Man was that a mistake.

I played it a bit one night waiting for a group to show up for another game. The group ended up canceling so I kept playing. Next thing I had known 3 hours had gone by,  It wasn’t hard to get my roommate interested. It was a simple game with low requirements.

I quickly found and setup a multiplayer server for the two of us.

Fast forward a couple weeks. I get back from family trip/PAX to find my roommate has built a couple really sweet houses.

Got my friend Nigel playing on my server the last few nights. Last night My roommate and I went down to the lava areas to mine for Obsidian, after about an hour, we came back up, to find Nigel had been busy on his own house. I can’t wait to see what we do next. I think the group exploring is the most fun.

I have to say I know I’ve gotten my $10 worth (it was on sale, so actually less) probably a hundred times over so far.

I’ve always been annoyed there is no steam cloud support. You can’t switch between computers to play the same character/world.

Today I remembered that dropbox is a cheap and easy cloud save game support

junction "%USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Games\Terraria" Terraria

I describe the game as a merge of both simcity and any space trading sim. I’ve sucked in at least 2 coworkers, and a few others have tried this game out. I love the public wiki based help system, complete with a public tech tree. Its very cool how every ingame building and ship (and a few others) all make sure to have a wiki link which people can expand.

The game has a completely open jsonrpc based api. Which allows all kinds of fun tools to be created. I’ve seen one set of tools being created to generate nice solar system maps, and we’ve been discussing various other random tools at work.

I think its awesome how you are safe and can continue to do the single player experience of building your planet up, but the instant you send out colony ships and expand you are no longer protected. I now have 2 colonies and having a minor fight with one of my neighbors, and I can’t wait to see what other multi-player options there are.

So go ahead and join lacuna and send me (halkeye) a message hi.

Random notes and stats to remember this by:
beat the final boss in 5 or 6 rounds
my 2 gladiators did 1500 damage (at 50 tension) and nearly 2000 (at 50+double up)
it helped i didn’t use forbearance
so one guy didn’t get slaughtered
3 rounds for tension + 1 for magic mirror + 1 for double up + 1 to attack = 6 rounds

Stats:
Time Spent Playing: 122:29
Time Spent in multiplayer: 13:52
Battle Victories: 2869
Times Alchemy Performed: 103
Accolades EArnt: 120
Quests Completed: 37
Grottoes Completed: 24
Guests Canvassed: 79
Defeated Monster List Completion: 79%
Wardrobe Completion: 25%
Item List Completion: 51%
Alchenomicon Completion: 19%
mini medals: 59

Levels:

Goku – Lv.47

Cassie  - Lv.47

Norbert – Lv 37

Stacey – Lv. 35

Was trying to debug a ssh+svn connection. There is a very simple way to get debugging turned on:

$ export SVN_SSH="ssh -v "
$ svn checkout svn+ssh://

Any other ssh commands can be put in that env variable too, so ports and such.

So far its been an eye opener. Its not really as transparent as I thought. You still need some sort of storage system to store openid keys. I sorta cheated, since my apps are only using google logins, and I can “require” emails, I just made a little config file with emails in them.

Last project was php, ended up later being kohana v3, which has all the error/warning levels turn right up full. Which is awesome. Except the one openid library I could find was pretty heavily written for php4, and when php5 code used it, it would error like mad. But the samples and everything worked out the box. Started to port/upgrade, got tired, started to look for other libs. Found a ported version of the lib, but it seemed to fail every time I used it. Tried out janrain’s service rpxnow. But considering you had to set up a new setup each time to point to the different boxes, it didn’t seem like a good plan for an “easy to deploy system. Finally settled on lightopenid which turned out to be very simple and easy to setup.

Fast forward to tonight.

Tonight was perl night. Had an old script I figured I could turn into a web interface. Wanted an excuse to play with dancer anyways. Go check on cpan, find out that Martin Atkins (one of the ones I worked with while volunteering with livejournal) released, or at least helped out with Net::OpenID::Consumer. Figured sweet, cpan modules seem more hardened and easier to use than php libs, so I figured it would be easy to setup.

Whoa was I mistaken.

Started off simple. Copy and pasted the example code into a .cgi file for testing.

Oh, missing modules, okay, it was more pseudo code, so no worries.

Added use statements, installed modules.

Hrm, nope, still no go.

Oh, the $csr->claimed_identity(“https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id”) and $claimed_identity->check_url calls only need to be made once? Okay, that was commented, but not really clear, no worries, simple little fix.

Yay! now its redirecting and returning just fine. Oh wait, its complaining about bad_mode, something about setup_needed.

Fast forward a couple hours, after much googling, and reading code, and looking at other implementations, and my favorite codesearch.google.com I could find nothing. Still nothing about this setup_needed. More googling. Found an unanswered mailing list post by Martin. But still nothing.

Finally, flash of random insight. What other modules are used? Looked a bit more closely at the code. Net::OpenID::ClaimedIdentity which leads me to the documentation. Vaguely it made clear to me that if you are not using an ajax popup, you should set “delayed_return” which means the openid provider (google) can take control of user, and popup any sort of validation it needs. Which google does at least the first time you request it from a new trust_root (learned that from my work on the php code).

Quickly updated my code to the following:

my $check_url = $claimed_identity->check_url(
delayed_return => 1,
return_to  => "http://localhost/cgi-bin/test.cgi?yourarg=val",
trust_root => "http://localhost/",
);

Ran my test again. Everything is golden. Works perfectly out of the box. Next I need to look at AX support, and moving the code into dancer (or something else).

I’m hoping that since I had trouble, and figured it out, someone else can find this post for searching and hopefully reduce someones frustrations.

BATMANNNNNNNN

BATMAN WAS AT THE OLYMPICS!

The interesting about this thing, is when I first saw the title of the facebook group, I was sure that was odd, but I quickly ignored it and moved on. Then I saw it again tonight, and I started to do a bit of digging.

http://www.brain-thee.co.uk/2010/01/how-to-tell-a-scam-on-social-networking-sites/ manages to describe my thought process pretty well actually. But I went a few steps more. I got very weirded out by the fact they wanted me to use javascript to select all my friends for invite (I still can’t believe I immediately recognized that javascript the second I saw it.). So after I visited the page they said you could only visit after you invited your friends (look at that, I visited it fine).

Anyways, to make a long story short, I started to dig through the js on the page, found out its essentially a small page with a ad or something to c p a l e a d (dot com, I don’t want to link to it). That in itself isn’t that interesting, its the fact that it tries to detect firebug so you can disable whatever it does (video maybe? I run with noscript so I don’t see it).

I put the code up on pastebin @ http://pastebin.com/d40ea2d1c for anyone who is curious. Its simply the only javascript on the scammers page after I ran it through the reverse dean edwards packer.

sub rw { my $word = "$_[0]"; $word =~ s/(.)/rc($1)/ge; $word;}
sub rc { return ((rand(1)*2+1)%2) ? lc($_[0]): uc($_[0]);    }

(i don’t care about efficiency or whatnot, i was just creating a simple function for a unit test, it just looks like someone threw up some letters.

Here’s an exerpt of code called whenever a new quote is added.

$get = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM quotes ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1");
 
while ($count = mysql_fetch_array($get)) {
    $tempid = $count["id"];
}
/* Increment the id */
$newid = $tempid+1;
$sql = mysql_query("INSERT INTO quotes SET id = '$newid'");
$sql = mysql_query("UPDATE quotes SET quote = '$newquote' WHERE id = '$newid'");
$sql = mysql_query("UPDATE quotes SET comment = '$comment' WHERE id = '$newid'");
$sql = mysql_query("UPDATE quotes SET ip = '$ip' WHERE id = '$newid'");

1) It loops through 1 entry trying to find the latest entry number (I’m sure max() is faster than order by and limit).
2) Once its it found, it does one insert with the id being set. Then it does 3 more queries setting each field in its own query.

That sorta explains why the db doesn’t have auto_increment fields turned on, but its scary. I’m afraid of looking at much more of the code. Luckily I then found Rash Quote Management System. I don’t like this one very much either.. but they are more personal reasons versus code issues.

I should clean up and submit patches (it doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2006) for rqms.

Now the game, as the anime, is very repetitive. I didn’t find it too bad, but I ended up not finishing all the optional missions because I got tired of the racing missions.

The timed ones in general were not bad, but when you got 5-10 minute long races with traps that can easily delay you enough so you can’t get to the next checkpoint it gets really annoying. The worst was the last one I did. I got to one gate from the end, then got stuck behind a trap. It took forever to get that far.

I also found the jutsu really awkward to do in battles too. You had to knock the other guy away far enough to wait for the bar to fill up fully. Luckly you could do smaller powered ones quicker. I ended up mostly just doing rapid regular combat combos.

But as I said, the game was overall enjoyable, and I did manage to finish the game.. at least I think I did, I got the credits, but then i was thrown back into town, so I’m not sure.

Either way, I’m glad I rented it, It doesn’t have enough replayability to buy the game, but the one shot rental was kinda cool.