Waverous finally moves to GitHub

What with the imminent demise of Google Code (has it been around that long already?), it was finally time to move Waverous over to GitHub. Henceforth:

https://github.com/wainstead/waverous

Wandering around the Stunt ecosystem and GitHub

I've spent some time today compiling Stunt, trying out Improvise and looking at my fork of Stunt on GitHub. Been a long time!

I had little luck playing with the console one gets via Improvise (think: a terminal emulator in the browser), but it was cool nonetheless. The experience was much like loading the Minimal.db that comes with the original LambdaMOO server code: pretty much anything you type ends in a cryptic error.

Reading more documentation cleared things up a bit. I've half a notion to build out a personal website based off of Stunt and Improvise. My recent thinking is to plunge into the Indie Web movement a bit and run a personal site: first, as a WordPress site (just to get going) and then perhaps rolling my own CMS using Node.js or Django.

(The ideation phase is always the most fun, when all things are possible and sound really cool in your head).

But the possibly-meaningless thought of "making a personal web site that is programmable by any user" has the weird appeal of the pre-Cloud days of the Web, and even the weirdness of the pre-World Wide Web days of the Internet. (LambdaMOO was born roughly the same time as the web).

Well, much to think about. I'd like to see Stunt become widely available via various package management systems (Fedora, MacPorts, etc).

Oh, I should note here I've moved to Key West, Florida. This came about after, one day in May, I was looking at the classified ads in the online edition of The Citizen, Key West's local paper. There was a job listed in Help Wanted that was perfect for my wife: Director of Development for the Key West Art and Historical Society. I teasingly sent the ad to her, she applied for it just to show me up, and landed the job. So in short order we moved from Las Vegas to Key West.

This spells the end of my technology-scene-building days for a while. Vegas was a tabula rasa as far as tech scenes go, so I plunged myself into every tech Meetup there was and started one of my own (Las Vegas Developers Meetup, for any software developer regardless of technology). I also cofounded the first Vegas GiveCamp, a weekend hackathon for charity.

But since at least the middle of this year I've longed to get back into open source development. Probably longer. I think the free time is now there to finally finish work on Automake and roll some Linux distro packages. 

Stunt is now C++

Over at Stunt.io, Todd Sundsted has released the C++ version of Stunt, his fork of the LambdaMOO server.

Much of my Waverous LambdaMOO went into it, even if not directly: Todd had done so much work on the multiple-inheritance addition to the MOO scripting language that my branch was too far out of sync with the mainline to be merged... but Todd used my branch as a guide.

See the announcment on the MOO-talk mailing list!

Long hot summer

I have nothing new regarding the project. I've been super busy running LVDev, participating in the National Day of Civic Hacking (I won the category "Best Civic Hack"), and organizing the first Las Vegas GiveCamp.

Lately I've been longing to plunge into more open source work though!

Waverous patches soon to be integrated into Stunt

I saw a wonderful message from Todd Sundsted this weekend on the MOO-Talk list:

Next up, I'm going to start integrating Steve Wainstead's C++ patches into Stunt. This will give us better tools for abstracting away some of the complexity in the current codebase.

I haven't been doing anything with Waverous for months now and this is a shot in the arm. In part I took a deep dive into Minecraft and spent a lot of time on it -- a few hundred hours of playing time.

This was a direct result of reading Jane McGonigal's "Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World." I never knew all those years of playing Grand Theft Auto were making me happier and mentally healthier. I sold my PS3 a couple of years ago and decided I wouldn't sink any more time into gameplay. When my wife took a four day trip to New Orleans I decided to spend the alone-time in a new immersive experience. I loved every minute of it.

This is related peripherally to LambdaMOO development work in that some people still use MOOs to create and play games. The MOO I reside on does not do this, but one of the projects I want to pursue is use the package management system of Stunt to create some rooms and objects... I think prefabricated worlds (or even just portions of worlds) offer some good potential for wizards and world building. Imagine someone recreated the world of Harry Potter in a MOO: another person could contribute the Hogwarts Express, for example. The world builder might have two or three Hogwarts Express packages to choose from, offering different features. Todd's package management system will allow a level of sharing that was never possible before with LambdaMOO.

I highly recommend watching Jane McGonigal's TED talk "The Game That Can Give You Ten Extra Years of Life."

A C++ version of Stunt is born

Compiling:

-*- mode: compilation; default-directory: "~/Sites/projects/moowork/stunt-swain/" -*-
Compilation started at Thu Jul 12 19:38:35

make
[ config.h : config.status ]
./config.status
config.status: creating Makefile
config.status: creating config.h
config.status: config.h is unchanged
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o ast.o ast.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o base64.o base64.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o code_gen.o code_gen.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o collection.o collection.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o db_file.o db_file.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o db_io.o db_io.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o db_objects.o db_objects.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o db_properties.o db_properties.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o db_verbs.o db_verbs.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o decompile.o decompile.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o disassemble.o disassemble.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o eval_env.o eval_env.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o eval_vm.o eval_vm.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o exceptions.o exceptions.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o exec.o exec.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o execute.o execute.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o extension-fileio.o extension-fileio.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o extensions.o extensions.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o functions.o functions.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o hmac_sha2.o hmac_sha2.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o http_parser.o http_parser.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o json.o json.c
bison -y -d parser.y 
mv -f y.tab.c parser.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o parser.o parser.c
touch y.tab.h
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o keywords.o keywords.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o list.o list.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o log.o log.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o map.o map.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o match.o match.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o md5.o md5.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o name_lookup.o name_lookup.c
touch net_single.o
touch net_multi.o
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o network.o network.c
touch net_mp_selct.o
touch net_mp_poll.o
touch net_mp_fake.o
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o net_mplex.o net_mplex.c
touch net_bsd_tcp.o
touch net_bsd_lcl.o
touch net_sysv_tcp.o
touch net_sysv_lcl.o
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o net_proto.o net_proto.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o numbers.o numbers.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o objects.o objects.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o parse_cmd.o parse_cmd.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o pattern.o pattern.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o program.o program.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o property.o property.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o quota.o quota.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o regexpr.o regexpr.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o server.o server.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o sha1.o sha1.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o sha256.o sha256.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o storage.o storage.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o streams.o streams.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o str_intern.o str_intern.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o sym_table.o sym_table.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o tasks.o tasks.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o timers.o timers.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o unparse.o unparse.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o utils.o utils.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o verbs.o verbs.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o version.o version.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o yajl.o yajl.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o yajl_alloc.o yajl_alloc.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o yajl_buf.o yajl_buf.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o yajl_encode.o yajl_encode.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o yajl_gen.o yajl_gen.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o yajl_lex.o yajl_lex.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o yajl_parser.o yajl_parser.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H  -c -o yajl_version.o yajl_version.c
g++ -m32 -O -DHAVE_CONFIG_H ast.o base64.o code_gen.o collection.o db_file.o db_io.o
 db_objects.o db_properties.o db_verbs.o decompile.o disassemble.o eval_env.o
 eval_vm.o exceptions.o exec.o execute.o extension-fileio.o extensions.o functions.o 
hmac_sha2.o http_parser.o json.o keywords.o list.o log.o map.o match.o md5.o 
name_lookup.o network.o net_mplex.o net_proto.o numbers.o objects.o parse_cmd.o 
pattern.o program.o property.o quota.o regexpr.o server.o sha1.o sha256.o storage.o 
streams.o str_intern.o sym_table.o tasks.o timers.o unparse.o utils.o verbs.o 
version.o yajl.o yajl_alloc.o yajl_buf.o yajl_encode.o yajl_gen.o yajl_lex.o 
yajl_parser.o yajl_version.o parser.o -lexpat  -o moo
rm parser.c

Compilation finished at Thu Jul 12 19:38:51

Running:

bash-3.2$ ./moo Stunt.db Stunt.db.new
Jul 12 19:46:36: CMDLINE: Outbound network connections enabled.
Jul 12 19:46:36: STARTING: Version 1.8.3+?_ad_hoc_?? of the LambdaMOO server
Jul 12 19:46:36:           (Using BSD/TCP protocol)
Jul 12 19:46:36:           (Task timeouts measured in server CPU seconds.)
Jul 12 19:46:36:           (Process id 39697)
Jul 12 19:46:36: LOADING: Stunt.db
Jul 12 19:46:36: LOADING: Reading 11 objects ...
Jul 12 19:46:36: LOADING: Done reading 11 objects ...
Jul 12 19:46:36: VALIDATING the object hierarchies ...
Jul 12 19:46:36: VALIDATE: Phase 1: Check for invalid objects ...
Jul 12 19:46:36: VALIDATE: Phase 2: Check for cycles ...
Jul 12 19:46:36: VALIDATE: Phase 3: Check for inconsistencies ...
Jul 12 19:46:36: VALIDATING the object hierarchies ... finished.
Jul 12 19:46:36: LOADING: Reading 94 MOO verb programs ...
Jul 12 19:46:36: NAME_LOOKUP: Started new lookup process
Jul 12 19:46:36: LOADING: Done reading 94 verb programs ...
Jul 12 19:46:36: LOADING: Reading forked and suspended tasks ...
Jul 12 19:46:36: LOADING: Reading list of formerly active connections ...
Jul 12 19:46:36: LOADING: Stunt.db done, will dump new database on Stunt.db.new
Jul 12 19:46:36: INTERN: 770 allocations saved, 9815 bytes
Jul 12 19:46:36: INTERN: at end, 750 entries in a 10007 bucket hash table.
Jul 12 19:46:36: Loaded protect cache for 177 builtin functions
Jul 12 19:46:36: LISTEN: #0 now listening on port 7777
Jul 12 19:46:36: > WARNING: Log-in via passkey is enabled for the following players
 (specified in $passkey_players):
Jul 12 19:46:36: > WARNING:   "Wizard" (#5)
Jul 12 19:46:36: > WARNING:   "Programmer" (#6)
Jul 12 19:46:36: > WARNING: This is a severe security vulnerability.  In a secure 
environment you should:
Jul 12 19:46:36: > WARNING:   disable passkey login:
Jul 12 19:46:36: > WARNING:     ; $disable_passkey_login = 1
Jul 12 19:46:36: > WARNING:     ; $passkey_players = {}
Jul 12 19:46:36: > WARNING:   disable existing passkeys:
Jul 12 19:46:36: > WARNING:     ; #5.passkey = 0
Jul 12 19:46:36: > WARNING:     ; #6.passkey = 0
Jul 12 19:46:36: > WARNING:   and for good measure:
Jul 12 19:46:36: > WARNING:     ; set_player_flag(#5, 0)
Jul 12 19:46:36: > WARNING:     ; set_player_flag(#6, 0)
Jul 12 19:46:36: > PASSKEY for "Wizard" (#5): 14FC3656E763CB43C5E16F4CE9A9B77EE742629677A29048C44423C640A59442 (keep it secret)
Jul 12 19:46:36: > PASSKEY for "Programmer" (#6): 2B3BE77D36447234AE5AEBB920FC1E3F7B0FDAB8D4169A3FED23C57C0753C398 (keep it secret)
Jul 12 19:46:54: ACCEPT: #-2 on port 7777 from localhost, port 56831
Jul 12 19:47:11: CONNECTED: Wizard (#5) on port 7777 from localhost, port 56831

And connecting:

Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
Welcome to Stunt!  For information about Stunt, check out http://stunt.io/.  To 
connect to the server, type "connect ".
connect 14FC3656E763CB43C5E16F4CE9A9B77EE742629677A29048C44423C640A59442
*** Connected ***

In truth, there's one more file that needs modification: exec.c, which uses goto as it was meant to be used but g++ doesn't like it. But that's a small obstacle to overcome.

UPDATE! Todd sent me a patch for exec.c. I've applied, compiled, tested, committed and pushed it.

The finish line nears!: Merging Waverous's C++ changes into Stunt

Yesterday I had several blissful hours to hack away, applying patches to the "waverous" branch in my fork of Stunt.

I had to deal with a few more places in the Stunt code that differed from the Waverous code; namely, Stunt was forked from a later commit of LambdaMOO than Waverous was. (I started with the code base on Sourceforge, whereas Todd started with the code base on Github). There are several places that use a new macro, TRY_STREAM, which in turn uses the original TRY macro. I fixed the compiler error occurring after macro expansion (which didn't turn out to be all that hard, fortunately).

By midnight last night I had the project successfully compiling, which was quite exciting. But the linking phase was failing; I found I was missing a handful of source files in Makefile.in, like json.[hc], collection.[hc] and a few others.

I think the Makefile.in is now up to date and I just have to update the files for File I/O to make g++ happy. After that, there's about 100-150 patches to look at but the vast majority of them are specific to my goals with Waverous, like including the LambdaMOO and JHCore databases, removing scripts used during porting, adding documentation, helper tools like Neil Fraser's Moo Database Browser, etc.

I think there are a handful of patches to apply still that deal mostly with updates to the Autotools but I consider those to come after the milestone of a running "Stunt++" server. Todd announced my work on the MOO Talk mailing list this morning.