As you probably know (if not, Google “earthquake in Chile”), Chile's been struck by an earthquake approx. 8.8 in the Richter scale in the region near Concepción. I live in Santiago, and we have also been affected by this unfortunate event.
(Following comes from this Wesnoth.org forum post, now missing due to the former autopruning mechanism.)
I am OK right now, but I got trapped in the house during the earthquake (I was in the bathroom and some really heavy objects were in the way to the kitchen, which is the closest way to exit from my bedroom) and thought I wouldn't be able to get out in time. I did (about right at the end of the earthquake, not knowing at the moment if its intensity would continue increasing...), but we are not sure whether the house deteriorated further or not and do not really believe it'd resist a real earthquake with epicenter near Santiago.
There's a good distance between Concepción and Santiago, so it was about 7 in the Richter scale in Santiago according to the authorities last time I checked — about 10 am via FM radio on the car, we didn't have electricity, tap water or Internet at all until around 2 pm and I fell asleep around 1:16 pm after being unable to sleep the whole night with the strong and continuous tremors that followed. I originally posted this around 6:40 pm.
While everything's fine for us here right now, sadly, other areas of this same region didn't have this luck. Including areas where some of our family lives.
Naturally, everything to the south is chaos according to the news and there are still isolated people in coastal areas closer to the epicenter.
***
There are still tremors as of this writing. There was a small one which cut the power lines for 1 second some minutes ago, followed by a stronger one with lots of underground noise. The movement pattern continues being the same as the original earthquake. Internet is flaky.
If anyone's really interested in speaking to me, I've temporarily opened ##shadowm on irc.freenode.net.
It took me much less time than I expected to put the new layout of the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev website together. Observe.
Okay, that's basically because most of the design was already made long time ago, in the form of the site's earlier incarnation, codenamed “Soradoc”, which looked rather busy and useless with the sidebar and other design elements. The new design, “Kalari”, removes the sidebar, clears the site banner a bit, and blends the site with Wesnoth.org as far as appearance is concerned. It's not the same design, but it's similar — that should be a good thing considering the purpose of Wesnoth-UMC-Dev.
That site also had a Blosxom-based blog, but I removed it since nobody was making actual use of the space.
The greatest thing about all this is that most of the PHP, “Poison Ivy” was finished in 1 night, while the rest took me just a few additional hours. Now that Poison Ivy is completed, I can reuse its code for the next incarnation of this very website blog.
It's all for teaching some web design and programming basics to myself, really.
Finally, it's January! The New Year celebrations are mostly over and fading away, and people all around the world are going back to regular business and everything should be back to normal in a few days.
I used to be fond of the Christmas and New Year celebrations as a child as I could spend time with my family and eat delicious food. That is not the case anymore, because, even if I still live with my parents, there's no longer a sense of family here and we only want to throw sharp stuff at each other. There's not much enthusiasm by the end of the year anymore, and phrases such as “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year” (in Spanish, though) are truly unheard of in this house. Recent disagreements amongst us indicate that this is not going to be a good year for anyone. To add insult to injury, one of our cats died in a rather tragic and violent fashion on December 22th — it's a tradition here that one or more pets must always die in December. While we have many of them, the first ones to die are those whom we are most attached to.
To mark the actual start of 2010 (as far as the Gregorian calendar is involved, of course), there was a black-out on the area about 6 minutes 7 seconds past midnight, which left us with no Internet or tap water until around 1:50 AM. What a great way to start the first day of the year.
But there's still some hope at the moment. Some days before Xmas, my creativity returned from its long, chaotic journey and my Wesnoth add-on, After the Storm (sequel to Invasion from the Unknown has seen steady progress and two new releases were published in less than two weeks. Keep in mind that this add-on had not seen any public releases for almost a year.
After the last released version of AtS (0.2.1) including 5 of 12 planned scenarios in Episode I, there has been more progress in the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev repository. Just yesterday, I finished the two-part cutscene that is the sixth scenario of Episode I, one of the most important points of the plot's development, in which two forest elves finally make contact with the desert/Quenoth elves.
I won't be able to release AtS 0.2.2 or 0.3.0 until scenario 7 and the next cutscene (appropriately named “Resolutions”) are finished, since I'd be teasing the players otherwise. However, those who are really interested on it can always check AtS out from the repository's trunk into their <wesnoth preferences dir>/data/add-ons dir and play using the latest development version of Wesnoth:
svn co https://wesnoth-umc-dev.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wesnoth-umc-dev/trunk/After_the_Storm
It's really exciting to work with several plot elements from quartex's Under the Burning Suns in new, creative manners — kind of like Fanfic production taken to a new level using the power of the GNU General Public License (version 2 or later!). Nevertheless, I am fairly sure he deliberately left much details unresolved in the original campaign, and that he'd fry us (Espreon, AI0867 and me) alive if he found out what we are doing with his story.
One week before Xmas, the Wesnoth.org forums saw another upgrade on which Turuk and I worked hard and quickly to improve forum usability by not only upgrading the codebase to phpBB 3.0.6, but also tweaking the templates, adding modifications and a couple of new forum styles to take advantage of the new features implemented by the phpBB devs in this iteration of their software. The main points were highlighted in this forum post (originally a Global Announcement).
This year should also bring us a new stable series (1.8) of the Battle for Wesnoth game itself. There are currently some problems delaying the first Release Candidate and getting us flooded with generic beta releases, but the developers in charge of them will (hopefully!) find a solution so we can get 1.8 released and trunk “thawed” soon, to work on new features and allow new code contributors to join the project. As for me, I can't wait for the new stable series — development series players seem to be scarce and the new versions of IftU and AtS are receiving little feedback on the forums because of this! I suppose Multiplayer content authors are similarly eager to get more fresh meat to play their add-ons.
I also recently talked about how I can finally suspend my laptop to RAM using Linux, and run some basic OpenGL-based software without crashing or destroying anything. That's something I didn't expect to be able to do in the near future, so the Mesa, libdrm and X.org radeon driver developers have my thanks for improving the Linux experience of those unfortunate enough to own onboard ATI graphics controllers!
In summary, as usual, a new year brings good and bad news. I guess it's up to us to take what's good and fix what's wrong. So, anyway (although I guess it's pretty much unnecessary at this point): happy New Year and have fun!
While checking the Wesnoth.org forums ensuring that everything is working properly, I occasionally find spambots who have managed to make it past our hacky anti-bot registration measures, probably with help from humans. Most of these spambots go into a hit-and-run attack leaving one spammy post in some random place of the forums — sometimes in existing threads, sometimes starting new threads themselves.
Two nights ago (November 30th, 4:45 AM), some guy came into our Off-topic section asking this:
Post subject: Linux
How long does it take to become a Linux Administrator? Also is 1 year of linux study enough to get a job as System linux administrator? What exactly do I need to learn to achieve that goal?
It was his first post, and there were no signature or links whatsoever. He joined the forums two days before that (November 28th, 8:08 AM). You may note that the message above is not in proper English, but there are many underage or foreign users in the board. Nonetheless, some regulars and I replied to this guy's message in good faith.
On the next day, December 1st 8:36 AM, “he” edits his message adding spammy links after a fake signature separator similar to the phpBB 3 subsilver2 template's, except a bit longer. The post spent approximately 14 hours as search-engine bait because no other Wesnoth developers noticed the cheat (or read the Off-Topic forum, I guess) and I was away for the whole day until I went in and found this surprise after a third look at the thread.
Fascinating. 😐
In one occasion I had one of these drones join the forums and make their first spam post after 6 weeks (and shortly get kicked out of the house). I guess it must have been collecting posts and feeding them to a learning engine in order to enhance future spam posts by fitting them into the board's context for the time being. Not that its own attempt at posting succeeded.
The problem is that they sometimes do manage to produce reasonable posts — as long as you use a very flexible definition of “reasonable”, which is more or less required around the Wesnoth.org forums these days especially since there are real people who join the board and never post anything constructive or interesting and roam just the Off-Topic forum asking weird, unimportant questions and answering other weird, unimportant questions with bogus, misleading or uninformed answers or opinions (no, not pointing at anyone in particular here). On the other hand, it's still possible that those weird guys or gals will eventually drop their masks and reveal their true identities as spambots. Or maybe someone else will remove it for them.
During my work on the Coordinated Wesnoth User-Made Content Development Project (which we dub "wesnoth-umc-dev" for short), I came up with an interesting concept related to Subversion's standard workflow. Half-assed commits are revision commits to the Subversion repository that are not completed due to the subversion client (or server!) process dying unexpectedly, usually due to anything but a SIGTERM.
The obvious symptom of a half-assed commit in your local file system is a bunch of 'L' flags in the svn st command output. These can be removed with svn cleanup. So, most half-assed commits are harmless to you. However, according to the (holy) Subversion Book, it may leave garbage, half-assed transactions in the repository. These are not viewable to anyone but the repository admin of course, and should not harm anyone provided the filesystem on which it resides does not run out of space.
😐 Last afternoon I ran into a more harmful and painful sort of half-assed commit. I renamed some files in my working copy, invoked svn ci, and my crappy Wireless LAN connection burped just when it was about to update the working copy with the changes introduced to the repository:
Transmitting file data ...svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: MERGE request failed on '/svnroot/wesnoth-umc-dev/trunk/Invasion_from_the_Unknown'
svn: MERGE of '/svnroot/wesnoth-umc-dev/trunk/Invasion_from_the_Unknown': Could not read status line: Connection reset by peer
(https://wesnoth-umc-dev.svn.sourceforge.net)
svn: Your commit message was left in a temporary file:
Unsurprisingly, I was left with my files in an awful state that caused local conflicts with the repository. That is, next svn update failed because the commit above was successful for the server, leaving the renamed files in the repository. SVN just didn't like that at my end, because I had those renamed files already in the working copy as result of the svn move result I just (half-ass) commited.
Thanks for nothing SVN! Seriously, the protocol should have the server request for a final confirmation from the client to check-in the transaction after its changes have been merged in the client's working copy. Or the inverse: have the client react in a smarter fashion to these situations that people like me often run into.
