HeroQuest 2nd Edition

The paper & dice roleplaying game I was project manager for is finally nearing release: the second edition of Robin Laws’s HeroQuest. It’s due to be released in June.

I’ve run lengthy campaigns with this edition and the previous, and find this version to be even more flexible and easy to run than the last. It gives you plenty of tools to run games that follow a dramatic flow. My players all found it easier as well, but lost none of HeroQuest’s flexibility.

HeroQuest is now generic — suitable for running games in any genre. (Previous games were tied to Glorantha, so you needed to do a little adaptation if you wanted a different setting.) But Glorantha fans take heart — I’ve also been helping edit The Sartar Book, which has rules for Orlanthi magic and plenty of information on the inhabitants of Dragon Pass in general and Sartar in particular. It also includes an epic campaign suitable for characters of any level (though I recommend a little player experience). The Sartar Book is still in the editing phase, but while you’re waiting, Glorantha fans can use the appendix in HeroQuest to play (though you’ll have to provide your own cultures and scenarios).

I’m perhaps biased, but I really like the new HeroQuest rules, and The Sartar Book is shaping up to be pretty darn good as well.

Apple Keyboard

I think I’ve requested a rationally sized keyboard several times over the years, so when Apple finally came out with one, I figured I needed to put my money where my mouth is, and buy one.

I plugged it into a KVM, and it works fine (typing on either a 20 inch aluminum iMac running Mac OS X 10.5.6, or a G5 tower running 10.4.11).

As with my MacBook Air, I missed the Enter key. So I installed KeyRemap4MacBook. Despite the name, it works fine with the Apple Keyboard as well as the MacBook Air.

The only problem was that for some reason, I wanted to put my right hand too far to the left —apparently I’m too used to positioning it away from the right side of the keyboard.

It’s really nice having all that desk space back!

Small At Last!

Hallelujah! Apple is once again offering a keyboard that doesn’t take up excess space on your desktop, and will work without draining batteries! 

Welcome to the Anti-Social

So I was on the bus today, and noticed someone was flipping through something on his iPhone. Turned out it was his playlists. And once he picked a song, I could easily see which album it was from, because of the album cover (easy to recognize because I too have some Vampire Weekend on my iPhone).

To me that’s just as valid a music sharing experience as whatever the Zune is supposed to do. And we didn’t even have to cooperate.

Mac Box Set & Leopard

Just got my Mac Box Set (Mac OS X, iLife and iWork). At $149 (Amazon price as of 30 Jan), it’s the same price as iLife and iWork bought separately. I wanted both of those.

As it happened, I used the Mac OS X DVD to update a machine to 10.5.6, and tried to use that computer as part of my compile farm (using Xcode’s Distributed Build feature). It showed up as incompatible with the others. Apparently Mac Box Set includes 9G66, while the combo update installs 9G55. I didn’t realize Apple was distributing multiple builds of 10.5.6. Normally no one would really care, but distributed builds need perfect configuration matches.

So I probably won’t be able to use this machine in my compile farm until the next Mac OS X update.

Control Room

Just watched the documentary Control Room, about Al Jazeera during the invasion of Iraq. Poor Al Jazeera! They were hated by both sides, as near as I could tell because they were devoted to broadcasting the truth.

The movie was for me full of ambiguities. For example, the soldiers going door to door (pretty scary stuff from my own training) vs the poor civilians caught in this. The soldiers trying to control the civilians without being able to speak their language vs the poor civilians who had no idea what they were being told. The reporters wanting information, the military not wanting to give out something useful to their enemy.

I found 1Lt Josh Rushing very sympathetic (perhaps because I was once a 1Lt). He seemed to be honestly trying to understand the Arab point of view. And was keenly aware that he reacted to dead Americans on TV differently than to dead Iraqis.

The DVD includes deleted scenes. I didn’t watch all, but many were political discussions that may be enlightening but didn’t really relate to the main theme of the film.

An interesting and thought-provoking documentary, still relevant.

Class Names under gcc

We recently changed our C++ framework to use the language’s RTTI (historically we didn’t because some compilers didn’t do a good job with it, but that’s pretty ancient history by now). Previously we used a bunch of macros to roll our own, including the ability to print an object’s class (for debugging purposes), something like “ResourceImage.” The first cut at “native” support showed this as “N3GF213ResourceImageE,” which is too ugly for my liking. (It’s essentially a mangled name.)

So Chris Blackwell pointed me in the right direction, and we now have

#include <cxxabi.h>

template <typename ObjType> std::string class_name(ObjType* anObject)
{
int  status;
char  *realName;
realName = abi::__cxa_demangle(typeid(*anObject).name(), 0, 0, &status);
std::string retVal(realName);
free(realName);
return retVal;
}

which returns a human-readable name.