I’m technically a TA for the course that produced this, so I probably should not play favorites, but semester’s over, and I can’t resist. My favorites for the semester - Elsia and Penguin Adventure, two projects from the CIS 300: Intro to Computer Game Design class.

Penguin Adventure is a cute, quick paced 2D platformer that puts you in the shoes of Tooks the Penguin. The game features amazing artwork and fun music. Unlike most games you would typically get from the game design class, Penguin Adventure has a lot of content, featuring a total of 20 levels, with high replay value.

Elsia is a highly unique cooperative platformer featuring Spike and his sidekick Friday. The cooperative element puts two players on the same machine with one controlling Friday with the mouse and the other controlling Spike with the keyboard. It’s surprisingly fun!

These games were the work of a handful of random Cornell University students in a single semester’s time (14 weeks). Both games were made using the GameX engine, much like GameMaker but requires a ton more programming.

So, I figured, fine, I’m not afraid of code. So I inserted it, edited my stylesheet and even created a little icon for those “gravatarless” individuals. To my dismay, this resulted in everyone being “gravatarless.” Needless to say, I was frustrated. In order to install this fancy plugin, I had to drop in a gravatar folder containing default images as well as a rather large .php file. I opened it up to find that there was actually a lot of code in there and automatically assumed that it’s probably not something I could dissect in a few hours. So I proceeded to the Gravatar website to figure out if they had any solutions.

What I found there was shocking. So this thing that apparently required a plug in consisting of a folder and a .php file with a LOT of functions is really something that can be done in as many lines of code as I had to add to my comments.php file. Even LESS if I wanted the gravatars to always link back to the gravatar website. No plugins required.

So for those of you who use WordPress and are too lazy to install the plugin here’s the simplest form of the code:


<img src=" http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=
  <?php echo md5($comment->comment_author_email)
  .”&default=”.urlencode($default); ?>” alt=”" />


That code displays just the image. Of course I use a much more complicated code to generate the links and default image:


<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) :
$default=””;
if (” != get_comment_author_url()) {
   echo “<a href=’$comment->comment_author_url’
title=’Visit $comment->comment_author’>”;
} else {
   echo “<a href=’http://www.gravatar.com’
title=’Create your own gravatar at gravatar.com!’>”;
}
echo “<img src=’”;
if (” == $comment->comment_type) {
  echo “http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=”
  .md5($comment->comment_author_email)
  .”&default=”.urlencode($default);
} elseif ( (’trackback’ == $comment->comment_type) ||
  (’pingback’ == $comment->comment_type) ) {
  echo gravatar($comment->comment_author_url);
}
echo “‘ alt=” class=’gravatar’ width=’80′ height=’80′ /></a>”; ?>


Just enter in the full path of your default image where it says $default = “” and replace the


<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) ?>


Anyway…I figured if you can accomplish it in the same amount of code in your .php file, why the hell do you need a plugin with a lot of functions to do it for you?

So why are they so good at this witty humor with a voice thing? One theory: every once in a while they have a very short sentence. Seriously.

Sometimes, it’s its own paragraph.

This makes me wish I had a voice in my writing, and was altogether a lot more interesting to read. People have told me that on AIM I sound the way I talk — they can hear my voice in the words I type. I took that as a great compliment. Somehow, that translates rather poorly to blogging. Why? Well, I’m not exactly the most eloquent of people in real life…maybe that’s why I sound unique on AIM. I have a rather suspicious vocabulary, populated with random sounds (erm, durrrr, ugh, pfffft), Canadian spelling (colour), and blatant misuse of words from foreign languages (ano). Somehow, that just doesn’t work in sentence form.

After trying it out extensively on one of my subdomains, I made the big switch. It was smooth. It so smooth I actually felt confident enough to dump my entire Drupal database. Then I came to the startling realization that Gallery2 and WordPress integrate horribly. The access point is this wp-gallery2.php files which drives everything. They don’t support URL rewrites and I had to install two extra modules just to stop getting error messages. When it finally displayed something, it makes my sidebar go crazy. I fixed it with a rather hacky solution. Then comes the motherload of the troubles, I get an error if I have to click any of the links. This is beyond me. I’m baffled. So baffled, I think I’m going to sleep.