» My Father’s Bike: 0.714 (28,567 / 40,000 words)
» Wind, Bear, and Moon Query: 0.000 (0 / 26 weeks)
» Summer Biking: 0.228 (91.2 / 400 km)

One useful method of getting an genuine imitation heart attack:

1. Ride your bike after not doing it for a couple weeks because you are (still) sick.
2. Do so on a really humid and hot day.
3. Worry about a wobble in the rear tire.
4. Struggle a lot trying to beat your wife’s time and then just equal her.
5. Lean bike against office door.
6. Get really, really involved with work.
7. Jump loudly when bike tire explodes without anyone touching it.

So, my tire decided that it was done and committed suicide yesterday. Startled the hell out of me and was good for a few minutes of everyone asking what in the world that noise was. The rest of the day was rather sedate. I’m trying to get LDAP and PAM (ldap-pam) running in our office.

Oh, because my Google-Fu didn’t find it, if you get “I have no name!” and you are not using ncsd, make sure your /etc/pam_ldap.conf and /etc/libnss_ldap.conf are chmod a+r. Just note to others who spend two days trying to figure it out.

Last night, I worked on Sprite3 on BooGame. This is going to be a graphics library for doing sprites in various rendering systems and eventually leading into getting a GUI (menus, windows, etc) working on a pure graphical interface. Kind of like the windows and popups you see in games. I had hopes that CeGui# would do it, but I can’t get that project to do what I need it to. I didn’t get very far–I spent two weeks thinking about it, but when I got into actually coding it… nada. I did manage to get one demo working, of three kids moving around the screen every five seconds.

I did have one minor disappointment. In 2004, I wrote something jendave called the Moonfire Demos for SDL.NET. It was my effort to do basically the same thing with Sprite3, but years ago. Sprite3 is also what I did with my Gtk# Sprites, but that isn’t really important. Last year or so, jendave said he was working toward moving SDL.NET into more of a pygame approach, which is to provide simple game-related functionality instead of my rather specific sprite library. I thought he was going to keep them in there, but in the last couple rounds of changes, apparently most of my stuff was taken out.

On one hand, I can understand that. I haven’t done much with SDL.NET for a few years and I wasn’t maintaining it. But, it hurts a bit to find out that something I worked on basically got removed because it was too broken. I can understand that it happen and I hope that I won’t drop Sprite3 the same way, though I do plan on getting it working on SDL.NET again, mainly because I keep finding myself wanting this library for the various game projects and maybe if I do it properly, I’ll stop doing it. Or at least stop reinventing the wheel every nine months.

It’s may fault for not paying attention to SDL.NET and the ton of other projects that I start to get involved with, I know that. And this is the consequences of doing paying attention since I have simply so many other projects to work on.