An Independent Game Developer’s Diary

• Train jsut lost power. Looks like we’re going now, but it keeps jerking… that can’t be good! #
• great now about 10 people are getting on train, I’M SITTING ON THE FLOOR… DO YOU THINK THERE IS SPACE? DO YOU? #
• Finally updated my blog again. AppEngine talk today. Need to re-read the GFX, Chubby and BigTable documents #
• @kob42kob Damn you ben! Isn’t that faster than here in the G? #
• Site down, site down #
• My site, not the Guardian #
• ah.. got it back, the rm command is wonderful! #
• I want to move to switzerland, or sweden, or anywhere with faster broadband. UK Sucks #
• Google AppEngine presentation starts in 20 minutes. I am SO not ready today, so should be good! #
• @cv Me too #
• Presnetaiton went well I think. Nobody complained too much! #
• Sounds like @brunns has done mostly google app engine hacking today rather than real work! And he wasn’t even in my presentation #

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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.

If you want to match something in a line in vim, and have had problems.

Something like

aaabccbaaaabccbaaabccbaaaa

and you want to extract the first bccb from the string and replace the line with only the match. (say getting the link portion of weblinks from some source html)

you would be forgiven for doing

:s/.*b(.*)b.*/1/

Thats what I did and to my suprise it provided me with the equivalent of ccbaaaabccbaaabcc

The reason for this is that the b at the end of the match matches the last b in the string, and the .* is greedy and matches as many characters as it can.

The answer is to use the magic \{-} match, this does the same as * but means do it with a least matching algorithm.

:s/.*b(.{-})b.*/1/

does exactly what I expected, returning cc for this line.