December 23, 2012

Beyond my Ability, Part 1

I’ve been working on my CityGenerator off and on for years; it’s finally reached a point where I’m content with it’s output and I want to move to the next level. I’d like to start generating an entire continent, then populating it with my CityGenerator. So, step 1- figure out how to generate an awesome map. I’ve tried a couple of things, including my last couple of posts on using gimp, but that won’t work for the city generator- I need something that can scale reasonably well.

December 15, 2012

Generating a world in Gimp, Part 2: Terrainasaurus wrecks

Ok, so lets come back to the landmasses Click on the land layer and color select the land Use Filter->render->cloud->solid noise with the following settings: random seed 1056316098 detail 15 turbulent x,y= 4.0,4.0 Select colors->levels and click auto, then OK If you want nice, boring land, you can color this with the technique below and be done. Otherwise we should spice it up a bit. With your landmasses selected Create a new layer Click on the land layer and color select the land Use Filter->render->cloud->solid noise with the following settings: random seed 2925538520 (note that this is different) detail 15 turbulent x,y= 6.

December 14, 2012

Generating a world in Gimp, Part 1: Land and Shallows

This is a work in progress on how to create a nice, quick worldmap. Create a new image in gimp, 1200×800 Delete the background layer because it’ll just get in the way. Create a new layer group Create a new Transparent layer in the group called “noise” Use Filter->render->cloud->solid noise with the following settings: random seed 1056316098 detail 15 turbulent x,y= 4.0,4.0 You should end up with something like this:

November 16, 2012

So, on CentOS 6.x, I get the following warning when trying to use check_twill: [jmorgan@in1c6ut002:~]$ /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_twill /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/twill/other_packages/_mechanize_dist/_auth.py:14: DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead import re, base64, urlparse, posixpath, hashlib, sha, sys, copy Sorry, check_twill requires 1 option check_twill 1.2 (twill version 0.9) This plugin executes a twill script and returns results for Nagios. It is designed to be a simple method to funtionally test websites. (see http://twill.

September 13, 2012

Meet Varone Matto

I’m testing out D&D Next with the latest playtest and decided to build out a new character. I wanted to expanded my character list a bit, so I decided to come up with a new one. It’s a bit generic so far, but I hope to flesh it out. Varone Matto is a broken man. A soldier of a fallen kingdom, he has lost his king, his family and all sense of self worth.

August 16, 2012

Mark a job unstable in Jenkins from a shell script

Here’s the workaround I cam up with Configure JUnit reports to read status.xml and output something like this: echo '<testsuite><testcase classname="yourJob" name="yourError"><failure> a description of the error </failure></testcase></testsuite>'>status.xml Simple as that!

July 22, 2012

Quick Mapmaking with Gimp

Ok, so here are some quick steps to make a simple map. Create a small image, 20px by 20px Drop solid black onto background layer Create layer called “path” With white 1px pen, drag a windy area Upscale to 500px, turn off interpolation select white area by color on Path layer select distort – thresh 127, spread 8, granularity 2, smooth 2, smooth horizontal and vertical both checked create new layer called floor add layer mask (black) fill in selected area with white on layermask hide path layer switch to layer mask of floor, select white select->grow selected area by 20px dropfill floor layer with white- this should reveal the layermask filter -> noise -> rgb noise w/ rgb .

April 24, 2012

Frack it, I’ll Build My Own.

So long story short, I’ve decided to attempt building a guitar by hand- mainly because I’m an idiot. It doesn’t have to be beautiful or well formed or even sound good, I just want to make my own. So… I went to Lowes, bought some wood, bought some tools, and got to work. Supplies: 1″x3″x4′ Poplar board. 1″x4″x2′ Poplar board. 1″x6″x2′ Poplar board. 1″x12″x2′ Poplar board. Tools: Coping saw 1/2″ chisel Hammer Miter box Surform shaver Note that the design I’m working on is lopsided-the bottom half is larger than the top half.

March 25, 2012

The Limoncelli Test

For grins, I went through Tom Limoncelli’s sysadmin questionaire to see how “a team I have worked with previously” fares: A. Public facing practices: *1. Are user requests tracked via a ticket system? No, a high estimate would be 1/3rd of their requests are tracked. *2. Are “the 3 empowering policies” defined and published? No. 3. Does the team record monthly metrics? No. Outages are tracked by management, but that’s it.

March 6, 2012

NTP Querying

Setting up a new NTP client? Can’t tell if it’s syncing properly? Use ntpq -c lpeers to figure out if things are syncing properly.