Erkki

EA Presents: Roger Zelazny's Lord of Fight: Serious Sam vs. Sam

EA Presents: Jane's Ire

EA Presents: Piggy's Revenge: Sword of the Flies

It's really great to have The Idle Thumbs Podcast back!

I sometimes skip to the last paragraphs and score when reading Eurogamer reviews. However, I'm finding it quite hard to do in the case of Heavy Rain. The beginnings of paragraphs in reverse order:

What is it? I can't see it. Either I'm going blind or my attention span has eroded completely.

I think I'll pass too. I didn't find BioShock very interesting when I originally started playing it, but after a lot of people hyped it, I decided to try again and it was quite an enjoyable shooter, with an awesome atmosphere. But I did find parts of it boring, and if the second game is just more of the same with better combat, I'm not that interested. Also, I still have Mass Effect 2 and Assassin's Creed 2 and Uncharted (both) to play, those are must plays for me right now.

That sounds interesting indeed.

Happy Birthday, the only Vania I know besides Castlevania!

Also, I'll probably be taking a small break in development now (I haven't played any games lately, except beating Batman 3 times), so I'm not sure when the next improvements will come.

I added some preliminary avatar support. But no uploading yet, it only gets the avatars via. OpenID (Attribute Exchange or Simple Registration). I know Yahoo! supports it, don't know any others. To try it, if you didn't sign in with Yahoo! at first and have a Yahoo account, you can now link another OpenID after you've signed in with one (click the Settings link). I will add uploading soon, and may add Gravatar and Pavatar support later. Also do you think posts without an avatar should be indented like the ones that have an avatar?

There's this really well-made basketball flash game that's great if you have moments with nothing to do at work. I created an IdleThumbs group: http://www.onlinegames.com/basketball/?v8vocrtbez

Thanks for the feedback, guys. It's roughly banter in Estonian.

Bug fixed. You can now login with Google and Yahoo! The problem was missing SSL certificates for java.

Now accessible from: http://tinbullet.in/ (changed the port to 80 so the previous url doesn't work)

I have a really EARLY preview up and running. A few warnings: * it's ugly. I'm not a designer * it's more of a series of hacks than real code currently. I've been using it to learn the Lift framework. Bugs lots there of may be. Eventually I'll refactor it and make it completely bug free, guaranteed. * not even all of the things I listed above are done, so it's really really basic * Google sign-in doesn't work for some reason. I haven't tried them all, but at least Wordpress.com sign-in does work. BTW others will not see where you sign in from, well, except I will if I have to go muck about in the database, but I probably won't have to look at the users table. * sometimes you'll have to refresh the page for changes to take effect (posting a new thread, changing wysiwyg editor) http://109.74.194.143:8180/ [edit]of course, by "I'm not a designer" I don't mean that this is how I would design a forum, but that I haven't gotten around to that yet, I'll try to get the functionality first.

I just got user sign-ins via OpenID implemented. Some day in the future I may add username/password login, and possibly Facebook and Twitter. Still loads of things to work out, but when I get the following done I'll try to get it up somewhere (anyone knows a good hosting provider that supports Java?): * sign-ins (needs UI improvements and some additional features -- currently there are no fields besides 'username') * profile editing (needs at least signature/avatar editing) * browsing the forum list (somewhat done, needs better UI) * browsing threads in a forum (really basic and ugly, needs work) * posting new threads (nothing done) * viewing posts in a thread (needs lots of tweaking, currently there's only flat [i.e. non-threaded] single-page viewing and everything gets loaded at once) * posting replies (needs additional features, currently there's just an editor and a "post" button) * editing posts (needs UI tweaking, and maybe adding immediate updates for people who are viewing the thread where the post appears) * removing some HTML from posts (i.e. so that users wouldn't be able post (script)alert('Hello!');(/script) or something more malicious. That's all I have planned for the first version, plus delete buttons for admins. It will lack a lot of things: search, admin pages, tags, BBCode (will be HTML only), profile pages, visually distinguishing unread threads and posts etc.

Did you try GOM Player? I've been using that lately.

Damn you guys, you* inspired me to work some more on this. Won't promise anything though, but I'll try to get a basic version up in less than a month**. -------------- * and a snapshot of the Lift framework just becoming officially available for Scala 2.8 ** unless I get bored

That could be done. I also made signatures different from usual: a copy will always be stored with the post so if you change your signature, it won't change for old posts. Doing that for avatars would be a tad more difficult since storing the image with the post would waste a lot of space, but it can be done through versioning. Also, the forum would (eventually, but probably not in the first version) allow linking your account to Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, gravatar, Steam etc. so you could immediately get a collection of avatars from there and just choose a default one.

I still might put up an incomplete, but working version of the forum somewhere, in a not too distant future.

I think he is kidding.

Ah fuck it, I'm not going to do this. I realized there are just too many boring parts to writing awesome forum software. In other words, it's too much work for a side project done on my free time and I'm not planning on quitting my day job just now. Also I wanted to do it with a technology stack that doesn't even fully exist yet -- Scala 2.8, Lift on Scala 2.8, OSGi in web apps etc. Maybe I'll resume the project some day or tinker with it now and then but it's not really something I want to spend a lot of my free time on right now.

Yay! 100% done. And only 3 achievements I haven't gotten. How does one get the Mano a mano achievement?

That's the craziest pavement I've ever seen!