So, resolved. No backups for now, not until I pick up a new TB drive.

I was playing TF2 last night, and first off, I ended up playing with some of my internet idols: Lore Sjöberg and Mark Rosenfelder. I knew I was playing with Lore—both recognizing his voice and having his steam username. But when I was playing as a medic and healing someone with the username Zompist, I knew it was Rosenfelder, and was excited.

And the internet makes that kind of contact easy—we were all there to play a game together. I just happened to wander into the right place. It’s not like there was much meaningful communication, as we were mostly focused on the game, but that’s almost the point. It was casual.

Later, with different people, there was another weird and awesome moment. In an arena game, it had gotten down to a Sniper and a Heavy. Without words, they faced each other and the Heavy swapped to melee. So did the Sniper. And they duked it out hand-to-hand. The Heavy even gave the Sniper his Sandvich.

OK, that paragraph won’t mean much to you unless you know TF2. But it was cool.

The company makes browser-based games, particularly Facebook games. (remember when it was The Facebook? Yeah.) I’m particularly curious about their game design process; I can code, sure, but with the years I’ve put into thoughts about gameplay and setting design, I’d like to get to try my hand at that, too. It has been implied that I might. We’ll see. Updates as I have them.

Oh, also: Facebook as medium for ARGs? How do you, should you, monetize that? Molly, we should talk about this.

(Since people keep asking: Google Wave is not, in and of itself, anything new.  It is, rather, a beautifully conceived [though not yet quite fully implemented!] melding of existing technologies.  The tag-line version is that it is a integration of wiki, IM, email, and collaborative document editing, with line-item threaded responses and real-time typing from other users visible.  Many people balk at this last point, but it’s (a) really surprisingly useful and makes communication a lot more like, well, real conversation, and (b) eventually going to be configurable.)

The pros are good pros for me, and the cons are cons that don’t bother me, but might be bad for other people. I like the speed, UI, option for on-screen (for general use) or slide-out (for intensive, or SSH, use) keyboard. I like the selection of apps (by which I mean that there’s a good, free, SSH app, and then other, very Google-oriented apps, and a Pandora app).

I like the battery life, I like the resolution, I like the camera. I like running six different apps at a time, and I still like the battery life.

I think that the shape of it is very male, it’s a little thicker than I’d like (for fitting in my erstwhile cell-phone pockets), and many of the apps seem buggier than I’ve seen on the iPhone—but they’ve yet to be destructive bugs. Mostly, the Twitter app I use complains that it needs to force-quit a lot, and then doesn’t, because, actually, it doesn’t need to.

This point is a slight win for the Droid over the iPhone: it can input extended latin characters quite easily, and — and … particularly, but it doesn’t have the fonts to display weirder Unicode, like ♆.

It can’t (yet) play arbitrary Flash embeds, so I can’t watch ZP on it. But it can catch YouTube links and redirect them to the YouTube app.

In the end: nerdy guy, yes. Anyone else, probably not. Price is completely equivalent to the iPhone, in terms of data plan as well.

I am kind of sick of sitting and typing for so much of the day.

WordPress and its plugins, though updated, do not think that they are.

I’m sick of bash.  The syntax is absurd, and absurd syntax makes me sad. So I’ve just recently set up iPython as my shell. What follows are the relevant config files and some explanation.

First, we want to make sure that iPython is installed, and if we’re on OS X, that it’s installed for Python 2.6. The reason for this is that earlier versions of Python don’t handle tab completion and command line history well—by using libedit rather than readline proper, they have some bugs that make things still strictly speaking functional, but hardly visually appealing.  You’ll have to trust me, as I don’t want to find the words to explain the ways it looks bad.

So, for OS X, download Python 2.6, install it, and download the latest stable source for iPython and install it with Python 2.6.  Something like this:

curl http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.6.2/python-2.6.2-macosx2009-04-16.dmg -o python-2.6.2-macosx2009-04-16.dmg
open python-2.6.2-macosx2009-04-16.dmg
# do the installer dance
curl http://ipython.scipy.org/dist/ipython-0.9.1.tar.gz -o ipython-0.9.1.tar.gz
tar -xzvf ipython-0.9.1.tar.gz
cd ipython-0.9.1.tar.gz
sudo ./setup.py install

Now, to make sure it’s working, run ipython and you should see Python 2.6.2 (r262:71600, Apr 16 2009, 09:17:39) or something like it as the first line. The key part is the 2.6.2.

Now, to make this your shell. The Proper Right and True way would involve chsh, but because I like to sync my homedir configurations across many systems I operate on, I’ve done it the Immoral Bad and Evil way, by just appending exec /usr/local/bin/ipython -noconfirm_exit -p sh to my .bashrc.

Let me unpack that line. exec is a bash builtin that executes a command, replacing bash with that command. /usr/local/bin/ipython is just a fully qualified path to ipython; ymmv. -noconfirm_exit gets rid of the “are you sure you want to quit?” on ctrl-D, which I find annoying. Again, ymmv. Most importantly, there’s -p sh. Dark secret, I actually have -p kit, which loads a custom profile called kit. But the idea is the same, and that profile is based off of the builtin sh profile. I won’t go in to making a custom profile here; start with sh and play around with it.

Save the relevant files, open a new terminal just to make sure nothing’s borked (leaving your old terminal still open!). You should see something like

Last login: Tue Jun 16 18:01:54 on ttys000
IPython 0.9.1   [on Py 2.6.2]
kit@morgana[~]>

Now, you can pretty freely mix Python and shell commands. If you need to escape something to be shell-y, and make sure it doesn’t get pythonized, just prepend a !. Enjoy. Comment with questions; I’ll elaborate.