An Independent Game Developer’s Diary

Not here obviously, but on the guardian website.  My first blog post has gone live.  That should make Mr Brunning fairly jealous

So I’ve had a problem under ubuntu that maintaining my creative Zen’s music has been hard.  I decided to copy my entire music collection onto my laptop, use Amarok to organise it and re-tag everything correctly, and then re-upload my music.

However, to do that I had to delete all of the music tracks on my nomad.  Now Amarok and Gnomad seem fine for uploading music, and even downloading music, but deleting files seemed to continuously throw segmentation faults, and cause errors.  I’m guessing this is a problem with the underlying libnjb library.

However the libnjb package has a libnjb-examples package, which includes an njb-deltr program, which deletes a single track.  Combined with the njb-tracks client to get a list of all of the track id’s on the system, the following bit of Bash magic worked a treat:

./njb-tracks | grep "ID:" | cut -d' ' -f2 | while read track; do
  echo "Deleting track $track"; ./njb-deltr $track;
done

Just because it was non-simple to setup.

Do apt-get install blogtk or your alternate equivalent.
In the settings you want your xmlrpc.php file. so http://www.mysite.com/xmlrpc.php
Add your username and password as normal.
Click save, then from File, click connect.

Go!

(Written using BloGTK while on the 8:31 train from Royston to Kings Cross. Damn this bluetooth GPRS mobile phone stuff is cool)

So I don’t think I’ve blgged about this, so if you hadn’t heard, My wife is now 6 months pregnant, and I’m due to become a father for the first time.

This is pretty scary for me.  I’m totally not ready for this, but as my wife wisely noted (with some bias I imagine) “You’re never going to feel ready”.

The desire to start a family is something that I ahven;t personally felt, but I knew my wife has wanted one for basically forever.  That is one of the reasons that I decided to go back to actually earning money, and has affected a lot of our life decisions since.

I’m not really intending to blog about becoming a father a lot, but I figure that as a major part of my life it will be something that I will have opinions on and will probably blog about.

So I’ve gotten a twitter account (twitter.com/mibgames if you care) and I’ve noticed a couple of things.

I get followed occasionally by a complete stranger, and I look at their profile.  Some of them are following nearly 2000 people.  Surely that defeats the point of twitter?  I follow only people I either personally know, or people I admire in the podosphere and feel they might say something interesting. But other than that I’m only interested in kearing what interestng people have to say.

Secondly, Twitter came up trumps the other night on Launch night at the Guardian.  We had a question that we couldn’t answer, and were worried about something.  I twittered to one of the devs on the team, and lo and behold 5 minutes later he walked into the office to find out what we wanted.  It turned out he was in the pub just down the road, and got my twitter so popped in to see if he could help.  It was a moment that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.