Older blog entries for diablod3 (starting at number 22)

Certification
movement had mentioned certification was slightly broken, using amnesia as an example. The problem is, amnesia has not certified him/herself, doing so will probably fix it. My apprentice certification didn't happen until I certified myself, so may be the Advogato new user page needs to update to force users to rate themselves.

Shadow Conflict and Project Inferno
Well, the secret project I wasn't mentioning is on hold; I've gone back to working on Project Inferno to work out ideas to see if they can be possibly applied to Stratagus. Most likely, I won't be able to, but at least the ideas will be worked out.

Sourceforge.Net
Ive noticed a lot of people trolling about how much Sourceforge.Net sucks. "cvs is broken! its the end of the world! sf.net is dieing!!!1" Im getting tired of it. CVS has been a little screwy lately because they've been spending the last week or so transfering data to the new CVS infrastructure. After this is done, all connection caps and other connection problems will go away.

The new system is a group of six Xeon-based computers, all equipped with very fast RAID disk systems. Compared to the old system, which is two ancient machines with an equally ancient disk system, its blazingly fast. The switch over was supposed to have been done in August, but due to unforseen delays (including late hardware delivery), its taking place now.

About 40% of the projects have been moved to the new system. The old system has been having problems because its not suited to handle the load. If you get an error of...

cvs [login aborted]: unrecognized auth response from cvs.sourceforge.net: M PserverBackend::PserverBackend()
Connect (Connection refused)

... its because the old CVS pserver is hitting max load, and is trying to limit connections.

Sourceforge.Net provides a free and very useful service to the open source community, and people who speak ill of it, in my opinion, are idiots who shouldnt look a gift horse in the mouth. For many projects, including my own, they wouldnt exist without Sourceforge.Net.

Shadow Conflict
Yup, I'm still working on it.

Sepember 27th 1983: The Birth of GNU
20 years ago Richard Stallman proclamed to the world that the end of closed source software is nigh. And the blood thirsty crowds chanted, "GNU! GNU! GNU!". However, Linus was a little late to the party and didnt start working on the Linux Kernel until September of 1991. (Which Linus himself didnt name. Ari Lemmke did.)

Shadow Conflict
The secret project is continuing along fine. Hopefully soon, I can unveil its existance to the world.... maybe in a few months.

Jobs
I give up! Job hunting sucks, especially when done constantly for 2 years straight. Id rather work on Free Software thank-you-very-much.

Alleyoop
I found out about this program about a half hour ago from

Alleyoop is a graphical front-end to the increasingly popular Valgrind memory checker for x86 GNU/ Linux using the Gtk+ widget set and other GNOME libraries for the X-Windows environment.

In other words, its quite cool. It makes using Valgrind quite easier, and makes development work much faster. I wish I knew about this program earlier. Too bad it isnt packaged in Debian. Oh, and you Debian users who want to use it, remember to apt-get binutils-dev for libiberty first.

Shadow Conflict
Im shifting direction in what I want to do with Shadow Conflict, but hopefully I will meet the 0.1 deadline in 5 months with... something. Yup, Im keeping that under wraps. However, I wont be officially mentioning anything on the website until its confirmed my new ideas will fly.

Job, where art thou?
To work, or not to work, that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

FreeCraft isnt Dead
The old FreeCraft engine is being reworked and now resumes activity under the new name Stratagus. Also, my own project, Project Inferno, is somewhat of a fork of FreeCraft, though I havent actually intergrated any FC code in.

Shadow Conflict and Project Inferno
Up, still working. I may infact hit the 0.1 release date 5 months away from now.

Jobs
Still dont have one. Still looking for one.

VeriSign Can Bite My Shiney Metal Ass
The bastards seem to have set up some sort of wildcard DNS entry, so it picks up all typo'ed urls, and forwards it to the VeriSign SiteFinder website. What did I want? Oh yeah... Bloody Vengance!.

Not only does it fuck up spam filtering systems that dump mail based on if its coming from a valid host or not, its costing some companies millions of dollars. And really, I would rather Microsoft and AOL get the money, instead of VeriSign. I urge sysadmins at ISPs all over the world to block the SiteFinder website.

iRATE
iRATE has download resuming now! No more being left out because you're on dialup!... Okay, really, Im the only dialup user on iRATE. -_-;;

On the whole, iRATE is shaping up quite well. CVS has a different download metric, one similiar to "Download files until X files are unrated". The only major thing left for it is Vorbis support, which, for some odd reason, isnt high up on their todo list. Go figure.

Jobs
Yup, still looking for one.

Shadow Conflict and Project Inferno
Yup, still working on it. Im still trying to aim for the 0.1 release in 5 months, but I probably wont make it.

iRATE
In addition to what I said in my last post, I think iRATE should drop the use of external players. Yes, I realize this may be very hard in Javaland, but it would allow easier intergration of the player system into the UI.

Also, the use of BitTorrent would also be nice. It could be used to take a load off the download servers. Though, it would be an optional external dependancy.

Also, I think it should be downloading using a different metric. The only two acceptable ways I can think of are "Download files until X files havent been listened to yet" and "Download files until X files are unrated". People could just set it to some really high number, and run the client overnight.

The last thing is somewhat of a requirement. _RESUMING OF DOWNLOADS_. Im on dialup, so I'd rather not waste time restarting a download at 90%. If you add one thing I've asked for, it has to be this. ;)

Also, similiar in nature, I want to be able to rate partially downloaded files. Since I just started using it, I tend to get files that I rate "this sux". Why should I have to download the whole thing if it sucks? This would, of course, require the ability to play partially downloaded files.

In addition to _all_ of this, it would also be nice to have a simple download speed/eta meter like most downloading apps have.

And theres more! iRATE currently doesnt try to do simple file size validating to see if the file was correctly downloaded. This will be needed to be added.

(Yes, I know, its a long list.)

Rootless Root
The set of koans mrorganic pointed out are very good. This should be manditory reading by soon-to-be hackers. esr is a very smart man, but I have to admit, this is one of the better things he has written. (Not that his other stuff was bad, or anything.)

iRATE
iRATE is pretty cool. I never realized this many artists released their music like this. However, I think iRATE needs a couple things to really take off. The first thing is an online database of all music in the database. The second, going well with the first, is the ability for people to submit entries for the database. (That is especially good for artists who want to add their own music to the database.)

The database could also list information about the artist (like website or email), and other songs he/she/they made. Even an Amazon-ish "people who highly rate this song also highly rate..." type of metric could be nice.

Jobs (still quite nonexistant)
Sadly, the job hunt is still going. Even the local McDs isnt hiring. I would rant about the sad state of the economy, and that the war in iraq is killing it off, but why bother: I'm preaching to the choir.

Shadow Conflict and Project Inferno
This is where I insert a comment about how progress is going slowly. But you should be happy that there is any progress at all. ;)

The Giant Advogato Think Tank
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to think of a good name for an R-Type clone. (Please, no names that I could get sued by Irem for. That means to *-Type submissions.)

Shadow Conflict and Project Inferno
Work is slowly progressing, though I'm kind of taking a break.

Jobs (nonexistant)
Yup, still dont have a job. Doesn't anyone need a clueful fellow to do stuff? Web/Graphic designing? Coding? Anything?