Time warp

Whoa. It's been a while since my last diary entry. Time to catch up.

The return of Eucalyptus

I've decided to resume development on Eucalyptus. Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I'm starting over. The original program was very Amiga-centric and doesn't (obviously) want to port cleanly to Linux/Unix. Plus, it just doesn't feel right. Some may agree with me: coding is very much an art form.

I've spent the last couple months in what little spare time I've had jotting down new ideas and working things out. Now, I can finally start hacking things up a bit.

Rugrats

I remember last year conversing briefly on IRC with raph about our respective sons when they were still "in the oven." It's nice to read about how Max is growing. They really are rewarding.

My son, Teddy, is also growing at an astronomical rate. His older sister was, and still is, petite. At 2 years, she is still shy of 30 pounds. At 6 months, Teddy is quickly closing in on 20 pounds. Yeesh.

He's starting to rock back and forth on his hands and knees, and will sit unsupported for quite a while. And he has this obsession with my keys....

The house that Jack bought

Michelle and I are buying a new home. It's very exciting! It's also very frustrating to have to wait for it to be built!! We drive by the site once a week to see the progress and take pictures. Electricity was finally run, and we are waiting for the drywall to be put up, which has been sitting in palettes for weeks. ARGH!

My rowing station

Work is going well. My issued laptop is finally usable. (It was given to me sans power adapter. So it sat on my desk for two weeks until a new one was ordered.)

On the other hand, internal politics are flaring up more often now as our little startup moves more toward a corporate feel. Such is life in the world of dot-coms.

Just registered a new project with SourceForge, The Iron Hells. I've always loved playing Angband, but it seems to lack the "prettiness" of most modern games, not to mention being only a single player game. The Iron Hells is my effort to add real-time play capability, as well as multi-player. I also want to separate the game into a client/server model, which would allow a running "game world" where players can join and play with or against each other. It would also allow development of whatever type of client the player prefers, be it graphical or Angband's original text-based interface.

The website has (literally) nothing yet, but I have some artwork ideas and such. I do need a (or several) good artists for the client interface and game art, as well as better sounds.

Anyway, enough rambling....

Ah, lovely California. It's good to be back. I accepted a position with a L.A.-based startup and Michelle and I have moved back to Cali. The commute can be nasty sometimes, but the job is well worth it.

Just got back on the net today, and we're still settling into the house, so I haven't had much time to work on Eucalyptus, but I've been working over some of the ideas in my head. Don't even really feel like coding right now. We'll see....

Last entry before I go offline for a bit...

Flew to L.A. yesterday for a job interview. Things look good, so I'm hoping to get an offer soon.

Today we pack the truck for the big move back to California. (I hate moving, but I'd rather be back in California, close to family, friends, etc.)

Eucalyptus is still coming along. I'm going to look into doing socket read/writes better. It's too ugly right now, and doesn't handle "non-standard" error conditions very well. Gnet looks like it might be a good way to go. Given that, it might be possible to merge the POP/SMTP code back into the main thread, and avoid the pitfalls of potential deadlocks, mutexes, semaphores, and the like. I think threads might be more suitable for sub-tasks, like decoding attachments, printing, saving to disk, i.e., stuff that doesn't require an event loop.

Anyway, time to get packing/loading. The time away from the computer will give me much needed subconscious processing time for these ideas and others. And that's why I'll keep my notebook handy. :)

Y2K draws ever closer, and my work at Epixtech nee Ameritech Library Services is winding down. But now we (the family) are gearing up to move back to So. Cal. with this new job. We'll see how everything finalizes when I fly out there on Wednesday.

Major changes on the Eucalyptus front. The multi-paned interface is here to stay (it seems to be the most popular), so I'm shifting things around a bit for that. I'm anxious to get some sort of address book into Eucalyptus, but I don't want to end up "writing it twice": once, either proprietary or reading GnomeCard's files (which I hear is going bye-bye), and 2nd, implementing a container for a Bonobo component. I imagine the Evolution guys are working on that, but I've no idea where they are, or what their plans are for the address book.

Christmas was good. Had family up here for a couple days, and Katy is being spoiled rotten by her grandparents. But that's a grandparent's job, is it not? :)

See you all on the other side (of 2000). ;)