Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

Creating ”The Perfect Day(s)” in Majora’s Mask

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This post contains spoilers for the game Zelda: Majora’s Mask (3D) and the movie Groundhog Day. If you haven’t played the game or watched the movie, you really should.

In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays an a**hole tv weather man stuck in a time-loop, forced to repeat the same day over and over again. He eventually breaks free, basically by realizing that since he repeats the same day time and time again, and thus has the ability to know everything there is to know about anyone in the small town in which is he is forced to roam, he has the ability to learn all that’s needed for him to help everyone have an as good day as possible. In the end he tries to create ”the perfect day”.

In Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D (and the old N64 version) Link is forced to relive the same three days over and over again. As I play the game I help a lot of people with different things and I am rewarded in various ways, mostly with ”pieces of hearts” or masks. (Most of the helping of these people is done in ”side quests”. Not essential to the completion of the game.) The people I help are happy but once time resets their perils are back. I don’t need to help them again since I’ve already got what I need, but as I immerse myself in the game I have a hard time not feeling sorry for them as their problems come back.

As I think I’m getting closer to the end of the game I’ve gotten the idea to try and create a ”Perfect Day”, or more like three perfect days, for the inhabitants of Thermina. It will likely not change anything about the ending of the game but I will feel accomplished and happy if I managed to do it. The idea is to help as many people as possible with whatever I’ve helped them with in past run-throughs, before I finally head into the Clock Tower and whack Skull Kid.1 I know I will not be able to help every single person in the game in need of help, in a single run-through of the three days. I’ll have to make some prioritization.2

I’m currently in the middle of a trial run for this. In previous rounds I have finished all four temples so technically I could head for Skull Kid right now and finish the game. Still, I’d like to help some more people first and hopefully add them to my list of participants in the ”Perfect Round”. This round I’m trying to help the star-crossed lovers Anju and Kafei by retrieving the Sun Mask that the thief stole from Kafei. This is a quest that I have not completed before.

For this round I’ve made the following list of things to do and people to help. (Checkmarks indicate what’s already done this far in this round, around midday of the first day.)

People to help

Things to do

  1. I think facing Skull Kid is the way I’ll take the game to an end, but I don’t know for sure. ↩
  2. Perhaps a more skilled player than me could actually help every single person in need of help in one run-through. Perhaps not. ↩
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House of Cards

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Ikväll har Linn och jag äntligen börjat titta på ”House of Cards”. Jag misstänker att vi kommer gilla den serien rejält så småningom men nu, efter ett avsnitt, känns det förvirrande med många gubbar med dolda agendor hit och dit och väldigt oklart vad någon egentligen vill.

Fördelen med att börja att se en sån här serie ganska sent är att nu har vi tre hela säsonger att se innan vi måste börja vänta på nytt.

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When atp (atp.fm) talks about audio equipment I realize how car professionals must’ve felt about Neutral.

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Men varför i helvete sitter jag och läser en text från Aftonbladet Kultur, om Niklas Svensson?

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Replied to Found the Super Nintendo. Anyone up for a game of Super Mario World? (david.shanske.com)

I’m up for Super Mario World anytime!

(This is mostly a test to see if I’ve gotten WebMentions to work on my site.)

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Karaktären Gunvald Larsson är verkligen den värsta sortens knogsläparsnut. Precis en sån idiot som absolut inte ska vara polis.

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Finns det någon Thunderbolt-docka som inte kostar skjortan och femtio? USB, DVi/HDMI/DisplayPort och Ethernet är allt jag begär. FireWire är trevlig bonus.

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Idag lyssnar jag för första gången ordentligt på U2s *No Line on the Horizon* och måste säga att den är ganska bra. Grymt elbasljud!

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WordPress’ Link Manager might be really powerful

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Just a quick note before I head to bed. In a comment to a post I linked to earlier Andy Sylvester points out that WordPress’ ”Link Manager” (aka ”blogroll”) could be used to generate an OPML file.

Per this WordPress support page, you can type in a URL like the following and see the blogroll or links of a WordPress weblog in OPML format:
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/wp-links-opml.php
http://andysylvester.com/wp-links-opml.php

To me this seems like a more or less forgotten and highly downplayed feature of WordPress that could be really, really powerful.

I’ll get back to this subject eventually.

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Installing River4 on Ubuntu

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I just installed River4 on a headless Ubuntu server. Unfortunately it was not as straight forward as it was installing it on my Mac.

If you’re trying to install River4 on Ubuntu, please read this whole article. Don’t do things as you read. Reading it in its entirety will likely spare you some headaches.

Dave Winer, the creator of River4, has an easy to follow guide on how to install River4 on a Mac. To install it on Ubuntu you need to be able to wing it a bit.

The first order of business for me was to install Node.js. I tried to do that simply by running

It seems to work fine so I uploaded the River4 files via my FTP-client of choise. I then navigated to the River4 folder and tried running

And hit a big snag. It turns out installing Node via apt-get does not install NPM. So I tried

Okay, NPM got installed and I tried npm install once again. Still no luck. NPM itself ran but couldn’t download the specified packages.

After doing a bit of searching I found a Stack Overflow post that instructed me to change the way NPM got its data. I managed to do that and it seemed like the install process got further but it still ended up failing, now with and error message telling me my version of Node was too old for River4.

WTF?!? I just installed it. How can it be too old?

Well, after som more searching I found an article titled Node.js v0.12, io.js, and the NodeSource Linux Repositories. I did not read every word of it but the gist of it is that the latest versions of Node is not accessible via apt-get(!). Instead the article gives us the following command-line instructions to run:

# Note the new setup script name for Node.js v0.12
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_0.12 | sudo bash -
# Then install with:
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

I’m sure someone smarter than me will know the exact details of what this does. To me it was enough to know that it would allow me to install version 0.12 of Node. So I ran it and then tried to install the River4 dependencies again. Once again it didn’t work.

Out of frustration I removed the entire River4-folder from the machine, re-uploaded it via FTP and tried NPM again. This time it worked and the app could be launched with node river4.js.

When I logged out of the server it stopped working so I learned the hard way that I needed to launch it using nohup node river4.js > /dev/null 2>&1 &. This way it’ll continue running in the background indefinitely.

What to do

This is an attempt of telling you how to go about installing River4 on Ubuntu. I leave absolutely no guarantees. It might not work. It might blow up your server. It might make you sad.

  1. Install the latest version of Node.js using
    > # Note the new setup script name for Node.js v0.12
    > curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_0.12 | sudo bash -
    > # Then install with:
    > sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
  2. Install NPM using sudo apt-get install npm.
  3. Upload the River4 app via FTP.
  4. Run npm install in the River4 folder.
  5. Start the app and server using nohup node river4.js > /dev/null 2>&1 &.

If NPM gives you problems in step 4, try changing where it gets its data:

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