Today while reading the latest tweets of my VPS provider, I noticed that they had some problems with one of their DNS servers. This led me on a strange train of thought about why the login prompt for my server would take so long to show up when I was using SSH. Could it have been their slow DNS server? Nah, that''d be silly! After a bit more research though, I found a blog post detailing two reasons for SSH slowdown. Turns out the culprit really was the nameserver, so I popped open /etc/resolv.conf and added in the 3 nameservers suggested by Grokthis and now it takes a mere second to show the prompt!

Just goes to show that the impossible is merely improbably.... is likely the case.

While I was testing out torpedoes (new weapon with a heavy particle effects bent!) I noticed several things had become broken wrt basic use of the battleviewer. :( So today I've been debugging and cleaning those right up.

Also, here's my latest youtube video:

Today has been uneventful. I spent most of the day trying to get a good damage text system set up (you know, the little floating text ala WoW.) Right now there seem to be two good solutions to this:

• Using particle effects
• Using an ObjectTextDisplay

Both have their own unique little challenges. With the particle effects I would basically be setting up a point particle generator on the ship being damaged and generate a texture with the damage amount. Two roadblocks I ran into here were that I couldn't find much documentation on how to render a font into a texture and I had no experience with particle generators.

On the other hand ObjectTextDisplay looked promising, but I wouldn't automatically get a floating number, which was fine for now. David Mandelin was kind enough to post his python port of the OTD code on the ogre wiki, so I used that and fixed a few blatant errors. However, it isn't displaying anything at all after I enable it. Perhaps this is one of those Ogre workflow issues I have trouble with :) .

Tomorrow? I want to debug this OTD or see if I can maybe get a basic particle effects thing going without too much hassle.

Today I noticed that irssi was displaying a spike in network activity randomly. Wondering who it could be that was hammering my little section of the internet, I checked the lighttpd logs only to find out that the Googlebot had found my test spider trap! A bit more digging and it looks like it has been accessed over 35,000 times by Googlebot alone and is featured on over 40 pages of Google search results for listings from my site.

I guess it's about that time to set up a robots.txt :)

(The spider trap is located at http://lfowles.org/loop.py ... don't worry, it's safe to a normal browser ;) )