Gnome-Mud · I still don't have a title

GNOME-Mud 0.11

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 20:38:00 +0000

GNOME-Mud 0.11 was released yesterday. This was probably something unexpected to those who follow the mailing list, as it’s the first release in over three years.

Back in 2006, Les Harris started contributing to the project and started a major rewrite of the program. Things looked very promising, with the program being ported to newer GNOME technologies and standards and being basically rewritten from ground up. However, Les got hit by Real Life™ and being the project’s only real hacker, development basically stopped for nearly two years. On June, I was tempted to remove my irssi subscription to #gnome-mud; all I did was idling or telling people who popped by that nothing was being done and that wouldn’t change unless someone rolled up their sleeves and finished up the nearly ready 0.11 release.

A few days after considering declaring GNOME-Mud dead, Les joined IRC after more than a year of no contact, recovered his GNOME account password and started to commit the missing bits at an awesome pace.

A few weeks later, 0.11 was done, with even more features than originally planned (support for more advanced MUD protocols like MSP or ZMP, for example) and I finally found the time to make a tarball and publish it. Les has lots of plans for the next release, and I hope my old wish of seeing GNOME-Mud becoming a MUD client that is comparable to the classic zMud will soon be a lot closer. The foundation set by this release certainly will make it easier to accomplish.

As always, if you want to contribute, we’ll be happy to help you out on #gnome-mud at GIMPnet, or in gnome-mud-list@gnome.org.

More progress on GNOME Mud

Wed, 21 Jan 2004 23:39:00 +0000

In the last days, the facts have convinced me that GNOME Mud is officially out of the death spiral where it had got stuck in the last many months due to development inactivity. Some days ago I posted about my surprise seeing new blood coming into GNOME-Mud. In the last few months (where barely anything had happened with GNOME-Mud), Robin and I had been getting subscription notifications to gnome-mud-list, but everything was quiet, and we were considering posting a call for help to FootNotes. Suddenly, Aravi and Uranus started joining #gnome-mud regularly, and have posted a few interesting patches. Lately, Aravi fixed PyGTK support and wrote his first script ready for mass consumption, the typical health monitor for your character, which nicely attaches to your taskbar. Finally, a usable GNOME Mud plugin! :) Meanwhile, Robin should be finishing the first bits of the move to libglade, while Uranus finishes MSP support, using GStreamer to play sounds. I’m trying to identify the numerous places where the app needs HIG love.

I tried playing a bit with Sodipodi and Inkscape to create a small shield to be used as notification area icon. Hmm, I suck at those programs for now. :)

We finally sent in the proposal to reorganise Debian’s Catalan team. There’s not too much feedback yet, but at least it’s positive for now. Looks promising though, I believe we can find plenty of contributors in the many Catalan LUGs around the territory. We’ll see. Committed a bunch of new GNOME translations from Xavi, while we try to figure out what to do with the giant evolution translation.

Holliday tomorrow, which means getting up quite early for cycling…

Internet Explorer sucks; GNOME-Mud progress

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 18:50:00 +0000

“No shit, Sherlock!”, you guys are probably thinking. Well, of course I knew, but yesterday it was the first time I did a serious webpage with CSS and stuff that is aimed at Windows users, and after my teammate and I finished it, with some nice looking results, we discovered it’s completely crap when viewed on Internet Explorer. This time, the “they lose” strategy won’t work, because we don’t expect duathletes visiting the site will be using Firebird, so we better fix it. It sucks that 90% of the browser market is dominated by this utter crap. Come on, it’s 2004… it’s about time transparent PNGs were supported by software that pretends to be serious… not to talk about the random behaviour of their CSS parser. I need to ask some GNOME webmaster how they get their header IE-happy. It probably boils down to avoiding transparent png’s where possible, and using jpeg’s instead. *sigh*.

To make this entry a bit less ranty, I’ll add that as days pass, Debian’s GNOME meta packages are nearer and nearer of entering testing. Today, another dependency of the five that remain is entering testing, and Abiword, one of the tough players, is nearly ready. Again all thanks to Kamion and aj doing magic. Now, if we could get epiphany-browser correctly built…

In the more GNOMEish front, it’s been a nice week for GNOME-Mud. It has gone from mostly maintenance mode, due to lack of manpower, to, suddenly, having 2 or 3 new persons poking at it and submitting patches, some very nice which close TODO items that were years old. Big thanks to Nuno Sousa, who is on hacking spree, and has already coded connection status and activity for the mud tabs, removed some old annoying behaviours of the tabs, created a nice tray icon that informs of MUD stuff and is currently finishing some rocking MUD Sound Protocol, which will bring sound support for MUDs that support it. It won’t be long before 0.10.5 is out. Nuno has more ideas, so stay tuned. :) (anyway, if you think GNOME-Mud has the potential of becoming “The MUD Client” for GNOME and want to help, please write to gnome-mud-list, as we still need help to get things going. For example, we have a plan to move to libglade and do HIG cleanups, help would be very welcome in those areas.)