Halo 3: AutoUpdate Released. What still needs fixing?
The first AutoUpdate for Halo 3 was just released last night (or morning, depending on where you are and what you consider ‘night’) and addressed a few issues people were having with Halo 3. The largest and most noticeable change has to do with the melee system. The short answer says that, in Halo 3 v1.0, if 2 people both tried to melee within 100ms of each other, whoever had the most health would survive and the other person would die. Some cases would seem partially random because if one player took even 1 extra bullet, he would lose the melee contest and the other would walk away. In v1.1, there’s some lea-way that says if you have considerably more health than your opponent, you survive and they die. If the health is too close to call, you both die. I was able to notice this in the first couple of games I played but it really didn’t change much as far as how I play or anything. It’s a good fix. Other than that, not much will be noticed.
Since this update is out of the way, all we can do now is look forward. What still needs to be fixed for the next update? I’ll start my saying that some of these things I was hoping would be resolved in this first update, but I won’t be too picky about that. Bungie does good work and I’ll patiently await v1.2. Please note, these probabilities are just my own little estimates and really have no weight to them at all.
Halo 3 Players on Facebook
I’ve released my very first Facebook application! A few days ago, Halo 3 Players went live on Facebook! I learned me how to do a few things on a Solaris system (I’m using that free for a year joyent facebook accelerator), and finally learned how to use Capistrano. After you understand what Capistrano does, it’s amazing how awesome it is! I’ve thrown a few code updates out already since it’s as easy as ‘cap deploy’. I can’t believe I never learned it earlier. Anywho’s, just thought I’d throw a post up here and tell anyone who plays Halo 3 and has a facebook, head on over to Halo 3 Players and let me know what you think.
Update: Haha.. I wrote this about 2 weeks ago but I guess I accidentally checked the ‘draft’ button so it never published…
New Facebook Gem/Plugin
I’ve been using the RFacebook Gem and plugin for my latest facebook application. It works great and all, but the things I’ve read about it are very true. It’s really not very ‘ruby’. I like all the features and it’s not too hard to use, but I’m sure we can do better to integrate facebook and rails in a prettier way. I’m wondering if anyone wants to collaborate on a new gem or a new plugin that would make things more Ruby-ish.
A few things I would love to see would be some form of meta-programming that could map calls to something like Facebook::User.getInfo, instead of fbsession.user_getInfo. Just looks nicer. I’d also love to see some form of Active Record integration. The acts_as_facebook_user helper is great, but it still requires you to call manually call a facebook API call from your controller to get user information. It would be great to have something like User.facebook_info[:first_name] without any extra effort. Just something to take the facebook data portion out of the controller and put it where it belongs, in a model. Last, but not least, RFacebook compatibility to maintain applications until they can refactor to use the new methods.
Anyone who wants to help out with this, I’d love to get some type of plan written up and some good people working on it to get something working quickly and well. Let me know!
Smallest fix for ajaxyxml
If you happened to grab the mephisto_ajaxyxml plugin just after it was release, you may want to update to revision 17. A weird bug about the application controller not reloading or something cropped up but I was able to fix it pretty easily. Weirdest thing was that I think it only affected the trunk/edge release and not 0.1. Other than that, I haven’t found any huge show stopper bugs. So test away and let me know what you think. It’s currently 4 in the morning, so I must sleep now, but I think tomorrow I’m going to work on making the plugin parse rss/atom feeds as well as add a little more error/syntax checking/handling. I’m also thinking about adding either a standalone filter for mephisto or a small extra part to this plugin that will give twitter back it’s ‘relative_created_at’ functionality. Stay tuned for more!
mephisto_ajaxyxml : Dynamic XML content for you Mephisto blog
After spending a good week trying to get around the non-safeness of class variables when threads are concerned, I finally got a release of my new plugin to share with you all! I haven’t done a whole lot of testing, but it does seem to work. So, if you have any bugs or suggestions, don’t hesitate to pass them on to tehdnite at gmail and I’ll see what I can do about them.
First things first, a brief introduction. Ajaxyxml is a mephisto plugin that makes it easy to fetch any (at least I’m pretty certain it should parse any) XML file from the internet and aggregate the contents into whatever form you want on your blog. The difference between this and the other plugins that parse XML data is that this works via teh Ajax. Instead of needing to flush your cache to update that small section of your blog that has dynamic content on it, it’s fetched on the fly. If you want to jump right in, go ahead and read the README file and get started. For those of you using the latest stable release of Mephisto (0.7.3), you’ll need to grab the 0.1 version, anyone using the most up to date mephisto from SVN can use either 0.1 or the latest trunk.
UPDATE: These instructions reference an SVN server that doesn’t exist anymore. Please visit the github repo to download it now.
To install for ‘Edge Mephisto’…
script/plugin install -x http://svn.dnite.org/mephisto_ajaxyxml/trunkOr if your using 0.7.3…
script/plugin install http://svn.dnite.org/mephisto_ajaxyxml/tags/0.1Also, if you using the 0.1 release, you will need to add the following line to your config/routes.rb file ABOVE the Mephisto::Routing route…
AjaxyXml.connect_with mapYou should be all set to use the plugin now. Restart mephisto to load up the plugin. Using the plugin is easy but requires 2 steps. First, you’ll want to create a partial file. Let’s use twitter as an example for this. Go to your admin interface for mephisto and select Design and New Template. We’ll add the following code.
<p>My current Twitter Status: {{ xml.text }}<br /> It was set on {{ xml.created_at }}</p>Now let’s name it. This plugin needs it to be named a certain way. It must start with _ajaxy_ and end with the name of the element you wish to be updated on the template your going to be using this tag on. Let’s call it _ajaxy_twitter_status. Click Create Template and verify that it exists on the right. Mephisto should have appended a .liquid to the end.
Last thing we have to do is add the code to our layout. Open up layout.liquid and add the following. (Also, if you don’t have prototype load up already, make sure you add {{ 'mephisto/prototype' | javascript }} somewhere inside the HEAD of your layout)
<div id="twitter_status">Loading Twitter Status</div>
{% ajaxyxml url: 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/swemoney.xml', element: 'twitter_status', quantity: '1' %}This will add a DIV that will say ‘Loading Twitter Status’ and an Ajax request right under it. As soon the Ajax request gets back, the twitter_status DIV will get updated. The only big ‘weird’ thing I found with this release is that the tag is really picky about line breaks. Just make sure there are NO line breaks in the {% ajaxyxml %} tag at all./ You can put the ajaxyxml liquid tag anywhere on your page as long as it lands after the element you wish to update with it. I like to throw mine at the bottom of the page.
That’s about it. I tried to make this introduction article as non-technical as possible, so for those of you who thought this was all obvious, I apologize. If you have any comments, suggestions, complaints, or whatever don’t be afraid to leave some comments! Enjoy!
UPDATE : I added some support for mootools, read about it here,
Ajaxyxml is almost here!
I’ve been working on a plugin for mephisto that will fetch and parse an xml file through ajax so you can keep your mephisto cache in tact and still display dynamic content on your site. I’ve got almost everything ironed out and it should be ready for public consumption very shortly. The main problem I’ve been having is getting around the fact that Rails is not ‘Thread-Safe’, which means that I have a plugin that works pretty flawlessly under 1 mongrel instance, but if you have a cluster, things start to break down. I will figure it out shortly and I will release very soon so for the few people I’ve gotten interest from, just another day or two, I promise.
XMonline in Ruby!
Who wants to log in and go through the hassle of navigating a website when you can type a simple command to get the same thing? Not me! I usually use the MediaPlayerConnectivity Extension which lets me launch streaming media outside of the browser, but I wanted to go a step further and remove the browser completely from my XM Radio listening when I’m outside of my car. I created a nice little Ruby script for doing just that. With the wonderful Mechanize gem it’s quite easy to traverse websites without every looking at them.
The first thing (I mean, you obviously need Ruby, so go get that if you don’t have it yet) your going to want to do, is install the mechanize gem.
gem install mechanize -yIf you get permission errors, you probably need to run sudo gem install mechanize -y instead.
After that, you can copy the code below and paste it into your own xmradio.rb file. It’s pretty easy to use too. The first time you run the script, it will ask you a few questions about your login information and what type of media player you want to use. After this, you won’t see that message again unless you delete your ~/.xmradio file. You’ll probably need to make sure to chmod a+x xmradio.rb and you may want to throw the file somewhere like /usr/bin or somewhere that’s in your PATH so that you can execute it easily. The rest is easy!
xmradio.rb 202The above command will launch the script, connect to listen.xmradio.com, log you in and start your preferred player. The number you specify after the xmradio.rb is the channel you wish to listen to. If you don’t specify a channel, it will play whatever default channel you chose when you first configured. If you ever want to reconfigure the script, either edit ~/.xmradio or just delete it and the next time you launch xmradio.rb, you’ll be asked the same questions again.
In the near future, I think it will be cool to add a couple of features, such as the ability to change channels while the script is running, or maybe the ability to save the stream with certain players. The recommended player is mplayer right now, but I also tested it a little bit with xine. Code is after the jump! Go get it!
UPDATE (2011/5/7) :: This code was created with the very old version of XMRadio online that has since been merged and updated to SiriusXM. I’m 99% sure this code doesn’t work anymore. If I ever get around to it, maybe I’ll try and create a new script that will work with the new site.
Burn an Audio CD with Ruby (Ubuntu/Linux)
I’m a simple person. I don’t need much when it comes to burning CD’s. Which is why I don’t really care that the CD burning support in linux isn’t all that spectacular. If there’s one thing that Ubuntu doesn’t do well, it’s burn CD’s. For their own sake, I hope they fix up Serpentine for the release of Feisty, because right now it’s terrible. It takes 10 minutes just to import a few mp3’s and then another 10 minutes to convert them.. and then we have to cross our fingers and hope the burn works or that Ubuntu see’s the blank CD that’s in the CDRW.
Luckily, this is the only thing I really use a CD burner for. Sometimes I need to burn some songs to an audio CD to listen to in the car. Since I was tired or working with Rails for an evening, I took a couple of hours to code a small script in Ruby that automates the process for me. There’s no GUI. It’s very simple. But it doesn’t need to be complicated, so who cares? It requires Ruby (of course) and the ruby-mp3info ruby gem. It also requires cdrdao. Which I’m pretty sure is standard in most Ubuntu systems, but I could be wrong about that.
gem install ruby-mp3infoHere’s the code. Have fun with it. Maybe I’ll slap a GUI on it when I feel like playing with Ruby and GTK some day. This shouldn’t have any problems running on any linux disto that has cdrao, ruby, and ruby-mp3info installed.
has_many_friends released!
Even though the Trac has been up for a week, the plugin hasn’t really been in functional order. Today announces the first real ‘release’ of has_many_friends!
I wrote a pretty big handful of tests for an application I’m working on know and the plugin passed pretty well like. The next step is to extract some of the tests and insert them into the plugin. I really need to figure out a good way to do this because everyone has a different user information and different information that’s required and must be validated, so I’m having a hard time thinking of a good way to implement tests that will validate and be pretty transparent. If anyone out there has some idea’s, let me know. Id love to hear them.
I’m also very open to any suggestions or comments about the plugin in general. Even though adding tests directly to the plugin would be great, it’s the plugin itself that deserves the attention. So have a look, or give it an install and tell me what you think. Let me know what could be done better. Let me know what was terrible about it or what you really liked. I still have a lot to learn and enjoy any feedback you can give. If you wish to jump right in, use the command below..
git clone git://github.com/swemoney/has_many_friends.gitUPDATE: HowTo (of sorts) has been written and availiable here. Check it out if your having trouble using the has_many_friends plugin.
