On Bukkit

Posted on 2011-08-25 by lithium3141

For a while now, there’s been something bothering me about the Bukkit development community. It’s been difficult to place a finger on the exact problem, and a lot of the smaller bits can be dismissed with the old “beta software” argument, but I worry that some of these minor issues are indicative of a larger problem.

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Statistical interlude

Posted on 2011-06-16 by lithium3141

I’ve always been one of those people interested in statistics about everyday things. So whenever a new program comes along that promises to count some mundane aspect of my computing environment, I generally go for it.

The following is a summary of the various aggregate statistics these programs have been gathering. Some of the numbers are a bit scary.

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Hello, Liza

Posted on 2011-05-03 by lithium3141

I picked up Minecraft last December with a couple friends, and since then I’ve progressed steadily from basic player to server admin to Bukkit user. Now, after seeing the infamous FernFerret write a couple plugins, I’ve decided it would be a fun project to write a unit-testing framework for server-side Minecraft plugins under Bukkit.

Enter Liza.

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Siftability

Posted on 2011-04-14 by lithium3141

This story properly begins two years ago, when a professor showed me the TED Talk for something new called “Siftables.” They were these magical little cubes, built by a MIT grad student, that could talk to each other and serve as an app and game development platform.

This past January, Siftables (rebranded Sifteo Cubes) became available in an “Early Access” program. It was quantity-limited, so I made the somewhat rash decision to buy a pack for $100 that included three cubes, a dock, the USB dongle, and some apps (and the obligatory free T-shirt).

The Cubes got here Monday, and that $100 was one of the best expenses of this decade. Continue reading →

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Because IAIT won’t

Posted on 2011-02-07 by lithium3141

CS students at Rose are perpetually haunted by the specter of the bandwidth policy. Although it was revised this year, the terms are still pretty onerous for people who tend to consume a lot of the Internet:

  • After the first 3GB downloaded (or uploaded) in a 36-hour window, total speed gets cut to 1024kbps
  • After another 500MB in the same window, total speed drops to 160kbps

There are a number of discounts in place (traffic between 2am and 6am, for example, only “costs” 40% of actual usage), but it’s entirely possible to go over the limits and not realize it until you can’t load YouTube videos any more.

As a result, I started developing a RoseBandwidth iOS application a while ago. It scrapes the web page showing bandwidth usage for students and formats the data nicely, even keeping a history of past bandwidth use.

The problem is that the Rose bandwidth server isn’t available off-campus, and so for testing purposes (and the Apple review process) I needed another bandwidth service to scrape with the same format as the IAIT page.

So after a few quick lines of PHP and a grab of the existing bandwidth-check HTML template, I came up with the randomized bandwidth usage page. It’s accessible anywhere in the world – even over the cell network, for mobile devices – and it picks a weighted random bandwidth usage number for each of the four “big” measures.

If anyone out there winds up developing a client that checks Rose bandwidth and uses this page for testing, shoot me an email (root@nullpneumaticsystem.com) – I’d love to hear about it.

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