Rosio Pavoris

I can’t deal with this anymore, so now you kids can provide your own content, if you like. Anything even tangentially related to anything can go there, if you so desire.
Those forums will also be the official Rota Hall forums now, in the sense that any complaints, suggestions, or requests about Rota Hall or any of its projects (including Muffins, if you’re still upset about that) go there.

If there’s enough activity, I may add more subforums (one for religion might be interesting, if anyone was actually interested in debating), but I don’t foresee that being a problem.

If you registered an account on the blog, it will work on the forums as well. If you register on the forums, that account almost certainly won’t work on the blog, but if it’s a problem I can always look for the relevant plugin. I’m told one exists.
The theme was made by Terras, because that’s what he’s for~

Now get to activitying.

Which is also the first laptop I’ve ever owned. You don’t realise how much you use a numpad until you can’t use it anymore.

So yes, three weeks after I ordered that laptop through the university, it finally arrived. It ended up being much cheaper than planned, too.
The original price was 749 €, but that included delivery and Windows Vista, both of which turned out to be optional. Without them, it was 664 €. And now it turned out the price recently went down, so I ended up paying 585 € (which includes the 21% tax).
Considering the retail price is about 1,000 €, that’s a decent enough deal.
Not retiring my desktop just yet, though.

(Also, since Gentoo doesn’t come with ATI drivers by default and I can’t be bothered to troubleshoot, I ended up installing Ubuntu after all. It’ll have to do.)

Apparently WordPress.com has been blocked in Turkey.
I don’t understand why people are still seriously considering Turkey’s accession to the EU, considering that they keep doing shit like this. Most famously, they also blocked YouTube last March after someone posted a video claiming Atatürk was homosexual (which is probably the most ironic way they could have dealt with that), though that only lasted two days.

Turkey’s Great Firewall isn’t nearly as extensive as China’s, obviously, nor is it as hard to circumvent.
It just works on DNS level, so if you can specify different DNS servers than Turkey’s national ones, or you can access a website through its IP (which it probably isn’t, in WordPress.com’s case; subdomains can be odd), it’s trivial to get around the block.
If you can’t do that, you can just use Google as a proxy, or any of the countless proxy providers out there. Or you could use Tor or similar networks, which more people need to familiarise themselves with.

Still, since all of these things are likely to be beyond the average user still, and considering the influence of blogs and the influence of the blogosphere in keeping tabs on governments in general, this is a significant blow to freedom of speech (which, of course, is a basic human right, and the most important indicator of a free society) in Turkey.
Fewer people use WordPress.com than YouTube (I’m pretty sure), but the protest will probably be significant enough to repeal this block relatively quickly. Still, the fact that the Turkish government thinks they can get away with this (and without explanation) is a very bad sign.

If anyone wants a Casual Collective invite, just ask.
The game is buggy enough that I haven’t actually been able to play it (despite having been a member for a month now (closed beta FTW)), but it might work for some people.

It’s disappointing when the creators of a game worth playing (in this case Desktop TD) turn out to be worthless or incompetent douchebags. It’s been happening far too often lately.
Though I guess it’s not that surprising that Windows programmers (and I use the term loosely) would fall into corporate lockstep so readily.

And I still don’t have a Bedrijfsinformatiesystemen textbook. Not that I intend to go to the exam, but you’d think it’d be readily available a week before the exams actually start, wouldn’t you?

I did, however, buy Cryptology Unlocked (for roughly twice the price listed there), and finally bothered to find out where the Standaard bookstore is in Leuven.
I would’ve bought more (since I went to literally every bookstore in the city), but it’s kind of hard to browse quietly with your mom looking over your shoulder when you’re officially looking for a textbook.

Anyway. This is worth checking out (though people need to stop thinking KoL is “indie” just because it’s not made by Blizzard or SOE).
Random kitten.

This isn’t the first time some public figures have made controversial edits to Wikipedia—Diebold, Walmart, and Congressional gimps have all done it before—and I guess it shouldn’t surprise us that the news network with the biggest problem with reality has taken a page out of Colbert’s book. Still, the extent and blatantness (and especially the pettiness) of it are surprising, even by Fox’s standards.
Geeks are Sexy has the details.

Yes, much of that (all, maybe) is probably just individual Kool-Aid drinkers who happen to be using Fox’s connection rather than a deliberate attempt by the network to smear people who keep shattering their illusions (after all, that would be the type of employee they’d attract), but it’s still pretty funny.
Keep fighting the good fight, dickweeds.

Someone found the original source code for Adventure.
It seems to be written in FORTRAN IV, which I don’t speak, and which, as you can tell, barely deserves to be called a programming language. Still, exciting~

Internet groups warn BBC over iPlayer plans

Some of the largest broadband providers in the UK are threatening to “pull the plug” from the BBC’s new iPlayer unless the corporation contributes to the cost of streaming its videos over the internet.

The likes of Tiscali, BT and Carphone Warehouse are all growing concerned that the impact of hundreds of thousands of consumers watching BBC programmes on its iPlayer – which allows viewers to watch shows over the internet – will place an intolerable strain on their networks.

Once again, the core of the whole net neutrality issue:
Consumers pay for their bandwidth. Content providers such as the BBC pay for their bandwidth. If ISPs make promises they can’t keep, that’s nobody’s problem but their own.

It’s not that fucking hard. Trying to blame this alleged “bandwidth crisis” on the consumer is bullshit, and I’m amazed this doesn’t spawn countless false advertising lawsuits.

If I hear one more idiot say “The invisible hand of the free market will solve everything!”, I’m going to punch someone.

American Red Cross sued over its emblem by Johnson & Johnson

After more than a century of sharing the same emblem, a red cross on a white field, Johnson & Johnson has sued the American Red Cross for using its trademark for other than non-profit purposes.

J&J claims the ARC is marketing first-aid kits to make a profit, while the Red Cross says the money from the sale of the kits goes exclusively to its relief services and called the pharmaceutical giant’s lawsuit “obscene.”

And ARC is right.

J&J registered “their” logo as a trademark in 1905, and claim to have been using it since 1887. The Red Cross has been using it since 1864, and the Geneva Conventions stipulate that it’s the only organisation that can use it.
When the US ratified the Geneva Conventions in 1882, it took a while to enable the necessary legislation (no surprise there), and by the time they did, lobbying by J&J ensured that they got to use the logo themselves, in violation of said Conventions.

So for over a century, J&J has been using this logo (illegally, though obviously not in the American sense of the word) for commercial purposes, while the American Red Cross has been using it for non-profit purposes.
Now they think the fact that the ARC is selling things to fund their (still non-profit) projects infringes on “their” trademark, and they’re demanding punitive damages (and legal fees).

Seriously.
The only way they could be more evil is if they actually shot puppies for profit.

Tonight, my dinner consists of a hamburger, steak, french fries, and about a pound of cheese.

In case you haven’t seen this, it’s a repository of videos from the various talks given at TED by various people. They’re rather long, and most of them are very interesting, so beware if you’re subject to monthly download limits.
Obvious reccomendations are Dawkins and Dennett, but seriously, browse through and watch whatever looks interesting. Everything is.

(I forget where I found this. I’ve had this link in my bookmarks for ages.)

You may or may not be aware that a while ago, bookseller Borders in the UK moved all copies of the comic book Tintin in the Congo to its adult section, and added stickers warning of shocking content, because it was considered racist. Since Tintin is Belgian, this made the news here at the time.

If you aren’t familiar with the album, in it, Tintin visits Congo, which was a Belgian colony at the time (1931). The actual storyline isn’t very interesting, but he interacts with the natives on several occasions, and yes, by today’s standards it’s quite racist.

And now, it’s in the news again.

Parket opent onderzoek naar racisme in ‘Kuifje in Afrika’

Bij het Brusselse parket is een vooronderzoek geopend naar de strip ‘Kuifje in Afrika’ van Hergé nadat een Congolese student een klacht had ingediend omdat hij het album “een belediging voor alle Congolezen” vindt.

A Congolese student filed a complaint because he thinks the album is “an insult to all Congolese”.
In particular, he objects to the stereotypical way the Congolese are drawn and speak, and the way Snowy talks to them.

This is a comic book written in 1931. Hergé was aware it was racist, but he was trying to capture the Zeitgeist of the time. He was quite explicit about this.
Nevertheless, he still toned it down when it was redrawn in 1946, and he even removed references to Congo being a Belgian colony, even though they wouldn’t become independent for another decade and a half. Newer editions are toned down even further.

Hergé has been dead for twenty-four years. The album is seventy-six years old, and somehow it went without lawsuit for all that time.
It’s a work of art, very obviously not intended to target blacks. It reflects the spirit of the time, and is emphatically not covered by hate speech or discrimination laws.

This guy is complaining about a cartoon dog thinking rudely in the general direction of cartoon black people.

It’s just a retarded attempt to get national attention, and apparently it worked.
If there was any sort of black/white racial tension in Belgium (there isn’t, really; Flanders can be retardedly racist, but really only towards brown people), this would be exactly the sort of thing to make it worse.

Congratulations, Mbutu Mondondo Bienvenu. You’ve successfully wasted the court’s time, and fed the stereotype of blacks being hypersensitive to racism.
Oh, and you got to appear on national TV. Go you.

I set up a blog for Livia/IcLubYou two weeks ago, and she’s finally made her first post.
So go visit and welcome her to the Rota Hall fold, would you?

In case anyone’s interested, I’ve stripped the The Mansion code of any game content and uploaded it here. It’s heavily commented to help you understand what everything does.
(Start reading in core.cpp.)

Calling it a game engine would be a bit much, but if you’re new to C++ (but not very new to programming in general) and would like to make your own text adventure, I think you could start from there.
There are a few design decisions that would probably get me a spot on The Daily WTF (or would have, back when they still did code as opposed to just random screenshots and weaksauce stories), but I’d like to think most of them are defensible in light of increased readibility of the code (except for the way generic_actions.hpp works—I should’ve made that into a function and included it once, probably; still, a bit of redundant code never killed anyone, and I can’t be arsed to fix it now).
It’s certainly good enough for small to medium-sized text adventures, anyway.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. And if you decide to make your own text adventure in it, do let me know.

Ubuntu is an excellent OS for people who are afraid of their computers, in the same way that Mac OS is, only a bit less painful. I’ve installed it on a spare hard drive to check it out, and if I can’t manage to get Gentoo working on my laptop (which has been ordered, and will apparently only cost 664 €, instead of the 749 € it would have cost to have it delivered and have Windows Vista installed on it), I may end up using Ubuntu instead (though I’d still much rather not).

I downloaded Gentoo last night, but couldn’t get it to work properly (on my desktop). A borky X server is hard to troubleshoot if you don’t have a graphical browser available at the same time. You’d think Linux support forums would keep in mind that more than none of their userbase would want to browse them using links, but apparently not.
Anyway, it’s either the fact that my video card is nearly completely fucked, or something to do with their ATI drivers. I don’t foresee it’ll be an issue for the laptop either way.

No word on when said laptop will be arriving, but I don’t expect it to be more than another two weeks or so. That should give me the time to try a few other distros as well.
Wooh.

So apparently my blog was crashing IE consistently (as opposed to randomly, which it manages all by itself). I couldn’t actually be bothered to figure out why, and embedded YouTube videos were blamed.
When I looked at today’s announcement to see what the transparent PNG looks like in IE, though, it still crashed, so clearly it was something in the sidebar.
Apparently it was that sidebar election poll.

It’s been up for about a month now, so I doubt it’s going to change much in the near future, except for maybe a few more random trolls voting for Republicans, so I took it down. Result are →

As expected, most people voted for Gore. The Ron Paul voters are the ‘tards trolling Technorati for Ron Paul posts, who dropped by a while ago. Not sure who voted for Thompson. Probably random Karel Dillen masturbators.

Anywae.

Alright, so it’s almost a month ahead of schedule. After three days of playtesting, I think it’s ready for its first release.

About

The Mansion is a text adventure in the style of Zork, perhaps, except shorter and not intended to be funny.
You are the unnamed protagonist. You went camping with your friend and/or loved ones, and got lost in the forest in a storm. You slip, hit your head, and lose consciousness. When you wake up, you find yourself in a mysterious mansion.
Your goal, obviously, is to escape.

Warning for the lolis: this game touches on some “mature” subjects, including suicide, rape, murder, infanticide, pedophilia, and—gasp!—video games.
I would like to think this game is horror, but I doubt I actually achieved that.

You can find the game here. Right now, there’s only a Windows version, though it will work under Wine (for Linux users) or Darwine (for Mac users; though if you’re on an older Mac, finding the PPC version of Darwine can be a problem).
I intend to add a Linux version soon, but unless I find a decent cross compiler, a Mac version might be problematic. If you know of one (that would work under either Windows or Linux), do let me know. (I could send the source to someone who owns a Mac, for them to compile, but I really don’t want to do that at this point. Maybe in a month or so.)
If (when) you find bugs or typos, please do report them (either as a comment here or in some other way; my contact information is on my About Me page), so I can fix them.

Edit: Version 1.0.1 now. About a dozen mostly very minor bugs (and maybe one or two significant ones) have been fixed. If you downloaded the game more than a day or so ago, it’s probably a good idea to download it again.

The maps in that folder have been created by Terras, and are pretty awesome. Feel free to use them to guide your imagination, but if they conflict with it, ignore them, of course.

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