Friday
Oct182024

Why do I even have a website

Sometimes I have to wonder why I support this thing.  It's not like I hardly ever post content to it.  I should really consider migrating to something else, possibly self-hosted one day.  In the meantime, I'll try to post more often ...at least once a year haha.  Seriously though, I need to add relevant content, even if it's just for folks trying to figure out how some of my tools works.

Sunday
Jul102022

More Docker Moo

This weekend I finished updating my ToastStunt docker images to fix an issue with some file names and to also add support for PUID and PGID variables so that the containers can be run under a host user.  I'm pretty proud of these containers.  I owe a lot of thanks to the ToastStunt server community and to Lisdude specifically for helping overhaul one of my scripts that was not handling some parameter values with spaces in them properly.  Now it should be a piece of cake for anyone to fire up a ToastStunt moo server in a docker container.  Next I need to go back and add PUID and PGID support to the Lambdamoo server docker images as well.  One step at a time!

Tuesday
Jul052022

Edgerunner Moo and Docker Too

I recently dusted off the old server source code for the patched Lambdamoo server I used to run back in the day along with the rpg core I was building then.  I had thought the core might have been corrupted or that it would never load again due to using various server patched functions that don't exist in the base server, but I was wrong.  It then occurred to me that running my Moo from a Docker container would be an ideal approach.  After a quick search for Lambdamoo dockers and some testing, I realized that I didn't really care for the Moo dockers that existed, so I set forth to building my own.  During this journey I also decided that I needed to move my core to ToastStunt server, which seemed to be the clear winner of the various possibilities out there, since the Lambdamoo server source hasn't changed in over a decade.

After two weeks of speed learning, trial and error, I had working Docker images for both Lambdamoo server and ToastStunt server.  Since then I have been working to improve both images with community help and feedback.  Docker is absolutely wonderful to use, though developing for it has quite the learning curve (especially when your Linux knowledge is lacking).

It really is a wild ride to dive back into a passion project from nearly 25 years ago and learn many new skills as part of that project.  I have also shared a git repo of my moo server docker projects so people can see how the images are built.

Thursday
Jan142016

DotSerialize

Well I finally have my first fully functional beta release for DotSerialize and I've now posted it on nuget (wooo!).  It's not quite as performant as I'd hoped speed-wise, but it more than delivers in other aspects so I'm still quite happy.  I have now moved onto new projects.

Monday
Mar162015

Coding Fever

Lately I've been hit with the urge to code like mad again.  Most of the time work manages to crush any urge to code on my own projects out of me.  By the time I get home I don't even want to think about code (the curse of your main hobby also being your job).  Lately though I've found myself back in the groove and being quite productive.  I published a new library on codeplex called DotSerialize and am working on an article for CodeProject detailing how to customize it to serialize complex data structures.  I'm also working on some commercial enterprises again.  I don't know how long this will last, but I hope I can keep up the steam for another 6 months at least.  Any other programmers out there stay in near perpetual burnout thanks to your job?