I know the domain name is the cheesiest thing ever. BUT… this is the result of me learning that yes, BIND 9 does in fact support wildcard domains.

WorldWars is an extremely old game, though the format has changed a few times each new version, the overall look and function of the game has stayed the same. It’s at least 10 years old, and has been through hell… but somehow survived. The original creator of WorldWars goes by the internet name “Phantom”. He brought this game into the world, and has repeatedly taken it out. He never left the game up and running for longer than four months at a time. Recently, he left for good. I have an old version of the game so I decided to put it online. However, the PHP code is encrypted. I have been able to run the game but it’s full of bugs. We’re able to keep an eye on players using the bugs, but we can’t fix them because the code is encrypted. The main reason we are leaving this game up is because I plan on developing a completely new version of WorldWars. This will be our code, our concepts, our game. We are adding routes to the game, new units, new constructions, new researches, new country names, etc. We are hoping that with this fresh version of WorldWars, that we will attract a large portion of gamers from all over the world.

However, for the moment we’re running this old, beat up, out of date version of WorldWars… and we need more people to sign up for it, and give it a go. This way, we can become known in the internet gaming community.

So to review, WorldWars is:

Text Based. (No 3D dazzle here, guys.)
Browser Game. (You don’t have to download anything, it opens right up.)
Runs on Ticks. (This is when the game updates. We usually do it every 30 minutes.)
Free. (No signup fee, no pay-to-play, but we do accept donations.)
Teams. (This is a group of players who have joined together to protect each other and reach the top.)
Alliances. (This is a group of teams that have joined together to take out rival or dangerous teams.)
5 Different Types of Units. (IN-Infantry, LD-Land, AR-Air, NV-Navy, BU-Building)
3 Different Types of Income. (Gold, Oil, and Titanium, all required for training units and constructing buildings.)

Most of this information was shamelessly stolen from my brother’s MySpace blog entry. He helps me run the game.

I’ve been up all night playing with my webserver. As in MY webserver. At the office building. And I have learned today… that mod_suPHP is a BITCH. From HELL. Not only does Simple Machines Forum not function well without it, I managed to completely fuck up the file and folder permissions on one of my sites today by trying to satisfy suPHP’s Nazi-like requirements… which are a lot like safe mode and I hate it. You have to own the script file and no one else can be able to write to it. Okay… so blanket solution. Change to the root folder of the site and execute chmod -R 644 *. WRONG. I conveniently forgot folders have to have the execute attribute set to be able to list anything in them or directly request a world-readable file in them. (Through some sort of process, you can also conclude that file permissions on a UNIX-based system are also bitches who live next door to suPHP in hell. Windows file permissions, however, have the penthouse in the seventh circle of hell along with Lucifer himself.) So I had to go through all the subfolders and set their permissions to 755. It would have been a lot easier if there were some sort of commandline option to only apply the change to directories. There’s not, so please, let’s frustrate Drew more. After mistyping the chmod command about 383738452475369 times, and that value is slightly exaggerated, all the folders were back to normal and something actually showed up when I visited the site.

It’s safe to say that today has already been quite interesting. I have plenty of work to do and I haven’t had a bit of sleep. Lovely!

I tried to upload that Pidgin installer file to DrewBurden.com, which is on a server at Staminus Communications in California. Either they, one of their upstream providers, or possibly even my own ISP have really been shitting themselves lately. I’ve had nothing but timeouts and disconnections communicating with much of anything. I ended up having to put the installer on a server here in the office building I work in. It’s a really slow connection (384K upstream) but at least I know it works. And besides, when anything is on that server I have a 100Mbps connection to it.

And finally for now, I have put a homepage on DrewBurden.com, essentially rendering the site finished. Of course I’ll still work on it, but you can actually do something there now. For the time being, I have this blog and my Twitter feeds featured on the front page, along with my Meebo room which I think won’t stay long. I’d much rather do a Google Maps mashup showing where I am that day (for when I travel). I could set up a thing where I could send a text message to an email address and it would update the map with my location. That’s something for when I’m really bored.

I just had the strange urge to get get a bag of chips…

geekchat.us: Moved to WordPress.com. You’re reading it, duhhh.
fragforjes.us: Moved. Now it’s on a dinky little server on a cable internet connection in a closet in the office building I work in. This should end well…
podsaferadio.net: Not moved. That’s several gigabytes’ worth of files. I smell a weekend project.
nedrub.com: Down, but moved to the same dinky server in the closet. I just have to find a way to get files.nedrub.com (which is online) migrated somewhere else. People all over the internet link to that thing.
drewburden.com: Not moved, but I have a place for it to go. Will do soon.
All those other obscure domain names I never use anymore: I’m taking them offline.

DrewBurden.com may go offline for a few days soon. That means my apps won’t work, but you’ll survive. I’m also going to Louisville today. I get to take my new car for a nice long drive!

Sorry I’m kinda hard to understand and rambling, I haven’t had sleep in about 20 hours.

I’m done. It’s Friday. Go look out the window and daydream or something.