Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Working with Heroku and github for ruby on rails development

This is a little rough, but wanted to record the commands I used and why for some ruby on rails development using heroku as a server and github as the source code repository.


So, create a project on github and add it to heroku.  

Then invite yourself to it:

#Install heroku toolbelt on your local machine.

# copy and paste the invite you get from heroku:
git clone git@heroku.com:yourherokurepository.git -o heroku

#Add your public key to heroku site 

git pull
chmod 0600 /home/homedir/.netrc 
heroku logs -a yourherokurepository

#because we checked it out from heroku we have to add in the github repository as well.
git remote
  >> only says 'heroku'
git remote add origin git@github.com:githubusername/yourherokurepository.git

#after you add and commit changes, push the changes out:
git push origin master ; git push heroku master


#run a local copy of the code for testing:
rails s
:~$ vi testcommands.editme.txt 
:~$ cat testcommands.editme.txt 


#Install heroku toolbelt

git clone git@heroku.com:yourherokurepository.git -o heroku

#Add your public key to heroku site

# make sure you are upto date
git pull

chmod 0600 /home/homedir/.netrc 
heroku logs -a yourherokurepository

#because we checked it out from heroku we have to add in the github repository as well.
git remote
  >> only says 'heroku'

git remote add origin git@github.com:githubusername/yourherokurepository.git

#after you add and commit changes, push the changes out:
git push origin master ; git push heroku master


#run a local copy of the code for testing:
rails s

Monday, June 23, 2014

The Rise of the Intelligent Agent.

In the future, when all the corporations (i.e., the de facto government) are tracking our every movement with AI we are going to need our own intelligent agents that act almost like a 1950's secretary between you and the world. Back then the boss didn't do anything for themselves, the secretary did everything for them, from taking notes, to getting the dry cleaning.

When you want something on the Internet you will ask your secretary and the secretary will cloak itself in a layer of anonymity and go seek out the services and information you want, in a safe and untraceable manner, then return with it.  Of course, all info should be properly filed so that it can be accessed instantly inside "the office."  The secretary would also remind you of birthdays, and send out a newsletter to each of your friends and business associates personalized for each person.

These IA would friend each other at our command and interact directly with each other using insane levels of verification and strong crypto to schedule appointments and exchange messages .

The IA will have to be hardware based, and be able to easily perform levels of crypto that would choke a computer today.  The device should perform voice to text transformations for you, rather than using the cloud, because recording your voice to the web leaks too much info about you to a third party.  It goes without saying that you need to own this hardware device yourself and have full control over it.  It should be able to be instantly and irrevocably wiped at the touch of a button.

This device would act as a onion router and cooperate with other devices of the same type to cloak our identities and guard our actions.  You would post all your messages and social media to this device and only others that you have given access to the information would be able to see the information.  You could finally post your full contact information for your friends and family to see, without having to share the information with a corporation and their advertisers, as you must now.

Every Google search you perform should appear to be from a brand new browser that has never connected to Google before.  These searches and your links should be saved on your side so that you don't have to repeat them very often.  We may want to cycle through a list of search engines to make any patterns we are looking for more difficult to spot.

A device like the Beagle Bone Black, along with a couple of specialized programmable chips to do the crypto and voice recognition would be all we need.  Rooting our phones to put a secure OS and loading a secure OS onto something like a chromebook to operate closely with the device over a heavily encrypted wifi vpn link.

These devices should also perform some sort of private financial services between individuals using a mechanism like bitcoin to ensure that there is a free and open economy even in fascist states that try to control and track every financial exchange.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Hackmaster character manager: charcter attributes.

Character attributes:

There are 7 attributes, each with a set of bonuses or penalties to various gaming abilities.  For example, having a strength of 15.48 would give you the following abilities:

Damage Mod  +2
Feat Str         +7

Lift (lbs.)         245
Carry (lbs.)      91
Drag (lbs.)       613

The various abilities would stack, some attributes adding and some taking away.  These abilities of attack Bonus, Speed, initiative, defense, and damage would combine with your class and  level abilities, special bonuses, talents, racial bonus, armor, shield, and magic abilities for a specific weapon and fighting style in order to generate the weapon rose that is used for combat.

To build out all the abilities I am thinking having one table for all attributes that would have a row for each ability at each different level that the attribute can be.

So for a strength of 15.48 would match the following rows:

attribute  min      max     name      mod
strength  15.00   15.50   damage  2
strength  15.00   15.50   strfeat     7
strength  15.00   15.50   lift          249
strength  15.00   15.50   carry      91
strength  15.00   15.50   drag       613

So every line from the book for each attribute would have multiple entries in this table for all the ability scores.  The table would be queried for every attribute, and all the abilities added up and combined into a single set of abilities for the character with all the modifiers combined.

Ability scores can only change due to leveling up, or purchasing more ability points using build points.  Magic items may modify ability scores while worn, or .  Once we get to the point of allowing characters to join campaigns, then we would allow game masters to award changes to scores based on a set of rules.

Build points are awarded at character creation, for the addition of quirks, and for each new level.

I think that you can assign the order you want the attributes to be increased when you level up, assigning a d20, d12, d10, d8, d6, and d4 to the various scores and this will happen each time automatically... maybe give the opportunity to mod this before the additional values are generated and added to 6 of the 7 attributes.