Rosio Pavoris

Classes have started again, and are tiring. Not so much the classes themselves (hell, even I can manage the first month or so at this point) as the getting up early and the moving about on foot all the time and the having to remember to eat and things. That, and it’s interfering with me being able to play KoL at lag-free hours.
Still, schedule’s not that tough, really, and a lot of the nubies aren’t all that bad. I’m probably getting along with them better now than I did with last year’s batch after four months. And last year’s batch was already pretty coal. Kind of miss them. The early classes were cool. I miss Katia (or however you spell that), too. Though I have to admit, in terms of hotness, this year’s a lot better than last. Even our token Dutchie is pretty hot. (Last year, it was a guy. >.>)
I also don’t think I’m behind with anything practical this time around. I have all of my books, I still have the practice CDs on my HD, I extended my train thing (with a year, to my mom’s chagrin; bloody expensive, that), and I even picked up some real dictionaries (same series/publisher as the kanji dictionary I bought last year). The cash I have on hand has gone down by a *lot* in the past week, but I’m still fairly affluent (505 € for university enrollment, 35 € for each of two dictionaries, 432 € for the train thing, 50 € for Myst V CE (side-effect of me being in Leuven), 10 € for Going Postal (paperback version at long last), about 20 € for random food this week… adds up to 1,087 €; quite a bit, even by my standards).

I’ve rewritten bits of the main site to list all hosted blogs on a page of their own. Also made room for (links to) our store, if Roberts ever gets around to finishing the rocketfish pic. I should probably poke her about that again. If she can’t find the time, we could use the original one, I guess. Spreadshirt is more flexible than Cafepress when it comes to adding text to shirts anyway, and I’m almost entirely sure we’ll be going with Spreadshirt.

MSAIT rollover was three days late, because of the barbecue thing and the grandfather’s birthday party thing and the university introductions and the actual classes. Ended up getting it done on Wednesday night. Possibly not as eloquent as I would’ve liked to have made the descriptions, but the other option was waiting until Saturday. I’m not actually sure I’ll be able to keep this up with seven players (rednwhite quit last week, voluntarily).

Oh, and what I actually wanted to talk about: bandwidth.
It’s October now, so I’ve got statistics for September, our first full month of uptime. SWBHG has been running for most of that month (since the 4th), and I burned some bandwidth on other things. Anyway, numbers:

Total usage for September 2005: 3.94 GB
Busiest subdomain: swbhg.rotahall.org with 3.3 GB
Second-busiest: www.rotahall.org with 137.14 MB (Because of my Music folder; I should give that a subdomain.)
Third-busiest: lbrs.rotahall.org with 122.46 MB

forums.rotahall.org used 97.39 MB, which is less than what it used in August (117.63 MB). The least busy subdomain was rouge8.rotahall.org (0.02 MB), because that’s just a forwarder. The least active actual subdomain was community.rotahall.org (1.00 MB), because I closed that off to the public.
goldfish.rotahall.org used 25.23 MB, mostly because of the forums, I’m guessing, and the bandwidth consumed in uploading and configuring those (the actual posting is negligable; I’d like to say that’s because people only post once they’ve thought everything over carefully, but really, it’s pretty dead).
Of the five blogs we host, mine was the most active (18.28 MB), and Lori’s was the least (marginally; 1.18 MB).

We get 20 GB of bandwidth per month, so we’re still pretty safe, I’d think.

Exciting, isn’t it?

Barbecue thing at Thomas’s yesterday. Almost didn’t go, and I wouldn’t have regretted it.
Karel, Thomas, and Pieter-Jan were their obnoxious selves, as usual. Pieter-Jan’s girlfriend is an arrogant, superficial dimwit with no taste in music. Same goes for Pieter-Jan himself, I guess. And Thomas, and, up to a point, Karel. Actually, Karel has some taste in music, but he’s too arrogant about it. If he hasn’t heard of it, he assumes it sucks, especially if I’m the one to suggest it.
I pretty much pwned everyone music-wise, though. And Aelegil agreed. I think this is the first time in the eight or nine years I’ve known him that we’ve agreed on something about music.
I introduced him to TMBG, and he kind of liked it. Also played the Gypsy Kings (which Thomas insists on spelling Gipsy Kings) version of Hotel California, which is infinitely better than the original. And I played some Devil Doll, which people seemed to like. I hope Thomas doesn’t take to downloading and liking all of their stuff. That would ruin them forever for me.
Also played Bananaphone (the original Raffi, not the sped-up one). Thomas had never heard it. There is something fucking wrong with him. As soon as I get all of my cigars out of him, I’m going to prune him from my circle of friends.
And I played The System Is Du, the Rammstein/Strong Bad mashup. Aelegil loved it. I should send that boy a bunch of links.

Non-music-wise, the barbecue wasn’t too impressive. Aelegil took care of the barbecue fire, which was pretty decent, especially considering that he didn’t have any experience with it. Kept to himself, which is a good thing, because it allowed me to talk to him without him getting hogged by Thomas, as tends to happen.
The bonfire thing Thomas set up was a disaster. Nobody died, but, fuck, Thomas shouldn’t be allowed to attempt to build fires. He used too much paper, so everyone around it was covered in ashes, and the wrong kind of wood, so there was way too much smoke, and the flames went far too high. He pretty much took ten years off of the life of his firebasket, and made it nearly impossible to roast marshmallows over the fire without turning them to charcoal or having them taste like ash.
Some of the people I was kind of looking forward to meeting again didn’t show up at all, and some of the others left far too early. I guess that’s not really anyone’s fault, but it still kind of sucks.
Party ended around 3 AM, because apparently we’re old people now.

In conclusion, Thomas, Karel, and Pieter-Jan still suck, Aelegil’s still pretty cool (and easily amused), and Jennifer’s pretty French.

Today, then.
My grandfather on my mom’s side turned 80 sometime this week, so we had a get-together thing in the Köpenhagen (spelling is a vague estimate). Food wasn’t too brilliant, but I’m too used to expensive restaurants to stomach regular ones. If I’d gotten the same food at home, I probably would’ve loved it. As it was, though, the meat was too blah.
Grandfather was a bit sad at times, and my 9-year-old niece was hurtfully oblivious, but over-all, I think he had fun. Bonded a bit more. We don’t do that enough. I like him, but we don’t really have much to talk about, and few opportunities to talk at all.
Noticed the dog’s getting senile. Either that, or he was just too tired and in too much pain to be very coherent (as coherent as dogs can be). My mom claims he’s not in pain at all. I think she’s blind. Either way, I’m going to get her to take him to the vet, or to get the vet to come over (probably more practical).

Anyway, sangria yesterday (which was ruined because those dipshits always want to add extra alcohol to everything; seriously, grow the fuck up) and lots of wine today means I’m still pretty drunk. Forgive any spelling errors and incoherencies, and, yeah, MSAIT is going to have to wait until tomorrow.

Made a droid on SWBHG.

Pavor (droid)
Strength: 620
Defense: 250

54,400,001 credits, one power crystal, three heads, one torso, three legs, three arms. I actually got the highest defense I could’ve gotten, given those parts. Which is pretty unlikely. Maybe Merc changed the formula.
The original Pavor’s starting stats, incidentally, were 605 strength, 700 defense (all my logs show is that I paid 59,586,949 credits, nothing regarding droid parts). Though I know Merc nerfed the formula after that. The defense bit, at least.

Anyway, yay for being the first person to build a droid again.

Goldfish forums are now up and running, and officially open.

phpBB, but version 2.0.17. Not as disgustingly clunky as the phpBB offered by Yourspace’s version of Fantastico. Takes a bit of time to get used to, and it misses a lot of features I take for granted in IPB (but not as many as you’d think at first glance), but it’s more secure, and free, and has a fair following of competent modders.

Goldfish will mostly be used to discuss cerebral topics and to plan world domination. Very heavily moderated with no tolerance for dipshits, which is something I can’t really afford to do on the main Rota Hall forums.
The first test, obviously, is finding the forums themselves.

Updated the PHP files that hold the content for Rotahall.org to deny access if you try to access them on their own (with the exception of index.php, for obvious reasons, and staff.php, for reasons that I promise will become apparent eventually). Alright, so it doesn’t do much for actual security, but it prevents people from seeing the site without layout. >.>

Also wrote this script thingy to calculate the power of an SWBHG unit at level 20 by entering the level 1 stats. It’s orgasmtastic.
Also moved the other SWBHG PHP files to that folder, so gamestats.php is now here and the droid power calculator is apparently broken. Don’t feel like trying to fix it right now.

I’m really just fucking around with tweaking existing files and making really simple new ones to avoid having to work on SWBHG’s trade system. >.>

I wrote a maintenance type script that automatically deletes all entries in the news table, except for the thousand newest ones. Was a hiccup because I suck at MySQL, but it got sorted out.
Also added a measure of security. If you’re not logged in, you’ll get an error (a planned one, I mean, not a MySQL one). If you are logged in, it checks your powerlevel. If it’s less than 3 (admin), you’ll get a different error. If it’s 3 or more, the script will run without asking for confirmation.

Nifty, eh?

Almost forgot, but today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Talking like a pirate doesn’t quite work out in Dutch, and I think we all know where I stand in the Ninja vs. Pirate debate (*cough*), but I still like today, as holidays go.
PZ Myers busted out his pirate talk convertor again at Pharyngula, and fireball set up a set of Piratespeak triggers in #radio-kol. I’m sure other people are doing other things, but I’m getting all the pirate-ness I need for the year from those two.

I’ve cleaned up rotahall.css. There were a few oversights that were just clumsy (mostly setting font-size to normal instead of medium), and the entire file was a bit messy. It’s cleaner now (and, as a result, slightly smaller), and completely valid, with the exception of the IE-only scrollbars. Yay.

I’m really tempted to stop catering to IE users, but I’m hesitant, because, well, I’m one of them. As it stands, though, I’ll continue to make exceptions as needed, except when it’s way too much work, or when it interferes with how things look in standards-compliant browsers. Basically meaning, I’ll keep the Javascript gizmo for the logo and the custom scrollbars, but that’s probably it.

Also added a Misc category to this blog, because I want Personal to be stuff that happens to me IRL, and not include things like my post about Google Talk.

With a little help from Merc, I straightened out the MySQL error in the Staff section. Also managed to rig something up so that it prints the header and the footer itself if accessed through staff.php directly, and not when it’s called through an include on index.php. This makes that bit valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional too, the last little bit that needed straightening out.
The reason that it needs to be callable on its own is to view unlisted staff. Unlisted staff isn’t listed in the menu thing, but are people I want in there nonetheless (like CoD). Eventually, it’ll include all forum staff (for all forums, possibly), and any special contributors (like Roberts for the fish, though she’d be listed anyway because she’s on the forum staff).

MSAIT went into Turn 3 today. Three people didn’t give their commands. Rednwhite for the second turn in a row. Three is going to be the maximum. Maybe it’d be a good thing if I just kicked repeat offenders. Eight players is a bit too much.
It’s borderline manageable now (and will become a bit more manageable every time I add another helper thing, like today’s planet look-up, which still needs some refining, I guess), but the last two or three players aren’t *fun* to do anymore. I don’t want this to become a chore for anyone, least of all myself.

Still working on the trade thing for SWBHG. Not making a lot of progress, because I keep getting sidetracked. Nevertheless, I’m confident that I’m at least *capable* of coding it. If I’ll ever get around to it, I’m not entirely sure. >.>

Everything after this is RL stuff. Feel free to skip it.
Wheel night tonight. Wheel’s closing for three months, I gathered, so Jean hired a band of some sort to play a few songs (reasonably famous, even, I believe, though I don’t know who they were) and handed out free beer (regular Jupiler and brown Leffe) and wine (mostly white, apparently, though I didn’t drink any anyway). Probably would’ve given free stronger stuff too, but I didn’t ask. He seemed remarkably sober. Place was too crowded to have fun, though.
Not that I’ve had fun in the company of the Wheel Gang in ages, I guess. They don’t know who I am anymore, and I don’t like who they’ve become.
Apparently most of them got Myspace accounts, and they don’t see what’s wrong with that. When I offered them real webspace, Thomas acted insulted and told me he could get his own if he wanted to. Judging from the website he made on university servers, though, his hesitation is due to a lack of knowledge of anything required to run a website. Meh. I’m used to being able to make them feel stupid, but I never used to evoke hostile reactions because of it.
Seriously, though, in the past two or three years, they’ve gotten considerably less mature. Either that, or this is just another symptome of my relatively new unwillingness to put up with fucking dipshits.
Their superficiality and their preoccupation with alcohol (though this has lessened), weed (and other types of drugs), and sex (ye gods, how sad is it that they validate themselves according to their sex lives?) has just been getting on my nerves more and more lately. Thomas is having a barbecue/campfire thing next Saturday. He invited me, though he has yet to send formal invitations. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to go.

I’ve rewritten the entire front site. It’s now entirely in PHP.

index.php is the central page. The rest is referenced through $_GET['topic'] and includes.
I’ve added some content to the About page (formerly about.html) and split off the Staff section. That section now references the database and isn’t entirely smoothened out yet. It’s also the only page that can be opened on its own, because the header and footer includes are on the page itself instead of on index.php. Reasons for this will become apparent later on.
I’ve also rolled the exception CSS for the index page (formerly index.html) into rotahall.css, which is one of the reasons it now looks like ass in IE despite being standards-compliant. No other way to do it, though, unless I want to force IE users to use the old site, which would mean I’d have to manage two sites at once.
I’ve removed the individual links to Rouge’s and Quhan’s sites, and added a Links section, which also references the database. This does work properly. It calls from a single table, and sorts the links based on their aff(iliate) flag (0 for regular links, 1 for affiliates). It doesn’t look as spiffy as I’d like it to yet, but that can be worked on.
The rest of the files only echo stuff, for now. I thought about making the Content section dynamic(er), but it doesn’t change often enough to warrant that many database hits.

What I’ll probably do next (besides fixing the Staff page) is remove the individual blog links (and possibly either keep the ones on the Content page, or add a Blogs link in the side menu), and add a link to the store. Once Roberts gets back to me with the final version of the shirt design.

Edit: “This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!” (Well, this one is too, but I mean the front site. All of it, even.)

I added a new helper to the MSAIT helper thing: the ship cost calculator.
Players enter their name, and the dynamic form checks their relevant tech levels in the database. It then displays only the parts of the form that are useful to (useable by) the player. For example, if you have no hyperdrive tech, the hyperdrive menu won’t show up. If you have researched, say, a level 5 hyperdrive, you’ll have a dropdown menu where you can select what hyperdrive to use (from none to level 5). Same with weapons, shields, &c.
This makes for a very cluttered page once you’ve researched, say, level 7 weapons and level 8 shields and level 4 colonisers and level 9 fighter bays, but I imagine I’ll rewrite most of it by the time anyone gets there.

Only downside to it is that players must enter their player name exactly, and anyone can access their ship tech. If anyone even so much as tries to abuse that, I’m replacing the playernames with random hashes, and I’ll give each player just their hash. That’d be fucking inconvenient for me, though, and slightly inconvenient for the players.

LOOK WHAT ROBERTS MADE!

Isn’t that the most awesome thing ever? IT TOTALLY IS!

I *need* a shirt with that on it. It exemplifies everything that Rota Hall stands for. Viking rocket cybergoldfish with a ninja and a Rota Hall flag (the ninja’s hiding behind the fish). Seriously. It’s… wow.

So yeah. Expect shirts, teddy bears, bags, coasters, boxes, stickah, and anything else Cafepress offers, with that goldfish on it.
If I find a reasonably local place that makes custom shirts (but doesn’t necessarily offer store functionality) at a reasonable price, I’m getting a few high-quality ones made as well and handing them out to people who deserve them.

Dunno if Q or Coren were actually still working on anything, but I doubt they could top this. If you’re ever in a position to provide Roberts with oral secks, do so. She deserves every bit of it.

FUCKING SHITGARGLING SERVER TIMING OUT AND EATING MY HUGE BLOG POSTS BEFORE POSTING THEM! >.<

Anyway.

I updated the MSAIT helper to output formatted integers. More legible, if nothing else. Still doesn’t accept formatted integers as input, though, and I don’t think I’ll be changing that anytime soon.
I need to convince Merc to use number_format() for SWBHG too.

Also wrote a droid power calculator, which contains tons of bigjob spoilers. This is probably admin power abuse, really, so I’m not posting it anywhere but here. I showed it to the people in #rotahall and to Rouge, because I want to encourage people to join us on IRC, I guess.
But seriously, even the levelling formula, which is used in the calculator to calculate the power at level 20, hasn’t been cracked yet, AFAIK, and the droid power formula itself is quite a bit more complex.

But yeah. I’m getting the hang of PHP, I think. Eventually I’ll probably rewrite the entire front site in PHP, for no reason whatsoever. And it’ll be valid XHTML, too.
MySQL still hates me, though, but I’ve picked up some additional tricks from browsing through Mercury’s code.

I’ve updated irc.html. Instead of automatically connecting you and giving you a default nickname (Guest???, IIRC), it’s now a form where you can specify your nickname and NickServ password. It’ll then connect and automatically identify and whatnot. I’m not sure how it’d behave if your nick already existed on the network, but I think it’d default to Guest???. If your password is wrong, you’ll get the standard NickServ error. Same if you leave it blank, but that’s not big enough of a deal to code in a contingency.
See? Nobody needs bloated front-ends. *cough*GoPJIRC*cough*

Mercury’s been pretty active lately, and has fixed pretty much all of the errors with SWBHG. The game itself is now the best of both worlds, with both XP-giving exploring and the post-reset battle system (instead of the tedious 12-hour battles). Also has all of the new stuff Merc threw in when the game reset, like droids and capturing and Jedi, but none of that has really been tested.
Skatje’s still having fun with it, and Roberts is pwning the leaderboards (giving me and guru a run for our money, at least), and Proximaria signed up again, and our bandwidth is holding out, so it would seem like things are looking up.

KoL-wise, not much is happening. I hate being a Pastamancer.
Nana started a thread in the RoF which is both reasonably interesting and incredibly long-winded. G_God turns out to be a bigger dipshit than I imagined (the ‘creativity’ he showed as a Generia admin also shows in his flames), Oogy really isn’t made for forums.
Turns out nana’s both pretty cool and pretty hot, though. Pity she lost /villa access. I posted a suggestion in her Livejournal, but she hasn’t replied to that. I wonder if I’m creeping her out yet.

Merc didn’t show up today, so nothing changed to SWBHG. Skatje likes it, and is apparently addicted already. Yay.
Site’s been slow on occasion today, but not when SWBHG was at its busiest, so it’s not that. Crappy shared servers.

Updated about.html to include Mercury. Updated content.html, minor edit to the SWBHG entry.

Finished my hardcore boozetafarian AT ascension today, opened tons of gift boxes. Nobody ripped me off, apparently. Crimbo pants, mafia wine, amp’s Big Package (included a Mr. A Jr.), handfuls of meat, &c. Picked up a Jekyllin hide belt, didn’t have to sell anything for it, quite awesome.
Dumped a shitload of stuff in my Mall store, all of it but the wine sold immediately. Jekyllin hide belts ruined the Mr. A Jr. market, but I’m assuming that’s temporary. No big deal, I’m not in a hurry.
I’m rich again, and back into a hardcore boozetafarian Pastamancer ascension. Drank my three bottles of single-barrel whiskey, because I could. At this rate, I’ll be back on schedule in three months.
Fucking tired, though, because KMD is doing a 24-hour show for reasons that are wholly unimportant. Too amusing. I was thinking about giving him my mafia wine for playing “Rock You Like a Hurricane”, but I’m too greedy and really don’t care about New Orleans.

Fucking timeouts eating my giant blog posts. If this is the effect SWBHG will have on rotahall.org, I’m switching hosts and going dedicated with someone somewhere.

As I was saying, SWBHG is up, more or less. More more than less this time around, thanks to Merc. It’s the post-November reset (but pre-Yoda bug fix) version, but Merc is apparently going through his archives to find the original code.
I should update about.html and content.html to include Merc as staff and SWBHG as content, respectively. Remind me to do that in the morning.

MSAIT rolled over for the first time today. Two people didn’t get their turnly commands in. If they’ve completely forgotten about the game, they’ll have revolutions on their hands in two or so weeks, and I’ll have two NPC empires to manage. Should be interesting.
The rest managed pretty alright.

Created an SWBHG category for the blawg. Exciting stuff. Looks like Merc might be fixing the login thing.

It’s currently 2 AM Saturday night (Sunday morning, technically), and three out of eight players have gotten their turnly commands in for MSAIT. Three.
Rednwhite and Terras are in the process of getting theirs in right now, I believe, and Quarren said he’d do it on Sunday morning (fair enough, for once, I guess). Roberts has, I presume, forgotten because of that Derby thing, so maybe she’ll do it tomorrow morning too. Ranger has just forgotten, I guess.
Either way, it’ll be a demonstration of what happens when you don’t do anything as a ruler for a year. In a less critical period, the effects probably wouldn’t be as harsh, but the people want to unlock the solar system.

Went to see H2G2 with Q today. Sucked pretty hard, I’ll post a review tomorrow, probably.

First turn of MSAIT is approaching. Three out of eight players have posted their turnly commands, and none have really screwed up much yet.
Wrote a planet and ship lookup thing. Vairy coal. Formats the information for easy pasting into the relevant threads, too. I should add a description field to the planets table, so I can just rely on copy/paste altogether, without having to pay attention to anything.

Gave Mercury FTP access to swbhg.rotahall.org. I’ll keep fiddling with it (unless I see him online; don’t want to interfere with people who know what they’re doing), but I don’t really expect to get it running without him.
He also has access to the MySQL server now, of course, which also means he can do pretty much whatever he wants to Rotahall.org. If it’s gone tomorrow, you know who to blame.

Now for a KoL update, so this entry can be in all four categories: I’m almost ready to wrap up my AT ascension. One or two more days, depending on the RNG and how much I suck in the NS battle. After that, pressies. Still looking forward to my millions of meat, mafia wine, and crimbo pants.

I’ve written admin tools for MSAIT. PHP and MySQL FTW.
Right now, all that’s there is a way for me to easily add planets and ships to the database. Tomorrow (probably), I’ll write some stuff to actually retrieve the information (and format it properly) without having to bother with phpMyAdmin (might make that bit public, but probably not). Should be challenging enough. I’ll take a look at Jick’s code for autosorting and whatnot. The day after that (or whenever I feel like it), I’ll write something to update existing entries (though phpMyAdmin would probably be easier and quicker in almost every case.

This isn’t doing much to expand my PHP and MySQL skills, because it’s just using the same functions over and over again (all of which I already used in Muffins; incidentally, I got the modifying bit to work earlier today) but the main reason I’m doing this is to make MSAIT easier for me.
Speaking of which, Rouge already posted his turnly actions for this week, and they’re actually pretty intelligent. Yay.