Having pretty much moved everything over to git & github for all my source control needs, I am now getting used to how Git works. It hasn’t, however, solved the problem that I’ll occasionally work on something for a while, make it work on my local system, then forget to commit to it and return some days later to work on something else. Commits become either huge things of no trackability, or I end up committing by chunk and trying to remember exactly *why* I changed the define syntax to be “look up” instead. So, because I don’t have enough impenetrable bash scripts in my life, I wrote another one.

This one finds git repositories in $HOME, iterates though them looking for where your friendly user hasn’t committed stuff, and then whines to him in email about it.

it’s executed like this:

and the “uncommited-dir.sh” file looks like this:

This is what that looks like:

(That file is in /etc/apache2/sites-available as “vhosting”, then enabled with a2ensite. This is all under Debian. You’ll also need the vhosting module installed, enabled and working. )

One of the most common things you also need to do is automatically redirect people who go to “www.domain.tld” to “domain.tld” or vice versa depending on your religion. In this world, the canonical name of the site is whatever the directory is called. The thing with the 404 errors and the EverythingIsCatchingOnFire (Spot the reference for five points) stuff means that by default 404s go to this script, which in the event of a “This domain doesn’t exist”, it looks for an appropriate domain and sends you there:

(Meaning not only does http://piracyinc.com/ go to the right place, but http://www.piracyinc.info/ does too)

Disclaimer

I am a geek. This is geek advice, fraught with assumptions of savvy and technological pitfalls that didn’t happen when I tried it. It assumes you know what you’re doing and that if following these instructions word for word does cause an explosion that destroys you, your computer and your favourite pillow that you will not track me down and take me to a haberdashers to be forced to replace it. Caveat lector.

Tech Background Bit

UAC has no such concept as a “whitelist” and doesn’t provide a mechanism for skipping the prompt, but it does allow you to schedule a task to run with elevated privileges that doesn’t ask permission (because a scheduled task that asks for permission every time it is run is as useful as a chocolate tea service). Martin Zugec came up with a proof-of-concept utility called “Elevator” that creates a scheduled task to be launched immediately with elevated privileges

The method of making it work

1. Go to the webpage and download “SkipUAC.zip”
2. Extract the contents somewhere non-temporary, like c:\program files\SkipUAC
3. In that directory, right click “Install” and click “Run as Administrator” (If you do not click “Run as Administrator” and instead just run it, it will look like it has worked, and the right click menu below will be there, but nothing will happen. RUN IT AS ADMINISTRATOR)
4. Find your Application with the nifty blue and yellow quartered shield on it, right click on it, and select “Elevate Me”. This should work without prompting you. If not, please read the words in the bullet point above, read the text on the web page linked to above, or complain to someone on the internet.
5. Copy your Application’s icon, in case this bit doesn’t work.
6. Slightly complicated bit now. Right click on the Application icon and go to “Properties”, then in front of the command line, prefix it with the path to the place you put SkipUAC, and ElevatorRunner. So if your patcher icon reads: 

   "C:\Program Files\Games\City of Heroes\cohupdater.exe"

   it should now read: 

   "C:\Program Files\SkipUAC\ElevatorRunner.exe" "C:\Program Files\Games\City of Heroes\cohupdater.exe"

7. The natty blue shield should be gone when you click “OK” (and it may have changed the icon to Elevator’s ugly pixelated thing, but you can fix that). Run it, and the application should launch without any permission boxes.

Also interesting, though, is that the new game is based on the D&D 4th Edition ruleset, which is roughly what happens if you apply a computer-game cooldown-style mechanic on an RPG game. It would be interesting to see a cRPG with the “At will”/”Per Encounter”/”Daily” mechanic.

I have a Supergroup, but it’s not a public one. It has all my characters and, more recently, Clare’s and other people who I know, but for the first five years of playing it was with pick up teams, and it still – mostly – is. I’ve got 29 characters over four servers, none have hit the level cap (Closest is Spiralling Shape, at 45/50). I am in Heroes – as in every game I play – not numbers obsessed, but a “lore” person. Stories – both my characters’ and the game’s – are important to me.

Heroes has a scrappy approach to story. In Heroes itself, there is an awful lot of backstory and universe out there. There are universal conspiracies you uncover, and if you read mission descriptions carefully, almost every “So how does that work” question gets answered. The story progresses with your character, to some extent, so at level 5 you start running into this group called The Lost, who appear to be some kind of organised group of the homeless. Later, you find they are starting to mutate and are getting harder to fight, and you start running into the Rikti, the invading aliens that are central to Heroes’ overarching story. If you pay attention, you see that a lot of the weapons the Lost wield are primitive versions of those the Rikti are firing at you… and then missions start appearing that tie things together, explain the secrets. The theory is sound, but because of the vageries of levelling, it’s entirely possible to miss huge chunks of the plot because you spent that level range running missions with a group of level 40s or something.

(Game mechanic thing, Heroes has always had a mechanic of “Sidekicking”, where any hero on a team could take a lower-level player and “Mentor” them, raising them to an effective level of one level below the Mentor. This made teaming with your lower level friends much easier. Plus, going in the other direction (“Exemplaring” to a lower level Hero) would earn you “influence” (money, basically). More recently, this was upgraded to “Super Sidekicking”, a mechanic where everyone on the team is fighting at roughly the level of the team leader. This takes a lot of the problems with finding teams of the same rough level away. In addition, below level 5 you can enter a level pact with one other character, meaning you will earn XP in lockstep, so a duo will level at the same rate. Mechanic stuff over).

Recently, the “Flashback” system, which allows you to play any mission in the game below your level that you may have either missed or wanted to do again, solves all these things. That the “Big storyline” quests now have special icons by them is even more helpful.

In Heroes, you get a Contact who will give you missions until you reach a sufficient level to be introduced to the next contact, or outlevel their missions, or finish them all. By this method you are passed from zone to zone, contact to contact. The basic set of missions you get like this are defined by your “Origin” (Natural, Magic, Tech, Mutant, etc) and you can go from 1-50 like that. In addition, they will introduce you to cross-origin contacts, most of which are linked to one of the zones released more recently.

Zones released since launch tend to be more self contained, you get introduced to a contact at the start, who will lead you to the next contact, and on and on. Because this stays in the same zone, and the linear set of missions mostly advance – or at least extend – the story you get a stronger narrative thread, and this tends to work better with actually telling a full story, instead of relying on you taking on specific contact (usually you’ll have several at any one time).

City of Villains – released a year later – modified the system a bit. You go into each new zone with no contacts or friends, and by doing one shot schemes inspired from the newspaper (Generic missions of a “Kill everyone here” or “kidnap this person” type. Occasionally self-indulgent, like the one where you kidnap the executive producer of a games company for getting your likeness wrong in an MMO) until someone’s impressed enough to give you a lead on a bank job. Succeed in the bank job and you get a proper contact with missions and stories.

The stories in Villains tend to be stronger, and there is a constant background narrative – the reason you were broken out of gaol at level one – with various other loops and sidetracks.

Towards the upper end of Heroes, you encounter “Portal Corp” a company whose technology allows it to build portals to other worlds. Some of these are places where the lower-level goons you beat up 45 ranks ago had read the Evil Overlord’s Handbook and got their shit together, others are the mysterious monster-filled worlds of super-powerful beings known as the Shadow Shard. Inside this was the straight up comic convention of the goatee-wearing evil mirror universe “Praetoria”, where the Superman-analog “Statesman” was the evil lord “Tyrant” who had bent the world to his will.

Going Rogue has three parts, and this is the first. Praetoria has been designed and opened up as a new “City”, alongside Paragon (City of Heroes) and the Rogue Isles (City of Villains), and contains a new content track from levels 1 to 20.

Moustache twirling evil’s good for a straight up antagonist – as Praetoria was in Heroes – but isn’t quite deep enough to set an entire game there, so Paragon Studios have gone for a Functional Utopia/Dystopia vision, where you have a working society with gleaming, golden buildings and mind-reading authority on every street corner, people who see themselves as “safe” rather than “oppressed”. A world where the superman-analog has seized the reward for saving the world by keeping it.

Of course, this doesn’t work entirely, and there’s an underground resistance – literally and figuratively – you can join that works to topple “Emperor Cole” (aka Tyrant) and his perfect world, or you can remain a Loyalist puppet of a perfect tyranny. Again, two content paths with crossover paths (both sides want you working as a mole in the other).

Praetoria is really pretty. Paragon Studios pushed the edges of their ageing graphics engine to bring “Ultra Mode” last content-push (Issue) with realtime shadows, realistic water and reflections; and the new zones are the first built with this new tech in mind. It’s not Crydis pretty, or up to the standards of a top of the range new game (and it demands quite a lot of oomph for the same detail under a more modern system), but for a six year old game Heroes looks remarkably good.

The missions follow Paragon’s recent upward trend in writing and story quality, the first MMO to bring NPCs with the kind of dialog trees Monkey Island had twenty years ago. It’s still a four colour comic universe, with bombastic super heroes that can throw bathtubs at your head from thin air, but the plotlines are a little more nuanced. For all Cole’s tyranny, the world does appear to work, and the people who don’t care are happy. The Resistance have their own brand of barely-understandable gibberish at times, and are murder-happy enough not to be classed as the “Good Side”. Where Heroes is a straight black line between Good and Evil, here you get more Order verses Chaos, or possibly Lawful verses Chaotic. It’s still not going to have great essays written about the social structure of the world, but it’s deeper than your average video game.

Actually, on the side note of writing: A little while ago Heroes got a series of Guest Authors - including Mercedes Lackey (who apparently plays the game, interestingly) – to contribute some stories to the Player Mission System “Mission Architect”. Playing though them, it’s interesting how much being a talented writer helps create engaging stories. Of course, only creating one mission set, as opposed to enough content for a horde of descending player content-locusts – is a different thing entirely. There’s a lot of good writing in CoH, but some of the Guest Author missions stand out well.

Up until this release there have been two distinct games in the Heroes world. They’re constructed the same; they work the same way; they use the same graphics engine, character generation and servers, but they’re split across “Heroes” and “Villains”. For a comic book game, there’s a major trope missing here, that of the Heal Face Turn, ie the bad guy going good, or the good guy going bad (Which is a or even Face Heal Turn) (Warning, that’s a TV Tropes link). They’ve wanted to fix this for a while, and now they have. You can go Rogue.

Going rogue is an interesting process. As a hero, once you hit level 20 you start getting “tips” as drops from killing things. These tips give you a mission, which you can do one of two ways either as a straight up mission to reaffirm your existing status and get “Hero” or “Villain” points, or you can make a choice that starts sending you down a different route. Heroes who decide that it would be better to ignore the bombs and go after the bomb-maker, for example, start drifting towards “Vigilante”. The number of tips that drop are limited per day, and the number of points you can pick up are limited too, so the process of turning from one state to another takes a couple of days. You don’t get any new content as a Vigilante or Rogue (as Villains drifting to the light are named), but you can visit both cities. If you turn completely around you lose access to the opposing side, of course, “Go Dark” from your super group and your badge titles are flipped to the other equivalents.

It takes a few days real time to do the switch, but it might solve one of the perennial problems with Heroes, which is that while the base Villains content is better written than a lot of the base Heroes stuff (They learnt a lot in the 18 months between releases), it’s generally got a lot lower population (and is a lot harder to get a group together to do the big team content).

Finally, there is a more standard content push alongside all the above. The “Doppelgänger” tech that debuted last issue that pits you up against a clone – or flawed clone, or reversed clone – of yourself has been let into the player generated mission system “Architect”, they’ve buffed the UI a bit to allow tutorial hints, and the huge multi-team “Raid” style thing – the Cathedral of Pain – has been revamped and reinstated (It was removed about three years ago after being massively exploitable). I haven’t tried that yet, so I can’t really comment.

I’m not convinced it’s a massive expansion pack, is the thing. I love the new zones, the new power sets (Duel Pistols and Demon Summoning), and the new maps are wonderful. The new map sets have a spaciousness and environment that’s lacking from the rest – Heroes has been rightly criticised often for putting you in almost identical office/warehouse/cave layouts over and over again – but as much as I love the new train-tunnel map – for example – you encounter that a lot too.

Heroes players are spoilt by the Issues system which delivers gobs of content including whole new zones, mission sets, powers and stories, and huge leaps forward like the Mission Architect system (An MMO with actual player created missions is, if not unique, very rare. EvE can argue to have them, I think, but nobody else major) for free every four months or so. To release this – which contains a lot of gorgeous content – as a paid expansion makes economic sense but isn’t a lot more than we’d get in an Issue. Vitally, I think they make a huge mistake in releasing the souped-up “Ultra Mode” engine as part of the last major Issue, as it makes it seem a lot less important. On the other hand, this is twenty levels of content with two separate paths through most of it, in a brand new hand crafted environment that looks really nice, with a huge amount of new lore behind it, so I shouldn’t complain too much.

I hope Going Rogue does well, because if the various costume packs can fund this, I’m very much looking forward to what the sales of a good expansion pack can do. I’m expecting more zones of Praetoria, and Heroes is still a fun game to play. You should come and play it with me :)

At 20:30 yesterday UK time on the US servers, for the first time since CoV launched, the top two most populated servers were in “queue to get in” mode, and the rest were all saying “Under heavy load”. This is a good sign for a game I really quite like.

(If you’re interested in trying CoH, I can send out ten day trial codes. Drop me an email)

Claret everywhere.

(By which I mean “ow, my toe is bleeding” and “Bother. I’ve spilt port and elderflower liquor all over the floor”. Which I know isn’t claret, but still).

This weekend I am doing nothing.

Well, I’m playing Dragon Age, Team Fortress 2, Bioshock 2 and City of Heroes. I’ve watched Lock, Stock & Two smoking barrels; Snatch and Rocknrolla; I’ve reduced the washing up pile to zero; Thrown the various fragments of The Book’s git repository around a bit so they stick to each other a bit better (and done some Actual Planning, if no Actual Writing); Got my dev environment for PiracyInc.com back up and runing (complicated somewhat by the fact that the front page currently segfaults PHP); Done a bit more work on Omnyom.com (What it is, what it looks like, how it works); and now updated this with… well, this.

So, a quiet weekend.

The blog post link above summarises the episode, although the actual show is better, as they go though various theoretical methods of working out how much a pelican is worth (from “You cannot put a price on life” meaning – in these terms – “They’re free” on down). Eventually, they come to a non-economic answer from the US governmental department responsible for dealing with this kind of issue: One pelican is worth… exactly one pelican. They require the fined company to invest in breeding centres and such to the point where they cause more pelicans to exist. Not the dollar value they were looking for, but means that BP don’t end up paying fines that end up bailing out those worthless penguins.

Possibly not my greatest idea ever, because I need extra bonus timesinks like I need a punctured skull, but having ditched Champions Online and not making it out of the Closed Beta of Star Trek Online before being bored with it, I thought I’d give WoW another try before they rewrote the beginning.

I did a 14 day trial of WoW in 2005, but nobody I knew at the time was playing it. I bought a boxed copy in 2006 and spent a while pottering around in it, not really getting very far:

2006-08-28: I’m trialing World Of Warcraft again. After the ease of teaming and working and… everything that City of Heroes gives you, I’m finding the idea of attempting to build an entire social interface for a game as big as WoW on a substandard IRC client hellish. “LFG L31 Pally F RFD” pops up in the chat window. LFG… looking for group, yes. L31 Pally? Oh, Paladin. I’m one of those. Not L31 yet… RFD? Real fucking donkeys? Ready for domination? Red Flowers Die? Alt-Tab GoogleGoogle Razorfen Downs. Right. Ignore that then…

One of the things I really like about City of Heroes is the effortless *multiplayer* bits. That is, you set a flag saying you’re looking for a team (Any team, or a missions team, or a “task force” (er, WoW players can see that as a Raid, I guess), but I logged into my account (mostly to check I still know the password), and it offered me a free trial of Burning Crusade, so I’ve spent a few hours over a couple of evenings levelling up my shiny new Blood Elf:

Mostly, though, I’m noticing how empty the world is.

It’s similar to the problem in LOTRO, but there are supposedly 11 million people playing this game (Although that number is now two years old, and breakdowns per country seem thin on the ground), but there is nobody in chat, and I see other players of anywhere near my level every few hours, and always running in the opposite direction.

Maybe its that Warcraft’s emphasis on pushing the world boundries out along with the level cap is bouncing against my being used to Heroes, where the emphasis is on either rerolling or – more recently – doing content on forks you didn’t take as “Flashback” stories, but the emptiness is kind of weird. Obviously, I need to rope in other people to level with at the same time, or something. Most of the people I know are doing the top-end raid content, though.

The white-robed boys swept back their hoods and Locke saw that they were twins; perhaps a year or two older than himself, and far sturdier-looking. They had the olive skin and black hair of the true Camorri; their identical long, hook-ended noses, however, were something of an anomaly. Smiling, they joined hands and bowed in unison from the waist.

‘Um, hi,’ Locke said. ‘Which of you is . . . which?’

‘Today, I am Galdo,’ said the one on Locke’s left.

‘Tomorrow, I will probably be Galdo,’ said the other one.

‘Or perhaps we’ll both want to be Calo,’ added the one that had first spoken.

‘In time,’ Father Chains interrupted, ‘you’ll learn to tell them apart by the number of dents I’ve kicked in their respective arses; one of them always manages to be ahead of the other, somehow.’ He stood behind Locke and placed both of his wide, heavy hands on Locke’s shoulders. ‘Idiots, this is Locke Lamora. As you can see, I’ve just bought him from your old benefactor, the master of Shades’ Hill.’

‘We remember you,’ said presumed-Galdo.

‘A Catchfire orphan,’ said presumed-Calo.

‘Father Chains bought us just after you arrived,’ they said in unison, grinning.

‘Knock that bullshit off,’ Father Chains said, his voice somehow regal. ‘You two have just volunteered to cook dinner. Pears and sausage in oil, and a double portion for your new little brother. Get. Locke and I will deal with the kettle.’

That’s what I was reading yesterday, and so, casting around for something to do for dinner today, the quote popped into my head. Pears and sausage in oil.

(If you like the book, you can buy it in most decent book stores. If you’re not quite sure, there’s another 29 and a half pages of the book in extract form on Mr Lynch’s site. I’d highly recommend both the book and the sequel).

Tescos supplied me with some “Cumberland style” sausages and a few pears, edibly ripe.

The frying pan has yet to recover from the weekend, so we won’t be frying them. Pears are quite delicate to the taste, and we want to bring out the flavour rather the bury it, so this is going to end up as simple as possible.

A roasting tin, into which we throw four of the sausages, each sliced into three. The pears are peeled (which is a bastard) sliced and then stripped of the core bits, then thrown in without any more slicing. Olive oil is drizzled over that to help it cook, and Onto that goes a sprinkling of basil with a dash of thyme, ginger, salt (Basil because I like it, thyme because I think it’ll work well with the pear, and a pinch of ginger to add an subliminal edge. The salt helps bring out the flavour too); some sliced tomatoes go over the top because I think that’ll help, and then the whole kit and caboodle gets thrown into the oven for an hour and a half on 150°c while I go attempt to work out why so many people like World of Warcraft.

A while later, I come to the conclusion this isn’t quite enough of a balanced meal, throw some rice on, and serve that lot over it about ten minutes later.

Then I have an idea.