ShrimpWorks

Since the XBox Live “GamerCards” are so nicely exposed, there’s really no reason not to have a DynaBar plugin for it, now is there.

I’ve noticed a few GamerCards claiming to be in “userbar” format, however they do not follow userbar standards in layout, dimensions, or fonts. So, soon you too can have a lovely dynamic standards-compliant GamerScore userbar such as this:

I’m only posting now, since I finally managed to drag myself away for long enough to actually do some useful stuff for a change.

I could probably rave on for hours about how awesome the thing is, but then, you’ve probably read a million other reviews already.

Launch day I was up with the sparrows, off to my local Look & Listen to pick up my pre-order, only to realize they open an hour later than I had arrived :D. An eternity later (AKA one hour), I was in as the door opened, at the counter collecting my stuff (and the cashier labelled “Trainee” ended up instructing the manager on how to do the sale, since the pre-order deposit had to be taken into account). I was rather disappointed with their limited game selection, they had no Tomb Raider: Legend, Dead or Alive 4, or Project Gotham Racing 3 - despite DOA and PGR being the main selling points apparently, with huge posters everywhere.

Went over to Incredible Connection who have a branch in the same centre, to be greeted with lovely PGR stands and banners everywhere, yet no actual PGR or DOA stock, and the usual assortment of lame staff who looked shocked to discover that there was in fact this gigantic X'360 stand/area in the middle of the shop.

Anyway, off to Makro next, who luckily had loads of stock of DOA and PGR, and were a bit cheaper than the prices on Look & Listen’s website.

Oh, I forgot to mention just how heavy the darn thing is. Lugging it around the shopping centre was no walk in the park, and my weakling arms were actually quite painful afterward.

Anyway, between then, usual working hours, and now, I’ve been playing, learning, discovering, etc. It was a bit of a schlepp to get hooked up to Live, as it’s not actually supported in SA yet, and since they seemingly don’t allow you to change your country after sign-up, it’s a bit of a mission to set up a profile that is usable. I ended up creating a UK-based Passport and Live account.

On the subject of Live, Sony is going to have to pull off something really amazing to beat Microsoft’s setup, it’s really quite altogether cool (except that, because of Telkom I’m willing to bet, every now and then when communicating with Live, adding friends, unlocking achievements, etc., the machine hangs completely and needs to be reset - probably why Live is not officially supported here yet).

And I seriously need a better spam filtering setup. SpamBayes catches only around 50% of my spam, regardless of how much more I train it, if anything it’s getting less effective over time. Currently looking at Bogofilter.

Anyway, I’m off to see how DOA4 multiplayer works :)

Well, despite around 10 years of pure PlayStation fanboyism, I’ve caved in and decided to get an XBox 360. With the South African launch happening officially at midnight on Friday the 29th, I now find myself counting the hours, and thinking XBox and games every waking moment. I don’t know if it’s hype or something, but I can’t remember being this excited about a console before.

I shall be collecting my new toy from Look & Listen, first thing on Saturday morning, along with an extra wireless controller, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Burnout Revenge (all included in a R4399 bundle), then I’ll be dashing off to BT Games to grab Dead Or Alive 4, and Project Gotham Racing 3 at somewhat lower prices than Look & Listen offer.

Looking forward to writing about my experiences with the 360, something different for a change. Only two sleeps left!

After the release of the “Dumb Image Browser”, (which worked/works very well for what it’s supposed to do), I thought of prettying it up a bit, and adding some extra features.

The result is the Nice Image Browser. It’s vastly improved in terms of visuals, as well as offering features like easier browsing around the galleries, easy creation of new galleries, and uploading files directly from the browser.

It maintains the same PHP5-powered, database-less, cache-less, auto-thumbnail generating system of the Dumb Image Browser, meaning it’s just as easy to get set up (copy the files to a directory you want to become your gallery).

Thanks to Korpse/k4y/K` for the new stylesheet used for displaying the thumbnails.

The ReadMe includes usage and setup instructions. Happy image browsing! :)

Alrighty, time to release DynaBar 2.

I’ve thrown together a page for it, check it out. Download and a lot more information on features and plugins are available on the new page.

To see what’s new, take a look at the README in the docs/ directory.

Have fun :).

Indeed. I discovered the only thing I didn’t like about this site’s design was the page header image.

So it’s gone, and a leet one is in it’s place. Yay.

Hmmmmm, long time no update. That’s not to say I haven’t been busy recently.

Last month, we released “UnWheel R5”, which seems to have become the (hopefully) final release. I’m pretty happy with it at the moment, all the major bugs are gone, multiplayer is working wonderfully and the online record system is churning records around at a mean rate (and those records still need a monthly rotation system applied, so still some work to be done there). I still haven’t decided if I want to do this all again in Unreal Torunament 2007 or not :).

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing around with DynaBar, and it’s grown a lot. The plugin system has been tweaked to allow better customisation options from the developer side, as well as having options added to improve the user interaction side of things. There are a whole crapload of other options available as well, multiple layers (supporting PNG graphics with alpha transparency), different scanline styles, text prefixes and suffixes, better caching options, etc. In addition, you can choose to have the background be a gradient blending between any two colours, horizontal or vertical, and you can create “groups”, which is a bunch of userbars animated (with fading/blending between bars), and they all remain fully dynamic. Speaking of dynamic, I’ve also added a whole load of plugins, from XFire, to more Last.FM options, to Battlefield 2 and TrackMania, and even RSS headlines and live game server status via Qstat.

I’ve put up a test system here as a sort of sandbox, so feel free to try out all the options and plugins, and if you have any suggestions or ideas for plugins, please let me know. In addition to the designer, there’s a browser available, which lets you easily build the animated groups mentioned above. Also, it all works with Internet Explorer now, which I didn’t bother fixing with the previous version (wasn’t meant to be such a “big” project :)). Source code package will be available as soon as some more testing is done.

In addition, I’ve been re-writing my online Dosage-powered comic viewer - Injector

• again, this time it’s going fully “Web 2.0” (ZOMG!), so everything’s quite nice and quick. This project still needs a bit of work on the administration and installation side of things before it can see a release.

Aside from all that, I’ve also been slowly building a new UnrealZA site, using the Python-powered Django framework. It really is a wonderful thing. Please excuse me for a minute while I run away from a horde of crazy, twisted, Nevow fans (among others). Anyway, I’ll happily recommend Django any day of the week to anyone looking for a Python web framework.

I’ve also decided I don’t like the look of this site anymore, so I guess that’s another thing to go on my to-do list for the near future.

Alright, so I’ve been getting more and more spam in recent weeks, and they’ve been getting harder and harder to build basic filter rules for.

My mail works in a pretty round-about way:
I have multiple POP accounts all over the place, which have sort of accumulated over the years. It becomes a bit of a mission to always set up and check all these accounts, so what I have now is a small Python script that connects to each of the servers, grabs the mail, sorts them based on some simple filters (like, containing a [mailinglist] type subject), and places them within a Maildir structure based on that sorting. In addition, it does the same thing for deciding if it should delete a message - extremely basic spam filtering rules can be set up to check out certain headers for possible spam flags, etc.

The downloaded mail is then served via IMAP, using the Dovecot mail server. The great thing about that, is then every time I re-install any of the machines I use for mail access, or install a new one, I instantly have all my neatly sorted folders, all my mail from all my accounts, and only one IMAP account I need to set up.

Anyway, basically, the spam filtering of the above system was rather lame, so I went on the hunt for something a little more useful. Enter SpamBayes - a mail proxy application written in Python.

It’s already “in Debian”, so installing was as fun as always (aptitude install spambayes), after which I only needed to start the service, and then it’s off to a browser to configure it. Actually there wasone step before that - since I’m running this on my server, and SpamBayes is meant for use by a single user on their own PC, it doesn’t allow connections do it’s browser-based configuration from other hosts. Which is a bit of a problem when running a server which I have no interaction with beyond a command shell. Thanks to Lynx I was able to configure it to allow connections from my local network.

For starters, you need to tell it which POP3 servers you want to connect to, and assign local ports to each one, which will be stand-ins for port 110 when connecting to servers. The interface for this is a bit troublesome however, requiring you to enter each server into a single input field, separated by commas. The associated ports for each server are then entered into another input field in the same manner. It took me a while to get both the fields synced due tot he number of servers I intended using.

Next up, I fed it a few emails for training (saved emails out of Thunderbird as EML files, and these can be uploaded to the server for training via the browser interface) both ‘ham’ and spam.

Once it knew the basics, I simply updated the list of servers in my Python script to “localhost”, and whichever port each one was set to. Shortly thereafter, mail started passing through the system. Most of it was identified as “unsure”, as it hadn’t seen enough examples of ham or spam yet. Quite smartly, it keeps a record of each message that’s passed through, and you can easily train ham or spam from these.

Around 50 mails later, it was identifying almost every message perfectly. I’m going to leave it running for a day or two more, training everything that arrives, then I’ll just add a single filter to my mail fetching script, looking at the “X-Spambayes-Classification” header for “spam” (delete), or “ham” take no action.

I’m quite happy with this setup, looks like it’ll work quite well :D.

Seems just about everything on my server machine has been running perfectly since I upgraded to PHP5, except this site :(.

So for the time being, the attachments plugin is disabled (the cause of the problem), so no downloads are available until I fixxor it.

Edit: Well, that took all of 5 minutes to fix ;)

Created two very basic scripts this past week:

The first, a basic Image Browser:

Basically, I really hate trying to set up and use normal image publishing/gallery software. Something like Gallery is pretty nice and feature packed, but for putting a photo of your cat online, it’s pretty much a mission, with users, permissions, logins, galleries, categories, grouping, keywords, thumbnail options, etc, etc. I just want to upload a JPEG and say that’s the end of it, but still have ti browsable with some thumbnails that didn’t take me 10 minutes to create in Photoshop.

Anyway, yar. So I made this script. It’s actually a pair of scripts. A basic browser interface that simply goes through a directory, finds all images, links to them, and shows thumbnails of them via the second script - a basic thumbnail generator.

So ‘installation’ is simply dropping this pair of scripts into the directory you want to publish your images from, and it’s done. Any sub-directories will be navigable, so you can use them as ‘categories’ if you’d like. Since the thumbnails are generated on the fly as needed, there’s no database or anything, and adding a new image is as simple as dropping the file into your image directory.

The second script, is a Download Tracker:

Extremely simple again, simply does a count of hits on any file passed to the file.php script. The files can be located anywhere on the system (so if you really don’t want people getting at your files without going through the counter, they can be outside of your www published path).

Again, I was going for simplicity here, so there’s no massive upload manager UI, or snazzy hit monitoring UI, or a 5000 table MySQL database. It keeps track of the hits by simply storing them in a regular PHP array, and then serializing this array to a file. Next time the file it requested, the hit log file is loaded, then unserialized into the array, the array is updated and serialized again. :). So you’ll need to make sure the files.log file is writable by the web server (or the whole directory the tracker files are in). It also requires PHP5, unless you write replacement functions for file_get_contents() and file_put_contents() on earlier PHP versions.

Link to a file as follows: http://my-site.za.net/file.php?installer.exe, or even http://my-site.za.net/file.php?path/to/document.pdf

You can then view the hits and things via the file_stats.php which outputs a very basic tabular representation of the stats the hit log tracks.

Both of these packages’ code is pretty well documented, so if anything, they may be educational so you can build more exciting versions of these. However, as they are, they serve my needs, but just thought I’d share anyway ;).

Usage instructions are also within the code.