rjbs versus Encode

December 8, 2011  📧 🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

What a day! I kept really busy. I did some good (I think) refactoring of some libraries for sending transactional mail. I made a nice little improvement to our (on-CPAN) mail generator to make our Markdown-based messages look better in both plaintext and HTML. I deleted 36 obsolete fields from an annoyingly large table. I felt pretty productive.

on gold as experience

November 16, 2011  ⚔️

Old-school D&D rewards experience for treasure on a 1 GP = 1 XP basis. I stopped finding this horrible ages ago, and I think it makes plenty of sense, and don’t care whether any given DM wants to use or not use that rule.

noism's "Things Role Playing Bloggers Tend Not To Write About"

November 15, 2011  ⚔️

Am I a role-playing blogger? Yes, obviously in the strictest interpretation of the words, but do I get anybody following my blog’s feed mostly to see my write about RPGs? I don’t think so. I think anybody doing so is probably chased off by the technical posts… but there’s little to no chance I’m going to try maintaining two blogs. Blech.

the city of Alar is finally being explored

November 11, 2011  ⚔️

Absolutely ages ago, I decided I wanted to start running a second D&D game. I’ve been running a 4E game since January 2009, but we only play about once a month, and while I enjoy the game and the players, I find the infrequency of our play to be pretty unsatisfying.

random table successes and failures

October 24, 2011  ⚔️

A couple months ago, I produced a set of fourteen tables for generating random encounters in the Great Plain of my “Ethos” 4E D&D campaign. I’ve used them for the past few games, and I think they were a huge success from my perspective. I’m taking the approach that the tables tell me what the party encounters, and I figure out why before the encounter begins.

non-ASCII characters in Rubric!

October 24, 2011  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻 📕

Only what… seven years after its first release, I’ve finally added tolerable support for “funny character” to Rubric. It wasn’t all that hard – it had the usual problems. I knew what I should’ve done to begin with, but then I had to figure out all the stupid things I had done before that, and had to undo them.

yapc asia: awesome

October 19, 2011  🐫 ✈️

I spent the last week in Tokyo for YAPC::Asia. It was great!

first impressions of ActiveState Stackato

August 25, 2011  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

When Heroku started to become popular, I thought it was pretty neat, but not neat enough to get me to change my primary development language. A year or two ago, a friend asked if I was interested in helping develop “Heroku for Perl.” I said I didn’t see much value in it for myself. I knew how to deploy applications “the hard way,” so investing in making it easier didn’t win me much. This year, a few PaaS providers supporting Perl have shown up, and I didn’t pay them any attention until someone told me that ActiveState’s Stackato cloud system was having a contest and that I should consider entering it.