Year: 2008

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Having become fed up with the memoryhog that is the Apache webserver, I’ve begun looking at alternatives. The one standing out at the moment is Lighttpd . Youtube, Wikipedia and other large sites use it, from what I undernstand – and it’s extremely minimalistic and efficient, saving memory and system resources. Those of you who know me known that A) I tend to switch software pretty often, seemingly just because I like trying out new software, and B) that I’m a die-hard minimalist, especially when it comes to system resources. I run Blackbox, for crying out loud.

Anyways, Lighttpd seems like a great fit. However, I know next to nothing about how it actually works… Over the past years I’ve come to know at least enough of Apache to make me a passable webmaster, but Lighttpd is a strange beast. It’s all greek to me. And there, perhaps, lie part of what attracts me – I thoroughly enjoy fiddling around with new systems and new software, tweaking and modding until I’ve mastered whatever-it-is.

Just to be on the safe side, I’ll make the move one site at a time. Perhaps starting with my webapps, who use nothing more than the odd bit of PHP and none of that crispy MySQL goodness. Did I just make a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reference involving MySQL? I guess I kind of did. Anyways, one site at a time… My server has about 7-800 mb RAM, which is WAY too little for a monster like Apache. Hopefully, this’ll help.

I guess I’ll post some kind of update here later on. Also, I’m thinking about chaning my Wine+uTorrent setup for rTorrent, simply because I can, but that’s another topic for another post.

Strap yourselves in, people. These next few days might be a bit bumpy on the omegarpg server…

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Contrary to popular opinion, robots aren’t enough to save anything. Robots are, of course, inherently cool – but they need to be put in context.

I’m talking about RF Online. I saw the game at a local store, went home and looked it up, discovered that it had recently been made free-as-in-beer. I downloaded the client (laughing inwardly at anyone who ever bought it), got myself a free account (laughing outwardly at anyone who ever payed for their accounts), and gleefully started playing. The game impressed me at first by being beautiful. Absolutely stunning. Think Phantasy Star but not as cheesy. And with way cooler robots. Very nice. and didn’t seem to demand much in terms of system resources, either. Very nice. and it has robots, which are very cool. Did I mention the robots?

Anyways, I created my character (three playable races, one of which is a race of robots, so it wasn’t much of a choice) and begain playing. Pretty nice controls. A not-too-bad combat system and the experience system, in which you become better at the stuff you actually do, is nice… Erh, OK, quests come automatically as you level up… And they don’t seem to be connected, or have any sort of plot… And this is my twentieth mission in a row that’s just “kill 20 of X”… Waiiiitaminute, this was made by koreans, wasn’t it?

And there it was. Inescapable, unavaidable. A korean MMO. I tried playing for a while, but ultimately, koreans just can’t make good MMO’s. OK, they got loads of stuff to kill and a couple of cool abilities, but koreans are, judging from the kind of games they produce, very fond of mindless hacking of identical enemies, lack of plot, and not playing socially.

So – Robots aside, RF Online is crap. The robots are still very cool, but they’d need to be in a game that didn’t suck ass. Too bad, this game actually looked good, played well etc. If it had only hade some more social gaming/role-playing elements and perhaps, i dunno, a plot or fifteen, it might’ve been good.

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These past few days, I’ve been searching for a competent IDE for creating WxWidgets interfaces, primarily for the Python programming language. The reason for this is that I’m working on a small project to get my creative programming-juices flowing again – Tempest’s on its way, but I needed some kind of “learning” project in order to get my Python programming skills up to “moderately skilled” level before I tackle the continuous challenge that is Tempest. This new project of mine is a managing software for the PSP – most, if not all, of the managers out there are too limited or just plain too buggy for my tastes. The project is going well – I wrote a couple of functions that decode the PSP’s various files to get info like savegame details or PNG files, and now I mostly need – the interface.

Anyways, here are my results (windows software only):

FarPy GUIE

Pretty neat and very user-friendly, outputs Python code – but in striving for usability it leaves out all kinds of advanced functionality, like Spacers – and Spacers are absolutely necessary if you need your inteface to have a scalable window.

Boa Constructor

From what I’ve been told, the best and the greatest. I hate multi window layouts in software, and the inteface of Boa Constructor is very, very advanced – and incredibly klunky. Here’s an interface that does it all when it comes to Python programming, but the interface makes everything extremely painful. I’m sure the software is mightily powerful, but it’s just not for me. Next!

Visual Wx

One of the better ones. Has a bad habit of naming controls and refusing to let me rename them to stuff I can actually remember, and the visual display of what I’m working on sometimes doesn’t update correctly. Has rudimentary support for custom components, but nothing fancy. Some weird graphical bugs, rather ugly buttons and complete lack of help files for the actual interface lowers the score. Supports XRC input/output, which is always nice. Interrestingly, importing some XRC’s from wxFormBuilder actually makes the prog crash and some stuff seems to not import correctly… Can generate code for Python, C++, Lua, Perl and Ruby (=impressive) but the same project cannot, as far as I can tell, export to multiple languages. If you created a Python project, then it is and always will be a Python project.

WxDesigner

Non-free editor, and it kinda shows. Pretty sleek interface, does its job and does it well. The main problem here is its lack of custom components – I need a special version of BitmapButtons, and it’s not supported. Why don’t more of these have a module-based structure? Anyways, WxDesigner supports C++, Python and Perl, and as far as I can tell, the same project can be used to export multiple kinds of code…

wxFormBuilder

Excellent in terms of interface and usability. Easy to use, and relatively complete in terms of functionality. There are no help files or support for custom controls, but there’s a moddable structure and though it can’t export directly to Python, it does generate XRC files. One very suprising and excellent interface feature is that every control and property are explained in a small box – no more checking the online manual to find out what WX_WHATEVER does…

Anyways, having done this research and tested every wxWidgets IDE from here to eternity, I decided, in the end, to use the XRC  intermediary format for my UI needs, which meant choosing wxFormBuilder. It had the best interface, creating stuff really is a breeze compared to, say, WxDesigner. And it’s free. The XRC format provides another clear advantage: I can work on the core functions and the GUI stuff separately, and as long as certain core stuff remains the same – the names of certain forms and events – I can work freely on one without bothering with the other. This also makes it possible for possible future users to create their own user interfaces if they think mine suck, and it also makes it more sensible to create “placeholder” purely functional interfaces to test the core functions, and only later caring about aesthetics.

I’ve also done some new research when it comes to crossplatform programming languages and their respective executable/runtime sizes. Java’s too big, FreePascal too much of a hassle (and it produces 11-13 mb EXE’s)… Well you know, the usual list. FreePascal was the only real newcomer, and it fell seriously short despite being based on one of the first programming languages I ever learned (Turbo Pascal 6). C++ is really the only contender to Python, and I simply find Python to be more intuitive, if slightly slower. No matter, processing speed really isn’t an issue in most of my projects. Perhaps I’ll learn C++ some day – after all, wxWidgets exist for C++ as well, which means my XRC files will work even if I change programming language (how cool is that?).