EVE vs. VO

So lately, I've been dabbling in a couple of new MMORPGs. Both have trial accounts and are of the sci-fi genre. Below is a table of categories comparing the two games. I rated them on a 1 - 4 scale; poor, moderate, good, excellent.

	EVE Online	Vendetta Online
Graphics	Excellent	Good
RPG Content	Excellent	Moderate
Combat	Moderate	Excellent
Interface	Good	Moderate

Graphics: EVE Online has phenomenal graphics. All the screenshots on their website are indeed in-game captures. The effects of the environment are amazing. There's a three-dimensional map of the galaxy, with ever star system mapped and plotted. As you warp your ship around, you're not put into any special graphics effect. You see your ship rushing past planets, stars, and any other sort of object in space. Entering and exiting warp is all done in the same environment. Vendetta Online has very impressive graphics as well. Very well designed particle effects, as well as warp enter/exit sequences. However, EVE wins the graphics section. Its ship designs are more elaborate, and the seamless warp transitions is a new feature I've never seen in any space-flight-sim before.
RPG Content: Both games are sci-fi RPGs. They have a very similar back story, as well as similar opposing factions. The "blue" faction (organized, corporate militant, empire) vs. the "red" faction (tribal, unstructured, violent), with a neutral faction thrown in. EVE actually has 4 factions, and their connections are slightly more complex than Vendetta's. EVE however, has significantly more "RPG" content than Vendetta does. Part of this is due to the differences in combat systems, so I cannot hold this against/for each game. There's more character development in EVE, and more interaction with "guilds" (or corporations).
Combat: Now, the differences in the combat system is what makes these two games so different. Its what makes VO a flight-sim, and EVE not. VO advertises itself as having a "twitch-based" flight system. You control your ship with a joystick. EVE has a flight system that is more along the same lines as the Diablo or Warcraft series. Click at a point, and your ship flies there. Though most of its flight is done through interaction with the interface, rather than direct controls. I put VO's combat above EVE's, as I'm more familiar with a "twitch" style, and EVE's system just seems wrong for a sci-fi space game. The combat is rather drab too, as its all done through the interface, rather than you having to actually track your target & lead it with your blasters.
Interface: EVE has a very elaborate (almost too elaborate) interface. All windows are drag-enabled, you can sticky them, minimize them, etc. There's no HUD, as you're not ever given a in-cockpit view. EVE has more of a navigation system than a flight system, and that's reflected in the interface. VO has a simple, clean, and concise HUD, as well as station interface. Its a little awkward to get used to at first, but not daunting in any way.
So that's my review. I'm leaning towards VO, as I'm more a fan of flight-sims. I "grew up" on Star Wars: Tie Fighter, so my roots are in space-flight-sims. EVE has great RPG aspect, but the lack of human-controlled combat is enough to steer me away from it. Fortunately, VO runs on Linux, appears to have a more active development community, and is cheaper per month. Now as if I have time to start playing two MMOs... maybe the review will help someone though.

Backpack it

Just stumbled across Backpack it, a cool online to-do/notes site thing. Basic accounts are free, are allowed 5 pages. I think its a really slick way of organizing stuff. I tend to not keep track of files stored on my local system, and so having a few pages stored remotely someplace seems helpful. They're not publicly viewable, so the only people you have to trust your information with is the owners of the site. There's a handy Dashboard widget to go along with it, so I'm going to use it to replace my ToDo Tracker widget, as well as my old method of using 4 different Stickies widgets. Seems like a nifty set-up to me.

New archive

Those of you who read this blog know I used to blog on my other website, subpop.net. About 1 year ago I decided to stop blogging there due to a few conflicts of interest. I recently wrote a script that migrated all my posts from the Nucleus CMS blog (that I had originally used) to a Blogger blog. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't expost comment posting via their Atom API, so all the comments from the old blog are not migrated. I still have the blog database backed up, and if Google ever decides to add comment posting in Atom, I can migrate them in. But for now, all the posts are once again available. I've got it up on a blogspot site: sub-pop.blogspot.com.

img2img

So I was trying to think up a way of converting my Warcraft screenshots from 5MB TARGAs to 1MB PNGs or 500K JPEGs, but the OS X Preview's Automator actions don't convert them very well. My instinct was then to turn to powerful UNIX tools. I installed ImageMagick, and wrote up a quick bash script you see below. You can change OLDSUFFIX and NEWSUFFIX to whatever you want, and you've got a quick-hack anyimg2anyimg script.

#!/bin/bash

OLDSUFFIX=tga
NEWSUFFIX=jpg
CONVERT=`which convert`
FILEPATH=$1

if [ -z "$CONVERT" ]; then
echo "error: cannot find \'convert\'";
exit 1;
fi
if [ -z "$FILEPATH" ]; then
echo "error: no filepath provided";
exit 1;
fi

DIR=`dirname $FILEPATH`
FILE=`basename $FILEPATH`
NAME=`echo $FILE | cut -d"." -f1`

cd $DIR
$CONVERT $NAME.$OLDSUFFIX $NAME.$NEWSUFFIX
cd -

So you can make calls to this in an Automator workflow, and make it a right-click script. I'll be damned if I can get a stupid workflow to work right though. I've uploaded what workflow I have in case you guys want to make one work.

New look

As you might have noticed, I changed the theme quite a bit. I'm still debating on whether or not I'll continue to blog. If I do it'll probably less frequently, and less about what goes on in my life, with more pre-meditated, small essays and such instead. I'm working on a header to bring in the "wild things" like on the previous site template. Let me know what you think of the new theme.
EDIT: I reverted back. There were some bugs in that other template, and this one just looks nicer anyway.