Earthquake in Chile

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.

Throwaway code

It has become increasingly common for me to come up with a program for an amazing task one day, to rewrite it the next day.

umcdist, the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Distribution Tool, has been in development hell for a year mostly for this reason; the other reason is that it seems like it will perform worse than build-external-archive.sh a.k.a. “Scrappy” due to an excessive usage of Perl's system function. I cannot make up my mind and choose between performance and maintainability; Espreon knows that build-external-archive.sh is broken, but I can't be bothered to try to understand that unholy abomination again to fix it.

Meanwhile, umcstat (Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Statistics Service) is still a work in progress, but with more emphasis in progress; there's actual code written already, and I've been using freenode's Eir bot framework to test it.<

While Eir could possibly be a nice way to get rid of umcreg's Net::IRC dependency and code, it's actually a C++ program that can be compiled only with GCC 4.4 at minimum, due to at least one C++0x feature used throughout the code: auto. The target machine runs Debian lenny, unlike my laptop (Squeeze), and therefore doesn't have GCC 4.4!

Instead of sticking with Eir, I'm refactoring umcreg's IRC code into a custom Perl-only framework, umcbotd, and making creative use of eval writing an abomination code-named “Naia”, which I'm rewriting again because the first version I wrote, which worked, was very badly designed and ugly. I know it's a problem when I have three classes or modules all depending upon each other's internals.

The goal of umcbotd/Naia is producing a Net::IRC-based abstraction layer for our bots that treats them as “services” with multiple “modules” (not in the Perl sense, though) that can be easily inserted and removed from the system by adding/removing their files. umcreg already runs with a prototype implementation of this mechanism, but it needs to be generalized further before it can be usable with Naia.

Writing our bots could be this simple, if Naia gets completed:

#!/bin/true
CO_SERVICE_COMPONENT('umcreg');

sub ctcp_version_reply () { "Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Registry Service, using " . Naia::version_string() }

sub eh_ctcp_version
{
    my ($self, $event) = @_;
    $self->ctcp_reply($event->nick, 'VERSION ' . ctcp_version_reply());
}

# ...

my $bot = Naia::get_bot('umcreg');
my %eh = (
    'cversion'      => \&eh_ctcp_version,
    'msg'           => \&eh_msg_private,
    '330'           => \&eh_whoisloggedin,
    '318'           => \&eh_endofwhois,
    '331'           => \&eh_notopic,
    '332'           => \&eh_topic,
    '403'           => \&eh_nosuchchannel,
);

$bot->connect();
$bot->register_event_handlers(%eh);

And their modules would be like this, more or less the same as umcreg's modules already are:

#!/bin/true
# token, subroutine, privilege level (A: admin, H: half-admin, U: user)
CO_MODULE('RAW', \&co_raw, 'A');

sub co_raw
{
    my ($parent, $nick, $hostmask, $svaname) = (shift, shift, shift, shift);

    if(!@_) {
        $parent->notice($nick, "Not enough arguments for \002RAW\002.");
        return;
    }

    $parent->sl(join(' ', @_));

    broadcast_to_log("RAW [$hostmask]");
}

... And of course it would still involve lots of ugly stuff under the hood (eval magic), but if done right I shouldn't have to touch it whenever I wanted to add or remove a feature from any of our two services.

Kalari at last

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.

Creativity drops

At this point, I should know better than tempting fate in a blog post:

[...] 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. [...]

Two days afterwards, my creativity disappeared like a drop of water in the sea, again — which means that After the Storm has seen relatively no progress since then. I hope I get better next week, because this work needs to be completed as soon as it's possible.

Is it over already?

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!