Sorry, I've been a bit busy recently with tasks including but not limited to actual work, Wow ranting and gaming, some performance analyzis in [Xeres|Dev/Xeres#perf1], and too much stuff to read on design patterns. I've also been thinking on some new hypothetical project (meaning I will probably never code the project itself but I'm looking at what's out there that would enable such a project to exist.) This generated a lot of [MiscLinks], such as XQuery, libmng, SDL, and Tao.

The problem that arises from this is that both actual work projects and personal projects generate fragmentation and I don't think I efficiently deal with it -- i.e. when I'm working on several things in parallel, a bit here then a bit there. I like some fragmentation actually, yet at the same time it's frustrating. I like it because if I feel out of fuel on one project I can focus on some other one -- it lets the former project rest, I think of it from time to time and generally end up with a better view of where I am and where to go. Yet at the same time fragmentation means I don't focus as much on a project as I could and thus it takes longer to get the job done. I guess it's a tradeoff and it's all about finding the right granularity.

I think personal home projects suffer most of fragmentation -- they get the impact of both work and home project's fragmentation. That is the more work projects I work on that are interesting, the less I feel like coding when I'm back home. This is easy to see in [Xeres' M0 plan|Dev/Xeres#m0plan]. The project is lucky when it gets one hour of time allocated some days. It does really progress only when I'm able to focus a full evening or a full week-end afternoon on it. Then again home personal projects are just that -- outlets.

Unrelated: I'm really happy with my workflow in [Izumi|WhatIsIzumi]. I made a CVS repository with all the pages back in December. I can edit them on the laptop or the desktop and when I'm satisfied I simply commit the changes. The server runs a cron job that will update the web site from CVS every hour. The only limitation is that to see the actual result I would have to run Izumi locally. Instead what I do is that I simply manually do the cvs update on the server and look directly at the uploaded result. It's ok if a page has a broken tag for a few minutes or hour.

On a different topic, I should write something about my current "diet" (basically eat normally with the right carbs and right fats as indicated in the South Beach Diet, combine with a bit of exercise and make soda/candy/alcohol exceptional.) It's working really nicely, with only a minimal amount of effort.

Not much new to report around. Still busy with Wow and [Xeres|Dev/Xeres].

Wow has been interesting as my little character progresses. On the other hand the Lothar server we use tends to crash regularly when under a lot of load. This is most frustrating for a paying service. I assume they do more than just hit the reset switch when it happens, yet as a customer I fail to see the difference.

The way that server (and probably the others) fails down is interesting. Everyone gets booted and logs back in, which as a side effects overloads the login server. NPCs vanish from the game, including mailboxes and chars at the inn (which imho means every interactive element is the same, from an humanoid to a chair.) I can summon my pet and it vanishes a few seconds later. Many times in this case it is plain impossible to log out.
These interactions are most interesting. Sounds to me like part of the interaction is started or handled by the client or the server directly connected to and then the real interactive part is handled by a separate entity and the link is down.

As a side effect, it had me wondering about Netdroids (warning: old French text, full of cr*p and lame puns.) Could an MMORPG be based on a peer-to-peer decentralized network? The updated idea is that clients would be able to create, customize and share not only game data, but also quests, world landscape, client UI, etc.

[Xeres|Dev/Xeres] is advancing, slowly but surely. Not as fast as I'd like to but that's a matter of time allocated rather than technical issues. I've also forced myself to do NUnit testing, found a way to adapt it to my dev workflow when needed, discard it where not applicable and I've also been able to see direct occurrences of these tests helping discover bugs before runtime. I will have to report on this in [Dev/IdeasForDev] later.

Side idea: mix webcam and offline IM. A server-based IM could record video/audio/text messages and serve them when the user logs in again. The trick is that the server could act as a client and record with video with adaptive quality, then act as a server and serve the video live with adaptive quality too instead of merely transmitting a video file. This is a logical evolution of the two concepts.

On a more personal side: Tg's knee is doing better. We've met with Sr, which was at the same time interesting, relieving yet a bit odd. The next step has begun and this is pretty exciting I think. Oh and Gl is calling on Friday, so maybe I'll know more next week about this and that.

Interesting times.