Wednesday, May 28, 2008
comments?
We drew a sketch on the whiteboard over lunch, I've transcribed it using inkscape for the benefit of future generations:
Monday, April 21, 2008
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Khaz'goroth BBQ
It all started just before Christmas when the infamous Funshine The Plan:
1pm Sat 2nd Feb, at the Silvan Dam Reservoir Arboretum in Victoria. BYO picnic/bbq food.
Afterwards:
To the Mcawber Park Tavern in Belgrave for some fine Dwarvish stout.
The fallback plan(because bloodelves melt in the rain):
If its raining heavily we will just leave the park and go straight to the tavern, the have great counter meals etc.
Extras:
I will be taxi-ing people from the Belgrave station at 12 noon to the park, we will have several cars, coordinate with funshine if you would like to travel with the
So far we will have members from:
bear, blackwing, tempus, conviction, knights of dark renown, legion of chaos and possibly khazuals
leave a reply here, or email tjstebbing over at gmail.com, or get on irc.oz.org and join #khazgoroth and chat with us :) feel free to link this post to your forums, all khaz'goroth players are welcome, please, no LAPVP :O
Thursday, January 3, 2008
random flying updates
I've been so flat out I've hardly had time to scratch let alone blog. So whats been going on? Argh!
oct/nov 07: Was made Lead Developer after the previous lead left, began implementing some sane development procedures, UQDS, Trac etc, team seems fairly happy and things are going well, have the next six months of development planned out, its going to be big :)
nov/dec 07: Christmas again, where did 07 go? crazily busy at work trying to get everything ready for next deployment, down one senior programmer, trying to fill the role desperately before we get too far into jan, do you know anyone?
Christmas/New Year: Carols at Werribee Mansion put on by the local churches was fantastic, about 15,000 people, the girls loved it, especially the nativity play with live donkey, camels etc. I was impressed by the firey poi and the multi-denominational sense of oneness in Christ. Christmas day was breakfast at our house at 6am, girls opening pressies, much excitement. Lunch with Leigh's family in Werribee, saying farewell to Rory (leighs brother) and Kim, who are moving to QLD to live. Dinner with my grandparents down at Dromana on the peninsula, then back home on boxing day because the delivery man was arriving the day after with my pressie for Leigh, a new laptop :) (she got me a wii! wooot). New years at Joel and Fee's place was groovy, except for the hot weather causing a 'glow stick wrist band' to explode and spray glow in the dark stuff in Leigh's eyes :( all good now, no harm done. We almost ran over a young man (about 16ish) at 1am driving home, he was staggering in the dark around the road trying to walk home from Monbulk to Ferntree Gully! Here is his attempted 1am stagger:
View Larger Map
We gave him a lift home, turns out he had phoned his mum but she was too enebriated to pick him up :/
jan 08: Just back at work, Mark and Naomi got married last night! awesome service/reception, will post pics when I can scan them in (we forgot our digital camera and had to buy one of those disposable ones from coles).
oct/nov 07: Was made Lead Developer after the previous lead left, began implementing some sane development procedures, UQDS, Trac etc, team seems fairly happy and things are going well, have the next six months of development planned out, its going to be big :)
nov/dec 07: Christmas again, where did 07 go? crazily busy at work trying to get everything ready for next deployment, down one senior programmer, trying to fill the role desperately before we get too far into jan, do you know anyone?
Christmas/New Year: Carols at Werribee Mansion put on by the local churches was fantastic, about 15,000 people, the girls loved it, especially the nativity play with live donkey, camels etc. I was impressed by the firey poi and the multi-denominational sense of oneness in Christ. Christmas day was breakfast at our house at 6am, girls opening pressies, much excitement. Lunch with Leigh's family in Werribee, saying farewell to Rory (leighs brother) and Kim, who are moving to QLD to live. Dinner with my grandparents down at Dromana on the peninsula, then back home on boxing day because the delivery man was arriving the day after with my pressie for Leigh, a new laptop :) (she got me a wii! wooot). New years at Joel and Fee's place was groovy, except for the hot weather causing a 'glow stick wrist band' to explode and spray glow in the dark stuff in Leigh's eyes :( all good now, no harm done. We almost ran over a young man (about 16ish) at 1am driving home, he was staggering in the dark around the road trying to walk home from Monbulk to Ferntree Gully! Here is his attempted 1am stagger:
View Larger Map
We gave him a lift home, turns out he had phoned his mum but she was too enebriated to pick him up :/
jan 08: Just back at work, Mark and Naomi got married last night! awesome service/reception, will post pics when I can scan them in (we forgot our digital camera and had to buy one of those disposable ones from coles).
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
WoW UI Modding
People are often commenting on my WoW UIs when they come around, I've been 'modding' my UI for a fair while now and have a fairly simple set of addons I find greatly effective across all of my characters. I can usually throw together a nice looking workable UI in about 10 minutes, so I thought I'd share my set. I like my UI to be functional, clean & visually appealing.
There are a few fundamentals I find can be covered really well with minimal fuss, they are 'action bars', 'chat windows', 'minimap' and 'viewport'. I have used many unit frame addons in the past but these days I'm happy enough with the default ones.Action Bars
Without a doubt the best mod here is bartender3 from wowace.com, easily configurable from the waterfall menu ace2 is so well known for, it will do just about anything you want it to.
Chat Windows
I dont ask a huge amount form a chat window mod, I want to drop the scroll buttons, add mouse scroll, and other than that, to get out of my way. I find SimpleChatMod from wowace.com does this just fine.
Minimap
SimpleMiniMap from wowace.com, does different shapes, hides the annoying bits, has coordinate options, allows the map to move, allows the map icons to be detached, and most importantly, allows for independent movement of the bits of the regular wow ui that hang off the minimap, most notably, your quest tracker and your durability meter.
Viewport
Viewport modification is such an important part of any UI mod but so many people just do not understand what it is. Your viewport is the amount of the screen that the WoW client renders the 3D world into, WoW lets you change this using addons. Why? because by shrinking your viewport to make space for your UI (rather than overlaying your UI on the viewport as is the default), you actually see -more- of the environment. Still not sure what I mean? download Sunn -ViewportArt from curse and try it out (I suggest downloading all of the ArtPacks that go with it, 5 to date). If you don't understand what I'm talking about, give it a go, I'm sure it will click :)
In general I try to only use ace2 addons from wowace.com, why? because ace2 addons use shared libraries to cut down on the memory usage in your lua runtime, and it also means configuration, skinning etc of your addons works across the board, rather than on an addon by addon basis. Also they run their project like any decent opensource endeavour, that gets my vote any day.
Other addons I use:
Omen (threat meter)
BigWigs (raid boss mod)
Ora2 (CTRaid compatible raid helper)
Baggins (great bag mod)
ClosetGnome (wardrobe mod)
Baggins_ClosetGnome (makes baggins keep my gear sets seperate)
DrDamage (shows the agerage heal/damage on the action bar of each skill)
Gatherer + GathererDB (essential for herbing)
All of my addons are ace2 with the exception of Gatherer and ViewportArt.
Happy modding!
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Games, Kids and Parents
I consider myself a gamer, the first game I played would probably have been donky kong hand held back in the early 80s as a small child in primary school.
My family was never very wealthy as I grew up so we got our gaming where we could, my aunt and uncle had a c64, my brother and I used to spend ages playing frogger, pit fall, and my all-time fav: Pirates! by sid mir.
Toward the middle of primary school the NES brick was released, my brother and I were the first kids in our school to have one. Not because our rich parents went out and bought one.. no, we had heard about the release 6 months prior and spend our entire holidays on a neighbors property shelling chestnuts (from their damn spikey husks) for 50c a bucket, every day taking our $5 earnings up to the local toy store to pay off more of our deposit.
I don't believe anyone else appreciated Super Maro Bro's as much as my brother and I, it was worth the wait. I remember well the NES-blisters, and how we initially made curious 'jumping' movements with the control pad as we pressed the buttons, actually leaning the way we wanted to move as be became accustomed to the new concept; (curious that with the Wii we see this old behaviour re-emerge ;)
Like I said, we did not have a whole lot of money, but a kindly aunt of ours worked at a retail outlet that sold NES games, and she would often 'loan' us stock for a few weeks, on the condition that we kept it in -mint- condition. Gradius, Kid Iccurus, Castle Vania, Legend of Zelda.. those were the days. Since then I've owned a SNES (the golden age of tile based RPGs), game cube, ps1, ps2, and many many PC games.
I mourned the death of a flower girl from the streets of Midgar, I gaped in astonishment as the true nature of Samus Aran was revealed in 32 pixel bikini-clad glory.. Now days I'm 28, married with two fantastic daughters, by day I'll play Spyro the dragon or Pooh's adventures with my girls, by night I'm a level 70 tauren druid tank, with my resto druid wife at my side we roam the outlands defending the horde. At times I'll break out in FPS fever and spend long evenings with some mates crowded around a table full of PCs or an xbox or two for some halo deathmatch.
Oh, and just to throw an interesting slant on it all, I'm a deeply dedicated Christian :) so there goes your stereotypes, on both sides of the fence :)
So there you have my credentials, so where, you might wonder am I taking this? Game Censorship is where I'm headed, the number of ill informed people I talk to who have come to the conclusion that games are evil, will turn your kids into latent killers.. therefore games that portray mature themes should be banned; its moronic to say the least.
Game censorship needs to start (and end) in the home people, I own games that contain violence, do I let my kids play (or even watch) them? hell no. Do you own any violent movies? probably, do you let your kids watch them? I hope not.
Saving Private Ryan may arguably be of great value, passing on the narrative of bloody warfare, but its a lesson best learned when you are old enough to put the violence in context. Parents need to take responsibility for what their kids watch and play, and perhaps failing to do so should incur the same ramifications as if I let my 5 year old drink the bottle of whiskey I have in my house.
The rating system we have for games is there as a guide to parents, so they can make informed decisions. Perhaps more games need to carry a higher rating, but in the end, as a parent I'm going to make sure I have a full understanding of a games content before it passes through my filter to my kids.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a wild statement:
Guns don't kill people, Games don't kill people, Stupid Parents who bring up unbalanced kids can sometimes kill people, Don't be stupid :)
-tjs
My family was never very wealthy as I grew up so we got our gaming where we could, my aunt and uncle had a c64, my brother and I used to spend ages playing frogger, pit fall, and my all-time fav: Pirates! by sid mir.
Toward the middle of primary school the NES brick was released, my brother and I were the first kids in our school to have one. Not because our rich parents went out and bought one.. no, we had heard about the release 6 months prior and spend our entire holidays on a neighbors property shelling chestnuts (from their damn spikey husks) for 50c a bucket, every day taking our $5 earnings up to the local toy store to pay off more of our deposit.
I don't believe anyone else appreciated Super Maro Bro's as much as my brother and I, it was worth the wait. I remember well the NES-blisters, and how we initially made curious 'jumping' movements with the control pad as we pressed the buttons, actually leaning the way we wanted to move as be became accustomed to the new concept; (curious that with the Wii we see this old behaviour re-emerge ;)
Like I said, we did not have a whole lot of money, but a kindly aunt of ours worked at a retail outlet that sold NES games, and she would often 'loan' us stock for a few weeks, on the condition that we kept it in -mint- condition. Gradius, Kid Iccurus, Castle Vania, Legend of Zelda.. those were the days. Since then I've owned a SNES (the golden age of tile based RPGs), game cube, ps1, ps2, and many many PC games.
I mourned the death of a flower girl from the streets of Midgar, I gaped in astonishment as the true nature of Samus Aran was revealed in 32 pixel bikini-clad glory.. Now days I'm 28, married with two fantastic daughters, by day I'll play Spyro the dragon or Pooh's adventures with my girls, by night I'm a level 70 tauren druid tank, with my resto druid wife at my side we roam the outlands defending the horde. At times I'll break out in FPS fever and spend long evenings with some mates crowded around a table full of PCs or an xbox or two for some halo deathmatch.
Oh, and just to throw an interesting slant on it all, I'm a deeply dedicated Christian :) so there goes your stereotypes, on both sides of the fence :)
So there you have my credentials, so where, you might wonder am I taking this? Game Censorship is where I'm headed, the number of ill informed people I talk to who have come to the conclusion that games are evil, will turn your kids into latent killers.. therefore games that portray mature themes should be banned; its moronic to say the least.
Game censorship needs to start (and end) in the home people, I own games that contain violence, do I let my kids play (or even watch) them? hell no. Do you own any violent movies? probably, do you let your kids watch them? I hope not.
Saving Private Ryan may arguably be of great value, passing on the narrative of bloody warfare, but its a lesson best learned when you are old enough to put the violence in context. Parents need to take responsibility for what their kids watch and play, and perhaps failing to do so should incur the same ramifications as if I let my 5 year old drink the bottle of whiskey I have in my house.
The rating system we have for games is there as a guide to parents, so they can make informed decisions. Perhaps more games need to carry a higher rating, but in the end, as a parent I'm going to make sure I have a full understanding of a games content before it passes through my filter to my kids.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a wild statement:
Guns don't kill people, Games don't kill people, Stupid Parents who bring up unbalanced kids can sometimes kill people, Don't be stupid :)
-tjs
Monday, September 10, 2007
analogy of my work
I was recently asked how to describe the work I'm doing to our new CEO, I'm refactoring our application from single, central, slow ZODB to be distributable, scalable and fast.. using storm.
The problem is, while they see $ being spent on this project, they see no output up front, there is no new UI feature to point at and say 'There, thats what we got for our development cost.' as there is with other projects going on in our little team.
So here is the little story I sent off to our team leader, its my attempt to explain the work I'm doing in laymen terms.
We have a Datsun, in the Datsun is a bomb, if the Datsun goes below 50 we all blow up. The Datsun's top speed is about 85, and we're told that the bomb limit will be increased from 50 to 100 in the near future, and possibly higher.
We need to replace our Datsun with a Porche 911.. without dropping below 50.
Before we can start on any of the interesting components like the wheels, engine, breaks etc.. we need to prepare the chassis, the 'framework' for the new parts.. this is what we're doing now, its about 75% complete.
Because the car will be running with porche parts as well as old datsun parts for a period of time, we need to make sure they can work together, sometimes we may even have to create a new part which will, for a time, run as slow as the old part it has replaced, simply because it is hooked up to other old parts.
Sounds tricky? well yes, but thats ok, we've done this kind of work before, you just need to tiptoe for a while, the speed increase grows exponentially after the chassis is done :)
The problem is, while they see $ being spent on this project, they see no output up front, there is no new UI feature to point at and say 'There, thats what we got for our development cost.' as there is with other projects going on in our little team.
So here is the little story I sent off to our team leader, its my attempt to explain the work I'm doing in laymen terms.
We have a Datsun, in the Datsun is a bomb, if the Datsun goes below 50 we all blow up. The Datsun's top speed is about 85, and we're told that the bomb limit will be increased from 50 to 100 in the near future, and possibly higher.
We need to replace our Datsun with a Porche 911.. without dropping below 50.
Before we can start on any of the interesting components like the wheels, engine, breaks etc.. we need to prepare the chassis, the 'framework' for the new parts.. this is what we're doing now, its about 75% complete.
Because the car will be running with porche parts as well as old datsun parts for a period of time, we need to make sure they can work together, sometimes we may even have to create a new part which will, for a time, run as slow as the old part it has replaced, simply because it is hooked up to other old parts.
Sounds tricky? well yes, but thats ok, we've done this kind of work before, you just need to tiptoe for a while, the speed increase grows exponentially after the chassis is done :)
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