I'm still alive! Just so very busy lately.

Minecon was a blast, I met lots of interesting people (some of which wanted my photo or signature, for some reason. I think they're PIs in disguise.) and had lots of fun! We held a small 1-hour long panel for people to come learn a little more about us, and you can check out the recorded videos of that over here.

We're all working hard trying to get an RB out for Minecraft 1.0.0 ASAP, and it should hopefully be very soon now! I've been losing so much sleep over it trying to get everything fixed and perfect, but it'll all be worth it in the end.

In other news, it happens to be the same month as Christmas! And by jolly tradition at this time of year, today I found out that I have exactly -£21.58 in my bank account. Oops. I'll probably have to borrow some money to pay for my rent again, which really isn't so fun - especially at this time of year :(

That's all for this post, back to working on bukkit!

Somehow I'm now engaged to Ola. That is all.

(Yay!)

So RedditGifts are trying to break the Guinness world record for the largest online Secret Santa. I figured this year I should join in! It should be lots of fun, and I encourage other people to come join in for random love and gifts. You might get me, in which case please be nice! Or I might get you, and I promise it'll be something cool.

Come join in!

So I got back from my trip to Blizzcon last week. It was lots of fun, I met most of the curse peeps, and the rest of the bukkit team were there too so we all met for the first time in person!

The flights were rather bad, I managed to get my name on some kind of blacklist somehow which got me a long random security check before I even checked in for my first flight! They asked me a bunch of random questions, such as if I had any letters from the bank as proof of address on me (why would I bring that to a holiday :(), and took my luggage to a special screening area with half a dozen employees watching the baggage screening monitor closely like it's about to explode. Personally, I'm blaming my new beard.

After some long meetings with Curse, we took a trip out to Disney Land for teambuilding. I managed to break my phone pretty early on, not quite sure how yet but I think I must have crushed it. It was ok at first, just a cracked screen but worked, however it's pretty much dead now and I think I'll wait for the Nexus Galaxy and buy that when it's out.

I managed to get sick pretty early on, and I lost my voice for blizzcon so I didn't get to spend much time there - I decided to just sleep it in. I did meet Gabe Newell though! Invited him to the Curse afterparty, he said sure but didn't come :( Ola met with Richard A. Knaak + Christie Golden and she was really excited about that!

The Curse party was excellent, lots of people there - famous and cool - and it was pretty fun. Unfortunately, loud ...

However, there's absolutely no documentation on how it works. Considering it came out just earlier this day I'm not really surprised, but I thought I'd go fix that. Here's a tech document for you guys on how the status query works. To clarify: This means lots of tech data that probably means little to anyone else. Helpful for those of you who run websites for this kinda stuff, not helpful to Mrs. Sue who's looking for a new recipe for crafting her own bread.

The status system is incredibly simple, with only 2 possible packet types that you can send to it. It runs on UDP and thus supports multicast requests (initially), but individually replies to each one. In addition, it uses a challenge token which is explicitly designed to prevent multicast status updates, so you can request a challenge with no issues but when it comes to actually asking for the server status, you're outta luck. Keep in mind, all my diggings into this is from datamining, I am not an absolute authority over the meaning of any of these values. In addition, the protocol is very likely to change in the future. In the case that it does change, I'll update this post (and make a new one saying the changes).

It's also designed to carry a custom 4 bytes (a single int or 4 chars, whatever floats your castle) between requests so you can easily pair-up any data you receive with a request that you initially sent.

Every packet you send must be prefixed with two magic bytes (0xFE, 0xFD), followed by a packet-type (again, a byte). There are two current packet types: 0x00 and 0x09. 0x00 is responsible for actually giving you the status of the server but ...

Since 1.8 came out, I received an amazing amount of donations (to me personally) and I was really surprised and touched. I didn't have time to personally reply to each one, but I'm going to do so now and also on my blog!

Before now, the most I've ever had in donations could have bought me a single pizza at Dominos. I'm certainly grateful for them, as it's the thought not the money, but I never really did much that deserved people donating towards me - lo is the life of working behind the scenes :D

But these, my word, I couldn't believe it. I really appreciate every single one, no matter how big or small they were, and everyone else who emailed me or tweeted me or left a comment over here to say "thanks!" - it was really touching. Thank you all <3

With recently moving house, my girlfriend moving country with no job*, and two big company trips coming up - it's pretty tough dealing with all the bills and stuff we have to get sorted out. You have no idea how much all your donations helped us both, and we're really grateful for each and every one. The majority of the money either was or will be spent on bills and typical nasty stuff we need to get out of the way, the rest went straight to delicious pizza!

Thanks again for all your wonderful words and assistance! If you ever need my help with something techy or programming, just drop me an email! :)

(*She has a job now! Yay! Don't forget to check out her blog at missmarzenia.com <3)

Yay, it's almost that time of year again! Where I spend over a full day travelling to meet some friends at blizzcon and waste all my money :D

I'm getting my flights, hotel and blizzcon tickets paid for by Curse, so this year that's a huge load off my mind. I got my flight info through yesterday... doesn't look so good. 3 stops both ways, and each one is in US :( I don't like being manhandled by US customs!

Unfortunately only a couple of my friends from MMO-Champion will be there this year, but I should see a bunch of other people whom I know and it should be a lot of fun. Any of you guys going too? :D

I won't be working on Bukkit while I'm out... unless mojang release while we're out and then I'll have to. But let's hope it doesn't come to that. I go on holidays to avoid work, not to find new scenery to work in :(

Speaking of, I have a nasty feeling that Notch wants to release Minecraft live at Minecon in november. The entire Bukkit team will be there, so it may look like we're all going to have to work together in person to get that some. Should be... interesting!

1.9 should hit us fairly soon, and we've been doing everything we can to prep for it. It shouldn't be as large of an update as 1.8 was, but it's still fairly big in terms of code changed. I managed to get a build of Bukkit working on 1.9 pre-1 but I decided instead to work on optimizing our deobfuscation stuff, which means I have to redo 1.9 pre-1 but it ...

So I woke up Thursday morning to a strange surprise. I had a few tweets saying "good luck with 1.8" and suddenly many more "when is 1.8 gonna be updated lol" than I usually had. What a curious thing!

Unfortunately, sleepy me didn't realise what this meant at this point in time, and was unaware that he was better off just staying in bed all day, so he decided to go investigate. Some time later, it hit me. Like a wall full of irc highlights. Mojang released 1.8 much earlier than we thought they would. Uhoh!

It appeared that I was a couple of hours late, so I thought, maybe it's ok and we've already started to work on it. But checking our repos and irc channels... it seems I was the only one who was available to handle it. It was just a bad time for all of us. The best part about our team is also the worst part; we're each in a separate timezone so there's always one of us awake for the major hours, but times like this it's just not possible for anyone else.

What's a bone supposed to do, but update the server by himself? First things first, though, is to tell everyone DON'T PANIC and that I'm working on it. Done! That wasn't so hard. Things might be easier than I expected!

So, to the actual updating. We have a top-secret-ultra-sensitive-really-hackish 3 step process of handling updates. Four, if you count the pizza time afterwards. The first two steps are essentially deobfuscation, and the third is almost rewriting the entirety of Craftbukkits net.minecraft.server section. That's a whole lotta code. We have some very fancy tools written by ...

So it's common knowledge now that Mojang have started to test updates with small groups of people before releasing them. We, Bukkit, are one such group and we're usually first in line. People don't seem to like this idea though, thinking that testing builds before releasing them is a complete waste of time and that testing is their job as a player during Beta.

This is quite strange. Every update before now that contained any bug of any type, people screamed loud and clear: "WHY DON'T MOJANG TEST THESE THINGS BEFORE RELEASING?!". Huh.

See, there's a huge difference between us testing cutting-edge builds and the general community testing the gameplay. We make sure you can actually run the game, that it doesn't crash on launch, and that things work. The communiy tests the gameplay and everything else.

To give you some small examples of things we've encountered so far:

• Entities of any type can become invisible or even half invisible.
• The game will crash if you die.
• Sometimes, everyone else + the server will crash if you die.
• The game will crash if you join a server.
• Destroying one particular block will corrupt your world and you have to start anew.
• Furnaces are evil.

Here's a few examples of things that were left inside release builds and the community absolutely hated:

• Some crashes of various types, usually in rare situations
• Pistons can sometimes dupe or get rid of blocks
• HP is reset upon travelling between worlds
• Certain combinations of redstone don't produce the "expected" output
• Some mobs become clientside and unkillable
• Pistons could corrupt a map

Some used the argument, "ok we test those and then we get .1 .2 .3 .4 etc". Really? Why not just the initial release and no ...

I has a pig! :D

Ok, there's a story to this I promise. It's not just because I love fluffy toys. That only had a small part in it!

Back when we were house hunting, you may remember that we found a house that came with its very own pig. A toy pig, mind, but a pig none the less. We didn't get the house, and this was a great loss - who can go back to regular houses after something like that? We need a pig with our house now!

So the good chap Grum, another one of the bukkit team, realised this and decided to send us our very own piggy. He also bought one for himself too, because piggies. It came from an Amazon seller somewhere in England; I live in England and Grum lives in Netherlands.

This was about 3 weeks ago. His came almost instantly, from England to Netherlands. Mine never came at all. After many yellings at the sellers, he got a refund a few days ago and bought one off ebay instead - and here it is!

Yay piggy! Thanks Grum :D

Yay, minecraft is updating! To 1.8! And then again soon after with more features! :D

I both love and hate these periods where updates are coming. I love them because I actually have stuff to do, it's always interesting reading all the new changes in the code, and it's actually quite fun (in a sadistic manner, I guess) racing to be the first mod to release.

I hate it, because I always see complaints like "omg bukkit will take forever to update, I'll have to make a backup then switch to vanilla and wait for bukkit then restore the backup and then update bukkit and then update bukkit plugins it's so much work!"

Our update times lately are within the hour, sometimes minutes for experimental releases. Updating to bukkit will take you all of 1 minute, and updating your plugins is not needed (except for the VERY few that stupidly use native api which guarantee them to break very often. But that's true of other mods too). This puts the consumer amount of work to about 5 minutes, and seeing people complain about that when I'm about to spend an entire week crawling through obfuscated code line by line to actually make it possible... it does make me sad :(

But we'll still keep at it! And hopefully, we'll make this update as seamless as possible and as fast as you can imagine :)

So, we at Bukkit made a huge announcement a few days ago: We're now with Curse, and through them we've managed to launch the ultimate Minecraft modding site. It's quite an exciting time for us, and we're hoping to expand onto this in the future with some much bigger plans.

Purely incidental, this happens to also mean that I now have a job! I'm now contracting my time out through my own company, which sounds more fun than it is. I have no idea how to run a company :( I need to find an accountant. Tax scares me, and I can't pay myself yet because of it. :(

I've paid this months bills (rent/etc) so I'm safe again, so a huge thanks to everyone who donated and put up with the adverts. I'm not out of the woods yet until I manage to figure out how to pay myself through my company, though :(

In completely unrelated news, I'm doodling basic ideas for a game in my free time. I need to learn opengl + 3d math and make a start on this, I think it could have potential. The math is going over my head though, so far :( 3D math vs taxes; eep!

Okay, Ola is here and we're having lots of fun, but it's time to get back to work.

I'll be making some more Bukkit tutorials starting tonight, finishing up on the carpet plugin and maybe going into something a little more adventurous (if you have any suggestions, leave a comment! I'll be glad to do anything that's helpful!)

We've managed to get enough money to pay our bills and rent and stuff, thank you all for your support! I got £80 from donations and (some day, when google let's go) £50 from ad money. Much more than I expected! Huge thanks to the three people who donated (v1sper, jrtc27 and FlayaN), iChingPow for his kind words and everyone else for putting up with the adverts! :D

I'm currently planning out some big changes for Bukkit stuff soon, including researching a possible new security system (let's be honest; allowing any plugin to do whatever it likes without you knowing... it's not good), Material enum aliases (with a twist; you'll see!) and hopefully a better Configuration class.

It's a good time to wear a bukkit on your head!

In 5 hours, I will set out to the airport to pick up Ola. That is all.

(Yay!)

In other news, £28~ in Adsense stuff since yesterday, and a very generous £20 donation from a reader. Huge thanks! Shame I can't get the adsense money until a month or so, could really use some kinda expedite method in it. But I'm not complaining, huge thanks to you all for putting up with the adverts and double thanks to FlayaN for his donation!

To the airport! :D

Those of you who are brave enough to browse the internet without blocking adverts (be honest, none of you :D) will have noticed there's now an advert on the right-side menu on my blog. Last resort, but I kinda need the cash.

Turns out, due to legal trouble and taxes and stuff, I won't have any sort of income until it's too late. I have rent in a week and already being slapped with many bills for water/etc, and I only have enough to pay the rent for that month and nothing else. Long story short, I don't have enough money to live. I will soon, hopefully, but not now. I don't even want to think about shopping :D

Please feel free to help a bone out and hit me with a donation (or, equally as valuable to me, a hug). It'd really help me, but you don't have to!

In better news, my beautiful Ola is moving in with me on Monday. I'll be leaving to pick her up at 4am on monday, so that's going to be fun. But yay, we'll be living together!

So, I moved in yesterday. Spent the whole day packing and unpacking and putting things back together and stuff. Exhausting! But it's all done and I said my goodbyes to my parents and now here I am all alone, in my very first home.

It's scary, but I can get used to this. There's all sorts of weird unfamiliar creeks which I'll have to get used to, and for some reason the whole house sometimes violently shakes and screams whenever the bathroom hot water tap is used. I'm assuming it's air and it'll pass, but I'll get it checked out if it isn't.

I ordered a pizza yesterday to celebrate, and the bloody delivery guy was wandering around looking lost on the other side of the street. I yelled him over and it turns out we're going to have a lot of trouble with nobody knowing where our house is. We're number 11, the house directly next to us is 15, and there's no number 13 (unlucky number etc) which confuses people who are hunting around. Plus, we have a sign for a completely different road outside our house. Not good!

The internet just activated, and it's 3.9 Mbps down. Seems a lot faster than my old one.

So I got the keys to the new place. It's beautiful. I've decided to go with BT for broadband (note: we can only get ADSL, 5~ Mb/s downstream if we're lucky, and it's BT or virgin) and it'll be going into effect on Monday the 8th of August. So there's my move-in date. 8th!

I've taken some pics and put them at my google+ page, if you want to head over yonder.

Exciting times :) Wish me luck!

Second episode is up, now with 500% extra sound.

Clicky! (Source here)

In this episode, we'll give a command to toggle the red carpet + a permission for who can use it. Hopefully it should be simple to follow!

In other news, today is the day I receive dozens of spam emails from long forgotten websites wishing me a happy birthday. Suddenly I just realized I am now 20 and can no longer claim to be a teenager and blame things on that. Oh well, here's to another year!

I decided to give the plugin video tutorials a try, and now I regret it after seeing the terrible quality it produced. But I've already published the first ep, so I'll make a few more and see if I get any better.

The first episode of my tutorials is up, you can find it over here. For the generator used, you can find that over there and for the end result of the tutorial (the sourcecode+jar) you can head on over yonder.

The quality sucks, I suck and the tutorial sucks. But I'll try better next time, I promise!

Bukkit has recently hit its milestole 1,000th build on the 17th. The commit that brought it up to this lovely number was my new Permission system! This marks a pretty big week for Bukkit.

I've decided to look into making a small video tutorial series on how to make simple Bukkit plugins that actually do stuff, and see if I can clear up some mysteries surrounding some methods whilst I'm at it. I might not actually pull this off and will give up next week, but I'll certainly give it my best shot.

To aid in making plugins, I've created a small tool which I'm dubbing The Pluginator. Simply enter a few details about your soon-to-be plugin, and it'll create the basic structure for your plugin (it compiles and everything!). No more worrying about the messy stuff, and you can now jump straight into the code within seconds.

I'll be expanding on my toolset soon by adding something to edit Permissions and Commands, but I'll come back to them later. Planning first!

Good news, two people who read my blog! I got the house :D I'll be signing for the place on the 29th and moving in shortly after, looking forward to it but it's quite scary! My girlfriend will be moving over in the middle of August so I'll have some time alone to get used to. But yay!

In other news, at my current place our internet is absolutely terrible lately. We're with a company called Pipex, who once got bought out by Tiscali, who then got bought out by Carphone Warehouse and got part of Talk-Talk. I think. It's complicated. Anyways, the last 3 weeks our internet connection has decided to randomly disconnect, and can take anywhere from 5 to 40 minutes to reconnect. It's very frustrating.

We did a line test with BT (who own the line), everything checks out. I tested it myself using a phone and it works fine, and I also tried to connect using our other phone line and same issues. So it's absolutely not the phone line.

We called up the ISP a few days ago, and explained the situation. They said "our router isn't supported by them because Belkin (the brand) use their own 'signal channel' to connect to the internet at the exchange which is why it sometimes doesn't work". Yeah, crap technobabble. They didn't acknowledge any faults with the service or such, and just tried to sell us a Talk-Talk branded router instead. We hung up.

Pretending it wasn't the ISP, I decided to buy a new router and see if that works. It's fairly hot here, the router is fairly old and we use it a lot. It could be overheating, right? Well, new router came, set ...

I made an offer on the last property I posted about, now it's just waiting. I have a good feeling though, but we will see!

The agents phoned me up yesterday morning and asked if I was going to make an offer, apparently the landlord was interested and wanted to know. They hadn't done this for any other property I've viewed, so I'm not sure what it means. Either way, I went later that day and everything is good and sent!

We didn't get the last place with the stairs and the pig. Sucks, but someone beat us to it :(

So I arranged for 2 more property viewings. One of them was so new on the market I had to have a small argument with the agents that they did actually have it. "It's on your website" "No it isn't. We don't have it". But they did, and I just got back from viewing the place now.

I had the same agent as the viewing as I did back on the 15th. The guy who wasn't really sure of much. He had no idea of anything of this house and had to call the people up to find out how many bedrooms it has and how much it was etc. To be fair, it was very recent on the market, I guess.

It's a lovely place in a lovely street with lovely neighbours and everything was just lovely. It's furnished, and the furniture is lovely.

The living room is lovely. It's not huge but it's not small either, it's just right. No pig, unfortunately :( It has a lovely view to the garden out front, a big sofa, chairs and a spot for a TV. But we won't be using a TV so that's moot for us.

Upstairs we have just one double bedroom, with a nice big bed and huge walk-in wardrobes. You could fit about half a dozen people in these things. The windows overlook the front garden of the house which is a nice view again, and there's a great big chest of drawers for putting stuff in. Overall awesome for the bedroom.

The bathroom has the usual stuff, shower, bath and looks quite nice. Not ...

Small post, but I just wanted to have this down. After much talkings with my girlfriend, we've decided we're going to make an offer on the last place! Huzzah! Now to figure out how we actually do that. Hmmm.

So, I had another viewing today. Two bedroom house, nice area, even has a mini garden. Yay!

I was 5 minutes late thanks to traffic, but thankfully the agent was nice and didn't care. The house is a rather old building with black and white beams inside, but it's rather lovely.

The living room is fairly spacious and comes complete with a toy pig. The agent said it comes with the house, sounds like a tradition! It directly connects to the kitchen and stairs leading to the 2nd floor (it has a 2nd floor!) and a little hallway on the other side of the house to the downstairs bathroom and the back alleyway.

The kitchen is pretty meh, it's a sink and two cupboards. It has fixtures and a space for a gas cooker, but obviously we'll have to buy it ourselves. It's average sized, I'd say, considering it joins into the living room and such. There's a few more cupboards in between the living room and the kitchen so that makes up for only 2 in the kitchen itself.

The bathroom is big and the utilities inside it are small. We have a small toilet, a small sink and a bath. The bath has a tap-shower attachment, but that's fairly meh.

The alleyway outside is nothing to mention really, but there's a little garden which comes with the house and it's somewhere along the alleyway - we couldn't see it as the agent wasn't told by the landlord which one would be ours.

Going upstairs, you have two big bedrooms with lots of room for nekkid parties and all the things we love. No built in wardrobes or spacing for clothes or anything fancy like that, just 4 ...

So I have a third set of teeth, and apparently this is pretty rare.

A few years ago a premolar from the 3rd set decided to show itself, but I already had a tooth where it wanted to grow. So it grew inside my mouth, towards my tongue. I thought "That's odd!", cut my tongue on it a few hundred times, and thought nothing of it for a few years.

Now, a few months ago, it started to feel ignored. It wanted attention, it didn't like the tooth I already had in its place so it decided to play rough. It's currently knocking my other tooth out of the way, and there's not really much I can do to stop it.

The tooth in question is actually a premolar, so it won't be that noticeable that I'll be missing a tooth there. But the embarrassing part about it is that I won't actually be missing a tooth, the 3rd one would still be there and it's just at the worst imaginable angle possible - the other side of my jaw. To give you an example, my tongue actually rests on it. It's that far in.

I'll have to arrange to see a dentist about it soon, hopefully it won't be too painful. But either way, this tooth is coming out soon and it's :(

So I had a viewing today with the apartment we were supposed to see last week. We talked about it and from what we already saw from outside and such, we decided we'll probably go for this one unless it's too noisy or there's any other big issues from the viewing today.

So I arrive there dead on time, and I get a call; "Sorry, the guy's going to be late, he's very busy today". Okay, fine, at least they told me this time. I waited around and he gets here 5 minutes later, which isn't bad at all. We talk, shake hands, the usual introductory crap and I notice he's looking around like he's lost. I ask him what's wrong, and he admits he has no idea where the apartment is. No problem, it's a confusing area, I'll show him!

We get inside, he closes the door with the keys still in it from outside. Hm. He pulls out a big factsheet for the apartment and takes a minute or two reading it over, and then just puts it down and walks up to the window.

"Well here you have, uh, a laundrettes. You use them to wash your clothes. Obviously. And there's a flippin' fish. Not sure if you're aware, it's a fish and chip shop. Maybe you're into that sort of thing." And he just lists everything he sees from outside. Useful maybe, but I already knew all this. I knew all this from just glancing outside. Maybe he's just getting it out of the way!

"Unfortunately this place hasn't got a driving space, so- oh, sorry, it has two parking spaces. Imagine that, the parking is bigger than the ...

People keep asking me why I haven't made a new blog post yet. Odd because there's only about 2 people subscribed to this blog anyways. But this isn't daily, it's just whenever I have interesting stuff to say!

I'm currently working on a django IRC stats+log system for #mmo-champion (and such channels I'm in). So far I've had a big success working on the log, I think it looks quite good so far. Example screenshot!

I've another apartment viewing tomorrow by myself (my girlfriend has gone back to Poland). It's the one that the agents cancelled because they didn't have a key. If it's good, I'll probably make an offer, it's the best one we've seen so far (even though we haven't actually seen it all) and we're running short on time.

In other news, today I just found out that £550~ of my already-low amount of cash was stolen from me sometime last year. I visited Sweden in April and had some cash converted, I didn't use it and hid it away somewhere fairly safe for a time that I might need it. I should have checked on it more often or put it back into the bank, because I found out that someone had found and stole it last year (I have no proof but I know whom it was. They also stole a key to the house, which is how they got in. We took it back months ago, but the damage is done.)

There's nothing I can do about the money now, it's long gone and there's no chance of me getting it back (even if I can prove who did it). Someone close to ...

So it's now tuesday, my girlfriend goes back to Poland tomorrow and we won't see each other again until I manage to find us a place.

The apartment viewing on Saturday was cancelled, the current owners of the apartment don't want a couple living there. Yay.

There was a final viewing today at 1, and we decided to go there a little early just in case we wouldn't make it in time (yay taxis!). We arrived at 12:55 and nobody was around, okay, we're early so it's kinda to be expected. But then we waited, and suddenly it was 1:25 and we decided to go yell at the agents.

"Oh, we don't actually have keys to that property, we cancelled the appointment a few days ago. We were supposed to leave you a message!".

So that's that. We've now seen a total of 4 apartments (well, 2 unique) and we've ran out of time. I'm going to try to find a place on my own now, but things might start to get pretty bad soon. :(

From outside, the place looks okay. It's spacious inside and looks fairly fancy. I checked it out with BT and they say I can expect ~17Mbps there. Yay! But, it comes with a down side: It's directly on the corner of an extremely busy road. Not so sure I could survive the noise. Maybe it's quiet inside though, there's no way for us to know without actually going in.

Here's hoping for a miracle home to drop out of the sky. Somewhere quiet.

Just got back from the fourth apartment for today. Taxi was 15 minutes late, and thus we were late, but it's all good the current occupant is very friendly and doesn't mind. Yay!

This one was literally 1 foot away from the entrance to the building. That's both very cool (yay, less walking!) and very not cool (noise!). Building looked like it only had about 6 apartments though, and the girl said it's always very quiet there, so I guess that's fine.

Apartment had one bedroom, which was a very tight fit for a double bed but looks quite nice. I'd probably hit my head waking up every morning though, I'm not too keen on overhead cupboards for beds.

The bathroom was tiny, everything inside it was tiny to make it look bigger. It apparently had a bath and a shower, but I think they wrote bath instead of sink. I didn't see a thing!

Living room and kitchen were kinda merged into one, but I don't know how I'd describe that. They were clearly separated and there was even a wall and everything, but it was just one room. Fun! Kitchen was recently redone and looked really nice, and the living room was cosy but fairly small. We'd probably have to squeeze to fit two computers in there.

Nice neighbourhood, fairly quiet and looks really good, but the apartment is right outside a primary school which could get noisy. Overall, I like it, but we'll hold out for something else.

So we've booked a bunch of viewings for apartments and a couple of houses, had 3 already today in the same block of apartments, and another different one later tonight.

The ones we saw today were converted from an old boys school, it's very roomy and quiet and just overall lovely. The first apartment there had a very high ceiling, which is always good for tall people like me, but right as you come through the door to the apartment there's a cupboard on the left which was strategically placed so that you're guaranteed to hit your head on it as you enter. Not cool. The kitchen was fairly nice but meh, and the bathroom was very pink, but otherwise we liked it.

The second one was recently renovated and had a very nice kitchen. The window sill in the living room was huge and I swear it can double as a sofa, and the bathroom was just lovely. It was a single bedroom, but large enough that you can squeeze a double bed in there. Living room was okay, enough for what we need but we're holding out for something bigger. Overall, this one was our favourite from the 3. Just wish it were a little bigger.

The third one was tiny, had a tiny kitchen (you could barely move!) and also features a pink bathroom. Definitely not big enough for us. Still looked nice though.

Fourth apartment tonight, another one tomorrow, another one on tuesday and we're waiting to hear back for a couple more viewings elsewhere. Busy busy!

So, I'm finally venturing out from inside this hidden high security vault, and find a new place to live. With my girlfriend. Who's moving from Poland. This is going to be an adventure!

This is my first real time looking for a place, and it's all a little confusing. Started to hunt for a nice place for both of us this week, which is going ok but we haven't seen anything really fancy yet. Since neither of us have any strong ties to where I currently live, we could look for a place anywhere but we're opting to stay near Shropshire to stay close to my family.

The only big factor in finding where we want to live, however, is internet speed! At my current place, I average about 2.7 Mb/s down (0.7 Mb/s up), and I'm maxed at 3 down. My girlfriends place is even slower, so we're really hoping to find somewhere that's at least half decent.

Not much else to say for now, back to watching movies and being lazy!

So Minecraft beta 1.6 came out today. Four times, in fact. What a fun day this has been!

After staying up all night to prepare for the patch (which was scheduled to come early morning) and make sure this update goes as smooth as possible, it hits about 10am my time and instantly the whole team are ready to go and working together over Skype to get this done as quickly as humanly possible. It took us 2 (!) hours later, in which time Mojang released 2 more (minor) updates, but we finally had a 1.6 compatible build ready to go. Everything went better than we could have imagined!

And then we went to test it. Oh joy. None of our test servers were strong enough to let us all join the same server. And trust me, these aren't cheap VPS' with 500mb of ram. What the hell could be making it go so slow?! We spent about an hour trying to figure out where the bottleneck is, with a few small theories but none remotely coming close to fully explaining the 100% CPU. We were all too tired and too worn out to find this, but we couldn't test without it. Tricky situation.

We decided to push what we had of the update live, and let the community try dev-test it for us. We usually don't do this so early, we like to at least know that the basics work before letting other people look at it, but we didn't have much of a choice.

And then minutes later, a wild patch appears! Patch uses CPU fix. It's not very effective! Enemy server feints.

Seems Mojang, too, couldn't find the problem so easily. They managed to release a 1.6.4 a ...

So, I've finally got around to making a website! And an actual website this time, and not "this site is broken"!

The blog aspect is based off Zinnia, a cool little open source blog project for Django. The rest of the site (which as of time of writing, is extremely little) are my own Django apps. This's my first real project in Django and I must say I'm liking it so far!

I decided a while ago that I needed a blog so I can write about the rather amazingly stupid adventure I recently had towards the end of my previous job. But I think I might just skip that depending on how bored I'll get, and just skip to the more boring technical posts. Who doesn't love technical blogs about something nobody really cares about! <3

My current plans for this site are to redevelop the old IRC stats I ran for #mmo-champion in django, and then find something interesting to blog about. Maybe squirrels. Squirrels are cool, right? My lovely girlfriend Marzenia wants a blog set up too, so I'll probably tackle that first.