Woo - long time without an update. Excuse - I managed to graduate from university. What's happened in the past few months? Well, I've done very litte on Constellation; considered it in hibernation. I have been doing lots of WorldForge related stuff, however. Most important is the creation of Eris, a client-side session library which makes building a functioning (and Atlas compliant) client about twenty times easier than it was previously. To prove the point, someone has assembled a CrystalSpace based client in about a week. Eris is getting semi-stable now, with a few big tasks and lots of bug fixing ahead.

Recently I hacked up the ODBC driver for STAGE to produce a native MySQL one; this is working pretty well (given the limited usage it currently gets from Echo). In the process of testing the driver I ended up re-writing big chunks of the Mercury authentication code. Oh well.

Once Eris settles down I'm planning to turn my attention to COAL and get it speaking Atlas. Also the relationship between the Semantic Maps paper (ask aloril) and COAL needs to be assesed. Hopefully Coal and Eris (especially with Python wrappers) wil become sufficently reliable and generic that most clients can take advantage of them.

Unrelated to WorldForge, I've been working on a GPS for FlightGear. Initally I'm cloning the venerable KLN-89b, since the docs are available and I can compare with the example in Fly! The basic output is working, but there is not yet any paging or input to the unit - hopefully comming soon.