cat /proc/claus

So I decided to participate in Ludum Dare this weekend.

Ludum Dare is an event that happens about 3 times per year. It challenges you to build a complete game, from scratch, in 48 hours. By ¨from scratch¨, I mean everything: design, code, image assets, sounds. A theme is picked and you have to follow this theme.

It is a great opportunity for game developers to show off, and for common folk to try and finally complete that pong reimplementation. Guess which category I´m in

To record my adventure, I decided to make a time-lapse video of my desktop: something I have never done before. Hey, if I can learn one thing, I can learn two at once, right? So my idea is to take a screenshot of my desktop every minute this week, and put all the images together into a video in the end.

The problems started there…

I found on the net a nice spell to take screenshots from the command line using xwd. Then I tried to put it on cron. Nothing happened. No error message either (if you don´t have a mailing agent installed, where does cron send its error messages in ubuntu??? ). Since I only have 5 hours to the start of LD, and I have other important preparations to make (like writing this blog post), I decided to write an infinite loop script to do this for me, as a quick fix. Here it is, for the curious:

#/bin/bash

while true; do
i=`date +%d%H%M%S.png`
xwd -root | convert xwd:- -resize 800x800 $i
sleep 1m
done

I´ll post more about LD this weekend, stay tuned!

Someone at team liquid forum posted a strategy guide joining two things that I love, zombies and StarCraft:

A Zombie´s Guide to Starcraft

There is some surprisingly good advice there about gaming and laddering mindset. I´ll be sure to put it to good use.

Braaaains!

We need more people in space, making more stuff like this. I find it particularly impressive the many blue flashes from thunderstorms seen in the time lapse.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

I’ve been working recently to setup a webserver for my work group at UFRJ. After talking to some friends, I decided that the best idea to set up a common main page for the laboratory was to use some sort of wiki. So that everyone can edit it without too much trouble.

Now, there are SO MANY wiki solutions that it is kinda hard to choose the right one. Fortunately, I managed to find the Wiki Matrix. Wiki Matrix is a website that helps you compare wikis. You can use a “wizard”-like questionnarie, where you specify what are you looking for, and what you wish for a wiki, and they will filter their data base for you. Going through their wizard, I managed to reduce my search from 200-something to 18 wiki softwares. After that, these wiki softwares are displayed side by side with a feature list, and you can hide certain features you don’t care about. I managed to further refine my search to 3 wikis, with DokuWiki the clear winner (and two more in case I can’t use it for some reason).

So even if you already have a favorite wiki, give Wiki Matrix a chance before making a new installation. Some of their comparison criteria, such as date and frequency of software updates, were very useful for me.