Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Our Minecraft Server part II

See previous post here : Our Minecraft server

When writing the previous post, my first intent was actually to write about what's on our Minecraft server. My introduction turned the whole post to be a sales pitch about what the server is hosted on. MY BAAAAD. So here's what I actually wanted to blog about.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Tutorial to setup Supybot for the easy-to-confuse like me.

Supybot is an awesome and feature rich IRC bot in Python. Today I was setting one up to replace my defunct eggdrop XvORTOR who died with Shellium I revivated it! :D.

The documentation however is a mess of poo that is all over the place including the wayback machine (no one feels like retrieving it and making it available?) which times out 1 out of 3 times. So I am going to make a retard-proof tutorial on how to install Supybot, for the easy-to-confuse/ADHD people like me who get easily confused/overwhelmed, hopefully avoiding a lot of people lots of frustration, hair pulling, broken screens/keyboards, death wishes and a very bad mood.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

The BEST alternative to mIRC, XChat, life and everything.

No, screw XChat, screw mIRC. KVIrc is the real deal.

If I say that I dislike XChat, I don't think anyone will seriously wonder why.
Its GTK interface albeit simple, is ugly and it doesn't have nearly as many features as mIRC has.
Sure it supports Python, Perl, TCL and even Lua, but even then, it sucks because there is no way to easily implement something as simple as automatically responding to a text on a channel without having to make a full blown module or whatever.
I use softwares to use them, not to get off toying with them and trying to make them do what I want like Linux geeks do. To put it simply, I'm more of a Apple girl than a Linux girl. I hate losing my time trying to make things work when my goal is to use them.

mIRC is simple, full of features and the most important, has a really simple scripting language... up to some point. The annoyance comes with its editor, its syntax, its weird string support and ITS COMPLETE LACK OF ERROR REPORT. When you script in MSL, you're pretty much all by yourself trying to figure out what doesn't work in what you wrote because mIRC won't tell you anything. Another thing I have a hard time with with MSL is how it sacrifices clarity, readability and meaningfulness for the sake of """simplicity""" (yes, triple double quotes here.) Okay, a timer in MSL is as short as "/timer 0 8 msg $chan Hello". But then, what the hell are 0 and 8? The names for the default variables, functions and commands in MSL can be so damn meaningless and unintuitive. That makes them very difficult to memorize and that makes it very difficult to know how you can do something in MSL and what MSL can do. Because of this it can also be difficult with more advanced scripts to just pick it up, read it and understand it, unless you know exactly what every meaningless variable/function/command does.

Never underestimate the power of meaningful variables and function names. Damn. It better be too clear than not clear enough.

So?

I won't say mIRC sucks because it doesn't. However, there is better. There is...
KVIrc... c... c...

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Our Minecraft server

Like everyone, I first ran a server on my own computer. The machine I was running it on was a laptop with 1GB of RAM (I made 768Mb available to the server). It turned out to be a failure (obviously). I would lag like crazy and the server could never keep up even though I was the only one connected (durr). I am not even talking about the fact that I have never been able to make any of my computers visible on the Internet even though I forwarded ports and all that shit (even in DMZ it didn't work).

My goal was to run a Minecraft server with plugins like WorldEdit, SupplySigns, etc and my laptop could not even keep up with a vanilla server... At that time I was playing on a friend's server which was running on a machine with 8GB of RAM and was STILL lagging. So I knew I was in for some wallet raping if I wanted to have my own server with mods...

I started looking for dedicated servers...
It quickly turned out to be a "FORGET ABOUT IT!"
DAMN! Those are so &@*$%¤£ expensive!
Rackspace, Godaddy, Hostgator... All over $100/month for 2GB! And that didn't even include the bandwidth and the hard drive space!

So how the hell did so many people manage to host their own servers?

I went and took a look at the MC forums and found... Multiplay.

The servers are hosted on SSDs.
They don't have a storage limit that I know of.
You can have as many maps as you want with MultiVerse.
No bandwidth limit.
Support for Bukkit, hey0, Canary mods.
Their plugin list is HUGE. If you want a plugin that isn't in the list, you can have them add it.
Automatic Backups!
The support is great, be it by tickets or by their forum.

The performance is GREAT!
It's CHEAP!

I run a ton of plugins (some like WorldEdit being very demanding) and 5 different maps with Multiverse.. on 600MB of RAM! It tell you! It's unbelievable! The only slowdown I have noticed is in the map loading time... but that's clearly because of the abusive number of maps I run because I did not notice any slowdown when I only ran 3 maps.

How much do I pay?
I pay 6£/month for 8 connections and 600MB of RAM.

They also have Brink servers, Call of Duty servers, Counter Strike servers, Battlefield servers, Halo Servers, any multiplayer game you can think of, they have it.

Clicky on the banner bellow to get your own server.
They are awesome.


Multiplay Game Servers



Edit :
As I was writing my other blog post "Our Minecraft Server Part II", I noticed that Multiplay is now OFFERING A 50% DISCOUNT (Ouch! My eyes! wtf!) and now offers awesome server badges! :D

Server Banner

Saturday, May 21, 2011

So the rapture happened.

The rapture happened. I saw 2 people being raptured in front of my eyes, plus my grand-ma has been raptured in front of my grand-father's eyes.


We've all been left behind.




Proof, shit started blowing up :





















Oh wait... that looks like a GIANT UPSIDE DOWN COCK'N'BALLS!

It's not actually the rapture... it's the RAPEture. :P


Source : http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504943_162-20065043-10391715.html