Yay, it’s done. Chaos in the Old World is fully painted now – in other words, the minis don’t look completely out of place on the awesome game board anymore.

My apologies in advance for the somewhat bad-quality pictures – my camera is not that awesome. I’m sure you’ll notice the color bleed from the minis to the white background.

Tzeentch Demons

I painted the Tzeentch ones first. Partially because, as I said before, it’s the one I like best in the board game at the time being, but also (admittedly) because I imagined the Horrors would have to be somewhat easy to paint – mostly a drybrush job.

Lord of Change, Back

The Lord of Change on the other hand was tougher; I wanted his robe to be white-ish with blue hue, with the inner bit being darker than the arm pieces, and there were all the gold details. I added highlights by washing the lower edges of some trims with black, and it seemed to work out well – I continued that with the other models.

Finally, the Warp Stones (green-yellow stuff) took a bit of time and quite some iterations to get right. I wanted these as close to the game’s tokens as possible.

Slaanesh Demons

Next, I painted the Slaanesh demons. Arzo, my wife, pointed out that the Demonettes weren’t purple enough at first, so I washed their corsets or whatever-that-is with purple. I took some care to make the claws of the Keeper of Secrets a different purple than its (more pink) body, so they’re clearly distinguishable.

I’m not absolutely happy with the way the Demonettes‘ bodies turned out. The color is fine as it is, but the drybrushing strokes are too clearly visible, particularly to their left (as seen from the front).

Khorne Demons

Khorne came next. I googled a bit for the exact coloring of the Bloodletters; I didn’t remember the exact color of their horns. Turns out I couldn’t actually possibly remember it, as there’s all kinds of variations between red and black horns. Still, inspiration was a good thing, it made me color them slightly more orange to try and get some of that “hellfire” feeling.

While painting these, I had to resist the urge to stand up and shout something along the lines of…

Blood for the Blood God!

Nurgle Demons

Finally, my favourite Chaos God, Nurgle. Lots of details on these models, with all the worms and blains and all – another reason (apart from me wanting to save the best for last) why I took them last, after having warmed up. The skin of the Plaguebearers took quite some layers until I was happy with the sickly-rotting green-brown mix.

Note how the Lepers, the Plaguebearers and the Great Unclean One all share the green base color, but have different color nuances themselves – giving a coherent picture while maintaining distinguishability. At least that’s what I tried to do

Are you painting minis as well? Any comments or suggestions?

I have this new board game, Chaos in the Old World. And even though I still haven’t painted the last ones of my Doom demons, I started painting stuff for this one, for relaxing between sprees of working or learning.

The cultists are already done:

Cultists of all Chaos Gods

I’ll upload the pictures to Board Game Geek as well of course. Here’s a few mug shots of each of the four groups:

Khorne Cultists

Bloodsworn, the cultists of Khorne, the Blood God. He mostly lusts for battle, thus cultists (who do all the corrupting and pillaging for the gods) aren’t as interesting to him. Since the game really plays differently with the different gods, this means that it also provides less cultists for him (and more demons to beat stuff up with).

Nurgle Cultists

Lepers, the cultists of Nurgle, the Lord of Pestilence. Interestingly, he does most of his victories through corruption, which in turn is the main purpose of the cultists in this game – and he has less of them than Tzeentch. Ah well, he has more and cheaper demons instead. Nurgle hits a soft spot for me, I always loved his fluff. My all time favourite Chaos God

Tzeentch Cultists

Acolytes, the cultists of Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways. He’s the god of magic and intrigue, a control type character. So I think the mage style robes work pretty well. The demons will be in a lighter blue. Tzeentch has most cultists, and he teleports them around the board in a pretty unpredictable way. Currently my favourite god to play in this game.

Slaanesh Cultists

Seductresses, the cultists of Slaanesh, the Prince of Pleasure. It is interesting how these are the only cultists that are supposedly female. Not sure why “Seductors” wasn’t chosen. I added another layer of light (purple mixed with white) drybrushing here after thinking they looked too similar to the Tzeentch ones (before trims), I think they’re much more obviously purple now and it really brings out the detail in their robes.

Teaspooned Tzeentch Cultist

Interestingly, what took me longest with these cultists are the little trims around their hoods and sleeves; they’re just so tiny that it’s a lot of work to get these right. To the left here, you see one of the Tzeentch ones in a teaspoon for size.

The demons and greater demons will be next, I’ll do those one god at a time. With the cultists, I thought it made most sense to paint all of them at the same time: The steps I took with each of the Chaos god’s deluded followers were very similar, even though I tried to make them convey different moods through more vivid (Slaanesh) or muted (Nurgle) color schemes. Since the demons look really different for each faction, that approach really doesn’t make sense for them.

This blog here was quiet for quite some time now. I plan to write again, now that my diploma thesis is finished – it’s with the Professor now. I will most probably publish it here, too. Examns are incoming in March, finally, after way more than enough time studying. And, we’re getting a baby, yay

I am not certain whether I will keep the Politblog. Maybe one of the reasons why I didn’t feel like posting anymore was that it started feeling too much like work. What do you think? Should I keep it?

So, this was one of my first “dear diary” blog posts in this blog. Back to more interesting more random subjects again soon

I’ll make a post soon, comparing Ruby on Rails to C# with ASP.NET MVC, but this here is atomic and might be of help for one or two readers.

If you want to set and get properties in C# in a type-agnostic way, these are the functions you want to put into a library class somewhere (or, as I did, into the class that uses them):

private object getProperty(object containingObject, string propertyName)
{
    return containingObject.GetType().InvokeMember(propertyName, BindingFlags.GetProperty, null, containingObject, null);
}
 
private void setProperty(object containingObject, string propertyName, object newValue)
{
    containingObject.GetType().InvokeMember(propertyName, BindingFlags.SetProperty, null, containingObject, new object[] { newValue });
}

That’s all I will say on this subject.

In the recent weeks, I have gotten quite a bit of not-quite-but-nearly-totally-spam-that-duisguises-really-well. As a result, I removed my DoFollow plugin.

But I don’t really like that solution.

I think I might change my approach and make a new commenting policy rule. A quite simple one at that: Every comment that uses some kind of product name as their “name” will be deleted (also those who were made before today), no questions asked, and I re-establish the DoFollow plugin.

I can always delete the links that lead to sites I don’t want to support afterwards, although I’d of course need to introduce an explicit disclaimer for that as well. (Luckily, my current disclaimer reads “I reserve the right to delete spam as I see fit, even if it’s handcrafted”, so I won’t break any promises if I delete things that are spammier than I like retroactively).

On the other hand, I really love your contributions, and I really don’t want to make contributing with comments harder than it apparently already is…

What do you think? How do you handle that kind of thing in your own blog(s)?

As you may or may not have noticed, I now have a second blog: haslos Politblog. I decided I’d want to blog about Swiss politics from time to time as well, and with this blog being English only and having a global rather than Swiss target audience, these subjects didn’t really fit in here.

Politblog

So I went and started a second blog. Finding a theme and installing WordPress was one thing, but how do you tie those things together? And while we’re at it, why not add stuff like the Twitter feed or Delicious bookmarks? And why not make a mini-tutorial out of it? (That idea actually wasn’t mine, thanks @knowLED!)

When looking at easy ways to create such a mashup for a portal site, I stumbled upon the Google AJAX Feed API, and was amazed. Essentially, it does everything we need, in a format that’s incredibly easy to style with CSS. The higher-level FeedControl class is easy to use, and does exactly what I need: display a collection of feeds in <div> elements.
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Well, my comment at the Thesis blog is “awaiting moderation” for over 2 weeks, so I guess it won’t happen anymore. Unsurprisingly so, I might add. The folks at Thesis are apparently, essentially, doing illegal things. The only reason why they can do it is because nobody sues them.

First things first: WordPress themes are GPL. Necessarily, the PHP code (although not the CSS or image elements of a theme) has to be, since it is based on WordPress’ GPL code, GPL. Legal wording:

The PHP elements, taken together, are clearly derivative of WordPress code. The template is loaded via the include() function. Its contents are combined with the WordPress code in memory to be processed by PHP along with (and completely indistinguishable from) the rest of WordPress. The PHP code consists largely of calls to WordPress functions and sparse, minimal logic to control which WordPress functions are accessed and how many times they will be called. They are derivative of WordPress because every part of them is determined by the content of the WordPress functions they call. As works of authorship, they are designed only to be combined with WordPress into a larger work.

Speaking of our specific case of Thesis again, the logic is probably less sparse than in your everyday theme, but every other word except “sparse” fully holds, so I guess it’s not that exceptional in this regard. Or can anybody with legal training assist me, am I wrong there?

The guys at Thesis now go and forbid owners of Thesis to remove the backlink to the Thesis site. I appreciate that such a backlink is a great marketing and SEO measure, but I don’t see the legal grounds for such a thing really. They can certainly sell push-style upgrades, and the images they provide with the theme, and of course their support and forums. But the theme itself seems to be necessarily open source, so the Thesis pricing model seems to need re-evaluation.

Edit 2009-07-19 16:20: Just do clarify, unless I am mistaken they can certainly ask money from people for the theme – there are no limits for monetizing distribution in the GPL. However, they don’t seem to be allowed to restrict people’s rights to redistribute and alter the theme.

Particularly in the Swiss blogosphere, with the recent Thesis craze, I think this is fairly important information. What do you think? Or did I misunderstand some legal background?

So, I got MySQL to work for my Ruby on Rails development environment. Let’s be clear about what I actually wanted:

• Ruby 1.9.1
• Rails 2.3.2
• Any version of MySQL whatsoever
• Any way whatsoever to make my up-to-date Ruby on Rails talk to that MySQL

I don’t care what version of MySQL. I don’t care if I have to force platforms for Gems or recompile or whatever. I never did care, and I’ll happily even dig through code to make manual changes before compiling or what-have-you. What I do care about is actually getting this to work, so I can finally stop tinkering and start doing something productive.

Well, I learned a lot on my way there. I had a glimpse at how extconf.rb works (because I had to figure out correct parameters), I dug through rails sources to find errors that you don’t even want to know about, had another good look at makefiles, and generally tried to understand what exactly didn’t work.

Also, there is a more efficient way to do this, as pointed out by Luis in the comments. Thanks!

So, in the end, it now works

This tutorial blog post on Code Elite was very, very helpful. So were Luis comments here and elsewhere (although me being quite the newbie when it comes to gcc and the likes, they went a bit over my head).

The Code Elite post is not the best at being copy-paste-able though, the formatting kinda ruins that. It does point out the correct steps to getting MySQL to work in Ruby (and consequently, Rails).

Long story short, these are the steps that lead to a working MySQL integration:
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