I then started my own company and ran that for nearly two decades, everything largely self-taught. After that, because of the peculiar shape of my CV, and “falling between a lot of stools” as a friend pointed out, interviews were… tricky!

I remember one such interview a few years ago. He was good at diffusing any anxiety and it was a pretty relaxed interview. He wanted to know if I knew architectural design patterns - a term I hadn’t heard before. He gave me examples, circuit breaker, pub / sub and a third one I can’t remember anymore. I recognised pub / sub and the other one I think - but was not aware of circuit breaker. He explained it to me - something about reducing the risk of a downstream service failing.

It made sense - but I couldn’t remember any instance where I’d done that and I said as much.

No big deal! We moved on.

As you may have noticed from my recent flurry of posts, I’ve been going through a bit of an excavation of all things kraya, and discovering little nuggets that I’d forgotten all about.

Claude code went through all of my emails, all the code repositories and put together interesting things I had done. The purpose was mainly to pick out things that could be good blog posts, stories, or just reminders.

Claude had found two circuit breakers.

The first one was built by the seat of my pants in 2004. There was an active marketing campaign on megabus and the system was struggling. I’d plumbed the depths of the tech stack - the web servers, the database server to get every last ounce of performance out of the system.

What I really needed was to slow down the deluge of people coming into the site - just a little bit. I needed to prevent the snowball effect, and I tried a simple way to achieve it. I wrote the following around my 23rd birthday.

(The eagle eyed among you might notice a bug in the above code. It wasn’t resolved for years. Coding live on a production system tends to create bugs. See if you can find it before reading on.)

(Regular readers may also remember a part of this story from I Know People Like You)

The system already tracked searches - so I just needed to check it.

This bit of code checks to see how many of the searches that started in the last two minutes were incomplete. Except that’s not what it did - I forgot to actually use $timestamp so it only checked the current minute’s worth.

I considered failing and letting the user retry manually - but I didn’t want to force the user to take action unless absolutely necessary. This one waited up to 15 seconds and then let the search happen anyway.

If the user was still waiting after 15 seconds, might as well try and do a search and see what happens. In hindsight, it might have been better to fail at that point. If there were too many searches after 15 seconds, the database server was likely already snowballing.

This bit of code survived through to the end of the PHP codebase apart from minor tweaks. The Java version had layers of circuit breakers. Session limits, rate limiters and threadpool configuration for scaling up. None of it though, was called a circuit breaker - not by me or by the team.

So, have I built a circuit breaker? Thinking back, what threw me off was the wording. I had the feeling that the circuit breaker would “protect” another service.

In my mind, the database wasn’t another service - it was a part of the same service.

By the time it was 2015, I did not.

I had poured blood, sweat and tears into a ticketing system that kraya built — first for megabus, then for Polskibus. It had broken me, and we were now just limping along.

By 2015, we were spending 101–286 hours each month on a support contract that paid for 60. I raised this with the client and suggested a minimum of a 100% increase. They refused. Instead, they minimised their requests to just about 80 hours each month. Without the development work, I was now making a loss each month providing the resources for this support contract.

I could cancel the contract, but that would involve letting them have the source code, which was otherwise kraya’s property. There was a six month notice period — six months of providing all the support they need to run and to migrate the system to their team.

At some point, I went from taking on the challenge to holding the fort.

I could see that any effort to make things easier would backfire. I built them a feature for free — they complain about one bug in it — and they need it fixed urgently. I loosen the rules and deploy an additional server just before the weekend, letting them know about the risks. Something goes wrong and they are surprised.

The hardest thing for me to change was the belief that the client’s wins were my wins. If anything, the client’s wins were my loss. It meant more unpaid work in the support contract. It meant more complex systems to support and maintain — while every penny was being questioned.

I started to say no. No, we will not deploy new servers on a Thursday because the weekend is too close. No, we will not reduce the QA time on this bit of functionality you want. No, we will not restore reports which could display erroneous data.

It all came to a head in one specific instance where the CEO insisted on speaking to me because they needed something deployed urgently. They needed us to work through the evening or the weekend. I said no. They offered to pay double. I said no. They were not happy.

A few months later, they cancelled the contract.

I remember the meeting. It was amicable and friendly. They asked if I could keep the staff on till the end of the year - they wanted backup in case anything went wrong during the migration.

I wouldn’t want to let them go before Christmas anyway.

I had a brief conversation with my brother to decide what to do next. I already knew that there was nothing left to keep running. We kept it running for three more months until the end of December.

I remember going into the main office, gathering everyone around and delivering the news. Polskibus had cancelled. We are shutting kraya down. We’ll keep going until the end of December.

I remember the Christmas party. It had often ended up being drinks, and being out all night. It didn’t this year - we went home after the meal. The atmosphere was one of sadness and relief. We’d all been through the fires and made it out the other end. It was over.

It was the end of what I’d built over 15 years.

I felt nothing.

It was time for kraya to take a leap. We should take the megabus.com ticketing system to the next level and build a distributed ticketing system that could potentially scale infinitely.

I’d picked JBoss because it was backed by Red Hat - it had all these features and capabilities - a lot of which we needed. The other option we considered was Glassfish, but it just didn’t have the features we needed. There were other options but that involved prohibitive licensing fees.

We costed it out at £650k and a year. It was unrealistic but I could not imagine Stagecoach paying more, or giving us more time. They wanted it for £500k and in six months. I should’ve pushed back, but we’d built a booking system over the weekend, only a few months back - this should be possible, right?

It wasn’t.

We got a year in the end — we didn’t ask for it, and we didn’t know until we were most of the way down the path. When I heard about the delay it was a mix of relief and regret. We’d burned through most of the budget on getting in contractors who were leaving imminently. We could have got fewer people on board, but as permanent staff.

We launched to Canada first, and that wasn’t too bad. Then it was the US, and the nightmare started. The UK launched last on my birthday in 2010.

In the intervening years, we had a budget shortfall of £150k and because we’d rushed to build the product, we’d cut corners, and all the contractors had left. We even had to let go of some of the permanent staff. I asked Stagecoach if they’d fund us the extra £150k as we’d asked at the start. They said no. They renegotiated the contract. They demanded more oversight - and increased our reporting obligations.

Load testing was already a part of our process and we tested the new system under load. We identified issues and fixed them. On paper, it looked good.

It wasn’t.

The problem wasn’t load per se. It was the stability of the system. It struggled to stay up for extended periods of time. The more nodes there were, the worse it was.

It was exactly the kind of problem that was hard to replicate and hard to test. The main option we had was to think through what all it could be and to take stabs in the dark. I put together a hit list and worked through it methodically. Convincing Stagecoach to spend the money was sometimes harder than solving the problem.

Ultimately, the one thing that pushed us over the line in terms of stability was staggered nightly automated restart of each node.

I thought I was done working with software that needed regular restarts to stay functional and at first resisted this. We are running enterprise level software, and that too on Linux. If I was comfortable with such shenanigans, I might have stayed with Windows. But we were running out of options. It was a hail Mary - it worked.

I had been working with Linux and related software for years by that point. I, in fact had servers that had not been restarted for literal years at that point, with services that were running just as long. A lot of these services didn’t even need a restart on config change - just a reload.

None of these services even had a paid tier. That should have been the clue.

I cannot imagine having to restart PostgreSQL nightly or even Apache. I still do not understand how something slated for the enterprise market can have leaks that would warrant a regular restart to keep it working.

Years later, when I looked up issues around JBoss, I realised that it was notorious for a whole slew of problems with JGroups and clustering. I remember scouring the internet for details on any kind of issues and coming up empty.

I’d fallen into a marketing trap. JBoss was no Apache — it was the commercial product of Red Hat. I thought all enterprise open source software would be of the same calibre. It wasn’t.

From what I understand, Stagecoach spent millions and maybe two years building the whole ticketing system inhouse. kraya limped along for a few more years before being shuttered.

The people involved, though, fortunately seem to have gotten through it largely unscathed. It gives me a great deal of joy to see so many of the juniors I’d hired now CTO’s, VP’s, Directors.

I believed that every victory was ours but when something went wrong, it belonged to me. After all, I made every choice. I chose to pursue the Java EE ticketing system. I chose JBoss. I chose to keep going.

I was in a narrowing path, with fewer and fewer options.

I knew I was the only one holding that line - I didn’t know that there was another option.

Bit by bit, I lost all sense of what I was paying to fix these mistakes.

It was the same every time. I would drag myself up to answer the phone - my body, my mind screamed at me, but I had gotten good at overriding every instinct through sheer willpower. I could hear the apologetic tone on the other side, and I could recognise some of the voices after a while. I mustered up all of my strength to be and sound as awake as possible. I needed to be professional even if I was still in my underwear.

I had a glass of water on my bedside table. I’d pick that up and head to my office in the spare room. The computer was always on and always ready to go — like me I guess. I’d log on to the servers, and check the logs. If I can identify which one fell out of the group, I can restart just that one. If I was too late or if the issue had escalated, I’d have to restart the whole cluster — shut them all down, give them a few seconds, then bring each one up, while keeping an eye on them. I could do it half asleep after a while.

Falling back asleep wasn’t a breeze either - I was tired - exhausted - but I was now also wired. Waking up in the morning was harder - the alarm would go off and my body would be limp. I still remember the sheer power of will to drag myself into the shower, then carry on with the rest of the day.

Of 266 incidents over about two years, I answered 156.

I remember one particular night, though I do not remember how many times I’d woken up beforehand. I was already tired.

megabus.com had gone offline. I got an alert. “But someone else is on call tonight,” I told them. “We already tried them twice,” came the reply. I had to deal with this. I had to deal with this.

I remember sitting at my desk at home working on fixing it. At some point, something was different, though I don’t remember what. While I was working on fixing it, I remember being overcome with an overwhelming impulse to get up from the chair and walk away — I almost imagined myself walking away. I resisted and shut down that impulse. I fixed megabus as I had always done. In fixing megabus though, something broke inside me, somewhere deep, in the very core of my being. I was never the same again.

I analysed the system top to bottom, inside and out. I even waded through JVM internals.

It got incrementally better, more stable. I think I rewrote every component that wasn’t the core ticketing system. In the end, what pushed it over the line were two unexpected changes. Automated nightly restarts of each node in the cluster and a rate limiter.

On the 10th December 2012, the system, now serving Polskibus, had a sale event. We had a bank of screens on a wall with all the key stats for the system. It looked cool, and we felt a bit like we were on a TV show. At peak, nearly 15,000 concurrent sessions — six or seven times the average. Over 30,000 bookings in a single day, three times more than the normal amounts across all systems.

We watched it closely, all day. Nothing broke. Nothing screamed. Everyone smiled, but there was no celebration.

We were also working on the fringe website. We integrated the website with the brand spanking new ticketing system - which cost nearly £900k.

We were also hosting websites for Boots, Kellogg’s Food Service and dozens of other clients.

All of this was held together by three or four developers, two systems administrators and me.

On the 13 June (incidentally, I got married on the same date years later), as I was just getting ready for a wild night on the town, a call comes through - which John answers.

I still remember them laughing and then doing a double take “oh, you’re serious? let me get Shri”

It was the fringe. We’d already known that they were having trouble with their ticketing system. I’d even pitched in, made suggestions - looked at their code to try and help, but none of that was enough. I expected an update.

They wanted to know if we could put together an interim booking system for them over the weekend. I wasn’t sure. I told them I’d speak to my team and get back to them.

I wasn’t involved with the work on the fringe up until this point. I knew very little about it. I was focused on megabus.com. The US version of the site had a big marketing campaign happening in a few days and that was what I was meant to be focused on.

By the time I put the phone down, Chris, who had been the lead on the fringe already had a answer. “We can do it!”

“But how - it’s got to take more than a weekend - right?”

The fringe website was already built well and had a clean layer interfacing with the new ticketing system. In fact, that was the bulk of the work that year.

So.. Chris told me - all we would have to do is to implement the functionality within that thin layer, fattening it up.

He believed we could do it. I believed him.

I hopped in a cab, headed over to the fringe to talk it through. I didn’t promise them we’d be able to get something ready by Monday, but I promised we’d do our best.

We were in the office on the weekend, writing code. I remember working on the basket, sending diffs over email and generally having a good time.

I even had some megabus US fun to keep me entertained in the form of issues with loading sheets - I was already in the office, so it was one step easier to fix.

One of the bits of functionality which took a surprising amount of time was the seat allocation. None of us had to worry about that before - it was just capacity management on megabus. For the fringe though, we had to allocate actual seats with seat numbers and everything.

With the fringe we had multiple tables which all joined together (thanks hibernate) to encode a tremendous amount of detail about the seating plans - including their physical location on a map.

It was too much detail for us, so we had to simplify it all down to get it working in the timeframe. We kept most of the rest of the structures intact to keep the data migration easier once the ticketing system was fixed.

By Monday, we had each managed at the most 6 hours of sleep each of the previous three nights. I still have vivid memories of a suit of armour that we put together using packing material while we were waiting for bits of data or details of logic.

I broke the MySQL replication at 01:24, fixed by 01:32

I remember the delirium setting in. Email sent to the client with “fun fun fun fun fun fun fun” as the subject

There were random emails to my brother “I’m still here!”

I also remember making makeshift beds with bubblewrap to get a wee nap here and there. We were all so exhausted - pumped up on coffee and nicotine.

Finally at 03:35 on the Tue email to client: “DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE NODE NODE NODE NODE”

Then at 05:33, requesting a PostgreSQL server rebuild for megabus US for their marketing campaign.

At 10am on Tuesday, the fringe is finally able to sell tickets. The website promptly fell over from the load, but we nurse it back and it sells 65k+ tickets in the first week.

It would be at least two more weeks before the ticketing system is fixed and brought back in.

For the work we did for them that year, and the previous one, we effectively only charged about 30% - because that’s all they could afford. This year, we asked if they could put our name on the website.

Over the next two weeks(while megabus US was on their marketing campaign), we fought many battles. There were 750 duplicate bookings. Numerous customer complaints (thanks to our name being on the website) - almost all of them blaming us for the failure of the ticketing system. People did not understand that we put in the interim one, not the one that failed.

Press releases went out from the fringe - only two credited us. Both misspelt the company name. Both called us a web design company — which, we were not, had never been, and had no interest in becoming.

In truth, I wanted to be a hero - I think we all did. What we really wanted was an acknowledgement of what we had done - which was nowhere to be found. We got paid though - at least for a part of our effort.

For many years after that, I would tell people with pride - “did you know - I saved the fringe, back in 2008,” which was inevitably met with something like “oh, did they have a problem that year?”

It started off small, and little by little, I carried more and more. I became we, and we carried more and more. Before we realised, we were carrying a great deal. Ultimately, though, if something went seriously wrong, it would be on my shoulders.

The chart does not capture the scaling of the organisation, or other departments like tech support or hosting, which had dozens of clients.

The section at the top is the number of active committers for that quarter. You can see my on my todd at the start and the rise and the fall of the dev team.

The very peak of it was in 2008. We built a booking system over the weekend for the Edinburgh festival fringe because their brand new £800k+ system could only handle one person at a time.

There were a handful of us building it while I was simultaneously prepping and managing the megabus US systems for a sales campaign. At the same time we were operating megabus across the UK, USA, and Canada, Oxford Tube, Coach USA, the Fringe website itself and numerous other smaller hosting clients like Boots, Kelloggs Food Service, and so on.

We were a total of ~4 developers and two systems administrators holding all of these together.

I was recently reminded of a story a friend of mine told me. Before he was my friend, he worked with me, and one of the things we did together was one the big megabus deployments when we migrated to a Java EE ticketing system.

One part of the migration was the data. I had developed a tool to migrate the data and on the evening - everything was prepared, we were off peak, and we had taken the site offline. He ran the script, which went on for a wee while and it failed. It was not meant to do that.

The way he tells the story, he told me about the failure. I come over, look at the errors, say “hmmm, that’s interesting,” and head off to have a cigarette. A few minutes later I go over to my desk type away furiously, then asked him to run it again.

It worked, and completed.

I remember that night. I don’t remember what the problem was or how I fixed it, but I do remember that moment when I went over to see how it had failed. In the short walk from my desk to his, I reiterated in my mind, all the possible backup plans - with the worst case scenario being to call off the migration on that day. We would do it another day. It would cost money, but it would be do-able. I was ok with that.

I was curious as to where my limits were, so I kept pushing, until I would meet with a wall.

There were no rails and there were no railings - just a cliff edge, unmarked… I didn’t know that - I expected a brick wall.

The worst of it would be only a few years later, in 2011. We built a new Java EE ticketing system for a fraction of what it should have cost in about 30% of the time it needed.

I personally responded to over 250 out of hours emergency tickets over an 18 month period. That was hard!

I had run off a cliff edge, and like the roadrunner in the cartoons, it took a while before I realised there was no ground beneath me.

A few years after I ran off the cliff, the company shut down. A few years later, I would start my active recovery journey through therapy. A few years later still, when I felt ready for a leadership role, I was asked to lead a problematic team - a role they struggled to fill for a while.

The team worked hard and delivered but struggled with the perception of poor delivery. Trust was thin, stress was high and morale was low. The situation was so bad that the week before I was supposed to start, the scrum master who was supposed to be my guide through it all quit.

I was warned by multiple people that this job was loaded with problems. I took on the job anyway, without a real guide, straight into multiple serious issues.

I loved it and managed to turn the whole thing around in my first week. Delivered key items, laid the foundations of trust and improved morale. It took a bit longer to bed everything down. Within weeks, I was asked if I would take on leading the entire digital team.

It was here, many years later, I got a sense of how unusual it was for such a tiny team to do so much.

It was here, many years later, I got a sense of how it is to have guardrails, to have support, peers to lean on.

It was here, for the first time I realised that the job didn’t have to be a lonely one.

I was 22 years old.

When I built the original prototype for megabus.com, I built it using PHP + PostgreSQL. I put together a document detailing my reasoning for these choices. I quoted 33 days for it, built it over six weeks and charged £13,200.

The support contract was £350/month - for one day a month. On the first day, megabus.com sold 200 orders.

When megabus had its first expansion, I was up overnight bringing new servers online and scaling it live. I loved it - my code was finally being tested.

Over a week, I’d probably burned through many days of effort. I remember the project manager specifically asking me to invoice for the extra work I put into it. I even said that I would - except I didn’t.

I’ve had a long time to think about this - why did I not send that invoice? I even had approval.

The answer, as with most things of this nature is complicated. I loved the work and I didn’t want it to end. I didn’t want a potential conflict trying to figure out what a reasonable amount was to charge. I felt that I should have done a better job in the first place - I felt responsible that I had not told them that scaling of this nature would not have worked without prep work.

I had not scaled anything before.

I was 22 years old.

I was super grateful that someone believed in me. I naively assumed that they saw all the extra effort I was putting in and that they would reward me for it - that they would have my back.

I remember adding a bunch of different bits of functionality because I wanted it there. I didn’t want to go through the process of quoting for it, and it getting potentially rejected, not to mention the waiting for decisions. One key bit of functionality I remember is adding in a percentage load column for the loading sheets. I built it, showed it - they loved it! It went live. I did not charge for it.

At this point, the vast majority of my time was spent on megabus - very little of it actually paid for.

At a glance, based on the emails sent, I probably spent a minimum of 10 days each month supporting megabus when I was charging for one day.

In Jan 2004 - I proposed doubling the contract to two days for £4,800/year. It probably kicked in in Feb 2004. By March 2004, the site exceeded that revenue each day.

In the following months, I probably spent, on average a minimum of at least double the time I was paid for. I should have charged for it.

I grew the team, and the support contract based on the minimum I needed to maintain the product - not based on the amount of time I was spending.

For my 28th birthday, my girlfriend at the time organised a cake which was a image representing kraya - which was basically megabus. I felt bad that she thought that kraya was the most important thing in my life - she was right - but it still felt bad. kraya had other clients at the time, but my time wasn’t monopolised by other clients, or indeed by kraya - my heart still belonged to megabus.

And it would all have been fine too, except for a grave miscalculation I made.

In 2010, after trying to rebuild the ticketing system for £500k, and making some mistakes with people I trusted, kraya ended up in £150k in the hole. We needed some money urgently.

I was desperate and naively, I reached out to stagecoach for help. I thought they were my friend - that they would have my back.

They understandably lost a great deal of trust in my ability to manage and lead my company. I trusted the wrong person - but that was still my mistake. They were right.

I thought that I’d built up enough goodwill that they would help me through this. I’d felt I would have way more than that “in the bank” in terms of goodwill. I learned that professional relationships do not work that way that dark afternoon, standing outside my office on the phone, in the rain.

They didn’t make my life easier. Instead, I’d ended up rattling the cage - they were now panicked - realising their over-reliance on an organisation that could disappear at any point.

Instead of support, I had further actions, renegotiating the contract and what felt like punitive, and definitely invasive reporting obligations.

I was hurt and angry. I had poured my heart, my soul - hey, my very life into this product that I loved.

Suffice it to say - I got no help - no loan, no offer of investment - though they did suggest buying us outright - which I rejected.

I signed a contract under circumstances I would not wish on anyone.

The best I got from them was a challenge - if we were really spending more time than we were charging for - prove it. I did! We documented every minute we were spending - I wasted my time on spreadsheets, pointless meetings and work to try and rebuild the broken trust.

We went from £300k in the hole to £200k profit within a year. We charged for a whole year in support around 20% of what the system made in a day.

I was 28 years old.

Around the same time, I was also dealing with the operational aftermath of trying to build a java EE ticketing system over six months for £500k. I thought it would take a year and cost £1m. In hindsight, it needed two years and probably three million pounds.

Over 18 months, I personally answered over 150 out of hours emergency calls. We had a rota and others on call too - but I took the vast majority of these calls. I felt bad putting others through what I knew was gruelling.

All of this led me down a narrower and narrower path to a serious breakdown - though I didn’t know enough to name it until many years later. All I knew - all I felt was that something broke in me.

We managed to resolve all of the issues, but the deployment of that version kept getting pushed.

Stagecoach cancelled the contract in 2012. They had started building a ticketing system in-house two years prior - the cost of my grave mistake. I wasn’t able to make the meeting - I was in India, and at the same time as the meeting, I was meeting for the first time the one who is now my wife.

I was 28 years old. I spent the next 15 years putting myself back together.

How much did it cost them to build it inhouse? If I had charged for my time from the start, would we all have been better off?

I still feel something deep inside me every time I see a megabus - a sense of pride mixed in with a deep sense of sadness - not for what I lost - but for what could have been.

I am 44 years old, and I am starting again.

We’d done the sensible thing and shared the payment code between them — DRY, less surface area for error, obvious call.

Then the larger system needed PostAuth. We updated the code, added a scheduled task to catch anything the non-deterministic bits missed, moved on.

A few months later: why has no money come through on the smaller system?

We’d ported the PostAuth flow across when we updated the shared code. We hadn’t added the scheduled task. The payment provider, chosen for cheap and cheerful rather than reliability, failed silently rather than erroring. The accounting department, running at the same pace as everyone else, hadn’t caught the gap.

Four separate things had to go wrong simultaneously. Any one of them holding would have meant no loss at all.

The client lost money. Not a catastrophic amount, but real money. I braced for the call.

Try and let me know the next time you decide to run a sale.

He already knew the cost. He’d known before the mistake happened.

The team had already written a lot of stuff in Spring - but I really did not like it. There was all this XML all over the place which was annoying, but what I really didn’t like was that the code and configuration for each component was spread out all over the place. It meant that to understand how something worked, I had to go hunting. Eventually, I got sick of it, and ported it to EJB myself.

Later in the same interview, he said: “I know people like you - you come in, shake things up and get things done - but that’s not what I’m looking for.”

He was right. I understand that. But I’ve been thinking about what he was actually describing.

When megabus.com was still a PHP site, search was the problem. It returned quickly when the database was healthy and crawled - and slowed down when the database was struggling. The load came in spikes. Even within a minute, there were peaks and troughs.

My fix was simple. Before the search query ran, I added a small SQL check: how many queries are currently active on the database server? If too many, wait a second and try again. A few retries, then send it anyway.

A rate limiter baked into a search algorithm, written live on a production server.

There were edge cases to consider, not to mention the load the rate limiter would add to the database server. I knew though that if it broke, I could fix it - I could just remove it - live, if needed. Not having the rate limiter was at the time, more expensive than having it.

It worked. It got us through more than one hump.

The database was still the ceiling. We were on PostgreSQL 7 - no replication support. Getting a more powerful server was possible but disproportionately expensive. So I built something.

Two database servers. All writes went to both. Reads were distributed randomly between them. Everything funnelled through one section of code.

I didn’t do this live. I tested it. I knew what failure looked like: if the servers diverged badly enough, I’d pick a primary and reset the other. That was the contingency. It wasn’t a safety net someone else would pull - it was mine.

The data integrity held better than I expected. Under very high load there were edge cases - ticket IDs for the same customer could be in a different order across the two servers on a return purchase - but because the IDs were consistent within each server, it never caused a real problem. It held the fort until I could replace it with something better.

I occasionally lie awake at night imagining the databases diverging and figuring out how I would fix it.

I picked PostgreSQL over MySQL when MySQL was the obvious choice. Under heavy load it stays up — it slows to a crawl, but it keeps going. And it had transactions. I was building an ecommerce site; I needed transaction support. MySQL was fast and popular. It also had a habit of giving up under sustained load. I still pick PostgreSQL - but nowadays, so do most other people.

The thing these decisions had in common was that I was the person who’d be fixing them at 3am if they went wrong. When you’re personally accountable for the consequences, the risk calculus changes. You think harder about what failure looks like. You build the contingency before you go live. You know which direction to pull if it goes sideways.

Caution that’s never personally tested isn’t rigour. It’s consequence-avoidance dressed up as responsibility.

“I know people like you - you come in, shake things up and get things done - but that’s not what I’m looking for.”

We had one ADSL connection coming into the office and three of us. I wanted to share the internet. Windows NT didn’t support it cleanly — it had a way, but it was clunky enough that no internet was arguably better. We’d paid hundreds of pounds for it.

I’d heard about Linux. Downloaded Red Hat, installed it, configured it for NAT. It worked — it was like magic. I’m pretty sure I had to recompile the kernel to get some bits working, but there were instructions and they were honest. It did what it said.

Here was software that was completely free — free enough that I could read the source code, make changes, run it however I wanted. It did more than the hundreds of pounds worth of garbage sitting on the desk. And once I set it up, I never had to restart it. Never. Compared to once a week on the NT box.

The difference, in my mind, was simple. Linux was built responsibly. NT was built as a money-making enterprise.

That held for a long time. I moved to Debian, then celebrated when Ubuntu arrived and made things more accessible. I’ve recently been able to abandon Windows altogether — gaming on Linux is finally viable. I came back full time and felt mostly at home.

But there were minor niggles. Things that felt slightly off but that I couldn’t quite name.

Then I started digging into systemd.

I remembered feeling odd about having to run specific commands to read logs. Odd about one tool doing many different things — which ran contrary to the Unix philosophy that had made Linux what it was. When I looked into the history of the opposition to systemd, it was revelatory.

systemd becoming process 1 is, in a word, irresponsible. It makes everything easier and more accessible, which is why it won. But unlike the Linux of old, the tradeoff isn’t visible upfront, and there’s no real choice. The responsible option isn’t the default anymore — it’s the thing you have to go looking for.

I thought I had already done the work. I thought I had found the alternative.

While I was celebrating Linux becoming mainstream, I hadn’t considered what it would cost.

The Linux ecosystem had started optimising for mainstream at the expense of responsibility. It works now, for far more people. But it’s a different thing than it was. When linux was really taking off, there was a joke going around (before memes were called memes) about Microsoft Linux. Turns out the joke was on us!

It is always a tradeoff between security and convenience — something convenient is rarely secure, and vice versa. I think something similar applies to responsibility. The more accessible you make something, the harder it becomes to hold the line on what it was built to do.

There was a time when software going wrong meant losing your work. Now it means losing your money, your reputation, or — in a car, in a hospital — your life.

The context has changed. The attitudes haven’t. And the places that once had better attitudes — the ones built on responsibility, on craft, on caring about the thing itself — are being pulled in the same direction. It gets everywhere.

Do you want your car running Windows? What about systemd?

This isn’t about any of that.

It’s about the fact that none of those decisions show up in the metrics that matter to the people making hiring and delivery calls. The cost is immediate and visible. The return is delayed, quiet, and arrives in the form of things that didn’t happen — the investigation that took two hours instead of two days, the API change that didn’t bleed into the domain model, the bug that the structure caught before it shipped.

Sprint velocity captures the extra day. It doesn’t capture what that day bought.

This is not a new problem. Most engineers who’ve been around long enough have felt it from both sides - made the careful call and got measured on the slowness, or inherited the codebase built entirely for speed and paid the tax. The measurement system was already broken. It has been rewarding the appearance of velocity over the thing velocity is supposed to serve.

This was true long before anyone was generating code with AI. The PR process in a lot of teams was already largely theatrical — review comments on naming conventions while the architectural decisions slipped through unquestioned, approvals given because the diff was too large to meaningfully read. The gate was already not doing much. We brushed it under the carpet and moved on.

AI tooling is changing the volume of code moving through that process by an order of magnitude. The pressure to remove the gate entirely — to trust the output, to ship faster - is only growing. The faster-is-better incentive that was already making review ineffective is about to be handed a much larger surface to work on.

Many years ago, I pitched full redevlopment of a ticketing system from a PHP based system to a Java EE system because it was struggling to scale.

It probably needed a couple of years to build. They wanted it in six months. I accepted the challenge.

We built and deployed the system in eight months. We spent the next year fixing it.

The client then rebuilt it in-house.

When AI runs this experiment at scale, who takes it back?

It collected structured metadata about games - tags for features, screenshots, videos, reviews. Users contributed information. We gamified participation and rewarded it with games and gifts.

It started making money through “similar games” lists.

All of our traffic came from Google.

Then we needed more revenue.

So we did what teams do.

We added features.
Integrated Steam, Xbox and PSN.
Pulled in achievements.
Expanded recommendation lists.
Tweaked advertising.
Worked on SEO.

Traffic crept upward.

Still not enough.

Eventually we decided the problem was perception.

The site looked too much like a community project. It needed to feel more premium. More authoritative. More modern.

So we renamed it.
Changed the domain.
Redesigned it from the ground up.

Months of work.

We launched.

Traffic collapsed.

We never recovered.

In hindsight, the failure wasn’t technical.

It wasn’t branding.

It wasn’t SEO.

It was that we never made a hard decision about what the product actually was.

Was it:

• A participatory community?
• A structured data engine?
• A search destination?
• A content property optimised for Google?
• A recommendations platform?

It was all of them.

Weakly.

What Google valued wasn’t polish. It valued volatility.

Our homepage changed many times a day because users were contributing.
Those contributions created fresh internal links, fresh content, fresh signals.

Participation was the engine.

When we redesigned for the information consumer instead of the contributor, we stabilised the surface.

We accidentally killed the engine.

We optimised the visible layer and ignored the system feeding it.

I first heard the phrase “we’ll fix it in post” from my filmmaker brother.

Something wasn’t quite right during filming, but they moved on anyway. It could be corrected later.

In film, that’s sometimes true.

In product development, it’s usually self-deception.

Lean encourages delaying decisions to the last responsible moment.
That’s discipline.

What most teams practice is delaying decisions until they become painful.
That’s avoidance.

An MVP is not the smallest thing you can push out.
It is the smallest thing that is coherent and viable.

Viable means it has a clear shape.
It respects constraints.
It closes more questions than it opens.

If you ship something that only works on the happy path, with undefined edges and postponed trade-offs, you haven’t preserved optionality.

You’ve preserved ambiguity.

Ambiguity spreads.

In code, as defensive layers.
In design, as half-committed patterns.
In product, as multiple possible futures carried at once.

Teams don’t slow down because they’re weak.
They slow down because no one chose.

Every postponed constraint becomes cognitive load.
Every “temporary” rule becomes precedent.

Lean does not say “don’t decide.”

It says: decide at the point where delaying further increases cost.

Most teams drift past that point because deciding feels like loss.

Loss of flexibility.
Loss of imagined futures.
Loss of political safety.

But momentum comes from commitment.

Once something is decided, energy frees up.
The system becomes legible.
Subsequent decisions compound instead of conflict.

We didn’t fail because we built the wrong feature.

We failed because we never chose what we were.

Most startups don’t die from lack of effort.

They die from unmade decisions.

“We’ll fix it later” is not iteration.

It is hope disguised as strategy.

Back in the late noughties, when MySQL was getting popular, people would often ask me why I was picking Postgres. MySQL was so popular and so fast and it had cool things like query caching (with postgres did not have). My answer was simple - postgresql was a “real database system.” I remember being shocked when I trying to use transactions and it just ignored it. Postgresql was also really good at failing gracefully under high load while MySQL had a bad habit of just stopping processing any requests and becoming unresponsive.

This was more than 15 years ago now so things may have changed with MySQL, though its acquisition by Oracle was certainly a bad sign.

Years on, and it would seem that people are better informed as to the benefits of postgresql.

I am currently working on a small game-like social experiment app and it requires persistent storage. I was intially considering firebase but the costs put me off. In the world of cloud, I didn’t think that spinning up a postgresql server was really an option - or is it?

Supabase

I ran into Supabase as a more cost-effective option and as a bonus it’s open source and based on PostgreSQL. I’ll admit that I was skeptical that it would embody the postgresql philosophy that I knew and loved. I expected another capitalistic effort at monetising open source.

I was pleasantly surprised. I am in the very early stages of using it, but so far, I love it. Not a huge fan its love of javascript, but the whole world seems to be a big fan (I am not - but then I wasn’t a fan of MySQL either ;))

I didn’t end up going further with it, but the early impression was good enough that I’d reach for it again.

However, I had a couple of issues:

• With html (instead of markdown), it would not pick up the code blocks correctly
• With markdown, it would render the relative links incorrectly

What I really wanted was a way to render the hugo markdown into Jekyll style (which is what forem wants) but with the links rendered.

This was a little more complicated than I would have liked.

Goals

At a minimum, I wanted two main things:

• Render code blocks correctly
• Relative URLs should be rendered as absolute (because they won’t work on dev.to)

Pre-existing Solutions

I found hugodevto which looked promising except:

• Not a fan of having to manually update hundreds of posts with the devto id
• Had a couple of fiddly bits to get it working (my plain text outputs had some troubles for unknown reasons)
• It rendered image urls, but not regular urls.

Ultimately though, it felt a bit bulkier than what I was looking for

Using Hugo

I had done enough work with hugo and output formats to have a vague idea of how to make it work.

Limitations

There are a few limitations to doing it this way though. Hugo does not provide render hooks for everything. You will end up with html in the output. However, since Forem (and Jekyll) will just render them, it fits my use case. It won’t work as well if you try and use this to generate like for like markdown usable in Jekyll.

Define a new content type

We want a new content type which will output markdown

You also need a basic template before hugo will output our markdown files.

layouts/_default/single.jekyll.md

With this, if you hugo build, it’ll render the .md files, but the content will be html.

Render code blocks as markdown

We can use the code block render hook to “convert them” back to markdown.

layouts/_default/_markup/render-codeblock.jekyll.md

Render absolute urls

I already have a pretty extensive render-link so updating it was just a case of making a copy of it and replacing relative url references with absolute ones.

It’s fine for it to be in html because Forem will still render it correctly. They could be rendered as markdown and it should work just as well.

layouts/_default/_markup/render-link.jekyll.md

Output

With these relatively minor changes, I was able to render markdown files I could then pop into dev.to and it works for the handful I set up.

Next Steps

Images

One big glaring omission is images - it’s not as relevant for me because I rarely use images.

I expect it to be easy enough to use the image render hook to achieve this.

Tags

One of the issues I have is that dev.to has a strict tag limit of four. Currently I manually edit that when I create the post on dev.to.

It would be better to have a devto_tags field because my local content tags aren’t always relevant for dev.to.

I could also write a script to automate the setting of the devto_tags field automatically based on the first four tags, and mapping from my tags to dev.to tags if necessary by building a small map data set somewhere.

Automation

Once the above two are done, it would be good to automate it. I could

• get all the posts
• get all the local posts
• map them based on the canonical url (which is returned by the endpoint)
• upload updated ones.

Not all my posts are technical, so I’d also want to add a field to the frontmatter (devto_published) and figure out a way to push updates only if there are changes.

Conclusion

I have a working solution for now - and if dev.to brings enough traffic / value, then I’ll consider spending a bit more time adding polish.

For the time being though, seems to work!

Feel free to use any of this code (such that it is) as you wish.

zig, through emscripten generates both a js and wasm file, which, by default are expected to be in the same directory.

I wanted to put them in different places, and struggled to get that working with lume for a bit. I did eventually solve it though:

Include emscripten js file

Firstly, the js file output from emscripten should be included in you page manually. I had used site.add which meant that it was loaded before we could put the override for locateFile in window.Module.

I am using the simple-blog theme, so I add the following line to the top of src/index.vto

Override Module

You can override how emscripten finds the wasm file in the Module Object.

This can be done in the html file in a script block, or even better, in a js file that is included automatically.

js/main.js felt like a good place.

Closing

With this setup, I can not only have the js and wasm files in different locations, it’s also easy to modify / augment the Module object.

I am currently planning to using supabase for storage. Unsurprisingly, it does not have a zig sdk. It does, however, have a javascript sdk.

If I can write basic CRUD operations in javascript and call that from zig through webassembly, that could make that integration a lot easier.

Goals

There are a few ideal restrictions for me - mainly because writing javascript is not fun for me.

• Use the Supabase js/ts library through zig
• Use TypeScript as much as possible. (I don’t love TypeScript, but at least it’s not javascript)
• Keep as much of the supabase related code in the web part so that deno and lume can handle any heavy lifting.

Options

I can’t use FFI(Foreign Function Interface):

because imgui pulls in emscripten, which means we don’t have the ability to call instantiateStreaming.

With emscripten, declaring an external function is easy enough.

There are a couple of options to wire them up to the javascript:

library.js / mergeInto

This option requires javascript files on the zig side. If you want to start with typescript, you’ll need to integrate a transpiler into the build chain as well.

First, you want a javascript file - let’s call it libshine.js, and pop it into a js dir.

The project would do well to be multiplatform - mobile and web. The obvious choice was flutter and I have enjoyed working with it before.

However, as I’m currently in love with zig, I wanted to work with that instead.

Libraries

Graphics

I’ve been playing with raylib and that was my initial instinct. However, raylib does not support iOs and has issues with wasm

I considered a few options, including

• sdl, which looked great but was perhaps a little too low level for me.
• jok - does not support mobile and possibly has a little more than I needed.

In the end, I decided to go with sokol and sokol-zig.

While a little more lower level than raylib, it has:

• a modern clean api
• first class mobile support
• first class wasm support

UI

I’ve been working with dvui a lot recently. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support sokol. imgui is a better option.

There is even a template project that I could start from.

WASM first

To keep things straightforward, I decided to start with wasm. If I make the site mobile friendly, I could see how it goes and see if it needs a mobile version.

I will need some shared data storage and have been considering supabase, which has javascript libs. By using wasm, I can effectively shim in js functions to handle that instead of having to write bare rest calls from zig.

Structuring the project

Is this a zig project with a web component, vice versa or indeed two independent parts that work together.

I did a fair amount of web searching to see if there was some guidance I could I find for a good way to structure a relatively straightforward zig+js project.

I could not find one. In the end, I decided to keep it fairly straightforward.

Frontend

After a bit of research, and realising that I will probably need a little bit of supporting content around shine, I decided to go with lume

I used the simple-blog theme as a template to start from. I could have just pulled the template in but I wanted a custom homepage.

When I tried to add an index.md, it complained about two files wanting to write index.html. From what I could find, the easiest way to override the homepage was to just pick up the theme and edit it - which was easy enough.

WASM => frontend

I didn’t want to copy over the wasm and the js file every time, so I added a couple of steps to build.zig right after the link_step (also included below)

These steps will copy across the wasm and the js file across to static/shine. I wanted to put the js in src/js and the wasm in the static dir. However, the js file expects the wasm in the same dir. I tried overriding locateFile but it didn’t work.(you can use a different location by overriding locateFile)

I was able to get lume to process the javascript file by adding it.

Conclusion

With all of these set up, I was able to run:

in one window. This command will rebuild wasm and provide it to lume whenever the zig code changes.

Running this in another window will mean that lume will rebuild on any changes, including a new wasm file and redeploy. The redeploy will trigger an auto-reload of the page as well if I have it in a browser.

I now effectively have automated reload with changes if I make changes in either zig or the frontend.

I don’t have hot reload - but this is pretty good for now.

1. The score font is too small
2. The ball can get stuck inside a paddle
3. Trigger score on edge (not the middle) of the ball going past.

We’ll also refactor score tracking to better match game logic structure.

🖋️ Make the Score Font More Readable

The score text was a little too small. If you’re using dvui, here’s how to adjust it:

Thanks to code sample from milogreg

You may also need to adjust the width and height of the container if the larger font gets clipped. In our case, font size of 64 felt about right.

🧱 Fix the Ball Getting Stuck in the Paddle

When the ball moves too far in one frame, it can land inside the paddle and bounce back and forth infinitely.

This trap happens because we just multiply the x-velocity with -1 to reverse direction.

One way to fix this is to only trigger the bounce if the ball is moving toward the paddle. For example:

Thanks again to code sample from milogreg

This ensures we don’t apply the bounce logic when the ball is already inside the paddle.

Another (potential) way to fix this would be to change the collision logic to fix the x direction based on whether it’s the left or right paddle.

🧮 Trigger a Score When the Ball’s Edge Crosses the Screen

Previously, we checked whether the ball’s center (ball.x) crossed the screen edge. Particularly with the ball being bigger than the paddle, this caused issues when the top/bottom of the paddle hit the ball.

Game.zig

This triggers the score as soon as the edge of the ball crosses the screen bounds.

🔄 Refactor: Move Scores Out of the Paddle Struct

Storing the score inside the Paddle struct is convenient but semantically odd

• paddles shouldn’t own scores. Instead, let’s move them into your Game struct:

Then, pass the score explicitly to the rendering function.

You can find the updated code in Game.zig.

✅ Bonus Fix: Make Score Display Use Paddle Play Area

We now compute each paddle’s play area (a dvui.Rect) and use it to position the score label, keeping layout logic more re-usable.

We add a play_area field or method to our Paddle struct that returns its side of the screen. This makes the rendering logic clearer and more flexible.

⏭️ What’s Next?

Next episode: adding a pause menu to Pong, based on what I just built for my other game, triangle. We’ll add basic Resume/Quit options and freeze game state mid-play.

Links

• Watch Video
• Source Code (at this point)
• Prev: Smarter Collisions & Cleaner Code
• Next: Pause Menu

After a bit of working it out, I ended up with this plan:

Until now, hitting Escape would just exit the game immediately. Not ideal. triangle needed a proper menu: something that pauses the game, gives players a chance to resume or quit intentionally, and maybe even shows a bit of useful info.

So that’s what I’ve been building. The menu now:

• Pops up when Escape is pressed (as long as no panels are open).
• Pauses the game,
• Shows a few buttons: Resume, Quit, Contact, and Config Path

Ordering

At first, I was a bit confused as to why I was not able to see the menu. I was under the (mistaken) impression that dvui would always draw last.

Once I switched things around to always draw dvui at the end, I could see the menu.

Pause/Resume

Since we use the frame time to determine how much time has passed, pausing was simply a case of setting that time elapsed to zero.

In fact, it skips the update call altogether. One thing I noticed while I was doing that was that the camera movement code happened in render. While there is a particular logic to that, it’ll need to be moved to update (later), at which point, render will also not require the elapsed time.

Resume was simply a case of letting “time flow” again.

Logging

I thought logging might be useful — but writing to file or supporting runtime filtering requires a custom log handler. While it’s probably doable, I didn’t want to dive into it just yet. For now, I’ve left it out entirely. Maybe a separate debug build is the better option anyway.

Contact

I set up a form at tally.so and ChatGPT helped me write a tiny bit of code that opens a browser to that form.

I’ve not tested this on Mac/Windows and would appreciate any feedback (when a sprout build is available.)

Quit

We now have a quit button that will quit the game. The game will also currently quit if you hit q. I’ll unmap this later.

Config path

The config location is also displayed. The path can be selected and copied - so that the player can navigate there easier to be able to override controls etc.

Final

While perhaps not as pretty as the sketch (credit is more to tldraw than me), it is functional.

Next steps are to get a dialog working with some basic information, including a changelog and possibly a roadmap.

Links

• YouTube Video
• Let’s code devlogs
  • #1.1 - Getting Started
  • #1.2 - Theming & More Buttons
  • #1.3 - Wiring & Finalising
• Prev: Under the Hood of Triangle

Turns out… not much, but it still took a few hops.

Choosing the Right Setup

I already had Python installed, but rather than littering system Python or managing a bunch of ad hoc virtualenvs, I decided to do it properly — with Poetry.

So far so good.

PyTorch + CUDA: the PyPy Pitfall

My first attempt to install torch, torchvision, and torchaudio failed in a confusing way — no versions found at all. The clue was in the command: I’d accidentally run it with pip-pypy3. PyTorch doesn’t build wheels for PyPy. CPython only.

Sorting Out Python Versions

My system Python was 3.13. PyTorch had just released 3.13 wheels for torch, but not yet for torchaudio — version mismatch. I used pyenv to install 3.12 instead:

Updated pyproject.toml:

And re-pointed Poetry:

Poetry ignored me the first time because 3.13 was still hardcoded. After recreating the environment and verifying the version, I was ready.

PEP 668: the “Externally Managed” False Alarm

Even inside the Poetry shell, Arch’s patched Python threw a --break-system-packages error. This check is meant to protect system Python — but it was firing inside a fully isolated Poetry environment. Safe to ignore. I added the flag:

Worked perfectly.

The Result

Transcribed 2.5 hours of audio, timestamped segments ready for chapter generation. All local, GPU-accelerated, isolated from system Python, and repeatable.

In Summary

If you’re on Arch and want Whisper with CUDA:

1. Use poetry + pyenv
2. Set Python to 3.12 (not 3.13)
3. Install torch with --break-system-packages and the cu121 index
4. Whisper just works

A bit of fiddling up front, but now it’s a solid local tool — one less cloud dependency to think about.

Extract out Game struct

One of the structural changes I wanted to make to tidy up the code was to pull out the game logic into its own struct. This change helps to declutter the main.zig file, leading the way to add in the dvui scaffolding.

This refactor pulls the update and render logic into a Game struct, which helps declutter main.zig and sets up a better foundation for UI work.

Game.zig

Add dvui dependency

Let’s fetch the dependency, adding it to build.zig.zon:

zig fetch --save git+https://github.com/david-vanderson/dvui.git

Then, in build.zig, we also need to declare it:

and then add it as a dependency:

Add dvui to game loop

We also need to initialise dvui in the main loop.

main.zig

Import

Initialise

Pre-render

Post-render

Show Score

We can now show the score using dvui.label with positioning hardcoded to about 25% and 75% across the screen. There may be a better way to position it but it works well enough for now.

I had to generate an id for the label so that they were unique. I generated it the x-position using @intFromFloat().

Game.zig

Closing

As always, things took a bit longer than expected, but by the end:

• The game’s structure is cleaner
• DVUI is wired up properly
• Scores now show up on screen

Shoutout to milo_greg on ziggit.dev for loads of really valuable feedback and tips. That kind of thoughtful review really helps.

Links

• Watch Video
• Source Code (at this point)
• Prev: Smarter Collisions & Cleaner Code
• Next: Font Size, Collision Bugs, and Refactors

I was going to dive into menus and UI, but after sharing the early version of Pong on ziggit.dev, I got a bunch of helpful feedback. The feedback was the kind that makes you stop and think, ah, right… I should probably fix that before carrying on.

So that’s what this episode became: a collection of fixes, tweaks, and small refactors that clean up the code and align things more closely with how things should be done in Zig (or at least, better than I had them before).

🧼 Naming Matters

I’d originally named my files paddle.zig and ball.zig - lowercase, snake-case. I had tried to find the guidelines around this, but turns out I only got half the story. If a file implicitly defines a struct via top-level fields, it should be named in PascalCase. So, Paddle.zig, not paddle.zig.

It’s a small thing, but one that helps be a bit more idiomatic - and avoids confusion when others are reading it.

(now to make the same change across many more files in triangle)

🛠️ Default Field Initializers (and When Not to Use Them)

Another thing I learned: structs that aren’t used as config objects shouldn’t use default field values. Instead, they should have an init constant that represents their starting state.

I’d missed this distinction, and both of my types were using default values incorrectly. So I cleaned that up and added the values into the init method. It’s a subtle change, but it keeps config objects and plain data objects conceptually separate - and makes it clearer which parts of a struct are supposed to be overridden.

✨ RLS, Please

One of the comments suggested I lean more into Zig’s Result Location Syntax - where you define the type on the left-hand side and let Zig figure out the rest.

I’d been using a mix of styles. Nothing broke, but consistency helps. So I swept through the code and updated those as well.

🎯 Fixing Paddle Collisions on the Y Axis

Now for something more visible: my collision detection logic only checked the center point of the ball along the y-axis. That meant if the ball clipped the paddle at the edge, it was sneaking through.

The fix was simple: add/subtract the ball’s radius in the y-axis check. Much better.

You can actually see the difference in-game - that satisfying little thock now triggers when it should, even on corner hits.

(now I just need add some sounds - I’d forgotten about that)

🧽 isColliding Should Only Collide

Previously, isColliding also handled coloring the paddle red when it detected a hit - a debug leftover that had no place in the final function.

I stripped that out and left isColliding to do just one thing: return whether there was a collision. If I want debug visuals again later, I’ll wrap this in another function.

🔀 Movement Logic Encapsulation

Paddle movement was scattered, and the logic for moving up/down lived inside main.zig. I pulled that out into proper moveUp and moveDown methods on Paddle.

It reads cleaner now:

…and it keeps the input logic in main, but the movement logic in the paddle - where it belongs.

📐 Resolution Independence

Some values were hardcoded (like setting y = 200 for paddle start position), while others used getScreenHeight() and getScreenWidth(). I refactored to make everything use actual screen dimensions, converting i32 screen height values to f32 where needed.

It was a bit fiddly, but worth it. Now Pong should behave properly regardless of window size.

Closing

So, yeah - not the flashiest episode, but a satisfying one. Lots of small things that feel better now that they’re fixed. And it’s a reminder that sharing early (even rough work) is usually a good idea. You never know what you’ll learn.

Next time, we will get into UI. I’m planning to bring in DVUI and show a basic score display, a pause menu, and maybe some options for reset and quit.

Until then, thanks for reading (and watching) - see you in the next one.

Links

• Watch Video
• Source Code (at this point)
• Prev: Ball Movement & Paddle Collisions
• Next: Integrate DVUI & Show Score

I moved a file that was referenced in a blog post. I then had to go to that blog post and update the links - this is fine if I remember the linked blog posts - but that’s not scalable.

Also:

• Finding the link on GitHub, then copying and pasting is annoying
• It worries me a little that the version they are linked to could be vastly different from what I mention on the post.

I was already trying to create permalinks using tags, but that is laborious and error prone.

What if I could get Hugo to:

• Automatically link to GitHub if the relative link is not within blog/content
• What if I could get it to link it to the file at the last commit of the post.

The last one is something to bear in mind. If I update a blog post, I’ll have to ensure that the links are still relevant.

Alternatively, let’s allow an override at the page level where you can provide a specific commit to link to:

Step 1: Enable git info

To be able to get the commit of the post, we need to enable git info

hugo.toml

Step 2: Update rendering of link

layout/_default/_markup/render-link.html

Bonus: Allow per-post commit override

In the above code:

The commit id is picked up from the page parameter link_commit, or if that doesn’t exist, from the last commit of the page.

You can therefore, set the commit to use for a post with:

But if I’m generating the descriptions automatically… I’m hardly going to be excited about copying and pasting them into YouTube - right? right!

Automating this process brings up a few design choices.

Planning

Which language

There were a few contenders, and here’s how I thought them through:

Zig

I’m currently learning Zig, and I love using it for my game development. But it doesn’t yet have mature libraries for working with the YouTube Data API - and I don’t feel like writing one. So, sadly, Zig’s out for this one.

Python

I used Python for despatches and it was the right fit there - good libraries for BlueSky and Reddit.

However, I did not enjoy the experience:

• bazel was a constant struggle

• poetry is nice… but still a bit of a nightmare. It just makes the pain more structured

• Worst of all: blusky failed after reddit succeeded caused a partial success, which broke the Git commit and silently caused a post to be repeated (embarrassing!)

  That kind of problem can happen in Go (nil pointer), though it wouldn’t in Zig. But at least with Go, most handleable errors stay errors — they don’t crash the whole tool.

java

Sure, I could do this in Java - but I really don’t want to mess with the JVM. And more importantly, I’m doing this for fun. Java doesn’t feel like that anymore.

golang

Not quite my favourite any more, but still a close second. It’s fast, has YouTube libraries and it somehow seems fitting that Hugo is also a go baby.

Even though I’m not wiring the two directly, the ecosystem fit is nice.

Overall Plan

• Let Hugo render the YouTube description as plain text

• Traverse the youtube/*.md files in the source directory

  • Skip videos that are too old to update (maybe older than 30 days?)
  • Hash the rendered output (title, description, tags, etc.)
  • Compare that hash with the one stored in the frontmatter
  • If it doesn’t match,
    • Update the metadata on YouTube
    • Update the hash
  • commit and push any updates (should be only hash changes)

Validation

One thing worth being careful about is whether the metadata is valid. We do not want the sync to fail during its scheduled run - when it won’t have many choices on how to resolve it.

In a bid to mitigate this, we’ll add a command to validate the source and rendered files.

The validation would expect the rendered files to be generated as well, which seems reasonable since Hugo is probably running as hugo serve while the content files are being updated.

The validate function will retrieve the relevant files and check that there is a corresponding rendered description.

If it errors in that process, we know that it would error out in the sync.

We can’t catch errors around the API though at this stage, and that’s unavoidable.

Sync

Hashing the Description

This part was surprisingly easy:

The challenge was trying to write the updated yaml frontmatter back. I was using the adrg/frontmatter library to read the frontmatter, but it does not support writing it back.

Detour: Write a small frontmatter Library

I took a little detour to build inscribe, a little frontmatter library that supports reading and writing back in yaml.

Auth

We need the YouTube Client to have an OAuth Token, which we can retrieve by:

• Create a new OAuth Client - Type of desktop is probably the easiest
• add your user account to test users:
• go to https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/v2/auth?client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID&redirect_uri=urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob&response_type=code&scope=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube
  • Remember to substitute your actual client_id
  • Add any other scopes you might want
  • Go through the flow steps - it’ll warn you that the app is unreleased, which is expected
• Take the code that it provides
• Call the following curl command

You should finally get something like:

The refresh_token is what you want to save / use as the access_token will expire (after an hour in this example).

The authentication was a bit more involved with a refresh token, but the oauth2 library helps us out:

Updating the description

Setting the description is a little more complicated because you can’t set just the description.

Everything defined in the VideoSnippet gets updated.

To support this, what we need to do is get the current snippet for the video, then update it:

GitHub Action

The GitHub Action is fairly straightforward, mostly a copy of the Hugo one, then:

• Add Bazel
• Run projector sync
• Commit if changed

We also needed to upgrade one permission - contents

Conclusion

The Google/YouTube documentation was the hardest part here in that it was pretty obtuse and hard to understand.

Writing a little frontmatter library was unexpected, but while it took a little time, was straightforward.

Once I got a handle on that, the rest of it was pretty straightforward, partly because I was reusing parts from before.

Links

• Part 1: Outputting YouTube Descriptions from Hugo
• inscribe: simple frontmatter yaml library

🧱 Edge Collisions

We already had paddle collision working, but we needed the ball to bounce off the top and bottom edges of the screen. That meant checking if the ball’s y-position was outside the visible range and inverting its vertical velocity accordingly:

There was a small detour where I realised screen_height wasn’t giving the expected value - using GetScreenHeight() directly from raylib helped resolve that.

🏁 Scoring System

Once edge collisions were in place, it was time to detect goals. If the ball passed the left or right edge of the screen, the opposing player got a point. We also need a reset() method to the Ball struct to return it to the centre after each goal.

For now, let’s print the scores via std.debug.print, but this sets the stage for UI integration.

⌨️ Player Input

Finally, we wired up keyboard input to allow paddle movement. We used IsKeyDown from raylib, and made sure movement was frame-rate independent by scaling it with dt:

Left paddle uses W/S, right paddle uses E/D. Simple and responsive.

✅ What’s Working

By the end of this episode, we’ve got:

• Ball bounces off top and bottom edges
• Scoring when the ball passes a paddle
• Ball reset after each goal
• Both paddles are fully controllable

All that’s missing now is a visible score, a win condition, and maybe a simple menu.

Links

• Watch Video
• Source Code (at this point)
• Prev: Ball Movement & Paddle Collisions
• Next: Code Improvements from Review

Links

• Intro Post
• Source Code
• All posts

I started with adrg/frontmatter before I realised that it didn’t have the ability to write back.

I considered contributing to that one, but writing back is a little more complex than reading - particularly because the frontmatter.Parse in that one is built to support partial reading.

Because adrg/frontmatter only unmarshals into a struct, and doesn’t store the original bytes, you can’t write back without losing untouched keys.

Looking around, I could not find another frontmatter library for Go. I know that python has a decent library which supports writing back to it (I used it in the depatcher but I don’t want to write python.

Multiple Formats

Let’s make it extendable by defining a Format that will allow us to add in other formats later:

Writing Back

We could also do with a struct to hold the whole file contents so that we can write it back easier.

By storing the full frontmatter, we can later accept partial updates without losing other keys.

Naive Merging of Updates

We (the user) should be able to update just the keys we care about. All the other keys should be preserved.

The easiest way I could find to do this was to Marshal, Unmarshall and then merge with the raw Unmarshall:

Minimal merge strategy (loses order and formatting)

⚠️ Warning: Key ordering is lost

Due to the way maps work, the key ordering is lost More accurately, the keys are sorted alphabetically during write.

It fully rewrites the frontmatter, which also means that double quotes might disappear etc.

In Place Merging of Updates

If it is important to keep the frontmatter formatting as much as possible, we need to bigger sledgehammer.

I explored an approach using yaml.Node with ChatGPT’s help.

I fitted it into the Format as well

This preserves frontmatter formatting well - but it only handles flat YAML. Nested maps require a bit more work.

Supporting maps etc. as values

We need to switch to map[string]any and tweak a bit of the loop

It’s funny how things can be more complicated than it first seems.

Minor tweaks

I also wanted to add the delimiter into the format and use that instead of hardcoding, which was easy enough.

Conclusion

This is probably the main bits of functionality I’ll need to continue with the projector sync.

I had considered frontmatter to be a blackbox with complicated functionality, but cutting it up and working on it has demystified it and made it easier to work with. ChatGPT helped.

It should be fairly straightforward to add other frontmatter formats like TOML, and to autodetect the formats, but I don’t need it right now.

Links

• Source Code on GitHub

Ball Movement

The first step was to give the ball some velocity and update its position every frame.

We also fixed a small oversight: the ball and paddles were being recreated every frame inside the game loop. Moving their initialization outside meant we could actually observe state changes between frames.

Frame-Rate Independence

Raylib provides GetFrameTime() which returns the time in seconds since the last frame. Multiplying the velocity by this dt value ensures that the ball movement stays consistent across different frame rates:

With that, the ball now moves at a steady speed, no matter the frame rate.

Paddle Collision (X-Axis)

Next up: detecting collisions between the ball and paddles. I considered writing a standalone collision checker, but ended up keeping the logic within the Paddle struct itself.

To simplify which edge to check (left or right), I added a which field to paddles - an enum with values left and right. That made the conditional logic much cleaner.

To debug collisions, I added color switching: when a paddle detects a collision on the x-axis, it flashes red.

Paddle Collision (Y-Axis)

After confirming horizontal collision detection, I added vertical bounds checking. This just involved verifying the ball’s y-position is within the paddle’s vertical range.

Bounce Logic

With detection in place, we added bounce logic to the ball. If a collision with a paddle is detected, we flip the x-component of the velocity vector:

What’s Next

That wraps up part 2. In the next episode, we’ll handle edge collisions (top and bottom), scoring, and input management.

Thanks for following along!

Links

• Watch Video
• Source Code (at this point)
• Prev: Place Paddles & Ball
• Next: Edge Collisions, Scoring & Inputs

I also want to link to and from blog posts and social posts - and making sure those links stay in sync is a hassle.

It gets more complicated when scheduling multiple videos.

I wanted to make it easier

I (at the time of writing) use hugo for this blog site, and I regularly link from the YouTube description to a page on here. Since I want to save having to copy and paste that link into YouTube, leveraging the CMS felt sensible.

A YouTube Content Type

archetypes/youtube.md

It loved to watch the birds, to race galloping creatures below, often pretending to lose.

One morning, not unlike many others, it was resting atop a mountain watching the sun rise, basking in the warmth of the sun and the twittering of the birds.

It’s funny how much can change in a moment.

It was now drifting in silence surrounded by what looked like asteroids. The warmth of the sun felt like a distant memory. How many moments had passed in between? It did not know.

Beyond the asteroids, far in the distance, it could make out vague shapes. Amongst them, one it almost recognised - a segment of a shattered sphere. The ship recognised the ocean, now spilling into the black of space. It had once felt the mist from that ocean, many years ago. It would not skim that ocean again.

It slowly became aware of the structure - gargantuan, black, looming in the dark. It hung weightlessly above what was once the ship’s home, barely visible, quietly consuming the remains. Methodically, mechanically, it tore through the wreckage, scattering crumbs into the void - rocks, dust, fragments of what once was.

The ship found itself drifting in silence surrounded by what looked like asteroids.

There was no asteroid belt here before.

Every time I finish a video for shri codes, while I am still in the zone, I want to post to all the places (YouTube, BlueSky and Reddit). However, this is usually the worst time to share these if I want to get some decent traffic and raise awareness.

I’ve been remembering to post on the relevant days at reasonable times, but this process is annoying at best, interrupts flow and takes up cognitive load.

I wanted to automate it. I’ve got to say that automating these two seemingly simple tasks were rife with unexpected complexity.

My first challenge was trying to get rule_python to work, which, in the end, I did not succeed and gave up.

Getting pylyzer to work in neovim was also a challenge - another one that I gave up on.

I briefly gave up on python altogether and went with go, and I made stellar progress until I got to the bit about actually posting to BlueSky - ChatGPT had (once again) lied to me (shame on me not verifying their claims). The library it wanted me to use was a hallucination, and did not exist. I then realised that there was no real library for reddit integration either.

Back to python, and trusty poetry to see me through.

Scheduled Elements

There are four elements to getting scheduling to work

YouTube Scheduling

This part was the easiest. The platform is kind enough to provide an option to schedule release of videos, and we’ll use that!

Scheduled Publish for Blog

hugo supports this out of the box. The bigger challenge was how to get GitHub Actions to regenerate the site when relevant. In the end, I identified the window during the week when I want to be publishing.

10am - 4pm Mon - Fri seemed like a decent slot. GitHub Actions though does not support summer time. I opted for 10am - 3pm, which seemed the better option.

My GitHub action for publishing takes one minute to execute. If I run the action every 30 minutes, for three hours five days a week:

2 * 5 * 5 * 4 = 200

.github/workflows/hugo.yaml

I will need to run a second one for the despatches (below) as well, which would mean around 400 minutes each month - while there are no limits for public repos - it felt a little abusive to run it every minute.

Once this has been running safely for a while, I’ll consider bumping the cadence.

Cron is Unreliable on GitHub Actions

After I got this all ready with the two workflows set up to run on GitHub Actions, I waited, and waited, and nothing happened.

GA schedule doc states:

The schedule event can be delayed during periods of high loads of GitHub Actions workflow runs. High load times include the start of every hour. If the load is sufficiently high enough, some queued jobs may be dropped. To decrease the chance of delay, schedule your workflow to run at a different time of the hour.

The upptime post about GitHub Actions schedule not working includes some suggested workarounds, namely:

• IFTTT - seems to be limited to a maximum of hourly
• Google Cloud Scheduler - could be a good solution but a bit of a sledgehammer
• Cronhub - starts at $19/mo

I also discovered:

• cron-job.org - haven’t tried this yet, but looks viable

I was going to try out cron-job.org when ChatGPT suggested a simpler alternative - a simple workflow that only triggered the relevant workflows.

According to ChatGPT, the more complex a workflow, the more likely it is to be dropped. It makes sense, of course, and while I wasn’t fully convinced, I decided to give it a go.

It’s only been 10 minutes, but it has completed one run already - which is promising, but the original run also ran once.

I’ll have to keep an eye on the reliability of this.

Switched to cron-job.org

While the above strategy was OK, I wanted something more reliable, so I switched to cron-job.org

I created a new access token, restricted to the repo and with two additional permissions:

• actions: read & write
• contents: read (to read the workflow file, ChatGPT suggests)

I then set up a http call to:

https://api.github.com/repos/<gh-username>/<repo-name>/actions/workflows/<workflow-filename>/dispatches

• <gh-username>: use your github username from the url
• <repo-name>: name of your repo, again from the url
• <workflow-filename>: The filename of the workflow you want to trigger

To triger my hugo run, I used: https://api.github.com/repos/drone-ah/wordsonsand/actions/workflows/hugo.yaml/dispatches

Under advanced, I set the following Headers:

• Accept: application/vnd.github+json
• Authorization: token <personal-access-token>
• Content-Type: application/json
• User-Agent: cronjob

Set Request method to POST

Request body:

BlueSky

This one - posting to BlueSky was far more complicated than I anticipated. All the complexity was around its requirement to separate the post out into facets. I recognise and value the semantic content such a process would output. However, I could not find an algorithm or any details on how to extract the facets from some text - e.g. markdown.

I referenced some code from a couple of sources for a stopgap solution to address urls and hashtags.

And then, I found blueskysocial

Reddit

You first need to register an app on reddit, from a page I don’t seem to be able to get from anywhere except a direct link.

Once I registered a personal script, which will let any of the developers registered on that client to post, I got to try and login and was faced with:

prawcore.exceptions.OAuthException: invalid_grant error processing request

Red Herrings

I tried directly with curl:

and I got a similar error:

{"error": "invalid_grant"}

After stumbling around for a while, verifying and re-verifying the credentials, I also set up a brand new account using password auth (mine was originally oauth). It also returned the same error.

Some resources that I followed:

• redditdev
• OAuth2 Quick Start Example

While I was lookin around, I noticed in tiny little letters on the page to register an app, when you create a new app:

By creating an app, you agree to Reddit’s Developer Terms and Data Api Terms. You must also register to use the API.

(Emphasis mine)

I followed the instructions on that page, which felt more like red tape, but easy enough for an app that is only intended to post on a schedule.

Alas, this too did not help!

Final Solution

Perhaps not surprisingly, the final solution was to not use the password, but get a refresh token instead.

You can do this manually on the browser. Start by going to the following URL:

https://www.reddit.com/api/v1/authorize?client_id=YOUR_CLIENT_ID&response_type=code&state=xyz&redirect_uri=http://localhost&duration=permanent&scope=identity,submit,read

• YOUR_CLIENT_ID: Replace this with the client id from your reddit app
• redirect_uri: This value has (http://localhost in the example) has to match the redirect_uri setting in your app
• scope: Update to the scopes you are looking for. /api/vi/scopes will return the list of valid scopes and their descriptions.
• state: can be any value. It’s supposed to match in the next step

The browser will then ask your permission (of the scopes you defined). If you approve, the browser will redirect to localhost (or whatever url you define for the redirect above).

This redirect will likely fail, but that’s ok. There is one parameter in the URL that you are looking for - code

In my case, I got something like:

http://localhost:8080/?state=xyz&code=RilF7XDhRTr7o7B-iov2gpdDgum5pA#_

(don’t worry - that code isn’t the actual one)

You want to take the code, but without the #_ at the end and substitute it in the following:

• CLIENT_ID: The app id from your app settings page (again)
• CLIENT_SECRET: The secret from you app settings page
• CODE: The code that was in the URL above
• redirect_uri: exactly the same redirect_uri as above, and in the app settings

I build a small tool to automate the scheduled posting

Links

• Intro Post
• Source Code
• All posts

This post goes alongside my video on YouTube, and walks through the early steps of the project: setting up the game, getting something on screen, and implementing the paddles and the ball.

Why Pong?

Sometimes, before getting deeper into a project, it helps to do something simple just to get your hands moving again. I hadn’t written Zig in a couple of weeks, and wanted a fast feedback loop to:

• Get back into using raylib-zig
• Have a bit of fun
• Remind myself why I made certain decisions in the first place

Project Setup

I’m using raylib-zig for this. You can scaffold a new project with:

For the broader story behind the project - what Triangle is, where it’s going, and why I’m making it - check out the triangle endeavour or the devlog archive. This post is about the how.

🧩 Core Systems So Far

At this stage, Triangle supports:

• Basic player movement and shooting (Asteroids-style).
• Procedurally generated asteroid fields per sector.
• Material drops (iron ore) from destroyed asteroids.
• Automatic recipe unlocking when new items are picked up.
• Smelting system that converts ore to ingots.
• Unlocking and queuing up constructors using the crafting menu.
• A basic UI for crafting and inventory.
• Configurable keyboard mappings using TOML.

That’s the visible layer. Below the surface, the codebase has carved out some space for more ambitious systems.

🗂️ Code Structure Overview

Here’s a quick tour of the key directories and their purpose:

blit/

Handles all the 2D rendering abstractions - bounding boxes, shapes (including triangle fans 😉 and circles), and canvas drawing. Wraps raylib for better namespacing and type control.

phys/

Physics system. body.zig implements basic movement, collisions, and inertia. Still minimal, but usable.

combat/

Still early - only bullet is implemented, and is used to destroy asteroids. Placeholder for upcoming systems like health, damage, and targeting.

items/

This module forms the backbone of the crafting system. Items are tied to recipes, and recipes are triggered via pickups or crafting actions. There’s a lot more to unpack here - likely its own devlog soon.

notifier/

Manages in-game UI feedback. When you pick something up or unlock a new recipe, this is what shows it. Notifiers are scoped - one for inventory, one for crafting - and show up on either side of the screen.

ship/

This module contains the ship related logic, including movement, and the logic for constructing smelters and other buildables. Eventually this will handle assembly chains.

asteroid

These files should be refactored into its own module, and should contain the asteroid itself, as well as sector, a chunk of space - asteroids, entities, bullets, etc. This is the closest thing to a “level” in Triangle. It’s procedurally generated, and you can eventually travel from one sector to the next.

diag/

Code to support diagnostics & logging

game/

This module should get a bit of refactoring as well, moving some of the files from the root into its own module

• config: Takes care of user control bindings and input overrides via a TOML config file.
• notifier: supports collecting notifications across multiple channels.
• save: Just scaffolding for now - no save/load logic yet, but it’s a placeholder to group serializable components together.
• context: container struct to support dependency injection.

ui/

Holds in-game panels like crafting and inventory. Needs cleanup and consolidation.

🧪 What’s Missing

A lot of the systems are stubbed out, but not yet wired in. For instance:

• power is empty (future energy system)
• The canvas currently wraps raylib without adding much - that will likely change as UI complexity grows.

🧶 Threads I’ll Pull Next

These are the next things I’ll either build or record:

• Improving the coding structure. I’d like to improve organisation and am considering extracting a re-usable library out of it, mainly so I can tinker with other smaller game projects.
• A rudimentary menu system
• A build+deploy system to generate early test builds
• Possibly a contact/feedback form directly in-game or on the site

I’ll be releasing this in what I’m calling a “Sprout” build - a playable seed, a form of extremely early access. Feedback and collaboration is really important to me and I want to get this out there as soon as there is the tiniest spark of “life.”

If you’d like to follow the journey, you can watch the video devlog

Links

• YouTube Channel
• Blog Posts

The Real Stuff Behind Making a Game

Making games is hard! Making games independently is harder. When you’re doing it solo, it’s harder still.
It’s juggling health, money, and energy - not to mention motivation.

I’ve spent over 20 years in tech, running a company, building stuff like megabus.com’s ticketing system.
After burning out and dealing with some tough health issues, I’m struggling with even the idea of picking up freelance work or hustling like I used to. I have about 3 months of money left, so I need to be smart.

On the positive side, I’ve got the experience - in dev and solo work - to see this through,
I just need to figure out a sustainable financial path.

What I’m Doing Now

Here’s my current rough plan to keep triangle moving without burning out:

1. Building Community

I’ve been posting devlogs and videos, but haven’t really focused on building a following or community. I loathe the “like and subscribe” crowd, so I don’t want to be doing that. I want to focus on adding value.

It’ll take me longer, and that’s ok - I have to figure out the finances, but that’s a separate problem.

I want to keep doing what I’ve been doing. Devlogs, videos, sharing and collaborating. I’ll have more time for a bit as well since the main project I was working on has now been canceled.

I also want to make some improvements to this site to link things up a bit better and make it a bit easier to find things. That’ll have to happen on a “little bit here and there” kind of basis though.

2. Going for Grants

I’m looking at funding from places like Creative Scotland that support mental health and creative projects.
triangle isn’t just a game - I’m trying to express something real, and I’m trying to communicate that clearly.

3. Maybe a Kickstarter

Further down the line, I might run a Kickstarter -
but only if I can find the right piece of work that adds real value for everyone involved: myself, the game, and potential contributors.

4. Patreon / Ko-fi - But No Paywalls

Once I have enough of a following / community (5k - 10k subs), I could set up Patreon (and/or maybe Ko-fi), but no paywalls - I don’t like them. I want to invite people who want to support and join in, and participate.
Everything stays public - devlogs, updates, builds.
Supporters get perks like name credits and priority access.

4. Loans Only If I Have To

If I really need it, I’ll consider a small loan to get through a crunch -
but only if it helps hit a real milestone, not just to stretch things out.

Other Stuff I’m Doing

I’ve also started a coding video channel, Shri Codes.
It’s a way to share bits of the process behind building triangle, maybe other excursions and the things I’m learning along the way.

This blog is where I write devlogs, ideas, and rambling thoughts -
it’s turning into a bit of a central hub that connects everything else I’m doing. I have a bunch of other things that I’ve done in the past (and am working on now) that I’d like to put on here as well. Of course, that takes up time too, and I’m not sure how much real value that will add.

If You Want to Follow Along

You’re welcome to follow along on whatever platform works for you - no pressure, no strings.
I love collaboration and would really value your thoughts, whenever you feel ready to join in.

If you have advice, experience, or just want to say hi, please do. It means a lot. I’ll take every bit of encouragement and support I can get.

I was adding in a dependency to zig-toml and this is the rule that I used:

Let’s break it down:

• name: Pretty flexible, but you probably want to use the lib name, or the name you would use in the zon file.
• urls: You need the url to the zip file. If you want main - you can click on the button that says Code and at the use the link at the bottom that says “Download ZIP”. GitHub documentation on source code archives has more information as well as details on how to get he url for specific commits etc.
• sha256: When running for the first time, bazel will tell you that a canonical reproducible form can be obtained by modifying arguments integrity = "sha256-<hash>". However, for whatever reason, it uses a different format from what you need to use in the MODULES.bazel file. To convert it, you can use:

For a while, it was fine - except that some CI runs would take 15 minutes and we couldn’t quite figure out why.

I finally had to update bazel from 7.x to 8 and in that process (which honestly could have been easier, but oh well), I ran into a problem with compiling protobuf.

Namely, I kept running into this error:

I tried many things but was not able to get past this error. In the end, I was able to narrow it down to devbox/nix and how it messes with the environment that doesn’t quite agree with bazel.

What didn’t work

• installing gcc from devbox
• installing stdenv.cc.cc.lib
• Setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH (to <workspace-dir>/.devbox/nix/profile/default/lib, which is where the devbo version of libstdc++.so.6 is installed by stdenv.cc.cc.lib)
• Using the --action-env=
• rules-nixpkgs

None of which really worked.

Disabling devbox did work, which was at least partly encouraging. I also found a bunch of evidence online around this issue (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Bazel seems to generally dislike non-system gcc.

A ray of hope

I was just about ready to throw in the towel when ChatGPT, in passing suggested using the protobuf binary directly. I wasn’t even using this binary - it was being pulled in as a dependency and I just needed it to work. I did not need it to be built from source.

Furthermore, I found, from my research into trying to solve this that building protobuf was the likely culprit in the CI taking 15 minutes.

I also remembered that someone else on the team had issues trying to get it to build on a mac at some point.

All in all, it was a problematic piece of software and I was seriously considering switching to opentofu - but they might be using it too.

bin protoc

It was difficult to find decent documentation about how to achieve this though, apart from a partially answered on:

• stackoverflow question,
• google groups for bazel-discuss
  • which also led me to a gitlab repo with some code

These resources gave me just enough to be able to cobble together a working solution, which needs:

Install protoc

The first thing we need is a locally installed protoc bin (I’ll used devbox to install it for consistency across dev environments)

You can add a version specifier for better reproducibility.

Runnable Target

We also need a shell target that will execute this correctly. The bazel flag to override protoc takes a local target, not a bin.

third_party/tools/BUILD.bazel

third_party/tools/protoc.sh

Override protoc

You should now be able to override protoc with:

Having to pass in a flag each time is annoying though, and you can add it to your .bazelrc

Sample code

You can find the sample code in the wordsonsand repo which uses this exact solution to override protoc and get the pulumi sample code to work ;)

PS: It also includes a fully migrated MODULES.bazel with support for golang. You will also want to check out BUILD in the root.

As a starting point, my keyboard layout is colemak, and I doubt that the controls I use would suit the majority of players.

I am putting off a UI based config management option down the road (did I mention that I do not enjoy GUI work?). As such I’ve been pondering alternative configuration options.

Platform independence

Before I even get to that, the first problem I need to solve is a way to determine the location for the config files independent of the platform.

Fortunately, known-folders came to the rescue and provided an easy to use framework that can be used to determine the various relevant locations for multiple platforms.

Locations

There are three real locations of relevance for triangle

• The binary / package
• Config, technically, split into two
  • user (or in Windows parlance, the remote dir, and can be shared across computers)
  • system (in windows parlance, local, and is specific to that system)
• Save Data

User & Game Config Files

With that sorted out, the next bit is to identify the relevant config files. I expect that triangle will continue to use these, and will eventually just get a UI config option as well.

User Config

There are two main bits of user configuration

• Preference like controls
• System details like resolution

I am currently unsure when it’ll support system config.

Game Config

There are two bits of config that the game will store. One set of config is to remember game choices the user has made.

Remember Player Actions

For example, it will be useful to show the user details of changes to the game since they last played. To do this, we need to track the last set of changes that the user saw.

The game will show a notice on startup about its extremely early access status, and provide an option for the user to hide that in the future. We need to save that somewhere too.

Telemetry

The second bit of config is metrics. While a lot of games will simply send telemetry information directly to the developer, player privacy is really important to me. I recognise that I will get far less data because of this, and that there will be a bit of survivorship bias with the data - but I feel that privacy is more important.

The way I want telemetry to work is that it will all be saved in a human readable telemetry file in the config file location.

The data is stored only locally, and is never automatically sent. The player is welcome to use this data for themselves if they wish and also share at their discretion. The information will be stored in a human readable format that should be as easy to understand as possible - no data dumps.

The location will also store logs (if enabled).

Setting Config

In terms of allowing the player to manage config, there are a couple of challenges:

• Providing enough documentation that it is easy to do
• Allowing for updates, particularly to the addition of new keys

To tackle this, I am going to provide an annotated template file with all the config options. The user can create a separate file based on this with only the config they wish to override.

It will be tricky to change how particular parameters are configured. E.g. If a single value key needs to switch to an array. I’d be loathe to sprinkle the code with checks for legacy keys/formats. We’ll play it by ear.

I considered updating the config file automatically, but this would discard any comments the user had added. While I could offer an option to merge changes in, it’s not straightforward enough to implement just yet.

Format

I’ve been considering toml and yaml for this, with zig-toml and zig-yaml respectively.

zig-yaml seems to be more active (more stars, forks, issues and pr’s and currently also the more recent commit).

I am also more familiar with and prefer yaml.

However, it does not currently support default values. I would like the user to have to specify only the config they’d like to override. zig-yaml currently expects all the keys to be defined if you want to parse it into a struct.

#85 should bring it in, but I could not get it to work

So, I tried out zig-toml and the test worked the first time.

src/toml_with_defaults.zig

Using the config

The final part is to use the config.

Loading config

All config is loaded at startup and attached to a Config struct, which is in turn part of a Context struct that is passed around.

src/load_save_config.zig

User config (controls)

This one involves a little translation as we need to know the rl.KeyboardKey for each mapping to be able to detect it.

I use a std.StringArrayHashMapUnmanaged(rl.KeyboardKey) to map the string to each key

src/load_save_config.zig

Game Config

As a starting point, we’ll probably only have one config entry here - the last time the news was marked as read by the player.

We’ll store this as an i64 and loading it is exactly the same as above.

The main difference with the Game config class is that on writing any value, it will also save it to disk.

I ran into a bug where the api for serialization was broken. There is (currently) a pending pr #33 to resolve it

One of the challenges of using emerging language and ecosystem is that you’re more likely to run into bugs. One of the great joys of working with such ecosystem is the greater opportunity to contribute and get involved!

Links

• YouTube Devlog
• Prev: Crafting Machines

While it sounds swell, most icons I could find were still SVG.

When I tried to use a standard SVG, I got the following errors:

I couldn’t find a lot of resources online on how to convert an SVG file into TinyVG.

On their website, under tooling, there are links with binaries for various operating systems.

I am not a fan of downloading binaries, but it seemed reasonable - maybe run it in a chroot or container to be safe.

It needed two steps:

Convert from SVG to TinyVG Text

In this post, I want to describe how I got it to push images build locally up to googles artifact repository. It will include creating the artifac repository using infrastructure as code

The project is in a monorepo that uses bazel.

The executable to be packaged

Build Container Image

add rules_oci

rules_oci is a good place to start to integrate container support into your bazel configuration. It’s also worth reading up a bit on distroless if you are not aware of it.

Adding rules_oci into bazel MODULES is straightforward:

If you use the WORKSPACE, or if you want the latest version, you can find details on their releases page.

tar.bzl

oci_rules uses tar files to build the image. To build tar images, you will want to use tar.bzl.

Add the following to you MODULES

Latest version and instructions for WORKSPACE can be found on their releases page

BUILD.bazel

There are language specific sample build files that you can start from.

Starting from the example go BUILD.bazel, and simplifying it, I have:

There is more information at the go doc page including details of migrating from rules_docker

Building of the images now completes

Push Image

Pushing the image can be pretty straightforward:

• Enable the container repository in Google Cloud
• Configure it in the BUILD.bazel file
• bazel run to push

I would like to do the whole thing through IaC so that it is

• Repeatable, and
• more importantly documented

IaC Tool Options

terraform has no bazel support, and is a questionable choice from an ethics perspective. opentofu has

rules_tf. However, that does not support apply

Google Cloud Infrastucture Manager is vendor lock in.

That leaves us with pulumi (If there is another alternative, please let me know).

I like the stacks concept in pulumi, and while it doesn’t have bazel integration, what it does have is an automation api. While not he best documented, there is enough documentation out there to be able to piece it together.

With this, we can build a runnable unit, and then run it too. I’ve experimented with tagging specific runnables and then running them through the CI. I won’t get that far in this post. My focus here is to get it working locally.

Enable Artifact Repository

In pulumi, you can enable the artifact repository with:

Crafting in triangle should be a mix of random number generation (rng) and deterministic. Crafted items will have a random set of mods. However, like in Last Epoch, you can extract the mods of the items. These can then be placed into another item.

It feels like mod crafting would be an interesting way to approach crafting in general. Unlike in the Last Epoch, the extracted mods aren’t just combined back together.

What if each mod retains its values? What if you could combine two mods together to upgrade or reroll them?

When you insert a mod into an item, what if it destroyed the mod that you were replacing?

Tiers

All materials, items, and mods have tiers. Factories will only process items of their tier or lower. A Tier 1 smelter cannot process a Tier 2 material and a Tier 1 constructor cannot craft a Tier 2 item.

I am currently mulling over the idea of having nine tiers.

Items (a.k.a Buildings? Machines?)

I’m toying with the idea of the tier determining how many mod slots it could have. A Tier 2 item would have two mod slots and a Tier 5 item would have 5 slots.

This provides a natural power curve, even if the mods themselves do not have tiers.

All items will also have up to one implicit mod. This mod will be item type specific. e.g., for smelters, it will be smelting rate

From a concept perspective, there are probably buildings, or some kind of structure that can be slotted on to the ship.

Perhaps buildings are a better name for them than items.

Slots / Hardpoints

I see two kinds of slots on the ship

• Interior slot: Machines like the smelters will go in here
• Exterior Slot: Weapons, Armour, Hull Extensions etc. could go on to these.

Mods

Currently mods also support tiers, but I am wondering whether the power creep could become exponential, combined with the additional mod slots. There may be good ways to mitigate it though, which will only become apparent once some of these mechanics have been implemented.

Another reason to skip tiers on mods is if that means that the player ends up with far too many mods in their inventory.

There are a couple of key areas in which I am thinking about deviating from other games (like the Diablo series, PoE 1/2, Last Epoch etc.)

Local only

Each mod applies only to the item it is on. A firing rate increase on your smelters won’t do anything - since they don’t fire. A smelting speed increase on your weapon will likewise have no effect. It would make sense to extract or replace the ineffective mods.

If you have two weapons attached, and one of them has a mod that increases firing rate, that will impact only that weapon.

No Prefix / Suffix mods

There is no classification of mods as prefix/suffix or limits of each type. You can have full attack mods on if you like. Considering the previous restriction, it makes more sense to stack attack on weapons and defense on armour.

Machines

There are a few factory based machines I have in mind so far.

All these machines will have a rate at which they will complete their work. I have been pondering whether higher tier machines will complete lower tier work faster.

Smelters

The standard refinery. It will convert ore and scrap (obtained when enemy ships are destroyed, and from scrapping items) into refined materials.

Constructor

Converts refined materials into items of Tier 1. For Tier 2 onwards, I am considering taking items from the previous tier plus a refined material of the new tier. E.g. to craft a Tier 2 factory, it could take 2 x Factory Mk. I + 30 Tier 2 materials (whatever that turns out to be)

This could keep the recipes easy to understand and reason about. It also provides one use for poorly rolled items.

Disassemblers

These function similar to the Foundry in Last Epoch, at least with regards to extracting all the mods from the item.

I haven’t decided how deterministic it will be. Will it extract all items or could some be damaged in the process and maybe turned to scrap?

Scrappers

These are a bit like the trash bin. If crafting requires lower tier items, these might not be necessary. TBD!

Foundry

This would be the machine that could do mod crafting. I am still a little foggy about how or if this machine could work.

Should mod crafting involve risk? Like combining two mods to maybe create a higher tier one - or failing and getting scrap?

What about rerolling a mod by sacrificing another mod?

All ideas accepted :)

Augmentor

The Augmentor could be the final step in the pipeline - letting you insert or fine-tune mods once you’ve refined or crafted them.

This machine will work instantly so that it doesn’t tie up the items currently in use. It would allow you to modify items up to its own tier.

triangle

With machines slotted directly onto the ship, triangle becomes a living, drifting factory - salvaging, upgrading, refining, evolving, fighting, and surviving!

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• Companion vlog for this post
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• Next: Coming Soon

Ring a bell?

I remember having mixed feelings when coding bootcamps were springing up everywhere. People were paying thousands to go on a six week bootcamp to learn how to code. I was happy that coding was becoming accessible, but I was not happy that people were picking this career path purely as a way of making money.

The same thing had happened in India - the popularity of software engineering had stemmed from the massive amounts of outsourcing that was happening. It was a lucrative career option. There was no love for the job, no curiosity about learning. It was a job.

Trying to hire a software engineer in 2021/2022 was an absolute nightmare. Salaries were skyrocketing and engineers were rare. Good engineers were rarer. The bootcamps were going hell for leather at this time, and then the layoffs hit. Tens of thousands of jobs lost, along with all the new graduates who entered the market. On top of that, add the promise of A.I being able to write code. It can probably write code as well as some of the bootcamp graduates.

There was a time that the majority of software was written by people who loved the work. It was treated more as a craft and we were all figuring out how to do it better. This craft then got commercialised, industrialised.

The focus is now on productivity, and how quickly we can get code out. The love of the work has been lost. Let A.I have that joyless (thankless) job! I (We?) don’t want it.

I’d rather be the last carpenter who still enjoys the job! What about you?

Drops

As a starting point, when asteroids are destroyed, they will drop materials. I’ve also been pondering whether materials could drop when they split. It makes logical sense, but I want to get a better sense of pacing before diving into that question.

Currently, only iron drops. I started off by finding a sprite sheet with reasonable looking sprites and then started integrating them in before I decided to just stick with shapes — so iron drops are little blue circles.

PS: you haven’t seen the Shape code, but you get the gist.

These drops are managed by a MaterialField that keeps track of all the dropped materials. They are given a low linear velocity, and no rotational velocity (it’s a circle, so you wouldn’t see it anyway).

They do not interact with collisions to avoid them being bumped off the screen or you having to chase them down.

At some point, they could also be optimised to only update if they are on screen. Assuming the player will pick up most of them, this may not be necessary.

Pickup

I also “installed an attractor” on the ship such that if it gets close enough to a material, it’ll pull it in. When it’s close enough, it’ll be “picked up.”

It is a physics interaction, so it is possible to slingshot the material and have it fly off the screen (it’s happened to me). It feels like a sun interaction and you are in control of it, so I am inclined to leave that in.

Once it’s close enough, it’s picked up, and added to an inventory.

The attractor also feels like an upgrade that can be crafted later.

Smelting

Crafting Panel

For smelting, I started by sketching out a straightforward UI. I’ll admit up front that I don’t enjoy UI work, but in earnest I started on it, and I got as far as displaying the panel itself and I got tremendously bored.

I decided to make material refinement prioritisation automatic, at least for the time being. It would always prioritise the most valuable material that is in the inventory.

Actually, that’ll remove some factory micromanagement without removing the feeling of agency from the player.

It’ll mainly be a problem if the player has run out of lower tier materials and they have a large amount of higher tier items in the inventory. I figure let’s wait until we have some playtesting before we worry about it. The system currently only drops one material and it can be refined automatically.

Refining

All materials and items will have a tier, starting with iron at 1. To be able to smelt a material, you’ll need a smelter at a minimum of that tier. For example to craft iron, you need a minimum tier 1 smelter (which is fine since 1 is the minimum tier anyway). If you wanted to smelt a tier 3 material, you’ll need a minimum of tier 3 smelter.

The ship starts with a Tier 1 smelter and will always have a tier 1 smelter. This smelter cannot be modified, removed, or destroyed. The same is true of some other factories, which will be covered in the next post.

The first iteration of refining took the total capacity of all smelters at each tier, and would convert a portion of the materials from ore to ingot. It used floating points to track progress. If it would take four seconds to convert one ore to ingot, over one second, it’d transfer 0.25 from ore to ingot.

The display only showed integers, so there was a bit of floor and ceil to be able to show consistent numbers.

I didn’t like this way of doing things. It felt icky — hacky — but it was simple enough and it works, for now.

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• An asteroid field that feels infinite
• Natural-looking distribution and density
• A safe starting area for the player

Spawning Asteroids

I explored strategies for spawning multiple asteroids on screen without overlaps and avoiding the player’s starting zone. Initially, I considered a brute-force collision check for each spawn candidate, but quickly realized it wouldn’t scale well with many asteroids.

I decided to split the screen into a grid. If the maximum radius of an asteroid is r, then each grid would be 2r x 2r, and would be able to accommodate asteroids at their full size. The asteroid size is determined randomly, with a minimum size. It also offsets the center of the x by a random amount, up to a maximum of r.

In theory, this means that if two adjacent cells spawn the full size asteroid and offset in the “wrong” direction, they could start off overlapping. I’ve not seen this happen yet, likely because the full size asteroids are not that common.

The grid has an additional offset in the x axis for each row. With this offset, even if every asteroid was placed at the x center of each grid, they would not look uniform.

Finally, for each grid cell, there is some further randomisation that determines whether the asteroid will get spawned at all.

In hindsight - there might be more randomisation than we need. It works well though.

The asteroids are also given a low starting velocity, both linearly and rotationally.

Even if asteroids do overlap on spawn, the physics will correct it through the collision detection.

Spawning the Ship

The code for this part is a little icky right now. It checks the y position of the ship and avoids spawning asteroids in any grid cell that overlaps the starting location.

Of course, this should only matter for the asteroids spawned on the starting screen. The rest of the asteroids don’t need this check. It works just fine though - for now :)

Making it “Infinite”

I pondered the best way to make it feel infinite without risk of slowdowns and issues. A quadtree was an obvious answer. However, it felt too complicated since I’d never written one before, and I was worried about how I would move each asteroid between each section as it moved. (Spoiler alert: I should have just used quadtrees, and intend to move to it later.)

In the meantime, I wanted to build something which felt simpler, which was basically to create chunks of asteroids, with each chunk being a little larger than the size of the screen.

The system could then, based on the current y position, track just the current, previous, and next chunks, and process only these asteroids.

When I got it working, it was pretty ok. The main problem I had now was the asteroids leaving the screen and never coming back.

After I’d implemented this, I ended up watching Coding Challenge #98: Quadtree, and boy did I feel silly about being scared about quadtrees. They were promptly demystified and felt like a much simpler solution than what I have here - so I’ll add that to the list to change.

Asteroids Drifting Offscreen

One of the problems was that the asteroids would drift offscreen. Because I wasn’t updating all the asteroids, they’d never come back on to the screen. In fact, even if I updated all the asteroids, the screen would eventually clear. I believe this was because there is a lot of offscreen space (mainly on the left and right of the screen) that the asteroids could fly off to.

I tried various ways of wrapping the asteroids around after they hit a few hundred pixels past the edge. I didn’t want it to look like a wraparound, and pretending like the screen was about twice the width helped.

However, the problem was now with the asteroids slinking out the bottom of the screen (and the top too), and there wasn’t an easy way to tackle those.

In the end, I ended up using an attractor, which I placed on the center of each chunk.

This worked surprisingly well that I didn’t even need the horizontal wraparound.

I had also ended up making the Chunk struct a little heavy, and I ended up refactoring it. While refactoring, I overoptimized it to only update asteroids on the screen. This “fix” meant that asteroids off-screen aren’t attracted to the center of the chunk anymore, and the screen ends up clearing again. Something to fix later - maybe when I implement the quadtree.

Debug Panel

There were various points when I was trying to track down issues that I reverted to my habit of printing stuff out - but that was a nightmare because it was printing the same thing in each frame.

Eventually, I got into the habit of displaying stuff on screen and drawing different colours etc. I then wanted a way to see things easier and toggle some of the debug features. To do this, I needed a GUI.

I looked at raygui, which looked good but probably too basic for me. I don’t enjoy GUI work and I figured something a little more fleshed out would help.

I had already looked at dvui before and it looked like it could be a good candidate.

Integrating it into triangle was pretty straightforward - at least once I figured out how to add it to build.zig.

Next Steps

Right now, the field feels big enough (around 15 chunks), but not truly infinite. I’m thinking of implementing a circular buffer - say, 8 or 10 chunks - where old ones are recycled as the player moves forward. If a player backtracks, most asteroids will have drifted off anyway, and replacements will blend in just fine.

I’ll probably tackle that - and maybe finally add a quadtree - soon.

Next up: crafting systems and how I’m handling material drops and recipes.

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The Ship

Spawning the ship itself was relatively straightforward. I only needed three points and drawTriangle from raylib.

In the coding challenge, the ship was rotated with the keyboard, but I wanted the ship to point to the mouse so that aiming was straightforward. Rotating to the mouse was trickier — it involved atan2 and ChatGPT got me started.

The coding challenge video did not worry about time lapsed between each frame, but I wanted triangle to be framerate independent. That involved a bit of jiggery pokery to get working, including determining how much the ship can move within a time frame.

Moving the ship was a bit easier, but based on the many videos of the Coding Train that implemented force, velocity and dampening, it was pretty straightforward. Dampening took a bit of trial and error. ChatGPT sent me down the garden path initially with an over-complicated formula, but I was able to simplify it later.

Integrating the physics for linear momentum with the one for rotational momentum was also quite nice — it meant that the ship could overshoot the aim when rotating and will correct back.

The Asteroids

The coding challenge worked with a fixed number of on screen asteroids and they wrapped around. I needed to expand this to:

• A potentially infinite vertical scroller.
• Collisions between the asteroids (currently the same as from the challenge, only checks full circle collision)
• Figure out how to handle asteroids moving out of the screen

The above will be covered in a bit more depth in the next devlog.

The Camera

I also needed a follow camera. Unlike the original asteroids, the ship can move up/down and the camera should follow it.

The current code looks something like this:

It predicts the position of the ship, based on its y velocity. If that’s outside the middle zone, it’ll move the camera at up to the maximum speed. There is some clamping to prevent things flying off at high speeds. It also prevents the camera from overtaking the ship.

This code is mostly hacked together with some help from ChatGPT. It’ll be cleaned up later, once I have a better indication of possible ship speeds, and how/if we’ll zoom in and out as well.

Another important facet to consider with the camera was what to do with the edges. Out of the four edges, only one is infinite.

The current solution is that the camera stops tracking when it gets to the “bottom.” It also does not move to the left or right. The ship, on the other hand is free to move out of the range of the camera. Currently, nothing changes except that the camera does not follow.

Since the thrust works in the direction of the mouse, it’s pretty easy to bring the ship back on to the screen. This feels like the world is big and still out there, we just don’t track what happens out there.

I considered wrapping around on the left and right, but that felt more like the ship was trapped in that zone. I want the feeling of being trapped in vengeance to be more subtle ;)

Combat

Combat is pretty much a mirror image of what happens in the coding challenge, though I didn’t have some of the helper functions. I learned some math :)

Initially, the update loop only handled asteroid collisions. I added bullets as a separate field in the update loop. It then checks each bullet with every asteroid in the active chunks (covered in devlog #2).

If there is collision, the asteroid is split into two, moved apart a bit, and given opposite linear momentum. The bullet also takes “damage” at this point, and can be removed. The damage system is designed to support penetration, which is currently not active.

If the spawned asteroids would be too small, nothing is spawned. Later on, this would be the trigger to spawn a material drop.

Zig / Raylib

Learning zig and raylib was a big part of this. Fortunately, both were a lot of fun to learn and work with.

One thing I found annoying was that the vector functionality in raylib was scattered around as individual functions instead of on the vector struct. While this was understandable, with raylib being written in C, I found it a bit frustrating.

I ended up writing my own Vector struct in zig and the functions that I used as methods on that struct. It was an opportunity for me to learn some vector math as well.

I also encapsulated raylib inside a Canvas struct. I probably still have some rl. calls other places in the code, but the idea is that a canvas is passed into any bits of code that needs it. The main help is that it’ll convert our version of Vector2 to the one that raylib wants.

I am also thinking about how I want input handling to work. I would like to encapsulate that into a separate struct. Right now, I mainly access raylib directly.

Manual testing

While I am a big proponent and fan of Test Driven Development, I was happy enough with manual testing for triangle. I found joy in seeing it work each time I manage to get something working.

I do end up writing tests later, particularly when I got to bits of code that was harder to test manually.

Feel

triangle already feels fun and light. There are some clunky elements to be ironed out, but so far, it feels good :)

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There is a quote by Mario Andretti:

If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.

This one clearly embodies the hare, but is it a good attitude to have in all work, or in general life?

We all seem to place so much emphasis on speed, it seems like we are trying race through life. Aren’t we all going to the same place?

I think the quote (of unclear origin)

If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together?

is a good comparison of our options, and while it might be nice(r) to go far, I think there is a lot more value in traveling together.

We are born alone, and we die alone. We do not have choice in those, but why do so many of us go alone, just to go fast?

My youngest uncle was a Computing Studies teacher at a local college. He also taught private classes at home. I couldn’t get enough.

I don’t know what most ten-year-olds dream about, but my dream was to learn C. I saved ₹300 - a lot of money in 1994 - to buy a book called Encyclopedia C. I read it cover to cover, understood maybe 10% of it, and reread it years later to pick up more.

But I never actually programmed in C.

The Long Detour

Life took me through a range of other languages instead: Prolog (strangely, what my school machines had), Visual Basic, ASP, PHP, Java, Python, JavaScript, Go, Rust. I tinkered with C++ when messing with game engines, but never quite got around to C.

Some of the early fears carried through - memory management was intimidating: malloc, free, and in C++, new and delete.

Over time, I began to overcome the fear of systems languages - first through Java, then Go. But I never revisited C, and I never quite got over the fear of manual memory management.

In hindsight, these concepts weren’t really designed for a ten-year-old to grasp. It makes sense that they felt out of reach.

Allocator Confusion

Zig had me curious for a while, and some recent health issues gave me the space to explore it. I’ve been building a small game in Zig, and it’s been feeding that original desire to learn C - just with a bit more clarity.

I was still intimidated by memory allocation though, and went as far as I could without using an allocator.

Eventually, I had to use one. I understood the convention of init and deinit, and the idea of allocators in general.

But I was confused about how deinit worked in the context of ArenaAllocator.

A little learning is a dangerous thing

– Alexander Pope

If the arena frees memory for you, wouldn’t calling deinit on individual objects inside it risk double-freeing?

If I skip calling deinit on a struct that normally needs it, will I miss other cleanup tasks?

And does this mean the arena allocator isn’t a true drop-in replacement if I have to skip deinit?

At the time, the answer wasn’t clear - and I couldn’t find documentation that resolved it.

Clarity

Thankfully, the super friendly folk at Ziggit helped clarify things.

ArenaAllocator handles it

ArenaAllocator is a drop-in replacement for other allocators. If you deinit objects using memory from the arena, and those objects try to free that memory, the operation is effectively (though not exactly) a no-op. There’s no risk of double-free.

It’s always safe to free / destroy memory from an arena, as long as you treat it as freed of course. But it won’t actually be released until the arena is deinit’ed.

– mnemnion

Even if some memory is freed manually before the arena is cleared, it’s handled safely.

I was overthinking it.

deinit should still be called

deinit exists for cleanup logic - not just memory. It should always be called where appropriate, regardless of the allocator. That part doesn’t change.

Further learning

Zig also encourages a light touch. One of the impacts of this is that the object itself should not hold on to the allocator in the init and use it in deinit. It could, but the better way would be to accept the allocator in both the init and the deinit.

This convention is further reinforced by zig deprecating the managed variants of collections

Thanks

In many ways, this was about cleaning up more than just memory.

Special thanks to the helpful folks at ziggit.dev.

References

• Full discussion on ziggit.dev
• Implementation of ArenaAllocator

One of the activities to pass time while healing was playing a lot of ARPG’s recently, particularly PoE 2 and the Last Epoch. I’d even had a few ideas about how I might do things a little differently. Since my brain capacity was pretty low, these games with their repetitive nature and easy dopamine hits were really enjoyable.

I found the gameplay a bit fragmented though, and having to follow guides was annoying. I had been mulling over the idea of making something which flows, and supports your decision making. It’s not about giving the player answers, but about providing the player the most relevant information in an easy to digest format. They still get to make the choices. I struggled to identify what mattered - guides were easier.

I did wonder if there was an easy way to just say - “use this build from this guide” so that it would save me from all the tedious clicking :/

All this left me wondering if I could build something that captured the fun while keeping you in the flow. I even looked at how complicated it would be to make an isometric game. Too complicated for me was the answer.

Factory games, one of my other favourite genres felt a little too mentally taxing. Otherwise, I would have dived into Space Age.

I have also been bingeing on youtube videos and discovered a fantastic channel - the Coding Train.

I’ve been almost religiously watching the Coding Challenges playlist and I have been loving it. I love how he makes 2d graphics programming seems so easy and approachable. I used to be so intimidated by all the math.

There was a slow confidence building in me that maybe - just maybe I could build a game.

Coding Challenge 46

Last night, I was watching the one about remaking Asteroids. He made it look so easy and fun. How he puts those asteroids together felt so clever - neat! I could do that. Actually, I could make that really interesting.

For a little while now, I’ve been wanting to try out one of the challenges, tied in with playing with zig, which has also been on my radar. I’ve largely worked with higher level languages like Java (and golang more recently). I’ve always been fascinated by C, and C++, but never quite got into it. Zig represented a more fun and modern version of C that I could enjoy. I also really liked how explicit and simple zig feels.

It feels like a perfect opportunity to feed two birds with one scone. I could try and replicate what he did in that video in zig.

A little bit of research on graphics/game libraries in zig revealed raylib to be the best candidate for my needs. While a C library, it has zig bindings, there is plenty of documentation, albeit not necessarily in zig - but that was ok.

I could see it in my mind - a field of asteroids, pew pew pew, asteroids break apart. Destroyed asteroids would drop resources. Oh you could have factories on the ship and build your armoury - weapons, armour, scanners - everything. That would be an interesting twist - you don’t pick up loot - you build it.

Each item would still have randomised mods, but you could extract them like in Last Epoch and use them in other ones - I have a lot of ideas.

Story

In terms of the story, I’ve been pondering the destructive nature of capitalism a lot lately and that felt like a good metaphor to bring in here - it just connected.

The planet where the triangle belongs has been destroyed by a corporation - not necessarily maliciously, but in a bid to extract it of all valuable resource.

I have this image in my mind of something called a “Mill” that the planet is put through. The remnants create an asteroid field in which you find yourself.

The game essentially starts off with seeking vengeance. Victory - at least over the corporation - is not possible. You can get stronger, much stronger, and you can get to a place where you can beat the waves with relative ease - but the waves never end!

I have been pondering a softer ending, a choice that the player can make, when they’ve had enough - but I’m reluctant to give that away.

On pondering this. I realised this could also be a quiet metaphor for depression. Having been through it in my life, I could feel a connection. What if the triangle is indestructible?

Actually, that would improve the flow - no game over screen, and no respawn. All the machinery and installations on the ship could be destroyed, but the core of the ship - that always remains. You can always keep fighting.

Gameplay

Scavenge

Starting off in an asteroid field, you’re able to scavenge materials. The ship starts off with a smelter, a factory, and some basic power. You can refine materials and construct buildings to get stronger.

Each sector will get more difficult. I thought about being able to travel vertically and horizontally, but in the end, I decided to make it a vertical scroller. A two dimensional map might be more interesting, but it also brings annoying choices, particularly in terms of wondering whether you should have gone another way.

By putting the game on some form of rails, you have a smaller context to think about - and you can focus on fun. I am reminded of Raptor: Call of the Shadows, a game that I loved in the 90’s.

Raptor had shops, but I want to do a super simplified factory aspect. Every upgrade should feel earned — constructed, not found. I want to feel that progress is made entirely by the actions of the player.

There will still be randomisation, but it will be limited to the mods that are spawned on the items that are constructed. The player gets to decide what items to build.

I want the crafting to be as deterministic as possible, but while also keeping it interesting.

Figuring it out

There are no (traditional) tutorials or help sections. This decision will put a lot of pressure on getting the UI/UX intuitive and easy to use. However, it will also help maintain flow and keep every bit of progress feeling earned.

Items will have descriptions and details so that the user can make choices, but it is about experimentation and exploration. I would also like a component, something like a computer that can be installed. The idea is that this can do analysis of items and mods and give you details of clear and easy to understand benefits and disadvantages. Not just what attributes change, but how it will impact gameplay. I can’t be perfect, but it must be accurate, and be able to provide enough information to be able to decide whether it’s worth a try.

The intention is that this computer can act a bit like the guide that you would otherwise google.

Each sector increases difficulty, but is infinite in itself. After traveling for a bit, you will be offered an exit. If you keep going, exits will be offered at regular intervals - but you can just keep going.

You are dropped into a universe and every step is up to you to figure it out.

Aesthetic

I can hear the synthwave tracks that play in the background already (it could be because I’ve been listening to a lot of synthwave recently). It feels right and thematic to the original Asteroids.

The graphics, at least initially is going to be simple and shape based, again thematic. I’ve been pondering whether and how the graphics would get updated as you get through the sectors. The start of it is going to be black and white with little hints of colour. As you progress, you’ll get more and more colour and the vibrancy increases, sometimes in leaps and bounds. It could be a metaphor for the journey of recovery.

The sound effects should also have a strong 80s vibe. I want it to feel like you’ve been transported to the 80s but if it happened in 2025.

triangle

As a name, at least for the time being, I’ve settled on triangle. It is a passion project - I have a vision and a strong idea of how I want to feel playing it.

At its heart, triangle is about (re)building - a game where every piece of progress feels personal.

I would like to share it with the world and am looking for feedback, thoughts ideas and supporters.

If the idea or any of the concepts resonate with you, I’d love to hear from you.

Other Posts

• Next: Basic Gameplay

Updates

2025-05-31: Added devlog #0 on youtube
2025-05-21: Added an itch.io page

Inspired by Asteroids, ARPGs like Last Epoch, and factory games, triangle blends fast-paced combat with deterministic crafting and a focus on flow. There are no tutorials - just intuitive design, thoughtful feedback, and space to explore.

At its heart, it’s a quiet metaphor for recovery: from black-and-white beginnings to vibrant growth, you always survive - and you always rebuild.

Links

• Posts
• YouTube Channel
• Itch.io
• TIGSource

Truth be told - it also very nearly killed me! I had a breakdown which left me an emotional and mental wreck, as if I’d been hit by a bus (10 points if you tell me which one!)

It has taken me the better part of 15 years to recover from that, and in the meantime I tried working for others and I enjoyed it. In the end, though, I think once you have run your own company for a while, it is incredibly difficult to do anything else. It was inevitable that if I ever got well enough, that I would want to start something of my own again.

It was a long and hard journey, but I am finally better, and I am ready to start again. I am taking all the hard earned lessons into this venture, and I want to do it even more differently this time.

I promised myself that this time around, I would:

• Surround myself with people who will challenge me and expand my perspective.
• Accept the fact that I do not have all the answers
• Do things the way that we are meant to:
  • Bring in expertise we do not have
  • Have someone in the team right from the start focused on marketing
  • Technically, BDD, TDD, Agile, Lean, ““The only way to go fast is to go well””
• Focus on people first
• Focus on the journey, not the destination

One thing I realised as part of this journey is that doing things differently means that all the tools, technologies, and processes out there don’t quite fit.

With #muster, we are starting with one of the easier parts, and streamlining the developer experience. We are ending up building a lot of other things in the process, but they all take longer.

With choosing to do things in a very different way, we don’t know exactly how it’ll all pan out, but it will an interesting journey

Project Stargate: $500,000,000,000(i.e. $500b, the GDP of Singapore) in AI over the next four years, starting with $100,000,000,000 (i.e. $100b, the GDP of Bulgaria). https://lnkd.in/getadcFN

These numbers boggle the mind. The California fires have been estimated to cost between $250b and $275b, which is just about half the total investment into Project Stargate.

How much of this money is likely to be spent on mitigating bias? What about on exploring the risks of AI? I don’t mean AGI, Singularity, or about AI taking jobs. I mean the day-to-day risks to ordinary people: the spreading of misinformation and biases. We all saw the damage that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica brought to the world. How much more damage could this cause?

How might these new tools be used to manipulate, control and oppress? How might these tools further marginalise those who are already disaffected?

Yes, there might be fantastic breakthroughs, but at what cost?

I am somehow reminded of the poem “First they came…”:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—
And there was no one left to speak for me.

The Manhattan Project, which built the first Nuclear bomb, cost $2 billion, which, adjusted for inflation, comes to $27 billion. America wants to spend almost 20 times that amount over roughly the same time on Project Stargate.

I apologise for the doom & gloom, but I have genuine concerns about the risks at play here. How about you? Are you worried, excited or both?

Dave uses the example of Agile, which is a sore topic for many. He talks about how selling shrinkwrapped agile is not going to work, because it is different for each company, and each team. It has to be custom fit.

It’s hard to disagree. I do think though that a lot of the practices that are talked about as being the “best,” are good practices. However, a challenge is that a lot of these practices depend upon or are meant to encourage “good mindsets.” The mindsets are far more valuable than the practice itself.

The question then becomes about how prepared an organisation or team is to shift their mindset. As you probably know, it sometimes feels like it would be easier to move the earth than some mindsets.

I encourage people to consider practices (good, bad and ugly) with a critical perspective to understand the mindset behind it. Only then is the question of relevancy capable of being answered. If the mindset that is encouraged can be achieved in another way, that could be your version of that practice.

The problem, of course, is that communication is difficult, and our ability to perceive possibilities is limited by our own perspectives. Sometimes, it takes a period of trying out a practice before we can begin to understand its potential value.

What do you think about best practices? Are there universal ones?

Agile really shines here. In fact, it was agile that pointed out that the original estimates (which we thought was pessimistic) was actually still optimistic. The two weeks of user story mapping saved us a great deal of pain.

As Robert C. Martin puts it:

Planning can destroy hope… and show us just how screwed we are.

By constantly reassessing plans, Agile gives us an early warning system when things are slipping.

I used to think that the point of Agile was to be faster. The book Clean Agile argues that the point is to fail sooner.

In our case, Agile gave us an early warning system. It killed hope before hope killed the product.

Instead of going into overdrive and being a workaholic (again), we simplified scope, adjusted the deadline and found a better balance.

We like to think of this as the way of the tortoise.

How has Agile helped/impeded you and your team?

He looked out at the world,
Everywhere he looked,
Everyone he knew,
Led their life carefully,
Moved through crowds cautiously,
Stayed far from the ledge.

It took many years,
Jumping off many cliffs,
Chasing butterflies,
Breaking his little heart,
many, many times.

He understood the fear,
He felt it as he lay on the floor,
cradling himself,
Afraid to open the door,
Afraid to get up,
Afraid to breathe,
Letting the darkness take him.

The fear permeated him,
Every pore, nook and cranny,
A darkness with no beginning,
A darkness with no end.

Forsaken!

Cold!

Afraid!

Alone!

Flicker,
Flicker,
Flicker,
Hope.

Step...
Step...
By,
Step...

Into...
The light.

There once was a man,
And he was brave!

You can tame this by setting:

I dropped this into my .bashrc, and it instantly reduced background memory pressure. One gig is plenty for most compile-and-run tasks during development.

Reactive vs Traditional Spring Web

I began by reviewing performance comparisons between Spring MVC and WebFlux. Reactive Web generally comes out ahead in benchmarks, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

In our use case—web notifications—the benefit of reactive patterns depends heavily on how data is delivered. If we were polling, the advantage would be limited. However, with Server-Sent Events (SSE), Spring’s support aligns directly with Reactive Web, making WebFlux the more appropriate choice for this part of the system.

The Deployment Constraint

Ideally, I would have started with a monolith: a single deployable artifact combining both the Kafka Streams logic and the API. This option would have simplified initial development and allowed us to iterate quickly. But at the client, the platform does not allow deploying a Kafka Streams app and an API within the same Kubernetes deployment.

This effectively rules out a true monolith, even for a prototype.

Options Considered

Shared Library with Thin Deployments

A middle ground was to build the core logic in a shared library and have lightweight deployments wrap around it. This would allow the streams app and the API to share code without needing to make HTTP calls between them.

The downside: these services are no longer independently deployable. But given our team size and velocity goals, this compromise might be acceptable.

Full Microservices

Another option was to separate the services entirely:

• Streams service (Kafka, plus domain-specific logic)
• Web API (for delivering notifications)
• Subscription API (managing notification subscriptions)

This adheres more closely to the single responsibility principle, especially as we move from PoC to MVP. However, it adds deployment and coordination overhead.

Application Profiles

A third hacky option was to control which parts of the app run using environment-based profiles. For example, we could disable Kafka in dev or use conditional beans to keep deployments clean. While not ideal long-term, it offers flexibility for early stages.

Conclusion

Constraints matter. While I lean toward monoliths for rapid delivery in small teams, platform limitations forced a hybrid approach. We intend to evolve into microservices over time, but only when the benefits clearly outweigh the cost.

Have you faced similar deployment constraints that shaped your architecture? I’d love to hear how you navigated them.

Things are a little better in the non-profit sector. Sure, the currency may be different, with a focus on “doing good” but in my experience, compassion is not a high priority. Justice is often a key element, as is fairness, but compassion is often forgotten.

We human animals have been in survival mode for so long, for so many generations, that we are all carrying around bags and bags of trauma. Few of us do not have real childhood traumas, even if most are unaware of them. According to the UK Trauma Council, “One in three children and young people are exposed to at least one potentially traumatic event by the time they are 18.” Add to this the influence of your parents and family, how much *They F*** You Up*, and we are all in a pretty dire state right out of the gate.

After an incredibly bad burnout and several years of being unable to work, I started my therapeutic journey in mid-2016. It was only through this intense and challenging but healing and learning journey over several years that I was finally able to go back to work (in January 2019).

This journey helped me understand just how much trauma was in my life and how trauma begets trauma.

Will Bowen said, “Hurt people hurt people.” We are all hurt, so we hurt others, sometimes intentionally, often unintentionally. I think there is a corollary to this — hurt people get hurt. The hurts we carry around leave us sensitive to specific triggers. This can put us into a defensive mode that causes a repeat of the pattern, leading to more hurt. You may be able to think of some examples of this happening to you.

Why does it matter? We are all professionals. Shouldn’t we “man up” and leave all this stuff at home? Toxic masculinity aside - this is not possible. We are human, and no matter how much we try, it is impossible to separate our traumas or hurts from our day-to-day existence.

Most of us spend most of our time at work (and recovering from it). We do this believing that it will all eventually be worth it - perhaps when we retire or finally make enough money to take a step back. Are we trapped in the promise of the future? I was! Do we have the mental space to realise when we get to that destination? Are we trapped in Stockholm, at the mercy of the prison we have built for ourselves?

Mindfulness aside, how can we make our day-to-day life more enjoyable? How can we make the journey more valuable than the destination? Ultimately, the destination is the same for all of us. Should we be rushing to get there? (If the idea sounded even remotely appealing, I would encourage you to consider finding a good therapist - they do wonders!)

I think it all begins with compassion, starting with compassion for oneself. What if we could create an environment where failure is not an option — not because we must succeed at any cost, but because nothing that happens is considered a failure? What if mistakes are not chastised but used as opportunities to learn from?

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
— Thomas A. Edison

How do we build an environment where innovation, imagination, and creativity thrive? I believe the key here is a sea change to the fundamental attitude and purpose of the organisation. We can create this environment by making the organisation’s primary focus collaboration (with everyone who wants to collaborate) and making compassion the most vital tool of that collaboration.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have deep pockets, so I still need to worry about paying the bills. We also do not (yet) live in a “Star Trek”-like universe where money is no longer critical to society. How will we pay the bills if we focus on something other than commercial viability?

Today, while co-working, someone (thanks, Mike) suggested an alternative integration, currently not available but potentially equally (or more) valuable. What if we link ClickUp (or other productivity platforms like JIRA) to Slack? The idea would be to create a Slack channel for any tickets that are in the OPEN state.

ClickUp <–> Slack

The user would start by linking up and authenticating with Slack. They would then need to authenticate with ClickUp (more integrations in the future). Once this is done, GiToLink can link the user’s ClickUp account with their Slack account.

When the user opens a new ticket (moving from TODO to any open state), GiToLink automatically creates a new Slack channel and adds the assignees. The channel description will be the ticket description, and any files will also be uploaded/linked to the channel. There will also be links back to the ClickUp ticket.

Any comments already on the ticket would be created in the Slack channel as messages attributed to the relevant user, where possible.

Once the channel has been created, any additional comments in ClickUp will be added as a message into Slack and vice versa.

All the messages in the Slack channel would be synchronised with the ticket in ClickUp. It could ease communication around the relevant tickets, increase visibility and improve productivity.

Challenges

Channel Proliferation

The biggest challenge is that everyone would end up with several more Slack channels. In an agile environment, each individual within a team should only have a handful of tickets that are relevant to them, and the team should be limited to 9 people. There should be one ticket each person is working on, and perhaps one or two they have handed off to another team member. The product owner might want visibility on all the tickets the team is working on, which in a large team could be (theoretically, at least) around nine.

Most people likely have around 15 channels (or fewer), and doubling that is problematic.

Invite only Owner + Assignee

One way to mitigate this is to invite only the Owner and the assignees of the ticket to the channel, and when assignees change, any new assignees are added to the channel.

The product owner will likely still get inundated with channels, assuming they create the majority of tickets.

Disable automatic channel inclusion

An option that lets them opt out of automatic channel inclusion may be enough. They can be manually invited into the channel if and when required. In this case, though, the person assigned to a ticket could end up in a channel alone.

Channel Sections

Slack allows you to have channel sections, mitigating the larger list of channels by separating the ClickUp channels into a specific section.

Value

Another challenge we have to address is whether such an integration adds enough value. Can we streamline communication enough to save time, money, and effort? Can we capture and store more relevant information in each ticket?

Streamline Interactions

If we can load up all the information from the ticket into the Slack channel, the person working on the ticket may no longer need to open up ClickUp in another window/tab/workspace. Fewer windows open mean fewer distractions and better focus.

If more information is needed or there is a question, you can pull the person into the channel to ask the question, making the process of chatting about a ticket easier.

We can provide some additional interaction buttons in the channel for changing the ticket status or re-assigning it to someone else, further reducing the requirement for having the ClickUp app open during the lifetime of a ticket.

If this tool proves its value, we could have an additional channel to track the current sprint, showing the highest priority tickets so that a user can pick up a new ticket on Slack. This channel could provide high-level updates from the sprint tickets.

Alternatively, when the user closes (or re-assigns) their only open ticket, it could automatically open and assign the next relevant ticket to the user. This automation might be one too far.

Communication Trail

Since a Slack channel is dedicated to each ticket/issue/task, this encourages each user to have conversations related to that ticket in its Slack channel rather than in direct messages. These interactions are now captured within the channel and in the ClickUp ticket for reference later. Having a single source of all communication related to that ticket is easier.

What’s Next

Overall, I think the value added by integrating ClickUp tickets into Slack channels is much higher than the risks posed by the challenges.

I still have questions about commercial viability which I will continue to explore alongside the exploration of the technical implementation.

In the meantime, I would also like to collect all feedback on issues, challenges, benefits and potential additional functionality. If you have any thoughts on this, please reach out to me — either on site or on LinkedIn

Updates

• 2025-03-01: GiToLink is now #muster

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In my mind, a good agile team works in this fashion. The team has a shared vision, a goal and everyone is empowered to make choices they feel contributes to progress to the shared goal.

With my recent post on collaboration, I have been thinking about how a concept like this applies within a truly collaborative environment. In the quote, there is clearly a group of people and one of them wants to build a ship. We do not know what the rest of the group desires. In the context of traditional leadership, what the rest of the group wants is importance mainly in the context of understanding how their wants and needs align with those of the ones in leadership.

Within this context, collaboration is often seen as something the team does for the purpose of achieving the goals or the vision set forth by leadership.

Having been through the gauntlet of various levels of company ownership and levels of leadership, the only thing I feel I have ascertained is that I don’t really like any of it. In positions of leadership, the amount of responsibility and pressure is immense and the higher up the ladder you go, the lonelier the job is.

Being a team member with no leadership responsibilities is liberating. There is a great deal of joy in being able to physically and metaphorically shut the computer down at the end of the day and be done with the job. The rest of your life is yours. The downside, on the other hand, is that I disagreed with (at least) half the decisions made. With little power to improve the quality of life of myself or my fellow team members — mainly because ultimately what was important was the bottom line, not quality of life.

Which brings me to the question: how do you build a collaborative environment where the traditional boundaries of leaders and members are dissolved?

I find the first challenge here is finding like minded people. Having the motivation to build a highly collaborative team is only half the challenge if the people in it are trapped in traditional team roles of member or leader — or even worse, manager!

How easy is it to find someone able to see the possibility of a different way of working when we have all been stuck in the rut of us vs them, infinite growth and shareholder value? How easy is it to then learn to put aside our differences, our childhood traumas and our baggage to be able to express our authentic thoughts and desires without triggering our defence mechanisms or letting our emotional baggage leak out? How much does it matter?

Hurt people hurt people, and humanity struggles to cooperate and collaborate mainly because of our hurts — the ones we are unable to heal and recover from. Because our hurts, particularly from childhood, are so strongly seared in us, we see danger when anything close to our hurts presents itself. Like a soldier who ducks and covers when they hear a car backfire — we all go into defensive mode when something familiarly scary comes into our vicinity. Unfortunately for a lot of us, we live in a world full of little triggers — some of which may be so small that they are undetectable — but it impacts our mood and our ability to reason.

We live in the belief that what is good for “the machine,” is good for the individual - be it capitalism, the government, or society. What if we worked on the basis of the opposite.

Not all those who wander are lost.
— J. R. R. Tolkien

You don’t have to take my word for it. Kate Vitasek on Forbes talks about how widespread collaboration will make the world a better place including some excellent examples.

Personally, there are few things that bring me greater joy or a sense of fulfillment than being involved in something collaborative. It can be as simple as a tête-à-tête or as complex as a large scale project of some form. I love watching the efforts of a group of people come together into glorious fruition. Perhaps that’s why I ended up leading teams, often delivering incredibly difficult, apparently impossible challenges.

One severe burnout and several adventures later, I am at a place in my life where I am pondering next steps. Having run my own company for almost two decades, I have a personal style of working, which makes working in a corporate environment more challenging for me. I would like to start my own company again, perhaps on the basis of a product, either of my own, or in partnership with someone else.

Since I have little to no capital (I put almost all of it into buying a house, and the rest went into what we’ll call some poor investment choices), I figured to start with something small. Admittedly, I might run out of money before I get it completed, but I intend to give it a decent shot.

I believe in and follow Lean methodologies, BDD, TDD, DevOps, and most importantly on putting people first. In every job before, I have had to make compromises because the focus was so heavily on commercials. I am taking this opportunity to put my money where my mouth is and follow the methodologies with faith that the commercials will work itself out.

For the product itself, I decided to try and build something like Axolo. I used Axolo at my previous company and absolutely loved it. It is a great collaborative tool that really eases the peer review process. I have only one (but major) complaint about Axolo and that’s the price. $8 per user per month feels incredibly overpriced, particularly when you consider that GitHub charges $4 per month and Slack charge $7.25.

Most businesses consider how they can maximise revenue – how to exploit a marketplace. This is at odds with my people-first philosophy, and I want to turn it around. No exploitation of the market and no maximising of revenue. I want to know what you want – well, what my customers (hopefully, including you at some point) want. I want to consider what a fair fee for the service is – not “what it’s worth” (I am looking at you pharma companies). At its extreme, could the cost per seat be purely the running costs + a reasonable markup? Product development could be funded by an additional revenue stream where the interested users pay into the features they are interested in – essentially democratising the roadmap.

I also believe in transparency, so I will also aim to be as transparent about everything as possible. While I want this to work, with my limited capital, it is possible that I will run out of money before this starts to make enough money and I might have to go to plan B and find myself a contract or permanent role. At that point, it is possible that any updates here will quickly stop.

In that event, I will consider open sourcing whatever I have completed so that it can be put to good use.

On that note, I should probably introduce myself. I am Shri and I ran kraya, a digital technology company for 15+ years. I have extensive experience in leadership and tech, having played a huge range of roles within the digital sector including CEO, CTO, Technical Architect, Software Engineer, Systems Engineer, DevOps etc. etc. etc.

As I mentioned at the start, I love collaboration and feel that it’s my superpower – or at least my favourite power. I would love to hear your thoughts – please ping me a message on LinkedIn and I’ll do my best to respond.

You could write end to end tests, but it means a deployment after each change and then checking the logs to see what failed. Even if you use iac (terraform/pulumi), the deployment will take seconds or a minute or two - not exact rapid test feedback.

What I have been doing is to set up a hook which is called from the lambda handler, which can also be called locally. Within the test, I then assume the role that runs the lambda and then test the hook.

This mechanism allows to me easily test that the permissions are set up correctly and that details are in place for the code to work.

For the full end to end test, I then have a simple smoke test or two.

The code samples are in golang(only because it happens to be my current language of choice), but the idea should be equally applicable in other languages.

Assuming The Role

the cfg is then passed into the New method for the resource you are interested in. e.g.:

Working Example

You can find a full, working example test in my github repo under post/2023/11/autolambdatest

NOTE: It WILL automatically try and deploy a role and a ssm parameter, and it will delete it after the test.

The BeforeSuite will deploy the minimum configuration to be able to run the test, and the AfterSuite will destroy the same stack.

You will likely need to log into pulumi to get this test to work.

If you run into permissions issue for AssumeRole, read on.

AssumeRole Permissions

For this to work, the user running the tests need to have permissions to AssumeRole.

There are two steps to this. The first part is to allow "anyone" to AssumeRole the relevant role:

You can add it to your ~/.bazelrc (it needs the path to be absolute)

From our integration tests, we run pulumi stack output (or in some cases pulumi up) through the automation API before we run the tests so that we can

• Confirm that the stack is up
• Get the relevant parameters (actual names of lambdas / dynamo db tables etc.)

However, since we use bazel for our tests, we ran into a small problem in that Bazel (rightly) prevents the tests from writing to anything outside the sandbox. This restrictions results in this error

Unit tests are designed to run as fast as possible, so any slower processes like databases are mocked out. While super helpful and powerful in terms of providing confidence in the software, it should be only one part of the testing strategy.

Integration tests, as is implied runs tests of the different part of the software integrated together. Technically speaking, you can still mock out the database and other slower layers to keep it running quickly. However, there is value in including a database or other slower services in the process to test as them in an automated fashion.

What this does mean though, is that you want to be able to run only the unit tests or run the integration tests as well. You might also want to have smoke tests, which are run on your live production environment.

How

You could define a separate target in your BUILD file with the unit tests and let gazelle automatically build your default test target with all the tests. I found this frustrating to use as I had to keep tweaking the dependencies manually whenever anything changed (which happened often)

Tagging

The easiest way to achieve this for golang and bazel is to tag your source code files. You can do this by adding the following to the top of your integration test files

something_integration_test.go

You can pick any tag name you want instead of integration_test like integration, smoke_test etc.

IDE Support

You will likely need to add this source file into the IDEs build constraints to get the IDE to treat it as a source file. In IntelliJ (IDEA/Goland), you will be warned of this

If you click Edit settings, you can add the tag in

When running gazelle, you want to include the files with these tags

Gazelle

If you have multiple tags, you can separate them with commas. This command will generate a test target with all of the source files and its dependencies

Bazel Integration on test

To run only the unit tests, you test as normal:

To run the integration tests as well, include that tag

Run only Unit Tests

This setup will currently not allow you to run ONLY the integration tests. To be able to do that you'll need to add a unit_test tag to the unit test files so that you can exclude them.

You can then run only the unit tests with

Only the integration tests

Or both:

Simpler gazelle command

You can enable the tags by default in the BUILD file so that you don't have to pass the tags into gazelle each time.

BUILD

You can then just run bazel run //:gazelle which will run with these tags enabled.

Sample Source

You can find sample source code demonstrating this in my github repo, under post/2023/11/separatetests

This is lifted straight out of their golang example code, so if you're working in another language - you should be able to find the relevant code in the same repo

In Pulumi, the function URL is created after the function (and even otherwise), I can't pass the output of the lambda (or lambdaFunctionUrl) back in as an environment variable. Fortunately, there is an easy way to pick up the Function URL (or the function name for that matter) - if you know how ;)

There are other defined lambda function environment variables as well that you can use.

I used to configure Pulumi to be triggered directly from the build process, but bazel (as far I know), does not support Pulumi. When I used pants, there was a custom module, developed by one of the community members which did support pulumi (You might have to ask in the slack channel if you're interested), but they stopped maintaining it as they moved to the Pulumi Automation API.

I am using Automation API from the start, and configuring a "deployer" per product/project within the monorepo. The intention is for the deployer to be as smart as possible - eventually up-ing only the stacks that have changes since the last time- but that's a way down the line.

Another benefit from the Automation API is to pick up the stack outputs automatically when running integration/e2e tests, making the test configuration smoother.

The first step is to be able to define a stack within a product, hook it into the main iac executable and have it working. My directory structure is roughly as below: While I am using golang as my language of choice, it's probably not hugely different in other languages.

• products
  • productA
    • auth
      • iac_auth
        • BUILD
        • deploy.go
        • Pulumi.dev.yaml
        • Pulumi.yaml
      • OtherAuthModules
    • iac
      • BUILD
      • main.go

iac_auth/BUILD

iac_auth/deploy.go

One of the requirements we have is to build a lambda module and then deploy it. The lambda module is a target being built by Bazel (golang, but shouldn't matter):

We then have the iac module, which should get the built version of the above module, so that it can then upload it into lambda

There are two key parameters here to note:

• args: We generate the path to the target module using //products/productA/module/lambda_module)
• data: We use the data tag to ensure that the built output is included when building/running this target

We then need to use runfiles support within golang to be ablet to identify the correct location for the built binary. The reason this part is complex is to be able to support multiple operating systems. I should caveat that I have only got this working on Linux, but Mac/Win shouldn't be too different.

We use the flag module to retrieve the path passed in as a runtime parameter

We use runfiles.Rlocation to pick up the "real" path to the file, prepending the workspace name to the start. You can define the workspace name in the root WORKSPACE file with workspace(name = "workspace_name")

Finally, resolve the Symlink to get the actual file path

References

There are similar mechanisms to find the rLocation in other languages, a couple of which are described in its design document

There is some documentation in rules_go around accessing go_binary from go_test which I referenced and updated to get the above example

I found the above link from a stackoverflow post about feeding bazel output to another bazel rule

First things first, the way it works in C++, at least in Visual Studio, unlike in Java is that the tests are set up in a separate project, but within the same solution. I will try and remember all the steps I had to undertake to set this up.

This, however, is not the only requirement. When testing, since we can have only one main function in the final executable, it also makes sense to put all of your code, apart from the main function for your application in another project.

In summary, you end up with three projects

• Your Solution
  • Static Library with all your code *except* the main function
  • Executable project with your main function (linked with your static library above)
  • Tests project (again, linked with your static library above.

Once you have this set up, you will want to add a reference to the static library from both the executable project and the tests project

Finally, you will also have to update the linker to link with the library project. I am sure there is a better way of doing this, but I did it by right clicking the project -> Properties -> Linker -> General:

Additional Library Directories -> and adding in something like “$(SolutionDir)<lib-folder>\$(IntermediateOutputPath)*.obj”

You may have to add the same into Linker -> Input -> Additional Dependencies.

Hope that helps

Here is a simple solution, a combination of https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/341277/25975 and https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/28520/25975

Add the following functions into your ~/.bashrc It will push the current title and icon into a stack and pop it afterwards.

Restart bash / log out and back in, and it should work.

For security reasons, it is not possible to query the current title of the terminal. However, with the following command, you can push the current one on to a stack

The title can then be set to anything, by ssh for example. You can then pop that back from the stack using

The main step is to go into the settings in Docker Desktop -> Resources and make sure that your distribution is enabled for docker.

1. Make sure that you have no docker packages installed on your WSL distribution. Docker Desktop will deploy its own binaries, and any pre-existing binaries will confuse it. This issue exhibited itself for me with errors related to missing files around credentials.
2. Remove any DOCKER_HOST environment variables. Docker Desktop will sort it out. Docker kept hanging for me until I fixed this.
3. If you want to use docker as non-root user, add yourself to the docker group.

Errors / Issues I ran into:

docker.credentials.errors.InitializationError: docker-credential-desktop.exe not installed or not available in PATH - Fixed by 1 above.

docker-compose from WSL2 errors out - Again, fixed by 1

Unable to run docker as non-root user - fixed by 3.

Docker hangs when run as non-root user - fixed by 2.

In addition to this, according to issue #179, there are a few other caveats

• The file name has to be the same as the module name
• The store should go in ~/store, not ~/store/modules
• You have to export default your module classes

In fact, picking up all the installed packages on Windows seems be a bit cryptic. There are API calls you can make and I considered JNI. I suspect this might be a superior solution, but I haven't tried it and I read that it may be slow.

After much research, I came across ListPrograms. My initial thought was to link to it using JNI. However, it seemed simple enough to warrant a rewrite in Java if I could access the registry somehow.

This is where JNA and the Advapi32Util class came in handy.

It didn't take me long to put together a quick replica of behaviour. I skipped out the part about user installed programs because it isn't relevant for me (yet).

I also missed out issues which will be around when running it as part of a 32bit VM within a 64bit OS.

You can find JavaListApps at GitHub

This is a collection of the things I learnt developing a simple JavaFX app over the last month or two. My background is very much in Java EE with decades of experience building high end, high-performance ticketing systems. This means that my expectation from a development environment is relatively high. There are many optional components in here that I find worthwhile setting up at the start, but are not necessary

Tools

Maven

One of the most useful tools I have found while working with Java is maven. If maven isn't a part of your build, have a look at it and re-evaluate that. I have no doubt that maven has saved me hundreds, if not thousands of hours over the last few years.

JavaFX Scene Builder

While this one has a bunch of issues and serious limitations, it can still be a helpful tool. It helped me get a handle on the components available and placing items.

Libraries

Testing

I use junit5, but there are other options like test-ng which are equally good. I use **Mockito **for mocking, but there are many other options like PowerMock, JMockit, EasyMock, etc.

For UI Testing, you can use TestFX. I don't like UI work, so haven't done much work with this.

    org.junit.platform
    junit-platform-launcher
    1.2.0
    test


    org.junit.jupiter
    junit-jupiter-engine
    5.2.0
    test


    org.junit.vintage
    junit-vintage-engine
    5.2.0
    test



    org.mockito
    mockito-core
    2.18.3
    test

Logging

I can’t live without logging in any application. It can make troubleshooting much easier, particularly when you’ve deployed your app. log4j2 is the main logging framework out there. You can choose another one if you like, but I strongly recommend having and using one.

    org.apache.logging.log4j
    log4j-slf4j-impl
    2.11.0


    org.apache.logging.log4j
    log4j-api
    2.11.0


    org.apache.logging.log4j
    log4j-core
    2.11.0

Dependency Injection

If you have working the Java EE Environment, you have almost certainly come across Inversion of Control,  particularly in the form of Dependency Injection. I love dependency injection. It helps with decoupling components and with testing. I looked at various frameworks including Dagger 2, Spring, Guice.

Dagger

The fully static (compile time) nature of Dagger 2 means that it doesn't gel well with JavaFX which is very dynamic.

Spring

I had worked with Spring many years ago and didn't want to tangle with a behemoth for a small project. There are many components and loads of functionality in spring and if you building a large and complex project, it might be worth it.

Google Guice

Google Guice is the framework that I ended up going with. It does have some dependencies like Guava, but as it turned out, I Guava comes in handy for JavaFX anyway. We don't need an entry in the pom.xml for this because of the following dependency.

Gluon Ignite

Gluon Ignite was released by gluon labs to integrate Dependency Injection frameworks with JavaFX. In other words, it ties in the DI framework with the FXMLLoader so that it will load the correct controller instances. Since I am using Guice, I needed the ignore-guice module. If you add this into your pom.xml, it will also pull in google guice. Easy eh? ;)

    com.gluonhq
    ignite-guice
    1.0.2

If you don't want to add another dependency, you could take a look at the code in this module. It's fairly straightforward to integrate that manually into your app. It's just easier to add in the dependency and let it do the magic

Event / Publisher / Subscriber Framework

It is likely that you will need an event framework or a publisher/subscriber framework. The nature of GUI design and work is that it is an easy and simple solution for a number of problems you will come across. Fortunately, we already have an event framework in place within Guava which is a dependency of Google Guice.

Project Lombok

Don't you love adding in a getter and a setter for each field? When you change your fields, don't you love going in and updating all the getters and setters? How about defining the long, pita to type types with generics of variables that you are assigning from a method call? I mean the compiler can't possibly figure that out by itself, right? How about writing out the toString, equals and hashCode for each class? What do you mean no, you don't? You don't love these tedious repetitive tasks of development? Good! You will love Lombok. Unfortunately, with Lombok, it's not as simple as adding it into your pom.xml. Check out the install instructions on their website for you IDE etc. You also need it in your pom.xml.

    org.projectlombok
    lombok
    1.18.0
    provided

There is some controversy around Lombok. There is a good post on stackoverflow that covers some of these things in a reasonable fashion.

Apache Commons

Last but certainly not least, we have apache commons. This is a collection of libraries rather than a single one. You know all those bits of code you write over and over. Chances are that there is something in here that does it better and in a simpler way.

Persistence

TBC

Packaging

TBC

I currently upload a few videos a week and this involves:

• Copying and pasting various bits of text for:
  • The description
  • The title
• Copying and pasting in the tags, and adding any additional ones
• Scheduling the video
• Adding to playlist
• Generating and uploading a thumbnail
• Scheduling a tweet

YerToob tries to automate all of the above. It works by defining templates for the description and the title using tags.

Title Template Example

Description Template Example

Tags

There are a set of tags associated with each playlist and with each episode. These are combined together and set against the video.

Schedule

You can select which days of the week a video should be uploaded in each playlist. You also select the time at which it should be published.

The app will then schedule them accordingly.

Playlist

Each video is added to the relevant playlist automatically.

Thumbnails

The app will pick up a screenshot from one folder, put the specified overlay image on top, and then scan and overlay another image on top based on the episode number. The thumbnail is then set against the video.

Tweet

You define a tweet template:

Link up your Twitter account, and it will post that tweet at the scheduled time.

Finding Videos to Upload

For each playlist, you specify which folder the app should scan for new videos. Each video in that folder is then uploaded. Each video needs to be tagged with an episode number. For example, the 50th episode could be:

If you haven’t already defined the episode details in the app, it will create a new episode with the title of “The 50th Episode” by removing the episode number tag and the file extension.

This can be useful if you don’t have much episode-specific information.

Current Status

I am currently testing this app. If you are interested in further updates, please follow me on Twitter.

Holding me tight,
A little too tight
Holding me close
Hold me closer

A drop rolls down my face,
Another races to my chin,
One is stopped,
By upturned lips.

Is it today or tomorrow,
Maybe it’s yesterday,
Is that the sun I see,
Or is it the moon?

There’s the roses again,
Is that how rainbows smell?
Pitter patter, pitter patter,
All around me.

#01 - Shipwrecked

[We find ourselves shipwrecked on an island we don’t recognise. Let’s explore]{style=“font-weight:400;”}

#02 - Heading East

What's over there in the east of the island? I get stuck, and think it's all over, but there is more.

I got curious about doing it as a series, and here it is

This episodes talks about getting started with Playne

#01 - Getting Started

Let's get started with Playne

#02 - Settling in

Settling into meditating daily

#03 - Time for meditation

Making time for meditation is important

#04 - Layers of the mind

The mind is like an onion - so many layers and it makes you cry.

#05 - Level 2

We get to level 2

#06 - Positive Changes

Have you started seeing positive changes?

#07 - One Week in

That's one week of meditating daily. How do you feel?

#08 - Stick with it

There are definitely benefits to sticking to meditating daily

#09 -

#01 - Signal Fires

A meteor falls from the sky, and everything changes.

#02 - Forgotten Forest

We find a dark forest, forgotten and resistant.

#03 - Cold Shoulder

We witness another calamity, which once again changes everything.

#04 - Drowning Halls

Ice and water in these halls. Do we learn another language?

#05 - Spark

We stumble across Chapter 3 and another language

#06 - Creation City

Explore the rest of Creation City

#07 - Ice Mausoleum

We come across the Ice Mausoleum while exploring and delve into it.

#08 - Winds of Change

We run across Chapter 4 while exploring.

#09 - Shattered Isles

We go into the shattered isles and discover the fourth language.

"100 years in the future, something happened on Mars. Once frequently visited, it is now abandoned with some left behind. Explore and Survive the Red Planet."

~ Memories of Mars

When I saw the game description on steam, I was intrigued. When they were giving out Beta keys, I volunteered and got myself a key. Following are videos put together from maybe around 10 hours of gameplay. Hope you enjoy

#01 - Exploring Mars

Random wanderings, musings and exploration of Mars.

#02 - Building a base

This is mainly the highlights of me figuring out and building a base on Mars :)

#03 - Beta 1 Highlights

Highlights from around 6 hours of gameplay over the Beta 1 Weekend.

I spent a few weeks putting together a quick app to do that for me.

I build it in javafx and it was far too clunky in the end. I dug it out, but it doesn’t compile anymore.

I’ll fix it and make it available, at some point

https://youtu.be/_075xAh0VNM

I had been pondering automated mining in Space Engineers for a long time and I need ponder no longer. I stumbled across this script one fine morning and have implemented it more than once. I absolutely love this script. This video covers how to set it up and various things to consider for maximum mining efficiency.

After much head scratching and metaphorically banging my head against a wall, here are the things I learnt.

Empty Trash

Local Trash

Make sure that have emptied the trash on the VMs .Ubuntu has this issue and so might other distributions

Network Trash

If you have SAMBA enabled on your VMs make sure that the Recycle Bin is not enabled. I have openmediavault running on a VM and I had to go through and disable the Recycling Bin. Make sure that the Recycle bin is emptied. They are hidden folders in the root of your shares.

Correct Driver & Settings

• When setting up the hard drive for your VM, make sure you use virtio-scsi (or just scsi on the web interface).
  • If you disk is already set up using IDE or VirtIO,
    • Delete it. Don't worry, it's only deleting the link. The disk itself will show up in the interface afterwards
    • Double click on the unattached disk and select SCSI and Discard
    • You might have to fix the references to the drive in the OS
• On the Device Screen, make sure discard is selected.

TRIM

Configure the OS to send TRIM commands to the drive

Linux

On Mount

You can pass the parameter discard to any mountpoint and the correct TRIM commands will be sent to the disk. HOWEVER, this is apparently a big performance hit.

To do the actual trim, run

OR to run fstrim on all supported drives

Digital Ocean has a detailed post about setting TRIM and setting up a schedule etc.

Windows

My condolences! Also, I don’t run Windows on any of my VM’s so I have no experience with it.

#01 - Getting Started

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PByyKwJ-ouY

Getting the hang of the game and getting involved with a startup.

#02 - Self Driving Cars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owx83tHERio

Getting involved with self driving cars.

#03 - Optimisin'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9Hd2cV-7GE

Lots of optimisations.

#04 - More Optimisin'

Try my hand at more optimisations and also complete one more task.

#05 - $2,147,483,648

Fail at completing a task because it's just a little too slow. Run into a bug that puts me billions of dollars in debt, effectively ending my playthrough.

Ships

Big Bertha - Leviathan Mining Ship

I got tired of the multiple mining trips I had to do. This frustration led me to build this large mining ship. It took me several hours and more steel plates than I could count. Hope you enjoy this tour

I dusted off my credit card, bought Subnautica and dived right into it. This is what happened.

I will be continuing both these series in parallel.

#01 - Getting my feet wet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZmipiqFrYs

In this episode, I get acquainted with the surroundings and craft myself a knife. I also end up dying  :(

#02 - Let There Be Light

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJkxGAkeeL8&t=1s

I craft a flashlight so I can see in the dark, which is a lot of places / time. I go hunting for materials and end up blowing up :(

#03 - Don't Die

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5XQ3hZ_2i4

The main aim of this episode was to not die. Do I succeed? I also go find a lifepod.

#04 - Lifepod 17

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FugOP8Aczk

I start this episode trying to find some silver, and end up going to find Lifepod 17.

#05 - Explorin'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWCLYEl_zpU

We continue our hunt for silver, lead and the final piece of the seamoth. Trying to remain alive at the same time.

#06 - The Sunbeam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt0yU9c-TRw

We get a message from the Sunbeam telling us that they are about to land. Rescue at last! or is it?

#07 - Lifepod 13

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3YCJ8Z7Dhw

We head out to lifepod 13. On the way back, "Detecting multiple leviathan class lifeforms in the region. Are you certain whatever you're doing is worth it?"

#08 - The Aurora

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0710Yo8Viw

We head over to the Aurora and manage to explore a part of it.

#09 - Time Capsules

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MV_W1HTbjU

We head over to Second Officer Keens lifepod and find a few time capsules along the way.

#10 - Close Encounters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHbejQwsVuM

Try to head over to lifepod 12 which has sunk over 250m, but we don't make it that far. Why not?

#11 - Land Ahoy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYfkuaUCdLU

Head over to the co-ordinates provided by Second Officer Keen. Still scared of water from the last episode.

#12 - The Jellyshroom Habitat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxHVvBqcm-I

Follow the Degasi into the Jellyshroom cave where we discover some treasures.

#13 - Stasis Rifle

https://youtu.be/3wxo_75jfoA

We head back into the Jellyshroom cave looking for Lithium but ending up finding a lot more.

#14 - Wanted: Gel Sack

https://youtu.be/AGEHX0G4dq8

Realising how crucial these little things are, and regretting accidentally eating a bunch of them, I try and find some. Do I succeed?

#15 - Some Base Building

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g20Unqz5bZU

A little bit of base maintenance and upgrades. Making life easier ;)

#16 - Back to the Aurora

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4Yq6BErfM4

We go back to the Aurora, trying to get back into the Prawn Bay.

#17 - Lifepod 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fjh-x79NiQ

We try to find Lifepod 4 which is in Reaper territory. Scary!

#18 - Avoiding Lifepod 12

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdFlpFSea8U

Terrified of going back to lifepod 12, I find something else to do.

#19 - Balls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kMAntYaaps

I visit lifepod 12 (the balls). I then make my way to the Degasi habitat at 500m and run into a field of blue balls. On my way back, Balls! What the hell was that?

#20 - PRAWN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR1Vb7XNJCg

Finally get the parts together to build a PRAWN suit.

#21 - Torpedoes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg70y0OZq2w

Get down the 500m deep Degasi habitat, then decide I probably need some torpedoes.

#22 - Crabsquid Ahoy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MOd5cnGLTM

We head back to the 500m Degasi habitat, torpedoes armed and full of bravery.

#23 - Enforcement Platform

I try and find the island which shot down the sunbeam again and this time, I succeed. Lots of exploration and finding lots of new things.

#24 - Enforcement Platform pt 2

Offload all the loot and go back to the Enforcement Platform for more explorin'. What is that alien device that needed an ion cube?

#25 - What... are... you?

This episode is full of surprises.

#26 - Knowing Me, Knowing Yu

We go looking for Yu's lifepod and find some treasures.

#27 - Scanning Output

Set up a scanning output to try and find fragments a bit easier

#28 - Scanning from Output

Use the new output to try and find fragments for blueprints

drone ah adventures

Space Engineers

The Pilot Series I still have the last video or two, which I never got around to uploading

Academy

Just the one tutorial video

Subnautica

Wet Feet

I got too scared to be able to finish this one

while True; learn()

First Run

Played when it was still pretty early. Run was terminated by a bug.

A lot of the levels also got changed and I was never quite motivated to go back

Memories of Mars

Beta 1 Gameplay

Cut together videos of the beta gameplay.

Epistory

Unfolding the Story

A beautiful game and a lovely story - one that I finished on here

Playne

Daily Meditation

I think I got 30 consecutive days of meditation with this awesome game

Revisiting Playne

Another couple weeks of meditation

The Azure Isle

Shipwrecked

I loved this little game, but I got stuck!

Slay the Spire

Clambering the Spire

Loved this game - I might not have gotten round to uploading the last video

XCom Chimera Squad

Exploring City 31

A great game, but I got distrated.

Book of Demons

Deck Building Diablo

I enjoyed this one for a little bit

I have been watching gameplay videos on youtube for a while now. I have always been inspired by them and wanted to start a series of my own.

I hadn't played space engineers for a few months and had been wanting to go back to it. That made it an ideal candidate to try this on. One thing I always struggled with Space Engineers is that it doesn't have a goal to work towards. To this end, I have tried to come up with a backstory that'll give something to work towards

It was substantially more difficult than it looks to talk and play a game and the first couple of episodes are incredibly stumbly. I share them for posterity, continuity and hopefully to also show how much improvement there is later on, hopefully.

Backstory

A lone space engineer wakes up in his small ship, far away from a home he once knew. There are only a handful of people still awake, with a few thousand people across a few factions in cryo-sleep. A capital ship is being built to house these cryo chambers. Several engineers have been sent out into the galaxies to build a base.

Their mission is to colonise planets, ideally multiple planets, for each of the three factions. With a few hundred to a thousand people in each faction. Once all the habitats have been built, the engineer is to send a radio signal and await the arrival of the cargo.

With the heavy burden of this mission on their shoulders, this space engineer wakes up, caught in the gravitational pull of a blue planet.

Episodes

Below are the episodes already uploaded to youtube.

#01 - Hunting for Uranium

https://youtu.be/GOqmD4lVTGM

In the first episode, we start in a respawn ship within the gravitational pull of Earth. We then move off into space and go hunting for uranium before we run out of power. The most excitement came when I realised that I was running out of oxygen and I hadn't taken a canister with me. Will I die from suffocation? Find out ;)

This is a very noob video, my very first. Also, due to a recording mistake, there are no game sounds on this video :(

#02 - Starting a Base

https://youtu.be/7qVowX5whJ4

We identify a location to start our base out on and start building it in earnest. Partway through, I realise that the scaffolding that I had painstaking built out was way too large, so I tear it down and try to build a small base. I also spend some time mining out a bunch of iron.

This is also a very noob video, though I think there are fewer boring parts (hopefully). The game audio issue is also fixed part way through.

#03 - Furnishing

https://youtu.be/m5Enko3Sxxg

This episode revolves around finishing construction of some of the items inside the base. There was some confusion about how to build a cargo container without dismantling the one on the ship.

This is hopefully starting to get a little better.

#04 - More Furnishings

https://youtu.be/oqEjvVypnlI

Realise that I am running out of oxygen (again) and we don't have an Oxygen Generator or Ice. Fix that first, then build a turret for some protection.

I felt this episode was a lot better.

#05 - The Bug

https://youtu.be/QXClJZm9Hb0

This episode starts with building a rudimentary mining ship which I screw up. I had been away from this game for a while ;) I then fix a bunch of the stuff, do some mining, then fix a bunch of other things.

This episode also felt pretty ok to me.

#06 - The Shredder

https://youtu.be/3w1T7pClos0

In this episode, I build a grinding ship. I then use this ship to grind down the original respawn ship completely. I also reconstruct the roof of the base to be a little tidier. The rest of the episode is spent scouting for resources.

It feels like I need to commentate more. While editing, I realise that there are a few unexpressed thoughts and the sheer amount of time when I am not saying anything still surprises me. A lot more work still to do :)

#07 - The Digger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcBFEOzxyEQ

We build another version of the miner, so that we don't have to deal with the container snafu 'bug' ;) This episode runs a little longer, but we end up with a much better version of the miner which I call the digger. This is a callback to a game that was released in 1983 which I loved growing up :) You can try it online.

I feel that the videos are definitely improving and look forward to hearing what you think :)

#08 - Tim is in Charge

https://youtu.be/6NCFKtMxRnQ

Tidy the base up a bit, plugging the reactor into the conveyor system. I then set up Talendan's inventory management (TIM) to automate the refinery, assembler and the inventories. Set up some LCD panels to see the status of these as well.

#09 - Base Expansion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PmEuCeQu8U&index=9&t=0s&list=PLQb-fOWHIdUzyM-bJllq3QpWdVGDBhC98

Fix a couple of things on the base and start on expanding it.

#10 - The Mole

Build a tiny mining ship using the Vertex Thrust 2 Script. This doesn't go exactly according to plan.

#11 - The Refinery Room

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiqFMIspVHU

Get the framework for the refinery room more or less complete

#12 - The Beaver

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7-unJTywWo

Most of this episode was spent trying to build a small and compact enough welding ship.

#13 - The Refinery Room Pt 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsMY4q_hBHw

We weld up the refinery room and link it up to the rest of the cargo network.

#14 - Misbehavin' Tim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMMrfkdvItM

Start on boring out the refinery room and run into some trouble with Tim too.

#15 - Assembler Jigsaw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq0E45KqhhM

Start putting down assemblers.

#16 - Assembler Room

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vORayj8-f-0

Finish construction of the assembler room.

#17 - Base with a View

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i2N8o9c1KQ

Prettify the base and tidy things up.

#18 - The Storage Room

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcmL3luT_8U

Drilling out the storage room

#19 - Storage Room Complete

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrTGpPYQi0c

Completed the welding and setup of the storage room.

#20 - Control Room

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaAL_MOdghY&t=2s

Tidying up the Control room and preparing the base for pressurisation.

#21 - Fully Automated Mining

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3uaLVomaMo

Using Rdav's AI Autominer Script to put together a fully autonomous mining ship.

#22 - Ant Mk II Better Automated Miner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvLNVdIRlkg

While falling asleep, I had some ideas on how to improve the Ant. I get on with constructing the Ant Mk II.

#23 - Testing the Ant Mk II

https://youtu.be/WhtVJZxtj3E

Wait, why does the ship try and drill through the asteroid sideways?

#24 - Ant Mk II Chassis

We build the Chassis around most of the Ant, send it off mining and start working on airlocks.

#25 - Rotary Airlock

Put in Airlocks and start on getting the base airtight.

#26 - Airtight Refinery Room

We manage to get the refinery room airtight? What was the problem - something I had done right at the start of setting the room up.

#27 - Fully Pressurised

Fix the autominers so they work across reloads. Get the base fully pressurised and move on to the next project.

#28 - Holey Cave

What I wanted was to have the new section to be mostly just rock, or in this case, iron deposits. Do I manage to get it airtight?

#29 - Unholey Cave

Working on making the way to the hanger airtight.

#30 - Fixing Sim Speed

Space Engineers had been dragging for a few episodes. Fix that.

#31 - Way to the Hangar

We make progress building our way towards the hangar.

#32 - Building a Tunnel

Building the tunnel that'll take us to the Hangar.

#33 - Finishing the Tunnels

We finish off the tunnel to the Hangar

#34 - Under the Stairs

We start furnishing under the stairs ;)

#35 - Starting the Hangar

We make our way to the hangar and start on it in earnest.

#36 - Hangar Foundations pt 1

We start putting in the struts that will hold the hangar together

#37 - Hangar Foundations pt 2

We continue our work in putting in the struts around the hangar

#38 - Small Steel Tubes

While putting in the tubing around the hangar, we run out of small steel tubes.

#39 - Automining Without Lag

Try and get the autominers working without lag.

#40 - Faster Mining

Try and speed up automatic mining by attaching several more drills.

#41 - Hangar Foundations pt 3

Putting down another set of foundations for the hangar

#42 - Hangar Foundations pt 4

Piping up the hangar

#43 - The Printer

Build a welding ship and get started on the capital ship.

#44 - Everything is Broken :(

One by one fail by fail. At least, that's how it felt.

#45 - Fixing Things

Try and fix everything that broke in the last episode.

#46 - Making Space

Making more space inside the large grid ship to put things.

#47 - Interior Design

So... What should go inside this brand spanking new ship?

#48 - No More Gold!

We run out of gold while building the jump drive.

#49 - Detaching the Ship

We grind off the supporting beams. Will the ship crash and burn?

#50 - The Big Five O

The fiftieth episode of this series. My first ever YouTube series and it has got to 50 episodes. Hurrah!

#51 - Interior Redesign

I start off with the intention of finishing off the hanger, but end up grinding the whole hangar down.

#52 - Rebuilding the Hangar

We get back on to the hangar and get most of it down

#53 - The Right Wing

No, it's not a political episode, it's about building the wing on the right hand side of the ship.

#54 - Out of Cobalt

Working on the right wing and I run out of metal grids, which as it turned out was because we were out of Cobalt.

Future Plans

The main next plan is to flesh out the base a bit and get a solid starting point. After that, we'll go to the moon. We'll build a moon base with a habitat of some form.

If I am not bored after that, I might try heading to Mars or the Alien planet since I've not been to either of those locations.

Unlikely but would be awesome

In an offline map, kaljack and I were working on building a massive capital ship with hundreds (or thousands) of cryo chambers. The idea being that this ship would contain the remaining people from a now dead civilisation. They are looking for a place to land and call home.

The habitats and the environments we are building are for these people. If we ever finish that capital ship, we'll get it jump into our world and land on one or more of these locations.

Finally

I welcome comments, ideas and thoughts, ideally in the form of compliments ;) but I also welcome constructive criticisms, ideas, questions and requests.

If you like Space Engineers, you might also like games like Space Engineers (by game cupid)\

In a land of sorrow and sadness,
I grew up believing the words of rock n roll,
I believed in fate, destiny, and happily ever after.

In a land of poverty and subservience,
I felt wealthy beyond all comparison,
I was rich with hopes, dreams and fantasies.

In a land of despair and regret,
I grew up and moved away, far far away,
To a land rich and happy, filled with marvels.\

In a land of wealth and influence,
My dreams of fairy tales were dashed,
I experienced misery and pain, day after day.\

In the land of princes and princesses,
I learnt of music full of sadness and anger.
I played the rhythm and the blues day after day,
night after night.

In the land of independence and power,
I felt trapped and powerless,
Life was happening
I fought against it
I grew up,
I lost

Then I met you!

This is an issue in both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. This is due to the fact that drupal doesn't actually delete the data for the field when you delete the field. It deletes the data during cron runs. If cron hasn't been run enough times since you deleted the field, drupal won't let you uninstall the module.

To force drupal to purge the data, you can run the following command

Increase 500 to a high enough number to wipe out the data. Afte this has completed, you should be able to uninstall the module

References:
Module uninstall dependencies (drupal stackexchange)
Message "Required by Drupal (Fields Pending Deletion)" baffles users
Can't uninstall YAML because of following reason: Fields pending deletion

You access the node index endpoint by going to

http://<domain>/<endpoint-pathnode.json (or the alias given to node in the resources section)

You can replace .json with with other extensions to get the same data in different formats

To access the second page, you can use the page parameter

To change the number of items on each page, you need the “perform unlimited index” queries permission. You use the pagesize parameter to change it

To filter a field, you can use the parameters[property] where ‘property’ is the field on which you want to filter. It needs to be a field on the node table, and not a drupal field as it does not do the joins to pull in field data.

To apply a different filter than of equality, you can use options[parameters_op][property] where property is the same as above.

To return fewer fields, you can use fields and comma separate the properties. Once again, you can only specify properties on the entity (i.e fields on the base table)

you can sort the results by using options[property]=<asc|desc>

You can also mix and match these separate options

I set up a pool using 4 2TB SATA disks.

The total size displayed here is the total size of the 4 disks. The maths works as 4*2TB = 8TB = ~7.25TiB

RAIDZ2 is like RAID6 and it uses two disks for parity. Thus, I would expect to have ~4TB or 3.63TiB of available space. I haven’t been able to find this number displayed anywhere.

However, you can find the amount of disk space still available using the following command.

The value of 2.19T is the amount of unallocated space available in the pool. To verify this, you can run

If we add the two numbers here, 1.21T + 2.19T = 3.4T.

5% of disk space is reserved, so 3.63 * 0.95 = 3.4T

et voila

See the love flowing from your heart,
Redirect it all into the other part of your heart
Watch as your heart fills slowly.

Don’t try too hard, let it flow naturally.

When ready, let it overflow, slowly.

Let flow all over your body, cover your entire body with love
Let it flow into your mind, cover all of it with love
Let it flow into your entire being

Now, let it flow outside you,
The barriers that kept that love inside you is gone.

In the middle of your heart is a tunnel that connects you
It connects you to everybody whom you love
Let the love flow.

The love within your being does not diminish.
The newly created love replenishes any that is flowing out.

Let it flow out and it flows through the ones near you.

The love dances with the love from the others

Slowly, bit by bit, dancing, flowing, playing, all of the love merges together.

We are one, particles within an ocean of love.

We are no more, there is only the love.

Fear has gone missing,
A glimmer of it only now and again,
And it hides again.
Every action certain,
Every step sure.

Walking, running, crawling,
always moving.

A moment, a day, a year, an eon,
It all moved the same.

A glimmer in the far
Growing faintly as I draw near.

Walking, running crawling,
Always moving.

Light abound, as far as the eye can see,
Nothing but light
Shadows around,
That and the memories,
Everything else is light.

Standing a crossroad,
Fear has been found,
And it fills the light.
All the courage I could muster
Crushed under the weight of the fear,
Ash in the light

When god created him, and his brothers and sisters, they were all created without gender. There was no need for angels to procreate. Besides, there was no place for sex or other animalistic activities in heaven.

It had taken him millennia but he didn’t regret volunteering for this. He had been preparing for the rapture and it was a lot of work. He didn’t know exactly how many people will be lifted up at the moment of rapture. All he knew is that it could be anywhere between 0 and near enough 7 billion.

He had decided to err on the side of caution and prepare for 7 billion people. Now that is a large welcoming hall and a complicated party to organise.

The biggest one he had done before was for a few thousand people. He had organised music throughout the hall, played by millions of angels. He had rehearsed with them and it took many hundreds of years before he could get them all to be co-ordinated. The timing is complicated to get right in a hall built for 7 billion people.

Halfway through the plans, he had changed the hall too. He felt it might be a little too restrictive, and so he changed it to a meadow. That took many years again. This also threw off all the acoustics and it took many more years to practice for the musicians to get it right again.

He had thought about food and he flip-flopped on whether to provide it. There is no need to eat in heaven, but people are so used to pleasure and comfort of eating, he thought. In the end, he organised food, or at least something like it.

He recruited a few thousand angels to prepare food and drink. One of the benefits of heaven is that things don’t go bad. This meant that they had as much as they needed to prepare all the food.

He watched as platters of food started to pile up on the millions of tables across the meadow. He watched as butterflies floated across the meadow, basking in the late afternoon glow.

Xioban had decided that the feeling of late afternoon would be the ideal time. It would be the time when you get that lull in the day.

While all this was being prepared, he was also negotiating with the four horsemen. They were not big fans of the apocalypse. They had enjoyed their laziness over the years and were not looking forward to doing some actual work.

If they were on earth, they would have gotten fat and useless. Luckily for them, they were immune to such things.

They had spent their time between heaven and hell, partying hard and taking it easy. Xioban had found it difficult to light the fire of enthusiasm within them. They did not share the passion as he did for the rapture. This would have made Xioban sad, but he didn’t have the gift of the rollercoaster ride of emotions. None of the angels were.

Pestilence had been the most vocal

“How many people will my babies have to” he made quotation marks in the air “take care of?”

“I have no idea” Xioban had to admit “but, it’s more than likely no more than maybe a third. I hear the earth has a lot of religious people.”

“Alright, fine!” Pestilence grumbled

Death was a bit more direct

“I better not have to make too many trips. I don’t like Pela getting tired” He looked at his horse as he said this

“Don’t worry about Pela. Your horse, and you can take as much time as you like” Xioban had said.

The other two horsemen had just grumbled. Over the centuries, Xioban would revisit this conversation in one guise or other. Each time, they would complain and they would finally agree.

Over the centuries, he had found that it took longer and longer to get to the point where they agree. While he had found this a trifle worrying, he figured it wouldn’t be an issue. Since there was no deadline, he could take all the time he needed to convince them.

One day, Xioban was basking in the glory of the almighty, in a meadow somewhere. His eyes closed, and his mind still, he heard someone clear their throat. He opens his eyes to find someone standing over him. His (he assumed from the way he was dressed) wings were white and only partly open. He was smiling, as everyone does.

“It’s ready!” He said

“Everything?” Xioban asked, almost surprised. It had been centuries that he had almost forgotten about it.

“Yes, everything.” He said

Xioban smiled, and thanked him.

Xioban got up and made his way to the four horsemen. It might have taken a few minutes, a few hours, or perhaps a few years. Nobody knew, and nobody cared.

He saw them dancing in the moonlight, around a fire. As he walked up to them, they stopped, and from the expression on their face, he suspected they already knew.

“It is time” Xioban said

“Yes, it is” Pestilence replied.

Xioban smiled, turned around and made his way to the gatekeeper. A few moments of walking later, he could hear soft hoofbeats behind him. He smiled.

It took some time to get to the gatekeeper and nobody spoke the entire time. Xioban enjoyed the walk. He liked the rhythmic beats of the hooves following him.

He saw the gatekeeper, sitting at an ornate desk. The desk was in the middle of a meadow, under a solitary tree. The tree was lush and green and seemed to have different types of fruits. They had different shapes, sizes and colours.

Behind the tree was a stream, and he could hear it babbling. It soothed his heart.

When Xioban got closer, he could see that she was smiling. She heard him and looks up.

“Oh! Hello, I have been waiting for you” She said

“Hello, and I, you. It is done!” He bows as he speaks

“Are you sure?” She asked. Xioban wondered if she too had almost forgotten.

“Alright!” she said, “I’ll push the button as soon as you get to the hall.”

Xioban bowed and started to make his way to the hall.

“Wait!” Pestilence called him from behind and he turned around

“We’ll come with you” He explained, “We want to see how many make it up”

Xioban nodded, turned around and continued to the hall.

It might have taken many years again, but once again, he enjoyed the walk.

When he got there, he closed his eyes and prayed. He then walked over to a podium, and pushed the big red button on it.

The musicians started to play music. The air, already filled with the luscious aroma of food, now also carried the sweetness of music.

Xioban waited, and nothing happened. He pushed the red button again. This time he heard a click and a whoosh.

Three people appeared in front of him. It looked like they had just jumped up, though he didn’t see them jump.

Xioban pushed the red button again, and nothing happened. He heard the click, but no whoosh. He tried pushed it several times more and there was nothing apart from the clicks.

It was dawning on him that his millenia of preparation was perhaps meant for only three people. He put on his biggest smile and looked over to the three people who looked lost and confused.

“Welcome to heaven!” He said into the microphone.

He heard his voice across the meadow. He turned the microphone away and walks down the stage and to the three people.

“It would seem that you are the only ones worthy of heaven” Xioban started to explain.

From the looks on their faces, he knew that this would take some time. He called over some of the angels waiting to induct the newcomers and handed the three people off to them.

Pestilence got off his horse and walked towards Xioban.

“We are not going down there to take care of 7 billion souls.”

“Wait! Let’s go back to the gatekeeper. Maybe there is a problem” Xioban hoped there was a problem preventing more people from coming up.

The walk back to the Gatekeeper took some time. He did not enjoy this walk.

He was almost running now, and he could still hear the soft hoofbeats, following him. It was as if they were chasing him now.

“What happened? What went wrong?” He asked as soon as he got there

“What do you mean?” The gatekeeper looked confused

“What do you mean? What do you mean? There were only three people” He was almost shouting now.

“Really? Well, what can I say! There are only three people deserving of heaven down there” The gatekeeper was nonchalant.

“But that’s impossible! There are 7 billion people down there” Xioban was pleading now

“Ah! You have not been watching them” The gatekeeper tried to explain.

“What do I do now?” Xioban seemed to muster up sadness from somewhere.

Xioban hears someone clear their throat behind him and he turns around. It’s pestilence and he too looked distraught.

“Erm, so what do we do?” Pestilence seemed to be pointing the question more to the gatekeeper.

Xioban looked at the gatekeeper, eyes almost full with tears, expectant.

The gatekeeper mulled it over for a moment.

“Listen guys, just go back to what you were doing. The people down there are doing a fine job of bringing the apocalypse down on themselves”

The Javadoc for MahoutDriver (if you can find it) provides a good summary of how to implement it

[General-purpose driver class for Mahout programs. Utilizes > > org.apache.hadoop.util.ProgramDriver to run main methods of other > classes, > but first loads up default properties from a properties >

file.]{style=“color:#353833;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12.16px;line-height:normal;”}

To run locally:

``` $MAHOUT_HOME/bin/mahout run shortJobName [over-ride ops] ```

Works like this: by default, the file “driver.classes.props” is loaded from the classpath, which defines a mapping between short names like “vectordump” and fully qualified class names. The format of driver.classes.props is like so:

``` fully.qualified.class.name = shortJobName : descriptive string ```

The default properties to be applied to the program run is pulled out of, by default, “.props” (also off of the classpath).

The format of the default properties files is as follows:

``` i|input = /path/to/my/input o|output = /path/to/my/output m|jarFile = /path/to/jarFile # etc - each line is shortArg|longArg = value ```

[The next argument to the Driver is supposed to be the short name of > the > class to be run (as defined in the driver.classes.props >

file).]{style=“color:#353833;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12.16px;line-height:normal;”}

Then the class which will be run will have it’s main called with

``` main(new String[] { "--input", "/path/to/my/input", "--output", "/path/to/my/output" }); ```

[After all the “default” properties are loaded from the file, any > further

command-line arguments are taken in, and over-ride the > defaults.]{style=“color:#353833;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12.16px;line-height:normal;”}

So if your driver.classes.props looks like so:

``` org.apache.mahout.utils.vectors.VectorDumper = vecDump : dump vectors from a sequence file ```

[and you have a file core/src/main/resources/vecDump.props which looks >

like]{style=“color:#353833;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12.16px;line-height:normal;”}

``` o|output = /tmp/vectorOut s|seqFile = /my/vector/sequenceFile ```

[And you execute the > command-line:]{style=“color:#353833;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12.16px;line-height:normal;”}

``` $MAHOUT_HOME/bin/mahout run vecDump -s /my/otherVector/sequenceFile ```

[Then org.apache.mahout.utils.vectors.VectorDumper.main() will be called with arguments:

You can also implement it slightly differently by just dumping the jar into the mahout home directory and naming it starting with “mahout-” i.e. mahout-mydriver.jar

Hope this helps someone

You’ll need to install Java first, then download and unpack the mahout distribution.

I then placed it in /usr/local/mahout

To be able to run Mahout from the path, the following bash script was placed in /usr/local/bin

Update the paths as relevant

The first step is to clone the project from github

The module that we are interested in is the miniupnpc and in that directory, there is another directory called msvc and this contains the solution file for Visual Studio. Open this and if you have a more recent version of visual studio (which very likely do), it will want to upgrade everything. Let it go through the upgrade process.

Building the project now will most likely fail due to a missing file miniupnpcstrings.h . This file needs to be generated and the way to do that is to run a script in that folder called updateminiupnpstrings.sh. You will most probably need something like cygwin to for this script to work as it a unix shell to work

Once the miniupnpcstrings.h has been generated, we also need to follow some instructions for Unreal Engine for Linking Static Libraries Using The Build System, particularly the section on customizations for targeting UE4 modules.

From the project properties page, choose configuration manager. From the Active Solutions Platform, select new and type in or select x64 and save it. You have to do this for only one of the projects.

Building of the static project will fail since it can’t find the lib which is now in x64Release as opposed to just Release. The exe is not required for integrating with Unreal Engine, but if you want to complete the build, just fix the path in Project Properties -> Linker -> Input.

You should choose the release build instead of the debug build and you should now be able to build the solution from visual studio. It did pop up some warnings for me, but the build completed successfully.

The rest of the instructions are from the unreal engine documentation about integrating static libraries, starting from section about Third Party Directory

Perforce is a good tool for small teams since it is free for teams with less than 20 developers.

Another thing that can be confusing is what files/folders to add into the source control. Generally, we do not want to include any files which can be auto-generated (e.g. builds) or are transient (e.g. logs). You should generally include the following folders into source control

• Config
• Content
• Intermediate/ProjectFiles/<projectname>.vcxproj\* (the .vcxproj.user file may not be relevant if there are multiple developers)
• Source
• <projectname>.sln
• <projectname>/.uproject

I found it odd that the project file is in the intermediate folder since one wouldn’t intuitively think to include it in source control

Many years later, I sat down and expanded it out into a novel size story. As my first writing venture, it is far from ideal. I clearly loved exposition and I probably go through enough story there to cover a handful of novels rather than one.

In my mind, there were at least two more such exposition filled books yet to come. Alas, I ran out of steam and motivation and all that is left is this one book.

I will find it and include it here

In life after life, in age after age, forever,
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,

That you take as a gift, to wear around your neck in many forms

Why oh why?
Why is there so much joy,
In the misery and sorrow?
In the chewing bubble gum,
To solve a maths equation.\

Why oh why,
Do I,
Am I,
Do I,
With little to carry around,
Worry that I indeed have little,
I have only this trouble,
This trouble or that\

I am lacking,
Not in joy,
Yes in joy,
For I am lacking,
In troubles\

• The IntelliSense compiler (EDG) is more strict than the MSVC compiler.
• Some #defines are setup differently for IntelliSense than when building normally.
• C++ compiled by IntelliSense is always treated as 32-bit.

However, there is also the case where the Intellisense is just plain wrong. USTRUCT() structures are just such a case. You will find that Intellisense complains about definitions with the structures defined as USTRUCT.

This may not be a big deal, except for the fact these fales positives makes it difficult to spot actual errors and I like to see a clean workspace with no errors (not even false positives). Fortunately, there is a workaround. You can include the USTRUCT definitions only if it is not being compiled by Intellisense.

Fortunately, it is just the GENERATED_USTRUCT_BODY() line that is the culprit. To get these errors to go away, instead of that single line, use the following

That’ll make those pesky squiggly lines to disappear and give you a nice clean workspace :-D

• Change the scale down to say 0.5 and then increase it to 1.0 for sprinting
• Change the MaxWalkSpeed for walking and sprinting.

I prefer the second technique because it will keep the code simple enough and continue to function as expected with analog controllers.

Lets start by adding the input action bindings

Edit -> Project Settings -> Input -> Bindings and add an action for Sprint with Left Shift for the key.

All the code is in the Character class.

Within the header file, there are two blueprint variables for the WalkSpeed and SprintSpeed so they can be modified easily.

We also override the BeginPlay() Method. This is used to default to Walking.

Add the following to your character header file

Add the following to the constructor so we have defaults

Plug in the Sprint action to the methods by adding the following lines into the SetupPlayerInputComponent method:

And implement the rest of the methods

When using the Top Down view however, there is a hurdle to get over when trying to get multiplayer to work. This is a C++ project solution to this problem based on a BluePrints solution.

The basic problem stems from the fact that

“SimpleMoveToLocation was never intended to be used in a network environment. It’s simple after all ;) Currently there’s no dedicated engine way of making player pawn follow a path. " (from the same page)

To be able to get a working version of SimpleMoveToLocation, we need to do the following:

• Create a proxy player class (BP_WarriorProxy is BP solution)
• Set the proxy class as the default player controller class
• Move the camera to the proxy (Since the actual player class is on the server, we can’t put a camera on it to display on the client)

The BP solution talks about four classes - our counterparts are as follows:

• BP_WarriorProxy: ADemoPlayerProxy
• BP_WarriorController: ADemoPlayerController (Auto-created when creating a c++ top down project)
• BP_Warrior: ADemoCharacter (Auto-created when creating a C++ top down project)
• BP_WarriorAI: AAIController - we have no reason to subclass it.

So, from a standard c++ top down project, the only class we need to add is the ADemoPlayerProxy - so go ahead and do that first.

The first thing we’ll do is rewire the ADemoGameMode class to initialise the proxy class instead of the default MyCharacter Blueprint.

The features of DayZ, on the other hand are interesting. While it doesn't really have any RPG elements, it does seem to have unusual features and when the mod came out, it was noticed for being different... and difficult...

My brother has been trying to get me to play DayZ for a little while and I did try the mod a while back. I found it to be a bit "too real" to be really enjoyable. From the near explosion of similarly themed games recently, it does seem like a popular genre though...

The new hunting and weather mechanics that they are talking about - particularly the ones being compared to Frostfall in Skyrim is particularly interesting. I thoroughly enjoyed playing through hardcore mode in Fallout: NV and the Frostfall and the more complex needs of Skyrim.

The permadeath part of the game is unattractive for me though - but maybe one day this will change..

The sun shone ever so bright
on a soul dark and bitter…

Sipping another drag of nicotine,
quaffing another shot of something strong,
at least in the mind,
of the soul still so dark and bitter.

The heat bearing down…
trying its best to burn away..
at least at the edges of the bitterness…
and even the sun…
could do very little…

The birds chirping tried…
so did everything in its path..
but none had any effect.

Then it encountered something unexpected…
Hidden away in a corner of the world!

Something it had given up on finding…
a time before time itself.

In a moment,
lasting an eternity,
it changed…
everything changed…
existence itself..
was no longer what it was…

The energy, the optimism,
the joy and love expressed..

Beyond words,
inexpressible in action.

Even art fails to grasp
that which happens in an instant.

Some call it love at first sight.

Other call it fate..

Others yet call it destiny.

I just called it my destination.

Everything conspired,
sometimes cruelly,
sometimes sweetly,
sometimes stubbornly….

But as all roads once led…
led to Rome…

All roads led me to you…

And time is suddenly moving too fast…
Trying to slow it down,
but time is more stubborn,
than poor old me…

Two years, a lifetime, many lifetimes..

A brand new life - one barely imagined..
barely contained…

Happiness discovered; love infinite…

While this post will talk about my gripes with the game, it should be noted that I still love this game and look forward to hundreds more hours of playtime. The gripes are on paper to get them off my chest and hope that they will be resolved. Gripes about TESO are not hard to find - the eso forums are rife with complaints and bugs - but that’s really besides the point… :-p

TESO was a game I was very much waiting for; breath baited. Took time off work, got my brother to take time of work and played it in earnest. It is difficult to put my finger on what was expected from this. In all honesty a multiplayer version of Skyrim would have been fine for me. It was not the MMO elements that attracted me but the multiplayer elements.

If they had merged Skyrim and Borderlands (2), it would be a perfect game - or so went the thought process. The features of Elder Scrolls Online do seem to be (on paper at least) a good mix of MMO Features and Elder Scrolls Features.

I don’t care about the “bugs” since they seem to be pretty on the ball with regards to getting them fixed and while there are a ton of them, and they are annoying - let’s be fair - would it be an Elder Scrolls Series without more bugs than a dark and damp cave?

Forced Single Player - Really?

The first gripe with the game and still by far the largest is this. For an MMO, there is an awful lot of content that you are forced to play single player. This makes no sense to me!

When the game was designed / developed, did they not know that this was an MMO? Why create a story that follows the entire Elder Scrolls series when you are someone uniquely special? It was such a massive opportunity wasted to create a story line where you could have an immersive experience accepting all the other people jumping around the place.

I think it was DC Universe Online that made it so powers were like essences that were scattered and “creating” a number of superheroes. This makes sense and maintains the immersion. Most MMO’s seem to have this kind of a story - and it makes a lot of sense. Why would you make an MMO where you are ’the Vestige/Soulless One’ - a unique hero? I mean, you get out of coldharbour and instantly meet thousands of other Vestiges… :-/ WTH man, you said I was special!

In TESO, this immersion is regularly and quite badly broken. You are asked to do some missions and you see other people do the same mission - not a big deal in itself except when the completion of the mission is supposed to change the world - and you see someone else finish it - but nothing happens - you still have to finish it. If the other players were just not displayed, that would have been better.

Back to the soloing of missions - I can completely understand the need to instance areas to a group(for bosses perhaps). However, for the main mission and the missions for the two guilds (fighters and mages), you are forced to solo it. This makes no sense. If I wanted to do missions on my own - I’d play Skyrim, Oblivion or Morrowind - or indeed other single player games.

I guess in summary - they seem to have failed in making it an MMO OR a Single player game. In the main MMO area, there is too much immersion breaking interaction with other players and where you do want to be able to group, you are forced to solo.

Another gripe - but its a small one because they are getting fixed are the sheer number of mission bugs - some of them are hard progress blocking bugs. The team seems to be working hard on resolving these so this should just be a matter of time. Unfortunately, it’s the early adopters who suffer the most.

XP - In an Elder Scrolls Game?

Oh the next gripe is about this game being called Elder Scrolls Online but one of the critical parts of what an Elders Scrolls game should be is only half implemented. The main reason I started playing the Elder Scrolls games was that the skills levelled up not based on XP but on how much it was used.

Sure, Morrowind had some problems in that skills levelled up quicker as you levelled up since it levelled skills based on successful use of a skill and the better you were at it, the higher chance you had of success.

In my mind, this would be easily solved by changing it to level up based on how much it was used - successfully or not. Of course, this may have other complications.

In no way, however, does it make sense to level skills based on XP gained. This at best just breaks immersion - but its just heartbreaking. If I want to get better at a skill, I should be using it - not just swapping my toolbar and handing in the missions!

Class Specific Skills… Yeah?

If we were to pick one word to define the entire Elder Scrolls Series - which word do you think would be picked? No matter what you think - the word Freedom would be up at the top or very near it… How does class specific skills fit into that? Each class has three skill lines, and at this point, there are four classes. This means that that any given point, every character is missing out on 9 entire skill lines.

It very much feels like they got an MMO expert in to consult and they were told “There is only one way to do MMOs and that’s to follow all the other ones out there.” Well, let’s be fair, if we wanted to play a game like the other ones out there - well, we would just play the other ones out there. The same goes for why I prefer Skyrim to the plethora of other games.

Shoehorning in the Elder Scrolls system of skill progression and getting XP seems to have been a “compromise” they struck - but let me tell ya - I don’t like it! The whole idea of skills progressing as you use it works because it feels “real”. “Oh I found a new location and look, I am better at fighting with swords…” - eh?

Feels like a lazy way of bringing balance to a game and if you ask me - it makes balancing more difficult since you now have to ensure that entire skill lines are balances instead of just skills

Finally

Am I going to stop playing TESO? Am I going to recommend not playing it? Hell no! It is still, in my opinion, the best MMO out there… What breaks my heart is that it could have been oh so much more. I very much think that they should have maintained their faith in the product - one which has been massively successful thus far! I can only hope that they see the light at some point and open it all up…

This was not a good start… Floating in freezing water off the shore of skyrim somewhere on the way to Solitude. Brrrr… Grasping at the strands of consciousness seemingly content to float away on the freezing waters, I dived in to find a way out of here.

There was luckily a few things hanging around in the capsized ship, some weapons and some armour - could be worse. One of the crates also had some snowberry extract as luck would have it. Swigging it down, dived down again and slowly traipsed my way out of the ship before the first hit from the extract finished.

Making my way to the bottom of the ship, which was ironically on top, there was an aldmeri lady on top carrying some stuff, which I conveniently lifted :-D

Now was the hard part, it would seem. I was surrounded by the icy ocean and the cold breeze did not help much either. Preparing myself mentally, finished off the last of the snowberry extract, hoped for the best and dived right into the icy blue seas.

The swim to the shore was not that bad - the snowberry extract kept me going! Once there, I managed to collect some deadwood and light a fire to dry me off and warm me up. There really wasn’t much of anything around - until I spotted a camp - with a tent and a fire and everything. It was an absolute surprise how it was missed the first time round - and it looked a lot nicer than the little camp I put together with deadwood.

I went over there and looked around. There was an Argonian there - and although I tried to talk to him, he was really not interested.

Looking around, I picked up something that was on one of the barrels, and the Argonian friend did not take kindly to me snooping around - so I had to kill him. Hmmmm.. The first drop of blood spilled on this land.. and it was all over a misunderstanding… :-/

Anyway, I warmed up a bit there and looked around more to realise that I had to swim across to another island - and I had no snowberry extract left. Well, the hard way it will have to be  then. Fortunately, it was a short swim across and I found a tent on the other side and a little camp which I used to warm up.

After that, a short hop skip and a jump later, I was in Dawnstar, and freezing. As luck would have it, it was night and everything was closed.. it took me a while, and it seemed like an eternity, but I finally found the inn… and warmed myself up…

As I was falling asleep, it dawned on me that there were a couple of draugr that I killed in a cave earlier but couldn’t remember exactly when or where it was. The cold and the tiredness drifted me off to sleep rather swiftly…

I was looking for a way to have a class hierarchy that matched the bundle “hierarchy” of entities in drupal. Yes, they are all “subclasses” of ONE parent, but it is still useful to be able to have a class per bundle.

The entity bundle plugin does a good job of providing a plugin framework to instantiate classes per bundle type. There is also an example of how to use this. However, this was a bit of overkill for me. I did however borrow the idea (and some code) to implement it in a simpler fashion.

Implement a custom controller and override the create and the query methods

I can now define a PHP class for each bundle as follows in hook_entity_info

Don’t forget to clear the cache and you should be able to get bundle specific classes instantiated. It will fall back to the ’entity class’ defined for the entity if the bundle ’entity class’ is not defined or cannot be found.

It is a shame that with all of this power, some of the features I have really enjoyed in games like witty banter with your companions (The Baldurs Gate series being a very good example) are still so sorely missed. :-(

I found myself in Ivarstead one morning on my way to Whiterun. The walk was largely dull except for me trying to play hunter. Trying to shoot an arrow into a moving deer is more difficult than I imagined. Needless to say, little was achieved more than losing a few arrows.

Walking past the alchemists hut, I snuck in to see if the herbs and grown, ready for another pruning ;-) but it was not. It re-ignited my curiosity about the previous owner of the hut but I got distracted by a deer. After losing another few arrows, I decided to focus on picking some mountain flowers and other alchemical ingredients.

Things were dull until I got to Riverwood. I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to deliver a note from Faendal (the scoundrel) to some girl at the bar. I didn’t like how he wanted me to lie about some guy and as luck would have it, the guy was at the bar too singing something.

He probably deserves to know what was happening so I told him the truth. Now he wants me to lie and say that Faendal wrote a stupid letter. Now this was not my intention. Now I am in a situation where it is obvious that this town has not one but two lying idiots. I mean - what’s wrong with these people - can’t they sort this out themselves? I mean even a old fashioned duel would still better than this lying about each other.

I headed over to the girl resolving to tell her that both the men in her life are idiots. I started to tell her that Sven (that was the other guys name now that I remember) wanted me to lie about Faendal and before I would explain that Faendal was the same, she shouted some abuse about Sven and told me that I should probably thank Faendal. Oh wait, the women are crazy too. To each their own I thought and wandered across to Faendals house.

It was a little late in the night and he was fast asleep. I couldn’t be bothered to wait till morning, so i broke into his house. Considering that he’s a lying bastard and he was soundly sleeping, I robbed him of all valuables - which honestly was really not that much. I then woke him up and told him the good news - he seemed happy. The things we do for love… I thought.. For a moment, I wondered if I had done such silly things in my life… but only for a moment and jumped off the balcony and ran across to Whiterun.

Running past the honningbrew meadery, I remember that I had kicked the previous owner out and put somebody else in place for Maven Black Briar (one of the things I did for the Thieves Guild). I thought to drop him a visit and see how he was getting on.

He was happy to see me and told me how fortunate he was to go for being somebodies lackey to a very wealthy man overnight. He did not even offer me a free mead. I went upstairs and robbed him of all his valuables and I was just about to head out when I saw that the bar was full of bottles of Black Briar Mead. Not only are they delicious, they are also worth a fair bit of money, so I snuck around and shoved them all into my pockets.

I also tried to pickpocket the now wealthy Mallus but he had nothing on him that I could find…

It was pretty late when I got into town and stumbling into the first tavern, it turns out they don’t have rooms. I then made it across to the town square which had another tavern. This one did have rent out rooms - thank god.

After ditching all of my extra stuff that I could at the merchants, I headed back out in the direction of Markarth. I did various things on the way including killing a bandit leader is some cave and speaking to Kematu which was enlightening and further eroding faith in people.

Finally, I reached Rorikstead, it seemed like a nice quiet town. I even met Rorik who seemed like such a nice man to have bought a bunch of land for people to live off.

It was a nice enough place that I decided to spend a day hanging around and taking in the scenery and the loveliness of it all. There were even kids running around playing.

As one of them ran past, I stopped her and talked to her but it didn’t quite go the way I hoped. “Most days, I do all I can to stay away from my sister and my father. The beating’s the same from either one.” she told me. Sure enough her sister was right behind her and I realised that they were not actually playing…

This made me very curious and instead of hanging about soaking in the atmosphere, I followed people around trying to confirm how true this was and it saddened me a great deal to find out that it was indeed true. As it turns out Lemkil, their Father had lost his wife to the birth of the twins. A sad thing no excuse for what his daughters are going through.

I was overcome with a desire to put their father out of his misery. I did not even have the patience to wait until it was dark. He was working on a farm, I went up on a hill and hid behind a rock. I took aim and the first arrow hit the rock and rolled down the hill. I couldn’t help but giggle. I then readied another arrow, aimed a little higher and let it loose. Time slowed as the arrow left and found its mark.

Erik screamed bloody murder - pointing out it was in cold blood but I was well hidden and safe. Erik had told me how much he wanted to travel and be an adventurer. Hey, two birds with one stone eh? ;-)

However, I like to tinker with C++ and I wanted to get some of the CDT functionality into emacs. In truth, I have used very little CDT so my expectations from emacs will be set differently. Considering that emacs has been used for C/C++ development for decades, I am hopeful that it will be more feature-rich than eclipse or any of the other IDE’s like Anjuta, Code::Blocks etc (both I have tried to use).

First things first. In the world of Java, I am a massive fan of maven which makes build management so easy and simple. Having used it now for years, it is easy to forget how much of a learning curve it had to get started.

Autotools are a massive pain to use and has a very steep learning curve. I have used it in the past to set up build environments and it works fine. pkg-config is pretty awesome and in a lot of ways, maven does pale in comparison. i.e. instead of having maven pull in dependencies, you just use your systems package manager like apt-get or yum and it installs the libraries for you.

Long story short, I am using cmake which has the added advantage of being a little more cross-platform (i.e. supported in Windows as well as *nix). If you haven’t used CMake before, let me tell you - it’s a heck of a lot easier to get used to than Autotools. Just go through their tutorial and you should be off.

The next thing I wanted to sort out was on the fly syntax checking. This makes life a lot easier and means that you can write and correct syntax errors etc without having to build manually.

Flymake is what you want to use for this. The later versions of emacs comes with Flymake so you won’t necessary need to install it to get started. However, flymake doesn’t (unfortunately) just work magically out of the box and requires a little configuration.

After hunting around for a bit, and finally from the EmacsWiki Flymake page, found a couple of options cpputils-make and cmake-project. Cmake-project seemed simpler and I opted for that. I also tried installing cpputils-make and didn’t have any issues with that either.

There is one thing you need to be aware of though - both these tools expect you to do out-of-source-builds. This essentially requires you to create a build folder (called bin for cmake-project and build for cpputils-make) and generate the Makefile etc. in there.

This is the preferred way with CMake anyway so it’ll be better to do build in that way. It’ll also  make it easier to have different builds (Debug/Release etc.)

The easiest way to install either of these is through marmalade. If you don’t already have it installed - it is so easy - just follow the instructions on their homepage. You can then install by running

M-x package-install cmake-project

OR

M-x package-install cpputils-cmake

add the following to your .emacs file for cmake project. Instructions for cpputils-make can be found on their github page

[(require ‘cmake-project)]{style=“font-family:Consolas, Monaco, monospace;font-size:12px;line-height:18px;”}

Do a full build on your sources first by going to the bin or build directory and generating the makefiles by using cmake (cmake .. or cmake ../src depending on how you set up cmake) and then make.

You can then initialise the mode within emacs for cmake:

M-x cmake-project-mode

You may have to also enable flymake;

M-x flymake-mode

The particular library was in the pom.xml dependency hierarchy but it was resolving to an earlier  version. Maven was switched to offline mode during the tests and I had never needed this version of the library before. This meant  that the local version of my maven repository did not have jar and maven emits it slightly unhelpful error. It would be better if it told us that it could not find the artifact and since its in offline mode, can't go and retrieve it.

There are two quick hacks. Add the library and version into the pom.xml and do a build. This will pull the library into your local repository and maven will be able to find it offline. You could also just take maven in the tests online by removing the goOffline() method call.

As for the cause of the issue, it stems from the way maven resolves dependencies from Arquillian in comparison to building. I had updated a library version, which now depends on the newer version of javassist. However, in considering all the other things within the pom.xml, maven brings it down to an earlier version when building.

However, the dependency resolution within the maven run through Arquillian considers a slightly different set of requirements and resolves to a later version of the lib which is not available.

I was in front of the daedric lord Clavicus Vile and it was all slowly coming to me. I heard Barbas barking away in the background and Jordis the Sword Maiden was her usual self, prancing about.

I looked for a way to get out and got to a closed gate. Seeing now way to open the gate, I took the long way back out the cave. No biggie, it was a good way to re-acquaint myself with the world again.

Once I got out of the cave, I re-prioritised. I had enough of traipsing around doing whatever I fancied. It was time to put an end to the civil war and of course to put a stop to all this dragon malarkey.

It was nice to have to followers - and one of them a pet though it did start to get very annoying when Barbas would just refuse to stop barking. He'd bark at anything. If I moved, he'd bark, if I stayed still, he'd bark, ooohhh there's a butterfly, woof woof. but I put up with it. More aggravating was his desire to always get in my way - in his own playful way of course, but he always like to come along an lie down in the door way. I could usually jump over him but it did sometimes cause me a bruised head with the doorway deciding to take up the same space as my head..

The three of us, the merry trio, did a lot of good things in Skyrim - defeated a number of dragons, helped a bunch of people do this and that, sold a lot of stuff and made a lot of money and even got up the throat of the world and travelled back in time.

I would often head back to my first home in Whiterun and see Lydia hanging about and while Jordis too complained about being sworn to carry my burdens, she somehow simply did not irritate me as much as Lydia did and I was happy.

I would often run off without waiting for the two of them and on more than one occasion, I would lose them somewhere, but after a while, sure enough, they would find me. Barbas was usually the first (must be his keen olfactory senses) and Jordis wouldn't be far behind. It usually brought a smile to my face to see Barbas - he always seemed so happy to see me "Where did you go - we've been looking everywhere for you", he seemed to say. I always imagined Jordis probably had a similar expression, but she was wearing a helmet that covered her whole face, so all I could see was cold hard steel - oh well.

After the brief jaunt through history, seeing Barbas still following me around, made my heart sink with sorrow. He was following me around since I promised to find an axe and re-unite him with his master... I hadn't done that for a very long time. I was level 25 when he started to follow me around and I was now level 31.

I decided it was time to find the axe for Barbas and re-unite him with his master. So I traipsed around a mountain, into a cave, killed a wizard and got the axe. That was easy. I returned to Clavicus Vile with no regard for his nonsense, I left Barbas by his masters side. I took a few moments to say goodbye and was confounded by the door I could not open again. This time though, I was used to world and saw the little chain on the right of the door, pulled it and et voila, I was out.

It was once again, just me and Jordis, the sword-maiden. My heart was heavy with the absence of Barbas but I shrugged it off and carried on. Helped with more the civil war stuff and got to Fort Snowhawk. I found these to be a little more difficult than ordinary missions, partly because, as a mage, I had very little health so it was easy to get injured. More importantly, I always found it difficult to be able to tell who was who and as a ranged combatant, it was even more difficult. I usually kill a few stormcloak  troopers by accident but I don't pay it much mind. After taking over the fort, I did various other things and it was time to take over the next fort. Once I got to that fort, I noticed that Jordis was nowhere to be seen.

I looked around, teleported around, and I still couldn't find her. It dawned on me that she might have been killed - and that too a while back - so there may be no way to fix this. I went to Proudspire Manor. Waited a while, and no - she did not come home and I was sure that she must have been killed. I had to be sure.

I wanted to know so badly that I resorted to otherwordly magic (I uttered the blasphemous phrase ~player.moveto 000A2C95) and I was in the strangest room I had ever been in. There were four hallways meeting and each of them led to what seemed like eternity. On the ground were a bunch of dead bodies and among them lay Jordis. I was speechless. She was dead! We had spent so much time together and without even a goodbye, she was dead. She was dead and all her armour was taken off, and I saw her face again. Calm and Serene.

I thought about resurrecting her with otherworldly magic but decided that would not be what she would want. I had to do some otherworldly jiggery pokey (load the previous save) to get out of that place since running out the door would just drop me back in the room.

Just a little while ago, I had two companions and within a matter of hours, I was all alone... I knew that if she takes enough damage, she would yield and  enemies would not attack her. It occurred to me that the last time I saw her was at Fort Snowhawk and then the realisation dawned on me. It was entirely possible that she was killed not by enemies, or wildebeasts - it was entirely possible that it was me who killed her.

I had recently killed a Boethiah cultist and was considering going to her shrine, where I suspected I would have to kill my companion so had avoided that mission. I had also gotten out of killing Barbas. Was it possible that Boethiah and Clavicus Vile were working their twisted magic to get me to kill my own follower? In any case, it was done! She was dead! and I was the most likely suspect for her murder.

When we finally crushed the Empire and liberated Skyrim form the Thalmor, when Ulfric Stormcloak was praising me, I thought of Jordis and Barbas. Fallen Comrades! Friends!

To be fair, the main issue was just poor documentation. It took me a day to sort out what should essentially have taken an hour(or two)

The documentation you get to from http://www.seamframework.org/Seam3/SecurityModule seems to be out of date. The fact that the page referes to version 3.0.0.Alpha1 and Alpha2 should have tipped me off but the url for the doc suggested it was the latest.

The more up to date documentation I found was at http://docs.jboss.org/seam/3/3.1.0.Final/reference/en-US/html/pt04.html

I followed chapter 33 on there and I won't repeat it here for the sake of brevity.

What follows are the additional steps I had to take to get it to work.

I ran into a javax.enterprise.inject.CreationException, the relevant part of the stack trace being:

To resolve this,  I had to add in the @IdentityEntity Annotation to the IdentityObjectType class

The next exception was org.picketlink.idm.common.exception.IdentityException: Error creating identity object. The relevant part of the strack trace being:

It turned out that the entitymanager was not being picked up and it was null. This part was probably in the documentation earlier with regards to configuring seam but I had skipped directly to the security section so missed it. We need to define the persistence unit with the beans.xml. I have included my full file below.

This brought us further forward still. The next exception was:

This was related to missing data in the database. It needed a credential type. I created one for password.

This brought us forward on to the next exception: org.picketlink.idm.common.exception.IdentityException: Exception creating relationship

with the relevant part of

This was solved by adding in a relationship type

Both the sql statements were put into import.sql and hibernate is configured to create tables. My test case is as follows. It was taken from https://github.com/seam/seam-example-confbuzz/blob/develop/src/test/java/seam/example/confbuzz/test/integration/LoginIntegrationTest.java and modified.

Do comment and let me know if it helped :-D

Outside of life itself was existence,
an adrenaline fueled ride into oblivion,
a life envied, hated, admired, reviled!

A path of self destruction,
collateral damage and catharsis.

Destroying everything and anything,
that which was, is, could be, will not be..

Close to few, far from few…

Living fast, dying young…
Anywhere but here,
Anywhere but now…

Flying fast… into the mountains…
and captured, not just attracted or found..
but captured.

Slow as a snail now. Days go by too fast…
Slow it down - anything to slow it down…

Hold on tight,
for one day,
it will go,
it will disappear.

But not today,
Not right now,
not if I can help it.

For tomorrow,
Realise that it is gone,
and not for a moment or a day,
but for ever.

And I might resent that which,
that, which,
which slipped away,
while I held on to these hot coals.

Scars are but I have left,
but not from that,
not that which I desired,
but that I didn't,
that which I couldn't,
I just...

Told once not to,
Don't give life your all,
Not if happiness is seeked,
Not within the confines,
Not happiness in the life,
Not the life you know,
Not the life you understand.

So I held on,
To the net,
The safety nets,
Not just one,
But all I could.

And yet, ripped,
Not just away,
Not just apart,
All the nets,
If not in life,
then in death.

To live a life,
As alone as it will be,
For nobody,
To throw away,
To discard their nets,
Their safety nets,
In life, and walk.

Along the edge,
Where with a hello,
and  a how do,
life meets death.

To die is to live,
To live is life,
But if happiness you seek,
Happiness confined,
Happiness from another,
Don't take the leap.

Just hold on tight...

Firstly, create a new file called /etc/group.login.allow (it can be called anything - you just need to update the line below to reflect the name)

In this file, pop in all the groups that should be able to login

Edit /etc/pam.d/common-auth (in ubuntu), it might be called /etc/pam.d/system-auth or something else very similar. At the top of the file (or at least above other entries, add the following line:

For the record, found this little tidbit over at the centos forums\

Everything is as is. Nobody, however, can see. A rose flowered in the middle of a field and everyone sees something different. Amongst these people, there is someone who sees me in that rose, and someone who sees you. Somebody sees a rose they saw when they were a child, perhaps one their lover gave them yesterday, last week or in another life.

The smell reminds someone of a perfume, of a girl, of an evening, of a dinner date, The colour reminds someone of blood, of pain, of joy. And yet others see a rose.

Nobody, however, can see. Not this rose, with its own uniqueness, with its own joy and bliss and love. It is expressing itself - unlimited. For that which it wishes to express is limited and can be expressed in its mere existence. The joy and greater sadness of consciousness, the way we use it anyway, is that existence is not enough to express ourselves - not safely (for society) anyway.

As I trampled on this rose, I realise that I have no regret, no remorse. The rose expressed itself. It was happy, in bliss, for to express, to be expressed is enough, more than enough - in fact, it seems to be what all of existence yearns for.

Oh you might say - what about the people who might enjoy the rose. Who enjoys the rose? People, at best enjoy the memories triggered by the beauty of this creature. They cannot even see it, then how can they appreciate it?

Memories are dead things - the most dead thing in the world - why? what is the point in keeping something so that someone may further flog the proverbial dead horse. They cannot let the memories go. They think the memories are them, define them, mould them. And it does - it creates a mould around them. Stops them, restricts them - keeps them within the niche, the rut they have created for themselves.

I do not understand how someone can live, survive as a mere shadow of how they are supposed to be. How someone can do that so easily is so far beyond me. Everyone is drenched in misery - dripping in the rain, with barely a rainbow. Yearning for, waiting for that rainbow and once the rainbow is there, so afraid of the sunlight which will wipe out the rainbow.

And of course if someone gets as far as the sunlight, they will then be scared of the rain next.

It would seem that misery and fear is the greatest joy for people. As an objective viewer, which I am not, I suspect, this may be an easy observation to make.

You want to be happy - what’s stopping you?

Really? What is stopping you?

If the entire world expressed itself fully and fully, it would disintegrate any semblance of society and anarchy would ensue. The truth is that people are sick. Once all the sickness is expressed, and out, in the past, as anything expressed instantly is. Let go of it, move on and you have utopia.

There is no need for technology, no need for power, no need for structure. Humans as a group, free group, free of the repressed are beautiful creatures like the rose and death is no longer feared by one who has lived.

Death is not a fear for one who is living. We are all so dead - just mechanically following the procedure and process book of life - one step at a time and hoping that the book didn’t lie when it said that it would eventually bring us all to joy - secretly (perhaps unbeknownst even to themselves) more importantly, freedom. Not freedom to do something but freedom from! Everything! So that we have a chance, a time, a space to just be ourselves.

I say - why wait? Be YOU. Screw the world!

There is only one rule. Never stop. That which you think is you is a lie. It will pass. You will find that the things you think you want to do are actually not the things you actually want to do. They just seem like good ideas from where you are. It will pass - you will go through it - just pay attention to see if you still want that. It will change - I promise. Everything does. It will pass - everything does.

Pay attention. What do you want? What’s stopping you? I am not talking about silly little things. I am talking about expressing yourself. Things that don’t rely on the meagre contribution another human being, or another creature could make into your life. Why should anyone contribute to your life? How much are you contributing to your own? and I don’t mean surviving. I mean nearly 8,000,000,000 - that’s seven BILLION people manage to survive.

Do something different - Be You!

We picked a quiet spot to make camp. The strange creature like man they called Acacius led the group, tending to our severely injured leader, Ta’oma with such care and affection, with such love that it was difficult to believe that he was not a creature of light.

As the moon set, the sun rose and its golden rays would soon blind us. We crawled into the most comfortable spaces that we could find while Acacius stood watch. Here was a creature who did not know fatigure, nor did his power or energy wane during darkness of light, a creature akin to a god but I know better - there is no such thing as gods or demons. Except of course within ourselves.

As my eyelids started to shut weighed heavily by the burden of the night, I saw Acacius sit in the middle of the camp, in the lotus posture, eyes closed. I had heard that sight was not necessary in the lives of someone like Acacius or Ta’ome who could simply sense the energy of the universe.

I know not for how long I slept but it felt like mere minutes when I was woken by the screeching of blades. I reached for my sword and leapt to my feet and I saw that several others had done the same. I kicked awake the few that were asleep near me as I witnessed an awe striking image.

Acacius was on his own, hundreds of feet away from the camp, both his hands holding a sword over his right shoulder about to plunge it into the neck of the brightest most magnificent creature I had seen. It was an advance scout - a pegasus, as white as snow and with wings of an angel. As the sword plunged into its neck, it shrieked and the bright brilliant white had the bright red flowing, tainting, dripping, screaming, deafening. The hands that I had held up to prevent myself from being blinded were now covering my ears and my eyes were closed firmly shut.

As I opened them again, the pegasus was on the ground, and Acacius was knelt in front the animal, wiping the blood off on his knee. What kind of a creature was this, that would kill a creature of the light, and yet, pay his respects to it.

As I made my way towards him, he stood up and started walking towards us. I couldn’t help but keep my eyes the magnificence of the creature, now fallen and motionless.

Acacius paid no attention to me as he walked past. I knelt down to touch the slain creature and it was the softest fur that I had ever felt. The blood had dripped along its neck and it was still flowing with gusto. There was now a growing pool of blood on the ground, seeping into its pure soft white fur.

I heard Acacius talking to Abaddon, the one who had taken charge when Ta’ome was injured. “They have been alerted, we have only a few minutes at the most before they get here. We must prepare to defend ourselves. " I guess neither of them had to explain our disadvantage that we are weaker in the light and that they are stronger.

Abaddon shouted orders and I headed back to join the ranks. Once we dispersed to take our positions, I heard Acacius, whispered to Abaddon, “I cannot partake in this battle.” I could see Abaddon thinking about questioning his motives, then refrained.

As everyone moved to form a circle around the camp, Acacius took his place in the middle, he sat down again the lotus posture and closed his eyes, his sword dug deep into the earth right in front of him.

He just killed one of their soldiers, a scout, and yet he refuses to kill more. If he helped us, we could defeat them easily and make our way to the temple. It was at most another 12 hours trek. I truly struggled to understand his inability to join us in this battle which we would like lose without his help. Ta’ome would be killed or captured. Why does he care for his so yet refuse to assist us to protecting him?

I could not question our orders. These people, creatures, live in ways that I cannot understand, and I left it at that.

Just in that moment, I heard the screech of a winged creature, it was again, as white as the snow but it was small, not larger than a small monkey, but it wielded a sword and moved quicker than my eyes could follow.

I saw as it was struck down by a sword. There was another and yet one more. Then it was quiet but only for a few seconds before what seemed like a swarm of them came at us. It was a strange feeling as the brushed past me and flew around me and my comrades, the softness of their fur in such stark contrast to the sharpness of their blades.

We fought and we found hard and the vast majority of them lie dead at our feet and just as an iota of pride started to rise up within my soul, I saw it; This was again, just an advance guard, the next wave was snow leopards of forms and other creatures that I could not describe, all white. I guessed that they would all be soft to touch yet their growls and screams would describe a contradiction of the most magnificent magnitude.

As we tried to beat back the first wave of what seemed like flying monkeys, they retreated to join their brethren and it seemed like I just blinked before they were just a few dozen feet away from me. At this point, I knew that death would soon be upon me. I closed my eyes for a moment in prayer and cursed Acacius for not joining us, for not protecting us.

As I opened my eyes, The creatures screeched and charged towards us. I dug my feet into the ground and in an instant they all hit a barrier that neither I nor they could see and they fell to the ground. One by one they stood back up and reached out into the air to touch a glow in the air. It stopped them.

I looked behind and Acacius was on one knee, both his hands on the sword. I heard a horn and the creatures started to retreat, slowly at first and started to speed up. I saw the glow in the air now and it was shrinking. I could not understand why the creatures were running since the glow was getting closer to us. It quickly covered enough ground to be a feet or two away from us and we moved backwards into a tighter and tighter circle.

Once we were all as close together as we could be around Acacius, the glow around us stopped for a few moments, moments that felt like hours and it exploded. Racing across the land and as it touched the bright, magnificent creatures, they all fell to the ground. Some of them groaned, some did not.

The ones that were furthest away fell to the ground,  and I could do nothing but watch in awe. A moment later, Acacius stood, took a cigarette, lit it up, reached for his hipflask and took a drink out of it. He allowed himself to enjoy it thoroughly for a few moments.

“They will all be out for a few hours; it might be a good idea to not be here when they wake up”

To this end, I installed the following plugins:

Task Scanner
FindBugs
CheckStyle
PMD

After restarting Hudson, there are a few additional configuration bits to complete.

I added an additional build step and set the goal as

I then enabled the four plugins, saved, ran a build and et voila... Just like magic

Installing hudson / jenkins is easy enough. I deployed as part of a pre-existing tomcat6 installation so was as simple as popping the war file into the webapps folder. Tomcat automatically started it up without issues.

I chose to have hudson use /home/hudson as its home directory. Since I am running an ubuntu system, I added a line into /etc/defaults/tomcat6. There are various other ways of doing this but it was a quick fix for me.

You of course need to make sure the directory exists. I also popped in a .m2 folder from my home directory to save it from downloading all the various jar files and included a settings.xml file with appropriate configurations.

Hudson 2.2 uses maven 3 but I use maven 3 locally as well even though the projects pom files were built for maven 2. There doesn’t seem to be any issues with this setup.

First step is to create a new job from the home page. This asks for which type a job you want to create. If you use maven and a standard source control, it is as simple as choosing the first option: Build a free-style software project.

Give it a name and you are brought to the configuration screen. There are a number of options here and I started with the basic set:

I chose Subversion for the source control management section and gave it the svn path. There is a checkout strategy as well and I chose the one to revert and update which I feel to be a bit cleaner.

I chose to poll the scm every fifteen minutes

and saved.

Running the build pulled the code out of svn and stopped there. This was because I didn’t add a step to build / install it.

Go back into configure the job and add a maven 3 build step. This automatically selected the clean install goals. Save and build now and the project was checked out and built without issues.

Success!

There are a number of other options you can play with here but this gives you a solid starting point.

Later on, I will cover the addition of various other plugins for source analysis including findbugs and pmd.

I used this to run sl (yes sl, not ls - try it - I love it) repeatedly.

for example

Bear in mind that this loop is infinite and there is no way to cancel out of it except to kill of the terminal.

The first thing that you’ll want to do is to add in bricks. Bricks are similar to physical volumes a la LVM. The thing to bear in mind is that depending on what type of cluster you have (replicated / striped), you will need to add a certain number of blocks at a time.

Once you have a initialised the nodes, to add in a set of bricks, you need the following command which adds two more bricks to a cluster which keeps two replicas.

Once you have done this, you will need to rebalance the cluster, which involves redistributing the files across all the bricks. There are two steps to this process, the “fixing” of the layout changes and the rebalancing of the data itself. You can perform both tasks together.

As a starting point, to view the status of a rebalance, you can use:

You can also stop / pause a rebalance with

To “fix” the layout changes, you need to run:

Rebalancing the volume to migrate the data is easy and can be done using a similar command:

To complete both in one command, you just need:

Easy right?

With this mechanism, you have the ability to have storage that can be expanded on the fly by using additional hardware. You can also remove existing bricks using:

This means that you can remove a brick with smaller hard drives, upgrade the harddrives, and re-integrate into the cluster with bigger hard drives. This means that you have a cloud like storage solution which you can easily grow as necessary without worrying about resizing underlying filesystems or hotswapping hardisks or any of that hassle.

In fact, we also considered GFS2 but looking around on the net, there seemed to be a general consensus recommending ocfs2 over gfs2.

Ubuntu makes it pretty easy to install and manage ocfs2 clusters. You just need to install ocfs2-tools and ocfs2console. You can then use the console to manage the cluster.

What I totally missed in all of my research and understanding, and due to lack of in depth knowledge on clustered filesystems was that OCFS2 (and GFS2 for that matter) are shared disk file systems.

What does this mean?

Wikipedia defines a shared disk filesystem as being “shared by being simultaneously mounted on multiple servers.”

This essentially means that the storage medium is mounted on to cluster. The cluster is a collection of the clients. The storage is traditionally a SAN mount point. This means that a shared storage space is accessed at high speeds by a number of clients.

From a simplistic point of view, this is not that different from mounting the SAN point onto a server and then running an NFS server on it with all the clients mounting over NFS.

The main difference is that OCFS is distributed. There is no single point of failure (assuming that the storage medium is redundant which a SAN would be). The NFS server is a clear single point of failure.

If you do not have access to or want to use a SAN, you can also use DRBD.

NFS is described as a network filesystem and GlusterFS is described as a NAS file system.

There has been a solution for this for several years and the first time I did this, I installed cygwin with X11 but there is a far simpler way to accomplish this.

Install XMing. I then used putty, which has the forward X11 option. Once logged in, running xeyes shows the window exported onto my Windows 7. Ah.. so much better.

I actually used this to run terminator to connect to a number of servers. Over local LAN, the windows didn't have any perceptible lag or delay. It was more or less like running it locally.

It is possible to set up shortcuts to run an application through putty and have it exported to your desktop. I haven't played with this enough to comment though.

This of course only worked because I have another box which is running Linux. If that is not the case for you, then you might want to try VirtualBox but since the linux kernel developers have described the kernel modules as tainted crap, you might want to consider vmware instead which is an excellent product.

On the bright side, there are a few new things that have been worked on so hopefully plenty of things to cover soon.

We manage a number of servers and all over the place and all of them require to be backed up. We also have a number of desktops all with mirrored disks also getting backed up.

I like things to be all nicely efficient and its annoying when one server / desktop runs out of space when another two (or ten) has plenty of space. We grew to dislike NFS particularly due to the single point of failure and there were few other options.

We had tried glusterfs a few years ago (think it was at version 1.3 or something) and there were various issues particularly around small files and configuration was an absolute nightmare.

With high hopes that version 3.2 was exactly what we were looking for, we set up three basic machines for testing

Previously, glusterfs required all the configuration to be completed manually and with text files. It also required a fairly detailed knowledge of what they called translators and a lot of tweaking and fiddling with parameters.

I am very happy to report that this is no longer the case with 3.2.

The three servers(cserver[1-3]) are running Ubuntu and was updated to Natty (11.10) to get access to glusterfs 3.2 (11.04 only had 3.0). One thing to bear in mind is that the glusterfs website seemed to only have the 64 bit version but Ubuntu 11.10 also has the 32bit version.

Installing the server part of glusterfs was simple and straightfoward

Once this was done all three servers (terminator is a godsend when doing these things across a number of servers), adding the servers into a “cluster” was easy enough.

The thing to note is that these probe statements are two way. In other words, all three servers are now part of the same cluster.

The thing is that if you type in an incorrect hostname, the probe will keep trying to connect to it. I haven’t left it running long enough to know if it every returns.

Thankfully, removing host does-not-exist is simple enough

Creating a volume is straightforward. There are a number of different types of volumes which you can find out from the documentation. In this particular instance, we are creating a distributed replicated

The reason I have not included cserver3 in here is that the volume needs a multiple of the replica number of bricks. In the case, the there needs to be a muliple of 2 number of bricks.

Additionally, you could use rdma instead of tcp if you are using infiniband

Starting the volume is simple enough

this volume is now accessible from all the boxes in the cluster

Mounting this from another box is easy

If you get the error of “endpoint not connected” when listing the content of the mount, it is likely because the volume is not started.

If you are curious, check the gdata folders in the bricks after copying some files into the mount and you’ll find them show up intact and on both bricks in the above example.

I waited till midnight and on the gong (as it were), I clicked install and instead of it saying that the game was not released yet (and I do wonder why they make us wait until midnight when we have the stuff to be able to play it anyway but that is a whole another blog post), it started to install.

I felt an anticipation and an elation that I have not felt in a very long time. My first foray into the world of Elder Scrolls was daggerfall and this was way after it was released. I had always thought about a world; a living breathing world that was built upon simple foundations that could grow to envelop your imagination.

Elder Scrolls promised to do that and while Daggerfall failed spectacularly to deliver this, it set an expectation. I for one am glad that Bethesda continued on and eventually brought us Morrowind which I played for a while and loved but couldn’t quite get the hang of.

Then there was Oblivion which again, I played for a while but couldn’t really get the hang of. In honesty, it is only in replaying it now over the last few weeks that I started to get the hang of it. The secret was to not over-specialise which was the mistake that I originally made. The other mistake I had made as not to be patient. It is tedious and annoying in the earlier parts of the game because, as a character, you are just not powerful enough.

At level 20, I was finding the game rewarding. The level itself is largely irrelevant, it was that I was able to fill the skills gap using other mechanisms. For example, my securiy skill was atrocious but I managed to acquire the skeleton key (which also ups your security skill). This helped me make leaps and bounds of progress through the thieves guilds missions.

Alchemy and getting that up to a 100 pretty much changed the game for me as well. Having picked the Atronach as the birth sign (No Magika regeneration but spell absorption at 50), I really struggled at the beginning of the game to keep my Magika replenished.

After about level 16 or so with Alchemy ramped up, I found that I had more Magika potions that I could throw a stick at. My intelligence was also up at a 100 at that point and the discovery that there was no benefit in increasing my willpower (since there was no Magika regeneration to worry about) changed the focus on levelling up as well.

Along the invisibility spell, Oblivion was suddenly much easier to play. I also got the hang of regularly swapping between and using the various spells. Major Heal wounds instead of health potions became a habit particularly since my Magika restoration usually meant that Magika was still going up after I’d killed all the enemies around the extra regen was just going to waste.

In short, Oblivion is a complex game and you cannot over-specialise if you want to be able to succeed. As the prebuild Sorcerer class, I had an unusual combination of skills to work with including heavy armour and magic.

I expect the biggest complaint that people might have about Skyrim is that it is a lot simpler. There is no armourer skill component for maintaining your armour for example. While this was a nice maintenance thing, particularly when you levelled up on it and you got that feeling of satisfaction, I believe that Skyrim is going largely in the right direction.

Fallout 3 based on the same Engine did a great job to kick it up a notch from Oblivion and Skyrim feels like it has really kicked it up a few notches.

The graphics are absolutely stunning ( in fairness, I am seeing it with the the quality set to ultra high :-] )and the game just flows so much better. The NPC interactions (in my limited 90 minutes or so gameplay) is practically sublime.

Let me put it this way, stealing from a family made me actually feel guilty. If a game can make you feel like the characters in it are real and make you feel guilt like that, then you are definitely doing something right.

The radiant A.I system with the updates coming into Skyrim is also very impressive. Actualy gameplay experience does seem to give it much a organic and fluidic feel.

I expect that my feelings might change over the next few days and dozens of hours of gameplay. However, I would like to finish by saying the Skyrim has so far failed to disappoint which if you know me, is a rare and high praise.

The tasks themselves were meant for data migration but that is not particularly relevant. We were writing a number of tasks which all had a set of dependencies (some of the tasks did not have any dependencies or the process could of course never start).

It was assumed that there were no cyclic dependencies (which would be error in this particular case anyway)

Bearing in mind that this was a quick and dirty tool for use three times, some of the bits in here could do with tidying up.

Each task was defined to implement the following interface

It should all be self explanatory. Extending the Runnable interface ensure that we can pass it into threads and other relevant bits of code. The getDependencies is expected to return the name of the tasks that it depends on.

The basic task runner which I describe below does not check if the task described in any list of dependencies actually exist. If an non-existing dependency is defined, it will likely just throw a Null Pointer Exception. I wrote this a long time ago, so don’t actually remember.

The BasicTaskRunner which we used to run the tasks implemented the TaskRunner Interface

The addTask method simply added it to a map from String -> Task and threw an exception in the event of a duplicate task being added in.

the prepare method just calls a method to buildGraph. This uses the jGrapht library to build a Directed Acyclic Graph

So we create a simple directed graph, loop through the tasks, then each of its dependencies to create an edge, which we then add to the graph. Simple stuff really.

the start method, which actually executes the task is as follows:

As a basic algorithm, we pick up the number of available processors and use that many threads. scheduleTasks is a pseudo-recursive function whose role is to add the currently executable list of tasks into the executor to execute.

If there are no tasks left to execute, we shut the executor down. All being well, we add every single task in the graph that has no dependencies to be executed. The threadpool ensures that any tasks that cannot currently be executed are queued.

We use a custom version of the threadpool as follows:

The main purpose of this is to use the completed and failed callbacks to ensure that on complete, dependent tasks can be executed. On fail, we ensure that dependent tasks are not executed. The code currently does not allow for tasks that are left behind and will hang indefinitely after executing all tasks it can.

On completion of a task, we simply remove the task from the graph. The frees up all its dependencies to be executed. We add these tasks into the list by calling scheduleTasks again. There is nothing more for us to do when a task fails except to schedule any other tasks that can be executed. In theory, this call is redundant since any tasks that could be executed before the failure are already in the queue. Any tasks that can be completed on the completion of another item will be initiated on the completion of that task.

I hope the above makes sense and has been helpful. The code for the full class including further logging statements follows. Please bear in mind that this was hacked together over a couple of hours for something that was to be executed a grand total of three times.

We recently found this as we were trying to update every row in a table that had over eight million entries. We found in the first few tries that the update was taking over 24 hours to complete which was far too long for an update script.

Our investigation of this led us to the pgsql_tmp folder and the work_mem configuration parameter.

When the query was being executed, we checked the pgsql_tmp folder to see how was space being utilised in there. We already knew about the pgsql table from past experience. We had a server running out of disk space and rapidly. We had narrowed it down into this folder. In cancelling the query referenced by the tmp files in here, we were able to free up literally gigabytes of disk space...

We had found roughly half a gig of temporary files in here. This led us to investigate the configuration file.

The one parameter that stuck out was work_mem which was set to a default of 1mb which I guess might make sense under most circumstances but not in this one. According to the postgresql documentation

work_mem (integer)

Specifies the amount of memory to be used by internal sort operations and hash tables before switching to temporary disk files. The value is defaults to one megabyte (1MB). Note that for a complex query, several sort or hash operations might be running in parallel; each one will be allowed to use as much memory as this value specifies before it starts to put data into temporary files. Also, several running sessions could be doing such operations concurrently. So the total memory used could be many times the value of work_mem; it is necessary to keep this fact in mind when choosing the value. Sort operations are used for ORDER BY, DISTINCT, and merge joins. Hash tables are used in hash joins, hash-based aggregation, and hash-based processing of IN subqueries.

This would tell us that the total memory usage with work_mem could be several times the value set here and setting it to half a gig would probably be a terrible idea for a heavily utilised production server. However, for the migration process when we need to update over 8,000,000 rows, it might be a good temporary fix.

After updating the work_mem to 512mb, we found that no more tmp files were created and the whole thing was done in memory.

When updating so many rows, there area a few other things to consider.

Firstly, autovacuum will likely kick in several times to vacuum the table. You'll probably want to disable this for the duration of the update statement and run a vacuum afterwards.

You can switch autovacuum back on after the update statement has completed

A few other things you want to take a look at are the

• fsync parameter (I usually have this set to off anyway since the servers are pratically fully redundant)
• checkpoint_segments: I changed this to roughly 5 times the original value (check the log to see if it says that its checkpointing too often)
• checkpoint_completion_target: I changed this to 0.9

With all of these updates, we were able to bring the total time of the update down to a few hours.

To simplify it, the code was originally written to create an anonymous class a la Runnable which is wrapped around a try catch block. The exceptions that are thrown are then converted to a soap fault and passed back.

Nothing inherently wrong with this. However, there are a couple of issues with this in that each soap method is set to throw an ApplicationException and there is not further documentation of which of the subclasses are actually relevant to that method.

In a runtime environment, this is not hugely relevant. However, when generating documentation from the WSDL’s, it is.

To resolve this, we changed each method to throw their relevant exception, and wrote an interceptor to pick up the exception and convert it…

The first step was to write an interceptor which is surprisingly simple and straightforward.

The class doesn’t need to extend the AbstractSoapInterceptor but you would then have to manually implement a number of mechanisms that the abstract class provides.

The constructor simply defines where this interceptor should be inserted into as part of the chain. There is a whole bunch of different places where it can be inserted based on this. Information can be found in their documentation.

To insert this interceptor into a web service, the service needs to be annotated as follows:

Each exception thrown from the web service will now be intercepted. You can then include any further further information in the soap fault.

In this particular case, the only thing that gets done is to update the fault code with the error code set against the exception. Any additional information can be set against the soap fault at this point. You can also log as we are doing.

To test this, the plan was to build two versions of the same web service and load test it to see the memory and cpu utilisation to compare cost / performance.

In the process, I also discovered other differences.

Both the web services were built against this interface

That is of course a simple enough interface.

The EJB version of this is as follows:

Simple and straightforward enough and the POJO version is not that different

I also used the following web.xml. This may not be a necessary step any more.

Now that was complete, there was the deployment to consider. I had assumed that I could just do one build, package it as an war and just deploy it but as it turns out, that didn’t work. This only deployed the Pojo web service. To deploy the EJB web service, I had to package it as an EJB (maven) and deploy a jar file.

This meant that I ended up with two deployments, wstestpojo.war and wstestejb.jar.

Once deployed, I used SoapUI to load test both the web services and the results were interesting.

In the grand scheme of things, the difference was pretty minimal between the two. However, the Stateless EJB web service used a little extra (3% - 5%) CPU presumably from the pooling of the beans and accessing them.

I used JBoss 5.1 and ran into an issue with log pollution

EJBTHREE-1337: do not get WebServiceContext property from stateless bean context, it should already have been injected

This was printed every time an EJB based web service was called.

I found more information about the EJBTHREE-1337 issue and a workaround for it The workaround simply involves updating log4j to not log it which is good enough for me… :-)

As a final note, I am unsure as to how this would scale with complex web services that have multiple instantiated objects as part of it.  I have a sneaky suspicion that web services with expensive object instantiations would perform better if using Stateless EJB Beans as would web services that are memory hungry. However, this has not been tested.

Essentially what happens is that when I leave my desktop for a while, under specific circumstances, and often, on returning and moving the mouse or using the keyboard, the pointer would come back  on screen. However, this only works on one of my two screens.

The unlock dialog does not show up and it seems that there is no way to get back in.

In the past, I would log into the terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F1 or any function key through to F5 or so) and

This would of course kill all processes owned by me and is therefore unpleasant at best and have you losing a bunch of work at worst.

After a brainwave yesterday (as detailed in the aforementioned post), I decided to check the status of the screensaver and killed just those processes. Happily, this gives me my desktop back. However, my gnome-shell had given up which I had to restart

Unfortunately, I did not get the windows into the original workspaces since everything just got dumped into the one workspace but it is better than having to kill everything off.

EDIT: I just realised that the screen saver of course no longer kicks in and I had to restart it

Luckily, working in Linux means that I can spread each stream of work into the various workspaces.

Now GNOME 3 makes things a little more complicated with the dynamic workspaces but I’m learning to use it to my advantage

However, with Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot and GNOME 3, I seem to be running into an issue regularly…If I leave my computer for a while, it doesn’t unlock correctly. The screen remains black and I can’t move the mouse to my second screen and the unlock screen doesn’t show up.

Thinking about it, it seems like there might be two screen savers being started but I shall investigate that tomorrow. I have the same issue at both work and home so it is more likely to be related to Ubuntu + GNOME 3 or something about the way I set things up.

I  usually resolve this by logging into the console and here a neat trick for killing all our processes in one fell swoop.

Another thing I have been doing a bit more of recently is gaming which involves rebooting in Windows.

Both of the above leaves me with a restarted workspace. Starting up the applications pops them all into the same workspace. Chrome is especially a nightmare. I might have 135 open tabs but they are in about 6 windows spread across four workspaces.

It is annoying to have to distribute these things out each time.

After having done much research, I have not been able to find a clean automated solution.

There are two half solution that I have found however.

The first one is Devil’s Pie and for a graphical interface gdevilspie. According the website for Devil’s Pie, it is “A totally crack-ridden program for freaks and weirdos who want precise control over what windows do when they appear. If you want all XChat windows to be on desktop 3, in the lower-left, at 40% transparency, you can do it.”

Unfortunately, that is exactly what it is. If you pre-determine where you want your windows to be, you can use this very useful application. However, that is not quite what I want. I want the current configuration to be remember. Exactly like how Chromium remembers which tabs are in which order in which windows and their position on the workspace, but for multiple workspaces.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any way to save the current state.

There is however, another tool I found scouring the web.

libwnck-3-dev is what I installed on my Ubuntu box. There are two key commands here

This will list all the windows across all the workspaces. To get more information on a specific Window,

The XID is the number returned next to each window from the first command. The post that I  mentioned above has a nifty tool attached that saves the window positions and can also restore them using wnckprop.

However, it saves them based on the Window title. This of course doesn’t work for Chromium or such Windows that changes the title each time you change the tab.

However, if the save is the last command you run and the restore is the first command you run after opening up the windows, it can restore the windows into the correct workspaces.

With the idea of the dynamic workspaces in GNOME 3, you might have to initialise the workspaces first but it is better than spending five minutes after logging in each time re-arranging windows…

There is of course now way of figuring out how many rows had been updated already. The first step was to create a sequence

We can then use this sequence in the update statement to ensure that each row updated also increments the sequence

Once the query is running, you can open another connection to the database. To get an indication of how far it has got, you can just run the following

Bear in mind that this will also increment it by 1 but if you have millions of rows which is really the only case in which this would be useful, a few additional increments is hardly going to make a difference.

Good luck and have fun!

Walking a world covered in snow,
A cold heart cracked.

Stayed up late… and every night,
The lights flickering and switching,
Faster than I could keep up,
music, louder, louder and louder still.

I can feel the bass, pumping through me,
Existence, but a mere memory,
drinking, and drinking,
till the memories fade.

Walking out into the cold,
the snow falling,
forever falling,
walking with the snow crunching,
and it felt like forever.

Dragging on yet another cigarette,
on yet another dark day,
yet another grey day,
The sun might be brightening up the day,
but it wasn’t making a dent on mine.

Wandering back into the darkness,
the noise screams at me,
People shout and I wave,
I push and trudge my way to the bar,
for yet another drink,
with yet another drunk.

I smiled, I laughed,
and inside, I didn’t cry,
for all that would make me cry,
was being forgotten,

was a lifetime away,
and yet never quite forgotten.

But in this pain,
in this misery,
in these grey days,
I lived a life.

A life fuelled by drugs and passion
a strong desire to run
far far far away.

Today, now, looking back,
music, louder, louder and louder still.

A drink in my hand,
but no cigarette to my mouth.

Pain, misery and suffering but a memory,
something I barely remember,
not forgotten. A life that was.

All it took was a beat, a song, a lyric,
and in an opening,
the memories come back,
flooding as if they were always there.

It is yet different,
They are calm,
no longer running.

And I let the music seep in
and into my existence,
enjoy my existence
as I once myself was lost
in the music, in the bass, in the beat.

What I once stumbled across,
only while running away,
I now experience,
not entirely by accident,
but by choice.

The power,
the charisma,
the love,
the passion,
the bass,
the melody,
the lyrics,
the drugs,
the passion,
the love….

life… :-)

Time, with its ever changing moods,
never stopping,
always without mercy,
I have myself a stay of execution.

Swimming in this warmth,
this glow of love and affection,
I am nary a man,
nary a being of time or space.

In infinity I bask, in the glory,
of simply being loved,
by a heart that knows not,
not what bounds are.

These roads we pave,
Sometimes with shit,
Sometimes with silver,
Perhaps with gold.

We pave these roads
  With whatever we find,
    With whatever we can afford.

  But nothing changes the fact
    The simple fact,
      The destination is hell.

  You can plant trees,
    You can have butterflies,
      Deer, birds and bees.

You can move in a car,
  You can walk and
    You can cycle there

It can be midday,
  Or a moonlit night,
Dusk or dawn,
  It matters not.

The road you are on,
It takes you to hell.

Words as simple as love,
had a power…
a power that was indescribable.

In the world of words, it was easy,
easy to get lost and forget,
forget the feelings,
the memories,
the thoughts,
that they embodied.

I was never prepared,
A time when words would fail me.

For there are some things,
some rare things in life,
that words cannot describe,
words have not been created for,
words cannot be created.

I would read the the dictionaries,
not just of this tongue,
but all that has ever been writ,
to find but one word,

one word,
to come close,
to how much,
just how much,
I love you…

I’m pretty sure my next phone was an A1000, a pretty awesome phone. This was around the time that Motorola started releasing the razr which I was far from impressed with. I jumped ship to Sony Erricson and I went through a couple of those before heading over to the wonderful world of HTC. I wanted a smart phone to help with work and so on and I got the HTC HD (If I recall) which was a Windows phone.

While this make me uncomfortable, I was still more comfortable with this than a blackberry. I couldn’t get an iPhone for some reason that I cannot remember.

The phone was pretty laggy and I got pretty sick of it pretty quick. I then got myself my first android phone - an HTC Hero… Most people didn’t like the curvy bit at the bottom but I didn’t care. I was happy to be on the cutting edge. It was also a bit slow and laggy. but it was android and I loved it. It started a brand new love affair… Let me tell you more…

This phone got rooted and got all forms on interesting things installed on there. I eventually wanted a phone that was faster and more responsive and opted for the HTC Desire.

Another phone that I loved and it was quicker… and that was nice. I finally had a phone that could compete with the iPhone and did a lot of the things that I wanted it to do. It provided me with the level of flexibility that I wanted.

Unsurprisingly, I rooted that one too and loved it. I wanted the HTC Desire HD when it came out but I had to wait out contract expiries and a good thing it was too.

By the time I was able to get a new phone, I was sick of HTC for various reasons. I had installed a ROM on my phone without HTC Sense and I was surprised at just how much I just did not miss it.

On doing some research, I also realised that HTC had fallen behind and had no “superphones” available.

This led me to the Samsung Galaxy S2 and the Motorola Atrix. It was a tough call for me and for a while, I was seriously considering the S2.

Throwing the question around the office, the Atrix was recommended and without a second thought as such, I went for it. Motorola deserved another shot and I loved their high resolution screens.

My mum got the S2 and someone else I know had it too. I had gotten used to other people having the same phone as me with the Desire, but I love to have something different. The S2 seemed a little flimsy and I like the more solid feeling from the Atrix.

The phone arrived today along with a keyboard, mouse, remote control and a dock. I had a very busy day, so didn’t really have a change to play around with the accessories. I’ll tell you what though - I remember why I loved Motorola in the first place.

I feel sophisticated and techy with the phone. I love the fingerprint scanner. Its a little laggy and its arguable as to whether its any quicker than punching in the passcode but that’s not relevant. Its bloody cool.

And the screen - the screen in absolutely beautiful. Better than HD.

It also come jam packed with some cool applications like Swype. I used to have it a long time ago when it could be purchased.

After it was pulled, I switched to SlideIT which I thoroughly enjoyed. Going to back to Swype though has been beautiful. It just looks and feels much nicer.

There is one complaint in that it still runs Android 2.2. instead of 2.3. Perhaps I shall learn patience. I am not sure if I will root this one. Hopefully I don’t quite get bored of it as I did with the HTC’s.

I like the bunch of additional stuff that comes with the Motorola phone including the Swype. I’m not convinced that I’ll want to give that up.

I’ll just wait patiently for the gingerbread upgrade. Until then, I’ll just enjoy the other ways in which the device is awfully sweeeeet!

I stumble into a bar in the darkest of night and order a scotch - neat! The redhead that serves me bring back faintly vivid memories of a blonde I once knew. Her shoulder length hair draped over a bright purple low cut top. Cleavage like mountains.

The bar as quiet as the night herself and the lights as dim as the ones that light my heart. I take off my coat and drape it over the bar and I can’t help but sense the love with which the coat clings on to the bar is if so frightened of falling - perhaps in love. Why did no one bother to tell it that it is not the falling but that sudden stop that will kills!

She brings the drink over and I take a wholesome sip. It burns my mouth, my tongue with a passion I haven’t felt in recent memory. I let it envelop my whole mouth. I can feel it burning through every part of my mouth that it can taste.

I ask for another one as it just rolls down my throat burning everything in its path and the rest of it is poured in my mouth.

She looks at me quizzically! I tap twice on the bar and say “please!”.. and she trots off to pour me another one. As she walks away, I can’t help but admire her from behind. She reminds of a brunette I knew once, not so long ago. The vividly faint memories flush my mind as the scotch burns my mouth and my throat with eager anticipation.

I can feel the peat thunder through my palate, burning all in its path. I close my eyes to listen to the music for the first time and it tells that the I’ve got to believe.. little does it know…

Brought back to reality by the drink being put in front of me, I decide to savour it a bit more this time. I take a big sniff of it and I can feel it rush up my nostrils and try to pierce through to my brain…

I only take a sip this time and turn around to look at the blonde that asks me if the seat next to me is taken. I wave my arm as if to say - “all yours!”… As she sits down, I realise that she reminds me of a redhead I once knew… With curves like a dagger, brutal yet somehow alluring. Inviting me to surrender to death.

She orders a scotch and I wave to the redhead and ask her to put it on my tab.

The blonde turns around and thanks me. I point out to her how rare it is to meet a girl who drinks scotch.

I finish my scotch and order another two as I introduce myself. She tells me that her name is Lana.  I tell her about this girl I once knew by that name… I look into her deep green eyes, caress her face, with skin so soft and tell her that the Lana I knew had eyes bluer than the ocean and her soul as kind as the oceans are deep paled in comparison to how danced… in the darkest of night, in the heaviest of rain, with the full moon the only light…

The next thing I know, I am being thrown up against the wall of my apartment. The glass walls looking out into an ocean. She rips my shirt apart as if it was made of paper and her lips finds its way around my face, my neck and my chest..

I push her away, which fails, so I pick her up and throw her on the couch. Softest leather in the world. I grab the remote and put on the stereo and it blares out screaming to the world that a seven nation army could not hold me back. I head over the bar and pour two drinks - of scotch. She comes over and holds me from behind, running her fingers, as soft as silk on my chest and kissing my neck with her lips softer than her skin.

I turn around and hand her a drink which she promptly puts down to kiss me. I don’t let her - I lean back and make her work harder… I enjoy watching her get a little frustrated… and try harder to get closer.

I take her hand and lead her over to the sofa and I sit down with her looking over me. She leans over to kiss me and I let her kiss me this time, but only briefly. I run my fingers up her soft naked legs, under her dress.

I run my hands softly up her inner thighs kissing her gently, like butterflies with my fingers. She breathes in sharply as I reach round and slowly, gently, up behind her and slowly reach into her pants. I pull them down, again, with my fingers gently kissing her skin all the way down. She lifts up one leg after the other as I take it off and throw it into the distance.

She bends on knee and places it alongside me and then the other to straddle me. She leans forward to kiss me and I let her kiss me… little butterfly kisses to start.

My hands run up her back and into her hair and down her back again. I run my fingers on her shoulders and and across her chest - pushing her away gently to visually absorb her stunning red dress tightly caressing her curves like blood on a dagger…

I look into her eyes and lean forward to kiss her. She tries to lean back to tease me but my arms hold her tight and there is no room for her to move…

My lips touch her lips and I can feel them making love, but her lips are not enough. I kiss her lower lip, her chin and her neck as my hands take hers and wrap it behind her.. trapped but only for a moment, before I run my fingers up them to find her shoulders again. It seems my fingers cannot get enough of her soft soft skin.

She pushes me back. Looks into my eyes, and her fingers run down to undo my belt and I realise that as much I would love to tell you what happens next.. it will have to wait… :-P

I briefly look up and spot the two parachutes landing close by. I look around and spot my target - he is amidst them all in a chariot, heading towards me. The two parachutes land in flanking positions amidst the army. I unsheathe my sword and can’t help but smile.

The soldiers come at me in swathes and I cut them down. I feel my sword enter the heart of one and the lungs of another. As I begin to feel myself get bored of the bloodshed, I clear a circle around me. I leap on to the shoulders of the ones closest to me and run across on the shoulders of the soldiers before they have a moment to realise what is happening or react. I run across and when the chariot is but a stones throw away, I leap and land on one side of the chariot. My lieutenants are not here yet but I see that they have seen what I did and they do the same thing. I turn around and roar.

The soldiers around my leap up on to me and drag me to the floor. I use my sword to block the attacks and push back hard as I leap to my feet. I fight them off and it doesn’t take long for my lieutenants to get to me. Once they distract the soldiers, I use some of the dead soldiers and the shoulders of some who are alive to help me leap on to the top of the chariot. My sword cuts through the top of and I use my hands to rip it apart and drop inside.

I see the fear on his face as my swords softly touches his neck and a smile creeps into my face. I use my other hand to reach for my hip flash and take a sip.

His hands tremble as he reaches under his seat and brings out the urn. I can hear the screaming and fighting outside. As my fingers grasp the urn, I hear the whistling was was faint earlier rapidly get louder and turn into a shrieking whine.

The next thing I know I’m flying through the air riding a shock wave of epic proportions. I crash into the ground and I look around and see that my lieutenants have also landed nearby. Immortality is cool but it can be painful at times. I pick myself up and look behind to see that most of the army is decimated. In the air however, I spot airships - and they’re not mine. They glide low and drop soldiers to the ground and they amass like ants and they rush towards us.

I signal to the other two and turn around to spot our airship in the distance gliding towards us. Its bay doors opening slowly. The hot air hits me like a wall as I leap up and grab on to the hanging door along with the other two. I lift myself up into the bay along with the others and hit the door close button. For an instant, I felt the g-force spike as the air ship made an abrupt stop mid air and lifted off directly into the stratosphere.

I pat them both on the shoulders, grab my flash and finish it off as I head to the cockpit…

As I look at her picture, the flashes of memories tug at my heart and I  can feel the love that I once felt slowly stew and burn and turn into rage and bitter bitter revenge.. It has been a very slow process and it has been months, but there was a lot of love to turn into bitter rage.

I could still taste the bile in my mouth - I don’t know how Acacius manages to keep drinking that stuff as it was water. I’ve thrown up more of that stuff today that he drinks in an hour. It actually tastes worse coming back up than it does going down and that is quite a feat.

I lie back and look up at the all too familiar ceiling and I have stared at each of those specks of dirt, those marks for so many hours, trying to figure out what the hell happened. How did I miss it? How can she have betrayed me so?

I turn over and reach across to the pack of cigarettes lying about - its easy to spot it cos its bright red.

The only thing separating me from those smokes were these empty bottles of various types and brands of alcohol vibrating gently from the loud reverberating music - if you can call it that. It just screams and beats away, tugging at my heart strings - if I still have a heart that is - a debate I’ll leave to other people to discuss and decide, for I simply care not, not in the slightest.

As I knock those bottles out of the way, I wonder how I managed to go through so much in just the last couple of days. Fuck, this is an empty pack, oh it’s ok, there’s another pack, also empty. I crumple them up and throw them into the corner of the room, atop the pile of crumpled up empty cigarette packets.

Ah, here’s a pack - it only has a few left, but I only need one…

I take one out, and barely drape it over my lips… The lighter, where the hell did I put the lighter - I pat myself down and notice I had left one in my trouser pocket. There benefits to having a number of lighters scattered all over the place, I think to myself.

I take it out and light the cigarette. As I take a deep draw from the cigarette, I feel like the smoke penetrates not just my poor little lungs struggling to keep oxygen circulated around my body, but it is draping a huge smog around my brain.

As I breathe out, I feel free, but only for a moment. My mind is clear, and all is well with the world. but only for a moment. Before I  can put the cigarette back on my lips, the door bleeps at me.

I knew this was inevitable. I wouldn’t get to sulk down here forever. I’m surprised it took them this long, but hey ho, I guess it’s time. I contemplate dragging myself up when the door beeps again. I giggle to myself.. wimps - if only they had balls, they would have been more insistent. They should have come in here weeks ago and dragged me out. Just can’t get good people these days.

I  manage to get myself on to a chair and door bleeps again. I wonder if I should sit here for a few minutes and test them - will they keep beeping? will they just come in? or will they give up and go away?

“Sir!”, I hear through the door, the voice trembling ever so slightly.. Poor lad - he’s trying atleast… I realise there is another way to make this fun, so I stand myself up, walk across to the door and just before he is about to put the button again, I open the door and scream “What?”

The boy nearly jumped out of his skin. I giggled in my head. The look of fear on his face was so precious, so adorable. The track changed and it felt like my heart was ripped out of for it brought a flashback with vivid details and the searing pain of it being ripped away. I wondered why I put that fucking thing on random going through all the tracks. That’s just suicide and then I remembered - that’s exactly why.

I didn’t realise this boy could be any more scared when I noticed that he was - he was truly terrified - petrified. I realised that my facial expression must have changed markedly when the track changed.

“What is it boy?” I howled. Trembling, he reaches into his pocket and hands me an envelope.

As I open the envelope, the tracks softly notes:

“Oh her eyes, her eyes
Make the stars look like they’re not shining”\

In the envelope, there is a small folded piece of paper. I unfold it and it simply says.

“We found it!”\

The next thing I notice is the track screaming:
“When I see your face
There’s not a thing that I would change
Cause you’re amazing
Just the way you are”\

I giggled to myself at their people stumbling about, trying to keep their stomach. They seem to have calmed down a bit over the last hour..

As I take another bite off my sandwich, Alvin heads over and tells me that we’re within range of the dive site. The science team were already taking measurements and confirming assumptions. This meant that there was probably only another 10 - 15 minutes to get ready and into the bathyscaphe.

The idea of diving to the bottom of one of the deepest surveyed points in the oceans filled me with excitement and anxiety. It would take me a two to three hours to get down there and it should be an uneventful descent.

I finish the rest of the sandwich and head over to the bathyscape. The crew, nod and wish me luck as they walk past carrying out their duties and I nod and smile, nod and smile.

I climb in and the door is closed and secured from the outside. Pushing down on the communicator button, I check with the science team before starting the pre-dive sequence. They take a moment to reply but come back with an all-clear.

As I run through the checks, the floor seems to fly away as I am lifted up and brought over the ocean and gently placed on the surface. Since so much of the craft is transparent, it is almost as if I am floating in a bubble.

I let the team know that the craft is ready for descent and they confirm dive. As I hit the release button, there is a brief dipping sensation before it settles, and slowly, slowly sinks. I push the button to dive and it sinks faster, and faster but still at a fairly leisurely pace.

As the darkness sets in, I switch on the lights and spot various fish swimming past and I open a bar of chocolate and lean back. I knew there was a reason I had the extra comfortable chair installed on here..

I consider drifting off into sleep, but only for a moment - for the beeping of the detector kicked in. We must be less than 10km away. I make some minor adjustments and lean back enjoying the chocolate bar.

A number of adjustments, a magazine, another chocolate bar and a nap or two later and were just a few hundred metres away. As I take my eyes away from the controls and to look at where we are going, I notice a faint glow in the distance.

I switch off the lights to check that it’s not just a reflection and sure enough, there is something emitting light down here. This is unbelievable, we are 10km or so under an ocean. What the hell could be emitting light?

As I get closer, I see that there are no specific sources of light - it is as if the whole ocean is floor is glowing. Closer yet and I notice that it’s the plants and indeed some of the fish and it is quite a sight to behold. I felt a bit as if I had accidentally wandered into a brightly lit city under the ocean.

There it is - in the middle of it all, in the highest point of the ocean floor, the brightest of them all, and it’s not a plant or a fish, it looks like a flask of some form. The ocean life is richest and wildest and brightest near this flask and very slowly fades into the distance.

I let the team know that I have spotted the artifact and that I was en-route to retrieve it. As I get closer, I notice that the craft is slowing down. Checking the controls and guages, I am not able to discern anything wrong with the engines or the craft.

As I look around, I notice something odd - there seems to be a plant like thing stuck on the rotors on the back of the craft. I reverse the engines and forward again to jettison the plant. Easy enough.

A few seconds later, the craft gets slower again. I lean over to the engine controls and look behind to check when to my surprise, there is nothing wrong with the engine. Nothing in the rotors and then I see it - a creeper of some form had gotten a hold of a bar on the outside of the craft and was slowing it down.

There was nothing I could do. Oh well, if it takes a little longer - so be it. As I turn around, i am greeted by the sight of a fish barrelling itself again the craft. What the hell? Are they blind down here?

As I get closer to the artifact, I notice that there are more and more fish heading towards me. The plants seems to moving towards me too. They are not blind - they are protecting the artifact.

I let the team know and ramp up the engines to get me there quicker. This spurs on the ocean life to attach the craft with even more gusto.

As I reach the artifact and engage the arm to pick up the artifact, half the craft is covered by some form of plant life and the other side is mostly just various forms of fish and other animals. I can barely see the arm pick up the artifact.

This craft was built to survive under very high pressures but these creatures and attacking with an aggression that I had never seen before.

As soon as I had the artifact, I hit the surface button and I start to surface slowly before being dragged back down by the increased weight of the craft.

If that wasn’t bad enough, alarms start to go off. Hull integrity was being compromised - these creatures were causing drag and increasing the weight of the craft making it difficult, if not impossible for me to surface.

I only had one choice left and that was to engage the emergency protocols for rapid surfacing. It was a dangerous manoeuvre, even more so with all these creatures attached to the craft. I had no choice. I  hesitate for a moment, then hit the button.

For a moment, it seems like it had no impact, and then there was an explosion. I saw large chunks of the plant life attached to the craft disintegrate and drift off.

I smile in relief and turn around to see the largest fish I had ever seen in my life heading towards me. I jump onto the controls and swerve wildly to avoid the behemoth and almost narrowly averted it before it flicked its tail fin off the front.

Even though the structural integrity needle was not all the way in the red, we were still intact.

I leaned back into the chair and confirmed that the artifact was still secure. I informed the team about the situation and leaned over to the controls to pick up another chocolate bar when I spot this tiny cute little glowing fish right in front.

It was matching the craft’s ascent and and it looked like it was inspecting me. I waved at it and it came towards me and tapped on the glass. There it was - a tiny little crack.

As it swam away, I thanked the gods that this craft was built to withstand a crack here or there. As I  lean back on my seat, I see the little guy is back and he’s brought friends. There are only a half a dozen or so of them, but they surround me. In a moment of pure operatic genius, they dance, in a beautiful co-ordinated fashion towards the glass and hit it on all sides at the same time.

The see the cracks on each side, and they slowly creep and start to join together. I am surrounded entirely by cracks. Then the first one, the one that I first saw, takes another, one final stab and I close my eyes.

What? Is that all? I mean seriously.. who the hell am I and more importantly? where the hell am i? The frustration, the rage and the panic was starting to build up and.. “beep”, “beep beep”..

I  turn around to where the sound was coming from and there is a terminal beeping and flashing away… I get out of the bed and make my way over.

The screen tells to me to press any key… so I do, I press the biggest easiest key on the keyboard to press and it doesn’t do anything.. I try again - nothing!

I can feel the frustration and rage building up again, and then I pay attention to the keyboard and there it is a key that is marked “any”.

You know how everyone imagines that when you die, you entire life flashes before you… Well, that is nothing compared to what happened at that very moment. I had memories of what seemed like a million years compressed into a few seconds get pumped into my brain..

Typical - of course it is. The trigger had to be something so inane, and of course there were no clues - where would the fun be in THAT!

Even the frustration and rage was explained, as I opened the top draw of the desk, took out the pack of cigarettes, lit one up… looked around for a bottle; and there it is… As it burns down my throat and the smoke destroys my lungs, I can feel the sense of utter calm overwhelm me.. ah, to experience the bliss that is this moment and this unique moment… never to be repeated… never to be outdone.. and there is nothing quite like the first draw…

Alright… back to this fragile reality and I hit the any key to be greeted with the loud beat reverberating through what feels like each and every single cell of my body right through to my soul… and I shall leave the trivialities of whether I have one, whether indeed anyone has one to those who find it a fascinating realm of study…

I wonder how long I have been asleep and more importantly what the weather is like outside. I head on over to the lift, hit the button and it opens up. I get in and the light is flashing at a negative 50. and it goes all the way up to 50.. “Ah, I love symmetry”, I think to myself as I push the 50. I’m glad the 50 above ground is still there and it hasn’t been decimated in the time that I’ve been asleep in here. Perhaps, I’ve only been asleep for a few days or months - who knows?

The lift rockets to the top and it opens on to the penthouse suite and it’s well maintained - just the way I like it. I make a mental note to thank whoever has taken over the maintenance duties.

I head over to the coffee table, pick up the remote and push the button for the curtains which promptly opens, all the way to reveal the glass walls that is now looking onto a landscape that is as white as the clouds or a brides gown and oh so beautiful. My heart skips a beat as I draw on the cigarette.. You know - I don’t care about the reason for being woken - this view is reason enough; and I have to take a moment to admire the view. I look down on all the landscape, all the snow, all that white - “is it Christmas?” I wonder.. nah - it can’t be - there would be presents and tree in here if it was..

I glance across to the calendar on the wall and its only November… The 30th, but nevertheless, only November.

As I wander back to the lift, a thought wandered through my mind that the reason for me being woken should be investigated. I hit zero in the lift and let that thought wander along. It waited all these years; it can wait a few more hours.

The lift plummets to the ground floor and once it lets me out, I head to the garage. It is always such a touch choice as to what I want to take out on such a beautiful day. As I walk past all the cars and the bikes, my mind reels nostalgically to the memories in each of them, but only for a moment for I spot the perfect one for this occasion. The dark horse. yes… on a day of snow, a day when everything is white, the dark horse is the prefect companion to go out into the world with.

I walk over. It is jet black with beautiful sleep chrome lines. I hit the button to open the doors, and as all the others disappear into the ground and the doors open, the chilly air envelops me and I  don the leathers.

I take one last draw from the cigarette and flick it into the distance. I put on the helmet and giggle a little, in victory, as the music gets transferred from the room to my helmet and admire my own technical ingenuity as I get onto the bike.

As I start it I can feel it purring and I  can’t help but smile. I rev the bike just to hear it purr, to feel it purr. I can feel the cold air caressing me as I blaze out of the garage and slide on to the road and speed away.

The world hasn’t changed much. There are still roads, although there isn’t any traffic - hey, all the more road for me… I accelerate and I watch the speed climb rapidly past a 100 when the track in my head is interrupted with ringing.. “ring… ring ring… ring.. ring ring..”

I guess it was inevitable… so I hit the answer button and ask.. “what up?”…

First things first - “is it confirmed?” I ask him. “Yup, source checks out, as does satellite images and local intelligence”. I have an overwhelming desire to order a chopper, fly over with a few teams and just blow the place up. I lost 15 people to them last time - eye for an eye, but that’s not what we are about. We are the good guys - right?

As we go our separate ways and I head to my office, I ask frank to prepare a briefing for the team in 15 minutes. I start to imagine the ways in which we could get payback. I wonder if I want to kill the people in there slowly or whether a high yield detonation would be more appropriate.

I log into the computer and quickly check through the emails, nothing interesting - no voicemails. I have another five minutes and imagine how nice it would be have a cigarette but I quit a few months ago. Darn those health kicks…

I sit back, pop my feet on the desk and just sip on my coffee. I wonder if I’ll be able to get my hands on a sniper rifle and find a location high enough - if the building catches fire, they would all have to evacuate. I could then pick them off one by one. I wonder if they would panic.

Frank knocks once, open the door and tells me that they are ready. I walk over and can’t stop thinking about more interesting ways to kill these people. Where could we place the C4 charges, all around the building?

Frank fills us all in on the intel that we have on the base called “Glaucia” - who picks these names I wonder? As the deeper recesses of my mind imagine watching as a napalm bomb is dropped on the base, we are told that the base is surrounded by acres of woods, lakes and plains. “Well, that removes the option to sniper”, I think to myself. The boundary of the base is marked by a tall electrical fence that detects intrusion and reports it. It will take roughly five minutes for drive from the gate to the base. It is likely that road is booby trapped with explosives although we haven’t been hit by that before.

The satellite imagery shows a few hundred people in the base so it certainly looks in use. We’ll need to manage a strike that is lightning fast to avoid alerting them to our presence since we want to get in quickly so they don’t have an opportunity to destroy all the data as they have done every time we hit them before.

Frank then tells me something that I didn’t expect, and it makes me smile. “We have an in this time…, The west wing of the building is in disrepair and they have contracted a local company to make the repairs. We have intercepted them and will take their place.”

There is a problem with the plan. It has to be a smaller team, about twelve people in total. I interrupt and tell him that there will be thirteen - I am going! Frank starts to object and I make it clear that it was not up for debate.

I tune out as Frank goes through the rest of the plan…

I am in the lead car, Frank is driving. There are three cars in total, two with four people, and mine with five. As we drive the quiet streets, I take a moment to enjoy the snow and imagine it covered in blood spatter… Not long now.

As we approach the gate, Frank lowers the window and shows his fake id to open the gate. This is the first time that we have entered one of the bases without alerting them. This is going to be a success for us. The first one. I can feel my skin tingling with anticipation. I pick up a cigarette from Frank’s pack and light it up - screw quitting. Life is too short! As I take the first draw, I feel the nicotine pulsing through and it calms me down. I forcibly ignore the guilt and just push it to one side. I’ll deal with it later.

Its hard to ignore the beauty of this place and even harder to imagine the snow covered in blood spatter - it somehow feels wrong - just plain wrong. I want to turn around and leave - I don’t want a part of destroying such beauty and we keep moving.

I can see the building now, like a fairytale, majestic and so beautiful. It towers so high that it makes me feel like an ant and it looks so old that I have to wonder how they would have taken that heavy stone all the way up to the top. I  wonder how much blood was spilt in making this beautiful and powerful structure. I wonder how much C4 it would take to blow it into the ground - probably a lot more than we have.  In front of the building, there is a statue, which looks to be very old but well kept.

The car comes to a stop behind the statue and I feel the cold air caress my skin softly and the snow crunches under my feet. The cold air fills my lungs with enthusiasm. I take a moment and close the door. I close my eyes while filling my lungs slowly drawing on the cigarette as the rest of me fills up on the cold, crisp beauty and serenity of the place. By the time I open my eyes the teams have already scouted the perimeter and come back to report.

I take a moment examining the statue, it is difficult to tell if it is merely hundreds of years old or thousands but a lot of care has gone into maintaining its glory. It starts to snow softly  as I look up to see the face of the statue, a man with a look of power and serenity and I can sense a feeling of deep peace, but only for a moment as it is interrupted by quiet radio chatter.

There are no other entry points. The windows are inaccessible and there are no other doors. The main door is the only way in. I notice that there is music coming from the building. I can’t make it out yet - I wonder why they might be playing music, and so loudly.

Two of the teams line up either side of the door. My whole body is tingling, I can feel my heart beating, I concentrate on my breathing to help me focus and relax. They count down silently from three, open the door and enter, I can hear the radio repeating “clear” which the music in the background. I was expecting gunfire but heard none. I go in with the two other teams coming in behind me and the music is louder. The rooms to each side are cleared and we enter a hall which must be the center of the building and it is massive. There are murals over the walls and the ceilings, of gods, angels, demons, war, peace, beauty, everything. I keep focussed. In the center of the room, there is a display panel.

The music is coming from here. The size and the acoustics of the room makes the sound so imposing and majestic. It feels like we should all kneel on the floor and submit to the music but we keep moving, spread through the room. I hear the door close and click behind me. I see a couple of the team try to get it open again with no luck.

As I walk over the panel in the center of the room, I look up and spot someone standing on a balcony looking down. He hasn’t spotted me. I can get him and I  have two choices - shoot him or trace him. As he looks over to spot me, I grab my tracer pistol as quickly as I can, aim and fire. He spots me, smiles, walks to wall, opens it and walks out.

I radio central to pick up the trace as I  spot what it says on the panel - its counting down from 5. By the time I realise what is happening, its already at three. Fuck! If im going down, I’m taking at least that one bastard with me! I radio central to fire the rockets - they ask for confirmation - and I confirm. After 1, it shows a smiley face and in that moment, I felt time slow down, almost stop. I saw my life. The crush on Lisa in school, joining the force, my wedding, the birth of my son, the divorce, the sadness on my sons face when he asked me not to go to work today, the way he wrapped his whole hand around my little finger the day he was born and I can’t help but smile.

Right into the heart of hell.

It takes time to walk this path,
Patience, they say is a virtue,
But one day, I will get there...

I watch the butterflies,
The red roses,
And the chrysanthemums,
As they lean towards me,
As if to try and get away,
From the gates of hell...

With each step, as I get closer,
I taste the air get more arid,
Just a little, only a little,
Barely noticeable...

And I watch the butterflies
As beautiful as a rainbow,
Glimmering ever so bright,
As they turn into moths,
As dark as the night sky,
Not even a sliver of light,
For there is no moon.

The flowers,
With the undeniable,
Their unforgettable fragrance,
Swaying softly in the breeze,
Inviting me into a world,
A world of joy and fun,
As they turn into death,
Into the dark branches,
That once held the beauty of all life...

The gate ever so wide open,
One does wonder, but quietly,
Why there are gates at all...

Walking through, I feel the heat,
It burns my skin, but slowly,
I feel myself burn away,
Slowly and with passion...

Sparks fly enthusiastically,
Playing with each other,
like lovers on a moonlit night.

When all is done and said,
I see that my heart is still beating,
The fires licking it, kissing it tenderly,
Coaxing it, ever so quietly and gently.

Join us, in this eternal fire,
This fire of infinity,
Burn, and for ever,
Be for ever a part of this.

But my heart denies the fire,
An eternity, an instant,
A drop of blood,

A small drop of blood,
floats down into the fire.

I realise that she does not love me,
For what she felt me for me,
There is not a word,
Not a phrase, a paragraph or a book.

Even all the words ever written,
All the words ever spoken or thought,
Yet could not describe that...

That undeniable, irrevocable feeling,
That fundamental fibre of her being,
Indescribable to any mortal,
Perhaps even the immortals...

My knees feel the rocks underneath,
And as I look up, I see her,
In all the glory that my mortal eyes can behold...

Her wings spread out,
In all their multicoloured glory...

Her bare feet, with her golden skin,
Glistening in the moonlight...

Her soft golden curls,
Draped over her kind  face,
Glistening in the glory of the sun...

You might know her as life,
Others describe her as fate,
Others yet might know her as destiny...

I did, but only once hear,
That she was described,
As nothing less than the universe...

Walking on this earth,
On the same streets each day,
Past the same buildings,
The same stores,
And the same concrete sidewalks...

The same as I walked on yesterday,
And the day before...

I straighten my back,
And I look up at the sky...

And I feel the tingling sensation,
Just very faintly on my back...

As it grows and sprouts,
Like a tree that has been watered and fed,
Not just for a day or three but decades and centuries...

I feel the wings on my back,
In all its multi-coloured glory...

In a moment of clarity, I realise,
To fly, all one has to do is dream...

And then simply reach for them...

For I am nothing,
Yet, I find that I am,
I am everything.

In your soft hands,
I am putty,
Malleable, changeable, to be moulded,
I could be everything,
and I can be nothing.

Bend me,
Break me,
Shape me.

Breathe life into me,
With but a simple kiss.

And I shall be yours,
Not just for now,
or this life,

For all life,
All lifetimes,
For eternity.

There are various ways to combat this issue and the first instinct would be suggest that there is a memory leak. After eliminating this as a possibility, the next challenge was to identify where the memory was being taken up. This took some time and effort and the hibernate second level cache was identified. We were storing far too much in the second level cache.

This is another double edged sword. The hibernate second level cache is absolutely imperative to a high performance system. It does however, come with a price. The cache needs to be managed carefully to ensure that balance between performance and memory requirements.

To this end, it was important to be able to identify what was taking up all the memory in the cache. Each object might only take a couple of hundred bytes, but with our second level cache set to store hundreds of thousands of items, this quickly takes up hundreds of megabytes. With the metadata of the cache, this could easily hike it up near a gigabyte of memory usage. This gets substantially worse with cache evictions and the adding of new items into the cache.

The correct way to resolve this is to identify specific object types that “overload” the cache. i.e. items that have an large number of instances stored in the cache. Identifying classes that store a large number of items is easy enough - we just traverse the cache and count up the number of items. However, there might be a class that stores a smaller number of items but take a sizeable amount of memory. For this reason, it is important to understand the object sizes in memory as well.

If you have ever tried to find a way to identify object sizes, you will know that this is no easy task. You can calculate to some degree of accuracy the size of an object based on the data it stores but this is a manual process.

The only real way to get this information is to use a java agent and use that to calculate a more accurate memory usage. For this purpose, we used the classmexer agent which requires a simple installation step of adding the following parameter to java -javaagent:classmexer.jar. You can then figure out the memory utilisation of an object by calling

You can also pass in a collection of objects:

This was the simple part.

Traversing the node structure of jboss cache and collating a collection statistics with regards to the number of each type of object and its memory utilisation was a little more interesting.

I will cover this separately

As I see the sun set,
I think to myself
By the time the sun rises,
I shall love you,
Not any more
For ever more.

As I see the sun rise,
I think to myself,
By the time the sun sets,
I shall love you,
Not any more,
For ever more.

One more week,
I think to myself,
When this week is over,
I shall love you,
Not any more,
For ever more.

One more month,
I think to myself,
When this month is over,
I shall love you,
Not any more,
For ever more,

Just a year,
I think to myself,
By next year,
I shall love you,
Not any more,
For ever more,

And now I lay,
My life spent,
In trying
Not to love you,
As I draw my last breath,
I think to myself,
When I am born again,
I shall love you,
Not any more,
For ever more.

As I draw my first breath
My first breath of new life,
I think to myself,
I shall love you,
For ever more.

Icarus, such a fool,
With his wings
Of wax and feathers

Close to the sun,
He could not go

For he did not fly
Simply as I do,

Soar, as I do,

Ever higher I go,
Closer to the sun,

And all because you love me!

I can taste the iron in the blood of victory in the cool air. My armies are committed and it won’t be long before the final battle starts.

After I awoke, I realised that the world had changed in the two thousand years that I was asleep. Humanity had kept itself busy fighting between themselves - we were never even missed. If only we weren’t restricted to meagre fractions of our armies if we are to fight on this world or they could have witnessed a real war.

My awakening meant that the other nine was also awake. The only wildcard was Acacius and his complete absence meant that this was, for the first time in all eternity truly between the armies of the dark and the armies of the light. I knew that to achieve victory, I needed allies.

More importantly, I needed a strong human presence since this was would be fought on all fronts. I sent my team of four to the four corners of the world to build an empire, to make allies and be ready for my call. This works as a good deterring tactic, particularly since Aelia and her armies will be reluctant to spill the blood of the innocent.

It doesn’t matter how powerful my army is if I don’t know where the enemy is. This was for me to tackle.

It took a lot of hunting and a few years ago, I discovered the location of one of their offices. The head of the corporation, Lucia reports directly to Aelia. She was my target, and I got to know her. We fell in love and together, we will rule all that is, and all that ever will be…

As I turn around, I can see Lucia’s airship in the distance dropping her off. I changed the plans to move the final battle a few weeks earlier and she is not going to like that. Our preparations finished ahead of schedule and there is no point in waiting.

I don’t like having to walk all the way over there but there is far too much at stake and it is not worth the risk of being spotted by anyone. The ground starts to turn muddy as rain starts to pour down, as if sad to see the world as it is come to an end. I can feel the rain dripping down my face and I can see her now, her long black hair clinging to her face and her black coat. She is walking slowly towards me. I smile. She smiles back, but its different. I haven’t seen this smile before.

She knows something that I do not… not yet and I can feel my gut twisting - I am not going to like what is to come.

The clouds clear, the rain stops and sun’s brightness streams through with a vengeance. She takes her coat off to reveal white, pure pure white silk clinging close to her soft skin. Her hair changes, the water in her hair glistens, for a moment, and slowly changes to gold, dry, and flowing the soft the soft breeze.

The irony of the betrayal made me smile. This was Aelia herself. Now, we are both equal, just on opposite sides, so I know that she would not be here unless her armies were nearby. I know that her lieutenants are engaged elsewhere through my other sources.

She kneels on one knee and picks up the sand, which is now dry and throws it into the air. From it springs beautiful creatures of gold and platinum, thousands of them. in the blink of an eye, there was an army.

The beauty of it brought a tear to my eye as it always did and I took my stand. She smiled a confident smile and I laughed. She mistook it for arrogance and her smile widened in preparation for victory.

Just as they prepared to attack, there was a loud boom through the sky. It was one of my transports, zooming along at mach something or other. Too fast to pick me up but not to drop something off. Not something, but two of my lieutenants. Before Aelia and her army recovered from the surprise, the two lieutenants had already thrown their daggers at her. The three of us are charging towards them all.

I can see the two daggers join together in front of me to form a sword and going right for Aelia. I’m glad there are rules against using “modern” weapons - swordplay is just more fun. The satisfaction you get from plunging it into a body is unparalleled - where is the joy in squeezing a trigger?

Before the sword finds its intended target, one of her soldiers get in front On impact, it turns to dust, but before the sword has a chance to fall to the ground, my hand is around the hilt. She has her sword out as well. To either side, I can see my lieutenants fighting through hordes of the creatures.

As I raise my sword to strike, I can feel the rage, the anger and the desire for destruction boiling to the surface. I want to slowly place this sword into her heart. Just as I was about to bring the sword down and strike, I hear something metallic drop down at my feet. It beeps and sends out a powerful shockwave throwing us all apart. It takes me a second to recover and I hear the noise of a car - who still drives those?

It screams through the space between the three of us and the army. It spins around to separate the army from us. I can see from his manner, the cigarette in his hand, the hipflask on the passenger seat, and the music blaring loudly that its Acacius. He gestures for us to pop in and without hesitation, we jump in. He turns around and speeds to the cliff…

The army of Aelia following behind. Before I can ask him what the hell he was doing, we are flying off the edge of the cliff. Just as I wonder if I should have just stayed and fought, I see an airship - its docking bays are open. We land, race to the end and come to a stop. He switches the car off and after I take a moment to catch my breath, ask him why he still drives around in one of these. “Meh, I still like them”, he tells me.

We’ve both had some nice red wine, the music is perfect, it is tugging at my heart strings, this is perfect, romantic with a hint of filth, the perfect time for my phone to buzzzzz. I know that I have a few seconds before the ringtone kicks in. My right hand changes it mind, moves over to the phone and pushes ignore. At least it doesn’t call for anything more than one arm.

My right arm makes it way to her back. I like the way her tongue feels, particularly the stud she has in there… not sure exactly what word to use to describe it. My right hands feels along the bra strap onto the buckle again…

bzzzzzzttt. Perfect! its important, but thats ok, its not urgent. I wonder what it could be, for a moment, as my right arm repeats the ignore.

My right hand just strokes her back this time round. I need to allow for a minute or two. The phone could ring again but it didn’t. My body is in automatic pilot, keeping the pace but does not have my attention, not yet. One… Two… Three… Four… Five… I could as slowly as possible… Six… Seven… Eight… and there it was, not a ring, not a bzzzzzzzzttt, but a short burst bzztt. I know what is coming… One… Two… and my phone screams… Its not a call, its not urgent, not at all, its an emergency.

Why is my tongue still in her mouth? I roll her over, take my tongue out, grab my shirt, my phone and walk out as I start to button up, As I close the door, I hear her shouting out for me to call her. Ring up the lift, put my headphones on and click play. Music screams. I need to make a phone call but it’ll have to wait until I’m out of the building.

The lift pings, the door opens and reveals and rugged man with long-ish, ruffled hair, tight shirt, jeans. Can’t help but admire the man and his animal magnetism. Now that is why there should be more mirrors in the world!

I have a minute maybe 90 seconds before I need to deal with this, so I dissolve into the music - auto-pilot.

As I scream out of the garage, I call. It rings only once. “The coordinates for the base Aquila has been compromised”, he tells me. “How long do we have”, I ask. “ten to fifteen minutes. The base is already in auto-destruct with 9 minutes”, “I’ll be there in five!”.

Heavy snow, nicely under the influence of a bottle of nice red wine and I have five minutes when it takes me 20 on a good day. Now, this is what I live for. As the phone disconnects, music comes back, loud and and the whole car reverberates with the bass as the pedal hits the metal - blitzing through the traffic, I can feel the adrenaline hit as I reach over to the passenger street to grab the hip flash and bring it to my lips. I can feel it tingling down my throat. The only thing that could make this better is a cigarette, but I have to wait until the next stretch of straight, and then I spot the lights.

Hmmm, I wasn’t expecting them for another 30 seconds. Oh well! as I turn into a corner, I notice the the lights are red and cars a backed up ahead, opposite traffic is trickling down slowly, so I take the only sensible choice I  have, to weave through oncoming traffic and slide through the lights turning right. I pick up the pack of cigarettes from the passenger seat, flick it open and bring it to my mouth so I can fish one out. Grab the lighter and light it.

As I look in the rear-view mirror, the lights are already so far behind that I can’t seem them through the snow.

I have a minute, 90 seconds to relax.

I can see the door opening - no matter how many times I have enjoyed the automations, I still appreciate it - the less I have to do the better.

The car screeches to a halt as I open the door and get out. The door open automatically - you gotta love technology. I walk through and there is a countdown timer projected onto the wall with a cartoon of a smiley face exploding instead of the zero’s. That still cracks me up! Four minutes and thirty seconds to go. I’m thirty seconds early. I hang a right into the kitchen, straight to the fridge to pick up a nice cold bottle of beer.

Walking back into the main space, with just over four minutes to go, I am drawn to the conference table in the middle with all the pizza - I need to pick up a slice.

As I walk over to the table, I am told that the outer perimeter sensors have detected an incursion. That gives us another seven minutes. An extra three minutes. They are getting faster. I’m glad for the pizza - I wonder if they knew that I was in the mood for some pepperoni.

As I enjoy the pizza, I ponder on whether to delay the auto-destruct by a few minutes so that I can catch a few more of them in the blast. My train of though is interrupted by an informational dialog popping up on the wall to tell me that all sensitive information has been wiped clean and that all personnell has been evacuated. Two minutes to go - we are also getting faster, but we are down by one minute.

“Delay the auto-destruct by four minutes”, I tell them. “But that’ll give them a full minute” responded Arin. “Good!” I thought and nodded to arin. The timer was reset.

As the countdown went down to a minute, the building sensors told us that they were just entering the building and I imagined it. They think that they are early, that they beat the timer. I know that they will see the welcome banner as they walk in - I like that! This is the first time that they will have seen that. They have never gotten this far before.

And they’ll meander in, with all their gear, signalling and shouting, the room must be filled with adrenalin and testosterone. For a moment, I feel bad for them, but let it go. As the timer goes down to ten seconds, I wonder if they got to the heart of the building, whether they are trying to bring the dead machines back to life, opening up filing cabinets with cute little messages on them. I wonder if they smiled.

As the counter hit zero, I know that they heard it, the explosion right outside the building. There are no longer any exits to this building. The building no longer has any windows - the explosion blew them out. It’ll take them a second to figure out what happened. All of the walls of the building now light up with a timer, and the soft sweet voice of a girl counting down… Five… Four… Three.. Two… One… Zero… The zero is a smiley face. It teases them for a second, then explodes, and so does the whole building. They didn’t stand a chance.

And now I see that I have reached the top,
the very top of a mountain,
and I see it all,
the life I led.

Standing here looking down on the life I led,
I can’t help but feel a little envious,
of the life that I myself led,
looking back with the sun shining on my back
and a tear in my eye

This accidental life that I led,
all because I was running,
away from something.

It might just be time.
Time to face that past,
that which I’m running from,
And stop running

Standing at the edge of this cliff,
perhaps its time,
to let it all go.\

Perhaps its time to take a leap of faith,
and let myself fly
and for the first time,
not away from something,
not towards something…
but to just fly..

As per the instructions, it was implemented as follows (to use a template)

However, when trying to apply the theme, it didn’t work. I tried various things and identified that the hook above was just not being called. A little bit of digging helped me discover that themes are cached. This happens even in the dev mode. To resolve this, go to

Administer  -> Performance -> Clear Cached Data (right at the bottom of the page)

and et voila my theme was now being utilised.

Then it happened, its supposed to be onchanged. This particular component requires the extra d at the end… and it worked and everyone lived happily ever after…

Passing in custom objects is a little more complicated. You could just mark the class as Serializable and let Java take care of this. However, on the android, there is a serious performance hit that comes with using Serializable. The solution is to use Parcelable.

The intricacies of the class is described in the code above. There is now one more special case. What if you have an object that references another object. Clearly, they would both need to be Parcelable, but how would be integrate them. ObjectB shows a parcelable embedded in another parcelable…

When writing the parcel, we need to pass in the flags - which is easy enough. When reading the parcel, we need the classloader, which can be picked up from destination class of the parcelable. Again easy!

Finally, passing a parcelable object to an intent

Almost too easy - right?

and to read the values,

It it was any easier - we’d all be out of a job ;-)

Accessing preferences / configuration / settings from Android is actually pretty straightforward as long as you are in an Activity. To read:

SharedPreferences is the key class. To write, you also need the [SharedPreferences.Editor](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/SharedPreferences.Editor.html{ class, as follows:

In general however, you will need access to settings in more than one activity and it seems a bit wasteful to get these bits littered through the application. Since I am lazy and like to write things just once, I  separated all the prefs stuff into one class called Settings.

It has a constructor which takes a Context (We need this to access the SharedPreferences Object). It also has setters and getters for each property being saved. This example, just saves/retrieves a username and password.

Nothing particularly exciting. Now, how do we access this. The Android framework has a neat little feature that is not very well documented and it involved the use of the Application class. If you inherit from this class, and point to it in the manifest file, it will get initialised first before any other objects. This is an ideal place for bits that need global access. You could use Singletons or static fields but this works with the framework.

There are two parts to making this work

The application class:

The onCreate method on MyApp will be called before onCreate on any of the Activities. The Settings class described above, needs a Context to be passed in. Lucky for us ;-) Application is also a Context.

You also need to wire it into the AndroidManifest.xml. You need to add the android:name element into the application tag{

Tie this power with either grep -l. (Thanks to Steve for pointing out a mistake in the following, now corrected)

or find

If there are multiple changes you want to make, just put them all into a file and pass it in via the -f flag.

file: replacements.patterns

and the command, using find to iterate through all files in the current directory and subdirectories.

et voila - hope it helps.

Lets start with the data. For the sake of this demo, lets use a simple contact list:

Some straightforward fields and getters/setters

Next, we need an Adapter. For this one, we will use a ArrayAdapter. We will extend it so that we can override the getView method.

The key bit here is the getView method. We pick up the LayoutInflater which we can use to pick up the view that defines the TwoLineListItem view. This allows us to use two different snippets of text as part of the list. We then pick up the each of the TextView items and set the text against them. The formatting of these item are defined in the xml file.

The TwoLineListItem class also defines a placeholder for the selectedIcon. Check the documentation for more info.

The xml file for the layout goes as follows:

As you can see, we are just defining a TwoLineListItem element with two embedded TextItems. Tthe android:id parts are important. It ensures that the getText1() and getText2() methods work as expected!

Finally, we have the activity. In fact, we will be using a ListActivity as follows:

getContacts clearly just creates a couple of contacts for the sake of the demo. its the setListAdapter that is the key here. It creates a new ContactArrayAdapter that we have written, passes in the context (which is just the current activity), a resource ID and a List of items to display.

Run it and you should see something like:

So easy when you know how. I believe could use a View or a ViewGroup as needed instead of the TwoLineListItem but I shall leave that to you to discover.

I have included all the files that I created/modified but if you want the whole project tarred up, just drop me a note ;-)

I installed synergy on both ends, with the linux one as the server

and the mac as the client

http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergykm/

and it worked.

There was just one very very annoying problem. The Ctrl key and Cmd keys were different. This really messed with my muscle memory. After some hunting around, I just had to update my .synergy.conf file in linux. Here is the relevant section

et voila. It now works a charm. I  have neglected the configuration of the synergykm and synergys but these can be figured out easily ;-)

Being a bit of a purist, I ran Debian{for very many years but found their stable releases lagging behind far too much. This was largely due to their perfectly understandable view of it being ready only when it is right.

For a while, I ran their unstable distribution called Sid{ based on the disturbed, hyperactive 10 year old boy in the film Toy Story{ The idea being that Sid breaks things, and it certainly did. While it taught me a heck of a lot about linux (and the terminal), my computer was broken on a very regular basis.

I switched down to the testing version and that helped ease the pain to a very large extent. I had always thought that Debian with a more regular and shorter release cycle would make a world of difference. Clearly, Canonical had the same idea.

Thus Ubuntu was born and it has grown from strength to strength. Its latest distribution of 9.10 codename karmic koala released October 2009, is a massive step forward.

Stephen{ the head of krayatec{was so impressed by the new release that he conducted an experiment. He asked three people in the office who are not tech savvy to install and try out the new release. My view was that it was still too early for such kind of an adoption. I felt that pushing people to try it out at this stage would damage the reputation of the user friendliness of Linux rather than help it.

I must admit that I was proven wrong.  All of the installations went smoothly and it was possible to log in and do the things that they wanted to do.

Do they now use Linux instead of Windows - No! There is still a learning curve and with tight deadlines and little time for re-learning how to navigate around a computer, it remains an experiment.

However, it does answer one question. Can a user who is not tech-savvy, pick up a CD/DVD of the latest version of Ubuntu and run with it? The answer, from this very tiny experiment is a resounding Yes!

As someone who is technically very demanding, I have very few complaints about the latest version. The only one is that it still looks largely the same as the previous version. Then, the release is a collection of tools, so this is understandable.

My three favourite things about the new release are:

• substantially faster bootup times
• Empathy (particular for people-nearby which works great in the office)
• Cloud (Client & Server)

In my opinion, this is the beginning of the end. Linux, has finally taken a leap that shows its potential to change everything… I would wish it luck, but it looks like it doesn’t need it ;-)

Why not download a live cd and try it out?

My biggest concern was of course, about security and twitter-apps. A little while ago, I noticed that this has been resolved. Twitter is now linked with applications in a more security conscious way. I love the way twitter now asks if an application should be  authorised to access information. Yay! No more giving my twitter account details to third party websites.

I also covered an issue that I had with grouping users to see relevant tweets together. This has also been resolved with the use of lists. In fact, lists have changed how twitter works to an extent. There is a blog post about how lists will impact follower counts Lists provide a powerful mechanism to follow a group of people - now, if only I could have an option to see all the tweets made my the people that I am following as well as the lists - that would be cool. It probably should’t be the default, but an option to do that would be useful.

I also like the new feature where it tells you that there are new posts since I last viewed a timeline - saves me from having to click reload randomly to see if there are no posts. The little grey line differentiating the new posts help in that I know how far down I have to read to see just the new posts… :-D

I needed host networking to be able to access network resources (Samba shares etc.) which does not work if the guest OS is on NAT :-(

Solving it was easy though… I assume Vista is installed as a guest with the guest additions and that your user account is a part of the vboxusers group.

On the linux host, first install bridge utils. I run Ubuntu, so it was as easy as:

Next, you need to set up the bridge; again, easy on Ubuntu:

add the following section to /etc/network/interfaces

Add the interfaces to VirtualBox

Within the VirtualBox Guest settings, choose Host Networking and fo the interface, choose br0

bring the interface up:

and start your guest os… et voila, it just works…

The movie that I loved the most was Kung Fu Hustle. I had seen it before but it was definitely enjoyable watching it again. Funnily enough, I didn’t watch it in HD (Although I recently got a HD TV) since it was on Film4 (which, unfortunately, does not have a Film4 HD).

I have been thinking about what I love the most about the movie… Is it the story? The story is great and I do love it but it is a simple story although it does bring in humour, romance, action and edge of the seats suspense fantastically well.

Would I watch it if it was a low budget movie with the same story? Absolutely!

It also has absolutely fantastic special effects. Absolutely beautiful. If the story was not as good but the special effects was just as fantastic, would I still watch it? YES!

I don’t have surround sound (yet) but I suspect that the sound is absolutely gorgeous with 5(/6/7).1. Would I watch a movie without as good a story or special effects but it had such good sound/music? Not sure, but probably…

I am certain the movie looks better in HD but would I watch it without HD. Since I didn’t see it in HD, yes, of course I would. Will I watch it in HD? Hell Yeah!

I also watched “I married an axe murderer”, this time in HD. Of course the fact that i was in HD made no real difference to my viewing experience… I enjoyed Kung Fu Hustle better (of course) but it was still a good enjoyable movie. God bless Mike Myers

I also watched “Man Of The Year” with Robin Williams. Fantastic movie… Again in HD. Again, didn’t notice the HD part but I checked it side by side and the quality was better.

I suppose it all comes down to what we take for granted and what we are used to. With the big plasma tv’s the image gets stretched a little too much and this is noticeable. HD solves this. Of course 5.1 sound is beter than Stereo.

Before I go on, let me just mention the bad film I saw - it was Prophecy with Christopher Walken. I could see the movie’s potential. It has a good story but I got bored halfway through - not because there were no special effects (I imagine better effects through the movie). The story was not half bad (at least the 2/3rds that I watched). The acting was not bad either. In my view, the movie failed to capture my attention for one very simple reason… Pacing… This is not necessarily the movie’s fault. We are now used to movies for the MTV generation where everything moves so much faster. No, I am not talking about cuts every 5 seconds. I am talking about the story moving forward. I watched for a good 40 minutes or so, I still didn’t know more than I knew at the start of the movie. MTV generation or not, that is just boring…

I sincerely believe that everything has its place and a movie can be good just because it has a fantastic story, fantastic special effects or fantastic sound. It also needs to be delivered just right. Most importantly, for a movie to be fantastic, you need it ALL!!! Thats what makes it a movie to be watched repeatedly.

There are of course movies that buck this trend. The Big Lebowski is an absolutely fantastic movie.

I have already seen this half a dozen times and I’ll watch it again. In all honesty though, if it “looked better”. I’d probably watch it even more often… Although, in all fairness, I am not sure how it could look better but that’s not for me to worry about - I am not a filmmaker [yet ;-)]

I have since used:

• Filemaker Pro,
• Microsoft Access,
• Microsoft SQL Server,
• MySQL,
• PostgreSQL,
• SQLite and
• HSQLDB.

I have not yet used:

• IBM DB2,
• Oracle.

Wikipedia has a list of database systems.

Having worked with this range of database systems and having done copious amounts of research into DB2, Oracle and other DB systems I have not mentioned, I like answering the age old questions. Which is the best database system?

Ah! if only it was that simple. There is no database system that is appropriate for any given requirement. But then, if you have been in the technology sector long enough, you would already know that. It's all about using the right tool for the job.

I separate these systems into two broad categories and Oracle. There are the Desktop based database systems:

• DBase
• Foxpro
• SQLite
• HSQLDB
• Filemaker Pro
• Microsoft Access
• MySQL

DBase, FoxPro, Filemaker Pro and Microsoft Access are essentially a GUI frontend that has a database backing.

Access is the best choice for this purpose under the majority of circumstances. Filemaker Pro is relevant in some. The usual reason to use DBase or FoxPro is simply that the developer is used to it. This is not a good enough reason.

I have used DBase III+ for developing an office management suite back in 1994. I have since used Filemaker Pro to develop a simple contact management database in 1998, Microsoft Access to develop a patient management system for a clinic.

SQLite, HSQLDB and MySQL are database engines that are to be utilised by popping a frontend on top; sometimes the frontend is Microsoft Access. Microsoft Access can also be used for its database engine.

Access is usually the worst choice for this except as a stopgap. There are exceptions to this. One is for a web frontend if the site is not too busy and its running on a microsoft platform. You don't have to go to the hassle of installing anything on the server. The drivers will take care of it all.

HSQLDB becomes an obvious choice for a light java based application and SQLite for any other lightweight applications.

MySQL is substantially more powerful and scales a lot better. I include it in this section because it is a server grade database system that can also work well in a desktop environment.

I have used Access for several web based systems and I have used HSQLDB for unit testing hibernate and for a quick and dirty MP3 library that linked into musicBrainz. I have used SQLite in passing to be utilised by open source products.

I have used MySQL with an Access frontend as a management suite for a website as well.

And we have the server based database systems:

• MySQL
• Microsoft SQL Server
• IBM DB2
• PostgreSQL

MySQL was used as the backed database system for the edFringe.com website. This was the perfect choice since the most important requirement was speed. Particuarly with the Query Cache and Master Slave replication, MySQL was the best choice.

SQL Server was used as the backend system for an online course for the Scottish Enterprise around 1999/2000. While MySQL would have been a good choice this, it was not of production quality at the time.

We have also used Ms SQL Server for an insurance company since all the infrastructure was based on Windows and PostgreSQL did not have a viable Windows version at the time.

We use PostgreSQL for megabus. While speed is absolutely critical, it is a ticketing system which means that transactionality is absolutely critical.

While MySQL now has transactionality with innodb, it is still nowhere near as good as the transactionality provided by PostgreSQL through MVCC (Multi-version Concurrency Control). We could have used Ms SQL Server but the cost savings are dramatic.

To summarise, each system has a specific use, specific strengths and weaknesses and which should be used is highly dependent on what it is to be used for. I am hopeful that the summary of what we have used each of these systems for us useful in determining which one is best placed to solve any specific problem :-D

We have not yet used Oracle and it was a strong contender for megabus but the serious heavyweight functionality provided by Oracle comes at a price and it is not yet a cost effective option.

I should point out that I don’t know the people at twitter at all and is very much an outsiders opinion. I have been running a business for about nine years, and while it is of nowhere near the success of twitter, I’ve definitely learned some hard lessons. I am not complaining - I am however, voicing some ideas on how things could be made better.

My experience also includes working very closely with megabus.com, which grew from a fledgling website 6 years ago to what it is today servicing over a 100,000 visitors every day.

My gut instinct about Twitter is that the guys and gals are working hard to delivery one really good service really well. However, it is of a size now where service delivery should be happening in the background with little or no effort.

When megabus.com first launched and over the first couple of years, we spent a lot of time managing the hardware, software and processes till we got it right. It went through a dramatic re-architecture in 2005 and since then, the management time has dropped dramatically.

To take twitter to the next level so that it can be bigger than facebook, in my opinion, requires twitter to a lot of things:

Reliability & Performance

I don’t know the architecture / infrastructure of twitter but having used it fairly heavily over the last few days, have noticed intermittent outages. This has to be solved. Not just in the short term, but in the medium and long term. Twitter has to be a service that just works. All websites suffer glitches and outages but the mean time to failure needs to be a lot higher and it should be cheap and cost effective to scale.

TwitApplications

There are a lot of services and applications that link into twitter. I consistently use tweetburner, tweetdeck and have looked at / considered a range of other services / applications. While the wiki page can point someone in the right direction. This needs to be integrated better into twitter itself

Facebook really took off and removed bebo and myspace as competitors, in my opinion the day it introduced facebook applications.

It should be a different process from facebook as facebook applications are of a different breed and different target market. Twitter simply needs to make it easier for applications to integrate in to solve two problems

1. Easy launchpad to add them in and use them
2. Remove the need to provide the twitter username/password in other websites. I currently have to do this with tweetburner to post directly which makes me very uncomfortable.

Accessibility

I am not talking about makes it easier for people with disabilities to access the site. I am talking about people who are not technically savvy or more importantly twitter savvy.

I joined twitter a while back and just felt a bit lost. There was no guidance as to what a tweet was, what it meant to be a follower or what it meant for people to follow you.

It took an article on a magazine explaining it to make it easier for me to understand and re-boot my twitter life.

Help & Support are good and useful but it should not be necessary if the help and support is present throughout the site. Facebook does this well and makes it easy to learn and do new things. It does not need to be idiot proof but it does need to have just enough information for a newbie to get started.

There are numerous blogs, articles and websites that cover this information but that means that someone has to spend enough effort getting out there and finding out.

This can be difficult when you don’t know what you are searching for as well.

Functional Integrations

There are several integrations that would be useful. There are websites that do some of these things but it would be useful to have them integrated within the site. Examples include:

• Easy way to see the last tweet of all the people you are following / your followers
• Popularity of the people you are following / your followers
• Group people, so that you can follow people who blog about different things but read them together

Conclusion

From my perspective, this is of course a starting point, the tip of the iceberg. Twitter is involved in a lot of new things but without the soft aspect, I think it is making its life harder than it has to be to get the masses.

I am making some assumptions based on how I see twitter working. I have little information about how it is architected apart from some posts that suggests that it is running ruby on rails with MySQL?

Twitter is in the rare category where there is a very large number of data being added. There should be no updates (except to user information but there should be relatively very small amount of that). There is no need for transactionality. If I guess right, it should be a large amount of inserts and selects.

While a relational database is probably the only viable choice for the time being, I think that twitter can scale and perform better if all the extra bits of a relational database system was removed.

I love challenges like this. Technical ones are easier ;-)

If I didn’t have a lifetime job, I would prototype this in a bit more depth. Garry pointed me in the direction of Hadoop. Having had a quick look at it, it can take care of the infrastructure, clustering and massive horizontal scaling requirements.

Now for the data layer on top. How to store and retrieve the data. HBase is probably a good option but doing it manually should be fairly straightforward too.

From my limited understanding of twitter, there are two key pieces of functionality, the timelines and search.

The timelines can be solved by storing each tweet as a file within a directory structure. My tweets would go into

/w/o/r/d/s/o/n/s/a/n/d/<tweet-filename>

The filename would be <username>-<timestamp>

For the public timeline, you just have a similar folder structure, but with the timestamp, for example, the timestamp 1236158897 would go into the following structure as a symlink

/1/2/3/6/1/5/8/8/9/7/<username>

For search, pick up each word in the tweet and pop the tweet as a symlink into that folder. You could have a folder per word or follow the structure above.

/t/w/i/t/t/e/r/<username>-<timestamp> OR

twitter/<username>-<timestamp>

You would then have an application running on top with a distributed cache with an API to ease access into the data easier than direct file access. Running on Linux, the kernel will take care of the large part of the automatic caching and buffering as long as there is enough RAM on the box.

This can in theory be done without Hadoop in between and separating the directory structures across multiple servers but that can have complications of its own, especially with adding and removing boxes for scalability.

You are also likely to run into issues with the number of files / sub-directories limits but they can be solved by ‘archiving’ - multiple options for that too…

Thinking about this problem brought me back to the good old days of working on the search mechanism within megabus.com. We needed the site to deal with a large number of searches on limited hardware when the project was still classified as a pilot.

With some hard work and experimentation, we were able to reduce the search time to a tenth of the original time.

I’ll admit that I don’t know the details or the intricacies of the requirements that twitter has. I have probably over-simplified the problem but it was still fun to think about. If you can think of problems with this - let me know; I wanna turn them into opportunities ;-)

Jeff raises a couple of valid points. With no viable competition, where is the incentive for them to improve the functionality.  It’s pleasant to see that google still invests time and money into improving features including the ability to personalise your search results. However, the question of how long they will keep doing this is worth asking…

The more interesting point that Jeff raises is:

“I’m a little surprised all the people who were so up in arms about the Microsoft “monopoly” ten years ago aren’t out in the streets today lighting torches and sharpening their pitchforks to go after Google.”

My view on this is straightforward. Yes, google is a monopoly on the search market. There is no viable competition. Yes, it possibly uses this position in the market to push itself out more and more to the masses.

However, the reason Microsoft got into the bad books (at least for me) is that while it provided (or provides) fantastic software - it doesn’t treat its customers fairly. Bundling Internet Explorer with windows is fine IF it also bundled Netscape/Firefox which was/is a strong competitor and the only reason people did not use them was lack of experience / knowledge of the option.

The reason google is successful is because it is the only viable choice. There is no other option. If Internet Explorer had no competitor. Then, its fine to include that exclude the others.

Then there is the unfairness in how Microsoft priced the products in relation to the number of issues / bugs that were in the product. Not to mention the feeling that, as customers, you were paying for the privilege of beta testing software.

As a software engineer, I am well aware of the issue around bugs. They are present, and always will be. That’s the nature of software. The issue is not just the number of bugs that are present in software shipped but also the amount of time it takes to resolve them.

It’s not the monopolisation of the market that “got them”. It was their attitude. The monopolisation of the market was the tool used to get them. Kinda like Al Capone being arrested for Tax evasion instead of all the other crimes he commited since that was the only way to get him.

Two main reasons for this is that most software that comes on Linux is highly customisable to start off with. The second reason is that if you don’t like something, you can change it.

There is also the nice thing that most things that you think would be cool or useful in software is already available in some form since someone else thought so too, but before you did and has had the chance to spend some time building it.

I love this so much so that I have often put together a quick linux box for doing things that one could easily replace with an embedded device like a router. I have swayed between the two options based on how much I want simplicity vs flexibility.

One of my favourite responses to someone telling me that we need something that we don’t have is - “we’ll build one”… The software customisation / writing has turned into a metaphor that I apply across more and more things. You need a new table with custom bits - let’s build it. You need a classic car with all the modern gizmos - you know what - let’s just build it.

This has its pro’s and cons. For one, it feels like anything is possible. It also becomes very frustrating to work with limited, limiting, or closed source software (esp when you just want to fix a quick bug that really irks you). It also eats up all your time as you try and do all the things you want… just because you can…

Striking a balance is hard especially when a client asks if it is possible to do something very specific. The answer is of course yes and there is a question that goes with that response. At what value does it become cost effective and provide a good Return On Investment(ROI)

Google, one of the largest corporations in the world went through and acquired a whole bunch of online communities and this is all fine. However, should a company of this calibre not be more careful about associating with a website that has such a silly but serious security flaw. A flaw that could probably be resolved within an hour of work. I appreciate that there are probably numerous other issues that the site has...

However, if the security of the site is not given any priority, how can we, as the masses place so much trust into an organisation that we trust to perform our searches, store our emails (GMail), our files(Google Docs) and trawl through our websites to make it searchable and available to the masses?

In all honesty, if Google cannot allocate enough resources to at least fix security issues within its products, perhaps, they should at least shut them down to limit the damage hackers can do to legitimate users.

Sure, if someone falls for a scam and accidentally gives out their password, they end up paying a price but having zero control over being able to resolve it is unacceptable. A user should be able to change their password and know that someone who had your old password can no longer log in...

We are not necessarily controversial, just that we hold a view that is usually a little different from the mainstream views. It could be said that we bring the alternative to the mainstream.

But then, so did some world governments, bringing open source software into their work places, successfully or unsuccessfully in the last few years instead of Microsoft.

Someone recently suggested that we were anti-microsoft. I don’t think that is case. Microsoft has its place in a technology infrastructure. It is simply that its position is usually overrated or misplaced. As far as desktops for technically shy users are concerned, there is really no alternative but Microsoft Windows. I can hear the Mac users scream that Macs are also an alternative. Theoretically, yes but the fact is that they are too expensive for someone to dabble with it. This is precisely the reason that Microsoft Windows dominates the desktop market.

We support and use Linux. In fact, the majority of the desktops in the office run Linux (Ubuntu as it happens) but people who have a non-technical role use Windows. They could use Linux but Windows is better suited to their role.

This is not necessarily a cost-saving decision. Sure, we have saved thousands of pounds by sticking to Linux instead of using Windows but that is a co-incidence more than anything. In some ways, it is a testament to the skillset of the people who work at Kraya that they are comfortable with Linux. The mindset of Linux is in alignment with the mindset of a developer.

I used to develop in Windows and I often found myself fighting with Windows, whereas with Linux, it just fits. There are several reasons for this. One being that Linux forces you to understand what you (trying to ) do to a bit more depth instead of pretending its magically taken care of.

I am not, for one moment implying that developers who use or develop on the Windows platform is inferior or not as skilled. Simply that my experience was that the Windows platform made it easier to do things badly and more difficult to do things well.

Microsoft has done wonders in bringing technology to the masses and making it more accessible. However, there is still a massive barrier, even for people specifically in the technology sector to appreciate and use technologies which require a bit more experience or knowledge to use appropriately.

There are a couple of really good examples. PostgreSQL is a powerful outstanding database server that can easily compete with Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. However, very few people know about it and even fewer use it.

MySQL on the other hand is also an open source database server but is much more widely used and accepted.

It surprises me when MySQL is used when PostgreSQL is, from a technical perspective better suited. MySQL is faster than PostgreSQL at the cost of poor transaction managment (at best). For any system where data integrity is even remotely important, PostgreSQL is a better choice. However, since there are better GUI tools for MySQL and since it is easier to get the hang of, it gets chosen.

This give technology and people in that sector a bad name. Every tool or software has its place, and should be used in an environment where its strengths are displayed, not its weaknesses. We have instances where we use multiple database servers within one project. PostgreSQL for all the data integrity sensitive areas and MySQL for the speed sensitive areas. Sometimes you want integrity and speed. In these cases, you have to make a choice based on which is more important or layer the databases to use the strengths of both.

Metaphorically speaking, MySQL is a hammer, and PostgreSQL is a sledgehammer. Would you use a sledgehammer to crack a nut, or a hammer to crack a slab of concrete?

Before someone jumps down my throat, I am not suggesting that PostgreSQL is better than MySQL or vice versa - just that they both have different goals, different strengths and weaknesses. They have spent a lot of effort to converge and strengthen their weaknesses but not matter the amount of convergence, their core goals are still different that they will never truly be able to remove their weaknesses without giving up some of their strengths as well. One tool cannot be both a hammer and a sledgehammer…

I was pleased to find out that this was also available for linux. Great... Lets try it out.

First stumbling block is the requirement to register on the website before I can download a trial. I am a firm believer of try before you buy. I should be able to register but it should be entirely my choice.

I am more comfortable with registering before buying or for the use of a free piece of software. However, registering for a trial always irritates me. This was also the case when I wanted to trial InDesign / Illustrator the other day.

After registering, there was the irritating wait for the email to arrive. Now, this is irritating. When I want something, I want it NOW. I hate waiting. Adobe did not make me wait for the confirmation email of registration before downloading the trials. There are two good reasons as to why this irritates me.

1. Email, as reliable as it is generally, can take time. In theory, this can be anywhere from a few seconds to hours. How about if my mail server is currently down. Or even more importantly, what if I have shut down my mail client so that it does not keep distracting me from something that I am trying to do. Opening up my mail client, I now want to find out about the other emails that are in my inbox and whether any of them require an action...
2. I have reluctantly provided details about myself. Confirming my email address before I am allowed to download a trial suggests that Tasktop does not trust me enough to just let me download the trial. The software has started off on the wrong foot. How much of an issue is it really if someone gave the wrong details before downloading a trial. Is it really that important that you are able to keep bugging them via email to buy the product?

I was curious enough to jump through the hoops to download the product. The first thing I noticed is that there is no 64bit for Linux :-(. More steps involved in installing this on my 64bit machine. So instead, I installed it one of my 32bit machines - save time.

Once the download completed, the steps on the website suggested that I needed to configure it (with ./configureTasktop.sh) and then run Tasktop. The configuration step required no input from the user and outputted nothing. I have to ask:

1. Why is the configuration step not integrated into Tasktop and configured to run once? Alternatively,
2. Why does the configuration step, not start Tasktop right after.
3. Even better: Make Tasktop a symlink to configureTasktop.sh, which then relinks that to the Tasktop Binary with the configureTasktop running Tasktop right after. This means that from the users perspective, they are always running the same command, and you save any cost associated with run once checks.

I finally got Tasktop to run and it asks me if I want to install the firefox addon to integrate with Tasktop. I want to see how it integrates, so I do. Of course, this is yet another step.

A restart later, I was ready to try out Tasktop - or was I? We use bugzilla to track tasks and I wanted to integrate that in similar to how I do it in Eclipse. This was also trickier than I expected.

I went into the partner connectors section which did not cover bugzilla, which I assumed meant that it came with Bugzilla integration by default. This is true but how the hell do I get there to configure it. It took me a little while to find the configuration section (there are no menus). Once I was there, I wanted to get back to the original layout which was tricky since the "close configuration" button was nicely hidden away up at the top right.

Once I had this working, I tried out the active/deactive mechanisms and this works just the same as in Eclipse. Except with the Firefox plugin, it adds in the links that you browse as part of your context - GREAT!

Add in a task to blog about it and went through writing half the document, then decided to de-activate it before I started working on something else. All the firefox tabs were closed - again, great...

The problem is that when you re-activate the context, it just clears the tabs in firefox and shows you the links you last had open. The page titles for the pages that I had open were the same for a few, so going through them trial and error to get to the blog post was tricky. More importantly, the cookie was already gone and I had to re-login. This might be a timeout issue with Wordpress so wont tag that against Tasktop.

I haven't tried linking folders / files yet but considering that with the above process taking me more time than I expected due to the sheer number of steps involved, I shall have to leave that to another day. In all honesty, it might never happen.

I do like the time logging feature of Tasktop as it tells me which tasks I spent my time on in different chart formats. This is great. However, I have a problem in that this is on an individual basis. I see nothing on here about how a team leader can link in Tasktop used by the team to calculate total time spent on a project / task. This is a necessary feature for a tool like this in the team environment.

It is possible that all of this is easier in a windows environment. Possibly because it was built on there, but more likely because Windows users are used to taking several steps to achieve something (what is it - 7 clicks to delete a file in Vista?)

Having ranted on for a while, dont get me wrong. I think that Tasktop is a fantastic concept and with a bunch of tweaking can be a very intuitive tool to use. However, at the stage that it is in, it does not do what I need it to do. It is actually more obtrusive than useful (e.g. by removing all my tabs from firefox when switching out of a context and not re-instating them on going back to the context).

Then, it is probably just because I simply expect too much... :-(

However, in the modern age of websites, this kind of a websites simply does not cut the mustard. It is of course adequate, but simply feels a little lacking.

There are several websites that I have recently come across that excel in design - they have fantastic design but when it falls down when it comes to usability or functionality. The websites of some graphic design agencies are prime examples of this.

On the other hands, we have highly functional websites with a wide range of features and functionality. The website might even be attractive but fails terribly in terms of usability. sourceforge is a very good example of this. I used to use it a lot a few years ago but its usability has gotten worse in the last few years, not to mention the fact that it seems to have slowed to a crawl. I still use sourceforge now and again to look up pieces of software but I don't look forward to it.

Then you have the rare gems, that are exceptionally usable and functional. Google is an excellent example of this. Note however, that the design of google in minimal.

Having worked in the web for numerous years and having used more websites than I could possibly count, I strongly feel that the medium that is the web is heavily under-utilised.

Facebook is a good example of some of the good things you can do with web. Things just feel a lot more natural. If you take the news feed, you can hover over an item to see the menu at the top right that lets you set your preferences for that particular item.

Same with your wall, hover over an item on your wall, and you see a menu option, click on it and you get relevant options.

This is a simple and minor thing. However, this brings in the concept of context and I think that context is largely ignored in all applications. However, it should be easier and much more useful to have context sensitive commands / functionality within websites.

Now, If facebook was to take it one step further and allow you to right click anywhere on a news item and then choose one of the options, that would be even better - save me from moving the mouse to the menu.

Another excellent thing Facebook has done is provide the ability to comment on most things that someone does. Social interaction can take a website from zero to hero in an instant. How can you allow your customers / visitors to interact with each other. Even better - Can your website integrate with Facebook and allow your visitors / customers to use the interaction capabilities of Facebook to drive your site further?

What the document basically suggests is to limit what proprietary software developers can do by licensing libraries as GPL instead of LGPL.

This is no longer free(as in speech, not beer) software. Why?

Freedom means the ability to use something without restriction. If I cannot use a library in a proprietary product, that is removing an important freedom.

This attitude is likely to alienate the "commercial" or proprietary developers further from FSF/GNU.

In fact, doing this is just not fair and not in line with how I view is the concept behind the FSF. The point is to write software / libraries and share that with the world so others may build upon what you have done. Stand on the shoulders of giants in a way...

It makes perfect sense for software to be GPL since you don't want somebody to pick up a GPL software, build something on top, and sell it without source.

However, if libraries are released under the GPL instead of LGPL, it means that I can not link against that library to write a non-GPL compatible application.

The GNU Website states

"Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve"

Additionally, the Quick Guide to GPLv3 states that

Nobody should be restricted by the software they use. There are four freedoms that every user should have:

• the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
• the freedom to change the software to suit your needs,
• the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, and
• the freedom to share the changes you make.

This has always been my impressing of the purpose of GPL. Now, how does this work with Libraries? A little differently... :-(

From my perspective, if I have the freedom to use the [library] for any purpose, that means that I can write an application that uses that library without having to worry about licensing issue.

However, this is not the case. There is a clause that states that the software cannot be used in a larger software project that has a license incompatible with the GPL. This includes linking the library into another software application.

Therefore, I do not have the freedom to use the software for any purpose.

Freedom cannot be uni-directional. If GNU/FSF are trying to muscle out developers of proprietary software, all they are doing is alienating themselves further...

I run a technology firm that uses a heck of a lot of open source software. In fact, I am posting this from an ubuntu desktop running firefox from a VServer. I am probably using a dozen open source applications to do this simple straightforward act.

There is in fact, not a simple closed source application at any point through this.

The main problem that I see with this is that it makes Open Source so much more zealot(ous) and FSF, GNU and OSS becomes fundamentalists. The attitude is not one of freedom and inclusion but of exclusivity and marginalisation.

The worst part is the price that is asked of developers who want to use an Open Source library. The price is the acceptance and propogation of an idea (Freedom or else).

Compared to the cost of conversion to another idealogy (Free Software Idealogy), the cost of a few hundred, thousand, or even millions of dollars / pounds for a piece of software seems dirt cheap.

I understand that each developer has the freedom to choose which license to use for their products/libraries. My question is how can an organisation that claims to be a proponent of freedom encourage the removal of freedoms?

I would like to ask how this shift is any different from religious fanatics who tell you that their god is the one true god and there is nothing else.

However, recently, I have been niggled by the amount of time it takes to switch perspectives on eclipse. It takes a good 4 seconds to switch between perspectives.There is also a noticeable lag when performing some operations.

To resolve this, I spent a lot of time looking at the linux real-time and low-latency patches. I had expected that running X11 applications remotely would not cause a bottleneck over a gigabit link. Turns out that I was wrong.

To test this, I ran a vnc server on the application server and found that switching perspectives on there was super fast.

To be able to resolve this, the first thing to do was to remove any latency put on the X->X communication by ssh.

We use gdm, so I had to enable to TCP on there first. Do this using the following config line in /etc/gdm/gdm.conf

Restart gdm

on the remote host, export DISPLAY

The Project aim was to bring together the easy time logging capabilities of Process Dashboard along with the project management capabilities of Microsoft Project (including the Server Component). It is also to be integrated into our request tracking System - Request Tracker. Eventually, it is also to integrate with our accounting system and turn into an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system and MIS (Management Information System). There are plans to integrate with our Wiki and our Document Management System too.

But these are all lofty goals.  One of our recent projects introduced me to the Spring Framework. While I am still not a fan of Spring, the scale of the project and the way of approaching it gave me some ideas and additional tools to work with. I wanted to bring these into the InVision Project.

The key one here was Maven 2. InVision already used EJB3 and JBoss (4.2 as it happened). There was one additional issue for me to resolve and that was out of container testing. Something that is very easy to do with Spring but a little more troublesome with EJB3 since it doesn’t have an out of container framework…

I have grown to be a big fan of Maven 2 and using Maven 2 to configure an EJB project is not as easy or straightforward as I would have liked: I wanted to separate the whole project into four parts

• Domain Model (or just the entity beans); Also referred to as a Hibernate Archive (HAR)
• Stateful/Stateless Beans (Just the Beans, since I don’t consider entities beans in EJB3)
• Application Client (J2SE Application)
• Web App (Using SEAM)
• I would also need an EAR project to deploy the DomainModel, Beans & WebApp as one pacakge into JBoss.

I have not got as far as the SEAM project yet but the other ones were straightforward enough to set up with Maven 2.

Both the Domain Model and the Beans project had to be set up as ejb projects and use the maven-ejb-plugin

I set up the persistence context within the Domain Model

I could then reference the context from the Beans project by injecting it with

Easy enough!

Now configuring the EAR project: This was configured as an ear package which depended on the other two projects with the following configuration

With this configured, from the EAR project, I could do mvn ear:deploy to deploy to JBoss.

Additionally, within eclipse, I created a new run-type that ran ear:undeploy package ear:deploy to re-deploy the package to JBoss. Works a treat

There are still a few kinks to be ironed out.

I still need to install (mvn install) the two projects before the EAR will pick it up to deploy. I need to get the ear re-deploy to re-build the other projects. Something to look at another day.

I had manually deployed the DataSource file to JBoss. It might be possible to do this via Maven.

I also very much liked the Eclipse automatic deploy feature. It is possible to use the eclipse plugin on maven to get Eclipse to identify this as a JBoss deployable project but I ran into some problems and gave up. Ideally, Eclipse would auto-deploy the project.

However, the above is less relevant once Out-Of-Container testing is in place. Now, this does work, but I will leave that to another day…

In the open source world, I expect that all things which are accessible as 32bit are also accessible and 64bit and ubuntu makes it automagic enough that everything just works. Yes, I run into problems with closed source software like Flash Player (recently resolved with flash player 10) and the Java Plugin but that is another story. I use Eclipse and wanted to do some performance analysis and benchmarking to find a bottleneck and installed the TPTP plugin; and ran into a problem. It just didn’t work.

To resolve it, I turned to google… In this instance, it turned out to be a distraction and a red-herring. It lead me in the direction of installing libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2_2.95.4-27_i386.deb which was difficult at best since there was only a 32bit version of the package and that wasn’t even in the standard repository.

In the end, digging deeper, I found that it simply missed the following shared object libstdc++.so.5.

All I had to do was install libstdc++5:

and it worked… :-D

Now, I think that ACServer which Eclipse uses to do TPTP should not link to an outdated library but that is another issue…

Simple? NO! The main problem was the management of the data set. I had set up, in the past fairly interesting classes to test the functionality using reflection, and injecting the data from the classes themselves through the data provider mechanism of TestNG. However, this was error prone and clunky at best. It also made dependency management of data quite cumbersome.

With a view to resolving this, I also looked at DbUnit, unitils and Ejb3Unit. They all did some things that I liked but lacked some functionality that was important.

This led me to write a simple testing infrastructure. The goal was straightforward.

• I need to be able to define data in a CSV (actually it was seperated by the pipe character |, so PSV) based on entities.
• The framework should automatically persist the data (and fail on errors)
• It should test that it can load all that data back
• It should run as many automated tests on the DOM as possible.

The framework uses the CSV files to read the data for each of the classes (using the excellent SuperCsv library). It needs an Id field for internal reference. As long as the id’s match within the CSV files for the relationships, it will be persisted correctly into the database even when the persisted id’s are different.

For example, I could have a Contact.csv with 5 records (ids 1 through 5) and a Company.csv with 3 records (ids 1 through 3).

The Contact.csv records can map to the id specified in the Company.csv file and when the records get persisted, they will be associated correctly, even if the id’s in the database end up being different.

The framework also looks for the CSV file which has the same name as the class within the location defined within the configuration file. This means that as long as the filename matches the class name, the data loading is automatic.

For simple classes, the Test case is as simple as:

I realise that I am moving away from the analogy here but there is an important concept here. Libraries were born out of the desire to share and distribute code to be re-used.

The idea for Remote Procedure Calls dates as far back as 1976. Microsoft brought along OLE and then COM made this more generic and better.

RPC is widely in use these days and there are several other mechanisms for inter process communication including CORBA, REST & SOAP.

I don’t think software is broken down into small enough components. *nix is great in that you can tag a whole bunch of commands together on the command line to do some amazing things. I have personally piped data through a dozen or so commands and scripts to do some interesting things.

If we could break everything down into individual components that could be linked together, we would have a massive arsenal of interoporable tools that each user can pick and choose to put together very powerful solutions.

How many times have you found a piece of software that does one thing really well, but fails in something else. Then found another piece of software that does the other thing really well.

For example, the extensibility of Firefox is fantastic but I love the rendering of Safari. I love the Contact Management within Evolution and the Mail capabilities of Thunderbird.

Why don’t we break each software down into each of it’s individual components (and I am not talking about libraries here) and allow them to be deployed as services usable by other pieces of software.

In other words, release the contact management capabilities of Evolution as a product of it’s own right with a pre-defined API that any application can link into (including perhaps a web interface). Release the Mail management component of Thunderbird as a service, Release GUI’s as a component. Then we can pick any GUI we want, link into a specific mail component and another addressbook component.

Do one thing and do it well. In fact, let’s take it one step further and release a public API for each software component - an API for Mail, one for Contact Management and so on.

Each software component can then be a black box that delivers this API.

Choice can be a bad thing if it makes it difficult to choose - Subclipse vs Subversive is a good example of this. Let us however, not confuse choice with flexibility.

Let’s say that you want to find all the files within a folder modified within the last 3 days containing the text “abracadabra” and then replace all occurences in those files of the world “super”  with “hyper”.

To do this in linux, all you would do is chain find (to identify files modified in the last 3 days), grep (to identify only the files that contain “abracadabra”) and sed (to do the replacement).

If you know these commands well enough, you could chain something together in half a minute or so. You could probably figure out how to do this with the search tools in Windows within a minute or so but where this really shines is if there are thousands of files that needs to be processed. With other search tools, you would have to wait for the original search results to be returned before running to replace operation. This takes up the users time.

With the chaining of commands, I have run it and worked on something else while it completes.

Let me visualise a brave new world:

In this world, all software would be interoperable components. For example, there would be components for:

• Mail account management (Perhaps genericised into configuration management)
• Text composition (usage for mail, documents, plain text et al)
• Text reading (again, usable for mail, documents, plain text et al)
• Spam Filtering (already available to some extent)
• Contact Management (optionally linked into organisation’s LDAP server)
• Task Management (Standalone Mylyn if you know the product)
• Scheduling (or calendering if you prefer that term)

If all of these components were interoperable, then there would a GUI that is generic and could bring all of these together. In this way, the people working on each of the components could concentrate on doing one thing and one thing well.

If we then start working on public API’s in a collaborative fashion, each of the component could be fleshed out to be as flexible and complete as necessary to gain maximum benefit.

If these components provided the services as a network based API, it would also allow for the components to be distributed across a network providing redundancy and efficiency. This makes it easier to turn each desktop into more of dump terminal concentrating purely on user interaction and getting closer to the invisible interface.

Software as a service has taken a step in the right direction. Can we take a leap and have software component as a service…

According to W3C, as of November 2008, IE(6/7) dominate 46.6% of the market with Firefox at 44.2%. Compare this to November 2007 when IE (5/6/7) dominated 56% of the market and Firefox only had 36.3%

It is interesting to note that between Nov 2007 and Nov 2008, Linux adoption (as far as internet browsing is concerned) went up a meagre .5% from 3.3% to 3.8%.

This means that a very large proportion of the firefox users are from the Windows Platform. Why is this impressive? There is technically no reason for a user on Windows to download Firefox. Windows comes with Internet Explorer, which should be adequate for all the internet browsing needs.

If 44.2% of all windows users went to the effort to download, install and use firefox instead of Internet Explorer which comes pre-installed, let me ask the question - if Windows came pre-installed with Firefox instead of Internet Explorer - how many would go to the effort of downloading and installing Internet Explorer.

While it is possible to install Internet Explorer on Linux, it might be a little unfair to answer this question based on the number of Internet Explorer's running off linux. People who run linux have proven to be biased against Microsoft anyway, so it would be a loaded statistic.

While I have no doubt in my mind that Firefox is better than Internet Explorer, I still don't feel that Firefox is perfect. It still feels far too bulky, with disproportionate memory usage and it is still not as fast as Safari in terms of page display.

Sure, the addons and themes functionality is great and useful. However, it would be nice if it was faster to load, faster to use and just felt more lightweight... like Safari does.…

Having said that, I am not going to switch to safari. I like the browser but it is still just not as good as firefox.

One of the points of open source software, should be to bring all the benefits of all the competing pieces of software into one but it just doesnt work like that. If Firefox had all the benefits of firefox as well as the benefits of Safari, I am sure the adoption rate would be far higher...

Lets take it one step at a time... I vote for firefox feeling a lot quicker and snappier for a wishlist... :-)

Here is the mascot too shy to show his face. Our mascot loves and cares about us. Cheers up when we end up working those really late night shifts to rescue a website or hit a crunch deadline which our clients sometime ask us for. Even used to bring us food, beer, bubblewrap and good humour.

In serious times of need, the mascot would even dance for us:

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We love the mascot because he goes to such lengths to make us happy. Unfortunately, sometimes, it all gets a little too much for the little guy:

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We love the mascot and look forward to seeing him as Tinkerbell at our Christmas Party next week :-)

Here is to our Mascot:

This explains why, for a long time, I used a fairly bland desktop environment. My desktop itself was just pure black with no wallpaper. Ironically, I would remove all the icons, so it would be pure black and nothing else.

This should have tipped me off on my own desire for design. I thought my desire for black stemmed from the “good old” days of DOS when the screen was black and my love for the linux terminal. As an aside, I used to reconfigure the terminal windows in X to have a white on black background as well - so much better for the eyes. In fact, I still don’t understand why everyone uses a white background for terminals and such like. Paper was white because that was easier. There is really no reason for the screen to be white too…

Now, this was before I bumped into Enlightenment (at this time, it was E16) and to put it bluntly, I was captivated. This was absolutely gorgeous. Fairly unusable since I was used to GNOME and of course Microsoft Windows. I thoroughly enjoyed this until it became more of a distraction…

I ended up reconfiguring GNOME to be prettier - in fact, I had the Mac OS X theme for a while which I enjoyed.

I then dabbled with E17 and it was absolutely gorgeous - E16 paled in comparison. I ran into a bug where some java applications would jump a few pixels when changing the decorations. This was a real pain since I was developing a Java application at the time. I spent an entire day trying to “fix” this before I realised that it was E17 screwing it up and not my code… :-(

More recently, I thoroughly enjoyed Compiz with the shaky windows and such like - I just always wished that I could actually throw a window and watch the momentum carry it that extra distance.

Nevertheless, this bridged the gap enough to E17 to keep me happy for a little while.

Last week, I dabbled with E17 again to see if the issue with Java was resolved. To my surprise E17 had changed more or less completely - it was bridging the gap between a window manager and a full fledged Desktop environment.

However, there was a problem. It looked like I couldn’t get it back to its old glory of absolutely fantastic graphics without some effort in configuration. One other issue I ran into was that maximising a screen would fill it up across both my monitors. Another thing I could configure but then, it all seemed like too much effort.

E17 gives me the feeling that this is where user interfaces will end up - it automates so many of the things that makes it quicker to do anything. However, it still lacks some of the “basics”.

E17 is a very good example of a UI that tries to conform to what I call the “Invisible Interface” which I will be writing about later.

To bring it all back to now, I found it a hassle to go through all the available themes for WordPress for the Company Blog as well as my own.

I used to take great pleasure in going through dozens or hundreds of themes and picking ones that I liked but after doing it a few times (for Firefox, Thunderbird, my phone, GNOME, GDM and my flat), it gets a bit repetitous.

Now, for a wish. A website that pulls in all the different themes for all over the world for everything. A one-stop-theme shop. Here, I could go through and pick a general theme that I liked and download it for all the applications, my phone(s), mp3 players (and of course, taking it to the next level, all the gadgets at my flat).

That gives my life more uniformity. Perhaps this is something that Designers could take on… Say Hugo Boss, and design something that even matches your clothes, shoes, hair - everything.

That way, you could have your own unique branding… and while you are at it link it into Gravatars and you are also instantly recognisable

Now for the issue of privacy - I think I best leave that for another day.

I could only ponder about the sheer stupidity of this teacher and wonder about the next generation of students brought up under this ignorance.

I grew up with Microsoft, with DOS 3 as my first Operating System and went through DOS 5, 6, Windows 3.1, 95, NT, 98, & ME.

I also played around with BeOS, and various versions of Mac.

I was then introduced to Linux turned into an open source zealot and wiped out my Windows installation in anger. Since then, while my primary operating system is Linux, I still have Windows running on my Laptop and have both Windows & Linux on my home computer.

I have since worked with Windows 2000, XP, 2003 & Vista. I love what Microsoft does with these products. They do innovative things, pick up features from other products that are useful and try to simplify things.

My Laptop came pre-installed with Windows and I never went to the effort of installing Linux and I use my home computer to play games, which (whether I like it or not) just handles games so much better.

As per the old joke, It is the software engineers job to make software as idiot proof as possible. It is the job of the universe to create bigger and bigger idiots. So far the universe is winning.

Linux & Open Source software (in general) takes a different approach to software. It should be easy to use and manage software but it also expects you to understand (or at least think about) what you are doing or trying to do.

Microsoft seems to be under the impression that this is not necessary. The user does not need to know what they are doing - they just need to know what is to happen. e.g.

Lets take a simple operation - deleting a file. Before Windows 95, this used to be a simple, difficult to undo operation. Windows 95 brings in the concept of the Recycle Bin (or Trash), a concept that was available on the Mac platform for quite some time.

After this point, you no longer delete a file on Windows - you move it to the Recycle Bin, which will delete them from the disk when the number of files in there exceeds the set capacity.

Now, from a users perspective, what they are doing is deleting a file - in fact, thats what the menu item says - Delete. But what happens is completely different. The file disappears from their folder. What they aimed to do - “make this file disappear” has happened. However, the file has not been deleted.

Windows has effectively lied to the user since it is “smarter”. If the user later discovers that they deleted the wrong file, it can be recovered easier. However, that is not the point.

Microsoft software, are in general rife with such miscommunications. I find this fairly insulting and this was one of the main reasons that I started using Linux.  If you ask it to delete a file - it deletes it. If you want to move something to recycle bin, it can do that too.

To go back to the original point, the ignorance shown by the teacher in this school is exactly the kind that Microsoft panders to. Microsoft allows (nay encourages)  its users to be as “simple” as possible and let Microsoft worry about the rest.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that Microsoft do a fantastic job in making software accessible and easy to use but it should also help educate it users on what they are doing and help them think about what they are trying to do. Don’t pretend or try to do their thinking for them. Thats their job.

“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish ; and you have fed him for a lifetime”

Now, take the internet with just under 1.5 billion people linked in. Now, if you think up something that would be cool or useful (especially if it pertains to technology in some way), there is a good chance that somebody else has thought about it. And if you, like me just want to use it instead of creating it, somebody else has probably gone to the effort of making it work.

For a trivial example, it would be cool if I could have just one bookmarks folder for my Firefox and have this synchronised across all my computers (one in the office, the laptop, and the one at home). Do a quick google search and Bam - there it is… Foxmarks and guess what - it does even more…

Now, this has an interesting side effect. What about all cool things we could do if only I knew what to search for in the first place… I am subscribed to enough newsletters, websites and blogs (of course) to stay apprised of a lot of things that are happening, changing and being used in the world but that still does not tell you about all the cool things that could be done. So, when I stumbled across this tiny (pun intended) little gem of a service called Gravatar, I was intrigued and impressed. It is such a tiny, simple, straightforward little thing. It also does just one thing, but it does it well. Now what it does it do?

It allows you to set a picture as your avatar against your email address and everyone who subscribes to the service is able to associate you with this avatar.

Why is this cool? Well, we just installed Wordpress for our blog and it comes integrated with Gravatar and my user account was automagically liked in to the display the picture that I had set as my avatar. Cool!

If that is not cool enough - I set my mail account to link in to Gravatar (thats actually how I stumbled across the service) and anyone else who uses the service will show up with their pre-defined avatar on my browser.

All that needs to happen now is for Facebook to integrate with Gravatar so that when I change my profile picture, it will update my Gravatar…

I lived, breathed and loved megabus for 9 years. Whenever my girlfriend at the time asked me what I was thinking - the answer was inevitably megabus.

It nearly killed me. When I talk about burnout - megabus was the main culprit.

I still have the code for the final iteration of it, which was a Java EE ticketing system.

I don’t think I have the code for the original php based system anymore.

If there is some interest, I’ll consider sharing the code, albeit it was last updated in 2015.

💡 Note
The date of writing this is unclear. All I know is that it was before May 2007

I knew it my heart,
even though I doubted it,
now and again.

My love was not for a purpose,
it simply was.

I knew this but I forgot.\

I wanted nothing back,
I wanted nothing forward.

I just wanted to be,
I just wanted to love.

It is easy to get confused,
Who loves?

Is it me, my heart, my soul?\

Is it wrong that I miss her?\

To be with her fills me with joy,
fills me with happiness,

Is that not selfish?

Should I not let her be?

Let her do what she wants?

as long as it makes her happy!

Indeed, but I still miss her,
and all I want to do,
is what I can to make her smile,
to bring a little joy into her life.\

💡 Note
The date of writing this is unclear. All I know is that it was before May 2007

All the riches in the world,
Diamonds, jewels and gold.

Palaces with a thousand servants,
Gardens with a million roses,

All the luxuries that money can buy,
Or the ones that money cannot buy.
Even to be a star,
admired and loved by all.

None of this (if I had it) would compare,
not even a little bit,
to the happiness I feel,
Every time I see you smile.

💡 Note
The date of writing this is unclear. All I know is that it was before May 2007

Sitting here quietly,
At the railway station of life,
Quietly watching lovers and friends,

As they say their fond farewells,
As they pray for the train to be delayed
so they may spend another minute together,
just one more minute,
just one more second.

As they wait with baited breath,
For the train to arrive,
So they may say their enthusiastic hello’s.

I am not sad,
that I sit here alone,
for I love you,
with all my heart,
and it matters not,
not a little bit,
that you do not love me

💡 Note
The date of writing this is unclear. All I know is that it was before May 2007

Every single cell,
Every single atom,
Of my mind,
Of my body,
Of my soul.

My whole being loved her,
Loved her totally,
Loved her completely,
Loved her unconditionally.

She took my hand,
kissed it sweetly,
and just walked away

💡 Note
The date of writing this is unclear. All I know is that it was before May 2007

Who but you my love,
Can brighten my day,
The saddest of days,
The hardest of days,
The most frustrating days,
With but a smile.

Who but you my love,
Can make me feel rich,
When I have lost,
All that I had built,
With my blood, sweat and tears,
When you embrace me.

Who but you my love,
Of all the people,
In the whole wide world,
Who but you my love,
Can break my heart.

💡 Note
The date of writing this is unclear. All I know is that it was before May 2007

make me happy,
make me sad,
make me calm,
make me angry.

I love you not for who you are,
I love you not for how you make me feel,
I love you for the adventure we embark upon.

💡 Note
The date of writing this is unclear. All I know is that it was before May 2007

Thank You, she said,
Thank you for the dance.

Thank You, I said,
Thank you very much.

For brightening my day with you smile,
For making for forget my worries,
To take me away from the illusion of this world,
and into the depths of your eyes.

Thank You, I said,
Thank you very much.

For freeing me from the shackles of this world,
And liberating my heart and soul,
When I love you as I do,
I feel joy in everything I do.

Thank You, I said,
Thank you very much.

For the pain that I feel that you are not mine,
The sadness every time you walk away,
The sorrow when you say goodbye,
and the longing when you are away

Thank You, I said,
Thank you very much.

For all the joy I feel when you are near,
For all the pain I feel when you are far,
For all the love I feel for you always,
and I am grateful that I feel these for You.

Thank You, she said,
Thank you for the dance.

💡 Note
The date of writing this is unclear. All I know is that it was before May 2007

Ill sleep when I am dead.
Spending all night thinking of you,
against my will,
against my tired body,
my tired mind,
and my tired heart.

Lying here, thinking of you,
unable to sleep,
all night long.
all week long,
all life long.

Until it is time to sleep.

💡 Note
The date of writing this is unclear. All I know is that it was before May 2007

I have lived a thousand lives,
through countless millenia.

And now that I have met you,
whats another few days,
another few months,
another few years,
or a few more lives,
for us to fall in love.

I am many things and this site captures in words, some of the things that may be capturable in words.

Feel free to get in touch

PS: The name drone.ah has nothing to do with drones. It’s a pun. drone ah sounds like Drona and was intended to embody the acharya, or teacher aspect. It suggested by my brother, and it became my handle way before drones “were a thing.”

shri, lightkeeper
tending to what glows quietly.