Ian’s Blog

I’ve been spending the past few days working on getting my Ascent server up to date. However, there seems to be, well, quite a number of problems with this:

• Development on Ascent looks to be stopped. The main domain of the site’s been parked, and all forum activity appears to be dead.
• Development on the database that I’ve been using for Ascent looks to be dead as well. I’ve been a big fan of ‘NCDB,’ but, the maintainer has mentioned on his website that he’s stopped doing any development work for it.
• There are other alternatives, specifically, ManGOS, but, Mangos seems to be to geared to the WotLK client only (3.1.3), and I’ve got the last one.

I know that you might say, “But Ian, why don’t you play online?” Well, it’s really somewhat simple—I’m tired of playing with 13 and 14 year old kids who have the mentality of a 4 year old. Also, since Bilzzard makes it somewhat easy for me to extract the Map and world contents, reverse engineering of things is still legal here in the United States, and I’m not trying to run a server for anybody with the exception of myself, I really don’t see any issues with it.

My problem is that the Emulator community has seemingly taken this entire thing and taken it down to a Junior-High school playing field. There are a lot of great developers, and a lot of great database talent, but, they always seem to be calling each other out when users submit bug reports—The database telling folks that the Emulator is the problem, and the Emulator folks saying that the database is the problem, instead of either showing the user why the emulator/database is the problem, or by taking the open source way and either fixing the problem, or showing the user how to fix the problem themselves.

I know that there could always be better community support with these groups, and I know that they could try to do the right thing, but, it’s going to have to wait until everyone gets off the playground and stops looking so they can let down their ‘badass coder’ facade and get on with development.

Ok, I’m off of my soapbox, I promise.

In a move of “Open Source first, ask questions later,” I ran across an interesting post on one of the ThinCrust lists. As many of you know, I’m a big proponent of using Open Source software, and in the past few months, I’ve been getting more and more interest with using ThinCrust and ACE for building $WORK_SOFTWARE automatically as a part of our nightly build process.

This user had ran into issues that I had struggled with when initially looking into using thincrust a few months ago. Thinking nothing of it, I replied, not really thinking about the name in the email above.

After I had hit send, I noticed that the user’s email domain came from one of our competitors…who doesn’t currently offer an appliance (at least, not on their website).

I know that some of the COLUG guys work for financial services companies, and they do take part in email threads created by their LUG-mates who work at other companies, so I feel “ok” a little bit about it, but, it still is interesting for me—I don’t usually offer ‘aid to the enemy,’ but, I really think that there’s enough cash in our vertical that some competition is a good thing.

After a wonderfully hectic week, the weekend is finally here.

Last night, Carrie and I went to watch “The Taking of Pelham 123,” and really enjoyed it. I was a little saddened that they didn’t expand on the Mayor’s comments to Garber at the end of the movie, however, I still think that this movie is a great summer thriller.

Today, I think we’re going to go to the Flea Market that’s near South Amherst, and see what interesting junk they have for sale down there, and then we’ll probably end up over at Sally’s house, where we’ll probably finish cleaning out the trunk and take care of a few other things.

We still need to go grocery shopping today, and figure out what we’re going to cook for dinner.

I know—I live such an exciting life

This weekend, I plan on getting icinga installed on my home network, and expand on getting my cacti and opennms bindings for TeamForge. Expect another blog post once this is all done.

I’m being pushed into the shower, so more later.