Still here…
Don’t worry, I’m alive, sort of (I got a job).
You can see what I’ve been toying around with lately on github.
DSTROSMASH! v1.0B Released
Well, DSTROSMASH has essentially been done for a month, but I held off releasing it because I wanted to put together a nice mini-site. Unfortunately, the job-hunt and some other projects I’m currently working on (as well as beautiful summer weather) have taken up all my time.
DSTROSMASH! is a heartfelt and (mostly) faithful remake of John Sohl’s classic Intellivision action-arcade game, ASTROSMASH! for the Nintendo DS. As you might have guessed, ASTROSMASH! was a childhood favorite of mine, but I would encourage anyone who loves a good shmup to give it a try, even if they’ve never heard of the Intellivision.
(NOTE: If you don’t have the tools necessary to play homebrew games on your DS, NO$GBA runs the game perfectly, even through WINE in Linux.)
So, without further adieu, allow me to present DSTROSMASH! download
DSTROSMASH! Intro
Coming soon to your homebrew DS cart…
HOWTO: Cherokee + Loggerhead
Hey! bzr init!
Did you catch that? I just taught you how to set up a bzr repository for a project in the current directory, and I didn’t even need to use a blockquote.
Yes, I’m a fan of Bazaar, the decentralized-VCS developed by Canonical and the central-VCS for the ever-popular launchpad.net. As I demonstrated above, it’s stupidly simple to start up a bzr-managed project without any need for a dedicated server unlike most other popular VCSs.
However, I’ve recently needed a central place to keep all my bzr repos – preferably accessible from a browser – but my projects are too small or personal for Launchpad.
Loggerhead does just what I need.
There are, of course, several alternatives, but many of them are either abandoned/defunct projects, or are plugins for comparatively-behemoth suites like Trac or Redmine.
Loggerhead?
Yes, let me tell you about it.
It appears to be the official bzr web interface and can be seen in action at Launchpad.
Loggerhead has become integrated into bzr as the magic behind bzr serve --http – a good indication that it wont be abandoned any time soon – and is very easy to use.
Just don’t ask me where Loggerhead got its name.
I cannot see how this seaturtle (adorable as it may be) could have anything to do with bzr, or Bazaars, or branching, or merging, or anything but logging. I can just picture someone somewhere coding up a log-file parsing tool, cursing Loggerhead for ruining a golden opportunity for superfluous cleverness.
Thankfully, Loggerhead makes up for its shortsighted name with its ease of use and simplicity.
For example, suppose you kept all your bzr projects in a folder named ~/bzr-branches:
louman ~ $ serve-branches ~/bzr-branches <debug messages snipped> serving on 0.0.0.0:8080 view at http://127.0.0.1:8080
Voilà! You may now browse all of your branches and view each of their full revision histories by visiting localhost:8080.
Naturally, I sought to integrate it with Cherokee to avoid ugly numeral- and colon-riddled URLs. It was not terribly obvious to me how to go about doing this, so let me share with you what I’ve learned.
Babysitting…
My sister’s been on vacation the past week in Vermont.
I’ve been burdened with watching her untamable beast until she gets back.
Thankfully, I only have to deal with this veritable demon for a few more days.
Looks like she’s claimed her throne. All hail Queen Lacey.
DS Homebrew Development in Linux
I have written a HOWTO for setting up a Nintendo DS homebrew development environment in Linux.
It’s been a while since I last played around with homebrew development on the DS, but I can’t find any reason why. It’s surprisingly easy and there are plenty of very nice tools and libraries available — I’d strongly recommend it to anyone interested in game development.
I recently updated an old script I wrote to make the set up of a development environment easier under Linux, and I’ve copied the guide I originally wrote for the Ubuntu forums here where I intend to keep it up to date.
The script is very simple, but will save you a lot of time as I’ve included some important fixes.
Now that I’ve rekindled my interest, you can expect a homebrew game or two to make their way to the projects page in the near future…
If you’re interested in DS homebrew development and have any questions, drop me a line and I’d be glad to help.
ArchLinux + Cherokee + WordPress
= What You See Here
In this post, I will describe the necessary steps for installing WordPress on top of Cherokee inside an ArchLinux environment, but before I go any further, let me introduce Cherokee and explain why I chose it over Apache or lighttpd.
For the record, I’m a fan of Cherokee, but the fact that my WordPress theme matches Cherokee’s color-scheme is purely coincidental.
The Cherokee developers make some bold statements, but whether or not Cherokee is “the Fastest free Web Server out there,” they rightfully brandish its beautiful integrated admin tool: cherokee-admin. Rather than edit the server’s config file by hand (a familiar yet often dreadful process), admins are encouraged to use this web-based tool. There are other web-based admin tools out there, but none that I know of give you such fine control over the server’s config file. Of course, the config file is still human-readable and advanced users can edit it manually if neccessary or desired.
The real beauty of cherokee-admin lies in the fact that it is not tied to the server in any way, meaning if you screw up your server configuration, you can still fix it from the comfort of your browser. To use it, you simply run sudo cherokee-admin and it starts its own python-based web server:
louman ~ $ sudo cherokee-admin Login: User: admin One-time Password: wb1A4EfgxR5FB91z Web Interface: URL: http://127.0.0.1:9090/ Cherokee Web Server 1.0.2 (Jun 1 2010): Listening on port 127.0.0.1:9090, TLS disabled, IPv6 enabled, using epoll, 4096 fds system limit, max. 2041 connections, caching I/O, single thread
Point your web browser to http://localhost:9090, log in with the random credentials outputted by cherokee-admin, and you’ll see this:
Configuring Cherokee for WordPress was astonishingly simple, thanks to the built-in WordPress “wizard”. Of course, you still need to manually set up a MySQL database and configure PHP; details follow.
blah blah blog
I’ve managed to get WordPress running on Cherokee in ArchLinux. Cherokee is pretty sweet if you’re not dumb and forgot to install php-cgi.
I will talk more about that later.
For now, I need a break from the keyboard and probably a dozen hours of sleep.
