supersonic feet

I enjoy this blog-writing lark so much I started another one.

Following my entry into the world of Ruby on Rails, I’ve got a pretty decent forum system up and running and as a test data set, I imported all the forums, users and posts from my old website, Haloplayers. I’d been toying with the idea of re-launching the site for a while and the announcement that Halo 2 is finally on its way to the PC as well as my work on a new forum system (the best bit of Halo Players was the forum community) has pushed me over the edge into re-launching.

I’ve had a blog going for a while with the odd post now and then about potentially bringing the site back, but now I’ve opened it to the world to keep track of the progress made. There’s a partial screenshot of the forum system as a sneak-peek on there already, though since it was added (admittedly only yesterday) I’ve started to implement a new style, more along the lines of how I want the end product to look.

I think I’ll largely keep the new look under wraps (for a few days at least hehe) as it is still in development and could change again. There’s also a cool new feature or two that I don’t want to give away just yet

I continued my foray into the world of Ruby on Rails this evening with some success.

As I started out in PHP writing a forum system, I decided it’d be a good app to build up a I get the hang of Rails and indeed, in the space of a couple of days I’ve got a basic forum going, with multiple forums and the ability to post new topics and replies.

Tonight I got around to sorting a user authentication system and Rails doesn’t disappoint there. It seems ready-made login code has been built up quite well already and I had the Salted Hash Login Generator working in short order (bar a brief confusion until I found out it needs the iconv package on Windows).

So I now have a basic forum system with proper user registration and login. I’ve been developing the database to store the posts in a proper threaded (tree) system, though I’m sticking to displaying in ‘flat’ view for the time being. I’ve also been using Rails’ built-in tree behavious, so I’ll have to wait and see if that does what I need when it comes to offering threaded as well as flat view forums.

More to come I’m sure…

I recently dropped back in on my old Tribes/Halo team’s IRC channel for the first time in months and spotted a link to a very interesting post on TribalWar.

The suggestion very definitely seems to be that Garage Games are going to announce a spiritual successor to Tribes at GDC 06 next month. The Garage Games staff member who stirred this up posted a video of himself playing with a new tech demo of GG’s Torque engine and going for a mighty ski across a large landscape.

This is of course all speculation, but Tribes fans will take any sign of hope they can that they might finally get a decent succesor to Tribes 1. I’ve hosted the video here as it unsuprisingly got pulled from ajaxprotection’s blog.

Team Valley by night

On my way home from my mate Krishna’s flat tonight (or this morning as it now is), it was quite foggy and cool, so I headed up into the hills of the Team Valley and managed to get this shot which I think is quite cool.

I was dangerously low on petrol with no petrol stations open though, so had to head home soon after. Would’ve been nice to be go for more of a drive and find some other spots.

Continuing the Rails theme and thanks to a tenuous link…

I spoke to an old acquaintance from my Haloplayers days for the first time in ages last night, who pointed me at the stunning upcoming game, Project Offset. I then followed a link from their news page to Red 5 Studios’ site, who just licensed the Offset Engine.

The Red 5 Studios site has a jobs listing up as they’re just starting work on a new project. The ‘Senior Web & DB Developer’ role was worth a look I thought and noticed one of the pluses is a developer with an ‘interest in Ruby on Rails‘. It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, they’re planning on doing with Rails to integrate with the new game.

Shame I’m not a Java programmer hehe.

It’s been quite a while since I last attempted a look at Ruby and Rails, but a combination of too much PHP work and the lack of a decent editor for Ruby/Rails meant I never really got anywhere with it.

Today I decided to start having another look and it turns out there’s now RadRails, an IDE based on Eclipse. It’s still not at v1.0 yet but is looking rather spiffy already, with nice touches such as the ability to run generate commands like scaffold from within the IDE.

If I get time I might finally get into this Rails lark.

Are people still calling it ‘re-aligning’ when you slightly re-design a website to improve functionality, usability, etc. without drastically changing the style? It was all the rage last time I re-designed this site as the phrase had only recently been coined by Cameron Moll.

Whatever it’s called these days (does three months later count as ‘these days’?), I’ve done it again. The new re-alignment shifts the main menu up alongside the content and, depending on what resolution you have your browser window at, a new bar with a random selection of my flickr photos too. At smaller screen sizes, the flickr photos will just shift down.

As is often the case, Internet Explorer poses a bit of an issue with its lack of min-width support, so in IE the menu will shift down as well if you go small enough.

The new design isn’t entirely finished yet - for a start I need to add in a couple of ’skip to…’ links at the top for accessibility - but it’s basically there.

UPDATE: Seems the ‘flickr badge’ code does a good job of destroying the validity of the site HTML by using straight ampersands (&) in URLs instead of the HTML version (&). In newer XHTML specs ampersands are viewed as object references. Grr. Guess I’ll have to look at writing my own flickr random display thingy at some point if I want the pages to stay 100% valid

The Ruby on Rails clone, PHP on TRAX seems to still be making progress and they’ve just set up a new demo app that mirrors the flickr demo app from a RoR screencast.

John Peterson, lead developer/founder of PHP on TRAX, posted notice of the new demo to the TRAX mailing list and also mentioned that Walt Haas has been working on new documentation for the framework.

All sounds good and I’ll have to have another more in-depth look at TRAX again in the future.

Great news for me as a non-smoker - the House of Commons last night voted for a total smoking ban in all enclosed public places in England. Obviously not good news for smokers who want to smoke down the pub, in the restaurant, etc. but if the Government’s hopes that it causes 600,000 people to quit smoking gets anywhere close to being realised it’ll be a Good Thingâ„¢.

This story has been pretty well covered by all the big news organisations already, I just want to comment on a quote I find slightly disturbing from the shot guy’s daughter.

In the BBC article, she’s talking about how things like this happen from time to time. Fair enough, it’s bound to with groups of people in a forest firing guns at fast-moving targets and it’s nice she apparently isn’t holding a grudge against Cheney, but she then says:

“This is something that happens from time to time. You know, I’ve been peppered pretty well myself”

The suggestion seems to be that it’s pretty much to be expected that if you go hunting you’re gonna end up being shot by some dozy idiot who hadn’t noticed you were there. It’s astonishing to me that they have such a blasé attitude to potential death. What if Cheney had killed him?

EDIT: It was the ranch manager with the quote above, not the daughter. Still a weird attitude, but ever-so-slightly less outlandish coming from someone with more of a vested interest in not portraying the ’sport’ in a bad light.