Added a last.fm sidebar to the blog. Yeah, big whoop, wanna fight about it?

Going to Madison tomorrow to go to the Museum of Science and Industry on Saturday with some of the gang. Excited.

Project’s nearing completion. A bit behind schedule, but not by much. Just need to polish a couple things and finish the plugins.

Woo, excuse for posting an entry. Bluehost is upgrading their tubes, which is good, because it looks like it’ll decrease some of the extra-long response times we’ve been getting on very rare occasion. In any event, pings are down, and that’s always a happy thing. The IP changes shouldn’t need to propagate the entire Internet, so this should have absolutely zero influence on your browsing; in fact, you’re probably already on the new IP and everything is hunky dorey.

Over the weekend, I suggested the gang in #lh partake of some good old-fashioned mutual killing in the form of an FPS. Saturday was Enemy Territory, which would have been entertaining had we more people, but on Sunday we fired up a great free (and Free) deathmatch FPS: Nexuiz.

So yesterday and today a bunch of us played it for hours on end and had a gleeful time fragging each other, torsos and skulls bouncing around the landscape as rockets explode and bolts of electricity fly about. The deathmatch FPS is such a simple game, yet so much fun in concentrated bursts.

It’s free, and it’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, so check out Nexuiz. (And it runs on older hardware, if you don’t all have AMD64 3800+ X2 systems with a 7900 GT and 2 GB of RAM.)

I got carded today buying a can of compressed air. Apparently kids are getting high off cleaning their keyboards. It’s such a huge problem, the company in question has come up with “UNIQUE BITTERGENT TECHNOLOGY” to help “deter inhalant abuse". Or so they say. We know what the real story is. The dirtistas are threatened by clean electronics, firearms, and artificial plants.

In other, less inane news, I have been working on getting parts of the True20 Companion prepared for use in my campaign. Most of the fantasy section will be included, and I’m still thinking about using ritual magic and corruption as well. I’ve already started introducing the heroic character archetypes. The book is great, and although I don’t think I’ll feel the need to make custom roles for the game, there is a lot there to use.

True20 Companion, a great book for all setting and system tweakers looking for a guide and some interesting additions.

Read more! »

Well, soon after the last post, a couple good-natured Japanese teens from the 1980s broke into the apartment and massaged my brain for about fifteen minutes, and then we played Shenmue and petted kittens until I was satiated. This post will be less ranty.

I recently upgraded my eMusic account, and I filled up the month (and the past couple months, actually) with a lot of rock ("metal", I believe the kids are calling it these days). Lost Horizon, Opeth, Cradle of Filth, Amorphis, a little bit of Blind Guardian, Freedom Call, Rhapsody, HammerFall, Lamb of God… Two things of note that I’ve really gotten into are Therion, a Swedish symphonic metal band with some great vocals on Secret of the Runes, and Danish Wuthering Heights‘ Tolkien-themed Far from the Madding Crowd. It’s been some really nice stuff, and definitely pulled me out of now-forgotten boredom with my rock collection.

Now just a couple more bands need to come up and give the video game music world a guitar to the throat. Or, alternatively, Minibosses needs to release full albums at least quarterly.

Also, since this is a calm post, or something, included is another picture, of a lot of snow. It’s from Friday, following a bout of regional (Minnesotean, anyway) panic over catastrophic snowfall. I think it was actually bad there, here only a couple inches of snowfall and a heap of it in front of the door.

I swear. The next version of my website is going to be a series of text files. In updating the d20 experience calculator (thanks Pants, despite the headache the comment caused), I have assembled a list of gripes, complaints, and pleas regarding our friend the HTML specification, and more pressingly, Internet Explorer’s horrible implementation of supporting it.

Internet Explorer just makes it worse. Oh, so vividly worse. Do I have to come to people’s houses and poke them in the eye until they start using Firefox?

Gripe #1: Whitespace in the DOM

In a general “this is stupid” complaint, I’ve learned over the past couple days, in working with the JavaScript behind the calculator, whitespace in the markup creates text children in the DOM tree. The DOM is a critical part of any sort of interaction with the HTML page, and manipulating elements (and their children) breaks in annoyingly stupid ways if you have whitespace in the HTML file itself.

As a quick and dirty example:

<div id="out"><div id="in"></div></div>

The “out” div has one child — “in". However, in…

<div id="out">
<div id="in">
</div>
</div>

“in” has three children — text (the first whitespace between <div id="out"> and <div id="in">), the “in” div, and more text (the remaining whitespace between </div> and </div>).

This is so amazingly stupid. Of course, the problem can be avoided by writing all your HTML sensitive to this problem, without whitespace, or by employing some JavaScript hacks to work around the problem, but why can’t things be sane and promote readable HTML markup?

Gripe #2: IE’s Crippled DOM

When working with JavaScript, you can check the object type (say, to determine if it is text, or a div node) with a simple line of code. For our example above, if we are looking at “out"’s children and trying to do something with all HTML elements (not text), we could traverse the list of children and make this check:

if (children[i].nodeType == Node.ELEMENT_NODE)
…

…unless, of course, the code is meant to be executed in Internet Explorer. IE doesn’t understand Node and thus bails, leaving the entirety of the code unexecuted.

Gripe #3: IE and <script>

Just another of many complaints from a day of poking around in Internet Explorer: The HTML specification, and indeed, IE itself, allow specifying a HTML tag without children or contained text in the following manner:

<img src="..." />

Unless, of course, the tag is script. When IE sees, say,

<script type="text/javascript" src="..." />,

it bails, entirely, and totally gives up rendering the rest of the page. Even the parts unrelated to the JavaScript are ignored. IE stops all rendering due to a supported tag that is specified in a manner supported perfectly fine in other situations by IE. A+. (This is the problem that Pants uncovered. The calculator page was blank, aside from the background image, in IE.)

Gripe #4: IE’s awful CSS support.

Internet Explorer 7 still doesn’t support display: table. So here’s the kicker, and the end of my rant: although the d20 calculator is “fixed", if you’re using IE, you are intentionally wanting it to look like crap. I can’t put it any other way. There are alternatives. Better alternatives. I’ve worked around IE’s stupidity so many times over my many years, but on this point, I’ve had it.

I welcome clean HTML/CSS submissions that render that page correctly in IE, but otherwise, if you don’t want the d20 experience calculator to display in one giant column, use any of the other popular browsers. They all get it right.

I have updated the d20 experience calculator, after many long months of neglect. Basically, it doesn’t do anything new, but it does do it without spewing PHP errors everywhere, in part because now I’m using JavaScript. Behold the d20 Experience Calculator!

I want to do more with the code there (rightfully titled as if it was a suite, the d20 Tools), including maybe porting Expected Damage (see JoJo and I talking a bit on the subject), but for now, the experience calculator is up. If people could hammer on it a bit and let me know what they think, that would be great. The URLs to the old PHP versions now redirect to this, so really, this entire announcement is kind of unnecessary.

You’ll notice that it doesn’t submit a form at all, through the majicks of JavaScript, so if you save the requisite files (the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), you can use the calculator offline.

So check it out and play around with it a bit. The algorithm isn’t that hairy, so I didn’t test it too much, but it should be accurate (or at least, no less accurate than it was before). I’m going to eventually add years-promised functionality to it, once I’m sure everything is hunky dorey.

I was poking through some albums and I found this picture of Andy at gaming. I like to think he’s contemplating how best to utilize his fury tokens before surging into battle, but it’s more likely a question of when he should expect the next dirty song about his physical traits and biological brews, or references to great Germanic woodlands one would set up camp within, or comments regarding his faux-heritage from those of us with blood of the north in our lineage.

Anyway. Here’s a picture of Andy.

So it seems all the server software upgrading has gone swimmingly. Hooray for that. I think a new Gallery 2 release is imminent, so it looks like I’ll be revisiting Kirbythulhu and the maintenance page before too long.

Otherwise, the only new stuff at the moment is Dreamcast-related stuff, which yes, I am still on a nostalgia spree about. I’m a bit bummed that we (the Port collective) were not able to play any Dreamcast games over the weekend, but the weather really did us in. ChuChu Rocket! will have to wait for another day.

More troubling, however, is that I still have yet to get the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 I am entitled to, and the eBay seller has been missing since I brought it up. So I’m a bit pissed about that.

Games are trickling in, though, now that I have four controllers and four VMUs again. The aforementioned game of space mice vs. space cats is of course prime, but Gauntlet Legends has been fun, and I’ve been picking away at the Record of Lodoss War game. Of more interest are two imports I’ve bought, Maken X featuring a battle with the Pope in the Vatican and a brainjacking sword, and Frame Gride (as “glide"), a well-regarded mecha combat game. Both are in Japanese (natch — they are imports, afterall, and importing from Europe doesn’t have quite the same allure), so I need some translations. I’ve found things for Frame Gride, but Maken X has been elusive so far. Perhaps it is time to dust off my atrophied Japanese language knowledge hidden in unmapped parts of my brain, its secrets possibly lost forever.

Oh well. It beats feeding money to Sony, the knobs that they’ve been proving to be for this entire generation.

I have Dreamcast games I want to play, Pants recently got Guilty Gear X2 (finally!), and we have a couple terrible movies we want to force upon the group. Maybe we can find time for it soon, and if not, there’s always April…