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So, given the success of the livestream, I'm discussing with the staff doing future livestreams to sit back, discuss things with the community and such. We're thinking about once a month, and perhaps doing a multiplayer game that everyone can join in on (I'm thiking either Civilization or Europa Univeralis IV).

However, given my own experiences doing it, I'm going to try my hand at doing a Let's Play. Given its where we started, I thought it would be most appropriate to start with a series based on NetHack, and am working on recording an introduction video which will go over the basis of the game, and help prevent the series from being too repeative (I'll only upload runs which have a decent chance of ascending; generally ones that make it to Mine's End and finish Sokoban, maybe a bit further).

I'll post the intro video and my first episode hopefully this week. I'll probably upload them to YouTube and provide raw files. I'm encoding my raw videos in VP8+Ogg Vorbis in a WebM container, and will be licensing my content under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Once I figure out a place to upload large WebM files, I'll also provide the edited source files for anyone who is YouTube allergic. I'll probably enable monetization on my account and let YouTube place ads in my video, to hopefully get a little money out of it. Beside NetHack, I may feature other games on Linux and open source gaming in general.

NOTE: This is a personal project and not related to SN directly. Unless something is on the main page, assume this is non-SN related, and I'm just writing about it here (since this is the closest thing I have to a blog)

This is just a place to hang some UTF-8 character regression tests.

Finally got the first set of code committed to rehash to allow use of IPv6 properly (dev.sn.org has had a AAAA record for ages, but IPv6 address handling has been hosed since day 1, that's why we don't publish one for production). Just need to add some UI tags so admins can see if a ipid/subid is IPv4 or IPv6, and we're more or less set here.

I'm surprised that this hasn't been addressed by the academic communities. Someone with a degree in English or linguistics or something like that should have though of this decades ago.

This word (actually more than one word) has various spellings, and I've probably used all of them at one time or another. The word is email, or eMail, or e-mail, or some other variation. They're all wrong.

It's a contraction of "electronic mail" and as such should be spelled e'mail. The same with e'books and other e'words.

So why hasn't someone with a PhD in English pointed this out to me? I have no formal collegiate training in this field. It's a mystery to me.

In his 1951 short story The Fun They Had, Isaac Asimov has a boy who finds something really weird in the attic -- a printed book. In this future, all reading was done on screens.

When e'books* like the Nook and Kindle came out, there were always women sitting outside the building on break on a nice spring day reading their Nooks and Kindles. It looked like the future to me, Asimov's story come true. I prefer printed books, but thought that it was because I'm old, and was thirty before I read anything but TV and movie credits on a screen.

And then I started writing books. My youngest daughter Patty is going to school at Cincinnati University (as a proud dad I have to add that she's Phi Beta Kappa and working full time! I'm not just proud, I'm in awe of her) and when she came home on break and I handed her a hardbound copy of Nobots she said "My dad wrote a book! And it's a REAL book!"

So somehow, even young people like Patty value printed books over e'books.

My audience is mostly nerds, since few non-nerds know of me or my writing, so I figured that the free e'book would far surpass sales of the printed books. Instead, few people are downloading the e'books. More download the PDFs, and more people buy the printed books than PDFs and ebooks combined.

Most people just read the HTML online, maybe that's a testament to my m4d sk1llz at HTML (yeah, right).

Five years ago I was convinced ink was on the way out, but there's a book that was printed long before the first computer was turned on that says "the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated".

* I'll write a short story about the weird spelling shortly.

Squished an annoying bug in rehash that prevented formkeys working due to changes in how mod_perl works, I dunno worse, the abuse of the MP1 API, or the hack I had to code to emulate the old behavior; here's the comment I left about it:

                # UNBELIEVE HACKINESS AHEAD
                #
                # Ok, under MP1, it was possible to use param as a "semi-persistant" scratchpad
                # that is, to save a new element in the hashref, and get it back by future calls
                #
                # This worked because the older APR methods allowed you to store into the HASREF.
                # even though this behavior was wrong, and bad according to MP documentation. MP2
                # now removed the STORE method from the APR tables so any attempt to write to them
                # goes BANG.
                #
                # Since we can't do that now, we're going to have to fake it. On our first call to
                # getCurrentForm, we'll copy the param tables to a hashref, then shove it into the
                # apache2 pnotes, and then retrieve it on demand.
                #
                # This is a fucking hack, but I can't think of a better way than to refactor a TON of
                # perl, and perl is not a language that makes it easy to refactor ...

Currently deep in working on getting the first rehash (MP2 slashcode) release put together. lithium got rebuilt and is now on the MP2 release. Since this upgrade is disruptive anyone, we decided to go full-in and put in a migration to MySQL cluster as well; which will require some code changes for Search, but otherwise was mostly a drop in upgrade.

I don't spend much money, and I seldom give any to online people. But - yeah, I'm aware that Soylent is in need of money. Then I saw it - an UNOBTAINIUM KEY CHAIN!! I'll be the first kid on my block to acquire unobtainium! I'll save my pennies and nickles, and discretely order a few more of these over the next months - and I can then build my UNOBTAINIUM BOMB!

Ooooh, I haven't been this excited since I ordered that little battery powered submarine when I was six or seven years old!

I'm just going to leave this here ...

Server: Apache/2.2.29 (Unix) DAV/2 mod_apreq2-20090110/2.8.0 mod_perl/2.0.8 Perl/v5.20.1
X-Powered-By: slashcode 15.01
X-Fry: I'm never gonna get used to the thirty-first century. Caffeinated bacon?

and just say I'm a certifiable madman.

I've uploaded a new book to mcgrewbooks.com. Edgar E. Smith was a well known science fiction writer known as "the father of space opera", and Doctor Smith was a food engineer in his other life. The novel I've uploaded is Triplanetary, first published in serial form in Amazing Stories in 1934.

Some of the dialogue is a bit juvenile, but it would make a great movie.