The punk label in the middle is really bold . But you can also see a tiny drum and bass too. The most listened artist list is altered due to that I lost some of my DVDs. I’m an album listener, which means I listen to a whole album, than comes the next. Since I listen to last.fm for a year the artists whom I don’t own an album have 30 listens too, and some previously favourite artists have also stucked on the 30 track level, and so they’re missing from the top20 list:

For example there’s no Linkin Park, P.O.D., Papa Roach or NOFX. But Rise Against is really strong on the top, which is my new favourite and Kultur Shock is also there, because I like the wild balkan beats. The artist written with japanese characters is Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, after them comes Flatliners who also play ska and on the 5th place comes Alvin és a Mókusok (Alvin and the Chipmunks) a Hungarian punk band.

Like oil and water. 4 years compressed into some lines and curves. I’m not quite satisfied with that either, it’s too thin and the shoes are lame compared to the other parts. But I thought I share it as a therapy method .

• move my site to the new 150 gigs storage (which sucks, because I have to migrate from Drupal to another CMS, maybe WordPress)
• preparing the new storage to the collaboration effort of the new OpenArena website
• migrate the Young Wind Ensemble of Tapolca site to Drupal
• LilyPond Hungarian translation project
• Hungarian Battle for Wesnoth site development
• (planned) haXe Hungarian translation

That’s all. Every project is open source and a lot of fun .

There had to be one form for the registration of players. The players got randomly sorted into groups and matches got established in the groups. I had to display both the groups and matches. The championship lasts only 4 months, after that the pages will be archived, so permanent content types aren’t needed at all. This kind of module went pretty smoothly, it is much better than the former CCK version was, easier to install, easier to maintain.

But the next one, where registered site members can upload their replays, was damn difficult. Here I went for the new content type, because I wanted comments and ratings etc. I needed a custom file upload method, for which the how-to wasn’t easy to find! The Drupal API doesn’t say a word about how you should validate the uploaded file, actually it is a cross solution from other form validations. Pretty hidden if you ask, found on a user blog.

The other nasty trick was the AHAH form rendering. I wanted to make only one form for two basically different tasks. The user chooses the type from a radio button list and than more fields appear according to the choosen value. Drupal has this built-in, but it’s useless. Why? You need to registrate the new fields by yourself through cache_get and cache_set. Which you can find on another user blog. The method described there failed me, but fortunately he mentioned that he got it from the poll module. So I turned to that module and it was faulty too! A seemingly sound but actually corrupted Drupal installation has wasted 4 hours of my work! If the site displays just fine, why can’t the JavaScript core work just fine too? So a reinstall solved all my problems and finally got my shiny custom upload, AHAH form.

Drupal’s node and hook system is incredibly logical. But as you dig deeper the well-planned hooks turn into nasty hacks which you can only figure out by yourself or by googling wild. Now I plan to migrate another site from my custom php functions to a content management system, but I have doubt if I should use Drupal or not. I even have some plans to make a new CMS in haXe. But free time is, as always a big limit…

While I used the openbox+lxsession combo, XFCE 4.6 arrived into Debian Sid. What a relief! A was using Lenny, but the installation didn’t required much update of the libraries, only 70 megs were downloaded. The experience got a little better, but it sometime still hangs on startup, and there are some bugs here and there, but it works out of the box. I tweaked it a bit, but it required still less time than lxsession. And for surprise after restart it only consumes around 260 megs of RAM. Lxsession too wasn’t lighter, so I remain a happy XFCE user .

With such gaming experience behind me, I decided in autumn 2008, that I try out some clan stuff. I first turned to /taka/ clan, because they had the most Hungarian players, and playing with your own nationality can’t go wrong, right? It turned out, that they went from a Hungarian only to an international clan, but I was welcomed. We played some matches, some good and some really bad. A God and StrikerFred were our heroes, but when we faced clans who had more pro players than us, we were really badly punished.

In the winter 2009, /taka/ was destroyed. Or so did the rumours go, but in reality Zero and ADA (A God) decided to have another name, and the other /taka/ founder Neiji was kicked. The new page was made in january, which is still online, so you can more or less follow the things. All the more experienced /taka/ players just changed the clantag, and everything was the same. SoSo (another Hungarian) formed Hell Raisers Clan, which was regarded as our beta clan. We joined the OpenArena Clan Leage, where we experienced some really serious defeats. And than Zero left the clan. It hit me unaccepted, because he talked earlier that all the clan members have to activate themselves, and than I offered him my help as organizer. And than I thought it is alright, but than he left the clan with a single forum topic.

Ok, I was left alone, I took over every organization things. I talked with SoSo about /HeRa/ Clan, and he just replied that, he’s in eG already, so HeRa doesn’t exist anymore. Cool. Now we made the active HeRa members to eX members. 6502 had a great influence on the clan, he came up with the mentor system, and he pulled it out perfectly. S.Creamer was raised from HeRa to eX in no time, and now he’s a fierce warrior. S.Creamer and Diho was raised in eX, and I’m really proud of them.

Unfortunately we got out of steam, Narses completely and silently turned his back on OA, and OA-CL. There isn’t a true alternative. SoSo and Zero wanted to start another leage on national bases, but it failed as it was borned. The site even had a spelling mistake in its name and it was supposed to be organized by to teenagers who previously left their clan dying? Non-sense. I didn’t organized matches, because we didn’t want any serious defeats again, but it was quite hard to organize trainings. There were problems with one HeRa member, we lost some flags because of him, and than came the match against oaHUN. I think it was the final blow. The oaHUN members aren’t good except SteveFox, but we were owned. After that 6502 asked: “What are we, if we suffer from oaHUN too?” Yeah, we are nothing.

After some levitation in the void, there came some new members. Stalker and Tobey. Stalker is a great player, he was by K/M, Tobey is infamous in the scene, but he had some tremendous skill improvements. Zero and even Stalker said that they can easily beat Tobey, but he actually beat all the eXes, and some oaN members too. Maybe something is fishy, but I didn’t care ’cause he fragged on our side. He still has some huge ego, which no one can stand, and actually after threatening me three times that he will leave us, he finally left the clan when I left it too. After Stalker and Tobey was in, another German soldier stepped in: w33d. And a guy named j0nas, from Sweden if I’m right. Now we had the skilled members, we even kicked Evil’s butt, everything was perfect. Even the OA-CL was back.

Or at least it seemed so. Because Narses left without a word, Geroj, the other admin took over things. Better said he didn’t take over anything, he just gave admin rights to K/Maiji/M. Maiji is Stalker’s schoolmate so they solved the clan not only in Germany but in the neighbourhood. Some of the other clans didn’t like it at all. And now with 6R, eG and uM having a full objection against the leage leading it won’t get nowhere I’m sure. And that was the point when I said: no more, thanks.

I decided to leave on Monday, and now on Thursday I can surely say the OA-CL leage is dead. The OA-CL servers are down, and will never again come back. Some say that Maiji and Stalker killed the leage, but it’s not true. Narses and Geroj killed the leage. They could save it while they knew every player and every helper in the leage, and they could choose the person everyone would accept. They didn’t. The other clans didn’t accept the new leadership, and instead trying to convince Geroj about that, they left it dying. Maybe they will create a new one, who knows.

Compared to that I just simply wanted to play OA in a clan, I caught myself being a lone clanleader for two months. S.Creamer and 6502 can’t play because of their jobs (though S.Creamer got an invitation from eG), Diho left OA entirely, then came back just to join SOD (former oaHUN) and ADA was put in an inactive state after playing months seek and hide, and now he has gone mad. The old team was gone, and the reason fighting for a new one is gone too. Stalker didn’t want to be co-leader anymore, due to the voices which echo lies through the community. Everything depends on StrikerFred. Not the best moment to give over the clan, but if it dies off completely I won’t have a hard feelings about it.

I will be still around on the servers, but don’t waste your time inviting me to clans. I only have time for one-or-two frags, not any more. OA right now doesn’t deserves time to be taken away from something else.

But the new desktop menu was working, the session manager noticed the non-responding apps and lot of plugin improvements were there! But it was slow. The one out of the two reasons is gone. The XFCE team is walking a path to get closer to GNOME, they have a settings daemon, they use gstreamer and they will port thunar to gvfs. It’s not bad actually, because the GNU system is fragmanted as hell, some co-operation and standardisation comes handy. But it’s not the Cholesterol Free Desktop Environment any more. And it’s time for me to move on…

The next stop is LXDE. The Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. Modular approach, little dependencies, sounds good. But I wasn’t fully satisfied. First Debian got the GDM with it, which is quite useless for me, because I already had some other autologin and xstarting method. So no thanks! And the panel is just ugly. It has no padding between the icons, adding space between the elements is not an accaptable solution. But it’s fast as lightning, and it’s elements can be used separately. I think it will be more mature with time, but now I don’t really like it.

If the most barebone desktop environment won’t do the trick, your only alternatives remain the different window managers. I tried Fluxbox. I thought it would be cool to be a real Linux nerd with a pure desktop, but I realized it’s not for me. But it gave me a great idea. What if I would combine some different elements to mix the perfect environment for myself? Like Fluxbox too needs some other apps, LXDE’s apps can be combined too.

So here is my magical mixture: openbox, lxsession, fbpanel, pcmanfm. Lxsession is essenial to have some logout, shutdown, autostart functionality, openbox don’t has any bonus features I don’t need, fbpanel looks nice and pcmanfm provides desktop icons and wallpaper. It turned out that lxsession don’t really needs GDM to handle the session, so I got rid of it, I installed some configuration tools, some configurations by hand, some autostart applications, and an xcompmgr to give nice shadows which I liked so much back in Xfce. It required a whole day to figure out all this, but now I got a nice desktop which boots up in 51 seconds. (In comparison to LXDE from Lenny repo: 55s)

And yeah of course the screenshot:

Update: I actually figured out, that lxpanel is based on fbpanel, but it got improved. So fbpanel is out lxpanel is in.