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Author: Bryant

On schemes

May 15, 2004
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Regarding prisons in Iraq:

“When the duke occupied the Romagna he found it under the rule of weak masters, who rather plundered their subjects than ruled them, and gave them more cause for disunion than for union, so that the country was full of robbery, quarrels, and every kind of violence; and so, wishing to bring back peace and obedience to authority, he considered it necessary to give it a good governor. Thereupon he promoted Messer Ramiro d’Orco [de Lorqua], a swift and cruel man, to whom he gave the fullest power. This man in a short time restored peace and unity with the greatest success. Afterwards the duke considered that it was not advisable to confer such excessive authority, for he had no doubt but that he would become odious, so he set up a court of judgment in the country, under a most excellent president, wherein all cities had their advocates. And because he knew that the past severity had caused some hatred against himself, so, to clear himself in the minds of the people, and gain them entirely to himself, he desired to show that, if any cruelty had been practised, it had not originated with him, but in the natural sternness of the minister. Under this pretence he took Ramiro, and one morning caused him to be executed and left on the piazza at Cesena with the block and a bloody knife at his side. The barbarity of this spectacle caused the people to be at once satisfied and dismayed.”

Secretary Rumsfeld! Ware, ware the knives! Look to your own neck!

The other shoe

May 15, 2004
7 Comments

Six Apart changed the pricing and the license. You can now buy addons to a personal license at the rate of $10 for one additional weblog and one additional author. They have also removed the CPU limitation. Finally, although they didn’t mention this specifically in their update, they’ve changed the credit requirement from one link per page to one link per site.

They have not removed the prohibition against reverse-engineering, the restriction on automatic computer-generated publishing, and it’s still not legal to put a PayPal link on your Movable Type Personal License weblog.

Quick recommendations for others: if you’re doing a one-person simple personal weblog, I’d use the free version of Movable Type 3.0. If you’re an author who uses her weblog to self-promote, I would find a new solution rather than buy a commercial license. If you’re doing a group blog, you’re going to want to move, I think.

The new pricing plan is not a problem for me, both because I can afford to pay a little more than I’d like and because I don’t run a group blog on Movable Type. It is a problem for others. For a personal license, it would make sense to have an unlimited weblog/author option. Mean Dean has an excellent pricing suggestion. Probably a little low, but you could boost the base price for a personal license to $50.00 easily enough.

At this stage of the game, I’m going to wait and see. WordPress is proving a little cranky; it is not a polished product. The biggest blocker for me is that Brad Choate’s version of Textile 2 is slightly more feature rich than the version that comes with WordPress; I’d have to do a lot of hand-tuning on hundreds of entries to migrate to that solution. I’ll pause while I contemplate how unwise it is to use a platform-specific markup solution… OK, done.

I’ll keep fooling with WordPress and other blog solutions, however, because I think at this point I might want to be on an open source platform. It’s safer for me as a user. It’s not, again, that I’m not willing to pay for software — I paid $50 for Movable Type already! On the other hand, now that I’ve dug into the new plugin capabilities, I have to step back a little from my comments about new features. Movable Type 3.0 is exceedingly feature rich from a plugin point of view.

So, yeah, we’ll see what the future holds. A basic Personal License would cover everything I do; I may still want to move to another solution, depending on exactly how many cool new things third-party developers do with the plugin architecture.

WISH 93: Incoming!

May 14, 2004
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I can answer these in any order I want! And I want to do WISH 93 right now.

Does joining a game with a lot of background thrill or intimidate you? What do you do to try to learn the background, or to compensate for not having it? If you GM, how do you help newcomers to a background-heavy game? What has worked for you as a player/GM, and what hasn’t?

I kind of like it as an opportunity to play supporting character. I always feel a bit of pressure, when starting a new game, to help establish group dynamics and character. As a newbie to a big game, I can play a supporting role and feel satisfied — I can be there to support someone else’s characterization happily. That’s a lot of fun for me.

It’s also convenient as a method of getting real newbie characterization. The other PCs know things which mine do not, which means I can play wide-eyed or naive effectively. “Look, there can’t possibly be UFOs.” That sort of thing. It’s a dynamic that’s hard to get in a new campaign because everyone’s on equal ground.

I guess in general I’m saying that it’s fun to leverage unequal OOC ground to provide good unequal ground roleplaying in character.

Licensing

May 14, 2004
6 Comments

So let’s take a look at the new Movable Type Personal Edition license. Not the whole thing, just excerpts. I’ll stick this in a cut so as to avoid annoying all the nice people who’re wondering when I’m gonna talk about politics or gaming again.

Except for one bit which is so funny and sad that I have to highlight it. A number of people are pointing out that we should expect to pay for good software. I completely agree. However, I also believe that software companies should be expected to write reasonable license agreements, and a license agreement that’s violated by a default installation of the software is not entirely reasonable.

You must maintain, on every page generated by the Software, an operable link to http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ , with the link text “Powered by Movable Type”, as specified by Six Apart, unless otherwise stated in the terms included with your copy of the Software.

This is ridiculous. Once I pay $70 for software, I expect to be able to use it without a credit link. I do not have to include a “generated with Microsoft Word” credit on every document I write in Word.

Also, the default Movable Type templates do not include the credit link on pages other than the front page. So just to be clear: everyone who buys the personal edition of Movable Type and installs it will be in violation of the license unless they carefully modify a minimum of ten templates.

On to the other stuff.

Continue ReadingLicensing

More on less

May 13, 2004
1 Comment

Timothy Appnel says, “The delineation between TypePad and MT have become clear with this release — TypePad is for general users wanting to blog and Movable Type is for developers and professional organizations wanting to do more then just weblogging.”

This may be true from Six Apart’s point of view. However, it is not clearly true from the point of view of Movable Type users. I am not a developer or a professional organization; I am a general user who wants to blog. I also want to use Textile and subcategories and threaded comments and so on. Six Apart has provided me with a simple way to add plugins to my blog; they have put that capacity in the hands of semi-technical general users. They have created a user base which will not be satisfied with TypePad as a general blogging solution.

I don’t know if Timothy’s assumptions about delineations match what Six Apart thinks, but if so, it’s going to be important for Six Apart to take a look at the user base and make sure their categories match the real categories.

Disclaimer: I think Six Apart is a good company and I really like their product.

HOWTO: Kick 'em

May 13, 2004
9 Comments

Movable Type 3.0 pricing is, bluntly, horrendous.

I don’t think software needs to be free; I shelled out for Movable Type 2.5, because I thought it was good software and I wanted to pay for it. I also don’t mind paying more for professional versions of the software. However, the new pricing is linked to the release of Movable Type 3.0, which doesn’t feel much like a major version release to me. The important new features, from a user point of view, are comment moderation. That’s not enough to justify a $75 price hike on the basic version of the software.

What’s worse is the limitations they’re putting on the various price tiers. Since there are no major new features in 3.0, they’ve elected to limit the number of authors one can have on a weblog, and the number of weblogs one can have in a given installation. I.e., a user who’s been merrily humming along with multiple blogs and multiple authors may suddenly have to pay $600 to get the functionality they paid $25 for previously.

These aren’t hypotheticals, either. Shelley would need to pay $600 bucks. So would Michael and Ginger. For no significant new features.

Me? $70, discounted by the amount of my previous donation. But I wouldn’t be able to casually fiddle around with new ideas any more. So, yeah, I’m looking at WordPress and Textpattern.

Spinoff comic

May 12, 2004
2 Comments

I got into the Movable Type 3.0 beta the other day, but I had no idea what I would test with. I didn’t want to convert Population: One over since beta code can’t be expected to be stable. And then it hit me — keep my current obsession out of the way of anyone who doesn’t care about MMORPGs.

Accordingly, I give you Population: Heroes. The LiveJournal feed is (or should soon be) popheroes.

McCain's second shoe

May 12, 2004
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Kerry said today that his first choice as Secretary of Defense would be John McCain. Nice move — it’s less threatening to the Democratic base than McCain as VP, and it’s less damaging in 2008 when McCain runs for President in his own right. It also still brings a lot of the advantages that McCain as VP brings.

This could also be a trial balloon to move the McCain as VP idea forward. We’ll see how McCain reacts. Good move on Kerry’s part either way.