Recent blog entries for i0lanthe

Wow, advogato is still around.

I updated EggsHam today. Rah.

bgeiger and badvogato are both wrong. 88 has meant "love and kisses" for decades.

Long time no diary. I have updated my publicly accessible page since it was several projects out of date.

Released PaleoHack 0.02 this week. Lo, many bugs were fixed (though it still crashes now and then). Unfortunately there are four or five other tasks that people would probably have preferred me to work on instead.

With the aid of the google kibozer I like to keep an eye on people who talk about roguelikes and PDAs (since often they are talking about me). Today I was rather charmed by the optimism of someone who, after first inquiring to discover whether anyone had already done it, declared his intent to port Nethack to Java so that it could run on his Nokia cell phone.

It took umpteen tries to post this entry, so I remember now why I haven't updated the diary in a long time.

The recursion play remimded me of something which led to a google search that unexpectedly turned up This. I think it is the most alarming page I have seen all week.

In other news, I am porting Hack. It is going slowly, considering that I started last year.

(My first post of the new year..) Lately I've been adding HandEra 330 support to kMoria. The PalmOS Emulator only supports HandEra emulation under Windows. This is really pretty irritating when you develop under Linux, but, I know HandEra users will appreciate the result, so I guess it's worth all the rebooting.

I've been pretending to have a life and not hacking much in the past few weeks. I got a total upgrade to the home development computer ("here's a nickel...") and compiling stuff is Blindingly Fast now. POSE is no longer almost-painfully slow. Rah. While reading papers for a class I found out about StarTool which looks like it would be nifty. I am trying to get cstar (StarTool for C programs) to accept a slightly-disemboweled copy of the crufty kMoria source. This requires 1. get rid of the c++-style comments (for a first pass I stripped them out with some random dude's perl script, which was ok except for a couple of printf's that contained the string "http://www..." that suddenly became unterminated); 2. get rid of the include's of PalmOS API header files because it just can't cope with heinous header file madness (does not help that they like c++-style comments too... heh!), and replace them with Folger's Crystals: a header file that just has a bunch of fake typedefs (all pointer types are void *, all struct types contain only the members I ever referred to, all named constants are 1, hey, it doesn't have to run); 3. some other thing that I forgot - oh, yeah, get rid of the sections.h include that tells the compiler toolchain how to deal with the multisegmentness. Did all these things and cstar consented to grok my code and allow me to create star diagrams. Now I just have to figure out "what it's good for".

I have nothing to say today. The semester is underway. I am actually taking a course (needed one more elective). Between this, thesis research, reading papers, and what passes for social life, don't have much free time just now.

I got a couple of new fish for my aquarium. (J. Random cichlids; they're cute in a way, and don't bother the bottom-feeders, which are all the other fish I have. They have not yet quite forgiven me for the trip from the pet store.)

Because I'm such a rebel I'm not going to say "it's been a while since my last diary entry". It hasn't. The 5th of August was, I assert, yesterday, and I really don't know where the intervening mumble days went (maybe they're in the pocket of my other pants? or out protesting a calendar reform?)

I have almost finished re-re-writing the slides for the talk I am giving next week (on Monday I am leaving "on a jet plane / don't know when I'll log in again"). Also I bought a guidebook for Amsterdam which is where the workshop is. I have given a talk before, and I have been across the Atlantic before, so I can't decide which one I should be more nervous about at the moment, so I think I'll just fret about whether I will forget to pack something useful and/or important. Do they have internet cafes there? Forget drugs, I'm addicted to email.

second try. Observation #1: that emacs has trained me to type alt-q in untidy paragraphs.. does not work well when said paragraphs are in netscape.

Biked on part of the Eliza Furnace trail today and it was very furnacy and dehydratory. Maybe autumn is a better time (it's a nice flat paved trail but.. could be more shaded..)

I should be making iLarn able to beam itself, or answering email, or perhaps I should make iLarn able to answer my mail for me (that would be pretty funny), but instead, I have been pestering people to discover the licensing situation of various old old code that I might want to port. (and, so far, I have learned that if you ask whether the license of something can be changed, the answer will always be that it isn't possible, but, so far, I ask anyway because I am curious about how many different ways there are to reach this state, and also because I am shameless.)

So if I did port any too-restricted-to-be-"Open" freeware, where would I put the actual, "download my tarball here" page? Geocities maybe... I was there for a little while peddling GPL foo before someone pointed me at SourceForge. Or is there some more-hip site? (anyone up-to-date on these things?)

What have I been up to this week? I stuffed more gratuitous features into kMoria.. you can beam your high score to another player, or you can beam an object from your inventory. Also added support for multiple users (PalmOS device as time-shared machine: discuss) so you can lend the game to a friend without fearing for your own character. Someone started a thread on r.g.r.moria so I posted in it (kibozagoogle!). I should release again soon but it would be nice to actually fix some bugs first too.