Trac, Imagination

[update: I've moved the Imagination web site to projects.twistedmatrix.com/imagination. The post has been updated to reflect this change.]

Trac is pretty awesome. It's an integrated wiki, bug tracker, and SVN interface. I just set one up for Imagination: projects.twistedmatrix.com/imagination. Check out the Timeline view. Doesn't that just make you all happy inside?

Unfortunately it doesn't work with remote SVN repositories. so I'm running it on the pretty badly-performing Wolfwood. I plan on setting I've set up a hotcopy+rsync of the repository to another machine, though, since it's not terribly critical that Trac have up-to-date data, and Imagination is relatively slow moving. Also unfortunately, it depends on Apache or similar for authentication; I had to hack up a horrible little piece of code for twisted web that gives authentication info to the CGI. If anybody's interested in it, send me a holler.

Speaking of Imagination! It has had a *lot* of activity recently! If you're interested in crazy virtual world simulation stuff (suitable for Interactive Fiction, MUDs, and more advanced things, eventually) check out the web page or stop by #imagination on irc.freenode.net :-)

Looking for work

Hi. My name is Christopher Armstrong. I'm a programmer. I have a lot of Python and Twisted knowledge and experience. Do you need me to implement your protocols? Maintain your server infrastructure? Develop user interfaces for service management? Hire me! I'm available for contract work or full-time work, short or long term. My resume is available.

"Why do people play this stuff?"

Dash (the guy who has VW-ish interests similar to my own) asked me this question about SecondLife. Here's my answer!

Click that to see a couple more snapshots.

That's a Shrike AV (= Avatar) that I'm making. Yes, he's still early in development; I need to give him two more arms and a lot more spikes, and texture him better. The Shrike, for those of you who aren't big SF nerds, is a spikey demon-of-death kind of fellow from an awesome series of novels by Dan Simmons, starting with Hyperion.

I'm doing this entirely with the in-world building tools. They're not perfect; they're simple, but they facilitate some amazing things, like that Shrikey-boy right there.

SL also allows attaching arbitrary behavior to objects you create using a mostly-secure event-based scripting language. It's not wonderfully designed (well, I have big issues with it, actually, but I guess I'll post about that later); it's simple, but it can do amazing things, just like the in-world modeling tools.

SL is a world that really encourages and facilitates creativity, more so than any other VW, hands down.

Another amazing thing about it is that you don't need to pay a monthly subscription unless you want to own land; LindenLab has discovered that charging for land ownership for all the land in a "sim" (= one machine on the cluster that makes up the entire world) can cover the cost of that sim, and so they don't need to charge non-land owners.

So, given all these things, in addition to rumors about the future, like the one about LindenLab eventually allowing third parties to run their own SL servers, SL is the coolest VW in existence, and actually worth playing, in my book. Later I'll post about why it's still vastly insufficient :-).

Infopage

I put up a small page about Infogreater where you can download, see a screenshot, get info, etc. It hasn't had development lately, but I decided it's just barely releaseable as alpha-quality.

I'm going to do a write up about SecondLife soon.

I'm going to go release Twisted 1.3.0 now.