I was poking through other peoples' blogs and bumped into one that mentioned a bunch of things I should do to my booklist plugin to fix it. One of which involved switching it from hard-coded html to use pyblosxom flavours. So I did that work and some other neatening up and released it. Get it on my pyblosxom page.

I went through and added the MIT/X License text to all my plugins and updated them with some minor bug fixes and additional features.

My pyblosxom stuff is here.

It's nice to release things. Check the website for more details.

Reading this and this was super! But I have to add the following which account for almost all the bug/feature related emails I get:

• It would be more efficient if... (this is my personal favorite since it's almost never accompanied by any kind of explanation as to why the sender thinks it's more efficient or what conditions the existing code is inefficient in)
• You need feature x, otherwise no one will use <software>...
• It would be more user-friendly if...
• Everyone will want feature x...
• Your documentation is terrible...

The last one is totally true. But it's not because I'm a bad person--it's more because I'm pretty much a one-man band and I just don't have time to do everything, so some items suffer until enough people complain (or better yet--contribute).

With Lyntin, I think I've got a really decent user base that's pretty able considering that the documentation is fairly lacking. I wish they were a bit more communicative, but otherwise, it's perfect for my tastes. Easy to deal with, friendly, mature, not overly needy, and pretty supportive. It's one of those things that I think would be somewhat spoiled if I lowered the bar of entry to using Lyntin by making it all user-friendly and such. Who knows? The main important thing to keep in the back of everyone's mind is that Lyntin development is so totally not my day job and I'm more interested in a sophisticated framework than I am in a fancy user interface.

I installed Oracle 8i (8.1.6) on Windows XP Professional and noticed that it worked fine after I installed it, but after I rebooted the OracleOraHome8TNSListener would come up fine but the OracleServicePORTDB (my oracle instance) service would try to come up, but wouldn't come up fully. Yeah--that's super vague. In the XP Services applet, it would show up as Starting as opposed to Started. There was an ORACLE and an ORADRIM process running, though. So I was puzzled.

Hunting through google search results is really enlightening from a sociological viewpoint, but not a technical one. Finally found a post that mentioned Oracle 8i works fine under Windows XP Professional but that you have to manually start the services.

So if you switch those services to Manual startup, and then write yourself a nice batch script like this:

  net start oracleorahome8tnslistener
  net start oracleserviceportdb

(fill in your instance service name for the second one)--then it works fine.

There's something wonderful about releasing software. I think it's probably the relief associated with throwing it to the world and knowing that you're done with it. Of course, in this case, since it's another beta, that isn't entirely the case. Though I don't plan on touching it for a few days, at least.

Anyhow, more information at http://lyntin.sourceforge.net/.

Now I'm going to take a nap and get my clippers and go to a party because I get to sleep an extra hour tonight. Whee!

I'm on vacation right now. In fact, today is one of two days it's actually been sunny. Instead of sitting outside, I sat down and implemented registry entry editing--something that's been sorely lacking. Unfortunately, the hacks I just did to get it to work are really icky. A small part of me wants to sit down and refactor it right now, but the other 90% of me is thinking that I don't have vacation very often... Refactoring can wait.

It's been a long time coming, but I keep getting bogged down in other projects. I'm only releasing a tar.gz file. I wanted to do a Windows installer, but I can't seem to get an installer that builds a desktop shortcut. I don't really want to keep throwing time at it either. So if you're inclined to tackle this issue, let me know.

Things in this release:

• Added Python distutils support (will make packaging much much easier).
• Removed the Tintin eval mode and the idea of eval modes.
• Refactored hooks. Hooks now pass around arguments in dicts rather than tuples--this is a big big change from 3.x.
• Split much of Lyntin's internal configuration into the constants module and the config module.
• Wrote a completely new configuration system.
• Overhauled ui's so that they'll work correctly. This also makes it possible to write ui's in other widget systems.
• Split the substitutes module into substitutes and gags.
• Added a configuration ini file for setting boot options.
• Added tagged actions and also the ability for actions to trigger off of text with/without ansi colors removed.
• Fixed a bunch of bugs, some documentation updates (but not many), and additional features here and there (most of which aren't documented yet--sorry guys).

If you discover bugs or have other problems, let me know. I'm on vacation 9/24 through 9/30--so email sent will likely get queued until I read it.

Download here (.tar.gz).

Rock on!

Download it now!

• added #antisubstitute command
• added action priorities
• fixed #read and #write so they're inverses of each other
• changed handling of IAC GA and IAC TELOPT_EOR
• changes to documentation and help system
• fixes to Lyntin so we handle errant mud echo requests better
• added a debugmode (#config debugmod) for making macro writing easier
• cleanup to plugin importing at startup

Read the ChangeLog for gruesome details.

This will be the last release before 4.0 which is scheduled around October 2003. There's some heavy things that are in the plans to be redone between now and then. Read the roadmap for more details and watch this site for news.

Thanks to the folks who helped make this a clean release--their help in the last few weeks discovering and diagnosing bugs has been great!

This plugin handles registry kinds of things. I use it (now) for the Lyntin code registry. It's soooo much easier to deal with than the one I wrote in PHP.

Code here.