It’s almost over. Time flies even faster as we get closer to the end of 2010, and apparently there’s a lot to summarize despite we’re not in the finish line yet!
This has been a particularly difficult year for me in a more personal sense, and I’ve faced some trials I won’t speak about and then some, but I’ve also learned new things in the road — things that may be of greater use to me in the future. There’s really a lot that could be said about this year but I’ll restrict it to computer stuff to avoid boring the audience too much bore the audience as much as possible.
Frequent visitors of the Scenario & Campaign Development Forum at Wesnoth.org’s board may have noticed that there’s a release announcement for After the Storm version 0.3, which is available at the official 1.9.x add-ons server and at SourceForge.net thanks to the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project.
I’m certain at this point that I can’t promise regular updates, but I’m trying to resurrect this project after a long period of inactivity that unfortunately followed the ceasing of development on its predecessor Invasion from the Unknown.
The truth is, I have been busy with all sorts of stuff this year — as a result, AtS has had to endure some parental abandonment. Although things aren’t becoming much easier for me in the following weeks, I hope to be able to finish episode I by next February, if not earlier.
As for IftU, I may resurrect it for 1.9.x if my time and creativity allows. Some convenient conversions of WML code to Lua are already done in SVN trunk, and at least the first scenario works, but more testing is required. In any case it’s unlikely to see the sunlight again until some more drastic (non-technical) changes I have planned become possible.
Often on IRC I refer to my computers by their unique hostnames, which I also use to differentiate their Linux kernel configuration sets, optimized for every individual machine.
Many get confused with this because the names aren’t very descriptive of these machines, so here’s some technical background and history for every one of my technological pets.
Two days ago, my HP laptop’s battery was working perfectly fine. Then I had to unplug the AC adapter and do stuff with the laptop elsewhere, so the battery was completely discharged afterwards. Then, I charged it again, but when going to bed I unplugged the adapter again when the battery was around 50% charged.
Fast-forward to the next afternoon, when I’m going with my family to celebrate stuff, and I turn on the laptop while in the car. Linux resumes from hibernation fine, and I see my KDE desktop again, with the battery meter at 50%. I check the Wesnoth.org forums for spambots as usual, fire up my IRC client…
And then the battery meter drops to 0%, KDE warns about suspending to disk in 5 seconds, and the laptop’s front panel battery status LED starts flashing.
I assumed that the laptop had just gone bonkers like it’s done before and ignored the warnings of imminent failure. Just as I was mentioning the ongoing problem on IRC, the laptop shut down completely, as it ran out of power.
It seems that this battery has finally collapsed, since the maximum charge dropped dramatically afterwards, and even the BIOS software warned me about it on the next boot. Here’s what acpitool has to say about the poor thing:
$ acpitool -B
Battery #1 : present
Remaining capacity : 704 mAh, 100.0%
Design capacity : 9000 mAh
Last full capacity : 704 mAh, 7.822% of design capacity
Capacity loss : 92.18%
Present rate : 0
Charging state : charged
Battery type : rechargeable
Model number : 25 mAh
Serial number : Primary
(Note: Linux has always reported 9,000 mAh as the battery’s design capacity since day zero. This information is incorrect, and the correct value should be 4,000 mAh. Also note the bogus model/serial information.)
Since this is a rather critical situation, I’m probably going to buy a new battery for the laptop soon — besides sending it away for maintenance, which is in my list as soon as I buy that external hard disk drive on which I’ll be able to fit a complete raw disk image of my laptop’s HDD.
After almost two days of wandering around the streets of the city, my emissaries located a place to buy a new AC adapter for my much beloved HP Pavilion “ATI hellspawn” dv5-1132la, and I have thusly regained access to my development environment for Wesnoth and related projects.
48 hours of using a laptop with a broken display, short-lived (8 minutes) battery, unusable touchpad buttons, different keyboard layout and outdated user config can be very frustrating, but it was a good exercise nevertheless. It's better to have a broken spare laptop running Linux (Debian Lenny before Stable) than no spare laptop or no Linux laptop at all. 😉
My laptop's AC adapter has finally died after passing out in three opportunities. I've already sent my emissaries across the city to find a spare for this thing.
For now, I'm using my old, broken Acer laptop and I won't be available for most of the time until I can use my HP Pavilion dv5-1132la again.
My own software projects tend to be very much like pets to me. I take care of them, carry them with me anywhere if it's possible, I feel horribly sad when something bad happens to them and, even when I go mad at them for something, in a few hours we are together like a neat happy family again.
Invasion from the Unknown has been theWesnoth add-on project of mine since around September 10th 2007 and it has evolved throughout time and endured 3 mainline development cycles introducing drastic game engine changes, receiving little automated help from the likes of wmllint. Instead, it has been kept on shape by me and a few people who have helped with the huge maintenance burden that this epic-length campaign is.
With an initial goal of 30 playable scenarios, 29 of them were made at first and I later shrank the campaign to approx. 26 stages per suggestions from various people including ESR, and split it into two halves of roughly 13 scenarios each. IftU outlasted two other projects of mine which finally rotted among my hard disk backups for good — one after 5 years of development and little progress, and the other after three months of development and decent progress. It also directly or indirectly created or inspired the following Wesnoth-related projects:
It's been almost 3 days since the earthquake in Chile which affected many regions of the central-south areas, including the region of Santiago. While things are mostly normal here — besides the many closed stores, the many damaged buildings, unusable highway infrastructure in some places, some fallen buildings, zones without electric power, unstable mobile phone networks and a bit more than 30 dead in the region, the disaster here pales in comparison to what can be seen following the coastal line to the south near the region of Maule and Bío-Bío. There's no way I could properly summarize what happened there, so you'd better use Google if you are curious. Many locations look like ruined, flooded, destroyed battlefields.
And yet, opportunists have pillaged around 16 supermarkets in our region so far; some succeeded, but most failed. There was not enough damage on this region to justify such vandalism. Naturally, Concepción and many other locations in the south are also being constantly vandalized, enough to justify passing the control of two regions over to the army to try to keep the order. They haven't completely succeeded, and the vandals have started fires, given false alarms of tsunamis and destroyed or damaged private and public property.
The aftershocks have been scarce today and they've mostly faded out from our point of view in the Santiago region — that is to say, they haven't stopped in Maule and Bío-Bío and it doesn't let those people rest or sleep for much time. A few stronger aftershocks have reached us as well. Fortunately, they are not anything like the original earthquake.
However, they seem not to stop for me. I've been feeling dizzy since the moment I got out of the house during the earthquake and, no matter if I'm on my bed or sitting on a chair or on the toilet, everything feels the same as in the aftershocks, like a big boat on the sea that never stays still. It's very annoying but I still work on stuff and chat on IRC despite of this.
As sad as this is, and as grim as everything may seem, Santiago is mostly alright and we must move on and continue our lives and help however it is possible. But an earthquake with epicenter near our city isn't a terribly far-fetched possibility since we live next to several (relatively inactive) volcanoes, so let's not relax too much either.
The Wi-Fi router I use for connecting to the Internet stopped working last night (that dreaded “No route to host”). It's back now, but I'd have liked to post an update yesterday. Anyway, no news is good news, no? Er, well, assuming that the communication systems work, that is...which sadly seems not to be the case for the location of the epicenter, Cobquecura.
It's been more than 30 hours after the earthquake that caught me in the bathroom some minutes after 3:30 am yesterday. The aftershocks, while generally small, continue every 5-90 minutes, and at this point it just feels like one long ride on a bus through a badly deteriorated road — and it's getting fucking annoying.
I'd said that we were okay before. First I was scared when all this happened, and then I was sad after the news. Next, I was worried about the aftershocks. Now I'm just annoyed. Really annoyed.
Nonetheless, I'm not letting an earthquake and a never-ending sequence of aftershocks stop me. There's some groundbreaking work going on here — which you can't see, but I can, and I must say it looks really nice.
Now, could we just stop this madness and allow the rescue groups do something in the most affected locations near the epicenter without having the ruins of the buildings shaken every few minutes by a whimsical force of nature?