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.

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.

MJ brought two of my boxes of books.  I know where one is right now, just need to find the other one and see how many books I can fit in my checked luggage.  I’ll be able to put some in my carry-on too, as I don’t need to be quite as cautious about what goes in my checked luggage this time (for the flight out I had all the camera gear in the carry-on).

Spent several days this week mowing Kevin’s acre of land, after I fixed one of his lawnmowers and the weed-whacker.  The weed-whacker had a combustion chamber and air filter that were full of water, and the spark was all gummed up.  A bit of shaking and leaving in the sun dried the filter and chamber, and a bit of gasoline and sandpaper fixed the spark.  Presto, working weed-whacker.  MJ came down Tuesday evening, and we’ve been having good chats, working on the garden beds and just generally been the good friends that we are.

Didn’t manage to run the BBS at UberCon, but that’s life.  I should have it up and running on the Avatar game host in the next week or so.

Boss has kindly said I don’t have to be on call until Tuesday, which is good – I could do Monday night, but I’m bound to be jet-lagged (my trick doesn’t work so well when going forwards in time zones).  So, I get back to the UK tomorrow morning, and I’ll be back at work the next day.  Pity that, I was just starting to relax properly.

Something sparked in my brain the other day that I really wanted to play Land of Devastation again, and while I was at it, TradeWars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon might be a good idea too. So, off on my hunting I went, excercising my Google-Fu in the quest to find a BBS package that runs on Linux, and supports DOS door games. I ended up finding Synchronet BBS, and a fair bit of documentation on how to get all three games running.

Unfortunately, the documentation wasn’t all right, but it was enough to get LORD and TW2002 up. LOD was a bear – it runs fine in local mode, but refuses to run in door mode. Beeps twice as it tries to load, and then drops back to the Games menu in the BBS. I initially thought it was a FOSSIL problem, and edited game.ctl to use the internal I/O driver, but the problem persisted. Several hours later, having gone round and round and round with compilers (recompiling SBBS), dosemu settings and operating system changes, it occurred to me that LOD’s game.exe has a /P flag. I had been ignoring it, or pointing it to a Linux path. D’oh! Made it /PD: (D: being the virtual drive where SBBS was dropping the call file), and presto, it all works. Now to choose between RIPtel (which runs full screen, with large fonts) or SyncTerm.

I’m off to UberCon in the next few days, and we’re having a bit of a retro kick with the consoles, so I think I’ll help out on the LAN side, and make the BBS available on our gaming LAN for a bit of old-school BBS gaming. Need to get licenses for the software though, so that I can tune the number of turns per day etc – the con is short-lived, and most of these games were aimed at a week or more of playing (LORD in particular was closer to a month). The best part is that all of this is running on an 8 GB USB stick that has a Kubuntu installation on it, so I’ve got a PC on a stick with me that also doubles as a BBS server.

The other thing to sort out is whether to enable the full QWK part of Synchronet, along with the web interface, FTP interface and more. I suppose it depends whether I see a point in doing it other than nostalgia, and whether it would make sense to tie it to Avatar.

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.