Kythin's Rants

Since I quit WoW again a few months ago, I’ve been spending a lot of that now-spare time buying way too many games on Steam and playing them start to finish. At the moment I’m deep into Mass Effect 2 and loving it, but it’s making me feel nostalgic for some of my other all-time favourite and best built games. It’s too early to call ME2 a favourite, but I’m definately enjoying it and despite not having a ‘jump’ function, it’s got a really good control style both in and out of the ship.

One of the games I’m nostalgic about is an old one from 2001 called Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos. It’ll always stand out as the best space-piracy game I think I’ll ever play, with very easy and intuitive controls and a nice semi-sandbox feel to is that you really need in any open space game. You really had to size up the convoy of ships before you attacked and took their cargo pods, and with the space-police and other mercinary escorts around you had to be smart and quick with the controls. I forget most of the story now, but I remember it being pretty great.

Not many people have played it, or even heard of it, so it’s also one of those little gaming gems that never makes it onto any lists or into many reviews. I just wish I could buy it on Steam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_War_2:_Edge_of_Chaos

I had to figure out how to upgrade Mootools from Joomla 1.5′s default, horribly outdated 1.11 to 1.2 in order to use some funky scripts in a new client template today, and after a bit of stress and searching I found this:

http://www.dwightjack.com/diary/2009/02/23/upgrade-mootools-to-v12x-in-joomla-15/

It seems that the admin dropdown menu’s stop working if you just overwrite the old Mootools files, so Dwight has come up with a quick and easy frontend solution to keep the admin section loading 1.11 and allow the template to load 1.2 instead!

Thanks Dwight!

I spent a bit of time yesterday rolling out a new version of Wordspinner for WordPress. Nothing much really, but now it comes with a widget that you can use to add spinnable text to sidebars without having to make a change to the wordpress text widget manually.

Grab it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordspinner/

I’m busy with my business at the moment, but I thought it was about time I spruced up the site.

New wordpress makes it so easy… I think it took 10 minutes for me to find a theme and install it, didn’t even have to touch any files directly or do anything via ftp!

And now, an update! *gasp*

I just finished putting the final little touches on an idea I’ve been kicking around for years. It’s just a little ap to visually build lists (or teams, etc). It’s got no database, no login/username requirements, and a very simple way to save the state of your workspace to come back to later.

The basic idea is that you can add things to the ‘table’ and then move them around as if they were scraps of paper. So if you’re in a WoW guild with 30+ active raiders and need a way to build 10man Ulduar teams, this is here to help you out.

Check it out, I’m pretty happy with it: Kythin’s WoW Teambuilder and Generic List Builder

And ofcourse if you like it enough to want to support my random programming project habbit, you can always buy me a beer!

Hiya Wordspinner fans;

I’ve had a couple of emails lately about this little addon, and I do want to put some more work into it (e.g. nesting brackets, and not needing manual code changes to enable it) but I just haven’t had time lately. If anyone out there wants to make some mods to it, you’re welcome to, just send me your updates and I’ll go through SVN hell again to put it on the wordpress server.

Seriously, have they not heard of an FTP server? geez.