JDHarper.com

Notice anything different? » 0

If everything went right, you shouldn’t notice too much different about my site today. But underneath, everything changed: I went back to WordPress from Habari.

Why? Mostly because of the ecosystem: There are lots of plugins and programs that work with WordPress that don’t work with Habari yet. I was working with WordPress on another project and found it a great plug-in for adding time-lines to a WordPress blog. That kind of stuff is years away from coming to Habari.

Also, because Habari is still an alpha-level project. It’s not finished yet. It’s pretty, and the code base underneath it is supposed to be really excellent, but I don’t want to work with the code base. And when I do try to find bugs, I can’t report them.

And there are a lot of things that WordPress just does better. For example: “Remember Me” on the login page actually works. It automatically replaces regular vertical quote marks with the pretty quotes. I can hit Ctrl-I and it will make the text italic, instead of me having to manually code in <em> tags. Updating to the latest version of the software is as easy as pushing a button (no need to open up FileZilla at all!). And, new in the latest version of WordPress, you can embed videos just by including the URL on its own line. For example:

Lastly, and most unforgivable, Habari does not have a built-in export option of any kind. If it weren’t for this script (mirror) that somebody wrote, I would have been having to export each entry by hand (or else write my own script, which would have taken at least as long). Not cool Habari!

So, anyways, let me know if you see anything that looks broken. Thanks!

Will this change also lead to me posting more often? MAYBE!

Ubuntu: Karmic Koala » 0

Off and on over the years, I’ve tried various incarnations of Ubuntu, the free replacement for Windows. The latest version, Karmic Koala, finally feels like a finished operating system.

Installation was easy, as always. It boots up incredibly fast on my laptop, and when the desktop appears its ready to go–as opposed to Windows, which seems to need grind the hard drive for another few seconds before its ready to do anything. It’s not a huge difference in actual time, but it makes a world of difference in how it feels.

Ubuntu automatically recognized most of my laptop’s hardware, which was a pleasant surprise. Previous versions have had problems; for example, my desktop’s old wi-fi card was not automatically recognized in previous verions of Ubuntu. The only things that didn’t work out-of-the-box were the TabletPC bits. Fortunately, there are some relatively easy to follow instructions for fixing the pen and the screen rotation buttons.

I love how easy it is to install most software. When I needed an onscreen keyboard program to use with the pen, installing it was as easy as typing “sudo apt-get install cellwriter” into the terminal. You can install most software this way (or using the Synaptic Package Manager).

And it comes built-in with most of the software you’ll need, like a web browser (Firefox), email (Evolution) and chat clients (Empathy[1]), free versions of word and excel (OpenOffice), and even Photoshop (GIMP Image Editor).

You can give it a try without changing anything on your computer–just download and burn their CD, pop it in your hard drive, and reboot. It’s really pretty neat free software, just a pleasure to use.

[1]. Empathy is really very nice software. Talks to AIM, Google Talk, Jabber, MSN, Yahoo, and several other chat networks. Could not be simpler to use.

A couple of years ago, I bought a CVS camcorder to hack. Unfortunately, the camera had a new firmware version that encrypted the contents of the camera’s memory, making it impossible to suck all the videos off the camera.

In the intervening years, someone has written a handy bit of software called Burning Man to get around this problem. I was able to successfully download all the videos out of the camera and onto my hard drive.

Now I just need to think of something clever to do with a cheap video camera….

Left 4 Dead 2 » 0

Just over a month ago, I mentioned that I was getting rid of Left 4 Dead. I hadn’t planned to buy Left 4 Dead 2, but every night I would see that everyone in my friends list was playing it, and I was tired of playing single player games.

Left 4 Dead 2 is so much better than Left 4 Dead was. They seem to have improved some of the code for things that frustrated me in the old game (e.g. unloading a clip of autoshotgun ammo at a Hunter and doing no damage). Plus, they added a whole bunch of new stuff:

There’s a much wider variety of weapons, including new melee weapons which are great for clearing out a horde of regular zombies that’s gotten right in your face.

There’s several new kinds of special zombies, like the Charger (which can grab a survivor, run him far away from his friends, and pound him into the ground repeatedly), the Jockey (which jumps on a survivor and lets you pull him into danger), and my favorite, the Spitter (who spits noxious acid onto the ground, forcing the survivors to run out of the corner they’re hiding in).

The panic events at the climax of each level are much more interesting. Instead of hiding in a corner and waiting for a timer to go off, you have to run a gauntlet to go turn off an alarm to make the zombies stop coming, or you have to run all over a mall to find gas cans to fill up a car, and so on.

If you’re short on time but want to play Versus, there’s a new Scavenge game mode where you and the other team take turns trying to fill up a generator with gas. Which ever team can get more gas in the tank before time runs out or the whole team dies, wins.

And the levels are amazing. The joy of the L4D comes from doing awesome stuff like running to a helicopter from a hospital roof top while being chased by the Tank (think The Incredible Hulk, but brown instead of green). The new game gives you more awesome per level. I was playing a campaign game with some friends, and we were trying to get to the top floor of the mall to turn off the alarm that was attracting zombies. One of my friends was further ahead of me, but he was eventually taken down by a horde of zombies who were stomping on his prone body. I come in behind him, whack the zombies with my baseball bat, turn off the alarm, and bring him back to life with a handy defibrillator. It felt like something you’d actually see in a movie.

I haven’t even mentioned the level where you start a rock concert to attract the attention of a passing helicopter. Or the zombie clowns who attract more zombies with their squeaky shoes. Or the Realism mode that turns off the highlighting on your friends and makes it communication MUCH more important. Or the incendiary bullets and laser sights.

In short, this game is everything that L4D should have been and more. I’m having a blast with it.

Brett Turner’s Banjo Music » 0

Looking for great banjo music? You could do a lot worse than Brett Turner’s posts on Metafilter Music. They range from sad to playful, from western ballads to just plain fun songs.

I really like So Does Everybody Else, Only Not So Much, an adaption of an Ogden Nash poem that’s “an apology from an aging man who spends his time boring people with the same stories.”

O all ye exorcizers come and exorcize now, and ye clergymen draw nigh and clerge,
For I wish to be purged of an urge.
It is an irksome urge, of nettles and glue,
And it is turning all my friends into acquaintances, and all my acquaintances into people who look the other way when I heave into view.

There’s also several songs in French, and several instrumental pieces. You can get it all here, downloadable as MP3′s.

Why I’m uninstalling Left 4 Dead » 1

Left 4 Dead is a game about surviving the zombie apocalypse. You and three other people are immune to the virus that is converting humanity into undead monsters; the rest of the city is not so fortunate. You have to run, using a variety of weapons and fighting a variety of special monsters, from your starting point to an escape vehicle. It can be a lot of fun.

Can be. With the right people it’s fun most of the time. But sometimes, even having the most fun people in the world isn’t enough to save it.

Tonight, I played with pretty much my favorite group of internet gamers. But it was still frustrating. I lay the blame for this almost entirely on the game: I would pounce on people’s backs as Hunter and just bounce off of them. My teammates would vomit on three of our opponents as Boomer, and would only get credit for one of them. A full clip of autoshotgun ammo wouldn’t take out the Hunter I was shooting at as survivor.

To be fair, the other team was really good, and I felt like I was dragging our team down a bit. I got taken down literally three steps outside of the initial spawn. I did almost no damage as the tank. Etc, etc.

The point is that, between the game’s technical deficiencies and my own lack of skill, the game frustrates me at least one game in four, even with my favorite teammates/opponents. So I say: Goodbye and thanks for all the pills! I’ll see my friends in chat and in TF2.

Can I get a 3X game? » 2

JD came into the room, blew a great cloud of dust off of the blog’s admin panel, coughed briefly, and began to type a new entry without bothering to apologize for neglecting the blog for four months. “That’s what RSS readers are for, to let people keep in touch with websites that are infrequently updated,” he reasoned. “Besides, no one wants to hear a long-winded apology. Best to get to the actual content.”

I have loved 4X games (games in which you control an entire society, starting from a small village/planet, eXploring the universe, eXpanding your empire, eXploiting the resources, and eXterminating your enemies) since I first played Master of Orion back in the mid 1990′s. I like starting from scratch, gradually increasing in power, building a mighty empire.

What I don’t especially care for is that last X. I like building my empire, but I don’t really care for conquering other empires (or, far more frequently, getting conquered).

Tonight I was playing Civilization 4, happily building the Portuguese empire. I had expanded out to a small island off the coast of the main continent, I had hanging gardens and spices and all the comforts of a great empire. What I didn’t have was a strong enough military to keep it–Celtic invaders broke off our trade agreements and took over everything but my small island in an embarrassingly swift conquest.

Maybe I’ve been spoiled by Euro-style board games like Agricola and Puerto Rico, but I like having a field that I know that people can’t mess with directly, where you’re competing on how well you use the resources available to you to build your territory, rather than conquering other people’s territory.

I want there to still be a goal and competition–SimCity bores me to tears–but I want it to be indirect. I want the video game equivalent of a Eurogame. Any ideas where I can find one?

Ubiquity » 0

Ubiquity adds easy to use commands to Firefox. It’s dead simple to use: activate it with a keyboard shortcut (I use Ctrl-Space), then type in a command. The commands autocomplete, so you don’t even have to remember or type in the whole command. Some good ones:

weather <location> gives you the local weather
tinyurl <URL> sends the URL to tinyurl and enters in the shortened URL at the current cursor location. (Great for Twitter!)
twitter <message> broadcasts a message on twitter
tag <list of comma-separated tags> saves the current tab as a bookmark and assigns it the list of tags
email <text> to <email address> starts a new email in Gmail with a link to the current web page
escape HTML entities replaces all instances of greater than signs with > and all less than signs with < in the selected text–very useful for HTML-enabled forms where you want to discuss HTML tags
translate <text> <from language> <to language> replaces the selected text in a website with a translation of that text into a new language.
add to google calendar <event> adds an event to google calendar, e.g. “add to google calendar dinner with parents Friday at 5pm”
list opens a list of all the commands Ubiquity accepts

Very spiffy.

My iPhone App is Done! » 0

So, I’ve been gone for a while. I’ve been spending most of my time learning how to program in Objective-C and writing a new iPhone app. And now, it’s finally ready and available for download!

The FoodPad Calorie Tracker is designed to make it as easy as possible to keep track of what you eat. It remembers previously entered foods in an autocomplete list for later meals, and it helps you discover how many calories are in your favorite homemade foods with the Recipe Calculator.

You can download FoodPad from the iTunes App Store now or find out more about it.

I’ve downloaded Textmate, which I’ve heard all kinds of good things about. So far, it’s exceeded my expectations for how awesome it is. The only disappointment so far is that the Blogging bundle doesn’t play nice with Habari yet. It works fine with a test WordPress blog that I have, so the problem is with the MetaWeblog plugin for Habari. Clicking Fetch Post returns the error “Can’t convert Array into Integer.”

I attempted to submit a bug report on the Habari website, but gave up after several attempts were rejected as spam for some reason. So, maybe some Habari person will read this instead.

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