Cricalix.Net

Over the past few months, the Avatar code has been having a few crashes that leave no recognisable/usable stack for GDB to read.  It’s also been having a few hangs, with strace indicating futex_wait (in an application that doesn’t use threads), and gdb of the core (after killing the process) indicating __kernel_vsyscall.  Unfortunately, I’m not really a programmer/coder, so my efforts to track the cause down have probably been a bit haphazard.

The most annoying part so far is that yesterday we encountered the hang situation 4 times, so I enabled a strace against the binary, and channeled the output across the ‘net to my PC where I’ve got a rolling 40,000 line buffer.  24 hours later, at a constant 2 Mbit/s, and we still haven’t hung.

I call Heisenbug.

It’s been a pleasant two week vacation.  Caught a train and a bus down to Heathrow on the 22nd, and crossed the Atlantic courtesy of British Airways after staring at an Asus EEE 700 series in Dixons (though I’ll wait for the 900 series with the bigger screen and 20 GB SSD).  Did my usual trick of pushing how late I stayed up, with the intent of resetting my body clock and avoiding jet-lag (which worked).  Spent the next few days imaging all of the LAN PCs for UberCon, and catching up on a bit of sleep.  UberCon ran from the 25th to the 27th, where I had the pleasure of being an attendee for once, instead of a staff member - though I still did staff-like stuff since I knew the answers.  Note to self, never go behind the desks at registration or help-desk unless I want to work.

Didn’t shoot too many photos, but got something like 30 of Mr. T. Zahn, so I’ll be checking those in Lightroom when I get home.  Hopefully there’s at least one good one we can use on the UberCon site.  I also need to get his contact details to see if he minds if I use them in my personal (online) portfolio.  Missed the tear-down of the convention by being a lazy sod and sitting in my room reading.  However, I helped pack the truck for the trip to the con, so I think I’m excused. (more…)

Avatar MUD is celebrating its 10th anniversary - complete with multiple HoGathons (it’s a MUD thing), area building quests and trivia contests!

So, what does a bored Immortal do when the announcement about the area contest comes out? Write the core of a nifty little area in 2 hours. It draws some inspiration from the Death-Gate Cycle series, as well as my general interest in all things steam powered. Got my copy of the builder guide and my vnums (virtual numbers - another MUD thing) via e-mail last night, and I’ve already spent 30 minutes this morning putting in some of the technical markup required to turn my wads of text into something the MUD will parse.

I, of course, have a slight advantage over the other builders who are competing - I can boot a test port on the server and make sure that my area flows nicely :) I suppose it also means I should get off of my rear and put together a cross-platform area editor and run-through tool. DaWiz put together a tool that validates the area, but beyond that builders are stuck with either a text editor, or the ancient AvMZF. I’ve pondered Ruby and Perl so far, but cross platform GUIs for either language seem to be few.

I will have to revisit the text later on - I merely have the first draft, and I’m not too happy with some of the sentences. I’ll probably take a look at some of the work by Nadreck - a fellow member of staff, and a fairly good writer - for inspiration on how to clean my area up.