A little breathing room
It turned out that we didn't do an all-weekend push to get the stuff at work done, puzzlingly. I went in yesterday and got several hours and some valuable refactoring done, but there's more to do tomorrow in advance of Tuesday's big build.
Today, I took some much-needed mental health time, and played D&D and went to the Amerks game with Jan. And I went up a level! It was a really interesting session -- no combat, but lots of sneaking around and maneuvering. And monkeys.
I also seem to be having a huge burst of creative energy lately, directed toward recreational hacking. I'm suddenly motivated to finally get around to writing that interactive fiction piece I've been meaning to for years, and even did some research for it. This isn't the really big King-Lear-in-space one, but a smaller piece tentatively titled Bleeding Kansas. I've been looking over Platypus and Onyx Ring for Inform 6 to try to decide which library to use -- I've finally talked myself out of trying to get into the business of creating my own IF tools -- and will probably kitbash the two and roll in big chunks of code from my old ADVSYS library.
More interestingly, I've been taking a look at the underlying technology behind GNOME with a view toward refactoring my operating system to make use of it. Part of where I got hung up was in inventing my own system programming language to give me fine-grained control over the object system, which GNOME seems to have solved by just going and implementing gtk+ objects in plain old C. With a few changes, my object system and the persistent store associated with it could be made to work with gtk+ objects instead, and my OS could actually see the light of day as a smaller and lighter-weight bottom layer optimized to run GNOME.
Even more interestingly, it looks like I could accomplish this in a series of small open source projects that would be independently useful. And Amanda has expressed an interest in dragging out and revisiting my old OS stuff. Hmm....
Today, I took some much-needed mental health time, and played D&D and went to the Amerks game with Jan. And I went up a level! It was a really interesting session -- no combat, but lots of sneaking around and maneuvering. And monkeys.
I also seem to be having a huge burst of creative energy lately, directed toward recreational hacking. I'm suddenly motivated to finally get around to writing that interactive fiction piece I've been meaning to for years, and even did some research for it. This isn't the really big King-Lear-in-space one, but a smaller piece tentatively titled Bleeding Kansas. I've been looking over Platypus and Onyx Ring for Inform 6 to try to decide which library to use -- I've finally talked myself out of trying to get into the business of creating my own IF tools -- and will probably kitbash the two and roll in big chunks of code from my old ADVSYS library.
More interestingly, I've been taking a look at the underlying technology behind GNOME with a view toward refactoring my operating system to make use of it. Part of where I got hung up was in inventing my own system programming language to give me fine-grained control over the object system, which GNOME seems to have solved by just going and implementing gtk+ objects in plain old C. With a few changes, my object system and the persistent store associated with it could be made to work with gtk+ objects instead, and my OS could actually see the light of day as a smaller and lighter-weight bottom layer optimized to run GNOME.
Even more interestingly, it looks like I could accomplish this in a series of small open source projects that would be independently useful. And Amanda has expressed an interest in dragging out and revisiting my old OS stuff. Hmm....