further prisk enhancements

imagine a world map. now show me on the map where china is - easy, uh? where is irkustk? tougher, isn't it? but it remains a region which exists in our world... now imagine we have another map in front of us... a map named godstorm for example... where is thule? or poseidonis?

those questions aren't rethorical, when playing prisk. because, when you exchange 3 cards to get reinforcements, you also get bonuses if you exchange a card representing a country that you own. and if it's easy to check at a glance if you own china when playing classical risk map, it's another challenge to locate thule on godstorm map.

therefore, i'm glad to introduce latest prisk version (3.101510, currently on its way to cpan). in the card window, one can now double-click a card, and this will highlight a country on the big map. this way, you'll know exactly which card to exchange (or what country to invade) in order to maximize your reinforcements. happy invasion!

(remember that i'm always welcoming code contribution or new translations)

new continent window for prisk

some further enhancements to prisk: latest version got a brand new continent window, listing the continents, their bonus, and who owns the countries. it also highlights when a continent is totally owned by a player. it is also updated during the game, when players gain and loose countries.

without further ado, here's a snapshot of the new shiny feature:

also new in version 3.101430, the ability to run prisk directly from the checkout. previously one would need to run "dzil run ./bin/prisk" since file::sharedir requires a fully built + installed distribution before finding its stuff. now, prisk detects if it's running in a local checkout, and will bypass file::sharedir.

the code is on github where you can fork it: patches and translations welcome!

mst lost his ironman status

as said on his blog, mst lost the ironman competition. i wonder how many of the early joiners still retained their ironman status. i still should be in the competition (although really hard at some times), even if there's no way to tell since the ironman app isn't updated since quite some time.

anyway, i get to cast my vote. i don't really care the hair colour, but the talk bit is more interesting. before you guys start submitting ideas such as why php/ruby/python is far better than perl, remember that:

1. mst started the challenge to help perl get known. finishing by forcing him to praise another language seems to be against the rules. not even speaking of this not being very classy...
   
2. the talk will be heavily advertised (at least in the perl community). are you sure you want to offer such a gallery for another language?
   

so i'll cast my vote on a what i will do to advertise perl even more this year talk - hoping this will motivate mst to start another initiative to help promote perl^[0]. i'm open to any other talk subject in the same vein. and i'm ready to trade my colour voting^[1] for you to vote for such a topic. :-)

so here's my vote, mst!
in the meantime, this does not preclude you to continue blogging...

[0] of course, mst can game the talk by showing a single slide with "nothing" on it, but, that, again, would not be very classy. and mst would not settle on such an easy end, would he?
[1] for the pink or orange fans around there

games::risk speaks your language!

well, maybe not yet, but very soon - as soon as you'll contribute the translated strings! :-)

those days, i feel like working on prisk, the risk clone that i wrote in perl. i added full internationalization, and contributed the first foreign language (french, as you may have guessed :-) ).

you can contribute translations for your language by forking the project, and then sending a pull request with your changes. it should be quite fast, since it only features 73 strings to translate. you know what to do... :-)

note that i also fixed a crash that was appearing sometimes during game startup. i'll now try to find some time to work on bigger topics, such as sanitizing the whole codebase, or adding features...

is cpants down?

since some time, i did not manage to reach cpants... i don't seem to be the only one, so does anyone know what's going on?

perl status for mandriva 2010.1 (version freeze)

it's that time of the year: next mandriva version is due beginning of june, which means all updates are on hold - unless they solve a bug or any other problem worth fixing.

on the perl front, mandriva 2010.1 will therefore ship:

• perl 5.10.1 (5.12.x has been postponed to 2011.0)
• padre 0.60
  
• parrot 2.3.0 and rakudo 2010.03
• ... and 1912 dists from cpan!
  

as always, if you miss a perl module, just drop a note (in the comments, or a mail, or on mandriva bugzilla) and i'll package it for you.