Is this thing on?
It looks like I can post from vim, but there’s something in one of my posts that makes Python’s xmlrpc library burst into tears and I can’t view a list of my posts :(
Posts in category Coding
windowtidy for irssi
Finally got around to writing a script for irssi which closes all empty windows.
Reformatting SomethingAwful forums
I’ve just found the Stylish extension for Firefox, which is to CSS what Greasemonkey is to JavaScript, or something. It lets you define CSS snippets for pages. Admitted what can be done with this can be done by hacking up your userContent.css file but this makes it so much easier.
Go see userstyles.org for an index of snippets you can download. Meanwhile, I present my own one for the SomethingAwful forums. It does the following:
- Highlights the thread row under the mouse on a forum page
- Moves the “somenick fucked around with this page” text off to the right and makes it less intrusive
- Moves the paginator from the bottom of the page to be hovering bottom right at all times; semi-transparent mostly but opaque when moused over. This works on both forum views and reading a thread.
- Hides the post buttons (edit/quote/report) except for the post your mouse is over.
BEHOLD!
To install, create a new blank style in Stylish and dump this into it:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); @-moz-document domain("forums.somethingawful.com") { tr.thread:hover td { background-color: #fff7df !important; } .postbody .mainbodytextsmall { text-align: right !important; color: #555; } div[class="pages bottom"] { position: fixed; top: auto; left: auto; right: 5px; bottom: 0; background-color: #fff7df; border: 1px solid black; padding: 3px; font-size: 12px; -moz-opacity: .50; } div[class="pages bottom"]:hover { -moz-opacity: 1; } table[class~="post"] .postbuttons { -moz-opacity: 0.2; } table[class~="post"]:hover .postbuttons { -moz-opacity: 1; } }
TriviaCow Scoring Plans
Almost ever since I wrote the TriviaEngine script, I’ve been planning to redo the scoring system on it. The original scoring system was based on the #newbies (spit :argh:) script, which just kept adding to your score. This meant that people who were around all the time (in the longer term) would get unassailably high scores which would just put new people off from playing (when the person you’re chasing has a 5000-point lead you stop caring).
The current TriviaCow scoring system resets the scores to zero Friday night (or Saturday night, I forget which). It does maintain the scoring history, but the code isnt’ there to do anything with it.
The new plan modifies the current version a bit to keep it fun on a week-to-week basis, but also adds a bit more of an element of competition. I hope.
The way it works is:
- Everyone’s score resets to 0 at the end of the weekly period. Currently, this is set to midnight Saturday (i.e. last thing Friday night).
- At the point it resets the top 5 people from that week are awared 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 points to their overall score (which isn’t affected by the number of questions you get right). This gives us a leaderboard of weekly performance.
That’s it.
It looks pretty simple but getting the code right is much more complicated, but I think I’ve figured out how I’m going to do it properly now.
To make for an exciting and dramatic adventure, the script will start counting down to the end of the scoring period as the deadline approaches, possibly encouraging people to play by pointing out that they can gain a place by answering X more questions.
Any other ideas, suggestions or thoughts on this scoring system are welcome as comments against this post.
Once the new scoring system is working properly, I’ll adjust the website to work again :)
ok GO
gallery integration test
so this should be humphrey:
and this should be the wedding album:
hooray, it works! the WPG2 plugin seems to be working fine. All I needed to do was adjust it slightly because it insisted on embedding Gallery in my blog, which isn’t what I wanted.
I fixed it with a mod_rewrite rule in .htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(v/.+) http://gallery.jamesoff.net/$1 [R,L]
which just redirects gallery-type URLs here to the correct URL (needs to go above the other WPG2 stuff in .htaccess). Not sure if I need the R flag in there or not, but it works so I’ll leave it.
blbl.org kills my stuff
Unfortunately, blbl.org (my BLog Blocking List) is generating a lot of load on my poor colo’d machine, and is causing general slowness and at times outright failures of my other websites.
Also unfortunately for blbl.org, I like my other websites being up more than I like blbl.org being up, so this means one of several things:
- I shut it down
- I move it to another machine that can handle it
- I change it so it generates less load
TriviaCow improvements
TriviaCow, my trivia bot is getting some upgrades. It’s now possible for users in the channel to report problems with questions back to us (with !trivia report). !trivia by itself will tell the user how to start the game, since many random people seem to join, try the command, and then leave when nothing happens.
Most importantly though, I’ve written an import tool for Roz, who is currently locating and adding questions. I’ve also made it so that we can update the category of a question in real time, to improve data quality :)
Now the major thing to fix is the scoring, which is a little off still.
SK2 RBL Plugin Update
See http://www.grooblehonk.co.uk/sk2/rbl-plugin/ for details.
- Don’t look up same host more than once per post
- Fixed URIs not getting looked up properly
The downloadable file has been updated.
RBL Plugin available for SK2
If you want to try out the new improved RBL plugin for Spam Karma 2, have a look here. It works fine for me so I’d like some feed back from other people now :)
SK2 RBL Plugin Update
After a good evening’s coding last night I’ve got a working version of the Spam Karma 2 RBL plugin which looks IPs and URIs up in different RBLs, and can also submit back to blbl.org when it finds a spammy comment.
Still got some testing to do and also tidying up the code, adding options etc to do. Hopefully I’ll put a version for testing up shortly.
Related to the above, I’ve changed blbl.org to list IPs under bl.blbl.org and URIs under uri-bl.blbl.org. I shall be giving the blbl.org site a bit of a facelift soon.