2002-10 - Weblog - Xiven.com

Saving the world before bedtime...

I've been down in Melksham these past couple of days where I met up with Hixie, GwieF and Kam.

Sadly I wasn't able to come down in time to enjoy the BUNCS LAN, but we did go to see the Powerpuff Girls Movie which was very good IMHO (just beware of the slightly unnecessary seizure-inducing flashing light section). Also got to catch up with Stargate SG-1 since Hixie has been saving the new episodes on his TiVo. I have to say the new season seems to be shaping up pretty well from what I've seen so far.

Posted: 2002-10-22 12:51:31 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

Job hunting part I

So here's what I've discovered so far in my quest for employment:

www.jobs.co.uk and www.monster.co.uk are both very good places to start looking.
Very few people want PHP; ASP is apparently a much more valuable language to know. Fortunately I have quite a bit of experience with both.
Far too many companies want people who know Macromedia Flash and/or Shockwave. I have to say I have a slight dislike of Flash, as it makes navigation much less intuitive and less standardised, reduces accessibility (eg. screen readers for those with visibility impairments won't work with Flash), and takes far longer to download than a nice, clean simple HTML page.

Posted: 2002-10-14 09:39:54 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

Stuck in a rut

Currently finding it hard to get any work done on Voidwars. The main obstacle we are all facing at the moment is the tech tree. It's just so hard to think up names for all the techs, define what techs are required for what ship/ability/building, justify the reasons for each aforementioned item requiring said techs, adding sensible cross-linking between different fields of research etc, especially when the tech tree needs to be as big as this one does. Plus we then have to modify the Terran tech tree to provide the techs for the other 2 races. Motivation is becoming a problem.

In other news, I am now hunting for a job since the one "possible" that I had lined up has fallen through (took 3 months just to find out that I don't have a job... sigh). Don't suppose anyone has any bright ideas as to where to start?

Posted: 2002-10-13 17:03:47 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

Longing for the days of broadband

So there we were, happily playing a game of Warcraft III. The enemy had employed the typical rushing technique, but we were easily holding our own, when BAM!: You have been disconnected. Now Freeserve (my ISP) disconnects after 2 hours of being online, which although annoying is just about tolerable, you just have to remember to reconnect before doing anything. I had however, only connected about 30 minutes before I was so rudely disconnected, so that put me in a somewhat bad mood. Needless to say, my teammate was unable to hold out on his own against both enemies so that's another game lost.

I would get cable internet or ADSL, but sadly neither are available in this backward area of the country. Guess I'll have to wait until I get a job and move house.

Posted: 2002-10-12 15:29:28 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

If only all software development were like this...

This is the Voidwars (was Space Battlegrounds) development team hard at work creating the tech tree for the next round (start time still yet-to-be-determined). This photo was actually taken a few weeks ago, but because someone couldn't find their USB camera cable, I've only just got hold of it.

(Note: yes the picture is blurry, that's intentional; we don't want people getting a sneak preview at the tech tree now do we.)

Posted: 2002-10-12 11:46:02 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)

Pingback implementation II

Well, implementing pingback turned out to be about as difficult as I had expected. I managed to get hold of some nice XML-RPC functions which certainly helped matters.

So, after the headache of trying to figure out when and when not to escape ampersands (&), I now have a working Pingback. It's quite satisfying to have actually succeeded =).

Posted: 2002-10-11 13:30:30 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)