Author: srittau
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Guildpact Card Wordings
Yesterday the FAQ for the upcoming Magic expansion Guildpact was released. I had a bit of time today and I came across two card wording that I don’t like: The FAQ entry for Goblin Flectomancer says: Goblin Flectomancer {U}{R}{R} Creature — Goblin Wizard 2/2 Sacrifice Goblin Flectomancer: You may change the targets of target instant or sorcery spell. The ability can target any…
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Public Transport in Winter
It’s winter in Berlin. It’s cold and wet. There’s muddy snow. Using public transport during winter is not fun. It’s crowded and you have to wait on cold, windy stations. But today it was especially bad. Returning from university I was waiting at the S-Bahn station Adlershof. First, a passengerless train was passing the station without stop. Some wagons had…
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Ubuntu (Non-)Collaboration
Today I discovered on Debian’s Package Tracking System that Ubuntu has patched my Netatalk package. The patch seems to be rather useful (start cnid_metad in init if the user requests it). I just wonder why it was never submitted directly to me. Isn’t it easier just to take the upstream message than to (re-)sync every time I release a new version? Below…
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Blonde Joke
Normally, I don’t like blonde jokes, but this one is really good! Oh and: Happy New Year! But the really funny thing about this is that I stumbled across it on Planet Debian, a computer-related RSS aggregator. And while following the links, I came across The Ferret’s blog. Ferret is a well-known employee of the Magic web site and…
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Judge Situation in Berlin
Christoph Meise, a level 1 judge from Berlin, complained about the way I portrayed the judge situation in Berlin at the moment. According to him there are more judges that would be willing to judge if they were just asked by the TO. Well, even if counting graciously, I count about 6 active judges, available for larger events, in…
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Good Bye, Amigo
A few days ago, Amigo Spiel + Freizeit announced in their newsletter that they will pass Magic Operated Play (OP) on to Wizards of the Coast, starting 2006. They will continue to distribute Magic in Germany and Austria though. I am a bit sad to see them go. I think they did their job fairly well and I…
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PTQ Honolulu in Berlin and 2-Headed Giant Event
Saturday we had a Pro Tour Qualifier for Pro Tour Honolulu in Berlin. The Extended event took place at the FUNtainment Game Center as usual. Our staff consisted of scorekeeper Huy (L2), Falko (paluschke) from Greifswald (L2), Crille (L2), and myself (also L2 – can you spot a pattern there?). Peter, the store manager, was acting TO. The event…
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Activity Monitor
The Problem Several applications need to know about user activity. This includes screen savers, RSI prevention tools like Workrave, and IM programs (for automatic away message). Currently each program has to implement activity tracking itself. This means that there is no unified configuration, but also that programs like movie players have to resort to hacks to…
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Blog Comments
I’ve finally managed to implement comments for my blog. I’m still playing around with the code and especially the layout, but I think it’s an important step forward. The future will probably bring a few more features, like: Improved layout E-mail notifications for new comments Trackback support
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Standards
Mark Pilgrim posted a great article about the problems of many committee standardization processes. Microformats use a different approach: Design for the common case first, think about corner cases only later.