Windows Browser Election 2010
Screenshots of the EU-mandated browser choice screen rolling out on Windows.
The journal
Notes from the workbench.
149 articles on building software and understanding how it works.
Perl: Command-line regex
A few one-liners I keep reaching for: filtering and replacing with regex straight from the Perl command line, including in-place file editing with automatic backups.
Perl: Modify certain line number in text-file
A tiny Perl snippet that rewrites a specific line number in a text file — written up as pseudocode for a previous post.
Tip: Always use ASP.Net State Server during development
Using ASP.Net State Server during development forces everything you put in Session to be serializable — which means switching to State Server or SQL sessions in production won't blow up in your face later.
Tip: Never use IP addresses
Hardcoded IP addresses are never actually required — DNS names or a hosts-file entry always work, cost nothing extra, and save you from hunting down every stale reference when a server moves.
.Net tools to use: log4net
First in a small series on .NET tools worth using: log4net, Apache's free logging framework. One line at the top of each class, a standard XML section in web.config, and you have proper leveled logging.
.Net tools to use: Nini
.NET tools to use, part two: Nini, an uncommonly powerful configuration library. Reads web.config, .ini and .xml config with type conversion and default values in a couple of lines.
C#: Replacement of $REPLACE_ID$ tokens (file or stream input+output)
Helped a guy on IRC with a method that reads a file or stream line by line, runs a custom replacement callback on each line, and writes the result out — without eating memory on large files. BSD-licensed, take it.
OpenSim in Visual Studio on Win64
OpenSim's native dependencies (SQLite, ODE, OpenJpeg) don't do 64-bit, and OpenSim.32BitLaunch.exe only helps from the command line. Here is the workaround to get full Visual Studio debugging on 64-bit Windows.
SECS in technicolor
A colour-coded model of the SECS pipeline. Work in progress — boxes that share a colour are related.
Script Engine Component System (SECS)
People define a script engine narrowly as "the thing that runs the scripts" — I'd argue it's the most important component of OpenSim. SECS is my proposal for a component system with interfaces worth building on.
DotNetEngine and xengine
Reflections on why a common way of implementing script engines was needed: many found it hard to build engine variations on DotNetEngine, and not all developers want to conform to one structure.
OpenSim tackles high load
3Di contributed region splitting and dynamic load balancing to OpenSim: multiple physical servers cooperating on one region, and regions migrating to less loaded machines while running. Green computing, virtual-world style.
Objectifying LSL
OSSL takes an object-oriented turn: instead of only LSL2-style function calls you can now write Prim.Position.x += 10 or set Prim.Text directly. A more modular approach to the scripting language.
New languages
DotNetEngine now speaks VB.Net and JScript — just start your script with //vb or //js. LSL state support landed too.