Category: Uncategorized

I was never really a frequent MUD player, but I always enjoyed developing: it’s an enjoyable doubly-creative process when you can write code and storylines at the same time. That’s one reason why our extreme programming tutorial uses a simple MUD-like game as the sample project.

I haven’t thought much about MUDs in a long time, but this evening I was chatting with two of the FaerieMUD developers and noticed some /morphic resonance/ when I remembered some of my old ideas. As I listened to the plans for FaerieMUD, they started to sound very familiar. Some of the ideas could well have been copied verbatim from my notes, if I had ever kept any notes. I mentioned this to the guys, and they were amused. I then went on to tell them some of my other MUD thoughts, and it became their turn to feel the resonance.

It was all quite strange, but it’s not uncommon; that’s probably why there are weird theories to explain it.

http://martian.org/marty/img/xpday-oscon-2003.jpg

Our Day of Extreme Programming tutorial was extremely stressful before lunch. When everyone arrived we realised that the room was too small, so we moved to a slightly larger one.

Then we encounted another one of the now infamous OSCon wireless network problems: about half of the laptops could not connect to the CVS server. They were receiving incorrect IP addressed from a dodgy DHCP server. We spent too much time trying to work around this.

Despite the problems, most of the attendees seemed to enjoy their day as extreme programmers, and that’s really what matters. It would be great if they also learnt something as well.

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I had read that San Diego had a free public WiFi network operating at the bay end of Broadway, so I went looking. I discovered lots of open networks, but I couldn’t find any info to tell me which one was deliberately public access. I think they need to WarChalk themselves, or at least put useful technical info on their website.

Microsoft like to keep their lawyers busy. Today they seem to be doing something useful: suing spammers where they can, and trying to change the law elsewhere. Bill’s boys have enough funding and legal cunning to destroy nations, so I’m sure they’ll have no trouble with the spammers.

I used to hate all advertising on the Net: not because I thought it was wrong; because I thought it was ugly, irritating, and invasive. But things change, and I don’t hate it all any more. Spammers should still be fined and imprisoned, and people who use popup ads should have to pay the Mozilla developers (thank you Mozilla). But relevant banner ads are ok.

Now that I’ve decided that advertising is not all evil, I’ve signed up for some affiliate schemes. I have some websites that aren’t doing much at the moment, so I might as well connect them to sites that are. If doing this can make money without irritating anyone, why not.

So I signed up with TradeDoubler. My original intention was to sign up for just one scheme with a particular retailer for just one of my sites, but TradeDoubler have a long list of partners in different categories so it was quite easy to sign up to lots of relevant schemes. Their list even gave me ideas for some of my other sites.

My first attempt at installing Debian via PXE had worked, but I wasn’t happy with it.

I tried it with udhcpd again, and it worked, after I removed some of the options from the udhcpd config file to leave it looking like:

interface       eth0
start           10.20.30.50
end             10.20.30.80
opt     subnet  255.255.255.0
siaddr          10.20.30.40
boot_file       /pxelinux.0

If you need to find words based on approximate pronounciation, use Metaphone (or similar); don’t use Soundex.

The Soundex algorithm was invented before 1880 (yes, 1880). It worked well for what it was designed for: their database was a set of large boxes containing rolls of microfilm and/or paper cards.

Don’t use Soundex in the 21st century! We should have stopped using it in the 20th.