Welcome to Sorcerer's Isle, a weblog covering a multitude of topics, ranging from programming to 3D graphics; photography to gadgets; tutorials to tinkering.
Within Sorcerer's Isle are three sub-blogs, which each focus on different aspects:
At Sorcerer's Tower you'll find programming and web dev; Midnight Isle covers photography and digital art; and with 100% Geek you'll find gadgets, gaming, technology, and more.
Articles may appear on just one of the weblogs, or across multiple, but every article posted will always appear on this one.
It's 1st June 2010 today, and that means we're celebrating for the third time the annual International Regular Expressions Day.
Ben Nadel kicked off this event two years ago, in order to promote the use of Regex, especially amongst those who might consider them something scary and obscure.
As before, Ben is running a contest, this year's prizes being some O'Reily Regex books and IIS Mod-Rewrite Pro licenses.
Entry to the competition requires writing some code, and the deadline is today, so if you're interested then hurry up and read the blog entry to find out more.
This is my new and improved weblog, where I will be posting on a large assortment of topics which I hope you will find interesting. All of the old blog messages have been ported across, and re-catalogued into more useful groupings.
For anyone wishing to read posts only on particular areas, there are three sub-blogs available, which filter the messages from this main blog according to their respective focus. Combined with the ability to subscribe to feeds for individual or multiple tags, it should be easy to get at only the content you wish to read. And to follow all the messages, you can simply read just the main blog.
Currently, everything is still rather basic, but over the next few months I will be adding to, extending and improving the various features that are available, and I welcome any feedback you might have.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy your stay, and please feel free to ask if you have any questions.
If the momentus event this post is celebrating wasn't obvious from the title, here is an even bigger clue:
echo "scale=33;4*a(1)" | bc -l | perl -e'$p=<STDIN>;$p=~s/^(\d)\.(\d)(\d)\2(\d)\d(\d)(\d)\d{3}(\d{2})(\d)\d\d{17}(\d)\d*$/\2\5\1\3\4\6\8\7\9/;print$p'
:)
This weekend Taleworlds have finally released v1.003 of Mount & Blade, an excellent game based primarily around mounted combat.
The game has been developed in shareware form for many years, it has a large following of fans and numerous graphical and gameplay mods, and earlier this year it was picked up by publishers Paradox Interactive, through whom it is now available to buy online and in shops.
Anyone who paid for a shareware version is entitiled to this full release at no extra cost.
Set in the mediaeval world of Calradia, Mount & Blade is an open-ended role-playing game which gives you a lot of freedom - there is no set storyline, and you can choose to do pretty much as you please.
The more exploratary of users may have noticed that the Task Manager in Google Chrome allows you to specify which fields you would like to display.
(The menu for this is on the context menu of the background panel, not the main area of the dialog.)
One of the 234 possible options (yes, I did count them) is the intriguing "Goats Teleported" field, which (when enabled) displays a number that increases at an alarmingly rapid rate.
Where are these goats coming from, and where are they being teleported to? Has anyone even noticed their disappearance?
Today, 1st June 2008, has been officially decreed as Regular Expressions Day.
And in honour of this event, there are a couple of regex-oriented competitions happening.
Ben Nadel, nominator of this great day, kicked things off with a handful of prizes for the best comments: June 1st 2008 - National Regular Expression Day!
The deadline for Ben's competition is today - that is, you must post the comment on (or before) RegExp Day, and the winners will be selected tomorrow.
Don't despair if you miss that though, as Steve Levithan also has a regular expression competition running, and the deadline for that is Friday 13th, almost two weeks from now: Regex Day Contest
Happy Reg Ex Day!
For the next week, I'll be staying in York, wandering around and taking photographs of whatever I find up here.
Each evening I intend to update this post with what happened that day, and show a quick selection of the photos I've taken.
Updated: 9th November
I took my driving test yesterday morning, and passed first time.
Was very nervous and made a fair few mistakes because of that, but managed to hold it together enough to get through.
Once I've got insurance and a car sorted out, I'll be able to go out to more places for my photography.
From the 26th May to 2nd June I'll be in Edinburgh, exploring the city and surrounding areas, and taking plenty of photographs. At the end of the week I'll be attending Scotch on the Rocks, an annual ColdFusion developer conference.
Each day I'll be updating this entry with what I've been doing, as well as including some of the photos I've taken.
Update, Sunday 10th June: Photos Available
I've put a selection of photos into an online gallery, available at photos.bpsite.net/edinburgh
....Transmission Intercepted.... We have obtained confirmation.. *bzzzt* ..e target will be *bzzzt* ...ission in Edinburgh in two months *bzzzzzzzzt* ...ion that the ta... *bzzt* area for the whole preceeding wee..*bzzzt*..nable to confirm the purpose *bzzt*...ngly suspect photographic reconnaisance of the target zone and surrounding are.. *bzzzzzt* ..unable to predict how the targe.. *bzzzzt* ..operation affec... *bzzt* clear which factio.. *bzzt* ..arget will alig.. *bzzzzzzzt* ..d will monitor the target's actions close... *bzzzzt* ....Transmission Ends....