At last, umcreg, Wesnoth-UMC-Dev's Registry Service, is finished, deployed and announced in the forums, thus completing the first part of introducing the Registry system to the project.

There were some changes from its original incarnation, but everything turned out pretty well for a bot written from scratch in approximately 6 days by a Perl fanatic with no knowledge of object-oriented Perl — I actually learned some object-oriented Perl while at this and I feel like I can do anything with it now.

I was in a hurry to get this done right before freenode deployed ircd-seven today (yays!), for no particular reason; this resulted in a security feature not working with hyperion-ircd until I introduced a quickie hack that I'll be retiring later today.

We are using a private git repository for managing the source code, but since I wrote it with an open-source licensing model in mind as usual, here's umcreg version 0.1.1 for the curious, released under the terms of the GNU GPL version 3.

• umcreg 0.1.1 (gzip tarball, 35.7 KiB; MD5 sum: 7877c82082d42c45d45f68647c223459)

I have already registered our current members using some basic, known information about them — even including their join date. Old projects' registration will be a little slow as I need to research the current structure of the repository, of which I lost track a year ago, and retrieve original timestamps. The registry's web interface, provided by the umcreg::Web and Thoria::Web packages, can be found here.

umcreg is already working at the project's admin channel on freenode too. It only obeys the project staff's orders, though, so there's no point in trying to send messages to it.

The next step in implementing the Registry model is writing the Statistics service, codenamed “Listra”, and most likely going to be named umcstat. That will definitively take much longer than umcreg's development. Meanwhile, Espreon is trying to convince me to take care of umcdist (codename “Blackmore”) first.

After some weeks of inactivity, I have finally completed the first arc (not the first episode, though) of After the Storm in the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev SVN repository, comprising 7 scenarios out of planned 11; this means that a 0.3.0 release is coming soon. It was about time!

With this new arc completed, I have introduced new background story elements that could be considered controversial if any mainline purist is actually paying attention to the campaign — that's okay, I never intended IftU or any sequels to be mainlined. I still struggle to keep everything as fuzzy as possible to give a certain degree of flexibility to any content authors who decide to take what is said in IftU and AtS as “canon”. It's harder than it sounds, particularly because it must still be clear enough to allow the plot to progress; so I cannot just throw a bunch of nonsense into the campaign and say “hey, look at this, this is our vague excuse for this pathetic plotline!”.

Now that the characters have a decidedly vague excuse for the plot of the next arc, I face a problem that I knew I'd have to handle sooner or later: artwork.

I am not a good pixel artist, but I don't have any loyal slav- pixel artist that could help me either. And even if I could get one, I'm not completely sure I could describe the concepts I have in mind in plain words to tell them what unit sprites I require. There's also the spoileriffic factor; there's a reason that I removed the original (clumsy) storyboard from the SVN repository and departed from the original plans, most notably by removing a main character and introducing two new sidekicks instead. So, it's up to me to create any pixel art needed to make the campaign work; baseframes are enough for this purpose, although I still wish IftU and AtS' original units had animations.

At least I don't need to write a game engine from scratch too, thanks to Wesnoth's scripting flexibility.

It's year 2010, and, despite the promises, there are no flying cars, no jetpacks, people still die, there's no interplanetary travel, no apocalyptic event triggered by humans made Antarctica disappear on 2000, and most importantly, we are still awaiting the day we can have our own robot pals.

But here's IRC to solve that! No, really! What do you mean, it's not awesome!?

Okay, obscure references aside, the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev started as a fairly casual repository set up by me and Eric S. Raymond for managing a few add-ons that were, at that time (March 2008) candidates for being mainlined at some point of the future: Invasion from the Unknown, Legend of Wesmere and Delfador's Memoirs. Guess which of them has not made it to Wesnoth's mainline project yet.

The way we worked before was fairly different to what we do nowadays. Some time before AI0867 joined me in this quest, I decided to open the “UMC Sandbox” for projects not intended/expected to be merged into mainline. This had some unexpected success by the end of the year and we got a fair amount of add-ons to manage. As I write this, I'm wondering what the hell we are hosting anymore — I lost track!

At the beginning we also had a wiki page at Wesnoth.org with the list of projects and authors. AI0867 and I tried to keep it up to date at all times, but we inevitably forgot its existence after a while. The fact that Wesnoth.org crashed around July 2008 and stayed dead for nearly one month, and was resurrected from 2 months-old backups didn't help. When I remembered the page, I decided to wipe the rusty listings out; the only thing that survived was the admin list, which is now happily hosted by AI0867 on our project's website.

But it'd benefit everyone if we didn't need to look at SVN directory listings or history to check what add-ons we host, or who are in charge of them. To solve this problem, two new services are born: the Statistics service (umcstat, codename “Listra”) and the Registry system (umcreg, codename “Thoria”). I've been asked about their purposes and goals a few times lately, mainly because umcreg is finally reaching completion, so here it is; a thorough description of our new pals.

At last, the new layout is ready and deployed. Codename “Dorset2” was completed some days ago but I spent additional time figuring out ways to make a few parts work with Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6. Yes, I know those browsers are obsolete, but IE 6 is the last version that can be installed on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98 and later (wikipedia) — yes, I know nobody should use anything older than Windows XP for Internet browsing nowadays, hush.

I also had to work around a couple of bugs in Mozilla Firefox 3.5, of all things. Webkit and KHTML-based browsers (Google Chrome understands some KHTML extensions for some odd reason) also displayed some quirks of their own.

Here's a few of screenshots that should display the overall differences between Dorset and Dorset2 (big files ahead!):

• Dorset
• Dorset2
• Dorset2 on Internet Explorer 6 SP1

Naturally, this site is no longer very compatible with IE 5, 6 and 7 because it's using some CSS 2.1 characteristics that are not implemented correctly or at all by those versions. IE 8 works like a charm except for a minor problem with the pre element height rules — which I could fix with a small work-around if I cared enough — but there are also some CSS 3 techniques and/or vendor-specific extensions in use for round borders and text shadows. Nonetheless. I made sure that the site's functionality would not differ between IE 5, 6 and 7, so even if the appearance differs, nothing should work incorrectly.

VirtualBox was very helpful when testing all this stuff. It'd been very hard to run Debian lenny and squeeze at the same time otherwise!

Opera 10.00 showed problems handling multiple children elements with transparent background images. That's a real pity and I hope that newer versions don't have this problem.

The bottom-left corner is not round. There's a good reason for this, and I hope to fix it in the next iteration, some day. For now, Dorset2 is here to brighten and soften your day!

I have recently discovered that the color scheme and overall “look and feel” of an user interface, including web sites, can do a lot with my mood. Two days ago, someone on freenode.net's social channel (#defocus) linked to her blog, which has a black background — that's not bad or unusual, but I noticed that the dark scheme affected my mood making me feel slightly upset for a few minutes. I have no idea if this is just another quirk in my brain's functionality, or normal.

Nevertheless, it does sound like something I could use to my advantage, and to please my somewhat loyal reader (hi Espreon!).

Codename “Dorset2” has been a work in progress since last November. I had experimented with round shapes, box shadows and gradients, using CSS 2.1 and background image tricks, but I didn't get very far due to Dorset's inflexibility and design flaws at the PHP level; basically, I'd have had to edit every single page to adapt them to the new scheme, and that'd be boring and tedious. However, a few days ago, “Poison Ivy” was completed, enabling me to share the basic and simple functional code with three websites, or document sets, so to speak:

• The Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website, (now codename “Kalari”);
• This website (codename “Dorset”); and
• Dorset2, not yet online.

Ivy's design allows me to simply “flip the switch” to convert every web page in my laptop's test Apache instance to use the new scheme, thanks to a extremely primitive, yet effective template and configuration system. A couple of lines of code:

define('DORSET2_ENABLED', TRUE);
define('SKEL_BASE_PATH', DORSET2_ENABLED ? '/dorset2' : '/dorset');

By toggling DORSET2_ENABLED, I can test my code with the old and new templates and stylesheets as necessary, without editing any of the actual pages!

I deployed “Poison Ivy” on the online site last night, so this is already theoretically possible in here... except that the Dorset2 files are not finished or online yet. I did resume my work on it some days ago after finishing Kalari, though.

If a dark scheme can have negative effects on my psyche, what could bright (but not too bright), soft colors and shapes do for me? Basically, Dorset2 aims for a relatively simplistic look, with soft shapes and colors using gradients and round corners for some elements. The color scheme is also slightly brighter than Dorset for some elements; but the shapes are what matters here. A box with round corners and no solid border makes the contents look soft to me; compare current Dorset which uses (way too many) rectangular boxes with solid and dark borders everywhere, inside and outside the main body.

Here's a (rather big) screenshot of Dorset2. Apologies for the admittedly awful rendering of Verdana Bold; that must be freetype's fault.

• Dorset2 (PNG screenshot)

Since it's a work in progress, I have not gotten around to tweaking the CSS to make it work as best as it's possible with Internet Explorer. It doesn't look too bad at first glance, but it gets worse at the bottom (not pictured) thanks a gradient background trick that makes some text disappear at random in IE 6 SP 1 — and for whatever reason, this doesn't affect IE 5.5 or IE 6 SP 2 and later. I figured that I'll make my work easier for now if I write rules to disable certain decoration elements with these broken browsers.

Hopefully this gets finished soon.

I use KDE 4...

Sounds suicidal? Go check your facts. Anyway, I use Mesa 7.7 for 3D, plus libdrm and the X.org radeon driver from their git repositories. The system is Debian Squeeze, but it's a few weeks behind testing because I've not had access to a strong connection to download the shitload of packages (~350 MB) for upgrading.

I normally use the QtCurve style for Qt3, Qt4 and Gtk2 applications, but last night I decided to give Nitrogen-style (based on Oxygen) a go again.

I found that if I open Konqueror's bookmarks menu, when it has many more elements than they fit in the whole screen, X.org crashes!

Backtrace:
0: /usr/bin/X(xorg_backtrace+0x26) [0x4ee056]
1: /usr/bin/X(xf86SigHandler+0x39) [0x484199]
2: /lib/libc.so.6 [0x7ffc172e8fd0]
3: /usr/lib/dri/r600_dri.so(r600SetTexOffset+0x8b) [0x7ffc028e306b]
4: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions//libglx.so [0x7ffc163b911c]
5: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions//libglx.so(__glXleaveServer+0x18) [0x7ffc163affa8]
6: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions//libglx.so [0x7ffc163b055f]
7: /usr/bin/X(Dispatch+0x374) [0x44d494]
8: /usr/bin/X(main+0x3aa) [0x43337a]
9: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xfd) [0x7ffc172d5abd]
10: /usr/bin/X [0x432819]

Fatal server error:
Caught signal 11.  Server aborting

It reproduces with the Oxygen theme too. All with KDE 4.3.2 — but the crash seems to come via Mesa 7.7's ATI R6xx/R7xx DRI driver. Ah, yays for newborn drivers.

It took me much less time than I expected to put the new layout of the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website together. Observe.

Okay, that's basically because most of the design was already made long time ago, in the form of the site's earlier incarnation, codenamed “Soradoc”, which looked rather busy and useless with the sidebar and other design elements. The new design, “Kalari”, removes the sidebar, clears the site banner a bit, and blends the site with Wesnoth.org as far as appearance is concerned. It's not the same design, but it's similar — that should be a good thing considering the purpose of Wesnoth-UMC-Dev.

That site also had a Blosxom-based blog, but I removed it since nobody was making actual use of the space.

The greatest thing about all this is that most of the PHP, “Poison Ivy” was finished in 1 night, while the rest took me just a few additional hours. Now that Poison Ivy is completed, I can reuse its code for the next incarnation of this very website and blog.

It's all for teaching some web design and programming basics to myself, really.

(No, not that one.)

There are many content management systems out but all of them seem to require some sort of database server and occasionally sacrifice flexibility in favor of ease of use.

This is why neither this site or Wesnoth-UMC-Dev's use one of those nifty software packages although they still use PHP. The latter website uses a bunch of ugly code codenamed “Soradoc” which has the actual XHTML layout embedded on it; the CSS stylesheet is also codenamed Soradoc and it's derived from “Glamdrol”, the Wesnoth.org wiki skin by Ettin; and “Dorset”, which is Soradoc's immediate ancestor, used on this very personal website — which in turn uses PHP code derived from the current incarnation of “Soradoc”.

Enter codename “Poison Ivy”, which is basically the same thing as Soradoc/Dorset, except written from scratch, much cleaner and more flexible; in particular, the XHTML layout and the site configuration are no longer part of the engine's source code which will allow me to share that among both websites more easily. It also introduces seamless support for document compression, which may be useful for my personal website.

Ivy is mostly finished, but I'm now busy reworking the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev site's design under a secret project, codename “Kalari”. Maybe once I'm finished with that, my next web project will be bringing umcreg (codename “Thoria”) to life.

(Okay, it's not a secret anymore. Dammit.)

Long, long ago, I talked about several issues I had with Mozilla Failfox Firefox 3.0 and openSUSE 10.3 for the AMD64/EM64T architecture.

Ever since then, I have learned several things:

1. Debian's Iceweasel fork doesn't seem to be much ahead of mainline Firefox in terms of bugfixes, as far as I can see. This might be not true for security fixes and such; I admit I haven't done any actual research on this and I'm basing this statement on my user experience.
2. The Download Day was a trap.
3. Other people who I have talked to regarding Firefox's stability on Linux claim that is never/rarely crashes, but all of them use x86 kernels and userspace.
4. Iceweasel 3.0 taints the Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny distribution on the AMD64/EM64T architecture, with no differences in either of my laptops. This Linux distribution is remarkably stable otherwise, and lived up to my expectatives since I originally switched to it when it was the Testing distribution — this is, comparing it to the released openSUSE 10.3.
5. Off-line browsing is truly, horribly underestimated, to the point that one of the major web browsers does not support it at all; probably in favor of simplicity and ease of use, and “permanently connected people”. But, STILL...
6. It's not a good idea to leave a chainsaw and a newspaper near the reach of a cow.

I recently switched to Debian Squeeze, which is still under development (e.g. Testing) as of this writing. Originally, I just got a newer revision of Iceweasel 3.0 with the set. Some weeks ago, I got upgraded to 3.5.

As I mentioned in my previous post in this series, the status bar does still glitch a lot — no, wait — the status bar glitches even more than in 3.0. Scrolling is less laggy but only with smooth scrolling disabled, although I am not exactly using a well-supported video configuration at the moment and I probably should not complain about performance issues with any 2D application unless I'm willing to use the unaccelerated X.org VESA driver for benchmarking or shut up.

The Live Bookmarks feature stopped working after the upgrade until I went and manually reloaded every single Atom/RSS feed I had linked in a neat folder in the bookmarks toolbar. It took me a while to realize that nobody posting anything near Christmas was a bad sign — I didn't miss much anyway, since my feed sources aren't really chatty. Yes, I know I'd be better using an actual feeds reader, but I'm just that lazy, which is also why I don't use Opera as much as I want.

However, this version of Firefox is much, much more stable than 3.0 — as far as this AMD64/EM64T architecture user is concerned, that is. Firefox just got better, really. But it's still rather odd because I've heard comments on IRC of people claiming that it got more unstable instead. Hmm... Well, maybe Windows or x86 Linux users are less lucky this time?

Firefox 3.5 also supports the CSS text-shadow property, which was introduced in the CSS level 2 specification, removed in revision 1 (CSS 2.1), and seems to have been picked up again for CSS 3. No version of Internet Explorer before and including 8.0 supports this (although ISTR that they support a shadow filter using a custom extension to CSS that didn't even follow the specification for naming vendor-specific properties), and current Opera, Safari and Chrome support this property well. That means that I must make more use of it in this site's stylesheets from now on.

At this point, I should know better than tempting fate in a blog post:

[...] Some days before Xmas, my creativity returned from its long, chaotic journey and my Wesnoth add-on, After the Storm (sequel to Invasion from the Unknown has seen steady progress and two new releases were published in less than two weeks. Keep in mind that this add-on had not seen any public releases for almost a year. [...]

Two days afterwards, my creativity disappeared like a drop of water in the sea, again — which means that After the Storm has seen relatively no progress since then. I hope I get better next week, because this work needs to be completed as soon as it's possible.

Thanks to this KDE 4 feature, I no longer need to preview whatever zip, rar archive or tarball I download to check if it has a suitable structure for uncompressing directly into a separate dir without help. Awesome.

(Yes, I admit it; this is a filler, just for the sake of breaking my habit of not posting anything on Sundays.)

Finally, it's January! The New Year celebrations are mostly over and fading away, and people all around the world are going back to regular business and everything should be back to normal in a few days.

I used to be fond of the Christmas and New Year celebrations as a child as I could spend time with my family and eat delicious food. That is not the case anymore, because, even if I still live with my parents, there's no longer a sense of family here and we only want to throw sharp stuff at each other. There's not much enthusiasm by the end of the year anymore, and phrases such as “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year” (in Spanish, though) are truly unheard of in this house. Recent disagreements amongst us indicate that this is not going to be a good year for anyone. To add insult to injury, one of our cats died in a rather tragic and violent fashion on December 22th — it's a tradition here that one or more pets must always die in December. While we have many of them, the first ones to die are those whom we are most attached to.

To mark the actual start of 2010 (as far as the Gregorian calendar is involved, of course), there was a black-out on the area about 6 minutes 7 seconds past midnight, which left us with no Internet or tap water until around 1:50 AM. What a great way to start the first day of the year.

(In case there's doubt — I assure you, I'm not making any of this up.)

But there's still some hope at the moment. Some days before Xmas, my creativity returned from its long, chaotic journey and my Wesnoth add-on, After the Storm (sequel to Invasion from the Unknown has seen steady progress and two new releases were published in less than two weeks. Keep in mind that this add-on had not seen any public releases for almost a year.

After the last released version of AtS (0.2.1) including 5 of 12 planned scenarios in Episode I, there has been more progress in the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev repository. Just yesterday, I finished the two-part cutscene that is the sixth scenario of Episode I, one of the most important points of the plot's development, in which two forest elves finally make contact with the desert/Quenoth elves.

I won't be able to release AtS 0.2.2 or 0.3.0 until scenario 7 and the next cutscene (appropriately named “Resolutions”) are finished, since I'd be teasing the players otherwise. However, those who are really interested on it can always check AtS out from the repository's trunk into their <wesnoth preferences dir>/data/add-ons dir and play using the latest development version of Wesnoth:

svn co https://wesnoth-umc-dev.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wesnoth-umc-dev/trunk/After_the_Storm

It's really exciting to work with several plot elements from quartex's Under the Burning Suns in new, creative manners — kind of like Fanfic production taken to a new level using the power of the GNU General Public License (version 2 or later!). Nevertheless, I am fairly sure he deliberately left much details unresolved in the original campaign, and that he'd fry us (Espreon, AI0867 and me) alive if he found out what we are doing with his story.

One week before Xmas, the Wesnoth.org forums saw another upgrade on which Turuk and I worked hard and quickly to improve forum usability by not only upgrading the codebase to phpBB 3.0.6, but also tweaking the templates, adding modifications and a couple of new forum styles to take advantage of the new features implemented by the phpBB devs in this iteration of their software. The main points were highlighted in this forum post (originally a Global Announcement).

This year should also bring us a new stable series (1.8) of the Battle for Wesnoth game itself. There are currently some problems delaying the first Release Candidate and getting us flooded with generic beta releases, but the developers in charge of them will (hopefully!) find a solution so we can get 1.8 released and trunk “thawed” soon, to work on new features and allow new code contributors to join the project. As for me, I can't wait for the new stable series — development series players seem to be scarce and the new versions of IftU and AtS are receiving little feedback on the forums because of this! I suppose Multiplayer content authors are similarly eager to get more fresh meat to play their add-ons.

I also recently talked about how I can finally suspend my laptop to RAM using Linux, and run some basic OpenGL-based software without crashing or destroying anything. That's something I didn't expect to be able to do in the near future, so the Mesa, libdrm and X.org radeon driver developers have my thanks for improving the Linux experience of those unfortunate enough to own onboard ATI graphics controllers!

In summary, as usual, a new year brings good and bad news. I guess it's up to us to take what's good and fix what's wrong. So, anyway (although I guess it's pretty much unnecessary at this point): happy New Year and have fun!

(The Abridged version: let's get this party started already and kill some spambots! GAAAA!)