Sometimes I really wonder how it is that Apple hasn’t kicked Microsoft‘s butt up and down the marketplace by now. Witness these ever-so-useful logos intended to help hardware shoppers make the right decisions. Together they’re a coup of non-helpful graphic design cloaked in uninformative marketing noise.
Read the rest of this entry »
Only a handful of times since the advent of Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 have I had the occasion to drown a player character. I’ve been playing in or running D&D games nearly-continuously since the release of the d20 rule set, and it simply doesn’t come up that often. When it has, it has been frustrating, especially the v3.5 version.
Drowning should be a harrowing situation. The very air you need to survive is denied you as you struggle to surface, yet the rules as written make it a cakewalk in all but the most extraordinary circumstances.
Read the rest of this entry »
As much fun as it can be to sift through sites like 4chan or Wakachan for amusing pictures, image boards of this nature tend to have storage issues. To address this, they don’t keep content available for very long. This is where sites like Danbooru come into play. Alas, sending a friend or coworker to any of these sites is likely to result in the viewing of some “not safe for work” content, and lead to embarrassment for everybody involved.
I noticed that the Danbooru back-end is publicly available, and figured I’d give it a whirl. Alas, it requires PostgreSQL. Apparently, installing PostgreSQL successfully requires a great deal of skill, the blood of an unspotted lamb, and the patience of Job. Having none of the above, I looked around to see if somebody had modified or extended Danbooru to use MySQL instead. No luck there, but I did find Shimmie, which was written by somebody also suffering PostgreSQL-traumatic stress disorder.
Shimmie doesn’t have all the features of Danbooru (like a built-in wiki, comment board, and so forth), but those weren’t germane to the core purpose of an image gallery. I installed it, uploaded a few files, and started wrenching on the code a bit. The resulting code isn’t terribly pretty (as I’m not a programmer by trade nor hobby), but the site itself has a semblance of functionality. You can find it at burrowowl.net/shimmie/ for now.
Thanks to Shish for doing 99.42% of the ground work on this.
For the past few years, I’ve been using Firefox. I ran it when it was Firebird. I ran it
when it was Phoenix. I ran it with a silly little extension that randomized its name to the amusement of many. The thrill, sadly, is gone.
When the Mozilla Project released a browser-only version of their client (which was basically just Netscape with a little more nerd-appeal), there were some pretty high hopes. It was highly-extensible, it was a tiny little file you could download quickly over a dialup connection, and was generally an excellent alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer, which many web nerds had grown fiercely dissatisfied. Now it’s time to look at Firefox without that new-browser smell and hopeful aspirations of beta and first-version software.
Prop 90 seeks to limit the state government’s ability to exert “eminent domain” on private property to benefit other private concerns.