Max Battcher's Comments

Blog | WorldMaker.net : I decided that today was D2-Day | Blog | WorldMaker.net

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:30:45 +0000

Greetings Gour! I've got a few small things for Darcsforge in the works, but mostly they are taking a back seat to my graduate work (I'm working very hard to graduate in December with my Masters). You might notice that my Code section is down right now. I'm running this website on a very small VM and so all of my blog code plus all of the Darcsforge-based sites I was running got to be a bit much for the one VM, so I've bought a new VM for a Darcsforge-specific server and I'm in the process of slowly setting it up. I decided it was time to update the models for Django 1.0, and I had a list of small model tweaks that I wanted to accomplish so I think I'm going to get those done first. Also, I should probably point out that even though my code websites are done my public repositories themselves are still available. For example: darcs get http://repos.worldmaker.net/darcsforge/main/ Also, the current Darcsforge documentation is still available.

Blog | WorldMaker.net : My Unfinished Norse Project | Blog | WorldMaker.net

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:09:31 +0000

I remembered my plan for Jormungand, the Midgaard Serpent: the idea was that Jormungand was a part of the Midgaard terraforming process, a giant "shield" around the planet acting as a defense platform after terraforming, and also as a side effect obscuring the immense Yggdrasil from view of Midgaard. (I figured that even with a bunch of new-ish technology there was still a wish to provide for and protect good old "base model" Homo sapiens.) Also, I wasn't surprised by Too Human making Odin a machine intelligence, but in my plan I believe it was Loki that was the machine intelligence rather than Odin, or perhaps it was both.

Blog | WorldMaker.net : Blogs of the Round Table: Indiana Jones and the Quest for a Great Film Adaptation | Blog | WorldMake

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:54:16 +0000

Here's an "official" blog update on the subject: http://blog.worldmaker.net/2008/sep/11/banshee-ma...

Blog | WorldMaker.net : Blogs of the Round Table: Indiana Jones and the Quest for a Great Film Adaptation | Blog | WorldMake

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:53:29 +0000

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, sometimes referred to as Indy4 (and in my opinion a better story than the actual fourth film, KOTCS), is this month's game in Mixnmojo's Secret History series and it was reading it this week that reminded me that Last Crusade was actually a good film adaptation to video game. (FOA "Talkie" was my first LucasArts adventure game, it was on a Macintosh double feature CD with Secret of Monkey Island in one of the labs in elementary school...) LucasArts eventually produced Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine and Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb, neither of which have I played but most call them "meh" and a few like/love them. They were basically Tomb Raider rip-offs with Indiana Jones. Last Crusade and Fate of Atlantis are the two adventure games and definitely classics, though.

Blog | WorldMaker.net : The Power Outage Adventure | Blog | WorldMaker.net

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:52:25 +0000

Power back on at 2 this morning, still waiting on AT&T/BellSouth for the DSL to work.

Blog | WorldMaker.net : PAX Day 1 | Blog | WorldMaker.net

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 01:39:27 +0000

Freezepop has been great live, both times I saw them. This time they
were in full force, though, with The Duke and a new (to me) drummer.
I'd recommend it if you do get the chance.

Blog | WorldMaker.net : My View for the Next Batman | Blog | WorldMaker.net

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:01:11 +0000

I wasn't aware of the Huntress, but the Helena Bertinelli version actually sounds like it could work pretty well in the series... She would also fit the mob through line, as I mentioned in my C Plot and contrast well with Scarface, too.

Blog | WorldMaker.net : Darcs Workflow: Completely Distributed Pull-Only Workflow | Blog | WorldMaker.net

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 15:37:58 +0000

If one developer is lost you end up doing basically the same thing as in a centralized workflow: If it is all corporate infrastructure you can walk to the other side of the office and grab their system and maybe get a little bit more information from their working repository. If if it were a remote development system, theoretically if their public server is a hosted one it will probably out-survive the developer and so you'll still have access to what's left of the developer's public patches that you hadn't already grabbed... Then you just re-route around the hole. If you lose an entire office, that may be unfortunate, but you haven't lost nearly as much data as you seem to think (and as would happen in the case that fabjan pointed out where there was a central server in that office in which you could actually lose everything)... Theoretically devj should still have a buildable repository and even though there may be man-hours of lost work, there's a pretty good possibility of rebuilding entirely from devj's repository (he doesn't need write access to any other repository than his own). But, even what is lost in this case is still going to be potentially smaller than what you imagine: it's mostly going to be work in progress data (wasn't ready to be publicly exposed) or "side-branch" data outside of the main line of development that needed more work before devj would have integrated it into his own copies of the repositories. ...and that's before you even get into the world of back-ups. Theoretically, devj's office would set up a server to auto-get clones of every public repository in the other office, first because it would speed up devj's workflow if he can ping a local server for updates rather than a number of remote servers individually, and second because that means that devj's office could have entire local backups of remote activity. Ultimately it's easier to argue that the decentralized case will survive better than the centralized case every time, because in a decentralized world a smart enough "code organism" is going to be multiply redundant and adaptable as circumstances change.

Socialist Software : A simple Django life stream. - Socialist Software

Thu, 3 Jul 2008 21:01:08 +0000

I could see a use for a middle-ground... The hang-up for tumblelogs of n-feeds is you generally need n-feed-APIs and so a central service like FriendFeed or similar might be a great way to bootstrap with 1-API-to-n-feeds to a StreamItem+FriendFeed database. As you want more specific data from feeds you could then slowly add in the other feeds on your own, dropping them from your "FeedFriend pull" as you add in your own particular code... This may end up somewhat along the lines of what I eventually do.