Codex

While working on my pet PostGIS/OpenLayers project I ran into some difficulty with PostGIS – the version I was using didn’t support export to GeoJSON, a feature that was pretty key to what I was trying to do.  Poking around, it looked like in order to upgrade to the latest version of PostGIS (1.4, as of right now) I would need to upgrade to PostgreSQL 8.4.  Attempting to do that via command line on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS proved to be a bitch, because of what appears to be a (mostly) undocumented aspect of Postgres installed through apt-get on Ubuntu systems.

Working backwards from a couple of internet walkthroughs, I uninstalled then reinstalled the postgresql-8.X, postgresql-client, and postgresql-contrib packages.  After doing so the client programs, particularly psql, were still a mess, and postgres didn’t appear to have been launched.  Manually launching it didn’t seem to work, and even Webmin couldn’t find or launch the service.  I did notice while poking around that the installation files didn’t seem to be in the same place as in the standard Postgres install documented at their site.  Finally launching a GUI package manager resolved the problem – on Ubuntu, postgres is installed by default with a package called postgresql-common, which modifies the installation directories to allow multiple instances of Postgres (8.2, 8.3, and 8.4, for example) on the same box.  Since I don’t really need that, the solution was easy – remove the postgresql-common package, then install like normal.  Worked beautifully.

Hope this saves someone the several hours of frustration it caused me.  Now to upgrade PostGIS – since the standard apt-get package for 8.04 doesn’t have GeoJSON support, it may be a frustrating adventure into the land of make/make install.

I’ve been fairly boring lately. Most of my boringness is attibutable to Galactic Civilizations 2, which is very addictive and, as it turns out, fairly tough. My only disappointment with the game is that there is no tactical view, but the strategic options more than outweigh that minor complaint.

Marla has also been overtaken by a game as well, and a good one at that: Black and White 2. I really appreciate how the little villagers are much more self-sufficient this time around, and the enhanced city-building aspects of the game, but I have to say that I think the final word on city-building games will wait for Caesar 4. Number 3 is a game I still fire up every once in a while; there’s just something about moving around little quantities of goods, I can’t get enough. Weird, I know.

Being a gamer, right now is a fun time of year for me, what with E3 going on and all that. For the most part, I enjoy the hell out of the coverage, especially at my two favorite gaming sites: www.gamespy.com and www.gamespot.com. What irritates the hell out of me is the phenom of the “booth babe“, one of the recent hallowed traditions of E3.

Leaving aside my own view of attractive, scantily clad women, the ONLY function they serve at a venue like E3 (which is supposed to be a trade show) is to completely strip any sense of integrity from the industry. The computer and video game sector is growing dramatically, and right now it is in a pivotal stage. Animation is getting to the point where characters in games can actually have, well, character. The avatars can emote, and there is enough money in games that real writers can be had. Games are finally coming into the public consciousness in a serious way, and they have the potential to make a strong, positive first impression, yet it seems like the game developers and publishers themselves are determined to shoot themselves in the foot by depicting the entire gaming community as a club of adolescent boys. The whole “booth babe” problem is just one instance of this self-defeating attitude.

There are certainly games and designers who buck this trend. The problem is that for every Sims game, which has broad appeal and doesn’t alienate women with their depictions thereof, there are 10 Guild Wars or Dead or Alives, which, despite the fact that they have solid basic gameplay, demonstrate through their depiction of women a complete lack of respect for at least half the population of the earth. If games are ever going to be accepted or even tried in the first place by a larger group of people, that ratio needs to be reversed.

If E3 can clean up it’s act a little, that might go a long way towards convincing the public at large that games are no longer the exclusive domain of adolescent boys. It is, after all, the most public event in gaming. Increasing the professionalism of that event, it seems to me, would demonstrate the increased level of professionalism that has already crept into the industry. The publishers and to some degree developers may be aiming games at a pretty low level, but recent stats put the average age of gamers somewhere around 28 to 30. I think it’s time for the industry to reflect it’s consumers.

And let’s be serious here – if gamers really want to see half-naked women, they can just pick up a Victoria’s Secret or Maxim. You don’t really need to go to E3 for that.

I recently installed SugarCRM on the server at my work. It was quite a bit easier to install than the other workflow/project management software I had tried, and it is turning out to be much more customizable than I expected. It’s still overkill for a company with a grand total of 4 employees, but it should be a dramatic improvement over the system based around a physical calendar that we have been using thus far.  There are a few bugs; we had to renew a couple of passwords today because the system suddenly decided to reject them, but overall it’s been pretty sweet.

I find SugarCRM kind of facinating, because it’s an open-source project with its roots in a commercial enterprise, just like MySQL.  I’ve always thought of open-source projects being these spontaneous uprisings of the community, but it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that the “spontaneous uprisings” die out very quickly.  It’s the projects with something driving them, be it commercial success, a dynamic personality (the most famous example being Linus Torvalds), or the fairly urgent need of some group of people.  This is of particular interest, since I would really like to figure out how a quality open-source game could be produced.  It seems that having a commercial venture at it’s core might be viable, but it is difficult to see how such a framework could be constructed without, you know, charging for the game.  Something to ponder.