Hammer of Code

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.