A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Volity got its hooks into me on Tuesday, and has been dragging me down the pavement ever since. The catalyst may have been radiotelescope himself being moved by the spirit last weekend and closing a bunch of our RT tickets. I had also managed to give myself some interesting homework at the last biweekly meeting of the Volity Illuminati: beginning a recruitment campaign for hackerly help with the project, particularly from the Java crowd for Gamut's sake.

When it happened that this had a lot of unmet prerequisites, I went a little crazy and did them all, heedless of the fact that this took two days - in one case staying up until 2am making code repairs (while catching up on Lost in a background window). Boy it's been a while since I've been moved to do that.

Today I finally started posting a want ad around, starting with Sourceforge, in a "help wanted" forum that seems to be half-populated by confused people wanting help in running programs or opening files or downloading porn. But whatever, it's a start. Where else should I post?

I have barely done any billable ITA work this week, and Gameshelf #6 production has gotten behind schedule too. But criminy, for weeks I have pining for Volity inspiration - more than one of you have been good friends as I bent your ear about it in-person - and it came. That it did not come meekly does not seem to be something I should really complain about.

Just as well, though: I have less than two weeks to put together an attractive hacker-level slideshow about Volity. Holy smokes. I gotta get on that.

All righty, new SourceForge project for Google Checkout in Perl: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gcheckout-perl

If you want in, just tell me your SF username and I'll add you. I plan on being promiscuous with commit bits, as always.

There isn't any code yet because I'm still baking up the first alpha, but it's getting there. Lord willing and the crick don't rise, there'll be stuff in subversion before the Monday night Volity meeting.

This is going to be the tightest Perl code I've ever written. Volity's Perl libraries are quite good (I am told), but they're based on programming philosophies I held three years ago, and I've gone up a level or two since then.

Christ, those Splunk banner ads are irritating.

I wish there was a nearby shrine to MySQL I could go visit. I'd like to go there and burn some incense or something.

In the middle of some pretty hairy DB work in order to make the revenue reports work, and I swear to you, all my guesses as to syntax for bizarro table relations that looked like they might work actually did work.

If this were Oracle, this would have taken me a week to figure out.

Am supposed to be starting to attend to my end of the revenue model implementation now, but wound up spending the afternoon fixing a hairy problem in the Perl libraries that has hung up another Volity hacker, a fellow chugging along with a Hearts implementation. It was a conscious decision: getting developers psyched is a top priority for us, and having broken libraries is not the way to do it. Furthermore, I am really excited about having a well-known game like Hearts on the Network.

I did the right thing but I really can't punt any more with the revenue stuff. The Andys will look at me badly if I haven't made progress by Monday night. But there's also all the RSS stuff that needs to get done... eek.

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I didn't feel like doing anything last night so I worked on the G*mesh*lf for about three hours, enough to throw together a rough draft out of the footage from last December. It is not our best work - the guest players are great, but the host bits are a bit too dorky if you can believe that - but I wanna get it done. I can't start thinking about where to take the show next when I have this eight-month-old undigested bolus sitting on my hard drive. Gotta poop it out. I think you'll like it anyway, when it's done.

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Speaking of poop, I dropped Tom Vasel's The Dice Tower podcast after listening to a few episodes. It's an all-right show - I especially like what he does with guest-produced content - but its overall attitude about games and maybe about life in general is just different enough from mine to irritate me.

I finally dropped the feed when a recent show featured a top-ten list of worst themed games, and I thought that every "worst theme" they mentioned was actually pretty awesome. They hated all the Cheapass Games themes for being either boring ("Who wants to pretend to be in a ren faire?!") or absurd ("'Devil Bunny'? That doesn't make any sense!"), and dismissed other games on bogus perceptions, like calling Funny Friends a game about "being a cool teenager" - though I'm sure that if they knew more about the game they would have hated it anyways. As far as I can tell these guys just don't like either sort of below-the-waist-based humor, and as far as I'm concerned that makes them aliens. (The kind of aliens that don't go to the bathroom and reproduce via budding, I guess.)

Speaking of aliens, I have picked up taskboy3000's Pseudocertainty, a news podcast covering the world of pseudoscience and bizarre phenomena. I have only listened to the first ten minutes of the most recent show so far, but I like what I've heard, and now I won't be able to prompt jjohn for further mock outrage about how I never listen to his show.

It sort of fills the void left by Skepticality, which I stopped listening to when (and believe me, I feel like a jerk about this) Derek came back from hospital and I found it just too igry listening to him trying to communicate through his recent brain damage. Maybe he and the show are better now... I suppose I could give it another listen sometime.

Today I finished a draft of a column that I last week successfully pitched to an online publication (where I've appeared before) and asked some former cow orkers for a tech review. Got two responses, one helpful, one less so. Put it aside for now.

Fielded an idea from a couple of more recent ex-orkers regarding an online resource for all kinds of legislative tracking. I noted how it rekindled my ideas about a sort of IMDB for Congress, where bills and laws are like film titles and the congresspeople behind them are like the cast and crew, and everything is hyperlinked and automated. That would be kind of cool.

Picked up another Arcus contract. (Or got tossed one, rather.) It's a 20-hour job due in two weeks, but is most notable in that it requires me to get familiar with some software that I wrote two years ago, including a shopping cart Perl module that I was rather proud of at the time, and have since utterly forgotten about. It has lived on, in my wake. Nutty. Also, hmm. Despite Joe's feelings to the contrary, I still can't find anything like it on CPAN. This I will put on my list of things to revive.

Revive? I today found that O'Reilly.com has a link in their catalog page to P&X, so I really have to at least mention it on my own site. Haven't done this yet, but I did get bit by the desire to play with "corndog", my own weblog software. I got it running on my iBook with a little bit of struggle (more the fault of my not-quite-understanding of one aspect of HTML::Mason). It's ready for me to swoop in and add the glossary components that I've been wanting for many many months. That, sadly, may prove to be the end of my regular LJ postings. I think it will be for the best. We'll see what happens.

It's past 7 but I think I'll change my pants and head over to Denis' anyway.