Dorward Online
The personal website of David Dorward
Saturday 17 July 2010
A miniature coincidence
Entry created on Saturday 17 July 2010 at 17:05:07.
A few months ago I mentioned that I had started pulling together some figures for a game of Fantasy Craft (and excellent system that has just had its first batch of errata). As usual, other projects got in the way, but I have finally got a significant number fully painted — more then I originally planned, but I’ll come to that in a minute. Today I applied a coat of matt varnish and can call the first batch “finished”, so I’ve taken some pictures and will relate the story of how they came to be.
The original plan was to paint a few figures to represent House Deneith mercenaries in my ongoing, but infrequent, Eberron campaign. (I also plan to paint some Orcs, and should probably up the priority of that little project as we are getting close to the session when they come out to play with the merry band of heroes).
When I want to get miniatures, I usually make Foundry my first port of call. They are a little on the expensive side, but produce some very nice figures — and the frequency of their 20% off deals helps a lot! The trouble with getting nice figures is that it leads the fanatical Warhammer players that you call “friend” to make comments such as “They would make a great core to a really characterful Empire army!”. To which there is only one response — “Yes, yes they would.”
So it seemed I was doomed to getting back into Warhammer, and I stuck my head in the Empire army book and tried to figure out what I wanted from an army. The answer was simple, cannons and other things that go “Bang!”. The fluff suggested a Nuln army and, while the text shouted “Black! Black to hide the soot marks!”, the pictures showed a number of units which had gone for a red and black colour scheme.
I took another look at the House Deneith pictures in the Eberron source books. Black and red was a common theme. It seemed the world wasn’t going to give me an excuse to avoid it.
I dabbled with various figures and eventually got to the point where I was painting my first cannon (I have another two still waiting in their blister packs). How was I going to apply my colour scheme here? I looked up and saw, framed and hanging on my wall, the answer in a holiday photo I had taken a couple of years previously.
Too many coincidences?
Meanwhile, Warhammer 8 has been released and given me another reason to keep painting. At the current rate, I should shortly have enough fully painted models to be a reasonably sized army and will be able to take them to the tabletop with some degree of pride.
Tuesday 6 April 2010
Validating email addresses with regular expressions
Entry created on Tuesday 6 April 2010 at 08:12:15.
Yahoo! can’t get it right and they are a huge name, why do you think you can?
Tuesday 23 March 2010
Detraining
Entry created on Tuesday 23 March 2010 at 10:11:00.
My journey into work this morning was hellish, mostly because a central line train “detrained”
- detrain
- verb leave or cause to leave a train.
I’m yet to work out how and why a train was a passenger…
Thursday 18 March 2010
Consumer appliances and custom browsers
Entry created on Thursday 18 March 2010 at 10:17:28.
I’m having the joy of writing webpages targeted at consumer appliances. Unfortunately, the vendors of many of these devices have not seen the light and thus failed to grab one of the open source browser engines on the market or go to Opera. Either they are rolling their own, or buying browsers which have never seen a desktop computer.
Thanks to a bug in the rendering engine of one major vendor with a name that starts with S, I have to have odd spaces when I make text bold.
foo <strong>bar </strong> baz
However, this causes a bug in the browser used by a different vendor (also with a name starting with S) so I’ve ended up with:
[% MACRO sfix BLOCK; IF product.browser.someVendor; %] [% END; END; %]
and
foo <strong>bar[% sfix %]</strong> baz
Isn’t that just lovely?
Oh, if only I could just target Webkit and Presto!
Wednesday 17 March 2010
The Personal Touch
Entry created on Wednesday 17 March 2010 at 11:52:42.
There are job agencies that treat you like a person, and there are job agencies that…

Monday 15 March 2010
Figuratively speaking
Entry created on Monday 15 March 2010 at 10:06:30.
I paid a visit to my local Games Workshop yesterday. Inevitably this resulted in my sacrificing control of my ears to the staff for half an hour during which I discovered that the new Blood Angels codex is very beardy and that the models are gorgeous. GW is doing an amazing job with its plastics these days, the quality is astounding.
Happily I managed to escape having bought nothing more then the three things I went in to buy (two pots of paint and some plastic glue). The afternoon was spent working on some House Deneith figures for my Fantasy Craft game. I have a long way to go, but it should make for an entertaining next session.
Monday 22 February 2010
Flash continues to suck (possibly)
Entry created on Monday 22 February 2010 at 09:45:22.
A Flash developer on the subject of touchscreens:
The only potential “solutions” to the mouseover problem are terrible ones:
A) The best case: every Flash app on every site is re-thought by its designers and re-coded by its programmers (if they’re even still available), just for touchscreens.
Really? Are you seriously telling me that every Flash application out there is entirely dependent on being able to point the mouse at things without clicking?
Even if you ignore touch screens, that still violates WCAG 2.0 2.1 by being inaccessible to keyboards.
I have trouble believing that every single Flash developer is that bad.
Tuesday 16 February 2010
Spirit of the Century returns to the Tuesday Knights
Entry created on Tuesday 16 February 2010 at 13:55:12.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, SotC is getting another outing at my regular group. I’ve even managed to write up the story so far.
It has been a very long time since I’ve been able to run it (so long that one of my players has forgotten about the interesting dice in the game), and I’m really looking forward to getting my GMs hat on tonight.
I’ve been lifting large chunks from a prewritten adventure, but the third act never really sat well with me. So I decided to rewrite it, less than 24 hours before I ran it. Aren’t I clever? Still, I think my efforts last night were worth it, I got rid of annoying sequence of repeated “Look here, fooled you! Look here instead!” scenes, and added an Indy reference (along with a few things that I’d better not talk about before they come out in play).





















































