So I decided to start tracking my (board)game plays on BoardGameGeek. To the right, just below my Gamertag you should see my last five plays. Wootness. The "Collection" function of BGG is not terribly accurate for me yet - I'm adding games as I run across them, so it's pretty spotty right now. It will get better over time. BoardGameGeek can be slightly . . . inpenetrable to the normal mind so I should point out one "feature" of how the database works, especially as it relates to plays. Each game and the game's expansions are listed separately, so an individual "play" of a game (such as Carcassonne) can trigger multiple entries. For instance Karin and I played Carcassonne only once (on Christmas Eve) but we used three expansions (The Games Quarterly "Mini-Expansion", The River II, and Inns & Cathedrals for the curious. Even though we own Traders & Builders and The River (1) we left them out.) so this creates four "plays" in my record.

While I was at it I fixed two long-standing HiddenJester bugs. It used to be that if I didn't have enough (or recent enough) post content the right sidebar would flow into the left - which I found quite ugly. Also, any "normal" text in the right sidebar would be in a dark blue color that was unreadable against the grey. I'd like to change the color scheme and lose the grey, but for now I fixed it so the right column stays right, even if there are no entries, and regular text is now black. (Although it occurs to me it should be the same light grey as main text. Hmm. I'll go fix that when I'm done posting. EDIT: Yeah - It's the "regular" grey now.) Let me know how it looks for you. It should work on Internet Explorer, but honestly, for my own personal blog? Can't be bothered to test. I didn't do anything that should trip up IE - but if I did oh well.

Before I've never had the HTML/CSS chops to fix this, but I've been doing enough web development that I can actually read the underlying structure of the site, so I fixed it.

Lots of stuff afoot, but let me just say if you're interested in boardgames and you haven't played Caylus? WOW! I like it a lot, a lot, a lot. The rules are murder to figure out and fairly poorly organized - if you're local get me to play it with you and I can (now) explain it much better than before Karin and I struggled through it today. But wow, was it A) complex, and B) fun. It currently ranks #3 on the BGG ranks (under Puerto Rico and Tigris & Euphrates - also both really freakin' great games that you can ALWAYS get me to play if you muster up the right number of players.) It might fall a bit over time, but I think it's really hot in the 2-5 player space. Way more complicated than Thurn & Taxis (which is why it missed out the Spiel des Jahres - even though it got the weird new "Special Prize for Complex Play" which was invented pretty much for Caylus) and I can think of groups of 3-4 people where I'd reach for Ticket to Ride, or Thurn & Taxis first, but if I've got a table of folks who will play for real - right now I'd go for Caylus in a heartbeat. Only one play under my belt, but I really like it this far.

technorati tags:games, MovableType, Caylus, BoardGameGeek

Blogged with Flock

As an ongoing thing I always see a few 404's for "index.rdf" in the logs. I've never paid much attention - that part of my system logs is a cesspool of various probes to see if some sort of botnet exploit thingie is on my system. I just assumed that index.rdf was one of those.

But lately I've been doing some web development stuff, so I have some fairly high-powered JavaScript debuggers and DOM Inspectors installed. And I noticed that THEY were complaining about index.rdf when I visited my own damn site. Oops. So I looked at it in some more detail. Turns out there are alternate links for the site in RSS, Atom, and RSD (whatever the last is) formats. Only the RSS file is named index.xml, not index.rdf. So if you've ever tried to subscribe to a RSS feed here and had some problems, I apologize. Try it again and let me know if it works. And next time my site gives you a glitch, drop me an email wouldja?

(And for all of you saying "But I've been using a RSS feed for a long time now" - the sidebar links on the right that said "Syndicate" pointed at the right file. This would be if you had some application that directly read the metadata from the header.)

technorati tags:administration, web, RSS

Blogged with Flock

Is anybody out there using the comments feed to watch comments here? If so, are you seeing posts with more than one comment get screwed up? I upgraded NetNewsWire around the same time of the freaky web server crash and ever since then it amalgamates comments into one big comment with a revision history. I've looked over the MT templates, done a rebuild, and visually inspected the XML file itself and that all looks good. So I think it's a new "feature" of NetNewsWire, but I'd like to confirm whether anybody else has trouble.

technorati tags:NetNewsWire, RSS, Apache

Blogged with Flock

So I woke up this morning, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. Made my way downstairs and . . . hang on that's a Beatles lyric. Let's try again.

This morning I fired up my browser and it said it couldn't find www.hiddenjester.com. Rubbish! The cat is sitting on it - I can kick the box from here. The machine itself was still online, so I went in and tried to restart the server - seg faults. Reboot the machine - still seg faults on startup. Look at the logs, not much there. at 4:03 AM it says "Graceful restart request, doing restart" (I think this was for log rotation maybe?), then it says [error] (9)Bad file description: apr_socket_accept: (client socket) - which is a great error message, very informative to the average user (rolls eyes).

So I dunno. Ended up uninstalling and reinstalling the web server. Seems to be fine now. I did compile some new stuff yesterday, but it was all GUI thing-a-ma-bobs - nothing that should have impacted the web server. Let me know if anybody has an issues with the server and apologies for the outage.

technorati tags:Apache, web, crash, administration

Blogged with Flock

Ok then. I decided to plunge on with a Linux upgrade today without prior notice, thinking it would be easy. Bad move. I think everything is patched up again, but I'm tired so I might have missed something. If you see something that seems wrong please drop me a line.