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.

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.)

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.

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!)

The X.org radeon driver continues to be very stable with Mesa 7.7 and a newer libdrm (2.4.17), and now I'm running the Linux kernel 2.6.32.2. When building it for the first time, I enabled ACPI S3 suspend (to RAM) support in the configuration because I had initially planned to try it with the kernel mode-setting drivers (that part of the plan got scrapped when I found out that the KMS drivers are not intended to work well for 3D yet) — so, after rebooting, I noticed a new button in the power management widget in KDE's panel.

A shiny new button... S3 suspend had not worked for me during all this time because uswsusp and the kernel were unable to bring the keyboard, touchpad and screen back to life when resuming normal system operation, so I had disabled support for it in the configuration for many kernel versions for fear of accidentally suspending to RAM instead of disk, and losing my current work as a consequence.

However, the power of Debian Squeeze's current hibernate script package (?), the vanilla+TuxOnIce 2.6.32 kernel, and all the new graphics drivers, seems to do miracles. Suspend-to-RAM works at last on this laptop! After a year of fiddling with build and run-time kernel configuration and tools! (And this is why it's a bad idea to run Linux on a brand-new laptop; but I knew it was going to be like this and still went ahead, mind you.)

This means that the ATI mayhem is over (well, except for a little problem), and now that I can run some of my favorite OpenGL-based software, suspend to RAM and disk safely and run KDE 4, my mission is complete my work here is done. My local builds of this software are my very own Christmas gift this year.

Yays for the open-source community! \o/

The End.

...OR IS IT?

(... or why I am not a good father, explained in a ridiculously long article.)

As explained in detail in the recently overhauled projects section, Invasion from the Unknown and After the Storm are two campaigns I am maintaining as external add-ons for the Battle for Wesnoth Project with the power of the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev repository. Both are sequels to the mainline Under the Burning Suns campaign, and, in a way, to Descent into Darkness and the infamous The Dark Hordes as well.

Lately I have had no time to write new blog entries, as I've have been very busy fixing and preparing stuff in Wesnoth's mainline for 1.6. Similarly, my Wesnoth add-on Invasion from the Unknown experienced a new rebirth in December 2008 when I finally got around to make it work properly with Wesnoth 1.5.x and fix some quirks in the mainline game engine which I noticed in the process.

I wouldn't have made it without the support of... heck, too many people actually.

My biggest thanks go to the now MIA Wesnoth Developer and website Administrator, Cycholka/Mist. He made the initial port of IftU for Wesnoth 1.5.0 or 1.5.1 on May 2008, with some help from wmllint and manual fixing, and encouraged me to continue fixing and improving the campaign in this new development branch. He demonstrated great interest in seeing it eventually mainlined. It's a shame that he disappeared shortly after the Grand Wesnoth.org Hard-Disk Crash of July 2008 - not without restoring and repairing the severely damaged website, of course.

Mica and Espreon are some of the youngest members of the community, but without their enthusiasm and encouragement, even IftU for 1.4.x would have been abandoned. Actually, I'd have abandoned even greater things than IftU or Wesnoth without their support. It's also a shame that Mica disappeared last December.

ESR's encouragement and help with the text revisions helped me get around to start improving IftU from Cycholka's port, adding stuff not seen before in the 1.4.x versions. However, ESR went missing for a time, and I got distracted with mainline development. It was not until Patterner, Elvish Pillager, and Loonycyborg started playtesting the half-broken, non-released IftU for 1.5.x around August, that I didn't realize that it was worth the effort to salvage the campaign.

AI0867 removed most of the pressure I had during that time by taking over my role as the lead administrator of Wesnoth-UMC-Dev. He also contributed some critical bugfixes to IftU's WML and English text strings. Kitty's work on the original portraits since October made me take a new route in RL, and at the same time, summon all the possible manpower to polish IftU, fix most (if not all) regressions from 1.4, overhaul some of my original sprites, and get Invasion from the Unknown version 1.10.1a released on Christmas Eve, 11:30 PM CLT (GMT-04:00 + DST) - not without releasing two interim test releases: 1.10.0 and 1.10.1. After releasing IftU, I got my Christmas present from my parents: a new laptop. Just what I needed!

It was a bumpy path indeed, and 1.10.0 was actually scheduled to be released on November 10th 2008. That didn't happen due to the extreme bugginess of the mainline engine at that moment. At the end, the campaign's definitive release announcement on the Wesnoth.org forums is probably the longest one I have written for a long time.

At the moment, mainline is in good shape for 1.6 (with the first Release Candidate published today) and my attention is directed to IftU yet again. Although since the Xmas 2008 release there has been some development in it (1.10.2, 1.10.3, 1.10.4, 1.10.5, 1.11.0 and 1.11.1 have been released, not counting today's 1.11.1.1), there's still lots of things to improve. Recently Solsword brought up some continuity issues in IftU scenarios 3, 8x and 10, which I have addressed, and contributed some text revisions. Thespaceinvader contributed new graphics and code for the Water Serpent unit, and Kitty contributed portraits for a major enemy boss, portraits which certainly exceeded my expectations.

I'm looking forward to see how Kitty will depict the last major enemy boss in IftU, the Shadow Master himself (oh noes!). I also look forward to animate the Elyssa and Shadow Master sprites, and overhaul part of the Shaxthal unit tree (and add animations while at it).

Four Buttons for the Multimedia-maniacs under the window,
Twelve for the UI Designers in their skyscrappers,
Three for the Emacs Men doomed to hack,
One for the Power Source on its dark throne
In the Land of Silicon where the Circuits lie.

I have been victim of a horrendous accident in which the power-on button of my laptop broke to never work again. For a week, I kept beside my desktop computer, to hack and hack Mesiga as I haven't for a long time. Yesterday, I went to the capital to connect to the Internet, inform the Wesnoth project of my situation, and find information about the official technical support offices for my laptop's brand in Chile. (If you're curious, it is an Acer Aspire 5050, and certainly not a choice I liked, but it was a birthday present and I couldn't reject it.)

So, I found a single location at Ñuñoa, Santago. Went there. Talked to the... salesperson. The deal was unacceptable.

The laptop has three hardware problems (known to me) at the moment: pinkish LCD at the middle, non-functional touchpad keys and, oh, the power button that sank like the first ship destroyed by the Kracken on Pirates of the Caribbean II (and this is not a metaphor). The support service would not let me decide what to repair, and they would examine the computer by themselves within a period of 4 work days, and then get me a nice report of what should be fixed and at what price. I managed to convince the man to spit the usual price for repairing the issues I'm aware of, in particular. It was beyond my possibilities. He told me that the other option was to buy the components myself and get someone to replace them.

To hell with them! How can there be a way such laptop components (the display, power button and touchpad parts) can be distributed in the same fashion as their desktop counterparts, and still make profit with that? I mean, WE ALL KNOW that every laptop model has completely different shape and size; worse if we put every manufacturer in the game. There are generic laptops that can be built from scratch with generic components, but if I owned one of these I'd not be coming to your damn offices in the first place!

So, knowing that there is no commercial solution for me, I decided to try and disassemble the laptop.

I removed the panel above the keyboard, and got access to the mechanism of the sunken button. Examining it in detail, there is a push-button below the plastic thing I usually press, just connected to the circuit below. However, that push-button didn't work. So the breakage affected more parts than I suspected, oh great...

Around 2:00 AM, I was examining the board with a non-conductor artifact, namely the remainings of an ink pen's external plastic tube, and while searching for clues as to where was the LED which illuminates when the power is on, I slipped my fingers and accidentally touched (rather impacted) a component which I didn't see, causing the computer to turn on, and notice that the LED seems to be part of a miniature chip. I'm no hardware man and I know little to nothing of this stuff.

Oh joys, so I have two options: either the round push-button below the laptop's cover is a fake button, just put there to make a click sound and have bindings to the circuitry for no reason at all, or it was damaged long ago and the broken external button just made it worse. Because, well, the power button was faulty for a long time; it wouldn't work unless I pressed its bottom-left corner in particular, an almost non-issue for me.

Now, if I only knew how to fix it, I'd be happy, LCD and touchpad aside. Really, I can live with the other problems*, but I want to be able to turn on and off the laptop without having to use OS facilities, which are unavailable when the power is down. For the mean time I'll not turn it down and only use suspend to RAM to let it inactive, connected to a power outlet. I'll have to specially make sure Linux kernel doesn't crash, and that I don't issue a power-off command accidentally.