Basternae.org

I’ve been in California for two weeks and already have two job offers, at least one of which offers a six-figure salary and is a company you’ve definitely heard of, and I’m likely to get a third offer within the next week.  I know which one I’m going to go with (hint: it isn’t the one that pays the most), but it is awesome to be in a place where my skills will be appreciated.

If I were still in Ohio I’d likely have to work somewhere that would involve cranking out WTF-worthy ASP.NET pages all day.  I’d rather live under a bridge, thanks.  Too bad Ohio doesn’t have very good bridges.

Funny thing is, I don’t really care all that much about pay and benefits at a place where I work.  I’m more interested in finding a problem that’s so hard I’ll have to throw my whole brain at it.  Not having to waste time shoveling snow and scraping ice off my car windows makes for more time to brain at hard problems.

I’ve escaped Ohio. Right now I’m living in San Jose, CA and it’s a vast improvement so far. Hopefully development on Basternae 3 can resume soon, work and life arrangements permitting.

I can’t believe I never heard of this before now, but apparently there’s a Dark Age of Camelot server emulation project:

http://www.dolserver.net/

Unsurprisingly, the most popular server is based on classic pre-Trials-of-Atlantis DAoC.

Not that Bast3 needs more things to distract me from it, but I’ve been tinkering with it a bit, and may eventually put up a custom server. Not soon.

As you may or may not know, I currently live in Columbus, Ohio. It’s a nice enough place to live during the spring, summer, and fall months — the cost of living is pretty low, there’s plenty of economic activity, and lots of things to do for entertainment. Other than the fact that locals treat a silly college football team like it’s the most important thing in the world, there’s not that much to complain about.

With one major exception, of course. The Ohio winters. Ohio has a climate very similar to that of Germany — warm summers that are often too humid, and brutal, snowy winters. I guess that’s why one of the most prominent areas of this city is the German Village.

I’m a mild cryophobe, so when the weather drops below freezing I have a really bad time. In February, we had a new snowfall record of more than 30 inches:

http://www.columbusbestblog.com/news-weather-sports/february-2010-freaky-weather/

I don’t know about you, but more than an inch a day is more than I can deal with.

The wife and I have been planning to cast ‘etherportal’ <elsewhere> for a while, with all possible destinations being very far west and/or south of here (Portland, Seattle, Austin, San Jose and the SF Bay Area). Sunnyvale, California is the winner, and we’ll end up there as soon as things can be worked out (finding work, a place to live, etc.), but definitely before winter.

This relocation will obviously put a dent in the amount of time available for Basternae, but a coder who isn’t afraid to get out of bed for five months out of the year will get more done.

I’m not really all that sure why I created it, but Basternae now has a Facebook group.  Here it is:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=110462168980682

Can’t say I have plans to post much of anything, but go ahead and fan us anyhow.

I spent some time working on the client, only to find that the Windows Presentation Foundation doesn’t support right-click events.  That’s a deal-breaker because I need right-click support.  How could a GUI toolkit not support something so basic?

So, the wxWidgets-based client is being resurrected.  That’s good, because it was further along.  The big problem was that I couldn’t easily support scrollback with the SDL integration.  Well, since then I’ve figured out how I’d make that work.

In case you’ve forgotten or are not aware, THIS was how far along the wxWidgets-based Basternae client was last time we looked at it.

Code versioning is a good thing. You can rollback changes that make things worse, compare current code to past code, keep backups, and access your code from almost anywhere. It also helps make sure that every machine being used for development is kept current and that changes aren’t easily overwritten. Any serious development should have a source code repository, especially if that development is done on more than one system or by more than one person. I’m only one person, but I used three different dev systems.

I’ve tried to set up a Subversion code repository at home twice. Both times it was on an extra laptop and both times the laptop’s hard drive died within a month of setting up the repository. I didn’t lose the code (every development machine is technically a code backup), but it was pretty frustrating.

The other day I signed up with Assembla for my audio software development (see http://zetacentauri.com) and it’s been so useful that I’ve added the Basternae code too.

I’m debating whether to start using the Trac issue tracking system with Basternae 3. It works well for the Zeta Centauri projects, but the workflow here is far more organic and to-do-list based than issue-and-ticket based. I suspect the verdict will be “no” on Trac and I’ll keep using my got-it-done.com website to track Basternae.

At one point I owned 40 domains.  I’m gradually reducing that number, selling off or otherwise parting with those that I don’t have the time/energy/resources to build properly.  One of those that may be of interest is Fantasy-RPG.com.

It’s for sale on eBay right now, and you’re likely to be able to get a pretty good deal on it.

It would be an excellent domain to use for hosting a MUD server, a MMORPG, or a related subject of interest to the loyal Basternae 3 blog readers.

Progress will have to halt for a bit — started the new job and there’s a bunch of things I don’t know as well as I’d like to, so it’s reading tech books that’ll take up the spare time for the next few weeks.

For the past two years I’ve been working for a home automation company, first as a developer and then as a development manager.  Unless you’re deaf, dumb, and blind you know that the real estate market has been far less than optimal for the past year or three.  That makes it pretty challenging to work in an industry driven primarily by new home sales and secondarily by stock and investment markets.

I’ve just been offered a development job with a glass company, one that’s not particularly affected by real estate market cycles.  I start in two weeks.  It’ll be great to have a change of technology/scenery/responsibilities.  I’ll miss the people where I am now — I worked with some pretty kickass programmers and great people — but I have hit something of a plateau by not being exposed to any new environments lately.

What’s that have to do with Basternae?  Pretty much nothing, other than the fact that your friendly neighborhood codemonkey might get smarter by being exposed to new things.