Over time I’ve grown particularly fond of my habit of not deleting files regardless of their uselessness — this has saved my butt in several occasions. On this subject, I recently came across of a backup of some assorted IftU/AtS-related files in my homedir on bluecore, and one file named The_Start_of_The_Search.txt caught my attention.

I shortly remembered that a certain individual whose username I will not disclose dropped me a message on the forums in January 2008 with a proposal for scenario 1 of IftU’s then-unnamed sequel.

The verbatim contents of the text file follow.

I lLiked a Lot Your Campaing, here is an contribution for your sequel (accept it Please) :

After many years of wandering Galas, The Lady Of Ligth and Mal-Keshar runned into the Aragwaith Country seeing wath happened to the elves they tried to spoke with them so they reconciliate but it was useless, so they stayed a few nigths on the place of the Forest elves, and they started to deliberaate once again the Mal-Keshar idea of a few years of destroying Uria, since they rescued some of the prisioner of the Jail, the drake Spke:

Drake (I cannot Remember his name): Long Ago my Ancestors destroyed the gate to hell, but seeing that still are demons on Earth, i think that the gate wasnt destroyed at all, but was closed by our fire Breath, if im rigth i can guide you there to see the gate, if you want to enter onto the hell...

Galas: Yes that sounds like a plan but how we can get there? and more important since the power of the union was destroyed how we can destroy Uria?.

Mal-Keshar: ... ... ..., when i was a human mage aprentice i overheard some Silver Mages something about of the Clearnus Book, a book that is cursed by the knowledge that it posses since it have the greatest and darkest secrets of the magic, and my master said the same thing of it..., so i asume if we can found it maybe we can know if the union is really gone, or if its a major power than it.

Lady Of Ligth: Yes.., i have heard of that book, but he last one that had it was an Lich, fore being more specific an Horrible Lich, more powerfull than Keshar himself, and Horror Lich, but i heard that he was Buried onto an a Mountain (asuming that this is the Final from the Dark Hordes since i read the Ending idea i hope that the Authors dont have problem with this) but

Mal-Keshar: Aye its true that is such an Lich but, the last ive heard of him was that he wasnt exterminated, in fact he was just buried under the Rocks triying to escape to take revenge once again.

Lady Of Ligth: But the Problem is how we are gonna to free the Lich, and two how we are gonna to vanish him, since it more powerfull than Keshar and My Powers arent Completly Awoke at his point.

Galas: So we have to call to the Union, not the one of Ligth and dark but one from Almost all the races of this World, Excluding, Both Demons and Kahagarathi, and now that i remeber, wasnt a Civilization that was more superior on magic than Elves?.

Mal-Keshar: You refer the one of the Library?.

Galas: Yes, know that they said that they Knew that they opened some kinda of PPortal, if they are Survivors, and lets have hope that, well they havent lost their knowlredge, we can try to convince them to join them to our side, and try to open the Portal that our drake Friend Mentioned Before.

Mal-Keshar: Yes that wouldnt be such an a bad Idea.

Lady Of Ligth: Agree..., wait! there is...

Elvish Messenger: Red Alert, Red Alert, an a Shaxtal Group is aproaching.

Galas: The Shaxtal are now animals, they cant kill anything now.

Messenger: I Know, but these are lead by a Loyalist.

Galas: Well we have no choice but figth.

Well this is all for the First Scenario.

Admittedly, if I invested as much effort as this guy storyboarding AtS scenarios, I’d have finished the campaign and its (currently untitled) sequel by the end of 2009.

Due to recent abuse of the Tor anonymization network detected on Wesnoth.org’s forum board, I have decided to permanently block access through this service.

This is rather unfortunate, since I have found myself in need of using Tor before, as an alternative to broken ISP ←→ Wesnoth.org’s upstream network routes; however, it seems to be the most sensible solution to help fight vandalism. I won’t hesitate to extend these measures to the rest of Wesnoth.org if further issues arise.

Users’ accessing the forums via Tor or any other blocked hosts, service providers and proxies will see the following error message:

As those who have read the Wesnoth.org Website forum should know, there’s currently an ongoing brute-force attack targeted at the Wesnoth.org community board attempting to log into multiple users, developers, artists and administrators’ accounts.

Although the situation is mostly under control at the moment, it’s always a good idea to remind people to choose safe, non-guessable passwords for their online accounts, and to make sure they aren’t shared amongst services.

I have been setting up filters to deny access to the board to multiple suspicious addresses and subnets. If you see a 403 Forbidden message when trying to access the forums, follow the instructions on the error page to contact us so we can sort it out.

I don’t currently have further information available on the attack that I can freely disclose, although I personally suspect it’s an attempt to disrupt regular user activity by forcing people to fill in the maximum log-in attempts CAPTCHA in the User Control Panel page.

Despite Espreon’s rather unfortunate accident with the (back then still experimental) ATI R300 Gallium3D driver from Mesa, I have been wanting to give the R600 driver a try since a while, especially after consulting on the #radeon IRC channel about its feature status.

R600g appears to be rather complete and on par with the classic Mesa R600c in terms of capabilities, and while I did not try many applications with it yesterday to avoid tempting fate, I witnessed its performance on a Linux 2.6.37 kernel, using the latest libdrm, Mesa and xf86-video-ati DDX code from the Freedesktop.org git repositories.

In terms of speed, R600g has some major drawbacks with some of the applications running on my Debian Squeeze/Sid+Experimental laptop, most notably KDE SC 4.4.5’s window manager. Apparently there’s a small incompatibility between KWin in 4.4.x/early 4.5.x and Mesa Gallium3D that renders the OpenGL compositing code really slow for most purposes, albeit still usable. Someone in IRC mentioned to me that he experienced the same issues in KDE 4.5.1 but not 4.5.5.

In fact, replacing KWin with Compiz did the trick for me. I don’t run any serious benchmarks here, so this is all pretty subjective, but I could swear Compiz runs slightly faster with R600g than with R600c.

Then there’s one of my favorite time-killers, SuperTuxKart. Performance with R600g seemed to be on par with R600c — that is, without disabling some of the game’s visual effect features, the poor graphics stack here could barely manage around 30 FPS. On the other hand, R600c suffers from some texture corruption bugs with STK that don’t appear with its Gallium3D counterpart.

Frogatto is a whole different story. It’s already suffering great performance penalties in some border cases with transparent background tiles using the classic DRI/DRI2 driver on KMS mode; with Gallium3D, it’s just absolutely unplayable in exterior levels displaying parallax backgrounds.

Summarizing, I doubt I’ll be able to enjoy R600g until Debian Squeeze is released and a newer KDE SC version (probably 4.6.x by that point) makes it to the package repositories. I still plan to figure out exactly what’s wrong with Frogatto on R600c and R600g, somehow.

There might be some hope with the ATI R600 page-flipping code that’s scheduled to land in production kernels with Linux 2.6.38, but I won’t bet on it for now.

Since my last post on the matter, I have had the opportunity to experiment with Mercurial and Git much more for my own projects in order to investigate options for the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project. A random forumer recently raised a stealth complaint against our usage of SVN, and he seems to prefer Mercurial (I can’t blame him for it, since SVN sucks at every conceivable level), but I don’t think it is the solution for our usage scenario.

To get it out of the way, I do use Mercurial to manage the Spanish translation for the Atheme IRC Services suite, and more recently, Hakone and Poison Ivy are hosted at Bitbucket (which is pretty cool, especially since it has out of the box support for CIA bot notifications).

The problem, as all Wesnoth-UMC-Dev related issues are, centers around the learning curve for non-tech-savvy newbies.

Mercurial uses a very strange user-level commit representation that involves a revision number and a hash, like 136:5c70e078efce (Hakone tip as of this writing). The only component in this commit specification that matters to most commands is the hash — the commit number is just there for decoration.

This is particularly jarring when history becomes non-linear.

changeset:   136:5c70e078efce
tag:         tip
user:        Ignacio R. Morelle <shadowm@xxxxxxx.xxx>
date:        Sun Jan 09 03:37:37 2011 -0300
summary:     application: Normalize capitalization of "Wesnoth-UMC-Dev"

changeset:   150:5c70e078efce
parent:      148:537ad43f161b
user:        Ignacio R. Morelle <shadowm@xxxxxxx.xxx>
date:        Sun Jan 09 03:37:37 2011 -0300
summary:     application: Normalize capitalization of "Wesnoth-UMC-Dev"

These two commits are, as far as the content (diff) is concerned, identical. The only difference is that one resides within my local repository on my hard disk on a clean tree that doesn’t have any merges; the other is on the live Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website and has several merges resulting from the lack of the rebase extension in the Hg version we are using.

What’s wrong, you may ask? Those who are used to DVCSes won’t see anything of interest here. Those who are used to CVS or SVN will notice that the “revision numbers” in here differ for the same commit. Why is this? Because of the multiple merges down the history in the website’s repository. This is an arguably ridiculous case of non-linearity that could have been solved with the aforementioned plug-in if it were available on the system version we are running. However, it’s not too far from what would happen in an actual project with multiple contributors with direct commit access.

So, just like in Git, the ultimate solution for commit management is using hash specs. And that scares newbies because hexadecimal numbers are 1337 |-|/\XX0|3 stuff or something.

But unlike Git, the solution to our problem requires manual activation (~/.hgrc), and isn’t built into older Mercurial versions.

[extensions]
hgext.rebase =

Does this make sense to you? Good, because it doesn’t to me. Maybe it’s a cool way to demonstrate how extensible your VCS can be, but for me this is just ludicrous.

Git, on the other hand, is as bloated as a Swiss Army Knife, and you might not even need most of what it ships with — which is good, because not all of us are Linux kernel developers. Fortunately, the authors are not evil enough to try to lure unsuspecting clueless users with fake revision numbers.

(Incidentally, Mercurial is implemented in Python. And I hate Python, as you know. Coincidence? I think not.)

I didn’t receive any gifts this Christmas, or so I thought. I have been approached by a certain someone who seems to had forgotten about these two cool items she bought for someone she can’t even remember. By default, I appear to be the recipient.

Chocolate figurines!

A chocolate snowman and Santa Claus! (Well, Viejo Pascuero in Chile.)

They’re just so cute... so deliciously defenseless… so doomed.

I’m a big fan adorer of chocolate, but I still have trouble deciding whether to eat them or not, and when or how. It feels so unfair for them to be devoured…

Never mind! Lunch time! See you at night, tasty pals!

Don’t throw your shoes at me! I didn’t come to continue the overly long “display resolution” gag!

I have been thinking about some stuff to do during this year for a while, actually. It’s really hard to decide because I’m a person who runs into all sort of trouble while trying to get projects accomplished (including procrastination).

One thing I’m already doing is learning some Japanese, for no particular reason at all — although you’ve got to admit that having multiple languages in your curriculum is worth a bunch of coolness points. Espreon is helping me along the way with his own recently gained knowledge. It seems quite fun to learn a language in a non-Latin alphabet, if not a tad overwhelming at times, especially with kanji.

It’d be a good idea to lose some weight this year, too. My addiction to sugary stuff isn’t quite compatible with my heart condition! (Nor is coffee, but… meh.)

Then there’s Wesnoth. I intend to finish the Second Act™ of After the Storm Episode I as soon as I may, even through the means of placeholders — I’m willing to do anything to rescue AtS out of Development Hell before the end of 2011.

Wesnoth RCX’s development is halted right now due to lack of interest on my part to invest energy on writing the rest of the new functionality (i.e. definition of custom ranges and palettes), but I know that once I touch Qt Creator’s awesome interface I can’t stop working for a while — so I may eventually get some inspiration to redesign the main window, which should inevitably lead me to tinker around with the rest of the code.

C# was the first “major” programming language I learned, not counting Visual Basic. I have some fond memories of my first experiments with C#, but after I embarked upon learning and using C++ I kind of forgot about it. I have been considering the possibility of writing an IRC client of sorts using C# just for kicks, and to not forget this language in case I ever need it again. Why IRC? Because clients for this protocol are simple and challenging to implement, both at the same time!

I’ve already started to learn a bit of Lua for my work on the aforementioned Wesnoth campaign — in fact, there’s already some released code within it written in this language, particularly in scenario 5! I have plans to rewrite parts of Invasion from the Unknown in Lua to clean it up a little, thus paving the road for future maintenance work by me or other people (don’t forget that IftU is still abandoned!).

Another software project I intend to tackle in the short term is Rei 2. Sure, she’s doing well and her main command handlers are many and useful enough for channels such as ##shadowm and #wesnoth-umc-dev, but her dependence on Irssi’s core might well be a curse for one of our use cases: Shikadibot (the Second), which runs on a resource-limited VPS where every drop of RAM has got gold value. I’m already brainstorming a possible abstraction layer (codenamed “API 3”) which could allow the Irssi core to be swappable with a custom, native IRC client core (codenamed “Anya”). There’s really not much in the current Irssi-based implementation of the internal interfaces (“API 2”) that make a dependency switch unfeasible.

Finally, I’m not going to stop producing useless updates for my website! Dorset5 0001 is already a reality, although there’s still much I want to do before replacing the current layout. This time I have placed an emphasis on readability and elegance that I don’t think the previous revisions have lived up to so far.

• • •

All in all, I always have so many ideas floating in my mind that I rarely carry to realization, so this can’t be considered a definitive list. There are other possibilities I’m contemplating for the long term regarding my personal life, but that’s a much more volatile subject to discuss so I’m avoiding it for now.