Nerdstation

MUD Client for Maemo

18-10-2009 tags: discworld maemo mud pygtk python

I'm tinkering a bit this weekend with hacking a (Discworld) MUD client for the Nokia N900 running Maemo 5 Linux. I've never before worked with PyGTK, but I am pleasantly surprised with this library. I have to say that compares really well against TkInter and WxPython with which I have tinkered before. (the MUD client I'm normally using on my macbook uses TkInter for instance)

And yes, it's evolved from modifying a helloword.py example for PyGTK. :) It's under 200 lines of code at the moment, but that's not a surprise since it hardly has any features. It does have an nifty menu which gets displayed when you click on the title bar (indicated by the little blue triangle next to the title). This menu can be used to open a connection to a MUD and to change the used font and fontsize.

Another nifty feature has to do with the input. Normally the N900's slide out keyboard just types it's commands into the entry field at the bottom and when you hit enter, this gets send to the server. However, if you press ctrl the input from the keyboard switches to a different mode. In this mode every key (except ctrl of course) can be mapped with a shortcut alias which gets send to the MUD when that key is pressed. So on the right side of the keyboard I have a block of 12 keys allocated to commands for walking around and looking around on the MUD. It takes some getting used to, but I didn't think of a more practical way for that type of input. (and NO, I'm not going to use the accelerometer for that :) )

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Some new features for my ...

27-09-2009 tags: blog discworld django twitter

I finally managed to release some new stuff on my website. Honestly, finishing things is really hard it seems. Even though it's been in the pipeline for quite some time, quite a bit of the code feels rushed and ugly, but I'm glad it's finally here.

There's a timeline with tweets, bookmarks and blog entries. I'm not a very avid tweeter unless I'm at an event or something similar, but the concept of making a micropost from just about everywhere is nice. So I used Python Twitter to conjure up a bit of an ugly twitter django app. Very much something too ugly to ever see the public light of day.

My bookmarks are ever increasing. Every time I browse along something shiny, I bookmark it. So I thought it would be interesting to share some of that for all the webspiders visiting my site. I've got about twelvehundred bookmarks in my Firefox. I won't bother you with all of them, but I'll look into the dusty archives if there are some interesting links I could put on here too.

I've also thrown some tagging juice on top of it all using the Django tagging app. I feel that this app does have some rough edges, but not enough for me to try and reinvent the wheel again.

Next up for this site is some refactoring of the Discworld Mud bits. Nearly all of the content there isn't public, and the public bit seems to run into some performance issues. I really shouldn't need a database table with nearly fourty million rows, but recording information about every player on the mud every five minutes does seem to add up. A fairly big table in combination with using the smallest available VPS with XLS hosting is really bogging down stuff.

After I whipped the discworld "top 10 online players last week" in shape a bit I'll intend to do a more complete refactor. Let's see how long that will take... :)

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