Blue Sparks

We have started our new Warhammer campaign as of February 17th, and we are now gearing up for our second installment on Sunday. I’ve always enjoyed playing low level characters since they are, for the most part, goons. Even better in the Warhammer world is the fact that most players start of in menial careers which have nothing to do with adventuring! We start off as normal people with normal (medieval) careers and as the situation progresses we evolve into our real characters. For example, my last character started off as a Pharmacist, basically an apothecary, then advanced into the Physician career, the field doctor for our party, and was planning on become a deadly assassin by using his mastery of the body, disease and poison.

My current character is an outlaw. It is more of an adventuring career than most at the start, but he is about the only one. Other characters in our group include a pugilist, a tomb robber, an apprenctice priest of justic, a rune smith (dwarven magic enchanter) apprentice, and a fast talking thief (I am not certain on this character yet since he hasn’t joined yet). Everyone is in rather basic careers and are just normal people, if you can call warhammer people normal.

The idea that we start off as snotlings (a warhammer reference, but you should be able to pick it up in context) rather than in an archetype of Rogue, Wizard, Cleric, or Warrior in the D&D world adds an extra level of depth to the game. At least that is how most of us feel while we’re playing Warhammer. Many of us were previously avid D&D players, but have since dropped the habit. Don’t get me wrong, we all still enjoy AD&D (2nd Edition. Death to 3/3.5E) but the characteristics of the WFRP world and the gameplay make it so very interesting.

Anyway, while I’m talking about Warhammer I remembered this Penny-Arcade comic about Warhammer Online from last year:

Penny-Arcade Warhammer Comic

We’re glad that at least one other person enjoys Warhammer as much as we do!

As I promised yesterday, I have packaged together the gallery copy/resize script for anyone else’s use. And, as an added bonus I have also included the script I use for decoding EXIF data and caching it to a file, which can save your gallery from having to generate the data on demand.

Both scripts are released under the GNU GPL. I would have liked to release the decoder script under the LGPL, but the PEL library is GPL so there’s no choice in the matter. C’est la vie, so they say.

Just thought I’d post this comment from Darryl after the old gallery was removed:

<WerkinSsa> disk space usage dropped by 10%
<WerkinSsa> good work

That’s, uh, significant.

Ok, I’ve been getting a little flak from my friend Darryl who hosts my site here. It seems my picture gallery was taking up about… oh 10 GB of space or so. I’d been concerned about this as well, and have been meaning to convert the pictures to a smaller size so we take up less space. The real issue is that I really didn’t want to do this manually, I needed to write a script to do it.

Well, I finally got around to writing the script last night. Walking a directory tree and then resizing pictures isn’t a real big deal. I had that done in about an hour. The hard part was getting the meta data ( exifs ) from the old image to the new one. Most resizing functions don’t understand exif data and ignore it. I have an exif library already on the site, but it was only for reading the data!

So, browsing around the intarwab last night, I managed to find a library called PEL to help out with the dilemma. I struggled with version 0.9 of this library for a while, and then went to bed. This morning I fiddled with it a little more, and then upgraded to the “bleeding edge” SVN version. The SVN version has some handly little functions known as getExif and setExif, which allowed me to easily transfer the data from one photo to another.

And now, I’m uploading the new and improved gallery! (I’ll make a link to the gallery shrinker script later)

I figured I’d post here that my William Gibson site http://neuromancer.ca will be moving to this site. It will now be located at http://zenwerx.com/neuromancer/. And I think that’s about it. Not much new around here!

So, I’m working at home again. This started about two weeks ago I guess; November 7th or around there. I still find it humorous that work bought a new office with a million square feet and somehow there’s not enough room! I do understand the issue, but it’s funny anyway. And it’s a great story to tell.

Basically, what happened is weren’t slated to get put in the new building until after renovations. This would probably be somewhere around next May or June. Our offices at the time were bursting at the seams and we had people all over the place: home, remote offices, in their vehicles, etc. Oh, and we only had washroom facilities for one person at a time. Yeah, it was a big ordeal. So we got moved in to the new building early as an emergency and we get moved where there’s space. This time, between renovations and people who have been moved into their permanent places, we got stuck with a smaller area.

BOOM! No more room, I get to work from home. Interesting how that works. Now, why do I go into the office at all any more? Hehehe.

Just thought it would be interesting to note that my site was officially dugg the other day. Not that it really got anywhere, but someone thought 4 million decimals of pi was interesting enough to submit. There’s a lot of crap that gets submitted as well, but it’s still fun.

http://digg.com/offbeat_news/PI_to_4_Million_4194304_Decimals

So, lot’s of stuff has happened since my last post. Not all of it good. So, let’s go through the list shall we:

1) (BAD/GOOD) Everyone on our street had their tires slashed. Jackie and I each had two slashed on our cars. We replaced all of the tires since it needed doing anyway, but it was something we were saving up for. This was a little sudden.

2) (GOOD) Engagement party for my brother. Sean and his fiance announced their engagement shortly after our marriage. This was the first meeting of the extended families. A nice time was had by all.

3) (BAD/GOOD) Right before we left for the engagement party the power supply unit (psu) on my computer blew. The smell of burning electronics ensued. I’m hoping nothing was damaged since it seems to have been just the psu overheating due to the fan seizing. The fan has been acting up lately anyway, so this was needed. I added some extra goodies on the order too!

4) (BAD) The wife of my old Director (the manager of my manager) died. Brian was an excellent fellow and was always helping me move my career along, and was sure to credit work well done. He retired almost a year ago, and his wife was diagnosed with cancer shortly afterwards.

5) (BAD) The father of my friend Don passed away on the weekend. I had never met Don’s father, but I do know the pain of losing a loved one. We attended his “Celebration of Life” yesterday at the Port Dover Legion to show our support.

I think that’s about it really. Oh, and the kitten is a devil. We have to keep many doors shut so he doesn’t get into trouble, such as eating toilet paper, eating a whole bag of food, or eating the plants!

I’ve upgraded to Ubuntu Edgy Eft today, and it’s running pretty good. I had to install the correct kernel by hand, since it picked the 386 kernel by default. I also had to change my settings from XVideo overlays to OpenGL overlays. Any time I tried to watch a video the screen showed up blank, and then the movie would show up when I moved the mouse to the left, and disappear again when I moved to the right. Very strange.

I’m also happy that my usb “joystick” works now. I have a usb adapter for my PS2 controller, and I’ve got my PSX emulator up and running, as can be seen here:

PSX

I haven’t tested out my headset yet, but I couldn’t get the speakers or the microphone to work previously. We’ll see soon enough.

Getting excited for the next incarnation of Ubuntu Linux: Edgy Eft, aka 6.10 (labelled by year/month for those who care to know). I’m hoping feels a little more refined than it did last month, since I was slightly turned off at the time.