Andreas Gohr: Weblog [splitbrain.org]

Zombie Cow Adventures

Andi — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 21:54:08 +0100

I spent most of yesterday night and today with playing two old fashioned but wonderful point and click adventure games by Zombie Cow Studios.

The first, somewhat shorter one is called Ben There, Dan That. It's named after its two protagonist characters who in turn are named after the two developers who created the game.

After the Ben and Dan return from some adventure, they discover that their TV antenna is broken. On trying to repair it they are abducted by aliens and need to puzzle their way home through various hilarious dimensions. The games makes various references to classical Lucas Arts adventures, Internet memes and made me literally laugh out loud multiple times.

The full game can be downloaded for free and is good for a couple of hours of fun.

When you finished “Ben There, Done That” and liked it, you will not think twice about buying the sequel called Time Gentlemen, please. It costs about 3.50€¹⁾. It took me about 6 or 7 hours to complete – excellent value for the price of a coffee!

The game picks up where the first one ended and sends the two heroes through a complex time travelling adventure. Graphics are slightly better than in the first part, but its wit and story what makes these games so much fun anyway.

Some puzzles in this one reminded me of the ones in Day of the Tentacle. Eg. you need to change things in the past to solve a problem in the future. But don't get me wrong, “Time Gentlemen, please” is no lame copy of old classics, it's an excellent game on its own. Oh and if you're still not conviced: you will fight Cloned Nazi Dinosaurs ! Now get it!

PS: Both games are Windows only unfortunately.

Tags:: adventure,; games,; review

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¹⁾ You can optionally pay the same amount again as way of saying thanks for the first part.

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Search Delicious with Google CSE

Andi — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:01:13 +0100

Delicious¹⁾ is a great service to bookmark those sites that might come in handy one day.

Unfortunately your bookmarks are only as good as you tag them. Since that's the only way to find them again later. Today I thought about ways to not only search through the tags but through the contents of the bookmarked sites as well. And of course whenever you think about search you think about Google…

Google let's you create you own specialized search engines (re)using their index. The feature is called CSE – Custom Search Engines.

Usually you provide a list of sites to include in your search engine manually. But there is also a way to let Google automatically download that data from a special XML file on an URL you provide.

So whipped up a script that uses the delicious API to create a Google CSE “Annotation” file:

delicious_cse.php

<?php
// configure
$USER  = 'fixme'; // delicious user
$PASS  = 'fixme'; // delicious password
$CSEID = 'fixme'; // Google CSE inclusion label
 
// no changes below
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement(
               file_get_contents(
                   'https://'.rawurlencode($USER).':'.
                              rawurlencode($PASS).
                             '@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all?'
               )
       );
 
header('Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8');
define('NL',"\n");
 
echo '<GoogleCustomizations>'.NL;
echo '<CustomSearchEngine>
  <Title>My Bookmarks</Title>
  <Description>Index over my del.icio.us bookmarks</Description>
  <Context>
    <BackgroundLabels>
      <Label name="'.$CSEID.'" mode="FILTER" />
    </BackgroundLabels>
  </Context>
</CustomSearchEngine>'.NL;
 
echo '<Annotations>'.NL;
foreach($xml->post as $post){
    $post['href'] = trim($post['href']);
    if(!preg_match('#^https?://#i',$post['href'])) continue;
    if(strpos(parse_url($post['href'],PHP_URL_HOST),'.') === false) continue;
 
    echo '  <Annotation about="'.htmlspecialchars($post['href']).'">'.NL;
    echo '    <Label name="'.$CSEID.'" />'.NL;
    $labels = explode(' ',$post['tag']);
    foreach($labels as $label){
        $label = trim($label," \t,");
        echo '    <Label name="'.htmlspecialchars($label).'" />'.NL;
    }
    echo '  <Comment>'.htmlspecialchars($post['description'].' - '.$post['extended']).'</Comment>'.NL;
    echo '  </Annotation>'.NL;
}
 
echo '</Annotations>'.NL;
echo '</GoogleCustomizations>'.NL;

First download the script above, then create a new Custom Search Engine. When asked for a site to be indexed just give http://example.com and delete it again once your engine was created. We don't want to specify any sites ourself – that's what the script will do for us.

Next go to the setings of your CSE and swich to the “Advanced” page. There you'll find a label to be used to include new sites in your engine. You need to put that one in the $CSEID variable in the script. Also put your delicious user name and password in the $USER and $PASS variables respectively.

Then upload the whole file to your PHP enabled webserver. The URL to the script needs to be entered as Annotation feed in the above mentioned “Advanced” page of the CSE settings.

That's it. Your Custom Search Engine should now automatically search the contents of all sites you bookmark at delicious.

Tags:: del.icio.us,; google,; cse,; php,; api

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¹⁾ or del.icio.us as I still like to write it

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Strasbourg

Andi — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:54:22 +0100

After my failed trip to the US I needed some vacation. So I took the week off and visited Strasbourg. I had really good luck with the weather and enjoyed this beautiful city a lot. As usual, here's a selection of the photos I took.

Tags:: strasbourg,; vacation,; travel,; photos

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Delta Airlines Sucks!

Andi — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:50:43 +0100

I'm currently sitting at home in front of my computer. That alone wouldn't be worth mentioning, if it wouldn't be for the fact that I should be in Orlando, Florida right now.

But let's start at the beginning. The original plan looked like this:

Friday the 23rd:
- fly Delta Airlines from Berlin TXL to New York JFK
- take a Delta Airlines plane to Orlando a few hours after arrival
See Disney World
Visit the WikiSym conference
Tuesday the 27th :
- Fly back to New York City with Delta Airlines
Spend a few relaxing days in the Big Apple
Saturday the 31st:
- fly back Delta Airlines to Berlin with lots of photos and happy memories

On Friday morning, I met my colleagues at the airport and we went to the Delta Airlines check in. And that's when it all started…

The girl at the counter couldn't check me in because “you have an e-ticket but somehow you don't”. What? I still have no idea what that was supposed to mean, but after 20 minutes or so she got it sorted out via telephone. Phew. Who cares that I couldn't sit with my colleagues because she wasn't able to do anything about that?

When we boarded the airplane, I was surprised. I did a few cross Atlantic flights during the last years and never sat in a plane where I did not had at least my own monitor in front of me. In fact most also had a movie on-demand and gaming system. The plane looked more like from the 80ies. But okay, it's just 8½ hours, I had a book and my laptop with me – enough to entertain me for a while.

We saw the security video and the plane made off to the runway. Then it stopped. And stood there for quite a while. Nobody payed attention to it, until the captain gave us the news: Something about some valves in the right engine wasn't right. We had to drive back to the gate and have a mechanic look at it.

The mechanics had a look at it. A long one. They first just tried to fix the problem by some “manual adjustments”. That didn't work. The captain told us they had to replace the valves. This took them more than an hour. Finally the captain announced that the mechanics finished and are now “doing the paperwork”. Takeoff in about 35 minutes.

50 minutes later we're back on our way to the runway when the captain stops the machine and tells us “Sorry problem still not fixed”. Back to the mechanics we go. At this time we were sitting for about 3 and half hours in the plane. During this time we got a cola and peanuts.

Another half hour later with no fucking information whatsoever, the captain is speaking again: the mechanics had identified the problem and it can only be fixed by replacing a whole part of the engine. That part would need to be flown in from Frankfurt and it would take at least another 4 hours.

Fuck. You'd think they would now make sure their passengers are comfortable, which they probably aren't very much after waiting it a fucking plane for 4 hours, right? Wrong!

The captain continued to explain: they only have certain duty hours after which they aren't allowed to fly anymore. So they are checking now with headquarters in Atlanta til when they could fly.

Did you get what happened there? They were checking if they could fly that plane after it had been repaired (which would be in about 4 to 5 hours) and did not let us out while checking for that possibility! Half an hour later they figured that their duty window had passed and began organizing busses to get us back to the terminal. Yes! Delta considered to let 200 passengers sitting in that plane for another 4 to 5 hours before an 8½ hour flight.

When we finally arrived in the terminal, chaos ensued. None of the Delta ground personal did have any detailed information. When one said one thing, another said the opposite. Many passengers where concerned about their connecting flights of course. And so were we.

After getting our luggage, we went to the Delta ticket counter, where a single elderly lady was the only one in charge of answering the customer's questions. We spent probably about 2 hours or more ¹⁾ until we finally could tell her about our connecting flight to Orlando. It took a while until she understood that we had booked this one separately from the flight to New York²⁾ and that this meant it would not be automatically changed as she tried to make us believe. When she finally understood the problem she couldn't help. She as a Delta Agent couldn't rebook these Delta flights for us and we should try in New York when we get there.

Delta Agent: I can not help you. I called the highest position at Atlanta Headquarters and they told me you should ask at the New York Delta desk

Passenger: Oh! The highest position in Atlanta? Please give me the name of the one you talked to.

Delta Agent: I can't. It's always a different one. It's a call center.

Passenger: The highest position in Atlanta is a call center? Now that explains a lot!

While personal tragedies took their place at the ticket counter (a girl missing her sisters wedding, a groomsman carrying the rings with him, …) we went home. Tired and exhausted.

At least we had a new schedule. A new flight to New York would take off the next day at 9:00. Check-in at 6:00.

And there we were. A new day after a short night. There wouldn't be time for Disney World, but at least we'd make it to WikiSym on time. Or so we thought…

We checked in, no problems at all, went through the security and waited.

It was 20 minutes before 9 and there was still no call for boarding. It became 9:00 and there was no call for boarding. Meanwhile a few clever passengers had checked the flight number on the Internet. Estimated: 13:00. What the Fuck?

About 9:30 a Delta Airlines employee came in and read out a statement:

The machine still needs to be repaired.
A part has to be flown in.
That part would arrive at 12:30.
The machine would take off at 13:00.
Passengers can visit the restaurant “Take Off” for lunch at 10:15.

That's it. No explanation why they checked us in for a machine they knew was broken and wouldn't be available. No explanation what the fuck they had done since yesterday. No apologies.

We went to the restaurant³⁾ and discussed what to do. Even if the machine would really take off at 13:00, which we doubted heavily, we would arrive relatively late in New York. Even if we had no problems with getting a connecting flight to Orlando, we would arrive there very late at night.

This again would have made at least the 1st day of WikiSym a pain for sure. Without the conference the trip made no sense anymore and after spending 1½ days at the airport we were fed up with Delta's lies and non-informations. So we canceled the flight.

Even after the decision to cancel the flight Delta managed to continue fucking up our day. When we asked for our luggage, they told us to pick it up at the Airport customs baggage claim in an hour. When we asked for our bags there an hour later, they didn't even knew about it. Delta failed to tell them about our canceled flight. So we spent another hour or so waiting at the baggage claim.

So I'm really pissed about Delta. Sure a plane can break. And of course it needs to be fixed. But what I can not excuse is:

Leaving us locked in a plane
Not caring about our wellbeing (5 hours without food and drinks)
Not giving us any information what is going on
Lying about the plane's repair status and let us check in knowingly we wouldn't be able to fly
Generally being completely unprofessional with an unforeseen situation

So if you have a choice: don't fly Delta Airlines.

PS: I just checked the Delta website. The machine finally took off at 14:31. I wonder if they really boarded the machine at 12:30 as planned and let the people sit there for two hours again.

Tags:: delta,; rant,; flight,; airline,; servicefail

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¹⁾ I lost a bit track on time somewhat by then

²⁾ because of the delayed return from NYC

³⁾ which by the way had a similar bad service as Delta's

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Growing the DokuWiki Community

Andi — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:07:53 +0100

Some of you may know that I visited the FrOSCon conference a few months ago. But I didn't blog about it. Not because there wasn't anything worth mentioning, but because it gave me too much to think about that I couldn't write down right away.

The conference had quite a few sessions on Open Source communities and what makes them work - or not. And that got me started on thinking about the DokuWiki community state.

I think we're doing well, but could do better. A nice metric one of the speakers gave, was the bus factor:

The bus factor equals the number of people that need to be hit by a bus before nobody understands the code anymore. For most Open Source projects that factor is 1.

I think we can surely say DokuWiki's bus factor is significantly higher than 1. But is that enough?

Unfortunately an awful lot of stuff is still very much depending on me. This is starting to become a problem. Not only for my work/life balance, but also for the growth of DokuWiki. The DokuWiki project can only progress with a working community that takes care not only of development, but also of doing support and “marketing”.

Over the last months I tried to make a few first steps to foster community building by implementing a few ideas I had while listening to the FrOSCon talks:

Display MonsterID avatars in the forum to give everyone a “face” and encourage people to set up their own avatar
Creation of the community subforums where people can introduce themselves or organize user meetings
Creation of the newsletter and trying to find a team to maintain it
Talking to people personally asking them to step in for a certain task they showed interest in
Made the wiki use the forum logins to connect people's forum identities with their wiki activities

I still have a few more ideas I want to apply over the next months. One of them is to give more people commit access to the DokuWiki source code. This will probably include switching from darcs to the more popular git RCS¹⁾.

But all this is just technology. The important thing is to get people working together - even face to face. For example I'm happy to announce that there is a Japanese DokuWiki User Group in founding currently²⁾.

I encourage everyone to start their own user meetings.

Here's another gimmick: have a look at the map below. It displays all forum users who set up their location in their profile. Zoom in to see individual users. Maybe you find two or three others in your area to do a little meetup?

Map data is refreshed every night. Just set up your location in your forum profile.

Tags:: dokuwiki,; community,; forum

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¹⁾ No ETA, yet

²⁾ More info will probably be available in the new Japanese sub forum soon

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Paperless Geocaching with the iPhone

Andi — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:15:25 +0100

The iPhone 3G has a builtin GPS receiver. Even though it isn't as precise as a dedicated GPS it makes a good device for casual Geocaching or for storing the cache data while using a real GPS to navigate.

The simplest way to access cache data is using the geocaching.com website on the iPhone's web browser. There are several one Dollar tools that will open a cache listing with your current location prefilled and there are even ways to get that functionality for free. However this doesn't give you any navigation feature or access to any data when you have no internet connectivity.

There are a handful of dedicated geocaching applications in the appstore. Here are the ones I currently use.

Official Geocaching App

Groundspeak has its own application in the app store now. It gives you direct access to the website's data, displays nearby caches on a map and can direct you to a selected cache. Pocket Queries can be downloaded within the application and selected caches can also be stored for offline access. You can also write field notes and later upload them to the website for logging your finds.

It is a solid application and works as advertised. Unfortunately it is very slow. Just starting the app takes about 8 seconds on my iPhone 3G.

The application is available for 7.99€ in the App Store.

Geosphere App

This application is a dream. Unlike the offical app it can not access the online cache database. Instead you need to feed it with GPX files – usually Pocket Queries, so you need a premium membership at geocaching.com. However the application makes it dead simple to import your Pocket Query data: Geosphere includes an internal browser with which you can easily access your webmail account (or any other website) and download a (zipped) GPX file directly into the app.

Once you have imported the data, there is not much to wish for. The app can list nearby caches based on various adjustable filters, can display them on a map and will help you navigate there. You can even create a snapshot of the Google Maps satellite image at the cache's location in advance. Fieldnotes can be stored and later uploaded. Important for puzzle caches: new waypoints can be easily added, too. It is also much faster than the official app.

The application is available for 5.99€ in the App Store.

Geocaching Toolkit

The Geocaching Toolkit is not a replacement for the two apps above, but will help you with solving certain puzzle caches. It provides a few tools for things like creating cross sums, converting Roman to Arabic numbers or to calculate different waypoint projections.

The application is available for free in the App Store.

If the iPhone's GPS would be more precise and its battery would last longer, with the above apps it would make a fantastic primary caching device. But even now, it is still very useful for paperless caching.

Since I won't own an iPhone forever, I wonder what Geocaching options are available on the Android platform. If you have any experience with Android geocaching, let me know in the comments please.

Tags:: iphone,; apps,; geocaching,; review

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Geocaching Weekend

Andi — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 21:55:26 +0100

Kaddi and me rented a car again and went for some Geocaching around Berlin this weekend. We were really lucky with the weather and enjoyed two gorgeous Autumn days on Friday and Saturday. Even today the rain stopped once we left the car . Below are a few photos we took.

Tags:: photos,; geocaching,; autumn

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WikiCamp Canceled

Andi — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:09:12 +0100

Yes, you read that right. The WikiCamp that was supposed to be held in about a month in Frankfurt was canceled yesterday.

The camp was originally suggested by Martin Koser to KongressMedia who are organizing the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. I met Martin and Björn Negelmann from KongressMedia back in Spring at the re:publica where we first talked about the WikiCamp idea. From what I understood back then, KongressMedia already had a venue and was looking for a side program to their preconference workshop tracks.

Even after the E20 Summit and with it the WikiCamp had been rescheduled from October to November, I fully supported the idea. I spoke to many people in the Wiki community and asked them to attend. I even announced it in the last DokuWiki newsletter.

Now it was canceled yesterday, just a month before the day. I don't know much, but the announcement talks about “rescheduling” the camp again, even so the E20 Summit will take place as planned. It also mentions that the new venue will be “more cost-efficient […], leaving more budget”.

To me this sounds like KongressMedia simply used the Wiki community to give their expensive business congress some grassroots touch. But when they found out that having an extra bunch of people that don't pay for $$$ tickets, in a frickin 5-star hotel isn't as cheap as they thought, they just dumped them.

Personally I'm really pissed about that attitude and probably will not promote a possible replacement event like I did with WikiCamp, when it will be organized by KongressMedia again. I just don't trust these guys anymore.

Update: WikiCamp is now scheduled for March the 6th, 2010 and will be located at the CeBit Hannover.

Tags:: rant,; wikicamp,; kongressmedia

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Media RSS & DokuWiki Gallery Plugin

Andi — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:28:50 +0100

Inspired by a tweet by Nicolas Bertrand I updated the Gallery Plugin today.

Nicolas asked for a way to display flickr sets as a gallery in DokuWiki. But instead of playing with the flickr API I had an idea to add support for a whole bunch of services at once. The answer is called Media RSS and is an extension to the standard RSS format to embed media like images or video in a feed.

What I did, was to use the excellent SimplePie library¹⁾ to read any Media RSS feed, get the images from it and display them in the gallery. Of course you can use all the gallery plugin parameters with those images as well. Including the lightbox mode.

Here's an example of my latest mobile phone uploads at flickr.

Tags:: dokuwiki,; plugin,; gallery,; flickr,; mediarss

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¹⁾ which is already included in DokuWiki

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