What I've done on my Xmas Holiday

As has been mentioned several times, I tend to spend a lot of time hacking on Sutekh, the VtES card manager.

I am, however, also somewhat addicted to the (now defunct) Dune CCG, so some time ago, I vaguely started working on a fork of Sutekh to deal with Dune's cards.

And, with minimal cheating [1], I now present the first evidence of Thufir's evolution to non-vapourware status [2]:




[1] It doesn't parse unmodified html files yet - I'm leaning towards just distributing the tweaked files as a better choice fixing the parser to handle the rather horrible html.

[2] git repo

PRASA 2008

So, this year PRASA was in Cape Town, and, riding on the work of my loyal minion (i.e. my M. student), I was once represented. Notes from this year:

• I should never, ever, ever get a job which involves commuting in on the N2 - taking around 90 minutes to get from my flat to the conference venue each morning was not a good way to start the day.
• I should be more forceful when chairing sessions - I left the long talk to go on embarrassingly long.
• Ideally, I should duck out of chairing sessions more often. It's easier to catnap in the back during the boring bits that way.
• Two bottles of wine per table (1 white, 1 red) just doesn't cut it for the conference dinner
• I'm very glad I wasn't driving after the conference dinner (see previous point).
• Ordering off the menu a week in advance didn't work well, and hopefully that won't be repeated for some time.
• I came away with fewer things that struck me as really interesting this time - I think the first point played a role in that, though.
• The meeting footage database does sound like a fun dataset to have on hand. I'll hopefully remember to follow up on that.
  
  

Sutekh 0.6.0 released

After far too long, we finally got the current trunk to a state where we were happy to release. Unlike the previous stable releases, we decided that this one was worth a bigger splash, and announced it on the VTES newsgroup.

As such releases go, that seems to have been a success, and I've spent the last couple of days obsessively watching the sourceforge downloads counter tick up.

The increasing number of downloads, however, has not been accompanying by any comparable flood of queries or requests. As a measure of validation that people are using out work, this leaves a fair bit to be desired. Typical, really. Users are never around when you want them, and often there to complain when you don't.