Once I found a WordPress plugin and a Vim syntax file, I was all set.

What’s more, Ubuntu has a package called python-markdown. I’m not sure whether or not I’ll use Markdown for anything other than blog posting, but on the other hand, it’s awfully tempting to take advantage of this kind of intuitive, powerful formatting.

Yes, I’ve taken a step down a dark path: I’m writing blog posts in Vim, in Linux. Although I use it for coding as often as possible, I’ve thus far avoided it for anything like actual writing.

Still, I think Changeling would be a good challenge for me; I’ve learned a few things, and Changeling is one of those games that’s kind of amazingly open-ended. I mean, there’s a lot you can focus on in any given game. Off the top of my head, there’s changeling politics; changelings’ relationship with mortals, family (incl. fetches) or otherwise; various changeling-specific supernatural stuff; and of course conflicts between privateers, True Fae, and changelings. It’s intimidating, which I’m guessing is why good GMing advice tells you to consider seriously what your players want.

Divine Power comes out soon, as well, if it’s not out already. I’ll have it by next week, I think. Previously, I voiced interest in running a divine-themed game and I’ll confess my interest in D&D in general has waned somewhat. 4th Edition’s system is less invasive in many ways, but I’m concerned about unintentionally performing a bait-and-switch. That is, I feel I might be cheating people if I ran a D&D game with a little combat as I typically include.

A little bit of my hestitation with regard to running new games is this tension between wanting to run a long-ish game and the improbability of actually pulling it off. This is a pretty common complaint among adult gamers, as far as I can tell; it comes with the territory of being an adult. I saw how my first long-ish D&D game nearly died until I forcibly rescusitated for one last session. I’m glad I did it but it sucks that I had to.

Anyway, all that aside, I’m also really excited about Geist. Here’s a brief roundup of interesting things I’ve read about it.

First off, you can see some examples of character creation from some of the White Wolf freelancers, incl. Stew Wilson and Matt McFarland. Also, I’ve been remiss in not keeping up with Matt’s actual play thread, as many entries have become unlocked since I last checked.

Finally, if you have any substantial interest in the game, you owe it to yourself to read Martin Ralya of Gnome Stew’s preview of Geist. He got his hands on a review copy of Geist, and takes a nice, long look at the game.

That’s all for now!

One thing guaranteed to bring on swearing is an OS that’s tanking. Some process sucks up CPU or disk and pulls down the whole OS with it. *nix flavored operating systems make this easier to deal with by exposing OS internals and providing you with tools to process that information.

What’s bothered me until now is that I had no idea how to audit things like who’s using up the most CPU cycles, who’s taking up all the network bandwidth and so on. My rough equivalent was ps -eo c,args | tail -n +2 | sort, wrapped up in a convenience function. I was looking at NetBSD stuff and stumbled across a few tools under the configuration, administering, and tuning section. These tools surely have Linux counterparts, if they aren’t mostly the same.

Of particular interest to me were:

• iostat(1)
• lastcomm(1)
• sa(8)

sysstat appears to be a collection of tools in Linux.

I still haven’t found a good network auditing tool. I suppose wireshark is a viable choice, coming as it does with command line tools. I’ll have to play around— I don’t really want low-level packet dumps, and a list of open connections from netstat(8) isn’t quite what I want, either. I’ll have to play around. And of course if you have any suggestions, feel free to drop ‘em in the comments.