Cygon’s Blog

In my ongoing effort to build an appealing site in order to gather a .NET game development community, publish my articles and ultimately sell my games, I recently evaluated several CMS solutions. My top choices were Drupal and Xaraya and I’m still not fully sure which one to use.

Drupal has shown to have a surprisingly small codebase which makes it very easy to extend the system without first examining the its architecture from the ground up. On the downside, Drupal’s sources are a huge collection of of copy & paste redundancy, questionable programming practices and most of the official modules are pretty much tailored towards what the author’s requirements were.

As an example, the ‘article’ module, which is responsible for presenting the user with a nice, browsable overview of the articles on a site, by default shows types of nodes you ever created. That means your static page structure will be mangled together with your actual articles, weblinks, projects, issues and so on.

Drupal does not ship with a module to handle links to other sites in the way I’d like to. There’s the linksdb module which uses an ugly URL scheme and is fully detached from the node and taxonomy system (meaning you’ll have to rebuild the entire category tree for your links), the janode module which provides a new weblink node that is called “janode node” (wtf?) and the flexinode or CCK modules for creating your own node types.

I tried modding the article, story and janode modules to suit my needs. The package attached to this post contains the following four modules:

• weblink - The janode module modified so the node is named ‘weblink’

• article - The story module modified so the node is named ‘article’

• weblinks - The article module, renamed to weblinks and modified so it only shows nodes of type ‘weblink’

• articles - The article module, renamed to articles and modified so it only shows nodes of type ‘article’

So, effectively, you can now view all your articles as http://mysite/articles and all your weblinks as http://mysite/weblinks and everything is named the way you would expect it to be.

Download the package here: drupal-nuclex-nodes-4.7.tar.bz2

When I started my parkour training a few weeks ago, I noticed that even thought I could jog for hours, the jumping and rolling quickly killed my endurance. Guess I fell for the typical exercise trap: Keep doing a single kind of exercise and you will only train a subset of your muscles, leaving the remainder as a bottleneck that painfully surfaces as soon as you embark onto something new.

One thing I did was to include a few all-out sprints near the end of my jogs. For example: moderate jogging for 40 minutes, 10 second sprint, walking for 5 minutes, another 10 second sprint, walking for 5 minutes, easy jogging 10 minutes. Mind you, 10 seconds isn’t much but by “all-out”, I actually mean it: running at absolute maximum speed, pushing as hard as you possibly can.

You’ll feel really drained after the sprints, but a week after or so, I began noticing an increase in overall energy as in being more awake and optimistic. So much in fact, that I decided to research this subject. And I came to gather some rather surprising finds:

• Training at high intensity burns more fat. For decades, low intensity, long distance running has been recommended as the way to lose excess body fat. Just about any fitness guide will advocate this idea. But: While high intensity burns more carbohydrates and less fat, it will increase the overall metabolismic rate for several hours after the exercise, burning a lot more fat than the low intensity training possibly can.

• Higher intensity means more muscle growth. During the extended recovery time after a high intensity workout, your body builds up muscle mass. Muscles are commonly referred to as “active tissue” since they consume energy while idle and even more when in use. A muscle burns about 9 times as many calories than an equivalent mass of fat. And during one year, a muscle will burn about 5 times its own mass in fat.

• Sprinting does increase your endurance. Common training systems that draw the famous line between “aerobic” and “anaerobic” exercise teach that in order to gain endurance, you need to run slow and long. Long runs make sense as they can teach you to run more efficient, reduce impact on joints and develop a longer stride. But high intensity training will increase your endurance more in a shorter time than traditional training can do in a longer time.

• Extreme intensity exercise makes your body produce growth hormone. This hormone improves your mood, increases disease resistance, accelerates muscle growth and even slows down the aging process. Of course the risk of injuries is the highest for this kind of training.

Recently, I’ve been reading books one and two of the Dragon Temple Trilogy by Janine Cross. This series has generated a lot of negative feedback from other bloggers. The funny thing is that some of them openly admit never having read the books at all, whilst others make absurd statements about what is supposed to happen in the story, so conclude yourself whether there is anything to read out of those “reviews” other than the fact that the blogger is a narrow-minded moron…

The heroine of our story, Zarq, grows up in a society where women are treated as inferior to men and even sold into prostitution on a common basis. Dragons are as common in this world as maybe horses in our reality. And althought the dragons are being worshipped as divine beings, they suffer a fate no better than the women, the vast majority being crippled by amputating their wings as hatchlings, only to be used as laying hens or working slaves.

Now what caused some people to bash this novel is the slight act of (consensual) bestiality taking place between a group of women, including our heroine, and a dragon. I said slight, because the physical side of it merely involves a hallucinogenic poison on the tongues of dragons and a creative way of absorbing it. It is tastefully written, not overdone and to say the truth, I liked it.

It should be clear by now that Janine Cross had the guts to touch topics that are hard to digest for most people given their social conditioning. Still, the Dragon Temple Trilogy should be considered a fascinating and unsettling novel in the first place. And only in the second place is it adult material.

I have yet to finish reading through the second book but I’m glad the author, being active on the internet herself, didn’t take the criticism about the first book to heart and continued writing on this novel.

As far as criticism goes, I think neither the first nor the second book really develop much pressure, urging the reader to continue reading till late in the night. The heroine is utterly powerless and the realism of this work makes that fact all the more oppressive. If you are watching hollywood movies and listening to pop music, this is not for you.

Check out Liz Hentry’s page for a complete and informative review of these books!

When I ran the weekly update on my server today, rebooting the system to ensure all running processes are using the latest version of all files, courier-imap failed to launch. No error message, nothing in the logs.

Thankfully, only four packages had been updated and knowing what to google for, I quickly discovered this bug report on gentoo’s bugzilla: Bug 98745 - courier-{imap,authlib} init scripts fail to work with baselayout-1.12.*

Basically, it seems as if the current baselayout package changes something in the way daemons are run, breaking the courier-imap init scripts which are badly written as it seems. The init scripts for the same daemons in the full courier package have been reported to be still working. So either switch to the full courier suite or replace your courier init scripts with the ones that have been attached to the bug above.

What actually shocks me is the bug’s age. It has been reported more than a year ago and today, it made its way into the gentoo stable branch. That’ll be a whole lot of fun for all those people installing courier-imap for the first time. How many days would you spend trying to get your configuration fixed until you finally consider the package itself is broken?

Update: The courier-imap package has been updated and includes working init scripts, so everything is back to normal now

No, I’ve not gone french now. “Le Parkour” is a french adrenaline sport that involves moving over and around obstacles in ways most people think the human body is not capable to (eg. jumping from great heights onto hard ground, running on walls, jump-diving through tight passages).

To get an impression, take this page of the “PARKOUR Österreich” (Parkour Austria) team explaining the basics: Basic Parkour Movements. Even if you don’t understand german, the animated gif movies will give you an impression what this is all about.

Well, to come to the point, watching some parkour videos I was immensely fascinated by the feats these “Traceurs” (the persons performing Parkour) could do. I know that jumps from 2 meters upwards are realistic since I’ve done that a lot as a child, much to the dismay of my parents. So I decided to begin learning parkour.

One of the worst things about living in a small village is that just about everyone seems to know you. Word would quickly spread you’ve gone crazy if people see you trying to jump off walls and attempting somersaults while running. But that’s not a problem as I go jogging through the local forest 3 or 4 times a week. Parkour originated from “La Méthode Naturelle”, which is basically parkour applied to nature instead of urban environments, so this should work out fine.

If you’ve ever been to a gym that is even remotely related to martial arts, you probably heard that being able to roll in order to deflect impact energy (or just so you don’t hit the ground hard with some part of your body) is of utmost importance. So I tried somersaulting inmidst of running on the soft forest floor. Funny how, becoming an adult, one can totally unlearned doing somersaults. The skin on my right shoulder blade has taken a healthy blue shade by now.

It was fun nevertheless and I’m definitely going to continue this. There also are lots of opportunities for practicing precision jumping and balancing. If I could manage to do a flip over a log or even a backflip against a tree trunk within the next few weeks that would be quite a feat I think