I had the damnedest time controlling my character. The controls were the standard WASD for movement (which gives my hands cramps after five minutes) and the mouse-look was frequently overridden by the matrixy camera moves. While matrixy camera moves in a Matrix game are entirely appropriate, it makes moving around in the world a real female dog.

Example: when going down a staircase, the camera would be following my character in a spiral down the stairs. All of a sudden, the staircase would stop spiralling, and the character would be spiralling while the camera would go straight down. No warning, no notice. As long as you kept going, things worked out well, but if you stopped (like if you were surprised by the change) the camera has to be reset in order for you to go forward.

Add into this problems with interacting with everything around you. Which is done with the mouse. Which is fine, until you try and click something or someone and the camera matrixes the item you were trying to interact with away from you. A real exercise in frustration.

I will give MXO props for the graphics...it looks purdy. Too bad I had to turn down the graphics to get it to play acceptably on my box. <humor type="exaggeration">Ended up looking more like Tron than the Matrix.</humor>

I see now why people consider MMO games to be the domain of hardcore nutballs. If I, a psuedo-casual gamer, can't make it work without a minimum of frustration, what hope does anyone else have?

And I was so looking forward to MXO...&shrug;

Need I say more?

What is it with programming houses and small windowless offices? I mean, it's not like we're vampires or various sundry creatures of the night that will evaporate at the merest hint of the Day Star; but every place I've worked in the past four years has been in a small windowless rooms. Come to think of it, I seem to going downhill...at my last job, it was a large windowless room filled with other geeks; this one, a small room with just my lovable self. At least I'm done with this crypt^Woffice at the end of the month.

Turns out I haven't read email since late January. And with me on Debian mailing lists, I had a nice surprise waiting for me when I checked by inbox: 2300 messages. Thank god for Thunderbird and message threading.

Snow. Or more precisely, the lack thereof.

Back in eastern Washington (where I've spent the better part of the past nine winters) there would have been snow on the ground for six to eight weeks by now. Contrast this to the greater Seattle area, where the recent low temperatures (averaging around 40-some degrees) have consistently been higher than the high temperatures I've become accustomed to back east (typically in the high 30s). Not to mention Seattle's reputation as drizzle capital of North America.

Oh, well...such is life.

But working in a Windows environment, I find myself debasing myself to new and never before plumbed depths. CMD.EXE, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways:

• No control structures other than if, goto and for.
• Variable access semantics are different depending on how and where the access occurs.

  %VARIABLE%

  Standard access to variable contents.

  %VARIABLE (or %%VARIABLE inside a .CMD file)

  Access to the current iteration of a for loop. (The double percents are actually to escape the percent sign, so the script parser won't try and substitute a variable.)

  !VARIABLE!

  Delayed expansion. Since each statement is parsed and executed individually, expand the variable at the point of execution, instead of when the statement is parsed. This has esoteric uses such as from within a for loop. (Not really all that esoteric if you think about it.)

• It is impossible to capture the output of a command back into the current script. There is a echo-set/call idiom that seems to be prevalent as a workaround, but imagine how the elegant idiom.sh (well as elegant as Bourne shell can be):

  OUTVAR=`subcall.sh`

  becomes the ugly idiom.cmd:

  subcall.cmd
  if exist %temp%\passback.cmd (
      call %temp%\passback.cmd
      del %temp%\passback.cmd
  )

  Plus, you have to modify subcall.cmd to add the following:

  echo set OUTVAR=%Result_I_pass_back% > %temp%\passback.cmd

  instead of just printing $Result_I_pass_back to standard out. &shudder;
• Most non trivial text manipulation usually calls for shelling out to Perl. (Basically anything more complicated than perl's split builtin cannot be handled by CMD, but must be shelled out to perl with the results coming back to the script via the echo-set/call discussed above.)

I'm sure that if i sat down and really thought about it, I could come up with more things to dislike about it. No one ever accused me of being sane.

OK, I've been very delinquent in composing this email. For that I sincerely apologize.

First, I should mention about my situation... persistant rumors on the mailing list about my demise are vastly exaggerated. I have had problems with a pair of epilepsy induced car crashes (ironically, the only two times I've had a seizure), but things are well under the control of medication on that front. I did loose my job back in January, and had either been so depressed I was sleeping 12 hours a day and playing an MMORPG the other 12, or busy hunting for a job. But now that I have found productive employment again, things are able to start heating up on the NJS front.

Probably the biggest thing is that I went crazy at my domain registrar and picked up njs-javascript.org. Redirects from everything important to their new locations are in place; everything should be transparent. In conjunction with this, now is the time to bid adieu to Sourceforge. They're a great site and all, but their recent fiasco with CVS services shown me that outsourcing bites.

Also, the move away from Sourceforge is conditioned by the fact that I've fallen in love with Subversion. It makes things simple and means I don't have to muck about with mapping CVS users to a cvs account; the web server already does that. Add in mod_macro, and management becomes uber-simple. I've written up info on how to access the NJS repo at http://www.njs-javascript.org/svn.html. If you happen to be a died-in-the-wool CVS fanatic, fear not; we're going to be keeping the anonymous CVS access and mirroring changes as they show up in SVN.

Since we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, lists will end up moving to lists.njs-javascript.org. Since I can't get list preferences from SF (and I have asked about this), I will simply do a bulk add of everyone on one of the SF lists to their new equivalent on lists.njs-javascript.org. This means that if you had changed something in your subscription, you'll have to do it again once the first-of-the-month password reminder comes from Mailman.

Now that we have infrastructure covered, its time we got to the meat and potatoes: the code. As far as I can see, the following points need to be addressed before Resurrection can go live, if you'll pardon the pun:

* General Fixes: Small things, really. Convience functions to throw exceptions easily from builtin code. Separation of default and ECMA environments. Memory management fixes. Most of these are in BugZilla at http://bugs.njs-javascript.org with a target milestone of "Resurrection".

* Regular Expression Engine: Verify the test suite and weed out incorrect cases on Mozilla JS engines (SpiderMonkey and Rhino) and Microsoft JScript engine. Fix test failures from revamped suite. Write glue to allow engine use from VM (RegExp object).

* Convert Builtins to JIG: Finish converting builtins to jig.

* Documentation: My writing sucks. Must steal documentation about the JavaScript language from somewhere. Must document newly written tools such as jig and jigdoc. And must add jigdoc comments to the default builtins in order to be able to add them to the main manual.

* And anything else I may have forgotten about.

As for granting commit rights to the repository, I'm all for it. Just speak up (letting me know what area you'd like to work on - mainly for contributors information on the webpage), and I will grant them. After letting this thing languish for more than five years, I know I can't do it all (as much as I would like to be omnipotent, it just ain't gonna happen until I can learn to impersonate Linus). If there turns out to be enough interest, I will probably institute a lieutenant type subsystem "ownership" policy.

Hopefully, it won't be so long the next time I have to write one of these...if not, just give me a swift kick, and I'll come a' flying.

Brian

1. Leaves. There are leaves everywhere. The yard. The sidewalk storm drain next to my bus stop. They've even found their way into the windshield wiper well on my car. <question type="rhetorical">How do people live with all these leaves?</question>
2. It's late October; where's the snow?

On the plus side, it seems that there is sufficient cell service along the entire route that I can do anything I want, whether that be general web browsing or blogging in particular, form the comfort of my Sidekick. The only downside I see is the route(s) I have to take. One of the perks my employers offers is a free (to me) bus pass. However, it's only good on Sound Transit (the regional bus service) and Metro (serving King County), excluding service on Community Transit (which serves the area in which I live, Snohomish County). &gumble; So to get to my job in north Bellevue, I end up taking Sound Transit 530 from Canyon Park all the way down to downtown Bellevue, and the Metro 220 from there up to my building, which fortunately has a 220 stop right by the front door.

Oh well, at least I don't have to worry about the 405 commute any more.

Having fun reorienting (or should that be disorienting) myself to a Windows environment. Missed vi enough that I installed Vim on my workstation. Although on the up side, I do seem to be the group's Perl expert.

Oh, well, we'll see how this goes...I always have contract renewal in December if I decide I want out.

It also turns out that the other speaker was the same person who wrote the HOWTO I used to set up teevee, my MythTV TiVo-alike. It impressed him that I, a died in the wool Debianista, abandoned his Debian-based mythbox in favor of his directions.

Looking back, I find it hard to believe I said I was interested.

Lucky for me, they were looking for someone with more experience with MS products. Imagine that... &shrug;

/me loves tiny semantic differences that prevent code reuse. &sigh;

We're now down to failing 112 out of the 525 stolen test cases, down from 137 yesterday. That seems like progress to me.

And I even found some more specific issues to tackle next time I sit down to this insanity.

/me scurries off to hunt for gainful employ

• The author of OpenVPN talked about the cryptographic and networking challenges in building virtual private networking systems. He also talked about the advantages in a user space VPN over an IPSec-style solution. Things seem decent enough for me to resurrect my VPN on dedicated firewall project (in my Copious Free Time, of course).
• Got a bit of background about using VoIP and Asterisk. Having adminned a telephone switch in a past life, and seeing the simplicity at dealing with the VoIP issues, I'm seriously considering shelling out to buy the hardware needed to do the interfacing with good old POTS.
• Rasmus Lerdorf gave a talk about optimizing PHP. Rather insightful about what kinds of simple things that can be done to cause PHP to drag. It's also rather encouraging the way it is possible to get the valgrind set of tools (kcachegrind in particular) to work with other languages; I immediately thought of how to integrate NJS.
• An engineer from OSDL talked about their organization and the new 2.6 kernel. Not the most in depth talk, but you've got to give credit to an organization that supports both Linus and Andrew Morton (even if they did misspell Linus' last name on one of their slides).
• Aaron Seigo from the KDE Project talked about developing KDE applications. From all the nifty tools he showed us, it is apparent they meet at least one of Larry Wall's characteristics of good programmers: laziness.
• Participated in the obligatory PGP keysigning. Got ten new signatures, and learned a new phrase: key slut. "A person with a large number of signatures on their key." The canonical example that was used was of Benjamin Mako Hill and his (well-signed) key.

I definitely plan on being there next year. Heck, I may gather up enough nerve to volunteer to give a talk. :)