I’ve got a theme that doesn’t make me want to tear my eyes out, but it’s not what I want yet.

I’ve acknowledged all missing images that I noticed by tagging the post as ‘broken images’, and I’ll be going through them again later to see if I have any remaining local copies of the files in question.

I’ve installed a modern syntax hiliting plugin, so code should be readable again.

Sooo close.

Also, my company has recently had to make some dramatic changes that I’m still coping with. I am still employed, but I’m not much in the mood to continue with any of my previous article series at present.

On the bright side, this gives me an excuse upgrade to WP2.9 and dig through my 250+ post archive and clean things up.

Please excuse the mess while I unbork everything. Happy new year.

I plan on making my Florensia update some time next week and hope to resume regular posting for most of January.

The rules are simple. Every week for the next 50+ weeks, I am going to try to choose a free to play mmorpg or one for which I have acquired a nda-free beta invitation. I will register and download and install and play the game. I will attempt to play one character to a decent level and maybe attempt an alt if time/interest allow. I will catalog/tag broad features and elements of the game to allow for easy comparison between all games thusly reviewed.

Schedule-wise, I will attempt to post on Wednesdays. This gives me a running start into the weekend.

I will accept suggestions, but lacking a suggestion will otherwise choose games that jump out at me from banner ads or mmorpg.com over the course of the week, etc… Games chosen will go into a queue and the next new game will be announced when the previous game’s review is posted.

In the case of games I have attempted before but haven’t ever formally reviewed… I’m not entirely sure what to do. I think that many of them are worth consideration and a second chance, so they will likely find their way onto the queue – but I promise to avoid doing two re-reviews in a row and will extend that to a promise that I will attempt to avoid largely similar games on successive weeks.

In the event of closed beta sorts of games where I’m not at liberty to disclose details, I will attempt to maintain my regular schedule in addition to closed beta duties… and will try to produce an end-of-nda sort of review if at all possible.

All that being said, I will begin the torture tomorrow

What got deleted:

• How I’d build an internet radio station if I had to do it again. (Distributed network of listening sources, magical listening preferences dj algorithms).
• What I’d like to see in an internet television station. (I built a prototype, but VP6 encoding is hard to automate – h.264 support in Flash makes that concern moot now).
• A rant in response to all of the uninspired flames I received for my LOTRO stress test review. (I wasn’t impressed with either the game or the apparent education level of the trolls).
• A gory description of the innards of an AS1 project I had inherited and wrestled into usability. (Don’t let script kiddies write your website for you).
• Several WoW rants, ui mod reviews, and spec discussions. (The stock quest interface needs help in a very big way, Dark Pact warlocks are awesome – so is saccing your felpuppy, Combat Experience and Careful Aim aren’t worth it, Every class needs a panic button or three, Protadins need to choose carefully between Sanctuary and Kings).
• Part 6 of my 2007 spring anime lineup review series. (Lucky Star absolutely terrifies me).
• A rant on the differences between Adobe AIR and MS Silverlight. (They’re entirely not the same thing, btw).
• A lossless way to get video out of .mov and into .avi wrappers for editing in utilities that can’t read Quicktime but can use arbitrary DirectShow codecs. (Huffyuv + ffmpeg).
• A few benchmarking experiments with AS3/Flash 9 performance. (Setting a DisplayObject’s alpha to zero is almost, but not quite as good as setting its visible to false; For some strange reason, switch statements appear to be slower than if-else blocks).
• A review of Rogue Galaxy. (One of the best console RPG’s I’ve played in a while).
• Walraven needs quest journals badly. (EQ2′s is the closest to what I want; Need the ability to set one quest as a pre-requisite for another).
• The four part epic story of how I sweat blood in order to build an SVN/Trac account management system that ran on a windows server… and then wound up getting to port it to Linux after a week when the windows box blew an hdd controller. (It took something like 4 weeks to build the original, it took 8.5 hours to port it).
• A 2-year-old idea for a little web comic about chibi pirates. (Still probably going to revisit this one).

The queued articles I didn’t delete and still pretend I might write one day are:

• Why it’s futile for me to pretend that I have any privacy online, and why I’m not splitting this blog up into three separate sites any time soon.
• How to set up apache to write its logs to a remote host over an encrypted tunnel.
• Two more character classes for my TSRPG idea.

But I’m probably just kidding myself. Part of the reason these ideas wind up getting shelved is that the spark of the idea is lost after an interruption. I’ll start recording some fascinating insight I had about humanity after watching Kurosawa’s Rashomon… only to be interrupted by feeding time for the baby. By the time she’s taken care of and happy again, I’ve lost half of the idea and can’t bring myself to post a 75% written entry.

This is also why I keep having long breaks between posts. The goals need to be less lofty and more frequent. We’ll see if I can’t manage better over the next few weeks.

Ever since I migrated my blog over to WordPress, I've had a little dropdown box in the right column that contained a list of my post categories. Well, that box never actually did anything. There was no form associated with it and no javascript.

Well, I finally buckled under and figured out the javascript. The code in question to make the category box automatically jump to the desired category search is something like this:

Of course, if your url scheme is different, you might need to specify something slightly different for the destination. But the point is, this works so far as I've tested it, and it was pretty painless to drop into place.

The install took <5 minutes. It was 100% painless.

1. Download the plugin
2. Unzip into WP plugins dir
3. Open WP admin console -> Plugins
4. Click 'Activate' next to Sociable in the list
5. Go to Options -> Sociable
6. Set desired preferences
7. View your blog with cool links at the bottom of posts

Go. Get it now. You know you want to. Your blog will love you for it.

Last night, despite my best efforts to hack this package to prevent comment posting, they still managed to find some URL to allow them to do so... I got hit with 92 more spam comments.

In desperation, I started digging through the database schema and discovered that each post has a flag that determines what level of comments to allow. I edited the table to disable comments on all existing posts, changed the default value for new db entries, and found the line in the admin interface where I type new posts that was setting comments to 'open' by default and overriding the prefs stored in the db.

This time had better work