ShrimpWorks

Heh, I’m feeling sort of blank lately… :(

Finally my Naruto collection is up-to-date thanks to |sAvAgE|, and he’s filling in the missing parts of the Full Metal Alchemist series too. So I’ve started watching FMA from the beginning again.

Something is REALLY wrong with the IS FTP server. I think they must be doing shaping for non-IS customers properly now :(. Updated a bunch of xan’s (this server) packages last night and it took an age to download just 27mb.

How kewlies is that - UnWheel has taken it’s rightful place as the #1 voted driving mod of 2004 (across all games supported by modDB). Hehehehe.

Might as well list all UnWheel’s achievements to date for the fun of it ;)

Make Something Unreal Contest - Phase 2 (UT2003):

• 1st place, Best Non-FPS Mod
• 1st place, Best Vehicle
• 1st place, Best use of Karma Physics

Make Something Unreal Contest - Phase 3 (UT2004):

• 3rd place, Best Non-FPS Mod
• 2nd place, Best Vehicle
• 1st place, Best use of Karma Physics

Make Something Unreal Contest - Phase 4:

• 7th place, Best Non-FPS Mod (can’t win em all ;-))

Make Something Unreal Contest - Grand Finals:

• Finalist (results pending)

Other accolades and awards:

• Bundled as one of 11 mods in the retail Unreal Tournament 2004: Editor’s Choice Edition.
• 1st place in ModDB’s Mod of the Year - Driving category.
• Awarded PC Zone UK’s Essential Choice, and featured on cover DVD twice (Sept + Oct 2004).
• Featured Mod on FilePlanet’s homepage (EC/MSU Phase 4 version).
• Featured on several magazines’ cover disks throughout the world, including UK PC Gamer (Dec 2004).

Not too shabby, hey?

Here’s something that’s been keeping me quite entertained recently. Outer Space is an online multiplayer space game where you try to explore and colonise as many systems as possible while forming alliances with other players to try to keep alive.

Sounds pretty simple… But throw in a huge tech tree that you can research to improve your production, research, population, ships, etc, and things become complicated pretty quickly.

The game is turn based, and each turn lasts an hour, so you need only check up on your empire once an hour. Or if you build up production, research and fleet order ques, you can check in even less often if you like.

Check it out: http://www.ospace.net/

Requires Python and PyGame

Well I got the E-Check list problems sorted… Was reusing odd variables :-/

Improved preview functionality in the core and GUI, and added a message source viewer. Also populated the list of accounts properly with a wxCheckListBox that lets you select the accounts to check. All working nicely.

Someone told me I don’t talk enough in IRC… :P

Well today I got multiple accounts working as well as writing/reading to/from a config file thanks to the ConfigParser module.

Improved the body retrieval in the MailBox class so it doesn’t die when there’s an attachment or some other weird part of a multipart message. Also on the GUI side of things needed to sort out some problems with different character sets, so now non-ASCII messages are encoded to iso-8859-1as needed.

There seems to be some problem now with the message list box returning the incorrect message selection, so trying to preview the last message in the list results in the first one being previewed… heh.

Todo: Fix list problems, selecting of messages for deletion.

Okay well I’ve been working on this for a while now - a new version of my aging “E-Check” application.

Brief into to E-Check: It’s a small utility that allows you to preview your POP3 mail accounts before downloading their contents into your email client. If there’s a message you don’t particularly like the look of, you can select it and have it deleted before it ever reaches your Inbox.

E-Check was written in Delphi 3 using the Indy (at that time it was knows as Winshoes) suite of networking components. There are currently a number of problems on Windows XP, and of corse, it doesn’t run on anything but Windows.

I’m re-writing it as modular as possible in Python. Currently I have a very nice “MailBox” class that connects and collects headers of all mail messages on the server. Extracting information from each of these messages is extremely basic, just call MailBox.GetSubject(msg_id) for example returns the subject of the message requested. Yes, I know Python has a whole suite of email utilities (and I am in fact making use of a couple of the functions/objects it provides - thanks mithrandi), but this seems (to me anyway) a much more simplified way of managing and accessing email messages, plus you get the whole ‘mailbox’ effect…

Anyway, with that class doing it’s own thing, I can pretty much plug it into any GUI. Web-based mailbox previews? How about checking your mail via a WAP device? “Python for Delphi” would allow me to re-make it almost the same as it is now (bound to Windows still though). At the moment, I’m running with wxPython though. Had a bit of trouble getting to grips with sizers and stuff, but now I’m building most of the GUI by hand (tried loads of builders and things) and it’s working out pretty well indeed. Cross-platform too.

To-to for right now: Multiple account support and saving/loading config info to/from file.

Well, after mucking around for a couple of days with possible layouts and trying to decide on Python or PHP, I gave in and took the easy way out and decided to try some pre-built blogging/CMS software…

I found Geeklog (what you’re looking at now). It seems to be a nice blend of blog and CMS… I think I can get it to do what I want it to with a minimum amount of effort :P.

Umm anyway, this is going to be my personal site type thing where I put my stuff and things…