CS2007 Upgrade Complete!

 Here are the magical words that everyone loves to hear when undertaking a major upgrade:

"Well, that was easy!"

I was able to jettison Community Server 2.1 in favor of the just-released CS2007 in fifteen minutes flat, including the database upgrade, backups, and replacing the old with the new. That time does not, however, include the six or so hours spent converting my old blog skin to Chameleon, the new theming engine (many thanks to Ben Tiedt's documentation for getting through this one). This was not made any easier by the fact that I didn't know that the SDK was released alongside the product. Either way, I got the job done. More on that exciting undertaking in another post.

I'm sure I missed something, so I'll be looking things over carefully for the next few days, but everything seems to be running (on the first try, even!) 

CS 2007 is Available

Looks like Community Server 2007 made it out the door on time after all. I've already got it installed on my local environment, but it would appear that there's some port work necessary to get everything up and running with my old skin. Seeing as my development environment isn't 100% there yet (new machine; more on that later), that will take a little time. Perhaps I shall document it.

I haven't played with the new software at all, yet, but I can say one thing without a doubt: the new default skin is a tremendous improvement over CS2.x.

WoW TCG Now Played Here

About a week ago I conned a few of the guys at the office into trying out the new World of Warcraft Trading Card Game (new compared to most other TCG on the block). I say "conned" because, having played Magic: The Gathering all throughout high school, I knew exactly what the risks of taking up a TCG are. The difference is that I am no longer on a high school student's salary, and can actually afford to play these games (well, one of them, anyway) to the depth that I please.

In any case, I found Upper Deck's online demo to be intriguing enough to give the actual game a shot, so we acquired a few starter decks and tried things out. It turns out that the game is a lot of fun, and offers a pretty good amount of variety thanks due to the game's class structure: decks are themed after a hero that represents one of the WoW MMO's nine classes, and can only contain cards that are compatible with that hero. Each class's specific cards help ensure that each class has a different flavor than the others.

The only problem we're having is building a deck around our class of choice. When you have nine classes to represent, it becomes that much more difficult to get the right cards for your class, and you end up having to buy/trade quite a bit. It's not impossible to play without said cards, but it is certainly frustrating to open an entire box (twenty-four packs/360 cards) of boosters and only see half a dozen cards specific to your hero.

Learning Chameleon

Ben Tiedt, one of the developers working on the new Community Server 3.0 skinning engine ("Chameleon"), has been cluing us in on some of the details of how the new functionality works for the past week or so. From what I can see, this is going to be a huge change, and almost certainly a good one. For anyone who does any sort of CS skinning, I highly recommend checking it out.

Personally, I've been waiting for the details of the new skinning engine to arrive before I start work on a new blog skin (actually, with Chameleon's help, I may go straight for the complete site skin, but we'll see how much time I've got). I figure that the best way to get familiar with the new system is to try putting it to work. Looks like it's about time to get some new designs in motion...

Trackbacks are Awesome!

Without the miracle of trackbacks, I wouldn't know that I can still get my Community Server news fix at http://csnews.csmvps.com/blogs/dn/ now that the old news site has apparently stopped updating. Thank you, trackbacks!

Of course, I'm sure that someone mentioned this at some point. I should probably be more observant.

HTML in Your CS Comments

A while back, I was provided with a solution to the problem of allowing HTML in my blog comments by Jayson Knight. This involved modifying the SafeFeedback method in the Community Server source code and rebuilding the module. While that works, I chose to implement it as a complete CS module of its own. Why do this? Because the fewer changes that I make to the CS source code, the easier things are to deal with when I have to upgrade. As long as the changes to the stock FeedbackHtmlFormatting module are minimal (or nonexistant, as they were with 2.1 SP1 and SP2), I can upgrade the product without having to reimplement my modifications.

So now, after much procrastination, I've packaged up a new version of NinjaFish.CommunityServer. The only change here is the addition of a new CSModule, FeedbackHtmlFormatting. This module shares a name with one of the stock CS modules because it is intended as a replacement.

The version of FeedbackHtmlFormatting that is included in this assembly provides the exact same functionality as the original version, but will allow limited HTML (the same HTML as in your forum post configuration) to pass through into the comment body. It provides the addition restriction that image tags are not allowed (they are converted into plain text links) and repeated links are not converted into HTML links.

I tried to make the link detection reasonably robust in order to keep the comments from becoming obnoxious, but I'll be the first to admit that I probably didn't think of everything. As always, the source code is included, so feel free to customize the SafeFeedback method for your own needs.

And, of course, the module is running on this blog, so feel free to play with it.

Lego UCS TIE Advanced (Part 3)

I'm starting to think that maybe I took too many pictures of this thing... You can find part 1 here and part 2 over yonder.

Above is the last set of "in progress" image. The first two images show the outside and the inside of the center sections of the wing, respectively. The fully-assembled wings are actually pretty hefty, and they are only supported by four posts, which go into the four holes you see in the second image. You'd think this wouldn't be enough, but the kit holds them up quite well.

And here we have the final assembled kit. The assembled craft measures approximately 13 inches wide by 13 inches deep, and about 15 inches tall when placed on the stand, and comprises 1,212 pieces. I would estimate that it took at least eight hours to assemble, and quite possibly more.

Of the few UCS kits that are currently available, I actually thought this one was one of the least interesting (next to the Death Star II. That is, until I got well into the assembly process. It's actually a toss-up between the TIE and the AT-ST as to which one I like more. The completed TIE is pretty imposing (you can see how it compares in size to the AT-ST above), and I think it looks fantastic.

On a completely related note, my UCS Y-Wing arrived yesterday...

Lego UCS TIE Advanced (Part 2)

Here's the next set of pictures from the TIE Advanced assembly. If you missed it, part 1 can be found here.

The pictures above focus on what I affectionately refer to as "the shoulders" (they remind me of shoulder pads, for some reason). The first image, which is actually taken from the underside of the craft, shows the detailing that hides behind the shoulders and peeks through the holes in the front. You can also get a sense of how they are attached to the main body, partly because you can see the hooks on the left, and partly because the manual snuck into the picture in the background. The third image is the fully-assembled mid-section of the craft, seen from above and behind.

It's at this point that the instructions have you assemble the stand. I'm assuming that this is due to the immense size of the wings, but I personally found that it made attaching the wings more difficult than it needed to be. As the TIE is significantly wider than the stand, it tends to wobble a bit, and this is exaggerated when the while kit is lopsided with only one wing attached.

I'm not sure if it's by design or just a side effect, but as you can see above, the stand is capable of maintaining two positions. The second position offers an inclined view of the kit, but I found it to be a bit too dramatic.

What you don't see in these images is that I've made a small modification to the stand. As designed, the two posts on the top of the stand insert into two matching holes in the bottom of the midsection (you can see these in the very first picture in this post). One of these holes happens to be right under the seat of the cockpit. The problem is that the full weight of the TIE fighter places too much pressure on the front post, and any physical disturbance to the kit (and probably just enough time sitting around) will pop the seat out of place. You have to completely remove the face of the cockpit in order to replace the seat, and even then, it's a tight squeeze. Fortunately, the rear post is in a much more stable position on the craft and is more than strong enough to support the full weight of the kit.

The change that I made was to simply slide the front post down one notch. This is enough to relieve the pressure under the seat, but not so much that the post is no longer inserted into its hole, so it still adds to stability.

Unfortunately, I'm short on time and have a few too many images left to cram them all into this post, so I'm going to cut this one short.  The last part will show the wings and the final assembly.

Lego UCS TIE Advanced (Part 1)

A recent upsurge in the amount of Legos that I own has caused me to finally get off my ass and make this post. The following are some snaps of the Lego Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series Vader’s TIE Advanced. The TIE Advanced eclipses the size of the Imperial AT-ST by almost 200 pieces. I've been sitting on these for about three months, I think. Shots were taken at various stages of construction, as well as of the completed model (naturally). Click on the thumbnails for larger versions.

The first set of shots were from day one, which completed the base of the cockpit and began the wing supports.

Above are some pictures of the TIE's body section. The middle shot shows the detail on the center of the body, while the last image shows the body attached to the cockpit.

The above pictures show the detail inside the cockpit. One of the best parts of the UCS kits is the amount of details they add that you never get to see, much like in a traditional model kit. Even though the cockpit lid opens by design, it doesn't allow a very good view of the interior. I removed the cockpit facing in the first image in order to get a better look at the seat.

I'm going to cut this one off before it gets ridiculous with the images. Hopefully I'll be able to get the rest of them up without requiring a part 3.

Happy Whatever

I figure that I have no excuse for not updating this thing when I've been on vacation for almost two weeks. Something to keep in mind if you run Community Server and you've ignored your blog for a while: when you go to your blog dashboard and click on the number next to "Awaiting Approval" for comments, you are presented with the list of comments published on your blog, and not the list of comments awaiting approval. Make sure you are aware of this before you start nuking comments. Otherwise, you will look like me: stupid. Thankfully, I think I only killed one legit comment. Apologies to whomever just got bumped.

I have many things to catch up on. Apparently there is a new service pack for CS, which I will attempt to deploy over remote desktop (since I am not home from vacation yet). I've also got an update for NinjaFish.CommunityServer that I've been meaning to publish for, oh, a month, which includes a new CS module that (hopefully safely) allows HTML in blog comments.

[Update] Fifteen minutes later and we have another flawless service pack application. Yay for easy patches!

Wii Component Cables GET!

As promised, Nintendo shipped out their first batch of the official Wii component cables this Tuesday, and my set just arrived today. To my knowledge, the Nintendo online store is the only place to get these until about mid-December. They were previously sold out online as well, but it would seem that Nintendo's done some trickery to get more stock. They'll run you about $30.

So are they worth it? If you've got a TV capable of 480p, then the answer is a resounding "yes." The progressive image is sharper with significantly less noise than delivered by the composite cables included with the console. I'm pretty certain that they're even using a different font for the system menus if you have 480p enabled.

If your TV can't display a progressive image but does happen to have component inputs (I have seen this), then these are still probably worthwhile, as there is currently a distinct lack of S-Video cables for the Wii, and anything is going to be better than composite.

As for physical characteristics, the cables are 8.2 ft (2.5m) long and have gold-plated contacts on the RCA plugs. The cable quality seems to be equivalent to that of the standard composite cables, which is plenty good. They're not going to give you HD, but it's worlds better than 480i.

Snap Preview Anywhere

Once again, this is what happens when I stop paying attention (to be fair, though, I was on vacation this time). As mentioned in various posts linked off of the Community Server Daily News, Snap (whom I had admittedly not heard of until today) has come up with a damn cool little tool called Snap Preview Anywhere that creates popup Javascript/HTML previews of the links on your site. Want to see it in action? Just roll over any link on this page! This is really handy for people like me who like to litter their blog posts with lots of pointless links.

While that's fancy enough on its own, what impressed me the most was how easy it is to implement on your site. You go through the sign up process and you add one Javascript reference to your site. That's it. Very cool stuff.

Well, it's almost that easy. Snap Preview Anywhere creates previews for every link on your page. This has the rather annoying side effect of previewing links back into your own site. Snap does provide a simple Javascript solution for disabling the previews on internal links, however:

<script type="text/javascript">

//<![CDATA[

    //change sites internal links to class "snap_nopreview"

    var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');

    for (var l = 0; l < links.length; l++)

    {

        if(links[l].href.match(/^http:\/\/blog\.ninjafish\.net/))

        {

            links[l].className += " snap_nopreview";

        }

    }

//]]>

</script>

Add this script to the bottom of your page, before the </body> tag (it has to run after the page has rendered). Obviously, you'll want to change the search string to match your site instead of mine. There's also no reason why you can't use this to filter out domains other than your own.

[Update] If you use Scott Watermasysk's Share It module, you'll probably want to update that script to filter out the links that it creates. Here is the regex I am using to do just that:

/^http:\/\/(blog\.ninjafish\.net)|(del\.icio\.us\/post)|(www\.digg\.com\/submit)|(reddit\.com\/submit)/

Wii Are Successful!

After just over twelve hours in line at Target in the bitter cold of Plano, Texas, I have managed to score a Nintendo Wii. I honestly haven't put in much time with the machine yet, as I spent most of Sunday sleeping, but here's some quick thoughts. I'm not going to go into too much detail, as I'm tired and need to sleep.

I am very impressed with the machine itself. It's compact, quiet, and unassuming. The simple design is very attractive, and wouldn't have trouble looking at home anywhere. The Wii Menu (as Nintendo refers to the Wii's equivalent of a dashboard) is very much serviceable, though I still feel Nintendo is a bit overprotective when it comes to online settings. You have to jump through a few hoops to get things done online, and several of the online features have yet to be implemented, such as the Opera browser and weather updates.

The remote, of course, is going to be what garners the most reactions from new players, and so far it has been wonderful to use. While I'm not certain that it's quite as accurate and functional as Nintendo had hoped, I'm also not certain that I care. It's fun, period. My only gripe is that it's not quite as comfortable as it could be — while the Nunchuk is lightweight and contoured for comfort, the remote is on the heavy side (though it's not going to break any arms) and lacks said contours. These are minor things, however, as the overall experience has been very positive.

As for games, I picked up Zelda (along with everyone else), Excite Truck, and Rayman - Raving Rabbids. I have yet to crack open Excite Truck, so I can't say much there. I'm finding that the reviews are spot on for Zelda — the beginning of the game is very, very slow, and I'm not feeling an overwhelming urge to jump back in. From what I understand, I just need to work past the beginning and then it will pick up. I sure hope so...

Rayman, however, is surprisingly fun. The Wii version of the game is a collection of minigames in the same vein as the Wario Ware series of games, but more involved. The game has an excellent sense of humor and makes creative use of the controllers. There appears to be a large variety of games to unlock, so this one should keep you busy for some time.

Was there anything I didn't like? Just one, really: I was expecting the games on the Virtual Console to be a bit cheaper than they are. Anyone expecting to pay significantly less than the prices on Xbox Live Arcade will be somewhat disappointed. The pricing that you can expect is $5 for a game from the NES era, $8 for a game from the SNES era (includes Genesis and most likely TG16), and $10 for N64 games. There are somewhere around a dozen games available for launch, but I've yet to try any of them. There are, of course, no demos — these are unmodified emulations of the original titles, unlike the games on XBLA — so you can't try before you buy.

Overall, though, I am quite satisfied with the purchase. I'm currently visiting the family in Texas for Thanksgiving (many thanks to my brother for camping out with me the same day that I arrived), so I'm very interested in seeing how the rest of them take to the new machine. I have a feeling that I can sell at least one of them on Wii Sports Bowling.

I've got a couple of pictures from Saturday night. I'll update this post with those when I get home.

BlogMailr?

So Telligent released something called BlogMailr this week -- a web service that allows you to post to your blog via email. This post is more or less content-free; I just wanted to test the silly thing and see what it does. I'm using my web mail client at ASPnix to enter the post, which fully supports HTML and all that good stuff.

OK, I guess I do have some content...

BlogMailr supports attachments via the MetaWeblog API. As you're probably aware, Community Server doesn't. Well, it didn't: it turns out that Telligent has also back-ported some of the API changes from CS 3.0 to CS 2.1. The update is available here, and is a simple, one-file change. The greatest improvement is support for newMediaObject, which allows BlogMailr (and Windows Live Writer) to attach files to your posts.

And now I press the "send" button and pray that this doesn't implode.

[Update] BlogMailr is a lying liar. I just got an email confirmation claiming that this post doesn't actually exist, so stop reading it before you permanently damage the fabric of reality.

Gears: Take Two

Holy crap. And I thought the game was good solo.

I just finished up running through act 1 of Gears of War a second time, but this time I was playing co-op with my brother, and I have this to say: I want to give Cliffy a big, crushing hug. Online co-op is 31 flavors of awesome.

As you may or may not know, Epic has made the entire single-player campaign available for online co-op play. For me, this is a huge, huge selling point, as I don't have many people nearby who I can play with. They've also made it drop-in/drop-out style, so your partner can join and leave at any time. When playing online, all of the important aspects of the session are controlled by the host player, including pausing and ending. You can even set up a public co-op game and let random people join in. You choose where to start (either the beginning of a chapter or the checkpoint stored on the host 360), the difficulty, and off you go.

What makes the co-op mode so great is, of course, the fact that your partner is no longer a sub-moronic, mouth-breathing imbecile (depending upon who you play with, of course). The more tactical encounters are so much better when you have two players who can really work together. The AI isn't very skilled at capitalizing on any advantages that you provide, while a human can easily flank and provide covering fire.

I also managed to squeeze in a couple rounds of warzone (team deathmatch), though the people I jumped in with seemed to still be learning the ropes. I'll have to get some more of that in, as it seems like a lot of fun, and a bit of a change of pace from your Halo-style gameplay.

Gears is great stuff. Do not hesitate to pick it up.