rather silly to me that such a language would be designed such that web designers must resort to specialized recipes to deal with seemingly simple and common page layout designs. While powerful, CSS seems to become more and more a search for hacks and snippets to make many designs possible. Browser support is also an elusive and secretive gem; unless explicitly stated, what works in one browser will probably at some point fail mysteriously in another.