TheCrypto's Blog

The last week or so, I've been learning Lisp. I started looking at it again after someone directed me to a book that teaches Practical Common Lisp. Previously, when I had looked for a Lisp tutorial, they always ended with "And that's how you create a list." I would then look at that tutorial and go "Why don't I just use Python then?" This books starts you on the right foot by showing you the advanced features, like macros, and even, amazingly enough, how to get output. I swear, every other Lisp tutorial I found did not explain how to do a simple print statement.

So now that I've been learning all this about Lisp. I'm applying it in another direction. I've also been interested in learning Lojban. And I've got many parts of the general grammar down, but I have almost no vocabulary. I've tried paper flashcards and even the Flashman process but none of them have worked. Many people recommended Supermemo but I don't run Windows so that doesn't work for me, even under Wine. None of other flashcard programs for Linux work well either.

So instead, I'm going to write a flashcard program in Lisp. I already have it parsing the database format I want. Now all I have to do is get it to print out the card on the screen and implement an algorithm for picking a card. Luckily, Supermemo has their algorithm posted.

That's how I think. When I can't find a program to help me learn something, I'll learn something else in order to make a program to help me learn something.

TC Out

Recently, to continue in my Second Life, I've been playing with the scripting language. For a friend, I've been making a animation script. When you sit on a couch it should ask you how you'd like your body animated and animate the avatar. This is actually pretty hard to pull off completely.

The scripting language is a C derivative with some features from other scripting languages, like a real list type. It's a strictly typed language and actually pretty useable. I've almost got the script done, I just have to fix the stand up action.

On this note, with all the recent posts about Second Life, would people prefer that I move them to a second blog or do people not mind?

I will be getting back to some fun Python programming soon, I've just been spending lots of time working in Second Life and at work. But I've also just reactivated trying to enforce a strong Getting Things Done regiment again, so I'll hopefully will be GTD.

TC Out

In a recently slashdoted article, there was a discussion of how MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) will take over the world.

Now as I've recently mentioned, I've fell in love with the word of Second Life which could technically be the MMORPG without a hard RP part. Or even really the G part. It's a completely free form environment for everything. I've seen it used as a chat environment, a decent 3d modeling environment, a shopping mall, a wedding location, a casino, a night club, and the list just goes on. And this is just what I've seen and heard of in the week I've been on it. People are already making a living working on Second Life because of the exchange rate. This is exactly what the article was talking about, but it was glossed over for the bomb that was the Sims Online.

On IT Conversations, Will Wright, the man who invented the Sims and Sims Online spent almost half the time in the questions section attempting to explain why didn't the Sims Online do anything like what Second Life has been doing. It boiled down to that the Sims Online didn't make it free form enough and it didn't promote user interaction as much as it should have.

All that Linden Labs needs to do to get everyone into Second Life is make Second Life the last part of the article that hasn't come about in it yet. That would be making the world the interconnection between all the other MMORPGs. They have the technology to simulate everyone's avatars and move them around in an intelligent way. Even now, the different parts of the world live on different servers. They'd just have to compromise on a protocol for sending the avatar information back and forth.

At the moment, that plan would be pretty much a pipe dream. But if it does come true, Second Life would be the revolution that would not be televised. With the increases in the number of people who are playing MMORPGs and the current advancements in immersion technology, we are approaching the Meta-Verse. And I like that.

TC Out

A bit of a lack of updates here, but I've been stuck in Second Life or SL for short. It's an MMORPG without the RP part. I have been hanging out on there for hours a day, just having a blast watching the various avatars, seeing what people are making, and just hanging out. It really is fun. I'd recommend it to anyone, and it even runs under WINE. If you want to sign up, refer TheCrypto Doctorow and you can find me under that name on SL as well.

Heading back into the game now,

TC Out

A very good friend of mine is doing the Blog-a-thon this year for the EFF. I didn't have time to do it myself. Too much schoolwork and programming to do. I am donating at least $10 and as much as required to get him up to a $50 total. So make a pledge to Pride Pride. Thanks.

TC Out

The WSGI Toolbox is now available for download. Release early and often they say. I've written some preliminary documentation as well as some of the philosophy behind the code. The cookie support isn't there yet, but it is useable for one off authentication. The file is a working example. It uses the run_with_cgi from the PEP so you should be able to just load it on any CGI capable webserver and see it work.

My only question is what license the code in the PEPs are under? I'm licensing everything under the MIT license so I'd just want to make sure that copying that function is fine. Licensing is important but I haven't found anything by googling for information in the PEP license.

TC Out

I've almost finished the WSGI Authentication. After getting a tip from Ian Bicking, It actually works now. I've been able to authenticate against a function and there is no template callable either. Instead, if the authenication fails, it redirects to another page using a 302 Found status code. The code for it is really small weighing in at about 70 lines for the actual authentication work. And I still have a bit more work I can do on it to clean it up and make it smaller and easier to read.

All that's left before I release the code is cookies and documentation. I'm working on the documentation at the moment but I wanted to get this out. Then cookies will just store an ID that I can check using the authentication function to see if the cookie stores the right information.

I'm also working on packaging a bunch of little WSGI middleware together into a toolbox. It'll be simple 200 line scripts that you can throw around any WSGI application to do tasks like authentication or sessions. It'll be kind of like a completely seperable Paste, another great project I've been following.

TC Out