Another redesign! I know. This one takes a different approach, it’s supposed to look like a futuristic computer panel. Click here to have a gander. This design also includes my first foray into Javascript – although I have used it in the past, I’ve never really developed with it. This is me creating my own code now, learning it all for myself. So far so good, I’d say. Notice the ‘more’ and ‘less’ buttons in the most recent update (all the text is shown if the user does not have Javascript on), and the mouse-following popup panel when you hover over the button on the right of the frame (unfortunately, no non-Javascript workaround here, but it’s just aesthetic).
All in all, I’m really pleased with the style. it looks best on a browser that supports CSS3 (Firefox or Chrome for example), but should still look dapper on other browsers. You just won’t get rounded corners and glows
But yeah, I’m not gonna say how “this is the style”, because… well, I’ve said that about them all. Maybe I’ll just get building the website itself now…
Incidentally, that page is part of a test area I’ve set up for mucking about with styles and Javascript. Frames are bad, I know. It’s a quick and dirty showcase setup, nothing fancy. Just a nice place to collect all my efforts!

Hurray! Now everyone can join in on the fun! The Final Fantasy XI Character Profile plugin has been released. You can check it out here. Leave comments on the project page. Enjoy!

Well, I’ve done it now. I bought FFXI, so I’ll be heading back to Selbina soon.
I’ll try and get the character widget plugin for WordPress published soon. I’m pretty happy with it!
If you’re on Phoenix, keep an eye out for Nuraiel!

The Star Trek Online beta has left me grossly underwhelmed. The game is far from ready, the amount of issues and lack of interesting things to do just don’t justify a purchase. It looks nice for the most part, but character animations look very clumsy and lifeless, every location is instanced (even social locations like the spacedock outside Earth), it just doesn’t feel cohesive at all.
I’ve been contemplating returning to FFXI, but that said I do have a fair amount of other games to get through. I think I’ll leave MMOs in the meantime. Final Fantasy XIV will be out soon anyway!

I recently found out that the release of Star Trek Online, the Star Trek MMO, is right around the corner. After a brief bit of reading up about it, I decided to cancel the order for FFXI (it was taking too long anyway), and pre-ordered STO through Amazon. Preordering with Amazon gives the player a ‘liberated borg’ crew member. How could I not preorder that?
It’s a wee while to go before the full game kicks off, but I got a key for the open beta from Ten Ton Hammer (free signup required). [No more keys! Oh noes!]
I must admit, I’m reet excited about giving it a blast! Engage.

This is a very early prototype of a game I’m working on. You move the mouse and the block thing follows it. The white dots are pseudo-stars, and serve as an indication of the block’s vector. The block will eventually be a ship, but for now, it’s just a block.
And the hardest part? Getting that damn ‘Full Screen’ button to work.

Several years ago, I played Final Fantasy XI. I stopped playing because I didn’t really have the time for it. Well when I found out there was a 2-week free trial, I thought “what the hey, I’ll give it a go”.

And I have to say, I’m loving every minute of it! I’ve started life as a Mithra Thief by the name of Nuraiel in Windurst (Phoenix world) – Mithra have the best agility and dexterity, making them the ideal race for a Thief, my favourite job. Their intelligence also makes them good Black Mages, another of my favourite jobs. However, I’m sticking with Thief for now.
There have been a lot of improvements since I last played, including some good quests to get beginners learning quicker and more effectively, while boosting experience gained. Field manuals (floating books) outside of cities also offer mini-quests in the form of “kill X amount of Y”, with the rewards being a large chunk of experience. Experience from enemies is also higher than it used to be, and one of the first items you can obtain is a ring that boosts experience by 75% (although it does have very limited usage).
I’m just about to hit sunny Valkurm Dunes to level up with people I don’t know. So far I’ve been soloing, and it’s been good, but an MMORPG is really all about playing with or against other people. Now that I’ve got my Thief and Warrior (for subbing) at level 13, I’ll be making the treacherous trek over to Mhaura soon, and then get the boat to Valkurm from there. Good times.
When my trial ended, I was pretty disgruntled to find that to continue playing, I’d have to purchase the game again. Now, I could just reactivate my old account, but I’m quite enjoying the fresh start. In the end, I decided to purchase the game again – it was a tenner on Play. It includes 30 days game time, and I get two new expansions to go with it.
Returning to the game inspired me to make a plugin for WordPress. You’ll see it on the left, there. The plugin page is here, and should be released soon. It’s a widget that shows your character’s information. Unfortunately, all the information has to be edited manually, but an options page is provided in the administration section that makes it very straight-forward to update. I may add features to this over time, depending on feedback and what improvements I think it could do with.
Now I just need the box to arrive so I can start playing again!

I recently upgraded my PC from Windows Vista to Windows 7. I got Vista when it came out, and I sometimes feel like I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t hate Vista. Yes, I like it. Never had a beef with it. I even stood up for it when people were so quick to put it down. Anyway, enough of that, this article is about Windows Vista Service Pack 3 7.
I must admit that I was a bit underwhelmed by the new features over Vista. Of course, anyone migrating from XP to 7 will notice a couple more improvements. The most obvious new addition when logged in is the revamped taskbar. Merging the functionality of the quick launch and the taskbar program buttons is a great idea, which I understand started out in Linux. Aero-peak, which is called by hovering over the show desktop button is kinda cool, but not really that useful. Aero Shake is a little more handy though, grab a window and shake it to minimize all other windows.
A really useful feature is Aero Snap, something that seems so obvious it feels like it should have been in Windows 98. Drag a window to the left or right side of the screen, and it fills the entire half of the screen – makes transferring files between two locations much, much simpler. Drag a window to the top to maximise it, but I prefer the good ol’ double-click the title bar option.
So those are the main aesthetic changes, another big improvement is performance. Starting up and shutting down is ridiculously fast. As in “wait, did that shut down properly?” fast. It’s awesome, and it’s the way technology should be going. The UAC prompt that pops up when there’s a potential security vulnerability also appears much quicker, and I’ve noticed appears less often than it did with Vista – so that’ll cheer a few people up.
There are many other improvements, but I reckon these are the main points. Since I’ve been using Vista for so long, I’ve felt it improve over time, and moving to Windows 7 isn’t much of a leap at all. The speed improvement is always welcome, and the new features are handy to have, too. But if Vista annoyed you, I can’t see Windows 7 being any better. My advice is to grin and bear it, Windows 7 is not a bad OS by any means.

I’ve just done a little experimenting with CSS3, and I’ve come up with a design that I’m extremely pleased with. It wouldn’t work the same without rounded corners and shadows, and I think I’ve come up with the style I’ve been looking for.
At the moment it’s just on a test HTML page, but it’ll be easy enough to port to the main website. You can find it by clicking here here!
As it’s just a test HTML page, it’ll be changing a bit as I experiment s’more, but I’m really, really pleased with this design and want to start using it immediately!

I had a little bit of trouble with this recently, and thought I’d might as well post the solution. I have two computers, both using a wireless connection. One runs Linux Mint, the other runs Windows Vista. I wanted to use Synergy on both machines so that I only had to use one mouse and one keyboard. I got that working easily enough, but over wireless it was a bit choppy, sometimes a little unresponsive.
“I know what to do,” I said. “I’ll fix it with a good ol’ crossover cable” (I didn’t really, I just used a regular cable, network cards are smarter than they used to be). As simple as that it was not! Mint wanted to use the wired connection for all traffic. When I had the cable plugged in, I could not access the internet. Sure, I could have shared the network through Windows, but I wanted a more elegant solution… Here is what I did to get it all working.

• Give the wired network adapters manual IP addresses in a different subnet to the wireless connection – in my case, the wireless connection was a class C subnet (see this Wikipedia article for more information on subnets), so I opted for a class B subnet for the wired interface. Looking at the Wikipedia article, that would give them a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0. I gave the interfaces IPs of 128.0.0.1 and 128.0.0.2. Default gateways and DNS servers do not matter here.
• This is the bit I had trouble with. In the Mint Connection Manager, select the wired connection and go to IPv4 Settings, and click the Routes button.
• Add an entry and enter the address that the wireless adapter has, and use the router address as the Gateway

Sorted! Mint will now use the wired connection for Synergy, and wireless for internet/network stuff.