• May 25, 2004

    One year of blogging

    One year ago today (well, it's actually yesterday, since it just crossed midnight), 24 May 2003, I wrote my very first blog entry. Of course, I started with good old Blogger, moved on to Blog-City, and then FreeRoller (now renamed to JRoller), before I finally settled on using Movable Type on my own hosting account. Probably going to stick around, at least until I manage to move to WordPress without losing my customizations to my Movable Type installation.

    In the one year that's passed, this weblog has undergone just 3 major redesigns (which I regrettably haven't archived for future, er, contemplation). It started out as a Java blog, before getting more involved with web development topics, and then Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird) news. I think I've settled comfortably on the topics of "web development, Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, CSS, programming" plus any tech bits that interest me.

    Anyway, I'm glad that people are still reading :), and I am honored to have actually made a good number of blogrolls. Thanks for having me.

  • May 25, 2004

    Lone Wolf RPG has landed!

    The good people at Project Aon sent out an email on their mailing list today to announce the release of the Lone Wolf RPG (RPG in the Pen and Paper sense, not the CRPG sense). Yes, a PnP RPG! Not that I've ever truly played one beyond a fleeting tryst with BattleTech PnP. Where are the people who play PnP games in Singapore hiding?

    Anyway, I digress. The rulebook seems to be very interesting reading - the usual stuff you'd expect in a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook. I suppose this sounds fantastically geeky, but reading rulebooks and sourcebooks for Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms at Borders is something I actually enjoy - and yes I don't play PnP. Go figure.

    Check out the character classes available:

    In this rulebook, we have included the following character classes to get you started - the Brother of the Crystal Star, Dwarven Gunner of Bor, Kai Lord (of course), Magician of Dessi, Shadaki Buccaneer, Sommerlund Knight of the Realm, and Telchos Warrior.

    And who doesn't remember those Crypt Spawns, Doomwolves, Drakkarim, Giak, Gourgaz, Helghasts, Kraan and Vordaks.

    Lone Wolf RPG rulebook cover art


    If you're interested in The Lone Wolf RPG, check it out at Amazon.com (there isn't much there at the moment though), and if you purchase it, affiliate earnings would help fund Project Aon.

    Note: I wrote about Project Aon while back, in case you're interested.

  • May 24, 2004

    One ping (service) to rule them all: Ping-O-Matic

    Ping-o-Matic is now not only a HTML form-based service that you can use to notify multiple sites of your new weblog entry. This weblog entry let us in on the new ping URL http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ that you can use to replace the long list of URLs you're currently pinging everytime you make a new weblog entry.

    Screenshot of MT ping form section


    This means no more waiting for your weblog software (be it Movable Type, WordPress, or something else) as it pings multiple services.

  • May 23, 2004

    Sorry, no more hot-linking, please

    Yup that's it, no more hot-linking of images (and CSS files as well) on this site, please. Thanks to pippo's
    How can I prevent hot-linking images?     post, any hot-link requests to this site will be redirected to this image below instead:

    Image shown in place of hot-linked images


    I know there have been cases of legitimate hot-linking (at least in my view they are legitimate), such as from forum threads (legitimate because I don't expect your run-of-the-mill forum member to have webspace). So this "sorry" goes to you guys. If I notice hot-linking from forum threads in the future, I'll be sure to add you to the allowed list of referrers. In fact, I've already added http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/ and http://mozillapl.org/forum/ to the "allowed list" in my .htaccess.

    I did this because there have been people who have been leeching my image files, list bullets and even my CSS(!), and I think that is bad form. If you want an image from this site, download it, and upload it on your server. So far every image and screenshot I've ever posted is available for "free" despite the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 license, and should be in the future unless I turn into the Picasso of graphic design soon.

  • May 21, 2004

    MT-Blacklist Updater 0.2 - user-contributed improvement

    Edward Bateman wrote me last week to suggest an improvement to MT-Blacklist Updater.

    I then realised that if large numbers of users began to use your script, then Jay's server would be under extremely high load just around the hour of each day, and especially during specific US times.

    He then went on to suggest a tiny bit of code for how to workaround this problem - it works by generating a random interval of time for the script to sleep before accessing the MT-Blacklist master blacklist changes RSS feed. Er, yes I didn't think of this at all and all credit to Edward for pointing this out.

    Go get it if you're interested - to upgrade from 0.1, just simply replace the existing files with the current ones. Of course, you have to change the configuration settings in updateblacklist.php again, so make sure you copy them out from the old file.

    Also, I haven't upgraded MT-Blacklist since version 1.62 so it would be nice to know someone could tell me if MT-Blacklist Updater breaks in the newer versions.

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