This first picture details one of the scariest monsters in the known pixelverse:

But no worries! The Earth may be saved yet! Our hero is the captain of this rockin’ space tank:

Both of these are 16×16 pixels, but expanded for this post’s purposes. I have some of the basic game mechanics worked out, but have done some Something Bad ^TM with malloc somewhere… but have yet to find it. I will be firing up GDB shortly to investigate.

This started to be a hassle for me as I began to add repositories. I’d forget the names, have to ssh in, find the names, and then run a clone from my machine. It takes too much time, so I wrote a little shell script to do all of that for me.

It is not magical. It checks the source server for new repositories, and clones them to you if it finds any. After that, it cycles through all of your repos and performs an ‘hg pull’ followed by an ‘hg up’.

It makes the assumption that you are hosting all of your repositories in a single directory on both ends. I also recommend that you use keys for authentication and have a key agent running on your local box to avoid having to type your password during each transaction.

#!/bin/bash
 
SRC_USER=michael
SRC_SERV=styledbits.com
SRC_DIR=code
DEST_DIR=$HOME/code
 
mkdir -p $DEST_DIR
 
for x in $(ssh $SRC_USER@$SRC_SERV "ls $SRC_DIR")
do
  if [ ! -d $DEST_DIR/$x ]
  then
    hg clone ssh://$SRC_USER@$SRC_SERV/$SRC_DIR/$x $DEST_DIR/$x
  else
    cd $DEST_DIR/$x && hg pull && hg up
  fi
done

I will also need to reconsider my approach: my goal is to build a simple operational handbook that is easily updated.  I’m not so sure that weekly weblog posts will get me there… perhaps I need to revisit Drupal, and use their book system to write the handbook and their stock article system to write about updates and other news…

Perhaps, perhaps.  I make mistakes so you don’t have to.  ;-)

In the meantime, trying to do something creative, I thought I’d toy with Pygame - an open source multimedia framework written in Python. It looks intuitive, and is a wrapper for the SDL libraries. Unfortunately, it doesn’t play well with OS X. I originally had the idea that I could hack it so it would run on my box, but quickly realized that I’m missing the point. If I ever wanted to distribute my project to others, I’d have to provide crazy instructions to those that wanted to run it on OS X. I need to be closer to click-and-run.

So, I started looking for an alternative framework. It doesn’t look there are any real solutions in Python or Ruby, but I can go the pure SDL route or use Allegro if I’d like to (or have the guts to) use C. Both are robust and proven, and I had written a few small games (more like demos) in SDL back in college. I wish I had the brains to use revision control then, because it’d sure be nice to look over what I had done. Oh well.

It’s been a while since I’ve done anything serious in C, so I’ll probably make some ugly mistakes. The first time I ever worked with C was in 1996, and I was 16. I was trying to get my Slackware linux distro to use my network card, and the device driver wouldn’t compile. I had more balls than brains then, and decided that the best way to solve the problem was to comment out the offending line. And it worked. The driver compiled and my card freakin’ got out on the local net. Wow. I felt like I had been initiated into some sort of secretive occult group. It is now more than obvious that it was all dumb luck, but hey, it was encouraging.

Most of my college CS courses were rooted in C, and I did pretty well in them. Towards the end of my course work, the staff decided to move the department to C++. I got the basics without much trouble, but never felt that I mastered it. For example, if you ask me what a template is, I’ll just give you a blank stare.

Now I’m working with it again. I just wrote a simple app that uses the Allegro libraries, and I have a little guy that walks around my screen at the command of my keyboard. Not too shabby for very little work. Even better, this code can be compiled on the three platforms I care about - Linux, Windows, and OS X.

We’ll see if I’m still smiling when I get my first segfault ;-)

I think that I can build better utilities with Python than I currently can in Perl or Ruby, although that can only be proven through trial.

Sure, PHP 6 may have a shorter release cycle than Perl 6 has, but at the end of it all, we’ll have Perl 6, and you’ll still have PHP.

I also launched a security-centric blog today titled ‘Michael on Security‘.  If you’re going to focus, you might as well get your name as specific as possible, right?  I don’t see how I can deviate from the planned topic, unless I want to talk about home alarm systems.  I doubt I will.  The site is powered by Drupal, as it has the community features that I need built in.  It still has some rough edges, but the same can be stated about the author.  I look forward to working on it this year and learning even more.

This is easily to avoid.  All one has to do is write up a document describing how a production switch must be configured in their environment, do the work, and then audit the switch to make sure that they complied with everything.  It just has to be a basic checklist.  Yes, it adds work, but it will certainly improve the quality.

It’s all too easy to forget these things and to just focus on solving the obvious problems of the day, but we must temper ourselves.

• it’s non-relational and you can’t run queries against multiple ‘domains’
• attributes are limited to 1024 characters
• you must zero-pad your numbers
• no built in full-text search
• your are not guaranteed immediate access to updated data

The more and more that I look at this, I think of SimpleDB as an awesome way to add metadata to S3 objects. Use the SimpleDB domain to describe the S3 object (think of a photo or video site), and have a field container a URL to the object.

Just remember that no matter what anyone tells you, it is certainly not the traditional database killer. As it stands, the field limitations wouldn’t even be able to hold a moderate sized Wordpress entry. The point of all this is not to knock Amazon’s SimpleDB… I just wish the pundits would think things over before making themselves look silly. SimpleDB will be useful to solve some problems, but certainly won’t be knocking down any Oracle databases anytime soon ;-)