Hammer of Code

I spent the majority of the day today working on this site. As you might know I picked up hammerofcode.com yesterday. I found myself a host for the mean time with decent storage, bandwidth and features. If I do encounter bandwidth/server problems should I get enough traffic I figure I can just upgrade anyways. I’ll just be sure to keep backups .

I’m actually very excited to get my first site off the ground; I’ve never been much of a web development programmer, so its quite a bits out of my comfort zone. Problem is, now that I have the site here I’ll want to make sure I get onto the search engines. That means I’ll be looking at SEO in my off time.

There wasn’t much work done today directly relating to GSoC. I did, however, spend a little bit of time chatting with my mentor xdotx. We mainly discussed expectations for pre-GSoC work and weekly reports once GSoC coding begins. As it stands I’m planning on gaining as good an understanding of how tpserver-cpp and the rulesets work before coding begins. Optimistically I would like to get a shell ruleset up and running before coding starts. That way there will be lots of time polish the ruleset once the game logic and universe is implemented. I’m going to keep records of work done through this blog, and then compile a weekly report outlining files modified and work done via a weekly report.

In other news, and completely unrelated to GSoC, I picked up GTA IV today. As it stands on metacritic GTA has a 99 on average across 27 reviews. All I’m going to say is that even after only 4 hours playing it well deserves it.

Well that seemed to be a fairly productive first day. After dealing with some car mechanical stuff at the crack of morning I plopped down and started reading documentation. Just like the previous school term things had coalesced with time; What seemed out there and difficult during applications was/is now clear. This shouldn’t be as hard as I thought it would be

I also enjoyed a heap bunch more fun getting my dev environment going. As those on the tp-devel mailing list know I was having difficulties compiling libtprl, and consequently tpserver-cpp itself. I had scrapped mithro’s instructions for a /opt/tpserver-cpp/ install and tried install without any special conditions. Things compiled, but tpserver-cpp would not launch, citing a difficulty finding libtprl and ncurses (which was there with a dev package might I add.) I searched, and scoured, and relearned most what I knew about compiling from source. I grabbed many packages, and then i found the generic “build-essentials” package, which I thought would already be included in some capacity. I installed that, and I believe that MAY have been the last nail in the coffin on compiling libtprl. Yet it wasn’t evident to me at the time.

I was getting pretty frustrated when I figured I’d give mithro’s instructions another go. Line-per-line I copied them, not adding in ncurses paths as I had been, etc, and lo and behold, things just worked. Not a single error on compile, no missing libraries, no problems running configure, nothing. Everything just works. So if you are reading this Mithro, everythings OK now!

Having noted that I now had a dev environment that successfully built tpserver-cpp I decided I should make a script for recompiling it all, should I need to rebuild (which I hope I will, or else I wouldn’t be developing would I.) I’d never scripted anything before and I scoured the web for maybe thirty minutes getting my head around what could be done. I then sat down and pretty much copy-pasted mithro’s instructions to my script. While this isn’t anything crazy I can still be proud to say I made my first bash script. I then proceeded to make a bunch of other scripts for various things like cg-updating and launching the server with a ruleset; Perhaps tomorrow I will try my hand at scripting a shell script that asks you which ruleset you want to use.

After all of this fun came submitting my forms to Google. I had just seen that Google’s fax machine was now working again so I shipped off those forms; hopefully ending my servitude to administrative tasks.

WOW, i almost forgot the most important news! I purchased hammerofcode.com today, as I really like the name. I’ll be setting up hosting and wordpress (maybe) in the next few days and migrating these posts over there. This is my first purchased domain, so I am pretty excited. I’ve never really had a reason to blog/keep up a website and GSoC has me really wanting to keep a steady blog.

Just finished cleaning my office, and now I’m back to preparing a dev environment. Turns out Ubuntu 8.04 doesn’t play well with VMWare. I think I will probably be able to get by for a month with 7.10 before getting my Macbook. After this install of 7.10 finishes I’ll have to get the tpserver-cpp up and compiling again. At least the repositories will have everything like they should; even though 8.04 is released, it just doesn’t feel ready without everything apt-get’able.

As for this coming week, I’m expecting to dive into documentation; Specifically, tpserver-cpp documentation, and llnz’s older ruleset documentation. I’ve never really “pored though” any documentation before, and I think I should talk to xdotx about that (xdotx == my mentor, btw.) I will then move on to going over existing rulesets, whose better than xdotx’s from last year! However it turns out, I’ll keep you posted!

Funs abound as I wind down from writing my last two finals. I’ve already received two marks back and i got two “A”s. I don’t know why the University of Manitoba can’t give a percentage, as they clearly use one to calculate GPAs. That aside, I think I’ll do well this term; It’s been tough, transferring, and having been out of school for a year doing co-op and moving. I may have nearly failed Calculus 2 though, partly because I didn’t spend enough time on it, and partly because I spent the other part of my time applying for GSoC. All is not a loss, as I’m here with you now. Lesson learned. At least I can say I got to do GSoC this summer.

So, as for my development environment, I’ve started to work towards getting a stable “not-messing-around” build set up. I’ve got my beefy workstation at home here set up as a pseudo-server: Sharing all my media throughout the house. Remote accessibility. WAN syncing of files/documents, etc. etc. And now I’m currently setting up Ubuntu 8.04 in VMWare (Yes, I use windows on the box, gimme a break, I have to…) Unfortunately things are going a little slow, on account of the release of Hardy Heron repositories are slow as molasses. Ultimately, however, I don’t intend to use this box as my work machine. I’m actually lucky enough to have gotten a good return this year, and am selling a car, so I am just waiting to order a new Macbook (can’t count your chickens before they hatch!) Once I get the macbook THAT will be my work machine; I have a Mac Mini that I’ve been playing around with some TP stuff on, except it’s my media center for my TV.

As for actual work towards SoC I’ve been mostly dealing with administrative work. I was shocked the other day when I spent over two hours just responding to emails and setting up website accounts. Besides my tax/conf. of enrollment forms I have to send to Google I am, luckily, finished with administration. I’ve also made a commit to my branch of tp-servercpp, and am just about to check that it really updated on the server, here on another machine.

As an observation and an aside, the whole mailing list and IRC culture is really foreign to me, and in terms of “community building” I find it difficult to imagine any building will happen in the private GSoC mailing list, its NUTS. At peak times I see almost 100 messages an hour. While a lot of the information and links are great, especially the wiki page they’ve set up, I find it hard to see why mailing lists are so much better than say, forums.

For starters, Hi, and thanks for visiting my blog. I won’t go on to regurgitate every bit of information already in the About Me section.

So you’ve read about me, and know I am going to produce a Risk ruleset for Thousand Parsec. I won’t be simply cutting and pasting the rulebook into my ruleset, I’ll tell you that. For starters, as easy as it might sound, I don’t believe it will create a coherent play experience. Go and pick up TP, its in my links, and see for yourself. Secondly, Risks one-at-a-time play style doesn’t really mesh up with TP. I plan to get around this by “re-engineering” Risk to play what I call “all-at-once.” This transformation, once basic Risk game play is implemented, will most likely occupy the majority of my time. I can tell already there are a few points in the game where there will be the need for conflict resolution, and I hope these conflicts can be resolved in a way that extends the game, instead of simply bandaging it and shoving it into the TP framework.

I look forward to having a reason to blog, and hope I can incorporate blogging into my daily schedule.