Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Whizzard

As I've mentioned a few times, I spend a reasonable amount of my free time (and sometimes bits of my not free time ("compiling!")) working on Sutekh, our card manager for VtES.

As I've also mentioned, I created a fork of Sutekh called Thufir, which does the same thing for the defunct Dune CCG. While I got Thufir to a point I was happy with, I never really kep it up to date with Sutekh's developments, so the two code bases diverged rather rapidly.

Now we add the recent Android: Netrunner LCG into the mix. While there are a varierty of web-based card managers for A:NR, I find them clunky, and there's a dearth of other options. Maintaining a third fork of Sutekh also looked really unappealing, so I hatched a cunning plan to refactor Sutekh considerably, pulling a lot of non-VtES specific code into a nice, reasonably reusable basis for writing card management applications. I also reworked Thufir to use this new framework, fixing a lot of bugs and gaining a whole lot of new, useful features there. Of course, this all took time, and, as a result, I didn't get around to actually working on my A:NR app (called Whizzard).

Over the weekend, I decided to knuckle down and actually start working on this. Although there is still missing data and a bunch of features to hook up, it's moved past the vapourware stage really quickly, which gives me a warm fuzzy feeling about the refactoring work done on Sutekh.



Sutekh's base infrastructure is still not quite as self-contained as I'd like, which would avoid needing to duplicate code in the various repos, but I still haven't come up which a way of plugging the last couple of leaks I'm happy with, so I'll live with the current state of affairs until inspiration strikes.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Wheels

Sometime towards the end of last year, I lost an argument about how traffic lights work with a minibus taxi. While I got off reasonably unscathed, my poor Honda didn't, which was a very sad experience.

Consequently, I spent some time looking for a suitable replacement. This took longer than I wanted, due to general end of year craziness, but eventually resulted in something I quite like.




Now that I have the licensing all sorted out, I hope to be able to enjoy the remaining good biking weather before winter sets in suitable style.