OwlManAtt’s Blog

Howdy kids, not too much going on outside of work.

I would just like to remind you that Friday was sysadmin appreciation day. I hope you all appreciated your sysadmins.

Development on Cybitures is driving on, despite Tigress being gone until the 14th of August. I’ve gotten a good deal of administrative/logging code done, and I hope to finish off my log viewers by Tuesday and get back to game features. Since I have limited knowledge of how the whole thing is supposed to work, it will be a pain to find things to do game-featurewise until the 14th, but I can make due.

Also, I have written and release a brief SQL tutorial, which covers MySQL’s SELECT/JOIN/ORDER BY/LIMIT/GROUP BY/INSERT/DELETE/UPDATE and a few other things. It can be found on the file server: An Introduction To SQL.

That’s it for now.

Can you smell that? Smells like OwlManAtt.com housekeeping.

I went through the entire three year archive of OwlManAtt.com and sorted the posts into catagories, changed the [b]’s to strongs, and the [url]/[links] to proper HTML, etc. While I make no guarentee that my links lead anywhere, as I did not check for dead links, they are at least clickable.

Mod_rewrite is also enabled. Sorry about that folks, I hadn’t noticed that the archives/permalinks were all broken until last night. Steve took care of things though, kudos to him.

Oh, and on the topic of Steve…OwlManAtt.com is no longer hosted by Cyberpixels. Why? Well, Wintermute’s uptime was becoming increasingly erratic. The final straw was when it was down for about a day last week. This was the day I had scheduled myself to be categotizing posts, so natrually, this pissed me off. But not enough to switch.

So what happened to make me switch? I submitted not one, not two, but THREE helpdesk tickets regarding Wintermute being down. Not a single fucking ticket made it into the ticket quenue. I do not know why, but that was just plain fucking unacceptable. That was the third week running that I’d had trouble with Cyberpixels (although, for one week, I really can’t blame them, as domain renewal time is always a fucking mess).

I will, however, leave my domain registered through them for the next few years. I’m not quite ready to sever all ties to the last tangible Bettapets legacy. Not just yet.

In other news, I’ve started thinking about NaNoWriMo ‘05. As of this moment, I have no idea as to what this year’s novel is going to be about. It will, however, be either fantasy or (you guessed it) scifi. Big surprise there, eh?

I’ve been conteplating an idea that I had last year. Instead of a narrative, it would be a collection of IRC logs. I’m sort of leaning against this now.

I’ve also found a small bug in Ubuntu’s update notification applet.

And as for Cybitures, development is (very slowly) underway. Tigress is off in some barbaric foriegn country and is not online all that much. I could be doing stuff, but it’s sort of annoying when a discussion is needed on $MAJOR_DESIGN_DECISION. Once we get the Cybitures core systems done, things should be a bit smoother. Of course, once the core of Cybit is done, she’ll be back in America, so…bah.

As you all know, I’ve been developing shit in a proper development enviorment for awhile (read as: not being a cheap hack like I normally am). Some of the stuff I’m doing is really handy, so I thought I’d muse about it and how it may be applicable to Cybitures.

First of all, CVS. Up until now, I haven’t ever touched source control, ever. CVS makes things so much easier. It allows multiple developers to work on the same source tree without stepping on each other’s toes.

It works like this. It keeps a copy of the current, bleeding-edge source base, and it keeps copies of every revision done. You can roll back changes done to a file.

The other excellent feature is that it allows you to download the current code base and work on your own local copy. When you finish playing with a file, you can commit that file back to the centeral repository. If anyone else has committed the same file, CVS will look at the differences between the two files. If you worked on a different section of the file than the last person, it will merge the two together. If you changed what they changed, it will notify you so that you may resolve the problem yourself.

For example, say I was working on functions.php, a file with all of our functions. If Tigress worked on the PrintFoo function, and I worked on the DeleteBar function, it would be able to just merge everything together and have one big happy file. If I worked on PrintFoo between the time I last updated my local copy of the code and when Tigress updated it on the CVS server, it would barf and tell me to fix it myself.

The handiest way to use CVS would be to set up a folder that you can access from the web and upload to (via ftp, scp, whatever). This will serve as your development copy of your web application. You play with the files as you normally would, then when you get whatever you’re working on debugged and ready to go (like you add X feature and get it to work), you commit your change (you wouldn’t commit as you were developing, because then you’d have to give it log messages for every little freaking change, and I bet you don’t want to commit five hundred times because of stupid shit like misspelling variables), and you are happy. You can roll back to the old version if absolutely nessecary.

Then you have your production copy of your web application. This is what all of your users play with, and it always works perfectly, because you test everything before putting it into production. It’s extremely easy to get your nice, tested development version and your production version sync’d up, just check out a copy of the source base from CVS. Boom, instant, easy updates with rollback.

I set up CVS on my local machine just to get some experience setting it up. I hope that Tigress would be interested in using it for Cybit.

I’ve got quite a few projects to work on. And I’m now going to share what’s on the owlmanattian TODO list. Each item is seen as a seperate project.

• Install Ubuntu on the new old iBook (liz).
• Set up Ubuntu on the new old iBook (liz).
• Get OpenBSD 3.7, install OpenBSD 3.7 on almus.
• Set up SMTP server, clamav, and spamassasin on almus.
• Set up POP3 or IMAP (haven’t decided) on almus.
• Maybe set up Hoarde on almus for webmail? (need apache, php)
• Finish Evanion-base:

• Private messages
• Avatars
• Admin (user stuff, forum stuff, news stuff, tracking/data relation display)
• News

Just like to say I’ve been tweaking the blog a bit. I’ve had to play with the date line a bit, but I’ve gotten it back to oldschool owlmanatt. I also prodded the code here and there, and removed an entry from the archive.

The new admin panel is very nice, but I managed to blow things up with the plugin updater. I think I’ll leave that one alone from now on.

In other news, I’m working on Cybitures again, except this time its Tigress’ show and not Ken’s.