I'm not going to be posting week-by-week status updates here. (For that, read my "progress" tweets on @zarfeblong.) But you get one special one tonight. The new year has reached its Mondayness, so you're probably wondering if I am officially In Gear.
Answer: yes. I spent the end of December more on slacking than designing. That phase is over. Here's what the beginning of January has looked like:
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I made some improvements to the profiling code of my Glulxe interpreter. (Graham Nelson wants to work on optimizing his Inform 7 compiler, and he asked me for some features to aid measurement.)
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I fired up XCode and started a new iOS project. This is an audio toy, not an IF interpreter. I need to remind myself how ObjC works before I start anything serious. (After two evenings of work, it displays a button and beeps continuously. No, this is not Boodler... yet.)
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I filed to create Zarfhome Software Consulting, LLC. This is exciting! The last time I tried to start a business was 1997, and I never got beyond a name and logo. Now I have a Federal Employee Identification Number!
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I tried to set up a business bank account, but failed because I didn't have the LLC form printed out. I'll go back there tomorrow. In the meantime, I bought a printer to print the form, so that's some progress.
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I spent a couple of hours futzing around with a programmable LED badge (available in the hardware-shovelware aisle of your local MicroCenter!) (Where I went to get the printer.) I got this Linux driver compiled on my Mac -- jury-rigged to a trial, but it worked. Once. Now the USB library won't recognize the device. Oh well. No, this has nothing to do with Hadean Lands, but I am revelling in my freedom or some such.
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I withdrew $28699 from Amazon Payments. (To my personal bank account, yeah, whatever, this is what accountants are for.) $28699 is what $31337 looks like after Kickstarter and Amazon take their cuts.
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I wrote down more design notes for Hadean Lands. This is the phase I am in, and will be for a while -- alternately write down ideas and stare at them. I will do this every day. Eventually the ideas will start fitting together. It's not fast but it's the way it has to work. (I'll know it's done when I start wailing "Oh, woe, all the coolness has leaked out of this project and my design is completely lame." Then I can start coding!) (Yes, this really is the way it always goes.)
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A little bit of slacking anyway. Of course.
Expect more of the same in the weeks to come.
Comments imported from Gameshelf
Ron Newcomb (Jan 5, 2011 at 12:40 PM):
"I made some improvements to the profiling code of my Glulxe interpreter."
(That wouldn't include printing a call stack trace on runtime error by chance, would it?)
My real reason for posting: I'm hoping your tweet feed (or whatever those things are called) is on the Planet I-F. I am tweet-challenged.
In any event, congratulations on Living The Dream(tm)!
Andrew Plotkin (Jan 6, 2011 at 12:55 AM):
No, not a stack trace. It's not exciting unless you have a test harness set up to profile the performance of hundreds of Z-code and Glulx code examples.
My twitter feed is not on Planet IF. I don't think that would work out, because I don't use hashtags much, and the whole feed is not particularly IF-oriented. But you could follow the RSS through some other mechanism than Planet IF, of course.
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