Ben

13th Age Character Sheet Generator

[Link to my 13th Age Character Sheet Generator] I have been taking part in a 13th Age campaign for the past 6 months or so. It is a really cool system that I would highly recommend anyone interested in Pen & Paper RPGs to check out. As the story of our party has been developing,…Read more

Drools Netbeans Plugin

Having become fed up with Eclipse, I’ve found myself using Netbeans for my day-to-day work more and more in recent weeks. As a replacement IDE for Java development I’m pretty happy with it, though the one thing I found lacking was support for the Drools rule engine. While you can certainly create rule files in…Read more

For King and Country

I recently felt the urge to take some time off from the long-term game project I had been working on for most of this year, so I decided it would be fun to have a little weekend hackathon focusing on a small project. After the recent game-jams I had participated in as part of a…Read more

Replacing the Ubuntu network driver

(Update 10/15/2016: There is now an updated version of the driver package available on Github. Some of the changes described in the following post are no longer necessary) I’ve been running a Shuttle mini PC for the past few years as a low-power Linux server / NAS. All was peachy, until I started noticing that…Read more

Lessons from the Jam

Another April, another Game Jam: in fact, it was time for Ludum Dare 26. After the mixed experience that was this year’s Global Game Jam, I was curious to see if we were able to apply any of the lessons learned. The theme of the Jam was “Minimalism”, which to me personally isn’t so much…Read more

A* Pathfinding with Moai SDK

In preparation of the next gaming jam, I started evaluating Moai SDK, a LUA game framework which gained more widespread recognition last year, when Double Fine selected it to use be used for their Kickstarter adventure game. To get a good idea of a few different aspects of the SDK, I decided to try to…Read more

On Failure

This past weekend, I joined a group to participate in the 2013 Global Game Jam – and all things considered, we failed. But that’s a good thing: while our game did not materialize in the way we envisioned, this coding session taught us a number of valuable lessons on how to make games in general,…Read more

Javascript Canvas Raytracer

Check out this demo I’ve been working on in my free time over the past months. It’s a simple ray tracing engine written in Javascript using the HTML5 canvas element. I’m considering adding support for multiple threads in the future to improve the rendering speed, but the basic rendering is now implemented.

Two-way remote backup using rsync

After a recent hard drive failure, I decided to revisit the backup strategy I employ in my local network. While you can find a lot of different OSS solutions for this these days, I prefer the simplicity of rsync. In the following, I will describe how to use it to set up file synchronization between…Read more

From LDAP to Samba

While my days of system administration are mostly a thing of the past, from time to time I miss getting my hands “dirty” with some real’ Linux work. As was the case when I decided to upgrade my Ubuntu 12.04 LTS box to Samba domain controller. Mainly, I was interested in having a single login…Read more