About & Contact

Articles & Links
Subscribe by Email

Articles Only
Subscribe by Email

Want a cool custom feed count image like the one above? Check out Conflagration!

RGR is hosted by asmallorange and powered by Serendipity. Have you checked out my other web sites? You can promote your blog at your favorite web forums with SigFeeder, or find some current, interesting news and opinion on a wide range of topics at Siteb.us! Like 'toons? Chat it up at the Animation Republic Forums. Or stalk me on my Pownce page.

In praise of Smultron

Thu 14 Feb 08 21:58 | Tags: Mac, Programming, Software

I write this post in praise of what I think is one of the unsung heroes of development on the Mac; the Smultron text editor.

The shadow of TextMate looms large and dark, despite its ~$60 shareware fee. It's by far the most popular text editor among Mac coders, and it even has its own dead tree book. However, even though I'll occasionally go back and give it a try, I keep coming back to Smultron, and not only because it's free.

One document at a time? That's for sissies!

Smultron supports most of the features of competent text editors, such as tabbed editing (Smultron uses vertical drawers by default, but can be easily switched to use horizontal tabs), automatic line numbering, syntax coloring, integration with FTP programs such as Transmit, and so forth. But let me quickly run a couple reasons why I keep choosing it over others, including TextMate. (This list might not be totally fair, since it's been a while since I last tried TextMate.)

The most common uniquely Smultron feature I use is the Split Window feature. This lets you look at two documents, or possibly two different parts of the same document, in one window. The window is split horizontally if you just select the Split Window item from the View menu (or press Command-Apostrophe), but holding down the Option key while opening the View menu (or pressing Command-Option-Apostrophe) lets you split the window vertically, which I find much more handy in these days of triple-wide monitors. Editing a template, but can't remember what variables you've assigned to it? Open up the template in the left pane and the code where you've assigned the variables in the right. Made a complicated function and you can never remember the order of the parameters when you go to use it? Open the function definition in the right pane, and continue hacking away on the left. What a great feature!

Another great feature is the Advanced Find & Replace window. The regular Find feature (Command-F) just uses the simple standard Mac OS X find-and-replace tool, but the Advanced Find feature (Command-Shift-F) works with regular expressions. That in itself is not too fascinating, but what's cool is that it will build you a list of lines that match your pattern, and selecting the line will show you where that line appears in the document in the pane below. This is absolutely great for testing regular expressions before you do a replacement with them. It's also handy for testing a regular expression that I want to use in my code instead of on it; I just open up a new tab, paste or type in some sample data, then bring up the Advanced Find window and test and refine my pattern until it's perfect.

And did I mention it's free?

The Advanced Find window. Very cool.

It's lacking a few features, though, of course, most notably any auto-completion features of any sort -- though I personally don't miss 'em. Also, though it's possible to make your own syntax definitions for syntax coloring if one of the fifty or so included with the program doesn't suit your needs, or add one that someone else made, it's not very convenient; you have to literally use the Finder's Show Package Contents feature on the app itself and root around in there -- the process could be much easier.

Still, if TextMate isn't cutting it for you -- or maybe you just can't afford it -- it couldn't hurt to give Smultron a try. With my current job, I can now easily afford a more expensive, more feature-packed editor, but I'm still sticking with Smultron.

Get more great Ray Gun Robot content sent directly to your feed reader or email inbox! Subscribe today!
Articles & Links — Via Email
Articles Only — Via Email

1 Comment | 0 Trackbacks | |

Web hosting on Windows III: Reluctant Success

Mon 28 Jan 08 22:27 | Tags: Web Hosting, Windows

Okay, I've been putting off ending this series (Part I, Part II) for too long. Please forgive me for sort of rushing through this, but I think we both agree that I tend to write too much anyway.

So clearly the server is now up and working. What was the final solution? Well, as much as I tried to avoid it… I went with Apache. I still think that Apache is a spectacularly mediocre web server with a fantastically horrible configuration system, but Amaya was not cutting it. I swallowed my pride, did my research, and installed it.

I'm giving it a hard time, and rightly so, but as horrible as the syntax is, Apache's configuration files are well-commented and set to fairly secure defaults. Which is good, because I didn't need most of Apache's features, such as .htaccess files or subdomains or such. We did need some parts of the site to be locked up by a username and password, and, as with LightTPD, I was even able to get those parts to work over an HTTPS encrypted connection as well; it wasn't as easy as it was with Lighty, but I did it. However, one feature I wasn't able to get working was WebDAV. The feature is there in Apache, so it can be done; I just couldn't get it to work. We could log in, but not upload files; probably some Windows-specific permissions thing that I don't want to even bother guessing about. So… I turned back to LightTPD. Yes, through a little more tweaking of configuration files, I've set up both Lighty and Apache to run on the box; Apache handles all the web requests, whereas Lighty responds to the WebDAV ones. Ideal? No, but it works.

Now that I was using Apache, I once more tried to get PHP working via FastCGI… no dice. Eventually I gave up and installed PHP as an Apache module. For reasons I've explained before, this isn't the most ideal solution, but it's working. And it's allowed me to install XCache, which really set the server on fire; it was definitely noticeably faster.

But, if you were paying attention, you may realize that there was one more problem we haven't solved yet; outgoing mail. For whatever reason, IIS's outgoing mail server just wasn't wanting to relay mail. On a whim, I tried the slightly scary-looking hMailServer; imagine my surprise when it worked fantastically! I don't know if this program would be up for the task of a full-service mail relay, but for this server, which maybe sends out a couple dozen messages a day at most, it seems to be working just fine.

So that's the story of how I got a web server of moderate traffic up and working on Windows. Was it as bad as I thought it was going to be? Well… yes, just about. Having done it once, I'm now more knowledgeable about the process, but just as reluctant to do it.

Get more great Ray Gun Robot content sent directly to your feed reader or email inbox! Subscribe today!
Articles & Links — Via Email
Articles Only — Via Email

0 Comments | 0 Trackbacks | |

NiGHTS disappoints

Sat 19 Jan 08 20:19 | Tags: Games, Reviews

Way back in April of last year, soon after it was finally confirmed that Sega was making a sequel to its oft-overlooked Saturn classic NiGHTS, I broke out my old Saturn, found a NiGHTS demo disc I had laying around (I had sold the full copy of the game I had owned earlier, regrettably), connected it to my video capture doohickey (my own Pepito, and recorded some footage to put on this blog. That entry became what is likely the most read RGR entry ever, thanks to some link love from Opposable Thumbs. As a fan of the original game, I was looking forward to the sequel, but at the same time apprehensive that the game wouldn't match my nostalgia-influeced expectations.

Well, that sequel, NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams has now been out for a month, and I personally have had it for about two weeks, though I haven't been playing it every day. The verdict? Unfortunately, I was right to be apprehensive.

It doesn't seem like it'd be too hard to replicate NiGHTS' success, really; just create a game that plays just like the first one, where you race through the circuitous levels, collecting chips to destroy the Ideya captures (the snowglobe-looking things), then fighting a boss. (If you haven't played it in a while (or ever), it couldn't hurt to watch the video to refresh your mind of the original's astounding gameplay.) And there are a few stages in Journey of Dreams which are like this, and they are the most fun to play. Unfortunately, instead of collecting twenty blue chips to advance in these stages, you now instead are expected to race through and catch up to a flying bird-like enemy, defeating it to collect a key which lets you advance through the next stage. Right there is a basic change for the worse in the gameplay; in the original, exploration through the levels to find caches of chips was encouraged, but in this game exploration is punished as it allows the bird-thing to fly further ahead; the best thing to do is to fly in a straight line as quickly as possible. But it looks and plays close enough to the original, and the boss battles at the end of these levels are so fantastic, that that's a forgivable change.

What kills the game, though, are the levels which deter from the original's gameplay, and those levels make up about three-quarters of the game. Now the original NiGHTS had a few gimmicky parts of levels, such as switching to a top-down view in the forest level or having NiGHTS transform into a sled in the snow level, but they were relatively short segments. Journey of Dreams' other levels, however, take these gimmicky segments and turns them into entire levels. Whether you're riding on NiGHTS as a boat or a roller-coaster, or winding through a city-styled maze restricted to a top-down perspective, or even doing 3D platforming as William and Helen alone without any flying segment at all; these are just no fun and feel like filler in between the retro-styled levels.

The storyline of Journey is pretty much the same as the original. Just substitute basketball-playing Elliot and singing Claris with soccer-playing William and violin-playing Helen. I won't go into it much further than that.

Allow me to go into lazy rant mode for the rest of my gripes with the game.

The game's levels take quite a bit of time to load compared to other A-list Wii games; and much more time than the Saturn version. Let me say that again; loading times for the Wii version of NiGHTS are significantly worse than the Saturn version. Granted, the Saturn game had unusually short loading times for its peers, but I can't particularly tell why the Wii game's loading times must be longer than its peers.

Another new feature debuting in this Wii version for the worse is dialogue. And unskippable cut scenes. Dang it, the first game did just fine without explaining just how Clarus and Elliot can control NiGHTS (they dualize! Oh wow!) or giving NiGHTS a voice like a British nanny. On a related note, there's an uncanny valley thing going on, I think, with the character designs for William and Helen; they look plastic and unappealing. The other non-human characters we often see, namely NiGHTS and a new character named Owl (he's an owl!), are unimpressively modeled and could use a few more polygons thrown their way. (Why are Owl's glasses shiny false-reflective discs instead of actually transparent glass? Even just modeling empty frames would have looked better than that.) The levels and bosses look fairly good, though.

The Wii controls are not the best for this game. The more traditional way to play is to use the "nunchuck's" joystick to steer NiGHTS and use the Wii remote's A button to give NiGHTS a burst of speed. (The pointing or motion detecting capabilities of the Wiimote are not used.) You can also use the Classic Controller or a GCN controller, if you have one. However, the analogue stick on all of these controllers is in an octagonal well instead of being perfectly round. One of NiGHTS' basic moves is to fly him in a circle quickly to collect or kill the things inside that circle; the octagon makes it quite difficult to do this smoothly, as well as rather noisy -- clickclickclickclickclickclick! In contrast, the Saturn's analogue controller's joystick had a perfectly circular well which made it easy peasy to throw NiGHTS for a loop. An alternative control mode uses just the Wiimote to point a circle on the screen that NiGHTS will fly torwards, but this control scheme is just so far different from the original gameplay that I tried it for about ten seconds and promptly went back to the Wiimote/nunchuck combo style.

The game has a bleak and boring overworld between levels. Overworlds can be cool; this one is lame and just another interruption to the action.

So, all that aside… NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams is not really a bad game. I mean, it's very playable. It's just tragic that it falls so short of the original's glory because it far too much tries to do new things instead of sticking to the finely-tuned simplicity of the original. I will probably keep playing it until I beat it, but then it will be on the short list of games to trade in at GameStop. If you're a NiGHTS fan, maybe give it a rent, but otherwise save your money and hope that Sega decides to release its PS2 remake of the original NiGHTS outside of Japan.

Get more great Ray Gun Robot content sent directly to your feed reader or email inbox! Subscribe today!
Articles & Links — Via Email
Articles Only — Via Email

0 Comments | 0 Trackbacks | |

Web hosting on Windows II: Of Speed and Stability

Sun 13 Jan 08 00:48 | Tags: Web Hosting, Windows

So at the end of Part I, we were given a Windows 2003 server to host on and told to go nuts -- we could install whatever software we wanted on it, but we couldn't change the OS. Okay, fair enough.

As I mentioned, my first choice for a server was LightTPD. There's a great project called WLMP Project, which provides an installer which MySQL, Lighty and PHP all as a "kit," including their services (the Windows equivalents of daemons). The installer itself is in Hungarian, but it's easy enough to get through; just click the default buttons all the way through.

One problem, though; it configured Lighty to connect to PHP via CGI instead of FastCGI. The difference between these two is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that the latter is faster, and would also allow me to use the opcode cacher XCache to make things even faster. I tried to reconfigure Lighty to use FastCGI, but as it turns out… FastCGI simply doesn't work on the Windows version of Lighty and apparently never has.

Well, okay. Maybe old CGI without XCache would be good enough. So I tweaked the configuration back to using CGI, and things worked great for the rest of testing period.

Then we went live and Lighty promptly crashed.

Well. We could restart it and it would hold up for a few more hours, chugging along very slowly. The error log was packed with errors like this:

2007-12-30 22:39:13: (connections.c.132) (warning) close: 14 Interrupted system call 
2007-12-30 22:39:26: (connections.c.132) (warning) close: 9 Interrupted system call 
2007-12-30 22:39:27: (connections.c.132) (warning) close: 9 Interrupted system call 
2007-12-30 22:40:37: (connections.c.1205) connection closed: poll() -> ERR 8 
2007-12-30 22:40:37: (connections.c.1205) connection closed: poll() -> ERR 9 
2007-12-30 22:41:55: (connections.c.1205) connection closed: poll() -> ERR 7 
2007-12-30 22:41:56: (mod_cgi.c.1231) cgi died ? 
2007-12-30 22:42:25: (connections.c.132) (warning) close: 7 Interrupted system call 
2007-12-30 22:43:23: (connections.c.132) (warning) close: 7 Interrupted system call 
2007-12-30 22:43:23: (mod_cgi.c.1231) cgi died ? 
2007-12-30 22:43:41: (connections.c.132) (warning) close: 8 Interrupted system call 
2007-12-30 22:44:26: (connections.c.1205) connection closed: poll() -> ERR 11 
2007-12-30 22:44:27: (mod_cgi.c.1231) cgi died ?

I never precisely figured out what the problem was, but seeing as how I had run into incompatibility problems with Lighty and CGI before, I decided at this point that, as much as I loved LightTPD, it was just never meant to run on Windows. Time to look for alternatives.

Now, the obvious alternative was Apache. I shied away from it at first, though, because I hate Apache's confusing configuration files -- the illegitimate child of XML and that kind of meth which makes you think you can take a cop who has a gun drawn and pointed at you -- and I needed a crash-resistant server working now. What I ended up with was Abyss. Abyss is a closed-source server with a free and a commercial version; I installed the free one first. Abyss uses a rather pleasant graphical configuration system which is accessed by going to port 9999 on localhost in a web browser. It sounds really Mickey Mouse, but it was actually pretty capable; it connected to PHP via FastCGI with no problems, and it could handle URL rewriting with regular expressions so we could keep the same "pretty URLs" we had set up with Lighty. Most importantly, it never crashed. However, it couldn't handle WebDAV as LightTPD could, so I configured LightTPD to only listen to WebDAV requests through another port and leave port 80 to Abyss. Since LightTPD got a lot less traffic and didn't have to try to connect to PHP in this case, it started behaving itself again and stopped crashing.

So Abyss was stable and faster than the suffering LightTPD, but it still was unacceptably slow at times. Also, since Windows doesn't have Unix/Linux's sendmail, how was PHP going to send outgoing email? There was more work to be done, clearly… But I'll leave that for another day.

Get more great Ray Gun Robot content sent directly to your feed reader or email inbox! Subscribe today!
Articles & Links — Via Email
Articles Only — Via Email

0 Comments | 0 Trackbacks | |

Web hosting on Windows I: Not on my worst enemy

Thu 10 Jan 08 01:17 | Tags: Programming, Web Hosting, Windows

My new year's resolutions that I probably have no chance of not breaking are, in no particular order:

1. Exercise more. This desk job isn't making me any thinner.
2. Get my credit cards and student loan paid off and never go into debt again ever ever ever.
3. Start posting regularly on Ray Gun Robot again.

But it's not like I've been lazy this whole time. Quite the contrary, I was working on the biggest web project of my entire life. Namely: the web site for The Eureka Reporter, a local newspaper.

Like all good projects of any size and substance, this was definitely a learning experience. We decided to go with the excellent Drupal content management system, which is made all the more amazing when you can code your own modules for it -- which I learned to do, with the help of a most excellent book entitled Pro Drupal Development. Maybe some time in the future I'll convert RGR to Drupal…

So the programming was not so much a challenge… it was just pretty voluminous, and learning the Drupal way of doing things was new. One particularly tricky thing was finding a way to convert the paper's printed pages to Flash files without cheating and just turning the pages into huge bitmaps (PDFs were nixed as being too easy to download). Well, we did it… I'm afraid just how is going to have to stay a bit of a trade secret.

There is one part of the project I'd like to talk about, however… The experience with getting the frickin' thing up and hosted and visible to the world. The Reporter's parent company is a rather large financial firm which has its own data center. (The newspaper is something of a pet project of the company's head honcho.) We were told (or, at least, had assumed that we were told) by our main contact at the Reporter that we would have access to a Unix- or Linux-powered server of some sort, but apparently there was a miscommunication somewhere, because very late in the project, once we finally got access to the parent company's IT department (the thickest stack of non-disclosure agreements I've ever seen and a few layers of corporate bureaucracy stood in our way), we found out they were a Microsoft-only operation; Windows 2003, Exchange email servers, MSSQL databases, IIS web servers, the whole bit -- the previous CMS that we were replacing had been written in ASP. So when they heard we wanted to run a PHP app with a MySQL backend running through LightTPD on some flavor of Unix or Linux, they were like, "you want to put what on our iron? Uh… no."

So then we scrambled to consider third-party hosting solutions, to which they replied, "you want to put our data on a server outside of our own four walls? Uh… no." Did I mention we were supposed to go live in less than a week at this point?

Well. At this point, I was expecting their IT guys to be real hard-you-know-whats, so I was pleasantly surprised when they got back to us with a compromise. For the initial launch, we could go ahead and use a shared hosting provider, just for the time being. However, they were going to set up a Windows 2003 server for us, and we were going to be expected to use that. Furthermore, we could install whatever software we wanted on it, but they would only be responsible for tech support to the extent of Windows itself; we were on our own as far as troubleshooting beyond that.

A fair compromise given the circumstances, I think; it meant we didn't have to rewrite Drupal in friggin' ASP or anything. However, it meant that I still needed to learn how to set up and run a Windows 2003 server, and fast.

I will go into detail into the trials and errors involved with this (and boy, were there a lot of errors), but I'll sum it all up here. In the Unix/Linux hosting world, I can use a mail server from here, a web server from there, a programming language from these people, a database by those people, and an operating system originally conceived by hippie-nerds in Berkeley decades ago, and even though all these things are made by different people, odds are they'll work together quite well. However, I've come to the conclusion that, on Windows, the most successful way to tackle the project is exactly as The Reporter's parent company was doing it; use Microsoft's mail server and Microsoft's web server and Microsoft's programming language and Microsoft's database on Microsoft's operating system. Once you venture outside of Microsoft's little bubble, any guarantees of interoperability go out the window. Now, of course, different people (especially those who have formal training in running Windows-based servers) will have different experiences, but as you read more about my personal experiences in the days to come, you'll see that it was quite simple for me to reach this conclusion.

Get more great Ray Gun Robot content sent directly to your feed reader or email inbox! Subscribe today!
Articles & Links — Via Email
Articles Only — Via Email

0 Comments | 0 Trackbacks | |