Out for V-I-C-T-O-R-Y, but Missing Tiles
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Missing a key piece to your favorite board game? The Web's abundance of board game sites might help.
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Tycho:  I should have all the science lined up by the end of the week, ready to stuff into the piano black lozenge I've obtained to celebrate my return to personal computing.  Wish me luck; I've never before had the opportunity to fry four processors at once.       I know things.  Specifically, things that may be of interest to you.  For example, I know if playing Eye of Judgment online is an onerous as it might seem.  It is not!  I cannot express my relief.    Well, let's try.  In my last, vast expose, I broke down a card's unique language and expressed some misgivings about online play - ultimately just accepting it, because what they're trying to do is so weird that there's no prior art.  Essentially, you "register" your thirty card deck with the system itself, where it is stored and named for future use.  This process is extremely straightforward:  it is simply a matter of you laying your cards anywhere on the mat, a few at a time.  It will probably take two minutes if you really keep on it.  Then, you jump online, choose what nation you want to play for, and track down a partner.  At this point, the game will "draw" you your five card hand by showing you the card art onscreen.  You get one Mulligan (or redraw), but if you like your hand you move into the game proper.  We laid out our deck by element, face up, and this smoothed the turn to turn process considerably.      In the build we have, and I hope this is changed for release, it shows you these cards in a single file line without their name or text - just the art.  Once you got familiar with these images, slightly modified from their card format, it's pretty quick - but the names should be displayed on this screen.  You can use the controller to pull up the names, but let's be serious - at no point should the player be forced to interact with a mundane controller once the game is underway.     You should know that the game really wants a well-lit environment.  You don't need a flare gun or anything, but we didn't have what we needed before and certain squares would slow down the game flow with partial reads that would only resolve after several attempts and minute card adjustments.  I should state that here in the office, we removed all the overhead lights, installing a single track of illumination that we point at the ceiling, where lights used to be.  We tend to transform any place we live into a cave.  So, our scenario might be somewhat atypical.    Also, I know if playing Rock Band with all the instruments off of a USB hub is onerous.  You will be happy to know that it is not - we played said instruments spread out on an actual stage, and found it more than satifactory.  The reality is that the drum kit already needs its own wire, so it isn't as though the future had actually arrived anyway.  Plus, the mic isn't wireless either. This makes the contrived brouhaha over wired guitars a fairly transparent traffic ploy.    This is a matter quite apart from Microsoft's reticence to play ball with unique, third party hardware.  And when I say "play ball," I'm taking about the shakedown operation they've got going licensing their wireless technology, which either makes products for their system more expensive or (in the salient case of Rock Band) results in them bundling a wired controller for the same price as a wireless one on a competitor's system.  This is the last holiday they can get away with this sort of thing...  right?
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Kore Nordmann looks at his attempt to install the cairo_wrapper and includes a handy note on how he found to get it working.   I tried to install the cairo_wrapper by Hartmut on my gentoo machines, to play around with it, and probably writing an output driver for Image_3D, but I had some problems installing it, I want to share.   He was seeing failures with phpize when he tried to compile it, but had a suggestion from Hartmut on something that would help - setting an environment variable (PHP_AUTOHEADER) and then running the pear command from there.
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Latest PEAR Releases:Net_Wifi 1.0.0PEAR_PackageFileManager_Cli 0.2.1Structures_DataGrid_Renderer_Flexy 0.1.3Mail_Mime 1.5.1Net_LDAP 1.0.0RC1Testing_FIT 0.2.0pearweb_index 1.16.6pearweb_index 1.16.5UDDI 0.2.4Mail_Mime 1.5.2pearweb_index 1.16.7Image_Canvas 0.3.1Benchmark 1.2.7PEAR 1.6.1Tree 0.3.1pearweb 1.16.1
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Elizabeth Smith has a new post today points out some Windows builds of some of the more popular PHP-GTK2 widgets she's compiled (including GtkSourceview, GtkHtml, and LibGlade).   I have these extensions building on windows, or have found someone else who is building them for windows. You can find downloads that are either the full distributions (if no one else is building them) and/or the runtimes + items needed to build with PHP-GTK2 at my callicore build site with the other gtk libraries.   She uses the rest of the post getting into some detail on how she compiled the modules, issues she had with some, and what widgets/packages are on the horizon.
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Latest PEAR Releases:System_Folders 1.0.0HTML_QuickForm_DHTMLRulesTableless 0.2.3HTML_QuickForm_Renderer_Tableless 0.4.3XML_Query2XML 1.0.0Structures_BibTex 0.3.0Auth 1.4.3Text_Wiki_Creole 0.0.1Image_Tools 0.4.2Services_Pingback 0.2.1File_HtAccess 1.2.0Console_Getopt 1.2.1Testing_Selenium 0.3.0Net_MPD 0.3.0devMP3_IDv2 0.1.1Net_DNSBL 1.2.0beta1
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Latest PEAR Releases:Structures_Graph 1.0.3Console_ProgressBar 0.5.0betapearweb 1.2.0RC1Text_Wiki_Creole 0.4.1Text_Wiki_Creole 0.4.0Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_MDB2 0.1.7Structures_DataGrid_DataSource_DBQuery 0.1.7Text_Wiki_Creole 0.4.2pearweb 1.2.1pearweb 1.2.0Auth 1.5.0RC2HTML_Progress2 2.3.0a3XML_XUL 0.8.3pearweb 1.2.2pearweb 1.2.3XML_Query2XML 1.1.0Text_CAPTCHA_Numeral 1.1.0Text_Figlet 1.0.0Log 1.9.10
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Tycho:  Having already purchased two fifths of The Orange Box over the last few years, the level of value I have derived from it is "fantastic" but not "supernatural."  For Gabriel, who never finished the second Half-Life and never purchased the first episode, the aforementioned Box represents an intimidating and possibly even brutal level of content for one's holiday dollar.  It's hard enough trying to keep up with all the games that are coming out, but when you start putting more than one game on the disc the difficulty is compounded.   We're lucky, then, than the best thing on there can be completed in only a couple hours.     I've tried to make my rounds through the disc, but I kept coming back to Portal until I'd completed it.  I expect every part of this strange collection to be full of virtue, in the way that Valve's anomalous position in the games industry allows: self-funded development in their sky-high Bellevue commune until each product sings.  But Portal is strange, even for them.  Risky on every axis, we may now say that the "first person puzzle comedy" has now been proven out as a genre.  The gameplay is strong, but Portal's unique combination of hilarity and menace elevates it, resulting in a few perfect, indelible hours of gameplay.          My TeamFortress 2 experience so far on the console has been fairly uneven.  Coming from the PC beta, where I sometimes battled with stability concerns but the games played smooth, I'm now grappling with the reverse.  I love the play experience, as I've already expressed, and I'm rarely of the opinion that having more players automatically improves a game - so the differential between the PC and 360 platforms isn't as important to me as it might be to others.  No, the problem with TF2 on the 360 (and likely the PS3, as well) is that peer to peer hosting just ain't cutting it.  There are games that seem to manage it better, but with Vista PCs authenticating into the service now peer to peer games should be an option.  This needs fixed overnight.     I'll try to complete the second Episode over the weekend, interleaved with finishing the writing on my own game, which has become more difficult since completing Portal.  I'm starting to think that Precipice needs a greater concentration of synthesized ladies.      I would be abdicating my duty if I neglected to mention the EA thing, which is really the EA/BioWare/Pandemic thing.  I was under the impression that BioWare and Pandemic had merged precisely to give themselves leverage over monolithic publishers like Electronic Arts, but who knows.  The biggest fallout in the short term is that, beyond the first Mass Effect, a multiplatform release is almost certain.  Of course, I wholly endorse that kind of thing, but I imagine that Microsoft might hold a different opinion.  After spending years promoting the series, enduring delays, and now having spent months beating the shit out of it in test, it's fair to say that MS was investing in a larger trilogy - one that gamers would associate exclusively with their brand.
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Keynote Kathy Sierra gives designers the antidote for apps that can't read faces, movement, tone or anything: Give users a way to express themselves. Plus: TV panel goes rogue. In Listening Post.
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On the SitePoint PHP Blog, there's a new post from Harry Fuecks pointing out an extension for PHP that allows it to use the Cairo graphics library.   Cairo is the "next generation" vector graphics library for Linux and very cool to have it available in PHP. Also cool about the extension was created using PEAR::CodeGen_PECL, which Hartmut describes here: look Mum - no C! (well almost).   Harry also asks if, with the rise of new technologies like this, if it's time to make the move to deprecate GD from normal PHP use - at the same time, removing another hurdle in PHP's path towards being thread safe.
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Blog: Stripped-down laptop, which was supposed to launch this week, needs a little more time after the discovery of some glitches.
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It's still considered beta, though, and doesn't include Sidebar or Gadget features found in the Windows version.
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Tycho:  Gamespot is saying there's a reproducible crash in the new Tiger Woods for the 360, and that the Gamernet functionality doesn't work there either.  PS3 version sounds clean.    Next year, can you guys make sure you put your crash bugs into the demo, too?  It would really help the consumer make an educated decision.    It's so weird; we had problems with the last one, but it never occurred to us that the next one could be worse.  That is to say, I expect inertia.  I don't expect it to break before I even get the Goddamned thing home.      (CW)TB
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Here's a screen shot of the HTML source.  Looks like it's trying to serve some kind of ActiveX control. Happy to be using a Mac.  PS: Scoble just showed up and TM works on his cell phone so there's something weird going on.
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Windows update doesn't play well with all applications, even Redmond's. Also: CNET Reviews on security work still to be done.
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We are proud to announce the release of version 0.9 or LeafRSS! This version includes full smarty template integration, as well as options to embed the articles in another web page, or even to allow the output of the filter as an RSS feed.   A patch file has been included to upgrade from version 0.8 to avoid any loss of data. Please see the PATCH file for details.  This will be the final major release before we release our first stable version.  If you have any questions or discover any bugs in this version, please post them either in the Help section of our sourceforge forums or in our sourceforge bug tracker. We would appreciate any input you could give us to help us test this release in preparation for moving this project to stable status.  More detail is available at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/leafrss
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Recovering 736 missing digital images can be arduous -- and expensive. Here's the right (and wrong) way to do it.