Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

I continue to be really bad at predicting what I’m going to have enough enthusiasm to work on in my free time.  I’ve made no progress at all on getting back into doing any comics, but I’ve made a great deal of progress on writing and releasing a superhero RPG.  We’ve been playtesting it in the Sunday game group, and that’s been going well. I’ve almost completed the manuscript (currently in its 9th draft), including typesetting in in LaTeX (for which I had to learn just enough LaTeX), and started to produce some artwork for the illustrations.  The plan is to release it as both a free PDF and a POD book via some service like Lulu, under a Creative Commons license.  So I’ve been quite busy, happy and productive, just not on the project that I thought I was going to tackle next….

I’m planning on getting back into doing comics, to give myself a creative outlet.  One minor problem: my wife glommed onto the Macbook Pro that I used to use for these things.  She’d be willing to loan it back on an as-needed basis, but I know myself well enough to know that if whenever I wanted to sit down and do some art I’d first have to go get the laptop and bring it up, plug in the monitor and so on, I’d never get around to it after the first couple of times.  So instead I’m planning on reproducing my environment on my Vista box.  My Wacom tablet works, no problem, and I’ve just downloaded trial versions of Comic Life and Corel Draw Painter (which is up to 11, from version 10 last time I touched any of this stuff).  I’ve got 30 days to decide whether I like the Windows versions enough to pay for them, or want to try to find something else.  As an added bonus, I’ve just stuck a Seagate 1TB external drive on this machine, so I have plenty of backup space.  I lost way too many of the original files for my last comic when my prior Macbook Pro was stolen.

Now I just have to decide little details, like what’s the comic going to be about, the format, and so on.  One thing I have decided is I want to actually draw it instead of using mostly photos of Legos, but I haven’t yet decided whether to do a gag-a-day, a continuity strip, or what.  My wife says I should do something funny, so even if I do a continuity strip it’ll be humorous as best as I can make it.  I’ll probably set it up as its own WordPress blog on this site, using the ComicPress theme.  I do still have a Webcomics Nation account, but I kind of like the idea of being in control of the whole thing…and it’s not like the bandwidth is going to kill me, even if it turns out to be more popular than my wildest dreams.  Ok, maybe in my wildest dreams, it would require me moving it to Webcomics Nation for free hosting, but those are some pretty wild dreams for somebody who doesn’t have much more than an idea that he wants to do a comic and there are certain genres he enjoys.

Yay!  Installing Ubuntu 8.04 instead of Easy-Peasy fixed my wireless access (basically by downgrading the drivers to ones that worked–theoretically I could have done that by fetching them and compiling them, but without net access I was missing too many pieces).  Now all I have to do is never upgrade again and I’m set!

update: actually, it survived the first update.  It claims to be current for the moment for the build, and wireless still works.  Time to call it a success and a night.

Got this done enough to share with people, on a release early, release often basis.  It’s probably only of interest to RPG nerds, unless you want an easy way to set up fortune cookies in your TiddlyWiki…

Rollon Plugin – a plugin for rolling randomly on tables

The goal of Rollon is to make creating and rolling on tables as easy as editing a wiki, or cutting and pasting from a blog or web page.

Rollon is a TiddlyWiki plugin designed to let you roll randomly on tables, such as you might find in roleplaying games. When we talk about “tables” in Rollon, we don’t mean an HTML , just a list of entries such as a Wandering Monster Table or Treasure Table might have. To Rollon, any tiddler containing a list is potentially a table, whether the list is an unordered list, an ordered list, a dictionary list, or even just text where each line starts with a number. This gives you a great deal of freedom in designing lists, or cutting and pasting them into your TiddlyWiki from other sources.

Tried installing Linux (EasyPeasy Linux, which is Ubuntu specifically for the Asus) on my Asus EEE PC Netbook, and everything works… except the one thing that’s most vital: the wireless. It connects, but can’t get enough signal quality to actually get out to the internet except once in a long while. I can’t roll back to XP (at least without a lot of work trying to create an install image on a usb stick, or buying a usb dvd drive, and yes I probably should have gone the extra mile to figure out how to set-up dual-boot instead), but it’s hard to move forward without wireless.

Reading the forum, there are people who’ve had the same problem with this particular wireless chipset on this model (Atheros AR242x) who’ve managed to fix it by installing earlier (madwifi) drivers instead of the ath5k_pci… but even though I’ve downloaded the driver source, oops, I don’t have the build-essentials package, and getting it without a net connection is a huge pain. I’m going to try going down to the basement tonight and seeing if I connecting directly to the router will let me get the package(s) I need to try the driver downgrade.

If not, I’ve got a friend who has a working version of the one-generation-prior distro on his one-generation-prior EEE PC, and we’re going to try getting the packages on his machine and transferring them, or if that doesn’t work, installing the distro he’s using (which we think has the drivers that work–at least for some people), or if that doesn’t work installing the Xandros distro that came with his PC that according to the forums has much more robust wireless drivers even though nobody much cares for the interface. At this point I could totally live with a less-than-ideal interface if I could have a working netbook again.

• Tiddlywiki internals 1 of 3: Architectural Concepts

Still wrestling with getting my head around coding stuff for Tiddlywiki… so there will probably be a handful of posts like this one, reminding me of the useful resources I’ve found.

I’ve been getting back into Javascript coding recently, and as is my wont I immediately start looking around for a) a unit testing tool, and b) a toy project to fiddle around with where I don’t have deadline pressure and am free to try more cutting edge technologies than at work (where, for example, we’re still limping along on Java 1.4 and IE 6, because for a large corporation upgrading tens of thousands of workstations is a headache of Brobdingnagian proportions).

For the first, there’s jsUnit. Whenever I wonder whether my profession really is making progress, given that many of the complaints in The Mythical Man-Month could have been written yesterday instead of thirty years ago, I comfort myself with the fact that whatever language I start fiddling with I can count on there being an xUnit test framework just a Google search away. jsUnit appears to be a fairly straightforward port of jUnit, so it should be easy enough to get the hang of. I also see that it comes with a mini server app that’ll let you incorporate jsUnit tests into Ant scripts, which should be useful if I ever try to sell my workplace on using it.

For the second, I’m contemplating rewriting my Python table rolling program as a plug-in for TiddlyWiki, because that’s mostly what I’ve been using lately for campaign notes for my RPGs, and it already has all the javascript objects and methods I’d need for self-modifying an html page based on the results of rolling on the tables. The more I look at it, the more I admire TiddlyWiki’s simplicity and flexibility, and it’s inspired me to a new approach to defining random tables for games. Where before I had a fairly elaborate special-purpose XML mark-up language, now I’m planning on just using standard HTML (with maybe a few extra attrs). You want a list of options? Make an HTML list, then just use a TiddlyWiki macro to roll a random result from the list.

• Who are the aggressive drivers?

  • Watch out for cars with bumper stickers.

    That’s the surprising conclusion of a recent study by Colorado State University social psychologist William Szlemko. Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other "territorial markers" not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express rage — by honking, tailgating and other aggressive behavior.

I think this is interesting on several levels, particularly (if you click through and read the excerpt) that it doesn’t seem to matter at all what the substance of the personalization is merely the fact that it is personalized, and the more stickers the more aggressive.  Also that it’s not whether you get angry behind the wheel, but whether you act it out.  So stay the hell away from that car plastered with "Visualize World Peace", "You Can’t Hug a Child With Nuclear Arms", "Let’s Not Elect W in 2004, Either!", "My Other Car is The Millenium Falcon" and such over every inch of the back.

It’s not clear whether removing stickers and other territorial markers from your car will make you a less aggressive driver…it could, after all, be that the type of person who is prone to territorially marking a car is the type of person who is aggressive behind the wheel (correlation doesn’t imply causation, and all that), but I can certainly envision a psychologically plausible mechanism by which choosing to treat your vehicle as an extension of your personal territory influences you to take "threats" to that territory more personally and get more angry.  In which case, you might be able to influence your future behavior and moods by deliberately choosing to downplay the personalization and emphasize the simple utility aspect: a car is just a box on wheels that takes you where you want to go.

• PC World – Business Center: Vista Security Is Annoying by Design

  • Ars picked up this tidbit at the recent RSA 2008 security conference in San Francisco, where David Cross, Microsoft’s product unit manager for Windows security, discussed the company’s security directions post-Vista. "The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I’m serious," Cross is quoted as saying.

Microsoft reasons that by annoying the users every time a program requires rights that MS thinks it shouldn’t, users will put pressure on developers to fix those programs.  This ignores the fact that users will, rightly, blame Microsoft and not the particular program for this misfeature, and that if they get annoyed enough, they’ll turn off the security entirely.  Even if the user thought to complain to the vendors of the program, and the vendor jumped right on doing something about it, the lag between the time it first started annoying the user (i.e. as soon as it was installed on Vista) and when a patch would be available to fix the "problem" would encourage the user to just turn the damn security feature off.  And then, if you don’t want to be nagged incessantly to turn it back on, you also end up turning off that warning too–which requires telling the Security Control Panel not to warn you about anything.  If Microsoft didn’t have the arrogant, overbearing culture that they do, they’d have designed it the way ZoneLabs designed their popup warnings about programs trying to do things that might be dangerous: allow the user to white-list the particular program if they know it’s safe, but re-inquire if something has changed about the program (indicating it might have been tampered with by a virus or trojan), and if you didn’t care about a particular class of warning message, disable just that message.

• Language Log » Advice from numbers

  • So we can quantify Arnold’s surmise. In spoken English, even in fairly formal settings, hopefully is not ambiguous, because it’s essentially never used as a manner adverb. In written English non-fiction, the manner-adverbial use is well below 10%, and probably below 5% in most genres. In fiction, the manner-adverbial usage is common, but largely limited to a few stereotyped cases — hopeful quotatives, hopeful looks and hopeful gestures account for the great majority of examples.

Of course, it probably won’t. I notice that of the first page of Google hits, every one of them mentions the disfavor in which it’s held, though thankfully only two of them fully endorse that view. Unfortunately, those two include the only two that are obviously about style (“Hopefully or I Hope?“, and “Lynch- Guide to Grammar and Style“) the rest of the top hits being dictionaries.