Shadowmaster’s Blog - Miscellaneous

After the Storm 0.7.0: Mission Complete!

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 02:17:00 +0000

After the Storm’s development began in 2008, some time after the completion of Invasion from the Unknown. Since then, the campaign’s development was repeatedly and severely hindered by multiple planning issues, partially caused by (borderline pathological) perfectionism on my part; plus many other personal problems.

During most of 2011, development was unofficially halted, with a half-baked E1S9.2 lingering around in the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev SVN trunk for months. Version 0.4.0 was released near the end of September, and from that point onwards, I decided to not stop working on the campaign ever again, until it reached completion.

That day, sadly, arrived sooner than I expected. Version 0.7.0 is here, presenting a complete Episode II with 12 scenarios, adding E2S8 through E2S12 to the line-up found in version 0.6.1.

AtS was always planned to have only two episodes, so as previously said I consider it to be 100% complete in terms of scenario count right now. The third episode (After the Storm: Final) is still in the planning stage and it will most likely be developed in parallel with the balancing, clean-ups and touch-ups leading to version 1.0.0, making it a target for version 2.0.0 instead.

Right now, AtS is in urgent need of portrait art for the new characters introduced throughout E1 and E2, at least two new unit baseframes for use in E1S9.2 and E2S11, plus a third baseframe for E3. While portrait art isn’t a version 1.0.0 target per se, I would really welcome any help at any time, as long as the art style stays consistent with Invasion from the Unknown. It’s very likely the missing baseframes will be provided by myself in the meantime.

Later, I’ll publish a more complete to-do list with the tasks remaining to be done for version 1.0.0, and I’ll try to make a more exhaustive art to-do list as well.

The changelog for this version follows:

Version 0.7.0:
--------------
* Graphics:
  * New or updated unit graphics: Dusk Faerie, Shaxthal Worm, Shaxthal
    Rayblade, Shaxthal Assault Drone, Shaxthal Protector Drone, Shaxthal War
    Drone, Shaxthal Runner Drone.
  * New or updated terrain graphics: Dark Hive Floor (transitions).

* Scenarios:
  * E1S5 - Bay of Tirigaz:
    * Rewrote shipwreck generator code so the message strings can actually
      be translated.
  * E1S8 - Fear:
    * Updated to use a Wesnoth 1.9.10 terrain.
  * E2S1 - By the Moonlight:
    * Updated to use a Wesnoth 1.9.10 terrain.
  * E2S2 - The Heart Forest:
    * Updated to use a Wesnoth 1.9.10 terrain.
  * E2S4 - Shifting Allegiances:
    * Fixed a local variable leak.
  * E2S6 - The Voyage Home:
    * Updated to use a Wesnoth 1.9.10 terrain.
  * E2S7 - Proximus:
    * Added a hint regarding the enemy leader's chance-to-hit override to
      objectives.
    * Fixed animation glitches.
  * E2S8 - And then there was Chaos:
    * New scenario.
  * E2S9 - New Hive:
    * New scenario.
  * E2S10 - The Betrayal:
    * New scenario.
  * E2S11 - A Final Confrontation:
    * New scenario.
  * E2S12 - Fate:
    * New cutscene scenario.

* Units:
  * New unit: Shaxthal Worm (replaces the Shaxthal Wyrm).
  * Balancing:
    * Reduced Nightshade Fire's ranged arcane attack strength from 12-3 to 10-3.
    * Reduced Nightshade Fire's ranged cold attack strength from 13-2 to 11-2.
    * Reduced Night Nymph's ranged arcane attack strength from 9-3 to 8-3.
    * Increased Errant Soul's ranged attack strength from 2-1 to 2-2.
    * Reduced Chaos Headhunter's ranged attack strength from 6-3 to 5-3.
    * Reduced Chaos Marauder's axe attack strength from 10-2 to 8-2.
    * Reduced Chaos Marauder's ranged attack strength from 7-3 to 6-3.
    * Reduced Chaos Soulhunter's axe attack strength from 13-2 to 12-2.
    * Reduced Chaos Soulhunter's ranged attack strength from 10-3 to 9-3.
  * Revised Shaxthal unit descriptions.
  * Shaxthal Runner Drones can no longer advance to Assault Drones.
  * Added a custom teleport animation for Nightshade Fire.
  * Added unit type descriptions for Night Nymph and Nightshade Fire.
  * Removed conflicting markup from the Sylvan Warden unit type description.

Just like the previous release, AtS 0.7.0 requires Wesnoth 1.9.10 or later. The presence of the Rotten Bridge terrain in several scenarios (mentioned in the changelog) really enforces this requirement in this opportunity.

So... yeah, the campaign is complete now. Go forth and play.

Wow

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 03:26:00 +0000

commit 9f6bd04ec405d3987a513ae490fcfef7fad6a034
Author: shikadilord <shikadilord@87cc232e-6748-0410-ac04-a3fa75566414>
Date:   Mon Jan 16 03:22:28 2012 +0000

    AtS E2S12: completed epilogue scenario
    
    This makes After the Storm 100% complete in terms of scenario count.
    
    git-svn-id: https://wesnoth-umc-dev.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wesnoth-umc-dev/trunk/After_the_Storm@12917 87cc232e-6748-0410-ac04-a3fa75566414

I never thought this day would come.

2011 Wrap-up

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 20:52:00 +0000

At long last, 2011 is coming to an end. In a few hours, we’ll have to dump our old calendars to replace them with new ones bearing the number 2012 in a big font size. Then the people who believe 2012 will be the end of life on Earth will begin to panic as we approach December again. Those nutcases.

This was a relatively calm and monotone year in what pertains to my personal life, so I’m not going to delve into details in this opportunity. However, I made some resolutions last New Year and it might be worth it to review them and check why I didn’t accomplish all of my goals.

Learning Japanese: I got severely sidetracked after a while. I may still try again in the future, just because.
Losing weight: I may have gained ~~some~~ a lot of weight during the course of the year. Oops. I did, however, stop drinking coffee, because my stomach started to reject (read: try to vomit) it after a while for some reason.
Wesnoth RCX: Still halted. Frankly, there doesn’t seem to be enough interest amongst the Wesnoth community nowadays for this kind of tool, and for my own purposes Wesnoth-TC serves well as it is.
Relearning C♯: Also sidetracked. It doesn’t seem worth it, in hindsight.
Learning Lua: Accomplished according to certain definitions. I haven’t really learned more about the language than necessary, but I have indeed committed some Lua code to mainline Wesnoth, and several tasks of varying difficulty are accomplished with custom Lua-backed WML tags in After the Storm and Invasion from the Unknown as of this writing.
Rei 2 IRC Bot: Stalled, due to lack of interest. There are also seem to be a few Irssi-specific problems with Perl 5.14, which is in the operating system I’m using at the moment, Debian wheezy.
Website: Accomplished. In fact, in a few hours I’ll deploy a few minor changes to the code to optimize the blog template processing a bit.

One particular resolution deserves separate analysis, though:

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.

I didn’t resort to unlawful methods to accomplish this goal as I originally feared, but it still happened! Granted, rather late.

During September and October I had a rather unexpected creativity and productivity spurt which culminated with the release of AtS version 0.5.0 with Episode I: Fear complete with 13 scenarios. More recently in December, we reached version 0.6.1 with 7 complete scenarios for Episode II: Fate. As of this writing, E2S8 and E2S9 are also complete in SVN trunk in Wesnoth-UMC-Dev, although it’s been suggested that the latter could use some spicing up. E2S10 is a work in progress since yesterday, and part of E2S12 was written already back in October, just not committed.

Thus, it could be said that after many difficulties, After the Storm broke out of Development Hell. Whether I’ll consider Episode III: Final (expected to be shorter, around 6 scenarios) part of the required line-up for version 1.0.0 is a matter I haven’t settled yet.

Once After the Storm is finished, I plan to take a rather long break from campaign development. That isn’t to say I’m out of ideas, since there is one character I want to explore in further detail in her own campaign. However, I may have my Wesnoth time taken up by mainline work after 1.10 is released depending on the situation then, since there’s a rather large technology gap in Wesnoth that needs to be solved.

Other than that, I haven’t really decided on any resolutions for 2012, so I’ll leave you with the one resolution of the moment:

...
screen #0:
  dimensions:    1280x800 pixels (338x211 millimeters)
  resolution:    96x96 dots per inch
...

(This information is utterly wrong. xdpyinfo reported the same screen dimensions on bluecore last year in spite of its screen being glaringly larger than reicore’s by a few milimeters.)

Sabayon Linux likes to play dirty

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 23:12:00 +0000

My friend just mentioned on IRC a rather unusual banner displayed during the installation of Sabayon Linux, somehow involving Debian. I didn’t pay much attention to his claims at first, but then he uploaded a screenshot he’s kindly authorized me to repost:

Isn’t it nice to know there are Linux distributions resorting to over-simplified, uneducated statements to promote themselves? And the banner design itself is ugly as well. I think this merits no further analysis.

WML is like XML, all right...

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:39:00 +0000

Since people keep saying WML is like XML, I decided to provide an example of what a standard WML snippet would look like if it had to be translated to XML.

WML:

[event]
    name=last breath
    [filter]
        id=shadowm
    [/filter]
    [message]
        speaker=shadowm
        message= _ "NO!"
    [/message]
[/event]

XML:

<event name="last breath">
    <filter id="shadowm" />
    <message speaker="shadowm" message:gettext="NO!" />
</event>

My knowledge of XML doesn’t go far enough, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of translatable strings being an integral part of the syntax, hence the funky-looking XML attribute name for event.message.message above.

This example only covers the basic WML syntax (i.e. no preprocessor directives, +nodes or embedded Lua) on purpose.

The Tantalizing Trinket

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:01:00 +0000

VVVVVV is a fun retro platformer which features gravity flipping instead of jumping, and some ridiculously hard rooms (the hardest ones are usually optional). It was part of the Humble Indie Bundle #3 earlier this year.

For a good while I've been trying to get the optional trinket in “Doing Things The Hard Way”, and apparently I got the hang of it at last. This is the first time I succeed in this little side-quest after something around 1000 attempts. Two (unexpectedly) failed attempts are also featured in this footage:

Sadly, for technical reasons I couldn’t record any sound, hence I decided to keep it unlisted in my account. The chiptune music and sound effects are, in my not-so-humble opinion, an essential aspect of the game and they may well be the only reason I accepted the challenge and completed all the main levels (back in August, granted, but there is replay value).

New TV

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 02:37:00 +0000

Years ago, I donated my TV to someone else at home who needed it, just so we didn’t have to buy a new one and give up on buying the laptop that came to be Bluecore. More recently, everyone at home decided to buy new TVs for their own use to replace the old CRTs we’d been using for the last decade — so I was finally left as the one TV-less denizen of this fortress of insanity.

That’s no longer the case.

I have a TV of my own again, decidedly cheap as we didn’t buy it for ourselves, and it works — not that I couldn’t watch TV when I wanted already, since my desktop computer (Blackcore) does have an analog TV capture card that works nicely on Windows (Linux, namely X.org, on VIA IGPs is an atrocious disaster). Most notably, this is the only TV that came with VGA and audio cords, so I can also connect my laptops (or my desktop) to it, although I can only wonder why there’s no HDMI cord when that appears to be what cool kids use nowadays.

It’s not too useful either way, for the maximum resolution such a setup can handle is 1360x768 (albeit the manual claims 1366x768) — compare against Reicore and Bluecore’s native LCD panel resolution of 1280x800. I don’t care much about its purportedly actual function of serving as an entertainment device since local TV kind of died for me circa 2006, when it stopped broadcasting anything of my interest. I spend more time on computers doing work than watching videos or movies anyway.

As an aside note, it appears KDE SC 4.6.5 or X.org server 1.11 (in Debian wheezy right now) don’t handle display output switching very gracefully in regards to window geometries, and windows tend to become 0x0 (when plugging in the TV) or get tossed offscreen (when unplugging the TV). I won’t claim KDE’s window manager is perfect, but in my experience X.org is not the best piece of software found in current general-purpose Linux distributions and it could as well be literally made of explosives and still do its job in the most basic configurations.

Giving Debian Wheezy another whirl, and an unpleasant surprise from Reicore

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 02:23:00 +0000

The last time I tried to switch from Debian stable to testing I was hit by a disease known as X.org Server 1.10, and more specifically, fd.o bug #31017, which made my KDE experience less than worthwhile, to say the last. The solution I devised was not particularly productive either.

However, X.org Server 1.11.1 hit Testing a while ago, and it’s what I am using right now — I successfully switched to “wheezy” again, today, and this time it would seem a massive rollback won’t be required, since the aforementioned bug is finally fixed.

I don’t think I can claim the upgrade was smooth, though.

Continue reading "Giving Debian Wheezy another whirl, and an unpleasant surprise from Reicore"

More on the imminent hard disk crash

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 02:15:00 +0000

As I previously reported, reicore’s hard disk might be dying. This is not surprising in the least, since I have been hearing loud noises from the drive during high activity since a long while — playing vanilla Minecraft is apparently the most straining task for it for some reason. Considering reicore didn’t present any such issues at the beginning, it’s possible the person who gave her to me when bluecore croaked did something bad to her while I wasn’t looking. He’s unlikely to confirm such a thing, though.

A short drive self-test last night revealed that one of the bad blocks is currently part of the very root filesystem. Since I started to consistently hit a bad block while logging into KDE, I decided to run e2fsck -c on all partitions from a Grml live CD system (also Debian-based).

(Yes, I just realized I inadvertently left the swap partition out of the emergency check procedure. I just ran badblocks on it in read-only mode and it appears to be clean.)

Scanning a 466 GiB hard disk for bad sectors isn’t a quick task, but it took just as long as it did with the 1.18 GiB disk on my first computer back in 1998 — about two hours and some minutes — and here are the good news: there are only two damaged sectors, both of them within the root filesystem, and only one file was lost: /usr/lib/libQtDesigner.so.4.7.3, provided by the libqt4-designer package in Debian wheezy.

Why the dynamic linker felt it necessary to access this file while launching Akregator and KMail during the login process is beyond me, but it’s good that nothing was lost, as I promptly reinstalled the package. Either way, I had a fresh pre-upgrade backup in my external 2 TiB hard disk drive ready just in case.

I’ll certainly have to get used to making backups more often than my previous, sloppy ~~biweekly~~ n-weekly schedule. Thanks goodness for rsnapshot!

After the Storm 0.5.0

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 05:41:00 +0000

The idea of continuing and developing the Invasion from the Unknown storyline further was in my mind from the beginning, and I apparently started to work on a sequel on May 2008, if the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Registry is anything to go by.

After the Storm’s development has been repeatedly impacted and put at risk by various “real life” issues.

Earlier this year, I decided to go back to work on the campaign after a long hiatus — so long I don’t remember how long anymore — but my attempt ultimately failed anyway. I promised a delivery, but the delivery did not happen.

Until I rediscovered the fun in video games with VVVVVV, Minecraft and Portal. Then, magic ensued.

I said I would try to finish the first episode of the campaign before December. I am glad to say that mission has just been accomplished. After the Storm 0.5.0 is out in the Wesnoth 1.9.x add-ons server, with the first episode (that’s 13 scenarios) complete!

For those who’d rather read a terse piece of text with no emotive speech in it, the changelog for this version follows:

Version 0.5.0:
--------------
* Scenarios:
  * 09 - The Triad (part 3):
    * Fixed problems with the final cutscene on Wesnoth 1.9.8 and earlier.
  * 11 - Return to Wesmere (part 2):
    * New scenario.
  * Completed episode I.
* Units:
  * Removed Skirmisher ability from Elynia.
  * Spawners have a small chance of deactivating themselves after spawning a
    unit.

I have tried to make sure AtS remains playable on Wesnoth 1.9.8, but my primary development target is still 1.9.9 and support for 1.9.5, 1.9.6 and 1.9.7 is mainly theoretical at the moment. If you encounter any “Invalid WML errors” or such, and you are using Wesnoth 1.9.7 or earlier, try with Wesnoth 1.9.8 or 1.9.9 instead if you can, and give me some feedback in the forum thread so I can address any such issues as soon as I may.

I take this opportunity to remind you that you can also find and follow me on Twitter as @ShikadiLord or join my personal channel ##shadowm in the freenode IRC network.

Have a lot of fun!

Crucial flaw, Part II

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 06:44:00 +0000

I figured that fixing the recordMyDesktop breakage in my Debian installation would be worth the extra effort after all, so I made a complete backup of my system and switched all installed packages I could to their debian-multimedia.org counterparts. That is not to say that this road is covered with rainbows and populated by puppies; dm.o’s version of the mplayer package conflicts with Debian’s mplayer-gui package because of one icon file provided by both, so I had to remove mplayer-gui to complete the “upgrade”.

Based on what I’ve heard about dm.o this is par for the course, though.

This repository does not provide custom versions of rMD or its Gtk+ GUI, so I had to stick to the Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) version of gtk-recordmydesktop (link) to be able to do some configuration again.

The outcome? Success. recordMyDesktop’s videos finally work with both YouTube and ffmpeg, which I had to use anyway to reduce the output’s size from about 250 MiB to 50 MiB so it wouldn’t take hours or days to upload:

$ ffmpeg -map 0.1 -b 2000000 -i Videos/capture/achievement.ogv Videos/capture/achievement-trans-2000.ogv

All just in time for a little personal milestone:

The video is silent, though, for a reason:

It turns out that ALSA doesn’t expose a hardware loopback capture control for me for some reason and that is exactly what I need to be able to capture audio from ALSA applications! I haven’t figured out whether it’s possible to intercept the crap sent to the sound card in software so I’ll just settle for silent captures for now. I could use the laptop’s builtin microphone if I wanted, but I tend to be in really noisy environments where anything can happen in the background while I’m recording.

It’s a real shame that ALSA can’t detect (or reicore’s onboard sound controller doesn’t expose) a loopback control. If anyone knows any method to do the aforementioned interception without using PulseAudio (or Jack, which Minecraft/LWJGL does not support), I’d really love to hear about it.

Crucial flaw, or “Why You Should Stick To Windows”

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:39:00 +0000

Recording screen captures/screencasts in Debian GNU/Linux (and as far as I know, Ubuntu as well) is not trivial.

It’s really frustrating that even though Linux enthusiasts generally place special emphasis on the ecosystem’s vast array of choices for various software application classes, a simple and ubiquitous field like screen recording applications appears to be mostly empty, only populated by a few rare specimens that attest to fundamental flaws in Linux architecture which seal its place as a non-mainstream operating system that’s not suitable for the average Joe.

Proprietary solutions to this seemingly trivial problem appear to be scarce. There’s Wink, but it doesn’t produce actual videos in any of the most popular video container formats, so it’s useless for capturing clips to upload to everyone’s favorite “lols” repository.

The free/open-source solutions can be divided in two major camps:

Horribly complicated command-line applications or clever tricks, such as convoluted ffmpeg options.
Featureless GUI front-ends like recordMyDesktop or VLC.

As a mobile broadband user with a very restrictive monthly transfer quota (6 GiB download + upload) I am not really keen on videos as a medium, but there are cases where they really are the only format that makes sense in situations like sharing gameplay footage. Multiple times I have tried to use recordMyDesktop to capture some bug-hunting action in games like SuperTuxKart or Frogatto to no avail; the application itself won’t produce output in any format but Ogg/Theora/Vorbis (presumably by design), and in Debian squeeze in particular, it is affected by two bugs:

The Advanced dialog won’t come up (bug #630664, solution is either to take the risk and use the Ubuntu 11.04 gtk-recordmydesktop package, or have someone figure out what patch needs to be applied to fix it in Debian (not sure if I can be bothered to work on that since I’m not really happy with rMD either way, see further below)).
Sound capture doesn’t work by default because of a case-sensitivity issue regarding the device name (thanks Gambit for noticing this), that can only be fixed by changing the audio device name in Advanced preferences (see above) or hand-editing the config file in ~/.gtk-recordmydesktop.

There’s another two or three bugs affecting me that are apparently not recordMyDesktop’s responsibility:

YouTube won’t recognize the Theora videos produced by rMD for some reason, apparently due to some library/backend bug that still affects Debian squeeze (but apparently not recent Ubuntu versions). The result is a static green picture in most cases.
Similarly to the above, ffmpeg is unable to recode rMD’s output correctly regardless of the target format (even Theora to Theora), producing unreadable garbled videos.
VLC and ffmpeg can see an unidentifiable “zeroth stream” with no valid associated codecs in rMD’s output.
Linux’s audio architecture is fucked up.

Regarding the last “bug”, all I know is that I’m unable to capture audio from ALSA applications’ output as opposed to a real physical capture device like my laptop’s built-in microphone or an external microphone. I would not be surprised if I’m missing something in my mixer configuration that I need to make it work — given the huge amount of chipset or manufacturer-dependent options that can be seen below:

All this is using Linux 2.6.39.3 and the HDA Intel (snd_hda_intel) driver on some onboard controller identified as “00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)” in lspci’s output.

The closest thing I get to actual internal audio capture is a lot of random, stuttering noises mixed with application sounds that definitely doesn’t come from the built-in mic.

I personally can’t be bothered to research much about using ffmpeg tricks to capture footage of my awesome Minecraft world since, after all, I only want to capture footage of my awesome Minecraft world rather than learn a lot of crap that no sane average desktop/laptop user should ever need to touch. Furthermore, I’m using a graphical desktop environment for a reason!

So the only viable solution for me, at this moment, turns out to be rMD. Without sound. And with a very messy workaround for that mysterious library bug that causes ffmpeg and YouTube to choke on my videos.

I really think that, as a graphical desktop environment user I deserve a working solution out of the box, not a crapload of hacks working around some developers’ lack of interest on usability matters. I’m currently hoping that things won’t look so utterly grim after I switch to Debian wheezy (current Testing), once certain major bugs are addressed upstream or downstream.

The Double-posting Dilemma

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:39:42 +0000

When I prepared the final draft of the October 2010 revision of the Wesnoth.org Forums Posting Guidelines, I deliberately skipped clarifying a specific point regarding posting rate conducts, more specifically, point 1f, in order to see what the community would make out of it.

That’s not to say I didn’t alter it in any way whatsoever since the previous revision, which was basically a left-over of Turuk’s administration:

Before:

Think and Read.
Read the entire thread before you post. And when you post, explain your reasons. Nonsense may be deleted without warning, especially in a working topic. Posting the same thing after it has been deleted will get you a warning. Doing it again will get you a ban.

No Spamming.
Post a single idea/question/comment in only one forum. Do not double post, edit your previous post if you have something new to add but no one has posted yet.

After:

No spamming — think and read
Post a single idea/question/comment in only one forum. Do not double post, and instead edit your previous post if you have something new to add and no one has posted yet. Technical support requests may be bumped after a while in case they have been forgotten and sink past the first forum view page. Read the entire thread before replying to it. Nonsense may be deleted without warning, especially in a working topic.

I introduced the support requests bit with the intention of giving users in the support forums (Technical Support, Release Announcements, Compiling & Installation; WML Workshop, Coder’s Corner, Lua Labs, Scenario & Campaign Development) special protection as bumping topics in there is usually a legitimate and reasonable course of action. But in reality, there are other cases where bumping by means of double-posting should be allowed. Those are not described or explained in the Guidelines because I felt that elaborating on a specific point would derail the whole post.

One of those cases applies to campaign development topics, where the OP may post the announcement for a new version of the campaign and only a few hours later find himself or herself in need of another announcement because of a quick update fixing some important bug.

Another case, more technical than practical, is the maximum number of attachments per post, which exists to discourage and limit senseless spamming of unwanted content by automated and non-automated agents, and encourage use of compressed containers like tarballs, zip files and rar archives to keep our overall disk usage relatively low. Users exceeding the attachment limit will need to continue posting their content in consecutive posts.

Generally speaking, users reporting double/multiple posting according to section 5 of the Guidelines have enough common sense to understand that sometimes exceptions need to be granted and that this is one of the reasons we don’t call them the “Forum Rules”. Rent-a-modders occasionally lack this common sense, however, and they make their intentions evident through this mechanism. I imagine one can never be too anvilicious while reminding them what this entails.

Mining your way to victory

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 12:01:00 +0000

Thanks to a Wesnoth user (you know who you are!) who bought an order of the Humble Indie Bundle #3 for me last Tuesday, I finally had the chance to try the popular in-development Minecraft, thanks to the included trial that lasts until this Sunday 14th.

My thorough review of this game follows.

Continue reading "Mining your way to victory"

So, Google+

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 08:54:00 +0000

Where do I start?

Sometimes it’s easier to let Randall unwittingly do the talking for us.

To be honest, I’ve never really been into social networks unless Twitter counts — your mileage may vary in that regard. I don’t have many close er, “friends” and I don’t know most of my relatives. Facebook is pretty much useless for me for that purpose, and so is Google+ or any other such service.

Facebook… oh gods, where do I start with Facebook? It’s always been a shadow lurking behind me, trying to catch me off-guard, sending me shady blackmail messages to my Gmail account. For some reason some people thought I’d be interested in Facebook invites back in the day so I got spammed with them multiple times. I joined last year to stalk one single person (one who is perfectly aware of the situation, mind you) and still I have not had much use for it.

It is outrageous, however, that I must receive (by default, anyway) stupid reminders telling me to come back to Facebook when I’ve not logged into the main web proper for a week or so.

Hi Ignacio,

You haven't been back to Facebook recently. Here are some people you may know on Facebook. Connect with friends, family, classmates, and co-workers to see their updates, pictures, and more.

[Partial list of people whom I don’t even remotely know.]

… Oh wait, this is post is not about Facebook. Alright, then! Sorry for veering off-topic.

So, Google+ looks better in a few senses, but it’s still vastly unexplored territory for me right now because I have even less contacts whose email address I (still) know or who I want to implicitly invite. I got one of my former minions from the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project users to add and invite me so I could check it out before my fellow countrymen get the chance.

Google+ lets me add people to different circles and doesn’t force the “friend” misnomer upon me. I can have proper friends, relatives, acquaintances, or any other kind of contacts I want.
I don’t need to add people who add me and I don’t need to be added by people who I add to my own circles; this is nice and reminds me a bit of Twitter
~~It’s a Google product.~~
It’s not Facebook.
It doesn’t look like shit.

That said, if someone from my ~~microscopic~~ set of readers wants a Google+ invite, I may consider adding them depending on my mood that day at that time.

Wesnoth-UMC-Dev: A Retrospective

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 07:35:00 +0000

Today, after the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev reached its most important milestone, I have decided to step down from the project administrator position to leave the decision making and user support tasks to Espreon and AI0867, who have done an undeniably good job in my absence the last year while I was busy working on other projects.

This does not mean that I’m completely breaking my ties with this exciting platform for add-on development which ESR and I founded. I’ll continue to take care of infrastructure matters such as the website design, content and coding, the Registry tools and miscellaneous utilities whenever I have time; I’m not going to abandon After the Storm either, since I continue to be a user of the project either way.

I mentioned that I’d be following up the official r10000 announcement with the history of the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project. Most of the content below is taken from an interview I recently had with BfWEthnographer which eventually touched this subject.

Continue reading "Wesnoth-UMC-Dev: A Retrospective"

Wesnoth-UMC-Dev: r10000

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 23:42:00 +0000

The Coordinated Wesnoth User Made Content Development Project, better known as Wesnoth-UMC-Dev, has today reached SVN revision 10,000.

Here’s the official announcement.

I’ll soon post details about the project’s history here.

Campaign unit names

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:27:00 +0000

While searching for examples of translated generic unit names from data/core/macros/names.cfg in Wesnoth (much to my disappointment, the Japanese translation uses the source strings verbatim for this), I discovered an oddly familiar name amongst the female Elvish names for the markovian generator.

Anylindë.

Back in 2007/2008, I was pretty much forced by Syntax_Error/Blarumyrran to change the name of one of the main characters in Invasion from the Unknown. Why? Because her name was Analia — never mind that female human units named “Bra” occur quite often in the game thanks to the RNG’s influence over the name generation algorithm.

So I consulted ESR, who came up with Anlindë as a possible replacement. I never noticed before that it was just one letter away from being a generic unit name. Then again, Galas and Elynia were my own design choice and they are, indeed, part of the name generator sources — I had gotten so frustrated at the design phase that I took a random generic name for Galas and the first feminine-sounding name starting with ‘E’ for Elynia.

Furthermore, I also took Analia from names.cfg and it’s still there. No overzealous purists have complained so far.

Would IftU have been a better campaign if I had used custom names for these three characters? Maybe, by a marginal difference. On the other hand, the one time a recruited elf with the name Elynia appeared during gameplay (that one Sprite I got in IftU doesn’t count), I protected her until ~~the end~~ the second-to-last scenario of HttT — by then she was a veteran Elvish Shyde.

Talking about Debian Sid

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:47:00 +0000

While I had read Rhonda’s post on the matter of Debian Sid’s status as “not for end-users” back in the day, I was not aware that it was just one side of the coin. Now that the puzzle is complete, I thought I’d share a couple of links with my vast, intelligent audience:

Pay attention to the post dates, and don’t forget that both authors are Debian Developers.

Incidentally, at the time I read the last post (i.e. the same day it was published) I was already using Debian Sid, although in middle of Squeeze’s feature freeze. I didn’t pay much attention to the comments after it popped up in my feed reader, so I kind of missed the context.

Re: a Public Service Announcement

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 06:25:00 +0000

Some broken forum or email client software have the nasty habit of prepending “Re:” to the subject field of messages that are intended as a response to previous ones, without checking whether this prefix is already in place, which is the case when you are replying to another user’s response to the thread.

If you have one of those broken messaging clients, replace it. If you are using one of those broken forum boards, you have two options:

The user option: fix your subject field by hand and bug the administrator about it, whom I encourage to take:
The admin option: check whether there’s a fix for the software you run in your site; bug the developers to release a patch fixing this behavior, or (in the worst case) switch to a better solution.

You can avoid making yourself look like an idiot if you follow these few simple steps! Please! No-one wants to read a message with a title full of ReReReReReRes, or visit a site filled with such posts! It’s up to you to save the Internet from this horrendous disease!

The End Of The World As We Know It

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:30:00 +0000

Duke Nukem Forever is being released at last, and some parts of the world already got it. U.S.A. will have to wait till next Tuesday.

I just want to say that I always knew it’d happen. I never used DNF as a measure of project completion probability, not even once. Nonetheless, I thought I’d note that, in no particular order, all the following things did not happen before DNF’s release:

World domination by me
The Year of the Linux Desktop
GNU/Hurd 1.0 (you’ve got to give them credit for admitting their defeat, though)
The release of Microsoft Windows’ core frameworks as open source software
After the Storm version 1.0
~~Commander Keen: The Universe Is Toast~~ Screw that, Ceilick and his team did manage to complete an awesome unofficial trilogy
Invasion from the Unknown version 2.0
Battle for Wesnoth 2.0
Ubuntu Linux 17.04 “Zany Zebra”
Rei 2 IRC Bot 1.0
Mesiga 1.0
The end of Microsoft
2012 (no, not the movie)
Google Chrome 69.0
World domination by Linus
Waldo being found for good
Reicore Mk. II
Linux kernel 3.0 (the RCs don’t count!)
Irssi 1.0
Rapture
Evangelion 3.0
Evangelion: Final
Complete OpenGL 3.0 support in Mesa DRI/DRI2 drivers
World domination by TV Tropes
Invasion from the Unknown being merged into mainline Wesnoth
The completion of the current Order of the Stick story arc (strips #673 - ???)
The GNU General Public License version 4
The end of the freenode IRC network
phpBB 3.1
World domination by Wikipedia (that’s no moon…)
Debian GNU/Linux 20.0
Contact with extraterrestrial intelligence (or did it?)
Frogatto 2.0
World domination by Lady Gaga
Wesnoth-UMC-Dev SVN commit r10000
Reiser4 being merged into mainline Linux
ReactOS 1.0
SuperTux 1.0
Microsoft Windows 13 14
World domination by Tommy Wiseau

… and many, many other things that would be totally cool to have now.

Long Live the Wesnoth.org Favicon!

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Thu, 26 May 2011 07:21:00 +0000

Today, May 26th, a few minutes past 06:00 AM UTC, after 6 or 7 years of history, the Wesnoth.org favicon has finally been replaced by command of the Art Director on the live website and in SVN trunk, revision 49655, meaning this change is also effective in mainline starting with version 1.9.7 (not yet released).

The differences between both versions are far from subtle, as you can see to the right.

I for one mourn the loss of this significant piece of history that reflects an older, more cartoony art style that was slowly abandoned towards Wesnoth 1.0 and beyond. Until now, this icon also accompanied the owned village counter in the game’s top bar, and served as an indicator overlay for moves affecting village ownership since version 1.4 onwards. Finally, it served for a long time as the village terrain category icon in the Map Editor.

In case anyone requires the old icon for the sake of nostalgia, it’ll be preserved here for your own use under the conditions of the GNU General Public License version 2.

PNG format (468 bytes)

Choosing an email client with Firefox

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sun, 22 May 2011 22:57:00 +0000

Whatever rules Mozilla Firefox follows to determine the user’s default email client don’t seem to work properly on Debian, at least not when GNOME is not the desktop environment originally installed. For whatever reason, what Firefox tries to do with mailto links and the Send Link context menu option is to open the Evolution mail client, which is not installed with the KDE or LXDE desktop environments.

Fixing this is supposed to be trivial, and it is, but the relevant option is hidden in the worst possible place in Preferences.

Chromium/Google Chrome does not have a user-accessible setting for this, but somehow still appears to get the right idea from the desktop environment.

Spamming trends: Electronic cigarettes

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sun, 15 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Since the popularity of DVD rippers appears to be waning as of lately, the Wesnoth.org forums may or may not be about to become prey of a new spam fad. This time it’s “Perfect” Electronic cigarettes.

Thanks to our sophisticated CycholkaSoft Anti-bot Registration™ technology (patent pending), the little critters still need some human assistance to make it to our domain. If I had to guess, their purpose is to have their account settings prepared by a middle-man who enters their credentials into a database so the bot(s) can later log into the board(s) and perform automated posts. Otherwise, it makes no sense that they create a spammy signature to not start posting immediately.

(Notice that the default phpBB 3.0 configuration disallows guests and crawlers to see users’ profiles, which is the only way signatures from non-posting accounts can be seen by anyone.)

JS/Linux

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Thu, 19 May 2011 04:57:00 +0000

If you are running Google Chrome 11 or Firefox 4 or later and you know how to find your way through a Unix console OS, here’s something you might want to check out: it’s a Javascript PC emulator running a custom (patched) build of the Linux kernel 2.6.20. Directly. On. Your browser. With Javascript.

And it’s made by the same guy who wrote QEMU!

Javascript.

Bluecore’s back

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Thu, 12 May 2011 23:59:00 +0000

Sooner than expected, I was notified that Bluecore had been repaired and was awaiting to be retrieved in the support center. Thanks to my never-ending laziness, however, the retrieval did not take place until yesterday.

The verdict was that the screen had to be replaced.

A big problem with this is that I still see the same gray stains beneath the screen’s outer layer that were there back in February the last time I used Bluecore, around the top left corner of the panel, which brings up the question, what did they mean by “screen”?

Whoever did the repairs or testing managed to boot and properly shutdown Linux several times, so my logs indicate that the first successful boot (resuming from hibernation) took place around 15:30 UTC-04:00 (+DST) on April 28th. I’m glad that they figured out how to turn it off from the KDE display manager instead of resorting to wild button pushing.

Since the repairs were effected under an “extended warranty” plan from the store at which Bluecore was purchased, the only mission of the tech support people was to make Bluecore boot again, so everything else (fan, keyboard, etc.) is still in the same crappy conditions, except for the touchpad buttons — oddly enough, the right button is no longer hyper-sensitive to touch and works correctly.

I’d love to know exactly how a screen replacement fixed the laptop or whether it is really possible and valid to replace all display components bar the outer transparent material layers with the aforementioned stains.

Dorset6 (codename “Air”)

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sat, 14 May 2011 04:35:24 +0000

The website’s appearance has changed again! Dorset6 (codenamed “Air”) has come to replace Dorset4 and to reduce the site’s data weight by a significant amount, by abandoning the use of bitmap graphics for layout and replacing them with some well-supported rules from the CSS 3 suite.

As a consequence, older browsers will not work with the website very well and might not display some neat details like rounded corners and shadows. Despite this, it’s still readable and mostly functional with Internet Explorer 6 and later. Both Chrome 11 and Firefox 4.0 provide all the required features to make this work properly, but there’s also some degree of compatibility with previous Chrome versions, some other versions of webkit-based browsers, and Firefox 3.5 (found in Debian 6.0) and later.

There were also a few structural changes around the Project section with this revision, making it hopefully more readable and concise.

As for the version number skip, Dorset5 was ultimately scrapped and recycled into Dorset6. Here’s what it looked like before the slaughter.

Rei 2 Feeds: Behind the scenes

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:56:00 +0000

Just today I completed an initial, working implementation of an XML feeds reader in the Rei 2 IRC Bot framework. This implementation was pushed into master and I later tagged Rei 2 version 0.2.8, which will be eventually deployed on the shikadibot production instance, once this new shiny feature has seen enough testing and appears to be stable enough.

Thus my nearly 12 hours long coding spree culminates.

There were various design issues I faced when developing the feeds reader functionality. I already came across inefficiencies inherent to the legacy single-threaded model for SVN bot functionality found in Shikadibot 0314 and reimplemented in Rei 2; it’s not directly feasible to listen and respond to interactive events from an IRC connection socket while waiting for a reply that might never arrive from a SVN server. In the feeds reader case, more complications arise from the need to download and parse multiple documents from different remote servers in quick succession.

Rei 2 is still bound to the Irssi IRC client, and will remain so for a good while until the new S² state tracker is completed. The current situation is by no means bad as it allows me to concentrate my efforts on the bot’s outermost functionality layer, but the dependence on a non-native (i.e. C as opposed to Perl) backend places several constraints on what can be done in Rei 2.

Instead of resorting to threads — a possibility that I still don’t dare test with Irssi+Perl — I ideated a convoluted mechanism taking advantage of child processes and a simple caching strategy. Rei 2 forks its own helper daemon (rei2-feeds-worker.pl) when loaded (not necessarily always at Irssi’s startup!). This assistant simply fetches all XML feeds in the background every once in a while, and saves them to disk at a special location in the configuration dir — no more, no less. Meanwhile, Rei 2 sets up timed events to trap into the feeds processor and quickly work with what’s in the local on-disk cache.

Theoretically, this model could be extended to other Rei 2 modules, the SVN bot code being a particularly attractive candidate. It could be possible to either fork more unique helpers in the background, or somehow merge them all into another modular application. Either way, I’m not strongly interested on messing with the design right now other than researching more optimal mechanisms to monitor cache activity — inotify comes to mind.

• • •

For testing purposes, Rei2 on freenode already tracks the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev frontpage aggregator feed in #wesnoth-umc-dev and the Wesnoth.org’ Off-Topic forum posts feed in #wesnoth-offtopic. There’s also a duplicate feed of this very blog competing against one of my earliest private-use modules which has been reporting blog posts and Twitter updates in ##shadowm nearly since Rei 2’s inception. I’m meant to port the latter two to the new model soon-ish.

To celebrate this rather important milestone, I’ve updated the Rei 2 IRC Bot project page in this site as well with some new information.

Cats, rainbows, and stars, oh my

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 20:10:00 +0000

I don’t know what’s the worst (or best) part: that HTML 5 is being used for this kind of gimmicks, or the fact that there’s people who are entertained by a gray cat who shits rainbows while flying- er, running across the universe with a pop tart glued to its back. Does that make sense? No. Does it need to make sense? No — this is the Internet, after all.

Feel free to click the links, but don’t blame me if your score in future IQ tests drops by a significant amount as a consequence.

Protip: nyan.cat works best with Google Chrome. Firefox 4 and Opera 11.10 miss the rainbow animation for some reason, on Linux at least. Not that I care, really.

Firefox 4 gets a clue, plus Bonus Track

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 06:08:00 +0000

Apparently the people at Mozilla finally decided to give their last Firefox release a try on a Linux/Gtk+ configuration other than Ubuntu 10.10’s default, or some diligent user reported to them how awful the new interface looks to the rest of the world who’s not using Windows. In any case, I seem to be receiving new builds through their beta channel, and a few hours ago I got my hands on Firefox 4.0.1 “beta” build 1, whatever that means.

The following picture should speak by itself: (Hint: look between the Firefox button and the toolbar.)

Before switching to Mozilla Firefox 4’s builds from the Nightly (Minefield) channel some time around mid-2010, I used to follow closely the blog of one of the Debian Iceweasel maintainers, from which I got goodness such as updates on the status of Iceweasel 3.6 for Debian Sid/Squeeze in Experimental, that I used for a while.

There’s a little piece of customization advice for Iceweasel/Firefox 4.0 users posted around January that I overlooked until now.

Turns out that this night after Firefox 4.0.1’s update, I decided that the “Firefox button” should match the Oxygen window decoration in style — because I’m that crazy. I took the ~/.mozilla/firefox/<session>/chrome/userChrome.css modifications from the blog post and played around with various combinations until I produced something marginally uniquer.

#appmenu-toolbar-button > .toolbarbutton-text {
  /* oxygen "carved" effect */
  text-shadow: 0px 1px 0px white;
  /* bold */
  font-weight: bold;
}

I am actually afraid of messing around with the many possibilities of XUL/CSS styling further, lest I spend the rest of the month producing my own full-fledged Firefox theme. The fact that I can handle CSS makes this all the more worrisome.

Web browsers and UI design divergence

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 04:26:42 +0000

Web browsers break any established GUI design molds and this is no news for us. It was a necessity to create new controls (also known as widgets) in the ’90s when the Web was still a new, unknown thing and no common consensus on how users should interact with it existed. However, with time this practice has lost some of its technical grounds to become more of a profitable marketing strategy used by giants such as Mozilla and Microsoft to create distinct looks for their products.

Above we can see four browsers I personally consider major players in the GNU/Linux ecosystem in particular. From left to right, top to bottom in descending order of wheel reinvention and UI differentiation, we have: Opera 11 (???), Google Chrome 10 (GTK+), Mozilla Firefox 4.0 (XUL/GTK+) and Konqueror (KDE/Qt4) from KDE SC 4.4.

At the lower end, we have Konqueror, which has been designed to blend in with its parent application suite, the KDE desktop environment, so it uses a common visual design instead of inventing its own. At the top there’s Opera, a cross-platform browser that is not part of any specific suite and attempts to keep a consistent internal look between different operating systems, resulting in various reimplemented controls with different, custom functionality and a visual design unique to this software product.

In the middle we have Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, which have chosen to use the GTK+ toolkit to avoid reimplementing too much and concentrate on their actual business, that is, web browsing. But something’s horribly off about these two.

In Google Chrome’s case, we have a default, “Classic” theme that presents the user with the distinctive Chromium look and feel but keeps the standard GTK+ application design for modal dialogs. Embedded input controls in web pages such as checkboxes and unstyled command buttons appear to be rendered by a custom engine using Chrome’s own ideas of what a widget should look like. As Chrome belongs in the GTK+ territory like all of the GNOME desktop environment, this makes it really stand out as an individual application that behaves and looks like nothing native to GNOME or other GTK+-based environments. As an alternative, we can choose to use the “GTK+ theme” in the application’s preferences, which does nothing but switch the color scheme to respect the user’s desktop preferences a bit and fallback to GTK+’s icon paths for some (not all!) toolbar buttons.

This so-called “GTK+ theme” keeps the hideous low-contrast, Chrome-style scrollbar in the web page view area as well, basically mocking users who would hope for some desktop consistency and accessibility by choosing this option.

Mozilla Firefox provides an interesting case. Powered by the XULRunner framework, it aims to blend in with every one of its target platforms, using native Windows controls on Windows and GTK+ as a backend on Linux. However, someone didn’t get the memo with the main window’s tab bar, and instead of native GTK+ versions we get awful customized tabs that do not respect the user’s chosen GTK+ engine. It seems that in Firefox 4’s particular case the developers intended to achieve something closer to Opera in design, which worked in Windows, but didn’t get completed for Linux — probably due to time constraints and lack of volunteers to do the grunt work required in the coding area. Firefox 4 in Linux currently barely resembles the original mock-ups. (To their credit, those mock-ups showcase a really elegant — if somewhat unoriginal — design that is too unfortunately missing in the RTM builds.)

The current strategy appears to be all too profitable right now for these people to abandon it. We’ll probably just see more development in the GUI design department from web browser vendors than operating systems and desktop environments in the near future.

So long, Wesnoth.org forums

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:43:00 +0000

It’s official now. As someone with a keen eye for forum changes already noticed, Gambit is replacing me as the Wesnoth.org forum admin, effective now.

There are various circumstances that led to this decision, including my traveling to France tomorrow, and Gambit’s competence and great ability to bear with high work load (much better than mine anyway).

I am sure that this change won’t disrupt regular activity in any way whatsoever.

I’ll follow up with some notes on the forum’s history later.

Happy April Fools, people!

Quod erat demonstrandum

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 22:14:00 +0000

In an unexpected turn of events, the flight was cancelled at the last minute due to a rather confusing brawl between International police agents and ophidians aboard the aircraft.

After having been caught sitting on a toilet in middle of a M 8.8 earthquake, I can only thank the gods for not putting me into a similarly embarrassing situation on a flying vehicle filled with these scaly creatures.

But that’s out of the matter now. This episode is over and thanks to my new-found aversion to airplanes, I think we can safely say that I’m here to stay.

Happy April Fools, people!

Spamming trends: DVD rippers

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 06:50:00 +0000

Last year it was SEO spam.

This year it might be DVD rippers.

During the last couple of weeks, the Wesnoth.org forums have been constantly hit with a “new” kind of spam involving DVD ripping software, which may also involve some kind of scam as the linked site contains a Buy button, amongst other things. I’m not touching it further; not even with my 5 mt. pole.

You read me right. It’s not new in the literal sense of the word, since I have seen this shit hitting us before, albeit at a much slower rate. If I recall correctly, I have banned no less than 6 accounts in less than two weeks because of the current trend.

Whoever invented it clearly targets a low-IQ demographic, with retarded statements such as the following:

Many DVD users want to enjoy their favorite DVDs on their portable devices

Nobody whom I know would, in their sane minds, watch a friggin’ movie on a device with such low resolution and display size. We’re mainly talking of Apple’s iShit devices, of course. And I’m not going to get into how “illegal” or not it is to break those lovely DRM restrictions.

Since I’m in a lazy mood today, I’ll leave the research of the purpose of this shady “marketing campaign” to my readers and loyal fans.

Project Y: The Battle for Irdya (brainstorming)

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 04:38:00 +0000

I accidentally stumbled upon this Wesnoth.org forum post this night while searching for suspicious (read: spammy) activity — which gave me the following idea:

<shadowmaster> http://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?p=481052#p481052
<shadowmaster> "Inferno8 and I have agreed that we want more publicity and exposure for the campaign, including promotion and review on indie gaming websites. [...]"
<shadowmaster> Espreon:
<shadowmaster> AI0867:
<shadowmaster> I have an awesome idea
<shadowmaster> let's take UtBS, IftU and AtS (and optionally TSL) out of Wesnoth-UMC-Dev
<shadowmaster> let's go big
<shadowmaster> let's create a separate OSS project for them
<shadowmaster> game engine included
<shadowmaster> let's strip Wesnoth of all the shit we don't need and build a better engine
<shadowmaster> for Project Y.
 * Espreon chuckles
<shadowmaster> DEAL? [Y/N]
<shadowmaster> We could even take Aethaeryn 's Thunderstone with us
<shadowmaster> think of it
<shadowmaster> "Project Y: Thunderstonecraft"
<Espreon> Someday Ignacio, someday. We don't have enough minions at the moment.
<shadowmaster> The Battle for Irdya!
    -- ##shadowm, 2011-03-07

I think this is a possibility I never considered before, and a fabulous idea which I should steal, in good old Shadowmaster tradition.

If you want to make this possible, join the IRC channel ##shadowm on chat.freenode.net with your favorite IRC client, or use one of the links below!

In case you can’t tell, this is a joke.

Bluecore's status

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 20:16:00 +0000

Last night, after shutting down bluecore and leaving it alone for hours, the BIOS boot stage failed and I had to turn it off and try again. Today that’s not the case, and bluecore won’t boot.

I do not understand why is this, or what could be the cause, since in both opportunities the laptop went through a successful hibernation cycle from Linux. There doesn’t seem to be any relation to the AC adapter or battery status, since I tried turning it on with different power source combinations. The GPU and display screen don’t come up, and the keyboard doesn’t work — the only visible indication of (in)activity is the two blinking Caps Lock and Num Lock LEDs, which I saw before when Linux wouldn’t resume from suspend-to-RAM properly back in the 2.6.26 days, two years ago.

This means that my files, configuration and software are currently inaccessible and unusable, save for a ~2 weeks old complete system backup on my 2 TiB external hard disk, which I could use with the machine I’m using right now, blackcore. There are various problems with this desktop computer, however, that make it barely usable with Linux. In particular, GL applications crash X.org thanks to VIA’s nearly nonexistent IGP support, and there’s nearly no means of 2D acceleration.

The current plan is to take bluecore to the technical support people. Hopefully they’ll prove their worth in money this time.

Bluecore's status II: Introducing Reicore

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:54:00 +0000

Bluecore is now officially dead, and only a miracle could bring it back to a usable state. During the next week I’ll be taking it to technical support, so the current condition will hopefully be temporary.

Some days ago, I came up with a joke in ##shadowm regarding a hypothetical “Reicore” laptop, which would have some awesome NVIDIA GPU and a quad-core processor. This is most likely not going to happen, yet I have reused the computer name on my new, temporary laptop, which used to belong to my father and was, in fact, bought exclusively for his use during 2010.

My main reasons for choosing “Reicore” as its hostname over another “<color>core” combination are the following:

Like its namesake’s namesake*, Reicore is intended for backup purposes until Bluecore or a new laptop come to replace it.
It’s a nice reminder so I don’t complain about inefficiencies in working computers again. That seems to bring bad luck.

Continue reading "Bluecore's status II: Introducing Reicore"

Preparing for yet another year

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 02:11:00 +0000

It’s almost over. Time flies even faster as we get closer to the end of 2010, and apparently there’s a lot to summarize despite we’re not in the finish line yet!

This has been a particularly difficult year for me in a more personal sense, and I’ve faced some trials I won’t speak about and then some, but I’ve also learned new things in the road — things that may be of greater use to me in the future. There’s really a lot that could be said about this year but I’ll restrict it to computer stuff to ~~avoid boring the audience too much~~ bore the audience as much as possible.

Continue reading "Preparing for yet another year"

After the Storm: What Could (Not) Have Been

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 08:02:00 +0000

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.

Delayed Christmas presents

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 21:47:00 +0000

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!

Resolutions!

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 06:30:00 +0000

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.

Approaching 2011!

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 22:10:00 +0000

New Year’s Eve lunch, including rice, peas, shrimp, green beans, avocado, diced tomatoes and onions. Later: cake.

2011 will soon start for me, a denizen of the UTC-04:00 (+DST = UTC-03:00) segment of the world. So far it looks good, although I can’t tell for sure yet whether we’ll have a black-out at 00:04 like the last time!

Yesterday I was out for most of the day, eating delicious stuff (including ice cream) and watching movies at the theater (Tron Legacy for the 2nd time, and Tangled, if you are curious). Today, I eat delicious stuff and relax at home.

I have also figured out a neat method to get my computer to tell me the New Year resolution!

$ sudo apt-get install x11-utils
$ xdpyinfo | less

...
screen #0:
  dimensions:    1280x800 pixels (338x211 millimeters)
  resolution:    96x96 dots per inch
...

Spambots never rest, so I’m still patrolling the Wesnoth.org forums this night along with my serv- trusty moderators team — a member of which has recently received an über-ugprade.

Thank you all for your support and Happy New Year!

Loneliness

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 02:49:00 +0000

Although I used to have people to talk with about randomness, I’ve always been a rather solitary person who wouldn’t pursue relationships of any kind or get stable “friends”. My lifestyle has been the same for very long and I’d never cared much, but as time passes this is starting to bite me in the ass very hard.

At this point I don’t think it matters if I confess the truth: I’m going through a major depression since many years ago, and underwent some sort of treatment during most of this year. Now that I realized that medication won’t help me I’ve stopped. It is really pointless to continue torturing myself with extraneous chemicals that do nothing but interfere with my body’s functions, including my sight, which isn’t as good as it was before the start of the treatment, an omnipresent reminder of the mass of shit I’ve become.

I’ve not improved at all over time — on the contrary, my situation is progressively worse and I don’t think I’ll be able to stand it for long. Hesitantly, I gave away some vague hints as to what was going on with my personal life in this post, and I occasionally post cryptic updates on Twitter which surely fly past most of my followers’ heads… precisely because there’s really no-one who cares about what happens to me other than myself, barely.

Loneliness never hurt me as much as it does now.

I’m almost out of energy, and I don’t know for sure what will happen next — and this has been a truly awful year for me, fact that I also hinted before. Will 2011 be better for me? Most likely not, unless I can find the path again on my own. Can anyone help me? Certainly not, and I’m perfectly aware of it.

The end-of-year festivities only serve to remind me what I’ve become. There’s nothing exciting, fun or comfortable for me, now that I’ve become hopelessly detached from my family and the few people who know me. This is why I’ve not really posted anything lately — there’s just no fucking point.

Hakone 1.1: the new face of Wesnoth-UMC-Dev

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:00:01 +0000

After so much work, codename “Hakone”, the new website layout and software powering the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website is finished, bringing with it a series of changes to begin to renew the project for the upcoming new year.

Ancient, old, and new

The Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website has gone through three revisions counting “Hakone” — “Soradoc” and “Kalari” being its predecessors.

My emphasis during the construction of codename “Hakone” was placed on functionality, standards compliance at the web interface level, and a soft, elegant and modern look, all of which I think have been accomplished. Through the integration of technologies such as XML feeds using SimplePie, and the minimalistic yet extensible blog engine provided by Blosxom along with our homegrown Poison Ivy PHP engine, we have achieved our ultimate objective of establishing our own network identity as an independent, parallel project to Battle for Wesnoth.

We have also added an embedded IRC client using freenode’s neat webchat gateway, available from within the Contact section. This should pave the way for further coordination between developers and repository administrators using our official discussion and support channel.

In this opportunity I’ve also opted for standardizing the spelling of our short project name to “Wesnoth-UMC-Dev”, as opposed to the earlier “wesnoth-umc-dev” and “Wesnoth UMC Dev[elopment]”.

There are bugs that remain to be fixed though, which are related to the feeds handling within the various site components — but nothing that is going to matter for the moment due to our rather restricted audience.

So there goes another bit to add to my web design stories, an experience from which I’ve learned a lot of valuable information for my work on “Dorset5”.

Hakone online, not fully operational

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 00:53:31 +0000

The Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project website is now running with the Hakone layout system, but the blog section is currently not operational due to administrative issues I hope to have solved within the next 24 hours.

Forum games, part 2

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 21:42:00 +0000

I have deliberately avoided to return to the issue of forum games in Wesnoth.org for a long while, but Gambit and I have become increasingly worried about the board’s security due to potential guidelines violations from people who register for the sole purpose of playing a game on a forum thread.

I feel that this practice derails the Off-Topic forum as a whole. My intention when gaining control over it was to make it a fun place for us Wesnoth users, not to convert it into a general social forum with no relation whatsoever to Wesnoth’s community. As things look right now, we may have an issue in our front door which needs to be solved before the intention behind the forum’s existence vanishes even further due to this kind of invasions.

Therefore, I’d appreciate if people stopped publicizing Off-Topic threads elsewhere for entertainment purposes. The “Roll 2 Dodge” forum game has become a special case of its own after we discovered a forum member posting links to it on other forums (along with hotlinking forum smilies for some reason, no less). You don’t want the Off-Topic forum to go back to its old administration practices where autopruning was considered a feature by the Powers That Be™, right? An alternative is restricting it to known members of the community using more advanced management techniques with phpBB, but I don’t think we want that either if we can manage a reasonable deal without software intervention.

Codenames

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 03:51:00 +0000

It’s a tradition of mine to assign random codenames to my projects when they are early in development, usually because I haven’t decided on a definitive production name at the time, or in other cases, just for fun. Here’s a rather complete list of the names I have used for this purpose and why, for the curious.

Web shadow: the original layout for this very site, which got later replaced by Dorset.
Dorset: this is probably the first project of mine with a formal codename convention, using the name of a Far North location from the Battle for Wesnoth — as a bonus it’s also a real-world location. It has now become more of a production name.
Soradoc: yet another Wesnothian location, this corresponds to the first layout for the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website.
Kalari: a location relevant to the plot of one of my campaigns, After the Storm; this is the current Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website layout as of 2010, soon to be replaced. Since Wesnoth-UMC-Dev was originally built around the prequel Invasion from the Unknown it was just logical to choose a name from my own canon as a codename for the second website layout.
Hakone: initially mentioned by me in ##shadowm as a joke, this became the production name for the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev 2011 website layout. This name corresponds to an actual location in Japan (箱根町), which is also the area where Tokyo-3 was built in the Neon Genesis Evangelion series.
Scrappy: the build-external-archive.sh tool from Wesnoth-UMC-Dev. Useless, annoying, and ultimately dangerous. It has truly become our personal Scrappy, hence the name.
Blackmore: the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Duke Nukem Forever — I mean Distribution Package Tool, potentially going to use umcdist as production name. Blackmore is a city in the Green Isle from the Battle for Wesnoth, The Rise of Wesnoth.
Thoria: umcreg, the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Registry Service, which is in charge of abstracting user and add-on management for us administrators.
Listra: codenamed after the Wesnothian river, umcstat has this assigned after its relationship with the umcreg service.
Everlore: yet another Wesnothian river, also related to the Arkan-Thoria and umcreg — this is the current codename for the Atom feed front-end to umcreg.
Rei II: named after the character from Neon Genesis Evangelion, this is Rei 2 IRC Bot, which spent around a year in planning as a C framework until I decided to ease the task and reuse Irssi’s core, turning Rei2 into a small-ish Perl module and libraries for writing simple IRC bots for this fantastic IRC client.
Elynia: better known as Shikadibot 0314, our old utility bot that used to linger in the #wesnoth-umc-dev channel until we replaced its core with Rei2’s.
Asuka: again, a character from Neon Genesis Evangelion, it is the PHP code powering the little Wesnoth Fortunes database I serve on this site.
Poison Ivy: codenamed after the plant of the same name, this is the PHP engine that generates most pages on this and Wesnoth-UMC-Dev’s website. It has now stuck as part of the production name, “Poison Ivy PHP Engine”.
Morning Star: the temporary production name used for Wesnoth RCX at the beginning.
Naia: an abandoned branch that intended to generalize the framework used by umcreg in order to port umcstat’s prototype to use it.

Rent-a-Mod

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 16:33:00 +0000

The Wesnoth users community has always been rather special compared to other gaming groups. The forumers are usually civilized, they respect the Posting Guidelines, rarely start heated discussions on their own, and follow our moderators and developers’ orders and recommendations.

The development team, our current moderators and I are usually around to help with any thread requiring moderation. Such a pacific community doesn’t require maintenance work like that very often, not counting the insatiable spam generators that never stop coming to attempt to plague the forums with cheap search engine-feeding signatures and gratuitously large ad-posts.

However, a rather recent phenomenon is that of Rent-a-Modding. There are some members who seem to think, consciously or not, that forum moderation works by following a tight set of rules resulting in mechanical procedures fitting every possible situation, derived of course from our Posting Guidelines. Other users attempt to answer to forum posts authored by newbies, by guessing what a developer or moderator would say in such situation, or by copying past moderator reactions.

The behavior I’m describing here is commonly known as backseat-modding, and as Urban Dictionary puts it (mature/NSFW language), they are, effectively, a pain in the ass for actual mods and admins, but it’s not because they look like wannabe-mods, but because most of the time they are doing it wrong!

As I was saying, moderators don’t really follow strict rules to decide how to react to a particular situation, since every situation involves completely different contexts which depend a lot on the poster’s background and past behavior — there is, after all, a reason for handpicking Forum Regulars who might fit the job. This is what makes Rent-a-Mods annoying in the first place, since they can easily give out a really bad impression of our community and standards, scaring away newcomers and spreading bad words about us in other corners of the ’net.

Taking a wild guess of what a Developer will say to a poster regarding a specific development issue, such as Wesnoth’s future plans, or why problem X has not been fixed yet, or why feature Y is apparently never going to be implemented, is also a really Bad Thing™ since it wastes our time correcting the spreading misinformation before it gets stuck in people’s heads. There has been a lot of random guesswork regarding recent problems such as the supposed GNU General Public License violations by the iPhone/iPad port creator and distributor, or why a complaining poster has been banned from the multiplayer server(s) — hence we had to ban both to keep things orderly and avoid the development of useless time-consuming arguments.

In case I’m not getting my point across:

DON’T DO IT. IT’S NOT USEFUL FOR ANY OF THE INVOLVED PARTIES. LET THE MODS DO THEIR JOB.

Thanks for reading. I’m fairly certain that this post might not provide a clear enough answer for cases such as this, but I don’t feel like writing a longer and thorough rant at this moment.

Living on the bleeding edge

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 05:47:00 +0000

I just finished upgrading the X.org server on my laptop from Debian Squeeze/Sid’s version (1.7.x) to 1.9.2 from the Experimental repository. It was quite a task since my initial command pulled some incorrect dependencies and then forgot some.

sudo apt-get install -t experimental xorg xserver-xorg

This installed the ATI Catalyst and NVIDIA drivers along with pretty much every video and input driver for some reason, which I had to manually remove later — this even though I had disabled Recommends. Since my laptop runs with custom builds of Mesa, the Radeon DDX and the DRM library, I had to rebuild those by hand as usual, but that wasn’t enough to make my system usable again because I forgot to upgrade xserver-xorg-dev, of all things. So, rinse and repeat, and voilà…after several attempts, my X server works again!

sudo apt-get install -t experimental xserver-xorg-dev

Of course, all this calls for the question: why am I using Debian Sid+experimental instead of sticking to a different, more “updated” distribution?

The fact is, I feel comfortable with Debian even though my installation isn’t a normal one anymore because I have foreign stuff I require for testing purposes, X.org included. I can manage myself very well no matter what happens, as you can see above — the little exercise I mentioned lasted for less than 20 minutes because I know how the system works so I can fix it if it breaks — I’m definitely not recommending random people to do whatever I do in any case. But after trying Sabayon GNU/Linux on my desktop box (Blackcore), I know for sure I don’t want to replace Debian with it. I am also certain that openSUSE is not what I want anymore, and this has a lot to do with the package management architecture employed.

It should also be noted that the only reason I’m using stuff from Experimental right now is that Squeeze is frozen, so basically no new upstream versions are entering Sid until Squeeze becomes the new stable. I’m not running away of any bugs — rather, I’m searching for more bugs to face and I’m not afraid of them.

Now I go back to bug-hunting on the Radeon DDX!

General update

nospam@example.com (shadowmaster) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 01:37:44 +0000

At last, it’s the second weekend of October and here in Chile we’re already switching to DST-based schedules. But I didn’t come here to talk about how nice it is to have sunlight past 7 PM, or to announce any plans for summer.

Instead, I came here to announce the early arrival of codename “Dorset4”, the new revision of the site’s layout, now with more CSS 3! (Really.)

It’s not really as big an update as I expected because there’s really very little to fix overall — I feel quite happy with my work on Dorset3 and save for some minor things no big improvements appear to be necessary. Of course, I introduced a couple of bugs with this revision (notably, in the Projects section index), which will be fixed over the next days. The most notable changes are the introduction of a few icons in places where it made sense, and the tidying up of the sidebar and footer, all with the purpose of presenting the most important information more cleanly than ever.

But these aren’t all the changes. Besides the stylesheet revisions, there’s also a new project page for Rei 2 IRC bot and a new separate page with information on the website. The blog has also now acquired entry paging powers, which means that multi-page articles will be possible in the future — in fact, the forthcoming follow-up to Wesnoth Evolution: 0.1 may take advantage of this new feature.

I know people in the northern hemisphere are going to freeze very soon as winter approaches, but I know I’ll still envy them in a few weeks when local temperatures start going over 32°C.