… well messing around really. Turns out WeeWar is a fun little web based battle game. The type of thing that makes we go, gee, I wish I’d written that. Only, you know, I don’t have the time.

Anyway, as always with these things I’m generally quite terrible at them and thoughts soon turn to how to automate the whole process. Given half a chance I’ll often mention to people how much I’d like a game I don’t have to actually play. The answer is of course a Bot, that’ll somehow play for me.

I’m not there yet, but it’s going ok. So far I have some a GreaseMonkey script that loads in more external scripts (from localhost as it happens). A method I find easier to debug that direct GreaseMonkey stuff. It can read in all the moves and have a good stab at replaying them all back.

The next task is to take a simple map like Aruba and see how many past games played on it I can find. The run those games over and over again to see if I (or the computer) can spot what he winning strategy is. Then I’ll have a go at improving the GreaseMonkey script to actually play the game for me.

See, far easier than actually playing it!

See how terrible I am at keeping a blog, anyway …

Last week was the Web 2.0 Expo, where I was presenting A Flickr Approach to Making Sense of the World. I think it went ok and I was fairly happy with it when it was over You can find the slides over at SlideShare.

It was my first time using keynote and I was really looking forwards to it. It has a lovely duel screen presentation thing going on, where the slides are shown on the main screen and you get to see the current slide, the next slide and your notes on your laptop.

Well that’s the theory anyway, in this case while getting the laptop set up, with all the switching around and so on, my laptop resolution got set down to 800×600, consequently I couldn’t actually read any of my own notes.

Fortunately, and as you’d expect, I knew the subject and my slides well enough to get through it. Although I did end up missing a few points, which, after I had a chance to reflect, probably would have better explained some of what I was trying to get to. Consequently I finished my presentation about 10 minutes early.

On the plus side that gave a good bit of time for questions, in which lovely and astute members of the audience picked up on the parts I’d glossed over and drilled for more information. And with really smart questions too. So I guess it evened out in the end.

Glad it’s over though, what I really want is a presentation right at the start of a conference so I can actually see and enjoy other sessions.

There’s so much I should have written, considering this is supposed to be my personal blog. But then I realized that most of them would be complaining or being snarky about something or other and I didn’t want this to turn into a vent-blog.

So positive stuff only (mainly).

In this instance I’m going to start poking around at writing a game again. The reason why I’ve been putting it off and off is that I really want to make is in the Settlers/Fantasy RPG school however I’m no good at graphics and therefor wouldn’t have any sprites or whatever to use.

The general solution to this, in my head anyway, was to actually base the game on more abstract concepts so the graphics could be simple and still work. I finally settled on a hacking based game spread across computers and networks. Even a artistic simpleton like me should be able to manage that.

However that was just a mental block and no matter how much I thought about it I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

That all changed with this though …

… frankly I should have searched sooner, molotov.nu has a whole bunch of tile based resource links. A fair few are out of date, there’s still enough there.

Now, I’ll admit that they’re a little retro and hardly Lost Garden to say the least. But good enough for my needs.

Next stop, a procedural landscape generator.

And so, not only do I find myself starting a sentence incorrectly but also unable to blog.

Not here obviously but over at geobloggers, because I left my laptop at work and as much as I love my phone, afterall I’m writing this on it, it’s not really practical for full on blogging. Which is what I currently have in mind.

On the plus side it gives the ideas time to stew over and over. On the down side everyone else gets their opinions in first. I guess I’ll just have to take the route of being more informed or something.

Tomorrow is therefor blogging day, perhaps.

Well as you can see, or at least you would if anyone actually read this blog, which no-one does, that it has a spanking new header graphic. The header is impressive for at least two reasons and this blog post important to me for at least one. Here goes.

Impressive reason 1) I actually found some time to do it. Normally mornings are too busy, daytime is work and evenings I’ve too tired. How people actually have the time to blog I have no idea, probably by not having children.

Impressive reason 2) I had to do at all one armed, because even though I found the time, I still had Master Zachary asleep on me, regard …

… that happens a lot. Normally it’s not so much of a problem, with Photoshop though half my usual shortcuts involve opposite ends of the keyboard.

Important reason 1) I’ve working out how the WordPress template stuff works and need posts in different days. This is now the other day.

And that is all.

Ok, that’s it. I once more have a blog thing. After doing blogging in various different ways, ranging from the really old hand editing of html years ago to blogger to trying to pull in Twitter and Flickr photos into a stream of consciousness thing, I’ve decided to fall back on good old WordPress.

The reason being that I want somewhere to dump thoughts that are longer than Tweets and not directly geobloggers related. This is it. I also want to strip back the WordPress template to something really simple and probably ugly to start off with. Then build it back up from there.

No doubt this means the first several blog posts will be “How the heck do you get WordPress templates to do something-or-other”.

But then, what else are personal blogs for other than a bit of introspection.

… is now over here.

As I’ve now turned fluffykittens into my own blog (again) I moved the calendar’s landing page.

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