Linden LAN » Software

Hyphenation!

Admin — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 05:04:43 +0000

Do you like typography? Are you tired of ragged right text? Do you have a WordPress blog? Go here now! wp-Typography is the merger of wp-Typogrify and, more importantly, wp-Hyphenate. I do LaTeX typesetting, and as a result, I’ve acquired an appreciation for properly formatted text. If you ever tried using the CSS property text-align, you inevitably are disappointed with the results because it resembles nothing like what LaTeX can produce. You often have to make your text eye-jarringly wide to make it useable, and that doesn’t always work. This is because the browser lacks built-in support for hyphenation. This plugin makes up for this browser deficiency by inserting hyphenation hints, known as soft-hyphens, which the browser does understand. The algorithm is based on the one used in TeX to boot! Brilliant!

Use .htaccess To Password Protect All But The Index File

Brian — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:14:14 +0000

I helped deploy a Magento store today, but the client did not have all the products entered in the database, and won’t be ready to launch that part of the site for another month. So they wanted a “Coming Soon!” splash page to be at the subdirectory where the store is and password protect everything else. To do that I had to reconfigure the .htaccess file.

First I needed to chage the default index file. That’s simple. Change…

DirectoryIndex index.php

to…

DirectoryIndex index.html

Next I needed to password protect the site. That accomplished by using htpassword to setup the users and groups, followed by adding the following directives to the end of the .htaccess file.

AuthType Basic
AuthName "protected area"
AuthUserFile /home/68571/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /home/68571/.htgroup
Require group group
Require user username

That will password protect everything. Finally, I need to allow the index.html file for the splash page.


  Allow from all
  Satisfy any

The first regex will match against “subdir/”, the second regex matches “subdir”, and the third matches “subdir/index.html”. That’s it.

Pidgin Went Cuckoo

Brian — Fri, 18 May 2007 19:41:38 +0000

I was a big fan of Trillian because during my 15 year history of using the internet—it’s even longer if you count my bulletin-board days—I’ve acquired multiple IM accounts from different providers. I’m in the process of transitioning my multiple computers away from proprietary OSes that aren’t necessarily worth the money spent. (That’s not to say there aren’t OSes worth paying for.) However, since Trillian is platform dependent, it was out. I needed a multi-network IM client that would work on multiple platforms. Enter Pidgin. It fit all my needs, except…

Despite being a relatively robust release, Pidgin 2.0 certainly wasn’t bug free. I managed to encounter a major bug. In my particular situation, I reorganized some MSN contacts into different groups on my laptop (Xubuntu) after organizing them on my desktop (Windows). This caused a synchronization problem:

Buddy list synchronization issue in xxxxxx[at]hotmail[dot]com (MSN)
blah_blah[at]hotmail[dot]com on the local list is inside the group “Individuals” but not on the server list. Do you want this buddy to be added?

Unfortunately, no matter how you answer the dialog Pidgin crashes. Sometimes Pidgin just pukes at startup. Other times just trying to disable/enable the account causes a crash. Pidgin is just hosed. If you can manage to delete the account (because even attempting that can crash the client), then the problem goes away. However, recreating the account in hopes of starting from scratch doesn’t work. That’s because deleting the account doesn’t purge the data files of the old data.

The good news, the Pidgin developers have already fixed this bug. The bad news, there are two dozen or so more bugs to squash before 2.0.1 is released. Fortunately, I managed to find a workaround. Since the problem is a corrupt buddy list, you just simply have to delete the blist.xml file. Pidgin is smart enough to rebuild the file. This won’t prevent future corruption but at least the workaround is mostly painless.

‘Bout Time

Brian — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 23:21:14 +0000

So I was skimming through the latest EGM (Issue 210), when lo and behold, I come across a preview about Crossfire. Along with Army of Two and Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, this trio of games make-up the genre of buddy games. With all the advances in technology the gaming industry produces year after year, it floors me that it took them this long to produce games that are cooperative by design, where the single-player mode is the alternative rather than the default. Unfortunately in this initial release, the number of players are limited to two. My gaming buddies and I would love to have more cooperative, adventure/action games. At least this budding genre gives me hope.

WoW Musings

Brian — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 18:16:57 +0000

I’ve never been a huge fan of MMOs. From a gamer’s perspective, the whole idea of a game without end is great in theory (like eating pizza for the rest of your life), but sucks in practice. That’s not to say it’s bad from the publisher’s point of view. In fact it’s quite lucrative. Without an end (goal), there’s very little sense of accomplishment built into MMOs. There’s no payoff in the form of end-game credits and cutscenes for the time and money invested. So the player is forced to set goals for themselves within the limits of the game. For example…

I got dragged into playing World of Warcraft the December after it launched. As the group of us did not have any other alternative we could all agree to play for gaming night, WoW filled the void. During that period, the most fun we had was milking the auction house. Suffice it to say, we got bored after about 6 months. Unfortunately, we exhausted the replacement games too. And so we got pulled into WoW once more. Part of the problem with our first stint, we attributed to picking pansy Alliances characters. We also researched our classes a heck of a lot more and twinked them like crazy using our Alliance funds. G-zan FTW!

We also made the game more challenging. We concentrated on instancing only, leveling to the point where we’d be high enough to go into an instance and finish it in one run (where possible) but be low enough in level that we didn’t overpower the mobs and bosses. Our best was when we 3-manned Sunken Temple with one death during the fight with Eranikus. Playing this way made the game much more enjoyable the second time around, but shows that it was only fun because we found a way to make it fun, bringing me back to my original point.

Since we could level however we wanted in between instance runs, I opted to do PVP because the Warsong Gulch rewards were easily attainable. Plus I missed playing FPSes and this was the closest I’d get. Eventually we exhausted all the instances we could 3-man and that was pretty much the end, which left me to decide whether to continue with PVP or not. I did get what I originally sought after which was an epic mount. As much as I liked the fact that we completed instances in such a way that we got a sense of accomplishment, I ultimately decided it really wasn’t enough. So I figured I had the skill and time to push for High Warlord. I also realized it was also an investment because once a High Warlord always a High Warlord, and the PVP gear automatically upgrades as the levels expand which means every 10 levels of expansion I can simply buy one of the top three items in the game depending on the content at any given time. Being HW means never having to care about a drop again. Update: Blizzard changed the honor system such that honor is now treated as currency instead of a measure of rank which is a welcomed change but it just means only my title is worth anything. So no easy upgrades for me. At least my weapons lasted me til 70.

So seven months after I started PVP (Remember what I said about it being lucrative for the publisher?), Polio attained rank 14. Of course props go out to Maskimxul, Nelgrath, Black Raiders, Starshadow, The Asylum, and everyone else who offered support. It’s good to be the king. It’s also good that I could walk away feeling I accomplished something. Granted it’s much more a measure of time played versus skill but that’s a whole other topic.