Minecraft

One of the more interesting things to hit the geek scene at the moment is Minecraft. For quite some time now, in just about every Linux or programming medium I use I come across discussion of Minecraft. By most definitions Minecraft is an indie sandbox construction game, although peoples ‘mileage’ does somewhat vary.

The most popular gameplay mode at the moment is survival mode. When you first start you spawn somewhere in the world, and in the time between spawning and the sun setting, you need to do something to ensure survival, because it’s going to be a somewhat scary night if you intend to just sleep underneath the stars.

When you start you are armed with nothing but your fists, which aren’t really very productive in doing very much. The first step is usually to punch some trees until you collect some wood to make basic tools. From this point you’ll want to try and produce something that produces light, and some sort of dwelling which will save you from attack. After this beginning however, people start to play different.
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Dropbox

Dropbox is a free service which creates a folder on your hard disk which it mirrors both online and with other machines you have also installed the service. Therefore it allows you to carry certain files with you, no matter which PC you visit, either by installing the application, or accessing the files online. It works pretty much without hitch, you start with 2gb of space, but you can buy larger accounts or accumulate space via referrals.

Extra space:

  • Sign up using a referral.
  • Get people to sign up using a referral.
  • Link an academic email address.
  • Link your twitter/facebook.

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Where should my data go?

At the moment, I store my data in 3 places:

  • Windows and programs run from a single 300GB hard drive (which I would like to upgrade to a solid state drive sometime soon).
  • My user folder is dumped onto a RAID-1 array of 2x 1TB disks.
  • Drobo containing 4x 1TB disk, formatted to give 3TB (or 2.7 TiB) space.

The Drobo is the current centre of question, I’m now up to 85% used which doesn’t give me much room for expansion. The question is what to do now.

My Drobo is currently piped through a DroboShare, which limits its performance greatly, I generally don’t get more than 12MB/s from it, even across a gigabit network. While this is not bad from a network device, it isn’t ideal. One way to fix this performance is to upgrade to an FS.

Upgrade options:
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New things

Like most people, when new things come out I am immediately attracted to them, in the IT community you can often push this a little further and grab at things before they are ‘new’. I first started using gmail and windows 7 when they were both early on in their beta and was impressed with what I found, the same might be said for wordpress 3, it seems to improve on 2.9, in much the same way 7 improved upon Vista. I’m also looking forward to trying out the new Ubuntu 10.04, which I would expect to be even more impressive.

While personally I’m not a strong believer of linux on the desktop environment, I prefer it on my server and in my devices, I just don’t find it as useful on the desktop. It will however be interesting to see how well it fairs at work, when I install it on a currently unused server.

I won’t however be upgrading my server from 8.04 quite yet, I did a little trial run on a copy and found it to break quite a few things in the upgrade. I will probably be waiting ’til Virtualmin GPL officially supports 10.04, and then use the import/export tool to move users over to a fresh 10.04 install.

I also finally got around to picking up a new computer chair, my old one was doing no favours to my back or posture. Office images following. Continue reading

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iDM

For quite some time now I’ve been working on an IRC gamebot called iDM. Just thought I’d detail some of the project info for archival purposes.

The concept:
Quite often on IRC you will find large swathes of channels with very little actually going on. iDM’s purpose is to add a simple ‘verses’ game to these chat channels as a diversion, something to do to fill the lull in conversation or to pose as a standalone distraction that needs no further resources for anyone already on the IRC network.

The audience:
iDM is mainly aimed at people who are already on a certain chat network. The network mostly caters for teenagers and young adults playing online RPG’s who are also sitting on the network as a means of communicating with other players. Quite often gameplay can get repetitive or slow and further distractions would be useful. The game is designed with a specific game as inspiration in the hope that it means players wont actually need to learn anything to play.

The technology
As of today the game exists in a few components. Firstly there is the original chat client platform. The first version of the game was designed as a mIRC script, that is a script running on a chat client scripting platform. mIRC scripts are designed to automate processes for people using it as their chat platform. In this situation it means the bot has a fully working GUI which can be used to monitor spam and perform manual tasks which would otherwise need coded. I would prefer to move away from this platform due to overhead.
The next layer is sBNC. This BNC software allows the owner to load TCL scripts upon the BNC and upon BNC connections. In this case the BNC is used to handle many issues, mostly to do with multiple heads. The IRC network has certain limits which for example prevent users from producing large amounts of text. Using the BNC I can script a load balancer and extra heads which divide the traffic over multiple connections.
The next visible layer is the website. The more complex user management tasks, for both admins and users have been moved to a PHP website. The website allows staff to pull up all sorts of user and channel information, and also contains management tasks such as ban appeals. Other tasks of the website include displaying highscore tables and help docs.
The final layer of the project is the database. Almost everything relating to iDM has now been moved to the database. This is true to the point that even attacks and functions can be maintained from the database without having to edit a line of code.

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The danger is in real life.

Today while reading articles hidden deep in Google reader when I should have been polishing my CV or doing something more productive, I came across the girl who cried webmaster. The difference with this story is ‘the danger came from real life and salvation came from the online world‘. I stumbled upon the link within a coding horror article, and was pleasantly surprised, I generally don’t bother to follow those sorts of anecdotal links.

Entering the fiction world for a few moments, one of my favourite authors passed away just a few days ago. David Eddings wrote some brilliant fiction, including my favourite trilogy ‘The Elenium’ (the following trilogy tagging along shortly after). The Elenium follows Sparhawk and Aphrael two of my favourite characters exploits in a interesting world where some gods take a bigger role in peoples lives.

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