Well those 9 months went very fast and here we are its all over now.  :)  I have a beautrful baby girl and I couldn't be prouder!  She was born on Tuesday and now that its over you will see a few changes coming to MudDomain!  More to come...

Wow what should have been a few hours of downtime turned into over a week.  Guess thats what happens when you plane major site updates in the middle of flu season. We are now running the newest version of elgg (the software powerin this site) which gives us added stability, features,and alot of bug fxes.  With the upgrade i'm sure some of my custom additions have been broken.  I've not found any errors yet if you do let me know.  I will be turning on some of the new features such as bookmarks over the next few days.

 

Thanks Again!

Wow... been awhile since I posted here.  Who would have known that buying a house and the needed to learn how to fix things around the house would take up so much time :) and put on top of that it being Christmas which is happens to coincide with the busy season where I work (thank God its not retail though :) ) and there you go no time to update this site or other similar sites I run.  But, there is good news! Elgg, the open source project that this site is based on has just released another package and this being the package I was waiting on before I rolled the updates to the site.  I'm hoping to update the site on Tuesday at that time I will take the site out of beta mode and all users to sign up with out the need for an invite.  Unless you guys prefer it this way and like the more closed community?  If that is the case I will rework the invite system, but we will see.

When it comes to coding in new features to our mud, I've pretty much stopped doing that. Instead, I've been working with Lua and scripting a lot of things or extending the mud's functions and variables into the Lua environment so they can be accessed via scripts.

 The way Lua works in the C code seemed a bit weird to me at first, but I think I've gotten my mind wrapped around it well enough now.

Using a modified version of the call_va function from the Programming in Lua book, I've been able to strip out some hard-coded things from our random equipment code and placed it into Lua scripts. This has made it much eaiser to add in new varieties of names and affects for random equipment.

I've also extended the functionality of several of the item and mob invoking functions that were provided with Nick Gammon's Lua code for SmaugFUSS. (I had to do some slight modifications to this before I started since my code was based in Smaug 1.4a.) The extended versions allow scripts to generate new items instead of copies of indexed items and new mobs in the same manner. The scripts allow for adding of flags and various other settings assciated with item or npc. I plan to use these to create more robust tasks (again, using Nick Gammon's Lua task system, which is a questing system.)

Also added was the ability to award skills to, or remove from,  a character. Compensation is given to the character in the form of practices if the skill is removed. The number of practices depends on how well that skill was learned by that character.

I've been planning to replace the whole newbie training area with a set of tutorial-like tasks to teach new players the ropes. The goal is to make a new character's experience fun as well as teach them necessary things and reward them with items, equipment or skills designed for their class (or class combinations), race and/or gender.

My next projects with Lua is to create a generic skill handler similar to the smaug_spell function, saving and loading of items and mobs, and to create virtual rooms with linked exits.

Well, I think I better get back to it. 

Finally,  I'm done moving and am begining to get settled in my new house.  After a few days of no Internet I'm back online and ready to push out some site updates.  Expect to see them with in the week.  I'm sure you'll be happy with some of the changes, bugfixes, new features, and cosmetic changes to come in this release.

 

Sorry for the recent lack of updates to the site.  I had to freeze the site as a new version of the software was being released and I didn't want to continue to make changes that would make an upgrade more difficult.  I will be updating the site very soon to a new stable release once I have all of our enhancements added back in so be watching for that.  Other than that not much going on our site stats continue to grow with more people visting the site each day.  Continue to invite you friends and remember you have unlimited invites under you "myFriends" link on the toolbar.

 

Thanks

I use Google as my homepage, customized with several of their little gadgets, one of which is a set of news articles related to science and technology. So last week an article appeared that caught my eye. I don't remember what it said, but it was about Ubuntu's Gutsy Gibbon (7.10). After I read the article, I followed the links to the main Ubuntu site and downloaded the live cd suited for my cpu.

I had tried out a few Linux distros before. They mostly seemed about the same and most of them had a few pieces of hardware that weren't supported at the time for one reason or another. 

I continued to read the features that were available, looked over several screenshots and decided to burn the cd and check it out for myself.

I rebooted the computer and the self-boot disc took over and booted straight into Ubuntu. Since there wasn't any users set up, it booted right into the OS. It had a nice clean look to it. It comes with Firefox installed with quite a few extentions available from the disc. Installing new components, thankfully, doesn't require a reboot, which is a nice change from Windows. 

There are a few visual effects that are available to machines that are Vista-capable. Having a Vista-capable machine, I decided to activate these effects. Some of these effects included sticky windows, which are windows that stick to the edges of the screen and stretch and bend when you drag them away, various transparencies, animation effects on popup texts that kind of *boing* into place, alt+tab live window previews, and my favorite, the windows-key+tab window switching, which shows the open windows in a 3D view and flip as you tab through them.

I installed Wine and copied over my MUSHclient directory from the Windows partition and it started up as expected. The fonts had to be reset as the default fonts through Wine didn't quite look as good as what I was used to seeing. After fixing up a few other settings, MUSHclient works just as well in Wine as it does in Windows. There are some oddities with it though; the command line is black and text typed into it appears in an Arial-like font despite resetting the font settings and is written in black but highlighted in white. The built-in notepad also has a black background. I haven't tried using the notepad so I'm not certain if it has the same font settings as the command line does.

Also installed is the Pigeon instant messenger which makes a fine replacement for Trillian. Although, if you have multiple accounts on the same messenger service, it will import all contacts for each account multiple times (once for each account.) So if you have three AIM accounts, like I do, then each AIM contact will appear 3 times in your buddy list. A little pruning and this is fine too. It also allowed me to get rid of all those AIM bots that the AIM network insists I have on my buddy list.

The only real problems I've had with Ubuntu 7.10 is that it has completely locked up on me twice, both times while using Firefox. I'm not certain if that's related to the lockup or not, but that's what I was using at the time of the lockup.

Other than that, I've been pleasantly surprised with the way Ubuntu operates, its appearance and ease of use of most of the applications.

It's funny though, but the Linux distros are the only OSes I've been able to find good versions of Majong to play. 

My wife, Danielle, and I went to the Doctors the other day and heard the baby's heartbeat for the first time so I guess its offical now.  The due date is May 6th which is 2 days before Danielle's.  Needless to say we are excited and of course i've begun that freaking out stage which starts with the fact that our 1 bedroom apartment is suddenly way to small

Well my employer finally convinced me that I need to take some certificaion exams so I went today and took(and passed) the CompTIA A+ IT Tech. exam.  CompTIA recently released their new exams and this one was very easy so anyone worrying about taking it ... don't.

 

I like numbers and statistics which is why I like to post these results.  Sorry if they bore anyone.  For the month of September, our very first month as a Social Network, we had a total of 130,000 hits from 628 unique visitors

Browsers Grabber Hits Percent   Firefox No 61840 49.6 %   Opera No 28202 22.6 %   MS Internet Explorer No 27104 21.7 %   Mozilla No 4242 3.4 %   Unknown ? 2087 1.6 %   Links No 629 0.5 %   Safari No 240 0.1 %   Netscape No 72 0 %   Epiphany No 56 0 %   BonEcho (Firefox 2.0 development) No 47 0 %   Others   70 0 %