Well, I haven't touched Anima for a couple of weeks, but I'm planning on getting back to it. In the mean time I've been distracted by a number of things. First, I've been slowly working my way through my reading stack. I just finished Cryptonomicon (second reading), and the first Harry Potter novel. I've also been spending about one evening a week with Laura, someone I met at one of the Human Awareness Institute workshops.

Last weekend, I decided to finally break down and learn Python, so I spent most of Saturday and Sunday puttering around with my laptop. By the time I was finished, I had most of a working MUD (Multi-User Dungeon). This might seem like a really bad idea (there are so many MUDs out there already), but it's actually related to Anima, or more accurately it's related to Strattica, of which Anima is a prerequisite. (Strattica is my plan for an open-source 3-D strategy game engine). I suspected that working in Python would allow me to quickly prototype server implementations (more quickly than Java, in fact), and this turns out to be true. One of the basic concepts of Strattica is that the game will be massively customizable via scripts (similar to Quake-C) and embedding Python into the game engine seems like it could do the job really well.

MeV is also coming along quite nicely. I'm not directly involved in coding this, but the rest of the team has been quite busy. I've had about 4 Music-X inquiries in the last month, and I have redirected these to the MeV site.

At work, I have been learning Resin, which is a really advanced open-source/commercial servlet engine that has XSLT processing capabilities. I've created a prototype of a stylesheet which allows for special "text" tags that facilitate internationalization.