Work has been full on EvoGrid development. See the evogrid-dev mailing list for more details.

Recently moved the wireless network to WPA2 and remembered why I'd tried it before and reverted to WEP. My laptop's ndiswrapper'ed wifi add-on card doesn't reliably connect to WPA2 networks. It keeps dropping into scanning mode after associating. Except when it does work.

Fell out of the habit of posting with December's social whirl.

Investigated a C# port of libnoise to test and confirm it produces the same noise. Some of the functionality was missing and noiseutils had not been included, so I produced a functional equivalent to the noise utils and confirmed I was able to produce the same terrain maps from the new library as the old library. Since this is pure C#, it can be ran on both Mono and .NET without any additional binary dependencies, which wrapping libnoise needed. This will be relevant if I make my terrain generation publically available.

Took some time over the last week to produce Christmas lights in Second Life. I made some last year that worked well, using particle effects, but since many snow, smoke or steam effects use more particles then they should, this only worked in certain conditions. Revamped the system to use some temp-rez objects (which look nicer after some prim tweaking), decreased script load (due to not having a moving object for placing the particles) and made the placement system more sensible. It's now at a point where I feel other people could use it. I also added gravity effects, so the line of lights hangs, but I feel this is going to need more work before I'm happy with it over long spans of lights.

I also continued work on the EvoGrid simulation manager, working on the database design for storing analysis results, while allowing for future expansion and re-evaluation of previously completely evaluated data.

Improved the daemon implementation, and implemented a grid-based temperature calculator, to allow identifying localized increases in temperature.
Also did some mangling of the Digital Space website code, so that my automatically generated date index only showed up on pages where there articles had been sorted by date. It didn't work on pages without that sorting, and didn't make sense to anyway.

Spent a while implementing a custom libnoise module that can create a bounding box, with a transition border. Used this to generate a terrain map with a guaranteed below water edge. Notice on this image there are no islands running against the edge of the map.



This is an "artificial" constraint to apply to the "pure" noise generation, but what use is automatic data generation if it doesn't do what we want? My next thought is to make a module that allows me to make flat areas on the map, to have the data generator auto-magically include flat sections for building placement (because my manual terrain mangling skills are less then stellar).

After a few days which seemed to be more interruption then things to be interrupted, got back into the EvoGrid development. Implemented the server daemon and module design for separate analysis implementations.

Spent some time poking at Google Wave after being offered and invite (I don't have any more). Finagled one for my boss, gave it a try as a collaborative tool. It shows potential needs work, and a lot of the "wow neat" is in the Google web UI, which is not part of the protocol and not being open sourced.

After more testing, ionice is out. It works at the block device level and the VM doesn't HAVE block devices, rather it is using vzfs, which is a shared FS (copy-on-write), and so all ionice operations fail. The ones that looked like they didn't where just having their errors fed into /dev/null.