WordPress 2.0.1 was released the other day – I’ve already updated the site from the nightly code.  Just before the release I started going through Trac to see if I could fix any of the bugs or what not that people had found.  I submitted a couple diffs for some of the minor issues – not for 2.0.1 but for the eventual 2.1 release.  By no means spectacular but, every little bit helps I guess.  Besides it gives me some good PHP practice.  I’m going to follow the Trac and the wp-hackers mailing list as I have time – to see if I can continue to contribute.

I’ve got a couple of ideas in the works for the site – hopefully I’ll have some news posted soon.

Ismo has a post today about an interesting project he has been working on… It’s a nice PHP/MySQL app for personal movie reviews. It even has a wish list of sorts with a log of movies in line for future purchase and ones which will be skipped over. I suggest everyone check it out.

Hey, Ismo you should add a suggested viewing section so people can submit films they think you’d like – and when you release the source let me know (I think I might have to add that to my site).

It’s all Mikey’s fault! Because of him – I can’t get this damn idea out of my head – unless – I chase it out – with a bullet.

The plan is to one day get together with some of his friends and play a pen and paper Cthulhu game. And someday it might happen. That reminded me of something that we had talked about long ago. The idea was to create a system so the game could take place over the i’net. Not much ever come of the idea…

I remembered that idea the other day and just haven’t been able to let it go. Maybe it’s because I’ve got a strong enough background now with PHP/MySQL that I could probably make it work. Cthulhu in a web based environment. Hmm. It might be fun…

Where to begin? OK. Databases. First database table would hold user data – e-mail addresses and stuff like that. The second database would hold character info – stats, levels, etc. The tables would be able to be referenced by a common user id number. Character generation would be a simple matter since once you’ve got your base stats it’s all simple math to figure everything else out. Mike (or Google for that matter) could give me all that info.

Look at that – a quick trip to Usenet get’s me ‘D20_WTC_88624_Call of Cthulhu – Official Character Sheet.pdf’ that should give me everything I need for the character table. I’ll have to ask Mike about the rest later.

The problem is where do I put people. NPC’s, players, horrors? I would need to build the code to make a ‘living/breathing’ town/city/country side. I need to start with a small location say ummm – a farmhouse. Then I can limit it to general places around the farmhouse. For instance: ‘the fields’, ‘the barn’, ‘the silo’, and the farm house itself. This could lead into at least one NPC – the farmer. Farmers have a pretty strict schedule don’t they? So, depending on time of day (based on real time * 10 or something like that) the farmer would be in different locations around the farm. That seems pretty broken down so it should be a nice start.

So, I guess I could whip up a couple of tables (user_accounts, characters, npc) and then move on to some basic location code from there.

Well, I’m going to make some ramen noodles…

Anyone, who knows me knows I’m a rom junky. And because of that I’ve recently become involved with TOSEC. For those that don’t know, TOSEC is a huge rom naming project. Actually, it’s become more then a naming project with the team releasing TIM (TOSEC Information Management) a while back. TIM is an all encompassing rom set tool. Used to rename and audit your sets TIM takes a large part of the troubles of dealing with large rom sets. And I do mean large – the number of systems covered by TOSEC/TIM is incredible.

The nice thing about TIM is it’s open source so anyone can work on it. I was checking out the File Information part of the program the other day and I noticed it didn’t actually do anything. To make a long story short I sort of volunteered to take a look at some bugs in the code to see if I could fix them. I’ve managed to track down a couple so far (look here for info) so now I’m going to shift focus over to the File Info part of TIM. We’ll see if I can get something working…