Advogato blog for fufie

28 Sep 2001

Fri, 28 Sep 2001 10:27:23 GMT

Gah.. no time for open-source these days. Work and thesis steal all time. Sigh.

Maybe I should write something sensible here. Can't think of anything. Nah, I'll eat breakfast, it's half past noon. Time for breakfast.

28 Aug 2001

Tue, 28 Aug 2001 19:50:16 GMT

It's been more than a month since I wrote anything here at Advogato. It's been a varied month, with a few developer releases of my lispy game Langband and work starting again.

Work: Work involves very little hacking these days unfortunately. After a research-prototype in the spring it's a lot of meetings, planning, getting external verification on the ideas in the prototype and trying to find working business-models that combines open-source, making enough money, research and fun.

Wish: Now if only we could find a partner using J2EE or moving into J2EE with a complex domain to map to Java I think our tools would be useful and worth the investment.. but it's not easy getting the first customer. Oh well.

Code: Too little time for open-source.. *sigh* All time is sucked away by thesis and work. Maybe I can find some time for more langband-hacking later... that would be fun.

Life: I'm oddly enough healthier than I've been in a long time. My FEV breathing-tests are up from 35-40% in the winter to 50-55% now which is amazing. My effective lung-volume is still in the 30s but it's up from the 20-something I've had the last year. Can't explain why really, as the opposite direction would be more realistic. But I like it :-)

20 Jul 2001

Fri, 20 Jul 2001 00:36:24 GMT

Been trying to make recently released CLISP-version work with CCLAN. But of course it had to introduce some new pathname-problems which wasn't in the working CVS-version I made last week. Hip Hip Hurrah for progress!!!

<rant>
Common Lisp tries to abstract up pathnames to be portable across implementations, but ends up with an unimplementable spec of 'logical pathnames' that nobody manages to get right or even compatible with other implementations on the same architecture. It's like otherwise intelligent programmers get into a c++-mindset and makes code that is incompatible with antyhing else as soon as the spec is vague instead of discussing things like sane people. I'm sick and tired of logical pathnames. Of course, everything that is built atop the LPNs look like mutilated spaghetti-code.

There has to be a better way to handle paths. (The 'handle paths as strings' is of course worse, Common Lisp is just the least bad alternative.)
</rant>

18 Jul 2001

Wed, 18 Jul 2001 15:38:17 GMT

Spent most of the weekend writing a darned research-report, but the whole team wrote their parts and we finished just in time. Stressful, but very good teamwork. The report will howerver not win a Funniest Writing Award 2001.

Got a chance to work a bit with Langband the last two days and tossed out a 0.0.12 version last night that is improved and is fairly installable as debian-packages. I hope to get some time working on it this month as well as on my thesis.

11 Jul 2001

Wed, 11 Jul 2001 21:32:53 GMT

Made a new user-interface for birth in Langband which I think can also be ported to regular Angband. It allows selection with arrow-keys and display necessary help for highlighted options. IMHO a considerable improvement over the old interface which was absolutely non-intuitive to new users.

Of more personal concerns, my tooth is being sadistic again and painkillers only do a moderate job. I hate my tooth almost more now than I hate seeing dentists. A few more days now and I'll call the dentist.

I am also planning a very serious slime-mold patch for regular Angband this weekend, allowing slime-molds to be used as radios and playing mp3-songs. This will hopefully make Angband the number one "sex, drug's and rock'n roll" game.

8 Jul 2001

Sun, 8 Jul 2001 22:08:23 GMT

Have basically relaxed last couple of days, but tonight I finally got around to make a decent clisp debian-package for CCLAN which seems to work decently, but in slightly perverse ways to hide deeper ugliness. Also adds a hackish trick to ensure that clisp now defaults to ANSI-mode and not the proprietary mode usually preferred by the clisp-people. It's good to have it working. :-)

7 Jul 2001

Sat, 7 Jul 2001 00:32:12 GMT

An absolutely useless week. Been recuperating from the pneumonia that hit me, but I've been utterly and totally uninspired. That sucks when you have a long TODO-list and there's no willpower to do other things than reading newspapers, Usenet and Lady Di jokes.

Yesterday and today I've done some work on getting CLISP to work with CCLAN and done some debian-packaging. It doesn't require hard thinking and is as reliable a source of frustration as actual development. That's great. Let frustration and apathy be available to everyone. But I mostly got CLISP working which is an important milestone as CCLAN is now usable by other systems than CMUCL and derivatives.

My big issue is that I should work on my bloody thesis, but it requires hard thinking and dull writing. And my bad conscience (for not working on the thesis) prevents me from doing something on the fun and useless Langband game. After all, I might get hooked and get even worse conscience. Sick. I know. But that is basically this week in a nutshell.

16 Jun 2001

Sat, 16 Jun 2001 13:37:37 GMT

Not much open-source done this week, and ended up getting a severe cold during my visit to Oslo earlier this week.

Today, true to tradition, I released a new patch for Vanilla Angband. This one allows one to decorate the home in town. After all, decent heroes should have decent housing and what looks better than a stylish elf-skeleton in the corner? The last week has however revealed that some people actually take my joke patches very very seriously and are openly opposing them. I don't know if it's sad or amusing to watch people violently attack mock strawmen. Oh well.

10 Jun 2001

Sun, 10 Jun 2001 22:00:48 GMT

Spent a sizable portion of yesterday fixing up CCLAN-packages and then I ended up writing a mirror-script for CCLAN and then later (and far too late) spent time making a repository-control system which allowed packages to be uploaded and then appropiate announces is mailed to the cclan-announce list and files are moved into the right places and replaced packages are moved into the backup. Hopefully the cool Sourceforge-people will allow us to make the repository rsyncable as we then have a cool distribution point for Lisp-packages. Yay!

Ended up staying up for far too late, got way beyond tired and was unable to sleep properly. This is bad because I have to catch an early flight for Oslo tomorrow morning. Oh well. As a sidenote, actually got some work done on my thesis and rearranged my home office and put in a couch to drop all sorts of stuff on. A weird day today but a stressful week with little open-source ahead. Happy Hacking everyone else.

9 Jun 2001

Sat, 9 Jun 2001 12:57:21 GMT

The last couple of days I've been swamped in work and been very tired but I seem to have managed to revamp some Langband packages for CCLAN and done a lot of bug-reporting and patch-submitting for various lisp-systems and libraries. Most of it has resulted in upstream bug-fixes so I am happy about that. Going to toss out a bunch of CCLAN packages today to reflect changes the last couple of days.

I also made a 'revenge of the slime molds' patch for Vanilla Angband today which also includes new use for the junk in the game. Has been posted to r.g.r.a and to clockwork so it's up for grabs for people who wish to enhance their Angband games.