Spodding

I have just spent almost the entire weekend trying to upgrade the One Ring to use phpBB3. What a nightmare!

The new forum software provides a very good conversion utility that seems to work extremely well, except for one fatal flaw – it is so memory and cpu-intensive that it would drag our server’s performance down to a snail pace. So naturally our hosting company refused to let me do it. After several email exchanges, in which they completely failed to understand what I was talking about (despite giving them the actual configuration settings they need for their apache servers), I gave up and decided to download everything to my laptop and run the conversion there.

Yes, my Toshiba laptop can handle this, when their gazillion terrabyte servers can’t!

So, painfully extracting the data 2MB at a time table by table, I managed to import it onto my laptop and run the conversion process. It took a while, but it worked flawlessly. So far so good!

Uploading it back to the website again in small chunks, I managed to import it into the database without any hiccups. Except that the system stubbornly decided it would just not work. The theory was fine: the data was in there, all users, posts and messages were uploaded, but the website just completely failed to work. After doing this for 12 hours on the trot (not to mention the 16 hours over the past week backup up files and databases and previous installation attempts), I’d had enough.

Besides, I had to go out to dinner – my 22nd wedding anniversary. It was a wonderful dinner and my wife looked stunning, but she kept telling me I seemed “a bit distracted”. No kidding darling.
And then at about 2 in the morning I woke up with a horrendous headache and was sick as a dog. I slept fitfully until 1:30pm when I finally dragged my sorry butt out of bed in search of coffee.

While sitting there feeling like crap, I had a thought about what the problem with the site was. I needed to flush the cache (I think the word ‘flush’ might have triggered the thought), so I found the cache and deleted it and lo! the site came back to life. A quick recalc of some stats and a check of the forum’s permissions and it seemed to be all working. So hopefully, I managed to actually do what I set out to do this weekend.

The big tasks are still ahead of me, but at least the site is safe and a bit more secure from hackers.

Now I just need my stomach to settle a bit.

I just received some photos from Nic and John at Eureka Miniatures of the table setup for the Jurassic Reich game at Little Wars back in May. These are much better shots than I could achieve and so, with their permission, I’ve posted them here for all to see.

I’m really pleased with the way that the table came out and the minis looked superb on the countryside.

These guys have been staring at me for the past few months with their big dead eyes, pleading to be painted. I have around 50 Nazi zombies waiting for me to find the time to give them the attention they deserve. The zeds are for the game “Incursion” from Grindhouse Games (link there’s a down below) and, together with the power-armoured GIs from the Lucky 7th and some British MI13 operatives, form the bulk of my current painting backlog. So far I have 6 models painted out of a total of 68 for this game. Damn! Not even 10%.

Ok, guys, you’re up next!

Who wants to be first? Sarge? Ilsa? Or will it be Lt Murphy? This is my current mission in life, reduce this backlog to something more respectable, perhaps even zero!

PS, Welcome to ‘fuzzywauzzy’ – our latest follower.

Just took these off my camera – apologies for the delay. I was somewhat busy on the day itself and so didn’t get around to as many of the tables as i would have liked. I really wanted to chat with the fellow who brought in the Lord of the Rings table – his work is astounding and highly inspirational.

The big day has come and gone. The dice have stopped rolling and the tables have been packed away for another year. This year’s Little Wars was everything I had hoped and expected it to be – packed with people exploring new games, having fun, rolling dice and coming away with a swag-load of goodies that they have to explain to their wives.

There were some wonderful games on display – amongst my favourites were a superb Martian game using Eureka’s Pax Limpopo range, some stunning scratch-built Martian walkers, and the G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T ruleset. Another visual feast was a Lord of the Rings game with a wonderful Corsair’s ship as the centrepiece – the person who brought this along has consistently outdone himself each year and this was no exception. And then there was a fabulous little game of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” using a simple ruleset that recreated the poem line by line. And there was even a Flashman figure along for the ride! And lastly, there was a stunning table of Dad’s Army recreating the village of Walmington-on-Sea.

Fantsastic work by everyone involved. The organisation of the day was excellent and the whole thing ran without any significant hiccups – well done and my deepest thanks go to Ara, Mike and Nic for organising such a superb convention, and to the Nunawadding and League of Ancients clubs who helped out so ably on the day. Man it was great!!!

Thanks to the folks who came up to me and said they’d been following the table’s development on the blog. It was great to meet you all and have a chat. Thanks go to Kosta who sculpted such wonderful figures, without which the game would have never taken place and to Tom, the incredibly talented man who painted a ridiculous number of figures in such a short space of time.

And lastly, thanks to Nic Robson and Greg Hallam, two of the best guys I could hope to have as friends.

Here’s some pictures from the playtest session:

More to come…

The castle is packed in the boot and the table is assembled ready for strapping to the roof of the car. It’s finished* – with about 2 hours to spare! The road trip starts at 7:30am tomorrow and I should reach Ballarat around 3:00pm where I’ll be stopping for the night and then driving on to Melbourne the next day. It’s around 800km I think, a big trip to do on your own, especially with a massive game table tied to the roof.

Should be able to blog a while on the road, and will definitely have some photos of the assembled table and the painted armies on Saturday.

Wish me luck!

A recent reconnaissance flight over Nazi-occupied France captured an image that immediately sparked interest amongst the Allied High Command. The following document is considered “Most Secret.”

Check out the dossier compiled by our man in the field for more photographs: Jurassic Reich Blog

The big day is drawing near (a week and a half to go), but the castle is taking shape very nicely now. I’ve finished sculpting the cliffs and there’s very little actual construction that needs to happen now – it’s just the remaining painting that needs to be done and filling in some gaps here and there. Oh, and finish off the river and waterfalls.

Here’s the latest photos:

Time is running out to get this done in time, so I switched into “Full Panic Mode” and drew up a project plan listing all of the tasks I had remaining and an estimate of the time I need to complete each one. I then worked out how much I can work on this each day and mapped out exactly when it will be finished by. According to the plan, I’ll be a week late.

The final few weeks will be a blaze of glory as I burn myself out trying to get this done. I had to swear to the missus that I would never take on a project like this again!

Here’s some photos:

Work is progressing at a pace now that panic has set in.

I have almost finished the farmyard, just need to do some windows and doors and finish off the thatching on the small shed. The dino lager is my project to complete over Easter, and by then I should also have a substantial amount of the cliff faces done too. After that, it’s a case of paving the castle courtyard, doing the roof and upper storeys, filling the river with water, and finishing off the various painting and flocking tasks.