We The Free

Well, last week was pretty full-on. The weekdays were taken up by LCA 2010 (Linux Conf Australia), this year held in Wellington, and the weekend was KapCon XIX, one (and probably the biggest) of Wellington’s annual RPG conventions.

Both were awesome. It was my second LCA (last year I went to the one in Hobart), and it was my first KapCon.

The one thing I noticed at LCA, or rather noticed the lack of, was attendance by Linus. He was at last year’s LCA, and he says he tries to make it out to all of them, but unfortunately he didn’t make it out this year (or stayed hidden, which isn’t likely).

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I’m starting to run my RPG soon, so I thought I’d go into Wargames Supply to pick up some figures — most of mine are from wargames like WHFB, 40K, Warzone, and stuff like that so are mostly unsuitable for character figures.

Things certainly have changed, as in the old days, I could rock into somewhere like Mind Games or Pendragon, and pick up any assortment of miniatures designed for RPGs — Ral Partha, Grenadier, and Marauder were available, although from memory Marauder were producing more LotR targeted figures. Now nothing. There are a few random figures available, but they mostly seem to be aimed at a specific game.

So I thought that my options might be to get some D&D ones made by WotC. The only options available were a starter set of what appears to be a collectible figure series — why the fuck they’d do that for an RPG is beyond my comprehension, but so are most things that Wizards do — and a couple of “boosters.” The starter was $40 and had 3 heroes, 1 baddie, and one dragon. So 3 figures I might reasonably expect to find useful. The boosters were $28, of which 2 figures in one of them might have been useful. And they were the worst quality figures I’d ever seen. Very very shoddy crap. There are rumours (that I’ve seen but not read in depth) that Wizards are canning their figures. Part of me thinks it’s a bloody good idea, but there’s a niggling part of me that wonders what (or who) will fill the gap.

Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff on eBay, but I like to be able to walk into a shop and have something to play with by the time I walk out.

OK, so the WotC figures weren’t an option as they’d work out to be about $15 a figure, and I’m not prepared to pay that for such low quality mass produced junk. So what are my options?

I had almost given up when I spotted a huge, and I mean fucking ginormous, box set of a board game called Descent: Journeys in the Dark for $157.. A bit pricey I thought, but I’ll have a look. Lifting it off the shelf almost gave me a hernia. Its contents included 20 hero miniatures, and 60 plastic monsters. Eighty furgin’ figures for under $160! That’s less than $2 a figure. Alright, so I have to paint them, but a) they look to be much better quality than the WotC figures, and b) they’re two fuggin’  dollars each. And I get a board game for free.

Yep, I’ll take it. I got me a wheelbarrow and I took it home (after paying for it of course).

I’ve decided to migrate to WordPress as it allows me to change the dates of old posts, so I’ve reposted everything from this site’s WolfCMS blog and have yet to do the following:

• Update other pages from the original site (such as gallery, articles, and “stuff”)
• Add my sidebars with my cool linkages from the original site
• Migrate over my old BlogSpot blog
• Migrate over my old LiveJournal
• Possibly consider migrating content from my old fatbastards.net.nz site which dates back to 1999-2000, and is archived on the Wayback Machine (sans images)

It’s going to be a bit of work, but I’d like everything in one place, and once I find a nice theme for WordPress, it’ll be so much the better.

At work we normally do all our CentOS builds using Kickstart and our own local mirrors. On top of which I built a couple of custom repositories — one for own own private software, and one for customer boxes (with software such as updated Sendmail, Clam AV, SpamAssassin, etc).

That works very well, and a (reasonably performing) box takes about 5-10 minutes from plugging a flash stick in, to pulling it out and rebooting with a fresh OS install.

But one thing we’ve needed is to build a recovery stick for use on a customer’s site. The default LiveCDs are too bogged down with extraneous crap (like X for a start) to be of any use in the field, while the recovery option on an install CD suffers the opposite problem. I needed to build something that was the best of both worlds — it had to have heaps of tools on there and it had to boot quickly. On top of which we’ve got some custom stuff that would be useful to be able to carry around such as a custom version of gawk that has a lot of modules written by my boss, Don, such as file IO functions (ala libc), cgi, and more.

So I investigated building a flash image that would meet all our worldly desires.
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I’ve just finished creating a card game. It’s a simple 1-deck, play over lunch time at the kitchen table kind of game. I’m not sure about how many players it’s going to be good for and how my card ratios will play out (ie; too many or too few attack, defense, and goal cards), but playtesting will sort that out.

The gist of it is that you each play mobsters that have to get truck-loads of money onto a Money Train so it can be taken to the launderers. The first person to hit $10 million wins the game.

You will be able to attack other players by stealing their loot, causing their trucks to get lost via “detours”, dob them in to the cops, put out a hit on them, and more. Of course, there will be cards to block these actions too, such as “donut shops” to throw the cops off your trail, corrupt lawyers, and more mobsters.

Currently the deck size is probably suited to 2-4 players, but I’d like to get this to a max of 6 players without making the deck too unwieldy.

I’ll be playtesting it starting this week and over the xmas holidays, so send me an email, post on my BBS, or contact me on Facebook.

After spending a weekend at a (really frackin’ cool) hacker con, and while setting up some bookmarks on my laptop, I decided to make all my login links point to https pages — because when you’re on an open wireless network, all your traffic is being sniffed by at least one person.

It’s well known that TradeMe store your password in a plaintext cookie in your browser, but that’s OK (?) because your box has to be owned before that matters. However, people sniffing network traffic shouldn’t be able to sniff your password. And given that most people use wireless now, the likelihood of this is pretty high. So I tried to change that http://www.trademe.co.nz to https://www.trademe.co.nz. Should be a simple thing — one extra character on your URL ensures all your requests are encrypted.

OK, so I hit their site with https, and my browser tells me there’s something funny about the certificate. Really? Were they too cheap to get it signed by a known Certificate Authority? I mean it’s a few hundred bucks a year, but this was a company that was purchased by Fairfax for seven hundred fucking million dollars. Plus an extra $50 million if they met certain targets over the next two years, which apparently they did.

Right, so they can afford a cert.

I pull the cert up to have a look at it and find something a bit more innocent. It was registered with a proper CA, but they registered secure.trademe.co.nz and www.secure.trademe.co.nz (the latter of which, incidentally, doesn’t even resolve in DNS). But, no problems, I plug https://secure.trademe.co.nz expecting to get to a secure login page. Guess what? It just automatically redirects to http://www.trademe.co.nz. WTF? I tried appending /Members/Login.aspx at the end of that secure URL and I still get redirected. Try it yourself: https://secure.trademe.co.nz/Members/Login.aspx

Thanks TradeMe, I can’t use your site while I’m on a wireless network.

If anyone from TradeMe ever reads this, why did you buy a certificate if it isn’t being used? And why can’t I log in via SSL? This isn’t complicated shit (nor expensive) we’re talking about. I’d offer to fix it for you guys, but you couldn’t pay me enough to touch a Windows server. Actually maybe Fairfax could.

I have just received an invite and busy playing with myself as I only know a couple of others with Wave accounts… or at least that’s it according to my GMail contact list. If you have Wave, add me and send me a wave. My address.

AKA: Sharing Is Caring.

I’m writing this partly because I’d like to help people shift gear, and partly because many of my friends read interesting things online every day and I’m a nosy bastard and don’t have enough crap to read.

In ancient times, back when stone was being beaten into simple tools and wheels were being invented, people read their news on large sheets of pulp. The papers would even be delivered to your house so that you didn’t have to venture farther past your over-grown, under-loved garden, and you could find out how the world devolved today before you even had pants on.

Fast forward to the end of the 20th century, and news was being displayed as pixels on computer screens. The problem with this was that you had to visit various different sites. Bookmarking them all, and visiting, waiting for their epileptic-fit-inducing banner ads to display before you could even get a list of the available articles. So some days you’d forget, and some days you’d spend in bed recovering from yesterday’s seizures.
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Several years too late as far as I’m concerned. Ars Technica has the story that covers McBride’s dismissal.

A nice quote from the article:

“Even after SCO’s deception was exposed and the company effectively lost its case, Darl McBride continued to insist that the company has evidence of System V code in Linux. No such evidence has been presented and McBride’s argument directly contradicts testimony given by other SCO executives. McBride’s stubborn detachment from reality has made him a subject of ridicule in the Linux community.“

In the wake of the disastrous attempt at litigation against everyone and their dog, SCO expect to “restructure” and continue to grow their UNIX business as if nothing had ever happened, but I think that irreparable damage has been done to them and their brand by McBride.

RIAA sends a crusader to Wellington with the aim of encouraging the government to reinstate s92a as it was originally planned in its original undemocratic glory.

He has also brought with him almost 20,000 comic books that will be given to school children. The latter strikes me as a better approach, even though it will no doubt be full of fear-mongering. But education seems to me as being the right alternative to bad law.