Older blog entries for Radagast (starting at number 4)

On my 36th waking hour now, for reasons I'm not entirely clear on myself. It started with me falling back to my old work as a designer to cover for a large amount of work at one time, and it kind of got out of hand. Still, I've made all the design for two web sites in this time, and according to both me and others, they're some of the nicest I've done. Now to implement the HTML, but that'll happen after I sleep.

Flux 0.4.1 was released, on the heels of 0.4.0. With this new release comes new web pages, a lot of very nice new functionality, and lots of optimizations. Hans Petter seems happy and worked up over it. I just wish I'd had time to work on the Python extensions lately, but I haven't. I'm scheduling that for the end of the coming week, I think.

Also, Loom is kind of stagnant, mostly my fault, Iain has actually done work on it, I haven't. Need to look at that, preferably at least poke around in it this weekend, see what happens. I took a look at The Sims today, the new game from Maxis, and that looks absolutely fantastic. I know I need to get it, but I also know my productivity will suffer terribly. Good thing is, it's iso 3D. I'd really like to clone this when Loom is more or less working, but it'll be a lot of work. Better not put more items on my todo just yet. Hans Petter says he wants to port our old favourite networked strategy game, Empire, to Loom when it's more or less working, though, so this could get fun fast.

Went to see Bringing out the dead today. Brilliant movie. Scorsese is a genius. Same day as Hans Petter and I discovered we both love his movie After Hours. Weird coincidences.

Sleep now, I think. My vision is getting slighly blurry, and I have a headache.

Long time since I wrote anything here. Lots of things have been happening, i comitted the new GNOME webpage layout, people seem happy with it. Flux has a lot of neat new features now, like fully crypted sessions. We're toying with prototypes for a VPN product based on this. Hans Petter is working on object database functionality for Flux now, and it's looking really nice. This is going to be a big boon both for Conglomerate and FIDEL.

I've more or less mapped out what I'm going to be working on in the next six months, and it's looking quite interesting. The Python module for Flux is going well, in addition I'm hacking on an admin console for this VPN thing, and later I'm going to be doing interface work for FIDEL, and also starting up my toy project of writing a generic isometric 3D engine for games using the GNOME canvas. Strategy games are fun, and so is the canvas.

Also went investor-hunting the last few weeks. Seems a lot of people are interested in what we're doing, but there's a bit of a leap from there to actually giving us the money. We'll see.

We didn't know what we started. Since we announced Conglomerate a couple of days ago, the response has been overwhelming. Lots of mail, lots of encouragement, and general inspiration and ego-stroking. It seems Hans Petter and I are going to GUADEC as more or less a direct result of this. Now all we need to do is juggle all the damn projects, get a test release of Conglomerate within a week, FIDEL within new year, and then we plan to do the new Conglomerate parser in January, alongside the reimplementation of the main editor display as a Canvas.

The fun never ends. Thanks to everyone who's said good things about our stuff lately.

So, we finally got around to announcing Conglomerate today, on Freshmeat and Gnome news. We thought it was about time, since there's been increasing interest about the project, and after talking to Miguel, we got some new ideas and input, so we decided that now is the time. I produced a record amount of content for the webpages, and fixed the design, so everything should be set. I hope people will get on the mailinglists and start giving their opinion.

Hans Petter got Daniel to check out the 0.3.0-pre of Flux from CVS today, so the textmode client for FIDEL is finally on its way. December 4th just started, slightly below 28 days to get a working FIDEL. I still think it should be possible. But then again, I might be mad.

Interesting day, got a tip from Ole Aamot to tune in to #gnapster, and got there in time to watch the end of the fireworks, as well as some excellent diplomacy by Nat. Bad part: I resurrected my IRC habit. This might be tough to shake again.

On the professional side, almost finished up the client web site I'm coding on, so I can turn to more interesting stuff soon. Crimz is wrapping up documentation for flux, his neat networking, data storage and general utility library, so it seems coding on FIDEL will commence this week. We have one month to get it working before Y2K eats FIX' current BBS software. Should be possible. Also got a chance to talk to Raph about trust metrics, and it's fairly certain that a trust metric system is going into FIDEL at some point. The number of users and amount of activity on FIX is already too large to be easily administrated by hand.

Oh, well, back to coding.