My brother sent me this. I responded with this.

Then my brother sent me this url which allows me to make my own comics without blatantly manipulating the querystring.

So I created this.

Will the bashful Rainbow Sprites win back their pot of gold from the grasp of the evil Ice Cream Man? You decide!

They really do. Case in point, take this conversation on the Necro guild line:

Chats (last 15 of 102 available):

Nabiki [19-L]: ive never played that
Nabiki [19-L]: better get my booty to raylorn
Rapocco [33-P]: is there an info file?
Flamerus [13-V]: k but i need a min xplainin vamps to a friend
Shadowhawke [Lady]: the instructions are there, it's fun!
Saidin [Marq-V]: bah boot
[->GUILD<-]: Halix rises from the crypt.
Halix [13-V]: lo all
 [ 7:30pm ]
Flamerus [13-V]: lol
Macros [30-P]: Hi Halix
Flamerus [13-V]: ne1 else want to play???????????????????
Flamerus [13-V]: morion go to courtyard(1st)
Flamerus [13-V]: there r instructions u can read
Morion [21-W]: ah :P

One substitute command later and I now see this:

Chats (last 15 of 102 available):

Nabiki [19-L]: ive never played that
Nabiki [19-L]: better get my booty to raylorn
Rapocco [33-P]: is there an info file?
ignore [13-V]: k but i need a min xplainin vamps to a friend
Shadowhawke [Lady]: the instructions are there, it's fun!
Saidin [Marq-V]: bah boot
[->GUILD<-]: Halix rises from the crypt.
Halix [13-V]: lo all
 [ 7:30pm ]
ignore [13-V]: lol
Macros [30-P]: Hi Halix
ignore [13-V]: ne1 else want to play???????????????????
ignore [13-V]: morion go to courtyard(1st)
ignore [13-V]: there r instructions u can read
Morion [21-W]: ah :P

I've finished all the programming for Lyntin 3.2. I plan to release it next weekend. Between then and now if you want to grab the latest in CVS and test it out and report bugs, that'd help a great deal!

Things that Lyntin 3.2 will have:

• new scheduler system with the ability to schedule commands to kick off at a given time

• redid the #import stuff so it's now #load and #unload

• refactoring of the thread manager, the datagrep buffer, the ticker (now uses the brand new scheduler), and session shutdown

• fixed the EOR issue, #textin, #config

• added the #grep command and removed #datagrep and #datagreplines

• implemented the #bell command and added bell functionality to the textui

There's some neat stuff in here and some minor optimizations and fixes to documentation as well. It'll be a good release.

(Mark made me do it.)

It was the nicest bug report I have ever gotten. I felt obliged to release a fixed version since I've known about the bug for a month and wasn't ready to release 3.2 yet.

The only difference between Lyntin 3.1 and 3.1.1 is the fixed #config command when you don't have any readfiles or moduledirs set at the command line. Well, that and I adjusted the information in #version as well so we don't go calling two different releases of Lyntin by the same version number.

I'm in some kind of Lyntin development kick again. I implemented all the changes I talked about in yesterday's email:

• removed #import and added #load and #unload

• fixed addCommand so that it removes a command first (and its help file)

• changed the order of how modules get imported

Then on top of that, I wrote a testing module and started building tests for various functionality. It's not a great module, but it definitely gives me the ability to programmatically regression test large portions of Lyntin's functionality. The issue now is that I have a lot of tests to write, run, and then verify. It's somewhat time consuming. I don't plan on releasing 3.2 until I get a significant number of tests done and verified.

Additionally, I worked out how I want to handle the config stuff. I still have to write it out and fill in the details. I want to release 3.2 and get some other things cleaned up before I start on the config stuff.

So while the lyntin-devl list is deathly quiet, there's definitely stuff happening.

Last week I took a break from Lyntin development and I'm probably not going to do much this coming week either. Having said that, I made some minor changes last week including:

• moved the databuffer to the session class, ditched datagrep and datagreplines commands, and added a grep command (with context flag)

• removed the threadmanager

• gave some good thought to the config system

Then Josh implemented his default argument code for the argparser which is extremely cool though I'm not entirely sure we should be storing those kinds of things in the variable manager.

Read more about it here.

I've been using PyBlosxom for 3 months now and it just keeps getting better. On top of that, the development and user communities have grown significantly in the last month--definitely a testament to the project and its maintainer.

I spent a few hours working through a second tutorial for Lyntin module development. The first one covers the basics of developing modules in Lyntin and also walks through the basics of creating Lyntin commands. This one walks through the basics of hook usage.

I don't have any ideas for writing a third tutorial, so I'll wait until I'm inspired.

Josh discovered a page on the Python wiki that talks about Large Python Projects. Turns out that Lyntin is one of three listed. There are probably a lot of other large Python projects out there so that doesn't really mean quite what we think it means. Anyhow, they list us as having 11,856 lines of code back in July of 2002.

Josh and I then used their pycount.py script to figure out how many lines we have now and discovered we have 14,024 total lines (listing here) of which 6,157 lines are actual code, 4,649 are doc-strings and 1,171 are comments. That means that 41.5% of our code-base is documentation. That's pretty cool. How many projects can say that about themselves?

I went to the Gentoo introduction thing at MIT last night. I mostly went because my friend Brian is toying with Gentoo now and I thought it would help him along to get something more than the documentation and it would give me a good idea of how much Gentoo I know. Turns out I know a fair bit. I learned one or two minor things, but generally already knew the material.

One thing of note was that Rajiv said that if you trusted the developers' decisions in regards to building the stage 3 package, you might as well start there and skip the first two stages of installation. I disagree. I don't think most people appreciate the sheer magnitude of effort that has gone into GNU, the Linux kernel, the drivers, Mozilla, Python, X, OpenOffice or other components.

Ooops... Got sidetracked. Anyhow, the introduction was interesting.