About me

Hello! I am Ignacio R. Morelle, better known as shadowmaster or ShikadiLord, depending on the community. You don’t want to know where I come from, and I often forget where I go to. My native language is Spanish since I was born and I live in Chile, but I also speak English.

I’m one of the main developers of the Battle for Wesnoth game project, which is free software, and which is best described in its own website. I’m also the administrator-in-chief of the official forum board as of this writing. More recently, I have contributed many levels to Frogatto, a platformer made by a few people from the Wesnoth crew. You can read more details about it in the relevant blog post.

I’m a geek, and I like to do stuff with computers as long as printers or document scanners are not involved (except for this). I like the C and C++ programming languages — especially C++. I really fell in love with Perl’s simplicty, flexibility and power. Of course, I also use PHP. I don’t want to learn Python — despite what people say, it looks alien and often unintelligible to me. CSS’s power still amazes me and I crave for mastering it.

While maintaining the Wesnoth.org forums, I have learned some bits of SQL, but I’m hardly experienced with it, although I hope to master it someday. PHP is something I learned both for the purpose of administrating phpBB 3-based boards, and easing my work on this website so I can concentrate on the content instead of the presentation. Of course, I also love to write HTML by hand to achieve results that would be impossible or difficult to get using a WYSIWYG editor.

If you want to know about my software preferences, read this post. My last three and most often used computers are also described in a blog entry of their own.

Website information

The website layout, codenamed “Dorset3 r4”, is arranged at runtime by the “Poison Ivy” engine. Absolutely all components were coded by hand; I don’t trust web page editors. The blog runs with Serendipity using a heavily modified version of the Bulletproof template.

All pages are verified to be valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional using the mark-up validation tool from the W3C. They are also verified to work with the most popular current browsers — some old browsers such as IE 5.5 also work I recently dropped support for any IE versions earlier than IE 7.

Some text in the website and blog may deliberately use non-ASCII characters encoded as UTF-8. Platforms or user agents that do not support UTF-8 or do not have appropriate fonts might not display some text correctly.