Time Flies...

Even when you're not having fun, it seems. I haven't been doing anything out of the ordinary and, lo and behold, it's the first day of school for me. Time seems to have gotten away from me on this one -- I haven't been able to get done anything I planned to a couple of weeks ago. It'll probably take a little time to recover from the madness that is the schedule during the first couple of weeks of school, but I haven't given up. I've got a lesson that is almost complete and ready to publish and another started. Paladin is making good headway but I apparently won't get a release out before summer's end. Ah well. C'est la vie. Until next time, everyone.

News Stew

From the looks of this blog the last few weeks, you'd think that I'd dropped off the face of the earth, but you'd be wrong. I've just been too busy to post. I took a week off for vacation, but I've also been coding quite a bit. I planned on doing a lot more while on vacation -- coding is fun for me -- but I ran into some problems which shot most of the time I could've spent writing code. Anyway, I'm in the process of retooling the code responsible for using project templates in order to make them more flexible. I've also been working on a couple of lessons. One finishes out the Translation Kit, but it's taking a *lot* longer than most lessons would because I'm in the process of learning the basics of writing a Translator and a support framework for writing them. Writing a Translator isn't hard, but it is unfamiliar for me.

Paladin's next release is now on the horizon. The new work on the template section will make more complicated possible, including one which is *this* *close* to being usable: a Tracker Addon template which should make writing them dramatically easier. There are some new command-line utilities which I've written that should come in handy. luare (lu-AR-ay), does regular expression search-and-replace without the mess that is sed. luagrep searches for text in a file, but only one file -- it's mostly meant to be used in combination with find. A text-based build system, pbuild, should make into the release. I've wanted to use a text-based build system for Paladin development, but I wasn't satisfied by any of them out there: make is weird and aggravating, scons is slow, jam has zero documentation, and many are just overkill. pbuild leverages full-blown Lua in a way that you don't have to write much to do basic tasks, but more complicated stuff is possible.

New to Paladin is a Find command which searches all project files and it works quite nicely. It'll be possible to search using regular expressions, but it will be using Lua's regular expressions. Lua doesn't do regular expressions quite the same as Perl or *NIX, but it's pretty close -- most of the differences are just few obscure uses. The boost in speed and simplicity are worth the change.

I haven't stopped writing, just slowed down because the work isn't as easy or fast as I'd like and I'm also trying to get most of the Paladin work for the release done before I have to go back to school. Have a great one, everybody!