Current events

From House of Genius

February 17, 2008

The "Wikidrops" extension is no longer being used.

February 16, 2008

Wiki updated - again

After much research and aggro, I have managed to repair the wiki following the last upgrade (made a week or so ago) to Mediawiki 1.11.1. The previous upgrade left the wiki in an odd state where foreign and special characters did not display, replaced by ugly question marks. It is now fixed.

For those who are interested, the issue rested around version 1.11.1 going to a default UTF-8 character encoding scheme (designed to embrace character sets from all over the world), rather than the older scheme that it previously used. What I needed to do was convert just the mediawiki files, but the underlying MySQL database, from the previous standard to UTF-8.

This was more involved than it might sound. The process went something like this:

Dump the existing database into an SQL file. This was easy - I backed up the database using the hosting company's provided utilities. I ended up with a 40MB .SQL file.
Convert the database character set from ISO-8859-1 encoding to UTF-8 encoding. I did this by going to OS X's terminal app (gotta love the BSD core), and issuing the command
```
$ iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 olddb.sql > newdb.sql
```
Create a new mySQL database with my hosting company.
Import the old database into the new one. Three or four times, figuring out what the error was and then trying to fix it and then figure it out again and so on and so on.
1. First error was a permissions conflict - the backup file was trying to create new database inside the old.
2. Second error was a key-length issue, since UTF-8 characters are three times the byte-size of older encodings. This resulted in moving to a MySQL 5.0.
Install a new instance of MediaWiki, point it at the database, mess with the settings, shuffle files around on my web server, add in something that didn't get into the backup, archive the old wiki, and sit back, immensely satisfied with myself.

November 16, 2007

I apologize for not regularly attending this website. I must admit I have been distracted by the many other things going on in the world (can you believe the hollywood screenwriters are on strike!? ... ok, I tried to care, I really did).

Anyway, I will return this to its rightful place near the top of my "to do" list.

July 13, 2007

A full conversion of Shadowrun 4th Edition to the One Roll Engine rulest has been posted at Shadowrun ORE

July 5, 2007

A full conversion of the Shadowrun 4th Edition rules to the Savage Worlds ruleset has been posted at Savage Shadows

February 14, 2007

Indeed, Nihm is the first non-admin to join the new wiki. In other news, you are no longer asked to use the "footer" feature:

{{Footer}}

When editing a page, since I installed something called "wikidrops," which should put a little "breadcrumb" path at the top of each page, to let you navigate back to the previous pages. It appears to work quite well, and should make getting around the wiki a little easier. Of course, you are allowed to use the footer, but it isn't (and never really was) a requirement.

-the SysOp

February 14, 2007

I am not sure, but I may be the very first non-administrative member to join this new awesomeness. Excellent work, Sysop. It looks like things are going quite smoothly.

-Nihm

February 11, 2007

The migration continues apace. Information from the "Musings" section of the original wiki has not been transferred yet due to security issues and access control questions. However, the site has a funky new logo.

-the Sysop

February 8, 2007

I am currently working to migrate the House of Genius from Xwiki (see the Original Wiki for more info) to MediaWiki, so please bear with us. New stuff will be added, old stuff might be removed or moved to a more secure location, and much will be in flux. If you have something to add, but aren't sure how, visit the Sandbox for tips on editing.

Sincerely, The Sysop

Current events

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