tunagami.com :

Upgrading RubyGems without outside or proxy access

Fri, 23 May 2008 10:20:00 -0500

Just something I ran into recently and thought I would write a quick note about. I had rubygems 0.9.4 on a closed off server and was able to upgrade it. I was trying to do some form of the “sudo gem update –system” and giving the path to the actually rubygems-update-x.x.x.gem, but I couldn’t get it to fly. Instead I downloaded the latest tarball and ran the setup file in it. I was nervous that it would install a second instance of rubygems, but I saw this lovely message come up while installing it:

Removing old RubyGems RDoc and ri
rm -rf /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/doc/rubygems-0.9.4

After it installed I checked the version of rubygems and it was what I installed. All my gems were still good too. The light is green, the trap is clean.

Firing up Firefox 3 RC 1

Wed, 21 May 2008 21:12:00 -0500

Recently I have been noticing Safari 3.1.1 has been running like doody for gmail when I am at work and at home as well. I also have been having more occurrences of it crashing lately. While I am trying to stick with the “Mac Mindset ™” and use mac only or cocoa apps, or some other kool-aid-ish type thing, I decided to try out Firefox 3 RC 1.

I used to be a HUGE FF fan when it was in its 1.x days. Anyone who would let me, I switched them to using FF. It was like a whole other world. Browsing was just better. Tabs were the norm. Finding text on a page was awesome and you could highlight, etc. And it rendered faster too. I kicked IE to the curb and only used it when QA’ing any work I had.

Fast forward to FF 2.x. I tried to stick with FF, but safari was rendering much faster in its 3.x incarnation, the memory footprint seemed to be way more manageable, and I couldn’t resist it. It’s search was as good, if not cooler than FF. I dove it and actually found I liked it more than FF 2.x and it became my default browser.

That leads me up to now. The past 2 days I have begun using Firefox 3 RC1 more and more and I am liking it. It reminds me of the zippy 1.5. I am also finding it fits well with OS X all the same and by just changing a few settings, I am able to take advantage of some of the little “it works” type of things you get with Safari in OS X 10.5 Leopard.

So, give it a whirl. It is not full release, but it is good enough for me… for now. Maybe I will write more about it, but if I don’t, it probably means I am still just sticking with Firefox 3 now.

Neat Animation

Mon, 19 May 2008 13:12:00 -0500

I am sure I am not the only one posting this (in fact, I found this on 37 signal’s site), but I want to post it on this site too just to spread the neatness of it. enjoy!

Monsterpocalypse: Monster Disappointment

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:05:00 -0500

Well, I am pretty sure I won’t be trying this game any time soon. The last thing miniature gaming needs is another collectable game in my book.

When I first began playing miniature wargames like warhammer fantasy and 40k I saw another game being played by some of the CCG regulars, Wiz Kids’ Mage Knight. When I saw the figures all I thought was, “bleegh”. The figures looked liked crappy knock off action figures that spent too much time in the sun. I did appreciate the bases containing the stats, but was quickly turned off by how they looked. A friend of mine one Christmas gave me a starter pack of them, and while I appreciated the gift, after I played it with him a few times, they took up space in my closet and have never left (anyone want some old Mage Knight figs?).

When Heroclix came out, I thought, hmm I will give this a shot. I mean, come on. It has super heroes, how can it suck? And ya know what? It didn’t. It was and still is a pretty fun game. Wiz kids simplified some of the movement rules by supplying a map divided into squares and some ideas of buildings/terrain/etc. There were rules for throwing people, throwing your own heroes at other heroes, all kinds of super-hero type of things. A friend of mine at work, at the time, played many a lunch time games each having a starter and a booster or 2. The problem was, if we wanted to expand, we needed to buy boosters. While I have no problem paying good money for a game that gives me hours of enjoyment, I don’t like playing the lottery…

Thus ended me playing hero clix. Back in the day, I used to play Magic:The Gathering (sheesh I am busting out the geek now) and while I really enjoyed that game at the time, I HATED having to either:

..buy a cases of cards in the hopes of getting some good cards or…
…paying through the nose for good singles

In fact, one of the things I liked a lot about most miniature games was if I want to play with 10 of X trooper I go out and buy 10 of X trooper (more or less). I don’t have to worry that X trooper is a “rare miniature” and that only 1 of the 5 miniatures in a booster is a “rare minature” and that there are 20 “rare miniatures’ for that series of booster… ad naseum for lottery conditions. I want to go into the store, slap my 10 pence on the counter and say “I would like a box of Puce Rapid Fire Kabold Troopers, fine sir”. That is how I like my miniature games.

So, where am I going with this? Well, tonight I saw that what I thought originally sounded like a cool concept from a decent game studio turned out to be another lottery miniature game. No thanks. If you want to give me some free blisters to try it out, fine, fire away, but unless your game is like crack on acid while smoking heroin out of a tuna-fish sandwich, I doubt it is going to have me riding the gaming lottery again. Looked neat, but no thanks

Privateer Press' Hordes - Gaming with the Mrs: Part 1.5

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 21:42:00 -0500

Earlier this week I got a few more of my trades from bartertown. “Who run bartertown?”… couldn’t help it…

I have only begun to read through the rules but it seems like an interesting ruleset with units actually having formations which make a difference to gameplay (as to what extent, I do not know yet, but I like the potential). I received the soft cover version of the rules and the art is really cool inside: I have only begun to read through the rules but it seems like an interesting ruleset with units actually having formations which make a difference to gameplay (as to what extent, I do not know yet, but I like the potential). I received the soft cover version of the rules and the art is really cool inside:

Also, when picking up a can of primer, the local game store threw in a copy of this:

I have been a subscriber of White Dwarf for I don’t know how long and every year I plan on not getting it anymore, but fortunately for Games-Workshop they have lately been putting in nice bonus figures with a subscription that have been good for trading/etc, otherwise I would have canceled a while ago.
Meanwhile, it seems that No Quarter seems like a decent magazine. The problem with White Dwarf is that they have pretty much shred the majority of quality articles like the special rules for new variant army lists, quality short story fiction, FAQs, etc and have pretty much just littered it with ads of what new gear they want you to buy. That is not to say that No Quarter is the best. I am still a pretty lousy judge at the quality of the publication, but I do notice that they publish quarterly and probably pack all the content that WD creates in 3 issues into 1 and without the magazine being like 40% ads (did I mention I hate the fact that GW’s LotR game typically takes up to 20-40% of the space in WD too…..)

Anyway, enough ranting about what gaming rag is better than the other. I figure I should give a little bit of progress made. I was able to get 4 shredders and part of the warlock built:

I will say I was impressed with the small amount of flash and mold lines I found on these figures. I do need to give them a little bath before I prime them to make sure it sticks well. I didn’t put the bow on Lylyth because I wanted to pin it along with the Carnivean heavy warbeast. I just got a little time to glue those few guys together. One thing I did too was a size comparison for the GW stuff I have. Hordes figures seem bigger. I like that ;-). More area to paint:

One last thing. For giggles I figured I would give you a few shots of my workspace. Why? I don’t know. Just look if you are interested.

I hope you all are enjoying this Hordes newb blog. Happy gaming!

Privateer Press' Hordes - Gaming with the Mrs.!

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:25:00 -0500

My wife and I don’t get much time to go out anymore now that we have a couple of munchkins in the house, so in order to have more fun at home without having to leave the house, I have introduced her to wargaming [cue sinister music]. I got her initially interested in playing because she thought all the figures looked neat. She decided she liked the fantasy looking figures more than the sci-fi and thus we began playing warhammer fantasy battles. The problem is, there are a lot of figures to paint, lots of rules to learn and a lot of time to play just one game. While I like to spend all that time working on my Warhammer and 40K armies (Dark Elves, Salamanders, Necrons and newly acquired Chaos Dwarfs), we wanted to have fewer figures to paint for our games to worry about completing.

I had heard from a friend that Hordes was a pretty fun game. I wasn’t a huge fan of Privateer Press’ Warmachine line of models (they are very nice, but not necessarily my cup of tea), but when I checked out the Hordes figures, they seemed pretty sweet to me. I had a few of armies from other game systems laying around just collecting dust, so I off to bartertown.com and I worked out a bunch of trades in order to get all 4 of the warpacks and the 2 rulebooks. While I could have gotten an idea of the game with just 2 packs and no rule books, it worked better with trading what I had, plus it seems that hordes warpacks are always in demand anyway, so if I wound up not being a huge fan I could trade most things with relative ease.

So, this week I got two of the warpacks that I traded for, Skorne and Trollbloods. Below are a few shots of the box sets still in pieces. I plan on attempting to record the progress my wife and I have while working on building and painting them and maybe some shots of some of our games in progress in addition to thoughts about the game, modeling, etc. Enjoy!

Round 4 (5? 6?)

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:33:00 -0500

So, here is another incarnation of my blog. One of these days I am gonna get it right and comfortable. The plan is to start really using this in the near future for some programming notes/help and wargaming dorkery.

So hold tight. Some cooler stuff is on the way.

RegExp, Java, Email, RFC 2822 & YOU!

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 20:37:00 -0600

I am sure a lot of you have dealt with using regexps for validating email. Its lots of fun. Regexps are extremely readable, make perfect sense the first time you look at them and are very intuitive…. oh what… what’s that? They are not? No crap!

Well, I had to improve one that was pretty limited in what it would allow. After reading a few articles on the best way, I found one at this site that had a nice java implemention of the RFC 2822 standard. While overall, it worked ok, it still allowed some emails that were not ok or stifled some that were ok. So I changed his pattern a little:

private static final String sp = "!#$%&\'*+-/=?^_`{|}~";
private static final String ftext = "[a-zA-Z0-9]";
private static final String atext = "[a-zA-Z0-9" + sp + "]";
private static final String atom = atext + "+"; //one or more atext chars
private static final String fatom = ftext + "+";
private static final String dotAtom = "(\\\\.|-|_)" + atom;
private static final String localPart = fatom + "(" + dotAtom + ")*"; //one fatom followed by 0 or more dotAtoms.

//RFC 1035 tokens for domain names:
private static final String letter = "[a-zA-Z]";
private static final String letDig = "[a-zA-Z0-9]";
private static final String letDigHyp = "[a-zA-Z0-9-]";
public static final String rfcLabel = letDig + letDigHyp + "{0,61}" + letDig;
private static final String domain = rfcLabel + "((\\\\.|-)" + rfcLabel + ")*\\\\." + letter + "{2,6}";

//Combined together, these form the allowed email regexp allowed by RFC 2822:
private static final String addrSpec = "^" + localPart + "@" + domain + "$";

//now compile it:
public static final Pattern VALID_PATTERN = Pattern.compile(addrSpec);

and a method using that pattern:

public static boolean isValidEmail(String address) {
    return VALID_PATTERN.matcher(address).matches();
}

This seems to catch all that I need it to catch and still follows the standard. Thanks to the original author for the inspiration. ^.^