When I first started playing this game, earlier in the year, I was dismayed to find they had placed jetpacks in a weapon slot, preventing you from being able to fly and shoot at the same time. Well, you still can't fly and shoot at the same time, but they've given everyone hands-free jetpacks now so that they are moved out of a weapon slot and assigned to the spacebar. Flying in this game just went from manual to automatic transmission!

For some time now, I have been picking away at the idea of connecting the Mailman mailing list server to Xaraya. If I could get Xaraya to read Mailman data, including the list of members and the archive of posts, I could provide a powerful (and free) listserv to Xaraya members by automatically adding them to a mailing list in Mailman that is associated with membership in a specific group in Xaraya (ostensibly the default Users group, but any group could ostensibly be used for various purposes). Furthermore, I could automatically establish user accounts in Xaraya for all listserv members in Mailman, run via CRON to keep a Xaraya group and a Mailman list in sync together.

However, it's been an uphill battle getting at Mailman from anything but the command line... until now!

Over the years, various people have scoffed at my aspirations of political involvement. Astrologically, I am a Leo, and I fulfill that stereotype quite well, if I do say so. Leo's are typically attributed with leadership skills and a strong inclination to use them. I am no exception. I was a supervisor almost as soon as I was hired on in many of the jobs that I have held over the years. Let's say that I just... have a tendency to take over.

As of this month, I am now officially a member of the Xaraya PMC (Project Management Committee), the body responsible for maintaining and supporting the Xaraya platform and it's developer communitee. Together with Marty Vance and Chris Powis, we will be responsible for ensuring that Xaraya continues to be the most viable web platform available.

Xaraya is free and Open Source software (FOSS) licensed under the GPL. 

Stay tuned for details about the Xaraya PMC and what it will be doing to start building the community. Not all of the developers have to work on the code; some of them have to work on the bigger picture.

It is my privilege and pleasure to serve alongside my fellow committee members. I look forward to posting here about my many successes with inspiring other leadership within the Xaraya community. This incredible tool is available to give web developers what they will find missing in any other FOSS platform on the market today. Welcome home and thank you for voting!

A while back, I posted about how I was using Ping.fm to cross-publish my articles from Xaraya to my various social networking profiles.

I had been experimenting with direct use of the various API's made available by Facebook/MySpace/etc., but it was becoming a long and arduous process.

Then I discovered Ping.fm and have been using it ever since.

However, I was not able to publish the code snippets that I used to accomplish this for you, my readers... until now.

While developing the PokerEnlightenment site, I was exposed to an issue with using the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor to insert Flash when using IE. Apparently, IE likes to rip up OBJECT/EMBED/PARAM tag contents and restructure in funny ways. After some googling, I came across a post by Spocke, the main developer of TinyMCE. As specified in his post, I added the media plugin to TinyMCE in the advanced config and IE suddenly started to behave itself.

By now, everyone is, of course, quite sick of seeing the buxom ads deployed to entice new players for Evony. Being rather burnt out on everything else available on the market, I've been giving it a try. No, there isn't any comely wench in-game, of any sort, that I've found. But, it is free, after all, right..? Right?

Except they nerfed medals...

You can play for free until you get out of newbie-mode by trying to advance beyond Knight, which requires these medals, see?

Since the market has become virtually flooded with fantasy MMO's, the focus of the gaming community is beginning to move towards the sci-fi end of the spectrum. For years, EVE Online has dominated the sci-fi MMO market, remaining viable for years with a growing loyal fan-base while other aspiring sci-fi MMO's flared briefly before fading away.

However, EVE Online is not a game for everyone, heavily featuring PvP action. I've personally tried playing twice only to have the experience ruined by bored griefers with too much virtual artillery. As a result, I have been on the watch for something new to play, specifically in this genre.

Reviewing the unreleased games that are anticipated, I have selected three that appear to be worth investing some time in, once they are available.

After the jump, I will cover the primary features of interest for each game, detailing exactly why it is worth looking into. In expected order of release, they are Jumpgate Evolution, Earthrise and Infinity.

After listening to some of the other podcasts that are out there, I decided that the time has come for me to give it a try.

I recently downloaded Audacity, which offers voice-activated recording features and accepts the line-in that is currently carrying the mic from an old over-the-ear gaming headset I had sitting around. I have to increase the Gain quite a bit to hear myself after recording through such a low-end mic, but it gets the job done.

In order to run a podcast, however, you need more than just a few mp3's.

In about two hours, I worked out a way to run podcasts from Xaraya using only Xarpages, a new articles pubtype and a couple of templates. Continue reading to see the actual templates and get started setting up your own podcast using Xaraya!

What does it mean to get "Slashdotted"?

If you have been online for a decent amount of time, you probably know about the news site for geeks called Slashdot.

From this, you may surmise that getting "Slashdotted" involves getting your site linked to in an article on Slashdot, resulting in a significant increase in your site traffic.

You would be correct. Very correct.

You may also surmise that this increase in traffic results in a corresponding increase in sales/leads/etc.

I found an incredibly cool graph illustrating the anticipated future trend of computing, gaming, movies and artificial intelligence. They graph things between Best, Worst and Base Case scenarios, showing a range of just how pleasant or unpleasant things could become. Regardless, it is all inspiring from a technology perspective. Some truly great ideas are listed across the graph; things that I had not previously considered and that the industries affected may not have either. Virtual cinema attendance was one idea that struck me as obvious in retrospect, but predicting the last human produced film and game on such short notice (10 years from now?) is not something that ever occurred to me.

No matter who you are, there is bound to be a few things that spark your interest. I will be using the graph as a repeated inspirational exercise going forward; it's just that cool.