I am currently in the process of migrating to gitolite. It's involving rebuilding the repo, hopefully I can keep all my info, and chown'ing and chmod'ing a few directories to allow gitolite and public_html to work togethor. Umask also seems to be an issue--posts are getting set to -rw------ when they should be -rwxr-xr-x

Debbug Browse has just been introduced! It is a foray into the wild world of Web Services. The particular Web Service I am targetting is the Debbug SOAP interface. It allows one to search for bugs on a certain package, maintained by a certain person/group, or of a certain severity. It's your one-stop-shop for read-only Debian BTS access! It is a quite interesting piece of tech, and I believe a browser for this information would be useful.

Currently, it looks like this. More documentation and development will be forthcoming.

Debbug Browse is written in Ruby --- bad Ruby, as this is my first foray into the language --- utilizing the tech from KDE's language bindings. The bindings are quite similar to their Python bindings, and once I had some concepts of the language, I was able to transfer my knowledge. I'm utilizing the soap support from Debian's libruby package, which is quite adequate for my needs, and easier to follow than the recommended Python package. I would recommend anyone with a mind to try Ruby give them a shot as the initial introduction.

As of the Summer 2010 semester, San Jose State University is to begin using the Learning Management Software 'Desire2Learn'. This is a change away from the current LMS software, BlackBoard.

Now, I've never used Desire2Learn, so I cannot adequately describe its perks and flaws, but I can say that BlackBoard was a horrendous mess. The looks of Desire2Learn aren't much better --- a system that tries to be anything and everything a student may need in his/her academic career. Email, Grades, Quizzes, even Blogs. There's a reason unix-like systems do so well, and it's called 'do one thing and do it well'. I already have an email addy and a blog, and I still think paper is the best quiz-taking medium. I should note, as an aside, that Desire2Learn supports requiring Respondus LockDown Browser. If I am forced to use that pile of breakage, I will complain verbosely; until then I will reserve verbage.

CS 160's page on MySJSU indicates that it might require Desire2Learn. We shall see. I hope to never again touch the byzantine breakage that is Learning Management Systems. 100W biased me against them heavily. While it was used in Bio 23, BlackBoard wasn't used as...annoyingly there, so there is hope for professors to use them wisely.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Till next blogging!

The Spring 2010 Game Dev Club second challenge has finished. I completed a game for it, Budget Crisis 9000. The game is rather simplistic --- control an economy with value sliders and try to keep various constituency groups happy. Further constituency groups than Liberals and Conservatives were determined by popular vote --- Cat-People being the last group added.

The formats of the input files are not hard to understand, so anyone could ajdust the game to use differnt values. It was a major design decision to load values for files beforehand, rendering the `hidden values' not so hidden; I don't consider that a problem. Anyone willing to investigate text files would probably be willing to go source-diving.

Budget Crisis 9000 is, in addition to an entrant in the competition, an attempt to further my Python knowledge. I also learned a GUI toolkit with this project --- Qt4. It is an interesting toolkit. I'm not sure I'd want to do a game involving sprite collision with it, but for this it was a good fit. Perhaps I will do a simple blog editor in it, though I use ikiwiki so such editors are of less use to me. Perhaps I'll try my hand at microblogging...

Results of the competition is 2 weeks.

The Game Development Club has concluded the programming section of the double-barreled competition. There was only one game that made it to completion, so Team Marek wins by default.

While I did not complete, I did put in a great deal of work towards the game. I learned a great deal about Computational Fluid Dynamics from Intel and a GDC Paper, but was unable to get something up and running that was

1) Correct

2) Fast-Enough (even in C++)

3) Understandable (especially in C++)

If anyone is interested at besting me at getting something to work, the Game-Design is Kelsey's. I will be doing my level best to get something working before I perish --- and hopefully before I lose all contact with Kelsey.

The first edition of Collaborative Storytelling is available. With this webapp, you can create stories one sentence at a time, hopefully in cooperation with one or more other storytellers.

Currently, there are no explicit linebreaks, so I recommend keeping your stories short, or dealing with the chaos of single-paragraph stories. Also, no, I cannot tell you who screwed up your story. This is by design. The Internet is all about chaos and anonymity. Why then do I require registration? Because an sql-injection scanner, for example, might dump huge amounts of garbage into a story, and I'd like to keep the garbage to people actually interested

Collaborative Storytelling was developed in python using the Django web framework. This made it dizzyingly easy to develop the app---less than three days of off-and-on work. While this doesn't include beautification, I'm not an artist, so...

I hope you have as much fun using it as I had writing it! Go forth and create!

Editing has been re-enabled. If spam picks up, we will be forced to consider other options, but for the moment we will be content that AlbertF will no longer be able to spam our blog about his website. Buh-bye AlbertF.

Wiki spam has forced the poor operators of Shades of Nothingness to disable web-based editing. This will, unfortunately, also disable comments on blog posts. Hopefully the administrators can find a reasonable solution to the problem soon, as the whole point of a wiki is its edit-ability, and blogs are nice when you can comment on them. We also occasionally edit our wiki from the web, and will miss the ability to do so. Any suggestions to the admin team at christopher.nelson@cavein.org.

Unfortunately, Mass Effect 2 on the XBOX 360 has the same stability issues which plagued Mass Effect 1---namely, after a seemingly-random period of playing, it pops up the message "This disk is unreadable ...". This is rather annoying, as when I play games I like to set aside a day and blast through them straight-through-like, and this issue is like a time-limit on playtime.

I suppose a limit on playtime is not such a bad thing for my health and sanity, but if it was to be introduced, I'd prefer some sort of configurable timer/clock reading (one of my favourite features of Master of Orion 3 was its clock which popped up at a specified time telling you to go to bed). I doubt that ME2's issue was, however, intentional on the part of the developers. Perhaps the QA team never played that long? Though that's hard to believe; I would imagine they played 8+ hours on some days.

Next step: install game to console. Just learned from here that this is possible, hopefully it will fix my issues, as they manifest as 'disk read' so, if there's no disk to read...

The first project for CS 159 (Parallel Processing) has been released. It covers the use of fork in C, as an example of what concurrent and parallel execution looks like but without going into the more interesting (and reserved for later in the course) software details.

The project also touches on an interesting bit of system I/O handling---buffering. I did not realise how the different modes of running applications handled the buffer differently; buffer handling makes a significant difference in the output of the programs in this project. Perhaps more will be learnt in CS 149 (Operating Systems)?

Hopefully I learn this material well enough to use it in my personal projects and future coursework, and not just enough to pass the course by.