Random updates
I haven’t blogged in quite some time - since I couldn’t take a vacation from work I took one from all my personal projects. Did you miss me?
I’m catching up on my reading/e-mail now, so you might start seeing a few things from me. Here are some random updates on various things.
The parsing of Redland file: URIs on Windows does not appear to follow the standard (see RFC 1738), which seems to cause problems on some systems. See also the proposed update. I need to investigate further.
A somewhat obvious if not necessarily easy fix is to allow the language bindings to pass in something that Redland considers a file-like object (can this even be done with SWIG?), or punt off the handling of file URIs to something like CURL. That moves the pain to someone who has already solved it, but may not play nicely with underlying code assumptions.
During a remote SSH session, I attempted to open evolution. It failed since I wasn’t tunnelling X - but it erased my email store!! Three years of emails and all my contacts gone. And in the spirit of true disaster I had erased my email backup for some storage space, intending to recreate it on a new device a bit later. Thank goddess for the archiving of mailing lists.
Work on my character generator was stopped for a bit. I did work up a pretty nice character sheet using Reportlab, but really want to see GnomePrinting/cairo integration. The Gnomeprint roadmap does not seem to exist. Next on the list is transitioning the races/classes to RDF and some refactoring to handle the lack of default logic in OWL.
I agreed to review two role-playing products in exchange for free copies. Have read both of them, working on the reviews now.
The Aestia campaign setting is largely converted to True20 mechanics. As a byproduct I’ve been able to put together several articles on handling the transition for a “live” campaign. May or may not be ready for the Green Ronin setting search, but I’m still uncertain about signing up for that anyway. Not really in the spirit of open gaming (mind you, Green Ronin has an impressive track record of open content).
Thanks to some links on PlanetRDF, I’m beginning to understand why there are certain holes OWL’s coverage. You can work around those holes, but we need more OWL-based reasoners to explore the space of really solving them. I’ll write more on those later.
Also, filed my first Ubuntu bug; fixed in a impressively brief timespan. Malone is shaping up to be a pretty slick interface over the UI horror that is Bugzilla. They really need to get their HTTPS certificates fixed, though.