Sean Middleditch

Crappy Life(tm)

We have three dogs. Two big ones, Spinone’s (however you spell it), and a small Silky. One of the big dogs and the little one are always fighting - viciously. Today, they all three start fighting to the death. Seriously trying to kill each other. Each of us humans about (mother, sister, and I) try pulling them apart. The vicious big dog misses lunging for the little one and clamps onto my arm.

So now, I have some rather deep and very ugly wounds in my arm, am missing 4 hours of my life from the ER, and also a rather alarming amount of blood spilled all over the floor in 3 different rooms.

Why do I tell you this? To help better explain why I’ve always, always hated dogs. *erg*

Computer Stuffs

Well, we’ve the name and game title for the Linux Game Dev Company pinned. Not being the PR guy, I’ll not release it - let the people ready to deal with hordes (read: 3) of Linux gamers and their questions.

I honestly haven’t done much coding lately. Most my free time has been taken up with Zelda: Wind Waker, friends I’ve recently gotten back in contact with, and excessive bleeding. Er, I mean, and stuff at work.

Speaking of work, we’re going to do some more work on SupportWeb. The next set of changes might actually make it possible to use outside of environment - then it might be worth my time to update the SourceForge page for SupportWeb! Yay!

I’m hoping otherwise, but free time for AweMUD hacking is looking rather slim for at least another week or three.

I hate phones. Really.

Aside from the fact I almost always near fall asleep when I’m talking on them, they are a pain in the butt!

A friend I haven’t seen in ages leaves a note on my door to call him. 3 days ago. No matter when I call, what time of day, his frickin phone is busy.

Another friend called a while back. Never answers her phone, never returns messages.

Honestly. E-mail/IRC/IM is so much frickin nicer. Soon as we all have the bandwidth for voice-IM I’ll be a happy person.

Spent way too much time documenting stuff for the game development than I should have at this stage. All of today after work. And we’re not even sure what game idea we’re going to work on/publish! But no, enough of that - buahaha, hafta wait for official announcement! :P

I’m having so much fun with this project tho. I can’t measure my happiness in being a part of the game dev company. (We need to get that name picked… calling it the dev company is getting old.) Really, tho, immeasurable happiness. ^,^ yay me!

So I got FreeBSD running on my laptop. I hope Linux hackers learn some good habits from the BSD folks someday. ;-) Like, say, exposing a stable API/ABI for driver developers, or having actually meaningful version numbers. To Linux distros, tho, don’t learn anything from FreeBSD. It’s great that FreeBSD actually works, and works well, but for a laptop that I want for easy-to-use desktop system, not so good userspace. Definitely like their kernel, tho. (And related utilities, of course.) Linux (or, I suppose more correctly, GNU) userspace + BSD kernel + a few more average user apps, and I’ll be in heaven.

Don’t get me wrong, Linux kernel developers are awesome. It’s quite stable, very flexible, super speedy and responsive - just, the parts of it that Average Users interact with (mainly, installing and using drivers for new periphials/hardware) sucks. Linux might be great for things like embedded devices, or for clusters/super-computers, but when it comes to sensible desktop machine, the idea that a user has to download, configure, and install a new kernel to get new device support (even for open-source drivers!) because the API/ABI changes between a minor revision, or that upgrading this kernel then requires all externally built drivers to be rebuilt… ugh. Not good, people. But this is an old rant.

In any event, Linux can’t properly support my laptop adequately, and FreeBSD does. (Well, it still doesn’t support the speed stepping on the AMD processor, so it’s battery life is still too short, but it runs without crashing, and all the other hardware in it works 100%.) So now it’s time to start learning the ins and outs of FreeBSD. And get my software ported. I try to avoid automake, but it looks like for things like shared libs, it and libtool are gonna be needed. Dangit. Also have to figure out some of the differences in header file locations. But, this is fun stuff none-the-less. ^,^

Maybe someday someone will do like Lindows/Xandros and make a (Free|.*)BSD based desktop distro. And no, Mac OS X doesn’t count, since it’s not wholly Open Source - I’m talking an Open Source desktop operating system; FreeBSD + XFree86 + GNOME. But easy to install with system config utilities and sane defaults for desktop users. Yum!

Well, I’m starting to finally get over a bad illness that struck me Sunday night. Apparantly some virus decided the nerve responsible for balance in my left ear was a good place to hang out, and as such, it stopped working. The entire world has been spinning around me constantly, making walking rather entertaining, and reading (i.e., computer displays) very very difficult.

Add to this that my motherboard died for sure during my illness, I’m also now about $220 poorer as I picked up a new power supply (my old one’s fan was dying, and it was rather weak anyways), and the cheapest Socket 7 motherboard I could find at a local dealer ($120 - ugh), since I plan on replacing it all when the Athlon64s are out anyways. So I’m now really hating hardware. And if I ever find the guy/girl that designed the clips that hold the heat-sink onto the motherboard, I’m going to cause his massive grief. This new motherboard also seems to have problems with my USB hub my mouse has to be plugged into (cables don’t reach), so I’m getting very very very very annoyed. Argh!

But, to make up for it all, I made the LGP Game Development Company Team! Yes!

Well, I just resigned from Arch Linux development. Feel bad about it, I liked working on it, it was a great experience, and people actually depended on me for the packages.

Time just isn’t going my way. Work, school, possibility of this linux game dev position, need to work more on AweMUD, my pretend social life, etc…

Hmm, so the fan on my motherboard chipset died. I ran over to CompUSA (they have an anniversary sale today, yay for me), bought a generic motherboard fan/heatsink, a wire-less access point (I have a wireless pcmcia card in my laptop, which is kinda useless without an accesspoint - i was cheap and went with an 802.11b access point tho, didn’t feel like payin gan extra $50 for 802.11g when my pcmcia card doesn’t handle it), and some new altec speakers.

So far, happy Sean. Then, it appears the generic motherboard fan doesn’t fit the chipset - the holes for the pins don’t align. So, I just took some thermal compound and a heatsink, replaced the dead fan with that, stuff in an extra fan in the case to increase air-flow, and just hope that stays stable enough until I get a whole new machine.

I am so sick of dealing with hardware… :(

So I’m rewriting the character creation code in AweMUD completely in Scriptix. It’s great for two reasons:

• First, it’s really helping me flush out both the needed Scriptix changes (I found a bunch of string bugs during the process), and the necessary function/methods for the AweMUD classes.
• Second, it’s a lot of fairly interesting code, and it all works and runs in Scriptix. IOW, it’s proof that Scriptix Works(tm).

I definitely need a better closure solution tho. Bound arguments are “readonly” (the values of the parent function’s copies can’t be modified in the closure), since the parent function might finish and disappear off the call stack long before the closure is ever called. I’m thinking to do something like I do with the global variable hack. There, I “silently” create an array instance that holds the global values. Very nasty, but requires no work/code on the part of the interpreter. Also has a few bugs there; for example, the ++/+=/etc. operators can’t work on globals (since they aren’t interpreter recognized variables).

What I think I’ll do is create an actual special “floating variable” type in the interpreter, that would be used for globals and closure variables. If a function has one of its variables used in a closure, it’ll be automagically promoted from a normal variables to a floating variable, and then it’ll be modifiable anywhere.

Of course, that would make those variables more inefficient, and there might also be times you don’t want this behaviour (create a closure with a certain variable, and expect to be able to modify the variable without changing what the closure recieves). So I need to think up yet *another* syntax for it all. yuck.

I really need to finish documenting Scriptix, so when I post stuff like this people at least have a chance to read up and see what the hell I’m talking about.. ;-)

Somehow in my last entry, in my moaning about lack of time, I forgot something that has me very, very excited:

Linux Game Publishing is forming a new company to develop a Linux (and possibly other platforms) game, of a commercial nature and, hopefully, quality. They took public applications, and have made a sort of contest out of picking 8 developers for the initiali team.

Well, if you take a look at here, you’ll see that they’ve narrowed it down to 16 applicants to be chosen for the final 8. And I’m one of those 16. Go me! ^,^

If I do end up on the final team, I’m definitely going to have to drop quite a few projects/commitments. I’ll keep hacking on AweMUD/Scriptix, but it may end up being a lot less. I won’t be able to hack on commercial software while here at work (see how productive I am?), so any spare time I have here will be all I have for open source stuffs. But I’ll get over it. ;-)

Anyways, I’m really happy about this, and hoping I get on the final team. Hopefully the game developed will be something really great. As much as I’d love to work on a large-scale RPG, I realize the project won’t have the resources needed for something of that undertaking. As long as it’s not some (lame) Qauke wanna-be, I’d be happy. ^,^

Way too much to do. Too many projects for my schedule. Definitely need to cut some things out. Thinking after I get the GNOME 2.2 packages for Arch Linux fully stable and bug-free, I might call it over with that - it easily eats up a night that could’ve been used hacking just to upgrade, test, and debug a few packages.

Also some of my “promises” to work on a few other projects here and there might have to be rescinded. Just don’t have the time if I want to keep hacking on AweMUD and Scriptix. And I do.

Dangit.