ownage blog

Last day in Hong Kong =(

I AM pondering how to get sackboy designs out of LBP the make sackboys. It’s on my mind. Yesh.

Custom Django Exceptions + Flash AJAX workarounds

Recently had an issue with handling exceptions in a pretty et informative manner.

In addition, some of the Flash widgets on the website weren’t able to parse error messages returned by the server because Flash has a limitation that it will only parse server data on a HTTP 200 response (won’t parse squat for 302, 404, 500, etc). While I was at it, I wanted to make some sexy for my AJAX exception handling too.

So added a Django Middleware to take care of everything. Returns a 200 response for flash, a proper 500 for AJAX with a json response, and a custom rendered 500 for all other requests that are not debug.

class PrettyExceptionMiddleware(object):
	"""
	Exception takes care of pretty 500 server error exceptions as well as formatting exceptions
	properly (with proper error codes) for AJAX and Flash.
	"""
	def process_exception(self, request, exception):
		import sys, traceback
		(exc_type, exc_info, tb) = sys.exc_info()
		
		data = {'type':str(exc_type.__name__), 'message':str(exc_info)}
		
		if request.is_flash():
			return HttpResponse(simplejson.dumps(data)) # flash needs 200 response to retrieve server data

		if request.is_ajax():
			return HttpResponseServerError(simplejson.dumps(data))
		
		# treat as normal request
		if not settings.DEBUG:
			log.debug("error type: %s", exc_type.__name__)
			log.debug("error value: %s", exc_info)
			r = render_to_string('500.html', data, request)
			return HttpResponseServerError(r)
				
		return None

The request.is_flash() is a custom method I added in another middleware that boils down to this:

"flash" in request.META.get("HTTP_USER_AGENT", "").lower() 

Cause the user agent for flash requests is generally “Adobe Flash Player 9 yadda yadda.”

HTH

Keepin it too REAL?

Reblogging this:

A 43-year-old Japanese woman whose sudden divorce in a virtual game world made her so angry that she killed her online husband’s digital persona has been arrested on suspicion of hacking, police said Thursday.

The woman, who is jailed on suspicion of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data, used his identification and password to log onto popular interactive game “Maple Story” to carry out the virtual murder in mid-May, a police official in northern Sapporo said on condition of anonymity, citing department policy.

“I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry,” the official quoted her as telling investigators and admitting the allegations.

The woman had not plotted any revenge in the real world, the official said.

She has not yet been formally charged, but if convicted could face a prison term of up to five years or a fine up to $5,000.

Players in “Maple Story” raise and manipulate digital images called “avatars” that represent themselves, while engaging in relationships, social activities and fighting against monsters and other obstacles.

The woman used login information she got from the 33-year-old office worker when their characters were happily married, and killed the character. The man complained to police when he discovered that his beloved online avatar was dead.

via Yahoo news.

Like we used to say in school…

It’s all fun and games until someone’s avatar gets killed.. then its FREAKIN HILARIOUS

Sorry about the lack of posts recently. One, we’re really excited about what we’re working on so we forget to post. Two, I’m just too lazy to fire up all the software and IP anonymizers required to access tumblr. Three, Twitter is still alive in China so I tend to tweet more often since its easier to access. You can find us here on twitter (http://twitter.com/ownage). I need to add a tweet widget onto my tumblr when I find a good one.

Hehe.. note the positive tense “alive in China.” It’s cause I love China. I want to marry it. Oh keep us alive great fire-protective-wall god. We are harmonious.

Til’ next time~

Added Commenting

Added commenting through Disqus since Tumblr doesn’t support comments by itself. This is a pretty good setup until I find the time to roll our own blogging engine via wordpress install or write our own in Python. Blogging via Proxy is ridiculously slow (takes 5-10 minutes to load each page). We should just move to blogger.. =/

Disqus is pretty slick.. I like the threaded comments and up and down votes a la Digg. Two person company? Color me impressed.

On a side note, the tumblr RSS feeds seem f’ed up at the moment. So subscribe via our FeedBurner if you’re using Bloglines or some other feed reader. Thx!

Gamer RIGHTS... Fight Back against funny EULAs and DRM

Hey slave! Yes thats who you are. You pay to play a game and some companies say that the identities you create are property owned entirely by them.

There was a whole fiasco the last two weeks with the release of the new game Spore. The publisher, Electronic Arts, decided that it would wrap the game up in a license program that would only allow you one install. If you needed to install the game again, even if you went out and bought the boxed CD copy, you’d have to call into the company to get a code to unlock the game to be installed again. This really ticked gamers off and they bombed 2000 reviews of Spore on Amazon with 1 star. People also started pirating the non-DRM hacked version of Spore on bittorrent networks, making it the most pirated game of all time.

What is it that governments, records companies, and game publishers are so afraid of people that they need to overreach their legal control over our minds and our rights? Like we see with the record companies and the RIAA, for every one person they scare/sue into obedience, three people are like “shit, I’m not buying music from them ever again.”

If you find a more fun way to consume the media you bought, you have no right to use it that way or else have to pay more for it? DRM shouldn’t be called Digital Rights Management… its too flowery. It’s like making a burger out of poo and selling it as “The Tastiness.” That’s just wrong isn’t it?

So if anything said here hits home, you should support a Declaration of Gaming Rights: (quoted below)

- Due Process & Habeas Corpus (instead of the usual ban hammer, a player tribunal, perhaps?)

- Right to free avatar expression and assembly

- Non discrimination

- Right to transfer your whole account to another individual

- Compensating users for service outages

- Permitting mashups and fan art

- Welcoming user-created content

Kotaku is also calling for a PC Gamer (Consumer) Bill of Rights.