Warll's Blog ワロウのブログ http://blog.warll.com カナダじんです。 Sun, 30 May 2010 22:35:37 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 How to craft the Towering pillar of hats in TF2 http://blog.warll.com/2010/how-to-craft-the-towering-pillar-of-hats-in-tf2/ http://blog.warll.com/2010/how-to-craft-the-towering-pillar-of-hats-in-tf2/#comments Sun, 30 May 2010 22:35:37 +0000 Warll http://blog.warll.com/?p=349 Despite what the TF2 Wiki says and what a Google search would lead you to believe, there is in fact a way to craft the  awesome Towering pillar of hats.

Craft two of the Spy’s Camera Beards which will create a Towering pillar of hats!

I only found it out by accident and when I mentioned it one of the other players already knew about it. It would seem that players are attempting to keep the secrect under wraps. I can hardly blame them considering how much I envied players with the Tower of hats.

Of course to do this you’ll need two Camera Beards which aren’t exactly common, or maybe they are after all I had three of them.

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Noticebar

What?

Noticebar is jQuery plugin that adds, well, a noticebar to the top of any page. Much like the one that will have shown up right about now.

Why?

A while back I wanted to drive traffic from one  of my older sites to a successor site. Inspired by the IE security alert page  I whipped up a very ugly, static solution, a purely html lime green bar across the top of the page. Before that I had searched for a javascript solution but came up empty handed.  Since then I’ve been meaning to create Noticebar for a while.

Features

It uses minimal markup and accepts several options.

  • Use of text and HTML markup
  • Custom CSS to change the appearance.
  • Optionally have the bar slide into view, like I have done here.
  • With animation on you can have the bar’s arrival delayed, again like done on this page.
  • A close button
  • Prepend the Noticebar to any div by specifying the target argument.

Example code

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”jquery.noticebar.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
jQuery.fn.noticebar({html:  “your text or html here”,  close : false,});
</script>

To use the above code copy and paste it inside your websites head tag.  By this I mean between the “<head>” and the “</head>” part.

Options

A list of accept settings with their defaults:

jQuery.fn.noticebar({

html :  “Notice is credit to team!”, //Your message which can use html
animate  : true , //true means that the noticebar will ’slide’ down after the delay
delay  : 0 , //A delay in milliseconds, 1000 would be one second
css  : “”,  //Used to customize CSS styling
close  : true, //Whether the close button appears
target  : “body”, //Use “#id” you have the noticebar appear on an element with said id, .class for classes

})

Download jquery.noticebar.js |  Preview An example page

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But did you know that Google is the underdog in a number of markets?

Russia has Yandex

China has Baidu

Yahoo.jp is Japan’s largest

And Sezman has the Czech Republic.

In the two Eastern Europe cases they beat Google by supporting their local language better than Google.  In Asia I couldn’t dig up any information indicating that anything  similar had happened.

For as much as I love Google I do think it deserves some strong competition, un-fortunately I am unwilling to help with that as is likely the case with many Google loyals.

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Turns out there is no program that does it. So I’ve created my own. It is done in flash and has some minor latency due to the use of flash, but any solution will have a bit of latency and hopefully for your needs it will be good enough.

To run it you have to give it permission to use the mic, it will automatically show you the permission dialog and will start working as soon as you close the dialog.

You can download the file and run it locally should you need to. To do so right click on the following link and select “Save file as”

Download: Warll’s Microphone playback’r

Embedded below:

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Headline goes here in “headline” font

Or at least thats the headline. All the article has is the standard “The Economist welcomes your views.”  At time of writing there are 27 comments and I must say, these commenters know their archetypes.

The ‘full’ article can be found on the site for now, http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15993648&fsrc=rss , image below the fold for posterity:

]]> http://blog.warll.com/2010/economist-com-screws-up-commenters-respond/feed/ 0 How to make a subdomain point to a sub-folder on Dreamhost http://blog.warll.com/2010/how-to-make-a-subdomain-point-to-a-sub-folder-on-dreamhost/ http://blog.warll.com/2010/how-to-make-a-subdomain-point-to-a-sub-folder-on-dreamhost/#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 23:04:00 +0000 Warll http://blog.warll.com/?p=301 By this I mean haveing the domain folder.example.com be hosted in the FTP folder example.com/folder.

You can do this in the “Add new domain” page by changing the “Web directory” field for the sub-domain “folder.example.com” from “/home/username/folder.example.com” to “/home/username/example.com/folder”

Example screenshot follows.

]]> http://blog.warll.com/2010/how-to-make-a-subdomain-point-to-a-sub-folder-on-dreamhost/feed/ 2 IMHO 2010 is going to be perfect gaming wise http://blog.warll.com/2010/imho-2010-is-going-to-be-perfect-gaming-wise/ http://blog.warll.com/2010/imho-2010-is-going-to-be-perfect-gaming-wise/#comments Tue, 20 Apr 2010 08:31:10 +0000 Warll http://blog.warll.com/?p=297 2009 was a rather dull year for video games as far as my interests are involved. 2010 is shaping up to be the exact oposite. What I’m getting excited about:

  • Civilisation 5
  • Crysis 2
  • Fallout: New Vegas
  • Dead Space 2
  • Lost Planet 2

Civ V and Fallout should be real treats.

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Things I like:

  • Backend dosn’t hide options behind menus or other pages
  • Strictly enforced coding style
  • Theme markup encourages presentation to be removed from data manipulation
  • A block system that effectively gives users a ton of widget panels, and everything is placed like a WP widget would be
  • A form api that takes care of mundane and verbose html input markup
  • A ton of plugins that are rather generic yet well integrated with Drupal allowing for easy adoption and extension.
  • A focus on security even if at the cost of higher minimum skill set for usage.

What I dislike:

  • code style enforces the use of spaces instead of tab chars, which is positively insane.

In the end I like Drupal and am currently working on a port of the default Wordpress Theme.

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<!-- START GOOGLE ANALYTICS --><script type="text/javascript">  var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");  document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));</script><script type="text/javascript">  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-2146411-1");  pageTracker._initData();  pageTracker._trackPageview();</script><script type="text/javascript">  function trackCustomEvent(customEvent) {    var eventname = "/custom-event/topsites/"+customEvent;    if (pageTracker != undefined) {      pageTracker._trackPageview(eventname);      return true;    }  }  function trackExternalLink(externalLink) {    return trackCustomEvent('external-link/'+externalLink.replace("http://", ""));  }

</script>

<!-- END GOOGLE ANALYTICS -->

<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="http://atrk.alexametrics.com/atrk.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript">_atrk_opts = { atrk_acct: "s3LE913x9k00WW", domain:"alexa.com", label:"topsites" }; atrk ();</script><noscript><img src="http://certify.alexametrics.com/atrk.gif?account=s3LE913x9k00WW&jsv=20080822" style="display:none" height="1" width="1"></noscript>
<script>  $('a.offsite').click( function() {    trackExternalLink(this.href);  });  $('a.social').click( function() {    trackCustomEvent( "social/" + this.name );  });  $('a.trackme').click( function() {    trackCustomEvent( "link/" + this.name );  });  $('button.trackme').click( function() {    trackCustomEvent('button/'+$(this).text());  });$('a.trackme-cross').click( function() {			      trackCustomEvent( "link/" + this.name );			      selectTab('#keywords');			    });

</script>
]]> http://blog.warll.com/2010/alexa-uses-google-analytics/feed/ 0 Cities XL is dead, long live Cities XL! http://blog.warll.com/2010/cities-xl-is-dead-long-live-cities-xl/ http://blog.warll.com/2010/cities-xl-is-dead-long-live-cities-xl/#comments Sat, 20 Feb 2010 07:11:39 +0000 Warll http://blog.warll.com/?p=281 I am very fond of the city building genre. Sim City 2000 was the first video game I ever bought and I enjoyed I thoroughly. A very surprising fact considering that my cities always ran deficits thus IMACHEAT found much use in my economic disasters.

Sim City 3000 kicked this trend and by the time Sim City 4 came around I had finally mastered the game.

Sim City 4 is now five years old and the genre is in dire need of an update.

Cities XL is the best hope to fill that spot. Unfortunately Cities ZL has already been released. This is unforunate because Cities XL has two critical flaws which stop it from ever taking the crown.

  1. Somehow Monte Cristo managed to make Cities XL linear through overly restriction population requirements. You don’t so much as plan a city as you grow it and this lack of control kills re-playability.
  2. Effectively no custom content. There is a massive community producing new buildings and concepts for Sim City 4, Monte Cristo’s “We’ll make new content ourselves and sell it to you” strategy is foolish in comparison.

Monte Cristo says that the ability to make custom assets, modding, is on the to-do list. Fallout 3 also had delayed modding tools, fans had to wait three months for the Fallout tools while it has already been four months since Cities Xl’s release.

I had all but given up on Cities XL, until recently.

Two weeks ago Monte Cristo released some news, they were going to close the online portion of Cities Xl, a service they called ‘The Planet Offer’ and marketed as an MMO.  They cited lower than expected subscription rates.

The news could well be a sign of financial trouble for a company that invested somewhere in the range of ten million dollars to bring their passion to the market. At least a portion of that funding would have been based off of the possibility to create an MMO niche devoid of competition.

For what ever finacle harm it may cause the silver lining better be that they get their act together. They plan on releasing ‘Cities XL 2011′ which if they have taken the correct lesson to heart should focus on the single player experience as well as offer modification abilities. It is after all what their target market demands.

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